Between Raid and Rebellion: The Irish in Buffalo and Toronto, 1867-1916 9780773589025

Citation preview

b e t w e e n r a id a nd rebelli on

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mc gi l l-qu een ’ s s tu di es i n ethnic history s e r i e s on e  don ald harm an akenson, editor 1 Irish Migrants in the Canadas A New Approach Bruce S. Elliott (Second edition, 2004)

10 Vancouver’s Chinatown Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875–1980 Kay J. Anderson

2 Critical Years in Immigration Canada and Australia Compared Freda Hawkins (Second edition, 1991)

11 Best Left as Indians Native-White Relations in the Yukon Territory, 1840–1973 Ken Coates

3 Italians in Toronto Development of a National Identity, 1875–1935 John E. Zucchi

12 Such Hardworking People Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto Franca Iacovetta

4 Linguistics and Poetics of Latvian Folk Songs Essays in Honour of the Sesquicentennial of the Birth of Kr. Barons Vaira Vikis-Freibergs

13 The Little Slaves of the Harp Italian Child Street Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Paris, London, and New York John E. Zucchi

5 Johan Schroder’s Travels in Canada, 1863 Orm Overland 6 Class, Ethnicity, and Social Inequality Christopher McAll 7 The Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict The Maori, the British, and the New Zealand Wars James Belich 8 White Canada Forever Popular Attitudes and Public Policy toward Orientals in British Columbia W. Peter Ward (Third edition, 2002) 9 The People of Glengarry Highlanders in Transition, 1745–1820 Marianne McLean

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14 The Light of Nature and the Law of God Antislavery in Ontario, 1833–1877 Allen P. Stouffer 15 Drum Songs Glimpses of Dene History Kerry Abel 16 Louis Rosenberg Canada’s Jews (Reprint of 1939 original) Edited by Morton Weinfeld 17 A New Lease on Life Landlords, Tenants, and Immigrants in Ireland and Canada Catharine Anne Wilson 18 In Search of Paradise The Odyssey of an Italian Family Susan Gabori 19 Ethnicity in the Mainstream Three Studies of English Canadian Culture in Ontario Pauline Greenhill

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20 Patriots and Proletarians The Politicization of Hungarian Immigrants in Canada, 1923–1939 Carmela Patrias 21 The Four Quarters of the Night The Life-Journey of an Emigrant Sikh Tara Singh Bains and Hugh Johnston 22 Cultural Power, Resistance, and Pluralism Colonial Guyana, 1838–1900 Brian L. Moore

23 Search Out the Land The Jews and the Growth of Equality in British Colonial America, 1740–1867 Sheldon J. Godfrey and Judith C. Godfrey 24 The Development of Elites in Acadian New Brunswick, 1861–1881 Sheila M. Andrew 25 Journey to Vaja Reconstructing the World of a Hungarian-Jewish Family Elaine Kalman Naves

s e r i e s two  john zu cchi , edi tor 1 Inside Ethnic Families Three Generations of Portuguese-Canadians Edite Noivo 2 A House of Words Jewish Writing, Identity, and Memory Norman Ravvin 3 Oatmeal and the Catechism Scottish Gaelic Settlers in Quebec Margaret Bennett 4 With Scarcely a Ripple Anglo-Canadian Migration into the United States and Western Canada, 1880–1920 Randy William Widdis 5 Creating Societies Immigrant Lives in Canada Dirk Hoerder 6 Social Discredit Anti-Semitism, Social Credit, and the Jewish Response Janine Stingel 7 Coalescence of Styles The Ethnic Heritage of St John River Valley Regional Furniture, 1763–1851 Jane L. Cook

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8 Brigh an Orain / A Story in Every SongThe Songs and Tales of Lauchie MacLellan Translated and edited by John Shaw 9 Demography, State and Society Irish Migration to Britain, 1921–1971 Enda Delaney 10 The West Indians of Costa Rica Race, Class, and the Integration of an Ethnic Minority Ronald N. Harpelle 11 Canada and the Ukrainian Question, 1939–1945 Bohdan S. Kordan 12 Tortillas and Tomatoes Transmigrant Mexican Harvesters in Canada Tanya Basok 13 Old and New World Highland Bagpiping John G. Gibson 14 Nationalism from the Margins The Negotiation of Nationalism and Ethnic Identities among Italian Immigrants in Alberta and British Columbia Patricia Wood

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15 Colonization and Community The Vancouver Island Coalfield and the Making of the British Columbia Working Class John Douglas Belshaw

25 Jerusalem on the Amur Birobidzhan and the Canadian Jewish Communist Movement, 1924–1951 Henry Felix Srebrnik

16 Enemy Aliens, Prisoners of War Internment in Canada during the Great War Bohdan S. Kordan

26 Irish Nationalism in Canada Edited by David A. Wilson

17 Like Our Mountains A History of Armenians in Canada Isabel Kaprielian-Churchill

27 Managing the Canadian Mosaic in Wartime Shaping Citizenship Policy, 1939–1945 Ivana Caccia

18 Exiles and Islanders The Irish Settlers of Prince Edward Island Brendan O’Grady

28 Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil Yiddish Culture in Montreal, 1905–1945 Rebecca Margolis

19 Ethnic Relations in Canada Institutional Dynamics Raymond Breton Edited by Jeffrey G. Reitz

29 Imposing Their Will: An Organizational History of Jewish Toronto, 1933–1948 Jack Lipinsky

20 A Kingdom of the Mind The Scots’ Impact on the Development of Canada Edited by Peter Rider and Heather McNabb

30 Ireland, Sweden, and the Great European Migration, 1815–1914 Donald H. Akenson

21 Vikings to U-Boats The German Experience in Newfoundland and Labrador Gerhard P. Bassler 22 Being Arab Ethnic and Religious Identity Building among Second Generation Youth in Montreal Paul Eid 23 From Peasants to Labourers Ukrainian and Belarusan Immigration from the Russian Empire to Canada Vadim Kukushkin

31 The Punjabis in British Columbia Location, Labour, First Nations, and Multiculturalism Kamala Elizabeth Nayar 32 Growing Up Canadian Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists Edited by Peter Beyer and Rubina Ramji 33 Between Raid and Rebellion The Irish in Buffalo and Toronto, 1867–1916 William Jenkins 34 Unpacking the Kists The Scots in New Zealand Brad Patterson, Tom Brooking, and Jim McAloon

24 Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century Elizabeth Jane Errington

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Between Raid and Rebellion The Irish in Buffalo and Toronto, 1867–1916

W i l l i a m Jen k in s

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2013 ISB N 978-0-7735-4095-8 (cloth) ISB N 978-0-7735-8902-5 (eP DF) ISB N 978-0-7735-8903-2 (eP UB) Legal deposit third quarter 2013 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Jenkins, William, 1972–, author Between raid and rebellion: the Irish in Buffalo and Toronto, 1867–1916 / William Jenkins. (McGill-Queen’s studies in ethnic history) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISB N 978-0-7735-4095-8 (bound). – IS BN 978-0-7735-8902-5 (eP D F). – ISB N 978-0-7735-8903-2 (eP UB) 1. Irish – Ontario – Toronto – History.  2. Irish – New York (State) – Buffalo – History.  3. Irish Canadians – Ontario – Toronto – History.  4. Irish Americans – New York (State) – Buffalo – History. 5. Immigrants – Ontario – Toronto – History.  6. Immigrants – New York (State) – Buffalo – History.  7. Irish – Ethnic identity.  8. Toronto (Ont.) – Historical geography.  9. Buffalo (N.Y.) – Historical geography.  I. Title.  II. Title: Irish in Buffalo and Toronto, 1867-1916.  III. Series: McGill-Queen’s studies in ethnic history FC 30 97 .9.I6J 46 2013  971. 3' 541004916 2   C 2 0 1 3 - 9 0 3 5 7 2 - 9  C2013-903573-7

This book was typeset by Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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For Kathleen Ryan and in memory of Jeremiah (Jerry) Ryan (December 1927–October 2012)

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Contents

Figures xi Tables xiii Acknowledgments xv 1 Introduction: Irish Immigrants and Questions of Place  3

Pa rt o ne   I r i sh L i v e s, P l ace s , an d I d e n t i t i e s in Lat e V i c tor i a n B uf fa l o an d T o ro n to

2 Nineteenth-Century Buffalo and Toronto and the Contexts of Irish Immigration  19 3 Known Groups: Patterns of Work, Residence, and Everyday Survival 55 4 Pews and Parades: Institutions, Networks, and Social Encounters 107 5 Wards and Votes: The Irish and Their Political Arenas  144 6 From Misrule to Rome Rule: Irish Diaspora Politics in the Post-Ridgeway Era  181

Pa rt two   C o nt i nui t i e s a nd T ran s i t i o n s in the E a r ly T we nt i e t h C e n t u ry

7 Channels, Niches, and Preserves: Occupations and Careers in the Early Twentieth Century  223

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x Contents

8 Lodges and Lace Curtains: Homes and Neighbourhoods, c. 1900–15  264 9 Prevailing Threads: Diasporic Nationalism and Unionism, c. 1893–1916  306

Conclusion: More Than Just Points on the Map  355

Appendices 365 Notes 373 Bibliography 449 Index 491

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Figures

2.1 Locating Buffalo and Toronto in the western New York/Ontario borderland 21 2.2 Irish provincial and county origins of “established” Toronto residents in the early 1880s  37 2.3 Irish provincial and county origins of “needy” Protestant Toronto residents in the early 1870s  40 2.4 Irish provincial and county origins of Buffalo residents 1850–1930 47 2.5 Inferred regional origins of Toronto Irish population (Roman Catholics only)  51 2.6 Inferred regional origins of Toronto Irish population (non-Catholics) 52 2.7 Inferred regional origins of Buffalo Irish population  53 3.1 Buffalo places and landmarks referred to in text  63 3.2 Toronto streets, places, and landmarks referred to in text  68 3.3 Classified advertisements exhibiting religious preferences in the market for domestic service, Toronto 1880  69–70 3.4 Households of Irish ethnic origin as a percentage of all ­households by ward subdivisions, Toronto 1881  76 3.5 Irish Protestant household heads as a percentage of all heads of Irish ethnic origin by ward subdivisions, Toronto 1881  76 3.6 “Irish Sufferers”  81 3.7 Households of Irish ethnic origin as a percentage of all ­households by ward (1–11), Buffalo 1880  83 3.8 Aspects of the geography of Buffalo’s First Ward in the late nineteenth century  84 3.9 Wells Elevator, Buffalo  85

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xii Figures

3.10 Buffalo’s First Ward: saloons and boarding-houses, c. 1880  89 3.11 Saloon, Ganson Street, Buffalo  89 3.12 Swannie House, Ohio Street, Buffalo  90 4.1 Orange Order 12 July parade in Toronto  139 5.1 “Sheehanism”  154 5.2 “Taking the Pig to Market”  176 5.3 “He’s Bound to Have the Ballot!”  177 6.1 “Uncrowned” emblems of Toronto Irish Catholic and nationalist societies and the “crowned” emblem of the Irish Protestant Benevolent Society  188–9 6.2 Toronto Irish Protestant Benevolent Society invitation card, 1906 199 8.1 Irish intergenerational residential mobility in Buffalo, 1880–1910, showing the ethnic character of destination environs  268 8.2 Irish intergenerational residential mobility in Buffalo, 1880–1910, showing the class character of destination environs  269 8.3 Results by ward in the New York gubernatorial and American presidential elections, Buffalo 1908  280 8.4 Results by ward in the New York gubernatorial election, Buffalo 1910 281 8.5 Irish intergenerational residential mobility in Toronto, 1881– 1911, showing the average house values of destination environs for the offspring of 1881 middle-class households  287 8.6 Irish intergenerational residential mobility in Toronto, 1881– 1911, showing the average house values of destination environs for the offspring of 1881 working-class households  288 8.7 The distribution of Orange meeting venues in Toronto and ­surrounding areas, 1914  295 8.8 “Local Geography”  304 9.1 Robert Emmet meeting poster  313 9.2 “First Fruits of Home Rule”  336 9.3 “The Irish Village”  337 9.4 Toronto Sentinel advertisement for Sir Edward Carson statuette 340

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Tables

2.1 Occupational structure of household heads in Toronto and Buffalo, c. 1880  32 2.2 Characteristics of the population of Toronto, 1871–91 33 2.3 Characteristics of the population of Buffalo, 1870–90 34 2.4 Toronto Irish-born males by departure year and age at departure 41 2.5 Irish-born in Toronto by year of immigration, 1901  43 2.6 The most frequent surnames of household heads in the Buffalo and Toronto Irish samples, 1880–81  50 3.1 Occupational distribution of adult males of Irish birth and ­ancestry, Buffalo and Toronto, c. 1880  59 3.2 Occupational distribution of Irish adult males by birthplace, Buffalo and Toronto, c. 1880  59 3.3 Occupational distribution of Toronto Irish adult males by ­birthplace and religion, 1881  61 3.4 Live-in domestic servants and their employers in elite residential sections of Buffalo and Toronto, 1880–81 65 3.5 Characteristics of selected lodgings on Ohio Street, Buffalo, 1880 86 3.6 Annual number of applications to the Charity Organization Society, Buffalo, by birthplace, 1880–85 99 3.7 Characteristics of the Irish-born in the Erie County Poorhouse, 1829–86 100 4.1 The relative presence of pupils from Irish families in selected Buffalo public schools in 1878 and 1880  122 4.2 c mba membership for selected Buffalo branches, 1888 and 1903 132

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xiv Tables

5.1 7.1 7.2 7.3

The First and Eighth Wards in Buffalo elections, 1870–80 150 Characteristics of the population of Buffalo, 1900–20 226 Characteristics of the population of Toronto, 1901–21 227 Occupational distribution of adult males for leading ­ethnocultural groups in Buffalo, 1900  229 7.4 Occupational distribution of adult males for leading ­ethnocultural groups in Buffalo, 1920  231 7.5 Irish-born in Toronto by year of immigration, 1911  234 7.6 The occupations of Toronto adult males by selected “racial ­origin,” 1911  234 7.7 The occupations of Toronto adult males by selected birthplaces, 1911 235 7.8 The occupations of Toronto males of Irish “racial origin” by birthplace and religion, 1911  236 7.9 Live-in domestic servants in elite districts of Buffalo and Toronto, c. 1910–11  244 7.10 Distribution of “Irish” policemen and firemen in Buffalo, 1890–1910 250 7.11 Irish-born members of the Toronto Police Force by religion, 1910 252

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Acknowledgments

The seeds of this project were initially planted with my decision to relocate from Dublin to Toronto in 1996. Comparing the experiences of Irish settlers in Buffalo and Toronto was not my original idea upon leaving Ireland, but perhaps it was my trip to long-suffering Buffalo via a Niagara Falls excursion that made the real difference. The American border city presented a vastly different landscape from the multicultural metropolis of Toronto, though it was one that I nonetheless found intriguing with so much of its historical architecture still intact. Realizing that Buffalo became, like Toronto, a popular destination for Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century, and that it was then the larger and more vibrant city of the two, made some sort of a comparative project irresistible. Thanks are therefore due to Aidan McQuillan, who from the beginning believed in what was tentatively framed as an “Irish in Great Lakes Cities” project and who admirably fulfilled his role as insightful critic, motivator, and ruthless editor. Robert Lewis offered many valuable scholarly suggestions, prodded me to keep on track, and imparted important career advice. Cecil Houston shared data on Orange lodges in Buffalo and Toronto as well as various other Orange “people of interest.” Mark McGowan and Sherry Olson offered perceptive commentaries and have remained supporters and critics ever since. I also received valuable ideas from discussions and coursework with Kim England, Jock Galloway, Dirk Hoerder, and Tom McIlwraith. There were also many others who in my early years at the University of Toronto and Massey College played important and memorable roles in my own adjustment as an immigrant to Canada. Not all of them were necessarily obsessed by things historical, geographical, and/or Irish, but I am pleased to acknowledge here the positive difference that was made

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xvi Acknowledgments

by Richard Braeken, Daniela Caringi, Mike Doherty, Kieran Donoghue, Carl Drouin, Damian Dupuy, Linda Gilbride and the Quirke clan, Andrew Hudson, Steve Kirchgraber, Richard Koo, Joe Leibovitz, Angela Marseglia, Natalie Rose, and John Vincent. In later years, as I returned to Toronto and York University, Lisa Oliveira became a source of constant support in all manner of ways and remains a very dear friend. Academic colleagues and friends, as well as the staff of various institutions, deserve sincere thanks for helping my research along at various points. In Buffalo, David Gerber provided critical readings, advised me of useful documentary sources, and took me on the first of several visits to the imposing and derelict grain elevators on Childs Street. Mrs Eileen Kirchgraber of Kenmore, ny was an unfailingly generous, entertaining, and knowledgeable landlady – it is a real pleasure to have known her and met various members of her widely dispersed family. I also benefited from the assistance of Donna Shine and the Buffalo Irish Genealogical Society, Martha Kavanaugh (who helped with the search for Irish county names on gravestones), Joan Graham-Scahill, and Tim Bohen, who has recently published his history of Buffalo’s Irish First Ward. I also acknowl­ edge with gratitude those institutions that have permitted the reproduction of illustrations and photographs as specified in the book’s captions. In Buffalo, the reference staff at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, and the archives of the Catholic diocese of Buffalo were all very helpful. In Toronto, I thank the archivists and staff of the Toronto Reference Library, the City of Toronto Archives, the Archives of Ontario, the Orange Order museum, and the archives of the Presbyterian and Anglican Churches of Canada. The interlibrary loan facilities of the Robarts (University of Toronto) and Scott (York University) libraries deserve many thanks for obtaining materials for me through a service that we often take too easily for granted. Likewise, the optical character recognition and digitization ­projects for newspapers such as the Globe and the Toronto Star have proven immensely helpful. At Catholic University in Washington, d c, Tim Meagher was both a helpful archivist and a scholarly inspiration. In Ireland, the staff of the National Library of Ireland and the Linenhall Library in Belfast helped to fill in some important informational gaps during trips home. I benefited immeasurably from the criticism, encouragement, and suggestions I received from those who took time to read and comment on earlier versions or related writings as I moved from Toronto to ­Vancouver and back again. Kerby Miller and Don MacRaild deserve special thanks

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Acknowledgments xvii

for their careful reading of countless paragraphs and for helping me to remain excited about comparative history writing. My work has also been much improved by input from Kevin Kenny, Enda Delaney, Lindsay Proudfoot, Kevin James, David A. Wilson, Richard Harris, Simon Jolivet, Jason Gilliland, Rosalyn Trigger, Kris Inwood, Gerry Kearns, David ­Nally, Ely Janis, and Tom Slater. Patrick O’Sullivan’s online Irish Diaspora forum proved to be a much-valued site for scholarly discussion and information dissemination. Thanks are also due to Eric Sager and Peter Baskerville of the Canadian Families Project and Gordon Darroch of the Canada Century Research Infrastructure project for their help in obtaining for me 1901 and 1911 Canadian census microdata, as well as to the team at the University of Minnesota associated with the I­ ntegrated Public Use Microdata Series (i p ums). Malcolm Smith of Durham University also generously processed my sample data to help further clarify the regional origins of Buffalo and Toronto’s Irish. Various audiences commented on work relating to this book at conferences, seminars, and workshops held in Canada, the United States, Ireland, England, Scotland, Germany, and Finland. Their critiques are much appreciated. The original manuscript was completed during a sabbatical from York University that included spells in the Geography Department at Queen Mary, University of London, and in the Research Institute for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. Thanks to Catherine Nash in London and to Michael Brown and Cairns Craig at Aberdeen for making my time at their institutions both enjoyable and productive. At McGill-Queen’s University Press, I thank Donald Akenson for his original invitation to submit my manuscript to this series, as well as for his encouragement and patience as deadlines came and went. Kyla Madden gave invaluable advice as the book chapters took shape and the original draft finally got submitted, and I appreciate also the work of her successors, Mary-Lynne Ascough and Joan Harcourt. In more recent times, I thank Grace Rosalie Seybold for her meticulous copyediting, Carolyn King of York University’s Cartography office, who prepared the maps with her usual skill, and Jeet Das for help with images. Celia Braves prepared the index, and Natalie Rose provided invaluable help with the final proofs. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers of the original manuscript who were, as I hoped, incisive, perceptive, and challenging. They encouraged me to  clarify my use of several concepts, sharpen my arguments further, and think more deeply about the wider contribution of the book. They also wisely insisted on a shorter final

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xviii Acknowledgments

manuscript. Some material on a­ ssociations (chapters 4, 6, and 9) and political culture (chapter 5) in Buffalo and Toronto, and residential mobility in Buffalo (chapter 8), has been reworked from articles previously published in Immigrants and Minorities, Volume 23, Issues 2 & 3 (July–November 2005); Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Volume 25, Issue 1 (2007); and Journal of Urban History, Volume 35, Issue 7 (November 2009). I am pleased to have permission to include this material here. All errors and omissions in the final product are mine. Undertaking additional research involved applications for research grants and, when successful, employing graduate students as research assistants. I am thus grateful to the sshrc for the awarding of not only a postdoctoral fellowship to the University of British Columbia but also a standard research grant that helped me to explore transatlantic dimensions of Irish diaspora politics. York University’s now-defunct Faculty of Arts also aided my work with a research grant, and I am delighted to extend my thanks to the following York students for the skill and diligence they exhibited as research assistants over the years: Bradley Chin You, Jeremy Kowalski, Joyce Kwong, Eduardo Padilla, and Subhadra Roy. Last but not least, I am truly fortunate to have a supportive family as I have made my way along academic highways and byways. My mother and father have been constant and inspirational sources of love and affection. I am more than grateful for the sacrifices they made in funding my own education, for the seemingly limitless patience they have shown to a restless and prodigal son, and for making Clondalkin such a warm and welcoming place to return to. I thank also my brother David for some impromptu bits of research help over the years. This book is dedicated to my godmother and aunt, Kathleen Ryan, and her late husband Jeremiah (Jerry) Ryan. Uncle Jerry was a Tipperary man of great heart and personality, who went to a better life in October 2012. He loved history, the Irish landscape, and stories about the Irish outside Ireland and, like my mother, proved to be something of an archivist in his own right. He also loved a good book launch. Figures 3.1, 8.1, and 8.2 previously appeared in “In Search of the Lace Curtain: Residential Mobility, Class Transformation and Everyday Practice Among Buffalo’s Irish, 1880–1910,” Journal of Urban History 35, no. 7 (November 2009). Figure 3.7 previously appeared in “Identity, Place and the Political Mobilization of Urban Minorities: Comparative Perspectives on Irish Catholics in Buffalo and Toronto, 1880–1910,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25, no. 1 (2007).

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Acknowledgments xix

Figures 3.4 and 3.5 are redrawn from versions that previously appeared in “Between the Lodge and the Meeting House: Mapping Irish Protestant Identities and Social Worlds in Late Victorian Toronto,” Social and Cultural Geography 4, no. 1 (2003). Figure 3.8 is redrawn from a version that previously appeared in “In the Shadow of a Grain Elevator: A Portrait of an Irish Neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Eire-Ireland 37, nos. 1–2 (Spring/ Summer 2002). Figure 8.7 is slightly modified from a version that previously appeared in “Views from the ‘Hub of the Empire’: Loyal Orange Lodges in Early 20th Century Toronto,” in The Orange Order in Canada, ed. David A. Wilson (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007).

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b e t w e e n r a id a nd rebelli on

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1 Introduction: Irish Immigrants and Questions of Place

Questions of place, territory, identity, and belonging have insinuated themselves into modern Irish history. Yet such issues were no less significant in the lives of the millions of people who left Ireland in the nineteenth century than they were for those who remained. For the vast majority of those who departed, emigration was an exercise in literally finding a place, a comfortable home in the world where they could survive adequately from one day to the next, which they felt that Ireland was unable to offer them. As is now well known, North America was the major destination for Irish emigrants. Popular and academic history have had much to say about these New World Irish, particularly those in the United States, and such commentaries have related stories of successful adjustment as much as they have emphasized themes of alienation and exclusion. By the early twentieth century, cultures of emigration touched all parts of Ireland and most of its social classes. Now, in the early twentyfirst century, the annual visits paid by both Irish and Irish-American tourists to the Ellis Island Museum in New York’s harbour, the long-trodden journeys of middle-class North Americans to Irish archival institutions to  satiate their knowledge of their ancestors, and the mushrooming of industries dedicated to the tracing of said roots in cyberspace and through genetic tests, all speak to a sustained interest in the history of this transatlantic movement at a time when, before the most recent economic downturn, Ireland was posting positive net migration figures.1 For those Irish men, women, and children who made their way to North America from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, efforts at successful relocation involved a variety of adaptive struggles to gain understanding and knowledge of a new place, and when viewed within the broad geographical imprints of Europeans in North America, these

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4

Between Raid and Rebellion

Irish fortune-seekers, despite notable regional concentrations, went on to cover most parts of the settled map.2 The cumulative impact of these movements transformed North American rural and urban environments in a variety of ways, with the Irish winning the praise and envy of some and the derision and distrust of others. Whether those transformations involved the pushing back of agricultural frontiers in the American South and Upper Canada, or concentrations of settlement in “low” forms of housing in New York, Boston, or Montreal, the Irish could not be, and were not, ignored. Just as hopeful migrants often set their sights on specific cities and regions, so too have scholars focused their analyses of the Irish experience in North America at a range of scales, with the urban being the most prevalent. What is striking, however, is the fact that the American and Canadian literatures have remained largely separate. Scholarly visions have aligned with national boundaries.3 Such separateness is especially noteworthy in the light of periodic calls from migration scholars for comparative works that demonstrate sensitivity to spatial as well as temporal contexts.4 At the same time, popular and scholarly interest in the historical and geographical elaboration of a global “Irish diaspora” has heightened significantly over the past two decades.5 Therefore, in an effort to advance comparative Irish diaspora studies and North American immigration and ethnic studies alike, this book examines the settlement and adaptation experiences of Irish immigrants and their descendants in an American and a Canadian city from circa 1867 to 1916. These cities, Toronto in Canada and Buffalo in the United States, are geographically close, they share Great Lakes locations, their economies and societies evolved during the same period, and significant numbers of Irish immigrants recognized them as places of opportunity at various points of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the early 1880s, both cities were home to at least 10,000 Irish-born individuals, and both grew to become prominent economic centres in eastern North America by the early twentieth century at a time when their relative attraction to Irish immigrants was waning. This book explores how immigrants departing from particular regions of Ireland over a roughly comparable time period fitted into life in Buffalo and Toronto through a focus on settlement geographies, patterns of work and everyday interaction, incorporation within political structures, and the shaping of identities through institutions and voluntary associations that addressed, amongst other things, diasporic concerns about the political fate of Ireland itself. As we shall see, self-identification as Irish remained important for not only many

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Irish Immigrants and Questions of Place 5

immigrants but also their descendants throughout the period. At the same time, these Irish contributed to transformations in the social, cultural, and institutional makeups of each city, as well as to wider articulations of what it meant to be American and Canadian. As “Irish cities” in North America go, Buffalo and Toronto were both ranked in the top twenty circa 1870 if the percentage of Irish-born within the total population is used as a measure of Irishness (Appendix A). While the famed Irish settlements of Boston (22.7%) and New York (21.4%) top the list, Toronto comes in sixth (18.4%) and Buffalo seventeenth (9.6%).6 Toronto was not an especially prominent city on the continent, however, being the last-ranked in terms of overall population, while Buffalo occupied eleventh position. Choosing these cities for study, then, clears the ground for not only a rare Canada–United States urbancentred comparison, but also a perspective on the lives of the Irish in settings more substantial than one-company mill towns and less metropolitan than major eastern seaboard destinations.7 This book takes its point of departure from the confluence of a number of events in both receiving societies between 1865 and 1867 that touched Irish communities in the chosen cities. The first event is the conclusion of the American Civil War in 1865, a conflict in which Irishmen from Buffalo and elsewhere played a role as volunteers. The second event is the attempt by a group of demobilized Irish veterans of that war, fiercely committed to the cause of an Irish republic, to breach the border with British North America in 1866 under the name of the Fenian Brotherhood. The most well-known of these incursions occurred in the Niagara peninsula between 31 May and 2 June, during which the Fenians, by now seasoned soldiers, fought off the largely volunteer Canadian militia at Ridgeway before departing back across the border. This is the raid referred to in the book’s title; the affair would ultimately cost the lives of more than twenty men.8 The third event is the signing of the British North America Act in 1867 that established Canada as a selfgoverning dominion within Britain’s empire. This was an important move in adding further political legitimacy to the border while dampening American pretensions of extending its “manifest destiny” to the lands north of Lakes Champlain, Ontario, Erie, Huron, and Superior. The end year of the study, 1916, is also framed by a series of events that stretches back over three or four years. As both inhabitants of Ireland and observers of Irish life past and present have scarcely been allowed to forget, the year 1916 witnessed the Easter Rebellion that shook the centre of Dublin.9 This attempt to overthrow British rule in

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6

Between Raid and Rebellion

Ireland, and particularly the subsequent execution of its leaders, certainly added new complexities to the face of Irish nationalism “at home.” Yet the rising and the political developments preceding it, the “Ulster Crisis” (c. 1912–14) as well as the support for Britain in the First World War by most Irish nationalist politicians and volunteers, collectively constitute an important point at which many among the Irish abroad contemplated the strength, content, and meaning of their Irish identity and their hopes for Ireland’s political future. From about 1910, the rejuvenated hopes for Irish self-government or “Home Rule” recaptured the imaginations of many Irish worldwide in a way not seen since the mid1880s. But where the Irish chose to settle – a question of place – mattered to these readings of identity and politics. Complicating this picture was participation in the war: Ireland and Canada both committed hundreds of thousands of men to the struggle, and the Canadian contingents contained many men of Irish birth and descent. The United States, on the other hand, remained neutral until joining the Allies in April 1917. Focusing on the period from 1867 to 1916 does not disregard the impact of earlier phases of Irish settlement in Buffalo and Toronto. Indeed, while the Irish were a known quantity in both places before the end of the 1830s, Buffalo and Toronto were both profoundly affected by Ireland’s mid-century potato famine migration. Present-day visitors to each city’s waterfront will notice commemorative parks and monuments erected to pay testimony to the dark days of the late 1840s when local populations were supplemented by substantial numbers of povertystricken refugees. As is now well documented, Ireland’s famine resulted in more than one million Irish men, women, and children emigrating permanently to North America and other English-speaking locations.10 Other scholars have uncovered aspects of the “famine moments” in both cities, but my main concern here is the people of Irish birth and ancestry who participated in the shaping of Buffalo and Toronto at later stages in their history.11 I will nonetheless argue that the years of the late 1840s and early 1850s were pivotal in establishing and supplementing immigrant neighbourhood concentrations that persisted for several decades, places whose character in turn shaped perceptions among non-Irish majorities about the sorts of Irish inhabiting their cities. The period in which the book is set also makes an exploration of urban life appropriate. By the early 1870s, Canada and the United States were eighty and seventy-five percent rural respectively, but by the early 1920s this percentage had decreased to around fifty in both societies.12 This classic age of urban modernity has moreover been characterized as

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Irish Immigrants and Questions of Place 7

a watershed era for the Irish in which men and women alike realized appreciable degrees of social mobility. “Lace-curtain” families, attempting to distance themselves from the less sophisticated “shanty” values of their immigrant forebears, now appeared in cartoons, plays, and novels, especially in the United States, situating them within a new consumer age where their efforts to accumulate wealth brushed awkwardly against recurring status anxieties. At the same time, immigrants from eastern and southern Europe arriving in the cities of the northern United States and Canada rendered the Irish an “old” group, yet one which many European newcomers encountered in neighborhoods, workplaces, and churches.13 Analyzing the experiences of Irish immigrants and their descendants in Buffalo and Toronto between 1867 and 1916 will therefore provide us with a picture of them that is not purely working-class, while illuminating the lives of those “affluent Irish who were not so ­conspicuously rich.”14 This book also addresses the denominational diversity of the Irish in Buffalo and Toronto, especially the latter. Keen readers of studies of the urbanized Irish in the United States will note that they have dealt almost exclusively with Catholics. This is not altogether surprising since, as David Noel Doyle has outlined, famine and post-famine Irish emigration to America was largely Catholic (as much as nine-tenths) and Irish patterns of urban settlement intensified as the century progressed.15 Questions thus remain unanswered about the urbanization of the Protestant Irish either during these decades or in the pre-famine period, a task scarcely aided by an American census tradition that has eschewed the collection of denominational affinities. A 1988 United States survey that cross-linked ethnicity, race, and religion, however, found that “white Protestants” were, at fifty-seven percent, the dominant group among those who selfidentified as Irish, though there was no indication of where those survey respondents were living.16 Andrew Greeley’s explanation for the paucity of research on these Protestants is “perhaps, in part, because they tend to live in Southern rural and mountainous districts.”17 This is not the full story; indeed, it may not even be half the story. Much therefore remains to be accomplished where urbanized Irish Protestants in the United States are concerned. Cecil Houston and William Smyth’s mapping of Orange lodges in the nineteenth century suggests New York City, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh to have been prominent locations for Irish Protestants, and a recent study on New York by Mary C. Kelly richly depicts the lives of Irish Protestants within the worlds of Freemasonry, Orangeism, and nationalist activism between 1845 and 1921.18

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While the inclusion of a religious variable in the Canadian census helps us to gain some perspective on urbanized Irish Protestants north of the border, scholarly works on Irish Canada have focused less on cities than those on Irish America.19 Nineteenth-century Irish immigration to Canada was more rural than it was urban and had a significant prefamine cohort. In the central Canadian province of Ontario, the key Irish destination, almost eighty percent of the Irish-born lived in rural locations in 1851; for those of Irish ancestry in 1871 the figure was 77.5 percent rural.20 If the Irish are to be compared in the United States and Canada for the time period suggested here, however, their general urban orientation in America requires an urban Canadian counterpart, and important studies on the Irish in Montreal, Quebec City, and Saint John have emerged over the last decade or so.21 The Toronto portion of this book links to the works of Brian Clarke and Mark McGowan on the changing social worlds of the city’s Catholic Irish community from the 1850s until the early 1920s. Those works have amply served to dispel images of these Canadian Irish as “little more than clones of their Irish Catholic American cousins.”22 Yet the emphasis of these two authors has been on understanding Toronto’s Catholic community on its own terms, with little attention paid to the city’s Irish Protestants and their relations with these Catholics. While Houston and Smyth and Gregory Kealey have offered insights into Irish Protestantism in Toronto, they have done so largely through the lens of the Orange Order. But focusing on the latter body does not adequately tell the story of urbanized Irish Protestantism; as these authors show, the Canadianized Order recruited beyond its Irish constituency in the city and, as a mostly working-class organization, was largely avoided by middle-class Irish Protestants.23 My concern here is therefore to situate Toronto’s Catholic community of Irish origin in tandem with its Protestant counterpart in a way that extends beyond “Orange” and “Green” oppositions (as persistent as these turned out to be) and illuminates everyday lives, social worlds, and identity negotiations on a broader canvas. Considering these historiographical gaps alongside Mary Lethert Wingerd’s reminder that scholars should recognize the contingent relationship of religion “to the power structures and politics in place-­specific locales,” this book also contributes to studies of North American urban religion.24 Religion was something practiced and committed to as well as being a badge of identity, and it partially structured the lives and interaction circles of Irish men, women, and children through associations, schools, fraternities, and less formal affairs. Yet, as Wingerd’s point

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Irish Immigrants and Questions of Place 9

indicates, religious institutional matters were not divorced from issues of state, and indeed often proved divisive in terms of how society was envisioned in both American republic and Canadian dominion. Protestantism was assumed as the dominant and superior religion in both societies, especially the United States, where non-Protestants comprised little more than five percent of the population in the early nineteenth century and where the constitution emphasized the separation of church and state.25 In Canada, Protestantism fused with British subjectivity to inform normative visions of the new dominion’s social order, despite the presence of the large Catholic (and mostly French) minority. In Englishspeaking regions, however, public debates about the rights and political representation of Catholics took place either side of Confederation, and the Irish often took centre stage within them. Despite anti-Catholic backlashes in the two countries at various times, both ­witnessed the elaboration of urban parochial infrastructures from the 1850s by a ­clergy determined to wrest social respectability from the constraints of working-class poverty.26 Though there were exceptional instances, Irish identities in North America were more likely than not to remain fractured along sectarian lines.27 The evidence from Buffalo and Toronto shows how religion, in both a socio-political and a spiritual context, continued to inform the shaping of identities for those of Irish origin throughout the period of study.

W it h in a n d B e yond Ci ti es : C o m pa r is o n , S pac e, and Place Scholars with a range of historical interests have written about the virtues of comparative study for some time. For American historian John Higham, comparison “not only admits unwelcome truths; it also lessens the special empathic flavor that is conveyed by the insider’s report.”28 For his contemporary George Fredrickson, the undertaking of comparison needs to do “justice to diversity and pluralism without becoming so particularistic as to make cross-cultural reference impossible or irrelevant.”29 This book’s comparison of the city lives of an immigrant group sharing a national origin corresponds to the “divergent model” of migration research as termed by Nancy Green.30 Here, however, I seek to integrate the contrasts likely to be offered by two different destinations with an approach that also identifies similar forms of action and experience for the Irish within those contexts.31 As Jay Winter has noted, comparative urban history “requires an analytical framework which can

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identify both convergences and divergences in the experiences of metropolitan populations.”32 There are also good reasons for choosing cities as the unit of comparison. Green, among other authors, maintains that comparative urban studies offer a useful intermediate or “mezzo” analytical scale that bridges the lives of migrants touched by local- as well as national-scale f­ orces.33 Kevin Kenny likewise advocates comparative Irish diaspora research to be undertaken “at the urban or regional rather than the national level.”34 One study that has influenced the present work is Samuel Baily’s examination of Italians in Buenos Aires and New York City between 1870 and 1914, Immigrants in the Land of Promise. Like Baily, my (unenviable) task here has been the completion of “two monographs integrated into one work.”35 I also share his concern for explaining the ways in which migrants “creatively coped” with the economic, social, and political structures they encountered in urban host cultures. Since the Irish did not have the goal of homeland return that Baily ascribes to many of his  Italians, however, they are referred to in this book as immigrants rather than migrants.36 And though Baily and I situate our comparisons in ­different countries, my focus incorporates a diasporic (transatlantic) dimension that is mainly political in emphasis.37 While few envisaged a permanent return to Ireland, many held out hope for reform in a place they considered burdened for too long by “perfidious Albion.” Before discussing such macro contexts, however, some words about the approach to studying the Irish within the cities are in order. In its attempt to capture the structures of everyday lives and landscapes of Irish immigrants and their descendants in Buffalo and Toronto, this book draws inspiration from the dialectical idea that just as urban dwellers shape cities and their constituent spaces, so too do those cities and spaces shape the thoughts, actions, and relationships of their inhabitants. Urban space, in this formulation, possesses imaginative and symbolic, and not simply material and physical, properties. Chiefly associated with French theorist Henri Lefebvre and later refined by writers such as David Harvey and Edward Soja, this idea of a “socio-spatial dialectic” has long engaged the work of geographers and has in more recent times influenced social and urban historians.38 On one level, the point that Irish immigrants were active in the shaping of North American cities is not particularly novel if we consider the bricks and mortar (or, quite often, the wooden frames) of the multiple “Little Irelands” spread across the continent from Boston to Butte, not to mention their role in the building of urban physical infrastructures.

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Irish Immigrants and Questions of Place 11

More can be said, however, about the dynamic and symbolic roles that space played in the everyday lives of the urbanizing Irish, especially where questions of identity are concerned. Postmodernist approaches have, after all, encouraged scholars to appreciate the fluid, socially constructed, and contested dimensions of identities, with groups now seen as anything but “continuing, transhistorical entities with agency, homogeneous membership, and consensual goals.”39 As William Yancey and his colleagues put it back in 1976, “being a descendant of an immigrant does not necessarily make an individual an ethnic in America … Rather than a constant ascribed trait that is inherited from the past, ethnicity is the result of a process which continues to unfold.”40 The history of such an unfolding is what American immigration historians have termed “ethnicization,” though, somewhat ironically, attempts to copper-fasten ideas of historical identity are an important part of this history.41 Sociologist Rogers Brubaker, for instance, conceptualizes ethnic group identity as something that comes alive at particular events that are oftentimes the creation of middle-class ethnic brokers whose interest lies in reifying a “common sense primordialism.”42 These insights about the dynamics and uncertainties of group-making are useful when considering attempts to shore up Irish identities in both cities, whether through appeals to the Catholic religion or invocations of the “Irish race.” The urban-spatial perspective allows us to observe and analyze those places and times when identity boundaries were drawn between the Irish and others as well as among the Irish themselves. “Ethnic events” communicated certain readings of Irishness and were often elements within calendars of occasions rather than discrete or tokenistic gettogethers. Views on what it meant to be Irish were expressed in venues such as fraternal meeting halls, churches, and saloons, while city streets were used in more periodic, but often more dramatic, fashion to define, perform, and circulate select readings of group personality. In such ­cases, ethnicity was explicitly “a practice rather than attribute” and of a contingent and relational rather than substantive nature, though we should not discount the power of essentialist rhetoric to enthrall multi-­ generational audiences and reaffirm their sense of membership within the wider collective.43 Although the demographic significance of the North American–born generations of Irish origin increases throughout the period, this book argues that ideas about Ireland and Irishness were in a constant state of fabrication at a range of times and places in Buffalo and Toronto between 1867 and 1916. Associational activities provide documentable attempts

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to define the contours of such ethnicities, and there were also times when an Irish identity badge worked to the advantage of those seeking to forge careers as politicians or civic employees. The following pages reveal that patterns of ethnic space-usage were not entirely similar from one North American “Irish city” to another and that the forms and contents of ethnocentric affairs, or whether they happened at all, were influenced by both community priorities and the location of the Irish within local power structures. The comparative approach adopted here affords a close look at the contexts in which power relations and identities were being shaped in Buffalo and Toronto, and the relative capacity of the Irish, or some groups of Irish, to establish themselves as influential players within such structures. Imaginative and symbolic readings of Irishness were moulded not simply through routine interactions and planned events in physical places, but also through print cultures. Nationalist literature circulated between cities in book and pamphlet form as well as within an ethnic press whose editors were usually adept gaugers of the opinions and expectations of readers. At other times, editors provided commentaries on the sociopolitical progress made by their local Irish audiences. In this sense, the ethnic press formed a crucial link alongside voluntary associations in negotiating the place of the Irish within wider urban public spheres. But mainstream newspapers and magazines also had their way of transmitting characterizations of minority Irish bodies, character types, and lifestyles.44 As others have shown, such representations often placed the Irish on “the wrong side of the tracks,” reifying them as less a group than an out-group.45 The experiences of the Irish in Buffalo and Toronto cannot be discussed without reference to their national and transnational dimensions. Patricia Limerick writes that “local history can simultaneously inhabit regional, national, and planetary levels of significance,” and as some of the previous discussion has already shown, local events involving the Irish also connected to wider geographies of nation, diaspora, and empire.46 While the United States–Canada border was a “permeable membrane” in the second half of the nineteenth century, the fixing and defending of separate political jurisdictions and identities was still its primary function.47 Irish immigrants and their children were thus confronted with ideas of what it meant to be American or Canadian in schools, during elections, and on feast days and holidays, and much scholarship has relied on discrete city-based studies for evidence of such national “becomings.”48

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Irish Immigrants and Questions of Place 13

Patterns of institution-building and immigration in the nineteenth century also produced divergences between Canada and the United States. In the post-Confederation decades, English-speaking Canada remained strongly infused with ideas about “British” values and traditions, with the United Kingdom (of which Ireland at the time remained part) as its principal source of immigrants. American immigration, in contrast, had long drawn from a more diverse set of European regions. In the realm of politics, republican ideology created an American public life characterized by decentralized government while promoting a confident nationalist mythology in which ideas of citizenship, democracy, and “the people” were central. In Canada, the terms of Confederation, along with its political centralism and resilient regionalism, combined to short-circuit national visions of comparable coherence.49 The Irish nevertheless formulated their own concepts of what it meant to be American and Canadian. As we shall see, they celebrated the American political and social system in Buffalo in a way that complemented their celebrations of Irish identity. In Toronto, a dominant culture that valorized British subjectivities while undermining democratic notions shaped a more diverse set of responses. Irish Protestants, especially of the Orange variety, subscribed to a Canadian loyalty that intertwined with a support for militant British imperialism, but its jingoistic edges were seldom appreciated by Irish Catholics. Though supportive of the dominion’s imperial link and its later participation in the First World War, these Catholics focused their loyalties more exclusively on Canada itself. These varied ways of cultivating senses of belonging in Canada and the United States by the Irish were informed in no small degree by their diasporic situation. For Martin Sökefeld, diasporas are “a special case of ethnicity” in that the history and experience of a named group, scattered throughout several locations, becomes framed, narrated, and p ­ romoted.50 This framing typically incorporates stories of historical exile and loss alongside romantic evocations of the “homeland” to fortify a shared solidarity along ethnic, racial, and/or religious lines. Diaspora is treated in this book largely through the political context of an Irish nationalism that was at once local, inter-city, transatlantic, and global. Combining comparative urban contexts with their transnational and diasporic dimensions creates what Kenny describes as “a comprehensive and flexible framework of historical analysis.”51 Other historians have echoed these sentiments, stressing that the incorporation of transnational themes into migration studies provides a step forward from viewing the adjustment patterns of immigrants simply in terms of “the closing of one door

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and the opening of another.”52 Readings of diasporic group identity ­frequently conceal internal complexity, of course, and we should not assume that the doings of the Irish abroad in the name of “old Ireland” amounted to some variant of nationalism. The Toronto context will show how a significant number of Protestants of not just Irish birth but also Irish ancestry had other ideas about proposals for Irish Home Rule that related to Britain’s empire and Canada’s place within it. Likewise, that city’s Catholic Irish cohort will be argued to have retained an interest in Irish cultural and political affairs to a degree that has remained undetected in studies favouring assimilationist narratives of a “waning Green.”53 Catholic Irish critiques of Britain’s (or, more frequently, England’s) legacy in Ireland also added something to the process whereby they conceived of themselves as loyal Canadians; south of the border, a more virulently expressed distaste for all things English likewise played an important role in structuring Irish allegiances to the United States. In both cities also, the second and later generations proved vital to attempts to keep Irish ethnic identity fresh and meaningful. Buffalo and Toronto are thus conceptualized in this book as places whose socio-political cultures, economies, and landscapes were fashioned by a combination of external relationships as well as by the activities of insiders. Here, geographer Doreen Massey’s conception of place as open, relational, and unbounded is helpful. Massey views places “in terms of the social interactions which they tie together” and that themselves change through time.54 Place is, in other words, viewed as a process in much the same way as ethnicization and the construction of a diasporic consciousness. Conceiving of place and identity in processoriented and relational terms, then, aids our appreciation of how neighbourhoods, cities, and host societies interacted together to mould the different degrees of opportunity and marginality that the Irish of various stripes would experience. Overall, this is a story that stresses Irish acculturation rather than assimilation to life in two North American places, places that the Irish helped to shape and that shaped them in turn.

O u t l in e o f t he Book This book is divided into two parts, the first dealing with the period from circa 1867 until the early 1890s and the second examining the years between the mid-1890s and 1916. While each chapter deals with specific sets of themes, the case of the Irish in each city is presented in a largely interactive fashion. While I have chosen to make sections within

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Irish Immigrants and Questions of Place 15

chapters devoted to a single city most of the time, I hope that the overall effect will enhance the comparative texture of the work without unduly confusing the reader.55 Chapter 2 provides an overview of Buffalo and Toronto from each city’s inception until the early 1880s, locating their growth and development as distinctive places in regional, national, and international contexts. Outlining these foundations helps to situate each city as a host culture for the immigrants it received from Ireland, whose regional origins and contexts of departure are also discussed. The third, fourth, and fifth chapters provide a sense of the economic, social, and political structures encountered, negotiated, and transformed by the Irish in the two cities. Chapter 3 describes settlement patterns in the 1870s and 1880s and addresses questions of how a largely workingclass group of Irish integrated themselves into labour and housing ­markets while retaining some visibility within certain neighbourhoods and workplaces. These micro-geographies of community are elaborated upon in chapter 4, which examines some institutional forms and networks that captured the time and attention of Irish individuals at different stages of their lives. Churches, schools, and voluntary organizations are the focus here. The fifth chapter addresses the nature of local political involvement by the Irish and considers in particular the uses to which city wards were put as socio-political territories. Toronto electoral contests, as will be seen, were often shot through with sectarian rhetoric in ways that were less apparent in Buffalo. The sixth chapter then tackles the issue of diasporic activities and imaginations, exploring how various organizations were mobilized in response to movements for political reform in Ireland. The forms of collective activity outlined in these chapters, when taken together, illustrate the contexts in which Irish identity was thought to matter in the lives and activities of many people as well as how “Irish matters” occasionally came to the surface within urban public cultures and discourses. At the same time, of course, overlapping groups of men and women of Irish origin gained a sense of themselves in other categorical terms: Catholic, Protestant, middle-class, Democrats, Tories, Liberals, British, Canadians, Americans, and so on. Chapter 7 commences the second part of the book and moves into the twentieth century by examining various economic and social transitions experienced by the Irish in Buffalo and Toronto. Discernible channels of social mobility emerged in the two cities and in certain sectors of their local economies that illuminated both processes of empowerment and the retention of some ethnic visibility. Chapter 8 then discusses some of the transformations taking place in everyday lives, particularly those of

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the North American–born generation, and mainly through the lens of residential movements within each city. Here we track the “middle years” of two developing Irish communities variously “suspended between slum and suburb,” to use Patrick Blessing’s phrase.56 These intra-urban movements are supplemented by discussion of the developments taking place within churches and other organizations that continued to inform understandings of ethnicity and “respectability” amidst an unprecedented degree of urban growth, consumerism, and ethnic diversity. The ninth and final chapter returns to the consequences of varied yet resilient ­readings of Ireland and Irishness in the context of transatlantic diaspora politics. Tracking the responses to the resurgent interest in Home Rule, Irish enlistment in the First World War, and the 1916 rebellion provides an opportunity to revisit the ways in which the Irish of Buffalo and Toronto considered the past, present, and future political shape of Ireland and, in turn, the nature of the American and Canadian societies that they were now part of. Clearly, a comparative study of the Irish in these two cities could have been written in any number of ways. In that vein, I trust that the preceding pages will have convinced the reader that Between Raid and Rebellion is not a work of military history! I have favoured a wide-ranging approach to understanding how the Irish of different generations experienced their lives and shaped their identities in various social, cultural, and political spheres in Buffalo and Toronto. While such an approach should aim at being sufficiently illustrative, it cannot hope to cover all its ground in an exhaustive manner. The problem of the “endlessly spiraling inquiry,” as Green terms it, is one that haunts comparative practitioners in particular, and a topic such as sport, for example, is one that I feel deserves more in-depth treatment than I have been able to provide here.57 Nonetheless, if this book provides useful guidance for how future efforts to understand the lives of immigrants and their descendants within the histories of cities, nations, and diasporas might be written, it will have served a worthwhile purpose.

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P art o n e Irish Lives, Places, and Identities in Late Victorian Buffalo and Toronto

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2 Nineteenth-Century Buffalo and Toronto and the Contexts of Irish Immigration

Buffalo and Toronto were not yet functioning settlements when the vital events of the American Revolution ended with a new jurisdictional line being drawn across the northern part of the continent. By the time of the war of 1812, both had emerged as recognizable places within each of their frontier regions. Sixty years later, Buffalo and Toronto had become thriving urban centres of undoubted importance within their respective nations. The first section of this chapter discusses the evolution of the two cities in a way that pays attention to not only the local contexts of development but also the dynamic regional and national processes that affected their “becoming” as places, one a garrison town and sometime colonial capital, the other a frontier town whose commercial potential later appeared limitless. The second section then considers the cities comparatively in the post-1850 decades through the lenses of population, politics, and economy. Only through such comparisons can we sharpen our sense of what was similar or different about Buffalo and Toronto, and how it might have felt to visit each city in the 1880s. What the cities also shared, of course, was the presence of thousands of Irish immigrants. With prospects for local employment and access to land in increasingly short supply for men and women coming of age in rural and small-town Ireland before the middle decades of the century, the networks of communication relaying news of alternative opportunities in North America grew in importance. These networks, connecting extended families and neighbours on both sides of the Atlantic, were influential for but not always determinative of where the departing Irish would settle in North America. As the third and final section of the chapter will illustrate, however, the “Irish communities” of late Victorian Buffalo and Toronto were shaped by immigration from quite distinct provinces and regions of Ireland.

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U r ba n B e g in n in g s : “Muddy York” a n d N e w A m s terdam The American Revolution ended with the creation of not one but two political entities: the United States of America and British North America. An obvious issue that emerged in the wake of the United States’ victory in 1783 concerned just how the remainder of Britain’s colonial territory could be made British in terms of population, language, institutions, and political loyalties. Its non-aboriginal settlers, after all, were mostly French-speaking Catholics still smarting after the Conquest of 1763. This dilemma for the “British possessions” was partially resolved by the flight of American Loyalists into Nova Scotia, the unsettled territories north of the St Lawrence River and Lake Ontario, and the lands on the western side of the Niagara Peninsula. The Loyalists were a diverse social group of military and civilian refugees whose new lives north of the border were aided by direct assistance from the Crown in the form of land grants and tools.1 The Constitutional Act of 1791 carved a new colony, Upper Canada, out of the existing colony of Quebec in an attempt to establish institutions of government for the Loyalists and other land-speculating Americans who followed them to this new frontier. The blueprint of governance for the Upper Canadian colony, like its Frenchspeaking Lower Canadian counterpart, involved the appointment by Britain of a lieutenant-governor who in turn appointed executive and legislative councillors. It also laid the foundations for a close relationship between a Protestant (Anglican) church and state. Such a design for government, while appearing quite conventional for the British legislators who drafted it, would later have to adjust to the realities of colonial frontier life. It did, however, offer a contrast to the social and political worlds taking shape in Jeffersonian America. In the fledgling American republic, the victorious thirteen colonies formulated plans for a new capital in Washington, d c, while the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 laid the basis for the mid-century rush to the Middle West and Great Plains. Prior to that movement, however, there was the more immediate matter of the trans-Appalachian frontier for exploration, survey, marketing, and pioneer settlement by whites. This push westward included the territory on the eastern side of the Niagara peninsula that, after a meeting in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1786, became a part of the State of New York.2 By the early 1790s, the territory lying west of the Genesee River Valley, totalling 3.3 million acres, was in the hands of the Amsterdam-based Holland Land Company (figure 2.1). As

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Nineteenth-Century Buffalo and Toronto 21 0

N

40

0

8 0 km 4 0 m i.

YORK COUNTY

ONTARIO

Toronto

LAKE ONTARIO

Rochester

LAKE ERIE

NEW YORK

Va e se Gen e

Buffalo

ERIE COUNTY

lle

y

Hamilton

Figure 2.1  Locating Buffalo and Toronto in the western New York/Ontario borderland.

with other private land companies who had bought up tracts of frontier land at the same time, the Dutchmen hoped to profit from the resale of their western New York holdings. However, the intense competition for pioneers in other frontier areas, Upper Canada among them, saw the Company instead become a land developer, engaging in the geometric surveying of a grid of townships as well as the formal platting of villages. From the late eighteenth century until about 1830, the influx of settlers from diverse origins transformed the societies and landscapes of western New York and Upper Canada. On the Upper Canadian side, a new Lake Ontario settlement with a British garrison presence, named “York” by the first lieutenant-governor, John Graves Simcoe, became the site of the first colonial parliament, which met there in 1797. While the Dutch redistributed property in western New York for a price, settlement in Upper Canada was facilitated by a mixture of government initiatives and private speculation. Initial land grants to individuals often totalling thousands of acres were justified by beliefs “that a concentration of wealth among the elite was entirely fit and proper.” However, while the promotional campaigns that followed the release of Crown

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and clergy reserves in 1826 served the interests of land-seeking immigrants arriving in the 1830s, no Upper Canadian landed aristocracy would emerge.3 As has now been documented, a significant number of these landseekers were Irish Protestants of “some means” who established settlement cores in the Upper Canadian countryside that would mature into a zone of Irish settlement running “east of a line … from Hamilton northwest to Lake Huron” by the 1860s.4 In an era of buoyant land prices, these rural districts were no place for poor Irish immigrants short on capital and farming skills. Although rural Upper Canada and centralwestern New York both became inhabited mainly by Protestant settlers, Irish newcomers were far more prominent in the former region than in the latter. In western New York, six villages were platted by the Holland Land Company between 1797 and 1820.5 One of these, located at the eastern shore of Lake Erie, was completed in 1804 and named “New Amsterdam.” A visitor to the district that year noted that there were “as many Indians in the village as white people,” a reference to the presence of the Senecas.6 More substantial commercial visions beckoned for the town’s founders, however. Developing the Ohio territory and the Northwest would require a sustained westward movement of pioneer farmers, goods, and provisions via the Great Lakes before the industry of those people would initiate the shipping of raw materials back east for processing and consumption. In this vision, New Amsterdam promised to serve as an important point of transshipment, though by the time of hostilities in 1812, its white settlers had come to know it as “Buffalo.”7 While Upper Canada became an increasingly self-conscious regional bulwark of loyal Britishness north of Lakes Ontario and Erie, such loyalty was anything but assured in the decade before 1812. Although the York militia played an active part in the British victories at Detroit and Queenston in the war, the Upper Canadian legislature was burned along with other York public buildings in April and July 1813, and British reprisals in December 1813 and January 1814 reduced Buffalo to ashes.8 The conflict did, however, lay foundations for a refashioned myth of loyalty that would transcend the loyalism of the early settlers and later resonate with a large proportion of English-speaking Upper Canadians; at the heart of this myth was an unshakeable distrust of American-style egalitarianism and democracy.9 Upper Canada had become both British and not-American, its glories defined by its continued attachment to the British mother country rather

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Nineteenth-Century Buffalo and Toronto 23

than by a patriotism tied to its own soil alone.10 Tory interests in the colonial legislature, centred on the York-based clique known as the “Family Compact,” were important early promoters of the discourse of loyalty.11 The Compact was a closed oligarchy of intermarried government officials who patronized the Anglican church, and over time they created a political system where the appointed executive held the reins of power over the elected assembly, the franchise was restricted, and dissent was not tolerated.12 Observing the implementation of a wide franchise based on “common-man democracy” in Andrew Jackson’s America, the Compact was determined that the status quo would remain in Upper Canada. Taking inspiration from notions of “English values” and the historic rights conferred by the “British Constitution,” they sought to “keep the multitude out of government and under control.”13 By mid-century, the concept of loyalty had expanded beyond its Tory roots to become something present within the general consciousness of the white Protestant population. The days of the Family Compact were numbered as Irish immigrant Dr William Warren Baldwin and his son Robert, among others, advanced Reform ideas that sought to establish the power of the electorate within the legislature, as well as the latter’s accountability, in a more open system of “responsible government.” This was still a moderate and pro-British politics, however, and its momentum was only temporarily disrupted by the 1837 Rebellion. With the creation of the united province of Canada in 1841 in which Upper Canada now became Canada West, a more discernible party structure took shape in which more, but not much more, scope for political dissent was possible. Loyal identities, once conceived in hereditary terms, could now be inculcated through education, property-holding, and an all-round respectable lifestyle. For Jeffrey McNairn, the proliferation of public debates that preceded parliamentary government demonstrated the presence of a “deliberative democracy” in the region that attempted “to check democratic excess without denying democracy itself.”14 Ian McKay has argued, however, that post-1840 developments were evidence of a “classical liberal order” in the making, one that would ultimately come to manifest itself throughout Canada.15 York, once the epicentre of the Compact’s high Toryism, would also exemplify key elements of this liberal ethos in the decades after 1834, the year it became the new city of Toronto. Toronto possessed a population of 9,252 in the year of its incorporation, and the post-Waterloo arrivals of English, Irish, and Scots onto its

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streets played a prominent role in shaping its character, as they did that of Upper Canada generally.16 About 600,000 individuals from the United Kingdom arrived in British North America between 1825 and 1846, with almost 250,000 arriving between 1831 and 1836.17 In city and colony alike, Anglicans were joined not only by Presbyterian adherents to the Church of Scotland but also by revivalist evangelical Methodists and Roman Catholics, putting paid to the Tory dream of an established church. The newly christened city had come some way toward erasing its label as “Muddy York,” and not only through a change of name. Pride in its markets, churches, public buildings, and commercial institutions was supplemented by pride in its status as the colonial capital. There were periodic setbacks such as cholera outbreaks in 1832, 1834, and 1849, the fire of 1849, and the loss of provincial capital status in 1841 to Kingston (Parliament would return in 1849–52 and 1856– 58). Nonetheless, frequent steamboat traffic stimulated commerce in the early 1840s and property values were on the rise. Some distinctions were also emerging on the social scene. A census undertaken in mid-September 1845 enumerated 4,046 adherents to the “Church of Rome” within Toronto’s population of 19,706.18 Representing a substantial increase from the census figure of 2,401 for 1841, Catholics were now claiming a solid presence in the city, forming onefifth of the urban population, and most of them were either Irish or of Irish descent.19 The increase in population caused by the famine immigration was not as substantial as the drama surrounding the mass arrivals of unfortunates in the spring of 1847 would suggest. Still, 5,903 Catholics were counted in an 1848 population of 23,503, and within two decades, more than forty percent of the city’s population was of Irish birth or ancestry. As in the Upper Canadian countryside, Protestants were part of this particular urban Irish story, and the social tensions that arose among this religious mix of Irish in the 1850s and 1860s earned Toronto a new and not entirely flattering label – the Belfast of Canada.20 It did not take long for the inhabitants of Buffalo to revive the fortunes of their town after its destruction in early 1814, and while it can be argued that a Protestant host culture also took shape in the town and its region through the following decades, that Protestantism was manystranded in terms of its denominations and the cultural backgrounds of its followers. New England and eastern New York were the primary source regions for Buffalo’s population prior to its incorporation as a

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Nineteenth-Century Buffalo and Toronto 25

city in 1832, with its emergent elites of Episcopalian (Anglican) and Presbyterian backgrounds. The settlement of Buffalo was, as Donald Meinig points out, part of a general westward expansion of New England Yankees “routinely imprinting their mark upon a succession of frontier regions.”21 Yet he notes that the outcome of these geographical thrusts “did not quite add up to a replica of New England … in broader political and social terms, the State of New York, with its strong legacy of an Anglo-Dutch landed and mercantile oligarchy and its powerful role in the initial land market and all subsequent developments, could never be simply transformed into a Yankee commonwealth.”22 The settlement of central and western New York had other distinctive qualities, namely its capacity for intense religious revivalism. The rich soils of the Genesee River Valley enabled its development as an early breadbasket for the northeastern states, and “Genesee fever” circulated in primarily upland areas of New England touched by the Second Great Awakening.23 Whitney Cross has shown how the participation of ex– New Englanders and eastern New Yorkers in successive bouts of religious revivalism before 1845 marked this particular part of New York State – known as the “Burned-Over District” – as a quite different sort of cultural region from Upper Canada. And if the religious loyalties that prevailed in rural Upper Canada were also to be found in Victorian Toronto, the fervour of the Genesee Valley was only partially echoed in Buffalo, at best. A visiting clergyman described the inhabitants in 1804 as “a casual collection of adventurers” that had retained “but little sense of government and religion.”24 While such raw characterizations were not untypical of frontier settlements, questions of religious morality would struggle to gain a place in Buffalo’s public consciousness compared to that of Toronto. For Cross, an agrarian maturity marked those parts of western New York most receptive to evangelicalism. Buffalo, on the other hand, had become a “rapidly expanding town … too active to be concerned with spiritual motives.”25 The words chosen by a migrant from rural upstate New York to describe this “instant city” in 1847 are instructive: “Probably … there is no place in this state where Intemperance, Gambling, and Licentiousness walks [sic] so boldly abroad as here, and it is disgraceful to see men of reputed standing in Society and even set down as Church going men, are sometimes a little more engaged in operations which should put the most abandoned to blush. The situation of this City commercially and otherwise considered make it a place where the depraved can easily congregate.”26 As immigration proceeded in the 1840s, Buffalo’s religious makeup became less and less reflective of western New York’s as a whole.

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Buffalo’s potential as a commercial entrepôt was boosted by the late  1820s, when it became the western terminus of the Erie Canal. The implications of the canal’s completion in 1825, conquering as it did the narrow Appalachian barrier between the continental interior and the eastern seaboard, reached far and wide. For Patrick McGreevy, the canal secured American hegemony in the interior and “played a key role in sparking the market revolution that transformed the economic and social structure of the United States,” and improvements to Buffalo’s deep-water harbour continued after the canal’s opening.27 Enlivened by this new sense of a continental destiny, New York became the “Empire State” with Buffalo hailed as “the Queen City of the Lakes.” The city’s population figures were dramatically affected; the total of 15,661 for 1835 had almost doubled to 29,773 ten years later, despite the financial panic of 1837.28 America’s breadbasket region was now shifting westward. Ohio’s grain crop exceeded that of New York State in 1836, “and now grain, which had been previously shipped west from Buffalo, began to come east.” A steam-powered elevator for grain handling was made operational by Joseph Dart in 1842, simplifying the task of unloading more than four million bushels of grain from Great Lakes vessels.29 The repeal of the British Corn Laws and the trade disruptions resulting from continental wars in Europe combined with these national processes to make Buffalo the world’s largest grain-shipping centre by mid-century. Buffalo’s commercial success had implications for not only the size but also the ethnic mix of the city’s population between the 1820s and the late 1840s. Some French- and German-speakers from Alsace settled in the city during these decades to be followed by a larger and more diverse cohort of Germans, Lutherans and Catholics alike, fleeing the revolution of 1848.30 The transferring of grain from boat to barge, meanwhile, was the responsibility of labour gangs, and considerable numbers of Irishmen, many of them now escaping a homeland scarred by famine, arrived in the city prepared to undertake such work. Despite the boom-and-bust cycle typical of a commercial frontier city, the confidence held in Buffalo as a place of opportunity was sustained. The surrounding countryside of Erie County remained largely Yankee in origin, with some German settlement in towns such as Hamburg, Cheektowaga, Lancaster, and Collins.31 Irish families were scarce here, their most significant settlements in the region being in canal towns such as Lockport and, further east, Rochester.32

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Nineteenth-Century Buffalo and Toronto 27

S t ru c t u r e s o f P oli ti cal and E c o n o m ic L if e , c. 1840–80 What sorts of political cultures and economic orientations had become predominant in Buffalo and Toronto by late Victorian times? The differences between nineteenth-century American and Canadian politics have been analyzed in terms of their placement along a “court-country” ideological continuum.33 In Canada, the emphasis on centralized Crownappointed executives during the years of the Upper Canadian colony was a prime illustration of the “court” model, contrasting with the “country” model of weak central government prevailing in the United States since the eclipse of the Federalists in the early nineteenth century. By the 1840s, argue Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin, Americans had created an “egalitarian politics” in a “rude republic … that prided itself on its challenges to deference and its disdain for the formalities of polite address.”34 Although Upper Canadian Reformers sought to empower the assembly, any proposals that bore too close a resemblance to the American model were instantly denounced as disloyal. The preservation of order was also on the Canadian agenda, but this project required, according to McKay, “a liberal vanguard of ‘free’ and ‘cultured’ men willing to restrict ‘democracy’” in order to protect “the true interests of individuals.”35 The two political systems did, however, come to possess some common features, such as two-party dominance, the absence of established churches and aristocratic landed classes, and the use of patronage as a way of shoring up party support. On the face of it, Toronto’s and Buffalo’s incorporations in the 1830s symbolized a political and economic coming-of-age for each place – both were now divided into five wards, each of which elected aldermen to council. In keeping with the liberal model, the Canadian Municipal Corporations Act of 1849 included a civic franchise restricted by a set of income and property qualifications, and when Thomas D’Arcy McGee declared in 1857 that “each province must retain its local parliament for local purposes” in a purported design for Canadian Confederation, he was not referring to the role of cities such as Toronto as units of local governance.36 This was a distinct meaning of “local”; municipal affairs were something quite different. For all this, municipalities had their powers, responsibilities, and administrative procedures clarified in legislation, and they came to constitute an important new political sphere in their own right.37 In a setting where “the people” referred largely to

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male ratepayers, however, it is little wonder that Toronto’s municipal scene was described in the 1860s as “cozy, cautious and uninspired.”38 The empowerment of the white and foreign-born working classes through the Jacksonian franchise in America made city politics there a far more intriguing scene, as parties strove to refine their organizational apparatuses down to the scale of the neighbourhood (ward), and a culture of mass politics found its place in Buffalo by mid-century. New York State adopted a liberal approach toward naturalization in its 1846 constitution, and the absence of state registration laws left the way clear for grassroots party operatives to educate immigrants on voting as well as the “virtues” of partisan loyalties.39 As in other northern cities, decisions on schooling and law enforcement in Buffalo were rooted in wards, districts, and precincts, fostering political awareness among the various groups in  the city. The sheer numbers of immigrant Germans and Irish that made Buffalo their home after 1845, once concentrated within distinctive neighbourhoods, were such that their interests could not be ignored. Municipal government thus became bound into a structure geared towards the accommodation of diverse (white) ethnic and class interests.40 By the mid-1840s it was clear that, while the Whig Party enjoyed a large degree of support from the city’s Anglo-American Protestants and those of an evangelical bent in particular, the Democrats, with a formidable network of campaigners and organizers, had emerged as the party in command of the immigrant vote.41 Though the Whigs were succeeded by the American (Know-Nothing) and Republican parties within a decade, the bipartisan structure of political life in antebellum America remained locally solidified in Buffalo in the post-1865 decades. Besides their geopolitical locations and the ethnocultural mixes of their populations, the economic opportunities presented by Buffalo and Toronto were crucial in determining what sort of shape everyday relations in workplaces, homes, and neighbourhoods would take. In Toronto, a lighter and more diversified manufacturing base contrasted with Buffalo’s heavier industries and more developed port facilities. The chief economic functions of Toronto by mid-century were the importing, exporting, and distribution of goods. The expansion of the western Upper Canadian frontier and the opening of the Toronto Stock Exchange in 1852 spoke to the opportunities for merchants, wholesalers, and other dealers that the city provided. Wholesaling became a notable source of commercial wealth, as imported goods required a central location before redistribution to stores in an expanding rural

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Nineteenth-Century Buffalo and Toronto 29

hinterland through an ever-improving road network. The completion of the Welland Canal in 1829 solved the issue of navigability between Lakes Erie and Ontario, offering a route for Upper Canadian mercantile and shipping interests to both the Atlantic and the expanding American market for Canadian goods via the Erie Canal. Chief exports were wood and grain, the wood sourced from the Georgian Bay forests and the Upper Lakes region, and the grain coming from farms in Toronto’s hinterland. And while the grain elevator became a novel sight on the Toronto harbourfront, it would not distinguish itself there in a manner comparable to Buffalo. The growth of an unskilled immigrant labour force in Toronto after 1850, coupled with the new dominion government’s active support for railway construction and the protection of home manufactories through the National Policy, assisted Toronto’s transition to an industrial city. The international trade climate mattered too: imperial free trade by Britain had boosted the city’s economy in the 1840s, and this was strengthened further by the Reciprocity Treaty that Canada enjoyed with the United States between 1854 and 1865. By 1860, a miniscule percentage of wheat and flour shipped from Toronto was going to Montreal, as production responded to the signals of American and British markets.42 The total number of industrial establishments in the city rose from 561 in 1871 to 2,109 in 1891, while the number of employees increased from 9,400 to 24,470.43 New uses of iron and steam reorganized a production process whereby the factory replaced the small-scale shop of the craftsman and artisan, and the main industries to emerge were clothing, iron and steel, and food and beverages. Electricity, which lit up Toronto’s streets in the early 1880s, also became an important source of industrial power, and by the early 1890s, the city’s factories embraced “nearly everything required by the general public, among which may be mentioned: organs, pianos, boilers, building materials, agricultural implements, cast iron work of every description, pressed brick, hardware, machine and boiler shops, foundries, distilleries, breweries, etc.”44 Although industrial establishments were now spread across the city, the large-scale factory was still an exotic feature in Toronto’s economic landscape.45 Absent were employers capable of organizing industrial ­villages or dominating certain districts; and absent, too, were significant numbers of blast furnaces, large chemical plants, locomotive works, or other heavy industries.46 The city’s capacity to be the dominant industrial centre for all of southern Ontario was, however, also compromised by the scarcity of available land within city limits, municipal complacency,

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and provincial legislation.47 While smaller cities such as Hamilton were able to attract industries and reduce Toronto’s competitiveness, the latter’s trading potential expanded with its development as a railway hub, at the notable expense of public access to its waterfront. Although Buffalo’s economic orientation was focused more on transshipment and commerce than industry by the eve of the American Civil War, the postbellum decades witnessed significant progress in its industrial profile. Like Toronto, Buffalo sought to make the most of its location during the era of the railroad. By 1884, the city occupied an important node on eleven railroad systems, it was encircled by a “belt line,” and access to Pennsylvania coal was secured via railroads such as the Lehigh Valley and the Delaware-Lackawanna.48 Imports of anthracite coal into Buffalo totalling 521,000 tons in 1872 grew to 2,451,410  tons in 1884.49 The Lehigh Valley Railroad did more than simply transport coal into Buffalo, however; it developed and improved its port facilities in the city’s harbour, where it loaded coal onto vessels for shipment up the lakes.50 Through the railroad, Buffalo was linked to all the places that were crucial to keeping its economy buoyant, not only New York, Pennsylvania, the Midwest, and Canada, but also the Upper Middle West, whose iron ore would become central to the development of the city’s iron and steel industry. Events further west helped to preserve Buffalo’s reputation as a port. The activities of Upper Middle Westerners and the Great Plains pioneers not only kept the city’s grain trade buoyant but also promoted the expansion of its milling and brewing industries. Flour receipts at the port of Buffalo increased from 4,582,190 barrels to 11,053,439 between 1886 and 1901, while receipts of wheat rose from 41,430,440 bushels to 61,294,248 over the same period.51 Pine and hemlock lumber, stripped from the forests of Michigan and the Upper Middle West, also arrived in increasing volumes for dispatch onto Erie Canal barges, while cattle herders sent their beasts eastward through Buffalo, invigorating the city’s stockyards, soap factories, and fertilizer plants.52 By 1880, 1,183 manufacturing establishments were present in the city.53 While water traffic thus remained an important dimension of Buffalo’s economic life long after the coming of the railroad, Toronto’s port went into relative decline. Though it was hardly on a par with the port of Montreal, Toronto’s harbour was still ahead of provincial competitors such as Hamilton and Kingston in terms of business generated by the import of foreign goods.54 Yet Toronto’s port did not remain as central to the city’s economic progress as Buffalo’s. Most of the steamboats

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Nineteenth-Century Buffalo and Toronto 31

operating from the port in the early 1880s were limited to mainly shortrange passenger transport, while the long-range steam freighter was a  more common sight in Buffalo’s harbour. While the absence of a “Canadian west” of comparable vitality to that of the United States can be cited as one factor behind the stagnation of Toronto’s harbour, the city’s attitude to the railroad mattered as well, and the gradual silting up of the harbour later in the century told its own story. As early as 1866, a waterfront distillery had switched to drawing most of its grain by rail since “vessels drawing more than eight feet of water cannot get down to their wharf.”55 In 1880, 219 vessels were registered and licensed in Buffalo, comprising a total tonnage of 101,257; in Toronto, the figures were 30 vessels and 8,138 tons.56 As Maurice Careless writes, “the harbour that had made Toronto possible was left to laissez-faire neglect. The industrializing city had too many other prospects to give its port the attention it deserved.”57 In the eastern Great Lakes, it was clear whose port ruled the roost. These contrasts in their respective economic structures do much to explain differences in the occupational profiles of Buffalo and Toronto at the beginning of the 1880s. Citywide samples of household heads of five  percent each show Buffalo to contain a more prominent manual labour force (summarized here under the label “manual working class”) than Toronto.58 While household heads engaged in unskilled labour formed 16.9 percent of all household heads in Toronto for whom an occupation was stated, the corresponding figure for Buffalo was 24 percent (table  2.1). With an abundance of seasonal work in a vibrant port economy, it is not surprising that this market for unskilled labour remained significant. Indeed, as chapter 3 reveals, the extent of Buffalo’s working class is underestimated by the sampling of only household heads, since the city’s boarding-house culture was also more extensive than that of Toronto. A comparison of city directory data on boarding-house establishments in 1880 reveals Buffalo to have had 1.16 per 1,000 population; the Toronto figure was 0.79. Despite issues of seasonality, Buffalo’s waterfront economy was receptive to transient single males, and the sheltering of these people maintained the demand for such establishments. Elsewhere, the other manual categories that combine skilled and semi-skilled workers with those in the building trades show these groups to also have been proportionately more important in Buffalo (37.6 percent of household heads as opposed to 33.6 in Toronto). The location of each city within the national urban system also helps to explain these economic differences. In addition to being Ontario’s

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Table 2.1 Occupational structure of household heads in Toronto and Buffalo, c. 1880 Toronto Occupational group

N

Buffalo

%

N

%

Owners/managers Agents on commission Self-employed Other middle-class Clerical

58 36 212 99 52

6.3 3.9 23.0 10.7 5.6

68 26 240 110 69

5.1 1.9 18.0 8.2 5.2

Manual working class Building trades Skilled/semi-skilled Unskilled Tota l

101 210 156 924

10.9 22.7 16.9 100.0

144 359 320 1336

10.8 26.8 24.0 100.0

Source: Five percent samples taken from US Federal census manuscripts (Buffalo) and City assessment rolls (Toronto).

political capital, Toronto’s rise to becoming the province’s dominant financial, wholesaling, and commercial centre is illustrated by its having twice the proportion of commission agents (including commercial travellers) of its American counterpart. Owners and managers comprised a proportionately smaller share of Buffalo’s labour force, compared to Toronto. Neither did Buffalo share Toronto’s prominence as a financial or wholesaling centre; those in rural New York purchasing their wares in Buffalo turned more towards New York City as a result of railroad links.59 Toronto, in contrast, possessed a “tendency to concentrate the wholesale trade of the Province,” housing branches of Montreal wholesale firms among other concerns on Front Street, the centrepiece of the city’s “wholesale district.”60 The patterns of in-migration discussed earlier continued to shape the character of each city through to the late Victorian period (tables 2.2 and 2.3). While the Irish, indicated by the numbers of Irish-born, had a clearly noticeable presence in both cities, the English- and Scottish-born in Toronto contrasted with the strong German and later Polish settlement in Buffalo. Immigrants from England, Ireland, and Scotland respectively made up seventeen percent, twelve percent, and five percent of Toronto’s population of 86,415 in 1881, and their native-born descendants formed the majority of the remainder. Only eighteen percent

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Nineteenth-Century Buffalo and Toronto 33

Table 2.2 Characteristics of the population of Toronto, 1871–91 1871

1881

1891

City population

56,092

86,415

144,023

Number of Roman Catholics As % of city total Birthplace England As % of city total Ireland As % of city total Scotland As % of city total United States As % of city total Italy As % of city total Germany As % of city total Austria-Hungary, Russia, Poland As % of city total

11,881 21

15,716 18

21,830 15

11,089 20 10,336 18 3,263 6 1,997 4 13 0 336 1 40 0

14,674 17 10,781 12 4,431 5 3,357 4 63 0 492 1 113 0

22,801 16 13,252 9 6,347 4 5,086 4 451 0 799 1 412 0

Source: Census of Canada, 1871, 1881, and 1891.

of the city’s population was Roman Catholic by this time, but they remained a group largely of Irish origin.61 While Toronto’s Catholic Irish could be classed as disloyal outsiders at worst (and they often were), they were rarely thought of as foreigners. That sector of the population was still small and was comprised mainly of Jewish, German, and Italian immigrants. Toronto’s credentials as a fortress of loyal Britishness and Protestantism thus remained intact, something that was true of Ontario in general.62 Americans were a constant though now-unobtrusive presence in the city through the Victorian era, though their component of African origin inhabited a largely separate social and institutional world. In 1877, a visiting Buffalo Courier correspondent noted Torontonians’ “personal pride in their good old English and Scotch stock” to the extent that they “don’t care to acknowledge any other.”63 In 1891, a journalist from the same paper commented that upon arrival in Toronto, “you need to exercise your fancy but a little to believe that you are in Merry England.”64 These writers’ comments, when allied with the above figures, illuminate Christopher Armstrong and H.V. Nelles’ observation that it “would be

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Table 2.3 Characteristics of the population of Buffalo, 1870–90

City population Total foreign-born As % of city total Birthplace Germany As % of foreign-born As % of city total Ireland As % of foreign-born As % of city total Canada As % of foreign-born As % of city total England As % of foreign-born As % of city total Italy As % of foreign-born As % of city total Poland As % of foreign-born As % of city total

1870

1880

1890

117,714

155,134

255,664

46,237 39

51,268 33

89,485 35

22,249 48 19 11,264 24 10 4,113 9 3 3,563 8 3 50 0 0 135 0 0

25,543 50 16 10,310 20 7 6,021 12 4 4,319 8 3 186 0 0 723 1 0

42,660 48 17 11,664 13 5 10,610 12 4 7,098 8 3 1,832 2 1 8,879 10 3

Source: US Federal Census, 1870, 1880, and 1890.

hard to imagine a more was p-ish city than Toronto in the late nineteenth century.”65 By 1923, Jesse Middleton, author of the three-volume Municipality of Toronto, wrote: “Loyalty to the British Crown had been a main principle of action with the founders of Upper Canada and of Toronto. With their successors it was something more than a mere principle; it was a passion.”66 For some outsiders, but many more insiders, Torontonians had become more British than the British themselves. In Buffalo, the socio-cultural foundations laid down during the first half of the century also remained in place up to the 1880s. If the city had come to embody a sort of “American pluralism,” the process would continue. By 1870, Buffalo had the third highest proportion of Germanborn among American cities after Milwaukee and Cincinnati, and they now comprised almost half of the city’s population.67 Although the religious variable is absent from American census manuscripts, city ­

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Nineteenth-Century Buffalo and Toronto 35

directories do provide lists of churches, and the evidence from Buffalo for 1880 indicates the numerical superiority of Protestant churches in the city over those of Catholics by a ratio of about 2.6:1. These figures tell us nothing about congregation sizes, though Chancellor Hoelscher of the Catholic diocese of Buffalo estimated there to be 75,000 communicants resident in the city by 1888, making up almost one-third of its population.68 The impact of Polish and Italian immigration would later increase this proportion.

P rov in c ia l P at h ways: Uncoveri ng Im m ig r a n t Ori gi ns A miniature “Merry England” was one popular perception of Toronto. Several months after the Ridgeway raid, the Fenian Col. William R. Roberts entertained Buffalo supporters with his dismissal of the Canadian city as “England on a small scale.”69 But there was, as we have noted, an alternative label, and while the coining of Toronto as the “Belfast of Canada” was inspired in part by the intermittent riots between Catholics and Protestants, it was also suggestive of the regional origins of many of the city’s Irish.70 Through the careful use of a number of sources, we can go beyond the popular impressions prompted by the label in order to make more substantial statements about immigrant origins within Ireland. One such source is the two-volume History of Toronto and the County of York, compiled by Irish-born man of letters Charles Pelham Mulvany and Scottish-born author G. Mercer Adam, and published in 1885 to coincide with the city’s semi-centennial. This is more than simply a narrative of the Toronto region’s historical development, however, for it contains biographical information from all sectors of the city’s business and trading community, from ice dealers and soda manufacturers to dry-goods merchants and the directors of financial institutions. As a document, its information is biased towards middle-class men who had spent many years in the city, many of whom probably subscribed to the publication and awaited the work of compilers hoping to make a profit. For our purposes, though, the numbers of entries of Irish-born individuals in its pages confirm the capacity of that group to find their place within Toronto’s commercial, financial, and public circles by the early 1880s.71 A search for all individuals born in Ireland in the two volumes returned a total of 138 men. Given certain inconsistencies of detail for variables such as birth year and religion, a cross-linking exercise was performed to enhance the profiles, using the indexes to the Ontario censuses of 1871 and 1881.72

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The results show Ulster-born Protestants to have occupied prominent positions among what may be termed a middling “Irish elite” in late Victorian Toronto. This claim is based on the provincial and county origins of 111 males derived from the History of Toronto volumes; the results are mapped in figure 2.2 and summarized by county in appendix B.73 The predominance of men of Ulster birth is clear (62.2 percent), with Armagh and Tyrone as the most prominent counties of origin, comprising 24.3 percent of entries between them. When viewed in a religious light, these volumes depict an overall picture of Catholic under-­representation in the city’s middle class. Of the 120 individuals for whom religion was recorded, only twenty (16.7 percent) were Catholics. Of the seventy-eight Protestants with known provinces of origin, fifty-three (67.9 percent) hailed from Ulster. The provincial origins of eighteen Catholics were recovered, eight being from Munster and four each from Leinster and Ulster, suggesting quite a different regional distribution. More substantial research on Toronto’s Irish Catholic community from Brian Clarke, however, has yielded a similar picture. Inspecting marriage registers for three of the city’s parishes between 1850 and 1859, he concluded that while a majority of the city’s Catholic Irish originated in southern counties and especially Munster, “virtually all regions of the country were represented.”74 This skewed nature of the Toronto Irish towards Ulster origins and Protestantism is not surprising, given how transatlantic emigration ­networks became implanted within various parts of the northern Irish ­province from the second half of the eighteenth century.75 Neither is this regional bias surprising given the key role such Protestants played in the post-Waterloo settlement of Upper Canada, when emigration from Ulster became further networked into an Atlantic commercial world. The Ulster linen industry’s demand for flaxseed linked the northern ports of Derry, Belfast, Larne, and Newry to the United States, while the timber trade established new linkages between Ulster and British North America.76 Houston and Smyth have shown how chain migrations continued to channel individuals and young families onto Canadian shores. A.C. Buchanan, appointed as immigration agent in the city of Quebec, noted the disproportionate numbers of emigrants from Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone disembarking there in the 1820s, while substantial numbers of Ulster folk arrived at the New Brunswick port of Saint John during the following decades.77 While early nineteenth-century Irish emigration did not revolve solely around Ulster, it was the case that those wishing to depart, Protestant

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Nineteenth-Century Buffalo and Toronto 37

Number of people mentioned in Mulvany and Adam, History of Toronto (1885) N

1-3 4-7

Londonderry

Donegal

8-11

Tyrone

≥ 12

ULSTER

Fermanagh Sligo

Leitrim

Antrim

Armagh

Down

Monaghan Cavan

Mayo

N

Roscommon

CONNAUGHT Dublin King's County

LEINSTER

Queen's County

Wicklow

Clare

Limerick

Kerry

Kilkenny

Wexford

MUNSTER

Cork

Provincial Boundaries County Boundaries 0 0

25

50 25

75

10 0 km

50 m i.

Figure 2.2  Irish provincial and county origins of “established” Toronto ­residents in the early 1880s.

and Catholic, did so from those regions of the island most affected by commercial agriculture, proto-industrialization, and the everyday use of the English language. The collapse in grain prices after Waterloo inflicted new stresses upon the Irish agrarian economy, as the pre-1815 emphasis on tillage was followed by a reorientation towards livestock with negative implications for the agricultural labour force and the capacity of tenant farmers to subdivide land between sons.78 The writing was on the

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wall for hundreds of thousands of farmers’ sons, and the emigration from Ulster smallholding districts of farmers possessed of some capital was noted in the Poor Inquiry of 1836.79 In the two decades before the famine, fertile agricultural districts in Ulster, Leinster, and northeast Connaught became especially susceptible to emigration since “opportunities for an extension of settlement were severely limited.”80 Ulster counties such as Cavan, Monaghan, and Armagh, as well as parts of Sligo, suffered as cottage weaving and spinning lost out not only to town-based factories in the Belfast region but also to cotton goods manufactured in northern England.81 Monetary payments to outgoing tenants, especially in Ulster, may also explain their ability to emigrate in the period before the famine.82 Those Irish-born who merited a mention in Mulvany and Adam’s book were therefore unlikely to have arrived in Canada as members of a disoriented and unskilled peasantry. As an Irish emigrant himself, Mulvany was well placed to observe the social and occupational progress made by his countrymen in “the Queen’s City.” In any event, the costs associated with emigration meant that only those with some financial capital could afford to depart in the 1820s and the first half of the 1830s, by which time Buchanan was taking note of eastward-flowing remittances.83 Canada had become, in many ways, the cheap option. David Fitzpatrick has noted that the price of a steerage passage from Ireland to New York was three times the cost of passage to Quebec, for instance, and Canadian emigration promoters and agents stressed the economic advantage enjoyed by their ports in publicity drives.84 This price advantage did not, of course, imply that the United States had lost favour as an emigrant destination during these decades, and it did not take long for some of those arriving in Quebec, Saint John, and Halifax to make their way south to New England and upstate New York.85 In Canada, however, Ulster Protestants were an important part of the story, and from the mid-1830s onwards, emigrants became drawn from a wider variety of Irish social classes than previously. So much for what became a largely Ulster-derived Irish Protestant middle class in late Victorian Toronto. Less fortunate Irish Protestant individuals and families, drawing from public and private sources of financial assistance to different degrees, were also present in the city. Appendix B includes data on the county and province of origin for eighty-seven relief recipients from the Irish Protestant Benevolent Society (ipb s) for the year ending 31 March 1872, and these are mapped in

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Nineteenth-Century Buffalo and Toronto 39

Figure 2.3.86 While it is probable that many of these were recently arrived immigrants struggling to gain a foothold in the local labour ­market, that group may have been in the minority. Elderly individuals, whether single or widowed, were also prominent recipients. While a more variegated geography of Irish provincial origins is observable here, Ulster’s importance remains clear with just over half of i p bs recipients hailing from the northern province, followed by Leinster (25.3 percent), Munster (14.5 percent), and Connaught (9.2 percent). Though the numbers of individuals are relatively small, figures 2.2 and 2.3 provide valuable insight into the regional backgrounds of Toronto’s Irish Protestants, and unsettle any illusions of an Irish group in the city divided between affluent Protestants and impoverished Catholics. The very existence of an organization dedicated to the welfare of an exclusively Protestant Irish group, however, says something about the sectarian lens through which Irishness was being viewed, something that provided further legitimacy for comparisons with Belfast. We shall return to the activities and significance of the i p b s in later chapters. How did Toronto’s Irish make their way to the growing Lake Ontario port city? Scholars of Irish emigration generally agree that family-based movements were the norm in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.87 While descriptions of the lives and careers of the Irish-born in the History of Toronto volumes occasionally include details of the context of departure, a more systematic method can provide useful impressions about whether individuals migrated as parts of family groups or on their own, when both the year of birth and year of departure from Ireland are known. Table 2.4 indicates that of those Irishmen who had established themselves within various middle-class circles of Toronto by the early 1880s, just over half (51.2%) had departed their island of birth before the years of mid-century famine. Only two left the island before 1815, one being Co. Monaghan–born John Harper, who travelled first to New York before making his way to York in 1817, where his expertise as a builder and architect would find expression in St Michael’s Cathedral, the post office, and numerous fire and police stations.88 The departure years of the remaining forty people leaving between 1810 and 1837 suggest the prominence of the years 1830–35, when twenty-three left Ireland. This aligns well with the documented pattern of Irish emigration to British North America; the annual rate of 12,000 people of the late 1820s gave way to the “flood proportions” after 1830, with annual departures reaching upwards of 40,000 and sometimes 50,000.89

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Number of relief recipients from the Toronto Irish Protestant Benevolent Society, 1872. 1-2

Londonderry

Donegal

4-6

Tyrone

≥7

Fermanagh Sligo

Antrim

ULSTER Armagh

Down

Leitrim Cavan

Mayo Roscommon

CONNAUGHT

N

Longford Dublin

Westmeath King's County

Kildare LEINSTER

Queen's County

Limerick

MUNSTER

Tipperary

Wicklow

Kilkenny

Waterford

Cork Provincial Boundaries County Boundaries 0 0

25

50 25

75

100 km

5 0 m i.

Figure 2.3  Irish provincial and county origins of “needy” Protestant Toronto residents in the early 1870s.

In terms of age at migration, table 2.4 shows a broad split between those who came prior to their seventeenth birthday and those who came after. Family-based migration thus appears to have been an important component overall, though it should not be assumed that those arrivals older than seventeen years of age were all independent hopefuls. Some of these entered with their families, while others followed already established migration routes shaped by their families or by relations and friends

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Nineteenth-Century Buffalo and Toronto 41

Table 2.4 Toronto Irish-born males by departure year and age at departure Known year of departure from Ireland

Number

%

Between: 1810 and 1837 1838 and 1846 1847 and 1855 After 1855 TOTAL

42 22 32 29 125

33.6 17.6 25.6 23.2 100.0

Estimated age at departure from Ireland 30 to 40%

Don River

ST. DAVID’S

ST. THOMAS’

ST. JAMES’

ST. STEPHEN’S

ST. JOHN’S

ST. PATRICK’S

> 40%

≤ 30% Ward boundaries Ward subdivision boundaries Queen St

ST. ANDREW’S ST. LAWRENCE’S ST. GEORGE’S

N

Toronto Harbour 0

.25

0

.5 .25

.75

Lake Ontario

1 km

.5 mi.

Source: Census of Canada manuscript sample.

Figure 3.4  Households of Irish ethnic origin as a percentage of all households by ward subdivisions, Toronto 1881.

Bloor St

> 80%

Dufferin St

ST. ANDREW’S Claretown

Cabbagetown

Don River

ST. DAVID’S

ST. THOMAS’

ST. JAMES’

ST. PATRICK’S

ST. STEPHEN’S

ST. JOHN’S

> 65 to 80% > 50 to 65% ≤ 50% Ward boundaries Ward subdivision boundaries Queen St

Corktown

ST. LAWRENCE’S

ST. GEORGE’S

Toronto Harbour 0 0

.5

.25 .25

.75 .5 mi.

N

Lake Ontario

1 km

Source: Census of Canada manuscript sample.

Figure 3.5  Irish Protestant household heads as a percentage of all heads of Irish ethnic origin by ward subdivisions, Toronto 1881.

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Known Groups 77

with other prominent areas being the western Claretown division straddling St Andrew’s and St George’s Wards (figure 3.2). In the western suburban settlement of Brockton, the local Irish population was also mostly Catholic, and St Helen’s Church was established there in 1875 to cater to the spiritual needs of those settlers.58 Places stamped with Irishness, however, reached spatial scales finer than that of ward, parish, or neighbourhood. A largely working-class landscape of single-family homes, corner stores, Protestant churches and meeting-houses, and few Catholic families, Cabbagetown emerged in the nineteenth century as a well-known gathering place for Irish Protestant immigrants to Toronto. Located broadly between the well-off districts west of Parliament Street and the Don River, the district was the home of, as journalist John McAree noted, “the North of Ireland traditions which had developed” through the nineteenth century.59 These traditions came alive during McAree’s own upbringing, with a home life flavoured by an evangelical mix of Methodism and Anglicanism “imported from Down and Armagh.”60 The district’s reputation as a hotbed of Orangeism and Conservative politics also contributed to this association with Ulster. Although accepted with some pride by its inhabitants, the neighbourhood name that recalled the cabbages grown in gardens by its earliest settlers hardly cultivated middle-class pretensions. Irish Catholics’ residential clusters were usually located within easy reach of a Catholic church or the centrally located St Michael’s Cathedral (completed 1845). The east-west corridor of Queen Street acted as a spine from which various branching streets housed concentrations of Irish Catholic families (figure 3.2).61 Beginning in the east end, the southern “boundary” of the neighbourhoods of Cabbagetown and Corktown, located in the vicinity of St Paul’s Church (1822), featured households headed by Irish-born Catholic labourers, widows, and spinsters residing in modest dwellings of frame and rough-cast construction. Westward, Irish Catholics could be found in the densely populated area around Duchess and Jarvis Streets, cluttered with small hotels, boarding-houses, and modest rear housing. On St Patrick’s Night in 1889, Orange Young Britons from Cabbagetown were reported to have “wrecked windows in every Catholic house between Jarvis and Sherbourne streets on Duchess street,” indicating a fine-grained sense of local geographical knowledge, however misguided its application.62 Other pockets of Irish Catholic settlement existed west of the downtown on Bolton and William Streets. Bolton Street housed a mix of Irish

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Catholic labourers, railway workers, and other skilled individuals living adjacent to the foundry of Patrick O’Connor and Alfred Webb. William Street, until 1875 known as Dummer, housed another cluster of Irish Catholic families, and on its corner was situated a favourite target for the young and rowdy elements within the local Orange institution: Owen Cosgrove’s tavern, owned by a Co. Fermanagh immigrant. The tavern, frequented by militant Irish nationalists in the 1860s, was attacked at least six times in the 1870s; on one occasion in 1877, the news that Orangeman Thomas Lett Hackett had been killed during a Montreal riot resulted in the tavern being pelted with stones.63 William Street’s Catholic reputation was also enhanced with the completion of the stone St Patrick’s Church at its north end by 1870 (figure 3.2).64 Further west towards Bathurst Street and St Mary’s Catholic Church (built in 1852), Portland Street had a mix of Irish Catholic railway workers (engine drivers, conductors, and engineers). In terms of residential segregation, therefore, Toronto was not as polarized as Belfast.65 Beyond certain working-class enclaves and the streets inhabited by the city’s elite families, Catholic and Protestant households of Irish background lived close by each other.66 And yet as the antics of the Young Britons illustrate, the endurance of some spatial concentrations informed social perceptions and actions. Just as the everyday practices of individuals and groups are central to the making of places, so too are they crucial to the reputations such places acquire within the local social imagination. Given the material conditions under which many of the Irish arrived since the time of the famine migration, the public behaviour of many impoverished Irish immigrants frequently clashed with the expectations held by middle-class sections of host cultures. Toronto Catholic Bishop John Joseph Lynch’s 1864 pastoral letter, addressed to the senior Irish clergy and entitled “The Evils of Wholesale and Improvident Emigration from Ireland,” lamented those who, arriving “absolutely penniless,” had few options but to turn to streets and neighbourhoods whose social environments quickly transformed them into wayward souls, “lost to morality, to society, to religion, and finally to God.”67 Certain urban locations, therefore, played an important role in the process of Irish ethnicization. Street activity and conduct was one way in which some groups became more visible than others, and not only during designated times of procession. The Catholic Irish settlement of Stanley Street was probably not far from Lynch’s mind when he evoked such shadowy places. Though it was but a minor street on the fringes of the downtown and three blocks

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south of St Michael’s Cathedral (figure 3.2), its inhabitants were no strangers to clashes with Orange bands and the liberal gaze of the Globe newspaper. This paper, ever vigilant in its crusade to improve the city by ridding it of immoral elements, documented the court appearances of residents through the 1860s and 1870s whose crimes ranged from drunkenness and petty theft to physical assault and worse.68 Patrick McGurn and his wife Margaret were both in the dock in 1866 for assaulting a man with a bootjack, for example, and McGurn was to return five years later for committing “an unprovoked and severe assault upon his wife” who was “struck on the head with a 4 lb. iron weight.”69 Wherever else one looks in Canada, few other streets of Stanley’s length were so dominated by Irish immigrant households at this time. In 1871, more than eighty percent of its ninety-eight household heads were Irishborn, with about half of these headed by two Irish-born parents with varying levels of literacy.70 Demonstrated toughness earned respect in this hard-bitten environment, and residents theatrically cheered on their natural leaders in the arenas of local justice.71 In 1869, “a large crowd of the unwashed” collected around the entrance of the nearby Toronto police court to support James Doyle, a labourer from the street whose reputation had earned him the nickname “the mayor.”72 After witnessing cases against Joseph “The Rooster” Cox and Daniel Devlin (“a  frisky looking Irishman”), those assembled heard how Doyle was charged by another street personality and fearless pugilist well known to police, Jerry Sheehan, for having gouged the latter’s “unfortunate eye out once more.”73 Sheehan was also known as a regular flouter of liquor license laws and, when arrested some months after, was drunk and “in the act of ‘reorganizing’ his wife.”74 Such accounts certainly shaped impressions of Stanley Street as the toughest in town, convincing the likes of Chief Magistrate George T. Denison that its Catholic Irish had little to offer the civic order other than alcoholism, affray, vice, and criminality.75 Stanley Street became elevated into local popular-cultural lore in other ways. It was also the home of the fictional Toronto Irishman and cousin of Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Terry Finnegan, the creation of journalist James McCarroll in the 1860s, who waxed nostalgic about “the janius of the anshent Irish” when not calling men to arms “to redress all the wrongs of our down-trodden people.”76 This caricature was made flesh, however, in the form of Dan Dwan, a labourer of the street also blessed with political instincts. Like the aforementioned James Doyle, Dwan was also bestowed with the title “mayor,” and Dwan entered the pages of the satirical Grip magazine, on one occasion “penning” a eulogy to

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Irish-Canadian lawyer and author Nicholas Flood Davin, where he praised the latter’s ability to not “let a poor bhoy be bamboozled by the lawyers and the coort … by rayson o’ the sup o’dhrink.”77 The boundary between the caricatured Catholic Irishman with a thick brogue and tastes for local politics and “the hard stuff,” and real-life versions was increasingly hard to draw for a middle-class readership, but they were regularly reminded of a local class whose behaviour fell far short of the rational liberty enjoyed by “self-possessed individuals.”78 Despite the street’s renaming to Lombard Street in 1876 and the gradual decline in its population, its reputation for poverty and social dysfunctionality hardly diminished. An 1882 Globe story documented the lives “of debauchery and sin” led by the occupants of a two-storey dwelling where “drinking, carousing, and infamy” were engaged in.79 The following year, the locals’ farewell to Dwan was the basis for another colourful description of “drunken brawls and rows of various degrees of magnitude. A number of residents in that portion of the classic street seemed to have taken on board an extra cargo of bad whiskey and were determined to work it off in pugilistic, brickbat, and other styles of encounter.”80 The street’s dependent poor were also depicted in a Grip parody of Irish nationalist arguments, which claimed that the “suffering Irish” were not confined to “the old country” (figure 3.6). These trying circumstances may not have typified the lives of many of Toronto’s Irish Catholics, but the visibility of these stories and the places associated with them certainly mattered to the way the Catholic minority was perceived one generation after the settlement of the famine refugees. Toronto’s middle class could also draw conclusions about the most disreputable elements in the community through the publication of crime statistics. Not surprisingly, the Catholic Irish gained a prominence in such calculations from the late 1840s. In 1865, the Globe published the nationalities of offenders appearing in the police-court column for several months, an exercise which once again depicted the dubious contribution of that group to the urban community.81 In 1875, the paper published the jail statistics for the previous year, highlighting the fact that the most common cause of incarceration was being drunk and disorderly. In a telling indictment of the lenses through which “social life” was popularly viewed, variables of religion and birthplace were included, and Catholics were disproportionately represented. Of the 2,065 males jailed, 719 (almost thirty-five percent) were Catholic and just under one‑third Irish-born. Yet “criminality” in all its guises was not simply the domain of unfortunate immigrant men who were fond of alcohol.

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Figure 3.6  “Irish Sufferers.” Grip, 3 January 1880. Here, “Mr. McFinnigan” and his Lombard Street family are portrayed as “a fair specimen of many more to be found in our city” and used by the magazine to remind “those benevolent people who are getting up the fund for the relief of the Irish sufferers” that there are local Irish families also deserving of their help.

There were 556 females jailed, and 280 (just over half) of these were Catholic with a similar percentage Irish-born, many of them likely working as domestic servants at one time or another.82 Shining examples of Victorian womanhood they were not, but the uncharitable language that was often used to describe the bodies and dispositions of these female offenders only served to bolster dominant middle-class perceptions of proper ladylike behaviour and, for some, to discourage the hiring of Catholic women. Besides the lurid accounts of life on Stanley/Lombard Street that appeared in police-court and assizes columns, those who sought to blame Irish Catholics for many of the city’s social ills or various forms of public disorder could also refer to such quantitative information. The statistics published for 1875 did not record a great deal of change.83 The Catholic Irish could still be seen as Toronto’s p ­ rimary

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out-group by many within its Protestant majority, with their poorest fraction facing challenges of adjustment on several fronts. Buffalo: Territory and Territoriality Although the Irish were also a known people in Buffalo prior to the potato famine, the arrivals of the late 1840s put enormous strain on existing structures for work and shelter. By 1855, more than half of all Irish households had carved out modest existences in the lakeshore and canalcorridor sections of the first and eighth wards, with some regularly tending to animals in and around their dwellings to serve as a key non-wage income source alongside the ubiquitous boarders.84 Twenty-five years on, Irish immigrants and their families were represented in every ward of the city, though they remained closely tied to the waterfront and canal districts, especially the first ward where familiar sites of employment, the grain elevators, increased their presence along the Buffalo River (figures 3.7, 3.8, and 3.9). Few Irish were to be found north of Seneca Street, beyond which lay the largely German East Side. Taken together, the first and eighth wards accounted for fifty-two percent of all sampled Buffalo Irish households in 1880, with the first ward alone accounting for thirtysix percent, a figure that downplays the substantial numbers of single Irish boarders augmenting the incomes of many households (table 3.5). Many of the remaining households were clustered on streets located adjacent to these two wards, with the West Side already looked upon as something of an “improved” district.85 Those engaged in waterfront industry did not have far to walk to their places of work, and the first ward became recognized not only as an Irish area but as a neighbourhood name – the First Ward – in its own right. What originated as a functional administrative division had now acquired a popular social meaning. While the city’s most elite component’s residential splendour on Delaware Avenue has already been commented upon, Buffalo’s AngloAmerican working class of mainly railroad and foundry workers, printers, and machinists was to be found in the cosmopolitan downtown area, and interspersed with German families in the districts to the west and north of the business district. Few among this group pursued unskilled labour. German speakers, meanwhile, clustered in the fifth, sixth, and seventh wards of Buffalo’s East Side, their share of these three wards’ populations in 1880 being 75.7, 94, and 81.2 percent respectively. This side of town was not known as a Deutschendörfchen for nothing.

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Niagara River

11

7

10

8

9

6 4

5

> 60% > 40 – 60%

2

> 20 – 40%

3

≤ 20%

1

Buffalo Harbor

N 0 0

0.5

1.0 0.5

1.5 km 1.0 m i.

Source: United States federal census manuscript sample

Figure 3.7  Households of Irish ethnic origin as a percentage of all households by ward (1–11), Buffalo 1880.

The First Ward, however, was akin to a small industrial town, and it was primarily within this section that understandings of Irishness in Buffalo were moulded and modified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Toronto did not possess an Irish neighbourhood of such scale, and so this particular “Little Ireland” is worthy of some discussion. Rather than the Satanic mill, the ward’s immigrants and their families lived in the shadow of the grain elevator, surviving in “hundreds of wood

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Perry St.

io . St

ty

34

St.

Haker Town

Bagley Town

2 .

Union Town

p

i Sh

.

St

Ci

on ns

N

Ohio Basin

Louisiana St.

Oh

Ga

Lake Erie

The Beach

Elk St. 33 Ab bo tt R d Katherine St.

Mackinaw St.

The Flats

Fulton St.

Sm ith

1 4 Miami St.

Alabama St.

Elk St.

Hamburgh St.

Perry St. Fulton St. Chicago St.

3

Michigan St.

Between Raid and Rebellion

Main St.

84

Ca na

30

South St.

l

Grain elevators Roman Catholic Churches 1 St. Bridget’s 2 St. Stephen’s Public schools Railways

Bu 0 0

0.2

0.4 km

Riv

ffa

er

lo

0.2 mi.

Figure 3.8  Aspects of the geography of Buffalo’s First Ward in the late nineteenth century.

frame houses, most of which had little picket fences, gates and tiny front yards set back from wooden sidewalks and dirt streets.”86 The low-lying topography and occasional floods made it an undesirable residential district (it was especially hard-hit during the cholera epidemic of 1849), and its geographical isolation contributed to perceptions of it as an Irish village.87 Households with heads of Irish birth and ancestry comprised seventy percent of all households in the ward in 1880, with the remaining households headed by Americans, Germans, and a host of other nationalities, many of whom were the owners of hotels, boarding-houses, and saloons.88 A Co. Clare–born veteran of the ward wrote in 1915 of Elk Street as a place where “no matter from what part of the green isle the Irish lad might come, always there was one of his own to give him a welcome.”89 For those used to demarcating senses of belonging in their Irish localities at the scale of villages, parishes, townlands, and even fields, informal naming procedures were also evident within Buffalo’s urban-industrial milieu, shaping territoriality, familiarity, and memory. Figure 3.8 maps these names; the aforementioned Hakertown had a Munster context while those who lived in the vicinity of the Buffalo Union furnace were termed “Union towners.”90 This non-official placename geography was imposed within Irish Buffalo from at least the 1850s when parts of the first, second, and eighth wards had names such as “the Patch,” “the

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Known Groups 85

Figure 3.9  Wells Elevator, Buffalo. Courtesy of the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society.

Flats,” “the Hook,” and “Sandytown” conferred upon them. Elsewhere, the Irish who lived along the seawall in a neighbourhood known variously as “The Island” or “The Beach” depended mainly upon fishing, and a Catholic church was built for them in 1873.91 These dimensions of the settlement experience may also have prolonged feelings of Irish regionalism. A correspondent to Toronto’s Irish Canadian using the ­apposite pen name of “rambler” reported from Buffalo in 1881 that “many sincere Irishmen have advanced against our fellow countrymen of Buffalo the charge of fostering ‘Provincialism,’” before adding with dismay that there were “good grounds for the indictment.”92 To the city’s non-Irish, however, the southern wards were firm Irish territory.

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Table 3.5 Characteristics of selected lodgings on Ohio Street, Buffalo, 1880 House number on Ohio St 34 38 40 44 54 160 170 172 189 286 336 370 390 496

Occupation of proprietor Boarding ho./saloon Boss shoveller Boarding ho./saloon Boarding house Boarding ho./saloon Laborer Keeping house Boss shoveller Boss shoveller Grocer Saloon keeper Boarding ho./saloon Elevator boss Laborer

Birthplace of proprietor Ireland Ireland Germany Germany Ireland Ireland Scotland Ireland Ireland Ireland New York Baden Ireland Ireland

Total no. of boarders

No. of Irishborn boarders*

10 (2) 15 (3) 25 (4) 19 (2) 5 (1) 10 17 19 (1) 17 (1) 26 14 (1) 8 (1) 32 4

4 (2) 12 (3) 8 (4) 4 (1) 4 (1) 7 0 18 (1) 8 16 0 0 27 1

Source: US federal census manuscripts. * Number of married or widowed boarders shown in parentheses; otherwise all are single.

