A Tale of Two Cities

F. Matthew Gallman. Receiving Erin's Children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish Famine, 1845-1855. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xii + 306 pp. Notes and index. $55.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

In the United States, where the separation of church and state has long been fundamental dogma of the country's civil religion, some hear crackles of heresy in President George W. Bush's call for the federal funding of faith-based social service organizations. The president's acolytes argue their position on the grounds that twenty-first-century American pluralism and mutual respect among religious communities precludes heavy-handed proselytizing. So, why not fund those agencies most successful in the struggle against poverty, ignorance, and disease regardless of the source of moral and spiritual fervor that inspires the aid-givers? Critics reply that faith-based social assistance is inherently coercive, seasoned with moral and spiritual subtexts imposed upon recipients. This current debate over who should aid society's neediest is merely the latest tiff in an on-going struggle that extends well beyond America's borders and has challenged municipal leaders in countries across the Atlantic community.

Today's needy are often immigrants from parts of Asia, the Caribbean, or Latin America. Their presence tests both the resources of the cities where they live, work, and educate their children and the resourcefulness of those who govern. Their plight echoes an earlier era and debates over how cities should cope with the challenges of poverty and dislocation.

In the mid-nineteenth century Irish immigrants left their homes to join a diaspora they hoped would take them far from the poverty and starvation that was their lot in Ireland's southern provinces. Unlike previous studies of Irish famine and flight, F. Matthew Gallman's tale focuses upon two host countries--England and the United States--but even more specifically, two cities where Irish immigrants settled in great numbers. Placing Liverpool, England, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, under his microscope, side by side on the same slide, Gallman's broader aim is to illuminate "the ways in which cities and national governments address a variety of social ills, particularly those affecting the materially disadvantaged" (p. ix). If "poverty, disorder, and disease,"(p. 5) challenged cities and countries on both sides of the pond, the migrants of the Irish potato famine tested the system and allowed the responses to social stressors to be most easily studied. Gallman emphasizes that he is less concerned with "direct responses to the Irish newcomers" (p. 5) than he is with better understanding how each society addressed similar social problems, some of which clearly preceded the famine years, as did the institutional instruments with which such problems might be addressed.

But why Liverpool and Philadelphia rather than the two great cities of London and New York? Explaining his methodology and its relationship to the intent of the work, Gallman opted for two similar cities, neither the largest or most important in their respective countries. Nor had either Philadelphia or Liverpool been as scrutinized as thoroughly by scholars as New York and London. Gallman explains, "Liverpool and Philadelphia played similar roles in their respective worlds. Second in size and importance to the dominant metropolises of London and New York, both enjoyed international prominence as major ports and commercial centers" (p. 6). Moreover, each of his choices was expanding in population from approximately 160,000 to 400,000 between the 1830s and early 1850s, with large Irish populations that had begun arriving well before the famine. Gallman reminds readers that by 1850 nearly 72,00 Philadelphians and 84,000 Liverpudlians--17.6 percent and 22.3 percent of their populations respectively--were born on the emerald isle. However, Philadelphia was more ethnically diverse with substantial populations of immigrants from Germany and England and almost 20,000 African Americans (5 percent of the population), giving the American city a racial diversity that Liverpool lacked. While both cities had some notable buildings...