How+was+life+portrayed+for+the+Irish+in+Pittsburgh+upon+their+arrival?

· Although the Irish Catholics started very low on the social status scale, by 1900, they had jobs and earnings about equal on average to their neighbors. After 1945, the Catholic Irish consistently ranked toward the top of the social hierarchy, thanks especially to their high rate of college attendance · Many became farmers and tradesmen · The ship the Irish used to sail to the new world was regarded as the “coffin of death” since it brought about death and illnesses · Many came from an area known as Ulster, and brought their skills to the area as **teamsters** and **shopkeepers**.  · Upon their arrival many of these Irish immigrants were impoverished. · In 1940 David Lawrence, a Pittsburgh Irish mayor and later the governor of Pennsylvania gave the city something to be proud of, thus promoting Irish heritage · Turning their Catholic identity to their advantage and pursuing political opportunities unavailable in Ireland, the Irish moved steadily upward in American society. · The Irish immigrants of the famine era were the most disadvantaged the United States had ever seen. · The Irish poor lived in basements, cellars, and one-room apartments lacking natural light and ventilation and frequently flooded with sewage. They suffered from alarmingly high rates of cholera, yellow fever, typhus, tuberculosis, and pneumonia · The Irish immigrants were mostly unskilled, worked for low wages, and were often used as substitute labor to break strikes. · Native-born workers worried that their own wages would decline as a result and that gains made by organized labor would be undercut. · Many Americans also feared that the Irish would never advance socially but would instead become the first permanent working class in the United States. · Since the Irish were the first Catholic group to come over from Europe in large masses Catholicism became the single most important ingredient of their Irish-American identity. · By the 1820s, many Irish men began arriving in the US to fulfill migrant labor roles, such as building the canals that crisscrossed the Northeast industrial areas, as well as other manual labor roles. · Building railroads and woking in coal mines was dangerous and life threatening work.