The First Ward’s elevator landscape was a powerful visual testimony to Buffalo’s international stature as a port that in turn stimulated transatlantic passages of Irish for several decades. Locally held impressions of Irishmen’s capabilities for undertaking heavy labour, shaped by their role in the creation of the Erie Canal, informed later remarks such as  those of a local Doubting Thomas who, scornful of Joseph Dart’s attempts to develop a steam-powered elevator, opined that “Irishmen’s backs were the cheapest elevators.”93 Dart’s success, however, spawned subsequent phases of elevator-building, and by 1878 at least thirty elevators were in business, more than half of them possessing storage capacities exceeding 200,000 bushels.94 By the end of the 1880 season, over 100,000,000 bushels of grain were being received in Buffalo, about seventy percent of which was stored in elevators rather than transferred directly to canal boats.95 This did not mean that perceptions of Irishmen as cheap and disposable workers were overturned, however. The elevators were owned mostly by private individuals and railroad companies, with the interests of both managed by the Western Elevating Company since 1859. The successes of local Yankee businessmen

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associated with the grain trade were the stuff of commercial brochures and boosterist histories whose fawning narratives centred on the familiar American themes of progress, prosperity, and self-made men.96 Not surprisingly, little to nothing about the lives of labourers appeared in such accounts. Though technological progress meant that the “Irishman’s back” was no longer used in the same way as in the early 1840s, each arriving ship’s hold still had to be rigged with steam shovels to scoop out the grain, and the nooks and crannies that could not be reached by the buckets had to be cleared by human effort. Either way, the bodies of the scoopers were being literally beaten up. Perry Smith’s comment that Buffalo’s elevating business would be “almost impossible” without “the immense crops of western grain” failed to acknowledge the men that transferred that grain, season after season.97 The First Ward landscape was one created by labour as much as capital. Although it was heavy work, prospective emigrants from rural southwest Ireland responded to the demand for labour unfolding on Buffalo’s waterfront. Consider, for example, the ten children born to George “The Old General” Evans of Castlemaine, Co. Kerry, six of whom migrated to Buffalo’s waterfront at different times. Thomas was the first to arrive in 1885 and immediately acquired work as a grain scooper, while his fiancée Nora Fitzgerald later joined him. Thomas was able to sponsor the passages of five other brothers who, like their eldest brother, all secured work on the boats. Of the twelve children belonging to the brother Thomas left behind in Castlemaine, six would follow to Buffalo during the Irish War of Independence (1919–21), illustrating how a new rural Irish generation availed itself of a migration chain established between its locality and an American city by its members’ uncles (and perhaps other locals and relatives) decades earlier.98 Thomas Evans would later leave the uncertainties of grain-scooping behind. Having work and everyday life revolve around a local landscape of canals, docks, and slips was hazardous for several reasons. Men at work occasionally fell into the water and drowned, and one of the betterknown to succumb in this manner was Frank B. Gallagher. A veteran of the legendary Corcoran Irish Legion in the Civil War, a Fenian “centre,” and a participant in the Ridgeway raid of 1866, Gallagher died in 1870 after falling to the bottom of a dam constructed during a project to deepen the Buffalo River. The Express described him as “a widely known and highly respected citizen … a man of the people, and very popular with the working classes.”99 At other times, victims were not known at all, as newspapers occasionally reported an “unidentified body” in the river,

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Clark and Skinner Canal, Evans Ship Canal, or Ohio Basin. But when people were identified, it was not only the names of Irishmen such as John Rourke and Michael Shannon that appeared in their pages, but also those of women such as Bridget Devine and a “Mrs. Foley.”100 What might have appeared as accidents at the time were not always so: in September 1880, Bridget Roach attempted suicide by drowning.101 There were other hazards. Tuberculosis and asphyxiation were widespread among the scoopers, as the grain dust would get into their lungs and cause asthma, while fires broke out occasionally in the elevators and frame-constructed dwellings. Thomas Evans’ wife and two of their children were among the many unfortunates to fall foul of tuberculosis, though further disasters would follow, as three out of five children from Thomas’ second marriage also fell victim to the disease at an early age.102 With a plentiful supply of labourers cramming into the boarding-houses and saloons of the First Ward each season, wages were kept low and the temptations of alcohol were ever-present. Seasonality added to the uncertainties of work life (the navigation season was seven months), but even then, vessels would arrive irregularly, resulting in the under-utilization of elevator capacity. The Irish did not accept these conditions unquestioningly, and a number of strikes occurred in the 1870s that only seemed to reinforce a long-held view reiterated in 1881 by P.G. Cook, secretary of the Western Elevating Company, that “the Irish are the only class who can do the work; they [the elevator owners and foremen] have employed Germans and colored men, and have brought them from a distance, but they have never been able to stand the work.”103 What some arriving Irish may have initially considered “opportunity” also left them open to exploitation, however. It was not a simple case of powerless Irish labour being ground down by powerful Protestant Anglo-American capital. Michel Foucault has suggested that power “passes through much finer channels” than simply downwards, and between the elevator owners and scoopers were the men who recruited scooper gangs.104 The foremen employed in each elevator subcontracted the task of finding men for the season to a “boss” who then resolved to find gangs of men numbering anywhere between thirty and one hundred, sometimes more.105 These bosses were invariably also Irish and were the owners of saloons or boarding-houses, or related to owners of these establishments. Under their authority, labourers were channelled from specific boarding-houses to selected elevators. The saloon, often doubling as not only a boarding-house but also a grocery, became the most familiar commercial establishment in the First Ward (figures 3.10, 3.11, and 3.12), utilized by workers as a cafeteria,

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Perry St

Fulton St

Fulton St

Elk St

io St

Louisiana St

Oh

Sidway St

Bagley

Union Town N

South St

o

ffal

Bu

Michigan St

Haker Town

Town

St on

l na Ca

ns Ga

ch ea

ip Sh ty Ci

eB

Th Elk St

Ohio Basin

Alabama St

Mackinaw St

(conjectured locations) (conjectured locations)

The Flats

Miami St

Katherine St

Chicago St

Elk St Hamburgh St

Michigan St

Main St

Perry St

er

Lake Erie Ohio

St

Saloons Boarding houses Hotels

Riv

0 0

0.1

0.2 0.1

0.3 k m 0.2 mi.

Figure 3.10  Buffalo’s First Ward  saloons and boarding-houses, c. 1880.

Figure 3.11  Saloon, Ganson Street, Buffalo. Courtesy of the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society.

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Figure 3.12  Swannie House, Ohio Street, Buffalo. Courtesy of the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society.

a hiring location, a place to sleep, and a location for general conviviality for people with nicknames like “Pasty” Quigley, “Beans” Danahy, “Iggy” Holeran, and “Hippo” McGrath. These saloons were overwhelmingly a man’s world, and many owners worked first as labourers before setting their sights on saloon ownership as a route towards economic and social distinction in a tightly knit neighbourhood where the strength required to scoop grain acted as a measure of manliness, or in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, embodied “cultural capital.”106 The power circuits centred on ­saloons and boarding-houses enveloped not only worlds of work and leisure but, as chapter 5 demonstrates, those of politics as well. Elements of this hierarchy can be observed in birthplace and marital data for the boarders of fourteen dwellings on Ohio Street (table 3.5). Most of those providing shelter were Irish, and while they did not take in Irish boarders exclusively, these dominated the scene, representing well over half the total. The non-Irish boarding-house keepers still took in a lot of Irish people, one of the notable exceptions being the Scot who ran the Swannie House at number 170 (figure 3.12). In two cases, the occupation of the household head was given simply as “laborer,” but in the case of John Hoolahan, his provision of space for ten boarders

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highlights the degree to which an informal market for shelter existed. John Haley was not alone in regarding Irish men to be the only ones with the muscle to do waterfront work. He took in thirty-two boarders, twenty-seven of whom were single Irish-born males, and his lodgings were teeming in the summer of 1880 with men in their twenties and thirties with surnames such as Shaughnessy, Hickey, McCarthy, Griffin, O’Day, Hennessy, Dolan, and O’Grady. While the sharing of domestic space with individuals without blood ties to the family was a common source of supplementary income, some of the household heads listed in table 3.5 had a more deep-seated position in the local labour-supply network. Consider thirty-six-year-old grocer Patrick Kane, whose dwelling space at 286 Ohio Street sheltered not only his extended family, with a wife, two sons, one daughter, an aunt, a niece, and his mother-in-law, but also three servants and twentysix boarders, sixteen of the latter being Irish-born. How many of these sixteen would have been impressed by the fact that “Captain” Kane was another veteran of Ridgeway who had done his bit for “Ireland’s cause” in 1866?107 This was another species of cultural capital, similar in form to that possessed by the unfortunate F.B. Gallagher. Not merely centres for the distribution of goods and credit locally, then, “groceries” such as Kane’s were products of their place and time, not just in Irish America but in Ireland.108 To those on the outside looking in, there was much to scorn about these socio-economic arrangements. As local reformer James Dormer’s paper to the Charity Organization Society in 1883 put it, the First Ward grocery had become “the most pernicious channel the [beer and liquor] traffic has assumed, or can assume in or out of hell – that of the bossshoveler’s boarding-house possibly excepted.”109 The Irish Canadian’s “rambler” similarly observed that “the unmarried man, fortunate enough to secure the favour of the ‘Boss,’ very often finds himself at the end of a season, owing to the avarice and cupidity of which he is the victim, not only out of money, but deeply sunk in debt.”110 Dormer described the “sloppy counters” of saloons and boarding-houses acting as “the Sunday pay desk of rich elevator owners and soulless corporations whose greed for grain … closed all their eyes and hands to the ruin and terrible misery and cost of life and wrong they brought to us”; not until after the strike of 1899 would the scoopers be paid at a neutral venue.111 This way of viewing Buffalo’s elevator district was very different from the boosterist account offered by Perry Smith. What was largely missed by critics, though, was the coincidence of ethnicity between the scoopers and the

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bosses/saloon-keepers. The latter were exploiting the only people they felt they could confidently exploit – those of their own kind. They could hardly expect such exploitative arrangements to have survived with masses of Germans or native-born Americans. For different reasons, the Irish were indeed seen as “the only class” who could do the work both inside and outside the elevator district. Understandably, then, not all Irish felt at home within such an atmosphere. Even if encounters with others from the old country were frequent and brought some comfort, feelings of alienation were never far away. Some would respond with alcoholic excess, to the detriment of both their health and their family’s finances and quality of life. Others would leave their families behind, never to be heard from again. More would move on and hope to start afresh elsewhere. Enough, however, would settle to ­preserve the Irish flavour of the district, continuing a culture of everyday life that generated solidarity in a community acutely aware of its Irish heritage.

P ov e rt y … While Irish immigrants and their families in Buffalo and Toronto strove to maintain the economic solvency of their households, there were those who fell into more dire financial circumstances. Illness, injuries, deaths, and job losses could suddenly throw a family into chaos. While neighbours could offer some assistance, their material circumstances were seldom much better, and moving on to pastures new was easier said than done. While these challenges faced by individuals and households were sometimes of a temporary nature, others experienced chronic deprivation. Broad perceptions about the neediest elements of local society were shaped in Toronto between the 1840s and 1870s: they were both Irish and Catholic. From the vantage point of the Protestant majority, Catholic poverty typically “provoked more criticism than sympathy.”112 These perceptions were sharpened not just by public sightings of paupers and street beggars, printed accounts from the police court, or middle-class notions of liberal individualism, but also by the building up of webs of charitable institutions directed to intervene between indigent Catholics and the state. The St Vincent de Paul Society, for instance, offered assistance only to those Catholic families “with children who were or had been married and … without other means of support.”113 The number of families assisted grew from approximately eighty in the mid-1860s to

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three hundred in the mid-1880s.114 For those Catholics in need of temporary shelter, there was the House of Providence located beside St Paul’s Church in the heart of Corktown, opened in 1857. Sectarian distinctions were shot through Toronto’s landscape of charity, with other institutions such as the Protestant Orphans Home and Female Aid Society and the proselytizing Toronto City Mission.115 Though a poor law was not to be forthcoming during the period, some public relief was available. The House of Industry, authorized by an act of 1837, was funded by municipality and province as well as by private subscriptions and donations from the city’s well-to-do, and ­provided “relief to all who may require it, irrespective of creed and nationality.”116 Like the St Vincent de Paul Society, it too operated within the parameters of liberal political economy that distinguished between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, or what one local commentator termed a “wise discrimination” that warded off “a spirit of dependence.”117 Subscribers included most of the leading clergymen of the city, and each relief application was investigated by ward-based teams of visitors while others could apply directly to the downtown headquarters. Those deemed deserving were then provided with food and fuel and, where required, shelter. To the great annoyance of the House’s medical officer, illness was occasionally feigned to obtain assistance. In 1868, 532 families containing 1,873 individuals were assisted; by 1875, the corresponding figures rose to 729 families and 2,760 individuals as the effects of immigration and economic depression began to bite.118 That almost twice as many individual women were assisted as men says something about the effects of the death or desertion of husbands on family life, prevailing doubts about working-class women’s ability to take care of themselves and their families, and related assumptions of their place within the ranks of the “actual” rather than “pretended” poor.119 Irish Catholics were unsurprising applicants for relief to the House of Industry during the famine era, but how prominent were they by the 1870s?120 More than three hundred applications for relief and shelter recorded by the House of Industry for January 1871 were analyzed, and in most but not all cases, birthplace and religion were recorded along with family structure and time of arrival in Canada and Toronto.121 Despite these inconsistencies, some trends are readily apparent. Of the 172 cases where birthplace was identified, the vast majority of applicants were of English (76, or 44.2 percent) or Irish (75, or 43.6 percent) birth. Yet while the English cohort was made up of mostly complete Anglican families of recent arrival, that of the Irish was mostly Catholic

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with more single-person and single-parent applications than those representing complete families. Only 14 out of the 75 Irish cases involved complete families; this household form comprised 55 out of 76 English cases in contrast. Moreover, of the applicants whose time of arrival could be determined, all of those who came between 1869 and January 1871 were English. While groups of English immigrants entered Toronto at various times, the primary source of the late-1860s intake was the London docklands, a pattern that lasted until the early 1870s and stretched the finances of the local St George’s Society.122 The mean age of English applicants (mostly husbands) was 38.7 years; that of the Irish-born was 49.6 years. While the word “emigrant” was frequently applied to the English families by house visitors, this label was rarely applied to Irish cases, suggesting the latter households to be not only longer-established in the city but also solid members of the ranks of the chronically poor. Being an emigrant evidently meant being of recent arrival in the eyes of the inspectors. The English/Irish contrast also translated along denominational lines, with Anglican and Catholic families making up 132 of the 163 cases where the religion of the applicant households was recorded. The aforementioned Stanley Street was an intermittent inclusion in Catholic case descriptions and the Globe unsympathetically appraised the 398 Irish-born adults relieved by the House in 1872 as “old persons who, though now sober enough, were in many cases brought to what they are by idleness, improvidence and strong drink.”123 By the end of the 1870s, English Protestants and Irish Catholics continued to make up the main applicant groups for House of Industry relief, with the former group comprising the bulk of new immigrants to the city and the latter continuing to have proportionately more chronic cases.124 With the Charity Act of 1874 authorizing provincial grant payments to institutions on the basis of the number of indigent persons cared for, however, the Catholic House of Providence stood out as a noted beneficiary and, by the early 1890s, was receiving a greater provincial subsidy than Toronto’s House of Industry.125 Given these patterns, some influential Irish Protestants took steps to differentiate between the poverty experienced by their group and that endured by Catholics, and their beliefs came into the open with the establishment of the Irish Protestant Benevolent Society (ipbs) in March 1870. Its founding reflected not simply a willingness to assist the neediest portions of the city’s present Irish Protestant population, but also an expectation of further Protestant arrivals from Ireland and the “deserving”

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character of the group on the whole. Other national societies of the time, such as those of St George and St Andrew, did likewise for their own deserving poor. Co. Cavan–born Methodist minister and editor of the Christian Guardian, Rev. Edward Hartley Dewart, complained of the tendency of “indiscriminate charity … to increase rather than ameliorate the evil of begging” while maintaining that “only the minority and a very small minority of the poor who applied for aid were Protestants.”126 The follow-up remarks of Alexander Hamilton, also Cavan-born and a militia captain in Toronto during the rebellion of 1837, were more blunt when he claimed that Protestants “would rather perish than beg, but it was not so with the Roman Catholics. No doubt the majority of beggars in the city were Irish, but they were not Protestants.”127 Underlying these criticisms, of course, was the distinction between self-possessed and dependent individuals, with the latter’s capacity for reform stymied by communitarian Catholic traditions. As the Toronto World put it in 1889, the Roman Catholic was “a man who has abdicated the right to think and act for himself in things political and spiritual and whose liberty is in the keeping of an ancient and powerful Italian organization.”128 Popular representations of places such as Stanley/Lombard Street within Toronto’s public sphere certainly contributed to assumptions about the nature of Catholic Irish dependency that had been in place since the famine era if not before.129 Begging ­visibly demonstrated evangelical Protestants’ belief of poverty being “the penalty for immoral or ‘irresponsible’ conduct.”130 Hamilton later claimed that “Irish Protestants had a right to look after the countrymen of their own religion in preference to bestowing indiscriminate charity, when the Roman Catholics would support only their own poor.”131 These claims by Dewart and Hamilton to the liberal higher ground were traceable back to Ireland and to Ulster in particular, where “immorality and ignorance … thought to be products of Roman Catholicism” were defined as the common enemy of Protestants.132 Consider, then, the words of the Ulster-born Presbyterian minister Rev. William Patterson, who told i p b s members in 1888 how “unselfishness, independence and self-reliance characterized the Irish Protestant … They did not seek relief if they could help it and, during a Famine in Ireland the poor in Ulster had to be searched for in their homes and supplied with food or money by the distributors.”133 This was a perfect illustration of how the reality of Famine suffering in the north of Ireland became downplayed in its aftermath, as Belfast industrialized and beliefs about industrious Ulster Protestant males and the glories of the Union became solidified.134

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Presbyterians in Patterson’s birthplace of Maghera, Co. Londonderry, were, however, among those adversely affected by conditions in the 1840s.135 If these Protestant Irish did not see themselves as victims in Ireland, they were not prepared to be seen as burdens to the state in Canada. Less overtly sectarian elements of such attitudes percolated down to the Canadian-born generation. John McAree, for example, described his Uncle Aleck as having “the Ulsterman’s shrewdness and thrift” while being as “tight-fisted a curmudgeon as ever came out of Ulster”; Aleck’s friend William was another “shrewd Ulsterman.”136 These were more subtle ways of drawing lines of character within Toronto’s Irish population than those deployed by Rev. Patterson, but they were no less important for that. The ipbs annual report of 1871 stated the society to have attracted 291 members and to have dispensed relief to fifty-one persons for their households’ benefit.137 By 1872, the membership had climbed to 360  while more than one hundred households received relief.138 The ipbs contribution to those households struggling to make ends meet was therefore not inconsiderable. Though precise descriptions of household circumstances are unavailable, women were prominent recipients of aid. In January 1871, the society’s Charitable Committee recommended relief to eight female applicants, “sober and respectable,” who were “unable from age or sickness to do much for themselves.”139 Of the 103 households receiving relief in 1872, forty were widows, while in seven other cases, the husbands had deserted or been declared insane.140 In 1874, the eighty-two successful applications for relief represented 259 individuals “many of them old and infirm, and others of them suffering from disease” while in 1877, the circumstances of economic depression resulted in the distribution of relief to more than two hundred applicants.141 During its first  twelve years, the ipbs raised an estimated $12,000 for benevolent purposes.142 Other lifelines were possible too, such as the supply of credit that came from neighbourhood groceries. Local families racked with unstable employment and income levels were, as regular and known customers, rarely cast aside by shopkeepers. This system of credit provision that placed families in perpetual debt to local merchants and retailers had also been widespread in rural Ireland.143 The Cabbagetown store operated by the Ulster immigrant relatives of John McAree was one such institution where “it would be unheard of to stop a man’s credit just because he was out of work.”144 McAree’s rather romantic depiction, however, leaves out any indication of the interest rates charged by his relatives!

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With a higher working-class component in their ranks and a larger “floating” population of single men, the problem of neediness among the Buffalo Irish was more acute than for their Toronto counterparts. There was, again, a range of official outlets to which the city’s Irish poor could apply for assistance. Catholic parishes and churches established during Bishop John Timon’s reign were strengthened in the 1870s by his successor, Bishop Stephen V. Ryan, through a network of new organizations promoting benevolence, temperance, and piety (chapter 4). By the 1870s, the services of the St Vincent de Paul Society were augmented by benevolent societies set up in St Bridget’s and St Patrick’s parishes in the first and third wards respectively. The objective of the St Bridget’s Society was to distribute monies “for the benefit of members who are in want, sick, dying, or the heirs of those who are dead.”145 Low wages meant that saving for “retirement” was not an option, and if elderly parents could not be taken in by their children, they were left destitute or faced the poorhouse. Women were especially vulnerable, and the St Nicholas’ Home for Orphans was a regular beneficiary of funds raised from St Patrick’s Night entertainments.146 Given its location in the First Ward and its functions as described, it is unsurprising that the St Bridget’s Society became “probably the largest Catholic society, with the exception of the Young Men’s, in the city.”147 Relief was also available on both a formal and an informal basis. Political “ward-heelers” acutely observed the daily struggles facing households in neighbourhoods. While Irish-American history is littered with tales of how political patronage networks put thousands of Irish into public employment, the networks of loyalty constructed by these politicians and their allies were also responsible for the distribution of non-monetary items such as blocks of wood, lumps of coal, or Christmas turkeys, gestures that eased the hardship of families.148 These acts were rarely forgotten at election time. Buffalo’s public overseer of the poor also distributed outdoor relief assistance, with Irish and German families being prominent recipients.149 Between 1 October 1878 and December 1880, for example, 1,296 individuals from 342 families of German background received relief, with Irish families not far behind with 1,253  individuals from 346 households. While both received approximately $11,250 from a total outdoor relief budget of $32,513, the fact that the German-born comprised almost twice the Irish-born proportion of the city’s population (table 2.3) needs to be kept in mind.

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These patterns of relief distribution are also discernible from the records of the Charity Organization Society (co s), a non-political and non-religious body established in the city in 1878.150 Setting up four district offices before the close of 1879, the society declared its mission was to “help the poor to help themselves, to foster habits of thrift and independence, to raise the needy from pauperism to the condition of selfsupport.”151 Their published reports include breakdowns of applicants by birthplace (“nativity”), and table 3.6 shows the Irish to be once again overrepresented among applicants. Only in 1885 would the share of Irish-born applicants fall below twenty percent of the total. This was also a year when Poles assumed a heightened presence among applicants, though given the partition of Poland, it is also possible that some of the German-born included Polish speakers. A proportion of the American-born applicants were undoubtedly of Irish parentage also, yet to what extent is unclear. While the Irish and Germans were the main applicants for outdoor relief in Buffalo, the Irish did not fare so well when crime statistics and poorhouse admissions are considered. Sidney Harring notes how Buffalo’s arrest pattern for the mid-1860s was, like Toronto’s, dominated by public order offences, and in 1866, one-third of those arrested were Irish.152 In 1881, the report of the city’s police superintendent recorded 9,012 arrests, over half of which involved “white Americans,” and while 800 Germans were involved in arrests, the Irish figure was 1,580, making them the primary immigrant group associated with crime.153 Labourers were also the occupational group most likely to be involved in arrests, and the waterfront and canal districts became synonymous with general anti-social behaviour, with wards popularly dubbed the “Bloody First” and “Bloody Eighth.” These Buffalo-specific labels not only echoed the “Bloody Ould Sixth” Irish ward of New York City, but also captured the rough-and-tumble political culture within both neighbourhoods and cities (chapter 5). The Irish were also notably present in that infamous indoor space of relief, the Erie County poorhouse (table 3.7). The profile of the poorhouse’s inhabitants had changed since its relocation to a farm site six miles north of the city in 1856. With the numbers of children declining over time, the institution was shaped into more or less “a home for unmarried mothers and a maternity hospital.”154 Yet, as Michael Katz’s data on inmates’ length of residence show, the poorhouse served a function as a temporary refuge for those Irish who suffered from short-run

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Table 3.6 Annual number of applications to the Charity Organization Society, Buffalo, by birthplace, 1880–85 Birthplace of applicant US

Germany

Ireland

Canada

England

Poland

Others

1880: N %

307 23.4

426 32.5

338 25.8

51 3.9

71 5.4

33 2.5

86 6.6

1881: N %

329 23.3

418 29.5

355 25.1

82 5.8

82 5.8

80 5.7

69 4.9

1882: N %

312 18.2

470 27.4

427 24.9

152 8.9

114 6.7

145 8.5

93 5.4

1883: N %

313 23.7

389 29.4

318 24.1

70 5.3

64 4.8

112 8.5

55 4.2

1884: N %

339 24.4

439 31.6

301 21.7

69 5.0

85 6.1

92 6.6

65 4.7

1885: N %

420 23.7

543 30.6

335 18.9

69 3.9

7 4.0

254 14.3

145 8.2

Source: Charity Organization Society annual reports, Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society.

employment during economic downturns. As he argues, these occupants “were not passive, degraded paupers who … lived out their [poorhouse] lives in dependent torpor.”155 Between 1853 and 1866, for example, just over one-quarter of the 1,514 Irish-born users of the Erie County poorhouse had stayed within its walls less than one week, with a mere 0.7 percent staying for at least one year.156 The Irish poor, on this evidence, were not a homogeneous mass and used local relief resources in mostly a short-run and strategic way rather than on a long-term basis. The famine and immediate post-famine cohorts made their presence felt in the poorhouse in the 1850s, when the proportion of Irish-born entering with relatives was more than one-third and almost one-half of  the Irish-born were women, with an appreciable number of children also present. By the 1880s, however, Irish-born inmates were likely to be entering on their own rather than with relatives, while the 1875 Children’s Law (removing all children aged between two and sixteen from poorhouses to orphanages) rendered the young Irish-born cohort all but absent. Those elderly Irish inmates were now more likely to be men than women, and for many if not most, the Erie County poorhouse became the place where they would see out their final days.

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Table 3.7 Characteristics of the Irish-born in the Erie County Poorhouse, 1829–86

1829 1835–39 1840–44 1853–54 1855–59 1860–64 1865–69 1870–74 1875–79 1880–86

1829–44 1853–69 1870–86

Irish-born inmates as a percentage of total

German-born inmates as a percentage of total

Females as a percentage of all Irish-born

Percentage of Irishborn inmates entering with relatives

13.6 16.2 29.6 39.3 40.4 38.9 31.2 31.0 27.9 27.4

4.9 2.2 6.1 35.3 22.1 16.7 10.8 19.4 13.2 19.3

15.3 29.5 41.7 48.8 51.4 54.0 44.4 24.2 12.5 32.9

12.8 24.4 19.5 10.6 14.9 20.3 3.4 3.7 2.4 0.5

Irish N

German N

Percentage of Irish-born aged 0–14

Percentage of Irishborn aged 50 and over

171 682 953

38 403 535

10.0 29.0 1.7

9.9 14.7 38.8

Source: Michael B. Katz, Poverty and Policy in American History (New York and London: Academic Press, 1983), 246–54 (Tables A.6, A.7, A.11, and A.16).

… a n d P ro gres s The words “happy home life” used by countless biographers of prominent citizens of nineteenth-century cities described a world far removed from the poorhouse. What passed for contentment in the domestic realm was clearly a subjective question, however, and more than a few Irish immigrants aimed to enjoy some degree of comfort in this sphere, not least through the achievement of homeownership. Middle-class ethnics in particular proved crucial in promoting the idea of homeownership among the working class as a step towards increased social worthiness and the acceptance of bourgeois capitalist norms, or what Kerby Miller has termed “quasi-middle class” values.157 Things would be little different in Toronto and Buffalo. Of the 470 multigenerational Irish households in Toronto whose tenure could be identified, 167, or 35.3 percent, owned their dwelling units in 1881. This was an above-average rate for the city as a whole, though

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the city’s Irish Protestants were not necessarily acquiring the status of property owners faster than their Catholic countrymen despite their more advantageous economic position.158 The Catholic property ownership rate was 32.3 percent, or 54 out of 167 classifiable units. In proportionate terms, the Irish of the second and later generations were less likely to be homeowners than the immigrants, a fact likely explained by the older age profile of the latter group. Significant numbers of Toronto’s Irish were thus committed enough to their location to save and purchase property in it, and lending institutions helped facilitate their ambitions. For the mostly working-class Catholic group, Bishop de Charbonnel had established the Toronto Savings Bank in 1854, and its successor, the Home Savings and Loan Co. Ltd had several prominent Irish Catholic businessmen among its directorship in 1880.159 Its advertisements in the Irish Canadian that year noted that it received deposits “from twenty cents and upwards,” providing loans “on real estate mortgages” as well as for other purposes.160 Property-holding mattered not only to the cultivation of social respectability and family stability – it was also important in the spheres of education and politics. Catholic ratepayers could now divert their taxes to separate schools (chapter 4), and property ownership mattered, as in Ireland itself, in terms of franchise qualification, no small issue at a time when the Irish Canadian was agitating for greater Catholic representation in politics (chapter 5). While a local property culture developed in Toronto, variables such as land and house prices, length of residence, and the general economic climate were crucial in encouraging homeownership. With more than a hint of jealousy, one Bay Street tailor told the Globe in November 1880 of “labouring men who came here twenty years ago, when … land [cost] next to nothing,” who “are now owners of lots worth $500.”161 Yet the process of purchasing a home took time for many working-class families, and John McAree’s recollections of 1880s Cabbagetown pay homage to the industry of locals building homes “by instalments. They would save enough to buy a lot. Then they would save enough to buy the material for three or four rooms; and then they would build what was intended to be the rear of the house.”162 The housing demands of the diverse occupational and income groups of Irish in Toronto were met by an equally diverse group of landlords. Moreover, many among Toronto’s Irish owned not simply the residences they dwelt in but also those occupied by others. In fact, the providers of rental housing in nineteenth-century urban Canada were a diverse group,

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and not just wealthy investors or speculators.163 Irish Protestants and Catholics, then, were as likely to be leasing from a small-time builder as from a speculative property-owning professional, and of the 285 landlords identified, the vast majority were private individuals.164 The occupations of only 170 of these individuals could be traced, and their heterogeneity supports the findings of other scholars: while over thirty percent were self-employed and seventeen percent were owners/managers, there was a “manual working-class” sector of landlords that formed twenty-seven percent of the total. Half of the latter, unsurprisingly, were in the building trades. What was the extent of ethno-religious overlap between landlords and Irish tenants in the New World? Very little research has been done on this issue, perhaps for lack of available sources. For the Toronto Irish, ethnic origin could be determined from the 1871 census index for 119 landlords.165 Such a method of ethnic identification biases long-­ established landlords, but the results nevertheless point to an ethnic diversity among those landlords renting to Toronto’s Irish. Just over half of the landlords whose ethnic origin was determined were also Irish (54.6 percent), with lesser percentages of English (24.8 percent) and Scottish (18.6 percent) origin. The religion of both landlord/lessor and lessee could be established for only 125 cases, and no discernible pattern emerged. In other words, Catholics were not renting only from Catholics, nor Protestants only from Protestants. Though sectarian attitudes were detectable in other areas of the city’s public life during these years, Toronto’s housing market was not especially affected. Some of these landlords lived outside Toronto, while others resided on affluent streets in the city. Other “community” landlords lived on the same street as their lessees and/or were actively involved in local housing construction.166 In the east end, Patrick Mahoney, a forty-four-year-old Catholic teamster, owned from 67 to 89 Sackville Street in Corktown, a total of twelve properties; he lived in number 89. Nearer to the downtown, Thomas Bonner, a Catholic dairyman living on Ann Street, owned eight other properties on the same side of the street as his residence. Even so-called “problem families” could own the houses they occupied. The Globe grumbled about such householders on William Street in 1878, most of whom owned “the wretched hovels they live in and cannot, therefore, be driven out of the street.”167 This was the one-time “notorious” Dummer Street, and as with Stanley/Lombard Street, a namechange did not lead to an immediate change in reputation. Although property-­holding was a key element in the making of a liberal society,

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and at least one-quarter of this street’s households owned their properties in 1871, these families were evidently failing to live up to other sorts of social expectations.168 Elsewhere on the property-owning scale were men such as long-settled Methodists Richard West and William Wilkins. West, born in Co. Fermanagh, arrived in Toronto in the 1850s before establishing himself in the contracting business, and by 1890 was in possession of eighty-five houses in the city, along with significant tracts of vacant land.169 The Cork-born Wilkins emigrated directly to Toronto in 1834, entering the mercantile world. By the early 1880s, he was in business with his son, and their joint enterprise had “built over one hundred houses in the eastern portion of the city.”170 The Toronto housing landscape was being actively shaped by the Irish in both subtle and unsubtle ways. Despite dominating one of the key working-class neighbourhoods in Buffalo, the Irish in that city were only slightly less successful in acquiring property than their counterparts in Toronto. Studies done by Glasco for 1855 and Mary Catherine Mattis for the 1860s and 1870s point to an Irish immigrant group gradually experiencing property mobility.171 Through income-generating strategies, patience, and the discipline to save, the Buffalo Irish had found their niche within the city’s property market by 1880. Their overall rate of homeownership was 32.6 percent (157 out of 482 households) in that year, based on the Irish sample and surviving tax rolls. The rate was 37.3 percent for the Irish-born but, as with Toronto, their older age structure explains this difference from the second generation. The rates ranged from 27.3 percent in the first ward to 44.4 percent in the nearby third ward, where more of the Irish in the business and skilled sectors resided. As in Toronto, a small but influential Catholic middle class promoted the virtues of homeownership to their co-religionists in Buffalo. In the late 1860s, no less an individual than the aforementioned Fenian F.B. Gallagher was a trustee of the Emigrant Savings Bank, advertisements for which regularly appeared in the short-lived Fenian Volunteer newspaper.172 The bank was run by Irish and Germans and folded in 1870. Nevertheless, two other trustees, John McManus and James Mooney, established themselves as local real estate agents in the following decades. Both were also loyal church and (Democratic) party men, and Mooney, as we shall see in chapter 6, was at the centre of militant Irish nationalism in Buffalo in the 1880s.173 In 1884, some members of the American-born generation formed the Irish-American Savings and Loan Association “to enable the struggling

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mechanic and laborer to procure a home.”174 The association’s title was an obvious appeal to ethnic (and, implicitly, religious) loyalty, and it attracted 1,200 members within the first five years; in 1890, its advertisements appeared in the Catholic Union and Times alongside those of Buffalo-born real estate agents of Irish Catholic parentage.175 In 1889, Timothy J. Mahoney, a “well-known real estate and insurance man” who, like McManus, had served as city assessor, was said to have “issued a large catalogue of desirable property for sale or to rent.”176 He, McManus, and Mooney thus played a central role in encouraging habits such as saving among Buffalo’s Irish-Americans. The church and party affiliations of these men also provide additional insight into why anything resembling a militant working-class consciousness was unlikely to have developed in any meaningful way. Occupational pride also seemed stronger than any sense of wider proletarian solidarity. The evidence presented in this chapter conveys more a sense of a slowbut-steady process of occupational and residential integration for the Irish in Buffalo and Toronto than it does that of a group trapped in physical ghettoization. In late Victorian Toronto, the model of the “successful Irishman” was more likely to be Protestant than Catholic, though this is not to say that Catholics were without role models. They were, however, familiar inhabitants of the pockets of concentrated Irish poverty that remained in both cities by the 1880s, with “Irish territories” persisting at a variety of scales, from saloons and street blocks up to wards, defined and acknowledged by Irish and non-Irish alike. In addition to the skills and capital brought across the Atlantic by the immigrants, the economic structures of both cities had an impact on the occupational distributions of Irish within them. The relatively concentrated Irish settlement in Buffalo in particular owed much to that city’s world-renowned port. The First Ward acquired for a time a reputation as a place for Irishmen to find work, as the evidence of chain migrations shows. The neighbourhood’s “boss-saloon” system, however, vividly illustrated the point that not all Irishmen necessarily operated for the group benefit of their countrymen. In Toronto, settlement was more dispersed, yet the Irishness ascribed to select spaces and places was more than occasionally highlighted through the media of social conflict and popular parody as much as the fact of residence. If Cabbagetown was thought to represent Ulster and Protestantism, the origins of Claretown and Corktown lay in other parts of Ireland and in Catholicism. Understandings of Irish ethnicity in Buffalo and Toronto were, in such

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instances, not entirely the result of fabrication but were rather “grounded in real life context and social experience.”177 Some Irish were also actively involved in the making of non-Irish identities in both cities, notably those Irish women who, in their role as domestic servants, helped to maintain the lifestyles and identities of Anglo-Protestant elites. Such experiences provided these Irishwomen with a window on these bourgeois worlds not typically experienced by Irishmen, and the roles they played later in life as housewives and mothers, particularly where decisions about new family homes were concerned, can only be guessed at. This is a topic returned to in chapter 8. Whatever the role of newspapers and magazines in constructing notions of poor people and poor places, the public image of the Irish was also shaped by the interventions of Catholic leaders such as Archbishop Lynch in Toronto and Bishop Timon in Buffalo. Their mission was not only to foster a communitarian spirit among their flocks but also to guard their welfare through the establishment of charitable networks and other institutions.178 In Toronto, Lynch had both an institution and a nationality to defend; in Buffalo, this task was assumed most by Union and Times editor Rev. Cronin. Both men combatted negative stereotypes of the Catholic Irish, and in 1883, Lynch reprised his opposition to further Catholic Irish immigration. Having vetoed a proposal to bring Irish slum children to Toronto in 1872, Lynch continued to lament in his 1883 letter to the bishops and clergy of Ireland the “overcrowded tenement houses” in which the Irish lived “in the poorest and most unhealthy parts of the city.”179 In 1887, Cronin struck a brighter note when opining that in Buffalo’s “enumeration of nationalities furnishing elements dangerous to society, the Irish are not mentioned. They may not have the ability to accumulate wealth, but they are looked upon as fully in harmony with American ideas and principles … Confessedly only children in commercial habits a few years ago, the Irish are improving, and their descendants are destined to improve still further.”180 Given the numbers of Poles then entering Buffalo, Cronin sensed that the mantle of out-group was being passed on, and he was happy to expedite the process. It did not necessarily mean that the city’s Irish, though acquiring liberal-capitalist values, would lose their distinctiveness in the local social order. Cronin’s statement concerned acculturation rather than assimilation, and his editorial appeals to Irish nationalism would make him an enduring promoter of Irish ethnic identity. One of the “American values” he referred to here was undoubtedly the growing interest in property ownership among a group of hitherto modest means.

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There was nothing exceptionally “American” about this, of course, though it had important symbolic value for those Irish immigrants in both cities who had known only of rents being paid to landlords in the land they left, not to mention the eviction of neighbours. But these and other ideas about individual and collective improvement did not come only from ethno-religious newspapers or neighbourhood-level gossip; they came also from institutions such as churches and voluntary associations, and the circles of interaction encouraged by these entities are investigated in the following chapter.

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4 Pews and Parades: Institutions, Networks, and Social Encounters

This chapter considers institutional formations involving the Irish in late Victorian Buffalo and Toronto and the ways in which these institutions facilitated patterns of interaction, encounter, and network-building. These institutions helped create spaces around which social networks – “variously structural and performative entities” – came alive, and where the activities associated with them assumed familiar forms and meanings over time.1 Although some of these spaces were more fleeting than others, they did inform understandings of identity and group attributes for men and women of varied ages, birthplaces, and religious denominations. In the process, notions of what it meant to be “Irish,” “Irish-American,” “Protestant,” “Canadian,” or “British” were worked out, modified, and recast. The chapter uncovers a select series of social networks that, shaped through institutions, touched the lives of Irish men, women, and children in ways that not only brought them into contact with each other but also enabled shared experiences with the non-Irish of various stripes in Buffalo and Toronto. Three broad institutional worlds are discussed in turn, namely those of church, school, and voluntary association. Although aspects of the encounter between the Irish and institutions such as poorhouses and jails were discussed in chapter 3, institutions are conceived here in a way that transcends a focus on the bricks-and-­mortar of buildings. Visible neighbourhood institutions such as churches and schools, in other words, are treated in open and relational terms rather than as closed and discrete locations.2 Their pursuits and the populations they catered to affected, for instance, the sorts of conversations and routine practices that were undertaken within other spaces such as homes and meeting halls, not to mention more periodic forms of public activity that used streets and parks. Attention to such interactional

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geographies illustrates how “the Irish were active, not passive, in the construction of their worlds” without losing sight of the structuring, and often divisive, effects of these institutions in terms of circling the “group wagon.”3 Ethnicity, as Charles Tilly writes, involves “looking inward and outward at the same time.”4 While the focus on associations promises insight into the place of the Irish within the making of both cities’ public spheres, we will necessarily pay attention largely to non-bourgeois populations as well as to the variable of religion, two dimensions that are notably absent from the classic model of the public sphere formulated by Jürgen Habermas.5 As chapter 3 indicated, efforts were made by segments of the Irish middle class in both cities to promote aspects of personal uplift and bourgeois respectability. Religious devotion was an important aspect of this, and this chapter shows that the Catholic Church proved especially adept at moulding a web of associations to order its vision for society in both ­cities, even though this vision clashed with liberal reformers’ notions of the “common interest” or “greater good.” In precisely this vein, Protestantism in Toronto knitted together a coherent sense of itself within a series of overlapping collectives, the most vocal of which was the Orange Order. Within and beyond such webs, and on both sides of the sectarian divide, however, outlets were available for Irish ethnicities to be expressed in varied and meaningful ways.

Rel ig io n a n d E v e ry day Soci al Worlds Recalling his boyhood in late nineteenth-century Toronto, John McAree observed, “I never heard of any atheists or agnostics,” which indicates the almost obsessive degree to which matters of religion inflected both public and private discourse in the urban heart of loyal Ontario. Toronto may have possessed a larger number of churches per 1,000 people than Buffalo (0.85 versus 0.64 circa 1880), yet such aggregation tells us little about the place of the church in the lives of Irish immigrants and their descendants in these cities. More than simply sites for Sunday worship, churches were also institutions that engendered senses of belonging and whose activities offered congregations outlets for regular socialization through benevolent societies, young people’s clubs, fund-raisers, and reading circles. By the second half of the nineteenth century, these networks were profoundly shaping the world views of a growing number of Irish in Toronto and Buffalo. Since the Irish held memberships across multiple denominations in Toronto, the following will have more to say

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about the church-centred networks created in that city than about those in Buffalo, where most Irish were Catholic but where, as in Toronto, the common challenge was to transform a large number of nominal and working-class supporters of the Church of Rome into a devout and obedient group of Mass-goers. The Irish and the Making of “Protestant Toronto” Toronto’s Protestant Irish immigrants rarely dominated either individual congregations or their administrative hierarchies, but rather became drawn into networks of faith alongside other adherents from England, Scotland, and the United States, as well as the Canadian-born. Together, these Protestant denominations fostered particular Christian world views in an urban setting that was becoming more institutionally secure and ecumenical by the 1880s, as church leaders throughout the dominion “viewed the aftermath of Confederation as an opportunity for greater consolidation within denominational families.”6 In the early 1870s, such coordination seemed unlikely, with Toronto’s Presbyterians and Methodists divided between different sects and the Anglican bishop A.N. Bethune at the centre of struggles between evangelicals and high church supporters. A decade later, however, institutional union was realized by the Presbyterian and Methodist churches, with the new Anglican bishop, Sweatman, navigating between the different elements in his diocese in much smoother fashion than his predecessor. Middle-class groups such as the Lord’s Day Alliance and the Sunday School Movement also laid foundations to draw the city’s evangelical Protestants closer together and rigorously defend the “quiet Sabbath.” At the same time, there were some churches and congregations that exhibited a more noticeable Irish, and indeed Ulster, stamp than others, such as Cooke’s Presbyterian Church and Trinity East Anglican Church. The strong tradition of self-government within nineteenth-century Ulster Presbyterianism, as well as its growing evangelical component, made its Canadian institutional counterpart receptive to the expectations of those departing the northern province. The church union of 1875 brought coherence to Canadian Presbyterianism of a type similar to that in Ulster, where a “general tightening-up on regulations and behaviour” occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century.7 Prior to arrival in Canada, many if not most Presbyterian immigrants would have heard about a Toronto church named after Henry Cooke, the most outspoken Ulster cleric of the age. Cooke’s Church, originally

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named the Second Presbyterian Church, was established in 1851 with a subscription list totalling almost two hundred persons.8 The church, built at Queen and Mutual Streets (see figure 3.5), was opened in 1858 and was later referred to as “the most pretentious structure in the city [with] its lofty twin towers pointing heavenward.”9 Henry Cooke came to prominence at a time when both the Presbyterian and Anglican churches in Ireland “came to recognize the relevance and effectiveness of at least some aspects of evangelicalism in the campaign against Catholicism and secularism.”10 Marianne Elliott has, moreover, described a “highly stylised vocabulary of Irish Presbyterianism” where a “language of crusade” combined with a persistent insecurity among the group long after their settlement in the north of Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.11 Armed with an unwavering belief in the Calvinist Westminster Confession of Faith and with the energy of the peripatetic preacher, Cooke became the public face of a militant Ulster Protestantism in the wake of Daniel O’Connell’s triumphant campaign for Catholic emancipation. These Ulster precedents are critical to understanding the evangelical character of mid- and late-Victorian Toronto, where the influence of Ulster Protestants would surface at different times and in different ways. The Presbyterian contributions are most directly traceable in the congregants and ministers who served the Toronto church dedicated to Cooke for the half-century following his death in 1868. An early twentiethcentury report alluded to the Irishness (or rather Ulster-ness) of the congregation, commenting that “many of the members of Cooke’s Church have not only seen but have heard this truly wonderful divine.”12 But the Ulster flavour of the church was clearly reflected in the origins of its ministers: from 1851 until 1924, eight served the congregation, all except one (a Scot) hailing from Cooke’s Ulster heartland. Of these, Rev. William Patterson was the most colourful. Sharing Cooke’s birthplace of Maghera, Co. Londonderry, Patterson arrived in 1885 and during the fourteen years of his ministry, “2,720 persons united with the church, 1,449 on profession of faith in Christ and 1,271 by letters from other churches.”13 Patterson was also resolutely hostile to the growing power of the Catholic Church in Ireland as well as in Canada, and he was a familiar figure on the podiums of the Orange Order and the Irish Protestant Benevolent Society by the end of the 1880s.14 The interior spaces of churches and the conduct of services mattered greatly to nineteenth-century congregations possessed of evangelical convictions. This was a time when some considered the inclusion of music

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in celebrations to be sinful, and in December 1880, a meeting of the Cooke’s Church music circle was angrily interrupted by six congregation members who forcibly removed its recently purchased organ. Testifying in court, the church’s Co. Antrim–born minister Rev. J. Kirkpatrick admitted that “for several years there has been a difference of opinion as to the introduction of music,” and four of the interrupters were subsequently given options of fines or jail time.15 Yet the split in the congre­ gation was temporary, and Patterson’s arrival heralded better times. Increased service attendance resulted in a new two-thousand-seat church being built with a basement Sunday school for nine hundred scholars, and a measure of the church’s rising reputation was its hosting of the Pan-Presbyterian Council in September 1892.16 Patterson also built a strong network of associations, including the Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavor, the Young Women’s Mission Band, the Aaron and Hur Prayer Meeting, the Chinese Class, and the Boy’s Brigade. With the nineteenth-century Church of Ireland characterized by a similar puritanical streak, Irish Anglican immigrants were more likely to be present within evangelical circles in Toronto than not. Alan Hayes goes as far as to argue that the Anglican laity of the city were “steeped in the evangelical theology of the Church of Ireland” that routinely clashed with the high-church approach of a clergy “imported from Anglo-Catholic English colleges.”17 By the late 1870s, there was a “great liturgical variety among [Anglican] parishes” in Toronto that was particularly demoralizing to Bishop Bethune. One of his leading evangelical critics was secondgeneration Irishman Samuel Hume Blake, a lawyer and social reformer who served as warden of Trinity East Church (also known as “Little Trinity”) from 1864 to 1874 and who also spoke at Presbyterian and Methodist pulpits.18 The church and parish of Trinity East was planned in 1842 and opened its doors in 1844 as the second Anglican church in Toronto after St James’ Cathedral.19 It too was known for having an Irish flavour, and while it bowed to the Gothic fashion of the times, the church’s interior bespoke its outlook, appearing “chaste and seemly in all its fittings and simple decorations.”20 An 1887 account indicated ­little change, highlighting the “plain and bare [walls] … the floors and stairways well worn, the furniture severely simple,” with the chancel “a very narrow compartment containing a plain communion altar amply covered with a heavy red cloth.”21 That Trinity’s parish boundaries overlapped with the Catholic parish of St Paul’s in Corktown, whose church was barely a two-minute walk to the north, provides some indication not only of how many Protestants

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were also resident in the district south of Cabbagetown (see figure 3.3) but also of the potential for routine street encounters on Sunday mornings between various mixes of church-going Irish. By the early 1890s, Trinity East’s location was described as “way down among the smoke and dirt of factories” in a neighbourhood that has “always been poor.”22 Mirroring such words, the baptismal register for these years reveals why Little Trinity became known as “the Poor Man’s Church,” listing a plethora of fathers employed in skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled forms of labour. Of the eighty-three men whose occupations were listed, for example, twenty-one were labourers.23 Yet although it was pew-holders rather than poor congregants who managed the church initially, the abolition of pew rentals in 1887 heralded a new era of representative lay government and social organizations that strengthened both the Anglican denomination as a whole and its capacity for ecumenical outreach.24 Inspired by the energy of S.H. Blake and others, the convictions of Toronto’s evangelical Anglicans occasionally led them to split from established churches and begin their own. The Church of the Ascension was one such case, established in 1875 after a split in the St George the Martyr congregation over the issue of voting rights for women within the vestry.25 Yet these evangelicals would scarcely have survived in a church that was later described as “one of the few Anglican churches in the city [to] possess a surpliced choir.”26 Of the 274 burials listed for Ascension between 1875 and 1890, thirteen percent were for Irish-born individuals, though there were doubtless others in these lists born to Irish parents.27 One of Ascension’s most well-known figures of Irish origin was storekeeper Robert C. Bickerstaff, a veteran of the Battle of Ridgeway and sometime Master of Armstrong Orange Lodge No. 137, who served as treasurer of the church’s Sunday school for thirty-eight years.28 The church was deeded to its trustees on condition that it remained “always strictly Protestant and evangelical.”29 The loyalty demanded by such words had obvious appeal to an Orangeman like Bickerstaff. There was no one Methodist congregation in Toronto that could be argued to have a noticeable Irish heritage. Irish Methodists were distributed among the increasing number of churches and meeting-houses that took root in the city in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. Yet these immigrants and their descendants played important clerical and lay roles in the consolidation of the Methodist presence in Toronto, and in establishing connections to other Protestant denominations. The Co. Cavan–born Rev. E.H. Dewart edited the weekly Christian Guardian, served as chaplain to the Irish Protestant Benevolent Society, and was

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also active in the Ontario Temperance League along with Co. Donegal– born Rev. William Gregg, a noted academic and William Patterson’s ­predecessor at Cooke’s Church.30 Co. Fermanagh–born Rev. John Potts became well-known at the central Metropolitan Methodist Church, whose impressive Gothic structure was completed in 1870. Potts converted to Methodism in Kingston, Ontario, and his aptitude for inspired preaching remained with him; at the end of March 1879, he led a “gracious revival” at the Elm Street Church that lasted at least three weeks.31 As the birthplaces of Dewart and Potts suggest, the Ulster background highlighted earlier was no less important to understanding the world views of Toronto’s Irish Methodists. Biographies published in Thomas Edward Champion’s 1899 history of Methodist churches in Toronto include twenty-nine Irish-born individuals, twenty-six men and three women, whose birthplaces conform to the northern bias of nineteenthcentury Irish Methodism, with twenty-two born in Ulster, four in Leinster, two in Munster, and one in Connaught. Four were converted in Ireland, four in Toronto, and one each in England and Scotland. While some ­conversions were intensely individual experiences of religious awakening, others occurred collectively within family contexts. David McCann was  a Co. Armagh–born Anglican whose entire family converted to Methodism before he emigrated on his own, and who later became a “zealous member” of the Bathurst Street Church in Toronto’s west end.32 Likewise, William Sheppard of Trinity Methodist Church, whose working life in Toronto was as a railroad mail clerk, was brought up in a Co. Fermanagh family inspired by Gideon Ouseley, a well-travelled one-eyed preacher of the early nineteenth century.33 In addition to the three main Protestant denominations, smaller numbers of Irish families belonged to Baptist, Unitarian, Bible Christian, Disciple, Congregationalist, and Plymouth Brethren congregations. Co. Tyrone emigrant William McMaster, well-known in the city’s commercial circles, was a guiding force in the building of the Jarvis Street Baptist Church, while Co. Antrim–born Dr Joseph Workman spearheaded the city’s Unitarian movement, though he was known more for his expertise in psychiatry.34 Although membership in these smaller congregations fostered a sense of togetherness, the possibility of schism and defection was hardly extinguished. That a Presbyterian clergyman was moved to remark in 1898 that “a man stood a poor chance in Toronto in the ministry unless he was born in Scotland or the North of Ireland” said something about the familiarity and impact of the Ulster brogue at the city’s Protestant pulpits.35 Outreach efforts were not entirely the domain of

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men, however. The wife of Dublin-born Methodist Samuel Alcorn was said to have been “largely instrumental in the erection of the Girls’ Home … the Magdalen Asylum and the Refuge for Aged Women,” for instance; Alcorn, who emigrated with his family to Quebec City when a boy, later became chairman of Toronto’s House of Industry and a noted temperance advocate.36 Elsewhere, figures such as the Dublin-born “energetic mission worker” Louisa Pettigrew made telling contributions on behalf of their churches.37 Through such activities, Irish immigrants, their families, and their descendants considered themselves to be securely part of Toronto’s increasingly ecumenical Protestant culture. By the early 1880s, the minutes of the Cooke’s Young People’s Christian Association branch describe meetings that opened with prayer, readings from scripture, and the occasional hymn, followed by the meeting’s business and a program of readings, solos (mostly by women), and lectures or other addresses on various topics. The meetings held in late 1882 and early 1883 varied in terms of attendance, the average being thirty people or so.38 Members of local Methodist and Baptist churches paid occasional visits, while local Methodist and Congregational ministers were present at the church’s re-opening services.39 In addition to its Bible class and Sunday school, the Church of the Ascension’s congregation promoted an associational culture to bring people of all ages together. The 1890 Easter report listed the Woman’s Auxiliary to Missions and its offshoots such as the Ladies’ Aid society, the Mission Helpers, the Parochial Missionary Association, and the Children’s Mission Band. The Ascension branch of the Church of England Temperance Society could boast that “during the winter 125 new names have been added to our number” while one of its invited speakers was Rev. Patterson of Cooke’s.40 These were just some of the networks forged within and between Toronto’s Protestant denominations, shaping interactions and relationships between Irish and non-Irish alike. They communicated not only ideas about individual salvation, morality, and perfectibility; at a wider level, some of them formed part of the army of liberal reformers who “diffused the gospels of individualism and improvement,” and sought to imprint a sabbatarian culture upon “Toronto the Good.”41 Irish Immigrants and Catholic Parishes If the hierarchical Catholic vision of the world began with the family rather than the individual as the essential unit of concern, the mission of

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dioceses, parishes, and their institutions was to bring families together in congregations and dispense to them specifically Catholic notions of devotion, education, and morality that were, as Jon Gjerde notes, “antecedent to the state.”42 The individualist emphasis within evangelical Protestant theology was not to be trusted in this model, especially where the interpretation of spiritual matters was concerned. Scholarship in the past two decades has drawn attention to the historical capacities of North American Catholic churches and parishes to reinforce senses of belonging and territoriality among their inhabitants.43 Catholic parishes, like wards, were lines drawn on maps that after a time acquired important social meanings, with consecrated churches serving as spiritual foci for the faithful living within their boundaries. The influx of Irish Catholic immigrants to Toronto and Buffalo, as well as Germans to the latter city, spurred the development of new parishes from the 1840s on, such that by the early 1880s an extensive parochial geography had been imprinted on both cities. Loyalty to and identification with one’s parish was thus promoted, and moving between neighbourhoods often meant consciously switching parishes. In contrast, the Toronto Methodist family of John McAree, without moving residence, first “went to the old Richmond Street church, then later … moved to the Metropolitan; and later still split up between Berkeley and Parliament Streets.”44 Although the sight of crowds of Catholic families filing obediently to church was common in Buffalo and Toronto by the end of the century, it should not be assumed that such was the norm in earlier decades. The Catholic Irish settling in both cities in the 1850s had little if any exposure to the ultramontane “devotional revolution” in Ireland that sought to standardize patterns of Mass attendance, prayer, and reception of the sacraments. Spearheaded in Ireland by the redoubtable Cardinal Paul Cullen, the devotional revolution set in train a project of Catholic revivalism designed to make churches, parishes, and clergy central to the lives of Irish men and women while communicating to them the spiritual mysteries emanating from the “eternal city” of Rome. In the years before the famine, these disciplining efforts were concentrated in the commercialized, English-speaking, and large-farming areas of eastern Ireland. As shown in chapter 2, however, many Catholics arriving in both cities in the late 1840s originated in less advanced regions of the island, and Emmet Larkin has claimed that “the ‘bulk’ of the Irish people in the 1840s never did have the opportunity to approach the sacraments.”45 In the aftermath of the famine migrations to both cities, a new phase of instilling devotional habits began.

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The close correspondence between English-speaking Catholic parishes and Irish Catholic settlement was observable in Toronto and Buffalo by the 1870s. The oldest Toronto church, St Paul’s, was built in 1822 in what would become Corktown (figure 3.5). While St Paul’s darkest moment came with the unmarked burial of 757 famine victims in its cemetery in 1847, the church emerged as the spiritual centre for east end Catholic families through the nineteenth century, in addition to being the city’s pro-cathedral.46 In 1866, the parish served approximately 2,600 individuals, and a decade later, 3,500; a larger church was completed in 1887.47 The decade following the famine was an important one for parish-building in Toronto; following the opening of St Michael’s Cathedral in 1845, St Mary’s (1853), St Basil’s (1855), and St Patrick’s (1861–62) Churches were added under the guidance of Bishop Armand de Charbonnel to serve the largely working-class population from the east to the west ends of the city. On its opening in April 1853, St Mary’s Church was estimated to attend to the spiritual needs of “between two and three thousand” Catholics (figure 3.5).48 Catholics also possessed their own cemetery, St Michael’s, to the far north of the city, making them the only denomination other than Anglicans to have one.49 If the accents emanating from the pulpit signified “Ireland” to the casual visitor to Cooke’s Church, that individual would have reached a  similar conclusion from occasional visits to St Paul’s Church in the 1870s and 1880s. Those accents heard, however, covered a wider set of Irish provinces and counties than the Ulster burr heard in Cooke’s. The majority of St Paul’s pastors from 1848 until the end of the century were Irish-born, and complementing their presence was a revolving group of assistants, or curates, who also came mostly from the Emerald Isle.50 At various points of these decades, the voices of men born in Counties Kerry, Kilkenny, Cork, Meath, Galway, Leitrim, Armagh, and Londonderry could be heard from the pulpit. Yet the careers of the St Paul’s parish priests were such that they invariably involved themselves in the affairs of other churches throughout Toronto and Ontario. The four pastors covering the years 1858 to 1880, Frs John Walsh (later archbishop of Toronto), Francis Patrick Rooney, John Joseph McCann, and Patrick Conway, had, for example, also served at the west end parish of St Mary’s either before or after their tenures at St Paul’s. True to criticisms of Roman Catholic “ritualism,” the interiors of ­parish churches and of those of an evangelical Protestant orientation were very different. At the opening of St Mary’s Church, the Mirror’s correspondent, anticipating the finished appearance of the altar and

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sanctuary, stated that upon completion, “their beautiful decorations, will exhibit a noble specimen of ecclesiastical embellishment, suitably adapted to the solemn services of a Christian temple.”51 While the rebuilding of neighbouring St Paul’s Church in a Roman style in 1887 would involve three marble altars and painted scenes from the life of St Paul on the ceiling, its Anglican neighbour of Trinity East would remain consistent with its evangelical principles with a modest amount of interior decoration.52 St Mary’s, meanwhile, was rebuilt in 1889 in a French Gothic style with “altars … built of stone and marble richly carved.”53 A similar network of Catholic parishes took shape in Buffalo to serve Irish individuals and households. By 1880, thirteen Catholic churches catered to English-speaking congregants. Five served those areas of Buffalo where the Irish were particularly numerous: the centrally located St Joseph’s Cathedral, St Bridget’s in the First Ward, St Patrick’s in the south-eastern “Hydraulics” section, Holy Angels on the West Side, and St Stephen’s on the southeastern periphery of “Uniontown” (figure 3.8). Given the realities of life for these households, efforts to develop steadfast churchgoing traditions would face challenges similar to those in Toronto. The Buffalo Irish middle class was small, while the demands of  dock-based work and the social attractions of the saloon provided neither opportunity nor incentive for the observance of Sunday Mass by men during the spring and summer. The building of a community of pious and respectable families would prove an unenviable task. Foundations were nevertheless laid during the diocesan reign of Bishop John Timon of the Vincentian order. Though congregations ­initially met in temporary structures, church-based services were performed in St Patrick’s by 1841, Holy Angels in 1858, and St Bridget’s by 1860.54 Religious orders were critical to sustaining the development of facilities for education and training as well as worship. The Oblate Fathers of Mary Immaculate were invited by Timon to build a diocesan seminary and college in Holy Angels parish; the Franciscans took charge of St Patrick’s parish; and the Sisters of Mercy assumed responsibility for the parochial schools in St Bridget’s and St Stephen’s parishes.55 High schools were established by the Jesuits and Christian Brothers in 1850 and 1861 respectively.56 Timon also asked the Irish Vincentian John Joseph Lynch, then in Missouri, to come to western New York and found a seminary in 1856. The result was the Seminary of Our Lady of Angels at Suspension Bridge, the forerunner settlement to present-day Niagara Falls, New York.57 While the seminary would later house Catholic Union and Times editor Rev. Patrick Cronin, who arrived as

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Chair of Rhetoric in 1870, its founder, Lynch, would go on to become the archbishop of Toronto.58 As with some of Toronto’s parishioners, those frequenting celebrations in the above-mentioned Buffalo churches during the 1870s and 1880s could expect to see and hear priests of Irish birth and ancestry in command of the altar. In the cases of St Bridget’s and St Stephen’s especially, priests with surnames such as McMullen, O’Connor, Lanigan, Gleason, McDermott, and Quigley ministered largely to a co-ethnic flock.59 Established within the southern wards of Buffalo, these churches became Irish-American ethnic spaces as much as ones designed to ­communicate the doctrine of a universal church. Their contribution to ­fostering senses of Irish ethnicity in these neighbourhoods was not manifested simply in their bringing people together on a Sunday, however, but in their ability to position themselves at the heart of community and parish life through the social organizations that spun from them. As we shall see at various points in this book, Rev. Cronin’s diocesan weekly would also add much to this ethnicization process.

S pac e s o f S c hooli ng The idea of a state-funded school system challenged the role of churches in the education of children. In the United States, where the federal Constitution’s First Amendment prevented a single national state church, the taxes of Catholics among others funded a system of public schools. Catholics, however, “enjoyed freedom to maintain schools at their own expense.”60 Unsurprisingly, then, the First Plenary Council of American Catholic bishops at Baltimore in 1852 identified the building of parochial schools as a key objective. The following year, an appeal to the New York State Assembly for state-supported parochial schools ended in failure.61 In Buffalo, the educational foundations laid by religious orders recruited by Bishop Timon were strengthened by his successor, Stephen V. Ryan, ordained in 1868. In Canada, Catholics had acquired their political rights with the Constitution Act of 1791, and by the early 1850s in Toronto, Bishop de Charbonnel’s invitation to religious orders resulted in three hundred children attending schools run by the Christian Brothers and the Sisters of Charity.62 In 1863, the Scott Act was instituted by the parliament of the United Province of Canada, providing opportunities for Catholics to divert their property tax payments from public schools to their own “separate” schools at the elementary level.63

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The Scott Act was delivered from a colonial parliament made up of mostly Francophone Catholics and Anglophone Protestants and, significantly, had not been supported by most of the members from what became the Province of Ontario in 1867.64 This sowed the seeds for subsequent decades of hostility against separate schools by hardline Protestant elements in Toronto and other parts of the new province. For such individuals, separate schools were symbolic markers of wider ­power relations and political struggles, not merely between Protestants and Catholics in Ontario, but within Canada generally. They were seen to typify the capacity for interference by an illiberal transnational institution in the affairs of state in the new dominion. In 1881, twenty-two public schools were present in Toronto, to which the sons and daughters of Irish Protestant immigrants were sent. The various Protestant churches brought together immigrants from England, Scotland, and Ireland and their Canadian-born offspring; these children also shared their early years within the city’s public school system. Public schools and their textbooks were designed to foster social practices that would mould Protestant children of diverse denominations into young and moral Christian Canadians. With the school readers adopted from the Irish national schools replaced in the 1870s and 1880s, Robert Stamp notes that “an omnipotent and omniscient God permeated every page” of the new variety.65 Some Catholic families also sent their children to the public schools, but how widespread this practice was is unknown. John McAree, who attended the Dufferin Public School in Cabbagetown (figure 3.5), remarked that “a boy makes his friends only among his neighbours or at school” before adding that “of course I met no Catholics at school. So it happened that I made no Catholic friends until I had almost grown up and was not dependent upon a home and school environment for my acquaintances.”66 Those early years, for McAree, shaped an “unreasonable prejudice” that “would not have existed … had it not been for Separate Schools.”67 It is clear who was to blame for what McAree considered an avoidable contribution to the city’s sectarian atmosphere. Toronto’s separate schools faced challenges not only financially, but also in terms of credibility from Catholics and Protestants alike. There were relatively few affluent Catholics in 1870s Toronto, and if their educational institutions were to adequately serve their congregations’ children, greater investment was necessary than the revenue from property taxes could offer. The regulation of separate school patronage also had a spatial dimension, since those Catholic families who lived within three

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miles of a separate school were obliged to send their children to it or be denied the sacraments.68 Toronto Separate School Board chairman, Rev. John Shea, remarked unhappily in 1875 about the “bare pittance” of income received by separate schools, which was “only a little over one percent of the golden flood with which the Public Schools were inundated.”69 Most of the Catholic school buildings around this time were still wooden structures and the “qualifications and ability of the members of the religious orders who served as teachers remained in question.”70 By the end of the decade, reports and commentaries on conditions in the schools varied between the damning and the encouraging.71 The schools could barely function without the contribution of the religious orders, working for low salaries, and yet they became an important dimension of neighbourhood and parish life. Public and separate schools thus became established within Toronto’s education system, each with its own elected board of trustees. The Toronto School Board was composed of the city’s middle-class Protestants, including some Orangemen of Irish origin such as Inspector James L. Hughes, Thomas R. Whiteside, Francis Somers, and Thomas Allen. The  deputy provincial education minister from 1876 to 1890 was also a Dublinborn resident of the city, John George Hodgins. The Separate School Board trustees were not, however, composed simply of the laity; the chairman was usually a cleric, and Archbishop Lynch in particular played a pivotal role in the administration of the Board, though not always in a way that ensured harmonious lay-clerical relations. A similar separateness in schooling was present in Buffalo during the same period, though this was not entirely the result of church endeavour. Separateness in this context relates to the presence of Catholic Irish children in both parochial and public schools as dictated through settlement concentrations. Through fund-raisers, bazaars, and other entertainments, Catholic families contributed to the maintenance of their parish schools, but given the demand, children of Irish background still attended public schools. The 1881 Buffalo directory listed thirty-six public schools and eight parochial schools, the latter built beside parish churches as in Toronto. In Irish Buffalo, the parochial schools were staffed by nuns, many of whom were Irish-born and educated.72 In 1878, St Bridget’s Parochial School in the First Ward, run by the Sisters of Mercy, reported a total of 917 children, 551 girls and 366 boys.73 Four public schools, however, were in operation elsewhere in the ward (figure 3.8).74 After elementary school, the most academically inclined pupils attended institutions such as the Christian Brothers–run St Joseph’s College.

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Some Buffalo public schools, then, became heavily Irish social spaces, situated as they were in majority Irish neighbourhoods, and education commissioners’ reports provide valuable evidence regarding the degree of Irish participation in the city’s system. In 1881, 14,507 pupils were registered, and the “nativity” of these pupils’ parents was recorded, giving a total of 18,606 parents. Of the latter number 2,834 (15.2 percent) were Irish, with the corresponding figures for German and “American” parents being 9,088 (48.8 percent) and 4,612 (24.8 percent) r­ espectively.75 Those schools with the heaviest Irish presence are given for 1878 and 1880 in table 4.1, and most were in the First Ward. Public School No. 4 had more than half of its pupils claiming Irish-born parents in 1882 and was described as “overcrowded.”76 Public School No. 1 on the West Side had just under half of its pupils claiming Irish parentage in 1878. The most impressive showing, however, was Public School No. 34 in the Hakertown neighbourhood (figure 3.8). An increasing number of teachers in these schools were also of Catholic and Irish backgrounds.77 As with the parochial schools, the public school in the southern wards of Buffalo became an ethnically Irish social world in terms of teachers and students. In 1888, a School Bill aimed at reducing political involvement in teacher recruitment was denounced by the Catholic Union and Times as “a specious Knownothing scheme to oust the ‘Biddies and Gretchens’ from the teaching body of the public schools altogether” since “many of the teachers profess the Catholic faith” and have names “stamped in Celtic and Teutonic moulds.”78 As the introduction of the bill illustrates, politics at different scales affected the environments of public schools in Buffalo’s Irish neigh­ bourhoods. First, Catholic pupils were spared any engagement with the King James Bible, since religious instruction was not part of the curriculum. The State Superintendent of Common Schools had decided in 1866 in favour of secularizing public education in the upstate area.79 This was, in any case, a rather abstract issue for those working-class parents who believed that their children should contribute to family income as soon as they had learned how to read and write. Second, the localist character of municipal politics in Buffalo put teaching appointments in the hands of local aldermen, and the Irish in the southern wards were not slow to claim their share of patronage spoils in the city.80 At the same time, the project to extend the parochial schools within the local web of Catholic social infrastructure continued. While identifying the role of mothers as initial implanters of “genuine Catholic sentiments and instincts,” Bishop Ryan stressed the role of parish schools as spaces

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Table 4.1 The relative presence of pupils from Irish families in selected Buffalo public schools in 1878 and 1880

School number (Ward number in parentheses) 1 (8) 3 (1) 4 (1) 33 (13) 34 (1)

For term ending 29 March 1878

For term ending 24 December 1880

Total Number Percentage number of pupils with of “Irish” of pupils Irish parentage pupils

Total Number Percentage number of pupils with of “Irish” of pupils Irish parentage pupils

570 373 903 350 404

273 246 574 185 349

47.9 66.0 63.6 52.9 86.4

661 317 851 393 401

334 182 495 190 348

50.5 57.4 58.2 48.3 86.8

Source: Reports of the Municipal Officer of the City of Buffalo 1881, 162 (Table VIII).

where such sentiments were to be deepened further.81 He remained, however, unimpressed with the “unaccountable apathy amounting to religious indifference in the community regarding the religious education of the young which bodes no good to religion or country.”82

C at h o l ic A s s o c iat i onal Worlds: S h a p in g E t h n o - R e l ig i ous I denti ti es Irish Catholic adults, meanwhile, shaped their social lives across a wide range of institutional venues. In a formal context, they were active within networks of voluntary religious, social, and recreational associations in the final three decades of the nineteenth century. Some of these networks were linked directly to the local Catholic hierarchy, while others, notably the informal groups of men whose recreational activities included get-togethers in saloons and taverns, were not. Either way, their effects were felt in the structuring of interaction patterns on a monthly, weekly, or more frequent basis. While church-based clubs and groups within Toronto’s Protestant denominations had elements of an ecumenical atmosphere by the 1880s, the social relationships forged through Catholic associations were in the process of creating “a comprehensive social life” that was “separate from that of the Protestant majority.”83 In Buffalo, Catholic organizations sought to achieve similar results, building on patterns already shaped by class and neighbourhood geographies.84 And while the potential of these networks to bridge Irish and German divisions within Catholicism were only partially realized, they became important avenues to adaptation in an urban-industrial society.

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Though many Protestants judged the Catholic Church as “anti-liberal” at this time, certain aspects of liberal individualism, such as diligence, thriftiness, sobriety, and the work ethic were promoted by these Catholic societies.85 As we shall see here and in the following two chapters, however, acculturation to a distinctly “American” sense of identity for Irish immigrants could complement, rather than come at the expense of, their ethnic portion. The promotion of values of respectability and personal uplift through church-based associations had a strong gender dimension. As per Bishop Ryan’s comments above, women were particular targets of ultramontane initiatives, with that model of self-sacrifice, Mary, the prime object of their devotion. By the 1880s, many Catholic women in both cities had acquired a coherent sense of their duties to the faith, both at home and within the parish. First, they were transmitters of devotional procedures (e.g. the saying of the Rosary) to their husbands and children within domestic space; second, they were key agents of the economic health of the parish through their organization of fund-raising activities that created outlets for Catholic families to socialize within homes and halls beyond Sunday Mass. Confraternal gatherings also drew women together. As Brian Clarke has shown, Toronto’s parish confraternities (also known as sodalities), established in the second half of the nineteenth century, were effective in promoting “the practice of piety” as “a means of acquiring virtue” while transforming the space of the home “into an extension of the parish church.”86 In Buffalo, similar outlets for communicating these duties took root. In 1877, the Arch-Confraternity of the Most Holy and Immaculate Heart of Mary held monthly meetings in their hall on the West Side.87 In 1889, twenty “young ladies” were received into the Sodality of the Children of Mary in St Patrick’s parish, with a further fifteen enrolled into the parish sodality and thirty others into the Society of the Infant Jesus while a “crowded” church looked on.88 Altar societies were established in Immaculate Conception and Blessed Sacrament parishes around the same time.89 In noting these developments, it should be remembered that Irish Catholic women were still negotiating the realities of working-class life in both cities, especially Buffalo. Largely absent from saloons, they preferred social activity based around informal house visits, occasions that often involved drinking and card-playing. As the crime statistics presented in chapter 3 suggest, problems with alcohol were not the exclusive domain of men, and the moulding of some devoted servants of Mary

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took longer than others, if it succeeded at all. Evidence for the success of  these church-based associations is sporadic for both cities, though Clarke does note that confraternities “enjoyed substantial support” among Toronto Irish women by the early 1880s.90 In these instances, the society offered not simply a world of Catholic learning but access to the  person whom many women came to view as the key community leader – the parish priest. Along with the help of neighbours, friends, and relatives, the support of the priest was also important when hard times fell upon families. Some religious organizations were also formed by Catholic men. The St Vincent de Paul Society provided the small middle class of Catholic men in Buffalo and Toronto with opportunities for material and religious outreach to the least fortunate of their communities, though its membership remained small.91 Most working-class men, for their part, were attracted to outlets more recreational than religious. In Buffalo, the prevalence of saloons was clear for all to see, while in Toronto, the Hibernian Benevolent Society (h b s) was an Irish nationalist society independent of the church that became a prime organizational outlet for young working-class Catholic males from the late 1850s to the mid1870s. The hb s aspired to provide “a constant round of social activities” to its members, and drink culture was certainly part of this, given the prominence of tavern-keepers among the leadership and the use of their businesses as sites for recruitment and, as it turned out, Fenian revolutionary planning.92 The society revived St Patrick’s Day parades in 1862 as unabashed expressions of Catholic Irish pride, and the Irish Canadian weekly newspaper was established the following year as a vehicle for militant nationalist beliefs. The h bs saw the Catholic church as an Irish national institution, and the title of their weekly newspaper, inspired perhaps by the corresponding Irish American newspaper in New York, confirmed the largely confessional lenses through which they viewed the “real Irish” of the city. Regional-scale circuits were trodden by Catholic associations through recreational excursions. In the summer of 1869, h bs day-trippers to Niagara Falls returned to Toronto’s Yonge Street dock where “an immense crowd were collected, who cheered loud and long as the excursionists stepped on to the wharf.”93 For the following year’s excursion, an estimated one thousand visited the falls.94 In the years after the Ridgeway encounter and with the h b s membership in decline, other societies would come on the scene, such as the Sons of St Patrick Benevolent Society and the Young Irishmen’s Catholic Benevolent Association (later

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to become the Irish Catholic Benevolent Union). Established with the involvement of the Christian Brothers, these societies’ preference for the “uncrowned harp” as their emblem did not go unnoticed by Toronto Protestants (see figure 6.1). The Sons of St Patrick held their first annual concert in 1869 and developed a “shoot” organization known as the Shamrock Club, while the Young Irishmen’s first annual excursion of that same year took them to Hamilton where “the usual games of football and hurling” were indulged.95 Promotion of the Gaelic sports of football and hurling had existed in Toronto for some years by then, and teams’ competitive fixture lists included games against Buffalo among others.96 Although an estimated one-fifth of Catholic adult males had memberships in these Toronto nationalist societies by the mid-1870s, they likely touched a larger constituency given the throughput of members over these years.97 Despite the popularity of taverns, temperance and total abstinence organizations sought to combat prevailing assumptions about the Irishman’s fondness for alcohol. Involvement in these societies and the taking of pledges, however, often meant re-configuring one’s social world in a way that challenged dominant norms of working-class masculinity. As Clarke puts it, abstainers during these years “were an isolated handful incapable of fitting into the majority’s rhythms of work, recreation, and drink.”98 In Toronto, though, the place of drink was coming under increasing challenge from the city’s influential Protestant middle class; Buffalo saloons, in contrast, “openly flouted the law by selling alcoholic beverages on a Sunday” in the late 1880s.99 Given the popularity of groups such as the h bs, temperance activity within Toronto’s Catholic world proceeded in fits and starts between the 1850s and 1880s, with organizations achieving little or no medium-term stability.100 The transfer of influential clergy to other parishes did not help what were still precarious social creations, and dissolutions had occurred by the early 1880s. The organizations that did endure were run by priests for a mainly middle-class male membership.101 Yet attention to religious devotion was not pushed as strongly in these societies as in the womens’ confraternities. Instead, the “ethic of the self-made man” and the virtues of sobriety were promoted, since “the clergy fully expected the religious behaviour of men and women to differ substantially.”102 Capturing the working-class males of the community remained a challenge, however, though the situation was likely aided by shifting opinions about the need for public expressions of Irish identity in the wake of the Ridgeway affair. After another defiant St Patrick’s procession in

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1870, the h b s’s John Jeremiah Murphy railed against “the shopkeepers and others – who were too respectable to join them in such a celebration as this, and whose grimaces … were often very amusing when they thought their Protestant friends suspected them of being connected to these (political) organizations.”103 By the later 1870s, associations that combined an agenda of religious uplift while maintaining space for moderate expressions of Irish nationalism gained in popularity in Toronto. The Emerald Benevolent Association (eba ), a lay organization with American roots established in Toronto in 1874, later forged links with the Church and had spread its network across Ontario within a decade.104 Only practicing Catholics could join the association, and while it became a vehicle for a “Catholic Canadian” identity, narrations of Irish history were incorporated into its calendar. St Patrick’s celebrations remained a staple, and the Globe reported in 1882 of several branches that were “discussing the propriety of celebrating the Dungannon Convention” of 1782, while pointing out that the association was “not distinctively Irish, as many Germans and Catholics of other nationalities belong to it.”105 While this may have been true in  an Ontario context, there were relatively few Germans in Toronto at this time. The eba was also at the forefront of commemorations of “Irish Liberator” Daniel O’Connell’s birthday in the 1870s and 1880s (chapter 5). In Buffalo, the five main churches patronized by the Irish, including St  Joseph’s Cathedral, became sites around which a similar phase of ­organization-building occurred during the first decade of Bishop Ryan’s reign. The promotion of temperance was again central, and thought by some to be sorely needed. Prior to the 1876 St Patrick’s celebrations, the Catholic Union and Times warned: “If you see a drunken Irishman anywhere tomorrow … roll him in the gutter and christen him a ground hog. Such a brute brings disgrace to an entire nation.”106 The following month, the St Bridget’s Total Abstinence and Benevolent (ta b ) Society held a musical and literary concert featuring solos, recitations, and ballad-singing. Proceedings kicked off with an address by Timothy ­ Cochrane, president of the St Vincent de Paul Society and “the War Horse of Total Abstinence”; later offerings included a rendition of “Come Take the Pledge” and a recitation by Miss Maggie Davis “who received rounds of applause from the audience for the artistic manner in which she acquitted herself.”107 Their counterparts in the St Joseph’s tab Society (established 1872) published their plans for their  own

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entertainment while requesting the all-male membership to meet the following Sunday morning “for the purpose of proceeding in a body to the Cathedral to receive Holy Communion.”108 It was important to provide public evidence of a different sort of Irishman. The evening affairs of temperance societies showcased the individual and collective talents of men and women within an atmosphere that emphasized self-control and condemnation of the demon alcohol. The numbers of saloon-going Irishmen likely to consider these alternatives were not great, however. The Irish saloon was a world for the hardened manual worker and job-seeker as well as a place for local party-political intrigue, with frequent forays into amateur pugilism providing one of its varied forms of “entertainment.” Those who scooped grain each season for low rates of pay saw little in the abstinence culture to identify with – bursts of binge drinking at the end of long days brought much-needed relief to many.109 And while many of these men viewed the saloon as the world of a “real man,” manliness could be demonstrated in other ways, such as on the First Ward’s waterways. By 1870, the Hibernian Rowing Club was reported to have “the best crew in Buffalo,” known as the Banshees, and to possess one boat, also called “the Banshee.”110 Just over a decade later, the Mutual, Celtic, and Lighthouse Rowing Clubs would stake a presence in the southern wards.111 And while fighting was not to be eradicated from the world of the neighbourhood saloon, the energies of the young south-side Irish would also find expression through boxing in local athletic clubs. For Buffalo’s Irish-American women, and their daughters especially, involvement in abstinence and temperance organizations complemented routines of religious devotion provided by altar and rosary societies. Personal dignity and devotion to God were better than a life racked by alcohol abuse, financial dependency, and domestic violence, scenarios exemplified by some members of Rose Shanahan’s fictional extended family who lived on “the Beach,” one of the remoter sections of the First Ward (Figure 3.8). There, grain scooper Paddy O’Farrell “beat his wife when he got a bit of drink in him and the way she beat the children, even without any drink in her at all, and the language they all used, were a disgrace to St. Bridget’s parish.”112 As the house-visitors of Buffalo’s Charity Organization Society knew, there were more than a few families similar to the O’Farrells living in the shadow of the grain elevators by  the 1880s, and their real problems with alcohol were not easily solved. In June 1880, a four-year-old boy burned to death through “the upsetting of a lamp by his drunken mother, Mrs. Delia Finnegan,”

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for example, and by 1889, the Catholic Union and Times reported with some despondency that “in eleven parishes, English speaking, in this large city, there is but one Temperance Society.”113 Yet for those parish associations that did remain vibrant in Buffalo throughout the period, opportunities were afforded for the strengthening of not only Catholic identities but also specifically Irish Catholic ones. The Young Men’s Catholic Association (ym ca ) of the 1870s brought together men of mostly Irish birth or ancestry; the equivalent association for the city’s Germans was the Catholic Institute, the new name for the German Young Man’s Catholic Association bestowed in 1872. The y mc a would not only foster respectability through their library, lecture, and “literary exercise” committees, but also educate men in matters as diverse as homeownership and Irish nationalism.114 Gettogethers included not only meetings and lectures but also entertainments and church parades. There were occasional mishaps, such as when a summer picnic in Germania Park in 1877 ended with the arrest of five  visiting Young Irishmen from Toronto after a drunken encounter with police. Buffalo’s y mc a evidently believed that the Young Irishmen “were a temperance and literary organization like themselves,” but the affair undoubtedly left them with a very different impression of these Irish-Canadians’ recreational priorities.115 A new chapter was also opened in the history of the Irish ethnic press in Buffalo during these decades. With titles such as Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s American Celt and Catholic Citizen and Patrick O’Day’s Fenian Volunteer coming and going, Bishop Ryan founded the aforementioned weekly diocesan newspaper, the Catholic Union and Times, in April 1872 and the following year installed Rev. Patrick Cronin as editor. None could match Cronin’s organizational energy, biting prose, and passion for Irish nationalist politics. Born in Co. Limerick in 1835 and arriving in the United States at fourteen years of age, Cronin cut a distinctive appearance in the city with “flowing silver locks crowned by a high silk hat [and] portly frame,” and threw his energy into the newspaper until his death in 1905.116 Although ostensibly a diocesan organ, the Union and Times had, like Toronto’s Irish Canadian, a regular “News from Ireland” column. It also reported on local parochial and associational activity, while political events in the homeland formed the basis of frequent editorial screeds by Cronin, making the paper markedly “ethnic.” The Irish had found their voice once again in Buffalo’s public sphere. More mundane, but no less important, initiatives revolved around the provision of Catholic literature and a “symbolic economy” of material

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objects. Bishop Ryan regularly donated books, papers, and pamphlets to the library of the y mc a and in 1876 its librarian reported that holdings “consisted of 877 volumes, and the number of books drawn was 651.”117 Timothy Doyle, a Catholic bookseller and stationer, set up shop opposite St Joseph’s Cathedral, while another publisher on Main Street specialized in the importing and manufacture of “church vestments and ornaments, banners and regalias.”118 In 1878, another book retailer in the city listed Lives of the Irish Saints and The Life of Christ and the Blessed Virgin among his catalogue for the most devout and literate members of the city’s Irish congregation.119 If Irish Protestant families kept Bibles in their parlours for study, these texts were the Catholic equivalents. During the Lenten devotions of March 1889, the Union and Times bookstore claimed twenty thousand visitors and a steady sale of “the books and articles of devotions recommended by the missioners” in addition to the sale of “scapulars, rosaries, crosses, statues and medals in great numbers and at prices within reach of the poorest.”120 Though Bishop Ryan felt that there was much yet to achieve on the question of parochial schools, there were other reasons to be optimistic about the development of a devotional Catholic culture, and it was the function of the Union and Times to communicate that optimism. Buffalo’s St Patrick’s Day celebrations also provided occasions for exhibiting respectable Irish and Catholic identities. The nationalist tone that prevailed in the Toronto parades was not replicated; these spectacles rather presented opportunities for the diocesan hierarchy to both distance the city’s Irish from the latest Fenian disturbance in the summer of 1870, and combat negative images of them as intemperate drinkers and fighters. After years of “quiet observance,” one thousand six hundred men from a number of Irish Catholic societies took their place in  a  parade through the streets of downtown and the First Ward in 1873  before reaching their appropriate destination of St Patrick’s Church.121 As with most other public processions of the era, only males occupied these symbolically important public spaces. In the parade of 1876, fifty boys marched as  a  corps for the Knights of St Mathew, while the recently formed St Bridget’s ta b Society turned out three hundred cadets.122 Parish society banners combined Irish symbols alongside American ones in demonstrations of ethnic hybridity. In 1876, the St Patrick’s ta b Society unveiled a banner featuring a golden harp with shamrocks on one side and “an American spread eagle surmounting a harp, with a ­flying streamer in its beak with the words ‘be sober and watch’” on the

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other.123 The St Francis Benevolent Society, established in 1868 and ­honouring the Franciscans of St Patrick’s Church, unveiled a flag that had its name inscribed on one side along with “the Harp of Erin and the Sunburst,” while on the back appeared “Ireland’s coat of arms, consisting of the Maid of Erin, the Harp, Irish wolf-dog, Round Tower and the ruins of a church in the distance.”124 Ireland was represented through people, animals, and landscape, the church ruins and round tower conveying the surviving traces of a distinctive and ancient civilization seen through a Catholic lens. Later organizational structures supplemented, and sometimes replaced, these initiatives of the 1870s as a once-energetic generation grew older. In April 1888, the Union and Times decried the “present deplorable ­condition” of the y mc a.125 Yet entities such as the Emerald Benevolent Association (eba ) and especially the Catholic Mutual Benefit Association (c mba ) were now on the scene. The former was part of the same organization that had established itself in Toronto, and by 1890, there were at least two branches titled (Daniel) “O’Connell” and “O’Brien” (the latter likely named after Irish Party m p William).126 In the late summer of 1888, Buffalo’s O’Brien Branch No. 10 was reported to have had a membership of 250, being “not alone … a benefit to the sick and needy, but [also an organization that] spreads literature and science amongst its members and frequently reminds them of their duty to God, to themselves and to the country.”127 A more extensive organization that had emplaced itself within Buffalo’s Catholic circles by then, however, was the cm ba , established in Niagara Falls, New York, in December 1876 as a life insurance business society. The c mba’s initial restriction of membership to men once again revealed much about who represented the Catholic household in the world of public affairs. The parish was the natural unit for local organization, and by the end of 1878, forty-nine branches had attracted two thousand members.128 The first Buffalo branches were organized in Holy Angels and St Bridget’s parishes in early 1878.129 Meetings were typically held weekly, and formal social gatherings such as excursions and entertainments were organized. With each branch installing a priest as a “spiritual director,” the c mba sought to encourage high standards of social behaviour and religiosity. Membership criteria stressed that “a man shall be a practical Catholic” and “physically sound,” with the signature of the parish priest verifying the former and a medical examination the latter.130 The attendance of 250 members of Branch 20 to receive communion at St Joseph’s Cathedral in March 1890, for example, was followed

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by the members of Branch 7 joining the O’Connell branch of the e ba at Holy Angels church a month later for the same purpose.131 Catholic respectability could, however, present itself on a much larger stage, such as when more than twenty c mba and e ba branches took part in the street procession of over ten thousand people that welcomed Bishop Ryan back from Rome in April 1888 when “red lights and bombs made the light blaze with brilliants of many colored hues.”132 Here was Buffalo’s Catholic public sphere putting itself on parade, and doing so in style. Although one of the key aims of the c m ba was “to draw together into one bond of fraternal union all nationalities,” it is clear that Irish Catholic identities were actively upheld through its activities in Buffalo, not least through the geographies of interaction shaped through neighbourhoods.133 That the St Bridget’s c m ba Branch No.  8 in the First Ward was reportedly composed “almost entirely of Irishmen, or sons of Irishmen” in 1886 was hardly surprising.134 An installation night for Branch  7 (Holy Angels parish) featured local Irish nationalist Anselm Smith speaking on “Irish Exiles” while other members responded with songs such as “My Heart’s in Old Ireland” and “The Meeting of the Waters.”135 More systematically, a list of board members of each branch printed in the Buffalo city directory for 1878 shows seven branches to be dominated by German names, five by Irish, and one by a mixture, and their meeting places broadly conformed to the geography of Irish and German settlement in the city.136 This is not to suggest that the Irish were remaining consistently separate from the non-Irish; it is, however, to argue that the c mba had not yet become the melting pot its leaders may have envisioned. The c m ba reached Irish families of a wide variety of material backgrounds by the end of the nineteenth century. Table 4.2 provides some indication of the uptake in c mba branch membership between 1888 and 1903 for those parishes in which the Irish had a notable presence. Analysis of the occupations of members provides some indication of emergent class divisions within Irish Buffalo that were also evident within the city’s social geography. Of those branches with substantial memberships in 1888, table 4.2 demonstrates that almost one-fifth of the First Ward’s St Bridget’s members were labourers, compared to 5.4 percent for the West Side’s Holy Angels branch, whose membership was more occupationally diverse with a greater nonmanual representation.137 Though not an “Irish” society as such, the cm ba provided one more layer to the networks of cross-class interaction established within and between parishes, and although the organization served to promote

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Table 4.2 cmba membership for selected Buffalo branches, 1888 and 1903 Branch/parish name (branch number in parentheses) Holy Angels (7) St Bridget’s (8) St Patrick’s (11) St Joseph’s Cathedral (20) Immaculate Conception (22) St Stephen’s (98) Annunciation (103)

Number of members, 1888

Number of members employed as labourers, 1888 (percentage in parentheses)

Number of members, 1903

279 242 382 267

15 (5.4) 46 (19) 49 (12.8) 18 (6.7)

407 842 1,045 572

117

7 (6)

214

34 32

9 (26.5) 4 (12.5)

180 208

Sources: Nicholas Scherer, comp., Address and Business Directory of the c m ba in Buffalo n y (Buffalo: self-published, 1888), Buffalo and Erie County Public Library; Joseph Ehnes, comp., Silver Jubilee Souvenir: Address and Business Directory of Branch No. 24, c m ba (Buffalo: Volksfreund Press, 1903).

practices such as thrift and self-help, it complemented the efforts of Rev. Cronin and others who narrated and celebrated the Irish portions of these Catholic identities.

I ri s h P ro t e s ta n t s , B e n e vo lence, and Orangei s m Although they were notable contributors to late Victorian Toronto’s majority Protestant host culture, the personal and group loyalties of Irish Protestants were not easily collapsed into a homogeneous “Canadian” identity. Confederation was a recent event carried out without a great deal of fanfare; Canadians remained British subjects; and a sense of Irishness survived, since few of these Protestants would have disputed the idea that social identities could be simultaneously Irish, British, and Canadian. Most Ontarians saw their province as the creation of the English, Irish, and Scots, and founded societies honouring patron saints to reflect this.138 Toronto’s St Patrick’s Day parades of the 1830s, for example, were ecumenical affairs that included the St Andrew’s and St George’s Societies. In 1842, two rival St Patrick’s Societies took to the streets, though the “split” reflected partisan passions more than sectarian rivalries.139 Popular reactions to the settlement of Catholic famine survivors from the late 1840s, however, wore down the ecumenical spirit that, among other things, spurred the formation of the hbs in the late 1850s.

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The foundation of Toronto’s Irish Protestant Benevolent Society (i p b s ) in 1870 challenged, on one level, the exclusively religious conception of “Irish-Canadian” popularized by the title of the h bs newspaper. But the assassination of Thomas D’Arcy McGee in 1868 and the enduring vitality of both the h b s locally and the Fenians across the border provided additional rationales for the articulation of identities that were self-consciously patriotic and loyal. These feelings turned out to be more real than imagined, since three months after the first i p bs meeting, another Fenian raid took place in Quebec.140 Factors relating to immigration were probably more important in spurring the formation of the ipbs, however, not least the ongoing campaign by Belfast emigration agent Charles Foy to encourage Protestant emigration to Ontario, and the completion of a new immigration facility on the Toronto waterfront.141 Three years following Confederation, there was reason to believe that Irish Protestant immigration would continue, and Article 2 of the ipbs constitution stated that their objective was to provide “advice and information to those Irish Protestants who arrive as strangers in our midst, and encourage their settlement in the Province of Ontario; to assist those of them who, from sickness or misfortune, stand in need of pecuniary aid, and to promote the welfare of Irish Protestants generally.”142 Article 3 stated that “Irish Protestants and their descendants, being Protestant, shall be eligible for election as ordinary members of the society,” while the following article welcomed “All Protestants” as “Honorary Members.”143 Through the title and practices of such an association, then, confessional bounds on Irishness were reinforced by these middle-class Protestants upon their less well-off countrymen and women arriving in town. With house visits undertaken by ipbs committees, cross-class social encounters were facilitated in a fashion similar to those of the House of Industry and the Catholic charities. The Toronto i p b s formed part of a wider network of Protestant Irish benevolence in eastern and central Canada. In Montreal, a “sister” organization emerged from the ashes of the non-denominational St Patrick’s Society after internecine disputes in the 1850s, and others were formed in Quebec City in 1860 and Hamilton in 1869. Still others would appear in London and Ottawa by the early 1880s.144 In Toronto, the i p bs built up a mostly middle-class membership of 360 over its first two years, with about eighty-seven percent of members Irish-born and Anglicans and Methodists especially represented.145 Some members, such as Co. Londonderry–born Thomas Kerr, were also set straight on the ethnic roots of their acquaintances. In 1874, Kerr remarked that since joining,

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“he had got to know a great many Irishmen whom he had always previously thought to be Scotch,” and Kerr had Scottish ancestry himself.146 Though regular meetings did not typically attract large attendances, some members came into contact with each other through their activities in other organizations such as the Masons, the Orange Order, the House of Industry, and temperance and Bible-reading clubs, as well as within their churches as wardens, treasurers, elders, or Sunday School teachers or class leaders. Given the flavour of Protestantism promoted within the churches in which the Irish had a presence in the city, evangelical and temperance interests were prominent among the founding i p bs members. Its chaplains, the aforementioned Revs. William Gregg, John Potts, and E.H. Dewart, were all temperance men, as were others such as future mayor Warring Kennedy and inaugural secretary Andrew Taylor McCord. William F. McMaster, J.G. Hodgins, and Kennedy were all members of the Upper Canada Bible Society, while McCord and his sister were also involved with the Home for Incurables, the Newsboys Home, and the Eye and Ear Dispensary.147 In addition to editing the Christian Guardian, Dewart was a member of both the Ontario Temperance Union and the Evangelical Alliance, and an active opponent of late shopping hours in the early 1870s, which, as an archetypal reformer, he pronounced injurious to “the moral and physical interests” of the city.148 As a pan-Protestant organization, the i p bs reached city-wide and had no parochial branch network into which its activities could be inserted. Unlike the hb s, its purpose was not to try to offer a complete lifestyle to  members; the associations of its constituent churches were already claiming much of their members’ spare time. But it did add another layer to the ecumenical web of relations bringing Protestants together within the city. Annual i p b s services “travelled” on a rotating basis to various Protestant churches, for example. Of the twenty annual services that took place from 1872 to 1891, five were held at Elm Street Methodist church, four at Cooke’s Presbyterian Church, three at the Metropolitan Methodist Church, three at St James’ Anglican Cathedral, two at Knox Presbyterian Church, and one each at All Saints, Grace (both Anglican), and Jarvis Street Baptist Church.149 Given such schedules, the proportions of each denomination within the membership were being served. But these travelling sermons also illustrate how the circles in which the ipb s membership interacted routinely activated their sense of status  within a dominant Protestant culture. The planning of other gettogethers reflected prevailing middle-class musical tastes and ideas about

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appropriate forms of collective celebration. The Christmas concert of 1883, for example, was held in the city’s Horticultural Gardens and featured a soprano and a contralto from New York, along with two pianists, a tenor, and a baritone.150 In the language of the time, the i p b s was a “national society” with a sentimental outlook towards the land of its members’ birth rather than one espousing any nationalist creed.151 And while its network drew Irish Protestants together, alliances were also forged with English and Scottish national societies. Occasions such as each society’s saint’s day celebration or Dominion Day (1 July) brought the three bodies together, as did the annual dinner initiatives of the i p b s that began in the mid1880s (chapter 6). Through these gatherings, complementary British and Canadian identities retained vitality and purpose among the city’s better-off. These three groups’ members saw themselves not only as the upholders of the loyal British presence in Ontario, but as the charter group that would set the demographic and cultural tone for the evolving Canadian society. Confessional strictures, however, were not the norm in all the national societies. A.J. Cattanach, president of the Toronto St Andrew’s Society, emphatically remarked at an i p bs banquet in 1886 that he “represented a society which knew no creed. It possessed a nonsectarian character.”152 If the ipbs preserved distinctions between the two sets of Irish in ­Toronto’s public sphere, the Orange Order added much to their efforts. Given the different class (and to some degree party-political) bases of the two organizations, there was minimal overlap between their memberships. Only a subset of Toronto’s Irish Protestants, then, were actively involved in the production of what many observers of the era would have thought of as an “Orange-Irish” identity. As chapter 2 explained, the Order became popular throughout many parts of urban, small-town, and rural Englishspeaking Canada by the second half of the nineteenth century, while its presence in the public life of Toronto was unsurpassed in any other North American city. The latter fact was recognized through the city’s hosting of  the triennial Orange Imperial Council in 1870. But Orangeism was framed not only by the concept of loyalty to Britain’s empire and monarch but also by the “open Bible” dimension of Protestantism and the myths of historical struggle of Protestants against Catholicism. Formal membership was restricted to Protestant men only, and the rules of initiation forbade entry to any Protestant who had married a Catholic. As with Ireland and Scotland, Canadian Orangeism was built upon a  hierarchical system of lodges that resembled Masonic societies and

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utilized those administrative territories (provinces, counties, townships) that were part of the development of the British presence in this part of  North America.153 At the top end of the scale was the overarching Grand  Orange Lodge of British America that comprised Canada and Newfoundland, established in 1830 in eastern Ontario through the organizing vigour of Co. Wexford–born Ogle Gowan.154 Next came the Provincial Grand Lodges such as Ontario East and Ontario West, and below these were the County Grand Lodges such as Toronto, which were split further into District Lodges. Districts in turn contained the local lodge unit, also known as the primary lodge. By the 1870s, Toronto Orangeism was largely working-class in composition and diversified by occupation and birthplace.155 By February 1878, the city had an established three-district lodge structure (central, east, and west) with a total of twenty-nine primary lodges; Central District had eighteen of these, Western had six, and Eastern five.156 Eight years later, thirty-four primary lodges were in existence.157 Orangeism’s place within Toronto’s public sphere was also advanced by the arrival of the weekly Sentinel and Orange Protestant Advocate newspaper in 1874. By 1892, the paper had a weekly circulation of fourteen thousand; this was a level comparable with the Irish Canadian and came at a time when the number of Orangemen in the city was estimated at 2,500.158 While the Order cherished the link with Britain, there were issues specific to North America that gave it not only a continued socio-political relevance but also a popular appeal among non-Irish Protestants. Points of contention were the endurance of militant Irish nationalism, separate schooling in Ontario, and the effects of Catholicism on the loyalties of Irish- and French-Canadians. The prevalence of each issue oscillated between these decades – while street violence was a particular scourge of the 1870s (notably during the Jubilee Riots of 1875), controversies over separate schooling reared their heads again in the 1880s.159 The cry of “British rights” was as likely to emanate from the Orangemen as anyone, but this conception of rights was both place-based and historical, originating as it did in the English Bill of Rights of 1688 whose leading principle was Protestantism.160 Irish reference points also remained within Orangeism’s ensemble of “deliverance myths,” usable in the defence of (Protestant) British liberties in Canada.161 These centred on the triumph of the Dutch King William III over the English Catholic King James II in the Boyne River Valley in eastern Ireland in 1690; “King Billy” became the centrepiece of the annual 12 July parade, as well as Orange iconography in general.

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Elsewhere, Williamite encounters in Ireland at Aughrim and Enniskillen, as well as the siege of Derry in 1688, were crucial ingredients of the myth. These events did not merely remove the last Catholic from the English throne; they were held to have had wider spatial implications. In 1883, the Sentinel reminded its readers that “the lesson of the siege of Londonderry is that of the entire long struggle of Protestantism against Popery for civil and religious liberty … Rome is the same today as when the dauntless men of Derry defied her hosts and like those noble aires [sic], our watchword must be ‘No Surrender’ of the rights and freedoms they fought and died for.”162 Words like these echoed through the decades from the time Orangeism took root in Toronto. While the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 and its conclusion in 1690 constituted a crucial moment of Protestant intellectual and political liberation, the myth of King Billy’s triumph proved adaptable to the Canadian context. An array of political languages, images, and icons compatible with the  Orange mission thus gained familiarity, using the events of late seventeenth-century Ireland. The ubiquitous Biblical self-styling of ­ Orange duties to protect what one Toronto-based Grand Master called “the walls and watch-towers of our lodges” dovetailed with the association’s mantra of “No Surrender.”163 The titling of their newspaper and lodges as “Ulster Black Watch” was another example of this militaristic language, and it is little wonder that Toronto poet Mary Thayer was moved to describe the Order as an “imperial militia.”164 There were also the long-revered songs “The Sash My Father Wore” and “Boyne Water,” whose renditions in lodge rooms and at street processions connected Toronto to other urban nodes of a globalized Orange network in Melbourne, Belfast, Glasgow, and Liverpool. Allied to these performances, of course, was Orangeism’s material culture, and advertisements appeared in the Sentinel in the 1880s for various Toronto outlets where the required banners, sash ribbons, King William badges, drums, and flutes could be purchased. In 1886, Harry Lovelock, the English-born secretary of McKinley Lodge No. 275, sold Orange badges, “artistically printed in colors,” from his house in the city’s west end.165 In 1893, a notice to “Have Your Premium Pictures Framed” was placed by Noble & Co. in the pages of the Sentinel, with the “Siege of Derry” and the “Battle of the Boyne” offered for framing in four-inch heavy gilt for $2.166 The advertisement was still running five years later, indicating the continued vitality of Orangeism. The values of Orangeism had not become incorporated into everyday life in Protestant Ontario without controversy, however. The Order was

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initially dismissed by Upper Canadian Tories and Reformers as an abrasive and over-exuberant gang of Irishmen interested in little more than transporting their sectarian rivalries with Catholics to a different location. While the same “rabble” could prove a useful intimidating force for the Tories at election times, their celebrations of King Billy’s victory each July threatened to spark violence with Catholic opponents.167 A Party Processions Act became law in December 1843, with the Order as its chief target, yet the institution successfully flouted it over subsequent years before its repeal in 1851.168 In 1860 came the infamous episode of the “Orangeman’s Arch” built to welcome the Prince of Wales to the city, despite attempts by the authorities to limit the Order’s participation in the festivities.169 Over the course of the century, however, the Order rose from the level of usable boot-boys for Tory candidates to a formidable socio-political organization in Ontario generally and Toronto in particular. It had steadily impressed an influence on municipal politics (chapter 5) while having some members sitting in both provincial and federal legislatures. The public parading of the Order’s sentiments had become part of the annual calendar in Toronto and other Ontario cities and towns by the 1870s (figure 4.1). When Toronto hosted the Imperial Council in 1870, seventeen of the city’s primary lodges participated in the procession alongside counterparts from other parts of Ontario. At least three Toronto lodges had memberships committed to the temperance cause, an initiative that was part of a wider plan to recast the Order’s public image.170 Speeches by local and visiting dignitaries solidified the Orangemen’s confidence in their mission, while the Globe reported that “each train that entered the city and each steamer that touched at the wharves brought in lodges from other places and swelled the crowd of spectators.”171 By the 1880s, alcohol had become banned from official Orange functions, while post-parade tavern-visiting was replaced by “a heterosocial event at the Exhibition grounds, where women were welcome to take part.”172 While Orange lodges were present in both the east and west ends of Toronto, they contributed to the “north of Ireland” traditions associated with the east end that John McAree mentioned in his Cabbagetown memoir. In a survey of the residences of Toronto Orangemen in 1894, Houston and Smyth observe their density to have been greatest in this neighbourhood.173 In 1876, “Beaty’s Field” at the corner of Parliament and Gerrard Streets served as the gathering place for lodges prior to the procession to Queen’s Park; three years later, the rendezvous point was at

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Figure 4.1  Orange Order 12 July parade in Toronto. Canadian Illustrated News, 1 August 1874. Courtesy of the Toronto Public Library.

the rear of John McAree’s alma mater, the Dufferin Public School, before the southward march along Parliament Street (figure 3.5).174 Although associated initially with adherents of the Anglican faith in Ireland, Toronto’s Orange institution included members of Presbyterian and Methodist denominations by the late Victorian period. In a circuit echoing that of the i p b s, churches of the three main faiths were also visited for annual 12 July “divine services.” In 1868, Cooke’s Church was the venue; in 1874, the brethren paraded to the Metropolitan Methodist Church; and in 1881, the service was held in St James’ Anglican Cathedral.175 Trinity East Church was visited by the city’s lodges as part of the 1897 Victorian Jubilee celebrations.176 The brotherhood even sought to uphold the local evangelical ethos on occasion. A retrospective examination of Toronto’s lodges recalled how a stress on “the purity and simplicity of religion” led to the passing of a resolution at the annual County Lodge meeting in 1871 that censured “the ritualistic practices and Popish tendencies in the (Anglican) Church of the Holy Trinity, Toronto,” and cautioned members “against the danger of permitting their families to attend the church.”177

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Few clergymen served the Order as chaplains, however. By early 1878, only four served the Toronto lodges at various levels.178 All were Anglicans and none were Irish-born. The Scottish Rev. Alexander Sanson of Trinity East served as chaplain for the County Lodge of Toronto, the Centre district, and Enniskillen Lodge No. 387. The English-born Rev. J.D. Cayley of St George’s Church was chaplain of Armstrong Lodge No.  137, while the Ontario-born Rev. A.J. Broughall of St Stephen’s Church was chaplain of the West Toronto district, a vice-chairman of the House of Industry, and a one-time lecturer in classics. Finally, Rev. Arthur Henry Baldwin of All Saints Church served the East Toronto district and Medcalf Lodge No. 781, and, surprisingly, was a descendant of the same Cork family that produced political reformers William Warren and ­Robert.179 Orangeism still won the sympathies of other Protestant ministers in the city, however, especially those born in Ulster. Rev. John Potts spoke at the Queen’s Park July rally in 1879, Rev. William Patterson occupied the corresponding podium in 1888, and one of his predecessors at Cooke’s Church, Rev. J. Gardner Robb, vigorously defended the Orange Young Britons blamed for disturbing the Catholic Jubilee procession in 1875.180 Outlets existed within the Orange association to channel youngsters into its ranks before their formal initiation into primary lodges. In the 1870s, the Orange Young Britons (oy b ) and the “’Prentice Boys” provided such opportunities to young Toronto Protestants. The oy b , the better known and more infamous of the two, emerged in the late 1860s, when the Fenian threat had not abated and the growth in leisure time afforded opportunities to young working men to indulge in pastimes with their peers outside of the home and workplace.181 They were also prominent participants in Orange parades; the drums and fifes of the Derry and Queen City lodges of the oy b book-ended the 1870 July procession, for example. Five years later, ten oy b lodges participated.182 Yet the oyb penchant for the public performance of Orange airs extended beyond official street processions. They were likely to test their playing abilities in various parts of the city and at different times of the year. Favouring youthful exuberance and a taste for alcohol over wider civic concerns for temperance, they were invariably involved in clashes with those other young men they were unlikely to encounter in their days at school – Catholics. John McAree described the oyb as a group of “husky, strutting young men, mechanics, and labourers who … would parade frequently and always made it a point of invading a [Catholic]

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neighbourhood east of Parliament Street and south of Queen Street,” while journalist Hector Charlesworth remarked that in “the east end of the city Orange Young Britons out on parade thought nothing of rushing into the homes of Catholic families just to frighten them.”183 The oyb were acutely aware of the Catholic geography of Toronto – in addition to the above-mentioned Corktown disturbances, other typical troublespots were Stanley/Lombard Street and Owen Cosgrove’s tavern on the corner of Queen and William Streets. The latter venue suffered particularly from persistent stoning during the second Jubilee Riot on 3 October 1875. As with the first riot on 26 September, Catholic processionists and police alike were attacked and revolvers drawn and fired. Yet the scene on 3 October was one of utter mayhem in this downtown district, with several thousand people involved.184 Miraculously, nobody was killed in either riot, but the oyb were identified as key agitators, and despite the protestations of Rev. Robb and others, it would not be for the last time. In 1889, they were also blamed for violent activities outside St Patrick’s Church on the Irish patron saint’s night “where church and school-house were filled with stones” by a group that was later witnessed returning to the east end “with their fifes and drums.”185 Commemorations among the Toronto brethren were not limited to the encounter at the Boyne. Remembrance of the siege of Derry also found its way into Toronto’s Orange calendar through the ’Prentice Boy lodges, named for the apprentice boys responsible for closing the gates of Derry on James II in 1688. The 12 July proceedings of 1876 featured the Walker Murray Lodge ’Prentice Boys No. 17 and the Martin Luther Lodge ’Prentice Boys No. 15, whose meeting notice in the Globe referred to the flag of the City of Derry by proclaiming “The Crimson Flag Still Floats.”186 By the end of 1877, four ’Prentice Boy lodges for the city were listed in the Sentinel; in addition to the two aforementioned were Medcalf Pioneer Lodge No. 12 and Hackett Lodge No. 28.187 While the former lodge was named in memory of the Toronto mayor and provincial Grand Master who had passed away in 1875, the latter was established in the wake of the shooting of Thomas Lett Hackett in Montreal that year following a 12 July church service. Once again, recent events merged with older memories in creating an iconographic nomenclature for young men eager to make their mark within Toronto Orangeism. By November 1877, the Hackett lodge was said to be “in a flourishing condition, financially and otherwise, having nearly doubled its roll of members, since its organization in August last.”188 Never surrendering also meant never forgetting.

