The Routledge History of Irish America [1 ed.] 1032219211, 9781032219219

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsements Page
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Contributors
Foreword by Marion R. Casey
Introduction
Part 1 From Colonial Era to Early Republic
1 Ireland and the Irish in the Atlantic World
2 Ulster Presbyterians and the Development of a “Scotch-Irish” Identity
3 Family and Labor in Eighteenth-Century Irish America
4 The Irish in the Revolutionary Atlantic
5 Race, Labor, and Slavery in Antebellum Irish America
6 Cosmopolitan Insights from Early Irish-American Letter Networks
Part 2 The Great Famine
7 The Great Famine Exodus
8 American Catholicism and the Irish from Colonial Times to 1870
9 The Rise of the Popular Press in Irish-American Culture
10 Anti-Irish Nativism in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
11 Irish-American Drama in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America
12 Folklore in Irish America
13 Irish-American Famine Literature
Part 3 After the Famine
14 How Remembering the Famine Shaped Irish-American Identity
15 The Irish in the Civil War and Reconstruction
16 Race, Gender, and Irish Labor in US Northeastern Cities
17 California, Race, and the Irish in the West
18 Irish Americans in American Politics and the Catholic Church, 1870–1945
19 The Emmets and the Jameses, an Irish-American Case Study
Part 4 The Turn of the Twentieth Century
20 America and Irish-American Nationalism
21 America and Irish Unionism, 1870–1930
22 Irish-American Women and Political Activism in the Early Twentieth Century
23 The Irish and Labor in the Industrial Era, 1880–1930s
24 Irish Labor, Liberty, and Literature in the Twentieth-Century Atlantic World
Part 5 After World War II
25 The Irish and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965
26 Irish-American Politics in the Mid-Twentieth Century
27 Revisiting the Role of the United States of America in Northern Ireland
28 Capturing Fading Communities in Post-World War II Irish-American Fiction
29 Lorraine Hansberry, Sean O’Casey, and the Common Space of the Theater
30 Irish Americanness in Late Twentieth-Century Hollywood Films
Part 6 Irish America in the Third Millennium
31 Media and the Irish Diaspora from the Twentieth Century to the Present
32 Irish America, the “Celtic Tiger,” and After
33 Irish Americans and US Politics in the Twenty-First Century
34 Breaking the Silence of Child Sexual Abuse in the Irish-American Catholic Church
35 LGBTQ Irish Activists and the Queering of Irish America
Part 7 The Twenty-First Century and Beyond
36 The Irish Language in America
37 Irish Music in America
38 Disability in Irish-Catholic America
39 Animals in Irish-American Poetry
40 Whiteness and the Contemporary Irish-American Family Saga
41 Contemporary Irish America and the Environment
Afterword: The Remarkable Persistence of Irish America
Index

Citation preview

Ranging from the colonial era to the present day and addressing a remarkably wide range of themes— including migration, labor, race, gender, sexuality, religion, politics, nationalism, literature, language, music, and the environment—this Routledge History will be an invaluable resource for all readers interested in Irish‑American history and culture. Kevin Kenny, New York University This volume represents a spectacular achievement that will appeal to scholars, students, and gen‑ eral readers. Innovative and wide‑ranging, it beautifully illustrates the diversity and complexity of Irish‑American culture and history from the earliest waves of migration up to the present time. Marjorie Howes, Boston College Carefully structured into seven well‑defined sections and written by both rising stars and leading scholars in the field, The Routledge History of Irish America is a breathtakingly wide‑ranging explo‑ ration of the lives, activities, and reception of Irish America across the centuries. A must for students and scholars alike. Donald M. MacRaild, London Metropolitan University and Honorary Fellow at Ulster and Edinburgh universities

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF IRISH AMERICA

This volume gathers over 40 world‑class scholars to explore the dynamics that have shaped the Irish experience in America from the seventeenth to the twenty‑first centuries. From the early 1600s to the present, over 10 million Irish people emigrated to various points around the globe. Of them, more than six million settled in what we now call the United States of America. Some were emigrants, some were exiles, and some were refugees—but they all brought with them habits, ideas, and beliefs from Ireland, which played a role in shaping their new home. Organized chronologically, the chapters in this volume offer a cogent blend of historical perspectives from the pens of some of the world’s leading scholars. Each section explores multiple themes including gender, race, identity, class, work, religion, and politics. This book also offers essays that examine the literary and/or artistic production of each era. These studies investigate not only how Irish America saw itself or, in turn, was seen, but also how the historical moment influenced cultural representation. It demonstrates the ways in which Irish Americans have connected with other groups, such as African Americans and Native Americans, and sets “Irish America” in the context of the global Irish diaspora. This book will be of value to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as instructors and scholars interested in American History, Immigration History, Irish Studies, and Ethnic Studies more broadly. Cian T. McMahon is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Honors College at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the author of two books, The Global Dimensions of Irish Identity: Race, Nation, and the Popular Press, 1840–1880 (2015) and The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine (2021), and has also published articles in a range of scholarly journals including Irish Historical Studies and The American Historical Review. Kathleen P. Costello‑Sullivan is Professor of Modern Irish literature at Le Moyne College. Along with articles and book chapters, she has written Mother/Country: Politics of the Personal in the Fiction of Colm Tóibín (2012) and Trauma and Recovery in the Twenty‑first‑Century Irish Novel (2018) and edited J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla (2013) and Norah Hoult’s Poor Women! (2016). She is the current Series Editor for Syracuse University Press’s Irish line and a former ACIS President.

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORIES

The Routledge Histories is a series of landmark books surveying some of the most important topics and themes in history today. Edited and written by an international team of world‑renowned experts, they are the works against which all future books on their subjects will be judged. THE ROUTLEDGE GLOBAL HISTORY OF FEMINISM Edited by Bonnie G. Smith and Nova Robinson THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS IN THE MODERN WORLD Edited by Katie Barclay and Peter N. Stearns THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF MODERN LATIN AMERICAN MIGRATION Edited by Andreas E. Feldmann, Xóchitl Bada, Jorge Durand and Stephanie Schütze THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF LONELINESS Edited by Katie Barclay, Elaine Chalus and Deborah Simonton THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF POLICE BRUTALITY IN AMERICA Edited by Thomas Aiello THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF ANTISEMITISM Edited by Mark Weitzman, Robert J. Williams, and James Wald THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF HAPPINESS Edited by Katie Barclay, Darrin M. McMahon, and Peter N. Stearns THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF IRISH AMERICA Edited by Cian T. McMahon and Kathleen P. Costello‑Sullivan For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge‑Histories/ book‑series/RHISTS

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF IRISH AMERICA

Edited by Cian T. McMahon and Kathleen P. Costello‑Sullivan

Designed cover image: The visit of American President John F Kennedy to Ireland. July 1963. Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy Stock Photo First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Cian T. McMahon and Kathleen P. Costello‑Sullivan; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Cian T. McMahon and Kathleen P. Costello‑Sullivan to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978‑1‑032‑21921‑9 (hbk) ISBN: 978‑1‑032‑23537‑0 (pbk) ISBN: 978‑1‑003‑27815‑3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153 Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

This book is dedicated, with love, to Kathleen’s mother, Kathleen (Dooley) Costello, and Cian’s children, Fionnuala, Dymphna, Clodagh, and Francis McMahon

CONTENTS

List of Figures List of Tables List of Contributors Foreword by Marion R. Casey

xiii xiv xv xxii

Introduction Cian T. McMahon and Kathleen P. Costello‑Sullivan PART 1

1

From Colonial Era to Early Republic

13

  1 Ireland and the Irish in the Atlantic World Audrey Horning

15

  2 Ulster Presbyterians and the Development of a “Scotch-Irish” Identity Peter Gilmore

29

  3 Family and Labor in Eighteenth-Century Irish America Judith Ridner

45

  4 The Irish in the Revolutionary Atlantic Samuel K. Fisher

59

  5 Race, Labor, and Slavery in Antebellum Irish America Angela F. Murphy

71

  6 Cosmopolitan Insights from Early Irish-American Letter Networks Jennifer Orr

83

ix

Contents PART 2

The Great Famine

97

  7 The Great Famine Exodus Anelise Hanson Shrout

99

  8 American Catholicism and the Irish from Colonial Times to 1870 Oliver P. Rafferty SJ

114

  9 The Rise of the Popular Press in Irish-American Culture Debra Reddin van Tuyll

126

10 Anti-Irish Nativism in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Hidetaka Hirota

140

11 Irish‑American Drama in Mid‑Nineteenth‑Century America Mary Trotter

152

12 Folklore in Irish America E. Moore Quinn and Cara Delay

163

13 Irish-American Famine Literature Marguérite Corporaal

176

PART 3

After the Famine

189

14 How Remembering the Famine Shaped Irish-American Identity Mary C. Kelly

191

15 The Irish in the Civil War and Reconstruction David T. Gleeson

205

16 Race, Gender, and Irish Labor in US Northeastern Cities Danielle Phillips-Cunningham

217

17 California, Race, and the Irish in the West Malcolm Campbell

232

18 Irish Americans in American Politics and the Catholic Church, 1870–1945 Timothy J. Meagher

244

19 The Emmets and the Jameses, an Irish‑American Case Study Colm Tóibín

257

x

Contents PART 4

The Turn of the Twentieth Century

271

20 America and Irish-American Nationalism David Brundage

273

21 America and Irish Unionism, 1870–1930 Lindsey Flewelling

285

22 Irish‑American Women and Political Activism in the Early Twentieth Century Tara M. McCarthy 23 The Irish and Labor in the Industrial Era, 1880–1930s James R. Barrett 24 Irish Labor, Liberty, and Literature in the Twentieth‑Century Atlantic World Maria McGarrity PART 5

299 310

320

After World War II

331

25 The Irish and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 Ray O’Hanlon

333

26 Irish‑American Politics in the Mid‑Twentieth Century Matthew J. O’Brien

344

27 Revisiting the Role of the United States of America in Northern Ireland Andrew Sanders

355

28 Capturing Fading Communities in Post‑World War II Irish‑American Fiction368 Beth O’Leary Anish 29 Lorraine Hansberry, Sean O’Casey, and the Common Space of the Theater Cara McClintock-Walsh 30 Irish Americanness in Late Twentieth‑Century Hollywood Films Matthew J. Fee

xi

380 394

Contents PART 6

Irish America in the Third Millennium

405

31 Media and the Irish Diaspora from the Twentieth Century to the Present Mark O’Brien

407

32 Irish America, the “Celtic Tiger,” and After Seán Ó Riain and Nessa Ní Chasaide

419

33 Irish Americans and US Politics in the Twenty-First Century Ted Smyth

432

34 Breaking the Silence of Child Sexual Abuse in the Irish‑American Catholic Church Sally Barr Ebest 35 LGBTQ Irish Activists and the Queering of Irish America Bridget E. Keown PART 7

445 458

The Twenty-First Century and Beyond

471

36 The Irish Language in America Nicholas M. Wolf

473

37 Irish Music in America Méabh Ní Fhuartháin

486

38 Disability in Irish‑Catholic America Joseph Valente

499

39 Animals in Irish‑American Poetry Kathryn Kirkpatrick

510

40 Whiteness and the Contemporary Irish-American Family Saga Sinéad Moynihan

523

41 Contemporary Irish America and the Environment Christine Cusick

536



549

Afterword: The Remarkable Persistence of Irish America Daniel Mulhall

Index553 xii

FIGURES

3.1 William Hincks, 1752–1797, Plate IV: representing the common Method of Beetling, Scutching and Hackling the Flax, 1791, Stipple engraving, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1978.43.250, public domain 46 7.1 J.E. Farwell & Co. American citizens! We appeal to you in all calmness. Is it not time to pause?. A paper entitled the American patriot. United States, 1852. Boston: Published by J.E. Farwell & Co. American cartoon print filing series (Library of Congress)100 16.1 “How to keep a servant girl—And keep her satisfied—In the Country”  221 16.2 An image juxtaposing an Irish woman and English social reformer Florence 222 Nightingale produced by Samuel Well’s publishing company 16.3 Samuel Wells standing in front of his publishing company in New York City 223 circa 1880s 16.4 “‘Pat, if yez don’t sell that pig he’ll soon be outside all we own.’ One of the humble 224 homes of County Kerry, Ireland” 

xiii

TABLES

3 2.1 Migration between the United States and Ireland 32.2 Proportion of population in Ireland who have lived outside the country 32.3 Irish America “Business 100”, 2023: Sector, gender and birthplace 36.1 Percentage of Irish‑Born Claiming Irish as mother tongue, by immigration‑ cohort decade, 1910 36.2 Mean Overrepresentation (positive values) and underrepresentation (negative ­values) of Irish‑born Claimants of Irish as a Mother Tongue, per census category, 1910 Census. Harmonized to 1920 census categories and calculated as mean difference between proportion claiming Irish in that category and overall population proportion (21.3 percent) 36.3 Top‑ten counties with highest percentage of Irish‑Born Claiming Irish Mother Tongue, 1910 36.4 Percent of Irish‑Born married couples with both spouses Claiming Irish as mother tongue, by decade of immigration, 1910

xiv

422 422 423 476

477 478 479

CONTRIBUTORS

Beth O’Leary Anish is Dean of Learning Commons and Classroom Technology and former E ­ nglish professor at the Community College of Rhode Island. Her book Irish American Fiction from World War II to JFK: Anxiety, Assimilation, and Activism, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2021. She earned her PhD in English at the University of Rhode Island. Her research interests are in Irish‑American literature and diasporic memory. James R. Barrett is Professor Emeritus of History and African American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana‑Champaign and Scholar in Residence at The Newberry Library, Chicago. He is the author of The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multi‑Ethnic City (2013) and History from the Bottom Up and Inside Out: Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Working‑Class History (2017). David Brundage is Professor Emeritus and Research Professor of History at the University of Cali‑ fornia, Santa Cruz. A scholar of labor, immigration, and Irish‑American history, his most recent book is Irish Nationalists in America: The Politics of Exile, 1798–1998 (2016). His study of W. E. B. Du Bois’s complex relationship with Irish nationalism appeared in The Irish Revolution: A Global His‑ tory (2022), edited by Patrick Mannion and Fearghal McGarry. Malcolm Campbell is Professor of History at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He has published widely on the global history of Irish migration and is the author of Ireland’s New Worlds: Immigrants, Politics, and Society in the United States and Australia, 1815–1922 (2008) and Ireland’s Farthest Shores: Mobility, Migration, and Settlement in the Pacific World (2022). Marion R. Casey is Clinical Professor of Irish Studies and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of History at New York University. She is the author of The Green Space: The Transformation of the Irish Image (2024), co‑editor of Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States (2006), and has written essays on a wide range of subjects. She has also contributed to many public history projects including exhibits and documentary films. Marguérite Corporaal is Professor of Irish Literature in Transnational Contexts at Radboud Uni‑ versity in the Netherlands. She was the principal investigator of Relocated Remembrance: The Great Famine in Irish (Diaspora) Fiction, 1847–1921 (ERC, 2010-2015). Among her recent international xv

Contributors

publications are Relocated Memories of the Great Famine in Irish and Diaspora Fiction, 1847–1870 (2017) and The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture (co‑edited with Oona Frawley and Emily Mark‑FitzGerald, 2018). Kathleen P. Costello‑Sullivan is Professor of Modern Irish literature at Le Moyne College. Along with articles and book chapters, she has written Mother/Country: Politics of the Personal in the Fic‑ tion of Colm Tóibín (2012) and Trauma and Recovery in the Twenty‑first‑Century Irish Novel (2018) and edited J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla (2013) and Norah Hoult’s Poor Women! (2016). She is also the Series Editor for Syracuse University Press’s Irish line and a former ACIS President. Christine Cusick is Professor of English and Director of the Honors Program at Seton Hill Univer‑ sity. Her research focuses on the intersections of ecology, natural history, and cultural memory. She has published numerous ecocritical studies of contemporary Irish literature and has been nationally recognized for creative nonfiction that highlights the confluence of memory and place. Her most recent coedited collection is Unfolding Irish Landscapes: Tim Robinson, Culture and Environment (2016). She is presently researching the entanglement of story, climate grief, and community in con‑ temporary Irish texts. Cara Delay is Professor of History at the College of Charleston. In addition to over 30 journal arti‑ cles and chapters, her work includes Women, Reform, and Resistance in Ireland, 1850–1950 (2015), Irish Women and the Creation of Modern Catholicism, 1850–1950 (2019), Birth Control: What Eve‑ ryone Needs to Know (with Beth Sundstrom, 2020), and Catching Fire: Women’s Health Activism in Ireland and the Global Movement for Reproductive Justice (with Beth Sundstrom, 2023). Sally Barr Ebest is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Missouri‑St. Louis. She is co‑editor of Reconciling Catholicism and Feminism? (2003) and Too Smart to Be Sentimental: Con‑ temporary Irish American Women Writers (2008), and author of The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women Writers (2013). She is currently writing about Irish‑American Catholic women’s autobiographies. Matthew J. Fee is Lecturer and Director of the Integral Honors Program at Le Moyne College. He has presented and written on Irish film and contemporary documentary, including “The Women In‑ carnate of “Words Upon the Window Pane” (2022) and “‘Seeing Too Much is Seeing Nothing’: The Place of Fashion within the Documentary Frame” (2019). Dr. Fee has a new book under contract on Irish cinema and the fantastic. Samuel K. Fisher is Associate Professor of History at the Catholic University of America. He is the author of The Gaelic and Indian Origins of the American Revolution (2022) as well as co‑editor of Bone and Marrow/Cnámh agus Smior: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Medieval to Modern (2022). Lindsey Flewelling is a Preservation Planner at the Colorado State Historic Preservation Office. She received a PhD in History from the University of Edinburgh, a Graduate Certificate in Historic Preservation from the University of Colorado‑Denver, and is the author of Two Irelands Beyond the Sea: Ulster Unionism and America, 1880–1920 (2018). Peter Gilmore received his PhD in History from Carnegie Mellon University in 2009 and teaches history in Pittsburgh‑area universities. He is interested in the intersections of religion and ethnicity and western Pennsylvania and the Atlantic World. Gilmore is the author of Irish Presbyterians and xvi

Contributors

the Shaping of Western Pennsylvania, 1770–1830 (2018) as well as many articles on Presbyterians and the Irish diaspora. He is also co‑author of Exiles of ʾ98: Ulster Presbyterians and the United States (2018). David T. Gleeson is Professor of American History at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. He is the author of The Irish in the South, 1815–1877 (2001) and The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America (2013), and editor of The Irish in the Atlan‑ tic World (2012). He is Principal Investigator of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) project Civil War Bluejackets: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the United States Navy www.civilwar‑ bluejackets.com. Hidetaka Hirota is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches US immigration history. He is the author of Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth‑Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (2017) and has published his work in leading scholarly journals, including the Journal of American History, American Quarterly, and the Journal of American Ethnic History. Audrey Horning is Forrest D. Murden Jr Professor and Chair of Anthropology at William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia and Professor of Archaeology at Queen’s University Belfast. She is the author or editor of eight books, including Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic, 1550–1650 (2013). Mary C. Kelly is Professor of History at Franklin Pierce University. Her books include The Sham‑ rock and the Lily: The New York Irish and the Creation of a Transatlantic Identity, 1845–1921 (2005), Ireland’s Great Famine in Irish American History (2014), and an edited volume, Navigating Histori‑ cal Crosscurrents in the Irish Atlantic: Essays for Catherine B. Shannon (2022). She continues to research ethnic Irish political culture and enduring connections with Ireland. Bridget E. Keown is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Stud‑ ies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. She has published articles and chapters on the history of gender and trauma, as well as on the labor of Irish queer public health activists during the outbreak of HIV/AIDS. Her most recent article, “‘There Is No Limit to What Could Be Done’: Considering the Past and Potential of Irish Queer Health Activism,” was published in Éire‑Ireland in 2021. Kathryn Kirkpatrick is Professor of English at Appalachian State University. She is the editor of Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identities (2000) and co‑editor of Animals in Irish Literature and Culture (2015). Kirkpatrick is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently The Fisher Queen: New & Selected Poems (2019), which was awarded the North Carolina Literary & Historical Association’s Roanoke‑Chowan Poetry Prize. Tara M. McCarthy is a Professor of History at Central Michigan University. She is the author of Respectability and Reform: Irish American Women’s Activism, 1880–1920 (2018). She has also pub‑ lished scholarly journal articles on a range of topics including women in the Oneida Community, the WCTU and the peace movement, Irish‑American women, and teachers’ political activism. Cara McClintock‑Walsh is the Associate Director of the Program for Community College ­Engagement at Princeton University. Her essays on gender and popular culture have been published in Reclaiming the Tomboy: The Body, Representation, and Identity (2022), The Encyclopedia of xvii

Contributors

LGBTQIA+ Portrayals in American Film (2022), and W. B. Yeats and Postcolonialism (2001). She is currently working on a book about race and Irish studies. Maria McGarrity is a Professor of English at Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York. She has published widely on Irish and Caribbean literatures, including the monograph Washed by the Gulf Stream: The Historic and Geographic Relation of Irish and Caribbean Literature (2008). Her new monograph, Modern Irish Literature and the Primitive Sublime (2024), has just been published by Routledge. Cian T. McMahon is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Honors College at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the author of two books, The Global Dimensions of Irish Identity: Race, Nation, and the Popular Press, 1840–1880 (2015) and The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine (2021), and has also published articles in a range of scholarly journals including Irish Historical Studies and The American Historical Review. Timothy J. Meagher is Associate Professor of History at the Catholic University of America. He is the author or editor of five books in history, including The New York Irish (with Ronald Bayor, 1996), Invent‑ ing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880–1928 (2001), and Becoming Irish American: The Making and Remaking of a People from Roanoke to JFK (2023). Sinéad Moynihan is Professor in American and Atlantic Literatures at the University of Exeter. She is the author of three monographs, the most recent of which, Ireland, Migration and Return Migra‑ tion: The “Returned Yank” in the Cultural Imagination, 1952 to Present (2019), was awarded the American Conference for Irish Studies’ Michael J. Durkan Prize. Daniel Mulhall is a former Irish Ambassador to the United States and a consultant with the global law firm, DLA Piper. He has been Global Distinguished Professor at Glucksman Ireland House, New York University, Parnell Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge and Resident Fellow at the Institute of Politics, Harvard University. His latest publication is Pilgrim Soul: W. B. Yeats and the Ireland of His Time (2023). Angela F. Murphy is Professor of History at Texas State University. She specializes in the mid‑ nineteenth‑century social reform movements of the United States and the Atlantic World, with an emphasis on antislavery, Ireland, and sectional politics in the United States. Dr. Murphy is the author of American Slavery, Irish Freedom: Abolition, Immigrant Citizenship, and the Transatlantic Move‑ ment for Irish Repeal (2010). Nessa Ní Chasaide is Assistant Lecturer in the Centre for the Study of Politics in the Department of Sociology at Maynooth University, Ireland. She is currently completing her PhD studies on the evolution of Ireland’s corporate tax regime. Ní Chasaide was the co‑editor of the Special Issue “Com‑ munity Development and Financialization: Making the Connections” in Community Development Journal, which also included her article “Ireland’s Tax Games: The Challenge of Tackling Corporate Tax Avoidance.” Méabh Ní Fhuartháin is Lecturer in Irish Music and Dance Studies at the Centre for Irish Studies, University of Galway. An expert in the study of commemoration, gender occlusion, and social dance

xviii

Contributors

spaces, she has published articles in Éire‑Ireland (2019) and Ethnomusicology Ireland (2021), and is the author of Heading the Fleadh: Festival, Cultural Revival and Irish Traditional Music, 1951–1969 (forthcoming, 2024). Mark O’Brien is Professor of Journalism History at Dublin City University, Ireland. He is the author of The Fourth Estate: Journalism in Twentieth‑Century Ireland (2017) and The Irish Times: A History (2008), and the co‑editor of Politics, Culture, and the Irish American Press, 1784–1963 (2021), and Political Communication in the Republic of Ireland (2014). Matthew J. O’Brien is Professor of history at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. An expert on Irish expatriate ethnicity in Britain and the United States during the twentieth century, he has published articles in a range of journals including Éire‑Ireland, New Hibernia Review, and Études‑ Irlandaises, and co‑edited After the Flood: Irish America, 1945–1960 (with James S. Rogers, 2009). Ray O’Hanlon is the editor of the New York‑published Irish Echo newspaper. He is the author of several books including The New Irish Americans (1998), which won the Washington Irving Book Award, and The South Lawn Plot (2011), his first work of fiction. His latest book is Unintended Consequences: The Story of Irish Immigration to the US and How America’s Door Was Closed to the Irish (2021). Seán Ó Riain is Professor of Sociology at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. He is the au‑ thor of The Politics of High‑Tech Growth (2004), The Rise and Fall of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger (2014), and co‑editor of The Changing Worlds and Workplaces of Capitalism (2015). Recent publications address low‑wage labor markets, capital’s growing share of national income, and workplace organi‑ zation across Europe. Jennifer Orr is Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University. She has published on Irish history and literature, including The Correspondence of Samuel Thomson (2012) and Literary Networks and Dissenting Print Culture (2015). Her current project, Transatlantic Networks 1800–1845, builds a “who’s who” of the Romantic transatlantic. Dr. Orr is also Vice President of the British Association of Romantic Studies (BARS) and a Royal Historical Society Fellow. Danielle Phillips‑Cunningham is Associate Professor in the Department of Labor Studies and Em‑ ployment Relations at Rutgers University‑New Brunswick. She is the author of Putting Their Hands on Race: Nannie Helen Burroughs: A Tower of Strength in the Labor World (2025). E. Moore Quinn is Professor of Anthropology at the College of Charleston. Dr. Quinn has published widely; her research analyzes the Irish diaspora in terms of its oral traditions, verbal art, and custom‑ ary behaviors and practices. In her most recent publication, Women and Pilgrimage (2022), Quinn compares the experiences of Irish women seasonal migrants to those of women pilgrims past and present. She is the 2023 recipient of the Carrie Johnson Fellowship. Oliver P. Rafferty SJ is Professor of Modern Irish and Ecclesiastical History at Boston College. He completed his D. Phil at Oxford, and is the author or editor of seven books, including Catholicism in Ulster (1994), The Church, the State, and the Fenian Threat (1999), and Violence, Politics, and Ca‑ tholicism in Ireland (2016). Professor Rafferty has also published numerous, book chapters, articles, and reviews.

xix

Contributors

Judith Ridner is Professor of History at Mississippi State University. Her research focuses on ­immigrant communities in early America, particularly the Scots Irish. She is co‑editor of Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and the author of A Town In‑Between: Carlisle, Pennsylvania and the Early Mid‑Atlantic Interior (2010) and The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania: A Varied ­People (2018). Andrew Sanders is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at De Montfort Uni‑ versity. He has authored several books including Inside the IRA: Dissident Republicans and the War for Legitimacy (2011), Times of Troubles: Britain’s War in Northern Ireland (co‑authored with Ian S. Wood, 2012), and The Long Peace Process: The United States of America and Northern Ireland, 1960–2000 (2019). Anelise Hanson Shrout is Assistant Professor at Bates College, where she teaches in the History Department and the programs in American Studies and Digital and Computational Studies. Her re‑ search explores the experiences of everyday people as they navigated spaces and bureaucracies in the nineteenth‑century Atlantic world. Her book Aiding Ireland: The Great Famine and the Rise of Transnational Philanthropy (2024) investigates the political uses to which famine relief was put by governments, groups, and individuals in the nineteenth century. Ted Smyth is President of the Advisory Board of Glucksman Ireland House for Irish and Irish Ameri‑ can Studies at New York University, and Chair of the Clinton Institute Advisory Board at Univer‑ sity College Dublin. A former Irish diplomat who served in the United States, the United Kingdom, ­Geneva, and Portugal, he contributed to the book Brokering the Good Friday Agreement: The Untold Story (2019), and is published widely, including in the Journal of American Ethnic History, the Irish Times, and IrishCentral.com. Colm Tóibín is Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the author of ten novels, including The Master (2004) and Brooklyn (2009), as well as many non‑fiction books, including The Irish Famine: A Documentary (with Diarmaid Ferriter, 2002). He is also a contributing editor at the London Review of Books. Mary Trotter is Associate Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies at the Univer‑ sity of Wisconsin—Madison. She is the author of Ireland’s National Theaters: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Movement (2001) and Modern Irish Theatre (2008). Professor Trotter is currently researching women actors’ onstage and offstage contributions to both theater and politics during the early twentieth century. Joseph Valente is UB Distinguished Professor of English and Disability Studies at the University at Buffalo. In addition to over 70 articles and chapters and several co‑edited collections, his works in‑ clude The Myth of Manliness in Irish Nationalist Culture, 1880–1922 (2011), Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness and the Question of Blood (2012), and James Joyce and the Problem of Justice: ­Negotiating Sexual and Colonial Difference (1995, 2009). He also co‑authored The Child Sex Scan‑ dal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable (with Margot Backus, 2020). Debra Reddin van Tuyll is Professor Emeritus at Augusta University. She is an expert on journalism during the American Civil War, and is the author or editor of nine books, including Politics, Culture, and the Irish‑American Press, 1789–1963 (2021), which was a finalist for the 2022 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Tankard Award for the best book on journalism. xx

Contributors

Nicholas M. Wolf is Associate Director for research and publishing initiatives at Glucksman Ireland House, New York University, and co‑head of the NYU Division of Libraries Data Services depart‑ ment. He is the author of An Irish Speaking Island: State, Religion, Community, and the Linguistic Landscape in Ireland, 1770–1870 (2014), a social and cultural history of Ireland’s Irish‑language community in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

xxi

FOREWORD

Marion R. Casey In a long 1999 review essay, David N. Doyle observed that American scholarship had “­conventionalized its classic forms on Irish America. Those who try to change the canons succeed best by methodical work within its codes.” He noted that critical research on a meaningful scale about Irish America was just beginning.1 Irish America as an academic field—rather than as a side interest of a scholar established ­elsewhere—emerged near the end of the twentieth century. By then, immigration and ethnic studies were so robust that comparative and global dimensions could be incorporated, while Irish studies was mature enough to look beyond Ireland and Great Britain. Irish‑American studies, despite being a late bloomer, benefited from the progress made in those other fields. Doyle would be pleased to see the extent to which the canon has indeed been changed. The significant milestones of this new departure can be tracked by the publication of The New York Irish (1996), The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America (1999), The American Irish: A History (2000), The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish‑American Fiction (2000), The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764 (2001), Money for Ireland: Finance, Diplomacy, Politics, and the First Dáil Éireann Loans, 1919–1936 (2002), The Columbia Guide to Irish American History (2005), Beyond the Ameri‑ can Pale: the Irish in the West, 1845–1910 (2010), and Irish Nationalists in America: The Politics of Exile, 1798–1998 (2016). Each pushed the field, widened the aperture, and demonstrated the value of research on Irish America not only for understanding the Irish diaspora but also its long impact on Ireland itself. One of the major accelerants was the creation of Glucksman Ireland House (GIH) at New York University (NYU) in 1993. Boston College and the University of Notre Dame had securely anchored Irish studies in the United States by then, so it was only natural for NYU to become the long‑awaited institutional home for Irish‑American studies. In addition to teaching, being based at a major research university enabled GIH to innovate. It began the Archives of Irish America (AIA) in 1997, now more than a thousand linear feet housed in Bobst Library that will be mined by researchers for decades to come. This includes over 300 oral histories with Irish Americans—an intentionally broad ­definition— which were recorded between 2005 and 2017 in a GIH initiative now available as a resource in AIA. GIH then inaugurated an annual endowed series in 1999, the O’Malley Lecture, to showcase the xxii

Foreword

work on Irish America of scholars like Kerby A. Miller, Kevin Kenny, and Bernadette Whelan. The first‑ever graduate degree in Irish and Irish‑American Studies followed in 2007, to engage master’s level students with the dynamic inter‑ and trans‑disciplinary research that was rapidly emerging. The GIH also curated three exhibitions: The Fifth Province: County Societies in Irish America (2010), Ireland America: The Ties that Bind (2011), and Labor & Dignity: James Connolly in Amer‑ ica (2013). These highlighted the influence of associational culture, the performing arts, and pro‑ gressive reform on the United States, bringing Irish‑American studies out of the academy to public audiences that numbered in the thousands. It published two important essay collections during this period: Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States (2006) and Ireland’s Allies: America and the 1916 Easter Rising (2016). “Irish America has plenty to give voice to,” Joe Lee concluded in his introduction to Making the Irish American, a volume that he hoped would remind us of the richness of tone and variety of range of that voice, however gruff at times, in the belief that it has something worth saying not only to Irish America but also to America itself, to Ireland and perhaps even, for those with eyes to see, to the wider world. That hope culminated when Kevin Kenny, Lee’s successor as Director of GIH, founded the Glucks‑ man Irish Diaspora book series in 2021. This partnership with New York University Press produced a quick succession of new milestones for twenty‑first‑century Irish‑American studies, including Amer‑ ica and the Making of an Independent Ireland: A History (2021), The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine (2021), Aiding Ireland: The Great Famine and the Rise of Trans‑ national Philanthropy (2024), and The Green Space: The Transformation of the Irish Image (2024).2 Even though diversity is such a defining feature of American life, the Irish imprint has too often been reduced to one‑dimensional stereotypes. A wide array of constituents lies behind the cultivation, preservation, and dissemination of such images at any particular moment in time. The Irish experi‑ ence in America over the past five centuries is complicated by multiple generations that overlap in a variety of class and cultural encounters, while rapid changes occurred in both the homeland and the receiving country. Two senior scholars—Timothy J. Meagher and Tyler Anbinder—capped their distinguished careers and heralded a new era for the field with the publication of Becoming Irish American: The Making and Remaking of a People from Roanoke to JFK (2023) and Plentiful Coun‑ try: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York (2024). These answered Doyle’s earlier challenge to make linkages and “grasp the roots” of diversity in Irish America too. Likewise, the 41 essays in this new volume use six themes—work, politics, religion, networks, gender, and identity—to embrace more than one definition of what it means to be “Irish.” As Cian T. McMahon and Kathleen P. Costello‑Sullivan astutely note in their Introduction, “the constructed nature of all communities, as well as the ways that Irish‑Americanness jostled with other identities and manifesta‑ tions of race and gender, both intra‑ and international, […] consolidated the imagined parameters that would define it.”3 Where do we go from here? There are more possibilities than we might think. Hopefully we can learn from genealogy and DNA research about the elasticity of identity, and of lived experiences, in Irish relationships in America. A major first step in this direction is already underway with the Black, Brown, and Green initiative of the African American Irish Diaspora Network. Hopefully, too, we will strive for a better integration of Canadian and Caribbean Irish studies into conceptions of “Irish America” by erasing borderlines that never truly inhibited the movement of Irish people from north to south and east to west on this side of the Atlantic.4 If by pondering the enduring theme of access to land in Irish history, we learn about the challenges of acquiring, retaining, and losing property in North America, what are the implications of urban or xxiii

Foreword

rural real estate for generational wealth or poverty? So, too, we know that literature and other art forms can powerfully reveal an ethnic emotional history long obscured by silence and family tension. Pondering domestic tranquility, the poet Ethna McKiernan wrote, Actually, it reeks of compromise: the first‑born son sold off to daddy’s bed and gagging snores, while mommy, like a fugitive, chips another gold nugget from her three‑year‑old’s childhood, hugging cool dinosaur sheets in Conor and his absent brother’s room. Subtexts like this nudge, lure, and tempt the thoughtful scholar or artist in new research directions.5 The Routledge History of Irish America blends the work of emerging and established scholars. The chapters interrogate how a people from a small island on the edge of Europe encountered, engaged with, and were affected by the complexities of life on the North American continent since the seven‑ teenth century. Essay collections such as this allow us to periodically assess, review, and chart a path forward. Research that steadily refreshes or challenges Irish‑American studies confirms that a field once on the margins continues its move toward the center of scholarship on the global Irish diaspora.

Notes 1 Doyle, “Cohesion and Diversity,” 411–412. 2 Lee, “Introduction” in Making the Irish American, 51. 3 Doyle, “Cohesion and Diversity,” 432. 4 Casey, “Family, History,” 115. 5 McKiernan, “Sleeping in Conor’s Room,” 161.

Bibliography Anbinder, Tyler. Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York. New York: ­Little, Brown and Company, 2024. Bayor, Ronald H., and Timothy J. Meagher. The New York Irish. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Brundage, David. Irish Nationalists in America: The Politics of Exile, 1798–1998. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Carroll, Francis M. America and the Making of an Independent Ireland: A History. New York: New York ­University Press, 2021. Carroll, Francis M. Money for Ireland: Finance, Diplomacy, Politics, and the First Dáil Éireann Loans, 1919– 1936. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. Casey, Marion R. “Family, History, and Irish America.” Journal of American Ethnic History 28, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 110–117. Casey, Marion R. The Green Space: The Transformation of the Irish Image. New York: New York University Press, 2024. Doyle, David N. “Cohesion and Diversity in the Irish Diaspora.” Irish Historical Studies 31, no. 123 (May 1999): 411–434. Emmons, David. Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845–1910. Norman: University of O ­ klahoma Press, 2010. Fanning, Charles. The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish‑American Fiction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. Glazier, Michael, ed. Encyclopedia of the Irish in America. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999. Griffin, Patrick. The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000. Lee, J.J., and Marion R. Casey, eds. Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

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Foreword McKiernan, Ethna. “Sleeping in Conor’s Room.” In The Next Parish Over: A Collection of Irish‑American ­Writing, edited by Patricia Monaghan, 161. Minneapolis, MN: New Rivers Press, 1993. McMahon, Cian T. The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine. New York: New York University Press, 2021. Meagher, Timothy J. Becoming Irish American: The Making and Remaking of a People from Roanoke to JFK. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023. Meagher, Timothy J. The Columbia Guide to Irish American History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Nyhan Grey, Miriam, ed. Ireland’s Allies: America and the 1916 Easter Rising. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2016. Shrout, Anelise Hanson. Aiding Ireland: The Great Famine and the Rise of Transnational Philanthropy. New York: New York University Press, 2024.

xxv

INTRODUCTION Cian T. McMahon and Kathleen P. Costello‑Sullivan

From the early 1600s to the present, over ten million Irish people emigrated to various points around the globe. Of that number, more than six million settled in what we now call the United States of America. Some were emigrants, some were exiles, others were refugees—but they all brought with them habits, ideas, and beliefs from Ireland, which played a role in shaping their new home. As a result, Irish experiences and ideas have been the bedrock of some key moments in American history. When the early colonies’ nascent economies were first developing, they relied on Irish indentured servants to hew wood and draw water. America’s emerging infrastructure networks, such as turn‑ pikes, canals, and railroads, could not have been built without the sweat and tears of Irish navvies. The expansion of the rights of “naturalized” citizens was, to a certain degree, the story of the rights won by immigrant soldiers, including many Irish, during the Civil War. In the Gilded Age, as big businesses raked in record profits, Irish men—and women—were not only working in the factories, but also demanding fair treatment by their employers. One of the most famous presidents in Ameri‑ can history, John F. Kennedy, was the great‑grandchild of a family that left Ireland during the Great Famine. As these few examples remind us, Irish immigrants’ footprint in American history is impact‑ ful, wide, and deep. There are dark sides to the story too, of course. Eighteenth‑century Presbyterian settlers from Ulster played a role in the expropriation and mass killings of Native Americans. From the mid‑ nineteenth century on, many Irish workers adopted white supremacy as a way to strengthen their position on America’s economic ladder. As Irish immigrants traveled west, they often brought with them Eurocentric assumptions about their superiority to other immigrants such as Chinese laborers. More recently, the child abuse sex scandals, which embroiled the Catholic Church in the late twenti‑ eth and early twenty‑first centuries, cannot be understood without a sense of the way Irish‑American ecclesiastical power developed as it did. Yet there is much more to the study of Irish America than merely names, dates, and “big mo‑ ments.” Over the past several decades, scholars from a wide range of disciplines have also examined the ways in which Irish‑American experiences and ideas were represented in literature, drama, and cinema. American theater could certainly be a source of crude anti‑Irish stereotypes, for example, but it could also be a site where Irish ideas about freedom and dignity were heard and understood. Nineteenth‑century fictional novels about Irish emigrant voyages often emphasized the fearful re‑ alities many faced on their maritime journeys to America, but they could also express hopes and fears about the challenge of integration. In his famous 1952 romantic comedy, The Quiet Man, John 1 DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-1

Cian T. McMahon and Kathleen P. Costello‑Sullivan

Ford used a story about a man “going home” to Ireland that was widely celebrated as capturing a romanticized, nostalgic Ireland—but it was also a way to critique the slag heaps and pig iron of in‑ dustrial America. These literary and artistic forms of representation capture the complexity of their historical moments. Moreover, they demonstrate the ways in which Irish Americans connected—with other groups, such as African Americans; through the transatlantic world, with the Caribbean and Europe; and transnationally, as Irish and American authors alike influenced and engaged with each other. Studying these cultural artifacts offers an understanding of the complex networks that Irish Americans negotiated and highlights the complexity of this important American subgroup—as well as the fabric of American identity itself. The Routledge History of Irish America gathers over 40 world‑class scholars to explore such com‑ plicated issues, for an audience that we expect to be as diverse as the subject itself. General readers and undergraduates dipping their toes into a new subject will appreciate that each chapter provides an up‑to‑date overview of the main players involved and the contexts in which they operated. Graduate students can lay the groundwork for their own independent research by delving into the lively dis‑ cussions of scholarly debates. Instructors interested in teaching something new will find the running themes that connect each chapter and each section helpful in organizing their material. Established scholars can engage the latest perspectives and trends current in the field. We trust that there is some‑ thing for everyone in this book.

Interpretations While the broad outlines of Irish‑American history and culture have long been understood, scholars working in a wide range of disciplines over the past several decades have understandably disagreed over how to make sense of it all. Those who study Irish identity in America have labored in the shadow of Kerby A. Miller’s instant classic, Emigrants and Exiles, which was published in 1985 and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize the following year. Echoing a pessimism expressed in Oscar Handlin’s Boston’s Immigrants over forty years earlier, Miller argued that nineteenth‑century Irish emigrants carried a “pre‑modern” mindset with them to North America, which predisposed them to see migration as a form of involuntary exile and hampered their likelihood for success overseas. Subsequent scholars have poked holes in Miller’s overall thesis. Some claim, for example, that, as a student of modernization theory, he overemphasized structural oppression over individual choice. Others have suggested that the very idea of an Irish “pre‑modern” mindset is shaped by Anglocentric models of what “modernity” means.1 While there may be some validity to the claim that Miller underemphasized migrants’ agency, the greatest legacy of Emigrants and Exiles may, ironically, lie in his patient search, discovery, and analysis of hundreds of letters and diaries. By publishing the private hopes and dreams of long‑ forgotten people, Miller reminded scholars that the best way to understand Irish America was to listen to the voices of the emigrants themselves. In the decades since Emigrants and Exiles was published, some of the best history books have thus emphasized the agency of Irish immigrants in America. Scholars such as Hasia Diner (who published Erin’s Daughters in America two years before Miller), Janet Nolan, and Deirdre Moloney brought women and gender into a subject that was all too often dominated by men and politics. Patrick Griffin, David Doyle, and others insisted that the Protestant experience be integrated into histories where “Irish” had traditionally meant “Catholic.” By the turn of the twenty‑first century, a host of exciting work had laid the groundwork for a number of excellent, single‑authored and co‑edited books, such as Timothy J. Meagher’s Inventing Irish America in 2001 and Making the Irish American, co‑edited by J. J. Lee and Marion R. Casey in 2006.2 Much of the scholarship over the past 20 years compared and contrasted the Irish at home and in America; however, the most exciting work has sought to connect the Irish around the world. How 2

Introduction

were Irish Americans shaped by their international contexts? This “transnational turn” has its roots in a broader scholarly trend that was becoming evident by the late 1990s. Its implications for Ireland and Irish America, however, were best expressed in a 2003 article by historian Kevin Kenny, who used the Irish as a test case to argue that “the history of American immigration and ethnicity [can] only be integrated into its wider global context” when historians compare, contrast, and connect people and ideas around the world. Several years later, Enda Delaney made a similar argument by suggesting that historians of modern Ireland ought to adopt a “transnational analysis that investigates particular topics or themes across national boundaries.” Since then, many great books have employed this global perspective. In Commemorating the Irish Famine, for example, Emily Mark‑FitzGerald showed how the popularity of memorials to the Great Famine in America and elsewhere from the 1990s onwards was part of a growing commemorative culture worldwide. Others have reinterpreted Irish nationalism through this lens. The Land League, which developed in the early 1880s as part of a twin campaign to win legislative independence and land reform in Ireland, had often been seen as a movement with wings in Ireland and America—but in books like A Greater Ireland and Chang‑ ing Land, Ely M. Janis and Niall Whelehan convincingly demonstrate that it is best understood as a transatlantic organization with countless connections back and forth. More recently, the work of Irish priests and nuns has been reconsidered through a global lens by historians such as Colin Barr and Sophie Cooper. This new work illustrates how current scholarship examines the Irish‑American case not only in an American, but also in its wider global contexts.3 As Irish‑American identity consolidated, so too did its accessible manifestations via cultural rel‑ ics like theater, literature, folklore, music, and film. Earlier representations of Ireland are dominated alternatively by the markings of nostalgia and post‑colonial/nationalist stereotype: mainstream repre‑ sentations of the Irish as combative, drunken, or foolish lower‑class bumblers later alternate with ex‑ cessive celebrations of the piously Catholic Irish in their anti‑industrial (read: non‑British), rural Irish homeland. Such representations shifted and consolidated over time in response to both domestic and external forces. Later cultural productions from the twentieth century also bear the mark of second‑ and third‑generation Americans’ attempts to reconcile their nostalgic immigrant imaginings with the lived realities of integrating into the American national imaginary. Not all such relics are fictional, either: letters between Irish immigrants and those they left behind, as well as intercontinental cor‑ respondence between authors, artists, and politicians, also lend insight into the ways Irish Americans imagined themselves over time and how they, in turn, were perceived. Many cultural artifacts since  2000 reflect the complex and ever‑evolving positioning of Irish‑American identity. No longer insecure in their “Americanness,” Irish‑American authors, musi‑ cians, and filmmakers thus not only celebrate and test their Irish cultural inheritance, but also ex‑ plore its relations to an established Irish‑American identity, making Irishness “object” in a way that was unthinkable to prior generations. Chapters here thus address Irish‑American letters, drama, film, folklore, music, and fiction. These artifacts capture and reflect both their historical moment and Irish Americans’ self‑conception in situ, as well as a shifting understanding of Ireland and an Irish cultural inheritance.

Themes As the chapters that follow demonstrate, a number of themes run like threads through the fabric of Irish‑American history and culture. Because it encouraged so many to go to America in the first place, one of the most enduring of these is work. In the early years of the Atlantic economy, the Irish came to the colonies in a variety of roles, including indentured servants, administrators, and soldiers. Be‑ ginning in the early eighteenth century, tens of thousands of Irish Presbyterians, who had experience with both farming and linen production in Ulster, brought their skills to Britain’s American colonies. 3

Cian T. McMahon and Kathleen P. Costello‑Sullivan

The stock image of the hardy “Scotch-Irish” settler is that of a man in a ‘coon skin hat with a double‑­ bitted axe over his shoulder—but the families who headed to places like the Shenandoah Valley could never have succeeded without the oft‑overlooked labor of women and girls. Beginning in the early 1800s, the character of Irish emigration shifted toward single Catholics who were eager to work in a cash economy, but who found themselves caught between nativist antipathies and labor competi‑ tion, often from African Americans. Single Irish women similarly jockeyed with Black counterparts for positions as domestic servants in the homes of America’s upper and middle classes. From these humble beginnings, Irish women were, by the turn of the twentieth century, playing leading roles in a number of activist fields, while Irish men held leadership positions in trade unions such as the Ameri‑ can Federation of Labor (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The story of work in Irish‑American history has, therefore, at times, also been a story of class conflict, and the concomitant struggle for equality and democracy. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act severely curtailed Irish immigration in the latter half of the twentieth century, but in the 1980s and 1990s, a generation of “New Irish” undocumented workers found ready, if precarious, employment in hospitality and childcare services. At the turn of the twenty‑first century, Irish‑American business leaders played a key role in contributing to the “Celtic Tiger” economic boom in Ireland. As anyone with an understanding of Irish‑American history knows, politics has been another critical theme. Indeed, politics was, like work, a reason in and of itself why many Irish immigrated to the United States in the first place. In late eighteenth‑century Ireland, the Penal Laws, which were designed to limit the economic and political power of Catholics and Presbyterians, convinced many Irish to move to America, where the promise of democracy was tempting. During the Age of Revolu‑ tions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many Irish rebels were exiled to America. Others helped to support reactionary governments around the Atlantic by serving as soldiers, ad‑ ministrators, and settlers. Decades later, Irish immigrants were often cited in heady debates over the limits of American citizenship. Such arguments were in some ways laid to rest through Irish sacrifices during the American Civil War, even if these new‑won rights and privileges were not always ex‑ tended to peoples of color. Successive campaigns for Irish political independence relied on financial and organizational support from Irish‑American nationalists. Nevertheless, as the Irish dominated urban machine politics in many cities, they also made important contributions to domestic progres‑ sive politics and campaigns for suffrage and workers’ rights by building diverse coalitions across the political landscape. John F. Kennedy’s election as President in 1960 is often cited as the acme of Irish‑ American political power, and in many ways, it was. However, this truism ignores the fact that as many as twelve previous US Presidents could claim “Scotch-Irish” heritage, going back to eighteenth‑­ century Presbyterian immigration from Ulster. Moreover, Irish political power has been evident on multiple occasions since Kennedy’s heyday. From the debates over the Immigration and Nationality Act to the Northern Ireland Peace Process, Irish Americans have used their voices and votes to shape government policy. In the twenty‑first century, while many of those who identify as Irish American vote Republican and oppose gun restrictions, there is also a large fraction who vote Democrat and support abortion. The Irish‑American community reflects the diversity of modern politics. Religion is another critical theme. The usual image of an “Irish American” is of a Catholic cel‑ ebrating Saint Patrick’s Day. In many ways, this makes sense. When mass migration started in earnest in the early nineteenth century, it was largely dominated by Catholic men and women who settled down and raised families. When faced with a nativist backlash, these newcomers found sympathy and support not only in the Catholic Church itself, but also in lay organizations such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians (which organized Manhattan’s annual Saint Patrick’s Day parade) and through Irish nationalist activism. Irish America came to remember itself, in other words, as poor, oppressed, and Catholic. The Routledge History of Irish America demonstrates, however, that Irish Protestants have also been a critical part of the story. The first settlers were Ulster Presbyterians seeking religious 4

Introduction

freedom and open farmland; their brand of rugged dissent subsequently shaped American Protestant‑ ism up and down the Eastern seaboard. When the influx of Irish Catholics spurred a rise in sectarian antipathies in the United States in the mid‑nineteenth century, many old‑stock Ulster Protestants joined ranks with American‑born nativists while adopting a “Scotch-Irish” identity to distinguish themselves from the “Papist” newcomers. By the early twenty‑first century, as American society has become increasingly secular, these differences between Catholics and Protestants have become less loaded with meaning. Yet, many latter‑day descendants of “Scotch-Irish” and Catholic immigrants, though several generations removed from the actual process of migration, still identify with the his‑ tory and culture of their forebears. There are ugly legacies to consider, as well. The discipline, power, and secrecy that gave the Catholic Church its power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also laid the seeds for cycles of abuse, denial, and homophobia, which came to fruition and are only in recent decades being fully acknowledged and understood. International networks have been another enduring theme in the history and culture of Irish America. From the earliest days of Irish settlement abroad, for example, business connections were critical. Whether traveling as free emigrants, indentured servants, or convicted felons, the Irish who sailed across the Atlantic Ocean before the mid‑nineteenth century did so alongside the cargoes and crews of regular commercial vehicles. By facilitating the movement of people and products, merchant links continued to keep those who settled in America in regular contact with those back home. By the late twentieth century, the vestiges of these business connections remained, allowing the United States to play an out‑sized role in the modern Irish economy. Bureaucratic networks have also connected the Irish in America and around the world. Many soldiers and administrators who worked in colonial America had experience in other parts of the world, as members of the British, Spanish, French, and Dutch empires that ruled the high seas at the time. Similarly, at the acme of its power, the Catholic Church was, in many ways, a global network of administrators; many of its most important nodes in the United States were dominated by Irish people. When the Peace Process in Northern Ireland was reaching its climax in the late 1990s, formal and informal linkages between diplomats, politicians, and grassroots activists shaped the final outcome. Finally, international networks of communication have been critical, as well. At a most basic level, epistolary connections between people writing let‑ ters to each other have allowed friends, family, and public figures to stay abreast of developments around the world. Similarly, newspaper editors working with limited budgets traditionally exchanged free copies of their titles with other editors, to save time and money. Literary and political figures maintained a vibrant correspondence, predominantly with Europeans, throughout the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, helping Irish‑American art and literature to cross‑pollinate with their ­British and continental counterparts—an exchange that has only become easier in recent decades. As tech‑ nologies allowed for the development of radio, television, and the Internet, however, these new forms of communications highlighted how different generations disagreed over what it meant to be Irish in America. The cliché image of an Irish American is often a hot‑headed pugilist, amiable policeman, or bea‑ tific priest. Obviously, such associations hinge on cultural stereotypes—but they also depend on the tacit gendered association of Irish Americanness with masculinity. While advances have been made in recent years in historiography, the role of Irish‑American women in the acculturation and devel‑ opment of American society remains relatively undertheorized in histories of the Irish in the United States. This is a persistent theme, but the role of Irish‑American women is woven throughout this book—a signal not only of historical accuracy, but also of the determination to enact a recognition that gender is not an “add on” to this critical analysis. Nonetheless, it is worth pausing to highlight the particular ways in which contributors to The Routledge History of Irish America make impor‑ tant interventions into this critical gap. First, our authors acknowledge the role women specifically played not only in the establishment of the earliest Scots‑Irish communities in America, but also 5

Cian T. McMahon and Kathleen P. Costello‑Sullivan

subsequently as Irish Americans sought to integrate into their new homeland. Thus, studies included here consider Irish‑American women’s role in the labor movement, referenced above, but also ex‑ plore the more problematic ways that they at times weaponized their white privilege, to the detriment of groups like Native Americans and African Americans. While the role of Irish‑American women in domestic service has been well‑documented, this collection sheds new light on the complex social ne‑ gotiation attendant to this work; it also explores how Irish‑American women engaged contemporary Irish politics in relation to suffrage, abolition, and unionization. Of course, Irish‑American women have also played a large role in producing the literary, artistic, and cultural productions that demar‑ cate and reflect an evolving Irish‑American identity over time. Recentering Irish‑American women’s role in American history is one of the critical interventions this collection seeks to effect. This compilation also offers an opportunity to consider Irish‑American identity as a social con‑ struct. As was made evident in the 1980s and 1990s by scholars like Benedict Anderson regarding nationalism, sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant on race, and Judith Butler on gender, identities are employed by humans as a way to understand and manage the cultural contexts and so‑ cial forces of the worlds they live in. “So true is it that unnatural generally means only uncustomary,” John Stuart Mill famously wrote, “and that everything which is usual appears natural.” Thus, earlier chapters in this volume engage a healthy debate over what defined Irish‑Americanness in its earliest iterations: Scotch‑Irish identity has been both claimed, and rejected, as a cohesive unit of analysis, and its reception differs in America, in Scotland, and in Ireland. As the Famine years saw an influx of often poor Irish Catholic immigrants flood America’s borders, nineteenth‑century newcomers faced not only stereotypical representations based on their class status, but also religious bigotry and the lingering taint of British imperial representations of the Irish as lazy, corrupt, or effeminate (in a presumably bad way). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Irish nationalism provided a way for immigrants both to free their homeland and establish their voices in America. Irish Americans’ sub‑ sequent efforts throughout the twentieth century to lay claim to their right to “Americanness” betray an implicit—and sometimes explicit—assertion of white privilege, as domestic workers, unionists, and others sought to differentiate themselves from African Americans, Chinese Americans, Native Americans, and others who were “Othered” by a conceptually white understanding of American identity. This reflects the influence not only of Irish America’s Eurocentric roots, but also the bur‑ geoning racism which, unfortunately, fed the very soil of American independence.4 As Irish‑American identity took root and flourished throughout the twentieth and twenty‑first cen‑ turies, however, fascinating shifts occurred. These changes reflected nostalgia for the Irish homeland of imagination and, ironically, a defensive stance against Ireland as a potential “Other” threatening Irish‑Americanness. This interesting oppositional streak also manifests in the trenchantly heterosex‑ ist constructions of Irish‑American identity, which set up repeated clashes with, and bigotry against, LGBTQ+ Irish Americans. In an ironic twist, such repressive gestures contradicted, rather than echoed, increasing liberalization and intersectional awareness of social justice in Ireland proper, as more recent Irish immigrants’ solidarity with various kinds of oppression clashed with a conservative, largely Catho‑ lic, heterosexist Irish‑American ethos. Such patterns emphasize the constructed nature of all communi‑ ties, as well as the ways that Irish Americanness jostled with other identities and manifestations of race and gender, both intra‑ and international, as it consolidated the imagined parameters that would define it.

Overview The Routledge History of Irish America consists of forty‑one original chapters offering the best of recent research on these and other themes. Organized chronologically into seven sections that tell the story of Irish America, this collection offers historical perspectives written by a combination of both established authors and rising scholars. Each section of the book asks three interrelated ­questions: 6

Introduction

Where were the Irish at this time? What were they doing? And how were they perceived by both them‑ selves and others? Each section also engages the literary and artistic production of its era, since this, in turn, reflects how Irish America understood and described itself as an ethnic community. “Part 1: From Colonial Era to Early Republic” offers six in‑depth chapters on the earliest phases of the Irish‑American experience. In Chapter 1, Audrey Horning reminds us that there was an Irish dimension to the story of the early modern Atlantic world, where a heady mix of European adminis‑ trators, adventurers, and others started putting down roots along the Atlantic littoral. The first phase of Irish mass migration began in the early eighteenth century, however, as Presbyterians from Ulster in the north of Ireland, often traveling in family groups or as members of faith congregations, began seeking religious toleration and free farmland in the British colonial borderlands. Peter Gilmore’s Chapter 2 traces the journeys of these early settlers, whose descendants would later self‑identify as “Scotch Irish” to distinguish themselves from Irish Catholics immigrants. Judith Ridner (Chapter 3) shows how Presbyterian women’s labor, both inside and outside the household, played a critical role in the success of these families, although that success often relied on the expropriation and murder of Indigenous peoples. As new ideas about national sovereignty began to swirl during the “Age of Revolutions” in the latter decades of the eighteenth century, Irish people were, as Samuel K. Fisher shows in Chapter 4, quite capable of acting as both rebels and reactionaries. In Chapter 5, Angela F. Murphy demonstrates that Irish Catholic immigrants of the early nineteenth century found them‑ selves in a society where skin color, labor, and notions of freedom were tightly intertwined. Feel‑ ing threatened, many Irish were unwilling to take up populist calls for the emancipation of ­African Americans. Finally, Jennifer Orr’s Chapter 6 reminds us that the negotiation of Irish‑American iden‑ tity often occurred externally; her examination of letters between David Bailie Warden and his intra‑ and international correspondents reminds us of the transnational forces that shaped and influenced Irish America. “Part 2: The Great Famine” looks at the ways in which the flood of mass migration that came out of Ireland during the late 1840s and early 1850s fundamentally re‑shaped Irish America. In Chapter 7, Anelise Hanson Shrout looks at the lived experiences of the emigrants themselves as they figured out how to gather the resources to leave, endure the voyage experience, and get settled in America. The huge influx of immigrants, many (but not all) of whom were Catholic, provided both challenges and opportunities for the American Catholic Church, which Oliver P. Rafferty SJ examines in Chapter 8. There had been Irish newspaper publishers and printers working in America since the late eighteenth century, but in Chapter 9, Debra Reddin van Tuyll explores the ways in which networks of print culture helped Irish‑American journalists and editors meet the needs of an emerging, immigrant reading public. In response to the arrival of these Irish Catholics, many native‑born Protestants feared that the influx would degrade American society. Hidetaka Hirota (Chapter 10) considers this nativist phenomenon, while also offering insight into the ways in which historians of antebellum America have employed analytical concepts such as race, class, and reli‑ gion to make sense of what happened during this period. In Chapter 11, Mary Trotter demonstrates how playwrights John Brougham and Dion Boucicault innovated in the Irish‑American theater, rehabilitating the figure of the stage Irish American at a time of nativist resentment, even as they adhered to the norms of contemporary American society. E. Moore Quinn and Cara Delay take a different tack in Chapter 12 by detailing how early Irish Americans used folklore both to navigate their immigrant reality and to process the loss and inheritance they brought from Ireland. Finally, in Chapter 13, Marguérite Corporaal traces the rich body of literature generated in the years dur‑ ing and after the Famine, to understand how Irish Americans processed traumatic experiences of hunger, imperialism, and religious persecution. These latter chapters reflect the moments of their cultural production while signaling the consolidation of a coherent Irish‑American culture in the mid‑nineteenth century. 7

Cian T. McMahon and Kathleen P. Costello‑Sullivan

The chapters in “Part 3: After the Famine,” consider the long‑term impacts of the mid‑cen‑ tury mass migration. This new, more “Catholic” version of Irish America found different ways to make itself at home in the United States. In Chapter 14, Mary C. Kelly looks at how the Famine was remembered for decades after mass migration had subsided, tracking how changes in forms of commemoration reflected broader transformations in Irish‑American identity and confidence. When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, tens of thousands of Irish signed up to fight. David T. Gleeson (Chapter 15) analyzes the motivations for, and experiences of, Irish people on both sides of the conflict. Many Irish women immigrated to the United States during this period, often competing with emancipated Black women for jobs in domestic service. Danielle Phillips‑­ Cunningham’s Chapter 16 suggests that the histories of these two female cohorts are best under‑ stood when studied in conjunction with each other, as they both (though not necessarily together) resisted stereotypes while struggling for better working conditions. Irish settlement in the Ameri‑ can Midwest and West has long been a blank spot in the history of Irish America but Chapter 17 by Malcolm Campbell shows that the Irish who went out to places like California found that the rules on race and class were different but definitely skewed in favor of white Europeans like themselves. In Chapter 18, Timothy J. Meagher picks up where earlier chapters on politics and religion left off, demonstrating that the key to Irish success lay in the leaders’ ability to build diverse coalitions in their heartlands of the Northeast and Midwest. Finally, as Colm Tóibín shows in Chapter 19, there was no such thing as a single, monolithic “Irish‑American” identity in the late nineteenth century. His analysis of the Emmet and James families reflects the great diversity in how Irish Americans could think of themselves. “Part 4: The Turn of the Twentieth Century” looks at different dimensions of Irish America at the height of its political and social power. While local and national networks of communication and exchange certainly shaped Irish‑American society during this time, it is also abundantly clear that connections with other Irish overseas often played important roles as well. In Chapter 20, ­David Brundage considers three important phases in the history of Irish‑American nationalism. By examining the Fenians of the 1860s, the New Departure of the 1880s, and the Irish Revolution of the 1910s and 1920s, Brundage demonstrates that American contributions to campaigns for Irish nationalism are best understood when considered in their international contexts. The flip‑side of that political coin, Ulster Unionism, which sought to maintain Ireland’s constitutional position within the United Kingdom, enjoyed a burst of activity and popularity at the turn of the twentieth century too. Chapter 21, by Lindsey Flewelling, demonstrates that Irish Unionists in Ireland and America were intimately connected in multiple ways. Women have long been ignored by traditional historians of politics and activism but Tara M. McCarthy (Chapter 22) shows that Irish female ac‑ tivists were at the forefront of nationalist, suffragist, and labor organizations in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Chapter 23, James R. Barrett brings a fresh perspective to the story of Irish‑American leadership in the labor union movement by showing how networks developed at the parish level, combined with influence through the Catholic Church, to ­ cGarrity render the Irish “gatekeepers” of urban working‑class life in America. Finally, as Maria M illustrates in Chapter 24, observing the intercultural exchanges between Irish and Caribbean au‑ thors in this time period not only reflects the impact of Irish authors on other American ethnic groups, but also reminds us that the “American” in Irish America can, and perhaps should, have a broader provenance. “Part 5: After World War II,” looks at the second half of the twentieth century, when the hegemonic power of Catholic Irish America both peaked and began to crumble. In Chapter 25, Ray O’Hanlon explores how the federal government’s 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act—well intentioned in its aim to reunite immigrant families—effectively shuttered Irish immigration, having huge ramifica‑ tions for Irish America even as it was arguably at the apex of its power. By comparing the political 8

Introduction

activities and postures of Joseph McCarthy and John F. Kennedy in Chapter 26, M ­ atthew J. O’Brien shows how many Irish Americans followed Kennedy down a path of confident, civic leadership. They rejected the pugilistic, nativist models of prior generations in favor of a more forward‑looking alternative, and thus created the political lens through which successive presidential administrations engaged the “problem” of Northern Ireland in the late twentieth century. Such efforts came to frui‑ tion in the 1990s, as Andrew Sanders shows in Chapter 27, when Bill Clinton made the Northern Ireland Peace Process a centerpiece of his foreign policy agenda, culminating in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. With the consolidation of Irish‑American identity and culture that this section traces came greater opportunities to represent and explore that identity artistically. Beth O’Leary Anish’s Chapter 28 considers how post‑World War II fiction not only investigates the nostalgia of prior generations, but also betrays the anxiety of successive generations as they weigh the seemingly contrary imperatives of American materialist culture and adherence to a romanticized but ethnic Irish‑American identity. In Chapter 29, recognizing that Irish‑American identity had sufficiently co‑ hered by the late twentieth century, Cara McClintock‑Walsh explores how other ethnic groups, like African Americans, could look to the Irish example of figures like Sean O’Casey as a model for iden‑ tifying and consolidating their own, independent American subculture in the United States despite forces of oppression and devaluation. Matthew J. Fee (Chapter 30) cements this understanding in his exploration of Irish‑American film: acknowledging the long history of caricature and stereotype that Irish‑American representation promulgated, Fee presents a fascinating picture of the ways in which this purportedly solidified Irish‑American identity was still subject to appropriation and exploitation during the difficult years of the Peace Process. “Part 6: Irish America in the Third Millennium” considers how Irish people (and those who iden‑ tify as Irish Americans) living in Ireland and the United States have maintained economic, political, social, and cultural connections between the two countries since the year 2000. Mark O’Brien’s Chapter 31 shows the ways in which radio, television, newspapers, and most recently, the Internet have served as media by which Irish people at home and abroad have stayed in touch as changes in technology impacted American views of Ireland and the Irish. In Chapter 32, Seán Ó Riain and Nessa Ní Chasaide explore how economic and financial connections between the two countries, especially since the 1990s and the “Celtic Tiger” boom, fostered opportunities for economic exchange and cre‑ ated a context for the political Peace Process in Northern Ireland. Chapter 33, by Ted Smyth, focuses on changes in the meaning of what it means to be “Irish-American” in twenty‑first‑century American politics by showing that, as the Catholic Church, Democratic Party, and labor movement became less critical to a sense of a static Irish‑American identity, the result was a broader, more diverse, and contested notion of the identity. Like Fee’s chapter in the section before, Smyth examines the ways that Irishness becomes selectively less important in some contexts than Americanness itself over time. Sally Barr Ebest’s Chapter 34 explores a darker aspect of the affiliation of Irish‑American iden‑ tity and Catholicism. Tracing the evolution of the child sex abuse scandal’s exposure and its causes, Ebest suggests that Irish Americans’ historical relationship to Catholicism as an anchor for immigrant communities, as well as preexisting tendencies toward silence and deference inherited from Irish culture, compounded the proclivities of a Church hierarchy dedicated to self‑preservation. In Chapter 35, Bridget E. Keown examines the construction of LGBTQ+ identity in Irish America. Noting the conservative, heteronormative, white, and Catholic construction of Irish‑American identity, Keown traces how during the late twentieth century, Irish immigrant‑activists asserted a more inclusive form of Irish‑American identity, which was attuned to Ireland’s histories of imperialism and oppression and more in keeping with Ireland’s evolving social and political mores. Finally, “Part 7: The Twenty‑First Century and Beyond,” explores the newest trends in Irish‑ American historiography and research. In Chapter 36, Nicholas M. Wolf demonstrates that scholarly study of the Irish language in America has long been over‑shadowed by other subjects even though 9

Cian T. McMahon and Kathleen P. Costello‑Sullivan

people claiming Irish as their “mother tongue” have, at times, constituted as much as one‑quarter of the Irish‑born population living in the United States. Méabh Ní Fhuartháin (Chapter 37) offers a pan‑ oramic history of Irish music in America, demonstrating the ways in which this key cultural practice was shaped by the changing social and material contexts of the United States itself. Chapter 38, by Joseph Valente, explores the work of Irish‑American author Alice McDermott and her representation of disability as highlighting how Irish‑American conceptions of community could narratively treat loneliness as a kind of disability. Engaging another new arena in Irish America, animal studies, Kath‑ ryn Kirkpatrick (Chapter 39) examines the poetry of four well‑known Irish‑American poets to show how a characteristic focus on place, combined with an inherited cultural awareness of oppression, leads the Irish‑American poets under consideration to relativize and reassess the relationship between human and non‑human beings in their work. Sinéad Moynihan picks up the important thread of race in Chapter 40 and brings it into the twenty‑first‑century context in her chapter on immigrant sagas. Examining current fiction by Irish‑American writers, she argues that Irish‑American conceptions of white identity continue to circulate in the Irish‑American imaginary, at times in problematic ways. Last—but certainly not least—Christine Cusick (Chapter 41) considers the ways in which the loss and nostalgia evident in contemporary Irish‑American poetry may model a path forward for learning to negotiate the contemporary, global climate crisis. Taken together, these chapters demonstrate that Irish‑American history and culture is much more complicated—and interesting—than it is traditionally given credit for being. The long‑accepted, stock image of male, Catholic, straight Irish people now shares the stage with other dimensions of Irish‑American experience and identity. As co‑editors of this exciting volume, we recognize that we stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before us. Even a quick glance at the works cited in this volume’s chapters illustrates that many of the conclusions offered are out‑growths of decades of research by countless scholars from the mid‑twentieth century onwards. Yet, we are also excited that the chapters in this collection represent the latest and greatest work by both emerging and established scholars based within and without the United States itself. This book is, in other words, a collabora‑ tive effort, and we are deeply grateful to all of our authors and peer‑reviewers, and friends, families, and supporters, not to mention the editorial and production staff at Routledge. We hope a wide range of readers will find this book useful for understanding the historical and cultural dimensions of that big, complicated phenomenon known loosely as “Irish America.”

Notes 1 Miller, Emigrants and Exiles; Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants. For critiques of Miller, see Akenson, Irish Di‑ aspora, 237–238 and Fitzpatrick, “The Irish.” On problematic critical engagements with Irish modernity, see Costello‑Sullivan, “Novel Traditions,” 150–152. 2 Diner, Erin’s Daughters; Nolan, Ourselves Alone; Moloney, American Catholic; Griffin, The People; Miller, Irish Immigrants; Meagher, Inventing Irish; Lee, Making the Irish. 3 Tyrrell, “Reflections”; Kenny, “Diaspora and Comparison,” 135; Delaney, “Our Island Story?” 601; Mark‑FitzGerald, Commemorating; Janis, A Greater Ireland; Whelehan, Changing Land; Barr, Ireland’s Empire; Cooper, Forging Identities. 4 Anderson, Imagined Communities; Omi, Racial Formation; Butler, Gender Trouble. Mill’s “customary” quote appears in Mill, Subjection of Women.

Bibliography Akenson, Donald Harman. The Irish Diaspora: A Primer. Toronto: P.D. Meany, 1993. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991.

10

Introduction Barr, Colin. Ireland’s Empire: The Roman Catholic Church in the English‑Speaking World, 1829–1914. ­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Cooper, Sophie. Forging Identities in the Irish World: Melbourne and Chicago, c. 1830–1922. Edinburgh: Ed‑ inburgh University Press, 2022. Costello‑Sullivan, Kathleen. “Novel Traditions: Realism and Modernity in Hurrish and the Real Charlotte.” In Facts and Fictions: The Irish Novel in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Jacqueline Belanger, 150–166. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005. Delaney, Enda. “Our Island Story? Towards a Transnational History of Late Modern Ireland.” Irish Historical Studies 37, no. 148 (November 2011): 599–621. Diner, Hasia. Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. Fitzpatrick, David. “The Irish in America: Exiles or Escapers?” Reviews in American History 15, no. 2 (June 1987): 272–278. Griffin, Patrick. The People With No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Handlin, Oscar. Boston’s Immigrants, 1790–1880: A Study in Acculturation. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1941. Janis, Ely M. A Greater Ireland: The Land League and Transatlantic Nationalism in Gilded Age America. Madi‑ son: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. Kenny, Kevin. “Diaspora and Comparison: The Irish as a Case Study.” Journal of American History 90, no. 1 (June 2003): 134–162. Lee, J.J., and Marion J. Casey, eds. Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Mark‑FitzGerald, Emily. Commemorating the Irish Famine: Memory and Monument. Liverpool: Liverpool Uni‑ versity Press, 2013. Meagher, Timothy J. Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880–1928. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. Mill, John Stuart. The Subjection of Women (1869). Early Modern Texts website. https://www.earlymoderntexts. com/assets/pdfs/mill1869.pdf. Accessed November 2, 2023. Online. Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Miller, Kerby A., Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling, and David N. Doyle, eds. Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675–1815. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Moloney, Deirdre. American Catholic Lay Groups and Transatlantic Social Reform in the Progressive Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Nolan, Janet. Servants of the Poor: Teachers and Women’s Mobility in Ireland and Irish America. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States. New York: Routledge, 1986. Tyrrell, Ian. “Reflections on the Transnational Turn in United States History: Theory and Practice.” Journal of Global History 4, no. 3 (November 2009): 453–474. Whelehan, Niall. Changing Land: Diaspora Activism and the Irish Land War. New York: New York University Press, 2021.

11

PART 1

From Colonial Era to Early Republic

1 IRELAND AND THE IRISH IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD Audrey Horning

Traditional understandings of Ireland in the early modern Atlantic have focused on the island as a site of endeavor for English colonial adventurers, positioning Ireland as a “blueprint for the colo‑ nization of America.” Proponents of this model point to the documented involvement of notable ­English ­Elizabethan adventurers such as Walter Raleigh, Humphrey Gilbert, and Ralph Lane in ­Ireland as well as in the Americas. Assumptions about the equivalency of English activities and ex‑ periences in Ireland and America are further bolstered by presumptions of cultural distance between the ­English and the peoples of both Ireland and the New World, founded upon widely distributed political descriptions presenting the Irish as fundamentally different from the English, and setting the stage for a still tenacious belief that Ireland was subjected to wholesale colonialism. This is a seductively straightforward story, but one that overlooks the dynamism of late medieval Ireland and its continental connections, the diversity of complex Native North American societies, and the proactive involvement of Irish individuals in overseas colonial ventures. If we set aside the rhetoric and concentrate instead on the evidence, what becomes clear is that individuals from the island of Ireland were integrally involved in Atlantic ventures and, by extension, implicated in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European colonialism and its impacts on indigenous societies from the earliest days of European Atlantic expansion.1 The story of Ireland in the early modern Atlantic is also far more complicated than the traditional narrative, which positions Ireland as a conquered and colonized nation—a perspective that remains strong within the contemporary Irish diaspora. To begin with, English efforts to subdue and colonize Ireland were haphazard and often failed. Irish society itself was neither static not unified, nor could it be characterized as a single nation. Ireland was ruled by powerful individual lordships, each of which determined its own set of relationships with the English, with continental powers, and with Atlantic expansion. And while the English ramped up their efforts to subdue Ireland as the seventeenth cen‑ tury dawned, Irish individuals were already actively involved in efforts to colonize in the Americas, ultimately participating in the emergence and establishment of the oppressive system of race-based slavery. In short, this chapter argues that while processes of English expansion into Ireland and North America were certainly intertwined, there was no effective model pioneered in Ireland that was ap‑ plied in North America, and, importantly, the Irish were themselves key players in European Atlantic expansion. Irish America thus begins in the sixteenth century.

15

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-3

Audrey Horning

Ireland and the Reformation When England’s King Henry VIII formally broke with the Roman Catholic Church in 1536, a period of radical transformation and disruption within English society followed, which rapidly reverberated across the Irish Sea. In England, the Reformation manifested itself in the dissolution of monaster‑ ies, the redistribution of church lands, and the destruction of religious icons and imagery. Although England had asserted political control over Ireland in the twelfth century, by the 1530s, direct English influence was limited to The Pale, an area surrounding Dublin and portions of today’s counties Dub‑ lin, Kildare, Laois, and Meath. Efforts were swiftly begun to impose the Reformation in The Pale and beyond, accelerating when Henry VIII declared himself King of Ireland in 1542. A key fear for the English Crown was the presence of Catholic Ireland just on the doorstep. This fear was actually less about confessional beliefs than it was about a potential alliance between Catholic Ireland and Catho‑ lic Spain, which was then England’s chief political rival. The fear was justified, as in the ensuing con‑ flict between Ireland and England, Spanish forces were frequently summoned to the aid of the Irish.2 Irish society was divided up into over 100 individual lordships, led by powerful Gaelic clans and Old English elites (descendants of twelfth-century Anglo-Norman invaders). Hereditary lords ruled over inherited territories and relied upon a complicated system of mutual obligation in which kin relationships, both real and fictive, ensured loyalty and affinity between non-related families. Each lordship was semi-autonomous, meaning that Ireland’s political structure was one of factionalism rather than unity. Competition between lordships, however, did not equate to insularity. Ireland oper‑ ated within the north Atlantic maritime world with direct trading relations with the European con‑ tinent, strengthened by affiliations between religious houses in Ireland and on the continent. While cultural practices varied between the Gaelic Irish and the Old English, they shared Catholicism. The English Reformation clearly put Ireland and England on a collision course, encouraging the English to over-emphasize difference between the lands to justify political violence against the Irish, newly constructed as “savage” people.3 The proximity and political entanglement of Ireland and England undermines the credibility of claims about Irish Otherness. Such claims were deployed to justify English efforts to impose political control and critiqued practices such as cattle pastoralism, Brehon law (the Gaelic legal code founded upon compensation rather than punishment), fosterage (fostering out children to build political ties between lordships), clothing styles, gender relations, and of course religion. As early as 1537, efforts to impose Englishness were enacted in law, as illustrated by the 1537 Act for the English Order, Habit, and Language: Wherefore it be enacted … that no person or persons … shall use or wear any mantles, coat or hood after the Irish fashion … every the said person or persons having or keeping any house or household, shall, to their power, knowledge, and ability, use and keep their house and house‑ holds, as near as ever they can, according to the English order, condition, and manner. Unsurprisingly, this effort failed. Later rhetoric devolved into vitriol, as exemplified by Barnaby Riche’s description of the Irish as “… more un civill, more uncleanly, more barbarous, and more brutish in their customes and demeanures, than in any other part of the world that is known.” Justifi‑ cation for taking Irish lands depended upon rationalizing such actions through constructing the Irish as barbarous and uncivilized, notwithstanding evidence to the contrary.4 Efforts to impose the Reformation were unsuccessful, even within The Pale. As late as 1590, the number of Protestants in Dublin was reported as “almost none.” Unable to bring either the Old English or Gaelic Lordships under English control, let alone to stamp out Catholicism, the Crown imposed its first effort at Plantation in the Irish Midlands in 1556. Plantation refers to the planting 16

Ireland and the Irish in the Atlantic World

of people rather than crops, with “planters” being those who undertook to settle in Ireland and to bring others with them. The Laois and Offaly plantations failed, not least because lands were granted to Irish individuals mistakenly presumed to be loyal to the English. By the 1570s, efforts to subdue Ireland devolved into all-out warfare, with English forces in Ireland increasing from a nominal few hundred in the 1530s to 21,000 by 1596. Military efforts targeted both Gaelic Irish and the resolutely Catholic Old English, who, in English eyes, were often culturally indistinguishable from the Gaelic Irish. And it is in these years of conflict that we can identify direct connections between Ireland and the Americas.5

Ireland and the Roanoke Adventure A laundry list of Elizabethan English New World adventurers, including but not limited to Martin Frobisher, Francis Drake, Humphrey Gilbert, Richard Grenville, Walter Raleigh, Ralph Lane, and Christopher Carleill, honed their military skills first against the Spanish and then in Ireland. Less well known is the involvement of Irishmen in their Atlantic ventures, reflecting the reality that Elizabethan forces in Ireland were heavily dependent upon Irish conscripts. In fact, numbers of Irish in the Eng‑ lish forces were so high that, according to Nicholas Canny, the most decisive battle between English and Irish forces, the 1601 Battle of Kinsale, was a civil conflict. This view complicates romanticized portrayals of heroic and unified Irish vanquished by their English foes at Kinsale. The presence of Irish in the English military also meant that Irish individuals were part of the first English effort to plant a colony in North America: Walter Raleigh’s Roanoke project. Raleigh himself was a prominent figure in the Irish wars, gaining notoriety for his participation in a massacre of 600 unarmed Spanish soldiers (allied with the Irish) following their surrender at Smerwick, County Kerry in 1580. Fol‑ lowing a scoping voyage in 1583, Raleigh outfitted an all-male colony under the leadership of Ralph Lane, with instructions to settle in the Albemarle Sound region of eastern North Carolina. Five named Irish men participated in this 1584–1585 effort: Edward Nugent, Darby Gland, Edward Kelly, John Costigan, and James Lacie.6 These Irish adventurers were accompanied by the English polymath Thomas Hariot, who pro‑ duced one of the most significant documents describing Algonquian life and the natural environment of coastal Carolina in his A Brief and True Report of the New found land of Virginia. Much has been made of Hariot’s sole comparison between Irish and Native practices in his report: a similarity be‑ tween Algonquian fishing darts and the throwing spears deployed by Gaelic Irish kern. His words are seen as evidence that the English viewed the Irish and Native North Americans as fundamentally the same, and as Other. Yet Hariot was working alongside Irish men and presumed no other equivalen‑ cies in his writings. While English colonial rhetoric about the societies that were targets of conquest emphasized savagery and especially inappropriate land use as colonial justifications, that does not necessarily translate into a widespread belief in those tropes, particularly by those, like Hariot, who were directly involved.7 In 1584, Irishman Edward Nugent gained infamy as the perpetrator of murderous violence against Wingina, or Pemisapan, the leader of the Roanoke Indians. As described by Lane, “an Irish man serving me, one Nugent… following him [Pemisapan] into the woods, overtook him…we met him returning out of the woods with Pemisapan’s head in his hand.” Nugent’s action served no useful pur‑ pose, as the would-be colonizers were wholly dependent upon Native communities. Facing starva‑ tion, Lane gladly abandoned his colony when the privateer Francis Drake (who slaughtered hundreds of people on Rathlin Island, off the north coast of County Antrim, in 1574 and Christopher Carleill, who once held a garrison at nearby Coleraine) landed in the Outer Banks in June of 1586.8 Following his return from Roanoke with Drake and Carleill, Ralph Lane was appointed as Muster Master General for the English forces in Ireland in 1592. Lane focused his energies not on 17

Audrey Horning

successfully implementing any plantation scheme, but rather on brazenly cooking the muster books, demonstrating what Rory Rapple describes as a “remarkable capacity for corruption, willful misman‑ agement, and wily self-defense.” Lane’s self-interested orientation was not unusual for Elizabethan adventurers. While charged with implementing ideologically driven schemes, the actions of men like Lane suggests that personal profiteering was a far greater motivation than taming uncivilized people on behalf of a beloved Queen. Raleigh’s second effort to plant a colony at Roanoke in 1587, led by the artist John White, was no more successful. While White was a less corrupt leader than Lane, he was no better at providing subsistence, sailing away from Roanoke, a scant month after arriving, to resup‑ ply and return. When he eventually made it back in 1590, the colony was gone. White gave up and, like Lane, found a better home in Ireland. Collectively, the failed Roanoke efforts directly influenced the Munster Plantation, which represented the next effort to colonize in Ireland.9

The Munster Plantation and Atlantic Exploration Launched in 1587, the Munster Plantation was designed to correct the mistakes of the Laois and Offaly plantations. Lands were only to be granted to incoming New English settlers, and on paper, the division of land was highly organized. Nine seignories of 12,000 acres, each accommodating 91 English, and divided into a manor and adjacent freeholds, were to be granted to individual undertak‑ ers. Founded upon the principal of res nullius, or empty land, the scheme deployed assumptions that would become common in colonizing ventures elsewhere. However, there were two significant prob‑ lems. First, the lands were far from empty, nor were the plots even contiguous. The Munster Planta‑ tion comprised the surrendered lands of the Old English Desmond Lordship, scattered across parts of Counties Cork, Limerick, Kerry, and Tipperary, still peopled with Desmond tenants and surrounded by powerful maritime lordships including that of the O’Sullivan Beare and the O’Driscolls. Second, lands were not granted according to the intent. The largest land grant, a whopping 42,000 acres, went to a largely absentee landowner: Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh gave leases to a handful of Roanoke adventurers, including Thomas Hariot and John White, but otherwise treated his lands as a disposable commodity, exploiting large swathes of forest for timber to fuel a burgeoning iron industry.10 Raleigh’s exploitative orientation was common. Munster council member and planter Henry Oughtred saw the plantation as a means of recouping his losses from failed investments in Martin Frobisher’s 1574 efforts to locate the Northwest Passage and Humphrey Gilbert’s 1583 efforts to claim Newfoundland. There were also connections through the role of the south coast of Ireland as a hub for Atlantic piracy. Piratical activities were partly condoned by the English crown to protect the lucrative Newfoundland fisheries and were facilitated by the maritime expertise of the O’Driscoll and the O’Sullivan Beare lordships. These lordships were intimately engaged with both legitimate and illegitimate trade in the Atlantic, and with the continent as well as the Mediterranean. Such mari‑ time engagements were not ad hoc, but rather were carefully organized and regulated, demonstrating the clear involvement of the Irish in the emerging mercantile economies. This is demonstrated by the O’Driscoll demands of those seeking to fish in their territory: Every ship or boat that fishes there is to pay the lord in money sixteen shillings and two-pence, a barrel of flour, a barrel of salt, a hogshead of beer, a dish of fish three times a week from every boat, and if they dry their fish in any part of the said country to pay thirteen shillings for the rocks. The fishery was a well-organized business analogous with practices found throughout the north Atlantic.11

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Whatever gains were made by the Munster planters were reversed in October 1598, when Irish forces led by Owny O’Moore, an agent of Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone and Gaelic leader of Ulster, damaged and destroyed plantation settlements during the conflict known as the Nine Years’ War. This conflict ended with a devastating Irish loss at the Battle of Kinsale in 1601 and led to the 1603 submission of O’Neill. Despite the favorable terms granted to him (retention of lands and title), O’Neill unsuccessfully attempted to secure the backing of the Spanish for renewed warfare. Sailing off from Donegal in September of 1607 alongside Hugh O’Donnell and their retainers in an event known as the Flight of the Earls, the Gaelic lords were rebuffed by the Spanish and diverted to Rome. Their absence left a power vacuum in Ulster, the most Gaelic territory of Ireland, and provided an opportunity for the English to implement the most extensive plantation scheme yet: the 1609 Ulster Plantation.12

Ulster Plantation and the Virginia Colony As a Crown-sanctioned colonial venture, the Ulster Plantation was planned out in detail and continu‑ ally assessed. Incoming planters were supposed to be Protestant and were forbidden from engaging with the Irish, who themselves were banned from residency in Plantation towns. The most restrictive effort within the Ulster Plantation was the Londonderry Plantation, which relied upon the London Companies (wealthy merchant guilds) to underwrite the venture in exchange for land. The Compa‑ nies were expected to build towns and villages, impose Protestantism, and remove all Irish. While significant changes were wrought on the landscape, most conditions went unfulfilled. Irish remained resident, even on Company lands, and some prominent planters were openly Catholic. The Ulster Plantation was also in direct competition with overseas ventures, notably the 1607 Jamestown col‑ ony. It is no coincidence that when the London Companies were compelled by King James to invest in the Londonderry Plantation, 55 out of 56 companies withdrew their investments in the London Company of Virginia. The dates are significant. The Ulster Plantation was launched in 1609; James‑ town experienced its disastrous “Starving Time” in that same year, as the poorly supplied colony lost two-thirds of its colonists through starvation and disease.13 The relaunched Munster Plantation fostered further competition for the faltering Jamestown col‑ ony. Like their Ulster counterparts, planters focused their attention on economic advancement. Con‑ trary to plantation precepts encouraging mixed agriculture, planters instead adapted Gaelic strategies such as cattle pastoralism and fishing. For example, Munster planter Vincent Gookin acquired and began exploiting the O’Driscoll fisheries, while Irish cattle exports increased rather than decreased under the new planters. Even the highly regulated Londonderry plantation built itself on pre-existing strategies, with a 1609 report for the port city of Londonderry noting that imported goods were to be paid for through exporting the “commodities of the Country; live cattle, beeves, hide and tallow.”14

The Irish in the Atlantic: The Amazon Ireland in the seventeenth century was far more than a colonized land. While often cast as the victims, in reality many Irish were directly engaged not only as participants, but as promoters of colonialism. In the 1610s, an Irish colony was attempted in the Amazon, spearheaded by Irish trader Phillip Pur‑ cell. Purcell was keen to benefit from Atlantic commodities, and in 1613 landed a colony of 14 Irish men in the Taurege River region of the Amazon. “Porsall’s Fort” focused upon tobacco, was reliant upon Native laborers, and worked in tandem with nearby English-led trading stations. Catholicism facilitated strategic engagements with Spanish and Portuguese adventurers not available to the Eng‑ lish. Akin to other European colonists, the success of the Irish was dependent upon local indigenous

19

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people who both facilitated access to territory and provided labor. Local Tupi peoples sought alli‑ ances with the Irish (and also English) for their own political reasons, principally to serve as a buffer against the expansionist activities of the Portuguese.15 By the 1620s, the Irish colony had grown in size, allied with the financially powerful Dutch West Indies Company. It failed, however, after Portuguese forces attacked the settlement in 1625. Over 50 Irish perished in this encounter. James Purcell, who escaped, would later join with a company of Anglo-Dutch traders who re-established themselves in the Amazon in 1628, only to be again attacked by the Portuguese. An Irish-led effort to negotiate with the Portuguese notably was reliant upon the linguistic skills of an unnamed man described as a “mulatto” from Cape Verde. The Irish were clearly content to rely both on the labor of African people captured as servants or slaves by the Dutch and on their linguistic and diplomatic abilities. In a reversal of fortunes, the Irish presence in the Amazon may have received a substantial boost in the 1640s when the Portuguese King João IV acceded to a request to allow one Peter Sweetman to resettle Irish colonists from St. Christopher to the Amazon under Portuguese protection. This was at a time of heightened persecution of Irish Catholics as part of the attempted Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, discussed below. Regardless of how appealing the Portuguese offer may have been, the documentary record is vague as to whether or not Sweetman actually transferred any Irish settlers into Portuguese territories. The Caribbean would prove a more successful space for Irish colonialism.16

The Irish in the Atlantic: The Caribbean In the 1620s, many Irish turned to the Caribbean as a space for economic advancement and religious freedom, with the Irish accounting for as much as half of the Caribbean settler population in the seventeenth century. This demographic reality implicates the Irish in processes of colonialism and displacement of indigenous peoples usually exclusively associated with the English and other Eu‑ ropean powers. The island of St. Christopher in the Leeward Islands served as an initial draw, and from there, Irish farmers, laborers, servants, and soldiers spread out through the English-held lands on adjacent islands, such as Nevis and Antiqua, and most significantly, Montserrat. While many Irish in the Caribbean arrived as indentured servants, they were not enslaved for life. An indenture was a time limited labor contract, and a far cry from race-based enslavement for life. As noted by Donald Akenson, Irish who emigrated to the Caribbean Did so by personal choice, with information in hand, and, in fact, made reasonable decisions as between two alternatives: remain in Ireland or emigrate. That neither of these alternatives may have been very attractive does not detract either from the self-preserving agency of the individuals involved, nor obfuscate the impact on other cultures which the exercise of that agency involved. Irish experiences in the Caribbean ranged from the travails of indentured servants to the economic successes of Irish planters, landlords, and merchants.17 The island of St. Christopher presented particular advantages for Catholic Irish émigrés. While Catholic worship was banned on English lands, the French also held territory on the island and main‑ tained Catholic houses of worship, providing opportunities for devout Irish to exercise their faith. Irish priests also made their way to the Leeward Islands, serving a community of at least 3000 Irish Catholics by the year 1639. Freedom to worship openly served as a draw to the neighboring island of Montserrat in 1632, when the governor of St. Christopher encouraged Catholic Irish to establish their own settlement on that island. Shortly after the move of an unrecorded number of Irish from St. Kitts, the new Governor Anthony Briskett brought a group of Irish settlers, principally from Munster, 20

Ireland and the Irish in the Atlantic World

to the island. According to Jesuit priest Father Andrew White, Briskett’s Irish had earlier been turned away by the Virginia colony. They were joined by others who had fled the Amazon, and then by a stream of immigrants sent by the principal Old English families, or “tribes,” of Galway: the Kirwans, Lynches, and Frenches. By the 1640s, the Irish community on Montserrat began to immerse itself fully in the Caribbean sugar economy with all of its attendant inequalities, including reliance upon unfree African and African-descended labor.18

The Irish in the Atlantic: The Chesapeake The Irish were also instrumental in early settlements in the Chesapeake, their numbers exceeding 3000. Even before the establishment of the Jamestown colony in 1607, Virginia was viewed by some English officials as a convenient dumping ground for unwanted Irish. Sir Arthur Chichester, Irish Lord Deputy when the Ulster Plantation was launched, suggested banishing Gaelic lords Donal Ballach O’Cahan and Hugh O’Donnell to the Virginia, “from whence they may never return,” while another treatise wanted to send kern (Irish peasants or foot soldiers) to the not-yet-established colony. While neither action was taken, the suggestions speak to English attitudes toward the Irish and the nascent Virginia colony.19 Once launched, the Virginia colony attracted individuals with considerable Irish experience, as well as some Irish themselves. Those with Irish military experience included Edward Maria Wing‑ field, Thomas Gates, Thomas Dale, Lord Delaware Thomas West, and William Newce. In 1620, Newce, who had previously invested in the development of Bandon and Newcestown in County Cork, “freely offered unto the Company to transport at his own coste and charges 1000 persons into Virginia” and in exchange received the title of Marshall and a patent to 1500 acres of land, with 50 tenants, near present-day Newport News. Also in 1620, Newce’s associate Daniel Gookin Sr. (brother to the aforementioned Munster planter Vincent Gookin), presented a plan to import Irish cattle and Irish servants to Virginia. The Council responded enthusiastically, expressing “great hope that (if the Irish Plantation prosper) from Ireland great multitudes of People will be like to come hither.” Irish commodities like cattle were also entangled with westward expansion. Following Gookin’s lead, in 1621, Thomas Woode petitioned the Virginia council for permission to import live Irish cattle, while later in the century, Irish salted beef was central to provisioning the enslaved African and Africandescended workforces on French Caribbean plantations.20 To fund his Virginia scheme, Daniel Gookin sold property at Carrigaline, County Cork to Richard Boyle, an English planter who had acquired Walter Raleigh’s original 42,000-acre land grant in 1603. Boyle’s son Richard (the chemist) was later instrumental in the establishment of the Brafferton Indian School in Williamsburg, Virginia. Daniel Gookin Sr. moved his family to Virginia, but the lack of supplies and a high death rate ensured the failure of his plantation. Gookin Sr. returned to Ireland, leasing his lands back from Boyle, while his son Daniel Jr. remained in Virginia, establishing a settle‑ ment in the territory of the Nansemond Indians, apparently by agreement with them. Archaeological investigation has revealed that Gookin Jr. followed the plan of an Irish bawn in fortifying his enclave. Gookin, a committed Puritan, eventually made his way to the New England colony where he worked alongside the Reverend John Eliot, known for translating the Bible into Algonquian and ministering to Native Christian converts (“Praying Indians”) in Massachusetts.21 Gookin taught English to the Praying Indians, viewing language as crucial to colonial success, and condemned the English for failing to impose language change on the Irish: “I incline to believe, that if that course had been effectually taken with the Irish, their enmity and rebellion against the English had been long since cured or prevented…” Gookin also pragmatically encouraged colonists to learn Native tongues, as evidenced in the use of the Massachusetts language in the early Natick town records. Here, he was directly contradicting the vehemently anti-Irish opinions of his uncle, 21

Audrey Horning

Vincent Gookin Sr., who despite readily adapting Irish economic activities, was highly critical of the English planters who not only learned the Irish language, but married into Irish families. In 1633, Vincent Gookin Sr. asserted to Lord Deputy Thomas Wentworth that he “ever will stand at a distance from the Irish, and will not so much as suffer my children to learn the language.” He may not have wanted his children to learn Irish, but to be without linguistic knowledge left planters at the mercy of translators—liminal figures who could not always be trusted.22 Other Irish who made their way to Virginia include an unknown number of Wexford natives who were sent off to Virginia in the second decade of the seventeenth century. In 1620, Sir Oliver St. John threatened to send even more “men of the escheated countries of Wexford, who have lately vexed their Lordships” to Virginia, “after their countrymen.” In 1622, the Virginia Company also consid‑ ered a proposal from “certain gentlemen of Ireland” to “transport out of Ireland 20 or 30 able youthes of 16: or 17 yeares of age to Virginia to be Apprentices for 6 or 7 yeares in the Companies service.” Other Irish were sent to Virginia during the conflicts of mid-century, with Irish surnames on lists of Virginia headrights in the 1650s. Despite these efforts, the Protestantism of the Virginia colony dis‑ couraged large scale efforts at migration.23 By contrast, the other Chesapeake colony, Maryland, was conceived of as a haven for Catholi‑ cism and so was attractive to Catholic Irish. The English Catholic Lord Baltimore, George Calvert, spearheaded the Maryland colony as well a colony in Newfoundland and Irish plantation settlements in Counties Wexford and Longford. Despite the religious tolerance that was a founding principal of the Maryland colony, it became primarily populated by Protestants, leading some Irish Catholics to adopt a pragmatic approach for their own advancement and protection in the face of Protestant opposition. Peyrol-Kleiber cites the case of Bryan O’Daly who emigrated to Maryland sometime before 1659, the year he completed his indenture. O’Daly then swiftly married a Protestant woman, acquired 300 acres of land, and strategically dropped the prefix “O” from his name to camouflage his Gaelic identity.24

Ireland and America after the Mid-Seventeenth Century Irish migration to the Americas accelerated after 1650 in the wake of long-term conflict. In 1641, when a small number of Irish elites in Ulster launched an armed constitutional protest in a bid to pro‑ tect their property and ensure their own role in ruling Ireland, there had been about 30 years of rela‑ tive peace, founded upon accommodation between the demographically dominant Irish and the new British planters. This small-scale revolt soon morphed into widespread warfare as part of the War of Three Kingdoms but with a distinctive sectarian element. English and Scottish Catholics joined Irish compatriots in a Confederacy, initially fighting against the Protestant forces of the Crown. The 1649 intervention of the Puritan Oliver Cromwell accelerated the violence, with Protestants in Ireland di‑ viding their allegiances between the Parliamentarian and Royalist forces, and Confederate Catholics forging an unlikely alliance with the Crown and the exiled Charles II. Hostilities ended in February of 1653, when the last major Confederate outpost, the Galway island of Inishbofin, surrendered. A shift in landholding followed, precipitated by the Cromwellian Act of Settlement in 1652, which aimed to punish Irish rebels and tighten the Protestant English grip. Stark figures tell the story. In 1641, Catho‑ lic landowners (Gaelic and Old English) retained 59 percent of land. By 1688, that figure plummeted to a mere 22 percent. Land confiscation worked in tandem with an effort to push Irish into the western province of Connaught, freeing up the more fertile eastern lands for incoming English Protestants.25 Unsurprisingly, the reordering of land encouraged many to emigrate voluntarily, while others were forcibly transported. Those who could plan their exodus generally eschewed the American colonies in favor of the continent. Irish soldiers who submitted to English forces could petition to leave the

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country, and by January of 1653, at least 13,000 soldiers had been accepted into Spanish service. Existing anti-vagrancy laws were deployed to justify the forced deportation of other Irish, often children, to the Americas. The Irish were not the sole targets of this policy. Thousands of Scottish prisoners were earmarked for forcible transportation, although many died or were released before being shipped.26 A project known as the Western Design called for thousands of Irish to be sent to the West Indies. A key figure in this effort was Admiral William Penn (father of the Pennsylvania Quaker leader), who in 1655 took Jamaica out of Spanish hands and delivered the island to the British. Shortly afterwards, Daniel Gookin Jr. agreed to lead a venture in which “one thousand Irish girls, and the like number of youths, be sent into Jamaica.” Gookin did not succeed with this plan and shifted his own atten‑ tions back to North America. He was, however, present in London at the time of the heated debates over the best way to rebuild Ireland. Illustrative of the intellectual network that linked Ireland and the American colonies, one of the more moderate voices in these debates was that of Daniel’s cousin Vincent Gookin Jr., who argued against efforts to punish and vanquish the Irish in favor of a more integrationist approach. His view was pragmatic, given the need for an Irish tenantry to provide labor and rents. While antithetical to the orientation of his father, Vincent Gookin Jr.’s accommodationist approach was mirrored by Daniel Gookin Jr. in his engagements with New England’s Native people, and later echoed by the Quaker William Penn, who spent formative years in Munster.27 Like many ambitious paper plans, the Act for Settlement was never wholly implemented, and it is challenging to delineate the precise numbers of Irish who emigrated. In 1655, planters on Barbados claimed that 12,000 prisoners of war (Irish, Scottish, and English) had descended upon the region. This is likely an exaggerated figure. Akenson estimates instead that an absolute maximum of 10,000 (including women and vagrants as well as prisoners of war) may have been transported to the Carib‑ bean. It is similarly difficult to discover how many priests were transported. According to a decree of 1653, all Irish Catholic priests were declared guilty of high treason. Any who did not voluntarily go into exile were, by a follow up 1655 decree, subject to transportation to Barbados or other American plantations. It is unclear how many were forcibly removed from Ireland, and similarly impossible to gauge how many returned. If we take a microscale approach, in 1657 a fortification on the island of Inishbofin, where the last Confederates had surrendered, was designated a prison for priests due for transportation. One estimate places just five imprisoned priests on Inishbofin, all of whom were released or had died by 1663. While there may not have been many priests relocated to the Caribbean, there is good evidence for an increase in numbers of Irish emigrating, concomitant with a hardening of local attitudes toward Irish incomers. In part, this attitudinal shift reflected the transition from in‑ dentured to enslaved labor. On Barbados, this was marked by lands increasingly being consolidated into large sugar plantations, which prevented laborers who had completed their indentures from ac‑ quiring land and limited opportunities for incoming indentured or free white laborers.28 The War of Three Kingdoms left another mark on Ireland, which was the impact of a sizable wave of incoming Scottish Presbyterian settlers. According to Judith Ridner, 60,000 to 100,000 individuals left Scotland for the north of Ireland between 1650 and 1700—a remarkable figure considering that the Ulster Plantation only attracted perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 settlers. The newcomers’ time in Ulster was short-lived as a result of the Williamite Wars of 1688–1690. Fought between the supporters of the Catholic James II and the Protestant William of Orange, the war culminated in the crowning of William III and his wife, Mary. Often described as the “Glorious Revolution,” there was little that was glorious in Ireland, where the bloody battles that secured the House of Orange claim were fought. Protestant control over Ireland only became assured after 1690, effected by legislated dis‑ crimination against Catholics and dissenting Protestants. As discussed in later chapters of the present volume, such laws encouraged Ulster Scottish Presbyterians to emigrate to the American colonies.29

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Conclusion Traditionalist understandings of Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries position the land as home to an archaic and insular Gaelic culture subjected to colonial oppression at the hands of the English. Clearly, this perception is at odds with the evidence of Ireland’s active in‑ volvement in Atlantic expansion alongside the complexities of the “on the ground” relationship between the English and the Irish. While historical myths are easily disproved, they underpin both the Republican and Loyalist ideologies of the late twentieth century that led to the 30 years of vio‑ lence in Northern Ireland known as “The Troubles.” Notions about Irish oppression also underpin many understandings within the Irish Diaspora. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did see Ireland subjected to the forces of English colonialism. However, it was not a clear cut process. Every overseas British colonial venture starting with the failed sixteenth-century R ­ oanoke ven‑ ture included willing Irish participants, and there were also significant Irish-led colonial ventures in the Americas. Distinguishing the early modern history of colonial expansion from the later history of Ireland and Irish emigration weakens the long assumed direct link between plantation and “The Troubles” of the late twentieth century and forces a reconsideration of the origins and character of Irish America itself.

Notes 1 Mackenthun, Metaphors, 34; Doan, An Island; Canny, Making Ireland British; Horning, Virginian Sea. 2 Connolly, Contested Island, 90–114. On the relationship between religious and political policy and suc‑ cesses, see Brady and Murphy, “Sir Henry Sydney.” 3 Campbell, FitzPatrick and Horning, Becoming and Belonging; Nicholls, Gaelic and Gaelicized Ireland; for political evolution of the term “savagery” and its application to both the Irish and Native Americans, see Das et al., Keywords. 4 “An Act for the English Order, Habit, and Language,” in Maxwell Irish History, 112; Horning, “Clothing and Colonialism;” Rich, A Short Survey of Ireland, 2; Canny, “Ideology.” 5 Jefferies, “Why the Reformation Failed,” 153; Loeber, “Geography and Practice;” Horning, Virginian Sea, 28. 6 Canny also notes the presence of English military men on the side of the Irish forces in Making Ireland Brit‑ ish, 74; Kupperman, Roanoke; Quinn, Roanoke Voyages I, 195–197. 7 Hariot, Brief and True; Doan, “An Island, 81.” For a recent reconsideration of the existence of a shared colonial ideology, see contributions to the Forum “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America Fifty Years on.” William and Mary Quarterly 80, no. 3 (July 2023): 435–492. 8 Lane, “Discourse;” Oberg, Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand; Horning, Virginia Sea, 77, 92, 197. 9 Horning, Virginian Sea, 75–84; Rapple, “Brazen as Falstaff” 390. 10 MacCarthy-Morrogh, Munster Plantation; Rynne, “Plantation Period Ironworks.” 11 Kelleher, Alliance of Pirates; Breen, Gaelic Lordship; Breen, An Archaeology; O’Mahony, “The O’Driscolls;” Turgeon, “Codfish;” Childs, “Irish Merchants;” Woodward, “Irish Sea Trades.” 12 Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion; O’Neill, Nine Years’ War; McCavitt, Flight of the Earls. 13 Curl, Londonderry Plantation; Moody, Londonderry Plantation; Horning, Virginian Sea, especially Chapter 3. 14 Smyth, Mapmaking, 97–98; Connolly, Divided Kingdom, 281; Horning, “Minding the Gaps;” “Commodities vendible at Derry,” CSPI 1608–1610, 340. 15 Lorimer, English and Irish Settlement, esp. 58; Canny, “Review”. 16 Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, 29; Lorimer, Amazon, 310, 121. 17 For population figures, see Akenson, Montserrat, 26, Rodgers, “Changing Presence,” 19, based on Briden‑ baugh and Bridenbaugh No Peace; Akenson, Montserrat, 49–50. 18 Akenson, Montserrat, 355, 35; Gwynn, “First Irish Priests,” 224; Rodgers, “Changing Presence,” 19; Zacek, Settler Society. 19 Peyrol-Kleiber, “Another Brick”; Chichester to Salisbury, Lansdowne MSS 156 (1607) ff265; Horning, ­Virginian Sea. 20 Kingsbury, Records I, 446; Horning, Virginian Sea, 272–273, 275, 280–281; Mandelblatt, “Irish Salt Beef.”

24

Ireland and the Irish in the Atlantic World 21 Edwards and Rynne, Colonial World; Horning, “Intersecting Worlds;” Kingsbury, Records III, 587; Gookin, Daniel Gookin; Breen, Praying; Pecoraro, Mr. Gookin; Horning, Virginian Sea, 314–317. 22 Gookin, Documents, 81; Bragdon, “Crime and Punishment;” Barnard, “Lord Broghill;” Gookin, “Letter,” 185; Palmer, Language and Conquest. 23 Horning, Virginian Sea, 279. 24 Krugler, English and Catholic; Lyttleton, “Manor Houses;” Peyrol-Kleiber, “Another Brick,” 26. 25 Ó Siochrú, Kingdoms in Crisis; Barnard, Kingdom of Ireland, 13, 29, 61. 26 Cunningham, Conquest; Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 53; Fitzgerald and Lambkin, Migration, 109. 27 Penn, 1833 Memorials, appendix H, 585; Pestana, English Conquest; Horning, “Irish Worlds.” 28 Akenson, If the Irish, 63; Walsh, “Cromwell’s Barracks,” 38–40; Reilly, “Irish in Barbados,” 51. 29 Ridner, Scots-Irish, 13; Ohlmeyer, Civil War; Barnard, Kingdom.

Bibliography Primary Sources Act for the English Order, Habit, and Language (1537), “The Bills and Statutes of the Irish Parliaments of Henry VII and Henry VIII.” Analecta Hibernica no. 10 (1941): 156. Chichester, Arthur. “Letter to Salisbury.” Lansdowne MSS 156 (1607) ff265, British Library. “Commodities Vendible at Derry.” In Calendar of State Papers of Ireland, 1608–10, edited by C. W. Russell and John P. Prendergast, 340. London: Longman and Company, 1874. “Father Figueira’s Account of the Assault on Tauregue, 1629.” In English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon, 1550–1646, edited by Joyce Lorimer, 304–313. London: Routledge for the Hakluyt Society, 1989. Gookin, Daniel. Historical Collections of the Indians in New England. Boston, MA: Belknap and Hale, 1674. Gookin, Vincent. “1633 Letter to Lord Wentworth.” In Calendar of State Papers Relating to Ireland of the Reign of Charles I and the Commonwealth, Volume 18, 1647–1660 & addenda, 1616–1660, edited by Robert ­Pentland Mahaffy, 185. London: HMSO, 1908. Hariot, Thomas and Royster, Paul, editors, “A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588)”. Electronic Texts in American Studies. 20, 1588. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/etas/20. Lane, Ralph. “An Account of the Particularities of the Imployments of the English Men Left in Virginia by Richard Greenevill under the Charge of Master Ralfe Lane Generali of the Same, from the 17 of August, 1585. untill the 18. of June 1586. at Which Time They Departed the Countrie: Sent and Directed to Sir Walter Ralegh.” In The Principall Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation, edited by Richard Hakluyt. London: Bishop and Newberie, 1589. Penn, William. My Irish Journal 1669–1670. London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1952. Rich, Barnaby. A Short Survey of Ireland, Truely Discovering Who it Is that Hath So Armed the Hearts of that People, with Disobedience to Their Princes. London, 1609.

Secondary Sources Akenson, Donald Harman. If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630–1730. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Uni‑ versity Press, 1997. Barnard, Toby. “Lord Broghill, Vincent Gookin and the Cork Elections of 1659.” English Historical Review 88, no. 347 (1973): 362–365. Barnard, Toby. The Kingdom of Ireland, 1641–1760. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. Brady, Ciaran, and James Murray. “Sir Henry Sydney and the Reformation in Ireland.” In Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550–1700, edited by Elizabethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben, 14–39. Abing‑ don: Taylor and Francis, 2006. Bragdon, Kathleen. “Crime and Punishment among the Indians of Massachusetts 1675–1750.” Ethnohistory 28, no. 1 (1981): 23–32. Breen, Colin. An Archaeology of Southwest Ireland 1570–1670. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007. Breen, Colin. The Gaelic Lordship of the O’Sullivan Beare. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005. Breen, Louise. “Praying with the Enemy: Daniel Gookin, King Philip’s War, and the Dangers of Intercultural Mediatorship.” In Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples 1600–1850, edited by Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern, 101–122. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

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Audrey Horning Bridenbaugh, Carl, and Roberta Bridenbaugh. No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1624– 1690. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Campbell, Eve, Elizabeth FitzPatrick, and Audrey Horning, eds. Becoming and Belonging in Ireland 1200– 1600: Essays in Identity and Cultural Practice. Cork: Cork University Press. Canny, Nicholas. Making Ireland British: 1580–1650. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Canny, Nicholas. “Review of English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon, 1550–1646 by Joyce Lorimer.” English Historical Review 109, no. 430 (February 1994): 173–174. Canny, Nicholas. “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America.” William and Mary Quar‑ terly 30, no. 4 (October 1973): 575–598. Childs, Wendy R. “Irish Merchants and Seamen in Late Medieval England.” Irish Historical Studies 32, no. 125 (2000): 22–43. Connolly, Sean. Contested Island: Ireland 1460–1630. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Connolly, Sean. Divided Kingdom: Ireland 1630–1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Cunningham, John. Conquest and Land in Ireland: The Transplantation to Connacht, 1649–1690. Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2011. Curl, James Stephens. The Londonderry Plantation. London: Phillimore, 1986. Das, Nandini, João Vicente Melo, Haig Z. Smith, and Lauren Working. Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility in Early Modern England. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. Daulton, Martin, and Rick Halpern, eds. Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples 1600– 1850. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Dickson, David. Old World Colony: Cork and South Munster 1630–1830. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Doan, James E. “‘An Island in the Virginian Sea’: Native Americans and the Irish in English Discourse, 1585– 1640.” New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua 1, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 79–99. Edwards, David, and Colin Rynne, eds. The Colonial World of Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2017. Fitzgerald, Patrick, and Brian Lambkin. Migration in Irish History, 1607–2007. Basingstoke: Palgrave ­MacMillan, 2008. Gookin, Frederick W. Daniel Gookin 1612–1687, Assistant and Major General of the Massachusetts Bay ­Colony. Chicago, IL, 1912. Gwynn, Aubrey. “The First Irish Priests in the New World.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 21, no. 82 (1932): 213–228. Hamilton, H.C., ed. Calendar of State Papers Relating to Ireland of the Reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth 1509–1573. London: Longman, 1860. Horning, Audrey. “Clothing and Colonialism: The Dungiven Costume and the Fashioning of Early Modern Identities.” Journal of Social Archaeology 14, no. 3 (2014): 296–318. Horning, Audrey. “Intersecting Worlds: The Brafferton and its Irish Atlantic Context.” In Building the Brafferton, edited by Danielle Moretti-Langholtz and Buck Woodard, 30–37. Williamsburg, VA: Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2019. Horning, Audrey. Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2013. Horning, Audrey. “Minding the Gaps: Exploring the Intersection of Political Economy, Colonial Ideologies, and Cultural Practice in Early Modern Ireland.” Post-Medieval Archaeology 52, no. 1 (2018): 4–20. Horning, Audrey. “The Irish Worlds of William Penn: Culture, Conflict, and Connections.” In The Worlds of William Penn, edited by Andrew Murphy and John Smolenski, 120–138. Rutgers: Rutgers University Press, 2019. Jefferies, Henry. “Why the Reformation Failed in Ireland.” Irish Historical Studies 40, no. 158 (2016): 151–170. Kelleher, Connie. The Alliance of Pirates: Ireland and Atlantic Piracy in the Early Seventeenth Century. Cork: Cork University Press, 2020. Kingsbury, Susan Myra, compiler. Records of the Virginia Company of London, Vol. 1. Washington, DC: Gov‑ ernment Printing Office, 1906. Krugler, John D. English and Catholic: The Lords Baltimore in the Seventeenth Century. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. Loeber, Rolf. “The Geography and Practice of English Colonisation in Ireland from 1534–1609.” Irish Settle‑ ment Studies no. 3 (1991).

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Ireland and the Irish in the Atlantic World Lorimer, Joyce. English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon, 1550–1646. London: Routledge for the Hak‑ luyt Society, 1989. Lyttleton, James. “The Manor Houses of the 1st Lord Baltimore in an English Atlantic World.” Post‑Medieval Archaeology 51, no. 1 (2017): 43–61. Lyttleton, James, and Colin Rynne, eds. Plantation Ireland: Settlement and Material Culture, c.  1550–1700. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009. MacCarthy Morrogh, Michael. The Munster Plantation: English Migration to Southern Ireland, 1583–1641. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.Mackenthun, Gesa. Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492–1637. Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Mandelblatt, Bertie. “A Transatlantic Commodity: Irish Salt Beef in the French Atlantic World.” History Work‑ shop Journal 63, no. 1 (2007): 18–47. Maxwell, Constantia. Irish History from Contemporary Sources (1509–1610). London: George Allen and Un‑ win, 1923. McCavitt, John. The Flight of the Earls. Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 2013. Moody, T.W. The Londonderry Plantation, 1608–41. Belfast: William Mullan and Son, 1939. Morgan, Hiram. Tyrone’s Rebellion: The Outbreak of the Nine Years War in Tudor Ireland. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1993. Nicholls, K. Gaelic and Gaelicized Ireland in the Middle Ages. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2003. Oberg, Michael Leroy. The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand: Roanoke’s Forgotten Indians. Philadelphia: Univer‑ sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Ohlmeyer, Jane. Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms: The Career of Randal McDonnell, Marquis of Antrim, 1609–1683. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. O’Mahony, E. “The O`Driscolls and their Revenues from Fishing: The 1609 Inquisition.” Mizen 8 (2000): 128–130. O’Neill, James. The Nine Years War, 1593–1603: O’Neill, Mountjoy and the Military Revolution. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2017. Ó Siochrú, M., ed. Kingdoms in Crisis: Ireland in the 1640s. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001. Palmer, Patricia. Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Eliza‑ bethan Imperial Expansion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pecoraro, Luke. “Mr Gookin Out of Ireland, Wholly Upon his Owne Adventure: An Archaeological Study of In‑ tercolonial and Transatlantic Connections in the Seventeenth Century.” Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 2015. Penn, Granville. Memorials of the Professional Life and Times of Sir William Penn Knight, Vol. 2, 1644–1670. London: James Duncan, 1833. Pestana, Carla Gardina. The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017. Peyrol‑Kleiber, Élodie. “Another Brick to the Wall: The Unruly Irish Nation Within the Civilized English Em‑ pire, 17th Century.” Diasporas (Toulouse) 34 (2019): 19–29. Web. https://doi.org/10.4000/diasporas.3879 Quinn, David Beers. Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584–1606. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Rapple, Rory. “Brazen as Falstaff, Devious as Iago: Sir Ralph Lane’s Approach to Office Holding in Ireland and Virginia.” Journal of British Studies 62 (April 2023): 390–417. Reilly, Matthew. “Irish in Barbados.” In Caribbean Irish Connections: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Ali‑ son Donnell, Maria McGarrity, and Evelyn O’Callaghan, 47–53. Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2015. Ridner, Judith A. The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania: A Varied People. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Historical Association, 2018. Rodgers, Nini. “A Changing Presence: The Irish in the Caribbean in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” In Caribbean Irish Connections: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Alison Donnell, Maria McGarrity, and Evelyn O’Callaghan, 17–32. Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2015. Rodgers, Nini. Ireland, Slavery and Anti‑Slavery: 1612–1865. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Rynne, Colin. “The Social Archaeology of Plantation‑Period Ironworks in Ireland.” In Plantation Ireland: Set‑ tlement and Material Culture c.1550–1700, edited by James Lyttleton and Colin Rynne, 248–264. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009. Smith, A.E. Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America 1607–1776. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012 (1947). Smyth, William J. Map‑Making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c.1530–1750. Cork: Cork University Press, 2006.

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Audrey Horning Turgeon, L. “Codfish, Consumption, and Colonization: The Creation of the French Atlantic World during the Sixteenth Century.” In Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World: People, Products, and Practices on the Move, edited by Caroline A. Williams, 33–56. London: Routledge, 2009. Walsh, Paul. “Cromwell’s Barrack: A Commonwealth Garrison Fort on Inishbofin, Co. Galway.” Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society 42 (1989/1990): 30–71. Woodward, D. “Irish Sea Trades and Shipping from the Later Middle Ages to c. 1660.” In The Irish Sea: Aspects of Maritime History, edited by Michael McCaughan and John Appleby, 35–44. Belfast: Queen’s University Belfast Institute for Irish Studies, 1989. Zacek, Natalie A. Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands 1630–1676. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

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2 ULSTER PRESBYTERIANS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF A “SCOTCH-IRISH” IDENTITY Peter Gilmore

Who are the Ulster Presbyterians? And what are they doing in a book about Irish America? ­Throughout the seventeenth century, thousands of Scots Presbyterians settled in Ireland, largely in the northern province of Ulster. In Northern Ireland today, they are called Ulster Scots; in the United States, their descendants have been known as the Scotch Irish or Scots Irish. All these names signal the irrefuta‑ ble importance of a Scottish cultural legacy. The nineteenth-century US term Scotch Irish has been largely superseded in recent decades by Scots Irish, which functions as shorthand for “descendants of Lowland Scots who settled in the north of Ireland and emigrated to the United States.” Although use‑ ful, these terms are problematic. The underlying conceptualization of the original Scotch-Irish idea (on which Scots Irish is based) rejected any fundamental connection between Ulster Presbyterians and Ireland. Indeed, the original promoters of the Scotch-Irish myth held that the differences between “Celtic” Irish and “Saxon” Scots were racial, rather than primarily religious or ethnocultural. Scots Irish, the modern alternative term, likewise tends to misdirect away from Ireland toward a Scottish past of attenuated significance.1 The persistence in Ireland and North America of their Scottish customs and speech and, above all, their Presbyterianism should not blind us to the overwhelming significance and determinative impact of their Ulster connection. Regardless of the names given to them, their ethnic origins, and their dis‑ tinctive brand of Protestantism, these migrants and their descendants had a reciprocal impact on Ire‑ land. The progeny of the seventeenth-century migrants from Scotland left Ireland for North America in the following centuries for specifically Irish reasons. Their values, politics, and aspirations were shaped by Irish history and experience. Both in the American colonies and new United States, Ulster Presbyterians dominated Irish immigration. Recognizing that these early migrants lacked a common or fixed ethnic identity, Patrick Griffin called them “the people with no name.” James Leyburn, how‑ ever, asserted that “[i]n their own minds” the colonial-era migrants regarded themselves as the “Irish of the North.” As they arrived in the New World on ships from Ireland, they were regarded as “Irish.” To their new neighbors, before and after the American Revolution, they were the Irish by virtue of that numerical dominance. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, to distinguish themselves from new, indigent Catholic Irish immigrants, the formerly Irish Presbyterians became “Scotch Irish” as part of the process of Americanization.2

29

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-4

Peter Gilmore

Presbyterians Make a Home in Ulster Scottish immigrants brought their Presbyterianism to Ulster from the early seventeenth century on‑ ward. The earliest settlers in central and western Ulster came, as Audrey Horning demonstrates in her chapter, in response to the government-sponsored Plantation of Ulster scheme following the Crown’s seizure of an extensive territory from the native Irish. Counties Antrim and Down had the greatest concentration of Scots, who settled initially under private schemes outside the Plantation. The greatest single influx of Scots occurred in the 1690s with the flight from a devastating fam‑ ine in Scotland, which drew tens of thousands to Ulster. In significant respects, these migrations were neither revolutionary nor alien invasions, either in terms of material culture (building construc‑ tion, agricultural techniques, and implements) or with respect to symbolic culture (music, dance, occult belief). Indeed, the migration to northeastern Ireland involved some Gaelic-speaking Scots (within the Scots-speaking majority) from southwestern Scotland, areas geographically close and culturally similar.3 Presbyterianism, their most significant and distinctive cultural marker, denoted the cultural origins of the Ulster Scots. Maps depicting areas of dense Scots settlement, Scots speech, and Presbyterian‑ ism in Ulster overlap, revealing (at its greatest extent) something of an arc stretching from County Down in eastern Ulster, north into County Antrim, westward along the northern coast into County Derry, west into eastern Donegal, and south into County Tyrone. Significant pockets of Scots could also be found in County Armagh and south County Derry. Presbyterians of Scottish origin created communities of their own. Together, these displayed cultural cohesion, institutional strength, and potential political power, which unsettled the Anglican landowning elite.4 At the turn of the eighteenth century, Presbyterians represented about a third of Ulster’s popula‑ tion of nearly a half million (at a time when Ulster was the most populous Irish province). Indeed, Presbyterians outnumbered Anglicans in the province. By the early eighteenth century, Presbyterians in Ireland had organized 120 congregations, nine presbyteries, three sub-synods, and a general synod. Irish Presbyterians had created, in effect, an unofficial, semi-legal national church, a state within a state. Although identified by their Scottish cultural inheritance, Presbyterians were also becoming progressively more Irish in upbringing and life experience.5 Ironically, perhaps, these Irish Presbyterians of Scots origins also became more Presbyterian than their Scottish cousins. Located between a Catholic majority and an Anglican minority—and subor‑ dinated economically, socially, and politically to the Anglican elite—Presbyterians clung to their creeds, covenants, and church organization as expressions of identity. After 1690, the Church of Scotland became the established church; much of its clergy in the eighteenth century inclined toward theological moderation and the rationalism of the Scottish Enlightenment. A majority of Ulster Pres‑ byterians did not. Ultimately due to Irish conditions and experiences, their religiosity tended to be distinctively traditionalist. The majority of Scots were drawn to Ulster by economic opportunity and beset by disadvantages at home. Seeking survival through access to land, most became tenant farmers. For a significant minority, economic opportunities meant trade or handcraft production. Merchants dominated life and work in seaports and market towns; urban spaces were home, too, to shopkeepers, artisans, and laborers, publicans, and professionals. Few in number, Presbyterian landowners were statistically insignificant. The relatively small numbers of Presbyterian gentry declined in the early eighteenth century as the well-to-do converted to Anglicanism to preserve their political influence and social standing. However high their social position, Presbyterians suffered second-class status because of their religion.6

30

Ulster Presbyterians and Development of “Scotch-Irish” Identity

Dissenters and Their Grievances From a twenty-first-century perspective, perhaps the most remarkable fact about Presbyterians in Ireland in the eighteenth century is that they were not legally “Protestants.” Instead, their distinct identity marked Presbyterians as “Dissenters” from the official Protestant church (the episcopalian Church of Ireland). The state and established church at the turn of the eighteenth century nervously contemplated Presbyterian unity and strength. The “Glorious Revolution” (1688–1690) brought Prot‑ estants and Dissenters together in a temporary alliance to defeat a Catholic monarch. Soon after, some Protestants regarded Presbyterians—with their demographic density and sense of their own ethnoreligious uniqueness—as a greater threat than the Roman Church. The authorities in church, state, and countryside feared the subversive potential of a competing complex of religious institu‑ tions, rituals, and independent governance. The church and state thus sought, with limited success, to copper-fasten Presbyterian legal inferiority. Anti-Catholic legislation in 1704 required officeholders to certify communion in the Church of Ireland, effectively disbarring conscientious Presbyterians. Additionally, decades-old statutes helped Churchmen enforce conformity. Lacking legal standing as Christian clergy, Dissenting ministers faced penalties for administration of sacraments. Landlords and church officials harassed Presbyterians as local conditions (or whims) dictated. Ecclesiastical courts prosecuted couples married by Dissenting ministers on charges of “fornication,” and their children were regarded as illegitimate. Presbyterians could be fined or jail for failing to attend wor‑ ship services of the Established Church.7 Presbyterian tenant farmers had additional grievances: dramatically increased rent levels followed the expiration of the long leases granted to Scots incomers in the seventeenth century, as landlords sought increased revenues and tenants competed for new or renewed leases. Higher rents, together with the tithes, rates, and fees demanded by the official Church, falling prices, crop failures, cattle disease, and other disasters, brought tenant farmers to their knees—or to emigrant ships. Rebellion, like emigration, promised relief. In the early 1760s, military intervention countered the growing con‑ tagion of the Hearts of Oak. Through this secret society, Presbyterian but also Anglican and Catholic cottiers and tenant farmers in County Armagh and elsewhere in Ulster protested compulsory labor on roadways, taxes, and the financial demands of the official church. Disputes over rents and leases triggered the more violent and exclusively Presbyterian Hearts of Steel rebellion in the early 1770s (see below).8

Ulster and the Linen Trade The struggle to make a living was eased by the production of linen cloth. By the second half of the eighteenth century, and with government encouragement, linen accounted for more than half of all Irish exports. Ulster’s ever-greater reliance on linen created simultaneously greater prosperity and hardship for tenant-farming families, as well as the means and opportunity for emigration. Linen expanded the complexity of economic relations in Ulster. The new rural profitability associated with linen simultaneously strengthened the position of landlords and the independence of tenant farmers, while exposing producers to the vagaries of overseas markets. Linen enhanced the role of women and girls through their essential production of yarn while at the same time condemning them to continual toil. Rents increased sharply during the eighteenth century; at the same time, rising living standards contributed to a population surge. Further, the increased significance of linen persuaded many land‑ lords to shorten leases. An urban-based Presbyterian middle class arose with linen in Ulster towns, predominating in the linen market and among the linen finishing trades.9

31

Peter Gilmore

Linen involved Ulster and Britain’s North American colonies in a continual trade loop. When Ul‑ ster’s tenant farmers used all flax grown for linen production, they looked to imported flaxseed from the Middle Colonies. Flaxseed became Ulster’s largest American import, with linen a significant Irish export to the American colonies. The merchant ships carried more than linen: to fill their holds, ships’ captains gladly took on passengers. By the end of the colonial era, shipping companies actively promoted emigration through advertisements and agents. Downturns in linen prices and production also encouraged emigration.10

Coming to America Emigration increasingly became a feature of Ulster Presbyterian life in the eighteenth century. Although religious and political persecution figured as factors in the emigration calculation, eco‑ nomic hardship assumed an increasingly larger role in the major waves of colonial-era migration in ­1717–1718, 1725–1729, 1740–1741, 1754–1755, and 1771–1775. Severe push factors, frequently combinations of natural disaster and rack-renting (dramatically increased rent levels), often gener‑ ated such waves. Just how many Presbyterians (mostly of Scots origin) left Ireland in the colonial era has been hotly debated. Although some estimates range as high as a quarter million, most scholars agree that between 1718 and 1776 emigrants numbered at least 150,000. Outside of wartime, the movement of people was continual. Emigration quickly resumed in 1783 following the interruption end of the American Revolution.11 While the earliest departures centered on the Chesapeake, the first large-scale, organized emigra‑ tion brought Presbyterians from Ulster to New England. On 4 August 1718, five ships containing families from the Lower Bann valley sailed into Boston Harbor. The Massachusetts Puritans were famously unimpressed by the newcomers, whom one Bostonian dismissed as “a parcel of Irish.” Why had they left Ireland? In a farewell speech at Coleraine, clearly designed for official consumption, the principal organizer, Rev. James McGregor of Aghadowey, County Derry, enumerated the reasons for the migration. He stressed the persecution by the state church. The emigrants sought the avoidance of “oppression and cruel bondage” and “persecution and designed ruin” as well as withdrawal “from the communion of idolators”—by which McGregor meant Anglicans, not Catholics. 12 But “persecution” was not the whole story. McGregor’s poverty-stricken congregation owed him £80. The General Synod of Ulster had pressured the Aghadowey congregants to pay at least half the arrears, to no avail. Their fields had not received adequate rainfall since 1714; severe frosts further constricted food supplies. Of course, landlords and Anglican priests continued to expect payment of rents and tithes. And tenant farmers now had the burden of rents doubled and tripled as seventeenthcentury leases with their enticingly modest terms expired. A pattern of colonial-era emigration comes into focus: decisions to leave were based on religious oppression and economic hardship, with the vagaries of weather (and later, the linen trade) often tipping the scales.13 The New World experiences of the New England settlers exhibited characteristics soon to be rep‑ licated further south, from colony to colony. The Ulster Presbyterian immigrants organized discrete ethnoreligious communities and practiced endogamous marriages. They engaged in mixed agricul‑ ture, combined with proto-industrial production. They adhered to a Presbyterianism that looked more to Ireland than to Scotland. As colonial-era immigration to New England largely ceased after the 1730s, Pennsylvania became and remained the premier destination, although significant numbers headed southwards.14 Whether departing from Derry or Portrush, Larne or Newry, Belfast or other Ulster ports, whether sailing to Philadelphia or Charles Town (Charleston, South Carolina), the transatlantic passage was long, cramped, and arduous. “Voyage conditions,” writes Kerby A. Miller, “often ranged from incon‑ venient to extremely unpleasant.” Over the course of the eighteenth century, passage fares declined 32

Ulster Presbyterians and Development of “Scotch-Irish” Identity

due to increased shipping between Ulster and North American ports and competition among emigra‑ tion agents and captains of emigration ships. Long delays—weeks, even months—were not uncom‑ mon, forcing expectant emigrants to part with scant resources. Any given ship’s declared carrying capacity could be as unreliable as their posted departure times. Vessels mostly had not been designed to carry passengers. Except for the affluent, emigrants subsisted in steerage or between decks in poorly ventilated spaces lacking sanitation. Consequently, diseases raged frequently, with fatal re‑ sults particularly for infants. The length of a voyage determined whether voyagers’ sea stores would last and the likelihood and severity of illness. In the 1720s, most voyages took between eight and ten weeks. By the early 1770s, average traveling times had improved to less than eight weeks.15 Many colonial-era Ulster Presbyterians departed in family groups, their passage and seed capital derived in part from linen sales and from what became known as the “Ulster Custom”: the ability of those departing to sell their interest in occupancy and value of their improvements to incom‑ ing tenants. The prevalence of family migration declined as the volume of Ulster migration grew and emigrants became disproportionately lower class. Paradoxically, even as passage fares declined, large numbers of would-be immigrants lacked either the price of the fare or the means to start anew in colonial America. As a result, between 1730 and 1775, as many as half of all Ulster migrants may have been individuals who traveled as bound labor. Those of limited means faced two choices: sign indenture papers before boarding, with their services (but not their bodies) to be sold to the highest bidder by the ship’s captain upon arrival across the Atlantic, or promise to redeem their passage in America, either by raising money from friends and relations or by having their time and services sold by the ship’s captain. Emigration, by whatever means, supplied an answer to Ulster’s nagging ques‑ tions of future economic improvement, if not survival.16

Ulster Presbyterians on the Frontier Once in Britain’s North American colonies, economic advancement would continue to elude many, as those born to generations of tenant farmers sought their own farms. The desire for land of their own continually drove population movement. Land ownership meant survival, sustenance, the hope of comfort, social status, and independence, as well as freedom from landlords, rectors, and their state. Farming long maintained its status as a way of life sanctioned by traditional values.17 Those writing about the “Scotch-Irish epic” have correctly seen a connection with the frontier without always adequately probing the historical contexts in Ireland and the United States. In The Scotch-Irish: A Social History (1962), James Leyburn reinvigorated an already old stereotype: The “Scotch-Irishman,” Leyburn wrote, should be regarded as America’s “first true backwoodsman.” On the frontier, Ulster Presbyterians pursued cheap land necessary for sustenance and independence, where they could found discrete ethnoreligious settlements. However, their presence on the frontier owed much to the persistence of authorities in assigning them to borderlands.18 The deliberate placement of newly arrived Ulster Presbyterian immigrants on the Pennsylvania frontier in 1720, said Provincial Secretary James Logan, followed from “some apprehensions from northern Indians.” As decades of wanton killing ensued, the colonial official later found the Ulster Presbyterians “troublesome settlers to the government and hard neighbors to the Indians.” Contrary to Logan’s initial claims, Ulster Presbyterians were not inured to bloodshed in the American frontiers by experiences in Ulster, nor were Ulster Presbyterians genetically predisposed to racism and cruelty.19 Ulster Presbyterians fulfilled imperial objectives by creating a buffer between potentially hostile indigenous peoples and English settlements. This allowed the Ulster Presbyterians to seize that most precious of desires—the land necessary for independence. Taking the land they craved heightened an‑ tagonism and hostility toward native peoples. Border warfare—raids, cruelties, merciless r­ etaliation— embedded racialized injustice in Ulster psyches and normalized a hard-edged viciousness.20 33

Peter Gilmore

The Meaning of “Independence” Chroniclers of the “Scotch-Irish” experience have frequently proclaimed “independence” and “rug‑ ged individualism” as hallmarks of those who came to North America from Ulster in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, overlooking contemporaries’ accounts of their gregariousness, their reliance on neighborliness for material and emotional support, and, above all, their Presbyterianism. Their religiosity privileged community values over individual wills. Their “independence,” suggests Kerby Miller, is best defined “in traditional rather than entrepreneurial terms.” The frontier experience reinforced that sense of independence. Frontier conditions encouraged the survival of the commu‑ nal labor and precapitalist culture brought from Ireland. For immigrants lacking financial resources and ready access to markets, the set of inherent difficulties facing would-be commercial farmers—­ distance from markets, poor transportation, lack of capital—confirmed the wisdom of combining subsistence agriculture with some market production. This subsistence-plus agriculture conformed to traditional practices through which considerable levels of cooperation supported familial autonomy.21 The mixed nature of colonial migration—family groups as well as individuals—served to em‑ phasize the importance of community in Irish Presbyterian settlements. Communal labor, such as flax-pulling, cornhusking, barn-raising, and harvesting, represented simultaneously essential means of subsistence, economic necessity, assertion of familiar Irish cultural norms, and the beginnings of a new American identity. The swapping of stories, songs, and tunes during long evening visits main‑ tained a tolerable, even happy life, with memories of Ulster echoing through the joys and sorrows of a new land. Simple pleasures added to an emerging American folk culture.22 The combination of access to arable land and markets and social stability allowed commercial, market-oriented agricultural production to develop alongside and in place of subsistence-oriented mixed farming, with production of grains, hemp, and flax. Southeastern Pennsylvania became “the best poor man’s country” to Ulster Presbyterians and others who wrested a satisfactory if not com‑ fortable living from years of labor, producing wheat, flax, and hemp for market. Agricultural improvements gave rise to market towns, which served as secondary centers for the distribution of manufactured goods and shipment of agricultural products to Philadelphia and over‑ seas markets. From Philadelphia and Baltimore, Ulster Presbyterian merchants shipped across the At‑ lantic the wheat, flax, and other produce raised by fellow Ulster immigrants to business associates in Belfast, Derry, and Newry. Transatlantic merchants and those dealing in goods from nodal networks formed an urban immigrant elite, consisting also of lawyers and other professional men, supported by others of Irish origins: innkeepers, tavern keepers, country traders, and artisans, indentured servants and laborers; also enslaved persons of African origin.23 As the Atlantic seaboard colonies became enveloped in a series of disputes with the metropole, the largest colonial-era population movement from Ulster brought tens of thousands from Counties Antrim, Armagh, and Down in the early 1770s. The Hearts of Steel uprising at the heart of the mi‑ gration derived from the 1770 decision of Lord Donegall to renew County Antrim leases expiring that year at the former rent levels but with the addition of heavy fines. Donegall also let holdings of Presbyterian tenants to speculators willing and able to pay more. Farmers feared what one called “the melancholy prospect of being turn’d out of their possessions and obliged to remove their numerous families to America.” Embattled tenant farmers and cottier-weavers who violently resisted landlord and government—not veterans of border warfare with the native Irish or a Catholic monarch—sailed to the colonies on the eve of rebellion.24 The politics of the American War affected the north of Ireland in the 1770s and beyond—a consequence of decades of connection through trade and emigration, and the perception of shared grievances. Ulster Presbyterians’ public commentaries stressed familial connections and offered comparisons between the subordinate status of Americans and Ulster. “There is scarcely a Protestant 34

Ulster Presbyterians and Development of “Scotch-Irish” Identity

family of the middle classes amongst us who does not reckon kindred with the inhabitants of that ex‑ tensive continent,” commented Rev. William Steel Dickson, the Presbyterian minister of Portaferry, Co. Down, in a Belfast sermon.25 The French alliance with the American insurgents, concluded in 1778, created new opportunities for the Presbyterian middle class in Ireland to insert itself into the political process. British troops stationed in Ireland had been sent to North America; the existing militia appeared to be unequal to possible emergencies associated with either foreign invasion or domestic insurrection. The landed gentry recruited unofficial volunteer companies for local defense from among their more affluent tenants. The Volunteer movement in Ulster was strongest among the Presbyterian middle class, given an ability to afford uniforms and equipment, a right to bear arms, and a Scottish tradition of forming “public bands” of armed men.26 This alliance of parliamentarians and citizens-in-arms, taking advantage of the crisis created by the American War, achieved several long-sought reforms, among them concessions on Irish com‑ mercial rights in 1779; the repeal of the Sacramental Test on Presbyterians in 1780; and removal of some penalties on Catholics in legislation of 1779 and 1782. Demands that Catholic males be granted full political and civil rights proved steps too far for the Protestant Ascendancy and sections of the Presbyterian middle class. In contrast, Presbyterian radicals, insisting on complete Catholic eman‑ cipation, helped organize the Society of United Irishmen in 1791. The United Irishmen viewed full political rights for Catholics as essential to completing parliamentary reform.27 If originally urban and middle class, the United Irish organization and its program swiftly spread beyond Belfast. The United society attracted particular support from among Presbyterian tenant farmers in areas of northern Ulster with sizeable Dissenter populations. Presbyterians welcomed the creation of a constitutional monarchy in 1789; radicals generally endorsed the Revolution’s Repub‑ lican turn. The willingness of the Catholic French effectively to disestablish their church electrified the countryside. War with Britain in 1793 forced the United Irishmen underground. The legacy of dissent from church and state placed a portion of Ulster Presbyterians on the road to rebellion—with implications for the continuing migration to North America.28 By 1795, the United Irishmen had committed themselves to armed revolution to achieve an Irish Republic, albeit with French assistance. Such a course of action continued to claim the allegiance of many thousands of Presbyterians, particularly tenant-farmers and cottier-weavers—indicative of Presbyterians’ considerable and continuing alienation from the Protestant Ascendancy. The commit‑ ment to revolution reflected the experiences of violent agrarian protest and the influence of two dec‑ ades of sermons, ballads, pamphlets, and newspapers, which asserted the right to alter government and gave voice to grievances.29 Districts in east Ulster, writes Kerby Miller, “which in the 1770s had produced the Hearts of Steel[,] were in the 1790s rife with Presbyterian farmers and weavers who joined the United Irish‑ men to overthrow rents, tithes, and taxes along with the government which enforced them.” Rebel demands in County Down reportedly listed abolition of tithes as the number one goal.30 Of course, not every Presbyterian tenant farmer or weaver set aside ingrained apprehension to‑ ward Catholics or loyalty to king and empire. But for many, the disdain and abuse suffered at the hands of landlord and rector combined powerfully to produce justification for rebellion. Revolution‑ ary politics became the spearhead fastened on the sturdy shaft of long-held economic and cultural grievances. In Sam Hanna Bell’s novel A Man Flourishing, teenager Hugh Purdie ponders the rebel‑ lion’s outbreak as he hides in a peat bog from yeomanry (the upper class in uniform) in search of rebels, real or imagined: Perhaps the insurgents who passed, night and day, would disperse and vanish without a cry or a blow. Perhaps all the disputation, the fierce hunger for political and religious liberty, the rage 35

Peter Gilmore

against corruption in high places, the determination to tear asunder the English connection, would fail to change these reformers into revolutionaries on the day of the refiner’s fire. But as the turf crumbled in his thin grasp, he knew that this was not so. Too much suffering, too much anger and hope and long memory, had gone into preparing this day for it to disperse a like a mist.31 The imposition of martial law on Ulster in 1797 provoked partisan violence, anxiety, and fear. The gov‑ ernment’s campaign of arbitrary arrests, beatings, and house-burnings incited hatred of the government and inculcated fear of punishment for perceived disloyalty. By early 1798, the ruthlessness of repres‑ sion had significantly weakened the United Irishmen in Ulster but had eliminated neither the organiza‑ tion nor the deeply held grievances around which Presbyterian tenant farmers and weavers rallied.32 An uprising commenced in three southeastern counties in late May 1798; two weeks later, rebel‑ lion erupted in two short blazes in Counties Antrim and Down. Tenant farmers from heavily Presby‑ terian districts in Antrim, wearing green cockades and shouldering a variety of largely home-made weapons, captured Ballymena on 7 June but were vanquished in close, desperate fighting in Antrim town. A day later, a similar United Irish force in Down fought an intense skirmish with government troops led by three Church of Ireland clergy. News of their victory out-shouted reports of less suc‑ cessful engagements, rallying the United Irishmen. Nonetheless, the rebel army went down to defeat in a major battle with government forces at Ballynahinch in north Down on 13 June 1798. In less than two weeks, the United Irish armies in Ulster had been defeated. Retribution and repression were swift and severe, with the violent opposition of the newly or‑ ganized Orange Order adding to Presbyterians rebels’ torment. Exiled Presbyterian rebels carried a hatred of the Orange Order and an abhorrence of sectarianism with them to the New World. Raised in a Covenanter church in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Pittsburgh, Jane Grey Swisshelm recalled the lack of animosity then between Catholics and Presbyterians. She cited the influence of her pastor, a United Irish refugee forced to flee Ireland under the cover of darkness.33

(Still) Coming to America In presenting his version of the Scotch-Irish myth, James Leyburn insisted the story of this people ended with the Revolutionary War. Although migration from Ulster resumed after the war, he wrote, newcomers “did not seek out Scotch-Irish communities in their country of adoption.” He argued fur‑ ther that notably in western Pennsylvania, the Scotch Irish lost their distinctiveness. These claims are unsupported by the facts. Ulster Presbyterian immigrants—and especially those with western Penn‑ sylvania as their destination—sought out friends, relations, and churches with familiar rituals and an acceptable theology. Writing of the colonial-era, eastern Pennsylvania settlement, Patrick Griffin proposed, “Pennsylvania appeared to men and women of the north as a perfect Ulster.” Arguably, something similar was true of the post-Revolutionary Pennsylvanian backcountry as well.34 Historians have noted the continuities in migration immediately before and after the American Revolution: a majority of Irish immigrants continued to be Presbyterians from Ulster, even as the volume increased. Possibly between 100,000 and 150,000 traveled to the new United States between 1783 and 1814, numbers equivalent to the colonial-era migration by the reckoning of some scholars. Until the 1830s, Presbyterians predominated as Protestants continued to outnumber Catholics in Irish immigration to the United States. Presbyterians leaving Ulster during the political and economic cri‑ ses of the 1790s and 1800s followed well-developed patterns. As in the colonial era, many would-be Presbyterian emigrants had the advantage of the “Ulster Custom” and linen sales to provide capital for removal to America.35

36

Ulster Presbyterians and Development of “Scotch-Irish” Identity

Along with intriguing, attractive accounts from friends and relations settled in the United States, political crisis and persecution helped to drive emigration. The official suppression of the Society of United Irishmen in 1794, the declaration of military law in Ulster in 1797, the repression following the disastrous 1798 rebellion, the failure of the 1803 uprising—all helped force the emigration ques‑ tion. The resulting immigration had a notable impact on US politics, as the Jeffersonian party was strengthened by the growing numbers of incoming Irish Presbyterians committed to republicanism in the 1790s.36 The transatlantic movement of self-consciously “Irish” radicals—and the transoceanic migration of political ideologies and loyalties—transformed local politics and shaped the development of an Irish-American ethnic identity. Observations of Saint Patrick’s Day, Irish-American fraternal associa‑ tions, an ethnic press—these early nineteenth-century manifestations of American “Irishness” owed much to Ulster Presbyterian leadership and activism. The concerns of earlier immigrants and Revo‑ lutionary War veterans melded with those forced to flee as a consequence of revolutionary politics in the old country. Both new and older cohorts in the 1790s mobilized in response to a series of political events, including the federal excise on distilled spirits, Jay’s treaty with Great Britain, the “quasiwar” with France, and the Alien, Sedition and Naturalization Acts. Together, these mobilizations helped to create an Irish republican identity in many areas of heavily Ulster Presbyterian settlement. At the same time, these processes reinforced the connection between “Irish” and “Presbyterian” in an Irish-American diaspora under the hegemony of Ulster Presbyterians.37 Federalist vilification of Irish immigrants, meanwhile, further helped clarify this developing sense of ethnicity in the new republic. The fevered imagination of a Federalist politician who harangued Congress about “hordes of wild Irishmen” while legislators considered anti-immigrant legislation spoke to his party’s fears of ties between domestic opposition and revolutionary developments abroad. Such condemnation only strengthened Ulster Presbyterian ties to the Democratic-Republicans on the basis of Irish identity.38 The election campaigns and presidency of Andrew Jackson, the son of Presbyterian immigrants from County Antrim, represents the apogee of this early Irish-American sensibility. In a tragic US reiteration of the 1790s moment, Irish Catholics, Protestants, and Dissenters united enthusiasti‑ cally behind arguably the most anti-British of presidents and advocate of expanded white-settler ­democracy—despite (or perhaps because of) his violent, anti-Indian racism and slaveholding. Per‑ haps the apogee of Ulster-origin Presbyterian involvement in Democratic Party politics occurred with the election of James Buchanan, the son of a County Donegal immigrant father. The Pennsylvanian Buchanan continued his party’s subservience to the South’s slave-holding elite, following the ex‑ ample of James K. Polk, the slave-owning descendant of early Ulster Presbyterian immigrants, and Jackson, in whose administrations he served.39

Creation of a “Scotch-Irish” Identity In the colonial period and later in the United States of the early national period, migrant Ulster Pres‑ byterians mostly called themselves Irish. Anglo-Americans described them as “Scotch Irish,” often in derision or disapprobation. A Scotch-Irish identity did not exist. How, then, did a “Scotch-Irish” identity replace this sense of Irishness? In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, immigrant letters continued to evince a sense of Irish identity, as we can see in Jennifer Orr’s chapter later in this section. The inclusive, non-sectarian mentality of the United Irishmen still enjoyed influence, manifest in Irish fraternal organizations with Presbyterian leadership. As late as 1842, Pittsburgh’s weekly Presbyterian newspaper assumed interest in Irish Presbyterianism’s tricentenary due to read‑ ers’ Irish origins.40

37

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By the 1840s, however, the pronounced anti-Catholicism in US Presbyterianism shattered nonsectarianism’s fragile fraternalism. The same Pittsburgh weekly referenced above favorably reported in 1845 that the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church had determined Roman Catholic bap‑ tism to be invalid. The Presbyterian Advocate added this news in June 1845 to columns replete with articles about the dangers and corruption of “Romanism.” As a young man in 1797, John Black fled Ireland rather than accept British rule. The elderly Rev. Dr. Black led efforts in Pittsburgh in 1843 to launch the Protestant Association, citing objections to Roman Catholicism both theological and political.41 Scholars have argued that the growing volume of Catholic Irish migration led Presbyterian Irish to adopt “Scotch Irish.” The mere presence of more Catholics by itself did not accomplish this trans‑ formation, however. Increased Catholic immigration in the late 1830s and early 1840s both led to competition for jobs and threatened American Protestant self-perceptions. For example, despite calls for temperance, Irish newcomers refused to abandon the Old-World drinking habits. And, following the Catholic hierarchy and Democratic machine, these recent immigrants regarded abolitionism with hostility.42 The initial voluntary adoption of the formerly insulting “Scotch-Irish” label can be viewed as a mark of assimilation or a measure of success. “[A]s some Ulster-American Presbyterians grew more wealthy and influential,” writes Kerby A. Miller, “positive definitions of ‘Scotch-Irish’ identity be‑ came more formal, elaborate, and pervasive—assuming the hegemonic function in their communities as did the exclusive identification of ‘Irish’ with devout Catholicism.” These internal-group dynamics in the US mirrored those of nineteenth-century Ulster, as Presbyterians still imbued with values of the United Irishmen or distrustful of landlords and the official church faced enormous pressure to con‑ form to the pan-Protestant, anti-Catholic Orangeism. As Lindsey Flewelling explains in this volume, the adoption of a “Scotch-Irish” label occurred as Ulster-American Presbyterians were conscripted into a political project linked to the continued dominance of their forebears’ antagonists in the north of Ireland.43 Just as the Catholic Church in the United States worked to transform unruly immigrant Irish into sober, law-abiding Americans (albeit in large part to counter nativism), so too did the Presby‑ terian churches and the elite who supported them superintend the emergence of a properly “Amer‑ ican,” Scotch-Irish middle class by scouring away residual rambunctious Irishness. Consider, for example, the concerted campaign after 1829 to sever the traditional ties between Presbyterians and ­whiskey-drinking. In attempting to suppress the habitual use of distilled spirits, the Presbyterian Church faced the stoutest opposition from recalcitrant Presbyterians. The church organized antiwhiskey committees of commercial farmers. These were modernizing, upwardly mobile, Americanborn men in need of sober, disciplined workers. Their New-World, middle-class, and entrepreneurial experiences contrasted unfavorably with older Irish-born cohorts, whose worldview had been shaped by the Presbyterian meetinghouse, near-subsistence agriculture, and a moral economy characterized by neighborliness replete with a customary dram.44 It is no surprise, then, that Rev. Dr. David Hunter Riddle, a leader of the 1830s temperance move‑ ment, propagated the “Scotch-Irish” idea in the 1850s. The grandson of a Presbyterian elder who migrated from County Donegal, Riddle explained approvingly that the term “Scotch Irish” severed any connection with Ireland. “Scotch Irish” meant fully “American,” with acceptance and absorp‑ tion of the same middle-class values espoused from the Catholic pulpits of primarily Irish parishes.45 Further evidence of group success implying the need for a distinctive ethnic marker came with a succession of US Presidents with Ulster roots. Andrew Johnson was the grandson of a County Antrim man. Ulysses S. Grant’s maternal great-grandfather hailed from County Tyrone. Chester A. Arthur’s father came from County Antrim, as did Grover Cleveland’s maternal grandfather. William McKin‑ ley came from Antrim people. More would follow them into the White House. Such highly public 38

Ulster Presbyterians and Development of “Scotch-Irish” Identity

successes underscored for some the necessity of creating a racial identity, the goal of the Scotch-Irish Society, which came into existence with an inaugural congress in 1889. This and a succession of congresses directed by the respectable and successful carefully fixed the racial categorization, defin‑ ing the Scotch Irish as distinct from and superior to the Celtic Irish. The Scotch-Irish American of the 1890s, opined Congressman John Dalzell, represented the “consummate fruit and flower of the original seed,” perfected by American conditions. An Ulster-Presbyterian “original seed” had been definitively reimagined by those controlling its legacy at the end of the nineteenth century.46

Conclusion Presbyterians largely of Scottish origin became rooted in Ireland (especially in the northern province of Ulster) during the seventeenth century. Ulster Presbyterians, mostly tenant farmers, experienced subordination on both religious and socio-economic grounds. Second-class subjects of a second-rate kingdom, they existed on the margins of empire both in Europe and North America.47 Economic, political, and religious grievances spurred migration to Britain’s colonies and later to the new United States. Perceived possibilities in the New World likewise encouraged movement. Communities com‑ bining old and new developed a distinctive culture based on Irish experience and American prospects. Often described as “Scotch Irish” by others, they were as likely to describe themselves simply as “Irish.” An association with the frontier and the forever-war with indigenous peoples followed their journeying, derived not out of a desire to be foot-soldiers for empire but from their craving for land and rights denied them in the old country. An Irish-American diaspora under Presbyterian hegemony developed in the 1790s, as earlier cohorts of immigrants and newcomers coalesced on the basis of shared grievances and aspirations. In the nineteenth century, the formerly Irish Presbyterians ac‑ cepted an identity as “Scotch Irish” in becoming fully Americanized. The reconceptualized Scotch Irish downplayed their Irish background and romanticized the remote connections to a Scottish past.

Notes 1 “Northern Ireland” is a political jurisdiction created in 1921. As such, this term does not appear again in this document. It is neither an accurate geographical term nor does it correspond to the historic nine-county province of Ulster in which our subjects lived and from which they emigrated. 2 Griffin, The People with No Name, 1–6; Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish, 327, 328. 3 Bardon, A History of Ulster, 118, 120–126; Robinson, The Plantation of Ulster, 194; Blaney, Presbyterians and the Irish Language, 8–9, 15–19; Fitzgerald, “‘Black ’97’” in Kelly, Ulster and Scotland, 79; Gailey, “The Scots Element in Northern Irish Popular Culture,” 2–8, 12–13, 18, 21. 4 Connolly, “Ulster Presbyterians,” 24–26. 5 Connolly, “Ulster Presbyterians,” 26; Griffin, The People with No Name, 19; Griffin, “Defining the Limits of Britishness,” 273, 272; Brooke, Ulster Presbyterianism, 62; Whan, The Presbyterians of Ulster, 52–53. 6 Whan, Presbyterians of Ulster, 55. 7 Griffin, The People with No Name, 274; Bartlett, The Fall and Rise, 31; Bardon, A History of Ulster, 173; Foster, Modern Ireland, 170; Connolly, “Ulster Presbyterians,” 26; Bartlett, Fall and Rise, 31; Dunlop, A Precarious Belonging, 25; Mac Suibhne, “Patriot Paddies, 22; Sherling, The Invisible Irish, 87. 8 Miller, Irish Immigrants, 25; Bardon, A History of Ulster, 206–207; Dickson, Ulster Emigration, 74; Don‑ nelly, 27; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 155. 9 James, Handloom Weavers, 20; Dickson, Ulster Emigration, 8; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 153; Crawford, The Impact, 64; Bardon, A History of Ulster, 179, 180–181. 10 Dickson, Ulster Emigration, 10; Blethen, From Ulster to Carolina, 21; see also Dickson, Ulster Emigration, Chapter 7, “Ports and Agents,” 98–124. 11 Montgomery, From Ulster to America, n5, xxxiii; Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish, 157, 170–173, 179–183. 12 Miller, Irish Immigrants, 435–438; Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish, 237–242; Bolton, Scotch Irish Pioneers, 113–114. 13 Bolton, Scotch Irish Pioneers, 43, 107; Dunaway, Scotch Irish, 29; Ridner, The Scots Irish, 28.

39

Peter Gilmore 14 Wallace, “The Scotch-Irish of Colonial New Hampshire,” 177–210, 321; Blaikie, A History of Presbyterian‑ ism, 53, 81; Bolton, Scotch Irish Pioneers, 56, 89, 157, 166–169, 180–181; Pickell, ed., Presbyterianism in New England, 7; Lawrence, The New Hampshire Churches, 40. Contrast colonial New Hampshire with colonial Pennsylvania: Yeager, “The Power of Ethnicity”; with western Pennsylvania in the late eighteenthcentury, Gilmore and Miller, “Southwestern Pennsylvania.” 15 Miller, Irish Immigrants, 90; Dickson, Ulster Emigration, 87. 16 Bardon, A History of Ulster, 178; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 154–155; Dickson, Ulster Emigration, 87–88. 17 Yeager, “Power of Ethnicity,” 173–174; McClorg Family Letters, David Pollock, Westmoreland County to Joseph Maclorg, Co. Derry, 18 Dec. 1794; Mellon, Thomas Mellon, 33–34. 18 Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish, 191–192, 256–257. The Scots-Irish Epic is the secondary title of Rory Fitzpatrick’s God’s Frontiersman, a 1989 publication in conjunction with the television series of the same name. 19 Dunaway, The Scotch-Irish, 144; Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish, 192. 20 Dunaway, The Scotch-Irish, 57, 60, 144; Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish, 192; Blethen, From Ulster to Caro‑ lina, 42; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 150; Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 51–52; Miller Irish Immigrants, 136; Dickson, Ulster Emigration, 49–50; Montgomery, “Searching for Security,” in Hofstra, From Ulster to America, 148. Sherling, The Invisible Irish, 199. 21 See Gilmore, Irish Presbyterians; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 163; Hofstra, From Ulster to America, 105– 106; Yeager, “The Power of Ethnicity,” 53–54, 63. 22 Doyle, Ireland, Irishmen and Revolutionary America, 84. See also, Gilmore, “A Fiddler,” 148–165. 23 Harper, The Transformation, x; Brown and Keller in Hofstra, From Ulster to America, 124, 134, 138–139; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 163; MacMaster, “Searching for Order,” 78–79, 85; Brown and Keller in Hofstra, From Ulster to America, 140; Ridner, A Town in Between; MacMaster, Scotch-Irish Merchants; Miller, Emi‑ grants and Exiles, 163; Doyle, Ireland, Irishmen, 89, 92; Ridner, Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania, 43. James T. Lemon’s 1972 study, The Best Poor Man’s Country, argues that the older settlements in colonial Pennsylvania served as a prototype of North American development, politically conservative, and character‑ ized by individualism. 24 Dickson, Ulster Emigration, 73; Jones, “The Scotch-Irish in British America,” in Bailyn, Strangers in the Realm, 294; Miller, Irish Immigrants, 467 n38; Bardon, A History of Ulster, 205–206; Dickson, Ulster Emi‑ gration, 74. 25 Bardon, A History of Ulster, 206, 211; Tesch, “Presbyterian Radicalism,” in Dickson, The United Irishmen, 43; McBride, Scripture Politics, 120. 26 McBride, Scripture Politics, 123, Miller, Queen’s Rebels, 33, 35; McClelland, “Thomas Ledlie Birch, United Irishman,” 27; Kirkpatrick, Presbyterians in Ireland, 49. 27 Mac Suibhne, “Patriot Paddies,” 126–141; Foster, Modern Ireland, 202–203, 211; Bartlett, Fall and Rise, 82, 101. 28 Bardon, 221–222; A History of Ulster, McClelland, “Thomas Ledlie Birch,” 28; McBride, Scripture Politics, 174, 176–177; Kirkpatrick, Presbyterians in Ireland, 50. 29 Miller, “Presbyterianism and ‘Modernization’ in Ulster,” 76, 80–84; Whelan, “The United Irishmen, the Enlightenment and Popular Culture,” in Dickson, The United Irishmen, 282-–285, 294. 30 Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 67; Bardon, A History of Ulster, 229. 31 Bell, A Man Flourishing, 8. 32 McBride, Scripture Politics, 182; Bardon, A History of Ulster, 229. 33 Ephraim Steele Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, James Steele, Raphoe, Co. Donegal, to Ephraim Steele, Carlisle, Pa., 1801; James Steele to Ephraim Steele, 1802; James Steele to Ephraim Steele, 1797; Wilson, United Irishmen, United States, 119; Swisshelm, Half a Century, 150; ­Gilmore, Exiles of ʾ98, 137–140. 34 Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish, 9, 233; Griffin, People with No Name, 66. See Gilmore, Irish Presbyterians. 35 Jones, “Ulster Emigration, 1783–1815,” in Green, Essays in Scotch-Irish History, 49; Bric, “Patterns of Irish Emigration to America,” 49; Parkhill, “Between Revolution and Famine,” 9–73; Miller, Irish Immigrants, 585; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 169–170; Sherling, The Invisible Irish, 199. 36 Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 172; Gilmore, Irish Presbyterians, 9–10. 37 Gilmore, “Scotch‑Irish Opposition,” 1–22; Ridner, A Town In‑Between, 150–154; Findley, History of the Insurrection, 243; Gilmore, Exiles of ʾ98, 4–5, 10–21. 38 Harrison Grey Otis, quoted in Bric, Ireland, Philadelphia, 267; Gilmore, Exiles of ʾ98, 4–5. 39 Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 189; Miller, Ireland and Irish America, 261; Kenny, The American Irish, 41. 40 Griffin, The People with No Name, 2001, 2–3; Montgomery, “Eighteenth‑Century Nomenclature for Ulster Emigrants,” 1–6; Gilmore, Irish Presbyterians, xxi–xxii, 9–10, 13–14, 113; Kerr Family Letters, Samuel

40

Ulster Presbyterians and Development of “Scotch-Irish” Identity Graham, Pittsburgh, to James Graham, Newpark, Antrim, Co. Antrim, Dec. 1851; McClorg Family Letters, William McClorg to David McClorg, Mar. 1831, William to David, July 1833; Gilmore, “Rebels and Reviv‑ als,” 701–702. 41 Presbyterian Advocate (Pittsburgh), July 30, 1845; Daily Morning Post (Pittsburgh), March 6, 1843. 42 Griffin, The People With No Name, 175 n5; Howe, What Has God Wrought, 826–827; Daily Ohio Statesman (Columbus) January 13, 1843. 43 Miller, Irish Immigrants, 626; Miller, Ireland and Irish America, 135. 44 Barrett, The Irish Way, 6, 284–285, Miller, Ireland and Irish America, 264–266; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 331, 332–333; Kenny, The American Irish, 113–114, 164–165; Doyle, “The Remaking of Irish Amer‑ ica,” 221; Gilmore, Irish Presbyterians, 111. 45 Gilmore, “Rebels and Revivals,” 691–695. 46 Kee, “A Peculiar and Royal Race,” 67–83, 77. 47 The “second class/second rate” phrase is from Gilmore, Irish Presbyterians, xx and adapted from Griffin, “Defining the Limits,” 287.

Bibliography Primary Sources Daily Morning Post (Pittsburgh). Day, Angelique, and Patrick McWilliams, eds. Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland: Vol. 2, Parishes of County Antrim 1, 1838–9, Ballymartin, Ballyrobert, Ballywalter, Carnmoney, Mallusk. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University, 1990. Findley, William. History of the Insurrection, in the Four Western Counties of Pennsylvania… Philadelphia, PA: Samuel Harrison Smith, 1796. Kerr family letters. Originals: Public Records Office of NI MIC.144/1. Transcription by Kerby A. Miller. McClorg family letters, 1787–1839. Originals: Schrier Collection. Transcription by Kerby A. Miller. Mellon, Thomas. Thomas Mellon and His Times. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994. Presbyterian Advocate (Pittsburgh). Ephraim Steele Papers. Originals: Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina. Transcription by Kerby A. Miller, personal collection. Swisshelm, Jane Grey Cannon. Half a Century. Chicago, IL: Jansen, McClurg, 1880.

Secondary Sources Bailyn, Bernard, and Philip D. Morgan, eds. Strangers within the Realm, Cultural Margins of the First British Empire. Williamsburg: The Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1991. Bardon, Jonathan. A History of Ulster. Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 1992. Barrett, James R. The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic City. New York: Penguin Books, 2012. Bartlett, Thomas. The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690–1830. Savage, MD: Barnes & Noble Books, 1992. Bell, Sam Hanna. A Man Flourishing. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1977. Blaikie, Alexander. A History of Presbyterianism in New England. Its Introduction, Growth, Decay, Revival and Present Mission. Boston, MA: Alexander Moore, 1882. Blaney, Roger. Presbyterians and the Irish Language. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation and Ultach Trust, 1996. Blethen, H. Tyler, and Curtis W. Wood, Jr. From Ulster to Carolina: The Migration of the Scotch‑Irish to South‑ western North Carolina. Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1998. Blethen, H. Tyler, and Curtis W. Wood, Jr., eds. Ulster and North America: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Scotch‑Irish. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997. Bolton, Charles Knowles. Scotch Irish Pioneers in Ulster and America. Bowsie, MD: Heritage, Books, 1989 (Facsimile reprint of 1910 publication). Bric, Maurice J. Ireland, Philadelphia and the Re‑Invention of America, 1760–1800. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008. Bric, Maurice J. “Patterns of Irish Emigration to America, 1783–1800.” In New Directions in Irish‑American History (pp. 17–35), edited by Kevin Kenny. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.

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Peter Gilmore Brooke, Peter. Ulster Presbyterianism, the Historical Perspective 1610–1970. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Brown, Katharine L., and Kenneth W. Keller. “Searching for Status: Virginia’s Irish Tract, 1770s–1790s.” In Ulster to America: The Scots‑Irish Migration Experience, 1680s–1830s (pp. 123–146), edited by Warren R. Hofstra. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012. Connolly, S.J. “Ulster Presbyterians: Religion, Culture, and Politics, 1660–1850.” In Ulster and North America: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Scotch‑Irish (pp. 24–40), edited by H. Tyler Blethen and Curtis Wood. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997. Crawford, W.H. The Impact of the Domestic Linen Industry in Ulster. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 2004. Dickson, R.J. Ulster Emigration to Colonial America, 1718–1773. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1988. Donnelly, James. “Hearts of Oak, Hearts of Steel.” Studia Hibernica XXI (1981): 7–73. Doyle, David Noel. Ireland, Irishmen and Revolutionary America 1760–1820. Dublin: The Mercier Press, 1981. Doyle, David Noel. “The Remaking of Irish America.” In Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States (pp. 171–212), edited by J.L. Lee and Marion R. Casey. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Dunaway, Wayland F. The Scotch‑Irish of Colonial Pennsylvania. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944. Dunlop, John. A Precarious Belonging: Presbyterians and Conflict in Ireland. Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1995. Fisk, William Lyons. The Scottish High Church Tradition in America, An Essay in Scotch‑Irish Ethnoreligious History. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995. Fitzgerald, Patrick, and Steve Ickringill, eds. Atlantic Crossroads, Historical Connections between Scotland, Ulster, and North America. Newtonards, County Down: Colourpoint Books, 2001. Fitzgerald, Patrick. “‘Black ‘97’: reconsidering Scottish migration to Ireland in the seventeenth century and the Scotch‑Irish in America,” in Ulster and Scotland, 1600‑2000: History, Language and Identity. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004. Foster, R.F. Modern Ireland, 1600–1972. London: Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1988. Gailey, Alan. “The Scots Element in Northern Irish Popular Culture.” Ethnologia Europaea 8, no. 1 (1975): 2–22. Gilmore, Peter E. “‘A Fiddler Was a Great Acquisition to Any Neighborhood:’ Traditional Music and Ulster Culture on the Pennsylvania Frontier.” Western Pennsylvania History 83, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 148–165. Gilmore, Peter E. Irish Presbyterians and the Shaping of Western Pennsylvania, 1770–1830. Pittsburgh: Univer‑ sity of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. Gilmore, Peter E. “Rebels and Revivals: Ulster Immigrants, Western Pennsylvania Presbyterianism and the For‑ mation of Scotch‑Irish Identity, 1780–1830.” Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 2009. Gilmore, Peter E. “Scotch‑Irish Opposition to the Federal Constitution in the Pennsylvania Backcountry.” Jour‑ nal of Scotch‑Irish Studies 2, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 1–22. Gilmore, Peter, and Kerby A. Miller. “Southwestern Pennsylvania, 1780–1810: Searching for ‘Irish’ Freedom— Settling for ‘Scotch‑Irish’ Respectability.” In Ulster to America: The Scots‑Irish Migration Experience, 1680s–1830s (pp. 165–210), edited by Warren R. Hofstra. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012. Gilmore, Peter, Trevor Parkhill, and William Roulston. Exiles of ʾ98: Ulster Presbyterians and the United States. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 2018. Greene, Jack P. Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the For‑ mation of American Culture. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Griffin, Patrick. “Defining the Limits of Britishness: The ‘New ‘British’ History and the Meaning of the Revolu‑ tion Settlement in Ireland for Ulster’s Presbyterians.” The Journal of British Studies 39, no. 3 (July 2000): 263–287. Griffin, Patrick. The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots‑Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Harper, R. Eugene. The Transformation of Western Pennsylvania, 1770–1800. Pittsburgh: University of Pitts‑ burgh Press, 1991. Hofstra, Warren R. “Searching for Peace and Prosperity: Opequon Settlement, Virginia, 1730s–1760s.” In Ulster to America: The Scots‑Irish Migration Experience, 1680s–1830s (pp. 105–122), edited by Warren R. Hofstra. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012. Howe, Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. James, Kevin J. Handloom Weavers in Ulster’s Linen Industry, 1815–1914. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007.

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Ulster Presbyterians and Development of “Scotch-Irish” Identity Jones, Maldwyn. “The Scotch‑Irish in British America.” In Strangers within the Realm, Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (pp. 284–313), edited by Bailyn, Bernard and Philip D. Morgan. Williamsburg: The Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1991. Jones, Maldwyn. “Ulster Emigration, 1783–1815.” In Essays in Scotch‑Irish History (pp. 46–68), edited by E.R.R. Green. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1992. Kee, Matthew. “A Peculiar and Royal Race.” In Atlantic Crossroads: Historical Connections between Scotland, Ulster and North America (pp. 67–83), edited by Patrick Fitzgerald and Steve Ickringill. Newtontonards, Co. Down: Colourpoint Books, 2001. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Educational Limited, 2000. Kirkpatrick, Laurence. Presbyterians in Ireland, an Illustrated History. Belfast: Booklink, 2006. Lawrence, Robert F. The New Hampshire Churches; Comprising Histories of the Congregational and Presbyte‑ rian Churches in the State… Claremont, NH, 1856. Leyburn, James G. The Scotch‑Irish, a Social History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962. MacMaster, Richard K. Scotch‑Irish Merchants in Colonial America. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 2009. MacMaster, Richard K. “Searching for Order: Donegal Springs, Pennsylvania, 1720s–1730s.” In Ulster to Amer‑ ica: The Scots‑Irish Migration Experience, 1680s–1830s (pp. 51–76), edited by Warren R. Hofstra. Knox‑ ville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012. Mac Suibhne, Breandán. “Patriot Paddies: The Volunteers and Irish Identity in Northwest Ulster, 1778–1786.” Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, May 1999. McBride, Ian R. Scripture Politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century. Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1998. McClelland, Aiken. “Thomas Ledlie Birch, United Irishman.” Proceedings and Reports of the Belfast Natural History and Philosophy 2nd Series, 7 (1965): 24–35. Miller, David W. “Presbyterianism and ‘Modernization’ in Ulster.” Past & Present 80 (1978): 66–90. Miller, David W. Queen’s Rebels, Ulster Loyalism in Historical Perspective. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978. Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles, Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Miller, Kerby A. Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration. Dublin: Field Day, 2008. Miller, Kerby A., Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling, and David N. Doyle, eds. Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan, Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675–1815. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Montgomery, Michael. From Ulster to America: The Scotch‑Irish Heritage of American English. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 2006. Montgomery, Michael. “Nomenclature for Ulster Emigrants and their Descendants: Scotch‑Irish or Scots‑Irish?” Familia, Ulster Genealogical Review no. 20 (2012a): 16–36. Montgomery, Michael. “Searching for Security: Backcountry Carolina, 1760s–1780s.” In Ulster to America: The Scots‑Irish Migration Experience, 1680s–1830s (pp. 147–164), edited by Warren R. Hofstra. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012b. O’Brien, Michael Joseph. The Irish at Bunker Hill. London: Irish University Press, 1969. Parkhill, Trevor. “Between Revolution and Famine: Patterns of Emigration from Ulster 1776–1845.” In An Un‑ common Bookman: essays in memory of J.R.R. Adams (pp. 59–73), edited by John Gray and Wesley McCann. Belfast: Linen Hall Library, 1996. Pickell, Charles N., ed. Presbyterianism in New England: The Story of a Mission. Boston, MA: Synod of New England, 1962. Ridner, Judith. A Town In‑Between: Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the Early Mid‑Atlantic Interior. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Ridner, Judith. The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania. A Varied People. Philadelphia: Temple University Press in partnership with The Pennsylvania Historical Association, 2018. Robinson, Philip S. The Plantation of Ulster: British Settlement in an Irish Landscape, 1600–1670. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1994. Sherling, Rankin. The Invisible Irish: Finding Protestants in the Nineteenth‑Century Migrations to America. Montreal: McGill‑Queen’s University Press, 2016. Tesch, Peter. “Presbyterian Radicalism.” In The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism and Rebellion (pp. 33–48), edited by David Dickson, Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan. Dublin: Lilliput, 1993. Wallace, R. Stuart. “The Scotch‑Irish of Colonial New Hampshire.” Ph.D. diss., University of New Hampshire, 1984.

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Peter Gilmore Whan, Robert. The Presbyterians of Ulster, 1680–1730. Woodbridge, Sussex: The Boydell Press, 2013. Whelan, Kevin. “The United Irishmen, the Enlightenment and Popular Culture” in David Dickson, Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan, eds, The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism and Rebellion. Dublin: Lilliput, 1993. Wilson, David A. United Irishmen, United States, Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Yeager, Kevin. “The Power of Ethnicity: The Preservation of Scots‑Irish Culture in the Eighteenth‑Century American Backcountry.” Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University, 2000.

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3 FAMILY AND LABOR IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY IRISH AMERICA Judith Ridner

William Hincks’s engraving of an Ulster farm family hard at work preparing flax fibers for spinning and weaving into linen cloth is a fitting place to begin a history of Irish-American family and labor in the eighteenth century (Figure 3.1). The print was one of 12 that Hincks, a Waterford-born artist, produced in 1783 to depict the stages of linen manufacture in the north of Ireland. Hincks’s scene, which he set inside one of the small, industrial buildings that dotted the Ulster landscape of the time, is an idealized one. The simple, earthen-walled structure, the young girl playing with the dog in the foreground, and the cockerel and pigeon perched on the beam above highlight rural simplicity. But the print also celebrates the industriousness of Ireland’s rural cottagers and documents the techniques and tools they used in their labors. In the left corner, a young girl breaks flax fibers with a cylindrical wooden mallet, or beetle. Just above, two women—one of them probably the female head of house‑ hold and the other a hired servant—wield wooden scutching blades to separate the flax fibers from the stem of the plant. Finally, the only man in the scene—presumably the male head of household—is about to draw the fibers across metal hackles to prepare them for spinning. Hincks used the scene to confirm the centrality of rural household labor to the manufacture of linen cloth, Ireland’s largest export commodity in the eighteenth century. The labors of husbands, wives, children, and servants built the foundation of eighteenth-century Ireland’s commercialized and increasingly proto-industrial economy.1 Households were not, however, just building blocks of economic life in Ireland: they were also foundational to the rapidly expanding domestic and export economies of Great Britain’s North American colonies and the early United States. As one of the largest European immigrant groups to eighteenth-century colonial America, Irish settler households helped drive American economic growth, as Peter Gilmore explains in his chapter, fueling the colonies’ and nation’s prosperity. Newly arrived Irish immigrant families struggled to put down roots in America but, once settled, they worked just as intensively to maintain and advance their family’s status. For the bulk of immigrants who moved to the interior in search of land, rooting themselves often entailed the arduous work of building new settler communities from scratch. These families had to claim land from Indigenous peoples or purchase it from speculators and then do the heavy work of clearing lands, planting fields, and erecting cabins. Over time, some also practiced trades like weaving, which they had learned in Ireland. But when Native peoples resisted dispossession, these same settlers waged brutal fights to defend what they believed was theirs.

45

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-5

Judith Ridner

Figure 3.1 William Hincks, 1752–1797, Plate IV: representing the common Method of Beetling, Scutching and Hackling the Flax, 1791, Stipple engraving, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1978.43.250, public domain.

For those who settled in the growing cities and towns of the Atlantic seaboard, by comparison, creating new lives in America demanded integration into existing colonial networks. To achieve ei‑ ther subsistence or prosperity, they founded retail businesses or practiced trades that became familybased enterprises. The most privileged among them built far-reaching family-based networks to take best advantage of the new economic opportunities America offered and to capitalize upon economic connections to Ireland. Regardless of their class background or where they settled, however, families and households were always central building blocks of experience. Irish-American settler families worked collectively to build new, American lives.2 Life in America, as this essay argues, also entailed considerable adaptation and innovation; it was not the same as in Ireland because there was more at stake. Starting from scratch as immigrants and forging futures as Americans placed new demands on families, which necessitated that their labors take new forms and be directed toward new ends. Irish-American men found new kinds of commer‑ cial opportunities available to them in America. They often pursued these opportunities with zeal. Yet, they also balanced them against the difficult and often dangerous work of building and defending their communities, putting their lives at risk in ways that were familiar to their Irish or Scottish ances‑ tors but not to them. Women’s roles in the family also shifted. Although women in Ireland were no 46

Family and Labor in Eighteenth-Century Irish America

strangers to working alongside their husbands and children in fields and shops, their labor was more essential to family survival and prosperity in America. Women’s reproductive labors as mothers also took on greater significance because children sealed families’ futures as Americans. Households were also different in America. North of Ireland households typically consisted of a nuclear family. More prosperous households often also included a hired young woman or two as domestic servants or spinners and sometimes an itinerant male weaver. Poorer households were often forced to cope with absent members while they worked for others. American households, by com‑ parison, were more complex. Because kin often immigrated and settled together, it was not unusual for extended family to be vital members of the household. Equally significant was Irish Americans’ reliance on various forms of bound labor. Indeed, eighteenth-century Irish-American families who accumulated capital or credit often chose to follow their American peers in purchasing the labor of white indentured servants and enslaved Africans. Bound laborers undoubtedly boosted households’ productive capacities and eased the burden of domestic chores borne by Irish-American women. The status of enslaved people of color as heritable property also fueled the creation and perpetuation of Irish-American families’ wealth. In addition, families’ reliance on bound laborers, and especially the enslaved, signaled the degree to which Irish-American men and women were willing to stratify and racialize their households by becoming masters and mistresses. This not only marked a substantial break with Irish experience, but also helps to explain the group’s later hostility to abolition and the cause of racial equality, which Angela F. Murphy examines later in this volume.3

Historians’ Views Historians of Ireland agree that the family was the fundamental unit of early modern Irish society and the building block of its economy. That was especially true in Ulster, the northern Irish province that witnessed dramatic economic growth in the eighteenth century and the place from which most immigrants to early America hailed. According to historian Raymond Gillespie, Ulster was one of early modern Ireland’s greatest economic success stories. Beginning in the seventeenth century and continuing through the eighteenth, “Ulster was transformed,” Gillespie has written, “from a poor, sparsely populated, peripheral region to one that lay at the core of the Irish economy.” Although the causes of this transformation were complex, an influx of Protestant settler families from the Scottish Lowlands in the 1690s was a critical factor. They increased Ulster’s labor supply and inspired waves of capital investment, construction, and commercialization, all of which spurred the rise of ports like Belfast and Derry. Their arrival also correlated closely with the growth of Ulster’s increasingly specialized and export-driven linen trade. Linen production began with family labor. It flourished in the areas of highest population growth, where tenant farm families who raised livestock and grew food crops also began to plant flax and to process and spin its fibers into yarn; some began to weave cloth, too. The rise of new technologies and distribution networks also helped propel the trade by stimulating new degrees of specialization among weavers, drapers, bleachers, merchants, and, even‑ tually, spinners.4 Irish families responded by making critical decisions about how best to deploy their labor, particu‑ larly that of women and children. Some choices were responses to pressure from landlords, shrink‑ ing leaseholds, and tightening household finances, but they were also aspirational. Jan DeVries has argued that Irish householders, like other western Europeans, were participants in an early modern “industrious revolution” where families chose to work harder so they could purchase consumer goods that would enhance their quality of life. Women’s labor was vital to this revolution. In Ulster towns, women found new opportunities to engage in paid work. In rural areas, single women worked as domestic servants or as farm laborers for flax-producing families. Spinning was the most common wage-earning work among rural women, however, because it could be balanced with other domestic 47

Judith Ridner

duties. As Jane Gray has noted, Irish women in Ulster and Connaught were long recognized for their skills in spinning woolen and linen yarn, though the expansion of the linen economy increased their potential for earning wages from it. Single women hired themselves out as itinerant spinners, while married women spun to support the family’s in-house production of cloth or sold their yarn in the market. Spinning bolstered women’s economic power in the family and lifted many families above the subsistence level. In some areas, wives’ income from spinning even paid the rent, while husbands fed the family through their work in the field. Families thus depended heavily on women’s labors to help them negotiate Ireland’s changing economy.5 On the other side of the Atlantic, historians of early America have long argued that families and households were the fundamental units of America’s eighteenth-century society and its economy. An early generation of women’s and gender historians, whose work focused primarily on the northern colonies and whose conclusions anticipated those of Jan DeVries, showed how women’s often invis‑ ible labor contributed to the household economy and how their domestic production of goods like butter, brooms, yarn, or cloth allowed participation in the market economy. More recent studies have moved beyond this contributory model, emphasizing instead how women’s work was a foundational pillar of the American economy. These scholars have dismantled the distinctions between households and markets, and the domestic and public spheres, by documenting the myriad ways early American women engaged in everyday economic exchanges as wage-earning workers, skilled tradeswomen, consumers, and as financial brokers who lent and borrowed money. They have also advocated for the important, but often unacknowledged, role women had in the household economy, while noting how various forms of bound labor, particularly the enslaved, reinforced patriarchy and heightened the status of white men. American men’s authority, unlike their counterparts in Ireland, was contingent on being independent landowners and by overseeing a host of dependents, from wives and children to hired or bound laborers. Women’s work was often overshadowed as a result.6 But what about Irish-American families and households, and Irish-American women in particu‑ lar? Where do they fit in these discussions of early American economic life and labor? Scholarly work on these topics has been surprisingly limited and focused primarily on the nineteenth and twen‑ tieth centuries. Scholars have paid particular attention, for instance, to Catholic Irish women and their work as domestic servants, arguing for the authority they could command as family matriarchs, their resilience in the face of discrimination, and, most recently, for their influential participation, along with Irish immigrant men, in the construction of a white racial order in America. Yet, few works have analyzed Irish-American households or Irish-American women’s labor in the eighteenth century, a time when most Irish Americans were Protestants and migrated as members of male-headed nuclear or extended families. Scholars of an earlier generation did little more than praise these Protestant households for their hardiness and hail the “sterling qualities” of women for their role as helpmeets to their husbands. More recent studies have moved away from such one-dimensional and stereotyped portraits. These scholars take Irish-American families and the household economy seriously, but still often read group experience primarily through the lens of male heads of households. A relative pau‑ city of evidence undoubtedly explains these trends. But at a time when early American scholars are paying new attention to the absences and silences of archives, historians of Irish America need to ask new questions of the records that do exist to uncover more about all members of these households and the labor they performed. This essay is a first step in that process.7

Laboring to Create New Lives in America Migration was a familiar experience for the thousands of emigrant families who departed Ireland for America between the late seventeenth century and the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Most, after all, were not Native Irish, as Peter Gilmore discusses earlier this volume, but Scottish 48

Family and Labor in Eighteenth-Century Irish America

Presbyterians from Ulster. They were comparatively recent arrivals to Ireland, and the trials and er‑ rors of migration had taught them some hard lessons regarding the necessity of balancing continuities with change and adaptation. They also had to figure out which economic pursuits, work routines, and values—like their Protestantism—to cling to and which to adjust to the circumstances found in new homelands. Although there were plenty of exceptions, most were tenant-farming families who had sold most of their belongings to pay for their travel and to secure a financial foothold when they arrived. Thus, as they disembarked at the mid-Atlantic ports of New Castle or Philadelphia, they did so as free people, unencumbered by indentures or contracts. Uncertainty abounded. How different would life be from Ireland? What would the future hold for their families? And how much and what kind of labor would be required to build and sustain their new lives in America? Many newcomers sought answers to those questions by taking up lands in America’s interior. As former Irish tenant farmers turned American settler colonists, they marveled at the inexpensive and even free lands colonial officials and speculators offered them in exchange for settling contested terrain. They also downplayed the work that hacking farms out of the forest would require and dis‑ missed the threat posed by the Indigenous peoples whose land claims they were usurping. Conse‑ quently, the transition to their new lives was often a shock. The Antrim-born James Magraw, his wife Jane, and their children were surely stunned by the primitive conditions they found upon their 1733 arrival at Middle Spring, one of the predominantly Scots-Irish settlements west of the Susquehanna River, which had been founded at the behest of Pennsylvania’s proprietors. Little more than a rudi‑ mentary camp in the woods, Middle Spring lacked all the amenities of the Irish market towns that he and his wife had known back home. As an unwavering settler colonist, however, Magraw was nonetheless determined to see his new home in a positive light. He looked for signs of the familiar, noting how the first settlers had already constructed 18 cabins since the settlement’s founding three years before. Thinking of the future, he also saw abundant resources, from forests of timber to wellwatered land. “I think we will like this part of the country when we get our cabbin bilt,” he declared hopefully.8 Getting that cabin built would not be easy, however. As Ulster-born Mary McDowell Greenlee recalled years later, selecting an appropriate house site and building a cabin entailed trial and error. Greenlee had migrated from County Londonderry to Philadelphia with her father, three siblings, and other extended kin in 1729. They first settled in eastern Pennsylvania, but then they relocated, like the Magraws, to the frontier that lay west of the Susquehanna where Mary married her cousin, James Greenlee. Then, the extended families, like many other Irish Americans at the time, moved again in 1737, heading south into Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Once there, the families acquired multiple parcels totaling a remarkable 3,000-acres from a speculator who was offering grants to colonists will‑ ing to erect and defend settlements that would help extinguish Native land claims in the region and attract other settlers. Mary remembered how they first “Struck their Camp” near a spring and then scouted its course to confirm it connected into the James River, a major waterway even above the fall line. She credited her husband with doing the back-breaking labor required to build their fam‑ ily’s first cabin, which involved felling and hauling trees, notching the logs, and stacking them. But when “she did not like the Situation,” “they” did it all over again, building another cabin. Finally, the couple built a third place near her brother, where they lived until 1780. Fields also needed to be cleared and planted, which was also an arduous and collective effort. Many settlers opted initially to employ the Native-American technique of girdling trees and planting between them because it was less labor intensive. In Pennsylvania, the Magraws then planted a food crop of potatoes—the Irish staple—and corn—the New World equivalent—to sustain them through the winter. The Greenlees surely did the same in Virginia. Over time, however, as McDowells and Greenlees cleared more land on their parcels, they also planted hemp, tobacco, and eventually wheat, marketable crops they could sell for profit.9 49

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While most Irish-American families who settled the frontier labored intensely to eke only a mini‑ mal subsistence from their lands, the McDowell and Greenlee families were among the exceptions who prospered. By the 1750s, the families’ male patriarchs had become gentlemen and leaders of an Irish-American “frontier aristocracy” who sought to imitate Virginia’s Anglo planter class. Before his untimely death in 1757, for example, James Greenlee had become an enslaver, a leading figure in local commerce and politics, and an elder in his local Presbyterian church. While Greenlee, like other men of his time in Ireland and America, was the public face of his family, his wife, Mary, their chil‑ dren, and their six enslaved laborers were the silent partners in building the family’s prosperity and influence. In the American interior, as in Ireland, it was not unusual for wives to work the fields and perform other kinds of heavy labor, especially during the first years of settlement. They sometimes worked alongside bound laborers or the enslaved. In a foreshadowing of the nineteenth-century racial dynamics discussed by Angela F. Murphy in this volume, women like Mary McDowell Greenlee also learned the cruel racial calculus involved in being mistresses once their husbands began to purchase enslaved workers. But even when they worked their fields alongside the enslaved, they also had to tend to the couple’s children and complete various domestic chores to keep their families fed, their clothes washed, and their households tended. Multiple pregnancies added another significant dimen‑ sion to the labor wives performed on behalf of their families. Mary, for example, had one young child and may have been pregnant with her second at the time she and James migrated south into Virginia. As the family built their new life on the Virginia frontier, she continued give birth every two to three years, having a total of nine children. Despite these multiple burdens, Mary and other female kin also carved out time to make butter they could sell at markets in New Castle and Williamsburg to raise the cash their families needed to pay their rents during their first years in the Valley. Women’s labor was critical to frontier families’ survival and to achieving prosperity.10 Not all newcomers followed the same course, even when they took up lands in the backwoods. Newlyweds James and Martha McCullough sailed from Belfast in 1745. By 1750, they had settled with their two young children in the Conococheague Valley, southwest of the settlement that would become Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and not far from where the Magraws had settled nearly two decades earlier. Like other settler colonists, theirs was a hardscrabble existence at first, but they also had advantages that other newcomers did not. The region they settled, though still a contested frontier populated by Indigenous peoples, had many more white settlers. This gave the McCulloughs a sense of safety in numbers that the Magraws did not have and meant they had more neighbors to draw on for assistance, including siblings who lived nearby. James could hire farm hands to assist with the arduous work of clearing fields and sowing crops like rye, wheat, corn, oats, and turnips, as well as the flaxseed he probably sold for export to Ireland. The family also had another advantage: James was a weaver. Much as in Ireland, then, the family balanced work on their new farm with the domestic production of various kinds of linen and woolen cloth, commodities they could exchange for cash, goods, or services.11 Weaving offered Irish-American families like the McCulloughs a hedge, as it had in Ulster, against the uncertainties of the agricultural economy and enabled greater participation in the consumer econ‑ omy. Weaving also enhanced families’ likelihood of achieving prosperity, with labor cutting along mostly gendered lines. Weaving was a male occupation in Pennsylvania as it was in Ireland, which meant that James wove the cloth. Demand was large enough, however, that he also contracted with at least one other weaver and his brothers John and Archibald to do additional weaving for him. Spin‑ ning also remained an exclusively female occupation in the colonies. Although wool and flax wheels were not as ubiquitous in Pennsylvania as in Ulster, James’s trade would have demanded that the couple own several. Using the skills she almost certainly had first learned as a girl in Ireland, Martha spun and reeled yarn into skeins. Other women like her sister-in-law Sara, some hired girls, or even her young children, probably joined her in the work. If there was any surplus, she would have sold 50

Family and Labor in Eighteenth-Century Irish America

or exchanged it locally. Like Mary McDowell Greenlee, the money Martha earned financially sup‑ ported the family and facilitated the purchase of various consumer goods. In these ways, rural life in America allowed families like the McCulloughs to recreate aspects of their work lives in Ulster, from flax growing and spinning yarn, to weaving cloth for sale.12 It is tempting to equate cloth production in the colonies with that of Ireland, but there were signifi‑ cant differences. Whereas upwards of 20 percent of Ulster’s adult male workforce was involved in linen weaving by the 1780s, weavers were quite rare in America, even in colonies with many UlsterIrish settlers. Moreover, they usually produced cloth only on a part-time, custom-ordered basis for highly localized domestic consumption, rather than at the behest of landlords or for international mar‑ kets. American cloth production was, writes historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “an extension of farm‑ ing.” As such, it was smaller in scale, less specialized, and less tightly regulated than Ireland’s more commercialized and export-oriented trade. For the most part, McCullough was a typical weaver, especially in the mid-Atlantic. His neighbors contracted with him to produce mostly utilitarian kinds of cloth, ranging from coarse canvas to no-frills wearing fabrics like linsey-woolsey, a linen-woolen blend, and linen shirting, as well as woolen blankets. In most cases, customers supplied their own yarn. In cases where they did not, or where they supplied only raw fibers, Martha and other spinners would have done the vital labor to spin the yarn. McCullough’s business, like that of most Ameri‑ can weavers, was overwhelmingly local. His frontier location did impact his business in one way, however. The sales he made to a local trader hint that some of his cloth—most probably the linen ­shirting—was being sold or traded to Indigenous peoples living deeper in the American interior. It would also not be surprising if local masters purchased some of the coarse fabric he wove to clothe their servants or enslaved laborers. Weavers like McCullough found the products of their labors served new kinds of customers in America.13

The Violent Task of Dispossession Building new lives in the interior was always a high-risk gamble. Clearing woods and fields for farm‑ ing and erecting cabins and barns were tasks that placed extraordinary demands on Irish-American settler families. Even practicing a familiar trade like weaving was different than in Ireland. Families were willing to take these risks to acquire land, however. But there was a catch, because claiming contested lands as settler colonists meant more than just building new lives as Americans; it also entailed, as Patrick Wolfe explains, a “logic of elimination” aimed at “the summary liquidation of In‑ digenous people.” That process sometimes unfolded quietly, as settlers erected their farms atop Indig‑ enous territory and undermined their societies by trading lots of European- or American-made goods, including alcohol, with them. But as Indigenous resentments built along with imperial tensions, and as war became the order of the day in the 1750s and continuing through the American Revolution and early republic years, settlers also employed brutal violence to try and achieve Native annihilation. Irish-American men who were intent on keeping what their families had just built fiercely defended their frontier settlements against what they perceived as unwarranted Native assaults. More signifi‑ cant, during the French and Indian War and American Revolution, they were among the vanguard of Americans who repeatedly took the offensive against Indigenous communities by attacking and burning their villages and fields, and killing as many Native warriors, as well as women and children, as they could. Fighting Indigenous people to secure their families’ land claims was another, if more problematic, labor they performed in America.14 Irish immigrants were no strangers to settler colonialism or to violent reprisals by hostile Native populations. Those who came from Ulster were the descendants of seventeenth-century Scots ScotsProtestant settler communities in the north of Ireland whom the English had recruited to colonize the Catholic Irish. Their memories of the Roman Catholic and Jacobite violence that had marked the 51

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wars of seventeenth-century Ireland conditioned them to look suspiciously at the Indigenous people they had settled among in America. Thus, when James Magraw saw the “good wheen [group] of ingens”—probably Shawnees and Delawares—who lived nearby, he convinced himself that they “intend[ed] to give us a good deal of troubbel and may do us a grate deal of harm” and tried to arm himself in response. Although Magraw failed to grasp why Native peoples might be hostile to set‑ tlers like himself, he was also prescient: a period of especially violent intercultural warfare was about to begin. As Indigenous peoples allied with the French launched raids on frontier settlements in the mid-1750s and 1763 to protest fraudulent land deals and settler encroachments, Irish-American men responded in kind. They built crude log forts as shelters for their families and staging grounds for defense; they armed themselves as best they could; and they organized themselves into informal militias to stage offensive and retaliatory raids, including the surprise attack led by the Scots Irish‑ man, Col. John Armstrong, which destroyed the Delaware village of Kittanning in 1756, murdering most of its inhabitants. Irish-American frontier families paid a heavy price for such violence. Native warriors destroyed their homes and fields, and killed or captured many settlers. Mary McDowell Greenlee’s brother, for example, was killed in a skirmish with Haudenosaunee warriors as early as 1742. Yet, it is interesting to see how Irish-American settlers always portrayed themselves as victims, displaying complete blindness to how Indigenous peoples might perceive them as the aggressors. James McCullough was typical. He recorded numerous instances of “Slaughter” when “ye indins” attacked nearby farms, including the murder of seven settlers while they were “loading a Wagon in ye field.” Fearing warriors would target his farm next, he hid his plow, farm tools, and weaving equip‑ ment and then the family fled into Maryland as refugees. But they did not stay away long enough. When they returned to harvest their crops and pull flax, “ye Indians” kidnapped his two young sons, taking them as captives. One of those sons was ransomed and returned to the family after living for eight years among the Delawares; the other was never heard from again. As the McCulloughs and other settlers learned firsthand, there were often unanticipated and sorrowful costs involved in Native dispossession.15

Laboring in Urban Contexts While the lure of land drew many Irish immigrants to the frontier, many others remained—whether by choice or necessity—in port cities like Philadelphia or settled in one of the new towns of the inte‑ rior, where they could conduct business, practice a profession or trade, or labor for others. The most privileged among these families typically set their sights on commerce, often connected to Ireland. For them, work in America was often an extension of what they had done back home. To pursue their goals, they knit themselves into existing trans-Atlantic commercial networks, while simultane‑ ously building new commercial connections in America. Contacts made before departing Ireland, or connections to kin who had already settled in America, undoubtedly eased their transition, as did their ability to command the labor of bound servants and enslaved persons. Intermarriage into other Irish-American families also helped. Still, those families who became the most powerful and ­prosperous—forming a new Irish-American cultural elite—also showed a willingness to innovate by adapting their interests to take best advantage of the opportunities America offered, or by marrying outside their group. Their experiences are a reminder of the varied forms settler colonialism and set‑ tler labor took in early America.16 The siblings Francis, William, and Ann West fit this pattern. Born at Clover Hill in County Sligo and probably of Anglo-Irish ancestry, they immigrated, along with Francis’s son William, to the Dela‑ ware Valley in 1750. Although little is known of the family’s history in Ireland, the quick success the siblings achieved in America suggests they were probably from merchant stock and possibly from the elite group of Protestant trading families in Sligo who had risen into the gentry. Upon arrival, 52

Family and Labor in Eighteenth-Century Irish America

William, the younger of the brothers, settled in Philadelphia, where he operated a dry-goods store and began speculating in town lots and land; his business grew rapidly over the following decade. The elder Francis, his sister, and perhaps his son moved West, following other Irish settlers to Carlisle, a new colonial market town and county seat that the colony’s proprietor had modeled on seventeenthcentury English colonial designs for the north of Ireland town of Derry. There, with the help of his brother, Francis purchased several of the choicest lots in town and opened a store. Working together, the West brothers built prosperity for their family that mimicked what their family had, or aspired to have, in Ireland. William imported goods—particularly fine fabrics—from London and Liverpool. He also imported linen and transported Irish servants from Sligo and Dublin. The two men then sold these goods and the servants’ work contracts at their stores in Philadelphia and Carlisle.17 Their Western interests were more innovative. As settler colonists of a different sort, the West brothers were one of many Irish-born merchants who sought to wrest the interior from its Indigenous inhabitants by speculating in land and trading with them for furs and skins. These interests, too, built on Irish precedents where merchants often had diverse commercial interests and strong inland con‑ nections. But in America, the producers—Native peoples—were different. William took the lead, especially after winning election to Pennsylvania’s Assembly in 1756. As the French and Indian War raged, he became a fierce advocate for arming settlers and was appointed a delegate to two of the most important wartime treaty conferences with Indigenous peoples. After the war’s conclusion in 1763, William won a coveted position as one of the colony’s nine Indian commissioners appointed to enforce new British trade regulations designed to enforce peace between settlers and Indigenous peoples by restricting the fur and skin trade to designated posts. Instead, he used the commission to create a monopoly over Western trade. To do so, he relied on his brother Francis to engage licensed traders working out of the Pittsburgh trading house to exchange goods for pelts. Francis then hired haulers to transport the pelts to Carlisle and Philadelphia, where William exported them across the Atlantic. Although this trade was riskier than the commission-based business many Irish merchants engaged in, William and Francis used it to advance their family’s wealth and standing in America. Their success was thus built in large part upon Indigenous land and labor.18 The West brothers were well positioned to capitalize on the opportunities the colonies had to of‑ fer, and their personal histories attest to their achievements. Both men became wealthy and powerful merchants. William had extensive commercial interests in Europe and North America. More telling, his business dealings in Caribbean and the ownership he claimed over several enslaved persons at‑ test to his reliance on slavery and racial inequality to build wealth. By the 1770s, he, his wife Mary Hodge West, and their eight children were living at Hope Lodge, an elegant Georgian-style estate outside Philadelphia, in a form of rural gentility imitative of an Irish gentry family. William was also highly esteemed in the colony. When he died suddenly in 1782 at the age of 58, his friends lauded him as “a gentleman of undiminished reputation” who was “upright and exact in his dealings.” He was also “deservedly happy, in his family connections.” Aside from his devotion to his wife and chil‑ dren, William remained close to his siblings throughout his life, and he employed at least two of his nephews in his counting house. His brother Francis also achieved considerable success. He owned land in and near Carlisle, was a leading merchant in the town, and a founder of its Episcopal church. By the 1760s, he, too, had opted to live the life of a rural Irish-American gentleman, residing with his wife Dorothy and their children on a farm outside Carlisle where he owned a gristmill and a sawmill. Like his brother, Francis relied on the labor done by enslaved persons to build his wealth and status. The eight individuals he claimed included a 50-year-old Black man with the telling name of Sligo and two other men, Jacob and John, as well as two adult women, Poll and Debby, and three children, one of them an infant. The men probably helped run his mills, while the women, with children in tow, probably performed much of the domestic labor. For the West brothers, then, business was inti‑ mately intertwined with not just family, but also with slavery. The two men capitalized on their Irish 53

Judith Ridner

experiences and took advantage of the new opportunities America offered, including the exploitation of Indigenous lands and trade and the use of enslaved workers, to render themselves the powerful patriarchs of enduring Irish-American families.19 Like their rural counterparts, men in privileged, urban Irish-American families were never alone in working to achieve success in America. Sisters and wives were also instrumental in advancing and sustaining the family’s interests. Women bore and raised the children that would cement their families’ long-term status as advantaged Americans, and they helped construct status and racial hier‑ archies in America by managing households that included servants and enslaved laborers. Yet, their labors were notable because of the constraints they faced. The average age of marriage for women was only 19 in the interior regions where many Irish settled, which was younger than in Ireland, Eng‑ land, or in other regions of the colonies. Among the wealthiest Irish-American families, custom often dictated that marriages be arranged. As such, it was not unusual for a teenaged girl to find herself married off to an older business associate or family contact.20 Ann West was only a teenager when she arrived in the colonies with her brothers. Soon after settling in Carlisle, her brother Francis married her off to the widower, Hermanus Alrichs, a fellow merchant. Alrichs, the descendent of an influential Dutch family whose roots stretched back to the seventeenth-century Delaware Valley, was one of Carlisle’s first and most prominent settlers. He was a local justice and a representative to the colony’s assembly. For the ambitious West brothers, this marriage was an advantageous one. For Ann, however, the union was more about doing her duty as a loyal family member and a woman. She undoubtedly faced challenges. The American-born Alrichs was some years her senior and of the Dutch Reformed faith. His business and political interests, which held such appeal to her brothers, also took him away from home frequently, leaving her alone to manage their household. Yet, Ann made her way. She gave birth to five children, naming four of them for members of her family, the only exception being their third child, Hermanus Jr. And like Irish gentlewomen, she served her husband’s interests by offering hospitality to guests at their Carl‑ isle home, which was well-furnished by frontier standards. Guests could sit comfortably on leatherupholstered chairs while gathered round a tea table enjoying and sipping tea from imported Chinese porcelain or English queensware cups.21 Ann faced new challenges when Hermanus died in 1772, leaving her, at age 39, with five children ranging in age from 3 to 14. She remarried quickly, to the widower Alexander Lowrey of nearby Lan‑ caster County, in a union that was probably also arranged by her brothers. Lowrey was an Ulster-born Presbyterian, a common Irish heritage that united him with Ann and her brothers. Lowrey was also a fur trader, land speculator, and soldier who had amassed considerable wealth. During the American Revo‑ lution, he would be an ardent patriot. Thus, he had means to provide for Ann and her children while broadening the West family’s business network. But this new marriage also brought new demands, as Ann was left to care for his five children and supervise the household during his frequent absences from home. Ann, whom local historians described as “a spirited woman” who possessed “wonder‑ ful energy and indomitable will,” did these tasks and more. She oversaw a blended household of 11 children, including a new baby daughter born in 1775, several enslaved persons, and probably a few bound servants. Residing only a half mile from one of the ferries crossing the Susquehanna River, she also entertained extensively, and, when the Revolution commenced, Ann joined other patriot women in collecting clothing to outfit the army. Until her death in 1791, Ann, like many other privileged IrishAmerican women, labored in multiple ways to serve her family and secure their future in America.22

Conclusion Irish-American households took many forms in eighteenth-century America. Although nuclear fami‑ lies typically formed their core as in Ireland, extended families or even groups of siblings migrated 54

Family and Labor in Eighteenth-Century Irish America

together and then lived and worked together closely, sometimes relocating multiple times as a kin group to find the location that would best serve their goals. The American lives they created as settler colonists, however, were determined not just by migration or where they settled, but by the various kinds of labors that all members of the household performed, their attitudes toward Indigenous peo‑ ples, and their willingness to utilize hired hands and to exploit the labor of bound servants or enslaved people. Irish-American family life and labor in America was, in short, a blend of their old and new worlds. Families brought knowledge, connections, and skills with them to America, and they utilized these assets once they were here. But life in America also presented new challenges that demanded adaptation and change. The American-born Alexander Parker, the son of Ulster immigrants, exemplifies how Irish-American households bridged the gap. When Parker, a prosperous farmer in Cumberland County, Pennsylva‑ nia, died in 1791, his estate inventory included two bushels of flaxseed, a flax break and hackle, and three spinning wheels, objects that testified to the continuation of Irish forms of family-based labor as depicted in Hincks’s illustration found at the beginning of this chapter. Indeed, Parker and his son probably did some of the work to process the flax, and his wife Rebecca and his two daughters surely spun those fibers into yarn. But Parker, like many other prosperous Irish-American farmers, was also an enslaver. His old “Negro Man Jacob” provided some of the labor needed to keep the family’s household and their whiskey still running; he probably also tended their cattle and sowed their fields of wheat and rye. New kinds of work and new kinds of workers, then, were also very much part of the Irish-American experience.23

Notes 1 Gray, Spinning the Threads of Uneven Development, 1. Crawford, Impact of the Domestic Linen Industry, 117, confirms that linen accounted for two-thirds of Ireland’s export revenue by 1788. 2 Griffin, “‘Irish’ Migration to America in the Eighteenth Century?” 596; Ridner, Scots Irish of Early Pennsyl‑ vania, 31–37. 3 For the composition of Ulster households, see Crawford, Impact of the Domestic Linen Industry, 122–123. 4 Gillespie, “Early Modern Economy, 12 (quote), 23–25; Crawford, Impact of the Domestic Linen Industry, 8–16; Griffin, People with No Name, 9–36; O’Dowd, History of Women in Ireland, 97; Whan, Presbyterians of Ulster, 5–10. 5 DeVries, Industrious Revolution, 96–121; Gray, Spinning the Threads of Uneven Development, 1; O’Dowd, 115–132, 139–140. 6 For earlier studies, see Jensen, Loosening the Bonds; Clark, Roots of Rural Capitalism; Schweitzer, Custom and Contract. For more recent works, see Brown, Good Wives; Damiano, To Her Credit; Hartigan-O’Connor, Ties That Buy; Hood, Weaver’s Craft; Miller, Needle’s Eye; Sachs, Home Rule; Ulrich, Age of Homespun; Zabin, Dangerous Economies. 7 Dunaway, Scotch-Irish of Colonial Pennsylvania, 183 (quote), 181–190. For studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish women, see Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America; Urban, Brokering Servitude, 29–63; Phillips-Cunningham, Putting Their Hands on Race; Casey, “Family, History, and Irish America,” 110–117. For the eighteenth century, see Brown and Keller, “Searching for Status,” 129–130; Griffin, People with No Name, 99–124; Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 662–690; Hofstra, Planting of New Virginia, 224–235; Pol‑ lock, “Household Economy in Early Rural America and Ulster,” 61–75; Ridner, Scots Irish of Early Pennsyl‑ vania, 38–47. 8 Miller et al., Irish Immigrants in Land of Canaan, 145 (quote), 143–144. 9 Miller et al., Irish Immigrants in Land of Canaan, 151 (quotes), 147–156, 145; Brown and Keller, “Searching for Status,” 123–142; Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 759–765. 10 Miller et al., Irish Immigrants in Land of Canaan, 149, 153–155; Foote, Sketches of Virginia, 2:90–94; Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 676; Sachs, Home Rule, 58. For the family’s genealogy, see https://ancestors. familysearch.org/en/9316-XXM/mary-elizabeth-mcdowell-1711-1809. 11 Miller et al., Irish Immigrants in Land of Canaan, 156–179; Stauffer, Annotated James McCullogh’s Book, 13.

