Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

An Interethnic Paradox: Chicago's Irish and Everyone Else

2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 115; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/23283335.115.1.03

2328-3335

James R. Barrett,

Latin American and Latino Studies

IT IS DIFFICULT TO AVOID THE CONCLUSION that of Chicago's broad range of ethnic groups, the Irish played a central role in shaping the city. They generated and held tenaciously to political power for generations, and for much of that time, they led the city's most important institutions—the police and fire departments, most of the city's unions, and the Catholic Church. Irish Catholic lay teachers and nuns taught and socialized many of the city's children, and as they moved up in the social structure, the Irish were found disproportionately among the city's most influential lawyers and businessmen. But to focus on the Irish in isolation from other groups in Chicago's history is a mistake. They made this place in consort, competition, and conflict with the city's many other peoples. Here, I argue for the essential inter-ethnic character of Chicago's story by drawing our attention to race relations and labor organization, two critical aspects of the city's history which might stand in for the central analytical categories in American urban history—race and class.The role of the Irish in shaping racism and racial conflict is rather well known, and Chicago is a particularly striking case of this phenomenon.1 Irish gangs played a key role in the central event in the city's racial history, the 1919 race riot, and tensions between African Americans and Irish Americans persisted through much of the twentieth century. Less well known perhaps is the Irish role in integrating later groups, including African Americans, into the life of the city and working for civil and labor rights.The strong defensive character of Irish American culture was shaped by early nativism and anti-Catholicism. “Who does not know,” candidate Levi Boone asked during the 1855 mayoral election, “that the most depraved, debased, worthless, and irredeemable drunkards and sots which curse the community are Irish Catholics?”2 Nativist politics and prejudice against the Irish flourished throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, accentuating their perception that it was essential for them to bond and to defend their accumulating power and influence in the city.3 The Famine, nativism, poverty, and their colonial past all lent the Irish a cohesive defensiveness that came alive in the neighborhoods of a city like Chicago. The folklorist William Williams observed that “the Irish seemed to understand that they had to succeed as a people, not just as individuals.”4 It was a lesson that later ethnic groups took to heart, hence the significance and viability of ethnicity as a social formation in the United States. In this sense, the Irish were the city's first ethnic group and, for better or worse, newcomers had to deal with them.The central institution in Irish religious, social, and cultural life was, of course, the Catholic parish, but the broader implications of this fact are not always grasped. Much of the networking that allowed the Irish to leverage their numbers into significant power and influence rested on “bonding” social capital generated through parish life, which tended to be literally territorial and defensive in nature. The physical boundaries of the parish constituted an important spatial understanding of the city, embracing some and excluding others. The territorial dimensions of this reality were only reinforced by the arrival of later migrants, each group trying to defend its own turf. Monsignor Daniel F. Byrnes, pastor of the giant Visitation Parish, periodically read out the boundaries of the parish from the pulpit as the African American population moved closer, and his message was certainly clear. Visitation would remain a largely Irish parish so long as parishioners stayed in the neighborhood. This religiously based territorial dimension of Irish American mentality helps to explain much of their relations with later groups. For urban Catholics, John McGreevy concludes, “the community came to be the church, within a particular, geographically defined space.”5Irish American street gangs thrived amid the poverty and prejudices of the city, and these classic urban institutions became models for later ethnic groups, providing the basis for the earliest organized crime in Chicago. As they did in other cities, gangs tended to divide the city up into distinct enclaves based on ethnicity and race. These boundaries could be quite precise, and interlopers might be greeted with “Irish confetti,” a mixture of paving stones and bricks. “Remember, it's the Ragen's Colts you're dealing with,” a gang of Irish youth bragged to a trespasser. “We have two thousand members between Halsted and Cottage Grove and Forty-third and Sixty-third Streets. We intend to run this district. Look out.”6 While the Irish gangs showed a general belligerence, they seemed to have a special proclivity for attacking African Americans. In the midst of the World War I–era Great Migration, the burgeoning Black Belt faced Bridgeport and Canaryville, two old Irish