American Pharaoh Read Online Free PDF Page A

encounter financial troubles. Throughout Daley’s childhood, other
     ethnic groups were growing in size and drawing closer to Hamburg: formerly Irish Lawler Avenue, a mere four blocks west of
     Daley’s childhood home, was renamed “Lithuanica” as the Lithuanian population around it grew. Mr. Dooley, the fictional creation
     of the great Irish-American journalist Finley Peter Dunne, expressed Bridgeport’s fears of being engulfed by fast-encroaching
     ethnic rivals. In Dunne’s columns in the
Chicago Daily News,
Mr. Dooley was the Irish-born keeper of a Bridgeport saloon. In 1897, five years before Daley’s birth, Mr. Dooley was already
     bemoaning the fact that “th’ Hannigans an’ Leonidases an’ Caseys” were moving out to greener pastures, “havin’ made their
     pile,” and “Polish Jews an’ Swedes an’ Germans an’ Hollanders” had “swarmed in, settlin’ on th’ sacred sites.” The most telling
     sign of Bridgeport’s “change an’ decay,” Mr. Dooley said, was the selection of “a Polacker” to tend the famous “red bridge,”
     which joined Bridgeport to the rest of the city, thereby placing control of the neighborhood in the hands of a non-Hibernian.
     It was the rising tide of black immigration, though, that Bridgeporters found most worrisome. Daley’s youth coincided with
     the start of an unprecedented migration, as southern blacks moved north to take industrial jobs in the Northeast and Midwest.
     Most of the blacks flooding into Chicago were settling in the South Side Black Belt, just a few blocks east of Bridgeport,
     and the ghetto was always threatening to move closer. By the time Daley was born, many Bridgeporters had decided that their
     tough little neighborhood, with its workaday bungalows and slaughterhouse ambience, was best left to the new ethnic groups
     that were engulfing it on all sides. Irish residents of Hamburg who had the money — like Mr. Dooley’s Hannigans, Leonidases,
     and Caseys — were already moving out to more attractive and prestigious neighborhoods where the lawns were larger and the
     air did not smell of blood. But despite all sense and logic, Daley’s family, and later Daley himself, remained intensely loyal
     to their small Irish-Catholic village. Daley never moved out and, it might be said, he spent a lifetime defending it. 10

    Daley was born in a simple two-flat at 3502 South Lowe on May 15, 1902. Daley’s father, Michael, was the second of nine children
     born to James E. Daley, a New York–born butcher, and Delia Gallagher, an immigrant from Ireland. Like most Irish-American
     immigrants, Daley’s forebears came to the country as part of the Great Potato Famine migration, which caused more than two
     million Irish to expatriate between 1845 and 1850. Though not brought over in chains, these Irishmen and Irishwomen were torn
     from their land and forced to emigrate by extraordinarily cruel circumstances. Before the famine ended, perhaps one-quarter
     of Ireland’s population of eight million had died of starvation and disease. Many survivors headed for America. Their journey
     across the ocean, made in aptly named “coffin ships,” was perilous. Passengers often succumbed to “ship fever,” a kind of
     typhus, along the way. It was a migration of refugees fleeing a country they held dear, often forced to leave loved ones behind.
     Family legend has it that Daley’s grandfather began his own journey when he went to market in Cork with his brother to sell
     pigs and, with the few shillings he made on the sale, boarded the next ship for America. 11
    Growing up in Bridgeport, Daley could not have avoided hearing about the horrors of the “Great Starvation.” Adults in the
     neighborhood, some of whom had seen the suffering firsthand, passed on to the children lurid tales of skeletons walking the
     countryside, and peasant women dying in the fields. These famine stories were invariably laced with bitter accounts of how
     the hated