Receiving Erin's Children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish Famine Migration, 1845-1855 Review

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Receiving Erin's Children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish Famine Migration, 1845-1855 ReviewJ. Matthew Gallman, in Receiving Erin's Children, analyzes how two demographically similar cities, Liverpool, England, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, during the 1840s and 1850s handled the large influx of refuges from the Irish potato famine. Purporting to discuss immigration issues, the book is more a social study of how different cultures responded to similar rising urban problems such as poverty and crime. Both Liverpool and Philadelphia were ports with growing populations. "Poverty, sanitation, housing, disease, sectarian and ethnic conflict, crime and policing, education and delinquency...had been ongoing subjects of public debate in both cities." (pp. 211-12) Gallman found that the resolution of these issues depended upon the "material conditions, dominant ideologies, and the magnitude of the migration in each port." (p. 212)
England with its small land mass and large population took a broader more public view of handling social issues. The poor were numerous and encroaching upon the middle and upper classes. Although the poor provided a useful labor force for the cities, their issues were becoming common issues which needed a centralized governmental response. On the other extreme, the United States had a large land mass with most of its population living along its eastern coast. The poor had the opportunity to improve their condition by moving westward. Social problems such as sanitation and crime were viewed as local problems that could be obviated by inducing the poor to move elsewhere. The concept of the frontier was distinctly American and colored the American responses to many social issues.
In England, there had evolved an acceptance of a hierarchy. The government was expected to act on behalf of its citizenry. Whereas, the United States had a strong cultural commitment to voluntarism. There was, and continues to be, a common distrust of centralized bureaucracies and of decisions being made in a hierarchical fashion. The United States, and Philadelphia in particular, consisted of numerous philanthropic societies and benevolent institutions that handled in their own ways with little oversight the problems that they found and chose to handle. The United States had little use for a federal form of internal government at this time.
Although England had a large immigrant population from Ireland, it did not have the diversity of the United States which was already a melting pot of European and African cultures. The Irish were considered to be outsiders by the English but there was no intention of making them conform to "English" ways. The Irish had always been neighbors living in close proximity to England; their culture was not unknown to the English-their culture was not a threat. The opposite was true in the United States. Immigrants were outsiders but because they all came from far away, their cultures were strange and threatening. There grew an impulse amongst Americans to acculturate immigrants quickly. The Irish also arrived a rung up on the social ladder, with Africans remaining on the bottom rung. This immediate movement upward was also threatening. Traditional animosities between nations continued as a microcosm in the new world.
"The crux of this study has been a comparison of choices-as they were made at roughly the same time in two different cities." (p. 224) The methods developed to deal with emerging social issues reflected how the two nations had handled social issues in the past. There was not yet a need to reinvent a new social construct. The English continued to rule and solve problems from the top down and the United States, though growing more democratic, continued to view its issues locally.
Receiving Erin's Children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish Famine Migration, 1845-1855 OverviewBetween 1845 and 1855, 2 million Irish men and women fled their famine-ravaged homeland, many to settle in large British and American cities that were already wrestling with a complex array of urban problems. In this innovative work of comparative urban history, Matthew Gallman looks at how two cities, Philadelphia and Liverpool, met the challenges raised by the influx of immigrants.
Gallman examines how citizens and policymakers in Philadelphia and Liverpool dealt with such issues as poverty, disease, poor sanitation, crime, sectarian conflict, and juvenile delinquency. By considering how two cities of comparable population and dimensions responded to similar challenges, he sheds new light on familiar questions about distinctive national characteristics-without resorting to claims of "American exceptionalism." In this critical era of urban development, English and American cities often evolved in analogous ways, Gallman notes. But certain crucial differences-in location, material conditions, governmental structures, and voluntaristic traditions, for example-inspired varying approaches to urban problem solving on either side of the Atlantic.--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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