neighborhoods, across Wentworth Avenue. As a teenager, the Black writer and poet Langston Hughes took a walk in his new neighborhood, inadvertently crossing this “deadline.” A white gang quickly set upon him, explaining simply that “they didn't allow niggers in that neighborhood.”7Part athletic club, part political enforcers, Ragen's Colts were bankrolled by a local politician and acted as “racial sentinels” guarding the boundaries of the neighborhood. It was the Colts and other Irish gangs who played the key role in Chicago's great Race Riot of 1919, and they enforced the color line between the neighborhoods during and long after the riot. To say that the riot pitted Black migrants against “whites” is at best an oversimplification of a fact that resides at the center of the process of racial identity formation. Recent immigrants played little role in the violence, which was largely perpetrated by “Americanized” Irish youth who seemed to have protection from the police, who were often drawn from the same neighborhoods. “Gangs operated for hours . . . without hindrance from the police,” the Chicago Commission on Race Relations observed. “But for them, it is doubtful if the riot would have gone beyond the first clash.” “It was evident during the riot,” social worker Mary McDowell noted, “that our Polish neighbors were not the element that committed the violence; it was committed by the second and third generations of American young men from the ‘athletic clubs’ which had grown under the protection of political leaders in this district, themselves mostly native born.”8 McDowell's observation, the findings of the Chicago Commission, and other sources all underscore a vital reality in the history of American immigration and the settling in of later immigrant groups: To “become American,” to acculturate to life in the American city, often meant to “become white,” and the Irish provided a key model for this transformation in Chicago and other cities.Ironically, some members of the Irish gangs frequented the “Black and Tan” integrated night clubs, cafes, and houses of prostitution just across Wentworth Avenue in the Black Belt. This juxtaposition of racial violence with an apparent attraction to interracial recreation and even sexual encounters suggests an ambivalence at the heart of some homosocial Irish American youth cultures. It is an ambivalence captured brilliantly in James T. Farrell's proletarian trilogy Studs Lonigan, which takes as its focus the fragility of the Irish American urban male psyche in the face of increasing racial and ethnic diversity on Chicago's South Side.9In this and other ways, Irish American gangs represented a contradiction in values. They and their Democratic Party patrons posed as defenders of immigrant Catholics even as they persisted in their racism toward African Americans. Democrat William Dever's 1928 mayoral campaign was notable for its white supremacist rhetoric, and the Colts continued their attacks on African Americans throughout the decade. But when the Ku Klux Klan launched an ill-advised challenge to the Irish Catholic establishment in the early twenties, machine politicians orchestrated a multiethnic political campaign and established an anti-Klan newspaper, Tolerance, with a readership of 150,000. The Colts and other gangs staged demonstrations, bombings, and ritualized lynchings of Klan members. Despite support among white Protestants in some of the suburbs, the Klan never recovered in the city.10One source for limited integration amid all these battles was the Catholic Church, its institutions, and some of its clergy and laity. Though they were always a minority within the church and in the Black community, African American Catholic converts poured into the church in the wake of the First Great Migration for a number of reasons. Catholic schools offered high academic standards, discipline, and an element of status. The church was generally segregated along ethnic lines. “National parishes,” defined in terms of the nationality of a particular group, catered to the city's various immigrant communities, and most Black Catholics settled into congregations of their own. Parish organizational life brought the opportunity for community-building, and affiliation with the Irish Catholic establishment offered the promise of some entrée to machine politics, patronage, and jobs. As they did for immigrants and their children, Catholic aesthetics offered beauty and a brush with the divine in inner-city neighborhoods. In defense of racial segregation, the hierarchy first equated Black parishes with “national” parishes, no different from those of other ethnic groups. Many English-speaking “territorial parishes,” defined in terms of specific geographical boundaries, served mainly Irish populations. A shift from the interwar years on from ethnically based national to territorial parishes, however, and continued relegation of African Americans to a few all-Black congregations, clearly represented a form of Jim Crow.11From the late nineteenth century through much of the twentieth, most leaders of Chicago's institutions were trained at Catholic high schools and colleges. The networks established at these schools provided the Irish with enormous social capital and facilitated their control of