>> as the presidential campaign enters its final months and the political parties prepare for their conventions, american history tv will air c-span's original series the contenders featuring 14 key political figures who ran for president and lost but impacted american political history. we'll air the series every weekend from june 3rd to september 2nd on sundays at 8:30 a.m., 7:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. eastern all here on american history tv on c-span 3. join us as historians preview the series on saturday, june 2nd at 10 a.m. eastern. each week american history tv sits in on a lecture with one of the nation's college professors. you can watch the classes here every saturday at 8 p.m. and midnight eastern and sundays at 1 p.m. this week history professor james connolly looks at immigration and the roots of pleuralism in the united states. this one hour and 15 minute class took place at ball state

university in indiana.uralism i. this one hour and 15 minute class took place at ball state university in indiana. on tuesday with in class we looked at the social in europe and one of the ways european governments attempted to appease the classes, reduce social tension, and one of the tools they used was mass politics as we talked about. that's also something going on in the united states but in the united states that process takes on a much different context, and the main reason for that is that in the u.s. you have universal white male suffrage by 1820 unlike in europe where it is france and the 1870s and other countries later on, in the u.s. you have basically full mass democracy very early on and you have it before most immigrants he show up, so when the immigrants begin to be

integrated into american society and particularly when they begin to be integrated into american politics, they're being integrated into a much different world than are those immigrants that we talked about in europe. so what i want to do today is talk about how the united states begins to develop a plurist philosophy, a pleuralist vision and i want to trace the roots back to the way politics worked in 19th century america. i have here just to give you a sense of the kind of politics we're talking about, an image from harper's weekly in 1858, around election time or just after election time, in 1858 and shows a saloon and a polling place. they didn't do it in elementary schools. they did it in places in sa loons and places like that. this is in the sixth ward. there are a lot of details that clue you in as to the environment that's being

created. it is a saloon. you have a dog running around, a kid who is i think begging, asking for money, and you have -- if you look at a lot of art from the magazines of the middle of the 19th century the clothing you see is very much working class style. the guys with the dark top hats on the right are sporting men, men usually involved in gambling and other kinds of vice and so forth. if you want to vote, you can see the doorway all the way in the back. you had to go in there to vote. anyone who wanted to vote had to make their way through the saloon itself to get into the back. if you see the two posters on either side of the door, i don't know how well you can make it out from back there, but on the left is a campaign poster for john clancy and on the right is a campaign poster for john kelly. clancy and kelly, this is an irish environment. this was an irish neighborhood. what's going on here is you're starting to see politics in which immigrants are heavily

involved. the person who drew this picture or designed this picture for harper's wasn't very happy about that, and this is supposed to be a picture of what is wrong with american politics in new york city in the 1850s. for many, many immigrants the politics is one of the key ways in which they integrate themselves into american life and they do this from the get-go and that is what's going to really make a difference in the way americans begin to conceive of their own identities and of the nation's identity as well. so that's what i want to talk about, the immigrant experience of politics in the 19th century and how that relates and develops over time and produces by the time you get to the early 20th century a plurist philosophy and explanation of what the united states was like. now, basically just there is a lot of different ways to define and understand pluralism and so just for our purposes of fairly

straight forward and basic definition of it is a vision of in this case the united states as a country with many different cultures, many different ethnic groups and there isn't one single american identity that everyone has to sub subscribe to in every way. another way to think about it is the way in which immigrants could identify themselves. they could identify themselves in hyphenated terms as irish american, polish american and italian american and what i want to do today is get at the roots of that identity, the roots of the development of that conception of what the united states is. we're to do it by going through three different sections, three different sets of developments. the first is going to be the world of party politics like the image we just looked at from the period from about 1840 to the end of the 19th century. it is a period when there is very stiff competition between

the two major parties for votes and that includes votes for immigrants and it is a period when efforts to naturalize and bring immigrants into american life are particularly intense, and it is a period when identities particularly will look at the case of irish american identities and take shape in a particular way. then we'll look at a little bit about how immigrant politics or ethnic politics changes as you get into the early 20th century. during that era you see a slower pace of naturalization. you get fewer and fewer immigrants who are coming into the united states and very quickly becoming citizens, the pace of naturalization slows down. there is a number of different reasons we'll talk about. you still see immigrants engaged in american public life and american civic life pretty intensely, and so you still have a process where immigrants are participating in politics while