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Orangeism made some limited inroads in Buffalo, and in that sense represents the only glimpse of any self-consciously Protestant Irish ­culture in that city. In 1875, a Buffalo lodge took part in the mile-long 12 July procession across the border at St Catharines.189 In December 1877, a celebration was held in Buffalo under the auspices of Joshua Lodge No. 30 to commemorate the closing of the gates of Derry. Proceedings began with “a grand march to the music of the ‘Protestant Boys’” while the numbers involved “and the gay Protestant colours worn were a sure indication that Buffalo is not without her true Protestant defenders.”190 The following July, the Globe reported that as Toronto’s Orange parade wound its way towards the harbour, the vessel containing the Buffalo brethren arrived and “the band with the Buffalo company struck up ‘God Save the Queen.’” A Buffalo Orangeman proclaimed in a speech later that day that the Order in that city “‘was not an old one, but it was built of the finest materials.’”191 These years appear to have marked the high point of Buffalo Orangeism. City directories have few entries on the Order until later in the century, and the evidence suggests that their institutional apparatus by that time was unlikely to cater to many more than a hundred persons.192 For all of the bravado about the “materials” of the organization’s membership, the numbers involved were probably little different from those of the 1870s. Examining these institutional and networked dimensions of social life that touched the Irish in both cities invites consideration of the primary actors within them, their rank and file, and their medium- and longterm  effects on identity constructions and group behaviours. As with other immigrant groups, influential personnel were literate members of the middle class: clergymen, editors, merchants, and other professional people, not all of whom were Irish-born. Associations such as the i p bs were concerned with assisting their “deserving” working-class counterparts of Protestant Irish background, while the h bs and Orange Order attempted to fashion more conscious “Hibernian” (Green) and “Orange” lifestyles around the politicized axis of religion for largely working-class memberships. Weekly newspapers targeted to specific audiences also kept Irish group identities fresh, though as later chapters reveal, ideas about what it meant to be an “American” and a “Canadian” also developed through these arenas and in ways that often complemented more than they eroded the Irish origins of readerships.

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Nonetheless, such networks produced as their flip-side patterns of nonassociation, ambivalence, fragmentation, and opposition. John McAree was not the only one to judge Ontario’s two-school system as encouraging an oppositional subculture between young Catholics and Protestants. But as far as he was concerned, it was the latter group that occupied the leading role in moulding late Victorian culture in English Canada. That the “ethnic community was never coterminous with the city’s Irish population” was especially true of Toronto.193 While the dividing line of religion remained explicit, class-based sensibilities kept many Protestants from the Orange fold. On the more spiritual side, the struggle of Catholic associations to fashion sober and respectable subjects from largely working-class constituencies was very much a work in progress, with taverns and saloons remaining important informal institutions in both cities – here, women were cast as crucial civilizing elements.194 Identities based on religion were made, however, not simply in the church but also in streets, homes, schools, and associational meetings. The effects of such group-making also carried over into the political sphere, and it is with the question of Irish involvement within the partisan cultures of Buffalo and Toronto that the next chapter is concerned.

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5 Wards and Votes: The Irish and Their Political Arenas

The economic and social experiences of the Irish within their cities and neighbourhoods provided opportunities for men to build reputations for themselves at various levels of the political scene. Images of Irish urban political activity, mobilized within working-class wards, are especially vivid in the case of the United States. In Henri Lefebvre’s terms, wards were “representations of space,” partitioned sub-units of municipal territories used by the founders of modern towns and cities for taxation and voting, and in that sense were legal-administrative constructs.1 And yet, as units for party organization and electoral contestation in the United States and Canada, wards often acquired social meanings, becoming “representational spaces.” American industrialization brought with it not only factories and working-class neighbourhoods but also electoral enfranchisement for adult white males, a key development that helped the Irish to become a force in city politics before the Civil War. For exemple, Robert Dahl has famously traced how the New Haven Irish used their votes and numbers to effect a transition from patrician-­dominated municipal governments to those where “ex-plebes” took charge.2 The Democratic Party was the well-known beneficiary of Irish votes. In New York City, centre of the legendary Tammany Hall political machine, “Irish-dominated wards in Lower and Midtown Manhattan gave the Democrats an average of two-thirds of their votes in the 1870s and 1880s,” and the “trinity” of Irish-Catholic-Democrat also took shape in smaller cities such as Albany, St Paul, and Worcester.3 Dahl notes that half of New Haven’s twelve wards were electing Irishmen by this time, and as Nathan Glazer and D.P. Moynihan contend, post-­ famine arrivals in New York “got off the boat to find their identity waiting for them: they were to be Irish-Catholic Democrats.”4

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When Michel Foucault claimed in 1971 that a “whole history remains to be written of spaces,” he added that to do so would be to write “a history of powers … from the great geopolitical strategies to the little tactics of the habitat.”5 As the above discussion indicates, it was precisely those micro-tactics practiced by Irish-American politicians within the “ward habitat” that informed the American public imagination. This was especially the case for the post–Civil War decades, described by Morton Keller as a “period of atrophy” for American state governments when much of their legislation promoted more active local government than previously.6 The stage was therefore set for the struggle between machine bosses and progressive liberal reformers. This may have given city politics “a distinctive and autonomous life of its own” but it hardly endeared the Irish to their Anglo-American hosts.7 Outraged writers described machine-style politics as “a plague, incubated in immigrant neighborhoods” that infected “the entire body politic,” and nativist satires such as Rufus Shapley’s Solid for Mulhooly (1889) left no room for doubt regarding the immigrant group held to be at the root of declining political standards.8 Irish writers and satirists were not far behind the likes of Shapley. John Brennan’s Erin Mor (1892) repudiated the Democrats’ self-styling as “the Irishman’s party,” arguing instead that the party threatened “any Irishman who kicks on votin’ the ticket” with public denunciation as “a thraitor and a turncoat.”9 Elsewhere, Trinity College Dublin graduate George Henry Jessop’s satire of Irish-American saloon-keeper-cum-politician Miles Grogan was published in Toronto’s Catholic Weekly Review in 1889 to the great indignation of Irish Canadian editor Patrick Boyle.10 Early twentieth-century writers similarly captured the spirit of everyday ward life in America, not least Finley Peter Dunne’s famous Chicagoan “Mr. Dooley.”11 American city politics had acquired an “Irish factor,” one with a strongly Catholic cast. In the Canadian context, a different sort of Irish politician emerged, one whose Irishness was not always explicitly recognized. Tales of ward life also assumed a different flavour, given the far fewer cities in which they could blossom. In the century following the 1791 Constitution Act, English-speaking politicians of repute were more likely to be Protestant than Catholic; those of Irish birth or ancestry were likewise mostly Protestants, and they occupied various points of the political spectrum. Notable Reformers were William Warren Baldwin and his son Robert in the 1830s and 1840s; their spirit of “responsible government” was taken forward by second-generation Irish liberals such as Edward Blake in the

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1870s and 1880s. Other Irishmen such as Robert Thorpe and Joseph Willcocks had opposed the Family Compact in the opening decades of  the century.12 Following a different political path was William R. Meredith, Ontario Conservative leader in the 1880s and early 1890s, who had an Irish-born father and cousins prominent in Irish public and legal circles; he was dismissed by the Irish Canadian as a “bondsman of the Orange-No Popery Party.”13 The most prominent Catholic Irish politician of the era was Thomas D’Arcy McGee, who moved from Reform to Conservative ranks before his assassination in 1868. McGee had observed the workings of Irish-American ward life at first hand in Boston, New York, and Buffalo prior to his arrival in Canada, and his evaluation was not flattering.14 There were Irish antecedents to these North American patterns, especially where the electoral behaviour of Catholics was concerned. Although Irish nationalist writers would eloquently denounce British misrule and the injustices of the Act of Union, those Catholic Irish who arrived as adults in North America during and after the famine had not been passive and powerless observers of elections. They owed much to the popular mobilizations of Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association in the 1820s that ultimately enabled Catholics to enter Parliament and hold civic and military offices through legislation passed in 1829. By the early 1840s, the “Liberator” had perfected machine-style tactics in both his campaign for the Dublin mayoralty and the mass national movement to repeal the Union.15 And though the Irish Franchise Act of 1850 made fewer than one in five adult males eligible for the vote, disenfranchised men and women, Protestant and Catholic, were not slow to communicate their interests to voters in towns and cities across the island, with bribery and mob violence commonplace.16 Knowledge of the price of votes was more widespread than awareness of the finer details of devotional religion, and features of this political landscape would find echoes in Buffalo and Toronto as the Irish sought positions of influence within local partisan circles. This chapter examines the course of Irish involvement in the political arenas of Buffalo and Toronto between the late 1860s and early 1890s. Irish successes and failures within and beyond these cities’ wards are documented, and case studies of particular elections are used to illustrate more general patterns. Sallie Marston has argued that the local political character of a social group is “very much a function of how wider social relations are actually constituted in a particular place,” and it will be apparent that regional- and national-scale processes, legal strictures, and

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general ways of “doing politics” affected comparative urban outcomes.17 It was not simply the case of party labels being different in the two countries. If the United States was a nation where languages of individual rights, liberty, and democracy were emphasized and struggled over within a culture of “mass politics,” then the world of Canadian politics was one where a “British liberal paradigm” held sway, with Confederation representing more an arrangement between political and commercial elites than the outcome of grassroots desires.18 For Ian McKay, the “emergent governing formula of ‘Peace, Order and Good Government’” in Canada “systematically minimized the efficacy of popular power.”19 While this chapter illustrates how elements of the above images of Irish electoral intervention in the United States and Canada resurfaced in the two cities, it also shows how sectarian identities featured in party-­ political discourse and electoral contests in Toronto to a degree that was less visible in Buffalo.

T he Ir is h a n d “ M as s P oli ti cs” i n Buffalo The competitive bipartisan politics that took shape in the cities of the American North prior to the outbreak of the Civil War continued to flourish in its aftermath. Although the Irish famously responded to the opportunities presented by urban administrative expansion, it was hardly a rapid rise to the top, and in Buffalo, civic leadership remained in the hands of “a remarkably homogeneous line of businessmen of German and New England stock for whom participation in city government was both civic duty and good business sense.”20 Elections were an annual feature of life in Buffalo and took place during the early part of November. Campaigns typically began at least one month in advance and often longer in the case of presidential contests, and election tickets featured long lists of names for each party. In 1870, for example, Buffalonians voted for a governor, lieutenant-governor, comptroller, prison inspector, and canal commissioners at the state level; at the (Erie) county level, they had a clerk, sheriff, coroners, justice of sessions, superintendent of poor, Congress representative, and five state assemblymen to elect; while at the municipal level, the offices of police justice, assessor, and justice of the peace needed filling.21 Eligible voters were naturalized male citizens at least twenty-one years of age who had also fulfilled a number of residency requirements.22 Such frequent bouts of electioneering structured ordinary people’s perceptions of their stake in the system. If they were unclear about the

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nature of this stake, ward canvassers were quick to communicate it to them. This was especially true in working-class neighbourhoods, where armies of party personnel mobilized to relate the ways of politics to voters, and especially new arrivals. With party workers distributing party-printed ballots to voters outside poll booths, tickets were difficult to split, and the opportunities for manipulation and intimidation were obvious.23 Drives by activists to register new voters took place in multiple spaces and contexts. Ward caucus clubs met to nominate each year’s slate of local candidates as well as delegates to county and state conventions. These meetings and polls were usually held in the houses of ward officers within each electoral district. Both the Democratic Courier and Republican Express reported on “rousing” rallies and “enthusiastic” meetings, while their publishing of long platform speeches attempted to stir voters. In 1871, a meeting of the First Ward’s “Fargo” Democratic campaign club took place in the house of one Mrs Newman at Perry and Louisiana Streets, where “fifty persons were elected members of the club and signed the constitution.”24 In 1875, a meeting of Democrats held to nominate the ward’s officers had polls open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Besides the elections for the position of alderman, supervisor, and constable, twelve election inspectors were nominated along with a five-man ward election committee.25 As in other northern cities, the staging of party-sponsored parades and other election-time spectacles touched the Irish and other groups in Buffalo. Described by one local newspaper as “people’s festivals,” these parades were essential features of presidential campaigns in particular.26 In 1872, the “Greeley and Brown” Democratic ward campaign clubs held a torchlight procession on the principal streets of the city days before the poll, where they were joined by bands, drum corps, and gun squads; an estimated 1,500 marchers participated.27 The following year, the popular pastime of starting bonfires was reported on by the Express; five years later, the paper observed the “patriotic small boy, ubiquitous as ever on similar occasions [who] lit up the whole city with huge bonfires.”28 In 1876, Civil War veterans took to the streets in a parade featuring Democratic “Tilden and Hendricks” ward clubs where torches, lanterns, brooms, and banners were brandished.29 While the Courier gave a predictably dashing account of proceedings, the Express reserved criticism for the First Ward’s Irish Democrats. For the paper’s journalist, the deeds of Buffalo’s Irish veterans on behalf of the Union Army, sullied by their persistent support for the rebel party of the Confederacy, were

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denigrated further by their public appearance. Carrying “a flaming ­banner inscribed ‘We fought for the Union, Cornelius Donohue for Coroner,’” some of the marchers were described as “located at the end of execrable five cent cigars, and all … looked as though they could do noble service behind a barricade of beer barrels.”30 The ethnicity of these veterans was no mystery to Express readers. Indeed, the First Ward’s partisan credentials had been established since the late 1840s, and the Know-Nothing nativism that touched the city during the following decade solidified Catholic Irish allegiance to Buffalo’s Democracy. For labour historian Richard Oestreicher, such working-class voting traditions “developed through repeated experiences” while simultaneously shaping a future partisan consciousness.31 And so it was that Democratic ticket heads for president, governor, or alderman failed in the ward in only two elections out of the seventeen held between 1843 and 1853, illustrating the cohering of such traditions.32 Neither did the ward offer much to Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 and 1864 elections; in 1860, he polled 353 votes as against 705 for Northern Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, and in 1864, his 326 supporting votes failed against a hefty 947 for George B. McClellan.33 In each of the biennial mayoralty contests held between 1859 and 1865, the ward returned the Democratic candidate, and on three of the four occasions did so with the highest majority for that nominee in the city. While the eighth ward also delivered Democratic majorities in these contests, the victory margins were narrower than in the First. Little wonder, then, that the Courier predicted that the 1873 aldermanic candidate in the First Ward would be returned “by an old-fashioned majority,” nor that, of the 5,223 reported participants in the street procession of the Tilden and Hendricks campaign clubs in 1876, 763 or 14.5 percent were from the clubs of the ward.34 The consistency of the Democratic vote in the southern section of the city was typically described as “solid,” a noun that was often used to characterize the candidates themselves. The 1870s brought little change to the pattern of Democratic voting in the First Ward (table 5.1), and unflattering references to the neighbourhood’s class, ethnic, and political loyalties continued. In 1870, the Express referred to “the frowsy look of the unterrified from the redoubtable First and bloody Eighth” that contrasted with the “respectable appearance” of the Republicans who attended a Democratic meeting where an “inane apathy” was exhibited by “the unwashed in attendance” and “the speaker was interrupted by the entrance of a band playing ‘Wearing of the Green’” with “a very dirty crew, mostly boys with

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Table 5.1 The First and Eighth Wards in Buffalo elections 1870–80 Number of contests/times on ballot Ward Alderman City mayor State governor Congressman US president

10 4 5 6 3

Number of Democratic victories

Number of Republican victories

% of Democratic victories

1

8

1

8

1

8

5 4 5 6 3

8 4 5 5 2

5 0 0 0 0

2 0 0 1 1

50 100 100 100 100

80 100 100 83 66

Source: Buffalo Courier and Buffalo Express, various issues, November 1870–80.

banners” coming upon the stage.35 By 1889, the Union and Times retorted that “First Ward people should resent the practice some papers make of referring to the ‘Bloody First’. The First Ward may not have all the wealth and fashion of the city, but its people are eminently respectable and law-abiding and are not all deserving of so opprobrious a title.”36 Undaunted, the Republicans organized their own First Ward rallies, and some Irish were drawn into those, but it was only during municipal contests that the Grand Old Party really stood a chance of electing candidates (table 5.1).37 The bread-and-butter of patronage and the ability of political personalities to respond to local issues were key criteria for election – it was not always a question of party affiliation. Once elected, aldermen positioned themselves on municipal standing committees such as those responsible for schools, fire, streets, police, water, and bridges, from which the patronage of appointments, contracts, tenders, and franchises was dispensed from municipal budgets. Much was familiar here to immigrants from Ireland, where successful electoral candidates were also expected to become “one-man employment agencies.”38 Who were the “solid” Irishmen behind these partisan activities in the First Ward? Analysis of the backgrounds of the ward’s Democratic aldermanic nominees between 1875 and 1880 reveals a group of “ex-plebe” small-business owners, lower white-collar workers, and some manual workers. Grocers and merchants earned distinction within the neighbourhood not only through the provision of goods and credit but also through their involvement in parish associations or other forms of local  service. The victorious alderman of 1874, for example, was Co. Monaghan–born John Hanavan, a flour, grain, and feed merchant who was president of the St Bridget’s Beneficial Society and later treasurer of

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that parish’s Catholic Mutual Benefit Association (cmba) branch; the Express would describe him as “one of the most inveterate politicians and chronic office-seekers in the city.”39 In 1876, James Ryan, “a grocer and old and enterprising businessman of the ward,” was elected.40 The 1877 nominee, Cornelius Donohue, was a Co. Kerry–born veteran of the Union Army who subsequently applied himself to Fenian raiding in 1866.41 In the aftermath of Ridgeway, the restless Donohue tried his hand at restaurant and grocery management and policing, while also spending two terms in the state assembly! As the aforementioned Express account makes clear, his status as a veteran was not played down when he was nominated for county coroner in 1876; to many Irish, however, Donohue’s reputation was founded upon two military careers rather than just one. One other well-networked nominee was Co. Clare–born Simon Nash, a one-time grocer and later weighman on the docks who served as vice-president of the city’s Democratic convention in 1876 and as recording secretary for the St Bridget’s Beneficial Society, a position that invites speculation as to how he and Hanavan might have worked to engineer Democratic loyalties within their supposedly apolitical association. Indeed, the development of partisan cliques within some cm ba branches caused a minor controversy at the end of the 1870s.42 Finally, the five nominees for supervisor from the ward for these years were dominated by the group most despised by Buffalo’s reformers – three saloon-keepers, along with one grocer and a marine inspector. The “grocer” on this occasion was one-time Fenian Captain Patrick Kane of 286  Ohio Street, on whose premises the census enumerator counted twenty-six boarders in the summer of 1880 (table 3.5). Nominees for election inspector were chosen at the sub-ward scale of the electoral division. Here was room for the less skilled sections of the neighbourhood to participate. Out of a total of twenty-four nominees, five labourers were present, followed by four saloon-keepers, two clerks, two grocers, and two railroad freight-house foremen, and then one each of tobacconist and liquor dealer, carpenter, horse-shoer, boilermaker, grain inspector, scooper, watchman, steam engineer, and iron roller. Democratic “midlevel” activism thus drew some small business owners together with skilled workers and others involved in waterfront industries, the sort of individuals who could sway the minds of large numbers of men.43 And it was, on the whole, a man’s world: party-proud Buffalo Irishmen of various generations voted, marched in the streets, gathered regularly in saloons, and were invariably to be found in the vicinity of local booths on polling day.

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For those Irish able to establish themselves as vote-getters on both ward and municipal stages, it was not only a fruitful political career that beckoned, but also appointments to business and commercial boards. One of the early First Ward Democratic aldermen to scale such heights as a career politician in the post–Civil War era was George Chambers. Born in Co. Cork, Chambers arrived in Buffalo at four years of age; just seventeen years later in 1867, he was elected as alderman and lasted two terms.44 Though favouring the graft-free politics advocated by Democratic mayor Grover Cleveland, Chambers remained on good terms with pro-machine brothers William F. (“Blue-Eyed Billy”) and John C. Sheehan, also descendants of a Co. Cork immigrant. One obituary described Chambers as “a man of absolutely fair balance” who survived politically at a time when “party loyalty meant all.”45 After serving his apprenticeship in the ward, Chambers served two terms in the state assembly before his appointment as state superintendent for public works in 1881. Politics also brought Chambers back to Buffalo in 1893, when the then–lieutenant governor of New York, William F. Sheehan, engineered his appointment as police commissioner; thereafter Chambers served the International Railway Company as treasurer, retiring at eighty-one years of age. As with many of his peers, Chambers’ active personality was not confined to politics. While an assemblyman, he served on the original board of directors of the Catholic Union and Times and, as with many of Buffalo’s well-to-do Irish-Americans, lived his later years on the city’s West Side (see chapter 8) where he involved himself in the associational circles of his parish. The Sheehans followed Chambers to the apex of notability in the ward or, in the eyes of their opponents, to infamy. By 1880, John C. was city comptroller, while William, a one-time clerk in his brother’s office, was a lawyer and alderman; before the end of the decade, the latter would hold a seat in the state assembly before becoming lieutenant-­ governor in 1891. The influence of Blue-Eyed Billy in the assembly secured an appointment to the State Aqueduct Commission for brother John, a position that paid $4,500 per annum, while a brother-in-law was placed on the State Insurance Board.46 In 1892, John C. Sheehan was appointed police commissioner in New York City at an annual salary of $5,000, where his reputation as “a very shrewd Tammany politician” was sealed.47 Back in Buffalo, the Sheehan legacy solidified what Mark Goldman describes as “a fortress of working-class Democrats” in the southern Irish wards for another generation of voters and political protégés attracted to the ways and mysteries of the machine.48 The brothers’

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unabashed preference for the politics of patronage made Grover Cleveland a noted adversary (he refused to run on the same ticket as John C. during his mayoralty campaign in 1881); they in turn supported David B. Hill (New York Governor from 1885 to 1891) in his race against Cleveland for the 1892 Democratic presidential nomination. There was, however, more to politics in the First Ward than the dominance of what the pro-Cleveland Courier termed “Sheehanism” (figure 5.1). Another force in the ward in the 1870s and 1880s was Irish-born and Boston-raised Republican Jack White, a one-time mail transfer agent. White’s politics were imbued with the same instinctual pragmatism where “it was the first ward first and the party later” with “basic loyalty … first to the riverfront community.”49 Joining the Republicans to accrue what he believed were advantages in being the local standard-bearer for the minority party, White remained on Buffalo’s board of aldermen for almost a quarter of a century. By 1891, he had proven sufficiently enigmatic to his party associates that the Express, while proclaiming him to be “the brainiest man in the Council,” added that he was also “one of the most uncultured … professes to be a Republican, but he enters into deals with the Democratic managers.”50 Aldermen may not have known everyone, but their cultural capital of being known carried their names and reputations beyond direct personal relationships within their constituencies, and the “uncultured” White knew that “plain talk” paid dividends with local audiences. In any case, the emergence and endurance of boss figures such as White and the Sheehans not only refined the partisan loyalties of a previous generation, but also made a material difference to the less fortunate in their midst. Before embarking on a two-month holiday to Ireland in 1888, White was presented with a diamond ring worth $300 from his First Ward supporters “as a token of their esteem.”51 If middle-class Republicans had misgivings about men like Jack White, they were a lot more impressed with the talent for public office shown by Rowland Blennerhassett Mahany, a second-generation Irish-American of Episcopalian (Anglican) faith. Born to a working-class family in Buffalo, Mahany’s precociousness earned him a place at Harvard College before his return to Buffalo in 1888 as a journalist with the Express, a teacher at the high school, and a sometime poet. After a diplomatic sojourn as envoy to Ecuador, Mahany accepted the Congressional nomination for the Buffalo Republicans in 1892, though he had to wait until 1895 for success.52 Mahany’s confidence as a public speaker unafraid to proclaim his Irishness also made him a star attraction at local nationalist meetings in the 1880s.53

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Figure 5.1  “Sheehanism.” Buffalo Courier, 5 November 1893.

Irish-American politicians in Buffalo were present not only in both of the main parties, but also in both Democratic factions during the 1880s. One of Grover Cleveland’s key allies was Timothy Mahoney, another son of Co. Cork–born parents from the city’s West Side.54 Mahoney was one of the dogged armies of activists before he even had the vote, canvassing in the Queen City flour mill as a teenager before graduating to saloons where he and his peers “used to have to buy drinks and imbibe in liquor to win friendships and votes.”55 Mahoney’s reputation as a vote-harnesser in the eleventh ward (figure 3.7) was rewarded with an appointment as police captain in 1869 and, even more impressively, helped bring about his victory in the 1877 election for city assessor with “the largest majority given to any city officer.”56 Though the return of  the Republicans to office signalled his removal on each occasion, Mahoney remained prominent in Catholic Irish circles as a real estate and insurance agent, promoting property ownership ideals to the workingclass around him.57

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Mahoney’s electioneering adventures return us to the saloon as a site for Irish electoral mobilization in Buffalo. With many saloons doubling as boarding-houses for transient workers, their potential for influencing electoral outcomes was clear. The “Hancock and English” Democratic campaign club of the First Ward’s fifth electoral division held at least one of its meetings at a saloon kept by a one-time caucus delegate in 1877, for example, and the same building was used for ward caucus meetings on previous occasions.58 More importantly, the everyday time-­ geographies of unskilled Irish immigrants corresponded not only to the hours and activities spent between the workplace of the docks and the place of dwelling, but also to the socialization patterns undertaken in saloons. The saloon-keeper, actively involved in the recruitment of grain-scooping gangs and operating as a mid-level activist in local political circles, naturally resisted political reforms that threatened the status quo. The reformer James Dormer damned the rise of this “small politician” as “the ubiquitous and cheap caucus attendant and stuffer – the venal party worker, the parasite of the public purse and the office-­seeker’s means, the blow-fly of the too frequent elections [and] the vile disburser of the viler rich candidate’s ‘campaign’ corrupting funds.”59 The presence of saloon-keepers as nominees for minor offices illustrates their place within the system, and their service as election inspectors ensured their participation in the goings-on at polling booths every November. With Lake Erie frozen over and a ready supply of labourers still present in boarding-houses, some saloon-keepers were ready to pay men to do whatever dirty work had to be done. The Express derided First Ward associates of the Sheehans such as “Mouthy” John Donohue, “a caucus packer, a member of the Fire Department and a saloonkeeper.”60 There were clear parallels with post-famine Ireland, dubbed by K. Theodore Hoppen the “age of the shopkeeper.”61 Those men departing Munster counties for Buffalo would have understood the importance of public houses as “meeting places for those with news, votes and influence” that temporarily transformed Irish country towns into places of “the outstretched hand, the bulging pocket, and the floating voter adrift on seas of whiskey, beer and stout” at election time.62 Election mobs in County Tipperary, the source of many Buffalo Irish, were said to be an “essential ingredient” of local electioneering culture, for example.63 Local politics in Irish Buffalo possessed ordered and panoptic qualities, with hierarchies of block and precinct captains and ward committeemen monitoring voter affiliations within neighbourhoods through the

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directions given by county-level party organizations.64 As David Harvey has written, “those who command space can always control the politics of place even though … it takes control of some place to command space in the first instance.”65 Rewards were there for the most able and loyal party workers, such as Co. Clare immigrant Anthony McGowan, who graduated from scooping grain to tending bar and then opening his own First Ward saloon in 1897. McGowan’s service to Democratic boss (and owner of several saloons and hotels) James Kennedy was rewarded with an appointment to the Department of Markets, and McGowan went on to serve as assistant superintendent of the Elk Street market for thirtyone years.66 James Kennedy was another Sheehan associate whose nephew John established himself as the local boss in the eighth ward, which in the 1890s would become the nineteenth ward. Although the rising cliques of bosses may have drawn some inspiration from that other well-known authority figure, the Catholic priest, the local clergy, weary of observing drunkenness, violence, and family desertion in their parishes, opposed what they considered an exploitative ­system ruled by “rings” of politicians and saloon-keepers. While Rev. Patrick Cronin admired the intellect of William F. Sheehan, the former had his own reforming instincts and remarked in an 1888 Union and Times editorial that it would be “a great misfortune” for the Irish or any group to belong “en bloc to any one political party.”67 The paper had long despaired of the boss-saloon system, and in 1889, local curate Fr James Quigley, later to become bishop of both Buffalo and Chicago, railed against a regime in which “men marched like cattle to caucuses and election booths.”68 Given the close connections between saloons and the waterfront labour market and the relative weakness of unions, it is little wonder that temperance campaigners struggled to get their message heard in the district. As Oestreicher puts it: “Once some political possibilities have been chosen, others become more difficult.”69 The goings-on in Buffalo’s Irish districts during the election of 1893 illustrate many of the issues discussed in the preceding pages: the role of saloons and boarding-houses as political sites within wards; the connections between their proprietors and the rings of elected officials, party workers, and election-day mobs; and the role of accumulated knowledge about local partisan allegiances. This election was a typically busy affair. The new city charter was passed by the state in 1891, and created a more fine-grained geography of twenty-five wards, each electing one instead of two aldermen, though the elected officials would now share the common council alongside nine officials elected at large.70 The Union and Times

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praised the increased secrecy promised by the election booth, where “the independence of the voter is assured” and thus freed from the influence of “the ward-heeler and election-bummer.”71 This was, however, a premature judgement. Almost five hundred persons representing five parties stood for office in the 200 districts of Erie County in 1893; 137 of those districts were in Buffalo. Election law prohibited electioneering “within [a] polling place, or within 150 feet therefrom in any public street or room, or in a public manner,” and however it may have been adhered to in other parts of the city, proceedings in the waterfront and canal wards took a different turn.72 A city directory cross-check with First Ward polling locations listed before the election reveals a variety store, a salooncum-boarding-house, an Irish labourer’s house, and the house of a patrolman.73 There was potential for the Bloody First to live up to its name once again. The Democrats remained divided between pro- and anti-machine factions, and however hopeful the Republican prospects (they had won Erie County in the presidential year of 1892), the Sheehans were determined to preserve their traditional vote, with cousin John opposing Jack White in the First Ward, John J. Kennedy attempting a return in the new nineteenth ward, and Cornelius Coughlin nominated for the first assembly district that covered both of those wards.74 While the Courier joined the  Express in opposing the Sheehans, the latter had the support of the Times. John Sheehan and Jack White also had loyal sets of saloon-­ keepers, and after one of White’s heelers was handled roughly in one establishment during an electioneering trip, its proprietor fired a revolver to scatter the Sheehanites. The gang included the likes of “Sloak” Slattery, “Bully” McDonald, and William “Fingy” Conners, the lastmentioned taking an especially active role in the fourth electoral district of the ward on polling day, 7 November. Born in western New York to parents of Irish descent, Conners had inherited the waterfront saloon bought by his Canadian-born father and was a classic “floating boss,” running previously for alderman on the Republican ticket.75 Less than a week before the election, warrants were issued by the police for the arrest of fourteen men charged with illegal registration, most of whom were boarding in Conners’ saloon on Ohio Street. Known as “colonizers” for their attempts to vote in electoral districts in which they were not resident, their surnames, which included Dolan, Nugent, Colgan, Kane, Crotty, and Mulligan, had a clear Irish ring to them.76 Little action was taken with the warrants, however.

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Conners enlisted his men not simply as personators, but also as intimidators who would shape the atmosphere around polling booths for Sheehan’s benefit in at least three First Ward election districts. The Courier described the vicinity of the booth in the fourth district on Illinois Street, where John Sheehan’s heelers came out in force and “prize fighters and Canal Street saloonkeepers were on all sides to aid in the intimidation of legal residents of the ward.”77 Watchers from at least three other parties were denied entry or forcefully ejected from the booth at different times, while saloon-keeper John “Ginger” Jennings electioneered directly outside it. Conners, meanwhile, had been nominated as a Democratic watcher at the second district’s booth, and the Courier reported how he arrived with “a gang of men from his Ohio Street resort,” before circulating “inside and … outside the polling booth, directing the forces.”78 The Express reported Conners’ men to have comprised “scoopers, barrel men, colonizers and others” and their presence around the booth (“a surging mob several hundred strong”) contributed to “most of the respectable element of the district [retiring] in  disgust.”79 White’s supporters were evidently on hand to challenge the intimidation of the Conners gang, the Express describing the sound of “the fist of a brawny Irishman against the countenance of a fellow Celt.”80 This was an unseemly sidebar to the spectacular politics epitomized by the campaign parades, though it illustrated that polling day in this corner of Buffalo was often more about crude entertainment than anything resembling an orderly democratic exercise. Episodes such as these reveal the degree to which polling booths and their vicinities could become locations denying the votes of certain individuals while encouraging those of others. As the Express put it: “In certain districts of the first and nineteenth wards, a very determined stand for one’s rights would have been suicide.”81 With approximately eight hundred men registered in the First Ward, which contained four polling booths, the degree to which the loyalties of individual voters could be known in advance by canvassing party workers was high.82 For Oestreicher, the “moral intensity of partisan identification” among urban working-class electorates in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was reinforced “by day-to-day living experiences, familial obligations, and kin networks” in such a way that “changing parties constituted treason to family, kin, and neighborhood.”83 When “Sheehan men” recognized a “Jack White man” approaching the booth, they delayed or intimidated in the accustomed manner, and the Courier and Express both reported little in the way of police intervention. There was little about the practice

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of voting that was secret, presenting one more parallel with Ireland, where, as a royal commission of 1869 put it, “every man’s politics are just as well known as the noon-day.”84 A similar state of affairs prevailed in the fifth electoral district of the nineteenth ward. John Kennedy controlled a situation where “a line of questionable voters extended nearly all day” outside Fox’s saloon, located twenty feet from the Lloyd Street booth.85 The Courier described the saloon as “a dive which was made the headquarters of the Kennedy forces” where men were hustled in, spoken to, and then escorted to the booth to vote before being paid in “a room in the rear of [the] barroom.”86 Saloons fulfilled a similar function in the two other First Ward election districts. The third district’s booth on Elk Street was located “directly in front of a saloon that was in full blast from sunrise until sunset” with the street “crowded with hundreds of idlers, drunken men, and small boys” and small cuffing matches and brawls breaking out over the course of the day.87 While Jack White’s home turf of the first district experienced seemingly less intimidation than elsewhere, “every saloon within a radius of 100 feet of the booth did a rushing business and it was an unruly crowd that blocked the street at dark.”88 The “caucus cattle” phenomenon could hardly have been more vividly demonstrated. For all of these instances of fraudulent behaviour, the election ended in crushing defeat for the Democrats. Only seven aldermen remained on the ward-elected council alongside eighteen Republicans, while just one Democrat was returned from the four state assembly districts that included Buffalo city wards. That lone Democrat was none other than Sheehan associate Cornelius Coughlin, a native of the First Ward who, like many others, observed the benefits in combining dock labour (Coughlin handled freight and managed grain elevators) with party activism. After spending four years in Albany, Coughlin returned to Buffalo’s waterfront, where he assumed charge of the Wells elevator (figure 3.9).89 While the Courier triumphantly declared the election to have heralded “the annihilation of Boss rule in Buffalo,” William F. Sheehan remained a force in Democratic state politics, with the reputation of “Fingy” Conners continuing its local rise, to the growing distaste of many. On the whole, the propensity of the city’s Irish to look more towards the Democrats than the Republicans was not easily unsettled. In the aftermath of the election, police superintendent George Chambers and police captain Michael Regan were both subpoenaed by a committee investigating the frauds. Chambers was questioned about the failure of the arrest warrants issued for Conners’ colonizers and Regan about the

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apparent favouritism shown by the police towards Sheehan heelers at the booth in the fourth electoral district.90 The hearing also noted how Daniel J. Kenefick, the assistant district attorney, son of Cork-born parents and of a Republican stripe, waited in frustration for the county sheriff, August Beck, to arrive at that same booth on the afternoon of the election. The Irish imprint upon Buffalo politics was thus multi-­ faceted, from the candidates of parties and party factions to the rings of party workers, paid intimidators, and illegal voters; and finally to the upholders of the law, prosecutors and policemen. If, as James T. Kloppenburg recommends, American political history is to be seen as a long-run series of struggles over democracy, its “procedures as well as principles,” episodes such as this exemplify such struggles in one corner of Irish America alone.91 For more than a few in the city, the Irish remained visible not simply as a working-class group concentrated in the less salubrious parts of town, but also as a  colourful force in local politics and a formidable bloc within Erie County’s Democratic organization. Electoral participation thus played a part in the process of Irish ethnicization in Buffalo, within a political arena where the voter was, for the most part, “not conceived of as an individual but as an entity enveloped in and defined by social circumstance and party affiliation.”92 But a force the Irish were, and when wired into the larger apparatus of party machinery emanating from Tammany Hall, their reputation would be recognized statewide. Although the symbolic capital of holding some form of elected office meant a great deal to the individuals discussed in the preceding pages, perceptions of politics as a blood sport were enough to discourage some prominent Buffalo Irishmen from taking the plunge. Sylvester Eagan, the son of Co. Kerry parents and one of the founders of the Irish-American Savings and Loan Association (i asl a), was said to prefer the comforts of family and private life to the world of politics, despite the opportunities available to him.93 Patrick Stanton, a Co. Mayo emigrant prominent in the c mba and real estate business, was described as “one of the oldtime democrats, but has no political aspirations.”94 Patrick Cochrane, co-founder of the i asl a alongside Eagan and later its vice-president, was described in his obituary as being “a stern Democrat politically” although he “several times refused to run for public office.”95 Although not necessarily without party loyalties of their own, these men, like many Anglo-American patricians in the city, clearly felt that the political scene had become too much to stomach, while regarding the positions they did hold as public enough.

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T h e S e a rc h f o r R e pres entati on in T o ry T o ronto The voting rights of males in Canada were restricted by property- and income-based qualifications prior to Confederation, and the new dominion remained a place where ideas promoting further political decentralization were unwelcome, not least to its first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald. In what amounted to two scales of “Crown”-type administration, power was centralized at the federal and provincial levels, while municipalities picked up what symbolically and financially meaningful crumbs remained. The Municipal Act of 1866 raised the franchise qualification in towns and cities, initially to those holding $600 worth of real property, and the Globe estimated that more than 2,000 people would be removed from the Toronto voters list as a result.96 The paper, however, far from lamenting such developments, opined that “this affords no ground for regret, for the disenfranchised are, no doubt, for the most part those whose votes are usually influenced by unscrupulous city fathers.”97 By the mid-1870s, Ontario election law stipulated that candidates had to be twenty-one years of age, British subjects by birth or naturalization, and owners or occupiers of property assessed at $400 or more, and the spirit of classical liberalism remained evident a decade later with the Toronto Mail’s reminder to its readers that “the principle of municipal representation was property.”98 The city’s reformers nevertheless remained ever watchful of ex-plebe interventions, aware as they were of critiques of universal male suffrage south of the border. The Globe’s view of the American political system referenced its corrupt Irish precedents when declaring in 1875 that although “the ballot prevails in the United States … we have all heard of the Irish emigrant who on nearing New York, being asked how much money he would have on landing, replied – ‘Not a half-penny – but thin my vote is worth three hundred dollars.’”99 But this is not to suggest that the paper passed up opportunities to level similar accusations at Toronto’s Irish Catholics. In 1862, readers were reminded of the capacity of the stereotypical “poor Patrick,” a “hodman of Dummer-street,” to sell his vote for cash to provide “pork and potatoes for Biddy and the childer.”100 The long and bewildering tickets of party nominees published during Buffalo elections were not replicated in the Canadian context. Toronto’s municipal elections, as with those in other cities and towns across the province, were held during the first days of January and on days separate

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from the less predictable calendar of provincial and federal elections. They typically involved campaigns for the offices of aldermen and mayors only, and for the first part of the 1870s in Toronto, aldermen only, since the city’s mayors were appointed by council. Although franchise restrictions were lowered and gradually relaxed by the twentieth century, the absence of the language of “manhood suffrage” meant that the intricacies and eccentricities of American-style local politics were played out differently in Toronto. The city’s aldermanic nomination meetings did not have the all-day quality of corresponding occasions in Buffalo. Officially held to be beyond the realm of party politics, nominations were accepted for one hour at meetings held within two weeks of the election. Candidates were proposed and seconded by their supporters, after which they made short speeches of acceptance or refusal. Queen Victoria was routinely toasted, and nominators typically expressed their support for individuals in terms of their enterprise within the local community, their status as property-owners, and/or their past achievements as aldermen. Some Irish-born nominees had their suitability discussed in precisely these terms. In 1870, the Anglican real estate agent Humphrey Hime was recommended to the voters of St Patrick’s Ward as “a property holder in the ward [and] an active and clever man of business.”101 Two years later, Catholic John Shea was described in St David’s Ward as “one of a class who have raised themselves from a very humble position to one of independence by ­honest toil and industry” and who “possesses considerable property in the ward.”102 Despite the non-partisan basis of municipal elections, party issues did enter into election discourse, and the city was not known as “Tory ­Toronto” for nothing. The joint ticket of three candidates in St John’s Ward in 1872 was denounced by one other candidate as a Liberal or “Grit ticket.”103 In 1875, the Globe declared the “affection of no-­partyism [to be] cast off.”104 The party affiliations of some municipal candidates were known, not to mention those of their nominators or seconders, so  partyism was not erased from the municipal arena, something that prompted action from so-called Property Owners’ Associations. That of St Patrick’s Ward attempted in 1878 to “have politics buried out of sight as far as municipal matters were concerned,” indicating the degree to which party allegiances had become an issue in the council’s decisionmaking processes.105 In the 1881 election, a Catholic candidate in St ­Stephen’s Ward, George Evans, “deprecated the introduction of politics into municipal matters, as it swept away the best considerations,”

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and the Globe later pointed the finger at the Conservative Mail for highlighting the partisan connections of candidates.106 The presence of partisan cliques within the Toronto council chamber made it not so dissimilar an arena to its Buffalo counterpart. Although the organization of municipal polling places in Toronto was comparable to that in Buffalo, there was less scope for distraction through entertainment and spectacle in the days preceding the vote. Ontario election law stipulated that each polling district was to serve no more than two hundred voters so that a smooth geographical ratio of voters to polling stations could be achieved.107 Seventy-four polling places were in operation for the election of January 1874, which reportedly passed off in a “very orderly manner.”108 The hourly announcements of polling numbers and the progress of candidates were now a thing of the past, as was intensive canvassing in the final hours of a poll to save candidates in trouble. The provincial election laws of 1875 decreed all taverns to be closed on election day, while no party colours or flags were to be flown on the streets or any “offensive weapons [carried] within two miles of the polling place.”109 The Globe predicted a downturn in election-day exuberance, noting that because the laws “will have the effect of concealing the actual state of the poll until it has closed and the struggle is over” it would remove “the stimulus of effort and energy on behalf of the two candidates.”110 In 1876, they reported that in the aftermath of polling “there was no opportunity of learning what the results really were until a late hour last night, and long before that time the streets were pretty much deserted.”111 The Australian (secret) ballot was adopted by the Canadian government in 1874, with ballot slips printed and distributed at public expense rather than by parties. This sought to lessen the incidence of intimidation by rowdies gathered at polling stations, especially during provincial and federal contests.112 And though large crowds typically congregated around newspaper offices to receive the final results before organizing impromptu victory marches, campaign fever was rarely very pronounced. Kealey’s analysis of participation in provincial and federal elections in Toronto between 1867 and 1890 demonstrates a high degree of public apathy, with the turnout rarely topping sixty percent.113 In the 1871 municipal contest, six nominees from two wards were elected by acclamation, a phenomenon repeated in 1874. The problem of political disengagement was frequently commented upon, especially in that organ of liberalism, the Globe, because such disinterest created the opportunity for the dreaded ex-plebe to enter politics. In 1871, the paper stated that

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“there is not a ward in Toronto where the respectable portion of the people could not determine the election in favour of upright and judicious candidates if they would take the trouble to record their votes.”114 As in American cities, the patrician elements of Toronto were now holding aloof from local contests, though Protestants of Irish birth and ancestry, rather than Catholics, were the ones gaining from their absence. The Globe castigated Robert Bell as a “ward politician of the worst class” before his election as a member of the provincial legislature for Toronto West in 1875, for example.115 Bell, who retained his seat in 1879, was the son of a Co. Fermanagh–born builder, and his days as an alderman of St Andrew’s Ward (1867–73) failed to impress the paper.116 Their pleas for the “best men” fared no better over the coming decade. Religion featured in Toronto’s public political discourse to a greater degree than in Buffalo, largely over the question of Catholic representation. Ex-plebes or not, few Catholics found their way into Toronto’s municipal chamber over the post-Confederation decades. Between 1834 and 1899, Toronto had twenty-nine mayors, only thirteen of whom were Canadian-born (all except one born in Upper Canada/Ontario). Of the remainder, there were six Irishmen, five Englishmen, and five Scotsmen, and none were Catholic.117 The first of the Irish-born mayors was Robert Baldwin Sullivan, a lawyer and cousin of renowned Family Compact critic Robert Baldwin, who was born in Bandon, Co. Cork, and elected in 1835. Three of the six Irish-born were also Orangemen, viz. Francis “Square-Toes” Medcalf (in office 1864–66 and 1874–75), E.F. (Ned) Clarke (1888–91), and Warring Kennedy (1894–95). By the mid-1870s, the Co. Wicklow–born Medcalf’s second spell as mayor coincided with the city’s three representatives in the dominion Parliament being of Irish birth or ancestry: Thomas Moss, Robert Wilkes, and John O’Donohoe, the last-named being the first Irish Catholic politician to be elected from the city at either the provincial or the federal level. As the phenomenon of the “Toronto Orange mayor” demonstrates, links between power, politics, and Protestantism were especially acute in the selection of candidates, the election of aldermen, and the distribution of municipal patronage jobs. Armstrong and Nelles have argued that since “electoral success depended so largely upon the vote-pulling influence of these (Protestant) organizations, their officers were the political sachems of the city.”118 If a political machine existed in Toronto it was one that fused Orange and Conservative interests, with the party also competing for support within more recently formed Protestant-only fraternities such as the Sons of England.119 James Beaty, Irish-born ­

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proprietor of the Conservative Leader and party member at the federal level, boasted how after receiving nomination, he “had a red flag hung out of the office window bearing the words ‘Perpetual connection with the British Empire, No surrender.’ My Orange friends knew that I meant it and I was returned.”120 The aforementioned Robert Bell was another Conservative who wore his Orange colours on his sleeve. He had been Master of the Duke of York Lodge No. 396 in the 1860s and spoke at the 12 July post-parade proceedings in 1882.121 For Catholics of Irish birth or ancestry, it was all but impossible to ignore the economic, political, and institutional power held by Protestants of various denominations. Patrick Boyle pointed to the fraternal connections existing across a range of public workplaces that preserved Protestant jobs, claiming in 1889 that “there are thirteen fire halls, but there is not, and there never was, a Catholic foreman in any of them … where Orange-Toryism prevails, the Catholic must remain a hewer of wood and a drawer of water.”122 The following year, a correspondent to the Toronto World complained of “North of Ireland rule” in the city, a  phenomenon no doubt shaped by the propensity of Orange lodges to use places of manual labour such as the street railway, breweries, and the gas works as recruitment sites.123 Toronto taverns had also long played a role in forging these connections, acting as sites for the reproduction of Orange-Tory identities in a way that offers striking parallels with the patterns identified in Irish Buffalo’s saloons.124 By the 1880s, Irish-born hotel-keepers (the term “tavern-keeper” having fallen into disrepute and the word “saloon” rarely used) such as Samuel Richardson, Alexander Purse, and John Wiggins were active Orangemen who circulated regalia, marched in July parades, and hosted lodges in their establishments (see figure 3.2). While the city’s west end was home to the “Richardson House,” Purse’s “Maple Leaf Saloon” occupied a more central location, with Wiggins’ “Oriental Hotel” in the heart of Cabbagetown.125 Elsewhere in the east end was the grocery of Co. Mayo–born Robert Kirkpatrick, a member of Trinity East Anglican Church and Metcalfe Lodge No. 781, a “staunch Conservative,” and a key organizer of the Orange Young Britons.126 On Adelaide Street East was the self-explanatory “William III hotel,” while W.D. McIntosh’s Yonge Street warehouse was in 1885 said to be “known as the ‘Orange Hall.’”127 Nearer the lakeshore, Co. Fermanagh–born Orangeman John McCaffrey, who was present at Ridgeway in 1866, ran the “Rose and  Crown” on Front Street East. Finally, one of the city’s breweries was claimed to be an Orange recruitment site; this may well have been

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Thomas Allen’s East End Brewery. Born in Co. Armagh, Allen was a prime example of an Ulster Orange Tory who was re-elected several times for his east end ward of St David’s in Cabbagetown; as another veteran of Ridgeway, his stock of cultural capital was considerable indeed.128 While civic pressure would be applied to tavern numbers in Toronto in the later 1880s, the fact that Ogle Gowan, founder of the Order in Canada, had served as provincial license inspector up until the mid1870s did not hurt the chances of those Orangemen who wanted to either renew their licenses or acquire new ones. By the 1890s, Victoria Hall would become a key meeting-place for lodges as the squeeze was put on liquor license numbers and some lodges embraced the respectable ideal of temperance. The hall was located on Queen Street East adjacent to the central business district; its cornerstone was laid in 1885 and the building was completed in 1886. Among those spearheading its construction were two Ulstermen, the aforementioned Ned Clarke and Frank Somers, another Ridgeway veteran born in Co. Fermanagh.129 These circulations between halls, workplaces, and taverns formed the basis for more structured and larger-scale initiatives. Harnessing various sites of Orange interaction to Conservative interests was one way in which party chief Macdonald’s strategy of nationwide grassroots mobilization was realized. One of his key Toronto men in this regard was Robert Birmingham, born and educated in Co. Armagh before emigrating to Canada, where he engaged in the wholesale dry goods business. Birmingham was appointed secretary of the Conservative association in the city when barely into his twenties, and rose to become party secretary in Ontario in 1884 when in his early thirties. One obituary identified him not only as a “close personal friend” of Macdonald but also as the “father of the ward association” in Toronto, where his initial service was as secretary to the St John’s Ward Conservative Association. Within and through such spaces, then, debates about nominations, campaign tactics, and other issues were worked out, and it may be more than just coincidental that the four-district structure of Toronto’s Orange County roughly aligned with federal and provincial riding boundaries.130 The political salience of wards was thus enhanced through the initiatives of men such as Birmingham, and six years prior to his death in 1914, he was appointed organizer for the Grand Orange Lodge of Western Ontario at a time when the demographic balance of English and French speakers in the northern part of the province had become an issue of concern to Orangemen. As the political life of Thomas Allen suggests, Orange and Tory “traditions” became especially implanted in Cabbagetown, which comprised

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much of St David’s Ward in the 1870s and 1880s. John McAree quipped that “to find an Orangeman who was also a Grit (Liberal) would have created the same feeling of astonishment that the sight of a red-headed Chinaman would have produced,” and one section of John Wiggins’ Parliament Street tavern functioned as both an Orange Young Britons Lodge meeting-place and a polling location.131 Patterns of municipal representation reinforced perceptions of an entrenched “Ulster Orange” influence in particular. In January 1877, two of St David’s Ward’s three aldermen were Irish-born. Barrister John Blevins was a Co. Armagh native like Allen, while the third alderman was William Adamson, an English-born wharfinger and Orangeman of Scottish ancestry. Although Blevins marched in the 12 July parade of 1875, he aligned himself more with Freemasonry than Orangeism.132 Adamson had already spent thirteen years on council by the time of this election and his nominators were both Irish-born, at least one being an Orangeman.133 The BlevinsAdamson representation of the ward lasted from the election of 1875 until 1881. By the time of the latter election, Adamson had been before the voters eighteen times and Blevins eight, the latter sitting on the Board of Works before later gaining an appointment as city clerk.134 Blevins was not simply well-educated; he was an active Conservative and stood atop platforms in the late 1870s exalting the party of Macdonald.135 Although successful attempts were made by some Irish Catholics to involve themselves in local issues and become elected to city council, embryonic “growth poles” within wards and neighbourhoods did not shape a class- or ethnic-based political culture to the same degree as in Buffalo. While the Buffalo Irish had long become attuned to the machinations of American party politics, Toronto’s Irish Catholics were British subjects in a new dominion where the concept of naturalization did not apply to them and a different political language had evolved. If aspiring Catholic Irish politicians were prepared to publicly acknowledge what Canada owed to the “British Constitution,” doubt still remained about the degree of affinity among their constituents for such concepts, or the abilities of potential candidates to become accepted within the most powerful circles. While some did involve themselves in municipal contests in the 1870s and 1880s, successes were few and far between. Co. Tipperary–born Patrick Hynes owed his ten-year tenure (1863–72) in St  David’s Ward largely to his Tory loyalties, and perhaps also to his captaincy of a company of the reserve militia, though he attributed his successful run to the fact that “he kept his hands clean and [gave] fair play to all parties.”136 In St Patrick’s Ward in 1871, Irish-born Catholic

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merchant John Mulvey “declared himself to be entirely independent of any clique or party; he had no axe to grind.”137 Yet Mulvey’s reputation was less secure than that of Hynes. He was a brother-in-law of Toronto Fenian leader Michael Murphy and had been imprisoned in 1866; nevertheless, a mere fourteen votes kept Mulvey off council.138 In ­ St Lawrence’s Ward, butcher James Britton, a one-time president of the Emerald Benevolent Society and known Conservative, missed out by eleven votes in 1873, though he was returned the following two years. But though the likes of Hynes or Britton could be termed “Irish Catholic” aldermen, they were cast in quite a different mould from Buffalo’s legendary patronage dispensers. With few elected politicians to call their own, some Irish Catholic localities in Toronto nevertheless contained personalities whom residents considered effective defenders of their interests. Dan Dwan, the “mayor” of Stanley Street, was reckoned by police magistrate George Denison to have “great influence among the residents” in his role as “an active politician.”139 The satirical Grip parodied Dwan as a reliable election mob enforcer, and Denison also noted a railway labourer named Pat Gibson who was apparently “known as the Mayor of Claretown … the principal man in the settlement.”140 Some inhabitants of Dummer (William) Street likewise conferred the label on labourer Michael Murphy in the 1860s.141 While Dwan and Gibson may have been party activists, the heights to which they could climb within party ranks were limited. And although rooted within their local places, they could not conquer larger ward spaces, not least since Toronto’s strip ward system, aligned with the Cartesian grid pattern of the city, acted as a further frustration for groupbased mobilization. The largest Catholic settlement in Corktown was, for example, located at the southern end of St  David’s Ward, with Cabbagetown comprising the remainder of the ward (figure 3.5), and the Catholic Mirror opined as early as 1858 that the problem of local political representation lay in “our scatterment throughout the City … being in a minority, and being unable to act in concert, we can have no choice in the selection of an officer between whom and ourselves a packed Council intervenes.”142 The Globe of course mightily approved of measures taken to minimize the influence of what it termed “objectionable voters” and gleefully speculated that the revision of the franchise in the Municipal Act of 1866 would work to the detriment of “the ‘free and independent’ electors of the Stanley Street district.”143 Although Catholics were intermittently elected to municipal council, the Irish Canadian continued to press the issue of representation. If

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previous pressure to secure the “Catholic interest” had succeeded through the diversion of tax revenues to schools, efforts to better the lot of Catholics were now entering a new phase. In 1889, Toronto’s Catholics were told to “bestir themselves” and “place candidates from their body in the different wards who, if elected, could be depended upon to see that Catholic interests were not sacrificed, as they are at present, owing to our almost total exclusion … from the Aldermanic list.”144 It was not simply Irish-American ward successes that informed such outbursts, but the workings of Orange-Tory interests closer to home. Yet at a time when their proportion of the city’s population was in decline and sectarian tensions had not completely abated, Catholic hopes of political advance would have to “jump scale” to the provincial or federal level.145 It was at these scales that the phenomenon of the “Catholic vote” or the “Irish Catholic vote” would become a topic of public discussion. Public patronage was one area in which Catholic leaders felt themselves and their co-religionists to be unduly ignored, and as mentioned earlier, its dispensation was something that was pioneered in Canada by  John A. Macdonald’s Tories and later adopted by Oliver Mowat’s Ontario Liberals. Macdonald’s ability to meticulously manage the flow of public patronage, aligning it relentlessly to party interests, has been commented on by other writers.146 Yet Catholics in Ontario were not well wired into these Tory patronage networks, and there was always the possibility that the Orange Order would veto Catholic appointments in districts where an Orange party worker was seeking a position. The federal Liberals, whether led by Alexander Mackenzie in the 1870s or by Edward Blake in the 1880s, hesitated to follow Macdonald’s style and adopted a more moralistic stance on patronage. Patronage went to those who were deemed loyal, for starters, and loyal not simply to party but to Canada and its British connection. And though there was no shortage of Catholics ready to profess their loyalty to Her Majesty, accusations of the group as disloyal reared their heads at different times during the late Victorian decades. The newly appointed Archbishop Lynch’s anti-Fenian stance was undermined by his enduring support for Irish nationalism, and the Queen was not typically toasted at Catholic celebrations of St Patrick’s Day. Continued agitation for separate school funding, and public disturbances associated with visits such as that of prominent Fenian Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa in 1878, did little to change the picture. At the same time, however, nationalist-minded Irish Catholics may not have been particularly disposed to seek municipal employment. In July

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1866, one month or so after Ridgeway, corporation employees were reminded that “in compliance with an order issued by His Worship the Mayor,” they were required to take the Oath of Allegiance to the Queen. It was, according to the Globe, “taken by everyone, without a moment’s hesitation.”147 The mayor was Irish-born Orangeman Francis Medcalf, who two years earlier had declared Irish Catholics to be “all one in their treason.”148 By 1881, however, the Irish Canadian opined that it was still “dangerous to nominate and difficult to elect a Catholic because of the prejudices of the masses … both Grits and Tories keep the safe nominations for their Protestant nominees.”149 Even well-­ educated Catholic activists could not take patronage for granted. In 1889, Nicholas Murphy, a Toronto lawyer and “a life-long Conservative,” was thought to be a victim of such party-wrangling and was described as unjustly still inhabiting “the ordinary stuff gown.”150 Despite these structural barriers, improved levels of public representation and patronage remained targets of lay Irish Catholic leaders. While Thomas D’Arcy McGee attempted to form Irish Catholics into one ­moderate political bloc, his death in 1868 cut this short. From there on, Catholic mobilization was shaped largely by the efforts of Toronto’s John O’Donohoe and the Catholic League. A Catholic convention held in Toronto in June 1867 inspired the formation of the League two years later, and it was an organization that brought together Catholics of different political affiliations, with the initially resistant Archbishop Lynch emerging as a key supporter.151 While the federal Conservative and Liberal parties both pursued the Catholic vote in the early 1870s, neither appeared to be adequately responding to Catholic demands for nominations and patronage appointments, with the result that lay Irish Catholics did not wear consistent partisan badges. For example, Michael Cottrell has demonstrated how the Irish Catholic vote in Toronto for provincial and federal elections swayed back and forth between Conservative and Liberal in the two decades following Confederation.152 Tension between clerical and lay elements over ethnic leadership also remained within the Toronto community during these years, which did little to entrench any singleparty allegiances among Catholics. Unlike the American Democrats, neither of the major parties was consistently palatable to Canada’s English-speaking Catholics at this time. The federal Conservatives had gained the support of Lynch in the 1860s when D’Arcy McGee was still a Reformer/Liberal, and while the Catholic League had publicly declared support for the federal Liberals

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in 1871, Irish Catholic voters were deserting that party by the 1878 election due to what one writer describes as the “fundamental ideological differences between the Irish Catholic community and the Presbyterian Reform tradition in Ontario.”153 The issue of separate schools, however, brought Archbishop Lynch into alliance with Oliver Mowat’s provincial Liberals in the 1870s; this “concordat” was also instrumental in blocking the incorporation of the Orange Order, which further strengthened the Catholic Liberal vote.154 With the decline of the Catholic League, it was left to Patrick Boyle to champion the “glorious cause” of Catholic representation.155 The brightest hope for bringing political success to Irish Catholics in Toronto during the 1870s was John O’Donohoe, and his career usefully illustrates the political twists and turns taken by that group in the city.156 Having emigrated to Toronto with his family from Tuam, Co. Galway, before the famine, O’Donohoe was elected alderman of St David’s Ward in the 1850s. He had higher ambitions, however. Active in the church and a close associate of D’Arcy McGee in the 1860s, O’Donohoe was called to the bar and became a prime mover in the formation of the Catholic League by the end of the decade.157 While his winning the Liberal nomination to the East Peterboro constituency in 1871 ended in failure at the polls, O’Donohoe was nominated in 1872 and returned to that part of Toronto that he had served as an alderman. His colleague Jeremiah Merrick, born to Co. Mayo parents, declared to a mass meeting that O’Donohoe’s nomination for Toronto East represented “an occasion of which every Irishman should be proud,” in that it signified “the union between the great Reform [Liberal] party and the Catholic body” and the end of an era of Tory support which had produced few tangible returns.158 O’Donohoe’s opponent was the owner of the Leader, James Beaty. The Orange-Tory and Catholic Irish mix in the riding’s social geography would make it a close-run fight on polling day. Orangemen such as the Irish-born John Hewitt publicly declared their support for Beaty as expected, while Beaty’s paper reminded Catholics of the inflammatory statements made against their religion by Reform-Liberal leader George Brown more than a decade earlier.159 Six years after the Ridgeway affair, however, there was also scope for the Leader to make something of the Fenian membership of O’Donohoe’s brother, Bernard (Barney), and the latter’s involvement in the border raid of June 1866. The paper was also quick to highlight the association of John Mulvey with the events of 1866 when he publicly declared his support for O’Donohoe.160

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Beaty himself brought up the issue of Fenianism while regaling his supporters with trusted “no surrender” rhetoric at a Cabbagetown campaign meeting, and a subsequent editorial urged voters to remember that O’Donohoe was a “sympathizer with [the] Fenians who murdered and robbed our volunteers and Canadian homes” as well as being “the pet candidate of  George Brown, the notorious enemy of all good government.”161 O’Donohoe’s efforts to marshal a Catholic vote also inspired some to suggest that a “Protestant vote” be used as a counter. Arguments about Catholic Canadian loyalty faded into the background, and O’Donohoe lost the election. In 1874, O’Donohoe returned to contest the riding, this time facing Orangeman Emerson Coatsworth in the aftermath of the Pacific Scandal that tainted the Macdonald administration. George Brown occupied a meeting platform to publicly lend his support, while Merrick returned to  remind the assembled that “every Catholic was loyal to the British Constitution.”162 The Leader raised the issue of O’Donohoe’s Fenian connections and sympathies once again, with one correspondent arguing that Toronto East “by the rejection or election of John O’Donohoe … [would] hereafter be judged as a loyal or disloyal constituency.”163 On this occasion, O’Donohoe won comfortably, and the jubilant celebrations that followed rivalled the spectacles usually associated with American political campaigns. O’Donohoe’s contribution to Catholic parliamentary participation was short-lived, however. Exposure of unlawful funding for his campaign, as well as charges of intimidation, unseated him by petition, and he faced the  Toronto East voters once more in January 1875. More importantly, ­perhaps, O’Donohoe had been dogged by his voting against the expulsion of rebel Manitoban Métis leader (and Catholic) Louis Riel from the Commons, a move that set him apart from other Ontario politicians in the main parties. The Leader argued that “however conscientiously” O’Donohoe might have acted when voting against Riel’s expulsion, “it was not his constituents, but his Quebec co-religionists whom he represented in the House on that occasion.”164 Such arguments did nothing to endear him to those east end Protestants who had given him a chance the first time round, and despite the unstinting support of the Globe and the city’s Liberals, O’Donohoe lost the election to the Ulster-born city water commissioner Samuel Platt, by 354 votes, with a loss in St David’s Ward of 172 votes.165 If O’Donohoe saw himself as the leading ethnocultural broker among Toronto’s Irish Catholics, his ambitions were frustrated by

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Archbishop Lynch’s continued preference for Macdonald’s party.166 Moreover, Samuel Platt’s nomination was supported not only by east end Orangemen such as Adamson, Blevins, and Medcalf, but also by Catholic Tories such as Senator Frank Smith, James Britton, and James Joseph Foy.167 Constructing the “Catholic Irish” as a coherent group with political force was evidently no easy matter. While the Leader argued that “representation by sect is a pernicious political doctrine,” this conveniently overlooked the role of Orangemen in highlighting interests that were selfconsciously Protestant.168 It also dismissed Catholics’ self-image as a distinctive minority within the province. Partisan splits within the Catholic Irish community would, however, lead some to come to a conclusion similar to that of the Leader. With the election of Platt, O’Donohoe’s opportunities for further appearances in the Commons evaporated. He returned to private practice and, disappointed by the failure of Mackenzie’s administration to reward Catholics for a support base mobilized through the Catholic League, agreed to support Macdonald’s Tories in the federal election of 1878.169 In this regard, he was following in McGee’s footsteps. Although O’Donohoe was not nominated in any riding, his zeal for increasing the  Catholic presence in the House of Commons was undiminished. Three weeks before the mid-September election, he called a meeting to discuss once more the question of Catholic representation. A circular explained that the meeting had been deferred “to the last moment practicable, to ascertain the position the two parties would occupy in respect of nominating Catholic candidates.”170 Attended by high-ranking Irish Catholics of both parties, the meeting soon descended into a shambles as differences of opinion about the issue of Catholic representation surfaced. A resolution stating that “no political party should receive the support of the Irish Roman Catholics of this Province unless such party is prepared to do them full justice in the matter of representation” was lost, inspiring loud cheering.171 Alderman Peter Ryan of St George’s Ward, a staunch Liberal, presented the sobering view that neither O’Donohoe nor “any other man could … bring Catholics up to casting a united vote. Catholics had their differences and they would always have them.”172 If clerical attempts to mould a pious and respectable Catholic collectivity proved challenging, those of lay politicians to mould a singular Catholic interest bloc were even more so. The cheers that followed illustrated how chimerical ethno-religious bloc voting now seemed for many in the room. While scarcely electable as a Tory (the Orangemen were too distrusting of him), O’Donohoe did

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receive some reward in the form of a Senate appointment by Macdonald in 1882, which he retained until his death in 1902.173 Michael Cottrell has pointed to the irony that while “O’Donohoe spoke the language of grievance and separation … the whole thrust of his career was to integrate Irish Catholics into the political structure of the state.”174 Whereas Buffalo’s various Irish bosses had their circumscribed territories in which to exercise control, O’Donohoe operated on a wider spatial canvas, and his persistent arguments for symbolic recognition were cast in both ethnic and religious terms. The political world of English-speaking Catholics in Ontario, moreover, contained successful candidates of English and Scottish background as well as Irish, all of them succeeding beyond the boundaries of Tory Toronto.175 The winning of Irish Catholic votes in Buffalo proceeded without a comparable emphasis on religious inequities, though this is not to suggest that sectarianism was absent from late nineteenth-century American public life in general, or from other cities where the Irish were active in politics.176 In his bid to construct a bloc of Catholic Irish voters, O’Donohoe underestimated the possibility that their demands and expectations might not have been so different from those of their Protestant neighbours. Not so with Peter Ryan. Born in the north of England to a shipbuilding father from Co. Down, Ryan applied most of his energy to garment manufacturing and auctioneering businesses after arrival in Toronto while becoming involved with the Liberals under Edward Blake.177 Though Ryan had made his mark as alderman of St George’s Ward by the end of the 1870s, he was far from the classic ward politician. Ryan strongly endorsed the culture of nonpartisanship on city council and proposed in 1880 that “the corporation be elected not by wards, but by the whole city having a voice in the return of each member.”178 This was classic progressive thinking. As his remark at the 1878 pre-election meeting demonstrated, Ryan did not see his political role as speaking exclusively for “Irish” or “Catholic” interests, and the wide social and political network that he forged throughout his business and political career earned him the respect of Tories and Liberals alike. Almost twenty years younger than O’Donohoe, Ryan was unimpressed by what he regarded as the narrow and divisive pressure-group politics of the Catholic League. Four years after the St Lawrence Hall meeting, a series of public exchanges between O’Donohoe and Ryan concluded with the latter declaring once more his preference that people be elected “on political grounds and personal fitness alone, the religious belief of the candidates being of no concern to the electors.”179 The

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difference of opinion between O’Donohoe and Ryan vividly illustrated the larger fissures within Toronto’s Catholic Irish world, and the American-style pragmatism of Boyle and O’Donohoe was satirized in Grip later that year as their efforts to mobilize Catholic votes in Toronto East were likened to voter allegiances being taken “to market like a fat pig” (figure 5.2).180 Also pictured in the Grip cartoon, and looking decidedly aghast at O’Donohoe’s and Boyle’s tactics, was Archbishop Lynch. Beyond party politics, the one significant entity representing Catholic power in Toronto was the Separate School Board, and it became a political stage in its own way with Lynch and the laity as the two main players. Any clerical assumptions that lay trustees on the board would obediently follow their lead in this area were misplaced.181 In 1876, a row developed between the laity and Lynch regarding the use of separate school monies for other church-related purposes, and the atmosphere at board meetings scarcely improved over the coming years. Lynch’s support for Oliver Mowat’s Liberals also alienated him from Patrick Boyle, and their feud was played out in the pages of the Irish Canadian for more than a decade.182 It also invited suggestions that the Catholic vote had become excessively influential in provincial politics, an ironic contrast to the arguments of O’Donohoe and Boyle that Catholics had long been under-represented in Toronto and Ontario politics generally. Prior to the 1879 contest, for example, Irish-born Methodist Ephraim Roden “denounced the present Ontario Government … [for] being under Catholic control.”183 Such sentiments fuelled the tempestuous relationship Lynch would occasionally experience with the city’s Conservative press during the following decade. In 1882, the Archbishop successfully agitated for the removal of Walter Scott’s poem “Marmion” from the high school English curriculum for its alleged affront to nuns and medieval religion. Four years later, his editing of “The Lord’s Prayer” for a new Bible to be introduced to the province’s schools stirred the cries of “No Popery” once again, chiefly from the Mail.184 This came in the aftermath of the Riel execution, when Catholics once again came under public siege from Ontario’s hardline Protestants, and with little in the way of lay political leverage to do anything about it. Catholic opinion rallied behind Lynch on this occasion, bolstering his belief that he was their boss. Yet his troubles with Toronto’s Separate School trustees continued. Despite Lynch’s misgivings, the city’s schools participated in the 1887 Victorian Jubilee celebrations; and in 1888, the issue of secret balloting brought the intense differences of opinion between the trustees and Lynch into

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Figure 5.2  “Taking the Pig to Market.” Grip, 13 May 1882. Courtesy of the Toronto Public Library. The cartoon neatly captures tensions between lay and clerical elements in Toronto’s Catholic Irish community, as well as the measures taken by figures such as Irish Canadian editor Patrick Boyle and one-time federal Liberal m p John O’Donohoe to secure Catholic political representation and patronage.

the open once again, illustrating what many Protestant observers believed to be the illiberal and undemocratic character of “the Roman Church” (figure 5.3). The lay pro-ballot forces would ultimately win their side of the argument with the Conmee Act of 1894, though the authoritarian Lynch did not have much longer to dwell on the issue, passing away in May 1888.185

P owe r a n d P l ac e : N av ig at i ng Poli ti cal Routes in B u f fa l o a n d Toronto Though much of the writing on the Irish impact on American politics has deployed terms such as “ward,” “fiefdom,” “kingdom,” and the like, it was the social practices that went on within these urban territories that counted, not least those that actively linked party politics to spheres of everyday life such as work and leisure. When seen from the vantage point of late nineteenth-century Buffalo, the Irish exemplified Robert Dahl’s classic group of pragmatic ex-plebes harnessed largely to the Democratic interest while weaving an elaborate hierarchical web that connected several neighbourhood sites and shaped the collective sense of “how politics worked” in their backyard. Behind their success in these

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Figure 5.3  “He’s Bound to Have the Ballot!” Grip, 18 February 1888. Courtesy of the Toronto Public Library.

working-class wards lay an army of poorly paid and often transient labouring men, fond of the bottle and rarely shy of a scrap, segments of an industrial army whose capacity to build a proletarian political consciousness was undermined by the political acumen of party men, conservative trade unionists, and the promotion of bourgeois values by the lay middle class and clergy alike. The role of teenage volunteers as party workers should not be forgotten either; some of them would form the next generation of “solid men.” On the whole, Buffalo’s working-class Irish Catholics, though generally holding low levels of economic capital, generated what Pierre Bourdieu termed “social capital” through these repeated experiences within closely knit neighbourhoods. Social capital, for Bourdieu, is gained from the web of social connections emanating from membership in, for example, a family or a group defined by ethnicity, class, religion, or politics (or combinations of these).186 Whether the politicized Irish

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gained attention for good or bad reasons, the prospect of rewards of even a modest nature proved crucial in building a partisan sensibility that acknowledged its Irish dimension and the value accorded Irish ethnicity. Sidney Harring has argued that “Buffalo was the only eastern city with a sizeable Irish population that never saw the Irish in major political positions.”187 But while the mayoralty eluded the Irish during this era, it may not have been the main attraction. The Buffalo mayor’s control over the city’s budget was restricted, and in this regard, the election of John C. Sheehan twice as comptroller was significant. And while there was a minority of working-class Irish Republicans, so too were there those Irish (of both Republican and Democratic stripes) less supportive of the more hardscrabble methods of machine politics. Many of these were of the second and third generations pursuing non-manual occupations and, as devout servants of the church, were eager to set standards of respectability to their co-ethnics while remaining staunch party men. Sustained pressure from progressive reformers led to some restructurings in the governance of both Buffalo and Toronto in the early 1890s. A council elected at large was put in place in Buffalo to check the activities of aldermen, and though Lieutenant-Governor Sheehan opposed the proposals for the council, he ultimately guided their final draft through the state legislature.188 This was still a long way from government by commission, though, and the propensity of ward politicians to exercise local authority remained. Shelton argues that Buffalo’s reformers ultimately became “more interested in health and housing than structural reform,” and after years of protracted battles, New York State legislated for the Australian ballot in 1895.189 The law on “blanket ballots” would now list all candidates running for office on the same ballot regardless of party.190 The Catholic Irish were much less successful at negotiating municipal politics in Toronto or generating meaningful social capital in this field. Dispersed throughout a city with a ward geography designed to minimize the effects of ethnic and class concentrations, they also faced a tighter franchise than their Buffalo counterparts. Catholic groupings such as the hb s, while opposing Orangemen, did not carve partisan avenues in a manner similar to the brethren. What passed for “ward culture” in the city worked more to the benefit of the Protestant Irish, especially those harnessed into the Orange-Tory machine. Links between workplaces, lodges, and taverns offer parallels with Catholic Irish Buffalo. Orange influence was met with unsuccessful attempts to harness a unified Catholic vote, while partisanship remained relatively muted at

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the municipal level. At the same time, it should be remembered that the city had prominent Protestant Irish Liberal supporters, not least the party’s Commons leader, Edward Blake. Given Blake’s opinion of politics as “dishonest and corrupt” and his dislike of patronage, he occupied a different ideological sphere from not just Sir John A. Macdonald but also Buffalo’s Sheehan brothers.191 The liberal reform impulse in Toronto transformed the size, shape, and names of wards in 1891. Ward numbers were reduced from thirteen to six, with each now electing four rather than three aldermen, a move that in turn shrank the total on council from thirty-nine to twenty-four. With the new wards still arranged in a strip-like fashion and each housing a population of greater income and class heterogeneity than before, the scope for working-class electoral mobilization was further minimized. As Paul Rutherford writes, it was “essential to subordinate the  neighbourhood to the city.”192 This did nothing to help the Irish Canadian’s campaign to elect Catholic aldermen to council, although it did no damage to Orange claims to power at City Hall. In the depression-ridden year of 1894, a corruption enquiry engulfed the council, one of those directly indicted being Orangeman “King William” Bell.193 Following from this, an executive Board of Control designed to mediate between aldermen and the mayor won provincial approval in April 1896. The controllers, initially aldermen elected from among their fellow council members, were subsequently elected at large through legislation passed in 1904, yet the “effective Conservative ward organizations and the Conservative majority in Council resulted in Tory domination on the Board of Control.”194 The problem of voter apathy was also little changed. In 1892, and with more than a hint of sour grapes, the Globe despairingly stated that year’s municipal contest to have been “absolutely devoid of  interest to the general public” with many candidates “altogether unknown to the citizens.”195 In continuing their search for political representation at the provincial and federal level, Irish Catholics found that the ethnic and religious dimensions of their identities were reinforced even if they were not necessarily unified. In a study of reform politics in the 1890s, Brenda Shelton observes that while “ethnic and religious voting blocs existed” in Buffalo, “sporting candidates did not overtly appeal to them.”196 In a nation where church and state were separate entities, elections were not typically fought in the “Catholic interest.” With ward men making their way into Buffalo’s council chamber and state assembly, the Irish had little reason to feel politically excluded. Many now knew how to play the

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game and were hungry for success. Rev. Patrick Cronin was impressed by the young achievers in his midst such as legal eagles D.J. Kenefick (“a young Irish-American with a level head and … a hard student”) and W.F. Sheehan (“a representative young Irish-American, one in which the Irish by birth and the Irish by descent can take pride”), though neither he nor  Bishop Stephen Ryan intervened in politics to the same degree as Archbishop Lynch.197 The nativist American Protective Association, active in the mid-1890s against Catholic schools, Catholic teachers in public schools, and Catholic immigration, did not make much headway in Buffalo. Using the example of New York, Amy Bridges argues that wards became “the central arena for the maintenance of voter support” in the process of party-building in nineteenth-century American cities, and the evidence from Buffalo demonstrates the role of wards in mobilizing partisan identities among the Catholic Irish.198 The Irish-Catholic-Democrat “trinity” was to a large degree accomplished in that city. In Toronto, parties maintained a more shadowy presence in the municipal scene, and Irish Protestants were noticeable beneficiaries in the order of politics built there, taking this advantage to wider political scales. These patterns also reveal something about the Irish experiences within the wider societies. The sense that the Irish could find their way within an American system replete with its fluid shibboleths of liberty and democracy contrasted with the situation in Ireland, and the belief grew during these decades that similar freedoms should prevail in Ireland. In Toronto, a different political language was in place where “British liberties” were more likely to be the focus of public gratitude and rhetoric. Despite the misgivings of the likes of John O’Donohoe about Canadian politics when he saw so few of his co-religionists in public positions, this did not mean that more abstract ideas about “Canadian-style freedom” and the political design of the new dominion could not productively inform debates about Ireland’s political status. The next chapter thus addresses the various ways in which the Buffalo and Toronto Irish engaged with the politics of the land they left, and how their experiences as residents in the two cities and the two destination societies shaped their diasporic imaginations in the 1870s and 1880s.

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6 From Misrule to Rome Rule: Irish Diaspora Politics in the Post-Ridgeway Era Who to-day are more truly attached to British connexion than the great majority of Irishmen all over the Dominion? Nicholas Flood Davin, The Irishman in Canada, 1877, vi With the first dawn of intelligence, the child, no matter what its sex, should be taught to love and honor the principles of American freedom, and to regard with abhorrence the name of England, associated as it has always been, with famine, sword, and flame, as well the thousand nameless cruelties which have been practiced upon the Irish race from time immemorial. Fenian Volunteer advice on the formation of “circles,” 24 August 1867

Those North American cities in which the Irish settled were not just locations for negotiating the challenges of finding jobs, psychological comfort, and political recognition. They also became nodes on the global Irish diasporic map, a map upon which expressions of Irish patriotism ebbed and flowed, and recent perspectives on diasporic circuits, networks, and imaginations have suggested ways in which the connections and engagements between Ireland and “Greater Ireland” can be charted.1 These diasporic impulses should be seen as crucial supplements to a process whereby Irish ethnicity was being made and remade at the local level, whether through the activism of local or visiting Irish dignitaries or the content of newspapers such as the Irish World or the Boston Pilot. Both of these newspapers had wide circulations and connected their continent-wide Irish readerships not only back to Ireland but also to each other.2 It is thus possible to conceive of a “diasporic imagination” that underwent a constant process of invention, promotion, and refinement during the nineteenth century, one that coalesced around the idea of a distinctive

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Irish island nation and was communicated in often banal ways though image, text, and public performance. But as Mark Boyle maintains, “it is in the interaction between migrants and destination regions that historical geographies of diasporic nationalism become forged,” and the past as well as the present of American and Canadian destination societies informed imaginations of Ireland and its diasporas, as the above salvo from Buffalo’s Fenian Volunteer illustrates.3 Such interaction involved more than simply the Irish-born, of course, since “immigrant nationalisms did not simply go to the grave with members of the migrating generation.”4 Irish history, geography, and culture had to be explained to more than simply the Irish-born, and quite often, explanations were provided by those born in North America. Only through such repeated exercises could conceptions of a continent-wide if not global “Irish community” with meaningful political agency gain coherence.5 This chapter examines how the political location and social relations of Buffalo and Toronto, as well as developments within their Irish communities and Ireland itself, structured the nature and content of diasporic imaginations and diaspora-related activities in the 1870s and 1880s. With particular attention paid to forms of commemorative practice and nationalist narration as well as their popular and organizational mobilizations, the chapter begins by gauging the balance between moderate and militant voices among Irish nationalists in Buffalo and Toronto in the decade following the Ridgeway raid. It then moves to the visits paid by Charles Stewart Parnell to both cities in 1880 and the articulation of constitutional “Home Rule” discourses within them up until the early 1890s. While the chapter concentrates largely on Irish nationalist identities and imaginations, the Toronto context reveals many Protestants of Irish origin who, while not necessarily forsaking their Irish roots for an exclusive “British-Canadian” identity, opposed proposals for Irish self-government. As the opening quotation reminds us, the “loyal dominion” was a different place from the “rude republic,” though its author was well aware of an Irish minority that was less than enamoured of Canada’s “British connexion.” But even in the absence of declared opposition to Home Rule, it must also be remembered that emotional attachments to Ireland did not always amount to active support for what were, in any case, contested readings of the nationalist cause.6

F e n ia n is m in t h e A f t e r m ath of Ri dgeway Outbursts of Fenian activity in Ireland, Britain, and North America in the second half of the 1860s exposed to a wider public the declared

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commitment of bodies of men to end British rule in Ireland and establish an Irish republic by force. Buffalo housed more than a few Fenians during the foray of early June 1866, and the symbolic capital earned by the raiders was flaunted to local audiences on a number of occasions in the aftermath of Ridgeway.7 Two mass meetings were held in Buffalo on 1 and 5 June to raise money and awareness of the cause; the first was chaired by two local judges and the second culminated with the entry to the hall of some freshly released prisoners.8 A week later, another mass meeting spurred donations of provisions and access to lodgings for those returning from the raid on the Vermont border, with the Courier praising the “excellent behavior” of the Fenians as well as the “spontaneous and determined” nature of their “uprising.”9 During the following year’s St Patrick’s celebrations, Fenian leaders tested the extent of their support in the city when reiterating the significance of Ridgeway in the wake of the failed rebellions in Ireland only weeks previously. Although publicly denounced by Bishop John Timon, they held a public meeting where a “Ridgeway flag” was flown and the president of the American Fenian wing, Col. William R. Roberts, advocated another Canadian invasion, while Senator A.L. Morrison’s request for men ready to cross the border inspired fifty youngsters to climb onstage. A total of $200 was offered towards the purchase of their uniforms, with a local judge leading the contributors.10 The Roberts wing had notably split in 1865 from that led by John O’Mahony, with the latter group opposing a Canadian invasion and favouring insurrection in Ireland alone. Buffalo was also the place to which Michael Murphy, Toronto’s onetime leading Fenian, escaped in September 1866 following his arrest en route to the hastily arranged invasion of Campobello Island by the O’Mahony wing. Although Murphy’s arrival in Buffalo spurred a visit by three hundred or so members of Toronto’s Hibernian Benevolent Society (h b s), it did little to dampen factionalism within the city’s Fenian movement.11 Murphy had denounced the Roberts wing, and his efforts to resume saloon-keeping activities were undermined since “local Fenians suspected him of spying for the British and avoided his establishment.”12 He died in April 1868 at the age of forty-two. Murphy had managed to form one Buffalo cell (D.3) of the United Brotherhood (u b), the only Fenian faction in North America in contact with the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Ireland, but the cell was suspended soon after his death.13 The ub was also the only Fenian faction to remain secret, and it would become known publicly as Clan na Gael.14 However Murphy’s ub cell might have contributed to factionalism in Buffalo, the mission of freeing Ireland by force remained a talking point

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in the city as the failed Irish rising of 1867 gave way to the public hanging of the “Manchester Martyrs” the following year. The daily newspapers continued to publish advance details of Fenian meetings in Buffalo, most likely those of the Roberts wing. A “monster picnic” was held in the summer of 1868, for example, while in March of 1869, the commander of troops at Ridgeway, General John O’Neill, was escorted into St James’ Hall by two hundred fully equipped soldiers of the “seventh regiment, i . r . a .”15 The seventh regiment had been to the fore on the other side of the Niagara River in 1866, and after reminding those assembled that they all shared the distinction of being “exiles on foreign shores,” O’Neill proposed a fund-raising campaign in which $1 would be levied on every Irishman and Irishwoman to support the “struggle for independence.”16 Though the typical household budgets of Irish families in Buffalo did not easily allow them to support campaigns like this, ­support them many did. In September of 1869, notice of “a general ­circle meeting” to be held at the “hall on Pearl Street” was published in the Express.17 The “hall on Pearl Street” was no insignificant venue. Indeed, it housed the auction rooms of Buffalo’s Fenian “centre,” Patrick O’Dea (O’Day).18 A Toronto-published compilation of accounts of the border skirmishes released shortly afterwards mentioned O’Dea’s auction rooms as “belonging to the Fenians” with their “armory and drill room … underneath the building,” and noted the employment of one Barney O’Donohoe there as assistant auctioneer.19 Indeed, fifteen “large boxes” containing reinforcement arms were seized from O’Dea’s premises on 4 June 1866.20 As readers of the Toronto Leader were reminded during the 1874 federal election campaign, the Barney O’Donohoe of Pearl Street, Buffalo, was John O’Donohoe’s brother Bernard. O’Dea meanwhile published weekly periodicals such as the aforementioned Fenian Volunteer and the United Irishman in the late 1860s, and following a foray into saloon-keeping, had departed Buffalo by the early 1870s.21 O’Dea’s production of Fenian propaganda in Buffalo was aided by another ex-Torontonian, the Irish-born James McCarroll. McCarroll was one of those rare creatures, a Protestant Irish Fenian, and while establishing himself as a journalist, poet, and musician, his fame came mostly from his stories and letters featuring stage-Irishman Terry Finnegan of “Stanly Sthreet” in Toronto.22 Gradually becoming disenchanted after the loss of his job in the customs service, McCarroll drew closer to Fenianism and was involved in the early publications of the Irish Canadian.23 After settling in Buffalo, McCarroll edited O’Day’s

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Fenian Volunteer and published Ridgeway: An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada in 1869, and while the novel doubtless came to occupy several shelves in that city, it was also advertised in the Irish Canadian.24 The cases of Murphy, O’Donohoe, and McCarroll thus provide a glimpse of the traffic of Fenian activists from Toronto to Buffalo following the 1866 encounter. Further, in July 1870, another excursion by the Toronto Hibernians was said to have been met at Niagara Falls by “several Torontonians, at present residing in Buffalo.”25 The last great public show of sympathy for Fenian ideals in Buffalo during these years occurred at the departures of volunteers for the border incursions of 1870. The Quebec border was the target, with Fenian volunteers amassing at Malone in upstate New York and St Albans, Vermont. Estimates of the involvement of the seventh regiment range from 150 to 250 men, a force supported by some Irishmen of means in the city.26 The costs of train passage were apparently defrayed by “prominent Irish citizens” who professed “great confidence in the success of the movement” and were led by First Ward alderman Colonel William B. Smith.27 There was quite the scene at Buffalo’s Exchange Street station on 24 May, where, according to the Commerical Advertiser, “old women howled most melodiously, and the colleens, though less demonstrative, were profuse in the matters of tears.”28 Despite the caricaturing qualities of this description, reminiscent of the rituals of Irish emigrant wakes, the emotion generated by this spectacle of revolutionary Irish muscle was palpable. These raids were the proverbial damp squib, however. The United States authorities were informed of the plans in advance, and although skirmishes occurred, O’Neill and others were quickly arrested. Volunteers were streaming back to Buffalo by 1 June. “They probably have had enough of ‘raiding’ by this time,” declared the Advertiser, and it seemed an accurate enough observation.29 Indeed, the public bravado of Buffalo Fenianism went into retreat thereafter, and the Irish could only look on as the city’s Germans fervently celebrated their accession to nationhood in 1871.30 O’Dea and another prominent Fenian, Colonel John Hoy, did not remain long in the city, while others such as Frank B. Gallagher and Colonel Michael Bailey passed away.31 Captain Patrick Kane remained in the familiar trade of saloon-keeping, and his premises became a well-known centre of First Ward Democratic politics (chapter 5). Some ultra-loyal Torontonians remained convinced that Buffalo was a hive of Fenian activity, however. During the federal election campaign of 1874, James Beaty claimed to have had “communication with a gentleman in the city of Buffalo who

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offered to place [the Fenians’] private correspondence in [his] hands. It was still an active operation.”32 How genuine such an offer was is difficult to assess, though the ub certainly underwent a phase of rebuilding during these years when the strategy of infiltrating legitimate “Irish” organizations became favoured over public bombast.33 Clan na Gael membership increased to 11,000 by 1877, and Patrick Ford’s Irish World was supportive.34 Thirty-seven Buffalo names appear in subscription lists published in five issues between April and October 1876, including that of Patrick Stanton, a real estate agent and later leading light in the c mba .35 Subscription to the Irish World does not imply active support for Fenianism, however. Financial contributions to O’Donovan Rossa’s “Skirmishing Fund,” set up in 1876 to bankroll attacks on England, are a better indicator. Fearful of stagnation taking hold within Fenianism, Rossa proposed a new strategy of skirmishing involving “the surgical use of violence by small groups,” a significant departure from the traditional strategy of collective insurrection, and Ford published the names of contributors and amounts received.36 One was Buffalo resident and Ridgeway veteran, the Co. Armagh–born John Quinn, who sent a “gold dollar” before proclaiming that “thousands of good Irishmen” in his city were in a position to send Ford “$5 more readily than I can afford one.”37 Quinn’s assumptions were somewhat misplaced. Unlike those from other upstate cities such as Albany and Troy, Buffalo contributions to Rossa’s fund were notably unprolific.38 Quinn’s list of “fifteen Buffalo friends” that appeared subsequently, however, included ex-aldermen George Chambers (first ward) and Daniel Cruise (eighth ward).39 Another note written to the World by railroad flagman Daniel Leahy that accompanied $6.50 donated by him and six other Buffalo men stated that “there must be no surrender, no compromise, no truce until our country takes her allotted place among the nations,” a recognizable tip of the hat to the last words of the leader of the 1803 Dublin rebellion, Robert Emmet.40 The fact that Rossa’s fund was opposed initially by the u b/Clan na Gael may explain the rather low Buffalo contributions, but by 1878, trusteeship was placed in the hands of the u b at a time when Rossa and Ford’s relationship was beginning to sour.41 By 1878, also, the Advertiser estimated two hundred “rank and file Fenians” to be resident in Buffalo, when some 7th Regiment veterans formed two military companies for occasional drilling.42 They were named the “Irish Rifles” and “Emmet Guards,” but William Smith predictably dismissed any talk of a Fenian revival as “humbug.”43

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Despite the passing or departure of leading Fenians from the city by the early 1870s, the survival of the ub/Clan na Gael in Buffalo was anything but humbug. An unknown number of Clan members greeted the released Fenian Michael Davitt when he passed through the city in 1878 as part of a nationwide tour.44 By the end of the decade, the prime Clan figure in the city was James Mooney, a successful real estate agent who was born in Queen’s County (present-day Co. Laois) and whose family lived for a time near Hamilton, Ontario, after emigration across the Atlantic.45 Mooney had served alongside F.B. Gallagher as a trustee of the ill-fated Emigrant Savings Bank in the late 1860s, and subsequently became known as an ardent church worker, a member of the Young Men’s Catholic Association, and the chairman of the Erie County Democratic Committee.46 He would become a central figure alongside Rev. Patrick Cronin in forming Land League and National League branches in the city in the 1880s, thus exemplifying the u b/Clan tactics of preserving secrecy through infiltration. For many Irish Catholics in Toronto, the Ridgeway raid was a source of public embarrassment. Considerable attention was given to the first prosecutions of Fenian prisoners in Toronto in October 1866, though desire remained in official circles for a fair and just demonstration of “British justice,” and the decision to commute the death sentences imposed on several was “made in secret almost immediately.”47 The assassination of Thomas D’Arcy McGee by a suspected Fenian in Ottawa in April 1868 was another dark moment. Despite well-attended excursions, hb s membership numbers were in decline by the end of the 1860s, and in one historian’s view, “most of those individuals brave enough to remain sworn members … had no intention of rebelling against the Canadian government.”48 Yet as long as Fenians remained in Canadian jails, militant nationalist sentiments were not quickly defused. Following Michael Murphy’s departure to Buffalo, Patrick Boyle, who had been imprisoned in the aftermath of both the raids and the McGee murder, presided at Fenian meetings and collected funds.49 The societies that marched in the 1870 St Patrick’s Day procession represented that portion of Toronto’s Irish Catholic world that retained an earnest belief in Irish nationalism; the recently formed Sons of St Patrick and the Young Irishmen were present alongside the hbs, while the Christian Brothers “played national airs along the route.”50 Proceedings closed with three cheers for the newly promoted Archbishop Lynch, whose nationalist sympathies were well-known, and with the Crown absent from the emblems of these societies (figure 6.1), the Queen was unsurprisingly passed over in the toasts of the occasion.

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Figure 6.1  “Uncrowned” emblems of Toronto Irish Catholic and nationalist societies (left) and the “crowned” emblem of the Irish Protestant Benevolent Society (above). Sources:  Globe, 19 June 1869 (Young Irishmen), 28 June 1869 (Sons of St. Patrick), and 1 March 1871 (Irish Protestant Benevolent Society).

Although ignoring the Queen was interpreted by many Protestants as evidence of Catholic disloyalty, it also conveyed a hope among some that monarchical symbols would soon become a thing of the past in Canada. In this analysis, Confederation was viewed as a moment when Canada had outgrown its British colonial roots and could now develop along its own “free path.” But similar questions about Canada’s political future had been posed at least a decade before Confederation, not least by D’Arcy McGee, who called for a “new nationality” for a “northern people.”51 McGee’s pluralistic vision was at odds with what he termed “Anglican assimilation,” a clear reference to the Family Compact era, though he did retain faith in monarchism.52 Following his death, McGee’s mantle was taken up by groups such as Canada First, though their attempts at organizing fervent celebrations on Dominion Day (1 July) fell noticeably flat.53 Remaining true to Fenian principles, Patrick Boyle went much further than McGee in his assessment of Canada’s potential to fashion a distinctive nationality. In the wake of Queen Victoria’s birthday celebrations in 1869, Boyle felt that there were now “few … in the country rash enough to predict that Canada will not assume, at no very distant date, her entire freedom from British tutelage … It is no treason in Canada to say that the country should be independent.”54 In predicting a new political dawn for Canada that transcended the staid pragmatism of Confederation, Boyle could not, however, draw upon myths about the achievements of Catholic Irishmen in Canada. McGee had been a prolific myth-producer

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in his 1850s writings on Catholics in America and the Irish in the American Revolution, but the one-time Young Irelander was forced to admit that in Canada “we have none of those old popular legends and stories which in other countries have exercised a powerful share in the government.”55 What Boyle did do, however, was persistently argue that Catholics, and Irish Catholics especially, should be accorded not only social respect but also their due share of public spoils in the new dominion (chapter 5). At every step, however, such conceptions would have to contend with majority Protestant affinities to monarchy, empire, and the rights (historical and contemporary) of British subjects. Canadian Confederation also touched the ways in which Ireland’s future was imagined. In 1870, Dublin lawyer Isaac Butt’s pamphlet on Home Government in the United Kingdom drew upon the ideas of the British North America Act in proposing Canada “as a model for the constitutional relationship between Britain and Ireland.”56 Arguments that Ireland should have what Canada was now given would reverberate through the following decades.

P odi um s a n d P a p e rs : S t ru cturi ng, Narrati ng, an d Com m e m o r at in g Ir is h I denti ty i n the 1870s Whether Irish nationalist sympathizers in Buffalo and Toronto in the 1870s retained faith in physical force or were ready to support the constitutional Home Rule initiative promulgated back in Ireland by Isaac Butt, ways of recalling and interpreting Ireland’s history were central to the shaping of diasporic imaginations and identities. Social memory, in other words, played an integral role in the process of Irish ethnicization; historical narrations and commemorations on pulpits, podiums, and stages, as well as in the press and popular literature, fortified the sense that Ireland’s political relationship with Britain required urgent reform. Although the Buffalo clergy opposed the Fenians, the church nevertheless promoted confessional readings of Irish identity that blurred the lines between religion and nationalist politics. There was nothing new about this indoctrination – it had taken place in Ireland from the late eighteenth century – and in Buffalo, Rev. Patrick Cronin became the central indoctrinating figure.57 Addressing the congregation at St Joseph’s Cathedral on St Patrick’s morning in 1873, Cronin described the day as one that was “both religious and national,” while reminding his listeners that “Ireland would remain, in the future, as she had been in the past, eminently Catholic … the lapse of time would bring no diminution of

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her love for the memory of St. Patrick, nor for the doctrines in which he had instructed her.”58 In 1876, the corresponding sermon was delivered by Rev. Edward Quigley, who, in documenting the spread of Protestantism around Europe where Ireland’s “sister nations” were “falling around her,” declared Ireland to have “remained steadfast as the rock in the ceep.”59 Such appeals to nationality also served to build community in the local-congregational sense. St Patrick was Ireland’s national saint, but Irish nationalists were not wanting for lay heroes whose deeds were of more recent vintage. While a “fine portrait” of the poet and balladeer Thomas Moore stood in the centre of a Renaissance-style frescoing of the ceiling of St Stephen’s Hall in Buffalo, and a litany of Irish historical figures was regularly toasted at St Patrick’s Day banquets and other entertainments from the 1850s, the late 1870s witnessed a surge in interest in the life and times of Robert Emmet.60 Born into Dublin’s well-heeled Anglican circles, Emmet sympathized with the United Irishmen movement responsible for the rebellion of 1798, and his subsequent activities culminated in his leading a  follow-up rising on the streets of Dublin in July 1803. It too was a failure, and Emmet was subsequently arrested, tried, and found guilty of treason; he was executed on 20 September 1803.61 In 1804, Robert’s brother and fellow revolutionary, Thomas Addis Emmet, left for America with his family, and it was in New York where, according to Marianne Elliott, he would serve “to give the most powerful stimulus to the Emmet legend.”62 If the number of pamphlets, newspaper columns, theatrical plays, and public speeches dedicated to Robert Emmet’s deeds and memory in the United States in the decades following his death are considered, it is apposite to speak of the circulation and reproduction of an “Emmet legend” that foregrounded the heroic sacrifice of a brilliant scholar, orator, and patriot. The last words of Emmet’s speech from the dock forbidding the writing of his epitaph and the inscription of his tomb until “my country takes her place among the nations of the earth” would echo across American stages for more than a century afterwards as well as in defiant notes such as that written by the aforementioned Buffalo ­flagman Daniel Leahy. Emmet would have wanted it no different; as Kevin Whelan has put it, his dock speech was “his defence against oblivion.”63 Interest in Emmet’s life reached an unprecedented peak in the United States in the last quarter of the century, however, and in this sense, Buffalo reflected patterns occurring in other American cities. The city’s Emmet Benevolent Association periodically organized entertainments

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and lectures and in 1876 contributed $100 to a fund to aid “the rescued Fenian prisoners,” a reference to the six Fenians who had successfully escaped from prison in Western Australia aboard the Catalpa earlier that year.64 The association’s Fenian sympathies were also clear in its invitation issued to an outspoken supporter of militant Irish nationalism, the Methodist Rev. George Pepper of Mount Vernon, Ohio, to speak on “Ireland and the Irish” in November 1876.65 But the dawn of the 1870s marked seven hundred years since the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169, or, as many would put it in speech and writing, the beginning of “seven centuries of English oppression.” All the more reason to restore Ireland’s greatness by bringing this reign of torment to an end, inspired by the memory of Emmet and other exemplary heroes. The centenary of Emmet’s birth, 4 March 1878, was marked in Buffalo by a recreation of his trial by the Young Men’s Catholic Association.66 In what appears to have been a dry run of sorts, an earlier performance was staged in St Stephen’s Hall the previous July, though the reenactment was felt by a Catholic Union and Times correspondent to have “many defects.”67 The commemoration of Emmet’s birth thus became a new annual occasion through which Irish-American voices could express themselves, especially where homeland affairs were concerned. Robert Emmet was an appropriate figure for commemoration in the United States for other reasons. He was regularly compared to George Washington for his republican idealism (a comparison Emmet had made himself in his speech from the dock), and Emmet meetings invoked ­powerful symbols of American nationhood, such as the Declaration of Independence, in projecting a similar future for Ireland. It did Emmet no  harm that Washington’s birthday of 22 February was less than two weeks before his own, and both men could thus be put to service as important symbols for Irish-American nationalists. In Buffalo, the commemoration of 1878 was no one-off affair. In 1879, the Irish Rifles and the Emmet Benevolent Association celebrated Emmet’s 101st birthday in the city’s armory, at which “Emmet’s speech was recited with much force and vigor,” and a resolution sent to the Irish World declared that the company would “never be renegades from the principles of Emmet.”68 These were moments in which some of Buffalo’s Irish could imagine themselves to be experiencing “American freedom” and the glories of American citizenship and democracy. Despite the ­generally lowly material fortunes of Buffalo’s Irish community, Irish nationalism implied a certain satisfaction with life in the United States.69 Such occasions also presented them with opportunities to demonstrate

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their commitment to republican values.70 In this sense, they exhibited what Jon Gjerde has termed a “complementary identity” that “valorized their allegiance to American citizenship as they reified their ethnic affiliations.”71 Commemorations of Ireland’s foremost politician of the first half of  the nineteenth century, the “Liberator” Daniel O’Connell, were, in ­contrast, more low-key in Buffalo. O’Connell’s efforts to win Catholic Emancipation through mass meetings and political pressure were wellknown outside of Ireland, and after its enactment in 1829, he set his sights on the Repeal of the Act of Union, which had bound Ireland politically to Britain since 1801. O’Connell’s political outlook, however, was universalist and his support for Repeal was founded on his belief that it disadvantaged Ireland economically, and “not because of any doctrinaire belief in nationality.”72 O’Connell criticized Emmet and the United Irishmen as “weak and wicked men,” and also decried the persistent American institution of slavery.73 These criticisms damaged O’Connell’s potential for legend status, not least in the minds of Fenian sympathizers. In 1876, Patrick Ford dismissed him in the Irish World as no more than an “imperial statesman.”74 The “beautiful life and tragic death of martyred Robert Emmet,” in contrast, made him “the fittest type of the principle of Irish Nationality known to the men of this generation.”75 O’Connell’s memory was thus most comfortably celebrated in the religious sphere, and so Buffalo’s clergy took control of the O’Connell centenary celebrations in 1875. A high Pontifical Mass was celebrated by Bishop Ryan at St Joseph’s Cathedral, while the evening lecture on O’Connell’s life was delivered by the bishop of Charleston, Rev. P.N. Lynch, to dignitaries that included the mayor and a number of judges.76 There was no street procession, but in a city where Fenianism still had more than a few fellow travellers, it was not difficult for the clergy to claim this event as one to be held under their auspices. In Toronto, where public debate was often marred by sectarian rivalries, O’Connell’s legacy was accorded a different level of attention. Patrick Boyle admired O’Connell’s tenacity yet described him as “a man who broke his heart in trying to get by moral force what must yet be got from physical force.”77 Unlike Emmet, however, O’Connell could still be ­celebrated as a Catholic hero by those sympathetic to a moderate Irish nationalism in Ontario at a time when the question of Catholic representation was an ongoing issue in the political sphere (chapter 5). O’Connell’s abolitionism was also less controversial in the Canadian context, and his

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deeds bolstered the argument that the Irish were historically Catholics, one put forth regularly by Archbishop Lynch. In 1875, Lynch declared that “Irish nationality and the Catholic religion go hand in hand,” and that despite the trials of the Irish people over several centuries, “their faith sustained them.”78 Lynch’s sermons about St Patrick were mostly of a panegyric nature, but in 1881, while describing the patron saint’s labours for justice on Christianity’s behalf, he remarked that “the old pagan laws against the Christians were trifles compared to the Protestant laws levelled at one time against Irish Catholics.”79 In contrast to Buffalo, the O’Connell centenary in Toronto was handled by lay organizations and took a prominent public form with a street procession. Despite rainy weather, the parade took two hours to wind its way through the principal streets of the city before a picnic and speeches at the west end’s Crystal Palace. Participating alongside the Young Irishmen, the Sons of St Patrick, and the h bs were parish-based temperance organizations, branches of the Emerald Benevolent Association (eba ), and societies from other towns in the region. Clergymen were also present on the platform, and Archbishop Lynch turned up at a late hour to deliver his speech. On the whole, a wide section of Toronto’s lay Irish Catholic world was present, though the speeches were less about Catholic piety and more about the proper course of pursuing Irish self-government. O’Connell’s life and memory did not dominate discussion, however. A banner featuring the Liberator’s head on one side juxtaposed it with that of Emmet on the other and was prepared to represent “all the sentiments that filled the hearts of the Toronto Irishmen on this day,” a fitting symbol for an audience containing both moderates and militants.80 Whatever feelings he may still have had about O’Connell’s shortcomings, Boyle praised the former’s universalist perspective in opposing oppression, while Lynch’s address placed the future of Irish nationalism within the empire. Looking upon O’Connell as “the great emancipator” who had “broken every chain and bond but one,” Lynch “hoped that the struggle would not cease till that was also broken,” and the requested cheers were for “Canadian Home Rule for Ireland; an Irish Governor under the Queen, and an Irish Parliament under the Governor.”81 Although sharing the platform with the archbishop, Boyle did not share Lynch’s seeming confidence in Butt’s vision of Home Rule for Ireland. He was probably more enthused later that evening as he introduced the militant Rev. Pepper of Ohio, who reminded the audience that Ireland would never have peace “until the flag which had kept her

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in slavery was banished from her soil,” before arguing that the struggle for Catholic Emancipation was but a “step toward O’Connell’s great object – the separation of the two countries.”82 This was one way of interpreting the Repeal campaign, to be sure, but in a final flourish, Pepper expressed “anticipation of an Irish revolution … [in] which he would be willing to give his body to the ground.”83 No doubt Patrick Boyle approved of such fighting talk, and it is unsurprising that he and the hb s likely manoeuvred in such a way as to prevent a Home Rule League branch from taking root in Toronto to supplement those founded in Quebec City and Montreal some years earlier.84 Signs of enduring support for Fenianism in Toronto were evident in 1877, when ub member Thomas Clarke Luby made a St Patrick’s visit, and again in 1878, the year of the Emmet centenary. 85 Toronto’s celebrations for the latter event were carried out under the auspices of the Grattan Benevolent Association, almost certainly a front for a Fenian cell or group of cells, and the invited speaker was Thomas F. Bourke, who, like Luby, was a veteran of the 1867 Fenian rising in Ireland.86 Also like Luby, Bourke was a Skirmishing Fund trustee, and his lecture was to be followed by a performance of the play “Robert Emmet” supported by “the full company of the Royal Opera House.”87 After the customary introduction by Patrick Boyle, Bourke praised the memory of Michael Murphy to cheers and declared his desire for a free Irish ­republic, adding that “he would not care whether [an Irishman] admired most the images of a William or the statue of James” before dismissing the Home Rule movement as “babyish … something to amuse Irishmen till they are in a position to do better.”88 The visit of Bourke and that of O’Donovan Rossa for the St Patrick’s celebrations some weeks later gave Boyle reason to hope for “a defiant and enthusiastic assertion” of Irish nationality that would challenge “the craft of West Britonism” in the city.89 He was to be disappointed. Rossa was invited by the Irish Catholic Benevolent Union (i cbu; the successor organization to the Young Irishmen) but his evening lecture failed to attract a large audience and did nothing to deter the less restrained elements of Orangemen and Young Britons who were determined to disrupt it.90 The low turnout may thus have been less a matter of apathy and more an anticipation of the violence that was liable to erupt at either the venue or on nearby streets. The Jubilee Riots of late September and early October 1875, sparked by Protestant attacks on male and female Catholic devotees marching in the streets, may have remained fresh in too many minds.