55

Judith Ridner 12 Stauffer, Annotated James McCullogh’s Book, 35, 37, 41; Crawford, Impact of the Domestic Linen Industry, 117–126; Hood, Weaver’s Craft, 67–79, 113; Ulrich, Age of Homespun, 76–107. 13 Ulrich, Age of Homespun, 95, 75–107; Dickson, New Foundation: Ireland, 140. Hood, Weaver’s Craft, 87, found that weavers comprised less than 2 percent of the male workforce in Philadelphia’s rural hinterlands; see also 85–113; Crawford, Impact of Domestic Linen Industry, 89-90. For the different kinds of cloth Mc‑ Cullough wove, see Stauffer, Annotated James McCullogh’s Book, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 35, 41; for his connec‑ tions to a local trader, see 39, 51. 14 Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism,” 388; Kenny, Peaceable Kingdom Lost, 123–146, 226–233; Ridner, Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania, 58–74, 83–86; Knouff, Soldier’s Revolution, 155–194. 15 Miller et al., Irish Immigrants in Land of Canaan, 144–145 (Magraw quote), 151 (Greenlee), 158, 178 (McCullough); Stauffer, Annotated James McCullogh’s Book, 155, 151 (quotes), 161, 165, 169, 175–176; Bankhurst, Ulster Presbyterians and Scots Irish Diaspora, 91–92. See also Sachs, Home Rule, 21; Ridner, Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania 63–67. 16 Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 642–650. For comparative examinations of the importance of ethnic and family-based economic networks in early American immigrant communities, see Beiler, Immigrant and En‑ trepreneur and Fogleman, Hopeful Journeys. 17 Wallace, “Historic Hope Lodge,” 131–138. For Sligo’s business community, see Bernard, New Anatomy of Ireland, 256–257, and Dickson, New Foundations: Ireland, 133, who notes: “big merchants [in Ireland] were drawn from families with some assets to begin with.” For Carlisle, see Ridner, Town In-Between, 12–43. For examples of William West’s advertisements for his business, see Pennsylvania Gazette, July 3, 1760, or December 25, 1760, where he advertises his trade with Sligo. 18 Horle et al., Lawmaking and Legislators in Pennsylvania, 1055–1062; Dickson, New Foundations Ireland, 130–131. For West and other Carlisle traders, see Ridner, Town In-Between, 95–111. 19 The Pennsylvania Journal, or, Weekly Advertiser, November 6, 1782 (quotes); Horle et al., Lawmaking and Legislators in Pennsylvania, 1061; Wallace, “Historic Hope Lodge,” 131–138; Schaumman, Carlisle, Penn‑ sylvania: Its Beginnings, 153–157; Francis West, Return of Slaves, August 22, 1780, Cumberland County, PA, Slave Returns, 1780.001, https://records.ccpa.net/weblink/DocView.aspx?id=237183&dbid=7&cr=1. For the Irish gentry whose lives they imitated, see Burnard, Making the Grand Figure, 21–78. 20 Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 675, notes that women married at an average age of 19 and men at 21. For compari‑ sons with landed families in Ireland, see O’Dowd, History of Women in Ireland, 89–93. 21 Horle et al., Lawmaking and Legislators in Pennsylvania, 195–198; Schaumman, Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Its Beginnings, 85–88, esp. 87; Inventory of Hermanus Alrichs, May 17, 1772, Cumberland County, Pennsyl‑ vania, Estate Inventories, Folio C-036, reel #3. For comparisons to gentry women in Ireland, see Bernard, Making the Grand Figure, 355. 22 Harris, Biographical History of Lancaster, 379 (quote), 375–381; Biddle, Notable Women of Pennsylvania, 106 (quote), 105–107; Egle, Pennsylvania Genealogies, 18–19. 23 Inventory of Alexander Parker, March 12, 1791, in “Papers of Alexander Parker, 1753–1791,” Cumberland County Historical Society.

Bibliography Primary Sources Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. Estate Inventories. Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, PA. Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. Slave Returns. Cumberland County Archives, Carlisle, PA. https://ccweb. ccpa.net/archives/. Miller, Kerby A., Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling, and David N. Doyle. Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675–1815. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Parker, Alexander. “The Papers of Alexander Parker, 1753–1791,” Cumberland County Historical Society, ­Carlisle, PA. Seaver, James. A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, edited by June Namias. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Stauffer, John, ed. The Annotated James McCullogh’s Book: Pages with Transcription and Commentary. ­Mercersburg, PA: The Conococheague Institute, 2016.

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Secondary Sources Bankhurst, Benjamin. Ulster Presbyterians and the Scots Irish Diaspora, 1750–1764. London: Palgrave Mac‑ millan, 2013. Beiler, Rosalind. Immigrant and Entrepreneur: The Atlantic World of Caspar Wistar, 1650–1750. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Bernard, Toby. A New Anatomy of Ireland: The Irish Protestants, 1649–1770. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Bernard, Toby. Making the Grand Figure: Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1641–1770. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Biddle, Gertrude Bosler, and Sarah Dickson Lowrie. Notable Women of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1942. Brown, Katharine L., and Kenneth W. Keller. “Searching for Status: Virginia’s Irish Tract, 1770s–1790s.” In Ulster to America: The Scots‑Irish Migration Experience, 1680–1830, edited by Warren R. Hofstra, 123–146. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012. Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Casey, Marion R. “Family, History, and Irish America.” Journal of American Ethnic History 28, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 110–117. Clark, Christopher. The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. Crawford, W.H. The Impact of the Domestic Linen Industry in Ulster. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 2012. Damiano, Sara T. To Her Credit: Women, Finance, and the Law in Eighteenth‑Century New England Cities. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. DeVries, Jan. The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008; repr. 2009. Dickson, David. New Foundation: Ireland 1660–1800, 2nd ed. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000. Diner, Hasia. Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. Dunaway, Wayland F. The Scotch‑Irish of Colonial Pennsylvania. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944. Egle, William Henry. Pennsylvania Genealogies; Chiefly Scotch‑Irish and German. Harrisburg, PA: Harrisburg Publishing Company, 1896. Fogleman, Aaron Spencer. Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colo‑ nial America, 1717–1775. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Foote, William Henry. Sketches of Virginia, Historical and Biographical. 2 Vols. Philadelphia: W.S. Martien, 1850–55. Gillespie, Raymond. “The Early Modern Economy, 1600–1780.” In Ulster Since 1600: Politics, Economy, and Society, edited by Liam Kennedy and Philip Ollerenshaw, 12–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Gray, Jane. Spinning the Threads of Uneven Development: Gender and Industrialization in Ireland During the Long Eighteenth Century. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. Griffin, Patrick. ‘“Irish’ Migration to America in the Eighteenth Century? Or the Strange Case for the ‘Scots/ Irish’.” In The Cambridge History of Ireland Volume III 1730–1880, edited by James Kelly, 593–616. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Griffin, Patrick. The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of the British Atlantic World, 1689–1764. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Hackett Fischer, David. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Harris, Alex. A Biographical History of Lancaster County: Being a History of Early Settlers and Eminent Men of the County; …. Lancaster: Elias Barr & Co., 1872. Hartigan‑O’Connor, Ellen. The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Hofstra, Warren R. The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley. Balti‑ more, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Hood, Adrienne. The Weaver’s Craft: Cloth, Commerce, and Industry in Early Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: Uni‑ versity of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

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Judith Ridner Horle, Craig W., Jeffrey L. Scheib, Joseph S. Foster, David Haugaard, Carolyn M. Peters, and Laurie M. Wolfe. Lawmaking and Legislators in Pennsylvania: A Biographical Dictionary, Volume Two 1710–1756. Philadel‑ phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Jensen, Joan M. Loosening the Bonds: Mid‑Atlantic Farm Women, 1750–1850. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988. Kenny, Kevin. Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experi‑ ment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Knouff, Gregory T. The Soldiers’ Revolution: Pennsylvania in Arms and the Forging of Early American Identity. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. Miller, Marla R. The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution. Amherst: University of Mas‑ sachusetts Press, 2006. O’Dowd, Mary. A History of Women in Ireland, 1500–1800. Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd., 2005. Phillips‑Cunningham, Danielle T. Putting Their Hands on Race: Irish Immigrant and Southern Black Domestic Workers. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020. Pollock, Vivienne. “The Household Economy in Early Rural America and Ulster: The Question of Self‑ Sufficiency.” In Ulster and North America: Trans‑Atlantic Perspectives on the Scotch‑Irish, edited by H. Tyler Blethen and Curtis W. Wood, Jr., 61–75. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997. Ridner, Judith. A Town In‑Between: Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the Early Mid‑Atlantic Interior. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Ridner, Judith. The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania: A Varied People. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2018. Sachs, Honor. Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion of the Eighteenth‑Century Kentucky Frontier. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Schaumann, Merri Lou Scribner. Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Its Beginnings 1749–1759. Self‑published, Merri Lou Scribner Schaumann, 2022. Schweitzer, Mary M. Custom and Contract: Household, Government, and the Economy in Colonial Pennsylva‑ nia. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of An American Myth. New York: Vintage Books, 2001. Urban, Andrew. Brokering Servitude: Migration and the Politic of Domestic Labor During the Long Nineteenth Century. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Wallace, Paul A.W. “Historic Hope Lodge.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 86, no. 2 (April 1962): 131–138. Whan, Robert. The Presbyterians of Ulster, 1680–1730. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013. Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409. Zabin, Serena. Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

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4 THE IRISH IN THE REVOLUTIONARY ATLANTIC Samuel K. Fisher

From 1760 onwards, the Atlantic world entered a phase of profound transformation. Colonies severed themselves from the empires that had brought them into being. The scope of political participation expanded, as common people began to insist on their involvement in politics: in coffeehouses and taverns, in clubs and militias, on the streets and in the fields, they refused to be excluded. Political ideas that were hitherto marginalized or even unthinkable became commonplace. Revolution seemed to have seized the whole world at once, including America in 1776, France in 1789, and Haiti in 1804. The first decades of the nineteenth century saw Spain’s American empire similarly dismembered by a wave of independence movements. That list, in fact, understates the pervasiveness of revolution, since it only considers successful cases. Revolutionary fervor also gripped the Netherlands, Belgium, Guadeloupe, Poland, Sierra Leone, Italy, and Hungary. Radicals were everywhere, even in England itself. Little wonder that men and women of the era realized they were living through an epochal mo‑ ment in history. “It is an age of Revolutions in which everything must be looked for,” intoned Thomas Paine, the avatar of the revolutionary spirit whose publications—Common Sense, Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason—were the handbooks of the revolution wherever they appeared.1 It comes as no surprise that Ireland, and Irish people, played key roles in such an age of revolution. After all, there were some obvious reasons why they, more than others, might resent their rulers. The majority of Ireland’s population were Irish-speaking Catholics who identified as representatives of the island’s ancient, indigenous culture, dispossessed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and subjected to a series of anti-Catholic penal laws in the eighteenth by a new colonial, Protestant ascend‑ ancy. They had little reason to love their monarch or the government that ruled Ireland in his name. Yet Irish Protestants were just as receptive—perhaps more so—to radical ideas. Irish Presbyterians were to punch far above their weight in the growing revolutionary movement. Migrating to America in vast numbers, they proved to be conspicuous supporters of the American Revolution (a “­Scotch-Irish Pres‑ byterian Rebellion,” one Hessian soldier called it). Staying in Ireland, they supported “patriot” calls to end Ireland’s constitutional subordination to Britain and their communities were hotbeds of radical‑ ism in the wake of the French Revolution. Even members of Ireland’s Established Protestant church, who monopolized power in the government with the backing of the English state, were not immune to new ideas. Many of them were “friends of America” and eager to secure their own political rights even in the teeth of English opposition, to the point that historians have sometimes thought of them as “colonial nationalists.” To many at the time, and to later historians, the Irish seemed eager participants in revolution. As natural foes of empire, they were the natural allies of freedom too.2 59

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-6

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Yet this image of precocious Irish anti-imperialists and republicans is only part of the story of I­ reland and the Irish in the age of revolution. Wherever Irish people appeared in the Atlantic world, as Audrey Horning demonstrates in her chapter in this volume, they enrolled themselves not only under the banners of revolution and independence but also under those of monarchy and empire. Thousands of Irish people—of all denominations and descriptions—served in the British army and imperial administration. Nor was Irish support of empire confined to Britain. A diaspora of Irish Catholics— many of them representatives of the island’s native Gaelic dynasties—sought to build new lives for themselves and their descendants in the service of other European empires, especially that of Spain. Like other colonized and oppressed communities in the Atlantic world, Irish Catholics often made the apparently paradoxical decision that the best way to fight for their freedom was to assist states and empires in their fight against the forces of independence and revolution. The paradox, however, is only apparent. That becomes clear once we take account of the par‑ ticularities of Ireland and the Irish. Like other people in the Atlantic world, Irish men and women understood, interpreted, and experienced the age of revolution through the lens of their own particu‑ lar history. Early modern Ireland was defined by colonial dispossession and the construction of a sectarian state. Little wonder, then, that Irish Catholics could be skeptical of Irish Protestant patriot claims to be fighting for liberty and the good of all Irish people, especially because so much patriotic rhetoric complained of the imperial government’s moves to improve the position of Catholics and other excluded peoples. The same dynamic helps to explain why so many of America’s Indigenous nations, and so many of those enslaved in the Americas, lent their support to Britain in the American War of Independence. This age of revolutions laid the foundations of the world we inhabit today; like our world, it was not without its dark side. As they sought to navigate a rapidly changing world, many people, plenty of them Irish, looked to empires rather than revolutionaries as their best allies.3 In other words, there is no such thing as the Irish experience in the age of revolution: there is, in fact, a panoply of different Irish experiences. If anything unites them, it is that they all filtered the uni‑ versalizing impact of the age through the screen of Ireland’s particular history. As is the case with all places and peoples caught up in these transformative eras of world history, historians studying Ireland and the Irish in this period have to balance the big picture with the small, the global with the local. In this period of profound motion and transformation, Irish people were everywhere, and they partici‑ pated fully in the dramatic changes of the era. To help keep track of the many places that Irish people went, and the many ways they engaged in this period of change, this chapter is divided into sections. The first covers the impact of the age of revolution on Ireland itself. The second considers the impact of Irish people on revolutions elsewhere, especially in Britain’s North American colonies and the United States. The third considers the ways Irish people fought for—rather than against—imperial states in the age of revolution.

Ireland in an Age of Revolution From 1760, the old certainties of eighteenth-century Ireland—Catholic marginalization, Protestant ascendancy, and attachment to Britain—were challenged as revolutionary ideas and examples swept the Atlantic world. The growing conflict between the American colonies and Britain accelerated the process. Irish Protestants strongly identified with the culture of Britain, as did their colonial coun‑ terparts in America. Like Americans, they saw themselves as bringing civilization and prosperity to formerly benighted and neglected places. Like Americans, they chafed at British attempts to in‑ terfere in their affairs and resented the implication that they themselves would be governed like the colonized people over whom they hoped to rule. Ireland’s Protestant leaders often sympathized with the Americans and suspected that the British government aimed to rob both Irish and American subjects of their rights. There was good reason for the idea: as British officials sought to rationalize 60

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and economize governance of the empire, they viewed both Ireland and the colonies as places that were insufficiently responsive to imperial needs. Sometimes these connections were close indeed. As Charles Townshend sought to raise revenues in America, for example, his brother George sought to make the Irish parliament more accountable to the British executive. Americans, for their part, often identified Irish Protestants as fellow travelers, joining them in support of the true imperial constitu‑ tion and the rights of colonial Britons.4 Inspired by the American example, the Protestant “patriots” of the 1760s, 1770s, and 1780s sought to restore what they saw as the true Irish and imperial constitutions. Ireland, they argued, was a kingdom sharing a monarch with Britain but having its own legislature. The British parliament thus had no authority to interfere in Irish affairs; Ireland was a partner kingdom, not a subordinate one. The patriots sought to eliminate restrictions on Irish trade and the supremacy claimed by the British Parliament over the Irish. This patriot constitutional program resembled the American one, imagining the empire as a web of independent units connected by their allegiance to the King and their shared British culture rather than their subordination to the British parliament. It would be a mistake, how‑ ever, to attribute Irish patriot ideas too directly to American influence. In fact, the Irish position had already been sketched out by earlier patriot writers like William Molyneux, Jonathan Swift, and Fran‑ cis Hutcheson—authors who influenced not only their Irish successors but also American patriots. It was the force of American example, rather than ideology, that spurred the growth of Irish patriotism.5 Most importantly, the entrance of France into the War of Independence as an American ally in 1778 led to the formation of the Volunteers—local, independent militia units that grew to become the armed wing of the patriot movement. Originally formed to protect Ireland from possible invasion by France in 1778–1779, the Volunteers became a national phenomenon. Locally organized and led, these patriotic militia units soon extended themselves directly into politics. Their pressure proved crucial to patriot success. In 1779, they rallied in Dublin on November 4, William III’s birthday, a ­sacred date in the Protestant commemorative calendar. Their cannon carried a placard reading “A Free Trade—or this.” In the face of this pressure, Britain granted trade concessions. Volunteer pressure was likewise crucial to the other signal success of the Irish patriots: legislative independ‑ ence. In 1782, Poynings’ Law and the Declaratory Act were repealed, leaving the Irish parliament free (at least in theory) of British control.6 In many respects, Irish Protestants had thus followed the lead of their fellow British provincials in the American colonies. Patriot politicians like Henry Flood, Henry Grattan, and Lord Charlemont, together with thousands of common Irish people in the Volunteers, had managed to secure what the Americans had originally sought in the 1760s: an independent local legislature still connected to the larger British world through the King. Grattan, commemorating the achievement in the House of Commons, declared 1782 the fulfillment of the patriot program. Ireland was now “a nation.” Yet this confidence hid some of the serious divisions within the Irish patriot movement. Success had come at a moment of British weakness, but when the American war ended in 1783, the government looked to regain control of the Irish situation. It had many advantages in such a contest. The Irish execu‑ tive was still appointed by, and beholden to, the British government. Perhaps most importantly, it could ­benefit from growing divisions among the Protestant patriots about who really belonged to the “­nation” I­ reland had now become. In other words, they could benefit from “the Catholic question.” For just as questions about ­Ireland’s relationship with Britain had come to the fore, so too did questions about the relationship of Catholics to the Irish, and wider British, state. Since the late seventeenth century, Catholics had been excluded from politics, but the demands of war and the growth of the Irish patriot movement forced reconsideration. As with constitutional questions, the upheaval triggered by the American Revolu‑ tion accelerated the pace of change in this area too. The need for soldiers to fight the war encouraged the British government to promote measures of Catholic relief—repeal of the seventeenth-century 61

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penal laws against Catholics—in exchange for recruits. The growth of an Irish patriot movement, meanwhile, meant Irish Protestants also had to reconsider the place of Catholics: they could only press patriot claims so far if they were advanced on a narrowly Protestant basis that excluded most of the island’s people from the nation they claimed to be representing. As a result, there was a socalled “race for the Catholic” between the crown’s government and the various patriot and republican movements arranged against it. Both the patriots and the government alternately wooed and rebuffed Catholics as part of their contest with each other.7 This is why the patriot movement of the 1770s and 1780s, while its leading figures were mostly Protestants, adopted a more inclusive notion of Irishness—one that could, at least with qualifications, make room for Catholics. Patriots knew they would otherwise fall victim to a “divide and conquer” strategy. While the Volunteers were originally organized to resist invasion from Catholic France—and squelch any Catholic Irish rising which might accompany such an invasion—many companies began to admit Catholics into their ranks in defiance of the penal laws. The growing embrace reached its peak in 1782 when a massive convention of Volunteer companies at Dungannon called for legislative independence and applauded Catholic relief. “To divide and conquer, was the policy of Administra‑ tion,” concluded one patriot, while “The policy of Dungannon, was to unite and be victorious.” In its cultural style, volunteering also took steps toward inclusion. Some patriot writers embraced an identity as colonized Irish people. One leading patriot writer adopted the name “Guatimozin,” a rebel against Spanish colonial rule; Joseph Pollock, another patriot scribe, went further and called himself “Owen Roe O’Nial,” a Gaelic, Catholic rebel of the 1640s. Some Volunteer materials drew on the Irish language, and leading patriot Henry Flood even left funds in his will for the study of the language.8 Yet this embrace was tentative. To some extent, it reflected similar colonial attempts at “playing Indian” in America, built not on real commitment but rather on expedience. Some patriots, Flood and Charlemont among them, felt that rapprochement with Catholics was a dangerous step and should go no farther than necessary to ward off the government’s divide and conquer approach. In the 1780s, these divisions scuttled the hopes of patriots for further reform. Many of them wanted to see the Irish Parliament become more representative, but there was no way to accomplish that task without admitting Catholics into politics. A Volunteer convention gathered in Dublin in 1784 but was riven by divisions over the Catholic question and ultimately failed to address the issue. The movement’s influence began to decline.9 The French Revolution broke this impasse. For generations, British and Irish Protestants had be‑ lieved Catholics were incapable of liberty. At a stroke, the French Revolution threw this supposedly commonsense assumption into doubt. France, viewed by Britons as the land of tyrannical Catholi‑ cism par excellence, was now the scene of revolution. The French Revolution thus opened the way for radical patriots to make common cause with Catholics. The institutional expression of this new mood was the Society of United Irishmen. Their original aim was to politicize the people with a view to ultimately achieving Catholic relief and parliamentary reform. As their name implied, the United Irishmen sought to create a united republican movement in Ireland, one that crossed the lines of sectarian division. Led by leaders like Theobald Wolfe Tone, they worked to spread the message of republican revolution among the Irish people. Tone’s pamphlet, An Argument on Behalf of the Roman Catholics of Ireland, laid out a case against the old sectarian fears. Fear of Catholics, argued Tone, had enabled Britain to put Ireland in chains, because Protestants sold away their rights for protection from Catholics. Yet the French Revolution showed that Catholics were not the implacable enemies Protestants had so long feared. The Society put this into practice, working alongside Catholics to fight for Catholic relief.10 As Revolutionary France embarked on a war with Britain, however, the government took alarm at rampant French influence. Government spies infiltrated the United Irish organization, and eventually it was forced underground. From this point, the United Irishmen planned for an armed insurrection 62

The Irish in the Revolutionary Atlantic

with the help of France. They also entered into an alliance with the Defenders, a decision which changed the complexion of the movement. The Defenders had originated amid sectarian feuding between Catholics and Protestants in Armagh and represented a long tradition of agrarian secret societies in Ireland. Members of such societies swore oaths of secrecy and worked together to resist rising rents, tithes, and other unjust burdens on the rural poor. The Defenders added radical politics to the formula, which made them likely partners for the United Irishmen. But the sectarian basis of the Defenders, and the persistence of anti-colonial, anti-Protestant grievance among their rank-andfile membership, complicated the alliance. The Defenders were not, as a rule, freethinking deists nor bourgeois intellectuals like much of the Society’s leadership. They emerged from the vernacular culture of anti-English grievance, which had exerted a profound influence on Ireland’s majority Irishspeaking Catholic population. But with the United Irishmen forced into secrecy and plans for violent revolution, the Defenders were formidable allies. They enabled the Society to become a nationwide revolutionary organization.11 Plans for armed insurrection with the help of France gathered steam when Tone—fresh from exile in the independent United States—reached France. A fleet sailed in 1796, carrying nearly 15,000 French soldiers, but bad weather left it unable to land in Ireland. Tone could only watch helplessly as the ships carried him and the soldiers back to France. The failed invasion proved a disaster, trig‑ gering a ferocious crackdown on the United Irishmen. The following year, government repression reached peak levels with the arrests of United Irish leaders, seizures of stockpiled weapons, and further infiltration of the Society by spies. Facing these bleak prospects, the leadership resolved to at‑ tempt an insurrection without French help. This came to fruition in 1798. The 1798 rising was meant to be coordinated and national with rebels in Dublin seizing the mail coaches as a signal to groups throughout the country. But the arrest of the Dublin leadership threw this plan into confusion. As it happened, the rising broke out piecemeal: despite the failure of the Dublin coup, parts of Leinster rose. A mainly Presbyterian force led by Henry Joy McCracken appeared in Antrim, while the rising’s most significant theater was Wexford. There, the rebels seized control of the county before a massive government army eventually dealt them a decisive defeat at Vinegar Hill in June 1798.12 The rising’s failure struck a severe blow to hopes of a successful Irish revolution. In its wake, the government seized the initiative. Instead of allowing for a reformed Irish parliament, the government now sought to abolish it entirely by constitutionally enshrining Ireland within the United Kingdom, which was achieved in 1800 through the Act of Union. Such a move, despite the loss of Ireland’s independence, had much Irish support, among both Catholic and Protestant communities. Despite the Society’s persuasive efforts, many Irish people had shied away from the United Irishmen. Some Protestants—especially northern Presbyterians—had accepted the need to work with Catholics, but others joined the Orange Order, a newly established sectarian loyalist organization, which had fought in support of the government as yeomen. As for Catholics, they too were a divided community. The Church hierarchy, suspicious of the atheism of revolutionary France, vigorously opposed the United Irishmen and the rising. One bishop charmingly referred to those priests who supported the rebels as “the very faeces of the Church.” For many Catholics, the Union was an attractive opportunity to seek relief within a larger United Kingdom rather than begging for it from Irish Protestants, who had little reason to concede it. Even among those Catholics who supported the 1798 rising, motives were varied. Despite the nonsectarian message of the United Irishmen, some of their supporters were still galvanized by the historic grievances of Irish Catholics. The rising in Wexford featured grisly sectarian massacres which were a propaganda coup for enemies of the United Irishmen. The Defender-United Irish alliance similarly challenged the United Irish effort to put their movement on a nonsectarian footing.13 Ireland was, in other words, a full participant in the revolutionary changes of the era, but it was not to be the home of a successful revolutionary movement. That reality had much to do with the 63

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particularities of its history. Revolution and loyalism were ideologies crisscrossed by religious and ethnic affiliations in Ireland, and this competing mass of allegiances was further complicated by the legacy of settler colonialism and dispossession. Influenced by the American and French Revolutions, the Volunteer movement of the 1770s and 1780s, and the United Irish of the 1790s, tried to move past those troublesome particularities, basing their appeal instead on the universal rights of man and the opportunity to begin Ireland’s history again on a firmer foundation. However, that they ultimately failed to achieve these ambitious goals should not blind us to their achievements. Their work ensured that the age of revolutions left a mark on Ireland.

The Irish Revolution in America? Irish people emigrated in huge numbers in the eighteenth century, and especially in the century’s second half. From about 1750, Ireland experienced steady population growth. This was welcome insofar as it was a product of economic development and a relatively peaceful era in the island’s otherwise bloody history in the early modern period. But it put increasing pressure on many Irish men and women. Capitalist practices of economic “modernization” and population growth meant that rents and fees rose, placing many tenants in a difficult position. Leases originally signed in earlier, more troubled periods began to come due, and landowners often seized the opportunity to press for better terms for themselves. These factors hit particularly hard in Ulster, where Presbyterian families—many of whom were the descendants of emigrants from Scotland—were also subject to legal disabilities that rankled them, as we saw in Peter Gilmore and Judith Ridner’s chapters in this volume. Like Catholics, some northern Protestants responded to the new pressures by participating in agrarian secret societies, while others became active in the patriot and United Irish causes. Oth‑ ers still voted with their feet, abandoning Ulster in waves to head for the North American colonies, which enjoyed an enviable reputation as “a good poor mans Country, where there are no opressions of any kind whatsoeiver.” That was overly optimistic. There were plenty of oppressions in America, as emigrants would find out (and frequently inflict on others) but there was some substance behind the claim. Emigration meant the chance to own a significant amount of land outright rather than rent smaller parcels at rapidly escalating rates. There were also no religious disabilities for Presbyterians in the colonies. And so, upwards of 150,000 Irish Presbyterians fled “the Bondage of Egypt” in order to “goe to ye land of Cannan” in the eighteenth century. In the colonies, they came to exert an out‑ sized influence on the American Revolution and the country that it created.14 There were so many of these migrants, and they played such an important role in the Revolution, that it is little surprise that a mythology has grown up around these “Scotch-Irish” communities. They are often depicted as individualistic frontier people, fiercely egalitarian yet also eager to seize op‑ portunities to rise. They are known for their piety, their stubbornness, and (more negatively) for the intensity of their hatred of the Indigenous peoples whose lands they hoped to settle. This image has much truth in it. The Scotch Irish were often champions of egalitarian ideas, and they supported the American Revolution in large numbers. They founded Presbyterian churches wherever they went and helped to fuel the growth of Presbyterianism, and evangelicalism more broadly, in the colonies. Many of them did settle in “frontier” regions where they contributed (with migrants of other backgrounds) to the formation of an American frontier culture. And they were also prominent in massacres of Na‑ tive people, most infamously at Paxton in 1763, earning them Benjamin Franklin’s denunciation as “CHRISTIAN WHITE SAVAGES.”15 Yet this mythology needs significant qualification. The idea of a separate “Scotch-Irish”—not just “Irish”—migration is a later invention, created to distinguish an earlier wave of largely Protestant migrants from poor Catholic migrants in the nineteenth century. Most of the people we now call “Scotch Irish” were simply “Irish” in the eighteenth century. They did not all agree politically, either. 64

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Some did not support the Revolution, and more established and secure migrants often disagreed with more recent arrivals about politics in the United States after independence. Nor should we take it for granted that only Protestants came to the colonies before the era of the Great Famine. Catholic emi‑ grants came too and also contributed to the making of the frontier and American life in this period. In some places, most notably Maryland, they achieved social and political prominence, as in the case of the Carroll family, one of whom was the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. In many other cases, they simply blended into the steady stream of men and women seeking opportunity in the colonies and (after independence) the United States, as did the “Scotch Irish,” whose distinc‑ tiveness should not be overemphasized. Both Catholics and Protestants migrated to the colonies from Ireland, and both groups could be found on both sides of the questions that divided American politics in this period.16 Nevertheless, it did seem to contemporaries that the “Irish” had an outsized impact on the Ameri‑ can Revolution, the creation of a frontier culture, and the democratization of American politics after the revolution. “Among the Irish, nine-tenths espouse the American cause,” boasted migrant and Philadelphia merchant James Caldwell in 1774. (Despite his apparently “Scotch-Irish” background, Caldwell criticized the Scots and was glad to be “among the Irish”!) Many commentators at the time and since believed that the Irish experiences of these migrants—dealing with high rents, land‑ lord oppression, religious disabilities, and organizing themselves to resist these challenges in secret societies—made them natural revolutionaries. Their resentment of English rule and the wealthy An‑ glican elite in the colonies was rooted in the same phenomena in Ireland. But such revolutionary commitment could also be explained by American factors. Frontier colonists of all kinds tended to resent wealthy elites in the cities of the east coast. Among colonists, there was also fear and resent‑ ment of the Anglican Church, which disproportionately attracted such wealthy elites. Nevertheless, the numbers indicate that Irish people did disproportionately support the revolution, especially in the middle colonies.17 After independence, Irish people continued to play important roles in American politics. The fail‑ ure of Ireland’s own patriot cause proved a boon to champions of American democracy, for exiled patriots and United Irishmen almost unanimously threw their weight behind the Jeffersonians. They resented the Anglophilia of the Federalists and hoped to push the United States toward democracy and away from Britain. They were, as in the revolution, disproportionately influential in the mid‑ dle colonies, especially Maryland and Pennsylvania. And, as in the revolution, it seemed to hostile observers that the Jeffersonian cause was a very Irish one. During his “very lengthy travels” in Penn‑ sylvania, wrote Federalist Congressman Uriah Tracy, he had “seen many, very many Irishmen, and with a very few exceptions, they are United Irishmen, Free Masons, and the most God-provoking Democrats on this side of Hell.” Such a judgment was not uncommon among Federalists, though it perhaps overstates the case. There were Irish people who supported the Federalists, especially those who had been in America for a longer period and were more well established.18 Despite all these qualifications, it is clear that Irish people played important roles in the Ameri‑ can Revolution and the democratization of American politics. So, too, did competing ideas of what “Irishness” represented. For some, “Irishness” was a badge of patriotic honor that represented antiBritishness, a commitment to equality, and other virtues of the revolution. For others, especially those who fought against the Revolution, or for Federalists who wanted to resist its most radical consequences, Irishness indicated anarchy, vulgarity, and violence. For still others, Irishness meant Catholicism, which, in a deeply anti-Catholic culture, was problematic. Many native Irish names appear in the rolls of the Continental Army, and some in the ranks of famous commanders, such as John Sullivan. But Sullivan was a Protestant and fiercely anti-Catholic himself, and it is clear that the kind of Irishness in vogue among American patriots was not one with much room for Catholi‑ cism or the speaking of the Irish language. Instead, patriots were often exclusionists when it came to 65

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those matters, and they were appalled by Britain’s attempts to woo such “fit instruments” of tyranny to its side by offering Catholic relief and recruiting Catholics into the British army. Some colonists, whether loyalist or patriot, Federalist or Jeffersonian, referred to their enemies as being predomi‑ nantly Irish by way of a slur, not a compliment. Tracy demeaned the Jeffersonians by pointing to their Irish support. Then again, earlier in the Revolution, Charles Lee had demeaned the British by claiming the army was full of the “Scum of the Irish Roman Catholicks.” In other words, observers agreed that the Irish were everywhere in the age of revolution. But they often disagreed about who they were, where they were, and whose side they were on.19

Irish in the Service of Empire This disagreement is important to understand because it helps us to see the complexity of Irish ex‑ periences in the age of revolution. The image of the Irish as “naturally” devoted to the revolutionary cause simply does not make room for the diverse reality of Irish, American, and global life in the pe‑ riod. It ignores the many Irish people who strove to uphold the authority of imperial states during the age of revolution, and, on a related note, it tends to take one particular Irish experience and make it stand in for the whole. Very often, the “Irish” historians discuss in the context of the American Revo‑ lution are the famed “Scotch-Irish” Presbyterians predominantly from Ulster. Such people did indeed play key roles in the American Revolution, the creation of a radical republican society (the United Irishmen) in Ireland, and the construction of transatlantic networks of radical politics that connected Ireland and America. But they were far from the only Irish people caught up in the age of revolution, and taking their experience as normative or typical erases that fact. In particular, it tends to elbow out the Irish-speaking Catholic majority, as well as the exiled Catholic families who had lost their lands in Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but made new lives for themselves in the service of the French and Spanish empires. To give a full accounting of Irish experience in the age of revolution means acknowledging, for instance, that some of the most important Irish individuals of the period were key players in Span‑ ish imperial politics rather than British or American ones. They bore names like O’Reilly, O’Neill, O’Donnell, and O’Farrill, names associated with some of the oldest noble, Gaelic lineages in Ireland, all of which had suffered in the process of conquest and colonization. They frequently found asylum in Europe, especially in Catholic countries, and they and their descendants became key players in the age of revolutions in their adopted homes. One historian refers to the period between 1754 and 1825, almost precisely the dates of the revolutionary era, as “the Irish hour” in Spain and its empire. Ricardo Wall, for example, was an exiled Irish Catholic who became a powerful minister in the court of the Spanish king Carlos III. He created a network of dependents, many of them Irish, as he con‑ solidated his power. The Wall connection meant that the era of imperial reform in the Spanish empire was frequently associated with Irish influence, just as in the British case, reform was often associated with the Scots.20 One of Wall’s protégés was Alejandro O’Reilly, a soldier and politician who built a spectacularly successful career as an imperial reformer, dispatched to troublesome areas to restore order and put imperial governance on a more secure footing. He played this role in Cuba (1763–1765), Puerto Rico (1765), and Louisiana (1769) before rising to the rank of Count (conde) and settling in Spain. In places like Cuba, O’Reilly often worked with other Irish families such as the O’Farrils, who had simi‑ lar Irish backgrounds and equal motivation to rise in the world by supporting imperial reforms. Irish people were so successful in gaining places of power in the state and imperial administration that they provoked a backlash among Spaniards against the influence of these extranjeros (foreigners).21 These stories are worth recalling because they mirror similar paths followed by Irish Catholic families who remained in Ireland or ventured to Britain’s American colonies rather than Spain’s. 66

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Some chose the path of conversion, and like their former co-religionists, many of whom were their family members, they often became defenders of the imperial state to which they had assimilated. William Johnson, for instance, created a career, and built a fortune, by converting to the Established church, emigrating to America, and establishing himself as an imperial Indian agent. In fact, John‑ son was one of several Irishmen who followed this path. His deputy, George Croghan, did much the same. Johnson died in 1774, before the War of Independence began, but his son, John Johnson, and nephew, Guy Johnson, both earned the hatred of colonial rebels by recruiting Indigenous warriors to support the British war effort. Individuals like Johnson had staked their lives on a commitment to the empire by abandoning ancestral faiths and homelands and seeking to enrich themselves by cooperat‑ ing with the imperial state. They were determined to protect that state when it was challenged. They were also notably successful in cross-cultural diplomacy. While it would be dangerous to overstate their sympathy toward Indigenous peoples—they were part of an ongoing imperial project—Irish people frequently supported empires by bringing their own experiences of hybridity, conversion, and assimilation to bear on diplomacy with Indigenous peoples. They were more willing to believe that Indigenous peoples could eventually become good subjects of the British state, just as they had. This was far from a real solidarity with Indigenous victims of colonialism, but it often distinguished Johnson and others like him from their contemporaries, and especially from the American patriots. Men like Johnson, despite, or perhaps because of, their marginalized Catholic Irish backgrounds, sought advancement and opportunity by investing in imperial reform. By helping empires become more efficient, rational, and modern, they hoped to make lives for themselves that would otherwise be impossible for people of their background.22 In Ireland itself, Catholic opinion about the patriot movements (Irish and American) was divided. Many Catholics in Ireland offered their support to the king’s government in its struggle against the colonists because they believed doing so would demonstrate their loyalty. The result, they hoped, would be the repeal of the Penal Laws. Charles O’Conor of Belanagare, a prominent apologist, noted the irony of Catholics, supposedly principled enemies of all things British, supporting the king while colonists, who claimed to be loyal, betrayed their allegiance. The Catholic Committee, of which O’Conor was an active member, repeatedly offered addresses of loyalty to the king. British officials, for their part, hoped to tap into reserves of Catholic support in order to find soldiers for the king’s army. For such Catholics, it made more sense to support the crown in its struggle against various pa‑ triot groups than to side with provincial Protestant communities that had championed their exclusion. This was also the typical position of the Catholic hierarchy. Bishops and priests urged their flocks to avoid giving offense to government and to wait patiently for relief.23 Yet not all Irish Catholics agreed. As we have seen, some did support the various patriotic and rev‑ olutionary forces at work in the Atlantic. Charles Carroll of Maryland was a signer of the ­Declaration. Matthew Carey was a revolutionary rabble-rouser in Ireland, and remained one during his subsequent exile in America. O’Conor’s own descendants were to become agitators for republicanism and Catho‑ lic relief in Ireland as well as migrants to America. Among common Catholics, who were still largely Irish-speaking, political poetry and song in Irish captured a more ambivalent reality. Irish poets often praised the American rebels, but they did so because they had dealt a blow to the hated British state. The same was often true of their comments about the Protestant patriots of the 1770s and 1780s. Irish-speakers could get behind opposition to the British government but, unlike the patriots, they often combined this with hopes of a Jacobite restoration (the return of the Catholic Stuarts to the throne), and the return of Irish lands to the native Irish elite.24 The result of all of this complexity and ambiguity is that Catholic loyalties did not often break down into easy patriot-loyalist or conservative-radical binaries. Take the famous poet Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin, for instance. He composed numerous poems predicting the downfall of the British regime and the return of the Jacobite prince. At the same time, however, we know Ó Súilleabháin 67

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served in the British navy and composed verses (in English) praising his shipmates and their com‑ mander. It is not clear whether he joined willingly or was pressed into service, but it may not matter much. His story indicates the ways marginalized communities experienced the age of revolution. For some, it was easy to join one of the “sides” but for others, the questions were more complicated, shaped by pragmatic as well as principled factors. Ó Súilleabháin was far from atypical in both making a living in the British armed forces and nursing deep resentments against the British state. Thousands of Catholics joined the British army in the late eighteenth century, and it seems clear that not all of them were motivated by a new enthusiasm for George III. Such pragmatic “loyalism” was not uncommon among other colonized peoples in the era, either, as indicated by the experiences of enslaved people and Indigenous nations during the American Revolution.25

Conclusion While in some important respects Ireland—and Irish people—were on the margins of the Atlantic world, their marginality, ironically, made them central characters in the dramatic events of the age. It contributed to their striking levels of mobility and their eagerness to seize opportunities, whether they were challenging imperial states or supporting them. While any idea of the Irish as natural revolutionaries simply does not fit the reality, it could certainly be said that Irish people were well situated to have an outsized influence on the age of revolution. Whether Catholic or Protestant, set‑ tler or native, loyalist or radical, in North or South America or in Ireland, Irish people crisscrossed an Atlantic world in the throes of revolution and made themselves at home in it as best they could. Their efforts to do so often put them in conflict with other Irish people who chose different paths, and there are few generalizations we can safely make about the Irish experience in the revolution‑ ary Atlantic. But one of those few is that, while Irish people participated in all of the significant upheavals and changes of the era, they did so in ways shaped by the particularities of Irish history. The heady brew of confessional conflict, colonialism, migration, and exile which characterized Irish life made their presence felt wherever Irish people went in the eighteenth century, even if in unpredictable ways.

Notes 1 Griffin, Age of Atlantic Revolutions; Polasky, Revolutions without Borders. 2 Morley, Irish Opinion. 3 Fisher, Gaelic and Indian Origins. 4 Bric, “Ireland, America;” Fisher, Gaelic and Indian Origins; Griffin, The Townshend Moment. 5 Morley, Irish Opinion; Higgins, A Nation of Politicians. 6 Morley, Irish Opinion; Higgins, A Nation of Politicians. 7 Bartlett, Fall and Rise. 8 Kelly, “Irish Protestants;” Kelly, “The Last Will and Testament;” Higgins, A Nation of Politicians, 76, 94–96; Fisher, Gaelic and Indian Origins, 223–236, 239–245. 9 Deloria, Playing Indian; Fisher, Gaelic and Indian Origins, 239–245. 10 Elliott, Partners in Revolution. 11 Smyth, Men of No Property; Elliott, Partners in Revolution. 12 Elliott, Partners in Revolution; Bartlett et al., eds, 1798, 97–188. 13 Whelan, Tree of Liberty, 99–175; Ó Buachalla, “From Jacobite to Jacobin.” 14 Miller et al., eds. Irish Immigrants, 2–10; Doyle, Ireland, Irishmen, 51–107. 15 Griffin, People with No Name; Hofstra, ed., Ulster to America; Kenny, Peaceable Kingdom Lost. 16 Hofstra, ed., Ulster to America, xi–xxvi; Hoffman, Princes of Ireland. 17 Miller et al., eds. Irish Immigrants, 543–544; Doyle, Ireland, Irishmen, 109–151. 18 Wilson, United Irishmen; Bric, Ireland, Philadelphia. 19 Doyle, Ireland, Irishmen, 137–144; Fisher, Gaelic and Indian Origins, 4, 211–254.

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The Irish in the Revolutionary Atlantic 20 Morales, Ireland and the Spanish Empire; O’Conor, ed., The Irish in Europe; Genet-Roufiac and Murphy, eds., Franco-Irish Military Connections. 21 Morales, Ireland and the Spanish Empire, 235–295; Fisher, Gaelic and Indian Origins, 231–234. 22 Shannon, “Dressing for Success”; Miller et al., eds., Irish Immigrants, 461–476; Wainwright, George Croghan. 23 Gibbons and O’Conor, eds. Charles O’Conor; Ward et al., eds., Letters; Bartlett, Fall and Rise; Brady, ed., Catholics and Catholicism. 24 Hoffman, Princes of Ireland; Bric, Ireland, Philadelphia; Morley, Washington i gceannas; Fisher and Ó Conchubhair, eds., Bone and Marrow. 25 Egerton, Death or Liberty; Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery, and Anti-Slavery; Calloway, American Revolution in Indian Country; Doyle, Ireland, Irishmen, xvii–xviii; Morley, Irish Opinion; Fisher and Ó Conchubhair, eds., Bone and Marrow.

Bibliography Primary Sources Brady, John, ed. Catholics and Catholicism in the Eighteenth-Century Press. Maynooth, Ireland: Catholic Re‑ cord Society of Ireland, 1965. Fisher, Samuel K., and Brian Ó Conchubhair, eds. Bone and Marrow/Cnámh agus Smior: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Medieval to Modern. Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2022. Miller, Kerby, Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling, and David N. Doyle, eds. Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675–1815. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Morley, Vincent, ed. Washington i gceannas a ríochta: Cogadh Mheiriceá in Litríocht na Gaeilge. Dublin: Cosicéim, 2005. Ward, Robert E., John F. Wrynn, S.J., and Catherine Coogan Ward, eds. Letters of Charles O’Conor of Belana‑ gare: A Catholic Voice in Eighteenth-Century Ireland. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1988.

Secondary Sources Bartlett, Thomas. The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question 1690–1830. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1992. Bartlett, Thomas, David Dickson, Dáire Keough, and Kevin Whelan, eds. 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003. Bric, Maurice. “Ireland, America and the Reassessment of a Special Relationship, 1760–1783.” EighteenthCentury Ireland 11 (1996): 88–119. Bric, Maurice. Ireland, Philadelphia, and the Re-Invention of America, 1760–1800. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008. Calloway, Colin. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Com‑ munities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Doyle, David Noel. Ireland, Irishmen, and Revolutionary America, 1760–1820. Dublin: Merrier Press, 1981. Egerton, Douglas. Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America. New York: Oxford Univer‑ sity Press, 2009. Elliott, Marianne. Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982. Fisher, Samuel K. The Gaelic and Indian Origins of the American Revolution: Diversity and Empire in the Brit‑ ish Atlantic, 1688–1783. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Genet-Rouffiac, Nathalie, and David Murphy, eds. Franco-Irish Military Connections, 1590–1945. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009. Gibbons, Luke, and Kieran Denis O’Conor, eds. Charles O’Conor of Ballinagare, 1710–1791: Life and Works. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2015. Griffin, Patrick. The Age of Atlantic Revolution: The Fall and Rise of a Connected World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023.

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Samuel K. Fisher Griffin, Patrick. The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World 1689–1764. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Griffin, Patrick. The Townshend Moment: The Making of Empire and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. Higgins, Padhraig. A Nation of Politicians: Gender, Patriotism, and Political Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010. Hofstra, Warren R., ed. Ulster to America: The Scots-Irish Migration Experience, 1680–1830. Knoxville: Uni‑ versity of Tennessee Press, 2012. Kelly, James. “Irish Protestants and the Irish Language in the Eighteenth Century.” In Kelly and Ciarán Mac Murchaidh, eds. Irish and English: Essays on the Irish Linguistic and Cultural Frontier, 1600–1900. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012, 189–217. Kelly, James. “The Last Will and Testament of Henry Flood: Context and Text.” Studia Hibernica 31 (2000/2001): 37–52. Kenny, Kevin. Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experi‑ ment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. McBride, Ian. Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves. Dublin: Gill & McMillan, 2009. Morales, Oscar Recio. Ireland and the Spanish Empire, 1600–1825. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010. Morley, Vincent. Irish Opinion and the American Revolution, 1760–1783. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Ó Buachalla, Breandán. “From Jacobite to Jacobin.” In 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective, edited by Thomas Bartlett, David Dickson, Dáire Keough and Kevin Whelan. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003, 75–96. O’Conor, Thomas, ed. The Irish in Europe 1500–1815. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001. Polasky, Janet. Revolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Rodgers, Nini. Ireland, Slavery, and Anti-Slavery: 1612–1865. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Shannon, Timothy. “Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier: Hendrick, William Johnson, and the Indian Fashion.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 53, no. 1 (January 1996): 13–42. Smyth, James. The Men of No Property: Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1992. Wainwright, Nicholas B. George Croghan, Wilderness Diplomat. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959. Whelan, Kevin. The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism, and the Construction of Irish Identity, 1760–1830. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996. Wilson, David A. United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

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5 RACE, LABOR, AND SLAVERY IN ANTEBELLUM IRISH AMERICA Angela F. Murphy

In 1841, after a tour of Ireland on behalf of the American Antislavery Society, Black activist Charles Lenox Remond brought an “Address from the people of Ireland to their countrymen and country‑ women in America” back to the United States. This “Irish Address,” eventually signed by over 60,000 Irish men and women, called upon the Irish‑American population to “treat the colored people as … equals, as brethren” and to support the abolitionists who promoted an immediate, unconditional end to slavery in their adopted nation. The address was penned by leaders of the Dublin‑based Hibernian Antislavery Society, and among the signatures on the document were those of prominent Irishmen, the most significant of which was that of Irish political reformer Daniel O’Connell. As an elected MP, O’Connell had supported the parliamentary move to end British slavery in the West Indies, but he was more famous as an advocate for the interests of Irish Catholics. He had spearheaded the movement for Catholic Emancipation in Ireland in the 1820s, pressing for their political rights. In the 1840s, he led the Loyal National Repeal Association (LNRA), which agitated for an end to the parliamentary union between Great Britain and Ireland and for the creation of an independent Irish parliament. Because of O’Connell, the abolition of slavery became a point of discussion in Irish na‑ tionalist circles. Many of the signatures on the Irish Address had, in fact, been collected at meetings to support the movement for Irish Repeal.1 With the arrival of the Irish Address on American shores, the causes of Irish nationalism and American abolitionism became intertwined in the United States as well, and transatlantic debates about the relationship between the two erupted from time to time throughout the rest of the Antebel‑ lum era. In each instance, leaders of the Irish‑American community rejected appeals that they support the abolitionist mission to destroy American slavery and promote racial equality. Influenced by their position in their adopted homeland as well as their concerns for their ancestral home, their refusal to support the abolitionists helped to shape Antebellum American views of the Irish‑American popula‑ tion as pro‑slavery and anti‑Black. Their refusal also led to sustained interest among historians of Irish America in explaining the group’s positions on race, labor, and slavery.

An Irish Catholic Laboring Class To understand the Irish‑American rejection of the abolitionist appeals, one first needs to understand the character and situation of the Antebellum Irish‑American community. When we speak of that community, we are primarily referencing the large wave of Irish Catholics, most of whom were 71

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-7

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people of little means who came to the United States after 1815, and increasingly so after 1830. ­Immigrants from Ireland had arrived in North America since the colonial period, but the earlier ar‑ rivals were mostly Ulster Protestants, who later would be known as the “Scotch Irish” in the United States, as Peter Gilmore discusses in his chapter in this volume. There had been a lull in Irish immi‑ gration to North America during the early years of the American republic, but in 1815 the flow of mi‑ grants across the Atlantic resumed. Travel had become less hazardous with the end of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, and the infrastructure building that occurred in the United States following the War of 1812 provided opportunities for work. Lacking political equality, access to land, and economic opportunities in Ireland, impoverished Catholics began to arrive in the United States in ever‑larger numbers. Irish Protestants continued to come, but during the 1830s Catholics began to dominate the stream of Irish migration, making up around 90 percent of the new Irish arrivals by 1840. Numbers of Irish immigrants in the early years of the nineteenth century were significant, with between 800,000 and a million arriving in North America between 1815 and 1840 and around one and a quarter million new arrivals between 1847 and 1854 due to dislocations caused by the Irish Great Famine.2 The Irish Catholic immigrants who made up the bulk of the immigrant stream of the Antebellum period filled the growing number of unskilled positions in factories, on public works, and in domestic service positions that proliferated as the United States developed its own industries and transporta‑ tion networks. As the character of Irish immigration shifted, Irish Protestants sought to differentiate themselves from the impoverished Catholic arrivals, taking on the designation “Scotch Irish.” By the mid‑nineteenth century, the label “Irish American” was associated primarily with Catholic immigrant laborers who were suspect to many in the United States due to their religion, their relative poverty, and their foreign ways.3 Lacking resources, most of the new Irish Catholic immigrants settled in ports of arrival in the Northeast, crowding into urban areas and transforming the cultures of seaboard cities like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Fewer migrated to the southern states, but those who did also tended to settle in port cities. Irish Americans became a primarily urban population as the men took on menial labor positions and many of the women worked in domestic service. They crowded into neighbor‑ hoods that became associated with poverty, violence, and disease. Most notorious among these was the Five Points neighborhood of New York City, where they lived alongside African Americans and other impoverished groups. Irish immigrants who moved inland generally did so to provide unskilled labor in mining and in railroad, road, and canal construction. Although immigrants found opportuni‑ ties in the United States that they did not have at home, their work and living conditions were far from comfortable. Irish laborers on public works faced many challenges, including exposure to disease, injury or death on dangerous job sites, inferior living conditions in the tent and shantytowns that arose along construction sites, and inconsistency in payment from their employers. These conditions often led to collective violence among the Irish, who brought with them a tradition of resistance from Ireland. This resistance, along with their Catholic beliefs, poor living conditions, vulnerability to dis‑ ease, and association with drink and disorder contributed to the disdain many native‑born Americans held for these new immigrants, and many explained the hardships Irish‑American laborers faced on assumed deficits in their character.4 In addition to the difficult material conditions endured by Irish Americans in the Antebellum pe‑ riod, they also faced the challenge of American nativism. The poor, Catholic immigrants who crowded onto the shores of the United States were objects of suspicion among many native‑born Americans who worried about the large, sudden influx of a foreign‑born population whom they believed, be‑ cause of their religion and lack of resources, would not be virtuous republicans. Antebellum nativists were especially concerned about religion, for they saw the Catholic Church as an authoritarian insti‑ tution that was incompatible with republican values, and they feared the influence of the church over Catholic immigrant decision‑making. Worried about their political impact, some nativists created 72

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organizations to encourage stricter limitations on access to the ballot box and ­political office for the foreign born. To protect their interests, Irish Americans banded together to exert political power and better their position in their adopted home. As they did so, they became an important constituency for the Democratic Party, which promoted Irish interests, opposed nativism, and often provided patron‑ age for immigrant supporters of the party.5 These circumstances provide clues as to why Irish immigrants rejected the call to support the antislavery movement. The rejection can be seen, in part, as a defensive reaction to the challenges of economic hardship and nativism. Economic competition with African Americans contributed to intergroup hostilities and a general apathy toward a social reform movement that would have no im‑ pact on their own dire condition. Nativism also contributed to the lack of support for abolition both because many abolitionists themselves expressed suspicion of Catholic immigrants and because Irish Americans wished to counter claims that their presence was a threat to the American republic. They portrayed themselves as good citizens who would not threaten the American Union, a charge often levied against abolitionists. In the South, Irish immigrants felt especially pressured to align them‑ selves with the institutions of their adopted home as they sought acceptance in states politically and economically dominated by a slave‑holding class. In addition, the Democratic Party, which helped Irish Americans steer their way through the difficulties of their position in the United States, generally supported the institution of slaveholding. Values brought by the immigrants from across the Atlantic also played into their position. The Catholic Church took a conservative stand on the issue of slavery during the first half of the nine‑ teenth century, criticizing the institution but withholding support from those who would attack it politically and urging instead to let it fall under its own weight. A traditional Irish Catholic antipathy for Great Britain and the Protestant ascendancy also played a role in their position because the aboli‑ tionist movement was associated with both. In general, Irish Catholics saw abolition as a Protestant social reform movement, and they believed its members to be generally antipathetic to the interests of Irish Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic. They also felt that the energy that was put into the abolition movement distracted from Irish calls for political independence from Great Britain and for attention to social justice for the Catholic Irish.

Nationalists and Abolitionists By virtue of their identity and circumstances, then, Irish Americans were unlikely to accept the appeal to join with the abolitionists that came with the Irish Address. After a meeting called in Boston by American Antislavery Society leader William Lloyd Garrison in January 1842 to present the address, leaders of the Irish‑American community denounced it as an inappropriate interference in American politics, which set the tone for future responses to abolitionist entreaties. Throughout the early 1840s, O’Connell and other members of the LNRA continued to communicate with Irish‑American support‑ ers of the repeal movement, criticizing their rejection of the abolitionists and urging them to adopt an antislavery stance—all to no avail. Leaders of American repeal associations argued that slavery was constitutional and that it was the duty of Irish Americans, as new American citizens, to uphold the values of the American republic. They also insinuated that the transatlantic abolition movement was part of a British plot to promote disunity among Americans and weaken the United States. American repeal associations in the slave‑ holding South responded to the abolitionists with defenses of slavery and their adopted states’ social order. And although Irish‑American leaders in the repeal associations of the North generally es‑ chewed racial explanations for their position against abolition in their rhetoric, some of the ­responses to the abolitionist appeals exhibited anti‑Black sentiment. A group of miners from Pottsville, Penn‑ sylvania, for example, responded to the address by announcing that they did not consider Black 73

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people their “brethren.” And in 1843, a native‑born Democratic politician wrote a letter to the LNRA on behalf of the Cincinnati Repeal Association stating that although most Americans saw slavery as an evil, “morality in abstract” didn’t justify an attack on property rights. Moreover, the letter made the argument that African Americans were “inferior as a race” and that slavery had so degraded the enslaved that “almost a century would be required to elevate the character” of Black Americans and “destroy the antipathies” of white Americans. Seizing on this rhetoric, Garrison and his abolitionist colleagues depicted the repealers’ rejection of their movement as a racist and proslavery stance, and Irish Americans gained a reputation of being anti‑Black as well as anti‑abolitionist.6 The debate surrounding the Irish‑American position on slavery continued after the rejection of the Irish Address as abolitionists, O’Connell, and other repealers in Ireland criticized Irish‑American anti‑abolition and repeated their entreaties to join in the fight against the institution. After the repeal movement collapsed in the second half of the 1840s, the issue persisted as the Irish faced the dev‑ astation of the Great Famine. American organizations sprung up to send relief to Ireland, but some abolitionists questioned whether the Irish should accept “blood‑stained money” from a nation that allowed slaveholding. Others, most notably those who supported a new generation of romantic na‑ tionalist reformers known as “Young Ireland,” denounced this inquiry as hostile to Irish interests, and this criticism echoed in nationalist circles on both sides of the Atlantic. The debate continued into the 1850s as Irish Americans expressed resentment for the support many members of the emergent antislavery Republican Party gave to nativists who wished to curb Irish‑American political power. At the same time, Irish nationalist exiles arrived in the United States throughout this period and en‑ gaged with the question of slavery along with the rest of the American nation as it faced the growing sectional crisis over the issue. There were various approaches to the problem of slavery among these exiles, but some, such as John Mitchel, who settled for a time in the American South, gained fame as vocal defenders of the institution. It was not until later in the twentieth century that historians really investigated these exchanges in any kind of depth. Early references to them simply pointed out, as an explanation, aspects of the Irish‑American experience highlighted above: their Catholicism, poverty and need to procure employment, association with the Democratic Party, and responses to nativism. In time, however, historians began to attempt to weigh these explanations and the way they interacted with one another in a more sophisticated manner.

Race and Nation in the Antebellum United States An early thread of investigation pivoted on the question of how a laboring immigrant class negoti‑ ated the economic and social structures of Antebellum America. This was an obvious line of inquiry, for immigrants arriving in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century had to adapt to a society within which the structures of class and race were dynamic. The Antebellum pe‑ riod witnessed the expansion of the franchise in the United States to all free white men, and class ­issues entered politics with a force not before seen. In addition, as democracy expanded for the white population, free Black Americans saw their rights explicitly attacked to curb any possible political power they might gain under new suffrage provisions. Racial lines hardened in the Antebellum era as slavery and the position of Black Americans in the United States became central to American politics. Within this emergent social order, Irish Americans were considered white and, under Ameri‑ can immigration law, could vote after a five‑year residency. Still, many found themselves relegated to an inferior economic position in their adopted home and felt their needs were ignored by those more interested in the divisive slavery issue. Resentment of the Black population grew among some members of the Irish‑American working class as they competed with Black Americans for the menial jobs relegated to those at the bottom of the American social order and as they saw their own struggles 74

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ignored or dismissed by social reformers. Taking note of the situation, scholars working in the sec‑ ond half of the twentieth century began to examine Irish‑American positions on slavery and race by focusing on this structural situation in the United States.7 Early scholarly references to Irish‑American hostility toward Black Americans and their allies explained their position as a result of labor competition between two groups who vied with one another for unskilled jobs in the burgeoning Antebellum economy. Several older accounts of Irish involvement in anti‑Black riots, for example, asserted that these riots occurred due to animosity created by job competition between Irish and Black Americans and fears that the achievement of abolitionist goals would increase the amount of free Black people with whom Irish immigrants would have to compete. Although labor competition certainly played a role in some expressions of Irish‑­ American anti‑Black sentiment, later studies hinted at other criteria associated with race and class. In the 1990s, changes in the field of labor history led historians who were interested in the phenomenon of class competition toward a more sophisticated inquiry into the Irish‑American position on slavery and race. Influenced by recent interest in race as a social construction and recognizing the lack of ­attention that labor historians traditionally had given to race in their discussions of American class negotiation and conflict, some investigators set out to integrate the scholarship on American race formation with that of class formation. The racial attitudes of Irish‑American immigrants, who made up such a large percentage of the new unskilled laboring class of Antebellum America, became the centerpiece of several of these studies.8 Among the most influential was David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, published in 1991. Roediger wrote within a Marxist framework, and class formation remained central to explanations in his book, but he also was heavily influenced by scholars of African‑American history, who pointed out the historic racial divisions between white and Black laborers in American society. His title, The Wages of Whiteness, is drawn from W.E.B. DuBois’s assertion in 1935 that although both white and Black laborers suffered from low wages, white workers still received a “public and psychological wage” of deference to their whiteness. Roe‑ diger addressed the way that the Irish working class tapped into this “wage” to improve their position in American society. According to Roediger, Americans viewed Irish immigrants as non‑white during the Antebellum period, their social standing parallel to that of the Black population. Irish immigrant hostility toward Black people and abolitionists therefore grew out of a desire to elevate their position and “become” white by allying themselves with mainstream American society and placing distance between themselves and Black Americans.9 Roediger’s book was followed by an outpouring of literature on “whiteness,” and several works addressed Irish‑American attitudes in a vein similar to his work. Theodore W. Allen’s The Invention of the White Race, Volume 1, published in 1994, compared the Irish position at home with that of Black Americans to demonstrate that understandings of race rested on culture and ideology instead of biology. Like Roediger, Allen asserted that the Irish learned how to be white upon coming to the United States. Noel Ignatiev’s 1995 publication, How the Irish Became White, also complemented Roediger’s study. In it, Ignatiev chronicled the Irish progression from being an “oppressed” group in Ireland to that of an “oppressor” in America by identifying with the white culture that existed in their new homeland. Although Ignatiev’s book spent more time describing specific instances of racism exhibited by Irish Americans than discussing why these attitudes came about, he framed his narrative around Roediger’s notions of whiteness as a social construction and the importance of this social construction to Irish‑American identity.10 This formulation of “whiteness” helped to open a new avenue in understanding Irish immigrant opinion. By highlighting the fact that mass Irish immigration occurred during a period when Ameri‑ can categorizations of both class and race were fluid but beginning to solidify, Roediger pointed to new influences that encouraged the reformulation of Irish positions concerning slavery and race once 75

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they arrived in the United States. The broad analytical quality of this work, however, was more valu‑ able in helping to generate further inquiry than in providing answers concerning the ways that Ameri‑ can conceptions of race affected immigrants. In later years, several scholars revisited and helped to refine Roediger’s theories on whiteness. Historians outside of labor history increasingly pointed to the limitations of examining “white‑ ness” solely within the context of class. Later books by Matthew Frye Jacobson and Ian F. Haney Lòpez, for example, focused instead on the political constructions of race. Their conclusions cast doubt on assertions that Irish Americans changed their racial identity once they arrived in American society. Legally, they were considered “free white persons” from the moment that they arrived in the United States, and they therefore accrued the rights of citizenship upon naturalization. This legal sta‑ tus helped to differentiate Irish immigrants from Black Americans as soon as they took up residence in their new country; there was no need for them to strive to “become” white to achieve such differ‑ entiation. These authors showed how legal definitions of race not only reflected but helped to create racial understandings in American society. Irish immigrant attitudes toward free Black people were at least in part derived from the structures of the American legal system and the racial definitions of citizenship that existed within that system.11 While Jacobson and Lòpez sought to redefine the notion of whiteness, in the first decade of the twenty‑first century some historians began to question its validity as an analytical concept altogether. In a 2002 article in the Journal of American History, for instance, Peter Kolchin argued that pro‑ ponents of Whiteness Studies sought to explain immigrant identity using too broad an analytical framework. In their hands, “whiteness” had become a stand‑in for “acceptable.” By pointing out the way specific aspects of the Irish‑American identity—like their Catholicism and their peasant background—came into conflict with American ideologies, Kolchin hinted at the need to move from an emphasis on American structures of class and race to include a closer focus on immigrant identity and the immigrant experience itself.12 Labor historian Eric Arneson also took exception with the whiteness scholarship that emerged in the 1990s, arguing in a 2001 forum that whiteness theoreticians relied on “highly selective readings” and that their arguments lacked engagement with the full range of evidence available, including that produced by the immigrants about whom they wrote. Kevin Kenny echoed this critique, pointing out that advocates of whiteness theory did not engage with the voices of Irish Americans in their argu‑ ments. The limitation of using the idea of whiteness to explain Irish immigrant opinion, according to critics of those who explained Irish‑American views through the lens of whiteness, was the exclusive focus of the theory’s practitioners on the structural conditions that the immigrants moved into and its neglect of the immigrants themselves. As Cian T. McMahon pointed out in a 2015 overview of white‑ ness and the immigration debate, the idea of Irish Americans becoming white had become a “truism” that “confuses more than it clarifies.” Although the theory accurately built on the idea of race as a so‑ cial construct, its application to Irish Americans ignored other factors that shaped the Irish‑American position on slavery and race, most especially those aspects connected to Irish‑American identity.13

Irish‑American Responses to Abolitionist Appeals In response to these critiques, historians of Irish America began to explore what Irish Americans themselves said about their position on slavery and race. This led to a more nuanced picture of their position, which was based on multiple aspects of their identity, including those that were nurtured in Ireland. These inquiries did not negate the idea, however, that much of the reasoning behind their viewpoint grew out of the tensions that erupted between the immigrant group and the demands of the new society into which they had moved. One early investigation, published years before the rise of Whiteness Studies, presented Irish‑American anti‑abolitionism from this perspective. Rather than 76

Race, Labor, and Slavery in Antebellum Irish America

approaching the question of Irish‑American sentiment as a question about race, Gilbert Osofsky’s 1975 article “Abolitionists, Irish Immigrants, and the Dilemmas of Romantic Nationalism” focused on the specific challenges that Irish Americans faced as an immigrant group struggling to gain acceptance in American society. In the article, Osofsky examined the failure of the allied effort of American abo‑ litionists and Irish repeal leaders to lure Irish Americans into the movement against slavery. Although he conceded that economic competition played a role in the Irish‑American position, Osofsky claimed that the real economic explanation for the rejection of anti‑slavery appeals was apathy. They were too concerned with survival to involve themselves in a cause that benefited others. Osofsky’s main point, however, was that American anti‑Catholicism put Irish Americans on the defensive. Because of suspi‑ cions expressed about their loyalty to the American republic, they felt the need to express unwavering support for their adopted home, the unity of which was placed under threat by abolitionist entreaties.14 According to Osofsky, this Irish‑American position was consistent with the patterns of all first‑generation ethnic groups, who tended to adopt the values of the new nation in order to reformu‑ late their identity as American instead of alien. Ironically, Osofsky, a historian of African ‑American history, stood virtually alone in looking at Irish‑American anti‑abolition within the context of the im‑ migration experience and the acculturation process until the twenty‑first century. Although the idea of Americanization is at the center of many early histories of American ethnic groups, including the Irish, there had been little discussion of how negotiation of this identity helped to inform immigrant interactions and opinions concerning key American issues such as slavery and racial equality. To understand the shift in Irish immigrant opinion and ideology concerning race and slavery fully, some twenty‑first‑century investigators recognized the need to build on Osofsky’s formulation of the issue as one involving immigrant attempts at adaptation to a new homeland. This required engaging with Irish‑American voices, for although Osofsky’s work presented a more grounded perspective than that of the whiteness historians who wrote a few decades after him, his argument contained the same limitation of those works: a lack of engagement with Irish‑American sources. It was time to examine what Irish Americans themselves said about their position on slavery and race. This was the goal of American Slavery, Irish Freedom: Abolition, Immigrant Citizenship, and the Transatlantic Movement for Irish Repeal, published in 2010. In addition to sources associated with the abolitionists, it engaged with the statements on slavery and abolition published by repeal socie‑ ties and other groups in the Irish and Irish‑American press. The investigation revealed that neither racial prejudice nor economic issues were at the forefront of the arguments against joining with the abolitionists. The anti‑abolitionist rhetoric, in fact, emanated mainly from the leaders of these as‑ sociations, many of whom were more prosperous members of the Irish‑American community and some of whom were not, in fact, Irish‑born, but were Democratic politicians who had allied with Irish repealers. Their arguments, as Osofsky had surmised in his 1975 article, were much more tightly focused on the perceived duties of Irish Americans to the American republic. They repeatedly pointed out the nativist suspicion that was cast on Irish Catholic immigrants, and they attempted to reassure fellow Americans of Irish‑American support for the unity and stability of the republic by opposing the divisive goals of the abolitionists. Their position revealed more about the question of slavery in American society at large than the position of a specific ethnic group.15 Around the same time, John Quinn also investigated the sentiments expressed by Irish‑American repeal associations, and in two articles he highlighted other arguments made by repealers for their rejection of the abolitionists. Based on his study of several repeal meetings in different US cities, he grounded their position in their commitments to the Catholic Church and the Democratic Party, two institutions that took an anti‑abolitionist position. Although they emphasized different reasons for the Irish‑American position, it is notable that both Quinn’s study and American Slavery, Irish Freedom found little to support the whiteness theoreticians’ interpretation of anti‑abolition among Irish‑American repealers.16 77

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Widening the View Chronologically and Geographically Much of the initial discussion of the Irish‑American position on slavery centered around the con‑ troversy that arose among Irish repealers over abolitionist appeals, but authors in the twenty‑first century increasingly expanded the conversation to include other episodes that arose among Irish Americans concerning slavery and race. These investigations made arguments that highlighted not only the situation in which Irish Americans found themselves in the United States, but also the trans‑ atlantic influences that shaped the views of the Irish in America. One of the first works of the twenty‑first century to do this was David T. Gleeson’s 2001 book, The Irish in the South, which discussed the acculturation process that Irish immigrants went through in the US South before, during, and after the Civil War. According to Gleeson, the immigrants “were able to overcome their ethnicity while not abandoning their distinctness” in the South by supporting the Southern social structure yet still maintaining their ties to various Irish institutions. In one chapter of his study, Gleeson addressed the complexities behind Southern Irish support for slavery. Accord‑ ing to Gleeson, Irish Southerners were proslavery for several reasons: their desire to show loyalty to Southern traditions and be accepted by their new communities, job competition with free Black people in the South, their association of abolitionism with British Protestantism, and the conservative position of the Catholic Church on slavery. Gleeson therefore recognized the interaction between Irish traditions, Southern values, and specific challenges faced by Irish immigrants in the South as factors in their position.17 Ian Delahanty’s more recent work on Irish‑American anti‑abolition made an even more explicit case for giving more attention to the transatlantic influences on their stance, which, he argued in a 2016 article, became especially important in the late 1840s and early 1850s as they confronted new controversies over slavery after the decline of the repeal movement. Acknowledging that Irish‑ American repealers explained their rejection of abolition with references to their interests in the United States during the early 1840s, Delahanty argued that Irish‑American justifications of their rejection of the antislavery movement changed during and after the Great Irish Famine, which caused immense dislocations in Ireland between 1845 and 1854. In response to that crisis, Americans in both the northern and southern United States organized to send relief to the suffering Irish poor, but some abolitionists, like Hibernian Antislavery Society member James Haughton, responded to this situation with suggestions that the Irish should send back “bloodstained money” provided by Ameri‑ can slaveholders and those who supported their interests. Many of Irish descent on both sides of the Atlantic were angered by this suggestion, seeing it as proof that the abolitionists cared little for the Irish population.18 Especially vehement were members of the Irish Confederation, a body that had risen to promi‑ nence as O’Connell’s repeal movement declined. The “Young Irelanders” who made up the Irish Confederation were romantic nationalists who were wholly focused on the needs of Ireland; unlike O’Connell, many were hostile to the abolitionists, whom they believed were unsupportive of their movement. With the emergence of Young Ireland, Delahanty argued, came a critique of abolitionism rooted in Ireland and Irish identity. Delahanty also pointed out that Irish immigration to the United States increased immensely as a result of the Great Famine, and that the impoverished immigrant ­arrivals in the United States felt their interests were similarly overlooked by the antislavery politi‑ cians of the 1850s, who were absorbed with the question of slavery. Thus, Irish‑American justi‑ fications for their anti‑abolitionist position were increasingly rooted in their transatlantic identity, reflecting aspects of their concerns for Ireland as well as for their position in the United States. Delahanty recounted how this position was elucidated in a series of controversies concerning slavery that emerged concerning Irish Americans between 1849 and 1854. In 1849, Irish Catholic temperance reformer Father Theobold Mathew toured the United States to promote his cause. As he 78

Race, Labor, and Slavery in Antebellum Irish America

did so, he encountered criticisms from American abolitionists who took exception to his refusal to address the issue of American slavery with his audiences, and Irish leaders expressed resentment for their critiques of the Irish reformer. Delahanty also gave attention to the “transatlantic investment in American nationhood” among Young Irelanders, who lifted the United States up as a source of aid for Ireland, a refuge for those dislocated by famine, and a republican training ground for Irish national‑ ists. These views led to continued criticism of British and American abolitionists who, they believed, exacerbated American sectionalism during the 1850s. Finally, Delahanty described the controversy that arose in 1854 when Young Ireland exile to the United States John Mitchel began to publish vehemently proslavery views in response to abolitionist arguments, going as far as to declare that there was nothing wrong with wishing for “a good plantation well‑stocked with healthy negroes in Alabama.” While many Irish Americans rejected the extremity of his views, most supported his expressed animosity toward abolitionists, for Mitchel’s critique arose at the height of the American sectional crisis, and Irish Americans remained concerned about the American union. Moreover, they associated antislavery sentiment with American nativism, as the Know Nothing Party and its Repub‑ lican successors seemed to marry the two causes together.19 Cian T. McMahon also placed the question of Antebellum Irish‑American views on slavery in a broader context in a chapter of his 2015 work, The Global Dimensions of Irish Identity: Race, Na‑ tion, and the Popular Press, 1840–1880. Chapter 3, “Battling the Anglo‑Saxon Myth: Irish Identity in the Antebellum United States, 1848–1861,” focused, like Delahanty’s article, on Young Ireland and Irish nationalism in the United States following the Great Famine. In it, McMahon pointed out that Irish‑American conceptions of race were not bound up so much in a white/Black binary, but instead were rooted in the difference between Celt and Saxon, and he argued that many Irish Americans sought to maintain a balance between their identity as Irish Celts and their commitment to American institu‑ tions. They countered ideas about Anglo‑Saxon superiority that were popular in their new homeland with arguments that Irish Celts and other groups who came to the United States were all “constitu‑ ent elements of the American nation.” Like Delahanty, McMahon gave attention to the debate over slavery that emerged with John Mitchel’s vocal defense of the institution in 1854, pointing out that this defense illustrated the transnational dimensions of the controversy, as it was connected to the ro‑ mantic nationalism of Young Ireland. Mitchel’s proslavery stance provoked a response among fellow Irish nationalists in the United States and Ireland, many of whom wished to d­ istance ­themselves from his extreme views about slavery and Black Americans. McMahon pointed out that, although there were some white supremacist elements among the Irish‑American community, most of its members believed that “their greatest threat came not from the Blacks below but the Anglo‑Saxons above,” and so they opposed abolitionism more out of its association with Anglo‑Saxon Protestantism than out of anti‑Black sentiment.20

Conclusion There has been a clear progression in the way that historians have interpreted the engagement of Antebellum Irish Americans, who made up a large portion of the nation’s Antebellum laboring class, with the contested issues of slavery and race. Starting with assumptions based on aspects of the Irish‑American identity and experience, scholars had, by the end of the twentieth century, shifted to more theoretical explanations concerning the construction of whiteness in the new republic. But those explanations also represented assumptions that were grounded more in theory than in data. With the dawn of the twenty‑first century, historians sought out a more evidence‑based approach, engaging with the voices of Irish Americans themselves in the form of the reports and communications of the Irish repeal associations of the early 1840s. These inquiries highlighted the desire of an immigrant group to prove they were loyal citizens as well as align their position with that of both the Democratic 79

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Party and the Catholic Church, two institutions that argued against the divisive nature of the abolition movement. And most recently, historians have extended the inquiry into the Irish‑American position on slavery chronologically, moving beyond the repeal debates to consider later issues like famine relief, the romantic nationalism of Young Ireland, and responses to the sectional politics of the 1850s. These inquiries have highlighted changes in attitudes over time and, more importantly, exhibited how Irish as well as American concerns helped to shape the position of the Irish‑American community. They have brought a truly transatlantic perspective to the reasoning behind Irish‑American opposi‑ tion to the abolition movement. To date, then, modern historians have proposed a variety of intertwined reasons for Antebellum Irish‑American attitudes on slavery and race. Scholars have given attention to the structural situation of the United States, the specific challenges that Irish immigrants faced in their new homeland, and interests and traditions that they brought with them from Ireland. Nevertheless, historians still main‑ tain differing perspectives on how to understand the “whiteness” of Irish immigrants, as evidenced by some of the chapters in this volume. Taken as a whole, these interpretations offer a complex picture of an immigrant group’s negotiation of their identity. They emphasize the challenges they faced as they arrived in a slaveholding nation in which they were themselves regarded with suspicion and as they negotiated their own needs for social justice and material relief for Irish communities on both sides of the Atlantic.

Notes 1 For discussion of the debates surrounding the Irish Address see Chapter Four, “The Irish Address,” in Mur‑ phy, American Slavery, Irish Freedom, 101–123; See quote from the address on page 51. On O’Connell’s abolitionism, see also Riach, “Daniel O’Connell and American Slavery,” 3–25; Nelson, “‘Come Out of Such a Land, You Irishmen’,” 58–81; Rodgers, “Daniel O’Connell and Anti‑Slavery,” 259–277; Kinealy, Daniel O’Connell and the Anti‑Slavery Movement. 2 Kenny, The American Irish, 45–46; Meagher, “Irish America from Revolution to Famine,” 42–59. 3 Kenny, The American Irish, 2–3. 4 Way, Common Labor; Dearinger, The Filth of Progress; Mason, “‘The Hands Here are Disposed to be Tur‑ bulent’,” 253–272. Anbinder, Five Points; Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–1863. 5 Potter, To the Golden Door, 241–261; Billington, Protestant Crusade, 53–64; Knobel, Paddy and the Republic. 6 Murphy, American Slavery, Irish Freedom, 147–148. See quotes from Pottsville on page 89 and from Cincin‑ nati on page 147. 7 On race and class structures in the Antebellum United States, see Stewart, “Racial Modernity,” 181–217. 8 Man, “Labor Competition,” 375–405; Man, “The Irish in New York,” 7, 126; Lofton, “Northern Labor and the Negro During the Civil War,” 251–273; Wittke, The Irish in America, 125–126. Barbara Fields’ 1982 article on race as an ideological construct was instrumental in this trend. See Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,”143–177. 9 Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 133–165; DuBois, Black Reconstruction, 727. 10 Allen, Invention of the White Race, 1:169; Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White. 11 Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; López, White by Law. 12 Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies,”154–173. 13 Arneson, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” 3–32; Kenny, The American Irish, 69–70; McMahon, “The Pages of Whiteness,” 40–41. 14 Osofsky, “Abolitionists, Irish Immigrants.” 15 Murphy, American Slavery, Irish Freedom. 16 Quinn, “The Rise and Fall of Repeal,” 45–78; Quinn, “Expecting the Impossible?” 667–710. 17 Gleeson, The Irish in The South. 18 Delahanty, “Transatlantic Roots,” 164–192. 19 Delahanty, “Transatlantic Roots,” 174–178. 20 McMahon, Global Dimensions, 77–110.

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Bibliography Allen, Theodore W. The Invention of the White Race. Vol. I. New York: Verso, 1994. Anbinder, Tyler. Five Points: The Nineteenth‑Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum. New York: The Free Press, 2001. Arneson, Eric. “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination.” International Labor and Working‑Class History 60 (Fall 2001): 3–32. Billington, Ray Allen. The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: A Study in the Origins of American Nativism. New York: Macmillan, 1938. Dearinger, Ryan. The Filth of Progress: Immigrants, Americans, and the Building of Canals and Railroads in the West. Berkely: University of California Press, 2015. Delahanty, Ian. “The Transatlantic Roots of Irish American Anti‑Abolitionism, 1843–1859.” Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 2 (June 2016): 164–192. DuBois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in the United States, 1860–1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1977 (1935). Ernst, Robert. Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–1863. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993. Fields, Barbara J. “Ideology and Race in American History.” In Region, Race and Reconstruction, edited by J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, 143–177. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Gleeson, David T. The Irish in the South, 1815–1877. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cam‑ bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. Harlow: Longman, 2000. Kinealy, Christine. Daniel O’Connell and the Anti‑Slavery Movement: “The Saddest People the Sun Sees.” New York: Routledge, 2011. Knobel, Dale T. Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1986. Kolchin, Peter. “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America.” Journal of American History 89, no.1 (June 2002): 154–173. Lofton, Willis H. “Northern Labor and the Negro During the Civil War.” Journal of Negro History 34, no. 3 (July 1949): 251–273. López, Ian Haney. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. Vol. 21. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Man, Albion P., Jr. “Labor Competition and the New York City Draft Riots of 1863.” Journal of Negro History 36, no. 4 (October 1951): 375–405. Man, Albion P., Jr. “The Irish in New York in the Early Eighteen‑Sixties.” Irish Historical Studies 7, no. 126 (September 1950): 87–108. Mason, Matthew E. “‘The Hands Here Are Disposed to be Turbulent’: Unrest Among the Irish Trackmen of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 1829–1851.” Labor History 39, no. 3 (August 1998): 253–272. McMahon, Cian T. The Global Dimensions of Irish Identity: Race, Nation, and the Popular Press, 1840–1880. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. McMahon, Cian T. “The Pages of Whiteness: Theory, Evidence, and the American Immigration Debate.” Race and Class 56, no. 4 (2015): 40–55. Meagher, Timothy J. “Irish America from Revolution to Famine.” In Columbia Guide to Irish American History, 42–59. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Murphy, Angela F. American Slavery, Irish Freedom: Abolition, Immigrant Citizenship, and the Transatlantic Movement for Irish Repeal. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. Nelson, Bruce. “‘Come Out of Such a Land, You Irishmen’: Daniel O’Connell, American Slavery, and the Mak‑ ing of the ‘Irish Race’.” Eire‑Ireland 32, nos. 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2007): 58–81. Osofsky, Gilbert. “Abolitionists, Irish Immigrants, and the Dilemmas of Romantic Nationalism.” The American Historical Review 80, no. 4 (1975): 889–912. Potter, George. To the Golden Door: The Story of the Irish in Ireland and America. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company, 1960. Rice, Madeline Hooke. American Catholic Opinion in the Slavery Controversy. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964. Quinn, John F. “The Rise and Fall of Repeal: Slavery and Irish Nationalism in Antebellum Philadelphia.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 130, no. 1 (January 2006): 45–78.

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Angela F. Murphy Quinn, John F. “Expecting the Impossible? Abolitionist Appeals to the Irish in Antebellum America.” New Eng‑ land Quarterly 32, no. 4 (December 2009): 667–710. Riach, Douglas C. “Daniel O’Connell and American Anti‑Slavery.” Irish Historical Studies 20, no. 77 (1976): 3–25. Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso Press, 1991. Rodgers, Nini. “Daniel O’Connell and Anti‑Slavery.” In Ireland, Slavery and Anti‑Slavery: 1612–1865, ­259–277. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Stewart, James Brewer. “The Emergence of Racial Modernity and the Rise of the White North, 1790–1840.” Journal of the Early Republic 18, no. 2 (1998): 181–217. Way, Peter. Common Labor: Workers and the Digging of the North American Canals, 1780–1860. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Wittke, Carl. The Irish in America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956.

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6 COSMOPOLITAN INSIGHTS FROM EARLY IRISH-AMERICAN LETTER NETWORKS Jennifer Orr

Ye free-born souls! who feel,—and feel aright, Come, cross with me, the wide, Atlantic main: With Heaven’s aid, we’ll to the land of light, And leave these ravagers th’ unpeople’d plain!1 Written many years before the Irish Rising of 1798, Samuel Thomson’s “Elegy, the Bard’s Farewell!” (1793) reflects a cosmopolitan universalism that marked many Irish republican immigrants’ ideologi‑ cal vision of America as “the land of liberty”, based on the values of republicanism, the universal rights of mankind, religious toleration, and economic opportunity. The bicentenary of the 1798 Irish rising provided a focal point for renewed historical interest in the activities of these “transatlantic radicals”, mostly Presbyterian but including many Catholics, who either fled Ireland or were pre‑ sented the option to emigrate “voluntarily” instead of standing trial. It is in the arena of Jeffersonian democratic republican politics, and its professed “asylum on the earth for persecuted humanity”, that these transnational exiles have often been seen to operate, in David Wilson’s words, as “the most dedicated Americans in the world”.2 Histories of the United Irish in America rightly emphasize their powerful political role in the construction of the early American republic as collectives in urban centres like New York and Phila‑ delphia. Less attention has been given to the significance of republican transnational networks abroad who conceived of themselves as thoroughly American but whose expatriate status tested the bounda‑ ries of the early American republic’s supposed cosmopolitanism. Prominent Irish Americans in the political arena like the Philadelphia Aurora editor William Duane and former United Irish leader and American Consul for Paris David Bailie Warden believed that their cosmopolitan republican‑ ism, coupled with “usefulness” to their Government through diplomacy, public print, and other acts of service, was enough to make them respectable citizens in the eyes of America’s oldest settler families. In this belief, they underestimated the degree to which the brash democratic discourse that they associated with republican meritocracy, coupled with their lower social class and their essen‑ tialized Irishness, created barriers to success in American public life where Madisonian political power networks were still maintained through family ties. Operating in tightly knit Irish-American communities with their own family networks, and where it was possible to celebrate United Irish his‑ tory openly, transatlantic radical figures like William Sampson, Matilda Tone, and her son William Theobald Wolfe Tone were able to achieve respectability and professional success, openly publishing 83

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-8

Jennifer Orr

memoirs of their experiences of rebellion and exile. The “old world” was a rite of passage to life on American soil where their ambitions could be fulfilled. While Sampson describes his emotional ­attachment to ­Ireland, “liberty” could be found on American soil. For Matilda and William Tone, whose family name was synonymous with United Irish republicanism, America provided the oppor‑ tunity to ­preserve Wolfe Tone’s legacy from being appropriated by an unsavory remnant of the Irish republican cause in France. By the same token, the Tones recognized that their life in America owed greatly to the access to European patronage and intellectual networks provided by transnational hubs like Warden. The contrasting experiences of these transatlantic radicals shows a profound distance between their often idealistic, cosmopolitan definition of republicanism and that of the establishment in early nineteenth-century America—a difference that many of them were reluctant to admit.3 David Bailie Warden’s experiences, which form the core of this essay, thus offer an important counterweight to the perceived success story of Irish-American inclusion in the early American ­republic and invites questions as to whether it was possible for expatriate naturalized citizens, how‑ ever prolific, to ever be accepted as fully American. While his correspondence demonstrates how Irish Americans profited by their cosmopolitan networks, it also reveals a pervasive and nascent tide of nativism experienced by Irish Americans whose political republicanism most obviously tran‑ scended geographical borders. As such, he was uniquely positioned to test the limits of American cosmopolitanism. Many histories of American foreign policy tend to regard figures like Duane as isolated examples of thorns in the side of the American government, but Warden’s private corre‑ spondence suggests a more pervasive nativist discourse in Madisonian America where social class, Irishness, and transnational republicanism excited particular suspicion. When tested in the crucible of the early American republic’s foreign relations, they formed insurmountable barriers to acceptance within a political system supposedly founded on the “universal rights of mankind”.

Testing the Limits of Republican Cosmopolitanism: David Bailie Warden, American Consul for Paris David Bailie Warden’s death in 1845 coincided with a climate in which United Irish history was beginning to be discussed openly following decades of silence. His obituary in the Irish North‑ ern Whig acknowledged his transnationality without any sense of paradox; in the same breath as ­celebrating him as an Irish patriot, the writer eulogized him as “the only American of any influence among the men of literature and science in France”. As one of the first United Irishmen publicly to represent the American government abroad, spending the majority of his life as a naturalized American in Paris, David Bailie Warden was uniquely positioned to test the limits of the cosmo‑ politanism that supposedly underpinned the American republic. This was precisely because his own definition of himself as American—an outward-looking, cosmopolitan identity based on republican ideological values such as the “universal rights of mankind”—countered an increasingly nativist and classist idea of “Americanness” which was anchored in family pedigree and commitment to residency within its geographical borders. Unlike the majority of transatlantic radical families like the Sampsons, MacNevens, and Tones, Warden’s emigration pattern took him to the new world and permanently back again to Europe where he remained by choice until his death in 1845. Warden’s conception of American republicanism as a cosmopolitan and meritocratic system encouraged him to regard his activities as a cultural intermediary as indispensable acts of service to the American government. These included granting access to his networks of learned institutions and European savants to Americans abroad and bringing the achievements of the American republic to a Euro‑ pean audience through his geographical scholarship. He fashioned this unofficial role as a cultural ambassador while holding the position of American Consul at Paris between 1808 and 1814, a role which brought him into contact with Napoleonic Paris’ most prolific intellectuals, statesmen, and 84

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salonnières. His position as an extraordinarily connected expat savant enabled him to construct his own identity through a cosmopolitan gaze, representing to his network something much closer to our modern idea of a cultural attaché. In practice, his American social superiors were suspicious of his association with Paris’ diverse community of “foreigners” and resented his direct republican style of challenging his superiors, often making direct democratic appeals to “the people”. While American nativist backlash against Warden prematurely terminated his political ambitions, he nonetheless re‑ tained an important cultural status in Paris and was able to improve the fortunes of fellow American citizens and transatlantic radicals alike.4 Supported by established cosmopolitan scholarly friends like the Marquis de Fortia d’Urban, Henri Gregoire, Conrad Malte-Brun, and Alexander Humboldt, Warden capitalized on a genuine Eu‑ ropean interest in the development of the Americas. Warden’s 1810 English translation of Gregoire’s De La Littérature des Nègres was, according to Sidney Kaplan, an important source for the abolition‑ ist movement in America. Other scholarly works informed by his diplomatic career included Treatise on Consular Establishments (1813) and Chorographical and Statistical Description of the District of Columbia (1816), which historian Francis Haber, writing in the 1950s, noted was “highly prized today” though it proved “not very saleable” in its day in spite of some glowing reviews. Warden’s six-volume French translation of Account of the United States (1820), influenced by his working relationship with Alexander Humboldt, “functioned as a double-edged criticism” of Metternichera political reaction in Europe and was so well-received in France that Warden was elected to the National Institute in 1823. US diplomat Edward Everett noted that District of Columbia “contains more information about the United States of America than is to be found in any other work, and is very deserving of our attention”. Along with the collaborative Antiquités Mexicaines (1833–1844), these important foundational works of American history swelled the entries of his impressive library, catalogued in the multi-edition Bibliotheca Americo-septentrionalis (1820, 1830, 1840), one of the earliest examples of American bibliography. In addition, Warden accounted “singlehandedly” for the conveyance of “tens of thousands of books” and other items across the Atlantic, not least furnishing the libraries of intellectual societies, colleges, and President Jefferson’s Monticello.5 Nowhere among these titles is there a personal narrative of his United Irish exile experience such as that published by his compatriots William Sampson and William MacNeven in America. The ten‑ sion between Warden’s articulation of cosmopolitan republicanism and his fear of being discovered as an Irish republican once again sets him apart from United Irish compatriots in America, whose residence within tightly knit Irish communities enabled them to publish their memoirs openly. Promi‑ nent United Irishman Miles Byrne’s memoirs present Warden as an active member of the Irish exile community in Paris, assisting his Irish compatriots through his diplomatic role, but Warden’s own references to this community were confined to private correspondence with trusted friends. Long after his departure from diplomatic office, Warden appears to have been so adept at concealing his Irishness that his own countrywoman, novelist Sydney Owenson (aka Lady Morgan), mistakenly claimed in her Autobiography that her “American friend” Warden was the former “Minister from the United States”, a role that would have been barely possible for an Irishman to hold at that time. Warden had, after all, made his name through a work which conceptualized America as the embodi‑ ment of cosmopolitan republicanism; A Statistical, Political, and Historical Account of the United States of North America (1819) was framed by a strong democratic republicanism which explained its quantitative study of “a great nation, which has taken its place among the most powerful and enlightened states in the world… constituted on principles to which the old world presents nothing precise”. According to Warden, the fruit of America’s success was that “all its offices are open to their ambition; and neither birth, professions, nor any form of religious belief, is a bar to their hopes”. Yet Warden, who had spent only five years on American soil before moving to France to work for the American Minister, appears to have concealed his revolutionary background from most of his 85

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American political peers, revealing his awareness of the limitations that his diplomatic role imposed upon his American republican ideal.6 The rise and fall of Warden’s diplomatic career offers considerable evidence against his own scholarly claims about American cosmopolitanism and makes for an important case study in the nativism and class politics that ran through the Madisonian era. Warden’s provisional appointment to the Paris consular office under Jefferson’s presidency, a period relatively friendly to foreigners, became increasingly precarious as tensions between America and France increased. Warden’s easy sociability in French political circles, helped on by proficiency in the French language and schol‑ arly collaboration with French republicans, soon eclipsed that of the unpopular American Minister to France General John Armstrong Jr. His first political quandary arose in an ill-received attempt publicly to defend his employer, General Armstrong, whose record of liberating French-captured American prizes had been called into question by the Federalist press. When William Duane, the influential republican editor of the Philadelphia Aurora, and Baptiste Irvine, fellow editor of the Baltimore Whig, printed his defence, Warden waded into the middle of a Federalist-Republican print war in which the principles of democratic free speech were seen to be at stake. Duane’s reputation as an editorial scourge, assisted by proximity to Washington where he was able to lobby the sitting government, made him a valuable ally for Warden, who was disadvantaged by geographical distance and frequently delayed transatlantic correspondence. But, as discussed below, public association with such a notorious Irish-American radical was a double-edged sword. Armstrong was displeased with a subordinate’s attempts to exonerate his character, suspecting that Warden sought to usurp him, and he promptly dismissed him from office. Whether Warden had been motivated simply by a desire to be “useful” to Armstrong and the wider Republican Party, or by the opportunity to enhance his own profile, his enemies on both sides of the Atlantic conspired in the pages of the New York Evening Post to characterize him as a pawn of Armstrong and (by suggestion) Duane. In a piece titled “Villains exposed!” his circumstances of arrival in the United States were called into question along with his citizenship status, and his loyalty to his adopted country: I am much misinformed if this man is an American citizen even artificially […] He came to this country about 10 years ago, but was never naturalized, as I believe. He was considered a zealot, attached to French politics, and though generally guarded, was viewed to be at heart a bitter Jacobin. This piece, which effectively exposed Warden as a United Irishman, was deemed to be serious enough that his United Irish comrade and celebrated New York attorney William Sampson, who had sued the Evening Post successfully in 1807, launched libel proceedings against its editor, William Coleman. A difference of opinion clearly existed within the republican brotherhood about the wisdom of this approach: Duane, whose enemies had many times attempted to silence him through legal proceed‑ ings, tried to talk Warden down from his “nice sensibility”, reminding him of his reactive tendency to “involve [him]self in the labyrinths of a lawsuit on account of […] unjust insinuations”. Never‑ theless, the wider republican brotherhood sprang into action with several enthusiastic defences of ­Warden, including one by Connecticut-born Jesse Buel, editor of the New York State Plebian news‑ paper, who dismissed the Post’s “epithets of ‘vagrant preacher,’ ‘zealot, attached to French politics,’ and the insinuation that he is a tool to our minister in France”.7 In spite of Buel’s attempts to dismiss the attacks as “the effusion of malice and offspring of re‑ venge”, the New York Evening Post affair proved to be a touchstone in the American political climate, where nativist sentiments echoed overseas in America’s diplomatic politics during one of the tensest periods of Franco-American relations. Evening Post editor William Coleman had based his attack on Warden on correspondence obtained from Isaac Doolittle, a disgruntled American detainee in France 86

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who had been employed as Secretary by the American Consul at Havre, Isaac Cox Barnet. Doolittle counterclaimed that Warden had diverted one of his personal letters to William Duane at the Aurora. Here, Doolittle insinuated that both Irish-American editor and diplomat were working together in a conspiracy against the native-born Barnet. Barnet was one of Warden’s most bitter rivals; his exploi‑ tation of Doolittle was one of a series of underhand manoeuvres designed to encroach gradually on Warden’s territory as Consul for Paris. This included interference in Warden’s conflicts with other American-born rivals in the American Legation like Consul for Bordeaux William Lee. Both Barnet and Lee were from well-known American families and had been “angling for the post of Consul at Paris” ever since Warden was appointed. Lee had even approached his family friend Joel Barlow to apply for the role of Consul Général, reasoning that “Warden only acts”. Warden was able to frustrate these nepotistic attempts temporarily by appealing directly to the Senate in 1811, a strategic move appropriately consistent with his democratic beliefs. His fortune changed for the worse when Joel Barlow succeeded Armstrong as Minister to France. 8

“An Adventurer Who Was Obliged to Fly his Home Country”: Nativist Discourses in American Diplomatic Relations Recent historical accounts of the Barlow Ministry, for the most part, tend to regard Warden as a thorn-in-the-side of the American Minister, jockeying for position with his peers and distracting the American Minister from his diplomatic negotiations. By viewing these events through Warden’s perspective, however, it is clear that anti-Irish sentiment and classism levelled at Warden were symp‑ tomatic of a more pervasive nativism at the heart of Madison’s government. Warden’s unanimous confirmation as American Consul by the US Senate led him to overestimate the extent to which republican meritocracy governed American diplomatic appointments and to neglect the subordinate and demure conduct that was expected in his dealings with his superiors. By this time, the highminded invective of Warden’s dispute over commission with William Lee had been laid before the eyes of the government. When news of Minister Joel Barlow’s unexpected death in Poland reached Paris in January 1813, Warden moved quickly to prosecute Legation business in the Minister’s stead. Appealing directly to the French Minister, the Duc de Bassano, for recognition as Consul Général, he subsequently advertised himself as such among his American peers. While Warden defended himself as acting on initiative, Peter P. Hill argues that it was regarded as a “power play” by the Barlows, who planned to replace the deceased Minister with his young nephew Thomas. Barlow’s widow, Ruth, took evasive action, withholding from Warden the documents necessary to perform official functions. Unable to discharge his duties despite being recognized as chargé d’affaires by the French government, a desperate Warden confronted Mrs Barlow directly. Invoking the direct language of democratic republicanism, he accused her of illegitimate interference and obstructing the will of the US Senate. To the Washington elite, however, he had ignored the appropriate sensibility due to a grieving lady, and consigned himself to history as the subordinate who wrote “insulting letters to [the Minister’s] distressed widow at a moment when every tender ligament was torn asunder, by the afflicting catastrophe of his death”.9 As a product of the Jefferson era’s austere theatre of pure republicanism, then, Warden misjudged the way in which his aggressive and direct tone clashed with the cultural hierarchies that governed Madisonian Washington. On Ruth Barlow’s return to the US, her sister-in-law, Clara Baldwin, sup‑ ported by accounts from William Lee, ensured that tales of Warden’s loss of temper and insubordinate indelicacy resounded in Washington drawing rooms. This was, as Catherine Allgor argues, the “draw‑ ing room diplomacy” that defined James Madison’s presidency: Dolly Madison’s Wednesday night soirées where official business was often conducted in a seemingly informal environment of tightly knit families. Tolerated four years earlier as a mild-mannered man of talents but few connections, 87

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and seen to be persecuted by the beleaguered and unpopular General Armstrong, Warden’s audacious pretensions to the office of Minister as a naturalized American made it too easy for his enemies, such as Lee, to suggest that his rebellious Irish past foreshadowed his duplicitous present: I will confess to your Excellency that as a native American educated in my country, descending from one of the oldest and most respectable families, and with more connections in the United States than perhaps any other man, to be thus calumniated by an adventurer who was obliged to fly from his own country, and has not lived long enough in mine to be legally naturalised is insupportable.10 Lee’s complaint conveys more than a hint of the nativist sentiment that underpinned the official grounds for Warden’s final dismissal from office, stated to be a breach of protocol in his appeal for recognition by a foreign government. This charge notably overlooked the fact that his consular rivals had made similar appeals, including Lee himself, based on a “false claim”.11 Historian William Butler defended Warden’s actions, arguing that it raised a fundamental legal question about the quality of consular function—whether it depended ultimately on recognition by the home government or the country where they were received. This was a topic Warden had explored himself in his acclaimed Treatise on Consular Establishments. Warden accused the Madison administration of a deeper po‑ litical motive behind his dismissal, stating that his cosmopolitan associations had been a significant factor: It appears that Mrs Barlow and her friends, have accused me of association with foreigners. […] The foreigners, with whom I occasionally associate, are friends to everything liberal and patriotic, distinguished by character and talents, whose names have reached every portion of the civilized world. […] It never entered my thoughts that such kind of inquisition could be acceptable to liberal minds. Even Warden’s American-born sympathizers like Eliza Parke Custis, whose familial status as grand‑ daughter of Martha Washington held weight with the Madison administration, wrote of her diminish‑ ing ability to intercede on his behalf. Although she put this down to Washington gossip around her romantic attachments to United Irish and Bonapartist revolutionaries like John Devereux and the mysterious Chevalier De Greffe, her correspondence hints at a more general hostility towards Euro‑ phile association with “foreigners” after the invasion of Washington in 1812.12 Warden’s suspicion that nativist sentiment had played a role in his dismissal was confirmed by correspondence with diplomat, utopian thinker, and journalist Mordecai Manuel Noah, often claimed as the most prominent American Jew of the age. Like Warden, Noah had been dismissed from his po‑ sition of American Consul at Tunis in what appeared to be Secretary of State James Monroe’s general policy of removing those of “foreign” extraction from US government posts. Noah quoted from a letter he reportedly received from Monroe that explicitly stated that his (Noah’s) Jewish religion had been “an obstacle to the exercise of his Consular function”. As Noah wrote to another correspondent, I believe [Warden’s] not being a native citizen is the great objection, and I have understood that some highest in the confidence of our Government have stated in Paris that no citizen (not a native) is to continue in, or be appointed to any office. In a duplicate letter, he added a postscript, “This is meant exclusively against Irishmen”. Ironically, it seems that the very transnationality that rendered Warden indispensable to American private citizens

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made him equally suspect in Washington circles. When taken together with his last ditch attempts to resist the US Minister’s authority by refusing to return the seals of office to the Legation and claim‑ ing defiantly that “by the abdication of Napoleon, late Emperor of France, your [Crawford’s] pow‑ ers have naturally ceased”, his perceived insubordination enabled his enemies to represent him as a potentially disloyal figure, whose transnational interests made him at best a nuisance and, at worst, a threat to American interests in France.13 Warden’s case tested the boundaries of American cosmopolitanism in ways that the more radical Irish Americans of his circle could see, but others could not. With the exception of William Duane, who had the strongest personal experience of nativist backlash, most of Warden’s Irish-American correspondents operated entirely on US soil and their politics remained wedded to the Democratic Republican Party. Most of the New York United Irishmen were therefore reluctant to believe that President Madison could be personally implicated in unfavourable political interventions against Irish Americans. John Chambers blamed “Mrs Barlow’s malice or other intrigues of your old enemy A[rmstrong]”, adding that “I would at any rate be sorry to hear that Mr M[adison] would allow himself to be accessible to the furious passions of a woman and do injustice to a public officer for the mere gratification of female spleen”. He advised Warden to draw on his networks and to “get letters … from respectable Americans in France stating the correctness and honour with which you discharged your consular duties”. Newspaper editors Baptiste Irvine and William Duane were more ready to recognize systemic corruption among the “courtiers” of Washington but still retained con‑ fidence in Madison as an “amiable honest man” who was fatally under the influence of advisors. Irvine expressed sorrow that Secretary of State “Mr M[onroe] who was reckoned honest and well meaning, should commit himself to the counsel and direction of a junta destitute of every honorable sentiment and principles, among [which] are your bitterest enemies”. Reluctant to view the case as a failure of republicanism, but rather as evidence of the general corrupting role of institutionaliza‑ tion, he lamented “that the weightiest arguments against [republican governments] are furnished by themselves”.14 Duane’s more sympathetic assessment of Warden’s situation reflected his own experience as a victim of extreme nativist backlash, extending even to mob violence. As such, he forms a useful point of comparison with Warden. Describing him as a “transoceanic radical”, Duane’s biographer Nigel Little points out that while three changes of nationality during Duane’s lifetime entitled him fully to claim to be a citizen of the world, it fitted Federalist accusations that Jefferson had been brought to power by “foreigners”. Even though Duane was born on American soil, Secretary Timothy Picker‑ ing claimed that he “pretends that he is an ‘American citizen’” and, in language strikingly similar to William Lee’s accusation that Warden was “an adventurer … obliged to fly from his home country”, Pickering asserted that Duane “only came to the United States within three or four years past … to stir up sedition and work other mischief. I presume, therefore, that he is … an alien, liable to be banished from the United States”. Unlike Duane, Warden was largely “out of sight, out of mind” for the American government after 1814; he never again held a political post but served as a convenient contact for US citizens abroad. Duane, on the other hand, was a visceral and immediate thorn in the side of the establishment so long as he continued to publish his newspaper. As early as 1811, Duane admitted that his uncompromising sense of republican principle, particularly his invective criticism of Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin’s “individual and unconstitutional power” over Madison, had reduced his political efficacy to serve his friends. It would, he argued, Place [Madison] in an awkward situation to receive a letter from me while I am discharging what I conceive conscientiously a duty to my country in exhibiting the deformity of the man (G’s) [Gallatin’s] character and conduct to the nation.

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In contrast to Warden, who lost President Madison’s favour gradually, Duane was always held at arm’s length by the democratic republicans from whom some of the most insidious nativist and clas‑ sist insinuation emanated. One writer in the Freeman’s Journal questioned how Duane had gained such influence in democratic republican circles, given he was “a stranger, without fortune, illiterate, nay, without a single adventitious circumstance to usher him into public notice”. Clara Baldwin’s similar slurs against Warden’s “inferior abilities” and “lack of American connexions” emanated from the same source accusation of his being a “naturalized citizen”. The evidence presented across the many correspondents examined above suggests that the language of nativism in American establish‑ ment discourse was indeed pervasive.15

“I Am Loyal to no Other Country”: Transatlantic Radicals and the Geography of American Republicanism Warden’s decision to remain in France, instead of returning to America, split the opinion of his IrishAmerican comrades and highlights pragmatic differences in their own attitudes towards the role that residency in the United States, and its impact on perceived professional success, played in the republican cause. For fellow cosmopolitan radical Duane, keeping “a man of [Warden’s] talent and abilities” at Paris was unquestionably in “the public interest”, because of Warden’s ability to procure information and services essential to advancing American improvement, a key republican aim. For others, Warden’s decision to remain in France seemed eccentric after the Bourbon Restoration sig‑ nalled “failure” of French republicanism. This reflected the fact that their ideological gaze was firmly on the new world where ethno-political networks and meritocratic principles created favourable con‑ ditions for economic success: Your countrymen who have become citizens […] your Companions in adversity, are in gen‑ eral prosperous circumstances. Mr Emmet is universally esteemed and is at the head of his Profession […] rapidly making a fortune. He and his Children were last week naturalized in our Supreme Court. […] Mr Chambers is also doing well […] I ought not to omit Counsellor Sampson – He is considered respectable in his profession and has a good share of business.16 As a celebrated attorney and writer on American jurisprudence, William Sampson successfully tapped into the popular demand for entertaining and polemical democratic literature in America with a cred‑ ibility that rested on his own efforts on behalf of Catholic citizens. Sampson’s witty legal opinions, from his defence of Thomas Paine’s memory in the libel trial of James Cheetham to his most con‑ troversial US publication, the Discourse on the Common Law (1825), which questioned the political role of the judiciary in the American system, encapsulated the democratic republicanism that defined his Irish-American identity. By the time he relocated to Washington in 1825, his reputation was so established that the members of the New York Bar dedicated a treatise to him, “expressing the high respect we entertain for your attainments, genius and virtues, our sense of your honorable, liberal and gentlemanly intercourse with us in public and in private life”. The signatories range from prominent Irish Americans like Thomas Addis Emmet to established New York family names like Verplanck, DeWitt Clinton, Sedgwick, and Bleecker. Little wonder, then, that Sampson was one of the most vocal Irish Americans in his regard for America as “a fine Country”, questioning why United Irish compatriots, like Warden and the families of Arthur O’Connor and Hampden Evans, chose to remain in Europe. Crucially, and in contrast to Warden’s transnationalism, success in America for Irish im‑ migrants seemed to require wholesale commitment to its entire way of life, including residence there, encapsulated by Sampson’s expression of his Irish-American identity:

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I may be partial to my own country [Ireland], perhaps the more because it is unfortunate. I may be partial to the country of my adoption [America] because I find in it that liberty which in my own is lost; but I am partial to no other… New York United Irishman John Chambers similarly “wish[ed] to God” that it could be possible to “transport my old and worthy friend [William] Lawless to this country”, opining to Warden that America’s superior meritocratic opportunities might raise his United Irish companion to a “profes‑ sor of anatomy of one of our Colleges”. Residence in America, the country that Warden promoted so assiduously in his expat life abroad, they argued, offered unparallel economic opportunities and a protective political network of comrades. It was clear that Warden’s definition of his republican voca‑ tion differed greatly from that of Sampson and Chambers.17 It was Warden’s American-born correspondent John Rodman who showed the most perceptive insight into the limitations that American focus on profession and capitalism would have on War‑ den’s scholarly vocation. Counselling Warden “to remain in France if you have the means […] for [America] is no country for enjoyment or ease”, Rodman further assured him that “if I had a thousand dollars a year, I would pack up tomorrow and be off for Paris”. Rodman’s opinion that the “general audience” of the American publishing market had little appetite for Warden’s dense, scholarly works was also borne out by the evidence from his book sales. Warden’s geographical works on America sold considerably better in an increasingly reactionary Europe where there was an appetite among lib‑ eral readers for the analysis of America’s republican experiment. In truth, Warden’s cultural relevance to the American republic rested less on his scholarship than on his position as cultural gatekeeper to the “old world” institutions for Americans abroad. This was evidenced by the constant flow of letters from American academics seeking scientific information as well as the scores of letters of introduc‑ tion that he received from young scholars flocking to Paris to complete their education. His “useful‑ ness” to the American republic as a citizen abroad was largely dependent on his geographical distance from it, resting on his transnational ability to broker between the two nations.18 It is quite likely that Warden would indeed have achieved more economic success within the geo‑ graphical borders of the United States where a popular historical climate in which it was possible to “openly heroicize the United Irishmen” enabled William Sampson to identify openly with his Irishness in a way that David Bailie Warden was unable to do in France. Nevertheless, Warden’s role in keeping connections open for the Irish in America with European intellectual networks was a crucial, and underacknowledged, catalyst in the success story of several of America’s most prominent Irish-American figures, particularly the Sampson-Tone family. Sampson’s international renown among a European readership owed a debt to Warden, who introduced Memoirs of an Irish Exile (1807), along with Wil‑ liam MacNeven’s Pieces of Irish History (1807), to the celebrated Catholic republican Henri Gregoire, who was so impressed with Sampson’s essay The Catholic Question in America (1819) that the vener‑ able republican mistook Sampson, an Anglican, for a “pillar of the [Roman Catholic] faith”. Likewise, Warden played a largely unacknowledged role in supporting the emigration of Wolfe Tone’s surviving family, whose son, William, would marry Sampson’s daughter Catherine in 1825. On the publication in 1826 of Matilda Tone’s Life of her husband Wolfe Tone, co-edited with their son William, the SampsonTone family became one of the most recognizable United Irish families in America. William had been appointed to the US War Office and brought his wife, Catherine Sampson, his mother Matilda, and his stepfather Thomas Wilson to Washington D.C. where they settled in a respectable neighbourhood.19 Like Warden, William Theobald Wolfe Tone lived a thoroughly transatlantic life, having crossed the Atlantic four times before his sixteenth birthday. Raised in Paris by his mother Matilda on his father’s French government pension, their relationship with the United Irish exile community in both France and America was both an essential source of support and a political obligation. While Tone relied

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heavily on Warden, as Consul for Paris, to facilitate her communication with others in the network, he was also a trusted friend who helped her achieve a degree of independence from the United Irish circle: Cant you slip from business and come here next Sunday to visit the poor Hermit? … I have a thousand things to ask, and as many more to tell you, indeed I did not know how much I was attached to you till you were gone. I ordered Devereux to felicitate you in my name as soon as you arrived, he talked of coming here last Sunday but to tell you the truth I would rather you came quite alone if possible. Matilda’s desire to see Warden without John Devereux, a radical United Irishman and recruiter for the Irish Legion, offers further evidence for Nancy Curtin’s claim that Tone’s performance of “virtuous republican femininity”, encouraged by association with the United Irishmen in Paris, was offset by a desire to resist their sense of ownership over the Tone legacy. Although Matilda had placed William in Napoleon’s École de Calvalerie at the Château-Vieux, St. Germain-en-Laye which, as Kennedy argues, “partly fulfilled Irish republicans’ desire to see him follow in his father’s footsteps”, she was clearly intent on keeping William out of the way of the “strange collection of Irishmen at Paris”, who had been responsible for co-opting her brother-in-law Arthur Tone to their continuing revolutionary cause “on account of his name”. Matilda therefore jealously guarded William’s prospects and carefully managed his father’s legacy. Not only did she plan opportunistically to approach the Emperor Napoleon during his hunting trip to St. Germain to secure French citizenship for William, but she also requested that Warden might introduce him to the new US Minister Joel Barlow who, she hoped, would “sp[eak] to [William] of his father”. Several letters discuss Warden’s efforts to procure French citizenship for William, which he received upon Napoleon’s remembrance. Warden also made use of his diplomatic status to write to Paul Hamilton, Secretary of the US Navy, asking him to trace Arthur Tone and make a case for his promotion, enclosing a letter from Matilda and pointing Hamilton to her “interesting” biography in William Sampson’s Memoirs. The letter played heavily on the Tones’ patriotic pedigree, suggesting that Arthur’s “active exertion [and] talents, one day may be useful to the United States”.20 Having found themselves on the wrong side of French politics during the Bourbon Restoration, the Tone family made their final emigration to America where they received a warm welcome into the Irish-American community, again facilitated through Warden’s networks in New York. Tone’s formative experiences in France left a lasting intellectual and emotional influence; he expressed his “envy” for the intellectual republican society in Paris to which Warden had introduced him, particu‑ larly Henri Gregoire and Helen Maria Williams, as well as an exciting new generation of Irish writ‑ ers, celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic, who visited Paris as Warden’s guests: Sydney Owenson, aka Lady Morgan; Thomas Moore; and Maria Edgeworth. For the Tones, emigration to America was not an attempt to jettison their Irishness or their republicanism, but to shape their own destinies. The Tones’ relocation from France to America allowed them to preserve Wolfe Tone’s republican leg‑ acy, recontextualized within the framework of American republicanism, while liberating them from the exploitative influence of less savoury elements of Irish republican remnants in Europe. Without Warden’s role as cultural translator between the Tones and the American government, without his introducing Tone to the savant world of Paris (including an honourable mention from the Institut de France of which Warden was a member), William Tone’s reputation as a military expert, his ap‑ pointment to the US War Office, and the publication of Wolfe Tone’s memoirs might not have been established. William Tone recognized this through gifting his Essay on the necessity of improving our national forces (1819) to Warden, seeking “the approbation … of an old and valued friend whom we have never forgotten”. Warden’s catalytic role in shaping the American republican afterlife of Wolfe Tone, one of the most powerful legacies of Irish republicanism, was one notable success born out of a problematic transnational status.21 92

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Conclusion Irish Americans can rightfully claim to have played an important part of the foundation of the early American republic, but there were clear limits to their influence. The experiences of the most trans‑ national Irish Americans make visible the American establishment’s discomfort with the implica‑ tions of pure republicanism, particularly the threat that multiple affiliations posed to an increasingly narrow conception of national identity and of social class. Warden’s and Duane’s direct appeals to the people and their uncompromising use of the language of the US Constitution in support of their arguments amounted to questioning the establishment’s fidelity to American republicanism. Whether it was Warden’s pretensions to perform the role of American ambassador, or Duane’s daring editorial tirades, which defined true republicanism against what he viewed to be establishment corruption, these transatlantic radicals were “useful” to Madison’s government only so long as they did not tran‑ scend their social place. The revolutionary ideas of cosmopolitan universalism that carried United Irish exiles across the Atlantic were also more constrained by national boundaries than some of them would care to admit. The Irish who settled in America, such as the Sampsons, attained comfortable respectability and “both figuratively and literally left behind the colonial world”. William Sampson reconciled himself, rhetorically at least, with residence in a country which was sympathetic to his ideals of liberty, equality, and meritocracy and made a respectable contribution to American jurispru‑ dence with the support of a powerful Irish-American political community. Others, such as Matilda and William Tone, broke ties with the old world in order to prevent the appropriation of Wolfe Tone’s republican legacy by what they saw as rogue Irish splinter groups. By emigrating and lending the military expertise gained in France to the American government, William Tone could be seen as putting the legacy of Wolfe Tone beyond the use of a “live” European revolutionary movement and bringing it to the true home of “new world” republicanism.22 The emigration of his compatriots inevitably rendered Warden as somewhat of an anomaly, but while he retained ties with his fellow Irish exiles in Paris, his cosmopolitan definition of republican‑ ism and desire to be “of use to his Government” allowed him to carve out for himself an intermediary position that would not have been possible on American soil. His status as a connecting hub for re‑ publican writers on either side of the Atlantic and his scholarly and bibliographic projects undeniably set a course for American historiography and bibliography, serving a cultural diplomatic role in pro‑ moting international understanding of the great global “republican experiment”. Although Warden’s cosmopolitan ideal was sorely tried throughout his life, he best fits David Wilson’s description of the United Irishmen’s “primarily ideological” Americanism in which “Irishness appear[ed] synonymous with radical republicanism”. His achievement as a cultural translator in bridging the Atlantic divide between his adopted country and that of the “old world” while remaining offshore stubbornly ex‑ pands the definition of republicanism towards its full cosmopolitan potential.23

Notes 1 Thomson, Poems, 49. County Antrim schoolmaster poet Samuel Thomson associated with many prominent United Irishmen throughout the 1790s and loaned his poetry to their cause in the Northern Star newspaper. Manuscripts of his early works such as “The Thoughtful Bard” (1792) were seized by Dublin Castle (see Orr, Literary Networks, 94). 2 “Land of liberty” (R. B. McDowell in Doyle, Ireland, Irishmen, 165); for histories of transatlantic radicalism see Twomey 1989; Thuente 1994; Durey 1997; Wilson 1998; Bríc 2001; Gilmore, Parkhill and Roulston, 2018; Jefferson quoted in Sampson, Memoirs, 3; Wilson, United Irishmen, United States, 175. 3 The present author is compiling a digital scholarly edition of Warden’s correspondence, a small sample of which is available at https://warden.atnu.ncl.ac.uk/home 4 For an assessment of cultural silence around the 1798 Rebellion, see Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance, 2018. For Warden’s 1845 obituary see “Some Lie Far Off Beyond the Wave,” Northern Whig [Belfast], 12 May 1846, available in the Warden Papers, MdHS.

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Jennifer Orr 5 Kaplan quoted in Gregoire, Cultural Achievements, xi; Everett in North American Review 13 (July 1821), 62; “doubled-edged criticism” see Haber, “David Bailie Warden”, 36. For this claim of Warden’s significance in transatlantic book transmission see Butler, “David Bailie Warden”, 383. Warden’s bibliographical library was sold in parts: first, in 1822 to Samuel Eliot of Boston who presented it to Harvard University; the second, to the State of New York in 1844, just prior to Warden’s death, and which is now housed in the New York Public Library. 6 Sampson, Memoirs of an Irish Exile, 1807; MacNeven, Pieces of Irish History, 1807. Byrne, Memoirs d’un exile, 23; Morgan, Autobiography, 50, 82; Warden, United States, xx, lxi; Warden was reported to have held a colonel’s commission in the County Down corps of the United Irishmen and upon handing himself in was allowed to “voluntarily” emigrate to America in exchange for not standing trial (Haber, “David Bailie Warden,” 2). See also Butler, “David Bailie Warden” (2011) for an impressive survey of Warden’s life and correspondence. 7 “Villains exposed! Warden, Armstrong and Duane”, New York Evening Post, November 8–10, 1809; Duane to Warden, April 6 1811, LC1647-8; Buel in New York Evening Post, November 8–10, 1809. 8 Buel in New York Evening Post, November 8–10, 1809; Doolittle in Balance and New York State Journal, July 7, 1810, 2: 55; Chenicek, “Dereliction of Diplomacy”, 159; Lee, A Yankee Jeffersonian, 78. 9 For American historical treatment of Warden under the Barlow Ministry see Hill, Joel Barlow (2012) and Buel, Joel Barlow (2012) and Chenicek, Dereliction of Diplomacy (2008) which draws mainly on an account by rival consul William Lee. Butler, “David Bailie Warden” (2011) allows for the most sympathetic read‑ ing of the case, having examined Warden’s original letters in detail to assess his significant contribution to American Consular Law. For Hill’s reference to a “power play” see Joel Barlow, 205; Lee to Warden, July 29, 1813, MdHS. 10 Allgor, Parlour Politics, 142. Lee to Crawford, Consular Despatches from Bordeaux, July 26, 1813, quoted in Chenicek, Dereliction of Diplomacy, 167. 11 Hill, Joel Barlow, 219; Chenicek, Dereliction of Diplomacy, 150–151. 12 On Consular Establishments see Butler, “David Bailie Warden”, 421;Warden to Crawford, September 15, 1813, MdHS Custis to Warden, November 9, 1813, MdHS. 13 Noah to Warden, October 9, 1815, MdHS; Noah to Phillips, October 1, 1815, MdHS; Noah to C.S. Thomas, Charleston, October 1, 1815, MdHS; Warden to Crawford, July 3, 1814, MdHS. 14 Chambers to Warden, October 10, 1814, MdHS; Duane to DBW, Jul 21 1811, LC1652‑3; Irvine to Warden, December 8, 1817, MdHS. 15 Little, William Duane, 153; Pickering quoted in Little, William Duane, 146; Duane to Warden, February 8 1811, LC1640; Freeman’s Journal quoted in Phillips, William Duane, 167; Clara Baldwin quoted in Buel, Joel Barlow, 365. 16 Theodorus Bailey to Warden, November 28 1809, MdHS. 17 Sampson, Memoirs, xix; Sampson to Warden, November 3 1809, MdHS; Sampson, Memoirs, 167; Chambers to Warden, June 23 1815, MdHS. 18 Rodman to Warden, June 6 1815, MdHS. 19 Kennedy, “Republican Relicts”, 631; Gregoire quoted in Sampson to Warden, February 5 1819, MdHS. 20 Matilda Tone to Warden, September 25 1811, MdHS; Curtin quoted in Kennedy, “Republican Relicts”, 631; Tone to Warden, January 8 1812, MdHS; Tone to Warden, November 16 1811, MdHS; Warden to Hamilton, January 10 1812. 21 Tone to Warden, Sep 20 1820, MdHS; Tone to Warden, June 27 1819, MdHS. 22 Walsh, “Rights, Revolutions, Republics”, 58. 23 Wilson, United Irishmen, United States, 175.

Bibliography Primary Sources Balance, and New‑York State Journal. Albany, NY. Byrne, Miles. Memoirs d’un exile irlandais du 1798. Paris: Gustave Bossange, 1864. Gregoire, Henri. On the Cultural Achievements of Negroes, edited by Thomas Cassirer and François Brière. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Lee, William. A Yankee Jeffersonian: Selections from the Diary and Letters of William Lee of Massachusetts, Written from 1796 to 1840. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958.

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Cosmopolitan Insights from Early Irish-American Letter Networks MacNeven, William and Thomas Addis Emmet. Pieces of Irish History: illustrative of the condition of the Cath‑ olics of Ireland, of the origin and progress of the political system of the United Irishmen, and of their transac‑ tions with the Anglo‑Irish Government. New York: printed for Bernard Dornin, 1807. Morgan, Sydney, Lady. Passages from My Autobiography. London: Bentley, 1859.New‑York Evening Post. New York. North American Review 13, no. 3 (Boston). Sampson, William. Memoirs of an Irish Exile, edited by William Cooke Taylor. London: Whittaker, Treacher, and Arnot, 1832. Thomson, Samuel. Poems on Different Subjects, Partly in the Scottish Dialect. Belfast: printed for the author, 1793. Warden Papers (MSS44594, Library of Congress) [LC]. Warden Papers (MS 871, Maryland Historical Society) [MdHS]. Warden Papers (MSS Alpha, Chicago History Museum) [CHM]. Warden, David B. A Statistical, Political and Historical Account of the United States of North America: From the Period of their First Colonization to the Present Day. Edinburgh: A. Constable and Co, 1819.

Secondary Sources Allgor, Catherine. Parlor Politics: In which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2000. Beiner, Guy, Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ul‑ ster. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Bric, Maurice. “Patterns of Emigration to America, 1783–1800.” Éire‑Ireland 36 no. 2 (2001): 10–28. Buel, Richard. Joel Barlow: American Citizen in a Revolutionary World. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Uni‑ versity Press, 2011. Butler, William. “David Bailie Warden and the Development of American Consular Law.” Journal of the History of International Law 13 (2011): 377–424. Chenicek, Jolynda. “Dereliction of Diplomacy: The American Consulates in Paris and Bordeaux during the Na‑ poleonic Era, 1804–1815.” Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 2008. Doyle, David N. Ireland, Irishmen and Revolutionary America, 1760–1820. Dublin: Published for the Cultural Relations Committee of Ireland by Mercier Press, 1981. Gilmore, Peter, Trevor Parkhill, and William J. Roulston. eds. Exiles of ‘98: Ulster Presbyterians and the United States. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 2018. Haber, Francis. “David Bailie Warden, A Bibliographical Sketch of America’s Cultural Ambassador to France, 1804–1845.” Maryland Historical Society (Baltimore, 1954) in David Bailie Warden Papers, MS 871, Roll II, 1–44. Hill, Peter P. Joel Barlow, American Diplomat and Nation Builder. Washington, DC: Potomac, 2012. Hill, Peter P. Napoleon’s Troublesome Americans. Franco‑American Relations, 1804–1815. Washington, DC: Potomac, 2005. Little, Nigel. Transoceanic Radical, William Duane. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008. Orr, Jennifer. Literary Networks and Dissenting Print Culture in Ireland 1790–1815. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015. Thuente, Mary Helen. The Harp Re‑Strung: The United Irishmen and the Rise of Literary Nationalism. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994. Twomey, Richard. Jacobins and Jeffersonians: Anglo‑American Radicalism in the United States, 1790–1820. New York: Garland Publishing, 1989. Walsh, Walter J. “Rights, Revolutions, Republics, 1750–1850: The Work and Works of William Sampson (1764– 1836): A Chronology.” American Journal of Irish Studies 11 (2014): 41–88. Wilson, David A. United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic. Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1998.

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PART 2

The Great Famine

7 THE GREAT FAMINE EXODUS Anelise Hanson Shrout

In January of 1852, the American Patriot newspaper debuted in Boston. This new periodical was founded to support the doctrines of those white US citizens who were opposed to immigration and Catholicism, and who were commonly known as “Native Americans.” A broadsheet announcing the new publication demonstrated these political attitudes through anti-Irish stereotypes. In the foreground, caricatures of Irish men and women swarm off a ship helpfully labeled “from Cork” as more ships portentously crest the horizon. Those already ashore bear signs in Hiberno-English claiming American rights of “Fradom o’ Spache an’ Action.” Men in the foreground, wearing stereotypical Irish costume, hold weapons and liquor bottles; a drunken woman struggles with numerous ill-tempered children, and Catholic priests shepherd the whole unruly mob ashore (Figure 7.1).1 This image depicts what the American Patriot’s editors claimed were the consequences of Ireland’s Great Famine. In the autumn of 1845, Irish potatoes became infected with the virulent fungus phytophthora infestans. From the winter of that year, people living in rural Ireland began to succumb to starvation and disease. The British government and private relief organizations stepped in to provide aid, but their intervention proved too little and too late. Nearly one million Irish men, women, and children died. Over two million more left Ireland, bound for Britain, North America, and the Antipodes between 1845 and 1855. In many ways, these people were different from the Irish immigrants who came before them. They were poorer, more rural, and more Catholic than the groups that Angela F. Murphy describes in an earlier chapter. The editors of the American Patriot used these demographic shifts intentionally to construct Irish Famine emigrants as an undifferentiated hoard, taking the United States by storm.2 As this advertisement illustrates, attempts to establish a singular narrative about Irish immigration to North America followed quickly on the heels of Famine migrants themselves. In the 1840s and 1850s, white residents of both the United States and Canada worked to associate Irish immigrants with uncomplicated and often derogatory stereotypes. In the years that followed, the Famine and its mass migration were put to many and varied political uses. As the chapters in this volume illustrate, however, there is more than one tale to tell about Irish Famine migrants in North America. These men and women left Ireland for a range of reasons and under divergent circumstances. The particular policies, bureaucracies, and structures of their localities shaped their departures. Their experiences coalesced on board ships on the journey across the Atlantic, constrained by the whims of ticket agents and ship captains. Their experiences diverged again after they landed, shaped by the laws of the places they settled and the biases and welcomes offered by the communities they joined. Some 99

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-10

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Figure 7.1 J.E. Farwell & Co. American citizens! We appeal to you in all calmness. Is it not time to pause?. A paper entitled the American patriot. United States, 1852. Boston: Published by J.E. Farwell & Co. American cartoon print filing series (Library of Congress).

made lives for themselves among immigrants of earlier generations, including Ulster Protestants in Pennsylvania, Quaker merchants in New York City, or Catholics in New Orleans and Charleston. Some navigated new spaces with little social or familial support, assimilating among other immigrant groups. Some turned to churches or to party political machines when they were subject to privation or hardship. Others relied on nascent public health and welfare infrastructures helping to shape those institutions to meet Irish needs. This variety of experiences makes it difficult for those interested in Irish Famine history to tell one coherent story about immigrants. The narratives that have emerged over time are linked to various interpretations of the Famine itself. Some see the Famine as a shared experience of trauma, caused by everything from government failures to ethnic cleansing. From this perspective, historical examples of bias, xenophobia, degradation, and rumors of “no Irish need apply” signs in every storefront are evidence of the hardships that members of the Irish diaspora had to overcome in order to knit itself together. Others have challenged the notion of Famine as primarily collective trauma because, they argue, doing so obscures the social and political power that Irish immigrants and their descendants had achieved in the twentieth century.3 In addition to reflecting authors’ interpretations of Irish history more broadly, these competing narratives also reflect the different kinds of evidence that can be used to tell Irish immigrant stories. Although most Famine emigrants arrived well before the establishment of immigrant depots like El‑ lis Island, they were subject to nineteenth-century bureaucracies. Ship captains collected information about immigrant passengers and passed it on to local officials. Hospitals likewise tracked data about immigrant patients in order to determine who would pay for care. Through mechanisms like these, people entering both the United States and Canada from overseas were counted, categorized, and examined in ways that laid the groundwork for later immigration institutions. Scholars of data and statistics have noted that these mechanisms were designed to differentiate “the national ‘us’” from “aliens within and without.” By counting and measuring immigrants, states and nations could deter‑ mine characteristics “desirable” in citizens. These apparatuses produced reams of data. For example, 100

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the National Archives and Records Administration maintains a dataset of “Passengers Who Arrived at the Port of New York During the Irish Famine,” which includes passengers’ names, ages, occupa‑ tions, countries of origin, destinations, plans while in the United States, and whether or not they could read and write. Data like this, in turn, allows scholars to bring quantitative, “big data” and “distant reading” methods to bear on the Irish Famine experience. These methods allow us to detect trends and patterns in Famine immigration, and to map the structures and constraints on immigrant life. 4 However, approaches that rely primarily on data about large numbers of Irish immigrants can obscure individual experiences. While they make it possible to know what most immigrants did, they often do not reveal the ways that individuals resisted or co-opted the forces shaping their lives. To access these experiences, scholars have turned to more ephemeral sources. Some of the richest are the letters that immigrants wrote about their experiences. Scholars often read these personal documents alongside descriptions of Irish immigrants written by non-Irish contemporaries in the United States and Canada. For example, Jennifer Orr’s chapter in this volume demonstrates what is to be gained by interrogating transnational letter networks, and Kerby Miller’s foundational book Emigrants and Exiles draws on a vast collection of immigrant letters. These letters, now held by the University of Galway, allow Miller to complicate narratives that cast immigrants’ “situation” simply “as one of unhappy exile.” Subsequent scholars have drawn upon the collection that Miller built, as well as other repositories, to discuss the trans-Atlantic migration experience, senses of immigrant identity, and as‑ sisted migration. These sources encourage different kinds of stories about Famine immigrants—ones that are more textured, personal, and emotional—but necessarily less representative.5 More recently, a robust body of scholarship on Famine memory has complicated these narratives even further, focusing not only on how people experienced mass migration but also how those experi‑ ences were carried forward into the future as group memories. These works look to cultural represen‑ tations of the immigration in fiction, performance, and public art which were produced in the years and decades following the Famine. These kinds of sources help to excavate everyday immigrant experiences, as well as the ways that those experiences are remembered among the Irish diaspora.6 This chapter charts the structures that shaped Famine immigrants’ lives while illustrating the wide variety of experiences made possible within those structures. First, it describes the circumstances that required some people to stay in Ireland while allowing others to go. Next, it turns to the ways that Irish men and women crossed the Atlantic, and the possibilities and perils afforded by a patchwork of immigration policies, as well as the profit motives of ship captains and ticket agents. It then looks to the forces acting on immigrants when they arrived in North America, exploring the experiences of the Irish who settled in port cities, as well as those who moved on to other cities, towns, or villages. Having described these experiences of migration and settlement, this chapter closes with a brief dis‑ cussion of the institutions, societies, networks, and shared cultural practices that Famine emigrants helped to establish—sometimes intentionally, sometimes accidentally—that would persist after they made permanent homes in the United States.

Leaving Ireland Irish people experienced the potato failure differently depending on who they were, where they lived, and how much wealth they had. On the eve of the Famine, two-thirds of Irish men and women made a living off of the land. Most were not landowners, but rather eked out a living laboring on large farms that belonged to others. Many rented accommodations in the form of small plots with “mud cabins having only but one room,” from the same people for whom they worked. In the early nineteenth century, landlords had begun to dedicate more and more of their land to the production of grain for export, due to its greater profitability. This meant less land available for tenant farmers to grow their own grain or other crops. These families were pushed to ever-more marginal land, where they 101

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occupied parcels that were so small and barren that potatoes, which yielded a high return on very small areas of rocky or hilly terrain, were the only supportable domestic food crop. When the potato blight came, these people were the most vulnerable and likely to suffer.7 However, reliance on the potato did not inevitably lead to death, starvation, or immigration. The vulnerability of Irish families depended on other circumstances, as well. Scholars have long debated which factors contributed to “excess mortality” (or, deaths beyond what would have been normally expected without a famine) in Ireland. In order to do so, they have relied on data collected during the nineteenth century and published in dense reports that purported to statistically describe nearly every aspect of rural Irish life. Many of these reports were part of colonial information-gathering campaigns undertaken by representatives of the British government. They reflected the perspectives of officials who were often primed to see the Irish countryside and people as inferior to England and the English. Despite these biases, they do reveal some important patterns. People who lived in areas where land was judged to have a low value were more likely to die during the Famine. Those who lived close to ports, urban markets, and workhouses were more likely to survive. This meant that many of the people in the worst-affected parts of the island died before they were able to contemplate emigration.8 For those who survived, a range of factors contributed to the decision to emigrate. Local cir‑ cumstances, experience with seasonal migration, and access to funds all shaped whether Irish men, women, and children were able to cross the Atlantic. These conditions changed over time, as reflected in the fact that the geography of emigration shifted over the course of the Famine. In the early 1840s, the highest numbers of immigrants left from western Ireland, and particularly County Mayo. Most of these were farmers living and working on small plots of land. Later in the Famine, people began to leave in droves from Limerick and Tipperary, places with persistently high levels of mortality, perhaps reflecting a desire to escape areas with deteriorating living conditions. Previous experiences with labor migration mattered, too. In the years before the Famine, many Irish people had first-hand experience with migration. Some (mostly men) left Ireland annually, traveling to Britain to work bringing in harvests, or in factories, and returning to Ireland in slack periods. Others were part of commercial and social networks that regularly crossed the Atlantic Ocean as well as the Irish and Celtic seas. These experiences made it easier for some Irish people to imagine emigrating perma‑ nently. Still others viewed their departure as a form of exile and felt forced out by circumstances beyond their control.9 Choosing whether or not to leave was complicated by the fact that trans-Atlantic transportation was expensive. While popular imagination often casts Irish Famine migrants as the poorest of the poor, in fact the most destitute were often not able to raise funds to purchase passage. Leaving Ire‑ land required resources. Some men and women with social connections were able to purchase tickets themselves, drawing on meager reserves or funds sent from family members who had already emi‑ grated. Families often worked as units, combining money to send one child to find work, with subse‑ quent family members following suit. Some of these networks were set in place before the Famine, making it easier for other family members to find community in a new country. Others appealed to charities for donations. Still others, without access to capital or connections, were aided by landlords and the British state. Landlords facilitated the emigration of between 50,000 and 100,000 Irish people during the Great Famine. The landowners were seeking to (humanely, they argued) clear the land of people who often could not pay rent while simultaneously making room for more profitable crops and livestock farming. Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, the third marquess of Lansdowne, famously helped ap‑ proximately 1,000 of his tenants to leave County Kerry for the United States. Henry John Temple, the third Viscount Palmerston, who served as Foreign Secretary during the Famine, similarly financed the emigration of 2,000 of his Sligo tenants to Canada. Other prospective emigrants availed them‑ selves of government assistance schemes, designed to support those financially who would not other‑ wise have had access to the resources required to leave Ireland. These schemes focused primarily on 102

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sending Irish people to British colonies, where their labor might strengthen the British Empire. These various pathways meant that Irish newcomers to North America were a heterogeneous lot, including those who felt like free emigrants, as well as others who saw themselves as exiles.10 In the midst of these different experiences, there are some notable commonalities. Thirty percent of Irish immigrants to North America between 1845 and 1855 were from the southeastern Irish coun‑ ties of Clare, Tipperary, Limerick, Waterford, Cork, and Kerry. Two-thirds of Famine migrants spoke Irish. Whereas Irish people who had emigrated before the Famine tended to be professionals or peo‑ ple of means, many male Famine migrants described themselves as laborers or servants. In official documentation, women’s occupations were most often limited to “immigrant,” “child,” “wife,” or “spinster.” In a similar deviation from earlier migrants, who tended to travel alone, many Irish people emigrated during the Famine in family groups, collectively choosing to make a new life across the Atlantic. This meant that many of them were women, older relatives, or children who, in other cir‑ cumstances, who might previously have stayed behind in Ireland.11

Crossing Oceans Some few Famine emigrants sailed directly from Ireland, but most—nearly two million—went first to Liverpool, paying as little as a few shillings for the trip, and from there, on to North America or the An‑ tipodes. Nearly 1.5 million Famine emigrants, leaving from both Irish and British ports, sailed for the United States. More than 300,000 were bound for British North America, and 70,000 for Australia and New Zealand. Fares to British North America were often lower than fares to the United States, because the British government taxed US-bound ships. The cost to travel from Dublin or Liverpool to Canada was approximately £3. Travel to the United States could be £4–£5, and to Australia and New Zea‑ land over £18. For many Famine emigrants, these were extraordinary sums. Even the cheapest tickets across the Atlantic could be equivalent to half of what they had paid annually in rent in Ireland.12 They crossed the Atlantic Ocean on ships which routinely made multiple crossings each year. Famine migration was a booming business. For example, ships belonging to the “Old Line” of Liv‑ erpool sailed from Britain twice each month, promising ships “all of the first class, and commanded by men of character and experience.” Over the course of the Famine, the eight ships belonging to the Old Line transported nearly 33,000 people to New York City. Of course, most Famine emigrants did not experience accommodations “of the first class.” They traveled in steerage, sleeping on platform berths alongside relatives, and often, strangers. Conditions on board these ships were theoretically governed by British and US legislation, known as “Passenger Acts,” designed to protect oceangoing travelers. The US Passenger Act, passed in 1819, established limitations on the number of passengers and minimal dietary standards for ships departing the United States. The UK Passenger Acts stipu‑ lated that each passenger receive three quarts of fresh water, tea and sugar, and one pound of bread, biscuit, flour, oatmeal or potatoes. However, these rules were unevenly enforced. Some emigrants guarded against poor shipboard conditions by bringing provisions with them, including potatoes, salt, boiled meat and dry goods.13 The business of migration was supported by brokers who sold passage aboard ships, often adding additional fees for baggage, storage, or simply raising fares because another prospective emigrant was willing to pay more. Because finding passage was so difficult, many Famine emigrants selected their North American destinations based simply on who was willing to sell them a ticket. This meant that in the early years of the Famine, a significant minority of emigrants, and likely those with the least resources, chose to emigrate to Canada because ships were available and fares were relatively cheap. However, after 1847, patterns of migration shifted. In the later years of the Famine, between five and seven times as many Irish people went to the United States as did those to Canada. There were patterns of migration within countries, as well. Most immigrants to Canada arrived via the 103

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St. Lawrence River and Quebec, though some arrived on ships bound for St. John, New Brunswick. Most of those who headed to the United States came on ships bound for New York, though some traveled on lines that terminated in Boston, Philadelphia, or New Orleans. Others landed in Canada before heading overland to the United States.14 The ships upon which Famine migrants crossed the Atlantic have entered the public imagination as “coffin ships,” a term coined by Irish nationalists as part of anti-landlord campaigns in the 1880s, and retroactively applied to the Great Famine. The idea of the “coffin ship” caught on because it is an evocative one. It conjures visions of emigrants packed cheek-by-jowl into the holds of wooden ships, subject to sickness, starvation, and death. This idea was enshrined in likely fictitious, or at least highly elaborated nineteenth-century accounts of Famine ocean crossings written by Irish nationalists, seek‑ ing to argue that the Famine was a consequence of the British government’s genocidal behavior and Irish people’s incredible persistence. The “coffin ship” persists today in public memorials, like John Behan’s “National Famine Memorial,” known colloquially as “Coffin Ship” in County Mayo, which re-imagines a nineteenth-century sailing ship as a collection of skeletons. It is also adopted by people who seek to undermine the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery by misguidedly casting the experience of Irish Famine migrants as analogous to the experience of enslaved people. However, as Cian T. McMahon has demonstrated, most ships carrying Irish emigrants were no more or less deadly than other contemporary vessels although the ships carrying impoverished people to Canada in 1847 were more dangerous than others. Rather than acting as a site of disjuncture, these ships often created unifying experiences for immigrants. They could be spaces of community forma‑ tion, which militated against a sense of isolation, trauma, or dislocation caused by the Famine and which, as McMahon also notes, created new kinds of social relations that would translate into new lives in the United States. While the experience on board individual ships varied somewhat, most Irish people crossing the Atlantic experienced similar accommodations, shipboard culture, and even food. Once they arrived in North America, however, their experiences began to diverge again.15

Transforming New Communities In the nineteenth century, rules about where immigrants could land, what bureaucracies they had to pass through, and even the conditions on board ships were shaped by national regulations like the Passenger Acts and patchworks of state laws. Furthermore, these laws were variably enforced, lead‑ ing to different implementation across space and time. This meant that Famine migrants’ experiences were highly conditioned by the ports to which they arrived. Most immigrants to the United States in the era of the Famine landed first in New York City. In 1824, New York State had established laws designed to protect New York City’s “mayor, aldermen and commonality, and the overseers of the poor of the said city, and their successors” from the bur‑ dens imposed by incoming immigrants. Ships carrying Irish men, women, and children bound for New York first stopped at the Marine Hospital on Staten Island to be evaluated. If they were visibly ill, they could be detained. However, because city officials were concerned that many of those not de‑ tained at the Marine hospital might eventually draw on city resources, ship captains were required to keep track of “the name, place of birth, and last legal settlement, age, and occupation of every person” arriving from outside of the state. This information was used in cases where immigrants appealed to the city or state for resources. Ship owners were required to pay bonds for prospectively destitute passengers. If those passengers drew on city resources, the city could turn to those bonds to cover the costs. Many shipbrokers sold those bonds to other brokers, who, for a price, assumed liability for Famine migrants, and often routed those bound for public institutions to private “hospitals” which failed to provide meaningful aid. The most notorious of these institutions in New York was William Tapscott’s “Private Hospital and Poor House.” The Tapscott company advanced credit for tickets that 104

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would be paid after arrival in America, where, agents promised, immigrants would be able to get work. When recently arrived passengers were unable to pay for their passage, they often appealed to Tapscott’s New York agents, who sent them to the private poorhouse and hospital. In an 1846 in‑ vestigation of the hospital, two Irish inmates testified that the food “furnished us was composed of a species of meal so black as to be unfit for use, and to that was added molasses and made into pottage; that our dinner was at times salt fish and the before-mentioned bread, and at other times, of refuse grease with other mixtures collected from the ships during their trips across the Atlantic: ‘the crumbs that fell from the rich men’s table.’”16 The city of Boston, where less than 10 percent of all immigrants landed between 1845 and 1855, had a model similar to New York, though city officials there also turned to a pauper removal law, which allowed them send some immigrants back to Ireland. In New Orleans, where just over 10 percent of all immigrants landed, by contrast, officials resisted quarantine and poor relief provisions, preferring instead to rely on collective immunity. These more limited quarantine restrictions made New Orleans an attractive prospect for ships’ captains, if not specifically for immigrants themselves.17 Passengers arriving in British North America (Canada) via Quebec were detained at Grosse Île, an island 30 miles downstream from Quebec City, which had been a quarantine station for seaborne traffic since the cholera outbreak of 1832. Before 1847, Quebec was the primary port of arrival in Canada for Famine immigrants. Because of the relatively lower fares on ships bound for British North America, many of the immigrants who sailed for Quebec were less well off, both in terms of the money they could afford to spend and in terms of their overall health, than those heading to the United States. This had disastrous consequences for Grosse Île. In 1847, the quarantine station witnessed disproportionately high rates of death among Irish immigrants, which in popular memory have contributed to the persistence of the image of the “coffin ship.” In response, the Parliament of the United Province of Canada instated an Emigrant Tax to dissuade ship owners from bringing destitute immigrants into Quebec. The shipping companies passed these costs onto the immigrants, who subsequently shied away from the higher fares. Other Canadian provinces followed suit, which contributed to a general decline in the numbers of Irish immigrants to Canada after 1847. Across the United States and British North America, government structures like taxes and bonds shaped the avenues open to Famine immigrants, as well as their options upon arrival.18 As the other chapters in this volume illustrate, Famine immigrants’ experiences varied consider‑ ably. It is possible, however, to sketch some broad commonalities in settlement patterns, which high‑ light the social, political, and economic forces within which immigrants were making their decisions. Some of these patterns can be discerned through the US Census of 1850, which provides a snapshot of Irish settlement patterns midway through the Famine migration. Across the United States in 1850, people born in Ireland were often the largest group of foreign-born residents. In states along the northern border, such as Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, and Oregon, there were more Canadians than people of Irish descent. Irish immigrants were outnumbered by people of German descent in western states like Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa, and by immigrants from Mexico in California and New Mexico. However, all along the east coast, in Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, being from Ireland was more common than being from any country other than the United States. This was also true in states bordering the Gulf of Mexico. The Irish outnumbered immigrants from other countries in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. In those states where Irish people outnumbered immigrants from other countries, they represented around 10 percent of the total population of the state. These trends held true in Canada as well. Across British North America, people born in Ireland outnumbered people born anywhere other than Canada. One notable difference in Canada was that Irish people had been the majority among immigrants before the Famine as well, reflecting longstanding connections between the British archipelago and British 105

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North America. In short, people born in Ireland were a significant presence in North America in the years after the Famine. Those who settled in places with extant Irish communities would have found social support as they transitioned to life in the United States and Canada. However, for the many who found themselves part of a newly numerous demographic bloc, settling in North America posed challenges of welcome and assimilation.19 This presence was especially felt in cities. By 1850, one quarter of the people living within the New York metropolitan area, which included Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and parts of New Jersey, had been born in Ireland. In the area surrounding New Orleans, 20 percent of residents had been born in Ireland. Irish people were also a significant presence in Boston, Albany, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh in the United States, and in Canadian cities like Toronto, Hamilton, Kingston, London, Montreal, and Quebec. These figures suggest something of a paradox: while most people who immigrated during the course of the Famine had lived in the countryside, after arriving in North America, many settled in cities. To some degree, these settlement patters reflected established com‑ munities. Before the Famine, relatively affluent Irish immigrants had begun to settle and build com‑ munity in the cities mentioned above, as well as Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit, St. Louis, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and San Francisco. It is no surprise that Famine immigrants would gravitate to those places as well.20 While Irish experiences differed from city to city, it is worth dwelling on the two US cities where Irish people were most populous: New York and New Orleans. In 1845, there were 97,000 Irish men, women, and children living in New York City. By 1855, that number had almost doubled. This was due largely to immigration trends. The number of Irish people entering the United States through the port of New York increased steadily between 1845 and 1851, and declined very gradually thereafter. In New Orleans, too, the number of Irish people entering the United States through that port peaked in 1851 at 52,000 people. There were some differences between these two urban spaces. In 1855, partly in response to Irish Famine immigration, New York built an immigrant reception center called Castle Garden in lower Manhattan. This was the precursor to Ellis Island, which opened in 1892.21 During the decade following the Famine, the number of people of Irish descent living in New York steadily increased, and they quickly became associated with poverty, tenement life, and with specific neighborhoods and wards. These were precisely the images that the editors of the American Patriot used to drum up anti-immigrant sentiment. Slums such as the notorious Five Points neighborhood in Manhattan became home to many of the Irish who settled in the city. These neighborhoods often developed according to networks transported from Ireland. For instance, the tenants whom Lord Lansdowne had assisted in their immigration also settled together in Five Points. Irish neighborhoods developed in other places across the city, too. While many Irish men positioned themselves at the heart of the city near projects that required labor, the most destitute drifted to the edges of the ex‑ panding metropolis. Irish women and girls made up a considerable part of New York City’s domestic workforce in upper-class households. Many Irish also settled outside of Manhattan, in Brooklyn and the Bronx, where workers’ enclaves formed around large public projects such as the Harlem Railroad, the Hudson River Railroad, and the Croton Aqueduct.22 By 1850, Irish men working in New Orleans occupied a range of jobs, including trade, manu‑ facturing, building, and transportation, and made better money than their compatriots in New York. These higher wages likely contributed to some Irish immigrants’ decisions to move to New Orleans from other places in North America. The Third Ward, the area of New Orleans with the highest concentration of Irish people in 1850, included those who had previously settled in Canada, New England, and the Midwest, among other places.23 As the demography of New Orleans’ Third Ward demonstrated, these cities were networked. Peo‑ ple arriving in New Orleans might head north via the Mississippi to St. Louis or stop and settle along

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the way in places like Tennessee or Arkansas. Those aiming to head west from the east coast might travel to Pittsburgh and from there, along the Ohio River to Indiana, Illinois, or Kentucky. People arriving in New York or Boston might have headed for the burgeoning mill towns of New England, or to their hinterlands. The networked nature of these cities points to a feature of Irish Famine im‑ migrant life often overlooked in the popular imagination and was certainly not imagined at all by 1850s “Native Americans” conjuring images of Irish invaders of US cities: that is, that significant numbers of Irish people, and particularly those who settled in Canada, made lives for themselves in the countryside. Many of these people became farmers and assimilated into the rural communities in which they settled. Others took up jobs in the burgeoning industries of the time such as the anthracite coalfields of Pennsylvania or the salt mines of New York State.24 One of the most persistent stories told about Irish Famine immigrants in the northeast, discussed in detail by Hidetaka Hirota in his chapter in this volume, is that they were consistently discouraged from applying for work through advertisements and ubiquitous signs in shop windows advertising “No Irish Need Apply.” During the Famine years, there were advertisements explicitly prohibit‑ ing Irish applicants. For example, in Philadelphia in early 1847, Louis Fontaine advertised for “an experienced white WOMAN, to take charge of an infant and to sew; no Irish need apply.” A few months later, “a small family” advertised for “A GIRL, to do the housework … and make herself useful. No Irish Need Apply.” These advertisements were often satirized, such as one published in the Yankee Doodle, which purported to be from “a pious Protestant cook” in search of a “very pi‑ ous Protestant family, which does not patronize the theatre, and is not otherwise carnally minded.” There is also some evidence from the period immediately after the Famine that advertisements for workers specified “Protestants only,” which would certainly have had the effect of excluding many (though not all) Irish Famine immigrants. The extent and persistence of these ads has been a mat‑ ter of historical debate and has spilled over into popular culture. Relying on searches of digitized newspapers, Richard Jensen argued in 2002 that overt discrimination in the form of advertisements was relatively uncommon, but that “No Irish Need Apply” was a powerful story that persisted for years after the Famine. In response, Rebecca A. Fried (who was a high school student at the time that her research was published) used digitized newspapers to note many examples of advertise‑ ments excluding Irish applicants, as well as domestic agencies whose refusal to consider Irish work‑ ers was so entrenched that it did not require mention in their advertisements. Similarly, Margaret Lynch-Brennan and Maureen O’Rourke Murphy have documented instances where Irish women were both implicitly and explicitly excluded from labor pools. These critiques of Jensen turn on the availability of digitized newspaper sources, but also on the significance and importance of memory as an object of historical study.25 Some Irish immigrants were able to attain financial footing relatively quickly after arrival. A tes‑ tament to that can be found in a rare data source not produced by surveilling governments, but by immigrants themselves. In 1850, New York’s Irish Emigrant Society organized the Emigrant Savings Bank, an institution that was intended to help the Irish community save money. The bank offered high interest rates as a way to attract patrons and kept records of the names and savings histories of depositors during the nineteenth century. Historians Tyler Anbinder, Cormac Ó Gráda, and Simone Wegge have used these records to demonstrate that many Irish people were able to attain economic stability after arriving in America.26 Not all Famine immigrants were immediately successful, however. Those in need turned to so‑ cial groups like the Irish Emigrant Society in New York or the Charleston Hibernian Society, which operated as employment bureaus, gathering spaces, and fundraisers for poor Irish within their com‑ munities. Others turned to nascent public health institutions. In the United States, these include the free public Bellevue Almshouse in New York City and a constellation of state-run almshouses in

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Boston. In Canada, they included orphanages run by groups like the Sisters of Charity in Quebec and civic organizations dedicated to helping immigrants become self-sufficient in Western Canada. These structures of social support afforded opportunities for Famine immigrants to make choices, albeit sometimes limited ones, about where to seek aid or expend resources. Whether they were able to do so was conditioned by a range of foregoing contingencies including conditions in Ireland, op‑ portunities for trans-Atlantic travel, the availability of work and transport in the ports in which they arrived, and simple luck, which made it possible for some to thrive immediately and required others to seek aid.27

Conclusion In summary, Famine immigrants’ decisions to leave Ireland, and their experiences of departure, ar‑ rival, and settlement, were not universal. Irish immigrants were neither homogenous nor universally poor, nor were they unthinking pawns in the face of British malfeasance or North American Hiber‑ nophobia. One of the primary sites of scholarly debate about Famine immigration lies in identifying where and how Irish immigrants were able to exercise self-determination While these debates reflect real historical circumstances, they also are indicative of the range of sources available to study the lives of Famine migrants. Documents that allow scholars to access the internal experiences of Irish people in North America are compelling. However, as Kerby Miller has demonstrated, they can be subject to lacunae (such as the dearth of letters written by people who primarily spoke Irish) or heightened emotion (such as the exile motif that appeared in letters as a consequence of deep unhappiness and homesickness). Topics not discussed in letters and memoirs might signify a lack of engagement. Equally, they might signify a trauma so deep as to belie discus‑ sion. Historical data, too, can be fraught with methodological peril. Much of the information collated about Irish people in North America was collected by governments interesting in militating against the impact that Famine immigrants might have on their localities. This data reflected both US and Ca‑ nadian nativist views of Irish men, women, and children. Archives like that of New York’s Emigrant Savings Bank are rare, but offer an alternative to the gaze of the state.28 Ultimately, as the chapters that follow demonstrate, there is not one story to tell about the Fam‑ ine Irish. They led complicated, and often divergent lives, shaped by individual autonomy, external conditions, and the realities of life on land and at sea in the nineteenth century. Understanding the cultures, governments, biases and charitable impulses that they encountered in North America can help to give texture to their lives and experiences, prompting us to tell not an immigrant story, but rather to create a reach tapestry of immigrant stories.

Notes 1 The Native American was announced in the Boston Courier, January 15, 1852. For a discussion of the history of Nativism, see Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery. J.E. Farwell & Co., “American Citizens! We Appeal to You in All Calmness. Is It Not Time to Pause? A Paper Entitled the American Patriot.” 2 For a review of British government responses to the famine, see Gray, Famine, Land, and Politics. For a dis‑ cussion of charitable Irish aid, see my forthcoming Shrout, Aiding Ireland, and McNeice, “Global Networks of Relief and the Great Irish Famine”; Mokyr, “What Do People Die of during Famines.” 3 These interpretations are driven in part by ideas about Ireland that developed among the Irish diaspora in the twentieth century. Akenson, The Irish Diaspora, 16; Kenny, “Diaspora and Comparison”; Kelly, Ireland’s Great Famine in Irish-American History; McGowan, “The Famine Plot Revisited,” 91. 4 The argument about data as a mechanism of social control is made in Poovey, “Curing the ‘Social Body’ in 1832,” 196. Balch Institute, “Records for Passengers Who Arrived at the Port of New York During the Irish Famine.” 5 Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 5.

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The Great Famine Exodus 6 See, for example Ó Gráda, “Famine, Trauma and Memory”; Mark-FitzGerald, Commemorating the Irish Famine; Corporaal, Irish Global Migration and Memory. 7 For discussions of the spatial dimensions of changes in Irish demography, see Fotheringham, “The Demo‑ graphic Impacts of the Irish Famine.” For a discussion of the demography of laborers in pre-famine Ireland, see Ó Gráda, Black ’47 and beyond, 25. For a discussion of the history of the potato as a crop, see Salaman, The History and Social Influence of the Potato. Description of housing from “Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Take the Census of Ireland, for the Year 1841.” xiv. 8 For a discussion of colonial information-gathering campaigns, see Doherty, The Irish Ordnance Survey. For discussions of British views of the Irish countryside as inferior see De Nie, The Eternal Paddy. For discus‑ sion of the distribution of famine deaths, see Ó Gráda, Black ’47 and beyond, 33. 9 For discussions of patters of emigration, see Cousens, “The Regional Pattern of Emigration during the Great Irish Famine”; Gregory, “Analyzing Spatiotemporal Change by Use of National Historical Geographical Information Systems”; Smyth, “Exodus from Ireland,” 500–502. Labor migrations reflected both emigrants’ needs and the wages paid for work in British cities. For example, see Harris, The Nearest Place That Wasn’t Ireland, 69–70; Davis, “The Irish in Britain, 1815–1939.” For earlier histories of Irish social networks, see Cullen, The Bordeaux-Dublin Letters; Bailey, “Metropole and Colony.” Kerby Miller famously argued that one of the signature experiences shared by Irish famine immigrants was one of exile – even as their under‑ standing of what that exile meant varied widely. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles. 10 For discussions of the cost of emigration and charitable aid, see McMahon, The Coffin Ship, 15–28, 38–34; Moran, Sending out Ireland’s Poor, 70–90. For discussion of the Landsdowne and Palmerston assisted emi‑ gration schemes, see Anbinder, “Lord Palmerston and the Irish Famine Emigration,” 443; Anbinder, “From Famine to Five Points,” 356. 11 Doyle, “The Irish in Australia and the United States,” 221; Ó Gráda, “Migration as Disaster Relief,” 11. 12 Doyle, “The Irish in Australia and the United States,” 79; Neal, Black ’47, 61; Hirota, Expelling the Poor, 25; McMahon, The Coffin Ship, 7, 81. The costs for different fares is documented in McMahon, 7. The Weekly Freeman’s Journal of May 8, 1847 advertised “To Emigrants. Steerage Passage, Each Adult £3 15s. to Quebec and Montreal.” On June 17, 1847, the Dublin Evening Post advertised steerage fares to New York at £4 10s. 13 For examples of advertisements for the “Old Line” of Liverpool, see Evening Post (New York), January 2, 1847. Liverpool Mercury. January 8, 1847. For discussions of the US Passenger Act, see Kenny, The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic, 61. Descriptions of the experience of preparations for embarka‑ tion can be found in McMahon, The Coffin Ship, 61; McMahon, “‘That City Afloat,’” 118. 14 For a discussion of the mechanics of ticket purchases, see Spray, “Irish Famine Emigrants and the Passage Trade to North America,” 6–7. For an overview of the development of US federal policy on immigration, and its relationship to state law, see Hirota, Expelling the Poor; Kenny, The Problem of Immigration in a Slave‑ holding Republic, chap. “Police Power and Commerce Power.” In her 2020 Dissertation, Katherine Carper argues that the collective actions of merchants, agents, aid organizations and con-men came to constitute a “migration business,” which operated with institutional logics throughout the nineteenth century. Carper, “The Migration Business,” For a discussion of settlement in Canada, see Houston, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement, 26. 15 For a discussion of the construction of Famine memory vis-à-vis “coffin ships,” see McGowan, “Famine, Facts and Fabrication” and McMahon, “Tracking the Great Famine’s ‘Coffin Ships’.” An artist’s statement for the “National Famine Memorial” described the piece as “a ‘coffin ship’ with skeleton bodies in the rig‑ ging (the term Coffin Ship was used to describe the horrendously overcrowded boats which left our shores with emigrants fleeing the famine in dire and unhygienic conditions—the mortality rate was 30%)” [see Solomon, “JOHN BEHAN RHA”]. In an article announcing the commission of the sculpture in the Irish Ex‑ aminer of August 1, 1996, then-Minister of State Avril Doyle “said that a sculpture, Coffin Ship, created by John Behan, would be the centrepiece of the National Famine Memorial.” Another article in the Connaught Telegraph of August 7, 1996 promised “a sculptured coffin ship with skeletal figures forming the sails.” This unofficial title persists, as in a September 20, 2016 article in the Mayo News celebrating a walking trail that passes by the “poignant bronze sculpture by the artist John Behan [which] depicts a ‘coffin ship’ with skeletons woven into the masts, in memory of all those who perished on the voyages to America.” While much of the rhetoric claiming that Irish were enslaved, and consequently that American chattel slavery was not racialized focuses on the colonial period, Liam Hogan’s series includes some examples of claims that Famine migrants were treated as badly, if not worse, than enslaved Africans through the end of the Famine. See Hogan, “The ‘Forced Breeding’ Myth in the ‘Irish Slaves’ Meme.” Hogan also cites examples of com‑ mentators arguing—in language that mirrors that of enslavers in the 1840s—that Irish people lived in a state of greater destitution than enslaved people, and that mortality on Famine ships was significantly higher

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Anelise Hanson Shrout than mortality on slave ships. For a discussion of the nineteenth-century promulgation of this idea, see the chapter entitled “Slavery” in Shrout, Aiding Ireland. For a discussion of more recent deployments of this myth, see Hogan, “The Abuse of History.” For discussions of the mortality on ships transporting Irish emi‑ grants and on ships as a place of identity formation, see McMahon, The Coffin Ship, 99–193 and McMahon, “‘That City Afloat.’” 16 Kapp, Immigration, and the Commissioners of Emigration, 45–46; Cohn, Mass Migration Under Sail, 156; Hirota, Expelling the Poor, 47, 64–65; New York State Legislature, An Act concerning Passengers in Vessels coming to the Port of New York. The quotation about Tapscott’s hospital appears in Kapp, Immigration, and the Commissioners of Emigration of the State of New York, 51. 17 Kelley, “Erin’s Enterprise,” 49; Olivarius, “Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans”; Hirota, Expelling the Poor, 62. 18 Houston, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement; Quigley, “Grosse Île,” 21; See, “‘An Unprecedented Influx,’” 443; Vineberg, “Healthy Enough to Get In,” 283; McMahon, The Coffin Ship, 154–155. 19 These figures are drawn from the report of the US census for 1850. Akenson, Irish in Ontario, 9. 20 McCaffrey, The Irish Catholic Diaspora in America, 67–68. 21 In 1851, 163,306 people from Ireland entered the United States through the Port of New York. New York State Commissioners of Emigration, Annual Reports of the Commissioners of Emigration of the State of New York, 288.For discussions of Irish demography of New York and New Orleans, see Diner, “‘The Most Irish City in the Union’”; Kelley, “Erin’s Enterprise,” 50. 22 Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America : Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century; Anbinder, “From Famine to Five Points.” 23 Kelley, “Erin’s Enterprise,” 65–68. 24 Akenson, Irish in Ontario, 1st Edition, 41; Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, 53–55; Campbell, “Immigrants on the Land”; Donlon, German and Irish Immigrants in the Midwestern United States, 1850– 1900, 54–57. 25 These ads were published in the Public Ledger (Philadelphia) on January 7 and November 13, 1847. The satirical Yankee Doodle ad was reprinted in the New York Express of January 25, 1847. Jensen, “‘No Irish Need Apply’: The Myth of Victimization”; Lynch‑Brennan and Murphy, The Irish Bridget, 73–74; Fried, “No Irish Need Deny”; Hogan, “Survey of the ‘No Irish Need Apply’ Qualification in Classified Ads in U.S. Newspapers (1827–1919).” 26 Anbinder, “Moving beyond ‘Rags to Riches’”; Anbinder, Gráda, and Wegge, “Networks and Opportunities”; Anbinder, Gradá, and Wegge, “The Best Country in the World.” 27 Purcell, “The Irish Emigrant Society of New York”; Duncan, “Irish Famine Immigration and the Social Structure of Canada West”; Mitchell, The History of the Hibernian Society of Charleston, South Carolina, 1799–1981; Hirota, Expelling the Poor, 80; Donovan, “The Boundaries of Charity”; “Digital Almshouse Project.” 28 For a discussion of the uses of immigrant letters, see Miller, Ireland and Irish America.

Bibliography Primary Sources Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies. Center for Immigration Research. “Records for Passengers Who Ar‑ rived at the Port of New York During the Irish Famine, Created, 1977 – 1989, Documenting the Period 1/12/1846  –  12/31/1851,” National Archives at College Park. https://aad.archives.gov/aad/fielded‑search. jsp?dt=180&tf=F. J.E. Farwell & Co. “American Citizens! We Appeal to You in All Calmness. Is It Not Time to Pause? A Paper En‑ titled the American Patriot.” J.E. Farwell & Co., 1852. Prints and Photographs Division. Library of Congress. Kapp, Friedrich. Immigration, and the Commissioners of Emigration of the State of New York. New York: The Nation Press, 1870. New York State Commissioners of Emigration. Annual Reports of the Commissioners of Emigration of the State of New York: From the Organization of the Commission, May 5, 1847, to 1860, Inclusive: Together with Ta‑ bles and Reports, and Other Official Documents. New York: The Commission, 1861. New York State Legislature. An Act Concerning Passengers in Vessels Coming to the Port of New York (1824). “Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Take the Census of Ireland, for the Year 1841.” 19th Century House of Commons Sessional Papers, 1843.

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Secondary Sources Akenson, Donald Harman. Irish in Ontario, 1st Edition: A Study in Rural History. Kingston: McGill‑Queen’s University Press, 1984. Akenson, Donald H. The Irish Diaspora : A Primer. Toronto; Belfast: P.D. Meany Co. Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University of Belfast, 1993. Anbinder, Tyler. “From Famine to Five Points: Lord Lansdowne’s Irish Tenants Encounter North America’s Most Notorious Slum.” The American Historical Review 107, no. 2 (April 2002): 351–387. Anbinder, Tyler. “Lord Palmerston and the Irish Famine Emigration.” The Historical Journal 44, no. 2 (2001): 441–469. Anbinder, Tyler. “Moving beyond ‘Rags to Riches’: New York’s Irish Famine Immigrants and Their Surprising Savings Accounts.” The Journal of American History 99, no. 3 (2012): 741–770. Anbinder, Tyler. Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Anbinder, Tyler, Cormac Ó Gráda, and Simone A. Wegge. “Networks and Opportunities: A Digital History of Ireland’s Great Famine Refugees in New York.” American Historical Review 124, no. 5 (December 2019): 1591–1629. Anbinder, Tyler, Cormac Ó Gradá, and Simone A. Wegge. “‘The Best Country in the World’: The Surprising Social Mobility of New York’s Irish‑Famine Immigrants.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 53, no. 3 (2022): 407–438. Bailey, Craig. “Metropole and Colony: Irish Networks and Patronage in the Eighteenth‑Century Empire.” Im‑ migrants & Minorities 23, no. 2–3 (July 1, 2005): 161–181. Campbell, Malcolm. “Immigrants on the Land: Irish Rural Settlement in Minnesota and New South Wales, 1830–1890.” New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua 2, no. 1 (1998): 43–61. Carper, Katherine. “The Migration Business, 1824–1876.” Ph.D. diss., Boston College, 2020. Cohn, Raymond L. Mass Migration Under Sail: European Immigration to the Antebellum United States. Cam‑ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Corporaal, Marguerite, and Jason King. Irish Global Migration and Memory: Transatlantic Perspectives of Ire‑ land’s Famine Exodus. Oxford: Routledge, 2018. Cousens, S.H. “The Regional Pattern of Emigration during the Great Irish Famine, 1846–51.” Transactions and Papers (Institute of British Geographers) no. 28 (1960): 119–134. Cullen, Louis, John Shovlin, Thomas Truxes, Louis Cullen, John Shovlin, and Thomas Truxes, eds. The Bordeaux‑ Dublin Letters, 1757: Correspondence of an Irish Community Abroad. Records of Social and Economic His‑ tory. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Davis, Graham. “The Irish in Britain, 1815–1939.” In The Irish Diaspora, edited by Andy Bielenberg. 19–36 Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000. De Nie, Michael. The Eternal Paddy : Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798–1882. History of Ireland and the Irish Diaspora. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Diner, Hasia R. Erin’s Daughters in America : Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. Diner, Hasia R. “‘The Most Irish City in the Union’: The Era of the Great Migration, 1844–1877.” In The New York Irish (pp. 87–106), edited by Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Doherty, Gillian M. The Irish Ordnance Survey: History, Culture and Memory. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004. Donlon, Regina. German and Irish Immigrants in the Midwestern United States, 1850–1900. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Donovan, Patrick. “The Boundaries of Charity: The Impact of Ethnic Relations on Private Charitable Services for Quebec City’s English‑Speakers, 1759–1900.” PhD diss., Université Laval, 2019. Doyle, David Noel. “The Irish in Australia and the United States: Some Comparisons, 1800–1939.” Irish Eco‑ nomic and Social History 16 (1989): 73–94. Duncan, Kenneth. “Irish Famine Immigration and the Social Structure of Canada West.” Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue Canadienne de Sociologie 2, no. 1 (1965): 19–40. Fotheringham, A. Stewart, Mary H. Kelly, and Martin Charlton. “The Demographic Impacts of the Irish Famine: Towards a Greater Geographical Understanding.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38, no. 2 (2013): 221–237. Fried, Rebecca A. “No Irish Need Deny: Evidence for the Historicity of NINA Restrictions in Advertisements and Signs.” Journal of Social History 49, no. 4 (June 1, 2016): 829–854.

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Anelise Hanson Shrout Gray, Peter. Famine, Land, and Politics : British Government and Irish Society, 1843–1850. Dublin; Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 1999. Gregory, Ian N., and Paul S. Ell. “Analyzing Spatiotemporal Change by Use of National Historical Geographical Information Systems.” Historical Methods 38, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 149–167. Harris, Ruth‑Ann M. The Nearest Place That Wasn’t Ireland: Early Nineteenth‑Century Irish Labor Migration. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1994. Hirota, Hidetaka. Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth‑Century Origins of American Immigration Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Hogan, Liam. “Survey of the ‘No Irish Need Apply’ Qualification in Classified Ads in U.S. Newspapers (1827–1919).” Medium (blog), September 5, 2019. https://limerick1914.medium.com/survey‑of‑the‑no‑ irish‑need‑apply‑qualification‑in‑classified‑ads‑in‑u‑s‑newspapers‑1827‑1919‑af77e79ace4c. Hogan, Liam. “The Abuse of History.” Medium (blog), March 6, 2018. https://limerick1914.medium.com/ the‑abuse‑of‑history‑681924717930. Hogan, Liam. “The ‘Forced Breeding’ Myth in the ‘Irish Slaves’ Meme.” Medium (blog), November 30, 2018. https://limerick1914.medium.com/the‑racist‑myth‑within‑a‑racist‑myth‑8eac2c890e92. Houston, Cecil J., and William J. Smyth. Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement: Patterns, Links, and Let‑ ters. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Jensen, Richard. “‘No Irish Need Apply’: The Myth of Victimization.” Journal of Social History 36, no. 2 (2002): 405–429. Kelley, Laura D. “Erin’s Enterprise: Immigration by Appropriation. The Irish in Antebellum New Orleans.” Ph.D. diss, Tulane University, 2004. Kelly, Mary. Ireland’s Great Famine in Irish‑American History: Enshrining a Fateful Memory. Washington, DC: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013. Kenny, Kevin. “Diaspora and Comparison: The Global Irish as a Case Study.” The Journal of American History 90, no. 1 (2003): 134–162. Kenny, Kevin. Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Kenny, Kevin. The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth‑ Century United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. Lynch‑Brennan, Margaret, and Maureen O’Rourke Murphy. The Irish Bridget: Irish Immigrant Women in Do‑ mestic Service in America, 1840–1930. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014. http://ebookcentral. proquest.com/lib/bates/detail.action?docID=3410176. Mark‑FitzGerald, Emily. Commemorating the Irish Famine: Memory and the Monument. Oxford: Oxford Uni‑ versity Press, 2015. Mary Poovey. “Curing the ‘Social Body’ in 1832: James Phillips Kay and the Irish in Manchester.” Gender & History 5, no. 2 (June 1, 1993): 196–211. McCaffrey, Lawrence John. The Irish Catholic Diaspora in America. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997. McGowan, Mark. “Famine, Facts and Fabrication: An Examination of Diaries from the Irish Famine Migration to Canada.” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 33, no. 2 (2007): 48–55. McGowan, Mark G. “The Famine Plot Revisited: A Reassessment of the Great Irish Famine as Genocide.” Geno‑ cide Studies International 11, no. 1 (2017): 87–104. McMahon, Cian T. “‘That City Afloat’: Maritime Dimensions of Ireland’s Great Famine Migration.” American Historical Review 127, no. 1 (March 1, 2022): 100–128. McMahon, Cian T. The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine. New York: New York University Press, 2021. McMahon, Cian T. “Tracking the Great Famine’s ‘Coffin Ships’ across the Digital Deep.” Éire‑Ireland 56, no. 1 (2021): 81–109. McNeice, Aoife O’Leary. “Global Networks of Relief and the Great Irish Famine.” PhD diss., Cambridge Uni‑ versity, 2021. Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles : Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Miller, Kerby A. Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration. Dublin: Field Day Publications, 2008. Mitchell, Arthur. The History of the Hibernian Society of Charleston, South Carolina, 1799–1981. Charleston, SC, 1981. Mokyr, Joel, and Cormac Ó Grada. “What Do People Die of during Famines: The Great Irish Famine in Com‑ parative Perspective.” European Review of Economic History 6, no. 3 (2002): 339–363.

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The Great Famine Exodus Moran, Gerard. Sending out Ireland’s Poor: Assisted Emigration to North America in the Nineteenth Century. Dublin; Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2004. Neal, Frank. Black ’47: Britain and the Famine Irish. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. Ó Gráda, Cormac. Black ’47 and beyond : The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory. Princeton Economic History of the Western World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Ó Gráda, Cormac. “Famine, Trauma and Memory.” Béaloideas 69 (2001): 121–143. Ó Gráda, Cormac, and Kevin H. O’Rourke. “Migration as Disaster Relief: Lessons from the Great Irish Famine.” European Review of Economic History 1, no. 1 (1997): 3–25. Olivarius, Kathryn. “Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans.” The American Historical Re‑ view 124, no. 2 (April 1, 2019): 425–455. Purcell, Richard J. “The Irish Emigrant Society of New York.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 27, no. 108 (1938): 583–599. Quigley, Michael. “Grosse Île: Canada’s Famine Memorial.” Eire‑Ireland 32, no. 1 (1997): 20–40. Salaman, Redcliffe N. The History and Social Influence of the Potato. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. See, Scott W. “‘An Unprecedented Influx’: Nativism and Irish Famine Immigration to Canada.” American Re‑ view of Canadian Studies 30, no. 4 (2000): 429–453. Shrout, Anelise. Aiding Ireland: The Famine and the Rise of Transnational Philanthropy. Glucksman Irish Dias‑ pora Series. New York: NYU Press, 2024. Smyth, William J. “Exodus from Ireland: Patterns of Emigration.” In Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, 1845–52, edited by John Crowley, William J. Smyth, and Mike Murphy, 494–503. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2012. Solomon Fine Art. “JOHN BEHAN RHA: MIGRANTS.” Accessed August 3, 2023. https://www.solomonfine‑ art.ie/viewing‑room/12‑john‑behan‑rha‑migrants/. Spray, William A. “Irish Famine Emigrants and the Passage Trade to North America.” In Fleeing the Famine: North America and Irish Refugees, 1845–1851, edited by Margaret M. Mulrooney, 3–20. Wesport, CT: Prae‑ ger, 2003. Vineberg, Robert. “Healthy Enough to Get In: The Evolution of Canadian Immigration Policy Related to Immi‑ grant Health.” Journal of International Migration and Integration 16, no. 2 (May 1, 2015): 279–297.

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8 AMERICAN CATHOLICISM AND THE IRISH FROM COLONIAL TIMES TO 1870 Oliver P. Rafferty SJ

This chapter’s aim is threefold: to say something of the development of Catholicism in the United States from the early years of European settlement, to ask how American Catholicism coped with the onslaught of Irish immigration during the Great Famine of the late 1840s and early 1850s, and to outline the problems the Church faced from 1850 to 1870. Ultimately, the bishops and priests who shaped American Irish-Catholic experience in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries aimed to show that the Church could be both American and Catholic, but there was also an ambiguity in the nineteenth century as some churchmen saw value in also maintaining a rugged sense of Irish identity. Indeed, some have even argued that the effort to preserve a sense of Irishness, as exemplified, for example, in the life and work of John Hughes, Bishop (and later Archbishop) of New York, set back the progress of Irish immigrants by at least a generation. Nevertheless, this chapter argues that the Church enabled Irish Catholics to find their place in America by insisting they conform to the middleclass norms of their new home.1 Historian Kerby Miller famously maintained that there were three institutions, at least for the pe‑ riod 1845 to 1870, that became the pillars on which the Irish-American experience was erected: Irish nationalism, the Democratic Party, and the Catholic Church. It was, however, above all the Church that enabled the Irish emigrant to negotiate the cultural and economic disruption occasioned by im‑ migration. The Catholic Church was the most important and, ultimately, most powerful institution that afforded continuity and religious solace in the transition between life at home and life in the American republic. Perhaps from as early as the 1820s on, it was an Irish version of Catholicism that ministered to hundreds of thousands of European Catholic immigrants who were fleeing political, social, and financial hardships in Europe and, from 1845, death in Ireland.2 If the Catholic Church, especially in its Irish guise, had to come to terms with American society amidst allegations that the Papacy was trying to take over the government in the United States, there was also a need for American mores to come to terms with Catholicism. The Church exercised influence on the political structures that were emerging in America, obviously over the Catholic body, but also on the culture as a whole, as the Church grew numerically and was brought into confrontation with libertarian American values. This was true right up to the time of the Civil War and Reconstruction. There was nonetheless a faction within American culture in this period that saw Catholicism, and Irish Catholicism in particular, as an impediment to American evolution. Catholi‑ cism was not only a religion but also a polity, and one regarded by many as “anti-modern and trans‑ national and, therefore, un-American.” Of all the problems confronting the Irish-American Church at DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-11

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an institutional level, this was perhaps its greatest difficulty. It needed to convince its opponents that it was possible for a good Catholic to maintain loyalty to a foreign potentate (in religious matters) yet simultaneously to be committed to the values and Constitution of the American Republic. At the same time, there was a major difference in Catholic attitudes to the culture with which these immi‑ grants wanted to integrate. The prevailing individualism of America was at variance with Catholic views of ecclesiastical community. The respectability of Irish-American Catholics came to be seen as a corporatist enterprise with the Church at its center. This was another factor that would seemingly put Catholicism at odds with American politics and society. Nevertheless, this chapter argues that the Church enabled Irish Catholics to find their place in America by insisting they conform to the value system of most Americans.3

The Early Evolution of American Catholicism and its Irish Components The earliest contribution that the Irish made to the Church in colonial America from the mideighteenth century was in Florida, where priests from the Irish College in Salamanca ministered to native Americans. This soon came to an end, however, and the main focus switched to Maryland, where the presence of English Catholics from as early as 1634 ensured that Maryland and Pennsylva‑ nia would become the cradle of the Church in the English-speaking New World. Although there may have been some tolerance for Catholicism per se, there are early indications of prejudice toward Irish Catholics. In 1707, for example, the Maryland Assembly imposed a tax on “Irish Papist” household servants in an attempt to reduce the number of lower-order Irish Catholics in the colony. By the time John Carroll was consecrated Bishop of Baltimore and became the American Catholic religious supe‑ rior in August 1790, there may have been as many as 35,000 Catholics in the country, up from 2,500 in 1700. They were widely scattered in such diverse places as Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Kentucky, and South Carolina. Even at that stage, it is clear that there were some Irish among them. The shape of Episcopal leadership would follow this pattern of Catholic concentration. Given the acute shortage of priests and the small numbers of parish churches, religion tended to be practiced in the home, with women playing a prominent part in leading prayers and catechizing children. When Irish priests began arriving in numbers after 1788, tensions arose between them and the existing clergy, almost all of whom were former Jesuit priests. Bishop Carroll was concerned by what he took to be the low level of education, the intemperate habits, and the worldly ambitions of the new Irish clerical arrivals.4 There also evolved in the post-revolutionary American Church a distinctive ethos which owed much to the Gallican proclivities of the Church in France, and which sought to meld with American ideas of liberty, independence, and democracy. Such dispositions would give rise to the idea that the laity should have a role in Church affairs, both with regard to the practicalities of each congregation and in terms of the selection of priests and bishops. Carroll was to the fore on this, but even when Irish bishops were appointed to American episcopal sees, it was clear that some warmed to the idea of a “democratic” Church. Even in Rome, there were prelates in the papal court who thought that America should be treated differently so far as Church government was concerned. One element here may have been the desire of a small group of Catholics to establish an independent Church along the lines of the Jansenist Church of Utrecht. Rome was, therefore, willing to give some concessions to the American democratic temperament in order to avoid schism. When the County Cork native John England arrived as Bishop of Charleston, South Carolina in 1820, he tolerated this democratic “Trusteeism” and gave a constitution to his diocese in which he set out the respective rights and du‑ ties of the clergy and laity. Although it is often said that such a practice was foreign to the modus operandi of the Irish Church, in fact there are examples of the practice in Ireland. The idea of lay patronage had given rise 115

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to disputes in Ireland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in such places as Antrim, Down, Fermanagh, Louth, Meath, and Kerry. The most complicated of these was the Wardenship of Galway. In general the lay elite elected a priest to look after the affairs of the Church in Galway for a three-year term. Pope Gregory XVI, the former Prefect of Propaganda Fide (the Vatican depart‑ ment which looked after Church affairs in missionary countries such as Ireland and America) claimed that the problems of the Wardenship took up more of his time than all the other problems of Ireland put together. The Trusteeism debate shaped the operations of the American Church until the 1850s, although historian David Noel Doyle has argued that most of the problems were actually resolved in the 1840s.5 Trusteeism was part of a larger problem that also touched on the place of Catholicism in Ameri‑ can society, namely the attitude of Protestant America to the Church. At its heart was a question: given its authoritarian nature, was Catholicism incompatible with American liberty? In addition, there was a suggestion that the use of the vernacular language in the administration of the sacraments would make Catholicism seem less alien. This was a view initially shared by Bishop Carroll, who told Propaganda Fide that the Holy See should grant such liberty to the American Church as the ideology of the age and the temper of American Catholicism required. Those who propagated antiCatholicism, although probably influenced by straight-forward bigotry, liked to argue that, given its despotic ways, Catholicism was alien to American mores. Although the antipathy remained, Catholi‑ cism could, however, to some extent be tolerated by broader American society as long as it remained a small conformist sect with no political influence. Once it violated those restrictions, the full force of anti-Catholicism would be vented against it. Nevertheless, Americans seemed to make a distinction between Irish-Catholic America and the rest. Thus, for example, in places such as Boston, where the Church had been led by Bishop John Cheverus since 1808, relations between Catholics and Protestants were extremely good. Cheverus’ sophisticated educational attainments commended him to his fellow Bostonians. When he returned to France in 1823 at the insistence of King Louis XVIII, more than 200 of the leading Protestant in‑ habits of Boston declared in writing that he was “a blessing and a treasure to our social community.” American Protestants found it easier to tolerate French clergy because they respected their general level of learning and culture, even though they were foreigners.6 A fissure opened up in the American Catholic Church between the French clergy, including those Irish who were educated in the French-inspired St. Mary’s Sulpician seminary in Baltimore, and the Irish who were educated either at Maynooth (Ireland) or in Rome, and increasingly from 1842, at All Hallows, Dublin. Even by the 1820s, Irish bishops such as John England could blast the French émi‑ gré clergy for the fact that they could never become American, since everything about them was for‑ eign, even their accents, and, in some instances, their less-than-fluent grasp of the English language. Bishop England even withdrew his students from St. Mary’s seminary to found one of his own so that his clergy would be thoroughly American. Such problems had already manifested themselves years earlier. In fact, one aspect of the growth of Trusteeism was precisely differences of opinion between the Irish Trustees in Norfolk, Virginia and Charleston, South Carolina, and the French archbishop of Baltimore. For his part, Archbishop Ambrose Maréchal, Carroll’s successor, had as early as 1819 complained to the Holy See about the unruliness of Irish priests and laity in his diocese.7 Although it is generally accepted that Irish Catholics who immigrated before the Famine tended to be better skilled and were relativity better off than those who arrived in the 1840s and 1850s, it is also clear that Irish poverty rendered them objectionable in the eyes of native-born, white Americans. It was simply taken for granted that the Irish were lazy, feckless, drunken, unreliable, and unwashed. Furthermore, they were, given their presumed inferiority, unfit for assimilation into mainstream America. This attitude toward the Irish was even shared by some Anglo-American Catholics and converts. In a letter to the Catholic convert and public intellectual Orestes Brownson, Judge G. H. 116

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Hilton of Cincinnati said of his Irish-born archbishop, John Baptist Purcell, that, “A mitre and years of contact & American attrition could not remove the Divine Paddy out of [him] […] Not that I am prejudiced to the Irish or Irishman in his proper place,” Hilton clarified. “But out of its proper place it is abominable: narrow, provincial & hateful.” Brownson himself declared that the decorum, mor‑ als, and virtues of the Irish-Catholic element in the American Church were the most deficient in the Catholic community. Concerns about the nature and extent of ecclesiastical authority and problems with relation to education, assimilation, and Irish nationalism were recurrent themes as Catholicism tried to make its way into American mainstream society in the 1830s and 1840s.8

The Growth of Catholicism Before and During the Great Famine By 1820, there may have been as many as 300,000 Catholics in the United States. This was approxi‑ mately ten times the number living there in 1790. By the time of the First National Council of the Catholic clergy in 1852, the Irish had virtually taken over the Church. There were six archbishops (all of them foreign-born) of whom four were born in Ireland. Of the 26 other bishops, eight were Irish-born, another eight were American though mostly of Irish extraction, and the rest were French, Belgian, or German. Irish supremacy was true also in terms of demography. Even before the Famine, Irish immigration in the 1820s and 1830s has been significant. Furthermore, owing to the numbers of Catholic Irish in America, the essential themes and structure of the Catholic Church were all in place on the eve of the Famine. One thing driving the exodus from Ireland was the availability of casual labor, as Anelise Hanson Shrout demonstrates in her chapter in this volume. Many church‑ men, however, feared that the unbridled capitalist ethos, which the Irish encountered in the early to mid-decades of the nineteenth century, would deprive the immigrant Irish of sensitivity to the things of the spirit. This would long be a lingering fear in American Catholicism “Nine-tenths of the Irish and their descendants in the United States are being offered up as human sacrifices in this temple of Mammon, the monster idol of the age,” rued Bishop John Lancaster Spalding of Peoria, Illinois in 1880, “and yet we Catholics are all the while congratulating ourselves upon the great progress we are making in this country.”9 Many of the Irish who arrived in America from the 1820s to the 1860s were already highly politi‑ cized; this worked both to their advantage and disadvantage. Those who crowded into the slums of New York would not only become the creatures of Tammany Hall and the Democratic Party, but they also generally shared Southern and Democratic Party views on slavery. This put them at odds with the man who had politicized them in the first place, Daniel O’Connell. Although Irish Americans had strongly supported both the Catholic Emancipation movement of the 1820s and Repeal of the Union agitation in the 1840s, they reacted negatively when O’Connell signed a public letter of the Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society in 1841, urging them to support abolitionism in America. The letter provoked outrage among Irish Catholics in the United States for a number of reasons. Although Pope Gregory XVI had condemned the slave trade in his 1839 encyclical In supremo apostolicus, although it is argued by some, he had not condemned slavery as such. A prevailing view among many American Catholics was that slavery as an institution was permissible provided one treated enslaved people well and did not sell them. Among those who objected to the Anti-Slavery Society letter was Bishop John Hughes of New York, who printed his reply in March 1842. Hughes urged his fellow Irish Catholics to repudiate the letter, which was also endorsed by Fr. Mathew, the well-known temperance advocate, not so much because of the ideas it contained, but because it was a foreign intervention in a matter of United States national policy. “I am no friend of slavery,” declared Hughes in a rhetorical flourish, “but I am still less friendly to any attempt of foreign origin to abolish it.”10 It was clear that the Catholic Church in America was equally divided on the issue. Given that Irish Catholics in Ireland had been themselves the subject of oppression, one might have expected that 117

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they would be sympathetic to the oppressed classes of their adopted homeland. One reason that was not the case was because of the treatment Irish Catholics received at the hands of Yankee abolitionists in cities such as Boston. As late as 1856, the Boston diocesan newspaper the Pilot railed against the “false philanthropy of those whose hearts are as soft as butter towards the oppressed colored laborers in the South, but as hard as flint towards a larger portion of the white laborers [i.e. the Irish].” These issues came to the fore again during the Civil War. Meanwhile, such was the growth of the Irish ele‑ ment in American Catholicism that Irish and Catholic almost became interchangeable terms. This was to be further ratified, despite an increase in German Catholic immigration, by the effect of the Irish Famine in the late 1840s and early 1850s.11 The hundreds of thousands of Irish who arrived on America’s east coast during the Famine years made for a pathetic spectacle. They were, however, welcomed by Bishop John Hughes, who saw in them a hope for the future of American Catholicism. Some of Hughes’ fellow bishops shared this view, but many in wider American society feared and loathed the sight of the incoming Irish. This was partly because of long-standing, nativist prejudice, but also because of a conviction that the Irish would be a drain on public charity. There was also an expectation that they would destroy the liberty and culture on which American society thrived. An 1848 report of the Massachusetts Senate condemned those Irish Catholics “pouring in upon us … wholly of another kind in morals and intel‑ lect.” But this was a mere reflection of a sentiment that had appeared in the Boston Bee the previous April, which complained of the debilitating influence that the mass of “bigoted, ignorant, and vicious offscouring of Ireland […] must have on our national character, our institutions, our morals.”12 One question that was thoroughly rehearsed in the liberal and Protestant press was who was to blame for the Famine? Generally speaking, Americans could at times blame the British government, but the favorite target was the Irish themselves, and more obviously the Catholic Church. Thus, among many examples of such polemic, the Boston based Christian Examiner in January 1848 reso‑ lutely declared that “starvation, suffering, and crimes which prevail among four millions [sic] in Ire‑ land are the legitimate fruits of Popery.” Even the Friends Review of Philadelphia could editorialize that it was the priests who made the Irish what they are, “or rather it is a degrading religion which has debased alike priest and people.” Many in both America and Britain also shared a conviction that the Famine was the mysterious work of Providence, which implied that the Irish were being punished by God for their sins. This view was not shared by many Catholics or indeed by skeptical Irish national‑ ists. Exiled ‘48er John Mitchel famously had observed that while God had sent the blight, the English had created the Famine. Similarly, in a famous lecture delivered in New York in 1847, Bishop Hughes repudiated the idea that somehow the Famine was the work of God and asserted rather that it was the work of man: “let us be careful […] not to blaspheme Providence by calling this God’s Famine.”13 During the course of the Famine, Irish Catholics in America contributed to relief efforts back home. Pope Pius IX’s issuance of an encyclical about the Famine Praedecossores nostros in January 1847 gave a boost to Catholic charitable contributions; in that year alone, Irish immigrants sent $1 million back to Ireland. Among the most curious aspects of Catholic activity during the Famine was that the building of churches continued apace. Thus, Fr. Batt O’Connor, parish priest of Milltown, County Kerry, went to Boston in 1847 to collect money for the building of the cathedral in Killarney. Paul Cullen, then rector of the Irish College, Rome, wrote to several bishops in Ireland about Pope Pius IX being forced to flee from Rome because of a revolution in the Papal States in November 1848. Cullen emphasized that Ireland “in her poverty” should come to the financial help of the Pope in his distress. Meanwhile, relief committees in various American cities differed in their organiza‑ tional competence. The committee in Boston, for example, was often denounced for being too politi‑ cal. This politicization would become a continuing feature of the collective memory of Irish-Catholic immigrants in their estimation of the Famine experience. Bitterness toward the British was even more

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vehement among the exiles than for those who remained in Ireland. As Mary C. Kelly shows in her chapter in this volume, the experience of Famine became a memory too powerful for the Irish to for‑ get. It bound the Irish to one another and became a touchstone for their identity every bit as dynamic as the Catholic Church.14 Protestant America detested the Famine migrants with a passion that sometimes bordered on hys‑ teria. Although Protestants did contribute enormous amounts to Famine relief, they did so in a way that made their relief entirely self-referential and emphasized American-Protestant virtue compared with Irish-Catholic vice. At the bottom of this was the old charge that Catholics could simply not be trusted with American democracy—an opinion that other developments in the 1840s seemed to confirm. Among the most important was the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848. The fact that a small number of Irish deserted during the course of the war to form the San Patricio Brigade to fight for Mexico was taken as proof positive of the disloyalty of Catholics to American values. By contrast, Bishop Hughes made the obvious point that the willingness of Irish Catholics to fight for the United States indicated their quintessential loyalty to, and reconciliation with, American values. Yet the fact that the treaty ending the war was signed at Guadalupe was seen by some as a further sign of Ameri‑ can contempt for Catholicism. Perhaps equally significant is the fact that the Mexican-American War also saw the first appointment of Catholic chaplains to America forces, albeit without official status. Two Jesuits served in that capacity, one of whom, the Irish-born John McElroy, went on to found Bos‑ ton College in 1863. Another series of conflicts that touched on the position of Catholics in America were the 1848 revolutions in Europe. Not only did they cause large numbers of anti-clericals to flee from places such as the Papal States, but once the revolution there had been suppressed, the political exiles were joined by similarly minded revolutionaries from France and Germany. Ireland also con‑ tributed to their number, including figures such as Thomas D’Arcy McGee, who left after the failed Young Ireland rising. McGee and his associates insisted that their failure was as a result of priestly intervention. Bishop Hughes said the Young Ireland exiles ranked among the “veriest wretches, that ever-disgraced humanity, or disturbed the wellbeing of society.” Hughes’ conflict with McGee dem‑ onstrated that while the influx of Famine Irish bolstered the Church’s strength in America, it also brought new challenges.15

Post-Famine Developments By 1850, the Catholic Church was the largest single Christian denomination in the United States. In this context, Catholic churchmen became increasingly defiant in the face of continued belligerence on the part of hostile Protestant opinion and the ongoing allegations that Catholicism and Americanism were incompatible. Archbishop Hughes gave a lecture in the old St. Patrick’s Cathedral in November 1850 in which he quoted Thomas Babington Macaulay’s famous prediction that Catholicism would continue to be young and vigorous as Anglicanism fell to ruins. He also made clear that the aim of Catholicism was to convert all Americans to the Church’s cause. These ideas were ill-received in the Protestant and nativist press, but they did harmonize with Orestes Brownson’s views, and he welcomed the fact that at last a Catholic Bishop was prepared to defend Catholicism robustly. One of the strengths of Catholicism in the post Famine-era in the United States was that Bishops managed to reconcile the social ambitions of the various sections of the Catholic community. One reason for this was, as histo‑ rian David Doyle has argued, the fact that Irish newcomers “never migrated en masse beyond the reach of their clergy.” But this does raise the issue of the level of practice and the degree of knowledge of the faith among the Irish who arrived in America in the 1840s and 1850s. There is no reason to suppose that it was greater than those who remain behind in Ireland, although some historians speculate that practice rates may have been higher than in Ireland, and that as many as 50 percent went to church.16

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It is also clear, however, that the forces of the “Devotional Revolution,” which re-shaped the Irish Church after the Famine through increased Mass attendance, also had their impact in the United States. Significantly, the first National Plenary Council at Baltimore, which aimed at consolidating American Catholicism, occurred two years after the reforming Synod of Thurles of 1850. As part of this consolidating process, Catholic infrastructure continued to grow in the shape of hospitals, orphanages, almshouses, and correctional institutions. In San Francisco, the Sisters of Mercy had already established a school in 1854. In California, the Irish tended to be better off than in other parts of the country, and initially public money was available for church schools. By the 1860s, however, crude nativist antipathies in the West became transformed into sophisticated dialog about the need for the separation of Church and State. In New York, growth in infrastructure was facilitated to the tune of millions of dollars for churches and schools by Tammany Hall. Even before this largesse, by 1852, some 28 Catholic schools were educating 10,000 children and by 1860, 79 percent of children whose parents were both Irish, attended these schools. In general, so far as schools were concerned, the Catholic authorities were determined to establish a parochial system wherever they could not bend the public-school system to their will.17 One remarkable feature of the growth of Catholicism in the 1850s was the strength of the relation‑ ship between the priests and the people. When Archbishop Gaetano Bedini met Irish priests in the Catholic Church in America, he admitted that, although they were not well-educated, were given to drunkenness, and were greedy, the people nevertheless saw them as “their father, their magistrate […] their idol. This is no exaggeration.” This is in contrast to the opinion of William West, the American consul in Dublin, who thought that the relative freedom from the clergy that the Irish enjoyed in the United States loosened “the bonds of mental slavery by which their faith enthralls them in this land of ignorance and superstation.” West’s views notwithstanding, the intensity of that bond and the gen‑ erosity of even the poorest Irish in relation to the Church enabled Catholicism to grow to such a pitch that by 1856 there were 41 dioceses in the country, with 1,910 churches and some 1,761 priests.18 Bedini’s presence in America in 1853 occasioned some of the worst anti-Catholic rioting since that seen in Philadelphia in 1844. There were violent disturbances in several cities, the worst being in Cincinnati, but here the main protagonists may have been anti-clerical Italian exiles, joined by Ger‑ man secularists. Bedini had been sent by the Pope to look into the question of Trusteeism and to try to resolve mounting tension between the Irish and the Germans in the American Church. Meanwhile, nativist anger had been building up for quite some time. One stimulus was the “Papal aggression” in the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales in 1850, which provoked anti-Catholic reaction on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition, Pope Pius IX intruded into American affairs by giving a block of marble from the Temple of Peace in Rome to be included in the Washington Me‑ morial. This gave rise to protests in many American cities in 1852, and the marble was destroyed by Nativist hooligans in 1854. The Irish immigrant New York Freeman’s Journal was inclined to blame the loyalist Orange Order and Ulster Presbyterians for nativist attacks on Catholics. Nativism reached a crescendo in the mid-1850s. There was Know-Nothing-inspired violence in many cities across America, the worst perhaps in Louisville on “Bloody Monday,” election day in August 1855. The Nunnery Inspection laws in Massachusetts were further indication of visceral dislike of Catholi‑ cism. One other consideration in exciting nativist antipathy was the growing political strength of Irish Catholics, especially on the east coast. To match this, Know-Nothing and nativist energies were being challenged in politics.19 American nativists did very well in the elections of 1854 but not all was doom and gloom. Catho‑ lics had made some inroads into Protestant-dominated America. In 1849, John Hughes was only the second Catholic bishop, after John England in 1826, to address the Congress of the United States. James Campbell was the first Catholic to be appointed to the cabinet in 1853 and that same year, the

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government withdrew restrictions on Catholic cadets at Annapolis so that they could attend Mass on Sundays. Abraham Lincoln defended Catholics against the Know-Nothing prejudice in a famous letter of 1855. And a court case involving the Irish-born, and All Hallows educated, Fr. John Telling upheld the inviolability of the seal of the Confessional. By 1861, Bishop John Bernard Fitzpatrick of Boston was given an honorary Doctorate of Divinity by Harvard University, the first Catholic bishop so honored, and at the Second Baltimore Plenary Synod of the American Church in 1866, President Andrew Johnson and his daughter attended the closing session of the Bishops’ meeting. At the same time, with the sudden decline of Know Nothingism, and despite some growing signs of respect, there was not much indication of general approbation of Irish Catholicism by the vast bulk of Americans.20 The Civil War seemed to confirm two contradictory stereotypes about Irish Catholics in America: first, as argued by many nativists, that they were racist, and second, from the Church’s perspective, that they were fully integrated patriots and loyal Americans. One element that did emerge to com‑ plicate the position of the Church in American society further was militant Irish nationalism in the shape of Fenianism. Irish nationalism would always be a blight that had the potential to thrust radical Irish domestic politics into Church affairs in the United States. Archbishop Martin John Spalding of Baltimore obtained from Rome a condemnation of the movement, although it was not to be made public, and priests were urged to use the confessional as a means to wean Irish Catholics away from it. The issue was raised again in the context of the First Vatican Council of 1869 to 1870. In January 1870, Pope Pius IX issued a condemnation of Fenianism in both Ireland and America without con‑ sulting the American bishops. Here again was an instance of Papal interference in American affairs, which increased nativist distain for Catholicism. This was exacerbated with the declaration of Papal Infallibility in July 1870, which American Bishops tended to think was “inopportune,” but only one of whom voted against the dogma. The Pope had already issued the Encyclical Quanta qura in 1864, with its appendix, the Syllabus of Errors. These documents combined to denounce all that America held dear: freedom of the press, freedom of speech, the separation of Church and State, and democ‑ racy. The Syllabus ended by denouncing the idea that the pope should or could reconcile himself with liberalism, progress, and modern civilization. It was a gift to nativist propaganda. Even some Bishops thought it placed American Catholics at variance with the polity under which they lived.21

Conclusion The Catholic Church in the United States only thrived thanks to the contribution made to its growth by immigrants. In the end, despite the influx of other nationalities, especially the Germans, the Irish made the biggest contribution to the Church’s development in the land of the free. That role was all the more remarkable because of the problems the Irish faced, including prejudice, active discrimina‑ tion, and, in many instances, desperate poverty. The Church not only gave the Irish a sense of identity but also facilitated integration and assimilation through its philanthropic activity, especially in the field of education. It enabled many Irish to conform to the American middle-class norms by turning them into sober, church-going, practicing Catholics. It was a remarkable transformation, given that for the most part, what greeted the Irish in their new homeland, particular during the Famine and its aftermath, was a level of anti-Catholic and anti-Irish prejudice perhaps greater than that exhibited by their British Protestant oppressors back home.22

Notes 1 McAvoy, “The Formation of the Catholic Minority,” 14, 26. 2 Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 328; Rafferty, Catholic Church, 162. 3 Roy, Rhetorical Campaigns, 67–68; O’Neill, Famine Irish, 65, 268.