also remaining within their own ethnic communities and developing these same hyphenated identities. you could be again italian american, polish american, and so forth in this period. all of this sort of comes to a head in the first part of the 20th century doing some of the stuff we already talked about and read about with the rise of nativism and particularly the justify jacobson outlined for you and immigrants are facing this onslaught, demands to restrict immigration and demands to prevent immigrants from becoming citizens, arguments that they're inferior in a biological sense and racial sense as well and so they start to argue back and this is when they begin to articulate the set of experiences they've had of being irish and american and being both italian and american and for the past century and so you see the articulation of a cultural plurism, a pluralism in the first decades of the 20th

century, so this makes sense to everyone? any questions? all right. good. let's go back to the early part of the 19th century. as i said before, the united states is a country that is the quickest to democratize in the western world, by about 1820 and every state and every adult white male can vote. you remember the naturalization rules that allow free white people to become american citizens. you have similar voting rules by the time you get to the '20s, so when immigrants start to show up in significant numbers, which is? what the case in the 1020s and 1830s and very much the case in

the 1840s and afterwards, they're showing up into a political environment in which they're already qualified to vote as soon as they become citizens, and remember the clause or the requirement that they be white. there is a debate about whether the irish are white. we talked about that a little bit and whether other groups are white or not but for purposes of voting, they were considered white, and so they had access to the ballot from very early on. now, the world they come into, the political environment they come into is quite intense. there is a fierce competition going on beginning in the 1830s and 1840s between two major political parties. the other feature of american public life that develops and intensifies in this period is the growth of mass political parties. the united states is not only the first to provide voting rights to just about every adult man, it is also the first country to see large mass

political parties. by about the end of the 1830s both parties are fully committed to mobilizing as many voters as possible of allowing as many people as possible or at least as many men as possible to participate in american politics and so there is an incentive on their part to mobilize new voters and those new voters are in many cases immigrants, so there is a real pressure on both political organizations, both major parties in the 1840s we're talking about the democrats and the wigs, a little bit later it will shift over by the end of the 1850s to being between democrats and republicans, the two parties that remain with us today, all the way through, and these two organizations need as many votes as they can get. they develop particularly in cities but elsewhere as well. they develop very elaborate organizations that will eventually come to be called

political machines, so machines is kind of another word for the party organizations of the 19th century and into the early 20th century. they're really well developed in cities where you have neighborhoods broken down, block by block, precinct by precinct, people in charge of mobilizing the vote in each of these little neighborhoods ensuring that everybody on the block has voted, has voted properly. voting was much more public in the 19th century than the 20th. there was no secret ballots so they knew how you were voting and they had all kinds of tricks and sometimes they printed their own ballots prechecked and everything so if you want to vote for the democrats, they just hand you a ballot and you handed it in and you didn't have to read it or know what was going on. gradually over the course of the 19th century you get rules that are designed to make it harder for parties to dictate people's votes, so they say you can't have preprinted ballots. you have to have publicly provided ballots and they would do clever things like putting

drops of perfume on their ballots which were also prechecked and people would stand by the polling place and sniff your ballot and if they didn't get channel number 5 or whatever it is, they knew you didn't vote correctly. there are all kinds of ways in which they are able to manipulate and shape voting. they also provide all kinds of incentives. part of the deal in voting was that you were making a sort of exchange. you were doing your voting for the democratic party in exchange for a job or some other kind of favor, maybe easy access to a liquor license or a favor getting your son out of jail or any of a number of other kinds of exchanges, so there was this bar tering that goes on in which you change votes for favors and votes for service and votes for patronage during the really the whole of the 19th century. this system develops gradually from the middle of the 19th century and cemented into place in most cities by the beginning

of the 20th century. the most famous of these political machines is taminee hall, remember the thomas nascar toons targeting boss tweed? tweed was a tammany hall guy. it becomes the quintessential machine, the quintessential example of a party organization in a city in 19th century america, and tammanee hall is really in the throes of fierce competition with republicans with other factions within the democratic party as well all through the middle decades of the 19th century. one of the things they try to do rather is get new immigrants to vote for them. they would send guys down to greet the ships when they arrived at the docks. they would help people find a place to live. they would get them a job. as soon as they could they would get them registered to vote, naturalized and registered to

vote. it became a matter of great importance to tammanee to naturalize immigrants as fast as it possibly good. these naturalizations we have up here between 1856 and '67 on average about 9,200 people were naturalized per year. in 1868 there was a very fiercely competitive election and they needed as many votes as they can so they managed in that year alone in new york city alone to naturalize 48,000 immigrants. this was done in illegal, corrupt ways. they had judges they bribed who didn't really care if immigrants who arrived and actually waited the five years. we talked about it is a five-year waiting period for citizenship, so they had judges who just ignored the fact that the person just got off the boat a couple weeks ago and allowed them to register people. they hired a printer in 1868 who