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These fears were well-founded. Cries of “Revenge for Hackett!” were heard as stones rained against the glass of St Patrick’s Hall, forcing Rossa to cut his lecture short.91 Nonetheless, an argument can be made for a growing feeling of apathy towards militant nationalist ideas. Subdued street activities caused Boyle to describe the day itself as one of “humiliation,” and his mawkish editorial lamented how “the green uniforms of Irish processionists have been set aside as things of the past in almost all parts of this new home of our people.”92 St Patrick’s Day processions would not return to Toronto until the 1890s, when respectability and restraint had become the watchwords.93 Boyle’s reluctant acceptance of a shift away from militant sympathies within Catholic Irish Toronto was mirrored somewhat by his careful if critical commentaries on wider imperial events in the Irish Canadian. If, as Paul Townend suggests, “anti-imperialism emerged as an integral, powerful part of Irish national mobilizing rhetoric” at the end of the 1870s, the measured solidarity of the Irish Canadian with the southern African Zulus was as far as things went in Toronto.94 Though describing the Zulu king Cetewayo as having “struck gallantly against foreign conquest” in the encounter at Isandhlwana, editorials predicted the triumph of Britain’s imperial war machine and the values of “civilization” over the “antique heroism” of the Zulus.95 Hope was expressed that Cetewayo would be “treated with all mercy and justice” once this happened, but in the final analysis, Boyle denounced the process of his overthrow and “the subjugation of his nation” as “an atrocity on a parallel with that of the partition of Poland.”96 Toronto readers of Patrick Ford’s Irish World could access more sustained and vitriolic anti-imperial arguments during these and later years, however.97 Unlike Buffalo, Toronto hosted no follow-up Emmet commemoration in 1879, the Irish Canadian noting only an anniversary held in St Catharines by a local Irish benevolent association.98 Besides the growing consensus among the clergy and some sections of the laity that ethnoreligious public processions were now doing more harm than good, there was likely also the sense that a regular celebration of Emmet’s memory ill-fitted the Irish Catholic minority in Protestant Toronto. In the United States, Emmet’s vision resonated with even moderately minded Irish nationalists. While Toronto had to import speakers and actors to recreate Emmet’s legend on stage, many of these were becoming homegrown in Buffalo. Little wonder, then, that Lyne and Toner conclude that Montreal and Quebec City overtook Toronto as the leading centres of Canadian Fenianism in the 1870s and 1880s.99

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In Toronto and other parts of Ontario, therefore, Daniel O’Connell was a more appropriate and symbolically useful figure for commemoration than Emmet, especially in light of an ongoing campaign for improved Catholic political representation. In 1881, the provincial branches of the eba celebrated O’Connell’s life and achievements at Dundurn Park in Hamilton.100 James Britton, a Toronto butcher, alderman, and e ba Grand President, urged “continued loyalty in the system of government under which they lived, and detestation of the tactics of such men as Crowe and Rossa,” while reminding his listeners of O’Connell’s ability to “secure the redress of the grievances of which his compatriots and ­co-religionists complained.”101 Three months earlier, in his inaugural address to the society, Britton had informed members of the decision to no longer take to the streets on St Patrick’s Day. He remarked with some optimism: “I trust that our self-sacrifice in that respect will ultimately result in others, with whom we agree to differ, being brought to see that in a mixed community such as we are composed of here, the true Christian is one who will not give offence to the feelings of any of his fellow citizens.”102 Britton’s comment about a “mixed community” echoed the language of D’Arcy McGee; both men held a vision of a loyal and pluralistic Canada exhibiting the benefits of self-government, accommodating minorities, and upholding the rule of law.103 This proposed retreat from public space on 17 March did not extend to the processions staged to honour O’Connell, however. The provincial eba branches held their 1884 parade in St Catharines, and two years later they joined with Toronto’s i c b u to mark the 111th anniversary of the Liberator’s birth, parading once again through the principal streets of the provincial capital, complete with diocesan clergy in carriages. As the Mail put it: “But for the green regalia visible on all sides the fife and drum music might have led one to think that an Orange celebration was in progress.”104 While Toronto’s Catholics were not entirely keeping their heads down, this once again promoted moderate and loyal readings of “Green” diasporic identity. By confining their St Patrick’s celebrations to the less public spaces of churches and banquet halls, Toronto’s Catholics were now adopting the practices of the Irish Protestant Benevolent Society (i p bs). Ecumenical spirit was not the order of the day, however. As the inaugural i p bs president A.T. McCord remarked in 1870, “although Irish Protestants had little belief in saints in the common acceptation of the word … they had a warm feeling towards the land of their fathers, and would like to celebrate the national holiday as a National Society.”105 In doing so, the

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ipb s was not so much challenging Toronto’s Catholics as mirroring the traditions of Scottish and English national societies in feasting the days of their patron saints. The i p b s saw itself as an integral part of the city’s majority Protestant culture, with the likes of the h bs and the i cbu remaining apart as distinctive blocs within the Catholic associational infrastructure. Indeed, if clerics Cronin of Buffalo and Lynch of Toronto were quick to use the revered saint to draw boundaries around Irishness in their cities, so too were Toronto’s Protestant clergy. Belfast-born Rev. J. Gardner Robb of Cooke’s Church declared at his testimonial service in 1875, for example, that St Patrick would have been a worthy Presbyterian, living as he did in a time when “there was no such thing as the invocation of saints” and the “dogma of (papal) infallibility” was unknown to him.106 A trenchant critic of Catholic theology and of Archbishop Lynch’s defences of it in particular, Robb also used the occasion to remind listeners of his opposition to separate schooling. In 1876, he requested that the audience “vindicate their national evangelical Christianity before those who never yet acknowledged what the Empire and its evangelical churches owed to Irish Protestantism” while concluding that they “be faithful to God, their country and to ever hold the sentiment ‘Erin mavourneen, Erin go bragh.’”107 The appropriation of the Irish language and other symbolism once again challenged the exclusive Catholic definition of Irishness, and these articulations of identity would remain with the society for years to come (figure 6.2).

T h e P a r n e l l Vi si ts The decline of the Home Rule League in Ireland and the resignation of its leader Isaac Butt were followed by the emergence of Charles Stewart Parnell as the leader of Irish nationalist aspirations at Westminster. A more charismatic individual than Butt, Parnell would by the mid-1880s shape a formidable and disciplined Irish Parliamentary Party as well as a cult of personality that earned him labels such as “the chief” and “the uncrowned king of Ireland.” Defiant obstructionism made Parnell’s initial reputation in the British House of Commons, but his careful alignment of militant and moderate nationalists through the New Departure and his experiences as president of the Irish National Land League during the Land War of 1879–82 would later seal it. Parnell also brought this new sense of national mission to the diaspora, though it was the onset of agricultural depression in Ireland and the fear of renewed famine more

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Figure 6.2  Toronto Irish Protestant Benevolent Society invitation card, 1906, complete with Maid of Erin, harp, shamrocks, maple leaves, the Irish language, and a Holy Bible. Courtesy of the Toronto Public Library.

than politics that brought about his visit to more than sixty cities in the United States and Canada in the winter of 1880.108 With Clan na Gael assuming primary responsibility for arranging the course of the travel, Parnell was accompanied by John Dillon, and Buffalo and Toronto were both on the itinerary.

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Ireland’s depression was not simply the result of the bad weather and poor harvests that befell farmers in 1879. Ironically, Buffalo’s army of Irish dock workers was an integral part of the networks of labour and trade through which American grain exports penetrated European markets in the late 1870s, depressing cereal prices and threatening rural livelhoods.109 Parnell arrived in New York on 2 January, and his invitation to Buffalo was issued by a five-person committee led by Rev. Cronin and other First Ward notables. The signatories included Democratic mayor Solomon Scheu, twelve municipal councillors (out of a total of twenty-six), and three city assessors who were said to collectively represent “not only the banished sons of Ireland, but the liberty-loving of other nationalities” who were united in their protest against “the crushing policy of a ruthless enemy” in Ireland.110 A sizeable welcome committee was put together by Cronin, and all of the city’s wards were canvassed but the heavily German sixth.111 Parnell and Dillon arrived in Buffalo from Cleveland on 26 January 1880. They had spent more than three weeks in the United States by this stage, and their presence in the city prompted the Courier to dispatch a correspondent with “enough Irish blood … in his veins to make his ribs stout and his temper good-natured.”112 Six clergymen joined Volksfreund editor Matthias Rohr on the platform at the Academy of Music, though Bishop Ryan was not present. A significant portion of the expenses had been borne by the organizing committee, with James Mooney donating $100, though the possibility of Mooney deriving this hefty sum from the coffers of the ub cannot be discounted.113 Before addressing his audience, Parnell was introduced by Judge George W. Clinton, a one-time Democratic mayor of Buffalo who lamented how “unhappy Ireland” had for centuries “been held down by oppressions” and more besides.114 For his own part, Parnell began rather dryly with a discussion of relationships between land tenure, population levels, and food production in different parts of Europe before turning to Ireland’s present condition. An emphasis on humanitarianism and charity promised to elicit more emotive responses than the finer details of political reform.115 Nevertheless, a vivid account of an attempted eviction in Co. Galway, including descriptions of swordcharging by local constables against women who tried to foil the bailiffs, was a suitable prelude to Parnell’s broadside against landlordism with his reminder that such encounters had taken place within “seven hours of London, the home of our most gracious sovereign, Victoria.”116 The cue was not missed by the crowd, who began to hiss, and one of the

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resolutions recalled the tragedies of “’46, ’47 and ’48 when over two millions of starved corpses were flung into coffinless graves while provisions were exported from the island enough to feed double the then large population.”117 This was more than rhetorical nationalist theatre, however. As C.C. O’Brien has written, the “fear of famine, or rather of having to choose between starvation and eviction” was the chief dilemma facing many Irish rural dwellers at this time, and the partial potato crop failures, coupled with the declining prices of other crops, “threatened a recurrence of … mass-starvation, mass-evictions [and] mass-emigration.”118 Evoking the memory of the death-dealing famine of only thirty years before was therefore a logical move for Parnell. In calling for a union of “the Orangeman of the North with the Catholic of the South,” he declared “it to be the duty of every Irishman to shed the last drop of his blood if necessary” to effect the necessary reforms in land tenure.119 Given that the degree of moral support for the revolutionary tradition was still significant in Buffalo, such rhetorical flourishes illustrate how Parnell came to be regarded with an “almost superstitious veneration” to the extent that he was granted the freedom of the city.120 Whatever the prospects of ecumenical co-operation in Ireland, responses to the agricultural crisis there and the coming visit of Parnell also offered potential for Toronto’s Irish to unite in the raising of funds for their troubled countrymen and women. Torontonians were fully informed of the deteriorating situation in late 1879, and on 6 January 1880, the Globe ran a story about the “very disturbed condition” of Co. Galway, while reporting that a proposal to the city’s ratepayers to grant $10,000 for Irish relief was convincingly defeated by 4,732 votes to 2,588. The result was interpreted as “not due to any lack of sympathy for the Irish people, but to a feeling that it would be unwise to encourage the interference of the Council in such matters.”121 Whatever the motives of Toronto’s ratepayers, efforts were made by Irish and non-Irish in the city to ameliorate the condition of the distressed populations across the Atlantic. On 21 January, an appeal from the Dublin Mansion House Relief Committee to Canadians was published on the front page of the Globe, and shortly thereafter, three hundred or so people attended a public meeting to organize the city’s Irish relief effort.122 The meeting struck a cross-denominational committee to coordinate fundraising that included Patrick Boyle, James Britton, Orangeman John Hewitt, and Methodist Rev. Dr John Potts, among others.123 Potts’ qualified comments warned against any meaningful

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rapprochement between Irish nationalists and the “other Irish” in the city, however, when he said that “Ireland historically was not their theme tonight … People said that the famine was exaggerated, and doubtless it slightly was,” remarking further that he could “safely aver that since 1847 there has not been seen in the British Isles such distress as now prevails in Ireland.”124 References to “coffinless graves” were unsurprisingly omitted from the discussion. The Dublin-based Nation provided occasional news on inflowing monies from Toronto as well as on the decisions of the Ontario and dominion legislatures to donate $20,000 and $100,000 respectively by early March.125 Parnell and Dillon arrived in Toronto on Saturday 6 March, more than one month after their Buffalo visit. The progress of the tour, including the controversial spat between Parnell and the New York Herald, had been widely reported in the city’s dailies. Having trekked for two months throughout the United States, Parnell reportedly found Ontario’s brand of Canadians to be “more nearly English in their manner and speech than any with whom I have met on this continent.”126 In sharp contrast to Montreal, where they would be received by a torchlight procession of five thousand people two days later, Parnell and Dillon’s reception in Toronto was low-key, something not helped by their arriving earlier than expected, some skepticism among the local media as to their motives, and Archbishop Lynch’s misgivings about their visit.127 Lynch had tried unsuccessfully to dissuade Parnell from coming, and ordered a clerical boycott for the visit. Precisely why Lynch tried to dissuade Parnell is not known – he was certainly tired of the periodic flareups between Protestants and Catholics in the city, opposed new Catholic Irish immigration, and likely feared that Parnell’s visit would occasion yet more strife. But Lynch had also fallen out with Patrick Boyle, one of the local organizers, largely on account of the former’s support for Oliver Mowat’s provincial Liberals.128 The fawning crowds and earnest politicos that cozied up to Parnell and Dillon in Buffalo and other American cities were less in evidence here. While the city council paid little attention to Parnell and Dillon’s arrival, they were received at the Rossin House hotel by a committee composed of Liberal aldermen John Hallam and Peter Ryan along with Boyle, John O’Donohoe, lawyer Nicholas Murphy, and J.L. Troy, a former president of the i c b u and editor of the Catholic Tribune.129 The address by the committee cautiously expressed concern at “the present lamentable state of the starving peasantry of Ireland” without pointing any fingers at “cruel landlords” or the like; it further expressed hope

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that reform could be achieved through legislative means in a way that was “supported by other patriotic representatives of the people and endorsed by an enlightened public opinion.”130 Parnell’s lecture at the Royal Opera House concentrated on the issues of land nationalization, the Land Act of 1870, and the current scale of the crisis in Ireland, though the mayor, James Beaty Jr (nephew of the Leader editor with the same name), did not attend. With characteristic shrewdness, Parnell made clear his “very great distinction between the people and the Government of England” before making several critiques of the latter body in regard to the ongoing crisis.131 Dillon’s follow-up speech likewise declared the enemies of Ireland to be “the English government and the English press” while describing England as a “charitable nation.”132 Those words were well-chosen not due simply to the contingencies of location, but also to the variety of interests in the audience. The clerical absence left more room for labour activists, captivated by the issue of land nationalization, to involve themselves. Alfred Jury, an English-born tailor and member of the Toronto Trades Assembly, was present on the platform while Parnell declared himself struck by the presence of members of Orange lodges who “subscribed liberally” at the meeting’s end; the Globe noted that when the list of subscribers was read out, “a large number of Canadians, Englishmen and Scotchmen” were included, with Parnell drawing $464 overall.133 Criticism was not far away, however. Although sympathetic to his efforts to raise funds for rural Ireland, the Orange Sentinel denounced the increasingly forceful methods of the Land League there. Michael Davitt, the League’s founder, had been arrested the previous November and charged with sedition, and League president Parnell made some impassioned speeches in the aftermath.134 Co-edited by Hewitt, the Sentinel argued (realistically) that making tenant farmers owners would do little to change the material conditions of the “real peasantry,” remarking that not only was landlordism a universal phenomenon, but that those applauding “the speeches against the landlords of Ireland are landlords in Canada, and by no means model ones at that.”135 The editorial concluded that the reality of land markets in “civilized lands” and the rights of property were such that future prosperity in Ireland would have to come through means other than “Home Rule or Parnellism.”136 Toronto’s nationalists could not have been too surprised. Those Orangemen who did attend Parnell’s meeting could barely ignore how the effort of the band to play “God Save the Queen” at its end was

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“greeted by hisses from different parts of the house and was left half finished.”137 This reaction did much to vindicate those who believed that disloyal elements remained within Toronto’s Catholic Irish world. Those who were drawn in by Parnell’s charisma, meanwhile, could purchase portraits of the chief, as advertised in the Irish Canadian, for twenty-five cents each.138

Di as p o r ic A g itat io n in t he Era of Parnell Parnell’s visits to Buffalo and Toronto, along with changing circumstances in Ireland, spurred new phases of organization-building in both cities during the 1880s. These diaspora-oriented entities added new and important layers to those cross-class associations that promoted select readings of Irish ethnic identity and collective memory while relating the political context of Canada and the United States to the Irish situation. The discursive space available for Anglophobia, however, remained greater in Buffalo than in Toronto, where voices against Home Rule gained traction alongside a process of general moderation in Irish nationalist outlooks. In Buffalo, Land League branches were founded by men and women to extend the flow of relief funds to those Irish rural dwellers hardest-hit by the depression as well as support the agitation for land reform. A Parnell Relief Fund was instigated under Rev. Cronin’s chairmanship and more than $5,300 was received by early February 1880.139 Over the following month, lists of donors and amounts contributed were published for all but two wards of the city; altogether, $3,426 was collected from 978 contributors, more than one-quarter of them residing in the First Ward.140 The axis of Irish clergymen, aldermen, small businessmen, association men, and government employees came to the fore in the effort, and some German surnames also appeared on the lists. Meetings were then held towards the end of the year to organize Land League branches in the city’s parishes. By December, 176 people had joined a Cathedral branch under Cronin’s presidency.141 Another meeting took place to organize a St Bridget’s branch in the First Ward; one hundred signatures were received and $126 was subscribed for the “agitation fund.”142 Cronin also sought to involve women in the movement, given the initiative shown by Parnell’s sisters, Fanny and Anna, in the formation of an Irish Ladies’ Land League branch in New York in October and the rapid spread of branches around the country.143 A call for volunteers in

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mid-December yielded about a hundred volunteers for a ladies’ branch in Buffalo, though Cronin’s belief that women “could infuse life into the movement as they could devote more time to it than the men whose attention was in the main taken up with the daily routine of business” revealed much about prevailing gender assumptions; one of these “timerich” women was Eleanor Mooney, or “Mrs. James Mooney” to journalists, who became treasurer of the new branch.144 A network of Land League branches thus took root in Buffalo’s most Irish parishes one year after Parnell’s visit. Cronin’s Cathedral branch (no. 1) had 812 names on its books by January, while the Ladies’ Land League had formed branches in St Bridget’s (no. 2) and St Patrick’s (no. 3) parishes.145 Given the layers of social interaction shaped through parochial, economic, and political organizations, as well as routine everyday life in neighbourhoods with concentrations of Irish families, the Land League’s ability to raise money quickly was not surprising. At a meeting of the St Bridget’s branch, five-man committees were struck for the five electoral districts to canvass for new branch members. The social worlds of parish and ward thus intermeshed, and politicians such as Jack White and the Sheehan brothers knew better than to have their names absent from membership lists, even if distributing patronage and winning elections were their main priorities.146 The choice of the Catholic parish as the ideal spatial unit for Land League branches also signified the role of the clergy in the movement in Buffalo. As argued in chapters 3 and 5, party-based affinities outweighed those of class, and nationalist activists such as James Mooney and Anselm Smith had strong ties to both party and church, the latter also becoming president of the cmba. The activism of Cronin and Mooney connected to a wider continental impulse that became evident when Buffalo was selected as the site for the first annual convention of the Irish National Land League of America in January 1881. A total of 137 branches was reported for New York State at the meeting, a resolution to boycott British-manufactured articles was passed, the hostile opinions accorded the League by the Buffalo Express and New York Herald were reported on by Cronin to supportive boos and hisses, and he was duly installed as the League’s first vice-­ president.147 Local efforts were made to retain momentum, and the following month, a meeting took place in St James’ Hall to protest the latest instance of coercive British legislation in Ireland.148 Chaired by the now-ubiquitous Mooney, the meeting attracted leading Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Jewish clerics, a number of judges, and the Republican mayor Philip Becker. Rev. Dr Van Bokkelen, the rector of Trinity

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Episcopal Church and the husband of an Irishman’s daughter, opined that “but for prolonged and ingenious misrule, [Ireland] would now stand in the front rank of nations.”149 Ireland’s plight once again provided an opportunity to reinforce exceptionalist myths of the United States as a nation that “has always held out her hand to the oppressed.”150 Consistent with the aims of Clan na Gael to assert influence in the movement, Mooney became president of the Irish National Land League of America the following year.151 The regional geography of disturbances during the Irish Land War likely influenced the level of Land League contributions from Buffalo’s Irish working class. Samuel Clark’s analysis identifies the areas of greatest agitation to be those “where the livestock economy coexisted with poverty and subsistence tillage”; Counties Kerry and Clare were two such areas, alongside the entire province of Connaught.152 Buffalo’s southern wards were not short of people from these parts of Ireland, and newcomers continued to arrive in the city with fresh news. Letters from families and friends in Ireland were also in circulation, and updates regularly appeared in the “News from Ireland” columns in the Union and Times.153 In any case, there are good reasons to suppose that many Irish-born participants at nationalist meetings in Buffalo could personally relate to encounters with famine, landlordism, or eviction in their districts of origin, and that this in turn fuelled their support for the city’s Land League branches. Visiting lecturers also contributed to these impressions of ongoing crisis in the homeland. One Jesuit priest, for example, recounted at a March 1883 meeting how “he had lived to see three famines and the bodies of the people who died of starvation thrown out upon the wayside” whose “blood cried aloud for vengeance upon the landlords that had caused their miserable death.”154 Eviction and agrarian outrage dramas continued throughout Ireland in 1880, and in October 1881, Parnell, Dillon, Davitt, and William O’Brien were arrested and the Land League suppressed. If “misrule” had been a key watchword for Irish nationalists and their supporters, they now had another – coercion. Parnell’s signing of the Kilmainham Treaty with Gladstone the following year, and the strong reaction to the murders of the Irish chief secretary and under-secretary in Dublin, however, marked a return to constitutional politics, with the land question giving way to the objective of restoring an Irish parliament. The National League was thus established in the autumn of 1882.155 With the Irish franchise widened in 1884, Parnell’s party was courted by both Westminster parties in the election campaign of the following year, which ended with the Irish

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Party holding the balance of power. The election also exposed the confessional split in support for Parnell’s party, with opposition concentrated in Ulster. In North America, the Irish National League (inl) of America was established in Philadelphia in 1883, replacing the organization in which Cronin and Mooney held key positions. Clan na Gael, however, remained influential in this new organization at the same time as a faction orchestrated a dynamite campaign in London. In Buffalo, Cronin and Mooney were driving forces in inl branch formation, women remained actively involved, and the new organization used the Emmet anniversaries to communicate its vision for Ireland in rousing fashion while maintaining a calculated air of respectability. The 1886 event, held one month before the introduction of the Home Rule bill at Westminster, was attended once again by Mayor Becker alongside diplomat James Putnam, local intellectual-cum-politician Rowland B. Mahany, Cronin, and Mooney. Mahany and Putnam both praised Parnell, Gladstone, and the growing Home Rule movement that they predicted would speed the writing of Emmet’s epitaph.156 The British House of Lords veto lurked in the shadows, however, and at an inl meeting several days afterwards, Mooney expressed desire that “the House of Lords would tumble to the ground.”157 The Home Rule issue also touched the activities of St Joseph’s College students when, in late March, the school’s assembly hall bore witness to the “Parnell Waltz” and the “Land League Polka” amongst other entertainments performed by students in front of a panel of judges.158 Bishop Stephen Ryan, born in 1825 in Ontario to emigrants from Munster, was less conspicuous than Rev. Cronin in Irish nationalist agitation in Buffalo.159 Sticking squarely to matters religious, Ryan managed his public affairs with an eye toward building alliances rather than reinforcing divisions. Upon his death in 1896, a revival meeting at the Music Hall representing forty Protestant congregations commemorated his years of public service. Rowland Mahany, now a Congressman, described him as someone “who never sought the praise of his superiors” while shunning “the applause of his associates” and finding “his one steady consolation in his own labors for his people.”160 For all this, Ryan had written in 1881: “You need hardly be told how I stand on the question of united, persistent, organized, legitimate agitation for the removal of a crying wrong for centuries inflicted on the Irish people. God bless those who, irrespective of party, nationality or creed, meet to hold up the hands and cheer the hearts of Irishmen battling for their rights. It is worthy of America and Americans to sympathize with the oppressed and to protect against tyranny.”161

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While it is apparent that Parnell’s crusade for Home Rule generated a significant degree of interest and support within Irish Buffalo, the bill that emerged on 7 April likely disappointed those who managed to read through its finer details. A unicameral Irish legislature of two orders would be established rather than a parliament; Irish representation at Westminster would cease; issues of foreign policy and trade would remain under the British purview; and the office of Lord Lieutenant would not only remain but play a role in appointing an Irish executive.162 The bill famously divided Gladstone’s Liberals on its way to defeat in the Commons in June, paving the way for the Salisbury Conservative government. It did not take long before the new British administration became the focus of a new wave of disgust in the pages of the Union and Times, and hope sprang eternal that with its removal at the next election, efforts to find a way forward for Irish self-government could resume. Visitors from near and far continued to draw crowds to familiar venues in the city. A few days after Christmas 1887, Irish Party members Arthur O’Connor and Thomas Henry Grattan Esmonde arrived on a tour which had lasted at least ten weeks.163 The following month, John Boyle O’Reilly returned to bolster the “anti-eviction fund” with a characteristic speech on “The Illustrious Irishmen of one Century” as a committee prepared for that year’s Emmet night some weeks later.164 The Emmet anniversary continued to play an important symbolic role, not least since public processions for St Patrick’s Day had been discontinued in 1878 due to excessive expense, and their replacement banquets were felt by Rev. Cronin to have become occasions where Irish identity was only superficially celebrated by “purse-proud shopmen.”165 Buffalo’s Irish diasporic imaginations were refreshed in print and performance through the summer of 1888. The relentless education in Irish nationalism offered by the Union and Times continued as it ran a twentyfive-part “Irish Graves in England” series throughout the year, replacing it with a series on “Ireland’s Battles and Battlefields” in a style reminiscent of Ireland’s Nation newspaper.166 Holy Angels’ Rev. D. O’Riordan described a recent trip to Ireland to an audience around the same time that the Buffalo i nl held an “inauguration night” featuring speeches by Cronin and Fr Edward Kelly, the recently installed pastor of nearby Annunciation parish. The Long Island–born Kelly explained that although he had never been to Ireland, his sympathies for the present crisis were learned “from his mother’s knee, and while he was learning his prayers in the u.s., he learned to hate the English government, and he

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wondered if the day would ever come when he could take up arms for Ireland.”167 The following month, the ladies’ i n l branch 6 organized a summer festival at Linwood Glen. There was thus no shortage of public and private discussions about Ireland’s future at pulpits, podiums, and picnic-tables that supplemented those in the ethnic press, and these rounds of activity bore results. A figure in excess of $9,000 was reported as Buffalo’s contribution to the in l national treasury since the rejection of the 1886 bill.168 The latest round of fund-raising commenced in late September 1888 and concentrated on Parnell’s court case with the London Times. Bolstered by a twenty-eight-man committee, it yielded $400 within the first month and $1,000 by late February 1889; the ladies’ yield of $67.84 was apparently won “in the face of much discouragement,” however, for reasons that are unclear.169 Though the numbers of contributors are unavailable, it was likely to once again be a case of many people giving small amounts alongside a smaller number of middle-class benefactors. Given the generally trying economic circumstances, these were impressive contributions, and the victory of Parnell over the Times gave cause for further local jubilation. The course of Irish nationalist progress in Toronto betrayed a rather different dynamic following the Parnell visit. A Land League branch was founded early in 1881 at a meeting chaired by Patrick Boyle, who was joined on the platform by some faces familiar from the previous year’s relief committee such as Peter Ryan and John O’Donohoe. Also present were future Knights of Labour men such as Alfred Jury, D.J. O’Donoghue, and the journalist Phillips Thompson, who would directly witness the effects of landlordism on his tour of Ireland’s distressed ­regions for the Globe later that year.170 On the orders of Archbishop Lynch, no clergy attended. Given the diversity of party affiliations and political philosophies held by the speakers, a consensus on the League’s direction was not easily reached, and it is unclear if any attempts were made for it to become wired into the American branch network. While Peter Ryan was prepared to give his hero Gladstone time to amend his policy in Ireland, Jury fumed at the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, which “took away all rights of citizenship.”171 Efforts to entice ­labour-friendly Irish Orangemen such as John Hewitt and E.F. Clarke to Land League meetings failed, however. Clarke’s response was clear: “[A]s a loyal subject of Queen Victoria I could not identify myself with any society or body of men who are enemies of Her Majesty and of the

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constitution, and who … would resort to unconstitutional means to attain their object.”172 Regardless of the Orangemen’s misgivings, it was important for the Toronto League, like its Buffalo counterpart, to present a respectable front. The Toronto League was, however, quite different from that in Buffalo in terms of the politics of its leadership, the degree of popular interest it was able to generate about Ireland’s situation, and its capacity for involving women activists. The Irish Canadian of March 1881 reported a “rather meager” meeting attendance, and all in all, the outfit lasted barely a year, crippled by internal politics and lacking the authoritative steering presence of an individual like Buffalo’s Rev. Cronin.173 Although Parnell’s arrest in Ireland in late 1881 was discouraging, the development of the Irish National League in the United States had no immediate ripple effects in Toronto, likely out of anxiety about the hand of Fenianism within the American organization.174 Despite its short life, the Toronto League provided a forum for public discussions about Ireland’s political future for a section of the city’s middle and working classes, complementing debates at higher political levels in Canada where support for Irish Home Rule was secured.175 The release of Parnell from prison and the “conversion” of Gladstone to the idea of Home Rule in 1885 prompted the rebirth of an Irish nationalist organization in Toronto, and an i n l branch was established in the city in September 1885. Boyle chaired once again, and while ­veterans of the 1881 League were joined by labour reformers such as Bryan Lynch, support was now forthcoming from the clergy as well as Conservatives such as Senator Frank Smith.176 The League’s resolution expressed Lincolnesque support for “every legitimate effort to obtain for Ireland such a government as we have in this Dominion of Canada, a government of the people, for the people, and by the people.”177 Earnest expressions of imperial loyalty were proclaimed, and St Patrick’s Night in 1886 occasioned the first annual dinner by the League with the opening toast dedicated to Queen Victoria.178 This was a far cry from the days of the h b s, and John O’Donohoe now explained that the League was “working towards the foundation of a greater empire, not by means of separation, but by a closer and more friendly alliance between Great Britain and Ireland … They were ready to forgive the countless injuries already done them; but if they were counted worthy to stand shoulder to shoulder with England … they surely had the right to demand a share in the prosperity of the Empire.”179

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Gladstone’s promise of a bill to “pacify Ireland” had clearly built a sense of anticipation among these Torontonians. Whatever they might have thought of the bill’s details, there was surely disappointment at its defeat. Yet the Toronto i n l remained intact, and also extended a hand to those supportive of Home Rule elsewhere in the United Kingdom. A Scottish Home Rule Association was in existence in Toronto by late 1888, while interested English and Scottish individuals attended a League concert during St Patrick’s week the following year.180 This confluence of interests and the conversations they encouraged kept ­ Anglophobia to a minimum. Toronto’s Land and National League branches thus occupied curious places within the wider networks of their respective North American organizations in the 1880s as the question of Irish land ownership gave way to a focus on Home Rule. With Toronto’s Land League wound down before 1882, four Montreal delegates were left to attend the Philadelphia conference in 1883 at which the Irish National League of America was formed. Along with the shifting geography of Canadian Fenianism, Montreal consolidated its hold as the hub of the Irish National League movement in Canada.181 But even if a Toronto league had existed by 1884, how would the likes of Alfred Jury have reacted upon entering the hall at the second i n l convention in Boston and seeing the Fenian-approved slogan “England’s difficulty – Ireland’s opportunity” on a banner? While Phillip Buckner has argued that the erosion of Irishness “came fairly painlessly” for Canada’s Irish Protestants, the era of the first Home Rule bill was one in which the i p b s actively articulated its group identity within Toronto’s public sphere.182 Through the initiative of Mail managing director Christopher Bunting, the society began to hold annual ­banquets in 1885. If the annual sermons acted as occasions where a trans-imperial identity was proclaimed for Toronto’s Irish Protestants, these dinners brought such narrations into more grandiose settings. Although the attendees rarely numbered more than two hundred, newspaper write-ups often covered several columns, not least in Bunting’s Mail. The respectable middle-class axis of Irish Protestant clergymen, editors, temperance activists, merchants, and municipal councillors came together with politicians from both parties as well as the Queen’s representatives in Canada. The inaugural dinner featured Ontario Lieutenant-Governor John Beverley Robinson at the main table alongside renowned University of

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Toronto historian and political essayist Goldwin Smith, while the following year’s meeting enjoyed the melodies of the Marcicano Italian string band.183 The pattern of toasts paid homage to the Crown as well as imperial and domestic government. In 1887, they toasted in order: the  Queen and Royal Family, the Governor-General and LieutenantGovernor of Ontario, the Army and Navy and Auxiliary Forces, the Parliament of the Dominion and the Legislature of Ontario, and “Our Native Land.”184 “Canada” was not the immediate focus of loyalty within this matrix of royal, military, and civilian authority.185 Legitimizing narratives of the Irish Protestant immigrant focused on past and present imperial endeavours to produce a diasporic reading of Irishness acceptable within the boundaries of the group. Irish Catholic narratives of exile and struggle against England were dismissed in favour of language that emphasized pride in Irish and British subjectivities and their connection to imperial and military traditions. At the annual service in 1885, Rev. Hugh Johnston described the transformative impact of Protestant Irish settlers in Canada in helping to “subdue its wilds … multiply its fertile fields … build up its cities, and extend its commerce,” while Rev. E.H. Dewart asked: “Where had they not scored for themselves a deep mark in the world’s history from the red field of Waterloo with Wellington, the Iron Duke, to the heights of Balaklava, the burning sands of Tel-el-Kebir and the deserts of the Soudan?”186 This was a familiar glorification of Irish achievement in Britain’s army in Europe, the Crimea, Egypt, and Sudan through the deeds of Arthur Wellesley (better known as the Duke of Wellington) and Garnet Wolseley, both Dublin-born, and others. It provided a perspective on the role of Irishmen in not only building Canada but also advancing Britain’s empire and its values of “civilization” to ever farther reaches of the globe. That Wolseley’s victory over Urabi Pasha at Tel-el-Kebir resulted in two thousand or so Egyptian deaths compared to fifty-six British was not dwelt on. Such heroic and manly adventures, when compared to the geographical project of Irish nationalism, made the latter appear both illegitimate and preposterous. The “big nation” of Britain was a more worthwhile enterprise. Though Dewart requested his audience to “cultivate a love for all Protestants and Catholics,” he could not hide his disappointment at the annual dinner a few days later that in the land of his birth “the people … paid more deference to an Italian ecclesiastic than to the Queen of England.”187 These remarks about religion frequently mapped onto region. Likely taking cues from a recent publication by Ulster unionism’s emergent

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leader Col. Edward Saunderson, Methodist Rev. Dr John Potts remarked at the second i p b s banquet in 1886 that “there were two Irelands … an Ireland which was loyal to the British flag, loyal to every interest of the British Empire. That was his Ireland.”188 Sharpened by a Co. Fermanagh boyhood, Potts invoked the island’s religious geography when relating how on a visit home to his widowed mother the previous year, an ­elderly itinerant fiddler “from the south” was rebuffed by the redoubtable Mrs  Potts for failing to know “God Save the Queen.”189 Such stories emphasized not only Irish Protestants’ loyalty as British subjects, but also their modernity. The “pastness” of the folk culture of the (Catholic) south was exposed, as was its political disloyalty, in the old fiddler’s failure to recognize or learn an anthem that, as far as Potts and his mother were concerned, possessed global significance.190 Such statements in turn supported popular images of Ulster’s industry and thrift. In September 1892, Rev. Alexander Cuthbert of Belfast reminded an anti–Home Rule meeting in Toronto that it was “the industry of the men of the north of Ireland that had made that country what it is to-day.”191 While this reading of Ulster as a “Protestant preserve” was not so new, it had been rearticulated at the Ulster Unionist Convention in Belfast the previous June, where the progress of both Belfast and “the Ulsterman” was put on display.192 In Toronto, the occupational and political achievements of northern Irishmen could be offered as further evidence of Ulster superiority, as some non-Irish sympathizers testified. Goldwin Smith, for example, noted the “noble fruits” that “the Protestant colony in the North of Ireland produced … Not to go back to ­Castlereagh and Wellington, has it not produced in our own time Gough and Nicholson, and both of the Lawrences, and Roberts, and the noblemen who now worthily reign over British India?”193 In formulating such comments, Smith and other i p bs members may well have leafed through the pages of Nicholas Flood Davin’s The Irishman in Canada by this time, or at least the parts of it that they most agreed with. This work of almost seven hundred pages was published in Toronto in 1877 by the Co. Limerick–born lawyer, orator, and journalist who had not spent more than six years in the dominion by that point.194 Declaring his aim to not give offence “in any quarter,” Davin’s book oozes balance and moderation.195 Daniel O’Connell is lauded, Robert Emmet is absent, and Saxons, Celts, Normans, and others are argued to be “from one parent race.”196 While the seventeenth-century plantation of Protestants was held to be a prime instigator of economic success in Ulster, the eighteenth-century penal laws rendered Catholics in Ireland

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“the victims of an oppression more awful than has ever been dealt out to any people or any portion of a people.”197 In the final analysis, however, the tight connections between the Irish and the empire remain the most emphasized theme in a book dedicated to Governor-General Lord Dufferin. Davin had an accurate sense of his audience in Toronto and beyond. Toronto’s Orange lodges were also aware of their audience both near and far, and proved to be the city’s most trenchant opponents of Home Rule. The Orangemen’s critique focused not only on the spectre of “Rome rule” in the homeland, but also on its harmful effects on Britain’s empire and Canada’s place in it. Mass meetings communicated the anti– Home Rule message alongside smaller-scale occasions at churches and lodges. When these different forms of assembly are considered alongside fund-raising drives, there are strong similarities between the strategies adopted and networks forged by loyalist-unionists and those undertaken by Irish nationalists across North America. Responses to Home Rule among Toronto’s Orangemen were directly informed by ongoing events in Ireland, providing them once again with momentary senses of their location within a wider “Orange diaspora.”198 The naming of Toronto lodges after Ulster Orangemen William Johnston and Lord Rossmore illustrates transatlantic circuits of action and reaction that produced new icons of the moment. Johnston, an Anglican from Co. Down, led the agitation for the repeal of the Party Processions Act in 1872 and visited Canada the same year as an Orange delegate.199 Rossmore was a Co. Monaghan landlord who responded to the rise of the Land League by joining the Orange Order, and his denunciations against Catholics in a Co. Fermanagh village in October 1883 earned him dismissal from the bench.200 In 1886, Lord Rossmore Lodge No.  142, with over fifty members enrolled, received a letter from the lord himself thanking them “that they should have done me the honor of calling their lodge after me” while enclosing a photograph “for the banner.”201 And so it was that in early March 1886, one month prior to the Home Rule bill’s introduction into the British Commons, placards were placed throughout Toronto stating “The Empire is in Danger” to announce the first meeting of the bill’s opponents.202 The meeting in Temperance Hall was a mostly Orange gathering with Ulster-born brethren to the fore. Warring Kennedy presided, and the Mail noted the presence of other Orangemen such as public school inspector James L. Hughes, Sentinel co-editor John Hewitt, alderman Follis Johnston, and future mayor Ned

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Clarke alongside Dr Potts and Goldwin Smith. Kennedy argued that “Canadians all have interest in the Empire, and what affects the Empire affects us,” adding that “under the British flag the greatest liberty in the world today was enjoyed.”203 The Protestant ministers predicted Rome rule as the outcome in Ireland before retiring “amidst loud cheering.” A Union Defence Fund for “the loyalists of Ireland” was established via resolution under the direction of Smith and Hughes, the latter remarking that “most of the money that was used in Ireland to persecute the Protestants came principally from the United States.” Toronto’s anti– Home Rule agitation was thus operating not merely within a transatlantic Orange circuit; it was informed by the actions of Irish nationalists both within and beyond Britain’s empire. For all of the loyal arguments put forth by Toronto’s Irish National League branch, the American Irish were seen as the real bogeymen. What did Ulster’s Home Rule opponents make of their supporters on the other side of the Atlantic? While Col. Edward Saunderson did not visit Toronto, others did. In September 1886 and under the organizational aegis of the Loyal Irish Patriotic Union, chaired by Orangemen Clarke and Hughes, Rev. R.R. Kane of Christ Church, Belfast, and George Hill Smith, an Armagh barrister, visited Toronto as part of a lecture tour of Ontario and the eastern United States.204 This was the first public appearance in North America for both Kane and Smith, who represented the Ulster Loyal and Anti-Repeal Union, and in addition to addressing “an immense assemblage” at the Mutual Street Rink, they were received by the city’s Orange lodges some days later.205 The platform at the rink contained a familiar array of Orange notables, Protestant ministers, and non-Irish allies such as Toronto’s chief magistrate, the arch-Tory Col. George T. Denison.206 The message was familiar: the military deeds of Wellington and Wolseley had given Ireland honour within the empire while, according to George Hill Smith, “a separate Parliament … would put us in the power of men who have been the law-breakers of the past.”207 As the idea of Irish Home Rule survived the passing of resolutions in the dominion parliament through the 1880s, so too did it become a key reference point among Ontario’s ruling Liberals in a struggle for provincial autonomy that lasted more than a decade. With the autonomists’ reverence for British Prime Minister Gladstone informing their views, Premier Oliver Mowat declared “We are all Home Rulers now” at a meeting of the Toronto i nl in 1886.208 The most prominent Protestant of Irish background to champion the Irish Home Rule bill in Canada,

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however, was the Anglican federal Liberal leader Edward Blake. As Robert Vipond has pointed out, the irony faced by Blake and the Ontario autonomists was that the Irish question forced them “to tell their story in a way that idealized the federal structure and suppressed its imperfections, that lionized provincial autonomy and veiled its difficulties.”209 Opinion among lesser-known Protestant Irish Liberals in Toronto was nonetheless shaped through these partisan channels, and became solidified by the coercion of Chief Secretary Balfour’s administration in Ireland. As Rev. E.H. Dewart wrote to the Toronto i n l in 1888: “I firmly believe a conciliatory policy is better for our native land than coercion, and I believe also that though baffled and delayed some substantial measure of Home Rule will come in due time.”210 In September 1892, he attended a League meeting where he reportedly “did not think that the Protestants of Ireland had anything to fear from Home Rule.”211 Not surprisingly, measured remarks about Home Rule in their homeland were also offered at i p b s banquets. In 1888, Orangeman Hughes declared with suitable ambiguity that “[w]hile they were in favour of a fair measure of Home Rule, they would never give separation from England.”212 But some other members of the Orange institution departed even more dramatically from the line taken by the Ulster brethren. In 1887, a Scottish-born Orange member of the Ontario legislature, William Garson, attended the i nl’s banquet, where he explained that “he was best fulfilling his duty as an Orangeman by advocating Home Rule for Ireland, because this element of disunion would remain until Ireland was free.”213 Yet Garson, as the sitting Liberal and pro-labour member for St Catharines and an active Knight of Labour, was hardly the stereotypical Orange brother.214 It is almost unthinkable that an Irish-born Toronto Orangeman, informed by events and opinion in Ulster, would have made such a public statement.

U n r av e l l ings By mid-May 1889, news of surgeon Dr Patrick Henry Cronin’s murder in Chicago hit the front pages of newspapers across the continent. Allied to this were rumours about the embezzlement of i n l funds. The frequency of meetings in Buffalo branches slowed down, with the Union and Times decrying the “thunderous silence” on the affair.215 By the end of the year, Rev. Cronin candidly declared the organization to be a dead duck, ruined from within by Clan na Gael influence.216 It is likely that this influence had been there from the very beginning, however, wielded

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for the most part by James Mooney and his associates, likely one-time members of the Emmet Benevolent Association that raised money for Fenian veterans in the mid-1870s. In February 1890, a Union and Times editorial suggested that “‘local politics’ had laid a deathly grip upon its throat,” with “a lot of political hucksters” seeking “to use the League for personal advancement.”217 Throughout this period of uncertainty, events in Ireland prompted local action once again, and in October 1890, Bishop Ryan called a meeting “for succor for famine-stricken Ireland.”218 Moved by a letter written by the superioress of a convent in Co. Galway, the bishop described the condition of “the poor people of Connemara whose anguishing cries for help should reach throughout the universe.” Having gained local support, Ryan distanced the appeal from those designed purely for political ends, and $3,500 was received from a published list of 244 subscribers. Tellingly, perhaps, James Mooney’s name appeared on the list as a subscriber of only $1, a paltry sum compared to Rev. Cronin’s $100 and Mayor Bishop’s $50.219 But the object this time was strictly humanitarian. Whatever sort of disarray the American i n l may have been in, Irish Party representatives continued their fund-raising ventures in the United States, and in late November, recent jail escapees John Dillon and William O’Brien arrived in Buffalo along with T.D. Sullivan, co-editor of Speeches from the Dock, lord mayor of Dublin, and author of “God Save Ireland.” A shamrock-laden banner with the words “For Erin and Home Rule” greeted them in the Music Hall, as did local guardians of Irish-American power, notably W.F. Sheehan, shortly to become the ­lieutenant-governor of New York. All were struck by Dillon’s report that in the aftermath of Christmas, “50,000 families will be starving in the west of Ireland,” and though he was not present at Bishop Ryan’s public meeting the previous October, James Mooney now appeared to present a cheque for $5,000 to the Irish visitors.220 Moreover, Mooney claimed Buffalonians to have contributed almost $50,000 to Ireland since the time of Parnell’s visit in 1880, a substantial figure for what was still a mostly working-class community. How much more money had been remitted across the Atlantic for private and family-related purposes, however, is anyone’s guess. But Parnell was working through his own tribulations at precisely the same time as his lieutenants were addressing Buffalo’s nationalists. Having been named as co-respondent in the divorce case of Captain William O’Shea and wife Katherine ten days previously, Parnell survived

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re-election as Irish Party chairman on 25 November. The next day, ­however, he publicly lost the support of Gladstone. A letter from Dillon, O’Brien, and O’Sullivan advising Parnell to withdraw from the chairmanship appeared in the Union and Times one week after the visit, and though the paper continued to support Parnell through late December, others such as the Irish World and the Boston Pilot turned against him.221 Rev. Cronin was described as “one of his warmest advocates,” though Bishop Ryan did not now share this sentiment; the unsympathetic New York Times reported that in Buffalo, “most of the Irish leaders openly favor Parnell, but the bulk of the members of the Irish associations are against him.”222 The paper also declared Parnell’s cause to be “dead in Canada,” but in Toronto at least, the momentum had been lost for some time, with the Irish Canadian declaring poor returns for the Parnell Defence Fund at the end of 1888.223 While Orange anti–Home Rule meetings would continue and the Irish Canadian be put to rest at the end of 1892, it was left largely to Edward Blake to keep the issue alive in Toronto during the 1890s, especially after the second Home Rule bill (this time proposing a bicameral Irish legislature) was brought down by the House of Lords’ veto in September 1893. After being invited to join the ranks of the anti-Parnellite faction of the Irish Party, Blake semirelocated to Ireland in 1892 and was elected to the British Commons the following year. Matthew Jacobson has written of how nationalist organizations tend to mark off “the range of political possibilities which emigrants of the period thought practical and desirable.”224 Such possibilities refer not only to questions of constitutionalism versus insurrection at home; they refer also to the ways in which conceptions of Irish nationhood were informed by homeland stories, memories, myths, and political dramas, as well as emigrants’ experiences of resettlement and perceptions of destination societies. Canadian Confederation was hardly rooted in democratic ideology, and Irish Catholics had scant political representation in Ontario, yet the new dominion was argued to offer a more advanced state of freedom than prevailed in Ireland. Nevertheless, Canada was still prone to being seen as less of a “finished article” compared to the United States. As a frustrated Patrick Boyle put it in 1888: “tied as she is to the apron strings of the British Queen, Canada can do no more than plod her weary way.”225 While the circumstances of American settlement provided space for pro-Fenian republican rhetoric in the 1860s, there were few outright appeals for an Irish republic in Buffalo during the 1870s and

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From Misrule to Rome Rule 219

1880s.226 In any case, the complementary nature of Irish and American “freedom-loving” identities assumed popular Irish sympathies for a republican model as Fenianism slipped into the background. Framings of political possibility were also shaped by repeated narrations of the lives of heroic figures at the centre of recent Irish history. While Toronto’s Irish Protestant defenders of empire acknowledged O’Connell and even Emmet, they were most comfortable celebrating the  likes of Burke, Wellington, and Wolseley. Parnell, recognized by nationalists in both cities as a living Irish hero in the mid-1880s, was thought of quite differently by 1891, while the Orangemen’s eternal icon of William III, untroubled by political vicissitudes, was augmented by Ulster men of the moment such as William Johnston. While the Protestant Emmet remained the primary object for diasporic Irish commemoration in Buffalo, the Catholic O’Connell carried more symbolic currency in Toronto, and the Emmet nights and O’Connell picnics provided opportunities for parallel allegiances to be expressed to the United States and Canada respectively, as well as forums of opinion about what a “free Ireland” might look like. Although Toronto’s Fenian sympathizers were not keeping their heads down through the 1870s, the movement had weakened by the early 1880s as more moderate positions were considered. Buffalo Fenianism lived on in the branches of the Land and National Leagues in the 1880s, and while its role in the life of the corresponding Toronto branches is unclear, these were conspicuous by the participation of non-Irish labour activists. With the progress of Irish Home Rule gaining mainstream press coverage as well as support at the highest political levels, the onus was on the Toronto League to deliver critiques of British rule in Ireland in a measured way. In Buffalo, alliances between laity and clergy took shape in the in l branches as emotional speeches about “British misrule” reverberated between meeting halls and homes just as the language of “no surrender” and warnings of “Rome rule” echoed at similar venues in Toronto. The fall of Parnell, however, took the steam out of Irish nationalism both at home and abroad.

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P art t wo Continuities and Transitions in the Early Twentieth Century

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7 Channels, Niches, and Preserves: Occupations and Careers in the Early Twentieth Century

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were characterized in urban North America by population expansion, a broadening of immigration sources, and the beginnings of corporate capitalism and mass consumer markets. Victorian church spires were displaced from city skylines as the advent of steel and “cage” construction enabled the appearance of modern skyscrapers housing financial, legal, and other institutions. The burgeoning office sector introduced new rhythms of white-collar employment, while technological developments in manufacturing industries transformed the meaning and experience of work for certain trades as labour aristocracies faced new threats from the de-skilling process. Yet the chief anxiety of skilled workers and their unions, the proliferation of low-paying and relatively unskilled jobs, brought with it another concern: the arrival upon North American (but mainly American) shores of millions of non-English speakers. The ethnic diversity to be found within the working class was now far wider than in mid-century as the Irish, British, Germans, and other northern Europeans were joined by immigrants coming mainly from southern and eastern Europe. The geography of the city was now more readily discernible than that of its high Victorian counterpart. Not merely larger entities, cities were becoming increasingly segmented into various districts differentiated by  land use and the economic and cultural strata of the population. Downtown business districts were distinguished by their clusters of banks, insurance companies, and retail department stores, though the uncelebrated slum districts were not so far distant. Elsewhere, the electrification of street railways facilitated the growth of outer residential suburbs for a middle class increasingly aware of its position within the social order and an upper layer that had long taken it for granted.

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Industrial districts, whether close to downtown or on the city’s periphery, were typically characterized by landscapes of expanded factories, railroad junctions, sub-standard air quality, and modest residences. Class-based segregation intensified under these conditions; those with the means to move away from what they saw as an increasingly unhealthy and dangerous inner core did so, while others could do little more than aspire to similar escapes. Concerns about the health of urbanites were voiced by progressive reformers, who also pushed for more efficient and less partisan urban governance while occasionally questioning the assimilative qualities of the latest batch of newcomers. These transformations in urban life had profound consequences for an established immigrant group such as the Irish in terms of work, residential location, and ethnic identity. In the United States at least, the Irish remained heavily urbanized.1 But the material conditions of everyday life for the Irish in these towns and cities were also changing as the North American–born generations grew in importance, and it was this mix of people that was touched variously by the phenomenon that so excited the “new urban historians” of the 1960s and 1970s: social mobility. Irish-American journalist William Shannon’s 1963 assertion that the Irish “stood at the opening of the twentieth century with a foot in each world” of the working and middle classes inspired studies of intergenerational Irish lives across a variety of American urban locations.2 These works have, for Catholic Irish-Americans at least, tracked phenomena such as occupational advancement, the fracturing of immigrant reception neighbourhoods, and the rise of a growing “lace-curtain” group increasingly confident of its place in American social and public life. At a macro level, they have argued that the degree and pace of social mobility that Irish-Americans would enjoy was a function of their historical and geographical context, in that the degree to which they “broke through” improved the further west they settled.3 The following two chapters extend discussion of Irish social mobility beyond a purely American and Catholic context while broadening understandings of social mobility itself. As we shall see, what passed for Irish advancement in Buffalo and Toronto had an uneven quality that was influenced by their patterns of adjustment in each place through the second half of the nineteenth century, as well as by the changes occurring in each city in the decade before the First World War. While immigrants from Ireland continued to arrive in both cities, their numbers were more significant in Toronto, making the cohort of Irish there gradually more Protestant in composition. In Buffalo, the Irish continued to be regarded as a largely, if not exclusively, Catholic group.

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The initial focus of this chapter is the changing place of the Irish within the labour markets of the two cities. While both new and familiar forms of employment secured the livelihoods of the North American– born generations, particularly in the private sector, certain “job channels” were also put in place, structured through the social, economic, and political conditions experienced by the Irish in each city over the previous half-century. The second part of the chapter then compares some of the “preserves” and niche sectors occupied by men and women of Irish origin in a way that illuminates how the attractions towards certain jobs operated, encouraging expectations in some fields and discouraging them in others. On the whole, the Irish reached new plateaus of acceptance and success in both cities, playing their part in making and maintaining (and not simply breaking and disrupting) law and order, and lobbying for both status quo and reformist socio-political agendas. And while they remained visible as a group, the Irish came to occupy an important subsection of the “host culture” that newcomers to Buffalo and Toronto would encounter on everyday levels, not only in neighbourhoods and workplaces but also in the areas of law enforcement and education.

Buf fa l o : A dva n c e d P l urali sm and the R e o r d e r in g o f t h e L a bour Hi erarchy The years between 1880 and the outbreak of the Great War witnessed continuous expansions to the physical structures and populations of Buffalo and Toronto, the former growing to 423,715 by 1910, the latter to 376,538 by 1911 (tables 7.1 and 7.2). Buffalo, now considered a “blue-collar” city, was also becoming known as a mainly Catholic one. Harring’s analysis of published census data on occupation for 1900 and 1910 concludes that the city had “a larger proportion of its labour force in industrial work than any other city in America,” for example, as iron and steel came to the forefront of the area’s industries.4 The line to transmit electric power from Niagara Falls was completed by 1897, and Buffalo’s industrial reputation was further enhanced by the arrival of Lackawanna Steel south of the city in 1905. While federal funding helped to develop the harbour further, rail lines shuttled goods and people not only between Buffalo and elsewhere but also within the city itself. By 1900, it was possible to cross the nine miles of the city by streetcar in less than one hour, and transportation became a sector in which many of the new generation of American-born Irish gained employment in both manual and nonmanual capacities.5 The switchmen’s strike of 1892,

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Table 7.1 Characteristics of the population of Buffalo, 1900–20 1900

1910

1920

City population

352,387

423,715

506,775

Total foreign-born as % of city total Birthplace Germany as % of foreign-born as % of city total Ireland as % of foreign-born as % of city total Canada as % of foreign-born as % of city total England as % of foreign-born as % of city total Italy as % of foreign-born as % of city total Poland as % of foreign-born as % of city total

104,252 29.6

118,689 28.0

121,824 24.0

36,720 35.2 10.4 11,292 10.8 3.2 17,242 16.5 4.9 6,908 6.6 2.0 5,669 5.4 1.6 18,830 18.1 5.3

43,815 36.9 10.3 9,423 7.9 2.2 17,434 14.7 4.1 7,070 6.0 1.7 11,339 9.6 2.7 62,586 52.7 14.8

20,898 17.2 4.1 7,264 6.0 1.4 15,916 13.1 3.1 6,712 5.5 1.3 16,411 13.5 3.2 31,406 25.8 6.2

Source: United States Federal Census, 1900, 1910, and 1920.

however, illustrated the often-volatile labour relations present in the sector, and if some Irish had been involved in the strike of 1877, others would face down National Guardsmen in the summer of 1892.6 The increased production of steel nationwide, coupled with daring architectural visions, enabled grandiose new structures such as the thirteenstorey Guaranty (subsequently Prudential) and Ellicott Square Buildings to take their place in Buffalo’s downtown core before the turn of the century. The Guaranty’s principal architect, Louis Sullivan, called it a “sister building” to his prototype skyscraper, the Wainwright Building in St Louis, and the Ellicott Square structure, boasting an Italian Renaissance influence, was the world’s largest office building in 1900, with ten storeys and six hundred separate offices.7 Other notable buildings were the neoclassical Buffalo Savings Bank (1901) and the General Electric Tower (1912), while the Mooney-Brisbane Building temporarily etched Irish nationalist and real estate guru James Mooney’s name onto

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Table 7.2 Characteristics of the population of Toronto, 1901–21

City population Number of Roman Catholics as % of city total Birthplace England as % of city total Ireland as % of city total Scotland as % of city total United States as % of city total Italy as % of city total Germany as % of city total Austria-Hungary, Russia, Poland as % of city total

1901

1911

1921

208,040 28,994 13.9

376,538 46,368 12.3

521,893 64,773 12.4

24,901 12.0 11,804 5.7 6,464 3.1 6,270 3.0 584 0.3 847 0.4 1,475

71,116 18.9 15,964 4.2 19,787 5.3 11,500 3.1 3,065 0.8 1,308 0.3 11,900

95,484 18.3 17,787 3.4 29,402 5.6 14,938 2.9 3,902 0.7 492 0.1 19,952

0.7

3.2

3.8

Source: Census of Canada, 1901, 1911, and 1921.

the Main Street landscape, and was completed in 1895.8 Developments in retailing included the building of an indoor street arcade in 1892, while the department stores of William Hengerer, H.A. Meldrum, and James N. Adam were the big names in the Saturday shopping rituals of the middle class. As a group, the Irish were now less conspicuous in the city than in the 1870s. By 1900, they formed just 10.8 percent of Buffalo’s foreign-born population, having been surpassed by Poles and Canadians, and by 1920, this proportion had dropped further to 6 percent (table 7.1). The 7,264 Irish-born individuals remaining in the city in the latter year were now heavily outnumbered by 31,406 Poles and 16,411 Italians. The three-way ethnic division of Buffalo between Anglo-Americans, Irish, and Germans that had prevailed for a half-century was now transformed by an influx of mostly Catholics. Anglo-American Protestants took note of this expanded cultural pluralism. The Episcopalian Bishop of Western New York, Arthur Cleveland Coxe, for example, compared the new arrivals to the “overflow of the Goths and Vandals upon Spain and Italy” and hoped that their assimilation would proceed without

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“any encroachment from Rome or elsewhere that exacts from any of  them any allegiance to foreign supremacy.”9 Elsewhere, the Buffalo school superintendent’s report of 1912 referred to the ongoing task of  moulding the “strange population” of “Slavs, Greeks, Ruthenians, Syrians and ­others” into a “useful, homogeneous citizenship, retaining the best ideals of each nationality and educating all to our own standards of learning and living.”10 In the Catholic Union and Times, Rev. Patrick Cronin remarked that the Irish were not merely one or two generations ahead of the newcomers but that “the American child of Irish parents [has] the English language and literature” and “the American tradition and spirit [from] the very beginning. In no way can he be called foreign born even for the sake of precision.”11 Although the complementarity between American and Irish identities was reiterated here, Cronin did not pause to consider the connections between such Irish “pre-­adaptation” and the long-term linguistic transformation in Ireland brought about by what he would in other contexts term “the Saxon foe.” In the world of remunerative occupations, things were improving for Buffalo’s Irish. Two samples generated from the 1900 and 1920 censuses by the Population Center at the University of Minnesota form the basis for the analysis of their occupational fortunes in early twentieth-century Buffalo.12 While the numbers of Irish of two generations in these samples are rather small, their results provide useful insights into the ways in which Buffalo’s labour market was becoming transformed by the turn of the twentieth century and how the position of the Irish had shifted within it. Entering the occupations of 1,023 adult males identified in the 1900 sample into the classifications used in earlier chapters produces a manual proportion of just over sixty percent for the city as a whole (table 7.3). The Irish fitted into this picture as a group that was still heavily manual working-class, with more than seventy-three percent of those adult males with a stated occupation fitting into this broad category. “Irish” here again refers to those of Irish birth as well as those born elsewhere to an Irish-born father in order to provide some degree of comparability, however imperfect, with the data presented in chapter 3. Yet this was not now a group in which the most substantial occupational category was that of unskilled labour – the bulge in the table is now in the skilled and semi-skilled sector (at 42.3 percent) with a proportion in the building trades (9.9 percent) slightly above that for the city as a whole. Italians and Poles were now notable for their concentrations in unskilled labour. Polish men, and some women, braved Buffalo’s foundries, factories, slaughterhouses, and railroad yards, with others trying

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Table 7.3 Occupational distribution of adult males for leading ethnocultural groups in Buffalo, 1900

Owners and managers Agents on commission Self-employed Other middle-class Clerical Manual working class Skilled/semi-skilled Unskilled Building trades Tota l

American

German

N

%

N

9 13 56 28 28

3.4 4.9 21.3 10.6 10.6

93 35.4 22 8.4 14 5.3 263 100.0

5 11 101 14 17

Irish

%

N

%

1.4 3.2 29.3 4.1 4.9

0 2 19 10 7

0.00 1.4 13.4 7.00 4.9

119 34.5 46 13.3 32 9.3 345 100.0

60 42.3 30 21.1 14 9.9 142 100.0

Polish N 0 2 5 3 1

All

%

N

%

0.00 3.0 7.6 4.5 1.5

18 36 226 67 63

1.8 3.5 22.1 6.5 6.2

19 28.8 28 42.4 8 12.1 66 100.0

360 35.2 166 16.2 87 8.5 1,023 100.0

Source: ipums sample.

their hands as longshoremen on the docks and labourers on construction projects.13 In 1900, a family survey in the Polish district of east Buffalo by the New York State Tenement House Commission revealed 543 family heads (sixty-three percent) to be engaged in labouring jobs from a total of 863 families.14 The Tenement House commissioners described the Italians as being largely “employed about the docks or as street laborers, also in railway construction.”15 They were, in the main, quite impoverished; struggling to make ends meet for their families when seasonal work in Buffalo dried up, Italian men floated around Western New York and further afield in their off-months. Yans-McLaughlin finds ­almost seventy percent of Buffalo’s 3,577 Italian-born working males to be engaged in labouring jobs in 1905, these overwhelmingly of the outdoor variety.16 While the Poles were most conspicuous on the east side of the city, Italian families were not enthusiastically received by many of the Irish into whose First Ward neighbourhood some of them later moved. In Days Beyond Recall, Italians are casually referred to in derogatory terms as “Dagoes” and “Ginnies”; protagonist Rose Shanahan’s grandmother expresses strong reservations about renting to “dirty Dagoes,” while on another occasion, her snobbish cousin Ella inquires about Rose’s life as a schoolteacher “with all the little Dagoes.”17 A non-fictional veteran of that rough-and-tumble ward, the Co. Cork–born Michael Regan who survived the 1893 election scandal to become Buffalo’s chief of police in 1906, considered the criminal tendencies of Italian men to be enough to make the group “a dangerous class” in general.18

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Buffalo’s Irish, then, were no longer the chief objects of attention for those investigating the city’s social problems. When one looks beyond the pages of the Union and Times, the Irish now possessed a relative invisibility – they were less feared and could, to some degree, be safely ignored. A boosterist volume, Twentieth Century Buffalo, published in 1903, had nothing to say about the Irish yet commented on the “admirable musical and social organizations” of the Germans, echoing the positive descriptions of that group given by Perry Smith in The History of Buffalo and Erie County almost twenty years earlier.19 The census samples provide useful context for the slow but sure advance of the Irish towards the occupational middle ground in Buffalo. The proportion of adult males of Irish birth or ancestry engaged in manual jobs, for example, fell from over seventy percent in 1900 to less than sixty percent in 1920, while the balance of manual and nonmanual jobs in the city as a whole remained stable for the period, most males remaining employed in skilled and semi-skilled work (table 7.4). The middleclass occupational group grew appreciably; in 1900, about seven percent of males of Irish birth or ancestry were pursuing these jobs, and by 1920 this percentage had expanded to seventeen as positions such as salesmen were taken up mostly by the American-born generation. The percentage engaged in unskilled labour dropped from 21.1 to 14.6 over these two decades. While there were still many Irish-born labourers present in the city, the numbers of new arrivals from the old country had slowed down noticeably. Though the census samples of 1900 and 1920 do not capture a large number of employed females in Buffalo, their results deserve commentary. The 330 females of all ages with a stated occupation identified in 1900 were not now confined to manual occupations such as domestic service and dressmaking. While thirty-seven percent were in domestic labour, a further thirty percent were self-employed (boarding-house keepers, dressmakers/seamstresses, launderers), and the middle-class and white-collar sectors made up twenty percent. The proportion of females of Irish birth or ancestry working in domestic service was only slightly more than one-quarter, most of these being Irish-born, while thirty percent engaged in white-collar jobs at percentages higher than the urban population as a whole. By 1920, white-collar jobs comprised about half of the jobs performed by females, although for those women of Irish origin (a mere thirty-five cases) there was not the same white-collar presence. This could be explained by the outflow of those third-generation daughters of Irish ancestry who became part of the “American” group

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Table 7.4 Occupational distribution of adult males for leading ethnocultural groups in Buffalo, 1920

Owners and managers Agents on commission Self-employed Other middle-class Clerical Manual working class Skilled/semi-skilled Unskilled Building trades Tota l

American

German

N

%

N

%

N

%

N

11 36 31 85 41

2.6 8.6 7.4 20.2 9.7

6 15 41 29 22

2.0 5.0 13.8 9.7 7.4

1 6 6 14 6

1.2 7.3 7.3 17.1 7.3

1 5 19 10 1

153 36.3 23 5.5 41 9.7 421 100.0

116 38.9 33 11.1 36 12.1 298 100.0

Irish

31 37.8 12 14.6 6 7.3 82 100.0

Polish % 0.5 2.3 8.8 4.6 0.5

76 35.2 89 41.2 15 6.9 216 100.0

All N

%

21 86 134 176 95

1.5 6.3 9.8 12.8 6.9

494 36.0 240 17.5 125 9.1 1,371 100.0

Source: ipums sample.

– almost sixty percent of the latter group was performing white-collar work. We will later return to the Delaware Avenue district to examine in closer detail the status of the “Irish Bridget” in early twentieth-century Buffalo, as well as the lives of the city’s Irish-American women in a familiar white-collar pursuit, namely teaching. The Irish were now also less prominent on the radar screens of Buffalo’s charitable agencies, as indicated by the annual reports of the Overseer of the Poor. Of the 1,417 families receiving outdoor relief during the fiscal year of 1 July 1907 to 30 June 1908, only eighty-one (5.7 percent) were of Irish “nationality.”20 Again, the focus had shifted towards the city’s Polish households, who made up 38.4 percent of all recipients, though there were doubtless many Irish-American families among the Americanborn, who made up 25.3 percent of the total number of aid recipients, which would extend the “Irish” percentage by 10 to 15 percent or so. If this is true, then Irish households of multiple generations were still less than one-fifth of city-wide relief recipients, and these proportions for the different nationality groups remained stable over the following five years.

T o ro n to : T h e “ Ir is h Race” wi thi n a M e t ro p o l ita n L a bour Market Although it too had become more industrial, Toronto was less blue-­collar than Buffalo in the early twentieth century. J.M.S. Careless’ depiction of the city in this period as a financial metropolis is useful, and in a

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dominion that still lacked big cities, Toronto now had the potential to house the headquarters of multiple commercial and financial institutions possessing a national reach.21 With settler colonization proceeding apace on the Canadian prairies, the business and employment opportunities it afforded were grasped by many within the city. This political-locational dimension set Toronto apart from Buffalo, which had to compete not only with Midwestern centres but also with the rising west-coast cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Much of Buffalo’s industry was also controlled by outside interests, limiting its capacity as a headquartering hub.22 The new age of corporate business in Toronto’s downtown was heralded by the completion in 1895 of the ten-storey Temple Building with its Romanesque exterior, and the years after witnessed a proliferation of structures of similar height in the area around the junction of Yonge and Queen Streets. The downtown recovered after the setback of the great fire of 1904, and by the time war erupted in Europe in 1914, the fifteen-storey Canadian Pacific Railroad Building had been completed; the twenty-storey Royal Bank Building followed in 1915. Eaton’s and Simpson’s represented Toronto versions of Hengerer’s and Adam’s, though unlike the latter, they managed to survive attempted purchase by larger New York-based concerns. The ready-to-wear garments advertised by these two retailing empires in the city’s newspapers also spoke to the importance of the clothing industry, and the outlet it created for female employment in particular.23 Indeed, in terms of employment, clothing remained the most important industry in the city, with iron and steel a distant second.24 In Toronto, the economic stagnation of late Victorian times gave way to a rejuvenated inflow of migrants anxious to enjoy the economic rewards promised by the Edwardian boom years. The wave of annexations between 1883 and 1893 “virtually doubled the areal extent of the city,” and it doubled once again in territory between 1903 and 1914.25 The change in Toronto’s population structure from 1881 to 1911 had less of a “foreigner” component than Buffalo’s, however. New immigrants came in search of work from the familiar source region of the United Kingdom, with the proportion coming from England far outstripping Scottish and Irish arrivals (table 7.2).26 These immigrants helped Toronto maintain its self-image as loyal, British, and Anglo-Saxon, buoyed as that already was by visions of imperial greatness generated in the years between the Victorian Diamond Jubilee of 1897 and the First World War. A peak was reached during the Anglo-Boer War, prior to which

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annual Empire Day parades were commenced to coincide with the 24  May holiday.27 Toronto, in contrast to Buffalo, was becoming less Catholic, but like in the American city, continental European arrivals were not escaping the notice of the host population. In the downtown area, the dress and language of Orthodox Jews and the street music of Italians signalled the presence of a different type of newcomer.28 Given this new context of visible and audible diversity in Toronto, the increase in the numbers of Irish-born between 1901 and 1921 did not attract much attention. This was, however, an important wave of Irish immigration that was largely Protestant in character, as analysis of the year of arrival from a 1911 census sample of Irish-born reveals (table 7.5). The original sample was taken at the national scale by the Canada Century Research Infrastructure (c c r i ) project and the households of the municipality of Toronto were extracted for examination.29 Of the 296 sampled Irish immigrants who settled in the city between 1901 and 1911, a little more than half did so from 1907, the vast majority of whom were Protestants.30 Given the charged political atmosphere in Ireland after 1910 especially, Toronto’s economic buoyancy, combined with its long-held reputation as an Orange-friendly place, made it attractive to Protestants planning their departure, not least from Ulster, where traditions of choosing Canada had long been set within many localities. The 1911 census categories also illustrate prevailing conceptions of race, with the variable “ethnic origin” now renamed “racial origin.” Racial discourses were not narrowly focused around skin colour, since the idea of Celtic, Gaelic, and Anglo-Saxon races had become entrenched in the popular imagination, thanks to the work of Irish and English nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic as well as local editors.31 The picture had, however, changed from the 1860s when more than forty percent of Toronto’s population had some Irish background (chapter 2). Now, only 21.7 percent of the city’s population was of Irish (paternal) origin, a decrease from 29.5 percent in 1901.32 The great “origin group” in the city was now the English, whose share of the population moved from 45.2 percent in 1901 to 48.2 percent in 1911, thanks largely to the upsurge in immigration. In employment terms, the 1911 Toronto ccri sample yielded a total of 6,062 adult males and 1,919 adult females with stated occupations (table 7.6). Employed males of Irish origin conformed broadly to the city totals for the various occupational groupings, with a slight under-­representation in manual work. On a multi-generational scale undifferentiated by

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Table 7.5 Irish-born in the City of Toronto by year of immigration, 1911 Year of immigration to Canada

Total number of Irish-born

1825–55 1856–70 1871–80 1881–90 1891–1900 1901–11 T o tal

43 81 87 141 50 296 698

%

Total number of Irish-born Catholics

%

Catholics as a % of the total for each immigration period

6.2 11.6 12.5 20.2 7.2 42.4 100.0

18 23 24 37 15 46 163

11.0 14.1 14.7 22.7 9.2 28.2 100.0

41.9 28.4 27.6 26.2 30.0 15.5 32.1

Source: Canada Century Research Infrastructure five percent random sample of dwellings.

Table 7.6 The occupations of Toronto adult males by selected “racial origin,” 1911 England

Owners and managers Agents on commission Self-employed Other middle-class Clerical Manual working class Skilled/semi-skilled Unskilled Building trades T o tal

Ireland

Scotland

N

%

N

%

N

116 235 109 347 149

4.1 8.2 3.8 12.2 5.2

49 129 66 129 96

4.0 46 10.6 115 5.4 31 10.6 138 7.9 76

%

Others N

4.9 49 12.2 72 3.3 110 14.6 92 8.1 25

Total

%

N

%

4.6 6.8 10.4 8.7 2.4

260 551 316 706 346

4.3 9.1 5.2 11.6 5.7

1,012 35.5 433 35.7 325 34.4 370 35.1 2,140 35.3 495 17.4 162 13.4 85 9.0 225 21.3 967 16.0 388 13.6 148 12.2 128 13.6 53 5.0 717 11.8 2,851 100.0 1,212 100.0 944 100.0 996 100.0 6,003 100.0

Source: Canada Century Research Infrastructure five percent random sample of dwellings. Note: Fifty-nine individuals without a stated “racial origin” have been excluded from the total.

religious denomination, then, “the Irish” did not stand out; Scottish males instead emerged as more middle-class than the Irish and English, with just nine percent of them working at unskilled jobs. How did these broad patterns appear when broken down by generation and religion? Less surprisingly, those Irish-born involved in manualwork categories exceeded the city averages (table 7.7). While about sixteen percent of all males in the city were engaged in unskilled wage labour, the share within the Irish-born group was just over twenty-five, almost identical to that of the English-born. England, however, was

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Table 7.7 The occupations of Toronto adult males by selected birthplaces, 1911 England N Owners and managers Agents on commission Self-employed Other middle-class Clerical Manual working class Skilled/semi-skilled Unskilled Building trades Tota l

39 75 50 138 56

% 2.6 5.0 3.3 9.1 3.7

544 35.9 383 25.3 230 15.2 1,515 100.0

Ireland N 5 21 24 22 18

% 1.7 6.9 7.9 7.3 5.9

104 34.3 77 25.4 32 10.6 303 100.0

Canada

Others

N

%

N

171 366 142 436 236

5.8 12.4 4.8 14.8 8.0

49 93 107 114 40

1,021 34.7 236 8.0 337 11.4 2,945 100.0

Total

% 3.8 7.2 8.2 8.8 3.1

493 38.0 279 21.5 124 9.5 1,299 100.0

N

%

264 551 323 708 349

4.4 9.2 5.4 11.8 5.8

2,149 35.7 958 15.9 717 11.9 6,019 100.0

Source: Canada Century Research Infrastructure five percent random sample of dwellings. Note: Forty-three individuals without a stated birthplace have been excluded from the total.

now by far the most important source of newcomers to Toronto, many of whom started initially in the lower reaches of the labour market like their counterparts of the 1870s. Though not considered foreign, the English were still distinctive, and, for one writer, were perceived by the Canadian-born in “less positive” terms when compared with Scots and Ulstermen.33 Those considered truly foreign, on the other hand (comprising many of the “others” in table 7.7), faced consistently negative attitudes and suspicion, though many of them avoided unskilled labour during this period. Jews in particular set their initial sights on self-­ employment as peddlers, artisans, and small-time traders before looking to the city’s garment industry for more skilled jobs.34 Among the four leading denominations of the city, the sample data reveal Catholics to have remained over-concentrated in manual jobs, with over twenty-eight percent of all adult Catholic males working in unskilled positions and over thirty-three percent undertaking skilled and semi-skilled work. Yet the results also indicate that individuals of Irish origin now made up barely half of all Catholics in the city, the remainder being (in order of importance) of English, Italian, French, Scottish, and German origin. In occupational terms, moreover, broad occupational distinctions between Toronto’s Irish Protestant and Catholic immigrants were not especially striking (table 7.8). Though the figures are rather small, the proportion of Irish-born Protestants engaged in manual labour (almost sixty-nine percent) did not diverge so widely from that of their

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Table 7.8 The occupations of Toronto adult males of Irish “racial origin” by birthplace and religion, 1911 Irish-born Protestant N Owners and managers Agents on commission Self-employed Other middle-class Clerical Manual working class Skilled/semi-skilled Unskilled Building trades T o tal

%

Not Irish-born

Catholic N

%

Protestant

Catholic

City

N

%

N

%

N

%

5 14 18 17 14

2.3 6.4 8.2 7.8 6.4

0 6 5 5 3

0 8.2 6.8 6.8 4.1

33 75 31 84 56

5.2 11.8 4.9 13.2 8.8

11 33 12 22 23

4.0 12.0 4.4 8.0 8.4

264 555 323 710 350

4.4 9.2 5.3 11.7 5.8

73 55 23 219

33.3 25.1 10.5 100.0

26 21 7 73

35.6 28.8 9.6 100.0

225 45 88 637

35.3 7.1 13.8 100.0

105 39 30 275

38.2 14.2 10.9 100.0

2,162 975 723 6,062

35.7 16.1 11.9 100.0

Source: Canada Century Research Infrastructure five percent random sample of dwellings. Note: Nine males that are Irish-born but not of Irish “racial origin” have been excluded from the calculations.

Catholic counterparts (seventy-four percent). Neither are the percentages of Irish-born Catholic and Protestant men working in unskilled jobs very different. The higher numbers of Protestant Irishmen, and the recent arrival of many among their number, help to explain this relative equivalence of position at the lower reaches of Toronto’s labour market. Finally, those Catholic males of Irish origin who were not Irish-born were not only underrepresented in unskilled work generally, but their proportion within nonmanual occupations (36.8 percent) slightly exceeded that for the city as a whole (36.4 percent). There were good reasons for many Canadian-born Catholics of Irish origin to feel confident about their future. The 1911 sample also indicates that although white-collar jobs were increasing in number, many women in Toronto remained concentrated in skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled work as dressmakers, factory ­operatives, laundresses, seamstresses, and domestic servants.35 Of the 1,919  women with stated occupations in the sample, fifty-six percent were working in these manual positions, with a further forty percent in  middle-class, clerical, and sales-related jobs. Those female workers of Irish racial origin, 513 in total, were overrepresented in nonmanual occupations (four were Catholic nuns). Of the 314 females of Protestant Irish background, almost half pursued manual jobs, with the 194 Catholic

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females (excluding the nuns) closer to fifty-five percent. Once again, it is not surprising to find the Irish-born within both groups to be concentrated in the service sector as waitresses and servants; Irish-Canadian women commuting to office jobs were of mostly the second and later generations.

C a r e e r D y n a m ic s Wi thi n and B e t w e e n G e nerati ons While the census samples offer useful cross-sectional and intergenerational snapshots of the fortunes of Irish men and women in the Buffalo and Toronto labour markets of the early twentieth century, a more longitudinal view of people’s lives provides a fuller sense of the dynamics of their employment histories. Such a view can be obtained by following the careers of (mostly male) individuals from the Irish household samples taken from the censuses of 1880–81 and used in the analysis of occupations in chapter 3. The familiar problem of common surnames meant that tracing the fortunes of all family members through city directories was not possible. Instead, a subset of households with relatively uncommon family names was generated, totalling 184 in Buffalo and 205 in Toronto.36 This approach had its own limitations, since many of these households had deserted the two cities before 1890, and prevailing attitudes towards gender roles meant that the salaried or waged careers of young females were largely over on their wedding days, resulting in their disappearances from the directories. Some patterns of interest are nonetheless worthy of discussion. Half of the cohort of Irishmen in both cities who were unskilled labourers in 1881 and remained residents of each for the following ­twenty years found an occupation in a line above general labouring. Most of these opportunities existed in the semi-skilled, skilled, and building ­sectors as drivers, railroad signalmen, firemen, plasterers, and policemen. Nonmanual work was rarely achieved for this group, and occurred mostly in supervisory roles as foremen or self-employment as building contractors or saloon-keepers, since it was difficult and costly for unskilled immigrants to accumulate the education and training required for the professions after emigrating as young adults. By 1885, seventy-four percent of these Buffalo Irish labourers were still pursuing unskilled work (a total of forty-seven individuals), but by 1910, when there were just thirteen of these individuals left, eight of them were engaged in more skilled jobs. In Toronto, where the unskilled were comparatively fewer

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and included a disproportionate number of Catholics, more than onethird had escaped such jobs by 1910, though with eight individuals remaining by that date, the numbers are too small to draw meaningful comparisons between the cities. The key point is that movement within the manual working class was the general pattern in both places, a conclusion that mirrors patterns found in other cities. In Detroit, for instance, lateral job movements provided Irishmen “with the important illusion of personal progress while requiring little need for retraining or entailing only a minimal investment of family savings.”37 The prestige accorded certain occupations was an important dimension of personal progress, whether real or illusory, though such perceptions did not always follow a smooth continuum from manual to  nonmanual. Instances of movements from the nonmanual sector (mostly lower white-collar clerical jobs) to the manual sector may not necessarily have been viewed as downward mobility by those experiencing them. The ups and downs of running a grocery may have led individuals to prefer more stable income streams within larger industrial or commercial establishments, for example.38 Ileen Devault has shown for turn-of-the-century Pittsburgh that the interface between “skilled bluecollar” and “lower white-collar” was anything but clear, while Ewa Morawska’s East-Central European informants discuss how skilled workers were placed ahead of “small shopkeepers and store clerks” in 1920s Johnstown, Pennsylvania, with police constables ranked “high in terms of power and occupations.”39 Generational distinctions were also discernible for the United States as a whole by the Immigration Commission’s report of 1911, which utilized the 1900 census.40 In the case of the Buffalo and Toronto Irish, new generations observed their parents and peers in making judgments as to what sorts of jobs were attainable and attractive, as well as those they wanted to avoid, to the degree that they had the ability to choose. Little in the way of formal training was needed to be a patrolman or firefighter or to manage a saloon, and these jobs attracted immigrants who may have scored low on formal education but high on ability and character. But even some white-collar positions proved frustrating: in 1910, bank clerks in Toronto complained of inadequate salaries as the cost of living increased.41 For those wishing to fulfill expectations of marriage and family formation, steady income streams mattered. The seasonality of waterfront work was not attractive to young North American–born men in this respect, and the isolation of domestic service became similarly unappealing to their female counterparts. While many among this generation avoided

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such futures, not all did. Finally, given prevailing attitudes towards alcohol among middle-class evangelical Protestants in Toronto, few of their sons or daughters were likely to envision careers as tavern or boardinghouse keepers.42 Comparing the occupations of fathers and sons is the most straightforward measure of gauging intergenerational differences in economic position in Buffalo and Toronto. Although determining the appropriate stage of a son’s career in order to compare his occupation with that of his father is not without its problems, the careers of those sons born between 1860 and 1880 were examined.43 The results show that while most Irish labourers’ sons remained within the working class in both cities, few occupied labouring jobs themselves. By 1910, more than seventy percent of the sons of fathers engaged in unskilled work in Buffalo in 1880 were working in more skilled positions, with some running their own groceries or working as lawyers. In Toronto, the sons of Irish labourers were likely to end up in skilled or semi-skilled occupations such as teamster, driver, packer, fireman, tilesetter, brickmaker, plumber, and policeman; by 1910, St Michael’s College had integrated with the University of Toronto and become a more attractive site to Catholics seeking higher education.44 As the following chapter will show, “Irish Catholic” neighbourhoods did not endure in late Edwardian Toronto to the same extent as in Buffalo, and in the latter city the scope for Irish businessmen and entrepreneurs to operate within ethnic neighbourhoods remained. In Toronto, while new immigrants such as the Italians claimed labouring jobs in sectors such as the street railway, they were also gaining footholds as fruit traders and greengrocers.45 In any case, expectations had clearly changed among the new generations, and each city’s school system responded to the needs of those from the upper echelons of the working class who could afford to stay longer in education. Manual training was available for boys, while girls received the basics of subjects such as bookkeeping and stenography. Expansions and improvements in transportation offered alternative arenas for steady, year-round employment. In Toronto, the sons of Catholic and Protestant Irishmen were employed by major railroad corporations such as the Grand Trunk and the Canadian Pacific, in addition to local concerns such as the Toronto Railway Company. Transportation offered a career outlet for such individuals as Methodist brothers ­Thomas and John Roulston, sons of a wood merchant, whose employers included the City Dairy Company and the intriguingly named Puritan Laundry Company. In Buffalo, too, where the impress of railroads on the

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waterfront and East Side was impossible to ignore, jobs were available for the North American–born generation. Indeed, one of the city’s ­Catholic parishes, St Columba’s, founded in 1888 and straddling its east and south sides, was described as “largely a railroad-men’s parish.”46 While Richard Cawl, the son of an immigrant ship carpenter, worked as a clerk for the New York Central, his brother John worked as a fireman for the Western New York and Pennsylvania Railway. Michael Dee, an immigrant labourer’s son, worked as a car tender and brakeman at various times for the Lehigh Valley Railroad, while Edward J. ­Condon, born in Canada and raised by a janitoress mother in the 1880s, acquired employment first as a baggageman and later as a clerk and agent for the Pennsylvania Railroad. There is more to the story of upward mobility than escape from the drudgery of menial work, however, since there were those among each city’s Irish whose families’ economic histories had brought them little, if any, interaction with such drudgery. Toronto’s Protestant Irish middle class, in particular, found ways to reproduce itself and extend its levels of economic and cultural capital. Some fathers channelled their sons into their own line of work or used their influence to open up other occupational avenues, thus maintaining the social standing of the family name in general. Family businesses endured through the passing of ownership from fathers to sons as they grew in scale and complexity. While the success story of Co. Antrim immigrant Timothy Eaton’s department store is a well-known case, another Irish Methodist, James Aikenhead, born in Co. Kilkenny, had his business taken over by his son Thomas while two other sons, James and John, worked as a clerk and a traveller for the company. A profile of the Toronto-born Thomas appeared in a 1911 publication that described him as “President and general manager of Aikenhead Hardware,” a firm with “some 100 employees, and … one of the most widely known hardware houses in Canada.” He was furthermore identified as “a member of the Ontario Club, Toronto Bowling Club, Board of Trade, and the Ontario Motor League … a director of the Tisdale Iron Stable Fittings Co … [and a] trustee of Elm St. Methodist Church.”47 As a member of both the Irish Protestant Benevolent Society (i p b s ) and the Orange Order, Thomas Aikenhead’s father built a wide network of contacts that he expanded further through business dealings. i p b s membership, in particular, helped James Aikenhead to confirm his place among Toronto’s respectable middle class. And while Timothy Eaton managed the same feat without fraternal involvement, both he and

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James Aikenhead became connected within Toronto’s commercial circles, with their sons accessing the most luxurious and bourgeois objects of the age, whether sailing craft or automobiles. Thomas Aikenhead, however, could not top Eaton’s son John Craig (Jack), who became vicepresident of the company in 1900, a “carefree bachelor who loved parties, plays and spirits as much as his father hated them.” Jack was the owner of Ontario automobile license no. 1, which he used for frequent trips to the northern Muskoka woods.48 Unlike that of the self-employed saloon-keepers in Buffalo’s First Ward, the clientele of Aikenhead’s and Eaton’s spread far beyond the city’s Irish communities. Membership in one of the four leading Protestant denominations secured their family names at the social and economic heart of the loyal British-Canadian majority in the city, and their advertisements appeared regularly in its directories and newspapers. Eaton’s famously extended white-collar employment opportunities for young women, and the occupational histories show that by 1912, the firm was employing Ontario-born women such as Eliza O’Toole and Margaret Larmour as clerks. Eliza was the daughter of an Irish-born Catholic cellarman and maltster who had worked in Eugene O’Keefe’s renowned brewery, while Margaret was the daughter of William Larmour, a merchant tailor born in Co. Down.49 More than two thousand sales staff were employed in the Toronto Eaton’s store by the time of the First World War, with others employed in its manufacturing, expense, and mail-order branches.50 Similar intergenerational business strategies were pursued by those Buffalo Irish families who had acquired some economic security. Patrick O’Rourke was a First Ward shoemaker who had his premises on the downtown artery of Main Street in 1880. His two sons went on to learn this trade in their youth, one (Thomas) eventually establishing his own premises further north on the street in 1883. The latter establishment, initially specializing in boots and shoes, was later expanded to include a  hotel (the Eureka) and a gents’ furnishings retail business. In other instances, fathers with a foot in Buffalo’s building trades as carpenters, ship carpenters, and painters passed on their occupational skills to their sons, and there were cases where fathers secured employment for both sons and daughters in non-family workplaces. In Buffalo, George Fullerton, a superintendent with the Mutual Gaslight Co., secured a job for his son, George Jr, first as a foreman and later as assistant superintendent. His daughter Amelia also worked there in her late teens as a clerk. In Toronto, Michael Cashman, an Irish-born Catholic, worked as a clerk with the Globe newspaper in the early 1880s, and subsequently

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found jobs there for his two eldest sons, Albert (as a clerk) and Richard (as a printer). Another son, George, later joined his father and two brothers at the firm, working as a line operator. All three sons remained in the employ of the Globe beyond the end of the tracked period (1911), and when Michael died of apoplexy at his home in 1916, he had been at work earlier in the day. He was sixty-seven years of age and had spent a total of forty-five years in the Globe mailing room.51 Finally, weeklies such as Buffalo’s Union and Times reported local success stories of men who were “making it” such as E.P. Clossey, who in 1890 was noted to have “resigned his position as train dispatcher of the Lake Shore road for this division and will devote his entire attention to his chosen profession, the law. Mr. Clossey obtained his degree by close study after business hours and passed high in his class.”52 Such stories, when related often, shaped the aspirations of some while animating the gossip circuits of others.

N ic h e a n d P res erve There were multiple workplace situations in which men and women of Irish origin felt themselves to be experiencing a sense of progress by the early twentieth century. However, chroniclers of Irish America have typically cited the group’s capacity to enter public employment positions such as policemen, firemen, and teachers, among the most popular.53 In John Brennan’s critique of Democratic ward politics in Erin Mor, alderman Burns is asked by a recently arrived Irish immigrant what a citizen is and responds: “If you’ll ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies. You’re a citizen and a Democrat – a Jacksonian Democrat; and maybe it’s a policeman I’d make of you one of these days.”54 And while Steven Erie’s sobering analysis of Irish American occupational shifts cautions against overemphasis on the public sector, analysis of this sector offers some insight into shifts within wider power relations in cities and the symbolic capital accorded certain occupations by the Irish.55 Although the growth of Buffalo and Toronto increased each city’s need for more public employees, the cultural and political contexts of place mattered when the above-mentioned niches in public occupations are considered. These place-related dimensions also matter when considering Irish involvement in other occupations for which they had already become known, such as domestic service and saloon-keeping, and these two private sector pursuits are also examined to provide some balance to the analysis.

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The Fates of Females: Servants and Teachers While the emergence of corporate office skyscrapers in the downtowns of Buffalo and Toronto promised new opportunities for young and literate men and women, the presidents and executives serving the firms occupying these buildings continued to demand the labour of domestic servants to maintain their elite lifestyles. Recruitment of such labour was not now such a straightforward process, however. No matter how monotonous jobs as junior clerks and typists might have seemed, offices provided ready access to a social scene in which friendships and courtships could blossom. With many of the richest families retreating to suburban districts, domestic service now appeared even more isolating than before, despite the advent of electric streetcars. The ratio of servants per thousand families had fallen across the United States in the half-century preceding 1920 so that by the latter year, “servants were available to only about half as many families as they had been in 1870.”56 These trends were broadly followed in Buffalo. There, there were 145 servants over ten years of age per thousand families in the city in 1880, but by 1900, this figure was 118, and by 1920, it had declined further to 47.57 While Delaware Avenue became an artery along which the better-off moved in their quest to find residential tranquility in the northern parts of the city, it remained a coveted address. The district was now less of a home to Irish immigrant domestics than in the 1880s, however, as a revisiting of its wards through the 1910 federal census manuscripts reveals (table 7.9).58 Of the 458 servants employed in 203 district households, just 92, or one-fifth, were Irish-born. And though historians of Irish America have noted the continued propensity of Irish-born women to occupy domestic service jobs in the early twentieth century, the Buffalo evidence again indicates that their second-generation counterparts remained a significant cohort within the ranks of the city’s ­live-in domestics.59 Of the 170 New York–born servants, for instance, thirty-three were born to Irish fathers. If it is assumed that these New Yorkers were mostly Buffalonians, the presence of these native-born servant women is, if nothing else, a reminder that the working-class family economy was anything but a thing of the past in Irish Buffalo. While some Irish and German parents in the city were prepared to send their daughters into domestic service, those of Italian and Polish backgrounds were more resistant. Italian men in particular opposed their wives or daughters working “under another man’s roof” or in places free

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Table 7.9 Live-in domestic servants in elite districts of Buffalo and Toronto, c. 1910–11 Buffalo

Toronto

birthplac e

N

%

England Scotland Ireland United States New York Other US Canada Ontario Other Canada Germany Other and n.a. Tota l RELIGION Anglican Methodist Presbyterian Roman Catholic Other and illegible Tota l

30 14 92

6.6 3.1 20.1

170 23 46 – – 41 42 458 – – – – – –

N

%

37.1 5.0 10.0 – – 9.0 9.2 100.0

60 50 24 1 – – – 81 0 – 10 226

26.5 22.1 10.6 0.4 – – – 35.8 0.0 – 4.4 100.0

– – – – – –

66 42 73 18 27 226

29.2 18.6 32.3 8.0 11.9 100.0

Source: Street section samples.

from supervision by relatives or friends.60 In contrast, more than onequarter of the Delaware district’s domestic servant labour force was of Irish birth or ancestry, and “Bridget” remained a known quantity within the homes of Buffalo’s elite. Besides using their savings to pay for fashionable clothes and passages for emigrating family members, Catholic Irish servants were also acknowledged to have contributed their money to help speed the arrival of a distinctive new building to the Delaware Avenue landscape: the new St Joseph’s Cathedral, completed in 1912.61 In Toronto, however, Bridget was fast facing extinction. There, elites pushed into the northern districts of the city, and while the uptown sections of Sherbourne and Jarvis Streets remained addresses worthy of envy, the residential suburb of Rosedale, developed between 1895 and 1910, became the principal new location of choice (see figure 8.5). Envisioned by land developer Edgar John Jarvis as an exclusive enclave with winding, tree-lined streets, Rosedale was annexed by the city in

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1887. Tellingly, some elite housewives complained of it being initially “too difficult to find domestics who would go there.”62 In 1899, the Star complained more generally about how “the chittering god of the typewriter” had, alongside “the god that has his throne high over the department store,” displaced the “homely little god, whose symbols are the frying pan and the dust brush.”63 More than a decade later, the paper recommended that a way be found for servants to live out, remarking that the home in which the servant was employed was “not in any sense her home.”64 Analysis of Toronto’s live-in domestics from the 1911 census combined the contiguous Sherbourne Street and Rosedale districts to compile data on 226 servants found in 130 households (table 7.9).65 While the results again show a significant native-born cohort, English- and Scottish-born domestics were the most prominent among those born outside Canada, comprising almost half of the overall total. The Irishborn now made up scarcely more than one-tenth of the total, and within this share, the presence of Protestant women was significant; of the twenty-four women enumerated, just seven were Catholic. This was a  mostly Protestant live-in servant population for a mostly Protestant employer group. These trends for Toronto were reflected at wider scales in Canada. Barely ten percent of the female domestic servants to arrive at Canadian ocean ports from the United Kingdom between 1904 and 1914 were Irish-born.66 By 1914, “the government began to give bonuses to agents for female domestics directed to Canada,” and with British women seen as a civilizing influence, organizations such as the British Women’s Emigration Association and the Salvation Army arranged group migrations.67 In 1915, a Toronto social survey stated it to be “a sufficiently well-known fact that the trained English servant is a young woman of a rather superior type – not at all the sort who is likely … to ‘get into trouble.’”68 Furthermore, a study of women workers in Ontario between 1850 and 1930 concluded that servants were “first recruited in England and Scotland, then in northern and southern Ireland (in that order).”69 While Catholic Bridget had not entirely vanished from the Toronto market, her visibility within it had diminished significantly by the early twentieth century. A recent study of Irish-American female teachers has argued for them to  be seen as leaders rather than followers in the socio-economic ascent of the Irish in early twentieth-century cities.70 The spoils of political

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patronage mattered, however, in the initial stages of a process that produced what Janet Nolan terms the “Hibernicization” of American public school space.71 Though these teaching jobs did not always translate into lifelong careers, daughters’ paycheques were always valuable when families still had children to raise, transatlantic passages to fund, and the possibility of relocation to a larger home to consider (chapter 8). Public school teaching had become a largely feminized profession in Buffalo by the early twentieth century. By 1902, almost ninety-four percent of the city’s 1,275 principals and primary and grammar school teachers were women, and many of these, young as well as old, were of  Irish background.72 As chapter 4 illustrated, this phenomenon had steadily evolved through the decades with some help from local politicians, though the arrival of formal civil service examinations hardly dampened the appetite for teaching among Irish-American daughters. Ideas about gender that positioned women as “naturally” better to deal with young school-goers also informed patterns of recruitment. A 1912 report claimed that “it is universally admitted that women teachers are better for the younger children, and altogether superior to men as teachers of the lower grades.”73 As with office work, the idea of teaching as a suitable profession for cultivating young women’s senses of gentility and respectability took hold, and as successive cohorts departed to become wives and mothers, new entrants arrived to take their place and keep salaries low. The valued “natural instinct” would continue in the unsalaried sphere of domestic space, and in the new age of the administrative expert, the management of schools was frequently treated as a male preserve. By the early twentieth century, salaries earned by female grade-school teachers in Buffalo ranged between $400 and $640, with salaries for principals (often but not always men) usually exceeding $1,200.74 As noted earlier, the education superintendent had complete responsibility over the hiring and firing of teachers in public schools in the 1880s, and one writer remarked about how the “Republican Press enjoyed commenting on the number of Irish saloonkeepers’ daughters who became teachers.”75 In so doing, however, that press took a dim view of the dealings of First Ward patronage-dispensing Republican Jack White, who opposed school reform as a thinly disguised middleclass ruse.76 At a meeting held by the Republicans and Democrats of the ward in February 1888, White denounced the new school bill as one that “had emanated from the high and wealthy who did not send their children to [the public] schools.”77 The Republican Express described

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the meeting as one held at “the lair of the Jack White Club” while the Union and Times estimated an attendance ranging from 1,500 to 2,000 persons.78 It was evidently no small issue. The passing of Buffalo’s city charter ultimately brought school policies under an independent committee appointed by the mayor, while a separate board appointed by him “organized qualifying examinations to all prospective teachers.”79 Like many real-life females growing up in late nineteenth-century Irish Buffalo, Rose Shanahan, the protagonist in Roger Dooley’s Days Beyond Recall, has ambitions to be a teacher. Initially discouraged by the realization that her family “did not have enough political pull to wangle an appointment,” her passing the civil examination gets her there in the end.80 And so it was with many others who became teachers for both long and short spells. By the mid-1890s, a peak number of ten IrishAmerican female public school teachers were traced from the 1880 uncommon-name cohort in Buffalo’s city directories, two of whom were sisters. Six were still teaching by 1910, including the sisters. As with the teachers studied in other cities by Nolan, these Buffalo women did not come from especially prosperous backgrounds. Of the nine households they emanated from, four were headed in 1880 by widows, while in the remaining cases, the fathers worked as ship carpenter (two), weighmaster, milkman, and labourer. The Hibernicization of school space in Irish neighbourhoods also ­continued. The list of staff from Elk Street School (No. 4) in the First Ward from the 1901–02 school year is instructive (figure 3.8). The school was headed by principal James McDonough and the surnames among his nineteen female staff included Doyle (twice), Howley, Coveney, Hanley, Connors, Barry, Whalen, Gibbons, Kennedy, Collins, Mooney, Reardon, and Brennan.81 Their annual salaries were in the range of $600–$700 compared with McDonough’s $1,600; by the school year 1910–11, six of the staff, including McDonough, had departed. Perry Street School (No. 3) also employed many Irish-American women, but was less fortunate in its retention rate. Deputy principal Anna S. McGowan was the only one of the thirteen staff members to remain over the period 1901–11, while two moved to No. 4 School. In Hamburgh Street School (No. 34), the retention rate was five out of seventeen. Not that the activities of this latest generation of Irish-American teachers were confined to schools in Irish districts. As Barrett and Roediger have explained, it was through such Irish-American interactions with new immigrants that the latter came to learn “American ways.”82 Sisters Mary Ellen and Katherine McHale, daughters of

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a railroad yardmaster, both taught for more than twenty years in the sizeable Emslie Street School (No. 31) on the East Side, where their pupils and colleagues, led by principal Herman De Groat, were of German and Polish backgrounds. Teacher demand continued to increase as the number of children reaching the ninth grade in Buffalo’s schools increased fivefold between 1890 and 1915.83 In Toronto, two distinctive school systems remained, although there, too, teaching had become a largely feminized profession. By 1910, ­seventy-four public schools and nineteen separate schools were in existence, the former employing 890 staff, and the latter 110.84 The ccri sample data for 1911 enumerated a total of 101 teachers (including four principals, and thirteen teachers of singing and music), sixty-eight (or 67.3 percent) of whom were women. Two were religious sisters serving Catholic separate schools. Few teachers were born outside Ontario, and aside from the nuns and one music teacher, only six were Catholics. There were, then, no easy avenues to public school teaching for ­Irish-Canadian Catholic daughters in Toronto. Given the periodic controversies about separate schools that sharpened sectarian sensibilities in Ontario towards the end of the nineteenth century, Toronto’s public school trustees were all too aware of what the reaction might be if public schools recruited Catholic teachers at a rate similar to that in American cities. The Equal Rights Association, formed in the city in 1889 and led by Dublin-born lawyer and Orangeman D’Alton McCarthy, “provided a focus for Ontario’s Anglo-Protestant spokesmen to attack both bilingual and separate schools.”85 Five out of the twelve trustees elected to the Toronto School Board in 1894 came from Orange ranks, as did the board’s long-serving superintendent James L. Hughes.86 Other evidence indicates Toronto’s public schools to have remained largely Protestant spaces where the staff and students were concerned.87 Similarly, Toronto’s Separate School Board was not a prolific recruiter of lay teachers. In 1890, ninety percent of the teachers employed by the Board were clergy or religious, though by 1915–16, the proportion of lay teachers had risen to one-third, mostly unmarried women, and the figure continued to rise with increased enrolments and the building of suburban schools.88 While this new cohort of females had to contend with earning a wage below that of their male counterparts, only now was a process in motion that had already touched more than a generation of Irish-American Catholic women.89 Nevertheless, the far more numerous public schools provided few openings, prompting the Catholic Register to comment in 1916: “The Toronto Board of Education does not parade its

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practice of employing only Protestant teachers, but such is its practice. This is so well known that teachers living in Toronto, if they happen to be Catholics, seek employment in the State of New York rather than in the Public Schools of the city.”90 Urban Protectors: Police and Fire As with teaching, the rewards of political loyalty typically included appointments to police and fire departments, and while new ideas about professionalism sought to dampen these patterns, “club cultures” with a notable Irish presence evolved within these two sectors in both cities. Although they had never been the majority ethnic group in the city, men of Irish origin were over-represented in Buffalo’s police force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The number of patrolmen increased from 129 to 469 between 1881 and 1895, and by 1910, there were 586 patrolmen. In 1900, the salary of a Buffalo patrolman ranged between $720 and $900, and the conditions of work had improved greatly. Where once dismissals of captains and patrolmen were a likely occurrence with a change of political regime on council and the average working week took in all seven days, the professionalization of the force lead to a decrease in its turnover rate in tandem with “shorter days, regular days off each month, and attractive pension and benefit systems.”91 Harring’s surname analysis of the force for 1890 suggests that there were more than three times as many people with Irish surnames on the institution’s payroll as German; by then, eight out of the ten precinct captains were Irish.92 Of the thirteen city precincts in 1902, nine had captains of Irish birth or ancestry. While the figures shown in table 7.10 apply a stricter definition of an Irish surname than Harring and thus likely understate the proportion of those of Irish origin in Buffalo’s police and fire services, the results are nonetheless revealing.93 The Irish were well represented at all levels of Buffalo’s fire brigade, and their share of captains increased from 39.5 percent to 53 percent between 1900 and 1910. In 1893, Buffalo’s fire chief was Bernard J. McConnell, with Edward P. Murphy as his assistant, and these men were still at the helm in 1910. Men were relatively well-paid: in 1900, the annual salary for a second-grade fireman was $800; a first-grader made $900, a lieutenant $950, and a captain $1,100.94 As with teachers, Irish policemen and firemen were noticeably present within their own communities as well as others’, and the geography of Hibernicized police stations and fire halls in Buffalo also deserves

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Table 7.10 Distribution of “Irish” policemen and firemen in Buffalo, 1890–1910 PO L I C E D E P A R T M E NT 1890 Rank Captains Detectives Sergeants Lieutenants/Specials Patrolmen Tota l

1910

Total

Irish

% Irish

Total

Irish

% Irish

4 20 26 6 330 386

2 9 9 3 130 153

50 45 34.6 50 39.4 39.6

14 18 46 31 586 695

7 12 24 15 254 312

50 66.6 52.2 48.4 43.3 44.9

F I R E DE P A R T M E N T 1900

Captains Lieutenants Firemen Tota l

1910

Total

Irish

% Irish

Total

Irish

% Irish

43 45 326 414

17 18 123 158

39.5 40 37.7 38.2

51 51 548 650

27 18 184 229

53 35.3 33.6 35.2

Source: Annual Reports of the Buffalo Board of Police and Commissioners of the Buffalo Fire Department.

comment. Before his appointment as chief police superintendent in 1906, the aforementioned Michael Regan served Precinct 7 in the First Ward in 1890, and of the twenty-four patrolmen stationed alongside him, fifteen had identifiably Irish surnames. Likewise, two engine company stations in the ward, numbers 8 and 10, had approximately eighteen out of ­twenty-four staff of Irish extraction. One West Side station, engine company number 17, had eight out of twelve fire-fighting staff of Irish descent also. East Side fire stations, in contrast, employed very few staff with Irish surnames – the majority were instead either German or Polish, though Regan’s was a name well-known within the Polish precinct that, in his own words, he had “whipped into shape” when appointed there in the 1880s.95 Many Poles and Italians later testified to Regan’s fitness for the superintendent’s job; he personified all that the “American cop” was about to them and earned their respect as a result. Jobs such as policemen and firemen were thus well-regarded for those young men with the temperament to take them on. While Co. Clare immigrant Anthony McGowan began life in Buffalo scooping grain

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alongside many of his fellow countrymen, he quickly appreciated the rewards of local political activism. Later invited to tend bar in one of the saloons owned by James Kennedy, a well-known Democrat and key player in the turbulent election of 1893 (chapter 5), McGowan described how Kennedy praised his abilities in front of an audience of dock workers, promising that “if I stayed with him that he would put me on the police force and saying this in the presence of all those men made me a king in their eyes.”96 There was much to be said for earning a regular paycheque. Underemployment in Buffalo was common not only in the unskilled sector but  also in skilled trades. Masons and machinists in the city reported respective averages of 2.75 and 1.58 months spent out of work in the 1900 census, for example, and the averages for labourers and carpenters (including ship carpenters) were 2.35 and 1.79 months respectively.97 These did not compare well to the average of 0.64 months for clerks, whether employed in a store, railroad office, insurance company, or elsewhere, and the benefits and pensions and overall stability associated with non-white-collar jobs such as patrolman or fireman were now wellknown. Unskilled and semi-skilled workers could only hope to earn somewhere between $400 and $500 annually by this time; many earned less.98 Acquiring public jobs thus enhanced feelings of prestige for many families in the community, and it is unlikely that siblings who worked as policemen, firemen, or clerks made too much of what the “collar line” meant or was thought to mean. While a casual observer might have made a reasoned guess as to the Irishness of the likes of Michael Regan or Bernard McConnell in Buffalo, their Toronto counterparts such as David Archibald, Richard Ardagh, and John Thompson may have invited more hesitancy. Yet these three Irish-born men were at the top of their departments in the city and there were many more of Irish origin in the ranks below them. Analysis of table 7.11 shows that out of a total of 484 male personnel on Toronto’s police force in 1910, 116 (twenty-four percent) were born in Ireland, half of these being Anglicans. A majority of the leading officials on the force had their origins in the United Kingdom, most hailing from Ireland. Chief Inspector David Archibald, for example, was an imposing six-foot-three-inch Methodist who joined the force in 1865, after spending four years in the Royal Irish Constabulary (r i c). Nine of the twelve inspectors below Archibald were Irish-born and all were Protestants. The two eldest, Robert Gregory and

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Table 7.11 Irish-born members of the Toronto Police Force by religion, 1910 Rank Inspectors Sergeants Detectives Patrol Sergeants 1st Class Constables 2nd Class Constables 3rd Class Constables Tota l

Total

Irish-born

Ang.

Pres.

Meth.

rc

Other

Ex-r i c

12 23 12 21 167 143 106 484

9 8 3 3 42 26 25 116

6 4 2 2 23 16 5 58

2 1 1 1 4 7 13 29

1 0 0 0 10 2 0 13

0 2 0 0 4 0 5 11

0 1 0 0 1 1 2 5

2 3 0 0 6 1* 5^ 17

* = Includes one ex-member of the North of Ireland Imperial Yeomanry. ^ = Includes one ex-member of the North of Ireland Imperial Yeomanry and one ex-member of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Source: Annual Report of the Chief Constable of the City of Toronto, 1910.