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Oliver P. Rafferty SJ 4 Ellis, Catholics in Colonial America, 447; Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 84–85, 106. Kenny, Ameri‑ can Irish, 72–74. 5 Carey, An Immigrant Bishop, 128; Rafferty, “Constitutional Organization of the Catholic Church,” 154; Rafferty, Catholicism in Ulster, 82, 107; O’Toole, The Faithful, 51–55; Carey, People, Priests, and Prelates, 244, 249; Doyle, “The Irish and the Christian Churches,” 186–187; McGrath, “Secular Power,” 40–41. 6 Liptak, Immigrants and their Church, 45; Whitehall, A Memorial to Bishop Cheverus, xvi–xvii; 7 Moran, The Writings of Francis Patrick Kenrick, 238; Avella, “The Immigrant Church,” 33; Kenneally, Doc‑ uments in Propaganda Fide Archives, 31, 40, 61; Barr, Ireland’s Empire, 31–32; Morris, American Catholic, 49. Being perceived as sufficiently “American” was a core problem for the Catholic Church. It needed to demonstrate for American society as a whole that it was not an alien institution at variance with the American ethos. 8 Ó Gráda, “Irish Emigration”, 94; Meagher, The Columbia Guide, 43, 74; Sullivan, The Shamrock and the Cross, 159; AUND, Brownson Papers I-2-a undated; Wittke, The Irish in America, 41–42, 92. 9 McDougall, Throes of Democracy, 111; McAvoy, A History of the Catholic Church, 167; Doyle, “The Irish in North America,” 723; Ravitch, The Great School Wars; Spalding, The Religious Mission of the Irish, 132–133; Moore, Religious Outsiders, 49; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 194–5. 10 McGrath, Secular Power, 41–43; Rice, American Catholic Opinion, 84, 103; Morris, American Catholic, 50; Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 13–16, 102; Ellis, American Catholicism, 89; Cork Examiner No‑ vember 27, 1861; Gregory XVI, Papal Encyclicals online; Kellerman, All Oppression Shall Cease, 150–153. Fr. Mathew was distrusted by some American bishops because of his willingness to share platforms with Protestant clergy. They took the view that Catholic orthodoxy was to be preferred to social reform. 11 Pilot (Boston), November 20, 1856; 12 Wittke, The Irish in America, 90; O’Neill, Famine Irish, 7; Farrell, “Reporting the Irish Famine,” 70, 75, 78, 85; Hughes, A Lecture, 16, 22; Farrell, Anti-Catholicism, 20, 22–23; Kearney, Ireland: Contested Ideas, 272; Rafferty, Violence Politics and Catholicism, 70–86; Boston Bee, April 17, 1847. 13 Christian Observer (Philadelphia), January 8, 1848; Friends Review (Philadelphia), December 22, 1849. Hughes, A Lecture, 22; Mitchel, The Last Conquest of Ireland, 219. 14 Kenny, American Irish, 90, 92, 99, 100, 109, 113; Miller et al., “Famine Scars,” 40; Meagher, The Columba Guide, 79, 93; Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger, 206, 252; Kinealy, “Private Donations,” 113; Kehoe, Hughes Complete Works, I: 128; Carlen, Papal Encyclicals 1740–1878, 285–286; Barber, Prendergast Let‑ ters, 18; MacSuibhne, Paul Cullen, vol. 3, 57. Perhaps the most touching of efforts was that of the Choctaw nation who donated $170 dollars for Famine relief in 1847. This is something the Irish have not forgotten (see Washington Post, May 13, 2020). 15 Farrell, “Reporting the Irish Famine,” 72–73; Ellis, Documents of Catholic History, 331; Loughery, Dagger John, 193–195; Miller, Shamrock and Sword, 173–174; Allitt, “Ambiguous Welcome,” 26; Brading, Mexican Phoenix, 243; O’Toole, Ever to Excel, 22, 46–47. 16 Roy, Rhetorical Campaigns, 5; Kehoe, Complete Works vol. 2, 88 f; Brownson Quarterly Review, 5 (1851): 97; Doyle, “The Irish in North America,” 717–718. 17 Larkin, Historical Dimensions, 57–89; Ó Gráda, Ireland’s Great Famine, 148; Wittke, The Irish in America, 101; Walsh, “The Irish Way Out West,” 165–176; Gilley, “Nineteenth Century Irish Diaspora,” 196. 18 Connelly, The Visit of Archbishop Gaetano Bedini, 240–241. The full text in translation of Bedini’s 1856 report to Rome is reproduced by Connelly. 19 National Archives, Washington DC, United States Consul Dispatches, Dublin T 199 (roll 4) October 6, 1864; Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 222; Freeman’s Journal (New York), September 3, 1853; Oxx, The Na‑ tivist Movement, 98–99; Shaughnessy, Has the Immigrant Kept the Faith?, 142–143. 20 Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery, 52–74; Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 388; Roemer, The Catholic Church, 243; Fogarty, Commonwealth Catholicism, 137; Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants, 210–211; Knoble, Paddy and the Republic, 171; Kehoe, Complete Works, 1: 566–573; Carey, An Immigrant Bishop, 137; Mor‑ ris, American Catholic, 80. 21 Rafferty, Violence, Politics and Catholicism, 90; Hernon, Celts, Catholics & Copperheads, 13, 17, 105; Fogarty, Commonwealth Catholicism, 163; Witte, The Irish in America, 143; Kurtz, Excommunicated from the Union, 5–7, 53, 76, 108–112; Rafferty, Catholic Church and Protestant State; AAB Spalding Papers 35D-10, Spalding Papers 55-E-1; AUND Purcell Papers II-5-6; APF Scritture, 20 f. 1124; Carlen, Papal Encyc‑ licals 1740–1878, 380–386, papalencyclicals.net/pius09/p9syll.htm accessed 6/10/2023; Morris, American Catholic, 76. 22 McDougall, Throes of Democracy, 114.

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Bibliography Abbreviations ABB: APF: AUND: NAW:

Archives of the Archdiocese of Baltimore Archives of Propaganda Fide (Rome) Archives of the University of Notre Dame National Archives Washington DC

Newspapers Boston Bee Cork Examiner Christian Observer (Philadelphia) Friends Review (Philadelphia) The Pilot (Boston)

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Oliver P. Rafferty SJ Farrelly, Maura Jane. Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620–1860. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Fogarty, Gerald. Commonwealth Catholicism: A History of the Catholic Church in Virginia. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2001. Gilley, Sheridan. “The Roman Catholic Church and the Nineteenth-Century Diaspora.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35, no. 2 (1984): 188–207. Gray, Peter. Famine, Land, and Politics: British Government and Irish Society 1843–1850. Dublin: Irish Aca‑ demic Press, 1999. Handlin, Oscar. Boston’s Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1979. Hernon, Joseph. Celts, Catholics and Copperheads: Ireland’s Views of the American Civil War. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968. Hueston, Robert. The Catholic Press and Nativism 1840–1860. New York: Arno Press, 1976. Hughes, John. A Lecture on the Antecedent Causes of the Irish Famine. New York: Edward Dunigan, 1847. Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995. Kehoe, Lawrence, ed. Complete Works of the Most Rev. John Hughes DD. 2 vols. New York: Catholic Publica‑ tion House, 1864. Kellerman, Christopher. All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism and the Catholic Church. New York: Orbis Books, 2022. Kenneally, Finbarr. United States Documents in the Propaganda Fide Archives: A Calendar. Vol. 1. Washington, DC: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1966. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000. Kerr, Donal. “A Nation of Beggars?” Priests, People and Politics in Famine Ireland 1846–1852. Oxford: Clar‑ endon Press, 1994. Kinealy, Christine. “Private Donations to Ireland during An Gorta Mór.” Seanchas Ardmhacha Journal of the Armagh Diocesan Historical Society 17, no. 2 (1998): 109–120. Knoble, Dale. Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1986. Kurtz, William. Excommunication from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Larkin, Emmet. The Historical Dimensions of Irish Catholicism. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1984. Liptak, Dolores. Immigrants and Their Church. New York: Macmillan, 1989. Loughery, John. Dagger John: Archbishop John Hughes and the Making of Irish Americans. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. MacSuibhne, Peadar, ed. Paul Cullen and his Contemporaries with their Letters. Naas: Leinster Leader, 1965. McAvoy, Thomas. A History of the Catholic Church in the United States. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Univer‑ sity Press, 1969. McAvoy, Thomas. “The Formation of the Catholic Minority in the United States 1820–1860.” The Review of Politics 10, no. 1 (1948): 13–34. McCaffrey, Lawrence. The Irish Catholic Diaspora in America. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America press, 1976 McDougall, Walter. Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829–1877. New York: Harper Collins, 2008. McGrath, Patrick. “Secular Power, Sectarian Politics. The American Born Irish Elite and Catholic Political Cul‑ ture in Nineteenth-Century New York.” Journal of American Ethnic History 38, no. 3 (2019): 36–75. Meagher, Thomas. The Columbia Guide to Irish American History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Miller, Kerby. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford Uni‑ versity Press, 1985. Miller, Robert. Shamrock and Sword: The Saint Patrick’s Battalion in the U. S. – Mexican War. Norman: Uni‑ versity of Oklahoma Press, 1989. Mitchel, John. The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) 1861, edited by Patrick Maume. Dublin: University Col‑ lege Dublin Press, 2005. Moore, Laurence. Religious Outsiders and the Making of America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Morris, Charles. American Catholics: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America’s most Powerful Church. New York: Random House, 1997. Ó Gráda, Cormac. Ireland’s Great Famine: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006.

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9 THE RISE OF THE POPULAR PRESS IN IRISH-AMERICAN CULTURE Debra Reddin van Tuyll

The histories of Ireland and the United States have long been intertwined as events in Ireland have reverberated among the Irish communities in America, and that includes the history of the popular press. Catholic and Irish-interest-specific newspapers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries con‑ tributed to the building of a distinctly Irish-American community that connected immigrants to those back home as well as to Irish who immigrated to other parts of the world. They did so by sharing local news that focused on how to fit into American culture, how to understand American politics and customs, as well as articles about events in Ireland and global Irish communities. This chapter will explore how the earliest Irish-American journalists—from colonial times up to the post-Civil War rise of the Fenians—accomplished that work.

Precursors to the Irish-American Popular Press The roots of a vibrant Irish-American press were planted in the Colonial period by immigrant journal‑ ists and printers, who can jointly be referred to as news workers. In many cases, those news workers were looking for new opportunities. In others, they were involved with opposition groups such as the United Irishmen, and the later Young Irelanders, who were forced to flee to avoid prosecution for sedi‑ tion, treason, and associated crimes. In fact, Irish émigrés and American-born Irish staffed newspapers in the United States perhaps since the seventeenth century. The American Antiquarian Society keeps a file of identified printers who worked in the United States from the colonial period to the Early Re‑ public. Some 6,145 printers, editors, publishers, book binders, and papermakers are identified in that file, which, at one time, took up 25 card catalog drawers. The file has now been combined with other agencies’ resources to create an online catalog of all those known to have been involved in the printing trade through the year 1820. Of those 6,145 news workers, at least 53 were born in Ireland, including Richard Wilkins, Boston’s first postmaster, who also worked as a bookseller. Wilkins, likely one of the earliest Irish-immigrant news workers in the colonies, was not a journalist per se, though he was certainly involved in the dissemination of information in his service as postmaster and as a bookseller. An ad printed in 1691 by Benjamin Harris and John Allen identified Wilkins by name as a bookseller. Given that the first printing press did not arrive in the American colonies until 1638, it is clear that at least one Irish emigrant was involved in the colonial American information trade from its earliest days.1 Others came in the years prior to the Revolution, though immigration slowed temporarily dur‑ ing that conflict. Some 20 newspapers were edited by Irish émigrés prior to the 1800 presidential DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-12

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election. Four names stick out as particularly important among those post-war émigrés: Mathew Carey, John Daly Burk, Dennis Driscol, and William J. Duane, who had been born to Irish parents in America. Duane returned to County Tipperary with his mother when his father died, and then later returned to America himself. All four men emigrated for essentially the same reason: they were in trouble with the authorities and fled to America to avoid the consequences. Carey, Duane, and Driscol all went to America to avoid sedition charges, while Burk got himself accused of treason for espous‑ ing Deism and republicanism at Trinity College. Once in America, he would also find himself in hot water under the Alien and Sedition Acts, as would Duane. These four editors were the precursors of those who would later come and establish a press for Irish-American audiences in the nineteenth century. Carey, Duane, Burk, and Driscol wrote for a decidedly American audience, specifically for those who supported Thomas Jefferson’s bid for the presidency in 1796 and again in 1800. They situ‑ ated themselves amid the growing partisan press of the time, but they were journalists with targets on their backs, primarily because they were all Irish.2 Many Americans were deeply suspicious of politicized Irish editors like Carey, Duane, Burk, and Driscol. They were fully aware of the United Irishmen as a political movement in Ireland with ties to the Irish in America, and many American politicians, especially the Federalist President John Adams and his supporters, feared Irish newcomers would destabilize the new republic. Most Irish immi‑ grants, given their experience with British domination, were republican in their politics, some radi‑ cally so, and this meant all those thousands of votes would be going to Jefferson and his party rather than Adams and Federalist candidates. Immigrants, particularly the Irish who most Federalists be‑ lieved were conspiring with the French to invade America, were one of the significant motivators in Adams’ efforts to pass the Alien and Sedition acts in 1798. The Alien and Sedition Acts made it harder to become a naturalized American citizen and also punished those who criticized the president and his administration. Federalists targeted Irish Americans with these acts because of the danger their numbers and republican ideology presented to Federalist ambitions. Silencing the Irish and delaying citizenship so they could not vote in the upcoming elections made sense for Adams and his party.3 The more abuse that Irish Americans faced at the hands of the Federalists, however, the more they came to see themselves as a victimized group, and the more they flocked to the Democratic Republi‑ can party and its newspapers. By 1800, the seeds of the Irish-American press for an Irish-American audience were planted. Irish-American news workers had taken their places in newsrooms and com‑ posing rooms in some of the most prominent newspapers in America. They had helped build the Democratic Republican party, which fertilized the field for their continued and future involvement in party politics and political journalism. Readers had learned they could rely on these news workers at least to bring an Irish-American perspective to their work; over time, that would expand to include content very directly aimed at the needs and goals of immigrant readers, many of which were reli‑ gious in nature. While the earliest Irish immigrants were largely Protestant, Catholics followed. The first Irish-American Catholic newspaper in America, the Observer, appeared in New York City 1809, shortly after the end of Jefferson’s presidency. A year later, the general interest Shamrock appeared, and across the next 30 years, some 18 more Irish-American newspapers were founded. Not all would survive, but they would be replaced along the way by new titles. These titles laid the groundwork for a slew of newspapers that appeared once Famine-era immigration swelled to unprecedented numbers in the 1840s and 1850s.4

The Early Republic The Shamrock or Hibernian Chronicle, the first true Irish-American newspaper, appeared in New York City on December 15, 1810. It was also the first English-language newspaper for immigrants of any nationality; earlier newspapers for German and French immigrants had appeared in the readers’ 127

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native languages. The Shamrock, edited by Edward Gillespy, would set the tone for Irish-American journals and begin the construction of a global Irish community, with its emphasis on connecting readers with home via publication of news from Ireland for Irish immigrants and their American-born descendants. Gillespy published the paper from its opening day through to May 5, 1813, when he sus‑ pended publication due to unpaid subscriptions and his own poor health. He would reopen the news‑ paper in 1814 with Thomas O’Connor, a United Irishman exile, as co-editor, but Gillespy’s name disappeared from its masthead in January 1815. The paper was 17” by 20” with four pages of five columns each. Historians have speculated that the paper probably had a circulation of between 500 and 1,500. It would have been distributed via stagecoach and shipping that connected urban areas. Within a year of beginning publication, it had distribution agents in Hudson, Newburgh, and Albany, New York, as well as in Boston and Philadelphia. After the Shamrock finally suspended publication in August 1817, O’Connor started a magazine, the Globe, which was short-lived. In 1822, O’Connor showed up again, this time as editor of the United States Catholic Miscellany, an Irish-American newspaper based in Charleston, South Carolina.5 The next Irish-American newspaper, the Truth Teller, published its first edition on April 2, 1825. It was located in New York City and targeted an Irish-Catholic audience. It ran for 30 years and was published by William E. Andrews. Its printers were M. Toohey and J. McLoughlin. Andrews was an English Catholic who only lasted as publisher for six issues. He was followed by William Denman and George Pardrow. The paper eventually achieved a circulation of 3,000. Another title, entitled the Globe and Emerald, appeared in January 1824. It lasted until September 1827 but failed for the same reason as many others, namely the inability to turn a profit. The Irish Shield appeared in 1829 in Philadelphia. Its editor, George Pepper, was feisty, and he almost immediately took on the Truth Teller, accusing it of plagiarism, being owned by an Englishman, and lacking a Dublin correspond‑ ent. Pepper would rename the Truth Teller “the Lie-Teller” in his pages.6 These earliest Irish-American newspapers not only connected immigrants to home but also, as his‑ torian Thomas Moriarty observed in his study of responses to Catholic emancipation in Ireland, pro‑ moted assimilation by embracing “the ideas and principles on which the Republic was based,” ideas and principles that, it was claimed, many Irish brought with them. The editors of Irish-American newspapers such as the Irish Shield, for example, sought to support Catholic emancipation by keep‑ ing Irish Americans informed about activities happening in Ireland. The voices of those early IrishAmerican newspapers were amplified by prominent newspapers with broader circulation through reprinted articles called exchanges in publications such as the Federalist National Gazette, the Wash‑ ington, D.C. United States Telegraph, and the Richmond Enquirer. That these national papers even engaged in exchanges with smaller niche journals signals some respect for their work and the per‑ ceived newsworthiness of their stories to a larger, non-immigrant audience. Not long after the UK Catholic Emancipation act passed in 1829, Irish-American civic groups that had formed to support the measure began dissolving, and Irish-American newspapers had to find new issues to keep their pages relevant. It was in this period, roughly 1830 to the mid-1840s, that the Irish-American press began transforming from primarily an Irish Catholic entity to one with more general appeal.7 One of the best examples of this new trend was the Boston Pilot, which was originally founded as the Jesuit or Catholic Sentinel in 1829. Its founder was Bishop Benedict J. Fenwick, a Jesuit priest and second bishop of Boston. The Pilot was, initially, aimed at all immigrants, but after Fenwick sold the paper to H. J. Devereaux and Patrick Donahoe in 1834, it focused primarily on the Irish. The paper would become “the premier communication channel for the Boston Irish for much of the nine‑ teenth and twentieth centuries.” It was notable for the guidance offered to immigrants in their quest for citizenship, and it was nimble enough to refresh its content as reader needs and goals changed. The paper also served as a public forum through its letters sections, which allowed immigrants to connect with others in their community, to share insights into common problems, and to pass along 128

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information. Catholicism was engrained in the paper’s character, furthering its ability to serve its audience. Donahoe became the paper’s sole proprietor in 1836, and he renamed the paper the Boston Pilot “as a tribute to the Dublin Pilot.” In his prospectus, he addressed the paper’s role of service for Irish immigrants. He wrote that the paper would strive “to ‘pilot’ our readers through rough waters, the rocks of doubt or the quicksands of error.” By 1844, the paper had a circulation of 7,000. A decade later, it would have “1.5 million subscribers worldwide.” That circulation growth was due in part to connections Donahoe made with a Dublin newspaper, the Nation, which gave the Pilot a bit of cachet or, as one historian has phrased it, “a mantle of cultural authenticity.” That authenticity provided a bit of clout among Irish-American readers, for it was an indication that the Pilot had “its finger on the pulse of the motherland.” It also supported the paper’s service role by providing information of interest to readers. This new iteration of the Pilot would become particularly important as Irish im‑ migration picked up in the 1840s. Donahoe worked to remake the paper as Irish American, rather than specifically Irish Catholic, though he never entirely stopped publishing news of interest to Catholics.8

The Great Famine and the Popular Press The Great Famine in Ireland spurred massive global migration. Hundreds of thousands made their way to the United States, and others to Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and elsewhere. Their flight and resettlement spurred both the growth of the Irish press globally and its importance as a source of international and transnational conversation of ideas and issues that transcended national borders. This newspaper growth was important in planting the seeds of “Irish global nationalism,” which would become a particularly pressing matter later in the century and would influence Irish identity in its various expressions across the globe.9 In the United States, that contemplation of Irish identity was colored by a growing nativism that became pervasive in the period and that presented a compelling political issue for Irish-American immigrants and their newspapers. As discussed elsewhere in this volume, many native American publications responded to the influx of Irish immigration during the Famine era by characterizing the Irish as stupid, simian-like brawlers and thieves. The Irish-American press responded by defending its audience members, nurturing their connections with home, and encouraging their successful as‑ similation into American society even as its numbers expanded. The Boston Pilot was one of the lead‑ ing Irish-American newspapers of the period and a prominent challenger of any negative portrayal of Irish immigrants. That journal would continue its journey toward becoming one of the most im‑ portant Irish-American newspapers in this period of increased immigration. The paper is still in pub‑ lication today. Other important Irish-American newspapers of the period included Thomas D’Arcy McGee (the Nation in New York, and later in Boston, Buffalo, and New York City, The American Celt and Adopted Citizen), newspapers established by exiled Young Irelanders, John Mitchel (the Citizen), Thomas Francis Meagher (the Irish News), and the Irish World, founded by Patrick Ford, a Famine immigrant and veteran of William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator. All were important advocates for Irish Americans during periods of increased immigration. The newspapers “co-created with their readers a platform for the construction and dissemination of information and identity,” which was a significant factor in establishing an Irish-American community as well.10 Cross-pollination between the Irish and the Irish-American press continued throughout this period. In some cases, Irish-American editors even reprised names of Irish journals—McGee’s Nation and J. A. McMaster’s Freeman’s Journal, for example, echoed famous Dublin titles. In fact, newspaper exchanges and personal relationships between Irish-American and Irish journalists created links that lent, writes historian Cian T. McMahon, “a level of trust into business dealings and intellectual inter‑ actions that would have otherwise been absent.” A handful of new editors in this period were known names, for they were failed revolutionaries who fled to America to avoid prosecution, just like earlier 129

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generations of Irish-American journalists. They included Young Irelander exile Thomas D’Arcy Mc‑ Gee, who escaped to America following the group’s failed rebellion in 1848. Young Irelanders John Mitchel and Thomas Francis Meagher would follow later, after escaping exile in Australia.11 McGee founded the Nation when he arrived in New York in 1848. He ran the paper as “a secular, republican newspaper dedicated to Irish freedom.” To attract and serve his audience, he set up ex‑ changes with Irish newspapers and solicited subscribers in Ireland, eventually adding sales agents in Dublin, Limerick, Wexford, and Strabane. In 1850, he relocated to Boston following disputes with a New York bishop and the republican Irish in New York. There, he started another newspaper, the American Celt and Adopted Citizen. Two years later, he moved the newspaper to Buffalo, New York, but it did not flourish, and in 1857, he emigrated to Montreal, Quebec (where he later founded another newspaper called the New Era).12 Thomas Francis Meagher and John Mitchel started their papers within two years of one another. Mitchel started the Citizen a month after arriving in New York from exile in Australia. He would run the paper until he waded into the quagmire of American slavery and lost readers over his support for the institution. Meagher started his New York paper, the Irish News, in 1856 after escaping exile in Australia. Initially, he planned for a non-political paper to improve the lot of the New York Irish, but the paper shortly became embroiled in politics, particularly on the Democratic end of the spectrum. Three years after starting the paper, Meagher turned over the editorship to a staff member and went on a tour of Central America to explore business opportunities there. He returned to the United States in 1861, just in time to serve as a general in the Union Army during the Civil War. Each created news‑ papers intended to advocate for Irish independence and to serve their readers information needs.13 Most of those in the audiences for these newspapers were Irish Catholics who had fled the Fam‑ ine. Their immigration to the United States fueled the growth of Catholic-aligned newspapers such as the Boston Pilot, which published alongside secular periodicals for immigrants such as the New York Nation and the Irish-American. Both types of newspapers urged assimilation and citizenship for immigrants. Editorials encouraging Irish immigrants to seek American citizenship and to trust Irish-American newspapers “for protection as well as advice,” which Irish-American editors saw that as one of their primary roles. These newspapers stressed assimilation and citizenship because of the rising tide of American nativism that subjected foreigners and to suspicion and discrimination. This attitude, as might be expected, led to editorial attacks on Catholic-aligned Irish-American newspa‑ pers. When the Christian Alliance and Visitor, for example, accused the Pilot of being “a tool of the Pope,” the Boston newspaper countered that its purpose was to elevate Irish character, achieve Irish independence, and stop sectarian violence.14 The rise of the American (Know Nothing) party in the 1850s escalated anti-Irish Catholic senti‑ ment, as Hidetaka Hirota discusses in another chapter in this volume. The Know Nothings empha‑ sized America’s Protestant heritage and declared that true Americans were Anglo-Saxon. The Boston Pilot covered this party’s activities extensively, including reporting on violence against Catholics that included at least one school bombing. On July 8, 1854, the Pilot ran a story from the Eastern Free‑ man of Ellsworth, Maine, that reported on the bombing of a building that had been used as an Irish chapel prior to the completion of a new church. At that time, a school occupied the building. The paper reported that a powder canister “supposed to contain somewhere from three to six pounds, was closely and strongly inclosed [sic] and secured in a large quantity of tarred rope yarn … and placed against the outside door” before being ignited. The paper reported the blast was “so powerful that it burst the door from its hinges and broke out almost every pane of glass in the building… [and] came near unroofing the entire building.”15 Nativism was only one of the significant issues in America in the 1840s and 1850s. Slavery was another, and newly arrived immigrants as well as later generations of Irish Americans were drawn into that debate. As Angela F. Murphy demonstrates in her chapter, many Irish-American newspapers 130

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regarded the abolition of slavery as a weapon in their campaigns against anti-Irish sentiment. Some even viewed abolitionism as an expression of nativism. Others, including the Boston Pilot, declared abolitionism was a British plot to sow division among Americans, explaining that the issue was being advanced by “a vast noisy body […] of [English] Editors, Parsons, Quarterly Reviewers and strongminded females in incessant boisterous turbulent activity.” Not all Irish-American newspapers, how‑ ever, were anti-abolitionist. Some opposed slavery and supported abolition. Others declared slavery to be an American issue and thus the editors declined to take a position on the issue.16 Irish-American journalism in the years during and after the Great Famine demonstrates that links, both back to Ireland and within America, were deeply important. Connections with Ireland brought highly valued news from the home country. Yet, they also “drew the United States into an integrated transatlantic Irish conversation” and debates on social and political issues of importance in both spheres, both of which helped cement a series of tight relationships between the countries. The IrishAmerican press was one of the few social institutions that immigrants could turn to for guidance and information. The press “gave full expression to Irish insecurities and ambitions and helped devise strategies, however conflicting, by which the Irish could achieve a degree of acceptance in the United States.” Some recommended assimilation while others rejected the idea and counseled working with other oppressed groups to achieve goals.17 Irish-American newspapers came into their own in the 1840s and 1850s. The Boston Pilot, for example, claimed in 1855 to have a worldwide circulation of 1.55 million. The newspapers that appeared in this period helped immigrants assimilate into a new country by providing information about American political culture and social practices, as well as practical information about where to find a job or housing. Papers in this period also gained prestige through their employment of corre‑ spondents in Ireland who provided news from back home. Circulations grew, thanks to linkages with Irish newspapers and also thanks to readers who sent newspapers to friends and family throughout the growing Irish diaspora. The Irish then, as is true today, were used to “supporting a vibrant print culture,” and they continued that tradition wherever they settled. Furthermore, a global network of exchanges, including with newspapers in Australia, helped spread news and expand the Irish émigré community globally.18

The American Civil War Era Nearly 200,000 Irish served in the Civil War, the most famous unit of which was the Union’s Irish Brigade commanded by Thomas Francis Meagher. General Patrick Cleburne, a Corkman who had served in the British army before immigrating in 1849, was the best-known Irish officer in the Con‑ federate army. Cleburne was known as the “Stonewall Jackson of the West.” Meagher and Cleburne and their troops were among the chief subjects of Civil War coverage by the Irish-American press, but perhaps the “chiefest” of all was the politics of the war period, and a new generation of IrishAmerican journalists stepped into the roles of political writers and editors with relish.19 The Irish-American of New York and the Boston Pilot were the most likely to report on soldier experiences in the east. They also carried community leaders’ statements about how the war related to Irish interests. The Boston Pilot ran serialized stories about Irish bravery and, in 1862, started a new series, “Records of Irish-American Patriotism,” to demonstrate Irish loyalty to the Union, an impor‑ tant concern given the prevailing anti-immigrant sentiment among so many Americans. Such stories served as plain demonstrations of American values for those immigrants who were still learning about their new culture. Most Irish-American newspapers were not wealthy enough to support field correspondents and relied instead on exchange stories or, in some instances, soldier correspondents who would send in stories about their units’ experiences. Coverage of Thomas Francis Meagher’s Irish Brigade dominated many Irish-American newspapers and helped build support for the war 131

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among immigrants. The coverage also helped to overcome nativist prejudices against the Irish who fought for the Union with such courage.20 The Irish-American press did not focus solely on war coverage, however. It matured and ­diversified during the Civil War era. While Irish-interest newspapers continued, a new generation of Irish-­American journalists emerged who were not so concerned with the Old World but the New. IrishAmerican newspapers and journalists played an important role in the period, a role that expanded to include strictly American interests as well as the continuing role of contributing to the construction of Irish identity and the promotion of Irish-American interests. In the former case, Irish-American news organizations began the transition from ethnic and niche to mainstream. In the latter, they played a particularly important role in helping to combat the American nativism that had grown through the 1850s through publication of news stories and editorials that detailed the war experiences of IrishAmerican troops and touted the loyalty and bravery of those troops. Their war stories functioned as part of a global conversation about the war, which was covered widely outside the United States and spawned a conversation about, as one historian has put it, the “transnational struggle for democracy.” Such coverage also helped Irish Americans see themselves a part of a global community.21 Notable Irish and Irish-American editors of the period included Joseph Medill, who had been born to a Scotch-Irish family in 1823. Medill was different from those Irish-American journalists who had championed Irish interests, for his concerns were not Irish but American. He was a political journal‑ ist, just as Duane, Burk, and their comrades had been in an earlier generation. After a few years of owning newspapers in Ohio, Medill moved on to Chicago when he was offered the Managing Editor position at the Chicago Tribune in 1854. The Tribune flourished and became one of the city’s largest newspapers. Medill led the paper’s anti-slavery, pro-Lincoln positions. He served at the paper before transitioning briefly to a political career that included serving as Chicago mayor after the Great Fire in 1871 but was back at the Tribune in 1874.22 James W. Sheahan, another notable Chicago political journalist, also spent his career writing about America. He covered Congress for several Washington D.C. newspapers and for the New York As‑ sociated Press. His big career break came in 1854 when Stephen A. Douglas supporters invited him to Chicago to start a Democratic newspaper, the Chicago Times. A few years later, as the country was edging closer to civil war, Sheahan became editor of the Daily Chicago Post where he pledged to avoid politics, a promise that lasted only a week. By the end of December 1860, he was writing editorials supporting the Union and echoing Douglas’ positions. He declared that when South Caro‑ lina seceded earlier that month, it had declared war on the United States and committed treason. Like Douglas, Sheahan supported a war with the South.23 Belfast-born John Mullaly was an important New York editor in this period, who began his career at legendary New York newspapers such as the New York Tribune, the New York Evening Post, and the New York Herald. Archbishop John J. Hughes facilitated Mullaly’s decision in 1859 to start a Catholic newspaper in New York called the Metropolitan Record. Because the archbishop believed Catholics should remain neutral in the debates of the day, the paper did not cover the 1860 political conventions or the presidential campaign. The paper also followed Hughes in supporting Lincoln and conceptualizing slavery as more of a political issue than one of morals, and this was the position that the paper took. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, however, forced a break between the archbishop and Mullaly and led the editor to denounce Lincoln. Following the break with Hughes, the paper’s content became more bitter, and Mullaly became something of an anti-war activist, or at least an anti-conscription activist. In July 1863, New York City was ravished by three days of riots opposing the draft; some held Mullaly’s editorials directly responsible for the unrest among the IrishAmerican community. Later that summer, on August 19, he was arrested and accused of encourag‑ ing draft resistance. He avoided trial, however, because his hearing came up at the same time as the

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Democratic Party nominating convention in Chicago. Court officials decided to drop the charges rather than give a boost to the McClellan campaign, which they believed would be the outcome of prosecuting Mullaly.24 Other Irish-American papers in the east, including the Philadelphia Catholic Herald, remained loyal to the Lincoln administration throughout the war. The Catholic Herald editors strove to keep the paper out of any “racial or religious turmoil.” For much of the period, the paper neglected American issues, including the war, and focused instead on Ireland and Irish interests. A year later, the paper changed its position on Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. It described the proclamation as a “fire brand lighted by intolerant New England Puritanism.” Despite its dislike of Black Americans, the paper did condemn a Detroit riot that destroyed 30 Black homes, warning that such lawlessness could be turned on Catholics next. In the summer of 1863, during the New York draft riots, the paper de‑ fended Irish and Catholics, though its coverage was relatively muted compared to other newspapers.25 In November 1863, James M. Spellissy, previously an anonymous editor at the Boston Pilot, became the editor and owner of the Philadelphia Catholic Herald. He would span the two forms of Irish-American journalism that exemplified the period by covering both American politics and IrishAmerican interests. Spellisy worked to make the Herald a leading Democratic journal, and he ran the paper in a spirit of loyal opposition. He maintained its Democratic stance and believed Lincoln had governed well but lamented that the president had, in three years, failed to extinguish the rebellion. In 1864, he supported Democrat George B. McClellan for president. However, Spellissy’s support of the Fenian Brotherhood cost him support for the paper. Spellisy claimed not to be a Fenian, but he did target members as readers of his journal.26

The Fenians On the eve of the American Civil War, radicalism was rampant in both the United States and Ireland. American radicals split into factions over the issues of slavery and abortion, and radicals among the Irish-American immigrant population once turned their gaze to liberation of their homeland. In 1858, they took the first steps toward their goal, recruiting their Irish brothers and cousins as well. In Amer‑ ica, 1858 was the year of “King Cotton,” the first Lincoln-Douglas debate, westward expansion, John Brown’s Missouri raid, the Lecompton Constitution, and the founding of a very Irish organization, the Fenian Brotherhood. Inspired by the unsuccessful Young Ireland rising of a decade earlier, the Fenian Brotherhood and its Irish counterpart, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, advocated armed rebellion to liberate Ireland from British rule. In subsequent years, the American Civil War fueled the move‑ ment by creating hundreds of Irish veterans trained in warfare and willing to fight for Irish freedom.27 As was true of almost every other popular movement in the nineteenth-century United States, the establishment of the Fenian Brotherhood spurred the founding of new journals, journals that represented the final stage in the maturation of the Irish-American press. Numbers of Irish-American newspapers increased as did emphasis on those transnational connections between Irish communi‑ ties across the globe, and Fenianism itself served as an issue that would draw all those communities together. Fenianism also spanned both Irish and American politics, which, for some Irish-American journals, meant greater emphasis on Irish-interests among mainstream newspapers. The Fenian move‑ ment inspired a new generation of Irish nationalists in America, which encouraged closer connections to the old country among those who were native-born Americans but of Irish ancestry—some 50,000 Americans were card-carrying Fenians by the end of the Civil War, creating a huge audience for a new brand of content.28 The first Fenian newspaper in the United States was the New York Phoenix, but Chicago, B ­ uffalo, New York, and San Francisco each had their own Fenian newspaper, too. The Irish Republic, for

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example, was founded in Chicago in 1867, though a year later, it would move to New York City before eventually settling in Washington DC. The Irish People was founded in San Francisco in 1866, and the Fenian Volunteer in Buffalo in 1867. The New York Phoenix editor was John Roche, a veteran of Thomas Francis Meagher’s newspaper, the Irish News. The Irish Republic was one of the more interesting Fenian newspapers, and among the most long-lived. It did not cease publica‑ tion until 1873. Not only did it support armed revolution, a standard Fenian position, but it also supported the Republican Party, which was a bold step away from the alliance with the Democratic Party that most Irish Americans felt. Edited by Michael Scanlan, Patrick William Dunne, and Da‑ vid Bell, the paper covered news about the Fenians in America (and the Irish Republican Brother‑ hood in Ireland), general news from Ireland, and nationalist news from just about anywhere such movements were active.29 Perhaps the most prominent Fenian editor was John Boyle O’Reilly. O’Reilly had started his ca‑ reer in journalism as a printer’s devil at the Drogheda Argus in Ireland. He was released from that apprenticeship in 1859 when the paper’s editor died. O’Reilly traveled to England with an uncle and found work at the Preston Guardian, where he moved from the back shop to the news side of the paper as a reporter. Reilly returned to Ireland in 1863 and enlisted in the British Army. He was a model soldier until 1865 when he met John Devoy, a leader in the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Meeting Devoy radicalized O’Reilly. In September 1865 when informer Pierce Nagle passed word to the police about a planned uprising by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, three of its leading members, all of whom worked for the organization’s newspaper, the Irish People, were rounded up and arrested. A fourth escaped but was forced into hiding. New leaders stepped forward, and O’Reilly, who had been an inactive member since 1863, was among them. He recruited 80 of the 100 Irish members of his unit to join the organization. Eventually, British authorities gathered enough information on recruiters within the army to begin arresting them, including O’Reilly. He was court martialed and imprisoned in England at Millbrook Prison. He would eventually be transported to Australia.30 Two years after being transported, O’Reilly escaped and made his way to Philadelphia and then New York, where he was greeted as a hero. Some 2,000 people turned out to hear him talk about his incarceration and transportation. O’Reilly would take up employment at the Boston Pilot in the spring of 1870. He wrote to his Aunt Chrissy that he was A very fortunate fellow to pull clear through. I am likely to become a prosperous man in America. I write for the magazines, report for the Pilot, drill the Irish Legion, make speeches at public meetings for charities, etc., etc. For the moment, though, he was building his reputation. One of the biggest stories O’Reilly covered was the 1870 Fenian invasion of Canada. The idea was to use Civil War veterans to make the North American invasion, timed to occur with a rising in Ireland to force Great Britain into a two-front con‑ flict. In April, the Fenians tried to seize Campobello Island near New Brunswick but were dispersed by the US Navy. A second attack was set for June. A vastly larger Canadian force met the Fenians and turned them back. Upon arrival back in America, the US Army met them, broke up the forces, and arrested their commander, General John O’Neill. O’Reilly was given command of the Fenian soldiers upon O’Neill’s arrest but was soon arrested himself.31 O’Reilly’s pragmatic reporting on the Fenian invasion was influential and set the standard for other American (and many Irish) newspapers’ coverage of the incident. Perhaps more important for him personally, O’Reilly’s reporting impressed his editor, who promoted him to the editorial depart‑ ment where he would continue to get into trouble over Irish causes, including his comments on the

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July 12 Orange Order march in New York that turned into a riot when a mob confronted marchers. Ultimately, however, O’Reilly went from being a convict to a man of great influence within American journalism and the Irish-American community, just as he had once told his Aunt Chrissy he would.32

Conclusion Newspapers are key to building communities, according to sociologist Benedict Anderson. Anderson was thinking primarily of nations as communities, but his argument holds up for communities of any sort. As he observed, only a newspaper has the power to put the same thought in thousands of minds at the same time. This would have been particularly true in the nineteenth century when news‑ papers were the primary medium of mass communication and were limited enough in most places that a large number of subscribers would read the same journal. At the level of a specific immigrant community, where the number of available newspapers was indeed limited, newspapers’ community building role becomes even more obvious. Irish-American immigrants turned to their newspapers for information about how to function within their new national culture as well as information about what was happening within their own smaller sub-culture. Newspapers helped them understand America and Americans and their values, political and practices. Irish-American newspapers also connected immigrants to their home culture by including news from Ireland. This sort of content helped immigrants understand their new environment as assimilate into the dominant culture, and the content changed as reader needs changed through the eighteenth and nine‑ teenth centuries. In the Colonial period, Irish immigrants laid the foundations for their countrymen’s participation in the information trades by working as printers, booksellers, and editors. In the Early National period, Irish journalists and those who worked in related fields expanded their influence into the realms of American politics through their work in the partisan press. Through the Antebellum period, when the Great Famine fueled astounding numbers of immigrants to seek the green fields of America, ethnically Irish journalists expanded both the religious and the secular Irish-American press so that it could meet the religious needs of readers as well as their information needs for more practi‑ cal information about how to function as new Americans. The Civil War period gave Irish-American newspapers the opportunity to champion the valor of Irish soldiers and demonstrate Irish loyalty to a significantly nativist population. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, with the rise of Fenian‑ ism, Irish-American newspapers were more important than ever in connecting Ireland and America. The work of these early Irish-American journalists also helped to build the foundation of that close association between Ireland and the United States, a closeness that persists to the present day, and that Former Irish Ambassador to the United States Daniel Mulhall, who writes the Afterword to this collection, has predicted will continue. The 33 million Americans who identify as Irish American rep‑ resent the lynchpin in that relationship, Mulhall wrote in a 2021 book about the connections between the Irish America press, politics, and culture.33 That relationship would not be nearly as secure were it not for the connections soldered in place by journalists over hundreds of years.

Notes 1 Doyle, “The Irish in North America,” 171; American Antiquarian Society, “The Printer’s File at AAS;” ­Library of Congress Name Authority File; Benton, The Story of the Old Boston Town House. 2 Sullivan, “The Rising of 1798,” 9; van Tuyll, “Seditionists and Revolutionaries,”; Sullivan, “The Rising of 1798,” 9; McElroy, “Denis Driscol,” Dictionary of Irish Biography”; Durey, “Irish Deism and Jefferson’s Republic: Denis Driscol in Ireland and America, 1793–1810,” 56–76; Shulim, “John Daly Burk: Irish Revo‑ lutionist and American Patriot,” 1–60. Green, Mathew Carey: Publisher and Patriot, 3–5; van Tuyll, “Se‑ ditionists and Revolutionaries,” 11–12; Bulla, “William Duane: Globe Trotting Journalist of the Eighteenth

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Debra Reddin van Tuyll Century,” 22–26; Schlereth, “Partisan Religious Truths,” 115; MacGillobhui, “Sons of Exile,” 162; Durey, “Irish Deism and Jefferson’s Republic,” 56–66; Schlereth, An Age of Infidels, 111; Campbell, “America’s Temple of Reason,” 17, 20; Durey, “Irish Deism and Jefferson’s Republic,” 68–72; Campbell, “America’s Temple of Reason,” 14, 26. 3 Doyle, “The Irish in North America, 1776–1845,” 71–72; Sullivan, “The Rising of 1798 and the Political Foundation of Irish-American Identity,” 3, 13; van Tuyll, “Seditionists and Revolutionaries,” 15–18. 4 van Tuyll, “Seditionists and Revolutionaries,” 19–20. 5 O’Conner, “The Shamrock of New York,” 4, 5; McShane, “A Study of Two New York Irish-American News‑ papers in the Early Nineteenth Century,” 13, 14. 6 “The Truth Teller,” The News Media and the Making of America, 1735–1865; McShane, “A Study of Two New York Irish-American Newspapers,” 19, 20; Moriarty, “The Irish-American,” 368. 7 Moriarty, “The Irish-American Response to Catholic Emancipation,” 354, 363; Irish Shield, January 1829; National Gazette, April 9, 1829; Richmond Enquirer, May 19, 1829; Walsh, “The Boston Pilot Reports the Civil War,” 6. 8 Gümüs, “An Organ of the Irish Race on the Continent,” 1, 203–205; “The Boston Pilot in the 1840’s”; Mc‑ Mahon, “Ireland and the Birth,” 8, 9; “The Pilot Enters 175th Year.” 9 McMahon, Global Dimensions, 77–78. 10 Mulhall, “Blog by Daniel Mulhall on Black ‘47” McMahon, “International Celebrities,” 148; Mulcrone, “The Famine Irish and the Irish-American Press,” 51, 54; Rodechko, “An Irish-American Journalist and Catholicism,” 526; McMahon, Global Dimensions, 82. 11 McMahon, “Ireland and the Birth,” 9, 10, 18. 12 McMahon, “Ireland and the Birth,” 10–13; Burns, “Thomas D’Arcy McGee.” 13 Rzeppa, “Thomas Francis Meagher and John Mitchel”; Forney, Thomas Francis Meagher: Irish Rebel, American Yankee, Montana Pioneer, 65–67, 82; “Irish News,” Irish News, April 12, 1856, p. 8; McMahon, “Ireland and the Birth,” 16–18; McMahon, Global Dimensions, 87–90. 14 McMahon, “International Celebrities,” 149; Mulcrone, “The Famine Irish and the Irish-American Press,” 55, 57; Kenneally, “O’Reilly the Journalist”; Mulcrone, “The Famine Irish and the Irish-American Press,” 58. 15 Mulcrone, “The Famine Irish and the Irish-American Press,” 58, 59; Boston Pilot, “Know Nothing Demon‑ stration!” The Boston Pilot, July 8, 1854. 16 Boston Pilot, August 16, 1862; Mulcrone, “The Famine Irish and the Irish-American Press,” 53, 60; Mul‑ crone, “The Famine Irish and the Irish-American Press,” 62. 17 McMahon, “Ireland and the Birth,” 5; Mulcrone, “The Famine Irish and the Irish-American Press,” 49, 66, 67. 18 McMahon, Global Dimensions, 89–92. 19 Joye, “Irishmen in the Confederate Army”; Murphy, “Reconsidering the Complex Relationship Between Blacks, the Irish, and Abolitionists in Ante-Bellum and Civil War New York,” 4. 20 Shiels, “Recovering the Voices of the Union Irish,” 27–28; Walsh, “The Boston Pilot Reports the Civil War,” 8–9; Boston (Mass.) Pilot, September 27, 1862; McMahon, Global Dimensions, 116, 133. 21 McMahon, Global Dimensions, 111. 22 Anderson, “Joseph Medill: Legendary Tribune Publisher and Social Advocate.” 23 Swan and Swan, “James W. Sheahan,” 133–134, 151–152. 24 George, “A Catholic Family Newspaper,” 112, 115; Feighery, “The Reinventions of John Mullaly,” 44–45; Metropolitan Record, April 1862; Metropolitan Record, January 10, 1863, 24–25; Feighery, “The Reinven‑ tions of John Mullaly,” 45; George, “A Catholic Family Newspaper,” 121, 124–125. 25 George, “Philadelphia’s Catholic Herald,” 196, 201, 204, 206, 208, 209, 210–212. 26 George, “Philadelphia’s Catholic Herald,” 213, 214, 217. 27 Leary, Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism, 2; Steward and McGovern, The Fenians: Irish Rebellion in the North Atlantic World, 1858–1876, 59, 117. 28 Snay, “The Imagined Republic,” 239. 29 Joyce, “The ‘Galway American’ 1862–1863: Politics and Place in a Finian Newspaper,” part 2, 104; Joyce, “The ‘Galway American’ 1862–1863: Politics and Place in a Finian Newspaper,” part 1, 108; Knight, “The Irish Republic: Reconstructing Liberty, Right Principles and the Fenian Brotherhood”; Knight, “The Irish Republic.” 30 Kenneally, From the Earth a Cry, 7–10, 17, 21, 38. 31 Kenneally, From the Earth a Cry, 138, 140, 142, 145, 144, 148. 32 Kenneally, From the Earth a Cry, 148, 151–154. 33 Mulhall, “Foreword,” xi.

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Bibliography Newspapers Boston Pilot Irish News (New York) Irish Shield (Philadelphia) Nation (New York) New York Times Richmond Enquirer “The Truth Teller.” The News Media and the Making of America, 1735–1865, American Antiquarian Society. https://www.americanantiquarian.org/earlyamericannewsmedia/items/show/72. Accessed April 30, 2023.

Primary Sources Benton, Josiah Henry. The Story of the Old Boston Town House. Boston, MA: Privately Printed, 1908. CPI Inflation Calculator. https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1864?amount=54000. Accessed July 31, 2023. Library of Congress Name Authority File. https://id.loc.gov/authorities/names.html. Accessed March 30, 2023. O’Leary, John. Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism. London: Dooleys & Co., 1896. “The Boston Pilot in the 1840s.” Boston College Libraries. https://libguides.bc.edu/boston-pilot-story. Accessed May 1, 2023. “The Printer’s File at AAS,” The American Antiquarian Society. https://www.americanantiquarian.org/printersfile. Accessed February 1, 2023.

Secondary Sources Anderson, Jeffrey. “Joseph Medill: Legendary Tribune Publisher and Social Advocate.” Northwestern Univer‑ sity. https://100.medill.northwestern.edu/joseph-medill-biography/. Accessed May 10, 2023. Bulla, David W. “William Duane: Globe Trotting Journalist of the Eighteenth Century.” In Politics, Culture, and the Irish-American Press, edited by Debra Reddin van Tuyll, Mark O’Brien and Marcel Brosema, 21–46. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2021. Burns, Robin B. “Thomas D’Arcy McGee.” Canadian Dictionary of Biography. http://www.biographi.ca/en/ bio/mcgee_thomas_d_arcy_9E.html. Accessed May 1, 2023. Campbell, Paul. “America’s Temple of Reason: Proselytizing Deism in the Early Republic.” Master’s thesis. Temple University, 2015. Doyle, David Noel. “The Irish in North America, 1776–1845.” In Making the Irish‑Americans: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States, edited by J.J. Lee and Marion R. Casey, 171–212. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Durey, Michael. “Irish Deism and Jefferson’s Republic: Denis Driscol in Ireland and America, 1793–1810.” Éire‑Ireland xxv (1990): 56–76. Feighery, Kate. “The Reinventions of John Mullaly – Irishman, Inventor, Politician, and Publisher.” New York History Irish Roundtable Archive 34 (2020): 40–54. Forney, Gary R. Thomas Francis Meagher: Irish Rebel, American Yankee, Montana Pioneer. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris Corp, 2003. George, Jr., Joseph. “‘A Catholic Family Newspaper’ Views the Lincoln Administration: John Mullaly’s Cop‑ perhead Weekly.” Civil War History 24, no. 2 (1978): 112–132. George, Jr., Joseph. “Philadelphia’s Catholic Herald: The Civil War Years.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of His‑ tory and Biography 103, no. 2 (April 18, 1979): 196–221. Green, James N. Mathew Carey: Publisher and Patriot. Philadelphia, PA: Library Company of Philadelphia, 1985. Gümüs, Gamze Kati. ‘“An Organ of the Irish Race on the Continent’; The Pilot, Irish Immigration, and Irish‑American Identity, 1851–66.” PhD diss. University of Kansas (2018). “James W. Sheahan.” Chicagology. https://chicagology.com/biographies/sheahan/. Accessed May 16, 2023. Joyce, Toby. “The ‘Galway American’ 1862–1863: Politics and Place in a Fenian Newspaper,” part 1. Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society 48 (1995): 108–137.

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Debra Reddin van Tuyll Joyce, Toby. “The ‘Galway American’ 1862–1863: Politics and Place in a Fenian Newspaper,” part 2. Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society 48 (1996): 104–136. Joye, Lar. “Irishmen in the Confederate Army.” History Ireland 18, no 1 (2010). https://www.historyireland.com/ irishmen‑in‑the‑confederate‑army/. Accessed May 15, 2023. Keeley, Howard J., and Steven T. Engle. “A ‘Respectable Body of New Comers,’ Transnational Journalistic Perspectives on the Wexford, Ireland, Diaspora in Savannah, Georgia.” In Politics, Culture, and the Irish‑ American Press, edited by Debra Reddin van Tuyll, Mark O’Brien and Marcel Brosema, 47–68. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2021. Kenneally, Ian. From the Earth a Cry: The Story of John Boyle O’Reilly. Wilton: The Collins Press, 2011. Kenneally, Ian. “O’Reilly the Journalist.” https://www.johnboyleoreilly.com/journalist.html. Accessed May 1, 2023.Knight, Mathew. “The Irish Republic: Reconstructing Liberty, Right Principles and the Fenian Brother‑ hood.” Éire‑Ireland 52, nos. 3&4 (2017): 252–271. MacGiollabhuí, Muiris A. “Sons of Exile: The United Irishmen in Transnational Perspective, 1791–1827.” PhD diss., University of California Santa Cruz, 2019. McCabe, Desmond. “John Flood.” Dictionary of Irish Biography. https://doi.org/10.3318/dib.003296.v1. Ac‑ cessed May 24, 2023. McElroy, Martin. “Denis Driscol.” Dictionary of Irish Biography. https://www.dib.ie/biography/driscol‑denis‑ a2771. Accessed March 20, 2023. McMahon, Cian T. “International Celebrities and Irish Identity in the United States and Beyond, 1840–1860.” American Nineteenth Century History 15, no. 2 (2014): 147–168. McMahon, Cian T. “Ireland and the Birth of the Irish‑American Press, 1842–61.” American Periodicals 19, no. 1 (2009): 5–20. McMahon, Cian T. The Global Dimensions of Irish Identity: Race, Nation, and the Popular Press, 1840–1880. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. McShane, Kieran. “A Study of Two New York Irish‑American Newspapers in the Early Nineteenth Century.” New York Irish History 9 (1993–1994): 13–22. Moriarty, Thomas F. “The Irish‑American Response to Catholic Emancipation.” The Catholic Historical Review 67, no. 3 (1980): 353–373. Mulcrone, Mick. “The Famine Irish and the Irish‑American Press: Strangers in a Hostile Land.” American Jour‑ nalism 20, no. 3 (2003): 49–72. Mulhall, Daniel. “Blog by Daniel Mulhall on Black ’47: Ireland’s Great Famine and its After‑Effects.” Embassy of Ireland, USA. https://www.dfa.ie/irish‑embassy/usa/about‑us/ambassador/ambassadors‑blog/black47ire‑ landsgreatfamineanditsafter‑effects/. Accessed May 15, 2023. Mulhall, Daniel. “Foreword.” In Politics, Culture, and the Irish‑American Press, edited by Debra Reddin van Tuyll, Mark O’Brien and Marcel Brosema, xi–xvii. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2021. Murphy, Maureen. “Reconsidering the Complex Relationship Between Blacks, the Irish, and Abolitionists in Ante‑Bellum and Civil War New York.” Social Science Docket 7, no. 2 (Summer–Fall 2007): 69–70. O’Conner, John P. “The Shamrock of New York: The First Irish‑American Newspaper.” New York Irish History 4 (1989): 4–5. Rodechko, James P. “An Irish‑American Journalist and Catholicism: Patrick Ford of the Irish World.” Church History 39, no 4 (1970): 524–540. Rzeppa, Joseph Jude. “Thomas Francis Meagher and John Mitchel: Two Irishmen, Two Irish‑Americans, One America.” MA thesis. Texas Christian University, 2007. Schlereth, Eric R. An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States. Philadel‑ phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Shiels, Damian. “Recovering the Voices of Union Irish: Identity, Motivation, and Experience in Irish‑American Civil War Correspondence.” PhD diss., Northumbria University, 2020. Shulim, Joseph I. “John Daly Burk: Irish Revolutionist and American Patriot.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society New series, 54, no. 6 (1964): 1–60. Snay, Mitchel. The Imagined Republic: The Fenians, Irish American Nationalism, and the Political Culture of Reconstruction. Wooster: American Antiquarian Society, 2004. Steward, Patrick, and Bryan P. McGovern. The Fenians: Irish Rebellion in the North Atlantic World, 1858–1876. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013. Sullivan, William A. “The Rising of 1798 and the Political Foundation of Irish‑American Identity.” Master’s Thesis. William and Mary, 2005. Swan, Patricia B., and James B. Swan. “James W. Sheahan: Stephen A. Douglas Supporter and Partisan Chicago Journalist.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 1, no. 2–3 (2012): 133–166.

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The Rise of the Popular Press in Irish-American Culture Van Tuyll, Debra Reddin. “John Mitchel: Transnational Journalist.” In Politics, Culture, and the Irish‑American Press, edited by Debra Reddin van Tuyll, Mark O’Brien and Marcel Brosema, 117–131. Syracuse, NY: Syra‑ cuse University Press, 2021. Van Tuyll, Debra Reddin. “Seditionists and Revolutionaries: Planting the Radical Roots of the Irish‑American Press during the ‘Reign of Witches.” In Politics, Culture, and the Irish‑American Press, edited by Debra Reddin van Tuyll, Mark O’Brien and Marcel Brosema, 3–20. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2021. Wall, Alexander J. “Samuel Loudon (1727–1813), Merchant, Printer and Patriot.” New York Historical Society Quarterly Bulletin, October 1922: 75–92. Walsh, Francis R. “The Boston Pilot Reports the Civil War.” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 9, no. 2 (1981): 5–16.

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10 ANTI-IRISH NATIVISM IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY Hidetaka Hirota

The arrival of the predominantly Catholic and impoverished Irish in large numbers during the first half of the nineteenth century provoked an outburst of anti-Irish nativism in the United States. Protestant Americans, many of whom were of Anglo descent, viewed Irish immigrants as a menace to the religious, cultural, economic, social, and political fabrics of the United States. Opponents of Irish-Catholic immigrants disparaged them as unfit for American democracy rooted in Protestant‑ ism. They also stereotyped the Irish as predisposed to excessive drinking and violence. Antipathy to the Irish sometimes escalated into street and mob violence, for example, in Charlestown, Massachu‑ setts in 1834 and the Philadelphia suburb of Kensington in 1844, which I discuss below. As many indigent Irish entered public charitable institutions as paupers, native-born Americans denounced them as public health threats and financial burdens, advocating the expulsion of the Irish poor from their communities or even from the United States. Anti-Irish sentiment in the mid-nineteenth cen‑ tury culminated in the emergence of an expressly nativist political party, the American Party, in the 1850s. Discourse on and perceptions of the Irish have long been central subjects in historiography on anti-Irish nativism. Historians have produced a robust body of scholarship on the words and con‑ cepts nativists adopted in denouncing the Irish and their representations in popular culture. Political cartoons that depicted the Irish as simian, for example, have drawn much scholarly attention. In the 1990s, this line of inquiry led to the emergence of Whiteness Studies, which viewed anti-Irish nativ‑ ism as a form of racism. Historians of whiteness argued that the Irish, whose racial status as white was by no means guaranteed in the United States before the Civil War, “became” white by oppressing African Americans and thus “acquiring” whiteness. The whiteness thesis, however, suffered criti‑ cal theoretical shortcomings, such as the vagueness of the idea of “whiteness” and the fundamental misconceptions about race in the context of US history. By construing racial identity as acquirable by choice, historians of whiteness failed to realize that the primary function of racism in the United States was to deprive African Americans of control over their identity, as the so-called one-drop rule unilaterally determined who was Black. The idea that the Irish voluntarily “became” white over‑ looked this essential asymmetry, obscuring, rather than clarifying, the working of American racism. More recently, historians have shifted from studying nativism as discourse and perceptions to consider its practical consequences at the level of law and policy. Some of the latest studies reveal, for example, how anti-Irish nativism at mid-century stimulated the formation of state-level immigration control. Building upon colonial poor laws, northeastern states such as New York and Massachusetts DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-13

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enacted a series of passenger laws that primarily targeted the Irish. Under these policies, the landing of the destitute Irish was restricted or taxed, and those already in the United States were sometimes deported to other US states, to Canada, or even back to Europe. These state-level immigration laws helped lay the foundations for federal immigration policy, which developed from the late nineteenth century onward. Anti-Irish nativism, thus, had tangible impacts on the lives of Irish immigrants and the history of American immigration policy. Nevertheless, the strength of anti-Irish nativism should not be exaggerated. Some Irish immi‑ grants were excluded or removed by state officials, but the vast majority was allowed to enter and settle in the United States, whereas Chinese immigrants in the late nineteenth century were excluded as a group through national legislation. The Irish suffered considerable prejudice and some forms of discrimination, but they ultimately enjoyed privileges such as naturalization and suffrage and, on that basis, political empowerment. Most politicians hesitated to alienate Irish voters by promoting meas‑ ures that would be unpopular among immigrants, and soon the Irish dominated municipal politics, which further protected them against extreme immigration policies.

Aspects of Anti-Irish Nativism One major aspect of anti-Irish nativism in the mid-nineteenth-century United States was anti-­ Catholicism. Many Protestants looked down on Catholics as corrupt Christians whose religious life was guided by superficial formalities and superstitions, rather than genuine, individual faith. Hostile sentiment against the Catholic Irish had long existed in America. With their stringent adherence to Protestant values and sense of cultural superiority, Puritans in colonial Massachusetts cultivated strong hatred of the Catholic Irish, whom they contemptuously called “St. Patrick’s Vermin.” By the early nineteenth century, the United States had established itself as, in effect, a Protestant nation ruled by people of Anglo-Saxon descent.1 The substantial inflow into the United States of the predominantly Catholic Irish during the first half of the nineteenth century (detailed by Anelise Hanson Shrout in her chapter) frightened many Protestant Americans, triggering an anti-Catholic movement. The Catholic presence remained much smaller than the Protestant, but it was large enough to arouse the hostility of native-born Protestants, who believed that Catholics’ allegiance to the Pope in Rome and the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church would corrupt freedom and democracy in the United States. Given that the growth of the Catholic population stemmed from the mass immigration of the Catholic Irish during this period, the anti-Catholic movement was in essence a manifestation of Protestant Anglo Americans’ nativism against Irish immigrants. The anti-Catholic movement unfolded in the form of propaganda, as Debra Reddin van Tuyll ref‑ erences in her chapter. Nativists fulminated against Catholic immigrants’ alleged schemes to overturn American society and replace it with despotic papism. Nativist activists, such as William C. Brown‑ lee and Samuel F. B. Morse, published anti-Catholic propaganda to “warn our Protestant friends of the insidious Jesuitical working of that abomination, showing its demoralizing, debasing character.” Brownlee claimed that Europe had been “chained in mental slavery by Popery.” Catholics from Europe would corrupt American freedom with their servile characters. Brownlee warned that “the enemy is at our gates!” “It is a fact,” Morse asserted, “that Popery is opposed in its very nature to Democratic Republicanism; and it is, therefore, as a political system, as well as religious, opposed to civil and religious liberty, and consequently to our form of government.” Maria Monk’s 1836 Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal, which sensationalized the alleged immoral life at a Catholic nunnery, became a national bestseller. By exaggerating the Catholic threat and Irish im‑ migrants’ incompatibility with American society, these publications influenced even moderate Prot‑ estant Americans, who would otherwise have tolerated the Catholic Irish.2 141

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Anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiment sometimes escalated into physical violence. On the night of August 11, 1834, for example, a mob of 40 or 50 workingmen burnt down an Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, where nuns ran a boarding school for girls. Harassment of Catholic Irish immigrants occurred frequently, and immigrants’ resistance only added fuel to Protestants’ an‑ ger. In June 1837, when a band of Protestant firemen and Irish immigrants started a fistfight on Broad Street in Boston, the conflict developed into a riot that engulfed the city in anti-Irish furor. In Phila‑ delphia, anti-Catholic sentiment and Irish immigrants’ determination to resist intolerance sparked a three-day riot in the Irish neighborhood of Kensington in May 1844, resulting in the destruction of more than 30 homes, two Catholic churches, and a Catholic seminary.3 The influence of anti-Catholicism on Irish immigrants’ employment has become a subject of schol‑ arly debate. In February 1852, the Boston Daily Evening Transcript published a series of articles on Protestant families’ dissatisfaction with Catholic Irish servants. The author noted that “many families have positively refused to employ Irish servants at all, especially those who were Roman Catholic.” Reflecting similar sentiments, some employers indicated in their advertisements of domestic servants that no Catholic or no Irish need apply or that only Protestants were desired. Richard J. Jensen has argued that given the disproportionate representation of Irish women in domestic servant employ‑ ment in nineteenth-century America (nearly three-quarters of women servants in New York City in 1855 were Irish-born), actual job discrimination symbolized in the so-called NINA (No Irish Need Apply) advertisements was so rare as to constitute a myth (the origins of which he located in popular culture rather than actual employment practices). Margaret Lynch-Brennan, by contrast, claims that determining the scale of job discrimination, as well as the frequency of the NINA advertisements, requires a comprehensive review of newspaper advertisements in northeastern cities, which remains to be done. Additionally, Lynch-Brennan notes that the large-scale employment of Catholic Irish girls by no means indicated that American families willingly hired them. Instead, Lynch-Brennan argues, they did so only because they could not secure the preferred type of servants, namely native-born Protestant American girls. Although focusing on employment advertisements for men, Rebecca A. Fried has also challenged Jensen’s general claim that Irish immigrants rarely encountered job dis‑ crimination, by demonstrating that the NINA advertisements appeared in US newspapers much more frequently than Jensen contended, based on her research with digital databases that covered more publications than Jensen’s study.4 Another major source of anti-Irish nativism was immigrants’ poverty. As the material conditions of Irish immigrants declined in the 1830s, their poverty emerged as a chronic social problem in Amer‑ ican cities. In search of cheap rents, most Irish immigrants resided in congested slums, such as Five Points in New York City and those in the North End and Fort Hill in Boston. The Irish also accounted for a disproportionate share of charity recipients. In 1833, the Boston Free Dispensary aided 1,331 foreigners and 854 Americans. Of the 1,331 foreigners, 1,234 were Irish-born. In 1834, half of the foreign inmates in the almshouse of Philadelphia were born in Ireland. Immigration during the era of the Great Famine enhanced the distinct presence of Irish pauperism in northeastern cities. Irish-born inmates accounted for 57 percent of all inmates, and 87 percent of the foreign inmates, who entered the Boston House of Industry in 1847. In 1849, the almshouse in New York City admitted 1,006 Irish-born immigrants compared to only 92 English inmates, the second largest foreign-born group. The Irish were so overrepresented in the pauper population that “Irish,” “immigrant,” and “pauper” became virtually synonymous. Many Americans regarded the Irish poor as financial burdens on their communities and abusers of public poor relief.5 Destitute and often disease-stricken, Irish immigrants were perceived as a hazard to public health. Reporting a case when an American visitor to an almshouse in New York City and his daughter died of “ship fever” contracted from immigrant inmates, an anti-Irish newspaper called for “the necessity

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of taking immediate measures to protect our city against these evils.” Nativist sentiment of this sort sometimes came close to inciting violence. The arrival in Boston of destitute immigrants on the ship Thomas W. Sears in April 1847 stimulated “considerable excitement” among residents of Boston who almost started a riot against the ship. When the Boston city government decided to erect a quarantine hospital on Deer Island in Boston harbor for the reception of immigrants in May 1847, nativists threatened to destroy the institution, circulating handbills throughout the city that declared, “American citizens of Boston! The honorable Fathers of this City, have thought expedient to erect a HOSPITAL on Deer Island, for the protection of FOREIGN PAUPERS! … AMERICAN CITIZENS! BE IN AT THE DEATH!!” In New York City, residents on Staten Island, alarmed by the potential spread of contagious diseases from sick immigrants at the marine hospital on the island, repeatedly asked the legislature to remove the institution. Staten Islanders’ dissidence increasingly assumed an aggressive nature, and state officials received threats to destroy the institution. On the night of Sep‑ tember 1, 1858, the tension over the hospital culminated in a riot by a mob of 1,000 angry residents and property holders on Staten Island who burned the institution to the ground.6 Native-born Americans resented Irish pauperism not only because it drained public treasuries and threatened public health, but also because it violated prevailing economic ideals in nineteenth-century US society. In other words, Irish pauperism was ideologically, as well as financially and medically, problematic. By the tenets of the “free labor ideology,” in the influential explanation of historian Eric Foner, opportunity for property-owning independence was the distinctive quality of northern society as compared to the slaveholding South. The colonial experience of British oppression had implanted the sanctity of independence and the fear of unfreedom and dependency in Americans’ minds. After the Revolution, the continued presence of chattel slavery, a symbol of the denial of self-ownership, enhanced this conception. Free labor ideology assumed that, in a free society, which supposedly guar‑ anteed independence and upward mobility for everyone, citizens would engage in productive work. Pauperism, more than mere poverty, embodied a form of dependency that was not supposed to exist in a free society. Those in temporary poverty due to uncontrollable financial misfortunes received sympathy as the “deserving” poor, but middle-class Americans tended to view the chronic poverty of able-bodied persons as an individual failing arising from the personal laziness and moral defects of the “undeserving” poor.7 In the ethnically biased view of Anglo Americans, the dependency of Irish paupers, all of whom belonged to the undeserving poor, destabilized free labor society more seriously than that of the ­native-born poor. Allegations of pervasive Irish drunkenness and criminality reinforced the preju‑ diced association between Irish immigrants and the undeserving poor. Moreover, the economic frus‑ tration with the Irish was compounded by Protestant Americans’ prejudice that Catholicism, which made people docile and unprogressive, predisposed the Irish to willful dependency. As historian Maura Jane Farrelly puts it, “these Irish Catholic immigrants unwittingly revived and fed long-stand‑ ing Protestant fears about the connections between Catholicism and poverty, ignorance, dependence, and corruption.”8 Foreign pauperism became coterminous with Irishness. The nativist Boston Daily Bee declared the pauperism of the Irish to be “their normal condition.” Theodore Parker, a leading abolitionist and an outspoken nativist in Boston, wrote that the Irish were foreign in “ethnological disposition” and had “vices of their condition, wretchedness, beggary, drunkenness, deceit, lying, violence, treachery, mal‑ ice, superstition.” German immigrants, certainly included paupers, but public discourse on immigrant poverty and dependency tended to view the poverty of the Irish as more troublesome than that of Ger‑ mans. The New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor categorized the Irish as the undeserving poor, whose poverty stemmed from individual moral failing, and “natives and Germans” as belonging to the class of the deserving poor for being “willing and anxious to earn their living.”

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Some Germans were as poor as the Irish, but they stood at “the opposite [end] of the Irish, being generally a self-reliant, sober, frugal, thrifty people.” The Irish, by contrast, “are but little disposed to change their thriftless habits with a change of country.”9 The growing sense that the Catholic Irish were threatening the United States led to a nativist politi‑ cal movement that sought to minimize foreigners’ influence on electoral politics. During the 1830s, opponents of Catholic immigrants formed a political party called the Native American Democratic Association. The party opposed officeholding by immigrants, the immigration of paupers and crimi‑ nals, and the Catholic Church’s alleged intervention into American politics. In 1841, a group of citi‑ zens calling themselves “Native Americans” formed a political organization in New Orleans. (In the nineteenth-century United States, Americans normally used “native” to refer to US-born Americans, rather than indigenous people whom they called “Indians,” reflecting their settler colonial sense of ownership of North America.) Like their predecessors, they promoted the restriction of officeholding to US-born citizens and an extension of the waiting period for naturalization to delay immigrants’ participation in elections. The organization soon spread to New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Charleston. In New York City, the Native Americans, who named their branch the American Republican Party, successfully placed their candidate, James Harper, in the mayoral office between 1844 and 1845.10 The most intense form of political nativism emerged in 1854, when widespread nativist sentiment crystallized into the Know-Nothing movement. Emerging from secret anti-immigrant societies in New York City, the Know Nothings pledged to promote anti-Catholic and anti-foreigner legisla‑ tion by running their own candidates from their official organization, the American Party. Owing to the failure of the Whigs and Democrats to settle the issue of slavery, the Know Nothings attracted people’s expectations not only as a nativist party but also as an alternative to the traditional parties.11 In the elections of 1854, the Know Nothings made stunning achievements as a third party in north‑ ern states, where they adopted both antislavery and nativism as their main planks. In Massachusetts, the Know Nothings’ stronghold, they captured the governorship, elected all the state officers, and occupied every seat in the state senate and all but three of the 378 seats in the House of Representa‑ tives. In Pennsylvania, the Know Nothings also won the governorship and a majority in the house. In Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, nativists secured control of the executive and legislative branches of state government. Even though they fell short of securing the governorship in New York, leaders of the party found their showing promising. The Know Nothings also made a sizeable impact in California, Indiana, Maine, and Ohio. By the end of 1855, the Know Nothings had captured eight governorships, more than 100 seats in Congress, and mayors’ offices in Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago.12 As they sat down in their new offices, the Know Nothings started to pursue their nativist agenda based on two principles. First, they believed that Protestantism defined American society and that Catholicism was incompatible with American values such as democracy, freedom, and individual‑ ism. Second, they believed that only native-born Americans could understand and operate American republican institutions. Following these convictions, the Know Nothings proposed to extend the wait‑ ing period before naturalization from 5 years to 21 years to deter immigrants from becoming citizens and to curtail the political power of the foreign-born. In Massachusetts, the Know-Nothing legislature required all public schools to read the Protestant King James Bible every day and, in an effort to make Catholic children attend public schools, banned the use of public money for parochial schools. In February 1855, the legislature went so far as to appoint a so-called Nunnery Committee to investigate Catholic priests’ alleged sexual misconduct and the torture of nuns at convents and Catholic schools. In an investigation of a convent school in Roxbury, about 20 men, only seven of whom were official committee members, disrupted the school and inspected the building. They poked into closets and cellars and terrorized nuns and children but found no evidence of wrongdoing.13 144

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Other than Catholicism, the poverty of foreigners became the Know Nothings’ chief target. Like earlier nativists, the Know Nothings regarded foreign pauperism as a financial burden on American taxpayers as well as a threat to the public health and morality of American society. Erastus Brooks, a New York nativist, regretted that the United States had kept its gates wide open for foreigners to make itself “the common Alms-House of the world.” For Thomas R. Whitney, a Know-Nothing congress‑ man from New York, foreign paupers were “not merely useless, they are worse than useless.” By sending their paupers to the United States, European authorities afflicted Americans with “a disease, both moral and physical—a leprosy—a contamination.”14 The pace of the American Party’s decline was as striking as the swiftness of its rise to power. Un‑ able to reach a consensus over slavery, the national American Party was divided between northern and southern members and declined precipitously after the 1856 presidential election. In 1859, the Republican-controlled Massachusetts legislature enacted a law originally sponsored by the Know Nothings four years earlier, which required immigrant citizens to wait for two years after naturali‑ zation to vote or hold office. But nativism never regained the strength it had once enjoyed in state politics.15

Trends in Scholarship Two trends characterize scholarship on anti-Irish nativism for the last three decades. One is to view anti-Irish nativism as a form of racism. Previous historians had extensively examined how nativeborn Americans viewed Irish immigrants, what kinds of words and concepts nativists used in con‑ demning the Irish, and how Irish immigrants were represented in cultural products such as political cartoons. In nineteenth-century political cartoons, Irish immigrants were often dehumanized and de‑ picted as simian. Building upon this scholarship, a group of historians developed Whiteness Studies in the 1990s. These historians argued that anti-Irish language and cultural representations questioned Irish immigrants’ racial status as white. In The Wages of Whiteness, the most influential work in Whiteness Studies, labor historian David R. Roediger argued that “it was by no means clear that the Irish were white” in nineteenth-century America. According to this group of historians, the Irish were placed close to the bottom of US society and “became white” by oppressing African Americans through violence and job discrimination and acquiring “whiteness” through this process. Nativists, according to this interpretation, condemned the Irish not only on religious, cultural, economic, and political grounds but also on racial grounds. Irish immigrants’ assimilation into American society, then, was a racial process through which they transformed into white Americans. In making this ar‑ gument, historians attempted to reveal the working of American racism and deconstruct white racial status, which had been uncritically considered a normative condition for all European immigrants in the United States.16 Whiteness Studies provoked heated debates among historians. As Angela F. Murphy points out in her chapter in this volume, whiteness scholarship was characterized by the highly selective readings of sources and the general absence of the voices of Irish immigrants in the analysis. Critics objected that the core concept of whiteness was vague, inconsistent, and ultimately incoherent. If the Irish “became” white, what was their racial status before that? The idea of “becoming white” was also tenuous in light of the fact that Irish immigrants always enjoyed privileges that were denied to Black people, such as the right to become US citizens under the Naturalization Act of 1790, which limited eligibility to “free white” people. By contrast, the US Supreme Court categorically denied citizen‑ ship to African Americans, free and enslaved, in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). Historian Barbara Fields called whiteness a “shotgun marriage of two incoherent but well-loved concepts: identity and agency.” According to Fields, racism in the United States was an asymmetric mode of identification which specified only who was Black, whether the person accepted the identification or not, as in the 145

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so-called one-drop rule. In other words, the essential function of American racism was the automatic and coercive identification of the Black race. Whiteness obscured the asymmetric nature of racism by equating race with identity, something the Irish supposedly set out to acquire voluntarily. But race, for Fields, was a brand, not a choice, imposed on others by the act of racism. As an ideological construct, moreover, race signified different things in different national contexts. In nineteenth-century Britain, anti-Irish prejudice included a tendency to criticize Irish and Celtic peoples as inferior to Anglo Sax‑ ons. But this form of racial prejudice, which also extended to some extent across the Atlantic, should not be conflated with the dominant form of racism in the United States, where race was defined on the basis of the one-drop rule that determined who was Black.17 A second, and more recent, trend in the study of anti-Irish nativism is to examine its practical consequence at the level of immigration law and policy. Discussions of immigration control in the United States have long rested on what legal scholar Gerald Neuman calls an “open borders myth,” the assertion that “the borders of the United States were legally open until the enactment of federal immigration legislation in the 1870s and 1880s,” when the US national government started restrict‑ ing Chinese immigration. Approaching anti-Irish nativism as a form of bigotry, historians have ex‑ tensively analyzed its ideological and cultural dimensions but paid relatively scant attention to how hostile sentiment was translated into concrete, state-backed action. The “open borders myth” is partly based on the assumption that antebellum anti-Irish nativism did not affect America’s border policies. The latest research, however, examines the many, diverse forms of international and domestic migra‑ tion control conducted at the local and state levels before the federal government began administer‑ ing immigration in the late nineteenth century. Joining this trend, historians of Irish America have revealed how anti-Irish nativism stimulated regulatory immigration measures in Atlantic seaboard states, especially New York and Massachusetts, during the first half of the nineteenth century.18 In response to the growing immigration of the impoverished Irish, the eastern seaboard states built upon colonial poor laws regulating the movement of the poor and banishing transient beggars to develop policies for checking the entry of destitute foreigners. State passenger laws required ship captains to provide bonds or pay taxes for the landing of indigent foreigners and those deemed “likely to become a public charge,” so that the state would not suffer the financial burden of supporting these immigrants. If the ship captain refused or failed to provide the required bonds or taxes, the passengers in question were not allowed to land and normally returned to their places of origin in Europe. A New York passenger law of 1847, for example, authorized state immigration officials, the Commissioners of Emigration, to board ships arriving in the port of New York and to inspect the condition of pas‑ sengers. If they found “any lunatic, idiot, deaf and dumb, blind or infirm persons, not members of emigrating families, and who […] are likely to become permanently a public charge,” the officials would require shipmasters to provide a bond of $300 for the landing of each of these passengers. If shipmasters refused to provide such bonds, the passengers were excluded.19 In Massachusetts, an exceptionally strong anti-Catholic and anti-Irish tradition inspired the state legislature to go beyond merely setting entry regulations or excluding the unacceptable. Massachu‑ setts developed laws for deporting foreign paupers already resident in the state back to Ireland, or to Britain, Canada, or other US states. During the height of the Irish Famine in the 1840s, the Boston City Council received countless petitions, from groups of 30 to 200 Bostonians, demanding the strin‑ gent enforcement of the removal provision in state law. The petitioners requested that the city execute every applicable law to “cause all paupers in our Alms houses, to be sent or conveyed to the places beyond seas or otherwise, which they may belong.” Between the 1830s and the early 1880s, at least 50,000 persons were removed from Massachusetts under this policy, and the policy was largely an anti-Irish measure in its practical operation.20 This new research has important implications for our understanding of the nature of anti-Irish nativism. Previous studies located the origins of American immigration restriction primarily in 146

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anti-Asian racism, but some of these origins also clearly lay in cultural prejudice against the Irish and, more fundamentally, in economic concerns about their poverty. The recent research also dem‑ onstrates that nativism against the Irish in nineteenth-century America was more than just a matter of hostile sentiments. It left tangible consequences at the level of immigration law and policy that pro‑ foundly affected the lives of Irish immigrants in the United States. Anti-Irish nativism was engrafted onto existing poor laws, giving rise to a series of new immigration laws that physically removed foreigners and their children from the country. This finding is particularly significant for the interpretation of the Know-Nothing movement. His‑ torians have long considered the Know Nothings’ nativist achievements inconsequential because of the American Party’s short life and its ultimate failure to accomplish its chief national-level goals, notably the 21-year probation for naturalization. During the three years when the Know Nothings controlled Massachusetts politics, however, the enforcement of deportation law became radicalized. Inspired by nativist politicians’ anti-Irish language, pressure from nativist citizens for stricter immi‑ gration restriction, and the prevailing view of Irish paupers as undeserving of relief and sympathy, officials in Massachusetts banished Irish paupers forcefully and sometimes illegally. Among those unlawfully deported to Europe by the Know Nothings were some American citizens of Irish descent. While Irish immigrants criticized the manner of removals by Know-Nothing officials, nativists be‑ lieved that deportation was a “good law” that reduced the burden of “an ignorant and vicious Irish Catholic population.” Foreign paupers were “leeches upon our tax payers,” the Know Nothings as‑ serted, and “[t]he more vigorously this law is executed the better it will be.” The Know Nothings’ de‑ termination to expel foreign paupers continued to shape state-level immigration control through the Civil War and Reconstruction, helping to stimulate the emergence of national immigration legislation in the 1880s. Far from being an insignificant and temporary hysteria, the Know-Nothing movement, then, was a serious attempt to reduce the Irish presence from the United States that profoundly af‑ fected the course of American immigration policy.21 The history of Irish pauper removal expands our understanding of the nature of anti-Irish nativism in the nineteenth century, but it is important not to exaggerate its scale. After all, the vast majority of Irish immigrants were allowed to enter and settle in the United States, in stark contrast to Chinese immigrants in the late nineteenth century, who were excluded as a racial group through federal Chi‑ nese exclusion laws. For most of the nineteenth century, admission and settlement were the norm for European immigrants to the United States, and Irish pauper deportation in Massachusetts should be considered an exception. Nativists in other seaboard states called for the introduction of policies for expelling the foreign poor, but their advocacy largely failed. These states conducted some forms of admission restriction against the poor through bonds and taxes, but none of them developed a depor‑ tation policy similar to that in Massachusetts. To understand the failure of deportation outside Massachusetts, or the limit of anti-Irish nativism, New York’s case is revealing. By the 1850s, foreigners accounted for a quarter of the state’s popula‑ tion. In New York City, half the residents were born outside the United States and the Irish accounted for half the foreign-born population. The substantial presence of the foreign-born empowered im‑ migrants politically against the possible introduction of radical nativist policies like deportation. In explaining the recurrent failure of nativist attempts to restrict European immigration in the nineteenth century, political scientist Daniel Tichenor notes that the constant arrivals of European immigrants and their subsequent naturalization “created important voting blocs with whom powerful party politi‑ cians, especially Democrats, curried favor by defending immigration and the foreign-born.” Parties occasionally adopted nativist platforms to appeal to native-born voters but “even these parties some‑ times maneuvered to avoid electoral reprisals from foreign-born and Catholic voters by embracing the nation’s pro-immigration traditions.” The political mobilization of immigrants was a product of their own work as well. As historian Terry Golway notes, Irish-born Archbishop John Hughes played 147

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a significant role in establishing among the New York Irish “a commanding, unifying political voice around which to rally in the face of a hostile civil culture” during the 1840s. For American politi‑ cians, the immigrant vote was too valuable to alienate by promoting extreme nativist approaches to immigration. This again raises an important contrast with the situation of Asian immigrants, who were not allowed to naturalize on racial grounds or participate in American elections. It is true that Irish immigrants faced intense prejudice and hostility in the United States, but it is important not to overstate the strength of anti-Irish nativism.22

Conclusion Assessing the nature and extent of anti-Irish nativism in nineteenth-century America requires care‑ ful analysis. On the one hand, Irish immigrants suffered aggressive nativism. Opponents of the Irish condemned them as unsuited for American democracy, financial burdens on Americans, public health threats, and culturally and intellectually inferior. Hostility to the Irish became institutionalized when state governments developed restrictive immigration policies mainly to prevent or tax the landing of indigent Irish immigrants. Massachusetts in particular went so far as to deport the Irish poor already resident in the United States to Europe. On the other hand, unlike Native Americans, African Amer‑ icans, and Asian immigrants, Irish immigrants enjoyed various rights and privileges reserved for white people, such as naturalization and suffrage. Cultural stereotyping against the Irish continued, but by the turn of the twentieth century, the Irish as a group had attained political power to the extent that they controlled local politics in major American cities. Recent research on the economic and social mobility of Irish immigrants in New York City during the Famine era also reveals that, despite rampant anti-Irish sentiment, they did not remain in poverty, succeeding in saving a large amount of money and achieving occupational advancement. Approximately 35 percent of the Famine Irish man‑ aged to save the modern equivalent of $10,000 within ten years, and only a quarter of them stayed in low-wage unskilled labor until the end of their working careers. There was also significant regional variation. Irish ethnicity might have been considered a stigma in the Northeast, where Anglo culture remained predominant. On the West Coast, where race was a more decisive determinant of power and status than ethnicity, however, Irish immigrants faced much less hostility. They joined native-born white Americans in leading the anti-Chinese movement during the 1870s. In ­California, the Irish were promoters, rather than targets, of immigrant exclusion policies. Students of Irish America need to be sensitive to the context in which anti-Irish nativism unfolded when examining its historical significance.23

Notes 1 O’Connor, The Boston Irish, 14. 2 Bennett, The Party of Fear, 39; and Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States through Foreign Immigration, and the Present State of the Naturalization Laws, 15; Billington, The Protestant Cru‑ sade, Corrigan, Religious Intolerance, America, and the World; Farrelly, Anti-Catholicism in America; and Franchot, Roads to Rome. 3 O’Connor, The Boston Irish, 46–49; Dolan, The Irish Americans, 61; Bennett, Party of Fear, 56–58; Milano, The Philadelphia Nativist Riots; and Schrag, The Fires of Philadelphia. 4 Jensen, “No Irish Need Apply”; Lynch-Brennan, The Irish Bridget, 73–75; Fried, “No Irish Need Deny.” 5 Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants, 91–101, 109–123; Anbinder, Five Points; Page, “Some Economic Aspects of Immigration Before 1870,” 1012; Kenny, The American Irish, 60; Massachusetts, Report of the Joint Special Committee on Alien Passengers and Paupers, 1848, Senate Doc. 46, 9–10; Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 200–201. 6 Boston Daily Bee, February 3, 1847; Boston Pilot, April 10, 1847; Boston Pilot, May 29 and June 5, 1847. Emphasis is original; Stephenson, “The Quarantine War,” 82–90. On the medical dimensions of anti-Irish

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Anti-Irish Nativism in the Mid-Nineteenth Century nativism, see also Kraut, Silent Travelers; and Kraut, “Illness and Medical Care among Irish Immigrants in Antebellum New York City.” 7 Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, ix–xxxix, 23–29, 231–232. 8 Farrelly, Anti-Catholicism in America, 143. 9 Knobel, Paddy and the Republic, 63–67, 86–90; Boston Daily Bee, May 28, 1855; Parker, The Material Condition of the People of Massachusetts, 43; The Fifteenth Annual Report of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, for the Year 1858, 37, and The Seventeenth Annual Report of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, for the Year 1860, 51. 10 Anbinder, City of Dreams, 124; Anbinder, Nativism & Slavery, 11–13, and Bennett, Party of Fear, 53–60. 11 Anbinder, Nativism & Slavery, 43–52. 12 Mulkern, The Know-Nothing Party in Massachusetts, 61–86; Anbinder, Nativism & Slavery, ix, 52–102, 127–128; and O’Connor, The Boston Irish, 76. On the Know Nothings, see also Ritter, Inventing America’s First Immigration Crisis. 13 Anbinder, Nativism & Slavery, 104–106; Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 412–415; Anbinder, Nativism & Slavery, 135–142; O’Connor, The Boston Irish, 76–77; and Mulkern, The Know-Nothing Party in Mas‑ sachusetts, 102–103. 14 Brooks, American Citizenship and the Progress of American Civilization, 17; Whitney, A Defence of the American Policy, 180, 185. 15 Anbinder, Nativism & Slavery, 247–253; and Mulkern, The Know-Nothing Party in Massachusetts, 155–173. 16 Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 134. For representative works of Whiteness Studies besides Roediger’s work, see Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White; and Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color. 17 Fields, “Whiteness, Racism, and Identity,” 48. For the critique of Whiteness Studies, see also Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies,” “Scholarly Controversy: Whiteness and Historians’ Imagination,” Kenny, “Twenty Years of Irish American Historiography,” and McMahon, “The Pages of Whiteness.” On Irish immi‑ grants’ self-perceptions, see McMahon, The Global Dimensions of Irish Identity. On anti-Irish prejudice in ­nineteenth-century Britain, see Curtis, Apes and Angels; and de Nie, The Eternal Paddy. 18 Neuman, “The Lost Century of American Immigration Law,” 1833–1834; Law, “Lunatics, Idiots, Paupers, and Negro Seamen”; Parker, Making Foreigners; Hirota, Expelling the Poor; Schoeppner, Moral Contagion; Masur, Until Justice Be Done; and Kenny, The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic. 19 Annual Reports of the Commissioners of Emigration of the State of New York: From the Organization of Commission, May 5, 1847, to 1860, Inclusive, Appendix, 2. 20 Petitions May–June 1847, Folder 3, Box 2, Boston City Council Joint Committee on Alien Passengers Re‑ cords; Hirota, Expelling the Poor. 21 Boston Daily Bee, May 28, 1855; Boston Daily Bee, December 19, 1855, and Know-Nothing and American Crusader, June 9, 1855. Emphasis is original. 22 Tichenor, Dividing Lines, 48, 59; Golway, Machine Made, 33; Hirota, “Limits of Intolerance.” 23 Anbinder, “Moving beyond ‘Rags to Riches’”; and Anbinder, Ó Gráda, and Wegge, “‘The Best Country in the World’”; Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy.

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Anti-Irish Nativism in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Kolchin, Peter. “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America.” Journal of American History 89, no. 1 (June 2002): 154–173. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. New York: Longman, 2000. Kenny, Kevin. The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the NineteenthCentury United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. Kenny, Kevin. “Twenty Years of Irish American Historiography.” Journal of American Ethnic History 28, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 67–75. Knobel, Dale T. Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1986. Kraut, Alan M. “Illness and Medical Care among Irish Immigrants in Antebellum New York City.” In The New York Irish, edited by Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher, 153–168. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Kraut, Alan M. Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace”. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Law, Anna O. “Lunatics, Idiots, Paupers, and Negro Seamen—Immigration Federalism and the Early American State.” Studies in American Political Development 28 (October 2014): 107–128. Lynch-Brennan, Margaret. The Irish Bridget: Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in America, 1840– 1930. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009. Masur, Kate. Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruc‑ tion. New York: W. W. Norton, 2021. McMahon, Cian T. The Global Dimensions of Irish Identity: Race, Nation, and the Popular Press, 1840–1880. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. McMahon, Cian T. “The Pages of Whiteness: Theory, Evidence, and the American Immigration Debate.” Race & Class 56, no. 4 (2015): 40–55. Milano, Kenneth W. The Philadelphia Nativist Riots: Irish Kensington Erupts. Charleston SC: History Press, 2013. Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Mulkern, John R. The Know-Nothing Party in Massachusetts: The Rise and Fall of a People’s Movement. ­Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1990. Neuman, Gerald L. “The Lost Century of American Immigration Law (1776–1875).” Columbia Law Review 93, no. 8 (December 1993): 1833–1901. O’Connor, Thomas H. The Boston Irish: A Political History. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1995. Page, Thomas W. “Some Economic Aspects of Immigration Before 1870: I.” Journal of Political Economy 20, no. 10 (December 1912): 1011–1028. Parker, Kunal M. Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600–2000. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Ritter, Luke. Inventing America’s First Immigration Crisis: Political Nativism in the Antebellum West. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, Revised ed. New York: Verso, 1999. Saxton, Alexander. The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti‑Chinese Movements in California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975. Schoeppner, Michael A. Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. “Scholarly Controversy: Whiteness and Historians’ Imagination.” International Labor and Working‑Class His‑ tory 60 (October 2001): 1–92. Schrag, Zachary M. The Fires of Philadelphia: Citizens‑Soldiers, Nativists, and the 1844 Riots Over the Soul of a Nation. New York: Pegasus Books, 2021. Stephenson, Kathryn. “The Quarantine War: The Burning of the New York Marine Hospital in 1858.” Public Health Reports 119, no. 1 (2004): 82–90. Tichenor, Daniel J. Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.

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11 IRISH‑AMERICAN DRAMA IN MID‑NINETEENTH‑CENTURY AMERICA Mary Trotter

Playwrights in nineteenth‑century America were both artists and businesspeople, working in tandem with actors, designers, and audiences to create an image of the world onstage that captured America’s rapidly changing politics, demographics, landscapes, and longings. As the Irish emigrant popula‑ tion grew in New York and other cities in the wake of the Famine, plays and variety acts reflecting the experience of Irish emigrants and their descendants grew extremely popular: indeed, echoes of Irish‑American character tropes created on the nineteenth‑century stage are still present in American performance culture. Two Irish‑born playwrights who made their home—at least for a while—in America, John Brougham and Dion Boucicault, were pivotal to the development of this representa‑ tion of Irish‑American experience on the popular stage, as playwrights, actors, and theater managers. Both Brougham and Boucicault gained their first exposure to theater in Ireland before working for several years on the English stage. When they arrived in the United States, Brougham (in 1842) and Boucicault (in 1853) adapted their work products to suit the needs and expectations of their American audiences. They also performed key characters onstage in their own plays, further controlling the performance and presentation of their works. As the most prominent Irish‑American writers working in the mid‑nineteenth century theater, these two playwrights thus engendered culturally-informed perspectives on performing the Irish‑American experience that managed to speak both sympathetically to the plight of Irish immi‑ grants and positively of the virtues of an Irish‑American community. They upheld the norms of con‑ temporary American society, while also creating important images of Ireland and America‑at‑large.1

Performing Irish America Onstage Since the 1990s, a wellspring of new critical and theoretical approaches to theater history have pro‑ vided insight into mid nineteenth‑century theater and its relevance to understanding how Americans understood—or tried to make sense of—a rapidly changing nation. Bruce McConachie’s study, Melo‑ dramatic Formations: Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (1992), offered new ways of thinking about the theater of this period in American theater history in political and cultural context, rather than an earlier tendency to dismiss the theater of this period as underdeveloped drama created in a theater scene stumbling to find its voice beyond mere popular entertainment. These lines were followed beautifully in the three‑volume Cambridge History of American Theatre (1998), which was edited by Don. B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby and included chapters by leading theater historians of DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-14

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the period, including Peter Davis, Mary C. Henderson, and Joseph Roach. A newer collection of es‑ says, The Oxford Handbook of American Drama, edited by Jeffrey H. Richards and Heather Nathans (2014), offers important perspectives on African‑American drama by Marvin McAllister and on the politics of antebellum drama by Scott C. Martin. Specific to Irish‑American playwriting and representation during the nineteenth century, Irish Theater in America: Essays on Irish Theatrical Diaspora (2009), edited by John P. Harrington, in‑ cludes “Popular Attitudes and Stereotypes in Irish American Drama,” a thorough and foundational discussion of the form by Maureen Murphy. More recently, Deirdre McFeely’s work (cited below) on Boucicault’s reception in both international and local markets offers vital insights into multiple American responses to Irish‑American playwrighting. And, while covering a later period than this essay, Michele Granshaw’s Irish on the Move: Performing Mobility in American Variety Theatre (2019), offers exciting models for reading Irish representation on the later nineteenth‑century stage through such lenses as political history, technology, and visual cultures. This wealth of scholarship offers important context for understanding the work of Brougham and Boucicault. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, American theater depended on the Brit‑ ish stereotype of the “Stage Irishman” to create Irish characters. By the 1830s, however, increasing numbers of Irish immigrants in major US cities influenced new interpretations of Irish Americans, in partnership with other character types, such as the plain talking “Stage Yankee” or the buffoonish “Stage Dutch.” As Heather Nathans notes, playwrights like George Pepper and Almira Selden strove through the late 1820s–1830s to create positive representations of Irish‑American culture. Likewise, Irish actor Tyrone Power’s performances in the United States during the 1830s created a space for more dignified, refined representations of Irish character.2 By the 1840s, however, growing numbers of impoverished Irish immigrants in the United States— many of whom were Catholic and from rural areas—helped establish the parameters for representing new ideas of Irish‑American ethnicity onstage. Concurrent with the development of the Irish‑American stage type was rising anti‑Catholic Irish prejudice and growing anxiety about the power immigrant communities were developing at the time, as discussed in Hidetaka Hirota’s chapter in the present vol‑ ume. Anti‑Catholic riots were common in New York during this period, and identity clashes could be seen not only in the streets but in theater audiences as well. In 1848, playwright Benjamin Baker wrote for his play A Glance at New York (1848) an Irish‑American comic figure who would become an iconic stereotype of the white, male working class: Mose, the Bowery B’hoy. Frank Chanfrau, who was not Irish, created Mose, a parody of the Irish fireman with a tall hat, red shirt, heavy sideburns, and a cigar almost perpetually clutched in his hand or gripped between his teeth. From Chanfrau’s first appearance as Mose, this character was embraced by his working‑class audiences. In A Glance at New York, Mose embodied the belligerent stance admired by many in the working class, while also being capable of selfless acts of heroism and sentimentality. Mose is always ready for a fight or a jape, yet he also weeps at the memory of saving a baby from a fire. And although he knows his place in the class hierarchy, his cleverness and amiability allow him to transgress typical boundaries of race, class, and even gender in his adventures. Mose did have a woman counterpart in Lize the Cigar Girl, another working‑class figure, but she was a less influential character in working‑class theater culture. As the number of Irish immigrants grew in major American cities, slightly more nuanced representations of Irish‑American identity developed. Both Brougham and Boucicault were at the forefront of those changes.3

John Brougham’s Popular Plays in a Populist America John Brougham was born in Dublin to a middle‑class Anglo‑Irish family. He was raised by his uncle with expectations that he would begin a career in medicine. Brougham claimed that while in college he became involved in theatricals, and the experience called him to travel to London and begin a 153

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career in theater. In 1830, he was fortunate to be befriended by Madame Vestris and Charles Mat‑ thews, and he worked with them for over a decade as an actor and a playwright. He left their theater company in 1840 to serve for two years as manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London. In 1842, Brougham traveled to the United States where, after a rocky start, he established himself as an actor and playwright. By 1844 (after divorcing his first wife and marrying an American), he had be‑ come a naturalized US citizen who nevertheless held closely to his Irish roots. Through his writing and performing, he built an audience for Irish Americans wanting a connection to their homeland. In the 1840s, Brougham recited speeches (in character) delivered by leading Irish orators of the day, such as “the Liberator” Daniel O’Connell and the temperance advocate Father Matthew. Pat Ryan has pointed out how Brougham’s impersonations of these figures, particularly in a world without sound record‑ ing, “was simultaneously gratifying his oppressed immigrant countrymen’s appetite for nationalistic oratory (but as ‘theatre’) and testing the troubled waters of American nativist reaction to the voices of embattled Ireland.” As evidence of this point of view, Ryan quotes the New York Herald, which wrote: Mr. Brougham has done more, in these entertainments, to elevate the Irish character, and to dispel the prejudice which exists against our fellow citizens of Irish birth, than all the miserable charlatanical lecturers and ‘historians’ who travel about playing upon the feelings of the Irish population, to the tune of ‘money in both pockets.’ Brougham’s work consistently negotiates methods for portraying the Irish in America that can both comfort Irish newcomers to the United States and mollify the anti‑Catholic and populist factions rag‑ ing against them throughout the 1840s and 1850s.4

Brougham’s Temptation: Or, The Irish Emigrant (1856) This desire to subdue classist, anti‑Catholic prejudice against new Irish immigrants is perhaps clear‑ est in Brougham’s play Temptation: Or, The Irish Emigrant (first performed 1849, published 1856). This two‑act comic drama ultimately offers its audience the lesson that one should be grateful for what they have, rather than surrender to the temptations brought by wealth. At the start of the play, the audience meets Granite, an evil lawyer who swindled $250,000 out of the estate of his former employer, Travers, leaving Travers’ son, Henry, and his wife, Mary, penniless. The play then takes us to Henry and Mary’s home where their landlady, Mrs. Grimgriskin, is preparing to evict them. Grimgriskin abandons her demands when Sterling, a servant of the evil Mr. Granite, declares that he bears $5,000 cash from Granite to give the young couple. Mary and Henry Travers’ joy is short‑lived, however: Sterling suddenly realizes that he has lost the money in the street. Meanwhile, in a second plot line, the working‑class Tom and Polly Bobalink are preparing their dinner when an Irish emigrant, O’Bryan (played by Brougham), appears at their doorway “to rest himself.” Polly offers him a seat: “I pity him, Thomas, though he’s only an Irishman—sit down!” O’Bryan humbly refuses: “I didn’t mane that, ma’am; a lean o’the wall and an air o’the fire, blessings to you for giving it to me.” Rather than joining Tom and Polly at the table, O’Bryan accepts a morsel of food but refuses entrance into the house: “I relish it better standing up if you plaze. God bless you!” O’Bryan’s humility moves Tom, as do O’Bryan’s remarks that he is invisible to the rich, who “carried their noses so high they couldn’t see to read the starvation in my face,” and that he “wouldn’t ax poor people, for fear they were as bad off as himself.” He also gratefully accepts the offer to search for day work with Tom. The two men seek work in the street and are hired by Mrs. Grimgriskin to carry a trunk to the Travers’ home. O’Bryan takes the load on his shoulders and tries to find the address to deliver it. In a bit of comic business, O’Brian is confused by the numbering of buildings on the street, which are ordered in the American rather than Irish fashion. As O’Bryan lumbers on, Tom finds the 154

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wallet of money that Sterling lost. After a passionate monolog in which he tries to choose between honor and greed, Tom hides the money in his shirt and takes it home with him. Tom’s guilt that even‑ ing leads him to sleeplessness, then drink, and he rushes to go to work in the morning, leaving the wallet on the table at home.5 O’Bryan arrives at the Bobalink home shortly thereafter to begin his labors and celebrates the good fortune of work, a little food, and a chance to sleep in the stable with “a Christian‑like quadru‑ ped for company.” When he and Polly discover the wallet on the table, O’Bryan refuses to touch it: “It’s [t]emptation! [b]edivilment! I was foolish enough just now, to wish I had a trifle of money and may I never see harm if that lump of a pocket book didn’t spring up afore my eyes!” But after figuring out the rightful owners of the wallet, O’Bryan and Polly rush it to the Travers’ home. Mary Travers confirms the loss, and Polly joyously hands over the wallet. Mary offers Polly half the fortune, but she adamantly refuses it. O’Bryan, likewise, won’t touch the money. Tom arrives to confess to his crime and is shocked to find that his wife and O’Bryan are present at the Travers’ home and have already returned the money. Then, Sterling arrives and announces that Granite died suddenly when he heard news of the death of his only son, so Mary and Henry are now extremely rich.6 All rejoice at the good fortune, including Mrs. Grimgriskin, who urges Henry and Mary to move into one of her more expensive apartments. Brougham takes advantage of this comic ending to offer a bit of subversion to the play, as O’Bryan replies to Mrs. Grimgriskin’s tasteless remark: …haven’t you the gumption to see that there’s one too many here? Mrs. G[rimgriskin]:  Then why don’t you go, you Irish savage[?] [O’]Bryan:  Because I’m not the one. O’Bryan’s admonition against Grimgriskin’s behavior is quickly followed by Thomas asking and receiving forgiveness from Polly for succumbing to temptation. The play ends with an epilog reiterat‑ ing the moral lessons of the play: be kind and forgiving—and content with what you have.7 Temptation overturns the assumptions about Ireland’s most recent immigrants to the United States during a period of deep‑rooted and often violent anti‑Irish Catholic sentiment. It offers a defense of the new Irish immigrants, presenting them as honest laborers who wish only for work and sustenance. Unlike Mrs. Grimgriskin, who invites herself into her tenants’ apartments, O’Bryan carefully re‑ spects both class and spatial boundaries in his first interactions with all characters. He does not accept a reward for returning the wallet to the Travers family; however, he does accept their (earned) grati‑ tude and enters their home as an invited guest. By the close of the play, O’Bryan, the Irish outsider, becomes an American insider, with the authority to correct the moral behavior of the rich landlord who has entered the space uninvited. O’Bryan is a guest in the house of the Travers after helping to save them from financial ruin. Thus, in this final moment of the play, he has just enough power to correct a “better” for transgressing class ranks. O’Bryan’s remark is funny, but in no way a threat. While this class transgression is a comic one, it does not ultimately challenge the larger American status quo, illustrating Brougham’s attempt both to rehabilitate the Irish‑American characters’ reputa‑ tion and to respect contemporary class striations in America. In correcting Mrs. Grimgriskin’s bad behavior toward the now‑wealthy Henry and Mary Travers, O’Bryan in fact confirms his knowledge of, and obedience to, the task of upholding the American class system.

Brougham’s The Game of Love (1855) While Temptation offered a comic yet sympathetic view of Irish immigration and assimilation, The Game of Love satirizes the distance between new immigrants and established Irish Americans in the mid‑nineteenth century. In this complex comedy of manners, three couples find true love under 155

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ridiculous circumstances. Within the wealthy Devereaux household, the young ingenue Alice De‑ vereaux tries to get revenge on a former beau by marrying a poor man whom she can treat like her servant, both to make her former beau jealous and to have revenge on all fickle men. Alice’s house‑ keeper, Phoebe Tangle, cons her employer’s lawyer into marrying her by pretending to be Alice’s rich aunt. Finally, Jacob, a servant in his twenties who pretends to be a child to keep his job as a page, has fallen in love with another servant who is unaware of his real age. Each of these love plots ends in marriage and true love. But on the way, Brougham weaves a fourth plot into the play: an Irishman newly in America seeking his brother, who had immigrated years before. The audience first meets the immigrant, Ted Murphy, as he wanders down the street leading to Alice Devereaux’s house, asking everyone he meets if they Happen to know one Larry Murphy, from the parish of Dunduckedy, near Mud Island—a Son of ould Murphy, the reapin’ hook maker and a brother of me own, that kem to Ameriky in the ship Shamrogue, the spring of the year Anno Dominy 1825, from Waxford? Murphy gains entrance into Devereaux’s house when he helps Paul, a well‑educated man down on his luck, carry a large box of papers into the home for the Devereaux family lawyer (and Phoebe’s future husband) Foxglove. When Murphy sees Paul nearly faint under the burden he has been paid to carry, he immediately offers to help him and refuses to share a penny of the payment Murphy received for the job, despite his own financial troubles. When they deliver the box, Alice demands one of them to take on a longer but more economically profitable task. Murphy yields to Paul. It is in this way that Paul becomes Alice’s fiancé in her plot to make her former suitor jealous. Later in the play, Jacob, the page who is now working at the home of the nouveau riche De Murfie family, meets Murphy, who asks him to carry an invitation to Foxglove, which he does. During Murphy’s meeting with Foxglove, Foxglove write him a letter of recommendation that he can take to the De Murfie household for a position. Papers are confused, however, and Murphy leaves not with a letter of reference but with an invitation to the De Murfies’ extravagant party.8 On the evening of the party, Murphy, who is illiterate since he never went to school (except “the school of necessity”), appears in his humble dress to present his papers to the butler, unaware that he instead has given him an invitation to the party. The butler assumes that he is wearing a costume, and, as he is announced to the well‑dressed crowd as “Ted Murphy” and enters the ballroom, the other guests are thrilled by what they assume is a jest. Ultimately, Murphy meets the hostess, who, when asked if she knows “one Larry Murphy, &c, &c.,” screams. Mr. DeMurfie runs to his wife’s aid, only to find his long‑lost brother. The brothers embrace, and Brougham’s script calls for a tableau of the scene—a moment in which the characters position themselves in an image that captures the meaning and emotion of a key point in the drama.9 In this tableau, Brougham makes a strong, almost subversive visual statement about stereo‑ type, classism, and the performance of assimilation and transgression. The rich guests at the party assume Ted is a member of the elite disguised as a working‑class Irishman, when in fact Larry, the well‑dressed Irish immigrant pretending to be descended from French nobility, along with his wife, is the person in disguise as “French nobleman” DeMurfie. Ted, the “true Irishman” the audience saw in the initial performance at Burton’s Theatre in 1856, was played by Brougham himself. The potential for class consciousness or critique in this moment, however, is quickly forgotten in the final act, in which Mrs. DeMurfie visits Devereaux with Ted, pretending that Ted is indeed nobility in a new suit of clothes and a wig to hide his red hair. Ted makes known his discomfort with his new clothes, and even accidentally takes off his wig when he removes his hat, to Mrs. DeMurfie’s exasperation. In other words, Brougham’s comedies bring up social issues but

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stop short of really challenging the status quo. In his recollections of Brougham’s work, theater critic William Winter described Brougham’s comedies in this way: His thoughts, and often his talk, dwelt upon the great disparity of conditions in society, the struggles and sufferings of the poor, and the relation of evil to the infirmities of human nature. …In his writing as in his acting the characteristic quality was a sort of off‑hand dash and glit‑ tering merriment, a comingling bluff, breezy humor with winning manliness. The atmosphere of his works was always that of sincerity, but it never had the insipidity of strenuous goodness. Brougham’s plays point out injustice and indifference, but they ask for audiences to respond with individual goodness rather than systemic change.10

Boucicault’s Irish and Irish‑American Spectacles As mentioned above, Dion Boucicault was born and raised in Ireland but moved to London in his twenties to start a career on the stage as an actor, playwright and, later, a theater manager. He was also ambitious to the point of being considered a scoundrel by many. He freely borrowed plots and ideas from other playwrights and was an aggressive player in the competitive business of theater. Critic William Winter noted that John Brougham once said of him, “to play the second old man, he would scalp his grandfather for the wig.” A main reason for his move to America was his elopement in his early thirties with the teenaged Scottish actress, Agnes Robertson. But his work was also revo‑ lutionary to the business. Along with being a master of the popular melodramatic plot, Boucicault was particularly adept at including bold, technically complex special effects in his plays, known as “sensation scenes.” These spectacular visual moments at emotional high points in his plays stirred the feelings of the audience while also providing them a visual thrill and an opportunity to marvel at the technology of the stage. For example, in one of the last plays Boucicault produced before moving to the United States, The Corsican Brothers (1852), a unique style of stage trap was popularized to create the appearance of a ghost rising out of the ground while moving diagonally across the stage.11 Boucicault’s popularity stemmed largely from his bold moves not only toward technology, but also toward a more energetic writing style and plots that addressed contemporary concerns, from slavery to financial panics to Irish nationalism. In his autobiography, Boucicault described his vision for the stage in the 1850s in this way (and in the third person): Boucicault had used these three years [working in the United States] in study of the American people, their tastes, and the direction of their intellectual appetites. The poetic and romantic drama had no longer its old charm; the actual, the contemporaneous, the photographic had replaced the works of the imagination. It was in turning over The Illustrated Journal that the idea struck him that the stage might be employed in a similar manner to embody and illustrate the moving events of the period. Thus, it is not surprising that some of the first plays he wrote in the US used tropes already proven to sell tickets, particularly plays that offered audiences scenery displaying lifelike representations of local landmarks, making a spectacle of the audience’s own city on stage.12 Despite the move to a more modern visual and structural sensibility in his plays, his works through the mid‑nineteenth century continued to focus on individual acts of goodness over systemic change. Boucicault’s plays masterfully create relationships across classes that flourish due to what can be interpreted in the world of the play as an inherent goodness among many characters across societal

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boundaries, as well as a tacit acceptance by characters of their respective societal positions as both natural and reasonable. For example, his melodrama about slavery in the United States, The Octo‑ roon; or, Life in Louisiana (1859), was widely praised for its exposure of practices of slavery in the heated years before the Civil War. But at the same time, it was appreciated by audiences who sup‑ ported slavery as well as by abolitionists, with each group finding in the selfless acts of characters a justification for their point of view. While this phenomenon may be more a statement of the deep ideological divide between abolitionists and supporters of slavery in the United States at the brink of the Civil War, it also reveals the limitations of spectacular melodrama designed for commercial profit as a vehicle for social change. Like Brougham, Boucicault both innovated and adhered to the cultural expectations of the time.

The Poor of New York (1857) Boucicault’s first, and perhaps most influential, play to be both written and set in the United States was The Poor of New York, “inspired” by Edouard‑Louis‑Alexandre Brisbarre and Eugene Nus’ Les Pauvres du Paris. Brisbarre and Nus’ play describes the impact of economic crisis on the people of the city. Boucicault shifted the action to New York and the present day so that the play coordinated with the financial panic of 1857 which was then plaguing the US. Its characters show a broad range of New York life, from the wealthy, dishonest banker Bloodgood; to the upper‑class Fairweather fam‑ ily, victims of Bloodgood’s financial dealings who struggle to survive the economic downturn; to the Puffy family, a working‑class Irish‑American family who do all they can to support the Truebloods during their time of crisis. The Poor of New York creates a world in which evil bankers are villains, the middle and upper classes affected by bank mismanagement are victims, and the working class happily bear the moral and physical work of maintaining and restoring the status quo. The male lead in the play, Mark Liv‑ ingstone, is a young man of the upper classes ruined by the market crash, who bemoans the “invis‑ ible” effect on poverty among the class expected to keep up the appearance of solvency: The poor man is the clerk with a family, forced to maintain a decent suit of clothes, paid for out of the hunger of his children… The lawyer who, craving for employment, buttons up his thin paletot to hide his shirtless breast. These needy wretches are poorer than the poor, for they are obliged to conceal their poverty with the false mask of content. These are the most miserable of the poor of New York. With these lines, Boucicault mollifies the middle‑class and wealthy patrons in the theater who may be hiding their significant losses in the financial downturn to protect their reputation. But he goes so far as to say that the stress of the professional class pretending not to have financial troubles is more difficult than that of people from lower classes who are able to beg for money; Livingstone argues these are ultimately better off financially, since they will accept charity.13 The opinion that the upper classes need special attention in an economic downturn appears to be shared by the working class, Irish‑American Puffy family: a baker, his wife, and their two chil‑ dren. When Mr. Puffy meets Livingston on the street, he shares his own tale of economic woe with humor, comparing the rise and fall of his income with the quality of the neighborhoods in which he has been forced to move. When asked if he is “poor now,” he replies, “Yes sir; I ain’t ashamed to own it—for I hurt nobody but myself.” In fact, he is sacrificing his own comfort to care for the Fairweather family—upper‑class lodgers affected by the panic who Puffy describes as “poor as mice, but proud, sir—they was grand folks once; you can see that by the way they try to hide it.” Mr. Puffy,

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like Irish‑American characters Murphy and O’Bryan in Brougham’s plays, shows a sense of both personal honor and a respect for established class boundaries, regardless of current circumstances. At one point in the play, the Fairweathers and Livingstone sit down to a meal, which is served them by the Puffy family, who refuse to sit at table with their social betters, despite paying for and providing most of the food at the meal. As in Brougham’s work, the Irish‑American characters are likeable—but they know their place.14 The Poor of New York’s display of Irish‑Americans’ virtuous contributions as members of New York’s complex societal tapestry is shown most spectacularly in the drama’s sensation scene in Act IV, when audiences could thrill at the awesome spectacle of an apartment building catching fire on stage, while Dan Puffy, the young Irish‑American fireman, fights to rescue a man trapped inside and put out the flames. The audience sees Dan leap fearlessly into the building, then “leap out again black and burned, stagger[ing] forward and seem[ing] overcome by the heat and smoke.” He recovers him‑ self, saves the man trapped inside and in a final tableau, kneels over the victim while “extinguish[ing] the fire that clings to parts of his clothes.” Like Chanfrau’s Mose, Dan is a strong and fearless protec‑ tor of both the people and property of the city.15 At the end of the play, as Livingstone’s and the Fairweathers’ fortunes are restored, the restored upper‑class characters invite the Puffys to join them in a mansion on Madison Square (a far different habilitation than the Puffys’ tenement). The Puffys refuse to enter the drawing room because they “are afraid of walking on the carpets.” This is particularly ironic considering Dan Puffy’s heroic leap‑ ing into a burning building in the previous act. When they are finally cajoled in, Mr. Puffy expresses anxiety that he hadn’t wiped his shoes. Livingstone replies, “Come in—these carpets have never been trodden by more honest feet, these mirrors have never reflected kinder faces—come in—breathe the air here—you will purify it.” Ultimately, The Poor of New York celebrates both upper‑class and working‑class New Yorkers for maintaining a societal status quo with significantly different personal rewards. Livingstone’s comments praise the “purity” of the working class Puffys, but the action of al‑ lowing them into the drawing room as guests is a very limited undermining of the societal status quo. In fact, the Puffys’ kindness and purity, as judged by Livingstone, stems from respect for a system in which they are expected to thrive within their own caste, without trespassing the establishment’s societal boundaries; or, at least, not without their permission.16

The Colleen Bawn (1860) Boucicault reached out to his Irish‑American audiences again in his 1860 production, The Colleen Bawn. Although it was certainly not his first play on an Irish theme, it was ultimately his most popular and, as John Harrington argues, it was “fundamental to the representation of Ireland on the American stage.” Boucicault claimed that the play was written quickly on a wave of inspiration from Gerald Griffin’s novel, The Collegians. He wrote theater manager/actor Laura Keene, I have it! I send you seven steel engravings of Killarney. Get your scene painter to work on them at once. I also send a book of Irish melodies, with those marked I desire Baker to score for the orchestra. I shall read act one of my new Irish play on Friday… Just as the imagery of New York attracted audiences to see The Poor of New York, Boucicault was likely aware that images of the natural beauty of Ireland would inspire nostalgia or pride for Irish Americans in his audience. It also starred his wife, Agnes Robertson, and Laura Keene as the two beautiful ingenues from opposite ends of the social spectrum. Boucicault played the comic Irishman with a heart of gold, Myles na Copaleen, whose sacrifice and heroism saves the day.17

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The Colleen Bawn takes place on an Irish estate which has almost gone bankrupt due to the bad dealings of the agent middleman, Corrigan, who plots to take over the deed of the property and per‑ haps to marry the widowed owner, Mrs. Cregan. To get the estate out of debt, Mrs. Cregan expects her son, Hardress, to marry his cousin, the rich Anglo‑Irish beauty, Anne Chute. This plan is compli‑ cated by two issues: Chute is in love with Hardress’ best friend, Kyrle, and Hardress is secretly mar‑ ried to a peasant girl, Eily O’Connor, or “the Colleen Bawn.” A poor local man, Myles na Copaleen (played by Boucicault), is also in love with Eily, but since he knows of her marriage, he adores her from afar. In the sensation scene of this play, Danny Mann, Hardress’ devoted servant who knows of Eily and Hardress’ secret marriage, tries to kill Eily by drowning her in a lake. Myles, happening on the scene, shoots Danny, then dives off a cliff into the lake and saves Eily. As Eily goes into hiding, Hardress, thinking Eily is dead, agrees to marry Anne. On the day of Hardress and Anne’s wed‑ ding, however, all is set to rights as the truths are revealed: Corrigan’s plot to take over the estate is foiled, Eily emerges from hiding, Eily and Hardress’ secret marriage becomes public and is blessed by Hardress’ mother, Anne marries her beloved Kyrle instead of Hardress, and the estate is saved. As Deirdre McFeely, Christopher Morash, and others have pointed out, The Colleen Bawn was embraced not just in New York, but also internationally, in no small part because of its presentation of Irish experience from an Irish point of view. The social divide between the Anglo‑Irish and native Irish persons is mended by Hardress and Eily’s intermarriage and reflected in the acceptance and even celebration of one of the most common performative markers of class difference in Ireland, the “brogue” accent. Early in the play, when Hardress is torn by his love from Eily and his need to save the family estate, he angrily derogates Eily’s local accent. But a similar accent emerges in a later scene from the Anglo‑Irish gentlewoman Anne Chute when learning of Hardress’ impecunity. Anne’s cultured Anglo‑Irish accent falls away as she exclaims, “Does he think I wouldn’t sell the last rood of land—the gown off my back, and the hair off my head before [Hardress]…should come to a hap ‘orth of harrum?” When her linguistic shift is pointed out to her, Anne responds that when she is upset, “the brogue comes out, and my Irish heart will bust through manners, and graces and twenty stay‑laces.” Indeed, Anne ultimately becomes a great supporter of Eily, whom she embraces as a sister. At the end of the play, when Eily pronounces “speak” in dialect as “spake,” then quickly corrects herself (after all, her husband admonished her for that dialectal pronunciation in a previous scene), Anne insists, “Spake is the right sound.” The adaptation among the family of the local ver‑ nacular symbolizes a bond across class and ethnicity, thus representing for its audiences an Ireland with its own community and a shared culture. McFeely notes that for New York audiences particu‑ larly, the beautiful Irish scenery employed in the production, and the heroic and generous acts of its comic and romantic characters, created an image of Ireland that “contrasted greatly with that as represented by the great influx of destitute Irish immigrants and undoubtedly offered escape from the social reality of immigration.” A perspective of Ireland in the American imagination as a site of beauty and a source of pride was manifested onstage. Indeed, Boucicault’s The Colleen Bawn, and his Irish plays that followed, shaped the way Ireland would be imagined onstage throughout the rest of the nineteenth century.18

Conclusion As actors, playwrights, and managers working in mid nineteenth‑century America, Brougham’s and Boucicault’s prodigious turnout of plays and productions regarding American, Irish‑American, and Irish life was fundamental to the American theater’s fashioning of its relationship with Irish America, Ireland, and the world. Brougham’s comic approach to Irish‑American life in working‑class New York continued in the work of Ed Harrigan with his partner Tony Hart in shows like The Mulligan

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Guard. Those plays would, in turn, influence George M. Cohan’s productions at the start of the twentieth century. Cohan’s hit song, “Harrigan” (1908), was inspired by Ned Harrigan’s career. But by the 1890s, Irish‑American playwrights like James A. Herne turned to modernist playwriting mod‑ els, in particular realism, as the nineteenth‑century melodramatic traditions continued in popular theater and film. One of the most interesting records of that bridge between Boucicault and the twentieth‑century theater is the work of Irish‑American actor James O’Neill, who made his debut in Boucicault’s play The Colleen Bawn in a Cincinnati production in 1870. After less than a decade on stage, he became famous for his performance in an adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, which he played for financial gain but limited artistic satisfaction for decades to follow. His son, Eugene, would go on to write plays that helped shape the twentieth century stage, including dramas directly related to Irish‑ American life. Eugene wrote about his father’s experience in show business in a play loosely based on his father and their family life: A Long Day’s Journey into Night. Brougham and Boucicault’s influence stretched well into the next century. In the politically fraught landscape of mid‑nineteenth‑century American history, theater was a vital space for escape, education, inspiration, and even identity formation among diverse audiences. Brougham, Boucicault, and other Irish‑American writers and actors created a space for audiences to negotiate their role in a rapidly changing society. Since the plays were written to make money more than change, they rarely rocked the boat of middle‑class ideals of social caste. They did, however, present Irish Americans not as riotous, dangerous, or unintelligent (common prejudices of the period, rooted in the outcomes of Know-Nothing riots or the gangs of New York) but rather as industrious and generous allies to the American middle and upper classes, participating in—but not dominating— the social status quo. Even today, America’s popular image of Ireland, and of Irish America generally, remains deeply shaped by Brougham and Boucicault’s commercial theater spectacles.

Notes 1 The nineteenth‑century popular stage, like the mainstream culture from which it emerged, was also an inher‑ ently racist and sexist space that included blackface minstrelsy and other kinds of objectifying performance traditions. It relied strongly on class, ethnic, and gender stereotypes, particularly in comedy. This, too, mani‑ fests at times in these authors’ works. For instance, when John Brougham produced a theatrical adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti‑slavery play Dred, he cast T. D. Rice, the creator of the Jump Jim Crow minstrel caricature, in a major role as a slave. 2 Nathans, “Ethnic Identity,” 105–106. 3 Nathans, “Ethnic Identity,” 110. 4 Ryan, “The Hibernian Experience,” 37; The New York Times is also quoted on Ryan, 37. 5 Brougham, Temptation, 7. 6 Brougham, Temptation, 17–18. 7 Brougham, Temptation, 18, 22. 8 Brougham, Game of Love, 12. 9 Brougham, Game of Love, 29, 41. 10 Winter, quoted in Kippola, Acts, 180. 11 Winter, Other Days, 110–111. 12 Boucicault, quoted in Harrington, The Irish Play, 14–15. For a detailed account of the popularity of showing scenes from the city on the New York stage during this era, see Daly. 13 Boucicault, The Poor of New York, 260–261. 14 Boucicault, The Poor of New York, 257. 15 “The Poor of New York,” New York Times, December 10, 1857; Boucicault, The Poor of New York, 292–293. 16 Boucicault, The Poor of New York, 296. 17 Harrington, The Irish Play, 7. Boucicault is quoted in Morash, A History, 57. 18 Boucicault, The Colleen Bawn, 166; McFeely, Dion Boucicault, 16.

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Bibliography Primary Sources Boucicault, Dion. The Colleen Bawn, or the Brides of Garryowen. In Sensation Drama: 1860–1880: An Anthol‑ ogy, edited by Beth Palmer and Joanna Hofer‑Robinson, 88–167. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Boucicault, Dion. “The Poor of New York.” In Staging the Nation: Plays from the American Theater 1787–1909, edited by Don B. Wilmeth, 247–298. Boston, MA: Bedford Press, 1998. Brougham, John. Temptation: Or, The Irish Emigrant. A Comic Drama in Two Acts. New York: Samuel French, 1856. Brougham, John. The Game of Love. An Original Comedy, in Five Acts. New York: Samuel French, 1855.

Secondary Sources Daly, Nick. “Inventing the American City: Dion Boucicault, John Brougham, and Transatlantic Urban Melo‑ drama.” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 49, no. 2 (2022): 108–125. Harrington, John. The Irish Play on the New York Stage, 1874–1966. Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 2014. Kippola, Karl M. Acts of Manhood: The Performance of Masculinity on the American Stage, 1828–1865. Lon‑ don: Palgrave, 2012. McFeely, Deirdre. Dion Boucicault: Irish Identity on Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Morash, Christopher. A History of Irish Theatre 1601–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Nathans, Heather. “Ethnic Identity on the Antebellum Stage, 1825–1861.” In The Oxford Handbook of American Drama, edited by Jeffrey H. Richards and Heather S. Nathans, 97–110. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Ryan, Pat M. “The Hibernian Experience: John Brougham’s Irish‑American Plays.” MELUS 10, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 33–47. Whitehead, Gavin. “The Ghost in the Machine: The Corsican Trap and the Spirit of Industrial Capitalism.” Per‑ formance Research 26: 1‑2 (2021): 145‑155. Winter, William. Other Days: Being Chronicles and Memories of the Stage. New York: Moffat, Yard and Com‑ pany, 1908.

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12 FOLKLORE IN IRISH AMERICA E. Moore Quinn and Cara Delay

From the colonial era to the twenty-first century, Irish women and men traveled to “an oilean úr”— the New World—with vast amounts of folklore. Some of it was lost in the passage, but a significant corpus survived, evolving and adapting across the Atlantic. The folklore of Irish America thus offers a rich and varied palette, ranging from songs and stories of early travelers from Ireland to parades and music encountered by recent immigrants. In addition to unique expressions and bon mots, one finds material culture and foodways, prayers and proverbs, toasts, and curses. Folklore also reveals how the stereotyping and discrimination expressed against immigrants (and, indeed, against the Irish at home) remained in collective memory alongside the more innocuous or even celebratory facets of Irish-American culture and history. The lore sheds light on how and why Irish-American immigrants and their descendants remembered—or forgot—events such as the Great Famine. Both the remem‑ bering and the forgetting testify to the fact that silence and denials tell us much: they can divulge how symbols and culture can be used to express ethnic identities that at times appear exclusionary and even racist. Folklore, according to Juwen Zhang, “is no longer just about ‘the survived’ or ‘the disappearing,’ but also about what happens in the process of transmitting and transforming.” This chapter explores some of the primary genres and themes of Irish-American folklore by exploring processes of trans‑ mitting and transforming. We borrow our definition of folklore from Emily Hilliard’s expansive and inclusive explanation: it’s the art of everyday life—creative practices we learn by living our lives, passed informally from person-to-person rather than through formal training…. Folklore is all of the ways a group expresses itself creatively, manifesting in foodways, dance, music, language, stories, jokes, memes, dress, craft, and material culture….[it is] the many forms of creativity or ‘ex‑ pressive culture’ that are pervasive in our daily lives, shared between people, and rooted in community and/or place.1 With Hilliard’s rubric as our lens, we investigate and pay particular attention to customary sayings and practices that emerged from the Irish in New England, but lore, stories, and cultural items from other regions to which the Irish migrated—i.e. the American South, West, and Mid-Atlantic—are also considered, as is Irish-American folklore’s overlap with the expressions, behaviors, and experiences of other ethnic groups. Placing folklore within its historical contexts, we explore politics, gender 163

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-15

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norms, sociability, and culture. As much as feasible, this chapter synthesizes the existing scholarship and discusses some methods and approaches to studying immigrant folklore. Immigrants and their descendants, the chapter demonstrates, utilized folklore to preserve cultural values and transmit them to future generations, to express discrimination and give voice to historical grievances, and to con‑ struct themselves as patriotic and loyal Americans. Although Irish migrants to North America during the American colonial period were far fewer than their later nineteenth-century countrymen and women, these earlier immigrants had “major—in some areas predominant—roles in the political tumults, economic developments, social conflicts, and religious revivals that created and shaped the new American nation.” As we have seen in earlier chap‑ ters in this collection, before the nineteenth century, most Irish people who arrived in North America were Scotch Irish and Presbyterian. They settled not in the growing urban centers of the North, but rather in the rural areas of New England as well as Appalachia, Pennsylvania, and the South. With them migrated rich folkloric traditions like “songs and dances, … lilts and reels, … myths and leg‑ ends, riddles and kissing games, weather wisdom and proverbs, … witches and charms...”2 The toasting genre, which developed at St. Patrick’s Day banquets, is a prime example. Descrip‑ tions of eighteenth-century St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, including toasts, were published in news‑ papers at the time. Rather than featuring the parades of later decades, these celebrations usually consisted of banquets attended by Scotch Irishmen who, although not Catholic, still faced anti-Irish and anti-immigrant sentiments and responded by attempting to “create a distinct brand of ethnic identity” founded on Irishness and Protestantism, traits that would prove their adaptability in an American context. Drawing on the ubiquity and popularity of the verbal toast in British and Irish tradition, eighteenth-century Irish-American men utilized it during banquets and, in due course, other occasions. Most toasts began with a declaration of loyalty to king and country and then moved to other “masculine” topics: politics, business, and women: “[To] Ladies: with Assiduity we court their smiles; with sorrow we receive their frowns; but smiling or frowning we love them.” These verbal expressions endeavored to create masculine camaraderie and solidify men’s relationships with each other—necessary tasks for the eighteenth-century immigrant. The toast and the banquet “served as a discursive site for the creation and articulation of Irish cultural identity in America before 1845,” which also expressed commitment to British and American colonial cultural practices and thus gave voice to shifting national identities.3 Irish-American identity, as folklore and folk culture revealed, was persistently masculinist and increasingly nationalist as the eighteenth century progressed and the new century began. The late eighteenth century—a “heady, hopeful time of revolutionary possibility and favourable circum‑ stances”—motivated Irish-American men’s participation in politics. Some Irish immigrants and their children fought against Great Britain in the American Revolution; after the failed rebellion of 1798 in Ireland, emigrants to the United States brought with them increased nationalist fervor. Immigrants to the US at this time—some of them exiled after 1798—“founded Hibernian societies throughout America, embraced the symbols of the United Irishmen—the harp, the color green, and so on—and gave shape to the first consciously Irish-American communities” as well as to a popular political ma‑ terial culture that would inform not only Irish immigrant culture but also American politics.4 By the early decades of the nineteenth century, the imprint of the eighteenth-century Irish was conveyed in terms of lore, legends, songs, and stories. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, Scotch-Irish Protestant heritage would become overshadowed by a vibrant Catholic IrishAmerican culture. The 1820s began a series of migrations that ultimately would bring five million Irish women and men to the United States by the end of the twentieth century, as we have seen in this section. A very different kind of Irish immigrant—mostly Catholic, rural, and poor—left Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century, mainly as a result of the Great Famine, referred to by the people as An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger), or more simply, An Drochshaol (literally, the Bad Life, but generally 164

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meaning the hard or bad times). Ironically, as Peter Gilmore discusses in an earlier chapter in this volume, it was only then that earlier immigrants began to distinguish themselves as “Scotch Irish” or “Scots Irish,” contrasting themselves with the mostly Catholic newcomers crowding into the ports of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.5 By the late nineteenth century, chain migration created thriving Irish-American communities in the United States; in them, immigrants and their descendants created and contributed to institutions— political, religious, educational—like never before. While most immigrants settled in urban commu‑ nities in the Northeast, as the decades unfolded, the earlier cohort, or “the people with no name,” as Patrick Griffin calls them, had moved down the Great Wagon Road and into the western territories of North America, content to identify not with the hyphenated label “Irish American” but with the more inclusive word “American.” The latter was believed to validate them for their contributory presence in North America­— their industriousness, patriotism, and most of all, their adaptability.6

Work and Urban Life In the nineteenth-century American West, Irish Americans sought fortune and land; there, notions of independence and industriousness abounded even as Irish miners and other Catholic migrants faced nativist prejudice in a largely Protestant environment, as Hidetaka Hirota explores in an earlier chap‑ ter. Although Kerby A. Miller has argued that the folk hero so integral to Irish lore “may have been supplanted by that of the ‘exile’ or the ‘immigrant’,” Marguerite Quintelli-Neary finds commonalities between “elements of traditional Irish folklore,” such as the Fionn MacCumhaill tale and heroic or anti-heroic western folk tales and figures that included Billy the Kid and Calamity Jane. Irish-­American miners, meanwhile, combatted nativist opposition by maintaining their commitment to Catholicism and creating new Catholic institutions in the West; they preserved singing and reciting traditions such as ballads. One of them expressed the realities of industrial work for Irish-American men: They’ll soon take you down Where you can’t see the light of day, And give you a shovel or a car Or a hammer or a blunt little axe; The machine will be up top Working by air power, Your eyes will be blinded by dust At the break of day.7 Alongside those toiling in the mines of the West were the industrial immigrant workers and domes‑ tic servants of Northern American metropolises. Irish immigrants to the United States increasingly concentrated in the urban areas of the northeast by the late nineteenth century. “For most secondgeneration Irish Americans,” writes Timothy Meagher, “city streets, tenements, factories or mine shafts, corner saloons, and vaudeville houses—not fields, streams, and whitewashed cottages—were home.” Chain migration and endogamy aided in the creation of community in cities such as Boston, Chicago, and New York. Moreover, commitments to values and to the notion of place were brought across the Atlantic—both expressed in folklore. In New England, Irish “landscape narratives” and place-names helped immigrants and their descendants preserve a sense of identity. An Irish immi‑ grant part of Manchester, New Hampshire, was known as “The Fields”; in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, the Irish quarter was called “The Patch,” and sections of other towns and cities were known as “The Acre.” In Springfield, Massachusetts, the section of the city known as “Hungry Hill” had been set‑ tled, tellingly, by Famine-era emigrants from the Great Blasket Island. These examples testify to the 165

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work that folklore did in preserving and establishing links between Irishness and place in the United States. Collectively, they reveal how, just as “every stoney acre” had a name in Ireland, so, too, in Irish America: dinnsheanchas, or place-name lore, served as a mnemonic that reminded those who dwelled within those places of who they were and where they came from.8 Urban neighborhoods in the United States were mapped by a geography or topography of Irish‑ ness: pubs or taverns, corner stores, schools, and churches. One New England descendant of Irish immigrants remembered “the people standing at the door of the church at 12:15 Mass retiring quickly to ‘Finnerty’s’ bar when it was over.” Households and neighborhoods preserved celebratory aspects of Irish culture such as music and dance. One woman recalled of her immigrant relatives: My mother and aunt both spoke often of the dancing in kitchens in the 1890s in Worcester [Massachusetts]. Saturdays, they would get a pail of beer from Pat Mullins’s Saloon. A Poker used to stoke the fire in the kitchen was heated and then put in the beer to mull it. The music was supplied by Johnnie Kane, the blind fiddler. This storyteller’s use of specific places, people, and material items grounded her family’s and com‑ munity’s identity in Irish-American rituals and practices.9 Nineteenth-century migrants from Ireland, writes Hasia Diner, Built social institutions and fashioned ethnic practices which met their Irish and American needs, creating a powerful communal network and eloquent expressive culture. Wherever they settled in America, they used music, dance, theater, poetry, politics, athletics, and storytelling to explore and perform identity. Home practices included foodways; neighborhood behaviors included games. If there was work, there was also leisure, especially as it related to ritual events throughout the year. Calendar customs, which marked the yearly cycle of life in Ireland, particularly in rural areas, increasingly made their way across the Atlantic in the nineteenth century. Halloween, based on Samhain, the beginning of the Celtic new year, became an American tradition because of post-Famine Irish immigrants. Sam‑ hain traditions brought to New England include not only the jack-o-lantern but also the following, recounted by a woman whose parents hailed from County Kerry: In November we devote the whole month in prayers for our dead and for the dead who have no one to pray for them. The graves are cleaned and candles are lit. We light a lot of candles, as for each candle we light a holy soul is supposed to go to heaven. Perhaps the most popular Irish calendar custom even today, St. Patrick’s Day, evolved in the United States as much as in Ireland. A holy day in Ireland, St. Patrick’s Day became, in the Irish-American urban centers of New York and Boston, a day of celebration and merriment characterized by parades.10

Irish-American Proverbs and Advice One of the most significant aspects of the nineteenth-century Irish folkloric record was its proverbial lore. It is not always easy to determine origins, and this is as true for proverbs as it is for folklore in general. Like the toast, the proverb is a formulaic genre, “a terse and witty philosophical saying that conveys a lesson.” However, unlike the toast, the proverb operates with more flexibility, not only in terms of its context but also in terms of its subject matter. F. N. Robinson notes its capacity to borrow freely across international lines as well as the difficulty in determining its origins.11 166

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Some Irish-American proverbs offered general advice. E. Moore Quinn collected the following from interviews conducted in New England in the early 2000s: “Make a virtue of necessity”; “What‑ ever is worth doing is worth doing well”; “Some of our worst fears never materialize”; and “Lose an hour in the morning, spend the rest of the day looking for it.” Other proverbs in Irish America fall into numerous categories reflective of the topics that the folk deemed important. Insights like “He’d skin the hair of a louse for its hide” and “The truth from the liar is not to be believed” reiterated themes that indexed immigrants’ keen awareness of human character formed in close-knit rural communities. Additional expressions that fall into this category include “Street angel, house devil” and “She’s her own worst enemy.” With bon mots like these, the Irish reiterated old-world group morals and values in a new world. Utterances such as “God helps those who help themselves” stressed self-sufficiency; at the same time, they drew attention to the group’s faith in the supernatural, which was expressed with reminders that “God’s help is nearer than the door” and “God never closed one door but that he opened another.” These proverbs constructed an Irish-American collective memory, identified as “knowledge of the past based on a shared cultural stock of knowledge socially transmitted in lessons, rituals, traditions, proverbs, and other forms.”12 Cognizant of the need to educate and caution one another, Irish immigrants offered advice meant to cultivate essential traits like proper speech, found in expressions like “Least said, easiest mended” and “Fast recovery from sharp wounds, slow recovery from sharp words.” It should be noted that many proverbs collected in Irish America have their equivalents in the Irish language; “Easier said than done’ (Is fusa rud a rá na a dhéanamh) and “commendations of silence”: “Don’t let your tongue cut your throat” (Is minic a ghearr teanga duine a scornach); “The silent mouth is sweet” (Binn béal ina thost). These and many more are found in Quinn’s collection on Irish-American folklore in New England; their survival into Irish-American life emphasizes the importance of spoken words delivered in pithy form, especially in hierarchical structural contexts.13 In Irish-American proverbial lore, as in Irish-American immigrant communities, virtues like fru‑ gality and responsibility were encouraged: “Let your bargain suit your purse”; “One good turn de‑ serves another.” Likewise, favorable values were placed on patience: “Apples grow again”; “One by one the castles are built”; “It’s a long road that has no turning.” People were encouraged to exercise generosity: “An open hand rarely meets a closed fist”; “Charity begins at home.” These sayings and proverbs collected in Irish America gave voice to the realities of nineteenth-century rural Irish poverty, scarcity, and hunger, all of which required mindful generosity and hospitality; in fact, “to be hospitable was ‘an obligatory and integral part of social life in rural Ireland.’” That most Irish Americans lived in an urban world only made such proverbs more essential; these verbal expressions served to remind immigrants of their origins and assert a communal worldview in an often-chaotic city environment.14 The caution against “airing dirty laundry on the line” strengthened the belief that personal troubles should not be shared beyond the confines of the family. Irish-American priorities included clinging to “good names” in the belief that, should favorable reputations be tarnished or compromised, the families themselves would be considered “worthless.” For this and other reasons, children were cau‑ tioned not to “play the Paddy” (act foolishly) when in public realms, an admonition that served as a face-saving device that protected the clan against reproach.15 Many of these sayings were told by immigrant mothers who took on the responsibility of educat‑ ing children about religion, ethnic identity, values, and heritage—a form of domestic labor that Judith Ridner explores in her chapter in this volume. Notable is the fact that folkloric practices of women immigrants remain understudied, because the lack of written sources on and by women, combined with perceptions of Irish folklore and storytelling as male pursuits, created a silence about women. By the late nineteenth century, however, change was afoot; in the United States, the Irish tradition of the male storyteller increasingly “deteriorated.” In immigrant communities, women emerged as ­keepers of knowledge and tradition, including folklore and storytelling. The proverb “God is great 167

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and he has a good mother,” for example, is not surprising when one realizes that the formidable Irish mother served as the vanguard of proverbial lore in Irish America; repeatedly, she deployed idiomatic exhortations and admonishments having to do with appropriate behavior. Her candor and assertive voice were evident, as exemplified by sayings like “Your friends won’t tell you but your mother will.”16 A collective sense of mothering prevailed in Irish America; generally, mothers were of one mind when it came to disciplining children—their own as well as their neighbors’. Making good use of invectives to master situations within which they found themselves, they uttered threats that began with the formulaic “I will ….” A child might hear, for instance, “I’ll skin you alive”; “I’ll give you a good tweak on your ear”; or “I’ll knock you into the middle of next week!” These expressions were not unlike those of the Irish women keeners or traditional lamenters who used their outcries to over‑ come circumstances rather than capitulate to them. As with the admonition not to “Play the Paddy,” the result was the development of children’s proper “face” in interactions both public and private and to sustain communal, cultural values thereby.17

Lifecycle Beliefs and Practices Like those before them—and with immigrants in general—Irish newcomers to the United States throughout the nineteenth century brought an abundance of beliefs and folk practices that extended from cradle to grave, marking the lifecycle. As in many cultures, rituals of birth, marriage, and death— rites of passage recognized as unsettled or dangerous periods when successful outcomes are not guaranteed—were practiced in Irish America. Traditional patterns were preserved via words, deeds, prescriptions, and prohibitions. Pregnancy, for example—considered to be a time of v­ ulnerability— warranted proverbs and cautionary tales. The mother-to-be was encouraged to be patient, a virtue reinforced by the maxim, “When time comes, baby comes.” In Ireland, this expression appears as “The cow won’t have the calf ‘til she’s ready.” Cautioned to avoid rocking an empty cradle or setting up the baby’s crib before the birth, women “in the family way” were told to avoid courting disaster by shunning cemeteries to ensure that their infants would not be born with a “club foot” (Irish: cam reilige). Were the mother to miscarry or the infant to die at birth, gifts intended for mother and child would be given away to ensure that the next pregnancy would be successful.18 One phenomenon held in high esteem was the baby “born with the caul” (Irish: an caipín tsonais (the little cap or “capeen” of happiness); an brat linbh (the child’s cloak). In a caul birth, a new‑ born emerges with a membrane surrounding its head (and in some cases its entire body). Due to its rarity—­the phenomenon occurs in only one of every 80,000 births—the caul was valued in the past for its talismanic properties. Irish Americans believed that those born in such a manner would, at the very least, possess an inordinate amount of good luck. Such faith gave voice to the unpredictability of pregnancy and birth and furthered a traditional Irish association between misfortune, luck, and lifecycle. In effect, luck was life in Irish America, and just as it had operated in Ireland, luck was determined by circumstances observed and heeded in the natural world. In effect, attempts were made to control the uncontrollable through practices on the one hand and expressions of belief on the other. In these instances, folklore served as vernacular religion.19 In Irish-American culture, birth also was significant because it symbolized the growth of a new generation in a new land even as the rituals surrounding it expressed a commitment to heritage and inheritance. Although onlookers could make a wish when they held a newborn for the first time, there existed a taboo against praising an infant’s beauty; in fact, an Irish and Irish-American popular belief decreed that the fairies preferred beautiful children, boys in particular. Talk of comeliness was thought to prompt the fairies to steal children and leave a substitute, a “changeling,” in its place. In Irish tradition, fairies were supernatural creatures cast out of heaven who came to inhabit the earth, water, and air and who often proved meddlesome to humans. Within oral tradition, changelings stole 168

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new mothers and infants, leaving supernatural imposters in their places. Such beliefs regulated wom‑ en’s behavior and allowed people to express the very real dangers of pregnancy and birth. Fairy leg‑ ends, told to children and thus retained across generations, served to educate and inform. Immigrants in heavily Irish-American areas such as Appalachia and New England preserved narratives about fairies; a folklore journal from 1894 told of “superstitions” such as “ghosts, fairies, and pixies” in the old Massachusetts town of Marblehead. The author of the article wrote that when she was young, she and the other children used to “hunt for” the fairies, believing that whoever found one would be lucky for life. Here again we see the Irish proclivity to associate birth with luck or misfortune, but fairy belief performed multiple functions. It warned and educated about the tragedies that could befall individuals, families, and communities; it affirmed beliefs in the supernatural; and it brought magic to the lives of immigrant children.20 Irish-American marriages also were subject to stories, lore, and proverbs. Courtships were de‑ scribed as long and the saying “Marry in haste, repent in leisure” served as a cautionary tale because Irish-American Catholics did not approve of (and their Church did not allow for) divorce. Generally, marriage was something to think carefully about, attested by the scathing indictment, “You’ve made your bed; now lie in it.” This idiom was said to anyone who had rushed into an unhappy or unsuc‑ cessful union.21 Good luck was also important in Irish-American marriages. On their wedding day, the couple hoped that a brunette would be the first person spied; indeed, it was considered unlucky for the be‑ trothed to encounter a redhead on the way to the altar. In such a circumstance, they should reverse direction. For the bride to avoid bad luck, she was encouraged not to see or speak to her future hus‑ band on the day of their marriage. Significantly, Irish-American folk customs preserved the practice of continuing to reference married women by their maiden names. In this way, people avoided name confusion; for instance, the bride’s new name could be a reference to someone already in possession of that name—perhaps her mother-in-law or sister-in-law. This practice may have been particularly important as Irish Americans attempted to find relatives—a common endeavor, affirmed by the col‑ umn “Missing Friends,” which ran in the Boston Pilot from 1831 to 1916.22 Irish naming customs, of course, evolved across time and across the Atlantic in other ways. The reality that so many nineteenth-century Irish immigrant girls were called “Brigid” or “Bridget” led to discriminatory practices; among middle-class Protestant Americans, “Bridget” became synonymous with a domestic servant. By the turn of the century, naming a daughter “Bridget” understandably became a rarity because it was frowned upon by some Irish-American priests; some even refused to baptize girl children “Brigid” or “Bridget” “because of the negative connotations the name had ac‑ quired.” Most parents, especially mothers, complied, often working in tandem with Roman Catholic clerical figures to accomplish the goal of producing “worthy” Irish Americans.23 Although testimonials regarding ironclad clerical control are rife in Irish-American folk memory, so, too, is the questioning of their influence. The rhyme, “Open Confession is good for the sinner but a hungry man he needs [or wants] his dinner,” attests to circumspection regarding the clergy’s demands. One idiom suggests that religious figures were not to be “taken too seriously”; another cau‑ tioned: “If you want to be in with the clergy, keep out with them.” One consultant revealed a trenchant disavowal, overheard by a man coming from church: turning to his wife, he was said to have audibly whispered, “My own soul, Biddy, what a ‘sell’ we’d get if there was no God.” Such ambivalence suggests that, while proverbs could support notions of tradition and transmit communal values, other forms of verbal expressions could serve as forms of resistance to aspects of Irish culture that some found oppressive, reflecting Irish Americans’ efforts to construct a hybrid identity in the US.24 Like birth and marriage, death was surrounded by a set of proscribed and prescribed behaviors. Elements of Ireland’s heroic culture were transported into the new world via the wake, a frequently enjoyable and boisterous occasion held in the home of the departed. Food was provided by family 169

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members and neighbors. Toasting the deceased provided opportunities for sociability and ways to distract mourners. In keeping with ritual reversal, the spatial order of the home was offset: for in‑ stance, in parts of Irish New England, women occupied the parlor, and men, taking full advantage of the distribution and availability of cigarettes, congregated in the kitchen, the woman’s customary domain. The corpse, upon whose eyes pennies had been placed, was attended to constantly out of concern that fairies or devils would “make off” with the body. Just as they had when a person was born, beliefs about the Otherworld guided Irish-American practices at death. In contrast to the taboo against praising the beauty of the newborn, to comment on the aesthetic qualities of the corpse was de rigueur: wake attendees exaggerated their praise. Olivia Robertson notes that an Irish person’s death is “the only time that loveliness or beauty can be commented on without the usual ‘God bless it’ afterwards, as now the praised person is beyond danger from the envious [evil] eye.”25

Commemoration, Remembrance, and Forgetting Alongside beliefs and traditions that observed the seasons of the year were those items, practices, and lore that marked daily domestic life in Irish America. By the early twentieth century, most homes in Ireland were mapped by a Catholic devotional culture featuring images of the Virgin Mary, rosary beads that hung via nails on walls, and even holy water fonts located at front or back doors. Catholic Irish immigrant women brought these traditions with them. Once married, and having set up their own homes in an urban or suburban environment that made purchasing easier, Irish-American wives consumed mass-produced Catholic popular culture such as prints and posters featuring the Sacred Heart of Jesus and displayed them proudly. “Much more than incidental decoration,” writes David Morgan, “these images underscore the sacred function of the family and ground the formation of Christian identity in the everyday life of the home.” Such practices also helped link women immi‑ grants from Ireland with their mothers and grandmothers and aided in the establishment of transna‑ tional traditions of a feminized Catholicism that affirmed women’s religious responsibilities.26 Food and drink, and beliefs associated with them, are part and parcel of all folkloric traditions, but in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish-American culture, they took on unique meanings. Drinking culture, which had long been linked to sociability and hospitality in rural Ireland, also evolved in an immigrant and urban context. Before the Great Famine, drinking was a practice in which both men and women participated, usually at festive occasions such as fairs and during life‑ cycle rituals such as wakes. In the second half of the nineteenth century, in contrast, the pub—a spe‑ cifically masculine realm—came to dominate much of Irish drinking life. For Irish immigrant men in the United States, the tavern or bar replaced the rural pub; women immigrants, meanwhile, and especially domestic servants, increasingly turned toward temperance to demonstrate their commit‑ ment to respectability and middle-class values.27 Irish Americans, argues Hasia Diner, were the only immigrant ethnic group in the United States that “failed to develop an elaborate national food culture… poems, stories, political tracts, or songs rarely included the details of food in describing daily life.” When Irish Americans did reference food, however, they also invoked other histories; Irish Americans “spoke of hunger and lamented the absence of food in general.” Diner wonders if such developments arose because of the crossgenerational trauma of the Great Famine. Irish Americans’ unique relationship to food certainly is linked with the legacy of the Great Famine. For example, Peter Quinn’s assertion that the pattern of Irish-American recall seems to be “a reconstruction of mute and fragmentary remains that will always be incomplete” is demonstrated by certain sayings such as “she never ate potatoes,” which denied the horrors of famine and hunger. Mary C. Kelly writes that we still do not know enough about “the intellectual cargo wrought by the Famine and how it was processed and stored within the immigrant mentalité through successive decades and transitions.” Folklore may be a central avenue for gaining 170

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such understandings; even silences and forgettings convey meanings, including the reality that some things may be inexpressible and that trauma can cross generational lines. When asked about the Great Famine in the early 2000s, descendants of New England immigrants replied: “‘I don’t think I have enough information.’ ‘I hardly remember much.’ ‘Not much!’” Such statements reflect that, even as folklore can be a means to preserve cultural values, it can also be a vehicle of denial and reluctance to remember historical grievances and histories of cultural trauma.28 On the other hand, and perhaps not surprisingly, folklore also preserved painful historical realities in the Irish-American tradition. Nineteenth-century discrimination against Catholic immigrants in the United States appears vividly in twentieth- and twenty-first century anecdotes; so too do long-­ standing inimical feelings toward “the British.” A New England folklore informant, for example, when asked about the British, remarked, “Now you understand why we’re the way we are. Sure wasn’t it them that did it to us?” Even as a new generation of immigrants and their descendants worked their way into the middle classes and took on an American national identity, folklore re‑ minded them of the hardships of those who came before them and articulated an Irishness that would remember, not forget, grievances.29

Communal Inclusion and Ethnic Exclusion Folklore not only expressed identities; it also constructed and reworked them, as we have seen. However, this preservation of shared values and construction of a communal identity could also have negative consequences culturally. An example of maneuvering Irish identity occurred in 1933, when Eleanor Roosevelt championed Arthurdale, a new homestead community in West Virginia. The collector Fletcher Collins sought to reinvigorate West Virginian folklore, asserting that “cultivating these traditions could provide a model for the promotion of a national Scots-Irish cultural revival.” Collins identified significant elements of Scotch-Irish folklore including “balladry … Lyric folk song, Square- dances, Fiddle- music...” Tellingly, however, he failed to recognize the significant historical cultural exchanges between white, Black, and Native American people in the area. Arthurdale, ex‑ clusively white, was populated by German and Scots-Irish descendants, notwithstanding the fact that 200 applications for homestead, submitted by African Americans, had been rejected. The example of Arthurdale reveals how Irish-American folklore could function to exclude in an attempt to construct an American ethnic identity in opposition to people of color and other immigrant or migrant groups. This case celebrated a white ethnicity, one that allowed Irish Americans to claim their traditions when other marginalized groups were denied the opportunity to do so.30 The contested relationship between Irishness and whiteness was visible in the emerging symbols and rituals of Irish-American culture. Anthony Buccatelli discusses the complex and changing mean‑ ings of symbols such as the shamrock in Irish-American communities, arguing that “the values associ‑ ated with the symbol have been shifted, altered, and layered upon each other over the course of its long history.” A symbol of non-sectarian or even Protestant nationalism in the eighteenth century, the sham‑ rock morphed into one that, by the nineteenth century, represented Irish Catholic nationalism. In the 1880s, Abraham Hewitt, nativist mayor of New York, recognizing the association between the symbol and Irish Catholicism, refused to fly a shamrock flag over City Hall. A century later, in the 1970s, controversy erupted in Boston over proposals to integrate public schools by busing African-American children to traditionally white segregated schools. ROAR (Restore our Alienated Rights), an organi‑ zation created to oppose desegregation, had as its symbol a flag featuring the Italian tricolor and a shamrock. The shamrock, in fact, has been utilized as a symbol by “various white power organizations such as the Aryan Brotherhood.” Sadly, at least this element of Irish-American folklore and tradition, which we have shown worked for communal identity, mourning, and consolidation of a new, hybrid American identity, has at time also been harnessed toward ends antithetical to unity and community.31 171

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Conclusion While a cursory glance at Irish-American folklore may find a simple, celebratory expression of cul‑ tural identity, recent scholarship has revealed the complexities of both immigrant identities and folk culture. “Folklore,” writes Buccitelli, “should not be studied as a product such as the Cinderella folk tale or a quilt, but rather as a process of production…” In Irish America, this process of production has involved celebrating, intentional forgetting, remembering, manipulating, performing, and show‑ casing deliberate and unconscious biases. Currently, however, the field of Irish-American folklore is flourishing, evidenced not only through significant scholarship but also Irish-American oral history projects conducted at places as diverse as New York University and the College of Charleston (South Carolina). Meanwhile, online folklore and folklife collections, including those at the Library of Con‑ gress, the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and the American Folklore Society promise to facilitate more research in years to come.32 From the colonial era through the twentieth century, Irish-American folklore spoke to the reali‑ ties of immigrant life: working hard, creating and maintaining communities in a new environment, retaining a sense of tradition and custom, and grappling with tragedy and hardship. Folklore allowed the old and the young to express creativity even as it affirmed gender norms and established codes of behavior for individuals and families. It also, at times, romanticized a so-called “traditional” Irishness that was never as simple as some idioms and sayings expressed. Moving forward, the rich and dynamic field of Irish-American folklore studies could foreground the marginalized, explore how Irish-American folklore and folklife has (or has not) interacted with the cultures of other immigrant and ethnic groups, and compare folklore in the United States with that of Irish immigrants in other parts of the world, including the Americas beyond the United States and Canada. Possibilities for future work—highlighting the stories, proverbs, symbols, and rituals preserved in Irish-American culture—abound.

Notes 1 Zhang, “Introduction,” 384; Hilliard, Making Our Future, 5. 2 Miller, Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan, 5; Meagher, Columbia Guide, 4; MacCracken, Address to the Ulster-Irish Society of New York; cited in Lee and Casey, Making the Irish American, 286. 3 This is but one example of the laudatory toasts devoted to women that form part of John D. Crimmins’ 1902 collection of early celebrations of St. Patrick’s Day in the United States. In his self-published work, Crim‑ mins notes that praiseworthy statements in honor of women appear late in the records he collected, but they form part of many formulaic and repetitive statements uttered at celebratory Irish American occasions like banquets and balls. For more, see Crimmins, 269; Quinn, 25; Quinn, “Toasters and Boasters,” 20–25. 4 Meagher, Columbia Guide, 54; Gleeson, “Introduction,” in The Irish in the Atlantic World, 3. 5 Montgomery, “Scots-Irish Vocabulary,” 22. 6 Gleeson, “Introduction,” 5; Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish, 150; Griffin, The People with no Name. 7 Quinn, “The Lore of Women,” citing Miller, Emigrants and Exiles; Quintelli-Neary, The Irish American Myth, 38; Colum, A Treasury of Irish Folklore; Noonan, Mining Irish-American Lives, 255. 8 Meagher, Columbia Guide, 17; Buccitelli, City of Neighborhoods, 7; Quinn, Irish American Folklore, 184; Canavan, Every Stoney Acre. 9 Quinn, Irish American Folklore, 186–188. 10 Diner, Hungering for America, 114; Quinn, Irish American Folklore, 302–305; Cronin, The Wearing of the Green. 11 Yankeh, “Proverb,” 205; Robinson, “Irish Proverbs and Irish National Character,” 288. 12 Quinn, Irish American Folklore, 82, 85, 94, 99; Schudson, “Preservation of the Past in Mental Life,” 5–11. 13 Quinn, Irish American Folklore, 86–87, 92. 14 Quinn, Irish American Folklore, 82–84, 87, 95, 100; Quinn and Delay, “Bounty, Moderation, and Miracles,” 113; quoting Lynch-Brennan, The Irish Bridget, 16. 15 Gaffney and Cashman, Irish Proverbs and Sayings, 78.

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Folklore in Irish America 16 Quinn, Irish American Folklore, 103, 85. 17 Beiner, Remembering the Year of the French, 187; Delargy, “The Gaelic Story-teller”; Quinn, “The Lore of Women,” 126; Quinn, Irish American Folklore, 80, 87, 115; Bourke, “Lamenting the Dead,” 1365; Goff‑ mann, Interaction Ritual. 18 Wels et al., “Victor Turner and Liminality,” O’Farrell, Irish Proverbs and Sayings, 69; Ó Catháin, Irish Life and Lore; Quinn, Irish American Folklore, 240. 19 Quinn, “The Caul,” 188–193. 20 Kennedy, Legends of Witches and Fairies, 53; Delay, “Women, Childbirth Customs and Authority,” 11; Bourke, “The Virtual Reality of Irish Fairy Legend”; Farmer, “Folk-Lore of Marblehead, Mass,” 252. 21 Quinn, Irish American Folklore, 96; E. Moore Quinn’s research questionnaire notes. 22 Harris, “Searching for Missing Friends.” 23 Lynch-Brennan, The Irish Bridget; Quinn, Irish American Folklore in New England; Kelly, “Coarse Cloth and Clerical Tailoring.” 24 Quinn, Irish American Folklore, 214–215; Brophy, “‘Her Own and Her Children’s Share.” 25 Robertson, It’s an Old Irish Custom, 116. 26 Delay, “Holy Water and a Twig”; Kinmonth, Irish Rural Interiors in Art; Lynch-Brennan, The Irish Bridget, 6; Morgan, “Domestic Devotion and Ritual,” 45. 27 Lynch-Brennan, The Irish Bridget, 17–19. 28 Diner, Hungering for America, Chapter 4, quotation on 85; Buccitelli, City of Neighborhoods, 4; Peter Quinn, “Introduction: An Interpretation of Silences”; Kelly, “The Famine, Irish-American Transition,” 127; Quinn, “She Must Have Come Steerage,” 164.  29 Quinn, “She Must,” 164. 30 Hilliard, Making Our Future, 19–20, 33–34. 31 Buccitelli, City of Neighborhoods, 75–77; citing Casey, “‘The Best-Kept Secret in Retail,’” 96. 32 Buccitelli, City of Neighborhoods, 4.

Bibliography Primary Sources Colum, Padraic. A Treasury of Irish Folklore. New York: Crown Publishers, 1954. Delargy, James H. The Gaelic story-teller: with some notes on Gaelic folk-tales. Oxford: Geoffrey Cumberlege, 1947. Fadó Irish pub website, https://www.fadoirishpub.com/. Farmer, Sarah Bridge. “Folk-Lore of Marblehead, Mass.” The Journal of American Folklore 7, no. 26 (1894): 252–253. Gaffney, Sean, and Séamus Cashman, eds. Irish Proverbs and Sayings. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1979. Kennedy, Patrick. Legends of Witches and Fairies. Dublin: The Mercier Press, 1976. MacCracken, Henry Noble. “Address to the Ulster-Irish Society of New York, 1939.” In Making the Irish Ameri‑ can: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States, edited by J. J. Lee and Marion R. Casey, 286–288. New York: New York University Press, 2006. O’Farrell, Pádraic. Irish Proverbs and Sayings: Gems of Irish Wisdom. Dublin: Mercier Press, 1980. Robertson, Olivia. It’s an Old Irish Custom. New York: Vanguard Press, 1953.

Secondary Sources Beiner, Guy. Remembering the Year of the French. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. Bourke, Angela. “Lamenting the Dead.” In The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volume 4: Irish Women’s Writings and Traditions, edited by Angela Bourke et al., 1367–1397. New York: New York University Press, 2002. Bourke, Angela. “The Virtual Reality of Irish Fairy Legend.” Éire-Ireland (St. Paul) 31, no. 1 (1996): 7–25. Brophy, Christina S. “‘Her Own and Her Children’s Share’: Luck, Misogyny and Imaginative Resistance in Twentieth-Century Irish Folklore.” Irish Historical Studies 46, no. 169 (2022): 155–178. Buccitelli, Anthony Bak. City of Neighborhoods Memory, Folklore, and Ethnic Place in Boston. Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2016. Cahill, Robert Ellis. The Old Irish of New England. Boston, MA: Smith Publishing, 1985.

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E. Moore Quinn and Cara Delay Canavan, Tony, ed. Every Stoney Acre Has a Name: A Celebration of the Townland in Ulster. Belfast: Federation for Ulster Local Studies, 1991. Casey, Natasha. “Riverdance: The Importance of Being Irish American.” New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua 6, no. 4 (2002): 9–25. Crimmins, John D. St. Patrick’s Day: Its Celebrations in New York and Other American Places, 1737–1845. New York: John D. Crimmins, 1902. Cronin, Mike. The Wearing of the Green: A History of St. Patrick’s Day. London: Routledge, 2002. Delay, Cara. “Holy Water and a Twig: Catholic Households and Women’s Religious Authority in Modern ­Ireland.” Journal of Family History 43, no. 3 (2018): 302–319. Delay, Cara. “Women, Childbirth Customs and Authority in Ireland, 1850–1930.” Lilith: A Feminist History Journal no. 21 (August 2015): 6–18. Diner, Hasia R. Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration. New York: Harvard University Press, 2002. Gleeson, David T. The Irish in the Atlantic World. The Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010. Griffin, Patrick. The People With no Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scotch Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Goffmann, Erving. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Doubleday, 1967. Harris, Ruth-Ann M. “Searching for Missing Friends in the Boston Pilot Newspaper, 1831–1863.” In The Irish Diaspora, edited by Andrew Bielenberg, 158–175. London: Routledge, 2000. Hilliard, Emily. Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Jackson, Carlton. A Social History of the Scotch-Irish. Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1993. Kader, Emily. “‘Rose Connolly’ Revisited: Re-Imagining the Irish in Southern Appalachia.” The Journal of American Folklore 127, no. 506 (2014): 425–447. Kelly, Mary C. “Coarse Cloth and Clerical Tailoring: Negotiating Boston-Irish Cultural Imperatives in the Fam‑ ine Era.” Irish Studies Review 23, no. 2 (2015): 135–153. Kelly, Mary C. “The Famine, Irish-American Transition, and a Century of Intellectual and Cultural History.” In Ireland’s Great Hunger, Volume 2: Relief, Representation, and Remembrance, edited by David A. Valone, 123–139. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2009. Kinmonth, Claudia. Irish Rural Interiors in Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Lee, Joseph, and Marion R. Casey, eds. Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of theIrish in the United States. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Lenman, Bruce P. “Review of Patrick Griffin, the People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764.” H-Net, 2002. https://networks.h-net.org/ node/16749/reviews/17734/lenman-griffin-people-no-name-irelands-ulster-scots-americas-scots. Leyburn, James Graham. The Scotch-Irish: A Social History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962. Lynch-Brennan, Margaret. The Irish Bridget: Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in America, 1840– 1930. Syracuse, NY: University Press, 2014. Marston, Sallie A. “Making Difference: Conflict over Irish Identity in the New York City St. Patrick’s Day ­Parade.” Political Geography 21, no. 3 (2002): 373–392. Meagher, Timothy J., ed. The Columbia Guide to Irish American History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Miller, Kerby. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford Uni‑ versity Press, 1985. Miller, Kerby. Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675–1815. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Miller, Perry. The New England Mind: From Colony to Province. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953. Montgomery, Michael. “Scots-Irish Vocabulary.” The Journal of East Tennessee History 67 (1995): 1–33. Morgan, David. “Domestic Devotion and Ritual: Visual Piety in the Modern American Home.” Art Journal 57, no. 1 (Spring, 1998): 45–54. Negra, Diane. “Consuming Ireland: Lucky Charms Cereal, Irish Spring Soap, and 1–800‑SHAMROCK.” Cul‑ tural Studies 15, no. 1 (2001): 76–97. Noonan, Alan J.M. Mining Irish‑American Lives: Western Communities from 1849 to 1920. Denver: University Press of Colorado, 2022.

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Folklore in Irish America Ó Catháin, Séamus. Irish Life and Lore. Dublin: The Mercier Press, 1982. Quinn, E. Moore. Irish American Folklore in New England. Irish Research Series #47. Bethesda: Academica Press, 2009. Quinn, E. Moore. “She Must Have Come Steerage: The Great Famine in New England Folk Memory.” In Ire‑ land’s Great Hunger, Volume 2: Relief, Representation, and Remembrance, edited by David A. Valone, 161– 180. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2009. Quinn, E. Moore. “The Caul in Irish Folk Belief and Practice: A Birth‑Related Example of Continuity and Change.” In Birth and the Irish: A Miscellany, edited by Salvador Ryan, 188–193. Dublin: Wordwell Press, 2020. Quinn, E. Moore. “Toasters and Boasters: John D. Crimmins’s St. Patrick’s Day (1902).” New Hibernia Review 8, no. 3 (2004): 20–25. Quinn, E. Moore, and Cara Delay. “Bounty, Moderation, and Miracles: Women and Food in Narratives of the Great Famine.” New Hibernia Review 21, no. 2 (2017): 111–129. Quinn, Peter. “Introduction: An Interpretation of Silences.” Eire/Ireland XXXII, no. 1 (1997): 7–19. Quintelli‑Neary, Marguerite. The Irish American Myth of the Frontier West. Washington, DC: Academica Press, 2008. Robinson, Fred Norris. “Irish Proverbs and Irish National Character.” In The Wisdom of Many: Essays on the Proverb, edited by Wolfgang Mieder and Alan Dundes, 284–299. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. Schudson, Michael. “Preservation of the Past in Mental Life.” The Quarterly Newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition 9, no. 1 (1987): 5–11. Wels, Harry et al. “Victor Turner and Liminality: An Introduction.” Anthropology Southern Africa 34, no. 1–2 (January 1, 2011): 1–4. Williams, Donald M. Shamrocks and Pluff Mud. Charleston, SC: Book Surge Publishing, 2005. Yankeh, Kwesi. “Proverb.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9, no. 1–2 (1999): 205–207. Zhang, Juwen. “Introduction: New Perspectives on the Studies of Asian American Folklores.” Journal of Ameri‑ can Folklore 128, no. 510 (2015): 373–394.

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13 IRISH-AMERICAN FAMINE LITERATURE Marguérite Corporaal

The massive inflow of Irish immigrants into the United States during and in the immediate aftermath of the Great Famine greatly impacted American literary production. It led to the emergence of a generation of Irish-born Catholic authors, such as Dillon O’Brien, Father Hugh Quigley, and Mary Anne Sadlier, who had left Ireland around the time of the country’s biggest hunger crisis and who wrote prolifically for and about Irish immigrants to the New World. Their works often sought to pro‑ mote Irish-North-American Catholicism and community formation, urging their immigrant readers to “keep their faith on alien soil” and to resist the threat of cultural assimilation.1 This Famine generation of writers helped establish Irish-American literary infrastructures. O’Brien, an immigrant from Kilmore, Co. Roscommon to Minnesota, became editor of the IrishAmerican newspaper the Boston Pilot. For her part, Sadlier contributed significantly to ethnicallyoriented magazines such as the New York Freeman’s Journal, McGee’s New York-based American Celt, and the New York Tablet, the magazine of her husband’s and brother-in-law’s publishing house D. & J. Sadlier & Co. She played a central role in running this business, especially after her husband’s death. In many respects, the predominantly Catholic Irish who settled in the United States during and shortly after the Famine changed the literary landscape of their host society by creating Catholic liter‑ ary works, networks, magazines, and presses.2 As Mary C. Kelly argues, the Great Famine became “a vital element in the construction of the immigrant identity.” This is by no means surprising considering the malleability and transportability of cultural memory. As Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson contend, memories travel “within and be‑ tween national, ethnic and religious collectives.” Such transmissions of memory occur especially in contexts of diasporic communities, as Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad have argued. As they contend, “migrants carry their heritage, memories and traumas with them,” which “are transferred and brought into new social constellations and political contexts” in their host societies. In the case of the Famine generation, this implies that the legacies of their native country and host society over‑ lapped and interacted, as their recollections of hunger-stricken Ireland became integrated in Ameri‑ ca’s memory cultures.3 As a result of this shared memory culture, short stories and novels about the dire hunger crisis initially issued in Ireland or the United Kingdom were republished in American magazines catering to an audience of first and second-generation Irish immigrant communities. For example, Allen H. Clington’s Famine novel Frank O’Donnell (1861), which had initially been published by Dublin publisher James Duffy in 1859 (as The Old House at Home; The Adventures of Frank O’Donnell), DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-16

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was serialized in the Pilot from January till July 1863. This confirms Cian T. McMahon’s observa‑ tion about the “living connections between the home country and its far-flung emigrant communities’ Irish-American press,” which meant that American newspapers and magazines echoed and engaged with debates taking place in the mother country, while they reprinted news and texts from the Irish media in order to save expenses.4 At the same time, Irish-American writers of the so-called “Famine generation” reflected in their own ways on the dire effects of the catastrophe and on Ireland and its people, in particular in novels and short stories. They gave expression to the directly witnessed or second-generation “postmemory” of the Great Famine, and to the transatlantic passage and the subsequent settlement and process of integration of Irish-American communities. Often, this Irish-American Famine fiction was published in periodicals catering to readers of specific ethnic or religious backgrounds, such as the Pilot, the Irish-American, and the Catholic World, founded by Paulist Father Isaac Thomas Hecker in April 1865. However, these novels and stories also made it into more mainstream periodicals, and as (re-) published volumes they reached broad audiences in and outside the United States. This suggests that the legacies of Ireland’s Great Famine also became well embedded into processes of cultural produc‑ tion outside Ireland.5 This chapter will examine the frequently underexplored yet rich tradition of early Irish-American Famine fiction, most of which was published in magazines, focusing on two specific dimensions. Through readings of texts such as “Rebel Scenes” (Irish-American, 1851), Robert Curtis’ “McCor‑ mack’s Grudge” (Irish-American, 1862), Alice Nolan’s The Byrnes of Glengoulah (Irish Citizen, 1868), the anonymously published “The Emigrant” (Catholic World, 1870) and Anna Dorsey’s Nora Brady’s Vow (Boston Pilot, 1868; Patrick Donahue, 1869), this chapter will investigate how IrishAmerican stories and novels negotiated the painful memories of the Famine-stricken homeland. As will be demonstrated, these works especially framed this recent past in terms of religious controver‑ sies, Catholic martyrdom, and imperialism. Furthermore, literary texts about the Great Famine for Irish-American markets often tapped into the literary register of the pastoral in order to engage with the “Irish Question.” The scripts through which this transatlantic Famine fiction negotiates the painful legacies of the ­catastrophe also flesh out directions for Irish-American identities. Early Irish-American ­Famine ­fiction often features an Irish man or woman’s immigration to the United States, imagining the ­dynamics between the Famine Irish and other ethnic communities in the New World. To what extent do these literary narratives engage with ongoing debates about integration and community cohesion in IrishAmerican media? This will be discussed in relation to, among others, Nora Brady’s Vow and T. L. N.’s Captain Patrick Malony; Or, The Irishman in Alabama (the Pilot, 1860).

The Religious Politics of Irish-American Famine Fiction In “Our Own Green Island Home,” a poem by J. Boyle O’Reilly, published in the Irish-American magazine the Emerald on 19 February 1870, the speaker emphasizes feelings of dislocation and loss in remembering the homeland from which many Irish fled during the Famine Not one scene shall be forgotten, nor one feeling of the past For our souls will wander back, where’er we may be cast. This begs the question, how did Irish-American communities recall the starvation-afflicted Ireland from which many had escaped? As James Wertsch claims, societies tend to give meaning to their pasts by structuring their community’s memories according to recurring “narrative templates”— that is, recurring plotlines, characterizations, themes, and tropes. Folklore can also affect such 177

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meaning-making, as Moore and Delay’s chapter in this volume also illustrates. This idea of recurring narrative schemata certainly applies to the fiction written by or for the Irish-American Famine dias‑ pora. In fact, it can be argued that in such writings, the Great Famine is framed in three distinct ways.6 First, Irish-American Famine fiction represents the hunger crisis in Ireland primarily in terms of religious conflict and martyrdom. In these texts, the suffering of the Famine-stricken Catholic Irish is exacerbated by evangelicals who endeavor to pressure the starving and their vulnerable families into conversion to Protestantism in exchange for food. Although the theme of proselytism also occurs in early Famine fiction written in Ireland—such as Richard Baptist O’Brien’s Ailey Moore (1856) and Emily Bowles’ Irish Diamonds; or the Chronicles of Peterstown (1864)—and can therefore be regarded as a transnational memory script, it has a much stronger presence in Irish-American fic‑ tion from the same period. For instance, Mrs. Sadlier’s novel New Lights; or Life in Galway (1853) depicts famishing, devout, Catholic tenant farmers who are preyed upon by the so-called Soupers: Protestant evangelicals, often coming from Britain, who seek to lure the distressed Irish into aban‑ doning their creed and registering for a different denomination. The widow Katty Boyce is persuaded by Mrs. Perkins, “the lady that goes around with the tracts,” to apply for “some o’ the soup an’ bread,” on condition that she does not have to put her “name down as a Prodestan’.” However, to the fury of her friend Phil Maguire, Katty’s children are caught by these “white-livered dogs—the Jumpers,” who, taking advantage of the dire condition of the Catholic tenantry, take the infants to a Protestant school. In his view, these evangelicals are “prowlin’ about like wild beasts, watchin’ for their chance to pounce on poor little innocent children, and miserable starvin’ creatures, an’ draggin’ them away to their den.”7 This contextualization of the Great Famine in sectarian conflict can be found in other Irish-­ American works of fiction. Alice Nolan’s The Byrnes of Glengoulah features the inhumane characters of English minister Lord Biggs and his siblings who, rather than caring for the plight of their tenants, exert further pressure on them to relinquish their Roman Catholic faith. Lord Biggs’ spinster sisters make special visits to the tenants, Requesting in a most emphatic manner that the will of their reverend brother should be com‑ plied with in sending their children to the school he had established for them, and to no other. He expected it, they said, and would take no refusal. Those who refuse Catechism, like Mrs. Cormac and her daughter Norah, are brutally evicted from their cottage, to perish from hunger and cold. Death by starvation is thus represented as religious sacrifice: those steadfast in their Catholic belief are deliberately exempted from care and relief by Protestants.8 This plotline of Catholic martyrdom also features in Famine fiction written by Catholic authors without Irish roots and was therefore a more widespread plotline. American-born Anna Dorsey, after her conversion to Catholicism in 1840, became one of the pioneer authors of Catholic literature in the United States. She contributed regularly to the Boston-based periodical for Irish immigrants, the Pilot, including her novella Nora Brady’s Vow. Just as in the novels by Sadlier, Quigley, and Nolan, we find a plotline in which the Catholic main protagonist, who is seriously reduced in means by the “blight [...] on the potatoes,” is confronted with the pressure to abandon her creed in order to better the circumstances of herself and her children. Mary Halloran is forced to sell “the ould McCarthy More siller and jewels” and other possessions, and is faced with the serious illness of her daughter Grace, which puts her under pressure by external forces to relinquish her creed. Additionally, she loses the family estate, Glendariff, because her cousin, Donald More, has informed the English of her husband’s involvement in the 1848 Young Ireland rebellion and is rewarded by gaining posses‑ sion of the property. Mary’s fortunes are wrecked, and her kinsman Donald has given orders that 178

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“Mrs. Halloran’s personal effects were [to be] removed from the house.” Later, however, Donald— born from an English mother, a Protestant and Unionist—offers money to her and a sheltered home to Mary’s son Desmond through adoption, on the condition that the latter will “give up the superstitions and follies of the Romish Church and adopt the Protestant Creed.” More abuses his power and Mary’s vulnerability as a mother in distress to force her into conversion, thereby endangering her faith and that of her family.9 Mary, however, remains steadfast in her convictions despite her suffering: neither she nor her chil‑ dren will accept any favors from Donald, and she would rather “consign” both her son and daughter “to the grave” than accede to his “base proposal.” Through all, she states, she is determined to “pre‑ serve to them the gift of Faith.” This idea of starvation as a form of Catholic martyrdom and resist‑ ance figures prominently in Irish-American Famine fiction. In the earlier cited New Lights; or Life in Galway, pater familias Bernard O’Daly tells the evangelical Andrew McGillian, who receives sup‑ port from landlord Ousely, that he refuses to save his family and himself from famine by relinquish‑ ing their faith. McGilligan urges O’Daly to accept conversion, as otherwise his children and wife will “be turned out on the road to starve and die!” Bernard, however, dismisses the “Bible Reader” by stating that “the O’Dalys are of the ould stock, or the ould rock, your choice, an’ they can die for their faith, as they have lived in it, them an’ their fathers before them’.” The Famine is thus framed as an episode in a longer history of persecution of Irish Catholics.10 This particular plotline ties in with the circumstances of Irish Catholics at home and in the US. Prior to and during the Great Irish Famine, Catholic worship in Ireland was on the decline. Although the Catholic faith must have been a stronghold for those afflicted by the Famine, William Meagher’s Notices (1853) of the life of Daniel Murray, Archbishop of Dublin, claims that in Famine-stricken Dublin there was much corruption and “many Catholics there but… few practical Christians” fre‑ quenting “the holy sacraments.” So, why is the setting of the Famine as a climate of religious resist‑ ance so strongly present in Irish-American fiction from the 1850s to the 1870s? 11 One explanation could lie in the fact that, rather anachronistically, the literature which recollects the dark 1840s displays the influence of Archbishop Paul Cullen’s Devotional Revolution of subse‑ quent decades in its strong emphasis on “clerical discipline,” prayer, confession, and new devotional practices such as “the rosary, perpetual adoration, vespers, devotion to the Sacred Heart.” Irish men and women at home were thus encouraged to observe religious worship more intensively.12 This Devotional Revolution also strongly impacted American Catholicism: New York Archbishop John Hughes not only “regularized sacramental life” and “romanized the liturgy,” he also established a tight network of Catholic “educational and welfare institutions.” The framing of the Famine in terms of Catholic resistance to oppression in Irish-American fiction could therefore be viewed as an extended expression of Hughes’ politics, which correlated Irish-American identity to Catholic piety and religious observance. Indeed, John Francis Maguire stated in his seminal work The Irish in America (1868) that he had “devoted a considerable portion of the following pages” to the role of the American Catholic church in Irish-American communities, because “the education, the character, the conduct, the material welfare and social position of the Irish and their descendants are and must be profoundly influenced” by it.13 At the same time, this template of the Famine as “Catholic” persecution and stoical resilience in Irish-American fiction may also be interpreted as a response to the religious hostility that the Famine generation encountered, from their arrival in the 1840s well into the 1860s. Archbishop Hughes’ en‑ couragement that immigrants attend mass and observe the sacrament, and the fact that Irish-­American priests founded Catholic institutions, social services, and parochial schools, should be understood as a reaction to the virulent ethnic and religious opposition that the Famine Irish faced, especially under the influence of the Nativist or “Know-Nothing” party, as Hidetaka Hirota’s chapter on ­anti-Irish nativism in this volume argues in detail.14 179

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Their adverse circumstances, including discrimination in the work place, may have stimulated further cohesion among the Famine Irish through religious bonding as well as resistance to assimila‑ tion. As Lawrence J. McCaffrey argues, “Catholic worship was a bridge of familiarity between rural Ireland and urban America, providing psychological as well as spiritual comfort in a religious taste of home.” The recurrent plotlines in Irish-American Famine fiction which promulgate steadfastness of faith in the face of immense hardship may be seen as the coping strategy of a diasporic minority with a “tenuous and often threatened status” that is subject to the “stereotyping of otherness” and “exclusionary mechanisms.”15 This impression is confirmed when we consider how, in the Irish-American press, the pressure experienced by the Catholic American Irish to embrace Protestantism was often compared to the re‑ ligious persecution endured by the Famine-stricken Irish. As “The Protestant Propaganda,” an article published in the Pilot on 13 March 1858, intimated, the evangelicals in America who appear united “in “hatred of the Catholic Church” and in their aim to “overcome the common foe” are not unlike the “Soupers in Ireland” who “hailed the famine in that unfortunate country as an auxiliary to their cause.” As this article suggests, Irish Americans of the Famine generation were subject to discrimina‑ tion and exclusion because of their faith not unlike the religious oppression that the Irish at home had suffered during the years of mass hunger, and, previously, under the penal laws.16

The Famine as Imperial Atrocity The second recurring narrative template through which the Great Famine appears in Irish-American fiction is one that interprets the calamity as imperial conflict. More frequently than in Famine fiction written in Ireland, novels and stories written for the Irish-American literary market interpret the Fam‑ ine as deliberate neglect on the part of the London government to root out the Catholic Irish popula‑ tion. This is, for example, the case in The Dalys of Dalystown (1866), a novel by Dillon O’Brien (1817–1882), an Irish immigrant to Minnesota who was a schoolmaster, secretary of the colonization bureau, and editor of the Pilot. His main protagonist, Irish emigrant Henry Daly, is the mouthpiece to denounce Lord John Russell’s championing of political economy, which was rooted in a laissez-faire approach to Ireland’s Famine crisis, and which implied a serious reduction of imperial relief schemes. Henry argues that the Prime Minister’s relentless support of this doctrine conceals an ulterior motive to “uproot the Celtic race from Ireland,” the Famine being a fast and “effectual agent” to achieve this secret goal.17 A more implicit association between England’s economic policies and the great number of Fam‑ ine dead is evoked in Mary Meaney’s Irish-American novel The Confessors of Connaught; or the Tenants of a Lord Bishop (1865): the narrator quotes Dr. Cahill to point out that “English imperial legislation” is primarily known “to the Catholics of Ireland” by “depopulated fields” and “levelled villages.” As stock images to express Famine memory, and especially the common practice of evic‑ tions, the empty landscape and the disappeared communities are also signs of lifelessness, thereby implying that the English imperial authorities were to blame for the mass mortality among the Irish during the Famine.18 Similar interpretations of the Famine as colonial atrocity surface in other works of early IrishAmerican Famine fiction. This is the case in, for instance, Rebel Scenes, an anonymous novel serial‑ ized in the Irish American between 24 May and 5 July 1851 which remembers the Young Ireland revolt of 1848. The notion that England used the Famine to kill off the Irish is expressed by main pro‑ tagonist Richard Griffiths, who directly witnesses the atrocities of hunger and destitution confronted by those in his immediate surroundings. When his acquaintance, shopman Larry, wonders why he can no longer sell any of his fish and concludes that it is because most of the villagers have lost their lives, Richard angrily observes: “They were murdered. They were put to death by hunger, and cold, 180

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and exhaustion, and those that disliked that kind of a death were treated to a little of the policeman’s bayonet.” Richard’s bitter remark explicitly defines the Famine in terms of deliberate assassination. This impression is endorsed by the word “bayonet”: the English and representatives of their power aim to eradicate the Irish people in whatever possible way. The Famine is here imagined as the means through which the English can achieve this end, through non-interventionist politics.19 Another serialized novel, T. L. N.’s Captain Patrick Malony; Or, The Irishman in Alabama, pub‑ lished in the Pilot in June 1860, likewise blames England for Famine suffering and the decimation of Ireland’s population. In the installment of 16 June 1860, the omniscient narrator comments on ­Ireland’s transition to bleak times of hunger: “The times grew darker in Ireland. The cloud of misfor‑ tune was settling over her.” This comment is followed by explicit critique on England’s unwillingness to relieve the distress of the sister island sufficiently: England, as the last manifestation of a persecution which had endured for centuries, was about to stand serenely by, and see millions of the poor children of Ireland perish, without putting forth a hand to aid them. One act of England’s Parliament―one stroke of the pen of Queen Victoria, would have saved the lives of a million of her Majesty’s subjects―and they were left to perish. It was then that England filled the cup of her iniquities and from that hour dates her humiliation and retribution.20 These observations are not unlike those of the main character Willie Leyden in “The Emigrant,” a story published in the Catholic World in November 1870. The anonymously published story is first and foremost a short story about the Great Famine and the dire circumstances which compelled people to emigrate to new homes across the Atlantic. The story opens with Willy Leyden’s imminent departure for the United States. After the “crops failed,” and the “landlord gave them notice to vacate their farm, for which he had been offered a higher rent,” he is determined to look for better prospects across the Atlantic, while leaving behind his famishing spouse and children for the time being. Willy begrudges the fact that the English abandon the Irish in their distress. He complains about the cruelty of the “English tyrants” for whom “Irish hearts are their meat and dhrink”—a statement which not only contrasts Ireland’s hunger with England’s plenitude of food, but which also hints that imperial relations are inherently parasitical. The anonymously published story thus also interprets the Famine as a deliberate attempt on the part of the English and Anglo-Irish to exploit the Catholic Irish.21 Why is this narrative of the Famine as colonial injustice so prominent in Irish-American novels and stories published during the first decades after the catastrophe? The impact of John Mitchel, Young Irelander in exile, on Irish-American conceptualizations of the Great Famine as imperial abuse cannot be overlooked. As he famously wrote in his Jail Journal: Or Five Years in British Prisons (1854), “four years of British policy, with the Famine to aid” resulted in “killing fully two millions,” as Parliamentary politics encouraged “the extermination, that is, the slaughter” of tenantry on the part of the landlords. However, the sentiments which Mitchel voiced were already notably present in North-American press coverage of the Famine from the onset: newspapers and magazines targeted at Irish immigrant and Catholic audiences often interpreted the Famine as imperial outrage and identified the calamity with exploitation and deliberate extermination.22 We see early examples of such rhetoric in, for example, “Famine and Exhortation” (1846), pub‑ lished in the Boston Pilot on 10 January 1846. This poem presents a picture of colonial neglect and abuse. While famished corpses are “lying in every ditch,” the English “drain” the Irish of “every grain” to feed their horses. A year later, on 10 April 1847, the Boston Pilot printed the article “Physi‑ cal Condition of Ireland,” which stated that Ireland “is compelled to supply England with a great portion of her products” even if its own people are perishing with want. In fact, this article places the Famine in a long tradition of colonial oppression: the article claims that England’s treatment of 181

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famine-afflicted Ireland is symptomatic of “[d]espotic principles” which “have too long enthralled fair Erin.” The political tone that marks the previously discussed story “The Emigrant” was there‑ fore not uncommon for the Catholic World. Though first issued 15 years after the Great Famine, it featured many articles and other texts that remembered Famine suffering in light of colonial crises. In 1870, the year in which “The Emigrant” was published, Catholic World also printed an article titled “Ireland’s Mission,” about how the Famine and emigration were viewed as an opportunity for the “decimation of Irish Catholics,” for example. In other words, the narrative template of imperial maltreatment in early Irish-American Famine fiction appears to be connected to rhetoric surrounding the Famine, found in ethnic and religious specific periodicals with a wide reach.23

The Promise of Redemption The third narrative template that is typical for early Irish-American fiction can be described as redemp‑ tion. Novels and short stories written in Ireland or Britain during the Famine or its aftermath often do not end on a happy conclusion. Instead, readers are left with a picture of enduring crisis, desolation, and death. For instance, in Mrs. Hoare’s short story “The Black Potatoes” from Shamrock Leaves (1851), Jude’s brother-in-law, James, who had made his fortune in America, returns too late to offer his support to her. The widow collapses with hunger and dies, presenting an “awful scene.” By contrast, early Irish-American fiction often steers the narrative to a rather forced happy ending, marked by the restoration of an Edenic Ireland from which the dark clouds of hunger have been dispelled.24 An example which well illustrates this is Robert Curtis’ McCormack’s Grudge, which, although written by a county inspector in Ireland, was first serialized in the Irish American in September 1862. The installment of 20 September 1862 vividly describes the “sudden and destructive blight which the will of an inscrutable Providence cast upon the potato crops of Ireland in 1846” and the many scenes of harrowing and heartrending misery emanating from that “awful visitation” that ensue, especially in “the south and west, where numbers of the peasantry, with sorrow be it recorded, were hurried by starvation to the grave,” to the poorhouse, or to the emigrant ship. As a result, the country has become depopulated: as the narrator states, where, in 1844, I could have counted some hundreds of comfortable dwellings as I rode along, the smoke curling up from behind the whitethorn or elder, indicative of social life and ­industry,—it is not, I say, to be wondered at if, upon the same tour, subsequent to that period, nothing but broken-down gables and black rafters were to be seen. Ireland has changed beyond recognition, due to high mortality rates and the massive outflux of emigrants.25 The blight has also severely affected the fortunes of tenant farmer Myles McCormack: his unfeel‑ ing English landlord, Mr. Walcroft, evicts him and his family from their cabin, wrongly assuming that Myles had written the note that threatened his agent Bob Mahon. Myles and Mary are turned out into the snow, while their delicate only child, Kate, is severely ill. While the narrative thus appears to unfold toward a tragic ending, the plot takes an unexpected turn toward a positive resolution. The fact that Myles, Mary, and Kate end up in the poorhouse proves to be a blessing rather than a curse, for, discovering Kate’s serious illness, the wards make sure she gets hospital care: “Had the M’Cormacks not been turned out, Kate, without medical aid or warmth, would have pined away and died, in spite of all the nourishment poor little Harry Mahon from time to time could fetch her.” What is more, Myles heroically rescues the landagent’s son from the attack of a raging bull, meanwhile getting injured himself. Thankfully, Myles recovers well, and as a reward for saving Harry Mahon’s life, he is assigned a cottage and land where he eventually propers: Myles “ultimately fell in for Jones’s 182

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holdings, and became the most comfortable and independent man in the townland of Tullybrin or upon the estate.” As the narrative suggests, a Catholic’s compassion for and benevolence toward his or her adversaries will be rewarded, not just in the afterlife.26 Similar, rather forced, happy endings can be found in Mary Anne Sadlier’s Bessy Conway (1862) and Alice Nolan’s The Byrnes of Glengoulah. In Sadlier’s novel, the fortunes of Denis Conway’s family are severely afflicted by the potato blight. “Famine and disease had found their way into that happy household, and misery sat on the threshold,” and the family has to sup on “water and nettles, with a handful or so of oatmeal.” Nancy Conway has transformed into “a living picture of hunger,” while little Ellen, Bessy’s once lively sister, is on the brink of starvation: “But the terrible fangs of hunger had fastened on her vitals, and disease was wearing her young life away.” Furthermore, the family is about to be evicted from their home as a result of their arrears in payment. Miraculously, their daughter Bessy, an immigrant to New York, appears on the scene and has brought the abundant savings she has made as a servant girl there. She pays off the bailiffs and buys food for her parents and siblings, so that their empty table is transformed into a setting for a sumptuous banquet: And to be sure that was the supper that was well relished. No royal family in Europe was as happy that night as Denis Conway’s, for their cup of bliss was made sweeter than nectar by the recollection of sorrow and misery past. Moreover, Ellen’s “pinched, parched look” has disappeared as by magic, “and the ghastly paleness of the sweet features was tinted with a more lifelike hue.” The nightmare of hunger is dispelled as if by magic. This melodramatic plotline ignores the social conditions which exacerbated the wide-scale food crisis, creating the impression that Ireland is an Edenic country once more.27 A similar forced happy ending can be found in Nolan’s novel. The flint-hearted, originally Eng‑ lish landlord Biggs, who is responsible for many evictions on his estate, goes insane. After a failed ­assault on his life, Biggs suffers from “convulsive tremors” and is tormented by nightmares in which he is haunted by people who were sent prematurely to their graves due to his policies. He dies in a mental hospital, “chained like a dog to an iron bed,” having become “untractable,” and inclined toward “attempted self-destruction.” The Catholic tenantry, who had suffered immensely from the pressure of conversion that he had exerted upon them, are even more relieved when the relentless Jacob Margin is replaced by the former, beloved and compassionate landagent De Courcy. The novel ends on a restoration of a pre-Famine status quo that brings peace and stability to the tenantry. The narrative conclusion is marked by a utopian poetical justice that ignores ongoing class struggles in post-Famine Ireland.28

Recurring Literary Mode: The Pastoral In these early Irish-American works of fiction, the plot transition from suffering to redemption is ­accompanied by a rejuvenation of nature. In McCormack’s Grudge, Myles’ brave attempt to save Harry Mahon’s life and his subsequent restoration as a farmer on Walcroft’s estate occur almost ­simultaneously with a regeneration of the soil and crops. The Potatoes were ‘getting the better’ of the disease; and from this very period every year was better for the farmer than the previous one. Corn, hay, potatoes, every article of produce began to look up, and the farmers began to look up after them. Furthermore, farmers are even getting better prices for their yields: “Labour began, too, to bear a much better price in the market than it had ever done in Ireland.”29 183

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In similar fashion, Bessy Conway’s return to Ireland is marked by an overnight transformation of the landscape from wasteland into a spring carpet. Sadlier’s novel describes how the blighted cops and “arid soil” change into “green fields […] dotted over with white daisies and yellow butter‑ cups, the pale primrose—‘dower of sweetest memories!’—was peeping forth on every sunny bank.” Spring therefore symbolizes the end of the hunger crisis in Bessy Conway. Likewise, The Byrnes of Glengoulah evokes the image of recuperated nature in spring to emphasize the re-establishment of harmony on the Glengoulah grounds: “May came at last, and with the daisies and primroses came the summons to the landlord’s entertainment.”30 Can we explain why these happy resolutions, marked by a restoration of a bucolic Irish scene, feature more prevalently in early Irish-American Famine fiction? After all, the 1860s, during which these texts were published, gave no reason to be optimistic about post-Famine Ireland in terms of landlord-tenant relationships. The problems of exorbitantly high rent rates and evictions had far from disappeared: in 1866, Isaac Butt addressed the “problems of Ireland’s condition” in that the tenure system fuels the disloyalty of the people to “the whole system of landed propriety.” In similar fash‑ ion, in 1867, Lord Dufferin expressed concerns about the “iniquity of the laws affecting the tenure of land” in Ireland which, in his view, led to mass deprivation and emigration.31 An explanation can be found by looking more closely at the literary mode of the pastoral, which clearly informs these happy narrative conclusions. The longstanding literary tradition of the pastoral portrays the countryside as an Edenic place, or “locus amoenus,” that embodies what Terry Gifford calls an “aesthetic landscape that is devoid of conflict and tension.” Indeed, these works of fiction not only portray beautiful natural scenes at their narrative conclusions, but also suggest a restoration of harmony between the various social classes in the countryside. In Conway’s novel, Bessy’s return also marks a change in behavior with the Protestant landlord’s son Henry Herbert, who had devel‑ oped a love interest in her. From a gambling good-for-nothing who showed no respect for religion, he transforms into a God-fearing, virtuous young man who, moreover, converts to the Catholic church: “He had sown his wild oats, as the people said, and his real character was matured under the saving influence of religion.” At the end of the Bessy Conway, the landed and tenant classes are not only living in unprecedented harmony together, sharing the same religious conviction; they are united through the marriage of Bessy and Henry. The narrative imagines a post-Famine Ireland in which class struggle appears to have been resolved.32 In Nolan’s novel, the arrival of spring brings complete happiness to the community: the Famine days are over, and the new landlord Bentley erects an “immense marquee,” puts in “long tables… covered with substantials of every variety,” and orders pipers and fiddlers to provide repasts for the tenantry of the estate. There is a communal gathering in which all social classes together can enjoy leisure, thereby confirming the sense of a pastoral scene. Additionally, the beloved agent De Courcy and his family also convert to Catholicism: on a trip to Rome they “were baptized, and all made their first communion.” The happy ending of McCormack’s Grudge is similarly marked by a transcend‑ ence of class and cultural differences. Mr Walcroft realizes he wants to reside on his estate among his tenants rather than being an absentee landlord, and takes up “his permanent residence at Curranure.” He has also become acclimatized to the local environment: “from constant practice, he is enabled to walk the bogs.” The regenerated land interconnects all classes.33 The ways in which these early Irish-American Famine narratives tap into the registers of the pas‑ toral in their resolutions can be interpreted as a form of diasporic nostalgia for an idealized homeland. Paul Alpers’ seminal study on the pastoral shows that the bucolic landscapes and communities play a prominent role in nostalgic narratives of a lost past or country. This certainly applies to the represen‑ tations of Ireland in many early Irish-American stories and novels which are characterized by what Svetlana Boym calls “restorative nostalgia”: an “emphasis on nostos” that “proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps.” Even if post-Famine rural Ireland is far from a perfect 184

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society marred by ongoing hunger, class conflict, evictions, and agrarian violence, these literary texts imagine an Edenic Ireland from which all these problems have been resolved. They idealize a home‑ land in the context of a sometimes hostile host society.34 It is important to note, however, that there are early Irish-American Famine texts which draw an entirely different picture. These narratives envisage Ireland as a Paradise lost, and the happy endings that their characters meet occur in urban America. Furthermore, their successes in the New World do not depend on assimilation, but rather on maintaining a distinct Irish network and identity. In Nora Brady’s Vow, the eponymous heroine attains success in finding decent employment through her close contacts with other Irish immigrants to Boston. Through her close ties with other Irish men and women in diaspora, such as Mrs. McGinnis, she hears of a “respectable situation” as a domestic; furthermore, through the aid of employees at the Boston based Irish-American newspaper the Pilot, Nora eventually manages to track down John Halloran and helps to reunite him with her former mistress.35 Loyalty to one’s own ethnicity and faith is also shown to be rewardful in the earlier discussed Captain Patrick Malony; or, the Irishman in Alabama. The main protagonist, Patrick, leaves for America when “the times were growing worse and worse” and there “[t]here were many mouths to feed, and little work and poor pay.” Once there, Patrick has to overcome severe bias against “the idolatrous Church of Rome,” and his employer, Captain Satford, initially takes offence with his “Pop‑ ish superstition.” Despite all the hostility that Patrick encounters regarding his religious conviction, he remains true to his native creed and morality: “He was a brave, consistent, practical Catholic. […] After his Religion, Patrick was anxious to do honor to the country of his birth, and to that of his adop‑ tion.” Serving the new homeland by hard work as a shipmate on a steamer, but retaining typically Irish qualities, is the key to success: he gains the respect of Captain Satford and, after several promo‑ tions, can buy his relatives “a pretty cottage in one of the sweet alleys of Montgomery” and himself finds a “comfortable, genial and even elegant home.”36 The plot eventually also steers toward a conversion narrative: Patrick and the Captain’s daughter fall in love but cannot marry, as her father will “disinherit her” if she “dares to turn Papist.” After an explosion on the steamer during which Captain Satford gets mortally injured, Patrick sends for Father Daton and receives “the last sacraments of the Church […] with tears of contrition and the most edifying devotion.” Patrick and Ellen, who meanwhile has also embraced the Catholic faith, eventually become wedded. This Famine narrative, mainly set in America, is not that different from the previously explored texts that take place in Ireland during the years of mass hunger: they all dis‑ pel the painful memories of starvation and distress by happy resolutions which bring prosperity and harmonious class relations. Furthermore, the Irish-Catholic working class and upper Protestant class are brought closer together through the conversion of the latter to the Church of Rome.37

Conclusion The idea of a recuperated, pastoral old Ireland or a promising “new Ireland” in diaspora appear to be inspired by Famine immigrants’ difficult assimilation across the Atlantic. As “Two Sides to a ­Question,” published on 5 March 1859 in Boston based O’Neill’s Pictorial, wrote: In no land have the Irish melted and mingled down with the people and became willing to be absorbed in the national element, so much as in America, and if there are any distinct traits of national character still adhered to by them, save love for fatherland, it is owing to the bigotry and intolerance in the native born… who instead of receiving them with a true Republican wel‑ come, throw every obstacle in their way; who, instead of inspiring confidence in the stranger, receive them with suspicion. 185

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As we have seen, these kinds of generally shared sentiments of discrimination and exclusion suffered by Irish immigrants have left their imprint on the ways in which fiction written by or for the IrishAmerican diaspora represents the Famine past.38 Irish-American novels and short stories interpret the Famine as a catastrophe that was aggravated by religious, ethnic, and class hostilities, creating the impression that the Anglo-Irish upper classes and English government were strongly to blame for the Catholic population’s plight. Famine suf‑ fering caused by religious steadfastness in the face of pressures of conversion frames the Famine in narratives of Catholic martyrdom; plotlines in which Irish immigrant characters withstand pros‑ elytization in the New World mirror these narrative templates concerning the Famine-stricken home‑ land. What is more, characters are rewarded for their faithfulness to the Catholic Church, and often this early transatlantic Famine fiction incorporate storylines of counter conversion– a process which bridges gaps of ethnicity, class, and religion. These narratives moreover utilize the pastoral mode to endorse this image of an idyllic homeland, thereby displacing the more arduous dimensions of ongo‑ ing sectarianism in post-Famine Ireland.