the Democratic Party, the Catholic Church, numerous unions and corporations, and many of the city's leading law firms.12 A large proportion of Chicago's public school teachers were likewise trained by Irish American nuns at Catholic girls’ schools. As later groups entered these institutions, they were gradually provided contacts with the established Irish and an avenue to better jobs, upward mobility, and some measure of political influence. If this were less true for African Americans, nevertheless an identifiable Black elite was emerging by the post–World War II years, and many of these people were trained in Catholic institutions.13Much of the church's work was carried out by nuns, a greatly underestimated force in urban history. Two orders were particularly important in Chicago—the Sisters of Mercy organized in Dublin in 1831 and the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary established in the same city the following year. Both orders followed the Famine Irish into the American city. Irish nuns established Chicago's first hospital, nurses’ training school, orphanage, and girls’ academy. By 1896, the Sisters of Mercy had established five elementary schools and several high schools. Agatha O'Brien described the order as a “mixture of nations,” and they did eventually integrate young women from Chicago's various ethnic communities. In fact, however, the overwhelming majority of these nuns came from Irish working-class families.14 Unlike Polish, German, and other parish schools that aimed to maintain their languages and ethnic cultural identities, those taught by the Irish American orders used a curriculum that resembled that in the city's public schools, and they aimed for high academic standards. As the historian Sarah Deutsch writes, they were responsible not only for upward mobility of many of the city's young women, “but also, in the long run, for Americanizing them.”15Nuns were among the very few Chicago whites who lived and worked full time in Black neighborhoods, serving the African American community in a variety of ways, staffing Catholic settlement houses and other welfare institutions, and of course, teaching the community's youth, taking special pride in mentoring young African American women. Thus, it is not surprising that nuns emerged as major players in the church's earliest efforts to promote civil rights and integration.Because so many Irish families placed a premium on the education of their daughters and because so many nun-trained young Irish American women entered public school teaching, the values and socialization nurtured by the sisters went well beyond Catholic institutions. At the turn of the century, two-thirds of the candidates who passed the exam to enter the city's teacher training normal school were graduates of Catholic secondary schools. By this point, more than a third of Chicago's public school teachers were the children of Irish immigrants. Cardinal Mundelein estimated the proportion was about 70 percent by 1920.16 The proportion was so high that public school boards and administrators worried about the “Catholicization of the public schools,” and the high numbers did mean that the “Americanization” of immigrant youth we picture happening in the public school did take on a peculiarly “Hibernian” tone.17Bishop Bernard Sheil, an Irish American activist liberal and a supporter of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions and community organizing, was a strong voice for integration and racial justice. His Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) created a different sort of opportunity for African Americans to cross parish boundaries. It projected a deceptively simple vision with widespread implications: Reduce juvenile delinquency and begin the process of integration through racially integrated youth sports programs. CYO propaganda was ostentatiously pluralist, and as the organization matured, it embraced a more ambitious goal of racial justice. For both ideological and more practical political reasons, the CYO maintained close ties with both the local Democratic machine and the New Deal government. Large numbers of Black and white contestants and audiences crossed the color line repeatedly at the organization's events. By the late forties, the CYO was running fifty-six summer camps serving forty thousand children, hundreds of sporting events, a labor school, and seven settlement houses. CYO programs were racially integrated and most of the kids were from working-class immigrant or African American homes. Black athletes were celebrated citywide for their boxing, basketball, and track accomplishments. Catholic swimmers of both sexes crossed the most rigid color line of all at pools around the city. In a society where sports offered a means of both acculturation, that is, “becoming American,” and an avenue of upward social mobility, such experience was extremely important. Anyone familiar with Chicago's widespread segregation will find these accomplishments remarkable.18The strength of racism and the territoriality of the Irish American worldview meant that there were serious limits to these efforts, especially at the level of inner-city parishes, where the reality of race relations was often quite different than the church's official