Robert McClelland, had joined the force in the 1870s, both having served for over a decade in the r i c. None of the other Irish-born inspectors had Irish experience, however. Archibald’s religious and temperance convictions inspired his leadership in 1887 of a “morality squad” of undercover detectives to root out the vices of prostitution, gambling, drug use, and unlawful liquor sales.99 As Archibald saw it, his force of “muscular Christians” had a central role to play within the wider spectrum of moral reformers’ “purity work” projects designed to save Toronto the Good from the moral degradation suffered by growing cities elsewhere on the continent. While the Buffalo police had struggled with high turnover rates as a result of the workings of party politics, attempts to minimize this factor in the hiring of Toronto’s police constables commenced in 1856. The partial behaviour of some constables with Orange Order links towards their fraternal brethren inspired attempts to exclude Orangemen, though the best the authorities could hope for was that the Orange membership of constables would have no bearing on how they did their jobs, and the arrival of ex-ric personnel did little to change the prominence of Irish Protestants within the force.100 By the late 1870s, Toronto’s police were welcoming a selective inflow of Protestant men who had served in an Irish constabulary that was now mostly Catholic in composition, and they would enter a force in which Catholics remained a minority presence.101 Perceptions of the force’s ethno-religious character endured. As  the struggle for Home Rule in Ireland took on a more menacing

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character in the summer of 1914, the Catholic Register quipped that the “wooden gun” training exercises of the Ulster Volunteer Force were more a way for them “to fit themselves for the Toronto police force” than to endure the “blood and battle” of civil war with Irish nationalists.102 With the force assuming the character of a Protestant club in which an Orange subsection remained, its attractiveness to Catholics may not have seemed great. By the early twentieth century, however, the Catholic proportion on the force began to approach their share of the city’s population as a whole. By 1910, three of the eight Irish-born sergeants were Catholic and one of these, Owen McCarron, had served for over three years in the r i c. Overall, fifty-two Catholics (10.7 percent) were present on a force of 484. Most (55.8 percent) were Canadian-born, followed by the eleven Irish-born. By 1911, Catholics comprised twelve percent of  the urban population, so the discrepancy was not large, and three years later, the Evening Telegram declared, contra the impressions of the Register, that “the matter of a man’s religious denomination cuts no figure when he applies for a position on the force here.”103 The increased confidence with which Catholics were entering the force in the first decade of the twentieth century should not, however, lead to a conclusion that the influence of ethno-religious fraternalism or ­clannishness had been banished. In 1908, for example, the Toronto World announced Constable William Redford, a one-time Orange lodge master and “prominent Mason,” to have “secured a three months’ leave of absence” along with his “intention to address the Belfast Orangemen on July 12.”104 Likewise, in May 1913, the Sentinel reported on the funeral of Fred Davidson, “one of the popular young members of the Toronto Police Force,” who was buried under the auspices of Enniskillen Lodge No. 387.105 The Co. Tyrone–born John Charlton, described as “a most efficient officer,” was also idenfified as “a loyal supporter of the Orange Order” as well as an active member of Sherbourne Street Methodist Church.106 Finally, the 12 July parade of 1910 was said to have “many former policemen” in attendance.107 Given the prominence of Irish inspectors, it is no surprise to learn of rumblings of disapproval about the supposed workings of ethnic factors when a controversial promotion in 1915 occurred amid a wider series of restructurings (including demotions) by Chief Henry Grassett. One police inspector remarked that “the Irish are again coming into their own,” with others adding “that any reductions will be followed by the promotions of Irish constables.”108 Grassett denied the possible influence of any “lodge, religious or fraternal order of any kind,” making

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light of statements that “the ‘Irish’ were becoming too prominent in the  higher positions of the force.”109 While accusations of Orange or Masonic influence within Toronto’s police did not now have the lyrical quality of Patrick Boyle’s late Victorian denunciations, they had far from disappeared. The city’s fire halls had also been long identified as preserves of Orange influence. The lengthy reign of Co. Armagh–born Orangeman James Ashfield as chief gave these perceptions substance, and fire halls were regularly used as lunching places during late nineteenth-century 12 July celebrations.110 The five firemen killed while fighting the “McIntosh holocaust” of 1902 were all Orangemen, and Ashfield’s successor, Richard Ardagh, a Co. Tipperary–born Mason of the Methodist faith, was killed in a downtown blaze in January 1895.111 James Forsythe, a Presbyterian fire captain at Queen Street Fire Hall who served for twentyseven years before his death from pneumonia in 1913, was “an esteemed member of Boyne Lodge No. 173 and Royal Black Preceptory No. 344.”112 Two other well-known firemen of Toronto’s east end were John Thompson and William Crawford, both of whom were Ulsterborn and stationed at the Berkeley Street hall. Thompson, a native of Co. Antrim, was Orange, Tory, and Anglican to the core. He took over a department of 176 men in 1899 and controversially installed another Orangeman, John Noble, as his assistant.113 Thompson’s brush with controversy did not end there. He was accused of interference in the 1899 mayoralty election in which Orangeman John Shaw emerged victorious, and a commissioned inquiry undertaken by the New York Bureau of Municipal Research in 1913 criticized Thompson for his leniency toward delinquent firemen as well as his reliance “entirely upon his memory for matters which should be permanent records of the department.”114 The application forms circulated to prospective firemen also included the vexed variable of religion, and the American experts unsurprisingly recommended its removal. Having survived attempts to depose him, Thompson went on to run the department in a largely independent manner until 1915, when he and Noble resigned, having been found to have “exploited department men and equipment for private gain.”115 Thompson’s associate at the Berkeley Street hall was another Anglican, William Crawford, who left rural Co. Monaghan in his twenties, arriving in Toronto in the early 1880s. An attender and later an officer of Trinity East (Little Trinity) Church, Crawford combined his faith with memberships in the Masonic and Orange fraternities while also maintaining an

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influential presence at the fire hall. His Orange activities were devoted largely to King William Lodge No. 140, and he later graduated to the mastership of not only his lodge but also that of the Orange County of  Toronto.116 Crawford also became president of the Ward Two Conservative Association, and one obituary writer remarked that an “Orangeman out of employment was always referred to Captain Crawford.”117 No doubt some of the newly landed immigrants from Ireland armed with lodge certifications did precisely this. With the deputy city treasurer John Patterson also a member of his lodge, it is not hard to imagine how news of openings in City Hall could have been quickly relayed to Crawford; indeed, the New Yorkers’ investigation of the department also noted the pernicious influence of the ward association. Under such circumstances, Toronto’s fire service was not likely to contain more than a few Catholics, although some prospered and gained promotion in those halls where Orangemen were less influential.118 Toronto thus continued to be regarded by many as a place where Orangeism ruled a great deal of the roost, if not all of it, in the sphere of  public employment. At least 5,000 people were on the municipal payroll in 1910, with the waterworks and sanitary departments ranking as big employers alongside schools, police, and fire.119 Now the Register took up the mantle of complaining about the jobbery of the “Orange ascendancy.”120 Elsewhere, the Star commented that during the 12 July parade of 1911, the City Hall was “practically deserted,” with most of  its employees “marching to the tune of ‘Boyne Water.’”121 Two of ex–fire chief Thompson’s sons later gained employment at the customs and waterworks departments, showing how the taste for public employment was often passed on to the next generation, and seldom without some degree of “pull.” Challenging Saloons, Regulating Hotels The saloons and taverns of Buffalo and Toronto had been associated with political activities of one form or another through the nineteenth century, whether hosting meetings of Fenians, Orangemen, or Democrats, or suffering the physical attacks of opponents. As attractive as public employment had become for many aspiring Irish in both cities, ownership of these establishments was also regarded as an avenue to occupational independence and social respect. Their British equivalents were of course termed “public houses” (pubs), and on the western side of the Atlantic, the keepers of saloons and taverns were known people within

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neighbourhoods whose relationships with their clientele could make them, among other things, invaluable cogs in party-political machinery. And while access was often socially restricted along gender lines, these drinking houses were also public sites in that they faced criticism from moral reformers and clergymen alike. Provision of alcohol was also argued to have public consequences, because of the objectionable behaviour it was believed to encourage in surrounding streets after the hours of business, with offenders and their supporters subsequently swelling the halls and rooms of local courts. Enterprising Irishmen well-versed in the rhythms of their cities and neighbourhoods nevertheless entered an industry in which they felt they could succeed. While enthusiastic at the prospect of landing a job on Buffalo’s police force, Anthony McGowan would become the manager of one of James Kennedy’s saloons before opening his own establishment on the First Ward’s Elk Street in 1897. Given the past form of these men, the saloon would become another site for the mobilization of Democratic votes.122 McGowan’s trajectory was repeated throughout Catholic Irish America, adding to the connections popularly drawn between the Irish, alcohol, and politics.123 Opportunities for prospective saloon- or tavern-keepers were not identical in Buffalo and Toronto, however, and these differences had widened by the end of the nineteenth century. Although Toronto’s council expressed wishes to limit tavern numbers from at least the early 1850s, this proved no simple matter; in 1870, 232 tavern licenses were granted, costing $60 each.124 Nonetheless, the Canadian city’s Protestant middle class, buttressed by heady doses of evangelicalism and liberal reformism, tested the degree to which it could enforce ideas of appropriate conduct in the city’s public spaces during the late Victorian period, including attempts to limit tavern numbers.125 The number of hotels, saloons, and taverns per 1,000 population circa 1880, computed from city directories, reveals Toronto’s figure of 2.35 to be markedly lower than the 7.16 estimated for Buffalo; furthermore, hotels, saloons, and boarding-houses occupied proportionately more of Buffalo’s selfemployed household heads (22.1 percent) than Toronto’s (17.5 percent) at this time.126 While more saloons and boarding-houses existed in both c­ ities than were listed in their directories, the difference is dramatic. James Dormer of Buffalo’s Charity Organization Society reported in 1883 that the city had issued 1,653 licenses for the previous year, while a pro-reduction petition presented to the council three years

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earlier estimated between 1,400 and 1,600 saloons to exist.127 Dormer sensed “considerable hesitation and diffidence” about the question of temperance in the city, and added that although from “higher and holier places our pastors have spoken against it,” they had done so “to indifferent listeners.”128 A blind eye was less easily turned to the question of tavern control in Toronto. In 1885, it was noted that since “the change in the liquor license laws, which requires that every applicant for a license must provide accommodation for a certain number of guests, every tavern has become a ‘hotel.’”129 Two years later, the number of hotel licenses became frozen at 150, though whether or not the term “tavern” disappeared from popular parlance in the city is another matter entirely.130 Newly formed Knights of Labour locals encouraged sobriety as an essential component of worker dignity, and in alliance with prohibitionists, they were a key factor in the election of moral reforming mayor William Holmes Howland in 1886 and 1887.131 Howland, founder of the aforementioned police “morality squad,” mobilized support to pass the by-law on hotel license numbers while raising the annual license fee to the provincial maximum of $350.132 Catholic attitudes to Sunday leisure were one more way of marking them out as a minority in Toronto. Catholics did not suffer a great deal of self-deliberation if they visited friends, took a drink, or even worked on a Sunday.133 For the Equal Rights Association, however, “any proposal to violate the sabbath was linked with Catholic aggression … only the pealing bells in the steeples of Toronto’s numerous churches should break the reverential silence of the day of rest.”134 Prior to the 1892 referendum on Sunday streetcars, Presbyterian Rev. J.C. Madill denounced the cars as “a Papist invention.”135 Methodists prominent within Toronto’s middle class had no doubts about the positive results that came from hard work and sobriety, since so many of them occupied nonmanual forms of labour. More than the Presbyterians, they were confident of their ability to influence public policy for the moral betterment of society.136 Early twentieth-century developments would ensure that acquisition of a license to sell liquor would remain a more tenable prospect in Buffalo. Although Toronto was on its way to becoming a commercial metropolis, the hand of the state ensured that the city’s rising population would not be accompanied by an increase in licensed hotels, and the role of the drinking outlet in the world of politics was no longer

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so transparent. The Orangemen’s completion of Victoria Hall in 1886 aided the brethren’s attempts to present themselves as moral and responsible individuals. Though alcohol consumption moved into the more informal space of the lodge room for a time, the provincial Liquor License Department prohibited its sale and consumption in public halls and meeting places by “fraternal and secret societies” in November 1910.137 The largest and longest-established hotels, confident of retaining their licenses, did not mind the pruning of “low-class” competitors, in any case. Far from seeing drinking places as essential nodes of local community, then, some Irish Protestants played active roles in efforts to obliterate them from the Toronto social landscape. Noteworthy among these ­utopian “improvers” was Francis Stephens Spence, a Co. Donegal–born Methodist and secretary of the unambiguously titled Dominion Alliance for the Total Suppression of the Liquor Traffic. Spence was a Liberal who established himself in local politics as an alderman for several years, publishing books and pamphlets on the temperance cause, and was “credited by many as being the best-informed man on municipal matters in Canada.”138 Following in the footsteps of men such as Rev. E.H. Dewart, Spence was joined in his fight for the local “common good” by descendants of Ulster immigrants such as Robert John Fleming, mayor of Toronto in 1892–93 and 1896–97 and another Methodist and Liberal, and the Orange pastor of Parliament Street Methodist Church in Cabbagetown, Rev. John Coburn. These Irish-Canadians therefore participated in efforts to reform alcohol provision as civic activists and elected officials and not simply as opponents and consumers. Coburn, Fleming, and Spence were also members of a denomination that set up its own Department of Temperance and Moral Reform in 1902 to ­publicly engage in a range of socio-political causes.139 Although Toronto’s Catholic working-class drink culture was yielding some ground to devotional impulses, its temperance promoters did not look to the state for corrective measures, but rather to the taking of individual pledges.140 No Catholic in the city would be described as an “out-and-out prohibitionist,” as was Co. Antrim–born Robert H. Self, librarian and Sunday School teacher at Coburn’s church.141 Nevertheless, the cultivation of respectable mindsets among the new generation of Toronto’s Catholic minority shaped their outlooks on career paths, personal conduct, and recreational pursuits. If the election to the mayoralty of temperance campaigners such as Howland and Fleming was not enough to convince observers that

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declaring support for the limiting of hotel numbers in Toronto was less of a political risk than elsewhere, the 1894 plebiscite on prohibition surely was. In that year, 11,918 of Toronto’s men and women voted in favour of the total prohibition of alcohol against 9,455; across Ontario, the majority supporting the measure was 81,000.142 Although the prohibition plebiscites did not result in any immediate action being taken (the sacrifice of revenue was too much for provincial coffers to bear), the returns spoke volumes about the influence of the city’s Protestant middle class. The campaign by a pro-reductionist city council continued, and in January 1909, a majority of voters supported a decrease in the number of hotel licenses from 150 to 110.143 A jubilant Spence declared that cutting off bars in residential areas “does more good than cutting one off down town,” assuming that “a man would not go any great distance for a drink.”144 Although this idealized geography was not the course immediately taken, the shutting-down of hotels was in progress by the summer of 1909.145 By 1912, only 1,512 hotel licenses were issued in the entire province, though when Canada entered the First World War, the net was closing in on the local provision of beer and spirits.146 Of the relatively small number of hotel licenses issued in Toronto, however, a disproportionate number seem to have been in Catholic hands. One Catholic “layman” estimated thirty percent of the 150 licenses in 1908 to be held by Catholics, and with twenty of those scheduled to lose their licenses the following year, he concluded dejectedly that “the Roman Catholics rather got it in the neck.”147 On a wider scale, however, it was the city’s wage-earning male customers who were getting it in the neck.148 While the efforts of Buffalo’s reformers to press for control over saloon numbers did not go entirely without reward, the continuing importance of the harbour to Buffalo’s economy ensured an ongoing stream of unskilled and semi-skilled customers through the downtown, waterfront, and canal neighbourhoods. Lobbying by the city’s grain and transportation interests brought forth a new phase of harbour improvement that ended in 1903 with the completion of a breakwater almost 19,000  feet in length.149 A total of 9,727,304 tons was  handled in Buffalo’s port in 1902; the Toronto figure for 1903 was 1,165,289 tons.150 The price of Buffalo saloon licenses, which had risen to $125 in the late 1880s, had been increased further to $750 by 1903, with licenses to sell liquor not to be drunk on the premises set at $450 by the latter date.151 Yet the Buffalo city directory for 1910 enumerated 1,428 saloons, and given the substantial increase in the

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urban population, this was a modest rise from the 1,042 saloons enumerated in the 1880 directory. More striking perhaps is how close this  total is to that of the hotel-license numbers issued for all of Ontario in 1912! Buffalo’s boss-saloon system also remained entrenched on the southern waterfront during the 1890s through the actions of men of Irish ancestry who were not so much attuned to local labour rhythms as actively manipulating them. William J. Conners, the “floating boss” discussed in chapter 5, proposed to a shipping company that he be provided with a contract to find the men to handle its freight, and the resulting financial rewards allowed him to buy the Enquirer and Courier newspapers as well as a brewery. The broadening of Conners’ influence was extended by his appointment of saloon bosses to “provide business for the brewery and votes for the party.”152 In 1894, his associate James Kennedy acquired a contract with the Lake Carriers’ Association, and the two men colluded to establish a string of saloons in which loyal immigrant party men such as Anthony McGowan held sway. Strengthened by a formidable combination of swaggering self-belief and brutal business sense, Conners’ power endured through the remainder of the decade, as a large and poorly paid workforce of Irish scoopers and stevedores was kept in check. Meetings of the Grain Shovelers’ Union were held in May 1896, with one of Buffalo’s temperance advocates, Rev. Thomas Slicer, declaring that “[t]heir average earnings were little over $300 a year … while $18,000 went to the contractor, who received this large sum from sucking the very life-blood out of his men!”153 In 1899, a Union and Times editorial estimated “about two  thousand scoopers” to be employed during the season,” earning “from $300 to $320 for the eight months.”154 These estimates are striking in light of the annual salaries of patrolmen, firemen, and teachers discussed earlier. But Kennedy and Conners defied the workers, even when the latter formed an alternative union with a charter from the International Longshoremen’s Association (i l a). Opposition by progressive reformers was ineffective; the issue of workers earning a fair wage became confused with the issue of workers’ alcoholism and, for one historian, reformers ultimately “preferred the more conservative path of preaching temperance for the poor” to the zealous outpourings of prohibitionists.155 With the resurgence of the American economy, the spring and summer of 1899 witnessed the eruption of the scoopers’ long-simmering frustration with a bitter strike against Conners and his allies that lasted

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for more than one month. At the strike’s peak in mid-May, several thousand scoopers and sympathizers such as coal heavers and marine firemen had joined the agitation. Given the ethnicity, religion, and residential location of many of the scoopers, it was fitting that the First Ward’s St Bridget’s Hall emerged as a key meeting-place (one such meeting was reportedly attended by 2,500 scoopers) and that the new Bishop James Quigley, former parish priest of St Bridget’s, would become prominent in mediation efforts while Rev. Cronin continued his broadsides against Conners and Kennedy in the Union and Times. The police were now somewhat more cautious in facing down those of their own ethnicity, though Rev. Cronin was quick to accuse John and James Kennedy of manipulating the police department “in the interest of the grain contractors and against the men.”156 The drama of the 1899 strike has been analyzed in greater detail elsewhere, but for our purposes it demonstrates the enduring importance of Buffalo’s waterfront economy and how economic, social, and political conditions combined to perpetuate a saloon and boarding-house culture.157 It exposed the splits between Irish-American bosses and workers on a grand scale, though these had been present for some decades. The strike also illustrated how bosses such as Conners and the Kennedys maintained support for the Democratic political machine in the southern wards in ways that continued to undermine the prospects for effective labour organization and the cultivation of a proletarian identity. All told, the fall-off in interest in Buffalo among prospective Irish emigrants in the early twentieth century comes as little surprise. The assassination of President McKinley by an anarchist at the PanAmerican Exposition in Buffalo in 1901 further increased fears about political radicals, not least those of foreign birth, while the more aspirational working-class Irish were steered clear of militant socialism by their church and lay associations, not to mention an increasingly materialistic culture. Bishop Quigley issued a pastoral letter in 1902 warning against the advancement of socialist ideas within the city’s trade unions more than a decade after Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum encyclical.158 The president of the i l a, T.V. O’Connor of Buffalo, adhered to this conservative trade-unionist line by joining the directorate of Fr Peter E. Dietz’s Militia of Christ for Social Service in 1910.159 Police chief Michael Regan was also a loyal churchman; he was a founding member of the new First Ward parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in 1900 and followed the anti-socialist line of the bishop. Significantly, Regan’s lax enforcement of the liquor and Sunday closing laws was cited as one of

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the reasons behind his resignation in 1915.160 His was no morality squad of “muscular Christians.” The strike of 1899 also demonstrated the multiple meanings of reform as well as their limits. The victory for the scoopers was a rare example of worker agency that challenged a system linking wage payments to saloon patronage. One of the key settlements was the transfer of the site of payment to a union office, and scoopers would thereafter be hired from the recognized union, Local 109 of the i l a. Timothy Donovan, a prominent Catholic layman who had once scooped grain himself, was appointed Dock Inspector.161 Saloon-keeping, however, retained its allure as a business aspiration for those Irish toiling at manual labour, and local political machines remobilized to keep radical labour initiatives marginalized in the years afterward. In 1900, the Socialist-Labor candidate for president, Joseph F. Malloney, told a downtown Buffalo crowd that “the labor class has no representative. They must represent themselves against the class that is stealing from the workingman.”162 As if to illustrate his point, Malloney was then distracted by the horns and fireworks of the passing Republican parade. Among the parade divisions, however, a group carried a banner describing Irish-American Congressional nominee Rowland Mahany as the “scoopers’ friend,” an acknowledgment of  his role in efforts to resolve the strike of the previous summer.163 Yet the disappointment of electoral defeat was surely more deeply felt for Mahany than Malloney. The waterfront wards all delivered handsome majorities for the Democratic presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, and though Mahany ran it close with Democrat William H. Ryan, it was the latter who triumphed overall.164 Long-practiced voting traditions were not to be easily overturned. The turbulence of Buffalo’s waterfront in 1899, however, should not obscure the strides made by the Irish-American working class in the city in terms of occupational advancement. Indeed, this chapter has demonstrated that such upward mobility in terms of jobs and careers occurred in both cities, as North American–born sons and daughters moved further into the world of secure manual work or variations on the “white collar” theme. Though the process was gradual, it is hard to disagree with one writer’s opinion of American Catholics in the early twentieth century as a group who thought of themselves more as “incipient capitalists” than as “members of a proletariat,” a point of view that would extend to the Irish of both cities here, regardless of religion.165 While

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Protestants of Irish background continued to hold a labour market advantage over their co-ethnic Catholic counterparts in Toronto, the phenomenon of the poor and criminal Irish did not now register so readily in the mind’s eye of local commentators. While the latter point held true for the two cities, there remained in both a significant Catholic Irish working class, and the niches for occupational advancement, particularly in the public sector, were anything but identical for those seeking more secure and symbolically valued positions. Though the course and shape of Irish upward mobility may have differed between the western and eastern United States, variations were also apparent when one looked across the northern border. The creation of job preserves in both places from political and fraternal machinery shows that there was little to no difference between the Catholic and Protestant Irish in their capacity to indulge in jobbery, particularly where public appointments were concerned. The persistent Irish-American dominance within Buffalo’s boss-saloon system also served to maintain a low-paid and largely Irish work force on the waterfront where partyism continued to trump class. Sabbatarianism in Toronto, in contrast, brought an extra dimension to understandings of sectarian distinctions in the city that were otherwise shaped by Orange lodges. Irish Protestants played a pivotal role in both movements, resulting in “Toronto the Good” becoming an alternative to the “Belfast of Canada” label for the city. And while ideas about individual and group advancement connected to ideas about spiritual uplift promoted by both Protestant ministers and Catholic priests, the everyday surroundings in which such improvements occurred also mattered. The next chapter thus addresses the changing contexts of residential community for those of Irish origin in Buffalo and Toronto in the early twentieth century.

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8 Lodges and Lace Curtains: Homes and Neighbourhoods, c. 1900–15

While the transatlantic migrations of Irish men and women did not always end in the first, or even second, city they settled in, their North American–born sons and daughters also faced decisions about their own futures and the sorts of places they wanted to spend their lives in after reaching adulthood.1 Some would choose, if they even felt that they had a choice, to remain within the family home for another generation; others would search for a new home in their city or town of birth; and then there were those who would strike out for other parts of Canada and the United States, or sometimes even more distant shores. And while some were fortunate enough to acquire the means to travel back to Ireland for holidays and other occasions, few seriously considered resettling there permanently.2 The previous chapter provided a largely occupation-centred perspective on the social mobility (and immobility) experienced by different groups of Irish in Buffalo and Toronto by the early twentieth century. Here, I aim to connect those insights to transformations in everyday life at the household and neighbourhood scales primarily through an emphasis on residential behaviour. The social and economic transitions already outlined not only affected the living standards of people of Irish origin and the residential options open to them, but also reshaped both cities’ social geographies more generally. Whether examined for the immigrant or for later generations, residential moves (or non-moves) were important elements in wider strategies by which individuals and families strove to realize the goals they set for themselves. The decisions they made also reveal something about the ways in which expectations of urban life were being modified during this period, whether relating to neighbourhood resources, political allegiances, or the status anxiety typical of this

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era of intensified consumerism. While the process of residential upgrading has received attention in both historical and literary accounts of Catholic Irish America, a longitudinal and intergenerational approach has seldom been taken, and much remains to be known about the lives of second- and third-generation Irish Protestants in twentieth-century North American cities. And yet the mapping of residential relocations through city directories cannot by itself tell us much about the dynamic, emotive, and frequently ambivalent ways in which identities were negotiated as people moved themselves and their households around each city. Other sources such as newspapers, locally produced histories, and fiction, however, add to our understanding of the spectrum of experiences felt by those who continued to make Buffalo or Toronto their home by the end of the Edwardian era. Although the subject of residence suggests an emphasis on meanings of “home” and the privacy of the household in opposition to the public world beyond, this chapter bridges this divide by connecting the occupants of homes with the ongoing construction of associational and institutional networks in their midst, particularly those concerned with religion and politics. The chapter thus illuminates the types of social encounters involving the Irish of multiple generations, and how such engagements (and non-engagements) informed both their perceptions of each city’s socio-cultural spaces and the contours of their collective loyalties in the age of urban modernity.

Ca rto g r a p h ie s o f R e s i denti al Mobi li ty in   B u f falo Mapping movements out of cities is trickier than reconstructing the sorts of journeys that individuals and families undertook before settling within them. In 1890, Buffalo’s Catholic Union and Times published a brief note to its readers that “E.G. McGowan, for eleven years connected with the Erie freight office, is going to settle in the West.”3 McGowan, who directory evidence reveals grew up in the heart of the First Ward and secured a clerical job with the railroad, may have been unsure about where his next meaningful place of residence would be – or was reluctant to disclose it! Cities west of Buffalo, whether Cleveland, Chicago, or San Francisco, had all experienced notable increases in their Irish-born populations over the previous decade.4 But in addition to being one of the larger cities encountered as one travelled west through the northern states, Buffalo’s status as a border city made it, along with Detroit, an

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always-receptive place for those men and women departing Canada.5 The 17,242 Canadian-born in Buffalo in 1900 comprised a peak of 4.9  percent of the total population (table 7.1), and evidence from the microdata samples used in chapter 7 suggests somewhere in the region of twenty to twenty-five percent of this figure to have had some sort of Irish ancestry.6 These Canadians, however, were notable for their lack of public visibility – as fair-skinned English-speakers with accents derived from within North America, they entered the republic in their tens of thousands “with scarcely a ripple.”7 With the numbers of Irish-born in decline in Buffalo, the residential choices made by the second- and third-generation stayers would determine the degree to which an Irish territorial presence endured in the city. What this cohort decided to do in residential terms was affected not simply by household budgets and employment opportunities, but also by the expectations of kin, the location of affordable housing, the strength of the ethno-religious affinities and friendships developed during their formative years, and the residential behaviour of other groups in the city. The East Side, originally dominated by Germans, now also catered to the residential demands of the burgeoning Polish population in neighbourhoods such as Broadway-Fillmore and “Kaisertown” where they “largely kept together.”8 The Italians, on the other hand, settled closer to the Irish in the downtown area as well as in adjoining neighbourhoods on the West Side and in the First Ward, and the harbourfront area was declared to be “practically given up to them” by state housing commissioners in 1900.9 Well-to-do Anglo-American Protestants were by then attracted to newly developed northern suburbs close to Delaware Park such as Parkside and Central Park.10 These changes in Buffalo’s ethnic geography did not dispel the broad economic and cultural differences that differentiated neighbourhoods east and west of the Delaware Avenue/Main Street axis, however, and it remained a city where “group spaces,” whether defined in ethnic or class terms, remained distinguishable, more so than in Toronto.11 Small wonder that in Days Beyond Recall, the middle-class West Side priest Father Fitzmahon describes Buffalo as “not so much … a well-blended meltingpot stew” but more “a cake with several distinct layers.”12 Residential decision-making beyond the immigrant generation was an important factor in this ongoing process of “layering,” and some studies have noted the strong preference of Irish immigrant offspring to stay relatively close to the neighbourhood or (Catholic) parish of origin, reinforcing perceptions of clannishness.13 In Buffalo, the 184 Irish-American

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households included in the sub-sample of uncommon names were traced through city directories between 1881 and 1911 to capture the geographies of intra-urban mobility.14 Attrition was immediately apparent: precisely half of these households were not traceable in the 1886 directory, and the depression of 1893–97 may explain later departures. Michael Katz notes that for Erie County as a whole, “the number of individuals on outdoor relief exploded during the 1890s, rising from 7.7  per thousand in 1892 to 29.6, 16.3, and 28.4 during the middle years of the decade.”15 For those that remained in the city, however, new households formed from the old, and by 1911, details for seventy-four households were recorded.16 The locations of residences of parents and their offspring remaining in Buffalo between 1880 and 1910 were compared, with some systematic evaluation of the areas into which the latter moved, though these surviving offspring were mainly sons. Also, since the class and ethnic character of city streets frequently change by block, the classification of destination areas required analysis of small-scale units.17 David Ward’s concept of “environ” was adopted, whereby the occupational and ethnic characteristics of the five households on either side of the destination address were collected from federal census manuscripts to assemble a profile of the environs in which all remaining households were living by 1910.18 These households were classified as living in one of three types of classdefined environ, i.e. working-, mixed-, or middle/upper-class, while ethnic labels were added so that an area could be designated as primarily Irish, German, American, or of mixed ethnicity.19 An array of environ classifications was then produced that accounted for different gradations of both class and ethnicity, the mixed-class category containing occupations straddling both sides of the collar line.20 However arbitrary it might appear, this method allows for some light to be shed on the nuanced ethnic and class character of the movers’ new residential surroundings, and the results are shown in figures 8.1 (for ethnicity) and 8.2 (for class). The pattern of residential moves shows a spreading-out of families towards the upper West Side and around Main Street, while some chose to remain within the First Ward. This mapping also illustrates the retention of working-class neighbours for those who remained in the southern area, while those moving north or northwest entered environments where a broader mix of manual and nonmanual workers lived. Although also more ethnically mixed, these environs were affected by an Irish presence to differing degrees (figure 8.1). By 1910, more than one in three of

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Figure 8.1  Irish intergenerational residential mobility in Buffalo, 1880–1910, showing the ethnic character of destination environs.

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Figure 8.2  Irish intergenerational residential mobility in Buffalo, 1880–1910, showing the class character of destination environs.

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the remaining households were living within Irish environs overall, the majority being working-class and located in the First Ward and the canal districts of the West Side. This geography of residential decision-making not only reflected the broad perceptual divisions between the southern districts and the West Side of the city. It also revealed something of the link between socioeconomic aspirations and residential environment within Buffalo’s IrishAmerican world. For one thing, the maps clearly show the absence of any migration from other parts of the city to the southern waterfront district. They also show that as far as these movers were concerned, the West Side was a qualitatively different place from the First Ward, whose identity remained distinctly working-class and Irish well into the twentieth century.21 The destination environs on the north and west sides of Main Street were more mixed or cross-class than they were middle/ upper class, however (figure 8.2), though it was not unusual to see duplex houses inhabited by two families on these streets (with the mortgageholding family living upstairs), an arrangement that further fostered senses of community and belonging. These environs were also brought increasingly into the reach of potential movers by the developing network of streetcar lines, and within them the collar line became not so much a social chasm but in Ileen Devault’s words, “a social estuary, a site for the mingling of economic groups and social influences.”22 The unskilled were notable absentees from these West Side environs. Given that the occupation of labourer often signified transiency, key landscape features of working-class districts – boarding-houses and saloons – were not prevalent here either. While the number of saloons per 1,000 persons in Buffalo in 1910 was 3.4, the southern wards still exceeded this noticeably, with wards 1, 2, and 3 having proportions of 5.8, 8.3, and 5.9 respectively.23 While saloons were present on busy West Side streets such as Niagara, they were rarely found in the avenues to its north and east, and the latter were the sort of places the old First Warders were going. What about the lives and livelihoods of those who moved? The third chapter demonstrated how the often-early entry of sons and daughters into the local labour force was crucial in augmenting household economies.24 Such financial supplements widened the range of possibilities for these households, as the following two family histories demonstrate. In the first case, Irish-born ship carpenter Richard Cawl owned his house in 1880 on South Street, close to the Buffalo River and not far from the boarding-house and saloon landscape of Ohio Street (figure 3.8). Son

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and daughter John and Mary worked as a brickmason and dressmaker respectively, and a second-generation Irish boarder, Nellie Shay, was present. By the early 1890s, Richard had passed away, and his widow Kate and the family subsequently moved to the West Side’s Seventh Street. The household was now benefiting from the combined income of at least three adults, teacher Kate Jr, railroad clerk Richard Jr, and Nicholas, a one-time bricklayer now on the police force. Nicholas would move residence twice more on the West Side while remaining a patrolman, while John moved to the East Side following his marriage to a second-generation German. By 1910, he was making a living as a bricklayer and was now a homeowner, with a young son working as a railroad steamfitter. The Cawl clan’s occupational profile thus encompassed public and private sectors, manual and nonmanual work, and shows how occupational stability was more often than not a prerequisite for those planning on becoming homeowners. If labouring was the focus of wage-earning for any of these sons, it was something to be endured only in the early stages of their working lives. Job security and home ownership, once attained, provided this generation with some sense of control over their lives, and moving to a West Side address did nothing to harm whatever perceptions friends and neighbours might have had about the Cawls’ “upward mobility.” Our second Buffalo case concerns a household settled west of Main Street throughout the period. Patrick Dooley, who departed Ireland in 1846 aged sixteen, was by 1880 renting a property near the downtown with his wife, four sons, and two daughters. He worked as a coachman, and his three sons out of school were also employed in the transport sector as railroad clerks. By 1885, the family had bought a house nearby, while marriage brought about the move of one son, Joseph, to the upper West Side. One of the three clerks mentioned above, Joseph went on to work for the Irish-American Savings and Loan Association (i as l a) and by 1910 he had purchased a home with the coveted Delaware Avenue address. Aged forty-eight, he was now association secretary, and his twenty-five years of marriage had produced seven children without mortalities. His two-storey house with attic was situated opposite Forest Lawn Cemetery and a walkable distance from Delaware Park, while his neighbours on this urban frontier included attorneys and other businessmen as well as skilled tradesmen such as landscape gardeners. With one son working as an electrician, the collar line may not have meant that much to Joseph Dooley. His residential surroundings surely did, however. Dooley is significant not simply for showing that a comfortable

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quality of life was attainable, and where in the city it was so, but also for his position within a new generation of middle-class Irish-American real estate agents who continued to promote property ownership norms among their co-ethnics in the city.25 The Irish thus continued to make inroads into Buffalo’s property markets. The state housing commissioners visiting in 1900 estimated “nearly one person in three out of the total population [to be] a depositor in a savings bank” and noted the “considerable” number of building and loan associations that were disposed to “make loans almost exclusively on small dwellings” and in turn exerted “a very large influence in assisting the wage-earners to acquire and own property.”26 While the mid1890s depression impacted negatively on Buffalo’s mortgage-payers, the iasla remained an important force in communicating the virtues of homeownership, and evidence from the 1900 and 1920 census samples, although slight in terms of numbers, shows those of Irish birth or ancestry to have hovered around the average rates of ownership or mortgageholding in the city.27 While the commissioners focused their sights on the Poles and Italians as the chief victims of the “tenement house evil,” and described the Germans as a “frugal, thrifty, and industrious class” that largely shaped Buffalo’s reputation as a “city of homes,” the Irish were not mentioned at all.28 Yet it was, to a significant degree, a group movement of Americanborn Catholic Irish that took place between the southern wards and the West Side of Buffalo between 1880 and 1910, rather than an undifferentiated process of “spatial assimilation.” The house movers were switching not only neighborhoods, but also what were for them familiar social creations: parishes. Figures 8.1 and 8.2 show how the geography of Roman Catholicism in Buffalo, with parishes frequently organized along ethno-national lines, also acted as an important mediator of Irish residential movement within the city. It was a heterogeneous community that shared a common faith, and the elaboration of English-speaking Catholic institutions on the West Side added to the attractiveness of the district.29 Nevertheless, the founding in 1897 of a new parish in  the First Ward, Our Lady of Perpetual Help (known as “Pet’s”), anchored Catholicism in that neighbourhood for further generations, while the spiritual demands of families moving south across the Buffalo River would be served by Holy Family parish (1902). The First Ward’s public school statistics presaged these trends. School 34 had almost forty percent of its pupils possessing Irish parentage in 1902, with the parentage of the remainder being largely “American,” most of them

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likely third- and fourth-generation Irish. They were catered to by a teaching staff of seventeen, eleven of whom had a recognizably Irish background.30 Such was the influx of newcomers to the West Side, however, that Holy Angels parish was divided and Annunciation and Nativity parishes created in 1885 and 1898 respectively.31 The Annunciation records reveal an original core of about 200 families “predominantly of Irish extraction” while Nativity “originally had about 400 parishioners of Irish extraction.”32 The nerve-centre of the Buffalo diocese also participated in these northward relocations. In 1889, the Union and Times announced the completion of Bishop Ryan’s “new residence and chapel on Delaware Avenue … away from the dust and din of his Cathedral surroundings.”33 By 1912, New St Joseph’s Cathedral was completed beside the Bishop’s residence, the location accommodating IrishAmericans to the west and German-Americans to the east. That same year, the nearby Main Street location of the Jesuit-founded Canisius College was dedicated. This “streetcar college” would become an important vehicle for the economic and social advancement of Buffalo’s Catholics in the decades after the First World War.34 The example set by these migrating Irish affected not only their own group, as the Italians were to establish a presence on the West Side in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. This migration was referenced in the pages of Days Beyond Recall where the faces of children playing in the streets of Holy Angels parish “clearly showed the Italian influx.”35 Improvements in the standards of living for English-speaking Catholic families by the late nineteenth century spurred their church’s mission to not only secure their financial contributions but also reinforce expectations of the moral and religious conduct befitting a more “middle class” group. With more parish schools established, education was consistently promoted, the Union and Times stating in 1888 that “a little longer in the school room would qualify [children] for a much loftier position in which their remuneration would be correspondingly great.”36 By 1900, schools had been established in all the major Irish-American parishes in Buffalo. With lay congregations enjoying increased leisure opportunities, conditions were in place to develop further the associational infrastructure underpinning parish life. Religion was not simply a badge of ethnic identity but an institutional force, and in 1899, the diocesan newspaper identified “the parish circulating library, the Catholic lecture, the Catholic newspaper and magazine, and the Catholic reading circle” as necessary supplements to the Catholic schools or “the ordinary

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arsenals of Catholic thought and fact” through which “the cause of Catholic truth” would be defended.37 While the West Side parochial schools catered mostly to families of Irish origin, the district’s public schools were not short of Irish-American teachers and pupils either.38 Irish-American men and women, young and old, married and single, also became active participants in parish-centred associations. In 1893, “twenty young ladies were received into the Children of Mary” in Annunciation parish, while a similar number promoted the Sacred Heart Society.39 Junior and senior sodalities had been established in the parish by 1900 along with a St Aloysius Society.40 That year also, the conclusion of a parish mission was described as a scene that “was most effective [with] over 1000 women being present to receive the papal blessing.”41 Nativity parish had its Young Ladies’ Sodality and its Children of Mary, its Young Men’s Sodality of the Blessed Sacrament and its Altar Society in place by 1900, the latter “numbering many ladies of the parish.”42 During the Lenten devotions in 1908, the Nativity church witnessed “a constant stream of people … making the way of the cross,” while confessionals “were entered by over 3000, who received the sacraments during the forty days.”43 Finally, in February 1915, approximately 450 men and boys attached to branches of the Holy Name Society of Holy Angels parish made their way to seven o’clock Sunday Mass to receive Holy Communion; later that same evening, some members “acted as a guard of honor to the blessed sacrament during the services of the Holy Hour.”44 Devotional practices were also promoted through the networks of the  c mba and new outlets for Irish-Catholic fraternalism such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians (aoh). c m ba parish lodges continued to organize rounds of meetings, fund-raisers, “smokers,” debates, and Mass attendances in addition to the dispensing of monies to members for funeral expenses and the like.45 The Hibernians were also organized along parish lines, the first division being that of St Patrick’s parish in 1890. While the fraternity spread itself over the southern and West Side parishes over the following years, helping to shape the ethno-­religious sensibilities of the latest cohorts of Catholic males, few of its top officials lived in the southern working-class wards. In March 1892, however, six  hundred or so men participated in the street march of four  ao h divisions celebrating the dedication of the new St Stephen’s Church building, and reports of “edifying sights” of Hibernians arriving in bodies to receive communion in their parish churches were common in the Union and Times over the following years.46 Although the surviving

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records are quite scattered, the 1890s and early 1900s were propitious for aoh membership numbers, with a fall-off between 1910 and 1920. With four divisions able to assemble before six hundred or so marchers in early 1892, the average division probably contained around a hundred men. Eleven divisions were enumerated for the city by 1904, and by 1910 the city directory numbered ten divisions and six ladies’ “auxiliaries” at a time when the number of divisions in New York State had peaked at two hundred or so.47 These figures suggest an early ­twentieth-century membership of Buffalo Hibernians peaking at somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 men. The fraternity was also a force in keeping questions of Irish nationalist politics and ethnicity alive in the city, contributions discussed in more detail in chapter 9. Unlike their Toronto brethren, the Orange Order remained marginal in Buffalo. In 1897, four active lodges were identified in the city, representing approximately 120 members attending on a regular basis.48 The 1910 Buffalo directory identifies these lodges as holding their meetings in various parts of the city, indicating the spatial and cultural assimilation of Irish Protestants in Buffalo and how unwelcome such organizations would have been in southern neighbourhoods. While it is possible that some Protestant Canadians crossing the border may have found a home in these lodges, it is more likely that the membership was largely Irish-born, as in lodges elsewhere in America.49 Gentility and Community Beyond churches and meeting halls, homes also brought people together in structured and routine ways that served both spiritual and social functions. As Henri Lefebvre might have put it, homes became key nodes within circuits of local spatial practice.50 In particular, “womanly duties” were being undertaken whose effects were felt beyond the immediate family, and the coverage given to parish activities in the Union and Times illustrates this idea of homes as venues within wider parochial networks. In 1908, Nativity parish reported that a party at the West Side home of “Mrs. D.B. Collins was very successful,” while a special meeting of the Altar Society was to be held the coming Friday “when Mrs. Henry Farrell of 931 Niagara Street will kindly open her home for the benefit of the society.”51 At other times, homes hosted groups such as the Azarian Reading Circle, where the dictates of the church hierarchy were communicated through the writings of its clergy and prominent laymen.52 Brother Azarias was Patrick Francis Mullany, a Co.

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Tipperary–born Christian Brother and Catholic scholar; his published letters were ­described as being “as staunch in doctrine as they are finished in expression.”53 Homes also hosted associational initiations. In 1890, a report to announce the establishment of branches of the Ladies Catholic Benevolent Association (l c ba ) included a list of ladies who would provide “necessary information” and in whose homes branch initiations would take place.54 The l c ba was grafted onto the structure of the men’s c mba similar to the ladies’ auxiliaries of the ao h, though none of the homes listed for l c ba initiations were in the southern districts of the city. By the turn of the century, twenty-six of these “subordinate lodges” of the c mba were present in Buffalo with a total membership of 6,968.55 Words such as “subordinate” and “auxiliary” revealed much (again) about the place of women within the local Catholic public sphere. Blurring the secular-religious line more were the card parties that became popular for fund-raisers, and were organized by ostensibly spiritual groupings such as altar societies. In October 1902, nine homes were listed in the Union and Times as arranging parties in advance of the forthcoming bazaar in Nativity parish. These were organized in the interests of the Children of Mary, the l cba branch in Immaculate Conception parish, St Columba’s Altar Society, and others, prompting a local man to describe the women’s enthusiasm as “overwhelming.”56 While similar activities also took place in the southern wards, the West Side parishes were clearly seen as key engines of fund-raising within the city. The finances raised at a fair in St Stephen’s parish in 1888 were described, for example, as “magnificent … for a parish less wealthy than many others,” a statement that betrayed geographical imaginations of “rich” and “poor” areas within Irish-American Buffalo.57 It is possible to interpret these home-centred events as contributing to a wider urban process whereby self- and group-monitoring worked in dialectical fashion to reinforce conceptions and standards of respectability. If reading groups and card parties illustrate Patrick Joyce’s concept of a micro-geographical “oligopticon” whereby the few observed the few in routine fashion, the aggregate effect of Catholic women’s associational worlds thus worked towards a “demotic omniopticon” whereby the many observed the many.58 They were also constructing and engaging with notions of the modern in a fast-changing society, including novel objects, technologies, and consumer items, not least pianos and lace curtains. Only certain parts of the home were put on display for

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these affairs, and the parlour was a key stage upon which a family’s status could be exhibited. Patterns of house visiting thus tested the housekeeping abilities and tastes of these parish women, upholding a pervasive bourgeois ethos blandly outlined in the advice columns of the Union and Times but reproduced in livelier fashion through the gossip that was the stuff of everyday conversation. With parlours on display for other neighbours to view and experience, and the odd daughter or two’s piano or violin talents to show off, homes were more than purely private spaces. While many of the West Side’s Irish-American men may not have quite reached the conventional middle-class occupations of lawyer or doctor, a sense of gentility and community was nonetheless being created, and through women’s activities in particular, that made the district attractive to those in less affluent districts seeking something better. The diocesan newspaper’s inclusion of a front-page social column, including announcements of engagements, vacations, and birthday parties and descriptions of weddings, also cemented the cachet of certain addresses and districts within Buffalo. In another way, however, the church was putting on airs about itself, offering its own evidence of the respectable status that its Irish-American congregants had attained by celebrating and publicizing events in the lives of local “notables.”59 Like many of its congregants, the church too was not unaffected by status anxiety! Different ideas existed about what constituted respectability, of course. To the patriarchal mind, too much attention paid to social columns and department store sales would do little to stem materialistic urges. In 1900, the Union and Times expressed concern about female “vulgarity” generated by the new consumerist ethos, remarking on the “foolish craze for wealth and soft living in these later days.”60 A decade later, Maurice Courtney wrote of the “excellent work” of the Catholic Women’s Saturday Afternoon Club, whose object was “the pursuit and encouragement of a high ideal of culture” which he hoped would re-orient behaviour so that “instead of a frivolous, card-playing, dancing fraternity, of which we have an excess, we will have more women of high ideals, of intellect, and of those attributes which we admire in woman.”61 Politics and Neighbourhood: Solid Votes and New Role Models Reflecting on the history of social relations within Irish-American Buffalo, a local judge told the Evening News in 1972 that within this

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world “women emphasized the religious life, but men dominated the public image.”62 Such remarks are unsurprising, although the patronizing of department stores was one notable way in which the city’s Irish-American daughters, wives, and servants intervened in its publicspatial realm for most of the century.63 Politics, however, remained not only a man’s world but one where obsessions about voter numbers and allegiances continued within wards. For Buffalo Republicans and Democrats alike, the art of campaigning included the ongoing monitoring of those parts of the city in which their vote had become reliably “solid.” In contrast to Toronto, annexations had not taken place in Buffalo and the number of wards had increased, with each now electing one alderman rather than two. Twenty-five wards were created in 1892 and their geography was revised once again in 1905 while their number remained constant. By 1912, twenty-seven wards were present, and mechanical voting machines had become standard practice at elections.64 Throughout these decades, the first-numbered ward remained in its familiar southern territory, while the pre-1892 eighth ward became the nineteenth (1892–1905) and later the twenty-fifth ward. These ward realignments adjusted senses of where in the city party candidates could succeed, but only to a limited degree. The Express’s listing of thirteen “good Republican wards” on the eve of the 1902 election, for example, included most of the West Side.65 By that newspaper’s reckoning, almost all the southern and southeastern wards were either too close to call or solidly Democratic. This was also the area covered by the first state assembly district that elected the Democrat Cornelius Coughlin in the infamous 1893 election that otherwise ended in a Republican sweep of the city. In 1910, Samuel J. Rampsberger would avail himself of “the usual Democratic majority” in these same wards that now made up the forty-ninth congressional district.66 Likewise, the Republican procession in the 1904 campaign, which promised the ­now-familiar “flaring torches and redfire … roman candles and bursting rockets,” featured clubs from only fifteen wards, with the southern wards notably unrepresented.67 Both parties worked to add more solid wards to their tally, especially through the courting of Italian and Polish men, who often had IrishAmericans to thank for their political schooling. In the 1900 campaign, Congressional candidate Rowland Mahany addressed the Polish Republican League, praising the Poles “for their rapid assimilation” and sacrifices for “the priceless boon of liberty”; some nights later, he spoke to the Central Italian Republican League.68 The Democrats were not to

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be outdone, however. In 1902 southside Congressman William H. Ryan visited the Polish ninth and fourteenth wards to report on his efforts to organize “the erection of a monument to the great Polish patriot, Baron Pulaski.”69 It worked, as both wards returned Democratic majorities in a close contest, with Ryan returned to Congress.70 In the 1908 presidential election, the Democrat William Jennings Bryan defeated Republican William Howard Taft in most of Buffalo’s eastern and southern wards while suffering heavy defeats in most of the West Side wards, and the geography of victory for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, John Dix, was similar two years later (see figures 8.3 and 8.4).71 In the 1916 presidential election, the southern wards, contrary to some predictions, delivered strong majorities to help re-elect Woodrow Wilson.72 This resilient geography of Democratic loyalties in Buffalo prepared the way for a new generation of Irish-American political personalities, and a neutral observer might have been forgiven for thinking that little had changed in the city’s politics. The strike of 1899 did not mean that the capacity of saloon-keepers to become valuable electoral resources had been curtailed.73 In 1900, Democratic aldermen in the southern wards were drawn from a similar set of occupations as those in the 1870s. Besides the long-enduring hotel-keeper and W.J. Conners associate John J. Kennedy in the 19th ward, flour and feed dealer Jeremiah Gorman was elected in ward 1, ice dealer John P. Sullivan in ward 2, saloon-keeper Joseph Butler in ward 3, and John J. Collins, railroad foreman, in ward 4. In 1902, three Democratic Irish-American state assemblymen, including A.F. Burke and Charles V. Lynch, represented those constituencies containing most of their co-ethnics in the city alongside Charles J. Quinn. While Burke worked as a baker, both Quinn and Lynch owned saloons, and the latter was also a veteran of both the fire and police departments.74 In a bid to preserve traditions of machine-style politics, the First Ward was the only voting division in Buffalo to reject a new city charter in 1908, defeating the proposal by 576 votes to 254. The Republican Express identified “Alderman [John P.] Sullivan’s hand” as instrumental in this resistance; on a city-wide scale, the vote in favour was 12,120 with 4,337 against.75 Ice dealer Sullivan had taken up from where the likes of Jack White had left off, and his influence on local opinion was demonstrated again in 1914 with his organization of a parade of bands and drum corps that preceded an anti-charter mass meeting in a “crowded” St Bridget’s Hall.76 Commission government nevertheless arrived in  Buffalo shortly thereafter, ending Sullivan’s days as an alderman.

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Figure 8.3  Results by ward in the New York gubernatorial and American presidential elections, Buffalo 1908.

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Figure 8.4  Results by ward in the New York gubernatorial election, Buffalo 1910.

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Aldermanic office was only one component of the political landscape, however. The 1912 Democratic ticket once again featured a plethora of Catholic Irish-Americans running variously for congressional, state, county, and city offices, including Richard F. Hearn, a thirty-six-year-old saloon-keeper with a parochial-school education, who joined Sullivan in opposing the new charter.77 Hearn was re-elected to the state assembly. Buffalo’s Irish-Americans thus observed the fruits of long-running organizational efforts with a fleet of individuals from familiar sections of the city occupying an array of public positions. Some things had changed, however, and it was no longer simply a story of working- or lower-middle-class Democrats making good in politics as “professional Irishmen.” We have noted the advancements made by Buffalo’s Irish in terms of occupation, and historians such as Howard Chudacoff have termed the Republicans the “party of the upwardly mobile” during this era.78 Chudacoff’s study of Omaha, Nebraska, demonstrates how residential movements were from Democratic to Republican wards and from one Republican area to another, but almost never from Republican to Democratic, and literary representations of Irish Buffalo’s early twentieth-­ century geographies of political affiliation are provided by Dooley’s Days Beyond Recall. The novel’s protagonist Rose Shanahan proclaims early on that “in First Ward politics, whatever Mike Crowley said, went. [It was] Democratic politics, of course, for in the Ward, you were born a Democrat as you were born Irish and Catholic. What few Irish ­Republicans there were … generally lived on the west side.”79 Rose’s cousins on the western side of town, the Republican Fitzmahons, are the only family to receive a contrived Irish name in the novel, and to have a priest, a lawyer, and a doctor in their ranks, all graduates of the ­Catholic university of Georgetown in Washington, d c . One of the Fitzmahon daughters, Theresa, describes her young son Leo as “a right little Republican already.”80 These were not entirely crude caricatures. The Republicans did have middle-class West Side candidates and supporters with Irish backgrounds, many of them pursuing legal careers. In 1902, John J. Sullivan, a nominee for state assembly, spoke at a mass Republican rally on the West Side held “under the auspices of the Italian Republican League” as well as at events elsewhere in the city.81 P.J. O’Flaherty, Philip V. F ­ ennelly, W.J. Burke, Daniel J. Kenefick, and Edward R. O’Malley were other seasoned Republican campaigners and speechmakers who sought to ­ win over Italians, Poles, and others, while the party also tried to gain a footing in the southern second ward in 1904 by nominating young

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Irish-American Bartholomew Shanahan.82 Fennelly was a partner in a downtown law firm in whose building John J. Sullivan also worked as a lawyer. O’Malley, an assemblyman for the third district, also partnered in a law firm, and his house was located deep inside the West Side’s “safe” Republican territory. The evidence on residential movements presented earlier suggests a  similar pattern of Catholic Irish relocations towards the “solid” Republican neighbourhoods in Buffalo, and the occupations of the above-mentioned men give credence to the claim of a rising class of Grand Old Party activists that later informed the imagination of novelist Roger Dooley. But to what degree did improvements in the standards of living of Irish-Americans, especially where a move to a new neighbourhood was involved, coincide with a rethinking of political affiliations? In the absence of personal testimonies, it would be overstepping the mark to claim that one-time First Ward Democrats transferred their loyalties to the Republicans after resettlement on the West Side. Democratic inroads were made in the twenty-fourth ward (figure 8.4) over the first decade of the twentieth century, and some of this may have stemmed from the voting allegiances of in-migrating Catholics. It is worth noting, however, that the new parish churches of Nativity and Annunciation were built in what the Express would have considered solid Republican territory, and by 1914, Democratic open-air campaign meetings alternated with those of their rivals in this neighbourhood.83 Some of the new Democratic faces of Irish background were also West Siders. John Cunneen was a Co. Clare–born lawyer and chairman of the Erie County Democratic Committee who was successfully elected as state attorney general in 1902.84 While the Express labelled him an “excellent citizen, but … a bitter partisan,” he also lived close to Holy Angels Church and acted as diocesan counsel.85 John F. Malone, an insurance man elected as a state senator in 1914, possessed an enviable address at 290 North Street, while Henry W. Killeen, also on the 1914 ticket, lived on nearby Richmond Avenue. Killeen was also a partner in a law firm and a one-time member of the Erie County ao h executive. If one were to leave the question of party aside and consider the lives of politically active West Side Irish-American Catholics such as O’Malley, Cunneen, Killeen, and others, the picture of a small but solidly middleclass group of political men emerges. And though the occupational ­backgrounds of such men did not make the Irish-American Catholic community of the West Side middle-class in itself, they joined with clerics, editors, and associational leaders to shape a climate in which a new

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generation of sons and daughters could cultivate bourgeois visions for themselves. The West Side thus became the place of Buffalo’s “lace-­ curtain” Irish characterized in Dooley’s writing. Irish Democratic Buffalo, however, had been only partially eroded.

Cha n g in g a n d C r e at in g Nei ghbourhoods a n d S o c ia l C irc l e s i n Toronto A great many of those who had grown up in Toronto in the 1870s and 1880s had departed the city before the end of the century, and their subsequent movements were more likely to take them across the international border than to other parts of Ontario. By 1891, approximately fifty percent of all Americans but only one-tenth of all Canadians were living west of Detroit, and Kris Inwood and Jim Irwin have found that while Ontario was matching the poorest northern American states in terms of income per capita in 1870, it “had lost even that measure of relative prosperity” by 1890.86 Attrition from the subsample of uncommon names suggests (unremarkably) that it was the young, unpropertied, and relatively poor cohort aged between fifteen and thirty that was most likely to move on, and there was no evidence that those of Protestant Irish background were more likely to remain in “Canada’s Belfast” than their Catholic counterparts.87 If the broad class divisions within Irish Buffalo could be identified in terms of neighbourhood, such distinctions were more subtle in Toronto. Although pejorative labels such as “shanty” and “lace curtain” masked more complex social fortunes within Buffalo’s Irish families, these appear not to have surfaced as colloquialisms in Toronto. Irish immigration to Toronto continued in generally low-key fashion, opportunities for suburbanization were aided by municipal annexations, and pressure was brought to bear on downtown districts by commerce, industry, and ­shelter-seeking “foreigners.” The result was that most well-known “Irish places” of the mid-to-late Victorian era were no longer known as such. The once-notorious Lombard Street underwent the most profound transformation. No more than ten families of Irish background were ­living there by the early 1890s, as vacant lots became filled in by brick structures housing small businesses and industrial establishments.88 By 1910, the one-time dwelling places of labourers, widows, tradesmen, and charwomen were now home to concerns such as the Crescent Concrete Paving Co., the Marconi Wireless Co., and the United Typewriter Co., illustrating the relationship between wider technological developments

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and transformations in the socio-economic character of the downtown. The one-time residences of “Mayor” Dan Dwan and his neighbours O’Hearn, Flannery, Dwyer, and Brennan at its southeastern end now housed concerns engaged in carpet cleaning, paper goods manufacture, and the provision of building supplies, street lighting, and lumber. Changes also took place on William Street, at the southern end of which had once stood a favourite Orange target of the 1870s, Owen Cosgrove’s tavern. St Patrick’s Church remained at the northern end but was in 1908 “relinquished … to the Italians” and re-consecrated as the national parish of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, as change now occurred as a consequence more of non-Irish arrivals than of industrial encroachment.89 Although quite a few Catholic families remained, and a new St  Patrick’s Church was built practically next door, the westward migration of mostly Jewish immigrant households from the crowded tenements of St John’s Ward heralded a new era in the street’s social history.90 By 1915, a Chinese laundry was present near the southern end, while halfway along stood the Machkizi Hadas Congregation synagogue and around it lived families with names such as Kassman, Moskovitz, Friedman, Shugarman, Friendlick, Swartz, and Zukerman. Commercial laundries, Chinese or otherwise, now sidelined an occupation once engaged in by many Irish women, that of washerwoman. What about those districts once known to have contained more substantial concentrations of Catholic Irish, such as Corktown? Although St  Paul’s and Little Trinity Churches remained key focal points for Catholics and Anglicans in the east end, languages hitherto unfamiliar to the long-settled inhabitants now modified the local soundscape. While the city directory marked only a few dwellings on Front Street East with the description “Macedonians” in 1906, not only were such markings evident on more of the district’s streets by 1915, but the lists of surnames dispel any notion that Corktown might have remained a place of Catholic Irish dominance. A Macedonian church had been established at the southwestern corner of Parliament and Queen Streets, and anyone walking east on the north side of King Street East would, upon crossing Parliament, pass houses sheltering people with names such as Uzunoff, Georgieff, Michailoff, Stoicheff, and Finkelberg beside others containing Sheas, McCaffreys, Delaneys, and Gallaghers. They would then encounter another Chinese laundry. It is not known if these Chinese and Macedonian newcomers used the name “Corktown” to make sense of their new residential arrangements in this part of Toronto’s east end. The name was not mentioned in the

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descriptions by an Evening Telegram journalist in 1909 of the “Macedonian slums,” which later reports revealed to be an area of high infant mortality where households infected by tuberculosis were supervised by  the city’s medical office.91 In 1911, the city’s medical health officer, Dr Charles Hastings, concluded that the downtown St John’s Ward, Corktown, and Niagara (the district once known as Claretown) were the  three main “problem areas” in the city where “privies and cesspools, shack housing and extreme poverty and crowding predominated.”92 In a more recent analysis using assessed house value as a proxy for social class, Michael Mercier again reveals Corktown and Niagara to have been not only areas of low housing value but also areas of high Catholic infant mortality in 1901.93 Elements of Toronto’s mid-Victorian geography of poverty thus endured into Edwardian times. Given that intra-urban transit was well developed within Toronto’s municipal limits by 1900, living near one’s place of work mattered less than in mid-Victorian times.94 White-collar workers of Irish origin who lived in neighbourhoods west of the university such as the Annex or in western suburbs such as Parkdale availed themselves of the streetcar service to reach jobs in downtown investment companies, banks, and city or provincial departments. Their skilled and semi-skilled counterparts, working at a range of locations in the city, had a more varied experience of commuting. In any event, those working-class Protestants and Catholics of Irish background who elected to stay in Toronto were following general trends of movement away from the inner parts of the city. To shed more light on this process returns us to mapping the relocations of “survivors” from the subsample of uncommon names drawn from the census manuscripts in 1881, tracing them in the city directories every five years until 1911, and evaluating their destination environs. For Toronto, the analysis began with a total of 205 households, and the usual pattern of attrition was noticeable within the first five years.95 With new households again taking form through the decades, details for 91 households were recorded for 1911. Toronto’s assessment rolls also provide assessed house value, as well as tenure status and religion. Environs were now defined in terms of being mainly Catholic or Protestant in addition to the various gradations of social class as indicated by average house value.96 Since the third chapter demonstrated there to have been a noticeable middle-class group of (mostly Protestant) Irish nonmanual workers in 1881, the intergenerational comparisons are here stratified along manual and nonmanual lines as well as those of religion. Figure 8.5 compares

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3 km 2 mi.

Selected churches (all Methodist) 1 Wesley Church 2 Crawford St. 3 Bathurst St. 4 Timothy Eaton Memorial Church 5 Simpson Avenue

Figure 8.5  Irish intergenerational residential mobility in Toronto, 1881–1911, showing the average house values of destination environs for the offspring of 1881 middle-class households.

the residential location of Irish households whose head was engaged in nonmanual work (termed “middle-class”) in 1881 with those of their offspring in 1911; figure 8.6 does the same for households whose heads were engaged in (working-class) manual work.97 Some patterns are immediately noticeable: first, the general propensity of middle-class households to move towards the north (and north of the “Iroquois shorecliff” especially) and second, the corresponding expansion of those households at the lower-middle-class/working-class interface concentrating on westward and eastward moves. The sons and daughters (but mostly sons) of Irish Catholic families of all income levels settled in environs that were mixed in denominational terms. Only two such families found themselves surrounded by more Catholics than non-Catholics, and these lived on streets where Catholics had long been prevalent (the aforementioned William Street, and Sydenham Street in Corktown). Mark McGowan has written that Catholics in early twentieth-century Toronto were living “side by side with Protestants of all denominations and income levels,” and the findings here support this contention.98 The more middle-class

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Selected churches (all Roman Catholic) 1 St Helen’s 1875 2 Holy Family 1900 3 St. Peter’s 1896 4 Holy Rosary 1892 5 St. Joseph’s 1878

Figure 8.6  Irish intergenerational residential mobility in Toronto, 1881–1911, showing the average house values of destination environs for the offspring of 1881 working-class households.

sons and daughters of Irish Protestant families who had lived on streets with few or no Catholic families in the 1880s, continued to live in similar environs in the 1910s. Approximately thirty percent of surviving Protestant households with some Irish background and with a workingclass head in 1881 had at least one Catholic household in their environs by 1911; for those with an 1881 middle-class head, the percentage was twelve. Given the social geography of Toronto as described in the third chapter, these results again indicate that the more exclusive parts of the city had few Catholic families living in them. Irish Catholic households, now largely occupying the upper levels of the working class and lower levels of the middle class, had a presence in all parts of the city, and though few of their immediate neighbours might have been Catholic, those participating in the world of church-based associational activity were seldom far from their spiritual centre of the parish church. McGowan has ­charted how white-collar employment for Catholic households grew in ­midtown and suburban parishes such as St Helen’s and Holy Name

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(figure  8.6), while inner-city parishes continued to deal with issues of poverty and juvenile delinquency.99 He has also shown how homeownership levels in these outer parishes were higher than in the inner city, though this tenure gradient had become a feature of the urban area as a whole.100 St Helen’s and Holy Name parishes, then, were not unlike Buffalo’s Holy Angels, Nativity, and Annunciation parishes with their congregations of Irish ancestry whose occupations straddled the collar line and whose commitment to local community was demonstrated through their purchases of homes and participation in local associations. But whether the neighbours of Toronto’s Catholic Irish were English-speaking Protestants or non-Irish Catholic newcomers, they were becoming “more intensely aware of their own identification with Canada, its institutions, opportunities and freedoms.”101 There is little reason to believe that patterns of homeownership were much different for those of Protestant Irish background in Toronto, and as in Buffalo, the route to property acquisition was rarely associated with a change of occupation. In only four out of eighteen cases in Toronto where occupation both before and after tenure change was known did this happen. Moreover, overall rates of homeownership in Toronto continued to increase during the building boom of the early twentieth century and by 1921 had reached fifty-six percent for the entire urban area.102 Protestants of Irish background were still most likely to show up in the affluent parts of the city. Using average house value as a surrogate for the quality of an environ’s housing stock, the surviving Irish Protestant households were living in environs of higher housing quality than Irish Catholic ones (figures 8.5 and 8.6), something best explained by the historically higher proportion of middle-class Irish  Protestants in the city. Over half of the surviving Irish Catholic families and their offshoots lived in environs with an average building assessment of $800 or less, compared to 23.2 percent for those of Irish Protestant background. Two case histories, however, show that these Protestants still had a variety of experiences. Henry Reburn availed himself of the benefits of a long-running career to base himself and his family in a part of Toronto far from the pressures of residential overcrowding. In 1881, the Irish-born Methodist was aged thirty-five, working as a detective, and living with his wife and two children in a 2.5-storey roughcast building on Shuter Street close to downtown. By the 1890s, the family had moved to nearby Pembroke Street after buying a house assessed at $2,400. Henry’s two sons, Henry Jr and Edward, had now both secured clerical jobs in the nearby business

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district, Henry Jr in the City Treasury and Edward at the Freehold Savings and Loan Co. Before they were thirty years of age, both had married and moved to well-to-do areas on the outer edges of the city. After some years of renting, Henry Jr was ensconced with wife Jemima on Brunswick Avenue in the Annex by the early 1900s, a street with more than half of its families “headed by men who were self employed, or in professional and managerial occupations.”103 Later in the same decade, Edward bought a house above the Iroquois Shorecliff on Dunvegan Road, valued at just under $5,000, with wife Norma. He was then working as a clerk with the Canadian Permanent Mortgage Corporation. Having reached their mid-thirties, the two Reburn brothers were homeowners with young families living in established middle-class localities in the city with high levels of property ownership. Their father was now inspector of the Criminal Investigation Department of Ontario, and his impending retirement may explain his move to the Annex after turning sixty years of age. Henry Sr’s new house on Albany Avenue was valued at $3,400, compared to his namesake son’s $2,500 property two blocks to the east. Henry Jr was later appointed head of the accounting department at the City Treasury where he “installed a new system of accounting and records which … simplified the work of that department.”104 The values of holding down a steady occupation with good prospects for promotion, as well as establishing a comfortable home and family life, were clearly held within the Reburn household. The fortunes of other members of Toronto’s new generations of Protestants with Irish ancestry followed a more modest course than the Reburns’. In 1881, David Carothers, then a fifty-eight-year-old Irishborn Methodist carpenter, lived with his English-born wife Caroline on Taylor Street in the heart of Cabbagetown. The street housed the families of labourers as well as those of skilled tradesmen like Carothers, whose one-storey roughcast dwelling under his ownership was assessed at $343. The couple’s five children, now in their teens, were all born in Quebec, their age range indicating at least eight years of residence in that province by the family prior to their move to Toronto. One son, Samuel, had now entered the wage labour market as a machinist, and he later worked in the St Lawrence Foundry Co., within walking distance on Front Street East. David Carothers had died by the early 1890s, and Samuel and his young family then occupied the house on Taylor Street, his widowed mother having moved to nearby Simpson Avenue. By the turn of the century, three Carothers brothers and their families lived adjacent to each other on Taylor Street, while David Jr owned a

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fourth property. David Jr followed in his father’s footsteps as a carpenter, with another brother, William, acquiring experience as a fireman and expressman. This kin-based residential propinquity was not to last, however. William moved the relatively short distance to Wilton Avenue, while Samuel and David Jr both moved across the Don Valley to the emerging eastern neighbourhood of Riverdale. All three established a stake in their local property markets. William owned the house next door to his own where he lived with his wife and their five children. David Jr owned the five houses to the east of his own and, as a carpenter, was likely involved in their building. His own house on Gerrard Street East, assessed at $600, sheltered his wife and five children. Most of his neighbours were skilled tradesmen and the average building assessment of the environ was $668, marking it as respectable working-class territory. Samuel Carothers, meanwhile, became a homeowner on First Avenue in a locality where most other household heads were also skilled tradesmen and the average building assessment was $863. The story of the Carothers family connects with several points already made: first, the occupational stability that was associated with being a homeowner, and second, the role kinship played (or “group thinking” in its most intimate guise) in the choice of where to relocate one’s residence. While the Toronto case has uncovered a noticeable disintegration of the older neighbourhoods of settlement in terms of “Irishness” (a contrast to Buffalo), it has also indicated the role played by skilled small-scale builders and tradesmen of Irish background who, like many of their previous generation, were developing new districts on the urban periphery. The Suburbanization of Protestant Churches and Fraternities While the dispersal of places of worship for Protestant and Catholic denominations in 1880s Toronto partially reflected the pattern of Irish settlement, these structures also made their presence felt in the newly evolving neighbourhoods to which those new generations of Irish origin were moving. While Catholic churches became implanted in different parts of the city, as in Buffalo, the evolution of Toronto’s middle- and working-class streetscapes saw them outnumbered by Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist houses of worship.105 And while the consecrated venues of Catholic worship remained anchored within their neighbourhoods of origin, those of Protestants were more susceptible to closure and migration as the social geography of

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the  city evolved in tandem with its economic and industrial components.106 Downtown’s residents were now increasingly comprised of non-English-speakers and the Canadian-born poor. The most well-known “Irish” Protestant churches of the late Victorian period struggled to cope with the persistence of poverty and the relocation of more affluent congregants away from their inner-city locations. In the case of Trinity East Anglican Church, newly appointed rector Rev. Hillyard Cameron Dixon retained a firmly evangelical creed while reaching out to the working-class community in the spirit of the “social gospel,” creating a reputation for himself as “the Good Samaritan of the East End.”107 Like one of his predecessors at the church, Rev. Alexander Sanson, Dixon was also an active Orangeman, becoming Toronto County Chaplain in 1902 and later Grand Chaplain of Ontario West. Closer to the city centre, the “strictly evangelical” Church of the Ascension proved less resilient than Trinity. By 1919, Sunday services were “being held for a tiny, motley group of worshippers in the Sunday school room” with the sheriff ready to “seize the furniture against defaulted bills.”108 Cooke’s Presbyterian Church also witnessed the suburbanization of its congregation, though it did manage to sustain an associational culture for both male and female adherents. In similar style to Buffalo’s Catholic reading circles, several meetings of the Cooke’s Women’s Home Mission Society auxiliary took place in residences, and the minutes for January to June 1908 indicate attendances fluctuating from a high of fifty to a low of twelve.109 Anxieties about the future of the congregation were partially alleviated in 1915, when Cooke’s welcomed back Rev. William Patterson from May Street Church in Belfast. Patterson now reportedly faced a situation where the “most influential members of [the] old-time congregation now live in Rosedale” with only twenty-two families remaining near the downtown church in an area that was now “a boarding house and a business district.” As the Evening Telegram put it, “Dr. Patterson will have to attract the young people” who “will be Canadian, up-to-date, and, it is to be feared, lighter minded. The homely allusions to the old sod will not prove so irresistibly telling as they used to among people who were born in Londonderry, or whose parents spoke the ‘Nort’ of Ireland brogue.”110 As figure 8.5 indicates, affluent families of Protestant Irish background were indeed relocating north. Methodist churches were likewise affected by developments within and beyond downtown. The Methodists were no longer the church of the poor and dispossessed, and the revivialist verve of nineteenth-century evangelists had been replaced by more formal tones at the pulpit as the

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church “gained in support in the better residential areas” and “came to be made up of people who enjoyed economic and social security.”111 Nobody could have personified the latter group better than Irishmen James Aikenhead and Timothy Eaton. Rev. John Potts had overseen the enlargement of the Elm Street Methodist Church building in the late 1870s, and his fellow Ulsterman Rev. E.H. Dewart had served as its pastor in the late 1860s. By 1910, however, this property too was being touted for sale.112 Although some of their churches were on the move, Methodist Irish immigrants and their descendants also involved themselves in communitybuilding around their newly founded churches in the outer city (see figure 8.5). The clearest example was the building of the Timothy Eaton Memorial Church on the north end’s St Clair Avenue in 1914 as a permanent reminder of the retail king and his faith.113 In the west end, Co. Armagh–born David McCann was a trustee of the Bathurst Street congregation, and his wife took “a warm interest” in the church’s Ladies’ Aid Society; two of their daughters were members of its branch of the Epworth League, an organization designed to check “the heavy loss of support of young people to more aggressive evangelistic religious bodies or to secular agencies.”114 Several streets further west, Bella Dunlop, the daughter of Co. Tyrone–born William Dunlop, was described as “one of the best Sabbath School teachers” and “a valued member of the choir” in the Crawford Street Church, mirroring her father, a preacher, trustee, and class leader.115 Also in the district and serving the Wesley Church was Co. Fermanagh–born member of the provincial legislature Thomas Crawford; he also became honorary president of the Rusholme Road Lawn Tennis Club, which was “composed of young people of the church.” Crawford also achieved ranks of distinction in both the Irish Protestant Benevolent Society (i p b s) and the Orange Order.116 The activities of these Methodists invite some contemplation of the intra-denominational circuits forged in local contexts through aid societies, glee clubs, and Epworth League branches, as well as the webs of inter-denominational activity through which self-consciously Protestant identities were being reproduced, whether in the i p bs, the Orange Order, or other outlets. These were places where ideas about “character” were being relentlessly promoted while celebrating the virtues and superiority of Britishness and the Anglo-Saxon “race” in Canada, as well as its local hegemony.117 The i p b s, for its part, continued to visit different denominations’ churches through its circuit of annual sermons, and Orange primary and district lodges organized summer parades to local

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churches.118 On the morning of Sunday 8 June 1913, for example, the lodges comprising the Eastern District assembled at Riverdale Park before their march through Cabbagetown to a packed Trinity East Church. That same afternoon, the lodges of the Northern District met at the Western District Hall before marching to the recently completed Dale Presbyterian Church further south on Queen Street (figure 8.7) where the Canadian-born pastor Rev. J.D. Morrow was not only of Ulster ancestry but also chaplain of the Northern District.119 In October 1910, two hundred members of McKinley Lodge No. 275 attended divine service at Cooke’s Church, where the Ulster tones of Rev. Andrew T. Taylor, assisted by the grand chaplain of the Belfast lodges, Rev. Joseph Northey, brought them the now-familiar message to “banish the bars.”120 Some of the latest generation of Cabbagetown dwellers, meanwhile, caught sight of two lodges (William III Lodge No. 140 and Enniskillen Lodge No. 387) attending the Parliament Street Presbyterian Church around the same time.121 The above examples also invite us to consider the institutional growth of Orange lodges in tandem with the residential patterns of workingand lower-middle-class Protestants. In 1901, the Orange County of Toronto had three district lodges (central, eastern, and western), and the following year, a fourth (northwestern) was added; the number of primary lodges was then forty-four, an increase of ten since 1886.122 By 1914, a revamped Northern District became part of the four-fold structure, and the County total was now seventy-six. Thirty-two new primary lodges had therefore been established within thirteen years, and this was all part of a wider national phase of growth in the Order.123 While the (now more restrained) Orange Young Britons remained part of the scene, Orangewomen became more conspicuous within it, taking their place in 12 July carriages. The Toronto city directory listed four primary lodges of the Ladies’ Orange Benevolent Association in 1915, their emphasis on charitable activities complementing those of other Protestant women in church-based associations.124 Orange meeting-places expanded across the urban and suburban territory. New lodges were instituted within the mainly working-class districts of the east and west ends, with meetings held at an estimated twenty-one venues (figure 8.7). Some were used by the Orange Young Britons, while others were the property of other fraternities such as the  Masonic orders and the Oddfellows.125 In the north end, James E.  McMullen, a York county constable, was dubbed the “Dean of Protestant Hill,” and was Master of the Northern District in 1914; he

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Venues used by Orange Order lodges County Hall (used by 26 primary lodges) Western District Hall (used by 19 primary lodges) Other primary lodge venues Venues used by the Loyal Orange Young Britons Association (LOYBA) Venues used by both the Orange Order and the LOYBA

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Figure 8.7  The distribution of Orange meeting venues in Toronto and surrounding areas, 1914.

had previously served as Master of Lodge No. 2145 (Londonderry) who held their regular meetings in Wychwood at the top of the escarpment (figure 8.7).126 The lodge was instituted in 1909 and contained 140 members by May 1913, and a report noted that the energy of the membership would make it “a tower of strength for Protestantism on the Bathurst Street hill.”127 In the east end, Broadview Lodge No. 2474 was using the  Sons of England Hall on Broadview Avenue for meetings in early 1914, while Maple Leaf Lodge No. 455, from which 2474 was an outgrowth, met in the Oddfellows Hall on the same street.128 The movement of working-class Protestants such as the aforementioned Carothers brothers into neighbourhoods such as Riverdale spurred the formation of lodges such as these. More than a quarter-century earlier, Torbay

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Lodge No. 196 had been the first lodge established in Riverdale; meeting closer to downtown had proven cumbersome, while the fact that “the vast majority of the people of the neighborhood are Protestant” boded well for the lodge’s growth.129 Further east, Dian Lodge No. 2054 was founded, with its own hall and lodge room built in a district “composed entirely of workingmen.”130 The opening of the hall on 1 July 1914 included a parade “formed in front of the Rhodes Avenue Presbyterian Church, and headed by the Sons of Ulster Flute Band.”131 The naming of this musical collective and of lodges such as Magherafelt No. 864, not to mention those lodges inspired by the rise of political unionism in Ulster, indicates the impact of continued immigration from the north of Ireland on Toronto’s Orange ranks. In November 1913, a letter from Belfast Orangeman John Dugan to the recording secretary of Queen City No. 857 included a note of pleasure “to hear you have received so many Belfast brethren into your Lodge during the year.”132 Earlier that summer, Sandy Row Volunteers Lodge No. 2442 was instituted in Toronto Junction by thirty-six men, most of their certificates coming from Belfast, and indeed quite likely from the neighbourhood of that city from which the lodge received its name.133 In January 1914, Aughrim Rose of Derry Lodge No. 2159 affiliated “four loyal Ulstermen … by certificate.”134 Although most lodge meetings were now dominated by native-born Canadians rather than immigrants, the Ulster-born continued to serve as important role models and interpreters of Irish political issues.135 None did this more effectively than Fred Dane, a Belfast-born Methodist tea merchant described as a “veritable leader in Israel.”136 Like other Ulster-born Methodist Orangemen such as Thomas Crawford, Dane would also serve as i p b s president. Finally, the impact of Ulster immigration can also be observed through the Sons and Daughters of Ireland Protestant Association. Originally established as a mutual benefit association by the “sons” alone in the late 1880s, its early-1900s lodge structure included not only women but also names such as Fermanagh, Cavan, Ulster, Enniskillen, and later, Sir Edward Carson.137 The association’s links to Orange lodges are unclear but notices of meetings and lists of executive members were posted regularly in the Sentinel. Orange personalities such as Fred Dane were involved as well as the likes of Thomas Rooney, a fellow Orangeman, one-time ipb s president, and Conservative employed in the civic service. As a Co. Fermanagh native and trained accountant, Rooney served appropriately enough as recording secretary and auditor for Enniskillen

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lodge.138 Unlike the Orange Order, however, this particular collectivity of Irish Protestants kept a relatively low public profile. Catholic Worlds in Edwardian Toronto The social rhythms of Toronto’s Catholic world were now becoming more defined, as in Buffalo, by the founding of parishes and churchbased associations dedicated to moulding new generations of devout and respectable English-speaking Catholics. This was not altogether achieved within an atmosphere of harmony and co-operation, however, as Archbishop Denis O’Connor, whose reign lasted from 1899 to 1908, eschewed the liberal Catholicism of his predecessor John Walsh in favour of a return to strict Roman directives. O’Connor’s mixed success in implementing papal directives such as Motu Proprio (1903), banning women from church choirs and installing Gregorian chant in place of classical music during ceremonies, was one instance of congregational resistance to his authority. As McGowan explains, “local parishes once again assumed control of their parish liturgies and customs” during O’Connor’s episcopacy.139 While Toronto’s church-based associations continued to organize summer picnics, fund-raisers, and the like as in Buffalo, O’Connor’s dislike of public processions was acceded to, adding to the sense that the city’s Catholic Irish were keeping a low profile. O’Connor also steered clear of Toronto’s ao h fraternity while striving to keep out others such as the Knights of Columbus; the latter organization, dedicated to promoting middle-class pan-Catholic identities, did not take root in the city until 1909, more than a decade later than in Buffalo.140 O’Connor’s successors, Archbishops Fergus McEvay (1908–11) and Neil McNeil (1912–34), restored more liberal visions, accommodating the spiritual needs of new non-Irish Catholic immigrants through “national parishes,” while promoting an “unabashed Canadianism” among the diocesan flock as a whole.141 Within such an atmosphere, Fr Lancelot Minehan was one of the more noted parish-builders. Born in Co. Clare and educated in the ministry in Dublin and Montreal, Minehan’s initial charges in Toronto included the older working-class parishes of St Mary’s and St Paul’s before his arrival at St Peter’s parish.142 Located west of the Annex district in the city’s northwestern edge (see figure 8.6), the parish was organized as an outgrowth of St Mary’s, and Minehan’s tenure began with him working “all night installing pews” with some locals to erect the original church,

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which, by the time of his departure in 1914, possessed a “splendid organ and beautiful altar.”143 A visiting journalist in 1911 described a High Mass that was “full to overflowing” with “a very good type of middleclass” congregation and “little of the foreign element.”144 This was an accurate description of the surrounding community, and its relative prosperity gave Minehan scope to develop an associational culture with both junior and senior branches of the male-only Holy Nativity Society and female-only sodalities of the Blessed Virgin (with an adult membership of one hundred) and the Holy Angels (with a young membership of sixty). The journalist noted that the object of the Holy Nativity branch was to “inculcate reverence for our Lord and His name, and to put down irreverence and indelicacy,” while the female sodalities sought “to cultivate the virtues of modesty and propriety of conduct”; the Altar Society, meanwhile, apparently comprised “a very large proportion of the parish.”145 Minehan invited non-Catholics to his class on Christian doctrine to combat what he considered “a section of opinion here which manifests a bigoted and intolerant attitude towards Catholics,” and his efforts would earn positive acknowledgment by some Protestant clergymen.146 As in Buffalo, Catholic Irishmen became drawn into a devotional world that challenged the excesses of the tavern, and the assault on the city’s bars by evangelical reformers did no harm to these efforts. The men of St Patrick’s parish were reported to have “especially turned out in phenomenal numbers” to a Redemptorist Fathers mission in 1907, for example, as if to show that the bruisers, delinquents, and trouble-makers of Dummer Street were, like the street name itself, no more.147 Elsewhere, parish-scale clubs comprised the Toronto Catholic Debating Union, while the Catholic Young Ladies’ Literary Association held weekly meetings in members’ homes.148 Holy Name societies were especially influential, capturing over 2,700 members in the city by the end of 1912.149 The fruits of their efforts in the wider region were publicly displayed in the summer of 1911 with a parade of upwards of 6,000 men, and these annual gatherings increased in number until the outbreak of war in Europe.150 With St Patrick’s Day parades a thing of the past, this was the nearest that Toronto’s Catholics of Irish origin would come to expressing the religious dimensions of their identities in large-scale fashion. The absence of St Patrick’s parades did not, however, mean the disappearance of organizations promoting Irish ethnic identity from the Catholic social landscape. The first division of the Toronto ao h was organized in the summer of 1889, and in 1891, these Torontonians were invited to Buffalo to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the

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first division there.151 While the ao h provided insurance to its members, provincial president Hugh McCaffrey defined its wider role as the promotion and defence of Catholic Irish “manhood and character.”152 By 1900, the Toronto Hibernians had attracted and organized a membership of 865 in five divisions, two of which met in the downtown area, and the other three in the vicinity of St Paul’s, St Mary’s, and St  Helen’s Churches. Within five years, the membership had risen to 1,778 before falling to 1,236 in 1915, and attempts to establish ­women’s divisions seem to have prospered only after the departure of Archbishop O’Connor.153 Despite fluctuations in membership, the Toronto ao h was crucial to maintaining interest in Irish culture, history, and current affairs into the early twentieth century. While its activities in this arena are analyzed in the following chapter, the fraternity’s attempts to have Irish language and history included in Ontario’s separate school curriculum are ­worthy of note here.154 If such efforts reflected their assumption of an existing but under-cultivated Irishness within the schools, many of those in Toronto would have provided fertile ground for that assumption to grow. Of the total of 53,430 pupils enrolled in Toronto’s separate and public schools, 6,474 or 12.1 percent were in the former, a percentage reflecting the Catholic share of the city’s population. The share of pupils of Irish origin within Toronto’s separate schools was in decline (circa fifty percent by 1911), however, and opportunities for the ao h to promote their brand of Irishness among the next generation of schoolchildren were likely to be found more in newer suburban schools than in those closer to the core. Having said this, the library of the long-running St Mary’s School was in 1912 reported to contain “works on all cultural subjects from Irish literature to works on modern science, hygiene, and sanitation.”155 The sporting activities of schools, colleges, parish associations, and other amateur clubs also reinforced degrees of Catholic and Irish distinctiveness. Before the First World War, Toronto youngsters played in “inter-Catholic” leagues for hockey, baseball, pool, and billiards, and the best among them challenged non-Catholic sides.156 In May 1914, Holy Name junior societies considered organizing a parish-based baseball league, and those with track and field ambitions directed themselves to the Irish Canadian Athletic Club (i c ac ), an organization that was run by predominantly Catholic administrators but whose owner, Thomas C. Flanagan, was pragmatic enough to accept the best athletes of any background.157 Noteworthy among i cac rivals were teams

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drawn from Young Men’s Christian Association clubs, composed of “­rising numbers of urbanized middle-class Protestant males.”158 Also of significance was the rise of St Michael’s College as a focal point of athletic excellence and Irish identity during these years. This was part of a plan of educational and social revitalization masterminded by Fr Henry Carr in which the Catholic college rose from relative obscurity to federate with the University of Toronto in 1910. It had made a national name for itself by then, capturing junior and senior hockey and football championships as well as the hearts of a largely Irish Catholic fan base.159 The college teams’ nickname, “the Irish,” referenced in both yearbooks and the local press, echoed that of the i c ac , and their successes worked not only to assert Catholic equality in a Protestant city but also to create “cultural rallying points” for Toronto’s Catholic Irish.160 Although sporting notions of “the Irish” circulated in the city in a way that referenced a Catholic cohort, Torontonians were again reminded that the city was not about to shed the “Canadian Belfast” tag. Reflecting the early twentieth-century trend of immigration from Ireland, the Ulster United soccer club was established in 1914. The so-called “RedHanders” would capture the Canadian amateur soccer championship in 1925, by which time Ulster Stadium was inserted into the east end’s working-class residential streetscape.161 The following year, the visiting prime minister of Northern Ireland, Sir James Craig, would take the honorary kick-off in the club’s match against an aptly named Craigavon side. If this was not an event carefully arranged in advance, the timing could hardly have been any better.162 However Protestant-Catholic rivalries might have been played out in sporting terms, there were other, more fundamental, issues that continued to draw the ire of Toronto Orangemen and their fellow travellers through these years. Although encountering Catholics in various walks of life and counting some of them among their friends, the brethren’s weekly Sentinel kept them abreast of “the activities of Romanism the world over,” and especially within Canada.163 Separate schools, long at the centre of discord, were not now the only point of contention.164 Another was the Ne Temere decree, issued by Pope Pius X in April 1908 to curb the “evil” of interfaith or “mixed” Protestant-Catholic marriages, requiring that “to be valid under Catholic canon law, all interfaith marriages now had to be celebrated by a Roman Catholic priest.”165 In 1911, the decree was held to be a part of Quebec’s Code civile, sparking outrage in Ontario, with congregants at various Toronto Protestant

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churches treated to sermons with titles such as “Romanism and Why I Could Not Be a Roman Catholic” and “Why We Do Not Confess to a Priest.”166 The controversy did not dissipate quickly. In 1914, Orangeman Thomas Duff’s lecture to Parkdale Baptist Church on “The Influence of the Roman Catholic Church on the Educational Question in Quebec Province” was typical.167 As the following chapter shows, the power of the Catholic Church in Quebec also informed Toronto Orangemen’s understandings of the future shape of self-government in Ireland should Home Rule become a reality. There were other local concerns of a largely petty order. A “malicious report” circulated in 1914 about a Catholic obtaining the contract to build the Orange hall for Dian Lodge No. 2054, for example. District Master J.L. Bolton responded, however, that “the brethren sending us donations need have no fear that any of their money will go to a Roman Catholic.”168 The Orange-Tory jobbery uncovered in chapter 7, enabled by “fixers” such as fire captain William (Billy) Crawford, is unsurprising when viewed in such a light. On the other side of the sectarian divide, the attitude taken by the most visible figure in Edwardian Toronto’s Catholic archdiocese did ­little to build bridges with Protestant clergy. Archbishop O’Connor’s ­conservative line towards mixed marriages drove less-well-off Catholics towards Protestant ministers or magistrates to have their marriages ­performed, and McGowan has shown that just over forty percent of unions involving Catholics in 1911 were mixed, a percentage that ranged between thirty and forty over the following five years.169 The Catholic Register did not adopt a conciliatory editorial tone either, describing Protestantism at one point as “the most illogical, unreasoning, foolish heresy of them all.”170 Although sectarianism was not extinguished, neither were Catholics and Protestants polarized populations in the city, and while certain associational and institutional cultures limited regular interaction, mixing and mingling went on in workplaces, at dance halls, and at neighbourhood events. The Irish within the Course of Toronto Politics On balance, then, Catholics continued to stand apart as a group in the city. Indeed, despite increasing numbers, they were more of a minority in the Toronto of 1911 than in the 1870s. They also remained inconspicuous as political actors. Before the folding of the Irish Canadian in 1892, Patrick Boyle reiterated his opinion that “Catholics in Ontario do not

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take a lively interest in public affairs – they do not attend caucuses or conventions and if they do, their voice is not heard in either.”171 This was a stark contrast to the American situation. Municipal representation remained erratic; no Catholics sat on council in 1890, and though three made it to the chamber the following year, City Hall was still characterized as a place where “all the fat offices are reserved for the brethren.”172 In 1914, the Catholic Register credited the tight organization of Orange lodges with ensuring regular victories “in the race for civic positions and emoluments,” with the attempts of challengers likely to be “sporadic and futile.”173 While the discourse of ward politics in Buffalo was couched in terms of party and occasionally ethnicity (with the emergence of Italian and Polish partisan clubs, for example), religion rarely featured in the discussion. In many respects, it did not have to, since the Catholic composition of these groups was largely assumed. There, wards were known as “Irish” or “Polish,” but not “Polish Catholic” or even “Catholic.” In Toronto, the “Catholic vote” or questions of “creed” survived within political discourse, aided by moments such as James J. Foy’s nomination for election to the Ontario legislature for the Toronto South riding in 1898.174 Foy, a Toronto-born and England-educated lawyer of Irish parentage, was touted as a credible Conservative candidate by the Irish Canadian since at least the late 1880s.175 His chance finally came in 1898, in a riding whose population was between one-fifth and one-­ quarter Catholic and which contained working-class districts that, once plentiful with Irish Catholic families, had now become more diverse.176 Interestingly, each of the four city ridings had at least one candidate of Irish birth or ancestry in the election: Dr E.H. Dewart ran as a Liberal in North Toronto, while the aforementioned Thomas Crawford and his ­fellow Orangeman Dr R.A. Pyne ran as Conservatives in West and East Toronto respectively.177 Pyne and Crawford emerged victorious along with Foy in a Tory sweep of the city. Municipal politics in Toronto was in a process of transition, in any case. An at-large Board of Control was installed in 1896 and its members were elected from 1904. J.M.S. Careless observes the persistence in an age of increased economic prosperity of “political in-groups linked with Conservative and Orange machinery” on city council, along with other sectional interests such as manufacturers and commercial men, with labour interests relegated to the sidelines.178 The simplification of city wards was even less conducive to replicating the sort of micro-­ political culture still being moulded by Irish-Americans in parts of Buffalo than it had been in the 1870s, when liberal reformers sought to

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limit the effects of parties at the municipal level. For good government advocates such as Samuel Morley Wickett, the city needed to abolish wards altogether. His ideas were also shaped by pride in Canada’s “British traditions,” and his belief that “Jacksonian democracy had ­given the Republic an inferior and corrupt political system” was not a new one in Toronto.179 In 1910, the Evening Telegram noted how the “closeness of touch between Council members and people” had been “dwindling away with the growth of the city. All the municipal work worthy of the name is done by city officials, or Controllers elected by the city at large, now.”180 Some notable Catholic politicians of Irish ancestry did emerge on the municipal scene before the end of the nineteenth century, however, and J.J. Ward was one of the most colourful. Born in London, Ontario, Ward migrated to Toronto at the age of eighteen to pursue a career as a merchant tailor.181 By his early twenties, he had served as secretary of the Toronto Journeymen Tailors’ Union and the Parkdale Knights of Labour and had been elected as alderman for St John’s Ward (Parkdale). In 1905, Ward was elected as a controller, and his public persona was enhanced further by his inauguration of the “Ward Marathon” road race. Although he was Canadian-born, Ward’s Irish identity surfaced through his involvement with organizations such as the United Irish League, and this side of his character was occasionally picked on by newspaper cartoonists such as the Evening Telegram’s George Shields. Ward’s fervent enthusiasm for a sea-wall project was lampooned in a 1908 offering that bestowed upon him a thick Irish brogue (figure 8.8), and he was a frequent inclusion in that paper’s cartoons mocking the city’s Irish nationalists as the possibility of Home Rule in Ireland drew nearer (chapter 9).182 In keeping with the partisan divides that had long characterized the domestic political loyalties of Toronto Catholics, characters such as Foy and Ward allied themselves with each of the two main parties. The Liberal Ward tried his luck in South Toronto in the federal contest of September 1911 but to no avail, losing to Catholic Tory A. Claude Macdonnell, a former board member of the Catholic Weekly Review who had won the seat initially in 1904. While Foy was joined in the local Conservative camp by Gaelic League president D’Arcy Hinds, one of Ward’s Liberal allies was Andrew T. Hernon, an Irish-born butcher who became president of the aoh for York County and was a formidable athlete and i c ac member. Irish Catholic Benevolent Union president and lawyer C.J. McCabe also spoke regularly at Liberal campaign meetings.183

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Figure 8.8  “Local Geography.” Toronto Evening Telegram, 28 May 1908. Courtesy of the Toronto Public Library.

The federal and provincial elections of 1911 reinforced the city’s r­eputation as “Tory Toronto” when all five ridings were taken by Conservatives. Results for the provincial contest of 1908 had been similar, and Foy was the only Tory elected in 1911 who was not (and could not be) a member of the Orange Order. At the municipal level, meanwhile, Sentinel editor Horatio C. Hocken was re-elected mayor in January 1914 with a majority of over 4,700, and the Star reported that “three of the four other members of the Board of Control [were] members of the Orange Association as well as a majority of the aldermen.”184 In this context, and given the broad distribution of lodges across its landscape, the occasional characterization of Toronto as an “Orange city” was on the mark.

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By the time of the First World War, many of the North American–born of Irish origin had moved into new homes and neighbourhoods in both cities. They were finding their places within social routines shaped by associations, clubs, fraternities, and other circles, depending on the goals they set for themselves and their children as well as those dimensions of social identity they chose to emphasize and cultivate. Efforts to lead, and be seen to lead, respectable or “genteel” lives as owners of property were important to many of these Catholics and Protestants. There was more to upward mobility than occupational advancement, and while engagements with consumer culture demanded that attention be given to how people conducted themselves in public space as well as to how the private space of the home was furnished, community and associational events bridged these worlds of private and public. Although their clergy promoted respectable ideals among the Catholic Irish in both Buffalo and Toronto, so too did new generations of public representatives and associational figures personify this bourgeois respectability. While Irishness remained bound within rhythms of workingclass life and politics in places like Buffalo’s First Ward, its dynamics had changed somewhat by the new century as fewer Irish newcomers appeared on the local scene. Roger Dooley’s fictional portrayal of life there at this time identifies “the term ‘Irish’ as used by the Shanahans” to  be “no more than a convenient designation for those families they had  always known in a closer way than even their longtime German friends.”185 Here, ethnicity had a casual, even unacknowledged, dimension beyond the world of Hibernian activities or 17 March banquets, though it was confidently returned to public view in 1915 when the ward hosted a revived St Patrick’s procession. Group identity among Toronto Catholics, in contrast, remained strong despite the reality of residential deconcentration. While Toronto’s Protestant Irish also frequented churches, societies, and reading groups, they and their children were shaping identities as Canadian Protestants and British subjects in an environment where they remained a comfortable majority. Amidst these acculturative impulses, the process of Irish ethnicization took some twists and turns. Though these new generations of Americans and Canadians were now concerning themselves with local and national affairs to various degrees, the question of Ireland’s political status did not elude their interest. In the final chapter, we examine their responses to events in Ireland in the early twentieth century. What we will find is that the sense of feeling and identifying as Irish remained important, in multiple ways, to more than just a few in Buffalo and Toronto.

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9 Prevailing Threads: Diasporic Nationalism and Unionism, c. 1893–1916

Although they were now established as New World urbanites, many Irish immigrants and their North American–born sons and daughters continued to pay attention to political developments in Ireland, which periodically fired their imaginations and prompted their claims in script, speech, and gesture in the early twentieth century. “Home” meant more than simply the addresses they resided at in Buffalo and Toronto, though much of the time, engagements with Ireland focused on intimate matters rather than the dramas of British-Irish politics.1 And yet for many North American Irish, questions of economic and political achievement on the western side of the Atlantic were inseparable from the goal of realizing some form of Irish nationhood. Not all had escaped the feeling of being part of an exiled mass of emigrants. As Alan Ward has put it in the context of the United States, Irish-Americans “could hold their heads high only when Ireland was free,” and others have echoed his words.2 But the Irish self-image was in a state of transition within Ireland itself in the late nineteenth century, and the nationalist ideas and literatures that circulated globally and revived awareness of Ireland’s Gaelic and Celtic cultures were resources that could be used, alongside the material realities of socio-economic mobility, to argue that the Irish were now more than capable of governing themselves. This final chapter explores the ways in which Buffalo’s and Toronto’s populations of Irish origin accessed and expressed their sense of membership within wider diasporic collectives, whether drawn from varieties of an ethno-nationalist Irishness forged within American and Canadian contexts, or from a loyalist/unionist identity sharpened by understandings of Canada’s British and imperial connections as well as fears for the future of Ulster. The chapter’s first two sections document the activities of organizations and the press in framing Irish nationalist

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positions in each city in the years before 1910, while the third section explores responses to the rejuvenated prospects of Irish Home Rule after 1910 amid a reassertion of unionist claims in Ulster. The fourth section examines the context of Toronto during the first years of the First World War, and the chapter concludes with the reaction in both cities to the events in Dublin during Easter week, 1916. The experience of urban life in a dominion and a republic conditioned the ways in which developments in British-Irish affairs, as well as relations between Canada, the United States, and Britain, were perceived and reacted to by the Irish in both cities. And while public support for Irish republican separatism was consistently asserted in Buffalo throughout the period, it was not entirely absent in Toronto. Threads of moderation and militancy prevailed in both places, albeit at different intensities and levels of public visibility.

Mod e r at e s , M il ita n t s , and the Culti vati on o f Ir is h n e s s i n Buffalo Despite the passing of Parnell and the dissolution of the branch of the Irish National League (i nl) in Buffalo, the arrival of the second Home Rule Bill at Westminster in 1893 was followed by a new round of fundraising activity. Rev. Patrick Cronin remained at the forefront of organization, and money for an Irish Parliamentary Fund (i p f) was collected under the stewardship of Bishop Stephen Ryan and Democratic mayor Charles Bishop. The i p f had been established in the United States by moderate nationalists disillusioned by the i n l , and was dedicated “to help send members of the Irish Party to Westminster.”3 The seasoned Clan na Gaeler James Mooney, now in his late fifties, was a predictable critic of the 1893 bill, but nonetheless supported the initiative. Wardbased committees were again activated to disseminate tickets for a rally at the Music Hall at which more than 2,000 people assembled, including “true-hearted Americans and sturdy Germans.”4 Confessional identity politics was offered by Congressman Col. John R. Fellows of New York, who reassured his listeners: “Ireland is Catholic. For 700 years, the British Government attempted to make it a crime to be Catholic in Ireland.”5 However dubious as historical arguments, such claims stirred nationalist impulses and lightened pockets. More than $5,000 was collected for the i p f by early May, and the recently formed divisions of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (aoh) raised funds within parishes.6 Although the second bill passed Britain’s House of Commons, the Lords’ veto spelled its demise as it went down by 419 votes to 41.

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Although the aoh was discussed in chapter 8 as a vehicle for social respectability and Catholic devotion, the organization also cultivated and policed an ethnic Irishness in North America while keeping an eye  on Irish political developments. Installation ceremonies conferring Gaelic titles on officers dressed in ancient garb presented novices with “a living, authentic past, kept alive by the endurance of tradition and by the unchanging sameness of ritual.”7 But there were other rituals. In Buffalo, the aoh assumed responsibility for the Emmet commemorations following the demise of i nl branches, a process likely aided by the direct outflow of personnel from one organization to the other. “Emmet nights” had become a popular outlet for narrating Irish history and demonstrating the rising status of Irish-Americans, and a local Emmet Dramatic Circle had also been founded. In 1897, a reported 4,000 or so Emmet night attendees included “hundreds of non-Catholics,” while the ladies’ “brilliant gowns and graceful selves added brightness and beauty to the  scene.”8 Such respectable airs were typically reproduced at ao h St Patrick’s Day banquets, and the fraternity acquired a reputation for its attempts to purge American theatres of “stage” Irishmen and women.9 But even this was not all. In Buffalo, stories of vendors “preparing to reap a harvest ... with the largest novelties in green” on 17 March later prompted the Erie County aoh to call for the removal from stores of “articles of any nature that cruelly libel and belittle the Irish race.”10 Herein lay the dilemma of how representations of Irish culture were to be managed in Buffalo. The Irish homeland was one that few of the city’s Irish-born had come to know in any meaningful way before their emigration, and one that hardly any of their offspring had ever visited, as much as news from it was available to them. Ireland’s physical and cultural landscapes thus became things of great fascination for diasporic audiences, evoked as they were through literature, music, fine arts, and 17 March postcards, if not actual sprigs of shamrock.11 The ao h railed against an American-style commodification of Ireland and its people, but they could not hope to completely control what they believed were the only correct ways to present Irish cottages and clay pipes before the local public.12 While St Patrick’s parades were not held in Buffalo during the first decade of the twentieth century, representations of Ireland were still present in the public spaces of consumerism. One instance of an aoh-approved promotion of Ireland came in the form of an eight-day fair held in Buffalo in May 1898. It was conducted by F.L. Maguire, who had been involved with the Irish exhibits at the Chicago World’s Fair five years previously.13 Held at the Music Hall, its

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aim was “to reproduce the chief scenes of Ireland with events of her history, together with a miniature isle made of Irish soil.”14 After viewing Ireland’s famed mountains, rivers, and lakes, visitors could ride around a model map on a “tan-bark track with a jaunting-car and horse, also imported direct from Ireland specially for the occasion.”15 Other artefacts “faithfully reproduced” for the fair included the Blarney Stone, St Kevin’s Chair, and the Cross of Glendalough, while some degree of economic return was promised by an “Irish restaurant” and stalls selling Irish laces and linens. The duplicate of the Blarney Stone had reportedly “been rubbed against the original” while “all facilities” were said to “be afforded for kissing the stone exactly as it is done in the old country where flattery fastens forever on the fortunate lips.”16 Elsewhere, visitors were offered “Irish cows with Irish milkmaids and Irish dairies amid scenes reproduced from famous pasture counties in the land across the sea” alongside champion jig dancers that would “illustrate the intricacies of Irish reels and twists and other Terpsichorean triumphs.”17 The Buffalo public thus consumed a sensory experience of Irish history, geography, and culture that was mostly pre-industrial in content. The images and performances observed by those of Irish descent gave them a collective and nostalgic sense of their origins that was acceptable to ao h tastes. It was a “folk historiography” that owed much to Ireland’s ongoing Gaelic revival.18 A Catholic Union and Times description of one of the most recognizable features of Ireland’s landscape, the cottage, described its “thatched roof, the quaint method of cooking, the old Irish delft and the pretty Belleek china,” and despite the appearance of linen, no tributes to Ulster’s industrial landscape appeared.19 Romantic portrayals of Ireland as a place of rural tranquillity inhabited by cottage-­ dwelling peasant folk nonetheless had political import, especially when visitors juxtaposed them with the realities of “misrule” narrated on other occasions, or the mental pictures of poverty gleaned from both newspapers and private correspondence. The fair was a popular success, judging from the brief accounts of local newspapers. A “large number of Hibernians from Canada” evidently visited on the 24 May public holiday, forgoing (and without much regret, no doubt) their opportunity of toasting Queen Victoria on the other side of the border.20 Not content to have the latest generation of Irish-Americans imbibe history simply from their parents, the ao h also launched a nationwide effort to have Irish history taught in both parochial and public schools so that a sense of Irish ethnic identity might be transmitted to the latest cohort of American-born children. In 1902 and 1903, efforts were made

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in Buffalo and received a sympathetic reaction from Bishop Quigley, who declared his favourite text to be P.W. Joyce’s 300-page Child’s History of Ireland, though he would soon depart to become archbishop of Chicago.21 By January 1903, the ao h committee in charge of promoting Irish history lessons in Buffalo’s parochial schools had received “hearty co-operation” from the pastors of the diocese, reporting that “nearly all the parochial schools will, during the month of February, have Irish history taught as a regular study.”22 Elsewhere, the ao h promoted the playing of Gaelic sports at summer picnics, and a Gaelic League branch dedicated to Irish language teaching flowered for a time in the city.23 Committing to language-learning was harder cultural work than the recounting of stories about the “men of ’98” or the development of Gaelic sporting skills, however. And as much as sports such as baseball had become popular, the revival of Buffalo’s St Patrick’s Day parade in 1915 was headed by the First Ward’s Gaelic-American Athletic Association that contained “600 members, all native sons of Ireland.”24 The existence of Gaelic sport in Buffalo likely fed off promotional impulses in the New York City area during these years.25 The Buffalo aoh also articulated opinion on world affairs that resonated with the nationalist struggle in Ireland. In the case of the AngloBoer War, it was doubtless aware of the pattern set by Irish-Americans elsewhere as well as in Ireland where for a time, the “pro-Boer movement and the Irish nationalist movement were ... indistinguishable.”26 In  the United States, the Boers’ cause “found a political home in the Democratic party,” cementing further Irish-American support for a fellow underdog half the world away.27 And so in January 1900, fifty people assembled at a West Side hall at the behest of the ao h to organize Buffalo’s pro-Boer movement. “Fenianism or its tenets” were declared unwelcome in the meeting’s proceedings, an indication that the event was sure to attract some militant Irishmen.28 A sixty-person committee was subsequently organized, comprising mostly Irish- and GermanAmericans, and a three-hour mass meeting to express solidarity with the Boers was held almost two weeks later in the Lyceum Theatre, where 3,000 assembled and talk of diplomatic co-operation between Britain and the United States “found no applauders.”29 An “Irish emblem” hung from one of the boxes, while a portrait of Paul Kruger took its place on the stage “under the shelter of the stars and stripes” and a Transvaal flag, and $800 was collected to provide an ambulance and a corps for the Boer army.30 Although Canada was criticized for sending a military contingent to South Africa, the McKinley administration was also ­ denounced for its activities in the Philippines.31

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The aoh, then, was more than just a network offering outlets for socialization, religious devotion, and economic security among its membership. It reached out to these members’ children as well as the wider community to promote an ensemble of ideas about the Irish nation and Irish-American ethnicity. Its mission to promote self-respect and guard against popular denigration was aimed at the Irish as well as the Catholic portions of its members’ identities on the various occasions where group belonging was affirmed and celebrated. While the aoh upheld a broadly moderate form of Irish diasporic nationalism, the physical-force nationalists of Clan na Gael resolved their factional differences in 1900 and elected long-time agitator John Devoy as leader. O’Neill Ryan of St Louis, a justice in the Supreme Court of Missouri, headed the new Clan executive committee, though health reasons forced him to subsequently concede this position to John T. Keating of Chicago, who had been imprisoned for his role in Fenian activity in Ireland in 1867 before later serving as American national president of the aoh.32 Keating’s presence shows how blurred the lines between groupings of physical-force and constitutional Irish nationalists often were in North America, as in Ireland. Another key Clan member, Daniel Cohalan, a judge in the Supreme Court of New York, believed that democracy could be exported to Ireland from the United States.33 Buffalo’s music and parochial halls would feature as venues on the lecturing and organizing itineraries for the likes of Ryan, Keating, Devoy, and Cohalan over the ensuing decade and beyond. But their uncompromising expressions of desire for an Irish republic, although less welcome in Toronto, were not entirely out of bounds there either. The militancy of the revived Clan was sharpened by the growing ­diplomatic rapprochement between the United States and Britain, as well as by a rising Anglo-Saxonist discourse that was creating a “racial-­ exceptionalist bridge” between literate English-speaking Americans and Britons.34 By 1903, the Clan’s beliefs found a voice in Devoy’s new Gaelic American, and though Patrick Ford’s Irish World now favoured constitutional routes towards Irish independence, it too was critical of Anglo-American alliances.35 In Buffalo, the key Clan member was now John T. Ryan, a Spanish-American War veteran born in Brookline, Massachusetts. He was the natural successor to James Mooney, who retired from business life in 1907 and died just short of his 76th birthday in June 1910.36 Public distinctions between constitutional and militant Irish nationalists were noticeable in Buffalo from the late 1890s. Both camps organized Emmet commemorations in 1899, with the keynote speech at the

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Clan affair given by Judge Wanhope Lynn, who had “distinguished himself ... by refusing to drink to the health of Queen Victoria” at an earlier banquet in the city.37 The Emmet centennial in 1903 provided an  even more visible reminder, as Clan na Gael joined the ao h and other organizations in organizing commemorations across America.38 In Buffalo, at least two events were held in the usual March slot and another in September, the month of Emmet’s execution. The March commemorations were held the same evening in downtown locations. The billed “Irish Nationalist” meeting at the Star Theatre was addressed by Cohalan, and the evening began with a “declaration of principles,” a longtime Fenian ritual inspired by the American Declaration of Independence.39 Among the nine principles declared in 1903 was that of England’s difficulty being Ireland’s opportunity; another cast Ireland’s future in explicitly republican terms.40 The aoh’s Emmet celebration also passed resolutions. While the opener vaguely declared Ireland’s right “to a separate, independent and free government,” the remainder expressed continued faith in parliamentary procedures for the winning of concessions such as legislation that speeded the end of landlordism in Ireland.41 The likes of John T. Ryan would have countered, however, that Robert Emmet did not die for a land bill, and that such moves were nothing more than the latest attempt by British Tories to “kill Home Rule with kindness.” The September commemoration organized by the Nationalists was addressed by O’Neill Ryan (figure 9.1). Those assembled knew what they would be getting, since “the applause lasted several minutes” after his introduction. Ryan had given the keynote speech to the Emmet celebration in New York the previous March where Irish Party leader John Redmond’s constitutional strategy was attacked as “neither the wise nor the manly method of achieving the liberties of a people.”42 He pulled no punches now, declaring that the centenary of Emmet’s execution “should be commemorated only by men who believe that Ireland’s destiny is to be a republic, and that her sons have the right to win their independence by the sword.”43 The “Union of Hearts” between Britain and Ireland, now pursued by Redmond as a route towards gaining Home Rule, was anathema to Ryan. The old warhorse of Irish Buffalo, Rev. Patrick Cronin, had addressed the March meeting staged by the Irish Nationalists, and though often a fiery spirit, he retained faith in Redmond and the Irish Party, likely due to an enduring devotion to the late Parnell. In 1899, Cronin was invited to dinner in London as an honoured guest of the then-Parnellite wing of

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Figure 9.1  Robert Emmet meeting poster. Buffalo Catholic Union and Times, 17 September 1903.

the party, where he called for “a change of tactics if Ireland is to win her independence in this or the next generation. The world asks for deeds, not words; for results, not explanations. It honors the Boer, not the bore!”44 Shortly before, he had hosted Redmond in Buffalo when the latter came to raise funds for the Parnell statue in Dublin as well as for the saving of the chief’s Wicklow homestead “from foreclosure of mortgage.”45 Four years later, Cronin would ride the conciliatory tide, reacting to the 1903 land bill in characteristically overblown language, comparing its arrival to the day “that the God of Justice hath at last harkened to the prayer of the oppressed; that the blood of martyred

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centuries has successfully appealed to heaven.”46 Irish nationalism, for him, was in no danger of being weakened. The point of the editorial was not simply to praise the legislation, however, but to castigate Buffalo’s Irish for their failure to support Redmond’s efforts more actively. Cronin attacked “professional Irish patriots” who had thwarted the establishment of a moderate United Irish League (ui l) branch in the city.47 Cronin did not elaborate further, but with the aoh choosing to remain distinct from the u i l nationally and Clan na Gael clearly opposing its moderate politics, there was evidently no room for such a branch in Buffalo. James Mooney, in a 1901 correspondence with Michael Davitt, was unreceptive to the possibility of John Redmond returning to the city, and in other cities such as Butte, Montana, and Worcester, Massachusetts, the ao h and militants worked together to minimize the impact of the u i l.48 By the time the u i l central committee met in Buffalo in March 1910, a branch had still not been  formed there, and Boston journalist John O’Callaghan wrote to Redmond saying that “my object in urging Buffalo was to get a section of the country that has done little for us yet, but can do a great deal, actively interested.”49 While a ui l branch was established in Toronto before the end of 1902, it was not until mid-1910 that this was to happen in Buffalo.50 The upswing in the Irish Party’s fortunes in the recent British election undoubtedly helped, as did the selection of Buffalo as the site of the fifth biennial ui l convention in September 1910. Cronin, however, did not live to witness these moments, passing away in 1905. Although the aoh and Clan associational gatherings involved but a  fraction of Buffalo’s Irish, broad nationalist sentiments and their Anglophobic dimensions were regularly circulated to the Union and Times readership during these years. With celebrations planned in different parts of the British Empire for the Diamond Jubilee of 1897, for instance, Cronin used his editorial column to decline an invitation to a local banquet from an “English-born friend.”51 The war in South Africa likewise inspired praise for “the sturdy Dutchmen” and their president, “Oom Paul.”52 Two months after Buffalo’s mass pro-Boer meeting, the paper began a new series entitled “A Few Pages of English History: Being a Record of the More Important Political Crimes that have gained for England the Epithet ‘Perfidious Albion.’”53 It unsurprisingly dismissed Queen Victoria’s visit to Ireland, though upon hearing that Limerick City Council had passed a resolution of welcome to the monarch, the Co. Limerick–born Cronin screamed “for the days of Sarsfield and the heroic women who helped him to defend Limerick’s walls against the foe.”54

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The Union and Times also expressed dissatisfaction with growing pan-Anglo-Saxonism within American public discourse. This included critiques of the “unjust war” carried out by the American government in the Philippines, with parallels drawn between the American “looting” of Cuba and that of “our Anglo-Saxon mother” in Ireland.55 With the Anglo-Saxon racial ancestry common to both Britain and America referred to on an increasingly frequent basis, long-established sensibilities about a distinctive and pure Gaelic, Celtic, or Irish race were only strengthened. At the same time, the paper chimed with the views of the aoh in denouncing St Patrick’s Day consumerism. In 1908, readers were told to “keep a sharp eye out for stores that display green whiskey, bottles, pipes, ‘paddies’ astride a pig, and so on, – and go to some other store with your patronage.”56 However such headlines and editorials were responded to by Buffalo’s Irish-Americans, divisions between the city’s Irish nationalists do not appear to have been especially fractious. The prolonged absence of the u il in the city suggests some degree of informal co-operation between the aoh and the Clan-sponsored “Irish Nationalists.” More evidence comes from the fact that both groups alternated responsibility for the Emmet commemorations in the years following the centennial. In 1904, the Nationalists continued the militant momentum by inviting ex-Fenian Colonel Ricard O’Sullivan Burke of Chicago, while in 1905, the ao h invited attorney Francis Cullen of Oswego, New York, who with “native Irish eloquence told the oft-repeated but ever green story of the brilliant but checkered career” of Emmet.57 Not all Hibernians avoided militant language, however; nor were they hesitant to criticize American diplomatic relations with Britain. At the 1905 gathering, Hibernian organizer Dennis E. Ryan read resolutions “calling upon the mass of the American people to ... never rest until the un-American conspiracy for an AngloAmerican alliance is unmasked and sent back to the den in London in which it was hatched.”58 Such fighting talk was an appropriate presaging of the aoh presidency of the Boston-raised militant Matthew Cummings in 1906.59 Cummings visited Dublin in 1909 and in a meeting with the Irish Party’s Joseph Devlin recommended the Irish ao h to “cut adrift from the ui l, declare itself separatist, and transform itself into a revolutionary party” while promising Devlin access to Clan resources.60 His attempt at re-election the year after was only narrowly defeated as the moderate James J. Ryan took the reins. Possibly as a result of its location as well as the presence of a network of militant nationalists, Buffalo hosted the founding convention of the

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Sinn Féin League of America in August 1908. Daniel Cohalan chaired, and Buffalo plumber William F. Shaddock became the local presence on the Central Council, sitting alongside the likes of O’Neill Ryan. John T. Ryan joined John Devoy on the Committee of Constitution, while John A. Murphy, a Co. Cork–born insurance agent who was involved in Buffalo’s anti–Boer War agitation, became a member of the Committee of Nominations.61 Devoy returned to Buffalo the following year for the Emmet commemoration organized by the Buffalo branch of the League, where he joined Fr Patrick Wilson on the podium, and where a choir of seventy boys and men from St Bridget’s church in the First Ward also contributed to an evening where “intense patriotism” was palpable.62 Later that year, the militants observed the 42nd anniversary of the execution of the Manchester Martyrs, where Daniel O’Connell’s pacifist stance was  dismissed as a “fatal mistake of policy.”63 Yet just as the American Congress gave scant attention to pro–Home Rule resolutions presented in 1908 and 1909, the Sinn Féin League did not become the vehicle for Irish nationalism in the United States that its founders had hoped for either.64 By the end of 1910, when the Irish Party retained the balance of power at Westminster and the Lords’ veto looked like it might be consigned to history, there was a heightened sense that the constitutional route to a “free Ireland” would prevail.