Notes 1 See O’Neill, Famine Irish, 92; Fanning, The Irish Voice, 76. 2 Donohue, “Mary Anne Sadlier (1820–1903),” 333. Fanning describes some of these publishing companies, such as Patrick Donahue’s, in The Irish Voice, 72–114. 3 Kelly, Ireland’s Great Famine, xiv; Bond and Rapson, “Introduction,” 19; Assmann and Conrad, “Introduction,” 2. 4 See also Corporaal, Relocated Memories, 17–18; McMahon, “Ireland and the Birth,” 9; See also McMahon, The Global Dimensions. 5 Fanning, The Irish Voice, 72; For the term “postmemory”, see Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 14; Corporaal, Cusack and Janssen, “‘In Ireland I’d Have Starved’,” 130–131; Cusack, “Famine Memory,” 157. 6 O’Reilly, “Our Own Green,” 40; Wertsch, Voices of Collective Remembering, 6. 7 Sadlier, New Lights, 18, 33. 8 Nolan, The Byrnes of Glengoulah, 147. 9 “Anna Hanson Dorsey,” 116; Dorsey, Nora Brady’s Vow, 70, 123. 10 Dorsey, Nora Brady’s Vow, 124; Mrs J. Sadlier, New Lights, 247–248. 11 Meagher, Notices, 12. Rafferty confirms this view in The Catholic Church, 26. However, he adds nuance to this perspective by claiming that “Catholic places of worship in the early to mid nineteenth century” were often “unrecognizable” as such (95). 12 Larkin, “The Devotional Revolution,” 625; Miller, “Irish Catholicism,” 82. 13 Wosh, Spreading the Word, 12; Maguire, The Irish in America, xi. 14 See also Howes, Colonial Crossings, 144; Kenny, American Irish, 114; Miller, Exiles and Immigrants, 323. 15 McCaffrey, The Irish Catholic Diaspora, 83–84; Huyssen, Diaspora and Nation, 149. 16 “The Protestant Propaganda,” 4. 17 O’Neill, Famine Irish, 92, 98, 107; see Read, The Great Famine, 131–184; and Gray, Famine, Land, espe‑ cially chapter 2. O’Brien, The Dalys of Dalystown, 499. 18 Meaney, The Confessors of Connaught, 282. 19 “Rebel Scenes” (24 May 1851): 2. 20 T. L. N., Captain Patrick Malony (16 June 1860): 1. 21 “The Emigrant,” 803. 22 Mitchel, Jail Journal, 17–18. 23 “Physical Condition of Ireland,” 2; “Famine and Exhoration,” 1. The controversial idea that the Irish popula‑ tion could have been saved if the grain that was cultivated for markets in poor northern English cities had not been exported has been questioned in recent Famine historiography. See for instance, Gray, Famine, Land and Politics. “Physical Condition of Ireland,” 2; Brady, “Ireland’s Mission,” 194. 24 Hoare, “The Black Potatoes,” 49. 25 The novel was later republished in the Dublin Saturday Magazine in 1865. Curtis, McCormack’s Grudge (20 September 1862), 192. 26 Curtis, McCormack’s Grudge (27 September 1862), 207–208.

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Irish-American Famine Literature 27 Sadlier, Bessy Conway, 259, 278. 28 Nolan, The Byrnes of Glengoulah, 326, 332, 330. 29 Curtis, McCormack’s Grudge (27 September 1862), 208. 30 Sadlier, Bessy Conway, 264, 298; Nolan, The Byrnes of Glengoulah, 346. 31 Butt, Land Tenure in Ireland, 8; Dufferin, Irish Emigration, 2. 32 For a further discussion of this pastoral concept of a place of happiness, see Alpers, What Is Pastoral?, 6; Gifford, Pastoral, 11; Sadlier, Bessy Conway, 315. 33 Nolan, The Byrnes of Glengoulah, 347, 358; Curtis, McCormack’s Grudge (27 September 1862), 209. 34 Alpers, What Is Pastoral?, 28; Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 41. 35 Dorsey, Nora Brady’s Vow, 87. 36 T.L.N., Captain Patrick Malony (16 June 1860), 1. 37 T.L.N., Captain Patrick Malony (9 June 1860), 1; (16 June 1860), 1; (2 June 1860); (23 June 1860), 1. 38 “Two Sides to a Question,” 56.

Bibliography Primary Sources Bowles, Emily. Irish Diamonds; or the Chronicles of Peterstown. London: Thomas Richardson and Son, 1864. Brady, W. Maziere. “Ireland’s Mission.” Catholic World 11 (1870): 194. Butt, Isaac. Land Tenure in Ireland; a Plea for the Celtic Race. Dublin: John Falconer, 1866. Clington, Allen H. Frank O’Donnell. Dublin and London: James Duffy, 1861. Curtis, Robert. “McCormack’s Grudge.” Irish American, September 20–27, 1862. Dorsey, Anna Hanson. Nora Brady’s Vow and Mona the Vestal. Boston, MA: Patrick Donahue, 1869. Dufferin, Lord. Irish Emigration and the Tenure of Land in Ireland. London: Willis, Sotheran and Co., 1867. “Famine and Exhortation,” Boston Pilot, January 10, 1846. Hoare, Mrs. “The Black Potatoes.” In Shamrock Leaves; or Tales and Sketches from Ireland, 32–50. Dublin and London: J.M’ Glashan, Patrick and Oakey, 1851. Kickham, Charles Joseph. Sally Cavanagh; or the Untenanted Graves of Tipperary. Dublin: J.J. Lalor, 1869. Meagher, William. Notices of the Life and Character of … David Murray Late [Roman Catholic] Archbishop of Dublin, as Contained in the Commemorative Oration Pronounced … on Occasion of His Grace’s Month’s Mind. With Historical and Biographical Notes. Dublin: Gerard Bellew, 1853. Meaney, Mary L. The Confessors of Connaught; or the Tenants of a Lord Bishop, A Tale of Our Times. Philadel‑ phia, PA: Peter F. Cunningham, 1865. Mitchel, John. Jail Journal; or, Five Years in British Prisons. New York: Office of “The Citizen”, 1854. Nolan, Alice. The Byrnes of Glengoulah: A True Tale. New York: P. O’Shea, 1868. O’Brien, Dillon. The Dalys of Dalystown. St. Paul: Pioneer Printing, 1866. O’Brien, Richard Baptist. Ailey Moore: a Tale of the Times. London: Charles Dolman, 1856. O’Reilly, John Boyle. “Our Own Green Island Home.” Emerald, February 19, 1870. “Physical Condition of Ireland.” Boston Pilot, April 10, 1847. Quigley, Father Hugh. The Cross and the Shamrock. Boston, MA: Patrick Donahue, 1853. “Rebel Scenes.” Boston Pilot, May 24–July 5, 1851. Sadlier, Mrs. J. Bessy Conway; or, the Irish Girl in America. New York: D. and J. Sadlier, 1862. Sadlier, Mrs. J. New Lights; or Life in Galway. New York: D. and J. Sadlier, 1853. “The Emigrant.” Catholic World 11, no. 66 (1870): 800–806. “The Protestant Propaganda.” Boston Pilot, May 13, 1858. T.L.N. “Captain Patrick Malony; or, the Irishman in Alabama.” Pilot, June 2–23,1860. “Two Sides to a Question.” O’Neill’s Irish Pictorial, March 5, 1859.

Secondary Sources Alpers, Paul. What Is Pastoral? Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1996. “Anna Hanson Dorsey.” In Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5, edited by Charles Herbermann, 116. New York: Rob‑ ert Appleton Company, 1913.

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Marguérite Corporaal Assmann, Aleida, and Sebastian Conrad. “Introduction.” In Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, edited by Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, 1–17. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Bond, Lucy, and Jessica Rapson. “Introduction.” In The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory between and Beyond Borders, edited by Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson, 1–26. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Corporaal, Marguérite. Relocated Memories: The Great Famine in Irish ad Diaspora Fiction, 1846–1870. Syra‑ cuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2017. Corporaal, Marguérite, Christopher Cusack, and Lindsay Janssen. “‘In Ireland I’d Have Starved’: North Ameri‑ can Fiction about the Great Irish Famine, 1850–1918.” New Hibernia Review 25, no. 2 (2021): 129–154. Cusack, Chris. “Famine Memory and Diasporic Identity in US Periodical Fiction, 1891–1918.” Symbiosis 19, no. 2 (2015): 153–169. Donohue, Stacey. “Mary Anne Sadlier (1820–1903).” In Catholic Women Writers: A Bio‑Bibliographical Sour‑ cebook, edited by Mary R. Reichardt, 333. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001. Fanning, Charles. The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish American Fiction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. Gifford, Terry. Pastoral. London: Routledge, 1999. Gray, Peter. Famine, Land and Politics. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Howes, Marjorie. Colonial Crossings: Figures in Irish Literary History. Dublin: Field Day, 2006. Huyssen, Andreas. “Diaspora and Nation: Migration into Other Pasts.” New German Critique 88 (2003): 147–164. Kelly, Mary C. Ireland’s Great Famine in Irish American History. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. London: Longman, 2000. Larkin, Emmett. “The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850–75.” American Historical Review 77, no. 3 (1972): 625–652. Maguire, John Francis. The Irish in America. New York: J. and D. Sadlier, 1868. McCaffrey, Lawrence J. The Irish Catholic Diaspora in America. Washington, DC: Catholic University of Amer‑ ica Press, 1997. McMahon, Cian T. “Ireland and the Birth of the Irish‑American Press, 1842–61.” American Periodicals 19, no. 1 (2009): 5–20. McMahon, Cian T. The Global Dimensions of Irish Identity: Race, Nation, and the Popular Press, 1840–1880. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Miller, David W. “Irish Catholicism and the Great Famine.” Journal of Social History 9 (1975): 81–98. Miller, Kerby. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. O’Neill, Peter. Famine Irish and the American Racial State. New York: Routledge, 2017. Rafferty, Oliver. The Catholic Church and the Protestant State. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008. Read, Charles. The Great Famine in Ireland and Britain’s Financial Crisis. London: Boydell & Brewer, 2022. Stern, Andrew H. Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross: Catholic‑Protestant Relations in the Old South. Tusca‑ loosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012. Wakin, Edward. Enter the Irish American. Lincoln, NE: I‑Universe, 2002. Wertsch, James V. Voices of Collective Remembering. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Wosh, Peter. Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth‑Century America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni‑ versity Press, 1994.

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PART 3

After the Famine

14 HOW REMEMBERING THE FAMINE SHAPED IRISH-AMERICAN IDENTITY Mary C. Kelly

More than two million Irish people fled Ireland’s Great Famine between 1845 and 1855. Those who survived the grim transatlantic voyage sought sanctuary from Ireland’s devastation, and hopes of new beginnings, in the United States. Their mass arrival overshadowed colonial-era Ulster-Scots cultural profiles, and altered the ethnic identity accordingly. Other chapters in this volume explore the extraor‑ dinary Irish mass migration to America, the Catholic Church’s response to the Famine, and American reactions to the immigrant floodtide, through literary, theatrical, folkloric, and other lenses. These contributions reveal intensifying nativist perceptions of the Irish as unsuited to American citizenship, together with changing attitudes forged by the Civil War and ethnic advancement in post-Famine decades. This chapter considers contemporary challenges faced by the incoming Irish, and ways in which the Famine’s meaning and legacy shaped the ethnic identity over time.1 Several considerations bear mentioning at the outset. Predictably, the Famine’s magnitude altered the lives of all who arrived in New York, Boston, and other American harbors. Tenants, la‑ borers, and dispossessed smallholders who already suffered economic vulnerability before sight‑ ing a dilapidated Lowell dwellinghouse or a Bowery tenement could not soften either the blow of departure from Ireland, or widespread American aversion to their presence. As Hidetaka Hirota and other authors illustrate, Irish immigrant labor proved welcome, but negative associations with Ireland’s calamitous crop failure and the objectionable Catholicism of its refugees quickly engulfed the Famine Irish. These challenges understandably affected remembrance of the episode within the history of America’s Irish. Contributions to this volume by E. Moore Quinn and Cara Delay, and Marguérite Corporaal document cultural and literary channels through which ethnic priorities evolved. What follows builds on this material to reveal the Famine as a transformative historical episode that generated a shifting, and occasionally uncertain, course of remembrance between the mid-1800s and the 1990s. The forms and mechanisms of Famine memory examined here begin with those arising within contemporary responses to incoming shiploads of Irish refu‑ gees in the Famine years, as the next section documents, and evolution of these constructions of remembrance within ethnic Irish political and religious spheres from the 1850s to the early 1900s. From there, subsequent sections address the alignment of twentieth-century impulses, catalysts and modes of remembrance with changing Irish-American cultural imperatives; which, in turn, paved the way for conclusive, self-confident engagement with the Famine’s memory and signifi‑ cance by the century’s end.2

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-18

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Contemporary Reactions to the Famine Exodus The impact of the loss of Ireland’s potato crop reached American shores as early as autumn 1845 and escalated as conditions worsened over ensuing years. Economic circumstances had deteriorated over prior decades, but the pathogen that corroded the potato in furrowed fields by September 1845 and through the next three years, coupled with the British government’s failure to alleviate consequent devastation, overwhelmed Ireland’s most vulnerable population sectors. In the fall of 1845, the scale of impending crisis could not readily be predicted, and memories of past famines that had come and gone lingered. But conditions by 1847, or Black ’47, elevated hunger, death, and emigration to un‑ precedented levels. Shiploads of emigrants landing in teeming American shanty-towns and tenements quickly bolstered latent antipathies to largely Catholic tenant-farmers and smallholders making up the Famine influx and eclipsed older Scots-Irish ethnic associations in America.3 Reaction to this floodtide swelled rapidly in harbors berthing emigrant ship traffic, particularly in New York, where almost three-quarters of all who sailed for America came ashore. Strident contem‑ porary press reports publicized distressed conditions in western Irish seaboard counties and collapsed seed and food resources, even as outbound shipments of agricultural produce headed for mainland Britain remained at their current levels. Impressions of a shattered rural underclass melded with cov‑ erage of exhausted official and charitable aid resources and beleaguered British administrators who prioritized free-market economic ideological pillars over Ireland’s suffering tenantry. These attitudes subsequently hardened within nationalist political currents and land-agitation movements duly trans‑ ported across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, threatening political pressures and survival-challenges facing Catholic Irish immigrants suffused initial reactions to the Famine, and laid the foundations for future forms of remembrance.4 Famine immigrants typically aspired to settle in English-speaking urban centers. As yet consid‑ ered “a recent offshoot of Britain’s overseas empire,” the United States proved a favored destination. Following dreadful leave-taking scenes shot through with displacement and exile themes, the grim voyage of between six weeks to several months dominated contemporary accounts of the crushing immigrant wave. The finality of departure from home, family, and nationality offered hope of de‑ liverance from starvation but flung refugees into a bewildering cauldron of sorrowful anticipation. Buffeted by pressures that both defined and limited them upon reaching American harborsides, these vulnerable Irish transported a dark crucible of initial reaction to the Famine. Bundles of meager per‑ sonal possessions heaved aboard ocean-bound brigs later branded with the “coffin ship” designation reflected their fraught condition, as did private caches of internal baggage that infused their corre‑ spondence with loved ones left behind.5 Press coverage entrenched images of abandoned villages and overwhelmed workhouses within the graphic transatlantic narrative that quickly materialized. Depictions of a priest gathering villag‑ ers together before departure, for example, tragically encapsulated the Famine’s impact. In 1851, an eyewitness cited “splendid emigrant ships that ply between Liverpool and New York” and “in‑ creasing swarms of Irish” navigating sudden exile. “I came to a sharp turn in the road,” the writer observed, and immediately that my rev. friend was recognised, the people gathered about him in the most af‑ fectionate manner … He stood for awhile surrounded by the old and the young, the strong and the infirm, on bended knees, and he turned his moistened eyes towards heaven, and asked the blessing of the Almighty upon the wanderers during their long and weary journey. The scene captured feelings of inevitability and finality associated with Famine-era departure—­ motifs that soon infused personal correspondence dispatched across the Atlantic by immigrant Irish 192

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“wanderers” to those they left behind. These images powerfully amplified political references to the dark episode over the coming decades.6 Echoes of earlier experiences of hunger and death lent tragic familiarity to, and framed early re‑ membrance themes within, the burgeoning repository. Among these, stock images of cargo vessels and two-masted brigs that transported Famine emigrants across the Atlantic, such as the Quebec-built Dunbrody, the Amelia Mary, or the Lady Milton, embodied crucial dimensions of the experience. Together with sorrowful embarkation scenes, emigrant ships furnished an affecting symbol for the emigrant experience. An 1848 reference by nationalist campaigner Thomas D’Arcy McGee to “sail‑ ing coffins” belied the term’s relatively limited deployment in these years, but its ready exemplifica‑ tion of the brutal voyage and hopes of salvation rooted the image in future channels of remembrance. The specter of a creaking, crowded three-master under full sail encapsulated dominant themes of adversity, loss, death, and endurance as important modules of remembrance.7 The stark language of contemporary reporting on Ireland’s devastation and the upsurge in trans‑ atlantic emigrant traffic underscored the scale of the disaster by 1847. Local and national press re‑ porting left readers in little doubt as to its magnitude, and their evocations of starvation and death rooted representations of national disaster and emigration as predictable focuses of remembrance. “What appalling scenes disfigure the face of this unhappy country,” [meaning Ireland] the Boston Pilot noted, in language also familiar to readers of Philadelphia’s Catholic Herald and other ethnic newspapers, while New York’s Times, Tribune, and Herald broadsheets also mapped the Famine’s course. Contemporary observers struggled to capture the degree of suffering in western and south‑ ern Irish counties by 1846 and 1847. Eye-witnesses encountered ghastly instances of hunger and eviction, anguished funerals and mass burials. The unprecedented scale of human degradation in the modern era generated compelling copy, while concurrently exacerbating anti-Irish rhetoric and grounding currents of remembrance. Stories of women deploying physical force against administra‑ tors of British relief efforts, for example, underscored negative perceptions. The “ruined, black walls of a village ‘cleared,’” [sic], the Pilot described for readers in 1848, and “herds of naked children, emaciated women, decrepid [sic] old men, and sullen young men, crawling, shivering, and famishing in the cold winter air…” could not but ingrain adverse impressions of suffering and calamity within a contemporary American worldview heavily influenced by the popular press, as Debra Reddin van Tuyll demonstrates in an earlier chapter.8 Ireland’s abrupt loss of population and sweeping changes in land use likewise informed early stages of remembrance, particularly when expressed by nationalist or clerical authorities within the veritable “Irish spiritual empire” then under construction. In February 1848, “to the exclusion of most everything else,” the Boston Pilot reproduced letters from four prominent clerics including Arch‑ bishop John MacHale of Tuam and “‘our own’ champion in America, the learned Bishop Hughes.” Appealing for social justice and condemning England’s lack of political will to address starvation and rising lawlessness, these leaders contextualized ethnic prejudice, religious struggle, and nationalist aspirations for readerships on both sides of the Atlantic. Rural-smallholder losses, demonstrated by “dismantled cottages” in these accounts, became “monuments to attest the truth of their simple and artless story.” Such reports penned by prominent church leaders circulated widely, and depictions of peasants “crying out to me for food for that one day’s sustenance, and shrieking with agony that they were now thrown on the world to starve, banished forever from the shelter of their little cottages,” solidified themes of death, survival, faith, and nationality as formidable planks of remembrance. Graphic descriptions of destitution by lettered men (and occasionally women) who had traversed Ireland also infused the growing repository. In tandem with streams of correspondence between emi‑ grants and those they left behind, contemporary testimony preserved connections between swelling immigrant communities in America and the native Irish at home and anchored stock themes of re‑ membrance in tear-stained missives and myriad publications. These writings copper-fastened the 193

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Famine’s name within the ethnic mindset, bridged their enclaves with the native home across the Atlantic, and crucially contributed to the Famine-Catholic immigrant identity under construction in the mid-century decades.9 Charitable aid outlets also expanded the memory-narrative, particularly those spearheaded by political and church leaders. Fund drives organized by the General Committee for the Relief of the Suffering Poor in Ireland, among others, afforded Bishop Hughes of New York prime opportunities to foreground themes of loss, emigration, and British administrative failure to mass readerships and congregational audiences. His Lecture on the Antecedent Causes of the Irish Famine in 1847, for example, supplied more than a bookish reflection on the Famine’s impact. The Tyrone-born emigrant who became New York’s first Archbishop by 1850 occupied singular status in mid-century America. Arguably the most prominent Irish Catholic figure in the country, Hughes commanded an influential public platform. His Antecedent Causes fused familiar themes of Irish loss and political struggle doc‑ umented in legions of handwritten letters home. Hughes’ illumination of Ireland’s “famine-shrunken heart” and “horrors of a calamity which …threatens almost the annihilation of a whole Christian peo‑ ple” chronicled the Great Hunger’s effects in his customary vigorous fashion, but his consignment of “the primary, original causes” at the feet of English “incompleteness of conquest,” with descriptions of “bad government” and a “vicious system of social economy,” left listeners and reading audiences in no doubt of his judgment of the British government. The document linked anti-Irish attitudes with British administrative wrongs and effectively politicized the impact of the Famine. He characterized its mass devastation in searing, partisan language, strengthening rising remembrance themes and granting future campaigners for Ireland’s independence a prophetic narrative arc.10

Famine-Era Immigrant Settlement and Institution-Building Under the Famine’s Shadow Meanwhile, negative impressions of Catholic Irishness continued to proliferate. Adverse reaction to the immigrant tide by American city administrators, cultural institutions, and nativist cohorts who viewed the Irish incursion as a threat to cherished national values added layers to the Famine-memory narrative. As J. J. Lee noted regarding contemporary stereotyping, “Both Paddy’s nature and behavior precluded material success.” Famine immigrants familiar with cultural and political restrictions throughout Ire‑ land’s colonial history confronted fresh iterations of these attitudes in urban American neighborhoods. Pervasive depictions of the Irish as indigents, whose labor alone permitted their entry into America, aligned with commercial, industrial, and Western-settlement imperatives in framing the Irish ethnic identity, and also foreclosing opportunities to reckon publicly with the Famine’s impact. Irish political advancement on city, state, and national levels, together with Civil War service in Northern regiments, lessened nativist invective, as David T. Gleeson’s chapter affirms, but immigrant Irish public engage‑ ment with the Famine risked deepening associations with death, disease, national disaster, and inferior‑ ity, at a point when beneficial assimilation pathways had become increasingly accessible.11 In such a fraught cultural and socio-economic context, the pages of fiction could probe the course and impact of the Famine more freely than politicians, clerics, or ethnic community leaders, as Mar‑ guérite Corporaal documents in this volume. Novels that interwove the episode within their plot‑ lines and character-developments excavated grim deposits of the Famine’s force and shaped layers of memory in years that lacked other public outlets. Novels and short fiction pieces, together with interiorized memories sustaining within families through folklore and tradition, as Cara Delay and E. Moore Quinn reveal here, exposed the vexing duality of Irish advancement and ethnic struggle overshadowed by the Famine’s dark memory.12 Over the same years, institutions such as Fordham University (originally St. John’s College), the Irish Emigrant Aid Society, and the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank on Chambers Street in New 194

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York testified to ethnic advancement and evidence of higher savings’ rates than previously realized for the Famine generation. The Catholic Church likewise provided a cornerstone of support and ethnic significance in neighborhoods heavily populated by Famine refugees, many of whom hailed from the same county or townland in Ireland, and who maintained close relations. The labors of Archbishop Hughes and his construction plans for St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue further el‑ evated the Catholic Irish profile and identity, as did powerful visual reminders of Famine-immigrant presence and impact in Boston, including a Fort Hill Unitarian church re-consecration to St. Vincent de Paul, Chapel of the Holy Family expansion, and a St. James’ Church redesign.13

Famine Memory as Nationalist Political Capital in Later Nineteenth Century Many of the same parishioners in these and other ethnic strongholds supported Ireland’s struggle for independence, in forms ranging from benign social associations to militant activist campaigns. Irish nationalist support in America hearkened back to post-1798 Rebellion years, but the impulse to generate material and moral support for the cause broadened exponentially in Famine years. Cor‑ relations between the Famine calamity, mass migration, and concern for Ireland’s political status are well-documented, including motive, objective, identity, and other factors. Supporters of nationalist agendas in post-Famine decades updated strains of a late-1700s “foundation myth of dispossession,” Guy Beiner argues, within grassroots and intellectual channels that facilitated public reference to the Famine in decades offering few other public mechanisms to embrace memories of the dark chapter.14 It is understandable that immigrants who retained distressing memories of “emaciated forms, sunken eyes and pallid cheeks” witnessed by Frederick Douglass in the first months of the Great Famine would find a ready outlet for graphic references to the episode in nationalist organizations. Within these groups, the personal experiences of those for whom the meaning of “exile” persisted with such resonance could be not only engaged, but also channeled within powerful political agendas. How could immigrants forget debilitating memories of horrific scenes, or separate them from cher‑ ished images of home, family, and country? Over the course of the post-Famine decades, when few public spaces permitted deliberation of the Famine’s effects, the Catholic Church, the ethnic press, and nationalist organizations empowered Irish communities in American urban centers to name and confront a pernicious ethnic Irish burden that defied forthright public engagement.15 These collectives and fundraising drives constructed potent “meta-narrative(s)” for Famine mem‑ ory. Capitalizing on venerable nationalist traditions as well as the shattering experiences of separation from Ireland, these venues empowered public articulation of Irish grievances encapsulated within, and obviously aggravated by, the Famine. Drawing on immediate experiences of starvation and loss, the Fenian Brotherhood, Clan na Gael, the Land League, and other memberships cultivated an im‑ portant resource for immigrants seeking ways to explore the Famine’s consequence and impact on their lives. Those who landed in America “powerfully fueled by Famine memory,” J. J. Lee remarked, knew well the episode’s grim role in mobilizing their transatlantic voyage. They melded resentments and a powerful sense of injustice within radical nationalist charters, missions, and programs, joining and financially supporting them in large numbers. Fenian and Clan members found safe spaces and new forms of agency to launch charges of indifference and failure against the English government and to expand these concerns to encompass hostile white Protestants in America. The oral and pub‑ lished testimony they generated invoked a British lack of sympathy for the fate of Irish lives to justify a range of their actions, including use of force by some leaders. Recording harrowing reflections on the transatlantic crossing, rank, heaving tenement neighborhoods, and cultural and faith-based antagonisms, members stamped the Famine at the heart of their agendas. As Union Army Brigadier General James Lawlor Kiernan noted in a Fenian speech in 1864, the episode ranked alongside the foremost of British perfidies, including: 195

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wholesale massacres and outrage by the ruthless invader…the laws which made learning in an Irishman a crime, the practice of his religion a felony; the mounds beneath which lie moulder‑ ing rows of the famine stricken, starved to death by English legislation; the soup shop; the tract reader; the tithe proctor…the fearful array holds a large place in his memory. Delivered by a decorated military surgeon at a point of rising commendation for Irish Civil War ser‑ vice and associated prospects for acceptability as American citizens, as David T. Gleeson examines in this volume, this linkage of the Famine’s lethal force with nascent Irish nationalist aspirations took on powerful resonance.16 Likewise, speaking at the New York Academy of Music in 1872, the Very Reverend Thomas N. Burke reminded his audience that nationalist leader Daniel O’Connell sadly witnessed “Famine in the land” before dying in 1847, “and the Emancipator—the Father of Ireland—was compelled to see his people perish, and he had not the means to save them. O’Connell’s heart broke…” By the 1900s, po‑ liticization of the Great Hunger during Ireland’s revolutionary years between the 1910s and Irish Free State formation in 1921 sustained the Famine as a justification for radical actions. A handwritten list of nationalist keystones on New York’s Madison Avenue Hotel Seville stationery at this point con‑ firmed the Famine’s name in independence campaigns. Its listing is the only one underlined, in a lit‑ any including: “The Ninety-Eight Men,” Robert Emmet, “The Forty-Eight Men,” Daniel O’Connell, O’Donovan Rossa, the Land League, Pearse, Casement, Mrs. Green, those executed in 1916, and the “Tan War.” The piece concludes: “England asks to talk it over The Cause is sold again. will we go on and finish the job or die in the same old way?” [sic]. The document starkly concludes: “Men Starve. Food Leaves the Country Emigration Despair” [sic]. In short, the Famine’s name persisted at the core of nationalist rhetoric in America and contributed to Irish-American ethnic identity in evident ways.17

The Evolution of Great Famine Memory in the Twentieth Century By the early-to-mid-1900s, the passing of the Famine generation opened a new phase for America’s Irish communities and their evolving ethnic identity. Remembrance of the Great Hunger shifted ac‑ cordingly. Economic, political, and educational advancement dulled the Famine’s dark shadow and edged its memory onto the pages of history. By the late 1920s, themes of exile, faithfulness to the struggle for Ireland’s independence, and moral support against ethnic negativity faded and even dis‑ solved, as Irish Americans considered Irish independence substantially, if not fully, realized. Memo‑ ries of death and displacement, tinged with melancholy reflection, dispersed into inherited family, community narratives, and pages of fiction. We may ask, how meaningful was the closing of the Fam‑ ine crucible for second-generation, assimilating Irish Catholics celebrating John L. Sullivan’s prize‑ fights or marking young Joseph P. Kennedy’s financial rise? How would history filter or violate shards of memory? Did those embracing a hyphenated identity wish to remember a destructive episode that caused untold hardship? Did they seek to honor their parents as tough, scrappy Famine-survivors, or focus on brighter prospects? Would primary recollections interred within families eventually align with historical accounts, years before the Famine became an acceptable subject of academic study?18 Such questions reflect a stage of transition stamped by populist nationalism’s decline and the er‑ ratic archive of the Famine’s name within narrowing ethnic repositories. By the time James Cagney sported a new style of ethnic Irishness on the silver screens of the 1930s, the strident voices who drew on John Mitchel’s casting of the Famine as a British instrument of suppression had quietened, and ever-diminishing contact with the ancestral home further marginalized public engagement with the dark chapter. In years when assimilating Irish ethnics found reflection in James T. Farrell’s novels and other works of fiction, as Beth O’Leary Anish and other contributors reveal, their cultural chan‑ nels reflected those progressions. Irish Studies pioneer John V. Kelleher contemplated descendants of 196

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Famine immigrants who witnessed their parents’ survival and aspired to advance against still-evident negative stereotypes as “hidden Irish.” This generation alone merited the “Irish-American” desig‑ nation, Kelleher argued, in bridging Irish-born Famine and later native-born-American generations whose distancing from Ireland and evolving identity underscored that separation. The popularity of Irish-themed fiction maintained a measure of access to the dark chapter during these years, from Mary Anne Sadlier’s bestsellers to Harvey J. O’Higgins’ writings, among others, whose plotlines referenced the Famine to varying degrees, and who afforded second-generation readers encounters with the episode in forms other than narrow representations of impoverished exiles. Preceding essays in this volume affirm fiction’s significance in this regard, despite Patrick O’Farrell’s caution that “his‑ tory, rather than literature, or even folk-lore, has been the vehicle which has moulded the received image of the Famine.” However, as Mary M. Burke recently noted, cultural “baggage” associated with Famine-centered experiences generates ongoing literary engagement and, as Jason King has ad‑ vanced, conflicting views on the construction of memory offer good reasons to engage these debates.19 While politicians, sportsmen, entertainers, and labor leaders softened sinister “Paddy” into charm‑ ing “Jimmy” between the wars, and Finlay Peter Dunne, Eugene O’Neill, James T. Farrell, and John O’Hara rose on the same tides, the Famine’s centennial came and went. Retrospection on the 1845 death of Young Irelander Thomas Davis generally drew more interest than the Famine’s anniversary in Ireland, notwithstanding Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Éamon de Valera’s idea for a new history of the event. In the United States, formal public acknowledgement of the event lay in the future, but gentle voices began tentatively to broach its specter. Writers and commentators who were well insu‑ lated from its menace began to engage the episode and other buried aspects of their ethnic heritage. If, as Pierre Nora noted, “The quest for memory is the search for one’s history,” stewards of America’s ethnic Irish identity prepared to merge both aspirations by the middle years of the twentieth century.20 Mindful of over-presumption regarding communal remembrance, and of the erratic and oftencircumstantial character of the ethnic Irish memory-course, Irish-American research, recovery, and revival journeys encouraged inroads into Famine-memory retrieval by the 1960s. John F. Kennedy’s ascension from privileged American-Irish realms to the US presidency opened new vistas of ethnic Irish acceptability, and the Fitzgerald-Kennedy home base produced a signal, and forthright, en‑ gagement with the Famine’s history. H. A. Crosby Forbes and Henry Lee’s 1967 publication Mas‑ sachusetts Help to Ireland During the Great Famine featured a preface by Cardinal Richard Cushing and invoked the Hunger as “a little-known episode” that merited further exploration. On a broader transatlantic scale, in the same years, Cecil Woodham-Smith’s landmark book The Great Hunger expanded interest in the topic. The book, William H. Mulligan has observed, ratified “folk memories” of the episode preserved within his own family, and made an important contribution to ethnic Irish knowledge of Famine history. Meanwhile, social-justice movements that cleared ways for histori‑ cally marginalized voices to enter the historical record accorded ethnic Irish writers, activists, and cultural avatars increasing self-confidence to explore their ethnic Irishness. William Kennedy, Alice McDermott, Pete Hamill, Thomas Flanagan, Mary McCarthy, Tom Hayden, Peter Quinn, and others referenced the Famine’s shadow as variously evident, spectral, or missing in their lives, and engaged its significance in powerful and innovative ways.21 In interrogating their identities as assimilated ethnics, hyphenated American-Irish, or Americans whose heritage remained closeted, these intellectuals constructed an important source of Famine re‑ membrance that prepared the ground for later, more concerted remembrances. Against the backdrop of years of progress toward eventual peace in Northern Ireland—efforts which were actively sup‑ ported within Irish-American communities—the prospect of the Famine’s 1990s sesquicentennial of‑ fered the best opportunity to engage the Famine’s history and memory publicly in the entire twentieth century. The year 1995 marked the 150th anniversary of the first year of Famine as a major moment of reckoning in the United States and Ireland; that year ushered in a comprehensive public review 197

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and demonstrated a readiness to confront Famine history and legacy with intentionality. The com‑ memoration also revealed an understanding that prior generations had lacked the requisite cultural and political foundations, and the ethnic self-confidence, to accomplish this. New historical research, personal stories, local efforts to honor the event, and a prevailing sense of historical and meaning‑ ful public deliberation converged within a remarkable commemorative interval. The formal memo‑ rial spanned a broad spectrum, wherein academic research and presentation incorporated pioneering studies by historians of the caliber of Noel Kissane, Christine Kinealy, and others, whose contribu‑ tions exceeded all writing on the subject of the Famine produced to that point.22 Historians, economists, and folklorists asked new questions and launched groundbreaking probes into the event and its transatlantic consequences. They plumbed under-documented aspects and, in Kevin O’Rourke’s words, aimed “to restore the Famine to its rightful place as a major watershed in nineteenth-century Ireland.” Scholars such as James S. Donnelly, Christine Kinealy, and Cormac Ó Gráda pushed historical investigations into vibrant and illuminating territory. In now-foundational works in the Famine’s pantheon, they interrogated received wisdom and nationalist influence in prior constructions of Famine history. They also tackled revisionist and other commemoration vistas and addressed gaps in academic and popular knowledge of the episode. Some authorities, particu‑ larly Mary E. Daly, insisted on further research before broaching issues of British “responsibility and blame” and other contested points. The Famine was further institutionalized through The New York State Great Irish Famine Curriculum program, authored by Maureen O’Rourke Murphy, Alan Singer, and Maureen McCann Milletta, and similar efforts in other states to embed the episode in school curricula. The wealth of publications and conferences on both sides of the Atlantic generated a wellspring of international visibility, totemic studies, public addresses, and professional meetings. By the end of the decade, the momentum generated in 1990s commemorations institutionalized Famine remembrance and ongoing study in widely acknowledged and welcome ways.23 Forms of remembrance framed within new literature, poetry, theater, and fine arts-projects generated exciting and complementary energies, and underscored the diversity of approaches to processing the his‑ tory and its legacy witnessed in these years. Ireland’s historical course as a subject for art earned overdue attention, and innovative musical forms shifted remembrance onto airwaves and new cultural platforms. Sinéad O’Connor’s rap “Famine,” for example, engaged British culpability and Ireland’s national am‑ nesia and trauma, while poetry, fiction, and folklore rose similarly as conduits of collective and indi‑ vidual memory. These resources shaped constructions of the event as a historical site of trauma, healing, mourning, ritual, and mythology, among other responses, and expanded the ethnic identity accordingly.24 The tide of remembrance also produced public monuments and physical reminders in locations of strong ethnic Irish presence in the United States and global-diaspora centers, as well as the unveiling of major monuments cast 1990s commemorations in national and international light. Their structures and symbolic renderings revealed pathways by which memory can be arbitrated and repurposed by stakehold‑ ers and serve as compelling educational and cultural resources. A comparatively small number of North American ethnic centers had constructed public monuments to the Famine prior to the 1990s, including Grosse Île, Quebec (1909), and Cohasset, Massachusetts (1914). Clustered around eastern-seaboard sites of immigrant settlement, new works expanded the remembrance compass and stimulated deliberations around form, inclusion and identity. Examples in major cities tend to reflect expectation and hope themes, in contrast to examples in Ireland foregrounding the Famine’s disastrous impact and death tolls.25

Conclusion Since the tumult of the 1990s, “post-commemorative” years in the United States reflect ongoing interest in the event and its remembrance. Concluding reflections in this spirit reveal continued aca‑ demic engagement with the Great Hunger, and updated research focuses including the Famine’s 198

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colonial origins and implications. New work is emerging on the blight-pathogen, and interest in Canadian remembrance-forms is likewise being sustained. Meanwhile, deepening interrogations of British failures and ideas of genocidal intention persist, as do expositions of the Great Hunger in Irish literature and contested Famine-depictions in popular music and sport.26 Enduring fascination with these and other questions, ultimately, rests on the Famine’s monstrous impact and complex legacies. As this chapter established at the outset, the episode recast an earlier ethnic Irish identity constructed on Colonial-era Ulster-Scots settlements and burgeoning Irish Cath‑ olic communities that swelled to extraordinary proportions by the mid-1850s. As opening sections here document, incoming Famine Irish refugees negotiated a host of negative associations as they sought to consolidate personal experiences of survival and endurance within their evolving ethnic identity. Sections on immigrant Irish institution-building and nationalist campaigning established communications with the native home, allegiance to the Catholic faith, and support for Ireland’s freedom as functional channels of remembrance in years when the Famine’s name retained evident negativity. Engagement with the 1920s and the following decades addressed ethnic Irish assimila‑ tionist prerogatives that preserved Famine memory within narrowing cultural and literary spheres, which, in turn, facilitated fresh wellsprings of interest in the episode from mid-century on. These explorations, as the previous section affirmed, achieved optimal expression in the 1990s ratification of the Famine’s impact, legacy, and significance within the Irish-American ethnic identity. In the wake of 1990s commemorative forms, engagement with Famine history and memory across Irish American academic, cultural, creative, and political landscapes remains buoyant. Further explo‑ ration of the role of women in the Famine years addresses gaps and reshapes older interpretations, reflecting a palpable personal turn in historical writing that seeks out individual agency and local experiences in the Famine years. The varied experiences of an Antrim landlord, and Kerry priest Fr. John O’Sullivan, for example, augment the memory banks, as do graphic-style narratives. And the 1847 Choctaw Nation contribution to Ireland’s starving poor received welcome attention with the 2017 presentation of a memorial to the storied exchange in in Cork. Finally, the Famine’s citation in a Proclamation issued by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that declared March, 2023, “Irish American Heritage Month,” highlights the labor of “thousands of Irish immigrants” whose experi‑ ences made such a crucial contribution to the state from mid-century years onward. As the Famine’s bi-centennial looms on the horizon, the substantial foundations accumulated within Irish-American communities over past decades promise an equally edifying and rewarding moment of remembrance in 2045.27

Notes 1 Gillis, Commemorations, 3, 19 [quotation]. 2 Lee, “Millennial Reflections,” 35; Ó Gráda, “Famine, Trauma and Memory,” 140; Bodnar, “Public Memory,” in Gillis, Commemorations: 74–86; 75–76; Covington, The Devil, 10–14; Beiner, “Probing the Boundaries,” 297. 3 Read, The Great Famine; Kinealy, History of the Irish Famine. 4 Anbinder and McCaffrey, “Which Irish Men,” 624–625. 5 Canny, “How the Local,” 40; Hogan, “The Famine Beat.” 6 “The Priest’s Blessing,” Illustrated London News, May 10, 1851, 386. 7 “The Original Dunbrody Famine Ship,” cited in McMahon, Coffin Ship, 74, 184, 201, 237. 8 See Hogan, “Famine Beat”; Moore Quinn and Delay, “Bounty, Moderation,” 111–129; Boston Pilot xi, no. 1, Saturday, January 1, 1848, 2. http://digital.library.villanova.edu/Item/vudl%3A741059; Digital Library@ Villanova University; accessed December 31, 2022. 9 Roddy, “Spaces of Space-making,” 3, MacHale, “To the Honorable the Earl of Shrewsbury,” Boston Pilot, February 26, 1848, 4; Judd, Travel Narratives, 27–31; Beiner, “Probing the Boundaries,” 298–299. 10 Hughes, A Lecture; Kelly, Ireland’s Great Famine, 28–29; Lee, “Millennial Reflections,” 12. “Great Famine” and “Great Hunger” tend to be used interchangeably in the historical literature and otherwise. The former has evolved to denote the specific episode of 1845–1852 in general terms, while the latter conveys the added

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Mary C. Kelly dimension of contemporary perceptions of starvation and death despite the availability and exportation of other food-sources throughout these years. Both terms are used in this chapter. 11 Lee, “Millennial Reflections,” 20; Kelly, Ireland’s Great Famine, 57–58. 12 Corporaal, Relocated Memories; Meloy, “In the Dawn,” 19–44. 13 Emigrant Savings Bank Collection Data; Anbinder, Ó Gráda, Wegge, “Networks and Opportunities,” 1591– 1629; Moran, “Retaining their Irish Identity,” 113; Casey, “Cornerstone of Memory, 14, 23; Kelly, “Coarse Cloth,” 138–140. 14 Brundage, “Recent Directions,” 84; McCaffrey, “Components of Irish Nationalism,” 9; Beiner, review of Covington, Devil, 63; Miller, “’Revenge for Skibbereen,’” 180–195. 15 Ferreira, “All But ‘A Black Skin,” 79. 16 Miller, “Revenge for Skibbereen,” 180; Mulcrone, “The Famine and Collective Memory,” 220–221; Lee, “Millennial Reflections,” 36–38; Mannion and McGarry, eds., The Irish Revolution, 10; Mulhall, “Declaring Independence,” 28; Ó Gráda, Great Irish Famine, 64–65; Kiernan, Ireland And America, 6. 17 Burke, “Lecture, Delivered at the Academy of Music,” 226; Narciso and Severgnini, “The Deep Roots of Rebellion,” 1–9; “The Ninty Eight Men,” [sic]. 18 Beiner, “Probing the Boundaries,” 299–300; Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 8–10; quotation, 8; Ó Gráda, “Famine, Trauma and Memory,” 130; Ó Ciosáin, “Approaching a Folklore Archive,” 231. 19 Mulcrone, “Famine and Collective Memory,” 225, 232, 235; Connolly, On Every Tide, 66; Ó Gráda, “Famine, Trauma and Memory,” 140–141; Quinn, “... of All Sights That Pierced His Heart,” 79, 104–105; Fanning, “Hidden Flowering,” 11–52; Kelleher, “Irishness in America,” 152–153; Janssen, “Diasporic iden‑ tifications,” 199–216; O’Leary Anish, Irish American Fiction; Cusack, Corporaal and Janssen, “In Ireland I’d Have Starved,” 129–154; Ó Ciosáin, “Approaching a Folklore Archive,” 226–231; O’Farrell, “Whose Reality?” 1, 12–13; Burke, Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History, 76; King, “Remembering and Forgetting,” 20–41. 20 Kelly, Ireland’s Great Famine, 88–89, 93–95; Edwards and Williams, Great Famine; Nora, “Between Mem‑ ory and History,” 12–13. 21 Foster, “Re-Inventing the Past,” 188; Forbes and Lee, Massachusetts Help, preface; cited in Kelly, Ireland’s Great Famine, 129–130; Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger; Mulligan, “The Case for Emotion,” 149–152; Rogers and O’Brien, After the Flood; Kelly, Ireland’s Great Famine, 122–125. 22 Kelly, Ireland’s Great Famine, 125–128; Kissane, The Irish Famine, Kinealy, Death-Dealing Famine, 1; Daly, “Historians and the Famine,” 591, 601. 23 O’Rourke, “Did the Great Irish Famine Matter?” 1; Singer; O’Rourke Murphy and McCann Milletta, “Ask‑ ing the BIG Questions,” 286–291; Donnelly, “Construction of the Memory,” 26–61. 24 Kinealy, Women and the Great Hunger, 211; Smith, “The Origin of Style,” 121–135; Marshall, “Painting Irish History,” 46–50; O’Connor’s Song “Famine;” Eide, “Famine Memory,” 21–48; Kelleher, “Hunger and History,” 249–276. 25 Kelleher, “Famine and Commemoration,” 31; Shannon, “The Wreck of the Brig St. John”; Kelleher, “Hunger and History,” 268. 26 Kelleher, “Famine and Commemoration,” 34; Gray, “Was the Great Irish Famine,” 159–172; McGowan, “Remembering Canada,” 365–382; McGowan, “The Famine Plot Revisited,” 87–104; Roos, “Unlikely He‑ roes,“ 327–343; Bradley, “When the Past Meets the Present,“ 230–245. 27 Kinealy, Women and the Great Hunger; Kinealy, Heroes of Ireland’s Great Hunger; Hutchinson, “‘And This in Thriving and Prosperous Antrim!”; Kenny, Kenmare--History and Survival; Farrell, “‘This Horrible Spectacle’”; Goodfellow, Black ’47; King, Irish Famine Archive; “Kindred Spirits,” 2017; Governor Healey, “Irish American Heritage Month Proclamation.”

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Secondary Sources Anbinder, Tyler, and Hope McCaffrey. “Which Irish Men and Women Immigrated to the United States during the Great Famine Migration of 1846–54?” Irish Historical Studies 39, no. 156 (November 2015): 620–642. Anbinder, Tyler, Cormac Ó Gráda, and Simone A. Wegge. “Networks and Opportunities: A Digital History of Ireland’s Great Famine Refugees in New York.” American Historical Review 124, no. 5 (December 2019): 1591–1629. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz1023. Accessed January 3, 2023. Anish, Beth O’Leary. Irish American Fiction from World War II to JFK: Anxiety, Assimilation, and Activism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Beiner, Guy. “Probing the Boundaries of Irish Memory: From Postmemory to Prememory and Back.” Irish His‑ torical Studies 39, no. 154 (2014): 296–307. Beiner, Guy. “Review of Covington.” Devil from Over the Sea. History Ireland 30, no. 5 (September/October 2022): 63. Bodnar, John. “Public Memory in an American City: Commemoration in Cleveland.” In Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, edited by John R. Gillis, 74–86. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Bradley, Joseph M. “When the Past Meets the Present: The Great Irish Famine and Scottish Football.” ÉireIreland 48, no. 1 (2013): 230–245. https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2013.0002. Accessed April 22, 2023. Brundage, David. “Recent Directions in the History of Irish American Nationalism.” Journal of American Ethnic History 28, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 82–89. Burke, Mary M. Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Canny, Nicholas. “How the Local Can Be Global and the Global Local: Ireland, Irish Catholics, and European Overseas Empires, 1500–1900.” In Ireland and America: Empire, Revolution, and Sovereignty, edited by Patrick Griffin and Francis D. Cogliano, 23–52. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021. Casey, Marion R. “Cornerstone of Memory: John Hughes & St. Patrick’s Cathedral: Sixteenth Ernie O’Malley Lecture, 2014.” American Journal of Irish Studies 12 (2015): 10–56. Connolly, Sean. On Every Tide: The Making and Remaking of the Irish World. New York: Basic Books, 2022. Corporaal, Marguérite. Relocated Memories: The Great Famine in Irish and Diaspora Fiction, 1846–1870. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017. Covington, Sarah. The Devil From Over the Sea: Remembering and Forgetting Oliver Cromwell in Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Crowley, John, William J. Smyth, and Mike Murphy, eds. Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, 1845–52. Cork: Cork University Press, 2012. Cusack, Christopher, Marguérite Corporaal, and Lindsay Janssen. “‘In Ireland I’d Have Starved’: North Ameri‑ can Fiction about the Great Irish Famine, 1850–1918.” New Hibernia Review 25, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 129–154. Daly, Mary E. “Historians and the Famine: A Beleaguered Species.” Irish Historical Studies 30, no. 120 (1997): 591–601.

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Mary C. Kelly Donnelly, Jr. James S. “The Construction of the Memory of the Famine in Ireland and the Irish Diaspora, 1850– 1900.” Eire-Ireland 31, nos. 1–2 (Spring 1996): 26–61. Edwards, R. Dudley, and T. Desmond Williams, eds. The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History, 1845–52. Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1956. Eide, Marian. “Famine Memory and Contemporary Irish Poetry.” Twentieth-Century Literature 63 (2017): 21–48. Fanning, Charles. “A Hidden Flowering: Irish-American Culture in the Depression Era.” American Journal of Irish Studies 9 (2012): 11–52. Farrell, James Michael. “‘This Horrible Spectacle’: Visual and Verbal Sketches of the Famine in Skibbereen.” In Rhetorics of Display, edited by Lawrence J. Prelli, 66–89. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2022. Ferreira, Patricia. “All But ‘A Black Skin and Wooly Hair’: Frederick Douglass’s Witness of the Irish Famine.” American Studies International 37, no. 2 (June 1999): 69–83. Foster, Roy. “Re-Inventing the Past.” In Re-Imagining Ireland, edited by Andrew Higgins Wyndham, 186–190. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. Gillis, John R. Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Goodfellow, Damien. Black ’47: A Story of Ireland’s Great Famine: A Graphic Novel. Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2019. Gray, Peter. “Was the Great Irish Famine a Colonial Famine?” East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies 8, no. 1 (2021): 159–172. Gribben, Arthur, ed. The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora in America. Amherst: University of Massachu‑ setts Press, 1999. Hogan, Neil. “The Famine Beat: American Newspaper Coverage of the Great Hunger.” In The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora in America, edited by Arthur Gribben, 155–179. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Hutchinson, Wesley. “‘And This in Thriving and Prosperous Antrim!’: An Anglo‑Irish Landlord’s Perspective on the Famine.” Revue Française De Civilisation Britannique 2 (2019): 89–105. https://doi.org/10.4000/ rfcb.263. Accessed April 21, 2023. Irish Famine Curriculum. http://www.nysed.gov/curriculum‑instruction/great‑irish‑famine‑curriculum. Ac‑ cessed April 8, 2023. Janssen, Lindsay. “Diasporic Identifications: Exile, Nostalgia and the Famine Past in Irish and Irish North‑­ American Popular Fiction, 1871–189.” Irish Studies Review 26, no. 2 (2018): 199–216. Judd, Catherine Nealy. Travel Narratives of the Irish Famine: Politics, Tourism, and Scandal, 1845–1853. Ox‑ ford: Peter Lang, 2020. Kelleher, John V. “Irishness in America.” In Selected Writings of John V. Kelleher on Ireland and Irish America, edited by John V. Kelleher and Charles Fanning, 150–155. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002. Kelleher, Margaret. “Famine and Commemoration, 1909–2017: Sites and Dynamics of Memory.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 40 (2017): 21–37. Kelleher, Margaret. “Hunger and History: Monuments to the Great Irish Famine.” Textual Practice 16, no. 2 (2002): 249–276. Kelly, Mary C. “Coarse Cloth and Clerical Tailoring: Negotiating Boston‑Irish cultural Imperatives in the Fam‑ ine Era.” Irish Studies Review 23, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 135–153. Kelly, Mary C. Ireland’s Great Famine in Irish‑American History: Enshrining a Fateful Memory. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. Kenny, Colum. Kenmare‑‑History and Survival: Fr John O’Sullivan and the Famine Poor. Dublin: Wordwell Books, 2021. “Kindred Spirits” sculpture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindred_Spirits_(sculpture). Accessed April 21, 2023. Kinealy, Christine. A Death‑Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ireland. London: Pluto Press, 1997. Kinealy, Christine, Jason King, and Gerard Moran, eds. Heroes of Ireland’s Great Hunger. Cork University Press and Hamden, CT: Quinnipiac University Press, 2021. Kinealy, Christine, Jason King, and Ciaran Reilly, eds. Women and the Great Hunger. Hamden, CT: Quinnipiac University Press, 2016. Kinealy, Christine, and Gerard Moran, eds. The History of the Irish Famine: Fallen Leaves of Humanity: Fam‑ ines in Ireland Before and After the Great Famine. London and New York: Routledge, 2019.King, Jason. Irish Famine Archive, 2015. http://faminearchive.nuigalway.ie. Accessed April 21, 2023.

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How Remembering the Famine Shaped Irish-American Identity King, Jason. “Remembering and Forgetting the Famine Irish in Quebec: Genuine and False Memoirs, Communal Memory and Migration.” Irish Review 44 (2012): 20–41. Kissane, Noel. The Irish Famine: A Documentary History. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996. Lee, J. Joseph. “Millennial Reflections on Irish‑American History.” Radharc 1 (2000): 1–76. Marshall, Catherine. “Painting Irish History: The Famine.” History Ireland 4, no. 3 (1996): 46–50. Mannion, Patrick, and Fearghal McGarry, eds. The Irish Revolution: A Global History. New York: New York University Press, 2022. McCaffrey, Lawrence J. “Components of Irish Nationalism.” In Perspectives on Irish Nationalism, edited by Thomas E. Hachey and Lawrence J. McCaffrey, 1–19. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1989. McGowan, Mark G. “Remembering Canada: The Place of Canada in the Memorializing of the Great Irish Fam‑ ine.” Atlantic Studies 11, no. 3 (2014): 365–382. McGowan, Mark G. “The Famine Plot Revisited: A Reassessment of the Great Irish Famine as Genocide.” Genocide Studies International 11, no. 1 (2017): 87–104. McMahon. Cian T. The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine. New York: New York University Press, 2021. Meloy, Elizabeth. “‘In the Dawn of a Brighter Day’: Re‑Presenting the Famine at the Irish International Exhibi‑ tion of 1853.” New Hibernia Review 22, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 19–44. Miller, Kerby A. “‘Revenge for Skibbereen’: Irish Emigration and the Meaning of the Great Famine.” In The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora in America, edited by Arthur Gribben, 180–195. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Moran, Gerard. “Retaining Their Irish Identity: Marriage and the Famine Irish in Five Points, New York, in the 1850s.” New Hibernia Review 25, no. 3 (Autumn/Fómhar 2021): 111–125. Mulcrone, Mick. “The Famine and Collective Memory: The Role of the Irish‑American Press in the Early Twen‑ tieth Century.” In The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora in America, edited by Arthur Gribben, 219–238. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press; 1999. Mulhall, Ambassador Daniel. “Declaring Independence: America 1776, Ireland 1919” (2019 Ernie O’Malley Lecture). American Journal of Irish Studies 16 (2021): 23–36. Mulligan, William H. “The Case for Emotion: Looking Back at The Great Hunger.” New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua 12, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 149–152. Narciso, Gaia, and Battista Severgnini. “The Deep Roots of Rebellion.” Journal of Development Economics 160 (January 2023): 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2022.102952. Accessed April 1, 2023. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–24. Ó Ciosáin, Niall. “Approaching a Folklore Archive: The Irish Folklore Commission and the Memory of the Great Famine.” Folklore 115, no. 2 (2004): 222–232. O’Connor, Sinéad. “Famine.” Universal Mother. London, Ensign/Chrysalis, 1994. YouTube, https://youtu.be/ EZIB6MslCAo. O’Farrell, Patrick. “Whose Reality?: The Irish Famine in History and Literature.” Historical Studies 20, no. 78 (1982): 1–13. Ó Gráda, Cormac. “Famine, Trauma and Memory.” Béaloideas Iml. 69 (2001): 121–143. Ó Gráda, Cormac. The Great Irish Famine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. O’Rourke, Kevin. “Did the Great Irish Famine Matter?” Journal of Economic History 51, no. 1 (March 1991): 1–22. Quinn, E. Moore. “‘... of All Sights That Pierced His Heart’: Reflexive Language and the Great Irish Famine.” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 16, no. 17 (1996/1997): 77–105. Quinn, E. Moore, and Cara Delay. “Bounty, Moderation, and Miracles: Women and Food in Narratives of the Great Famine.” New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua 21, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 111–129. Read, Charles. The Great Famine in Ireland and Britain’s Financial Crisis. Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2022. Roddy, Sarah. “Spaces of Space‑making: Diaspora Fundraising by the Nineteenth‑Century Irish Catholic Church.” Journal of Victorian Culture vcad007 (2023): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcad007. Ac‑ cessed April 30, 2023. Rogers, James Silas, and Matthew J. O’Brien, eds. After the Flood: Irish America, 1945–1960. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009. Roos, Bonnie. “Unlikely Heroes: Katharine Tynan’s ‘The Story of Bawn’, the Irish Famine, and the Sentimental Tradition.” Irish University Review 43, no. 2 (2013): 327–343. Shannon, Catherine B. “The Wreck of the Brig St. John and Its Commemoration.” In Irish Hunger and Migra‑ tion. Myth, Memory and Memorialization, edited by Patrick Fitzgerald, Christine Kinealy and Gerard Moran, 69–82. Hamden, CT: Quinnipiac University Press, 2015.

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Mary C. Kelly Singer, Alan, Maureen O’Rourke Murphy, and Maureen McCann Milletta. “Asking the BIG Questions: Teaching about the Great Irish Famine and World History.” Social Education l, no. 65 (September 2001): 286–291. Smith, Sally Sommers. “The Origin of Style: The Famine and Irish Traditional Music.” Eire‑Ireland 32, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 121–135. “The Original Dunbrody Famine Ship.” https://www.dunbrody.com/the‑original‑dunbrody/. Accessed Decem‑ ber 29, 2022. Woodham‑Smith, Cecil. The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962.

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15 THE IRISH IN THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION David T. Gleeson

The sheer scale and size of the American Civil War (1861–1865), the bloodiest conflict in the nation’s history, had serious implications for the Irish in America, the US’s largest immigrant population. As Angela F. Murphy has highlighted in an earlier chapter, the Irish, with the English language skills and active political pedigree from the Catholic Emancipation and Repeal movements in Ireland, were at the center of the most important antebellum political struggles around class, race, and eth‑ nicity. Though the nativist Know‑Nothing movement had died by the late 1850s, its members’ view that Catholics, particularly Irish Catholics, were incompatible with the American republic remained strong. New Orleans still had a Know‑Nothing mayor in 1860, for example, while in Massachusetts many Know Nothings had migrated to the newly dominant Republican Party. The Republican legis‑ lature in that state resurrected a Know‑Nothing law requiring naturalized citizens to wait two years before voting or taking political office. The Republicans also zealously enforced the deportation of the indigent poor back to Ireland, even some who had already become Americans. Thus, on both sides of the coming conflict, North and South, the full citizenship of Irish Americans remained equivocal. The Civil War provided an opportunity for them finally to prove their loyalty to their adopted home by becoming fully “American under fire.”1

Irish‑American Response to the Outbreak of the War In both sections of the country, the Irish‑American response to the outbreak of the war came quickly. As Debra Reddin van Tuyll demonstrates in her chapter in this volume, the popular press played an important role in that process. In the North, the prominent Irish newspaper, the New York Irish American, probably summed it up best in the weeks after the Confederate shelling of Fort Sumter in April 1861 by telling its immigrant readers “to be true to the land of your adoption in this crisis of her fate” and to fight for “‘the Constitution and the Union—one and indivisible.’” Archbishop John Hughes of New York, the de facto leader of Roman Catholics in America, was no fan of the Repub‑ lican Party, but he rallied to the cause when war broke out. On April 23, 1861, he blessed the troops of the Sixty‑Ninth New York volunteers, the Irish‑American militia unit in the City then going into Federal service, from his cathedral church of St. Patrick’s. He also, in the Catholic press, made a spirited defense of the Union when he published correspondence between himself and the Irish‑born bishop of Charleston, South Carolina debating the legality of secession. Hughes undoubtedly saw the war as “an opportunity for the Irish to establish themselves in the American mind, for all time, 205

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as a loyal and brave people, fully as patriotic and dependable as any native‑born citizen.” Hughes’s explicit patriotism, along with the visible example of tens of thousands of Irish immigrants across the North joining the Union army, encouraged many to think that anti‑Irish prejudice would wither and die. Another prominent Catholic newspaper agreed: “Let us hear no more nativism for it is now dead, disgraced and offensive,” announced the Boston Pilot, “while the Irish Catholic patriotism and bravery are true to the nation and indispensable to it in any point of consideration.”2 On the other hand, Irish immigrants in the Confederacy, in general, took a different view. The aforementioned Bishop of Charleston who debated Hughes on secession was Patrick Lynch, who had been brought as a child by his parents from County Monaghan to South Carolina. Though he tried to avoid overt politics, his diocesan newspaper, the United States Catholic Miscellany, which was also the oldest Catholic journal in the United States, could not ignore the sectional crisis. Immediately after South Carolina seceded in December 1860, he changed the name to the Charleston Catholic Miscellany and published articles supporting secession. Once the war began in April 1861, Lynch, like Hughes in New York, blessed the troops of the “Irish Volunteers,” a militia unit about to enlist in the Confederate army, telling them to remember their Irish martial heritage in their fight for the new home in South Carolina.3 Across the South, Irish immigrants responded to Confederate calls to join the army of the new republic. In the 11 states that formed the Confederacy in 1861, the Irish were just a small percent‑ age of the population, but by concentrating in cities, they were a lot more visible, especially to recruiters. In South Carolina, for example, the overall Irish‑born population represented just under 1 percent of the total population and just under 2 percent of the white population. By living mostly in Charleston, however, the Irish in the state’s largest city produced two companies for Confederate service. Irish volunteers could, more or less, be found in any of the city’s companies. Beyond South Carolina, ethnic Irish units formed in towns and cities such Savannah, Memphis, Richmond, and even Vicksburg, Mississippi. The greatest producer of Irish troops was the Confederacy’s largest city, New Orleans. It had an Irish population of almost 25,000 in 1860 and recruited nine specifically eth‑ nic units. Irish‑American companies across the Confederacy often chose names such as “Shamrock Guards,” “Emerald Guards,” and “Irish Volunteers” to display their ethnicity. Names of historical Irish national figures who had fought the British, such as Robert Emmet (of the failed 1803 Dublin rebellion) and Patrick Sarsfield, (the cavalry hero of the Williamite War of 1689–1691. One unit from New Orleans, embracing a unique racial identity, called themselves the “Southern Celts.” A number, though only companies of about 100 men in size, used the term “Irish Brigade,” modeling themselves on the exiled “Wild Geese” who had left Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to fight in continental European armies. Commemorating Irish causes proved useful in Confederate recruiting among its Irish immigrant population.4 Due to their sheer numbers, the Irish in the North had much more opportunity to form an actual Irish brigade of approximately 4,000 men. The most famous Irish unit in the war was undoubtedly the Federal “Irish Brigade,” consisting of the almost completely Irish regiments—the 63rd, 69th, and 88th New York Infantry, the 28th Massachusetts Infantry, and the 116th Pennsylvania—representing the Irish of New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia, respectively. Formed in late 1861 and led by the famous Young Ireland nationalist from Waterford, Thomas Francis Meagher, the Brigade’s exploits dominated news of the Irish war activities in the national, Irish‑American, and Irish presses. Native and immigrant alike recognized the Brigade’s sacrifice at the bloody battles of Antietam and Fred‑ ericksburg in late 1862. Meagher’s Irish Brigade became the symbol of Irish bravery and sacrifice.5 The Brigade, however, represented only a small fraction of the Irish in the Union army. There were other Irish green‑flag units across the northern states. Connecticut had the Ninth Infantry, Wis‑ consin the Seventeenth Infantry, and Illinois its “Mulligan’s Brigade” (the 23rd Illinois Infantry), named for its Irish‑American commander, Colonel James A. Mulligan. Beyond distinctive units, Irish 206

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immigrants could also be found in companies or regiments based in, or close to, any sizeable urban area. In the border state of Kentucky, for example, a number enlisted in Company K of the Fifteenth Infantry from Kenton County. Kenton County was across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, Ohio, which had a sizeable Irish population in 1860.6 Though Irish immigrants fought in both the Union and Confederate armed forces, only 5 percent of the Irish in America (about 85,000 people according to the 1860 census) lived in the 11 states that joined the Confederacy, making for a much smaller recruiting pool. New York City alone had over 200,000 Irish‑born residents in 1860. This disparity in population is amply displayed in the over‑ all numbers of men who joined each army. The official count for the Union forces in the war lists 144,000 Irish‑born recruits, though when those who served in the “regular” US army, rather than in the volunteer regiments from a given state (like the 69th New York) or in the US navy, are included, the true number is closer to 180,000. Moreover, if those who were technically born in Canada or Great Britain but came from Irish‑American ethnic communities are included, the contribution ex‑ ceeded 200,000. On the Confederate side, in contrast, where enlistment records are patchier, only about 20,000 Irish‑born served in the armed forces. Combining the two figures, however, as historian Damian Shiels has pointed out, the American Civil War is the conflict that involved the most Irish people ever, except for World War I.7 In general, Irish immigrants on both sides earned a reputation for bravery. The actual situation of their combat was, however, more complicated. The initial rush to join up in 1861 tapered off some when the reality of a long, bloody war took hold. After the heavy casualties taken by the Irish Brigade at Antietam and Fredericksburg, for example, the most famous Irish unit never reached the numbers it had in 1862. By 1863, its effective fighting force was just over 500 men, about half the regulation size of a regiment, and far from a brigade. The Battle of Chancellorsville in May of that year reduced the numbers of fit men to just over 400. Meagher had had enough, believing that the Irish Brigade had become a “public deception.” It was a shadow of its former self, and he offered his resignation, which President Abraham Lincoln accepted. Though somewhat replenished in late 1863 and 1864 with volunteers and conscripts, it would never reach the heights of its early years.8 In the Confederacy, too, the initial Irish rush to enlist disappeared. A Confederate Conscription Act came into effect in April 1862 after the Battle of Shiloh, a very bloody encounter, which made Confederate authorities realize they needed a draft. A clause in the legislation allowed foreign nation‑ als to claim exemption if they had never intended to become citizens. Many Irish‑born soldiers, rather disingenuously, wrote letters to the Confederate War Department claiming this exemption, stating that they had only been passing through the South. For all their embrace of nationalist Irish heroes in their unit names, they also claimed the protection of Her Britannic Majesty, Queen Victoria, as her loyal subjects to escape the army. Some Irish Confederate companies ceased to function as ethnic units as a direct result of these exemptions.9

Disillusionment in the Ranks and on the Home Front Driving some this disillusionment among soldiers on both sides was the situation on the home front. The sheer size and scale of the Civil War compared to earlier American conflicts meant that the home and battle fronts melded liked never before, particularly in the South. In the early stages of the conflict, civilian support for “their boys” was vital in encouraging men to sign up and stay in service. Archbishop Hughes and Bishop Lynch’s churches were full of Irish and Irish‑American non‑­ combatants there to cheer on the volunteers. Women at home were key to service. They sent letters but also made more public displays of support. Sewing unit flags was especially conspicuous. The mostly Irish Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy in Savannah, Georgia, for example, had their students sew flags for local Irish companies. One Savannah flag encompassed the harp and shamrock of Ireland but also 207

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the stars of the southern Confederacy. Irish Catholic nuns provided support beyond colors. On both sides, they served with distinction as nurses on and close to the front. Irish priests also provided com‑ fort and solace to soldiers in each army. Clergy and religious were not, however, the only civilians with the armies. Occasionally, Irish immigrant women followed their menfolk, providing laundry and cooking services. Some became famous, such as Bridget Diver of the 1st Michigan, who many in the Army of the Potomac knew as “Irish Biddy.” She cooked and cleaned for many soldiers but also worked for the Union’s new important medical service, the United States Sanitary Commission. It was rumored that she once took up a musket to fight the enemy. One woman (that we know of) who did take up arms fully was Jennie Hodgers, originally from County Louth, who enlisted as Albert Cashier fighting and living her life as a man in the 95th Illinois Infantry.10 Irish‑American boosters could also use popular culture to promote Irish patriotism. Irish music, especially through the famous work of Irish composer, lyricist, and compiler, Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies, was popular in America. As a result, when the Civil War began, Irish songwriters took the opportunity to show how American the Irish were and how they were at the forefront of the war ef‑ forts. On the Union side, almost 150 ballads about Irish bravery and patriotism were published during or just after the conflict, making the Irish “the most sung about group of any in the period.” The songs mentioned Ireland and the Irish martial tradition but focused mainly on fighting for America. Lyr‑ ics about protecting the flag, the star‑spangled banner, were prominent. Irish journalists in America, like poet Charles G. Halpine, who wrote a column of the archetypal, though fictious, Irish soldier, Private Miles O’Reilly, in the widely circulated New York Herald, amplified the view of the loyal Irish soldier.11 This active support for soldiers was undermined, in part, by larger issues among those at home. In the Confederacy, the worsening economic conditions caused by war led to serious stress among those whose major breadwinners were away at the front. Some southern cities took the unprecedented steps of establishing “free markets” from which soldiers’ wives and other dependents could receive free food. This effort could not stop disillusionment among the poor Irish immigrants at home, however, which then impacted their loved ones in the army. In New Orleans, for example, the separation from family members up the river in the city among Irish soldiers at Fort Jackson played a role in the Fort’s surrender to Union forces in April 1862. The Confederacy was also plagued with so‑called “bread riots,” as food shortages hurt the civilian population. Across the South, women attacked food stores assigned to the army. In the Confederate capital of Richmond, the most notorious riot occurred in April 1863. The Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, had to leave the Confederate White House and rush to the scene to calm the rioting women who were smashing up stores in the downtown sec‑ tion of the city. After the incident, the local press blamed the trouble on “Irish and Yankee hags,” and though the arrest records show all kinds of Richmond women involved, Irish civilians took a lot of the blame.12 The Richmond and the other bread riots on the Confederate side paled into insignificance, how‑ ever, when compared with Irish opposition to the Union war effort. In the New York City draft riots of mid‑July 1863, the city witnessed an orgy of violence, driven in large part by Irish immigrants, which left over 100 people dead. The roots of the trouble lay in the introduction of Federal conscription in March 1863. Many Irish Americans in New York City, and across the North, believed that this new draft discriminated against the poor, and especially against the foreign‑born. The policy of “substi‑ tution” where someone, if they had the money, could pay for someone else to take his place in the draft was particularly galling. As government officials administered the draft in New York through the drawing of names by lottery on July 13, a group of about 500—predominantly Irish firemen—­ attacked the process. The violence soon spread, including an attack on the Colored Orphans Asylum which catered to the needs of over 200 African‑American orphans. Men, women, and children looted

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the building, though the police saved it from complete destruction. The wandering mobs also, angry at President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, attacked and murdered random African Ameri‑ cans they found on the streets.13 Along with the draft, the Proclamation, which had come into force on January 1, 1863, changed the focus of the Civil War from one of just restoring the Union to one of ending slavery, which also drove resentment among the Irish. They had supported the war primarily to save the Union, not to free enslaved people. Many poor Irish immigrants feared that the emancipated would come to New York and other northern cities to compete for jobs. The Irish‑American press echoed those fears in their opposition to Lincoln’s move. The African ‑Americans’ white champions, the Republicans, also seemed to be the same people who despised the Irish, their religion, and their taverns. The draft riots was only quelled when the army intervened by sending in troops who had recently served at the ­Battle of Gettysburg. Though not the sole drivers of the anti‑draft activities, the Irish did lead them.14 As a result, the bravery and sacrifice of the Irish Brigade and other Irish soldiers got lost in the re‑ action to the riots. The famous local observer and commentator, George Templeton Strong, expressed the change best. A Republican who had never been a big supporter of Irish immigrants, Strong had come around to the Irish when he saw the patriotism of the likes of the 69th New York marching through his city. The riot, however, changed his mind again. “No wonder St. Patrick drove all the venomous vermin out of Ireland!” Strong wrote in his diary. “Its biped Mammalia supply that island its full average share of creatures that crawl and eat dirt and poison every community they infest.”15 Strong and his ilk were also exasperated by the fact that the Irish in the North, despite their initial support for the War, had never embraced the Republican Party. They continued to vote Democratic, which included sending Fernando Wood from New York City to Congress. Wood had gained the support of Irish Americans through providing funds for Irish draftees to pay substitutes to take their place in the army. In Congress, he became one of the most vociferous opponents of emancipation, the Lincoln administration, and the war itself. At the presidential level, too, the Irish Americans at home turned against the war. With certain prominent exceptions, including former Irish Brigade com‑ mander Thomas Francis Meagher, the Irish endorsed the Democratic candidate opposing Lincoln in the 1864 presidential election, the former Union army general, George McClellan. McClellan was ostensibly a “War Democrat” seeking to continue the conflict, but he endorsed negotiations with the Confederate government, in reality recognizing the Confederacy. The New York Irish American, so strong for the Union and destroying the Confederates in 1861, endorsed McClellan. “Mr. Lincoln’s administration,” the Irish American told its readers, “has endeavored to substitute a government of force [including the draft] for that of right.” Lincoln had ruled through “fear” and thus did not deserve the Irish‑American vote.16 Politics were not as overtly partisan in the Confederacy. Political divisions existed in the Con‑ federate Congress not in party political terms, but rather over support or opposition to President Jefferson Davis’s war policies. There were a couple of Irish‑American representatives in Congress including the Irish‑born Edward Sparrow from Louisiana, William Lander of North Carolina, and the son of an Irishman, James Phelan from Mississippi. Lander and Phelan were generally pro‑­ Davis while Sparrow was not, but whatever their views, these men’s position could not be seen as reflective of general Irish opinion since they represented rural parts of their respective states. Irish civilians’ attitude toward the Confederacy can be measured, however, in another way, by consider‑ ing their view of defeat and Union occupation. From the very beginning of the war, large parts of the Confederacy came under Federal control, and the size of that territory only grew as the conflict continued. Two of the earliest cities to fall to Union forces were New Orleans and Memphis in 1862. In both places, Irish residents played a key role in accepting Confederate defeat and agreeing to a complete return to the United States. As mostly poor people, they welcomed a restoration of

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normalcy with trade revived, businesses reopened, and work restored. In New Orleans, the Union commander was even able to recruit Irishmen into the army, while in Memphis the new city admin‑ istration and its police force was predominantly Irish. On both sides, then, the Irish attitude on the home front toward their respective causes was at best ambiguous.17

Irish America and Reconstruction Thus, when the war ended in 1865 with a Union victory and the destruction of the Confederacy, the position of the Irish, whether Irish‑ or American‑born, within the reunited country as full citizens remained unstable. Though many Irish soldiers took part in the grand victory parade through Wash‑ ington DC in late May of that year, the memory of the draft riots and the opposition to the recently assassinated President Lincoln still remained raw for many native‑born Americans. In the aftermath of Lincoln’s murder, Federal authorities had arrested and incarcerated prominent Confederates such as former President Davis and a former Secretary of State on suspicion of participation in the plot to kill the President. Alongside them in prison in Fortress Monroe, Virginia, was John Mitchel, a prominent Young Ireland nationalist. Mitchel was not a suspect in Lincoln’s murder, but he had been a prominent Confederate journalist and propagandist in Richmond and continued to be one in New York City after the end of the Confederacy. He spent a number of months in prison through the summer of 1865 into the fall, and it was only the intervention of the new powerful Irish national movement in America, the Fenian Brotherhood, that secured his release. President Andrew Johnson’s new administration saw the Fenians and Irish Americans as useful to his attempts at building a new, personal political base, since he had merely inherited the presidency after the assassination.18 Mitchel had remained loyal to the Confederacy to the end and beyond, but virtually every other Irish Confederate accepted defeat. One Irish soldier, though proud of his Confederate service, wrote in the summer of 1865 that he was now again “a loyal citizen” of the United States, and that he could “call for [President] Andy Johnson as lustily as any person.” There remained some bitterness, how‑ ever. One Fenian organizer in the South argued just after the war that Fenian circles in the former Confederacy be named after Irish Confederate heroes like Mitchel or the prominent Confederate general, originally from County Cork, Patrick Cleburne, rather than any northern Fenians. The tactic seemed to work, as the Fenians did recruit some former Irish Confederate soldiers into their ranks. Indeed, the Brotherhood proved an important vehicle for reconciliation between Irish southerners and northerners. At a Fenian meeting in New Orleans in late 1865, for example, the prominent attendees and speakers included former Irish Confederate officers James Nelligan and Joseph Hanlon, but also newspaper publisher Hugh Kennedy and police chief John Burke, who had collaborated with Union authorities after the city’s fall in 1862. Focusing on Ireland’s freedom was a way to end their recent American quarrel. Ireland’s cause could lead Irish Americans to reconciliation between themselves and their adopted nation.19 There was one major issue, however, that disrupted the path to reconciliation. Irish America could not just ignore the realities of political “Reconstruction,” broadly defined as the attempt to reunite a nation riven by the war. Legal slavery was over thanks to the Thirteenth Amendment, which was ratified in late 1865, and secession declared moot through Federal victory. Yet, the main issue of Reconstruction, the integration of the formerly enslaved into the post‑war political system, remained fraught. Irish Americans had been amenable to the “Presidential Reconstruction” proposed by An‑ drew Johnson, which ignored the question of the “freed people” leaving their position and citizenship up to individual states. Johnson quickly met opposition to this position from Republicans in Congress who refused to accept his plan and proposed instead, in 1866, a Civil Rights bill which recognized the recently enslaved as full citizens. Johnson promptly vetoed it, and that year became, as one historian called it, the “critical year,” in determining what Reconstruction actually meant.20 210

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Irish Americans would play a significant role in making that decision. The Reconstruction dis‑ pute focused on the midterm elections of the critical year and whether the pro‑Civil Rights “Radi‑ cal Republicans” could win a veto‑proof (two‑thirds) majority in Congress. The place where Irish Americans came to have a major influence on this national decision was in Memphis. At the begin‑ ning of the war, about two regiments of Irish immigrant soldiers had joined the Confederate army but when Union forces took the city in 1862, the local Irish civilian population collaborated with the new Federal army administration. An Irish American became mayor and the Irish‑born dominated city services, especially the police force. They helped administer this city for the Federal authorities and had accepted with ease the city’s withdrawal from the Confederacy. Most of the returning Con‑ federate veterans accepted reunion too and some even joined the police force. What they could not accept was the equality of the formerly enslaved. The police, in particular, resented the presence of African‑American soldiers in the city and in early May 1866 precipitated a riot against these soldiers, their families, and Black Memphians in general. The result was three days of violence, the burning of an African‑American school and houses, and at least 48 deaths, of which only two were white. The army eventually restored order, but the “riot” made national news and prompted a congressional investigation. Politically, the Memphis violence drove many northern voters toward the Radical Re‑ publicans. These Republicans duly won their veto‑proof majority in the November elections and the new Fortieth Congress, which opened in March 1867, initiated a new “Radical Reconstruction,” with African‑American citizenship and voting rights at its center, expressed through the Fourteenth and (later), the Fifteenth, amendments to the US Constitution.21 The victorious Radical Republicans reached out to Irish Americans too and found some support. The famous Irish‑American newspaper editor, Patrick Ford, an immigrant from County Galway and a Union Civil War veteran, began his illustrious journalism career as an editor of pro‑Republican newspapers in Charleston, South Carolina. He found support from the likes of P. J. Coogan, a Fe‑ nian, South Carolina legislator, and supporter of African‑American rights. Others in the North, dis‑ appointed by President Johnson’s lack of full support for the Fenian efforts against British Canada, flirted with the Radical Republicans. North and South, however, Ford and Coogan were a small minority among Irish Americans. A traditional antipathy between the Republicans and Irish immi‑ grants, exacerbated by events like the New York City draft riots, increased again at war’s end. As historian Edward Spann has argued, even though the Irish in the Civil War “had been on the ‘wrong’ side regarding war policy, considering their service and sacrifice there was much less reason than before to doubt that they were citizens and patriots in their adopted land.” The reality, however, was different. Just as Radical Republicans sought to reconstruct the South, they also, in many northern states, “embarked on a program of ‘urban reconstruction.’” They challenged the power of the politi‑ cal “machines” in cities such as the Tammany Hall machine in New York, most of which counted on Irish‑American support. In New York, for example, the Radical‑controlled state government took over New York City services to stop patronage positions for immigrant voters. Similarly, in 1867, Republicans sought to restrict those of foreign‑born residents through extension of the naturaliza‑ tion waiting period. Across the Hudson River in New Jersey, the Republican legislature introduced laws to close election polls at sunset, thereby making it difficult for industrial workers to vote. As in New York, they also introduced longer naturalization waiting periods, but only for the state’s largest urban centers of Newark and Jersey City, both of which had large Irish populations. Any inkling of Irish‑American sympathy toward the Radicals quickly vanished.22 Exacerbating the tensions between Irish‑American voters and the Republicans were Fenian activi‑ ties against British Canada. The Radical Republican Congress was finally rid of President Andrew Johnson in 1869 when the Republican candidate (and former General‑in‑Chief of the US Army in the War), Ulysses S. Grant, became President. In its attempts to get compensation for American ships attacked by the British‑built Confederate raider CSS Alabama, Grant and his administration had no 211

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desire to provoke Great Britain. In contrast to the Johnson administration, Grant’s dealt differently with Fenian attacks on Canada. In May 1870, a Fenian incursion from Vermont into Canada led to a presidential proclamation denying any protections for US citizens involved. Its leader, Union army veteran John O’Neill, was arrested, tried, and convicted of breaking US neutrality laws. Sentenced to two years in prison, President Grant did pardon him in October (in time for midterm elections), but the message was clear: no more attacks on Canada. A further foray from Dakota territory into Mani‑ toba met direct opposition from the US army. Smooth relations with Britain were more important for the “true blue anglophile at heart,” Grant.23 Despite the estrangement between Irish Americans and the Radical Republicans and President Grant, the rapprochement between Britain and the United States (formalized in the 1871 Treaty of Washington), did bring benefits. As part of the new deal, the British recognized the naturalization of the Irish in America. Those immigrants with US citizenship would no longer be treated as Brit‑ ish subjects. As a result, the British released many Fenian prisoners in Ireland and Canada who had been convicted of “treason” despite being Americans. In a legal sense, the Irish truly were Ameri‑ cans. They continued to take advantage of this established status in American politics. In particular, they became leaders in the nascent American labor movement in the 1870s. In New York City, Irish Americans led the dockworkers’, carpenters’, and shoemakers’ unions. The most important national labor leader of the period was Terence Powderly, the son of Famine immigrants from Scranton, Penn‑ sylvania, who emerged in the 1870s as leader of the new Greenback Labor party, which challenged Republican dominance in the North. He would eventually become leader of the Knights of Labor, the first major national umbrella organization for labor.24 In the labor movement, however, one could see the limits of Irish acceptance in America in the 1870s. In Pennsylvania, for example, employer opposition to labor organizing in the anthracite coal mines led to the formation of a secret society known as the “Molly Maguires.” Denied the right to organize, the largely Irish immigrant workforce resorted to the secret society, an agrarian tactics of the old country. Violence against mine property soon escalated to violence against management, in‑ cluding the murder of mine inspectors. Sixteen Molly Maguires faced trials in early 1876 and were convicted and sentenced to death. Though many made good cases for their innocence, the Governor of Pennsylvania, Republican and Civil War veteran John F. Hartranft, who had been a contender for the party’s 1876 presidential nomination, waited until after that year’s election before deciding not to commute the death sentences to life in prison. Ten of the Molly Maguires were executed on the same day, June 21, 1877, which is still known as “Black Thursday” in eastern Pennsylvania.25 The year of Black Thursday also marked the nadir of Radical Reconstruction. Hartranft’s col‑ league and fellow Union veteran, Rutherford B. Hayes, had become President after the disputed election of 1876. Hayes ushered in the “Compromise of 1877,” which gained him the presidency at the price of ending Radical Reconstruction in the South. The Irish, in large part, accepted that compromise, having never been supporters of Radical Reconstruction anyway. The price to pay, though, was the placing in government of men like Hayes and Hartranft, who had no compunction in using Federal power against labor unions. Hartranft had called out the militia to break strikes in Pennsylvania, and Hayes became the first president, just a few weeks after Black Thursday, to use Federal troops to break up the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. The 1880s would be a tough period for all working‑class Americans, which meant it was tough for most Irish Americans. A rebirth of nativ‑ ism also continued to challenge Irish citizenship. As their unions failed to find significant success, the urban Irish‑American working classes sought protection against the rise of rapacious Gilded Age business through their machine politics. In return for votes, they gained local government jobs and contracts, even though the supply of this patronage could never meet the demand.26 This support for often corrupt politics only raised the ire of native middle‑class reformers. The Irish in America again became seen as less than fully American, so much so that many Irish veterans of 212

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the War felt they had to remind native‑born Americans of the sacrifice they had made. Irish veterans such as David Power Conyngham had begun the process as early as 1867 when he wrote a history of the Irish Brigade to highlight Irish dedication to the United States. He hoped to counter the view of many in the North that the Irish were mere traitors to the Union and accomplices to the Confederates.27 The efforts continued after Conyngham with memoirs from the chaplain of the Irish Brigade, Fa‑ ther William Corby, and one of the Brigade’s regimental commanders, St. Clair Mulholland. The most public remembering of Irish sacrifice came in 1888, when veterans of the New York regiments of the Irish Brigade unveiled a statue to their service and fallen comrades on the Gettysburg battlefield. It was the 25‑year anniversary of the battle, and Irish Americans wanted to be sure their efforts were not forgotten. The memorial featured a prominent Celtic Cross with a slumbering Irish wolfhound at its foot, ready to awaken and protect at any moment. One veteran who spoke at the unveiling ceremony reminded attendees that “wherever the stars and stripes floated in battle, there were Irishmen fight‑ ing for the preservation of this republic.” Indeed, echoing the social Darwinist “scientific” racism of the late nineteenth century, he reiterated that “Here, twenty‑five years ago, the Puritan and the Celt fought side by side for the Union founded by George Washington.” The “Celtic” Irish then, through battle, were just as American as those “Puritans.” The fact that he felt he had to emphasize this point 25 years after the immense Irish‑American sacrifice during the Civil War era, indicates that, despite improvements in their legal position in America, the Irish were still seeking full cultural acceptance.28

Conclusion The Civil War gave Irish immigrants an opportunity to prove their loyalty to the United States in an era when many native‑born Americans did not see them as compatible with the American Republic. In both the US and the Confederate States, they responded well to calls to support the war effort. Irish Americans, however, soon became war weary and their backing of their respective sides remained, at best, ambiguous. Political opposition to the war, especially in the North, soon surpassed sacrifice on the battlefield in the minds of many natives. After the war, Irish‑American opposition to Radi‑ cal Reconstruction only increased the view of all Irish in America, immigrant or American‑born, as suspect. Despite some gains in recognition of their citizenship rights, by the end of Reconstruction in 1877, their ambiguous Civil War era record, and their increasing involvement in organized labor, meant that they remained not completely American.

Notes 1 The 1860 Census listed just over 1.6 million Irish‑born residents. Kennedy, Population of the United States in 1860, 609. See, for example, Murphy, American Slavery, Irish Freedom; Sim, A Union Forever, 11–69; Soulé, Know‑Nothing Party in New Orleans, 115; Hirota, Expelling the Poor, 126–127; Samito, Becoming American Under Fire. 2 Loughery, Dagger John, 299–301; Gleeson, Green and the Gray, 154–156; Irish American (New York), April 20, 1861. 3 Heisser and White, Sr, Patrick N. Lynch, 1–140; Gleeson, Green and the Gray, 150–151, 154. 4 Gleeson, Irish in the South, 26, 35; Gleeson, Green and the Gray, 46–49. 5 Ural, Harp and the Eagle, 55–58, 82–84, 87–90, 113–125. The Brigade, for a period of 1862 contained the mostly American Twenty‑Ninth Massachusetts who eventually left the brigade after the battle of Antietam, Ural, Harp and the Eagle, 102, 123. 6 Keating, Shades of Green, 13–14, 28–29; Jenkins, Battle Rages Higher, 397–406. Almost 20,000 Irish lived in Cincinnati in 1860. Kennedy, Population of the United States, 612. 7 Gleeson, Irish in the South, 27; Kennedy, Population of the United States, 609, 621; Apthorp Gould, In‑ vestigations, 27; Gleeson, The Green and the Gray, 59–60; Gleeson, “Immigrant America and the Civil War,”178–179. Indeed, if you just count the 26 counties in the Republic of Ireland, it would be the largest “Irish” war. See Shiels, “Ireland’s Forgotten ‘Great War’?” and “Remembrance Rejected”.

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David T. Gleeson 8 Ural, Harp and Eagle, 155–156 (quote on 156). 9 Sacher, Confederate Conscription, 9–34; Gleeson, The Green and the Gray, 76–77. 10 For more on the close relationship between the South’s home and battle fronts, see Foote, “Rethinking the Confederate Home Front.” Shiels, Forgotten Irish, 51, 151; Kurtz, Excommunicated from the War, 68–88; Krasewski, Catholic Confederates, 94–104; Shiels, Irish in the American Civil War, 162–180. 11 Williams, ‘Twas Only an Irishman’s Dream, 19–29; Bateson, Irish American Civil War Songs, 1–2; Bateson, Irish American Civil War Songs, 180–189, 200–211. 12 Gleeson, Green and the Gray, 136–139, 143; Thomas, Confederate Nation, 205–206; Pierson, Mutiny at Fort Jackson, 113–114; Langley, “Dissent and Discontent,” 186–234; Chesson, “Harlots or Heroines?” 13 Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, 96–102; Bernstein, New York City Draft Riots, 1–43. 14 Bernstein, New York City Draft Riots, 123–124, 155–157; Silverman, Lincoln and the Immigrant, 95–97. 15 Quoted in Ural, Harp and the Eagle, 183. 16 Oakes, Freedom National, 452–453; Irish American (New York), November 5, 1864. 17 Rable, Confederate Republic, 9–12, 210–213; Gleeson, Green and the Gray, 127–129, 146–147; Gleeson, Irish in the South, 167. 18 Russell, Between Two Flags, 154–159; Steward and McGovern, Fenians, 87. 19 Gleeson, Irish in the South, 174, 176; Brennan, “Fever and Fists,” 295–298. 20 Foner, Reconstruction, 243–245; Beale, Critical Year. 21 Ash, Massacre in Memphis, 96–100; Gleeson, Irish in the South, 176–178; Foner, Reconstruction, 253–277, 446–449. 22 Rodechko, “An Irish‑American Journalist,” 524; Gleeson, Green and the Gray, 195; Foner, Reconstruction, 257–258; Steward and McGovern, Fenians, 138–139; Samito, Becoming American,188–189; Spann, “Union Green,” 209; Erie, Rainbow’s End, 35–37. 23 Samito, Becoming American, 214; Steward and McGovern, Fenians, 209–211; Chernow, Grant, 684. 24 Samito, Becoming American, 212–216; McKivigan and Robertson, “American Worker,” 303–304; Foner, Reconstruction, 514–515; Falzone, “Terence V. Powderly,” 289–310; Voss, The Making of American Excep‑ tionalism, 75–79. 25 Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, 345–376. 26 Erie, Rainbow’s End, 57–66. 27 Conyngham, Irish Brigade and Its Campaigns. 28 Corby, Memoirs of Chaplain Life; Mulholland, Story of the 116th Regiment; Denis F. Burke, quoted in Ural, Harp and Eagle, 258.

Bibliography Primary Sources Apthorp Gould, Benjamin. Investigations in the Military and Anthropological Statistics of the American Sol‑ diers. New York: U.S. Sanitary Commission, 1869. Conyngham, D.P. The Irish Brigade and Its Campaigns. New York: William McSorley and Co., 1867. Corby, W. Memoirs of Chaplain Life: Three Years Chaplain of the Famous Irish Brigade, “Army of the Poto‑ mac.” Chicago, IL: La Monte, O’Donnell and Co., 1893.Irish American (New York) Kennedy, Joseph G. Population of the United States in 1860: Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1864. Mulholland, St. Clair. The Story of the 116th Regiment, Pennsylvania Infantry: War of Secession, 1862–1865. Philadelphia, PA: F. McManus, Jr., and Co., 1899.

Secondary Sources Ash, Stephen V. Massacre in Memphis: The Race Riot that Shook the Nation One Year After the Civil War. New York: Hill and Wang, 2013. Bateson, Catherine. Irish American Civil War Songs: Identity, Loyalty, and Nationhood. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. Beale, Howard K. The Critical Year: A Study of Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co, 1930.

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The Irish in the Civil War and Reconstruction Bernstein, Iver. The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society in the Age of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Brennan, Patrick. “Fever and Fists: Forging an Irish Legacy in New Orleans.” PhD diss., University of Missouri, 2003 Chernow, Ron. Grant. New York: Head of Zeus, 2017. Chesson, Michael B. “Harlots or Heroines? A New Look at the Richmond Bread Riots.” Virginia Magazine of Biography and History 92, no. 2 (April 1984): 131–175. Erie, Steven P. Rainbow’s End: Irish‑Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840–1985. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Falzone, Vincent J. “Terence V. Powderly: Politician and Progressive Mayor of Scranton, 1878–1884.” Pennsyl‑ vania History 41, no. 3 (July 1974): 289–310. Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. New York: Harper and Row, 1988. Foote, Lorien. “Rethinking the Confederate Home Front.” Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 3 (September 2017): 446–465. Gleeson, David T. “Immigrant America and the Civil War.” In The Cambridge History of the American Civil War, Vol 3, Affairs of the People, edited by Aaron Sheehan‑Dean, 173–193. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Gleeson, David T. The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America. Chapel Hill: Uni‑ versity of North Carolina Press, 2013. Gleeson, David T. The Irish in the South, 1815–1877. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Heisser David C.R., and Stephen J. White, Sr. Patrick N. Lynch, 1815–1882: Third Catholic Bishop of Charles‑ ton. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2015. Hirota, Hidetaka. Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States & the Nineteenth Century of Origins of American Immigration Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Jenkins, Kirk C. The Battle Rages Higher: The Union’s Fifteenth Kentucky Infantry. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003. Keating, Ryan W. Shades of Green: Irish Regiments, American Soldiers and Local Communities in the Civil War Era. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. Kenny, Kevin. Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Kraszewski, Gracjan. Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2020. Kurtz, William B. Excommunicated from the War: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Langley, Brian. “Dissent and Discontent in the Confederate South, 1861–1865.” PhD diss, Northumbria Uni‑ versity, 2017. Loughery, John. Dagger John: Archbishop John Hughes and the Making of Irish America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. McKivigan, John R., and Thomas J. Robertson. “The American Worker in Transition, 1877–1914.” In The New York Irish, edited by Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher, 301–320. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Murphy, Angela F. American Slavery, Irish Freedom: Abolition, Immigrant Citizenship, and the Transatlantic Movement for Irish Repeal. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. Oakes, James. Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013. Pierson, Michael D. Mutiny at Fort Jackson: The Untold Story of the Fall of New Orleans. Chapel Hill: Univer‑ sity of North Carolina Press, 2008. Rable, George C. The Confederate Republic: A Revolution against Politics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Rodechko, James P. “An Irish‑American Journalist and Catholicism: Patrick Ford of the Irish World.” Church History 39, no. 4 (December 1970): 524–540. Russell, Anthony G. Between Two Flags: John Mitchel and Jenny Verner. Sallins, Ireland, Merrion Press, 2015. Sacher, John M. Confederate Conscription and the Struggle for Southern Soldiers. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Samito, Christian G. Becoming American Under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship during the Civil War Era. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Shiels, Damian. “Ireland’s Forgotten ‘Great War’?” History Ireland 27 (July/August 2019). https://www.history‑ ireland.com/irelands‑forgotten‑great‑war/. Accessed, April 24, 2023.

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David T. Gleeson Shiels, Damian. “Remembrance Rejected: Reflections on the First World War Centenary & Irish ‘Forgetting.’” https://irishamericancivilwar.com/2018/11/12/remembrance‑rejected‑reflections‑on‑the‑first‑world‑war‑­ centenary‑irish‑forgetting/. Accessed April 24, 2023. Shiels, Damian. The Forgotten Irish: Irish Emigrant Experiences in America. Dublin: The History Press, 2016. Shiels, Damian. The Irish in the American Civil War. Dublin: The History Press, 2016. Silverman, Jason H. Lincoln and the Immigrant. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. Sim, David. A Union Forever: The Irish Question and U.S. Foreign Relations in the Victorian Age. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. Soulé, Leon Cyprian. The Know‑Nothing Party in New Orleans: A Reappraisal. Baton Rouge: Louisiana Histori‑ cal Association, 1961. Spann, Edward K. “Union Green: The Irish Community and the Civil War.” In The New York Irish, edited by Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher, 193–209. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, 193–209. Steward, Patrick and Bryan McGovern, The Fenians: Irish Rebellion in the North Atlantic World, 1858–1876. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013. Thomas, Emory M. The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865. New York: Harper and Row, 1979. Ural, Susannah J. The Harp and the Eagle: Irish American Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861–1865. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Voss, Kim. The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nine‑ teenth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. Williams, William H.A. ‘Twas Only an Irishman’s Dream: The Image of Ireland and the Irish in American Popu‑ lar Song Lyrics, 1800–1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.

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16 RACE, GENDER, AND IRISH LABOR IN US NORTHEASTERN CITIES Danielle Phillips-Cunningham

From 1896 to 1897, sociologist and social reformer Isabel Eaton was determined to interview every white domestic service employer in the Seventh Ward of Philadelphia. The young, white, American woman researcher was working with her life-long friend and renowned African-American scholar Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois on producing “A Special Report on Domestic Service” to document the work‑ ing conditions of African-American domestic workers who migrated to Philadelphia from the Deep South during the Great Migration. Eaton’s seminal report was included in Du Bois’ The Philadel‑ phia Negro, a canonical social scientific study about the working and living conditions of southern ­African-American men and women in the City of Brotherly Love. Perhaps, unbeknownst to Eaton and Du Bois at the time, they had also produced groundbreaking data about how ideologies of race and gender impacted characterizations and the working experiences of Irish immigrant women. When Ea‑ ton asked white American housewives about their views concerning domestic workers, they told her that they were no longer satisfied with white servants, or Irish immigrant women, and they preferred to hire “green” southern African-American women instead. They did not hold back in expressing to Eaton what they believed were the racial differences between African-American and Irish immigrant servants, as they might have done had Du Bois interviewed them. This is what an employer told her: The Germans drink and the Irish order you out of the house, but the colored people [Black people] are more respectful and anxious to please […] We had white servants for seven winters, and always employed the best Irish servants we could get; but they were so unsatisfactory that we gave them up and tried colored servants. Our experience of them is that they are infinitely cleaner than the white Irish, both in their work and personally; they are more self-respecting and better mannered—more agreeable in manners […] When my sister was ill, the Irish maid I had at the time refused to carry up the breakfast tray, because, she said, ‘it was not her business to do nursing, and she wouldn’t do it for ten dollars.’ Soon after the employer fired the Irish maid, she hired a Black woman, who reportedly said, “Let me take up the breakfast tray, Mrs. W You look ready to drop.” Eaton noted, “Since she came, Mrs. W has never had a white girl in the house.” The interviewees’ complaints reflected White Anglo-Saxon Protestants’ (WASPs) regional anxieties about a changing regional and national landscape caused by the abolition of slavery and the migrations of African Americans and European immigrants into 217

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-20

Danielle Phillips-Cunningham

northeastern cities and across the United States. Irish women had been the largest immigrant group employed in domestic service in the US North since the Famine era. The newcomers from Ireland symbolized the typical servant especially in northeastern cities, yet their popularity in household employment did not shield them from ridicule.1 While employers in Isabel Eaton’s study and some employers in other northeastern cities offered seemingly complimentary remarks about African-American women in comparison to Irish immigrant women, their claims that the southerners were a natural fit for domestic service were even more prob‑ lematic. They romanticized southern plantation life and assumed that southern African-American women would naturally and happily serve their families like “Mammy,” a popular racial stereotype of enslaved African-American women constructed by southern whites who defended slavery. Dis‑ paraging representations of Irish immigrant women and African-American women had nothing to do with biological and cultural deficiencies, as WASP employers claimed, but these depictions had everything to do with preserving “whiteness” in the form of WASP social, economic, and political dominance in the United States. “White” and “Black” are social constructs, or invented categories that have shaped people’s lives and identities since slavery. “Whiteness” and “Blackness” are the physical, cultural, and religious characteristics associated with people who have been classified as members of the white and Black races, respectively. People’s racial experiences differ based on gender, or socially constructed iden‑ tity and roles ascribed to the male and female sexes. Although there is no sound scientific basis for race and gender, these man-made ideologies are at the core of laws, institutions, and social interac‑ tions that have historically and continue to impact people’s identities, working and living conditions, and access to citizenship rights and resources.2 From the 1970s to the 1990s, scholars of Irish history and immigration history more broadly argued that Irish Catholic men’s working and living experiences in the United States during the nineteenth century were impacted by slavery and ideologies of race. Beginning in the 1980s, scholars of Irish immigrant women’s history produced a body of literature making clear that an analysis of gender was important for delineating the specific labor and migration experiences of Irish immigrant women from a general Irish immigration history that foregrounded men’s experiences. While there is a general consensus that Irish immigrant women and men had distinct labor and migration histories, Cian T. McMahon, Angela F. Murphy, and Hidetaka Hirota have critically examined the usefulness of whiteness as a conceptual framework to analyze Irish immigrants’ experiences and perceptions about race as well as the stereotypes associated with them.3 To put it plainly, this chapter shows how gendered ideologies of race influenced Irish immigrant women’s labor experiences in the United States. As the 1619 Project and the rich body of literature on race and immigration have demonstrated, ideologies of whiteness and blackness have been cemented into the foundational economic, cultural, and political institutions since the transatlantic slave trade and the creation of the British Empire. Consequently, no ethnic group of people in the United States and in other parts of the world has avoided the all-encompassing ideology of race since that early period. Historians, anthropologists, and women’s and gender studies scholars, for example, have revealed how Italian, Latin American, Asian, Jewish, and Caribbean immigrants in the United States were character‑ ized and identified themselves in relation to stereotypes about white Americans and African Americans.4 This chapter picks up where Isabel Eaton and W.E.B. Du Bois left off with their study of race, women, and domestic service by documenting how Irish Catholic immigrant women’s labor experi‑ ences were not only impacted by ideologies of gender, whiteness, and blackness, but also how the Irish newcomers were integral to the development of these social constructs during the late nine‑ teenth and early twentieth centuries. This chapter also demonstrates that Irish immigrant women developed a range of strategies to challenge or align themselves with prevailing ideologies of race and gender in their demands for better working conditions. 218

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The Belligerent “Irish Bridget”: A Racial and Gender Construct When Irish women immigrated to US northern cities during the late nineteenth century, they entered a region and country that had been fraught with racial, gender, and labor politics. In the United States, European-descended, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant men invented racial categories and hierarchies to jus‑ tify slavery, exclude everyone but themselves from citizenship rights, and legitimize their control of judicial, economic, and political institutions. These early architects of race declared themselves the natural and eternally superior white race and they conferred full US citizenship rights exclusively to property-owning White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) men. According to WASP men in positions of power, enslaved African descended people were of the permanently inferior Black race, threefifths human, the legal property of slaveholders, and thereby the antithesis of US citizenship.5 In 1788, Thomas Jefferson, who was later elected president of the United States, enshrined racial ideologies in the US Constitution when he declared that Black people were inherently and perma‑ nently inferior to white men the same year that the Constitution was ratified. He wrote that there were distinct bodily and behavioral differences between both races, which led him to conclude that “the blacks are inferior to the whites in the endowment of body and mind.” According to Jefferson, the enslavement of African-descended, or Black people, was thereby not a moral or human injustice. Black people were unintelligent, uncivilized, irrational, and worshippers of savage religions and were not entitled to free labor, voting rights, and other citizenship rights like white men.6 Until the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, no women could access full citizenship rights. All women were characterized as physically and mentally inferior to WASP men and thereby unfit for citizenship rights. There was a racial hierarchy, however, among women. According to gen‑ dered ideologies of race, non-working class WASP women were the pinnacle of respectable wom‑ anhood, and women of other races were inferior to them. Black women were at the bottom of the hierarchy; they were stereotyped as the polar opposite to WASP women. In the WASP imagination, the labor and sexual exploitation of Black women was justified. According to them, Black women were irrational, licentious, and masculine in contrast to virtuous, fragile, dainty, and moral WASP women. These ideologies of femininity, masculinity, whiteness, and blackness were foundational to labor systems and enshrined in political and social institutions nearly a century before late nineteenth century Irish Catholic women reached the shores of America. The immigration of Irish Catholics to the United States during the Famine-era disrupted racial hierarchies that had been established decades before their arrival. While Black people were still considered in a permanent state of inferiority, WASPs created a hierarchy of “whiteness” to reas‑ sert their power over Black people and position themselves as superior to European immigrants of non-Anglo-Saxon Protestant backgrounds. Irish Catholics were thereby always white, yet they were characterized as not only beneath WASPs, but among the least evolved and civilized white people. Nineteenth-century scientists and social commentators attempted to naturalize myths about the su‑ periority of WASP men by developing a classification system that divided people into hierarchies of race and gender based on what they perceived as biological differences between women and men such as skin color, hair, head shapes, facial contours, and skull measurements. Their studies and drawings showed WASP men as the perfectly measured and evolved race; Black people as the least civilized race and akin to animals; and the Irish as white, but nearing bestiality and having similar characteristics to those of Black people.7 These dangerous myths had a detrimental impact on the lives of Irish Catholic women and en‑ slaved Black women. Historian Deirdre Cooper Owens revealed that James Marion Sims, also known as the “Father of Gynecology,” conducted medical experiments on enslaved Black women in the US South and poor Irish Catholic women in New York City to find medical cures for WASP women. Iron‑ ically, Sims considered Irish Catholic women and Black women immune to pain and psychologically 219

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subordinate to WASP women and thereby perfect specimens for experimentation. His cruel gyneco‑ logical surgeries often resulted in painful death or permanently excruciating disabilities.8 In addition to “scientific” claims, what people did for a living and where they lived also reflected their racial status. In US northeastern cities, WASPs frequently compared Irish Catholics to Afri‑ can Americans, hired them to work alongside free African Americans in the same dangerous and low-wage jobs, and restricted Irish immigrants and African Americans to the same neighborhoods. While Irish immigrant women outnumbered free Black women in northeastern cities, they had few options but to work in domestic service, the lowest-paid and least regulated occupation for women. Domestic service was a racially stigmatized occupation associated with slavery and Black women. US-born white women who worked in private northern homes preferred to be called “the help” to distance themselves from enslaved Black women in the South and free Black women who labored as domestic workers in northern cities. Non-working class WASP women were upheld as too re‑ spectable for wage labor. Pointing to objects for servants to clean to their satisfaction, embroidering fabrics, providing moral instruction for children, satisfying their husbands, and pursuing leisure activities were respectable tasks that defined virtuous womanhood. The arduous and “dirty” work of cultivating crops, preparing meals from live animals, bathing people, cleaning up after children, and cleaning sheets, floors, and dishes were, in contrast, reserved for women who were perceived to be inferior.9 As Timothy J. Meagher and James R. Barrett demonstrate in their chapters in the present vol‑ ume, Irish Catholic men had, by 1865, gained considerable social, economic, and political influence. They became labor union bosses and leaders in the Democratic Party through Irish-run political machines such as Tammany Hall in New York City. Some Irish immigrant men distanced themselves from blackness by assaulting African Americans. The most well-documented and vivid example, especially in the historical memory of African Americans, was when Irish men attacked African Americans in the 1863 draft riots. As educator and activist Mary Church Terrell remembered, she was inspired to join the early civil rights movement to combat racial and gender discrimination after learning that her father was shot by an Irish man during the riots. While Irish immigrant men were still not considered equal to WASPs, they were hired for higher paying jobs than those available to Black men and they gained access to city and federal government occupations that excluded Black men such as jobs in law enforcement and in fire departments. Their elevated social class status unde‑ niably distinguished their everyday working lives from those of Black people.10 Irish immigrant women, on the other hand, did not fully reap the privileges of Irish immigrant men’s newly acquired status. Many Catholic Irish women emigrated to the US into the late nine‑ teenth century to escape the poverty of tenant farming, restricted options for financial independence, and ethnic violence between the Irish and British loyalists into the late nineteenth century. Approxi‑ mately 3.5 million Irish immigrants lived in the US by 1900, and the majority of the newly arrived Irish women were single and worked in domestic service in northeastern cities. As with their mid-­ nineteenth century predecessors, Irish Catholic women encountered WASP anxieties about maintain‑ ing social, political, and economic dominance in a shifting landscape. This time around, WASPs were apprehensive about how the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments, which collectively abolished slavery, declared Black people US citizens and granted Black men voting rights; labor strikes; the women’s suffrage movement; migrations of formerly enslaved African Americans into northern cities; and continuous European emigration to the United States challenged foundational definitions and boundaries of race and US citizenship. Although the US North was upheld as the antislavery region and model example of American democracy, US-born white northerners were deeply ambivalent about racial progress, labor rights, and women’s suffrage (Figure 16.1).11 The home was considered the cradle of American civilization, and it was a primary site where WASPs defined and defended racial and gender ideologies in the face of socioeconomic and political 220

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Figure 16.1 “How to keep a servant girl—And keep her satisfied—In the Country.” Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, 1907.

change. As workers in the home, domestic servants became integral to regional and national debates about the perceived race and labor problem. While Irish immigrant women were never subjected to the same intense level of discrimination and violence that African Americans encountered, they were often compared to African-American women and were always characterized as inferior to their WASP employers. WASPs lamented that Irish immigrant women were the source of the rampant “servant problem,” or shortage of submissive, clean, honest, efficient, and qualified servants to care for their homes and families. Irish Catholic women had the same skin complexion as their WASP employ‑ ers and identified as female, but that did not dissuade photographers, phrenologists, journalists, and employers from portraying them as masculine, animalistic, aggressive, dirty, and pagan worshipping servants who domineered over terrified WASP employers and left their homes in utter filth and chaos. Racial depictions of Irish immigrant women became more ubiquitous deeper into the nineteenth century. Phrenologist Samuel R. Wells produced disparaging illustrations of Irish immigrants and circulated them widely for global consumption through his publishing company during the late nine‑ teenth century. He created an image juxtaposing an Irish servant with Florence Nightingale to dem‑ onstrate how white Anglo-Saxon women were “refined” and “governed by high moral principles,” while Irish women had “animal passions” that made them “rude, rough, unpolished, ignorant, and brutish.” Unlike Black people, who were stereotyped as in a permanent state of inferiority, Wells portrayed Irish women as capable of reform, but “only under the benign influence of long and per‑ sistent social, intellectual, and Christian culture.” His belief in the importance of conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism highlighted how religion contributed to racial tropes of Irish immigrants (Figures 16.2 and 16.3).12 Companies published actual photographs of Irish women and their households to convey that their claims and illustrations were in fact true. These sorts of media images reached some WASP employers before Irish women even applied to work in their homes, leading them to ask: How could Irish women servants possibly behave in a “civilized” manner and properly care for white American homes, if they were from such an “uncivilized” culture? Ironically, the portrayal of Irish immigrant women as unsuitable for domestic service facilitated the idea that they could or would eventually make their way out of the occupation. Until then, there was no shortage of complaints in popular periodicals about the belligerent “Irish Bridget.” 221

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Figure 16.2 An image juxtaposing an Irish woman and English social reformer Florence Nightingale produced by Samuel Well’s publishing company. Source: Samuel Robert Wells, New Physiognomy, Or Signs of Character, as Manifested Through Temperament (New York: Fowler & Wells, Company, 1894), 537.

At times, employers’ characterizations of Irish servants fluctuated depending on who they consid‑ ered to the best source of cheap labor. In most cases, employers compared the work ethics, physical appearances, and cleanliness of Irish women and African-American women to define female respect‑ ability and reinforce the unequal and segmented labor sector along the lines of race and gender. Whether the commentaries were complimentary or critical, WASP women were always positioned at the top of the hierarchy for women. According to disgruntled employers and journalists, the Irish newcomers were undesirable whites and disrupted WASP homes with their ignorance, laziness, and domineering behavior. Fluctuating representations of Irish immigrant women pointed to the inherent instability of racial and gender ideologies as figments of the imagination that were rooted in the larger social and political context in which they worked.13 Irish Catholic women were most commonly portrayed as inferior to WASPs and were dispropor‑ tionately represented in the most exploitative fields of labor on both sides of the Atlantic. As Bron‑ wen Walter argues, British depictions of lazy, cantankerous, uncivilized, and thereby racially inferior Irish-Catholic women were used to explain Britain’s rule over Ireland as the “natural” order. Similar to the segmented labor system in the US, tenant farming and domestic service were exploitative fields of labor that defined and sustained racial, class, and gender hierarchies in the British empire. In latenineteenth century Ireland, Irish Catholic women worked in a British-controlled political economy that favored the English and Irish Protestants. Irish Catholics were confined to tenant farming and domestic service in an internal colonial system that subjugated Ireland to British rule for centuries (Figure 16.4).14 The nineteenth-century Irish land system favored loyal Irish Protestants while politically and eco‑ nomically disenfranchising Irish Catholics. Irish Catholics had few options but to work alongside their family members as tenant farmers on lands owned by absentee British and Anglo-Irish land‑ lords. No matter how long and how hard tenant farming families worked, they could rarely save enough money to purchase their own land after paying excessively high rents to landlords. British control of the National Irish Education System kept Irish Catholics in an economically and politically subordinate position. Mary Ann Henry, who emigrated to the US to escape tenant farming and access better educational opportunities, recalled, “…the English, when they took over Ireland, they didn’t 222

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Figure 16.3 Samuel Wells standing in front of his publishing company in New York City circa 1880s. Source: Division of Rare Book and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

want the Irish to be educated. There was no school in the town [where my family was from].” There were fewer educational opportunities for Irish Catholic girls than boys. Irish girls were expected to leave school after attaining a primary school education to help their parents meet the crop demands of landlords.15 Irish women were not silent about their working conditions and the racial and gendered stereo‑ types associated with them on both sides of the Atlantic. While Irish women in Ireland called for the establishment of a domestic workers’ labor union, Irish women in the US wrote letters, delivered speeches, and created labor organizations to assert their own identities in their demands for better working conditions. Irish immigrant women proclaimed that they were hardworking and respectable 223

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Figure 16.4 “‘Pat, if yez don’t sell that pig he’ll soon be outside all we own.’ One of the humble homes of County Kerry, Ireland.” Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, 1905.

white ladies whose labor rights were long overdue. They claimed that they were being treated like white slaves in a country where Black people were free. While some Irish immigrant women dis‑ tanced themselves from African Americans in their demands for labor justice, others believed that they could achieve more from developing political alliances with African Americans.

Irish Immigrant Women’s Labor Resistance Irish immigrant women spoke candidly about their social proximity to Black people whether they lived in the same neighborhoods or worked in the same homes or not. Before arriving in the United States, they were aware of the negative connotations associated with Black people. Bridget Mc‑ Gaffighan, for example, recalled that her most memorable experience of arriving at Ellis Island was seeing Black people for the first time in her life. She remembered, I never saw anybody Black till I came to Ellis Island and there was an awful lot of Black peo‑ ple… when we were children growing up, we were always taught that the devil was Black…I was big enough then to know the difference. But anyway, there were a lot of them there, a lot of Black people. McGaffighan’s story was not unique. Other Irish immigrant women judged Black people by their preconceived notions of race. Bridget Ann Colgan Kauffman was also intrigued by Black people when she began living in New York City and questioned if they were fully human. She remembered, I had never seen a colored person. And I couldn’t get over these colored people you see. And I thought, oh, my, we had all thought we had seen the end of the earth. And I said, oh, what kind of people are they? And my aunt said, ‘those are what we call colored people. And you find a lot of them here.’ When Mary Jones landed at Ellis Island, she told an immigration officer, “I am not anxious to be here because I don’t want to get Black.” The officer replied, “They don’t feel bad. They feel they were born Black…” As Kauffman’s and Jones’ stories suggest, prevailing mythologies and notions of blackness that emerged during British imperialism had reached Ireland and influenced Irish im‑ migrant women’s understandings of race. While Jones mistakenly assumed that she would develop 224

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darker facial features by being in close physical proximity to Black people, she was clear about the politics of skin complexion.16 While settling into their new home, Irish immigrant women learned that in America their racial identities were intricately tied to their work and resisting their poor working conditions required them to position themselves vis-á-vis African Americans and US-born white people. As Tara M. McCarthy discusses in this volume, Irish immigrant women asserted their right to better working conditions by creating their own Irish-American identities and labor resistance methods. This section demonstrates how Irish immigrant domestic workers demanded their right to living wages by declaring themselves white slaves whose labor rights were long overdue. Irish immigrant women joined European im‑ migrant and US-born white women labor reformers and used phrases such as “wage slavery” and “white slavery” as organizing metaphors to protest the labor and sexual exploitation of northern white women industrial workers. The assumption underlying the metaphors was that it was a grave injustice for US-born and immigrant white women to endure labor and sexual exploitation. They were being treated like enslaved African Americans, although they were white women and slavery had been outlawed.17 No labor organization was fully committed to addressing the needs of domestic workers. Labor leaders decided to focus instead on occupations they believed could be most easily regulated such as factory and mill jobs. Without union representation, Irish domestic workers created their own as‑ semblies inside of labor organizations and they used the columns of newspapers to make the claim that they were white slaves and domestic service was in dire need of reform. As a domestic worker wrote to the Brooklyn Eagle, ‘J.S.G.’ says his girl has the liberty of the house and she lives on the best that money can buy. Let the lady treat the girl right and she will be rewarded for it. I have lived and am living with a family that would not have any other help but Irish. Certainly, the Irish will not do such slavish work as others may do, and they are not to do a man’s work.18 While the anonymous author and other Irish domestics did not always explicitly refer to AfricanAmerican women in their letters, the implication was always there in their references to slavery. Irish domestics made the claim that they were working white ladies who had been subjected to slave-like working conditions that were unbefitting their social status. Irish immigrant women also positioned themselves as hard working white ladies deserving of la‑ bor rights through their white women’s labor organizations. At the same time, US-born white women and European immigrant women labor organizers banded together across their distinct ethnic iden‑ tities in their fight against “white slavery.” According to historian Annelise Orleck, working-class white women activists identified class and gender, not ethnicity or religion, as the primary sources of their oppression. In white women’s labor organizations, US-born white women and European immigrant women collectively fought for government and factory owners to enact labor laws to standardize and improve the working conditions of white working-class women. Their class-based organizing strategy and the exclusion of Black women from white labor organizations expanded and consolidated the white category to include Irish immigrant women in demands for labor rights.19 Despite their claims to the privileged category of whiteness, some Irish women organized under the banner of “white slavery” and developed alliances with African Americans. Labor leader Le‑ onora Barry tried to implement a gender-based approach to labor organizing and attempted to form alliances with African-American women. Barry emigrated with her parents to the state of New York in 1851 during the Famine. In 1886, she became the national women’s organizer for the Knights of Labor (KOL). Soon after assuming the position, she traveled to Florida to organize with Black wash‑ erwomen and requested more support from male leaders to organize women workers expansively. In 225

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response to her gender and racial politics, male leaders of the KOL stripped her of the already scant financial support for women’s labor organizing. They were barely committed to addressing white women’s working conditions in domestic service and they were undoubtedly unwilling to advocate for African-American women household workers. Barry eventually left the organization altogether out of frustration with the hostility that she faced from male leaders.20 Irish-American labor leader Leonora O’Reilly, nicknamed the “Irish agitator,” also concentrated her efforts on fighting against so-called white slavery and establishing alliances with African Ameri‑ cans. As co-founder of the Women’s Trade Union League, O’Reilly joined the National Association for the Advancement for Colored People (NAACP) shortly after W.E.B. Du Bois co-founded the historic civil rights organization that was at the forefront of pushing for labor rights for Black women and men. As a founding member of the NAACP, O’Reilly worked directly with African-American women on the civil rights and labor-organizing front. Similar to African-American labor leader and NAACP ex‑ ecutive board member Nannie Helen Burroughs, O’Reilly believed that education was a powerful tool for challenging racial and gender discrimination in the labor market. Unlike immigrant white women, most African-American women were barred from the sewing trades. To counteract this discriminatory practice, O’Reilly offered sewing, dressmaking, and millinery courses to African-American women at a public school in New York City to help forge career pathways for them outside of domestic service.21 It is important to note that African-American women also attempted to create political alliances with the Irish. NAACP executive board member Mary Church Terrell delivered speeches across the country to express her support of the Irish independence movement in an effort to create global soli‑ darity between the Irish and African Americans against British colonialism and racism. Terrell was well aware of her predecessor Frederick Douglass’ political work with the Irish, and she wanted to extend the work that he started after his death. As she recalled, when she was delivering a speech in Delaware about the Irish, One of the detectives who had come to the meeting to arrest me happened to be an Irishman and reached the theater just in time to hear my tribute to McSwiney and my expression of hope that Ireland might soon be delivered from the English yoke. Afterwards, the detective said, “I’ll be damned if I arrest that woman.” Terrell told this story in her autobiography to inspire the Irish to join African Americans in their movement against global and national forms of racism.22 The prospects of cross-racial labor organizing were not always idyllic and could be contentious at times. Nannie Helen Burroughs, Mary Church Terrell’s former student, made clear that serious and transformative labor organizing required addressing racial disparities in women’s occupations that disproportionately impacted African-American women. As Burroughs declared, American-American laundresses were losing their clientele to industrial laundries that exclusively hired white European immigrant women. She told an African-American audience in Atlanta, Georgia, While little heed many have been paid to the demand for better help and the supplanting of Negro servants by the Irish, Italians, and the English may have been unnoticed by all of us, it is time for the leaders to sound the alarm, less we are rooted from the places we have held for over two centuries. While Burroughs attempted to work with white women across ethnicity, she was committed to creat‑ ing educational and labor organizing opportunities that she believed would make immigrant and USborn Black women competitive for jobs in a labor market that favored white US-born and immigrant white women.23 226

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By the 1920s, Irish immigrant women’s integration into labor movements led by white immi‑ grants, immigration restrictions, Jim Crow laws, and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment made the privileges of whiteness more accessible to Irish immigrant women. With their elevated social status, Irish immigrant women were no longer compared to African Americans. They could impact laws through voting and they were more easily hired for occupations outside of domestic ser‑ vice and their daughters could enter professions dominated by white American women. As the neat historical narrative goes, Irish women transitioned out of domestic service and became housewives in their own homes because of their hard work, sacrifice, and perseverance. Upward social class mobil‑ ity, however, did not mean that Irish immigrant women were instantly on par with white women in the labor market who had not experienced anti-Irish discrimination. While Irish immigrant women gained greater access to women’s occupations outside of household employment, they remained a generational and occupational step behind US-born white women and immigrant Jewish, German, and Italian women.24 In 1900, 54 per cent of Irish-born women were still in domestic service. During 1912 and 1913 alone, nearly 87 percent of the Irish women who emigrated to America were employed in some form of private or public domestic service at some point in their lives. Domestic service employ‑ ment remained unregulated work, and it was most easily accessible to Irish immigrant women upon arrival in the United States. Disparaging representations of Irish servants reemerged during the tu‑ berculosis epidemic of the 1920s. A medical doctor of the New York Tuberculosis Association, In‑ corporated warned employers against hiring Irish domestic workers. According to the doctor, Irish immigrant women contracted tuberculosis more easily than other immigrant servants due to their careless eating, drinking, personal hygiene, and personal habits of living. Refusing to employ Irish immigrant women, the doctor concluded, would go a long way in protecting white American homes from the disease.25 By the 1930s, Black women dominated the ranks of domestic service in the US North and South. On average, Black women were hired most frequently for the lowest status domestic service positions and they received the lowest wages of white immigrant and US-born domestic workers across the country. Unlike Black women, Irish immigrant women could leave household employment after mar‑ riage whereas Black women remained in domestic service for several generations. Due to unequal pay scales among white and Black workers, Irish immigrant men made higher wages than Black men making it possible for them to support their families with their sole income. While working-class Irish immigrant men could get higher paying jobs than Black men, they still worked in dangerous oc‑ cupations that put their lives at risk. Irish immigrant women married to working-class Irish immigrant men always faced the possibility that they might return to domestic service to support their families. Bridget Ryan McNulty, for example, sought employment in domestic service again after her husband died from a disease that she attributed to his railroad jobs in New York City and New Haven, Con‑ necticut. “The Irish always had the dirty jobs, but they took [them],” she later recalled. “There were a lot of railroad workers from Ireland […] [My husband] did very good and [then] he got the Lou Gehrig disease and died. He was only 60 years old […] That was a big shock to me.”26 While exiting domestic service was a gradual process for Irish immigrant women, they transi‑ tioned out of domestic service decades before Black women could access other occupations. Black women integrated their demands for labor rights in household employment and expanded career opportunities in their organizing against lynchings, sexism, racial segregation, voter suppression, and housing discrimination. After a century of relentless labor and political activism, Black women gained expanded job opportunities after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which included a title that prohibited discriminatory practices in the workplace, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which granted African-American women the power to vote against discriminatory laws that had dis‑ enfranchised them and their communities for centuries.27 227

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Conclusion Late nineteenth century representations and perceptions of Irish immigrant women underscore the importance of viewing their histories within the larger context of racial, gender, and labor politics. Their stories reveal how the deeply historical race problem in America has always been gendered and highly visible in the workplace. Race was such a totalizing ideology that every aspect of people’s lives had racial meanings including their ethnicity, jobs, gender identity, and religious faith. While Irish immigrant women were considered white, they did not enjoy the same gender privileges as Irish immigrant men. By virtue of their gender and their work, their journey toward an elevated status of “whiteness” was distinct from that of Irish immigrant men. As Irish immigrant men ascended into positions of political power, Irish immigrant women could not vote and run for political office until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment that granted white women the right to vote. They also remained in the low-wage and racially stigmatized occupation of domestic service, which was among the most exploited fields of work in the US economy next to share‑ cropping. The racial and gender politics of labor were intense and Irish immigrant women asserted themselves as skilled and respectable white women workers to demand better working conditions. Dilemmas of race and gender that shaped Irish immigrant women’s lives remain prevalent today. Immigrants’ pathway to US citizenship remains intricately tied to the work that they do; how they are racialized; and how they racialize themselves vis-á-vis white Americans and African Americans. Working-class white, Black, and immigrant women are concentrated in the most underpaid and un‑ derinsured jobs. To this day, poor women of Irish descent in cities such as Boston and in towns throughout the Appalachian region remain in low-wage occupations and in subpar housing condi‑ tions. Confederate flags and insurrectionist violence at the 2021 US Capitol and recent legislation that rolled back decades of labor, civil, and women’s rights legislation are blatant reminders that slavery-era ideologies of gender and whiteness never disappeared and remain hurdles to creating a truly equitable society. As immigrants who were initially characterized as uncivilized whites, Irish Catholic women’s stories, along with African-American women’s organizing strategies, provide promising guides for addressing aspects of whiteness that have threatened and prevented cross-racial alliances, especially among women. Building on the labor organizing ideas and efforts of Leonora Barry, Mary Church Terrell, Leonora O’Reilly, and Nannie Helen Burroughs can lead to the development of policies, la‑ bor union strategies, school curriculums, and everyday practices that disrupt deeply engrained gender and labor disparities rooted in the long history of race.

Notes 1 Hunter, “Historical Note by Tera Hunter,” The Philadelphia Negro, 425–426; Eaton, “A Special Report on Domestic Service,” The Philadelphia Negro, 487. 2 Quotations are not placed around white, whiteness, black, and blackness henceforth in the chapter to empha‑ size that real perceptions, consequences, and privileges have resulted from these social constructs and have impacted people’s everyday lives for centuries. 3 Publications about race and Irish immigrant men include Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth, 1971; Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 1991; How The Irish Became White, 1995; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color. Some of the first books about Irish immigrant women in the US include, but are not limited to Dudden, Serving Women, 1983; Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America, 1983; Nolan, Ourselves Alone, 1989; Lynch-Brennan, The Irish Bridget, 2009. More recent publications that examine the debates concerning whiteness and Irish immigrant history in the US are McMahon, “The Pages of Whiteness” (2015); Murphy, American Slavery, Irish Freedom (2010); and Hirota, Expelling the Poor (2019). 4 Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined intersectionality, a theoretical framework that explains how race, gender, and other social constructs have become institutionalized and produce simultaneous forms of

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Race, Gender, and Irish Labor in U.S. Northeastern Cities privilege and inequality that impact people’s everyday lives. Some of the studies that employ an intersec‑ tional analysis of Irish immigrant women’s history include:   Walter, Outsiders Inside 2001; Schultz, “The Black Mammy,” 2013; Cooper-Owens, Medical Bond‑ age, 2017; Urban, Brokering Servitude, 2018; Phillips-Cunningham, Putting Their Hands on Race, 2019. Nikole Hannah-Jones created and directs The 1619 Project. See “The 1619 Project,” New York Times Maga‑ zine, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html. Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk; Watkins-Owens, Blood Relations; Guglielmo and Salerno, Are Italians White; Diner, How America Met the Jews; Ong, “Cultural Citizenship and Subject-Making”; Hinnershitz, A Different Shade of Justice; Roediger and Esch, The Production of Difference; Márquez, “Juan Crow and the Erasure of Blackness in the Latina/o South”; Wilkerson, Caste. 5 Glenn, Unequal Freedom, 18–19. 6 Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 149–152, 155. 7 Kelly, The Graves Are Walking, 301. 8 Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage, 89–108. 9 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 99, 108; Valenze, The First Industrial Woman, 174; Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt, 139. 10 Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World, 36. 11 For immigration statistics concerning Irish women, see Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 346; Janet Nolan, Ourselves Alone, 2–3. 12 Samuel Robert Wells, New Physiognomy, 538. 13 Tomes, “Your Humble Servant,” July 1864; “Domestic Servants,” July 7, 1872; M.E.P., “Those Servant Girls: Wishes they had One Neck so that She Could Wring it,” March 11, 1897. 14 Walter, Outsiders Inside, 99; Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America, 4; Kinealy, “Was Ireland a Colony,” 48. 15 Henry, Mary Ann. Interviewed by Paul Sigrist, February 21, 1997; For a history of the influence of religion, politics, and social class on Irish female education, see Jane McDermid’s “Girls at School in NineteenthCentury Ireland.” 16 Devlin, Interviewed by Dana Gumb, September 19, 1985; Kauffman, Interviewed by Dana Gumb, Septem‑ ber 19, 1985. For histories of the global circulation of ideologies of blackness and whiteness during slavery in the British Empire, see Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic; and Peter D. O’Neill’s and David Lloyd’s The Black and Green Atlantic. 17 For further discussion about Irish servants positioning themselves as hard working white ladies, see PhillipsCunningham, “Slaving Irish ‘Ladies,’” 194–199. 18 D.M.B., “Servant Girl Question,” March 10, 1897. 19 Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 90. 20 Weir, Knights Unhorsed, 144–145. 21 Tax, The Rising of the Women, 224. 22 Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World, 351–352. 23 Burroughs, “The Colored Woman and Her Relation to the Domestic Problem,” 324–329. 24 Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth, 164–166. 25 Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth, 164–166; Kenny, The American Irish, 187–188; Margaret Lynch-Brennan, The Irish Bridget, 42; New York Tuberculosis Association, Inc. Bulleting, “Healthy Servants Only in a Healthy Home,” 1. 26 Phillips-Cunningham, Putting Their Hands on Race, 102–103; McNulty, Interviewed by Janet Levine, No‑ vember 24, 1998, Ellis Island Immigration Museum’s Oral History Collection, Bob Hope Memorial Library. 27 Nadasen, Household Workers Unite, 143–144.

Bibliography Primary Sources Burroughs, Nannie Helen. “The Colored Woman and her Relation to the Domestic Problem.” In The United Negro, His Problems and His Progress: Containing the Address and Proceedings of the Negro Young Chris‑ tian Congress, Held 6–11, 1902, edited by Irvine Garland Penn and John Wesley Edward Bowen, 324–329. Atlanta, GA: D.E. Luther Publishing, 1902. Conway, Ellen. Interviewed by Janet Levine, March 11, 1998. Ellis Island Immigration Museum, Bob Hope Memorial Library.

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Danielle Phillips-Cunningham Devlin, Bertha (Bridget) McGeoghegan (McGaffighan), Interviewed by Dana Dumb, September 19, 1985. Ellis Island Immigration Museum, Bob Hope Memorial Library. D.M.B. “Servant Girl Question.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 10, 1897. “Domestic Servants.” New York Times, July 7, 1872. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, [1899] 1996. Eaton, Isabel. “A Special Report on Domestic Service.” In W.E.B. DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, 427–434. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, [1899] 1996. Hunter, Jane Edna. A Nickle and a Prayer: The Autobiography of Jane Edna Hunter. Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press, [1940] 2011. Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. Richmond: J.W. Randolph, 1853. M.E.P. “Those Servant Girls: Wishes They Had One Neck So that she Could Wring It.” Brooklyn Eagle, March 11, 1897. O’Neill, Bridget (Delia). Interviewed by Kevin Daley. November 7, 1999. Ellis Island Immigration Museum, Bob Hope Memorial Library. Phillips, Elizabeth Delaney. Interviewed by Willa Appel, February 10, 1986. Ellis Island Immigration Museum’s Oral History Collection, Bob Hope Memorial Library. Smith, Charles Hendee, M.D. “Healthy Servants Only In A Healthy Home.” New York Tuberculosis Association, Inc. Bulletin 3, no. 4 (September–October 1922). Terrell, Mary Church. A Colored Woman in a White World. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, [2005] 2021. Tomes, Robert. “Your Humble Servant.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, July 1864. Wells, Samuel Robert. New Physiognomy, Or Signs of Character, as Manifested Through Temperament. New York: Fowler & Wells, Company, 1894.

Secondary Sources Cooper Owens, Deirdre. Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidis‑ crimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1, no. 8 (1989): 139–167. Diner, Hasia. Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. Diner, Hasia. How America Met the Jews. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2017. Dudden, Faye. Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth‑Century America. Middletown: Wesleyan Uni‑ versity Press, 1983. Foner, Eric. Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Henry, Mary Ann. Interviewed by Paul Sigrist, February 21, 1997. Ellis Island Immigration Museum, Bob Hope Memorial Library. Hinnershitz, Stephanie. A Different Shade of Justice: Asian American Civil Rights in the South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Hirota, Hidetaka. Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth‑Century Origins of American Immigration Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Hunter, Tera. “Historical Note.” In W.E.B. DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, 425–426. Philadel‑ phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cam‑ bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Kelly, John. The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2012. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. Harlow: Pearson, 2000. Kinealy, Christine. “Was Ireland a Colony? The Evidence of the Great Famine.” In Was Ireland A Colony? Economics, Politics and Culture in Nineteenth‑Century Ireland, edited by Terrence McDonough, 48–65. Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 2005.

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Race, Gender, and Irish Labor in U.S. Northeastern Cities Lynch‑Brennan, Margaret. The Irish Bridget: Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in America, 1840– 1930. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2009. Márquez, Cecilia. “Juan Crow and the Erasure of Blackness in the Latina/o South.” Labor: Studies in ­Working‑Class History of the Americas 16, no. 3 (2019): 79–85. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. New York: Rout‑ ledge, 1995. McDermid, Jane. “Girls at School in Nineteenth‑Century Ireland.” In Essays in the History of Irish Education, edited by Brendan Walsh, 105–128. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016. McMahon, Cian T. “The Pages of Whiteness: Theory, Evidence, and the American Immigration Debate.” Race & Class 56, no. 4 (March 2015): 40–55. Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Murphy, Angela. American Slavery, Irish Freedom: Abolition, Immigrant Citizenship, and the Transatlantic Movement for Irish Appeal. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. Nadasen, Premilla. Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Move‑ ment. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2015. Nolan, Janet. Ourselves Alone: Women’s Emigration from Ireland, 1885–1920. Lexington: University of Ken‑ tucky Press, 1989. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2015. O’Neill, Peter D., and David Lloyd. The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross‑Currents of the African and Irish Di‑ asporas. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2009. Ong, Aihwa. “Cultural Citizenship as Subject‑Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States.” Current Anthropology 37, no. 5 (1996): 737–762. Orleck, Annelise. Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working‑Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Palmer, Phyllis. Dirt and Domesticity: Housewives and Domestic Servants, 1920–1945. Philadelphia, PA: Tem‑ ple University Press, 1989. Phillips‑Cunningham, Danielle. Putting Their Hands on Race: Irish Immigrant and Southern Black Domestic Workers. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 2020. Phillips‑Cunningham, Danielle. “Slaving Irish ‘Ladies’ and Black ‘Towers of Strength in the labor world’: Race and Women’s Resistance in Domestic Service.” Women’s History Review 30, no. 2 (2020): 190–207. Phillips‑Cunningham, Danielle, and Veronica Popp. “Labor Organizer Nannie Helen Burroughs and her National Training School for Women and Girls.” Journal of Women, Gender, and Families of Color 10, no. 1 (2022): 9–40. Prashad, Vijay. The Karma of Brown Folk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Roediger, David, and Elizabeth D. Esch. The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Schultz, April. “The Black Mammy and the Irish Bridget: Domestic Service and the Representation of Race, 1830–1930.” Éire‑Ireland Journal 48, nos. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 2013): 176–212. Steinberg, Stephen. The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1989. Tax, Meredith. The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917. New York: Verso Books, 2022. Urban, Andrew. Brokering Servitude: Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor During the Long Nineteenth Century. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Valenze, Deborah. The First Industrial Woman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Walter, Bronwen. Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place, and Irish Women. New York: Routledge Press, 2001. Watkins‑Owens. Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900–1930. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996. Weir, Robert E. Knights Unhorsed: Internal Conflict in a Gilded Age Social Movement. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000. Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent. New York: Penguin Random House, 2020.

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17 CALIFORNIA, RACE, AND THE IRISH IN THE WEST Malcolm Campbell

“The boundaries of the American West,” asserted historian Richard White in 1991, “are a series of doors pretending to be walls.” From the establishment of the Territory Northwest of the River Ohio at the end of the eighteenth century, Irish immigrants and their descendants in the United States passed through this series of doors as they moved from the port cities of New England and the Mid‑Atlantic states to participate in the westward expansion of the nation. Following the discovery of gold in Cali‑ fornia in 1849, Irish newcomers arrived through an additional doorway, San Francisco, by sea from the south and east. Throughout the next 70 years, as post‑Famine emigration from Ireland continued apace, the American West played host to a kaleidoscope of Irish immigrant experiences as agents of national expansion, farmers on the land, miners underground, and residents of the cities of the new urban frontier. The result was a western American experience that defies easy classification, but which contemporary observers readily acknowledged to be different in tone from that of life on the eastern seaboard. Visiting the United States in the wake of the 1916 Easter Rising, the Sinn Féin cam‑ paigner Hanna Sheehy‑Skeffington wrote that “San Francisco is in many respects as different from New York as Petrograd is from London, and no one can estimate the strength of Irish sentiment in the United States who has not included the West in his observations.” Even if the divide was not quite so wide as Sheehy‑Skeffington postulated, America’s Irish recognized and enthusiastically embraced the West’s novelty, difference, and opportunities.1 In spite of Sheehy‑Skeffington’s sharp comment, historians of the Irish in America have not un‑ dertaken sustained inquiry into the differences between the East and West. Historian David Emmons frankly acknowledged in 2010 that “historians have not paid a great deal of attention to the Irish American experience in western America.” There are a few reasons for this lacuna. The first is the general problem of defining “the West” as an historical landscape. When Walter Nugent surveyed practitioners of Western history three decades ago about how to define the “West” and “Frontier,” he received a wide range of responses. Some correspondents focused on defining a particular place or space; others understood the West as a mindset reflecting the movement of the frontier. “The West is a ‘sense’ of westering,” one told Nugent, “wherever a ‘feeling’ of the westward movement is strong and evocative.” Other respondents more explicitly identified the West as a product of specific histori‑ cal processes. “Which West? When?” wrote William Cronon, arguing for a nuanced and evolving history, and maintaining that midwestern history ought to sit within its domain. In short, the complex questions of when, where, and how Western history is situated have worked against the development of a cohesive literature on the Irish in the West. While Emmons offered an important investigation DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-21

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into the lives of post‑Famine Irish Catholic immigrants in what he termed the “American Pale,” his book stands alone as a recent foray into the history of the West, broadly writ. Important works have examined the Irish in some western cities and towns, and in particular industries such as mining; however, wider synthetic works have not so far emerged.2 A second important explanation for the limited scholarship on the Irish in the West is that histori‑ cal orthodoxy long maintained that the immigrants were absent west of the Mississippi River. As‑ sumptions about the psychological impact of Ireland’s Great Famine, about the lack of capital and inadequate farming skills of mid‑nineteenth century Irish immigrants, and of the symbiotic relation‑ ship of these newcomers to the Roman Catholic Church limited historians’ field of vision and under‑ mined curiosity about the Irish‑born people who left New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and lesser East Coast cities to move west. Chicago constitutes one notable exception to this focus, although writing on its past has until recently tended to understate its role as a doorway to the West and helped fuel the historiographical myth that, in crossing the Atlantic Ocean, the Irish‑born transformed from a rural people to an urban one. While no doubt millions did reside in these important cities, the strength of this belief worked to limit curiosity about those more mobile people who farmed, mined, or con‑ structed railroads as the American nation extended westward.3 This chapter identifies key aspects of the Irish immigrant experience as the nation expanded west‑ ward, commencing with the late eighteenth‑century creation of the Territory of the Northwest, and following the Irish movement into the Plains states, the mountains, and finally to the Pacific coast‑ line after the Irish Great Famine. Hallmarks of the western Irish experience include the remarkable mobility of the newcomers; the range of places they settled; and the extraordinary diversity of life experiences of those who ventured westward. While a minority participated in schemes designed to resettle the Irish on western lands, many more were individuals or members of family units who adventurously sought improved livelihoods in the new American empire west of the Appalachians.

The Old Northwest American national independence posed important questions about the future of the West and of the disposition of western lands. New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut ceded claims to lands north of the Ohio River which became subject to the Congressional 1785 Land Ordinance. Congress’ 1787 Northwest Ordinance then set the scene for westward expansion into the trans‑Appalachian lands, the conquest of its First Nations inhabitants, and the imposition of a framework for future governance. Irish immigrants in the United States, who until the 1830s were predominantly Protestants hailing from the northern counties of Ulster, along with their American‑born descendants, participated in this early process of western expansion. One exemplar is Joseph Wright, Wexford‑born and a member of the Society of Friends, who emigrated to the United States in 1801 at the age of 44 years follow‑ ing the failure of his Dublin business. Settling initially in Baltimore, the ambitious Wright decided to undertake a 540‑mile journey to the Territory of the Northwest. Assisted in his quest for land by a surveyor of Ulster descent, Joseph summoned his wife and children to join him in America with the intention of establishing a Quaker settlement near the Ohio River in what would become Bel‑ mont County, Ohio. Wright’s western enterprise flourished for more than a decade, and he achieved prominence in business and civic life. Though his personal quest foundered into insolvency in the early 1820s, his children, like those of so many other Irish immigrants, did “passably well” in Ohio in different trades and occupations.4 Wright’s personal expedition westward foreshadowed larger‑scale Irish movement to the Old Northwest after 1815. Deteriorating economic conditions in Ireland following the end of the Napole‑ onic Wars contributed to a sharp increase in emigration. The sustained outflow from Ireland to Amer‑ ica, culminating in large‑scale migration during the crisis years of the Great Famine (1845–1855), 233

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was one factor in the sharp rise in the United States’ population from 10 million to 30 million between 1820 and 1860. During the antebellum period, fast‑paced economic change, urban overcrowding, and rising religious bigotry contributed, as Hidetaka Hirota demonstrates in his chapter in this vol‑ ume, to an increasingly hostile environment for the Irish‑born in the cities of New England and the Mid‑Atlantic states. In the face of rising nativist hostility, adventurous individuals looked westward to improve their fortunes. At the same time, sympathizers developed plans to facilitate larger‑scale western migration. A variety of newly established Irish immigrant organizations mobilized from the 1840s to encourage the newcomers to leave East Coast cities. The urgency of this endeavor increased as the Famine propelled panic‑stricken emigrants across the Atlantic Ocean. Yet while these ad‑ vocates justifiably highlighted the economic opportunities of land ownership, some Irish‑Catholic church leaders, including Archbishop John Hughes of New York, countered by expressing concern at the risks posed to Irish people who ventured west. Hughes publicly denounced proposals for inland “Irish towns” as impediments to assimilation while simultaneously attacking “the discomforts, the afflictions, the mental and religious evils which were frequently the result of rude Western life.”5 Writing in 1852, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, one of the leading proponents of Irish dispersal to the West, observed, “The six states carved out of the north‑western Indian territories since the begin‑ ning of this century, have been the favorite goals of all recent emigration.” He praised the extent of the Irish contribution to this phase of national expansion. “If, in our own age, this young nation has been able to export its superfluous breadstuffs to the other side of the Atlantic,” he wrote, “one of the chief causes is to be found in the constant supply of cheap Irish labor, which, for fifty years, has been poured along all the avenues of the west.” Mid‑century data demonstrate the extent of the movement. The 1850 United States census recorded 126,879 Irish‑born residents in the six states or territories of the Old Northwest, or 13.2 percent of the nation’s Irish‑born population. This figure was significantly lower than the proportions of the foreign‑born (24.8) and total US populations (22.7) within the re‑ gion. Yet in the period between 1850 and 1870, while the proportion of native born remained static at around 24.7 percent, new immigrants to the United States, including the Irish born, proved increas‑ ingly likely to move westward in search of opportunity. By 1870, 343,772 Irish‑born settlers resided in these six states, or 18.5 percent of the nation’s total Irish‑born population. Moreover, this does not take into account the children of Irish newcomers, Roman Catholic, and Protestant, who went west but are rendered invisible in the national census.6 While early Irish arrivals like Joseph Wright entered an overwhelmingly rural region, agriculture was not the only form of employment. At mid‑century, economic diversification occurred quickly across the region. From the 1830s, Irish migrants took up lead mining in the Driftless Hill Land in the inner basin of the Upper Mississippi River. Placenames including “Irish Hollow,” “Irish Dig‑ gings,” and a short‑lived village named Dublin, testified to the immigrants’ presence in Iowa County, Wisconsin. The period between 1850 and 1870 saw further changes in the patterns of Irish residence and work. Farming continued to be critical. In Minnesota, the 1870 census recorded 58 percent of the state’s Irish residents in employment to be farm owners or farm laborers, a figure higher than that of the native‑born but consistent with the total foreign‑born population. Yet, while farming remained the principal category of employment, thousands of other immigrants worked in the construction of new transport networks, including Irish canal diggers recruited to come to Indiana, and “gandy dancers,” hired by railroad companies to toil as the western tracks were laid.7 Even as newcomers took up opportunities for land ownership in locations such as Minnesota, the demographic and economic conditions on the Old Northwest showed signs of extraordinary change. Chicago, which grew rapidly from a town of 4500 in 1840 to become America’s eighth largest city within two decades, best exemplified this trend. As early as 1854, the city saw 74 trains a day con‑ necting it with the East; 37 each way. Newly laid railroad tracks linked the city with lands opening further west. Chicago stood, one writer explained, “atop a western urban hierarchy that included 234

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some two dozen cities in the trans‑Pacific West.” The Irish‑born figured prominently on this new urban frontier. By 1870, the number of Irish‑born in Chicago stood at 40,000, a population more dispersed through the city spatially and occupationally than in the older settlements of the Atlantic seaboard. In adjusting to urban life and employment in the newly emerging cities, the Irish behavior increasingly mirrored that of the region’s overall population.8 While patterns of Irish settlement gradually aligned with those of the population at large, in one respect their experience of land acquisition differed significantly from other groups. Led by church leaders, including the first Roman Catholic archbishop of Saint Paul, John Ireland, and secular organ‑ izations, such as the Irish‑American Colonization Company, several schemes in the 1870s and 1880s attempted to create distinctive Irish rural settlements. These schemes purchased land from vendors at favorable prices with the plan of transplanting viable Irish rural communities to Minnesota. These well‑intentioned endeavors mainly proved to be unsuccessful. While the immigrants’ lack of capi‑ tal and unfamiliarity with local agricultural conditions certainly contributed to the schemes’ dismal outcomes, an inescapable feature was that these initiatives occurred too late. Typically, they directed poorly prepared newcomers onto lesser quality farmland in competition with the modernizing trends of urbanization and economic change occurring in the Old Northwest.9

The Plains and Mountains Irishman George Berkeley foreshadowed what he saw as the rise of a new golden age for humankind in America when he wrote in the eighteenth century, “Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way.” While Europe withered, Berkeley announced, a new civilization was on the verge of fulfillment, a society greater than all of those that had preceded it. The second half of the nineteenth century saw the arrival of the new, formidable, and ambitious American Empire reaching west to the Pacific. The Irish were important participants in this era of conquest and westward expansion. Rebellion in Texas in 1836 raised pressing questions about the future of the United States, its west‑ ern lands, states’ rights, slavery, and the terms of any new territory’s incorporation into the national polity. Democrat James K. Polk’s election as President in 1844 confirmed a policy of national expan‑ sion. Conquest of the West was now proclaimed as the nation’s manifest destiny, and military force would be used to secure the nation’s territorial ambitions. From the early 1840s, working in tandem with the exhortation to expand westward, adventurous men and women began in increasing numbers to cross the treacherous overland trails to Oregon, the prized agricultural land west of the great di‑ vide. The Irish‑born and those of Irish descent figure among the ranks of those who participated in this project of national expansion.10 At mid‑century, older American hands predominated among the Irish who joined the intrepid westward parties. Frequently, these were highly mobile immigrants whose lives showed a relentless desire to seek opportunity. One well documented example was Martin Murphy, who was born in County Wexford in 1785 and migrated with his family to Frampton, Quebec, in 1820. Two decades later, his enlarged family was on the move. Traveling via Kingston, Buffalo, Cleveland, Portsmouth on the Ohio, and Louisville, Murphy and his family arrived in St. Louis and quickly purchased a farm of 300 acres in Missouri. However, the promise of superior opportunities on the West Coast beckoned, and in the spring of 1844, Murphy senior, now aged 60, along with his five sons and two daughters, set out as an overland party. Despite an arduous mountain crossing that included the birth of a child at the Yuba River, the party arrived safely in California in March 1845 and commenced stock raising. Judicious investments in land in the vicinity of Sacramento bore fruit when the discov‑ ery of gold increased the value of the family’s land holdings.11 Though such examples of rugged individualism and heroic family enterprise figure prominently in national mythology, as historians Robert Hine and John Mack Faragher explained, the nation’s 235

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westward expansion and the planting of the settler population there relied heavily on the Federal Government and its resources. The United States Army enlisted large numbers of Irish immigrants, particularly from the time of the Civil War, as it secured the nation’s westward push. Irish‑born sol‑ diers and others of Irish parentage participated in the conquest of the plains and the dispossession of its First Nations peoples: the infamous exclamation, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” is popularly attributed to an Irish‑American general, Philip Sheridan. Though scholars sometimes claim an Irish affinity with, or acknowledgement of, the plight of Indigenous populations subject to colo‑ nization, there is no denying Irish involvement in the extension of the settler state. That high level of military involvement continued during the United States incorporation of the West Coast. In 1870, one‑third of the United States army stationed in California was of Irish birth.12 In the footsteps of this westward conquest came thousands of immigrants determine to acquire land and build new lives. From the 49th Parallel south to Texas, the Irish came to the West as ranch‑ ers, workers, and adventurers. Historian Dennis Clark observed that in 1860 there were nearly 30,000 Irish in Iowa poised to move westward. Many cherished the ideal of achieving prosperity on a secure landholding. In May 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law the Homestead Act, which held out the prospect for all citizens over the age of 21 years to purchase public land. Historians now hold mixed views about the Act’s effectiveness, noting the power of wealthy landholders to frus‑ trate the small settler class. Nevertheless, thousands embraced the opportunity to participate in the westward expansion of the nation. By 1870, the Irish‑born constituted one‑in‑six of the foreign‑born residents in Nebraska, one‑in‑five in Iowa, and close to a quarter of the foreign‑born population in Missouri and Kansas.13 In addition to individual endeavors, group settlement schemes continued to be of importance in Irish western settlement. Mirroring what transpired in Minnesota, Roman Catholic Church leaders promoted several discrete Irish agricultural settlements. Railroad companies, too, encouraged im‑ migrant resettlement, fully aware of the benefits to be reaped from the development of new towns. Additionally, ambitious land agents developed plans to boost western settlement and attract Irish farmers. For example, in 1869, John Pope Hodnett, a Washington D.C. attorney and the US Asses‑ sor for Dakota, proposed to establish an Irish rural colony on the eastern side of the Missouri River adjacent to the Black Hills. With the cooperation of the National Fenian Convention, held the same year in St Louis, Hodnett and his supporters arranged financing to enable the development of a com‑ munity of ardent Irish nationalists, who would be ready to strike out to the north against the British Empire when an opportune moment arose. Though disagreement among its leaders and the failure of other Fenian military campaigns against Canada thwarted the ambitious plan, the Black Hills initia‑ tive signaled the continuing importance of Irish nationalism and resentment against Great Britain as a unifying sentiment among the western Irish settlers.14 In 1882, the Irish political commentator Phillip Bagenal wrote that, in America, the “population is moving westward en masse, and the Pacific Ocean is the only stopping‑point of the great line of inva‑ sion.” Bagenal observed the extraordinary tide of westward energy in the decades after the Civil War, which produced an urban frontier that gradually extended from Chicago and St. Louis to Kansas City and across the mountains to the Pacific Coast. The demand for infrastructure drew the Irish to bold new cities including Denver, as well as a host of smaller‑scale settlements. Thousands of Irish work‑ ers, including many former military men, labored in the development of the network of new railroads built with government support to serve the new American West. Others gained employment construct‑ ing the roads and buildings of the future with an eye to better opportunities for the next generation.15 The West’s incorporation into the fast‑growing national economy required mobile laborers, in‑ cluding those with industrial and mining skills. In the late nineteenth century, Irish‑born workers made their mark in the new economy, especially in the Mountain states. Butte, Montana stands as the most remarkable Irish mining settlement. Hundreds of Irish workers, attracted to the town in 236

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large part by the presence of Cavan‑born mine owner Marcus Daly, converged on Butte in search of employment, good pay and working conditions, a sense of security, and congenial community life. The early arrival of the Irish in Butte proved critical: as historian David Emmons has commented, “the Irish fared best where the resident non‑Irish population was least well‑entrenched and where industrial job opportunities were most numerous.” Fueled by the nation’s demand for copper, Butte grew rapidly: the town of 8,863 in 1880 grew by 1900 to be Montana’s largest urban center with a population of 30,470. Mobility up the occupational scale and the opportunity to shape the ground rules of community life contributed to the town’s stable and confident Irish nationalist mining com‑ munity. However, over the decades that followed threats arose, including the risks of mining work and the arrival of transient laborers, which presented challenges to the Irish ascendancy in Butte.16 Irish women made critical contributions in both rural and new urban communities in the West in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. They entered states and territories with decidedly marked, though narrowing, sex ratios. In Kansas, the ratio of males: females declined from 116.8 to 110.0 between 1880 and 1910; in Nebraska, a similar trend was at work where the sex ratio declined from 122.7 to 111.2. However, in the Mountain states, the preponderance of men was stark. Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Wyoming each had a sex ratio of 200 or more males to 100 females in 1880, and though that difference diminished across the next four decades, each remained heav‑ ily skewed in 1910. Irish women in the region were concentrated mostly in the newly developing towns, where they found employment in the delivery of personal services, as stewards of boarding houses, or in hospitality. In the late nineteenth century, these nascent western communities presented a distinctive landscape where opportunities for women’s political advancement proved notable by the standards of the nation. A strong correlation exists between the Mountain states and the early grant‑ ing of the vote to women. Historians have commented upon the diminished sectarian and nativism of the West as factors that contributed to the success of western suffrage campaigns and enabled Irish women’s involvement in progressive political campaigns in the Far West.17

The West Coast Irish The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in January 1848 laid the foun‑ dation for rapid population growth on the West Coast and the rise of San Francisco as a major new American city. A small coastal settlement known as Yerba Buena, with a population of barely 1,000 in 1848, grew to be the United States’ bustling entrepôt to the Pacific Ocean. Small numbers of men and women had crossed the mountains to the West Coast prior to 1848, but the gold discoveries attracted a new, large, and ethnically diverse population to San Francisco. The Irish‑born numbered heavily among these gold rush newcomers. Their presence as a charter population from 1848 set the scene for San Francisco’s development as a major American and Irish‑American city, a metropolis where the Irish population and their descendants exerted remarkable influence for the next three quarters of a century.18 Historians have conventionally identified the West Coast as a place of opportunity for Irish immi‑ grants. “The California Irish experience was not that of the rest of Irish America, in the years 1848– 1920,” historian James P. Walsh has written. “It was always closer to what is now the experience of that community generally: affluence, opportunity, individualism, and diversity.” Walsh’s analysis accords with the judgment of nineteenth‑century Irish writers in San Francisco, who typically cel‑ ebrated the unique opportunity presented in the burgeoning city. As one contemporary reported, “it is probable that in San Francisco the Irish race are more numerous than on average, as they certainly are more independent, than in any other city on the continent.” Although many immigrants experienced hardship and disillusionment, the balance of the historical record supports this view that conditions in California were more benign than those encountered in the major East Coast cities.19 237

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From the outset, the numerically strong Irish presence made for a confident and assertive com‑ munity. By 1852, the future city’s population numbered nearly 35,000, of whom 53 percent were for‑ eign born, and 4,223 were of Irish birth. The mid‑century Irish community drew upon three discrete streams of newcomers. The largest group arrived from the eastern United States to participate in the gold rush and subsequent economic expansion. A slightly smaller number of Irish‑born arrived from the Australian colonies. Known as the “Sydney Ducks,” these arrivals from across the Pacific Ocean attracted opprobrium on account of their time spent in colonies originally founded as British convict settlements. Only a small proportion, fewer than 10 percent, arrived directly from Ireland. These three strands of the Irish‑born residents established themselves as a numerically strong foundation group in the city. Associational life developed from the outset. In 1854, 1,000 people, each dressed with green sashes, proudly paraded to the Mission Dolores to participate in a ceremony organized by the Hibernian Society of San Francisco and the Sons of the Emerald Isle.20 Two main factors account for the secure Irish position in the city. The first is their early arrival and persistence. Writing of his travels through the Far West in the late 1860s, Mark Twain asked where the virile pioneers of the city’s gold rush decade had gone? His answer was “Scattered to the ends of the earth—or permanently aged and decrepit—or shot and stabbed in street affrays—or dead of disappointed hopes and broken hearts.” Twain’s perception of a society in flux proved to be cor‑ rect. Census evidence demonstrates that whereas other Western European migrant groups did in fact scatter, or received few new reinforcements, the Irish in this city proved most likely as a group to stick. A study of social mobility in San Francisco demonstrates that three‑quarters of all native‑born male employees in the city in 1880 arrived during the 1870s; two‑thirds of the foreign‑born men in employment that year arrived during the same decade. Fewer than 10 percent of San Francisco’s employed male population in 1880 had resided in the city for more than 20 years. Yet, whereas the proportions of the English and French‑born in San Francisco declined markedly following the gold rush years, the city’s share of Irish‑born remained nearly constant in the 20 years between 1860 and 1880. Critical to this was the propensity of the Irish to put down roots in the city and their continuing reinforcement by new immigrants. High levels of post‑Famine emigration from Ireland ensured that the energy and assuredness displayed by the charter population continued, even as the ethnic com‑ position of the city was substantially recast. Although this Irish influx in the 1860s and 1870s was predominantly comprised of southern Catholics, a contemporary in the city also noted an increase in the number of arrivals of “Protestant North of Ireland men in the late 1860s.”21 The second critical factor is the presence in the city of a substantial Chinese population, the effect of which was to produce a racial configuration distinct from that encountered in other North Ameri‑ can cities. While the numbers of Chinese arriving to the Californian goldfields at the end of the 1840s proved slight, their presence increased markedly from 1852. With San Francisco newspapers report‑ ing up to 500 Chinese disembarking on the town’s docks each week, anti‑Chinese agitation surged, along with white workers’ demands for immigration restrictions. Nativist critics contended that these transient Chinese laborers lacked sufficient commitment to the United States and should be denied access to the nation’s much vaunted protection for the dispossessed. San Francisco’s Alta California carried articles bearing inflammatory headlines including “The War Upon the Chinese,” and reported the demands of European workers that the Chinese newcomers be removed once and for all from the Californian goldfields.22 During the first decade, organized opposition to the Chinese proved to be sporadic in nature. After a short hiatus, concerns over the economic achievements of the newcomers fueled renewed agitation in the first half of 1854, focusing in particular on their allegedly deleterious behavior and inferior ways of living. However, at the same time as these gold‑era Chinese faced ostracization in the city, including occasional outbursts of racist violence, San Francisco’s Irish residents lived within the relatively charmed world of the white city dwellers, deemed with the English to be virtually 238

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indistinguishable from native‑born Americans. “Under the term ‘American’ are included the natives of Great Britain and Ireland, who are less easily distinguishable from native Americans than are other foreigners,” noted the contemporary observer Frank Soule while analyzing the 1852 Census returns. “Since the common language of the Americans and British is English, and their customs and habits of thought are generally the same, there seems no impropriety in calling them all in California simply Americans.” In achieving this favorable standing, the Irish position in San Francisco more closely resembles the experience of their compatriots in the neighboring Pacific gold societies, Australia and New Zealand, each the recipient of Chinese migration, than much of the United States.23 Vibrant growth during the Reconstruction Era transformed the geographical distribution and em‑ ployment patterns of the city’s Chinese population. By 1870, fully one‑third of California’s Chinese population lived in San Francisco. The urbanization of an estimated 18,000 Chinese, who were then employed in the city’s factories and laboring jobs, renewed conflict with the city’s white working class. As the Chinese population urbanized, the writer Bret Harte foresaw a limited future for Irish la‑ borers and domestics in the city. “In the domestic circle [they] are seriously threatened by the advent of these quiet, clean, and orderly male chambermaids and cooks,” Harte wrote. “That John Chinaman will eventually supplant Bridget and Patrick in menial occupations seems to be a settled fact.”24 Unsurprisingly, fears of displacement in the workforce and an underlying racial ideology that emphasized the inferiority of the Asian population contributed to renewed white working‑class mo‑ bilization. Mark Twain sympathized with the plight of Chinese workers, who were subject to virulent antagonism. He attributed the opposition to them not to the well‑to‑do Californians, but to the “scum” of the population, including policemen and politicians, “for these are the dust‑licking pimps and slaves of the scum, there as elsewhere in America.” The city’s Irish figured among his targets. In the late nineteenth century, other influential writers also shared this view. The prominent historian Hubert Howe Bancroft, in his own hostile invocation of stereotypes, later wrote, “The Chinese were driven from the United States at the instigation of Irish voters, who claimed the right to do all the dirty work in America, and which they were anxious to do only at exorbitant wages.”25 These local developments, allied with rising labor agitation across the nation, set the scene for the rise of the Workingman’s Party of California. Led by a confrontational Cork‑born businessman, Denis Kearney, the Workingman’s Party proposed a radical populist agenda that included the end of the political establishment and the removal of the Chinese. Kearney’s message, “The Chinese Must Go,” became the staple cry at his party’s meetings. Violent rhetoric characterized this white working movement’s opposition to the Chinese: bullets were not wanting, Kearney famously told one rally. Riots in the city in July 1877 signaled the mobilization of San Francisco’s white workers. The Work‑ ingman’s Party manifesto proclaimed, “We declare that white men, and women, and boys, and girls, cannot live as the people of the great republic should, and compete with the single Chinese Coolie in the labor market.” Under this threat, the Irish position in the city consolidated while the Chinese faced the prospect of ongoing violence.26 Not all of the Irish in San Francisco adopted Kearney’s position. Division emerged between him and Frank Roney, a long‑time Fenian and labor activist. Belfast‑born Roney initially aligned himself with the new Workingman’s Party and claimed to have written its first statement of principles. Motivated by recent experiences of inequality in the city, he founded the Seaman’s Protective Association, organ‑ ized workers in the San Francisco metal trades, and was first president of the Representative Council of Trades and Labor Federation of the Pacific Coast. However, in contrast to his countryman Kearney, Frank Roney concluded that exclusion of the Chinese from organized labor and demands for their re‑ moval were wrong, a position that marked a break with the Workingman’s Party and its supporters but foreshadowed the more inclusive racial position later adopted by the Industrial Workers of the World.27 Hallmarks of the Irish presence in San Francisco during the turn of the century period were their assured place in Democratic politics and ongoing commitment to the cause of Irish independence. 239

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Both had strong traditions in the city. Irish political sway extended back to David C. Broderick and the “Young Ireland” clique of the 1850s. This connection continued even as the Irish‑born popula‑ tion aged and its second generation achieved prominence in public life. James D. Phelan typified this changed trajectory of San Francisco’s Irish politics. Born in San Francisco in 1861 to a County Laois father who had arrived and prospered as a merchant in the gold rush years, Phelan, a firm Irish nationalist and vocal advocate for the restriction of Asian immigration, served in the United States Senate from 1915 until 1921.28 The cause of the Irish homeland also figured large in the lives of these West Coast Irish. From the Famine years, nationalism constituted a unifying force for most Irish. Regular meetings, picnics, and processions continued to rally San Francisco’s Irish community through the second half of the nineteenth century and apply political pressure on Great Britain. The aftermath of the Easter Ris‑ ing and the commencement of the War of Independence provoked widespread outrage. Enthusiasm peaked in the Golden City in July 1919 with the arrival of Eamon de Valera. The Sinn Féin leader spent five days attending large rallies, sponsored by the Friends of Irish Freedom, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and the United Irish Societies of San Francisco, including one at the Civic Auditorium that attracted 12,000 supporters. The long‑time Irish leader in the city, Fr. Peter Yorke, played a sig‑ nificant role in motivating the Irish reception, culminating in the Monitor’s assessment that the Irish leader “came, saw, and conquered the hearts and minds of San Franciscans.” The strength of support for Ireland extended north along the Pacific Coast and into the interior. During the Irish War of Inde‑ pendence, Sir Horace Plunkett, the Irish rural reformer, warned a London journalist about the toxic anti‑British sentiment in America, opposition that was “virulently active” in the West.29

Conclusion Hanna Sheehy‑Skeffington’s observations on the differences between New York and San Francisco noted at the commencement of this chapter provide a telling reminder that the Irish‑American story is a transcontinental one. The scale and complexity of the nation’s history, combined with deeply em‑ bedded beliefs about the American Irish, have contributed over the long term to the relative neglect of the immigrants’ experiences in “the West.” This chapter has argued that there is no one history of the western Irish; their story developed over time and in specific places as the settler colonial popu‑ lation occupied the United States. Immigrants in the Old Northwest after 1815 sought land, stable employment, and material progress, which seemed elusive for those living closer to the Atlantic Coast. Fundamental shifts in nineteenth‑century life relating to industrialization, urbanization, and transformation in transport and communications profoundly shaped that region. Similar motives at‑ tached to those who moved to the Great Plains and the Mountain states, where the same modernizing impulses similarly framed the lives of Irish newcomers and their American descendants. The West Coast presented its own distinctive story, shaped by the impact of gold and the presence of a sub‑ stantial Chinese population. Across each of these western settings, common but not universal threads linked the Irish immigrants’ experiences. The Roman Catholic Church, enduring support for an Irish nation, and a tendency toward Democratic politics, marked points of continuity with compatriots on the Atlantic Coast. However, the overwhelming characteristic of the Irish in the American West is of a restless, relentless energy to make new American lives for themselves and their descendants.

Notes 1 Sheehy‑Skeffington, Impressions of Sinn Féin, 19; White, It’s Your Misfortune, 3. 2 Emmons, American Pale, 2; Nugent, “Where Is the American West,” 12–13. 3 Billings and Farrell, Irish in Illinois, 1–8.

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California, Race, and the Irish in the West 4 Miller, Irish Immigrants, 200–223; Hine and Faragher, American West, 104–109, 114–129. 5 Shannon, Catholic Colonization, 34–38; Browne, “Archbishop Hughes,” 257–285. 6 McGee, History of Irish Settlers, 179; De Bow, Statistical View, 116–118; United States, Ninth Census, 376, 392, 419–420. 7 Lang, “Irishmen in Northern Indiana,” 190–193; Read, Driftless Hill, 7, 23–27; Campbell, Ireland’s New Worlds, 67–73. 8 Galenson, “Economic Opportunity,” 582; Hine and Faragher, American West, 406–408; Wyman, Immigrants in the Valley, 99. 9 Campbell, Ireland’s New Worlds, 80–84. 10 Hine and Faragher, American West, 199–202; White, It’s Your Misfortune, 73–84. 11 Biographical Sketch of the Murphy Family, 1–13. 12 Hine and Faragher, American West, 143; Emmons, American Pale, 3–4, 144–155; Campbell, Farthest Shores, 46–47. 13 Luebke, “Ethnic Group Settlement,” 407–416; Clark, Hibernia America, 123. 14 Collins, “Historical Sketch,” 3–5; Luebke, “Ethnic Group Settlement,” 415. 15 Bagenal, American Irish, 77 16 Census Bureau, Census Bulletin, 6; Emmons, Butte, 19–25, 63–65, 181–185; Noonan, Mining Irish‑­American Lives, 4–19. 17 White, It’s Your Misfortune, 355–359; Mercier “Women Irish,” 28–33; Curry, “Three Irish Women,” 66–72; Emmons, American Pale, 216–218. 18 Campbell, Farthest Shores, 76–77. 19 Quigley, Irish Race, 149–150; Walsh, “Irish,” 175; Breatnac, “Difference Remains,” 148; Blessing, West Among Strangers, 424–425. 20 Walsh, “The Irish,” 165–166; Burchell, San Francisco, 14; Burchell, “Gathering,” 279–298; Soule, Annals, 524. 21 Hopkins, Common Sense, 25; Decker, Fortunes and Failures, 170–172. 22 Markus, Fear and Hatred, 2–4; Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 23–40. 23 Soule, Annals, 484; Markus, Fear and Hatred, 8–11. 24 Quoted in Ou, “Ethnic Presentations,” 489. The subject of Irish women and domestic labor in the northeast‑ ern United States is discussed in Danielle Phillips‑Cunningham’s chapter in the present volume. 25 Twain, Roughing It, 111–112; Bancroft, New Pacific, 595. 26 Saxton, Indispensable Enemy, 3–7, 113–112. 27 Roney, Irish Rebel, 261–295. 28 Burchell, San Francisco Irish, 116–121; White, It’s Your Misfortune, 380; Phelan Papers, Biographical Note. 29 Sarbaugh, “Irish,” 73–76; Campbell, Farthest Shores, 202–203.

Bibliography Primary Sources Bagenal, Philip H. The American Irish and Their Influence on Irish Politics. London: Kegan Paul, 1882. Bancroft, Hubert Howe. The New Pacific. New York: The Bancroft Company, 1900. “Biographical Sketch of the Murphy Family Prepared for Chronicles of the Builders of the Commonwealth.” Bancroft Library C‑D 792–2. University of California Berkeley. Collins, Charles. History and Directory of the Black Hills. Central City, Dakota Territory: s.n., 1878. De Bow, James D B. Statistical View of the United States: Compendium of the Seventh Census, 1850. Washing‑ ton, DC: United States Census Bureau, 1854. Hopkins, Caspar T. Common Sense Applied to the Immigration Question Showing Why the California Immigrant Union Was Founded and What It Expects to Do. San Francisco, CA: Turnbull and Smith, 1869. McGee, Thomas D’Arcy. A History of the Irish Settlers in North America from the Earliest Period to the Census of 1850. Boston, MA: Patrick Donahoe, 1852. Phelan Papers, James D. Papers. CB‑800 Carton 3. Berkeley: Bancroft Library, University of California. Quigley, Hugh. The Irish Race in California and on the Pacific Coast with an Introductory Historical Disserta‑ tion on the Principal Races of Mankind, and a Vocabulary of Ancient and Modern Irish Family Names. San Francisco, CA: A. Roman and Co, 1878. Roney, Frank. Irish Rebel and Labor Leader. An Autobiography, edited by Ira Cross. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1931.

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Malcolm Campbell Sheehy‑Skeffington, Hanna. Impressions of Sinn Féin in America: An Account of Eighteen Months Propaganda in the United States. Dublin: Davis Publishing Company, 1919. Soule, Frank. The Annals of San Francisco. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1855. Twain, Mark. Roughing It. Vol. 1. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1913. United States Census Office [Francis A. Walker]. A Compendium of the Ninth Census, 1870. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872. United States Census Office [William R. Merriam]. Census Bulletin No. 33: Population of Montana by Counties and Minor Civil Divisions. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901.

Secondary Sources Billings, Mathieu W., and Sean Farrell. The Irish in Illinois. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2021. Blessing, Patrick. “West Among Strangers: Irish Migration to California, 1850 to 1880.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1977. Breatnac, Seamus. “The Difference Remains.” In The San Francisco Irish 1850–1976, edited by James P. Walsh, 143–150. San Francisco, CA: Irish Literary and Historical Society, 1978. Browne, Henry J. “Archbishop Hughes and Western Colonization.” Catholic Historical Review 36, no. 3 (1950): 257–285. Burchell, Robert A. “The Gathering of a Community: The British‑born of San Francisco in 1852 and 1872.” Journal of American Studies 10 (1976): 279–312. Burchell, Robert A. The San Francisco Irish, 1848–1880. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Campbell, Malcolm. Ireland’s Farthest Shores: Mobility, Migration and Settlement in the Pacific World. ­Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2022. Campbell, Malcolm. Ireland’s New Worlds: Immigrants, Politics, and Society in the United States and Australia, 1815–1922. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. Chen, Yong. Chinese San Francisco 1850–1914: A Trans‑Pacific Community. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Clark, Dennis. Hibernia America: The Irish and Regional Cultures. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986. Curry, Catherine Ann. “Three Irish Women and Social Action in San Francisco: Mother Teresa Comerford, Mother Baptist Russell, and Kate Kennedy.” Journal of the West 31, no. 2 (1992): 66–72. Decker, Peter. Fortunes and Failures: White Collar Mobility in Nineteenth Century San Francisco. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Emmons, David. Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845–1910. Norman: University of Okla‑ homa Press, 2010. Emmons, David. The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925. Urbana: Uni‑ versity of Illinois Press, 1990. Galenson, David W. “Economic Opportunity on the Urban Frontier: Nativity, Work, and Wealth in Early Chi‑ cago.” Journal of Economic History 51, no. 3 (1991): 581–603. Hine, Robert V., and John Mack Faragher. The American West: A New Interpretative History New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Hsu, Hsuan L. Sitting in the Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Lang, Elfrieda. “Irishmen in Northern Indiana Before 1850.” Mid‑America 25, no. 3 (1954): 190–198. Luebke, Frederick C. “Ethnic Group Settlement on the Great Plains.” Western Historical Quarterly 8 (1977): 405–430. Markus, Andrew. Fear and Hatred: Purifying Australia and California 1850–1901. Sydney: Hale and Iremon‑ ger, 1979. McCaffrey, Lawrence J. The Irish in Chicago. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Mercier, Laurie K. “‘We Are Women Irish’: Gender, Class, Religious, and Ethnic Identity in Anaconda, Mon‑ tana.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 44 (Winter 1994): 28–45. Miller, Kerby A., Arnold Schrier, Bruce D. Boling, and David N. Doyle. Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675–1815. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Noonan, Alan J.M. Mining Irish–American Lives: Western Communities from 1849 to 1920. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2022.

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California, Race, and the Irish in the West Nugent, Walter. “Where Is the American West? Report on a Survey.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 42, no. 3 (1992): 2–23. Ou, Hsin‑Yun. “Ethnic Presentations and Cultural Constructs: The Chinese/Irish Servant in Patsy O’Wang.” Canadian Review of American Studies 43, no. 3 (2013): 480–501. Ou, Hsin‑Yun. “The Chinese Stereotypical Signification in Ah Sin.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 46, no. 4 (2013): 145–161. Read, Mary Josephine. “A Population Study of the Driftless Hill Land During the Pioneer Period 1832–1860.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1941. Sarbaugh, Timothy J. “Irish Republicanism vs. ‘Pure Americanism’: California’s Reaction to Eamon De Valera’s Visits.” California History 60, part 2 (1981): 173–176. Saxton, Alexander. The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti‑Chinese Movement in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Shannon, James P. Catholic Colonization on the Western Frontier. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957. Walsh, James P. “The Irish in the New America: ‘Way out West.’” In America and Ireland 1776–1976: The American Identity and the Irish Connection, edited by David Noel Doyle and Owen Dudley Edwards, 165– 176. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. White, Richard. It’s Your Misfortune and None of my Own: A History of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. Wyman, Mark. Immigrants in the Valley: Irish, Germans and Americans in the Upper Mississippi Country, 1830–1860. Chicago, IL: Nelson Hall, 1984.

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18 IRISH AMERICANS IN AMERICAN POLITICS AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, 1870–1945 Timothy J. Meagher

In 1954, the English political scientist, D. W. Brogan, called Irish-American Catholics the “govern‑ ing class” in American politics. He did mean not the ruling-class of merchant lords and manufactur‑ ing barons but “a professional political class” who staffed American democracy. Just a year earlier, Paul Blanshard, a prominent Liberal writer, had argued that the Catholic Church had become “the most powerful church in America and in almost every aspect of its life it was led by the Irish.” IrishAmerican Catholics became powerful in American politics and the Church by adapting their unique political experience, strong Vatican connections, and the fierce Catholic sectarianism they inherited from Ireland to American circumstances of a rapidly changing democracy, sectarian conflict, and increasing ethnic diversity. Their early nineteenth-century arrival in America, positioned them as the nation’s first, substantial group of non-Protestant, white outsiders, which would contribute to their political success and help them dominate American Catholicism. It would, however, not be Irish im‑ migrants, but their American-born children and later descendants, who would fully capitalize on the group’s Irish inheritances by adapting them to changing American circumstances. They would create and lead the multi-ethnic coalitions that would make Irish-American Catholics the nation’s governing class and the rulers of its most powerful church by the middle of the twentieth century.1

Politics Irish-American Catholics enjoyed some political success in the tolerant and socially fluid trans­Mississippi West during the ante-bellum era, but they did far less well further east, even though that was where most Irish Catholic immigrants settled. Breakthrough in the east and in much of the Midwest came between 1870 and 1920 when Irish-American Catholics were first elected mayors in at least 39 northern cities from Maine to Wisconsin, including New York (1880), Boston (1884), Chicago (1893), Cincinnati (1906), and Detroit (1907), as well as at least 17 smaller cities in New England, seven in the Middle Atlantic states, and ten in the Midwest. As early as 1894, John Paul Bo‑ cock, a Protestant and proud descendant of a “First Family” of Virginia, wrote fearfully in the Forum Magazine about “The Irish Conquest of Our Cities.”2 Irish-American Catholics’ major breakthroughs in state and national politics would come shortly thereafter in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In 1894 only two Irish Catholics were elected to the Federal House of Representatives and their numbers there would remain in single digits until 1908, and then began to rise, climaxing at a remarkable 43 in 1912 before falling back to DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-22

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26 in 1914. Meanwhile, between 1906 and 1918, five Irish-American Catholics were elected gover‑ nors, for the first time, in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, North Dakota, and Illinois. Three Irish-American Catholics became speakers of the lower houses in the state legislatures of New York, Illinois, and New Jersey, and four became United States senators, in New York, California, Mas‑ sachusetts, and Montana- the first Irish Catholic senators in the latter two states. The Irish political ascendence stalled in the early 1920s with the collapse of the Democratic Party after World War I but achieved a new pinnacle with the Democrats’ nomination of second-generation Irishman, Al Smith, for president in 1928, the first nomination of a Catholic of any ethnicity for president.3 Irish state and national political power reached new heights in the 1930s. As Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal took off in the middle of that decade, 56 and 59 Irish-American Catholics were elected to the House of Representatives in the 1934 and 1936 elections respectively, about double the number elected in 1928. The number of United States senators also grew from two in 1928 to nine in 1934 and remained nine until 1938. Between 1930 and 1940, Irish-American Catholics were elected governors in six states, including four for the first time, in Maryland, Montana, Michigan, and Connecticut. Franklin Roosevelt also chose Irish-American Catholics to chair the Democratic Party National Com‑ mittee from 1932 to 1945.4 Why did Irish-American Catholics explode into politics in the seven decades or more from 1870 to 1945? Their political fortunes clearly depended in large part on those of their party, the Democrats, especially in state and congressional elections, but even as those fortunes fluctuated, the overall trend in Irish-American Catholic political power was upward. In part this was simply a product of numbers. The election of Irish Catholics as mayors in so many New England cities clearly reflected the high proportion of the Irish foreign stock in the urban population of that region. Nevertheless, though the Irish-American foreign stock population in Philadelphia in 1900, was larger than that of any other city in America except New York, a large native stock Protestant population and a powerful patronage rich Republican machine there stifled Irish-American Catholic political ambitions until the mid-twentieth century.5 The Irish, however, had other political resources besides their numbers. Unlike most immigrants to America, they spoke English, which helped make naturalization and mastering the American po‑ litical process easier for them. Their political experience in Ireland was perhaps even more important, however. Agrarian secret societies emerging in Ireland in the eighteenth and early nineteenth cen‑ turies to resist painful economic changes, taught Irish peasants lessons about organizing, the power of numbers, the necessity of communal solidarity, and the uses of selective violence. What really distinguished the Irish from other poor immigrants, however, was what they learned in Ireland about mobilizing voters from participating in Daniel O’Connell’s campaigns for Catholic Emancipation and Repeal of the Act of Union from the 1820s to the 1840s. As Mathieu Billings has documented, many of the Irish immigrants who arrived in America in those decades had been members of secret societies and participants in O’Connell’s campaigns and displayed a political savvy in the United States that astonished American observers.6 Irish immigrants continued to play roles and show exceptional interest in American politics throughout the nineteenth century. In the early 1880s, Irish-born William Grace and John O’Brien, became the first Irish-American Catholic mayors of New York and Boston respectively, for example, and by 1900, 81 percent of Irish-born males over 21 in the United States—over a half million Irish immigrant men—were naturalized citizens.7 Yet it was the second-generation Irish who led the Irish-American political breakthrough at the turn of the twentieth century. Seventy-seven percent (28 of 36 with information on birthplace) of the pioneering Irish-American mayors between 1870 and 1920 were American-born, mostly children of immigrants. In the early twentieth century, all the Irish-American Catholic governors and sena‑ tors and almost all the Irish-American Catholic congressmen were American-born. In the climactic 245

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election of 1912, for example, 40 of the 43 Irish-American Catholics elected to the House of Repre‑ sentatives had been born in the United States.8 That the second generation, not the immigrants, led this Irish-American Catholic political triumph is not surprising. By 1900, two thirds of Irish America’s foreign stock voters were second-generation Irish, but more than just their numbers made the second generation politically successful. Unlike the immigrants they were fully at home in their native America, easily familiar with its ethnic, re‑ ligious, and racial diversity and its emerging popular culture. They also grew up in Irish-American communities, rich with networks of family and friends reinforced by numerous parochial schools, boys’ gangs, clubs, and athletic teams. For some, like second generation Joseph Tumulty, Secretary to President Woodrow Wilson, or United States Senators Thomas and David Walsh, politics was the family business, as they built on the political passion and minor successes of immigrant fathers or relatives. Tumulty remembered: “I cannot recall a time when politics was not discussed” at home. Politics, unlike some other careers for the ambitious, also did not require the second-generation Irish to abandon old friends or Irish traditions of male communal solidarity to be successful. Indeed, those values and networks of friends were useful to achieving their ambitions. Yet American-born Irish Catholics were also attracted to politics because it was becoming an increasingly lucrative career in America. Expansion of the suffrage and the multiplication of elections at all levels of government in nineteenth century America created a need for political organizations to manage those masses of voters and growing number of elections. Meanwhile growing cities, offered an abundance of rewards, such as jobs, contracts, and kickbacks, for the men who ran these “political machines”—political organizations built on such exchanges—which emerged in the 1850s and were flourishing by the 1880s and 1890s.9 Irish Catholics did not invent the urban political machine in America. Indeed, machines run by ­native-stock, Protestant Republicans thrived during the turn of the century era. Irish-American Catho‑ lics, however, were well represented among the city bosses of that period, including men like Charles Francis Murphy, boss of Tammany Hall, in New York, Frank Hague of Jersey City, the O’Connell brothers in Albany, Roger Sullivan in Chicago, and the Pendergast brothers in Kansas City. Like the Irish-American Catholic mayors, governors, senators, and congressmen, most of these and other Irish bosses were American-born.10 Building and maintaining a political machine in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries re‑ quired constant adjustments in identifying, mobilizing, and rewarding potential supporters in the rapidly changing populations of American cities. Between 1900 and 1920, for example, 1.1 million Italian, 900,000 Polish, and about 1.5 million Jewish immigrants arrived in the United States, most of them settling in Eastern or Midwestern cities. Contrary to previous scholars’ contentions, Steven Erie has argued that Irish-American politicians rarely gave jobs—the most precious of their store of favors—to members of these new groups, reserving those for the Irish. They did this to reward their own, but they also believed that Irish voters were more dependable, more likely to vote as the boss wanted. Bosses tried to garner support from Italians and other recent immigrants, Erie contends, with cheaper favors like free fuel in the winter, holiday turkeys, or community entertainments. He also argues, however, that Irish politicians deliberately avoided naturalizing or registering members of new immigrant groups to vote because a smaller electorate enhanced the impact of their Irish base. Nevertheless, the number of new immigrants was increasing fast in the early twentieth century. As a result, ambitious Italian, Polish, Jewish, or other new immigrant leaders, as well as WASP Republi‑ can opponents and competing Irish Democratic rivals, often sought to enlist the newcomers to chal‑ lenge entrenched Irish bosses, forcing the bosses to do so, in turn.11 Irish politics in this era, Irish machine politics in particular, seemed oblivious to ideology, but there were important differences over issues, like limiting sales of liquor or state regulation of pa‑ rochial schools, pitting heavily evangelical Protestant Republicans against Irish and other Catholic 246

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Democrats. For machine bosses, their formal policies of white cultural pluralism neatly comple‑ mented their politics of personal exchange. As Jane Addams, the famous settlement house reformer pointed out, Irish bosses dispensed concrete favors to the immigrants but also “recognized” them, never trying “to hold up a morality beyond” them “nor…attempt to reform or change them.”12 Even as Irish political machines reached new heights of power in the early twentieth century, Irish-American Catholic politics was beginning to change. Some of these changes came from within. By 1910, for example, second-generation Irish-American men were overrepresented among college and law school students. All of the second-generation Irish governors, except Al Smith, and all the senators elected in the first two decades of the twentieth century as well as 65 percent (28 of 43) of the Irish congressmen elected in 1912 were college or law school graduates. In addition, all the IrishAmerican Catholic senators, four of the five governors, and half of the representatives elected in 1912 were lawyers. Education as well as experience as lawyers made Irish-American candidates seem more respectable to the broader, congressional, or statewide electorates beyond the old urban ethnic neigh‑ borhoods. Yet it also helped to better equip them to use new political tactics of manipulating media and public campaigning to sell themselves and argue issues to the middle-class voters of such electorates.13 While Irish-American Catholic politicians were becoming better educated in the early twentieth century, a Progressive reform movement emerged to transform the political environment in which they had to operate. American historians long defined Progressivism as a native-stock, Protestant middle class movement, but as John Buenker and others have documented, many Irish-American Catholic politicians, including bosses, strongly backed the Progressive agenda of social reforms like factory safety, maximum hours for working women, and workman’s compensation legislation. They did so to ride the enormous new success of the Democratic Party in the North in the 1910s, as it re‑ made itself into the party of Progressive reform and successfully exploited divisions between reform‑ ers and conservatives among the ruling Republicans. Irish-American bosses like Martin Lomasney of Boston or Charlie Murphy in New York, however, also realized that many Progressive reforms cost them nothing in terms of patronage and favors but appealed to their ethnically diverse, working-class constituencies and helped them fight off competition from recently ascending Socialist and other radical movements. College-educated Irish-American Catholics in state legislatures, like Tumulty and his fellow graduates from St. Peter’s College New Jersey, and in Congress during the Wilson administration, also backed the Progressive reform agenda. Meanwhile, Irish congressmen advanced the cause of ethnic and religious pluralism by voting repeatedly and almost unanimously to defeat bills preventing southern and eastern European immigrants from entering the country.14 Like college-educated men, Irish-American Catholic women began to participate in politics in greater numbers in the early twentieth century, as Tara M. McCarthy demonstrates in her chapter in the present volume. Second-generation Irish women were actually more likely to go on to higher edu‑ cation than their brothers at the turn of the century. This paid off for some in “charity” or social work jobs, but for most in work as teachers. Ten percent of all second-generation Irish-American Catholic working women were teachers in 1900. Some native-stock, Protestant, elite Progressive reformers, most notably in Boston and Chicago, lamented the growing number of Irish-Catholic teachers in the public schools, blamed it on the “spoils system” of Irish politicians, and sought to change hiring rules to exclude them. Irish-American Catholic teachers organized in those two cities to protect their jobs, but in Chicago, they also campaigned to increase public funding for the schools. Meanwhile, IrishAmerican Catholic women union leaders and charity workers joined with non-Catholic Progressives to pass legislation limiting women’s working hours and providing state support for female headed households through Mothers’ Pensions legislation. The struggle for women’s suffrage had long been dominated by middle- and upper-class Protestant women and tainted by nativism, but Irish-American Catholic reform and labor activists like Leonora O’Reilly and Margaret Foley, became involved in that movement, too, and helped convince Irish-American Catholic politicians to support it.15 247

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The Democrats floundered in the early 1920s, but with the crash of Socialists during the postWorld War I Red Scare and Republicans’ increasing conservatism and nativism, the Democrats began to slowly rebuild their support among new immigrants, who by now had nowhere else to turn. Al Smith was crushed in his campaign for president in 1928, but as many historians, including Robert Chiles, have argued, Smith’s candidacy kept alive the Irish Catholic commitment to Liberalism born in the 1910s and cemented the allegiance of most Catholic ethnics to the Democratic Party.16 When the Democrats revived during the 1930s, Irish-American Catholic politics flourished. Tam‑ many Hall began a long decline then, but many Irish bosses thrived, and new Irish political machines emerged in Chicago and Pittsburgh as federal money and jobs poured into those cities through them. Many Irish-American Catholics in the Senate were skeptical of the New Deal, but in the House of Representatives the Irish were among its strongest backers, making up almost half of the chamber’s 50 most consistent bread and butter Liberals during the New Deal’s heyday from 1935 to 1939. Irish politicians had begun to connect with Black voters in the North in the 1870s, but warily since IrishAmerican Catholics there continued to battle with African Americans over jobs and neighborhood turf. Yet Irish-American politicians’ efforts to attract the votes of Blacks and Civil Rights’ sympa‑ thizers increased in the twentieth century: voting for an anti-Lynching bill in congress in 1922, for example, and leading support for one in the House in 1937.17 Nevertheless, there were tensions within the New Deal coalition between Irish-American Catho‑ lics, whose political base was in the Democratic Party, and an emerging Liberal intellectual bloc entrenched in the New Deal bureaucracy. By the end of the 1930s, a new, strident, Vatican-inspired, Catholic anti-communism had also begun to grow in the United States, energized by disputes be‑ tween Catholics and New Deal Protestants and Jews over the Spanish Civil War. A revival of AfricanAmerican migration north during World War II would also ultimately make it harder to maintain the paradox of cautious Irish political support for Black rights with rising Irish neighborhood resistance to racial integration in northern cities.18

The Catholic Church The Irish became leaders in the American Catholic Church long before they reached national promi‑ nence in politics. Profiting from Ireland’s connections with the Vatican, Irish bishops ruled almost half of the Catholic dioceses in America (10 of 21) by the 1840s. Eight of the Irish bishops were immigrants and most likely most priests in America were Irish-born as well. Catholic seminaries in the United States at this time were small and rudimentary at best, and most of the graduates were not native-born Americans but immigrants, mostly Irish, “finishing off” the clerical training they had begun in Ireland.19 The Great Famine had, as Oliver P. Rafferty SJ demonstrates in his chapter in this volume, a powerful impact on the American church and the Irish role in it. The colossal Famine migration, the eruption in America of a Vatican inspired “Catholic Revival” within the Church and the rise of the powerful, anti-Catholic, nativist, Know Nothing enemy outside it, prompted a vast increase in the number of Catholic churches, the reunification of parishes fractured by old country regional rivalries, the stiffening of immigrant religious loyalties, and the reinforcement of hierarchical and clerical authority.20 Irish immigrants continued to play an important role in the Church, much more than they did in American politics, into the twentieth century. Between 1880 and the late 1920s, over 1.7 million Irish immigrants arrived in America. The Catholic Revival (or “Devotional Revolution” as its Irish mani‑ festation has been called) had swept Ireland too, and its effects were ongoing through the twentieth century. The new, lay, Irish immigrants were thus more institutionally disciplined and better educated in their faith than their Famine or pre-Famine predecessors. Yet the enduring Catholic Revival in 248

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Ireland also produced an abundance of priests and nuns, and, ultimately, some 4,000 priests migrated to the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These Irish priests as well as the Irish women religious who went to America spoke English, were educated, and came to the United States as part of a transnational institution and thus easily fit into the leadership of the rapidly growing Catholic Church in America.21 Nevertheless, by the turn of the twentieth century, the American-born Irish, mostly children of the Famine immigrants, played an increasingly important role in the American Catholic church. Disci‑ plined religious practice, encouraged by the mid-nineteenth-century Catholic Revival, persisted in America, just as it did in Ireland. After 1880, Irish-American parishes became hubs of a wide range of sodalities, confraternities, and clubs. Most of those parish societies served women, but a host of Catholic men’s fraternal societies emerged in the early 1880s and flourished into the twentieth cen‑ tury. Scattered evidence suggests that the second-generation Irish were overrepresented in the men’s societies, including, most notably, the Knights of Columbus.22 Just as important, American-born Irish men began to dominate the American Catholic clergy and hierarchy. In the 1880s and 1890s, new seminaries emerged in the archdioceses of Boston, New York, St. Louis, and San Francisco, as well as the dioceses of St. Paul and Rochester, while the oldest semi‑ nary in America, St. Mary’s in Baltimore, expanded enormously. The result was that American-born Irish priests began to outnumber Irish immigrants among the clergy in dioceses across the Northeast and the urban Midwest. They also began to outnumber the immigrant Irish among America’s bishops: Seventy- five American-born Irish bishops led American dioceses between 1880 and 1920, compared to 56 Irish immigrants and 74, non-Irish bishops in the same period. Notably, this generational shift was significantly greater than among the Irish in Australia, where the Catholic Church depended on Irish-born clerics and bishops well into the twentieth century. In America, the same kind of gen‑ erational shift was occurring among religious women. By the turn of the twentieth century, second generation Irish-American women made up substantial proportions, not only of Irish-based orders of Catholic sisters, but also of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur founded in Belgium and the Sisters of St. Joseph from France, two of the most important Catholic teaching orders in America. Overall, the number of Catholic women religious in the United States grew to almost 90,000 by 1920: “second generation Irish American women comprised by far the largest proportion” of them.23 Commitment to Catholicism thus did not flag among the American-born Irish. Religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants still figured fundamentally in American life and politics and was crucial in reinforcing religious loyalties and boundaries. The Church, however, also helped strengthen the discipline of ambitious American-born Irish lay men and women struggling for respectability, while those who became priests and nuns, found opportunities for higher education and community prestige and power through their religious vocations.24 Though Catholicism only grew stronger among Irish Catholics as they transitioned from an im‑ migrant to an American-born people, their church and its Irish leaders still faced many challenges. How could they maintain or advance the power and interests of the Catholicism they led in a Protes‑ tant America, and at the same time maintain their control of it among a rapidly diversifying Catholic people, all while navigating changing Vatican policies? In the 1880s and 1890s, Irish-American bishops in the American hierarchy broke into factions over the best strategy to adjust to their changing American and global Catholic environment. Though the end of Reconstruction in 1877 led to the abandonment of the nation’s commitment to Black Civil Rights, it signified for many white Americans a revival of national unity and inspired a new optimis‑ tic, American nationalism. A year later, Leo XIII, seemingly open to a new dialog with republicanism in France, became Pope, raising American Catholic hopes for fundamental change in the Church. Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore and Bishop John Ireland of St. Paul soon stepped forward to forge a new Liberal Catholicism in America. They wanted to make the Church more “American” and 249

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less “foreign,” but were especially committed to integrating Catholics fully into American society, even to the point of dismantling much of the Church’s institutional infrastructure—most notably schools—which, Catholic Liberals believed, trapped Catholics in a ghetto of their own making. If Catholics did not change, Americanize, and integrate into American life, Bishop (later Archbishop) Ireland and other Liberals worried, they ran the risk of provoking a new nativist movement and per‑ haps crippling the future of the Church in America.25 Catholic Liberals worried not just about the survival of the American Catholic Church, however, but also their control of it. Irish immigration increased significantly in the late nineteenth century, but German immigration, including German Catholics, grew more. Many Irish-American Catholics, fearful of Protestant power and committed to parochial education, opposed the Liberals. German Catholics, along with the smaller but also growing number of French Canadians, however, were espe‑ cially aggressive in attacking the Irish Liberals’ Americanization project. Irish Catholic conservatives joined Liberals to fend off German challenges by convincing the Vatican that only a suitably “Amer‑ ican” Church, would be acceptable to the new, increasingly powerful, United States. Implicit in their arguments was the assumption that they, Irish Americans, the only significant English-speaking group within this American Church, were the best equipped to lead it. Irish Americans thus wanted an American Church not just because it would be essential to its future in the United States but because it was critical to their continued control of it.26 Through the early 1890s, the Liberals seemed to have the upper hand, but after shifts in European politics made the Vatican increasingly wary of republicanism, Leo ultimately condemned them—if somewhat obliquely—in the 1899 encyclical, Testem Benvolentiae. Now closely tied to an increas‑ ingly reactionary Rome, the American Catholic Church became more conservative and insular, thus strengthening not weakening the American Catholic ghetto’s infrastructure.27 Irish-American Catholics such as American-born Cardinal William O’Connell of Boston still ruled the Church in America, but they would not be Liberals but militant American Catholics, fiercely Catholic and suspicious of Protestants but also proudly American. The Knights of Columbus was dominated by the Irish but it was also a deliberately pan-ethnic organization welcoming American Catholics of all national backgrounds, and it grew from 16,000 members in 1897 to 240,000 by 1910, and over half a million by the early 1920s. The Knights were both the best embodiment of this militant American Catholicism and the most successful promoters of it. They rejected any kind of rapprochement with Protestant Americans but reveled in their “lineage” as descendants of America’s “discoverer,” the Catholic Christopher Columbus, whom they proclaimed to be the first American, not the late-arriving, Protestant Pilgrims or Puritans (nor Native Americans).28 In the 1910s, Irish-American supporters of militant American Catholicism confronted a dilemma. In 1916, a rebellion erupted in Ireland and unleashed a new nationalism there, which ultimately led to a war for independence in 1919. Meanwhile, in 1917, the United States entered World War I as an ally of Britain, nationalist Ireland’s oppressor. Once America entered the war, the Knights of Columbus and America’s Irish bishops fully backed the American war effort, in part out of fear that “German Catholics and Sinn Feiners… will bring the patriotism of Catholics [in America] into question.” After the War ended, however, the American-born Irish Knights, almost all Irish-American bishops, and much of the Irish-American clergy flocked to Ireland’s cause. Yet the fact that this happened only after the War ended, thus rendering questions about possible conflicts in Irish-American Catholics’ loyalties to America irrelevant, underlines the contingency of their commitment to Ireland.29 After the Revolution ended in 1921, Irish-American Catholics largely ignored Ireland for the next half century and focused on their roles as the leaders and models of a new, pan-ethnic, patrioti‑ cally American but militantly Catholic people in the United States. They were not only militant but “triumphant” Catholics, however, glorying in the growth of the Catholic proportion of the nation’s population by one-third between 1890 and 1916. Much of that growth, as noted, came from the flood 250

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of immigrants from Catholic countries in southern and eastern Europe like Italy and Poland. In just the six years between 1910 and 1916, the number of Italian and Polish Catholic parishes in America doubled to 436 and 735 respectively.30 These new immigrants, especially Poles and Italians, clashed frequently with their Irish bishops through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Peasants in Italy perceived their own Catho‑ lic Church and clergy as stout allies of the landowners oppressing them, while middle-class Italians there saw the Church as an intractable opponent of an emerging Italian nationalism. Italian immi‑ grants would be religious in America, but their religious practice was a popular religion of traditional, often local, devotions and lay led festivals inherited from the homeland; they resisted Irish-American bishops’ efforts to make them conform to the strictures of a clerically run institutional church. For most Polish immigrants, like Irish ones, struggles against non-Catholic invaders of their homeland had reinforced loyalty to the Church. They eagerly built their own churches and schools in America, but they were jealously protective of those investments, quarrelling with one and another in their parishes, and resentful of Irish-American bishops who insisted on intervening in their parish affairs.31 Before 1900, southern and eastern Europeans had been so few in number that Irish-American Catholics, even conservatives, seemed to find them more of a nuisance than an advantage for the American Church and its future. In the twentieth century, however, that was no longer true. If IrishAmerican Catholics were to fulfill their own ambitions of leading a powerful, “triumphant,” Ameri‑ can Catholic Church, they needed to work out their differences with the Polish, Italian, and other southern and eastern European immigrants. The Vatican’s condemnation of the Catholic Liberals, who had so quickly dismissed “foreign” Catholics, may have also given Irish-American Catholic leaders pause about continuing such a policy in the twentieth century.32 Irish-American bishops thus began to adjust grudgingly to the twentieth-century Church’s new ethnic realities. In New York, Irish-born Cardinal John Farley established a diocesan bureau to deal with Italian immigrants, began providing funds for Italian congregations to build their own churches, and approved of Italian festivals that his predecessor, Archbishop Corrigan, had condemned. Mean‑ while, Irish-American Catholic leaders began to criticize “undue haste” in the Americanization of im‑ migrants. In the early 1920s, even the Knights of Columbus, long committed to the rapid assimilation of immigrants, launched an effort to underwrite publication of books celebrating American ethnic and racial diversity.33 Such efforts were attempts to counter the new popularity of Anglo-Saxon racism in America after the War, but the new postwar nativism was as much anti-Catholic as anti-immigrant, and ultimately it seemed to strengthen Catholic unity. The “most basic and pervasive concern” of the Ku Klux Klan, reborn in 1915 and reaching four million members by 1924, for example, “was the Pope,” and the order now became more popular and influential in the North than in the South. Irish-American Catho‑ lics, many of them veterans of the Irish-American nationalist movement, helped rally Catholics of all nationalities to combat the new Klan’s anti-Catholic and Anglo Saxon racist crusade. Al Smith’s campaign for the presidency, of course, also dramatically reinforced the boundary between Catholic and Protestant and strengthened Catholic unity. By 1930, the formation of new national parishes had about reached its peak, as the new immigration restriction laws shut off the flow of new immigrants from outside the Americas.34 The Catholic Church thus entered the 1930s united, with its Irish-American leadership largely un‑ challenged. In that decade, only ten bishops leading American dioceses had been born in Ireland and 42 were non-Irish ethnics, but 80 were American-born Irish. They led a Catholic Church that enjoyed a more powerful presence in America than it had ever had before. This was in large part because of the new political muscle that Catholics, especially Irish Catholics, gained in the triumph of the Demo‑ cratic Party and the resurgence of the Labor Movement. Yet the Church’s vast numbers and tight institutional discipline made it a powerful force in its own right as revealed by its emerging control 251

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of the censorship of movies in America. In part because of that influence, Hollywood manufactured a new, stunningly positive public image of American Catholicism in the 1930s and 1940s through the depiction of Irish-American priests as savvy leaders of a multi-ethnic, urban American church in movies like Boys Town (1938), Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), and Going My Way (1944).35 Irish-American Church and other leaders hesitated to support American intervention in World War II, but ultimately backed it fully. While the war has often been understood as a critical moment in the integration of white American ethnics into the American mainstream, the American Catholic Church worked hard to retain the religious loyalty of Irish and other Catholic service men and women overseas. Even before World War II ended, the Vatican and the Irish-American Catholic hierarchy were also already poised for a Cold War with communism. By the 1950s, the Church’s now far more extensive anti-communist crusade combined with postwar prosperity to produce a sweeping new Catholic religious revival, led by Irish-American Catholics, and marked by soaring mass attendance rates, Catholic school enrollments, and numbers of priests and women religious. Thus, as Paul Blanshard suggested, American Catholicism, led by Irish Americans, was stronger in the 1950s than it had ever been.35, 36

Conclusion By 1945, Irish-American Catholics had become a striking, nearly ubiquitous presence in American politics, “a governing class,” and the church they dominated, the largest, most tightly disciplined and powerful denomination in America. These achievements drew on their Irish past, but it was their ability to adapt that Irish inheritance to their new American environment that was the key to the success of their church and their political triumphs. Though Irish immigrants’ role in this process was significant, particularly in the evolution of the American Catholic Church, it was largely the American-born, especially the children of Famine immigrants coming of age at the turn of the twentieth century, who were responsible for these adaptations in the Church and politics. The roles of Irish-American Catholics in American politics and the American Church are thus good examples of the critical importance of second and later generations in American ethnic history. Less than a quarter century after the end of World War II, however, the Catholic Church began a steep decline and Irish-American Catholic political unity began to shatter. Such drastic change underlined another important lesson in American ethnic history: the crucial significance of contingency and how rapid, powerful and sometimes unexpected changes both within the group and in its environment can combine to quickly and dramatically reshape its history.37

Notes 1 Brogan, Politics in America, 96, 97; Blanshard, The Irish and Catholic Power, 261. 2 Irish mayors identified from lists of mayors for each city traced into Ancestry.com, local histories and other biographical sources; Bocock, “The Irish Conquest,” 186–195. 3 Congressional Quarterly: 707–740 traced into the Biographical Directory, New York Times, Washington Post, Ancestry.com and other sources. 4 Congressional Quarterly, 707–740 traced into the Biographical Directory and other sources; Slayton, Empire Statesman, 238–328. 5 Ruggles et al., IPUMS USA. U.S. Censuses 1880, 1900; McCaffery, When Bosses Ruled Philadelphia. 6 O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation,  1–34, 37–39; Billings, “Potent Legacies,” 1–46. 7 Gibson, The Attitudes of the New York Irish, 225–228; Ruggles et al., IPUMS USA. U.S. Censuses 1880, 1900. 8 Guide to United States Elections 707–740 traced into Biographical Directory and other sources; Ruggles, Flood et al. IPUMS USA, U.S. Censuses, 1880, 1900, 1910; Mayors traced into ancestry.com and other sources.

