Receiving Erin's Children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish famine migration, 1845-1855. (Reviews).

Receiving Erin's Children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish Famine Migration, 1845-1855. By J. Matthew Gallman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xii plus 306pp. $55.00/cloth $19.95/paperback).

Cities in the mid-nineteenth century have had powerful critics. Friedrich Engels told tales of fetid slums and festering proletarians in Manchester. Charles Dickens painted a savage picture of inequality and intolerance in the fictional Coketown, while Ralph Waldo Emerson worried about the godless, alienated, materialist populations of American cities. Clergymen, doctors, and novelists on both sides of the Atlantic identified industrial urbanism with social problems. Overall, cities were seen as social systems that had gone wrong. Historians of cities in this period have not uniformly taken this line, but nineteenth-century analyses awakened strong sensitivities to urban social problems and skepticism about the abilities of contemporaries to deal with them. Marxist analyses and class categories, of course, intensified the impulse to view the urban milieu critically, for it was identified with capitalism and with exploitative uses of political power which pushed social relations toward conflict.

J. Matthew Gallman's new book remains largely outside these broad historiographical traditions because of his focus upon urban reform and creative adaptation. In his work, cities are laboratories of social experimentation for those working to create livable environments. In the face of poverty, disease, and crime, citizens of Liverpool and Philadelphia cope, plan and innovate, even if sometimes unsuccessfully. Despite its title, Receiving Erin's Children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish Famine Migration, 1845-1855 is not a book about the Irish. Rather it is a well-designed study of urban institutions as they shifted in size and in scope. He offers a multi-causal analysis of the choices made and the constraints shaping mid-nineteenth century urban responses to unwelcome growth. The famine migrants confronted citizens with the challenge of feeding, housing, and employing thousands of poor Irish who differed from the majority in their religion and to some extent in language and social customs. The Other h ad arrived en masse. Since Liverpool was closer to the site of the economic disaster and cheaper to reach, that town was more heavily deluged, but the challenge posed by the migrant Irish was almost identical in the two cities. Residents of both cities wanted the Irish to move on, but they developed activist responses to the challenge of those who stayed.

Gallman designed his study carefully and cleverly. His book offers a tight, narrowly bounded comparison of public policy within two ports of similar size linked by transportation and marketing networks during a decade when the technologies of urban government shifted. Each was the second city within their national urban hierarchies. Outranked in terms of wealth, population, and commercial importance only by London and New York, each town housed fine civic buildings, an active elite, and a lively public culture. Each had resources--money, institutions, growing economies. Intellectual and human capital existed in abundance, but how to mobilize it? Since neither city was a capital, national governments remained relatively distant, and town officials had much independence. Gallman argues, however, that both towns belonged to a trans-Atlantic, Anglo-American community of shared faith in "localism, voluntarism, and representative government and a skepticism about corruption and taxation." (212). I would also add to the lists strong commitments to Protestantism and Liberalism. Morover, both towns fused the cause of public health with that of cleanliness. Philadelphia doctors and officials watched those in Liverpool; each set could have functioned comfortably in the other nation. Gallman's comparison highlights the similarities of thought and action existing within a North Atlantic world at mid-century. The design of the study as well as its findings undermine the case for American exceptionalism.

One of Gallman's subjects is that of state formation-its timing and the division of responsibility between the national and the local level. The major differences between Liverpool and Philadelphia were, of course, political. The British port functioned within a parliamentary system, which set the parameters for local initiatives in public health, welfare, housing, policing, education, and religious rights. Despite its professed devotion to laissez faire and its tiny national bureaucracy, Britain was a strong state slowly extending its reach at mid-century by regulating, recommending, and requiring. Gallman stresses how the Liverpool city government chose to work within national legislation and London-led initiatives to implement public health legislation and to control its streets. Not only had it expanded its public welfare institutions even before the famine, but it implemented national sanitary legislation in the late 1840's and organized a reasonably efficient police force. Weapons of current choice in t he war against poverty had already been set in place. In addition, local residents had the right to public support if destitute. While most of the Irish-born lacked secure entitlement under this system, they could claim short-term rights to relief. No such blanket guarantee existed in the United States. Moreover, Philadelphians had little national guidance in the construction of welfare policy and even less interest in looking outside town borders for help. The Philadelphia Board of Health was autonomous, and local hospitals mostly privately funded and organized. Actions taken in response to the Irish influx were temporary and privately organized. As a result, major public sanitary reform in Philadelphia was delayed until after the Civil War. Gallman argues that the institutional framework expanded less quickly and efficiently to deal with the famine migrants in the United States, although the challenge posed by them was smaller. Voluntarism and localism continued to be the response of choice to urban poverty and disease, an outcome Gallman finds less appropriate than the English model. His sympathies clearly lie with more aggressive styles of government and interventionist solutions.

In Gallman's view, trans-Atlantic distinctions emerge as ones of degree rather than kind. But small distinctions can produce large results. Gallman acknowledges but underplays social and economic differences between the two cities. The racial and ethnic diversity of Philadelphia combined with its low level of policing allowed a violent street culture to flourish. Protestant nativists had greater license and nastier habits on this side of the Atlantic. On the other hand, Catholics were freer in the USA than in Britain during the 1840s and 1850s to organize congregations and schools, as well as societies which aided the emigrants. The higher US wages and more benign demography gave emigrants themselves greater resources. More systematic social and economic comparisons might well have recast in significant ways the dimensions of the comparative problem posed by the famine Irish. In any case, the voluntarist social welfare solution chosen by Philadelphians lasted, for the most part, until the New Deal and has rec ently reemerged as the policy of choice for many in the Congress. It was scarcely a short term response soon to be abandoned. Without a more detailed examination of who was aided and what they received, its impact during the famine period cannot be measured accurately against that of the Liverpool Poor Law, which worked actively to deport Irish migrants and to give applicants as little as possible. Judgements on the relative effectiveness of public and private welfare initiatives in a period when benefits and entitlement were individually negotiated are notoriously difficult to make in large part because they require detailed analyses of need as well as of aid. Gender and age differences in populations shape policies and impacts in significant ways also. While I share Gallman's preference for state mandated welfare payments, its relative effectiveness in meeting the challenge of the famine Irish cannot be conclusively demonstrated without reference to other sorts of sources. While he demonstrates the benefits of a well-designed comparison, his strong focus on public policy does not supply all the materials needed to assess its impact.