The San Francisco Irish, 1848-1880

In this vivid social history, R. A. Burchell follows the Irish who crossed not only the Atlantic but an entire continent to make a new kind of urban life in Gold Rush California. The San Francisco Irish, 1848–1880 overturns East Coast narratives of entrenched nativism to show how a city without an inherited ruling class—exploding from fewer than a thousand residents to a quarter million in three decades—opened political, economic, and ecclesiastical space to newcomers. Drawing on census manuscripts, city directories, newspapers, and institutional records, Burchell reconstructs a community that by 1880 comprised roughly a third of San Francisco’s inhabitants, with Catholicism the city’s largest denomination. He tracks the rise of Irish financiers and builders (the Donahues), the founding of banks and orphanages, and early victories at the ballot box—from Frank McCoppin’s mayoralty to Eugene Casserly’s seat in the U.S. Senate—arguing that California’s compressed, improvisational urbanization blunted older hierarchies and recast ethnic power.

Burchell does not romanticize. Against the major theme of mobility and opportunity runs a persistent minor key: structural inequality, the burdens of poverty and disease, and the familiar, if muted, suspicions attached to Catholic allegiance. By juxtaposing riot-scarred Boston and Philadelphia with San Francisco’s cross-confessional “live and let live” ethos, he explains both the city’s unusual tolerance and the limits of that tolerance. The result is a finely grained account of how Irish migrants fashioned institutions, leveraged patronage, and settled permanently—evident in lengthening residence patterns—within a volatile extractive economy driven by gold, railroads, and Nevada silver. A model case study in immigrant urban history, The San Francisco Irish reframes the nineteenth-century American city from the Pacific slope, where the absence of a long past made the future, for a time, radically negotiable.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.