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Irish Americans in American Politics and the Catholic Church 9 Williams, “Green Again,” quote 13, 9–24; Barrett, Irish Way, 13–104, 157–194; Wayman, David I. Walsh, 34–42; John Blum, Joe Tumulty, quote 6, 7–8, 16; Bates, Senator Thomas J. Walsh, 1–27; Brogan, Politics in America, quote 132; Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion,149–172; Connolly, An Elusive Unity, 54–86, 135–164, 217–223. 10 Erie, Rainbow’s End, 84–105; Zink, City Bosses. 11 Erie, Rainbow’s End, 26–105. 12 Formisano, “The Invention,” 453–477; Addams, “Why the Ward Boss Rules” (1998). 13 “Children of Immigrants in Schools,” 154–164; Klinghard, “Reading Plunkitt,” 488–512; Wayman, David I. Walsh, 34–42; Blum, Joe Tumulty, 5–30. 14 Buenker, Urban Liberalism, 18–117, 163–197; Sarasohn, The Party of Reform, xi–xiii, 145–212; Kleppner, Continuity and Change, 125–135; Buenker, Urban Liberalism; Yougov.com Votes: February 18, 1913, Feb‑ ruary 4, 1915; February 1, 1917; Blum, Joe Tumulty, 3–19. 15 Nolan, Servants of the Poor, 46–114; McCarthy, Respectability and Reform, 33–48, 180–192; Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion, 202–220. 16 Huthmacher, Massachusetts People and Politics, 27–185; Chiles, The Revolution of 28, 11–178. 17 Biles, Big City Boss, 6–38; Dorsett, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 6–9, 70–75; Erie, Rainbow’s End, 107–139; Gamm, New Deal Democrats, 82–83; Lewis et al. (2021) Voteview 74th and 75th Congresses: http://vote‑ view.com/; Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln, 46– 119, 206–248. 18 Milleur and Milkis, Triumph of Liberalism, 31–134; Scroop, Mr. Democrat, 99–190; Bayor, Neighbors in Conflict, 30–149; Chamedes, A Twentieth Century Crusade, 167–232. 19 Barr, The Roman Catholic Church, 22–76; Code, Dictionary, 404–425; White, The Diocesan Seminary, 25–47. 20 Taves, The Household of Faith, 6–16, 45–128; Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery, 24–102. 21 Smith, Irish Priests, 25; Hoy, “The Journey Out,” 64–98. 22 The Catholic Pages, 523–527, 657–712; Kauffman, Faith and Fraternity, 29–228; Dolan, “The Irish Parish,” 18; Dolan, Catholic Revivalism, 44–50, 124–133. 23 White, Diocesan Seminary, 89, 165–180; Cummings, New Women, 65–67, 101–150; Merwick. Boston Priests, 90–91; Skerret, Chicago Style,12, 355; Barrett, Irish Way, 79; O’Farrell, The Catholic Church in Australia, 238–240, 357. 24 Meagher, Inventing Irish America, 79–97; McLeod, “Catholicism and the New York Irish,” 350. 25 Spalding, Premier See, 259; Cross, Liberal Catholicism in America, 36–145; O’Connell, John Ireland, 84– 342; Gleason, “The New Americanism,” U.S. Catholic Historian, 1–18. 26 Morris, American Catholic, 84–96; Janus, “Bishop Bernard McQuaid,” 56–70. 27 Morris, American Catholic, 106–112. 28 Kauffman, Faith and Fraternalism, 16– 227. 29 Kauffman, Faith and Fraternalism, 190–286, quote p. 190; McKeown, War and Welfare, 43–101; Doorley, Diaspora Nationalism, 62–193. 30 Association of Religious Data Archives; Burns, Catholic Education, 109–111. 31 Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street, 1–232; Casino, “A History of the Catholic Parish,” 37–65. 32 Linkh, Catholicism and European Immigrants, 27. 33 Liptak, Immigrants and their Church, 114–159; Linkh, American Catholicism, 108–111; Kauffman, Faith and Fraternalism, 261–286. 34 Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan, 103–106, quote 242; Barrett, Irish Way, 100–104. 35 Flynn, Catholics & the Roosevelt Presidency, 55–187. 36 Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor, 10– 69; Smith, The Look of Catholics, 181–221. 37 Flynn, Roosevelt and Romanism, 41–97; Seitz, “The Mass Clock and the Spy,” 924–956; Chamedes, A Twen‑ tieth Century Crusade, 242–267.

Bibliography Primary Sources Addams, Jane. “Why the Ward Boss Rules” (1998). http://usd116.org/profdev/ahtc/activities/addams_boss.pdf. Bocock, John Paul. “The Irish Conquest of our Cities.” The Forum XVII (April 1894): 186–195.Congressional Quarterly. Guide to United States Elections. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 2007. Congressional Votes Database – GovTrack. US

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Timothy J. Meagher Reports of the Immigration Commission, 61st Congress,3d Session, Document no. 247: Volume 29, “Children of Immigrants in Schools,” 154–164. Ruggles, Steven, Sarah Flood, Ronald Goeken, Josiah Grover, Erin Meyer, Jose Pacas, and Matthew Sobeok. IPUMS USA. U.S. Censuses 1880, 1900; Version 8.0 [Dataset]. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS 2018. The Catholic Pages of American History: Our Church: Our Country. New York: Catholic Historical league of America, 1905.

Secondary Sources Anbinder, Tyler. Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Association of Religious Data Archives. http://www.thearda.com/. Bayor, Ronald. Neighbors in Conflict: The Irish, Germans, Jews and Italians of New York City, 1928–1941. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978 Barr, Colin. The Roman Catholic Church in the English-Speaking World, 1829–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Barrett, James R. The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic City. New York: Penguin, 2012. Bates, Leonard. Senator Thomas J. Walsh of Montana : Law and Public Affairs, from TR to FDR. Urbana: Uni‑ versity of Illinois Press, 1999. Biles, Roger. Big City Boss in Depression and War: Mayor Edward J. Kelly of Chicago. DeKalb: Northern Il‑ linois University Press, 1984. Billings, Mathieu. “Potent Legacies: The Transformation of Irish-American Politics, 1815–1840.” PhD diss., Northern Illinois University, 2016. Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. Blanshard, Paul. The Irish and Catholic Power: An American Interpretation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1953. Blum, John. Joe Tumulty and the Wilson Era. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1951. Brogan, D.W. Politics in America. New York: Harper Brothers, 1954. Buenker, John. Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform. New York: Scribners, 1973. Burns, John A. Catholic Education: A Study of Conditions. New York: Longmans, 1917. Casino, Joseph J. “From Sanctuary to Involvement: A History of the Catholic Parish in the Northeast.” In The American Catholic Parish: A History from 1850 to the Present, edited by Jay Dolan, 7–116, Vol. I. New York: Paulist Press, 1987. Chamedes, Giuliana. A Twentieth Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe. Cam‑ bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Chiles, Robert. The Revolution of 28’: Al Smith, Progressivism and the Coming of the New Deal. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. Chudacoff, Howard. The Evolution of American Urban Society. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1975. Code, Joseph B. Dictionary of the American Hierarchy, 1789–1964. New York: J.F. Wagner, 1964. Connolly, James J. An Elusive Unity: Urban Democracy and Machine Politics in Industrializing America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. Cross, Robert D. The Emergence of Liberal Catholicism in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958. Cummings, Kathleen Sprow. New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 2009. Doherty, Thomas Patrick. Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Dolan, Jay. Catholic Revivalism: The American Experience, 1830–1900. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978. Dolan, Jay. “The Irish Parish.” U.S. Catholic Historian 25, no. 2 (2007): 13–29. Doorley, Michael. Irish-American Diaspora Nationalism: The Friends of Irish Freedom, 1916–1935. Portland, OR: Four Courts, 2005. Erie, Steven P. Rainbow’s End: Irish Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840–1985. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Fitzgerald, Maureen. Habits of Compassion: Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins of New York’s Welfare System, 1830–1920. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2006. Flynn, George Q. Roosevelt and Romanism: Catholics and American Diplomacy, 1937–1945. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976.

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Irish Americans in American Politics and the Catholic Church Formisano, Ronald P. “The Invention of the Ethnocultural Interpretation.” American Historical Review 99, no. 2 (1994): 453–477. Gamm, Gerald. The Making of New Deal Democrats: Voting Behavior and Realignment in Boston, 1920–1940. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Gerstle, Gary. Liberty and Coercion, the Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Gibson, Florence. The Attitudes of the New York Irish Toward State and National Affairs, 1848–1892. New York: AMS Press, 1968. Gleason, Philip. “The New Americanism in Catholic Historiography.” U.S. Catholic Historian 11, no. 3 (1993): 1–18. Grossman, Lawrence. The Democratic Party and the Negro: Northern and National Politics, 1868–1892. Ur‑ bana: University of Illinois Press, 1976. Hoy, Suellen. “The Journey Out: The Recruitment and Emigration of Irish Religious Women to the United States, 1812–1914.” Journal of Women’s History 7, no. 1 (1995): 64–98. Huthmacher, J. Joseph. Massachusetts People and Politics, 1919–1933. New York: Atheneum, 1969. Jackson, Kenneth T. The Ku Klux Klan in the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Kauffman, Christopher. Faith and Fraternity: The History of the Knights of Columbus, 1882–1982. New York: Harper and Row, 1982. Klinghard, Daniel. “Reading Plunkitt of Tammany Hall in the Context of Late Nineteenth century Party Nation‑ alization.” Polity 43, no. 4 (2011): 488–512. Lewis, Jeffrey B., Keith Poole, Howard Rosenthal, Adam Boche, Aaron Rudkin, and Luke Sonnet. Voteview Congressional Roll-Call Votes Database 74th and 75th Congresses, 2021. Linkh, Richard. American Catholicism and European Immigrants, 1900–1924. Staten Island, NY: Center for Migration Studies, 1979. Liptak, R.S.M. Immigrants and their Church. New York: Macmillan, 1989. McCaffery, Peter. When Bosses Ruled Philadelphia: The Emergence of the Republican Machine, 1867–1933. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. McCarthy, Tara M. Respectability and Reform: Irish American Women’s Activism, 1880–1920. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2018. McLeod, Hugh. “Catholicism and the New York Irish.” In Disciplines of Faith, edited by Jim Obelkevich et al., 337–350. New York: Routledge, 1987. Meagher, Timothy. Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880–1928. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. Merwick, Donna. Boston Priests, 1848–1910; A Study of Social and Intellectual Change. Cambridge, MA: Har‑ vard University Press, 1973. Milleur, Jerome M., and Sidney M. Milkis. The New Deal and the Triumph of Liberalism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. Murray, Damien. Irish Nationalists in Boston: Catholicism and Conflict, 1900–1928. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018, pp. 91–249. O’Connell, Marvin R. John Ireland and the American Catholic Church. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1988. O’Dea, John. History of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Vol. III. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, originally published 1923. O’Ferrall, Fergus. Catholic Emancipation : Daniel O’Connell and the birth of Irish democracy, 1820–30. Atlan‑ tic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1985. O’Farrell, Patrick. The Catholic Church and Community in Australia: A History. West Melbourne: Nelson, 1977. Orsi, Robert. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. Sarasohn, David. The Party of Reform: The Democrats in the Progressive Era. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. Schickler, Eric. Racial Realignment, the Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. Scroop, Daniel. Mr. Democrat: Jim Farley, the New Deal and the Making of Modern American Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Seitz, John C. “The Mass Clock and the Spy: The Catholicization of the Second World War.” Church History 83, no. 4 (December 2014): 924–956.

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Timothy J. Meagher Skerret, Ellen, Steven Avella, and Edward Kantowicz. Catholicism, Chicago Style. Chicago, IL: Loyola Univer‑ sity Press, 1993. Slayton, Robert A. Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith. New York: Free Press, 2001. Smith, Anthony Burke. The Look of Catholics: Portrayals in Popular Culture from th Great Depression to the Cold War. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2010. Smith, William L. Irish Priests in the United States: A Vanishing Subculture. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004. Taves, Anne. The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Nineteenth Century America. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986. Wayman, Dorothy. David I. Walsh: Citizen and Patriot. Milwaukee, WI: Bruce, 1952. Weiss, Nancy J. Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR. Princeton: Princeton Uni‑ versity Press, 1983. White, Joseph M. The Diocesan Seminary in the United States: A History from the 1780s to the Present. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989. Williams, William H. “Green Again: Irish‑American Lace‑Curtain Satire.” New Hibernia Review / Iris Éirean‑ nach Nua 6, no. 2 (July 2002): 9–24. Zink, Harold. City Bosses in the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1930.

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19 THE EMMETS AND THE JAMESES, AN IRISH‑AMERICAN CASE STUDY Colm Tóibín

The emigration of Protestant and Presbyterian Irish in the early decades of the nineteenth century ­represents an essential element in the history of the Irish diaspora. Although many arrived in the United States with little money, these Irish immigrants were able to re‑invent themselves and their identities in America, enough for some of them to feel uneasy about their Irishness, especially once the mass immigration after the Famine took place. The Emmet and James families were not typical immigrant families; they stood apart, as though by right, as though it were an aspect of their privilege. Among their members were some of the best‑known American painters of the early twentieth century and the most famous novelist. They distinguished themselves in many areas of life. Thomas Addis Emmet, for example, came to the United States not only as the brother of a patriot but also as a law‑ yer and a man of great eloquence with serious views on liberty, views that would have been received warmly by progressive elements in American politics. William James, from County Cavan, became one of the richest men in America. He carried from Ireland not only a talent for commerce but also a sense of religious destiny. His eloquence was inherited by three of his grandchildren who became important American writers. Both offer examples of how easy, almost natural, it was for this class of Irish Americans to shed their Irish identity.

The Emmets in America In 1901, the Magazine of American History, on the occasion of the death of the lawyer Richard Stock‑ ton Emmet in New Rochelle, ran an article on the Emmet family in America. It noted that 50 mem‑ bers of the family—descendants of Thomas Addis Emmet (1764–1827), brother of the Irish patriot Robert Emmet—attended the funeral and added: “It is doubtful if a larger or more distinguished family ever followed any resident of New York to his grave.” Richard Stockton Emmet, who died at 82, was a son of Robert Emmet, the eldest son of Thomas Addis Emmet. Among the mourners, the magazine wrote, was another Robert Emmet—Colonel Robert T. Emmet of New Rochelle—who had been in command of the First Regiment of the New York National Guard. He had inherited the ring that the patriot Robert Emmet had taken off as he mounted the scaffold in Dublin in 1803, ordaining that it should be handed down from one Robert Emmet to the next in each generation.1 The Emmet men, descendants of Thomas Addis Emmet, who himself rose to become New York Attorney General, the magazine emphasized, had been involved in professional life rather than busi‑ ness in America. They “have been lawyers, engineers or physicians, while the women have taken to 257

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art and literature.” But the men were also involved in Irish politics in America. Richard Stockton, Emmet’s father, who was a Justice of the Superior Court of New York, was also, at the time of the Young Ireland revolt in 1848, “one of the directory formed in New York to aid the agitation.” Simi‑ larly, according to the magazine, William Temple Emmet, son of Richard Stockton Emmet, Has taken a prominent part in the movements of the Irish societies of the country. When the big Irish mass meetings are held in New York to aid the movements for the amelioration of his countrymen on the other side of the water he is called on to preside. Thus, as the Emmets embedded themselves in the professional life of New York, they also maintained their ties to Ireland.2 The Emmets in New Rochelle also entertained many of the Irish leaders, including Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, Michael Davitt, John Redmond, and John Dillon. “The Irish people of New Ro‑ chelle,” the article added, “regard the Emmets with a pride close to veneration,” despite the fact that the Emmets remained Protestant. In two strange sentences, the Magazine of American History described their status with some ambiguity: The mode of living of the Emmets is democratic and very much like that of the landed families of Ireland. At their homes in New Rochelle formality, except on state occasions, is usually thrown to the winds and hospitality is supreme.3 The Emmets, then, were a part of a ruling class in New York State while also remaining loyal to the political traditions that Thomas Addis Emmet brought from Ireland. The family was unusual: the first generation of emigrants, in the person of Thomas Addis Emmet, rose very quickly on the legal ladder in New York State, as he possessed not only legal training but a sort of class confidence that came from his family’s position in Dublin. (His father had been state physician of Ireland.) Just as Robert Emmet’s growth as a patriot and rebel was not nourished by dire poverty, eviction, or social grievance, so too his brother’s crossing of the Atlantic was not motivated by the search for religious freedom or better social and economic circumstances. Rather, Thomas Addis Emmet left for America because he could hardly have lived in Ireland after his brother’s rebellion. He carried with him some of the very confidence that had energized his brother Robert, and also some of the eloquence for which Robert became famous as he made his speech from the dock. In November 1806, two years after he had arrived in America, when Thomas Addis Emmet wrote to an Irish associate who had wondered if he might return to Ireland, Emmet made clear that he had put down roots in the new country: I am settled here with the fairest prospects for myself and my Children, my principles and my sufferings were my first passport & introduction here & they procured me the effective friend‑ ship of the leading characters in this State and in the Union at large. Too much had happened for Ireland ever to become his home again: Ought I to go where [my principles] are treason & sufficient ground for perpetual proscrip‑ tion?…And with what feeling should I tread on Irish ground? – as if I were walking over graves & those the graves of my nearest relatives and friends…There is not now in Ireland an individual who bears the name of Emmet. I do not wish that there ever should while it is con‑ nected with England.

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From now on, the name Emmet would not only be associated with a dead patriot, but with a family rising socially and professionally in what seemed to them like a natural place of exile, a home away from English rule – the United States.4 In Dublin, between 1783 and 1787, Thomas Addis Emmet had studied medicine and held the pat‑ ent for state physician jointly with his father, but soon he changed to law; he was called to the Irish bar in 1790. According to the Dictionary of Irish Biography, “His family connections and oratorical and legal skill soon made him a leading figure at the Bar with a very profitable practice.” In 1792, he joined the United Irishmen and became a member of the society’s executive directory in 1797. As a lawyer, he defended well‑known radicals in court, such as Napper Tandy; he was a staunch supporter of Catholic Emancipation.5 When the British government moved against the United Irishmen in March 1798, Emmet was arrested and held in Newgate and then in Kilmainham. Later that year, because of his revolutionary sympathies, his name was erased from the Bar. The following year, he was exiled to Scotland with his fellow United Ireland leaders. Early in 1803, he made his way to Paris and began to discuss a French government‑sponsored invasion of Ireland. His younger brother Robert, also in Paris, made clear that he was planning a rebellion in Dublin. This took place in March 1803 without any assistance from France and was a disaster. Robert Emmet himself was executed and became a martyr for the Irish nationalist cause. Afterwards, Thomas Addis Emmet became disillusioned by any promises of French support for the Irish cause and gradually came to believe that a French invasion would merely result in a puppet au‑ thoritarian state in Ireland. He decided to leave France for the United States where, within three days of his arrival, he filed a declaration of his intention to become a citizen. But it was not clear that he would be able to practice as a lawyer in America. In Washington DC, soon after his arrival, he discussed his status in the new country with many powerful people, including President Thomas Jefferson. When it was suggested that he consider living in the South, he wrote to an associate in Georgia, “You know the insuperable objections I have always had to settling where I could not dispense with the use of slaves and that the more they abound, the stronger are my objections.” Later, he would outline his own political principles: They are a subject on which I am too proud to parley, or enter into a vindicatory explanation with any man. In me, republicanism is not the result of birth, nor the accidental offspring of family connections – it is the fruit of feelings and sentiment, of study and reflection, or observa‑ tion and experience[;] it is endeared to me by sufferings and misfortunes. In other words, Emmet had carried with him from Ireland and from France a set of principles that would have been appreciated and supported by many in the United States. He came as a lawyer and a republican, however, rather than a rebel, even though his political sympathies had been forged among the United Irishmen and had developed because of conditions in Ireland. In the United States, he would find many who had sympathy for his views on Ireland. But the terms he used were not inflam‑ matory; he couched his political vision using language that would have been amenable to Americans who were proud of having rid their country of British rule.6 With the support of George Clinton, the governor of New York State, and his nephew DeWitt Clin‑ ton, Mayor of New York City, Emmet was allowed to practice at the New York Bar, even though he was not a citizen. Soon, he had a thriving practice. Between 1806 and 1811, he made 45 appearances before the Supreme Court of New York State.7 No matter how involved he became in his new life as an American lawyer, however, Thomas Addis Emmet continued to be haunted by his past in Ireland. In 1807, he campaigned against Rufus

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King, who was running on the Federalist ticket, because King, as Minister to Great Britain in 1798, had objected to the plans of the United Irishmen prisoners to emigrate to the United States. Emmet accused King, in an open letter, of having been an instrument of British policy in Ireland. You degraded the dignity and independence of the country you represented, you abandoned the principles of its government and its policy, and you became the tool of a foreign state to give it a colorable pretext for the commission of a crime. He went on in the same letter to consider how different things might have been had he and his family been allowed to emigrate to the United States in 1798: I should have brought along with me my father and his family, including a brother, whose name perhaps even you will not read without emotions of sympathy and respect. Others nearly con‑ nected with me would have come partners in my emigration. But all of them have been torn from me. I have been prevented from saving a brother, from receiving the dying blessings of a father, mother and sister, from soothing their last agonies by my cares: and this, sir, by your unwarrantable interference. What is interesting is that while Thomas Addis Emmet is building his career as a lawyer in New York, then, he does not feel he has to hide or apologize for his brother’s ill‑fated rebellion in Ireland. Rather than making him into a dangerous figure, it gives him the nobility of someone who has lost a great deal in support of a cause.8 But it also made him vulnerable to attack. One of King’s supporters, a journalist, sought to un‑ dermine Thomas Addis Emmet in the New York Evening Post by referring to the Irishman’s revolu‑ tionary past: He was “the confessed abettor, aider, leader and manager of a system of robbery and assassination…practiced upon a tranquil and loyal population.” He also sought to undermine Emmet by noting that he was not yet an American citizen, objecting “[t]hat the conduct of Thomas Addis Em‑ met, in taking an active part in our elections before he has a right to vote…is impudent intermeddling with our concerns, and an outrage upon all propriety and decorum.” He referred to him as “Adder Emmet.” A letter, displayed prominently in the Post, asked: “Is New York to be put into the hands of United Irishmen and Foreigners?” In any argument, then, Emmet’s Irishness, no matter how proudly it was displayed, could be used against him and placed in a context in which Irish immigrants lacked “propriety and decorum”—a charge not unlike those Jennifer Orr explores in her chapter earlier in this volume.9 When the Federalists in New York lost heavily in the election, a crowd gathered outside King’s house to chant “Emmet and Liberty.” This open involvement in New York electoral politics took place early in Emmet’s time in America and was connected to what had happened in Ireland. There‑ after, he did not become engaged with politics in any direct way. He remained, however, a Republican and a supporter of DeWitt Clinton, but put his energies into his work as a lawyer, into investing in real estate and looking after his large family: he had ten children.10 Nonetheless, in New York, Emmet continued to see some old colleagues from the United Irish‑ men, including William James MacNeven, a doctor whom Emmet had known in Dublin and Paris. MacNeven, like Emmet, distinguished himself in New York, setting up the first chemical laboratory in the city. MacNeven’s stepdaughter married Emmet’s son Thomas. There were other former United Irishmen who were in straitened circumstances in New York, including Nicholas Gray, who attrib‑ uted his comfortable position in life to “the great and good Mr. Emmet.” Emmet in New York was not a struggling emigrant, but had a thriving law practice. This allowed him to maintain a leadership

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position among the Irish. In Ireland he had been part of a class of Irish Protestants who had thrown in their lot with Irish Republicanism. Eventually, it was their politics that caused them to go into exile; nonetheless, they were not themselves affected by the poverty and powerlessness that gave rise to mass emigration.11 For example, Emmet shared only elements of identity with the Irish laborers, Catholic and Prot‑ estant, in the second and third decade of the nineteenth century, who worked on the building of the canals in the northeastern part of the United States: Three thousand were working on the creation of the Erie Canal in 1818. Thomas Robinson, in his biography of Thomas Addis Emmet, writes, In 1826 there were at least 5,000 Irishmen working on four canals in the United States, and very probably there were numbers of them employed on the other dozen canals then in process of construction. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that every canal built in the North, until the Civil War, was built by Irish labor. But Emmet and his family were consolidating their position in New York society at the time this was happening, living as they might have lived in Dublin had they remained loyal to the Crown. And while Emmet remained a Democrat and continued to support the Irish cause, he still enjoyed his privilege. In 1805, shortly after his arrival in New York, he wrote to a friend: “We are at this moment also laboring under the most crying grievance in America – the badness of servants – of which and the enormity of their wages you can scarcely form an idea.” In 1818, DeWitt Clinton was shown a plan to teach literacy to the urban poor by Jeremy Bentham. When he suggested to Emmet that it might be used to help Irish immigrants, Emmet was skeptical—“unsure,” Thomas Robinson notes in his biography, “that teaching reading and writing was a realistic approach to the educational problems of the immi‑ grants.” In 1819, when Emmet’s daughter Elizabeth married into a wealthy merchant family in New York, her father wrote to her about wealth: “The regions of grandeur are not the biding place of the blessed, and the heart that devotes itself to this false worship never feels satisfied.” The tone used here in all its heightened religious currents, far from the tone we find in letters by most Irish immigrants, further establishes the difference between Emmet and the majority of his countrymen in America.12 Although his reputation as a lawyer and court orator was high, Emmet’s appointment in 1812 as Attorney General of New York State was a surprise. It was not a position he sought or lobbied for. He served for over a year until he was removed by the Federalist Council of Appointment when they came to power. In 1816, Emmet and MacNeven, as members of the Shamrock Friendly Society, were involved in producing a pamphlet for prospective Irish immigrants, advising them to adhere to a serious work ethic in the new country and to move into the interior of the country rather than stay in the congested cities. They warned particularly about the evils of drink: “The drunkard is viewed as a person socially dead, shut out from decent intercourse, shunned, despised, or abhorred…The pernicious habit is to be guarded against as scrupulously for political as for moral considerations.” Immigrants were advised not to go to the South because of the climate but also because they would have to compete with labor produced by enslaved people, as Angela F. Murphy explores in her chapter.13 In a letter written the following year, Emmet warned immigrants who were literate and wished to work as “penmen” not to have hopes about their chances in America. In another letter, written in 1820, he wrote of an Irish immigrant who sought to make a living as a clerk: He has been educated to earn his bread by his pen, and in this country he could not have a worse instrument in his hands for that purpose. In everything he knows how to do, there are thousands of native‑born citizens.

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Emmet in these years thus wrote as a very particular kind of leader, not encouraging others toward sedition against the old enemy, or furthering feelings of nostalgia and grievance, but taking the long view, encouraging Irish immigrants to succeed in America in the most practical ways. His tone also had a paternalistic edge, as though the vice of drinking too much, for example, was not something that he himself might suffer from, as though his own brand of Irishness set him apart from his less entitled compatriots.14 But no matter what he did, old Irish disputes continued to surface. On 12 July 1824, a fight broke out in Greenwich Village between Irish Orange laborers and their Catholic counterparts. In the subse‑ quent court case, Emmet represented the Catholic side. In court, he defended the record of the United Irishmen, establishing the connection between the ideals of the group and American democracy: The highest inspiration and most fervent aspiration of the United Irishmen was to make Ire‑ land what America is – politically free. The United Irishmen shed their blood and wasted their property to give Ireland a constitution, such as America is this day blessed with. The principles upon which the liberty of Ireland was attempted to be based was the same as those which place America as the only free nation on earth. On the other hand, he asked: “What is the celebration of Orangeism?” And replied: “Is it not the rejoicing of one sixth of the community over the rest?” This powerful statement tells us a great deal about the Republicanism that Emmet carried with him to America. It may have been high‑toned at certain moments, but it was rooted in Irish realities, in disputes that raged more fiercely in Ireland but were played out among Irish immigrants in America, and which were inflected by the privilege that insulated him from the day‑to‑day realities of most other Irish‑American immigrants.15

The James Family and Irish‑American Identity Emmet’s views on servants, as well as the evils of drink and the idea of false worship, must have formed the bedrock for the friendship between Emmet and William James—the grandfather of the philosopher William James, the novelist Henry James, and the diarist Alice James. William James came to America from County Cavan in Ireland toward the end of the eighteenth century; he may have come as early as 1789. He carried with him, according to family legend, “a very small sum of money, a Latin grammar in which he had already made some progress at home, and a desire to visit the field of the revolutionary battles.”16 William James’ legacy, besides the fortune he had amassed – he was, at the time of his death, one of the two or three richest men in America—included his will in which he expressed his views about inherited wealth, writing “of the lamentable consequences which so frequently result to young persons brought up in affluence from coming at once into possession of property.” He gave a number of trustees power to decide how his fortune would be dealt with and much control over how the next generation conducted themselves in the world: And in order to provide against accidental inequalities and diversities…but more especially with a view to discouraging prodigality and vice, and to furnish an incentive to economy and usefulness, I have further determined to invest my trustees with extensive discretionary powers in regard to the disposition of my property. If James’ tone here is Irish, then it is the high rhetoric of Ulster Presbyterianism.17

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James went on to exclude his sons William and Henry (the father of the writers William and Henry and Alice James) from the will but allowed the trustees to decide if they were to inherit a share of their father’s estate: If at the expiration of the period limited for the continuance of the trust, it shall satisfactorily appear to my trustees…that any of those who would otherwise be entitled to share in such parti‑ tion, leads a grossly immoral, idle or dishonorable life, such delinquent shall not be entitled to the share of my estate hereinafter provided for such person, but shall be considered as having forfeited the same either wholly or in part. Unlike Thomas Addis Emmet, whose language was more subdued, James has no trouble invoking elaborate systems of control and retribution, lasting into the far future. It is as though both men, close friends, represented two elements of Irish identity: one Dublin Protestant, more settled and milder in tone, and the other Ulster Presbyterian, more extreme, ready to use terms like “grossly immoral” and to make sure that his sons who were less than worthy would suffer in this world as much as in the next.18 (William and Henry James, his sons, successfully contested old William’s will and managed to receive an equal share of their father’s fortune without any strings attached. When this decision was announced by the court, Henry James [the father of the writers] said: “Leisured for life.”)19 William James had begun his life in America as a clerk in Albany, and then, with a partner, had opened a store on the waterfront there. Soon, he was running other stores in Albany and one in New York. “As an importer,” Alfred Habegger writes, “William seems to have concentrated on high‑­ quality staples, liquor, and dry goods that were shipped from Europe or elsewhere to New York City and then up the Hudson.”20 James’ first two wives died in childbirth. His third wife, Catherine Barber, had ten children, eight of whom survived. She outlived her husband by 27 years, surviving long enough to be remembered by her grandson the novelist Henry James in his memoirs. Both of Catherine’s paternal grandparents were Irish immigrants from County Longford. It must have helped William James’ career that rela‑ tives of his wife owned the weekly newspaper The Albany Register, in which James periodically an‑ nounced some new business venture. Like Thomas Addis Emmet, William James was a supporter of DeWitt Clinton. When the former mayor of New York and governor of New York State died in 1828, William James was, Habegger writes, “one of only two pallbearers out of a total of fifteen who did not hold political office.” This suggests his importance as a business figure who had come to public prominence in New York State remarkably quickly.21 Using Thomas Addis Emmet at times as his lawyer, William James also built up a large real estate holding. He eventually owned a block in Greenwich Village, more than 40 square miles near the Mis‑ sissippi River, and the village that eventually became the city of Syracuse in upstate New York. He invested in salt miles and served on the Commission to build the Erie Canal between 1810 and 1824. His speech when the first boat passed through the eastern portion of the canal in 1823 was deeply patriotic, with an emphatic anti‑English subtext, and worthy of an Irish Presbyterian who had made a fortune in America: With the perpetual example of despotism and wretchedness in the old world before our eyes, we may look forward with a well‑founded hope that neither tyrannical aristocracies nor intrigu‑ ing demagogues can ever succeed in corrupting our citizens, or blighting our liberties.

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On the completion of the canal in 1825, the chief address was also delivered by William James.22 It is striking how quickly and almost effortlessly both Thomas Addis Emmet and William James became eminent figures in New York State. It may be important that neither of them had fled Ireland primarily as economic migrants. And it is significant, too, that both came with ideas of liberty that set American freedom against foreign, or British, despotism. The legacy of the United Irishmen and the failure of Robert Emmet’s 1803 Rebellion became, for friends and supporters of Thomas Addis Em‑ met, a matter of pride. In the first volume of his memoirs, published in 1913, the novelist Henry James wrote of the name Emmet “being naturally, among them all, of a pious, indeed a glorious tradition.”23 In contrast, William James left Ireland as part of a large‑scale emigration of Ulster Irish, or Scotch Irish, as they became known in the United States. Between 1783 and 1815, at least a hundred thousand crossed the Atlantic, as we have seen in earlier sections of this volume. Kerby A. Miller notes how puzzling this is: “At first glance this emigration seems surprising for it took place during a period of relative prosperity in Ireland.” Miller estimates that two‑thirds of these immigrants were Ulster Presbyterians; “the other third a mix of Catholics and Protestants, mainly Anglicans, from the south.”24 While, in letters home, many of those who had emigrated emphasized the welcome they had received in the United States, they in fact arrived in a country that was uneasy about the expansion of its population. A number of acts passed in 1798 limited the rights of those arriving in the United States. These laws, Kevin Kenny writes, “required the registration of all resident aliens, extended the naturalization period for citizenship from five to fourteen years, and outlawed publications con‑ sidered defamatory of the government or subversive of its laws (including, by implication, those too laudatory of France).”25 Rather than deterring those who might wish to emigrate, however, this legislation helped to “bring a broad range of Irish rank and file of all sects into Jefferson’s party. Presbyterians and Catholics alike, then, became stalwart Democratic‑Republicans.”26 Thus, “From 1800,” Kerby Miller writes, “through the 1828 election of Andrew Jackson, son of emigrants from County Antrim, a common republicanism largely obscured old antagonisms between Americans and Irishmen, Protestants and Catholics.” In other words, Irish republicanism was a way of allowing immigrants to connect their own politics to a sort of high idealism about liberty and equality in the United States.27 In this context, the United Irishmen in exile, led by Thomas Addis Emmet and his associates, were not only tolerated in America as fugitives and exiles, but they had a role in shaping Irish America and its influence on politics. As Kerby Miller notes: “Thomas Jefferson’s election in 1800, achieved with overwhelming Irish‑American support, validated Irish revolutionary ideals.”Although Miller adds that Emmet and others “helped perpetuate the exile motif among Irishmen in the United States,” what we notice among the next few generations of the Emmets in the United States is not a sense of exile, but rather a sense of pure belonging and privilege.28

The Emmet and James Descendants Among the future Emmets, there were some who carried on the tradition of leadership and an ad‑ herence to an old Irish legacy. Among the future generations of Emmet women, however, the idea of heritage was more complex, as it was with the James family. It was not open to them to become lawyers or politicians; instead, they became artists and, in the case of Alice James, a significant diarist.29 In 1993, the Borghi Gallery in New York and the Orin Gallery in Roanoke in Virginia mounted an exhibition called “The Emmets: A Generation of Gifted Women,” with a catalog written by Tara Leigh Tappert, who wrote of a similar exhibition at the Arden Gallery in New York in 1936 called “Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture by Five Generations of the Emmet Family.” 264

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New York society stampeded to the opening,” she wrote. “For more than an hour the visitors literally fought to get through the crowd not only to see the portraits and landscapes the women had created but to see the Emmets themselves.30 The 1936 exhibition covered 100 years of work by five generations of Emmets, including Rosina Em‑ met Sherwood (1854–1948), Lydia Field Emmet (1866–1952), and Ellen Emmet Rand (1875–1941). Ellen Rand Emmet, known as Bay Emmet, had recently painted a portrait of President Roosevelt, now in the Smithsonian. Among her many fashionable subjects, Lydia Field Emmet had painted a portrait of Mrs. Herbert Hoover. The first painter in the Emmet family was Elizabeth Emmet Le Roy, who was born in Dublin in 1794. She was the daughter of Thomas Addis Emmet and the niece of Robert Emmet. When her father was exiled in 1799, she was brought up partly in Paris before the family emigrated to America in 1804, a year after Robert Emmet’s failed insurrection. While some members of the next generation of Emmets painted as a hobby, it was the great‑grand daughters of Thomas Addis Emmet who became professional painters and emerged as the most suc‑ cessful Irish‑American family in the visual arts. Rosina Emmet Sherwood, Lydia Field Emmet, and Ellen Rand (Bay) Emmet had much in common. They painted portraits, often of people in society, and both Lydia and Bay charged a high price for their work. Although they traveled in Europe a great deal, they were not influenced by Impressionism, nor indeed by artists such as Picasso or Braque. The brushwork of all three Emmets showed the influence of American painters such as William Merritt Chase, with whom both Lydia and Bay had studied, and John Singer Sargent. Although all three kept their Emmet name after marriage, thus connecting them in the most obvi‑ ous way to Irish patriotism, they did not insist on their Irishness. Indeed, in May 1877, Rosina, while in England, was presented to Queen Victoria. She wrote to her mother: We arrived at Buckingham Palace in good time…I had a good look at the Queen & was pleased to see that she didn’t look very cross, as they say she does generally. I was not a bit nervous but made a very nice curtsey…The Queen was bowing very graciously and holding out a fat purple hand, so down I went and kissed it.31 In 1894, two years after the death of his sister, Alice, Henry James the novelist, having received a copy of her diary which had been printed in a limited edition, began to muse on his sister’s politics during the eight years – 1884 to 1892 – that she had lived in England: The violence of her reaction against the British ambiente, against everything English, engenders some of her admirable and delightful passages…what comes out in the book…is that she was really an Irishwoman! Transplanted, transfigured – but nonetheless fundamentally ­national – in spite of her so much larger and finer than Irish intelligence. She felt the Home Rule question absolutely as only an Irishwoman (not anglicized) could. It was a tremendous emotion with her – inexplicable in any other way – and perfectly explicable by “atavism”. What a pity she wasn’t born there – and had her health for it. She would have been…a national glory. Henry James, who had come to England in 1870 and lived there mostly until his death in 1916, did not share his sister’s views on Home Rule. “All the England one doesn’t see,” he wrote to a friend, “may be for it – certainly the England one does is not. It seems probable that whatever happens here, there will be civil war in Ireland – they will stew, in a lively enough manner, in their own juice.”32 By this time, James had become so embedded in the England of his exile that he sought, in his memoirs, to emphasize the Englishness of his grandmother Catherine Barber: “She represented for 265

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us in our generation the only English blood – that of both her own parents – flowing into our veins. I confess out of that association…I feel her image most beneficently bend.”33 In fact, as James knew, Catherine Barber’s parents were Irish, coming, as we have seen, from County Longford. Henry James and his siblings were actually Irish on three sides – on the James side, on the Barber side, and on his mother’s side – her grandfather Hugh Walsh came from Killyleagh in County Down in 1764. His mother’s other grandfather came from Edinburgh. He did not have a single drop of English blood. His book was written while James was dining regularly among the rich and titled and powerful in London. Denying his Irishness would been self‑protection, especially since his family had never been large landholders in Ireland and did not have a title. The problem for Henry James was that the word “Irish” changed its meaning in the United States between the 1830s, when William James, Henry James’ grandfather, had “a native of Ireland” put on his tombstone, and the 1840s, when Henry and his siblings were growing up, when the Irish Catholic poor and dispossessed came to America. Although at times we note a revulsion in Henry James’ re‑ sponse to Ireland, this wavered and was open to change. His siblings, especially his brother William and his sister Alice, on the other hand, could express loyalty to Ireland, but this was also sporadic. Mainly, this generation of an Irish‑America family melted into an America in which they became em‑ inent. When asked where they were from, the Jameses often joked that they were natives of the James family. But this was a kind of pose, made necessary by the change in the way Irishness was seen in America after the Great Famine. The descendants of the Scotch Irish could take comfort in the fact that they could not, in general, be easily identified as Irish because of their surnames or their accents. Yet nothing was as simple as that. The Jameses were seen by others as Irish. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., for example, a friend and contemporary of William and Henry James, maintained that one would have to “invent a word” to describe the James household. In order to understand William and Henry James, he told an English friend, “one must remember their Irish blood.” In his book The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (2001), Louis Menand writes: The Jameses were not Brahmins. They were not New Englanders. They were descended on both sides from Irish immigrants, and although the Jameses now seem as American as the Em‑ ersons, and the Holmeses, to people like the Emersons and the Holmses, they seemed rather distinctively Irish. In their milieu, the Jameses were alone in having an Irish heritage. Despite their efforts to melt into the world of cultured New England and New York, the Irish elements in them, associated with wild‑ ness, could be detected as a source of amusement to others.34 Edward Emerson, the son of the writer, for example, has left an account of the Jameses at table. Wilkie, the third James brother, he wrote, Would say something and be instantly corrected or disputed by the little cock‑sparrow Bob the youngest…and then Henry (Junior) would emerge from the silence in defence of Wilkie…In the excited argument, the dinner knives might not be absent from eagerly gesticulating hands… In their speech singularly mature and picturesque, as well as vehement, the Gaelic (Irish) in their descent always showed.35 In letters, especially in the 1880s, Henry James the novelist made clear his dislike of Ireland, writing to his friend Grace Norton in Boston, for example, in 1881 that Ireland Seems to me an example of a country more emancipated from every bond, not only of despot‑ ism but of ordinary law, than any so‑called civilized country was before – a country revelling 266

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in odious forms of irresponsibility and licence. And, surely, how can one speak of the Irish as a “great people”. I see no greatness, nor any kind of superiority in them, & they seem to me an inferior and 3rd rate race, whose virtues are of the cheapest and shallowest order, while their vices are peculiarly cowardly & ferocious. They have been abominably treated in the past – but their wrongs appear, to me, in our time, to have occupied the conscience of England only too much to the exclusion of other things. Two years later, he wrote to her from London: “Here there is nothing but Ireland, & the animosities & separations it engenders – accursed isle! Literature, art, conversation, society – everything lies dead beneath its shadow.” By the time he had settled in London, James had shed the patriotism that his grandfather had carried from Cavan to New York. This sort of play with identity and allegiance was open to those with Ulster Scots names and with an interest in social climbing and covering their tracks. But there is a tone in these letters from James that seems almost too vehement and a sense that he is protesting too much. As Ireland became a subject for discussion in London, James, as an Irish‑ man in disguise, took a hard line, perhaps as a way of disguising his own background.36 Although Henry James’ high social position in London was a safe haven for his anti‑Irish views, it was thus shadowed by insecurity. Despite his grandfather’s wealth, his family background as Ulster Presbyterian would have been difficult to explain to a duchess. In some ways, his Irishness was like his homosexuality: it was something that he generally kept to himself. In his journey of self‑invention, he learned to erase, disguise, create masks, cover tracks. This denial of identity was something that the descendants of Irish Catholic immigrants to America would have found difficult or indeed impossible. On the other hand, James’ privilege, his entitlement, his share of the wealth that his grandfather had amassed, gave him the chance to invent strategies to cover his shame at being Irish.

The Emmet and James Legacy In his memoir “Notes of a Son and Brother” (1914), Henry James recalled the August of 1865 in North Conway, New Hampshire, spent with his orphaned cousins, the Temple girls. They were vis‑ ited by Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior and a friend, both of whom had fought in the Civil War. James emphasized the young men’s fascination with his cousin, Minnie Temple. Minnie, however, died in 1870 at the age of 25. A year before Minnie’s death, James wrote to his brother William about the marriage of Minnie’s sister Ellen: “Elly’s marriage strikes me as absolutely sad. I care not how good a fellow T. Em‑ met may be: Elly deserves a younger man.” Ellen married Christopher Temple Emmet, grandson of Thomas Addis Emmet, who was 28 years older than she was. A year earlier Kitty Temple, another sister, had married Richard Emmet, brother of Christopher. This meant that three of the granddaughters of William James of Albany had married three of the grandsons of Thomas Addis Emmet, since Catherine James, a first cousin of Henry James the writer, had married Robert Emmet Junior in 1848. This marriage, Alfred Habegger writes, Was the occasion for a famous bash at the two clans’ Hudson Valley estates. The knot was tied at the Emmet place in Staatburg, and then the huge wedding party sailed to Gus’s place [Augustus James 1807–1866, son of William James of Albany], Linwood, already packed with “family and friends from Albany.” The Emmets brought an old Irish fiddler, and the feasting and dancing continued day and night. When a follow‑up party was held at the Emmet residence near Washington Square, Mary [Henry James the novelist’s mother] went with five‑ year‑old Harry [Henry James the novelist]. The occasion made a lasting impression on the boy.37 267

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By the end of the nineteenth century, Kitty and Ellen had raised grown‑up daughters, among whom was Bay Emmet, the painter. Henry James referred to this generation of Emmet women as “the Em‑ metry.” In the summer of 1897, he went to stay with the Emmetry when they were on holiday at Dunwich on the Suffolk coast. James has written to one of the girls to say he hoped to see her and her artist sister in the summer “by which time you and Bay will have become still more interesting that you are already,” since they had been exposed to the art world of Paris.38 The problem with the four Emmet girls James met was their speech. “I am afraid our voices and sentences hurt his ear‑drums,” one of them wrote about Henry James who, in turn, wrote to his brother: They would be thoroughly “sympathetic” if they only had a language to be in! Their speech, absolutely unaffected as yet, so far as I can see, by a year in Europe…remains really their own fault. But it is a grave one. I attack it, however, boldly, and as much as I can.39 When they pronounced “jewel” as “jool,” and “vowel” as “vowl” and “cruel” as “crool,” their cousin, the novelist, was there to correct them. Soon, James would turn his efforts to deal with the flaws in the speech of young Americans into a lecture called “The Question of Our Speech.” Thus, in August 1897, the descendants of Thomas Addis Emmet and William James of Albany did battle about language with the most famous novelist of the age, also a descendent of William James of Albany. Their ancestors had come to America as immigrants with very little money. But in their world, for ambitious men, eloquence was a sort of capital. Part of the fame of the Emmets arose from Robert Emmet’s speech from the dock in 1803. Thomas Addis Emmet’s success as a lawyer came also from his eloquence. William James’ patriotic speech, with its open anti‑Englishness, at the launch of the Erie Canal, was widely reported. Both men spoke with Irish accents. How they spoke and what they said was at the center of their success in America; and yet it also set them apart. By 1897, close to a hundred years after his grand‑ father emigrated to America, Henry James had made himself at home in England – he would, toward the end of his life, become a British subject and be awarded the Order of Merit. He wrote, as he lived, from a perspective of high ambiguity. He learned to be neither American nor English. In between, like a strange secret, a sort of haunting, was his fragile Irishness, an in‑between state that nourished his art as he moved toward the creation of his late style and dramatized the lives of a set of characters who were free, as he was, to wander in Europe having inherited a fortune made in America.

Conclusion The life of the Emmet family in New York State in the nineteenth century is not typical. Rather, in the way it combined privilege, entitlement, and loyalty to an Irish ideal, it shows how many different ways there were of being Irish in America in the nineteenth century. When the lives of the Emmets are examined beside the lives of the James family – the family that produced the philosopher William James, the novelist Henry James, and the diarist Alice James – with whom the Emmets had close associations, then the variety of Irish‑American life in the nineteenth century becomes even more apparent.

Notes 1 Magazine of American History, issues 30–32, 5. 2 Magazine of American History, 6. 3 Magazine of American History, 8, 7.

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The Emmets and the Jameses, an Irish‑American Case Study 4 Robinson, The Life of Thomas Addis Emmet, 235. 5 Dictionary of Irish Biography [hereafter, DIB], “James Quinn.” https://www.dib.ie/biography/emmet‑thomas‑addis‑a2922 6 DIB, 237, 251. 7 DIB, 242. 8 DIB, 262. 9 DIB, 259, 265. 10 DIB, 268. 11 DIB, 278. 12 DIB, 287, 296, 293, 315. 13 DIB, 316. 14 DIB, 324. 15 DIB, 326, 409. 16 Lewis, Narrative, 3. 17 Lewis, Narrative, 27. 18 Lewis, Narrative, 28. 19 Lewis, Narrative, 30. 20 Habegger, Father, 15. 21 Habegger, Father, 14. 22 Lewis, Narrative, 34. 23 James, Notes, 35. 24 Quoted in Meagher, Columbia Guide, 45. 25 Kenny, American Irish, 41. 26 Meagher, Columbia Guide, 49. 27 Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 189. 28 Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 188. 29 Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 188. 30 Tappert, Generation of Gifted Women, 5. 31 Tappert, Generation of Gifted Women, 8. 32 James, Letters, vol iii, 123. 33 Henry James, A Small Boy and Others, 8. 34 Quoted in Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James, 32; Quoted in Holmes‑Pollock Letters, vol ii, edited by Mark DeWold Howe, 41; Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 77. 35 Quoted in Kaplan, The Imagination of Genius, 17/18. 36 James, Letters, vol i, 145. 37 Habagger, Father, 302. 38 Edel, Henry James: The Treacherous Years, 187. 39 Edel, Henry James: The Treacherous Years, 188, 189.

Bibliography Edel, Leon. Henry James: The Treacherous Years. New York: Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins, 1969. Gordon, Lyndall. A Private Life of Henry James. London: Random House, 1998. Habegger, Alfred. The Father: A Life of Henry James Senior. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. Howe, Mark DeWolfe. Holmes‑Pollock Letters, vol ii. Harvard: Belknap Press, 1961. James, Henry. A Small Boy and Others. London: Gibson Square Books, 2001. James, Henry. Dearly Beloved Friends: Letters to Younger Men, edited by Gunter and Jobe. Ann Arbor: Univer‑ sity of Michigan Press, 2001. James, Henry. Letters, edited by Leon Edel, vol i. Harvard: Belknap Press, 1974. James, Henry. Letters, edited by Leon Edel, vol iii. Harvard: Belknap Press, 1980. James, Henry. Notes of a Son and Brother. Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2011. James, Henry. Novels. New York: Library of America, 2003. James, Henry. The American Scene. London: Penguin, 1994. James, Henry. The Complete Notebooks, edited by Edel and Powers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Kaplan Fred. Henry James: The Imagination of Genius. New York: Morrow 1992. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. Harlow: Longman, 2000.

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Colm Tóibín Lewis, R.W.B. The James: A Family Narrative. New York: Anchor, 1991. Meagher, Timothy. The Columbia Guide to Irish American History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Exodus to North America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture by Five Generations of the Emmet Family. New York: Arden Gallery, 1936. Robinson, Thomas. “The Life of Thomas Addis Emmet.” Thesis diss., NYU, 1955. Tappert, Tara Leigh. The Emmets: A Generation of Gifted Women. Exhibit catalogue. New York: Borghi & Co 1993.

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PART 4

The Turn of the Twentieth Century

20 AMERICA AND IRISH-AMERICAN NATIONALISM David Brundage

America’s contribution to Irish nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was profound and played a crucial role in Ireland winning partial independence in 1922. This contribution began as early as the 1790s, when several Irish nationalist exiles (most famously Theobald Wolfe Tone), found themselves in the newly established American republic and worked to help the independence struggle back at home, a struggle that culminated in Ireland’s 1798 rebellion. Following the defeat of that rebellion, many one-time leaders of the revolutionary Society of United Irishmen emigrated to the United States, where they helped keep the dream of an independent Irish republic alive even as it faded in Ireland itself. In the early 1840s, the Irish barrister and politician Daniel O’Connell de‑ veloped an extensive network of American associations as an integral part of his campaign to repeal the Act of Union that had bound Britain and Ireland in a single political unit. This American network disintegrated later in the decade, as Angela F. Murphy discusses in her chapter in this volume, but Irish Americans in New York and other cities rallied behind insurgents in Ireland during the brief and disastrous rebellion of July 1848.1 While building on this earlier history, Irish-American nationalism from the early 1860s to the early 1920s was significantly greater in scale and intensity than anything that had gone before. Over this 60 year period, the balance between constitutional nationalists, who sought reforms that would give Ireland greater autonomy within the British Empire, and those advocating “physical force” revolution to achieve full political independence, fluctuated dramatically, with one or the other usually dominant at any point in time. In the 1860s, for example, the Fenian Brotherhood, which sought complete Irish independence from Britain by force of arms, gathered a huge following among Irish immigrants in America. Fenians failed to achieve this goal, however, and in the early 1880s, many Irish Americans backed the more moderate goal of Irish Home Rule. Some Home Rule supporters nonetheless also played a role in the so-called New Departure, which gave life to an influential and socially radical transatlantic organization called the Land League. In the early twentieth century, Irish Americans pro‑ vided substantial financial support for the moderate Irish Parliamentary Party, which appeared close to winning Home Rule on the eve of World War I. Their support for Home Rule collapsed almost over‑ night following the party’s decision to support the British war effort in 1914. This decline in support, combined with a series of dramatic events in Ireland that began with the 1916 Easter Rising, set the stage for the largest mass movement of Irish nationalists in America of all—a movement committed, in the tradition of the Fenians, to the establishment of a completely independent Irish republic. It must be emphasized that those Irish Americans who supported homeland nationalism were never more than a 273

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relatively small minority of the larger Irish-American community; however, given the massive number of Irish migrants who made their way to America over the course of the nineteenth century, even a minority of activists could constitute a political force to be reckoned with. As this chapter will show, a transnational perspective is the best way to make sense of this dynamic and influential movement.

Historians’ Interpretations Historians have long been interested in the question of what drew so many Irish immigrants and their descendants—even members of the second and third generations who had never seen Ireland—to Irish nationalism, making it so vibrant over these decades. For many years, the work of Thomas N. Brown provided the most persuasive answer. Brown had argued that the driving force behind IrishAmerican nationalism was an effort to win social acceptance and personal success for immigrants and their progeny in the face of intense anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice in the United States. According to Brown, Irish Americans believed that only if their homeland was free would Americans grant them the respect they craved. Brown’s interpretation continues to be influential, although, as Kevin Kenny has suggested, it probably fits moderate constitutional nationalists better than propo‑ nents of physical force.2 Overall, however, more recent scholarship on Irish-American nationalism has tended to pivot away from a focus on the quest for respectability and acceptance in America and toward ongoing links with Ireland itself, reflecting what has been called a “transnational turn” among both US and Irish historians. One important line of interpretation in this vein has seen Irish-American activism as reflecting a diasporic identity. Though the term “diaspora” has been much overused in recent years, this approach has the merit of focusing attention on the persistence of powerful feelings of loss and displacement among a widely scattered people, the global Irish. For example, in his landmark 1985 book, Emigrants and Exiles, Kerby A. Miller, without using the term, had already established a re‑ lated point: the relevance of a deep sense of “exile” for making sense of Irish-American nationalism, especially its more militant varieties.3 A transnational perspective has also encouraged scholarly attention to deep and ongoing connec‑ tions between Irish and Irish-American activists in the building of nationalist movements. As Kenny puts it, “fluid and interactive processes” existed throughout this period that served to connect “widely dispersed migrant groups with each other and with the homeland;” these processes have been the fo‑ cus of much recent study. Even the seemingly instrumental raising of funds through bond drives, for example, has been shown to have helped forge such deep connections. Sustained contacts between activists across the Atlantic, however, should not be taken to imply strategic or tactical agreement. In fact, the history of Irish-American nationalism is littered with transatlantic disagreements, some of which immeasurably harmed the cause.4 If American and Irish wings of the movement were not always in agreement, recent scholarship has also shown that, even in America, Irish nationalists were far from ideologically monolithic. Some of their disagreements related to personality or strategy, but others reflected deeper fault lines of class, religion, race, or gender. Research on Irish-American nationalism, like that on many other top‑ ics in US social and political history since the 1980s, has been shaped by systematic attention to class and gender, while Irish-American racial attitudes and the phenomenon of Irish-American whiteness have also been significant concerns for historians of Irish nationalism.5 Finally, the invented or imagined nature of Irish-American nationalism, a major theme of the scholarship on nationalism generally, has been developed in recent work. Irish nationalism in Amer‑ ica was never just a matter of guns and money, but also involved what some theorists of nationalism have called “imaginative ideological labor.” Books, pamphlets, newspapers, lectures, and songs— even the names given to Irish-American fraternal associations and clubs—provided platforms for 274

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communicating bitter narratives of historical suffering and inspiring tales of heroism and struggle, as E. Moore Quinn and Cara Delay’s chapter on folklore in his volume demonstrates. The rest of this chapter traces these various themes, giving particular attention to transnational perspectives, through three moments of Irish nationalism in America: the emergence of the Fenians, the New Departure, and the Irish Revolution.6

The Fenians The Fenian Brotherhood, which claimed as many as 50,000 (mainly working-class) members and an estimated 200,000 supporters at its peak in 1865, was the first mass-based Irish nationalist organiza‑ tion in US history. The emergence of the Fenians can only be understood in the context of the Great Famine and the large-scale emigration from Ireland that it triggered. Intense anti-British feelings were prevalent among the Famine emigrants of the late 1840s and early 1850s, many of whom con‑ sidered themselves to be involuntary exiles driven out of their homeland by British policies, such as the 1847 Poor Law Extension Act that facilitated the eviction of impoverished tenants. The influential Irish nationalist journalist John Mitchel gave voice to these sentiments, propounding a powerful in‑ terpretation of the Great Famine as an act of deliberate British genocide against the Irish people. “The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight,” Mitchel wrote in one of the most searing passages of his 1860 book, The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), “but the English created the Famine.” Though most academic historians today reject Mitchel’s charge of genocide, it resonated widely among the migrants, constituting an almost textbook example of the powerful role played by imaginative ideo‑ logical labor in the building of nationalist movements. Additionally, many of the Famine migrants experienced significant discrimination and anti-Catholic nativism in America, which undoubtedly also increased their attraction to the most militant forms of nationalism. As Miller suggests, facing poverty and discrimination in the United States, and culturally predisposed to see all emigration as involuntary, Irish migrants in the era of the Great Famine longed for a return to the homeland, and Fenianism “promised at least a vicarious realization of such longings.”7 All earlier nationalist organizations in America had essentially been offshoots of already-existing Irish organizations, but the Fenians were different, having been founded nearly simultaneously with their Ireland-based counterpart, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), in 1858–1859. In this sense, the organization’s emergence reflected the tighter links made possible by the rapid improvements in transportation and communication in the immediately preceding years. The nearly simultaneous and widespread adoption of the railroad, the ocean-going steamship, and the telegraph not only brought more of the world into the domain of an increasingly global capitalist system, but also made possible the transnational communication and organizing that was a central feature of the Fenians.8 Fenianism was transnational in another sense. Two of its founders, John O’Mahony in New York and James Stephens in Dublin, had both spent time in Paris after the disastrous 1848 Irish rebellion and were influenced by the organizations of socialist, communist, and republican exiles that they en‑ countered there. Stephens made a full study of the theory and practice of these organizations, which were at the center of European radical activism in the decade after the 1848 revolutions, adapting the idea of an oath-bound secret society to the Irish context. The fact that the immediate stimulus for the founding of the Fenians was a double-edged global threat to the British Empire (the prospect of war between Britain and France and the 1857 Indian Rebellion against British rule) provides yet more testimony to their transnational orientation. As with Irish-American nationalists in both earlier and later periods, those who organized the Fenian Brotherhood were highly attuned to the opportunities afforded by international events.9 The Brotherhood grew rapidly during the American Civil War, in which many Fenians fought, some under the Confederate flag, but most on the side of the Union, as David T. Gleeson demonstrates 275

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in his chapter in the present volume. This is not surprising, given that Fenian strength mirrored the patterns of the Great Famine migration, which drew the Irish mainly to the cities of the Northern states. Irish Americans in the North tended to see the Union cause as ideologically linked to the goal of Irish independence, though (not surprisingly) their Southern counterparts did not see it this way. Fenian organizers actively recruited in both armies, and many hoped that their military training would help them in a future military struggle to liberate Ireland from British rule.10 Wartime Fenian growth was also facilitated by the fact that the Catholic Church in America was somewhat less hostile to the Brotherhood than was the Catholic Church in Ireland, making a more public presence for the Brotherhood possible. New York’s influential archbishop, John Hughes, even reluctantly conducted an 1861 funeral mass for Terence Bellew MacManus, a veteran Irish rebel whose body San Francisco Fenians sent to Dublin for burial in one of the most dramatic displays of transatlantic connections during these years. The American Catholic Church would grow increas‑ ingly suspicious of the Brotherhood over subsequent years, but Fenians in the United States were operating in a very different environment than the IRB in Ireland.11 By 1863, the Fenians were ready to hold their first national gathering, a convention in Chicago with 300 delegates in attendance from across the country. A successful fund-raising event called the Fenian Fair, held in that city the same year with substantial support from local trade unions, illustrated the Brotherhood’s largely working-class base and its close relationship to the growing American labor movement. While American Fenian leaders were typically journalists, lawyers, or businesspeople, rank-and-file activists were mainly working class. This was true even though Fenians generally avoided challenging the deep class inequality that marked industrializing America.12 Given its physical force orientation, Fenianism might seem an unlikely space for women’s activ‑ ism. Nonetheless, in 1865, an auxiliary organization called the Fenian Sisterhood was formed, draw‑ ing harsh criticism from opponents of Irish nationalism who denounced it for taking advantage of supposedly gullible Irish women domestic workers. Such paternalist characterizations notwithstand‑ ing, the Irish-American women who participated were more likely expressing their strong support of an Irish republic, and the Fenian Sisterhood played a particularly important role in the selling of Fenian bonds. Bonds not only raised needed funds for the Brotherhood but also allowed women (and men) who purchased them to engage in constructing important transnational links and to participate in what David Sim calls “everyday diasporic nationalism.”13 Yet, for all this dynamism, there were internal tensions under the surface. Although O’Mahony’s alleged mismanagement of funds was one point of contention, a deeper conflict emerged over the commitment of an opposing faction, led by a Cork-born New York merchant, William Roberts, to launching border attacks on the British possession of Canada. In the end, both wings of the Broth‑ erhood participated in Canadian raids at five places, ranging from New Brunswick to Manitoba, between 1866 and 1871. The largest, at Ridgeway, Ontario in 1866, was a serious military encounter that left dozens of men dead or wounded. These raids were another example of the transnational di‑ mension of the Fenians, not only because they were incursions across an international border, but also because one of their principal strategic goals was to aggravate tensions between the United States and Britain, perhaps even dragging the two nations into war—a not entirely unrealistic objective given heightened US-British tensions following the American Civil War.14 The Canadian raids, along with an 1867 rising in Ireland itself in which some Irish Americans participated, failed to achieve Fenian goals, but they did have an important transnational byproduct: Britain’s recognition of the right of expatriation. Though US political leaders generally supported this right, British authorities had long held to a doctrine of perpetual allegiance, or as they often put it, “once a subject, always a subject.” When Irish-born, naturalized American citizens were arrested in Ireland in 1867, their trials, heavily covered in US newspapers, triggered a major transatlantic political debate that resulted in important 1868 congressional legislation declaring that the right to 276

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expatriation is “a natural and inherent right of all people:” Shortly after this, the United States nego‑ tiated several international treaties with other nations that established—at least for Europeans—the essential right to change one’s citizenship or allegiance. The Fenians may have been unable to free Ireland, but they ended up triggering a revolution in the international law of citizenship.15 The improvement in Anglo-American relations, the failure of the 1867 rising and the Canadian raids, and British efforts to address Irish grievances under William Gladstone, who served his first term as Prime Minister from 1868 to 1874, led to a decline in the fortunes of the Fenian Brother‑ hood. In the 1870s, it was superseded by a new organization, Clan na Gael, as the main expression of militant Irish-American nationalism. The Clan’s most prominent figure was John Devoy, a Fenian organizer in the British army who had been sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment but was released on the condition that he leave the country. Arriving in New York in 1871 as an almost archetypal politi‑ cal exile, Devoy would go on to play the leading role in revolutionary Irish-American nationalism for the next 50 years. The IRB continued to exist in Ireland, but the Irish-American Fenian Brotherhood was, for all practical purposes, dead.16

The New Departure The early 1880s saw a remarkable ideological fusion of nationalism and socioeconomic radicalism among large numbers of Irish-American men and women. The organization that expressed and chan‑ neled this fusion, the American Land League, spread rapidly across the country; the growth of the Ladies’ Land League, a distinct but related organization, far surpassed the level of women’s activism registered by the Fenian Sisterhood. The charismatic parliamentary leader Charles Stewart Parnell, who served as President of the Irish Land League, which had been founded in Dublin in late 1879, toured the United States in 1880, gathering huge crowds everywhere and paving the way for the emergence of the Home Rule movement that would dominate Irish and Irish-American nationalist politics until the beginning of World War I. Thousands of dollars went from Irish-American pockets to support the activities of the Land League and Home Rule movements in Ireland, while Patrick Ford’s New York radical newspaper, the Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, was widely read in both Ireland and the United States. Transnational perspectives, emphasizing reciprocal inter‑ actions between activists across the Atlantic, have shaped our understanding of this flowering of what Ely Janis evocatively calls “a Greater Ireland.” 17 Transnational activism was an outgrowth of what was known in Ireland as the Land War. Trig‑ gered by a series of poor potato harvests, falling farm income, and an increasing rural mortality rate that seemed to presage another Great Famine, the Land War, which lasted from 1879 to 1882, was marked by mass meetings, rent strikes, boycotts, and sometimes violent acts of intimidation against landlords or those seeking to carry out evictions. The goals of the campaign were to lower rents, halt evictions, and, in the longer run, abolish landlordism. Landlordism was seen as having both economic and political dimensions, since landlords played a central role in the political structures that shaped British rule in Ireland. It was this tight connection between a socioeconomic struggle and a political one that made the upheaval of these years a key moment in the history of Irish n­ ationalism—and of diasporic Irish nationalism, since the Land War drew supporters not only among Ireland’s rural poor, but also among Irish emigrants in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, and especially the United States.18 In fact, the New Departure, the name given to the change in Irish republican strategy that encour‑ aged revolutionaries to provide conditional support for both constitutional nationalism and radical land reform, was hammered out in New York City in 1878 by two important figures. One was the Irish exile and Clan na Gael leader John Devoy; the other was Michael Davitt, who can best be thought of as a “transnational connector.” Davitt had been born in County Mayo but was raised in 277

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industrial Lancashire, in Britain, where his parents had migrated after being evicted during the Great Famine and where he lost an arm working in the cotton mills at the age of 11. These experiences of eviction, poverty, and exploitation gave him an acute sensitivity to the problem of economic inequal‑ ity, as well as a deep commitment to social justice.19 Socioeconomic inequality was a major problem in the United States as well, where many con‑ temporaries spoke of the centrality of the “labor question,” especially in the wake of the dramatic 1877 nationwide railroad strike. Given this context on both sides of the Atlantic, it is logical that historians of the Land League have emphasized the class dimension of the movement, along with its transnational one. Scholars have focused especially on the Irish-born American radical Patrick Ford, who edited the Irish World as the voice of the most politically active section of the Irish-American working class. The Irish World had supported trade unions, strikes, and labor reform movements as early as the 1870s. In the early 1880s, the paper began drawing parallels between the Land War in Ireland and the labor struggle in the United States, asserting that “the cause of the poor in Donegal is the cause of the factory slave in Fall River.” In some areas of the country, particularly industrial New England and the mining regions of Pennsylvania and the Far West, working-class branches of the American Land League appeared, sometimes virtually merging with local assemblies of the Knights of Labor, a labor reform organization that also grew rapidly in this period. In such areas, what Eric Foner calls a “symbiotic relationship between class-consciousness unionism and Irish national con‑ sciousness” was visible.20 Land and labor issues were not the only new elements in the mix. Irish radicals in America also endorsed a new departure in the relationship of women to nationalist and social reform movements in these years. Both Irish and Irish-American nationalism were influenced by a dramatic expansion of women’s activism. In New York, Ford’s Irish World backed women’s rights along with labor and land reform. In addition, Fanny Parnell (Charles’s sister) and Jane Byrne organized the Ladies’ Land League in the city in October 1880. Over the next two years, active Ladies’ Land League branches appeared in many American cities, often raising significantly more money for the cause than their male counterparts, while also challenging long-established gender roles. This early example of IrishAmerican feminist activism, supported by Davitt but treated suspiciously by other male leaders in Ireland, spread to Ireland in January 1881 and played a central role in the Land War, until it was shut down by Parnell himself in August 1882.21 Finally, the rise of the Land League marked a significant change in the racial thinking of Irish nationalists in America and particularly in their relationship to the abolitionist reform tradition and the struggle for Black equality. While Irish-American nationalists in the 1840s had been generally hostile to abolitionism, the Land League struggle, and particularly the efforts of the Irish World’s edi‑ tor, ­Patrick Ford, who had begun his journalistic career working for the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, did much to transmit the moral and political values of this movement to Irish America. “Welcome the colored brother in the Land League,” Ford urged. “He is a marked example of a de‑ frauded workingman.” In a similar fashion, Ford asserted a fundamental Irish-American identity with colonized peoples around the globe, featuring a “colonization column” in his paper that furthered this perspective. There were real limitations to this racial inclusiveness, especially noticeable in the par‑ ticipation of many Irish-American nationalists and reformers in the anti-Chinese movement, which culminated in the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Still Ford’s efforts to connect Irish na‑ tionalism with the Black struggle for equality were significant and helped shape the inclusive stance that the heavily Irish-American Knights of Labor took toward Black workers in the mid-1880s.22 In the end, the Land League could not escape the internal conflicts experienced by previous IrishAmerican nationalist movements. The organization lasted only about three years, beginning to un‑ ravel when Davitt went beyond the demand for peasant proprietorship to embrace a call for the nationalization of land of Ireland. This was a more radical position than either Devoy and the Clan or 278

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most moderate supporters of Home Rule could endorse. More broadly, as Foner suggests, ideological debates in the early 1880s reflected the existence of two “overlapping but distinct centers of power” within Irish America. Those who read the Irish World and supported Davitt’s brand of radicalism could be found in the Knights of Labor, some trade unions, and the more radical branches of the Land League. Meanwhile, their more conservative opponents “reflected the views of a nexus composed by the Catholic Church, the Democratic party, and the Irish-American middle class.” Nonetheless, the New Departure and the Land League left a powerful legacy, establishing traditions of labor and women’s activism on behalf of Irish freedom that would take on even greater prominence 35 years later, in the era of the Irish Revolution.23

The Irish Revolution The Home Rule movement went into decline in United States, as a sensational London divorce case naming Charles Stewart Parnell in 1890, and the leader’s death the following year, led to a bitter divi‑ sion in the Irish Parliamentary Party that lasted for the rest of the decade. But when the party reunited under the leadership of John Redmond at the turn of the century, it began a resurgence that generated an outpouring of enthusiasm in America. Irish-American financial support provided $100,000 to the Home Rule party in 1910 alone, leading Redmond’s opponents to label him the “dollar dictator.” Two years later, the party seemed on the verge of winning its longtime objective as a Home Rule Bill passed its second reading in the British House of Commons. Physical force republicanism in the United States was not dead, and Clan na Gael, under Devoy’s leadership, soldiered on, providing support to the Gaelic League, the Gaelic Athletic Association, and several other organizations in Ire‑ land that were attempting to revive (or reinvent) aspects of traditional Irish culture. In 1903, the Clan launched a militant weekly newspaper in New York, the Gaelic American, edited by Devoy, which, like the Irish World before it, circulated widely in Ireland. Nonetheless, republicanism remained a minority current among Irish Americans, far overshadowed by the seemingly unstoppable Home Rule juggernaut.24 However, this balance of forces changed dramatically with the outbreak of World War I in August 1914. Redmond’s decision to support the British war effort and accept a postponement of Home Rule’s implementation transformed the Irish nationalist movement in America, undermining support for the Irish Party and leading to a sharp rise in the fortunes of its revolutionary wing. The shift was marked by the March 1916 birth of a new organization, the Friends of Irish Freedom (FOIF), at a socalled Irish Race Convention in New York, attended by over 2,000 American men and women. In the wake of the Easter Rising in Dublin the following month and the subsequent execution of its leaders, and with the onset of the Irish War of Independence in 1919, American support for Irish revolutionary nationalism expanded dramatically. The FOIF claimed nearly 300,000 members by 1919, and its later rival, the American Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic (AARIR), founded by the Irish revolutionary leader Éamon de Valera during his 18-month organizing campaign in the United States, had 700,000 members. A bond drive raised five million dollars in the United States for the pro‑ claimed Irish Republic by 1921, while Irish Americans raised another five million dollars to provide relief for Irish people suffering during its War of Independence. This was the greatest outpouring of support for Irish independence that America had ever seen—or would ever see again.25 As with earlier moments in the history of Irish-American nationalism, transnational approaches have shaped historical interpretations of this period. Fearghal McGarry, for instance, has noted that “transatlantic links were vital in the planning, organization and funding” of the Easter Rising, with the New York-based Devoy playing a particularly important role. Moreover, in the year preceding the Rising, Clan na Gael provided funds for the arming of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Irish Volunteers, two of the groups at its center. Historians have noted that five of the seven signatories of 279

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the “Proclamation of the Irish Republic,” which Rising leader Patrick Pearse read in front of Dublin’s General Post Office at the beginning of the fighting, had spent time in the United States. The proc‑ lamation itself referenced the important role of the Irish-American diaspora when it claimed that the Dublin rebels had the support of Ireland’s “exiled children in America.”26 Building on these now well-established diasporic and transnational approaches, some historians have begun to mark out the dimensions of a fully “global history” of the Irish Revolution, an effort to place both the Irish War of Independence and the activities of its Irish-American supporters in the broader context of world events. World War I, a truly global conflict fought on a geographical scale unprecedented in human history, is the starting point for this approach. In Ireland, the war provided the essential context for the Easter Rising, with the rebels taking advantage of Britain’s distraction due to the War and making efforts to gain support from Britain’s enemy, Germany. It was also the context of global war that led Britain to execute the Rising’s leaders as traitors, generating new and widespread sympathy for their cause. And it was the manpower needs of the War that led Britain to consider introducing conscription in Ireland. This led to several electoral contests in 1917 in which Sinn Féin, now the main political party advocating full independence, was able to win victories. When Sinn Féin emerged at the head of a full-blown anti-conscription movement in 1918, it set the stage for its landslide victory over the Irish Parliamentary Party in December of that year.27 The War was also the essential context for the transformation of Irish-American nationalism, an almost overnight rejection of Redmond, who had only recently been Irish America’s hero. Though America’s own entry into the War in April 1917 temporarily limited the ability of organizations like Clan na Gael and the Clan-dominated FOIF to operate, a left-wing New York-based organization called the Irish Progressive League (IPL) emerged at this point, backing the anti-war candidacy of Jewish socialist Morris Hillquit for mayor that year, and adding a dimension of socioeconomic radi‑ calism to Irish-American nationalism that harkened back to the Land League era. Active from the fall of 1917 until its merger with the AARIR in November 1920, the IPL brought together antiwar liberals, left-wing progressives, labor activists, women suffragists, and socialists in its campaign for Irish independence. These various radical currents of labor activism, socialism, and feminism were themselves US manifestations of some of the global forces unleashed by global war. Such forces included significant labor unrest in Britain, a socialist revolution in Russia, the emergence of panAfricanism, and an intensification of the international movement for women’s suffrage. At least some Irish-American nationalists were bound to be influenced by developments like these.28 As World War I ended, another global dimension appeared: President Woodrow Wilson’s inspir‑ ing rhetoric about self-determination for small nations, which, broader scholarship has shown, had a profound impact on anticolonial nationalist aspirations and campaigns in places as far-flung as Egypt, India, China, and Korea. The activities of a group called the American Commission for Irish Inde‑ pendence reveal the way Irish-American nationalists responded to what some have called the “Wilso‑ nian moment.” Led by another transnational connector, labor lawyer Frank P. Walsh, the commission was made up of three well-known Irish Americans who attempted to bring the Irish case for national self-determination to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Although they failed, they met with sev‑ eral other anticolonial nationalist leaders in Paris, including Egyptians, whose cause Walsh agreed to champion. On his return to the United States, Walsh established the League of Oppressed Peoples, which placed the Irish case for independence within a broadly global anticolonial framework.29 In a related development, the efforts of Irish nationalists served to inspire a host of other US-based anticolonial nationalists representing other descent groups. Zionists in America, for example, began a financial campaign to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine that was modeled, in part, on the Irish bond drive. Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-born, Harlem-based leader of the pan-Africanist Universal Negro Improvement Association, launched a “Liberian Liberty Loan” campaign in 1920 that was

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based on the Irish one, as we will see in Maria McGarrity’s chapter in this volume. Both American Zionists and Garveyites deeply admired the organizational and fundraising skills of Irish-American nationalists.30 Notwithstanding the relevance of this larger global canvas, more focused transatlantic ­interactions— ­as well as the seemingly ever-present transatlantic conflicts—continued to be an important part of this phase of Irish-American nationalist history. Especially significant was the decision of Irish revo‑ lutionary leader Éamon de Valera to tour the United States in 1919–1920. Greeted by large crowds, as well as by political and Catholic church leaders, and treated like a celebrity, de Valera experienced echoes of the cross-country speaking tours undertaken by Davitt and Parnell 40 years earlier during their sojourns. But de Valera’s tour brought tensions between nationalists in Ireland and those in America to a head, as Devoy and FOIF leader Judge Daniel Cohalan reacted resentfully against what they saw as de Valera’s efforts to dictate Irish-American strategy. This was only partly a clash of personalities. More important, as Michael Doorley’s research demonstrates, was the way this conflict reflected fundamentally different concerns and objectives between Irish and Irish-American national‑ ists, with the latter as much concerned with the place of Irish Catholics within a Protestant and still hostile American social order as they were with independence for Ireland.31 Irish-American nationalism in this period, even more than in earlier eras, overlapped with ­working-class activism and struggles for gender equality. Between 1916 and 1920, US trade union membership more than doubled, and over one million workers went on strike each year. Strikes and union organizing, moreover, were driven by more than “bread-and-butter” issues, as new demands for “workers’ control of production” or “industrial democracy” entered the language of labor conflict for the first time. For many labor activists, the fight for Irish independence—with its own language of republicanism, self-determination for small nations, and anti-imperialism—fit perfectly within the logic of this other struggle to democratize industrial society. The campaign for women’s suffrage peaked in the same period too, a movement which, as Tara M. McCarthy’s chapter in this volume shows, had much greater strength among Irish-American women than has previously been recog‑ nized. Irish-American women like Leonora O’Reilly embodied the close ties between feminism, labor activism, and Irish independence.32 Even more than in earlier periods, the critical fault lines of class and gender spilled over into the American movement for an independent Ireland. Internal tensions would increase in 1922, as a debate in Ireland over the Anglo-Irish Treaty turned into a bitter civil war. Some Irish Americans took sides in the conflict over the treaty, while many others drifted away from the movement altogether. None of this should be taken, however, as evidence for discounting the Irish-American contribution to Irish independence, which was profound. As Francis M. Carroll succinctly puts it: “By the 1920s, most of Ireland was an independent state, and the United States had strongly contributed to its making.”33

Conclusion From the 1860s to the 1920s, Irish-American nationalism was a significant force in both the United States and Ireland. As this chapter has shown, historians have developed several different perspec‑ tives to understand this phenomenon, but in recent years a transnational perspective has been the most important. This framework has enabled historians to understand the Fenians’ transatlantic in‑ teractions and influences and their military incursions into Canada. It has enabled scholars to track the US impact of the Irish Land War and highlight the confluence of socioeconomic radicalism and Irish nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic in the early 1880s. Finally, it has helped make sense of several different dimensions of Irish-American nationalism in the era of the Irish Revolution. In very recent years, scholars of this third moment have begun to move beyond transnational and diasporic

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perspectives to outline a fully global history of the Irish Revolution and its American supporters. Such efforts at global history may in the end prove useful in understanding earlier and later phases of Irish-American nationalism as well.

Notes 1 For recent overviews of the 1790s–1840s period, see Brundage, Irish Nationalists, 8–87, and Gleeson, “Emi‑ grants and Exiles,” 179–187. 2 Brown, Irish-American Nationalism; Kenny, “Two Diasporic Moments,” 50–51. For recent work influenced by Brown’s interpretation, see Ní Bhroiméil, Building Irish Identity; Doorley, Irish-American Diaspora ­Nationalism; and Doorley, Justice Daniel Cohalan. 3 Tyrrell, “Reflections on the Transnational Turn”; Whelehan, “Playing with Scales”; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles; Kenny, “Diaspora and Comparison.” 4 Kenny, “Diaspora and Comparison,” 135. For related work by historical sociologists, see Lainer-Vos, Sinews of the Nation; and Lune, Transnational Nationalism. 5 Brundage, “Recent Directions,” surveys work that emphasizes race, class, and/or gender. For a sophisticated study that employs both class and racial analysis to good effect, see Nelson, Irish Nationalism. 6 Anderson, Imagined Communities; Eley and Suny, “From the Moment of Social History,” 6–9; Connolly, On Every Tide, 239–240. Brundage, Irish Nationalists, gives particular attention to this theme. E. Moore Quinn and Cara Delay trace the ways that cultural artifacts can capture both cultural traditions and communal loss. 7 Mitchel quoted in Brundage, Irish Nationalists, 93; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 343. Chapters in this vol‑ ume by Hidetaka Hirota and Mary C. Kelly respectively examine anti-Irish nativism and remembrance of the Great Famine in more detail. 8 Comerford, The Fenians in Context, 8–9. 9 Whelehan, The Dynamiters, 43–50; Connolly, On Every Tide, 244; McGarry, “‘A Land Beyond the Wave,’” 165. 10 Steward and McGovern, The Fenians, 29–47; Gleeson, The Irish in the South, 2–3, 155–156. 11 Steward and McGovern, The Fenians, 41–45, 67. 12 Brundage, Irish Nationalists, 102–103, 109–110. 13 McCarthy, Respectability and Reform, 67–68; Whelehan, The Dynamiters, 234–245; Sim, “Following the Money,” 98–100. 14 Doolin, Transnational Revolutionaries, 2, 4, 191–245; Steward and McGovern, The Fenians, 107–146; Klein, When the Irish Invaded Canada. 15 Salyer, Under the Starry Flag, 3, 6, 215. See also Sim, A Union Forever. 16 Gleeson, “Emigrants and Exiles,” 188, calls Devoy, “the personification of the victim diaspora.” The best biography is Golway, Irish Rebel. 17 Whelehan, Changing Land, 5; Janis, A Greater Ireland. 18 Whelehan, Changing Land, 1–9. 19 Foner, Politics and Ideology, 154–155; Golway, Irish Rebel, 103–113; and Janis, A Greater Ireland, 8–11, 23–27. The term “transnational connector” is used by Mannion and McGarry, Introduction to The Irish Revo‑ lution, 21, to describe Frank P. Walsh, discussed below. 20 Foner, Politics and Ideology, 178. Ford quoted in Brundage, Irish Nationalists, 115. Irish-American labor union activism is discussed at length in James R. Barrett’s chapter elsewhere in this volume. 21 Janis, A Greater Ireland, 137–158; McCarthy, Respectability and Reform, 65–105. 22 Ford quoted in Brundage, Irish Nationalists, 120. Foner, Politics and Ideology, 151, argues that the rise of the Land League marked a “conjunction” of Irish America with the Protestant reform tradition of which abolitionism was a central part. 23 Foner, Politics and Ideology, 198–199. 24 Connolly, On Every Tide, 305–306; Carroll, America and the Making, 2–4. 25 The fullest treatment of Irish-American nationalism in these years remains Carroll, American Opinion, but for the FOIF, see also Doorley, Irish-American Diaspora Nationalism, 21–137. 26 McGarry, “‘A Land Beyond the Wave,’” 168–169; Carroll, America and the Making, 1–2. See also Schmuhl, Ireland’s Exiled Children. 27 See Mannion and McGarry, eds., The Irish Revolution, and, for the central importance of anti-conscription activism in Sinn Féin’s rise, Destenay, Conscription. 28 Nelson, Irish Nationalism, 218–229.

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America and Irish-American Nationalism 29 Mannion and McGarry, Introduction to The Irish Revolution, 10–11; Brundage, “The Easter Rising,” 356–358. 30 Adams, Shadow of a Taxman, 233–234; Bernstein, “Two Finest Nations,” 6, 24. For an analysis of Garvey’s admiration of the Irish struggle, more generally, and the organizational roadmap it provided him, see Grey, “‘Ireland Shall Be Free.’” 31 Doorley, Justice Daniel Cohalan, 128–159; Carroll, American Opinion, 149–193. For an important study of how this conflict played out in a major U.S. city, see Murray, Irish Nationalism, 143–199. 32 Brundage, Irish Nationalists, 155–158; McCarthy, Respectability and Reform, 109–152, 182–219; McKillen, “Neither Lenin nor Wilson,” 305–311. 33 Carroll, America and the Making, xii.

Bibliography Adams, R.J.C. Shadow of a Taxman: Who Funded the Irish Revolution? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised ed. London: Verso, 2006. Bernstein, Judah. “‘The Two Finest Nations in the World’: American Zionists and Irish Nationalism, 1897–22.” Journal of American Ethnic History 36, no. 3 (Spring 2017): 5–37. Brown, Thomas N. Irish-American Nationalism, 1870–1890. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1966. Brundage, David. Irish Nationalists in America: The Politics of Exile, 1798–1998. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Brundage, David. “Recent Directions in the History of Irish American Nationalism.” Journal of American Ethnic History 28, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 82–89. Brundage, David. “The Easter Rising and New York’s Anticolonial Nationalists.” In Ireland’s Allies: America and the 1916 Easter Rising, edited by Miriam Nyhan Grey, 347–359. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2016. Carroll, Francis M. America and the Making of an Independent Ireland: A History. New York: New York Uni‑ versity Press, 2021. Carroll, Francis M. American Opinion and the Irish Question, 1910–23: A Study in Opinion and Policy. New York: St. Martin’s, 1978. Comerford, R.V. The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics and Society, 1848–82. Dublin: Wolfhound, 1985. Connolly, Sean. On Every Tide: The Making and Remaking of the Irish World. New York: Basic Books, 2022. Destenay, Emmanuel. Conscription, US Intervention, and the Transformation of Ireland (1914–1918): Divergent Destinies. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. Doolin, David. Transnational Revolutionaries: The Fenian Invasion of Canada, 1866. Oxford: Lang, 2016. Doorley, Michael. Irish-American Diaspora Nationalism: The Friends of Irish Freedom, 1916–1935. Dublin: Four Courts, 2005. Doorley, Michael. Justice Daniel Cohalan, 1865–1946: American Patriot and Irish-American Nationalist. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2019. Eley, Geoff, and Ronald Grigor Suny. “From the Moment of Social History to the Work of Cultural Representa‑ tion.” In Becoming National: A Reader, edited by Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, 3–37. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Foner, Eric. Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Gleeson, David T. “Emigrants and Exiles: The Political Nationalism of the Irish Diaspora Since the 1790s.” In British and Irish Diasporas: Societies, Cultures and Ideologies, edited by Tanja Bueltmann, J.C.D. Clark, and Donald M. MacRaild, 177–208. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. Gleeson, David T. The Irish in the South, 1815–1877. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Golway, Terry. Irish Rebel: John Devoy and America’s Fight for Ireland’s Freedom. New York: St. Martin’s 1998. Grey, Miriam Nyhan. “‘Ireland Shall Be Free, Even as Africa Shall Be Free’: Marcus Garvey’s Irish Influences.” In The Irish Revolution: A Global History, edited by Patrick Mannion and Fearghal McGarry, 335–351. New York: New York University Press, 2022. Janis, Ely M. A Greater Ireland: The Land League and Transatlantic Nationalism in Gilded Age America. Madi‑ son: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. Kenny, Kevin. “Diaspora and Comparison: The Global Irish as a Case Study.” Journal of American History 90, no. 1 (June 2003): 134–162.

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David Brundage Kenny, Kevin. “Two Diasporic Moments in Irish Emigration History: The Famine Generation and the Contem‑ porary Era.” Studi Irlandesi 9, no. 9 (2019): 43–65. Klein, Christopher. When the Irish Invaded Canada: The Incredible True Story of the Civil War Veterans Who Fought for Ireland’s Freedom. New York: Doubleday, 2019. Lainer-Vos, Dan. Sinews of the Nation: Constructing Irish and Zionist Bonds in the United States. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Lune, Howard. Transnational Nationalism and Collective Identity Among the American Irish. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2020. Mannion, Patrick, and Fearghal McGarry, eds. The Irish Revolution: A Global History. New York: New York University Press, 2022. McCarthy, Tara M. Respectability and Reform: Irish American Women’s Activism, 1880–1920. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2018. McGarry, Fearghal. “‘A Land Beyond the Wave’: Transnational Perspectives on Easter 1916.” In Transnational Perspectives on Modern Irish History, edited by Niall Whelehan, 165–188. New York: Routledge, 2015. McKillen, Elizabeth. “Neither Lenin nor Wilson: The Evolving Anti-imperialism of Three Women of the Trans‑ atlantic Irish Left, 1916–1923.” In The Irish Revolution: A Global History, edited by Patrick Mannion and Fearghal McGarry, 289–315. New York: New York University Press, 2022. Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford Univer‑ sity Press, 1985. Murray, Damien. Irish Nationalists in Boston: Catholicism and Conflict, 1900–1928. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018. Nelson, Bruce. Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Ní Bhroiméil, Úna. Building Irish Identity in America, 1870–1915: The Gaelic Revival. Dublin: Four Courts, 2003. Nyhan Grey, Miriam, ed. Ireland’s Allies: America and the 1916 Easter Rising. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2016. Salyer, Lucy E. Under the Starry Flag: How a Band of Irish Americans Joined the Fenian Revolt and Sparked a Crisis over Citizenship. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2018. Schmuhl, Robert. Ireland’s Exiled Children: America and the Easter Rising. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Sim, David. A Union Forever: The Irish Question and U.S. Foreign Relations in the Victorian Age. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. Sim, David. “Following the Money: Fenian Bonds, Diasporic Nationalism, and Distant Revolutions in the Mid‑Nineteenth‑Century United States.” Past & Present 247, no. 1 (2020): 77–112. Steward, Patrick, and Bryan P. McGovern. The Fenians: Irish Rebellion in the North Atlantic World, 1858–1876. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013. Tyrrell, Ian. “Reflections on the Transnational Turn in United States History: Theory and Practice.” Journal of Global History 4, no. 3 (2009): 453–474. Whelehan, Niall. Changing Land: Diaspora Activism and the Irish Land War. New York: New York University Press, 2021. Whelehan, Niall. “Playing with Scales: Transnational History and Modern Ireland.” In Transnational Perspec‑ tives on Modern Irish History, edited by Niall Whelehan, 7–29. New York: Routledge, 2015. Whelehan, Niall. The Dynamiters: Irish Nationalism and Political Violence in the Wider World, 1867–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

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21 AMERICA AND IRISH UNIONISM, 1870–1930 Lindsey Flewelling

Violence erupted in New York City on July 12, 1870, as Catholic Irish Americans attempted to dis‑ rupt the annual Orange parade. Two thousand five hundred members of the Loyal Orange Institution of the United States (LOI), the American Protestant Association, and their families were gathered in Elm Park; the outbreak of violence was sudden. As American Orangemen and Catholic Irish Ameri‑ cans traded gunfire, eight people died and at least 15 were injured. The following year saw even greater conflict. After rumors circulated that Catholic Irish Americans planned to attack the Orange parade, the New York governor called out the National Guard. When the two sides again clashed, the National Guard opened fire on the crowd. Over 60 people were killed and more than 100 injured. Shaped by collective memories of historic clashes between Protestant and Catholic groups in Ireland, sectarian schisms were transferred across the Atlantic. But the Orange Riots of 1870–1871 were also reflective of their American setting. Tensions mounted from ethnic, class, and religious divisions within New York City, frustrations with the Tweed Ring that controlled city government, and desires to take a greater part in American society.1 In the mid-nineteenth century, American civic society was defined by the flowering of associa‑ tional culture and voluntary organizations. Ethnic societies flourished, emphasizing shared national identity, language, religion, and traditions for immigrant groups to participate more fully in American civic life. Catholic Irish Americans were, in many ways, at the forefront of this trend, participating in religious groups, temperance associations, mutual benefit societies, and political organizations sup‑ porting Irish nationalism. These groups helped Catholic Irish Americans to persevere in the face of nativist attacks in the United States.2 Irish Protestant immigrants also participated in American associational culture. Many Scotch Irish, whose identity is discussed in some detail by Peter Gilmore in his chapter in this volume, played prominent roles in nativist and Anglo-Saxon associations that were popular at the time. They celebrated their Scotch-Irish identity by joining ethnic societies to honor both their Scottish and Irish backgrounds, preserving ties to Ireland, and, perhaps most importantly, highlighting their contribu‑ tions to American society. Through ethnic associations such as the LOI and Scotch-Irish Society of America (SISA), the Scotch Irish were determined to become deeply ingrained in American civic society and to set themselves apart from Catholic Irish Americans. Prevailing stereotypes of the time painted Catholic Irish Americans as “violent and ignorant people lacking the capacity for ra‑ tional judgment, an indispensable quality for citizens participating in democracy,” in the words of historian Hidetaka Hirota. Contrastingly, the Scotch Irish asserted that they were the embodiment of 285

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democracy and the frontier spirit as they claimed a wholly American identity. It was from this vantage point that members of the LOI, SISA, and others claimed to be fully American while maintaining ties to Ireland, supporting Irish unionism, and fighting against Irish nationalism.3 In Ireland, sectarian conflict was a recurring theme, stemming from the Anglo-Irish landholding minority, who were largely of English descent and members of the state-supported Anglican Church of Ireland, asserting dominance over the Catholic majority. Starting in the late seventeenth century, the Anglo-Irish, who controlled the Irish Parliament, imposed Penal Laws formally dispossessing Catho‑ lics of political, social, religious, and economic rights. Presbyterians in the northern province of Ulster, who were “planted” from Scotland on lands confiscated from the Catholic Irish, also faced discrimina‑ tory Penal Laws, although to a lesser extent, which led to high levels of immigration to the American colonies. Presbyterians frequently clashed with Catholics in Ulster as they attempted to establish their own control of political and economic power. After the failed republican United Irishmen Rebellion of 1798, the Irish Parliament was abolished. Ireland became part of the new United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801. Throughout the nineteenth century, nationalists in Ireland sought to in‑ crease the rights of Catholics and gain a level of autonomy from Great Britain. By the 1870s, the focus turned toward Home Rule, a constitutional solution which would grant Ireland self-government while remaining within the United Kingdom. Irish nationalists called upon the large Irish Catholic diaspora, particularly in the United States, for political, organizational, and monetary support to work toward the goal of Irish Home Rule, with some supporting complete separation and independence for Ireland. Irish unionists, who supported the continuation of the Union between Great Britain and Ireland, represented a wide swathe of interests joining together in the face of challenges from Irish national‑ ists and, at times, the British government. Starting in the 1870s, as nationalist calls increased for Irish Home Rule, unionists forged uneasy alliances between those in Ulster and southern Ireland, between Liberal and Conservative Party members, and across Protestant denominations, to maintain the Un‑ ion as it stood. Irish unionism was a transnational phenomenon, drawing upon Irish Protestant immi‑ grant groups throughout the world to bolster their cause. As they attempted to gain American support in the fight for the Union, Ulster unionists in particular closely linked themselves to an idealized Scotch-Irish legacy, fighting to uphold liberties and determined to stand up for what they believed was right. Ulster unionists claimed the Scotch-Irish sense of determination and pioneering spirit for themselves. For an American audience, unionists attempted to walk a tricky line of denouncing in‑ volvement of Irish Americans in the Irish nationalist movement while appealing to these transatlantic ties and shared identities to garner international support.

The Scotch Irish in America With diverse origins in Ulster and, indeed, all of Ireland, the English-speaking, highly mobile, and highly adaptable ethnic group known in the United States as the Scotch Irish is a particularly dif‑ ficult group to track after the American Revolution. They carried an amalgam of traditions from Scotland and Ireland, and their culture also changed through adaptation to their new circumstances in America. As Peter Gilmore discusses in his chapter in this volume, Ulster Presbyterians made up the majority of early Irish immigrants to America and viewed themselves as Irish Americans, with no impulse to claim a separate identity. As Catholic Irish immigration increased, along with the growth of anti-Catholic nativism in the United States, Americans with Ulster Presbyterian origins sought to claim greater respectability in American society through adopting “Scotch Irish” as a posi‑ tive label. The term “Scotch Irish” has faced debate and criticism from historians. As Patrick Griffin explains, the group’s background makes it difficult to determine a fitting name, with divergence be‑ tween what the group has been called by others versus what they called themselves. The term “Scotch Irish” was embraced in the mid-nineteenth century, artificially homogenizing all Protestants from 286

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Ireland and concealing complex historical realities. Contrastingly, the group never self-identified as “Scots Irish.” With no clear appropriate terminology available, this chapter refers to the group as they referred to themselves in this era, as “Scotch Irish.”4 Studies of the Scotch Irish have overwhelmingly focused on their roles in the colonial and Revo‑ lutionary eras, often leaving the impression that the group was absorbed into mainstream American society after the early nineteenth century. As Rankin Sherling has pointed out, however, the history of Irish immigration is more complicated than what is reflected in the historiography. Protestants made up over half of the Irish immigrant stream until the mid-1830s, and steady immigration continued, although in declining numbers, until the 1920s. Sherling and Donald Akenson have argued that a separate Scotch-Irish identity persisted due to continued migration and the predominance of Protes‑ tantism across the generations of Irish immigrants. Recently arrived immigrants filled the ranks of the LOI and at least 20 percent of SISA members were emigrants from Ulster, despite the society’s own concentration on a pre-Revolutionary Scotch-Irish identity.5 Within wider studies of Irish America, Francis Carroll and Kevin Kenny have incorporated ele‑ ments of Protestant Irish history into their research. Kerby Miller and David Doyle have investigated the development of a unique Scotch-Irish identity within the context of the expansion of Catholic Irish America. Maldwyn Jones has also highlighted continued Irish Protestant immigration, the de‑ velopment of Scotch-Irish associational culture, and their political participation. Overall, however, the literature underscores the need for additional research on Irish Protestants in the United States after the mid-nineteenth century, particularly in regard to reciprocal connections between the Scotch Irish and Ireland.6 Connections between the Scotch Irish and Irish unionists were built upon existing ethnic, re‑ ligious, and associational networks. A transatlantic Presbyterian tradition was formed by flows of clergy and evangelical revivalists between Ulster and the United States. Transnational religious or‑ ganizations such as the Pan-Presbyterian Alliance were key to establishing connections based on shared religious heritage. These connections were further deepened through individual and organi‑ zational ties to the Scotch Irish Society of America. The American branch of the Orange Order, itself an organization emphasizing a Protestant vision and anti-Catholic policies, also maintained ties to Ireland while navigating its role within American society. By the late nineteenth century, religion and politics were inextricably intertwined as essential components of the relationship between the Scotch Irish and Ireland.7 Irish immigrants founded the first American Orange lodges in New York in the 1820s, and the or‑ ganization quickly spread to other east coast states. The Loyal Orange Institution, also known as the Orange Order, an Irish Protestant fraternal society founded in 1795, had spread throughout the world by the mid-nineteenth century, perpetuating Orange values such as defending Protestant civil and religious liberties, anti-Catholic sentiment, and support for British Conservative Party politics and the British monarchy. Although remaining limited in the United States due to the challenges of adapting its traditional support for the British Empire and monarchy, the LOI stressed its American loyalties while maintaining its concentration on the protection of Protestantism. As American anti-Catholic sentiment grew in the mid-nineteenth century, Orangemen participated in organizations such as the American Protestant Association and the Know Nothing Party. Later, the Orange Order was closely associated with the American Protective Association and the Ku Klux Klan. But the LOI itself also benefitted from the prominence of anti-Catholicism. National Grand Lodge status was achieved in 1870; the LOI soon had 120 lodges with more than 10,000 members nationwide. Orangeism con‑ tinued to grow following the Orange Riots of the early 1870s. Irish politics remained important as the LOI combined promotion of Irish unionism and traditional Orange values with advocacy of antiCatholic policies shared by the wider nativist movement in the United States. Orange lodges were deeply ingrained in American civic society. Philadelphia Orangemen, for example, participated in 287

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the city’s Labor Day parades and sent liaisons to attend meetings of like-minded organizations, along with the customary Orange program of lodge meetings, 12th of July parades, and picnics.8

Home Rule Crises As Irish politics neared the boiling point over the issue of Home Rule in 1886, the American LOI enjoyed increased growth. The Chicago Tribune, in describing the unusually popular 12th of July parades of that year, observed, The anti-home-rule agitation in the north of Ireland and the alleged arming and drilling of Or‑ angemen there have raised a spirit of emulation among the Orangemen of this city, and strong efforts have been made to spread and strengthen the organization. Nevertheless, the Supreme Grand Lodge of the United States voted against a resolution condemn‑ ing Home Rule because they did not want to be associated with foreign sentiments. Supreme Grand Master George Herron stated that it was important for American Orangemen to remain officially neutral. However, he also declared that “the Unionists are just getting aroused to the fight and that they are able to defeat the present or any other home rule movement.” These conflicting sentiments highlighted the difficulties in transferring the Orange organization, with its strong roots in the promo‑ tion and protection of the British Empire and monarchy, to the United States. As the Home Rule crises wore on, American Orangemen were increasingly drawn to openly support Irish unionism, especially in reaction to the prominent role of Irish Americans in support of the Irish nationalist movement.9 In Ireland, the Irish-American role in inciting violence and extremism in the nationalist movement was a constant theme in unionist rhetoric. Land agitation in rural areas throughout the 1870s and the dynamite campaign of 1881–1884, financed by the Irish-American Skirmishing Fund, drew unionists together in ire. They characterized Irish nationalism as being controlled by a foreign power and as‑ serted that this extremism had little support in Ireland or the United States beyond its Irish-American financiers. In 1885, Irish nationalists held the balance of power in the British House of Commons, supporting Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone, who pledged to implement Irish Home Rule. Irish unionists began to organize formally in the face of the Home Rule threat. The Irish Loyal and Pa‑ triotic Union (ILPU), founded in Dublin in 1885, and the Ulster Loyalist Anti-Repeal Union (ULAU), founded in Belfast in 1886, led the effort to spread information and propaganda for the unionist cause. While condemning Irish-American involvement in the nationalist movement, unionists attempted to appeal to the United States for their own support. The ILPU printed pro-Union pamphlets for foreign audiences and distributed their weekly newsletter, Notes from Ireland, around the world. They also sent propaganda materials to the pro-nationalist press in the United States. Unionists closely moni‑ tored American attitudes, with newspapers publishing letters of support from American Orangemen and reprinting articles on Home Rule from American newspapers. In their speeches, unionists empha‑ sized the continued loyalty of Irish Protestant immigrants, with the expectation of Scotch-Irish support in the fight against Home Rule. Protestant churches in Ireland, already heavily involved in Irish poli‑ tics, also prepared publications and statements calling for support from their American counterparts.10 Though the first Home Rule bill was defeated in 1886, unionists continued their efforts to build international backing. Through the ULAU, Reverend Dr. Richard Rutledge Kane of Belfast’s Christ Church, the Grand Master of Belfast’s Orangemen, corresponded with Irish Protestant immigrant groups in Canada and the United States, asking for support during the Home Rule crisis. Kane was dispatched with George Hill Smith, an Ulster barrister, to visit North America on behalf of the ULAU in 1886. On their tour, Kane and Smith spoke to large audiences of the LOI, American Protestant Association, and others in support of Irish unionism. They focused on political, social, and religious 288

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ties which drew the United Kingdom and the United States together as “guardians of constitutional liberty, political reform, and Scriptural truth.” They appealed to the American public to protect “Prot‑ estant truth and liberty” in Ireland. Upon their return, Kane reported that this visit convinced him that “the Irish Loyalist and Protestant loses nothing of his attachment to his principles and to his religion by being transplanted to American soil.”11 Transatlantic ethnic and religious connections led to the creation of a new Scotch-Irish organiza‑ tion, the SISA. Its first congress, held in 1889, attracted between 6,000 and 11,000 attendees. Robert Bonner, publisher of the New York Ledger and the society’s first president, characterized the SISA as non-political and non-sectarian, with membership open to anyone of Ulster Scots ancestry regardless of religion, although most were Presbyterian. SISA leaders wanted the organization to be perceived as thoroughly American, not involving itself in the affairs of any other nation. Throughout each of the ten congresses held between 1889 and 1901, SISA members were primarily concerned with under‑ scoring differences with New England Puritans and Irish Catholic immigrants. They were adamant about the unique status of the Scotch Irish in American history, emphasizing their role as pioneers of civilization and guardians of freedom.12 The 1890 Pittsburgh congress was the SISA’s most successful, with an estimated 12,000 people, including United States President Benjamin Harrison, in attendance. The SISA was determined to gain further attention and create a global Scotch-Irish network through increased communications. Though a large portion of each congress was dedicated to recounting the role of the Scotch Irish in American history, speakers did not ignore the current conditions of Ireland. John Hall, a New York Presbyterian minister, was by far the most outspoken society member on Irish matters. He traveled back to Ulster every summer and regularly reported on the state of Ireland at each congress. He informed the attendees of life in Ulster, how the Ulster Scots’ educational and religious values con‑ nected them to the Scotch Irish, and the role of the Presbyterian church in Ulster society. He espe‑ cially hoped to counter the American perception that all Irish were Catholic.13 In 1892, Hall spoke of the Irish unionist fear of Gladstone coming back into office, with the certain renewal of Home Rule policies. He explained that Protestants had joined together against Home Rule and urged the Scotch Irish to consider the prudence, wisdom, and integrity of their Ulster kin. The following year, Hall again called upon the SISA to think of Ulster, where, he reported, all Protestants were united against Gladstone and the Liberal party, now back in power. Other speakers praised Ulster unionists for fighting for liberty against Irish nationalists and the British government. One speaker even praised unionist militancy, arguing that if Home Rule was forced on Ulster, “The croppies would lie down again. The Scotch Irish would be found, as soon as the smoke cleared away, where they are everywhere and always: on top.” Overall, though, support for unionism and national‑ ism was mixed, with society members often insisting that American citizens should not meddle in the affairs of a foreign nation.14 The American LOI’s response to the second Home Rule bill of 1892 showed less concern with the dangers of involvement in a foreign issue. At the 1892 meeting of the Supreme Grand Lodge, the Orangemen passed a pro-Union resolution, declaring their support for Their brethren in Ireland to their resistance of the projected scheme of home rule. This they state is a bold attempt to inaugurate an Irish Roman Catholic parliament. The order deems it a solemn obligation not to support a Roman Catholic who seeks political preferment. If the American republic is to be maintained loyal American citizens should be on guard. The Orangemen portrayed the Home Rule threat as linked to the perceived threat of Catholic influ‑ ence in the United States. State Grand Lodges declared their unconditional support for the unionist cause, sent messages of sympathy to be read at the Great Ulster Convention in 1892, and raised funds 289

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to send across the Atlantic. As the fight against the second Home Rule bill wore on, the issue of Catholic influence on Irish politics and society continued to form a significant part of unionist argu‑ ments on both sides of the Atlantic. The bill passed in the House of Commons but was defeated in the House of Lords in 1893. With the Conservatives soon back in power at Westminster, unionists did not face serious demands for Home Rule again until 1911.15 As landed influence in Ireland declined at the turn of the century, the character of unionist poli‑ tics became increasingly populist and localized in Ulster. Unionists there cultivated an “Ulsterman” identity to unify Protestants ideologically while minimizing the importance of Catholics in the north of Ireland by drawing upon the concurrent revival of the Scotch-Irish ethnicity in the United States. Informed by the popular racial theories and social Darwinism of the time, the Ulster Scots laid out the characteristics of the “Ulsterman” in publications and histories: dour, shrewd, industrious, practical, independent, and naturally gifted with governing abilities. Presbyterian and Scottish characteristics were also vital elements. Ulster Scots memorialized the roles of the Scotch Irish in winning the American Revolution and taming the frontier. They claimed ownership over Scotch-Irish identity and achievements, asserting that they were united by the determination to uphold liberties and fight for what they believed to be right.16 Scotch-Irish identity in America broadened over time to include all Irish Protestant immigrants re‑ gardless of denomination or region of origin. In contrast, Ulster Scots increasingly drew on Scottish, Presbyterian, and Orange elements, to an extent excluding the Anglo-Irish, who were members of the Church of Ireland, from this sense of identity. However, as Anglicans, Methodists, and Presbyterians alike were mobilized in huge numbers through the Ulster Covenant in 1912, the Ulsterman identity was able to temporarily create cultural hegemony among Protestant denominations. This artificially minimized differences to forge a seemingly united Ulster Protestant opposition to Home Rule.17 While the SISA influenced the self-perception of the Scotch Irish in the United States and Ulster Scots in Ireland, the society itself was in decline by the turn of the century. The death of several key members and failure to organize successive congresses left the society irreparably damaged. Where there had once been ten affiliate societies, only the Pennsylvania Scotch-Irish Society (PSIS) remained after 1901. The PSIS, founded in 1889, persisted well into the twentieth century and was eventually renamed the Scotch-Irish Society of the United States. In 1911, on the recommendation of future United States President Woodrow Wilson, the PSIS commissioned Princeton University Professor Henry Jones Ford to write a history of the Scotch Irish. Ford’s Scotch-Irish in America was published in 1915, the culmination of a wave of new publications celebrating the role of the Scotch Irish, including Oliver Perry Temple’s The Covenanter, the Cavalier, and the Puritan (1897), Charles Hanna’s The Scotch-Irish (1902), John Walker Dinsmore’s The Scotch-Irish in America (1906), and Charles Knowles Bolton’s Scotch Irish Pioneers in Ulster and America (1910). Despite the decline of the SISA, these publications show the high levels of influence that the society had in reviving the Scotch-Irish ethnicity and shaping perceptions of the Scotch-Irish identity as quintessentially Ameri‑ can. The PSIS carried on the national organization’s tradition of official silence on Irish political questions, deciding “that it was unwise for the Society to take part in the present controversy regard‑ ing Home Rule in Ireland.” However, there are indications that society members remained deeply interested in events unfolding in Ireland. The society elected a number of Ulster unionists as honorary members and conducted extensive correspondence across the Atlantic.18

Third Home Rule Crisis and World War I While Irish nationalists reestablished their footing in the early twentieth century under the leader‑ ship of John Redmond, two new unionist organizations also emerged: the Ulster Unionist Council (UUC) in Belfast and the Irish Unionist Alliance (IUA) in Dublin. Both organizations sent appeals to 290

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international audiences, including Americans, for support. Unionist organizations closely followed Irish nationalist fundraising missions in the United States and denounced what they considered IrishAmerican extremist control of the nationalist movement. This emphasis on extremism was used as justification for the unionists’ own turn toward militancy. After the House of Lords veto was removed in 1911 and the third Home Rule bill was introduced in 1912, the Carson Defence Fund was set up to carry out anti-Home Rule campaigning, with American Orange lodges among those who donated. Unionists built support in Ireland through a series of mass meetings and the spread of propaganda, their efforts culminating with Ulster Day and the signing of the Ulster Covenant on September 23, 1912. Almost half a million Ulster men and women signed the Covenant, pledging to resist Home Rule by any means necessary. In 1913, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) was established, bringing together units that had been drilling since 1911. The atmosphere of militancy continued to heighten, and Ireland was now on the brink of civil war.19 Throughout the third Home Rule crisis, the American LOI remained connected to Ireland despite facing debilitating factionalism that split the organization in two. At the 1912 meeting of the Su‑ preme Grand Lodge, William Kirkland called on American Orangemen to support Ireland’s union‑ ists, stating, Our brethren in the old land are making a noble fight for freedom and religious liberty, and it is our duty to render them all the assistance possible. I know they have our sympathy… yet on this occasion it requires dollars and cents to win the battle. The enemy has had much of this American ammunition, and it is the source of their strongest fighting power. Let us therefore see that some of it is sent to the assistance of our boys. Kirkland’s words led to resolutions by the Supreme Grand Lodge assuring Ulster unionists of the sympathy and support of the Orangemen. State lodges also sent letters of support and funds to aid unionist actions. As tensions heightened and Ireland came close to civil war, Kirkland urged the Or‑ angemen to consider their duty to offer military aid to unionists, exhorting, If the worst has to come our hands should be ready to grasp the musket, cross over the pond and under the battle cry of No Surrender, stand shoulder to shoulder with them in the defense of freedom and religious liberty. While the Supreme Grand Lodge had once been determined to separate American Orangemen from associations with foreign sentiments, Kirkland’s words highlight the degree to which the Irish con‑ flict had been transferred to American soil through openly encouraging militancy in response to the Home Rule threat.20 When Home Rule was passed but put on hold for the duration of the First World War, the Ameri‑ can Orange lodges joined with other organizations in their local areas to respond to heavy losses sustained by British and Irish troops, especially at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Orange lodges throughout the Philadelphia area came together with other British-American and Scotch-Irish socie‑ ties to raise funds for distressed and disabled British soldiers. They formed a Scotch-Irish Relief Association, in which the PSIS also participated, that ultimately raised over $5,000 to be sent to the British Red Cross. The PSIS also contributed to the UVF Hospital in Belfast, along with several other American donors.21 The Easter Rising in 1916 was a major turning point in British, Irish, and American relations. With the news of the swift executions of the Rising’s Irish nationalist leaders, public opinion in both America and Ireland came out strongly against the British. Huge numbers flocked to join or support the revolutionary side of the nationalist movement, with many Irish republicans coming together 291

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under the banner of the Sinn Féin party. Fearing that the United States government would no longer support the British war effort due to the vehemence of Irish-American opinion, and under pressure from the British government, Ulster unionist leader Edward Carson agreed to go to the UUC and urge them to accept six county partition. The UUC’s official position since the signing of the Ulster Covenant was to maintain the unity of the province’s nine counties. Commitment to winning the war and staying in the good graces of the neutral United States forced unionists to reconsider their official position on Home Rule and formally commit to six county exclusion.22 American Orangemen pressed the United States government to refrain from interference on the Irish question, fearing that a settlement would be pushed through during wartime. At the 1916 meet‑ ing of one faction of the Supreme Grand Lodge, Grand Master William A. Dunlap urged the LOI to remember their duty to their “brothers across the sea,” directed pledges of support be sent to the Irish Orangemen, Carson, and the UVF, and endeavored to publicize the fight against Home Rule in the American press. State Grand Lodges also sent letters of support to Ulster, along with messages to President Wilson, the United States Congress, and Prime Minister David Lloyd George propagating the unionist stance. The New York State Grand Lodge sent letters of protest declaring that “sane, self-respecting, liberty-fostering Protestant America” would not stand for Ireland to be separated from the British Empire. After the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, President Wilson instructed his London ambassador, Walter Hines Page, to cautiously urge the British government to implement self-government in Ireland. Unionists were continually frustrated with the American influ‑ ence over Anglo-Irish affairs. Refuting any nationalist claims to American sympathy, Ulster unionists transmitted a letter to President Wilson with an appeal based on shared history and love of freedom and liberty. They emphasized self-determination and wartime sacrifices while discounting the contri‑ butions of Irish nationalists.23

Post-World War I With the end of the war, unionists faced greater pressures for a settlement. Irish and Irish-American nationalists found in President Wilson’s calls for self-determination a possible route to achieve their own goals. They viewed the Paris Peace Conference as an ideal place for Irish causes to garner in‑ ternational attention. When Irish nationalist representatives were not permitted to attend, the United States Senate passed a resolution by an overwhelming margin that the Irish should be allowed to present their cause. The IUA passed a resolution admonishing the Senate, “indignantly” resenting the intervention in what they considered a purely domestic decision of the British government. Unionists continued to produce pamphlets and other propaganda materials to rebuke American involvement and refute American allegations about the poor conditions of Ireland under British rule.24 Carson directly appealed to the United States in a Belfast speech in 1919. He criticized Irish Americans’ calls for Irish self-determination, asserting that this went against the example of Ameri‑ can history. “Self-determination is, in my opinion, one of the most misleading phrases that has ever been put forward,” he stated, “and it is being run, you know, for all they know in America. Would they allow the South of America, the Southerners, self-determination for themselves? Why not?” Unionists maintained that if Americans only realized the true conditions of Ireland, that it was not oppressed by British rule, that the Irish were overrepresented in the British Parliament, then their interference would come to an end. As Notes from Ireland remarked, “The more America knows of the truth about Ireland, the less, we confidently prophesy, will she be inclined to interfere.” Unionists hoped that the United States’ experience with Ireland during the war had created a picture of the Irish situation more in line with unionist views. War-driven events such as the Irish conscription crisis and the unionists’ willingness to compromise on partition were upheld as reasons the American public should change their views.25 292

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Unionists made attempts to reach out directly to the American public. President Wilson received letters from both sides of the Atlantic imploring him to ignore Sinn Féin’s demands. The Ulster Women’s Unionist Council (UWUC) and the Women’s Committee of the IUA both embarked on letter-writing campaigns to the United States. The UWUC targeted American women’s clubs to send unionist leaflets and newspapers. Unionist organizations also targeted American Orange lodges and the Loyal Coalition, a Boston-based pro-Union association. Additional propaganda efforts were coor‑ dinated by London-based unionists and via American connections tasked with putting the unionists’ case before the American public.26 As a draft of the Government of Ireland bill was prepared in the closing months of 1919, union‑ ists protested what they saw as the British government attempting to appease Americans. “American Opinion!” exclaimed Notes from Ireland. The apologists for [the Government of Ireland bill] would have us to believe that some such Act was necessary to placate public opinion in the United States. We fail to see the necessity – or indeed the efficacy – of the means to promote the end. The anti-English party in the States is not going to welcome a half-way house to Irish independence; and our friends in the Republic are content to allow us to manage our own affairs. Notes from Ireland highlighted one of the major difficulties for unionists regarding the United States. Irish-American nationalist supporters were vocally in favor of measures far surpassing the new Gov‑ ernment of Ireland bill. Those Americans who sympathized with unionists merely urged the United States to refrain from involvement in the Irish question rather than supporting a particular settlement or giving specific aid to the cause.27 Scotch-Irish organizations in the United States continued to protest American interference in Ire‑ land. Prospective speakers for the PSIS were told that they should feel free to select whatever subject they wished, but if they cared “to include… a word of advice to the effect that Americans should stop interfering in the Irish question, it will be entirely in order.” Though they did not directly take a stance on Irish politics, the urging of the American government to stop interfering was a way to appear fully American while still expressing sympathy for Irish unionism. The LOI also continued to condemn American interference. At the New York City 12th of July parade in 1919, Orangemen extended their “sympathy and support to the Ulstermen and all who are in sympathy with their cause throughout the world.” A few weeks later, one faction of the LOI drew up resolutions to send Henry Cabot Lodge, Chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, as well as all members of Congress and the press. The Orangemen protested the committee’s reception of Irish republican representatives during their hearings on the Treaty of Versailles, stating, “The American Senate has no business meddling with the unquestioned problems of the British Parliament.” They accused Sinn Féin of conspiring with Germany during the war and denied that there were any grounds for separation from the United Kingdom. The LOI asked that friends of Ulster’s self-determination be granted a hearing. State Or‑ ange lodges also petitioned members of the House and Senate to hear the unionist case against Irish independence.28 Along with these ultimately ineffective attempts to persuade the United States government to refrain from interfering in the Irish situation, Orangemen also protested the American visit of Éamon de Valera, president of Sinn Féin’s Dáil Éireann, in 1919–1920. Philadelphia Orange lodges and sympathetic organizations remonstrated against Mayor Thomas B. Smith when he formally wel‑ comed de Valera. Throughout the country, Orange lodges came out in support of a UUC-sponsored deputation that embarked on a three-month tour of the United States. The seven delegates, includ‑ ing six ministers from Irish Protestant churches along with Member of Parliament and Orangeman William Coote, hoped to counter the “misrepresentation and falsehood” of nationalist reports in the 293

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United States, to lay before the American public the privileges and liberties that Ireland had gained as part of the Union, to emphasize the historic ties and Anglo-Saxon character of Ulster and America, and to entreat Americans to refrain from interfering in the Irish question. Although they refused to engage directly with de Valera, the delegates believed that their very presence in the United States was creating positive headway. They reported being amazed by their reception, addressing members of the Orange Order, PSIS, Patriotic League, Loyal Coalition, and other sympathizers, raising funds, and refuting detractors.29 Once home, the delegates aimed to maintain their relationships with contacts from their trip, sending annual letters to friends in North America. Their letter of 1922 called upon their contacts to remember their historic ties to Ulster, urging them to speak out “so that British politicians shall hear” as they formulated further Irish policy and determined a settlement with the new Irish Free State. Coote was back in the United States in 1922, speaking out against alleged Sinn Féin atrocities in Ireland. He accused Sinn Féin of murdering and plundering thousands of Protestants in the south of Ireland, and implored audiences to donate funds for the relief of Protestant refugees. He was able to raise significant funds from the LOI, including $10,000 from Philadelphia Orangemen for the “aid of the Protestant Orphans and Refugees of the Irish Free State.”30 The Government of Ireland Act was passed in 1920, creating separate devolved parliaments for six counties in Ulster (known as Northern Ireland) and for the rest of Ireland (the Irish Free State), continuing representation at Westminster, and forming an all-Ireland council. The UUC had pressed for straightforward exclusion from Home Rule but accepted their new parliament as more secure than being under direct rule from Westminster. With the outbreak of the Anglo-Irish War and subsequent Irish Civil War, major American newspapers expressed frustration with conditions in Ireland. The climate of the United States following the First World War, with resurgent nativism, anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant ferment, and pseudo-scientific racism, helped to sway Americans against the cause of Ireland. These same impulses which influenced views of the Irish situation led to substantial restric‑ tions on immigration to the United States in 1921 and 1924.31 Such policies likely had the unintended effect of attracting fewer immigrants from Ulster to feed into the American Orange lodges. The hey-day of American associational culture had passed, and ethnic associations no longer held the appeal they once had. The two factions of the Orange Order reunited in 1930, but the organization never regained its strength and prominence of the late nine‑ teenth century. Despite organizational factionalism, the LOI had been united in its support of Irish unionism and condemnation of the influence of Irish Americans and the American government in the Irish situation. While pledged to “one hundred percent Americanism,” they had clear and continuous support for Irish unionists throughout the Home Rule era. The American audience for Ulster unionism declined after the establishment of Northern Ireland, but there was an enduring appeal to the celebration of Scotch-Irish heritage. Ulster Scots heritage groups persisted in Massachusetts, New York, California, Illinois, Michigan, and Pennsylvania into the mid-twentieth century. Both the LOI and the Scotch-Irish Society of the United States endured, though in diminished form, and newer organizations were founded, such as the Ulster American Loyalists, Ulster-Scots Society of America, and American Society of Scots-Irish. More recently, Jim Webb’s prominent book Born Fighting (2004) focused on the legacy of the Scotch Irish in the south‑ ern United States, with many similar themes to the history and identity celebrated by the SISA at the turn of the century.32 By the second half of the twentieth century, Ulster unionists once again called upon the Scotch Irish for support in influencing the stances of the United States government in Northern Ireland. A small number of grassroots supporters responded, but with little continued personal connections to Northern Ireland, this quickly dwindled. Ulster unionists continue to emphasize ties to the Scotch Irish in the publication of historical narratives, political and tourist pamphlets, promotion of educational 294

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exchanges, and preservation of the ancestral homesteads of American presidents. The Ulster-Scots Agency, which was created as a cross-border initiative in Ireland, highlighted the United States in its pamphlets, newspaper, and murals. The Ulster-American Folk Park in County Tyrone, established in 1976, similarly focuses on the success of the Scotch Irish and their pioneering character. Likewise, Ulster unionists and loyalists attempting to build a support base in the United States drew upon im‑ agery of the frontier spirit and loyalty to principles of freedom as shared inheritances.33

Conclusion The Scotch Irish in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were shaped by their Irish her‑ itage and motivated by a desire to stay connected to Ireland, which often included sympathy and support for Ulster unionism in the years prior to partition and independence. However, many were ultimately driven by a desire to participate more fully in American society, influenced by political, social, economic, and religious conditions in the United States. Celebrating Scotch-Irish ethnicity was a way to gain a foothold in the United States through forging connections leading to the creation of like-minded communities, participation in civic culture, employment opportunities, and symbolic separation from Catholic Irish Americans. This emphasis on their American identity left support for Ulster unionism limited in its scope, even as the same history and pioneering identity were celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic to further the causes of the Scotch Irish and Ulster unionists alike. Irish unionists attempted to foster a transnational network of support as they fought to maintain the Union between Great Britain and Ireland. Drawing upon shared ethnic heritage, organizational ties, and religious connections, they promoted the cause of unionism to Scotch-Irish communities in the United States and attempted to gain a wider basis of support among the American public. At the same time, they vehemently protested the involvement of Irish Americans in the Irish nationalist movement and urged the United States government not to interfere on Irish issues. Although their effectiveness was greatly limited compared to that of the Irish nationalists, Irish unionism was a transnational phenomenon, drawing upon support from the United States and elsewhere as they en‑ deavored to preserve the Union.

Notes 1 Gordon, Orange Riots, 2, 36; MacRaild, “Crossing Migrant Frontiers,” 58–61. 2 Ryan, Civic Wars, 74–75, 78–79, 224–234; Kaufman, For the Common Good, 9. 3 Hirota, Expelling the Poor, 153. 4 Griffin, People with No Name, 2, 172–175, 589; Leyburn, Scotch-Irish, 327–334; Doyle, “Scots Irish,” 151–152; Miller, “Scotch-Irish Myths,” 76–82. 5 Akenson, Irish Diaspora; Sherling, Invisible Irish; Wells, “Tie the Flags Together,” 22–56. 6 Carroll, American Opinion; Kenny, American Irish; Doyle, “Scots Irish”; Miller, “Scotch-Irish Myths”; Jones, “Scotch-Irish.” 7 SISA Ninth Congress, 231; Hempton and Hill, Evangelical Protestantism; Livingstone and Wells, UlsterAmerican Religion, 40–45, 48; MacRaild, “Associationalism of the Orange Diaspora,” 27. 8 Members of the Orange Order traditionally march on the 12th of July each year to celebrate the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the victory of King William of Orange, a Protestant, over the deposed King James II, a Catholic, at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland in 1690, with the marches often leading to sectarian violence. Houston and Smyth, “Transferred Loyalties,” 200–203; Kinzer, Episode in Anti-Catholicism, 59, 73, 92, 100; Wells, “Tie the Flags Together,” 3–5, 24, 57–58, 92–127, 164. 9 Chicago Tribune July 12, 1886. 10 Belfast News-Letter February 19, October 21, 1885, January 14, February 16, March 1, April 13, May 13, June 7, 1886; Witness (Belfast), December 24, 1885, April 16, May 14, 1886; Irish Times (Dublin), June 21, 1887; ILPU Annual Report 1886 (PRONI D989/A/7/1). The author thanks the deputy keeper of the records at PRONI and the Ulster Unionist Council for granting permission to quote from materials deposited there.

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Lindsey Flewelling 11 Belfast News-Letter July 24, December 18, 1886. 12 SISA First Congress, 3, 6–7; SISA Ninth Congress, 246; Appel, Immigrant Historical Societies, 64–68. 13 SISA First Congress, 108; SISA Second Congress, 7–8, 15, 74; SISA Third Congress, 14–15; SISA Fifth Congress, 45–46. 14 SISA First Congress, 1870–1890; SISA Second Congress, 100; SISA Fourth Congress, 155–156; SISA Sixth Congress, 70–118; SISA Eighth Congress, 103. 15 Belfast News-Letter June 18, 1892, September 5, 1892; Minutes, Pennsylvania State Grand Lodge (HSP MSS 93). 16 Jackson, Home Rule, 97–104; Walker, Intimate Strangers, Chapters 1–2; Holmes, Irish Presbyterian Mind, 115. 17 Walker, “Scotland and Ulster,” 93–97; Anderson, “Ideological Variations,” 139; Holmes, Irish Presbyterian Mind, 28–30, 113. 18 Appel, Immigrant Historical Societies, 48–49, 114–115; SISA Ninth Congress, 6–7; Council Minutes of Proceedings, Vol. 9 (SIF, HSP). 19 UUC Report 1909 (PRONI D972/17); Joint Committee Minutes (PRONI D1327/2/1B); Jackson, Ulster Party, 240, 285, 298, 313–318; Stewart, Ulster Crisis, 56–57. 20 LOI 34th Biennial Report, 1912, 47–48; LOI 35th Biennial Report, 1914, 29. 21 Minutes, RBP Star of Liberty Lodge No. 34 (HSP MSS 89); Minute Book, Lily of the Valley LOL No. 167 (Box #1, HSP MSS 87); Records 1885–1986, Washington LOL No. 43 (Box #5, HSP MSS 60); Council Minutes of Proceedings (SIF, HSP). 22 Hyde, Carson, 402–404; O’Brien, Irish Revolution, 271–277; McNeill, Ulster’s Stand, 247. 23 LOI 36th Biennial Report, 1916, 23; Minutes, Pennsylvania State Grand Lodge (HSP MSS 93); Carroll, American Opinion, 89; Ward, Ireland and Anglo-American Relations, 120; Whelan, United States Foreign Policy, 123; McNeill, Ulster’s Stand, 273–274. 24 Notes from Ireland August 1, 1919 (PRONI D1327/20/4/141); UUC Pamphlets (PRONI D1327/20/4/142). 25 UUC Pamphlets (PRONI D1327/20/4/124); Notes from Ireland November 1, 1919 (PRONI D1327/20/4/141). 26 Carroll, American Opinion, 131–146; Urquhart, Minutes, 118–121; Orange and Purple Courier I, no. 72 (May–June 1921); IUA Annual Report 1919–1920 (PRONI D989/A/7/4); Correspondence (PRONI D1327/18/19). 27 Notes from Ireland March 1, 1921 (PRONI D1327/20/4/141). 28 Miscellaneous Correspondence (SIF, HSP); New York Times July 13, August 30, September 2, 1919; Jones, “Scotch‑Irish,” 907; Minutes, Pennsylvania State Grand Lodge (HSP MSS 93). 29 Minutes, Washington LOL No. 43 (Box #2, HSP MSS 60); “America and the Irish Question.” 30 UUC Scrapbook (PRONI D1327/18/664); Chicago Tribune 14, September 16, 1922. 31 Buckland, Irish Unionism 1885–1922, 30; New York Times March 12, October 26, 1920; Los Angeles Times August 13, 1920; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 265–293, 300–324. 32 List of Scotch‑Irish Organizations (Folder 1, Series 4, Box 36, SIF, HSP); Jones, “Scotch‑Irish,” 907. 33 Montgomery, “Scotch‑Irish and Ulster,” 3; Murphy and Peden, “Ulster‑Scots Diaspora,” 97–108; Ó Dochar‑ taigh, “Reforming Online,” 117; Gardner, Ethnic Dignity, 145–169.

Bibliography Primary Sources “America and the Irish Question. A Short Account of the Visit of the Delegation from Protestant Ireland to the Churches of the United States of America. December 1919–February 1920. By the Delegates.” Belfast: BNL, 1920. Lily of the Valley Loyal Orange Lodge No. 167 (MSS 103, Historical Society of Pennsylvania [HSP]). Loyal Orange Institution, United States of America. Biennial Reports of the Sessions of the Supreme Grand Orange Lodge in the United States of America, 1912–1916. McNeill, Ronald. Ulster’s Stand for Union. London: John Murray, 1922. O’Brien, William. The Irish Revolution and How It Came About. London: Allen & Unwin, 1923. Papers of the Irish Unionist Alliance (D989, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland [PRONI]). Pennsylvania State Grand Lodge of the Loyal Orange Institution (MSS 93, HSP). Records of J.M. Barbour (D972, PRONI). Royal Black Preceptory Star of Liberty Lodge No. 34 (MSS 89, HSP).

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Secondary Sources Akenson, Donald H. The Irish Diaspora: A Primer. Toronto: Meany, 1993. Anderson, James. “Ideological Variations in Ulster During Ireland’s First Home Rule Crisis: An Analysis of Local Newspapers.” In Community Conflict, Partition and Nationalism (pp. 133–166), edited by Colin H. Williams and Eleonore Kofman. London: Routledge, 1989. Appel, John J. Immigrant Historical Societies in the United States, 1880–1950. New York: Arno, 1980. Buckland, Patrick. Irish Unionism, 1885–1922. London: Historical Association, 1973. Carroll, Francis M. The American Presence in Ulster: A Diplomatic History, 1796–1996. Washington, DC: Cath‑ olic University of America Press, 2005. Doyle, David N. “Scots Irish or Scotch‑Irish.” In Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States (pp. 151–170), edited by J.J. Lee and Marion R. Casey. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Flewelling, Lindsey. Two Irelands Beyond the Sea: Ulster Unionism and America, 1880–1920. Liverpool: ­Liverpool University Press, 2018. Gardner, Peter. Ethnic Dignity and the Ulster‑Scots Movement in Northern Ireland. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Gordon, Michael A. The Orange Riots: Irish Political Violence in New York City, 1870 and 1871. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. Griffin, Patrick. The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Hempton, David, and Myrtle Hill. Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society, 1740–1890. London: Routledge, 1992. Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955. Hirota, Hidetaka. Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth‑Century Origins of American Immigration Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Holmes, Andrew. The Irish Presbyterian Mind: Conservative Theology, Evangelical Experience, and Modern Criticism, 1830–1930. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Houston, Cecil J., and William J. Smyth. “Transferred Loyalties: Orangeism in the United States and Ontario.” American Review of Canadian Studies 14, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 193–211. Hyde, H. Montgomery. Carson: The Life of Sir Edward Carson, Lord Carson of Duncairn. Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1953. Jackson, Alvin. Home Rule: An Irish History, 1800–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Jackson, Alvin. The Ulster Party: Irish Unionists in the House of Commons, 1884–1911. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. Jones, Maldwyn A. “Scotch‑Irish.” In Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (pp. 895–908), edited by Stephan Thernstrom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.

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22 IRISH‑AMERICAN WOMEN AND POLITICAL ACTIVISM IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY Tara M. McCarthy

As passions ignited after Ireland’s Easter Rising in 1916, the New York Irish gathered to celebrate the life of Mary Jane O’Donovan Rossa, the widow of the former Fenian Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. Her old friend Marguerite Moore celebrated her life by offering Irish nationalists a message “from those about whom the sunset clouds are gathering to those of the younger generation, who are tak‑ ing up the burden.” By the early twentieth century, Irish immigrant women, like Moore, had a long history of participation in reform movements. Beginning in the 1880s, the development of the La‑ dies’ Land League and the entry of women into the labor movement served as twin catalysts to Irish‑American women’s political activism. During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the reform vision of Irish‑American women fell into four main categories: the fight to protect working women; the defense of teachers’ rights; the campaign for women’s suffrage (especially the state campaigns); and the demand to recognize the Irish Republic. Through these efforts, this generation of women embraced the need for reform, exercised their right to political protest, and engaged in lobbying those in power—even before women got universal suffrage.1

Changes in the Nineteenth Century Irish nationalism has often been written about as an exclusively male movement. Although more scholarly attention has been paid to the role of nationalist women in Ireland, immigrant women’s na‑ tionalist activities in the United States have only recently received much scholarly attention. As Mary C. Kelly argued in her 2005 study of the New York Irish, women played an important role in the devel‑ opment of Irish‑American identity through their participation in community organizations including Irish nationalist groups, beginning with Fenianism in the 1860s. By the 1880s, women participated more widely in the Ladies’ Land League, which was first founded in the United States and then devel‑ oped in Ireland as well. Although the two groups of women participated in very different ways, their presence in a political movement set off discussion and controversy over gender roles, making the Land League era a key period in the expansion of women’s activism. Organizers and critics alike rec‑ ognized the departure such activities represented for women and proceeded cautiously, encouraging them to participate, and defending their right to do so, in terms of women’s traditional roles. Patrick Ford of the Irish World published a letter from Fanny Parnell in which she argued that “Land League business is essentially women’s business because it is essentially a work of philanthropy and human‑ ity.” Such careful negotiation of existing gender roles highlighted the tension, not only for questions 299

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-27

Tara M. McCarthy

about women’s participation in politics, but also because of the large number of Catholic women involved. Land League’s activities did provoke clerical opposition on both sides of the Atlantic. In one of several high‑profile condemnations, Bishop Thomas Grace of St. Paul, Minnesota, delivered a public address on St. Patrick’s Day, 1881, in which he described the Land League as “repulsive” for encouraging Catholic women to investigate political issues, which were “foreign to their minds, their training, and their duties.” Blaming the men for drawing women into this inappropriate role, the Bishop considered the change in gender roles an “infringement upon the sacredness of the home life.” Despite such concerns, women defended their right to participate in the movement and many nationalist men supported them.2 While the Ladies’ Land League in America brought Irish‑American women into a political mass movement for the first time, unleashing debates about the proper behavior of women and the ap‑ propriateness of their presence in the public sphere, such debates did not end with the organization’s decline. Indeed, the discussion of the “Women Question” among American Catholics continued. Like middle‑class Protestant women, who were expanding their roles in the public sphere at the end of the nineteenth century, Catholic women employed maternalistic rhetoric to expand their activities outside the home, yet they used it more conservatively, embracing charitable efforts and taking stands on issues concerning faith and family, while generally avoiding controversial issues like suffrage. As Kathleen Cummings has argued about Catholic women in the Progressive Era, Catholic identity was “often marshaled in support of traditional gender roles” but could also “serve as a vehicle through which women contested and renegotiated the parameters of their experience.” Although many Catho‑ lic women rejected the New Woman and the challenge she represented to traditional gender roles, they still participated in reform efforts. These categories of Irish and Catholic do overlap to a significant de‑ gree in terms of nationalism. In addition to the Irish nationalist movement, the Irish working‑class ex‑ perience also inspired activism, and women labor leaders were early supporters of women’s suffrage.3

Protecting Working Women The early scholarship on Irish immigrant women points to three unique trends: the high number of young, single women among Irish immigrants, their subsequent experience as domestic servants, and their entry into the labor movement. Irish‑American women’s role in the labor movement has been well‑documented by historians. In particular, Hasia Diner’s book, Erin’s Daughters in America (1983), pointed to Irish immigrant women’s economic assertiveness, which set the tone for further research on working women. From the fiery oratory of Mother Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn to the feminist activism of the Women’s Trade Union League, it was through the labor movement that many women gained experience with organizing, speaking, and lobbying.4 By the late nineteenth century, women’s role in the labor force expanded dramatically. From 1870 to 1890, the number of women working (outside of agriculture) doubled. In total, women made up one sixth of the labor force. In addition to their dominance in domestic service, Irish and Irish‑­ American women were the largest ethnic group in other occupations and industries. By the 1870s, for example, Irish immigrant women made up almost 58 percent of textile workers in Lowell, Mas‑ sachusetts. Sewing and needlework were also common trades for Irish women. In 1900, one third of all seamstresses and dressmakers in the United States were Irish‑born.5 With the expansion of the workforce came the expansion of the labor movement in the late nine‑ teenth century. Irish Americans have a long history of trade unionism. Studies have shown that Irish‑American men were disproportionately represented among the leadership of locals affiliated with the American Federation of Labor by the early twentieth century. This strong presence in the ranks of union leadership is true of women as well. In addition, during the Progressive Era, as more reform‑minded women joined organizations aimed at improving industrial conditions, middle‑class 300

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and working‑class women formed alliances to fight for legislation to protect women at work. Irish‑American labor leaders and their allies played an important role in lobbying for protective leg‑ islation for women, thus bringing working women into the political process.6 One priority for legislation to aid women workers involved getting female factory inspectors appointed. Early laws were passed in Pennsylvania and New York. For example, Leonora Barry, an Irish American who became the first female organizer for the Knights of Labor, reached out to reformer Florence Kelley to cooperate on a Pennsylvania law to hire factory inspectors and regulate the work of women and children. Through the pages of the Irish World, Barry defended the proposal to the Irish‑American working class. She told her “brother workingmen of Pennsylvania, you are to blame for existing conditions” and called on men to use their votes to protect women and children by insisting on the enforcement of the existing state laws. Barry, Kelley, and a coalition of elite and working‑class women founded the Philadelphia Working Women’s Society with the purpose of help‑ ing women to “form organizations for self‑protection…and for obtaining and enforcing legislation in the interests of the working class.” In 1889, they succeeded in passing a law that not only regulated the employment of women and children, but also led to the hiring of the first female factory inspec‑ tors in the United States.7 A similar pattern emerged in New York where a bill advocated for by the Working Women’s So‑ ciety (of New York) passed in 1890, creating eight positions for women factory inspectors. Leonora O’Reilly, the daughter of Irish immigrants, was active in a number of social reform efforts which relied on collaboration with middle‑class women. While still in her teens, O’Reilly joined the Work‑ ing Women’s Society (founded in 1886), which sought to organize unions, advocate for shorter hours and higher wages, and press for enforcement of existing labor laws. Although its focus remained on working women, the Working Women’s Society also sought allies outside the labor movement, most notably Josephine Shaw Lowell, the head of the New York State Board of Charities, who attended meetings at O’Reilly’s request. Lowell helped organize the group’s first mass meeting in 1888, where they called for equal pay for equal work and protective labor legislation.8 O’Reilly, a former Knight, was also a founding member of the New York branch of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL). The WTUL (founded in 1903) had branches in several cities, includ‑ ing Boston, New York, Chicago, and St. Louis. The organization was designed to foster alliances be‑ tween working‑class and middle‑class women; it also sponsored protective legislation. The successful defense of protective labor legislation before the Supreme Court in Muller v. Oregon (1908) inspired a renewed effort for factory legislation in Illinois. The Chicago Women’s Trade Union League, and their attorney, drafted a bill for an eight‑hour day, and four working women, including two Irish Americans (Agnes Nestor and Elizabeth Maloney), took the lead in supporting it. Agnes Nestor had led her first strike while still in her teens, and in 1902 she served as a delegate to the founding conven‑ tion of the International Glove Workers’ Union. Like Barry and O’Reilly, Nestor also reached out to middle‑class reformers. In 1905, she spoke before the Illinois Federation of Women’s Clubs, which, as she recalled, was unusual for a working woman at the time. Nestor’s union leadership eventually took her out of the factory, but she continued to devote her life to working women.9 Nestor and her allies spent months lobbying for an eight‑hour day. Although the original legisla‑ tion did not pass, a compromise ten‑hour bill did. Two years later, Nestor and Maloney returned to Springfield to advocate for a shorter work week. The final compromise extended the ten‑hour day to all women except agricultural and domestic workers and limited the work week to 60 hours. Nestor went on to serve as president of the Chicago WTUL, where she would finally see an eight‑hour bill passed in 1937. As these three examples show, Irish‑American women played a central role in the development of women’s trade unions while their leadership created alliances with middle‑class Protestant reformers. Through these Progressive Era organizations, Irish‑American women embraced political and legal strategies to improve the lives of working women.10 301

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Teachers’ Rights While some Irish‑American women became leaders in the labor movement, others were moving into the teaching profession. By the turn of the twentieth century, Irish‑American women accounted for 10 percent of all female teachers in the United States, but in some urban districts that percentage was much higher. In New York and Chicago, one‑third of teachers were Irish‑American by the early twentieth century. According to Janet Nolan, “the daughters of mothers educated in Irish schools entered white‑collar work at least a generation before most of their brothers” and through this status, women “held significant social and economic importance within their families” and communities. It is therefore not surprising, given Irish America’s history with labor activism and the prevalence of women in the teaching ranks, that Irish‑America women stood out as leaders and reformers among local urban teachers’ organizations in the years before the creation of the American Federation of Teachers in 1916.11 Although the teaching profession presented educational and economic opportunities for Irish‑American women, working conditions for women teachers were poor. By the late nineteenth century, women greatly outnumbered men in urban schools; however, they were paid far less and were less likely to move into higher‑paying, administrative positions. The degree of bureaucratiza‑ tion in urban schools further exacerbated the gender inequality in two main ways: men were favored for administrative jobs, while set salary schedules programmed longstanding gender bias into the pay system. In 1900, women made up 70 percent of the teaching force; the vast majority of those women were single. In fact, teachers were expected to remain single or to leave the workforce once married, which left them economically vulnerable. As a result, pensions, raises, and equal pay became core political issues for women teachers.12 A pioneer in teachers’ rights, Kate Kennedy, who emigrated from Ireland during the Great Famine, fought for the first equal pay law for teachers in 1874. Although Kennedy also won tenure and pen‑ sion plans for San Francisco teachers, many of these victories would later be overturned. Pensions returned as a key issue for teachers in the late nineteenth century, and this established a precedent for legal strategies to improve teachers’ socio‑economic position. In the 1890s, ten states passed pension laws, and by 1910, 22 states had “some form of teachers’ pension legislation.” Like Kate Kennedy before them, leading activists in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco were often Irish Americans.13 Most of the scholarship on women teacher activists focuses on Chicago, where two Irish‑­American women, Margaret Haley and Catherine Goggins, worked together to fight municipal corruption, gain pensions and raises, and organize teachers’ unions. According to Haley’s autobiography, the pension movement was led by Goggins. “The legislation of 1895, granting a pension to teachers,” Haley later recalled, “had been the direct result of Catherine Goggins’ interest in other teachers and foresight for them.” When legal challenges threatened the pension system, 2,000 Chicago teachers formed the Chicago Teachers’ Federation (CTF) to protect their interests. With the support of Haley, Goggins campaigned for the presidency of the CTF, and once elected, promised to focus on economic issues, especially pensions and higher salaries.14 One of the most important victories during the partnership of Haley and Goggins was in a tax fight that would ultimately secure more funds for the city schools. In 1900, Haley took leave from teaching to devote herself to a full‑time investigation of corporate taxes. Employing Haley’s research, the Chi‑ cago Teachers’ Federation successfully sued five utility companies. A judge ruled that the tax assess‑ ments were illegal and ordered the companies to pay the Board of Education $600,000. In addition to her success in closing corporate loopholes, Haley promoted other strategies to help teachers. She was a suffragist and also advocated for cooperation with organized labor. In 1902, the CTF became the first teachers’ organization to affiliate with the Chicago Federation of Labor, creating a new type of teachers’ union. Between 1902 and 1910, 11 teachers’ organizations affiliated with the American 302

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Federation of Labor. This new approach to organizing would lead to the founding of the American Federation of Teachers in 1916.15 Like the teachers of Chicago, women in New York found themselves in a political struggle, but this time over equal pay for equal work. The organization spearheading the campaign, the Inter‑ borough Association of Women Teachers, was founded in 1906. Its first three Presidents were all ­American‑born children of at least one Irish immigrant parent. Several Vice Presidents were also Irish American. The first President, Katherine (Kate) E. Hogan was a lawyer, born in Albany, New York. The strategy of the equal pay movement was to lobby the New York State Legislature if the women could not accomplish their objective through the Board of Education. Although Hogan did not live to see it, their efforts led to three separate bills and took five years to complete. The woman credited with successfully steering the bill through the legislature was its third President, Grace Stra‑ chan, who took over the IAWT in 1907. Strachan was a Catholic born in Buffalo, New York to a Scottish immigrant father and an Irish immigrant mother.16 In her book Equal Pay for Equal Work: The Story of the Struggle For Justice Being Made by the Women Teachers of the City of New York (1910), Grace Strachan set out her views on equal rights for women, insisting on a place for women in politics. She declared that “the woman teacher has as much right as a man teacher…to take an active interest in politics” and she further defended a woman’s right to “express her views on all these subjects, and to do all that she properly can to influence the election of such officials as she prefers shall represent her.” Her vehement defense of women’s politi‑ cal activism came after several years of leading the movement to secure legislation for equal pay for women teachers. As champions of both equal pay and equal political rights for women, Strachan and the Interborough Association of Women Teachers were part of a new generation of teacher activists who had been influenced by liberal feminism and the suffrage movement.17 Although historians note her reticence on the suffrage issue, Strachan consolidated the relationship between New York teachers and the suffrage movement after the passage of the equal pay bill in 1911 and encouraged teachers to become active in the campaign. This ultimately brought Irish‑American women, many of whom were Catholic, more directly into the suffrage movement. The alliance led to the founding of the Empire State Campaign Committee’s Teachers Branch during the suffrage referen‑ dum of 1915. Grace Strachan served as the chair of the membership committee; a few other Interbor‑ ough alumnae were on the executive committee as well. The state suffrage campaigns provided unique opportunities for Irish‑American women to get involved as speakers and campaigners. Their contribu‑ tions to the labor movement and their leadership among teachers led to a demand for their services. Grace Strachan was a very visible figure in New York City but there was also a demand for working women who could appeal to other constituencies. Just as the number of state campaigns accelerated around the country during the early twentieth century, so too did the participation of Irish‑American women.18

State Suffrage Campaigns The suffrage movement employed a variety of strategies and benefited from many voices. However, the Irish‑American influence was small in the nineteenth century. One notable exception was Mar‑ guerite Moore, who was an organizer for the Ladies’ Land League in Ireland before she moved to the United States. In 1886, Moore addressed the annual convention of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association. According to the Woman’s Journal, she told her audience that she expected to find freedom for women when she reached American shores, but they did not even have the right of municipal suffrage already enjoyed in England. The influence of Irish Americans on the suffrage movement was most pronounced in the early twentieth century when laboring women emerged as suffrage speakers, the movement took a militant turn, and Catholic women developed separate 303

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suffrage societies in a few urban areas. A key part of this development was the importance of state suffrage referenda before the national amendment strategy gained momentum. Only a few states adopted women’s suffrage in the nineteenth century, but by the twentieth century, the number of state campaigns increased, including in eastern states like Massachusetts and New York, which had large Irish‑American populations.19 The National American Woman Suffrage Association sought to court male voters by appealing to various class, ethnic, and religious constituencies. Most of the women labor leaders and teacher activ‑ ists mentioned above were also suffrage supporters, especially Leonora O’Reilly. Additional suffrage talent included Margaret Foley of Massachusetts and Margaret Hinchey of New York. These women traveled widely as popular suffrage speakers because they could appeal to Irish and Catholic voters. Both also had trade union backgrounds. During the Montana campaign, Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress told Margaret Foley that “I believe you could do a great amount of good in our labor towns.” The Montana Equal Suffrage Association also requested the help of Irish‑born suffrage speaker, Margaret Hinchey. “Miss Rankin appreciates the splendid character and the ability of Miss Hinchey as a speaker in her direct appeal to the labor unions,” they said. “The union men here all seem to have heard of her work in New York.”20 As Hinchey’s contributions to the campaign suggest, union activism offered a strong appeal among working‑class voters. In addition to their union credentials, the ethnic and religious identities of suffrage speakers were seen as valuable assets. In 1914, Hinchey told the Equal Suffrage League of New York that she was willing to “go down to Washington and I’ll tell them the Irish do want the vote.” To reach Catholic audiences, suffragists worked with Catholic organizations and clergy. Dur‑ ing the New Jersey campaign, Hinchey spent almost three weeks making street speeches, visiting Catholic clergy, and attending meetings of Irish societies. Although suffragists did improve their outreach to Catholic audiences in the twentieth century, some Catholic women also chose to organize separate suffrage organizations. In the United States, Catholic women began reaching out to Catholic voters—largely to persuade them that the Church did not oppose women’s suffrage. Jane Campbell, a rare Irish American among nineteenth‑century suffrage leaders, organized the first separate Catholic organization in the US (the Catholic Woman’s Suffrage League) in Philadelphia in 1914. In New York, the St. Catherine’s Welfare Society, which decided to devote itself exclusively to suffrage in 1915 during the New York state suffrage campaign, was led by an Irish American named Sara McPike. Likewise, the president of the Margaret Brent Suffrage Guild of Boston, which was founded in 1918, was an Irish‑American woman named Evelyn Scanlan. Although very little is known of Scanlan, Margaret Foley worked for the Guild as an organizer.21 Margaret Foley was also trained in suffrage militancy. A local Boston paper called her its first “suffragette” but her innovation followed the efforts of Maud Malone of New York, who helped to lead the initial wave of militant suffrage activity seen in the United States, beginning with the first open air meetings and a suffrage parade. A pioneer in new suffrage techniques, Malone was arrested for interrupting political rallies during the presidential race of 1912, and she continued her militant activities with the more famous Irish American, Lucy Burns. Both women served jail time with other members of the National Woman’s Party in 1917. Burns was from New York, but she had pursued advanced studies abroad, where she first became acquainted with the suffrage militancy emerging in Britain. From 1909 to 1912, she worked with pioneering British militants, participating in her first hunger strike and teaming up with Alice Paul. Upon their return to the United States, Burns and Paul cooperated in pushing for a federal suffrage amendment. Under the auspices of the National Woman’s Party, Burns participated in the controversial picketing of the White House during World War I, and she served more time in jail than any other American suffragist. The influence of suffrage militancy later surfaced in the Irish nationalist protests of the World War I era, as events in Ireland took a violent and tragic turn, particularly after the Easter Rising of 1916.22 304

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Nationalism and Recognition of the Irish Republic American women began to organize in support of Irish nationalism during the Ladies’ Land League of the late nineteenth century. This was the first time that Irish‑American women had joined the movement in large numbers and, like the labor movement, it was a catalyst for increased participa‑ tion in public life. A core group of women remained active through the development of United Irish League of America, which was founded in 1901. By 1914, however, the American Irish began to turn away from the leadership of John Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party. After the events of Easter week in 1916, the United States saw its greatest period of support for Irish Republicanism. When the First World War ended, a new strategy emerged, focusing on American recognition of the Irish Republic. Women engaged in direct political action to influence the American government’s policy on Ireland. Through a number of organizations, including the Ladies’ Auxiliary of Ancient Order of Hibernians (LAAOH), the Irish Progressive League and the American Women Pickets for the Enforcement of American’s War Aims, women embraced their role as voters, or took inspiration from militant suffragists, to influence American policy toward Ireland.23 The largest organization of Irish‑American women, the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (founded in the 1890s), attempted to influence President Wilson during the peace talks after the war. Members of the LAAOH entered the debate as mothers of Irish‑American soldiers who had fought and died for their country and for Wilson’s principle of self‑determination. At the second Irish Race Convention in 1918, President Mary McWhorter told her audience that she represented 75,000 Irish‑American women, and that 75 percent of their members had sons fighting in France or preparing to go overseas. She expressed her support for the American war effort but also insisted that “it is not inconsistent with our American patriotism to talk up good and strong, and to act for the little Republic of Ireland.”24 McWhorter, who was born in Ireland, demanded a political voice for Irish‑American women based on mothers’ shared sacrifices in the war. This argument became the foundation of a “Mothers’ Mis‑ sion” to President Wilson. In her plea to the President, McWhorter’s rhetoric focused on the desire of Irish‑American mothers to see their sons’ sacrifices as meaningful, reminding Wilson that these mothers had “given their boys for the sacred cause of the oppressed races on the Earth.” Although she was not allowed to meet with Wilson, McWhorter enlisted the aid of Illinois’ representatives to support Ireland’s claims at the Peace Conference. She also advocated direct political action, urging the women of the Ladies’ Auxiliary to organize public meetings in their states and send appeals to President Wilson and members of Congress. McWhorter had publicly opposed suffrage in the past. but she did endorse political pressure for the protection of Ireland. “This is the age of women,” she declared. “Senators and Congressmen are showing great regard for our opinion.”25 In a more visible campaign to influence public opinion and put pressure on Congressional lead‑ ership, the American Women Pickets for the Enforcement of America’s War Aims grew out of the urgent need for publicity. In 1920, William Maloney, a former British medical officer of Irish parent‑ age recruited about 60 Irish‑American women to lobby in Washington, DC and poll Congressional Representatives as to their position on the Mason Bill, a measure intended to recognize the legitimacy of the Irish Republic by appropriating funds for the salaries of diplomatic officials. Hoping to attract attention to conditions in Ireland, the women protested in front of the British Embassy. Although Maloney intended for the campaign to be a temporary publicity stunt—even hiring pretty actresses to take part—he soon lost control of the campaign. Ten women were arrested, and the protest garnered plenty of media attention. The Chicago Citizen described the picketing campaign as “opportune, il‑ luminative, efficient work” by women who had “plucked a valuable leaf out of the book of the Ameri‑ can suffragettes.” As Patrick McCartan who represented the Irish Republican government recalled, the Pickets had captured America’s attention and were shown “nightly in Moving Pictures all over 305

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America.” These women participated in a number of dramatic protests to call attention to conditions in Ireland, but they also asserted their independence.26 Maloney’s involvement ended after the arrests, but Gertrude Corless and Kathleen O’Brennan, a Dublin newspaper woman, cooperated in founding a new organization called the American Women Pickets for the Enforcement of America’s War Aims. The new American Pickets led a number of other campaigns in the summer and fall of 1920, including demonstrations in Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. They attempted to flex the muscle of the new woman voter, for example, by lobbying for the Mason Bill. “We demand that justice be done to the 20 million Irish‑Americans,” the Pickets insisted in a letter sent to every member of the Foreign Relations Committee, “and we are organizing in your several districts to fight your re‑election in case of failure to go on record on this important decision.” When the Mason Bill failed, the women went to Capitol Hill to confront Congress directly. In a dramatic protest, American Pickets also burned a British flag in front of the American Treasury Department and marched to demand that the United States cut off loans to Britain. American Women Pickets also appeared simultaneously in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, where about 30 women disrupted proceeding by shouting from the gallery. In New York, Dr. Gertrude Kelly and other members of the Pickets and the Irish Progressive League planned a rally at the pier to send off Archbishop Mannix of Melbourne, Australia. The Irish‑born Archbishop had been critical of British rule in Ireland, leading two anti‑conscription campaigns in Australia during the war.27 By the end of the summer, the Pickets began advocating a new strategy, namely the boycott. In the summer of 1920, the Labor Bureau, an auxiliary of the American Commission on Irish Independence, was created to harness the power of organized labor for the Irish nationalist movement and included among its goals enlisting labor’s support for the recognition of the Irish Republic, publicizing the Irish cause, and campaigning for a boycott of British goods. The Labor Bureau sought to secure the endorse‑ ment of the American Federation of Labor for the boycott. Although the plan failed, the Labor Bureau built a network of over 200 local organizations to advance the cause. Among women’s groups, the Women’s Irish Education League, the American Pickets, and the Irish Women’s Purchasing League, led by Leonora O’Reilly, all supported the boycott strategy as part of a widespread grassroots campaign.28 The boycott strategy took center stage after the arrest of Terence MacSwiney, who was the Lord Mayor of Cork and a commandant in the Irish Republican Army. MacSwiney went on a hunger strike and ultimately died in prison. To raise awareness and support for MacSwiney, a few women, includ‑ ing Gertrude Kelly and Helen Golden, secretary of the Irish Progressive League, picketed the British Consulate in Manhattan. Then, at the end of August 1920, 30 women moved their protest back to the piers, encouraging longshoreman to boycott British shipping. This phase of the protest was led by Helen Golden of the Irish Progressive League. The women moved from pier to pier, encouraging workers to leave British ships and join the strike. According to the press, 2,000 longshoremen walked off their jobs even though their union leaders declared the strike unauthorized. The New York Sun called it “the first purely political strike of workingmen in the history of the United States.”29 While women urged on the strikers in New York, Gertrude Corless was in Washington, DC lead‑ ing a delegation of women to see Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby. She also sent a letter to the American Ambassador to England. Claiming to represent one million American women, she vowed to spread the boycott of British ships to “every nook and cranny of the United States.” The combined efforts of Corless and the New York picketers demonstrates the influence of the boycott strategy, as nationalist women sought to use the economic power of the United States to cripple England’s military capability. While Corless lobbied in Washington, DC, protestors in New York appealed di‑ rectly to workingmen, attempting to use the strength of labor to make an international statement. “Americans who really believe in human freedom are never without weapons,” Corless reportedly told Colby. “They have shown that in the strike which ties up British shipping in our ports; they will show it further in a nation‑wide boycott of British products.” Although women were active in all 306

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phases of the Irish nationalist movement in the United States, the final years of the movement show the most visible and direct political action as women embraced their roles as women, mothers, lob‑ byists, and voters to further the cause of Ireland. Their voices were in many cases independent of the larger, male‑dominated groups. They chose to assert themselves through the political process at a time when universal suffrage created opportunities for women to influence partisan politics, as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment became law.30

Conclusion By 1920, Irish‑American women had a tradition of leadership, organization building, lobbying, and pro‑ testing that dated back to the nineteenth century. They embraced their roles as reformers, campaigning for protective labor legislation, economic justice, suffrage, and Irish independence. Through Progres‑ sive Era reform and the labor movement, Irish‑American women entered alliances with middle‑class Protestant women and advocated for better working conditions. As teachers, Irish Americans embraced the fight for pensions, raises, and equal pay. And as diasporic nationalists, Irish and Irish‑American women insisted on being heard by picketing and protesting for the Irish Republic. What all three of these movements had in common was the level of political engagement women demonstrated. Many Irish‑American activists were also suffragists, and the suffrage movement benefitted from their support.

Notes 1 “Mrs. Moore Delivers Eulogy at Grave of Mrs. O’Donovan Rossa,” Irish World, 26 August, 1916, 3. 2 Kelly, Shamrock and the Lily, 57; For examples on the Ladies’ Land League see: James Kenneally, “Sexism, the Church, Irish Women”; Ely Janis, A Greater Ireland; Tara McCarthy, Respectability and Reform; Fanny Parnell, “Ladies’ Land League: A Permanent Organization to Be In New York City,” Irish World, September 25, 1880; Cote, 177; Kenneally, “Sexism, the Church, Irish Women,” 7. 3 Moloney, American Catholic Lay Groups, 168–169; Cummings, New Women, 4. 4 Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America. 5 Vapnek, Breadwinners, 34, 131; Diner, 74–75, 77. 6 McKillen, “The Irish Sinn Féin Movement,” 13. 7 Vapnek, 46; “Mrs. Barry on Child Labor,” Irish World, 2 June, 1888, 7; Sklar, Florence Kelley, 141–142. 8 Sklar, 141–142; Vapnek, 71, 73. 9 Hoy, “Chicago Working Women’s Struggle for a Shorter Day, 1908–1911,” 13, 16, 19; “Clubdom Extends Hand to Toilers,” Chicago Tribune, 21 October, 1905, 3; “Aids Girl Toilers,” Chicago Trib‑ une, 22 October, 1905, 3; “Agnes Nestor, Leader and Educator,” Christian Science Monitor, 19 May, 1925, 8. 10 Hoy, “Chicago Working Women’s Struggle,” 32. 11 Whelan, “Women on the Move,” 908; Nolan, Servants of the Poor, 2–3. 12 Perlmann, Women’s Work? American Schoolteachers, 110, 112; Van Ingen, “‘One Can’t Live on Air,’” 173–174. 13 Nolan, 69; Leroux, “‘Unpensioned Veterans,’” 36. 14 Reid, Battleground, 33; Leroux, “Unpensioned Veterans,” 49–51; Rousmaniere, Citizen Teacher, 54; Mur‑ phy, Blackboard Unions, 63. 15 Hogan, Class and Reform, 203; Rousmaniere, Citizen Teacher, 61; Murphy, 65–67. 16 New York City Municipal Deaths, 1795–1949, Familysearch.org; “Catholic Summer School,” Daily Morn‑ ing Journal and Courier, 13 July, 1898, 3, [Chronicling America]; “They Would Know Law,” New York Tribune, 12 December, 1898, 5, [Chronicling America]. The second President was Nora Curtis Lenihen (later Killeen), a Catholic whose parents had been born in Ireland. New York, US Index to Death Certificates, 1862–1948, Ancestry.com; McCarthy, 122; Urban, Why Teachers Organized, 91; Carter, “Everybody’s Paid But the Teacher,” 47; 1910 Federal Census, Grace C. Strachan, Ancestry.com; “Heroine of a Long Uphill Fight For Equal Pay For Women Teachers,” New York Tribune, 14 May, 1911, [Chronicling America]. 17 Strachan, Equal Pay for Equal Work, 277. 18 Santangelo, Suffrage and the City, 105. 19 “New York Convention,” Woman’s Journal, 3 April, 1886, 112.

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Tara M. McCarthy 20 Jeannette Rankin to Foley, 29 January, 1914, Foley Papers, Reel 8; Rankin to Foley, 27 January, 1914, Foley Papers, Reel 7; Mary O’Neill to O’Reilly, 20 June, 1914, Leonora O’Reilly Papers, Reel 7, Frames 107–108. 21 Minutes of the WTUL committee to secure votes for women, undated, Leonora O’Reilly Papers, Reel 12, Frames 133–134; “Margaret Hinchey Tells of Wilson,” New York Times, February 5, 1914, 9; McCarthy, Respectability & Reform, 209, 212. 22 McCarthy, 196; Bland, “‘Never Quite as Committed as We’d Like’: The Suffrage Militancy of Lucy Burns,” 5–8, 14. 23 Brundage, Irish Nationalists in America, 147, 156. 24 “The Irish Race Convention,” Irish World, 25 May, 1918, 3. 25 “Plea to President by Irish Mothers,” Irish World, 31 July, 1918, 12; “Appeal by National President,” Irish World, 18 May, 1918, 3; “Irish Self‑Determination,” Irish World, 4 January, 1919; “Woman Upholds Critic of her Sex,” Chicago Tribune, 22 May, 1910, 3. 26 Doyle, “Striking for Ireland on the New York Docks,” in Bayor and Meagher eds, New York Irish, 360–361; McCartan, With De Valera, 173; Burns, “American Identity and the Transatlantic Irish Nationalist Move‑ ment,” in Gleeson, 181–182, 179; McCartan, With De Valera, 178, 180–181. 27 “The Lady Pickets at Washington, DC,” Irish World, 7 April, 1920, 12; “American‑Irish Women Picket John Bull’s ‘American Citadel,’” Citizen, 9 April, 1920, 1; Burns, 180; “American Pickets,” Irish World, 29 May, 1920, 12; “Are the Pickets Politicians?” Irish World, 5 June, 1920, 12; “Mr. Colby Embarrassed—No Won‑ der,” Irish World, 19 June, 1920, 12; Doyle, 363–364. 28 The American Commission on Irish Independence was created as a result of the Irish Race Convention of 1919; McKillen, “American Labor, the Irish Revolution,” 47; Brundage, “American Labour,” 63. 29 Doyle, 365. An employee in the building above dumped water on the women as they picketed on Whitehall Street; “Women Here Picket British Consulate,” New York Times, 24 August, 1920, 2; Burns, 186; “Irish Crews Tie Up New York Liners,” Washington Post, 28 August, 1920, 1; Doyle, 357, 362. 30 “Women Fail to See Colby In Behalf of Cork Mayor,” Washington Post, 28 August, 1920, 3; “Take Irish Plea to Colby,” New York Times, 28 August, 1920, 3. The Reverend Sister MacSwiney lived in the United States and had appealed to Secretary Colby on her brother’s behalf; “Women’s Appeal to Colby,” New York Times, 29 August, 1920; “Picketing at the State Department,” Irish World, 11 September, 1920.

Bibliography Primary Sources Foley, Margaret. Papers, Research Collections in Women’s Studies—Women’s Studies Manuscript Collections from the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. Series I, Woman Suffrage, Part D: New England. O’Reilly, Leonora. Papers. Microfilm Edition of the Papers of the Women’s Trade Union League and Its Princi‑ pal Leaders.

Select Newspapers Chicago Tribune [ProQuest] Citizen (Chicago) Irish World (New York) New York Times [ProQuest] Washington Post [ProQuest] Woman’s Journal (Boston)

Printed Primary Sources McCartan, Patrick. With De Valera in America. New York: Brentano, 1932. Nestor, Agnes. Woman’s Labor Leader: An Autobiography of Agnes Nestor. Rockford, IL: Bellevue Books, 1954. Reid, Robert, ed. Battleground: The Autobiography of Margaret A. Haley. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Strachan, Grace. Equal Pay for Equal Work: The Story of the Struggle for Justice Being Made by the Women Teachers of the City of New York. New York: B.F. Buck and Company, 1910.

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Secondary Sources Bayor, Ronald, and Timothy J. Meagher, eds. The New York Irish. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Bland, Sidney. “‘Never Quite as Committed as We’d Like’: The Suffrage Militancy of Lucy Burns.” Journal of Long Island History 17, no. 2 (1981): 4–23. Brundage, David. “American Labour and the Irish Question, 1916–1923.” Saothar 24 (1999): 59–66. Brundage, David. Irish Nationalists in America: The Politics of Exile, 1798–1998. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Carter, Patricia. “Everybody’s Paid but the Teacher”: The Teaching Profession and the Women’s Movement. New York: Teachers College Press, 2002. Cote, Jane McL. Fanny and Anna Parnell: Ireland’s Patriotic Sisters. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Cummings, Katheen Sprows. New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progres‑ sive Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Diner, Hasia. Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. Gleeson, David, ed. The Irish in the Atlantic World. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2012. Hogan, David John. Class and Reform: School and Society in Chicago, 1880–1930. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. Hoy, Suellen. “Chicago Working Women’s Struggle for a Shorter Day, 1908–1911.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 107, no. 1 (2014): 9–44. Janis, Ely M. A Greater Ireland: The Land League and Transatlantic Nationalism in Gilded Age America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. Kelly, Mary C. The Shamrock and the Lily: The New York Irish and the Creation of a Transatlantic Identity, 1845–1921. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Kenneally, James. “Sexism, the Church, Irish Women.” Eire‑Ireland 21 (1986): 2–16. Leroux, Karen. “‘Unpensioned Veterans’: Women Teachers and the Politics of Public Service in the Late‑­ nineteenth Century United States.” Journal of Women’s History 21, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 34–62. http://doi. org/10.1353/jowh.0.0066. McCarthy, Tara. Respectability & Reform: Irish American Women’s Activism, 1880–1920. Syracuse, NY: Syra‑ cuse University Press, 2018. McKillen, Elizabeth. “American Labor, the Irish Revolution, and the Campaign for a Boycott of British Goods.” Radical History Review 61 (Winter 1995): 35–61. McKillen, Elizabeth. “The Irish Sinn Féin Movement and Dissent in America.” Labor: Studies in Working‑Class History 16, no. 3 (2019): 11–37. http://doi.org/10.1215/15476715‑7569776. Moloney, Deirdre M. American Catholic Lay Groups and Transatlantic Social Reform in the Progressive Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Murphy, Marjorie. Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900–1980. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Nolan, Janet. Servants of the Poor: Teachers and Mobility in Ireland and Irish America. Notre Dame, IN: Uni‑ versity of Notre Dame, 2004. Perlmann, Joel, and Robert A. Margo. Women’s Work? American Schoolteachers, 1650–1920. Chicago, IL: Uni‑ versity of Chicago Press, 2001. Rousmaniere, Kate. Citizen Teacher: The Life and Leadership of Margaret Haley. New York: State University of New York Press, 2005. Santangelo, Lauren C. Suffrage and the City: New York Women Battle for the Ballot. New York: Oxford Univer‑ sity Press, 2019. Sklar, Kathryn Kish. Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Urban, Wayne. Why Teachers Organized. Detroit: Wayne State Press, 1982. Van Ingen, Linda. “‘One Can’t Live on Air’: Sarah McComb and the Problem of Old‑Age Income for Single Women Teachers, 1870s–1930s.” History of Education Quarterly 54, no. 2 (2014): 172–196. Vapnek, Lara. Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865–1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Whelan, Bernadette. “Women on the Move: A Review of the Historiography of Irish Emigration to the USA, 170– 1900.” Women’s History Review 24, no. 6 (2015): 901–916. http://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2015.1013305.

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23 THE IRISH AND LABOR IN THE INDUSTRIAL ERA, 1880–1930S James R. Barrett

The “rise” of the Irish in the American class structure can easily be exaggerated. It took a long time. It was not a coincidence that the phrase “lace curtain” or “steam heat” for middle‑class Irish appeared toward the end of the nineteenth century as a small proportion, especially among the second genera‑ tion, moved into white collar work and the professions, but the community remained overwhelmingly working‑class well into the twentieth century. A significant rise into more skilled work left the Irish largely concentrated in blue‑collar jobs. Compared to the Germans and other nineteenth‑century im‑ migrant groups, their upward mobility was modest.1 As other chapters in the present volume demonstrate, the Great Famine left a deep mark on the Irish community, in ways reproduced over time through music, poetry, and the oral tradition, but the focus here is on later Irish immigrants and the second and third generation of Irish Americans at work and in unions. While these workers certainly drew on Irish experiences, ideas, and behaviors, they were shaped less by the Irish countryside and more by the streets and workplaces of the American city. Labor market competition and the struggle to build unions and conduct strikes led to conflict with other racial and ethnic groups, but the Irish also played a role in integrating and acculturating later migrants into labor settings. Strong networks based on parish and neighborhood served them well in the competition for work and urban space; thus, they were, as historian Bruce Nelson has argued, “gatekeepers” restricting access to jobs. But their placement in city jobs, school rooms, and unions also made them “Americanizers,” providing a model for, and socializing, later immigrant and migrant workers coming to terms with the American city and with industrial life and work. It was through the interaction of the Irish with these other groups that the American working class was “remade” between the late nineteenth century and the Great Depression.2

The Place of the Irish in the American Workforce The Famine Irish had settled disproportionately into unskilled laboring jobs. Until the late nineteenth century, Irish men remained concentrated in the ranks of “common labor” as carters, on the docks, or in constructing much of the nation’s infrastructure, including canals, railroads, bridges, and tunnels, along with other immigrants. Where they worked in manufacturing, it tended to be in declining trades degraded by skill dilution and mechanization, such as textiles, tailoring, and boot and shoe manufac‑ turing. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the second generation “Irish‑­American” work‑ force was reaching into municipal work as policemen and firemen, in skilled construction trades, DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-28

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metal working, on the railroads, and in urban transit. County associations, kinship ties, political clout, and extensive networking based on the neighborhood and parish allowed the Irish to carve out dis‑ tinct niches in urban labor markets. What the sociologist Terry N. Clark has referred to as the “Irish ethic” of intra‑ethnic patronage assured immigrants and their children of work. Influence at the upper reaches of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) helped to secure apprenticeships in the trades, while connections among building contractors and factory foremen translated into jobs in construc‑ tion, steel, meatpacking, and elsewhere. A new immigrant entering the vast industrial city at the turn of the century could thus “rely on his cousins to promote his interests in securing work.”3 Irish men were widely distributed in the crafts by the early twentieth century, but they concentrated among steamfitters, plumbers, stone cutters, and masons. Yet about one in seven Irish Americans and one in four Irish immigrants still labored in poorly paid unskilled jobs where they came into compe‑ tition with more recent immigrants. Tight neighborhood connections assured them jobs as dockers and teamsters but this was often casual work. Opportunities were better for those who moved West, but on the East coast and even in Midwestern cities, most Irish remained workers. In a strange way, their networking might even have retarded their entry into the higher levels of the social structure by concentrating them into what one political scientist has termed a “blue‑collar cul de sac.” In this sense the Irish remained scattered throughout the nation’s occupational structure through the early twentieth century and were often in a position to interact with and acculturate more recent migrants. By the post‑World War II era, however, the Irish‑American occupational structure had changed sig‑ nificantly. In 1950, 24 percent of Irish‑born men and 42 percent of the second generation were found in white collar jobs. Even at this point, however, a majority remained in the working class.4 Irish‑American women’s work and their rise in American society differed from that of their male counterparts. Many worked in the garment industry, but as late as the end of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, the immigrant generation remained concentrated in domestic service as cooks, maids, and nannies. This contributed to a contradictory stereotype of “Biddy” the Irish maid as simultaneously stupid and assertive. Irish female domestic servants developed a reputation for confronting their middle‑class employers, and they contributed their earnings heavily toward nation‑ alist organizations and the education of their daughters and nieces. The second generation, largely educated by nuns before entering teacher colleges and nursing schools, rose quickly into those pro‑ fessions. Their domination of public‑school teaching by the early twentieth century, as discussed by Tara M. McCarthy in her chapter in this volume, meant not only significant upward mobility but also a kind of “Irish Americanization” of immigrant children in the city’s public schools.5

Irish Americans in the Labor Movement Late‑nineteenth‑century labor and reform organizations owed a great deal to social movements in Ireland. Above all, most Irish came with a strong sense of community solidarity and, often, some experience in protest movements. At one end of the spectrum were the Molly Maguires, a group of anthracite miners with clear ties to violent secret societies in the Irish countryside. In New York City, Chicago, Pittsburgh, mining towns and cities in the West, and elsewhere, the Land League blended notions of land reform with union organization, usually in the form of Knights of Labor assemblies. The idea of the boycott, the tactic of leaving anyone who violated community solidarity “severely alone,” had roots in the Irish nationalist movement. Irish Land League activists used it against land‑ lords, their agents, and collaborating tenant farmers in the 1870s and the Land Wars of the 1880s, and immigrants subsequently brought the boycott to the American city and industrial town. It showed up in a Chicago streetcar strike in 1881 and in the New York and Jersey City freight handlers’ strikes the following year, and was soon embraced by unions throughout the AFL. Community sanctions were brought to bear on strikebreakers, struck employers, and tainted goods.6 311

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By the early twentieth century, the Irish had generated significant influence within the national AFL and in city labor federations across the country. Historian David Montgomery has found that the Irish held half of the 110 AFL union presidencies in 1910. Only Russian and East European Jews came anywhere near that level of leadership, and they were mostly concentrated in the needle trades. The Irish, it seemed, were everywhere. In 1920s Boston, 90 percent of the city’s 347 elected union offices were held by the Irish. Connections between municipal unions and city political machines undoubtedly strengthened the Irish influence.7 Irish‑American women played vital roles in the growth of the labor movement. When garment manufacturing took hold in the late nineteenth century, they became involved in the earliest organ‑ izing. David Montgomery has noted, for example, that until the 1909 “Uprising of Twenty Thousand,” led largely by Jewish women in New York City, virtually all of the prominent women activists in the Knights of Labor or AFL were Irish Americans. The women’s union in Chicago’s Union Stockyards originated in a club named for the nationalist women’s leader Maud Gonne, but the young women who organized it soon integrated Black, Polish, and other women into the new union. Here and elsewhere, vigorous women’s unions included not only garment and other factory workers, but also waitresses, scrub women, and public‑school teachers. Most of these efforts were led by Irish women. Important ag‑ itators included Agnes Nestor of the garment workers, Mary McDermott of the scrub women, Elizabeth Maloney of the waitresses, and Margaret Haley, Kate Kennedy, and Margaret Mahoney of the teachers. Boston’s Julia O’Connor established the first women’s local of the International Brotherhood of Elec‑ trical Workers among that city’s telephone operators. Irish workers, in concert with their middle‑class allies, launched the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) in Chicago, New York, and Boston.8

The Irish‑American Community on Strike The community solidarity so characteristic of Irish immigrants helps to explain this prominence in organizing and their behavior during strikes, which often took on the appearance of neighborhood risings. Concentrated in mining, the building industry, and on the railroads (all industries with high levels of strike activity), Irish workers could display both exclusionary and integrationist tendencies during the desperate strikes sustained by their communities. In Chicago, Irish women and children played prominent roles in crowd actions during the major strikes of the late nineteenth century: the 1877 Railroad Strike, the 1886 Eight‑Hour Movement, and the great Pullman Strike and Boycott of 1894. Here, as in other cities, Irish gangs mobilized to enforce pickets and attack strikebreakers. Chi‑ cago’s powerful teamsters’ union, the lynchpin of the city’s violent, early‑twentieth‑century “street strikes,” were led and largely populated by Irish Americans, although they also included Poles, Black people, and others. Irish butcher workmen reached out to Poles, Lithuanians, and Black workers to create a strong movement in the Union Stockyards between 1900 and 1904. Yet strikebreaking often led to ethnic and racial violence, as in the 1904 stockyards and 1905 teamsters’ conflicts. Strikebreak‑ ers came from various ethnic backgrounds in both these cases, but Black people were singled out as a “scab race” and subject to vicious attacks. It was the 1919 Race Riot that wrecked another promising interracial movement in the stockyards and undermined a 1921 strike there. Hostility between Irish and Black neighborhoods persisted through the interwar period, and labor did not effectively breach the color line in Chicago until the until the industrial union movements of the late 1930s and 1940s.9 In New York, Irish longshoremen reached out to Black and Italian dockers as early as an 1887 strike, but employers continued to introduce newcomers as strikebreakers over the decades, which led to recurrent tensions and violence. By the late 1890s, Italians had replaced the Irish on many docks in Brooklyn and parts of Manhattan. In the tightly packed dockside neighborhoods of Chelsea and the West Village, guarded Italian strikebreakers were attacked by crowds, which often included women and children. Women hurled all manner of objects from tenement windows, and crowds set 312

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upon the outsiders with clubs, hooks, and stones. The long history of conflict between Irish and Af‑ rican Americans had diverse origins, but these confrontations undoubtedly left a legacy of hostility.10 A Boston telephone strike exemplifies the strength and scope of the networks in Irish working‑class communities. Following their own successful strike in 1913, the largely Irish operators emerged as major players in the city’s WTUL, helping to organize scrub women and candy and garment factory workers. In the 1919 telephone strike, Boston policemen, who launched their own strike later that year, openly fraternized with the operators. When MIT undergraduates appeared as strikebreakers, Irish war veterans and operators attacked them, but the police did little to protect them. The telephone company only held out for five days.11

Irish Workers and the Exclusion of Others The Irish reaction to newcomers could be quite negative. They contributed extensively to the raciali‑ zation of Black and Chinese people and other immigrant workers throughout the nineteenth century, driving them off the docks and out of building sites, mobbing them during strikes, and by the early twentieth century, excluding them from craft unions. Initially living in close‑proximity to them in New York’s Five Points and other urban neighborhoods, the Irish fraternized with and even intermarried with Chinese and African Americans. Increasingly from the mid‑nineteenth century on, however, Irish workers turned on these workers of color. In New York, they made up a substantial portion of the mobs during the 1863 draft riots, attacking Black people on the streets and burning their institutions. On the West Coast, as Malcolm Campbell observes in his chapter in the present volume, Frank Roney, Den‑ nis Kearney, and other Irish immigrants were critical in forming and leading the Workingmen’s Party which spearheaded the drive for Asian immigration restriction and anti‑Chinese laws. Such intolerance is mainly explained by what Irish workers viewed as a threat to their wages and working conditions.12 As they settled into numerous niches in the urban labor market, the Irish excluded other newcom‑ ers in a variety of ways. On the docks and building sites of late nineteenth and early twentieth century New York, they attacked recent Italian immigrants and Blacks. Fights over work on the construction of subway tunnels were common. In the skilled trades all over the country, they employed apprentice‑ ship programs to “take care of their own.” Having entered heavy industry in a period of rapid expan‑ sion, they rose into skilled jobs and foreman and straw boss positions and were well‑placed to favor later Irish immigrants in the mines, on building sites, and in steel mills, meat packing plants, and other factory settings. In practice, of course, this meant excluding workers from other backgrounds. AFL unions supported immigration restriction throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and once the immigrants arrived, they insisted they were unorganizable, often against con‑ siderable evidence to the contrary. The AFL’s head organizer in New York refused to print leaflets in foreign languages. The immigrants, he said, “should be forced to learn English.”13

Irish Workers and the Creation of a Multiethnic Labor Movement There were alternatives. By the World War I era, mass production and mass immigration meant craft organization was increasingly unworkable, and the staggering racial and ethnic diversity in American industry meant that the Irish had to reach out to newer migrants in order to build an effective labor movement. In this situation, traditions of labor reform and labor and nationalist radicalism shaped a vital group of progressive Irish‑American organizers who pioneered a kind of “Americanization from the bottom, up” among the newer migrants. These forms of Americanism embraced free speech, inter‑ethnic solidarity, and the right to organize. Progressive elements like this thrived at the munici‑ pal level in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Detroit, and above all in Chicago where, for a moment, activists seemed to promise a way in which the remarkably diverse American working‑class population might 313

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come together as part of a transnational movement. The Chicago Federation of Labor and its presi‑ dent, John Fitzpatrick, led a remarkable burst of organizing in the open shop bastions of steel and meatpacking, sweeping thousands of immigrants and Black migrants—more than 40 distinct ethnic groups—into a progressive movement that embraced labor politics, international solidarity, and a militant strike movement. With William Z. Foster and other Irish‑American organizers, Fitzpatrick led the massive steel strike of 1919 by penetrating the nation’s ethnic communities and appealing to the burgeoning Black community. Employers crushed both of these efforts in the depression, racial conflict, and Red Scare of 1919 to 1922, but Fitzpatrick and Foster had demonstrated that it was in‑ deed possible to organize the masses of new immigrants who were populating American industry.14

Labor Politics Irish Americans are often thought of as a sort of conservative bulwark against socialist and independ‑ ent labor politics, and to a great extent this generalization holds true. There was, however, consider‑ ably more left‑wing influence in the AFL than is often appreciated. Some of the largest unions in the labor movement, including the mineworkers, the machinists, and the garment workers, all had strong socialist constituencies, but they were actively opposed by the secret Militia of Christ, a group that provided “an ideological antidote for socialism,” and whose leadership was overwhelmingly Irish. Much of the Church hierarchy also railed against socialism. and Catholic newspapers carried the message in English and numerous foreign languages. Writing in 1912, Boston’s William Cardinal O’Connell concluded, “There is not and cannot be a Catholic socialist.” Even at its strongest point in the early twentieth century, the Socialist Party of America never made great inroads in the Irish com‑ munities of American cities and industrial towns. In the massive industrial union and strike move‑ ments of the 1930s and postwar years, the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU), heavily influenced and led by Irish‑American priests and labor activists, represented the main opposition to communist influence in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).15 Why was the socialist movement so weak among the Irish? The Church’s influence is surely a big part of the answer. While the Socialist Party included a considerable number of Christians, these were largely from Protestant denominations, while the Communist Party projected a strong antagonism toward all organized religion. But another reason for the weakness of socialist organization among the Irish is almost too obvious. They represented the key leadership and core constituency for many of the largest and most successful urban political machines of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Ethnic networks and solidarity were certainly a factor. The machines’ reputa‑ tion for corruption and duplicity might be well earned, but most of them provided not only work and political influence, but often social and economic reforms and pro‑labor legislation and policies. In early‑twentieth‑century Chicago, the Irish‑educated reform mayor Edward Dunne led a progressive alliance that relied for support on the Chicago Teachers Union, Chicago Federation of Labor, and some of the city’s most famous middle‑class reformers. He went on to be a pro‑labor reform gover‑ nor. In New York, Tammany Hall eventually championed child and women’s labor laws, regulation of public utilities and banks, and workmen’s compensation. The machine slated committed reformers like Al Smith and Robert Wagner. Simply put, socialist organizations made little headway with the Irish because progressives convinced most Irish‑American workers that their interests were repre‑ sented by the urban machines, which collected their votes in exchange for patronage favors and jobs, and tended to sympathize with their unions.16 There were important exceptions, of course, in Ireland itself and in the United States. The republi‑ can tradition often reflected not only independence, but also a social and economic transformation for the island nation—from Michael Davitt’s land reform movement, through James Connolly’s Citizen’s Army and Irish Socialist Federation, to the left wing of the Irish Republican Army in the years of the 314

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revolution and long after. In the United States, a strong labor reform tradition embracing the Knights of Labor, the Land League, and Henry George’s Single Tax Movement extended throughout the late nineteenth century. Although the original Marxist organization, the International Workingmen’s Asso‑ ciation, was dominated by German immigrants, Irish Americans, including Peter J. McGuire, founder of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and the AFL, who is usually remembered as the father of Labor Day, and Joseph Patrick McDonnell, editor of the Marxist Labor Standard and a key figure in the New Jersey labor movement, were important leaders in the early American socialist movement. McDonnell helped to establish the Workingmen’s Party, the American affiliate of Marx’s First International. The key Irish labor and socialist leaders, James Connolly and James Larkin, both spent time organizing in the United States for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and other left‑wing groups. Connolly worked as an organizer for the Socialist Party and the IWW in New York City and elsewhere between 1903 and 1910, establishing the small Irish Socialist Federation and a paper, the Harp.17 The Church also had its radicals. Father Edward McGlynn, whom the New York Irish called Sogarth Aroon (the “good priest”), was part of the New York Academia, a group of liberal clerics in a conservative diocese. They supported not only labor organization and the poor, but also the plight of African Americans and recent Italian immigrants. McGlynn, who led a large working‑class parish in the Hell’s Kitchen slum, was central to Henry George’s movement and his 1886 mayoral campaign. A church concentrated among the poor, McGlynn argued, should take its lead from them. Excom‑ municated by New York’s conservative bishop, he refused to budge and after 75,000 marched in his support, he was reinstated. Visitors to tenement flats often found the priest’s image plastered to walls along with those of Jesus, the Virgin, and various saints. Father Thomas J. Hagerty became a labor activist among Mexican immigrant workers in the Southwest, where he began translating socialist lit‑ erature from German and French into English. He joined the Socialist Party and the American Labor Union, touring mining camps as a socialist speaker, and was suspended by his bishop for his efforts. Hagerty was a key organizer for the IWW from its foundation in 1905. Thus, socialist influence could appear even within the Church, but the hierarchy seldom tolerated it.18 Both the IWW and the Socialist Party had other important Irish leaders in the early twentieth century, and even the Communist movement claimed several key Irish Americans among its top leadership, including William Z. Foster, James Cannon, Jack Carney, and Eugene Dennis. Impor‑ tant local leaders like Chicago’s John Fitzpatrick worked with such radicals, projecting an alterna‑ tive to the conservative leadership of the AFL. The ACTU was anti‑communist but was essentially New Deal‑oriented in its practical politics. Among Irish‑American women radicals, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the Cork‑born organizer Mary “Mother” Jones are best remembered. Jones worked among miners in Appalachia and the Far West and was a founding member of the IWW in 1905, as Tara M. McCarthy notes in her chapter. Flynn developed as a brilliant soap box orator as a teenager on the streets of New York and became an organizer and leader of the IWW, the American Civil Liberties Union, and, later, the Communist Party USA. Leonora O’Reilly, who was steeped in Irish nationalism and culture, was perhaps more typical of her rebel generation. The child of free‑thinking Irish immi‑ grants, she had been a devout Catholic but left the Church as a teenager. She went to work in a shirt factory at age 11, joined the Knights of Labor and Henry George’s Social Reform Club in the 1890s, and the Socialist Party in 1910. She also joined the NAACP, helped to organize the New York branch of the Women’s Trade Union League, and worked with Jewish immigrant women in the “Uprising of the Twenty Thousand” and the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union. In the wake of the 1916 Easter Rebellion, she became active in the radical wing of Irish nationalism and helped to establish the Irish Progressive League and to promote the boycott of British goods.19 The relative weakness of socialism among Irish Americans did not mean that they eschewed the idea of independent labor politics. They were prominent in the “Workingmen’s Parties” and labor slates throughout the late nineteenth century, and they were instrumental in establishing thriving 315

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labor parties in the World War I era and the 1920s. In Illinois, John Fitzpatrick and the group around him in the Chicago Federation of Labor formed the Cook County Labor Party, the Labor Party of Il‑ linois, and later a national labor party. William Mahoney of St. Paul persisted in these efforts, helping to establish a national labor party and later, the Minnesota Farmer‑Labor Party.20

Labor and the Struggle for Independence Given the class composition of the Irish‑American population, and the continuing struggle for politi‑ cal independence in the home country, Irish nationalism was intertwined with working‑class life from its origins through the establishment of the Irish Republic and beyond. In the era of expansive class conflict in the late nineteenth century, it thrived among Irish‑American workers in cities and in min‑ ing and industrial towns where it often became closely associated with labor reform and radicalism. Many Irish workers opposed the imperialist adventures of this era and identified with the struggles of other colonized people. After declining briefly at the turn of the century, the movement enjoyed an enormous resurgence in the wake of the 1916 Easter Rebellion, paralleling the organizational and strike upsurge of the World War I years and the early 1920s. The Friends of Irish Freedom claimed a membership of 225,000 by 1920, based largely on working‑class members. The Chicago Federation of Labor and other groups within the AFL struggled to get the federation behind a boycott of British goods, and the small but influential Irish Progressive League, in tandem with the Socialist Party, sup‑ ported both national independence and the formation of a Workers’ Republic in Ireland.21 One of the most impressive cases of interracial cooperation occurred in a rare political conflict, the “Great Patriotic Strike” of August 1920, which started among Irish dockers in support of the Irish revolution. Italian longshoremen and British coal handlers joined the movement, and the stop‑ page spread to Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and other ports. Employers brought in hundreds of Black strikebreakers, but Irish representatives went up to Harlem to promise that Black union dockers would now be welcome on Chelsea’s “Irish piers.” Irish women marched with signs proclaiming “Ireland for the Irish, Africa for the Africans,” and the Black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey sent an emissary to appeal to the Black dockers to join the strike. Many joined what labor historian Bruce Nelson has called “a remarkably diverse line of march.” The strike was eventually defeated and the Irish reverted to their exclusionary tactics on some piers but Pier 60, the most “Irish” on the New York waterfront, remained open to Blacks from that point on.22 Many leaders and organizers of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) industrial unions of the 1930s and 1940s, which represented a genuine effort to build an interracial, interethnic move‑ ment, were Irish Americans. John Brophy, a veteran of progressive movements in the United Mine Workers, became the organization’s national director. Phil Murray, another miner, led the Steelwork‑ ers Organizing Committee which the labor radical Len DeCaux called “a Catholic Setup.” Joseph Curran led the Maritime Workers Union, Irish Republican Army veteran Mike Quill, the New York Transit Workers, and James Carrey and Albert Fitzgerald, the United Electrical Workers. Others led movements among rubber and auto workers. Labor priests like Bernard Shields in Chicago, Joseph Donnelly in New England, and John Corridan on the New York waterfront infused Irish‑American organizing with a strong moral element, and led the opposition to the Communist Party through the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists. The ACTU’s anti‑Communism can obscure its New Deal‑oriented politics and its aggressive pursuit of democratic labor organization and social reform.23

Conclusion Thus, labor market competition and the struggle to build unions led to conflict in workplaces and on the streets, but the Irish also played a vital role in integrating and acculturating later immigrants and migrants into labor settings. Strong networks based on the neighborhood and parish served the 316

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Irish well in the competition for jobs and urban space, while their placement in city jobs, the school room, and unions made them “gatekeepers,” restricting access to jobs, but also sometimes integrat‑ ing newcomers into urban life. Irish Americans played a disproportionate role in both the AFL and the CIO, and their influence there was shaped in part by the Catholic Church. Most held aloof from socialist politics and adhered to the Democratic urban machines, but they played an important role in independent labor politics throughout the late nineteenth century and early 1920s. The juxtaposition of conservative, exclusive but also progressive, integrationist tendencies is apparent throughout the history of the Irish‑American working class. In the first instance these leanings underlay efforts to keep work and union benefits for themselves and could even promote racist attitudes. In the second, Irish‑American radicals and rank‑and‑file leaders helped to create an inter‑ethnic labor movement by organizing and acculturating migrants. They sometimes acted to “Americanize” these newcomers from below. Both sides of the equation fundamentally shaped the labor history of the United States.

