Replies

What's interesting about the Italian immigrants is that they integrated into American society fairly quickly after Italians started to migrate to the USA en masse from the 1880's on. In the San Francisco area, Italians quickly became famous, especially in the bakery business (many of the best-known names of bakeries on the US West Coast were started by Italian immigrants).

Many Irish, on the other hand, had a much harder time integrating into American society, especially the Irish that arrived from the time of the infamous Potato Famine on. (The earlier Scots Irish immigrants, though, did integrate extremely well into US society; these earlier Irish immigrants were among the earliest people that started the westward migration of Americans.) The later Irish immigrants couldn't speak English well, were extremely poor and their Catholicism strongly clashed with the more dominant Protestants in the USA; as a result, the later Irish immigrants were heavily discriminated against even well into the 20th Century. Al Smith, the 1928 Democratic nominee for President, lost because even in 1928 people were not ready to accept someone who was Catholic and of Irish immigrant descent to be President.

With all due respect to Irish American freepers, the famine Irish were some of the least educated and "troublesome" immigrants ever to land on these shores. While other ethnic groups had large entrepreneurial classes (Italians, Jews, Germans and Chinese come to mind), the famine Irish did not. Through sheer numbers (those Irish girls knew how to pop out children back in the day) they were able to take over the political machines and looked to the civil service for advancement in place of commerce.

You ain't seen Irish until you come down to Kearny Avenue in Kearny NJ. THE BEST fish and chip joints on earth :)

Al Smith, the 1928 Democratic nominee for President, lost because even in 1928 people were not ready to accept someone who was Catholic and of Irish immigrant descent to be President.

Al Smith was Italian too: "Alfred E. Smith, who was elected governor of New York in 1919 and later was the first Catholic to run for President, was of Italian descent. According to his biographers Matthew and Hannah Josephson, Smith's paternal grandfather was born in Genoa in 1813 and given the name Emanuele Ferrara. The 1855 New York State census records, however, list him as "Emmanuel Smith, born Genoa." He was probably given the name Smith by U.S. immigration officers unable to pronounce his Italian name. His grandson, Al Smith, lost the presidency to Herbert Hoover in 1928."