pronouncements. In the postwar years, Sheil fell from favor with the hierarchy, the CYO declined, and white Catholics played prominent roles in neighborhood racial conflicts. With the Second Great Migration, the Black population exploded, expanding into previously all-white South and West Side Irish neighborhoods, and racial transition produced conflict. In Englewood, just south of the stockyards neighborhood, an area of second settlement for the Irish and other working-class ethnics, Visitation Parish became a focal point for this conflict. In 1949, major rioting broke out when a labor organizer hosted an interracial union meeting in his home near the parish. Crowds attacked the house, assaulted people passing through the neighborhood, and overturned cars. In 1963, violence returned when the first Black families moved into the neighborhood. Similar events occurred in South Side parishes and in heavily Irish parishes on the West Side from the late forties through the early sixties. Whereas earlier mobs were composed primarily of Irish, however, the postwar disturbances included many eastern European Catholics who now identified as “white” and had absorbed racialized language, values, and repertoires from the Irish.19Yet Catholic inter-racialism never disappeared, and it reemerged forcefully in the sixties. Despite its many contradictions regarding race, the church provided openings for interracial socialization and the basis for civil rights activism with roots in ethnic working-class neighborhoods. Founded in 1945, the Catholic Interracial Council (CIC) joined Freedom House, an integrated gathering place founded in 1942, in sponsoring a range of events aimed at mixed audiences. The council refrained from direct action, however, and moved slowly so as not to alienate white Catholics. When Cardinal Meyer replaced Cardinal Stritch upon his death in 1958, the hierarchy of the church became relatively more supportive of the CIC. The CIC was not an Irish organization in the narrow sense. The whole point was to achieve some measure of racial integration, so it included African American Catholics and whites from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Yet the leadership of the organization, many of the clergy involved, and a majority of its rank and file were from Irish backgrounds.20In 1961, CIC clergy and lay people from South Side parishes joined an interracial group at a “Wade-In” organized by the city's NAACP youth group to integrate one of the city's last segregated beaches. When the first Black family moved into Visitation Parish in 1962, members of the Catholic Interracial Council escorted them to church every Sunday for almost a year. When fresh violence broke out in the summer of 1963, activists circulated through the parish to calm the situation. That same summer, nuns and a priest picketed the Illinois Club for Catholic Women because it barred African American patrons from its swimming pool, and a CIC delegation joined the March on Washington. The following year, CIC priests and students joined Freedom Summer in Mississippi and, in 1965, the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery. In the heated summer of 1966, priests, nuns, and laity joined open housing marches through largely Catholic neighborhoods on the Northwest and Southwest sides, including the Marquette Park march where they were attacked along with Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists.21 “In the interval between 1951 and 1965,” William A. Osborne concludes, “the leadership of the Catholic interracial movement passed from New York to Chicago.”22A subtle element in this equation is easily missed. The reverence most Irish Americans had for the Church and its priests and nuns, made it difficult for them to simply dismiss this activism. Polling data from the 1940s through the 1960s indicated that Irish Catholics, were actually more amenable to open housing and integration than most whites.23 Yet in the neighborhoods, many Irish Catholics continued to oppose integration, and the activism tended to divide the community. In some cases, it raised anger and denunciations. A person who signed their letter to the activist priest Daniel Mallette “Irish Catholic” wrote, “When I think when I was a kid the respect we had for the priest or nun, . . . Take off the collar.” In others cases, it encouraged laity, especially young Catholics, to embrace the cause of civil rights. “As long as there are Catholics like you in the world.” Maria Romano wrote Mallette, “I shall do my best to be a good Christian.” She enclosed five dollars to support the priest's work.24 Numerous letters offered prayers and financial support and some offered to join Mallette in his work in the West Side ghetto.Likewise, in building Chicago's powerful labor movement, the Irish are often remembered, rightly, as “gatekeepers” protecting their own interests through craft union organization and apprenticeship programs. When we speak of the exclusive character of American unions from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth, we are often speaking of the Irish who created and dominated them in these years.25 In general, Irish workers constituted a conservative, exclusive influence in the labor movement. Although many took part in the rise of the