Notes 1 Barrett, The Irish Way, 109–110. 2 Barrett, “Gatekeepers and Americanizers”; Nelson, Divided We Stand, quote 18–19; Barrett, “Americani‑ zation from The Bottom Up.” For the Great Famine’s impact on Irish‑American culture, see chapters by ­Marguérite Corporaal, E. Moore Quinn and Cara Delay, and Mary C. Kelly in this volume. 3 Clark, “The Irish Ethic”; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, quote, 500–501; Barrett, The Irish Way, 113–127. See also Clark, “The Expansion.” 4 Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 499–500, 503; Erie, Rainbow’s End, 59–61, 243; Brundage, “Irish‑American Working Class.” 5 Barrett, The Irish Way, 122–130; Lynch‑Brennan, “The Ubiquitous Bridget,” 332–353. Danielle Phillips‑­ Cunningham discusses Irish‑American domestic servants in her chapter in this volume. 6 Kenny, Molly Maguires, 13–22; Kenny, “Labor and Labor Organizations,” 357–360; Brundage, “Irish Land and American Workers,” 46–67; Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, 109, 113–125; Gordon, “The Labor Boycott,” 184–229, quote, 192. 7 Montgomery, “The Irish and the American Labor Movement,” 206; Karson, American Labor Unions, 221–224; Ryan Beyond the Ballot Box, 147, n24. 8 Suellen Hoy, “The Irish Girls’ Rising”; Barrett, The Irish Way, 139, 142, Montgomery quoted, 139. 9 Montgomery, “Strikes in the Nineteenth Century”; Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle, 119–131; Tuttle, Race Riot, passim; Bates, The Ordeal in the Jungle. 10 Winslow, “Men of the Lumber Camps,” 80–81, 86–87; Joe Doyle, “Striking for Ireland,” 366–367. 11 Deutsch, Women and the City, 206, 211–212, 217–218; Norwood, Labor’s Flaming Youth, 169–198. 12 Anbinder, Five Points; Bernstein, The New York City; Saxton, Indispensable Enemy. On the racial status and racism among Irish immigrants, see Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness. 13 Barrett, The Irish Way, 117–122; quote, Interview with J.E. Roach, David J. Saposs Papers, Wisconsin Sate Historical Society; Lane, “American Unions, Mass Immigration”; Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 78–92; Asher, “Union Nativism,” 334–345. 14 O’Donnell, Irish Voice and American Labor, 143–161; Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle; Barrett, William Z. Foster, 81–101; Foster, The Great Steel Strike. 15 Murray, “Go Forth as a Missionary,” 1. On the relative weakness of the Socialist Party vote and membership among Irish Americans, see Marks, “Immigrant Support”; Leinenweber, “The Class and Ethnic Basis”; on the Militia of Christ, Karson, American Labor Unions, 233–245; O’Connell quote, 226; Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, 306–310, quote, 307; and on the ACTU, Seaton, Catholics and Radicals; Schatz, “American Labor.” 16 Drake, War for the Soul, Chapters 2 and 3; Buenker, Urban Liberalism; Wesser, A Response to Progressivism. 17 Lee, Modernization of Irish Society, 149–152; O’Connor, “James Larkin,” 183–196; Brundage, Irish Nation‑ alists in America, Chapters 5 and 6; O’Donnell, Irish Voice and American Labor, 117–141. 18 O’Donnell. Henry George; Montgomery, “Racism, Immigration,” 1266–1268; Flynn, I Speak My Own Piece, 31; Doherty, “Thomas J. Hagerty.” 19 Barrett, William Z. Foster; Palmer, James P. Cannon; Barrett, The Irish Way, 138–142; Bularzik, “The Bonds of Belonging.” 20 Fink, Workingman’s Democracy; Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America.

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James R. Barrett 21 Brundage, Irish Nationalists in America, Chapters 5, 6, 7; Nelson, Irish Nationalists, Chapter 8. 22 Doyle, “Striking for Ireland,” 357–373; Nelson, Irish Nationalists, Chapter 8; Nelson, Divided We Stand, 30–45, quotes, 37–38. 23 Nelson, Divided We Stand, 187–195, quote, 188; Brundage, “Irish‑American Working Class”; Schatz, “American Labor and the Catholic Church.”

Bibliography Anbinder, Tyler. Five Points: The 19th‑Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum. New York: Free Press, 2001. Asher, Robert. “Union Nativism and the Immigrant Response.” Labor History 23 (Summer 1982): 334–345. Barrett, James R. “Americanization from The Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the American Working Class, 1880–1930.” Journal of American History 79 (December 1992): 996–1020. Barrett, James R. “Gatekeepers and Americanizers: Irish‑American Workers and the Creation of a Multi‑­Ethnic Labor Movement.” In Frontiers of Labor: Comparative Histories of the United States and Australia, edited by Greg Patmore and Shelton Stromquist, 168-188. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018. Barrett, James R. The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multi‑Ethnic City. New York: Penguin Press, 2012. Barrett, James R. William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Barrett, James R. Work and Community in ‘The Jungle’: Chicago’s Packing House Workers, 1894–1922. ­Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Bates, David. The Ordeal in the Jungle: Race and the Chicago Federation of Labor, 1903–1922. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. Bernstein, Iver. The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance in American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Brundage, David T. “Irish Land and American Workers: Class and Ethnicity in Denver Colorado.” In “Struggle a Hard Battle”: Essays on Working‑Class Immigrants, edited by Dirk Hoerder, 46-67. DeKalb: Northern Il‑ linois University Press, 1986. Brundage, David T. Irish Nationalists in America: The Politics of Exile, 1798–1998. New York: Oxford Univer‑ sity Press, 2016. Brundage, David T. “The Irish‑American Working Class.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, americanhistory.oxfordre.com (October 2017). Bularzik, Mary J. “The Bonds of Belonging: Leonora O’Reilly and Social Reform.” Labor History 24 (Winter 1981): 60–83. Clark, Dennis, “The Expansion of the Public Sector and Irish Economic Development”. In Self‑Help in Urban America: Patterns of Immigrant Business Enterprise, edited by Scott Cummings, 177-187. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1980. Clark, Terry N. “The Irish Ethic and the Spirit of Patronage.” Ethnicity 2, no, 4 (December 1975): 305–359. Deutsch, Sarah. Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870–1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Doherty, Robert E. “Thomas J. Hagerty, the Church, and Socialism.” Labor History 3 (Winter 1962): 39–56. Doyle, Joe. “Striking for Ireland on the New York Docks.” In The New York Irish, edited by Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher, 357–373. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Erie, Steven. Rainbow’s End: Irish Americans and the Dilemmas of Machine Politics, 1840–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Fink, Leon. Workingman’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics. Urbana: University of Il‑ linois Press, 1983. Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley. I Speak My Own Piece: The Autobiography of the Rebel Girl. New York: Masses and Mainstream, 1955. Foster, William Z. The Great Steel Strike and Its Lessons. New York: Huebsch, 1920. Giordano Drake, Janine. War for the Soul of the Christian Nation: Socialism and American Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. Gordon, Michael. “The Labor Boycott in New York City, 1880–1886.” Labor History 16 (Spring, 1975): 184–229. Hoy, Suellen. “The Irish Girls’ Rising: Building the Women’s Labor Movement in Progressive‑Era Chicago.” Labor: Studies in Working‑Class History of the Americas 9, no. 1 (2012): 77–100.

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The Irish and Labor in the Industrial Era, 1880–1930s Karson, Marc. American Labor Unions and Politics. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958. Kenny, Kevin. “Labor and Labor Organizations.” In Making the Irish American (pp. 354–363), edited by J.J. Lee and Marion Casey. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Kenny, Kevin. Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Lane, A.T. “American Unions, Mass Immigration, and the Literacy Test, 1900–1917.” Labor History 25 (Winter 1984): 5–25. Lee, Joseph. The Modernization of Irish Society, 1848–1918. Dublin: Gill and McMillian, 1989. Leinenweber, Charles. “The Class and Ethnic Basis of New York City Socialism, 1904–1915.” Labor History 22 (1981): 31–56. Lynch‑Brennan, Margaret. “The Ubiquitous Bridget: Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in American, 1840–1930.” In Making the Irish American, edited by J.J. Lee and Marion Casey, 332-353. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Marks, Gary, and Matthew Burbank. “Immigrant Support for the American Socialist Party, 1912 and 1920.” Social Science History 14 (Summer 1990): 176–202. McKillen, Elizabeth. Chicago Labor and the Quest for a Democratic Diplomacy, 1914–1924. Ithaca, NY: ­Cornell University Press, 1995. McKillen, Elizabeth. Making the World Safe for Workers: Labor, the Left, and Wilsonian Internationalism. ­Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Miller, Kerby. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus in North America. New York: Oxford Uni‑ versity Press, 1985. Montgomery, David. The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American labor Activism, 1865–1925. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Montgomery, David. “The Irish and the American Labor Movement.” In Ireland and America, 1776–1976, ed‑ ited by David N. Doyle and Owen Dudley Edwards, 205-218. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. Murray, Damien. “‘Go Forth as a Missionary to Fight It’: Catholic Antisocialism and Irish‑American National‑ ism in Post‑World War I Boston.” Journal of American Ethnic History 28 (Summer 2009): 43–65. Nelson, Bruce. Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality. Princeton, NJ: Prince‑ ton University Press, 2001. Nelson, Bruce. Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Norwood, Stephen. Labor’s Flaming Youth: Telephone Operators and Labor Militancy 1878–1923. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. O’Connor, Emmet. “James Larkin in the United States, 1914–1923.” Journal of Contemporary History 37 (2002): 183–196. O’Donnell, Edward T. Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. O’Donnell, L.A. Irish Voice and American Labor: A Biographical Study. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. Palmer, Bryan D. James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890–1928. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso, 1999. Ryan, Dennis P. Beyond the Ballot Box: A Social History of the Boston Irish, 1845–1917. Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983. Saxton, Alexander. Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti‑Chinese Movement in California. Berkeley: Uni‑ versity of California Press, 1971. Schatz, Ronald. “American Labor and the Catholic Church, 1914–1950.” International Labor and Working‑Class History 20 (Fall 1981): 46–53. Schneirov, Richard. Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864–1897. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Seaton, Douglas P. Catholics and Radicals: The Association of Catholic Trace Unionists and the American La‑ bor Movement from Depression to Cold War. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1981. Tuttle, William J. Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919. New York: Atheneum, 1970. Weinstein, James. The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925. New York: Vintage, 1969. Winslow, Calvin. “Men of the Lumber Camps Come to Town: New York Longshoremen in the Strike of 1907.” In Waterfront Workers: New Perspectives on Race and Class, edited by Calvin Winslow, 62-96. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

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24 IRISH LABOR, LIBERTY, AND LITERATURE IN THE TWENTIETH‑ CENTURY ATLANTIC WORLD Maria McGarrity

The Jamaican social activist and reformer, Marcus Garvey, suggested several times that the green in his flag of the United Negro Improvement Association represented the “freedom of Ireland,” and he named his New York City headquarters “Liberty Hall” in homage to James Connolly’s center of operations in Dublin. Garvey repeatedly referred to the Irish struggle for independence in speeches from his head‑ quarters at Liberty Hall in New York. When the Irish Free State was established, Garvey sent a telegram to Arthur Griffith in Dublin on 11 December 1921, stating “[s]ix thousand of us assembled in Liberty Hall, New York, representing the four hundred million Negroes of the world, send you congratulations on your masterly achievement of partial independence for Ireland.” This essay will examine the intersec‑ tions between Ireland and the Caribbean in the Atlantic world of exchange of labor and equality through the literary works of Irish writer James Joyce and the Guyanese-born Caribbean writer Eric Walrond. Walrond reimagines the domestic spaces within Joyce’s short story, “The Boarding House,” from Dub‑ liners as an Atlantic‑world bordello in his story “The Palm Porch” in his collection, Tropic Death, set in the Panama Canal Zone. Both Joyce and Walrond intersect with Garvey as they engage issues of trans‑ nationalism, geographic zones of partition, the embodied commodification of butchery, and, as James Connolly would articulate, the “compromise bargain” of cultural liberation. This complicated network of influence surrounds Garvey, who ends up as the lynchpin between these four men. Garvey draws on Connolly explicitly in his construction of Liberty Hall and his rhetoric of cultural self‑determination just as Walrond, who writes for Garvey’s publications, draws on Joyce’s writing in his own. What Walrond’s reimagination of Joyce’s story makes clear, and what Connolly and Garvey also evince in their works, is that the price of liberation in fact moves beyond island partitions and continental divides. The larger comparative nexus reflects on an inclusive vision of what is termed “American” and includes not only the continent of North America but also the Caribbean and South America. The encounter with Irish‑ ness in these expansive locations thus highlights how the Irish cultural and political movement toward decolonization in the early twentieth century becomes a model for Caribbean activists and writers. This interchange also shows how definitions of what it means to be Irish American must engage with expan‑ sive, creolizing identities beyond the usual North American continent.1

Liberation and Print Culture Marcus Garvey’s admiration for James Connolly rests upon Connolly’s political advocacy for a free Ireland, the rights of workers, and the dream vision of a transnational labor movement. The 1916 DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-29

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Easter Rising and Connolly’s execution thereafter for his leadership had a profound effect on Garvey. He both admired the call to action and the willingness to take risks personally in the struggle for freedom. That Connolly did not live to see the Free State did not diminish the regard in which he was held. When the Free State was established in 1921, Garvey celebrated this as a critical moment for the decolonization movement across the British Empire. Garvey’s venture in advocating for both cultural emancipation and political liberation relies on the frameworks built around him, including, critically, the print culture of the early twentieth cen‑ tury. Garvey was apprenticed to a printer when he was a teenager in Jamaica and became a master printer by the age of 20. The Nobel prize winning St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott even alludes to Garvey himself as a print shop image, the device of a negative, in his epic verse novel, Omeros. Wal‑ cott writes, “his man a negative. An Adventist/he’s stuck on one glass that photograph of Garvey’s.” The negative is an inverse image used to transfer type in reverse form from a tray to sheets of paper. Garvey would go on as an adult not only to work as a printer, but in fact to become a publisher himself. He was particularly interested in the functioning as a printery of the original Liberty Hall, Connolly’s headquarters on the Dublin quayside that was destroyed during the Easter Rising. Con‑ nolly’s Liberty Hall was more than a mere meeting house: it served as the location where the docu‑ ment declaring the Rising was produced. The “Proclamation of the Irish Republic” was printed the evening of Easter Sunday into the early hours of Easter Monday on the presses of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU), commonly used to print the Workers’ Republic, at Liberty Hall on a “double Crown Wharfedale printing press” that Connolly purchased. The Proclamation had to be printed in two halves, Molloy [compositor] stating the ‘Brady’s [printer/ pressman] feat in joining the two halves was not inconsiderable.’ The Wharfedale was ‘so di‑ lapidated that parts had to be propped up with bricks, wrong fonts were pressed into service and new letters manufactured with sealing wax. When the Dublin Metropolitan Police raided the Hall on 9 May 1916 in search of the typeset for the Proclamation, they could not find a full page and thought the original was destroyed, but in fact, the half page of type discovered was all that was left because the other half had been disassembled to create the rest. It makes sense, then, that this was a touchstone for Garvey: the emancipatory potential of printing drove his publishing of newspapers and liberatory tracts. Garvey sought not merely to influence but to drive and ultimately lead the discussion for cultural and political independence in the African Diaspora. The centrality of the printing press at Liberty Hall for the Rising would naturally have excited Garvey.2

Garvey and the Irish in the Caribbean Garvey himself, born in Jamaica, would have been familiar with both the Irish presence in the Car‑ ibbean and the intersection between the Irish and Caribbean experience. The Irish occupied every social position possible in the wider Caribbean and in Jamaica itself. In Jamaica, these positions ranged from indentured servants to the Colonial Governor, Peter Brown Howe, the Marquess of Sligo. Garvey would also have been aware of the Irish presence on the island as overseers, as agents of slave holders, members of the island constabulary, members of the British army and navy, and even, though less common, as slave holders themselves. This complex history reflects Ireland’s wider and often complicit role in the efforts of European colonialism in the Americas. In the wider Caribbean, too, the Irish occupied virtually every social position. For example, the Irish were the dominant ethnic group in Montserrat for centuries. Even after the volcanic eruption in the late twentieth century destroyed most of island and left only a small portion habitable, the island 321

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still maintains and celebrates its legacies of Irish identity: the outline of a shamrock remains the identifiable passport stamp for entry. Yet, it is critical to remember that the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day on the island was and is not in allegiance necessarily with the Christian saint but rather serves as a remembrance of an early slave revolt, planned for St. Patrick’s Day to take advantage of the inebriated Irish overseers who were celebrating. This complexity of celebratory cultural positioning underscores how Garvey’s attempts at a nuanced identification with and understanding of the Irish attempts to throw off their colonial rulers have various iterations and multiple nuances that may not be overtly apparent.3

Connolly’s Rhetoric of Irish Slavery While Garvey’s admiration for Connolly may seem surprising today, given Connolly’s rhetoric of Irish slavery, this does not seem to have troubled Garvey. Connolly habitually defined the Irish in terms of enslavement. Scholars today are careful to distinguish indentured servitude from slavery; the former is for a set period and is not inheritable while the latter is eternal both for the enslaved person and all of their progeny. Connolly uses the rhetoric of slavery to highlight the brutal working conditions of the Irish and sometimes as a marker of fear of what might occur; he does not suggest that the Irish are literally owned by others. It is important to note that the Irish in the Caribbean were not themselves enslaved peoples. They were, however, indentured servants. While the rhetoric of Irish slavery has been a long one, and one that Connolly readily participated in, the historical record does not evince any material record of the Irish in the Caribbean having themselves or their offspring enslaved for life and as an inherited condition due to the color of their skin. As in the United States, the Irish were able to assimilate into the power structures of Caribbean society and the larger Atlantic world due to the privilege of their white skin. Connolly’s use of the rhetoric of Irish slavery does not appear to draw an equivalence between the Caribbean chattel slav‑ ery of an inherited social position based on skin color, but rather due to the brutal working conditions and material hardships of the impoverished Irish. The rhetoric of slavery in Connolly’s “Irish Linen Slaves of Belfast” speech in 1913, for example, like many of his other uses of the terminology, rests upon nineteenth‑century conceptions of the designation and is related not so much to race as to his advancement of transnational workers movements and the shared struggles of those whose labor is owned not by themselves but rather by their employers. In Connolly’s work, The Re‑Conquest of Ireland, he repeatedly invokes slavery and deploys a rhetoric of Irish slavery as a point of concern associated with the West Indies. In discussing the Cromwellian period, he notes: “In addition to this transplanting to Connacht, gangs of soldiery were despatched throughout Ireland to kidnap young boys and girls of tender years to be sold into slavery in the West Indies” [sic]. The West Indies operate as a location associated with forced labor. Connolly continues, When Sir William Petty coveted a piece of land, he but required to send a party of soldiers to hunt down the owners or occupants, ship them out to the West Indies as slaves, and lo! The trick was done. While this rhetoric is not unexpected given the time period in which Connolly is writing, it does sug‑ gest why a figure like Marcus Garvey would have been drawn to his arguments. Ireland serves as a colonial location that has achieved a degree of cultural freedom and quasi‑independence by 1922 in the Empire. Garvey understood that Ireland could be complicit in colonialism; nonetheless, he was drawn to Connolly despite his language of slavery because of the enduring struggle for and ultimate success of the Irish efforts to gain independence.4 322

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Labor in Contact Zones The contact zones that have historically functioned on the docks and quaysides of ports across the globe become particularly important in any discussion of Irish and Caribbean intersections when we envision the broad archipelagos across the Atlantic. People(s) have moved between and among Ireland, the Caribbean, the Canal Zone, and New York with a striking degree of frequency from the sixteenth to the twenty‑first centuries. The complexity of Irish identity in the Canal Zone and the United States is matched only by its dynamic fluidity. The Canal Zone was both an American colonial outpost and a culturally Caribbean location in the early twentieth century. The Canal Zone, created to shorten and ease transoceanic shipping lanes, becomes an apt nexus through which to examine the broader Irish intersections in the Western Hemisphere beyond the usual North American, mainly US, focus. The ports of the Canal Zone and the Atlantic become critical for an emerging labor movement that incorporates not only Irish Americans, but also African Americans and Caribbean Americans.5 Garvey plays a central role in this fusion of peoples in the strike and in his own Black Star Line endeavor. During Irish‑American “wildcat” strikes in August of 1920, organized by “the Friends of Irish Freedom” on the New York docks against British maritime companies, several hundred ­African‑American longshoremen joined in solidarity. The historian Joe Doyle asserts that “the deci‑ sion of African‑American longshoremen to join the strike appears to have been influenced by Marcus Garvey, an outspoken champion of Irish freedom.” Yet, the influence of Garvey seems to understate the case. Guterl argues that Garvey Personally sent a representative down to the docks that morning to encourage African Ameri‑ can support for the Irish. Irish American nationalists responded in kind, cheering the ‘Negro Longshoremen’ who struck with them, and later venturing into Harlem. Prominent Irish Americans … met with Garvey at the squat, brick‑faced headquarters of the UNIA, named Liberty Hall, that stood at 138th and Lennox Avenue. Once there, Gaelic activists promised financial support for the UNIA generally and for Garvey’s magnificent venture, the Black Star Line, specifically, and vowed that the causes of Irish and African liberation would forever be linked. Garvey’s Black Star shipping line was designed to allow people of African and African Diasporic identity to travel without encountering the discriminatory policies so common among the dominant European and American shipping lines of the day. It was also a model of African‑American self‑­ determination and economic activism, as this line was intended to travel between North America, the Caribbean, and Africa. Yet, ultimately, the line led to Garvey’s downfall. The FBI charged Garvey with mail fraud for having solicited through the US Postal Service for the sale of shares in a ship that the Black Star Line had not yet purchased in kind. The contact zones then, for Garvey and the work‑ ers on the docks on the ships, became such a threat to the American power structures that Garvey was forced to leave the United States.6 Garvey’s dedication to the cause of cultural and political liberation thus made him a threat to the social order both in the Canal Zone and the United States. According to Guterl, “No figure in the Afri‑ can American surge of postwar radicalism known as the New Negro Movement drew more powerful connections between anticolonialism in Ireland and the liberation of Africa than Marcus Garvey.” Garvey was a threat to the dominant power structures of Empire to both the British in Ireland and to the Americans in the Canal Zone. W.F. Elkins notes that The response of the American Government to the growth of Garveyism in the Panama Canal Zone, where thousands of British Afro‑West Indians worked…led to a successful campaign initiated by J. Edgar Hoover in the Department of Justice to have Garvey deported from the United States. 323

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Garvey’s advocacy of equality among peoples, as well as his rhetoric to throw off colonial oppres‑ sors, made him a threat to the status quo in the Canal Zone and in the United States. According to US Military Intelligence during the period, “Garvey appealed to the ‘racial instinct’ of Negroes… ‘by urging them to do like the Irish.’” Military Intelligence reported that one of Garvey’s “circulars” indicated that “The Irish… and all other oppressed peoples are getting together to demand from their oppressors Liberty, Justice, Equality, and we now call upon the four hundred million Negro people of the World to do likewise.” This suggests that Garvey’s endeavors for both cultural emancipation and the dissemination of liberatory tracts to some degree emerge through the influence of Connolly. Connolly’s efforts, though personally ended with his execution after the 1916 Rising, thus become a wider Atlantic inheritance and global view of the struggle for labor and freedom that relies upon the circulation of peoples and print culture. Garvey’s publishing endeavors mirror the essence of Connol‑ ly’s and offer African Americans and Caribbean Americans a means of identity construction—what Benedict Anderson might call an “imagined community” beyond national borders.7

Eric Walrond and James Joyce Walrond, like Garvey, was born in the Caribbean and moved to New York City. Both men even spent their later years in Europe. Walrond’s journey begins in Guyana, then British Guyana, and he moves to Barbados and then to the Panama Canal Zone, eventually working there as a writer and journalist. A writer for one of Garvey’s papers in New York City, Walrond would ultimately reject Garvey’s vision of an African homeplace for the peoples of the African diaspora as a fantasy vision. Nonethe‑ less, in his life he seems almost to shadow Garvey’s geographic movements. As Rampersad explains, Faithful to his Caribbean roots and his acute race consciousness… Walrond…threw in his lot with Garvey after landing a reporter’s job with his Weekly Review. He moved to Garvey’s popular weekly Negro World, where he became assistant then associate editor. However, his exposure to more cosmopolitan elements in New York cultural life led him away from Garvey. Walrond ultimately finds Garvey’s focus on Africa to be limiting. Whereas Garvey remained com‑ mitted to his project of a diasporic return to Africa and the centrality of African‑Caribbean identity for his work, Walrond moved between cultural zones and defied facile boundaries of identity and belonging. Michelle Stevens notes, In Walrond’s archipelagic Americas, transnational and transatlantic racial histories were the framework within which national histories of race were forged. Walrond’s … language repre‑ sented his attempt to look beyond the borders of modern nations and colonial territories to the lost “continent” of the New World, that prized object of European discovery and early moder‑ nity, that lay sunken underneath. Walrond’s short story collection, Tropic Death, employs a variety of settings for his stories. His understanding of location is broad and inclusive of the geographical zone that includes the Eng‑ lish‑speaking areas of Central and South America, and most importantly for this discussion, the Pan‑ ama Canal Zone.8 Published just a few years after the partitioning of the North of Ireland and the establishment of the Irish Free State, Walrond’s short story, “The Palm Porch,” from his 1926 collection Tropic Death, is a reimagination of James Joyce’s “The Boarding House,” from his 1914 collection Dubliners. The reimagination of Joyce’s Dublin tale in Walrond’s Atlantic world serves as a representative example of the connections between Ireland and the Caribbean through Walrond’s work for Garvey and his 324

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exposure to Garvey’s appreciation for Connolly. Walrond adapts Garvey’s esteem of Connolly and Ireland into his own approbation for Joyce and Ireland. In the introduction to Tropic Death, Arnold Rampersad explains Walrond’s magnificent if often overlooked story collection: “realism fuses with naturalism on one hand and with impressionism on the other; symbolism works its stabilizing func‑ tion; sentences break into fragments under the pressure of modernist psychology applied to folk consciousness; syntax, too, bends to accommodate the peculiar truths of Walrond’s unusual vision of Caribbean reality.” Walrond fuses the aesthetics of modernism with a kind a vernacular language and heightened globalized cognizance and cultural intersection. Akin to Garvey’s use of Connolly’s printing and circulation tactics to achieve liberation, Walrond is using Joyce’s modernist aesthetics within his own highly localized vernacular to create a narrative of personal emancipation.9 While the overall comparison between the Joyce and Walrond stories is already established in a co‑authored essay, “‘I’m a… Naughty Girl’: Prostitution and Outsider Women in Joyce and Wal‑ rond,” there remains a critical nexus between this twice‑told tale that remains to be examined in terms of the Atlantic world and the partition/dissection of colonial zones. Joyce’s story is set in the striving world of working‑class Dublin. The Mooney family has fallen in social respectability due to Mr. Mooney’s penchant for drink, the breakup of the marriage, and the loss of their Butcher shop. Operating a boarding house is one of the few options left for an uneducated woman to make a living and provide for her child. Framed as a compulsion to marry according to the social norms in the late Edwardian Dublin of the setting, where a girl who has been thought to be free with her attentions would have little opportunity for social respectability let alone advancement, the mother in the tale, Mrs. Mooney, creates a scenario in which Bob Doran, one of her lodgers, finds himself compelled to marry the daughter of the House, Polly. Yet, it is Polly, the daughter of Mrs. Mooney (who is herself a Butcher’s daughter) who is revealed to be the “meat” for sale in “The Boarding House.” In Joyce’s story, Polly has been prompted into an encouraged if not overtly forced marriage to guard her reputa‑ tion if not her already seeming lost virtue and what remains of the social standing of the house and family. The sex in Joyce’s story is hinted at, yet remains obscure; it seems highly suggestive of the casual form of prostitution that Clair Wills has identified during the period in Dublin. Yet, the fam‑ ily name has already been tarnished. Mrs. Mooney’s (called by Joyce “the Madam”) failed marriage to an alcoholic seems to presage that of Polly’s to Bob Doran (who will appear in Ulysses as a sad drunk and is conventionally understood in the masculinist Joycean critical canon to have been the somewhat innocent victim of Polly’s sexual advances). Polly’s encouraged if not forced marriage plays upon the “Naughty Girl” song in the opening of the story; she literally sings her availability in the house and for Doran.10 In Walrond’s story “The Palm Porch,” set in Colon, the port city of the Canal Zone’s Carib‑ bean side, all of Miss Buckner’s daughters are literally for sale in the bordello run by their mother. Miss Buckner’s quest is not merely to have her daughter’s earn money through sex work, but it is also to have them make good marriages. There is little distinction between the two in Walrond’s tale. In fact, for the daughters of “The Palm Porch,” potentially advantageous marriages become possible through their sex work. In Miss Bucker’s mind, a good marriage is defined by a racial caste system and money. Walrond borrows the framework of Joyce’s story but inverts the “naughtiness” invoked in the opening section of Joyce’s “The Boarding House” with Polly’s song and places it at the end of his tale in “The Palm Porch.” Walrond also switches both the placement, from beginning to end, with the reference and the gender of the naughty party, from feminine to masculine. Walrond writes, “It was butter in the Captain’s mouth, and Miss Buckner, at the door, viewing the end of a very stra‑ tegic quest, felt happy. The Captain, after all, was such a naughty boy!” Walrond picks up on both the food, butter, as oral emollient perhaps both social and literal, and as a metaphor of desire for and the sale of meat. The Captain, after all, will ultimately arrange to marry one of the daughters of “The Palm Porch.” Walrond makes the implicit bargaining for sex as a means of securing a kind of social 325

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respectability in Joyce’s story into an overt exchange of money for sex that leads to marriage and an escape from the bordello.11 Aside from the Captain, one of the central figures who seems to be competing as a possible match for one of the daughters in “The Palm Porch” is Tommy. Tommy is described as “His fire‑red hair was wet and bushy and rumpled. Black curses fell from his mouth. But six months in the tropics and the nights and the girls at the Palm Porch had overpowered him. Held him tight. Sent from Liverpool to the British Consulate at Colon, he had fallen for the languor of the seacoast, he had been seized by the magic glow of the Palm Porch.” Colon is the port city in Panama at the opening of the canal on its Caribbean side. While a quick analysis of Tommy would suggest Englishness, given his associa‑ tion with an English port city and the British Consulate, reading Walrond’s tale in the context of his clear usage of Joyce suggests in fact that the red‑haired lad sent from Liverpool is in fact operating as a displaced Irish figure, given the historic connections between that English city as a port of em‑ barkation for the Irish since the Famine era. Crucially, the city operates as a primary port of call for British ships engaged in the transatlantic slave trade, and although this trade was outlawed in 1807, the import of the port for British trade remains. During and after the Irish Famine from the mid‑1840s, peoples being transported to the Americas and beyond from this port were noticeably of Irish ex‑ traction. Tommy’s complicated Liverpudlian provenance becomes important because he serves as a symbol of the port of the Atlantic world contact zones so critical for Garvey. Tommy, then, would seem to operate as a figure of multiple identities and associated geographies. Tommy’s demise, as the figure who has lost himself to the languor and sexual fulfillment amid the Canal Zone and the Palm Porch bordello, comes with a quick cutting of a blade, courtesy of the madame, Miss Buckner. She dispatches the alcohol‑sodden Tommy like a slab of tenderized meat. Walrond describes Tommy’s clothes in terms of his ultimate end: “Only yesterday he had put on a gleaming white suit. Done by the Occupation, the starch on the edges of it made it dagger sharp.” Walrond’s re‑creation of Joyce’s story makes overt the cutting of Irish flesh amid an occupation for sale.12 Instead of the implied association in Joyce’s tale of the commodity of sex related to being a “butcher’s daughter,” Walrond highlights the transactional nature of exchange and the price of flesh cut to ascend the social hierarchies in an occupied colonial zone of domination where the flesh is cut just as the very continental hemisphere is severed irrevocably with the construction of the Panama Canal. What Walrond’s retelling of Joyce’s tale in “The Palm Porch” makes explicit as we read Irish literature from a more global, more broadly Atlantic lens is that Polly’s meat, her body, and the cut‑ ting of flesh of Mrs. Mooney, the “butcher’s daughter,” in “The Boarding House,” becomes sugges‑ tive of Ireland’s island‑scape. Walrond’s story, first published in 1925 in The New Negro anthology, is set in a time and place—the Canal Zone in the 1910s—that then becomes not only symbolic of the violent rupture between the North and South America with the construction of the Canal, but also seems suggestive of another colonial zone of domination torn asunder: the 1921 partition of the Republic and the North of Ireland. Irish writers, such as James Joyce, have long been encountering the fluid zone of the Atlantic world. For example, when Stephen Dedalus walks upon Sandymount Strand in the third chapter of Ulysses, he sees an empty bottle amid the flotsam and jetsam of the beach and terms Ireland an “isle of dreadful thirst.” This provocative moment continues: “Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze of dark cunning nets.” While this thought evokes Ireland’s complicated desires for the drink, Stephen’s pondering also suggests a potential intervention in the broader Atlantic and Ireland’s desires for, and entanglements with, fellow colonized peoples. Joyce’s depiction reveals Ireland’s enduring efforts to locate and connect with the other at home and abroad. In a passage in Finnegans Wake, Joyce contextualizes Garvey in terms of a sea passage and the Black Star steam‑ ship line, “when his steam was like a Raimbrandt round Mac Garvey.” Joyce transforms Garvey into a creolized, syncretic cultural figure, adding the “Mac” to his name in gesture of Celtic Caribbean 326

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connections. Yet, Joyce also acknowledges just moments later that “Irish eyes were smiling daggers down their [African peoples’] backs” thus highlighting the imperfect and unwelcoming intersection that figures of African descent often encountered. Joyce’s use of “dagger” offers an intertextual mo‑ ment, recalling both the butchery in his own “The Boarding House” and the stabbing murder in Wal‑ rond’s “The Palm Porch.” Joyce even seems to note Connolly’s Liberty Hall on the Dublin quayside, adjacent to the Customs House. He writes, “I’ll quit the doorstep of old Con Connolly’s residence! By the horn of twenty.” Symbolically then, the horn songs of Garvey’s steamships seem to be calling into the port of Joyce’s Dublin.13

Conclusion While it is evident what Connolly and the Irish Republican movement contributed to Garvey’s ideas about Black liberation, what is equally important to consider is how Garvey and the Caribbean might influence an increasingly globalized Ireland and reframe our understanding of Irish identity in the Americas. The Caribbean, an archipelago connecting continents, has functioned for half a millen‑ nium as a zone that incorporated not only African and European but also Asian and Latin-American cultures as well as indigenous peoples into its dynamic globalized modernity. In contrast, Ireland is too often seen and experienced as a monolithic and exclusive zone of singular identity. When we reimagine Ireland outside of its dominant relation with Britain and instead position her within the At‑ lantic world, we see not merely the “isla incognita” of territory, but more importantly the blue zones of current, wave, and depth that connect her with seemingly incongruous locations. The transnational cultural movement in the late twentieth century toward the celebration of creolization, a multiple and open form of identity, emerges first in the Caribbean. Creolization is in many ways more inclusive of multiple forms of identity formation; it moves beyond the conceptualizations of cultural hybridi‑ ties. Hybrid formations suggest the mixture of two elements to create a stable and fixed third form. Instead, creolization is an endless process of amalgamation to create dynamic, relentlessly evolving configurations. It seems apt that the Caribbean archipelago, volcanic (save for Barbados—a salt flat) emerges from the sea and remains necessarily dynamic. For centuries, the inhabitants of this island chain have learned to both acknowledge and embrace such open and inclusive cultural formations. According to Serpil Opperman, We should not think that its symbolic stories reduce the sea to a cultural signifier; rather, these stories are products of an imaginative impulse to visualize through poetic language ­terrestrial‑aquatic interactions and encounters. So, the stories of the sea matter as much as its materiality, and despite creating a problematizing tension in the sea discourse, these qualities are coextensive, provoking an investigation of how marine meanings are crafted and lived in a palpable sense between the natural and the cultural, and how they affect perceptual transforma‑ tions, ideological shifts, and amendments in knowledge production. The sea, then, becomes not merely a metaphor but a zone of engagement and connection. Its dynamic fluidity carries within it the means through which diversity and mutuality of dependence become man‑ ifest. Encountering the island‑scapes and terraqueous zone necessarily alienates one from territorial preoccupations. The ocean, this blue zone, commonly configured as empty space between territory, is instead the predominant mode of existence on the planet. It is not empty, but rather, filled with life.14 Ultimately, navigating these globalized currents through the comparison of Joyce and Walrond, Garvey and Connolly, suggests an increasing possibility to reimagine Ireland’s own vision of what might be called an Irish form of creolité. Framing Ireland within a Caribbean lens—a broader under‑ standing of what “America” and “Irish American” might mean—removes stark binaries that invite 327

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a reactionary posture with an eye on the big island across the Irish Sea. This comparative nexus of Garvey, Connolly, Joyce, and Walrond becomes indicative of the partition of islands and zones, the sale and reading of bodies, on the margins of the great Atlantic. It shows how these figures ruptured colonial networks of subjugation and created a contemporary vision that called for a transnational interchange nothing short of liberation.

Notes 1 While Guyana is geographically on the continent of South America, given its history and the legacy of its English language, it is categorized as a Caribbean cultural location. Hill, Marcus Garvey and Universal Ne‑ gro Improvement Association Papers, lxxvii; Gibson, James Joyce, 24. 2 Walcott, Omeros, 72; Devine, James Connolly, 43–47. 3 For a discussion of the St. Patrick’s Day slave revolt on Montserrat, see Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many‑Headed Hydra, 125–127. 4 Connolly, The Re‑Conquest of Ireland, 8; Connolly, The Re‑Conquest of Ireland, 8–9. 5 James Connolly moved his family to New York for several years, though he appears not to have ventured to the Caribbean. Garvey and Walrond also lived in New York and were more intrepid in a way as they ventured back and forth to the Caribbean and Europe. 6 Guterl, “The New Race Consciousness,” 326–327; Guterl, “The New Race Consciousness,” 327. 7 Guterl, “The New Race Consciousness,” 327; Elkins, “Marcus Garvey, the ‘Negro World,’” 64; Elkins, “Marcus Garvey, the ‘Negro World,’” 75; Elkins, “Marcus Garvey, the ‘Negro World,’” 75. 8 Rampersad, “Introduction,” 12–13; Stephens, “‘All Look Alike in Habana,’” 68. 9 Rampersad, “Introduction,” 15. 10 Parascandola and McGarrity, “‘I’m a… Naughty Girl’”; Wills, “Joyce, Prostitution, and the Colonial City,” 87; Joyce, “The Boarding House,” 62; Joyce, “The Boarding House,” 62. 11 Walrond, Tropic Death, 96. 12 This also potentially alludes to the British Foreign Office employing Irish in their foreign service such as Roger Casement, a man who is commented upon by Joyce in two of his novels, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Casement is notable for his development as a strong anti‑British colonial voice after seeing the exploitation of indigenous colonized people in the Congo and the Amazon’s Putumayo region. According to Francis Devine and Manus O’Riordan, “Britain falsely accused the Germans of cutting off the hands of Belgian children. These particularly false accusations nauseated Connolly all the more.” See Devine and O’Riordan, James Connolly, Liberty Hall & The 1916 Rising, 23. “Not only had such child mutilations never been ex‑ perienced by the Belgium, they in fact mirrored what Belgium itself had been inflicting on the people of the Congo. In his article ‘Belgian Rubber and Belgian Neutrality,’ Connolly expressed outrage at how quickly Britain had chosen to forget Roger Casement’s exposure, only a decade previously, of Belgian genocide against the Congolese.” See Connolly, “Belgian Rubber and Belgian Neutrality,” 23. James Connolly’s de‑ scription of the depiction of the Irish seems apt in terms of Tommy’s characterization. Connolly notes that “The English constituted delineators of Irish characteristics. The English slanderer lowered Irishmen in the eyes of the world, but his Irish middle‑class teachers and writers lowered him in his own eyes by extolling as an Irish virtue every sycophantic vice begotten of generations of slavery.” See Connolly, Labor in Irish History, xvii; Walrond, Tropic Death, 94–95; Kelly, “Irish Migration to Liverpool and Lancashire in the Nineteenth Century”; Walrond, Tropic Death, 94 (emphasis added). 13 Joyce, Ulysses, 3.153–154; Joyce, Ulysses, 3.153–154 (emphasis added); Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 176.18; Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 176.22–23 (emphasis added); Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 456.36–457.1). 14 Walcott, 51; Opperman, “Storied Sea and Living Metaphors in the Blue Humanities,” 450.

Bibliography Primary Sources Connolly, James. “Belgian Rubber and Belgian Neutrality.” Irish Worker, November 14, 1914. Joyce, James. Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes, edited by Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. Rev. ed. New Yok: Penguin, 1996 [1914]. Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. Introduction by John Bishop. New York: Penguin, 1999 [1939].

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Irish Labor, Liberty, Literature in the Twentieth-Century World Joyce, James. Ulysses: The Corrected Text, edited by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus ­Melchior. New York: Random House, 1986 [1922]. Walcott, Derek. Omeros. London: Faber & Faber, 1992. Walrond, Eric. Tropic Death. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013 [1926].

Secondary Sources Connolly, James. Labor in Irish History. Belfast: Citizens Press, 2016. Connolly, James. The Re‑Conquest of Ireland. Belfast: Connolly Publications Aras Ui Chonghaile, no date. Devine, Francis, and Manus O’Riordan. James Connolly, Liberty Hall & the 1916 Rising. Dublin: Irish Labor History Society, 2006. Elkins, W.F. “Marcus Garvey, the Negro World, and the British West Indies: 1919–1920.” Science & Society 36, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 63–77. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40401615. Garvey, Marcus. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Vol. 1, edited by Robert A. Hill. Oakland: The University of California Press, 1983. Gibson, Andrew. James Joyce. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. Guterl, Matthew Pratt. “The New Race Consciousness: Race, Nation, and Empire in American Culture, 1910– 1925.” Journal of World History 10, no. 2 (November 1999): 307–352. Kelly, Laura. “Irish Migration to Liverpool and Lancashire in the Nineteenth Century.” Accessed September 11, 2023. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/chm/outreach/migration/backgroundreading/migration Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. The Many‑Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000. Opperman, Serpil. “Storied Sea and Living Metaphors in the Blue Humanities.” Configurations 27, no. 4 (Fall 2019): 443–461. https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2019.0030. Parascandola, Louis and Maria McGarrity. “‘I’m a… Naughty Girl’: Prostitution and Outsider Women in James Joyce’s ‘The Boarding House’ and Eric Walrond’s ‘The Palm Porch.’” College Language Association Jour‑ nal 50, no. 2 (December 2006): 141–161. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44325361 Rampersad, Arnold. Introduction to Tropic Death, 10–18. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. Stephens, Michelle A. “‘All Look Alike in Habana’: Archaeologies of Blackness across Eric Walrond’s Archi‑ pelago.” In Eric Walrond: The Critical Heritage, edited by Louis J. Parascandola and Carl A. Wade, 57–72. Mona: The University of the West Indies Press, 2012. Walcott, Derek. “Isla Incognita.” In Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture, edited by Elizabeth M. de Loughrey, Renée K. Gosson, and George B. Handley, 51–58. Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 2006. Wills, Clair. “Joyce, Prostitution, and the Colonial City.” South Atlantic Quarterly 95, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 79–95. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876‑95‑1‑79

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PART 5

After World War II

25 THE IRISH AND THE IMMIGRATION AND NATIONALITY ACT OF 1965 Ray O’Hanlon

It was the high‑water mark for the Irish of America, though if literally water it would have been ice. The presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy, on January 20, 1961, took place in a frigid Wash‑ ington, DC. The weather did not matter for millions of Irish Americans. Regardless of party affilia‑ tion, this was an occasion for pride, for warm hearts. It was also a moment to savor, an opportunity for reaffirmation. In its past, much of America had rejected Irish immigrants. They had done so, at times violently, for years, decades, centuries. Kennedy’s triumph was one for the Irish team, a blow against history’s nativists, Know Nothings, and Brahmin bigots. It would take just four years and nine months for the high‑water mark to turn into an ebb tide1. On October 3, 1965, JFK’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, signed the Immigration and Nationality Act into law on Liberty Island in New York Harbor. The weather was pleasant, though the wind was strong enough to make the waters fronting New York City and New Jersey a tad choppy. For the Irish, for their story of immigration, survival, and ultimate arrival in the upper tiers of American society and political life, the new law would be akin to a legislative tsunami. It would strike not only at the numbers of Irish immigrants legally arriving in America, but at the pride America’s Irish felt about themselves and their role in building a new country, a country that would loudly pro‑ claim itself the greatest in human history. The act that bore LBJ’s moniker was not intended to close America’s door to the Irish, or to any other nationality. But it would have unintended consequences. The new emphasis in immigration law on family unification would not match the nature of Irish im‑ migration, which, by the second half of the twentieth century, was comprised mostly of individuals. It was a case of a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. Legal Irish immigration would be reduced to a trickle, but two decades later the Irish would arrive in numbers again and, in defiance of the law, they would stay beyond the limits of their visitor visas. The result would be tens of thousands of undocumented Irish spread across the 50 states. And with this new phenomenon of the undocumented/illegal Irish there would be shame and anger in the established Irish immigrant community, and the even more deeply rooted component of the United States known as Irish America. Simply put, the Irish had bled for America. And they were not shy about reminding themselves, and anyone else who cared to listen, that they had bled profusely. So it was not surprising that a closing American door would cause unease, indeed anger. The Irish had built America. They were not shy when it came to making that claim either. Of course, people from all over the world bled for America and forged a continent into a nation state. Every ethnic and racial group has its own story, its own mythology. But it being America, those who shout loudest tend to be 333

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heard the most. With between 30 and 40 million Americans claiming some degree of connection to Ireland, the Irish have no problem being heard.

A Cold Reception in the Nineteenth Century Numbers helped amid the clamor that was the growing United States of the nineteenth century and the years following the Great Hunger in Ireland. As historian Terry Golway notes in Irish Rebel, his biography of Fenian John Devoy, the Irish would absorb just about everything thrown at them by hostile nativists by dint of sheer numbers. In 1871, when Devoy landed in New York, and as Golway points out, the population of the city was approaching one million. Of this total, 20 percent had been born in Ireland, while 37 percent could lay claim to at least one Irish‑born parent. “So Gaelic was this Anglo‑Dutch city that one of its leading newspapers referred to the metropolis as ‘New Cork,’ after Ireland’s second largest city,” writes Golway. And so Catholic was the mass of immigrants that an editorial in the New York Times wondered ‘How Long Will Protestants Endure?’ It was a fair question: in 1840 New York was 64 percent native‑born and predominantly Protestant, and by the time of Devoy’s arrival, it was 47 per cent foreign‑born and, stunningly, 50 percent Catholic. Such numbers, according to Golway, “repulsed the city’s middle classes, who believed they were losing their city to feckless foreigners who brought with them alien customs, terrible diseases and a despised religion.”2 Those middle‑class north easterners were indeed repulsed, to the point of placing, or attempting to place, legal barriers in the way of the teeming masses of Irish spilling off ships. If the story of the Irish in America, from the opening of the nineteenth century to its closing, was indeed met with revulsion by many “natives;” if the Irish experienced innumerable instances of rejection; and if it seemed at times that they were not only on the back foot, but in actual retreat in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, the broader truth of the matter was that the retreat never amounted to much more than the tactical variety. The migration of the Irish westward across the Atlantic would be the largest human wave from a single country to reach the shores of America in the century that trans‑ formed a post‑colonial fledgling nation into a global power. That migration of the mid‑nineteenth century resulted from an end to an old Ireland. But that end would spark the birth of modern Irish America and ensure that, in the twentieth century, the Irish would, as previously stated, comprise the second largest European ethnic group in the US, second only to the Germans. As the twentieth century dawned, the Irish found themselves spread all over a continental‑sized nation, from Maine to California, and from Alaska to Florida. Irish political power in a number of big cities had been consolidated, and there was a growing acceptance of Irish culture and aspects of Catholicism that could be traced back to Ireland. Acceptance was not always freely offered, but it was hard to argue with an Irish population that was now reaching into the millions. The new century witnessed brakes on broad‑based inward migration, however. World Wars, economic depression, and more restrictive legislation coming out of Washington would see a gradual drop off in the number of Irish arrivals, very often single women and men rather than larger family groups. Most of the Irish arrivals were from rural parts of the island, often from farming families with significant numbers of children. One family member, typically a son, would inherit the farm. The farm could support some family members, but not all. So, sons and daughters would pack their suitcases and follow familiar paths to other lands, most especially England and America. By the 1950s, with harsh economic con‑ ditions prevailing in Ireland and growing demand for labor in an economically expanding United States, the Irish, and those Americans identifying themselves as primarily Irish in origin, continued 334

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to grow as a percentage of the overall US population. Helping this advance, and despite restrictions rooted in legislation from the 1920s, would be an immigration quota system that heavily favored northwestern Europe and the 32,000‑square mile island on its western edge. Out of favor were Arab, Asian, and African countries and regions. America being a competitive political and social environment, much emphasis has traditionally been placed on ethnic, religious, and racial blocs. The Irish of America, what is typically described as “Irish America,” is mostly Caucasian and Catholic. It has a significant Protestant component made up of the descendants of eighteenth‑century Scots‑Irish immigrants, as discussed in earlier chapters in this volume. Until recent times, Ireland was an island that was almost entirely white in terms of its inhabitants. But inward immigration from Africa, most notably Nigeria, has brought about significant changes. By the beginning of the 2020s, an estimated 17 percent of the population of the Republic of Ireland were born outside of its 26 counties. Some African Americans can lay claim to partial Irish descent. Two notables in this category, each with a single ancestral line back to the island, have been the late Muhammad Ali and former President Barack Obama. The quota system was still in operation across the ocean and Irish were still migrating westward across it, but the great 1950s surge had sharply tailed off by the time that the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act became the law of the land. By the mid‑1960s, the annual immigrant number totals were now consistently falling short of Ireland’s yearly quota, and those unused quota visas were not transferable. Meanwhile, other countries—Poland, Italy, and Greece to name but three—had far smaller quotas than Ireland, yet huge numbers of people who had applied for US residence were being held back in waiting lines that would take years to process. The pressure for changes in US law had built up noticeably during the late 1950s. But the reformers were battling deeply entrenched views.

Immigration Legislation Before 1965 The 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act had added new cement to the quota system wall, so much so that President Harry Truman had attempted, unsuccessfully, to kill it with a veto. “The idea behind this discriminatory policy was, to put it boldly,” Truman complained, That Americans with English or Irish names were better people and better citizens than Ameri‑ cans with Italian or Greek or Polish names. Through this bill we say to their people: You are less worthy to come to this country than Englishmen or Irishmen. The soon‑to‑be greatest living hero of the Irish everywhere, John F. Kennedy, agreed with Truman. Kennedy’s pre‑White House congressional activities included a 1957 amendment which allowed for family reunification without reference to national origin. By the decade’s end, the quota system was seen by JFK and others to be entirely inadequate when it came to dealing with divided families, sur‑ vivors of natural disasters, and, perhaps most importantly in the context of the day, refugees fleeing political oppression, not least that imposed by Washington’s bête noire: Communism. Kennedy’s vi‑ sion for a new system of immigration was outlined in his 1958 book, A Nation of Immigrants, which he penned while he was still in the US Senate. To Kennedy, it seemed only logical and fair. The times had absolutely changed, and Cold War America had to base its intake of newcomers on entirely new criteria. The new criteria would not be favorable to Ireland as it was included in the now out of favor national quota system.3 On July 23, 1963, four months before his death, Kennedy submitted to the 88th Congress propos‑ als for “revising and modernizing our immigration law.” This entailed elimination of the national quota system after a five‑year phase‑out period. President Johnson, during his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, took up where his late predecessor had already been. 335

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“In establishing preferences,” said LBJ, “a nation that was built by immigrants of all lands can ask those who now seek admission: ‘What can you do for your country?’ But we should not be asking: ‘In what country were you born?’” Irish Americans were prominent in the subsequent congressional debate. At first glance, the idea of family reunification seemed to pose no threat to Irish immigration as long as the Irish kept coming in numbers. The chief advocates for the emerging bill in the Senate were Senator Philip Hart and the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Congressman Michael Feighan. The latter had problems with some aspects of the new bill but was not opposed to the elimi‑ nation of the national quota system. When the dead president’s legislative legacy was first submitted for congressional debate, the acting Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee was for just about every last word. That acting Chairman was Senator Edward Kennedy.4 It would fall heavily on the youngest Kennedy brother to ensure that JFK’s views, as expressed in A Nation of Immigrants, found meaning in new laws. By virtue of his growing skills as a weaver of bipartisan deals, the brother would not fail in this task. As the bill was being debated in 1965, Kennedy, as Senate floor leader with responsibility for presiding over the bill’s amend‑ ments, gave advance notice of his talents as a broker of compromise. As with all legislation, the bill that finally emerged was indeed a compromise arrangement, or an arrangement of compro‑ mises, depending on one’s point of view. The bill not only did away with national quotas, but it also introduced a controversial ceiling on migration from the western hemisphere. Against such broad ranging change, Ireland looked like a dot in the ocean. A far smaller dot was Liberty Island in New York Harbor.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 On that pleasant early fall day, President Lyndon Johnson sat at the carefully situated desk on Lib‑ erty Island with the towers of lower Manhattan as an impressive backdrop. The location had been purposely chosen for Johnson’s signing of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. To Johnson’s left stood Ted and Bobby Kennedy, witnesses to the enactment of a new chapter of America’s great immigration story, one that had been crafted in the mind of their slain brother, the 35th president. That new chapter, politicians of every stripe had promised voters, would not change America a whit. Yes, family reunification would replace national quotas as the guiding principle of admission to the United States. But the same kind of people would make the journey from familiar foreign lands. It would not work out that way. The 1965 Act was grounded in the spirit of the times. It was as morally persuasive as a political action could be. But it would have unintended consequences, not least for the Irish, still America’s second largest European ethnic group after the Germans.5 Those unintended consequences starkly presented themselves less than three years after the Lib‑ erty Island signing ceremony. The 1965 Act had a three‑year lead‑in period. By the summer of 1968, the Act was taking full effect. In July of that year, the number of visas issued by the US Embassy in Dublin amounted to precisely zero. Some Irish‑American politicians were appalled by this. Some had even offered the Irish government a special visa package attached to the 1965 Act. Irish America, out‑ side the inner political realm, reacted by forming a lobby group, the American Irish National Immi‑ gration Committee (AINIC), to fight for Irish visas in Congress. In the waning days of January 1969, members of AINIC gathered at the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago to plan a course of action aimed at securing those visas. Similar scenes would be played out in other US cities 20 years later, and indeed thirty and forty years on. But while the calls for greater Irish access to the American Dream would draw media attention and inspire some congressional sympathy in 1989 and 2009, the 1969 Hilton gathering took place at a moment in time when an Irish call for a wider American immigration door seemed at odds with an American landscape that looked, in certain ways, as Irish as any part of the island 3,000 miles to the north east of the Statue of Liberty.6 336

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The year 1969 would see out a decade when the Irish of America had scaled seemingly impossible heights. At its opening, the first Irish Catholic president was elected. At its closing, two of the three crew members on board Apollo 11 could claim some degree of Irish ancestry. So, what had the AINIC members so riled up at a time of year when even damp Ireland seemed a warmer prospect than frigid Chicago? Simply put, a group of American Irish and their Irish‑born cousins were feeling discriminated against, marginalized, and shut out. It was not easy to get this mes‑ sage across—not in the context of the Vietnam War and Watts Riots. Not in the America of Kent State, Bull Connor, and Love Canal. There were a lot of problems, issues, and anxieties. A lack of visas for the Irish did not seem to rank at the top of them. It was not even close. Why did the American Irish National Immigration Committee form? Why was there such a meeting in a city that had so recently witnessed a Democratic Party convention, which had morphed into a tear‑gassed metaphor for a coun‑ try deeply divided? And if so divided, why the need for more Irish, more outsiders, more immigrants? In the answers to these questions, however, lay the very essence of the United States and its fa‑ bled dream. No matter how bad things were in America, there would be people in other lands who would leave everything behind for a chance to live in one of its 50 states. The Irish were no different. When they imagined America, they could draw on a version of the place that was itself Irish. Every new Irish immigrant had the luxury of experiencing both a push and pull effect. But by 1969, it was becoming more difficult to observe this phenomenon. That is because it was hard to spot the Irish newcomers. There were hardly any of them about. The reason for this was a combination with both a positive side and a negative one. By the end of the 1960s, economic activity on the divided island of Ireland was beginning to show the kind of vibrancy that had been elusive for centuries. This belated development would mean that fewer would have to emigrate. But fewer was not all. Many Irish were still being pushed and pulled and, as it was for countless of their ancestors, the 1960s Irish felt the strongest social and economic pull coming from the United States of America. Then it happened. In the middle of the decade, in 1965, the boom came down: a golden door was slammed shut, a flow of people stretching back centuries stanched. In place of the Irish and other northwest Europeans, others from around the world cross America’s threshold. As Carl J. Bon Tempo and Hasia R. Diner note in Immigration: An American History, in the final decades of the twentieth century, and following 1965, “Asia, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean became the major sources of newcomers to the United States, surpassing Europe.”7

The Impact of the 1965 Act on the Irish The 1965 Immigration Reform and Nationality Act would advance the process of flow reduction to the point that Irish immigration to America would almost completely dry up. In fiscal 1965, the Irish secured 5,378 visas, a number actually well below their quota allowance. In the following year, the total fell to 3,071. It dropped further to 2,665 in 1967 and rose slightly to 3,619 in fiscal 1968. In 1969, the year AINIC members huddled in Chicago, the bottom began to fall out. What was coming down the pike was clearly discernible as that final year of the 1960s opened and was a verifiable statistic at its close. Between July and December of that year, the number of US visas obtained by Irish im‑ migrants was all of 60. In later years, Ted Kennedy would acknowledge the unintended consequences that the Act would have for the Irish, telling Irish America magazine in a 1997 interview that the 1965 act “worked in a way we never predicted” and had “put restrictions on nations like Ireland.” A total of 60 visas in six months matched Kennedy’s assessment perfectly. It was such a low figure that many Irish and Irish Americans were certain that it had to be, somehow, unintended, a mistake. Whether or not it was unintended, it was inarguably a significant consequence for the Irish who failed to make the lucky 60. The 1960s was a tumultuous decade for many reasons. The end of meaningful Irish migra‑ tion to America was not one of the bigger headlines from those ten years of the 1960s. Far from it.8 337

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For the Irish, however, the negative consequences of immigration reform at the decade’s mid‑point would reach far into the future, reaching deep down into the collective Irish and Irish‑American psy‑ che. And the headlines, over time, would indeed grow steadily bigger. AINIC, principally led by a New York judge John Collins, and a Catholic priest, Fr. Donald O’Callaghan, had been able to go into battle sure of one thing: it could speak for millions of Irish Americans. The inflow of Irish immigrants might have been stopped, but the die had long been cast when it came to the significant social reality that was Irish America. Added to this, the committee could point to the centuries of Irish contribution to the creation and expansion of the United States. There would be many sympathetic ears on Capitol Hill, but there was no doubt that America had entered a new phase in its life as a nation of immigrants. Sentiment and the past counted less than present political reality and future ambition. Nevertheless, despite the screeching halt to legal inflow that would be brought about by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, Irish America, as a self‑proclaimed portion of the overall US popu‑ lation, would numerically peak in the 1980 and 1990 US censuses, a double take that gave birth to 44 million Americans claiming Irish ancestry as their primary origin. Since 1990, the estimate of the number of Americans claiming at least some Irish heritage has fluctuated. It has inhabited a space roughly defined by that 44 million at the top, and down to the low to middle thirties. If the 1990 es‑ timate was accurate, and the national population has continued to rise with each passing year, why are lower numbers being cited than the 44 million? That is because there is a fair bit of subjectivity in the entire matter of denoting one’s ancestry in a census take, a pen and ink process that does not come with a DNA test kit. Forty‑four million was Irish America’s high water mark. But like a tide, that number would retreat. The number of Americans identifying themselves as Irish American had declined sharply when the US Census Bureau revealed details of the 2000 Census. Thirty million Americans listed “Irish” or “Celtic” as an ancestral identity in that national count.9 The story behind the number here was both a long one and a short one, literally. Long and short ver‑ sions of the census form were distributed by the Census Bureau for the 2000 count. One in six house‑ holds received the long form while everyone else got the short version. The 2000 census concentrated on breaking down the backgrounds of Hispanics, Asians, and Pacific Islanders. Absent was a category for Euro‑Americans. The 44 million peak was a result of census forms that allowed for a significant de‑ gree of choice when it came to ethnic or racial self‑identification. The number was reached by combin‑ ing responses from Americans who considered their ancestry to be either “Irish” or “Scots Irish.” The “Irish” total was 39 million, with the “Scots Irish” pulling the number up to 44 million. The 1990 Cen‑ sus was so generous with its questions that it even allowed for respondents to fill in a separate category for being simply Scottish American with no Irish ingredient at all. There were over five million respond‑ ents in that category. The 2000 census, which was drawn from information supplied by respondents in answer to both those short and long forms, did not ask the kind of detailed questions regarding ethnicity as the previous two census tallies. However, one trend did emerge strongly from the 2000 calculations. More people were inclined to simply call themselves “American.” The effect of this was an apparent reduction in the number of people citing ties, not just to Ireland, but also to Germany, England, and other countries. So, the 44 million were still out there, but many of them were apparently in hiding, or felt so assimilated that they confined national self‑identification to that one word description: “American.” The 2010 Census resulted in a tally released by the Census Bureau amounting to 34.7 million Irish, or roughly 11.2 percent of the total US population. An additional 3.25 million described them‑ selves as Scotch Irish, so the combined total came close to 38 million. (The Census Bureau, over the years, has used both terms “Scotch” and “Scots” Irish). This was still impressive, but also yet another example of the roller coaster ride for the estimate of Irish America’s size. The 2020 Census return would reflect this with an uptick—an Irish total of 38,597,428. All this sustained “Irishness” has been despite decades of declining legal Irish immigration as a result of the increasingly reviled 1965 act. Inevitably, there would be a response to the perceived ills contained in that legislation. 338

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The year 1965 in the Crosshairs In an October 1986 editorial entitled “No Irish Need Apply,” Irish America magazine fired one of the first salvos at post‑1965 US immigration law as most of the Irish arrivals at that time were heading, inexorably, for undocumented status after the six legally permitted months on US soil. The law facing these “new Irish” was quite simply “a disgrace,” the editorial stated. The same issue also cast light on a long suspected but largely unseen hand in the perceived origins of this disgrace, the 1965 Act. In an interview with House Speaker Tip O’Neill, the veteran Massachusetts legislator recalled that as the debate over immigration reform had reached a climax more than 20 years previously, the then Irish ambassador in Washington (O’Neill could not actually recall his name during the interview but it was William Fay) had paid visits to the leading Irish‑American politicians on Capitol Hill urging them to vote in favor of the measure.10 The idea behind this ploy was noble enough in intent, at least from the Irish government’s perspec‑ tive. “Let me tell you about that bill,” said O’Neill. “The Irish ambassador came around to our offices and asked us to vote for that bill because there was a tremendous brain drain out of Ireland and they wanted to stop it. That’s why we voted for it. I can remember people in my neighborhood coming up to me, saying furiously they wanted cousins and relatives to come over here. And I told them, ‘Listen we’re doing this because we have been asked by the Irish government to help stop the brain drain.’ It would subsequently come to light that the Sean Lemass‑led Irish government had also opposed a special exemption for the Irish to be built into the ’65 Act, something that several Irish‑American political leaders, Senator Ted Kennedy among them, had drawn up. Two decades on, in Irish America magazine’s view, this had been entirely the wrong approach. The magazine opined that the Lemass government had been “short‑sighted in the extreme,” that Irish citizens had been held back for “an‑all‑too temporary economic renaissance,” and that the Irish government, “with the subtlety of a sledgehammer and no thought for future generations,” had “actually acquiesced in the closing of the American frontier, perhaps forever, to their own people.”11 At first glance, it looked as if any action prompted by such an editorial might be a replica of what had occurred during the campaign by the American Irish National Immigration Committee in the 1960s and 1970s: in other words, another all‑out drive against the 1965 Act’s consequences for the Irish, intended or otherwise. But there were, by the 1980s, other forces in play. After decades of in‑ dependence, the economy in the Republic of Ireland was beginning to gather some steam. Added to this was the fact that Irish emigration was no longer family based. Most who departed the island were single, and the bulk of them were heading for England, as opposed to New England and beyond. At the same time, there were still some openings for those Irish harboring an American Dream. In the ten years from 1971 through 1980, a total of 11,940 visas were issued to the Irish, so the exclusion from the United States was not total. And for a time, it seemed as if even the drastically reduced level of visa allocation might be sufficient to satisfy Irish demand. For one thing, economic recession in the US during the 1970s was enough to deter some who contemplated an Atlantic jump. The Irish Sea, as ever, was a much easier barrier to traverse. Besides, the Irish economy was growing, or at least there were promises of growth emanating from politicians. Maybe, just maybe, the closing of America’s door would prove to be an economically neutral oc‑ currence, perhaps even an irrelevant one. Then again, even if the legal obstacles were in place, and the American economy was sputtering, it could still generate a powerful pull effect on top of the push generated by Irish joblessness. A recessionary America offered more than a recessionary Ireland. For many young Irish in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was also the prospect of quick money, often 339

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cash, and potentially earned off the books. America need not be a permanent option, but a temporary Plan B with a return to Ireland, pockets stuffed with dollars, the intended climax of the adventure. There was also a Plan C: staying in America while living and working in the legal shadows. The lack of visas and their attendant green cards was not proving a deterrence to all the Irish arrivals. Far from it. The American frontier, though legally closed to most, was still, for the most part, physically open. And, as the 1980s advanced, the Irish were pouring across it. On top of all of this, the 1965 Act would be overshadowed to a degree by new and comprehensive immigration legislation, which would favor some Irish, even as it frustrated far more. And as was the case with 1965, the Irish would respond by joining ranks in an organization dedicated to tackling inequity, real and perceived. History was not about to precisely repeat itself. But a new generation of Irish immigration reform warriors was about to take up a fight that the previous generation, as rep‑ resented by AINIC, had fought. This time around, the front lines would be a staging ground for the rhetorical fire and fury of newly arrived and mostly young Irish—and a broad swathe of established America would find itself having to pay attention.

The “New Irish” of the 1980s and 1990s The Irish migration to 1980s America, Ronald Reagan’s America, began to pick up in numbers around 1982 and 1983. Those early arrivals discovered something that their ancestors had also iden‑ tified: that it was possible to settle in a new and unfamiliar place. What they also learned was that it was possible to do so even without the security of legal status. So, the numbers of the 1980s Irish began to grow. In 1984, President Reagan, a descendant of more traditional Irish immigrants, made his much‑ballyhooed visit to Ireland in search of his roots in Ballyporeen, County Tipperary. Some of the local kids were not around to wave at the Gipper. They were back in the United States giving his immigration agents the slip. Eluding the attention of the Immigration and Naturalization Service was not something to treat lightly, but it was a relatively easy task in those barely computerized pre‑9/11 years, when I‑94 visitor visa slips had a habit of falling out of passports. The east to west migration picked up steam in 1985 and ’86. Stories would drift back eastwards of a cousin or friend pulling in hundreds of dollars a week. It was financial catnip to a generation that had been promised a lot more than their parents, had access to much more than their parents in terms of education and creature comforts, but whose members felt that daily life in Ireland was fall‑ ing short of all the promises. It was not long before the “New Irish” were being noticed, though not necessarily by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Their fellow Irish, those long ashore and comprising established Irish America, could not but be aware of the new arrivals. The reaction was twofold: say little or nothing in the hope that the newcomers would be able to live and work under the radar; or take another hard look at the reason why all these young Irish were settling in (or trying to) as illegals, or, to use the less charged term, undocumented workers. The lack of visas and their attendant green cards was not proving a deterrence to the Irish. They continued to arrive in the US despite new restrictions contained in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. Signed into law by President Reagan, the Act included an amnesty, which would ultimately benefit an estimated three million people living in the immigration shadows. But the great majority of the 1980s Irish arrivals would arrive on American shores after an amnesty cutoff date. Sympathetic legislators in Congress were pressed by a new lobby group, the Irish Immigration Reform Movement (IIRM), a grassroots organization founded in a kitchen in an apartment in Queens, New York. The IIRM’s voice would be heard loud and clear—and well beyond that kitchen. It would be heard in Washington where those sympathetic Congress members went to work and steered various one‑off visa programs in the direction of the bulk of the undocumented Irish. But many thousands of Irish remained in those shadows of illegality despite the likes of the Donnelly, Morrison, Berman, and Schumer visa schemes. These programs would ultimately benefit over 70,000 Irish in the late 1980s 340

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and early 1990s, though even this significant number fell short of bringing relief to an undocumented Irish population widely believed to be reaching into the six‑figure realm at its height. The work of the IIRM, and of sympathetic established Irish‑American organizations such as the Ancient Order of Hi‑ bernians, would be reported in detail in the Irish‑American press, the long‑established Irish Echo, and the newcomer Irish Voice, which first hit the newsstands in December, 1987 with a front page head‑ line: “We’ll Never Return—Young Illegals.” Major media publications also took note of the young, loud, and demanding Irish. Readers of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Daily News in New York would learn of this surprising twist in the nation’s economic narrative: the illegal Irish.12 That narrative would continue through the 1990s and into the twenty‑first century. In the opening decade of the new millennium, the sustained exclusion of thousands of undocumented Irish would lead to the emergence of a third lobby group, the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform. (ILIR). The ILIR would take its campaign to Capitol Hill in a manner that was impossible to ignore. Hundreds of volunteers in “Legalize the Irish” t‑shirts gathered in a series of rallies that would be presented to the wider world by way of social media, a facility not available to the IIRM or AINIC. The year 2000 brought about a new US census. It told the story of Irish absence. For sure, Irish America was a demographic colossus. But what of Irish‑born people living from sea to shining sea? The first cen‑ sus to ask respondents their place of birth was in 1850. Significant numbers of Irish‑born would be recorded in every census from that mid‑nineteenth century year up to and including the 1960 census. After 1960, while there were yet thousands of Irish‑born in the United States, the numbers were too small to register in the census statistical table that emerged from the 2000 census. Not too small to register in that take would be the total of US residents born in countries such as Mexico, India, the Philippines, Pakistan, South Korea, and Vietnam. The 1965 Act was 35 years in the rearview mirror. So too was the era of numerically noticeable legal Irish immigration.

Irish Immigration and Twenty‑First‑Century Reforms The AINIC, IIRM and ILIR, in their years of peak activity, had kept the matter of Irish immigration and the paucity of visas for the Irish front and center in the consciousness of Irish America, and oc‑ casionally America in the broader sense. But Washington, in the first two decades of the twenty‑first century, was a discouraging place for proponents of the kind of comprehensive immigration reform that would help the undocumented from Ireland and numerous other nations. With the end of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and a sustained robust economy in the Republic, many Irish, legal as well as undocumented, left America and returned to their island of origin. They did so against the backdrop of failure on the part of legislative titans. A reform bill, the 2005 Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act, co‑sponsored in the United States Senate by Democrat Ted Kennedy and Republican John McCain, failed to take flight in that hallowed legislative body. Kennedy had been just a few feet from Lyndon Johnson on Liberty Island in 1965. Four decades later, he was still trying to make it possible for the Irish to enter America legally, though not by way of the long‑defunct quota system. Kennedy would die from brain cancer in August 2009, his Irish mission unfulfilled. In 2013, a Senate reform bill crafted by members from both parties, the so‑called “Gang of Eight” (John McCain among them), did pass muster with 68 votes but died in the House of Represent‑ atives where opposition to any relief for the undocumented was concentrated in a core group of Republican members. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama were broadly in favor of im‑ migration reform. President Donald Trump was not. President Joe Biden has been supportive and speaks frequently and proudly of his Irish roots. But Congress, though a repository for a number of dust‑gathering reform proposals, remains an arid political landscape when it comes to actually pass‑ ing comprehensive immigration reform legislation. And yet, the effort to bring about reform endures. The US Citizenship Act of 2021 at least gave new hope to the undocumented Irish. The bill proposed to scrap the three‑ and ten‑year bars against 341

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returning to the US, which were aimed at the undocumented. Those bars mean that leaving the US, even for the most important of personal and family reasons, is a one‑way ticket out of America’s Golden Door. Another piece of the 2021 bill focused on the Diversity Visa program. The Trump administration wanted to scrap it altogether, but somehow it survived. The 2021 bill, which reflected President Joe Biden’s vision of America as a nation of immigrants, proposed to expand the diversity program from 55,000 visas a year to 80,000 visas for countries that send specified low numbers of immigrants to American shores on an annual basis. Now, even with such an expansion, the number of Irish who would likely benefit would be pitifully small. The annual visa lottery attracts millions of applicants from around the world. The number of successful Irish recipients unveiled in 2022 was all of 17, and they hailed from the entire island of Ireland. Both Northern Ireland and the Republic qualify for the diversity lottery. Great Britain does not. The visit of President Joe Biden to Ireland in April 2023 would be a reminder of why Irish Amer‑ ica can be measured in the tens of millions. The 46th president can lay claim to more than one ances‑ tral land. England and France could sit beside Ireland in the Biden family tree. But for Joe Biden, it is all about Ireland and his Irish immigrant ancestors. As he landed on the island, initially in Belfast, Biden’s National Security Council (NSC) was delivering a briefing to reporters covering the visit. At one point, the NSC briefer stated: “One thing you will hear… the President talk about in Ireland is how much his Irish heritage means to him and how closely linked the United States and Ireland are,” the NSC briefer stated. “Today, 1 in 10 Americans have Irish ancestry. Irish Americans are proudly represented in every facet of American life.” And indeed they are, despite the legacy of 1965.13 At the same time, Irish America has undergone profound change in the decades since Lyndon Johnson used multiple pens to sign the immigration act that was supposed to change nothing, and yet changed everything. The native Irish part of Irish America is diminishing with each passing year. That Ireland itself, all of the island, is boldly facing into a future when forced mass emigration, thankfully, appears to be a thing of the past. The separate reality of near total denial of legal access to America is, nevertheless, a frustrating impediment to those Irish still inclined to envisage the ex‑ panded horizons of life in the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. The first half of the third decade of the twenty‑first century has not been witness to the kind of street level campaigning and corridor lobbying undertaken by AINIC, IIRM and ILIR. But it has witnessed the continuing decline of the Irish‑born portion of Irish America, as Ted Smyth discusses in his chapter in this volume. If Irish America can be calculated, conservatively, at anywhere between 30 million and 40 million people, depending on the kind of questions asked in a census, the number of Irish‑born living in the United States has hovered under and over 150,000 since the beginning of the century. But never much over. Irish America, increasingly, is American Irish.

Conclusion The story of the Irish in America is an extraordinary tale. The Irish piece is an indispensable part of the whole, an essential ingredient in America’s complex weave. The Irish, even when despised by the privileged and the powerful, have, since the earliest days of the American republic, always had their say. In United Irishmen, United States, his study of politically radical Irish immigrants in those early years, David A. Wilson writes of the more than 60,000 Irish who arrived in the America of the 1790s, “many of whom left their homeland for political as well as economic reasons.” Thomas Jefferson, according to Wilson, owed his presidential election victory in 1800 to the “organizational and propagandistic skills” of those Irish arrivals. Jefferson had opposed the exclusionary Alien and Sedition Acts, and after the Virginian had wrested the presidency from John Adams of Massachusetts in that 1800 vote with “overwhelming” Irish‑American support, according to historian Kerby Miller, the third president lost little time in erasing the bulk of the 1798‑born laws.14 342

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The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act is nothing like the Alien and Sedition Acts, but its ex‑ clusionary effect, it can be argued, has been even greater from the Irish perspective. Simply put, the 1965 Act closed America’s door to future large‑scale legal Irish immigration. This was an unintended consequence, as the Act did not specifically target the Irish or any nationality. The new obstacles to Irish immigration resulted in the phenomenon of the undocumented Irish who chose to ignore those legal obstacles. The long‑term social and cultural nature of Irish America has been fundamentally altered. Irish America is becoming less Irish‑born, though its sense of identity is still evident. When it comes to the concept, if not the reality, of Irish immigration, the post‑Covid years have brought about an uneasy calm. The view of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act typically held by US‑based Irish immigrant advocates is not a positive one, despite the legislation’s evident moral core. Hardened memory can be a spur for action. While there is no desire on the part of immigration advocates to see forced mass migration from Ireland in the future, the legacy of the past is more than enough to prompt a sustained rejection of an American frontier almost completely closed to the Irish. The story of the Irish in America, then, awaits new chapters.

Notes 1 Much of the material in this chapter is based on first hand reporting and content from the author’s own pub‑ lished works, including The New Irish Americans (1998) and Unintended Consequences: The Story of Irish Immigration to the United States and How America’s Door Was Closed to the Irish (2021). 2 Golway, Irish Rebel, 4. 3 Truman Veto of 1952; Kennedy, A Nation of Immigrants. 4 State of the Union Address 1964. Ballotpedia.org. 5 Okamoto, photo. 6 Collins, Personal Archive. 7 Bon Tempo, Immigration, 271. 8 Irish America (New York), March/April 1997. 9 U.S. Census Bureau. 1980 and 1990 Census Takes. 10 Irish America (New York), October 1986. 11 Irish America (New York), October 1986. 12 Irish Voice (New York), December 1987. 13 U.S. National Security Council Press Briefing, April 12, 2023. 14 Wilson, United Irishmen, United States, 2; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 188.

Bibliography Bon Tempo, Carl J., and Hasia R. Diner. Immigration: An American History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022. Collins, Judge John. Personal Archive, recording the work of the American Irish National Immigration Commit‑ tee, 1966–1973. Golway, Terry. Irish Rebel: John Devoy and America’s Fight for Ireland’s Freedom. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Irish America (New York), October 1986. Irish Voice (New York), December 1987. Kennedy, John F. A Nation of Immigrants. New York: Anti‑Defamation League One Nation Library Series, 1958. Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Okamoto, Yoichi R. Photo. Lyndon B. Johnson Library Collection, Austin, Texas. State of the Union Address 1964. Ballotpedia.org. Truman Veto of 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act. Trumanlibrary.gov. U.S. Census Bureau. 1980 and 1990 Census Takes. U.S. National Security Council Press Briefing, April 12, 2023. Wilson, David A. United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

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26 IRISH‑AMERICAN POLITICS IN THE MID‑TWENTIETH CENTURY Matthew J. O’Brien

The early postwar era featured a remarkable coming of age for Irish America, culminating in John F. Kennedy’s presidential victory in 1960 after the emergence of ethnic leadership in the Cold War fight against communism. Irish‑Catholic leadership, exemplified by the emergent figures of Joseph McCarthy and John F. Kennedy, exerted an unprecedented ethnic influence at the national level. Contemporary commentators announced this as a moment of Irish‑American arrival, pointing to the shared heritage and anti‑communist convictions of each man. There were a number of elements that contributed to this association between McCarthy and Kennedy, from their wartime military service in the Pacific Theater to the political sponsorship they received from Kennedy’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy. Yet the conventional focus on the 1950s as a time Irish‑Catholic arrival usually overlooks the contrasting paths taken by each man. McCarthy’s approach to Irish‑American ethnicity was dic‑ tated by a desire for retribution against alleged “elites,” combining Anglophobia with midwestern populism in a combustible revival of the interwar bitterness. Kennedy, on the other hand, looked to the future, confident in his belief that the time had come for a new generation of Irish Americans to stake their claim to national leadership. The celebration of this “American success story” soon evoked patriotic‑themed celebrations from organizations such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the American Irish Historical Society, some of whose chapters offered the new president honorary membership. These groups, who had only recently expanded their missions from confessional self‑defense to civic engagement in the years following World War II, were eager to claim their place at the forefront of this new American pageantry. Popular and academic writers also took up this narrative in a somewhat more restrained manner, sharing their appreciation of the Irish as an instructive example of success in this newly ascendant “nation of immigrants.” On a wider scale, the celebratory spirit of such works neatly dovetailed with the larger reassurance offered by the consensus school of American historians, whose sanguine message of moderation and reasonable compromise exerted a primary influence on aca‑ demic writing during the mid‑twentieth century. Works ranged from Bob Considine’s collection of anecdotes, titled It’s the Irish, to seminal works on Irish immigration by scholars in the nascent field of immigration history such as Carl Wittke and Oscar Handlin. Nor was this literature necessarily ad‑ verse to self‑criticism. William Shannon’s compendium of Irish‑American profiles candidly included more notorious figures alongside traditional ethnic heroes. Taken as a whole, the literature on Irish America during the early 1960s may have been generally inclined toward ethnic hagiography, but also included several more substantial works as well.1 DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-32

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Later Historical Writing on Postwar Irish America Shannon was soon joined in his intellectual honesty by a couple of other important works that con‑ fronted simple notions of ethnic progress with open skepticism. In his first step of a long and often controversial public career, a young Daniel Patrick Moynihan challenged the congratulatory spirit of the early 1960s with his chapter on “The Irish” in a groundbreaking collection of essays in urban and ethnic history entitled Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City. In addition to serving as a co‑editor, Moynihan provided an account of the New York Irish that reflected some of his own unredeemed hardship as the eldest son of an impoverished single mother in Hell’s Kitchen. Demonstrating an iconoclastic touch that would raise hackles on the left and the right for the next 40 years, Moynihan argued that New York’s Irish had been in substantial decline for the previous several decades, having failed to develop a rationale that could handle their inevitably shrinking share of the city’s population. Adept in electoral politics, but underdeveloped in social thought, “the Irish just didn’t know what to do with their opportunity.” The anti-communism of the postwar era had exacerbated this stultifying defensiveness, “encourag[ing] their tendency to be regular rather than creative.” Later editions of Moynihan and Glazer’s book would invoke the promise of President Kennedy, if only to mourn the lost potential: “He is gone, and there [is] none like him.” Bereft of a clear vision, Moynihan argues, the Irish of New York had created nothing intel‑ lectually substantive, but only indulged in political gamesmanship.2 John V. Kelleher also contributed to this elegiac spirit, as a singular pioneer in the field whose working‑class Irish roots in the Irish‑Catholic working class provided a pragmatic foundation for his prominence as Harvard University’s first Shattuck Chair of Irish Studies. With a literary expertise that ranged from ancient Celtic literature to early twentieth‑century writing and a clarity of expres‑ sion that made his writing accessible to non‑academics, Kelleher’s dedication to his students evoked accolades from essayist Roger Rosenblatt, who hailed him as “the wisest and most complete teacher and dedicated scholar I have ever seen.” Although he was largely silent (at least in print) about John F. Kennedy, it was clear that he had little time for the “immigrant contributions” approach to Irish‑American history. (Beth O’Leary Anish explores the literary consequences of Kelleher’s views on immigration and identity in her chapter of this volume.) In one of his best‑known pieces, Kelleher dismissed the ongoing celebrations of Irish‑American intergenerational progress with assimilative certainty, concluding that “The Irish [in America] became American, and that was it. […] The Irish contribution [to the United States] was their grandchildren, no longer Irish.” As he discarded the “faded pieties” of previous generations, Kelleher was unflinching. “Like it or not,” he concluded, “we’re on our own.”3 As the 1960s continued, most public interest in Irish America remained fixated on the person of John F. Kennedy, although the treatment of him as a subject changed dramatically. In the wake of his 1963 assassination, several figures within his administration released largely laudatory accounts, from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s Pulitzer Prize‑winning A Thousand Days to personal memoirs from Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen and Pierre Salinger, as well as an affectionate account from Kennedy’s closest staffers, who made up his “Irish mafia,” Kenneth O’Donnell and Dave Powers, in Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye.4 This affection was certainly lacking when Gore Vidal’s sharply critical essay on the Kennedy fam‑ ily in the late 1960s unleashed a torrent of works centered on alleged improprieties conducted by the former president and his intimates. History gave way to biography, and biography to scandal. As the tumult of the late 1960s blotted previous halcyon images of Camelot, several writers returned to an old critique of John F. Kennedy from his early political career: that he was an irresponsible playboy, funded by his ruthless, reactionary father, and equipped with no serious convictions. Saddled with re‑ sponsibility for the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, the popular memory of his legacy changed 345

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from the optimism of programs like the Peace Corps to unfulfilled ambitions and eventually to titilla‑ tion. Projected on Irish America during a time of backlash against traditional institutions, Moynihan’s critique acquired an increasingly bitter edge, reducing Kennedy’s call for ethnic civic engagement to risky ventures driven by opportunism, hypocrisy, and self‑gratification.5 By the early 1970s, apart from a few remaining nostalgic accounts, ethnic historians generally sought safer ground with earlier topics or studies of local communities far removed from Boston or Hyannis, with two notable exceptions. The first came in a large series of works published by the Arno Press. Drawing from a growing body of academic work on Irish America, this run of books offered a sophisticated treatment of numerous Irish‑American historical topics, although almost all avoided subjects from the last half‑century. Second, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, sociologist Andrew Greeley used data collected by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago to single‑handedly create a body of work on recent historical and contemporary trends within Irish America. In the process, Greeley overturned several increasingly held assumptions about the alleg‑ edly conservative (or even reactionary) nature of Irish America, providing a battery of survey evi‑ dence that revealed its disproportionately high rates of third‑level education, occupational prestige, and political liberalism among white Christian groups in the United States.6 As memories of John F. Kennedy reappeared in the early 1980s, it was partially because of then‑President Ronald Reagan’s effort to recast him within the context of the Cold War. Seeking to burnish his own credentials among Irish‑American voters unhappy with the Democratic Party, Reagan and several conservative writers emphasized Kennedy’s opposition to communism during the early Cold War. Combined with a growing sense of social conservatism within groups like the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Knights of Columbus, this recharacterization was left unchallenged by many of his biographers. According to the emergent Whiteness Studies movement of the 1990s, Irish‑­ American assimilation was a foregone conclusion, reducing John F. Kennedy to a mere cipher for nefarious figures like Joseph McCarthy or Joe Kennedy. According to one recent article, for instance, John F. Kennedy’s “ethnic speechifying” was upstaged by his father’s “backroom horse‑trading.”7 The relationship between John F. Kennedy and Joseph McCarthy, however, defies such an easy conflation. In fact, a deeper comparison of the two men reveals a major divergence in their approach to their Irish‑American identity. As Joseph McCarthy followed a retrograde path in his emulation of Father Charles Coughlin’s populism, the forward course of John F. Kennedy’s career would bring him eventually to transcend the parochialism of the past.

The Ethnic Background of “The Fighting Irish Marine” As the chief inquisitor of the anti‑communist Red Scare of the early 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy personified the destructive force of this movement. As chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcom‑ mittee on Investigations, the junior senator from Wisconsin drew national attention for his aggressive questioning of witnesses. His rhetoric became even more controversial as he took on increasingly prestigious targets, and in 1954 his verbal battle with the leadership of the US Army eventually led his colleagues in the Senate to censure him. Effectively silenced and disgraced, McCarthy died from alcoholism just three years later. Joseph McCarthy’s Irish heritage had deep ancestral roots that extended into his childhood. Born into a family where three of his grandparents came from Ireland and his remaining Bavarian‑born grandmother spoke English with an Irish accent, McCarthy came of age in a remarkably homogenous community outside of Appleton, Wisconsin that was known to nearby German and Dutch residents as simply as “the Irish settlement,” or “an island of Hibernians.” There were aspects of this early influ‑ ence that persisted until McCarthy’s law school days in Milwaukee, where his roommates remem‑ bered a lilting Irish accent that crept into his voice during phone calls with his parents.8 346

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McCarthy’s public identification with Irish ethnicity during the 1950s was also influenced by his impetuous personality. McCarthy’s irregular educational record reflected a boisterous youth, with a ten‑year gap between primary‑ and secondary‑level schooling, followed by an intensive one‑year course of study that qualified him for admission to college. Once he had entered Marquette Univer‑ sity, he would graduate with a B.A. and a law degree in only five years, despite pursuing extracurricu‑ lar interests in boxing and poker. Upon graduation, McCarthy soon entered public life as a candidate for a number of elected positions but lacked any interest in Irish‑American matters. In fact, his most notable engagement with ethnic issues came on behalf of his German constituents rather than his Irish heritage. During his first term in the Senate, McCarthy took up the cause of German prisoners of war who had been convicted of committing atrocities against Allied troops in the French town of Malmedy in 1944. As his public profile grew during the early 1950s, McCarthy rediscovered his ethnic roots at a time when Irish Americans seemed to take the forefront in the battle against communism. Taking up the nickname of “the fighting Irish marine,” McCarthy gave speeches to Irish‑American and Catholic audiences in which he proudly invoked references to an Irish love for battle. Proudly reassuring his followers that he wasn’t afraid to “get tough” with his communist adversaries, McCarthy accentuated his throwback image as a rough‑hewn, combat‑ready Irishman. Furthermore, McCarthy’s attacks also used ethnic stereotypes about his targets, characterizing them as elitist (and often effeminate) members of the white Anglo‑Saxon Protestant (WASP) establishment. Appealing to a long‑standing sense of antagonism between Irish‑American Catholics and their gatekeeping adversaries, McCa‑ rthy’s atavistic quest for revenge took on a patriotic tone, imposing retribution in the open‑ended name of “national security.” At the same time as postwar national leaders of the AOH sought to put old fights to rest with a pluralist response to communist conformity, McCarthy and his assistants re‑ peatedly invoked the ethnic backgrounds of their targets: “WASPs with three goddamn last names,” in the memorable words of McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn.9 McCarthy’s midwestern populism bore a strong resemblance to an earlier Irish‑American dema‑ gogue, Father Charles Coughlin. Known nationally as “the Radio Priest,” Coughlin’s message of economic populism during the early 1930s reached a national audience estimated in tens of millions before his descent into pro‑Nazi antisemitism at the end of that decade. Although McCarthy refrained from similar religious bigotry during the 1950s, his unilateralist disregard for Britain and attacks on the American diplomatic establishment harkened back to Coughlin’s earlier isolationist contempt for Britain and American anglophiles. McCarthy attributed the hardships of his followers to the betrayal by Washington elites: “It has not been the less fortunate or members of minority groups who have been selling this nation out,” he told a West Virginia audience in 1950, “but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has to offer.”10 This ideological connection also helps to explain why the junior senator from Wisconsin gener‑ ated his most fervent supporter in the same working‑class Irish‑American enclaves of Brooklyn and South Boston that were most receptive to Coughlin’s demagogic appeal. McCarthy’s regular broad‑ sides against the federal government echoed Coughlin’s later denunciation of Ivy League‑educated New Deal administrators. In Brooklyn, the diocesan newspaper, the Tablet, aggressively defended the Wisconsin senator with editorials that carried titles such as “Put Up or Shut Up,” later giving McCa‑ rthy a front‑page column almost every week immediately after his confrontation with the US Army in committee hearings held in April 1954. When McCarthy held a testimonial dinner for Roy Cohn at the Astor Hotel in Manhattan, observers noted that most guests seemed to have come from Brooklyn, creating an atmosphere in the expensive club that felt like “graduation exercises of an Irish Chris‑ tian Brothers high school.” Brooklyn’s most prominent Catholic priest, Fr. Edward Lodge Curran, who had earned the nickname of “the Coughlin of the East” in the 1930s, quickly became an ardent ­McCarthyite and remained a fierce advocate until the bitter end of McCarthy’s career. McCarthy was 347

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able to build on earlier Coughlin’s centers of support in certain Boston neighborhoods, as well. South Boston had been the only electoral district in the country that gave Coughlin’s hand‑picked candidate a majority of votes in the 1936 presidential election. Nearly 20 years later, “Joe McCarthy is the only man I know,” former governor Paul Drew explained, “who could beat Archbishop Cushing [a popular native of the neighborhood] in a two‑man election fight in South Boston.” In the words of contem‑ porary journalist Richard Rovere, McCarthy was empowered by a “coalition of the aggrieved—of men and women not deranged but deeply affronted by various tendencies over the preceding two or three decades.” At a time when the acute nature of Cold War anxieties still obscured any indications of upward mobility for many Irish Americans, “the fighting Irish marine” returned to familiar prewar grievances as the foundation of his leadership.11

Kennedy and McCarthy Joseph McCarthy enjoyed strong connections with the Kennedy family, which, combined with the particularly aggressive anti-communism commonly espoused by many Irish‑Catholic Americans during the late 1940s, drew an irrefutable association between him and John F. Kennedy in the years following World War II. McCarthy was clearly a favorite in the eyes of “the Ambassador” (as Joseph, the Kennedy patriarch, was known to his sons’ friends) who offered him generous financial sup‑ port and political advice. During his bachelor days, the junior senator from Wisconsin also joined the Kennedy family at their homes in Florida and Hyannis on a few occasions and dated two of the Kennedy’s sisters. Finally, and perhaps most significantly to John F. Kennedy, McCarthy hired his younger brother Robert as an assistant counsel for McCarthy’s investigatory committee. Robert Ken‑ nedy would eventually leave after seven months, but John F. Kennedy’s younger brother remained in contact with the fallen senator after McCarthy’s censure and flew to Appleton, Wisconsin quietly to attend the senator’s funeral in 1957. Nor was Kennedy entirely unwilling to defend McCarthy, at least initially. Upon his arrival in Washington, Kennedy joined the chorus of other Catholic congress‑ man in support of security checks and loyalty oaths. Representative Kennedy also voted for hard‑ line measures like the restrictive McCarran Act and criticized the Truman administration’s security programs as inadequate. Kennedy showed a certain ethnic defensiveness on behalf of McCarthy during a couple of visits to his alma mater, Harvard University, too. In November 1950, less than a year after McCarthy had introduced his initial allegations, Kennedy told the students in Professor Arthur Holcombe’s seminar that he “knew Joe pretty well, and he may have something,” although one student in attendance later characterized Kennedy’s remarks as “more personal and political than ideological.” Two years later, while attending an anniversary of his college dinner club, the normally composed Kennedy lost his temper when a speaker linked McCarthy with the disgraced Alger Hiss in a toast. Kennedy angrily defended his fellow Irish American to the largely WASP audience, calling the former “a great American patriot” and leaving the event early.12 Nevertheless, as McCarthy’s domestic crusade picked up steam, John F. Kennedy began to take a different approach to fighting communism. Rather than relying on bombastic accusations and rough treatment of subpoenaed witnesses, Kennedy began to take extensive fact‑finding trips overseas to learn more about the situations in various developing countries. At the same time, there were also increasing signs of a growing rift between the two. By the end of 1952, Kennedy was ready to give up on McCarthy’s domestic crusade. When the Wisconsin senator attempted to block the congres‑ sional appointment of two well‑established acquaintances to two high‑level posts, Kennedy refused to play along. On the other hand, the junior senator from Massachusetts stepped in to vote against a similar promotion for several McCarthy associates, including denying McCarthy’s associate R. W. S. McLeod the position of the US Ambassador to Ireland, which brought direct editorial criticism of Kennedy from the Boston Post. For “Tailgunner Joe,” things had gotten personal, and McCarthy told 348

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Kennedy, “Now wait until you try to get some special legislation for Massachusetts.” According to one friend, Kennedy told him, “[McCarthy] never really talked to me again after that.” The next year, when he was asked what he thought of McCarthy by a reporter from New York Post in 1953, Ken‑ nedy’s response was curt: “Not very much.” According to his biographer, James MacGregor Burns, Kennedy found McCarthy entirely disagreeable. “Everything Kennedy personally detested, vulgar, bullying, crude, cynical, dishonest,” Burns wrote, “McCarthy represented the mucker element in politics that Kennedy fought in Massachusetts.” John F. Kennedy vehemently opposed his brother Robert’s decision to work for McCarthy in December 1952, derisively dismissing McCarthy to his friends as “just another shanty Irish[man].”13

John F. Kennedy’s Camelot Irishness Burns’ observation, coupled with Kennedy’s use of the “shanty” slur, reflected the fact that the in‑ creasingly clear estrangement between Joe McCarthy and John F. Kennedy was about more than just personal distaste. As a former naval officer, Kennedy could presumably resort to a full repertoire of insults and curse words, but “shanty” was a term that derived a special power when used within Irish‑American ranks, conveying a sense of internalized shame within the ethnic community, rooted in memories of poverty. If McCarthy was a throwback to the rough, dangerous ways of the 1930s, Kennedy was impatient and openly disdainful about self‑destructive habits like undisciplined brawl‑ ing. For the cerebral, reserved politician on the rise, these internal fights were rarely forgotten, but were also not the sort of thing to be settled in plain view of an outside audience. Although John F. Kennedy’s childhood involved a level of privilege that was exceptional for a young Irish Catholic man, he still showed signs of affection for elements of the past. When his WASP boarding‑school principal used a slightly anti‑Catholic term in his description of Kennedy and his friends as “muckers,” young Kennedy was quick to adopt it proudly as a name for his club. There was also a sense of erudition and wit that followed the family during their peripatetic stays in Florida, New York, and Massachusetts, as well as a deep affection that Kennedy felt for his maternal grand‑ father, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, an ebullient embodiment of the old school who was known to offer spontaneous renditions of “Sweet Adeline.” When asked why he chose the 11th Congressional District as his inaugural political contest in 1946, one of the factors that the unproven candidate men‑ tioned was his respect for his grandfather, who had held an adjoining seat several decades before.14 The oral history archives at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston provide a wealth of inside infor‑ mation regarding Kennedy’s early political career, especially regarding the advice that the first‑time candidate received. The 11th Congressional District was previously held by one of the best‑known practitioners of old‑school politics (and a long‑time nemesis of Honey Fitz’s), James Michael Curley. Known colloquially as “the Rascal King,” Curley had cultivated the practice of ethnic politics to a legendary degree, which was well suited to the district’s collection of ethnic wards. Kennedy began to study the various neighborhoods involved assiduously, and he was tutored by a few experienced veterans of the Boston political scene. One such advisor, Robert “Patsy” Mulkern, quickly instructed the young candidate to abandon his casual attire of tennis shoes and pink shirts and to keep his col‑ lege friends from Harvard (“the guys with the big words”) over in Cambridge rather than inviting them to working‑class Somerville or Charlestown. Spending most of his days in that early campaign shaking hands and making door‑to‑door tours of the district’s neighborhoods, Kennedy would then return to his apartment, which was often filled with old‑time associates of Honey Fitz, many of whom would remain there talking until late into the night. Coupled with his father’s bankroll, this training proved directly important in the race for the Democratic nomination, which included several veteran competitors, including Curley’s old campaign manager. “There was a lot against him,” according to Mulkern. “The Curley mob wouldn’t go for him right away.” Instead, many of the experienced 349

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politicos outside the Kennedy camp dismissed the young man as “the Miami candidate” (for his ­father’s residence in Florida), or simply the “Kennedy boy.”15 At the same time, Kennedy understood the novel forces at work in postwar Boston politics. A few months into his tutelage, Kennedy began to reach out to the large number of young men and women who had served in the war effort. Although most of them were previously uninvolved in politics, Kennedy’s energy and vision appealed to a generation that was increasingly impatient with persistent problems like inadequate public housing and other practical issues. Peter Cloherty, whose long as‑ sociation with Kennedy started in the 1946 race, agreed. “It was rather a unique campaign,” Cloherty said, “inasmuch as there were a great many young people who I don’t think ever had been interested in politics before.” John F. Kennedy “brought a new gang in politics,” Patsy Mulkern later declared. “The old school is on the way out. There’s no question.” Another political veteran marveled, “I don’t know where he gets them, but they’re good and they’re all new.” Appealing to a sense of empowerment and reform, Kennedy’s campaign soon adopted a bold slogan: “A New Generation Offers a Leader.”16 For many voters, Kennedy’s reserved demeanor also marked a welcome difference from his prede‑ cessors’ oversized personalities. John F. Kennedy decidedly abstained from his grandfather’s croon‑ ing, and other observers noted that the young candidate was not the typical “How’s your mother?” personality, slapping backs and making appearances at wakes. Instead, the young candidate came across as serious and thoughtful, operating most effectively with small audiences rather than at large rallies. The Kennedy campaign built up a busy schedule of “house parties” hosted by supporters to introduce the candidate to frequently small groups of voters in the homes of supporters rather than relying on mass events. Kennedy successfully tapped into other relatively new groups of voters, as well. In addition to drawing large number of women’s votes, his polished manner secured support from the growing number of middle‑class Irish Catholics. Francis Russell, a longstanding commenta‑ tor on Boston politics, described Kennedy’s victory in the 1946 election as a long‑awaited departure from the old school: The middle‑class suburban Irish hailed him with joy and relief. After half a century of ­oafishness—Honey Fitz and ‘Sweet Adeline,’ Southie’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade enliv‑ ened by japers like 300‑pound Knocko McCormack mounted on a dray horse, of deft operators and blackmailers, of silver‑crossed younger pols—this attractive, well‑ spoken, graceful, witty, Celtic, Harvard‑bred and very rich young man was what every suburban matron would like her son to be. When the primary election was finally held, the result was a momentous victory. According to Peter Cloherty, this was enough for Boston’s Democratic establishment, and resulted in many requests for future appearances: “They would have liked to have him every place,” Cloherty later said, “because he was a young, attractive glamorous war hero, a new type.17 Kennedy’s ensuing departure for Washington meant stepping away from Boston’s ethnic politics. “Go down and work down in Washington,” was Mulkern’s advice. “Don’t be seen around here.” With the help of a few staffers like Dave Powers, whose Irish‑American wit kept Kennedy at ease, the new Massachusetts congressman demonstrated an independent streak that also appealed to his fellow war veterans. In the spring of 1947, Kennedy angrily criticized one of the most influential organizations in Washington, the American Legion, on the floor of the House of Representatives for their stubborn refusal to support federally financed housing. Later that year, the freshman congressman became the only member of the Massachusetts delegation to refuse to sign a petition of clemency for his imme‑ diate predecessor, James Michael Curley. According to Cloherty, Kennedy’s decision was as much about generational differences as it was about the case itself. “[Kennedy] was a new type of politi‑ cian, again in the best sense of the word,” Cloherty said, “and Curley was the old school and so forth, 350

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and [Kennedy] just wasn’t going to get associated with it.” Kennedy’s hold on the 11th District was unbreakable, as he was reelected in uncontested races in 1948 and 1950.18 This transition to a new generation of leadership within the Kennedy circle didn’t mean that the candidate was going to sacrifice his Irish‑American ethnicity. As he became further distanced from Honey Fitz’s cronies, Kennedy increasingly relied on an inner group of advisors later known as “the Irish Mafia.” These included, from 1946, Dave Powers and Billy Sutton, followed by Kenneth O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien a few years later. These men, most of whom were war veterans, offered a new generation’s understanding of Irishness informed by their war experience. They were proud of their loyalty and determination, but also openly contemptuous of Joseph Kennedy for his prewar isolationism and imperious manner. Describing his first visit to the Kennedy house on Cape Cod with other football players to celebrate the birthday of his teammate Robert Kennedy, O’Donnell took delight in the Ambassador’s shock at his teammates’ boisterousness. Furthermore, he noticed that the “all different nationalities and races, … bothered Joe Kennedy a lot,” remembered O’Donnell. “He kept mentioning it, and not in a pleasant manner.” Ken O’Donnell came from the same Irish ethnic stock as Joe Kennedy, but his recollection reflected the influence of wartime pluralism on his younger generation.19 This intergenerational tension continued for years after the initial encounter and was manifested in another point of conflict. According to O’Donnell, the Kennedy’s initial 1952 campaign initially foundered due to confusion and mistrust. Our basic problem with Joe Kennedy […] was that he firmly believed that Jack’s political af‑ fairs should have been handled by the same type of old Democratic pols who worked for Jim Farley and Ed Flynn on the Roosevelt campaign of 1932, O’Donnell remembered. “The Ambassador could never quite understand why Jack avoided those veteran politicians, with their valuable experience and connections, and surrounded himself with young college graduates from the station wagon set with no political background.” Taken together, the “Irish Mafia” provided Kennedy with a core of political strategists throughout the 1950s. But their self‑discipline and attention to detail not only served as a contrast with Joseph McCarthy’s bombastic manner. At a deeper level, Kennedy and his associates represented a new generational version of Irish‑American identity–one that was clear‑headed and determined in the pursuit of its ambitions.20

Conclusion By the time that John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, the internal dispute between Joseph McCarthy and Kennedy had been largely, if not entirely, settled. McCarthy’s angry Irishness, with its throwback to the embittered demagoguery of the 1930s, had largely burnt itself out apart from pockets of support in marginalized enclaves like South Boston and Brooklyn. On the other hand, Kennedy turned Irish‑American perspectives toward the future, empowering a new generation of ethnic Americans within his dynamic movement. With only two months left in the 1960 election, Kennedy even traveled to Houston in order to face evangelical accusers directly with disarming poise and a confident commitment to pluralist patriotism. “I am not the Catholic candidate for Presi‑ dent,” he famously declared. “I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President who happens to be Catholic.” Not everyone, or even every Catholic, was comfortable with Kennedy’s boldly drawn line between confessional beliefs and political responsibilities, and even today several conservative commentators have revisited this moment to argue that Kennedy betrayed his heritage through this purported accommodation. But John F. Kennedy’s inspirational sense of mission drowned out Mc‑ Carthy’s demagoguery, securing a victory without triumphalism.21 351

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The path Kennedy took, uncertain and winding at times, would provide a roadmap for his fellow Irish Americans who came of age during and immediately after World War II. Restless in their ambi‑ tion, they were also confident in their heritage and committed to civic leadership. As the later 1960s would reveal, John F. Kennedy’s legacy included low points, with personal scandals and the start of a war that would later deeply divide the country. But his ability to reconcile Irish‑American identity with progressive ideals carried great cultural and political importance. While Kelleher and Moyni‑ han offered worried elegies about the fate of Irish America, Kennedy subdued the angry demagogic voices of the previous generation. For the postwar generation of Irish‑American men and women who realized the long‑held political aspirations of those who had come before them, Kennedy’s call to engagement left no doubt that they too had arrived, with their energy focused on addressing the challenges of the future rather than the slights of the past.

Notes 1 Considine, It’s the Irish; Wittke, The Irish; Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants; Shannon, The American Irish. 2 Moynihan, “The Irish,” 229, 271, 287. 3 Larkin, “An Appreciation,” 9; Kelleher, “Irish America,” 154, 155. 4 Sorensen, Kennedy; Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days; O’Donnell, Johnny. 5 Vidal, “The Holy Family,” 243; Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment; Hamilton, JFK, Vol 1; Hersh, The Dark Side. 6 Greeley, That Most Distressful. 7 Stoll, JFK, Conservative; Kudlow, JFK and the Reagan Revolution; Cannon, “Kennedy, Boston, and ­Harvard,” 29. For more on Whiteness Studies, see Roediger, Wages of Whiteness; Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White; Diane Negra (ed.), The Irish in Us. 8 Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy, 79; McDermott, “The Rise and Fall of Tail Gunner Joe,” February 16, 2011; Tye, Demagogue, 21, 34. 9 The political significance of Irish‑American anti-communism was even recognized by President Harry Tru‑ man, who became the first American president to attend New York City’s Saint Patrick’s Day parade in 1948. Powers, Not Without Honor, 197; Meagher, “Irish America without Ireland,” 211; Massa, Catholics and American Culture, 78. 10 Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy, 21; Crosby, 191, 231, 237; Connolly, “Showing More Profile than Courage,” 39; Gendzel, “Pride, Wrath, Glee and Fear,” 45–46. 11 McNamara, “Catholic Journalism,” 102; Massa, Catholics and American Culture, 77; Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 189. 12 Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 162; Leamer, The Kennedy Men, 301; Burns, John Kennedy, 134. 13 Burns, John Kennedy, 142, 143, 151; Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 189–190. Longevall, JFK, 324. 14 Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 39. 15 Mulkern interview, 4, 11, 13–14. 16 Cloherty interview, 8; O’Donnell, Johnny, 62; Mulkern interview, 35. 17 O’Donnell, Johnny, 65–66; Russell, The Knave of Boston, 91–92; Cloherty interview, 12. 18 Mulkern interview, 16; Dallek, An Unfinished Life, 44; Cloherty interview, 16. 19 Helen O’Donnell, The Irish Brotherhood, 39. 20 O’Donnell, Johnny, 91–92. 21 https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about‑jfk/historic‑speeches/address‑to‑the‑greater‑houston‑ministerial‑­ association (accessed June 1, 2023); George Stephanopoulos, “Rick Santorum.”

Bibliography Primary Sources Burns, James MacGregor. Interview. By William H. Brubeck. John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program. May 14, 1965. Cloherty, Peter. Interview. By John F. Stewart. John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program. September 29,1967.

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Irish‑American Politics in the Mid‑Twentieth Century Kennedy, John F. “Address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association.” https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/ about‑jfk/historic‑speeches/address‑to‑the‑greater‑houston‑ministerial‑association. Accessed June 1, 2023. Mulkern, Robert “Patsy.” Interview. By Ed Martin. John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program. May 27, 1964.

Secondary Sources Burke, Mary. Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Burns, James MacGregor. John Kennedy: A Political Profile. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1960. Byron, Reginald. Irish America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Cannon, Eoin. “Kennedy, Boston and Harvard.” In The Cambridge Companion to John F. Kennedy, edited by Andrew Hoberek, 17–30. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Connolly, Michael. “Showing More Profile than Courage: McCarthyism in Massachusetts and its Challenge to the Young John Fitzgerald Kennedy.” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 36, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 29–57. Considine, Bob. It’s the Irish. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961. Crosby, Donald. God, Church, Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church, 1950–1957. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978. Dallek, Robert. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 2003. Gendzel, Glen. “Pride, Wrath, Glee and Fear: Emotional Responses to Senator Joseph McCarthy in the Catholic Press, 1950–1954.” American Catholic Studies 120, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 27–52. Greeley, Andrew. That Most Distressful Nation: The Taming of the American Irish. Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Press, 1972. Hamilton, Nigel. JFK, Vol. I: Reckless Youth. New York: Random House, 1992. Handlin, Oscar. Boston’s Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1959. Hersh, Seymour. The Dark Side of Camelot. Rockland, MA: Wheeler Pub., 1998 Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995. Kelleher, John V. “Irishness in America.” In Selected Writing of John V. Kelleher on Ireland and Irish America, edited by Charles Fanning, 150–157. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002. Kudlow, Larry, and Brian Domitrovic. JFK and the Reagan Revolution: A Secret History of American Prosperity. New York: Portfolio, 2016. Larkin, Emmet. “An Appreciation: John V. Kelleher, 1916–2004.” Irish Literary Supplement 23, no. 1 (March 2004): 9. Leamer, Lawrence. The Kennedy Men, 1901–1963. New York: Harper Collins, 2001. Logevall, Fredrik. JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917–1956. New York: Random House, 2020. Massa, Mark. Catholics and American Culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team. New York: Crossroad, 1999. McDermott, Peter. “The Rise and Fall of Tail Gunner Joe.” Irish Echo (New York), February 16, 2011. https:// group.irishecho.com/2011/02/the‑rise‑and‑fall‑of‑tail‑gunner‑joe‑2/ Accessed May 15, 2023. McNamara, Patrick. “Catholic Journalism with Its Sleeves Rolled Up.” U.S. Catholic Historian 25, no. 3 (Sum‑ mer 2007): 87–107. Meagher, Timothy. “Irish America without Ireland: Irish‑American Relations in the Twentieth Century.” In Transnational Perspectives on Modern Irish History, edited by Niall Whelehan, 189–223. New York: Rout‑ ledge, 2014. Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. “The Irish.” In Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, edited by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, 219–287. Boston: Mas‑ sachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1963. Negra, Diane. The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. O’Donnell, Helen. The Irish Brotherhood: John F. Kennedy, His Inner Circle, and the Improbable Rise to the Presidency. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2015. O’Donnell, Kenneth, David F. Powers, and Joe McCarthy, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye: Memories of John F. Kennedy. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1972. Oshinsky, David M. A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy. New York: Free Press, 2019. Powers, Richard Gid. Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.

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Matthew J. O’Brien Reston, James. “Washington: Poetry and Power Is the Formula.” New York Times, January 25, 1961. Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso, 1991. Rovere, Richard. Senator Joe McCarthy. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959. Russell, Francis. The Knave of Boston and Other Ambiguous Massachusetts Characters. Boston, MA: Quinlan Press, 1987. Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. Robert Kennedy and his Times. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Schrecker, Ellen. “Review of Arthur Herman, Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator.” American Historical Review 106, no. 2 (April 2001): 597–598. Shannon, William V. The American Irish: A Political and Social Portrait. New York: Macmillan, 1963. Shelley, Thomas. “Twentieth‑Century American Catholicism and Irish Americans.” In Making the Irish Ameri‑ can, edited Joseph Lee and Marion Casey, 1111–1193. New York: New York University, 2007. Sorensen, Theodore. Kennedy: The Classic Biography. New York: Harper and Row, 1965. Stephanopoulos, George. “Rick Santorum: JFK’s Speech Mad Me Want to Throw Up.” ABCNews, February 26, 2012.  https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/02/rick‑santorum‑jfks‑1960‑speech‑made‑me‑want‑to‑ throw‑up. Stoll, Ira. JFK, Conservative. Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2013. Tye, Larry. Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2020. Vidal, Gore. “The Holy Family,” April 1, 1967, Esquire magazine, in Loren Glass, “The Kennedy Legacy: From Hagiography to Expose and Back Again.” In The Cambridge Companion to John F. Kennedy, edited by ­Andrew Hoberek, 240–249. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Waters, Mary. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Wills, Gary. The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power. New York: Pocket Books, 1981. Wittke, Carl. The Irish in America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956.

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27 REVISITING THE ROLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA IN NORTHERN IRELAND Andrew Sanders

The United States will help to secure the tangible benefits of peace…We are proud to support North‑ ern Ireland. You have given America a very great deal…We will stand with those who take risks for peace in Northern Ireland and around the world…We are entering an era of possibility unparalleled in all of human history. If you enter that era determined to build a new age of peace, the United States of America will proudly stand with you.1 President Bill Clinton, November 30, 1995 We were just wondering, have you seen the Clintons knocking about around here?2 Derry Girls, Season 2, Episode 6 “The President” That the 1995 visit of President Bill Clinton to Northern Ireland was one of the most iconic mo‑ ments in the recent history of Northern Ireland was confirmed by its inclusion as the backdrop for the concluding episode of the second season of the hit sitcom Derry Girls, which is set in, and named for, the second largest city in Northern Ireland. This episode depicts the four main characters staking out a spot at Derry’s historic Guildhall Square to be as close as possible to the visiting United States presidential delegation during their visit in late November 1995 and captures the significance of the event for the people of Derry at a pivotal moment in the Northern Irish peace process. August 1994 had brought a ceasefire on the part of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, a move reciprocated by the Combined Loyalist Military Command in October. As talks developed over the course of 1995, so too developed a sense of hope that the years of conflict might finally be reaching a conclusion, a mood that is captured throughout the three seasons of Derry Girls. In May 2022, the final episode of Derry Girls aired and saw the characters voting in the refer‑ endum over the 1998 peace agreement, known variously as the Good Friday or Belfast Agreement. Speaking as part of the media celebrations of the show, Siobhán McSweeney, who starred in the role of Sister George Michael, expressed her deep concern at the juxtaposition of the Northern Ireland depicted in that final episode and the realities of Northern Ireland in May 2022. “I feel like the timing could not be more apt,” McSweeney commented. What it shows is how the past is not the past. It’s always with us…we watch the grownups head off at the end, full of tentative hope for peace, for reconciliation for the future, for young people and what their future is, and we cut to now and that is in danger and it breaks my heart.3 355

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-33

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The 2016 EU membership referendum, which ultimately took the United Kingdom out of the Eu‑ ropean Union, brought with it serious constitutional challenges to Northern Ireland, many of which remain unresolved at the time of this writing. Northern Irish voters had not favored what became popularly known as “Brexit,” and some 56 percent of Northern Irish voters had stated their desire to remain in the EU. Diplomatically, free cross-border travel and trade across Ireland had underpinned much of what had been envisioned for both parts of Ireland during the peace negotiations of the 1990s. This was now under threat. Concern over the future for the Northern Irish peace process was expressed by high-ranking US political figures in Congress and the White House, who believed that a “Brexit” deal that negatively impacted Northern Ireland would be unacceptable to the United States. The era of possibility that Clinton lauded during his 1995 visit has become an era of uncertainty. Nowhere has this been more starkly represented than in the Northern Ireland Assembly. Shortly before the final Derry Girls episode aired in May 2022, Northern Ireland had held elec‑ tions to its devolved, power-sharing assembly. This election saw Sinn Féin succeed the Democratic Unionist Party as the largest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly, but the latter was able to block the formation of an executive by refusing to back the election of a Speaker of the Assembly because the position requires cross-community support from a majority of members from both unionist and nationalist designations. Following nearly three years of inactivity at Stormont between 2017 and 2020, when the Assembly collapsed over a renewable heat-incentive scandal, Northern Ireland once again found itself without devolved government in 2022. The creation of a power-sharing assembly in the Parliament Buildings at Stormont Estate, for‑ merly the seat of the hegemonic unionist government of Northern Ireland, was one of the major triumphs of the 1998 peace agreement. The devolved assembly was to be elected by the single trans‑ ferable vote form of proportional representation with ministers elected on the D’Hondt method of power sharing to ensure cross-community representation. Perhaps predictably, the actual formation of a functional Northern Ireland Assembly proved tricky, even with the groundwork in place and an underpinning of overwhelming community support. The ability of either major party to collapse the assembly and deny devolved governance to the people of Northern Ireland has meant that the only consistent presence at Stormont has been the civil servants who keep its basic functions ac‑ tive. Elected representatives have regularly managed to find sufficient cause to withhold devolved governance from the people of Northern Ireland. Violence, though significantly reduced, still exists; the February 2023 shooting of senior police officer John Caldwell was a stark reminder of the per‑ sistent proximity of violence. Legacy investigations into historic killings have split the community. Unable to both embrace its past and effectively deal with it, Northern Ireland has also been forced to reckon with the UK’s departure from the European Union. The inability of political leaders to deal effectively with the past has left all sides frustrated. Among those seeking to help resolve these issues have been partners in the United States, exemplified by the 2023 visit of President Joe Biden to com‑ memorate the 25th anniversary of the 1998 Good Friday or Belfast Agreement.4 Three decades on from Clinton’s election and a quarter-century after the 1998 Agreement, this chapter investigates the legacies of the United States’ role in the Northern Ireland conflict and peace process, examining the ways in which the past is revisited and reinterpreted by the present. It will place recent interventions by US figures as senior as Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and President Joe Biden in the historical context of US policy toward Northern Ireland over the course of the previous three decades. Clinton’s interventions have become woven into the fabric of the Northern Ireland peace process, but it is a tapestry that remains incomplete. Following an overview of historic US interventions in Northern Ireland, this chapter will discuss the peak of the Clinton years before discussing how the Northern Ireland peace process has been challenged by wan‑ ing interest from US actors.

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Before Clinton England get out of Ireland. Badge worn by Governor Jimmy Carter at 1976 Saint Patrick’s Day Parade, New York City U.S. Government policy on the Northern Ireland has long been one of impartiality, and that is how it will remain.6 5

President Jimmy Carter, 30 August 1977 With Northern Ireland so integral to recent United States’ interventions in Irish affairs, it is sig‑ nificant that arguably the most famous presidential visit to Ireland, that of John F. Kennedy in 1963, saw the US president avoid crossing the border despite having been invited to Northern Ireland by its prime minister, Captain Terence O’Neill. Kennedy cited “tactical reasons” for keeping a respect‑ ful distance from O’Neill, a position President Truman had adopted when O’Neill’s predecessor, Viscount Brookeborough, visited the United States in 1950. O’Neill eventually secured an “off the record” visit with President Johnson on Saint Patrick’s Day in 1964, a meeting which, Johnson was assured, would not last “more than a minute or two with a picture.”7 That it was so tricky to persuade US presidents to engage on the topic of Northern Ireland was significant given the level of investment that US companies had in the region. At the time, some 7,000 Northern Irish jobs were with US firms, which had invested in Northern Ireland to the tune of approximately $75 million. Among the largest investors was Du Pont chemicals, which invested significant sums in the Derry area as well as locations in Belfast, Larne, and Enniskillen. Such was Du Pont’s investment in Derry that the city was able to cope more successfully than other areas when the British economy dipped over the course of 1966. Later, as violence began to spread across North‑ ern Ireland, Prime Minister O’Neill paid tribute to the role of the Du Pont plant, which employed a mainly Catholic workforce, in reducing unemployment in the northwest of Northern Ireland. O’Neill also publicly spoke to the historical ties between Ulster and the United States. “We are proud that Ulster, this small part of the world,” he said at the dedication of the President Woodrow Wilson home‑ stead near Strabane, “should have had such an undying influence on the great American people.” In ways that echoed the “Scotch Irish” identity examined by Peter Gilmore in an earlier chapter in the present volume, the ancestral homesteads for Presidents Arthur, McKinley, Grant, and Jackson were also advertised in brochures for Northern Ireland.8 As the conflict in Northern Ireland developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, President Nixon added reporting on Northern Ireland to the remit of his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger. Nixon’s perspective was that Northern Ireland was an internal UK matter and to intervene would be a violation of UK sovereignty. This became a popular view among subsequent presidential administra‑ tions, though pressure from political figures in the US, UK, and Republic of Ireland was forthcoming for more decisive interventions. Key among the domestic actors seeking an official line on North‑ ern Ireland from the White House were Senator Edward Kennedy, Representative Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, and Representative Hugh Carey. They were later joined by Senator Daniel Patrick Moyni‑ han; the quartet became known as the Friends of Ireland but, informally, as the Four Horsemen. Nixon was very much aware that US attempts to intervene would be poorly received in both London and Dublin. In mid-1969, Tip O’Neill, then a Congressman for Massachusetts’ 8th district, received a letter from the White House, which contended that “the US Government has no effective basis to intervene in internal political controversies or civil disorders in other sovereign countries.” It added: Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom. At the same time, in a manner unique within the United Kingdom, it has been given broad powers of self-government with regard to local affairs. We continue to believe that any problems concerning Northern Ireland can best be 357

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resolved by the governments directly concerned, i.e., the Government of Northern Ireland and the British Government. The Government of the United States is outside the area of construc‑ tive influence as well as sovereign responsibility.9 Later, during an April 1979 congressional visit to Dublin, Jack Lynch, the Taoiseach (Prime Minis‑ ter) of the Republic of Ireland, joked that O’Neill’s “nickname ‘TIP’ is really short for the phrase ‘To Influence Presidents’.” As much as O’Neill, and others, sought presidential engagement on Irish issues, there was consistent resistance. For Nixon, this extended to rejecting a July 1969 invitation to co-chair the American Irish Foundation along with Irish President Éamon de Valera. With little change evident during the Ford presidency, there was clearly some distance to be traveled by the US to reach the point where a sitting president could feel emboldened to step into Northern Irish issues and seek to engage policy makers in both London and Dublin. A significant change occurred during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. On 30 August 1977, Carter issued the first presidential statement on Northern Ireland, which called on “all those engaged in violence will renounce this course and com‑ mit themselves to the peaceful pursuit of legitimate goals.”10 Carter had, prior to his election, sought to reassure London and Dublin. “I do not favour violence as part of a solution to the Irish question,” he said. “I favour negotiations and peaceful means for find‑ ing a just solution which involves the two communities of Northern Ireland and protects human rights which have been threatened.” This followed photographs of Carter at the 1976 New York City Saint Patrick’s Day parade. Carter, who at the time had won five of the six Democratic primary contests, was photographed wearing a badge that read “England get out of Ireland,” an approved slogan for the parade. Discussions ahead of the drafting of the 1976 Democratic Party platform revealed that some within the party sought to encourage the formation of a united Ireland or, more radically, demand a UK withdrawal from Northern Ireland. The roles of Tip O’Neill and Ted Kennedy in Carter’s state‑ ment were noted by journalist Mary Holland, who wrote that Kennedy views it as a major breakthrough in his campaign, which he began by bringing pres‑ sure to bear on Henry Kissinger at the State Department, to ‘internationalise the issue’ of Northern Ireland, by declaring a United States interest and position on the problem. With the White House assuming more prominence in the US-NI relationship, O’Neill’s influence over successive Presidents would become a cause for concern for officials in London.11 Living up to Jack Lynch’s label, “To Influence Presidents,” O’Neill was again central to Ronald Reagan’s interventions on Irish affairs. The relationship between the two has been remarked upon because of the unlikely cordiality that existed between highly prominent members of rival parties. One area where the two found significant common ground was on Irish affairs. O’Neill had taken a leading role in persuading the State Department under President Carter to block the export of guns to the Royal Ulster Constabulary. “Shipments of arms to anyone in Northern Ireland by anyone in the United States should not be sanctioned by the State Department,” O’Neill wrote, as the “past record of the Royal Ulster Constabulary is not one of impartiality in maintaining law and order and the sale will therefore be viewed by many here as US Government support for a particular faction in Northern Ireland.” During the process that led to the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement and, from the US perspective, the Anglo-Irish Agreement Support Act, O’Neill was again influential. President Reagan lauded a “promise of peace and a new dawn for the troubled communities of Northern Ireland” while O’Neill pledged to support aid to Northern Ireland “absolutely, all the way, and I’ll lead the fight.”12

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The Politics of New York? Bill Clinton and Northern Ireland as an Election Issue in the US Dear Irish-American Leader, please find herewith a set of recommendations to President Bill ­Clinton from the Irish community in the United States. These recommendations have been gathered and shaped from the opinions of Irish Americans and Americans of goodwill throughout the United States, and represent the critical ways in which American policy can have a constructive impact on improv‑ ing the political, social, and economic landscape in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.13 Draft letter from Irish Americans for Clinton-Gore, 1992 The role of the Americans for a New Irish Agenda group has often been under-appreciated in histories of the Clinton years, as they pertain to the president’s role in Northern Ireland. The group was formed in 1991 as Irish Americans for Clinton by Niall O’Dowd, a Tipperary native who emigrated to the United States in 1978. O’Dowd was a leading figure in the Irish Immigration Reform Movement and the publisher of the Irish Voice newspaper, along with former Congressman Bruce Morrison. Morrison had attended law school with both Clintons and served on the Ad Hoc Committee for Irish Affairs before retiring to stand in the 1990 Connecticut Gubernatorial Election. Morrison contacted Bill Clinton in March 1992, in the middle of the Democratic Primary campaign, and wrote of his “ability to be of help to you in the Irish-American community, especially as it may relate to the New York primary.”14 Scholars noted that Irish issues had played little role during the campaign prior to the Connecticut primary on 24 March. There, Jerry Brown, the former Governor of California, had narrowly defeated Clinton and carried the majority of white Catholic voters. With the key New York primary two weeks ahead of them and white Catholic voters a group that the Clinton campaign felt he could win, a strategic re-thinking began. Clinton’s political career lacked any evidence of engagement on Irish issues, which were of marginal importance to the Arkansas electorate and its estimated 10 percent Irish population. Clinton himself was less forthright about the realpolitik of the move, but did note in his memoir that he “got involved in the Irish issue because of the politics of New York,” adding “it became one of the great passions of my presidency.”15 Clinton spoke to the American-Irish Presidential Forum in New York on 5 April 1992, laying out a comprehensive platform on Irish issues which was highlighted by a pledge to reverse the ban on Gerry Adams entering the US, support of the fair employment principles drafted by former Irish Minister for External Affairs Seán MacBride, and a commitment to appoint a peace envoy to Northern Ireland. Jerry Brown, who had similarly paid little attention to Irish issues throughout the campaign, echoed these pledges. Quite how a hypothetical President Brown might have acted in office remains a mat‑ ter of conjecture but Clinton’s commitment, however hastily constructed in the spring of 1992, was steadfast. John Major, UK Prime Minister throughout the first Clinton Administration, later reflected that during this period, “there were two issues on which Britain and America took different views: Bosnia and Northern Ireland.” In a letter to Bruce Morrison, Clinton was clear in his commitment: A Clinton Administration will take a more active role in working with the leaders in these na‑ tions to achieve a just and lasting settlement of the conflict. A permanent and peaceful solution to the crisis in Northern Ireland can only be achieved if the underlying causes of the strife and instability are dealt with vigorously, fairly and within a time-frame that guarantees genuine, substantial, and steady process. I believe the appointment of a US special envoy to Northern Ireland could be a catalyst in the efforts to secure a lasting peace.16

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George Mitchell, to much acclaim, would ultimately serve in the role of US Special Envoy to North‑ ern Ireland, but it is important to note that the role he performed was actually entitled Special Adviser to the President and Secretary of State for Economic Initiatives in Ireland, a job that is now titled US Special Envoy to Northern Ireland for Economic Affairs. One of Mitchell’s first tasks in the job was to organize an investment conference on Ireland. Clinton had made good on his campaign pledges, but it is worth emphasizing that Clinton’s relationship with the UK Conservative Party served to push him to move further on Northern Ireland. Notably, these included the revelation that members of the British Conservative Party, at that time the UK’s governing political party, had sought evidence of Clinton’s anti-Vietnam War activities during his time as a Rhodes Scholar. Raymond Seitz, ap‑ pointed as UK Ambassador by President Bush and retained in that role by Clinton, recalled that “as far as [Clinton] was concerned, the Tory Party had done its best to prevent his election. His coterie of score-keeping advisers was even more embittered.” In Seitz’s reading of the situation, Clinton’s cool relations with the Conservatives meant he felt no obligation to continue the long-standing US policy of non-intervention in Northern Ireland.17

“How the Past Is Not the Past, it’s Always with Us”18 The Good Friday Agreement was hard won and hard fought for… The people of Northern Ire‑ land voted for it, and now it’s in danger of being attacked through ignorance.19 Siobhán McSweeney, BBC Radio Four, May 19, 2022 Sadly, much of what we will hear about amounts to failures to deal with the past… Hopefully, that will turn around, but it is at this point not agreed to.20 Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ), March 11, 2014 Brexit cannot be allowed to imperil the Good Friday Agreement.21 Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), September 9, 2020 In April 2023, President Joe Biden visited Belfast to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Biden spent one morning in Belfast holding talks with UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and political leaders from Northern Ireland before delivering a keynote address at the University of Ulster campus in central Belfast. He then traveled to Dublin, where he became the fourth president to address Dáil Éireann, the Republic of Ireland’s parliament. The four-day visit was much longer than that of President Obama, who had made a short, day-long visit to Ireland as part of a wider 2011 European tour, which also included the UK, France, and Poland. It was also longer than that of President Trump, who spent two nights in Ireland during a 2019 visit, much of which was spent at his golf resort in Doonbeg, County Clare.22 US engagement in Northern Ireland post-1998 was significant, but never on the scale of the Clin‑ ton era. This is perhaps understandable with the relative drop in violence that occurred with the para‑ military ceasefires of the mid-1990s. Violence did not vanish, of course, and indeed continues to this day. A cursory examination of PSNI data shows that security-related violence, that is to say violence that is conducted in a manner consistent with that of paramilitary groups, has persisted throughout the post-1998 era. For example, the financial year 2016–2017 saw five security-related deaths, 29 bomb‑ ing incidents, 61 shooting incidents, 28 casualties from punishment shootings, and 66 punishment beatings. There were 137 arrests, which led to 19 charges for Terrorism Act offences.23 The decreased American engagement also speaks to the changing role and inconsistent commit‑ ment to the Northern Irish Envoy position. Mary Alice Clancy has noted the important work that was carried out during the Bush Administration, but subsequent US interventions in Northern Ireland 360

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faded considerably. Under President Obama, Declan Kelly was appointed to the role of Northern Ireland envoy by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but the role was vacant for three years from 2011 onwards. In 2014, Clinton’s successor, John Kerry, appointed Gary Hart, a former Senator from Colo‑ rado to “engage in the tough and patient work of diplomacy” in the role. Hart stepped down in 2017 and the role lay vacant until the 2020 appointment of Mick Mulvaney by President Donald Trump, a matter of months before his defeat in the 2020 Presidential Election.24 Despite the abbreviated nature of his appointment, which represented an effective dismissal from his previous role as the Acting White House Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney was at least superficially engaged in Northern Irish affairs. He made a September 2020 visit to Ireland, where he met with UK and Irish politicians on either side of the border—a notable visit given the ongoing Covid-19 pan‑ demic that had seriously limited international diplomacy. Mulvaney’s single visit was a complicated affair to arrange. “As is often the case with local politics, it was not appropriate for me to come on the tail-end of the (Bobby) Storey funeral, or on the tail-end of the golf event,” Mulvaney explained. “It’s one of those things you deal with when dealing with diplomatic matters, you have to go at a time that is diplomatically acceptable.” Mulvaney resigned in January, shortly before the inauguration of President Biden, in the aftermath of what Mulvaney described as “an attempted coup” at the US Capitol building on 6 January 2021. Biden was also slow to select a Northern Ireland envoy, appoint‑ ing former Congressman Joseph Kennedy III in late 2022. As Matthew J. O’Brien demonstrates in his chapter in the present volume, the Kennedy family had long played a role in Irish affairs. Joe III’s great-uncles Ted and John visited Ireland in the early 1960s as did his father, Joe II, in the late 1980s when he became involved in an altercation with British troops during a visit to Belfast.25 The diplomatic vacuum has, of course, also been problematic. The lack of an envoy was high‑ lighted in late 2012 when a role emerged, or rather re-emerged, for Dr. Richard Haass, who was President Bush’s first Northern Ireland envoy between 2001 and 2003. A series of demonstrations be‑ gan over the decision to limit the number of days that the flag of the United Kingdom would fly over Belfast City Hall. Visiting Belfast on 7 December 2012, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for calm, commenting that this was “a sad reminder, unfortunately, that—despite how hardy the peace has been—there are still those who not only would test it, but try to destroy it.” In September 2013, Haass returned to Northern Ireland with Professor Meghan O’Sullivan to chair a group known as the Panel of Parties in the NI Executive, a series of all-party talks on the issues of flags, parades, and dealing with the past. Six months later, in March 2014, the United States House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs held a meeting titled “The Northern Ireland Peace Process Today: At‑ tempting to Deal with the Past,” which featured Haass. Among the issues drawing concern was that of legacy prosecutions of former British soldiers. Haass cautioned the hearing that the 1998 Agreement and the subsequent negotiations had “to be sure, advanced the peace process, but in no way did they complete it, nor did they bring about a normal society.” Since then, the situation in Northern Ireland has grown more complicated, not least because of the UK’s departure from the European Union.26 In an attempt to resolve the so-called “Brexit Trilemma,” namely removing all of the UK from the European single market and customs union while maintaining free movement of goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland and also ensuring no hard border is creating between Northern Ire‑ land and the Republic of Ireland, the Northern Ireland Protocol was created in late 2019. The sacrifice in the protocol was made within the UK, with an effective “Irish Sea Border” created to allow for free movement of goods across Ireland. Pressure from within Northern Ireland led by the unionist DUP prompted a rethink of this mechanism, which drew concern from the US. Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi confirmed that the “fantastic and big” deal promised by then-President Trump, was less likely to materialize than Trump had suggested. With Congress the only body with constitutional authority to regulate trade with foreign nations, Pelosi was clear that there would be no US-UK trade deal if the Good Friday Agreement was undermined. House Committee on Foreign 361

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Affairs Chair Eliot Engel remarked that the situation “would directly affect the US-UK bilateral relationship […] Many in the United States and in Congress consider the issues of the Good Friday Agreement and a potential US-UK Free Trade Agreement inextricably linked.” Joe Biden, then a candidate for President, was also clear in his feelings on the matter. “We can’t allow the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland to become a casualty of Brexit,” he tweeted in September 2020. “Any trade deal between the US and UK must be contingent upon respect for the Agreement and preventing the return of a hard border. Period.”27 With US rhetoric decisive over its position vis-à-vis the future of Northern Ireland, Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar took advantage of his Saint Patrick’s Day visit to Washington D.C., shortly before the 25th anniversary of the agreement, to draw the connection between US intervention and peace in Northern Ireland. “The [Good Friday] Agreement is much more than a political compact,” he said. “It is a commitment to reconciliation—a reconciliation that demands more of us than mere accept‑ ance, or tolerance. True reconciliation requires courage, forgiveness and an open-hearted, shared imagining of a better future.” Varadkar was also careful to praise “the indispensable role of the United States in making it a reality.”28 A few weeks later, speaking to an audience at the new University of Ulster building in central Belfast, President Biden lauded the peace process, arguing that “peace and economic opportunity go together,” but the realities of Belfast, mere yards from where he spoke, betrayed the inequalities that persisted. Mere hours before Biden’s arrival, the discovery of incendiary devices in Derry, linked to the dissident paramilitary group the New IRA, served as a reminder of the proximity of violence. Biden’s Northern Ireland envoy, Joe Kennedy III, appears fully focused on the economic dimension of the role. Kennedy wrote in the News Letter in early April lauding the role that US economic inter‑ ventions in Northern Ireland could play. “The next 25 years,” he said, “can and should be a time of even more prosperity and growth.” Writing in the Guardian the day that Biden arrived in Northern Ireland, however, Sarah Creighton pointed out discrepancies between the US president’s rhetoric and the realities of everyday life. The building that hosted the President “sits jarringly alongside Belfast city center,” Creighton noted. The modern glass roof juts out against empty shop fronts and crumbling brownfield sites. The inner-city community of Carrick Hill sits close to the campus, their houses dwarfed by new student housing blocks. Homeless people and drug users are known to frequent the area, some sleeping rough in corners and on benches. Many buildings around the campus are dilapidated and dangerous.29

Conclusion As was so powerfully emphasized by Sarah Creighton, the US vision for Northern Ireland, whether that depicted in the final episode of Derry Girls or that of President Biden and his Northern Ireland envoy Joe Kennedy III, a man who was estimated by US political finance website Open Secrets to have a net worth of $46m, has rarely been easily reconciled to the realities of Northern Ireland itself. Biden and Kennedy appear to have a laser-focus on economic solution and it is true that inequal‑ ity has persisted, but it has been exacerbated by political dysfunction. “Injustice is something I’ve become accustomed to,” reflects one of the lead characters in Derry Girls. “I am, after all, a child of the crossfire, surrounded by conflict. But I choose to rise above it. The path to peace is paved with tolerance and understanding. Violence is never the answer.” It is in this sense that we see Northern Ireland today continuing to seek a new “Clintons,” that is to say fully engaged diplomatic leader‑ ship that seeks to embrace political realities, engage local political leaders and work toward political

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solutions. Economic investment is, of course, helpful, but as the Clintons found during the 1990s, it cannot succeed alone.30

Notes 1 Clinton, “Address to the Employees of the Mackie Metal Plant,” November 30, 1995, Miller Center, Univer‑ sity of Virginia, available at http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3442. 2 “The President,” Derry Girls, April 9, 2019, Channel 4. 3 Siobhan McSweeney interview on “Saturday Live,” BBC Radio Four, May 19 2022, available at https:// www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0015kpm. I will deliberately, in so far as is possible, refer to this agreement as the 1998 agreement so as to avoid the potentially loaded titles used by either community. 4 Lijphart, Thinking about Democracy: Power Sharing and Majority Rule in Theory and Practice; McGarry and O’Leary, The Politics of Antagonism: Understanding Northern Ireland; Northern Ireland Elections, “The 1998 Referendums,” http://ark.ac.uk/elections/fref98.htm. The DUP opposed the agreement and has since been claimed that Sinn Fein was also prepared to campaign against the agreement, see McClafferty, “Good Friday Agreement: Claim Sinn Féin Considered ‘No’ Campaign in South,” December 21, 2022; Police Ser‑ vice of Northern Ireland “Investigation update: Attempted murder of DCI John Caldwell,” March 2, 2023. This chapter will not seek to engage the 1998 negotiations in depth, and directs the reader to work such as Mitchell, Making Peace; Rhodeen, Peacerunner: The True Story of How an Ex-Congressman Helped End the Centuries of War in Ireland; Lynch, Turf War; Guelke, “The United States, Irish Americans and the Northern Ireland Peace Process”; Wilson, “From the Beltway to Belfast”; Wilson, “The Billy Boys Meet Slick Willy”; Sanders, The Long Peace Process; Cooper, The Politics of Diplomacy; MacLeod, International Politics and the Northern Ireland Conflict; Dumbrell, “The United States and the Northern Irish Conflict 1969–94”; Arthur, “Diasporan Intervention in International Affairs: Irish America as a Case Study.” For an explanation of the d’Hondt Method, see European Parliament, Understanding the d’Hondt Method, 2019, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2019/637966/EPRS_BRI(2019)637966_EN.pdf. 5 New York Times, March 15, 1976. 6 The National Archives: Public Record Office, FCO 87/1219, The U.S. Ban on the sale of arms for the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Statement by President Carter 30 August 1977. 7 De Bréadún, “When Camelot Came to Town”; Campos, “That’s a Bit Rich… Why Wealthy Stars like Ryan Tubridy Won’t Pay a Cent in Tax on Their Books”; Walker, A History of the Ulster Unionist Party, 151; New York Times, May 6, 1963. New York Times, September 29, 1963. Memorandum for the President from McGeorge Bundy March 17, 1964, Your meeting with Captain O’Neill, Papers of Lyndon Baines Johnson, President, 1963–1969, National Security File, Country File, Europe, Box 195, LBJ Library. 8 Irish Times, May 25, 1966 and August 29, 1966; Washington Post, June 18, 1966. 9 Mount, 895 Days that Changed the World; Charter of the United Nations: Chapter I: Purposes and Principles, http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter1.shtml; Letter from William B. Macomber, Assistant Sec‑ retary for Congressional Relations to Thomas E. Morgan, Chairman, Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, March 19, 1969, RG 59 General Records of the Department of State, Central Foreign Policy Files 1967–1969, Political and Defense, POL 29 IRAQ to POL 15 IRE Box 2222, NARA; Letter to Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr from Bryce Harlow, Assistant to the President July 7, 1969, in White House Central Files, Subject Files, Countries, CO160 United Kingdom, Nixon Library. 10 Speech by the Taoiseach, Mr J. Lynch, T.D. at the dinner for Speaker and Mrs O’Neill and American Con‑ gressmen, Dublin Castle, 19th April, 1979 at 10.00 p.m. in Ireland and U.S. Policy on Northern Ireland TAOIS/2009/135/745, National Archives of Ireland. House of the Oireachtas, Oireachtas Business, Ceisteanna – Questions. Oral Answers – American-Irish Foundation, Tuesday, 16 July 1963. Available at http://oireachtas‑ debates.oireachtas.ie/debates%20authoring/debateswebpack.nsf/takes/dail1963071600021?opendocument; Memorandum Department of State September 12, 1969, RG 59 General Records of the Department of State, Central Foreign Policy Files 1967–1969, Political and Defense, POL 29 IRAQ to POL 15 IRE Box 2223, NARA. The National Archives: Public Record Office, FCO 87/1219, The U.S. Ban on the sale of arms for the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Statement by President Carter 30 August 1977. 11 Telegram from Ramsbotham Washington to FCO October 28, 1976, Carter message to Fitzgerald, in U.S. Presidential Election and Northern Ireland, CJ 4/1835, TNA. New York Times, March 15, 1976. The Irish Times reported Carter as wearing a badge reading “I love New York”, March 18, 1976. Guardian, June 17, 1976; TNA: PRO, CJ 4/1835, U.S. Presidential Election and Northern Ireland, Attachments to letter from

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Andrew Sanders J  Davidson to M Hodge, Republic of Ireland Department, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (hereafter FCO) June 17, 1976, Amendments on Ireland proposed and rejected at Democratic Party Platform Meeting; Magill, October 2, 1977. 12 Mervin, “Ronald Reagan’s Place in History”; Matthews, Tip and the Gipper; Irish Times, November 16, 1985 and December 4, 1985. 13 Irish-Americans for Clinton-Gore draft letter, Box 1 Folder 1 Series I Americans for a New Irish Agenda: Irish-Americans for Clinton-Gore (Recommendations), AIA 008 Durkan Papers, Tamiment Library, NYU. 14 Irish Times, August 23, 1994; Letter from Morrison to Clinton, March 19, 1992, Correspondence in the Irish Americans for Clinton-Gore subseries of Series VIII: Ireland, Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries, Bruce A. Morrison Papers, MSS 1991.0021 (hereafter Morrison Papers, UConn Library). 15 O’Grady, “An Irish Policy Born in the U.S.A”; Clinton, My Life, 401. Gerlach, Immigrants in the Ozark; Moore et al., “Residents with Irish Ancestry Are in All 3,142 U.S. Counties and Make Up 20% of the Popula‑ tion in Some”. 16 Irish Times, April 7, 1992; Major, The Autobiography, 497; Letter from Clinton to Morrison, October 23, 1992, Correspondence in the Irish Americans for Clinton-Gore subseries of Series VIII: Ireland, in Morrison Papers, UConn Library. The special envoy promise echoed a pledge made whilst campaigning in California in October, see Irish Times, October 28, 1992. 17 Sanders, The Long Peace Process, 231–232; U.S. Department of State “Announcement of Joe Kennedy III as U.S. Special Envoy to Northern Ireland for Economic Affairs; Wallace, “Foreign Policy,” 295–296. The allegations were effectively confirmed by John Major in his autobiography, though he noted the actions of junior party officials were ‘not with my knowledge nor at my bidding’, see Major, The Autobiography, 498. Seitz, Over Here, 321. 18 Siobhan McSweeney interview on “Saturday Live,” BBC Radio Four, May 19, 2022, available at https:// www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0015kpm. 19 Ibid. 20 Opening remarks from Congressman Chris Smith, to “The Northern Ireland Peace Process: Attempting to Deal with the Past” House of Representatives Subcommittee on African, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations and Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Washington DC, March 11, 2014, p. 7. Available at https://chrissmith.house. gov/uploadedfiles/2014.03.11_the_northern_ireland_peace_process_today_-attempting_to_deal_with_the_ past.pdf. 21 Pelosi Statement on Brexit & Potential U.S.-UK Trade Agreement, September 9, 2020, https://www.speaker. gov/newsroom/9920. 22 McCambridge, “Packed Itinerary for Four-Day Visit of Joe Biden to Island of Ireland,” April 11, 2023, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/joe-biden-northern-ireland-belfast-international-airport-leovaradkar-michael-d-higgins-b2317744.html McCracken, “President Trump Ireland visit: Border Blip and the Blimp,” June 8, 2019, https://www.bbc. co.uk/news/world-europe-48542473. 23 Police Service of Northern Ireland “Police Recorded Security Situation Statistics,” January 1, 2022 to De‑ cember 31, 2022, January 6, 2023, https://www.psni.police.uk/sites/default/files/2023-01/Security%20Situa‑ tion%20Statistics%20to%20December%202022.pdf. 24 Clancy, “The United States and post-Agreement Northern Ireland, 2001–6”; Quoted in Berman, “The Gary Hart Renaissance,” October 21, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/ the-gary-hart-renaissance/381737/ 25 Perry, “Mulvaney Says U.S. here to ‘Protect and Defend’ Good Friday Agreement,” September 28, 2020, https://www.rte.ie/news/politics/2020/0928/1167863-us-special-envoy/?fbclid=IwAR2Nwdmpa_3CZq MmKKjMtPmOuBAhyzPQ_UngXcUo5bmu6AfylADdTvZmKQM. BBC News, “Mick Mulvaney: U.S. Special Envoy to Northern Ireland Resigns,” January 7, 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-­ ireland-55576676. Sanders, The Long Peace Process, pp. 181–182. 26 Morris, “Flag Protest Reignites Northern Ireland Strife”; House of Representatives, “The Northern Ireland Peace Process: Attempting to Deal with the Past”. 27 Booth, “Trump Boasted U.S.-UK Trade Deal Would Be ‘Fantastic and Big.’ Boosters may be Dis‑ appointed”; Pelosi Statement on Brexit & Potential U.S.-UK Trade Agreement, September 9, 2020, https://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/9920. The Commerce Clause, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 of the ­Constitution of the United States delegates power to regulate international trade to Congress. Cornell Law ­Legal Information Institute “Commerce Clause”, undated, available at https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/

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Revisiting the Role of the US in Northern Ireland commerce_clause#:~:text=The%20Commerce%20Clause%20refers%20to,and%20with%20the%20In‑ dian%20tribes.%E2%80%9D; Eliot Engel, letter on behalf of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs to ­Boris ­Johnson, September 15, 2020, available on Twitter @HouseForeign 15/9/2020, https://twitter.com/ HouseForeign/status/1305935896630493184; Perry, “Mulvaney says U.S. here to ‘protect and defend’ Good Friday Agreement”; Biden, Twitter account @joebiden, tweet September 16, 2020, available at https://twit‑ ter.com/joebiden/status/1306334039557586944. The NI Protocol was ultimately replaced by the Windsor Framework in February 2023, though the DUP continued its intransigence over the issue. 28 Department of the Taoiseach “Remarks by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar at the St Patrick’s Day Gala Con‑ cert,” March 18, 2023, https://www.gov.ie/en/speech/57080-remarks-by-taoiseach-leo-varadkar-td-at-thest-patricks-day-gala-concert/. 29 Liptak, “Biden Touts Dividends of Peace in Belfast, Even as Tensions Persist”; Joe Kennedy III Twitter Ac‑ count https://twitter.com/U.S.EnvoyNI. A Twitter account was created for the post in December 2022 and all but four of the 47 tweets posted to the account up to the arrival of President Biden on 11 April 2023 referred to the economic dimension of U.S.-NI relations. Three of the other four referred to the Windsor Agreement and the fourth was a tweet of support for PSNI officer John Caldwell who had been seriously injured in a gun attack in February 2023; Kennedy, “Ulster Was a Profound Influence on the U.S. and We Can Build on that to Boost Northern Ireland’s Economic Growth”; Creighton, “When Biden Visits Northern Ireland, he’ll find a Country Ravaged by the Tories”. 30 Open Secrets “Personal Finances Joe Kennedy III (D-Mass),” https://www.opensecrets.org/personal-­ finances/joe-kennedy/net-worth?cid=N00034044&year=2018; “Episode 1” Derry Girls, January 4, 2018 Channel 4.

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28 CAPTURING FADING COMMUNITIES IN POST‑WORLD WAR II IRISH‑AMERICAN FICTION Beth O’Leary Anish When John V. Kelleher wrote in 1947 that no one had yet written the great Irish‑American novel, he laid down a gauntlet for his contemporaries to try to capture the experiences of their immigrant and American‑born ancestors. Several authors based in cities in the northeastern United States ultimately took up Kelleher’s challenge, whether consciously or not. In 1946, Edward McSorley had already published his tale of an orphaned Irish‑American boy being raised by his immigrant grandfather in Providence, Rhode Island in Our Own Kind. McSorley’s novel was followed in quick succession by Harry Sylvester’s rant against the conservative Catholic Church hierarchy in the Brooklyn, New York‑based Moon Gaffney (1947); Mary Doyle Curran’s The Parish and the Hill (1948), a story of growing up torn between two communities in Holyoke, Massachusetts; Ellin Berlin’s Lace Curtain (1948), a tale of the newly rich Irish near the top of the economic ladder in Manhattan and Long Island, New York; and later, the book Kelleher thought answered his challenge, his friend Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah (1956), set in an unnamed city that most readers agree is Boston.1 Characters including McSorley’s Ned McDermott, Curran’s Johnny O’Sullivan, and O’Connor’s Frank Skeffington, all leaders in their communities in their own ways and all known as story tell‑ ers, keep alive for their younger family members the struggles and strengths of the Irish when they first came to America. Their deaths in the novels symbolize the end of the early Irish‑American community, as they were among the last keepers of its stories and the last people who remembered Irish America as it was. Such novels show that Irish‑American authors of the mid‑twentieth century feared what was left behind in the wake of that disappearing generation. The novelists represent Irish Americans who resort to bigotry against groups positioned lower than they are on the socio‑ economic ladder as shallow social climbers. They depict characters who, in extreme cases, turn from being the oppressed into the oppressor. Willie McDermott, Mary O’Connor, and Adam Caulfield are the rare younger family members willing to listen to the stories their elders tell, and who admire them and respect their values. They offer some small hope that the stories of early Irish America will live on, as they do through authors like McSorley, Curran, and O’Connor. The authors present these few characters as exceptions to the rule of Irish Americans pursuing middle‑class financial security and respectability at all costs. They are concerned that the warmth, generosity, and spirit of ­community‑mindedness they attribute to their Irish immigrant grandparents are being lost. Their novels serve as the dying words for the early Irish‑American community as the authors remember it.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-34

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Irish America in the Mid‑Twentieth Century If these authors were not responding directly to Kelleher, they were certainly responding to shared concerns about who the Irish were in America 100 years after the Great Famine, which first brought Irish Catholics to American shores in large numbers. Demographic changes culminating in the mid‑twentieth century left Irish Americans disconnected from the communities they had built and inhabited since the 1840s. The numbers of immigrants entering the US dwindled in the 1920s and 1930s due to new immigration restrictions, reduced travel during two World Wars, and the chill‑ ing effects of the Great Depression on the US economy, which had previously been so attractive to newcomers. In addition to reduced immigration, American‑born Irish were finding new social and economic mobility after World War II, due in part to the G.I. Bill that afforded returning soldiers opportunities for advancement through subsidized education and incentives for white families to relocate to newly constructed suburbs. For many Irish Americans, this would be the first time they left the working class and the urban neighborhoods in which a sense of Irishness was fostered by the proximity to other Irish.2 Scholars of Irish America have remarked on changes in the community in the mid‑twentieth cen‑ tury. In their volume After the Flood: Irish America 1945–1960, James Silas Rogers and Matthew J. O’Brien call these years “a distinct historical and cultural moment.” Though he acknowledges regional differences between cities of the Northeastern US and “more open and friendly environ‑ ments” of the West and Midwest, Lawrence J. McCaffrey similarly points to an overall change in Irish America at this time. “Events, especially between 1930 and 1960, transfigured Irish America, speeding its journey from mental and psychological ghettos into the American cultural mainstream,” writes McCaffrey. “However, many things, positive and negative, were lost on the way.” McCaf‑ frey concludes that the “acceptability and respectability” long desired and finally achieved by Irish Americans in this period threatened “their unique identity.” Irish Americans, now accepted into white middle‑class America, were at a turning point. Firmly American, they now had to work to maintain a sense of Irishness.3 When writing about what was lost along the way to American respectability, scholars often point to the communal values the Irish brought with them to the United States. Writing about the turn of the twentieth century, Timothy J. Meagher explains how for the Irish in Worcester, Massachusetts “their communal ethos was a mixed blessing.” Meagher continues, Communalism was not very helpful in a society that favored individual ambition and risk‑­ taking, but it softened the blows of a harsh urban industrial world as well, offering family or community strategies for survival even as it helped retard individual mobility. Eventually those communal strategies were given up as generations born in America assimilated to its more individualistic culture. Likewise, Sophie Cooper notes how the Irish in Chicago seeking middle‑class respectability turned away from socialism as a political option. Though the American Catholic Church could and sometimes did provoke its adherents to speak up in favor of programs and policies to help poor and working people, a conservative strain also could encourage bigotry and closed‑mindedness. McCaffrey points out how the “most fervent admirers” of “supposedly commu‑ nist hunting, anti‑civil libertarian” Joseph McCarthy, “tended to be Easterners, including members of the Joseph Kennedy family as well as bishops and priests.” (Matthew J. O’Brien says more about the distinctions between Joseph Kennedy and his son John in another chapter in this volume.) The quest for middle‑class respectability, in part pushed by the American Catholic Church, troubled Irish Americans when that quest was at odds with their traditional communal values and workers’ rights.4

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Irish America at large mirrored the differences between the socially progressive and conservative Church hierarchy and political leaders. Irish Americans could be conservative, looking to protect the financial gains they had made, or more socially progressive, realizing that the poor and newcomers to the country in the twentieth century deserved the respect and assistance they wished their ancestors had. The fiction of the time seems to spring from the idea that something is disappearing that is worth preserving. This “something” was often found in the values elder immigrant characters espoused, in‑ cluding the reminder that they were once the lowest on the socioeconomic ladder, and therefore others in that position should be helped, not despised. By the mid‑twentieth century, Irish‑American neigh‑ borhoods, built by immigrants into ethnic communities that supported and nurtured the first genera‑ tions born in America, were being abandoned for suburbs or wealthier city neighborhoods. Post‑World War II Irish‑American fiction is thus focused on the neighborhoods in which mostly third‑generation American protagonists grew up, influenced by their Irish immigrant grandparents. There is a sadness in leaving those neighborhoods, and a feeling that, while Irish Americans are clearly on the rise socio‑ economically, the values and connectedness of those neighborhoods are being lost. Ron Ebest calls this move of the Irish up and out of their urban enclaves “just another migration saga, this time out of the inner city and up the economic ladder.” To the Irish Americans represented in post‑World War II novels, however, this move is at least as painful as leaving Ireland. This is likely because such novels are written by mostly third‑generation Irish Americans, who do not have memo‑ ries of leaving Ireland, but do have memories of where their grandparents lived in the United States. These American ethnic neighborhoods formed them even more so than a distantly remembered Ire‑ land. Italian‑American scholar Edvidge Giunta provides another useful frame of reference for under‑ standing the difficulty of leaving these neighborhoods. She likens the move from the working class to the middle class to the original move of immigrants to a new country. She calls this “class migration.” Once writers move out of the working class through education and improved financial circumstances, they depict “the family as a homeland that can be revisited only through writing.” There is no going back to the old neighborhood as the same person.5 The field of memory studies explains some of the difficulty in leaving one’s old neighborhood. Maurice Halbwachs describes the process of memory‑making as a social one. He says, The greatest number of memories come back to us when our parents, our friends, or other per‑ sons recall them to us…. It is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories. Away from the people with whom foundational memories were formed for generations, a migrant, whether moving from country to country or from city neighborhood to suburb, will feel out of sorts, not quite at home in their new home. Paul Ricoeur adds to this that “the ‘things’ we remember are intrinsically associated with places.” He says, It is not by chance that we say of what has occurred that it took place…. These memory places function for the most part after the manner of reminders, offering in turn a support for failing memory, a struggle in the war against forgetting. Once again, migration away from one’s memory places would be as disorienting as leaving the people in those places. This feeling comes up repeatedly in Irish‑American novels of the mid‑twentieth cen‑ tury, as characters moving up in the world mourn the loss of the places and people that formed them.6 One might ask, then, why would they leave? Though the neighborhoods built by Irish immigrants and inhabited by their children provided the social comforts of home, American consumerism and individualism were alluring. So too was the thought of having more space, less crowded dwellings, 370

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and fewer of the problems associated with poverty. Chasing American respectability and physical comfort meant giving up some of the old ways. Irish Americans on the rise in post‑World War II novels exhibit shame over their humble origins. Part of this shame is a legacy of British colonialism, which they not only carried with them, but which was also still a factor when the Irish moved to the Anglo‑Protestant dominated United States. Frantz Fanon argues that colonialism causes a psycho‑ existential crisis in its colonized subjects, prompting them to ask, “Who am I in reality?” Ngugi wa Thiong’o explains further what damage colonial policies do to the people subjugated by them. He calls imperialism a “cultural bomb,” the effect of which “is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their ca‑ pacities and ultimately in themselves.” While Irish Catholics had the advantage of eventually blend‑ ing into white America compared to formerly colonized people of color, they still carried with them, for the first generations in the US, the knowledge that their language, their religion, their accents, and their ways of living were considered inferior to the ways of folks who had the money and ran the country. Characters in post‑World War II fiction who have turned their backs on their roots exhibit this inferiority complex. These characters are the newer generations, ashamed of the “old ways” of their immigrant relations. Though no longer colonized, they have internalized the attitudes of the Anglo‑ Protestant colonizer in regard to any behavior they deem to be backward or evidencing poverty. The authors paint them as being uncharitable, cold, and lost at best. At worst they are bigoted and oppres‑ sive to other religious, ethnic, and racial groups. They have turned their self‑hatred outward.7 Discussing the aftermath of the 1798 rebellion in Ireland, historian Guy Beiner posits that Prot‑ estants whose ancestors had been involved with the United Irishmen engaged in disremembering of these events. While they were proud of their ancestors, if politics had moved them to the side of Unionism over the interceding years, they could not very well celebrate rebelling against the Crown. This concept of disremembering is useful here because Irish Americans have engaged in it, too. The foundational memory for many Irish‑Catholic Americans was the Great Famine, but the poverty of the post‑Famine decades continued to force the Irish to leave home. While they could not forget those origins, they could reframe them. They could use them as the point of departure for their tremendous success. The thought of poverty itself brought shame to newly middle‑class Irish Americans. But the rise from poverty was a success story they could tell, and they could enhance that story with rising despite the discrimination they faced. Earlier in this volume, Mary C. Kelly traces Irish Famine re‑ membrance (and forgetting) over the decades since the Irish arrived in the US. Of the post‑World War II years, Kelly has observed, “Irish‑Americans coming of age in midcentury years, and cognizant of the disappearance of their childhood world and inherited immigrant traditions, stood to gain much from engagement in Famine remembrance.” After decades of public silence, they could use the Fam‑ ine to reclaim ethnic roots from their safe, respectable middle‑class position. From that position, the horrors of abject poverty and being dehumanized by their government could be safely approached.8 One could wonder, however, if that level of shame could be forgotten entirely. As Beiner notes, it is probably rather disremembered and given a new form. In her latest book, Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History, Mary Burke argues that “history is undead in Irish‑American narra‑ tive,” and says that “the Gothic mode expresses the complicity that achieving and maintaining power (whiteness) entails.” In literary texts, as well as in the stories around the lives of American popular and political figures of Irish descent, Burke shows that the past keeps showing up to haunt those who try to forget their roots. She finds repeated use of the protagonist meeting a haunting ancestor or double, and she posits that this haunting comes from the repressed past, the Irishness that financially successful Americans want to keep “closeted.” Social climbing characters in mid‑twentieth century novels explored in this chapter are similarly haunted by shame over their impoverished past.9 It may have taken some generations for Irish Americans to be willing to embrace their Irish roots. This is normal, per Marcus Lee Hansen, who famously said “what the son (second generation) wishes 371

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to forget, the grandson (third generation) wishes to remember.” Timothy Meagher quotes Hansen, but then says the process of embracing one’s ethnic roots over generations is not so simple. He finds the work of Kathleen Conzen, David Gerber, and co‑researchers more accurate. He summarizes their argument as follows: “Rather than a group’s or community’s changes through historical time alone, it is those changes combined with the silent, gradual revolution in everyday life that shapes and reshapes the community’s life.” Still, Margaret Hallissy finds validity in Hansen’s theory. “The emi‑ grant generation’s story was about survival in a new land; the second generation’s story was about as‑ similation, making that land accept them as ‘real’ Americans,” writes Hallissy. “The third generation, secure in its American identity, can explore the part of themselves that is Irish.” It is no surprise then that Irish‑American fiction of the post‑World War II years, almost without exception, is both written by and told through the eyes of third‑generation Americans.10

Leaving the Irish‑American Neighborhood: Mary Deasy’s The Hour of Spring While the novelists mentioned above—Edward McSorley, Mary Doyle Curran, Ellin Berlin, Harry Sylvester, and Edwin O’Connor—were writing in northeastern urban enclaves often associated with Irish America, Mary Deasy was tackling a similar project in the Midwest. She fictionalized her home city of Cincinnati, Ohio in several published novels, beginning with The Hour of Spring in 1948. Deasy, born in Cincinnati in 1914 to parents of Irish and German descent, joined her contemporar‑ ies in fictionalizing the emotional effects of leaving one’s immigrant neighborhood behind. Like the other Irish‑American novelists mentioned above, Deasy is a third‑generation Irish American. Her paternal grandparents were born in County Cork in 1849 before eventually establishing them‑ selves in the US. Also like the above authors, she tells her first published novel through the lens of a third‑generation Irish‑American character who is about her age. Deasy’s novels are often set in a midwestern city much like Cincinnati. In some novels, she calls it Corioli. If nothing else, this would move the typical Irish‑American story beyond the epicenters of Boston, New York, and Chicago. She is remarkable for more than that, however, as she joins the conversation of her contemporaries on what it can mean to be Irish American after three or more generations in this country. Sometimes Deasy resorts to essentialist language about genetic Irish traits (not only hair and ruddy complexions, but also temper and even a pride of bearing, presumably descended from Irish kings and queens). On occasion, when she needs a description, she reaches for supposedly inherited traits: “the voice of Monsignor Quillen, Irish‑rich, Irish oratorical”; “when it came to emotions, he was pure Irish”; Lady was straight Irish, not the mixed Americanized breed the rest of the D’Urfeys were, and she was civil to him as only a Celt knows how to be, while all the time she was adding him up in her mind with the shrewdness of a born judge of human nature; “he added to the things which he had already bequeathed to his daughter—his name, his quick Irish emotions, his oddly passionate feeling for music.” Though her use of essentialisms as a descriptive crutch can be troubling, Deasy’s addition to the canon of Irish‑American fiction is still noteworthy for what her work tells us about mid‑twentieth‑century Irish‑American notions of identity. Deasy’s nov‑ els posit the existence of ethnic traits that separated the Irish from the rest of white America. Deasy also imbues her characters with genetic traits at odds with respectable American society.11 Aside from brief mentions, not much criticism of Deasy’s work exists to date. Where her work is mentioned, it is praised as contributing to the telling of the Irish‑American story. Charles Fan‑ ning says of The Hour of Spring, “Deasy renders the bewilderment of the second‑generation Joy‑ ces, caught between the Old World and the New, and variously crippled in the working out of their 372

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American destinies in politics, acting, the business world, and an often‑tempestuous family life.” Along with Mary Doyle Curran’s The Parish and The Hill and Edward McSorley’s Our Own Kind, Lawrence McCaffrey calls The Hour of Spring one of the best Irish‑American novels of the 1940s. As with other Irish‑American novelists of this time, Deasy writes out of concern that something in the Irish‑American past is disappearing. Third generation Americans are losing a connection with Ireland that had previously been maintained, in some form, in urban immigrant neighborhoods bound together by church, culture, and common experiences, including financial hardship and all that comes with that. Moving out of these neighborhoods (as in Deasy’s The Hour of Spring) or away from tradi‑ tional ways of doing things (as in her O’Shaughnessy’s Day) causes an identity crisis. Protagonists in these books have to put back together who they are in this new version of Irish America.12 Deasy makes it clear that her project is to trace what is left of Irish America as the generations go on. She starts The Hour of Spring (1948) with a dramatis personae, as one would normally find in a play. She labels the characters by generation—The First Generation, The Middle Generation, The Young Generation—so there can be no mistaking the progression she is laying out. Though a letter from her editor in the archives at Boston University suggests she write a list of characters to begin the book to avoid confusion, her choice to label them by generation makes clear the changes time and assimilation have wrought on this family. The first generation are Irish immigrants to a midwestern US town in 1870. Timothy Joyce and Old Matt Joyce, his uncle, are young men when they arrive. Old Matt never marries, but Timothy does, and it is his children and grandchildren, along with some cousins and neighbors, who are the primary characters of the novel. The novel is framed by Timo‑ thy’s granddaughter Bride Joyce, a young woman expecting her first child and preparing for a move to California, trying to piece together the family story by interviewing older relatives. Bride is the third‑generation American who wants to put back together what has been lost. She is concerned with leaving a legacy for her son, so that he can understand his connection to Ireland. She is especially concerned because she is leaving behind the community that the family established. Deasy imbues Bride with nostalgia for her Irish roots: Oh, if I could go back, she thought, I would walk through the years, carrying my son in my arms to see the thick‑walled Kerry cottages with their honey‑colored thatch, the whin and the bog, and the sea that rolls endlessly out of the west. I would stand on the high hills and show him his past that will run in his veins to his own hunger and bewilderment and rich joy, the past that will give the form to his limbs and the color to his mind, bending his life to its pattern even before his birth. I would show him the troubled land, and the faces of his fathers.13 Interestingly, though Bride claims her son will be so influenced by his inherited Irishness, she rushes to get down the family story before she moves away to California. She is at a disadvantage as a keeper of this family history. Though she is one of the few third generation Joyces who seems concerned about her Irish heritage, she is distanced from it by multiple circumstances. Her father, young Matt Joyce, died when she was small; her mother, Angie Starkey, wanted to put all connections with what she saw as the “wild Irish” as far behind her as she could. Angie, the daughter of a judge and sister and wife of attorneys, feels she has risen above all that. And Old Matt Joyce and Timothy Joyce die when Bride is just nine and ten years old, respectively, leaving her with no direct connections to an Ireland she desperately wants to know about. Instead, as she prepares to head to California, she inter‑ views Staffy Brady, one of the last living immigrants in the old “Burke Street” neighborhood, and a younger cousin of Timothy and old Matt. Staffy has what is left of the family lore, but even he admits to not remembering much of Ireland. When Bride asks him to tell her about Ireland, he responds, “It’s all mixed up with the stories the old folks would be telling, the way I don’t know in the world what I saw and what I didn’t. I can remember the sea and that’s all of it.” He was too small a child when 373

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he left to remember much of Ireland. What he does remember is the Irish‑American neighborhood established by his parents and their cousins, however, and all the friends he knew growing up. He tells Bride, “But Burke Street?… That’s another story. I can tell you all you’ll want to know about Burke Street. Mo léir, it’s not what it was in the old days.” Both Bride’s and Staffy’s distance from their fam‑ ily’s immigration story evidences the gaps and fissures in the memory of Irish America. As generations die out, pieces of the story move out of reach. This is the root of the desperation of mid‑twentieth century Irish‑American authors to tell the story before there is no one left to tell it.14 Bride herself appears to be not much more than a literary device. She is involved in very little of the action of the story. It is told in flashback to her, but very rarely about her, with most of the action taking place long before she was born, and some when she was a small child. The piece she narrates herself is her grandfather Timothy Joyce’s wake. This is significant, as in most Irish‑American fiction of the time period, the death and wake of the elder immigrant relative signals the end of an era. This holds true for Deasy. Bride, interestingly, is one of the only grandchildren who would like to linger around to hear the adults talk. She is the representative of the third generation who from a young age wants to know the stories of her family. Though he dies when she is just age nine, she remembers her great‑uncle Matt Joyce’s stories of the old days on Burke Street. For the little time that Bride is in the novel, Deasy exhibits her need to understand and maintain the family history. As with other novels of the period, The Hour of Spring illustrates how leaving the working‑class, Irish‑American neighborhood where immigrants and their families first established themselves is sad, alienating. Christy Fogarty, a cousin of the Joyce family and a second‑generation Irish Ameri‑ can, is one of the narrators speaking to Bride. He voices this sadness over leaving the Joyce’s Burke Street house. He did not live there, but he spent most of his childhood there as playmate to his Joyce cousins. Christy remembers Timothy’s eldest daughter, Kate Joyce, turning her back to him and cry‑ ing on the day they moved out of the house, and he remembers that Maggie, his friend, cousin, and love interest, “wouldn’t even look back” when she walked away from the house for the last time. The day the family moved out of the Burke Street house, he said of himself, “I felt the sadness of the world coming over me; it was the first time in my eighteen years of living that I’d come to a change as big as this.” Christy tells Bride that if could do it over, he would go back to the days “in that little crowded house” when he and the Joyces were so close. He says, “It’s my generation that’s betwixt and between, that lost the old values and the old loyalties without being able to lose the remembrance of them, too.” Here Deasy allows Christy to voice directly the confusion assimilation causes the Irish American who wants to maintain a connection with his roots.15 Christy mourns the loss not only of his closeness with Maggie, whom he loves but can never marry, but also the old ways of the neighborhood itself. Concentrated ethnic neighborhoods such as the one on Burke Street had allowed for cultural transmission to continue and often felt like a safe haven in a new world. American values creep in, of course, and the family members who want to distance themselves from Irishness are seen as the least happy and grounded. Timothy’s second daughter, Marsh Joyce, gets a taste of fine manners at a private school she begs to attend. When Kate marries and leaves home, Marsh takes over (their mother had died giving birth to Hughie, the young‑ est of the second‑generation Joyces). With Marsh in charge, Christy says, “she had a way of making us uncomfortable with her new ideas of the proprieties of household management.” She is also the one who insists they leave Burke Street and move to what she considers a more desirable neighbor‑ hood. Marsh chases wealth and respectability her whole life, marrying an older widower who keeps her in riches. Riches do not bring her happiness, however, and her life seems like a constant perfor‑ mance until she dies tragically in a plane crash.16 The Hour of Spring suggests that social climbing Irish Americans don’t quite know themselves anymore, leading to some identity crises. This is true for young Matt Joyce, who tries to live the life of luxury that his wife Angie wants. Matt seems to have it all—a thriving law career, a beautiful, 374

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wealthy wife who is the daughter of a judge, and two healthy young children. He has lost himself, however, in all this supposed success. Matt and Angie are Bride’s parents, and though Bride (born Bridget) is named after Matt’s beloved aunt (and Christy’s mother), Angie refuses to call her by her given name. Angie remarks, “please don’t call her by that absurd name. We’re trying to get everyone to use her nickname; it doesn’t reek so of the kitchen.” Angie’s and Matt’s opinions on their rela‑ tionship to Irishness leads to friction in their marriage. Angie would like Matt to forget his family’s humble beginnings and act the part of the successful young American. On the other hand, Christy, Matt’s cousin and best friend, has always been an Irish nationalist while Matt played it safe. They are young professionals leading up to the Easter Rising and Irish War for Independence. Feeling boxed in, Matt derails what could be a successful American political career by diving into Irish nationalist politics, too. He mysteriously dies of poisoning, which appears to be related to his loudly supporting the cause of Irish independence. Matt never lives to integrate the Irish and American parts of himself fully, leaving Bride to try to do so when she grows up.17

A New Day for Irish‑American Politics in Deasy’s O’Shaughnessy’s Day In addition to nostalgia for the old neighborhoods, Irish‑American novelists in the mid‑twentieth cen‑ tury also often tackled a profession integral to the rise in Irish prospects in America: politics. Deasy published two novels in which a politician’s career is central to the plot, The Boy Who Made Good (1955) and O’Shaughnessy’s Day (1957). Both of these books exhibit some of the Gothic traits that Mary Burke identifies in earlier Irish‑American literature and in the lives of famous Irish‑American figures. Burke’s chapter on the Kennedy family illustrates how the rhetoric around their many losses despite great political and financial success is framed in Gothic style as a curse. Their success brought on their tragedy. Burke’s recent work argues there is guilt attached to Irish‑American success gained in unscrupulous ways.18 In Mary Deasy’s fiction, Irish‑American politicians who have risen too fast or at the expense of others are similarly cursed. They or their families suffer from their pursuit of power. As politics was one of the main routes to Irish‑American success in the twentieth century, grappling with the ensuing guilt is part of working out of Irish‑American identity for Deasy’s characters. For exam‑ ple, O’Shaughnessy’s Day looks at the legacy of an Irish immigrant elder who is less than a savory character. Unlike Frank Skeffington from Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, published just a year earlier, Aloysius O’Shaughnessy has no redeeming qualities. What’s most interesting here is that his three sons try to piece together how much of who they are is biological destiny—what does it mean that they are his sons—and how much is in their control? Liam O’Shaughnessy thinks, “how much of me is my own man and how much is Aloysius O’Shaughnessy’s son, carrying the sins of his father around with him in the blood of his veins?” Liam’s earliest memory is of being hoisted up onto a bar as his father boasted of bringing the boy with him that night against his mother’s wishes. Young Liam hears himself proclaimed his father’s son, but looking at their two images reflected in the barroom window, denies that he looks anything like him. Already in his earliest memory he is trying to deny this connection with his ghostly double.19 Deasy uses fiction to fill in gaps of memory, sometimes with a tinge of nostalgia. To start O’Shaughnessy’s Day, she says, “any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely co‑ incidental,” but surely it’s more than coincidence, for these books set out to capture a time in Irish America and the people who inhabited that time. If not real individuals, Deasy nonetheless captures in her fiction types that she likely would have known in her community. Similarly, although she calls the city where Aloysius O’Shaughnessy rules the wards Corioli, she models it on Cincinnati. She specifies that Corioli has a population of 401, 247. This was the exact population of Cincinnati in 1920. The cast of characters, including their genealogy, to start the novels instruct us that we are 375

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meant to understand the present of the books through the past. The forces that shaped these characters in the present are the immigration of their parents and grandparents in the not‑so‑distant past, as well as what it took to build the communities they inhabited. In O’Shaughnessy’s Day, Deasy informs her readers that the book takes place in two time periods: one day in 1922, and the time between 1891 and 1922 that led to that day in Liam O’Shaughnessy’s life. Liam is “advised to forget—the past that is walking these streets for [him] still.” He knows that is impossible to forget the past, because it’s all around him. He is a product of his upbringing as an Irish‑American politician’s son, and of his father’s immigrant community.20 The day in question in O’Shaughnessy’s Day is not just any day in Liam’s life: it is that of his father’s wake and funeral. The title, in fact, could refer to the elder or the younger O’Shaughnessy, again lending credence to the haunting double which Burke theorizes troubles Irish Americans trying to break from their past. Aloysius O’Shaughnessy, the father, had been political boss of the city, a thorn in the side of anyone who wanted to reform government or run against him, and an embarrass‑ ment and terror to his sons. O’Shaughnessy’s Day breaks with the benevolent Irish immigrant trope found in much of the other Irish‑American fiction of the time. The legacy of Irishness in this book is more troubling, violent, and wild. There are other Irish immigrant characters who are much more lov‑ ing and morally upright than Aloysius, but his is the blood that runs through his three boys. Whether Liam and his brothers can break from their father’s legacy is the central conflict of the novel. As with most Irish‑American literature of this time, the death of the Irish immigrant elder marks a turn to something new, a break with the old ways and a new day for Irish America. And yet there is the question of what is left of the old ways. On the final page of the novel, Deasy makes the connection between past and present, old world and new, clear, as she simultaneously depicts Aloysius newly in his grave, the Native Americans who lived and died on this land 150 years earlier, and the concep‑ tion of his great‑great‑grandfather in a ditch on the side of a road in County Cork at that same time: A hundred and fifty years before, Michael O’Shaughnessy, a wandering tinker with a cart for a home, had begotten one spring night, in a ditch outside Cork village, a son whose grandson’s son now lay here beneath the fresh alien sod. But that lost, incredible, and forgotten past was no more irrevocably lost now, no more incredible, no more forgotten, than the living days of Aloysius O’Shaughnessy, which would be preserved, briefly and fragilely, only in the memo‑ ries of others, on perishable fragments of paper, and more durably, but more anonymously, in the good and evil he had left behind him, ineluctable seeds of…. The Future. In another example of her use of Irish essentialisms, Deasy also pulls in anti‑Traveler bias, giving to this O’Shaughnessy ancestor a “tinker’s” cart as likely the humblest beginnings she can conjure.21 Earlier work by Mary Burke on the Traveler trope in Irish and American entertainment illuminates Deasy’s use of that figure to end O’Shaughnessy’s Day, a novel in which what of Irishness is carried in our genes is at the heart. Burke identifies the Irish Traveler trope in America as representing some‑ thing from the Irish past that could be reformed, civilized. “Altogether, the Traveler in the U.S. visual representation is informed by particularly American concerns with the inevitable ‘reformation’ of ‘flawed’ whiteness and the remaking of the uncouth past as a justification for the ‘civilized’ present,” she says. This trope, per Burke, harkens back to an allegedly more authentic and freer Irish past. It acts as an antidote to consumer capitalism. Burke notes that literary and media representation of the Traveler reinforce the violence and impoverished nature made out to be inherent in the community. These images would have been familiar to Mary Deasy, who relegates the O’Shaughnessy “tinker” ancestor to a distant past from which the Irish in America have emerged, but which still lurks beneath the surface in their genes. It still informs elements of their nature against which the O’Shaughnessy 376

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boys must battle in their journey to being upright American citizens. Deasy can draw on this trope without elaborating upon it because it is known in American popular culture. She was not above rely‑ ing on a stereotype when it suited her purpose—in this instance, by ironically marrying ethnic biases from Ireland with stereotyping impulses alive and well in America.22

Conclusion Not all stereotypes are negative. Mary Deasy also wanted to lay claim to the nobility of the distant Irish past. She gives some of her Irish‑American characters the attitude and posture of queens and warriors. She makes it explicit when she wants her readers to see these noble genes at work. She imbues other Irish‑American characters with not‑so‑noble inherited traits, such as a penchant for addictive behaviors. The fiery attitude that she also posits as genetic is often presented as a positive, though it can lead to violence as well. In a time when Deasy and her contemporaries were struggling to name what was still Irish in America, it is understandable that she would reach for something natu‑ ral, something that moving away from an ethnic neighborhood could not take away. Still, by leaning into essentialisms, Deasy does her part to add to the sometimes unrealistic and anachronistic view her American readership had of Ireland. In other places, such as the O’Shaughnessy boys’ struggle to find themselves in American politics and personal relationships without relying on their father’s connections, and in Christy Fogarty’s and Staffy Brady’s poignant memories of their Burke Street neighborhood, she speaks truths about the conflict inherent in many American assimilation stories. Deasy grapples with what of the past is in the present, and what of the present is a turn to some‑ thing new. Her characters grapple with this as well. She never offers a clear‑cut answer, but Deasy does fit with her contemporaries in offering the death of an elder as the death of a way of life. The wake and funeral of Timothy Joyce ends The Hour of Spring, though chronologically in Bride’s life it happened much earlier. The wake and funeral of Aloysius O’Shaughnessy is the occasion of O’Shaughnessy’s Day. Good or bad, these men were foundational to their communities, and their deaths indicate characters are on a threshold of a new Irish America, one where they must find their own way and where they fit in. Bride’s cousin Evelyn Hope, raised several states away from Burke Street and without his mother Marsh Joyce who died when he was young, voices the worry of Irish Americans who have lost touch with their immigrant ancestors. He says at Timothy’s wake, Isn’t it queer…not knowing any more about your own family than this? Do you realize that I’ve been surrounded all day by relatives I’ve never even seen before, all talking about relatives I never will see, because they’ve been tucked away for years in their cozy little graves? Similarly, Edward McSorley’s Our Own Kind ends with Willie McDermott, grandson of Irish im‑ migrant Ned, considering the nearby church graveyard, and realizing that soon all of the immigrant generation will be gone, and he will be estranged from the community he once knew.23 Despite her imperfections, including her tendency toward essentialism, Mary Deasy deserves to be discussed alongside other authors of the time who were attempting to chronicle Irish‑American life as it had been in the time of their grandparents. Writing from the perspective of grown adults in an America that had seen a Great Depression, two World Wars, white flight from the cities, and the rapid expansion of suburbia, of course these authors would view their childhood neighborhoods through a new lens. They fill in gaps of memory with the way they want things to be. In Deasy’s case, she may resort to filling them in with stereotypes about passionate tempers, while at times elevating all Irish to the level of kings and queens. Still, her novels evidence a common concern that something about Irish America was disappearing in the post‑World War II years, and that something was worth be‑ ing remembered. Deasy and her fellow Irish‑American novelists of the mid‑twentieth century argue 377

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through their fiction that lost in assimilating to America was a tight‑knit Irish‑American community where neighbors knew one another, helped one another, and relied upon on another. They had in many cases a common history of financial hardship and oppression. In America, the choice was to hide that history out of shame, or to find in it an affinity with other communities facing the same struggles. In painting the characters who forgot their Irish roots as least likable, these authors show they preferred the latter.

Notes 1 Kelleher, “Irish‑American Literature,” 127. Anish, Irish American Fiction covers these other post‑World War II novels in more detail. 2 Kenny, American Irish, 225–228. 3 Rogers and O’Brien, After the Flood, 3; McCaffrey, “Catholic Irish America.” 4 Meagher, Inventing Irish America, 22; Cooper, Forging Identities, 114. 5 Ebest, Private Histories, 59; Giunta, Writing With an Accent, 49–59. 6 Halbwachs, Social Frameworks of Memory, 38; Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 41. 7 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 182; Ngugi, Decolonizing the Mind, 3. 8 Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance, 89; Kelly, Ireland’s Great Famine, 121. 9 Burke, Race, Politics, and Irish America, 1, 5. 10 Marcus Lee Hansen quoted in Meagher, Inventing Irish America, 6; Meagher on Conzen, Gerber et al., ­Inventing Irish America, 8; Hallissy, Reading Irish‑American Fiction, 7. 11 Deasy, O’Shaughnessy’s Day, 127; Deasy, The Boy Who Made Good, 31; Deasy, Devil’s Bridge, 40; Deasy, Ella Gunning, 2. 12 Fanning, The Irish Voice in America, 298; McCaffrey, “Catholic Irish America.” 13 Correspondence with Deasy’s Atlantic Monthly editor Stanley Salmen is found in the Mary Deasy Col‑ lection, Boston University Libraries, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. The Letter asking her to include a cast of characters in The Hour of Spring is dated 27 August, 1947; Deasy, Hour of Spring, 6. 14 Deasy, Hour of Spring, 10. 15 Deasy, Hour of Spring, 71–83. 16 Deasy, Hour of Spring, 72–73. 17 Deasy, Hour of Spring, 288. 18 Burke, Race, Politics, and Irish America, Epilogue. 19 Deasy, O’Shaughnessy’s Day, 15. 20 Deasy, O’Shaughnessy’s Day, 34. 21 Deasy, O’Shaughnessy’s Day, 381–382. 22 Burke, ‘Tinkers’, 16. 23 Deasy, Hour of Spring, 339.

Bibliography Primary Sources Berlin, Ellin. Lace Curtain. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948. Curran, Mary Doyle. The Parish and the Hill. 1948. New York: Feminist Press, 1986.Deasy, Mary. Devil’s Bridge. Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1952. Deasy, Mary. Ella Gunning. Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1950. Deasy, Mary. O’Shaughnessy’s Day. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957. Deasy, Mary. The Boy Who Made Good. Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1955. Deasy, Mary. The Hour of Spring. Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1948. Mary Deasy Collection, Boston University Libraries, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. McSorley, Edward. Our Own Kind. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946. O’Connor, Edwin. The Last Hurrah. Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1956. Sylvester, Harry. Moon Gaffney. New York: Henry Holt, 1947.

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Secondary Sources Anish, Beth O’Leary. Irish American Fiction from World War II to JFK: Anxiety, Assimilation, and Activism. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Beiner, Guy. Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in ­Ulster. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Burke, Mary M. Race Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Burke, Mary. ‘Tinkers’: Synge and the Cultural History of the Irish Traveller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Cooper, Sophie. Forging Identities in the Irish World: Melbourne and Chicago, c.  1830–1922. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. Ebest, Ron. Private Histories: The Writing of Irish Americans, 1900–1935. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Fanning, Charles. The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish‑American Fiction, 2nd ed. Lexington: Univer‑ sity of Kentucky Press, 2000. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks. 1952. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, 1961. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004. Giunta, Edvige. Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Halbwachs, Maurice. The Social Frameworks of Memory (1952) in On Collective Memory, editor and translator Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Hallissy, Margaret. Reading Irish‑American Fiction: The Hyphenated Self. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Kelleher, John V. “Irish‑American Literature, and Why There Isn’t Any.” In Selected Writings of John V. Kelleher on Ireland and Irish America, edited by Charles Fanning, 126–135. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002. Kelly, Mary C. Ireland’s Great Famine in Irish American History: Enshrining a Fateful Memory. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2000. McCaffrey, Lawrence J. “Catholic Irish America: Drifting into the Mainstream.” Insight: New Perspectives in Irish Studies 3 (2006). http://homepage.eircom.net/~archaeology/three/mainstream.htm Meagher, Timothy J. Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880–1928. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. Ngugi, wa Thiong’o. Decolonizing the Mind. London: James Curry, Ltd, 1986. Ricouer, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: Uni‑ versity of Chicago Press, 2004. Rogers, James Silas, and Matthew J. O’Brien, eds. After the Flood: Irish America 1945–1960. Dublin, Ireland: Irish Academic Press, 2009.