printed up over 100,000 ballots or not ballots, 100,000 blank naturalization forms and about 70,000 completed naturalization certificates where they just had to write somebody's name in and also they could basically churn out as many new immigrants who are now american citizens as possible, so you had cases of immigrants being in the united states for a matter of months, a matter of a year or two and already they were registered to vote. it is not just true of new york. this is the most famous case involves tammanee hall and mobilizing immigrants in new york and it is happening other places as well, anywhere where there is a substantial competition. and there is a researcher that looked at buffalo politics in the 1840s and found in the months leading to every election there was a spike in naturalizations where it would be a couple hundred people a week every week for several months would be naturalized, so

the immigrants coming over, particularly irish immigrants coming into new york city and also true of germans as well, these immigrants were becoming citizens and becoming voters in the united states very quickly. does this make sense, everyone? how many of you wrote papers on the seifert's? he gets involved in politics and sets up a farm and saw mill in michigan and by the 1850s he is heavily involved in politics, getting exercise over the slavery question and do you remember who he is doing this politics with? who was he organizing with? do you remember? >> the germans. >> the other germans, exactly, like a german faction locally involved in politics. this is happening all over the united states through the 1840s, the 1850s and all the way really through to the end of the 19th

century. immigrants are very quickly becoming engaged in american politics. american politics is wide open and allows people to get involved quickly and incentives to bring new people in and so what you end up seeing is immigrants come along and become citizens and voters without becoming culturally american. so you can stay with your german group in michigan and still be heavily involved in american politics. you can be barely off the boat from ireland in new york city and already voting in local elections in this way. so there are implications here for the experiences of immigrants and the way they begin to identify themselves. we have talked a lot about how republican theories of the democracy require active civic participation. one of the essential things to being a good american citizen is participating in american politics. so you have these immigrants who are very quickly involved in one

sort of the main kinds of things you do as an american citizen all the while still living in annum grant neighborhood, perhaps not speaking english yet in the case of germans and still in every cultural way being am en meshed in your natural community and at the same time being fully active american citizens in a political sense, so it is very easy for people to think of themselves very quickly after they come over to the united states as american citizens and as irish, as american citizens and as germans, and so you end up very quickly developing these hyphenated identities. it is not hard for irish americans to imagine themselves as being both irish and being american and not thinking there was anything incompatible about those two things. not everybody agrees with that. we know there are plenty of people that disagree and the experience of these immigrants

that are coming over is makes it very easy for them to imagine themselves in these terms. this makes sense. any questions at this point? no one wants to stand up and ask a question? chicken. there is another event that fuels this process of creating these dual identities, and that's the american civil war. what you see here is an image of the marshaling, the mustering i suppose of the 69th regiment in new york city. this is in all irish american regiment that's going off to fight in the civil war. this is a scene that was sketched obviously of its parade before it departs new york city. the site that's been chosen for this image is pretty telling. along the right here is st. patrick's cathedral, the major

roman catholic irish catholic church in new york city. on the opposite side here is hi bernian hall. this is an irish fraternal group that was very prominent, around new york city for quite a while and did a great deal in terms of providing assistance to new irish immigrants and really one of the central institutions of the irish american community in new york city. so they're marching between these two big architectural symbols of the irish presence in new york and as you look at this, i am not sure you can see the details easily, but there is a flag they use, a regimental flag, all green with an irish harp in the middle and right next to it and also down the way a little bit as well is the american flag so you have both symbols, both expressions of identity, american and irish mixed together. when they were recruiting this regiment, they were waving this green flag right next to the

american flag, and they were arguing this is a way to really prove to those doubters, a way to prove to those no nothings that think that catholics can't be good citizens that are really are good, loyal americans preparing to make the ultimate sacrifice that any american would make. so you end up getting sort of these public symbols, these public expressions of identity in which both halves of these people's identities are expressed, both the irish half and the american half. yeah? whatever you want. yeah. >> so were the irish in the regiment? did they have to be citizens or could they be people straight off the boat? >> they were typically citizens. you didn't have to be. there were cases when they were not citizens, people not yet naturalized, but that was

unusual because naturalization happened so quickly when you get here, so it took awhile. you would have to really get someone pretty close to fresh off the boat to get them into this regiment without having already seen them naturalized and tammanee hall is involved so if they weren't they probably had them sign the form right there. yeah? >> since it is civil war, didn't immigration process was reduced? >> yes. that's exactly right. immigration is much slower during the 60s. remember the graphs we looked at. there is a spike in the '40s and '50s and slows down in the is ka of the irish because the crisis of the famine is over and things stabilize a little bit but it is not an attractive time to be visiting the united states. it doesn't disappear entirely because there still is immigration. it does slow down. that's another reason why most