F ru s t r at e d L oya lt i es : Toronto’s Ir is h N at io n a l is t s, 1892–1909 The 1890s was a lean decade for the raising of Irish nationalist funds in Toronto. If the issue of Irish self-government gained public attention at all, it was largely due to the efforts of the one-time Liberal leader at both the national and the provincial level, Edward Blake. While Blake’s joining the anti-Parnellite wing of the Irish Party and his subsequent winning of a Westminster seat in 1892 provided him with a new political focus, he did not cease his efforts to keep Irish affairs alive in Canada. Given the precarious financial state of a divided party, most of these consisted of seasonal fund-raising slogs, and in this respect, Blake’s access to Toronto’s most affluent Catholic Irishmen was crucial. A visit in the fall of 1892 to launch an evicted tenant’s appeal raised $7,000, although most of this came from the pockets of four well-to-do individuals.65 Some months after the defeat of the second Home Rule bill, Blake returned to the city and organized a public collection for the party coffers that exceeded $1,500. The fact that the sums of money flowing from the

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United States were not much more than those coming from Canada during this decade is a testament to Blake’s networking skills, and more than half of the 1898 Canadian total of $7,669 was credited to Toronto.66 Other Torontonians got to experience the Irish political climate at first hand. One of Blake’s foremost champions was the Co. Kilkenny–born Archbishop John Walsh, successor to John Joseph Lynch, who suggested the organization of an Irish Race Convention “to give new hope and heart and energy to Irishmen at home and abroad.”67 With the support of the anti-Parnellites, the meeting was held in Dublin over the first three days of September 1896, though the Irish Party divisions were not lost upon the Toronto delegates. Anti-Parnellite involvement may also explain the absence of a Buffalo delegation, though Rev. Cronin credited “pastoral labours added to editorial duties” as his chief reasons for nonattendance.68 Despite the mending of fences within the Irish Party in 1900, one historian has described the reunification as “half-hearted,” with key divisions still remaining in an outfit now led by “an able, kindly but highly defensive commander in the shape of Redmond.”69 The late 1890s also witnessed an upswing in pro-imperial feeling in English Canada, with Toronto as its epicentre. The 1897 Diamond Jubilee had been a largely inclusive affair, with Catholic and Protestant groups in the city celebrating the idea of “imperial cosmopolitanism.”70 If the representation of the Irish as freedom-loving men of action was emphasized in Buffalo, part of that martial image in Toronto recast them as fearless empire-builders. On St Patrick’s Day in 1900, a resolution was passed by the Board of Control to fly an Irish flag alongside the Union Jack from the city’s public buildings in recognition of the “Irish troops now fighting with the other imperial forces in South Africa in the cause of liberty, equality and progress.”71 The empire-building Irishman had long been celebrated at the March dinners of the Irish Protestant Benevolent Society (ipbs) and the heroic order was added to during these years. In 1898, Toronto police chief Grassett spoke of “Great Britain’s great Irish naval hero, Lord Charles Beresford,” and following the outbreak of hostilities in South Africa, Rev. William Patterson of Cooke’s Presbyterian Church noted that Sir George Stuart White, commander of the British garrison at Ladysmith, “came from Whitehall in Derry, and Derry knew no surrender.”72 In 1901, Canon Hill of St Thomas, Ontario, told the society that an “Irish Protestant who is not loyal to his King is unworthy of a land which produced a Wellington, a Dufferin, and a ‘Bobs.’”73 While martial prowess was something considered worthy of public demonstration in general, St Patrick’s Day processions were now largely

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a thing of the past.74 As in Buffalo, however, celebrations of Ireland’s patron saint still retained public dimensions as the feast became entangled within an evolving consumer culture. In 1897, the World reported that the city’s stores “displayed green ties, green socks, green ribbons, green cloths, green boots, green everything in myriad shades.”75 With refrigerated ships now allowing the importation of the revered shamrock, the Evening Telegram noted its adornment of “many of Ireland’s sons and daughters today. The absence of the old-time street parade does not seem to lessen their love for the memory of him who made the shamrock the emblem of the Emerald Isle.”76 Although Toronto Irish Protestants and Catholics wandered the streets on the 17th with green ties and shamrocks, the city’s Irish associations, stratified by confessional identity, continued to organize their own gatherings. In 1899, Liberal mp Charles Fitzpatrick of Montreal was present as “a representative Irish Catholic” at the i p bs dinner in what was described as a “pleasant incident.”77 Such descriptions only confirmed the existence of separate identities, and differences of opinion about affairs in other parts of the empire, notably South Africa, heightened these distinctions. Unlike in Buffalo, however, Toronto’s Catholic Irish did not speak with one voice on South Africa; opinion either oscillated between two extremes or remained quietly submerged. Despite its brief attempt at revival, the Irish Canadian was replaced by the Catholic Register (founded 1892) as the main outlet in the city for Irish and Catholic news. One of its October 1899 editorials on what it termed “the cry of the ‘little peoples’” was a searing critique of British involvement in South Africa. Sarcastically denouncing “the heaven-given harmony of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ civilization in these wars of the strong upon the weak,” the Register included Finland alongside the Philippines, the Transvaal, and the Orange Free State as nations that were “gasping in the clutches of merciless imperial giants.”78 Former Irish Canadian editor Patrick Boyle delivered a characteristically passionate analysis of these distant events. Although acknowledging the monarch’s gesture of allowing Irish soldiers to wear shamrocks, Boyle told an ao h audience on St Patrick’s Day in 1900 that “thousands would be wearing the shamrock with a different purpose than that of doing honour to hirelings for slitting the throats of men fighting for their independence.”79 One report described the “spasmodic applause” greeting Boyle’s remarks, and a rebuke was delivered by Rev. Dr Burns, whose objections to the likes of  the Dublin Fusiliers being referred to as “hirelings” were “warmly received.”80

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Worn down by the pro-British jingoism around him, Boyle’s remarks betrayed a frustration with his British subject-status in Canada that was at least shared by those in the audience who applauded him. The fact that some applause was forthcoming points to fractures in opinion about Ireland, Britain, and the empire within Toronto’s maturing Catholic community of Irish origin. From the Catholic Register’s point of view, loyalty in Ireland itself would not blossom without the return of a Dublin parliament, and the paper questioned why the Irish should rejoice in the “Saxon’s success” throughout the empire.81 Although not designed as  commentaries on Irish Catholic Canadians per se, such ­editorials ­signalled an ambivalence about these Canadians’ outlook on Britain, or, as another writer has put it, their condition as “reluctant Britons” in Canada.82 This tension was also evident in Toronto lawyer Frank Slattery’s address to two branches of the Irish Catholic Benevolent Union (icbu) at St Andrew’s Hall in 1903, where he declared the Act of Union to be a catastrophe that had led to the usurpation of “the Government of Ireland by the Parliament of England,” before later declaring “the Irishmen of Canada” to be “among the most loyal and most prosperous of His Majesty’s subjects.”83 Irish-Canadian loyalty was explained by the opportunity given Canada to govern its affairs; in Ireland, the denial of such an opportunity had compromised loyalty. For the Canadian-born among them especially, Toronto’s maturing community of Catholic Irish were expected to demonstrate loyalty to the symbolic order of Crown and empire. This was now easier for them to handle than in the 1870s, not least due to the impact of the separate schools, but it still had its limits. In 1862, Thomas D’Arcy McGee idealized Canadians as an “Imperial people, but not ... an Imperial puppet.”84 The long-dead statesman had not been forgotten by Catholic Torontonians, and in 1894, the Register led a fund-raising campaign for a monument to be erected in his honour.85 Although this came to nothing, many of the city’s Catholic Irish would come to identify with McGee’s moderate vision. Supporting Canada and its membership in the empire was one thing, but to succumb to puppetry was to accept the trumpeting of militant Anglo-Saxonism, something also patently incongruous with narrated memories of a long-time Saxon enemy in Ireland and the survival struggles of Gaelic-Celtic civilizations. They were, after all, living in a city where Anglo-Saxon Protestantism had firmly established a cultural and political hegemony. Moreover, little evidence exists to suggest that, unlike their Protestant counterparts, Catholic Irish Torontonians would have identified with a term such as “Britisher.”

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While many Catholics may have interpreted Canada’s imperial membership as a source of national strength, few were drawn to the Empire Day parades of the Edwardian era, not least because those in Toronto were organized by the local Board of Education. No doubt many Irishborn parents were among the 30,000 taking part in the 1905 proceedings at Queen’s Park that featured 2,400 public and high school cadets armed with wooden rifles, but these were almost all Protestants.86 Having fulfilled “patriotic exercises” in their classes that morning, pupils from these schools typically spent the afternoon at the procession, after which monuments were decorated. They would listen to speeches by Governor-General Earl Grey celebrating the empire as “the fearless champion of freedom, fair play, and equal rights” before being told to remain faithful “to their highest British traditions.”87 Many of these schoolchildren would subsequently comprise the hundreds of choral voices singing “Rule Britannia” and other such anthems that evening at the Massey Hall concert sponsored by the minister of Education.88 For one later historian, a Canada-focused nationalism was losing its “forward thrust” during these years, instead becoming caught up in the “greater emotional appeal of British imperialism.”89 This was not the only occasion where rifle-carrying schoolchildren could participate in public celebrations of Canadian militarism. Processions were also held on Decoration Day (2 June), where the Battle of Ridgeway loomed large among the remembered conflicts in which loyal Canadians fell.90 Whatever their thoughts on Fenianism, it is not hard to see how Toronto’s Catholic Irish could register disinterest towards an event saturated by the public face of Toronto Protestantism. It would merely remind them that though they were in the city, they were not thought of as being of the city. The 1898 downtown church parade of the Queen’s Own Rifles and Queen’s Own Reserves attracted marchers such as Orange Irishman and one-time mayor E.F. Clarke, as well as “thousands” of onlookers; but few if any Catholics were likely to take their place in Massey Hall to hear the regiments’ chaplain, in a reference to the recently commenced Spanish-American conflict, compare “the degeneration of the Latin races” to “the sturdy growth of the AngloSaxon.”91 Empire Day speeches were of a similar quality, and neither event featured the children of separate schools during these years. Toronto’s Catholics, in any case, had their own plans. The centrepiece of their Victoria bank holiday was the House of Providence picnic with its “gymnastic attractions, games and fireworks,” an event that took Toronto’s Catholic Irish (and no doubt many past and present residents)

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to the historic neighbourhood of Corktown.92 Almost 10,000 were present to enjoy festivities in 1907, and two years later a “400 chorus of schoolchildren” entertained crowds.93 Catholics’ sense of membership within the larger Canadian polity was reaffirmed, but the social distance between them and the city’s Protestants was still present. Empire Day elicited little editorial comment in the Register, whose columns were instead rich with reports of holy communions, confirmations, sodality events, and missions happening across the city’s parishes.94 If, as Carl Berger suggests, British imperialism operated as a form of EnglishCanadian nationalism during this period, it remained one more readily accepted by Protestants than by Catholics.95 The affective allegiances of Toronto’s Catholic Irish were thus weighted more heavily towards the Canadian than the British side.96 Like the Protestants around them, they were becoming Canadian, but on somewhat different terms. As Mark McGowan has put it, “Catholics neither rejected the empire nor entirely embraced the nationalist-imperialist rhetoric; they simply sought an independent Canada within an imperial partnership of equals.”97 The bills of the new Home Bank of Canada, founded with Catholic Church support, illustrated “events in Canadian history with striking effect” rather than imperial imagery, for example.98 But this attachment to Canada that was developing among Catholic Torontonians of Irish ancestry was not entirely a function of local or domestic experience. It was also informed by a transatlantic Irish nationalism that had long critiqued British imperialist hubris. That Canada was felt to exemplify a successful model of self-government in the eyes of the city’s Irish nationalist sympathizers not only reinforced loyal convictions to the dominion but also appeared to limit cries for an Irish republic. Some, however, felt moved to advance conversations about the limits of “home rule” in Canada. At the 1904 St Patrick’s celebration, leading aoh man Andrew T. Hernon proclaimed Ireland’s struggle with Britain to be ongoing “until the aspirations of the Irish race were realized. They were all good Canadians and hoped one day to see Canada free and independent.”99 Ambivalence toward empire had now turned to  antipathy, with the foundations of sovereign authority in Canada brought into question. Hernon was clearly drawing some inspiration from the now-deceased Patrick Boyle, but other recent Canadian critics of militant British imperialism, notably Henri Bourassa, likely also shaped his views. While the Telegram observed that Hernon’s words were well received in general, it noted that “the references made to an independent Canada met with only a very partial response.”100 Opinion

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among this Irish assembly was thus mixed on the question of whether unfinished business still remained regarding Canadian statehood.101 There was evidently no clear consensus of opinion about the degree to which these Canadians were already experiencing an adequate measure of home rule. Toronto’s uil branch provided a forum for more tempered narrations of British wrongdoing in Ireland. The North American uil had been launched in Chicago in 1901, and fund-raising tours by John and William Redmond, John Dillon, Joseph Devlin, and Edward Blake returned more than $10,000 to the Irish Party in less than two years.102 Despite early controversies regarding the destination of these funds, hundreds of thousands of dollars flowed across the Atlantic over the following twelve years or so, earning John Redmond the “Dollar Dictator” sobriquet by unionist critics.103 By March 1902, two hundred branches were in place; Canadian branches included Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa.104 The Toronto branch’s hosting of the visit of Joseph Devlin and Edward Blake at Association Hall in December 1902 affords an early glimpse at the local uil support base. The president was engineer T. Cunerty, with builder John Hanrahan serving as treasurer. Four priests occupied the meeting’s platform alongside Methodist police inspector David Archibald, and present also were Liberal mpp James R. Stratton, aforementioned lawyer Frank Slattery, Catholic Register publisher P.F. Cronin, ex-­alderman Peter Ryan (now registrar for the city’s eastern division), and alderman William Burns.105 While Patrick Boyle would have approved the resolution passed to “protest against the present enforcement of the Irish coercion laws, which are alien to our experience of British citizenship,” he had died in August 1901.106 Noting the recent accession of Australia to the self-governing dominions, Blake added that “he had learned that the way to make people loyal, contented and friendly is to  give them something to be loyal to, contented with and friendly towards.”107 Though Blake’s usually moderate stance contrasted with Boyle’s bluster, the former now shared this sense of frustrated loyalty. The middle-class profile of the Toronto u i l was consolidated during the first years of its existence and its cause was strengthened by the passing of another pro–Home Rule resolution in the Canadian Commons in 1903.108 A meeting held in preparation for John Redmond’s visit in September 1904 revealed the branch to have attracted more of the city’s Catholic Irish personalities. Brewers Eugene O’Keefe and L.J. Cosgrave were made honorary vice-presidents alongside lawyer Nicholas Murphy, railway contractor George Plunkett Magann, and contractor Michael

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J. Haney.109 O’Keefe, Magann, and Haney were also at the head of the Canadian Catholic Extension Society, an organization dedicated to promoting “English-speaking Catholicism as a force in the English-Canadian mainstream,” especially in the emerging Western prairielands.110 Among the three vice-presidents below Cunerty was market gardener Patrick Falvey, past County President of the ao h.111 Lawyers were prominent members, providing evidence of occupational advancements among Irish Catholics, and possessing the oratorical skills to defend Irish nationalism. This was a body of men who were well integrated into the rhythms of middle-class Toronto life, and with their voter base now significantly diminished, provincial Liberals continued to voice their support for Home Rule. Though Toronto’s aoh did not formally align with the u i l, some Hibernians besides Falvey became involved with the latter organization, such as its secretary D’Arcy Hinds. Toronto’s ui l activists knew that the issue of Home Rule needed to be kept alive if only to keep the Irish Party solvent, and repeated claims of it being “nearly there” and needing just “one final push” (phrases muchmocked by militants) featured in the speeches of John Redmond in September 1904 and T.P. O’Connor in October 1906. Accompanied to Association Hall by “Captain Donelan, the Protestant member of the Catholic county of Cork” among others, Redmond told those assembled that “the chance of obtaining in the near future a great advance on the question of national self-government in Ireland was never as great as it is at this moment.”112 Donelan’s presence was used to signify the waning of sectarianism in Ireland and informed Redmond’s dismissal of unionism as a movement consequential only in “one little corner of Ireland, consisting of Belfast and about half of two other counties.”113 Although the organization of the Ulster Unionist Council in 1905 suggested such opposition to Home Rule in that “little corner” to be anything but on the wane, the eighty-four-seat victory of Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman’s British Liberals in early 1906 gave renewed hope to Irish Home Rulers, even if they had not regained the balance of power. Later that year, the Liverpool-based mp O’Connor told Torontonians that “the hour of Ireland’s deliverance is at hand” to “loud and prolonged cheers.”114 Toronto Catholics did not have to rely only on the ao h and the u i l to provide outlets for reflection about what their Irishness meant to them. Some months before the O’Connor visit, a diasporic beachhead of Ireland’s Gaelic Revival was created in the city. In May 1906, Gaelic League founder Dr Douglas Hyde spoke to “1,000 enthusiastic Irishmen of all creeds, religions and politics” at Massey Hall.115 Hyde had been on

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the North American lecture circuit since the previous November and his trip would take in more than forty urban places.116 Home Rule was not on Hyde’s agenda, but rather Irish cultural regeneration via “de-­ Anglicization.” But since the latter concept had intercultural differentiation at its heart, Hyde’s outlook still betrayed an essentialist quality with his belief that the Irish “are distinguished by lightness, wittiness, piety, artistic temperament” and the English “marked by intense perseverance, great business faculties, [and] a grand capacity for making money.”117 Placing the Irish as moral anti-materialists echoed the images of preindustrial peasantry in “Old Erin” put on display at the Buffalo Irish Fair of 1898. Again, the de-linking of the cultural and the political was difficult, not least because “de-Anglicization was by its nature a separatist theory.”118 Such distinctions were productive, however, in reinforcing the ambivalence towards Britain and Anglo-Saxondom that was central to the condition of the reluctant Briton in English Canada. Hyde’s visit raised $1,000 and aided the establishment of a Gaelic League branch in the city. And while Irish people “of all creeds” might have attended his talk, the new branch does not seem to have attracted many Protestants. While Irish language enrolments were encouraging, the League’s St Patrick’s Day concerts were held under the auspices of the i c b u, and its first president D’Arcy Hinds emerged as a key figure in  Toronto Irish nationalist circles.119 Born in Barrie, Ontario, Hinds was educated at Toronto’s St Michael’s College and became a judgment clerk at Osgoode Hall in 1905. Hinds also immersed himself in local Conservative circles while honing his poetry and song-writing talents.120 In 1901, he published a song, “Oh, Who Would Not Be Irish?” an unabashed declaration of ethnic pride that subsequently became ­popular.121 Given his involvement in the u i l, the ao h , and the IrishCanadian Athletic Association (i c ac), Hinds was at the centre of several outlets through which an Irish-Canadian ethnicity was being communicated and performed among a largely Catholic cohort in Edwardian Toronto, a density of connections overlooked by Mark McGowan in his account of the “waning of the green” in the city during these years.122 But there were different ways to be an Irish patriot, and given his moderate and Romantic outlook on Ireland, Canada, and the empire, one must also suspect the influence of not only the likes of Douglas Hyde but also one Thomas D’Arcy McGee in the shaping of D’Arcy Hinds as an individual conscious of his Irish and Canadian identity. Hinds was born on 19 October 1868, more than seven months following McGee’s assassination in Ottawa, and was quite possibly named after him.

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As in Buffalo, Toronto’s aoh gave due attention to the politics of the homeland, most notably through their St Patrick’s Night concerts at Massey Hall. With attendances numbering in the thousands (“some 4,000 Canadian Celts” were said to be present in 1906), the affairs were notable for a time by the presence of militant Irish-American speakers.123 Studying these occasions thus offers valuable insight into the range of political sensitivities among Toronto’s Catholic or “Celtic” Irish. In 1904, the main speaker was John T. Keating, the aforementioned Clan na Gaeler and an ex–national president of the ao h who had attended the Wolfe Tone anniversary at Bodenstown in Ireland the previous summer. At a homecoming rally in New York organized by the Clan, he had denounced Redmond while predicting the “freedom of Ireland by force.”124 He was more careful in Toronto, evoking the image of an Irish nation in a Catholic rather than a republican context, and his recollection of an eviction witnessed in 1881 tugged at listeners’ heartstrings.125 At the follow-up banquet, Keating decried depopulation in Ireland before declaring that “the Lords and money powers” were the real obstacles to the island’s progress and that “English democrats are the friends of Ireland.”126 This was the right place and time for Keating’s Anglophobia to remain in check. A more interesting test of Irish-Canadian sensitivities came the following year, when O’Neill Ryan arrived at Massey Hall. The Telegram described the restrained reaction to Ryan’s pronouncement that Daniel O’Connell’s achievements “fell short of what Ireland demands and must have, because his appeals were made to a British parliament.”127 True to the established Clan pattern, Ryan had earlier exalted the achievements of Robert Emmet, though the critique of O’Connell struck a general nerve, and the words of the Catholic Register reporter are worth quoting at length: Judge Ryan gave us much of the history of Ireland and often won warm applause from his audience but often times too, we could not agree with him. For example, some found it hard to believe that O’Connell had fallen behind in the matter of achievement. We preferred our old lessons and impressions, which taught us that he had done more for the Irish people than all others put together; we did not wish our idol shattered and we wished to remember him as the emancipator, the liberator and the saviour of his people ... when we were asked to look forward to Ireland as a republic, the picture would not come readily.128

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If this was an accurate gauge of the feelings aroused elsewhere in the hall, Ryan’s subsequent hope that Ireland “wrest herself absolutely and completely from English domination and make of her a republic among the republics of the earth” was a step too far for some attendees.129 The Star reported that Ryan’s republican visions “were not enthusiastically received” and the World remarked that “his climax met with evidences of appreciation from only a small portion of the audience.”130 The Telegram, while noting a number of departures from the hall and gallery halfway through Ryan’s speech, was more resourceful than other dailies in capturing the voices of the disgruntled. Some found Ryan’s remarks “uncalled for and altogether out of place in Canada”; one “prominent Irishman” said it was “a mistake for the ao h to bring such men here,” and another declared Ryan’s sentiments to be “an injury to the Irish people … such statements are absurd. Ireland could not be a republic if she wanted to.”131 For such people, the Catholic pacifist O’Connell remained a more appropriate Irish hero than the Protestant revolutionary Emmet. The border between this section of English Canada, at least, and the United States was not as permeable for speeches favouring an Irish republic as it might have been in the 1870s, though it is worth remembering that there were some in the audience who agreed with Ryan’s ­republican vision. Nonetheless, the venue was not pelted with stones as it would likely have been in the 1870s, and no diplomatic incident resulted. The National Hibernian, the organ of the ao h published in Washington, d c, unsurprisingly kept any suggestion of a subdued crowd reaction out of its report of the evening’s proceedings.132 Despite the mixed reaction to O’Neill Ryan’s speech, Irish-Americans returned to this 17 March podium for the next four years. That the pattern was maintained may say something about the aims of the Canadian aoh leadership to retain the event as a high-profile attraction, or may indicate that there were less moderate elements within their ranks that have not yet been acknowledged. In 1907, Hugh O’Neill, a Chicago lawyer, echoed the texts of popular Irish nationalism by narrating the ancient glories of the Irish nation with its “line of 14 kings” and the resources of “10 colleges, with 8,000 to 10,000 students,” in the sixth and seventh centuries.133 This was safe “golden age” history, but the following year, O’Neill would join the executive committee of the Sinn Féin League of America in the company of O’Neill Ryan.134 In 1908, the militant Matthew Cummings arrived from Boston to similarly recount the riches of an ancient Irish civilization where a “Legislative Assembly [existed] 1400 years before the

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Christian era” and civilization existed “2000 years before England,” before the Irish became and remained “faithful to the teaching and authority of Rome.”135 The St Patrick’s Day visits of Irish-American speakers did not last. By 1910, the Ontario-born archbishop of Toronto, Fergus McEvay, anxious to extinguish any doubts about the loyalty of the city’s Catholics, “demanded that no American lecturer of an anti-British ilk … be permitted to speak at the annual concert,” a wish that was duly complied with.136 As in Buffalo, the Toronto ao h was intervening in the formation of opinion about British-Irish (and indirectly, Canadian) political affairs, though in Buffalo, the most extreme speakers spoke not at ao h gatherings but at those of the city’s self-styled “Irish Nationalists.” The St Patrick’s celebrations provided other evidence of the ambivalent dimensions of Irish-Canadian Catholic identity. Unlike Buffalo’s Emmet commemorations, where Irish and American flags shared balcony, hall, and stage space, Union Jacks were rarely if ever seen at these affairs on 17 March. In 1904, the World reported that “in front of the great organ was a drapery of the national color, adorned with golden harps, while the national flag fluttered profusely from the galleries,” while in 1905, Massey Hall had “a Celtic greeting waved over the galleries, and the royal harp … emblazoned on the small banners about the hall.”137 In 1908, however, the Telegram chose to report not on the decorations but rather the fact that “not one Union Jack” was displayed at Massey Hall; it would make similar observations in later years.138 But the Union Jack would also have appeared incongruous, if not insulting, to Irish-American visitors, while providing a confusing backdrop to denunciations of “British misrule.” The place of the Stars and Stripes in Buffalo venues prompted no such ambivalence: Irish and American identities had secured a complementary form. Though little is known about the age or birthplace composition of these Massey Hall audiences, it seems reasonable to speculate that a middle-aged and older crowd predominated, with some recent immigrants. Younger adults born in Canada may now have found little of interest in such gatherings, and the volatility in Toronto’s ao h membership between 1900 and 1910 signifies the setting-in of some complacency if not disinterest in Catholic Irish fraternalism. Nevertheless, and in the absence of Irish history being taught in Ontario’s separate schools, aoh divisions organized a calendar of Irish nationalist commemoration that extended beyond 17 March. Though no Emmet centennial commemoration took place in Toronto in 1903, a joint celebration of the

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126th anniversary of Wolfe Tone’s death and the 38th anniversary of the Manchester Martyrs’ execution was held later that year by the fifth ao h division with “many ladies” present.139 The following year, a “grand reunion” was held by the third division in a hall near the “traditional” Catholic neighbourhood of William and Queen Streets to coincide with the anniversary of the Martyrs.140 Yet such homages did not have the same intensity as Buffalo’s Irish Nationalist meetings, focusing less on declared principles and more on expressions of Romantic patriotism and ethnic pride. In 1907, the feats of the Manchester men were again acknowledged by the fifth division, and an evening of literary and musical performances included a lecture by D’Arcy Hinds that exposed “English cowardice and perfidy on every occasion when dealing with Ireland.” Hinds was no Anglophobe, but it is quite likely that Irishmen with more revolutionary outlooks participated in affairs such as these. In April 1907, the Gaelic League staged a lecture on “Irish Folk Lore and Fairy Tale” by Seumas MacManus, who declared that “the national spirit is coming back much as it did in the Fenian days of the ’60s” which elicited “loud applause and cries of ‘Hurroo.’”141 This was more than simply a moment of nostalgic bravado; MacManus was possessed of separatist ideals and had spoken at Buffalo’s Nationalist gathering to honour Emmet the previous March.142 Although quick to play up Irish martial achievements in the empire, there were those Irish Protestants who did not publicly involve themselves in debates about Irish Home Rule. As chapter 5 demonstrated, the ipb s membership comprised a range of partisan loyalties, and many members were not of Ulster origin. Liberal i p bs members were unlikely to publicly dissent from the support of their provincial premiers for Home Rule, and by the early twentieth century, a largely moderate body of opinion existed within the society’s ranks about Ireland’s future. Besides this, the i p b s executive now centred on a respected circle of professionals, while the four-hundred-strong membership was in a phase of generational transition. Richard Harcourt, the Ontario Liberal minister of Education whose grandfather came from Co. Fermanagh, reflected at the 1903 annual dinner that with “the self-government that the Dominion had long enjoyed, need we not wonder that a greater measure of self-government has not been accorded Ireland before this?”143 The following evening, Harcourt joined Dr R.A. Pyne, m p p, and former Toronto mayor R.J. Fleming, Protestants of Irish ancestry, at i cbu celebrations attended also by Mayor Urquhart and Goldwin Smith, the once-trenchant critic of Home Rule now better known for his fierce opposition to British imperialism.144

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While celebrating the land of their birth every March, i p bs members now placed more emphasis on the land they lived in as well as its place in the British Empire. Amidst the realization that “old faces were passing away,” barrister and president Elias T. Malone recommended in 1904 that disagreements in Ireland “should not be imported to this country. Canadians had nothing to do with them. We were here to build up the country ... That is our duty, Catholics and Protestants alike.”145 The following year, he remarked that “Canada was nearer to the hearts of [the society’s] members than the old land.”146 Sometime i p bs presidents Thomas Crawford and Fred Dane, both Ulster-born, had less compromising opinions on the Home Rule issue, however, and they would express these through the vehicle of the Orange institution.

D e t h ro n e B r ita in o r Defend Uls ter? T h e E r a o f t h e T h ir d Home Rule Bi ll Hopes for Irish self-government were revived in 1910 when, following general elections in January and December, the Irish Party regained the balance of power in Westminster, where a Liberal administration was returned under H.H. Asquith. In August 1911, the Parliament Act removed the House of Lords’ veto, enabling the Lords to delay legislation for two parliamentary sessions only. All the talk of Home Rule being “nearly there” now seemed vindicated, and on 11 April 1912, the Liberals introduced the third bill. In February 1911, Sir Edward Carson, a Dublin-born barrister of Anglican faith, had assumed the leadership of the Irish Unionists in Westminster, and in November of the following year, the movement’s ties to the British Conservatives were strengthened further by the replacement of Arthur Balfour by Andrew Bonar Law, a Canadian-born Presbyterian of Ulster ancestry, who promised Carson unconditional support. The regional bases of support for nationalism and unionism in Ireland had also hardened, and the mission of those in the Ulster unionist heartland was to convince not only Carson (who viewed unionism in all-Ireland terms) but also the Irish nationalists and the British public of their determination to resist Home Rule. These polarised opinions of Ireland’s future continued to play out in a variety of ways in Buffalo and Toronto. Emmet meetings continued to communicate moderate and militant viewpoints in Buffalo. In 1910, John T. Keating returned to speak at the Nationalist gathering. Unimpressed with the new political circumstances at Westminster, he related to a reporter his view that John Redmond “does not desire Home Rule, but wishes to be a factor in a great Imperial

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Parliament.”147 Indeed, his Buffalo-based colleague John T. Ryan expressed hope for a Conservative victory in 1910, writing to John Devoy that such an outcome would expose “the folly” of Redmond’s constitutionalism.148 But Ryan and his allies now had to contend with not only a pro-Redmond uil branch but also the wide coverage given to the fifth biennial uil convention held in the city in September 1910. Named after Parnell, the uil branch’s executive was made up largely of lawyers, businessmen, and clergy – the respectable Catholic elite. Wellknown lawyer Daniel J. Kenefick chaired the convention’s main assembly alongside the bishop of Buffalo, Charles Colton, and Nova Scotia mp John Costigan, with the main speeches given by Redmond, Joseph Devlin, and T.P. O’Connor. Though Redmond was reported to have “no trace of the Irish brogue,” he once again chose words appropriate to his location, requesting uil delegates’ aid “in a supreme and I believe a final effort to dethrone once and for all the English government of our country.”149 Those in Buffalo who advocated a republic for Ireland saw through such language, however. Divisions between Buffalo’s moderate and ­militant Irish could also be observed in the absence of overlap between the Parnell ui l executive and the sixty or so members of the Emmet Memorial Committee responsible for the commemoration of March 1913.150 The latter body also had a more diverse social composition than the u il executive. In 1913, it was chaired by physician Francis M. O’Gorman, with blacksmith Michael E. Murray as treasurer and insurance agent William J. Nunan as secretary. Aside from the ubiquitous John T. Ryan, other notables included the aforementioned William Shaddock, John A. Murphy, and Francis O’Gorman’s brothers, John M. and Stephen V., successful as a merchant tailor and a barrister respectively. Stephen V. O’Gorman was, like John T. Ryan, a veteran of the Spanish-American War and also served as supervisor of the city’s northeastern seventeenth ward from 1905 to 1907. John O’Gorman, father to  these three American-born brothers, emigrated from Kildysart, Co. Clare, in 1860. After “losing a finger at the battle of Gettysburg,” O’Gorman Sr found employment on the docks in Buffalo before switching his attention to the city’s police force, like many Irish before and after him.151 Service to the American republic was part of the O’Gorman genealogy, and the brothers were now moved by the mission of advancing the freedom of Ireland by force. The remainder of the Emmet committee covered all sections of the lower middle and working classes. Linking published lists of members to directories, and taking account of the problem of multiple names, a

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picture emerges of a group of detectives, saloon-keepers, patrolmen, foremen, railroad workers, boilermakers, clerks, letter carriers, salesmen, labourers, and small-time businessmen. Buffalo’s physical-force nationalists thus attracted sections of the city’s Catholic Irish working class, a pattern that other writers have speculated upon within Irish America in general.152 They also attracted some clerical support, with Rev. John J. Keane of the working-class St Stephen’s Church delivering the comparison in 1913 of Emmet’s “freedom-fighting” instincts with those of Washington, and Rev. Thomas P. Lynch of the nearby Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help chairing proceedings in front of 3,000 people in 1914.153 Although these accounts of the various wings of Buffalo Irish nationalism may conjure up visions of a city-wide array of participants ready to spring into action to help their ancestors across the Atlantic, the social realization of a diasporic community required constant mobilization by actors and organizations, especially when numbers of new immigrants were low. Consider the case of the Oblate Fr William J. Kerwin who arrived at the “lace-curtain” Holy Angels parish on the West Side in 1910. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1877, Kerwin was later credited as being “largely instrumental in creating in our population that sentiment in favour of [the Irish cause] which later grew into enthusiasm.”154 This was no easy task in a community with middle-class aspirations, and Kerwin’s initial labours were responded to negatively by “many a ‘shoneen’ in our midst [who] thought him ‘too Irish.’”155 In acknowledging the difference that individuals often made to the re-energizing of Irish identities within communities that were mostly North American– born, a comparison between Kerwin and the aforementioned Toronto “Irishman” D’Arcy Hinds seems appropriate. Buffalo’s “shoneens” could not easily ignore the militant turn of events taken in Ireland in 1913, however. The establishment of the Ulster Volunteer Force (uv f) in January was followed in September by the Ulster Unionist Council (uuc) taking steps to establish a provisional government in the north of Ireland should the Home Rule bill become law. Before the end of the year, nationalist Ireland responded with the formation of the Irish Volunteers. Given the momentum maintained by Buffalo’s militant nationalists, it is unsurprising that in July 1914, those involved in the Emmet committee formed an Irish Volunteer Association in the city. This was a fundraising body designed to contribute to Clan na Gael’s American Irish Volunteer Fund, established the previous month to aid  the Irish Volunteers.156 Police chief Michael Regan chaired the

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organization with John A. Murphy as secretary and William J. Nunan as treasurer. By mid-August, the city’s ui l branch followed the national executive committee in New York with a response to Redmond’s call for Volunteer funding that would help Irish people to “defend themselves” against “this audacious attempt of the British aristocracy and an Irish minority to put down by force [their] liberties.”157 They would soon be seeing John Redmond in a different light, however. Britain’s declaration of war on Germany on 4 August 1914 was followed in September by a call from Redmond for the Volunteers to support the Allied and British war effort, arguing that Home Rule would be in place once the war was over. The possibility of Ulster now becoming excluded from Home Rule had been public knowledge for several months, and doubts quickly emerged about Redmond’s strategy within his Irish-American support base, with criticism coming from both ao h national president Joseph McLaughlin and the Irish World.158 In Buffalo, Rev. Daniel Walsh of Nativity Church, honorary president of the Parnell u il branch, criticized Redmond for overlooking “his obligation to recognize the Irish in America, who do not want Ireland to contribute either men or money to aid England in waging this war.”159 Walsh’s reaction was unsurprising for one who had regaled u i l delegates in 1910 with tales of the “22,000 brave soldiers” (an outlandish figure; only about 5,000 were mustered in the Buffalo area) who had camped in the city in  1866 before launching their invasion of Canada in the name of Fenianism.160 In many respects a worthy successor to Rev. Cronin in his zeal for speaking out about the Irish situation, Walsh’s origins lay in Co. Clare, a county racked by high eviction rates during the famine and a later hot-spot of Land League agitation. No immediate collaboration between Buffalo’s moderates and militants resulted from this falling-out, however. The prospect of whether or not a public alliance with German-American organizations should be formed was a decisive issue, especially since the ao h had decided against espousing the German cause at the national convention in 1914.161 In Buffalo, a general committee representing the “United Irish Societies” of the city arranged a St Patrick’s Day musical entertainment on the West Side in 1915 that included the aoh, the Knights of Equity, the u i l , and the Gaelic League.162 The Nationalists had staged their Emmet celebration, pugnaciously billed as “the big Irish event of the year,” only two evenings previously.163 But more than simply being an Irish event, this Emmet commemoration showcased a local Irish and German associational alliance. A

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Niagara County event held “in honour of Ireland’s martyred dead” the previous November by the Irish Volunteer Association had included German “guests of honor” and “a large deputation of Buffalo men.”164 Now, the German Federation and the German-American Alliance cooperated with the Emmet Memorial Committee to invite Dr Kuno Meyer, professor of Celtic philology at the University of Berlin, to speak on ancient Irish poetry in Shea’s Theater, which was reportedly “packed to  the last inch.”165 Following the familiar declarations of principles, Dr  Meyer argued that the bond “uniting Germany and Ireland dates back centuries … [and] it was at the feet of Irish professors that German students were trained in the rudiments and fundamentals of culture.”166 This historic relationship, Meyer claimed, explained present acts whereby “German submarines are sending bombs into English ships in the Irish Sea [and] Germany is taking advantage … of its opportunity to recognize the Irish flag.”167 Described as the “leader and chief personality [of the] Celtic-Irish scholarly movement,” Meyer began his academic career in Liverpool, during which time he set up a Scientific School for Irish Learning in Dublin before returning to Germany in 1910.168 Yet Meyer’s American tour was a propaganda exercise designed to sway Irish- and German-American opinion in favour of the Central Powers. His earliest engagements included Clan na Gael meetings in New York, and by the time of his Buffalo visit, the freedom conferred on Meyer by the cities of Dublin and Cork had been rescinded.169 In assessing these events, the significance of German Buffalo needs to be kept in mind. German Day celebrations of August 1914 strongly demonstrated the community’s self-confidence and belief in an imminent German victory.170 Such uninhibited pride likely rubbed off on Irish-American leaders, who felt that a public reassertion of their own group’s presence was desirable with reform in Ireland imminent. And so the St Patrick’s Day street procession was revived in March 1915. The initiative was taken by the First Ward’s Gaelic American Athletic Association and the Elk Street Business Man’s Association, with planning meetings held in St Bridget’s parish hall and chaired by William Shaddock.171 The ward’s streets were “gaily festooned ... with Irish and American flags and bunting” for the day.172 While estimates of the number of marchers varied between 3,000 and 5,000, some nine divisions of mostly parochial groups were led by police chief Regan and a platoon of police in a procession that, with a “battle flag of the Civil War” held aloft towards its rear, created a carnivallike atmosphere all round.173 The First Ward consciously and publicly reasserted its reputation as a living Irish and Catholic territory.

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The revived parade was followed by the re-appearance of the Friendly Sons of St Patrick later that summer with a board of one hundred members and an executive of fifty individuals under the chairmanships of Kenefick and Shaddock respectively.174 Long-time physical-force supporters such as John T. Ryan now joined earlier Redmondites, and some local politicians such as Charles V. Lynch, J.F. Malone, T.V. O’Connor, and John P. Sullivan also lent their support. The organization’s purpose was preserving local Irish-American ethnicity as a necessary supplement to diasporic politics, and its efforts to expand on the achievement of 1915 succeeded when between 8,000 and 10,000 individuals took to Buffalo’s principal streets in nineteen divisions for the 1916 procession.175 No observer of that chilly wintry day would have suggested “the green” to be on the wane in this border city. Indeed, it was one more visible exhibit of a hyphenated American identity that would incur the wrath of President Wilson once America entered the First World War. The epic myths of Protestant struggle that sustained opposition to Home Rule in Ulster continued to reverberate in one of its most prominent diasporic locations. As in the 1880s and 1890s, Toronto’s Orange lodges were in the vanguard of this opposition, and given the expansion of lodge numbers and upturn in Protestant Irish immigration from the late 1890s onwards, the Order presented itself as a visible body of support for Ulster unionism to an even greater extent than previously. Although domestic issues were now the prime concern, developments in Ireland captured the attention of sections of both the Toronto Order’s leadership and its rank and file. Many recent inductees had, moreover, been raised in an Ulster where unionism had made its presence felt in public life for two decades or so. Orange-unionist opinion in Canada thus remained as rigid as ever. In 1906, Grand Master and m p Thomas Sproule, the son of Co. Tyrone immigrants, dismissed the loyal pretensions of Ireland’s nationalists, declaring that “whether it is called devolution or extension of local authority … the aim and object is always to get Home Rule and separation.”176 As Sproule’s profile suggests, Toronto’s most vociferous opponents of Home Rule were Orangemen of Ulster birth and ancestry. Prominent among them were men such as ex–i p b s president Fred Dane, fire c­ aptain William Crawford, and Conservative mpp Thomas Crawford, alongside ministers Revs. John D. Morrow, John Coburn, and H.C. Dixon, and the evangelical outbursts of the latter three men never failed to entertain audiences. Orange myths could be mobilized, and halls, churches, street

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processions, and public buildings all served as locations for the transmission of anti–Home Rule arguments. Opinions about Ulster’s future, whether voiced by new immigrants or present in correspondence received from Ulster Orange lodges, solidified these arguments. A letter received by Queen City Lodge No. 857 from Co. Donegal in September 1913, for instance, related a fraternal resolve “to die sooner than submit to be ruled by Rome. We are all ready for them at any time.”177 Several weeks later, the lodge received another letter from Belfast declaring satisfaction with the solidarity shown by “our Canadian brethren … in our fight for  men and money.”178 If pressure was brought to bear on northern Protestants in Ireland to support the unionist cause, expectations were also held about the contribution that could be made by Protestant (Orange) Irish communities in Canada, and in Toronto in particular.179 Toronto’s Orangemen were supported in their cause by the Evening Telegram, one of Toronto’s two “one-cent evening dailies” with a proclivity for sensationalist stories and much local news for the “less sophisticated” reader.180 While the Liberal Globe and Joseph Atkinson’s Star were more unequivocal in their support for Irish self-government, it was not uncommon to see anti–Home Rule letters from Ulster published in the pages of the organ owned by maverick Conservative John Ross Robertson, born in Toronto of Scottish ancestry, and a sometime Orangeman himself.181 The Telegram’s critique of Home Rule, however, was put forth less by Robertson and more by his editor John R. Robinson and the paper’s cartoonist, George Shields. A cartoon published in November 1911 entitled “The First Fruits of Home Rule” features five local proponents of Catholic Irish nationalism returning to the land of their ancestors (figure 9.2), for example. The five depicted were Peter Ryan, D’Arcy Hinds, J.J. Ward, John O’Neill, and James Joseph Foy (then attorney-general for Ontario). None were Irish-born, and for all its seeming irony, the cartoon questioned the Canadian loyalties of the five, given their swift reaction to “Irish liberation” through the act of return. Their eager passage in a perfect marching formation onto the steerage section of the ship marks a moment of demotion from middle-class Canadian life to a peasant existence in Ireland (complete with exaggerated brogue), something captured by their dancing and harp-playing antics in the “Irish Village” published some three months later (figure 9.3). In the minds of the characters involved, however, promotion rather than relegation was the reality, since Ireland was now in control of its affairs. Their period of transience or even exile in Canada had ended, but as sceptics argued, the economic and cultural fruits of Home

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Figure 9.2  “First Fruits of Home Rule.” Toronto Evening Telegram, 3 November 1911. Courtesy of the Toronto Public Library. The dialogue reads: H O N J. J. F OY – “Shure, Ireland’s the best country in the world, and we’d never bin here at all, at all, if they’d had a government as good as this country.” PETER R Y A N, D ’ A R C Y H I N D S & C O. – “And now tha they’re gittin’ home rule, we’ve no more rayson to stay here.”

Rule were highly questionable. Toronto’s Catholic Irish had risen beyond the hovels of Stanley and Dummer Streets, but their social and occupational elevation did not preclude their export “home” as gleeful dwellers in thatched cottages whose collective memories of historical injustices were held up for ridicule. Toronto’s first anti–Home Rule meeting of this period took place on 28 February 1912 in Massey Hall under the auspices of the Grand Orange Lodge of British America. It sought to raise funds and correct the opinion supposedly held back in the United Kingdom that “Canadians are unanimously Home Rulers.”182 The speakers present betrayed the close links between city politics and the Orange institution, and the

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Figure 9.3  “The Irish Village.” Toronto Evening Telegram, 1 March 1912. Courtesy of the Toronto Public Library. The dialogue reads: A L D. JOHN O ’ NE I L L – “Sure, ain’t this the merry place we came to after Home Rule brought us back to the auld dart, an’ saved us from havin’ to live in Canada.”

resulting resolution (clearly buoyed by the Ne Temere controversy) stressed not only the danger to the empire at large but also the potential “creation of a Papal State within the Empire, where British law and justice would be superseded by the canon law of the papacy as in the case in the Province of Quebec in this Dominion.”183 Canadian social and political realities continued to inform interpretations of Home Rule for both adherents and opponents. Quebec emerged once again as a geographical frame of reference for southern Ireland, with Orangemen drawing parallels between Ulster and Ontario as progressive Protestant regions. T.W. Russell of Tyrone South invoked the Quebec analogy in Westminster during the 1893 bill debates, drawing

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attention to corruption, “an empty exchequer, a poor population, and a Church rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”184 In 1903, the Quebec Assembly approved a second pro–Home Rule resolution, and the Ne Temere issue informed later comments such as that of Toronto Baptist minister W.T. Graham, who dismissed Quebec as “almost centuries behind Ontario” with districts where “ignorance, superstition and idolatry” abounded.185 Elsewhere, the expansion of French Canada from its St Lawrence heartland into northern and eastern Ontario posed a threat to the Orange vision of British Canada, not least through the issue of bilingual schooling in eastern Ontario. The Catholicism of southern Ireland and Quebec thus cast both as trouble-spots threatening to imperial stability. What wealth they possessed was argued to have come largely through the efforts of minority Protestant entrepreneurs, with majority initiatives stifled by a risk-averse conservatism imposed by bishops and priests. The triumph of King William at the Boyne in 1690 thus retained purchase within a Canadian context. But there were also potential Canadian benefits in the Telegram’s suggestion that in the event of Ulster’s resistance foundering, “scores of thousands of the Ulster unionists [would] find the homes which they seek here in Ontario.”186 Non-Orange critics of the role of the Catholic Church in Quebec also expressed support for the unionist cause, such as journalist Robert Sellar, who entered into a correspondence with Sir Edward Carson and whose writings were published in the Belfast Witness.187 In the wake of Ulster’s 12 July celebrations in 1913, Orangemen there were reminded of the dilemmas facing minority Protestants in Quebec by speakers drawing on Sellar’s work.188 Touring Ulster Orangemen paid visits to Toronto lodge meetings as part of their itineraries, and Protestant clergymen from that province carried the anti–Home Rule message beyond public rallies and into the space of the church. Just prior to the signing of the Ulster Covenant in September 1912, Rev. J.M. McIlrath, pastor of the Donegall Road Presbyterian Church in Belfast, told the congregation of J.D. Morrow’s Dale Church in western Toronto that Home Rule would deliver the government of the island “into the hands of those who have not been successful in business or politics, and who are disloyal to the Empire.”189 In August 1913, Rev. William Patterson, former pastor of Cooke’s Church, returned to the city to deliver two lectures on “The British Empire: Its Origin and Destiny” and “Romanism in Ireland and the Home Rule Situation.”190 Two months later, Rev. William Maguire of the Methodist North Belfast Mission, a longstanding Orangeman, reinvoked Ulster

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exceptionalism with his claim to speak for “the people ... who had tilled the soil of Ireland and who had built up its industries,” a people he claimed “would fight to live under the British flag.”191 The trail blazed by Rev. R.R. Kane in 1886 on behalf of Irish unionism had now become quite well-trodden. There were also clergymen who journeyed from Toronto to Ireland and back again whose experiences supported unionist arguments. In early September 1912, Rev. J.C. Speer of the High Park Methodist Church in the west end claimed on the basis of a two-month trip that Home Rule would “prove the ruination of Ireland” as a result of increased taxation and the emigration of the most able.192 Speer did not doubt that Protestants could also feel “Irish,” arguing that “the Catholic church … instilled into their adherents the fallacy that the Protestants of the north, the opponents of home rule, were not Irish at all.”193 For him, Home Rule was not only Rome rule but also “Rebel Rule.”194 Such multiple articulations of the unionist position in print, images, and speeches returned to the long-used loyal/disloyal binary. Speer’s lectures were well-timed in the sense that the signing of the Solemn League and Covenant and Declaration by 471,414 Ulstermen and women on and before 28 September 1912 sparked another round of activity among Toronto’s Home Rule opponents.195 But it was the visit in search of Ulster Fund contributions of British m p and one-time chief secretary of Ireland Walter Long that brought focus to the rising tide of unionism in Ireland. Toronto’s Orange top brass and their sympathizers re-congregated in Massey Hall where attendees received miniature Union Jacks upon entry, fife and drum bands paraded “up and down playing Protestant airs” outside, and an overflow meeting was held in the Orangemen’s principal venue, Victoria Hall.196 Speaking “as a citizen of the British Empire to other citizens of the British Empire,” Long reiterated the sentiments held on the other side of the Atlantic that were now very familiar to his listeners.197 Beyond meetings such as this, the unionist position made its presence felt in the city in more subtle ways. Although Sir Edward Carson never visited Toronto, statuettes of him were sold on the local market (figure  9.4). The natural place of these objects was presumably on the domestic mantelpiece somewhere below the pictures of Kings Edward VII or William III. The ripple effects of the Ulster situation were also felt in the naming of new primary lodges. Into western Toronto neighbourhoods were introduced Covenanters Lodge No. 2438 (June 1913), Sir Edward Carson Lodge No. 2515 (March 1914), and Carson Lodge

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Figure 9.4  Toronto Sentinel advertisement for Sir Edward Carson statuette, 25 June 1914.

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No.  2488 (June 1914).198 Sandy Row Volunteers’ Lodge No. 2442 in Toronto Junction honoured not only the Belfast neighbourhood of some of its founders, but also its role in supplying personnel to the Belfast uvf. One year after the signing of the Covenant and following the recent declaration of the uuc to form their own provisional government in Ulster if needed, Fred Dane spearheaded the formation of a Toronto branch of the Canadian Unionist League for the purpose of handling financial donations to the Ulster cause.199 By the end of May 1914, the Grand Lodges of British America and Ontario West had contributed $1,000 and $500 respectively.200 At the local level, King William III Lodge No. 140 offered $100 after some “forcible speeches” on the cause, while the young Londonderry lodge in the northern district of Wychwood (figure 8.7) heard a “rousing address on the Ulster situation” from Rev. Coburn, yielding $50.201 Elsewhere, Magherafelt Lodge No. 864 transferred $200 “to headquarters in Belfast to help defeat Home Rule and hold the freedom our forefathers fought for,” and E.F. Clarke Lodge No.  1684 voted to extract $40 from the lodge treasury “to assist the brethren in the old land in their noble stand for faith and for their land with an open bible – the secret of England’s greatness.”202 The lyrics of Orange marching tunes merged with evangelical and imperial discourse to reproduce a familiar political vocabulary.203 Altogether, an estimated $100,000 made its way from Orange-Canadian sources back to Ulster.204 The final anti–Home Rule gathering of significance took place on 9  May 1914. Comprised of a series of street parades converging on Queen’s Park, it was the most visible assertion of support for Irish unionism yet seen in Toronto. The participants were mostly members of Unionist League clubs, and they marched to the centrally located park from the east and west ends of the city. Union Jacks were unfurled in the eastern Riverdale Park while others arrived with banners declaring “No Home Rule for Ireland.” Their west end counterparts had their coat lapels emblazoned with badges proclaiming “We will not be coerced” along with a picture of Carson, and the Star estimated there to have been 6,000 marchers, ranging in age from eight to eighty.205 Though no Orange regalia was worn and a solemn atmosphere maintained throughout, the event was still dominated by Orange personalities, and the singing of hymns such as “Oh God Our Help in Ages Past” and “Onward Christian Soldiers” created a soundscape that unambiguously defined the parameters of inclusion and exclusion of the event. The faces on the platform were an almost exact replication of those present for Walter Long’s visit, with the likes of Dane and Thomas

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Crawford now joined by mps Albert E. Kemp (Toronto East) and Captain Tom Wallace (York Centre). Wallace had some unionist poetry published in the Telegram and was challenged in the Canadian Commons for sending a militant cablegram to Carson.206 Unlike Crawford, who hoped to “clean the Nationalists off Ireland,” Kemp’s comment that “the only way to bring about local government in Ireland was for the people to agree between themselves” was notably measured.207 When subsequently questioned in the Commons as to “whether he represented himself or the Government on that occasion,” Kemp replied: “I represented myself on that occasion, and the Government had no knowledge whatever as to anything I intended to say at that meeting.”208 Despite the multiple assemblies of Orange politicians and their sympathizers, these public appeals against Home Rule had their limits, and, though it is quite likely that some of Toronto’s Irish Protestants would have returned to Ireland in the event of civil war, the First World War intervened. The success of the Irish Party in Westminster provided Toronto’s Home Rulers with heightened hopes of political change in their land of origin. While the third bill that appeared in April 1912 again proposed a bicameral Irish legislature, the supremacy of the Westminster parliament was safeguarded. Only forty-two Westminster seats were now allocated to Irish mps, however (the 1893 bill had provided for eighty), the Lord Lieutenant had the power to reserve legislation, and provisions to prohibit discrimination based on religious denomination were also included.209 Though the bill elicited grumblings from both nationalists and unionists, Toronto’s Irish nationalist spokesmen trusted the instincts of Redmond and his associates from a distance. Reacting to a summary circulated in early February, D’Arcy Hinds remarked that the Irish in Ireland “should be satisfied” since the bill came “close enough to Parnell’s measure” and was “just the same practically as we have in Ontario”; Andrew Hernon likewise felt that the bill would “go a long way to conciliate Ireland and the Empire.”210 Hinds and Hernon were unmoved by the expressions of support for Irish unionism in the city, seeing them as bluffers in much the same way Redmond viewed Carson and his supporters, and the Catholic Register was similarly critical of those who signed the Ulster Covenant.211 Buffalo’s Union and Times, for its part, dismissed the covenant as “solemn humbug” while highlighting violent clashes in Belfast workplaces as fine examples of how the Orangemen sought to maintain their “civil and religious freedom.”212 A later editorial dubbed the Orangeman as “an importation to Ireland” who had “fattened” on a land he had no love for, arguing that only “the silent

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force in the nation’s stalwart manhood” prevented acts of retribution.213 This was potent language typical of an Irish-American weekly, but the Register often matched it. The upturn in fortunes for a peaceful and constitutional solution in Ireland coincided with the Toronto ao h ceasing their practice of inviting Irish-American nationalists as St Patrick’s Day speakers. In 1911, County President Hernon explained that “stories of English misrule in Ireland” were now “not appropriate to a festival like this, which should be in the nature of a thanksgiving that the Irish nation, though scattered in all parts of the earth, yet remains numerous and powerful.”214 The following year, French-Canadian nationalist Henri Bourassa endorsed a vision of Canada in which “British institutions as we have adopted them are the most noble, most fruitful and most solid institutions that Canada can enjoy.”215 In many ways, Bourassa was the perfect “local” speaker. He had visited Ireland once already, had opposed Canadian involvement in the Boer War, and in addition to stressing his loyalty to both the dominion and the Catholic Church, “believed in a Canada independent of the empire in terms of foreign relations.”216 The ao h was not about to recruit a speaker who did not have some reservations about Canada’s “British connection,” and Bourassa would also counter anti-Quebec tirades by Orangemen with his own criticisms of Ulster unionism. Through it all, Toronto’s u i l continued to raise funds, though Montreal now appeared to be the financial epicentre of Irish-Canadian nationalism.217 Although many of Toronto’s Catholic Irish were now convinced that Home Rule was imminent, internal debates bubbled underneath the surface. In one comical episode, D’Arcy Hinds resigned from division five of the ao h due to some misgivings about the laudatory tone of his ode to Princess Patricia, daughter of the new governorgeneral, the Duke of Connaught.218 It is not known if the Duke’s role in the resistance to the Fenians in 1866 had anything to do with these criticisms, though it provided ample material for Telegram cartoonist Shields to continue his lampooning of Hinds’s whimsical Irish patriotism.219 The affair indicated either a generational clash within the Canadian-born Irish or some dissatisfaction among those newcomers whose upbringing in Ireland inspired little reverence for British authority figures. Though certainly critical of Britain’s historical legacy in Ireland, Hinds was secure in his identity as an Irish-Canadian supportive of empire and of the British liberal imprint in Canada. He had earned a name for himself as one of the key spokesmen of Toronto’s Catholic Irish community through his efforts to preserve and transmit ideas of Irish culture and history to a new generation via clubs and

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associations. He was, however, a controversial and divisive figure, as demonstrated not only by the above episode but also by his departure from the i c ac and his setting up of a rival “Irish Club” along similar lines in 1910.220 A more vivid illustration of these internal tensions was the reaction of the Toronto aoh to a pro-imperial speech given in Montreal by their provincial chaplain, Bishop Michael Fallon of London, in late November 1913. Although publicly supporting liberal British traditions, Bourassa criticized Fallon’s hailing the “triumph of British imperialism,” and the Board of York County passed and published a resolution that stated their wish “to dissociate ourselves entirely from the Imperialistic views expressed by Bishop Fallon … Where would Catholicity be in Ireland, aye, or in Europe or America to-day, had the prelates of our Church in times past held the opinions of Bishop Fallon? What nation in the world to-day has crushed out more freedom than the British nation?”221 Once again, Canadian-British subjectivity sat uneasily alongside memories of British injustices in Ireland. Given the routine recounting of such historical misdeeds, Fallon’s words and Hinds’s poetry smacked too much of toadyism for some Toronto nationalists. Fallon serves as an interesting case of a relocated Irish-Canadian clergyman within North America. He had served in Holy Angels parish in Buffalo and had chaired an Emmet memorial there in September 1903 (figure 9.1). But the latter gesture may have been merely perfunctory, since Fallon had become aware of his own sympathies towards Britain’s empire during an earlier period of study in Germany that exposed him to the full force of a powerful but, as he saw it, a less agreeable form of civilization.222 Shortly after becoming installed as Bishop of London in May 1910, Fallon attended the u i l convention in Buffalo, where he encouraged Irish “plutocrats” to do all that they could to support John Redmond.223 Small wonder that in the wake of this latest controversy, John Devoy’s Gaelic American noted Fallon’s pro-British stance to be “nothing new. He contracted the disease many years ago. Buffalo Irishmen, when he was a priest there, had more than one tilt with him on the same subject.”224 While the above illustrates attempts to police the discursive content of Irish-American nationalism in Buffalo, the affair also shows how antipathies to England were understood separately from loyalty to Canada. In a city becoming more British (English) by the year, many Catholic Irish preferred to envision Canada as a self-governing and culturally pluralistic dominion, with some undoubtedly hoping that it would one day become more than just that.

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Local opposition to Fallon’s remarks was not unanimous, however, or was at least denied by Hernon. The sense that Ireland would soon be pacified by “British fair play” likely guided the swift reaction. Absent at the board meeting that passed the resolution, Hernon declared the references to Great Britain to be “particularly unfortunate and untrue at the present time, when the British Government is doing all that it can to do justice to Ireland … I emphatically repudiate the resolution.”225 He wasted no time in calling a special meeting of the board, and the resolution was retracted, having lasted for little more than a day! The conciliatory tone of the new resolution was explained by its timing during the Christmas season and its embrace of the pluralist dimensions of the Canadian nationalism espoused by Toronto’s Catholic Irish, and the board now resolved that “the great majority of Irishmen do not look upon the British Government as shedders of blood and crushers of liberty. The Irish people, through their legally elected representatives, have acted in unison, harmony, and co-operation with the British Government in ameliorating the condition of the oppressed and downtrodden, in breaking the shackles of feudalism and plutocracy, and in a general elevation of all of God’s creatures whose destinies they control.”226 Despite the challenge of unionism, Hernon recognized real potential in the latest state of affairs in Ireland and so resisted the temptation to rattle the sabre. It is hard to otherwise explain the dramatic about-face in the new resolution. Toronto’s Globe, long champions of the Home Rule cause, gave the reworded resolution their seal of approval, predicting that “the green flag with its harp of gold will yet become as unquestioned a symbol of loyalty to the British Empire as the lion rampant of Scotland or St. George’s cross itself.”227 South of the border, though, the Gaelic American was withering about the climbdown, dubbing the writer of the new resolution “an Irish renegade and those who voted for it … a pack of crawling slaves.”228 With militant nationalist outlooks remaining largely sidelined in Toronto, the city’s Catholics were now pursuing a moderate course in their hopes for Ireland’s future, and packed halls witnessing declarations of principles and Anglophobic diatribes were not part of this agenda. Recent immigrants were relatively few among them, and the only noticeable public protest during these years was the sight of Hernon leading a body of indignant Irish out of a touring production of J.M. Synge’s controversial play, The Playboy of the Western World.229 But they had good reason to remain confident of a peaceful outcome in Ireland. In March 1914, John Redmond’s brother William visited Toronto to gleefully

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announce the impending passing of the third bill despite its rejection by the House of Lords.230 Unionist resistance was again dismissed as a temporary interlude, with Redmond arguing that “the majority of the people of Ulster were undoubtedly in favour of Home Rule” with “tens of thousands of Protestant Irish” amongst its “staunchest supporters.”231 The dispatches of one-time Orangeman and Globe Irish correspondent Lindsay Crawford did little to dispel this assessment, with his emphasis on the regional (north-south) split within Irish unionism and the underwhelming training methods and numerical strength of the u vf.232 Headlines such as “Home Rule goes to law: Ireland again a nation” in the Catholic Register on 28 May 1914 legitimized the idea of a pre-1169 Irish nation as portrayed in popular nationalist histories.233 After the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, news that King George V had signed the bill convinced many that a self-governing Ireland would take its place among the nationalities nested within Britain’s empire, if not yet among Robert Emmet’s nations of the earth. Even the issue of Ulster exclusion did not dampen the convictions of men such as Andrew Hernon, who predicted that “the North of Ireland will be Home Rulers by the end of the year.”234 While the latter clearly did not occur, Hernon only just managed to live to see the end of the year himself, passing away in mid-January 1915.235

T oro n to ’ s Ir is h a n d t h e Fi rst World War The outbreak of what became the First World War in August 1914 brought with it a rush of excitement in Toronto as young and able men were encouraged to volunteer for the Canadian Expeditionary Force (cef). For the next month and more, streets were crowded, Union Jacks were displayed ubiquitously, and there were impromptu parades of marching bands as well as organized rallies. The 10 September issue of the Sentinel had the slogan “Orangemen! Enlist!” emblazoned on the front page, while Archbishop Neil McNeil moved swiftly to mobilize his Catholic flock, and as Ian Hugh Maclean Miller has shown in his sensitive portrayal of Toronto during the war years, the initial demand for volunteer recruits between eighteen and forty-five years of age was more than met as armouries and other depots became overwhelmed.236 Having long prided themselves as the foremost defenders of British imperial and Protestant ideals, Toronto’s Orangemen now had opportunity to demonstrate the depth of that commitment, though on the Western Front rather than in Ulster. Accustomed to the Williamite narrative, they did not

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require a great leap of the imagination to accept the argument that “they could not break faith with their ancestors who had provided the freedoms they now enjoyed.”237 And so the main focus of the meeting of St Anne’s Lodge No. 2478 in the west end in late August was “the parting with five members of the lodge who have joined the first Canadian contingent for service in the British Army during the war now in progress.”238 A few evenings later, departures were announced from Cock O’ The North Lodge No. 2214 and the Dreadnought lodge; some weeks later, three of the five departees from Duke of Abercorn Lodge No. 2477 were officers, and so the issue of replacing executive lodge members arose.239 From then on, primary lodge notes in the Sentinel regularly charted the enlistments of members, and as time passed, news of those who had made the “supreme sacrifice” filtered through. Although nobody anticipated a war that would last for more than four years, the danger of short-term stagnation in lodge activity was already clear; by early September, the notes of E.F. Clarke Lodge No. 1684 commented that “lodge muster was not up to the standard” with “a number of the members having volunteered for active service.”240 By March of 1915, ex– Toronto mayor and Orangeman Horatio Hocken estimated that “of the First Canadian Contingent of something like thirty-five thousand men, between seven and eight thousand of these were Orangemen.”241 Noteworthy for their volunteerism were the youngest members of Toronto’s “baby lodge,” Covenanters Lodge No. 2438; by mid-January 1915, twenty-seven of its seventy-one members were at the front.242 Recruitment efforts were stepped up by July 1915 through posters and active public campaigning, and younger Orangemen in Toronto’s east end were undoubtedly among the five hundred or so who volunteered immediately after the rally held at Riverdale Park on 9 August, where martial songs were sung while participants gazed at a giant electronic Union Jack.243 By March 1916, Toronto County Master A.A. Gray claimed that over 2,000 of the city’s Orangemen had “answered the call” with more “ready to make the supreme sacrifice for the Union Jack and British institutions.”244 Gray’s estimate suggests one-fifth of the approximate pre-war membership of 10,000 to have departed. The creation of individual battalions by prominent locals to encourage volunteering among colleagues and friends spurred much of this enlistment, and Orangeman and college principal Col. E.W. Hagarty proposed an exclusively Orange company within his alcohol-free 201st Battalion.245 Though their history remains largely unwritten, Protestants of Irish birth or ancestry, Orange or otherwise, took their place among these

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Toronto enlistees during the first years of the conflict. Orange sources provide some insight into their experiences of military engagement. The members of Sandy Row Volunteers Lodge No. 2412, many of them Belfast-born, had almost deserted their lodge by April 1916; forty-nine of the fifty-seven lodge members were by then on active service, when the Master suddenly resigned to join the fray.246 One of their number, Belfast-born Robert Dixon, had by then earned a Victoria Cross. The thirty-two-year-old Dixon had immigrated to Toronto only a few months before the outbreak of war, having previously served in the Enniskillen Fusiliers with his brother. Serving with the Canadian “Princess Pats,” Dixon rescued a lieutenant of his regiment who, having been wounded in the leg, became exposed to enemy fire.247 Well-known clergymen with Irish ancestry and Orange ties, such as Revs. H.C. Dixon and John Coburn, became war chaplains, while traditions of military volunteering within “Orange families” encouraged enlistment.248 The Ulster-born Frank Somers, a veteran of Ridgeway in 1866, observed his two sons sign up for military service, for example. Elsewhere, Henry Reburn Jr, the second-generation accountant whose residential mobility was reviewed in chapter 8, was “active in all the loan drives among the civic employees” with his accounting department “reaching 100% quota.”249 Rev. H.C. Dixon’s Trinity East Church also distinguished itself during the war. Its Sunday School reportedly sent more volunteers to the front than any other in the city; over five hundred served and seventy died.250 On the occasion of its seventy-fifth anniversary, a pamphlet containing an honour roll was published, and a cross-check between these and attestation forms reveals thirteen of Toronto’s Irish-born Anglican volunteers to have come from the parish.251 Here is another rare glimpse into the social backgrounds of Irish-born Protestant volunteers in the c ef. With the exception of one unknown birthplace, all were from Ulster counties and included two sets of cohabiting relatives (most likely brothers). Although their church was in a part of the city still recognized as working-class, they were not all pursuing manual occupations; alongside a street cleaner, a labourer, a teamster, a moulder, a driver, and two carpenters were five clerks and a bookkeeper. Four were married, and five (including one of the married) had previous military experience. Andrew William Nixon, a clerk born in Derry in 1893, lived with his bookkeeping brother David on the east end’s Gerrard Street at his time of enlistment, having served with the tenth battalion of the Royal Grenadiers for five years. Another clerk, Co. Fermanagh–born Loftus

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Henry Reid, served for more than two years with the twelfth regiment of the York Rangers. Toronto Catholics of Irish background likewise responded to the call for volunteers in the name of nation, king, and empire. Mark McGowan’s meticulous research has estimated that more than 3,500 Englishspeaking Catholics (mostly of Irish background) had volunteered for service by late 1917.252 While they may not have been prolific participants in Empire Day parades up to that point, some Catholic high school cadets had taken part since at least 1912.253 Now, young Catholic men could hardly ignore the atmosphere of shared hardship that had become dominant in the city around them. Catholic pulpits, periodical pages, and societies strongly encouraged army enlistment among men, while Catholic women contributed to the war effort through fund-raising, volunteering as nurses, and factory work. Archbishop McNeil encouraged donations to the Toronto and York County Patriotic Fund, allowed ­battalions the use of church basements, and said Mass to Catholic troops while his local clergy offered regular Mass intentions “for the safety of  troops and for peace.”254 In May 1915, fifty-three children from Toronto’s separate schools joined in the Empire Day demonstrations, a small but symbolically important presence amidst 3,800 or so public school cadets.255 While McNeil’s appeals for Catholic participation were influential, other figures such as city controller John O’Neill, Fr Lancelot Minehan, and D’Arcy Hinds also immersed themselves in recruitment efforts. Before the end of August 1914, O’Neill and Minehan were active in the Patriotic Fund, while Hinds participated in efforts to attract volunteers for the 208th Irish Battalion and began recruiting on St Patrick’s Day 1916; by that summer, 750 men had joined its ranks.256 Also a member of the Irish Rifles, Hinds was chairing recruitment concerts for the battalion at the time of Dublin’s Easter Rising. By now, approximately sixty percent of eligible Toronto males had volunteered, though not all of them qualified successfully.257 Although the 208th Battalion had an Irish identity, Catholic men of Irish origin dispersed themselves across the city’s twenty-eight battalions, their choices influenced less by ethnicity and more by occupation and neighbourhood. This reflected the suburban drift of Catholic households discussed in chapter 8, and McGowan’s small sample of the 208th estimated less than ten percent of its members to have been Irish-born.258 The parishioners of Trinity East’s Catholic neighbour in the east end,

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St Paul’s Church, witnessed 660 men from their congregation volunteer by June 1917, with almost 200 of these enlisting during the first twelve months of the conflict alone.259 Eighty-one of these parishioners would eventually perish. While Toronto’s Catholic and Protestant volunteers may have sensed their religious differences flattening in the tumult of battle, and while Catholic leaders on the home front may have felt that Protestant suspicions of disloyalty could now be dispelled, debates framed in sectarian terms were not put to rest. While the low rates of enlistment for FrenchCanadian Catholics were of ongoing concern in English Canada, headlines relating to religious and bilingual schooling reappeared on the front pages of the Sentinel throughout the first half of 1916, and Ireland’s Home Rule dilemmas surfaced in public debates from time to time. Sons of Portadown Lodge No. 919 were reminded of the “encroachments of Rome” in January 1916, while a newly arrived Ulster-born minster with Orange ties, Rev. Wesley Megaw, provided a first-hand account of political dealings in Ireland to several primary lodges during these months with lectures on “Sir Edward Carson, Ulster and the War.”260 If it was now difficult for Toronto’s Orangemen to justify accusations of disloyalty against local Catholics, long-embedded imaginations of Catholic trouble-spots elsewhere in the empire could still be activated. One of Megaw’s presentations included a commentary on how “the men of the south [of Ireland] have not gone forth in numbers pro rata to the North” while a later talk discussed “the tyranny of the Papacy in Ulster.”261 Born in Newcastle, Co. Down, Megaw graduated from the Presbyterian Assembly College in Belfast and would become a Canadian army chaplain alongside Revs. Dixon and Coburn.262 He arrived in Toronto as assistant pastor to that historic bastion of orthodox Ulster Presbyterianism, Cooke’s Church, whose old favourite, Rev. William Patterson, returned in April 1915 after spells in Philadelphia and Belfast.263 Both Megaw and Patterson witnessed at first hand the rise of militancy in Ulster. But Toronto’s Catholic Irish took little notice of the likes of Megaw and Patterson. A characteristically defiant Register editorial in July 1915 described most of the city’s rank-and-file Orangemen as “harmless and well-meaning folk” in contrast to their “clerical mob-orators.”264 As an increasingly horrific picture of life on the Western Front hit home, those who spared a thought about Irish Home Rule now believed it to be a largely moot issue. Rev. Thomas Francis Burke’s St Patrick’s Day oration to the aoh some months earlier drew a now-familiar analogy between

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“the heroic sacrifice of the little country of Belgium and the struggles of the Irish nation towards the liberty of self-government” before acknowledging that the “Home Rule Act had been passed, which was a treaty between the democracy of England and that of Ireland.”265 Yet if Burke was justified in using the context of wartime enlistment to argue that “the charges that Irishmen are disloyal today were baseless,” he still had to contend with the occasional circulation of reports about the militant arm of Irish America, its collusion with German-Americans, and its ­regular outpourings of Anglophobia.266 Indeed, the Canadian aoh expressed misgivings about their American brethren’s increasingly anti-British statements once the war began.267 The Sentinel was also an unsurprising monitor of Irish-American commentaries on the “blood-stained British Empire” and public meetings where “deep affection for Germany” was expressed.268 In March 1916, the Friends of Irish Freedom (foif) was established at an Irish Race Convention in New York. The Clan na Gael influence was evident in the adoption of a “declaration of principles of policy” and Buffalo’s John T. Ryan was elected to the inaugural national executive.269

R e s p o n d in g to E as ter 1916 Less than two months after the formation of the f o i f, central Dublin was rocked by insurrection. A provisional republican government was proclaimed by Patrick Pearse outside the General Post Office on Easter Monday, and after less than a week’s fighting, an unconditional surrender was signed by Pearse. The executions of fifteen men in early May, including the seven proclamation signatories, disgusted many across Ireland and its diaspora; Pearse’s vision of the rebellion as a “blood sacrifice” was brought to a conclusion few expected. In Buffalo, the f o i f branch was named after the executed Joseph Mary Plunkett. With John T. Ryan involved at national level, the Buffalo branch leadership included the aforementioned John A. Murphy and Shaddock, and their stated aim was “to ameliorate in every possible way the sufferings of the Irish people and to aid the families of those who have been executed or imprisoned.”270 A further means to this end was the establishment of the Irish Relief Fund Committee in New York, and in early July, Murphy sailed for Ireland as a representative of the committee where he delivered the funds raised.271 Ryan meanwhile worked alongside Jeremiah O’Leary in building connections between Irish America, Germany, and Ireland, and if one writer was to later appraise O’Leary as “one of the foremost Anglophobes” in the United States, Ryan was not far behind.272

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Toronto Irish Orangemen felt vindicated. As far as the Sentinel was concerned, the rebellion brought out “the fact that John Redmond’s guarantees of good behavior on the part of the Nationalists are the flimsiest possible grounds upon which the fortunes and fate of Ulster can be entrusted to a Dublin Parliament,” and was thus a warning to Britain “against the inclusion of Ulster within the sphere of authority within the Dublin Government.”273 Indeed, the editorial felt that the enactment of progressive land legislation in Ireland by the British government had deradicalized the farming community and thus removed a potentially powerful element from the ranks of the discontented. In other words, British governance had worked to foster a state of relative prosperity in Ireland over the previous decade-and-a-half, and if it was not to remain on the island as a whole, it had to remain in Ulster. The Sentinel also drew attention to the prayers being said in Buffalo for the repose of the souls of the Irish rebels, quoting Rev. Daniel Walsh of Nativity parish as requesting people to “humbly and charitably ... remember in their prayers the noble men of Ireland who were shot down in prison yards by command of the British government last week.”274 But Rev. Walsh was not alone. The Union and Times reported on 11  May that prayers were offered for the souls of the dead men “in many Catholic churches in this city.”275 Noting that “the next of kin and friends of those men could not have public prayers said for them in Ireland at this time” for fear of being tried for treason, it was, for Walsh, clearly incumbent on those clergy friendly to Ireland to perform such ceremonies beyond the boundaries of the United Kingdom. This very impossibility of offering such prayers in Ireland itself was held to offer yet more evidence of Britain’s determination “to either destroy the Irish race and the religion of a majority of Irishmen or else reduce them to worse than African slavery.”276 Disillusioned with “middle class” constitutional approaches, Walsh regarded Pearse, James Connolly, and the other rebels as individuals “inflamed with the spirit of 1798, 1848 and 1865,” and he saw no reason why the Romantic heroism accredited those associated with these risings should not now be similarly bestowed upon “the gallant band that took part heroically in the uprising in Dublin two weeks ago.”277 Robert Emmet now had serious competition as an icon, and in the years after, the anniversary of the rebellion was marked in Buffalo before the ending of civil conflict in Ireland in 1923. Reaction among Toronto’s Irish Catholics was a mixture of surprise and restraint. The first editorial response by the Register was somewhat ambivalent in its description of the deeds of an “unrepresentative”

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minority element which, though reprehensible, were not “difficult to understand”; if Home Rule was to lead to “a contented Ireland, part of the British Empire,” the paper added that there would be some “irreconcilables” opposed to this, “especially in the United States.”278 Such people, it was then assumed, were not now to be found in Toronto, if in any part of Canada. When the executions took place, however, the Register shifted its attention to Carson, who it maintained was the recipient of noticeably different treatment from the British government despite engaging in his own “criminally treasonable conduct” via his pre-war threat to form a provisional government in Ulster, not to mention his association with the uv f.279 Though not condemning the executions, the Register disapproved of the treatment meted out to the rebel leaders, but throughout the succeeding months, there was little if any sense that Home Rule in Ireland would be endangered by the after-effects of the rebellion and the persistence of war in Europe. Though the war dragged on, the assumption of Home Rule’s imminent implementation remained among its supporters in Toronto, if the Register was judging the opinion of its audience correctly. A number of editorials on the question of six-county exclusion in Ulster in the summer of 1916 concluded that its detractors had failed “to take account either of the wholly temporary nature of the entire arrangement ... There can scarcely be a doubt that almost the whole of the excluded territory will before many years be included, by the desire of its own people, with the rest of self-governing Ireland.”280 The dominant imagination of an island nation where Orange and Green would inevitably bury their differences, and the belief that the Orangemen would properly acknowledge their Irishness, were barely disrupted. No Irish matters were part of the official business discussed at the 14th biennial convention of the Ontario aoh in Toronto that summer; behind the scenes, however, things were surely different.281 Though we do not know how many of Irish birth and ancestry in Buffalo stated their conviction that Home Rule would not be enough for Ireland in the aftermath of the 1916 rebellion, there were likely many more than would have subscribed to that opinion in Toronto. The revival of the St  Patrick’s Day parade in 1915 brought Irishness back onto Buffalo streets, but this was more than a once-a-year form of symbolic ethnicity. Toronto, in contrast, was at war, and the city was no place to voice excessive critique of Britain and the empire when both Canada and Britain (not to mention Ireland) were involved in a cause which had already

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claimed the lives of young men from the city. If these Canadians continued to view Ireland as part of the “imperial family,” their Irish-American counterparts looked more to Ireland’s future membership in the “family of nations,” as per Emmet’s wish. In Buffalo, opinion was voiced more freely that the 1916 executions confirmed what a growing number had believed all along, namely that Britain’s centuries-long hostility towards Ireland and the Irish was not about to change significantly. The hasty nature of the executions was, like the coercive legislation of the past, more proof of the iron fist that lay behind the velvet glove of a “just and benevolent” British nation and empire. Buffalo’s locally recognized Irish pantheon would be reconfigured to incorporate Pearse, Connolly, Plunkett, and others alongside Robert Emmet, but as the coming decades in Ireland would attest, there would be no easy road to attaining the united and self-ruling nation desired by those that had for so long preserved, in both cities, memories of Irish heroes and martyrs.

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Conclusion: More than Just Points on the Map

This book’s comparison of the lives and allegiances of Irish immigrants and their descendants in two North American cities began in the aftermath of the Fenian Raids and in the first years of the Canadian dominion. While Buffalo and Toronto were touched in different ways by the events at Ridgeway in 1866, their main attractions for this work were their locations within different political jurisdictions, their mediumrather than big-city characteristics, and the presence within each of them of substantial numbers of mostly post-famine Irish. Recent historical studies of immigration have recognized the significance of local and regional perspectives, as have comparative historians more generally.1 No study has yet compared the urbanized Irish in the United States and Canada in any systematic way, and so this book takes its place in a long scholarly tradition of US-Canadian comparisons, while making a novel contribution to histories of urban immigration and ethnicity in North America as well as to Irish diaspora studies. Buffalo and Toronto have been treated here, however, not as discrete points on North American or Irish diasporic maps, but rather as distinctive places that evolved through varying combinations of local and nonlocal influences. And though analysis of both cities’ Irish has yielded some commonalities of experience, these should not be overgeneralized to represent “typical” Canadian and American Irish experiences, as a growing historiography of the Quebec Irish, when set alongside attempts to consider regional patterns within “Irish America,” would suggest.2 Nonetheless, this book sought to account for the presence and effects of national and transnational influences, seeing “place,” like Doreen Massey, as relational, unbounded, and process-oriented.

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The ongoing event of nineteenth-century transatlantic Irish immigration was but one example of how extra-local processes left lasting imprints on the local urban cultures of Buffalo and Toronto. But as chapter 2 demonstrated, Irish regional context also mattered greatly in terms of the socioeconomic backgrounds and religious outlooks brought by immigrants to the two destination cities. Irish origin was, in other words, less a constant and more an explanatory variable.3 In Toronto, Ulster Protestants figured prominently in a migration where the presence of families and the possession of some capital at the time of departure took on greater significance than in Buffalo. The American border city’s largely Catholic Irish were, in contrast, derived mostly from west and southwest Munster, where the labouring classes were being pushed out in startling numbers during the post-famine decades. Their skill-related deficiencies were illustrated by their lowly position in Buffalo’s labour market, though lingering Anglo-American prejudices and/or inabilities to see the Irish as anything other than menial labour, in contrast to the “sturdy Germans,” were also relevant. Although Buffalo and Toronto were situated on Great Lakes and lauded for the potential of their locations, their evolving economies presented different structures of opportunity for Irish settlers. The completion of the Erie Canal, a pivotal moment in American nation-building, enabled Buffalo’s port to achieve international renown and the city to become shaped in socio-economic and spatial terms by a cultural pluralism defined by Anglo-Americans, Germans, and Irish. The place occupied by the city within networks of national and international trade took dramatic material form not just in the waterfront landscape of grain elevators, but also in the nearby saloons, boarding-houses, waterways, and modest homes of the Irish First Ward. While Toronto served as an importing and distributing centre for a frontier region, steady immigration from the United Kingdom ensured that it would become steeped in the values of Britishness and Protestantism congealing within the wider regional society long before it became the commercial metropolis of English Canada, where the railroad superseded the port. Comparison helped to set these structural contexts and their power-related dimensions in sharper relief than a one-city study would have achieved. The third chapter revealed the combined impact of these socio-­economic structures and Irish backgrounds on the varieties of occupational pursuits and living conditions for the Irish within each city. Conceptions of Irish workers in Buffalo rarely deviated from the images of men scooping grain out of steamboats. In Toronto, more noticeable middle classes developed

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among both Catholic and Protestant Irish, but especially among the latter. Catholic Irish business owners and managers were easier to identify in 1880s Toronto than in Buffalo. For Irish working women in both cities, the familiar lot of domestic service helped to prop up the middle-class status of groups that were for the most part non-Irish. Comparison also exposes the ways in which religion operated as a social and political identifier, unifier, and divider in both cities. The phenomenon of “Irish poverty,” for example, continued to be casually ­referenced in the 1870s and 1880s in ways that isolated the plight of Catholic individuals, families, and neighbourhoods in both cities. Although Toronto’s spatial concentrations of poor Irish were not of the scale of Buffalo’s, classical liberal assumptions about the cultural deficiencies producing such poverty partially explained the assertion of a separate Irish identity through the Irish Protestant Benevolent Society. Orange rowdies aside, Toronto’s Protestant Irish enjoyed positive holdings of cultural capital, as Pierre Bourdieu would put it, in their social and political dealings with the English and Scots in constructing the city’s (Protestant) public sphere and majority host culture. The reception accorded their Catholic counterparts in both cities in the late Victorian decades, in contrast, remained one of indifference at best. If the third chapter highlighted residences, neighbourhoods, and workplaces as sites for everyday place-making for both cities’ Irish, the fourth investigated the role and impact of institutions and associations within these geographies of interaction. People shaped spaces, spaces shaped people, and ideas about groups and group identities came further into focus. Again, religion emerged as an important axis of distinction of which the Toronto street scuffles between “Orange” and “Green” were but one part. Catholicism also stood apart for its capacity to fashion infrastructures serving the social, educational, economic, and spiritual needs of congregants and their families. For Archbishop Lynch of Toronto and Bishop Ryan of Buffalo, only through such patterns of socialization could the Irish assert their group-awareness and equality with the Protestant classes around them. For the young, an informal sense of Irishness was palpable within some Buffalo public schools and Toronto separate schools, the latter inviting periodic Orange anger about transnational “Romish” incursions on the fledgling Canadian state. More ­formal expressions of Irish identity were cultivated by adults in both lay  and religious associations; though some of their names changed over  time, their contribution to the process of Irish ethnicization is undoubted. Cross-class memberships, linking elites and masses, also

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supplemented clerical attempts to blunt the growth of radical proletarian sympathies. At the same time, of course, Irish men, women, and children in these cities were continuously engaging with ideas of what it meant to be part of American and Canadian society. Comparison also reveals the presence and effects of the national within the local as Buffalo and Toronto became wired into political systems within jurisdictions that were largely two-party states (chapter 5). Here, the role of socio-legal structures and their urban-territorial workings within a “liberal dominion” and a “rude republic” were apparent as the Irish incorporated themselves within, and subsequently remoulded, local political cultures. Buffalo exemplified the “solid” Irish contributions to working-class and machine-oriented ward traditions of a type observed in other American cities, whether New York, Boston, Chicago, Worcester, or St Paul. Harnessed largely to the Democratic interest, the webs of relations spun by the city’s most enterprising political Irishmen both within and beyond their group enabled them to carve important niches within local power and patronage circuits. The Irish-Catholic-Democrat nexus that resulted was recognized by its friends and enemies alike. In Toronto, the limited degree to which Catholic Irishmen could find their way into party networks was acknowledged by spokesmen such as John O’Donohoe and Patrick Boyle. This was not a culture of mass politics, and the public struggle for Catholic representation within the main parties, alongside intermittent cries of “disloyalty,” further highlighted the role of religion as a lightning rod for identity politics in both city and province. Although O’Donohoe notably attempted to shape a coherent “Irish Catholic vote,” not all influential Catholics supported bloc voting. Catholic Irish prominence within Buffalo’s Democratic circles was mirrored somewhat by a largely Protestant cohort of Toronto Irish within Conservative circles. To write “largely Protestant” is to acknowledge the support given to Sir John A. Macdonald’s party by Archbishop Lynch and some prominent Catholic laymen before identifying a similar process of social capital formation whereby Orange-Conservative connections were being tightened and thickened. This was something testified to in more than a few obituaries of “staunch” Irish immigrants, as well as in the broadsides of Boyle. These Orange-Tory and Irish-Democratic networks, cultivated across a series of sites and spaces and set within wider processes of coalition-building with the non-Irish, would have a lasting quality. While the redistribution of patronage was a notable ­outcome of such mobilizations, the role of exemplary Irish figures as

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partisan educators to both immigrants and the locally born, Irish and non-Irish, should be remembered. Potential political friends were always valuable. Nor should it be forgotten that in frequently directing campaign rhetoric to “workingmen,” these dominant parties also incorporated and diluted the space for politicized labour in both cities. Despite the various social and technological transformations experienced in the two cities during the turn-of-the-century period, the legacies of earlier foundations responsible for shaping their socio-cultural distinctions and power relations remained. Toronto’s British and Protestant reputation had grown in intensity and demographics, a contrast to ­Buffalo’s developing blue-collar and Euro-Catholic character. Influxes of Poles and Italians contributed much to the pluralistic atmosphere of the American city while lifting the Irish, whose immigrant ranks were now not being significantly added to, into an intermediate position in the socio-economic order. Toronto’s “Canadian Belfast” tag, in contrast, was not erased since a thin but significant stream of Protestants flowed in from Ireland in the Edwardian years, aiding Orange expansion. The city’s other labels of “Toronto the Good” and “Tory Toronto” were also taken to new heights, not least through a persistent and puritanical campaign to ban licensed establishments. Protestants of Irish origin were active in this sphere, ultimately helping to secure a dominant BritishCanadian ethnoculture in the city that was increasingly excited by the dominion’s involvement in British imperial adventures. In seeing itself as an ideal cultural blueprint for Canada, however, this mindset all too often betrayed suspicion if not hostility towards non-Anglo-Saxon newcomers. At a wider scale, its Orange elements also displayed a public antipathy for French Canada, and often via discussions of Irish politics. New and old generations of Irish were also navigating their lives in cities espousing largely the same liberal-capitalist ethos. Drawn into an increasingly rampant consumerism, many sons and daughters entertained thoughts about property-holding and held white-collar jobs in some of the continent’s most impressive new buildings (chapter 7). Although Catholics and Protestants alike experienced occupational mobility in both cities, differences were marked in certain forms of public (police, fire-fighting, and teaching) and private (saloon- and tavernkeeping, and domestic service) employment, due in some degree to the aforementioned patronage channels, puritan sensibilities, and economic structures. The Irish also participated in the ongoing elaboration of institutions, associations, and circles both lay and religious as they made

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new homes and neighbourhoods within each city (chapter 8). Social and educational activities within new Catholic parishes or the catchment areas of suburban Protestant churches sought to instill devout and respectable practices among working- and lower-middle-class adults and youngsters alike. In Buffalo, the so-called “lace curtain” Irish emerged from these patterns of community interaction, but sectarian distinctions were not so easily dislodged by their workings in Toronto. The transnational dimensions affecting the lives of the Buffalo and Toronto Irish were highlighted in this book through the lens of diaspora politics. As chapters 6 and 9 demonstrated, both cities received the transatlantic traffic of political actors on fund-raising and publicity missions. Local organizations were mobilized to form branches of national-level initiatives and enhance further senses of local Irish “groupness.” Their activities added to the annual calendar of ethnic events, especially in Buffalo, and the amounts of money transferred from the two cities was not insignificant, particularly in the early 1880s. Irish nationalist myths and memories were also updated, refined, and mobilized to connect with local and national experiences, emotions, and imaginations. The United States represented the republican model par excellence even if the economic situation of many Irish was less than ideal. And so Buffalo Irish nationalist spokesmen enthusiastically marshalled the image and ideology of “America” to form a complementary Irish-American identity, within which the legend of Robert Emmet fitted seamlessly with that of George Washington. Emmet was also a flexible icon in his appeal to both Home Rulers and supporters of physical-force republicanism. To be a good Irishman was to be a good American, though more often than not, the “Irish race” was portrayed as essentially Catholic. Ideas about being an American were also important in that they were passed on to Polish and Italian newcomers by their Irish points of contact in schools, political meeting halls, churches, and the streets.4 North of the border, republican speeches were unlikely to make life easier for the Irish Catholic minority after 1866, though some defiant notes were sounded before the close of the 1870s. With religion regularly inflecting political discourse, and a recognized need for public expressions of Catholic loyalty to the new dominion, Daniel O’Connell appealed more than Emmet as a figure for celebration. O’Connell-style moderation echoed in the ending of St Patrick’s Day processions, the toasts and pronouncements of Toronto’s Irish National League, and the fact that speeches favouring advanced Irish nationalism were more likely to be delivered in the city by visitors from the United States than locals.

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Though some Irish nationalists would have undoubtedly wished them so, ideas of Canada and its destiny were not easily extricated from questions of Britishness and empire, and especially in Toronto. Although most of the city’s Catholics of Irish origin came to look favourably on Canada acquiring increased influence within Britain’s empire, they were unimpressed by a militant imperialism underpinned by Anglo-Saxon Protestant triumphalism. With their children mixing increasingly with those of non-Irish origin in the city’s separate schools, they took pride in Canadian, Catholic, and Irish-Canadian identities, whether expressed on streets, in lecture halls, or on sporting fields. Patrick Boyle’s news­ paper title largely assumed the “Irish Canadian” to be Catholic, but this  was a compound that all but ignored their legal status as British subjects. In the early twentieth century, figures such as D’Arcy Hinds were instrumental in cultivating an Irish ethnic awareness to largely Catholic audiences in the city in ways that sought to achieve a similar sort of hybridity. The order of allegiances for most of Toronto’s Protestant Irish, Orange devotees especially, was quite different. With unquestioned self-­assurance about their loyalty to monarch, empire, and dominion, a largely Orange sub-section of them pleaded the Ulster cause in anti–Home Rule assemblies from the mid-1880s onwards. If a case can be made for an Ulster diaspora identity cohering over time in Toronto and reaching a  peak either side of the First World War, it was an identity that overlapped strongly with the Orange variety.5 The rhetorical passion and communication methods witnessed in this mobilization had much to compare with nationalist efforts. And though “small differences” likely separated Toronto’s Irish Protestants and Catholics in occupational and residential terms by the early 1900s, popular perceptions of two Irish “tribes” in the city lingered on.6 By around 1910, then, the total number of Irish-born in Buffalo and Toronto was about 25,000, behind which stood a much larger multigenerational group with Irish ancestry. They had no doubt that their future lay in North America, even if combat duties returned some of them to Europe between 1914 and 1918. And though their cities had grown by astounding proportions since the 1870s and they had become Americans and Canadians first, many among these different generations of Irish continued to rework their sense of ethnic identity both publicly and privately. Ethnicity thus betrayed a fluctuating and non-linear rather than a strictly assimilationist character, though this is not to deny that there were many others for whom an Irish background held little more than

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symbolic value, if even that.7 While commercial impulses and nostalgic instincts may have helped “the Green” to shine brightest within hearts and on various articles of clothing on 17 March, networks shaped by cultural, fraternal, and diaspora-oriented organizations continued to promote Irish nationalist ideas within largely Catholic circles in both cities years before the revival of possibilities for Home Rule in Ireland. This process of Irish ethnicization would continue after Easter 1916.

B e yo n d 1 9 1 6 : A Coda Disillusioned by John Redmond’s decision to encourage the enlistment of Irish volunteers for Britain’s war effort, many within Buffalo’s Irish held fast to the ideal of an Irish republic after 1916. A tricolour was paraded on St Patrick’s Day in 1917, and Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington, whose husband Francis was detained and executed by the British during the rebellion, spoke at the Emmet and 1916 martyrs’ commemorations in March and April respectively.8 In the aftermath of the First World War, a petition signed by more than eighty diocesan priests was forwarded to President Woodrow Wilson in the hope that his influence at Versailles might yield something positive for Ireland.9 Wilson, however, considered the Irish situation to be a British matter. Nevertheless, in March 1919, Buffalo’s Irish received a new nationalist champion in the figure of Co. Limerick–born Bishop William Turner. With a guerilla war against British forces now in progress back in Ireland, Turner received 1916 veteran Eamon De Valera in December 1919 as part of the latter’s mission to secure recognition and funding for the Irish republic in America.10 The romance associated with the visit, as with Parnell’s in 1880, was not quickly forgotten, and there was sympathy in Buffalo for De Valera when the Anglo-Irish Treaty, creating a twenty-six-county Irish Free State dominion within Britain’s empire, was passed by the Irish Dáil in January 1922. Bishop Turner, reluctantly accepting of the treaty that De Valera famously opposed, was outraged by the events of the “unrighteous” civil war he witnessed when returning to Limerick (“the very hottest part of the firing line”) for a holiday that August.11 Long-wedded to the idea of a home-ruling Ireland within the empire, Toronto Irish nationalists contended with the rising support for De Valera’s Sinn Féin party in Ireland, the eclipse of the Irish Party, and the death of John Redmond. While it was fitting that Redmond received a requiem mass at St Michael’s Cathedral in March 1918, it was also unsurprising that the American-born Rev. John E. Burke, with “a strong

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Conclusion: 363

note of Irish nationalism in his words,” opined that Redmond’s heart was broken by the “treachery of the [British] Legislators in whom he had trusted.”12 There was, however, more moderation within the Toronto archdiocese than Burke’s defiant words suggest, and unlike in Buffalo, no cathedral requiem mass was held in Toronto for the Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, who died on hunger strike in a London jail in October 1920. Toronto’s Catholic Register nevertheless fired regular salvos during these months in response to the activities of British “Black and Tans” in Ireland, and support for the Self-Determination League for Ireland in Canada and Newfoundland (a suitably vague title) was also present in the city.13 While the Treaty brought a measure of Irish self-government within the empire, the prospects for thirty-two-county Home Rule receded significantly with the opening of the Northern Ireland parliament in June 1921. Upon receiving details of the Treaty, Toronto’s most vocal Redmondite, D’Arcy Hinds, displayed jubilation in exclaiming “God Save the Irish Free State and God Save the King!” but also frustration in denouncing Sir Edward Carson as a “bigoted political hasbeen.”14 Although Hinds opposed Sinn Féin, other locals were confident enough to endorse their Irish republican mission, and a public lecture by Peter MacSwiney, brother of Terence, in December 1922 gave the latter group an opportunity to represent themselves. For the Star, “solid republican views” were held by “the great majority” of the crowd gathered at the Standard Theatre.15 Following unsuccessful attempts to challenge MacSwiney’s militant and anti-clerical rhetoric, Hinds walked out in disgust. MacSwiney’s Toronto supporters were not now prepared to accept abstract platitudes about “British fair play.” A radical version of “the Green,” submerged for many years, was once again present in the city. Toronto’s Orange-unionist sympathizers meanwhile continued to lobby the case of Ulster. In February 1920, five Belfast-based ministers arrived alongside William Coote, mp for South Tyrone, as part of a tour to counter De Valera’s American trek. Locals with long memories could have drawn parallels with not only the Walter Long visit of 1912 but also that of Rev. R.R. Kane in 1886. Preachers entertained the converted once again, with one minister summarizing his reaction to Toronto thus: “It is home. It is the good old Empire.”16 Long-held ideas of Ulster’s difference, however, now gave way to Ulster’s successful exclusion from Home Rule and the creation of Northern Ireland. Its first premier, Sir James Craig, declared that he too felt “at home” when visiting Toronto in 1926, as would the third northern leader, Sir Basil Brooke, in 1950.17

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While the demographics were not as they were in the 1860s, dismantling the “Belfast of Canada” would take several decades. Partition would not produce long-term political stability in Ireland, of course. Reflecting on the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, Buffalo’s Catholic Union and Times predicted that although “wisdom dictates acceptance of the terms … [Ireland] will carry on the fight until her dreams are fully realized. Emmet’s epitaph will yet be written.”18 The outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland less than five decades later seemed to illustrate the point. As later generations of Americans and Canadians looked for interpretations of this latest crisis to hit the other side of the Atlantic, some of Irish birth and ancestry in Buffalo and Toronto contributed to new rounds of debate, counter-debate, fund-raising, and relief provision in ways that, once again, linked the local with the diasporic. The conflicting geographical imaginations of “Ireland” and “Ulster” presented in these and other corners of North America were not so dissimilar to those activated and reactivated several decades earlier. The cities and societies of which these Irish were now a part had, however, changed considerably.

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A p p e n d ic es

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Ap p e n dix A The relative presence of the Irish-born in the top twenty-five cities in Canada and the United States, 1870–71

City Boston Jersey City New York Albany Brooklyn TORONTO* Providence San Francisco Pittsburgh Philadelphia Chicago Newark Cleveland St Louis Montreal* Rochester BUFFALO Detroit Quebec* Cincinnati New Orleans Louisville Washington, dc Baltimore Milwaukee

Irish-born as percentage of total population

Total population

Rank (by total population)

Number of Irish-born

22.7 21.5 21.4 19.1 18.9 18.4 17.5 17.3 15.2 14.3 13.4 11.9 10.7 10.4 9.9 9.7 9.6 8.8 8.7 8.6 7.7 7.6 6.4 5.7 5.3

250,526 82,546 942,292 69,422 396,099 56,092 68,904 149,473 86,076 674,022 298,977 105,059 92,829 310,864 107,225 62,386 117,714 79,577 56,699 216,239 191,418 100,755 109,199 267,354 71,440

7 18 1 21 3 25 22 10 17 2 5 14 16 4 13 23 11 19 24 8 9 15 12 6 20

56,900 17,665 201,199 13,276 73,985 10,366 12,085 25,864 13,119 96,698 39,988 12,481 9,964 32,329 10,590 6,078 11,264 6,970 4,941 18,624 14,693 7,626 6,948 15,223 3,784

Source: United States, Ninth Census, Vol. I: Statistics of the Population of the United States (Washington, dc: Government Publishing Office, 1872), after Steven P. Erie, Rainbow’s End (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 18; Canada, Census of Canada, 1870–71, vol. 1 (Ottawa: I.B. Taylor, 1873). * = Canadian city

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Ap p e n di x B I: Provincial and county origins of two groups of Toronto Irish-born

County

History of Toronto (1885) “comfortable”

%

Irish Protestant Benevolent Society (1872) “needy”

%

Antrim Armagh Cavan Derry Donegal Down Fermanagh Monaghan Tyrone “north of Ireland” ALL ULSTER

6 14 4 4 2 8 8 4 13 6 69

5.4 12.6 3.6 3.6 1.8 7.2 7.2 3.6 11.7 5.4 62.2

7 8 9 5 2 3 6 0 4 0 44

8.0 9.2 10.3 5.7 2.3 3.4 6.9 0.0 4.6 0.0 50.6

Dublin Kilkenny King’s Longford Queen’s Westmeath Wexford Wicklow ALL LEINSTER

6 1 1 0 5 0 1 2 16

5.4 0.9 0.9 0.0 4.5 0.0 0.9 1.8 14.4

8 3 1 2 3 2 0 3 22

9.2 3.4 1.1 2.3 3.4 2.3 0.0 3.4 25.3

Leitrim Mayo Roscommon Sligo ALL CONNAUGHT

7 1 1 2 11

6.3 0.9 0.9 1.8 9.9

1 3 1 3 8

1.1 3.4 1.1 3.4 9.2

Clare Cork Limerick Tipperary Waterford Kerry ALL MUNSTER

1 2 3 8 0 1 15

0.9 1.8 2.7 7.2 0.0 0.9 13.5

0 3 6 2 2 0 13

0.0 3.4 6.9 2.3 2.3 0.0 14.9

111

100.0

87

100.0

TOTAL

Source: C.P. Mulvany and G.M. Adam, History of Toronto and County of York, 2 volumes (Toronto, 1885); Irish Protestant Benevolent Society, Annual Report 1872, Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library. Note: Only counties with at least one entry between the two data sets are included.

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Appendices 369

II: Provincial and county origins of Buffalo’s Irish-born, c. 1850–1930 County

N

%

Armagh Cavan Derry Down Monaghan Tyrone “north of Ireland” ALL ULSTER

2 2 1 6 3 1 2 17

10.4

Dublin Kildare Kilkenny King’s Longford Queen’s Westmeath Wexford ALL LEINSTER

2 1 5 1 2 5 1 7 24

14.6

Galway Mayo Roscommon Sligo ALL CONNAUGHT

1 9 4 1 15

9.1

Clare Cork Kerry Limerick Tipperary Waterford ALL MUNSTER

31 41 17 11 5 3 108

18.9 25.0 10.4 6.7

to ta l

164

100.0

65.9

Source: Database of Buffalo Irish birthplaces. Note: Percentages are given only where the number of cases exceeds ten.

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Ap p e n di x C Occupational distribution of adult males of Irish birth and ancestry in Toronto, by religious denominations, 1881

Owners and managers Agents on commission Self-employed Other middle-class Clerical Manual working class Skilled/semi-skilled Unskilled Building trades Total

Anglican

Methodist

N

N

%

%

Presbyterian N

%

Catholic N

%

Others N

%

28

2.8

11

9.8

4

3.7

6

2.1

1

3.7

33 104 62 60

6.1 16.0 10.3 9.9

6 14 11 18

5.4 12.5 9.8 16.1

5 17 11 10

4.7 15.9 10.3 9.3

7 32 13 9

2.5 11.3 4.6 3.2

2 7 5 2

7.4 25.9 18.5 7.4

209 140 106

28.2 15.0 11.7

29 4 19

25.9 3.6 17.0

25 16 19

23.4 15.0 17.8

88 88 40

31.1 31.1 14.1

7 0 3

25.9 0.0 11.1

742

100.0

112

100.0

107

100.0

283

100.0

27

100.0

Source: Toronto Irish sample.

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Ap p e n dix D Concentrations of Roman Catholics on selected Toronto streets, 1881

Street Name

Total number of households

Number of Catholic households

Percentage of Catholic Households

48 62 32

30 42 25

62.5 67.7 78.1

79 54 40

50 32 15

65.6 59.3 37.5

136

59

43.4

Sackvillea Duchessb Jarvisc Lombard (formerly Stanley) Bolton Portland William (formerly Dummer) Source: Toronto tax assessment rolls.

a = both sides from Queen Street to St David; b = both sides from Jarvis Street to Walker’s Lane; c = east side, numbers 83–123 from Duchess to Queen Streets.