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29 LORRAINE HANSBERRY, SEAN O’CASEY, AND THE COMMON SPACE OF THE THEATER Cara McClintock-Walsh

It is not difficult to find examples of scholarship from Sean O’Casey’s time and ours that question his continuing relevance and universality. Indeed, his significance may only be unquestioned in years celebrating anniversaries like the 1916 Rising or the Anglo-Irish War. While his Dublin Trilogy has secured a place in the history of Irish Theatre, even these plays encounter unfavorable critical reappraisal that regards them as limited, parochial, and too dependent on knowledge of early-twentiethcentury Irish history. In an essay from the 1980s, for example, Seamus Deane argues that “O’Casey’s virtues as a dramatist are sufficiently recognized but these should not be confused with his usefulness as an example.” Heinz Kosok similarly claims that although O’Casey was widely admired by his fel‑ low dramatists in England and Ireland, his work failed to influence, in any meaningful way, the shape of drama. More recently, Christopher Murray poses questions about O’Casey’s direct influence on the drama of the twentieth century: O’Casey … still remains at work in the world: his words, his characters, his situations are re‑ flected wherever poverty and laughter and urban warfare exist…. […][Although] [h]is afterlife is assured [,h]ow it is to be interpreted and extended, however, is an open question. This question of relevance and influence bedeviled O’Casey throughout his artistic career.1 Until the 2020s, Lorraine Hansberry faced similar questions of relevance and influence. Although her first produced play, A Raisin in the Sun, emerged as a cornerstone of American theater almost immediately (it was the first Broadway play with both a Black author and Black director), its legacy challenged Hansberry for the rest of her short life. Despite its enormous popularity, Raisin was ini‑ tially rejected by both the Left and Black radicals as too middle class and prosaic, even as it was deracinated by white critics who insisted that the Youngers were an “Every-family” whose Blackness was merely incidental. Amiri Baraka, an early critic of the play, admits, We thought Hansberry’s play was part of the ‘passive resistance’ phase of the movement… [and] ‘middle class’ in that its focus seemed to be on ‘moving into white folks’ neighborhood,’ when most blacks were just struggling to pay their rent in ghetto shacks. We missed the essence of the work…. Raisin reflects the real lives of the Black US majority [more] than any work [that] ever received commercial exposure before it, and few if any since.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-35

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After Raisin, many of Hansberry’s plays were un-produced or, like O’Casey after his Dublin Trilogy, underproduced in her lifetime.2 Hansberry was not only inspired and influenced by O’Casey as a socially committed playwright, then; as this critical reception shows, she also shared many of his critical misfortunes. Both suffered a general misunderstanding and dismissal of their serious political commitments as avowed and engaged communists and shared a type of intellectual homelessness when the aesthetics and themat‑ ics of absurdism and naturalism were dominant (versus the “romantic realism” both practiced). This chapter explores O’Casey’s greatest and fullest influence in America, through both the Dublin Tril‑ ogy and his more experimental plays. Postwar Black theater in America restores O’Casey’s lasting and meaningful influence and the fullness of his radicalism. It answers O’Casey’s biographer Chris‑ topher Murray’s question, “[W]here now was the [O’Casey] renaissance to come from?” by focusing on the ways in which Black scholars, actors, dramatists, and the vanguard of regional Black theaters recovered, restored, and reimagined O’Casey’s plays in the 1940s–1960s. Tracing O’Casey’s influ‑ ence on Black theater up to its apotheosis in the plays and theatrical philosophy of Lorraine Hans‑ berry opens up a fuller discussion of his far-reaching influence on socially progressive, politically committed Black American drama in its continuing quest to become, and remain, universal. Indeed, it is only by examining Hansberry’s wider, deeper commitment to O’Casey’s artistic philosophy in context that we can fully understand O’Casey’s appeal not only to one significant Black author, but to generations of Black theater-makers in the twentieth century.3

Irish and African-American Theater and the Desire for Self-Authorship The appeal of Irish authors to the emerging Black arts movement in the early twentieth century includes but extends beyond The Harlem Renaissance. While significant works of scholarship al‑ ready trace the many converging lines of influence between the Irish and Harlem Renaissances, this chapter concentrates on cultural artifacts from the 1920s and 1930s which signal the influence of Irish dramatists on developing independent Black theaters. Such artifacts reveal how Black authors claimed aesthetic kinship with Irish dramatists to develop the parallel aims of artistic independence, self-representation, and social justice.4 As early as 1921—four years before the publication of Alain Locke’s The New Negro—­ Montgomery Gregory, Director of the Department of Dramatic Arts at Howard University, invokes the model of Irish drama as particularly relevant to Black actors and playwrights. Published in The New Republic in November 1921, “For a Negro Theatre” argues for the importance of Black selfauthorship in drama. In the course of his appeal, Gregory cites the Irish example of successful postco‑ lonial dramatic art as inspiration: “What the Irish players have done for the Irish people … the Negro should have the opportunity of doing for his race.” The dramatic output of Irish authors, Gregory avers, advances a people by insisting on their inclusion in the story of their nation. The resulting “na‑ tive drama” of a Negro Theatre would deepen and enrich American drama itself and would “prove a potent agency for the amelioration of race friction and misunderstandings and would help American culture…. Any people must largely win respect and recognition in proportion as it contributes to the higher life of mankind….” The Irish model, then, would demonstrate for a skeptical American populace the possibility of an oppressed “Other” to claim full citizenship and humanity, not through propaganda but through excellent imaginative, dramatic output.5 Similarly, in his 1939 essay “Negro Folk Drama,” M. N. O’Brien outlines the need for self-­ authorship among the oppressed to demolish stereotypes to which they have been subjected and by which they have been limited, artistically and socially. Both Black and Irish authors, O’Brien sug‑ gests, are trapped within stereotypes authored by their oppressors; only through self-authorship can

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Black writers achieve “political and economic” independence as Irish dramatists did. This artistic progression of Black dramatists, inspired by and running parallel to that of the Irish Renaissance, would help “to drive from the stage the false stage Negro, and [lay] the foundation for a great Negro Drama that may find its realization in this century.” The American Negro Theatre (ANT) became the proving ground for Black drama in mid-century America, launching the careers of such important Black actors as Ruby Dee, Sidney Poitier, and Harry Belafonte, whose first leading stage role was as Johnny Boyle in Juno and the Paycock.6

The American Negro Theatre, Juno and the Paycock, and the Quest for a Black Universal The American Negro Theatre was founded in 1940 in the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library. Initially an outgrowth of the WPA Federal Theatre Project (Negro Unit), it was established by Fredrick O’Neal and Abram Hill to “provide black actors, playwrights, directors and other theaterrelated professionals… opportunities to work in productions that illustrated the diversity of black life.” Like the initial vision of the Abbey Theatre, the ANT imagined a theater that reflected its audi‑ ence’s life, but also helped to educate, inspire, and shape the aspirations of their community. In its statement of values, the ANT declares A people’s theatre …. provides the finest outlet for class emotions that can be organized. We need a people’s theatre which shall in effect, be a national theatre…. …The destiny of Negro participation in the theatre has been carved into a pattern which on the whole is negative. Through the honest portrayal of Negro life and character, this organiza‑ tion seeks to avoid the distorted patterns of the past, but hopes to relegate them into oblivion or at least present [a] more balanced picture of his life. For a “people’s theatre” that aspired to national significance and devoted itself to socially engaged and politically inflected theater, the question of the ANT’s repertory was particularly acute: what plays could the theater produce when, as founder Abraham Hill put it, “the black theatre [that the ANT imagined] did not [yet] exist”? While 12 of its 19 initial offerings were original plays, it also mounted all-Black productions written by white authors. Scholar Jonathan Shandell remarks that “the ANT’s contributions to the black theatre during the 1940s… followed a strategy of ‘reappropriation and redefinition.’”7 Although John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea in 1949 appears to have been the ANT’s final production, Sean O’Casey work was most often invoked by Black authors, actors, and directors as emblematic of drama that engaged, as Belafonte suggested of Juno, “social issues relevant to all.” O’Casey’s humanism and radicalism endeared him to this nascent theater, balanced between themati‑ cally and formally radical drama and the desire to represent its audience’s experiences through social realism. The ANT’s choice of a global repertory opened an artistic conduit that was both transnational and transracial; in so doing, it created a common space that made a convincing case for the universal‑ ity of Black stories.8 The ANT staged an all-Black production of Juno and the Paycock in 1946. This was not the first time it had staged a play by a white author: the ANT’s biggest commercial success was a 1944 allBlack production of Anna Lucasta, a play about Polish immigrants written by a “white playwright containing no specific discussion of race.” The rationale behind the ANT’s choice of Juno can best be gleaned from the history of Irish influence on Black plays in America, as discussed above, but also through interviews with the production’s actors and producers. Alice Childress, an important AfricanAmerican actor, playwright, theorist, educator, and one of the co-founders of the ANT, argued for the 382

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importance of a “black self-determinist theater.” She cited O’Casey as a powerful influence on her con‑ ception of plays’ usefulness thematically, representationally, and constructively for a people. In essays such as “Behind the Curtained World” (1942), O’Casey envisions the promise of such a “people’s” or “little theatre” that devotes its creative energies to depicting lives otherwise neglected by artistic ­representation—what he would elsewhere call “the dignity of the downtrodden.” O’Casey writes that “If the drama dies in one place, it springs to life in another…. Wherever we sit down, stand up… sing, dance, work, weep, … there the theatre is, and ever will be.” The postwar need for “new ways of living” and “new ways of thought” demanded a new theater, one with a broader and more meaningful scope. Childress, too, called for a self-determinist theater, one similarly rooted in lives otherwise overlooked by drama: “I have learned that I must watch my people in railroad stations, in restaurants, in the fields and tenements…. [A] Negro people’s theater” is all about the “opportunity [to see] the Negro people… in an effort to …eventually create a complete desire for the liberation of all oppressed peoples.”9 In her foundational essays, Childress points to O’Casey, Sholem Alecheim, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar as authors who extended dramatic treatment to subjects once considered beyond the realm of theatrical representation. Childress urges Black dramatists to eschew the critical approval of white critics and instead to create subjects who lay outside of white critical respectability. “[It is] a serious self-deception to think that culturally ignoring those who are poor, lost, and/or rebellious will some‑ how better our ‘image,’” argues Childress. “The wrong is not in writing about them but … in denying their humanity….” Tellingly, Childress invokes authors who are themselves outside of European and American traditions as examples of authors who created such characters. To present these subjects at all, as O’Casey does in his Dublin Trilogy and beyond, Childress suggests, is important; to celebrate these characters without omitting or simplifying their social situation distinguishes authors. Childress admired more than O’Casey’s choice of subjects: like Hansberry, she admired his style and ability to hew closely to reality while rejecting naturalism and its attendant sense of futility. In O’Casey’s drama, Childress saw a form of art that reflected the often-grim reality of its people yet also molded this experience to capture moments of genuine beauty, heroism, and possibility.10 The ANT’s transnational vision modeled this dialectic: by staging an Irish author’s plays with an all-Black cast, the ANT created space to issue a common call for liberation of all oppressed peoples. Both Harry Belafonte, whose role as Johnny Boyle in the ANT’s 1946 production of Juno marked his first leading role on the stage, and Douglas Turner Ward, who had a minor role in the ANT’s Juno but who is better known as the co-founder of the Negro Ensemble Company (1964), recognized the ANT’s production of Juno as an opportunity for Black actors to decolonize and desegregate the stage. In a 2002 interview, Belafonte reveals that his early exposure to Sean O’Casey’s plays “captivated the mind of a young black kid, born in poverty in Harlem, growing up in the plantations of Jamaica” and contributed to his desire to seek racial and social justice through his work as an artist. Further, Belafonte suggests that his identity as a Caribbean-American artist made him better suited for the role of Johnny Boyle in the ANT’s Juno. In the ANT’s production of Juno, “the black actors’ use of West Indian accents added a new dimension to O’Casey’s critique of British imperialism.” When AfricanAmerican actors performed Juno, the play extended beyond Ireland into a larger critique of colonial power. Paul Robeson, who attended the ANT’s production of Juno, concurred with Belafonte’s sense that in some ways African-American actors were better equipped to perform O’Casey’s plays in America than their white counterparts. Douglas Turner Ward echoes this sentiment in his assessment of the promise of Black treatments of white-authored plays. In an interview, he remarks, I think that excellent black actors … would do a play like Juno and the Paycock better than most white American actors. … O’Casey … was investigating a period of Irish revolution and the ghettos of Dublin which were almost like the ghettos of Harlem…. I claim we have a more natu‑ ral ability to do those works because we would be bringing to them a felt organic experience. 383

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Ward emphasizes a kinship between African-American and Irish stories via class and economic colo‑ nization, a kinship Hansberry too found when she used Juno’s setting in the slums of Ireland as in‑ spiration for the Younger family’s struggle to move out of their neighborhood in A Raisin in the Sun. By unmooring Juno from its specifically Irish context and transplanting it to a theater in Harlem, the ANT production highlighted its universality and emphasized the common cause of the poor around the world. Childress, Ward, Robeson, and Belafonte’s thoughts on O’Casey’s relevance suggest why O’Casey’s influence on American theater has for so long been overlooked: this relevance is most deeply felt among racially and economically marginalized artists during a time of deeply entrenched racist policies in American society.11

The Legacy of the ANT’s Juno and Efforts to Desegregate the Theater Although the American Negro Theatre closed its doors in 1949, several all-Black, mixed-race, or what might be called “Black-adapted” productions of Juno followed the ANT’s. In the January 17, 1953 edi‑ tion of The New York Times, Louis Calta, in a review of theater news, notes that “a Negro version of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock… is making the rounds of… managerial offices.” Miles Jefferson, in his 1950s column called “The Negro on Broadway,” also notes two racially inflected off-Broadway productions of Irish plays in 1955: George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara and O’Casey’s Juno at the Greenwich Mews Theatre, a production O’Casey was aware of (addressed below). These productions mark an important development in the ways Black productions of O’Casey’s plays mobilized drama to serve the ends of social justice—in this case, desegregation. As Jonathan Shandell notes, some early twentieth-century theater-makers “saw the insertion of black performers into traditionally white roles as a mark of progress” representing “an important refutation of an insidious ‘mental parallelism of white art for white folk and black art for black folk,’ and thus a crucial step toward equality of opportunity.” We should regard this entire era of all-Black or integrated versions of plays such as Juno as part of an effort to desegregate the American stage when segregation was still widely codified and defended as a cultural practice. The ANT’s productions of plays such as Juno and the Paycock, Riders to the Sea, and You Can’t Take it With You, all staged by the ANT, were no longer off-limits to Black actors, directors, or stage technicians (the latter of whom were still excluded from professional organizations).12 The ANT’s Juno also paved the way for such events as the Equity Integration Showcase of 1959, held a mere month after the Broadway debut of A Raisin in the Sun. Helmed by Frederick O’Neal, co-founder of the American Negro Theatre and the first Black president of Actors’ Equity, the Inte‑ gration Showcase “presented a two-hour program of scenes” of white-authored plays such as The Caine Mutiny and Tea and Sympathy in which various roles were played by Black actors “to show how the Negro actor can be used in ‘other than Negro roles’ without disturbing the artistic intent of the play.” O’Neal, as a member of Actor’s Equity, worked to eliminate some of the more degrading experiences of Black actors who were also Equity members: many had to arrange for their own hous‑ ing on the road, owing to discriminatory practices in hotels, and while Black actors could perform on stage at the National Theatre in Washington DC in the 1940s, “their relatives and friends could not come to see them.” The Integration Showcase’s aims may sound modest, but they represent the state of American drama at the end of the 1950s and help to recontextualize the radical nature of both the ANT’s efforts in the 1940s and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, which premiered on Broadway only weeks before 1959’s Integration Showcase.13

Lorraine Hansberry’s Vision of Sean O’Casey Lorraine Hansberry stands as a stark challenge to the evaluation of O’Casey and the limits of his in‑ fluence; indeed, she stands as the apotheosis of Sean O’Casey’s influence on and inspiration for Black 384

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American drama. Born in Chicago in 1930 and known both for her family’s groundbreaking legal challenge to restricted housing covenants and for her depiction of this struggle against institutional racism in A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry distinguished herself as a radical activist (working on such publications such as Paul Robeson’s progressive newspaper Freedom), a popular and experimental playwright, and a committed humanist. In her own version of her creative awakening, which her ex-husband Robert Nemiroff collected in a posthumous work called To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, Hansberry cites Sean O’Casey as the single strongest influence in her life as a playwright; she contin‑ ued to discuss O’Casey’s influence on her in various essays and in many interviews she gave during and after the premiere of A Raisin in the Sun. Examining Hansberry’s own writing shows that O’Casey’s influence on Hansberry has been si‑ multaneously over- and under-estimated, identified yet misunderstood for decades. It is overstated in that some critics accused Hansberry of plagiarizing O’Casey; ironically, Hansberry’s own generous acknowledgement of O’Casey’s influence on her work may have contributed to critics’ misguided attempts to deracinate A Raisin in the Sun. At the same time, most contemporary critics understate O’Casey’s most significant influence on Hansberry, which was not on Raisin itself but on her very philosophy of what a socially committed, racially progressive theater could do. Although some con‑ temporary scholars neglect O’Casey’s influence on Hansberry entirely and others look no further than Juno’s oft-discussed influence on Raisin, Hansberry demonstrated a deep and broad knowledge of O’Casey’s works that extended far beyond the Dublin Trilogy. Copies of Juno, Within the Gates, four volumes of O’Casey’s collected plays, and David Krause’s Sean O’Casey: The Man and His Work adorned Hansberry’s personal library; in interviews and lectures, Hansberry discusses Red Roses for Me, Shadow of a Gunman, and Sunset and Evening Star. While O’Casey’s influence on English stages might be difficult to discern, Hansberry’s deep study of the O’Casey beyond the trilogy, includ‑ ing more experimental works such as Red Roses for Me and Within the Gates, illustrates the extent of O’Casey’s influence on American theater in 1959—the year of Raisin’s debut.14 Hansberry’s lengthiest and most sustained meditations on O’Casey can be found throughout To Be Young, Gifted and Black, a collection of letters, contemplations, and experimental drama; in her lengthy interview with Studs Terkel in 1959; and in her speeches and essays on the state of contem‑ porary drama. In To Be Young, Hansberry cites own her exposure to O’Casey’s Juno as the event that steered her away from a path of pure activism toward committed social engagement through theater. As she tells it, I remember rather clearly that my coming had been an accident. […] The woman’s voice, the howl, the shriek of misery fitted to a wail of poetry that consumed all my senses and all my awareness of human pain, endurance and the futility of it—…the wail rose and hummed through the tenement, through Dublin, through Ireland itself and then mingled with seas and became something born of the Irish wail that was all of us. I remember sitting there stunned …. The play was Juno, the writer Sean O’Casey—but the melody was one that I had known for a very long while. I was seventeen and I did not think then of writing the melody as I knew it—… but I believe it entered my consciousness and stayed there. When Nemiroff arranges this material, he does so by interspersing scenes from A Raisin in the Sun with scenes from Juno and the Paycock, so that characters from both plays occupy the stage at the same time. This has the startling effect of dramatizing not only Hansberry’s personal reaction to O’Casey—dramatizing no less than her moment of artistic birth—but also the way in which Juno influenced Raisin by staging the two plays in direct dialog with one another. Keeping the cultural signifiers of each play intact, the African drums of Raisin interleave themselves with Boyle’s drunken rendition of an Irish melody in Juno.15 385

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Audiences and critics recognized the interrelationship between the two plays immediately upon Raisin’s debut; in 1959, only three months after the play’s Broadway premiere, The New York Times published a letter in which one audience member went so far as to accuse Hansberry of plagiarizing O’Casey’s plot but missing “the great man’s spirit.” But a brief consideration of the plays’ cor‑ respondences does not support this claim; rather, it illustrates how a play like Juno, set in Ireland during its own complicated Civil War, offered universal resonances relevant to Hansberry and other African-American dramatists in midcentury America. Both plays take place in tenement houses; both involve a family waiting for an inheritance through the death of a male family member; and both inheritances either never materialize or are squandered. Both use family dynamics to dramatize the personal impact of political and social realities; both involve strong maternal figures confronted by their unruly sons; both feature rebellious daughter figures who long for the life education might make possible for them. Additionally, both feature sons who are betrayed by, or who betray, their comrades. Both plots incorporate an unwanted pregnancy that brings to the fore deeply entrenched sexual taboos. Both plays show characters in conflict with their political and racial affiliations and identities; both expose the ways in which these affiliations diminish the individual and his or her ability to reach out and relate to others who do not share these affiliations. Both plays explore and expose the pernicious effects of poverty on a family’s most personal decisions; both use the device of the inheritance to illustrate the gross materialism and inequalities of our age; and both aver that dreams that depend on a financial windfall must fail. Both plays illustrate that change is yet pos‑ sible and must come from a solidarity among the poor and working class, a message consonant with O’Casey and Hansberry’s shared affiliation with communism. Both plays center on a family in which the men are intoxicated by dreams and ideals, and in which women must bear the brunt of reality and the fallout of these dreams.16 Hansberry heard in Juno a universal cry that she could tell “in a different key.” This universality does not flatten the specific concerns of race or class. Rather, it resonates with other economically and racially exploited, marginalized and disenfranchised communities. As Hansberry humorously and succinctly put it, Surely drunkenness, the eating of eggs and sausages, and the having of sisters must be known wherever men know thirst and frustration, hunger and familial relationships…. I cannot believe that [Irish culture] must alone lay claim… to those matters in dialogue or dramaturgy. Hansberry’s response to this accusation of plagiarism acknowledges her admiration of O’Casey but also suggests that the charge of plagiarism was evidence of an intellectual and cultural deficit in a segregated society: One of the prime features of a segregated society is the inevitable development of ignorance of the respective ways of the two isolated halves of that society…. The matriarchy in Negro life is such an entrenched characteristic, at once beloved and hated, that it would not occur to a Negro student of drama to search for the origins of a “Junoesque” mother in a play of Negro life. It is more difficult to imagine “Raisin” without Lena Younger than with her: she is not fabricated from another dramatist, she is overtly imposed from life. One may meet her at least a dozen times on a casual stroll through the Negro community, anywhere in the United States, any afternoon. In other words, the letter writer who accuses Hansberry of plagiarism only recognizes Mama’s simi‑ larity to Juno because he has only encountered this figure in literature, and in white literature. Hans‑ berry’s response makes clear the need for desegregated efforts in theater, as discussed with previous 386

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Black productions of Juno. Hansberry credits O’Casey with awakening within her a story she had known for some time already: Juno emerges as universal because Hansberry recognizes her story as also belonging to Black mothers like Mama, too.17 Most egregiously, the accusation of plagiarism misrepresents Hansberry’s greatest debt to O’Casey, a point she raises in her response. “As a matter of fact, I am the first to say that my play and all plays I shall ever write ‘owe’ deeply to the great O’Casey,” retorts Hansberry. “Precisely, however, where Mr. Boyle suggests departure: in spirit” (emphasis added). Hansberry repeatedly emphasizes that O’Casey’s most enduring influence on her is “in spirit.” In her incisive essay “Willie Loman, Walter Younger, and He Who Must Live,” Hansberry admits that she is largely delighted by the reception of Raisin, but that “some… quite missed the… terribly clear fact that [the bones of the play] … are very old bones indeed.” Hansberry illustrates the ways in which she and other Black authors turned to O’Casey not only because of cultural or thematic kinships, but also because his artistic credo in‑ sisted, first, on heroic affirmation for those subject to the harshest elements of society, and second, that society must realize this heroic possibility through its own radical reorganization. Hansberry and O’Casey both felt that this attitude toward socially engaged theater was necessary to counter the stultifying effects of Naturalism and Absurdism in drama. Juno and Raisin’s ultimate rejection of the fatalism of modern drama for what Hansberry would elsewhere call a “romantic realism” was for her the most important—and most misunderstood—connection between the plays.18 Here we find why Hansberry held up O’Casey not only as a source of personal inspiration but also as a model for other African-American playwrights. To accept the world as it is, as naturalists do, is to accept the conditions that perpetuate racial, economic, and social inequality. To Hansberry and O’Casey, naturalism and social realism are fatal to those disenfranchised and marginalized by society. In the opening paragraph of her 1959 essay “The Negro Writer and His Roots: Toward a New Romanticism,” Hansberry lays claim to O’Casey as part of an African- American aesthetic heritage. Hansberry holds up O’Casey as an example of a writer who experienced, confronted, and depicted acts of individual and cultural violence and injustice, yet remained a “warrior against despair and lover of humankind”; she locates O’Casey on one end of a continuum, the other end of which is Ten‑ nessee Williams, whom Hansberry identifies as one whose psychological dramas ultimately embrace “defeat and futility.” Hansberry asserts that between “these two expressions lies the essence of all arguments concerned with the destiny of the human race”: O’Casey’s war against despair and his devotion to the “new romanticism” that she embraces, or Williams’ sense of man as cannibal. The alternative to the “dead end” of realism, the abstraction of absurdity, the disgust of naturalism is the route Hansberry and O’Casey choose—not a form of drama that “go[es] dreaming in [a] Utopianland” but one that acknowledges and interrogates reality without bowing to its current restrictions and inequalities.19 To this formulation of the playwright’s social duty, Hansberry adds the dimension of race. For Hansberry, Black authors must depict not only the struggle but the possibility of affirmation because to refuse this possibility is quite literally fatal: I am one who considers the worship of despair pointless and, I must add, a rather boring pur‑ suit…. On the other hand, I am the first to say that ours is a complex and difficult country and some of our complexities are indeed grotesque…. I absolutely plead guilty to the charge of idealism. …. You see, our people don’t really have a choice. We must come out of the ghettoes of America, because the ghettoes are killing us: not only our dreams, as Mama says, but our very bodies. Through the “act of living and overcoming,” dramatic protagonists, even through their failures, can highlight unjust systems that govern our lives, and in so doing demand change.20 387

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Hansberry recognizes a type of cultural kinship between Black and Irish authors who see more acutely both the problems and possibilities of their respective cultures, because of their positions on the margins; both belong to a “dual culture.” For Irish authors, it is their position as colonial subjects that grants them special insight into questions of power and radical possibilities. Hansberry, in an inter‑ view preceding the debut of Raisin, likens the dual culture of the Black artist to that of “the great Irish writers—Shaw, O’Casey, Joyce. All members of the outgroup. When you’re at the bottom, you can’t help but see things more clearly.” She continues this line of reasoning when she recognizes Irish au‑ thors as part of, yet simultaneously outside of, the dominant European literary tradition. She remarks, For two hundred years the only writers in English literature we’ve had to boast about have been the Irish, who come from an oppressed culture, you know? Shaw, O’Casey… from Jonathan Swift to James Joyce and so forth…. I don’t think that’s an accident even though they aren’t protest writers in the sense that we think of in the United States. While it is a mistake to overstate this cultural kinship, as many Irish studies scholars have shown, Hansberry shares with some of her Black contemporaries a recognition of Irish literature as emblem‑ atic of works of art that are artistically accomplished and socially engaged. Imani Perry notes that Hansberry “persisted in her belief that great art emerges through the imagination of an alternative so‑ cial order, the kind of imagining that comes about only through shifting the frames that we assume.” The creation of a Black universal, or drama devoted to centering the marginalized, was for Hansberry and O’Casey part of this “shifting the frames.”21

Conclusion In what is perhaps the only existing review of the American Negro Theatre’s all-Black production of Juno and the Paycock, the reviewer writes that The importance of this production… lay in the actors[’] recreation of the crushing misery suf‑ fered by the Irish people—a phenomenon not exactly foreign to the Negro people…. All in all, this production indicated ANT’s potentialities in the direction of becoming ‘a people’s theatre.’ Almost ten years after this review, a divinity student, with some sense of alarm, wrote to Sean O’Casey in response to the racially diverse Greenwich Mews’ production of Juno. What, the cor‑ respondent asked, did O’Casey think of such casting? In May 1955, O’Casey replied: Of course, there is but one race—the human race, and we are all brothers and sisters…. But there are, thank God, many varieties of race; varieties in the states forming one people; varie‑ ties among communities in the State, and varieties among families within the community. I agree it is difficult to accept, dramatically, a negro among the characters of Juno, but the play is universal, and it needs but time and a closer union with our colored brothers to render the experience a common one. I hope that one day the characters will be all Chinese, Negroes, Indonesians, or any other race interested in the work; and that, indeed, would be Glory for Me. The universalism of O’Casey’s drama was one recognized by Black authors, actors, and theatermakers in midcentury America, from Lorraine Hansberry to Harry Belafonte, Alice Childress to Douglas Turner Ward, and, later, by the founders of the Free Southern Theatre, who would mount a touring racially diverse production of Shadow of a Gunman in the American South at the height of the Civil Rights movement. While claims of universalism have their own limitations, many of 388

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them dramatized by the attempt to whitewash and deracinate Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin, O’Casey’s claim to universalism as an Irish author depicting Irish historical events resonated with Black play‑ wrights, who similarly desired to create a Black universal. The need for a Black universal is both sim‑ ple and impossible to overstate for authors such as Hansberry: only in claiming a Black perspective as universal can racism itself become intolerable to those who are not Black. As Hansberry writes in “Willie Loman, Walter Younger, and He Who Must Live,” Nobody really finds oppression and/or poverty tolerable. If we ever destroy the image of black people who supposedly do find those things tolerable in America, then that much touted ‘guilt’ which allegedly haunts most of middle-class white Americans with regard to the Negro ques‑ tion would really become unendurable. If the Youngers’ battle against segregated housing could be simultaneously recognized as an actual problem faced by Black families in America and be appreciated more generally as a family’s struggle for dignity and equality in the face what O’Casey would call “custom [and] ignorance,” then white audiences would have no choice but to join in a call for the eradication of racist practices in America. O’Casey’s example held out the promise of a type of universalism that was simultaneously about very specific moments in Irish history and also about poverty, power, and hope in a way meaningful across cultures, races, and classes.22 There is, of course, a problem with the label of “universal,” particularly as it applies to AfricanAmerican authors, a problem Hansberry was particularly familiar with. As the reception of Raisin showed, the label universal sometimes had the effect of erasing the specific and unique challenges faced by African Americans in American society. The Youngers of Raisin confronted not only the pernicious effects of systemic economic deprivation, they also faced a multitude of other challenges not because they were poor but because they were poor and black. To erase the particulars of their struggle threatens to diminish the real, racist housing practices of the time to which the play draws attention to. O’Casey’s “Irish wail that was all of us” inspired Hansberry as both a playwright and a theorist of the theater. Yet Hansberry’s own attempt to show Black characters as fully human, with both universally understood desires and historically specific, racist realities that threatened their lives and dreams at every step, served to assuage white audiences, rather than alert them to the need for change in America. Ultimately, the claim to universalism enjoyed by Sean O’Casey was not equally available to Lorraine Hansberry as a Black woman. The extent of O’Casey’s influence, feared absent by biographers, scholars, and critics, here emerges in manifold ways in the world of African-American theater. Although Hansberry stands as the apo‑ gee of O’Casey’s influence as both a dramatist and a theorist, his influence would persist beyond both of their lives. The Free Southern Theatre, part of the Civil Rights Movement in the American South; Douglas Ward’s Negro Ensemble Company; and scholars who argued for the establishment of Africana Studies departments in the 1970s all pointed to O’Casey as a playwright whose success as a dramatist spoke to and beyond national concerns, and who served as a model for other margin‑ alized groups. In a 1988 theater column, Mel Gussow writes that, in O’Casey’s lifetime, “he was never fully regarded as an international playwright…. In a sense, he was a playwright without a real constituency.” Yet O’Casey did have a constituency among African-American playwrights, directors, scholars, and writers, and his influence spanned decades of the twentieth century. Now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, both O’Casey and Hansberry are enjoying belated recognition: sev‑ eral book-length scholarly works published in the 2010s and 2020s recover Hansberry’s radicalism and feminism, and O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy, as is customary in years that commemorate pivotal mo‑ ments in Irish history, is now being revived in monumental fashion by Garry Hynes in what has been hailed a “the most ambitious production in Druid’s history.” Dubbed DruidO’Casey, the production 389

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will mount the entire Dublin Trilogy in one day, “drawing parallels between an Irish past and an inter‑ national present.” The racially diverse cast of DruidO’Casey speaks to Ireland’s international present, and extends the ongoing legacy of racially inflected productions of Sean O’Casey’s plays.23

Notes 1 Deane, “Yeats and O’Casey,” 122; Murray, Sean O’Casey, 662. Kosok does make an exception for Juno and the Paycock, pointing out several theatrical works clearly written “under the influence” of this groundbreak‑ ing play, but the works he cites are almost wholly Irish or English, and all but one are by white, European men. 2 Baraka, “A Critical,” 19, 9. The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, her next and final major play after Raisin, lasted 101 performances on Broadway in 1964, but this was only made possible by a nightly appeal to the audience for donations. As Hansberry’s ex-husband Robert Nemiroff recounts, collection bowls were passed after every performance to extend the play’s run. At the time, reviewers expressed at best indifference to the play; at worst, Hansberry was called a second-rate Shaw and “cocktail party shrew” who “betrayed not only the functions of art, but social responsibility, political possibility, her own cause and, most radically, herself” (quoted in Nemiroff, “A Portrait,” 172). Fifty-nine years later, in 2023, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window enjoyed a star-studded revival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that was hailed by many major newspapers as “prescient.” 3 Murray, Sean O’Casey, 620. 4 Shandell, “Negro Little Theatre,” 104. 5 Gregory, “Negro Theatre,” 349. 6 O’Brien, “Negro Folk Drama.” 7 Schomburg Center, “American Negro Theatre Archives: Overview; Schomburg Center, “American Negro Theatre Archives,” 4; Encyclopedia of African American Society, “Theatre,” 811; Shandell, American Negro Theatre, 68. 8 Sippl, “Sing Your Song.” 9 There is evidence that the American Negro Theatre initially intended to produce an all-Black version of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World but then replaced this with Juno and the Paycock (see American Negro Theatre Archives). It is not immediately apparent why The Playboy was abandoned, but the dismal critical reception of the ANT’s later production of Riders to the Sea might give some clues as to why Playboy was dropped. Shandell, “Lucasta,” 533; Dugan, “Telling the Truth,” 147; O’Casey, “Behind,” 10, 17, 18, 19; Childress, “For a Strong,” 11. Emphasis mine. Like O’Casey and Hansberry, Childress identified as a Com‑ munist. And, like Lorraine Hansberry, Childress is enjoying a long-overdue appreciation in the 2020s. Her play Trouble in Mind (1955) finally received its Broadway debut in 2021. It originally opened off-Broadway at the Greenwich Mews Theatre in 1955, the same theater that mounted a mixed-race production of Juno and the Paycock (also in 1955). 10 Childress, “Knowing,” 9, 10. 11 Eldridge, “Day-O,” 119, 120; Smith, Becoming Belafonte, 23; Edwards, “Talking with Doug Ward.” 12 Calta, “Kaye.” Although this adaptation of Juno does not appear to have been performed, it is worth not‑ ing the setting of the play in Harlem in 1934–1935, during the time of both the 1934 Harlem Boycott and the 1935 Harlem Riot. I can draw no conclusions about how the play treated the possible correspondences between O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy and these events, but the events of the Harlem Riot do conjure the plot of Shadow of a Gunman. Fascinatingly, “[i]n this version, only Joxer remains Irish, ‘the last of the Irish in Harlem,’ and Johnny Boyle, the son, is renamed Dred Scott Boyle.” I can find no evidence that this version of Juno was ever produced, but Boyea did correspond with Sean O’Casey, going so far as to accuse Lorraine Hansberry of plagiarism of his adaptation when A Raisin in the Sun premiered. O’Casey did not concur with Boyea. Their correspondence can be found in the archives of the National Library of Ireland (Sean O’Casey Papers, MS 38, 110). Jefferson, “Negro on Broadway,” 308. Jefferson calls The Greenwich Mews Theatre “the most democratic organization at the moment off Broadway, in that it casts its plays with actors whose race and color are incidental.” Shandell, “Negro Little Theatre,” 107. 13 Kelly, “Earle Hyman.” 14 Lorraine Hansberry Papers, Schomburg Center, “Library”; see references to O’Casey throughout Godfrey, Conversations. In her interviews, Hansberry discusses her admiration of O’Casey’s lyricism and his willing‑ ness to experiment with various modes of artistic expression in his plays. She also reveals that at one point she inserted a ballet into A Raisin in the Sun, a decision I attribute to the balletic interlude in Red Roses for Me.

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Lorraine Hansberry, Sean O’Casey, the Common Space of the Theatre 15 To Be Young, Gifted, and Black’s provenance is a strange one. After Hansberry’s untimely death, her ex-­ husband and literary executor Nemiroff collected her unpublished writing and shaped it into first a seven-hour radio play and then a stage play, which was produced off-Broadway from 1968–1969. (Perhaps unsurpris‑ ingly, the staging was produced by Harry Belafonte.) At the end of the play’s off-Broadway run, “the collec‑ tion of autobiographical writings by Hansberry … were gathered and published as a book of the same title.” Nemiroff himself described it as “a self-portrait… in that the words, experiences, characters, and creations… are the artist’s own… But it is also an adaptation” (xxii). To Be Young, in all of its forms, was composed in an effort to draw attention to Hansberry’s unproduced works, which Nemiroff tried (unsuccessfully) to garner interest in after Hansberry’s death. Hansberry, To Be Young, 87 (emphasis in original). 16 Hansberry, “Mailbag.” 17 Hansberry, “Mailbag.” 18 The claim of plagiarism came from many sources; Hansberry devoted much time to untangling what exactly her debt to O’Casey was. Hansberry, “Mailbag,” “An Author’s Reflection: Willie Loman,” Village Voice. 19 Hansberry, “Negro Writer and His Roots,” 2; O’Casey, “Playwright and the Box-Office,” 3. 20 Hansberry, To Be Young, 129, 131; Negro Writer and His Roots, 9. 21 Hansberry, “An Author’s Reflection: Willie Loman,” Village Voice; Hammel, “A Playwright,” 7; Terkel, “Interview,” 88; Perry, Looking, 108. 22 Jones, “An Evaluation”; O’Casey, Letters, 135. In one particularly startling example of this desire to whitewash Raisin, a reviewer confidently asserted that Hansberry “had not written a play ‘about Negroes, but human beings.’ As if, apparently, there were some inherent contradiction” (Nemiroff, “A Portrait,” 168). Nemiroff also cites Ossie Davis’ observation that “some people were ecstatic to find that ‘it didn’t need to be about Negroes at all!’” “Foreword,” xiii). Although other examples were not so clumsily stated, the desire to see the Younger family as not Black was a common one. See Hansberry’s interviews with Studs Terkel, Mike Wallace, and others as collected in Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry. Hansberry, “Willie Loman,” Village Voice. 23 Gussow, “Stage View”; McLaughlin, “A Druid Production,” abbeytheatre.ie.

Bibliography Primary Sources American Negro Theatre Records, 1940–1981. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, New York Public Library, New York. Lorraine Hansberry Papers. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, New York Public Library, New York.

Secondary Sources Baraka, Amiri. “A Critical Reevaluation: A Raisin in the Sun’s Enduring Passion.” In A Raisin in the Sun: ­Expanded 25th Anniversary Edition, edited by Robert Nemiroff, 9–20. New York: Plume, 1987. Calta, Louis. “Kaye Plays Palace Tomorrow Night.” New York Times, January 17, 1953. Childress, Alice. “A Candle in a Gale Wind.” In Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, ­edited by Mari Evans, 111–116. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1984. Childress, Alice. “For a Strong Negro People’s Theatre.” Daily Worker, February 16, 1951, 11. Childress, Alice, “Knowing the Human Condition.” In Black American Literature and Humanism, edited by R. Baxter Miller, 8–10. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981. Deane, Seamus. “O’Casey and Yeats: Exemplary Dramatists.” In Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Litera‑ ture 1880–1980, 108–122. London: Faber and Faber, 1985. Dugan, Olga. “Telling the Truth: Alice Childress as Theorist and Playwright.” The Journal of African American History 87 (Winter 2002): 146–159. Edwards, Gus. “Talking with Doug Ward.” Douglas Turner Ward Quarterly 1 (September 2010). https://douglas‑ turnerward.wordpress.com/2010/09/16/talking-with-doug-ward/ Eldridge, Michael, and Harry Belafonte. “Remains of the Day‑O.” Transition 92 (2002): 110–137. Gough, Kathleen. Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic: Haptic Allegories. London: Rout‑ ledge, 2018. Gregory, Montgomery. “For a Negro Theatre.” The New Republic 28 (November 16, 1921): 350.

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Cara McClintock-Walsh Gussow, Mel. “Stage View: For Sean O’Casey, Acceptance at Last as a Modern Master.” The New York Times, October 30, 1988. Hammel, Faye. “A Playwright, A Promise: Lorraine Hansberry Reveals a Major Talent in the Forthcoming A Raisin in the Sun.” In Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry, edited by Mollie Godfrey, 5–8. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. Hansberry, Lorraine. “An Author’s Reflection: Willie Loman, Walter Lee, and He Who Must Live.” The Village Voice, August 12, 1959. Hansberry, Lorraine. “Mailbag: O’Casey‑Hansberry.” New York Times, June 28, 1959. Hansberry, Lorraine. “The Negro Writer and His Roots: Toward a New Romanticism.” The Black Scholar 12, no. 2 (March/April 1981): 2–12. Hansberry, Lorraine. “Thoughts on Genet, Mailer, and the New Paternalism.” The Village Voice, June 1, 1961. Hansberry, Lorraine. To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words. New York: Signet, 1969. Jaynes, Gerald D., ed. Encyclopedia of African American Society. 2 vols. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publica‑ tions, Inc., 2005. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412952507. Jefferson, Miles. “The Negro on Broadway, 1954–1955: More Spice than Substance.” Phylon (1940–1956) 16, no. 3 (3rd quarter 1955): 303–312. Jones, John Hudson. “An Evaluation of the American Negro Theatre.” Daily Worker, August 25, 1946. Kelly, Baron. “Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth.” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 33, no. 2 (Spring 2021). Keppel, Ben. The Work of Democracy: Ralph Bunche, Kenneth B. Clark, Lorraine Hansberry and the Cultural Politics of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Kosok, Heinz. “Juno and the Playwrights: The Influence of Sean O’Casey on Twentieth Century Drama.” In Irish Writers and the Theatre, edited by Masaru Sekine and Colin Smythe, 71–86. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1986. Lehman, Paul. “The Development of a Black Psyche: An Interview with John Oliver Killens.” Black American Literature Forum 11, no. 3 (Autumn 1977): 83–90. Liebermann, Robbie. “‘Measure Them Right’: Lorraine Hansberry and the Struggle for Peace.” Science & Soci‑ ety 75, no. 2 (April 2011): 206–235. McLaughlin, Caitríona, and Mark O’Brien. “A Druid production of Sean O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy: The Plough and the Stars, The Shadow of a Gunman, and Juno and the Paycock.” Abbeytheatre.ie Mishkin, Tracy. The Harlem and Irish Renaissances. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. Murray, Christopher. Sean O’Casey: Writer at Work. Montreal: McGill‑Queen’s University Press, 2004. Nemiroff, Robert. “A Portrait: The 101 ‘Final’ Performances of Sidney Brustein.” In A Raisin in the Sun: ­Expanded 25th Anniversary Edition, edited by Robert Nemiroff, 160–205. New York: Plume, 1987. Nemiroff, Robert. “Foreword.” In A Raisin in the Sun: Expanded 25th Anniversary Edition, edited by Robert Nemiroff, ix–xviii. New York: Plume, 1987. O’Brien, M.N. “Negro Folk Drama.” Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library. New York Public Library Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/6c888970‑8be1‑0133‑660b‑00505686d14e O’Casey, Sean. “Behind the Curtained World.” In Blasts and Benedictions: Articles and Stories by Sean O’Casey, edited by Ronald Ayling, 9–19. London: Macmillan, 1967. O’Casey, Sean. “O’Casey’s Credo.” The New York Times, November 9, 1958. O’Casey, Sean. “The Bald Primaqueera.” In Blasts and Benedictions: Articles and Stories by Sean O’Casey, edited by Ronald Ayling, 63–76. London: Macmillan, 1967. O’Casey, Sean. The Letters of Sean O’Casey, vol. III, edited by David Krause. Washington, DC: Catholic Uni‑ versity of America Press, 1975. O’Casey, Sean. “The Play of Ideas.” In Blasts and Benedictions: Articles and Stories by Sean O’Casey, edited by Ronald Ayling, 24–26. London: Macmillan, 1967. O’Casey, Sean. “The Playwright and the Box‑Office.” In Blasts and Benedictions: Articles and Stories by Sean O’Casey, edited by Ronald Ayling, 3–8. London: Macmillan, 1967. O’Casey, Sean. “What Thou Seest, Write in a Book.” In Blasts and Benedictions: Articles and Stories by Sean O’Casey, edited by Ronald Ayling, 153–157. London: Macmillan, 1967. Perry, Imani. Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2018. Shandell, Jonathan. “Looking Beyond Lucasta: the Black Dramas of the American Negro Theatre.” African American Review 42, no. 3/4 (fall/Winter 2008): 533–547.

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Lorraine Hansberry, Sean O’Casey, the Common Space of the Theatre Shandell, Jonathan. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018. Shandell, Jonathan. “The Negro Little Theatre Movement.” In The Campbridge Companion to African American Theatre, edited by Harvey Young, 2nd ed., 103–108. Cambridge Companions to Theatre and Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Sippl, Diane. “Sing Your Song: Belafonte Shows What it Means to Act.” Kinocaviar.com. January 13, 2012. https://www.kinocaviar.com/sing‑your‑song.php. Smith, Judith. Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014. Terkel, Studs. “Interview with Lorraine Hansberry.” In Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry, edited by Mol‑ lie Godfrey, 73–91. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. White, Walter. “The Negro on the American Stage.” The English Journal XXIV, no. 3 (March 1935): 179–188.

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30 IRISH AMERICANNESS IN LATE TWENTIETH‑CENTURY HOLLYWOOD FILMS Matthew J. Fee

With a total of 14 Academy Award nominations, 2023 was undoubtedly an unprecedented year for Irish cinema in Hollywood. Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) secured a ­record‑breaking nine nominations, while Colm Bairéad’s An Cailín Ciúin/The Quiet Girl (2022) became the first Irish‑language film to be nominated for Best International Feature. Moreover, Irish actors and their talent were recognized via nominations totaling a quarter of the top 20 acting catego‑ ries. Finally, and in advance of the awards ceremony, Catherine Martin, Irish Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport, and Media, capitalized on the increased interest in—and awareness of—Irish film as she led a delegation to Los Angeles in what had become an annual visit by trade rep‑ resentatives to promote the Irish film industry. Critics proclaimed “an astonishing, record‑shattering year” as they boisterously celebrated “the Luck of the Irish” and heralded “the great green wave roll‑ ing into Hollywood.” Hollywood had, it appeared, at long last discovered Irish cinema.1 But as dazzling as all this attention was, American cinema has, in fact, been familiar with the Irish in film since its earliest days. Irish‑Canadian Sidney Olcott was already an established director when given the opportunity by US film studio The Kalem Company to film outside of the United States, and he returned to his parents’ homeland of Ireland to film The Lad from Old Ireland in 1910. This first American film shot outside the United States quite notably portrays the experiences of a young Irish man who emigrates to America. The film’s incredible success with American audiences, who no doubt recognized elements from their own experiences, motivated Kalem and Olcott to shoot an astounding 17 films in Ireland over the next 18 weeks. Olcott’s Irish films were American not simply in terms of their finances, but in their address as well, as their protagonists frequently gazed westward across the Atlantic Ocean. As Irish film historian Kevin Rockett thus notes, “It is hardly surprising that the films Olcott made in Ireland for his American employers and orientated towards an (Irish) American audience should wish to characterize America as the land of bounty, freedom and opportunity.”2 Early efforts such as these set in motion a vibrant, longstanding, and complicated relationship be‑ tween American cinema and Irish representation that has endured for more than a century. Represen‑ tational traditions that were established during the silent film era subsequently developed throughout the Hollywood studio era decades from the 1930s to the 1950s, with their cinematic inheritances extending with remarkable consistency through the post‑studio era into the latter years of the twenti‑ eth century, and indeed during the decades anticipating this most recent and so‑called “green wave.” This chapter explores a thematic element dominant across these years, namely Irish migration to, DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-36

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and Irish‑American integration within, the United States. More specifically, it focuses on a particular moment for this trope within the substantial cinematic archive of Irish representation in Hollywood, examining select films from the 1990s that afford us multiple perspectives on the assimilation narra‑ tives so pervasive and central to depictions of the Irish in American cinema. It is impossible in a study of this length to discuss a great many of the most notable representa‑ tions of Irish Americanness in film. With such extensive, rich, and prolific possibilities, this chapter focuses its considerations on a selection of films from the 1990s for several reasons. First, the pro‑ gression of the Northern Ireland peace process during this decade and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 spotlight the exceptional importance of US‑Irish relations, and hence enhance our appreciation for how these relations inform films (both political and otherwise) at this particular historical mo‑ ment. Even more so, the Republic of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economic boom and its attendant array of social changes meant that Irishness was discussed, interrogated, circulated, and/or consumed on a global level and across multiple contexts to degrees previously unknown. As Diane Negra states, “Irish‑themed material flourished in 1990s American popular culture (in film, in print bestsellers, in advertising, and to a degree in series television),” with, as Stephanie Rains concurs, Irish cultural exports such as Riverdance and U2, Irish theme pubs, and Seamus Heaney’s poetry all “serv[ing] to confirm the levels of interest among Irish America in their cultural inheritance.” Consequently, the New York Times could proclaim in 1996 that “in almost every realm of culture there is a resurgence of things Irish,” while two years later, the Irish News succinctly announced that: “It’s ‘Cool’ to be Irish.”3 Moreover, there are a number of distinctively cinematic reasons to focus on the 1990s. This decade consists of a substantial number of Irish‑themed films; the works prioritized serve as prime examples of some of the most persistent representational traditions that have characterized depictions of the Irish in American cinema (e.g., migration journeys, gangster films, Troubles cinema). Following the increased visibility of award‑winning, Irish‑themed—albeit non‑Irish‑funded—cinema, such as Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992), the reestablishment of the Irish Film Board/Bord Scannán na hÉ‑ ireann in 1993 compels a certain attention to, and appreciation of, this decade’s unique consequence to Irish film history. State‑funded channels for the production and distribution of Irish cinema also expanded representational fields alongside the US and British film industries’ existing predilections for rendering Ireland and Irishness in film. Timothy Meagher expounds on the dynamic significance of this moment and its profound consequences for Irish Americanness when he incisively notes: A dramatic, new, and broadly supported interest in Irish culture…was already underway by the 1990s, when Ireland, flush with new prosperity as the Celtic Tiger, experienced a cultural revival of its own in theater, film, dance, and performing arts. The export of this culture to America on top of indigenous efforts in the United States made some recognition of their Irish‑ ness easy and, indeed, attractive to many Irish Americans. The 1990s consequently provides a fertile political, economic, social, cultural, and cinematic terrain within which to explore Irish Americanness.4

Representational Flows When American cinema imagines Ireland, it often does so through visualizing the Irish migrant’s journey and its consequences. Although this essay focuses on films from the 1990s, these films are part of an extensive and wide‑ranging cinematic field that charts the Irish migration journey to the United States, along with subsequent strategies for, and representations of (to various degrees), in‑ tegration and assimilation. As evident in The Lad from Old Ireland, referenced above, American cinema’s affinity for migration narratives, particularly those of the Irish, stretches back to its earliest 395

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decades, when immigrants constituted a significant portion of the film audience. These fictions recall the very real history of Irish migration, particularly to the United States, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although Britain and Australia produced many films that dealt with the plight of the Irish immigrant in their respective countries, it was American cinema, as Rockett argues in his seminal essay “The Irish Migrant and Film,” that became the dominant film industry to visualize Irish migration, more than all other cinemas combined. In fact, during the silent era alone, approximately 500 films were produced in the United States that focused primarily on Irish themes and characters. Looking at a vast array of films, Rockett attests that early American cinema emphasized the travels of the Irish migrant in order to attract Irish immigrants to the cinema. More specifically, one of the most popular themes that seduced the newly arrived film audience dealt with the experience of emigrat‑ ing from rural Ireland to urban America. These films prioritized the after‑effects of immigration to the United States, namely the struggle to assimilate and the resulting clash of social classes. As time passed, though, and as the numbers of Irish migrants entering the United States decreased over the course of the twentieth century, films that did prioritize the Irish experience in America were more apt to follow the travails of second‑, third‑, and even later‑generation Irish Americans—a kind of genera‑ tional shift that Beth O’Leary Anish also traces through literature in her chapter in this volume. The Irish migrant still existed—and as we shall discuss shortly, continues to exist—on the cinema screen, but in no way as frequently and foregrounded as in the earlier decades.5 As the Irish became more woven into the fabric of American society, their presence in cinema became more subtle. The focus in these representations shifted away from the migrant’s journey and its immediate repercussions to stories about descendants of the Irish migrant and their struggle to achieve success (i.e., the “American Dream”). The history of the representation of the Irish migrant in the American cinema is a story of the gradual change from early crude stereotypes to the current state where ‘Irish’ representations are most likely only to be identified by the name of the characters, argues Rockett. “In this over 100‑year process lies a tale of the gradual assimilation of the Irish into the multi‑faceted American culture.” Although general accounts of Irish representation in film throughout this extensive timeframe differ in their estimation of the caliber of Irish representation on offer, all agree that just as the Irish themselves assimilated into the American melting pot, so too did the Irish presence in film become much more integrated within film narratives. The Irish migrant was central to some films, but on the whole Irishness was made manifest in cinema via a cadre of character types: for women, the supporting roles of the dedicated and long‑suffering Irish mother or the feisty “colleen” were the main types (which was a notable departure from the more central and nuanced roles women had assumed within silent film narratives); for men, when not playing nameless simple, violent, and/or drunk caricatures, they were often figured as the Irish cop, the Irish priest, or the Irish gangster.6 Beyond subject matter and character typology, another and even more implicit Irish presence in cinema was located both in front of and behind the camera: great pains are taken in surveys of Irish (in) cinema to detail certain performers and filmmakers’ Irish authenticity, namely by highlighting “real” Irish names or the Irish county from which such Irish film labor is descended. What is rather interesting about these chronicles of Irish film history, however, are that while they demonstrate through the sheer quantity of film titles and performers under review how the Irish became a part of American cinema—and therefore how explicit Irish migration narratives became less central across the history of Irish film representation—these studies themselves employ the central concern of mi‑ grant narratives in their accounts of the sheer proliferation of, and thus perceived success of, Irish

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(Americans) in the film industry. The Irish and their assimilation are thus ubiquitous both within and to American cinema, as narrative subject matter, as well as in the roles of producers and performers. Surveying a range of studies of the Irish in American cinema enables us to map out slightly more detailed shifts in this “process”—recalling that there are, of course, exceptions to this timeline—in the lead‑up to the end of the twentieth century. And so, Meagher first outlines how, during the early decades of the Hollywood studio era, in the 1930s and 1940s, “[t]he Irish, the most Americanized of all…‘came into their own’ on screen” through “characters includ[ing] gangsters, but, as often, more respectable and favorably depicted priests, police, soldiers, [and] sailors.” Tony Tracy’s work echoes and somewhat extends this timeline (albeit with closer attention to the role of gender and race), as his study of Irish‑American masculinity and the construction of whiteness during the studio era takes as its backdrop “the prolific constructions of Irish Americans in Hollywood cinema between 1930 and 1960, a period when Irish‑American males—in particular—figured as an enduring, if varied and shifting, presence in the cinematic imaginary.” Elsewhere, Tracy qualifies this wide representational field when he describes how “[i]n the post‑war period American cinema continued to pursue its inter‑ est in Irish themes and characters, though with considerably less fervour than in previous decades.” Furthermore, and returning to Rockett, we learn that “by the late 1960s little distinguished the cin‑ ematic representations of Irish‑Americans from other groups”—a development complemented by Rains when she describes how the “frequent domination of the news media” by representations of Irishness during the Troubles coincides with “the decreasing level of Irish themes or even characters from fictional narratives produced in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s.”7 Given the crucial role ascribed to migration journeys and experiences, both within Irish film and to Irish/Irish‑American identity—not to mention how, within the field of ethnic studies, the Irish in America have become “a test case for questions of integration and resistance to assimilation”—it should thus come as no surprise that one of the most significant areas for engagement with this cinema and its understanding of Irish Americanness has consequently involved questions around as‑ similation. Werner Sollors’ framework of descent versus consent has proven particularly fruitful to Irish film studies, as it theorizes the fundamental dynamics that underlie the immigrant’s assimilation within the United States, specifically by articulating the tension between one’s ethnic identity and the assimilated, Americanized sense of self. As Sylvia Dibeltulo discusses in her analysis of Irish‑themed gangster films, “According to this binary notion, consent means Americanization, a voluntary act of assimilation into American society, whereas descent is associated with the ancestral country and the retention of ethnic customs and traditions.” To offer another example, consider John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952), the “production to which discussions of Irish‑American cinematic representations inevitably return.” The return of Irish‑American Sean Thornton (John Wayne) to his childhood home in Ireland thus not only involves a reversal in the migration journey’s typical direction, but also, one could argue in Sollors’ terms, stages an encounter between his consented‑to Irish Americanness (depicted as industrialized, modern, and individualized) and his descended‑from Irishness (framed as rural, traditional, and communal).8 Such identity exchanges are vital to Stephanie Rains’ The Irish‑American in Popular Culture, an illuminating examination of the ways that Irish‑American encounters with Ireland—“moments of contact, both literal and imaginative” in film and popular culture, activism, tourism, genealogical studies, and consumerism—have consequence for Irish identity as well as impact on the ethnic iden‑ tity of the Irish‑American diaspora. Particularly in Hollywood cinema, tracking these interactions and the development of ethnic identity inevitably involves concomitant shifts in gender as well, as the paths available for migrants’ assimilation and achievement differ. And so, in the case of depictions of Irish‑American identity, women could advance through marriage, while for men, success often involved criminal means (as seen in the Irish gangster films). Rains offers a trajectory that, while

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admittedly “schematic,” maps the course of Irish masculinity through the postwar era, particularly showing how the attributes of the 1930s Irish‑American gangster—which, arguably, drew upon prior nineteenth‑century associations of Irish masculinity with violence—became more acceptable once those supposed tendencies had been channeled into the war effort and its aftermath: “[a]s patri‑ otic heroes, returned from the war to an almost assured place in the rapidly developing suburbia of middle‑class America, Irish‑American men became frequent signifiers of assertive but trustworthy American male strength.” As Tony Tracy further explains (in a manner that we shall soon see informs 1990s representations), “Irish American masculinities function to express an ethnic—different but still white‑coded—patriotism, their descent‑inherited ‘fighting’ instincts transformed and repurposed for the national war effort.”9 In fashioning this gendered chronology of ethnic representation, this chapter is not arguing that the trajectory of Irish assimilation in the United States is paralleled by a uniform representational flow in cinema from migrant narratives to stereotypical and stock Irish characters, with a few nota‑ ble exceptions along the way. The levels and location of Irishness continue to vary across American film history. Nevertheless, the predominance of certain images of the Irish was often influenced, if not determined, by an assortment of social, political, and industrial factors. For example (and as noted earlier), migrant narratives were more prolific at times when early cinema sought to attract the Irish immigrant audience. As Joseph Curran shows, stereotypes of the pugilistic and inebriated Irish receded at points where Irish‑American groups such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians were most vocal in their calls for positive depictions. The robust transformations of the 1960s had quite notable consequences for the Irish and their representation in Hollywood cinema as well, according to Mea‑ gher, as “the decline of the assimilation ideal, combined with the new suspicions of authority and institutions, made the Irish seem not merely superfluous but reactionary.” In other words, whereas the Irish during the immediate postwar era were valorized for “manning the institutional bulwarks of American life as policeman [sic], priests and patriotic soldiers, the Irish now seemed merely cor‑ rupt agents of an oppressive, racist, old order that deserved no respect.” The repercussions for Hol‑ lywood representation, particularly for heretofore dominant Irish character types, were apparent: “Corrupt and/or racist Irish cops, priests, politicians or merely private citizens abounded in films of the post‑1960s era.” Regardless of the timeline assigned to the particular type of Irish representation or the aftereffects of larger socio‑political developments, one thing is certain: from the earliest days of cinema, both in front of and behind the camera, Irish characters and concerns have occupied a significant place in American film.10

1990s Currents Entering into the 1990s, three films very quickly and immediately establish the dominant trends in Irish‑American representation in Hollywood during this decade—films that, of course, we can locate as extensions of representational traditions that have stretched throughout American film and Hol‑ lywood’s depiction of the Irish: the gangster film State of Grace (Phil Joanou, 1990); the migration journey Far and Away (Ron Howard, 1992); and the Troubles film/political thriller: Patriot Games (Phillip Noyce, 1992). Although it is correct to claim that “[a]s a broad generalization, American films…downplayed Irish ethnicity as the twentieth century progressed,” at the end of that century—and keeping these three films and their brethren in mind—we nevertheless find ourselves with a rather remarkable num‑ ber of films in which Irish Americanness and its constituent travels and experiences assume a place front and center on the cinema screen. First and most straightforwardly, we have, during this decade, those films that depict the Irish migrant’s journey to, and early integration efforts within, the United States. With one of the most (in)famous examples released early in the decade (i.e., Ron Howard’s 398

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nineteenth‑century tale Far and Away), the migratory experiences of the Irish returned in full force at the end of the 1990s, with contemporary‑set films such as Gold in the Streets (Liz Gill, 1997) and 2by4 (Jimmy Smallhorne, 1998), as well as the 1999 television documentary on the Irish diaspora The Irish Empire similarly addressing these journeys and their effects. And while the journey to America occupies but a few moments at the conclusion of the film adaptation of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (Alan Parker, 1999), the literary and subsequent media phenomena that surrounded both McCourt and his memoirs bears witness to the decade’s continuing captivation with tales of Irish immigrants.11 Next, there are films centered around whom Ruth Barton puts forth as “[t]he figure who embodie[s] the contrasting allegiances of [the] ethic audience,” that is, the character and genre that most fre‑ quently highlight tensions between ethnic allegiance and American assimilation: the urban gangster. The decade opens with State of Grace, a film that, with its focus on Irish‑American gangsters, is a notable departure from the genre’s dominance by Italian Americans in the prior decades. Silvia Dibeltulo reads these works in line with ethnic studies’ interest in later‑generation European Ameri‑ cans and their patterns of ethnic identification, especially involving more recent notions of “ethnic identification as choice.” Films from the end of the decade such as Southie (John Shea, 1998) and The Boondock Saints (Troy Duffy, 1999) prove that the generic return of the Hell’s Kitchen criminal denizens of Joanou’s film and their ethnic conflicts were not to be short‑lived—particularly keeping in mind the later, very high profile, early‑twenty‑first‑century Irish‑American gangsters of Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002) and The Departed (2006).12 Bookended by these films, however, are three of the more intriguing engagements with Irish Americanness and ethnic identity from this decade: Phillip Noyce’s Patriot Games (1992); Stephen Hopkins’ Blown Away (1994); and Alan J. Pakula’s The Devil’s Own (1997). Indeed, the remainder of this chapter proposes that complex engagements with Irish Americanness from this decade also happen to be available in the most indirect and unexpected of cinematic spaces. In Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema, Martin McLoone argues that a “myth of atavism” animates anti‑Irish prejudices from nineteenth‑century political cartoons through to end‑of‑the‑twentieth‑century political thrillers such as Noyce’s, Hopkins’, and Pakula’s films. Col‑ lectively considering these three films alongside other cinematic works from the decade, he observes that, although not officially comprising a subgenre of “peace process films,” these works are nev‑ ertheless impacted by developments in the process that occurred in the 1990s. For McLoone, these films primarily serve a generic imperative independent of, but not without consequence for, their Irishness; namely, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse at the start of the 1990s, international terrorism provides the Hollywood action thriller with its new villains—attempting to solve what Gerardine Meaney describes as “the horrible dilemmas presented to thriller writers and to Hollywood studios by the redundancy of the good old Cold War plots. The Russians were not coming, not ever again…” But as McLoone adroitly demonstrates in his larger argument, in using Irish Republican Army members as their antagonists—whether they be framed as dissident elements repudiated by IRA leadership/membership (as in Patriot Games and Blown Away) or recuperated by being por‑ trayed by Brad Pitt and countered to the “real” villainy of exploitative US arms dealers (as in The Devil’s Own)—these films both draw upon and contribute to historical racialized stereotypes of the Irish as irrationally violent and brutal.13 In Patriot Games, during a visit to London with his wife and daughter, CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford) prevents an assassination attempt on the Queen’s cousin by a renegade IRA group, in the process killing the brother of group member Sean Miller (Sean Bean), who subsequently vows re‑ venge on Ryan and his family. In Blown Away, psychopathic bomb‑making afficionado Ryan Gaerity (overacted in the extreme by Tommy Lee Jones) escapes from a Northern Ireland prison to Boston, where he coincidentally rediscovers his former IRA colleague Liam McGivney (now a police officer 399

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in the bomb squad who goes by the alias Jimmy Dove). Blaming Liam/Jimmy (Jeff Bridges) for his imprisonment, Gaerity seeks revenge on Jimmy, his new wife, and his stepdaughter. And finally, in The Devil’s Own, New York cop Tom O’Meara (Harrison Ford) lodges Rory Devaney (Brad Pitt), whom he believes is an Irish immigrant construction worker, but who is, in actuality, highly wanted IRA member Frankie Maguire, who has come to the US to purchase missiles for the organization. When Frankie pauses the sale, the ruthless arms dealers threaten him, as well as Tom and his family, in order to get their money. From these brief plot descriptions, we can instantly ascertain that a central, shared story element to all three action thrillers is the threat posed to the Ryan, Dove, and O’Meara families by what the films frame as renegade IRA sects/members, or, in the case of The Devil’s Own, as the consequence of the IRA’s actions (with the more direct threat from the underground arms dealers). Narratively— and quite simply and clearly—these are mortal threats to the family members’ lives. The outsized importance of family to these films, though, is further established by its providing the impetus to these IRA members’ violence and/or vengeance: Sean Miller’s brother is killed when Jack Ryan interrupts the assassination attempt; Ryan Gaerity’s sister is killed when Liam McGivney attempts to abort a mission; and Rory witnesses his father murdered at the family dinner table. Family—whether Irish‑American or Irish—proves to be of cardinal importance to these films. The threat to the families in each of the films becomes expressed as a spatialized one, as the fam‑ ily is significantly endangered within its domestic realm. Patriot Games immediately establishes the home’s significance to both film and family via an opening image of the mailbox simply naming “The Ryans” as a metonymic stand‑in for the family and its domesticity. At the film’s conclusion, when Sean Miller and his paramilitary cohort elaborately attack the house both to kidnap the British royal and to get murderous revenge on the Ryans, Noyce’s film and its multiple night‑vision point‑of‑view shots explicitly and affectively convey this as an assault on the home. Similarly, Blown Away’s Ryan Gaerity breaks into the Dove household and calls Liam/Jimmy from his stepdaughter’s bedroom, a domestic violation that the film subsequently accentuates through an extended sequence of close‑ups and stirring music that (misleadingly) implies that each in a series of anodyne domestic chores (e.g., opening a refrigerator door, plugging in a phone, pulling on a light chain, and turning on an oven) will trigger a bomb. Perhaps The Devil’s Own’s Tom O’Meara best articulates the sense of domestic threat and violation when, after the arms dealer’s men break into the O’Meara home and attack him and his wife—and after he subsequently discovers that his Irish lodger has been hiding the funds for missiles in his basement room—Tom gruffly asks, “Did you bring this into my house?” Within this prioritization of the domestic sphere, Rains astutely posits that the “pathological Irish masculinity” of Patriot Games’ and The Devil’s Own’s IRA antagonists counter and ultimately clarify the heroism of their Irish‑American “father‑figure” protagonists—a heroism activated to preserve and protect the Irish‑American family. As a result, “Irish‑American masculinity [is] presented as comfortably domesticated and channeled into ‘acceptable’ outlets, [whereas] Irish men [are] instead represented as savagely outside of social controls upon male violence.” These films consequently supply rich examples to her larger study of how Hollywood’s diasporic encounters between Irish Americans and Irishness develop and sustain certain gender dynamics. Furthermore, although Rains focuses on Noyce’s and Pakula’s films (partly since their shared casting of Harrison Ford employs his star persona as a shorthand for their enshrinement of a heroic, Irish‑American masculinity), this chapter argues that we likewise incorporate Blown Away into this analysis, as it enhances our sense of these films’ concentration on the family. To be sure, Jeff Bridges’ star persona in the 1990s lacks the well‑established masculine currency of Ford’s. Rather than being solely interested in Jimmy’s vanquishing of Gaerity, however, Hopkins’ film emphasizes the acutely domestic valor of its Irish‑­ American hero, with its conclusion underscoring Jimmy’s resolve to leave his job for his family (i.e., both rescuing and reinforcing the domestic). Moreover and quite dishearteningly, though, including 400

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Blown Away alongside Patriot Games and The Devil’s Own—not to mention also recalling the migra‑ tion and gangster films from earlier—does nothing to challenge what Rains correctly and regrettably identifies as “the single most dominant trend in American representations of Irishness during the last decade of the twentieth century—the clear absence of Irish (or, for the most part, Irish‑American) women from narrative representations of any kind.”14 While each film focuses on the domestic not only as the locus for familial threat but also as an opportunity for the enshrinement of Irish‑American masculinity, given the abundant history of filmic depictions of Irish ethnicity and of assimilated Irish‑Americanness, of even more interest is how and why these films—to various degrees to be sure, and through diverse strategies—make significant narrative and aesthetic efforts to mark these endangered families as explicitly Irish‑American. As we shall see, such signaling pointedly evokes Hollywood’s tendency “to laud or to render invisible what was assimilable, those qualities that coincided with a consensual idea of what it meant to be an Amer‑ ican.” This ethnic characterization is much more muted in Patriot Games, which is not surprising given the association of Irish Americanness with working‑class identity, a status which the Ryans ob‑ viously transcend with their CIA analyst husband, Porsche‑driving eye surgeon wife, private‑school attending daughter, and colonial home on the Maryland coast. In fact, while Rains is correct to note that Noyce’s film presents “a powerful depiction of a model Irish‑American family,” its model‑ness, paradoxically, could arguably be found through its assimilating and integrating to such an exceptional degree (i.e., firmly established as upper‑class) that it evacuates most of what have become the typical cinematic signifiers of Irish Americanness. In other words, if, as shall be demonstrated shortly, Irish Americanness becomes a shorthand for a working‑class ethnic identity, then the Ryans’ discernably more advanced economic status does not require, and in fact precludes, the more frequent signaling of ethnic identity that we see in the other two films. Nevertheless, there is some marking of the fam‑ ily as Irish‑American in Noyce’s film, but this characterization is limited to their surname as well as a nondiegetic score that frequently introduces Irish instruments into its symphonic sweep—although who is actually receiving that national designation is inconclusive, given the film’s wide‑ranging and indiscriminate underscoring via Irish‑themed music.15 Although the Ryan family’s Irish ethnicity may be more ambient than obvious, such is not the case with the Dove and O’Meara families in, respectively, Blown Away and The Devil’s Own. Indeed, in both of these films, the specific ethnic identity of their protagonists, the assimilation narrative of their Irish Americanness, ruptures through their propulsive action thriller plotlines, in a manner and through means that would not at all seem out‑of‑place were it in the migration or gangster films men‑ tioned earlier, and that bookended these very works during the 1990s. And so, for example, in The Devil’s Own, the O’Mearas welcome Rory with a best‑intentioned dinner of corned beef and cabbage (even though Rory does not recognize the meat and has in fact never had corned beef and cabbage). A scene of Irish music and dancing accompany the celebration of one of the O’Meara daughter’s confirmation, while, upon Tom’s announcement that he plans to retire, Sheila O’Meara hesitatingly shares that she was “the only Irish girl in Brooklyn who didn’t want to marry a cop.” In a final means of drawing attention to the family’s ethnic identity, a self‑important SAS officer explains his doubting of Tom’s loyalties to his law enforcement duties by sneering, “You are Irish.” Such moments of overtly signaling Irish Americanness abound in Blown Away. There is another scene of Irish music and dancing, with this one accompanying the wedding of Jimmy and Katie (Suzy Amis). There is also, of course, Jimmy’s Uncle Max (Lloyd Bridges) with his shamrock‑branded car, muralled wall, and green shutters, not to mention (when questioned by Gaerity about the remain‑ ing hints of Max’s accent) his bellowing: “I’ve been in this godforsaken land of bungee jumping and McDLTs since I was 12. I didn’t like the way they talked.” But while Max may resist losing the Irish part of his Irish Americanness, Blown Away depicts the Doves as embracing that hyphen‑ ated ethnic identity’s Americanness in many not‑so‑subtle actions. For example, Katie helps Lizzy 401

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(Stephi Lineburg) distinguish between her right and left by quizzing her as to which hand she places on her heart for the pledge of allegiance, which does not, upon reflection, appear all that out‑of‑place when we later view Lizzy’s stars‑and‑stripes kite. Gaerity may connote the Irish dimension to Katie’s musical talent by slyly referring to her as a “fiddler,” but her Americanness rings out loud and clear through her position as a violinist playing in the symphony orchestra for an Independence Day con‑ cert. Indeed, Gaerity further summons forth the Americanness of the Dove’s Irish ­Americanness— and thus draws attention to their ethnic identity—by taunting Jimmy that his ultimate revenge is scheduled “on your new country’s birthday.”

Conclusion Declared simply, directly, and in a decidedly understated manner, Kevin Rockett notes, “American cinema is a rich and complex source for representations of the Irish.” Although this chapter has discussed developments within as well as trends across a range of depictions of Irish Americans in Hollywood cinema, it offers the 1990s as an era of unique insight and import when considering the vast scope of these representations. Spread throughout this decade, the latter‑generation Irish Americanness of Patriot Games, Blown Away, and The Devil’s Own complements that found in other cinematic works from this rich history, in particular other 1990s films that likewise visualize stories of ethnic identity, whether these be through overt tales of first‑generation migration or via the returns of assimilated Irish‑American gangsters.16 By signaling the Irish Americanness of their endangered families, though, these Troubles‑inflected action thrillers recall another group of noteworthy audiovisual texts from this decade, works for which Irish‑American identity proved fundamental: series television. In Diane Negra’s generative work on late 1990s television series, she examines how Irish Americanness in these works serves a variety of “sentimentalizing” and “therapeutic” functions. Specifically, during an era in which family values were under attack, the Irish‑American family acts “as representatives of an ennobled work‑ ing class…understood to work as an antidote for disturbed white family relations.” Similar to these television series, Patriot Games, Blown Away, and The Devil’s Own all traverse “an access route into a purified vision of family and community life.” But these films suggest a more distinct statement on this ethnic identity, for as a result of their placing families marked as Irish‑American at risk, they con‑ sequently signal not simply an ethnic identity, but more so, its particular worth. In other words, and within these films’ logic, if it can be threatened, then it follows that it has value. This value achieves particular historical significance within the late twentieth‑century United States, moreover, when we consider claims counter to this, namely that, in the latter decades of the century, ethnic identity was supposedly receding in importance, as embracing this identity became more of a choice. Under threat, Irish Americanness in these films comes to be valued as an embodiment of Americanness in its constitutive formation of family, community, and whiteness. At the start of the next decade and with global developments in the early twenty‑first century, especially the aftermath of 9/11, however, this inimitable value and function of Irish Americanness will prove to be of even greater consequence.17

Notes 1 Clarke, “Oscar Nominations 2023”; Ramachandran, “Luck of the Irish”; Cantor, “The Great Green Wave”. 2 Rockett, “The Silent Period,” 9. 3 Negra, “Irishness, Anger and Masculinity,” 279. Negra expands on the variety of ways that Irishness domi‑ nates popular culture considerations in the 1990s and into the twenty‑first century in “The Irish in Us”; Rains, The Irish‑American in Popular Culture, 3; as quoted in Negra, “The Irish in Us,” 3; as quoted in McLoone, Irish Film, 64. For more on U.S.‑Irish political relationships in the 1990s, see Andrew Sanders’ chapter in this volume.

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Irish Americanness in Late Twentieth‑Century Hollywood Films 4 Meagher, “The 1960s to the Present,” 168. 5 For a general account of the history of Irish migration to the United States, see Kenny, The American Irish; Rockett, “The Irish Migrant and Film,” 187, note 1. Rockett’s argument recalls Miriam Hansen’s account of how early American cinema would address their ethnic audiences. See Hansen, “Early Audiences: Myths and Models,” 60–89. 6 Rockett, “The Irish Migrant and Film,” 17. The most noteworthy general accounts and surveys of these representations, in scope if not necessarily in terms of critical depth, are (in chronological order): Slide, The Cinema and Ireland; Curran, Hibernian Green on the Silver Screen; Lourdeaux, Italian and Irish Filmmakers in America; Shannon, Bowery to Broadway; and Rhodes, Emerald Illusions. 7 Meagher, “Abie’s Irish Enemy,” 50; Tracy, White Cottage, White House, 3. Tony Tracy’s examination of whiteness builds on the work of scholars such as Richard Dyer, who interrogated how whiteness in cinema is, in contrast to other racial identities, constructed as natural and unmarked; however, “what is ‘natural’ is derived from a consensus formed around power relations at a given time and place.” As Tracy later expands, “For CWS [Critical White Studies], a central question is thus not just how has race been historically con‑ structed and imagined, but equally how does whiteness present as natural and normative; by what modalities does it maintain a consensual hegemony?” Tracy, White Cottage, White House, 2; Tracy, Captain Lightfoot, 194; Rockett, “The Irish Migrant and Film,” 36; Rains, The Irish‑American in Popular Culture, 168. Tracy, in turn, bases his latter claim on a quantitative analysis from information provided in Rockett’s indispensable and encyclopedic The Irish Filmography. 8 Barton, “Introduction,” 1; Sollors’ theories have been used by Barton, Tracy, and Dibeltulo; Dibeltulo, “Tales of Loss, Betrayal, and Regain,” 35, author’s emphasis; Barton, “Introduction,” 8. 9 Rains, The Irish‑American in Popular Culture, 9, 152; Tracy, White Cottage, White House, 10. 10 Curran, Hibernian Green on the Silver Screen, 18; Meagher, “Abbie’s Irish Enemy,” 54. 11 McIlroy, “Searching for the Sub(genre),” 300. 12 Barton, “Introduction,” 4–5; Dibeltulo, “Tales of Loss, Betrayal, and Regain,” 34. Gangs of New York is also anticipated by the 1990s migration narratives. 13 McLoone, “Traditions of Representation,” 60–74; Meaney, “The Devil’s Own Patriot Games,” 173. 14 Rains, The Irish‑American in Popular Culture, 172, 167, 176–177. Masculinity is also a key part of Meaney’s analyses of the films through the action film genre. 15 Barton, “Introduction,” 10; Rains, The Irish‑American in Popular Culture, 173. 16 Rockett, “The Irish Migrant,” 18. 17 Negra, “The New Primitives,” 229, 233; Meagher, “The 1960s to the Present,” 165–169.

Bibliography Barton, Ruth. “Introduction.” In Screening Irish‑America: Representing Irish‑America in Film and Television, edited by Ruth Barton, 1–14. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009. Cantor, Matthew. “‘The Great Green Wave’: Celebrating 2023’s Irish Oscars Takeover.” Guardian, March 11, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/mar/10/irish‑oscars‑takeover‑oscar‑wilde‑awards‑2023?CMP= share_btn_link. Clarke, Donald. “Oscar Nominations 2023: Donald Clarke on an Astonishing, Record‑Shattering Year for Irish Film.” Irish Times, January 24, 2023. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/film/2023/01/24/ oscar‑nominations‑2023‑donald‑clarke‑on‑an‑astonishing‑record‑shattering‑year‑for‑irish‑film/. Curran, Joseph M. Hibernian Green on the Silver Screen: The Irish and American Movies. Westport, CT: Green‑ wood Press, 1989. Dibeltulo, Silvia. “Tales of Loss, Betrayal, and Regain: Irishness and Ethnic Identity in Contemporary Irish‑Themed American Gangster Films.” In Rethinking Genre in Contemporary Global Cinema, edited by Silvia Dibeltulo and Ciara Barrett, 33–37. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer‑ sity Press, 1991. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. Harlow: Pearson Education, Inc., 2000. Lourdeaux, Lee. Italian and Irish Filmmakers in America. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990. McIlroy, Brian. “Searching for the Sub(genre): Irish‑American Film Comedy.” In Screening Irish‑America: Rep‑ resenting Irish‑America in Film and Television, edited by Ruth Barton, 299–310. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009. McLoone, Martin. Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 2000.

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Matthew J. Fee Meagher, Timothy J. “Abie’s Irish Enemy: Irish and Jews, Social and Political Realities and Media Represen‑ tations.” In Screening Irish‑America: Representing Irish‑America in Film and Television, edited by Ruth Barton, 45–58. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009. Meagher, Timothy J. “Chapter 6: The 1960s to the Present.” In The Columbia Guide to Irish American History, 149–170. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Negra, Diane. “Irishness, Anger and Masculinity in Recent Film and Television.” In Screening Irish‑America: Representing Irish‑America in Film and Television, edited by Ruth Barton, 279–296. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009. Negra, Diane. “The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture.” In The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture, edited by Diane Negra, 1–19. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Negra, Diane. “The New Primitives: Irishness in Recent US Television.” Irish Studies Review 9, no. 2 (2001): 229–239. Rains, Stephanie. The Irish‑American in Popular Culture, 1945–2000. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007. Ramachandran, Naman. “Luck of the Irish: ‘Banshees of Inisherin,’ Paul Mescal and ‘Quiet Girl’ Push Ire‑ land to Record Oscar Nom Haul.” Variety, January 24, 2023. https://variety.com/2023/global/awards/ ireland‑oscar‑nominations‑banshees‑of‑inisherin‑paul‑mescal‑1235500591/. Rhodes, Gary Don. Emerald Illusions: The Irish in Early American Cinema 1865–1915. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011. Rockett, Kevin. The Irish Filmography: Fiction Films, 1896–1996. Dublin: Red Mountain Media, 1996. Rockett, Kevin. “The Irish Migrant and Film.” In Screening Irish‑America: Representing Irish America in Film and Television, edited by Ruth Barton, 17–44. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009. Rockett, Kevin. “The Silent Period.” In Cinema and Ireland, Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons, and John Hill, 3–50. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1988. Shannon, Christopher. Bowery to Broadway: The American Irish in Classic Hollywood Cinema. Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2010. Slide, Anthony. The Cinema and Ireland. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1988. Tracy, Tony. “Captain Lightfoot (1955): Caught Between a Rock (Hudson) and a Rapparee.” In Screening Irish‑America: Representing Irish America in Film and Television, edited by Ruth Barton, 193–210. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009. Tracy, Tony. White Cottage, White House: Irish American Masculinities in Classical Hollywood Cinema. ­Albany: State University of New York Press, 2022.

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PART 6

Irish America in the Third Millennium

31 MEDIA AND THE IRISH DIASPORA FROM THE TWENTIETH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT Mark O’Brien

In his work on the emergence of the nation state, Benedict Anderson asserted that nationality and ­nationalism are “cultural artefacts of a particular kind.” In other words, there is nothing inherent about them: they are socio‑cultural constructs that “command profound emotional legitimacy.” Nations, then, constitute an imagined community “because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship.” As Anderson noted, a key component in the construction of this imagined community in the eighteenth century was the rise of print capitalism and, more specifically, the newspaper, as it provided “the technical means for ‘re‑presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation.” As a cultural product, the newspaper delivered imagined linkages between people in two ways. While calendrical coincidence situated readers in a shared chronological timeframe (day/month), the mass market nature of newspa‑ per production and consumption ensured a “mass ceremony” of imagined community creation. Print capitalism thus provided “a new way of linking fraternity, power and time meaningfully together.” As Roger Chartier has observed, readers “never confront abstract, idealized texts detached from any ma‑ teriality. They hold in their hands or perceive objects and forms whose structures govern their reading or hearing, and consequently the possible comprehension of the text read or heard.”1 Newspapers thus establish the imagined community of nation in the minds of readers over time, and though different newspapers may advance different conceptions of what or who constitutes that nation, the legitimacy of the nation as a political entity is, mostly, taken for granted. It is arguable that the same applies to public service broadcasting. In the Irish case, the establishment of Telefís Éireann (later Raidio Telefís Éireann or RTÉ) in 1961 saw the new television service tasked with “preserving and developing the national culture.” Although “the national culture” was not defined in the broadcasting legislation, it may have been assumed that everyone knew and agreed on what it constituted. The regular news programmes aired at the same time every day mirrored the newspaper’s “calendrical coincidence” as the nation collectively watched rather than read the news. Moreover, as with newspapers, RTÉ did not question the political legitimacy of the nation, though it very quickly became a forum for contested views on what or who constituted the nation.2 If a nation may be viewed as an imagined community, the same may be said of a diaspora. Irish America was and remains an imagined community, one of shared experiences of emigration, dis‑ location, homesickness, and adjustment while longing for the familiar or perceived familiar. All of this is expressed through social and cultural organizations that derive and maintain their legitimacy from the socio‑cultural constructed ideas of nation and nationality, which, in turn, come from shared 407

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-38

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imaginings created and reinforced by media consumption. If this is true of the emigrants that left Ireland for the United States in the 1920s and 1950s, when newspapers were the dominant form of mass communication, then it is true also of later emigrants exposed to new technology such as television and the internet. Over time, the interactions with different media forms and content cre‑ ated generational divides wherein different imaginaries of Ireland battled for supremacy. As outlined in other chapters in this volume, this divide was most forcefully expressed in disputes within the Irish‑American community about Northern Ireland, religion, and LGBTQ+ rights.

Media and Irish Identity While the intertwining of Catholicism and nationalism as components of Irishness has a long back‑ story, it was reinforced in the symbolism (blood sacrifice, resurrection) attendant to the Easter Ris‑ ing of 1916, an event that involved numerous poets, editors, and journalists. Post‑independence, this intertwining became an almost unquestioned component of Irishness. A recent history characterized journalism in Ireland in the period from the 1920s to the 1960s as “constrained” wherein the defer‑ ence paid to nationalism and Catholicism defined media content, with only the Bell and, occasionally, the Irish Times challenging this orthodoxy. In short, “nothing that might challenge the position of the [Catholic] church as the great arbiter of social, cultural, and political life could be published.” Thus, those who left Ireland between the 1840s and 1950s took with them a particular view of Irishness strongly shaped by its mediated construction at that time. This version of Irishness was affirmed within the shared political, social, cultural, and religious organizations that served that emigrant community.3 Later generations would carry different conceptions of Irishness based on their experience of grow‑ ing up in a modernizing and secularizing state. The adoption of free trade in 1959 prompted urbani‑ zation, an economic boom, and reform of the education system to allow more people to progress to second‑ and third‑level education. The media context was also changing. The period from 1961 to the late 1970s was characterized as a time of “contested journalism,” which saw the creation of a national broadcaster that was obliged by law to be objective and impartial in its coverage of news and current affairs. This effectively forced newspapers to do likewise, with the Irish Times leading the way with its reconstitution as an ownerless Trust to provide impartial news. As more critical coverage of politics, religion, and women’s rights emerged, political parties and the Catholic Church sought, unsuccess‑ fully, to re‑assert their authority, which was under scrutiny as never before. Thus, journalism from the 1970s onwards was characterized as a period of “challenging journalism” that was reflected in the rise of new publications such as Hibernia, In Dublin, Hot Press, and Magill, all of which articulated the concerns of a younger, more educated electorate. In the 1990s, many of the journalists who had learned their trade at these magazines would be involved in exposing the corruption that was endemic in the political, financial, and religious institutions that formed the centre of Irish life. All this occurred just prior to the advent of the World Wide Web, which would again revolutionize journalism and commu‑ nication technology. As Irish America is partly a creation of Ireland, its different variants, or different imaginaries of Ireland, during the twentieth century can only be understood in the context of an Ireland in which the nature of the state was fought over in media content. This, allied to an understanding of the developments in media technology, allows us a deeper insight into the nature of Irish America.4

Media and the Diaspora from the 1920s to the 1950s As Ireland settled down to an uneasy post‑independence period, a new wave of emigrants left for the United States. Peaking in the 1920s when 220,000 people left, emigration subsided during the 1930s (13,000) and 1940s (27,000), before rising again in the 1950s (56,000), with the two largest waves coinciding with political and economic trouble in Ireland. As Robin Cohen has noted, emigration 408

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is often traumatic and is characterized by collective memory, idealization of the homeland, and the creation of a strong ethnic group consciousness that is sustained over time. For the pre‑1960s Irish emigrant, letters home, the reception of Irish county newspapers, and the odd telegram were the only forms of communication with the home nation. In the host country, organizations familiar from home, such as the Catholic Church and fraternal organizations focused on the needs of emigrants, were the only mechanisms for identity expression. As regards media, newspapers dominated eve‑ ryday consumption and these reflected the Ireland that the emigrants had left, where nationalism and Catholicism shaped the ideological landscape. The key emigrant newspaper of this period was the New York Irish Echo. Established in 1928 by Charles F. Connolly, it was “the first major Irish‑­ American newspaper launched in the post‑partition era. And partition would be its daily, or rather weekly bread.” As the decades passed, little changed. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the paper was “filled with stories of newly‑ordained priests and nuns, the sons and daughters of proud parents from the Bronx and Queens, and the thirty‑two counties of Ireland.” It also published “notices for benefits dances and speeches for visiting priests from Ireland who were in the United States to raise money to build churches back in Ireland or to finance missions in Africa or South America.”5 By this stage, the Irish government had at least twice declined to help fund newspapers aimed at Irish immigrants in the US. In 1951, the Irish Ambassador in Washington, John J. Hearne, reported an approach from the Gaelic American for state sponsorship. In his report to Dublin, Hearne noted that the paper had a weekly circulation of 5,000 copies, annual costs of $30,000, and annual income of only $9,000. Declining the request, the Minister for External Affairs, Frank Aiken, noted that since any government funding would be public knowledge, the paper “would be regarded as merely a propaganda sheet of the Irish government and not as an independent organ of American opinion” with the result that “any reports or information on conditions in the Six Counties [Northern Ireland] would be tagged as government propaganda and discounted immediately.” Ironically, by the mid‑1950s the Irish Echo’s strident nationalism had driven a wedge between it and the Irish government. In 1954, an informal request from Connolly to the Irish Consulate in New York for “some form of subsidy direct or indirect” from the Irish government was rebuffed, with Joe Brennan of the Washington Embassy asserting that the “Echo cannot be much more extreme than it is now.” Later that year, the Consulate took exception to an article in the Echo, which had claimed that while Irish politicians had no effective plan to end parti‑ tion, Irish Americans would “continue to support all groups in Ireland that are fighting Partition.” The Department of External Affairs concluded that it would be best to ignore such sentiments, as it viewed the Echo as “an irresponsible paper consistently sympathetic with any displays of violent language or violent action directed against the British irrespective of whether such action and language serve any real Irish purpose.” Responding to such provocations would, the Department felt, “be played up by the New York papers as another amusing example of the Irish fighting among themselves.” By the mid‑1950s, the gap between the Irish state and those who had immigrated to the US in the early twentieth century had widened significantly in terms of resolving the problem of partition.6 Radio also played a role in providing cohesion to the Irish‑American diaspora. In 1926, the Irish prime minister W. T. Cosgrave, began broadcasting an annual Saint Patrick’s Day message to ­America. Between 1926 and 1931, this annual greeting was either pre‑recorded or read on Cosgrave’s behalf by a US broadcaster. As noted by Mary Daly, Cosgrave’s first live broadcast, on the CBS net‑ work in March 1931, “attracted a large audience, judging by the many letters and postcards that he received from his listeners throughout the United States and Canada.” Cosgrave’s successor as prime minister, Éamon de Valera, continued these broadcasts until 1938 when the task passed to the nation’s first President, Douglas Hyde. Radio also provided the medium to cement relations between the di‑ aspora and the home country when in September 1947, to commemorate the centenary of the Great Famine, the All‑Ireland football final was played at the Polo Grounds in New York with commentary relayed over the airwaves by Raidio Éireann’s commentator Micheál Ó Hehir.7 409

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Religion also featured on radio with two notable priests of Irish extraction utilizing the medium to advance various campaigns among the diaspora. In the early 1940s, Fr. Patrick Peyton, known as the Rosary Priest, secured a national weekly radio broadcast called “Family Theater of the Air” to spread his relatively benign message of the power of prayer. As Richard Gribble has noted, however, Peyton’s popular success later prompted the involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency in his rosary crusades in Latin America. In a similar vein, Fr. Charles Coughlin, known as the Radio Priest, began broadcasting in 1926. Kevin Kenny observes that he “retained considerable appeal throughout the 1930s, not only to Irish Americans but to Catholic Americans generally reaching millions in his weekly radio broadcasts.” Coughlin’s broadcasts, based on “nativism, anti-Semitism and conspirato‑ rial thinking” sought to portray the Second World War as “a conspiracy by Jews and Communists” and was taken off the air once the United States became a party to the conflict.8 In the wake of the war, attention turned to the possibility of long‑established Irish emigrants, or Irish Americans, visiting Ireland. One of the most frequent organizers of such visits was the Catholic Church, as parish associations led pilgrimages to Ireland. The wider economic potential of Irish‑American tourism was noticed by numerous companies. In 1955, the Irish Echo was purchased by Patrick Grimes with the expressed intent to promote his travel agency. As Mary Daly has noted, Pan American Airlines submitted proposals to Seán Lemass, then Minister for Industry and Com‑ merce, for a festival to extend the tourist season. The airline hoped to target Irish Americans who “have a strong sentimental tie with the Old Sod.” The proposals included a suggestion that the period after St. Patrick’s Day be known as “Come Back to Erin Month.” The airline believed that this idea would appeal “to an emotional desire on the part of people of Irish descent to visit Erin.” As Daly has observed, these proposals would come to define “the marketing strategy for Irish tourism in the United States for many years to come, with the mixture of sentiment, leprechauns, sport, references to ‘the old sod,’ and encouragement to visit the ancestral birth‑place.” In a similar vein, Stephanie Rains has shown how, throughout the 1950s, travel to Ireland was represented to the diaspora as a journey back in time or a journey home. Such representations, or marketing, originated from the Irish government’s tourism agencies which, according to Rains, “were vigorously promoting an idyllic and unmaterialistic representation of Ireland precisely in order to commodify Irishness in the pursuit of foreign‑exchange earnings and economic growth.” This marketing took the form of “feature articles (likely derived from Bord Fáilte press releases) on tourism to Ireland complete with promotional photographs (credited to Bord Fáilte) featuring pastoral scenes” in newspapers such as the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.9 Magazines published similar content. In 1951, National Geographic carried an article, “I Walked Some Irish Miles,” in which Dorothea Sheates observed that she was “going back” to a land her grandparents had left, a land she knew only from story and song. Two years later in a Vogue article titled “Ireland: The Great Meander,” Patrick O’Higgins observed that Ireland had agreed to “a sort of voluntary turning back of the clock.” And, in 1955, Life carried a photo‑essay by Dorothea Lange called “Country People of Ireland” that “focused on the connections between contemporary Ireland and the ethnic heritage of the diaspora.” Film, which Matthew J. Fee explores in his chapter in this volume, also propagated such representations. The titles of productions such as Glimpses of Erin (1934), The Spell of Ireland (1950), O’Hara’s Holiday (1959), The Irish in Me (1959), Honeymoon in Ireland (1963), and Green for Ireland (1967) tell their own tale. As Rains has noted, these films were shown or loaned out to Irish‑American organizations while some may also have had limited cinema releases. Similarly, Bord Fáilte’s Ireland Invites You (1966) represented Ireland as A green island set in the seas like a gem of a rare beauty, a haven of undisturbed peace in a restless world, a land of infinite variety of scenes, an ageless, timeless place where old beliefs and customs live on beside the spreading tide of human progress.10 410

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Such representations conceivably had the effect of ossifying a particular view of Ireland among Irish Americans who may have become wedded to the notion of an unchanging, conservative, Catholic Ireland. Certainly, a 1958 report on Irish America by the Irish Consul‑General, John Conway, to the Department of External Affairs, observed that “the liberal point of view is not essentially an Irish‑American characteristic.” But, as Ireland adopted free trade in the late 1950s, the duality of marketing Ireland as unchanging (to the tourism market) and as a modernizing state (to overseas in‑ vestors) was yet to become obvious. In some ways, the visit of President John F. Kennedy to Ireland in June 1963 marked the apex of this duality. It represented, as the Irish Times put it, the return of “a local boy who made good” but took place at a time when the Irish government was focused on the need to increase foreign direct investment and the socio‑cultural changes needed to facilitate this. As Kevin Kenny has noted, the decline in Irish emigration during the 1960s and 1970s effectively meant that the post‑war history of Irish America became concerned not so much with immigrants as with the second‑generation (and beyond) American‑born Irish. The decline in emigration meant demo‑ graphic change. Between 1940 and 1980 the number of Irish‑born Americans dropped from 572,031 to 197,817 while between 1940 and 1970 the number of second‑generation American‑Irish (Irish or mixed parentage) dropped from 1,838,920 to 1,198,845.11 Along with this demographic change came an ever‑increasing distance from first‑hand experience of life in Ireland, a point addressed by Irish prime minister Seán Lemass in a radio address for a New Jersey based station in November 1963. Referring to his visit to the US the previous month, Lemass noted that he had taken the “opportunity of helping the people whom I met, in the cities that I visited, to know more about the new Ireland which is now taking shape—about our economic and social pro‑ gress, and our high hopes for the future.” This was a clear break from de Valera’s idealized Ireland of rural homesteads, pastoral land, sturdy youths and comely maidens—an image that dominated Irish identity for decades. Lemass’ address was an attempt to alert Irish America that dramatic change, in the guise of industrialization and urbanization, was afoot in Ireland and that the imaginaries of what constituted Ireland and Irishness were changing too. Despite such entreaties, the discordance between the perception and reality of Ireland within Irish America would become acutely manifest in the 1980s.12

Media and the Diaspora in the 1980s From the 1960s onward, Irish emigration to the United States declined, with 37,000 arrivals in the 1960s and 14,000 in the 1970s. Two key factors that informed this decline were the US Immigration and Nationality Act 1965 (which favoured family reunification rather than open emigration and is discussed at length elsewhere in this volume by Ray O’Hanlon) and the growth of the Irish economy throughout the 1960s. However, amid the global economic crisis of the 1980s, emigration rose again, with the Irish Central Statistics Office estimating that net emigration between 1980 and 1990 was 216,000. This constituted roughly 5 percent of the population with a breakdown of the 1986 Irish Census indicating that two‑thirds of all emigrants were in the 15 to 24 age group. The vast bulk, 70 percent, of these went to Britain; Mary Corcoran has noted that the cost of travelling to America effectively meant that those who emigrated there were relatively well‑educated, had previous work experience, and had access to a pre‑existing network of contacts. Indeed, a 1992 study of 1986 school graduates found that those who had emigrated in the 1980s were more likely to be highly educated. The study found that 25 percent of those who had completed a third‑level qualification had emigrated compared to only 6 percent who had left school without such a qualification. This contrasted starkly with the 1950s emigration generation, most of whom had received only primary or elementary educa‑ tion, with over half leaving or finishing school before the age of 12. Unlike previous generations of immigrants in the US, the New Irish, as they became known, had emigrated for reasons “not solely 411

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determined by high rates of unemployment.” Other factors included dissatisfaction with poorly paid, mundane jobs at home, little prospect of promotion, and a desire to see the world. Furthermore, as this cohort had entered the US on tourist visas and had stayed on illegally, the New Irish viewed their time there “as a temporary and transient one.” As undocumented “illegals,” these immigrants worked largely within the Irish ethnic enclave, taking up positions in the construction, restaurant, bar, and caregiving sectors.13 This generational mixing between the New Irish and the established Irish‑American community was not wholly harmonious. Many of the New Irish complained of “unscrupulous employers.” More apparent, perhaps, was the different version of Ireland and Irishness exhibited by the New Irish. As Corcoran has noted, Irish emigration to the US had “effectively skipped a generation” and the New Irish had left an Ireland that had transformed itself during the 1960s and 1970s. The adoption of free trade saw the number of females working outside the home increase from 212,000 in 1971 to 488,000 in 1991. Reform of the education system saw the number of people completing second‑level educa‑ tion increase from 4,500 in 1950 to 19,000 in 1970, and the numbers completing third‑level from 7,900 in 1950 to 25,000 in 1970. The impact of human rights discourses, in the guise of feminism and gay rights, was also significant in terms of challenging the parameters of what it meant to be Irish. The establishment of a national broadcaster, RTÉ, obliged in law to be objective and impartial in its coverage of news and affairs, and the emergence of a vibrant periodical sector in the 1970s, had transformed a media that had previously been deferential to the totems of nationalism and Catholi‑ cism. National media outlets now openly discussed issues such as contraception, censorship, divorce, abortion, homosexuality, women’s rights, and accountability and transparency in public life.14 The New Irish had grown up in this milieu, and courtesy of the prevalence of US shows on Irish television, were more familiar with US culture than Irish America was with an Ireland that had changed beyond recognition. In her survey of the New Irish, Mary Corcoran found that they believed that Irish Americans were “either wholly uninformed or misinformed about Ireland” with their per‑ ceptions being based on stock images and stereotypes that bore “only spurious relation to the country in which the new Irish immigrants were raised.” While the New Irish viewed themselves as “steeped in realism,” then, they viewed their Irish‑American counterparts as indulging in “romanticism” and a simplification of “the complexities of the Irish situation.” Corcoran thus found considerable social and cultural distance between the two cohorts with the playing of Irish sport being the core unify‑ ing force. Corcoran also found that the public house, rather than the Catholic Church or fraternal organizations, represented “a home away from home, a job and accommodation advice bureau, a bank, a newspaper vendor, and fundraising venue.” In addition, the New Irish remained more fre‑ quently in contact with family back home in Ireland. The diffusion of telephone technology allowed for a convenient, if relatively expensive, means of communication. It also allowed the New Irish to establish their own hotline that offered advice not just on employment and housing but also on con‑ traception, sexuality and sexual health, and alcohol abuse, much to the chagrin of existing, mostly religious‑based, support organizations. As Timothy Meagher observed, while both the New Irish and the established Irish‑American community “had come from the same island, they had not come from the same place.”15 As the New Irish had come from a different place, it was inevitable that they would establish their own media outlets to reflect their reality. The dominant existing press consisted of the Irish People and the Irish Echo. Established in 1972, the Irish People proffered a strongly nationalist analysis of events in Northern Ireland. Similarly, the Irish Echo “devoted little if any news coverage to the issue of contemporary immigration,” preferring instead to foreground events in Northern Ireland. Television offered little difference. As noted by Rains, one of the key American television series of the early 1980s to focus on the Irish emigrant experience, the ABC/EMI mini‑series The Manions

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of America, centered on a diehard nationalist who fled Ireland, made his fortune in America, and returned to ­Ireland with shipload of explosives. The first publication to reflect the reality of the New Irish was Irish America magazine. Having helped establish the Irishman in San Francisco in 1979, Niall O’Dowd relocated to New York and launched Irish America in October 1985 with a loan from the proprietor of the London Irish Post, Brendan Mac Lua. In its first lead article, O’Dowd declared that the magazine intended to play its part in what it termed “the recent upsurge in ethic conscious‑ ness.” In this, Irish America promised to be “mindful of the old traditions and aware of the new.” 16 The motivation for the magazine came from O’Dowd’s “gut instinct that there was market out there for our publication, that people were tired of the shamrocks and green beer image which seemed to define Irish Americans for so many.” Published every two months, and with a circulation of 50,000, its award of Irish American of the Year and annual list of top 100 Irish Americans remains a fixture in the annual St. Patrick’s Day festivities. Building on this success, and backed by the Jefferson Smurfit Group (which had also invested in Irish America), O’Dowd established the Irish Voice in New York in 1987. Again, O’Dowd made his pitch on the basis that “the young Irish were poorly served by existing Irish‑American newspapers, many of which were caught in a time warp.” O’Dowd was de‑ termined that the Irish Voice “would not depend on rewrites from Ireland as the other papers did, but reflect the lives, loves, hopes and dreams of the burgeoning Irish community in New York—a senti‑ ment that fed into and fed off the critical view the New Irish had of Irish‑America as it then existed.17 With its tabloid format, colour photography, sharp layout, and distinctive blue masthead, the Irish Voice “openly courted the new Irish immigrants, especially the illegals who featured in a spe‑ cial survey, headlined ‘We”ll Never Return—Young Illegals,’ conducted for the inaugural issue.” Its first lead article committed the paper to be “forthright in its attempts to win for the estimated 135,000 Irish illegals, their proper places as full members of this society.” By reflecting the reality of the lives of the New Irish and offering a modern take on contemporary Ireland, the paper con‑ stituted a vital media space for the new generation of Irish immigrants. Each week, its centrepiece consisted of a spread of photographs of events hosted by the New Irish. A lively mix of society news, film, theatre, book and music reviews, and extensive sports coverage was accompanied by a “Green Card” advice column and the “Across Irish America” column penned by correspondents in San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston. It covered the activities of the Irish Immigration Reform Movement, legislative reform, and committed itself to covering the Troubles in Northern Ireland without prejudice by tasking senior Belfast‑based correspondents (who worked for Irish national papers) to report on major events. As recalled by O’Dowd, this even‑handedness was demonstrated by the paper running occasional opinion columns by Northern Ireland politicians from across the political spectrum. In her survey of the New Irish, Corcoran found that the paper was “perceived as providing broader and more objective coverage of Northern Ireland than mainstream print and broadcast media in Ireland.”18 The new arrival also prompted its rival, the Irish Echo, “to refocus its editorial thrust and consider the issues that mattered to a new reading audience of immigrants.” As Linda Dowling Almeida has observed, while the identity of the Irish‑American community had been defined by national struggle and reinforced through newspapers such as the Irish Echo, the New Irish “suffered no colonial inse‑ curities about their homeland,” growing up, as they had, in a media sphere that encouraged question‑ ing, debate, discussion, and diversity. The different worldviews within Irish America was noted in 1989 by Colm Tóibín. Dispatched to New York to report on that year’s St. Patrick’s Day festivities, he observed that the main evening event, organized by the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, was a male‑only event. Describing this as “something strange from the past, alien to the way Ireland was now,” Tóibín also attended an event hosted by the New Irish at which “there was no green beer and not a sign of a leprechaun.”19

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Media and the Diaspora in the New Millennium Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, Irish emigration to the US declined due to economic prosperity in Ireland and greater post‑9/11 scrutiny of who entered America. While the post‑Celtic Tiger crash saw 150,000 people emigrate between 2008 and 2012, the destinations of choice were now Canada and Australia. This decline in migration to the US was reflected in the 2016 American Community Survey which registered 125,840 Irish‑born in the US, down from 250,000 in 1980. As with the different worldviews that characterized those who emigrated in the 1950s and 1980s, those who left Ireland from the mid‑1990s onward differed greatly from the 1980s generation in terms of a transformed communications sphere. Along with more frequent avail‑ ability of flights and cheaper airfares, immigrants now had the World Wide Web at their fingertips. While the first wave of mobile telephone and internet technology (text messages, websites, and email) allowed for significant preparation prior to travel, in terms of rapid communication with potential employers and accommodation providers, the development of Web 2.0 with its greater digital affordances lessened again the temporal and spatial gap between home and host country. The arrival of cheap, instantaneous digital communication, in the form of video, messaging, and social media, meant that immigrants were in continuous real‑time contact with home. In some ways, the experience of emigration is now an instantaneously shared one, with familial support lessening any dislocation and lessening the need for immigrants to engage with the older immi‑ grant networks and support services. Indeed, it is now not in any way unusual, given that the Irish national broadcaster’s radio stations are accessible via the internet, to hear real‑time greetings from US‑based listeners to friends and family back home in Ireland. In a similar vein, coverage of emigration by the Irish Times, first as “Generation Emigration in 2011” and then as “The Irish Times Abroad” in 2016, while acknowledging the push factors such as the 2008 economic crash and housing shortages, also offers a positive view of emigration in terms of work experience and exposure to new cultures.20 As Feargal Cochrane has observed, today’s Irish immigrants are “emblems of global modernity, capable of inhabiting hybrid spaces where their mobility is psychological as well as physical and where their attachments are fluid and decenterd, simultaneously being home and away from home.” Contemporary Irish immigrants to America, Cochrane found, do not necessarily see themselves as economic exiles, tend to immerse themselves in American culture rather than isolate themselves in migrant support groups, do not idealize or romanticize the Ireland they left, and do not necessarily coalesce along ethnic lines. In a similar vein, Ray O’Hanlon has noted that, for this new generation of migrants, movement depends “less on a consideration of country of residence than it does on pros‑ pects within multi‑national corporations, industries or technologies.” Thus, in Hanlon’s view, “a form of third country is emerging, populated by an Irish diaspora pulled together by airlines schedules, fibre‑optic lines, and web pages.”21 Such fluid identity was reflected in the Irish government’s view of the Irish diaspora. In its Global Ireland: Ireland’s Diaspora Strategy 2020–2025, the government asserted that the dias‑ pora constituted “a diverse and dynamic community [and] increasingly multicultural, in which Irish identity can be one element of an individual’s broader cultural background.” However, this projection of a modern, multi‑cultural, secular, technologically focused nation state does not chime with long‑held collective memories of an impoverished country that form a core part of the identity of older generations of immigrants and their descendants. In some quarters, the notion of a conservative, agriculturally based society, and the perceived values that flow from this, still persist as the collective imagination of “the real Ireland.” In 2015, speaking at the Irish Network US annual meeting, the Irish Ambassador, Anne Anderson, mentioned the passing of the marriage

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equality referendum in Ireland that year and acknowledged that Irish‑identified generations in America found the extent of change in Ireland difficult to accept.22 One possible reason for this can be found in the continued media portrayal of Ireland as being an unchanging monoculture. The advent of digital technology allowed for the establishment of a pleth‑ ora of online newspapers. Journals such as the Boston Irish Reporter, Irish Edition (Philadelphia), Gael (San Francisco), Desert Shamrock (Arizona), Irish American Post (Chicago) were designed to serve the Irish‑American community, although the subject matter of such publications is mostly light, uncontentious, culture‑related content. Other news services, such as the Irish Central portal and Out of Ireland Television, offered more critical, current affairs coverage of contemporary Ireland. But within wider popular culture, it is the monocultural conception of Ireland that prevailed. In a survey of US sitcoms that aired in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Diane Negra found that those that featured Irish characters, such as Turks (CBS), Trinity (NBC), To Have and To Hold (CBS), Costello (Fox), Love and Money (CBS), Madigan Men (ABC), and The Fighting Fitzgeralds (NBC), used “Irishness as an ethnic code for reinstating social values perceived to be lost in millennial American culture.” In such programmes, Irishness represented “a point of access into a purified version of family and community life that specifically compensates for the exigencies of contemporary U.S. culture”—a kind of nostalgia also explored by Beth O’Leary Anish in her review of Irish‑American fiction earlier in this collection. Negra also noted that Ballykissangel, a folksy BBC soap opera set in a small rural Irish village, attracted a large following when it aired in the US.23 Other programmes, following a similar pattern, emphasized alcohol and violence. In 2000, Star Trek Voyager featured a computer‑simulated Irish village, Fair Haven, with a barroom brawl, while a follow up episode saw the computer‑simulated inhabitants of the village accuse the Star Trek crew of being Spirit Folk or fairies that manipulate reality. Likewise, one episode of The Simpsons featured “Catholic Heaven” as an Irish themed bar featuring a performance of Riverdance. A subsequent, tongue in cheek episode saw the titular family visit Ireland and unexpectedly encounter a modern, hard‑working country, where drinking alcohol had fallen out of favour. Arrested for breaching a ban on smoking in public places, the patriarch, Homer Simpson, declared that he was only “trying to take Ireland back to the good old days of Angela’s Ashes.”24 More pertinently, Negra observed a change in sitcom formula in the early 2000s with tel‑ evision shows that featured Irish characters, such as Rescue Me (FX Networks), Brotherhood (Showtime), and The Black Donnellys (NBC), being driven not by romanticized working class lives but by “masculinist narratives of anger, resentment, and defensiveness.” Negra also posited a link between such shows and the influence of “the emphatically angry Irish‑American males of cable news” who, during the 1990s and early decades of the twenty‑first century, constituted the backbone of conservative commentary culture on right wing cable news channels. Among such commentators were Sean Hannity (Fox News), Chris Matthews (MSNBC), and Bill O’Reilly (Fox News), all of whom professed their Irishness, as well as “traditional patriarchal power and a faith‑based social conservatism.” In some ways, this “Irish‑inflected American authoritarianism,” which included an affinity for re‑­purposing phrases from the Catholic liturgy, harkened back to the days of Fr. Peyton and Fr. Coughlin. Now, the enemy was no longer communism but rather an apparently emasculated masculinity, which could, to some eyes, be detected everywhere in con‑ temporary America. More recently, the prevalence of persons with Irish lineage, such as Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer, who served as media spokespersons during the presidency of Donald Trump, has been unfavourably commented on. Such sentiments point to an ever‑growing distance between a secularizing multi‑cultural Ireland and an Irish America that is being ever more per‑ ceived as a demographic that has lurched to the right and hankers for an idealized past that never really existed.25

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Conclusion Over the course of the twentieth century, communication technology continually evolved as news‑ papers were gradually supplanted by radio and television, which, in turn, were rapidly supplanted by the World Wide Web and social media platforms. While each wave of Irish emigrants to the US, from the pre‑1960s generation to the 1980s generation to the post‑1990s generation, effectively grew up on the same island, they came of age in contrasting media spheres wherein the imagined community of Ireland and what it meant to be Irish was differentially experienced and expressed. These versions of Irishness were articulated by media content and reinforced by its consumption, and as each wave of emigrants enjoyed separate relationships with media technology and content, these differences slowly and then very rapidly exposed the diverse worldviews held by successive generations of immigrants. The disjunction between these dissimilar and competing versions of Ireland and Irishness is unlikely to be resolved any time soon. As we have seen, the contrasting interpretation or imagining of what constitutes perceptions of Ireland has, since the 1950s, been a contested field, influenced by sentiment, romanticism, experience, and reality. How this imagining was, and continues to be, shaped by media content and consumption is of ongoing critical concern. The imagined community is never a settled one. It is continually re‑imagined by multiple cohorts of media producers and consumers, all of whom bring their idealisms or experiences to bear on what they perceive to be the true and authentic version of nation and nationality, whatever that may be.

Notes 1 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7, 25, 35–36; Chartier, “Laborers and Voyagers,” 50. 2 Broadcasting Act (Ireland), 1961, Section 17. 3 O’Brien, “Fighting and Writing”; O’Brien, Fourth Estate, 226. 4 O’Brien, Fourth Estate, 225–229. 5 Corcoran, Irish Illegals, 3; Cohen, Global Diasporas, 180; O’Hanlon, Unintended Consequences, 75; ­Dowling Almeida, Irish Immigrants, 96. 6 NAI, DFA/10/2/236, letter from Hearne to Aiken, August 13, 1951 & reply, September 7, 1951; NAI, DFA/6/412/5, letters from Joe Brennan July 29 & August 21, 1954 to department of external affairs; NAI, DFA/6/412/5, letter from Gareth Healy of New York Consulate to department of external affairs, November 10, 1954 and reply from latter, November 19, 1954. 7 The head of the Irish government was titled President of the Executive Council between 1922 and 1937 and Taoiseach thereafter. For ease of reference, the term “prime minister” is used throughout. Daly, “National‑ ism, Sentiment, and Economics,” 263; Brady, “Playing Irish Sport”. 8 Gribble, Anti‑communism”; Kenny, The American Irish, 207–209. 9 Rains, “Ireland as a Past Life,” 134; Dowling Almeida, Irish Immigrants, 175; NAI, S15297A, cited in Daly, “Nationalism, Sentiment, and Economics,” 267; Daly, “Nationalism, Sentiment, and Economics,” 268; Rains, “Ireland as a Past Life,” 140, 131. 10 Rains, “Ireland as a Past Life,” 131–140; Rains, The Irish‑American in Popular Culture, 107, 111. 11 NAI, DFA, P115/1, June 27, 1958, cited in Daly, “Nationalism, Sentiment, and Economics,” 279; Anon, “John F Kennedy”; Kenny, The American Irish, 225. 12 NAI, 2001/43/324, message recorded by Lemass for WJRZ radio station, NJ, November 8, 1963. 13 Corcoran, Irish Illegals, 3, 7; Taylor, “Emigration”; Corcoran, Irish Illegals, 9, 34; FitzGerald, “Population”; Investment in Education, 140; Corcoran, Irish Illegals, xiv, xiii. 14 Corcoran, Irish Illegals, xv, 127; Inglis, Moral Monopoly, 239. Redmond, That Was Then, 45–51; O’Brien, Fourth Estate, 177–181. 15 Corcoran, Irish Illegals, 126, 127, 132, xv; O’Carroll, Transatlantics, 225; Meagher, Columbia Guide, 154. 16 Dowling Almeida, Irish Immigrants, 70, 134; Rains, The Irish‑American in Popular Culture, 169–70; O’Dowd, An Irish Voice, 165; O’Dowd, “Publisher’s Letter’. 17 O’Dowd, An Irish Voice, 169, 183–184, 190. 18 Corcoran, Irish Illegals, 168; O’Dowd, “Editorial”. O’Dowd, An Irish Voice, 198; Corcoran, Irish Illegals, 169. 19 Dowling Almeida, Irish Immigrants, 134, 21; Tóibín, “Marching,” 65–66.

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Media and Irish Diaspora since the Twentieth Century 20 O’Carroll, Transatlantics, 45; Kennedy, Irish‑America, 139. 21 Cochrane, The End of Irish‑America, 22, 24; O’Hanlon, The New Irish‑Americans, 219. 22 Connolly, On Every Tide, 218; O’Carroll, Irish Transatlantics, 251–252. 23 O’Dowd, An Irish Voice, 315; McEldowney, “Bringing Irish News”; Negra, “The Irish in Us,” 4. 24 Star Trek, “Fair Heaven” & “Spirit Folk”, 2000; The Simpsons, “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Guest Star”, 2005 & “In the Name of the Grandfather”, 2009. 25 Negra, “Irishness, Anger and Masculinity”, 279, 282; O’Connell, “What Makes a U.S. Politician Irish.”

Bibliography Primary Sources Anon. “John F. Kennedy.” Irish Times, June 26, 1963, 7. Broadcasting Act (Ireland), 1961, Section 17. FitzGerald, Garret. “Population Implications in our Balanced Migration.” Irish Times, February 1, 1997, 14. Investment in Education Report. Dublin: Stationary Office, 1965. McEldowney, Eugene. “Bringing Irish News to U.S. Is Big Business.” Irish Times, August 5, 1996, 16. National Archives of Ireland (hereafter NAI), DFA/10/2/236, letter from John J. Hearne to Frank Aiken, August 13, 1951 & reply, September 7, 1951. NAI, DFA/6/412/5, letters from Joe Brennan July 29 & August 21, 1954 to Department of External Affairs. NAI, DFA/6/412/5, letter from Gareth Healy of New York Consulate to Department of External Affairs, Novem‑ ber 10, 1954 and reply from latter, November 19, 1954. NAI, 2001/43/324, message recorded by Seán Lemass for WJRZ radio station, NJ, November 8, 1963. O’Connell, Jennifer. “What Makes a U.S. Politician Irish?” Irish Times, April 22, 2022, 8. O’Dowd, Niall. “Editorial.” The Irish Voice, December 5, 1987, 4. O’Dowd, Niall. “Publisher’s Letter.” Irish America, October 1985, 5.Taylor, Cliff. “Emigration in Focus.” Irish Times, September 2, 1989, 2.

Secondary Sources Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2016. Brady, Sara. “Playing Irish Sport on Baseball’s Hallowed Ground: The 1947 All‑Ireland Gaelic Football Final.” In After the Flood: Irish America 1945–1960, edited by James Silas Rogers and Matthew J. O’Brien, 24–37. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009. Chartier, Roger. “Laborers and Voyagers: From the Text to the Reader.” Diacritics 22, no. 2 (1992): 49–61. Cochrane, Feargal. The End of Irish‑America? Globalisation and the Irish Diaspora. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas, an Introduction. London: UCL Press, 1997. Connolly, Sean. On Every Tide: The Making and Remaking of the Irish World. London: Little, Brown, 2020. Corcoran, Mary. Irish Illegals: Transients between Two Societies. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993. Daly, Mary E. “Nationalism, Sentiment, and Economics: Relations between Ireland and Irish America in the Postwar Years.” In New Directions in Irish American History, edited by Kevin Kenny, 263–279. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Dowling Almeida, Linda. Irish Immigrants in New York City, 1945–1995. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Gribble, Richard. “Anti‑communism, Patrick Peyton, CSC and the CIA.” Journal of Church and State 45, no. 3 (2003): 535–558. Inglis, Tom. Moral Monopoly: The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Dublin: UCD Press, 1998. Kennedy, Liam. “Irish America”. In Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies, edited by Renée Fox, Mike Cronin and Brian Ó Comchubhair, 137–148. London: Routledge, 2020. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. Harlow: Longman, 2000. Meagher, Timothy J. The Columbia Guide to Irish‑American History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Negra, Diane. “Irishness, Anger and Masculinity in Recent Film and Television.” In Screening Irish America: Representing Irish‑America in Film and Television, edited by Ruth Barton, 279–296. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009.

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Mark O’Brien Negra, Diane. “The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture.” In The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture, edited by Diane Negra, 1–19. London: Duke University Press, 2006. O’Brien, Mark. “Fighting and Writing: Journalists and the 1916 Easter Rising.” Media History 24, nos. 3 & 4 (2018): 350–363. O’Brien, Mark. The Fourth Estate: Journalism in Twentieth‑Century Ireland. Manchester: University Press, 2017. O’Carroll, Idé B. Irish Transatlantics, 1980–2015. Cork: Attic Press, 2018. O’Dowd, Niall. An Irish Voice. Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2010. O’Hanlon, Ray. The New Irish Americans. New York: Roberts Reinhart, 1998. O’Hanlon, Ray. Unintended Consequences: The Story of Irish Immigration to the U.S. and How America’s Door Was Closed to the Irish. Newbridge: Merrion Press, 2021. Rains, Stephanie. “Ireland as a Past Life: Bridget Murphy and Irish American Tourism to Ireland, 1945–1960.” In After the Flood: Irish America 1945–1960, edited by James Silas Rogers and Matthew J. O’Brien, 131– 145. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009. Rains, Stephanie. The Irish‑American in Popular Culture, 1945–2000. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007. Redmond, Adrian, ed. That Was Then, This Is Now: Change in Ireland, 1949–1999. Dublin: Central Statistics Office, 2000. Tóibín, Colm. “Marching Towards the Future.” In Being New York, Being Irish: Reflections on Twenty‑Five Years of Irish America and New York University’s Gluckman Ireland House, edited by Terry Golway, 62–69. Newbridge: Irish Academic Press, 2018.

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32 IRISH AMERICA, THE “CELTIC TIGER,” AND AFTER Seán Ó Riain and Nessa Ní Chasaide

When then‑Taoiseach Charles Haughey referred to Northern Ireland as a “failed political entity” in 1980, there was a deep irony that he did so as leader of the Republic of Ireland, a state that many of its own citizens considered to be “failing” due to mass emigration and unemployment. Twenty years later, after the Good Friday Agreement had been implemented and the economic boom of the “Celtic Tiger” had produced net immigration and rapid employment growth, these narratives appeared far in the past. The dominant narrative at this point was of the island of Ireland as a political and economic success story. Fast forward to the global “polycrisis” of more recent years, however, and the historical dilemmas have re‑emerged. Brexit has cast the status of Northern Ireland into new controversy, but with a more explicit economic dimension to the disagreements. Meanwhile, the economic model of the Republic of Ireland has become more uncertain, challenged by global crises but also by increased international political tensions over corporate tax. The US was clearly central to all of these different transformations in Irish politics and economy, as a source of foreign investment and political leverage, and as a key part of the international net‑ works that underpinned Ireland’s strategy of globalisation and re‑negotiation of the relationship to the UK. What is less clear is the role of Irish America in these transformations. Research has found that where there is a historical migration flow from one country to another, it is more likely that com‑ pany investment will flow back the other direction in later years. However, there is little evidence of investment decisions being made based on “ethnic loyalties.” What is the process at work here, and has it applied in the Irish‑American case? While our focus is on the economic transformations of the Republic of Ireland, these are also intertwined with the political changes in Northern Ireland. We start by examining the role of Irish America in driving those interdependent transformations. We then examine new ways that the US is shaping Ireland’s economic development, particularly in the face of increasing international conflict and changes in Irish‑American demographics and political and economic influence.1

Transatlantic Political and Economic Ties from the 1990s Ireland’s relationship to Britain has dominated its international relations for centuries. Even with its historic ties to the US through emigration, Irish America did not loom large in the politics of Ireland, North or South, after independence. As Ireland generally began to look more consistently outwards from the 1960s, connections developed to the US (and Europe), which meant that Ireland’s 419

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-39

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international ties were more diverse, even if Ireland was still in a subordinate position within inter‑ national negotiations and power relations. Through this process, over the past 50 years Ireland has shifted, in the words of Joe Ruane, from a “simple periphery” of the United Kingdom to a “multiple interface periphery” located between the UK, the United States, and Europe. This multiplicity of con‑ nections allowed the Irish state and political economy some “strategic flexibility” and was a crucial element in the private and public investment that occurred during the 1990s economic boom.2 The most obvious link between Irish America and developments on the island of Ireland was in the politics of the Northern Irish peace process. While links between the US and Ireland were longstand‑ ing, they were mobilised increasingly, consistently, and significantly from the 1970s onwards. As Andrew Sanders’ chapter in this volume demonstrates, part of this related to the increasing power of Irish‑American politicians. Indeed, while long established in particular urban areas, “it was not until the late twentieth century when Irish‑American politicians from a nationalist background became im‑ portant national leaders in Congress and the Senate.” With Tip O’Neill as Speaker from 1977 and the foundation of the Friends of Ireland Caucus in 1981, a strong Irish‑American voice on “Irish issues” was newly present in the US Congress. While dominated by Democrats, this group cooperated with President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s to help promote the Anglo‑Irish Agreement.3 These groups were closely affiliated with the position of the government of the Republic of Ireland on the conflict and territorial and constitutional issues in Northern Ireland, in spite of a competing mobilisation in the Irish‑American world to provide support to actors related to the armed struggle, in particular through the Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID). Through the 1980s and 1990s, however, links between “official” Irish America and Ireland grew, and elite connections were con‑ solidated. For example, the now‑established practice of the Taoiseach visiting the White House on St Patrick’s Day was, despite existing in some form from the 1950s, only fully institutionalised in the early 1990s, and developed further through the Clinton presidencies. Similarly, Ireland ranks relatively highly on the list of countries receiving US presidential visits, particularly relative to its size and geopolitical importance. It sits right behind the list of major military and geopolitical al‑ lies with 12 visits, including at least one by every president since Bill Clinton. This, again, shows the relatively recent consolidation of these international ties despite their emergence some decades earlier. While initially largely the preserve of the Democrat‑dominated congressional caucus, these ties have also created a new terrain where unionist politicians also travel to Washington and where even Trump‑affiliated politicians such as Mick Mulvaney attend political events in Northern Ireland.4 As is well known, these ties were central to the key role of the US, led by Irish‑American figures, in the Northern Ireland peace process. The peace process also solidified the political context for US investment and reduced security and political risks. However, US corporate investment in Ireland had been growing for two decades before these developments, since the initial investment in Galway by Digital in 1971. At the height of the inward investment of the “Celtic Tiger” years between 1998 and 2002, Ireland attracted 2 percent of global inward investment and 4.4 percent of investment into the EU. Furthermore, employment grew significantly in foreign firms in Ireland during these years. The majority of this investment was from the US, with American firms accounting for an increasing share of foreign firm investment and employment from the 1980s onwards.5 However, these economic ties do not seem to have been driven by ethnic networks and mobilisa‑ tion in the way that the political interventions were. While data on ethnic affiliations of corporate elites and their decision making are scarce, interviews with executives of US multinationals about investing in Ireland are, with the occasional exception, focused much more on commercial considera‑ tions than ethnic loyalties. Furthermore, while professional transnational networks are important, the Irish high‑tech sectors do not have anything like the level of densely networked and organisationally consolidated “transnational technical communities” that Anna Lee Saxenian finds for Indian and Tai‑ wanese entrepreneurs in California. Perhaps the most direct economic impact of ethnic ties between 420

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Ireland and the US is in tourism, always a critical sector in the Irish economy. Tourist expenditures in Ireland increased 77 percent from 2011 to 2018, with UK share declining while US tourists increased rapidly to a third of the total in 2018.6 Nonetheless, there is significant statistical evidence that historic and contemporary ties between countries make investment flows between them more likely, in addition to the more familiar issues of tax incentives, cheap labour, market access, and so on. Indeed, US counties are more likely to have at least one firm investing in another country if the county has a history of migration from that country. Nina Bandelj argues that foreign investment flows are embedded within broader social and political relations, so that “political alliances, cultural ties, and the presence of networks between countries shape FDI [foreign direct investment] flows.” We have already seen that there are significant political alliances between Ireland and the US, typically mediated through the Irish‑American political elite. Ties are further bolstered by cultural and civic organisations, including academic and cultural centres, funds such as the American Ireland Funds and Atlantic Philanthropies, and a variety of governmental and non‑governmental programmes and institutions, such as the US‑Ireland R&D Partnership and the Irish Technology Leadership Group in Silicon Valley. Furthermore, while sitting between the US, Europe, and the UK, Ireland is clearly part of the Anglo‑American institutional and economic world. It shares the English language as the dominant business language with the US, and “Irishness” in the contemporary world is racialised as “white,” despite the greatly increased ethnic diversity of the Irish population and shifting notions of “Irishness.” Similarly, despite some recent changes, “white” remains the dominant racial identity of US business elites. When US investors engage with Irish so‑ ciety and institutions, they travel a shorter cultural distance than they would for most other countries. These kinds of linkages may provide easier access to information, or higher levels of interpersonal or intercultural trust, or even a degree of ethnic solidarity on the transnational scale. Overall, they provide a structure and content to relationships within which economic exchange is constructed, negotiated and sustained.7 Within this context, migration ties still loom large as they provide the links and identities at the personal and interpersonal levels that activate these broader connections and bring them in to social and economic action, as Ted Smyth examines in his chapter in the present volume. The number of Americans who describe themselves as of Irish ancestry has been steadily declining in each Census from a surprisingly large number of over 40 million in 1980 to 34.7 million in 2010 and 31.5 million in 2021. American Community Survey figures show that the number of Irish‑born people living in the US declined from 156,000 in 2000 to 112,000 in 2019, one of the fastest rates of decline of any national origin group in the US during that period.8 However, at the same time, the connection between Ireland and the US has been re‑constructed through a migration circuit of Irish emigration to the US, return migration to Ireland, and a portion of American emigration to Ireland. While operating on a much smaller scale than the ethnic Irish‑­ American community, these connections are more direct. Emigration to the US from Ireland boomed in the 1980s and 1990s, but there was significant return migration throughout that time and even over recent decades (see Table 32.1). While return migration has increased each decade, emigration to the US has persisted with average legal emigration to the US between 2001 and 2021 running at 1,547 per annum and return migration (of those still in Ireland in 2022) at approximately 2,034 per annum. Even as the resident ethnic community has declined and immigration had greatly reduced before the 1980s, a new migration circuit has been generated. This was sparked initially by emigration in the face of unemployment and other problems in the 1980s, but then became the basis for return migra‑ tion both driven by, and contributing to, the Celtic Tiger economy from the 1990s onwards. It now seems to operate largely as a migration circuit, presumably helped along by the significant number of US citizens and their relations in Ireland, including spouses and children of return emigrants and those attached to US companies in Ireland. 421

Seán Ó Riain and Nessa Ní Chasaide Table 32.1  Migration between the United States and Ireland Migration Flow

Number of Migrants (Number Per Annum)

Legal Migration from Ireland to U.S., 2001–2021 Those who lived in Ireland in 2022 but had lived in U.S. for one year or more: Total Entered Ireland 1971–1980 Entered Ireland 1981–1990 Entered Ireland 1991–2000 Entered Ireland 2001–2011 Entered Ireland 2012–2022

32,481 (1,547 per annum) 78,242   4,005 (400 p.a.)   6,229 (623 p.a.) 17,403 (1,740 p.a.) 19,521 (1,775 p.a.) 25,221 (2,293 p.a.)

Sources: Migration Policy Institute Data Hub; Census of Population (Central Statistics Office) Table 32.2  Proportion of population in Ireland who have lived outside the country

1996 2011 2016 2022

Percentage of Population Who have Lived in U.S. (Last Country to Live in Outside Ireland)

Percentage of Population Who Lived in any Country Outside Ireland

Percentage of All Who have Lived Outside Ireland, Who Lived in U.S.

1.01% 1.54% 1.45% 1.53%

11.13% 19.51% 18.75% 21.13%

9.08% 7.91% 7.75% 7.26%

Source: Census of Population (Central Statistics Office) Census Question: Have you lived outside the Republic of Ireland for a continuous period of one year or more? If YES write in the country of last previous residence.

While not a significant migration flow in terms of the US population, it is noteworthy that a sig‑ nificant proportion of people in Ireland have at some stage lived in the US (Table 32.2). Furthermore, this proportion has been increasing in recent decades, even as the overall internationalisation of the population has increased even more quickly. It is also clear that this migration circuit is dispropor‑ tionately professional and third‑level educated.9 What does this mean for direct, ethnically driven business ties between Ireland and the US? We can get a sense of how business elites and ethnic elites overlap in the US through the Irish America Magazine’s “Business 100.” As Irish America puts it, the list reflects “Irish‑American and Irish‑born leaders, representing some of the most innovative and influential companies and corporations in the world.” It emphasises those who have made contributions to Irish America and as such is not a list of the most prominent or powerful “Irish” business leaders but does give an approximate description of the intersection between particular business sectors and mainstream Irish‑American civic life. Table 32.3 presents the summary characteristics of the list, based on the information provided in the online profiles. Finance and Information and Communication Technologies [ICT] (50 of the Top 100) account for the majority of men, especially for Irish‑born, but only one quarter of women. The pattern is similar across both sectors, though the numbers from finance are twice as big, overall. In most cases, the people listed are in prominent US companies or emerging start‑ups. There is perhaps some tentative evidence here of the “transnational technical communities” that have operated at a much larger scale

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Irish America, the “Celtic Tiger,” and After Table 32.3  Irish America “Business 100”, 2023: Sector, gender and birthplace Irish‑Born

U.S.‑Born

Total

Sector

Female

Male

Female

Male

Finance Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Construction and real estate PR and related Entertainment Tourism Public Law Health Business services Manuf, food, logistics Retail Total

3 2 0 3 2 1 1 1 0 2 1 1 17

10 6 2 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 2 0 24

2 0 0 2 3 2 1 0 0 0 0 0 10

18 9 7 2 1 1 2 3 3 1 0 2 49

33 17 9 8 6 5 4 4 4 4 3 3 100

Source: https://www.irishamerica.com/business‑100/

and level of cohesion in other countries. The more traditional sectors of public relations, entertain‑ ment and tourism (19) are 75 percent female (both US and Irish‑born). Those on the list from the historically Irish‑American sectors of construction and real estate are primarily US‑born men (nine in total). Other sectors are a smaller proportion and are relatively evenly spread (and even harder to judge with such small numbers).10 It is clearly difficult to assess the importance of these political, cultural, and migratory ties be‑ tween countries for foreign investment flows, and for economic relations more generally. Nonethe‑ less, it is clear that the kinds of ties that appear central to the research literature on these topics are present in the connection between Ireland and America. These include the reasonably obvious po‑ litical alliances, as indicated in the cooperative relations and mutual support of Irish‑American and Irish political elites. However, they also include less visible cultural ties, as reflected in the multiple institutional, civic and cultural links between the countries, and migration circuits, where ties are re‑animated and reconstructed, even as traditional ethnic identities decline. The prima facie evidence is that during the 1990s and after, Ireland’s ability to develop the peace process and maintain an economic boom was at the least facilitated by the presence of these ties to Irish America, which ap‑ pear to have operated more strongly at the level of political elites and economic networks than at any other time since the mass migrations of the 1800s. In more recent years, however, there have been very significant changes to Ireland’s economic model, to its international connections, and to Irish America itself.

Irish America in an Era of Crises The past several years have brought a wide variety of international crises stretching from the financial crisis and recession of 2008 and after, through the climate crisis, on to interlinked challenges such as the rise of the Far Right (including in governments in the US and UK), the Covid‑19 pandemic, and global conflicts (notably, but not only, that between Russia and Ukraine). What did these mean for the relationship between Ireland and America, mediated by Irish America, in the political and economic spheres? At the most general level it meant that the “multiple interface periphery” model was now

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splintering. Even in its heyday, the model had left Ireland vulnerable to additional levels of economic volatility. But now, each of the interfaces was under their own set of pressures. This can be seen in the EU, through the 2008 financial crash, in the US, most clearly in the conflicts associated with the Trump presidency and the movement that got him elected, and in the UK, most obviously with the conflicts in the Conservative Party and the politics of Brexit. These challenges then affected the bal‑ ance between the multiple “cores” to which Ireland had been a “periphery,” in particular with the split between the UK and Europe, but also in a broader set of global tensions. This global turmoil affected the relationship between Ireland and the United States in two main ways. First, the political settlement in Northern Ireland, already mired in various institutional and social quagmires, was profoundly disturbed by the departure of the UK from the European Union. Both the fact of Brexit, and the tortured politics of what exactly it was to consist of, resulted in the de‑stabilisation and questioning of the status of Northern Ireland and the complex configuration of international relations that secured it. This political turmoil also generated significant economic challenges. Second, one of the main planks of the economic growth of the 1990s and after became a highly salient political issue on the global stage. Ireland’s low corporate tax rate, and particularly its multi‑faceted mechanisms for reducing tax liability, became one of the public examples of a global politics of corporate taxation. Corporate tax, long maintained in the realm of quiet politics, was now surrounded by a lot of noise.11 Looking first at politics, Irish America itself was changing, reflecting broader declines in white ethnic politics and especially the cohesion of the Irish‑American bloc. This is partly due to the declin‑ ing size of the Irish‑American population, but also to some degree of political fragmentation as Irish Americans became more prominent in the Republican Party and leadership as well as in conservative media circles. This has not gone unnoticed in Ireland. For example, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern commented in 2023 on a shift in the sources of advantage for Ireland in the US. We are going to have to fight hard to keep our political position in the United States as well, because we will not have the power that we did in the Senate one time or that we did in the House of Representatives. There’s a generational switch away because the last big numbers of Irish people who went is now forty years ago. So we have to try and build our base. Now there are some people doing that already, moving to state representatives. But it’s going to change the game.12 The changing game of international politics looms large over the relationship between Ireland the US. Looking first at Brexit, the context of European integration had been a vital part of the increasingly close ties between the North and South of Ireland in the “all‑island economy” that had developed in conjunction with the peace process in the 1990s and after. When David Cameron made his reckless decision to hold a vaguely specified referendum on leaving the European Union, it always had the potential to open up these issues again. Nonetheless, it is clear that despite these challenges, the Irish political system is deeply committed to a future in Europe. What might have become a matter of strategic game playing in an era of normal politics has been turned by the virulent politics of Brexit into the need to make an “existential choice” as to whether Ireland will tie itself to the UK or the EU in the coming decades. Despite the significant costs, this has proven to be a relatively easy choice. A variety of “strategic” factors, including the importance of the EU to foreign investment, the legal and regulatory entanglement between Ireland and the EU, and the popular legitimacy of the EU in Ireland, mean that it is extremely unlikely that Ireland would detach itself significantly from the EU.13 This also immediately involves the US, which has clearly prioritised normal trade relations with the EU over any arrangements with the UK (a free trade deal between the UK and the US seems

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very far off at the time of writing). Nonetheless, the role of the US in Ireland’s negotiations with the UK varied quite significantly between the Trump and Biden presidencies. Trump’s open support of Brexit gave support to the Conservative Party, although it had little direct effect on the negotiations regarding Northern Ireland. Biden visited Ireland, North and South, in 2023, in a visit that clearly signalled support for the Irish position on Brexit and the need to maintain the provisions of the Good Friday Agreement and avoid a border on the island of Ireland. Of contemporary leading US politi‑ cians, Biden is probably the one most closely aligned with the Friends of Ireland Caucus. Indeed, his remarks at a fundraising party about his trip to Northern Ireland were firmly anchored in classic Irish‑American rhetoric, saying that he visited Belfast “to make sure they weren’t—the Brits didn’t screw around and Northern Ireland didn’t walk away from their commitments.” Strategic geopoliti‑ cal considerations, domestic political dynamics, ethnic identity and political culture, and the Irish‑­ American identity of President Biden shaped the US posture regarding Brexit over this period.14 Of course, we cannot consider these political dynamics without taking into account economic relations. The alignment between the US and Ireland was also linked to their mutual interest in sus‑ taining unfettered access to the EU for US foreign investment. Even as the share of inward invest‑ ment in global Gross National Product (GNP) increased in the 2010s, Ireland gained an increased share, taking 4.9 percent of world and 18.6 percent of EU inward investment between 2012 and 2016. Given our discussion of how migration promotes international investment, it may also be significant that there is an increasing professionalisation of both Irish America and Irish migration circuits to and from the US American Community Survey figures show that the Irish‑American population is becoming more highly educated with 32 percent having a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2010 but 42 percent having the same in 2021. In addition, the percentage in managerial and professional occupa‑ tions rose from 41 percent to 49 percent during that period. Irish‑American elites seem to be shifting from national politics to global corporations.15 Although foreign investment and growth statistics are volatile and difficult to interpret, the overall pattern is clear: Ireland’s ability to attract an increasing share of world and EU inward investment was an even stronger contributor to growth after the Great Recession than in the celebrated growth years of the 1990s. This is reflected in the notoriously unreliable character of Irish growth statistics, the most famous being the 26 percent growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2015, which lead to the coining of the phrase “Leprechaun Economics” as a popular international label for the dubious character of Irish growth. Despite foreign companies generating very significant economic activity in Ireland, the majority of FDI into Ireland is not connected to the Irish domestic economy. The Irish Central Statistics Office calculate that, for 2019, out of € 1,555 billion of inward FDI into Ireland, €261.4 billion is broadly connected to investment in Ireland’s capital stock. The difference is due to very large financial flows, partially influenced by Ireland’s tax and regulatory policies, and by its status as a European financial centre. Whatever its productive basis, part of the surge in foreign in‑ vestment has played a key role in a rapid increase in tax revenues. Indeed, the additional corporation tax revenue in recent years has effectively kept Irish public finances in surplus.16 Ireland’s share of US investment in the EU also increased: a key element in this was also clearly the search for lower tax rates, and increasingly the ability to manage what counted as taxable income through profit shifting and various complex tax accounting schemes. Of course, corporate tax had al‑ ways been crucial to attracting foreign investment. Prominent economists and policymakers, Patrick Honohan and John Fitzgerald write that If Ireland had not used the tax tool, but continued to use cultural and diasporic links to attract the U.S. MNCs [multinational corporations], the sectoral mix and scale of the inward invest‑ ment would have been different and the scale smaller.

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However, competition to attract investment based on corporate tax had its own political implications.17 The “tax tool” was indeed intensely significant to US MNC investment into Ireland. The phe‑ nomenon of US MNC profit shifting (moving corporate profits to low tax jurisdictions to reduce tax liabilities) into Ireland accelerated from the 1990s onward. By the 2000s, US Treasury files were showing disproportionate pre‑tax profits from sales from US affiliates in Ireland. This trend accel‑ erated through the following decades. The portion of US corporate foreign profits held in low tax jurisdictions rose from 10 percent in the early 2000s to close to 60 percent by 2019. Ireland ranked highly as a preferred hosting jurisdiction for this foreign profit, coming in third in importance after Bermuda and the Caymans. This profit shifting is strongly associated with US technology and phar‑ maceutical firms, rich in intellectual property, where their Ireland‑based activity and booked revenues far outpaces associated employment.18 The enabling of such large‑scale US corporate profit shifting did not simply lie in the attraction of Ireland’s low 12.5 percent headline corporate tax rate. US tax rules, complemented by the Irish tax code, were central to its facilitation. When combined, these rules made tax avoidance via Ireland a notably profitable endeavour. “Cornerstone” tax rules include US Cost Sharing Agreements (CSAs), which allow the legal (if illogical) allocation of US foreign corporate profits among different tax regimes internationally. Also, the so‑called “check‑the box” rule, introduced to the US tax code in 1997, was credited with accelerating US profit shifting into Ireland. This rule allows US corpora‑ tions to elect to have payments between lower‑tier companies in their corporate group disregarded by the IRS, by “checking a box” on their tax return. Such US rules, coupled with an idiosyncratic tax residency rule in Ireland, and EU legislation on the taxation of royalty payments, enabled avoidance structures such as the “Double Irish Dutch Sandwich” to flourish in this period. The “Double Irish Dutch Sandwich” was a tax avoidance structure, which enabled US corporations to defer tax pay‑ ments to the US through the manipulation of the interactions between US, Irish, and EU tax rules. Ireland, clearly aware of the tax avoidance implications of its residency rule, changed its legal scope in 1999. However, this change targeted countries without a tax treaty with Ireland, which, in effect, protected US corporate use of the structure until political pressure ultimately brought it to an end over 20 years later.19 The largely uninterrupted period of quiet US‑Irish tax politics in the 1990s and early 2000s was punctured by progressively “noisier” politics after the global financial crash in 2008. EU politi‑ cians in higher‑tax states, impatient with Ireland, expected an increase in the Irish corporate tax rate as a quid pro quo for EU loans issued to Ireland to save its beleaguered banking system. The Irish state successfully resisted this. Pressure mounted on Ireland once again, this time following a high‑profile Bloomberg article in 2010 describing the workings of the Double Irish structure. This was followed by exposure of the Apple “stateless” structure, which became subject to a hearing of the US Senate in 2013. Political pressure escalated further in 2016 when the European Commission Competition Commissioner launched a state‑aid investigation into the tax treatment of Apple by the Irish authorities. Despite the legal victory by Ireland (which is currently under appeal), and by extension, Apple, the damage had been done. Public opinions in the US and Ireland were outraged that tax rules could collectively facilitate “stateless” corporate profits that were taxable nowhere. These high‑level pressures caused Ireland to break with its traditionally uncompromising politi‑ cal pattern on corporate tax. In 2013, the Irish Government outlawed the possibility of stateless tax structures and, in 2014, changed its tax residency rules, which ended the Double Irish Dutch Sandwich structure. In this latter case though, a long transition period predated its closure, which eventually occurred in 2020.20 This did not, however, silence noisy tax politics. As Ireland engaged in these strategic tax contests, the US President Donald Trump introduced the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) 2017. Notably, the

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TCJA brought to an end the long‑standing option of deferral of tax payments on foreign profits for US MNCs, a fundamental enabler of US corporate global tax avoidance, including structures like the Double‑Irish. The TCJA reduced the US corporate rate significantly (from 35 percent to 21 percent) and introduced a combination of “carrot and stick” style taxes to close down tax avoidance opportuni‑ ties and lure profits and valuable intellectual property (IP) back to the US. Notable here was the in‑ troduction of a minimum tax on Global Intangible Low‑Tax Income (GILTI). Five years in, the effect of the TCJA appears mixed. While some companies have repatriated IP to the US, many have not, likely due to faults in the design of the GILTI, along with continuing weak rules. In the meantime, US MNCs are booking significantly greater profits, linked to the relocation of IP to Ireland. This has resulted in a historically unprecedented surge in both intangible capital stock into the Irish economy, and a massive surge in corporate tax receipts, effectively creating a multi‑billion‑euro wealth fund in Ireland as a result of profits linked to IP developed in the US. This transfer of corporate wealth is not going uncontested in the US. However, US business influence has tended to win out in any seri‑ ous political tax reform efforts, under the cover of political appeals to international competitiveness. Moreover, US presidential administrations, including that of President Obama in 2012, tended to backtrack after singling out Ireland as a specific problem. On the Irish side, the preservation of the low‑tax model has morphed into a sacred cow of industrial policy over time, eclipsing the possibility of a wider critique.21 Support for the policy has been consistent from the MNC community in Ireland, not least from the American Chamber of Commerce. This has the effect of tax policy capture among a relatively small grouping of tax elites, often networked in both countries as part of global advisory firms or business association networks. For example, in her study of the evolution of Ireland’s important research and development tax credit, Hilary Qualter finds a long‑term “relational” arrangement between govern‑ ment policy making and an elite group of tax policy influencers with “unfettered” policy‑influencing access. She concludes that this points to “a lack of alternative perspectives, tax policies or proposals” in this policy‑making domain. The introduction in 2012 of a significant income tax break for foreign corporate executives moving to Ireland indicates the Irish commitment to maintaining this circular flow of elite expertise. In 2019, out of 379 employees claiming the income tax relief, 27 percent of claimants were of US nationality and 32 percent of claimants had been living in the US prior to ar‑ rival in the Irish state. The highest numbers of claimants are concentrated in the finance and technol‑ ogy sectors and most claims are for a period of one year, indicating a cycle of regular exchange at a high managerial level between the US and Ireland.22 The global contest over rights to collect corporate taxes is now playing out at different levels. Ireland’s hard‑line stance on the global minimum tax contributed to reducing the recently agreed global minimum rate to 15 percent. Now dealing with a lower global minimum rate than he would have liked, and a hostile domestic politics, US President Biden has, however, succeeded in intro‑ ducing a 15 percent Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax (CAMT) via the Inflation Reduction Act. However, US alignment with global tax reforms seems far off. Republican Senators, alarmed by the global minimum tax proposal, which they claim undermines US tax treaties, are now doubling down in their opposition. This presents a picture of a highly symbiotic US‑Irish corporate tax relationship over time, where Ireland’s corporate tax rules shadow those of the US, without fundamental chal‑ lenge from the US political leadership. The reason for this lack of a direct challenge to Irish tax rules appears rooted in the lack of support in US domestic politics for more radical global corporate tax reform, and perhaps a tacit acknowledgement by US administrations that a significant part of the solution lies in legal reform in the US. The result is an Ireland‑ US corporate tax arrangement main‑ tained by a carefully observant Irish State, actively supported by corporate elites on both sides of the Atlantic and left fairly undisrupted by successive US political administrations.23

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Conclusion The unusual level of access that the Republic of Ireland has to US elites, particularly through Irish Americans, and the relatively easy business relations that are underpinned by political, cultural, and migratory ties, are major resources for the country. These ties provide a set of ongoing networks and relations that provide a framework for strategic action. They can serve at times as resources that can be activated in the pursuit of managing political difficulties (e.g., during Brexit) or mobilising investment and other economic resources (eg., through the efforts to attract US companies). Rooted in historic ties, they are also regularly “re‑activated.” This can occur through social changes such as new migrations and migration circuits. But it can also be deliberately mobilised, for example, through the everyday activities of the many offices of the Irish industrial development agencies in the US who use all the networks at their disposal in the process of seeking new investments. Furthermore, these organisational and state strategies of the Irish government themselves act, not only to make use of ethnic networks, but also as one of the mechanisms that try to create cohesive Irish‑American busi‑ ness communities. The Irish state has a strong interest in supporting the development of an ethnic community, which it can then mobilise when needed. With these strategic relationships come some constraints and clear quid pro quos. The US has become an ever more powerful point of Ireland’s multiple interface periphery and Ireland’s growth is deeply entangled with the dynamics of the US corporate sector. Famously, then Minister for En‑ terprise and Employment Mary Harney, commented in 2000 “Spiritually we are probably a lot closer to Boston than Berlin,” sparking a debate about the economic model being pursued in Ireland. In its market economy, Ireland is probably closer to the Anglo‑American model of “liberal market” capi‑ talism with high wage inequality, comparatively low rates of trade union membership, moderate (at best) social spending, and comparatively weak employment protection legislation. However, in other respects, Ireland diverges from the US model in particular, with relatively high levels of reduction of income inequality through taxation and welfare payments, along with elements of universal public services and national dialogue and negotiations among social partner organisations. While the con‑ nections to the US have clearly had a strong influence on the Irish economic and social model, they have not determined all its characteristics.24 Moreover, the US economic system has been changing. The corporate sector is increasingly frag‑ mented and dominated by the financial sector, a dominance that arguably extends to Irish‑American business networks (see Table 32.3). Mark Mizruchi argues that these corporate elites have become more powerful in pursuing their narrow individual interests and less capable of the coordination that can address issues in the broader economy. If so, Ireland’s relation to America, and Irish America, will be more through individual corporations and less through a cohesive American elite, whether with a green tinge or not. Furthermore, economic and political considerations are increasingly en‑ tangled for US multinational corporations. At a conference in Maynooth University in 2023, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern worried about the pressures that will emerge from these trends. “Increasingly we’re going to see America putting a lot of pressure on European companies to do things they would otherwise not do commercially,” Ahern warned. “Europe are trying to stay out of it, but you can see what’s happening, America are putting fierce pressure to take their side.” Ireland’s dependence on the US becomes more of a high‑stakes game in a geopolitical era of fragmentation and conflict, with major powers increasingly mobilising and “weaponizing” economic and technological interdepend‑ ence in the service of political projects.25 Irish‑American elites, embedded in the US state and global corporations, have been a significant resource in the political and economic strategies of the Irish state in recent decades. However, in the face of these heightening global pressures, connections to Irish America are as likely to reinforce these as to provide a buffer against them. 428

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Notes 1 On foreign investment see Bandelj, “Embedded Economies”, Burchardi, “Migrants, Ancestors, and Foreign Investments.” 2 Ruane, “Ireland’s Multiple Interface‑Periphery.” 3 White and Pausa, “Irish‑American Diaspora,” 337. 4 On NORAID see Hanley, “The Politics of NORAID.” On White House visits see Irish Times, “A Short History.” 5 Ó Riain, The Rise and Fall of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger. 6 Ó Riain, The Politics of High Tech Growth; Saxenian, The New Argonauts. 7 On foreign investment see Bandelj, “Embedded Economies,” 433; Burchardi, Chaney and Hassan, “Mi‑ grants, Ancestors, and Foreign Investments.” On diaspora see Boyle, “Ireland’s Diaspora Strategy.” 8 On Irish‑American demographics and identity see Hout and Goldstein, “4.5 Million Irish Immigrants.” 9 For discussion of Irish professional migration in 1980s and 1990s see Ó Riain, The Politics of High‑Tech Growth. 10 On “transnational technical communities,” see Saxenian, The New Argonauts. 11 For a broader discussion of these trends see Gallagher et al., “A Turbulent Commitment.” See also Culpepper, “Quiet Politics,” 133–143. 12 Ahern, “Ireland and the EU at 50.” 13 O’Rourke, A Short History of Brexit. 14 BBC, “Biden Visit.” 15 ‘US Census, “American Community Survey.” 16 On foreign investment figures see Central Statistics Office “Foreign Direct Investment”, Figure 4.9. 17 On tax accounting see Tørsløv, Wier and Zucman, “The Missing Profits”; on Ireland see Fitzgerald and Honohan, Europe and the Transformation of the Irish Economy. 18 Grubert and Altshuler, “Corporate Taxes in the World Economy”; Clausing, Saez and Zucman, “Ending Corporate Tax Avoidance”; Polyak, “Jobs and Fiction,” 4. 19 Avi‑Yonah, Advanced Introduction; Mason and Daly, “State Aid.” 20 Bloomberg, “Google 2.4% Rate”; Revenue Commissioners, “Corporation Tax”. 21 Clausing, “Fixing Five Flaws,” 31; Setser, “Cross Border RX”; Irish Independent, July 27, 2012. 22 Joint Committee on Taxation, “Present Law and Economic Background”; Hackelberg, Hypocritical He‑ gemon; Irish Independent, “Obama forced to Retract.”; Killian, “Irish Tax Policy”; Harrington and Seabrooke, “Transnational Professionals,” 399–417; Qualter, “An Examination of Tax Policy.”; Revenue, “Special Assignee Relief Programme”. 23 Senator Crapo et al. to Secretary Janet Yellen. 24 Fischer, “Boston or Berlin?”; Ó Riain, “Where Is Ireland in the Worlds of Capitalism?” 25 Mizruchi, The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite; Farrell and Newman, Weaponized Interdepend‑ ence; Ahern, “Ireland and the EU at 50.”

Bibliography Primary Sources Ahern, Bertie. Comments at Maynooth University Conference on “Ireland and the EU at 50: Politics, Policy and Transformation” (2023). Available at: Crapo et al., to Secretary Janet Yellen, December 14, 2022. Joint Committee on Taxation, JCX–8–23 “Present Law and Economic Background Relating to Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and U.S. International Tax Policy.” May 9, 2023. https://www.jct.gov/publications/2023/jcx‑8‑23/ Revenue Commissioners, Corporation Tax: Company Residency Rules. Published: December 7, 2022. US Census, American Community Survey. https://www.census.gov/programs‑surveys/acs/data/race‑aian.html

Newspapers BBC. “Biden Visit to Ensure ‘Brits Didn’t Screw Around.’” https://www.bbc.com/news/uk‑northern‑ireland‑ 65557068 Bloomberg. “Google 2.4% Rate Shows How $60 Billion Is Lost to Tax Loopholes.” October 21, 2010. Irish Independent. “Obama Forced to Retract Allegation that Ireland Is a ‘Tax Haven’.” July 27, 2012. Irish Times. “A Short History of Taoisigh Visiting the White House on St Patrick’s Day.” March 11, 2017.

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Secondary Sources Avi‑Yonah, Reuven S. Advanced Introduction to International Tax Law. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar ­Publishing, 2019. Bandelj, Nina. “Embedded Economies: Social Relations as Determinants of Foreign Direct Investment in ­Central and Eastern Europe.” Social Forces 81, no. 2 (2002): 411–444. Boyle, Mark, Rob Kitchin, and Delphine Ancien. “Ireland’s Diaspora Strategy.” In Migrations: Ireland in a Global World, edited by Mary Gilmartin and Allen White, 80–97. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Burchardi, Konrad, Thomas Chaney, and Tarek Hassan. “Migrants, Ancestors, and Foreign Investments.” ­Review of Economic Studies 86, no. 4 (2019): 1448–1486. Central Statistics Office Foreign Direct Investment in Ireland 2019. “Special Purpose Entities and Pass‑Through.” 2020. Clausing, Kimberly A. “Fixing Five Flaws of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.” Columbia Journal of Tax Law 11 (2019): 31–75. Clausing, Kimberly A., Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman. “Ending Corporate Tax Avoidance and Tax Com‑ petition: A Plan to Collect the Tax Deficit of Multinationals.” UCLA School of Law, Law‑Econ Research Paper 20–12 (2021): 1–20. Culpepper, Pepper. D. “Quiet Politics in Tumultuous Times: Business Power, Populism, and Democracy.” Poli‑ tics & Society 49, no. 1 (2021): 133–143. Farrell, Henry, and Abraham L. Newman. “Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion.” International Security 44, no. 1 (2019): 42–79. Fischer, Joachim. “Boston or Berlin? Reflections on a Topical Controversy, the Celtic Tiger and the World of Irish Studies.” Irish Review 48, no. 1 (2014): 81–95. FitzGerald, John, and Patrick Honohan. Europe and the Transformation of the Irish Economy. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 2023. Gallagher, Patrick, Fergal Rhatigan, and Seán Ó Riain. “A Turbulent Commitment: Economic Relations between Ireland and the European Union between the Crash and Brexit.” In Ireland and the European Union, edited by Michael Holmes and Kathryn Simpson, 66–87. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. Grubert, Harry, and Rosanne Altshuler. “Corporate Taxes in the World Economy: Reforming the Taxation of Cross‑Border Income.” Working Paper, No. 2006–2026 (2006). Hackelberg, Lukas. The Hypocritcal Hegemon: How the United States Shapes Global Rules Against Tax Evasion and Avoidance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. Hanley, Brian. “The Politics of NORAID.” Irish Political Studies 19, no. 1 (2004): 1–17. Harrington, Brooke, and Leonard Seabrooke. “Transnational Professionals.” Annual Review of Sociology 46 (2020): 399–417. Hout, Michael, and Joshua Goldstein. “How 4.5 Million Irish Immigrants Became 40 Million Irish Americans: Demographic and Subjective Aspects of the Ethnic Composition of White Americans.” American Sociologi‑ cal Review 59, no. 1 (1994): 64–82. Killian, Sheila. “Irish Tax Policy and Policy Capture.” In On The Future We The People Need, edited by Werner Puschra and Sara Burke, 79–85. New York: Friedrich‑Ebert‑Stiftung, 2013. LeBlang, David. “Familiarity Breeds Investment: Diaspora Networks and International Investment.” American Political Science Review 104, no. 3 (2010): 584–600. Mason, Ruth, and Stephen Daly. “Special Report on EU State Aid: Part 8 – State Aid: The General Court Deci‑ sion in Apple.” Tax Notes Federal 168 (2020): 1791–1806. Mizruchi, Mark. The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Ó Riain, Sean. The Politics of High Tech Growth: Developmental Network States in the Global Economy. No. 23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Ó Riain, Seán. The Rise and Fall of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger: Liberalism, Boom and Bust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Ó Riain, Seán. “Where Is Ireland in the Worlds of Capitalism?” In Ireland: Social Science Perspectives, edited by Tom Inglis, 22–33. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. O’Rourke, Kevin. A Short History of Brexit. London: Penguin, 2019. Polyak, Palma. “Jobs and Fiction: Identifying the Effect of Corporate Tax Avoidance Inflating Export Measures in Ireland.” Journal of European Public Policy 30, no. 10 (2023): 2143–2164.

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Irish America, the “Celtic Tiger,” and After Qualter, Hilary. “An Examination of Tax Policy Participation in Practice: The Case of Irish Corporation Tax Policy.” Ph.D. diss, National University of Ireland, Galway, 2022. Revenue Commissioners. “Special Assignee Relief Programme.” Statistics for 2020, July 2022. Ruane, Joseph. “Ireland’s Multiple Interface‑Periphery Development Model: Achievements and Limits.” Nordic Irish Studies 9, no. 1 (2010): 145–166. Saxenian, AnnaLee. The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Setser, Brad. “Cross‑Border Rx: Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and U.S. International Tax Policy.” (Statement, Before the Committee on Finance United States Senate 1st Session, 118th Congress, May 11, 2023). Tørsløv, Thomas, Ludvig Wier, and Gabriel Zucman. “The Missing Profits of Nations.” NBER Working Paper 24701 (2018): 65. White, Timothy, and Pausa, Emily “When Did the Irish‑American Diaspora Make a Difference? Influencing U.S. Diplomacy Toward Northern Ireland.” Studi Irlandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies 9 (2019): 329–346.

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33 IRISH AMERICANS AND US POLITICS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Ted Smyth

Freed from its post-Famine roots, Irish-American identity continued the process of redefinition in the twenty-first century. The foundations of that identity—the Catholic Church, the Democratic Party, and the labor movement—had begun to change from the 1960s since, with the growth of economic prosperity and social acceptance, these foundations were no longer considered crucial. Like Americans as a whole, Irish Americans came to be differentiated by politics, class, and education. Some felt no real connection to the past and their identity as Irish had thinned to the point of non-existence. Others were reshaping their connections, abandoning the automatic association of Irish and Catholic in favor of the cultural expression of Irish identity. But one facet of Irish identity that has survived and thrived since the nineteenth century is the Irish-American love of and aptitude for politics. As noted in earlier chapters, the post-Famine Irish immigrants enjoyed two major advantages over many other immigrants: they spoke English and they had a tradition of political organizing in the homeland from Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Emancipation movement to the Land League. What changed in the mid-twentieth century was that Irish Americans did not remain exclusively Democratic in their politics, but also became prominent in the Republican Party. While we will see that twenty-first century Irish Americans differed sharply on domestic issues such as taxes and abortion, they presented a powerful, united front in sustaining peace and equality in Northern Ireland. The continuation of this significant political role by Irish Americans in US politics and in supporting peace in Ireland remains to be determined, as Irish Americans transition from a closed community of shared education, religious, and social organizations to one that is more open and diverse, more loosely organized around cultural, business, and professional affinities. Earlier chapters in this volume examined the evolution of the Irish-American identity in the United States since the immigration of eighteenth-century Ulster Protestants who were prominent in the American Revolution, and who produced ten American presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, who visited Ireland in 1879. While the predominantly Presbyterian Irish remain a majority of the estimated 32 million Irish Americans, they are only intermittently engaged in their Irish identity. By contrast, Irish-American Catholics who fled the Great Famine in their millions remain much more invested in their ancestry, celebrating their ultimate triumph over disaster and defeat, and relishing their artistic and cultural heritage as they rose to the top of political, business, and academic life in America. Once a solid Democratic voting bloc that dominated numerous city and state governments, many Irish Americans have since the 1960s drifted to the Republican Party. Historian Terry Golway stresses the major impact the Irish-American conservative William F. Buckley Jr. and his National Review had in reviving modern American conservatism. “Without National Review, it is hard to imagine Ronald DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-40

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Reagan (Irish but not Catholic). Without Reagan, well, you get the idea.” Many Irish Americans continued to join the Republican Party as they became more prosperous and voted for less tax and business regulation. “We may love those wistful rebel songs that evoke the centuries our ancestors struggled against a superpower attempting to impose its language and values on our people,” noted the Jesuit America Magazine, “but many of us seem less sympathetic to sharing our now-comfortable status with others.” As will be discussed later, conservative Catholic Irish Americans were drawn to the anti-abortion position of the Republican Party. By 2023, a survey of Irish Americans showed that 48 percent were Democrats, 38 percent Republicans, and 15 percent independents. Irish Americans, no longer an exclusively Democratic voting bloc, have become powerful in both political parties, resulting as one member of Congress said to being “over-represented numerically when it comes to Washington DC, whether in Congress or the White House.” Indeed, one could generalize that Irish Americans have a gift for politics, having an identity that is generally popular, and being responsive to the everyday needs of people. For example, Matthew J. O’Brien’s chapter in this volume demonstrates how his “Irishness” played a role in John F. Kennedy’s political career. Moreover, historian Hasia Diner has recorded how American Jews in the early twentieth century looked to Irish Americans to teach them how to resist antisemitism and to become politically effective.1

The Peace Process and Special US-Ireland Relationship Importantly for Ireland, Irish Americans, while divided along party lines on US domestic issues, remained united in pursuit of peace in Northern Ireland and in maintaining a special US-Ireland relationship. The Economist magazine observed that “Ireland’s soft-power triumph is mainly testament to the continued enthusiasm of 32 million Irish-Americans for their heritage, and to their equally remarkable dominance of American politics.” President Biden and other leading Irish Americans understood that the ability of the United States to influence policy in Northern Ireland was much greater if done on a bipartisan basis. “Supporting the people of Northern Ireland, protecting the peace, preserving the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement is a priority for Democrats and Republicans alike in the United States,” Biden said, adding, “and that is unusual today because we’ve been very divided in our parties. This is something that brings Washington together. It brings America together.”2 For over half a century since the 1970s, Irish-American Democrats and Republicans have demonstrated their political skill in deploying power to achieve peace and equality in Northern Ireland. Senior Irish Americans in Congress, notably the so-called “Four Horsemen”—Speaker Tip O’Neill, Senators Ted Kennedy and Pat Moynihan, and New York Governor Hugh Carey—worked with Irish diplomats and the Irish Government to persuade American presidents to pressure their British ally to take a balanced approach to both the Irish nationalists and British unionists in Northern Ireland, instead of exclusively favoring the latter. As Andrew Sanders demonstrates in his chapter in this volume, President Carter became the first US president in history to recognize the role of Dublin in a Northern Ireland solution in 1977; a breakthrough bitterly resisted by the British government and British tabloid media. The Republican President Ronald Reagan, responding to the Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill, leaned on UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to sign the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, despite objections from her own party and, most bitterly, from pro-British Ulster loyalists. In the 1990s, the Democratic President Clinton took a deeply personal and pivotal interest in negotiating a solution, appointing Senator George Mitchell as his Special Envoy. Mitchell devoted five years to negotiating the end of the killings in Northern Ireland, culminating in the 1998 Good Friday (­Belfast) Agreement. The United States government was one of the guarantors of the Agreement and has ­remained politically committed to it ever since. 433

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While he did not highlight his Irish roots, the Republican President George W. Bush, elected in 2001, did assist the peace process by appointing the skillful diplomat Richard Haass as Special Envoy to Northern Ireland. The Democratic President Barack Obama, who made two presidential visits to Ireland to support the peace process, was both African American and Irish American, a descendant of Ohio and Indiana immigrants who came from Counties Offaly and Tipperary in Ireland. His administration included Irish Americans in high standing positions such as Bill Daley, the White House chief of staff; Tom Donilon, the head of the National Security Council; another chief of staff, Denis McDonough; press secretary Jay Carney; and Irish-born UN Ambassador Samantha Power. The successive visits to Ireland by American presidents, including those by Donald Trump and Joe Biden, were a reminder of the central role of Irish Americans in US political life.3 The Congressional Friends of Ireland is the best example of bipartisan Irish-American political power since its formation in 1981 by Speaker O’Neill. One of its rising stars noted that “Irish-­ American politicians in both parties in Congress have used their positions to fight to ensure the US remains active in the Northern Ireland Peace Process.” The President of the Ancient Order of Americans confirmed that the AOH was most effective by being bipartisan. “We can work with a government leader in common cause on one issue,” explained Danny O’Connell, “while reserving the ability to disagree on another, all while maintaining an attitude of respect and friendship.”4 With the cessation of violence and the success of the peace process in Northern Ireland in 1998, Irish-American political engagement in Irish issues lessened significantly. However, the UK’s decision to leave the European Union in 2016 (Brexit) threatened the reestablishment of a military border dividing British-controlled Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland (which remained within the EU). Such a hard border would have undermined the Good Friday Agreement and likely provoked renewed violence by paramilitary organizations. Responding to growing Irish-American concerns, the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, organized a bipartisan Congressional coalition to prevent the resumption of this militarized border by blocking a proposed new US-UK trade deal. This effectively stymied President Trump, who supported the UK’s exit from the EU and favored a US free trade agreement with London. Congressional leaders, opposed to Trump’s ignoring of the threat to peace in Ireland, were supported by Irish-American organizations and transnational advocacy networks (TANS) such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) and the bipartisan Ad Hoc Committee to Protect the Good Friday Agreement. This latter committee, co-chaired by former Members of Congress, Bruce Morrison, a Democrat, and Republican James T. Walsh, comprised over 60 former senior US diplomats and academics who met regularly with all the parties in Northern Ireland in addition to British and Irish officials.

Irish Americans: Political Relatability and Advocacy To what extent did American politicians’ support for peace in Ireland or the fact that they had an Irish-American identity help secure votes from Irish Americans? Or did domestic issues like healthcare, housing, and the so-called “culture wars” play a much bigger role in voting patterns? More research is needed here, but in a 2017 survey, 51 percent of Irish Americans aged 18–45 years, said their identity influenced their political perspective, but that influence decreased as their families’ departure from Ireland went further back through the generations. Former Republican Congressman James T. Walsh noted that both Republicans and Democrats saw the benefit of engaging with Ireland because it is popular with their constituents, “so if you can do something that is popular, why the hell wouldn’t you?” Congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon noted that being Irish American helped secure votes in certain states. “In my state, Pennsylvania, and in other states like Massachusetts, New York, and New Hampshire with large Irish-American populations,” she said, “being Irish helps to make a candidate more relatable to voters.” This relatability is also indicated 434

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by a survey, where 23 percent of respondents said they were attracted to their Irish heritage based on the positive perceptions of Irish identity in the US.5 During a state visit to Ireland in 2023, which had echoes of President Kennedy’s visit 60 years earlier, President Biden equated middle-class values with being Irish, making Irish identity a positive attribute in contrast with the hard-drinking stereotype of the past. As one newspaper noted, “Biden’s account of that value—getting up when you are knocked down, making a better life for your children, judging a person’s honesty by the sweat on their brow—is indistinguishable from how he depicts Irishness.” Susan Davis, the Chair of Irish-American Republicans, said that in a Congressional district with a significant number of Irish Americans, Republican candidates should embrace their Irish heritage. “You can’t be guaranteed the Irish vote,” noted Davis, “but it creates an affinity, making you more relatable to voters.” Davis was pleased that more young Irish-American business men and women were taking an interest in their ancestry, becoming especially involved in promoting trade between Ireland and the US. This last point is reinforced by a survey finding that Irish Americans believe that the most important issue for US politicians to address in relation to Ireland, after a peaceful united Ireland, is two-way trade and investment policy between Ireland and the US.6 Stella O’Leary, Chair of the Irish-American Democrats PAC, noted the commitment of scores of members of Congress to peace, justice, and prosperity in Ireland. “We have so much to be grateful for,” O’Leary said, “including the generosity of the United States for contributing half a billion dollars to the International Fund for Ireland since 1986.” O’Leary added that every American president had appointed a special envoy to Northern Ireland since Bill Clinton. In the 2020 election, the Biden campaign made a special commitment to securing Irish-American votes for Democratic candidates, coordinating with the “Irish Americans for Biden” voluntary committee in 2020. Actor Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars franchise) headlined ten online Irish-American rallies for Biden, which included prominent Irish-American politicians, community leaders, and musicians. One poll of Irish-American voters indicated that 52 percent had voted for Biden versus 39 percent for Trump in the 2020 Presidential election. It seems fair to suggest that this Irish-American vote would have made a significant difference in an election where, out of 156 million votes counted, if just 43,000 votes had not been cast for Democrats in battleground states, Trump would have won the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote by seven million votes.7 The Irish-American vote for Biden contrasts with the white Catholic vote as a whole, which voted for Trump over Biden by 57 percent to 42 percent. This demonstrates the folly of equating the white Catholic vote with the Irish-American vote as is sometimes done in the absence of consistent nationwide polls of Irish-American voting patterns. The evidence available suggests that a majority of Irish Americans supported presidential candidates from different parties since the 1950s, voting for Republican Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s because of his World War II record, switching to John F. Kennedy in 1960, then supporting Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, but supporting Bill Clinton twice in the 1990s. Clinton himself believes that the Irish vote was key to his critical New York primary win over Jerry Brown in 1992, which catapulted him to the Democratic nomination. In 2012, an Irish Central poll found that 51 percent of Irish-American voters planned to vote for Barack Obama with 48 percent leaning toward Mitt Romney. The survey indicated that 57 percent of respondents had voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 election, whereas 43 percent had voted for Republican candidate John McCain.8 Irish Americans were also politically active at the state level, with many later moving to national office. The American-Irish State Legislators Caucus created by Irish senator Mark Daly is a bipartisan network of Irish-American legislators and public officials across all 50 states, which promotes links between the US and their Irish counterparts. Irish Americans no longer dominated city government as they once did, but they continued to be elected as governors, including in New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts, with, in 2023, Maura Healy becoming with Tina Kotek the first openly lesbian governors in the US. 435

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Labor unions, once a powerful platform for Irish Americans, had weakened by 2021, with the percentage of workers belonging to a union at 10.3 percent compared to 20.1 percent 40 years earlier. By contrast, business leaders, following the Supreme Court’s decision to end campaign finance restrictions on corporations in 2010, exerted outsized influence on legislators when it came to tax laws and regulations. Irish-American Helen Clark, CEO of the powerful US Chamber of Commerce, voiced the general discontent of American business with the ideological divisions in Washington, calling on the House to “forge a serious bipartisan approach” and “strike a balance” in the new House Select Committee on China. “Do your jobs,” she said, “so we can do ours.”9 Did all this mean there was still an Irish-American voting bloc? Not really, as John McCarthy put it before he became a Special Advisor in President Biden’s White House. “It’s more of an Irish lobby, and it’s even more than that,” explained McCarthy. “It’s an advocacy arm.” The publisher Niall O’Dowd agreed. Irish Americans have “successfully organized support on policies of interest to us, such as peace and equality in Northern Ireland and immigration reform,” O’Dowd noted. “We cultivate influential political relationships at the highest levels through lobbying, media advocacy, canvassing at elections, and personal relationships. We are fortunate to have such responsive Irish Americans and political leaders.”10

Irish-American Responses to Growing Political Divisions in America America was a badly shaken nation following the 9/11 attacks by Muslim extremists at the beginning of the century, but it quickly united behind a resolve to defeat the terrorists. However, the subsequent 20-year “War on Terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan weakened that unity and significantly undermined American economic power and global leadership. At the same time, working Americans became increasingly angry in the Midwest and the South by the belief that they were forgotten by the coastal elites who enriched themselves through free trade and preferential tax and industrial policies. The surprise election of Donald Trump as president in 2016 was a response to this anger. While a majority of voters voted for the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, the Republican celebrity television candidate won the Electoral College with a populist message denouncing the endless wars, opposing free trade, and bringing back jobs to the forgotten Americans. Contrary to his promises, President Trump increased the income inequality gap and stoked fears and anger among Americans, forging a zeitgeist of mistrust and alienation fueled by a flood of misinformation on social and hard-right media. An epidemic of mass gun shootings and deaths from the fentanyl drug crisis added to Americans’ despair that they were losing control of their society. In addition, billions of dollars spent on political campaigns funded floods of disparaging negative television ads about candidates, threatening to turn America into a dysfunctional plutocracy. Unlike any previous American president, President Trump challenged the fundamental rules of American democracy by falsely claiming that the 2016 election was rigged and that he should have won the popular vote. He doubled down on these dangerous, baseless assertions in 2020 when he lost to Joe Biden, fomenting an invasion of Congress on January 6, 2021 in an effort to prevent Biden being certified as president. “This was,” noted one historian, “an explicitly anti-democratic act in a way not seen since the Civil War.” Trump was later charged by Federal and State prosecutors with two vast alleged criminal conspiracies to overturn the 2020 presidential election.11 Trump’s brutalizing political style and deviousness combined with his stirring up of class resentment traumatized the country even before the three agonizing and isolating years of the Covid pandemic, which killed over one million Americans. Each side of the political divide saw the other as an existential threat, a dynamic that made political compromise very difficult. According to Pew Research, members of both parties who had unfavorable opinions of the opposing party doubled between 1994 and 2022, while those who had very unfavorable opinions of the opposing party were 436

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at record highs as of 2022. In another poll, sizable majorities of US adults said that by 2050 the US economy “will be weaker, political divisions will be wider, and the United States will be less important in the world.”12 The prominence of Irish Americans in the Trump White House led to a public perception that Irish America had turned hard right. The reality, however, was that Irish Americans were prominent across the political spectrum. For every rightwing journalist like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, there was a liberal Maureen Dowd or a Stephen Colbert. For every conservative Chief of Staff like General John Kelly, there was former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director John Brennan, who attacked President Trump for being drunk on power. For every Sean Spicer or Kellyanne Conway serving President Trump, there was a Jake Sullivan or Mike Donilon in the Biden White House. For Justice Brett Kavanaugh, there was a Senator Patrick Leahy who tore into the Trump Supreme Court nominee at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, accusing Kavanaugh of lying under oath.13 Irish Americans demonstrated their diverse political identity by the contrasting responses to Trump’s assault on democracy. Of course, Irish-American Democrats vigorously opposed Trump, including voting for his impeachment in the House of Representatives. But even among Republican Irish Americans, there was opposition to Trump’s attempt to subvert democracy. Vice-President Mike Pence refused Trump’s orders to suspend the ratification of the election vote on January 6, being rewarded by having to flee for his life from Capitol Hill when the mob overwhelmed the police. The Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, of Scotch-Irish ancestry, said Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the January 6 attack. Mick Mulvaney, formerly Trump’s Chief of Staff, resigned as special envoy to Northern Ireland in response to Trump’s role in the storming of the US Capitol. Kevin McCarthy, who became Speaker of the House when Republicans won a majority in 2022, initially condemned Trump, but later aligned himself with the former president as many of his party, including Irish Americans, continued to propagate the Big Lie. Sean Hannity became the leading proponent of the stolen election on Fox TV, broadcasting false conspiracy theories to millions of viewers. All of these different reactions confirmed that while Irish Americans enjoyed a proficiency in American politics, they were divided on partisan lines except when it came to Ireland, and in particular, peace and equality in Northern Ireland.

Majority of Irish Americans Favor Equal Marriage and Abortion How did ordinary Irish Americans respond to these traumatic events and the so-called culture wars stirred up by Republicans and by rightwing and social media? The Irish vote in the 2016 presidential campaign between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump has not been clearly analyzed, although one pre-election poll suggested Irish Americans favored Clinton over Trump by a narrow majority of 52 percent. A 2023 survey of Irish Americans indicated that a majority held progressive political views, supporting Democratic policies on marriage equality and LGBTQ rights, climate change, gender equality, labor rights, racial equality, abortion and reproductive rights, and protecting Social Security and Medicare. Republican positions were favored by a small majority on national security, crime, and gun rights. The evolution of Irish-American views on social issues became evident in 2015 with the removal of the long-standing ban on gays marching in the St Patrick’s Day parade in New York City. Three years later, the gay Irish-Indian Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland, Leo Varadkar, marched with his partner in that parade, receiving cheers of encouragement from the crowds. Meanwhile, Ireland in 2015 became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage through a referendum.14 In 2022, the US Supreme Court’s decision to overthrow the Court’s 1973 Roe v Wade ruling reversed the movement toward women’s rights by permitting individual states to pass legislation outlawing abortion, despite approximately 60 percent of Americans supporting the right to abortion. 437

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Conservatives in the evangelical Protestant and Catholic churches had sought for decades to ban abortion and were finally rewarded by a Supreme Court with three Irish-American Catholics justices. However, prominent Irish-American Democratic members of Congress like Kirsten Gillibrand, Chris Murphy, Madeleine Dean, Chrissy Houlahan, and Mary Gay Scanlon opposed the Court decision and actively supported abortion rights. One survey indicated that Irish Americans supported the Democratic position on abortion rights over the Republican position by 51 to 32 percent.15 In their presidential election campaigns, both Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton who supported abortion rights were attacked by the large conservative movement opposing abortion. Donald Trump and the Republican Party, backed by anti-regulation and low-tax business leaders, effectively used opposition to abortion to win a significant number of conservative Catholic and evangelical Protestant voters. The majority of Irish-American Catholic bishops were anti-Biden during the 2020 election campaign. New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan even attended the Republican convention that nominated Trump in 2020 and prayed there publicly for “the innocent life of the baby in the womb.” Arch-conservative Cardinal Raymond Burke, former head of the Church’s Supreme Court, stated that President Trump was “undoubtedly” preferable to Hillary Clinton, asserting that abortion was the acid test for voters and more important than welcoming refugees or helping the poor. However, Cardinal Robert McElroy criticized those questioning Biden’s personal devotion to his Catholic faith based on his positions on abortion, characterizing “the public denial of candidates’ identity as Catholics because of a specific policy position they have taken [as] an assault on the meaning of what it is to be Catholic.” Pope Francis, closer to Cardinal McIlroy’s views, sent a message to newly elected President Biden accentuating common ground and offering prayers for “understanding, reconciliation and peace.”16

Waning Influence of Catholicism on Irish-American Political Views With many Irish-American Catholics prepared to support the legal right to abortion despite Catholic Church opposition, what did that say about their relationship with the Church? In truth, since the end of the twentieth century, Catholicism had played a diminishing role in Irish- American identity and its political views. One survey showed that only 12 percent of the 47 percent of respondents who identified as Catholic regularly attended church, 20 percent did not, and 15 percent no longer identified as Catholic. In addition, young Irish Americans did not identify with Catholicism as much as their older counterparts, with only 23 percent of those under the age of 35 identifying as Catholic. Interestingly, 16 percent of the Irish-American respondents said they were non-religious. These trends were part of an overall decline in church observance, with a Gallup poll showing that the number of Catholics belonging to a parish dropped from 76 percent in 2000 to 58 percent in 2020. Among Protestants, the membership decline in the same period was smaller, from 73 percent to 64 percent. The writer James Carroll connected the collapse of Catholic moral authority to the clergy sex abuse scandal, which is addressed by Sally Barr Ebest in her chapter in this volume. “The betrayal by abusive priests and bishops (who protected the abusers instead of the victims),” Carroll argues, “was part of the larger transition of religious meaning that began with the Second Vatican Council when Catholics left the closed-in world of the parish for the larger world of religious tolerance and secular enlightenment.” In addition, many Irish Americans, who were raised Catholic, and whose values were shaped by the Rerum Novarum encyclical on social justice, ceased practicing when the US Catholic bishops became more conservative.17 Ever since the Great Famine influx to America, most Irish Americans had identified their neighborhoods with the name of their Catholic parish, which was the core of Irish-American identity and community, connecting young and old through church halls, weekly Mass, high schools, colleges, and even hospitals. Did the fracturing of this Irish-American Catholic identity from the end of the twentieth century weaken Irish-American political influence? Fergal Cochrane’s book, The End of 438

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Irish America?, seems to confirm this fear, but his actual findings concluded that Irish-American identity was simply redefining itself. A survey of Irish Americans supported this conclusion, indicating that more than half of them attended Irish-themed music concerts. Peter Quinn agreed, saying that “the rise of secular Irish-American institutions like Glucksman Ireland House, the Irish Repertory Theater, the Irish Arts Center (all located in New York) seemed to track with the decline of the Church.” “The same phenomenon is operating in Ireland,” continued Quinn, because “the end of the Church’s predominance over all aspects of Irish life has cleared the ground for new and vibrant cultural and artistic expressions of Irishness.” James Carroll noted that, The transition may have made us less explicitly ‘Irish Catholic,’ but it made us more fully American and more fully, well, Christian. The innate goodness of Irishness, for all of its ‘fallenness,’ has come through powerfully and continues as a pillar of American virtue, for all of its fallenness.18 Dan Rooney, the President of the Pittsburgh Steelers football franchise from 1975 to 2002, is an illustrative example of someone who, having grown up in an Irish-American Catholic culture relatively removed from Ireland, became intensely engaged in the Northern Ireland peace process, eventually being appointed US Ambassador to Ireland in 2009. Rooney, a devout Catholic, whose great-­grandparents had emigrated from Newry in Ulster in the 1880s to become bricklayers in the Pittsburgh steel mills, grew increasingly concerned about the bloodshed and suffering in his ancestral homeland. Together with Anthony O’Reilly, then CEO of the global HJ Heinz company, he founded the Ireland Funds which has raised over $600 million for peace, culture, and community development on the island of Ireland. Rooney also promoted the so-called “Rooney Rule” in the NFL requiring league teams to interview ethnic-minority candidates for head coaching roles. Rooney endorsed Barack Obama during the Democratic primary in 2008, seeing in him a commitment to fairness and to helping working people. Rooney’s Irishness was deeply influenced by his Irish-American wife, Patricia, who taught and loved Irish literature, prompting the creation of the Rooney Prize awarded annually to outstanding young Irish poets and fiction writers.19

The Scotch Irish, Irish Americans, and Race The 2022 US Senate race in Ohio between two Irish Americans depicted the continuing political divisions among Irish Americans when the conservative libertarian and best-selling author of Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance, and liberal Democrat Tim Ryan opposed each other. One journalist wrote that Vance, who self-identified as Scotch Irish, won largely because of his support for Trump’s narrative of white nationalism and the fear of the Great Replacement. “Vance has just won an election based on the idea that white people are victimized by progressives,” wrote Meredith McCarroll, “and that experience as an exceptional white—better than the rest of Middletown, Ohio—makes him the leader worth following.”20 Jim Webb, the decorated former US Marine, Secretary of the Navy under President Reagan, and one-term Democratic senator from Virginia, has written many books including Born Fighting; How the Scots Irish Shaped America, extolling the contributions of the Scots Irish to America. One journalist noted that Webb “has been writing about the dignity of his people—the gun-loving, countrymusic-singing, working-class whites of Scotch-Irish descent who fight in wars, staff the nation’s factories and shop its Wal-Marts.” These people, Webb wrote, “gave our country great things, including its most definitive culture.” Webb also noted in interviews that other Americans had ethnic pride, but the identity of his own culture had been lost. Niall O’Dowd called Webb’s book “a cry from the heart to recognize what the mainly southern Americans of Irish heritage, from Andrew Jackson and 439

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Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett on down, have done to shape this country. These days,” O’Dowd continued, “Scots Irish are the poor and working-class whites who are deeply alienated from the Democratic party and who have turned the south almost all red Republican.” Pro-British Unionist politicians from Northern Ireland have made some efforts to secure the political support of the Protestant Scotch Irish but without any real success. The Irish government, as part of its outreach to Unionists in Northern Ireland, has sought to widen Irish-American identity to include the Scotch Irish as well as Black and Brown Irish.21 According to one political analyst, partisanship in the United States had by the 2020s become a “mega-identity,” “representing both a division over policy and a broader clash between white, Christian conservatives and a liberal, multiracial, secular elite.” This is a somewhat simplistic analysis of the division as illustrated by the more complex reasons for why Irish Americans voted for either Democrats and Republicans in the twenty-first century. 22 Yes, Irish Americans had a mixed record on race relations, with some being anti-racist and others supporting white Christian nationalism, the reactionary racist movement that claimed whites were endangered by the “Great Replacement.” Former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan promoted an anti-Semitic, racist, and anti-immigrant ideology, openly affiliating with white supremacists. In his 2011 book, Suicide of a Superpower, Buchanan complained that the United States was becoming an increasingly diverse country, that minorities would soon outnumber white Americans and that the country “is disintegrating, ethnically, culturally, morally, politically.” The Irish Times columnist, Fintan O’Toole, focusing on the conservatism of some Irish Americans, asked what Irishness brought to this nexus that Catholic conservatism alone did not. “The one-word answer is: victimhood,” O’Toole asserted. In the stew of far-right reaction, a crucial ingredient is the transference of victimhood: the claim that white men, rather than being (as they are) relatively privileged, are in fact victims… This is a strange and poisonous outgrowth of our particular history.23 However, as noted earlier, many Irish Americans were on the progressive side of American politics and fought for racial equality and civil rights, including the Jesuit Berrigan brothers, the New York lawyer Paul O’Dwyer, and courageous Irish nuns and priests who marched for civil rights in the South. Irish-American radicalism goes back to Mother Jones in the nineteenth century, and two heads of the American communist party, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and William Foster, were the children of Irish immigrants. Dorothy Day established the Catholic Worker Movement in the 1950s, combining aid for the poor and homeless with nonviolent direct action. More recently, the Boston-based band Dropkick Murphys, popular with working Irish people in New England, loudly proclaimed its opposition to white nationalism and support for the rights of labor and veterans. Reinforcing anti-racism, 60 Irish-American political and cultural figures sent a public letter to the Congressional Black Caucus in 2020, following the death of the civil rights leader John Lewis urging, “the great institutions of Irish America, particularly our colleges and universities, as well as our civic and fraternal organizations, to address their role in maintaining the institutional racism that has plagued this nation.”24 It is also probable that many Irish Americans and Scotch Irish who voted for Trump and other white conservatives were not racist but more focused, as was noted earlier, on neglect of their economic interests by “coastal elites.” The conservative Christian columnist, Lee Habee, argued that “Trump dared to challenge the US Chamber of Commerce, which loves cheap labor, and the Democratic Party, which cared more about building a voting block than attending to the needs of struggling Ohioans.” Indeed, by the 2020s, taking a cue from Trump populism, the Biden Democrats were more attuned to non-college educated rural Americans than previous Democratic presidents like Obama and Clinton. In 2020 Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the race for the White House largely because he promised to reverse the years of neglect of working Americans, a promise fulfilled 440

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by his passing some of the most pro-labor legislation in his first term since President Johnson’s administration.25 Recent research is bringing to light the complex interrelationship between Irish Americans and ­people of color. The African-American Irish Network, founded in 2021, fosters relations between African Americans and Ireland through their shared heritage and culture. (Cara McClintock-Walsh’s chapter earlier in this volume similarly examines cultural cross-pollinations between African-­ American and Irish theater in the last century). The Black, Brown and Green Voices series by Glucksman Ireland House at New York University represents a targeted documentation strategy of the Archives of Irish America, giving voice to the diversity of the Irish diaspora. The late musicologist Mick Moloney championed both the overlap between Irish, African, Jewish, and Galician music and culture and the inclusion of women artists in Irish music performances, including “Cherish the Ladies” which has performed at the House Speaker’s annual St Patrick’s Day lunch for the US president. For many years, conservative Americans advocated the trope that black Americans could succeed like other immigrants such as the Famine Irish if they really wanted to, and that social welfare programs only encouraged dependency. Their reasoning, which ignored the fact that there were no restrictions on the Irish immigrating to America in the nineteenth century, was reinforced by the myth that the Irish were an enslaved white race who by virtue of hard work had been more successful than African-American descendants of slaves. Some Irish were indentured servants for a period, but their children were free and they enjoyed American citizenship, a status far from chattel slavery. The false “Irish slave” narrative has been effectively debunked by Liam Hogan, an Irish scholar who assiduously tracked the myth in social media usage, noting that “this continued misuse of Irish history devalues the real history.” As historian Kevin Kenny makes clear in his book on immigration, while nineteenth-century Irish immigrants undoubtedly faced prejudice and bigotry, they could enter the US, move freely within and between the states, naturalize as citizens, vote, hold office, testify in court, and serve on juries, which most Black people, free or enslaved, could not.26

Conclusion Only time will tell if American politics will remain deeply polarized or if that will prove to have been a passing, ugly phase. Meanwhile, as Irish Americans grapple with these divisions, their political influence continues to thrive in both major political parties at both state and federal levels. If the past is any indication, the island of Ireland will continue to need the critical support and engagement of Irish-American political influence, both politically and economically, to secure a peaceful and prosperous future. While the guns in Northern Ireland have remained mostly silent since 1998, memories of atrocities and stubborn sectarianism prevail, inhibiting any serious reconciliation among the two communities. Some predict a united Ireland is inevitable, as demographics shift, but others feel an “agreed Ireland” has to come first. As the poet Paul Muldoon wrote on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement in 2023: “We’ve come a ways already, we’ve got a ways to go.”27 The continuation of Irish-American political influence in support of Ireland will be dependent on the regeneration and sustainability of Irish-American identity, where “attention needs to be paid to the particular needs and interests and the shifts in tastes and platforms used by younger diaspora cohorts.” This shift in tastes among the younger Irish generation on both sides of the Atlantic is encapsulated in the novels of Sally Rooney, who has been described as “the first great millennial author.” With few new immigrants from Ireland to refresh the “late-generation ethnicity” of Irish America, greater efforts will be required to provide opportunities for young Irish Americans to study, work, and volunteer in Ireland. With nearly two million American visitors to Ireland every year, Irish Americans and the Irish in Ireland are, as Mark O’Brien discusses in his chapter in this volume, increasingly connected by the internet and by Irish literature, films, sports, and music. As one writer put it, “New 441

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York and Dublin are now suburbs of each other.” The New York Times described the globally popular Dublin folk music group, Lankum, as “a gang of drone-loving experimentalists who have become a lodestar for the scene […] their creative bounty echoed in other Irish arts resonating abroad despite— and arguably because of—their rich, resolute Irishness.” This “new” Irishness includes the TV series “Derry Girls” and “Bad Sisters,” and the films “The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin)” and “The Banshees of Inisherin,” with both films part of the so-called Green Wave at the 2023 Oscars.28 In 2020 the emergence on TikTok of a Black-American performer of Irish step dancing who had no Irish ancestry signaled another new turn in Irish-American cultural identity. “With an acoustic remix of rapper Megan Thee Stallion’s song ‘Savage,’ Sandra Bullock burst onto social media, garnering a loyal following in America and Ireland almost immediately,” notes historian Cóilín Parsons. “This kind of emerging, loose affiliation between young Americans and Irish culture points the way to a future relationship between Ireland and America that is not strictly tied to identity or lineage.” Bullock went on to join the Riverdance troupe, itself a fusion of old and new, which since 1994 has been seen live by millions of people in over 50 countries across six continents.29 Caitriona Perry, the former Irish television correspondent in America, advocates a multifaceted approach to sustaining Irish-American identity and influence in America, combining the love of Irish music, culture, and art with “new approaches that include economic arguments, two-way investment and educational opportunities, both for younger generations of Irish Americans and for those who have no ancestral connections.” The success of this multifaceted approach remains to be determined as Irish Americans transition from a closed community of shared education and community organizations to one more open and diverse, and organized around cultural, business, and professional affinities. The Irish Ambassador to the United States, Geraldine Byrne Nason, believes that “the arts and soft power of both Ireland and Irish America, together with U.S.-Ireland business relationships, seem to be the principal assets in sustaining our evolving Irish-American identity.” The ambassador confidently predicted that “with our deep and diverse cultural relationship, Irish Americans will remain an influential voice in US politics throughout the twenty-first century.”30

Notes 1 Terry Golway, interview with author, March 28, 2023; O’Sullivan, “JFK to Mitch McConnell”; Irish American Nationwide Survey by Change Research, sponsored by Glucksman Ireland House, NYU, and the Council for American Irish Relations, January 24–28, 2023 (Change Research Survey, January 2023); Rep Brendan Boyle, D-PA, Interview with author, April 11, 2023; Diner, Hasia, “How the Irish Taught the Jews to Become American.” YouTube, NYU Hebrew Judaic, November 17, 2020. 2 Lexington Column, “The Irish conquest of America,” Economist, March 16, 2019; President Biden, Remarks by President Biden Marking the 25th Anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, White House Press Room, April 12, 2023. 3 Lawless, Jill, “Biden’s Ancestral Hometowns Prepare Warm Irish Welcome,” Associated Press, Boston Globe, April 9, 2023. 4 Rep Brendan Boyle, D-PA, interview with author, April 11, 2023; O’Connell, Danny, President American Ancient Order of Hibernians, Interview with author, March 30, 2023. 5 “Survey of Younger Irish Americans,” Amarach Research, October, 2017; Wall, Martin, “Belfast Agreement Is Almost the Only Topic that Can Unite Democrats and Republicans,” Irish Times, April 22, 2023; Rep Mary Gay Scanlon, D-PA, Interview with Author, April 13, 2023; Change Research Survey, January, 2023. 6 Luce, Edward, “Joe Biden’s Long Good Friday, US President’s Tour Will Be a Backdrop to His 2024 Campaign Launch,” Financial Times, April 12, 2023; Davis, Susan, Interview with author, March 8, 2023; Change Research Survey, January, 2023. 7 O’Leary, Stella, Interview with author, March 11, 2023; Change Research Survey, January, 2023; Presidential election campaigns are increasingly focused on eight “swing” states, three of which, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, Trump won in 2016 and Biden narrowly won in 2020. All three states have a relatively high proportion of Irish American voters.

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Irish Americans and US Politics in the Twenty-First Century 8 “Behind Biden’s 2020 Victory,” Pew Research, June 30, 2021; Much of the research on Irish American voting patterns is based on interviews with scholars of Irish America and contemporary commentary because the number of surveys is quite limited; Chozick, Amy, “Bill Clinton Recalls How the Irish Were Key to His Success in New York,” New York Times, March 16, 2016; U.S. Political Poll, IrishCentral.com, November, 2016. 9 Oprysko, Caitlin, “Chamber CEO to Lawmakers: ‘Do Your Jobs,’” Politico, January 12, 2023. 10 Perry, Caitriona, The Tribe, 74. O’Dowd, Niall, Publisher of IrishCentral.com and Irish Voice, Interview with author, March 26, 2023. 11 Kenny, Kevin, Interview with author, January 17, 2023. 12 “How Democrats and Republicans See Each Other,” Economist, August 17, 2022; Daniller, Andrew, “Americans Take a Dim View of the Nation’s Future,” Pew Research Center, April 24, 2023. 13 Brett, Siobhán, “Conway, Flynn, O’Reilly, McMahon and More – Introducing the Alt-Irish Americans,” Independent.ie, March 19, 2017; O’Hehir, Andrew, “How Did My Fellow Irish-Americans Get So Disgusting,” Salon, March 15, 2014; Gosse, Van, “Why Are All the Conservative Loudmouths Irish American,” Newsweek, October, 24, 2017. 14 U.S. Political Poll, IrishCentral.com, November, 2016; Change Research Survey, January, 2023. 15 Hollinger, Christianity’s American Fate; Change Research Survey, January, 2023. 16 White, Christopher, “Bishop Laments Questioning of Biden’s Faith Due to Abortion Policies,” National Catholic Reporter, October 13, 2020; Gehring, John, “Joe Biden and the New Divide within American ­Catholicism,” New York Daily News, January 22, 2021. 17 Change Research Survey, January, 2023; Carroll, James, Interview with author, February 15, 2023. 18 Cochrane, The End of Irish America; Smyth, “Irish Americans’ Connection”; Quinn, Peter, Interview with author, April 8, 2023; Carroll, James, Interview with author, February 15, 2023. 19 Rooney, A Different Way. 20 McCarroll, Meredith, “J.D. Vance and the Myth of White Exceptionalism,” New Lines Magazine, January 10, 2023. For more on the origins of the “Scotch Irish” identity in America, see Peter Gilmore’s chapter in the present volume. 21 Copel, Lib, “Don’t Call Him Redneck,” Washington Post, October 18, 2006; O’Dowd, Niall, “Scots Irish Jim Webb Thinks He Can Beat Hillary on White Vote in 2016,” IrishCentral.com, July 4, 2015. 22 Cohn, Nate, “Why Political Sectarianism Is a Growing Threat to American Democracy,” New York Times, September 8, 2021. 23 Buchanan, Patrick, “Unrepentant Bigot,” American Defamation League, April 26, 2017; O’Toole, Fintan, “Brett Kavanaugh Shows White Irish Catholic Is Now Core of U.S. Reactionary Politics,” Irish Times, ­October 2, 2018. 24 “An Irish American Response to the Death of Congressman John Lewis and the BLM Movement,” July 29, 2020, Green and Black in America Together, https://greenandblacktogether.com/the‑letter. 25 Habee, Lee, “Being J.D. Vance: Few Understand Better How the Left Lost Rural America,” Newsweek, June 6, 2022. 26 Stack, Liam, “Debunking a Myth: The Irish Were Not Slaves, Too,” New York Times, March 17, 2017; Kenny, The Problem of Immigration. 27 Muldoon, Paul, Poem for St Patrick’s Day Celebration of Good Friday Agreement, John F. Kennedy Center, Washington, DC. Ireland.ie, March 17, 2023. 28 Kennedy, Liam, “The Next Generation of Irish America,” Clinton Institute UCD, October 2019, p. 63; Barry, Ellen, “Greeted as the First Great Millennial Author, and Wary of the Attention,” New York Times, August 31, 2018; Hamill, Pete, Foreword, O’Hanlon, The New Irish Americans; Hermes, Will, “What’s Driving a Fresh Wave of Irish Music? Tradition,” New York Times, March 25, 2023. 29 Parsons, Cóilín, Interview with author, April 3, 2023; IrishCentral Staff, “On This Day: Riverdance Debuted at the Eurovision Song Contest in 1994,” IrishCentral.com, April 30, 2023. 30 Perry, The Tribe, 239; Byrne Nason, Geraldine, Ambassador of Ireland to the U.S. Interview with author, March 31, 2023. Ireland has a large diplomatic presence in the U.S. with an embassy and six consulates whose work with Irish Americans includes the Emigrant Support Program.

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Ted Smyth Coffee, Michael, The Irish in America. New York: Hyperion, 1997. Cronin, Mike, and Daryl Adair. The Wearing of the Green: A History of St Patrick’s Day. London: Routledge, 2002. Donnelly, Larry. The Bostonian: Life in an Irish‑American Political Family. Dublin: Gill Books, 2021. Farrell, James A. Tip O’Neill and the American Century. Boston, MA: Little Brown, 2001. Fitzpatrick, Maurice. John Hume in America. Newbridge, Ireland: Irish Academic Press, 2017. Hollinger, David. Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. Harlow: Longman, 2000. Kenny, Kevin. The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. Lee, J.J., and Marion R. Casey, eds. Making the Irish American. New York University Press, 2006. McCaffrey, Lawrence. The Irish Catholic Diaspora in America. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997. Meagher, Timothy, J. The Columbia Guide to Irish American History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. O’Carroll, Ide B. Irish Transatlantics, 1980–2015. Cork: Attic Press, 2018. O’Clery, Conor. The Greening of the White House. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1996. O’Dowd, Niall. An Irish Voice. Dublin: The O’Brien Press, 2010. O’Hanlon, Ray. The New Irish Americans. New York: Roberts Rinehart, 1998. O’Sullivan, Maurice. “JFK to Mitch McConnell: How Irish Americans Went from Reliable Democrats to Leading the GOP.” America Magazine, March 16, 2023. Perry, Caitriona. The Tribe: The Inside Story of Irish Power and Influence in U.S. Politics. Dublin: Gill Books, 2019. Quinn, Peter. Cross Bronx, a Writing Life. New York: Fordham University Press, 2022. Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Routledge, 1995. Rooney, Jim, A Different Way to Win: Dan Rooney’s Story from the Super Bowl to the Rooney Rule. Np: Chiloe Publishing, 2019. Smyth, Ted and Brian O’Dwyer, “Irish Americans’ Connection to their Heritage Remains Strong due to Draw of Ireland’s History and Culture,” Irish Times, March 1, 2022.

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34 BREAKING THE SILENCE OF CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE IN THE IRISH‑AMERICAN CATHOLIC CHURCH Sally Barr Ebest In 2001, Cardinal Bernard F. Law, Archbishop of Boston, made an astonishing admission: Seventeen years earlier, he had appointed the Rev. Father John J. Geoghan to be Vicar at an upscale suburban church despite knowing that Geoghan had been repeatedly accused of molesting boys. Although child sex abuse had been reported since the 1980s, and the Boston Globe had written about Geoghan in 1997, the revelation that the Church had hidden these reports and protected its priests—rather than their victims—became the impetus for Globe reporters to determine if this habit was anomalous. Their investigation, reported in the book Betrayal, revealed that Geoghan was not an aberration: scores of priests had molested hundreds of Catholic boys in the Greater Boston area. Geoghan him‑ self was said to have abused more than 130 boys over a 30‑year period.1 This chapter considers the elements contributing to the ensuing scandal. It traces the sources of clerical sexual abuse, the efforts to keep it private, and the transnational connection between Rome, Ireland, and America. It then examines possible sources of the problem—parochial education, vic‑ timization, seminary formation—and silence. Finally, it concludes with a contemporary view of the scandal’s effects on the victims and their families, Irish‑American Catholics’ renewed vigilance and activism, and hopeful views of the Church’s future.

Where Did It Begin? Child sex abuse, as well as efforts to cover it up, is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, the Catholic theo‑ logians Thomas Doyle, A. W. R. Sipe, and Patrick Wall maintain that secrecy has been the Church’s unofficial policy “for as far back as records are kept.” In the fifth century, St. Patrick brought Christi‑ anity to Ireland, introducing the concept of deference and its (ironically unstated) counterpart, silence, as he taught the Irish to obey the authority of their priest and their Pope. In the sixteenth century, in response to challenges posed by the Protestant Reformation, the Church attempted to purge itself of abusers. Nevertheless, as Martin Luther pointed out in the 1500s, Pope Leo X himself vetoed a meas‑ ure requiring cardinals to curtail the number of boys kept for their pleasure, for “otherwise it would have been spread throughout the world how openly and shamelessly the Pope and the cardinals in Rome practice sodomy.” Thus the conspiracy to avoid scandal became a pattern within the Church.2 Granted, in 1922 and again in 1962, the Vatican issued prohibitions against clerical sexual abuse. Pope John XXIII’s De Modo Procedendi in Causis Solicitationis, explaining how to process cases of 445

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solicitation, was sent to “every bishop and religious superior in the world.” However, recipients were ordered to retain this document in secret archives. This secrecy extended to anyone involved in sexual crimes committed by clergy, victims, witnesses, and Church officials on threat of excommunication. In Ireland, where sex abuse had been an open secret, pontifical secrecy was imposed by Archbishop McQuaid in 1968, thus establishing the practice throughout the country. Commenting on the perpetu‑ ation of this social aberration, the feminist writer Clair Wills asked: “how do we learn to not see what we see, or not know what we know?” These horrors were out in the open. They were “unseeable” because no one wanted to see them.3 Periodically, a scandal in Ireland seemed imminent. Fintan O’Toole reports that in the 1980s, Gerard Mannix Flynn’s Nothing to Say exposed the rampant child abuse within Ireland’s state‑run industrial schools. Next, parishioners were shocked by the discovery that beloved priests Bishop Ea‑ mon Casey and Fr. Martin Cleary had both fathered children. In 1999, Mary Rafferty’s documentary States of Fear revealed the extent of abuse across the 52 institutions. This documentary breached the wall of silence not only by “speaking the unspeakable,” but also by using the survivors’ words. Ten years later, the publication of the Ryan Report documenting abuse of children within the industrial schools and the Murphy report on clerical abuse and cover‑ups marked what O’Toole called “the final collapse of Catholic Ireland.” In response to the furor raised by these revelations, the Irish government formed the Irish Abuses Commission. Its final report, released in 2009, confirmed that thousands of Irish boys and girls had been beaten, raped, and terrorized by priests and nuns.4 This period marked almost simultaneous revelations of the Church’s collusion with abusers in America. Alarm bells first sounded in 1985 when the Rev. Thomas Doyle issued a warning at the annual Council of Bishops. He was ignored. Although child sex abuse had been reported since the 1980s and Americans’ awareness of the Irish crimes had been raised in 1990 by the television news shows 60 Minutes and 20/20, and the Boston Globe had written about Fr. Geoghan in 1997, that news did not provoke outrage until 2001. Pedophilia was one thing, but this was the tipping point, for it provided proof that the Church had known about—and hidden—the evidence. “The reason our cov‑ erage caused such a crisis was not that the documents we had showed priests had abused children,” explained Globe investigative reporter Michael Paulson, “but that the bishops knew about it, and still failed to keep those priests away from children.” And so, the Boston Globe Spotlight team sprang into action. The 2002 publication of their report, Betrayal, followed by the movie “Spotlight” illustrating the investigation, brought these crimes to the fore. Once the Globe reporters broke the silence, law enforcement started protecting the victims, lawyers initiated prosecutions, and families began speak‑ ing out. Thanks to their activism, the veil of silence was lifted.5

Boston: A Case Study of Silence and Deference An examination of the history of the Boston Irish, tracing their evolution from the despised immi‑ grants to accepted locals, explains their ethnic dominance. It does not, however, explain America’s abuse scandal. To understand that requires an exploration of Irish Americans’ inherited tradition of deference and silence in relation to the Catholic clergy.6 In 2002, more than half of Boston’s population—two million of the 3.8 million living there—was Irish Catholic, the largest proportion among all American cities. This population had been dominant since 1850. Indeed, the Irish ascendance in Boston is an American success story. In her chapter in this volume, Anelise Hanson Shrout describes mid‑nineteenth‑century Irish immigrants as “poorer, more rural, and more Catholic” than their predecessors. Hidetaka Hirota concurs, noting in his chapter that the predominantly White Anglo‑Saxon Protestants viewed these interlopers not only as threats to their “religious, cultural, economic, social and political” lives and “unfit for American democracy,” but also as dangers to public health and burdens to the public health system. However, by 1885, 446

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thanks in large part to their service during the American Civil War, Irish Americans had improved their incomes and their reputations—correlations explained in other chapters in this volume. But they did not control their Church. This became the mission of Paul Cullen who was appointed Ireland’s first Cardinal in 1852, a posi‑ tion he retained until 1878. According to Colin Barr and Hillary Carey, Cullen inserted “like‑minded allies, former students, relatives, and Dublin diocesan priests in senior positions across the English‑­ speaking world. These men pursued policies and built institutions that made Catholicism’s Greater Ireland world possible.” Together, they insisted on the Pope’s infallibility, promoted Irish symbolism, and “insisted on communal cohesion and social separation, especially in education and matrimony.” They also encouraged synod councils to unify their policy and practice, sliced larger dioceses into smaller Irish‑American enclaves, and encouraged loyalty to both Ireland and Rome. Consequently, by 1845, most major urban areas remained under the control of Irish bishops—except for Boston— whose priests preferred American‑born clergy. Even as late as 1894, fewer than half of the Boston‑­ area priests were Irish‑born.7 Cullen’s successors, Francis Patrick Kenrick and William Henry O’Connell, helped change that. Long before the Famine, Cullen had encouraged Rome to import Irish‑educated priests; Kenrick continued those efforts. After O’Connell was appointed archbishop of Boston in 1907, he finished the job. By the conclusion of O’Connell’s 37‑year tenure, Barr maintains that “Boston had become and would remain an Irish Catholic city.”8 In the context of the dominance of the Irish in Boston, the city could be considered a bellwether for institutionalized abuse across the Atlantic world. Because of their ingrained deference, no one would talk about the scandals. Certainly not the victims; they were ashamed. Not their parents; like their Irish forebears, they feared embarrassing their priest. Not the Church: Cardinal Law denied the scandals, refused to release Church documents, and hid the crimes by shuttling abusive priests from parish to parish. No one questioned him—neither Boston’s business leaders, politicians, nor media executives—all of whom were silenced by their faith and their respect for the Cardinal’s popularity. Not even the media dared report it, for they were Catholic too. This deference can be traced in part to the Church’s intransigent structure, which Barr describes as built on “unaccountable power, social deference, and self‑segregation.” On a personal level, defer‑ ence stemmed from the Church’s emphasis on the fourth commandment, which prohibits criticism of one’s superiors and requires children to love and obey their parents, nuns, and priests—in fact, all authorities—as they would God. As O’Toole explains, in late twentieth century Ireland, this mindset was instantiated by Archbishop McQuaid, who created a world in which the Church had a “near monopoly” on truth and reality, implanting its vision in the minds of the faithful, subsumed fully into their own consciousness. According to O’Toole, This was the Church’s great achievement in Ireland. It had so successfully disabled a society’s capacity to think for itself about right and wrong that it was the parents of an abused child, not the bishop who enabled that abuse, who were “quite apologetic.” It had managed to create a flock who, in the face of an outrageous violation of trust, would be concerned as much about the abuser as about those he had abused and might abuse in the future.9 When these families emigrated, such feelings were compounded. As the Boston Globe journalist Kevin Cullen writes, the immigrants believed they owed the Church for “giving them a foothold and a place in the New World.” And it did. According to the historian Thomas O’Connor: The central unifying force for [immigrant] Irish neighborhoods was the Catholic Church.[…] Everything revolved around the Church; the Church, in turn, became an integral part of almost 447

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every aspect of family life, literally from the cradle to the grave. […] The influence of the Catholic Church on a day‑to‑day basis was strengthened by the almost incessant involvement of the pastor and his curates in the activities of their parishioners, young and old.10 The Church’s involvement ranged from celebrating Mass and hearing confessions to organizing and sponsoring their parochial schools’ extracurricular activities. The priest was everywhere: talking to women during the day, to men on their way home from work, to kids on the street after school. This was especially true in Irish‑Catholic enclaves.11 In The Boston Irish, O’Connor reports that priests were viewed as a respected part of the fam‑ ily, for they generally hailed from the lower classes like their congregants; indeed, priests were so indigent that they often dined at their parishioners’ homes. Their presence ensured that “Most Irish Americans retained an intense faith and looked to their priests and bishops for guidance and sup‑ port,” wrote O’Connor. “Irish families clung to their church, revered their priests, memorized their catechisms, obeyed their doctrines, and followed their rituals to the letter.” Priests were especially welcomed by single mothers, who appreciated guidance for their male children, who, in turn, often craved male attention in their father’s absence. Who were they to question the actions of a man sec‑ ond only to God?12 Irish‑American lay women such as Martha Coakley, Judge Sandra Hamlin, and Judge Constance Sweeney helped to put a stop to this misplaced deference (as did members of SNAP and VOTF, discussed below). From the time former Boston District Attorney Coakley was a child, she had been aware of gender inequities in the Church. Girls were not allowed on the altar, nor could they play sports in their parochial schools. Women were treated as lesser than men: strictures banning contra‑ ception, abortion, and ordination were clearly biased against women. These attitudes broke through Coakley’s ingrained deference as a practicing Catholic.13 Not everyone shared her willingness to expose such crimes, however. In the 1980s, the first time Coakley prosecuted Fr. Paul Manning for sex abuse, both male and female parishioners supported him, his lawyer termed the rapes “horseplay,” the jury acquitted him—and locals accused Coakley of disrespecting the Church. In fact, Manning’s parishioners stood by him despite Fr. Paul Sughrue’s testimony that one night, upon returning to his rectory, “he heard ‘five distinct screams’ from a child. ‘They were horrifying. … They were pain‑filled screams. They demanded attention.’” Fr. Sughrue was disturbed but “conflicted” over what to do. Although he contacted the chancery, officials there waited a month before informing the police. Rather than decry Manning’s actions, his congregants turned on Sughrue for betraying their priest. Like their Irish cohorts, Irish Americans’ deference for the priest took priority over concern for the victim.14 The silence continued until a non‑Catholic, Martin Baron, took over the Boston Globe. He urged his reporters to launch the probe of what would become Betrayal. After the Globe exposé, judges and juries grew more willing to punish errant priests. In February 2002, when Fr. Geoghan was charged with fondling a boy, Judge Hamlin handed down a ten‑year sentence. That same year, although Judge Sweeney had been considered unlikely to overturn the Church’s desire to keep its records private, she argued instead that “the public’s right to know overshadowed the Church’s”—a decision that outraged the Catholic hierarchy, who had to turn over almost 10,000 pages of documents. Although the Cardinal’s lawyers appealed, Judge Sweeney’s decision was upheld.15 Male prosecutors were not blind to the priests’ behavior, either. Kevin Burke, District Attorney in Massachusetts’ Essex County, had always been struck by the disparity between priests and nuns. While the priests were driving Cadillacs and eating off fine china, the nuns were poor, lacking hous‑ ing and health care, and routinely reduced to attending to the priests as servants and housekeepers. Those sisters courageous enough to buck the system were hounded. And yet, Burke continued,

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Look how they treated priests who raped children. We throw this word abuse around, and it’s a nice, inoffensive word. In many of these cases, it wasn’t abuse. It was rape. They were rap‑ ing children. Where’s the indignation? Where’s the moral outrage? The intolerance and the hypocrisy of the Church lies at the heart of a lot of this.… To be covering up for those who rape children while being so judgmental of others, the hypocrisy is just breathtaking.16 In America, as in Ireland, the Church hierarchy continued to rely on its parishioners’ immigrant defer‑ ence to disable their capacity to think for themselves about right and wrong. After Cardinal Law refused to submit Church records to law enforcement and denied the ex‑ istence of abuse, District Attorneys Reilly and Burke went public, telling the Boston Globe that prosecutors—­not the Church and not its officials—should be punishing abusive priests. Clearly, the Church could not be trusted to report its clergy, let alone release victims’ names and case files. So, Reilly and his five assistant DAs threatened to “haul Church leaders before a grand jury” if they did not turn over all relevant material: This is an example of deference creating a system that put children at risk. . . . The policy the Church had, in terms of hushing things up, was completely consistent with a secret, authori‑ tarian institution. As things were reported, they were dealt with secretly. I think it was a very conscious decision by the Church to handle things the way they did. It was not an oversight, not a lapse in judgement. It was consistent with the institution.17 Although a bill was passed in 1983 requiring entities to report child sex abuse, the largely Irish‑­ Catholic Massachusetts lawmakers refused to include clergy on the specious grounds that doing so would break the relationship between priest and parishioner—an argument that not only mirrored their Irish counterparts, but also underscored the traditions of silence and deference.18

Why Catholics? Some researchers have questioned whether Catholic priests’ sexual abuse of boys is unique among Western religions. It is. It is more prevalent among Catholics than other Western denominations, more likely among priests than the laity, more often with males than females. The John Jay Report, a 2006 study commissioned by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, found that “an average of 712 claims of sexual abuse of children were made annually against Catholic priests during the years 1990–2002,” resulting in settlement payments totaling $3.2 billion. In contrast, even though Prot‑ estantism encompasses many denominations, Protestant claims averaged 206 per year, resulting in payments totaling $87.8 million to all the victims. Overall, the US had the highest number of reported Catholic sex abuse cases, followed by Ireland. In New York alone, the Catholic Church was the de‑ fendant in 98 percent of all abuse cases.19 Some of the Church’s defenders have suggested that the number of pedophile priests is no differ‑ ent from non‑Catholic laity. The American Psychiatric Association maintains that “3 to 5 percent of the general male population in the U.S. are pedophiles.” Similarly, 5 percent of school staff sexually violate children. These figures reflect statistics from the John Jay Report, which initially claimed that only 4 percent of Catholic clergy were abusers. By the time it was published in 2010, however, that number had been revised to 5 percent.20 The John Jay report was succeeded by a 2013 study, which maintained that 7 percent of all priests were pedophiles, a number considerably larger than the Vatican’s claim. But the Church’s assertion was merely a matter of semantics. “Pedophilia” refers to sexual attraction to pre‑pubescent children.