of these people likely joining up with the regiment are likely to have been citizens because there hasn't been that many new arrivals recently. thanks. anything else? now, this continues on. there is a lot of efforts to sort after certificate this. one of the things i found striking, too, is that the catholic hierarchy, the archbishops in new york and boston that also had an irish regiment and the 69th regiment we were looking at, that was just one unit in a larger irish brigade. if you go to gettysburg today, there is a monument to the tammanee regiment that fought and there was a conscious effort on the part of those participating in that unit and other irish units. there is an irish regiment that

comes out of boston as well, for instance, to demonstrate that you were both irish and a good american. part of the recruiting pitch is prove to everyone that we're good citizens and part of this union cause and of course they're all northerners, but there is also sort of we want to assert our own identity and maintain our own identity, so there is a story about an irish unit at the battle of fredericksburg in virginia that took clips of a box wood which is a little green bush with green leaves and put the box wood branchs in their hats and so there was a little sort of spash of green across the union blue uniform to let everyone know they were irish and so that's a strategy. that's a way of asserting yourself and saying i am american but i am also irish, so this is a context in which american and irish identities fuse even more tightly. it is not a coincidence that ant i catholic and anti-irish

nativism diminishes in the immediate aftermath of the war and will come back later in the 19th century but for a while the irish demonstration of their loyalty really proves to people that there is a tlsh there is reason to accept the irish as legitimate americans in this process. this is an irish catholic -- i am assuming they're irish. i am certainly they're almost all entirely irish from a boston unit celebrating mass on the battlefield. the picture is not identified. i don't know which unit it is. i don't know who the priest is. there is a couple of women in the picture, so my hunch is this is at camp before the battle started. there weren't a lot of photographers running around on civil war battlefields at the time. we talked about how hard it was to take pictures in the middle of the 19th century so this is clearly a posed photograph and it is also another signal, you know, that we are here participating in the war effort and we are still irish and still catholic.

of course what charge are they responding to here? what's the worry that catholics have in the united states? go ahead. >> only listen to the pope. >> that they'll only listen to the pope, that they're loyal to the pope before and instead of being loyal to the united states, and you can't be a good citizen, particularly if you're overly obedient to the pope and the clergy you can't not independent citizen required in the american public so this is a way of saying, hey, we're being good citizens and participating in the war effort even as we are still overtly practicing our catholicism. more of these kinds of expressions of dual identities. fast forward after the civil war a little bit. this is a famous st. patrick's day parade again in new york city in 1871 and where else have we seen a picture of st.

patrick's day before? anyone remember? 1867, the day we celebrate. a lot different. that was a picture of a drunken riot. this is the opposite. it is orderly, calm, peaceful, and that's not a coincidence. the irish are very conscious in the public displays as anyone vofltd and sending a message about who they are and the details here are pretty interesting. up front have you a guy on a horse that doesn't seem to be going particularly well and has the plumed hat and so forth. anybody recognize that uniform? i wouldn't necessarily expect it. it is a knights of columbus uniform, catholic men's organization. these guys with the long, flowing cloaks i guess they are, they are -- i will say it wrong,

gallow glasses i think is the name. gallow glasses, ancient irish warriors, the costumes they're wearing. in this main carriage that's being towed is a bust of general o'connell, the leader of the independence movement in ireland for this, so irish nationalism, remember how jacobson talks about nationalism being an important part of identities and he has that and he is in here and o'connell will come to new york city and over here you have the irish bri grade we were looking at a few years earlier and there is the harp and behind it the american flag marching in good order and this is not a riot or a drunken brawl of the kind that nas showed us from a few years earlier. what's the other big violent event during the civil war just a few years before? there is this history and perception the irish are violent

thugs creating chaos in the various riots and disloyal, so these orderly processions are designed to counter that image and to suggest something else. so there is a blend of these irish symbols, appropriating space in the middle of new york city. i think this is right near central park although i am not certain of that. this way there is a mixing of american symbols and irish symbols and throughout and notice the women dressed here like the feminine image of the republic or mary ann in the french case and the feminine image of a republic of virtue, one of the ways in which the american nation was symbolized in cartoons of the middle of the 19th century, so again blending republican american images with irish images and the fact that the campaign for a free irish republic meshes with the idea that the united states is a republic so it is very easy for irish people at least to imagine themselves as being good, loyal