Knights of Labor and joined major strikes in the late nineteenth century, most seemed resistant to and perhaps hostile to the socialist organizing that was actually quite strong at various points in the city's history.But in sticking too close to this narrative, we miss a submerged history of Irish American progressivism that shaped some of the earliest industrial union efforts, helped to integrate immigrant and Black labor into the movement, and even played a part in the city's radical history.26Many of the city's ethnic groups established niches in Chicago's industry over time, but the Irish were in a better position to carve out and maintain such niches, including in skilled construction work, on the railroads, in local government public works, and elsewhere. Political and parish networks opened the opportunity for municipal jobs, of course, but they also allowed the Irish to dominate apprenticeship programs and to cling to the leadership of many of the city's unions. Such networking and the creation of what sociologists term “bonding” social capital certainly opened opportunities for the Irish, but in effect they could also close such opportunities to other groups.27When threatened, Irish communities could exhibit a remarkable level of solidarity and joint action, usually in support of their own, sometimes in support of other workers and ethnic groups. Because community and family welfare were closely connected to labor struggles in the community's moral economy, women, children, and men all turned out for large, defensive crowd actions in each of the major strikes of the late nineteenth century—the great railroad strike of 1877, the stockyards and eight-hour strikes of 1886, and the Pullman strike and boycott of 1894. The participation of women and children as well as the large numbers of those involved in such “collective bargaining by riot” as well as attacks on those who violated community sanctions on strikebreaking underscores the mutually reinforcing character of class and ethnic identity.28 Such struggles brought Irish Americans into class solidarity with other ethnic groups, but the community ethic also reinforced racism when African American migrants worked during strikes. Though strikebreakers came from a range of ethnic communities, it was Blacks in particular whom the Irish came to see as a “scab race.” Irish American involvement in strike riots persisted well into the twentieth century. In the bitter 1904 stockyards strike, Blacks represented only a fraction of the strikebreakers, but observers noted effigies of “nigger scabs” in the Irish American neighborhoods. Race continued to be an obstacle to labor organizing on the city's South Side, and labor conflict played a major role in Chicago's central race riot of the twentieth century, one that left a legacy of racial antagonism in Irish communities for more than a generation. In this sense, class solidarity could accentuate the racism that derived from community sources.29While the bonding social capital based in parishes and politics allowed the Irish to not only insinuate themselves but also to exclude others, their employment of “bridging social capital,” the connections they made with other ethnic groups and their efforts to integrate newcomers into social movements, has been less well recognized.Irish radicals by definition ignored all ethnic and racial boundaries in an effort to create a more powerful working-class movement. These included Chicago-based communists like William Z. Foster and Jack Carney, the female labor paragon Mother Jones, and a myriad of faceless radical hoboes, Wobblies, and others.30 Born into a large, poverty-stricken Irish American family in Philadelphia, Foster grew up in an Irish American street gang, left home early, and tramped around the US in a variety of jobs, but he considered Chicago home, in part because of the city's radical reputation. This reached back to the 1877 railroad strike, a series of socialist and anarchist movements, the Eight Hour strikes and Haymarket massacre, and the Pullman strike and boycott. In the early twentieth century, the city was the birthplace of the Industrial Workers of the World and the Communist movement and boasted one of the best organized labor forces in the US. These movements were not the sole preserve of the Irish, but the Chicago Federation of Labor, which Foster called “the most progressive labor federation in the United States,” was led by its charismatic president John Fitzpatrick and was particularly friendly to the radicals.31Born in County West Meath in 1871, Fitzpatrick arrived in Chicago amid the labor upheavals of the 1880s and went to work in the stockyards. He rose through the ranks and served for decades as president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, yet he never left his Bridgeport neighborhood. Fitzpatrick's progressivism is significant precisely because he resided at the heart of the Irish American community and commanded respect and loyalty there and throughout the city. Married to a union school teacher, Fitzpatrick was a teetotaler, a devout Catholic, an ardent Irish nationalist, but above all, a militant trade unionist. He did not share Foster's revolutionary socialism, but he saw the route to power through the organization of