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Notes

c ha p t e r o n e 1 For an examination of this transatlantic interest in genealogy and genetics, see Nash, Of Irish Descent. 2 See Kenny, The American Irish; Mannion, Irish Settlements in Eastern Canada; and Doyle, “The Remaking of Irish-America, 1845–1880.” Doyle notes that the initial eastern regional concentration did not dissipate as a result of westward movements; eastern cities rather became effective “reception points” for new arrivals. 3 For urban studies in which the Irish are either the central focus or an important component, see Bayor and Meagher, The New York Irish; Anbinder, Five Points; Wingerd, Claiming the City; Burchell, The San Francisco Irish; Emmons, The Butte Irish; Meagher, Inventing Irish America and From Paddy to Studs; Vinyard, The Irish on the Urban Frontier; and Clark, The Irish in Philadelphia. Recent regional studies include Gleeson, The Irish in the South, and Emmons, Beyond the American Pale, while national-scale interpretations have come from Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles; Kenny, The American Irish; and Houston and Smyth, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement. 4 Notable champions of comparative research agendas in Irish migration history are Campbell, Ireland’s New Worlds and “The Other Immigrants”; MacRaild, “Crossing Migrant Frontiers”; and Kenny, “Diaspora and Comparison.” 5 For representative works, see Akenson, The Irish Diaspora; Bielenberg, The Irish Diaspora; and Fanning, New Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora. 6 Jersey City actually lies in second place with 21.5% Irish-born, though it was an integral part of a New York conurbation emerging on both sides of

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Notes to pages 5–7

the Hudson River. These figures are taken from Erie, Rainbow’s End, 18 (United States data only) and Census of Canada 1871, 1. 7 It contributes particularly to the insights gained from a recent cluster of studies of small American cities that overlap with the time period chosen here: Hartford, Working People of Holyoke; Mitchell, The Paddy Camps; Emmons, The Butte Irish; Wingerd, Claiming the City; and Meagher, Inventing Irish America. At a more practical level, the size of the Irish populations in Buffalo and Toronto permitted population sampling at a scale that in turn enabled a longitudinal analysis of individuals and families in terms of changing occupational and residential patterns. 8 For scholarly accounts, see Senior, The Last Invasion of Canada, and Vronsky, Ridgeway. Vronsky, 260, enumerates thirteen dead from the battles of that summer, but his website http://www.ridgewaybattle.ca (accessed December 2012) has since revised that total upwards. 9 Although the word “rebellion” implies that the incumbent British administration was legitimate (the revolutionaries did not think so), I agree with Charles Townshend who writes in Easter 1916 (xviii) that his preference for using it “stems largely from the fact that it contains the term for its makers, and that term – ‘rebels’ – carries a charge of romantic glamour which was wholly appropriate to their minds.” 10 Smyth, “The Story of the Great Irish Famine,” 4–5. 11 Fitzpatrick, “Emigration 1801–70,” 565–6. See also Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History 1780–1939, 173–209, and Black 47 and Beyond; and Donnelly, The Great Irish Potato Famine. For a recent comparative study of the institutional responses of two cities to the famine influx, see Gallman, Receiving Erin’s Children. With regard to the famine-era arrivals in Buffalo and Toronto, see Gerber, The Making of an American Pluralism, 121–62; Tucker, “The Famine Immigration to Canada, 1847”; Parr, “The Welcome and the Wake”; and McGowan, Death or Canada. 12 Nugent, Crossings, 136. 13 As Barrett and Roediger have argued for the United States, the Irish were now becoming “Americanizers” to others as well as themselves. See their “The Irish and the ‘Americanization’ of the ‘New Immigrants.’” 14 Doyle, “Cohesion and Diversity in the Irish Diaspora,” 433. McCaffrey, “Diaspora Comparisons and Irish-American Uniqueness” (25), calls for more studies of lawyers, doctors, teachers, firemen, policemen, and others. 15 Doyle, “Remaking of Irish-America, 1845–80,” 742–3, 725. 16 Gallup and Castelli, The People’s Religion, 122; see also Akenson, The Irish Diaspora, 219–20, and Greeley, “The American Irish,” 68. 17 Greeley, “The American Irish,” 69.

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18 Houston and Smyth, “Transferred Loyalties”; Kelly, The Shamrock and the Lily. See also Gordon, The Orange Riots. 19 Akenson, The Irish in Ontario; Bruce S. Elliott, Irish Migrants in the Canadas; Catharine Anne Wilson, A New Lease on Life; Houston and Smyth, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement and “Geographical Transiency and Social Mobility”; McQuillan, “Beaurivage”; Lockwood, Montague; and Mannion, Irish Settlements in Eastern Canada. See also Toner, “Lifting the Mist,” and Darroch, “Half-Empty or Half-Full.” 20 Akenson, The Irish in Ontario, 36–8. 66.3% of Catholics with Irish ancestry lived in rural areas. 21 See Olson and Thornton, “The Challenge of the Irish Community” and Peopling the North American City; James, “Dynamics of Ethnic Associational Culture”; Trigger, “The Geopolitics of the Irish Catholic Parish” and “Irish Politics on Parade”; Winder, “Trouble in the North End”; and Grace, “Irish Immigration and Settlement” and “A Demographic and Social Profile of Quebec’s Irish Populations.” 22 See McGowan, The Waning of the Green, 7, and Clarke, Piety and Nationalism. 23 See Houston and Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore, and Kealey, Toronto Workers Respond to Industrial Capitalism. For a brief but revealing comparison of Irish Protestants and Catholics in Toronto from the 1861 census, see Houston and Smyth, “The Irish Abroad.” 24 Wingerd, Claiming the City, 271. 25 McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America (13), notes that 5% of the United States population was Catholic in 1822. 26 Signs of a backlash were most evident with the burning of an Ursuline convent near Boston in 1834 and the emergence of the nativist American or “Know-Nothing” party in the 1850s, while the American Protective Association represented another upwelling of white Protestant fervour in the 1890s. See Gleason, “American Identity and Americanization.” For Canada, see See, Riots in New Brunswick, and J.R. Miller, “Anti-Catholicism.” 27 Work on the less-urbanized American South has shown how a more ecumenical Irishness prospered in the context of entrenched racial division and the common experience of rebellion. See Gleeson, “Smaller Differences.” 28 Higham, “Paleface and Redskin in American Historiography,” 113. 29 Fredrickson, “Giving A Comparative Dimension to American History,” 107–10. 30 Green, “The Comparative Method,” 15. A convergent approach would study the experiences of migrants from a variety of origins at a single

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Notes to pages 9–12

l­ocation. MacRaild, “Crossing Migrant Frontiers” (43), considers Green’s divergent model to be especially fruitful for Irish diasporic studies. 31 This “contrast of contexts” comparative research design is described in Skocpol and Somers, “The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry,” 175–81. 32 Winter, “Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919,” 10. See also Fredrickson, “From Exceptionalism to Variability.” 33 Green, “The Comparative Method,” 7. See also Haupt and Kocka, “Comparative History,” and Cohen, “Comparative History: Buyer Beware.” 34 Kenny, “Diaspora and Comparison,” 150. As Campbell, “The Other Immigrants” (12), adds: “Given the wide divergence between the predominant interpretation of the Irish experience in the United States and the much more positive pattern of accommodation revealed by most scholarship on other settler societies, the development of a rigorous comparative history seems an urgent and essential task.” 35 Baily, Immigrants in the Land of Promise, 17. 36 See Fitzpatrick, “Emigration 1801–70,” 566. 37 Transnational practices connecting the North American Irish to Ireland went far beyond the political sphere, of course. Remittances are the most well-known exception. See O’Day, “Irish Nationalism and Anglo-American Relations.” 38 See Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 38–9, and Soja, “The Socio-Spatial Dialectic.” See also Connolly, “Bringing the City Back In”; Gunn, “The Spatial Turn”; Bukowczyk, “The Production of History, the Becoming of Place”; Hayden, “Urban Landscape History”; Bender, “Theory, Experience and the Motion of History”; Ethington, “Placing the Past”; and Casey, “Boundary, Place and Event in the Spatiality of History.” 39 Yans, “On ‘Groupness,’” 119. 40 Yancey et al., “Emergent Ethnicity,” 400. 41 For a rich discussion, see Conzen et al., “The Invention of Ethnicity.” 42 Brubaker, “Ethnicity Without Groups,” 166. See also Sökefeld, “Mobilizing in Transnational Space.” 43 Stanger-Ross, Staying Italian, 144. 44 See, for example, Curtis, Apes and Angels, and De Nie, The Eternal Paddy. 45 Knobel, Paddy and the Republic, and Davis, “Little Irelands.” 46 Ayers et al., All Over the Map, 93. 47 Akenson, The Irish Diaspora, 14; see also Bukowczyk et al., Permeable Border. 48 As Conzen, “Mainstreams and Side Channels” (13), writes: “Our very reliance upon the local case study as a basic genre within immigration history

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rests upon the assumption that any one case is essentially representative of the broader universe of cases.” 49 Within a voluminous literature, see Stewart, The Origins of Canadian Politics, and Vipond, Liberty and Community. 50 Sökefeld, “Mobilizing in Transnational Space,” 266. 51 Kenny, “Diaspora and Comparison,” 162. 52 Gerber, “Forming a Transnational Narrative,” 66. 53 McGowan, Waning of the Green, goes too far in his portrayal of a Toronto Irish Catholic group disinterested in Irish affairs in the early twentieth ­century. McLaughlin, “Irish Canadians and the Struggle for Irish Independence,” provides an important corrective but seems to assume that diasporic interest in Ireland was dormant between the second (1893) and third (1912) Home Rule bills. 54 Massey, “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place,” 66. See also Ward, “Towards a Relational Comparative Approach to the Study of Cities”; Massey, For Place; and Agnew and Duncan, The Power of Place. 55 For a brief but useful discussion on how the findings of a comparative study should be presented, see Fredrickson, The Comparative Imagination, 12. 56 Blessing, “Paddy: The Image and Reality of Irish Immigrants in the American Community,” 114. 57 Green, “Forms of Comparison,” 51. On the topic of sport, however, see Darby and Hassan, “Introduction: Locating Sport in the Study of the Irish Diaspora.”

c h a p t e r t wo 1 See Wynn, “On the Margins of Empire 1760–1840,” 217–21. 2 The land was, however, disposed of by the State of Massachusetts. See Wyckoff, “Land Subdivision on the Holland Purchase.” 3 Harris and Warkentin, Canada before Confederation, 122. 4 See Houston and Smyth, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement, 207–9. 5 Wyckoff, “Land Subdivision on the Holland Purchase,” 153. 6 Smith, History of the City of Buffalo, 2: 37. 7 For early town plans, see Smith, History of the City of Buffalo, 2: 27, 30, 31. 8 Careless, Toronto to 1918, 31; Smith, History of the City of Buffalo, 2: 56–7. 9 Only in 1828 were “Americans already resident in the province able, after meeting certain residence requirements, to take the oath of allegiance and secure full civil rights and privileges.” See Read, The Rebellion of 1837, 6, and Errington, The Lion, the Eagle, and Upper Canada, 166–84.

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Notes to pages 23–7

10 See Bell, “The Loyalist Tradition in Canada.” 11 Read, The Rebellion of 1837, 4. 12 See Mills, The Idea of Loyalty, 12–34. 13 Stewart, The Origins of Canadian Politics, 24. 14 McNairn, The Capacity to Judge, 291. 15 McKay, “Canada as a Long Liberal Revolution,” 356. 16 The meaning of the name “Toronto” is unclear. Careless, Toronto to 1918 (9), includes three interpretations: “meeting place,” “lake opening,” and “trees in the water,” the trees being those of the peninsula (the present-day Toronto Island) that sheltered the harbour. 17 Harris and Warkentin, Canada before Confederation, 116; Weaver, De Jonge, and Norris, “Transatlantic Migrations 1831–1851.” 18 Brown’s Toronto City and Home Directory 1846–7, 22. 19 The predominance of Irish among Toronto Catholics before 1847 was assessed as such by Bishop Michael Power. See Stortz, “The Clergy of the Archdiocese of Toronto,” 75. 20 See Table 1 in Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, 16. Clarke’s figures are taken from the Census of Canada. McGowan dates the “Belfast of North America” label to the 1860s; see The Waning of the Green, 316. See also Jenkins, “Poverty and Place,” 479. 21 Meinig, The Shaping of America, 2: 266. 22 Ibid., 270, 272. 23 Cross, The Burned-over District, 5–6; Goldman, High Hopes, 57. 24 Smith, History of the City of Buffalo, 2: 37. 25 Cross, The Burned-over District, 75. 26 These words were contained in a letter from N.H. Wickes of 68 Huron St, Buffalo, to his brother in Stow Square, Lewis Co., New York. Its exact date in 1847 is not known but it was later discovered and published in the Buffalo Evening News, 3 March 1962. 27 See McGreevy, Stairway to Empire, 7, and Condon, Stars in the Water, 150. 28 Smith, History of the City of Buffalo, 1: 116, 121. 29 Gerber, The Making of an American Pluralism, 5–6. 30 Yox, “Bonds of Community.” 31 Smith, History of the City of Buffalo, 1: 233. 32 Erie County was carved out in 1821 from a Niagara County established in 1808. Mark Stern’s analysis of rural Erie County in 1855 also reveals Irish farming families to have been few and far between in contrast to the Germans. See his Society and Family Strategy, 120–1. 33 Stewart, The Origins of Canadian Politics. 34 Altschuler and Blumin, Rude Republic, 8.

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35 McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework,” 633. 36 Quoted in Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 2: 37. See also Weaver, Shaping the Canadian City; Garner, The Franchise and Politics in British North America; and Isin, Cities Without Citizens. The provincial autonomy movement in 1880s Ontario was also framed as a fight for “local” jurisdiction; see Vipond, Liberty and Community. 37 Dagenais, “The Municipal Territory.” 38 Careless, Toronto to 1918, 102; Dagenais, “Urban Governance in Montreal and Toronto.” 39 Gerber, The Making of an American Pluralism, 327. 40 This is the central argument of Gerber, The Making of an American Pluralism. 41 Gerber, The Making of an American Pluralism, 330. 42 Harris and Warkentin, Canada Before Confederation, 155. 43 Kealey, Toronto Workers Respond to Industrial Capitalism, 32. 44 McKim’s Directory of Canadian Publications, 116. 45 Careless, Toronto to 1918, 112. 46 Gad, “Location Patterns of Manufacturing.” See also Careless, Toronto to 1918, 115. 47 Beeby, “Industrial Strategy and Manufacturing Growth.” 48 Horton, History of Northwestern New York, 1: 216–18. 49 Ibid., 219. 50 Ibid., 219. 51 Hill, Twentieth Century Buffalo, 143. 52 Horton, Northwestern New York, 1: 220–3, 228–9. 53 United States, Report on the Social Statistics of Cities, 1: 507. 54 Spelt, Urban Development, Table VIII. 55 Globe, 12 December 1866. 56 United States, Report on the Social Statistics of Cities, 1: 507. At the close of that year, one Toronto aldermanic candidate bemoaned the fact that “at present, vessels [are] having to make a circuit of seven miles to the Western entrance [to the harbour].” See Globe, 28 December 1880. 57 Careless, Toronto to 1918, 120. As Beeby, “Industrial Strategy and Manufacturing Growth” (216), observed: “Without waterfront industrial lots served by a deep-water harbour, Toronto was at a continual disadvantage.” 58 The occupational classes used here and in chapters 3 and 7 follow Harris, Unplanned Suburbs, 293–6. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, clergymen, bookkeepers, and other professionals were classified “other middle class.” Unless otherwise known, shoemakers were designated “skilled and semi-skilled.” The self-employed were largely grocers, dealers of various types, and

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Notes to pages 32–6

keepers of boarding-houses, hotels, and saloons. While it was not clear at this time that a nonmanual job such as a clerk could not be seen as “working-class,” this had changed somewhat by c. 1910. See Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class, 269–70. 59 Smith, History of the City of Buffalo, 1: 260. 60 Globe, 19 November 1868; Gad, Buchanan, and Holdsworth, “Commerce in the Core: Toronto, 1881.” 61 See Canada, Census of 1881: 1; Clarke, Piety and Nationalism; and McGowan, The Waning of the Green. 62 Of the total Ontario population of 1,923,228 in 1881, only 16.7% was Catholic, with Methodists (30.7%), Presbyterians (21.7%), and Anglicans (19%) as the leading denominations. For a table of census figures by religion for 1871–1911, see Airhart, “Ordering A New Dominion,” 103. 63 Buffalo Courier, 28 July 1877. 64 Buffalo Courier, 4 October 1891. 65 Armstrong and Nelles, The Revenge of the Methodist Bicycle Company, 4. 66 Middleton, The Municipality of Toronto, 1: 314. 67 David Ward, Cities and Immigrants, 78; Yox, “Bonds of Community,” 151. 68 Horton, History of Northwestern New York, 1: 247. 69 Buffalo Courier, 18 March 1867. 70 On riots, see Way, “Street Politics,” and Clarke, “Religious Riot as Pastime.” For Belfast, see Baker, “Orange and Green: Belfast 1832–1912”; Hirst, Religion, Politics and Violence. 71 Mulvany and Adam, History of Toronto. Volume 1 contains biographical information for all sectors of Toronto’s business community, with volume 2 devoted to biographies of prominent citizens, past and present. 72 The Programme de Recherche en Démographie Historique at the Université de Montréal has made the complete 1881 census manuscript returns available at http://www.prdh.umontreal.ca/1881Browser/en/home.aspx, while Library and Archives Canada (lac) has an online database containing the heads of households counted in Ontario in the 1871 census at http:// www.collectionscanada.ca/02/020108_e.html (both accessed August 2006). Since this work was completed, lac has added an online database for the 1881 census at http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/databases/­ census-1881/index-e.html. 73 The birthplaces of the remainder were given simply as “Ireland.” The six individuals whose birthplaces were described as “north of Ireland” were assumed to have been born in Ulster. 74 Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, 41–2; “The Parish and the Hearth,” 187.

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75 Bric, “Patterns of Irish Emigration to America”; Royle and Ní Laoire, “‘Dare the Boist’rous Main.’” 76 Houston and Smyth, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement, 15–19. In this book, and in accordance with recent convention, I use the term “Derry” for the city and “Londonderry” for the county. 77 Ibid., 51; Fitzgerald, “From the Flight of the Earls to the Famine,” 481; Toner, “The Origins of the New Brunswick Irish, 1851.” 78 See Turner, “Rural Economies in Post-Famine Ireland.” 79 Kennedy, “The Rural Economy, 1820–1914,” 22. 80 Cousens, “The Regional Variation in Emigration,” 25. 81 Ollerenshaw, “Industry, 1820–1914,” 62–74. 82 Cousens, “The Regional Variation in Emigration,” 28; see also Kennedy “The Rural Economy, 1820–1914,” 41, and Clarkson, “Population Change and Urbanisation, 1821–1911.” 83 Grace, “Irish Immigration and Settlement in a Catholic City,” 237–41. 84 Fitzpatrick, “Emigration 1801–1870,” 581. See also David Noel Doyle, “The Irish in North America 1776–1845,” 693, and Ó Gráda, “Across the Briny Ocean,” 86. 85 Between 1816 and 1842, possibly as many as two-thirds of these arriving Irish relocated south shortly after disembarking. See Houston and Smyth, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement, 26. Others of better means, and perhaps more certain of their destinations, travelled to the United States via the English port of Liverpool. See David Noel Doyle, “The Irish in North America, 1776–1845,” 694. 86 Irish Protestant Benevolent Society Annual Report 1872. 87 Fitzpatrick, “Emigration 1801–1870,” 574; Houston and Smyth, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement, 5, 64; Ó Gráda, “Across the Briny Ocean,” 81. 88 Mulvany and Adam, History of Toronto, 2: 60, 91. 89 See Figure 2.3 in Houston and Smyth, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement, 22. 90 Errington, Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities (9), describes “emigration in the first half of the nineteenth century [as] an ongoing family affair.” 91 Mirror, 4 August 1848. 92 Read, The Rebellion of 1837, 14. 93 Mulvany and Adam, History of Toronto, 2: 3–4. 94 Ibid., 14. 95 Ibid., 130–1; Davin, The Irishman in Canada, 661.

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Notes to pages 42–4

  96 Important surveys of Canadian Orangeism to date are Houston and Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore, and Senior, Orangeism. See also Wilson, The Orange Order in Canada.  97 Mills, The Idea of Loyalty in Upper Canada, 84–90; see also Houston and Smyth, “The Orange Order and the Expansion of the Frontier.” For insight into some of their more controversial parades in Victorian Toronto, see Radforth, Royal Spectacle, and Goheen, “The Ritual of the Streets in 19th Century Toronto.” Some political rapprochements with Catholics were possible, such as in the 1830s; see Senior, Orangeism, 21–30, and “The Orange and Green.”   98 See Kealey, “Orangemen,” 49, 65, and Way, “Street Politics.”  99 Robertson, The History of Freemasonry in Canada, 2: 618. 100 Houston and Smyth, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement, 104–5. 101 See Fitzpatrick, “Emigration 1801–1870,” and David Noel Doyle, “The Remaking of Irish-America, 1845–1880.” 102 Sager, Thompson, and Trottier, The National Sample of the 1901 Census of Canada User’s Guide. 103 Quoted in Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 2: 240. 104 See, for example, Irish Times, 7, 14, 15, 19, 21, and 30 April, 6, 12, 13, 16, 19, and 20 May, and 1, 3, 8, 9, 16, 19, and 20 June 1870. A biography of Moylan is provided in Cottrell, “Irish Catholic Political Leadership in Toronto,” 476. 105 Irish Times, 24 January 1871. 106 See Houston and Smyth, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement, 115–16. 107 Miller, “Assimilation and Alienation,” 105. See also Schrier, Ireland and the American Emigration. 108 Fitzpatrick, “Irish Emigration 1871–1921,” 612. 109 Tielman, Buffalo’s Waterfront; see also Potter, To the Golden Door. 110 Condon, Stars in the Water, 150. 111 Donohue, History of the Catholic Church in Western New York (259), claims that in 1837 “thousands of Irish and German Catholics” were employed on the canal and that Rev. Charles Smith of Schenectady, New York, “said Mass in various places along the line of operations.” 112 See United States, Ninth Census, 1: 365, 388. Albany contained 13,276 Irish-born, while 11,264 lived in Buffalo. In between these, Rochester housed 6,078, Utica 3,496, and Syracuse 5,172, and more Irish lived in the counties beyond the municipal boundaries of these cities. 113 Cited in Gerber, The Making of an American Pluralism, 122; Buffalo News, 12 April 1929.

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114 Way, Common Labour, 102. 115 See Katz, Poverty and Policy, 246 (Table A.7). 116 Ibid., 246 (Table A.6). 117 Katz, Doucet, and Stern, The Social Organization of Industrial Capitalism, 114–15. The German equivalents were 10.6 and 9.1 years for males and females respectively, while those born in New England had average ­residencies in Buffalo of 17.2 and 16.2 years for males and females respectively. 118 The term is taken from Moya, Cousins and Strangers, 4. 119 Grace, “Irish Immigration and Settlement in a Catholic City,” 226 (Table 3). 120 Bukowczyk, “Migration, Transportation, Capital and the State,” 48–57. 121 Ellis, “State-Aided Emigration Schemes,” 387. 122 Buffalo Irish Times, April–May 2000. 123 Smith, History of Buffalo, 2. Of the ninety biographical subjects, ten were born in German-speaking Europe, with the vast majority of the remainder born elsewhere in New York State or in the New England states. 124 Thanks to Mary Cecilia Murphy and Donna Shine of the Buffalo Irish Genealogical Society, and also to Martha Kavanaugh who aided the research at Holy Cross Cemetery. 125 Smyth, “Introduction: The Province of Munster and the Great Famine.” 126 See Ó Murchada, “The Years of the Great Famine.” 127 Smyth, “Introduction: The Province of Munster and the Great Famine,” 370. 128 See Donnelly, The Land and the People of Nineteenth Century Cork, 112–19. The number of evictions in 1846 was estimated at 974, but in 1847 this increased to 2,436. A peak of 3,340 evictions was reported in 1850. See also Smyth, “Exodus from Ireland,” 498. 129 Donnelly, The Land and the People of Nineteenth Century Cork, 127, 130. Almost one-quarter of Co. Cork’s population departed during the 1850s and 1860s. 130 See “Irish Immigration to Buffalo,” an unpublished and undated typescript of the Evans family of Buffalo, available from either the Buffalo Irish Genealogical Society or the present author. Four of the six detectives at police headquarters in Buffalo in the early 1890s were from Munster, one from Connacht, and one from Ulster. See Jenkins, “Geographical and Social Mobility,” 144–57. 131 Catholic Union and Times, 14 January 1915. 132 See Courtney, Recollections, 241, and Dooley, Days Beyond Recall. 133 Grace, “Irish Immigration and Settlement in a Catholic City,” 228–30. 134 The samples of Irish households taken in Buffalo and Toronto for the years 1880–81 (utilized more extensively in chapter 3) show that there

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Notes to pages 48–57

were fewer American-born of Irish paternal ancestry present in Toronto than Canadian-born Irish of Irish paternal ancestry in Buffalo; while the numbers are small, the results indicate that there were about twice as many Canadian-born “Irish” in Buffalo. 135 Glasco, Ethnicity and Social Structure, 22; Gerber, The Making of an American Pluralism, 442. 136 Smith, History of Buffalo, 2: 26–7. 137 This stage of the analysis made use of MacLysaght, The Surnames of Ireland. 138 See, for example, Smith et al., “Isonymic Analysis of Post-Famine Relationships,” and Smith and MacRaild, “The Origins of the Irish in Northern England.” I am grateful to Dr Malcolm Smith for agreeing to work with my Buffalo and Toronto surname lists and for generating the maps that comprise figures 2.6, 2.7, and 2.8. 139 The random isonymy values in figures 2.5, 2.6, and 2.7 are bigger if there are more surnames in common and smaller if there are fewer, and are then used to shade the maps. The darker the shading, the more similarity there is between the distribution of names in the test sample(s) and the Griffith’s population of the Irish Poor Law Union. In other words, the more likely it is that the population has migrated from that Poor Law Union. 140 Vinyard, The Irish on the Urban Frontier. Another Corktown developed in Hamilton, Ontario; see Holman, “‘Different Feelings.’”

C h a p t e r t h re e   1 See Handlin, The Uprooted, and Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles.   2 Ellis, “State-Aided Emigration Schemes,” 388.  3 Belfast News-Letter, 9 September 1872.   4 A sample of 667 multigenerational households of Irish ethnic origin (which meant Irish paternal ancestry to the census bureaucrats) from the 1881 Canadian census manuscripts for Toronto was drawn and compared to a similar sample of 524 households from Buffalo, the latter taken from the 1880 federal census manuscripts. The total number of individuals in the Toronto and Buffalo households was 3,115 and 2,698 respectively. Of Toronto’s non-Irish-born, 1,866 (64.5%) were Canadian-born with only 2.8% born in the United States. In Buffalo, there were 1,169 (55.2%) who were American-born and 98 (4.6%) who were born in Canada. On the ­issue of ethnicity in the Canadian census, see Curtis, The Politics of Population, 286. There is no evidence that the sex ratios for all those of

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Irish birth or ancestry were unbalanced to any significant degree in the two cities. In Toronto there were 0.92 females per male and in Buffalo 0.91, though the servants employed in households headed by the non-Irish bring these ratios closer to equivalence. 5 “Irish” and “German” refer only to those with Irish or German fathers to align as much as possible with the Canadian measure of ethnic origin, though they include only one generation of North American–born. 6 “Adult” in this case refers to an individual at least eighteen years of age, though there were appreciable numbers of wage-earners under the age of eighteen. 7 It is worth reminding the reader that one cannot accurately measure a “second generation” of Irish in Toronto. The census variable “Irish ethnic origin” could include those of the third and fourth generations, but it is highly doubtful that many extended beyond three generations. 8 See Bodnar, The Transplanted, 57–84. He observes that “[pre-migration communal traditions] contributed significantly to the shape of family and household life but would have been insufficient factors in themselves without the accompanying reality of an industrial workplace which encouraged mutual aid and especially the widespread existence of wages insufficient for even modest standards of living” (76). See also Bradbury, “The Family Economy and Work.” 9 Globe, 3 February 1881. 10 Globe, 2 April 1881 and 3 February 1883. 11 Globe, 30 April 1881. 12 The relation of individuals to the household head is not included as a variable in the 1881 Canadian census manuscripts. However, it was felt that sons in families could nonetheless be discerned, especially when only their forenames were given. As a rule, the age difference between an individual listed solely by forename and the assumed wife of the head of the household had to be at least sixteen years before that individual was designated a “son” beyond any reasonable doubt. Closer age differences increase the likelihood that the individual could have been the brother of the household head or some other close relation. While the proportion of sons in nonmanual work given here must be regarded as an estimate, there are good reasons to be confident of its accuracy. 13 Shapiro, Yesterday’s Toronto, 118. Eaton was also far from the stereotypically impoverished Irish immigrant. See James, “Timothy Eaton of Canada and County Antrim.” 14 See Barber, Immigrant Domestic Servants.

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Notes to pages 62–70

15 Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America; Lynch-Brennan, The Irish Bridget. For an account of domestic servants in New York that gives particular attention to the Irish, however, see Stanshell, City of Women. The cartoon issue is covered well in Maureen Murphy, “Images of the Irish Servant Girl,” while the cinematic angle is discussed in Flynn, “How Bridget was Framed.” 16 Dooley, Days Beyond Recall, 23. 17 In total, forty-two private households from the city-wide sample employed at least two servants, and seventeen employed at least one female servant of Irish birth or paternal ancestry. All were either on or near Delaware Avenue. 18 Feather, “The Old First Ward,” 65. 19 Catholic Union and Times, 11 September 1879. 20 Stanshell, City of Women, 159, 160. 21 For Canadian (mostly Ontario) evidence, see Fahrni, “‘Ruffled’ Mistresses and ‘Discontented’ Maids,” 78–9. 22 Lynch-Brennan, The Irish Bridget, 16, 112. 23 Luhan, Intimate Memoirs, 3. As Bourdieu notes in Distinction, this elite mentality was one committed to the symbolic and the “seeming” (252–3). 24 See, for example, Buffalo Express, 8 November and 13 and 27 December 1880, and 7 January, 3 February, 16, 22, and 24 March, and 1, 5, 26, and 28 April 1881. Registry offices included Mrs York’s on West Mohawk Street and Mrs Wells’ on Allen Street. The one advertisement for a “Catholic lady” was for a position “in the interest of Catholic education,” however (Buffalo Express, 3 November 1880). 25 Fahrni, “‘Ruffled’ Mistresses and ‘Discontented’ Maids,” 70. 26 See Lacelle, Urban Domestic Servants, 74 (Table 13). 27 See tables and discussion in ibid., 76–9. 28 Mulvany and Adam, History of Toronto, 1: 289. See also descriptions of house construction on Jarvis and Sherbourne Streets in Globe, 27 November 1880. 29 Houston, “The Impetus to Reform,” 199. 30 Globe, 22 January 1886. 31 See Globe, 5, 8, 12, 17, and 31 January and 20 and 25 May 1881. My thanks to Colleen Mitchell for this information. 32 Such advertisements were present in earlier decades. Houston, “The Impetus to Reform,” 200. 33 Fahrni, “‘Ruffled’ Mistresses and ‘Discontented’ Maids,” 88. 34 Analysis of female servant numbers in the census manuscripts is in any case fraught with numerous ambiguities given the cryptic census categories of “At home,” “Keeping house,” and “Housekeeper”; distinguishing between

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Notes to pages 71–4

387

the first two is particularly problematic. Clark, “Irish Women Workers,” 119, sums up the researcher’s dilemma nicely: “Colloquially, ‘keeping house’ implied being at home and caring for a household. ‘Housekeeper’ was usually a woman who acted in a servant capacity in a household, boarding house or hotel … What the distinction was between ‘At home’ and ‘Keeping house’ must remain a mystery of enumerator’s jargon.” The Buffalo data also provide “servant” as a census category, and the percentage reported above applies only to this group. The other descriptions of “At home,” “Keeping House,” and “Housekeeper” were not considered, so the number of servants living within Irish households has possibly been underestimated, at least for Buffalo. The Canadian census for 1881 includes “servant” as an occupational category. It does not list “at home” or “keeping house” as wives’ occupations. 35 See Kealey, “The Orange Order in Toronto,” 19–21, and Frank Smith’s letter to the Toronto World, 1 December 1890. 36 Kealey and Burr, “John Hewitt.” The official name of the newspaper was the Sentinel and Orange and Protestant Advocate. 37 Kealey, Toronto Workers Respond to Industrial Capitalism, 175. 38 Ibid., 176–81. 39 Ibid., 195. 40 Ibid., 184–90, 206–8. 41 Ibid., 184–90. 42 Armstrong and Nelles, The Revenge of the Methodist Bicycle Company, 16; Murphy, “Edward Frederick Clarke,” 673. 43 Irish Canadian, 12 November 1885. 44 See Jenkins, “Patrolmen and Peelers,” and Kealey, “Orangemen and the Corporation,” 73. 45 Jenkins, “Patrolmen and Peelers,” 21. See also Strauch, “Walking for God and Raising Hell,” 52. 46 Gerber, The Making of an American Pluralism, 245. 47 Goldman, High Hopes, 157–8. 48 Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, 5 July 1870. Elsewhere, the Ship Carpenters’ and Caulkers’ Union had been in existence since the early 1860s, and there was also a Seaman’s Union; both of these were likely to include numbers of Irishmen. 49 Goldman, High Hopes, 154; Harring, “The Buffalo Police, 1872–1915,” 125. Five hundred members of the grain scoopers’ association met in 1880 to present President James Mahoney with a watch and cane, for example. See Buffalo Courier, 25 October 1880. 50 Shelton, “The Grain Shovellers’ Strike,” 212.

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Notes to pages 74–8

51 Heron, Booze, 215. 52 Catholic Union and Times, 3 November and 15 December 1887. Montreal’s clergy also denounced the Knights. See Trigger, “Clerical Containment,” 89. 53 This argument about the effects of rival associational alternatives comes from Jason Kaufman, “Rise and Fall of a Nation of Joiners.” As he writes (560), “the profusion of trade unions, religious sodalities, professional organizations, fraternal lodges, benevolent societies, and mutual-benefit organizations paradoxically undermined (or cross-cut) workers’ abilities to organize and maintain a vital constituency mobilized for decisive political action.” 54 As Amy Bridges has usefully put it, “rhetorical support for the workingman was not political support for union organization or decent wages” (A City in the Republic, 153). 55 Buffalo Courier, 3 November 1889; Buffalo Express, 3 November 1889. 56 Buffalo Courier, 10 February 1890; Buffalo Express, 10 February 1890; Catholic Union and Times, 13 February 1890. 57 In a wide-ranging quantitative analysis of Toronto’s Victorian social geography, Peter Goheen identified “economic rank” to be the primary axis through which “groups sorted themselves residentially.” See Goheen, Victorian Toronto, 194. 58 The subdivisions do not take account of population density, and it is worth noting that the population of Brockton in 1881 was 756, compared to St David’s Ward (containing both the Corktown and Cabbagetown neighbourhoods) which was over 10,000. 59 McAree, Cabbagetown Store, 2. 60 Ibid., 92. 61 The street segments housing significant Catholic concentrations in Figure 3.5 are based on the proportion of Catholic households living in those segments as revealed in the assessment rolls. These measures of “significance” vary from 37.5% (Portland St) to 78.1% (Jarvis St segment). See appendix D. 62 Irish Canadian, 21 March 1889. 63 See Clarke, “Religious Riot as Pastime,” 115–19. The Jubilee Riots of 1875 were another testing occasion for the tavern; see Strauch, “Walking for God and Raising Hell,” 43. 64 Robertson’s Landmarks of Toronto, 4: 335–8. An earlier wooden structure had been in place from the early 1860s. 65 For accounts of the neighbourhood geography and patterns of segregation in nineteenth-century Belfast, see Hepburn, A Past Apart, and Hirst, Religion, Politics and Violence.

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Notes to pages 78–82

389

66 The Orange hall on Euclid Street in the west end had an mixture of Orangemen, Catholics, and others living near it, for example. See Houston and Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore, 110. 67 Quoted in Stortz, “Archbishop Lynch’s The Evils of Wholesale and Improvident Emigration from Ireland,” 9. 68 Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, 158–9. For pre-1865 newspaper stories, see Globe, 10 March and 3 May 1860, 27 September 1862, and 14 March and 9 July 1864. See also Houston, “The Impetus to Reform,” 262. 69 Globe, 12 December 1866 and 26 September 1871. 70 See Jenkins, “Poverty and Place,” 495–8. The total of ninety-eight households is an estimate since address is not given in the 1871 census manuscripts. The number of households included on the assessment roll is 110. 71 See Craven, “Law and Ideology,” 272–3, 295–9. 72 Globe, 22 March 1869. 73 Ibid. 74 Globe, 13 August 1869. For more on Sheehan, see Jenkins, “Poverty and Place,” 499. 75 See Denison, Recollections of a Police Magistrate, 179. 76 Peterman, “From Terry Finnegan to Terry Fenian,” 142. 77 Grip, 18 September 1880; see also Grip, 9 October 1880; Globe, 12 December 1866, where Dwan is referred to as “a well-known citizen”; and Denison, Recollections of a Police Magistrate, 179. 78 For a sense of what expectations and standards looked like, see Curtis, “After ‘Canada’”; McNairn, “In Hope and Fear”; and McKay, “Canada as a Long Liberal Revolution.” 79 Globe, 5 January 1882. 80 Globe, 27 August 1883. 81 For an example, see Jenkins, “Poverty and Place,” 484, taken from Globe, 1 April 1865. 82 Globe, 8 January 1875. 83 Globe, 7 January 1876. 84 See Gerber, The Making of an American Pluralism, 123–4. 85 Nuclear and childless families of Irish origin were less likely to be found within the southern waterfront districts than on the city’s West Side. The percentages were 47.9 for families living east and south of Main Street and 56.3 for those living west of this axis (significant at the 10 percent level). Likewise, the Irish in the latter part of the city had significantly fewer numbers of non-family members per household than those in the First Ward (0.30 versus 0.55; also significant at the 10 percent level).

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Notes to pages 84–91

  86 McCarthy, “Emerald Eagles,” 2.   87 See Cotter and Patrick, “Disease and Ethnicity.”   88 See Jenkins, “In the Shadow of a Grain Elevator,” 20.  89 Catholic Union and Times, 14 January 1915.   90 Bonner, “The Way of the Ward,” 24–6.  91 Valaik, Celebrating God’s Life in Us, 151. The church was closed in 1915.  92 Irish Canadian, 14 July 1881.  93 Smith, History of Buffalo, 2: 215.  94 Buffalo City Directory 1878, 16. See also Smith, History of Buffalo, 2: 219–22.  95 See State Assembly of New York Documents, evidence of P.G. Cook, 119–21.   96 See, for example, accounts of the lives of David S. Bennett and Thomas Clark in Smith, History of the City of Buffalo, 2: 13 (second section).  97 Smith, History of the City of Buffalo, 2: 218. This perspective on a “landscape of labour” owes something to Mitchell, The Lie of the Land.   98 See Evans, “Irish Immigration to Buffalo’s First Ward.”  99 Buffalo Express, 20 July 1870; Fenian Volunteer, 28 December 1867 and 1 January 1868. 100 See the review of local events for the year 1880 in Buffalo Express, 31 December 1880. 101 Buffalo Express, 31 December 1880. 102 Evans, “Irish Immigration to Buffalo’s First Ward.” 103 State Assembly of New York Documents, evidence of P.G. Cook, 120. 104 Foucault, “Questions on Geography,” 72. 105 State Assembly of New York Documents, evidence of William H. Abell (132) and George Emslie (176). Working gangs, or meitheal, were common features of life in rural Co. Clare, a prominent source of Buffalo ­residents, but it was a system that was widespread throughout Ireland’s western districts in the nineteenth century. See Arensberg and Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland. 106 See Bourdieu, Distinction and “The Forms of Capital.” See also an interview with ex-scooper Jim Smith in Isay, Holding On, 108–10. 107 Fenian Volunteer, 24 August 1867, gives Kane’s address as 35 Illinois Street, where the city directory confirms he ran a saloon. He is the only Patrick Kane to appear in the directory in the years between then and 1880, during which time he moved to 286–288 Ohio Street. 108 See Hoppen, Elections, Politics and Society, 39–55. 109 Dormer, “Economic Aspects of the Local Liquor Traffic,” 19. 110 Irish Canadian, 14 July 1881.

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Notes to pages 91–5

391

111 Dormer, “Economic Aspects of the Local Liquor Traffic,” 26. 112 Miller, “Anti-Catholicism in Canada,” 37. 113 Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, 112; Houston, “The Impetus to Reform,” 203. 114 Ibid., 113. 115 See Davidson, “Pity and Piety.” 116 House of Industry 1869 Report, 7. See also Splane, Social Welfare in Ontario, chapter 3, and Houston, “The Impetus to Reform,” 241–53. 117 Splane, Social Welfare in Ontario, 104. 118 House of Industry 1868 Report and 1875 Report. 119 Houston, “The Impetus to Reform,” 246. 120 McGowan, Death or Canada, 98. 121 House of Industry Minute Book and Case Recommendations 1871–1874. 122 This immigration also laid the foundations for the Sons of England mutualist organization, established in 1874. See Stubbs, “Visions of the Common Good,” 62–70; Chilton, “Managing Migrants,” 254–5; Houston, “The Impetus to Reform,” 253; and Jones, Outcast London, 102–5. 123 Quoted in Houston, “The Impetus to Reform,” 253 (originally Globe, 13 February 1873). 124 Houston and Laskin, “Responses to Poverty, to 1891.” For a comparison of the 1877 and 1878 immigration figures, see Globe, 14 September 1878. 125 Splane, Social Welfare on Ontario, 84–6. 126 Globe, 18 March 1870. 127 Ibid.; Davin, The Irishman in Canada, 262–3. 128 Toronto World, 8 February 1889, quoted in Miller, “Anti-Catholicism in Canada,” 34. 129 McGowan, Death or Canada, 86–7, 94, and Houston, “The Impetus to Reform,” 262. This angle at which Irish life was viewed had a longer lineage. By the 1830s, David Nally argues, “it was widely assumed in British policy circles that Irish poverty was indelibly tied to moral corruption, economic underdevelopment, and agrarian agitation,” a point of view that the growing phenomenon of “Irish poverty” in English cities seemed to buttress. See Nally, “‘That Coming Storm,’” 720, and Davis, “Little Irelands,” 111. 130 Michael Gauvreau, “Protestantism Transformed,” 92; see also Sturgis, “Learning about Oneself,” 105. 131 Globe, 18 March 1870. 132 Hempton and Hill, Evangelicalism in Ulster Society, 43. 133 Toronto Mail, 12 March 1888.

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392

Notes to pages 95–101

134 McAtasney and Kinealy, “The Great Hunger in Belfast,” 434–9. 135 Smyth, “Introduction: The Province of Ulster and the Great Famine,” 418. 136 McAree, Cabbagetown Store, 20–6. 137 Irish Protestant Benevolent Society 1871 Report. 138 Irish Protestant Benevolent Society 1872 Report. 139 Irish Protestant Benevolent Society Minute Book 1871. 140 Irish Protestant Benevolent Society 1872 Report. 141 Irish Protestant Benevolent Society 1874 Report; Toronto Mail, 9 April 1877. 142 Toronto Mail, 19 March 1883. 143 See Kennedy, “Retail Markets in Rural Ireland.” 144 McAree, Cabbagetown Store, 8–9. 145 Catholic Union and Times, 27 April 1876. 146 For a discussion of the situations facing working-class families and individuals, see Katz, Poverty and Policy in American History, 7–12. 147 Catholic Union and Times, 27 April 1876. 148 See McCarthy, “A Tribute to Buffalo’s First Ward Irish.” 149 The report was printed in the Buffalo Express, 4 January 1881. 150 Katz, Poverty and Policy, 1. See also the Ninth Annual Report in Publications of the Charity Organization Society, 2–3, which reviews the first nine years of the cos. 151 Proceedings of the first annual meeting, 9 January 1879, in Publications of the Charity Organization Society, 6. 152 Harring, Policing A Class Society, 64. 153 The report of the police superintendent is contained in Report of the Municipal Officer, 9. 154 Katz, Poverty and Policy, 81. 155 Ibid., 87. 156 Ibid., 254 (Table A.16). 157 Miller, “Class, Culture and Immigrant Group Identity in the United States,” 119. 158 Mark Choko and Richard Harris estimate Toronto’s overall rate of homeownership to have been 26.1% for 1880. See Choko and Harris, “The Local Culture of Property,” 79. Their proportion refers to the City of Toronto as a municipal unit. The “urban area” proportion, incorporating surrounding suburbs such as Yorkville and Parkdale, is 28.1%, still lower than the computed Irish figure. 159 These included Conservative politician Sir Frank Smith, brewer Eugene O’Keefe, dry-goods retailer Patrick Hughes, and lawyer and Conservative politician James Joseph Foy. See Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, 120–1.

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Notes to pages 101–4

393

160 See, for example, Irish Canadian, 3 November 1880. 161 Globe, 3 November 1880. 162 McAree, Cabbagetown Store, 6. 163 See Burley, “The Senator, The Merchant, Two Carpenters, and a Widow.” One study of three Toronto neighbourhoods for 1890, for example, found that 55% of landlords owned 15.5% of dwellings, while the top 7.5% owned over 41% of rented houses; the former group of “neighbourhood” landlords were mostly men of modest means occupied in the self-­ employed, skilled, and semi-skilled sectors. See Dennis, “Landlords and Rented Housing.” 164 In all, twelve properties were held by estates, one by executors, four by ecclesiastical institutions, five by financial institutions, and four others by private companies, leaving 258 or 90% to private individuals. 165 Library and Archives Canada has an online database containing the heads of households counted in Ontario in the 1871 census at http:// www.collectionscanada.ca/02/020108_e.html, accessed August 2006. 166 Olson, “Occupations and Residential Spaces” (90), has observed a similar tendency among those involved in the construction trades in nineteenthcentury Montreal, where she found “roofers, plasterers, masons, carpenters, and painters” to be prominent inhabitants of the city’s edge where they “were able to achieve high rates of homeownership and space for themselves.” 167 Globe, 2 May 1878. 168 See Jenkins, “Property and Place,” 489 (Table 1). By 1881, almost thirty percent of the street’s householders were owners, twenty-seven percent of households were headed by labourers, and just under half of all the 143 households were headed by Catholics. 169 I am grateful to Professor Richard Dennis, University College, London, for sharing with me the biographical details of Richard West. For details on West’s property holdings in 1890, see Table 7 in Dennis, “Landlords and Rented Housing.” 170 Mulvany and Adam, History of Toronto, 2: 174. 171 See Glasco, Ethnicity and Social Structure, and Mattis, “The Irish Family in Buffalo.” 172 For example, Fenian Volunteer, 1 January 1868. A list of the key personnel in the bank is given in the Buffalo City Directory 1866, 41. 173 For McManus, see Commercial Advertiser, 14 March 1908, and Catholic Union and Times, 26 March 1908. 174 Catholic Union and Times, 29 March and 5 and 26 April 1888. 175 Catholic Union and Times, 26 April 1888 and 6 February 1890.

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394

Notes to pages 104–10

176 Catholic Union and Times, 4 April 1889. 177 Conzen et al., “The Invention of Ethnicity,” 4–5. 178 Stortz, “Archbishop John Joseph Lynch of Toronto.” 179 Stortz, “‘Improvident Emigrants,’” 173–4, 179; see also McKeown, The Life and Labors, 253. 180 Catholic Union and Times, 27 October 1887.

C ha p t e r f o u r   1 Knox, Savage, and Harvey, “Social Networks and the Study of Relations,” 128.   2 See Philo and Parr, “Institutional Geographies.”   3 Delaney and MacRaild, “Irish Migration, Networks and Ethnic Identities since 1750,” 132. Besides Brubaker’s important collection Ethnicity Without Groups, my thinking about “groupness” here owes something to the ideas of sociologists Harrison White and Charles Tilly. See Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution, 62–3, where following White, he notes that in group taxonomies, there are categories of people that share a common characteristic (such as having an Irish birthplace) and then there are networks of people who are related to each other (directly or not) through interpersonal bonds or chains. While White summarizes this interaction between “category” and “network” with the awkward label “catnet,” Tilly uses it to measure the group strength of different types of organizations. In the present work, organizations such as the Irish Protestant Benevolent Society and the Hibernian Benevolent Society in Toronto illustrate how those sharing the social category “Irish” could be fundamentally split through the networks (structured by the purpose and activities of the society and its membership criteria) generated by these two entities.   4 Tilly, “Transplanted Networks,” 90.   5 An addition of the religious dimension to Habermas’s model is offered by Hall, Civilising Subjects, 290–337.   6 Airhart, “Ordering A New Dominion,” 99.   7 Hill, “Religion and Society,” 501.   8 Alison, Annals of Sixty Years, 6–7. The First Presbyterian Church was ­appropriately named in honour of John Knox.   9 Ibid., 12–13. A sketch of the church appears on page 12.   10 Hempton and Hill, Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society, 43. See also Holmes, Henry Cooke.  11 Elliott, Watchmen in Sion, 14–15.  12 Robertson’s Landmarks of Toronto, 4: 237.

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Notes to pages 110–13

395

13 Alison, Annals of Sixty Years, 31. 14 For one characteristic Patterson broadside against Catholicism, see Toronto Mail, 18 March 1889. 15 Globe, 18 December 1880. This episode is also mentioned in Robertson’s Landmarks of Toronto, 4: 233. 16 Alison, Annals of Sixty Years, 27; Robertson’s Landmarks of Toronto, 4: 236. 17 Hayes, “Repairing the Walls,” 45. This split, centred on the re-infusion of Medieval-era rituals in services through the Oxford movement as well as the rights of the laity at parish and synod level, was expressed with separate newspapers, hymn books, Sunday school curricula, and theological colleges for the two branches of Anglicanism. 18 Hayes, “Repairing the Walls,” 54. See also “Trinity Church: An Historic Church,” 7; for Blake’s obituary, see Globe, 24 June 1914. 19 See Hayes, Holding Forth the Word of Life, 5–8. Through the initiative of Bishop John Strachan, local distiller William Gooderham, and ex-Dubliner Alexander Dixon, subscriptions were raised to provide a thirteenth-century Gothic red-brick structure. 20 The Church, 23 February 1844. 21 Robertson’s Landmarks of Toronto, 4: 3. 22 Ibid., 2, 5. 23 Trinity Church Baptismal Register 1886–1904. 24 Hayes, Holding Forth the Word of Life, 16–21. 25 Ruggle, “The Saints in the Land,” 191. 26 Mulvany and Adam, History of Toronto, 1: 311. 27 See Church of the Ascension Parish Register. Of the sixteen parish sidesmen listed for 1890, at least two were Irish-born and another had Irish parents, while the Ontario-born Dr Edmund Baldwin was a member of the Irish Protestant Benevolent Society. See Church of the Ascension Easter Reports 1890. In addition to Dr Baldwin, the sidesmen were Thomas Langton, James B. Fitzsimons (both Irish-born), and Robert C. Bickerstaff, son of Co. Armagh–born Thomas. 28 Sentinel, 1 May 1913. 29 Hayes, “Repairing the Walls,” 87; Cooke, The Parish and Cathedral of St. James’, Toronto, 70. 30 For Dewart’s obituary see Toronto World, 18 June 1903; his temperance activity is noted in Toronto Mail, 21 March 1874. 31 Christian Guardian, 19 March 1879. 32 Champion, Methodist Churches of Toronto, 287. 33 Ibid., 353; Hempton and Hill, Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society, 32–4.

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396

Notes to pages 113–18

34 For Workman, see Johnston, The Father of Canadian Psychiatry. 35 Mail and Empire, 26 March 1897. The remark was made during the induction of Rev. W.J. McCaughan of Belfast at St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, an event also attended by the Methodists Revs. E.H. Dewart and John Potts. 36 Champion, The Methodist Churches of Toronto, 305. 37 Ibid., 157, 323. 38 Cooke’s Church, Young People’s Christian Association, Minute Books. 39 Alison, Annals of Sixty Years, 26. 40 Church of the Ascension Easter Reports 1890, 11. 41 McKay, “Canada as a Long Liberal Revolution,” 353. 42 Gjerde, Minds of the West, 70. 43 See especially Gamm, Urban Exodus, and McGreevy, Parish Boundaries. 44 McAree, Cabbagetown Store, 99. 45 See Larkin, “The Devotional Revolution in Ireland,” 638. 46 McGowan, Death or Canada, 92. 47 Edward Kelly, The Story of St. Paul’s Parish, 112, 122. 48 Toronto Mirror, 15 April 1853. 49 Mulvany and Adam, History of Toronto, 1: 325. The Anglican burial ground was St James’ on the west side of the Don River. There were two other non-denominational burial grounds, the Necropolis (next to the St James’ plot) and Mount Pleasant, which was located to the north of the St Michael’s burial ground. 50 See the biographies for each of these individuals spread throughout Edward Kelly, The Story of St. Paul’s Parish. 51 Toronto Mirror, 15 April 1853. 52 Edward Kelly, The Story of St. Paul’s Parish, 178. 53 Robertson’s Landmarks of Toronto, 4: 321. 54 See Donohue, History of the Catholic Church in Western New York, 243–9. 55 Ibid., 263. 56 Gangloff, A History of the Diocese of Buffalo, 6–7. 57 See Stortz, “Archbishop John Joseph Lynch of Toronto.” 58 For more on Cronin, see Buffalo Times, 30 November 1909. 59 See the histories of each parish in Donohue, History of the Catholic Church in Western New York; regrettably, the birthplaces of these priests are not given. 60 Walker, Catholic Education and Politics in Ontario, 2: 1. 61 Pratt, Religion, Politics and Diversity, 194. 62 Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, 40. De Charbonnel’s predecessor as bishop, Michael Power, was more open to achieving an educational system that accommodated all interests. See also Akenson, Being Had, 174–80.

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Notes to pages 118–23

397

63 Stamp, The Schools of Ontario, 26. 64 Walker, Catholic Education and Politics in Ontario, 2: 1–12. 65 Stamp, The Schools of Ontario, 11. On the adoption and contents of the Irish readers in Ontario, see Akenson, Being Had, 143–87. 66 McAree, Cabbagetown Store, 92 , emphasis added. 67 Ibid., 93. 68 Walker, Catholic Education and Politics in Ontario, 2: 23. 69 Globe, 19 February 1875. 70 Houston, “The Impetus to Reform,” 209. 71 See the excoriating letter of “Don Pedro McPatrick” in Globe, 24 August 1877, while Walker, Catholic Education and Politics in Ontario, 2: 40, refers to the favourable reaction of the Ontario minister for Education, Adam Crooks, in 1878. See also Toronto Mail, 10 May 1878. 72 Seller, Ethnic Communities and Education, 31. 73 Catholic Union and Times, 7 March 1878. 74 The schools are numbers 3, 4, 30, and 34. See Buffalo City Directory 1881, 76. 75 Annual Report of the Superintendent of Education, in Reports of the Municipal Officer of the City of Buffalo 1881, 16. The number of families from which the pupils came is not given. One cannot assume, of course, that they all came from two-parent families. 76 Ibid., 88. 77 See Downey, “Some of the Neglected Areas of the First Ward,” 6, 10. He mentions that “[a]ll the teachers were of Irish descent” in Public School No. 30 at South Street and Louisiana Street (Figure 3.8). 78 Catholic Union and Times, 2 February 1888. 79 See quote in Pratt, Religion, Politics and Diversity, 192. 80 Seller, Ethnic Communities and Education, 13. 81 Catholic Union and Times, 3 March 1881. 82 Ibid. 83 Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, 256–7. 84 Though the common language of Buffalo’s Germans mitigated religious ­divisions somewhat. 85 See Light, “The Role of Irish-American Organizations in Assimilation and Community Formation” (114), for a similar argument based on research in Philadelphia. 86 Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, 68, 77. 87 Catholic Union and Times, 22 March 1877. 88 Catholic Union and Times, 13 June 1889. 89 Catholic Union and Times, 3 October 1889 and 20 March 1890.

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Notes to pages 124–9

 90 Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, 72.   91 See Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, 97–126; Gerber, The Making of an American Pluralism, 152.  92 Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, 182.  93 Irish Canadian, 28 July 1869.  94 Irish Canadian, 20 July 1870.  95 Irish Canadian, 21 April, 16 June, and 7 July 1869.   96 Ryan and Wamsley, “‘A Grand Game of Hurling and Football’”; Clarke, “Lay Irish Nationalism in Victorian Toronto,” 47.  97 Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, 206.   98 Ibid., 150.  99 Shelton, Reformers in Search of Yesterday, 87. 100 See Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, 133–40, and “‘Heroic Virtue,’” 66. 101 See tables in Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, 104–5. 102 Clarke, “‘Heroic Virtue,’” 65. 103 Globe, 18 March 1870. 104 Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, 234. 105 Globe, 14 February 1882. The Dungannon Convention, held in 1782, preceded the Irish parliament being granted legislative independence before its later dissolution. 106 Catholic Union and Times, 16 March 1876. 107 Catholic Union and Times, 27 April 1876. For Cochrane’s obituary, see Buffalo Courier, 3 March 1908. He held the same pew in St Joseph’s Cathedral from 1855 until his death. 108 Catholic Union and Times, 27 April 1876. 109 For a Canada-specific discussion of such proclivities, see Heron, Booze, 80–6. 110 Buffalo Express, 2 June 1870. 111 Scahill, “The Mutual Rowing Club,” 11. 112 Dooley, Days Beyond Recall, 20. 113 See the review of local events for the year 1880 in Buffalo Express, 31 December 1880; Catholic Union and Times, 24 January 1889. 114 See reference to a ym ca meeting in Catholic Union and Times, 16 March 1876. 115 Buffalo Courier, 24 July 1877. 116 Buffalo Times, 30 November 1909. 117 Catholic Union and Times, 16 March 1876. 118 Catholic Union and Times, 22 March 1877. 119 Catholic Union and Times, 14 March 1878. 120 Catholic Union and Times, 28 March 1889.

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Notes to pages 127–33

399

121 Catholic Union and Times, 20 March 1873. 122 Catholic Union and Times, 16 and 23 March 1876. 123 Catholic Union and Times, 16 March 1876. 124 Buffalo Courier, 18 March 1876. 125 Catholic Union and Times, 5 April 1888. 126 William O’Brien, alongside John Dillon, had led the Plan of Campaign of the late 1880s against absentee and rack-renting Irish landlords. 127 Catholic Union and Times, 9 August 1888. 128 Catholic Union and Times, 5 March 1879. 129 Catholic Union and Times, 5 March 1878; Ehnes, Silver Jubilee Souvenir, 14–16. 130 Branch 24 cm ba, Silver Jubilee Souvenir, 149. 131 Catholic Union and Times, 27 March and 3 April 1890. 132 Catholic Union and Times, 29 March and 26 April 1888; Courtney, Down the Corridors of Time, 17. 133 Catholic Union and Times, 7 March 1878. 134 Catholic Union and Times, 18 February 1886. 135 Catholic Union and Times, 17 January 1889. 136 See Buffalo City Directory 1878, 15–16. 137 See c m ba Directory 1894. 138 The St George’s Society was founded in 1835, while the St Patrick’s and St Andrew’s Societies were founded in 1836. See Walton, The City of Toronto and the Home District Commercial Directory, 48. 139 Brown’s Toronto City Directory 1846–7, 34; Clarke, “Lay Nationalism in Victorian Toronto,” 42; Toronto Mirror, 5 February 1841 and 18 March 1842. See also Goheen, “Parading,” 350. 140 Senior, The Last Invasion of Canada, 171. A Manitoba raid took place in October 1870 but was more “a private venture of [John] O’Neill and [William] O’Donoghue, the purpose being to spark a rising of the Métis and request annexation to the United States” (175–7). 141 Chilton, “Managing Migrants,” 244–5. 142 i p b s Constitution and Member’s Guide Book. 143 Ibid. 144 On 18 March 1870, the Globe reported, for example, that “such [Irish Protestant] societies are in existence in every other Canadian city … [with] the Societies of Montreal and Ottawa in particular … the most powerful National Societies in those cities.” The Quebec City ipb s is mentioned in Grace, “A Demographic and Social Profile of Quebec City’s Irish Populations,” 73.

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400

Notes to pages 133–7

145 See Jenkins, “Deconstructing Diasporas,” 381 (Table 1). 146 Toronto Mail, 7 March 1874. Kerr’s obituary is published in the Mail and Empire, 27 November 1899, where it is stated that he “belonged to a highly respectable and influential family of Scottish origin which settled in the North of Ireland fully two hundred years ago.” 147 See Kennedy’s obituary in Toronto World, 27 June 1904; on McCord, see Houston, “The Impetus to Reform,” 243. 148 Globe, 21 July 1871. 149 The Toronto newspapers the Globe and the Toronto Mail were checked for all of these years. Sermons were occasionally reported on and their texts published, but this did not happen on a consistent basis. Their record of occurrence was otherwise gleaned from ipb s advertisements posted in the classified sections of these newspapers. 150 Globe, 13 December 1883. 151 Rosalyn Trigger clarifies “national” and “nationalist” societies in her comparison of Victorian Montreal and Toronto. See “Irish Politics on Parade,” 163–4. 152 Toronto Mail, 18 March 1886. 153 See McFarland, Protestants First, 1, and Houston and Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore, 22–3. 154 The Grand Lodge of British North America, as it was titled in 1830, was therefore not an off-shoot of the Irish Grand Lodge, which had been temporarily disbanded in 1825. 155 Kealey, Toronto Workers Respond to Industrial Capitalism, 98–123. 156 Sentinel, 28 February 1878. 157 This lodge total for 1886 was compiled from an “Orange Directory” listed frequently in issues of the Sentinel. 158 See McKim’s Directory of Canadian Publications, 117–25; Kealey, “The Orange Order in Toronto,” 25. 159 See Clarke, “Religion and Public Space in Protestant Toronto,” 76–82. 160 See David W. Miller, Queen’s Rebels, 62, 91, and Heaman, “Rights Talk and the Liberal Order Framework,” 155–8. 161 Akenson, God’s Peoples, 138. 162 Sentinel, 9 August 1883. 163 Report of Grand Lodge of Ontario West 1911, 19. 164 Stubbs, “Visions of the Common Good,” 133. This militaristic imagery was replicated in Orange organs elsewhere. For example, during the 1850s and 1860s, Squire Auty published the Orange and Protestant Banner from the northern English city of Bradford; see MacRaild,

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Notes to pages 137–41

401

“Networks, Communication and the Irish Protestant Diaspora,” 330. In 1914, the Orange Standard, organ of the Loyal Orange Institution of England, began publication from Birmingham, before being later transferred to Belfast. See the search results for “Orange Standard” as an exact phrase in the British Library’s integrated catalogue online at http:// catalogue.bl.uk (accessed 8 December 2005). 165 Sentinel, 25 March 1886. 166 Sentinel, 15 June 1898. 167 The Orangemen were front and centre in the Toronto riot of 1841 after the Tories’ provincial election loss, and they also celebrated Guy Fawkes’ Night around this time; see Way, “Street Politics.” In November 1843, the Order paraded through Toronto’s King Street carrying effigies of Irishborn Reformers William Warren Baldwin, R.B. Sullivan, and Francis Hincks. See Toronto Mirror, 10 November 1843, quoted in Goheen, “Parading,” 337–8. 168 Goheen, “Parading,” 345–6. 169 See Radforth, Royal Spectacle. 170 Globe, 13 July 1870. 171 Ibid. 172 Clarke, “Religion and Public Space in Protestant Toronto,” 79; see also Anstead, “Hegemony and Failure,” 179. 173 Houston and Smyth, Sash Canada Wore, 106. See also Careless, “The Emergence of Cabbagetown in Victorian Toronto” (39), where he notes that in Cabbagetown, “[the people’s] Orange hue was markedly bright, one they shared with the Protestant city about them.” 174 Robertson’s Landmarks of Toronto, 4: 162–3. 175 Ibid., 160–4. 176 Toronto Star, 19 June 1897; Toronto News, 21 June 1897. 177 Sentinel, 27 July 1899. 178 These profiles are taken from Sentinel, 28 February 1878. 179 For Broughall and Cayley, see the Toronto Public Library Biographical Scrapbooks. 180 Robertson’s Landmarks of Toronto, 4: 163–5; see also Galvin, “CatholicProtestant Relations in Ontario” and “The Jubilee Riots in Toronto, 1875.” Robb was also a Masonic chaplain. 181 Clarke, “Religious Riot as Pastime.” 182 Globe 13 July 1870 and 13 July 1875. 183 McAree, Cabbagetown Store, 94; Charlesworth, Candid Chronicles, 57. 184 See Strauch, “Walking For God and Raising Hell,” 27–44.

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Notes to pages 141–5

185 See Galvin, “Jubilee Riots,” and Irish Canadian, 21 March 1889. 186 Globe, 11 July 1876. The Walker Murray lodge commemorated the Rev. George Walker and Adam Murray who mobilized the Ulster city’s defence. See McBride, The Siege of Derry in Ulster Protestant Mythology, 17. 187 Sentinel, 6 December 1877. 188 Sentinel, 29 November 1877. In this tense climate, a Montreal equivalent, “Hackett No Surrender oyb No. 133” was also established, and notes of its annual meeting were published in Sentinel, 13 December 1877. 189 Globe, 13 July 1875. 190 Sentinel, December 1877. 191 Globe, 12 July 1878. 192 Communication with Professor Cecil Houston, August 2000; thanks to Professor Houston for sharing his notes of Orange lodge foundations in Buffalo. 193 Light, “The Role of Irish-American Organizations in Assimilation and Community Formation,” 134. 194 For McCaffrey, “Diaspora Comparisons and Irish-American Uniqueness” (24), women were “the most important civilizing element in Irish America.”

C ha p t e r f i ve   1 See Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 33–53.   2 See Dahl, Who Governs? 32–51.   3 McKivigan and Robertson, “The Irish American Worker in Transition,” 306–7; Byron, Irish America; Meagher, Inventing Irish America; Wingerd, Claiming the City.   4 Dahl, Who Governs? 36; Glazer and Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot, 221.   5 Foucault, “Powers and Strategies,” 149.   6 Keller, Affairs of State, 114.   7 Bridges, A City in the Republic, 149.   8 Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 121 (and see 119–71 more generally). See also Fanning, The Irish Voice in America; Shapley, Solid for Mulhooly; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 48–56; and Altschuler and Blumin, Rude Republic, 184–93.   9 Brennan, Erin Mor, 120.   10 On Jessop, see Fanning, The Irish Voice in America, 183–5, and Irish Canadian, 31 October and 14 November 1889.  11 See, for example, McIntyre, The Ragged Edge; Dineen, Ward Eight; and Dunne, The World of Mr. Dooley.

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Notes to pages 146–9

403

12 Mills, The Idea of Loyalty, 20–3. 13 Irish Canadian, 14 November 1889. 14 David A. Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 2: 234. 15 See MacDonagh, The Emancipist, 199–243. 16 For a classic account, see Hoppen, Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland. 17 Marston, “Neighborhood and Politics,” 415–16. 18 McKay, “Canada as a Long Liberal Revolution,” 348. For this elitist interpretation of Confederation, see Whitaker, “Democracy and the Canadian Constitution,” 240, and also Watts, “The American Constitution in Comparative Perspective.” The desire for Confederation was not, for instance, tested by a popular referendum. 19 McKay, “Canada as a Long Liberal Revolution,” 373; see also the other essays in Constant and Ducharme, Liberalism and Hegemony. 20 Harring and McMullin, “The Buffalo Police, 1872–1890,” 7. 21 See Buffalo newspapers such as the Courier or Express, 6–9 November 1870. 22 Buffalo Courier, 7 November 1870. The residency requirements stipulated that voters must have lived in the state for at least one year prior to the election, in Erie County for at least four months, and in the electoral district they registered in for thirty days prior to the vote. 23 Schudson, “Was There Ever a Public Sphere?” 159. In 1873, the Express reported on a German who wanted to know “how much it cost to vote,” and five years later, the paper stated “the most active workers for both sides” to be “on hand long before the hour of opening of the polls, ready to seize upon the early voters.” See Buffalo Express, 5 November 1873, 5 November 1878. 24 Buffalo Courier, 6 November 1871. The club was so-named for the campaign of William G. Fargo for a seat in the New York State Senate. 25 Buffalo Courier, 26 October 1875. 26 This description, from the Buffalo Republic of 1857, is quoted in Gerber, The Making of an American Pluralism, 339. 27 Buffalo Courier, 1 November 1872. These campaign clubs were named for presidential candidate Horace Greeley and his vice-presidential running mate Benjamin Gratz Brown. 28 Buffalo Express, 5 November 1873 and 5 November 1878. 29 The clubs were named after presidential candidate Samuel J. Tilden and running mate Thomas Andrews Hendricks, and the brooms signified the sweeping of the Republicans from office. 30 Buffalo Express, 1 November 1876. 31 Oestreicher, “Urban Working-Class Political Behavior,” 1273.

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Notes to pages 149–53

32 Gerber, The Making of an American Pluralism, 346. He analyzes ticket heads for three presidential, four state, and ten local contests. 33 Tallies of the results of the 1860 and 1864 presidential elections, as well as the 1862 gubernatorial contest, the 1865 secretary of state contest, and four contests for the Buffalo mayoralty, are contained in the Buffalo City Directory 1866, 56–7. 34 Buffalo Courier, 1 and 4 November 1876. 35 Buffalo Express, 5 November 1870. 36 Catholic Union and Times, 4 April 1889. 37 See reports of such rallies in Buffalo Express, 25 October and 1 November 1872; Buffalo Courier, 27 October 1880; and Buffalo Express, 27 October 1880. 38 Hoppen, Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland, 82. 39 Buffalo Express, 4 November 1878. Hanavan lost his bid for an aldermanic seat on this occasion. See Donohue, History of the Catholic Church in Western New York, 390, for a less critical profile of Hanavan. It is not clear if the St Bridget’s Beneficial Society was the same as the St Bridget’s Total Abstinence Benevolent Society mentioned in chapter 4. 40 Buffalo Courier, 4 and 8 November 1876. 41 Catholic Union and Times, 7 March 1889. See also Buffalo Courier, 5 November 1877, where the Fenian episode is conveniently left out of ­reports on Donohoe’s First Ward aldermanic campaign. 42 See Catholic Union and Times, 9, 16, 23, and 30 April 1879. 43 “Midlevel activism” is the term deployed by Altschuler and Blumin, Rude Republic, 242. 44 This discussion of Chambers draws from his obituaries in Buffalo Express, 21 November 1925; Buffalo News, 20 November 1925; and Buffalo Courier, 22 November 1925. 45 Buffalo Express, 21 November 1925. 46 New York Times, 13 September 1887. 47 New York Times, 1 March 1892. 48 Goldman, High Hopes, 167. 49 Buffalo Times, 27 June 1933. 50 Buffalo Express, 31 October 1891. 51 Catholic Union and Times, 14 June 1888. 52 Catholic Union and Times, 27 October 1892; New York Times, 12 February 1892. 53 In 1881, he addressed the Irish Ladies’ Land League and appeared at the Robert Emmet commemoration five years later. See Catholic Union and Times, 31 March 1881 and 18 February 1886. It is tempting to draw some

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Notes to pages 154–7

405

ancestral links to R.P. Blennerhassett of Co. Kerry, a victorious Home Rule candidate in the 1874 Irish election; see Hurst, “Ireland and the Ballot Act of 1872.” 54 Buffalo Times, 20 April 1929. 55 Buffalo Times, 15 April 1928. 56 Buffalo Express, 8 November 1877; Buffalo Times, 18 April 1932. 57 Mahoney’s factional loyalties may help explain his admitting to a reporter late in life that he had voted for individual Republicans at one time or another. See Buffalo Times, 18 April 1932. 58 The saloon in question was located at 301 Louisiana Street. The Buffalo Courier, 25 October 1877 notes it as Dennis O’Brian’s house and the location of a ward caucus, while the city directory notes it as his saloon and place of residence. By 1880, the city directory reveals that the same saloon was kept by 1877 caucus delegate John Rochford and was the location of the fifth electoral division’s meeting (Buffalo Courier, 27 October 1877). 59 Dormer, “Aspects of the Local Liquor Traffic,” 28. 60 Buffalo Express, 2 November 1891. 61 Hoppen, Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland, 47. 62 Ibid., 60, 74. 63 O’Shea, Priests, Politics and Society, 50. 64 As a 1919 report on ward politics by political scientist William Munro put it, “a precinct committee which does its work well will keep careful record of everyone who comes into its neighborhood, and will proffer its help freely to those who seek to qualify as voters.” See Munro, The Government of American Cities, 167. 65 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 227. 66 McGowan’s story is documented in Powell, Rushing the Growler, 19–20. 67 Catholic Union and Times, 16 August 1888. 68 Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, 18 May 1889. 69 Oestreicher, “Urban Working-Class Political Behavior,” 1273. 70 Larned, A History of Buffalo, 1: 194. 71 Catholic Union and Times, 6 November 1890. 72 Buffalo Courier, 6 November 1893. The parties involved were the Democrats, Republicans, Prohibition, People’s, and Socialist Labor. 73 Buffalo Express, 3 November 1893. 74 The first Erie County state assembly district covered wards 1, 2, 4, 19, 20, and 22. 75 Powell, Rushing the Growler, 22; Shelton, “The Grain Shovellers’ Strike”; and Irwin, “The Rise of ‘Fingy’ Conners.” Although sensationalist, Irwin’s profile is less overblown when assessed in the light of other sources.

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Notes to pages 157–62

 76 Buffalo Courier, 2 November 1893.  77 Buffalo Courier, 8 November 1893.  78 Ibid.  79 Buffalo Express, 8 November 1893. The idea of “several hundred” men arriving there at the behest of Conners seems exaggerated, but their presence undoubtedly inspired not only White supporters and other curious onlookers but also spontaneous participants eager to make a dollar or two.  80 Ibid.  81 Ibid.   82 The approximate number of registered First Ward voters is given in Buffalo Courier, 12 November 1893.  83 Oestreicher, “Urban Working-Class Behavior,” 1262.   84 Quoted in Hoppen, Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland, 69. The (Secret) Ballot Act of 1872 did not, for Michael Hurst, change this picture very much. See his “Ireland and the Ballot Act of 1872.”  85 Buffalo Express, 8 November 1893.  86 Buffalo Courier, 8 November 1893.  87 Ibid.  88 Ibid.  89 Buffalo Courier, 31 December 1933.  90 See Buffalo Express, 9 November 1893, and Buffalo Courier, 12 November 1893.   91 Kloppenberg, “From Hartz to Tocqueville,” 351.   92 Schudson, “Was There Ever a Public Sphere?” 158.  93 Hubbell, Our Police and Our City, 786.   94 Ibid., 788.  95 Buffalo News, 18 March 1929.  96 Globe, 16 November 1867 and 29 February 1868.  97 Globe, 24 May 1867.   98 For a full outline, see Globe, 6 January 1875; Toronto Mail, 18 January 1886. See also Magnusson, “Toronto,” and Tindal and Tindal, Local Government in Canada, 133, where they note that “local governments were mainly concerned with providing services to property.”  99 Globe, 21 January 1875. 100 Globe, 29 April 1862. “Childer” is a brogue term for “children.” 101 Globe, 14 December 1870. 102 Globe, 7 December 1872. 103 Globe, 24 December 1872. 104 Globe, 22 January 1875. 105 Globe, 11 December 1878.

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Notes to pages 163–6

407

106 Globe, 28 December 1880 and 4 January 1881. 107 See Globe, 6 August 1872 and 6 January 1875. 108 Globe, 6 January 1874. 109 Globe, 6 January 1875. 110 Globe, 15 January 1875. 111 Globe, 4 January 1876. 112 Illegal election practices such as personation persisted, however. Journalist Hector Charlesworth recounted how in 1896 the chief proofreader of the Toronto World, a “joyous and resourceful Irishman” named Andy Kirkpatrick, “was always out on election day in the Conservative interest with a hack-load of ‘pluggers’, traveling from poll to poll to register the votes of absentees or anyone else who could safely be personated.” See Charlesworth, More Candid Chronicles, 126. 113 Kealey, Toronto Workers Respond to Industrial Capitalism, 331–2. 114 Globe, 30 December 1871. 115 Globe, 15 January 1875. 116 Mulvany and Adam, History of Toronto, 2: 8. 117 See Russell, Mayors of Toronto. 118 Armstrong and Nelles, The Revenge of the Methodist Bicycle Company, 6. 119 Stubbs, “Visions of the Common Good,” 111. 120 Globe, 24 December 1883. 121 Robertson’s Landmarks of Toronto, 4: 165. 122 Irish Canadian, 31 October 1889. See also Irish Canadian, 18 December 1890 and 8 January and 12 February 1891. 123 Toronto World, 8 December 1890; Kealey, Toronto Workers Respond to Industrial Capitalism, 109. 124 An early example of this was William Allan’s “Coleraine Tavern” on King Street which housed two Orange lodges and functioned as a Tory open house during the 1841 election. Another Orange venue of that era was John Lindsay’s “North of Ireland Tavern,” and by the early 1850s, William Mack’s “Enniskillen Home Tavern” was another known Orange meeting-place. See Way, “Street Politics,” 276, and Kealey, “Orangemen and the Corporation,” 49, 65. 125 Mulvany and Adam, History of Toronto, 2: 405; Robertson’s Landmarks of Toronto, 6: 165. 126 Toronto Evening Telegram, 13 March 1914. 127 Mulvany and Adam, History of Toronto, 2: 405. 128 Ibid., 379. Nearby Allen’s premises was sometime-alderman Thomas Davies’ Don Brewery. Davies, an Anglican convert to Presbyterianism, was another known Conservative whose enterprise employed between

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Notes to pages 166–71

50 and 75 men. On Davies’ career, see Adam, Prominent Men of Canada, 369. At various times, Davies nominated near-neighbour Francis Medcalf for mayor while being himself nominated for aldermanic office by John Wiggins. See Globe, 29 December 1874 and 23 December 1876. 129 Robertson’s Landmarks of Toronto, 6: 165, 182. 130 Toronto Evening Telegram, 11 August 1914. 131 McAree, Cabbagetown Store, 100. For details of the Orange Young Britons in Toronto in the mid-1870s, see Toronto City Directory 1874, 387–8. 132 Rose, A Cyclopedia of Canadian Biography, 127; Robertson’s Landmarks of Toronto, 6: 162. 133 Globe, 23 December 1876. 134 Globe, 28 December 1880; Rose, A Cyclopedia of Canadian Biography, 127. 135 Rose, A Cyclopedia of Canadian Biography, 127; Globe, 13 December 1878. 136 Globe, 3 January 1871; see also Mulvany and Adam, History of Toronto, 2: 83. 137 Globe, 15 December 1871. 138 For more on Mulvey, see Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, 170, 196, 228. 139 Denison, Recollections of a Police Magistrate, 179. 140 See Grip, 2 October 1880, and Denison, Recollections of a Police Magistrate, 182. 141 Jenkins, “Poverty and Place,” 494. 142 Mirror, 2 April 1858. 143 Globe, 24 May 1867. 144 Irish Canadian, 17 October 1889. 145 The idea of “scale-jumping” is taken from Smith, “Geography, Difference and the Politics of Scale.” See also Lightbody, “The Rise of Party Politics in Canadian Local Elections.” 146 For a brief but lucid account, see Stewart, The Origins of Canadian Politics, 57–77. 147 Globe, 5 July 1866. 148 Quoted in Clarke, “Lay Nationalism in Victorian Toronto,” 48. 149 Irish Canadian, 29 December 1881. 150 Irish Canadian, 17 October 1889. 151 Cottrell, “John O’Donohoe and the Politics of Ethnicity,” 73–5, and “Political Leadership and Party Allegiance,” 59. 152 Cottrell, “Irish Catholic Political Leadership in Toronto,” 225–454. 153 Ibid., 385.

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Notes to pages 171–5

409

154 See Stortz, “The Irish Catholic Press in Toronto,” 41–56, and Cottrell, “Political Leadership and Party Allegiance,” 60–1. 155 Irish Canadian, 11 June 1879. 156 Cottrell, “Irish Catholic Political Leadership in Toronto,” 477. 157 Cottrell, “John O’Donohoe and the Politics of Ethnicity,” 67–72. 158 Globe, 10 July 1872. 159 Toronto Leader, 7 and 12 August 1872. 160 Toronto Leader, 10 and 12 August 1872. 161 Toronto Leader, 15 and 16 August 1872. 162 Globe, 13 January 1874. 163 Toronto Leader, 21 January 1874. 164 Toronto Leader, 10 January 1875. 165 For campaign coverage, see Globe, 1, 4, 7, and 15 December 1874 and 8, 11, and 19 January 1875, and Toronto Leader, 18 January 1875. 166 On this point, see McKeown, The Life and Labors, 268–81. 167 Lists of personnel supporting the Platt and O’Donohoe nominations are given in Toronto Leader, 12 January 1875. 168 Toronto Leader, 9 January 1875. 169 Cottrell, “Political Leadership and Party Allegiance,” 61. 170 Globe, 28 August 1878. 171 Ibid. 172 Ibid. 173 Cottrell, “Irish Catholic Political Leadership,” 477–8; Globe, 8 December 1902. 174 Cottrell, “John O’Donohoe and the Politics of Ethnicity,” 84. 175 As Cottrell, “Irish Catholic Political Leadership”, 470–3, shows, of the eight Catholic seat-winners in the 1879 Ontario provincial election, four were of Irish background. In the 1882 federal election, the proportion was three of six. 176 See, for example, Meagher, Inventing Irish America. 177 Globe, 27 October 1925. See also Saturday Night, 7 November 1925. 178 Globe, 28 December 1880. 179 See Globe, 10 and 12 January 1882. Their disagreement was also played out in the pages of the Irish Canadian. 180 Grip, 13 May 1882. 181 Walker, Catholic Education and Politics in Ontario, 2: 12–13. This arena was characterized by stability rather than competition: in the 1889 election, contests were scheduled in only five of the twelve wards, with the remainder of trustees elected by acclamation. Only two wards ultimately held contests (Irish Canadian, 10 January 1889).

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Notes to pages 175–83

182 See Stortz, “The Irish Catholic Press in Toronto,” 46–50. 183 Globe, 16 December 1878. 184 For details of these controversies, see Walker, Catholic Education and Politics in Ontario, 2: 100–13, and Stamp, The Schools of Ontario, 27–9. 185 On the ballot issue, see Stortz, “Archbishop John Joseph Lynch of Toronto.” 186 See Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital.” 187 Harring, Policing A Class Society, 66. 188 See Shelton, Reformers in Search of Yesterday, 53. 189 Ibid., 64. 190 Ibid., 57. 191 Blake is quoted in Stewart, The Origins of Canadian Politics, 71. 192 Rutherford, “Tomorrow’s Metropolis,” 213; see also Tindal and Tindal, Local Government in Canada, 104. 193 Weaver, “The Meaning of Municipal Reform,” 90–1. Bell was Toronto County Master in 1890; see Landmarks of Toronto, 6: 169. 194 Weaver, “The Modern City Realized,” 50. 195 Globe, 3 January 1892. 196 Shelton, Reformers in Search of Yesterday, 59. 197 Catholic Union and Times, 17 May 1888 and 20 December 1888. 198 Bridges, A City in the Republic, 147.

chapter six   1 A classic study is Brown, Irish American Nationalism. See also Mulligan, “A Forgotten ‘Greater Ireland’”; Mark Boyle, “Towards a (Re)theorization”; and Akenson, “Stepping Back and Looking Forward.”   2 See Jacobson, Special Sorrows. By the 1890s, the Irish World had a circulation of c. 125,000 compared to the Pilot’s c. 75,000 but both were undoubtedly consumed by much larger constituencies of people; Whelehan, “Skirmishing, The Irish World, and Empire” (181), reports the World to have had a circulation of about 36,000 c. 1876. On the origins of the Irish-American press, see McMahon, “Ireland and the Birth of the IrishAmerican Press.”   3 Boyle, “Towards a (Re)theorization,” 442.   4 Jacobson, Special Sorrows, 5.   5 My thinking on diaspora here has benefited from Sökefeld, “Mobilizing in Transnational Space.”   6 On this point especially, see O’Day, “Imagined Irish Communities.”   7 Senior, The Last Invasion of Canada, 65.  8 Buffalo Courier, 2 and 6 June 1866.

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Notes to pages 183–5

411

9 Buffalo Courier, 9 and 11 June 1866. 10 Buffalo Courier, 18 March 1867. It should be remembered that Morrison was a Fenian “Senator.” References to Fenian ranks and titles are retained in this chapter, e.g. “Colonel” John Hoy and “Captain” Patrick Kane. 11 Sheppard, “‘God Save the Green,’” 143. 12 See Neidhardt, “Michael Murphy,” and Stacey, “A Fenian Interlude.” 13 Lyne and Toner, “Fenianism in Canada,” 32. 14 Ibid., 31–2; see also Funchion, “Clan Na Gael.” 15 Buffalo Courier, 13 March 1869. The presence of the 7th Buffalo regiment at Ridgeway is noted in Senior, The Last Invasion of Canada, 69. 16 Buffalo Courier, 13 and 18 March 1869. In the latter issue, returns were described as “satisfactory.” 17 Buffalo Express, 3 September 1869. 18 Vronsky, Ridgeway, 37. 19 Anonymous, The Fenian Raid at Fort Erie, 29. O’Donohoe was moreover described as “well known in Toronto.” 20 Buffalo Courier, 4 June 1866. 21 O’Dea, or O’Day, published the Fenian Volunteer from 136 Main St while living at 24 Erie St; see Thomas’ Buffalo City Directory 1868, 366. In 1869, he published the United Irishman from 178 Main Street while living at 321 Main St; see Buffalo City Directory 1869, 407. In 1870, his saloonkeeping enterprise was at 366 Main St; see Buffalo City Directory 1870, 457. 22 See Peterman, “Lost from View.” 23 Peterman, “From Terry Finnegan to Terry Fenian,” 146. 24 Irish Canadian, 21 April 1869. The Fenian Volunteer described itself as “A Patriotic Publication. At war with England to the knife, and opposed to her existence as a Power not only in Ireland but on any portions of this continent.” Some extant issues are available in the National Library of Ireland, Dublin. 25 Irish Canadian, 20 July 1870. 26 Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, 24 and 25 May and 3 June 1870; Buffalo Express, 3 June 1870. 27 Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, 25 May 1870. 28 Ibid. 29 Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, 2 June 1870; Toner, “The Fanatic Heart of the North,” 39. 30 See Lorenzkowski, Sounds of Ethnicity, 128–50, and Yox, “Bonds of Community,” 160–1. 31 Buffalo Express, 20 July 1870; Fenian Volunteer, 1 February 1868.

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Notes to pages 186–90

32 Toronto Leader, 15 August 1872. 33 See Toner, “The Fanatic Heart of the North,” 41. 34 Funchion, “Clan Na Gael,” 74. See also Brown, Irish American Nationalism, 66, where the figure is put closer to 10,000. 35 See Irish World, 19 February, 1 and 29 July, 19 August, and 14 October 1876. 36 See Whelehan, “Skirmishing, The Irish World, and Empire,” 186, and Mulligan, “A Forgotten ‘Greater Ireland.’” 37 Irish World, 8 April 1876. 38 Foner, “Class, Ethnicity, and Radicalism,” 23 (Table 1). Ford’s support base appears to have been located mostly in mining regions and Western cities. 39 Irish World, 22 April 1876. 40 Irish World, 29 April 1876. 41 Whelehan, “Skirmishing, The Irish World, and Empire,” 195 (footnote 50). 42 Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, 8 May 1878. 43 Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, 7 May 1878. 44 Moody, Davitt and Irish Revolution, 248. 45 Brown, Irish American Nationalism, 130, notes Mooney’s membership in Clan na Gael. 46 Mooney’s membership in the ym ca is noted in Catholic Union and Times, 16 March 1876, while the Buffalo Courier, 24 October 1879, identifies him as chairman of the Erie County Democratic Committee. 47 Brown, “‘Stars and Shamrocks Will Be Sown,’” 57. 48 Sheppard, “‘God Save the Green,’” 143. 49 Ibid., 143 (footnote 74); David A. Wilson, “The D’Arcy McGee Affair,” 101–2. 50 Globe, 18 March 1870. 51 See David A. Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 2: 16–40. J.L. Sturgis labels this a “Canadian territorial nationalism”; see his “Learning about Oneself,” 97. 52 David A. Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 2: 32. 53 Sturgis, “Learning about Oneself,” 99; David A. Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 2: 390–2. 54 Irish Canadian, 26 May 1869. 55 Quoted in David A. Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 2: 216; for McGee’s American writings, see 1: 274–5, 325–6. 56 Jackson, Home Rule, 32–3; Toner, “The Home Rule League in Canada,” 9. See also Kendle, Ireland and the Federal Solution. 57 MacDonagh, States of Mind, 18.

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Notes to pages 191–5

413

58 Catholic Union and Times, 20 March 1873. 59 Catholic Union and Times, 23 March 1876. 60 Buffalo Courier, 26 October 1875. See also Conzen et al., “The Invention of Ethnicity,” and Fanning, “Robert Emmet.” 61 See Elliott, Robert Emmet. 62 Ibid., 102. 63 Whelan, “Robert Emmet,” 51. There were also popular publications such as the Sullivan brothers’ Speeches from the Dock whose biographies of Irish political martyrs concluded with the prediction “that so much persistent resolution and heroism must one day eventuate in success.” See T.D., A.M., and D.B. Sullivan, Speeches from the Dock, 12–13; Emmet is covered on 40–56 with a glowing commentary on 534–5. 64 Irish World, 11 November 1876. 65 Irish World, 28 October 1876. 66 Catholic Union and Times, 7 March 1878. 67 Catholic Union and Times, 19 July 1877. No reports of mock trials or commemorative dinners for Emmet appear in the city’s newspapers for the first half of the decade. 68 Irish World, 22 March 1879. The issue does not report any celebrations in Toronto. 69 An important point made in Emmons, The Butte Irish, 308. 70 Conzen et al., “The Invention of Ethnicity,” 20–1. 71 Gjerde, Minds of the West, 229 (see also 51–76). 72 See O’Connell, Daniel O’Connell, 121–31. As Maurice O’Connell notes (122), “O’Connell’s interests embraced the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Poles under Tsarist rule, emancipation for British Jews, separation of church and state for France and Spain and even the Papal States, the peasants in India, and Negro slavery”; see also Brown, Irish American Nationalism, 7. 73 Elliott, Robert Emmet, 141. 74 Irish World, 12 August 1876. 75 Irish World, 8 February 1879. 76 New York Times, 7 August 1875. 77 Globe, 18 March 1870. 78 Toronto Mail, 18 March 1875. 79 Toronto Mail, 18 March 1881. 80 Globe, 7 August 1875. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid.

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Notes to pages 195–200

  84 Toner, “The Home Rule League in Canada,” 10.   85 Luby advocated revolution in Ireland and Ireland alone. See Lyne and Toner, “Fenianism in Canada,” 40.  86 Ibid., 38, 44. Two cells were possibly involved. Bourke was also a onetime resident of the city.  87 Irish Canadian, 20 February 1878.  88 Irish Canadian, 6 March 1878; Lyne and Toner, “Fenianism in Canada,” 43.  89 Irish Canadian, 20 February 1878.  90 Rosalyn Trigger, “Irish Politics on Parade,” 194–5.  91 Globe, 19 March 1878; New York Times, 19 and 20 March 1878.  92 Irish Canadian, 20 March 1878.  93 Trigger, “Irish Politics on Parade,” 195–6.   94 Townend, “Between Two Worlds,” 172.  95 Irish Canadian, 19 February and 30 July 1879.  96 Irish Canadian, 26 March and 8 October 1879.   97 Whelehan, “Skirmishing, the Irish World, and Empire.”  98 Irish Canadian, 12 March 1879.  99 Lyne and Toner, “Fenianism in Canada,” 67. Their conclusions are based on remittance amounts forwarded to Fenian causes. See also Toner, “The Fanatic Heart of the North,” 49. 100 Globe, 8 August 1881. 101 Ibid. Britton likely referred to Fenian Patrick Crowe. See O’Donovan Rossa’s quote in Whelehan, “Skirmishing, The Irish World, and Empire,” 185. 102 Globe, 23 April 1881. Britton later opined that the parades should cease and the money be “devoted to the benevolent work of the society” (Globe, 8 August 1881). 103 McGee described Confederation as “the first Constitution ever given to a mixed people,” quoted in David A. Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 2: 14. 104 Toronto Mail, 7 August 1886; see also Globe, 7 August 1886. 105 Globe, 18 March 1870. 106 Toronto Mail, 25 March 1875. 107 Toronto Mail, 20 March 1876. 108 Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, 108. Approximately £60,000 was raised for famine relief with a further £12,000 raised for the purposes of the Land League. 109 Othick, “The Economic History of Ulster,” 236. 110 Catholic Union and Times, 15 January 1880.

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Notes to pages 200–3

415

111 Ibid. 112 Buffalo Courier, 26 January 1880. 113 Catholic Union and Times, 15 January 1880. 114 Catholic Union and Times, 29 January 1880. Clinton, the son of New York Governor DeWitt Clinton, had been mayor of Buffalo in 1842. He died in 1885. 115 O’Day, “Irish Nationalism and Anglo-American Relations,” 181–2. 116 Catholic Union and Times, 29 January 1880. 117 Ibid. 118 O’Brien, Parnell and His Party, 1. 119 Catholic Union and Times, 29 January 1880; The Nation, 31 January 1880, reported a collection of $6,000. 120 O’Brien, Parnell and His Party, 7; Nation, 31 January 1880. 121 Globe, 6 January 1880. 122 Globe, 21 January 1880. 123 Irish Canadian, 3 March 1880. 124 Ibid. 125 The Nation, 24 January, 21 February, and 4 March 1880. 126 Toronto Mail, 10 March 1880. 127 Compare the 8 March and 9 March editions of the Toronto Mail regarding the Toronto and Montreal visits respectively; see also The Nation, 13 March 1880, and Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, 114. 128 Stortz, “Irish Catholic Press,” 46. 129 Toronto Mail, 8 March 1880. 130 Ibid. 131 Parnell’s speech is published in full in Irish Canadian, 10 March 1880. If militant utterances were to be Parnell’s stock-in-trade for Irish-American audiences, Irish-Canadians were a somewhat different matter; see Lyons, “The Political Ideas of Parnell,” 757. 132 Irish Canadian, 10 March 1880. 133 Toronto Mail, 10 March 1880; Globe, 8 March 1880. Of course, many of these so-called Canadians likely had one or two Irish-born parents. 134 See Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, 101–5. 135 Sentinel, 11 March 1880. 136 Ibid. 137 Globe, 8 March 1880. 138 Irish Canadian, 24 February 1881. 139 Catholic Union and Times, 5 February 1880. Davitt had formulated guidelines for branch formation; see Moody, Davitt and Irish Revolution, 388.

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Notes to pages 204–8

140 For published lists, see Catholic Union and Times, 5, 12, 19, and 16 February and 4 and 11 March 1880. The total is an estimate since miscalculations are present in the totals of the published returns. There were also some group-contributors such as the Franciscans, the Buffalo Seamen’s Union, and the Riverside Social Club. 141 Buffalo Express, 4 October 1880; Catholic Union and Times, 23 December 1880. 142 Catholic Union and Times, 30 December 1880; see also Buffalo Express, 27 December 1880. 143 See Janis, “Petticoat Revolutionaries,” 10–11. 144 Buffalo Express, 17 December 1880. 145 Catholic Union and Times, 20 January 1881. 146 Catholic Union and Times, 30 December 1880 and 3 February 1881. 147 Catholic Union and Times, 20 January 1881; Globe, 14 January 1881. 148 Catholic Union and Times, 24 February 1881. 149 Ibid. 150 Ibid. 151 Globe, 14 April 1882. 152 Clark Jr, The Social Origins of the Irish Land War, 255. 153 Walsh, “‘A Fanatic Heart,’” contrastes the eager contributions of Munster immigrants to Pittsburgh’s Land League to the relative indifference displayed by those from Connaught who were then employed in the lowestpaying jobs in the city. 154 Catholic Union and Times, 8 March 1883. 155 O’Day, Irish Home Rule, 80. 156 Catholic Union and Times, 11 March 1886. Putnam, a self-described “Anglo-Saxon American,” was a Republican Presbyterian and Mahany a Republican Episcopalian. 157 Catholic Union and Times, 18 March 1886. 158 Catholic Union and Times, 25 March 1886. 159 Cronin, Memorial of the Life and Labors, 4. 160 Catholic Union and Times, 16 April 1896. The same year was published Rev. Cronin’s biography of Bishop Ryan, Memorial of the Life and Labors. 161 Catholic Union and Times, 24 February 1881. 162 See Jackson, Home Rule, 67–72. As he noted, “the parliament of the United Kingdom remained the supreme legislative authority for Ireland” (68). 163 Catholic Union and Times, 29 December 1887. 164 Catholic Union and Times, 26 January 1888.

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Notes to pages 208–13

417

165 Catholic Union and Times, 5 April 1888. 166 On this aspect of The Nation’s layout, see Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, 149–50. 167 Catholic Union and Times, 7 June 1888. 168 Ibid. 169 Catholic Union and Times, 20 September and 1 November 1888 and 17 January and 21 February 1889. 170 Burr, Spreading the Light, 34; see also Kealey and Palmer, Dreaming of What Might Be, 327. 171 Globe, 12 February 1881. 172 Globe, 2 March 1881. 173 Irish Canadian, 10 March 1881. 174 As indicated by the appearance of John Devoy as treasurer; see Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, 114–15. 175 Eighteen speeches were delivered on the Irish Question in the House of Commons in 1882, twenty-seven in 1886, and forty in 1887. On each occasion, resolutions calling for Home Rule in Ireland were approved by both major parties, but not without some opposition. See Grob-Fitzgibbon, “The Curious Case of the Vanishing Debate over Irish Home Rule.” Lyne and Toner, “Fenianism in Canada” (53), suggest that the 1882 resolution, moved by Nova Scotia Conservative John Costigan, may have been a ploy “to forestall a more radical motion from the [Liberal] opposition.” 176 Kealey, Toronto Workers Respond to Industrial Capitalism, 276; Kealey and Palmer, Dreaming of What Might Be, 314. 177 Globe, 29 September 1885. 178 Toronto Mail, 17 March 1886. 179 Ibid., emphasis added. 180 Irish Canadian, 21 March 1889. 181 Trigger, “Clerical Containment of Irish Diasporic Nationalism,” 90. 182 Buckner, “Making British North America British,” 33. 183 Toronto Mail, 18 March 1885, 18 March 1886. 184 Toronto Mail, 18 March 1887. 185 See Jenson, “Place-Sensitive Citizenship,” 223. 186 Toronto Mail, 16 March 1885. 187 Toronto Mail, 18 March 1885. 188 Toronto Mail, 18 March 1886. Potts had presented a similar image of the island eight years earlier. See Toronto Mail, 18 March 1878, where he predicted that “Ireland would become a province of Rome, and her people subjected to Leo XIII” should a Home Rule bill be passed. 189 Toronto Mail, 18 March 1886.

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Notes to pages 213–15

190 The popularization of Gaelic Irish folk culture as timeless with a primeval “pastness” is discussed in Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, 157–223. 191 Sentinel, 9 September 1892. 192 See MacDonagh, States of Mind, 18–23, and Gibbon, The Origins of Ulster Unionism, 130–8. 193 Toronto Mail, 18 March 1886. A former Regius Professor of History at Oxford, Smith married the widow of prominent Orangeman and ex-­ mayor William Henry Boulton. He had been to Ireland twice by that point, and his views on Catholicism were highly unflattering. In 1886, he wrote to an American friend: “You fought for your Union against Slavery; we are fighting for ours against Savagery and Superstition.” See Wallace, Goldwin Smith, quoted 92. 194 See John Herd Thompson, “Nicholas Flood Davin,” in the online Dictionary of Canadian Biography at http://www.biographi.ca/009004119.01-e.php?&id_nbr=6664 (accessed 8 January 2012). See Davin, The Irishman in Canada, 3–28, for several footnoted references to Goldwin Smith’s writing on Ireland. 195 Davin, The Irishman in Canada, 667. 196 Ibid., 129. For Davin’s remarks on O’Connell, see 34. 197 Ibid., 25. 198 For more on this concept, see MacRaild, “An Orange Diaspora?” and Faith, Fraternity, and Fighting, 286–320. 199 See McClelland, William Johnston. Johnston returned in 1891 for the opening of the new Cooke’s Presbyterian Church; see Alison, Annals of Sixty Years, 28. 200 Jackson, Colonel Edward Saunderson, 51. 201 Sentinel, 27 May 1886. 202 Globe, 9 March 1886. 203 Toronto Mail, 9 March 1886. 204 The Toronto group took their name from the Irish Loyal and Patriotic Union, established in May 1885 to undermine Parnellism. See O’Day, Irish Home Rule, 114. 205 Toronto Mail, 8 and 9 September 1886. For more on the Ulster Loyal and Anti-Repeal Union and the North American tour, see Jenkins, “‘Two Irelands Beyond the Sea,’” and Savage, “The Origins of the Ulster Unionist Party.” 206 Toronto Mail, 10 September 1886. 207 Ibid. 208 Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, 231.

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Notes to pages 216–26

419

209 Vipond, Liberty and Community, 104. 210 Toronto Mail, 17 March 1888. 211 Sentinel, 22 September 1892. 212 Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, 231; Toronto Mail, 28 March 1888. 213 Toronto Mail, 18 March 1887. 214 Kealey and Palmer, Dreaming of What Might Be, 222. 215 Catholic Union and Times, 30 May 1889. 216 See a story on an interview Cronin gave to the Baltimore Sun in Catholic Union and Times, 21 November 1889. 217 Catholic Union and Times, 6 February 1890. 218 Catholic Union and Times, 30 October 1890. 219 Ibid. 220 Catholic Union and Times, 27 November 1890. 221 Catholic Union and Times, 4 December 1890. On Parnell’s downfall, see Callanan, The Parnell Split. 222 New York Times, 21 December 1890. 223 Ibid.; Irish Canadian, 6 December 1888. 224 Jacobson, Special Sorrows, 53. 225 Irish Canadian, 25 October 1888. 226 Lynch, “‘A Kindred and Congenial Element.’”

c ha p t e r s e ve n   1 David Noel Doyle estimated seventy percent of the Irish-born in the United States to be living in urban-industrial counties concentrated in the “northern core” region in 1870, a spatial pattern that increased rather than decreased in concentration later that century. See “The Remaking of Irish-America, 1845–1880,” 742–3.   2 Shannon, The American Irish, 145. A pioneering collection that directly examines Shannon’s assertion is Meagher, From Paddy to Studs.   3 See Meagher, From Paddy to Studs, 181–8; Burchell, The San Francisco Irish; Wingerd, Claiming the City; Blessing, “Irish”; and, most recently, McCaffrey, “Diaspora Comparisons and Irish-American Uniqueness.”   4 Harring, Policing A Class Society, 61. Harring makes a similar claim for 1905, estimating 69% of the city’s workers to be in the “mechanical and industrial labour force” (25, footnote 2).   5 DeForest and Veiller, The Tenement House Problem, 1: 127.   6 Horton, History of Northwestern New York, 2: 325–8.   7 Olenick and Reisem, Classic Buffalo, 15, 22–7. The latter section discusses the Guaranty Building.

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Notes to pages 227–33

8 Olenick and Reisem, Classic Buffalo, 38–9; Buffalo Architectural Guidebook Corporation, Buffalo Architecture, 68, 89–91. 9 Catholic Union and Times, 18 February 1892. 10 Annual Report of the Superintendent of Education for Buffalo 1911–1912, 41. 11 Catholic Union and Times, 28 April 1892. 12 The 1900 and 1920 Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (ipums) samples were both 1 in 100 national random samples. In 1900, this resulted in a sample of 107,000 households and 503,000 persons across the United States. The 1920 sample yielded 260,000 households and 1,050,000 person records. For more information, consult the ipums website at http:// usa.ipums.org/usa (accessed June 2012). 13 Obidinski, “Polish Americans in Buffalo,” 31. 14 See DeForest and Veiller, The Tenement House Problem, 2: 347–61. Ten years later, the findings of a locally administered social survey estimated 94% of Poles in Buffalo to be in receipt of less than a living wage. See Buffalo Courier, 15 March 1910. 15 DeForest and Veiller, Tenement House Problem, 1: 122. 16 Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community, 45 (Table 1). 17 Dooley, Days Beyond Recall, 210, 386. 18 Quoted in Harring, Policing A Class Society, 72; Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community, 112. See also Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 57–62. 19 Hill, Twentieth Century Buffalo, Part 1, 65. 20 These calculations are derived from Kennegott, Annual Report of Overseer of the Poor. Nationality likely referred to birthplace. The Irish did not comprise more than 6% of all recipients between 1908 and 1913, while the “American” group approached 30% by 1913. Polish households continued to hover around the 35% mark, with those of Italian nationality rising from about 5% in 1908 to almost 10% in 1913. 21 See Careless, Toronto to 1918, 149–61. 22 Shelton, Reformers in Search of Yesterday, 3. 23 On this industry, see Frager, Sweatshop Strife. 24 Piva, The Condition of the Working Class in Toronto, 18. 25 Harris and Luymes, “The Growth of Toronto,” 245. 26 See McCormack, “Cloth Caps and Jobs,” and Harris, Unplanned Suburbs. 27 Page, The Boer War and Canadian Imperialism; Stamp, “Empire Day in the Schools of Ontario.” 28 See, for example, Toronto Star, 10 January 1905. For a wider discussion of the anxieties over immigration during this period, see Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water, 104–28.

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Notes to pages 233–8

421

29 Households located within the City of Toronto but classed as “rural” were excluded. “Regular-sized” dwellings containing thirty residents or fewer were selected with equal probability across Canada, being five percent of all such dwellings in 1911. The ccri sample is a cluster sample of individual records, with the dwelling as the cluster. Households in apartments, work camps, and institutions were sampled differently. See http://ccri. library.ualberta.ca/en1911census/database/index.html (accessed June 2012). 30 Of the 185 Irish-born individuals included in the 1911 Toronto census sample who arrived in Canada from 1907, only 25 (13.5%) were Catholics. 31 Thomas D’Arcy McGee, among other writers and editors, popularized such distinctions in the 1850s. Later, the Ottawa monthly Anglo-Saxon disseminated these ideas in a way that connected with Canadian issues; it was ­notably anti-Catholic and anti–French Canadian. See Hastings, “‘Our Glorious Anglo-Saxon Race Shall Ever Fill Earth’s Highest Place.’” See also Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water, 77–114. 32 These figures have been calculated for Toronto from the Census of Canada for 1901 (vol. 1) and 1911 (vol. 2). 33 McCormack, “Cloth Caps and Jobs,” 189. 34 See Frager, Sweatshop Strife, and Hiebert, “Jewish Immigrants and the Garment Industry.” 35 The impact of the “office revolution” on work opportunities for women in Canada is covered well in Lowe, “Women, Work and the Office,” especially Table 1, which shows that the number of female clerical workers in Canada rose from 4,710 in 1891 to 33,723 in 1911. See also Piva, The Condition of the Working Class in Toronto, 17–25. 36 An “uncommon” surname had no more than five listings in city directories of each city for 1880–81. The 1881 and 1886 directories were treated as providing information for 1880 and 1885 and so forth. For more details, see Jenkins, “Geographical and Social Mobility,” 65–74. 37 Vinyard, The Irish on the Urban Frontier, 75. See also Burstein, “Immigrants and Residential Mobility.” 38 The Toronto data show instances of moves from self-employment or clerical work to mostly skilled work. Three individuals who worked as clerks, for example, later worked as a bartender, shipper, and finisher. In two other cases, a barber later worked as a blacksmith, and a foreman reverted to the status of a labourer. 39 Devault, Sons and Daughters of Labor; Morawska, For Bread with Butter, 235–7. 40 See Hutchinson, Immigrants and Their Children, 164–5. The report noted employment expansions in trade, transportation, and office work, with the last-mentioned sector peopled by the second rather than the immigrant

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Notes to pages 238–43

generation. Growth in domestic service was sluggish, though low-level office jobs in the telephone and telegraph industries were opening up, and opportunities remained for tailoresses and seamstresses. Immigrant Irishmen (whose categorization was dependent on the birthplace of their foreign-born parent as opposed to their own birthplace) were over-­ represented as labourers, saloon-keepers and bartenders, servants and ­waiters, draymen/teamsters, and steam railroad employees. The second generation of American-born was more scattered, though niches remained in saloon-keeping, building, printing, and as teamsters. 41 Toronto Evening Telegram, 11 June 1910. 42 Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water, 52–8. 43 This control for age has been employed in a similar way as in Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress, 104–14. While the careers of some females were traceable in the city directories throughout the period, this is likely due to their decision to remain unmarried. 44 McGowan, The Waning of the Green, 145. 45 See Zucchi, Italians in Toronto, 73–5, 86–100. By 1912, half of the fruittrading establishments in Toronto were owned by Italians. 46 Buffalo Express, 22 October 1900. 47 Greater Toronto and the Men Who Made It, 109. 48 Stephenson, The Store that Timothy Built, 51–2. 49 William Larmour’s obituary can be found in Toronto Evening Telegram, 26 June 1914. 50 Santink, Timothy Eaton, 233. 51 See Toronto Public Library Biographical Scrapbooks for Michael Cashman. 52 Catholic Union and Times, 27 November 1890. 53 Kenny, The American Irish, 149–58, 228. 54 Brennan, Erin Mor, 121. 55 Erie remarks, for instance, that “the private sector, not the machine, generated up to 90 percent of job opportunities for these workers.” See Erie, Rainbow’s End, 59. The term ‘symbolic capital’ comes from Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” 245. 56 Katzman, Seven Days A Week, 55. 57 Ibid., 61 (Table 2-6). 58 Due to problems with manuscript legibility, data was collected for the following wards and electoral divisions (in parentheses): 20 (198, 199, and 200); 21 (201, 202, and 204); and 23 (217, 218, 219, and 220). 59 See Miller, Doyle, and Kelleher, “For Love and Liberty,” 60, who noted that in 1900, 60.5% of Irish-born women wage-earners in the United States worked in domestic service occupations with less than 19% of second-­ generation girls and women working in household-based labour.

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Notes to pages 244–7

423

60 Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community, 203. 61 In 1972, South Buffalo priest Rev. Basil Ormsby claimed that the “Delaware Avenue maids really did a lot to help build St. Joseph’s New Cathedral … they were very generous.” See Buffalo Evening News, 13 May 1972. 62 Quoted in Crawford, Rosedale, 63. See also Snell, “South Rosedale.” 63 Toronto Star, 10 January 1899. 64 Toronto Star, 3 July 1912; see also 10 May 1912. 65 The following streets were surveyed in their entirety: North Sherbourne Street, Maple Avenue, Dale Avenue, and Elm Avenue. Partially surveyed were Glen Road (south of Roxborough Avenue) and Sherbourne Street (­between Carlton Street and Bloor Street East). The database combined the directory for 1912 with the 1911 census genealogical website: http://­ automatedgenealogy.com/census11/ (accessed June 2012). 66 See Barber, Immigrant Domestic Servants, 2 (Table I). 67 Ibid., 10. See also Frager and Patrias, Discounted Labour, 46–9. 68 Toronto Social Survey Commission, Report, 43. For more on those who were not faring so well, see Fahrni, “‘Ruffled’ Mistresses and ‘Discontented’ Maids.” 69 Acton, Goldsmith, and Shepard, Women at Work, 98. 70 Nolan, Servants of the Poor. 71 Ibid., 4. She also finds that in 1900, Catholic Irish-Americans were the largest single ethnic group among Boston’s teachers, while by 1910, 390 of San Francisco’s 804 primary school teachers, or 49 percent, had Irish surnames (pages 59 and 68). Meagher uncovers a similar Catholic prominence within Worcester’s school syatem; see Inventing Irish America, 161. 72 Hill, Twentieth-Century Buffalo, Part 1, 23. 73 Annual Report of the Superintendent of Education of Buffalo, 41. 74 Ibid., 162 and thereafter. 75 See Shelton, Reformers in Search of Yesterday, 98, and associated discussion. 76 One retrospective account recalled that he “could get jobs for his constituents regardless of which party was in power.” See Buffalo Times, 27 June 1933. 77 Buffalo Courier, 12 February 1888. 78 Buffalo Express, 12 February 1888; Catholic Union and Times, 16 February 1888. 79 Seller, “The Education of Immigrant Children,” 189. 80 Dooley, Days Beyond Recall, 11. 81 The lists of staff and their salaries are contained in the Annual Report of the Superintendent of Education of Buffalo 1901–1902. The comparative discussion draws also from the report from 1910 to 1911.