the unorganized regardless of gender, race, or ethnicity, through progressive municipal reform, and through independent labor politics. Under Fitzpatrick, the federation embraced a progressive foreign policy. With Irish American nationalism at a hightide in the wake of the Easter Rising, Fitzpatrick and other Irish American labor leaders in the federation supported independence for Poland and other small nations as well as the Mexican, Irish, and Russian revolutions and defended the rights of immigrants and other radicals targeted by the federal government. These efforts enhanced relations between the Irish and other ethnic groups. During World War I, Fitzpatrick launched a spirited labor paper, New Majority, which included a women's page and projected a progressive vision on a range of national and international issues and claimed one hundred thousand subscribers. Immediately after the war, Fitzpatrick launched the Cook County Labor Party. The organization crossed ethnic and even racial lines, organizing labor party clubs in the Black Belt and immigrant neighborhoods and balancing its municipal and ward tickets with workers from various ethnic backgrounds. In 1919, Fitzpatrick ran for mayor on the Labor ticket, projecting a “Chicago for the Workers,” and although he lost, the party did well in the stockyards district and some of the city's other immigrant wards. Fitzpatrick actively supported the organization of women and unskilled immigrants in Chicago's huge garment and other industries, and the effort to organize the burgeoning population of Black workers in the World War I era and the twenties.32As a result of the efforts of Fitzpatrick and those around him, Chicago had a much higher proportion of its workers, about half of its labor force, organized by the early years of the twentieth century. And this movement embraced vigorous women's unions including not only garment and other factory workers but also scrub women, waitresses, and the city's public school teachers. Most of the women's organizing—in the stockyards, the schools, and the service industries—was led by Irish American women: Margaret Haley of the teachers, Agnes Nestor of the garment workers, Mary McDermott of the scrubwomen, Hannah O'Day in the stockyards, and Elizabeth Maloney of the waitresses. Although organized by Irish Catholic women under the name of the nationalist women's leader Maude Gonne, the women's stockyards union soon integrated Black, Polish, and other women workers in the yards. Irish Americans, together with middle-class allies, were also vital in launching the Chicago Women's Trade Union League.33 When Foster brought Fitzpatrick plans to organize the open-shop bastions of meat packing and steel, he did not hesitate to throw the resources of the Chicago Federation of Labor into these efforts.Foster proved a master architect of huge, diverse union movements and strikes in the steel industry and the massive Chicago stockyards. Once the province of largely Irish and German skilled butchers, by World War I the stockyards and meat-packing plants were populated by a remarkably diverse group of unskilled laborers—Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Czechs, and a residue of Irish. The Great Migration brought thousands of Black migrants and the challenge of creating an interracial labor movement. By 1917 nearly twelve thousand Black workers, about a fourth of the stockyards labor force, had entered the industry in the midst of an aggressive organizing drive engineered by Foster and Fitzpatrick. Foster hired Black organizers and others who spoke the immigrant languages, and he worked through Black and immigrant churches and fraternal organizations. The organizing was particularly successful in the Polish community, where “the union became a household word.”34 But efforts were less successful among the Black workers. Most were recent migrants with little knowledge of unions; others had had bad experiences in Chicago and elsewhere. The packers ran an aggressive paternalistic program in the Black Belt. Estimates vary, but it seems the Stockyards Labor Council recruited perhaps half of the Black workers at best. The “big problem,” Foster explained, “was the organization of the colored men.”35After significant successes in 1917 to 1919, the stockyards movement disintegrated in the midst of postwar depression, the 1919 race riot, a failed 1921–1922 strike, and an aggressive open shop movement by the packers, who used race systematically to divide the stockyards workers.36 When the packinghouse workers’ movement reemerged in the late thirties and World War II, it was built largely on a coalition of Black workers and progressive whites, including some Irish Americans left over from the earlier organizing. The Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee, later, the United Packinghouse Workers of America, proved one of the most progressive unions in the militant CIO, especially strong in the area of civil rights.37 But this new movement was less the creation of the Irish than of the Black workers who had proved so resistant to the earlier organizing.Toward the end of World War I, again with Fitzpatrick's support, Foster built a similar movement in steel, facing staggering legal and extralegal violence in South Chicago and the mill towns throughout Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Again, working through the ethnic organizations and employing multilingual organizers who could bring the message to the unskilled immigrants in their own language, Fitzpatrick estimated that Foster and his staff had organized more than 350,000 steelworkers, most of them recent unskilled immigrants, at the start of the great 1919 strike.38 The movement was so strong among the recent immigrants that critics called it a “Hunky strike.” As in meat packing, however, the organizers faced their biggest challenge in overcoming the racism of the white workers and the skepticism of the Blacks. Many of the American Federation of Labor unions, half of them led by Irish Americans, had long drawn the color line. Black workers had been “deadlined” out of white working-class neighborhoods and lynched. Employers, on the other hand, in Chicago's stockyards, in the steel towns, and elsewhere, cultivated Black leadership and supported Black churches and other institutions, so long as they opposed the unions. “Through many an experience,” Foster told investigators from the Interchurch World Movement, “Negroes came to believe that the only way they could break into a unionized industry was through strikebreaking.” “Race prejudice has everything to do with it,” he told the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, “they don't feel confidence in the trade unions.”39When steel unionism reemerged in the late 1930s, the ranks of organizers were diverse with Blacks, the second generation of the “new immigrants,” including many Communist militants, but the Irish were once again prominent. CIO leader Len DeCaux termed the Steel Workers Organizing Committee a “Catholic Setup” with Phil Murray, the son of an Irish immigrant union miner, at the helm and numerous Irish Catholic leaders at the local level.40Undoubtedly, Irish Americans played a prominent part in deadlining, mobbing, and employment discrimination through their unions. What is striking in this context, however, is the insight Irish American radicals like Foster, Fitzpatrick, and others brought to the race issue, their recognition of the threat the color line posed to organized labor, and the elaborate planning they put into surmounting it. Measured by the standards of current anti-racist activists, these early Irish organizers will come up short, but they recognized that the labor movement would either integrate the diverse elements of the working-class population or collapse, and they put considerable thought into realizing this integration.What's at work in these efforts on the part of Irish American labor activists?—the church's social teachings, some understandable preference for the underdog, but also self-interest—the effort to build organizations and movements based on class rather than ethnicity. Especially with the advent of newer mass production methods, the related massive influx of unskilled immigrants from a bewildering range of ethnic backgrounds, and the advent of Black and Mexican migration in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, the idea of an “Irish” labor movement was a non-starter. Some skilled trades remained dominated by the Irish for generations, but the secular trend in one industry after another was certainly stacked against this strategy of exclusion. Mass production and the growth of huge industrial complexes like the Union Stock Yards and the South Chicago steel district brought thousands of unskilled immigrants into the labor force. Irish unionists in the stockyards put it rather more crudely to a federal Labor Commissioner: “However much it may go against the grain, we must admit that common interests and brotherhood must include the Polack and Sheeny.”41 The existing unions could either help to organize them or perish. And many Irish activists and organizers responded to this challenge—the CFL generally, organizing in garments, teamsters, meat packing, steel, and elsewhere.Chicago's Irish American community was divided on these and other issues. The very strength of bonding within the Irish community often lead to a defensive response to newcomers. Given their early history in the city, it is perhaps not surprising that, faced with what they perceived as a threat to their status and social capital, elements in the Irish community could lash out, sometimes violently, as in the 1919 race riot. Whatever the built-in tensions, the territoriality so prevalent in Irish neighborhoods and the gangs that sprang from this mentality reinforced the competition for urban space and resources.One striking feature of Chicago's Irish community in relation to other groups is networking. Building from parish contacts and beyond, the Irish carved out a niche for themselves—in physical spaces around the city, in workplaces and unions, in politics, and elsewhere. Such networking contributed to both bonding and bridging social capital, in the efforts to reserve space and resources for the Irish alone, but also in the plans of those aiming to create common ground with others. Thus, the story is one of both conflict and integration, and we ignore either at the risk of minimizing and misunderstanding the broader functions of the Irish community in a city like Chicago.