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Notes to pages 247–51

82 Barrett and Roediger, “The Irish and the ‘Americanization’ of the ‘New Immigrants.’” 83 Seller, “The Education of Immigrant Children,” 189. 84 Municipal Hand-Book of Toronto 1910, 102. 85 Stamp, The Schools of Ontario 1876–1976, 31. 86 Houston and Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore, 159. Hughes was a one-time Grand Master of Ontario West. 87 Toronto’s assessment rolls list the names and addresses of teachers for each public school. Seven schools were chosen in all areas of the city and the ­addresses of 64 teachers compiled from the 1910 rolls. The schools were Withrow Avenue (Ward 1), Duke Street and Winchester Street (Ward 2), Cottingham Street (Ward 3), Borden Street (Ward 4), and Niagara Street and Parkdale Schools (Ward 5). These addresses were re-traced in the same assessment rolls to determine the religion of these teachers. Religion was traceable for only thirty teachers (46.9% of the total), the remainder boarding in the houses of others. None of the thirty were Catholic. 88 McGowan, The Waning of the Green, 123. 89 Although the average public school salary for male teachers in Ontario’s cities was $892 in 1897, the female equivalent was $425, and things had scarcely improved by 1917, with females earning 48.6% of the average male salary of $1637. Stamp, The Schools of Ontario, 279 (Appendix 2). 90 Catholic Register, July 6 1916. 91 Harring, Policing A Class Society, 42. For frequent dismissal cases, see Jenkins, “Patrolmen and Peelers,” 18. 92 Harring, Policing A Class Society, 79 (Table 6). See also his “The Buffalo Police,” 120. 93 Table 7.10 was compiled from a list of police officers of varying rank at each precinct station in the annual reports of 1890 and 1910. Officers at headquarters and others employed in clerical positions are omitted. Surname analysis is an imperfect measure of (imputed) Irishness, of course, since ambiguous surnames such as Brown may have belonged to Irishmen. The fire department survey covered the various engine and hook and ladder companies of the brigade throughout the city (these numbered 29 and 9 respectively in 1900 and 33 and 11 in 1910). 94 Report of the Commissioners of the Buffalo Fire Department 1900, 155. 95 Buffalo Courier, 24 April 1906. 96 Quoted in Powell, Rushing the Growler, 19–20. 97 These figures were computed from the 1900 ipums census sample; given its size, some caution is necessary. The numbers involved are as follows: 12 masons, 50 machinists, 56 carpenters, 61 clerks, and 157 labourers.

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Notes to pages 251–6

425

 98 Harring, Policing a Class Society, 42–3.   99 Strange and Loo, Making Good, 81; Rutherford, “Tomorrow’s Metropolis,” 205; Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water, 53, 82. 100 Jenkins, “Patrolmen and Peelers,” 19–22. 101 Lowe and Malcolm, “The Domestication of the Royal Irish Constabulary.” 102 Catholic Register, 11 June 1914. 103 Toronto Evening Telegram, 21 March 1914. 104 Toronto World, 17 March 1908; “P.M.” stands for “past master.” 105 Sentinel, 22 May 1913. 106 Champion, The Methodist Churches of Toronto, 340. 107 Toronto Evening Telegram, 12 July 1910. 108 Globe, 20 May 1915. 109 Toronto Star, 20 May 1915. 110 Ashfield served as chief engineer between 1851 and 1877, before becoming inaugural departmental chief from 1877 to 1889. His biography is in Mulvany and Adam, History of Toronto, 1: 302-4. Regarding 12 July lunches, see Robertson’s Landmarks of Toronto, 6: 170; for more on Ashfield, see Toronto Evening Telegram, 11 January 1909. 111 The five Orangemen (David See, Walter Henry Clark, Walter O. Collard, Adam Kerr, and Frederick George Russell) are referenced in Robertson’s Landmarks of Toronto, 6: 181. 112 Sentinel, 31 July 1913. 113 See obituary in Sentinel, 26 April 1908. 114 “Report on a Survey of the Fire Department,” 9. Thompson had control over all appointments and promotions and was under no obligation to explain his selections. 115 Weaver, “The Modern City Realized,” 41. 116 See obituary in Sentinel, 3 January 1922. 117 Ibid. 118 McGowan, Waning of the Green, 36. 119 Toronto Star, 22 May 1909. 120 Catholic Register, 28 May 1914. See also Strauch, “Walking for God and Raising Hell,” 105–7. 121 Toronto Star, 12 July 1911. The Star later claimed that “by far the greater number of the (city) employees are numbered in the 12,000 [Orange membership]” (11 May 1914). 122 Powell, Rushing the Growler, 19–20. 123 An Irish priest in late nineteenth-century Worcester, Massachusetts, for example, estimated two-thirds of liquor license applicants to be Irish. See Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will, 49.

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Notes to pages 256–9

124 See the annual report of the license inspector for 1870 in Minutes of Proceedings of the Council of the Corporation of Toronto, 1871. 125 See Sendbuehler, “Battling ‘the Bane of our Cities.’” Other issues included a battle with the Canadian Pacific Railroad over its proposed uses of the waterfront, a search for solutions to the “problem” of how single wageearning women were spending their leisure time, and the latest effort to maintain a quiet Sabbath through opposing the operation of streetcars on Sundays (the 1897 plebiscite to allow their operation was only narrowly approved). See Goheen, “The Assertion of Middle-Class Claims”; Armstrong and Nelles, Revenge of the Methodist Bicycle Company; and Strange, Toronto’s Girl Problem. 126 The total number of hotels, saloons, and taverns in Buffalo for 1880 was 1,110; the Toronto figure is 202. The self-employment estimates are taken from the citywide samples of 1880–81. 127 Dormer, “Economic Aspects of the Local Liquor Traffic,” 23. Buffalo’s license costs for beer and liquor were quite low when compared to other major cities in the region. As Dormer found, Buffalo’s ratio of licenses to population was 1 to 96; Boston’s was 1 to 153 and New York’s 1 to 135. 128 Dormer, “Economic Aspects of the Local Liquor Traffic,” 17. 129 Mulvany and Adam, History of Toronto, 1: 331. 130 Sendbuehler, “Battling ‘the Bane of our Cities,’” 35. 131 See Heron, Booze, 215–16. 132 Morton, Mayor Howland, 73–4. 133 See McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America, 91–6. 134 Armstrong and Nelles, The Revenge of the Methodist Bicycle Company, 7-8. 135 Quoted in Armstrong and Nelles, The Revenge of the Methodist Bicycle Company, 64. 136 Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water, 52–3. 137 Toronto Evening Telegram, 17 November 1911. 138 Greater Toronto and the Men Who Made It, 119. 139 Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water, 52–3. For a short biography of Fleming, see Comeau, “Robert John Fleming,” in the online Dictionary of Canadian Biography at http://www.biographi.ca/EN/009004-119.01-e. php?id_nbr=8136 (accessed June 2012). 140 See Heron, Booze, 155–8. 141 Champion, The Methodist Churches of Toronto, 212. Self was born in the town of Coleraine. 142 Spence, Facts of the Case, 307. See also Globe, 6 January 1894; Toronto Star, 26 March 1912. Barely half of Toronto’s 42,163 eligible men voted, and just over one-quarter of their 5,006 female counterparts did so.

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Notes to pages 259–64

427

143 See, for example, the Toronto Star and Toronto Evening Telegram, 2 January 1909 and the days thereafter. 144 Toronto Evening Telegram, 2 January 1909. 145 See Toronto Star, 1, 3, and 4 May 1909. 146 Spence, The Campaign Manual 1912, 91. The Ontario Temperance Act of 1916 “made it unlawful to possess beer or liquor, except in one’s own home, and to sell liquor in the form of a drink” (Hallowell, Prohibition in Ontario, ix). 147 Toronto Star, 3 May 1909. 148 Heron, Booze, 184. 149 Hill, Twentieth-Century Buffalo, Part 2, 241, and Part 1, 109. 150 Ibid., Part 2, 81; Municipal Handbook of Toronto 1904, 63. 151 Catholic Union and Times, 16 May 1889; compare Hill, TwentiethCentury Buffalo, Part 1, 33, and Part 2, 241. 152 Shelton, “The Grain Shoveller’s Strike,” 213. 153 Buffalo Evening News, 4 May 1896. 154 Catholic Union and Times, 27 April 1899. 155 Shelton, Reformers in Search of Yesterday, 34. 156 Catholic Union and Times, 7 September 1899; see also 25 October 1899. 157 See Shelton, “The Grain Shoveller’s Strike.” 158 A decade later, the encyclical Singulari Quadam Caritate issued by Pius X further entrenched church hostility to socialism. See Karson, “The Catholic Church and the Political Development of American Trade Unionism,” 527–30. 159 Ibid., 534. 160 Harring, “The Buffalo Police,” 116. 161 Shelton, “The Grain Shoveller’s Strike,” 232. 162 Buffalo Courier, 3 November 1900. 163 Buffalo Express, 3 November 1900. 164 Buffalo Courier, 7 November 1900. 165 Hennesey, American Catholics, 188.

chapter eight   1 For a further illustration of the point, see Houston and Smyth, “Geographical Transiency and Social Mobility,” on the itinerant wanderings of Ulster migrant Wilson Benson throughout Ontario during the midnineteenth century. For all his wandering, Benson’s last sixty years were spent within the same region.   2 For a rare study of Irish return migration during the nineteenth century, see ’t Hart, “Irish Return Migration.”

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Notes to pages 265–6

3 Catholic Union and Times, 12 June 1890. 4 The Irish tally in San Francisco more than tripled from 9,363 to 30,718; in Pittsburgh, it almost tripled from 9,297 to 26,643; in Cleveland, it more than doubled from 5,429 to 13,512; and in Chicago, the change was most dramatic, with the numbers of Irish-born increasing from 17,889 to 70,028. See Blessing, “Irish,” 531. 5 Detroit absorbed larger numbers of the Canadian-born into its urban ­economy than Buffalo, for each of the intercensal years between 1860 and 1910. Yet since Buffalo had a larger population in these years, the Canadian element in its total population was less significant. In Buffalo, the 17,242 Canadian-born reached a peak of 4.9% of the city’s total population in 1900; that same year the 28,944 Canadians living in Detroit formed twice this percentage of their city’s total population. See Truesdell, The Canadian Born in the United States. French and English Canadians are aggregated here. Before 1910, persons born in Newfoundland were included. 6 Analysis of the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (ipums) sample for Buffalo in 1900 provides this tentative figure. Forty-seven (22.8%) Canadian-born individuals with at least one Irish-born parent were enumerated from a total of 206 Canadian-born. There may have therefore been approximately 3,900 Canadian-born in Buffalo with Irish ancestral links – little can be said about religious breakdown, however. 7 Widdis, With Scarcely a Ripple. See also Ramirez, Crossing the 49th Parallel. 8 See Obidinski, “Polish Americans in Buffalo,” 34, and Hill, TwentiethCentury Buffalo, Part I, 67. As Obidinski explains, the fifteen “Polish parishes” founded between 1891 and 1922 give some indication of how this developing social world was anything but a “melting-pot.” 9 DeForest and Veiller, Tenement House Problem, 1: 122. 10 See Cichon, The Complete History of Parkside. 11 Jose Moya’s calculation of a mean index of segregation for the three most numerous foreign-born groups in North American cities in 1910 is revealing for Buffalo, whose score of 52 places it ahead of New York City (43.1) and Montreal (42.5) and well ahead of Toronto (6.3). See Moya, Cousins and Strangers, 181–2. Recalculating for the ten most numerous foreignborn groups does not change this order of cities, though the gap b ­ etween Buffalo and Toronto decreases (41.2 versus 30.1). 12 Dooley, Days Beyond Recall, 211. 13 See, for instance, Gilliland, “Residential Mobility in Montreal,” 146. Comparing the residential location of sons to their fathers, Gilliland finds that 32.4% of sons lived in the same district as their fathers, with a further

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Notes to pages 267–70

429

38.2% living in an adjoining neighbourhood. Depending on the designation of Montreal’s districts, he notes further that 29.4% of sons lived in non-adjacent districts – which could in practice have been little more than one kilometre away or on the other edge of the city. In fact, the districts into which Gilliland divides Montreal are smaller than wards, being a “­collection of street segments, fairly homogeneous in socio-economic ­characteristics” (137). Another noteworthy study is Pooley, “Residential Mobility in the Victorian City.” 14 This uncommon name strategy is discussed in chapter 7, note 36. 15 Katz, Poverty and Policy, 63. 16 The 1900 and 1910 census manuscripts supplemented directory data for the surviving households while also verifying their correctness. 17 For example, Harris, “Household Work Strategies”; Olson, “Occupations and Residential Spaces”; Ward, “Environs and Neighbours”; Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality, 15–39. 18 Ward, “Environs and Neighbours”; all families in multiple-family houses were included, occasionally increasing the environ size to twelve or thirteen households. Where the residence was located relatively distant from other dwellings, data for a smaller number of families (usually between six and eleven) were collected. Ethnic data were inferred through the place of birth of the individual and his or her parents. 19 Occupational classes were grouped to simplify the class designation. Owners and managers, the self-employed, the middle-class, and those employed in clerical jobs all formed the “middle/upper class,” while the ranks of the skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled were aggregated to form the “working class.” Miscellaneous designations such as “gentlemen,” retirees, widows, and others were excluded from the analysis. 20 To measure the relative presence or absence of the various ethnic and class groups within each environ, I decided that if the number of families in either the middle or the working class was at least twice the share of families in the other group, the environ was characterized as either middle- or working-class; otherwise it was designated “mixed.” Likewise, if over 45% of the families (five out of eleven or greater) in a Buffalo environ were of a given ethnic stock (first- or second-generation Irish or German, or Americans of longer generation), then it was also defined in terms of that ethnic group. 21 Jenkins, “In the Shadow of a Grain Elevator.” 22 Devault, Sons and Daughters of Labor, 177. 23 The saloon numbers are taken from the Buffalo city directory for 1910 and the ward population figures were returned on a ward map available in the

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Notes to pages 270–4

Buffalo and Erie County Public Library. On the West Side, only ward 25, nearest to the central business area and bisected by the Erie Canal, exceeded the city average with 5.3 saloons per 1,000 persons. The corresponding figures for the neighbouring wards 19–24 were noticeably low at 1.4, 1.2, 0.9, 1.3, 0.8, and 2.6 respectively. 24 Bodnar, The Transplanted, 57–84. 25 Chapter 3 referred to the earlier generation of these established figures such as Timothy J. Mahoney and John McManus, while chapters 5 and 6 discussed their role as political activists, not least that of nationalist James Mooney. 26 DeForest and Veiller, The Tenement House Problem, 1: 126–7. 27 Evidence from the i pu m s sample for Buffalo in 1900 indicates just over 25% of those of Irish birth or with an Irish-born father to have been property owners or mortgage-holders. The numbers involved are very small, however, representing twenty-two household heads out of a total of eightyfive in the city sample whose tenure is known. Much the same can be said for the sample of 1920, which indicates that thirty-two (38.1%) Irish household heads owned or mortgaged property from a total of eighty-four. 28 DeForest and Veiller, Tenement House Problem, 1: 121. 29 By 1880, a diocesan seminary and schools had been added to Holy Angels’ parochial infrastructure established in 1852 by the Oblate Fathers, and a juniorate preparatory college and girls’ academy was built before the century’s end. 30 The corresponding Irish percentages for Schools 30, 33, and 4 in 1902 were 26.9, 21.7, and 18.2 respectively (Figure 3.8). See Annual Report of the Superintendent of Education of Buffalo 1901–1902. 31 These parishes are referenced in Dooley’s Days Beyond Recall. 32 The notes from Annunciation Parish are dated 1946 and are contained in the Catholic Diocesan Archives of Buffalo. The notes from Nativity Parish are also there but are undated. 33 Catholic Union and Times, 16 April 1889. 34 See Cuddihy, “Canisius, Buffalo’s ‘Street Car College.’” 35 Dooley, Days Beyond Recall, 417. 36 Catholic Union and Times, 5 July 1888. 37 Catholic Union and Times, 31 August 1899. 38 Public School 1 had just over ten percent of its 990 registered pupils of Irish parentage (i.e. Irish-born), but again, it is likely that many of those of American parentage were third-generation Irish. Ten of the school’s twentyone teachers also had names indicative of an Irish background, including Margaret O’Brien, Mary Ryan, Mary Crowley, Maria Ryan, and Belinda

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Notes to pages 274–8

431

O’Brien, all of whom lived nearby. See Annual Report of the Superintendent of Education of Buffalo 1901–1902, 104–6. 39 Catholic Union and Times, 6 April 1893. 40 Catholic Union and Times, 15 March 1900. 41 Catholic Union and Times, 11 March 1909. 42 Catholic Union and Times, 8 April 1900. 43 Catholic Union and Times, 23 April 1908. 44 Catholic Union and Times, 25 February 1915. 45 Catholic Union and Times, 27 March and 3 April 1890, 16 October 1902, and 23 April and 28 May 1908. 46 Catholic Union and Times, 10 March 1892. 47 Ridge, Erin’s Sons in America, 49. 48 Personal communication, Professor Cecil Houston, University of Toronto, July 2000. 49 Houston and Smyth, “Transferred Loyalties.” 50 Examining activities within and across parishes through a Lefebvrian lens received additional inspiration from Sterne, “Bringing Religion into Working-Class History.” 51 Catholic Union and Times, 5 March 1908. Cross-inspection of the directories reveals Collins’ husband to have been a policeman and Farrell’s to have been an engineer. 52 Catholic Union and Times, 5 March 1908. 53 Catholic Union and Times, 17 November 1892. 54 Catholic Union and Times, 20 March 1890. 55 Hill, Twentieth Century Buffalo, Part I, 97. 56 Catholic Union and Times, 23 October 1902. 57 Catholic Union and Times, 2 February 1888; Dooley, Days Beyond Recall, 11. 58 See Joyce, The Rule of Freedom, 109, 133, 147–8. Joyce cites free libraries, instituted in the United Kingdom from the 1850s, as a prime example of an oligopticon or a space that engendered “a self-surveillance that was also collective.” 59 See Jenkins, “In Search of the Lace Curtain.” 60 Catholic Union and Times, 25 January 1900. 61 Courtney, Recollections, 52–3. 62 Buffalo Evening News, 13 May 1972. 63 For more on this point, see Domosh, Invented Cities, 244–80. 64 Buffalo Courier, 7 March 1899. 65 Buffalo Express, 19 October 1902. The nineteenth ward was a clear exception.

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Notes to pages 278–84

66 Buffalo Express, 9 November 1910. 67 Buffalo Express, 31 October and 2 November 1904. 68 Buffalo Express, 14 and 18 October 1900. 69 Buffalo Courier, 26 and 28 October 1902. 70 Buffalo Courier, 5 November 1902. 71 Buffalo Express, 4 November 1908. 72 See Buffalo Express, 8 November 1916, and Cuddy, “Irish-Americans and the 1916 Election.” 73 See interview with Conners in Buffalo Express, 3 November 1904. Though much of it is political bravado, it reveals something of the way the man thought about power. 74 Buffalo Courier, 9 October 1926. The obituary makes no reference to Lynch’s involvement in liquor provision (though the city directory confirms this), and he later involved himself in the world of insurance before his death in 1921. 75 Buffalo Express, 4 November 1908. 76 Buffalo Express, 22 October 1914. 77 Buffalo Express, 6 November 1912. 78 Chudacoff, Mobile Americans, 153. 79 Dooley, Days Beyond Recall, 19. 80 Ibid., 10, 64, 101–2. 81 Buffalo Express, 1 November 1902. 82 Buffalo Express, 3 November 1904. 83 See, for example, Buffalo Express, 23 October 1914. 84 Cunneen apparently arrived in the United States with a loan of $40 from “a kind friend,” and he worked on an upstate New York farm and later as a machinist and carpenter before being called to the bar in 1874 and subsequently appointed as a lecturer on equity jurisprudence at Buffalo Law School. Cunneen died prematurely of pneumonia in 1907. See Catholic Union and Times, 23 October 1902, and Buffalo Express, 21 February 1907. 85 Buffalo Express, 3 November 1902. 86 Inwood and Irwin, “The Patterns of Net Migration,” 8. Also useful is Inwood and Sullivan, “Comparative Perspectives on Nineteenth Century Growth,” 77. 87 See Jenkins, “Social and Geographical Mobility,” 249–75. Jose Moya finds that for Spanish newcomers in early twentieth-century Buenos Aires, “age, marital status, and gender – rather than occupational mobility – proved the best predictors of residential trends, with young, single males being the least-rooted group.” See Moya, Cousins and Strangers, 177.

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Notes to pages 284–90

433

  88 See Jenkins, “Poverty and Place,” 503–5. Compare also the Goad fire ­insurance maps of the district in 1880, 1890, and 1903 available online through the City of Toronto Archives website: http://www.toronto.ca/­ archives/goads_fire_insurance_plans.htm (accessed November 2011).  89 Zucchi, Italians in Toronto, 120.   90 For a perspective on this intra-city migration of Jewish families, see Hiebert, “Jewish Immigrants and the Garment Industry.”  91 Toronto Evening Telegram, 5 and 8 November 1909 and 8 November 1913.   92 Mercier, “The Social Geography of Childhood Mortality,” 131.   93 Mercier, “The Social Geography of Childhood Mortality,” 134–6. Parts of Cabbagetown were also identified by Mercier as among the least well-off residential sections in the city.   94 After analyzing home and work locations in the city in the early 1900s, Richard Harris concludes that workers were generally “quite capable of moving to the suburbs while retaining jobs downtown.” See Harris, Unplanned Suburbs, 85.   95 If persistence is measured in terms of the 1881 address, for example, the survival rate of households to 1886 was 38%. If an intra-city approach is taken for these households during the same time interval, the rate rises to 70%.   96 In Toronto, the number of Catholic households in the environ of a target household was enumerated, and if six or more of the eleven households were Catholic, the environ was declared Catholic.   97 “Offspring” is the term used since the 1881 census manuscripts do not explicitly identify the relation of each householder to its head, though a comparison of ages within sampled families indicates that what is being mostly compared here is the location of sons’ residential places in 1911 to those of their fathers in 1881.  98 McGowan, The Waning of the Green, 25. Michael Mercier has also maintained that despite “the concentration of Catholics in [the] southern neighbourhoods, the majority of the population in all neighbourhoods was Protestant”; see Mercier, “The Social Geography of Childhood Mortality,” 139.  99 McGowan, The Waning of the Green, 44–5. 100 Ibid., 47. 101 McGowan, “Toronto’s English-Speaking Catholics,” 218. 102 Choko and Harris, “The Local Culture of Property,” 79. 103 Richard Harris, “Household Work Strategies,” 115.

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Notes to pages 290–4

104 Middleton, The Municipality of Toronto, 3: 245. Henry Reburn Jr’s promotion to chief clerk in the city treasury is reported in Toronto Evening Telegram, 18 April 1911. 105 By 1910, there were 52 Anglican churches listed in the city directory along with 46 Methodist, 41 Presbyterian, 28 Baptist, and 21 Catholic. A 1900 survey on church membership calculated Catholics to have the highest attendance rates (74%). The Baptist and Methodist denominations led the Protestant churches at 31.8 and 29.2 percent respectively. See Armstrong and Nelles, The Revenge of the Methodist Bicycle Company, 183. 106 See Gamm, Urban Exodus (60), where he argues: “Institutional constraints have proven especially strong in binding Catholics to their neighborhoods … Where Catholic attachments are fiercest – in the blocks surrounding a strong parish church – the housing supply for non-­Catholics is sharply limited.” For a Montreal case study of such Protestant church movements, see Trigger, “Protestant Restructuring in the Canadian City.” 107 For a brief biography of Rev. Dixon, evidently named after one-time Orange Grand Master and noted lawyer John Hillyard Cameron, see Journal of the Incorporated Synod 1926–1929, 46; see also Hayes, “Repairing the Walls,” 72. 108 Hayes, “Repairing the Walls,” 88. The parish was finally disestablished in 1933 after the church building was rented “in 1926 to a brake repair and automobile service shop.” 109 Cooke’s Church Women’s Home Mission Society (whms) Minute Books. The wh m s dated from 1903, growing out of a nurses’ committee serving the northwestern Klondike region. 110 See Toronto Star Weekly clipping in Toronto Public Library Biographical Scrapbook for William Patterson. 111 Clark, Church and Sect in Canada, 391. 112 Toronto Evening Telegram, 16 August 1910. 113 Stephenson, The Store that Timothy Built, 71. 114 Champion, The Methodist Churches of Toronto, 273; Clark, Church and Sect in Canada, 413. 115 Champion, The Methodist Churches of Toronto, 317. 116 Ibid., 368. 117 On this idea of “character,” see Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water, 104–5. 118 Clarke, “Religion and Public Space in Protestant Toronto.” 119 Sentinel, 12 June 1913. The church was built in 1911. 120 Toronto Evening Telegram, 3 October 1910.

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Notes to pages 294–8

435

121 Ibid. 122 The Toronto calculations are derived from tallies compiled from regular listings of the city’s lodges in the Order’s Sentinel newspaper between 1886 and 1914. 123 See Houston and Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore, 25 (Figure 1). The Sentinel, 28 January 1915, also notes that nine primary lodges comprised the (western) district of Toronto Junction which lay within the Orange County of West York. Adding these gives a “Toronto built-up area” total of eighty-five lodges. 124 Toronto City Directory 1915, 1842. The Ladies’ Orange Benevolent Association was established in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1889; see Houston and Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore, 90. 125 Of the eight halls used by Eastern District lodges, three were Masonic while one belonged to the Oddfellows. 126 Sentinel, 12 February 1914. 127 Sentinel, 1 May 1913 and 15 October 1914. 128 Sentinel, 12 and 19 February 1914. 129 Sentinel, 22 March 1888. 130 Sentinel, 3 December 1914. 131 Sentinel, 9 July 1914. 132 Toronto Reference Library, Orange Lodge (L35) collection, Series XVIII, John Dugan to Robert J. Small, 7 November 1913. 133 Sentinel, 26 June 1913. 134 Sentinel, 15 January 1914. 135 Houston and Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore, 104–5. 136 Champion, The Methodist Churches of Toronto, 325. Dane was also president of the central district of the Epworth League. 137 Toronto Star, 21 February 1900, notes the eleventh annual convention of the Sons of Ireland Protestant Association. Lodge names and executive members were collected from December and January issues of the Sentinel (1902–16). Thanks to Brad Chin You for organizing this database. 138 Toronto Public Library Biographical Scrapbook for Thomas Rooney (an included Globe obituary dates from November 1932). Enniskillen is the county town of Co. Fermanagh. 139 McGowan, The Waning of the Green, 100–1. 140 Ibid., 102–3. 141 Ibid., 68; Chin You, “‘New’ Immigration, Sacred Spaces, and Identity Transformations.” 142 Middleton, The Municipality of Toronto, 3: 351. 143 Globe, 10 August 1914.

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Notes to pages 298–302

144 Toronto Public Library Biographical Scrapbook for Lancelot Minehan. Toronto Star Weekly, 1911 clipping. 145 Ibid. 146 Ibid. 147 Catholic Register, 30 May 1907. 148 Toronto Star, 24 November 1900 and 3 December 1910. 149 See McGowan, The Waning of the Green, 158, 161 (Table 5.3). 150 Compare Catholic Register, 22 June 1911 and 18 June 1914. 151 Irish Canadian, 18 July 1889, 30 October 1890, and 28 May 1891. 152 Catholic Register, October 11 1894. 153 McGowan, The Waning of the Green, 153 (Table 5.1), 154. Attempts to organize a ladies’ division may pre-date O’Connor’s resignation, though one is referred to in Catholic Register, 29 May 1908 (three weeks after his resignation). 154 See McLaughlin, “Irish Canadians and the Struggle for Irish Independence,” 99–100, 113. 155 Catholic Register, 16 May 1912. 156 See, for example, Toronto Star, 11 March 1903, 28 January 1906, 5 January 1910, and 10 February 1911. 157 Toronto Star, 23 April 1914. For the i c ac, see Toronto Star, 4 December 1907, 10 April 1908, and 5 May and 21 October 1909. Their star was Tom Longboat, a Six Nations runner and Olympian who won the Boston Marathon in 1907. 158 Dirks, “Canada’s Boys,” 121. 159 See Ryan and Wamsley, “The Fighting Irish of Toronto.” 160 Ibid., 507. 161 Toronto Star, 30 July 1925. 162 Toronto Star, 4 October 1926. 163 Report of Grand Lodge of British America 1910, address by Sproule, 21. 164 Sentinel, 31 October 1912. 165 Akenson, Small Differences, 113; see also Miller, “Anti-Catholicism in Canada,” 41. 166 Sentinel, 11 and 18 May 1911; Moir, “Toronto’s Protestants and their Perceptions of their Roman Catholic Neighbours,” 321. 167 Sentinel, 12 November 1914. 168 Sentinel, 8 January, 5 March, and 9 July 1914. 169 See McGowan, The Waning of the Green, 108–14. 170 Catholic Register, 22 May 1913. 171 Irish Canadian, 12 December 1889. 172 Irish Canadian, 8 January and 12 February 1891.

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Notes to pages 302–9

437

173 Catholic Register, 13 August 1914. 174 See, for example, Globe, 24, 25, and 28 February 1898, and Toronto Evening Star, 5 and 7 February 1898. 175 Irish Canadian, 18 October 1888 and 26 February 1891. See his obituary in Toronto Star, 14 June 1916. 176 McGowan, The Waning of the Green, 276, 403. 177 See Globe, 23 February 1898. 178 Careless, Toronto to 1914, 193. 179 See Weaver, “Order and Efficiency,” and Wickett, Municipal Government in Canada. 180 Toronto Evening Telegram, 5 February 1910. 181 Greater Toronto and the Men Who Made It, 119. 182 Jenkins, “Homeland Crisis and Local Ethnicity.” 183 Globe, 25 February 1898. 184 Sentinel, 8 January 1914. 185 Dooley, Days Beyond Recall, 211.

chapter nine   1 See O’Day, “Imagined Irish Communities,” 412–15.   2 Ward, Ireland and Anglo-American Relations, 4. See also Kerby Miller, “Class, Culture and Immigrant Group Identity,” 117.   3 Funchion, “Irish Parliamentary Fund Association,” 205.   4 The Music Hall meeting is described in Catholic Union and Times, 27 April 1893. Preliminary meetings are covered in the issues for 6, 13, and 20 April.  5 Catholic Union and Times, 27 April 1893.  6 Catholic Union and Times, 4 and 18 May 1893.   7 Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, 143.  8 Catholic Union and Times, 4 March 1897.   9 Kenny, The American Irish, 202–3; Kibler, “The Stage Irishwoman.”  10 See Buffalo Courier, 17 March 1904 and 7 March 1909.  11 Catholic Union and Times, 17 March 1909.   12 Anxieties about “American” influence extended back to Ireland itself. See Cronin and Adair, The Wearing of the Green, 74.   13 Much of the Buffalo fair echoes the account of the World’s Fair in Quinn, “The Irish Villages at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition,” although Maguire is not mentioned.  14 Catholic Union and Times, 28 April 1898.  15 Ibid.

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Notes to pages 309–12

16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 The term comes from Jacobson, Special Sorrows, 76. 19 Catholic Union and Times, 26 April 1898. 20 Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, 24 May 1898. 21 Catholic Union and Times, 27 November 1902. Joyce was also reputed to have relatives in Buffalo; see 1 March 1903. 22 Catholic Union and Times, 29 January 1903. 23 For Gaelic sports, see Catholic Union and Times, 7 July 1892 and 13 August 1908. For Irish language classes, see Catholic Union and Times, 10 March 1898 and 2 February 1899. Their apparent demise is noted in Ni Bhromeil, Building Irish Identity, 50, 54. 24 Buffalo Courier, 14 March 1915. 25 See Darby, “Gaelic Games, Ethnic Identity and Irish Nationalism.” 26 See McCracken, Forgotten Protest, xx, and M.J. Kelly, The Fenian Ideal, 148. 27 Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions and Anglo-Saxons,” 1342. 28 See Catholic Union and Times, 11 January, Buffalo Express, 9 January, and Buffalo Courier, 10 January 1900. 29 Catholic Union and Times, 25 January 1900. 30 Buffalo Courier, 22 January 1900. 31 Buffalo Express, 22 January 1900. 32 Funchion, “Clan Na Gael,” 83. Keating’s role in the 1867 rising is noted in Gaelic American, 5 March 1910. 33 Carroll, American Opinion and the Irish Question, 8, 195–6. 34 Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions and Anglo-Saxons,” 1326. See also Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 203–22. 35 Doorley, Irish-American Diasporic Nationalism, 23–8; Ward, Ireland and Anglo-American Relations, 20. 36 Mooney’s younger brother Henry committed suicide only days before. See Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, 16 and 20 June 1910, and Buffalo Courier, 21 June 1910. 37 Catholic Union and Times, 9 March 1899. 38 Ward, Ireland and Anglo-American Relations, 17. 39 See, for example, Fenian Volunteer, 21 September 1867. 40 Catholic Union and Times, 12 March 1903. These principles were drawn up at Clan headquarters in New York and published on the front page of the Gaelic American. 41 Catholic Union and Times, 12 March 1903. 42 New York Times, 9 March 1903.

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Notes to pages 312–17

439

43 Catholic Union and Times, 24 September 1903. 44 Catholic Union and Times, 23 November 1899. 45 Catholic Union and Times, 16 November 1899. 46 Catholic Union and Times, 23 April 1903. 47 Ibid. 48 See letter from Mooney to Michael Davitt, quoted in O’Day, “Imagined Irish Communities,” 405; Emmons, The Butte Irish, 325; and Meagher, Inventing Irish America, 258. 49 Quoted in O’Day, “Irish Diaspora Politics,” 233. 50 The Buffalo u i l branch was named after Parnell and “the first name upon its membership roll was that of James Mooney” who died later that summer. See Buffalo Express, 20 June 1910. 51 Catholic Union and Times, 17 June 1897. 52 Catholic Union and Times, 31 August 1899; see also 25 October and 9 November 1899. 53 The series commenced in the Catholic Union and Times 15 March and concluded 30 August 1900. 54 Catholic Union and Times, 29 March 1900. 55 Catholic Union and Times, 5 May and 30 June 1898 and 31 August 1899. 56 Catholic Union and Times, 12 March 1908. 57 Buffalo Courier, 6 March 1905. 58 Ibid. 59 Cummings attempted to turn the organization against the Irish Party and forge links with German-American organizations when an Anglo-German war looked likely in 1907. See Ward, Ireland and Anglo-American Relations, 27–8. 60 Kelly, The Fenian Ideal, 231. 61 Gaelic American, 15 August 1908. 62 Catholic Union and Times, 25 February 1909. 63 Gaelic American, 27 November 1909. 64 O’Day, “Irish Nationalism and Anglo-American Relations,” 188. 65 Lyne, “Irish-Canadian Financial Contributions,” 184–8. 66 Only the wealthy could be persuaded to dig into their pockets for the ­benefit of the Irish Party, hence Blake’s strategy “to canvass privately the better-off Irish” before going public; see Lyne, “Irish-Canadian Financial Contributions,” 192, 201. The Toronto share is noted on 201. Blake’s biographer claims that “the Irish party was saved from collapse by his efforts.” See Banks, Edward Blake, 337. 67 Letter from Archbishop of Toronto to Hon. Edward Blake, qc , mp, in Proceedings of the Irish Race Convention 1896, 2.

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Notes to pages 317–21

68 Proceedings of the Irish Race Convention 1896, 69. 69 Jackson, Home Rule, 120. 70 See Stubbs, “Visions of the Common Good,” 202–43. 71 Toronto Evening Telegram, 16 March 1900. 72 Toronto World, 18 March 1898; Toronto Evening Telegram, 17 March 1900. 73 Toronto Evening Telegram, 18 March 1901. “Bobs” of course referred to Lord Frederick Roberts, then in command of the British forces in South Africa. 74 Minor parades are noted in Toronto World, 15 March 1897 and 14 March 1898. See also Trigger, “Irish Politics on Parade,” 195. None occurred, by my estimation, between 1899 and 1916. 75 Toronto World, 17 March 1897 and 18 March 1898. 76 Toronto Evening Telegram, 17 March 1898; see also Cronin and Adair, The Wearing of the Green, 72. 77 Toronto Evening Telegram, 18 March 1899. 78 Catholic Register, 19 October 1899. 79 Toronto Evening Telegram, 19 March 1900. 80 Ibid.; Mail and Empire, 19 March 1900. 81 See for example Catholic Register, 19 and 26 April and 9 August 1900. 82 Currie, “Reluctant Britons.” 83 Catholic Register, 19 March 1903. 84 Quoted in Wilson, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, 2: 146. 85 Catholic Register, 4, 11, and 25 October 1894. 86 Toronto Star, 23 May 1905. 87 Toronto Star, 22 May 1909. 88 Toronto Star, 25 May 1906. 89 Stamp, “Empire Day in the Schools of Ontario,” 38. 90 See, for example, the reports given in Globe, 3 June 1897, 1898, and 1899, and Vronsky, Ridgeway, 282–8. 91 See Globe, 30 May 1898, and Toronto Star, 30 May 1898. 92 Catholic Register, 23 May 1907. 93 Catholic Register, 23 May 1907 and 27 May 1909. 94 McGowan, The Waning of the Green (141), notes initial approval of Empire Day processions by the Register, but his argument that the day promoted social integration for Toronto’s Catholics does not hold for the years before 1915. 95 See Berger, The Sense of Power, 134, 259–60. 96 This idea of an affective, as opposed to an instrumental, allegiance comes from Hutchinson, “Diasporic Dilemmas and Shifting Allegiances,” 116.

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Notes to pages 321–4

441

  97 McGowan, “Toronto’s English-Speaking Catholics,” 211.  98 Catholic Register, 19 December 1907.  99 Toronto Evening Telegram, 18 March 1904. 100 Ibid. 101 Catholic Register, 24 March 1904. The attendance was estimated at 5,000. 102 Carroll, “United Irish League of America,” 272–3. 103 Ibid., 273. 104 Ward, Ireland and Anglo-American Relations, 16. 105 Globe, 2 December 1902. The occupations of those seated on the platform were obtained from city directories. 106 Globe, 2 December 1902. 107 Ibid. 108 John Costigan of Nova Scotia moved the resolution, which gained the support of both Liberal Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Conservative leader Robert L. Borden. While Borden was convinced that “the great mass of the Irish people were loyal,” Toronto’s one-time Orange mayor, E.F. Clarke, warned that the ultimate goal of the Irish Home Rulers was separation from the United Kingdom. Others were convinced that the precedents of the 1880s rendered Canadian interference in Irish affairs to be unwarranted. The resolution passed (102-41), giving the impression again that if Irish Home Rule mattered to Canada at all, it was in favour of the measure. See Globe, 1 April 1903, and House of Commons Debates 1903, 58: 719–814. 109 Globe, 17 September 1904. The occupations of the prominent officials mentioned were obtained from city directories. 110 McGowan, “Toronto’s English-Speaking Catholics,” 220. 111 Catholic Register, 5 March 1903. 112 Globe, 17 September 1904. 113 Ibid. 114 Globe, 15 October 1906. 115 Toronto Star, 18 May 1906. 116 Ni Bhromeil, Building Irish Identity, 73. 117 Toronto Evening Telegram, 18 May 1906. 118 Ni Bhromeil, Building Irish Identity, 78. 119 Catholic Register, 19 December 1907. 120 Globe, 26 March 1948. 121 Toronto Star Weekly, 4 October 1930. The original 1901 edition is ­a mi c u s No. 23732162 (search for “Hinds” performed on Library and Archives Canada website http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/index-e.

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Notes to pages 324–30

html, accessed 29 June 2009). A second edition appeared in 1915 (amicus No. 19815224). 122 McGowan, The Waning of the Green. 123 Toronto Evening Telegram, 18 March 1906. Tallies were comparable at other affairs. See Toronto Evening Telegram, 18 March 1909, and Mail and Empire, 18 March 1911. 124 New York Times, 31 July 1903; M.J. Kelly, The Fenian Ideal, 141. 125 Catholic Register, 24 March 1904. 126 Ibid. 127 Toronto Evening Telegram, 18 March 1905. 128 Catholic Register, 23 March 1905. 129 Toronto Evening Telegram, 18 March 1905. 130 Toronto Star, 18 March 1905; Toronto World, 18 March 1905. 131 Toronto Evening Telegram, 18 March 1905. 132 National Hibernian, 15 April 1905. 133 Toronto Evening Telegram, 18 March 1907; Catholic Register, 21 March 1907. 134 Gaelic American, 15 August 1906. 135 Catholic Register, 19 March 1908. 136 McGowan, The Waning of the Green, 154. 137 Toronto World, 18 March 1904; Toronto Evening Telegram, 18 March 1905. 138 Toronto Evening Telegram, 18 March 1908. 139 Catholic Register, 26 November 1903. Emmet was honoured only with a biography in Catholic Register, 5 March 1903. 140 Catholic Register, 17 November 1904. 141 Toronto Star, 4 April 1906. 142 Born in Co. Donegal, MacManus was prominent within a minority aoh faction in Ireland that had aligned with the Irish Republican Brotherhood and Clan na Gael, and he was put under police surveillance in Ireland several months after his Toronto visit. See M.J. Kelly, The Fenian Ideal, 182, 230–1; Buffalo Courier, 11 March 1907; and Buffalo Express, 11 March 1907. 143 Toronto Evening Telegram, 18 March 1903. 144 Catholic Register, 19 March 1903. 145 Toronto Evening Telegram, 18 March 1904. 146 Toronto World, 18 March 1904. 147 Gaelic American, 19 March 1910. Keating spoke to the Buffalo Express, and a report of the interview was published on 6 March. 148 Carroll, American Opinion and the Irish Question, 27.

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Notes to pages 330–4

443

149 Buffalo Courier, 28 September 1910. The convention was also reported upon in the Buffalo Express (25 and 28 September) and the Catholic Union and Times (29 September). 150 Catholic Union and Times, 27 February 1913. 151 See entry for Stephen Vincent O’Gorman in Larned, History of Buffalo, 1: 185. 152 Doorley, Irish American Diasporic Nationalism, 28; Emmons, The Butte Irish, 322; Meagher, Inventing Irish America, 243. 153 Catholic Union and Times, 13 March 1913; Gaelic American, 21 March 1914. 154 Catholic Union and Times, 19 January 1922. 155 Ibid. “Shoneen” (Little John) referred to an upstart Irishman happy to imitate English manners and other cultural mores. 156 Catholic Union and Times, 2 July 1914; see also Carroll, “America and Irish Political Independence,” 272–7. 157 Catholic Union and Times, 13 August 1914. 158 McLaughlin, “Irish Canadians and the Struggle for Irish Independence,” 143–4. 159 Catholic Union and Times, 1 October 1914. 160 Catholic Union and Times, 9 September 1910. Vronsky, Ridgeway, 241, posits a figure of 5,000, although 22,000 volunteers were mobilized on the Canadian side (xxxii). 161 Emmons, The Butte Irish, 348. 162 Catholic Union and Times, 4 March 1915. 163 Catholic Union and Times, 11 March 1915. 164 Catholic Union and Times, 19 November and 3 December 1914. 165 See the various reports before and after the event in Catholic Union and Times, 25 February and 4, 11, and 18 March 1915. 166 Catholic Union and Times, 18 March 1915. 167 Ibid. 168 Ó Lúing, Kuno Meyer, 1. 169 See Ó Lúing, Kuno Meyer, 170–4, 188. Meyer described the Buffalo affair as “splendid.” 170 See Yox, “The Fall of the German-American Community,” especially 128–31. 171 Buffalo Courier, 14 March 1915. 172 Ibid. 173 Buffalo Courier, 14 and 18 March 1915; Catholic Union and Times, 25 March 1915; Buffalo Evening News, 18 March 1915. 174 Catholic Union and Times, 1 July 1915.

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Notes to pages 334–41

175 Buffalo Evening News, 17 March 1916. 176 Report of Grand Lodge of British America 1906, 18. 177 Toronto Reference Library, Orange Lodge (L35) collection, Series XVIII, J.D. Lyons to Robert J. Small, 16 September 1913. 178 Toronto Reference Library, Orange Lodge (L35) collection, Series XVIII, John Dugan to Robert J. Small, 7 November 1913. 179 See O’Donovan, “Ulster and Home Rule for Ireland.” 180 Rutherford, The Making of the Canadian Media, 49. There were six locally published daily newspapers in Toronto at this time. 181 Such letters included that of F.G. Chestnutt from the Mountjoy Orange lodge in Belfast, whose long letter entitled “Home Rule Means Rome Rule” was published on 31 March 1914. 182 Toronto Star, 29 February 1912. See also Hopkins, “Canada and the Irish Home Rule Question.” 183 Toronto Star, 29 February 1912. 184 Quoted in Vipond, Liberty and Community, 105. 185 Sentinel, 4 May 1911; see also 5 September 1912 editorial. 186 Toronto Evening Telegram, 27 August 1912. See also 29 August 1911. 187 See Robert Hill’s introduction in Sellar, The Tragedy of Quebec, xxxi, and Hill, Voice of the Vanishing Majority. The Tragedy of Quebec was published in four volumes between 1907 and 1916. 188 See, for example, Belfast News-Letter, 14 and 21 July 1913. 189 Sentinel, 26 September 1912. 190 Sentinel, 7 August 1913. 191 Toronto Star, 11 October 1913. Maguire’s Orange links are referred to in the report of the Craigavon meeting in Belfast News-Letter, 14 July 1913. For a note on the visit of Belfast Presbyterian pastor and uv f chaplain Rev. John Gailey, see Toronto Star, 14 July 1914. 192 Sentinel, 12 September 1912. 193 Sentinel, 26 September 26 1912. 194 Sentinel, 28 November 28 1912. 195 Bew, Ideology and the Irish Question, 68. 196 Sentinel, 3 October 1912. See also McLaughlin, “Irish Canadians and the Struggle for Irish Independence,” 76–7. 197 Sentinel, 3 October 1912. 198 Sentinel, 26 June 1913 and 2 April and 6 August 1914. 199 Sentinel, 23 October 1913. 200 These were generous donations. See McLaughlin, “Irish Canadians and the Struggle for Irish Independence,” 76–8. 201 Sentinel, 14 May 1914.

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Notes to pages 341–4

445

202 Sentinel, 14 May and 4 June 1914. 203 Enniskillen Lodge No. 387 hoped that their contributions would stir other lodges to donate and so “keep the lamp of freedom burning that our forefathers died for at Derry, Aughrim, Enniskillen, and the Boyne.” See Sentinel, 11 June 1914. 204 Hopkins, “Ireland and the War,” 128. 205 Toronto Star, 9 May 1914, estimated a total of 12,000 participants; the Globe, 11 May, estimated 15,000. The latter, curiously, estimated a mere 2,000 marchers. The Sentinel, 14 May, estimated 6,000 marchers. 206 The cablegram read: “Thousands of loyal Canadians are with you in your magnificent fight to preserve the best traditions of British citizenship by resisting the coercion of Ulster. We are ready, if necessary, to help you with men and money to the last ditch.” See House of Commons Debates 1914, 115: 2082. 207 Globe, 11 May 1914. 208 House of Commons Debates 1914, 116: 3573. 209 See Jackson, Home Rule, 127–30. 210 Toronto Star, 3 February 1912. 211 Toronto Star, 29 February 1912; Catholic Register, 26 December 1912. 212 Catholic Union and Times, 10 October 1912. 213 Catholic Union and Times, 17 October 1912. 214 Mail and Empire, 18 March 1911. 215 Toronto Evening Telegram, 18 March 1912. 216 Jolivet, “French Canadians and the Irish Question, 1900–21,” 219. 217 See Toronto Evening Telegram, 9 March 1912. The Buffalo uil convention of 1910 reported $2,855 in contributions from Montreal in contrast to a mere $50 from Ontario; Catholic Union and Times, 29 September 1910. 218 Toronto Star, 15 December 1911. 219 See, for example, Toronto Evening Telegram, 25 April, 3 August, and 4 and 20 September 1913. 220 See Toronto Star, 9 May 1910. The issue of exposing young men to strong drink was seemingly a factor in Hinds’s departure from the ic ac, which was later discussed publicly. See Toronto Evening Telegram, 21 April 1911. 221 Gaelic American, 20 December 1913. 222 See Toronto Star, 25 February 1931. Reflecting on a period of study in the 1890s in Aachen, Germany, Fallon stated: “I began to think of England and Ireland, first of all, as a nation, then of Canada, and I brought in Australia and New Zealand and the other Dominions

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Notes to pages 344–9

before reaching complete conviction, and I said ‘What are these people going to do unless we get together?’ From that moment I was a British imperialist.” 223 Catholic Union and Times, 29 September 1910. 224 Gaelic American, 27 December 1913. 225 Gaelic American, 20 December 1913. 226 Globe, 19 December 1913. 227 Ibid. 228 Gaelic American, 27 December 1913. 229 Toronto Star, 21 and 22 April 1914. 230 Catholic Register, 19 March 1914. 231 Ibid.; see also Toronto Evening Telegram, 13 March 1914. 232 See, for example, Globe, 4 and 6 April 1914, and Boyle, “A Fenian Protestant in Canada.” 233 The headline appeared on the front page of the Catholic Register, 28 May 1914. 234 Toronto Star, 18 September 1914. 235 Toronto Star, 13 and 15 January 1915. 236 See Miller, Our Glory and Our Grief, 15–34. 237 Ibid., 29. 238 Sentinel, 3 September 1914. 239 Sentinel, 3 September and 1 October 1914. 240 Sentinel, 10 September 1914. 241 Toronto Star Weekly, 6 March 1915. 242 Sentinel, 28 January 1915. 243 Miller, Our Glory and Our Grief, 78. 244 Sentinel, 2 March 1916. 245 Sentinel, 16 March 1916. 246 Sentinel, 27 April 1916. 247 Sentinel, 24 February 1916. 248 Dixon became senior camp chaplain of the Toronto Military District while Coburn served as chaplain for the 201st Battalion. 249 Middleton, The Municipality of Toronto, 3: 245. 250 Hayes, Holding Forth the Word of Life, 28. 251 The honour roll is included in “Trinity Church: An Historic Church,” and the names were checked in the World War I enlistment forms available at http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/databases/cef/001042-100.01-e.php (accessed July 2007). 252 McGowan, The Waning of the Green, 258–9.

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Notes to pages 349–53

447

253 Sixty cadets from De La Salle Institute participated in 1912. See Mail and Empire, 24 May 1912. 254 McGowan, The Waning of the Green, 252. 255 Mail and Empire, 22 and 24 May 1915. 256 Toronto Evening Telegram, 21 August 1914; Toronto Star, 22 April and 28 July 1916; Miller, Our Glory and Our Grief, 93. 257 Miller, Our Glory and Our Grief, 95. 258 McGowan, The Waning of the Green, 262. 259 Ibid., 261. 260 Sentinel, 27 January 1916. 261 Sentinel, 3 February and 9 March 1916. 262 See obituary to Megaw in New York Times, 15 April 1973. 263 General Assembly, A History of Congregations in the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 184; Williamson, May Street Presbyterian Church Centenary, 88–91. 264 Catholic Register, 22 July 1915. 265 Catholic Register, 25 March 1915. 266 Ibid. See, for example, Sentinel, 19 November 1914. 267 See McLaughlin, “Irish Canadians and the Struggle for Irish Independence,” 143–6. 268 Sentinel, 24 February and March 30 1916. 269 Carroll, American Opinion and the Irish Question, 202; Doorley, IrishAmerican Diaspora Nationalism, 184. 270 Catholic Union and Times, 18 May 1916. 271 Carroll, American Opinion and the Irish Question, 79. 272 Ibid., 202. O’Leary later became president of the American Truth Society and received the following rebuke from President Woodrow Wilson during the campaign of 1916: “I would feel deeply mortified to have you or anybody like you vote for me. Since you have access to many disloyal Americans and I have not, I will ask you to convey this message to them.” See Link, Woodrow Wilson, 247. 273 Sentinel, 4 May 1916. 274 Sentinel, 25 May 1916. 275 Catholic Union and Times, 11 May 1916. 276 Ibid. 277 Ibid. 278 Catholic Register, 4 May 1916. 279 Catholic Register, 11 May 1916. 280 Catholic Register, 13 July 1916. Emphasis added. 281 Catholic Register, 20 July 1916.

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Notes to pages 355–64

c onc l usio n   1 Among immigration historians, see Kazal, Becoming Old Stock, 272; Meagher, Inventing Irish America; and Stanger-Ross, Staying Italian. For comparative historians, see Haupt and Kocka, “Comparative History”; Pedersen, “Comparative History and Women’s History”; and Campbell, Ireland’s New Worlds.   2 For example, Olson and Thornton, Peopling the North American City; Jolivet, “French Canadians and the Irish Question”; Trigger, “Irish Politics on Parade”; Emmons, Beyond the American Pale; Gleeson, The Irish in the South; and McCaffrey, “Diaspora Comparisons and Irish-American Uniqueness.”   3 Samuel Baily makes a similar point in his study of Italians, Immigrants in the Land of Promise, 220.   4 Barrett and Roediger, “The Irish and the ‘Americanization’ of the ‘New Immigrants.’”   5 Thus connecting to Donald MacRaild’s ideas of a global Orange diaspora; see Faith, Fraternity and Fighting, 286–320, and “Wherever Orange is Worn.”   6 Akenson, Small Differences. Increased rates of “mixed” marriages could also be considered here; see McGowan, The Waning of the Green, 104–16.   7 On the first point, see O’Day, “Imagined Irish Communities,” 408, and Conzen et al., “The Invention of Ethnicity,” 5.  8 Buffalo Express, 5 March 1917; Gaelic American, 14 April 1917.  9 Catholic Union and Times, 5 December 1918.  10 Gaelic American, 3 January 1920.  11 Catholic Union and Times, 31 August 1922.  12 Toronto Star, 16 March 1918.   13 McEvoy, “Canadian Catholic Press Reaction”; McLaughlin, “Irish Canadians and the Struggle for Irish Independence,” 224.  14 Toronto Star, 10 December 1921.  15 Toronto Star, 29 December 1922. McLaughlin also argues for the existence of Irish-Canadian republicanism in “Irish Canadians and the Struggle for Irish Independence,” 317.  16 Sentinel, 19 February 1920.  17 See Toronto Star, 1 October 1926, and Smyth, “In Defence of Ulster.”  18 Catholic Union and Times, 12 January 1922.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations, figures, and tables. acculturation, 14, 105, 123, 305 Act of Union, 146, 193, 319 Adam, G. Mercer, 35, 37, 58, 67 Adamson, William, 167, 173 Aikenhead, James (father of Thomas), 240–1, 293 Aikenhead, Thomas, 240–1 alcohol: at Orange functions, 138, 258; and poverty, 92; prohibition, 259, 260; regulation and control of, 257–9; temperance societies, 125–8; violence and, 79–80 alienation, 3, 55, 92 Allen, Thomas, 120, 166 Altschuler, Glenn, 27 American-British diplomatic relations, 310–11, 315 American Land League. See Irish National Land League of America American politics, 160, 161; Irish factor in, 144–5, 147, 176; in postCivil War decades, 145. See also Democrats; Republicans American Revolution, 19, 20

25560-Jenkins.indb 491

Ancient Order of Hibernians (aoh), 343, 350–1; Buffalo divisions, 274–5; commemorations, 312, 327–8; cooperation with Clan na Gael, 315; fundraising activities, 307; gatherings, 314–15; policing of ethnic Irishness, 308; and proBoer movement, 310; promotion of Ireland and Irish history, 308–11; Toronto divisions, 298–9, 323, 325–7 Anglicans, 24; congregation in Toronto, 111–12; occupational ­distribution of, 61–2, 370 Anglo-Boer War, 232, 310, 343 Anglo-Irish Treaty (1922), 362–4 Anglophobia, 204, 211, 314, 325, 351 Anglo-Saxonism, 232–3, 311, 315, 318–20, 324 anti-imperialism, 196 Archibald, David, 251–2, 322 Armagh, County, 42, 186, 215; emigration from, 38; as a source of Toronto’s Irish, 36, 41, 71, 77, 113, 116, 166–7, 254, 293 Armstrong, Christopher, 33

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492 Index

Armstrong, James, 41 Ashfield, James, 254, 425n110 associations: Catholic, 122–5, 143, 274–5; homes used for hosting, 276; and political affiliation, 150– 1; Presbyterian, 111, 292; purpose of, 11–12; recreational excursions, 122–5; role of clergy in, 74; sporting clubs, 299–300. See also temperance societies Australian (secret) ballot, 163, 178 Baily, Samuel, 10 Baldwin, Arthur Henry, 140 Baldwin, Robert (son of William Warren), 23, 140, 145, 164 Baldwin, William Warren, 23, 140, 145 Barrett, James, 247, 374n13 Beaty, James, 164–5, 171–2, 185 Bell, Robert, 164–5 belonging, senses of, 13, 84, 108, 115 Bickerstaff, Robert C., 112 Birmingham, Robert, 166 Blake, Edward, 145, 322, 439n66; fund-raising efforts, 316–17; Liberal leadership, 169, 174, 179; support for Home Rule, 216, 218 Blessing, Patrick, 16 Blevins, John, 167, 173 Blumin, Stuart, 27 boarding-houses, 31, 88, 89, 90, 256; owners/proprietors, 86, 90–1; as political sites, 155–6 boss-saloon system, 88, 91, 104, 156, 174; and labour relations, 92, 260–1, 263 Boston Pilot, 45, 181, 218, 410n2 Bourassa, Henri, 321, 343–4 Bourdieu, Pierre, 90, 177, 357 Bourke, Thomas F., 195

25560-Jenkins.indb 492

Boyle, Mark, 182 Boyle, Patrick, 175, 187, 189–90, 318, 358; on anti-imperialism, 196; on biased hiring practices, 73, 165; on Canada-British ties, 218; on Catholic participation in politics, 301–2; death, 322; description of O’Connell, 193; role in Land League, 209–10; view of Home Rule, 194–5 breadbasket region, 25–6 Brennan, John, 145, 242 Bridges, Amy, 180, 388n54 Bridget (“Biddy”) caricature, 62, 64, 67, 244–5 British Empire, 212–15, 319, 339, 345, 353, 361; celebrations of, 314, 320–1; involvement in South Africa, 317–18; loyalty to, 213, 345 British imperialism, 13, 320–1, 344; pro-imperial expressions, 317, 344 British North America, 20; Act (1867), 5, 190; Irish emigration rates, 39; immigration from the United Kingdom, 24. See also Upper Canada British Women’s Emigration Association, 245 Britton, James, 168, 197, 414n102 Brown, George, 171–2 Brubaker, Rogers, 11 Bryan, William Jennings, 262, 279, 280 Buchanan, A.C., 36, 38 Buckner, Phillip, 211 Buffalo: architecture, 226–7; early settlement, 22, 24–6; grain shipping, 26, 31; industry and manufacturing, 30, 225; location (map),

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Index 493

21; number of churches, 108; political structure, 28; Protestant to Catholic church ratio in (1880), 34–5; railroads, 30, 239–40; religious makeup, 25; riot of 1814, 22; schools, 120–2, 122. See also streets and neighbourhoods, Buffalo Buffalo harbour: anti-social behaviour at, 98; boarding-houses, 31; famine memorial, 47–8; flour receipts at, 30; grain elevators, 82, 85, 86–7, 356; improvement, 259; labour organization at, 73; work opportunities, 58–9, 87 Bunting, Christopher, 211 Burke, Rev. John E., 362–3 Burke, Thomas Francis, 350–1 Butt, Isaac, 190, 194, 198 Cabbagetown, Toronto, 77, 166–7, 168, 433n93 Canadian Catholic Extension Society, 323 Canadian Expeditionary Force (cef), 346, 348 Canadian Municipal Corporations Act (1849), 27 Canadian politics, 27, 145–7, 180; power structure, 161; provincial and federal elections, 170, 304, 409n175; public disinterest in, 163–4. See also Liberal Party Canadian Unionist League, 341 Careless, J.M.S., 31, 231, 302 Carr, Henry, 300 Carothers, David (and family), 290–1, 295 Carson, Sir Edward, 329, 338, 342, 353, 363; statuettes of, 339, 340

25560-Jenkins.indb 493

Cashman, Michael, 241–2 Catholic churches, Buffalo: Annunciation parish, 273–4, 283; associations, 122–4, 143, 274–5; banners and flags, 129–30; geography of, 272; Holy Angels parish, 117, 130–1, 273–4, 344, 430n29; Holy Family parish, 272; Immaculate Conception parish, 276; map of locations, 84; Nativity parish, 273–4, 283; Our Lady of Perpetual Help parish, 261, 272, 331; Seminary of Our Lady of Angels, 117; St Bridget’s parish, 97, 117–18, 205; St Columba’s parish, 240, 276; St Joseph’s Cathedral, 117, 126, 130, 190, 244, 273; St Patrick’s parish, 44, 97, 117, 205; St Stephen’s parish, 117–18, 274, 276, 331; West Side relocation of, 273. See also temperance societies Catholic churches, Toronto: attendance, 434n105; confraternities, 123; discipline and devotional habits of, 108, 115, 297; Holy Name parish, 288–9; maps of, 68, 288; St Helen’s parish, 77, 288–9, 299; St Mary’s parish, 78, 116–17, 297; St Michael’s Cathedral, 68, 77, 79, 116; St Patrick’s parish, 78, 141, 285, 298; St Paul’s parish, 93, 111, 116–17, 285, 350; St Peter’s parish (and associational branches), 297–8 Catholic Irish: homeownership, 101–4, 289; jail statistics, 80–1; narratives, 212; occupational profiles of, 58–61, 59, 61, 235–6, 236; political representation for, 168– 71, 173, 179, 218, 302, 358;

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494 Index

politicians, 164, 167–9, 171–2, 302–3; poverty and relief for, 92–5; predominance in Buffalo, 48; provincial and county origins of, 36, 37, 51, 52–3, 53; public perception of, 80, 92, 105; residential movements, 272–3, 286–8; settlement in Toronto, 77–80; surnames, 49, 55, 66; in Toronto police force, 73, 252–3; workplace discrimination, 73, 165 Catholic League, 170–1, 173 Catholic literature, 128–9 Catholic Mutual Benefit Association (cmba), 74, 151, 274, 276; branches and membership, 130–1, 132 Catholic Register (Toronto), 253, 255, 301, 318, 346, 363; account of O’Neill Ryan’s speech, 325; comments on Orange enlistees, 350; on employment of Protestant teachers, 248–9; on loyalty in Ireland, 319; reaction to Easter 1916 executions, 352–3 Catholic Union and Times (Buffalo), 129, 150, 217, 247, 273, 352; on alcoholism and temperance, 126, 128; on the Anglo-Irish Treaty, 364; on the boss-saloon system, 156; on Buffalo politics, 156–7; critique of Anglo-Saxonism, 315; description of Irish cottages, 309; on domestic servants, 66; on earnings of grain scoopers, 260; loan ads, 104; news of Ireland, 128, 206, 208; reports on home venues, 275–7; series on English history, 314; support for Parnell, 218; on teacher recruitment, 121; on Ulster Covenant, 342

25560-Jenkins.indb 494

Cavan, County, 38, 95, 112, 296 Cawl, Richard, 240, 270–1 chain migration, 36, 87, 104 Chambers, George, 152, 159, 186 Charbonnel, Armand de, 101, 116, 118 charitable assistance: for Catholic Irish, 92–5, 97; percentage of Buffalo families receiving (1907), 231, 420n20; from politicians, 97; for Protestant Irish, 94–6; total applicants by birthplace, 97–8, 99. See also House of Industry; House of Providence; Irish Protestant Benevolent Society (ipbs); St Vincent de Paul Society Charity Act (1874), 94 Charity Organization Society (c os), 98, 99 Chicago, 265, 322, 428n4 Chinese immigrants, 285 Christian Brothers, 117–18, 120, 125, 187 Chudacoff, Howard, 282 Church of Ireland, 110–11. See also Anglicans citizenship: American, 192–3; rights of, 209 city geography, 223–4 Civil War (American), 5, 147; veterans, 148–9 Civil War (Irish), 362 Clan na Gael, 183, 187, 199, 207, 216, 351; American Irish Volunteer Fund, 331; commemorations, 311–12; membership, 186, 311 Clare, County, 58, 206, 297, 390n105; as a source of Buffalo’s Irish, 46, 48, 84, 151, 156, 250, 283, 330, 332; surnames of, 49

13-08-29 13:46

Index 495

Clark, Samuel, 206 Clarke, Brian, 8, 36, 123–5 Clarke, E.F. (Ned), 71–2, 74, 209–10, 320 class: labour, 262; social, 75, 286. See also middle class; working class Cleveland, 265, 428n4 Cleveland, Grover, 152–4 Clossey, E.P., 242 Cohalan, Daniel, 311–12, 316 “collar line,” 251, 267, 270–1, 289 comparative studies, 9–10, 16, 355 Confederation, Canadian, 13, 27, 189–90, 218 Conmee Act (1894), 176 Connaught, province, 38–9, 43, 46, 113, 416n153 Conners, William “Fingy,” 75, 157–9, 260–1, 406n79 Connolly, James, 352, 354 Conservatives, 166, 170. See also Orange Order; Toryism consumerism, 265, 277, 308, 318, 359 Conzen, Kathleen Neils, 376n48 Cooke, Henry, 109–10 Cooke’s Presbyterian Church, 109–11, 114, 134, 292, 317 Cork, County, 53, 58, 103, 116, 140, 164, 323, 383n129; as a source of Buffalo’s Irish, 45–6, 48, 55–6, 152, 154, 160, 229, 316; surnames of, 49 Corktown, Toronto, 52–3, 75, 104, 168, 285–6 Costigan, John, 330, 417n175, 441n108 Cottrell, Michael, 170, 174 Coughlin, Cornelius, 157, 159, 278 Courier (Democratic newspaper, Buffalo), 148–9, 157–9, 183

25560-Jenkins.indb 495

Craig, James, 300, 363 Crawford, Lindsay, 346 Crawford, Thomas, 293, 296, 302, 329, 334, 341–2 Crawford, William, 254–5, 301, 334 criminality, 79–80; arrest patterns, 98; of Italians, 229; jail statistics, 80–1 Cronin, Patrick, 105, 117, 156, 180, 228, 307; background, 128; death, 314; dislike for the Knights of Labour, 74; nationalist politics, 190–1, 312–14; role in American Land League, 204–5, 207, 216; support for Parnell, 200, 218 Cross, Whitney, 25 cultural capital, 90–1, 153, 240, 357 Cummings, Matthew, 315, 326, 439n59 Cunneen, John, 283, 432n84 Cuthbert, Alexander, 213 Dahl, Robert, 144, 176 Dane, Fred, 296, 329, 334, 341 Dart, Joseph, 26, 86 Davin, Nicholas Flood, 80, 181, 213–14 Davitt, Michael, 187, 203, 314 Days Beyond Recall (Dooley), 48, 62, 266, 282, 305; “Biddy” caricature, 62; “Dagoes” reference, 229 de-Anglicization, 324 democracy, 23, 160, 303, 311 Democrats: befriending the working class, 75; Buffalo politicians, 75, 154–7, 279, 283; loyalties in Buffalo wards, 278–9; in New York City, 144; presidential candidates, 262; and residential movements, 282–4; victories in Buffalo, 149–50, 150, 279

13-08-29 13:46

496 Index

Denison, George T., 79, 168, 215 Derry, Siege of (1688), 137, 141 de Valera, Eamon, 362–3 Devault, Ileen, 238 Devlin, Joseph, 315, 322, 330 Devoy, John, 311, 316, 330, 344 Dewart, Rev. Edward Hartley, 95, 112–13, 134, 212, 216, 302 Diamond Jubilee (1897), 139, 314, 317 diaspora, Irish, 13–14; activities and imaginations, 15, 180–2, 190, 208–9; studies, 4, 10, 376n34 Dillon, John, 199–200, 202, 218, 399n126; arrest and jail escape, 206, 217 Dix, John, 279, 281 Dixon, Rev. Hillyard Cameron, 292, 334, 348 Dixon, Robert, 348 domestic servants, 357; advertisements for, 67, 69, 69, 70; anxieties and loneliness of, 66, 68; by birthplace, 64, 65; and employer profiles in Buffalo and Toronto (1880–81), 64, 65, 70; total per Buffalo household, 62, 63, 64, 66, 386n17, 386n34; total per Toronto household, 67–8; totals in Buffalo and Toronto (1910–11), 243–5, 244 Dominion Day, 135, 189 Donnelly, James S., Jr, 46 Donohue, Cornelius, 149, 151 Dooley, Joseph, 271–2 Dooley, Roger Burke, 48, 62, 247, 282–4 Dormer, James, 91, 155, 256–7, 426n127 Doyle, David Noel, 7, 373n2, 419n1 Doyle, James, 79

25560-Jenkins.indb 496

Dublin, 351–2 Dundalk Democrat, 43 Dunlop, Bella, 293 Dunne, Finley Peter, 145 Dwan, Dan, 79–80, 168, 285 Eagan, Sylvester, 160 Easter Rebellion (1916), 5–6, 349, 351, 374n9; commemorations, 362; reaction to, 352–4 Eaton, Timothy, 61–2, 240–1, 385n13 Eaton’s (stores), 232, 240–1 education. See schools election law: Buffalo, 157; Ontario, 161, 163 Elliott, Marianne, 110, 191 Emerald Benevolent Association (eba ), 126, 194, 197; branches, 130–1 emigration. See Irish emigration to Buffalo; Irish emigration to Toronto Emmet, Robert, 186, 207, 352, 360; commemorations, 192, 195–6, 208, 308, 312, 332; dock speech, 191 Emmet Benevolent Association, 191–2, 217 Emmet Memorial Committee, 330, 333 Empire Day, 320, 349 English immigrants, 234–5, 245, 356 Episcopalians, 25, 153, 227 Equal Rights Association, 248, 257 Erie Canal, 26, 44, 356 Erie County, 26, 157, 160, 378n32; outdoor relief recipients, 267; poorhouse, 44, 98–9, 100 ethnic events, 11, 360. See also Irishness; St Patrick’s Day celebrations

13-08-29 13:46

Index 497

ethnicity, 13, 71, 108, 305, 361; Irish, 104, 118, 178, 181; IrishAmerican, 311, 334; IrishCanadian, 324; as a process, 11 ethnicization, 11, 78, 160, 357; social memory and, 190 ethnic press, 12, 128–9, 142 Evans, Thomas, 87–8 Evening Telegram (Toronto), 253, 292, 318, 321; account of O’Neill Ryan’s speech, 325–6; cartoon of J.J. Ward, 303, 304; critique of Home Rule, 335; on Ulster unionists, 338 exploitation, 74, 88, 92 Express (Republican newspaper, Buffalo), 87, 155, 246, 279, 403n23; election coverage, 148–9, 157–8; on political trends of wards, 278, 283 Fahrni, Magda, 67 Fallon, Michael, 344–5, 445n222 Family Compact, 23, 146, 189 family economy, 60, 243, 270 famine, potato. See Great Irish Famine Fenianism: in Buffalo, 183–7; declaration of principles, 312; in Montreal and Quebec City, 196; prisoners, 187, 192; propaganda, 184; Quebec border raid, 185; Ridgeway raid, 5, 183, 320; sympathizers, 172, 185, 193, 219; in Toronto, 195 Fenian Volunteer (Buffalo), 45, 181, 182, 184–5, 411n24 Fennelly, Philip V., 282–3 Fermanagh, County, 36, 214, 328, 435n138; as a source of Toronto’s

25560-Jenkins.indb 497

Irish, 78, 103, 113, 164–6, 213, 293, 296, 348–9 firemen: Buffalo, 249–51, 250; Toronto, 254 First Ward, Buffalo: “Bloody First” label, 98, 150, 157; Catholic churches, 117; elections and voting patterns in, 149–50, 150, 279, 283; grocery, 91; Irish settlement in, 82–5; map, 84; politicians, 150–3, 279; saloons and boarding-houses, 88, 89, 90–2, 104, 155, 157–9; schools, 84, 121, 247, 272–3; St Patrick’s celebrations, 333 First World War, 6, 332; Catholic Irish enlistees, 349–50; FrenchCanadian Catholic participation in, 350; Orangemen recruits, 346–7; Protestant Irish enlistees, 347–9 Fleming, Robert John, 258, 328 Ford, Patrick, 186, 193, 412n38 Foucault, Michel, 88, 145 Foy, Charles, 42, 133 Foy, James J., 173, 302–4, 335, 336 Fredrickson, George, 9 Freemasonry. See Masons Friendly Sons of St Patrick, 334 Friends of Irish Freedom (foif), 351 Gaelic American (New York), 311, 344–5 Gaelic culture, 306; revival, 309, 323 Gaelic League, 303, 310, 323–4, 328 Gallagher, Frank B., 87, 91, 103 garment industry, 232, 235 Garson, William, 216 gender roles, 125, 237, 246, 277–8 Genessee River Valley, 20, 25; canal, 44 gentility, 277, 305

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498 Index

German-American organizations, 332–3 German immigrants: celebrations, 333; charitable assistance for, 97–8; occupational profile, 57; settlement in Buffalo, 82, 383n117 Gibson, Pat, 168 Gjerde, Jon, 115, 193 Gladstone, William Ewart, 206, 209–11, 215, 218 Glasco, Laurence Admiral, 48, 103 Globe, 94, 126, 161, 168, 335, 345; coverage of Parnell, 203; election coverage, 163–4, 179; employment opportunities at, 241–2; on Irish agricultural crisis, 201; Irish servant’s letter, 68; on the Orange Order, 138, 142; on Protestant societies, 399n144; reports on crime, 79–81 Goheen, Peter, 388n57 Goldman, Mark, 152 Gowan, Ogle, 136, 166 grain production: elevators, 82, 85, 86–7; scoopers, 73, 87–8, 91, 260; shipping, 26; strike of 1899, 260–2 Grand Old Party (Republican Party), 150, 283. See also Republicans Grassett, Henry, 253, 317 Gray, A.A., 347 Great Irish Famine, 6, 46–7, 95–6, 201 Great War. See First World War Green, Nancy, 9–10, 16 “Green” identity, 8, 197, 357; waning of the, 14, 324, 334 Gregg, William, 113, 134 Grip magazine, 168, 177; “Irish Sufferers” cartoon, 79–80, 81; ­satire on voting tactics, 175, 176 grocers, 150–1

25560-Jenkins.indb 498

Habermas, Jürgen, 108 Hackett, Thomas Lett, 78, 141 Hamilton, Alexander, 95 Hanavan, John, 150–1, 404n39 Handlin, Oscar, 55 Harcourt, Richard, 328 Harring, Sidney, 98, 178, 225, 249, 419n4 Harvey, David, 10, 156 Hayes, Alan, 111 Hearn, Richard F., 282 Hernon, Andrew T., 303, 321, 342–3, 345–6 Hewitt, John, 71–2, 171, 209, 214 Hibernian Benevolent Society (hb s), 132, 142, 178, 183, 198, 394n3; newspaper, 124, 133; recreational excursions, 124, 187 Hibernicization, 246–7 Higham, John, 9 Hinds, D’Arcy, 303, 323, 328, 342–4, 361, 363; army recruitment efforts, 349; background, 324; cartoon of, 335, 336 History of Toronto and the County of York (Mulvany and Adam), 35–6, 37, 39, 58, 380n71 Hocken, Horatio, 304, 347 Holland Land Company, 20–2 homeownership. See property ownership Home Rule, 6, 14, 182, 194–5, 204, 417n175; Act, 351; events post1920s, 362–3; first and second bills, 207–8, 211, 214, 218, 307; ipbs views of, 328–9; Orange attitudes to, 214–16, 334–5; Quebec approval of, 338; third bill, 329, 331, 342, 346; Toronto supporters/ opponents of, 210–11, 316–17,

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Index 499

323, 336–7, 341–2; Ulster exclusion from, 332, 334, 346, 353, 363 homes, 275–7 host culture, 10, 15; Protestant, 24, 132, 357 hotels: keepers, 165; licenses, 257–9; total per population (1880), 256. See also saloons and taverns House of Industry: English relief applicants, 94; Irish Catholic relief applicants, 93–4; total relief recipients (1868–75), 93 House of Lords, 207, 218, 329, 346 House of Providence, 93–4, 320 Houston, Cecil, 7–8, 36, 138 Howland, William Holmes, 257 Hughes, James L., 214–16, 248 Hyde, Douglas, 323–4 Hynes, Patrick, 167–8 identity/identities: American, 123, 327; British-Canadian, 182; in Buffalo, 131; Catholic, 126, 179, 198, 298; “complementary,” 193, 219, 360; confessional, 307, 318; expressions of, 125, 133; group, 11, 14, 211, 305, 357; Irish, 6, 11–15, 190, 204, 299–300, 357; Irish-American, 107, 123, 360; Irish-Canadian, 327, 343, 361; Orange-Tory, 165; partisan, 180; Protestant, 132, 211, 305; and religion, 9, 143, 273; sectarian, 147; of women, 105. See also Irishness immigration agents, 42, 133, 245 Immigration Commission report (1911), 238, 421n40 industrialization, 144 institutions, 107–8. See also associations; schools

25560-Jenkins.indb 499

Inwood, Kris, 284 Ireland: agrarian agitation, 206; agrarian economy, 37–8; British government in, 352; depression, 198, 200; elections, 206–7; fundraising efforts for, 201–2, 217; and Germany relations, 333; ­landlordism, 200, 203, 209, 312; military victories, 212, 215; religious geography, 212–13; representations and promotion of, 308–9, 318; routes to North America, 43–4 Irish-Americans, 224, 308–10; Anglophobia, 351; Buffalo politicians, 75, 154–7, 279, 282–3; household mobility (1881–1911), 266–7; identity, 107, 123, 360; teachers, 423n71 Irish Canadian (Toronto), 85, 91, 170, 175, 218, 318; on anti-­ imperialism, 196; on Catholic political representation, 168–9, 301–2; establishment of, 124, 361; portraits of Parnell ads, 204; report on the Toronto Land League branch, 210 Irish Canadian Athletic Club (ic ac), 299–300, 344 Irish Catholic Benevolent Union (ic b u), 72, 197–8, 319, 324. See also Young Irishmen’s Catholic Benevolent Association Irish emigration to Buffalo: age of Irish-born settlers (1855), 44–5; Catholic predominance, 44; ­provincial and county origins of settlers, 45–6, 47, 51–3, 53, 369; and social familiarity, 55–6; travel route, 45, 48

13-08-29 13:46

500 Index

Irish emigration to Toronto: agents, 42, 133; cost, 38; by departure year and age at departure, 39–41, 41; in Edwardian period, 232, 359; provincial and county origins of settlers, 36–9, 37, 51, 51–3, 52, 368; and social familiarity, 56; total Protestant and Catholic settlers, 42–3, 43, 233, 421nn29–30; transatlantic passage, 43–4 Irish Franchise Act (1850), 146 Irish Free State, 362–3 Irish Home Rule. See Home Rule Irishman in Canada, The (Davin), 181, 213–14 Irish National Land League, 198, 203 Irish National Land League of America: Buffalo branches, 204–6, 219; contributions to, 204; in Irish parishes, 204–5; Ladies’ branch, 204–5; Toronto branch, 209–11 Irish National League of America (i nl): Buffalo branches, 207–9, 216, 219, 307–8; contributions to, 209; dissolution of, 216, 307–8; establishment of, 207, 211; in Irish parishes, 219; Ladies’ branch, 209; Toronto branches, 210–11, 215– 16, 219, 360 Irishness, 11–12; aoh policing of, 308–9; Catholic definition of, 198; changing dynamics of, 305; erosion of, 211; of North American cities, 5; revitalization of, 323–4, 353; rituals and representations of, 308–9; symbolism and language, 198, 199, 299, 318 Irish Parliamentary Fund (i pf), 307 Irish Parliamentary Party: anti-­ Parnellite faction, 218, 316–17;

25560-Jenkins.indb 500

balance of power at Westminster, 206–7, 316, 329, 342; fundraising for, 217, 316, 322, 439n66; members, 208 Irish Protestant Benevolent Society (ipb s): attitudes to Home Rule, 328–9; emblem, 125, 189, 199; events and banquets, 134–5, 211– 13; founding, 94, 132–3, 399n144; identity, 211; membership, 133–4; objective, 133, 142; relief recipients, 38–9, 40, 96, 368; St Patrick’s celebrations, 197–8; travelling sermons, 134, 293 “Irish race,” 11, 231, 308, 315, 321, 352, 360 Irish Race Convention, 317, 351 Irish republic, 5, 218, 330, 362; Anglo-Irish Treaty (1922), 362–4; separatism, 307; speeches favouring an, 326 Irish Volunteer Association, 331–3 Irish women: charitable assistance for, 96–7; hosting and house visiting, 275–7; identity, 105; involvement in church-based associations, 114, 123–4, 127, 274–7; jail statistics for, 81; Land League branch, 204–5; occupations, 70–1, 230–1, 236–7, 241, 422n59; as teachers, 245–9. See also domestic servants Irish World, 186, 192–3, 311, 318, 326–7; circulation, 181, 410n2 Irwin, Jim, 284 isonymy, 50; maps, 51, 51–3, 52, 53, 384n139 Italian population: in Buffalo, 228–9, 266, 273; dislike for domestic service, 243–4; in Toronto, 233, 239 Italian Republican League, 278, 282

13-08-29 13:46

Index 501

Jacobson, Matthew, 218 Jews, 233, 235, 285 Johnston, Hugh, 212 Johnston, William, 214, 219 Joyce, Patrick, 276, 431n58 Jubilee Riots (1875), 136, 140–1, 195 Jury, Alfred, 203, 209, 211 Kane, Patrick, 91, 151, 185, 390n107 Katz, Michael, 44, 98, 267 Kaufman, Jason, 388n53 Kealey, Gregory, 8, 72, 163 Keating, John T., 311, 325, 329 Keller, Morton, 145 Kelly, Edward, 208–9 Kelly, Mary C., 7 Kemp, Albert E., 342 Kennedy, James, 156, 251, 256, 260–1 Kennedy, John (nephew of James), 156–7, 159 Kennedy, Warring, 164, 214–15 Kenny, Kevin, 10, 13 Kerr, Thomas, 133–4, 400n146 Kerry, County, 58, 72, 116, 206, 405n53; as a source of Buffalo’s Irish, 46, 48, 55, 87, 151, 160; ­surnames of, 49 Kerwin, William J., 331 Killeen, Henry W., 283 Kloppenberg, James T., 160 Knights of Columbus, 297 Knights of Labour (Labor), 71–2, 74, 209, 257 Know-Nothing (American) Party, 28, 149, 375n26 Labor Day, 75 labour: activism and strikes, 71–4, 225–6, 260–2; careers in

25560-Jenkins.indb 501

transportation, 239–40; class, 262; education and training, 239; family businesses, 240–2; generational approaches and, 238–9; lateral job movements, 237–8; markets, 57, 225, 228, 235–7, 263. See also Knights of Labour (Labor); occupational profiles; skilled and unskilled labour; trade unions “lace-curtain” Irish, 7, 224, 284, 360 Lacelle, Claudette, 67–8 Ladies Catholic Benevolent Association (lc ba ), 276 Ladies’ Orange Benevolent Association, 294 Land League. See Irish National Land League land nationalization, 203 language, Irish, 198, 299, 310, 324 Larkin, Emmet, 115 laundries, 285 Lefebvre, Henri, 10, 144, 275 Leinster, province, 36, 38–9, 43, 46, 113 lending institutions, 101; IrishAmerican Savings and Loan Association (iasla), 103–4, 160, 271–2 Leo XIII, Pope, 261, 417n188 liberal individualism, 123 Liberal Party: federal, 169–70; Ontario, 171, 215–16; support for Home Rule, 323 Limerick, Patricia, 12 Limerick City, 48 Lincoln, Abraham, 149 Londonderry, County, 41, 96, 110, 116, 133, 137, 292, 381n76 Long, Walter, 339, 341, 363 Loyalists (American), 20

13-08-29 13:46

502 Index

loyalty/loyalties: to Britain, 22, 34, 42, 169–70, 345; Catholic, 172, 327, 360; of the ipbs, 135; in Ireland, 319; Irish-Canadian, 319; of Irish Protestants, 132, 135, 212– 13; Orange Order, 13, 42, 56, 135, 361; partisan/party, 28, 153, 160, 279, 283, 328; to the Queen (Victoria), 187, 189, 209, 212–13; Tory, 23; in Upper Canada, 22, 25, 34, 41–2; voter, 158, 278 Luby, Thomas Clarke, 195 Lynch, Charles V., 279, 334 Lynch, John Joseph, 78, 105, 117–18; death, 176; on Irish nationality, 194; misgivings about Parnell, 202; promotion to archbishop, 187; relations with Conservative press, 175 Macdonald, John A., 161, 166, 169, 173, 179 Macedonian immigrants, 285–6 MacLysaght, Edward, 49 MacManus, Seumas, 328, 442n142 MacSwiney, Peter (brother of Terence), 363 MacSwiney, Terence, 363 Mahany, Rowland Blennerhassett, 153, 207, 262, 278 Mahoney, Timothy J, 104, 154–5 Malloney, Joseph F., 262 Manhattan, 144 Marston, Sallie, 146 Masons, 7, 42, 134–5, 167, 253–4, 401n180, 435n125 Massey, Doreen, 14, 355 Massey Hall, 320, 323, 325, 327; anti–Home Rule meetings at, 336, 339

25560-Jenkins.indb 502

mass politics, 28, 147 Mattis, Mary Catherine, 103 McAree, John, 77, 96, 101, 139; comments on religion, 108, 115; on Ontario’s separate school system, 119, 143; on the Orange Order, 140–1, 167 McCann, David, 113, 293 McCarroll, James, 184–5 McCord, A.T., 134, 197 McDonough, James, 247 McEvay, Fergus, 297, 327 McGee, Thomas D’Arcy, 27, 43, 146, 170, 189–90; assassination of, 133, 187, 324 McGowan, Anthony, 156, 250–1, 256, 260 McGowan, Mark, 8, 287–8, 297, 321, 349, 377n53 McGreevy, Patrick, 26 McKay, Ian, 23, 27, 147 McManus, John, 103–4 McMaster, William, 113, 134 McNeil, Neil, 297, 346, 349 Medcalf, Francis, 164, 170, 173, 408n128 Megaw, Rev. Wesley, 350 Meinig, Donald, 25 Mercier, Michael, 286, 433n98 Meredith, William R., 146 Merrick, Jeremiah, 171–2 Methodists: community in Toronto, 109, 112–14, 292–3; occupational distribution of, 61–2, 370 Meyer, Kuno, 333, 443n169 middle class: American, 62, 66; Catholic, 36, 124, 357; family businesses, 240–1; and homeownership, 100, 103; politics/politicians, 282–3; residential movements, 267,

13-08-29 13:46

Index 503

270, 286–8; and temperance activity, 125; Toronto Irish Protestant, 58, 240, 357 Middleton, Jesse, 34 Miller, Ian Hugh Maclean, 346 Miller, Kerby, 100 Minehan, Fr Lancelot, 297–8, 349 Mirror (Toronto), 168 mixed marriages, 300–1. See also Ne Temere decree mobility: social, 7, 15, 71, 224, 264; upward, 240, 262–3, 271. See also residential movements Monaghan, County, 38–9, 150, 214, 254 Mooney, James, 103–4, 200, 226, 307; death, 311; role in Clan na Gael, 187, 217; role in Land League, 205–7 Morawska, Ewa, 238 Morrow, J.D., 294, 334, 338 Mowat, Oliver, 169, 215 Moylan, James, 43 Mulvany, Charles Pelham, 35, 37, 38, 58, 67 Mulvey, John, 168, 171 Municipal Act (1866), 161, 168 municipalities, 27–8 Munster, province, 48, 52, 356; ­emigration from, 36, 46; surnames of, 49 Murphy, John A., 316, 330, 332, 351 Murphy, Michael, 168, 183, 195 Nally, David, 391n129 Nash, Simon, 151 nationalism, 6; and American citizenship, 192–3; Canadian, 320–1, 345; commemorations of heroes, 192–7, 219, 311–12, 327–8;

25560-Jenkins.indb 503

education in, 208; expressions of, 126; and fall of Parnell, 219; immigrant, 182; literature, 12, 128, 190, 306; meetings in Buffalo, 205–6, 312, 315–16, 329–31; in Ontario, 193; relayed in religious sermons, 190–1; in Toronto, 210, 316–17, 325–7, 362–3. See also Irishness; nationalist societies; St Patrick’s Day celebrations nationalist societies, 124–5, 189, 218; Irish Nationalists of Buffalo, 312, 315, 327. See also Ancient Order of Hibernians (aoh); Clan na Gael; Fenianism; Hibernian Benevolent Society (hb s); Sons of St Patrick Benevolent Society; Young Irishmen’s Catholic Benevolent Association; Irish National League societies nationhood, 192, 218, 306 naturalization, 28, 161, 167 Nelles, H.V., 33 Ne Temere decree, 300–1, 337–8 networks, 19, 107, 394n3; community, 56; emigration, 36; faithbased, 108–9, 114, 122; political, 97, 169, 358 New England, 24–5 New York (western): New Amsterdam, 22; religious revivalism, 25; settlement, 21–2; territory (1790s), 20–1, 21 New York City, 7, 98, 144, 428n11 Nolan, Janet, 246–7 Northern Ireland, 363–4 O’Brien, Conor Cruise, 201 occupational profiles, 359; of Buffalo males by ethnocultural group

13-08-29 13:46

504 Index

(1900 & 1920), 228–30, 229, 231; of cmba members, 131, 132; of household heads (Buffalo & Toronto, 1880), 31–2, 32, 379n58; of Irish males (Buffalo & Toronto, 1880), 57–60, 59; of Irish women, 70–1, 230–1, 236–7, 241; of Toronto Irish males by religion (1881), 60–2, 61, 370; of Toronto Irish males by religion (1911), 235–6, 236; of Toronto males by birthplace (1911), 234–5, 235; of Toronto males by “racial origin” (1911), 233–4, 234; of Toronto working-class families, 60. See also domestic servants O’Connell, Daniel, 110, 126, 146, 325–6; commemorations, 193–4, 197, 219, 360 O’Connor, Denis, 297, 299, 301 O’Dea (O’Day), Patrick, 184–5 O’Donoghue, D. J., 71–2, 209 O’Donohoe, John, 164, 170–5, 180, 202, 209–10, 358; cartoon of, 175, 176 Oestreicher, Richard, 149, 156, 158 O’Gorman, Francis (and brothers), 330 O’Keefe, Eugene, 241, 322–3, 392n159 O’Leary, Jeremiah, 351, 447n272 oligopticon, 276, 431n58 O’Malley, Edward R., 282–3 O’Neill, Hugh, 326 O’Neill, John, 184–5, 335, 336, 337, 349 Orange lodges, 165, 214; army recruitment efforts, 347–8; donations to Ulster cause, 341; hierarchical system, 135–6; locations and

25560-Jenkins.indb 504

gathering places, 138–9, 294–6, 295, 407n124; naming of, 296, 339, 341 Orange Order: attacks on Cosgrove’s tavern, 78, 285; in Buffalo, 142, 275; clergy associated with, 140; “deliverance myths,” 136–7; establishment in Canada, 42; evangelical component, 139; Home Rule ­opposition, 214–16, 334–5, 361; hotel-keepers, 165; influence on municipal politics, 138, 169, 178–9, 302, 304; issues and controversies, 136, 137–8; membership and recruitment, 8, 135, 139; misgivings about Land League, 209– 10; parades, 138, 139, 142, 293–4; at Parnell’s meeting, 203; police and firehall connection to, 252–5; politicians, 164–5, 167, 304; and working class relations, 72. See also Sentinel and Orange Protestant Advocate Orange-Toryism, 164–7, 169, 171, 358 Orange Young Britons (oyb), 77, 140–1, 165 O’Rourke, Patrick, 241 parades: Empire Day, 320, 349; held by Catholic parishes, 298; partysponsored, 148; Republican, 262; St Patrick’s Day, 124, 129, 132, 187 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 182, 198–9, 210; court case with London Times, 209; crusade for Home Rule, 207–8; as Irish Party chairman, 218; visit to Buffalo, 200–1; visit to Toronto, 202–4

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Index 505

patronage, 27, 169–70, 358–9 Patterson, William, 95–6, 110–11, 140, 292, 338, 350 Pearse, Patrick, 351–2, 354 Pepper, George, 192, 194–5 Pius X, Pope, 300, 427n158 place, conception of, 14, 355 Platt, Samuel, 41, 172–3 Plunkett, Joseph Mary, 351, 354 pluralism: American, 34; cultural, 9, 227, 356 police forces: Buffalo, 249–51, 250, 424n93; Toronto, 73, 251–4, 252 Polish population, 227, 266; occupations, 228–9, 229; political loyalties, 278–9 Polish Republican League, 278 politics, Buffalo: alderman nominees, 150–3; blanket ballot law, 178; and Catholic interests, 179–80; election campaigns, 147–8, 278–9; First and Eighth Ward elections (1870– 80), 149–50, 150; gubernatorial and presidential elections (1908 and 1910), 279, 280, 281, 404n33; Irish politicians, 151–4, 279, 282–3; mayoralty, 178; and parish associations, 150; party processions and parades, 148; perceptions of, 160; polling booths, 151, 157–9; reformers, 178; role of saloons and saloon-keepers in, 155–9; voter eligibility and registration, 147–8, 403n22. See also Democrats; Republicans politics, Toronto: Board of Control, 179, 302, 304, 317; Catholic Irish politicians, 167–9, 171–2, 302–3; Catholic representation in, 168–71, 173, 179, 302; Irish-born

25560-Jenkins.indb 505

politicians, 164–5, 167, 178; liberal reform, 179, 302; municipal elections, 161–3, 304; Orange-Toryism, 164–7, 169, 171, 358; polling ­places, 163; public disinterest in, 163–4, 179; secret balloting, 175– 6, 177; voters, 169–71, 174–5, 178 poorhouses, 44, 98–9, 100 Poor Law Union, 50, 53, 384n139 population characteristics, Buffalo: Canadian-born population, 48, 266, 384n134, 428nn5–6; Irishborn population (1880), 57; by rank in North American cities, 5, 367, 373n6, 374n7, 428n11; and surrounding cities, 382n112; total by birthplace (1870–90), 32, 34, 34; total by birthplace (1900–20), 225, 226, 227; total population (1835–37), 26 population characteristics, Toronto: Irish-born population (1880), 57, 385n12; Irish-born population (1901), 42, 43; Irish-born population (1911), 233, 234; by rank in North American cities, 5, 367, 373n6, 374n7, 428n11; total by birthplace (1871–91), 32–3, 33; total by birthplace (1901–21), 225, 227, 232; total Catholics (1848), 24; total population (1834), 23; total Protestant vs. Catholic Irishborn immigrants, 42–3, 43; Ulsterborn Protestants, 36, 38–9, 52 Potts, John, 113, 140, 213, 293, 417n188; on Irish distress, 201–2 poverty, 357, 391n129; poorhouse admissions, 44, 98–9, 100; relief for German families, 97–8; relief for Irish Catholics, 92–5; relief for

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506 Index

Irish Protestants, 94–6; slums, 286; system of credit, 96 power relations, 12, 90, 119, 359; Foucault on, 88, 145 ’Prentice Boys, 140–1 Presbyterians: community in Toronto, 109–11, 292; occupational distribution of, 61–2, 370 property ownership, 105–6, 272; landlords, 101–2, 393n163, 393n166; lending institutions, 101, 103–4; rates for Irish households, 100–1, 103, 289, 392n158, 430n27; and voting rights, 161 Protestant churches, Toronto: Church of the Ascension, 112, 114, 292, 395n27; closures and relocation of, 291–3; Cooke’s Presbyterian Church, 109, 111, 114, 134, 292, 317; Dale Presbyterian Church, 294, 295, 338; interior spaces of, 110–11; map of, 68; Methodist churches, 113, 134, 139, 287, 292– 3, 339; outreach efforts, 113–14; smaller congregations in Toronto, 113; St James Cathedral, 111; struggles with poverty, 292; Trinity East Anglican Church, 109, 111– 12, 117, 139–40, 292, 348 Protestant Irish: in Buffalo, 48; in domestic service, 67, 245; homeownership, 289–91; identity, 132, 211, 305; narratives, 212; percentage of households in Toronto wards, 75, 76, 77; politicians, 164–5; poverty and relief for, 94–6; residential movements, 286–8; settlement in Upper Canada, 22; surnames, 49, 56; in Toronto police force, 73, 252–3; of Ulster origin,

25560-Jenkins.indb 506

36–9, 37, 52, 104, 110; urbanized, 7–8. See also Irish Protestant Benevolent Society (ipb s); Orange Order Protestantism, 9, 24, 136; “open Bible” dimension of, 135; struggles, 137, 334; in Toronto, 8, 33–4, 108, 319–20, 356. See also Anglicans; Methodists; Presbyterians public employment, 73, 242, 251, 255. See also firemen; police forces; teachers/teaching Putnam, James, 207, 416n156 Pyne, R.A., 302, 328 Quebec, 337–8; Catholic Church in, 300–1 Queen’s Own Rifles, 320 Quigley, James, 156, 261, 310 Quinn, Charles J., 279 Quinn, John, 186 “racial origin” variable, 233, 234, 236 railroads, 30–1, 239–40 Reburn, Henry, 289–90 Reburn, Henry, Jr, 289–90, 348, 434n104 Redmond, John, 312, 330, 352; ­criticism of, 329–30, 332; death, 362–3; support for, 314; visit to Toronto, 322–3 Redmond, William (brother of John), 322, 345–6 Regan, Michael, 159–60, 229, 251, 261–2; as police chief, 250, 331–3 religion, 8–9; devotion, 108, 125, 127; and politics, 164, 175–6; revivalism in western New York, 25. See also Catholic churches;

13-08-29 13:46

Index 507

Methodists; Presbyterians; Protestant churches Republicans: Buffalo politicians, 153, 282–3; parades, 262; rallies, 150; and residential movements, 282–4; victories in Buffalo, 149–50, 150, 159, 278 residential movements, 16, 264; ­decision-making in, 266–7, 270; lives and livelihoods of movers, 270–2, 289–91; of offspring, 266, 428n13; intergenerational patterns of (Buffalo), 267, 268, 269, 270; intergenerational patterns of (Toronto), 286–9, 287, 288; ­politics and, 282–4 respectability, 276–7, 305 Ridgeway raid (1866), 87, 125, 187, 320, 355 Robb, J. Gardner, 140–1, 198 Robertson, John Ross, 335 Roediger, David, 247, 374n13 Romanism, 300–1, 357 Rooney, Thomas, 296 Rossa, Jeremiah O’Donovan, 169, 186, 195–7 Royal Irish Constabulary (ri c), 73, 251–3 rural-urban migration, 6–8 Ryan, Bishop Stephen, 118, 129, 207, 217–18; on parish schools, 121–2 Ryan, John T., 311–12, 316, 330, 334, 351 Ryan, O’Neill, 311–12, 313, 316, 325–6 Ryan, Peter, 173–5, 209, 322, 335, 336 Ryan, William H., 262, 279 saloons and taverns: alcoholism and, 125, 127; First Ward, 88, 89;

25560-Jenkins.indb 507

keepers and owners, 74, 90–2, 155–7, 262; licenses for, 256–7, 259; as political sites, 155, 158–9, 255–6; total per population, 256, 259–60, 270, 429n23. See also boss-saloon system San Francisco, 265, 423n71, 428n4 School Bill (1888), 121, 246 schools: background of pupils, 274, 430n38; in Buffalo, 120–2, 122, 247–8, 272–3; parish, 120, 121–2, 273–4, 430n29; politics and, 121, 246–7; promotion of Irish history in, 309–10; separate, 119–21, 175, 248–9, 299, 357; tax diversion for, 118, 169. See also teachers/ teaching Scott Act (1863), 118–19 Self-Determination League for Ireland in Canada and Newfoundland, 363 self-government, 6, 182, 301, 316, 329, 363. See also Home Rule Sellar, Robert, 338 Sentinel and Orange Protestant Advocate (Toronto), 137, 300, 350–2; criticism of Irish National Land League, 203; on enlistment of Orangemen, 346–7; founding of, 136 Shaddock, William F., 316, 330, 333–4, 351 Shannon, William, 224 Shapley, Rufus, 145 Sheehan, John C. (brother of William), 152, 157–8 Sheehan, William F., 152, 159, 217 “Sheehanism,” 153, 154 Shelton, Brenda, 73, 178–9 Shields, George, 303, 335, 343 Sinn Féin League of America, 316, 326

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508 Index

skilled and unskilled labour, 237–8; of Buffalo males by ethnocultural group (1900 and 1920), 228–30, 229, 231; father-son comparison, 239; of household heads (Buffalo and Toronto, 1880), 31–2, 32; of Irish-born males (Buffalo and Toronto, 1880), 57–60, 59; of Toronto Irish males by religion (1881), 60–1, 61, 370; of Toronto Irish males by religion (1911), 235–6, 236; of Toronto males by “racial origin” (1911), 233–4, 234; underemployment, 251; work location and, 286 Slattery, Frank, 319, 322 Smith, Anselm, 131, 205 Smith, George Hill, 215 Smith, Goldwin, 212, 213, 215, 328, 418n193 Smith, Malcolm, 49 Smith, Perry, 87, 91, 230 Smith, Sir Frank, 71, 173, 210, 387n35, 392n159 Smyth, William J., 7–8, 36, 138 social capital, 177–8, 358 social geography, 171, 288, 291–2 socialism, 261, 427n158 social mobility, 7, 15, 224 social relations, 56, 146, 277 Sökefeld, Martin, 13 Sons and Daughters of Ireland Protestant Association, 296, 435n137 Sons of St Patrick Benevolent Society, 124–5, 194; emblem, 187, 188 South Africa, 314, 317–18 space: group, 266, 357; Harvey on, 156; and power, 145; public and private, 305; representations of, 144; school, 246–7; urban, 10–11

25560-Jenkins.indb 508

Spanish-American War, 320; criticism of, 310, 315, 318; veterans of, 311, 330 Speer, Rev. J.C., 339 Spence, Francis Stephens, 258–9 sports teams and clubs, 125, 299– 300, 310 Sproule, Thomas, 334 Stamp, Robert, 119 Stanshell, Christine, 66 Stanton, Patrick, 160, 186 St Bridget’s Society, 97 stereotypes, 105, 161 St Nicholas’ Home for Orphans, 97 St Patrick’s Day celebrations, 125–6, 197, 317–18, 327, 362; concerts at Massey Hall, 325; consumerism and, 315; discontinuance/revival of, 196, 208, 305, 310, 333; parades, 124, 129, 132, 187; vandalism, 77 St Patrick’s Societies, 132–3 streets and neighbourhoods, Buffalo: Delaware Ave, 62, 63, 64, 243; East Side, 82, 229, 240, 248, 250, 266; elections and voting patterns in, 149–60, 150; Elk St, 84, 159; German area, 82, 266; map, 63; Ohio St, 86, 90, 90–1, 151, 157–8; Pearl St, 184; police station and fire hall locations, 249–50; school locations, 247–8; “The Island” or “The Beach,” 85, 127. See also First Ward, Buffalo; wards, Buffalo; West Side, Buffalo streets and neighbourhoods, Toronto: Annex, 290; Bolton St, 77–8; Brockton, 77, 388n58; Cabbagetown, 77, 104, 166–7, 168, 433n93; Claretown, 52, 77, 104, 286; concentration of

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Index 509

Catholics by, 371, 388n61; Corktown, 52–3, 77, 104, 168, 285–6; east end, 165, 285; Jarvis St, 67, 69, 77, 244; map, 68; Niagara, 286; Orange Order ­locations, 138–9, 294–7, 295; Parliament St, 77, 285; Portland St, 78; Queen St, 77, 285; Rosedale, 244–5; Sherbourne St, 67, 77, 244–5; Stanley St (Lombard St), 78–81, 94–5, 102, 141, 168, 284; St James, 67; west end, 165; William St (Dummer St), 78, 102–3, 285. See also wards, Toronto St Vincent de Paul Society, 92–3, 97, 124. See also charitable assistance suburbanization, 284; of Orange lodges, 294–6, 295; of Protestant churches, 292–3. See also residential movements Sullivan, John J., 282–3 Sullivan, John P., 279, 334 Sunday laws, 257, 262, 426n125 surnames: of Buffalo policemen and firemen, 249; of household heads (1880–81), 49–51, 50, 55 taverns. See hotels; saloons and taverns teachers/teaching, 245–9, 423n71, 424n87; salary, 247, 424n89 temperance societies, 125; campaigners, 258–9; events and entertainment, 127; St Joseph’s tab Society, 126–7; St Bridget’s tab Society, 126, 129 Thompson, John, 254–5 Tilly, Charles, 108, 394n3 Timon, John, 44, 105, 117

25560-Jenkins.indb 509

Tipperary, County, 46, 155, 275–6; as a source of Buffalo and Toronto’s Irish, 48, 53, 167, 254 Toronto: American presence in, 33; annexations, 232, 278; battalions, 349; “Belfast of Canada” label, 24, 35, 263, 300, 359, 364; downtown development, 232; finance and wholesaling, 28–9, 32, 231–2; ­fundraising for Irish relief, 201–2; incorporation, 27; industrial establishments, 29–30; location (map), 21; meaning of, 378n16; as “Merry England,” 33, 35; “Muddy York” label, 24; Orange County, 166, 255, 294; railroad companies, 239; school board, 248–9, 320; technological developments, 284–5; “the Good” label, 62, 252, 263, 359; total churches, 108, 434n105; transit, 286; upper class, 67. See also streets and neighbourhoods, Toronto Toronto harbour, 29–31 Toronto Leader, 171–3, 184 Toronto Mail, 161, 197 Toronto Star, 245, 255, 304, 326, 363; Home Rule coverage, 335, 341 Toronto Stock Exchange, 28 Toronto Street Railway Company, 71–2 Toronto World, 95, 165, 253 Toryism, 23; municipal elections, 162–3, 304; Orange Order and, 164–7, 169, 171, 358. See also Conservatives Townshend, Charles, 374n9 trade unions: Central Labor Union (c lu), 73–5; Grain Shovelers’

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510 Index

Union, 260; International Longshoremen’s Association (i la), 260–2; Toronto Labourers’ Union, 60; Toronto Trades Assembly, 71–2, 203. See also Knights of Labour (Labor) transformations, 4–5, 15, 264; urban, 224 Trinity East (Little Trinity) Anglican Church, 109, 111–12, 117, 139– 40, 292, 348 tuberculosis, 88, 286 Turner, William, 362 Tyrone, County, 36, 41, 113, 253, 293, 334; politicians from, 337, 363 Ulster, province, 95; emigration, 36–9, 37, 43, 296; exclusion from Home Rule, 332, 334, 346, 353, 363; Home Rule opposition, 215, 334–5, 338–9; i pbs relief recipients, 38–9, 40; Orange connections, 167, 334–5, 337–8, 361; popular perceptions of, 213; unionism, 212, 307, 329, 334, 338–9 Ulster Covenant, 338–9, 341–2 Ulster Unionist Council (u u c), 323, 331, 341 underemployment, 60, 73, 251 unionism, 342, 346; clergy support for, 339; Ulster, 212, 307, 329, 334, 338–9 unions. See trade unions United Brotherhood (u b). See Clan na Gael United Irish League (u i l), 314–15, 330, 343, 445n217; North American branches, 322; Toronto branch, 322–3

25560-Jenkins.indb 510

United States–Canada border, 12, 284 unskilled labour. See skilled and unskilled labour Upper Canada: governance, 20; loyalties, 25, 34, 41; political system, 23, 27; settlers, 21–2, 42 urbanization, 6–8, 224 urban space, 10–11 veterans, 148–9, 210, 217, 311, 330 Victoria Hall, 166, 258, 339 Vipond, Robert, 216 voters: “colonizers” or illegal, 157, 159–60; eligibility, 146, 147, 161, 403n22; Irish Catholic, 169–71, 174–5, 178, 358; loyalty, 158, 278; monitoring and intimidation, 155, 158; in New York City, 144; polling booths, 151, 157–8, 163; registration, 148 Walsh, John, 297, 317 Walsh, Daniel, 332, 352 Ward, Alan, 306 Ward, David, 267 Ward, J.J., 303, 304, 335 wards, Buffalo: gubernatorial and presidential elections results by, 279, 280, 281; Irish areas, 82–5; nineteenth, 156–9; non-official names for, 84–5; political loyalties by, 278–9; social meaning and, 144; system, 156, 278. See also First Ward, Buffalo; West Side, Buffalo wards, Toronto: households of Irish origin by, 75, 76, 77; St David’s, 167–8, 172, 388n58; St John’s, 285–6; St Patrick’s, 162, 167; ­system, 76, 168, 178–9

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Index 511

Welland Canal, 29 Westminster: Home Rule bills, 207, 307, 329; Irish Party power and, 206–7, 316, 329, 342; Irish representation at, 208 West Side, Buffalo, 62, 82, 266, 389n85; parishes, 272–4, 276; Republican politics/politicians, 278, 282–3; residential movement to, 267, 270–2, 283; St Patrick’s celebrations, 332 Whig Party, 28 White, Harrison, 394n3 White, Jack, 153, 157–8, 205, 246–7 white-collar employment, 238, 251, 286, 288, 359; for women, 71, 230–1, 241 Wilson, Woodrow, 279, 362, 447n272 Wingerd, Mary Lethert, 8 Winter, Jay, 9 women. See Irish women

25560-Jenkins.indb 511

working class: consciousness, 57, 71, 104; drinking culture, 258; ethnic diversity, 223; families, 60, 243; neighbourhoods, 103, 144, 148, 267; politics/politicians, 152, 160, 178; property ownership, 100–1; residential movements, 267, 270, 286–8, 294; social activities, 124; voting traditions, 149; women, 67, 70, 93, 123. See also domestic servants; skilled and unskilled labour Yancey, William, 11 Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia, 229 York County, 21 Young Irishmen’s Catholic Benevolent Association, 124–5, 128, 195; emblem, 187, 188. See also Irish Catholic Benevolent Union (ic b u) Young Men’s Catholic Association (y mc a), 97, 128, 187, 192

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25560-Jenkins.indb 512

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