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Much more common is “ephebolphilia,” defined as sexual attraction to post‑adolescent children. When this category is included, the percentages go up. According to the 2013 Australian Catholic Data Project, 78 percent of the claimants were male and 97 percent of the abusers were male members of religious orders. The male victims’ average age at the time of the alleged abuse was 11.5 years.21 The Irish researcher Marie Keenan found more definitive answers in her 2013 study, Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church. Some boys who had been sexually abused by priests in Christian Brothers schools—the largest residential education system in Ireland, as well as the one receiving more abuse allegations than all the other boys’ schools in the country combined—went on to abuse the younger boys at the school. According to O’Toole, among the Christian Brothers, Cries of pain and black‑robed figures belonged together. Violence and twisted sexuality were the expressions of troubled confusion on the part of the brothers—not because they had a mo‑ nopoly on any of these things in a society where violence against children and sexual repres‑ sion were the norm, but because they were themselves secretly and institutionally haunted by their failure to control them. Their violence was “‘inarticulable.’ Everybody knew about it but almost no one could utter it without the stammers of euphemism and evasion.” The Brothers knew that beating children—what O’Toole calls “intimate violence”—and the power they maintained over their young charges’ bodies “easily shaded into sexual abuse.” Although not every boy who was abused grew up to prey on other men, half of those who became priests tended to perpetuate the practice—a statistic that concurred with the John Jay findings and the Australian Catholic Data Project. Considering that until the 1990s, Ireland was the chief exporter of priests to America, it follows that after emigrating, the cycle of abuse of was perpetuated—by Catholic priests, parents, and schools.22 Keenan blames formation, or seminary training, for some of the Church’s ongoing problems with sexual abuse. Young men who had been abused often entered the seminary unaware of or unable to express their feelings. Their silence and shame became problematic when they were charged with fostering healthy emotional lives in their vulnerable young charges. Keenan argues that because sem‑ inary life did not sufficiently address personal needs, clerical lives in Ireland tended to be emotionally void. American seminaries’ educational failures led to similarly barren mindsets.23 The Catholic hierarchy did not help, either. The men in Keenan’s 2013 study grew up during a period when Ireland was defined by “sexual suppression and sexual fear” thanks to the Church’s omnipresence. Lessons from the hierarchy—men who had no heterosexual experience—led semi‑ narians to believe that sex was “dark, dirty, … unclean,” and depicted “human females as animals in their sexuality,” beliefs that can be traced to St. Augustine. For seminarians and priests, such beliefs created a gap between reality and theology. Whereas non‑clerical victims grew up, got on with their lives, married, and procreated, seminarians abused as children ignored what were actually normal sexual feelings—until they became priests—at which time they relaxed their celibacy by focusing on boys, who were not considered sinful like women.24 According to the former priests Doyle, Sipe, and Wall, sexual abuse of boys can be traced to screening problems at the entrance level. They cite Kennedy and Heckler, who found that only “7 percent of American priests were psychologically and emotionally developed; 18 percent were psy‑ chologically and emotionally developing; 66 percent were undeveloped; and 8 percent were mal‑ developed [sic].” Members of these latter two categories had “unresolved psychosexual problems and issues that are usually worked through in adolescence”—unless they entered seminary. In other words, 74 percent of American priests were operating (sexually) at the level of adolescent boys.25 As early as the 1950s, these issues had raised concerns. The Carroll Betrayal report’s findings led to the establishment of rehabilitation centers. Some, such as Servants of the Paraclete, were staffed by 450

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trained doctors who realized these problems went beyond spiritual deficiencies. More often, however, abusive priests were referred to Catholic facilities staffed by people who were not only unqualified to treat and evaluate sexually deviant behavior, but who also determined that their patients were sim‑ ply immature or impulsive and released them with a diagnosis of “atypical pedophile in remission.” Then they assigned these “atypical pedophiles” to a new parish. This alliance between religion and psychiatry helped conceal the priests’ ongoing crimes. Thus, Doyle and his colleagues concluded that sexual abuse of minors was “generated and perpetuated within the clerical system.”26

Why Didn’t They Speak Up? In many ways, victims and their families were groomed to tolerate abuse: through their Catholic training which decreed they honor and obey their superiors, through the Irish and American Church hierarchy’s policy of pontifical silence, through the clergy’s disregard of women, and through im‑ migrant deference—much of which is exemplified in the story of Fr. Geoghan. Like many of his brethren, the most notorious priest, Fr. Geoghan, tended to befriend single moth‑ ers, groom their sons, assault the boys, and swear them to secrecy. These families were grateful for the priest’s presence and therefore loathe to report abuse or to cause a scandal. In the Mueller family of four boys, the youngest surprised his mother when he said he did not want Geoghan in their home anymore. When she pressed him to explain, he started crying. Then he threw himself on the floor crying hysterically. When his mother asked her other sons about the priest’s behavior, all three broke down in tears. “Father said we couldn’t talk about it and tell you,” he said, “never to tell you because it was a confessional.” Fr. Geoghan also befriended the Dussourd family, comprised of three boys, their sister, and four male cousins. He molested all seven boys. When altar boy Michael McCabe’s fa‑ ther explained the facts of life to him, the boy replied, “Oh hey, that’s what Father Birmingham does to me.” Mr. McCabe’s first reaction was disbelief; however, when he learned that his son’s friend, Peter Taylor, had also been molested, his skepticism turned to fury.27 The boys’ fathers contacted a local pastor, who arranged a meeting with them, their sons, a Mon‑ signor, and Fr. Birmingham—who denied the allegations. Although the parents were relieved when Birmingham was removed, they were astonished to learn that he had been assigned to another par‑ ish. “It was devastating,” said Howard McCabe. Likewise, Mr. Taylor “left the Church… and never went back again.” Fr. Birmingham was re‑assigned to a Sudbury, Massachusetts parish. There he be‑ came a welcome visitor with the Blanchette family of seven boys and two girls—sexually assaulting 11‑year‑old Tom Blanchette over 300 times, raping four of his brothers, and every one of his friends.28 Why did the victims or their parents not report the abuse? “I never told my parents; they would have slapped your face,” said one. “I was twelve years old or so. No one would believe you in those days. The priests were everything.” Although a few parents were angry—and brave enough—to con‑ front their priest, most did not. “It’s bothered me all along. I let him get away with it. I ended up hid‑ ing his problem,” confessed one father. “We had so much respect for priests.” Those who did expose the abusers often found themselves ostracized by their fellow parishioners. Like their Irish counter‑ parts, the parents seemed to worry more about the priests’ reputations than their children’s safety.29 In most cases, when the victims’ parents reported this behavior, they were gas‑lighted. The hi‑ erarchy developed a repertoire of strategies to avoid blame by playing verbal semantics, citing the children’s age and social class, accusing them of being seductive, discounting the trauma of rape, blaming homosexuals, accusing the parents of negligence, and warning them against committing slander. In cases where parents or victims successfully sued, the Church insisted on Non‑Disclosure Agreements to silence the victims and keep the facts out of the news. Because the majority of the boys were post‑pubescent, sexual abuse per se was dismissed. Maintaining that most of these cases were examples of “ephebolphilia,” American Cardinals argued that since “Almost all the cases involved 451

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adolescents,” they were “not true cases of pedophilia.” This nicely sidestepped the fact that not only were the victims minors, but also that they had been raped.30 Many members of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy were perceived as neither concerned for the victims nor remorseful for their priests’ crimes. This perception led some victims to leave the Church, refusing even to drive past or set foot in the place where their lives had been ruined. Most suffered from depression, often undiagnosed because victims had repressed their memories by self‑­medicating with drugs or alcohol. Carroll’s Betrayal report revealed that many victims showed signs of substance abuse, suicide, PTSD, and by extension, lowered life expectancy, all of which were aggravated by “self‑blame, guilt, psychosexual disturbances, self‑destructive behavior, … and re‑victimization.” Studies of victims led to a new designation—Clergy‑Perpetrated Child Sexual Abuse (CPCSA)— coined because the trauma was considered more horrific than “regular” PTSD. Clearly, the systemic willingness to hide some clergy members’ crimes carried severe consequences for their victims in Ireland and America alike.31 Another excuse for ignoring the victims was moral relativism—the argument that moral judg‑ ments varied with an individual’s standpoint—a defense first proposed by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Ratzinger. As head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, Ratzinger was responsible for dealing with the sex abuse crisis, a job that he failed miserably because he would neither punish offenders nor remove them from their posts. Worse, he blamed homosexual priests. But homosexuality is not synonymous with pederasty. The majority of gay priests, like the majority of straight priests, have no interest in young boys.32 Nonetheless, the ultra‑conservative Ratzinger argued that homosexual priests should be weeded out. In his Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Care of Homosexual Persons, he ar‑ gued that: Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder. Therefore special concern and pastoral attention should be directed toward those who have this condition, lest they be led to believe that the living out of this orientation in homosexual activity is a morally acceptable option. It is not.33 After the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005, Ratzinger was elected pope. As Pope Benedict, he suddenly decided to laicize hundreds of abusers, he apologized to victims, and he even met some of them in person. But he showed little inclination to do more. When Benedict retired in 2013, Pope Francis was elected. In 2019, with clerical sexual abuse showing no signs of abating, the Pope held a conference to update the Church’s criminal code and add rules about punishment sought by activ‑ ists. Although sex acts were not mentioned beyond the irrelevant charge of adultery, the conference decreed that “A priest is to be stripped of his office … if he grooms or induces a minor” to participate in pornographic activities.34

Breaking the Silence The Irish‑American laity responded to the scandal with activism. Shortly after the Boston Globe rev‑ elations, in an effort to understand their leaders’ sins and to seek solace among friends, a few dozen members of St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church in Wellesley, Massachusetts began meeting and sharing their stories of abuse and betrayal. This group evolved into Voices of the Faithful (VOTF). Their goal, which they presented to Cardinal Law, was to “seek consensus in order to effectively respond to this scandal threatening our Church,” declaring that “the culture of secrecy and abuses of power that produced this crisis must end.”35 452

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The Church was notably hostile, denouncing the group, vowing to block its expansion, spreading disinformation, and banning its members from meeting on church premises. VOTF members re‑ sponded by citing Catholic core principles regarding “social justice and the common good.” Neither upstarts nor apostates, VOTF members were strongly committed to their Church and its betterment. Their goals were to improve communication between priests and lay members, increase laic partici‑ pation on Church boards, and, in conjunction with the Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), to support survivors.36 Since their founding, VOTF members have been key in preventing abuse and protecting victims. They have developed informational websites for parents, they sponsor annual conferences on pre‑ venting child sexual abuse, and their literature recommends establishing Safety Committees, which offer • Prevention education conducted annually for all children, parents, staff, lectors, Eucharistic min‑ isters and volunteers; • Checkups yearly on the criminal offender record information on all clergy, staff, ministers, and volunteers; and • Obtaining and disseminating information concerning past assignments of all new pastoral ­personnel 37 Irish Americans played a key role in SNAP, established in 1989. Although they do not necessar‑ ily dominate the organization, the founder and first director was Irish‑American Catholic Barbara Blaine, who had been molested by Father Chet Warren from ages 13–17. Blaine’s interim executive director was Michael McDonnell; the current president is Shaun Dougherty, and the treasurer is Dan McNevin. Blaine’s first Executive Director was David Clohessy, whose story follows a familiar pat‑ tern. From 1969 to 1973, Clohessy was molested and sodomized by Fr. John J. Whiteley. The priest had befriended Clohessy’s father and was revered by the family—so much so that they allowed 12‑year‑old David to travel all over the country with him, always with the same illicit results. In 1988, Clohessy’s repressed memories resurfaced after he started therapy and counseling through SNAP.38 In 1991, Cohessy sued Fr. Whiteley and his Diocese; his cause failed due to the statute of limi‑ tations. But because the litigation went on for years, Clohessy became the public face of SNAP. Journalist Bill Frogameni reports that together, Clohessy and Blaine became “the dual powerhouses of SNAP, with Blaine’s organizational ambition establishing SNAP chapters in every U.S. state and nine countries,” while Clohessy called attention to priest abuse by staging press conferences, meeting with victims, and “steadily churning out mentions in news stories throughout the 1990s.” In this way, Irish‑American Catholics worked to be part of the solution.39 Despite lawsuits and innuendo disseminated by the ultra‑conservative Catholic League, SNAP is still around: as of 2018, the group had “more than 25,000 survivors and supporters in its net‑ work, with 31 support groups in the U.S.” SNAP’s survival, along with VOTF, speaks to the power of Irish‑American laity in finally reclaiming their Church. As the Irish‑American poet and essayist Eamonn Wall explains, the laity have chosen to draw on the Church’s tradition of social justice to address and attempt to eradicate the evil that lies within. “To speak out belongs, at least in part, to Catholicism’s cultural legacy—a legacy built on faith, inclusiveness, forgiveness, the word as it is read, spoken and sung, discussion and community.”40 Will that legacy endure? There are positive signs. The Church hierarchy has begun to listen and to act, implementing practices first recommended by VOTF. According to the Catholic News Service, in 2020–2021, the hierarchy hired an outside firm to conduct almost two million background checks on clergy, employees, and volunteers. They also sponsored training for over two million adults and 453

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over 2.4 million children and youth “to identify the warning signs of abuse and how to report those signs.” Future plans include regularly auditing these programs’ efficacy, implementing Pope Francis’ 2019 Vos Estis Lux Mundi, “which established procedures for reporting allegations of sexual abuse and for holding accountable bishops, eparchs [smaller parishes], and religious superiors who protect abusers,” possibly adding a new section on Penal Sanctions to Canon Law, and establishing a mentor‑ ing program to oversee the eparchies that did not participate in the audit.41 This seems to be working. During the audit year of July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021, “2,930 abuse victims came forward with 3,103 allegations.” That number is 1,149 less than in the previous year. Moreover, the majority of these cases were “historical,” meaning abuse had occurred years if not decades before. In fact, only 30 of the 3,103 allegations were new. Of those, “six were substanti‑ ated […] every offender was removed from ministry [and] every allegation was reported to law enforcement.”42 Will this suffice? Years ago, the Irish‑American novelist Mary Gordon warned that “the Catholic Church in America is the Irish Church. And the Irish Church is a church that is obsessed with and committed to the idea of keeping silence.” This code of silence stopped the Catholic hierarchy from admitting and addressing the crisis; stopped Catholic attorneys, prosecutors, and judges from pros‑ ecuting priests; stopped seminarians from admitting their temptations and concerns about celibacy; stopped devout Catholics from discussing the rot; stopped victims and parents from speaking out; and stopped clergy from talking about the pedophiles in their midst.43 Thanks to the Boston Globe and predominantly Irish‑American groups such as VOTF and SNAP, the silence has been broken. Doyle et al. maintain that the abuse scandal has forced the Church to “redefine its ideology of sexuality, its responsibility to its members and its role in society.” To keep the pressure on, they encourage victims and their families to cultivate their anger, for it is the begin‑ ning of courage. Without the courage to demand clerics’ accountability and reform, they will never reform themselves: “They will never be able to achieve the integrity demanded by their office without the pressure, support, and supervision of the laity, who are the Church.”44

Conclusion Child sex abuse among Irish Americans is a transnational scourge inherent to the Catholic Church. Its transmission can be traced from Rome, where it was tacitly accepted; to Ireland, where it was an unspeakable open secret; to Boston, where the Irish tradition of silence, reinforced by immigrant deference, helped perpetuate the scandal. In the US, as in Ireland, Irish Catholic deference compounded the problem by insisting on silence from the victims, their parents, and the law enforcement community. This collusion resulted in thou‑ sands of victims, billions in settlements, and a loss of faith among multitudes of Catholics. Luckily, the Boston Globe reporters’ revelations of cover‑ups provoked sufficient outrage to break through parishioners’ ingrained deference, gradually resulting in prosecutions and imprisonments. Equally important, Irish‑American Catholics have helped raise awareness through advocacy groups such as SNAP and VOTF, which promotes vigilance among the lay congregation. Thanks to these efforts the silence has been broken, for as Doyle and his colleagues put it, “When clergy sex abuse is sealed under wraps, it festers and breeds; when it is brought into the light of day, it withers.”45

Notes 1 Carroll et al., Betrayal, 4. 2 Doyle et al., SPSC, ix; Arnow, Relationships; Doyle et al., SPSC, 53; Luther, 38. 3 Quoted in Enright, “Clair Wills.”

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Breaking Silence of Child Abuse in Irish-American Catholic Church 4 O’Toole, We Don’t Know Ourselves, 431, 437, 520, 540, 550. 5 Savage and Smith, “Sexual Abuse”; Carroll, Betrayal, 43. 6 Doyle, Sex, Priests, and Secret Codes, 53. 7 Barr and Carey, Religion and Greater Ireland, 7; Barr, Ireland’s Empire, 18. 8 Barr, Ireland’s Empire, 26–27. 9 Barr. Ireland’s Empire, 2; O’Toole, We Don’t Know Ourselves, 167–168. 10 Cullen, Scandal Erodes; O’Connor, Boston Irish, 137–140. 11 Carroll et al., Betrayal. 12 O’Connor, Boston Irish, 139. 13 Carroll et al., Betrayal, 126–128. 14 Carroll et al., Betrayal, 129, 30. 15 Knopf, Where Were Boston’s TV Stations?; Carroll et al., Betrayal, 129, 30. 16 Carroll et al., Betrayal, 135. 17 Carroll et al., Betrayal, 138. 18 Carroll et al., Betrayal, 138. 19 BBC News, “Catholic Church Child Sexual Abuse Scandal”; Herbeck, “Does Catholic Church Have Bigger Sex Abuse Problems?” 20 American Psychiatric Association; Carerra, “How the Crisis of Catholic Priests Sexually Abusing Minors Mirrors Society at Large”; McChesney, “What Caused the Crisis?” 21 Australian Catholic Data Project; Pearce, “Are Catholic Clergy more Likely to Be Paedophiles?” 22 Jordan; O’Toole, We Don’t Know Ourselves, 126, 128, 130; Keenan, Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church, 132; Wills, G., 184. 23 Keenan, Child Sexual Abuse, 134. 24 Keenan, Child Sexual Abuse, 139–140. 25 Doyle et al., SPSC, x.; Kennedy and Heckler qtd. in Doyle et al., 58. 26 Bier quoted in Doyle et al. SPSC, 70, 74; Carroll et al., Betrayal 2002, 55–56; Doyle et al., SPSC, 278. 27 Carroll et al., Betrayal, 17; 24; 25; 58; 59. 28 Quoted in Carroll et al. Betrayal, 61; 96–97. 29 Quoted in Carroll et al. Betrayal, 89; 91. 30 Carroll et al., Betrayal, 173. 31 Astbury, “Child Sexual Abuse,” 7–9, 20. 32 BBC, “Former Pope Benedict Failed”; Ratzinger, “The Church.” 33 Ratzinger, “Letter to the Bishops.” 34 Gibson, “The Rule of Benedict.” 35 Quoted in Ewick and Steinberg, Beyond Betrayal, 9. 36 VOTF 2021. 37 VOTF 2021. 38 Frogameni, “Toledo Native.” 39 Frogameni, “Toledo Native.” 40 Roewe, “Barbara Dorris”; Wall, “Irish American Fables,” 96–98. 41 Catholic News Service, “U.S. Bishops”; Pope Francis, “Pope.” 42 Catholic News Service, “U.S. Bishops.” 43 Gordon, Circling My Mother, 174. 44 Doyle et al., SPSC, 282. 45 Doyle et al., SPSC, x.

Bibliography Primary Sources Arnow, B.A. “Relationships Between Childhood Maltreatment, Adult Health, and Psychiatric Outcomes, and Medical Utilization.” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 65, no. 12: 10–15, 2004. BBC News. “Catholic Church Child Sexual Abuse Scandal.” October 5, 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/ world‑44209971. Bishop Accountabililty.org. 2004. https://www.bishopaccountability.org/news2013/03_04/2013_03_14_WUSA_ BarbaraDorris.htm

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Sally Barr Ebest Carerra, Catherine. “How the Crisis of Catholic Priests Sexually Abusing Minors Mirrors Society at Large.” NorthJersey.com. February 22, 2019. “Catholic Church Child Sexual Abuse Scandal.” BBC News, October 5, 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/ world‑44209971. Catholic News Service. “US Bishops: 2930 Abuse Victims Came Forward in 2020–21.” July 15, 2022. https:// www.ncronline.org/news/accountability/us‑bishops‑2930‑abuse‑victims‑came‑forward‑2020‑2021. Cullen, Kevin. “Scandal Erodes Traditional Deference to Church.” Boston Globe, May 30, 2012. https://www. bostonglobe.com/news/special‑0, reports/2002/05/12/scancal‑erodes‑traditional‑deference‑church/mplnp1b‑ fouhbpwju9zjyxl/story.htm. Knopf, Terry Ann. “Where Were Boston’s TV Stations During the Church Sex Abuse Scandal? Columbia Jour‑ nalism Review, February 26, 2016. McChesney, Kathleen. “What Caused the Crisis? Key Findings of the John Jay College Study on Clergy Sexual Abuse.” America Magazine, June 6, 2011. https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2011/06/06/what‑caused‑ crisis‑key‑findings‑john‑jay‑college‑study‑clergy‑sexual‑abuse‑150155 Pearce, Jonathan M.S. “Are Catholic Clergy more Likely to Be Paedophiles than the General Public? Redux.” Patheos, March 24, 2021. https://www.bishop‑accountability.org/2021/03/are‑catholic‑clergy‑more‑likely‑ to‑be‑paedophiles‑than‑the‑general‑public‑redux/ Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. “The Church and the Scandal of Sexual Abuse.” Catholic News Agency. https:// www.thecatholicthing.org/2019/04/11/benedict‑xvi‑the‑Church‑and‑the‑scandal‑of‑sexual‑abuse/Retrieved April 15, 2019. “Pope Francis Updates Canon Law to Address Paedophilia by Priests.” https://www.france24.com/en/europe/ 20210601‑pope‑francis‑updates‑canon‑law‑to‑address‑paedophilia‑by‑priests. Roewe, Brian. “Barbara Dorris, Two Board Members the Latest SNAP Leaders to Leave.” National Catholic Reporter, April 6, 2018. https://www.ncronline.org/news/accountability/barbara‑dorris‑two‑board‑members‑ latest‑snap‑leaders‑leave. Savage, Robert and James Smith. “Sexual Abuse and the Irish Church: Crisis and Responses.” The Church in the 21st Century. Occasional Paper #8. Boston College. chrome‑extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/ https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/top/church21/pdf/savagesmithfinal.pdf. 2003.

Secondary Sources Astbury, Jill. “Child Sexual Abuse in the General Community and Clergy‑Perpetrated Child Sexual Abuse.” Australian Psychological Society, July 2013. Barr, Colin. Ireland’s Empire: The Roman Catholic Church in the English‑Speaking World. Cambridge: Cam‑ bridge University Press, 2000. Barr, Colin, and Hillary Carey. Religion and Greater Ireland: Christianity and Irish Global Networks, 1750– 1969. Vol. 2. Montreal: McGill‑Queen’s University Press, 2015. Carroll, Matt, Kevin Cullen, Thomas Farragher, Stephen Kurkjian, Michael Paulson, Sacha Pfeiffer, Michael Rezendes, and Walter V. Robinson. Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church. New York: Little, Brown, 2002. Dezell, Maureen. Irish America: Coming into Clover. New York: Anchor Books, 2001. Doyle, Thomas P., A.W. Richard Sipe, and Patrick J. Wall. Sex, Priests, and Secret Codes: The Catholic Church’s 2,000 Year Paper Trail of Sexual Abuse. Los Angeles, CA: Volt, 2006. Ewick, Patricia, and Marc W. Steinberg. Beyond Betrayal: The Priest Sex Abuse Crisis, the Voice of the Faithful, and the Process of Collective Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Gibson, David. The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World. New York: HarperOne, 2006. Gordon, Mary. Circling My Mother. New York: Pantheon, 1997. Keenan, Marie. Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Luther, Martin. Luther’s Works. Vol. 47. Helmut T. Lehmann, General Editor, Vols. 31–55. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955. Maps, Jill Astbury. “The Psychological Impact of Clergy‑Perpetrated Child Abuse.” Society, September 1, 2016. Meagher, Timothy J. The Columbia Guide to Irish American History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. O’Connor, Thomas H. The Boston Irish: A Political History. Chicago, IL: Northeastern University Press, 1995. O’Toole, Fintan. We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland. New York: Liveright, 2021.

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Breaking Silence of Child Abuse in Irish-American Catholic Church Ratzinger, Joseph. Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, October 1, 1986. https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_ 19861001_homosexual‑persons_en.html. Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), 2021. https://www.votf.org/ Wall, Eamonn. “Irish American Fables of Resistance.” In From Oven Lane to Sun Prairie: In Search of Irish America, 91–108. Dublin, Ireland: Arlen House, 2019. Wills, Gary. Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit. New York: Doubleday, 2000.

Newspapers Boston Globe. “Thousands Say They Are Children of Catholic Priests.” August 16, 2017. Enright, Ann. “Clair Wills: Seeing the Unseeable, Saying the Unsayable.” Irish Times, May 9, 2023. Frogameni, Bill. “Toledo Native Barbara Blaine Crusades Against Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church.” Toledo City Paper, April 29–May 5, 2004. Henley, Jon. “How the Boston Globe Exposed the Abuse Scandal that Rocked the Catholic Church.” The Guard‑ ian, April 21, 2010. Herbeck, Dan. “Does Catholic Church Have Bigger Sex Abuse Problem than Other Religions?” Buffalo News, August 16, 2019.

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35 LGBTQ IRISH ACTIVISTS AND THE QUEERING OF IRISH AMERICA Bridget E. Keown

The weather was slightly warmer than usual in New York City on March 16, 1991; bright sunshine illuminated the two-mile route of the 230th annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade that stretched from East 44th Street to East 79th Street. For most parade observers, the day likely passed with what the New York Times described as the usual “unexplainable blend of symbolism and silliness: green bagels, green beer, green carnations, green shamrock-shaped deelyboppers and green tam o’shanters on the heads of green-around-the-gills police officers.” For others, specifically members of the New York’s Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization (ILGO), who marched with the Manhattan Division 7 of the AOH, the day was a tense one. ILGO members endured beer bottles flung in their direction, as well as prolonged jeering and profanity from the crowds all along the parade route. One marcher recalled hearing homophobic slurs and jeers from the crowd that included, “You’re not Irish. Your parents must be English!” A parade observer from Harrison, New Jersey, explained his opposition to the ILGO’s marching to Associated Press by stating, “They shouldn’t be here. The day is for the Irish.”1 This staunch refusal to acknowledge that the marchers could be both Irish and queer reflects a homophobic nationalist ideology present within many former sites of British imperialism. Within this thinking, homosexuality (rather than homophobia), represents an “imported European vice” that is inconsistent with indigenous culture and history. Closer scrutiny of the history of British imperial‑ ism reveals how British academics, colonial leaders, and institutions all emphasized “the body’s role as anchor of social roles and identities,” emphasizing the co-constitutive nature of race, gender, and sexuality as markers of “civilization,” and social respectability. As Franz Fanon notes, this construc‑ tion reinforces a dominant Western—specifically British—heteronormativity, while also ensuring that colonized people remain “trapped in the tight links of the chains of colonialism.” Over the course of generations, homophobic, anti-queer ideology comes to be seen as part of long-standing cultural attitudes, rather than part and parcel of colonial domination and dehumanization.2 Scholars have considered the legacy of colonization, as well as the more modern impact of neocolonial interventions, from a diverse range of perspectives and frameworks of analysis. Their focus, however, generally tends toward the late nineteenth century, during the age of “New Imperialism,” when the British Empire expanded into Africa and Asia. As a result, they often overlook historical connections to earlier sites of conquest, or in places where hierarchies of power remained more am‑ biguous. This especially includes Ireland, which was both a victim of British imperial violence and racialized domination, and which also actively engaged in the process of imperial expansion as a white “martial race,” as well as from hereditary and economic ties to England itself. Here, as in other DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-42

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spaces where British laws against homosexual acts narrowed Irish nationalists’ understanding of preconquest sexual identity and gender performance. According to Averill Earls, by the late Victorian period, Irish nationalist media held that “same-sex sex was an unnatural offense of English import,” that could only be driven out by Irish autonomous rule.3 With generations of immigration and the establishment of diasporic communities, queerness be‑ came an identity that was always outside the borders of “Irishness,” regardless of physical location. On one hand, as Mary Dorcey explained, “To be a queer who stays in Ireland and writes about it is to fly in the face of all our cultural expectations.” On the other hand, while emigration provided many the opportunity to live openly, most dominant Irish-American institutions (including those who organized St. Patrick’s Day Parades) insisted that homosexuality and queerness more broadly remained inherently antithetical to the Irish-American identity. As evidenced above, the spectators at the 1991 New York St. Patrick’s Day Parade affirmed this by claiming that the members of the ILGO were “not Irish.” In fighting to ban gay groups from marching in the 1995 Boston St. Patrick’s Day Parade, attorney Chester Darling explained, “We want to celebrate our themes, not somebody else’s.” Clearly, queerness and Irishness were understood to be antithetical. Nonetheless, the very presence of the ILGO at the parade indicates that this belief was neither universally held nor uni‑ formly unquestioned.4 This chapter examines the emergence of queer Irish-American groups in the latter half of the twentieth century, a period that coincided with both the gay liberation movement and the rise of neoconservatism, movements which directly invoked and impacted Irish-American communities in the United States. By focusing on how these groups embodied and celebrated a more expansive, welcoming, and creative Irish-American identity, this chapter considers, first, how their presence challenged heteronormative Irish-American identity, and how their engagement with queer theory, politics, and public demonstrations aided in manifesting multiple forms of resistance to exclusionary forms of Irish identity. Second, it traces how queer Irish immigrant and Irish-American communi‑ ties resist assimilation and depoliticization through consistent recommitment to a queer politics of solidarity. In order to show both the theoretical and practical evolution of Irish-American queer identity and theory, this chapter will consider two specific St. Patrick’s Day Parades. First, it looks at the 1991 St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Manhattan to demonstrate the legacy of race and class in the construction of a normative Irish-American identity, and analyze the specific challenges posed by the ILGO and its allies to that construction. Second, the chapter will move through time to the first St. Pat’s For All Parade, in the year 2000. This approach enables an examination of the ways in which construction of “Irishness” shifted over time, and continues to shift through the intervention of queer Irish emigrants and activists. While this framing does favor a specific geographic location, the national attention that these parades received made it a center of an international discussion about Irish-American identity within larger conversations about immigration, race, and class taking place at the time.

Queer Theory and Irish America This period is especially useful because of the simultaneous emergence of “queer theory” in the 1990s, both in academia and on the streets. As an academic tool, queer theory, coined by Teresa de Laurentis in 1991, emerged from and as a critique of more established frameworks like women’s studies and feminist theory. Although it shares a focus on lived experience, identity, and the effects of power on individuals, communities, and cultural narratives, queer theory specifically challenged the idea that there were any established “norms” or “natural” states of being, especially when it came to issues of sexuality. Gay and lesbian culture, communities, and sexual practices did not exist on the margins of a well-defined society; rather, they existed within, and in opposition to, that society. As 459

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Giffney explains, “Queer theorists refuse to ‘play the game’ of the dominant culture, and instead of asking what is wrong with queers, turn an interrogative gaze toward societal norms and the assump‑ tions which underpin those norms.” Thus, queer theory was inherently a force for social and political change, uniting marginalized groups in a common struggle, while never losing sight of the histories and experiences that made each group unique.5 Additionally, queer theory evolved terms to describe these norms, including “heteronormativity,” which describes how dominant institutions, including medical authorities, government policies, and media, assume heterosexuality and binary gender roles to be inherent through practices like narrative tropes, marriage, tax laws, or in the punishment of perceived deviance. Rather than being “natural” or “normal,” however, queer theorist Judith Butler explained that heteronormative gender roles and sexual relationships are neither fixed nor natural. Instead, they represent a framework of expectations that shape how an individual behaves on a day-to-day basis. This “regulated process of repetition” becomes so ingrained as to appear (and perhaps, for some, to feel) natural. That is, until and until someone, such as a queer Irish-American group in a St. Patrick’s Day parade, forces a society to examine the assumptions that underpin their performance.6 Such concepts would be impossible to articulate without the work of LGBTQ activist groups like ACT-UP and Queer Nation, whose work forced attention to the devastating impact of the AIDS crisis on those communities. Their work made queerness manifest through political engagement that was ideological, emotional, and highly performative in nature. These protests included “invading” spaces like the New York Stock Exchange, by forming a human chain to encirle pharmaceutical com‑ pany buildings, or performing funerals in the street, creating explicit visual connections between the structures and institutions of power that flourished while hundreds of thousands of individuals stood suffering and dying outside their borders. These disruptions of normative time, space, and routine also managed to disrupt individuals’ understanding of themselves and their community. Queer con‑ frontational politics helped shift internalized emotions of shame or anger away from the individual and redirected them toward the institutions and society responsible for stigmatizing queerness. This same transformation took place among Irish queer activists whose work around parade protests, as well as community activism, helped identify the social attitudes that contributed toward self-hatred and isolation.7 At the same time, activists insisted on the importance of coalition-building to continue challenging hierarchical oppression and familiar categorization that isolated and shamed individuals for their dif‑ ferences. In describing the work of Queer Nation, Allan Bérubé and Jeffrey Escoffier note that the use of the word “queer” represented more than the reclamation of a derogatory term for homosexuals— it represented a wholescale rejection of traditional categorizations by uniting “people who have been made to feel perverse, queer, odd, outcast, different, and deviant, and to affirm sameness by defining a common identity on the fringes.” From that commonality at the fringes lies the real potential of queer activism. As Cathy J. Cohen explained: For many of us, the label ‘queer’ symbolizes an acknowledgement that through our existence and everyday survival we embody sustained and multisited resistance to systems (based on dominant constructions of race and gender) that seek to normalize our sexuality, exploit our la‑ bor, and constrain our visibility. At the intersection of oppression and resistance lies the radical potential of queerness to challenge and bring together all those deemed marginal and all those committed to liberatory politics. As we will see, by challenging dominant Irish-American identities and later by organizing in soli‑ darity with other marginalized groups, queer Irish-American activists embodied the theoretical, the political, and the imaginative potential of queer theory.8 460

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Confronting Heteronormative Irish-American Identity In a retrospective essay on his Irish-American upbringing and queer activism, Sean Cahill recalls that “[g]rowing up in suburban Boston, our Irish heritage was not contested.” The “heritage” refers to the traditional script of Irish-American assimilation that supported heteronormative, patriarchal ideas regarding family structure, religious devotion, and patriotic loyalty, along with a healthy nos‑ talgia for a distant homeland. Yet, Cahill continues, “when GLIB [Irish American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Committee of Boston] sought to march in the 1992 Boston parade…suddenly our Irishness was contested…the legitimacy of our participation in the Irish American community, as openly gay people, was challenged.” It was only when activists interrogated the assumptions that supported this notion of “heritage” that the instability and inscrutability of that heritage became clear. Even though (or, perhaps, precisely because) he was raised with Irish cultural productions and stories “about the role our grandfather and great aunts played in the struggle for Irish independence,” Cahill only began to examine his heritage critically when the seams of its construction were shown to him: “My Puerto Rican American partner at the time asked me, “You’re that green thing, right?” I wondered, what is this heritage, this culture that people so hotly contest and seek to control?” Cahill’s experience of sudden exclusion from a community that had previously welcomed him without question highlights its implicit (and in some ways tenuous) construction as an “imagined community,” as well as the lengths the members of that community would go to protect it, expelling living members to preserve the fabricated ideal. 9 Cahill’s narrative offers a glimpse into the privilege of the dominant Irish-American identity that had emerged over generations of immigration and assimilation, as well as the perceived threat that queer Irish immigrants posed through their activism. As we have seen in other chapters throughout this book, Irish immigrants in nineteenth-century America navigated strict racial hierarchies and en‑ gaged in violent racial enforcement to assert their “whiteness” and thus gain access to racial privilege in their adopted homeland, often at the expense of Black populations and immigrants from other racialized nations. Jennifer Nugent Duffy acknowledges that such choices take place within a long history of “encounters with exclusion,” first by British colonial practices and later by racism and xen‑ ophobia in the United States. In choosing to ally with the source of heteronormative power, rather than with its other victims, the established Irish-American identity perforce grew increasingly exclusive and the conservative, inextricably linking Irishness with heterosexual, economic, and racial notions of “respectability.” This constructed identity also supports a linear narrative of progress where Irish Americans physically moved from their oppression in Ireland and raised themselves “up from pov‑ erty” in America, without acknowledging any potential for divergence or difference from the script.10 These protests occurred within the context of the global AIDS epidemic, but they were inter‑ preted within the specific context of the American moral panic over HIV and the villainization of its victims. Focusing on the highly visible nature of HIV-related symptoms, American media and political narratives equated “the deadly potential of AIDS…with a certain category of people whose biological death only confirmed that they had been undeserving of life all along.” Queer Irish and Irish-American protesters challenged more than just the conservatism of Irish-American organiza‑ tions by protesting their exclusion from St. Patrick’s Day Parades. At a time when social anxieties around homosexuality, disease, and desire relied on the stigmatization and villainization of the gay male body, they also insisted on membership in a community whose cohesion and privilege relied on its collective heteronormativity, gendered hierarchies, and subservience to institutions of power. This demand to embody both a queer and an Irish- or Irish-American identity, to be a sexual body in a community where sexuality remained unmarked, exposed the constructed nature of this identity itself, forcing those who had benefitted from the dominant cultural narrative to face those who suf‑ fered outside their proscribed borders.11 461

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“Coming Out of Hiding” in New York City, 1991 Brendan Fay immigrated from the Irish Republic to the United States in the 1980s, one of many young gay men eager to find acceptance and liberation in New York City, which Sally Munt described as an idealized “promised land,” for individuals living in repressive countries or communities. In many ways, the City lived up to its myth. Fay describes how the gay scene in New York helped him form a new sense of his own sexual and national identity. As he recalled in a later interview: I would say that the fearful, repressed, self-hating homosexual who arrived at Kennedy Airport began a slow, painful, but very liberating transformation…I began by finding books by Carter Heyward, Audrey Lorde, and John McNeil. By day I was studying…By night, I was discover‑ ing the gay world of Queens, at bars like the Magic Touch…which really reflected the Jackson Heights gay community in its diversity. Fay’s experiences reflect that of many queer Irish immigrants at this time who came to understand their own identity within the context of other marginalized identities, including immigrants of color and those from lower classes. Notable, too, is Fay’s implicit acknowledgment that he had internal‑ ized the prohibitions on homosexuality inherent in Irish society, which manifested in feelings of fear, repression, and self-loathing which he felt “at home.” The work of immigrants therefore meant more than just physical relocation; it also required moving away from familiar, harmful conceptions of the self and toward new, consciously formed identities within kinship groups that could offer support, recognition, and liberation.12 Much of Fay’s reading material came via Craig Rodwell, founder of the Oscar Wilde Memo‑ rial Bookshop. Fay credits Rodwell with introducing him to the importance of lesbians and gay men to Irish history, and with forcing Fay to “rethink being Irish and gay,” not as a paradox, but as two strands in a coherent identity. It was likewise at the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop that Fay came to understand the potential of a coalition to confront the violence of heteronormativity, nationalism, global racism, and economic imperialism. It was through his relationship with activist Jesús Lebron that Fay began taking part in activism, learning “how to take passion and love from the sheets to the streets.” As a self-described “Puerto Rican Gay man who’s out to his immediate family and proudly Boricua [Puerto Rican native] to all Gay people,” Lebron insisted “in the fight against racism and homophobia that it is very possible to be uncompromisingly demanding of respect for one’s whole being.” Rather than attempting to conform to the norms of each aspect of his identity, or compartmentalizing his queerness and his ethnicity, Jesús Lebron demonstrated the expansive potential of queer theory and activism, helping people like Fay “feel the possibility of coming out of hiding.”13 Eager to share his process of becoming, Fay placed a notice on the bookshop’s community bul‑ letin board in the spring of 1988, inviting gay and lesbian Irish Americans and immigrants to regular meetings that would eventually grow into the ILGO. The response was swift and enthusiastic. Anne Maguire recalled how profound these meetings were for gay and lesbian Irish immigrants, who at last had a place where they could acknowledge and celebrate their national and sexual identity together: Before ILGO we were forced to choose; we could be Irish if we were closeted…or we could be lesbians and gay men so long as we gave up the benefits offered by the Irish community to im‑ migrants to this city. The ILGO changed all that. Women and men from all walks of life flocked to the group…Self-identified Irish lesbians and gay men seemed to come as a surprise to many in the gay community and jokes were made about how our existence was an oxymoron.

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The ILGO thus offered a space to recognize that there was nothing inherently contradictory about being both Irish and queer, an idea that would pose multiple, overlapping challenges to the heteronor‑ mative status quo.14 Together, members of the ILGO also worked to reclaim the history of Irish lesbians and gay men as foundational to their identity as immigrants and as people of Irish descent in America. Fay recalls how the ILGO and its partner organization, the Lavender and Green Alliance, organized “dinner dance celebrations of Irish LGBTQ culture,” featuring “images of our Irish LGBTQ heroes—Roger Casement, Oscar Wilde, Eva Gore-Booth, Elizabeth O’Farrell, and Robert Rygor, among others—on the walls.” These portraits did more than replace the impersonal symbolism of shamrocks and lep‑ rechauns. They refuted the normative idea that queerness was a British import. Indeed, establishing Irish creativity, Irish nationalism, and Irish activism as the legacy of queer Irish ancestors meant, these celebrations acknowledged, “the queerness of Ireland herself,” first as a “colonial ‘other,’” and latterly as a nation “in the process of perpetual metamorphosis.” That emphasis on continual change represents a key aspect of queer theory, which insists that no identity is fixed in its time or place. According to Gayatri Gopinath, diasporic queer communities play a vital role in process by mobilizing “histories of racist and colonial violence that continue to resonate in the present and that make themselves felt through bodily desire.” Rather than seeing Ireland’s “queerness” only as part of a colonized past, the ILGO and the Lavender and Green Alliance understood queerness as central to contemporary Irish culture on both sides of the Atlantic. They also saw themselves as embodying, in their cultural celebrations and their sexual desires, a sense of Irishness in America that was more authentic than that which they had left, as well as the heteronormative construction of Irishness on display at St. Patrick’s Day Parades in the United States.15

“Irish Enough” in Queens, 2000 Time and space constrain the ability to examine how queer Irish- and Irish-American activists suc‑ ceeded in forcing more nuanced discussions of identity and belonging within the multiple and in‑ terconnected communities to which they belonged, or the ways in which these conversations led to progress within dominant Irish-American communities, as well as more private spaces where families and kin performed Irish-American identity through celebrations, food, and conversation. It is pos‑ sible, however, to infer many of these changes by considering another St. Patrick’s Day celebration in New York almost a decade later. The final part of this chapter will focus on the development of the St. Pat’s for All Parade, first held in 2000, and highlight the many ways that this parade manifested a more creative, flexible, and hospitable conception of Irish-American identity. By highlighting the ways in which this parade represents a physical and theoretical engagement with queer theory, this section will demonstrate how many of the same Irish-American activists who challenged the Man‑ hattan St. Patrick’s Day Parade worked to overcome the fixedness and insularity of Irish-American identity, and how they continue challenging their community to grow, develop, and embrace an everchanging and ever-expanding notion of Irish-American identity for the future. In an essay recalling his experience of being arrested for protesting with the Lavender and Green Alliance at the 1995 St. Patrick’s Day Parade, author Michael Cunningham provides an example of how Irish-American identity evolved over time. This was the first parade held after the Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston (GLIB) decision, where the US Supreme Court unanimously declared that the Irish Council of South Boston was within its rights to refuse parade permits to any group with whose message they disagreed. “What, then,” asked Cunningham, “could we do but join the 1995 parade anyway, with multiple banners?” Although Cunningham’s name implies an Irish heritage, he learned in his early twenties that “my paternal grandfather, third

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generation, took the name Cunningham because it seemed like a better bet for getting on in American than his actual name, Grig, which is Croatian.” Rather than see nationality as a barrier to his partici‑ pation in the parade, however, Cunningham instead used his unique heritage to justify his increased activism: America is, of course, full of people bearing invented names and, by implication, invented histories. I, with my own invented name and history, had never marched in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade before. But I believe that any living person is Irish enough to publicly face down discrimination no matter where, or who, it comes from. Cunningham’s narrative contests the closed system of the hegemonic American construction of Irish identity that relied on narratives of white privilege and strict adherence to heteronormative ideals. Instead, he invokes a history of Irish oppression and revolutionary determination that enables al‑ liances with other marginalized groups in America, specifically because of their marginalization. Indeed, within this narrative, to be of Irish heritage has nothing to do with the borders of one’s an‑ cestral homeland; instead, it is a willingness to face down bigotry, or ally with an underdog in need of support. Through this interpretation, Cunningham draws on the history of British imperial oppres‑ sion, and the history of revolutionary opposition treasured by Irish-American heritage organizations. Rather than using that colonial history to justify exclusion on the basis of a fixed and pure Irish cul‑ ture, though, Cunningham deploys it for inclusivity, holding that an ongoing, active struggle against oppression represents the real beating heart of the Irish identity.16 Fay, along with many other activists in queer Irish organizations, saw the constant battles over AOH parade participation as limiting and ultimately futile, especially since “winning” only repre‑ sented the same kind of assimilation to hierarchical power that queer activists specifically opposed. At the same time, they recognized that the presence of queer marchers would remain an exception to the general rules and orientation of the parade, rather than offering the potential for radical change. As Emmaia Gelman explained, even after marching down Fifth Avenue, “the parade still feels like a conservative, religious-right parade and not really an Irish community parade…it seems like there’s progress, but it doesn’t feel like home to me.” Creating a sense of “home” would require, to quote again from Gelman, acknowledging “the story of how Irishness hasn’t been only Catholic or white or male, nor especially polite, nor limited to venues marked ‘Irish.’”17 A possible method of embodying and demonstrating the multiplicity of “Irish worlds” emerged, according to Fay, while he and Duncan ate at a neighborhood Chilean restaurant in Woodside. When the owner heard their discussion about an inclusive celebration, he pointed delightedly to the portrait of Bernardo O’Higgins — Chilean independence fighter, first leader of a fully independent Chilean state, and son of an Irish immigrant. According to Adrian Mulligan’s history of the parade, this inter‑ action helped Fay and Duncan realize That gays and lesbians were not the only ones excluded from marching on Fifth Avenue each year[;] …there were thousands of other New Yorkers with cherished Irish historical connec‑ tions who had never been explicitly invited to participate in any St. Patrick’s Day parade. With this in mind, the organizers of the St. Pat’s for All Parade specifically included communi‑ ties whose “Irishness” seemed irreconcilable with their subordinate political status. They included people of color, against whom many Irish Americans historically constructed their whiteness and their middle-class morality. They also included the sick and disabled, whom most parade organizers deemed constitutionally unfit for the rigors of a parade. Articulating an Irish identity in opposition to heteronormative precedent represented a significant step toward reimagining kinship and community 464

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around St. Patrick’s Day, while also rejecting the imperialist, “domination mentality” chosen by many Irish-American institutions.18 The St. Pat’s for All Parade faced numerous ideological challenges from the beginning. First, organizers had to negotiate the political and affective realities of their chosen neighborhoods, which remain among the most ethnically diverse in the United States. This meant respecting the social and cultural differences that exist among even the most tight-knit communities as well as the multi‑ ple immigration narratives that framed individual lived experiences. Rather than condescending to the American notion of “multiculturalism,” which anonymizes and marginalizes any group that has not successfully assimilated, organizers emphasized the strength that came from centering differ‑ ence. Second, organizers needed to acknowledge what Sarah Schulman and Chloé Bruère Dawson argue is the concomitant threat of queer gentrification, and white, queer collaboration in domina‑ tion dynamics. To occupy the streets of Woodside without the welcome, consent, and input of the neighbors who lived there would merely replicate the imperialist attitudes of the larger parades in Manhattan. Through conscientious organizing around a welcoming, creative, and empathetic sense of “Irishness,” the St. Pat’s for All Parade demonstrated the queer potential in repurposing historical narratives, seeking solidarity through difference, and directly confronting systems and narratives of oppression to effect change.19 The parade organized around a line from the 1916 Proclamation of Independence: “Cherishing All the Children of the Nation Equally.” This quote invoked a celebration of the “connective strands of Irishness which unite a broad range of people,” regardless of age, appearance, or other affilia‑ tions, while simultaneously acknowledging that such differences have historically been “fostered by an alien Government, which have divided a minority from the majority.” While obviously invoking the English domination of Ireland, within the contemporary context, this reminder also referenced the biased and divisive policies of Irish-American institutions and the dominant American racial order. Those who marched behind this banner took (and continue to take) this dedication to “cher‑ ishing all the children of the nation equally” to heart. Leading the parade in 2000, alongside Fay and Duncan, was Franciscan priest and FDNY Chaplain, Father Mychal Judge, wearing his Franciscan robes and sandals. The son of immigrants from Co. Leitrim, Judge “unified the many disparate ten‑ ets of Irish-American identity,” specifically through his empathetic approach to service. A recover‑ ing alcoholic and a gay man himself (a fact he shared as part of his ministry and with close friends), Judge worked with and ministered to people with AIDS, the unhoused, and those struggling with substance abuse disorder at a time when stigma and discrimination harmed both victims of these circumstances, and those who cared for them. Judge has been historicized largely for his heroic efforts and ministry following the collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. As the first certified fatality of the attacks on that day, his legacy is inextricably linked to the national‑ ist American imaginary, even though his life’s work focused on caring for those whom American society explicitly overlooked.20 Parade organizers also welcomed representatives of the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma, who wished to celebrate their historic bond with the people of Ireland. The Choctaw people were the first to be forcibly relocated during the Trail of Tears, the name given to the ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of approximately 60,000 indigenous people between 1830 and 1850. Following their arrival in Oklahoma, survivors collected and sent $170 (equivalent to about $5,000 at the time of writing) to Irish Famine victims via Quaker relief committees. While historians have marveled that it would be “difficult to imagine a people less well-positioned to act philanthropically” than the Choc‑ taw, their gift emphasized a shared victimization at the hands of imperial power, an empathy that cut across racial identities or geographic barriers and embodied political solidarity before the English language had evolved to encompass those notions. The St. Pat’s for All Parade acknowledged this gift, along with the solidarity it implied.21 465

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Centering the historic bond between the Irish and Choctaw, specifically the idea that both peoples had suffered the injustice of conquest and domination, created even more potential to consider alter‑ native histories that could expand the reach of the St. Pat’s for All celebrations. The parade grew to include a Mexican contingent, representing the San Patricio battalion, made up of immigrants of Irish descent who fought alongside the Mexican Army during the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). In addition to celebrating the historic connections with Ireland and its people, the St. Pat’s for All Parade queered and queried familiar notions of parade heroism by celebrating acts of empathy and subversion by and among “defeated” peoples—those who suffered at the hands of neoliberal ideol‑ ogy, martial masculinity, and imperial violence. This act of historical reclamation recalls the images of queer Irish ancestors on the walls during the Lavender and Green Alliance’s “dinner dance cel‑ ebrations,” by repositioning Irish heroism in opposition to imperial conquest. It also demonstrates a radical definition of the “Irish nation” that overlooks national borders in favor of affective communal ties among historically marginalization without obscuring the unique narratives of each community. These actions further demonstrate how the St. Pat’s for All Parade challenged linear narratives of belonging, or heroic narratives of conquest. Instead, this parade incorporated the past in creative new ways that engaged with multiple histories of exclusion and injury, while still looking forward toward a historically informed future.22 This expansive definition of “Irishness” thus acknowledged not only a spectrum of sexual expres‑ sion, but also a multitude of bodily needs and desires, and a range of emotional and psychological attachments. We can thus “read” the St. Pat’s for All Parade as embodying queer theory, while also manifesting the desires of queer activists and feminists to move beyond discussion to action, or to realize the revolutionary potential of discussion when it reconfigures existing identities and future potentialities. This orientation, which challenged notions of inheritance and fixed identity categories, felt much more authentic to many Irish participants. Emmaia Gelman explained to the Village Voice that the “Irishness” on display in Queens was more in keeping with a modern Ireland, where activists were “making sure that the institutions created by the peace process include queers.” According to actor and writer Malachy McCourt, who marched with the LGBT contingent in the 2023 Manhattan St. Patrick’s Day Parade, this authenticity rested in a recognition of the critical importance of “hospi‑ tality” within Irish culture. Even before the imperial spread of Christianity that formed the basis of so much of the Irish-American identity, “one must never let a stranger pass your door without offering him the best of what you have because you never know if the stranger could be a deity.” Reorient‑ ing “Irishness” away from identity categories and toward an embodied sense of justice also forced spectators and participants to acknowledge where and how their own institutions and performances failed. This led to groups like Irish Queers NYC to spend St. Patrick’s Day protesting restrictive US immigration laws, and police officers of Irish heritage who enforced those laws.23 This is not to claim that the St. Pat’s for All Parade manifests a queer ideal—the foundation of queer theory is its acceptance of change, instability, and reformation. Nor can we overlook some troubling trends that have emerged as the parade has grown in popularity. For many politicians, ­attendance at the St. Pat’s for All Parade is often used as a stand-in for policy or political action. Within that same context, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have praised the “inclusivity” of the parade in a way that threatens to promote what Lisa Duggan terms “homonormativity,” or “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a…depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.” For example, in a letter to parade organizers in 2003, then Mayor of Dublin Der‑ mot Lacey declared, “In my view the inclusive nature of your parade reflects very much the new and welcome pluralist nature of the Irish Republic today.” Likewise, Barbara Jones, Consul General of Ireland in the United States, explained at the 2017 St. Pat’s for All Parade, “I think that the lesbian and gay leadership represent what are fundamental values of identity, inclusion, and equality that must be 466

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practiced everywhere, all the time.” While both letters demonstrate an appreciation for the work of the St. Pat’s for All Parade, they also posit “inclusivity” and “equality” as qualities that are inherent in normative, hierarchical institutions like the state, and reframes the radical potential of queer events as serving the interests of the state.24 It is more helpful to see the St. Pat’s for All Parade not as the sole actualization of queer IrishAmerica, but rather as one tangible manifestation of the transit of ideas, histories, and bodies that claim “Irishness” within and among different communities and identity groups. By reorienting Irish‑ ness toward the very concepts that were once held as anathema by Irish-American institutions, queer Irish-American activists have succeed in manifesting other tangible spaces for discourse, commemo‑ ration, and education. We can look to the 2022 ceremony where the corner of 34th Street and Broad‑ way in Astoria, Queens, became “Stanley, Kathleen, & Robert Rygor Way,” to honor the work of ILGO member and AIDS activist Robert Rygor and his parents. As a member of the ILGO and the Lavender and Green Alliance, Rygor led some of the first protesters, self-described as “gaylics,” to protest the Manhattan St. Patrick’s Day Parade. He went on to run as the first openly gay candidate for the New York State Legislature, as well as long-term organizer for ACT-UP. Following his death at age 40 from complications related to HIV, his parents became advocates in his name, emphasizing how even normative family structures can be challenged and reformed through the recognition and acceptance of queerness. Weeks later, San Francisco’s GLBT Historical Society Museum opened their “Out in the World” exhibit, focused on the “history of Ireland’s queer diaspora and queer Irish people’s impact on the world.” The exhibit, created by Maurice Casey of the Queer Northern Ireland project, first opened at EPIC: The Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin, before moving to the histori‑ cally Irish-American working-class neighborhood of the Castro, physically linking queer, Irish, and immigrant history in a novel, physical, and emotionally moving manner.25

Conclusion This chapter has attempted to show how queer Irish immigrants and Irish-American activists have ex‑ emplified and embodied the ideology of queer theory in order to challenge, expand, and reconstitute what it means to be Irish and queer in the United States. This work took place in direct and conscious opposition to long-standing, normative constructions of what it meant to be Irish American which relied on white privilege, racist violence, and conventional notions of middle-class, heterosexual “respectability” to claim a successful assimilation experience. The annual practice of St. Patrick’s Day parades provides unique opportunities to explore these ideas and confrontations. This is, in part, because of their tangible manifestation of a constructed Irish-American ideology, and also because parades themselves mirror the performative aspects of identity formation that queer theory seeks to challenge. The St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Manhattan represents an event and an identity founded on rigid hierarchies and inflexible narratives. While activists could confront and challenge these through their protests, inclusion in the parade felt to many like assimilation rather than revolution. In contrast, the St. Pat’s for All Parade provides an example of a community-organized event that encouraged the creation of multiple different, overlapping origin stories. This parade embodied a new, more creative identity that rejected assimilation and nostalgia for an imagined place and past, and instead celebrated as triumphant the very aspects of identity that many had learned to see as shameful. This included queerness and sexual identity, but also addiction, migrant status, and historical narratives of defeat, invasion, and displacement. It is important to note that, like the parade itself, the movements it represents continue to evolve. This is especially true as protesters, conservative organizations, and normative institutions work to suppress, stagnate, or appropriate queer movements across the coun‑ try. It is through a consistent and careful with the past, their faith, their alliances, and their embodied engagement that queer Irish American activists continue to critique and reflect on what it means to be 467

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all these things--queer, Irish, American, and activists--in every combination conceivable. Their work in the past and present opens creative possibilities for a future that is revolutionary in its hopefulness and future potentiality.

Notes 1 Barron, “Beer Shower”; AP, “Boos, Jeers”; O’Donnell, “St. Patrick’s Day,” 134. 2 Aldrich, “Historical Views of Homosexuality”; Buckle, “African Sexuality”; Wilson, “Empire, Gender, and Modernity,” 17; Shohat, Taboo Memories, 18; Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 54. 3 Jeffery, “The Irish Military Tradition and the British Empire,” 94–148; Earls, “Unnatural Offenses of English Import,” 399. 4 Quoted in Gray, Women and the Irish Diaspora, 88; Nealon, “St. Pat’s Parade,” 10. 5 De Laurentis, “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities,” iii–xviii; Giffney, “Quare Theory”, 244. 6 Butler, Gender Trouble, 145. 7 Cunningham, “Queer, Irish, Marching,” 216; Gould, “Rock the Boat,” 153 8 Bérubé, “Queer/Nation,” 12; Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens,” 440. 9 Cahill, “‘Cherishing Everyone Equally’”; Anderson, Imagined Communities. 10 Duffy, Who’s Your Paddy? 243; Brendan Fay interview; Duffy, Who’s Your Paddy?, 106. 11 Patton, Inventing AIDS, 132; Tannen, “Marked Women, Unmarked Men,” 18. 12 Munt, “The Lesbian Flâneur,” 118; Fay interview; Fay, “Finding Jesus on Christopher Street.” 13 Fay, “Finding Jesus on Christopher Street;” Lebron, “Never-ending Demands;” Fay, “Finding Jesus.” 14 Maguire, Rock the Sham!, 12–13. 15 Fay, “Remembering”; Graham Price, “Quite Another Thing,” 222; Gopinath, Impossible Desires, 4. 16 Cunningham, “Queer, Irish, Marching,” 216; Cunningham, 217; Mary Emily O’Hara, “Irish LGBTQ Group Skipping St. Pat’s Parade;” Cunningham, 217. 17 O’Hara, “Irish LGBTQ Group Skipping St. Pat’s Parade;” Gelman, “From Ireland to New York.” np. 18 Gelman, “From Ireland to New York,” np; Mulligan, “Countering Exclusion,”159; Gelman, “Mayor Must Reckon;” Schulman, Gentrification of the Mind, 30. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 108-9. 19 Hochschild, “There’s No One,” 738; Dawson, “Queer Gentrification.” 20 Provisional Government of the Irish Republic, Forógra na Poblachta, 1916; Traynor, “Remembering;” Fay, “Fr Mychal Judge”; National Academy of Sciences, Social Impact of AIDS, 65. 21 Shrout, “A ‘Voice of Benevolence,’” 558. 22 Higgins, “A Word,” xiii; Shrout, “A ‘Voice of Benevolence,’” 558; AP, “Insurgent;” Love, Feeling Backward, 18. 23 Humm, “Marching;” McCourt, “Made It”; O’Hara, “Irish LGBTQ Group Skipping St. Pat’s Parade.” 24 Duggan, “The New Homonormativity,” 179; Mulligan, 162; Warnock, “St. Pats for All,” 4. 25 Gelman, “From Ireland to New York,” np; Cassell, “Out.”

Bibliography Aldrich, Robert. “Historical Views of Homosexuality: European Colonialism.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, edited by William R. Thompson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1093/ acrefore/9780190228637.013.1246 Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 2016. Associated Press. “Boos, Jeers for Dinkins at St. Pat’s Day Parade.” Central New Jersey Home News, March 17, 1991. Associated Press. “Insurgent St. Patrick’s Day Parade Comes into Its Own.” New York Times, March 1, 2013. Barron, James. “Beer Shower and Boos for Dinkins at Irish Parade.” New York Times, March 17, 1991. Bérubé, Allan, and Jeffrey Escoffier. “Queer/Nation.” OUT/Look: National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly no. 11 (Winter 1991): 13–14. Buckle, Leah. “African Sexuality and the Legacy of Imported Homophobia.” Stonewall UK, October 1, 2020. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1990. Cahill, Sean. “‘Cherishing Everyone Equally’: My Gay Irish American Journey.” The Rainbow Times, March 16, 2016.

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LGBTQ Irish Activists and the Queering of Irish America Cassell, Heather. “Out in the World: GLBT Historical Society Exhibit Shows the Impact of the Queer Irish Di‑ aspora Globally.” Bay Area Reporter, May 25, 2022. Cohen, Cathy J. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3, no. 4 (1997): 437–465. Cunningham, Michael. “Queer, Irish, Marching.” In Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases, edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, 189–195. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020. Dawson, Chloé Bruère. “Queer Gentrification and the Gentrification of Queerness.” Bowie, April 3, 2023. De Laurentis, Teresa. “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities, an Introduction.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3, no. 2 (1991): iii–xviii. Duffy, Jennifer Nugent. Who’s Your Paddy? Racial Expectations and the Struggle for Irish American Identity. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Duggan, Lisa. “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism.” In Materializing Democ‑ racy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, edited by Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson, 175–194. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Earls, Averill. “Unnatural Offenses of English Import: The Political Association of Englishness and Same-Sex Desire in Nineteenth-Century Irish Nationalist Media.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 28, no. 3 (2019): 396–424. Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Fay, Brendan. “Breaking Centuries of Silence: Interview with Perry Brass.” March 1, 1999. http://gaytoday. badpuppy.com/garchive/interview/030199in.html. Fay, Brendan. “Finding Jesús on Christopher Street.” HuffPost, June 8, 2012. Fay, Brendan. “Fr Mychal Judge, the Saint of 9/11, and His Enduring Message of Compassion.” Irish Central, September 8, 2021. Fay, Brendan. “Remembering Tarlach Mac Niallais, Taken by COVID-19.” Gay City News, April 13, 2020. Gelman, Emmaia. “From Ireland to New York (and Back Again), Currents of the Queer Atlantic.” https://em‑ maiagelman.com/public-writing-2/. Gelman, Emmaia. “Op-Ed: Mayor Must Reckon with St. Patrick’s Parade Legacies.” City Limits, March 2, 2015. Giffney, Noreen. “Quare Theory.” In Theory on the Edge: Irish Studies and the Politics of Sexual Difference, edited by Noreen Giffney and Margrit Shildrick, 241–257. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Gould, Deborah. “Rock the Boat, Don’t Rock the Boat, Baby: Ambivalence and the Emergence of Militant AIDS Activism.” In Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, edited by Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jas‑ per, and Francesca Polletta, 135–157. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Gray, Breda. Women and the Irish Diaspora. New York: Routledge, 2004. Higgins, Michael D. Foreword to Famine Pots: The Choctaw-Irish Gift Exchange, 1847-Present, xvi–xviii. East Lansing: Michigan State University, 2020. Hochschild, Jennifer, and Vesla Mae Weaver. “‘There’s No One as Irish as Barack O’bama’: The Policy and Politics of American Multiracialism.” Perspectives on Politics 8, no. 3 (2010): 737–759. Humm, Andy. “Marching to a Different Drum.” The Village Voice, December 7, 1999. Jeffery, Keith. “The Irish Military Tradition and the British Empire.” In ‘An Irish Empire’? Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire, edited by Keith Jeffery, 94–122. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Lebron, Jesús. “Never‑Ending Demands.” The Blade, March 5, 1993. Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Maguire, Anne. Rock the Sham! New York: Street Level Press, 2006. McCourt, Malachy. “Made It to Another St. Patrick’s Day! And Expounds on the saint Who Really Isn’t a Saint.” Our Town, March 20, 2023. Mulligan, Adrian N. “Countering Exclusion: the ‘St. Pats for all’ Parade.” Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 15, no. 2 (2008): 153–167. Munt, Sally. “The Lesbian Flâneur.” In Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexuality, edited by David Bell and Gill Valentine, 114–125. London: Routledge, 1995. Nealon, Patricia. “St. Pat’s Parade Can Go Without Gays, Judge Says.” Boston Globe, January 18, 1995. O’Donnell, Katherine. “St. Patrick’s Day Expulsions: Race and Homophobia in New York’s Parade.” In Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture, edited by Wanda Balzano, Anne Mulhall, and Moynagh Sullivan, 128–140. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

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Bridget E. Keown O’Hara, Mary Emily. “Irish LGBTQ Group Skipping St. Pat’s Parade Protest, Will Turn to Immigrant Rights.” NBC News, March 16, 2017. Patton, Cindy. Inventing AIDS. New York: Routledge, 1990. Price, Graham. “Quite Another Thing: Recent Texts in Irish Queer Studies.” Irish University Review 43, no. 1 (2013): 222–233. Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso, 1991. Schulman, Sarah. Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Shohat, Ella. Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices. Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2006. Shrout, Anelise Hanson. “A “Voice of Benevolence from the Western Wilderness”: The Politics of Native Phi‑ lanthropy in the Trans‑Mississippi West.” Journal of the Early Republic 35, no. 4 (2015): 553–578. https:// doi.org/10.1353/jer.2015.0077. Traynor, Jessica. “Remembering Fr Mychal Judge, The Priest Who Was Killed in 9.11.” The Irish Times (­Dublin), September 11, 2019. Warnock, Kathleen. “St. Pats for All Bigger, Stronger than Ever.” Gay City News, March 16–29, 2017. Wilson, Kathleen. “Empire, Gender, and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century.” In Gender and Empire, edited by Philippa Levine, 14–45. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

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PART 7

The Twenty-First Century and Beyond

36 THE IRISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA Nicholas M. Wolf

What is known about the history of the Irish language in America has been limited as a result of a number of factors, including the paucity of references in source material to a language spoken by a smaller community within a vastly multilingual context dominated by English, the difficulty in positioning the topic within the historiography of the Irish language, and, in the end, too little attention by scholars of Irish America. To a certain extent, researchers have mitigated this last shortcoming in recent years through sustained investigations of the burgeoning print culture (specifically, newspapers) and associational life built around the language during the peak size of the native Irish‑speaking community in the United States and the early decades of the twentieth century. Yet the period covering roughly the late 1920s onward has not been explored in sufficient detail, leaving only a speculative sense of the declining level of Irish speakers in the United States and its diminished importance as a marker of identity.1 Building on these investigations of the content and personnel at the heart of the Irish‑language newspaper and organizational movements of the second half of the nineteenth century, this essay first provides some social context for why such activity could find an interested audience in this period. Feeding this support for the Irish language was a cohort of native speakers of Irish, most of them bilingual in English, whose numbers were driven by a growth in emigration from Irish‑speaking counties in Ireland from the 1840s onward—the Famine generation. In fact, this cohort contained a greater proportion of speakers of Irish as a mother tongue than in Ireland as a whole. These native Irish speakers ascended to an occupationally diverse living in the United States over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century and first decade of the twentieth that was not much different from that of their English monoglots peers. And although the majority of this population could be found in the American Northeast and parts of the Midwest, smaller concentrations of such individuals could be found throughout the United States. It was this population that provided the impetus for Irish‑language productions in the Irish‑­ American press, undermining, as recent scholars have demonstrated, previous assumptions that such work had been peripheral to the Gaelic revival movement in Ireland. Tied together by common ­experiences—many early Irish‑American advocates for Irish were Civil War veterans—scholarship has revealed key distinguishing features such as the depth of Fenian connections among early activists. This contrasted with the language movement in Ireland at the time, which contained individuals of similar ideological persuasion but also made room for constitutional nationalists and even those of a unionist persuasion. Finally, scholars have been right to emphasize the transatlantic and even global 473

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interdependence of the development of Irish‑language newspapers and association life (specifically, the so‑called Philo‑Celtic and Gaelic societies). Truly, the Irish and American (not to mention other diasporic locations) forged a global language‑revival movement in this period. But the language took on a different function for revivalists in the United States, its prestige advertised by proponents as a feature of an ethnic group thus equally equipped to strive for middle‑class respectability rather than as a means of defining a distinct national identity in opposition to foreign rule.

Historiographical Fits and Starts It should be understood at the outset that the lack of visibility of the Irish language in the United States among scholars is out of step with the swelling numbers of immigrants arriving in the country in the nineteenth century who could claim it as a first language. The key source for understanding this phenomenon is the 1910 US Census, the first to collect information on the “mother tongue” of all foreign‑born individuals and useful to understand retroactively the generation that had arrived in American as far back as the 1830s. This evidence, combined with scattered anecdotal evidence of the use of Irish prior to the Famine, suggests that the Irish‑speaking immigrant community was growing in size prior to the 1840s, but that it was probably smaller as a proportion of the Irish‑born than in subsequent years owing to the higher prevalence of immigrants from Ireland’s more English‑­speaking northern and midland areas. Thereafter, it can confidently be stated that those claiming Irish as a mother tongue in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had risen to approximately 291,000 in 1910, or 21 percent of the 1.37 million Irish‑born present in the country. Strikingly, with well over a quarter‑million claimants of Irish as a mother tongue, the Irish‑born in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century were more likely to claim Irish as a first language than the Irish in Ireland (21 percent in the United States compared to 13 percent in Ireland in 1911).2 The tendency during the Gaelic revival period of the 1890s onward to pair linguistic and national revival in Ireland, a perspective that has flavored subsequent modern scholarship, delayed a thorough study of the Irish language in the United States (and elsewhere). If, as the proponents of the revival of the Irish language argued, the independence of Ireland was tied to the preservation of Irish at home as a cultural marker, then how should one treat the presence of speakers of Irish—including those fiercely loyal to it as an aspect of identity—outside of Ireland? Could speakers in places like the United States, Canada, Australia, or even England be championed at a time when knowing the language was seen as the defining feature of the “pure” Gaelic western regions of Ireland, where significant numbers of native speakers could be found? For a select few, particularly those Irish speakers who had emigrated outside of Ireland, acknowledging a global Irish‑speaking community—an “Éire Mhór”—was conceivable but for most, the exploration of Irish speaking as a cultural marker entailed preserving and discussing the gaeltachtaí in Ireland, often positioned as a bastion against global migration (and with it, global intrusion). This made Irish speakers outside of Ireland an anomaly to be ignored in terms of scholarly interest, since their presence either uncomfortably signaled the failed health of Irish‑speaking communities in Ireland or represented a severing of the Irish language from its highly localized home in the west of Ireland.3 The other factor discouraging active investigation of Irish as a global language has been the tendency for evidence of its use to be drowned out by the larger ethnic linguistic makeup of the United States. The survival or even recovery of the Irish language in descendants of immigrants happened more than is usually conceded, but it was not visible in the United States in the same way that it was for other languages such as German, Spanish, or even Chinese. It is telling that the scholar Dennis Clark chose the phrase “muted heritage” to refer to the Irish language’s visibility in the Irish‑­ American community in his 1971 article on the subject. Reminders of the language’s existence, such as its use in newspaper media, were the few exceptions to this invisibility. This makes the recovery of 474

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this history a matter of searching extensively in scattered sources, even more so than it is for the history of Irish in Ireland where at least a nascent print culture in the early nineteenth century could still be found along with manuscript production, folklore, and observed day‑to‑day use for which traces appear in governmental and personal narratives.4 What is known about the Irish language in the Irish‑American community from the eighteenth century forward has been recovered in two clusters of publications on the topic, the first in the late 1970s through 1990s, the second starting in the early 2000s. The starting point is the 1979 collection edited by Stiofán Ó Hannracháin, Go Meiriceá Siar: Na Gaeil agus Meiriceá, Cnuasach Aistí, which gave the first indication how much Irish‑language history could be recovered once one scratched the surface. This collection brought together biographical sketches of some of the most active individuals in publishing, composing, and preserving the Irish language, among them the Cork‑born poet and farmer Pádraig Phiarais Cúndún, who immigrated to a farm in Utica, New York, around 1826; Pádraig Ó Beirn, a Donegal‑born immigrant who was an active participant in the Irish newspaper press in New York in the 1880s; and Micheál Ó Lócháin, a Galway‑born immigrant who launched the first newspaper explicitly given over to significant Irish‑language content, An Gaodhal, in Brooklyn in 1881. Ó Hannracháin’s collection also featured exploratory pieces like Proinsias Mac Aonghusa’s “An Ghaeilge i Meiriceá,” which visited evidence of the unexpected places where known Irish speakers had made their appearances in American history. These included an Irish‑speaker tried at the Salem witch trials, Irish speaking among Revolutionary War soldiers, the profusion of contributors to Irish‑language “Gaelic Department” columns that appeared in several Irish‑American newspapers starting in 1857, and the explosion of the so‑called Philo‑Celtic and Gaelic societies that were especially prevalent in the American Northeast in the second half of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth.5 Subsequent studies have tended to focus on the history of these last two most visible manifestations of Irish‑language culture in America: Irish in print and the Irish‑language advocacy societies. Although New York‑focused, Kenneth Nilsen’s chapter on the Irish language in the nineteenth century published in the edited collection The New York Irish (1996) presented the first extensive dive into the newspapers of the time, bringing to light not only anecdotal evidence of Irish speaking on the streets of New York, but also a sense of the scope of publishing in Irish by the Irish‑American press. Some 1,500 Gaelic columns printed in the Irish‑American newspaper alone between 1857 and 1915. To this earlier scholarly argument that such printing had been more extensive than hereto acknowledged, more recent scholarship has provided a better sense of the ideological and transnational features of these Irish‑language publications. Fionnuala Uí Fhlannagáin’s full‑length biography of Ó Lócháin, published in 1990, first gave a real sense of the richness of the original compositions of both verse and prose in An Gaodhal, while her more recent Fíníní Mheiriceá agus an Ghaeilge (2008) demonstrated the depth of participation of Irish‑American Fenians in the Irish‑language contributions to the newspapers. Supplementing Uí Fhlannagáin’s work in more recent years is Regina Uí Chollatáin’s emphasis on the transatlantic nature of the language‑revival printing and intellectual developments in the second half of the nineteenth century, paired with a call for further study of the many Gaelic columns appearing in scores of newspapers. This plea for more research on this last topic has been taken up in recent years by Fiona Lyons, who has written on the global reach of Gaelic‑column writings in newspapers, and Matthew Knight, who has conducted analysis of several US newspapers including the Irish‑American and San Francisco’s Monitor.6 Una Ní Bhroiméil similarly emphasized a transatlantic perspective for interpreting the revival, and in particular the Gaelic League, in a 2003 study. In particular, she underlined the financial importance of the American movements to the success of the Gaelic League in Ireland following three fundraising missions by League president Douglas Hyde in the early twentieth century. And while Ní Bhroiméil argued that the Philo‑Celtic and Gaelic societies in America ultimately proved to be largely local in 475

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scope and often at odds over aims, their contributions to Irish‑ American identity were significant in that they built a dialog with their Irish counterparts and even prompted them to mobilize. More recent publications have both reinforced the existence of strong rivalries and disagreements among the various Irish‑language supporters in America—with many such differences keenly observed by Hyde on his visits—and called into question the importance of Irish‑American ideological accord on language issues. Indeed, the ideological diversity of the language‑revival community on both sides of the Atlantic, with sometimes self‑contradictory takes on issues like urbanization and linguistic diaspora, has been portrayed as essential characteristics of the revival movement in convincing studies by scholars Síobhra Aiken and Patrick Mahoney.7 Taken together, the scholarship to date has revealed the significant underappreciation of the volume of material printed in Irish in American newspapers after the middle of the nineteenth century, the transatlantic conversation that collectively shaped the face of language revivalism in the same period paired with a shared diversity of ideology among Irish‑language advocates on both sides of the Atlantic, and role of physical‑force nationalism in early Irish‑language activity in the United States. While these studies are limited in their strong focus on specific manifestations of the language in America (print and associational life), they point to the presence of an important underlying cohort of native Irish speakers whose characteristics are explored in the next section.

Social Characteristics of the Irish‑American Irish‑Language Community While this recent research has revised the picture of Irish‑language cultural cross‑currents linking the American and Irish movements, what is still lacking is a basic social history of the community that explores the lived experience for speakers of Irish in America. Again, the 1910 census provides one of the few comprehensive entry points for this history. Arranging the Irish‑born in the sampled 1910 census into decade‑of‑arrival cohorts suggests that, up until the 1840s, individuals raised with Irish as a first language had been underrepresented in the immigrant population compared to levels of Irish speaking in Ireland at the time. Keeping in mind the caveat that older individuals in 1910 (perhaps accustomed to a largely English‑speaking environment in the United States) may have underreported Irish as a mother tongue of their youth, Table 36.1 shows that it was only at the mid‑century mark that the proportion of immigrants with Irish as their mother tongue (27 percent) matched and in fact exceeded their proportion in Ireland (23 percent in 1851). Underrepresented in the pre‑Famine period, claimants of Irish as a mother tongue rose with the increasingly Munster‑ and Connacht‑oriented emigration of the second half of the nineteenth century. From there, the proportion declined slowly Table 36.1 Percentage of Irish‑Born Claiming Irish as mother tongue, by immigration‑cohort decade, 1910 Year of Immigration

Percent of Irish‑Born Claiming Irish as Mother Tongue

1831–1840 1841–1850 1851–1860 1861–1870 1871–1880 1881–1890 1891–1900 1901–1910 All years

12.9% 26.8% 26.7% 24.4% 23.2% 20.7% 18.8% 16.7% 21.2%

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by a few percentage points per cohort per year, so that by the early 1900s it had dropped to 16 percent for the more recent arrivals—close to, but still slightly higher than, the proportion in Ireland itself.8 These Irish speakers arrived in the United States at a time of rapid transformation of work in all sectors, from agricultural mechanization to mining, clerical work, and industrial‑goods production. The question arises of the relative fortunes of speakers of Irish compared to their English monoglot counterparts, especially with rural poverty a growing reality in Irish‑speaking strongholds as the nineteenth century progressed. Occupation is, of course, an imperfect proxy for social status, since wages within occupational categories could vary widely, and standard of living is controlled by a number of non‑­ occupational considerations such as cost of living, availability of resources like education, and access to familial networks of advancement. Nevertheless, a comparison of the occupational groupings of those born in Ireland claiming English as a mother tongue as opposed to Irish provides at least a snapshot of the livelihoods of those participating in the workforce in 1910 and in the years preceding it. Given that 21 percent of the overall Irish‑born population claimed Irish as a mother tongue, it would be expected that this proportion would characterize the makeup of every occupational category if there were no factors driving more Irish claimants into one line of work over another. The harmonized occupational codes provided by the Minnesota Population Center for its IPUMS USA sample data enable quick groupings around larger categories of employment, with the 1910 census codes harmonized to the 1920 scheme oriented around agriculture, forestry, and animal husbandry; extraction of minerals, manufacturing, and mechanical industries; transportation; trade; public service; professional service; domestic and personal service; and clerical work. The census shows that for most categories, Irish‑ and English‑mother‑tongue proportions within each occupation were within five percentage points or less (on average) of the 21/79 split that we would expect (see Table 36.2). Claimants of Irish as a mother tongue were slightly underrepresented in the category of agriculture (by 3 percent), domestic service (by 3 percent), and clerical occupations (by 4 percent). The two language communities were properly proportioned in professional service and transportation and very close in manufacturing and mechanical industries (a slight overrepresentation for Irish mother tongue claimants of 1.5 percent). Irish‑mother‑tongue individuals were overrepresented in public service (by 5 percent), with particularly strong representation among postmasters and county officials. The two occupational super‑categories in which a language gap was most evident was trade, in which Irish born claiming Irish as a mother tongue were underrepresented by an average of 7 percent, Table 36.2 Mean Overrepresentation (positive values) and underrepresentation (negative ­values) of Irish‑born Claimants of Irish as a Mother Tongue, per census category, 1910 Census. Harmonized to 1920 census categories and calculated as mean difference between proportion claiming Irish in that category and overall population proportion (21.3 percent) Census Occupation Category

Mean Over/Under Representation of Irish Claimants of Irish Mother Tongue

Agriculture/forestry/animal husbandry Extraction of minerals Manufacturing and mechanical industries Transportation Trade Public service Professional service Domestic and personal service Clerical occupations

– 3.39% + 16.5% + 1.57% + .09% – 7.04% + 5.53% – .50% – 3.69% – 4.05%

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and mining, in which the Irish‑born tipped toward Irish as a mother tongue by a full 17 percent on average—the largest linguistic difference across all top‑level occupational groupings. Within the trade category there was no single driver of Irish‑mother‑tongue underrepresentation, aside from perhaps coal‑yard work, for which claimants of an English mother tongue were overrepresented by 10 percent, and in fact in some occupations such as undertaking Irish was better represented by a wide margin, 38 percentage points. In mining, claimants of Irish as a mother tongue were disproportionately represented among the Irish‑born across the board, with especially high numbers among mine inspectors, iron mine operatives, and quarry operatives. It is against this backdrop that scenes of gold‑strike‑bound Irish immigrants from diverse parts of Ireland coming together for storytelling sessions conducted exclusively in Irish, as recounted by the Donegal‑born Irish speaker Micí Mac Gabhann about his time in Montana and the Yukon in the 1890s, make sense.9 Just as important as the occupational fortunes of the Irish‑language community is the possibility of active language communities in which Irish could have been spoken because of locational proximity at the state, local, or household level. Proximity of individuals claiming Irish as a mother tongue does not guarantee that they were using it to speak to each other, but it served as a precondition for such speech to happen. Considering first the state and local situation, the density of Irish mother‑tongue claimants can be measured in two ways. The state containing the largest share of claimants of Irish as a mother tongue was New York (17.6 percent of the total), followed by Massachusetts (14.9 percent), Pennsylvania (13.9 percent), Illinois (8.4 percent), and New Jersey (6.4 percent). By this measure, almost two‑thirds of all Irish‑born Americans with Irish as a mother tongue were located in these five states. But this made sense given the large populations of Irish‑born in these states: they were also home to many English‑only Irish‑born, so much so that the density of Irish‑mother‑tongue individuals was not particularly high in these areas. New York’s 51,000 claimants of Irish as a mother tongue, for example, represented only 14 percent of its Irish‑born population, and in Massachusetts they made up less than 20 percent of its Irish‑born. By contrast, 50 percent of the 1,400 Irish‑born in Oklahoma named Irish as their mother tongue, and 47 percent of those in Maine, the two highest proportions among the states. The gross numbers that favored Illinois and the mid‑Atlantic/New England Irish‑born as potential Irish‑speaking communities thus should not obscure enclaves in other states. This is reinforced by surprising finds when one turns to the proportion claiming Irish at county levels. The top‑ten counties in the United States ranked by proportion of its Irish‑born claiming Irish include Rock Island County, Illinois, home to Moline and the Davenport region, with 90 percent of its 1,000 Irish born having Irish as a mother tongue, and Lapeer County, Michigan, north Table 36.3  Top‑ten counties with highest percentage of Irish‑Born Claiming Irish Mother Tongue, 1910 County

Percent of Irish‑Born Claiming Irish Mother Tongue

Rock Island, Illinois Lapeer, Michigan Windham, Connecticut Missoula, Montana Carson City, Nevada Montgomery, Ohio Lake County, Ohio McKean, Pennsylvania Atchison, Kansas Shawnee, Kansas

90.0% 85.7% 83.3% 83.3% 83.3% 83.2% 80.0% 80.0% 79.8% 75.1%

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of Detroit, with 86 percent of its 700 Irish‑born in the same category (see Table 36.3). In fact, only one of these high‑proportion Irish mother‑tongue counties (McKean County, Pennsylvania) is located in the top‑five states mentioned above. The takeaway is that locations with large numbers of Irish‑mother‑tongue claimants coexisted in the United States with other smaller but denser immigrant communities where Irish may have been spoken. While there is no guarantee that these individuals spoke Irish, anecdotal evidence suggests that it would be foolish to assume that this was not the case. Researcher Joseph Callahan, remarking on the strongly Donegal‑based immigrants of the Wilkes‑Barre region of eastern Pennsylvania in 1993, was told by his grandmother that her parents had “always spoken Irish with their friends,” and in fact had overheard it enough to learn some of it herself. Further south, in strongly Irish neighborhoods in Philadelphia, clusters of families were known to have “renewed their everyday use of Irish earlier in [the twentieth] century.” Moreover, it should not be underestimated how late into the twentieth century this generation of Irish speakers persisted. The Irish‑language instructor Pádruig Mac a’ Ghoill (b. 1934), another Irish immigrant connected to the Philadelphia area, arrived in the United States in 1957 to find “old people here when I arrived, and their Irish was as good as the day they left Ireland.”10 Although the role of children is hard to interpret given that many were American‑born and therefore no mother tongue was recorded, spouses offered another crucial element for any language maintenance. The US data offers a glimpse at the degree of linguistic mixing among married couples, measured as the proportion of couples who both claim Irish as a mother tongue versus mixed Irish‑English pairings. This is especially important because such data does not survive for the pre‑1901 censuses in Ireland owing to the destruction of the return original forms. In the United States overall, 56 percent of Irish‑born individuals for whom spousal information is present in the 1910 census were married to someone who also claimed Irish as a mother tongue. This overall proportion masks a change over time once the decade of immigration is taken into account. Whether because of more recent arrival (suggesting perhaps marriage in Ireland and therefore less opportunity for seeking a partner in a more linguistically heterogeneous United States), changing ages of arrival (a more youthful immigration cohort in earlier years would have tended to marry after arrival), a growing desire to seek a linguistically similar marriage partner in the United States (perhaps unlikely), or trends in linguistic endogamy in Ireland, the proportion of couples with both partners claiming Irish as a mother tongue grew from 43 percent for those who arrived in the 1840s to 65 percent among those who had arrived in the 1900s (see Table 36.4). Similarly, the US data helps us recover some part of the intergenerational transmission story, because census officials recorded the mother tongue of the parents of those who were foreign‑born. Excluding a very small number of cases involving languages other than English or Irish in order to simplify the analysis yields a population of just over 306,000 Irish‑born who either claimed Irish Table 36.4 Percent of Irish‑Born married couples with both spouses Claiming Irish as mother tongue, by decade of immigration, 1910 Year of Immigration

Percent of Married Couples in which Both Partners Claimed Irish Mother Tongue

1841–1850 1851–1860 1861–1870 1871–1880 1881–1890 1891–1900 1901–1910

42.8% 51.3% 52.6% 53.0% 57.1% 62.0% 65.2%

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as a mother tongue themselves, or could claim at least one parent who had been a native speaker. Of these individuals, a mere 6 percent followed the classic non‑transmission paradigm in which an Irish‑speaking generation (mother or father or both) yielded an English‑only child. By contrast, a dominant 94 percent of cases involved an individual with Irish as his or her mother tongue descending from one or more parents with Irish, and 92 percent involved both parents having Irish (another sign of strong linguistic endogamy in Ireland). As for language maintenance and transmission after arrival, the census data is less clear. Ominously, only 30 percent of all households in 1910 with at least one individual claiming Irish as a mother tongue contained more than one, whether because it was a single‑person household, a household headed by a widow, a case of a linguistically exogamous marriage, or because (one can presume) no transmission had taken place to any children present. Further research is needed, but this hints at a significant barrier to the sustainability of Irish in the United States by the second quarter of the twentieth century caused by the English‑speaking context in which these bilinguals found themselves and an insufficiently large population interested in transmitting Irish to a new generation to sustain such a language community. In terms of plain size of population, a full two‑thirds of all those who had been born with Irish as their mother tongue in the United States who were captured in the 1910 census could be found within five states of the Northeast and Midwest, with the remainder scattered in smaller communities of varying linguistic density—some even more concentrated—in the rest of the country. This cohort, which had grown in its proportion speaking Irish in the post‑Famine period, was able to achieve presence in most of the same occupations as their English‑only peers, though further research is needed to establish if this resulted in similar socioeconomic circumstances. More than half of households with an Irish‑born married couple present entailed both spouses claiming Irish as a mother tongue, a linguistic endogamy that was even stronger among their Irish‑born parents. But even if language transmission to children was happening in these households—a phenomenon that cannot be measured using extant data—overall multi‑generational transmission would have been curtailed by the small numbers of households overall that featured multiple Irish‑mother‑tongue claimants, a significant barrier to linguistic survival.

Newspapers, Associations, and the American Irish‑Language Community By far the most visible expression of Irish‑language culture in the United States came in the interrelated forms of print (especially newspaper) media, and the Philo‑Celtic and Gaelic societies whose associational life brought advocates for the language together to support its livelihood. These two initiatives were symbiotic, as Fiona Lyons has emphasized. The Gaelic columns of nineteenth‑ and twentieth‑century newspapers, the first of which appeared in 1857, reported on the personnel who founded the societies and shared meeting details. Meanwhile, by founding classes and encouraging a wider public connection among Irish speakers, the societies aimed to sustain Irish‑language content in the newspapers by bolstering its reading public.11 There are a few key features of this activity that are especially relevant here. The first is that, while care must be taken not to underestimate the prevalence of literacy in Irish among this immigrant population, the Irish‑language community had not attained mass literacy in the language. Consequently, a good portion of the energy of both newspapers and Gaelic societies necessarily had to be focused on a population either fluent or semi‑fluent in Irish, but usually not literate. The second, as the work of Uí Fhlannagáin in particular has shown, is that the drive behind Irish‑language print and associational life was strongly Fenian in its initial appearance in the mid‑nineteenth century, and it remained stoutly nationalist. Third, as Lyons, Ní Bhroiméil, and Uí Chollatáin have demonstrated, these developments were strongly transatlantic in character, so much so that it is possible to speak of continuous exchange of ideas, money, and personnel between Ireland and the United States (as well 480

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as other diasporic countries) in service of a growing Irish‑language revival movement. Finally, while there were important transatlantic currents forging support for the language, the US context for Irish Americans meant that the language had a role to play as a marker of ethnicity (and in particular as a marker used to convey respectability) not found among its speakers in Ireland. The availability of a small but stout corpus of Irish‑language texts in Ireland in the nineteenth century meant that there were opportunities for Irish speakers to learn to read the language. These included (for printed texts) Catholic primers and devotional publications, Protestant bibles and selections from scriptures, antiquarian editions of manuscript contents, and learner’s materials such as dictionaries and (especially by the second half of the century) lesson books. To these could be added book‑like manuscripts, still very popular among Irish speakers, including immigrants, who took these books with them when leaving Ireland. But this did not yield mass literacy in Irish, particularly given the universal absence of opportunities to be taught to read the language in a school setting outside of informal tutoring or Protestant missionary classrooms. The post‑Famine, Irish‑speaking generation that arrived in the United States, many of whom were eager to see their language available in newsprint in the same fashion as other immigrant languages, therefore faced the immediate barrier of needing simultaneously to impart strong literacy. Indeed, the problem went beyond literacy to include the challenges of standardizing in print aspects such as grammar and spelling for a language whose printing had been so comparatively anemic (even compared to the other Celtic languages) as to slow the natural selection of shared linguistic features for its printed version.12 As a result, a good portion of the content of the Gaelic department columns, and later of more extensive publications in Irish such as the monthly An Gaodhal newspaper founded in Brooklyn in 1881, was devoted to lessons in how to read Irish as well as often‑heated discussions over the “correct” way to translate texts or render Irish in print. Ulick Bourke’s Easy Lessons or Self‑Instruction in Irish, which had first appeared in the Dublin‑based Nation in 1858, were the favored source for such learner’s content throughout the second half of the century, though the teaching publications of the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language that appeared in the 1870s later came into popularity as well. In fact, Lyons observes that this type of instructional content became if anything more prevalent in Irish‑language content in the newspapers over time, starting in the 1860s. If the need for instructional material was one sign that the Irish‑language reading public was still finding its feet, the frequency of heated disputes in Gaelic department columns over forms of the language itself was another. The most notorious of these cases (as with many of them) involved the Westmeath‑born scholar and language activist Thomas O’Neill Russell, who prompted a months‑long acrimonious debate in 1888 in the pages of the Irish‑American and An Gaodhal newspapers over the correct use of the preposition chum.13 It is tempting to see these conflicts as a sign of the lack of unity in the Irish and Irish‑American community over the future of the language, but in many ways this was a natural process for determining a common standard for printing in Irish that other major world languages had gone through in previous centuries. As Lyons observes, “One of the outcomes of this controversy was the discussion and debate it created regarding orthographical and morphological issues of the Irish language at a time when the language was entering a period of transformation.” Moreover, as these exchanges spanning publications originated in both Ireland and the United States and involved participants constituting a transnational audience show, this shaping of the Irish language was in every way a diasporic effort. Irish‑language content originating in Ireland was published in Irish‑American newspapers, and vice‑versa; likewise, the efforts of enthusiasts like Ó Locháin to launch An Gaodhal prompted Irish‑based counterparts in the Gaelic Union to launch Irisleabhar na Gaeilge a few months later.14 But while the content of Irish‑language print media in the second half of the nineteenth century had undoubtedly been forged in a transatlantic (and in fact, global) context, the ideological background of its contributors and the significance of that Irish‑language content was marked by differences in the Irish and Irish‑American settings. To put it directly, the progenitors of Irish‑language content in 481

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roughly the first two decades after the appearance of the first Gaelic societies and newspaper departments in the early 1850s were Fenian and thus physical‑force nationalists. Uí Fhlannagáin has estimated that fully one‑third of the founding members of the New York Ossianic Society (founded 1858), a branch of the Dublin Ossianic Society, were Fenians. Among them were the chief notables either involved in the running of core Irish‑American newspapers or significant contributors of Irish material, including Patrick O’Dea (Phoenix), James Roche (Irish News, Phoenix), Michael Cavanagh (contributor to several newspapers), and especially John O’Mahony, originally of the Irish‑American and later editor of the Phoenix and Irish People, who produced a translation of Geoffrey Keating’s Foras Feasa ar Éirinn in 1857 and was a founding member of the Fenian movement.15 By contrast, no such strongly Fenian ties overshadowed the early Irish‑language movement in Ireland, where contemporary language advocate societies such as the Society for the Preservation for the Irish Language was ecumenical enough to include establishment figures such as the Liberal MP Francis Nathaniel Conyngham, who served as its first president, and Catholic prelates such as James MacDevitt, Bishop of Raphoe. And while it must be emphasized that the Gaelic League, founded in 1893 and considered the most expansive and successful of the revivalist initiatives, was never as apolitical in its first decades as it claimed, the aspiration by the League and especially its founder Douglas Hyde to position themselves as nonsectarian and nonpolitical up until the eve of World War I was at least in terms of rhetoric a strong contrast to the overtly Fenian overtones of some of the American Irish‑language contributors.16 The other way in which the American context forged a unique setting for efforts to revive the Irish language is in the way that its advocates wielded it to demonstrate an immigrant respectability and a separate Irish identity in contradistinction to other ethnic groups. This yearning for respectability echoes the motivations of some Irish nationalists, as examined in David Brundage’s chapter in the present volume. Whereas language advocates in Ireland aimed to show the antiquity and noble stature of Irish to preserve a national distinctiveness in the face of anglicization, in America it was considered important to prove the same qualities in order to place Irish Americans on equal footing (as an ethnic group) with other immigrants who spoke well‑regarded world languages with recognized literatures. Gaelic department contributors often spoke of their poems and scholarly assessments of Irish manuscripts as a means of “vindication” for the Irish language and a way of situating it on the same plane as the English, German, French, and other languages spoken by ethnic peers. Even Patrick Ford, editor of the Irish World and at best a lukewarm supporter of the language as a living entity, made it clear that the language should “be held in reverence” and “command respect.” This esteem also doubled as a marker of distinction: in an America where features like Catholicism were shared with other immigrant groups, the Irish language helped give Irish Americans their own identity marker that they could embrace.17 This connection between language advocacy and immigrant respectability was further cemented by a lean toward middle‑class Irish Americans as an envisioned audience for these newspapers. To be sure, as Síobhra Aiken has recently shown, Ireland‑based contributors to newspapers also framed their language advocacy in class terms, treating anglicization—including its forms prompted by immigration to the United States—as a debasement of rural middle‑class ideals of respectability. Yet for these commentators, the antidote to these trends was the maintenance of a protected, Gaelicized, rural middle class. Americans, by contrast, were more willing to embrace Irish‑speaking cultural expressions that were modern and international, even when they contained themes extolling Irish rural virtues. Thus, whereas in Ireland the Gaelic League of the turn of the century was making a push to make folklore and rural song traditions a wellspring for its burgeoning new Irish‑language literature, in America a play was made for Irish to join the ranks of respectability through formal musical and drama productions: Paul Mac Swiney’s choral work “An Bárd agus an Fó,” which premiered in New York in 1884; Thomas O’Brien Butler’s opera “Muirgheis,” which debuted in Ireland in 1903 but was 482

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slated for a performance in New York in 1916 before the war intervened; and Andrew J. O’Boyle’s drama Ar Son Cháit, a Chéad Ghrá, was performed at New York’s Lyric Hall in 1904. While it is true that these works rooted themselves firmly in ancient Irish mythology, they also selected forms (the idyll, the opera, and the drama, respectively) that were at home in a cosmopolitan European setting and helped Irish Americans convey to their adopted country that their music, literature, and language were simultaneously familiar and unique.18

Conclusion Much more is known today about the Irish language in the United States after the emergence of recent new publications on the topic. These studies have pressed rightly for a transatlantic and even global accounting of the various personalities involved in the Irish‑language revival movement, figuring a shared history shaping the literary and cultural features of language advocacy in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Certainly they have revealed the depth of activity, whether through newspaper publications or participation in Gaelic and Philo‑Celtic societies that took place in the United States, influencing the forms of publication and ideological movements around the Irish language that took root in the same years in Ireland. This American dimension to Irish‑language advocacy was built foremost on a wave of heavily Irish‑speaking, albeit bilingual, arrivals that picked up in the 1840s and remained strong—proportionally more Irish speaking than in Ireland overall—into the early twentieth century. Yet this burst was not sustained, undermined by the strong barriers to widespread language transmission in an Anglicized (or at least not heavily Irish‑speaking) environment. In retrospect, given the forces arrayed against the livelihood of the Irish language in America by the twentieth century—the dramatic slowing of the mass immigration that had fueled linguistic diaspora, the declining numbers of Irish speakers in Ireland that made up the immigration cohorts, and the lack of intergenerational transmission in the United States—the surprising aspect of its history may be its tenacity well into the 1930s and 1940s. Consider the case of Seosamh Daibhéid, who was born in Brooklyn in 1903 to an Irish‑speaking, Fenian father from Nottingham, England, and a Limerick‑born mother. Though not raised as a native speaker, he joined the New York Gaelic Society and started to learn the language in 1918. By his own account, it was only in his twenties, however, that he became fully fluent in Connemara Irish through the influence of his Irish‑speaking mother‑ and father‑in‑law. As a prolific correspondent, he went on to exchange letters with a number of Irish‑language scholars and authors of his day, including the writer Máirtín Ó Cadhain and the Irish‑American scholar Patrick Ferriter. Daibhéid’s library of books was among the few repatriated to Ireland—some 400 items gifted to the Royal Irish Academy by his son. But Daibhéid’s story also hints at the transition for the Irish language in America, from one entrenched among older community members to one increasingly found only through learner’s classes and Irish‑heritage associations. That history, too, is still to be written, and awaits an intrepid search through twentieth‑century oral interviews and associational records in order for it to emerge.19

Notes 1 The name “Irish” is the official and preferred term name used when referring to the language in English, not the sometimes‑seen alternative “Gaelic.” 2 Ruggles et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series. The dataset on which this essay is based is a one percent sample of the 1910 census available at the IPUMS website. The census provides two values that are treated as Irish mother tongue here: “Irish Gaelic” (code 1550) and “Irish” (code 1560). 3 The phrase appears to have originated with Mícheál Ó Locháin, editor of the Irish‑language newspaper An Gaodhal. On this and the use of Irish as an opposing force to urbanism and global forces, see Aiken, “­Ní cathair,” 93–99, 115. 4 Clark, “Muted Heritage,” 3–7.

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Nicholas M. Wolf 5 Ó Hannracháin, Go Meiriceá Siar. 6 Uí Fhlannagáin, Mícheál Ó Lócháin; Uí Fhlannagáin, Fíníní Mheiriceá; Nilsen, “Irish Language in New York,” 261; Lyons, “Irish Diaspora,” 229–250; Knight, “Our Gaelic Department”; Knight, “Gaels on the Pacific,” 172–199. 7 Ní Bhroiméil, Building Irish Identity; Hyde, My American Journey; Aiken, “Ní cathair,” 93–118; Mahoney, “Deoraidhthe Síora,” 110–138; Ó Mathúna “Dá ndéanfainn arís é,” 130–150; Mahoney, ed., Recovering an Irish Voice; Hyde, My American Journey. 8 Note that this indication of a rise in proportion of Irish‑language individuals confirms what had been a speculative claim to this effect. It also matches the 28 percent estimate that had been made by various scholars over the years. See Nilsen, “Irish Language in New York,” 254. 9 Mac Gabhann, Rotha Mór, 122–124, 189–191. On the immigration of Irish‑speaking miners, see also the case of Béarra, Co. Cork, explored in Ní Riain, “Seán ‘Irish’ Ó Súilleabháin,” 238–239. 10 Callahan, “Irish Language in Pennsylvania,” 22–23; Blyn, “A Native Speaker in the United States,” 43. 11 Lyons, “Irish Diaspora,” 232. 12 Ní Úrdail, “Patrick Ferriter,” 165; Ó Macháin, “Imirce agus Filleadh Lámhscríbhinní,” 136; Ó Ciosáin, “Creating an Audience,” 8–9; Ó Ciosáin, “Print Cultures of the Celtic Languages,” 348–349; Wolf, “Grammars in Search of a Corpus,” 8–24. 13 Knight, “Our Gaelic Department,” 142; Lyons, “Irish Diaspora,” 234; Knight provides a nice summary of the episode involving Thomas O’Neill Russell in “Our Gaelic Department,” 277–281. See also Lyons, “Thomas O’Neill Russell.” 14 Lyons, “Irish Diaspora,” 239, 234; Knight, “Our Gaelic Department,” 45, 54, 65, 209–211, 291. 15 Uí Fhlannagáin, Fíníní Mheiriceá, 25, 328–331. For Mahony, see Mahoney, “Deoraidhthe Síora,” 110–138. 16 Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language, 3; Quinn, “Henry Conyngham.” On this reappraisal of Douglas Hyde and political ideology, see Mac Mathúna, “Great War Strains,” 7–28; and Nic an Bhaird, “Reading between the Lines,” 48–63. 17 Knight, “Our Gaelic Department,” 32; Irish World, January 27, 1872, quoted in McMahon, “Ar Thóir na Gaeilge,” 156; Uí Chollatáin, “Athbheochan Thrasatlantach,” 284–286. 18 Knight, “Our Gaelic Department,” 249; Aiken, “Ní cathair,” 99; Ó Dochartaigh, “An Bárd ’gus an Fó,” 4–6, 18; Klein, “Celtic Legends,” 44–47; Breathnach and Ní Mhurchú, “O’Baoighill, Aindrias.” Note that as Breathnach and Ní Mhurchú observe, the O’Boyle who was author of this drama is not the same individual as the biographical head entry here. 19 Breathnach and Ní Mhurchú, “Daibhéid, Seosamh”; RTÉ, “Seosamh Dáibhéidh ó Nua Eabhrac.” I am grateful to Deirdre Ní Chonghaile for bringing this biography to my attention.

Bibliography Primary Sources Hyde, Douglas. My American Journey. Edited by Liam Mac Mathúna, Brian Ó Conchubhair, Niall Comer, Cuan Ó Seireadáin, and Máire Nic an Bhaird. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2019. Mac Gabhann, Micí. Rotha Mór an tSaoil. Transcribed by Seán Ó hEochaidh. Edited by Proinsias Ó Conluain. Indreabhán: Cló Iar‑Chonnachta, 1996. Raidió Teilifís Éireann. “Seosamh Dáibhéid ó Nua Eabhrac.” Raidió na Gaeltachta, January 12, 2014. Interview not dated but ca. 1970. https://www.rte.ie/radio/rnag/clips/20504571. Ruggles, Steven, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Josiah Grover, and Matthew Sobek, Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 6.0. Machine‑Readable Database. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2015. Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language Annual Reports. Vol. 1. Dublin, 1879.

Secondary Sources Aiken, Síobhra. “‘Ní cathair mar a tuairisg í’: (Mis)Representing the American City in the Literature of the Gaelic Revival?” Éire‑Ireland 53, nos. 3&4 (Fall/Winter 2018): 93–118. Blyn, Roslyn. “A Native Speaker in the United States: Pádruig Mac a’ Ghoill Discusses the Popularity and Teaching of Irish.” In The Irish Language in the United States: A Historical, Sociolinguistic, and Applied Linguistic Survey, edited by Thomas W. Ihde, 41–56. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1994. Breathnach, Diarmuid, and Máire Ní Mhurchú. “Daibhéid, Seosamh (1903–1974).” Ainm.ie, n.d. https://www. ainm.ie/Bio.aspx?ID=609

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The Irish Language in America Breathnach, Diarmuid, and Máire Ní Mhurchú. “O’Baoighill, Aindrias (1888–1972).” Ainm.ie, n.d. https://www. ainm.ie/Bio.aspx?ID=304 Callahan, Joseph. “The Irish Language in Pennsylvania.” In The Irish Language in the United States: A Histori‑ cal, Sociolinguistic, and Applied Linguistic Survey, edited by Thomas W. Ihde, 18–26. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1994. Clark, Dennis. “Muted Heritage: Gaelic in an American City.” Éire‑Ireland 6, no. 1 (Spring 1971): 3–7. Ihde, Thomas W., ed. The Irish Language in the United States: A Historical, Sociolinguistic, and Applied Lin‑ guistic Survey. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1994. Klein, Axel. “Celtic Legends in Irish Opera, 1900–1930.” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 24, no. 25 (2004/2005): 44–47. Knight, Matthew. “Gaels on the Pacific: The Irish‑Language Department in the San Francisco Monitor, 1888– 91.” Éire‑Ireland 54, nos. 3&4 (Fall/Winter 2019): 172–199. Knight, Matthew. “‘Our Gaelic Department’: The Irish‑Language Column in the New York Irish‑American, 1857–96.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2021. Lyons, Fiona. “Irish Diaspora, Cultural Activism, and Print Media in Transatlantic Contexts between Ireland and North America, c. 1857–1887.” Studi irlandesi 9 (2019): 229–250. Lyons, Fiona. “Thomas O’Neill Russell in Nineteenth‑Century America: Friend or Foe to Ireland?” Irish ­Diaspora Series Network, 2019. https://irishdiasporahistory.wordpress.com/2019/07/18/thomas‑oneill‑russell‑ in‑nineteenth‑century‑america‑friend‑or‑foe‑to‑ireland. Mac Mathúna, Liam. “Great War Strains and Easter Rising Breaking Point: Douglas Hyde’s Ideological Ambivalences.” Éire‑Ireland 53, no. 1&2 (Spring/Summer 2018): 7–28. Mahoney, Patrick J. “‘Deoraidhthe Síora gan Sgíth gan Sos’: John O’Mahony and the Development of a ­Diasporic Gaelic Print Culture.” Éire‑Ireland 56, no. 1&2 (Spring/Summer 2021): 110–138. Mahoney, Patrick J., ed. Recovering an Irish Voice from the American Frontier: The Prose Writings of Eoin Ua Cathail. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2021. McMahon, William. “Ar Thóir na Gaeilge: Tionscadal Lámhscríbhinní an Philo‑Celtic Society (Bostún), 1873– 1893.” In Litríocht na Gaeilge ar Fud an Domhain: Cruthú, Caomhnú, agus Athbheochan, Imleabhar I, edited by Ríona Nic Congáil et al., 155–190. Baile Átha Cliath: LeabhairCOMHAR, 2015. Ní Bhroiméil, Úna. Building Irish Identity in America, 1870–1915: The Gaelic Revival. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003. Nic an Bhaird, Máire. “Reading between the Lines: Hyde’s Writings, 1916.” Éire‑Ireland 53, nos. 1&2 (Spring/ Summer 2018): 48–63. Nilsen, Kenneth E. “The Irish Language in New York, 1850–1900.” In The New York Irish, edited by Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher, 252–274. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Ní Riain, Ciara. “Seán ‘Irish’ Ó Súilleabháin: Ó Inis Fearn go Butte, Montana.” In Litríocht na Gaeilge ar Fud an Domhain: Cruthú, Caomhnú, agus Athbheochan, Imleabhar I, edited by Ríona Nic Congáil et al., 233–258. Baile Átha Cliath: LeabhairCOMHAR, 2015. Ní Úrdail, Meidhbhín. “Patrick Ferriter (1856–1924): An Irish Scholar at Home and Abroad.” American Journal of Irish Studies 15 (2019): 164–194. Ó Ciosáin, Niall. “Creating an Audience: Innovation and Reception in Irish‑Language Publishing, 1880–1920.” In The Irish Book in the Twentieth Century, edited by Clare Hutton, 5–15. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2004. Ó Ciosáin, Niall. “The Print Cultures of the Celtic Languages, 1700–1900.” Cultural and Social History 10, no. 3 (2013): 347–367. Ó Dochartaigh, Liam. “An Bárd ’gus an Fó.” Comhar 34, no. 1 (1975): 4–6, 18. Ó Hannracháin, Stiofán. Go Meiriceá Siar: Na Gaeil agus Meiriceá, Cnuasach Aistí. Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar Tta, 1979. Ó Macháin, Pádraig. “Imirce agus Filleadh Lámhscríbhinní na nGael.” In Litríocht na Gaeilge ar Fud an Dom‑ hain: Cruthú, Caomhnú, agus Athbheochan, Imleabhar I, edited by Ríona Nic Congáil et al., 109–154. Baile Átha Cliath: LeabhairCOMHAR, 2015. Ó Mathúna, Pádraig Fhia. “‘. . . Dá ndéanfainn arís é, I’d make sure that they could understand me anyhow’: Stádas agus Stair na Gaeilge i gCathair Hartford.” Léann Teanga: An Reiviú 10 (2022): 130–150. https://doi. org/10.13025/ya5c‑xe60. Quinn, James. “Henry Conyngham.” Dictionary of Irish Biography Online, 2015. https://doi.org/10.3318/ dib.009767.v1. Uí Fhlannagáin, Fionnuala. Fíníní Mheiriceá agus an Ghaeilge. Baile Átha Clíath: Coisceím, 2008. Uí Fhlannagáin, Fionnuala. Mícheál Ó Lócháin agus An Gaodhal. Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar Tta, 1990. Wolf, Nicholas M. “Grammars in Search of a Corpus: Pre‑Revival Guides to the Irish Language.” Australasian Journal of Irish Studies 12 (2012): 8–24.

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37 IRISH MUSIC IN AMERICA Méabh Ní Fhuartháin

Echoes of Irish music in American life remain in the new millennium. This chapter provides an overview of the development of Irish music in America and contextualises the musico-cultural ex‑ perience of emigrants and generational Irish, while identifying traces of Irish music in regional and wider American cultural expression. The discussion takes a long chronological trajectory, beginning with the influences of eighteenth-century Irish emigration on developing folk music of the Ameri‑ can South and continues right up to the post-Riverdance millennium period. The chapter reflects in particular on the modernising soundscape of Irish music in America in the post-Famine and twen‑ tieth century period. Also acknowledged is the relationship between immigrant home and emigrant destination in circuitous and parallel processes of cultural production. The thread of Irish music as it becomes Irish-American music, and in specific contexts where it becomes American music, is woven through overlapping processes of assimilation, staging, and mediation. Cultural practice can only re‑ spond to the context in which it finds itself (socially, materially, historically): when context changes, music and practice respond.

Southern Beginnings Accounts of early Irish emigration acknowledge the importance of industrial developments in the new world, key among them cod fishing and sugar cane. From the seventeenth century, the former created a transatlantic exchange route predominantly from south-eastern Ireland to Canadian shores. The broadly parallel development of the sugar cane industry, first in the Caribbean but quickly there‑ after in the American South, created another passage. From the 1680s, Quakers and Protestant dis‑ senters found their way to America prompted by economic needs, and to a lesser degree religious persecution; 150,000 Scots-Irish Presbyterians emigrated between 1680 and 1810 from Ulster to America. Distinct from later patterns of post-Famine emigration, these emigrants left rural contexts in Ireland and dispersed to rural contexts in America “along the foothills of the Appalachians in Penn‑ sylvania, Tennessee, West Virginia and the Carolinas.” It is here, among those early settlers, that this account of Irish music in America begins.1 The hyphenated Scots-Irish description directly connects these migrants to earlier generations who crossed the North Channel of the Irish Sea from the Lowlands of Scotland to Ulster, agents of and adjacent actors to colonial plantation, as Peter Gilmore discusses in an earlier chapter. Cultural practice forged in Scotland, sustained and adapted in Ireland, then travelled with emigrants to the DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-45

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American South. Notwithstanding the pastness of traditional musics’ gaze, Scots-Irish sounds over‑ lapped with music traditions in Ireland and subsequently those in America. Distinctions between emigrant English, Scottish, and Irish/Scots-Irish cultural practice along the Appalachian borders are imprecise and arguably unproductive to pursue. Rather, a set of shared expressive practices emerged, forged in the growing settlements of Appalachia, and heard most vibrantly in English language bal‑ lad repertoire and instrumental music. This process of becoming is the dominant macro-pattern of change in emigrant music-making: practices remain connected to past sites, but reassert themselves as functionally necessary in new places. Beginning with an already hyphenated cultural identity and indebted to past soundscapes, Scots-Irish sounds became quintessentially American sounds amplified in local and regional landscapes, eventually expanding beyond the spine of Appalachia. Sounds of song-making from the geographical British Isles (Scots-Irish and Irish among them) are abundant up to the twentieth century in southern American states and in revival practices since. In Ireland, English language balladry developed hand-in-hand with colonising practices of language supplantation. English-speaking Scots-Irish were part of the process; in their move further westwards to America, they brought with them a repertoire of songs (and instrumental music). David Cooper writes that the “geographical isolation of the mountain regions” in America meant that cultural prac‑ tice in these communities existed in a “musical time capsule in which songs and tunes were retained in a form that was unchanged for decades or even centuries.” While collecting songs in the North Carolina region of the Appalachians in the early twentieth century, the English song collector Cecil Sharp found a rural population which included those from the lowlands of Scotland and Ulster. In light of that, it is striking that Sharp could “not detect many Irish or Scottish peculiarities” in behav‑ iours and musical practice. Cooper further notes that Sharp was unable (or unwilling) “to differenti‑ ate what he regarded as English traits from other settlers.” His ethnic-identifying conclusions were based, in part, on his excitement to find “sound English stock” (as Sharp describes these mountain people) connected to an earlier life in England, one “isolated from capitalist economics.”2 Individuals in a community of practice share interests and goals. Sharp’s findings in Appalachia evidence a community of practice within which English language song had developed cultural value within the community of practice. Embedded in mountain culture, song thrived and was central to that way of life. Though acknowledged by practitioners as coming from the past, this music was understood as its own generative practice, ethnically untethered, “a result of the interactions between the various diasporic cultures.” Cooper writes that settlers themselves “made little play of their eth‑ nic origins and identity in their [early twentieth century] exchanges” with Sharp. Ballad variants have their own simultaneous lives in diverse places, sustained and adapted over time in response to local and universal contexts. The Child ballad index, based on Francis James Child’s 305-song compendium The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, published between 1882 and 1898, remains a pillar of ballad variant identification across regions. The collection includes American variants of English and Scottish ballads with few denominated from Ireland. Nonetheless, many songs identi‑ fied by Child are still found among English language singing communities in Ireland. The Kentucky folk singer Jean Ritchie travelled to Ireland on a Fulbright scholarship in 1952 to search for musical genealogies through her folk songs, which she had learned in the isolated Cumberland Ridges of her youth. Ritchie’s song repertoire is connected back through generations of practice to Scottish, Eng‑ lish, and, indeed, Scots-Irish roots. Demonstrating the persistence of repertoire from early emigrant sources in mountain music of the American South, Ritchie used “Barbara Allen” (Child ballad no. 84) as a calling card when meeting Irish traditional singers. She heard multiple versions of this and other older ballads extant in her own repertoire from Sarah Makem in Armagh and Bess Cronin in Cork, among others. It was, for Ritchie, a musical homecoming.3 In southern states, the music of immigrants was one element in a patchwork of musical sounds, including African-American traditions, which created music fit for new contexts and generating 487

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“hybrid and syncretic musical artefacts through grafting and cross-pollination between performance practices and shared tune repertoires.” Early Irish immigrants carried with them instrumental music too (and some dance practices) with fiddle central to its sound and sensibility. Not unlike its musi‑ cal forerunners at the opposite side of the Atlantic, instrumental music the Appalachians, popular across all age groups, developed localised expressions rooted in rural domestic spaces, and like song was “a vital ingredient of everyday life.” Encompassing a broad repertoire of dance music, fiddle music is the most sustained, and robust, instrumental practice to which these early Irish emigrants contributed. Reels, jigs, and hornpipes are the foundation of dance music repertoire historically in Ireland and Scotland. Together with other dance-tune types, this repertoire underpins instrumental music traditions in Appalachia. The corpus of tunes, both extant and to which tune-makers then added (a typical folk music practice) was the necessary pillar for accompanying dance traditions that developed. Noteworthy in this regard is square dancing, a foundational dance practice of the colonial (and post-colonial) American South, which has origins in French and English dance traditions. In square dancing, fiddle music provides rhythmic and musical scaffolding for the music-dance cultural context. Not coincidentally, during the second half of the nineteenth century, a corresponding set of dance practices developed in parallel among rural communities in Ireland, also indebted to colonial pathways of cultural influence. In ensemble dance traditions, square dancing is to Appalachia as set dancing is to Ireland, both developing simultaneously with some core dance tune types in common.4 The science of origins for Appalachian fiddle traditions, analogous to southern song repertoire and style, is complex. What is certain is that “fiddle tunes and performance practices that emigrants brought with them from Ulster provided the bedrock of the music” (a hybrid tradition of influences itself, before ever leaving Irish shores). It then encountered and re-encountered other musical tradi‑ tions, including African-American ones. Similarly, songs took on their own identities of practice within the traditions emerging in the Appalachian American South, responding to the particular envi‑ ronmental and social context in which they occurred. Much later, this mountain music was commodi‑ fied as part of nascent country music practice in the twentieth century, in addition to being a well of inspiration for twentieth-century folk music revivals in the United States and beyond.5

Popular Music and the Nineteenth-Century Minstrel Stage While the diffuse influence of Scots-Irish emigrants in emerging folk music practice across the south‑ ern states is important, it is eclipsed in consequence and scale during the nineteenth century. From 1810, emigration from Ulster declined, but emigration from a wider swathe of Ireland increased. Between 1815 and 1846, some half million emigrated to America and by the 1830s, Irish Catholic emigration outstripped Protestant. During the Famine and immediate post-Famine periods, about two million Irish emigrated; they were predominantly Catholic with scant resources. These emigrants were mostly destined to build lives in port cities of arrival such as Boston, New York, or Philadelphia, or in growing metropolises such as Chicago, and smaller industrialising cities. Among them, a third were Irish speakers, a marked change from Scots-Irish migrants. These changes recast Irish emigrant identity in America, an identity sustained into the next century and beyond. Given the scale and na‑ ture of these changes, the impact of early nineteenth-century Famine and post-Famine emigrants on expressive culture necessarily exceeded earlier emigrant influences. Though popular music’s beginnings stretch back into the late eighteenth century, the 1830s was sociologically and musicologically the decade that show business was launched in America. Early popular music expression took hold in the context of population growth and expanding urbanisa‑ tion (both largely due to immigration), commercialism, and developing technologies of replication (initially through print technologies and later, recording). Up to the 1830s, “mainstream American music was essentially an imported tradition, with a small body of natively composed material,” an 488

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assertion applicable in a more nuanced way to the folk music discussed above. In parallel to rural, domestic spaces in Appalachia where Irish sounds were enfolded into American folk music-making, massive emigration drove evolving entertainments from the middle decades of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. From the 1830s, new “forms of Irish music” were “created in America” rather than being “music that immigrants brought with them,” and the bulk of these “fall within the compass of what is generally known as popular music.” Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin summarises the experience for emigrant musicians thus: “Many left rural Ireland as part of an amorphous caste of tradition bearers; in urban America they became professional entertainers.” American popular music developments were indebted to immigrant and African-American cultures with Irish immigrants es‑ sential agents of modernisation in the new musical dawn of American popular culture.6 That dawn was manifest in minstrelsy, a staged entertainment which embedded blackface per‑ formance in American life. Minstrelsy was “America’s first truly popular culture”; blackface was its foundation. Blackface was used as a characterisation of African Americans, but more broadly “theatrical blackness” was used “to represent [any and] all ethnicities” with Irish, Italian, German, and Jewish blackface characters appearing. Thomas Rice, an Irish American from New York’s Lower East Side was not the first blackface entertainer, but his success in the early 1830s established him as the father of modern minstrelsy. First gaining popularity in north-eastern cities, early minstrelsy performances were inserted as part of longer, diverse entertainments which including music, dance, and sketches. Rice sold out venues as he traversed the country and toured internationally (his first performance in Ireland is reported in 1836). An actor by trade, Rice was also a prolific playwright and his “production of a popular play, The Rifle, in 1829,” was the starting point for minstrelsy as popular entertainment. Importantly, the play introduced to white audiences the character of Jim Crow performing “a Negro dance.” A blacked-up amalgamation of African-American and Irish stereotypes, Jim Crow derived in part from the slave song “Jump Jim Crow,” but also drew from the conveniently witless stereotype of stage Irishman historically embedded in British drama. Jim Crow quickly mor‑ phed into an inescapably racist stereotype, central to a cast of ethnic and African-American minstrel show characters. African-American characters in minstrel shows were most often figures of comic and racist derision infrequently eliciting any sympathies.7 Fiddle and banjo were the instrumental core to minstrel shows. Banjo, an instrument of enslaved Blacks based on pre-enslavement cultural memory, is the most American of instruments. Fiddle was the minstrel musical counterpoint to banjo. In 1843, fiddle player Dan Emmett, the Mount Vernon, Ohio-born grandson of an Irish emigrant, staged The Essence of Old Virginny with his newly formed Virginia Minstrels in New York to huge acclaim. It was the first full-length minstrel show with black‑ face performers and it codified the minstrel show format for decades to come. Dance music from fiddling traditions, much of it based on Irish and Scots-Irish repertoire, was built into minstrel shows, but the Mount Vernon of Emmett’s youth also had African-American emancipated people, whose music and culture Emmett was exposed to and learned from. Motivated by commercial interests, the dramaturgy (such as it was) of minstrel shows depended on a range of stock characters including ethnic Irish. The delivery of those characterisations relied heavily on dancing and music-making that were consciously ethnic-Irish. Early minstrel shows incorporated sounds of Irish jigs and reels with African and African-American dance styles. Songs of, and from, Ireland and Irish America (predomi‑ nantly newly composed) were sung side-by-side with commodified African-American songs.8 Often, dances presented as culturally African American were Irish, repurposed in the show. ­Bernard Flaherty danced Irish and African-American dances and regardless of the blackface charac‑ ter he played, retained a strong Irish accent. Flaherty and his Irish-American minstrel cohorts brought cultural practice from their own ethnic background, but also what they gathered (or appropriated) in encounters with other ethnic and racial groups. Such was the early successes of minstrel shows, that before long minstrelsy itself was a popular culture well from which performers and writers drew 489

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directly. Proximity in urban environments, whether in Mount Vernon or the Five Points area of New York, was not the only site of origin for minstrelsy. Christopher Smith writes that the maritime and riverine contexts of the early nineteenth century on the “southern and western frontiers of antebellum North America” were culturally dynamic sites where African Americans and ethnically Irish were adjacent socially and occupationally, and necessarily had cultural encounters. Smith proposes these exchanges, on wharves, canals, and streets, were vital to the development of minstrelsy and, further, explain its instantaneous success on stage. Minstrelsy’s popularity “derived then not from its unfa‑ miliarity or novelty” but more convincingly from the resonance which “its working-class audiences experienced at seeing the music and dance” they already had familiarity with, now on stage.9 The expansion of popular entertainment offered other opportunities to thousands of Irish/IrishAmerican performers, and not just on the minstrel stage. Mick Moloney notes the “arts have always yielded accommodating occupations to marginalized populations.” In addition to Emmett’s child‑ hood experience in Mount Vernon, he acquired his trade while part of a touring circus on the Western frontiers, not uncommon for Irish/Irish-American performers. Johnny Patterson from County Clare was an uilleann piper, song-maker, and professional circus clown in Ireland and Britain before his de‑ parture for the United States in 1877. For over a decade, he toured with various circus companies dur‑ ing the tenting season typically from May until October, including Cooper and Bailey’s Great London Circus and the Sells Brothers’ Circus, among others. Patterson is remembered for his nostalgic song compositions, composed for an immigrant audience though having wider appeal to other migrant and ethnic groups who were also distanced from their respective homes. These songs frequently have emigration and longing as key theme such as in “The Stone Outside Dan Murphy’s Door” and “Shake Hands with your Uncle Dan.”10 Emmett, as minstrel show composer-performer, was in extensive Irish-American company. Fel‑ low ethnic Stephen Collins Foster was a prolific minstrel composer. Born in Lawrenceville, Pennsyl‑ vania, Foster’s songs such as “Oh Susanna,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” and “Beautiful Dreamer” were reanimated in living rooms, recordings, and later, films, becoming part of popular song rep‑ ertoire. Much of Foster’s work drew on his deep familiarity with the songs of London-based Irish poet Thomas Moore. Moore’s collections, published from 1808 onwards, included settings of poems arranged for piano, many using older Irish melodies; a “diverse audience purchased thousands of his [Moore’s] compositions in songsters, songbooks, broadsides and sheet music.” In the late 1800s, Moore’s collections and Foster’s song sheets in American homes implied music literacy. More im‑ portantly, these sheets, together with the piano and the parlour in which it sat, were signifiers in IrishAmerican homes of an ethnic group scaling the socio-economic ladder, becoming part of American life. Blackface representations of ethnic Irish remained comedic over the course of the nineteenth century, but gradually distanced themselves from their stage blackness. This contributed to, and mir‑ rored, wider patterns of social acceptance.11 Irish music in nineteenth-century American popular culture is a dynamic antiphon of the ethnic experience. Stages and characters offered a complex set of identity-making possibilities for per‑ formers and ethnic audiences alike. Irish Americans were crucial to minstrelsy through their par‑ ticipation as performers, writer-composers and showgoers. In many ways, Irish and Irish Americans became American through minstrel performances (and variety theatre), performing themselves into the mainstream.

Popular Entertainments: Band Music to Vaudeville to Tin Pan Alley From the late eighteenth century, there was a marked growth in the number of marching bands in Ire‑ land and Britain, some military, others associational or attached to villages and towns. Band expan‑ sion continued right through the nineteenth century, greatly enabled by increased structured leisure 490

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time. Growth of professional and amateur bands was happening concurrently in America. Though lit‑ tle commented upon or described in accounts of Irish music America, one of the most influential Irish emigrants in American popular culture is Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore. Born in Ballygar in County Gal‑ way in 1829, he was the most important band leader, composer, and arranger in the US prior to John Philip Sousa. As a youth, Gilmore played cornet (a mellower, more compact brass instrument than the trumpet), eventually joining a regimental band in Athlone. Following a brief stint in Canada with a British army band, Gilmore landed in Boston around 1848, already a virtuoso. He found employment in a music shop but quickly secured work as a cornet player, and his reputation as a musician grew. In 1851, Gilmore was reported playing with the Boston-based minstrel troupe, Ordway’s Aeolians (playing a tambourine), but by 1852 he was band leader of the Boston Brass Band, undertaking the role of music arranger and conductor, in addition to composing some band repertoire.12 Gilmore’s success was secured in 1855 when he was appointed band leader to the Salem Band (MA), attached to the Salem Light Infantry, the same year in which he established a lucrative publish‑ ing house for his band music (demonstrating his business acumen). He returned to the Boston Brass Band in 1859 with the proviso the name be changed to Gilmore’s Band. At the outset of the Civil War in 1861, Gilmore and his band enlisted in the 24th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment where he rose through the ranks, becoming Grand Master of the Union Army bands and spending much of the war at battle sites, including Gettysburg. In 1863, he published perhaps the most well-known of his lyric compositions, the (anti-)war marching song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” under the pseudonym Louis Lambert. The melody is a reworking of a previously published song, possibly Irish in origin, though sometimes attributed as having African-American origins.13 Gilmore was committed to spectacle and organised unprecedented large-scale performance events. Hosted in Boston, the post-war National Peace Jubilee (June 15 to 19, 1869) was a huge affair, with 10,000-plus singers, 1,000 musicians, and 50,000 people in attendance at a custom built venue in Boston. It was surpassed in excess by Gilmore’s World’s Peace Jubilee and International Musical Festival in 1872, which doubled the number of performers and lasted 18 days. Among the national and international acts, a number of musical highlights in 1872 are noteworthy: the Fisk Jubilee Sing‑ ers, a newly established African-American singing ensemble from Fisk University in Tennessee, who sang arrangements of Black spirituals and Stephen Foster songs; Johann Strauss and his Viennese orchestra; and the sight of 100 Boston firemen striking anvils as part of the instrumental ensemble assembled for Verdi’s Il Trovatore with Beantown’s church bells peeling and cannons firing for full effect. Gilmore moved to New York in 1873, taking up the position of band master of the 22nd New York Regiment; he toured extensively, including six concerts in Ireland in 1878. Among the many feathers in his musical cap, he was musical director for the dedication of the Statue of Liberty in 1886. Gilmore’s importance to the sound of popular culture in America cannot be overstated. He developed a new compositional style which combined band and classical traditions arranged innova‑ tively for brass and wind, and his ambitious expansion of professional band performance influenced all band playing subsequently. Through band music, central to American popular culture, Gilmore’s musical legacy still resonates.14 Popular culture’s parameters are defined by competing new entertainments. Found on Ameri‑ can stages from the 1840s, variety theatre was dependent on urban newcomers as performers and characters. As the name suggests, it comprised various “acrobats, magicians, jugglers, and other novelty acts, singers, dancers, comic and dramatic sketches, and animal acts.” Ethnic, racial, and occupational stereotypes multiplied and a “direct and unsophisticated” image of stage Irishman was projected. Unlike minstrelsy, much of the material was bawdy, young men the target audience. Following variety, vaudeville, born in and of urban expansion, was a sanitised version of its vari‑ ety theatre predecessor. From the 1880s to the 1910s, vaudeville was the primary popular leisure pursuit for the American public and “Irish popular songs proliferated.” Among the most influential 491

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and popular figures in late nineteenth-century vaudeville were the duo Ed Harrigan, the “foremost dramatist of the life of the Irish in America,” and actor-singer Tony Hart. Both Irish Americans (from Manhattan and Massachusetts respectively), they met in Chicago in 1871 while on tour with minstrel troupes. Harrigan’s cast of comic characters crossed ethnic, racial and intergenerational lines in which Black and hyphenated Italian, German, and Chinese characters portrayed stories of “lower class life in the [urban] slums.” Vaudeville’s Irish characters were less brutish than previ‑ ous stage representations as Harrigan specifically portrayed “the Irish in a favorable light,” most famously in his plays and songs of the Mulligan Guards, “a mythical Irish-American [militia] company of the 1870s.” His songs, such as “Muldoon, the Solid Man,” were multi-media prod‑ ucts, heard on stage, purchased as sheet music, and then recorded. Harrigan and other vaudeville song-makers codified a system of maximalist exposure for their musical wares, a model which has persisted since in popular music.15 Vaudeville production and performance were distributed across cityscapes, but with the birth of the new century, “the center of the whole entertainment industry shifted to New York where most of the writers were based.” Tin Pan Alley became the new hub for popular song writing and production, and “churned out thousands of songs with Irish and Irish American themes,” frequently written by those without Irish affiliations. Though this had been long in process, Tin Pan Alley’s Irish repertoire presented American themes in Irish guises, with a high quotient of sentimentality, yearning for “a lost homeland, a place of beauty and innocence” in songs such as “Twas Only an Irishman’s Dream.” As the fortunes of Irish Americans improved, they were less concerned with the issues of experiences of ethnics in crowded slums as heard in Vaudeville song. Rather, material contexts of Irish-American class ascension prioritised an imagined place of pastness in Tin Pan Alley song. Some repertoire crossed the Atlantic back to Ireland where these sentiments found a ready listening public, demon‑ strating the reciprocity of cultural production and reception between home(s), new and old.16

Collecting Irish Music: Francis O’Neill The collection of folk and traditional music repertoires in Europe increased from the turn of the 1800s, extending to North America and elsewhere in the latter part of the century. Much of that col‑ lecting and subsequent publication was motivated by antiquarian interests, undertaken by those exter‑ nal to the community of folk practice. As musical literacy increased among non-elite classes (pianos in the parlour a sign for Irish Americans), collecting of folk or traditional musics was also conducted from within. In accounts of Irish music and America, the story of traditional music collector Francis O’Neill is one frequently cited. Born in Tralibane, Cork in 1848, O’Neill is remembered for his pub‑ lished collections of Irish dance tunes, chief among them the 1907 compendium, The Dance Music of Ireland 1001 Gems. In the pantheon of Irish music printed collections, it is unparalleled in its importance to Irish traditional music in Ireland and worldwide. O’Neill’s lifestory is equally a source of fascination, from his beginnings as the youngest son of a relatively prosperous farming household and noted scholar at school, to his career as a police officer in Chicago, where he rose through the ranks to become chief of police in 1901. After he left Ireland in 1865, and before he joined the police of the Windy City in 1873, O’Neill spent time as a sailor on the high seas. Following his rescue from the shipwreck of the Minnehaha near Java in 1867 he was hired as a shepherd in California in 1868 and, with his seafaring adventures behind him, was briefly a teacher in Missouri in 1869. O’Neill then settled the year after in Chicago, the destination mid-western city for emigrants and a through-city for those heading to frontier territories. With a population of almost 300,000 when O’Neill arrived in 1870, by the time he retired as captain of the force in 1905, Chicago was a city of two million people, second only to New York in size.17

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O’Neill’s childhood was filled with music-making, a socio-cultural world dependent on networks of orality embedded in localised structures of kin and community. In his youth, he learned traditional flute and would later provide colourful descriptions of playing flute in various locations; it earned him extra food rations on board the rescue ship which carried him to Hawaii. The context of hyperlocalised cultural exchange and sharing, typical of traditional music practice in nineteenth-century rural Ireland, has some parallels with the urban context of O’Neill’s new domicile in Chicago. Home to thousands of emigrant Irish (almost 80,000 in 1900) living in concentrated proximity, and multi‑ ples of that in generational Irish Americans, traditional musicians were numerous if not often heard in public. O’Neill was not the first collector of Irish traditional music dance repertoire but he and his 1001 Gems are distinct. Previously published collections were often the work of those culturally beyond the community of practice in class and musical background; outsiders looking in on tradi‑ tional practice. In contrast, O’Neill was a cultural insider to this music practice with plentiful access to immigrant musicians coming to Chicago and through emigrant networks, to additional repertoire elsewhere in the US and Ireland. Furthermore, 1001 Gems was directed towards, not away from, Irish performance communities, presenting reels, jigs, and other dance tunes, in melodic lines without ac‑ companiment. O’Neill’s tune publications were part of a nationalising and modernising process and the collections filtered back to Ireland, influencing generations of Irish musicians, once again evi‑ dencing the trans-national pathways of cultural production. Though O’Neill’s occupation as a public servant was the focus of his professional life, his life’s work was collecting and publishing collections of traditional repertoire from Irish musicians.18

Traditional Music and Twentieth-Century Technologies By the 1880s, sounds of Ireland and Irish America were heard across a range of public contexts on stage, in occupational settings, and in circuses. However, while O’Neill was gathering tunes in Chi‑ cago, like other musics across the world, Irish music in America underwent a tectonic shift. Thomas Edison’s happenstance invention of cylinder recording in 1877 (he was more interested in his tele‑ graph, telephone, and lightbulb inventions), transformed the way in which people experienced music, from how it was heard to how it was learned. Edison’s recording technology commodified music in a manner theretofore unknown: the intersubjective necessity of listening in-person to music live was no longer required, creating a physical distance between music, those who play it, and/or those who listen. Recordings allowed musicians to reach potential listening publics that they may never have encountered in live circumstances. Among the first to record Irish traditional music on a traditional instrument was Patsy Touhey, a vaudevillian star who sang, performed comedic sketches, and played the uilleann pipes. Born in Gal‑ way, Touhey and his family emigrated to South Boston when he was a young boy. Uillean pipes are a complex bellows-blown instrument, peculiar to Irish traditional music and hold high status within the community of practice. He was from a family of uilleann pipers, learning his music initially from his family and, later, from other pipers he met in America, touring the eastern seaboard states as part of the Irish Hibernia variety show with John Egan, a fellow Galway piper. This illustrates the importance of Irish America as a source for Irish traditional music-making happening in parallel to, and intersecting with, commercial performance opportunities across a range of performance sites. Like Gilmore, who recorded the first American band music (in 1891), Touhey was an early adapter of recording; he bought an Edison recording machine in 1901 and sold his music in the US and interna‑ tionally. Precisely because of the recordings, he is among the most well-known Irish traditional musi‑ cians from this period. Touhey met O’Neill at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where he performed as part of the Irish exhibition. This confirms while networks of Irish musicians

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were concentrated in emigrant enclaves of expanding cities, wider networks of music makers were also in operation and O’Neill’s archive contains Touhey recordings. The emigrant context provided liberating, if limited, opportunities for women to subvert gender norms. Counterintuitively perhaps, when traditional music in Ireland moved from domestic to public spaces in the twentieth century, the challenges for women’s participation and visibility multiplied. Irish women emigrants to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became work‑ ers and business owners. Part of a rapidly expanding labour economy, particularly in cities (big and small), occupational opportunities in service industries abounded. As it grew, the world of technol‑ ogy and music recording was one dominated by men, as performers, studio workers, and recording company owners. However, in Irish traditional music, the exception to prove that rule was Ellen O’Byrne DeWitt. Born in 1875, O’Byrne hailed from Leitrim and emigrated in 1890 to New York. Ireland had the highest rate of single female emigration to the US compared to Italian, German, and Scandinavian groups, a fact not disconnected from the point above. She met and married Justus DeWitt, a firstgeneration Dutch immigrant, and in 1900, they opened a shop at 1360 3rd Avenue, a building they subsequently bought. Strategically using the double-barrelled “O’Byrne Dewitt” in shop and ancil‑ lary business titles to retain the signifying benefit of O’Byrne to the ethnic base, the business operated as a travel and real estate agency, sold musical instruments, and stocked recordings of Irish music. O’Byrne Dewitt established a mail-order business to reach Irish-American consumers across the US. Recordings of Irish performers were scant, but recordings of Irish tenor John McCormack were the most widely available and especially popular. In 1906, McCormack made his Covent Garden operatic debut in London (as the youngest principal tenor ever), but it was the launch of his career in 1909 in the US which made him one of the most successful performers of his day, in any music genre. Spend‑ ing much of his life on American soil, several coinciding factors in tandem with his musical talent led to his meteoric ascent: record sales, radio broadcasts, and an unequalled concert recital career, all coanimating elements in the technologised cultural space of the early twentieth century. Amid operatic arias and German Lieder in McCormack’s repertoire, piano-arranged renditions of Irish parlour songs such as Moore’s “The Minstrel Boy” and newly composed songs drawn from stage and manuscript appealed to a socially ascendent Irish-American class. Crucially, the success of McCormack (and O’Byrne DeWitt) was facilitated by processes of mod‑ ernisation through recordings. In the 1910s, as recording technologies advanced, disc formats over‑ took cylinder recordings. With exponential replication possibilities, record companies focused on expanding markets beyond classical and popular music. To that end, foreign, racial, or ethnic cata‑ logue listings (as described) were introduced, generating vast quantities of commercial recordings of traditional and roots musics in the decades after the First World War. For Irish traditional music, O’Byrne DeWitt was key in this development, and in 1915, she proposed to Columbia Records that with a ready-made ethnic consumer base, it should move into the Irish traditional market. With the proviso that O’Byrne DeWitt would purchase an initial 500 copies, Columbia agreed. Justus DeWitt Junior was dispatched to Celtic Park on Long Island, where the Gaelic League and other cultural organisations routinely hosted concerts and gatherings. Eddie Herborn and John Wheeler (some‑ times named as James) were engaged to record the first disc sides of Irish music in a traditional style on accordion and banjo, respectively, which were released by Columbia in 1916. Other recording companies followed suit and transformed the trajectory of Irish traditional music practice thereafter. Though Irish traditional music was found wherever there were Irish emigrant enclaves, New York was a particularly rich source of recordings in the 1920s and 1930s. Recordings of Sligo fiddle play‑ ers ­Michael Coleman, Paddy Killoran, and James Morrison created a heterogeneous style of IrishAmerican fiddle playing. As records were sent to Ireland, the recordings of Coleman and others, in an example of emigrant-origin cultural reciprocity, influenced traditional music in Ireland too.19 494

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At the turn of the century, social dancing began to move from domestic to public spaces as part of a broader cultural transformation. Irish-American dance halls sprang up in the 1920s, becoming the ubiquitous cultural site to engage with ethic Irishness. Ethnic dance bands, responding to the environmental demands of dance halls and their dancing emigrants, offered opportunities to mu‑ sicians across immigrant cities. Playing a combination of identifiably Irish and American popular music in an ensemble of Irish traditional instruments, with piano, drums, often brass, wind, and bass, Irish-­American dance bands were an acoustic signature for Irish America. In nomenclature, bands appealed to the widest possible ethnic audience by avoiding localised Irish references and adopting names like O’Leary’s Irish Minstrels and the Pride of Erin Orchestra. While dance halls were less important in the post-Depression years, they re-emerged in the 1950s as vibrant cultural hubs. In Boston, five halls in Dudley Square alone thrived (the Dudley Street Opera House, the Hibernian, the Intercolonial, the Rose Croix, and Winslow Hall). Some were multi-floored, and thousands of danc‑ ers gathered on any given weekend.20 The legacy of Ellen O’Byrne DeWitt stretches past the mid-century mark. Justus, her youngest son, moved to Boston following his mother’s death in 1926 and recreated the family business at 51 Warren Street in Roxbury, establishing a travel, music, and instrument shop; his brother James con‑ tinued the business in New York. Ethnic recordings were already in decline, but the war guillotined interest in them among larger companies. By the early 1950s, while Irish immigrants were dancing in Dudley Square, rock and roll had taken over the charts. Seeing an opportunity, Justus established ­Copley Records in 1947, which released 29 LP albums (a new format launched by ­Columbia in 1948), primarily of Irish-American dance bands with vocalists such as Mickey Carton and his Orchestra. Also among Copley’s listing were re-issues of Bing Crosby’s Irish catalogue. In film musicals of the 1940s, Bing Crosby sang and advanced Irish-American characters not as dangerously othered, but ones enfolding an American, everyman identity. Copley had an extensive catalogue in other formats (EPs, 45s and 78s) before it ceased recording in 1971. The O’Byrne DeWitts’ story and their influence on Irish music in America is an illustrative case-study of the mutuality of emigrant experience and modernising macro-processes.

Folk Music Revival, Twentieth-Century Music Flowering The western folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s was a watershed in American cultural life. Beginning in fringe spaces, folk music moved to the dominant cultural sphere for a brief time in the early 1960s, becoming the pop music of its day. In this revival, the prevailing and innovative mode of performance was folk song (historical and newly composed), sung in small ensembles with accom‑ panying strings, built around guitar. Among the most well-known acts was The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem (The Clancys), an Irish band of emigrant singers whose pathway to success mirrors changes in Irish America. Members of the band—Clancy brothers Paddy, Tom, and Liam from Tip‑ perary, and Tommy Makem from Armagh—gathered collectively through circuitous routes in Green‑ wich Village in the mid-1950s, where they began performing in intimate folk music venues. Paddy Clancy co-founded Tradition in 1956, a record label on which the band (unnamed still) released their first album in the same year, The Rising of the Moon. Home to alternative cultural expression and leftist politics, the Village was, not coincidentally, a bastion of folk music revival in New York. As such, the Clancys’ success was within that sphere, but not yet beyond: adjacency to leftist politics prevented wider approval among Irish Americans in the 1950s. Though Irish emigration was considerably diminished, a number of factors converged which re‑ sulted in The Clancys gaining dominant cultural recognition in the early 1960s. The band’s success was indicative of and reflective of the broader context of Irish America’s coming of age, mainstreamed through generational stability; political networking; education; and many decades of popular culture 495

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visibility. The acme of this process is John F. Kennedy’s presidency, as Matthew J. O’Brien dis‑ cusses in his chapter, which identified (Catholic) Irish America as part of middle America and corre‑ sponded with folk music’s expansion to the popular domain. The Clancy Brothers appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1961 and their 1963 visit to Kennedy’s White House concretised their place in mainstream America, and Irish America adopted them wholesale. A direct thread can be drawn from the Clancys’ popularity to the ballad-boom explosion in Ireland in the 1960s and indeed, to balladsinging troubadours in Irish-American bars of the new millennium. The circumstances described above, which led to Irish folk music’s growth, were the very same ones that suppressed older Irish traditional music practices in Irish America from the 1950s on. How‑ ever, since the 1970s, that pattern has reversed: traditional music has experienced ongoing, if un‑ even, growth since. Bicentennial celebrations in 1976 prompted interest in ethnic and racial heritages throughout America. In conjunction with this, Moloney assert that Roots, the hugely successful, 1977 television mini-series dramatising the experience of enslaved people up to and after the Civil War, had an energising effect on American ethnics and their own cultural attachments. Motivated by the zeitgeist, a suite of federal, state, and local government heritage funding awards were established, in‑ cluding the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) Heritage Awards. Joe Heaney, an Irish-speaking, traditional singer from Connemara resident in the US, was listed as an inaugural awardee in 1982. The recognition of Heaney through the NEA award dovetailed with a marked increase in undocu‑ mented Irish emigration to the US in the 1980s, as surveyed by Ray O’Hanlon in this collection; this brought a fresh cohort of first-generation musicians and listeners, the fiddler Martin Hayes among them. Stateside, immigrants encountered a growing music scene driven by second-generation musi‑ cians and also those without any Irish ethnic affiliation.21 Resonating with Ireland, conditions in the late twentieth century positively impacted Irish music in America (from traditional to popular) in the late decades of the century. From the 1970s, more for‑ mal systems of transmission took hold, as music learning moved out of kitchens and into classroom settings. For example, Martin Mulvihill, a first generation immigrant to New York, began teaching Irish traditional music in 1971 based in the Bronx (he also taught in Brooklyn, New Jersey and Phila‑ delphia). Fiddle player Eileen Ivers was one of his many students. In the 1970s, Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, a traditional music revival organisation founded in 1951 in Ireland, established a network of branches in America which supported teaching and performance; their students subsequently made musical pilgrimages to participate in competitions in Ireland with increasing success. Comhaltas was not the first organisation for Irish music in America, but early twentieth-century Irish music and piping clubs in Chicago, San Franciso, and other emigrant cities had long faded. The pub, initially adopted by Irish emigrants in England in the 1950s and following that in Ireland, became a key site of music-making in America in the 1980s and 1990s, refreshing cultural attachments. Finally, the rise of annual Irish cultural festivals at Snug Harbor, Staten Island and other sites, revolutionised Irish music culture in America as it did in Ireland. Festivals are important community building spaces, distinct from quotidian life, offering an antidote to the mundane with ongoing cul‑ tural benefits as people return to their everyday lives. Music is inevitably programmed as an experi‑ ential lynchpin at Irish cultural festivals and the largest among these festivals is the Milwaukee Irish Fest. First held in 1981, the festival’s music programme is consciously varied, presenting Irish music in its many forms from traditional to popular genres. With a summer school running in parallel, it attracted 80,000 people in 2022. The final late twentieth-century circumstance to note affecting Irish music in America is the Irish dance extravaganza, “Riverdance.” The ground-breaking show had its American debut in March 1996, going on to sell out multiple tours and residencies in the years since. American exposure was greatly enhanced by a broadcast agreement with PBS and, though a dance show, Riverdance globalised Irish culture and, collaterally, Irish music at a scale unknown previously.

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In the new millennium, Irish traditional music in America broadly coheres with the world of tradi‑ tional music in Ireland, experienced through festivals, pub sessions, concerts, and classes.

Conclusion As a portable aspect of culture, music travels with people but soundscapes of emigrant home and destination are resonant, reimagined over generations. Music practice also responds to its immediate material and social environments, creating new sounds, functions and meanings as necessary, and where opportunities arise. This chapter has traced transnational and intra-American developments of Irish music in the US since the eighteenth century, offering a window on processes of belonging and becoming not just of Irish music, but of emigrants themselves and American culture.

Notes 1 Cooper, The Musical Traditions, 138; Ó hAllmhuráin, “America,” 14. 2 Cooper, The Musical Traditions, 143, 144. 3 Cooper, The Musical Traditions, 144, 146; Munnelly, “Ritchie,” 577. 4 Cooper, The Musical Traditions, 148, 144. 5 Cooper, The Musical Traditions, 153. 6 Moloney, “Irish-American Popular Music,” 382, 381; Ó hAllmhuráin, “America,” 15. 7 Nowatzki, “Paddy Jumps Jim Crow,” 171; Moloney, “Irish-American Popular Music,” 382, 382. 8 Moloney, “Irish-American Popular Music,” 383; Nowatzki, “Paddy Jumps Jim Crow,” 180. 9 Smith, “Blacks and Irish,” 79. 10 Moloney, “Irish-American Popular Music,” 382. 11 Moloney, “Irish-American Popular Music,” 382; Nowatzki, “Paddy Jumps Jim Crow,” 171; Moloney, “IrishAmerican Popular Music,” 382, 382; Mooney, Irish Stereotypes in Vaudeville, 35. 12 MacNamara, “With Perfect Pitch,” 20. 13 MacNamara, “With Perfect Pitch,” 21, 22. 14 MacNamara, “With Perfect Pitch,” 23–28. 15 Moloney, “Irish‑American Popular Music,” 384, 387, 387, 391, 388, 391, 388, 388. 16 Moloney, “Irish‑American Popular Music,” 393. 17 O’Malley, The Beat Cop, 3, 71. Note, Francis O’Neill was not musically literate. James O’Neill (musician, policeman and no relation) completed many of the published transcriptions. 18 O’Malley, The Beat Cop, 5. 19 Ní Fhuartháin, “Copley Records,” 142; Ó hAllmhráin, “America, Irish Traditional Music,” 16. 20 Ní Fhuartháin, “Dance Halls.” 21 Moloney, “U.S.A,” 717–719.

Bibliography Child, Francis James. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 5 volumes. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1882–1898. Cooper, David. The Musical Traditions of Northern Ireland and its Diaspora: Community and Conflict. Surrey: Ashgate Press, 2009. MacNamara, Jarleth. “With Perfect Pitch: Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore.” New York Irish History Roundtable 27 (2013): 20–34. Moloney, Mick. “Irish‑American Popular Music.” In Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States, edited by J.J. Lee and Marion R. Casey, 381–405. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Moloney, Mick. “U.S.A.” In Companion to Irish Traditional Music, edited by Fintan Vallely, 717–719. Cork: Cork University Press, 2011. Mooney, Jennifer. Irish Stereotypes in Vaudeville, 1865–1905. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Munnelly, Tom. “Ritchie, Jean.” In Companion to Irish Traditional Music, edited by Fintan Vallely, 577. Cork: Cork University Press, 2011.

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Méabh Ní Fhuartháin Ní Fhuartháin, Méabh. “Copley Records.” In Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland, edited by Barra Boydell and Harry White, 16. Dublin: UCD Press, 2013. Ní Fhuartháin, Méabh. “Dance Halls, Parish Halls, and Marquees: Building and Regulating Irish Public Dance Space, 1897–1957.” Éire‑Ireland 54, no. 1&2 (2019): 218–250. Nowatzki, Robert. “Paddy Jumps Jim Crow: Irish‑Americans and Blackface Minstrelsy.” Éire‑Ireland 41, no. 3&4 (2006): 162–184. Ó hAllmhuráin, Gearóid. “America, Irish Traditional Music.” In The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland, edited by Barra Boydell and Harry White, 14–21, vol. 1. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2013. O’Malley, Michael. The Beat Cop: Chicago’s Chief O’Neill and the Creation of Irish Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. O’Neill, Francis. The Dance Music of Ireland 1001 Gems. Chicago, IL: Lyon and Healy, 1907. Smith, Christopher. “Blacks and Irish on the Riverine Frontiers: The Roots of American Popular Music.” South‑ ern Cultures 17, no. 1 (2011): 75–102.

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38 DISABILITY IN IRISH‑CATHOLIC AMERICA Joseph Valente

This essay proposes to treat Alice McDermott’s award‑winning novel, Someone, as a fragmentary but telling exemplar of the dispositions, latent and express, toward disability in latter day Irish‑Catholic America. The novel delineates the initial cohesion and slow dispersion of a Brooklyn Irish‑American community through the lens of its disposition toward physical and mental/psychosocial disability. In the same motion, it presents those different species of disability through the lens of the Irish‑­ Catholic experience, traced in the growth of the narrator‑protagonist, Marie, from childhood myopia to adult meconnaissance. To execute this recursive strategy, McDermott has recourse to the subtle, first‑­person narrative irony favored by her notable Irish contemporaries, such as Anne Enright, Anna Burns, Emma Donoghue, and Eimear McBride. McDermott relies heavily, if tacitly, upon the social model of disability, which has revolutionized the popular and professional understanding of such conditions by locating them not in the body or brain of the afflicted, but in an afflicting social order: in neglect, stigma, disaccommodation, or in the othering of the impaired—everything that goes under the heading of ableism. Although recent criti‑ cism of the social model for discounting the organic stratum of disability is well taken, this model, along with its corollary, the socio‑political model, has uncovered a truth as crucial as it is irrefutable: the limits of a community are determined by its demarcation of the border between ability and dis‑ ability and its openness to affirming the disabled as full members.1 McDermott’s novel explores how such limits manifest in an Irish‑American context. After delin‑ eating the nature of social models of disability, this chapter examines the ways in which Someone traces a shift from a seemingly inclusive Irish‑American community grounded in Catholic mores to the reality of class‑based, religiously inflected exclusions and its resultant disabling loneliness. Mc‑ Dermott’s Someone exposes the ways in which the social construction of an Irish Catholic American community can ironically lead to a different kind of disability: social isolation.

Social Models and Dis/Ability Compulsory able‑bodiedness/mindedness forms the most entrenched foundation, in Western cul‑ tures, of social hierarchy and discrimination, of the protocols of inclusion and exclusion, ascendancy and subdominance. It constitutes the primary instance of systemic violence, as elaborated by Slavoj Zizek. In his essay Violence, Zizek distinguishes readily visible types of violence, the subjective and the symbolic—disturbances of and within the social order, respectively—from violence endemic to 499

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the smooth, normal functioning of that order. The latter he calls systemic violence, which constitutes the seemingly neutral backdrop whereon the other forms of violence become legible.2 It is precisely as such a backdrop that ableism radiates outward from its conventional sites of operation to inform all manner of supremacist reasoning. Whether one adduces male superiority, white superiority, compulsory heterosexuality, neuro‑normativity, or class‑based elitism, the lower‑ ing common denominator is a stereotyped hierarchy of ability—be it rational, intellectual, practical, moral, etc.—in which the disempowered party ostensibly lacks effective possession of some essential capacity required to enter the circle of plenary esteem. A social regime arranged in these terms, and almost all are, have ableism qua systemic violence at their core. It was the distinctive historical fate of the Irish to be metrocolonial subjects—at once the agents and the inmates of Anglo‑European imperialism—claiming racial entitlement while suffering ethnic derogation, both the white man and his burden. As such, they held residence on either side of the (dis)ability ledger simultaneously. They were exponents in the main of a psychosocial normativ‑ ity that often militated against them. The ambiguity of their position in this regard conditioned two contrary alternatives by way of reform. On one hand, the Irish were inclined to intercept the imputa‑ tion of deficient, ersatz whiteness by rigorously policing the diacritical boundaries of soundness and debility within their own ranks. On the other hand, the Irish were afforded, and sometimes enacted, a unique perspective on how fuzzy, how porous was the cultural membrane separating functional limi‑ tations deemed relatively normal and those impairments classed as disabilities. Although tempting the Irish to defensiveness and self‑division, states of disability could also act as an invitation to fel‑ lowship. Over the course of three numbered segments, Someone represents its Irish‑American com‑ munity modulating from solidarity to scission, in concert with the Bildung of its narrator‑protagonist, the disintegration of her neighborhood, and, most importantly, a shift in emphasis from physical to mental/psychosocial disability. In the process the latter form of disability emerges as the precipitant, the scapegoat and the emblem of a community in dissolution.3

Part One: Community The novel opens in a pre‑Depression Irish‑American enclave, in which the integration of normative and non‑normative embodiment, and the respective bearers thereof, serves as the leading emblem of its tightknit character. At the heart of the quarter’s street culture stands, or rather sits, “Blind Bill Corrigan” and his coadjutor, the “gimp,” Walter Hartnett. Ever attired in a business suit, Corrigan ironically officiates as umpire for the boys’ daily stickball game, and his decisions, seconded by the hobble‑footed Hartnett, are never to be challenged. Defined, sidelined, yet never marginalized by their disabilities, Blind Bill and Walter are symbolically paired with two other prominently, but less disablingly, impaired figures: Marie, the narrator‑protagonist, and her friend, Pegeen, the initial focus of her attention. Severely myopic, Marie’s “defective eyes, ill formed,” answer in a minor key to Cor‑ rigan’s blindness. Pegeen’s “asymmetry,” which results in a “loping hunchbacked walk,” similarly mirrors the asymmetry of Hartnett’s limbs, which produces a halting gait. Such correspondence of disabling and non‑disabling, or more and less disabling, impairments indexes a communal ethos that goes beyond inclusivity to a virtual identification of normative and non‑normative embodiment.4 Ratcheting this identification to a clarifying extreme, McDermott stages a flip‑flop (literally) whereby “clumsy” but presumably able‑bodied Pegeen, and not the certifiably handicapped Walter, is perennially given to falling down (“I do it all the time”), the sort of practical dysfunction that defines disability. In addition, Pegeen, and not Walter, has the occasion to discover that “There’s always someone nice” to assist her in her stumbles. In the end, though, no one could help her. One day, without warning, she tumbles down the basement stairs to her death. The community embrace of their always clumsy girl, however, continues unabated in their concerted grief at her passing. 500

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The neighbors gather in droves outside her house when the ambulance arrives and then again inside that domicile to “wake” her stilled body for the final sendoff.5 Particularly given Pegeen’s mixed heritage, Syrian‑Irish, the sacred object and ritualized idioms gracing her wake—the use of her confirmation dress as a burial outfit, the mounting of the rosary in a simulacrum of prayer, the single taper illuminating her face—all go to suggest how far the cohe‑ siveness of this Brooklyn community roots itself in sectarian belonging no less than ethnic origin, or rather in Roman Catholicism as the very mark of Irish descent. The leading figure of faith in Part One, Marie’s soon to be ordained brother Gabriel, takes the role of religion a crucial step further. In the aftermath of Pegeen’s wake, and in keeping with his angelic namesake, Gabriel delivers a Scriptural message directly from God: “Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin?…Yet none of them falls to the ground out of your Father’s knowledge…so do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.” Centered upon the aptness of the word “fall,” Gabriel’s reading posits their faith as not just the institution anchoring the neighborhood ethnos, the shared sense of identity, but the institution modeling and fostering the community ethos, one of mutual empathy and solicitude.6 Marie’s one word rejoinder to her brother’s homiletics, “amadan,” Irish Gaelic for fool, gives offense to her parents and pause to the reader. She is quoting her friend Pegeen, who directed the epithet at herself for her pratfalls. But its provenance does not elucidate its purport on this occasion. Is Marie doubting the omniscience of the Father or His vigilance, perhaps even His limitless care for mankind? Is that why her father labels her a “little pagan”? Or is she disputing the charge to “not be afraid,” since Pegeen plainly had reason to nurture a fear of falling, her worth in sparrows notwith‑ standing? There remains, however, another possibility: that Gabriel, whose standing in the family has much to do with his apparent vocation, is “amadán,” a fool, for making claims on behalf of the Church, an intimation that finds some warrant later in the novel when he pronounces himself a fool for giving pastoral advice to Marie. If Gabriel is indeed amadán in his biblical profession of faith, without that pejorative touching upon the faith itself, it must allude to his perceived misjudgment of the tutelary reach, power, or beneficence of the Church, specifically a false equation (on the Church’s own authority) of the all‑encompassing provision of God for his flock and the Church community’s imperfectly enacted aspiration to the same ideal.7 This insight is in fact progressively thematized over the course of the novel in the repeated failure of the Church community to extend to the mentally/psychosocially disabled the human care or even the basic humanizing respect its own precepts would dictate. While Marie is as yet unable to cognize fully this default on the Church’s inclusivity, her narrative already knows, which indicates a degree of unconscious apprehension on her part. Ironically, once Marie has sufficiently matured to attain conscious awareness of this pastoral shortfall, including an inattentiveness to Gabriel’s own troubles, she has forsaken her illuminating “pagan” skepticism for a blinkered Catholic orthodoxy. Her Bil‑ dung evolves in tension with her potential enlightenment. That is to say the communal ties of the old Brooklyn neighborhood loosen, Marie’s ethical development aligns less with its implicit mores and increasingly with an orthodox Catholic tradition that is not altogether accepting of or hospitable to psychosocial disability in particular. Marie’s youthful intuition has its catalyzing and implicitly corroborating evidence in the figure of Big Lucy, whose stout able‑bodiedness is deliberately contrasted with her marked mental/psychoso‑ cial disturbance. Unlike the former, the latter species of disability seems to render Lucy something of a pariah or, in Agamben’s vocabulary, an “exception,” someone included in the tribal pale as its outside or beyond. Indeed, Marie introduces Big Lucy just before she “is about to sail out of the neighborhood forever,” exiled from an enclave dominated by a religious institution to the carceral precincts of a mental institution. Although we witness Lucy desperately attempting to participate in the big event of the day, the fanfare surrounding Dora Ryan’s wedding, her “harsh” yet “beseeching” salutation of “Good Luck” wins her no sympathy from those interested in the proceedings. Marie’s 501

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mother remarks that “No good could come” from Lucy’s benediction, and Marie herself entirely jus‑ tifies Lucy’s pending institutionalization: “What could her family do with Lucy’s suddenly outsized female body, her crude and childish mind, her fits of violence….” Unlike the physically impaired, Lucy displays remarkable bodily grace, drawing comparison to a “ballerina”, but her crude ways sin against the standards of social grace, precipitating her effective excommunication from the group.8 Terms like sin and excommunication are used here advisedly. Big Lucy turns out to be a harbinger of a decisive if unwelcome shift in the role of the Church in the novel’s Irish‑American community. Physical impairment or disability initially prompts a receptiveness and compassion among the neigh‑ borhood residents, consistent with the supreme good, charity, espoused by their Church. Mental and psychosocial disability, conversely, occasions abnormal behavior that can violate the codes of class respectability and often gets confused, in these religious circles, with errancy, inequity, sacrilege, and the dissolute. As Marie’s representation of her people unfolds, worldly concerns of rank and decorum infiltrate the religious articulation of spiritual values, and, in turn, religious judgments on moral stand‑ ing end up converging with and reinforcing secular notions of propriety. This muddling of discursive registers leads to the outright moralization of mental/psychosocial disability—an attitude implicitly drawn from the Christian Bible. In time, the consequences of this divisive ideological mutation prove profoundly isolating, not just for the banished Lucy, but for all the impaired characters from the old neighborhood, and even, perhaps chiefly, for that clerical voice of divine comfort, Gabriel. For each of these figures, in various ways and degrees, a disenchanted world of loneliness awaits.

Part Two: Coming Apart The rise of class‑based viewpoints and motivations in the world of Someone coincides, appropriately enough, with the end of Marie’s childhood innocence, both social and sexual. After Walter Hartnett drops a derogatory comment about the effect of Marie’s malformed eyes on her facial appearance, they begin a physically avid (for Walter) and bruising (for Marie) courtship. Theirs is an amorous en‑ tanglement of a distinctly maladroit sort: “My pumps caught themselves, somehow, and in the tangle as I fell into him, he slid his warm hand under my arm. ‘Not very graceful,’ he said.” But because the awkwardness of their amours grows out of their mutual impairment, it only makes them seem all the more suited to one another, at least from Marie’s vantage. In keeping with the mores of the time and their religion, marriage seems a foregone conclusion, explicitly affirmed by Walter.9 It soon becomes evident, however, that any marital interest he may have entertained in Marie stems from his own internalized ableism, his supposition that as a disabled person he could not “do better.” Once he discovers otherwise, Walter packs Marie off with a “nice lunch” and an explanation that is at once self‑serving and self‑loathing: he is quitting Marie precisely for complementing his debility with her own. Looks like me and Rita Sweeney are getting married…It wasn’t just that Rita’s family had money…although she was better off than the two of us…It was simply that Rita was better looking. No flaws that he could see. Not, he said, like you and me. “Blind you,” he said, “gimpy me.” … Don’t kid yourself that everybody’s equal in this country. It’s the best looking people that have the best chances. I’m giving my future children the best chance I can give them. What kind of a father would I be if I didn’t… Moneyed and good looking, Rita Sweeney personifies Hartnett’s conflation of proper embodiment and elite class status, his belief in their socially organic metonymy. His preference for Rita over Marie 502

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and the terms whereby he justifies that preference instance the spreading infection of localized Irish Catholic solidarity by class discrimination, which here devalues physical as well as psychosocial impairment. Hartnett’s eagerness to wed Miss Sweeney looks not just to economic but biopolitical advancement. He imagines himself delivered vicariously of the social demerit of his disfigurement by breeding, out of pretty Miss Sweeney, a well‑knit progeny.10 There is, the cologne of paternal concern notwithstanding, a disturbingly eugenical tenor to Hart‑ nett’s plan, a complicity in social Darwinism, the thriving of the (aesthetically) fittest. He proclaims himself and, by extension, all progenitors ethically bound to allow the prevailing dictates of bodily ideals or norms to determine the course of their reproductive practice and hence the very future of their people, and hence to leave behind the biomedically divergent (like himself, ironically, and Ma‑ rie). Given that he advocates this position in the advent of World War II, his marital project must be read in the light of the Holocaust that had already begun, not with the genocide of European Jewry, but with the genocide of the disabled, up to a quarter million slaughtered.11 Doubtful of her brother’s ensuing attempt to reassure her, Marie’s reaction to this peremptory, unforeseen desertion is to perceive herself expelled from the forms of life indigenous to her Irish Catholic background. She thinks, “My eyes would not heal. I would never step out of my skin and marry Walter Hartnett in the pretty church. And since this was true for me, it was true, in its own way for everyone.” It is certainly true in a most decisive way for her would‑be comforter, Gabriel. At the time and place represented, homosexuality was regarded as not just a sin, but a psychopathic disorder that disallowed its subject from performing certain functions, priestly ones for example, and therefore was in effect a psychosocial disability, to be considered as such herein. Gabriel has recently forfeited his vocation, and the undisclosed reasons for doing so—better described as the closeted ­reasons—leave him, as Marie only later surmises, with his own “blasted vision of an impossible future.” Accordingly, the question Marie poses to her brother, “Who’s going to love me?,” refers not only to her perceived deformation. It also speaks, still more poignantly, (a) to the forlorn straits in which Gabriel finds himself; (b) to the fear both she and Gabriel harbor of being socially isolated by their differently atypical constitutions; and (c) to Marie’s inaptitude for fully reckoning or empathiz‑ ing with the stringent mode of exclusion suffered by the non‑physically disabled individuals in her life, like Gabriel and Lucy. She has been vouchsafed but a foretaste of the lifelong loneliness that they, and not she, will wind up enduring.12 Whereas Marie’s childhood habitus in Part One accommodated an affinity between disabling and non‑disabling impairment, a porous border dividing and yet joining the two, the adult world and the adult Marie of Part Two continue to disavow a cognate affinity between physical and mental/ psychosocial disability. Through a subtle play of dramatic irony, however, McDermott contrives to depict this unacknowledged fellowship in its unacknowledged state. She signposts for the attentive reader the connection Marie, her narrator, cannot discern. McDermott sets forth a structural analogy between the differently disabled characters, centered on that signifier of Irish‑American cohesion, the Catholic Church, from which each of the analogized characters has been respectively sidelined. After Walter’s defection, Marie imagines herself, blear eyed, outside the “pretty church,” despairing of the sacrament of matrimony. Gabriel has taken himself, queer eyed, outside the church office of sacramental dispensation, the priesthood. And both of them recall Big Lucy, she of the “careening eyes,” standing outside their parish church at Dora Ryan’s nuptials, wishing “good luck” repeatedly and receiving derision for her pains.13 In something of a homeopathic remedy for her life‑altering loss, Marie becomes the “consoling angel” in the parish’s funeral home. In a sense, she adopts the seraphic role of comforter‑in‑chief once performed by the now defrocked Gabriel upon the death of Pegeen, and she finds herself installed as her brother had been at the heart of the Catholic enterprise, the join between Church and com‑ munity. The promise of her new situation, however, that she might be restored to the ethno‑sectarian 503

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gemeinshaft of her childhood proves illusory; or rather, the corruption of that possibility within her new establishment and its superintending Church proves revelatory. Shortly after assuming her posi‑ tion, her boss, Mr. Fagin, asks her to visit his mother “every once in a while” in her upstairs apartment. But what Marie discovers on her first visit is the ideological inner sanctum of community‑Church relations, wherein the vitiation of neighborly fellowship by a moralizing class/ableist snobbery is most acute. The apartment is “all Irish lace”: “lace curtains, lace tablecloths, lace doilies on the backs and arms of every chair, lace at the throat of the old lady’s dresses and a lace handkerchief on her pale hands.” This, the master signifier of Irish class “pretensions,” as Marie herself attests, turns out to be peculiarly suitable for the sort of captious gossip that characterizes Mrs. Fagin’s salon. The composition of the group—“nuns,” “immigrant ladies” —speaks to and for the Irish‑American identification of ethnic and sectarian belonging, which the ladies smugly monitor in their “sorting out of recollection and rumor, of gossip, anecdotes and stories.” The very first anecdote retailed for Marie indicates that in serving as a conversational hub and archive of parish life, this mortuary klatch has also become a locus of the contamination of neighborly spiritual togetherness by the schismatic energy of class distinction and rivalry. Mental/psychosocial disability, tellingly, constitutes the frame of reference for this dynamic, at least for Marie, who immediately learns “the fate of Big Lucy, whose mother was [recently] waked.”14 The theme of the church ladies’ parable of Lucy is the power of selfless, beautiful mother’s love, exemplified by Mrs. Meaney, to overcome the most baneful adversity and shame the devil. The actual purpose of the women’s story, however, is to congratulate themselves on “the glowing conclusion they had wrought out of Mrs. Meaney’s travail.” They begin by demeaning her as “shanty Irish,” a class label that fully justifies their condescension. Just as her graceless corpse took the mortician’s art to make her look like a “mummified dowager queen” rather than “her unfortunate self,” so her struggles with her daughter require these women’s approval to rise to the moral dignity their narra‑ tive allows her. Substantively, however, the dignity ascribed Mrs. Meaney depends on the gravity of the adversity surmounted. It is not enough for these nuns and ladies, evidently, that in caring for her daughter, Mrs. Meaney prevailed over expense, weariness, bodily weakness, and tedium; that she “made the trip—by subway, ferry. ferry, bus, and bus—to her daughter’s Staten Island asylum every Sunday”; not enough that she baked her cakes…and sat, broken‑hearted, holding her daughter’s hand.” They must instead lift the stakes of the laurel they bestow to the existential, even the theologi‑ cal plane. The triumph of Mrs. Meaney needs be over evil as such, ensouled in the devil and incarnate in her daughter. “In her derangement,” they say, Lucy “spoke only of vulgar things” and haunted her mother with “the terrible images evoked by [her] dirty words,” those words “the devil uses.” With this conflation of social and spiritual demerit, the vulgar and the dirty, the déclassé and the depraved, the ladies pinpoint Lucy as the adversity confronting her mother, the wellhead of Mrs. Meaney’s ills. At the same time, they infuse their attitude of class superiority with religious sanctimony, on which basis they feel comfortable refusing the disabled subject any sympathy or indeed any consideration. Lucy is simply the undeserving object of her mother’s indefatigable sacrifice, which the ladies see themselves as honoring by their memoriam.15 The mortuary women’s account slakes Marie’s curiosity about Lucy, and suspicious though she is of its pietistic, self‑congratulatory tone, she dwells no further than they do on the plight of Lucy herself. Her narrative follows theirs in leaving off without giving any thought to the tenor of Lucy’s existence since her mother’s death, to how no one comes to see her every Sunday to hold her hand; to how she might expectantly await the arrival of the one person who was “going to love [he]r,” only to be disappointed, downcast, even “heartbroken”; to how the isolating power of disability, so recently felt by Marie herself, might be most cruelly and permanently inflicted on an institutionalized social reject. In an astringently ironic hiatus in her ethical Bildung, Marie remains insensitive to any sort of inner life, affective or reflective, in the mentally disabled and so to the most devastating affliction 504

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that such a disability might bear: the permanent, profound loneliness that comes with being excluded, wholesale, from social intimacy. Never fully imaged, Lucy’s fate haunts the interstice between what is said in the novel (Marie’s narrative) and what is implied by the novel, where the reader is left to infer the harrowing prospect. In subjecting the mentally ill to both social and spiritual abjection, the “sisters in their wimples” and the lace curtain ladies not only exemplify the undermining of pastoral solidarity by positional advantage; they also rehearse, in a particularly atavistic mode, the scriptural grounds for previously noted treatment of the mentally/psychosocially disabled as figures of “exception” in Agamben’s sense of the term. Here again, McDermott contrives a narrative device for representing the disavowed as disavowed, for having her characters communicate unacknowledged truths without acknowledging, expressing, or even intimating them. In this case, Marie’s future husband, Tom Commerford, asks his old confessor, Gabriel, to relate a gospel story wherein Christ cures a blind man amid a discussion with his disciples of sin, suffer‑ ing, and punishment. According to Gabriel, “This man was born blind, they said, “was it because his parents sinned? It was a belief in those days,” he added, young scholar, “that blindness or deformity was a punishment for the parents’ sins.” In his zeal to wave off the archaic superstition of physical disability as moral inheritance, the young scholar neglects to observe the fact that “in those days” mental/psychosocial disability was taken to be a sign of demonic possession, of diabolic evil borne by or resident in the afflicted themselves. Sound familiar? What Gabriel, godly messenger, unwit‑ tingly announces by this censored allusion is that the church ladies’ moral abjection of Lucy draws upon a scriptural warrant and, accordingly, that the ignorant, invidious, libelous stereotype lodged in this apostolic legacy by no means confined to “those days.” Nor do the judgments rendered on this basis touch only upon the patently disabled. They can rebound even upon apparently impeccable members of this ethno‑sectarian socius. Marie’s sketch of the insinuating inquisitorial style of the mortuary klatch attests as much: But it was Gabe, I knew, who would give my brief life story the kind of turn that made the ladies lean forward…a handsome boy, his parents’ prize, only a year at his first parish before he came home without his collar. A mystery. I imagine them all…letting their words fall off into that long nod…. Just as the golden boy’s hidden social disability pairs him in anticipated solitude with his physically impaired, romantically abandoned sister, so his exposure to the opprobrium that engenders his social disability qua disability pairs him with the still more unfortunate Lucy.16 But the subsequent pairing of Gabriel with Blind Bill Corrigan, the last of the original disabled core, is the most instructive, completing as it does the dialectic of disability and loneliness begun with Hartnett leaving Marie. As World War I had taken Corrigan’s sight, World War II takes away the young men of the neighborhood, leaving blind Bill no place in their brotherhood of arms and no remainder of the street culture of which he was a mainstay. To the surprise of everyone, he commits suicide by putting his head in the oven. The dominant sentiment of the bereft community is “Why in the world would he do such a thing? Why in the world?” Or again, “Old Bill, what did he want to do that for?” It would seem the seclusion attendant to his blindness induced, under the circumstances, a second, mental disability, a killing depression. As one mourner puts it, “It was a lonely life for him.” The problem worrying Marie, besetting Gabriel, and haunting the memory of Lucy finally comes to the surface of the text in explicit verbal form. The disabled life is a “lonely life.” Moreover, and here is the dialectical twist, while disability (or socially unaccommodated impairment) precipitates isolation—whether by ostracism, neglect, or exclusion—the resulting loneliness, for innately social beings, can produce or simply become a form of mental disability, in turn.17 505

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Unlike the physical disability that defines Corrigan’s social identity in the old neighborhood, his mental disability, or rather the performative effects thereof, cause the defining institution of that neighborhood, the Church, to deny him ritual acceptance among its faithful departed: Because he had taken his life by his own hands, Bill Corrigan would have no funeral Mass at Mary Star of the Sea and he could not be buried in Gate of Heaven, where his father and infant brother lay. The parish priests will not even sanctify his extramural wake by leading the mourners in the ro‑ sary. A Church that contends we are all playing on the stage of eternity elects to isolate a disabled member both spiritually and bodily for all time in order to sanction the fruits of his mental/psycho‑ social disability. The funeral director’s assessment, “the damn Church is blind to life sometimes, blind…and don’t dare tell anyone I said so,” captures the tragic irony at work in the triumph of the Church’s ableism over the supreme value of caritas that it professes. Marie’s summary remarks to Corrigan’s old friend, Walter Hartnett, express a degree of sympathy not accorded poor Lucy, without suggesting the least demurral from the Church’s ableism: “Let’s both keep sic? Bill in our prayers.” It is rather Hartnett’s response that signals a rejection of the Church’s judgment: “More like him praying for us.”18 Like Corrigan, Gabriel instances a dialectical reversal in the normal course of disability, a queer‑ ing if you will of its typical progress. Instead of being strictly the cause (qua impairment) of ableist exclusion or neglect, disability becomes the effect of that exclusion or neglect. That disability‑effect is mental or psychosocial, growing out of disconnection, isolation, loneliness. But Gabriel’s predica‑ ment gives another twist to the dialectical screw. For he possesses no original catalyzing impairment in the conventional sense. Words intoned over the memory of Blind Bill Corrigan, “It was a lonely life for him,” are distinctly echoed, at Marie’s wedding reception, in her groom Tom’s somewhat complacent plea on behalf of homosexuals: “You’ve got to have some pity for them…People like that. It’s got to be a lonely life.” The absence of a reply on Marie’s part may well reflect her own homophobic impulses, as part of a securely heterocentric, pre‑Stonewall Brooklyn. But it certainly speaks to her ignorance of her brother’s sexual preferences and his struggles with them. For Tom’s sentiment applies pointedly if indirectly to Gabriel, who has not only suffered but internalized the strictures of his (religious) community on his sexual identity. If Corrigan has been separated by the Church from its agents, the priests, Gabriel has separated himself from his priestly functions, and, to a degree, from the Church as its agent. That he does so without being able to offer a credible, socially approved explanation spells a redoubling of his isolation. Gabriel removes himself from his society, his clerical circle, while remaining closeted within the larger community. Gabriel is “out” as in mar‑ ginalized without being “out” as in open and ex‑pressive of self, an especially deep well of loneliness issuing in and of a piece with his ultimate symptom of mental disability, the breakdown.19

Part Three: Loneliness (More or Less) In the synoptic concluding section of Someone, McDermott counterposes an ascending and a de‑ scending life trajectory to tie the disability narrative together. The ascending arc portrays Marie hav‑ ing overcome her physical impairment and found the people who are “going to love me” (88): her husband, Tom, and four healthy children, all living in a roomy house in the suburbs. The last item touches, in turn, upon the descending arc. The old neighborhood has gone to the dogs, scattering its Irish‑American community. Gabriel, who remained in Brooklyn to look after their mother, lapses into a slough of despond so severe as to drive him “naked and crying” into the streets. There he is pelted with “mud” and “thin branches torn from trees or bits of garbage.” With “taunts” and “jeers” 506

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raining down upon him, his feet “bare” and “bleeding,” he is taken into custody and shipped off to a well‑known local psychiatric facility.20 As a “golden child,” once pronounced a bishop‑to‑be by his father, and now abused and pilloried by the crowd, Gabriel makes a passing figure of a crucified messiah. But inasmuch as his execration and institutionalization responds to a very public psychotic break, Marie’s representation of Gabriel evokes a Biblical figure rather less exalted within his Irish Catholic circle, the demonically pos‑ sessed or their modern‑day correlative, Big Lucy. Then again, perhaps these reverse images are not mutually exclusive in the broader context of the novel. McDermott has fashioned this non‑impaired figure of youthful Catholic piety and scholarship, the “golden child,” to take unto himself the effects of disability suffered by the other characters at the hands of different elements, personal and institu‑ tional, of the Irish‑Catholic community: the dread of loneliness, the experience of denigration and psychiatric commitment, the removal from the rites and registers of the Church. By thus incurring, not to say incarnating, the features of mental/psychosocial disability in a non‑impaired constitution, the persecuted Gabriel a Points to the ontological affiliation of normative and non‑normative mindedness, analogous to the affiliation of normative and non‑normative embodiment on offer in the old neighborhood; b Summons an ethical affiliation of normative and non‑normative mindedness and with it a greater acceptance of the latter by the former. The Bildung of his sister Marie culminates, for better but also for worse, in a recognition of and response to these messianic implications of her own portrayal—the summit of McDermott’s subtle narrative irony.21 The ascending and descending life trajectories meet upon Gabriel’s release from the asylum and his sojourn in the Comerford’s suburban home. Marie shows evidence of outgrowing her passive subscription to normative standards of mental health, at least so far as her brother is concerned. Her efforts on Gabriel’s behalf serve on an item by item basis to free him from the messianic surrogacy of the impaired (Lucy, Bill, Marie herself), to which the structure of her narration, punctuated by scriptural motifs, tends to commit him. First, she brings him into her nuclear family, terminating the course of institutionalization that mirrored Lucy’s fate. Second, she appreciates that the lonesome‑ ness and lovelessness she once foresaw as her own fate have become his portion, not only in the past, but going forward, and she takes steps in their final interview to remedy that situation. [Gabriel] said, “That fellow that was here, Matt Cain, asked if I was interested in his place…the top floor’s available…I don’t know the neighborhood very well, but I told him I’d consider it.” “You’ll be lonely out there,” I said. I said it abruptly, without thinking. “It will be a lonely life.” I did not remember then that the phrase had been used for Bill Corrigan. “That’s occurred to me too,” Gabriel said softly. “…You’ll be at home here,” I told him. Third, afraid that Gabriel plans to decline the solace she offered for a more permanent solution to his loneliness, Marie pilfers his “prescription bottle,” thereby preventing him from embracing Corrigan’s suicidal fate, with its religious ramifications. Marie herself opines, “I might have saved my brother’s life that night,” in what counts as both the ethical climax and narrative denouement of the novel.22 However, the thrums of Marie’s lingering disappointment that her much admired brother has come to this pass forms a counterpoint to her outward acceptance of his disability and the increased moral flexibility and independence it evinces. Remarking Gabriel’s “meticulous and elegant table 507

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manners,” Marie pauses to approve the “lace curtain pretensions” of her parents for “cosseting, cor‑ ralling, patting down and holding in whatever it was that had undone him last summer.” She here elides an all too obvious irony: her specimen of the moral purpose undermining her family’s lace “pretensions” only goes to illustrate their utter failure in the event, as Gabriel had, after all, come thoroughly undone. But another, still more ironically overlooked point of reference involves the nuns and church ladies whose own “lace curtain pretensions” are so vaunted that they permeate the space and delimit the tenor of their daily conferrals. The superior Catholic sanctimony ventilated by the ladies and symbolized by their lace would have had a field day with the “scandal” of “Gabe’s his‑ tory,” as Marie herself observes, if “they would know the clear eyed truth of it.” That is to say, the “cosseting, corralling, patting down and holding in” attributed to such moralizing respectability help to enjoin Gabriel to secrecy, self‑denial, and even self‑repudiation, to consign him to the closet of solitude, and thus to foster the implosive condition that had undone him last summer.23 Marie’s unwonted approval of the normative constraints signified by Irish lace is at bottom an unconscious, displaced expression of her disapproval of her brother’s psychosexual make up. By the same token, her pains to discourage Gabriel from taking that top floor apartment is fueled in large part by her express dislike for “Gabe’s friend,” the aforementioned Matt Cain. Given Cain’s entirely innocuous conduct on his brief visit, the only conceivable reason for Marie’s antipathy lies in her suspicion of some objectionable relationship he has forged with Gabriel. Her husband Tom intuits as much and once again launches into an anecdotal defense of those laboring under the social cloud of psychosexual disability. His brief on this occasion persuades Marie to feel guilty for not leaving a warmer bedtime note for her brother, but she has lost or forfeited a measure of respect for him, mort‑ gaged as she is to a traditional Catholic worldview.24 Reflecting upon her brother’s breakdown, that cristological moment of her own depiction, she now finds its messianism circumscribed, if not tainted, by who or what he has turned out to be. She con‑ trasts the sublimity she attributed to the old Gabriel, a man whose aura of mystery was sacred, with her misgivings about the new Gabriel, a man whose obscurity of desire she dares not name, only euphe‑ mize: “And now my heart fell to think that the holy mystery of who my brother might be made flesh, ordinary flesh, by the notion that he was only a certain kind of man.” She contemplates the passion of the old Gabriel along lines of the passion of Christ, a sacrificial suffering of universal scope and other‑­ directedness, while she construes the passion of the new Gabriel as confined to his own person: “To think that he had walked out that summer day crying, weeping, naked, and grieving, not for the mortal world, but for himself alone”. Does Marie see Gabe’s crisis as inevitably self‑centered because it has as its occasion ordinary flesh; or does she tacitly recycle the psychoanalytic stereotype of homosexu‑ als as prone to narcissism? It scarcely matters. By presuming that her brother’s psychosocial disability imposes an empathic limit on his ethical being, Marie announces the limit on her own vision of mental/ psychosocial disability, an ethical limit consonant with, if more forgiving than, the limits of her Irish Catholic tribe. Whereas her community had trouble accepting the mentally/psychosocially disabled be‑ cause they saw them as irrevocably diminished beings, Marie accepts her brother’s disability, but only as a diminishing of who he truly was or might have been. The final limit of Marie’s Bildung, which is the best McDermott’s Irish America has to offer, resides in this hospitable mode of uneasy condescension.25

Notes 1 The social model focuses upon disability as a product of the larger society’s ableist response to impairment. Its offspring, the sociopolitical model, focuses upon the communities disabled people build for themselves. 2 Zizek, Violence, 1–3. 3 From the Act of Union (1800) to the founding of the Irish Free State (1922), Ireland was both a colony of the British Empire and a constituent of the United Kingdom, hence part and participant of the imperial

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Disability in Irish‑Catholic America metropole—hence metrocolonial. For the coinage of the term metrocolonialism and a detailed analysis of its structure and effects, see Valente, The Myth of Manliness, 19–25. 4 McDermott, Someone, 11, 3. 5 McDermott, Someone, 5, 9. 6 McDermott, Someone, 25–26. 7 McDermott, Someone, 27, 117. 8 McDermott, Someone, 33, 35. 9 McDermott, Someone, 67, 72. 10 McDermott, Someone, 77–78. 11 The disabled were the first victims of Nazi’s genocidal mode of eugenics. The targeting of Jews, homosexu‑ als, and the Roma people came afterwards. 12 McDermott, Someone, 80, 87–88. For the pre‑DSM, pre‑World War II view of homosexuality as a socio‑ pathic personality disturbance, see The History of Psychiatry and Homosexuality, https://www.aglp.org/ gap/1_history/. 13 McDermott, Someone, 80, 33. 14 McDermott, Someone, 114, 119, 214, 120–122. 15 McDermott, Someone, 122–123. 16 McDermott, Someone, 162, 131. 17 McDermott, Someone, 135, 137. 18 McDermott, Someone, 135–136, 142. 19 McDermott, Someone, 173. 20 McDermott, Someone, 203. 21 McDermott, Someone, 226. 22 McDermott, Someone, 231. 23 McDermott, Someone, 214, 131. 24 McDermott, Someone, 224. 25 McDermott, Someone, 227.

Bibliography McDermott, Alice. Someone. New York: Picador, 2013. The History of Psychiatry and Homosexuality. https://www.aglp.org/gap/1_history/. Accessed October 1, 2023. Online. Valente, Joseph. The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011. Zizek, Slavoj. Violence. New York: Picador, 2008.

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39 ANIMALS IN IRISH‑AMERICAN POETRY Kathryn Kirkpatrick

In his classic study of caricatures of the Irish in the mid‑nineteenth century, L. Perry Curtis de‑ votes a chapter to “Irish‑American Apes.” Political cartoonists of the era in the US drew on the already established trope of the simian Celt in the English press, variously portrayed as squalid, idle, and improvident or drunken, violent, and incapable of self‑governance. In the latter half of the century, American caricaturist Thomas Nast employed similar images to satirize Irish‑American politicians as corrupt and racist, even as other New York cartoonists deployed simianized “Paddies” to depict “the tens of thousands of working‑class immigrants and their children caught up in urban poverty and slum conditions after their flight from rural poverty and famine in Ireland.” Finally, in a multi‑­directional racial slur, Nast’s famous “The Ignorant Vote: Honors are Easy” (1876) depicts simian‑featured Black voters in the Reconstruction South carrying as much weight on the political scales as “the nasty, brutish, and simian Irish‑American voter in the north.” Less visible than the animalizing of racialized Others is the double demonization that makes the process possible: in order for the simian Paddy to be politically deployed, another construction and demonization had to occur, “namely, the construction of a monstrous man‑eating ape in equatorial Africa.” Acknowledging that gorillas are “neither aggressive nor carnivorous creatures,” Curtis observes that “[both] their size and inability to speak for themselves have meant that men were quick to project their fantasies–especially concerning physical and sexual violence.” Devaluing the Irish and Irish Americans is thus contingent on a prior devaluation of the gorilla.1 An animal studies lens allows this double move in the politics of representation to become visible. It is a commonplace in the fields of critical ecofeminism and critical animal studies that ­speciesism—the privileging of humans above all other animals—enables hierarchical human rela‑ tionships grounded in racism, sexism, and class privilege. As Margo DeMello has observed, elevating human animals at the expense of nonhuman animals in a human/animal binary has created the terms by which a category of degraded sentient beings is always available for degrading human Others. This, however, creates a skewed politics of representation. This chapter proposes an animal poetics, which employs an ecofeminist ethic of care. Such a poet‑ ics (1) refuses to reduce the non‑human animal exclusively to a symbol for purely human concerns, (2) challenges human exceptionalism by addressing poems in which animal lives, including indi‑ vidual animal lives, matter, and (3) confronts the abyss between human and nonhuman animal lives, such that neither radical differences between species nor empathetic multi‑species engagements are denied. DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-47

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Contemporary Irish poets are especially adept at “Animal Poetics.” The aim of this essay is to read poems by four significant Irish‑American poets—Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, Brendan Galvin, and Tess Gallagher—through a similar lens. Do these Irish‑American poets challenge anthro‑ pocentrism (the instrumental use of nonhuman environment entirely for human gain) by representing other animals as subjects of their own lives? This chapter argues that they do. An animal poetics interpretive process helps elucidate the ways they accomplish this and suggests one trait that may be considered common to Irish‑American poets.2

Ungrounding Identity Groups who have been degraded by being “animalized” as, historically, the Irish and Irish Ameri‑ cans have, face a critical question: in having once been subjected to the degraded animal side of the human/animal binary, should those who finally find themselves successfully on the human side continue to maintain this binary? Indeed, who must be excluded, and what half‑truths told, in order to construct a coherent identity? One of the challenges of moving from considerations of Irish poetry to Irish‑American poetry is that, in coming to America (a designation used here advisedly), the nar‑ ratives change. Oppressed by colonialism and settler politics in Ireland, Irish Americans joined and grew into a settler culture in America. Over time, as Noel Ignatiev argued in his now classic How the Irish Became White, rather than allying with similarly oppressed African Americans, Irish Americans often denigrated and competed with them, as Danielle Phillips‑Cunningham explores in her chapter in this collection. Some of the Irish‑American poets considered here also participated in such a pro‑ cess by erasing the human Other in their work. In his introduction to The Book of Irish American Poetry, Daniel Tobin has described “a collective cultural amnesia” in the work of Irish‑American poets who largely neglect “to treat substantially the historical and social circumstances from which Irish America arose.” This amnesia extends to the his‑ tory of American Indians, a central feature of the US settler culture in general, as addressed in the first section of this volume. For example, Tobin observes that Robinson Jeffers relied on a form of terra nullis to construct his own poetic identity. Jeffers’ “tendency to hold to the myth of an ahistori‑ cal New World only serves to strengthen his connection to the old albeit at the expense of those who arrived before the Europeans.” This orientation separates Jeffers from the poet of Turtle Island, Gary Snyder, who, however imperfectly, has worked to include Indigenous cultures of North America in his embrace of the spirit of place in his own California home. Snyder makes visible the human Others whom Jeffers did not.3 Irish‑American poet Marianne Moore’s erasures of the human Other in her work are even more dramatic. After graduating from Bryn Mawr, Moore attended Carlisle Commercial College, where, as a disenfranchised woman, she learned occupational skills, which she then taught at the Carlisle Indian School to disenfranchised American Indians: though her contemporaries, “William Carlos Williams, H.D., Amy Lowell, and D.H. Lawrence explored Native America as exotic subject mat‑ ter, Moore worked closely with Native Americans but rarely depicted them in her writing.” Mov‑ ing to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, at the age of nine, Moore lived for roughly 16 years in a community where American Indians were her neighbors: “[t]he town contained what may have been the largest and most diverse Native American population in the eastern United States, exceeding ten thousand students from over one hundred and forty tribes during a period of four decades.” For Wheeler and Gavaler, what Moore learned as a teacher at this American‑Indian boarding school—especially dur‑ ing a period of investigation over financial scandals and abuses of power—shaped both her profes‑ sional behavior and poetic aesthetic: “strategies of reserve and avoidance took literal form as she hid her political beliefs [socialist informed at the time] from her employers and chose a self‑isolating path of outward neutrality.” Thus, rather than amnesia, Marianne Moore chose a self‑preserving silence.4 511

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Was there too much at stake in a country made by racist ideologies for both Jeffers and Moore to navigate ethically the challenge of representing human Others in their work? Why was it possible to “see” the flora and fauna of the land their ancestors had “settled” but not the Other people who were displaced so that they could make the land their home? And what are the alternatives to the making of identity through the exclusion and degrading of Others? In what follows, I hope to offer some tenta‑ tive answers to these questions. Overall, however, Jeffers and Moore reflect an unfortunate tendency, shared by many others who entered fully into an (Irish‑)American identity, to participate in the very mechanisms of exclusion they themselves had escaped. Perhaps their nineteenth and early twentieth century proximity to arrival in the US left them with too shallow a foothold to challenge the terms on which they secured their own inclusion. For more recent Irish‑American poets like Brendan Galvin and Tess Gallagher, a more secure attachment to the new homeland allows space for both vulnerable humility and the acknowledgement of culpability.

Beyond Blood and Soil In his study of colonialism and climate crisis, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Cri‑ sis (2021), Amitav Ghosh addresses the genocide of the Bandanese by Dutch traders intent on the monopoly of the lucrative natural resource of their islands, the nutmeg tree. The massacre of 1621 violently emptied the Banda islands and, through “racial capitalism,” created a plantation system “in which a small number of Euro‑descended planters ruled over a majority population of enslaved workers.” As in Ireland, a colonial planter class, in this case Dutch‑descended, took over commodity producing estates, some worked by the original Bandanese owners of the land.5 Ghosh’s example becomes the occasion for an exploration of the connections between land and identity, and so it’s instructive for thinking about the Irish diaspora. For Ghosh, to settle in a new place is to be changed by the new landscape and its vitality, to create meanings and connection with the “autochthonous spirits” there: “This is a form of emplacement in which the landscape, and its hid‑ den forces, are active, vital participants: they are by no means subordinate to humans.” Ghosh works to undercut the idea that racial homogeneity creates powerful bonds with particular places, claiming that this type of “blood and soil” thinking leads to forms of eco‑fascism and “virulently xenophobic nationalism.” Rather, [F]or those who experience the Earth as Gaia, as a living, vital entity, a landscape doesn’t spring to life because its inhabitants happen to share a common origin. It is, rather, the vitality of the place itself that creates commonalities between the people who dwell in it, no matter what their origin.6 Ghosh’s formulations present challenging questions for an ethnicity like “Irish American” because a focus on what is brought culturally and genetically from the original homeland becomes less active generations on. In the postcolonial Bandas, A vibrant, deeply rooted culture came into being … due neither to contractual abstractions, nor to the invention of myths of primordial connections with the land. Instead, it was the vitality of the landscape itself that helped to forge a sense of rootedness among the people. Rather than an apology for genocide and colonialism which employ terraforming, i.e., a razing of the land to replicate the homeland, Ghosh describes strategies in the aftermath of colonialism that do not repeat the original abuses of power. By identifying “spirits of a place,” Ghosh grants particular land inspirited agency that shapes the people who inhabit it rather than the other way around. For 512

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Irish‑American poets Robinson Jeffers and Marianne Moore, a certain kind of cultural ­terraforming— an omission of Native cultures amounting to a replication of European whiteness—seems to have led to both political erasures and poetic innovation. Unique among other modernists in some ways, they were unfortunately not in this one.7 In this context, how do we address the qualities that have been associated with Irish‑American writing? In his introduction to The Book of Irish American Poetry, Tobin asks, “Does the experience of being Irish American predispose the Irish American poet to embrace any characteristic themes, subjects, or styles?” Tobin’s own timeline at the end of his anthology, as well as the preceding chapters in the volume, make the vast complexity of the question apparent: from the early seventeenth century arrivals of Irish Catholics who emigrated to North America as indentured servants to the transporta‑ tion of Irish Catholics to Virginia under Cromwell; from the early eighteenth century emigration of Scots Irish to the northeast and the following colonization of the Carolina back country by the Ger‑ mans and Scots Irish, to the waves of emigration from Ulster especially during the first three quarters of the eighteenth century; from the Great Famine when two million emigrated to North America to the arrival of the “New Irish” almost a century and a half later. Nonetheless, here are some of the qualities that Tobin suggests inform or have informed “a certain kind of imaginative identity” of the Irish‑American poet: “a uniquely American quest for freedom,” “what it means to be an American,” “social or psychic dissatisfaction, the relationship to family, to the natural world, to history, varying brands of religious sensibility,” “travel and exile, often with reference to water, and the recurrent theme of ‘the west’ perhaps constitute an almost unconscious subtext for the theme of diaspora in Irish American poetry.” In light of the essential unanswerableness of his own question, Tobin concedes, From one perspective the purpose of this anthology is to shift the locus of identification away from genetic templates and toward a cultural nexus so that ethnic claims, while acknowledged and respected, might also enjoin a wider scope of definition and aesthetic expression.8 If his The Book of Irish American Poetry is “a testing ground rather than a canonical template for what it means to be Irish American,” then, it is also capacious enough to accommodate an exploration of the animal poetics outlined earlier in this essay in the work of Irish‑American poets. Certainly, attention to relationships with other creatures in the natural world informs the poems discussed in this chapter, and beyond that, a quality of attention that seeks to engage productively with their differences. These poets often refuse to reduce other animals to symbols for the instrumental use of making human mean‑ ing. In this sense, a reciprocal exchange emerges in a creaturely dialog that does not always privilege human needs. These poets were able to “see” animal Others in their work much more readily than human Others. As I have discussed above, perhaps the stakes of making visible the flora and fauna of the new homeland, especially for Jeffers and Moore, were a good deal lower than the risk of exposing the shaky social ground they themselves inhabited as Irish Americans of the settler class.9

Robinson Jeffers and the Inhuman Jeffers’ poems display the practice of animal poetics by often engaging in creaturely dialogs. He turned his back on the modernist experiments of the poets of his own time, vowing as early as 1914 “not to become a ‘modern.’” As Tim Hunt, the editor of his Selected Poems, observes, Jeffers’ “reinvention of the poetic narrative,” “discursive poetic meditations,” and “intentionally nonironic celebrations of a redemptively beautiful nature” aligned neither with High Modernism nor New Criti‑ cism. Moreover, “[w]here the Modernists valued the imagination’s power to transform (and tran‑ scend) perception, Jeffers sought to intensify perception and thereby deepen our awareness of and participation in the natural world.” The approach was consonant with “inhumanism,” a term Jeffers 513

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created to name the decentering of the human “by seeing beyond and around the human race.” He described the perspective as “based on ‘the astonishing beauty of things’ and ‘the fact that mankind is neither central nor important in the universe.” While his inhumanist vision and his preference for solitude have led some to call Jeffers misanthropic, it might be more generous and accurate to read the perspective as profoundly anti‑anthropocentric.10 Though Jeffers may not have aligned with the major movements in the poetry of his day, he finds a significant place in an Irish‑American tradition. Dan Tobin likens Jeffers to “a hermit on Skellig Michael before the violent majesty of nature,” making a territorial rhyme between the forbidding Irish monastic setting off the stormy coast of Kerry and the “rocky shores of the California headlands around Carmel Point,” where Jeffers lived his adult life and built Tor House, an architectural echo of Yeats’ Thor Bally Lee. For Tobin, Jeffers was “someone whose Scotch‑Irish ancestry and Ulster heritage—and in particular his father’s Calvinist theology—shapes his imaginative identity,” which includes “a preoccupation with nature, place, and the metaphysical,” and a “disturbing version of the sublime.” Jeffers’ work lends itself well to an animal poetics interpretive practice.11 “Orca,” perhaps one of the poems for which Jeffers is best known, is the account of the death of a raft of sea lions. On one level, the poem works to chart the narrator’s apprehension of the event as he struggles to see it clearly. At first, the “[s]ea‑lions loafed” “at home in their element” and the Pacific Ocean seems “made for them.” The narrator’s panoramic view takes in “quiet birds” and an ocean that looks “vacant.” But just as the speaker catches sight of what he knows to be “the dorsal fins of two killer‑whales,” the sea lions also know, and they panic. Initially, Jeffers’ narrator falls into a customarily anthropocentric way of seeing: pursuing a sea‑lion, “black death drove in,/Silently like a shadow into the sea‑gorge. It had the shape, the size, and it seemed the speed/Of one of those flying vipers with which the Germans lashed London.” Writing just after the close of World War II, Jeffers has already identified the orcas as killers (though they are not alone among whales in being carnivo‑ rous), and here he likens them to the Blitz in London. The whales in this moment are reductively anthropomorphized as engaged in territorial aggression and conquest. Yet soon enough, Jeffers backs away from the impulse to turn the orcas into symbols for human concerns, calling the killings instead Clean and bright, it was beautiful./Why? Because there was nothing human involved, suffering nor causing; no lies, no smirk and no malice; /All strict and decent; the will of man had nothing to do here. The earth is a/star, its human element/Is what darkens it. Jeffers has chosen to give us the process in the poem of moving from an anthropocentric reading of the event to a biocentric one.12 Yet, the poem cannot seem to stop the pendulum swinging in the other direction. Human differ‑ ence is despised. We have not gone beyond the human/animal binary but rather reversed it; the other animal is elevated at the expense of the human. Although the impulse is entirely congruent with a post‑war sensibility, in this poem the human becomes the Other, the actual orcas and sea‑lions left behind amid revulsion at what humans have wrought: War is evil, the peace will be evil, cruelty is evil; death is/not evil. But the breed of man/Has been queer from the start. It looks like a botched experiment that has/run wild and ought to be stopped. It is hard not to value the emotional honesty of this, and yet through the lens of animal poetics, the other animals have debatably had not even a narrow escape. The poem verges on instrumentalizing them as clean, bright foils for human atrocities. In this sense, “Orca” struggles to allow the other animal to maintain its creaturely difference apart from human needs.13 514

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Almost a decade later, “Vulture” accomplishes what “Orca” does not. The poem powerfully ad‑ dresses human exceptionalism by turning the tables on who counts as prey. Here, two individual animal lives, bird and man, confront one another as the narrator lies down “to rest on a bare hillside”: “I saw through half‑shut eyelids a vulture wheeling high up/in heaven,/And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer, its orbit narrowing, I/understood then/That I was under inspection.” This bird is decidedly the subject of an individual life exercising agency, and he is so near that the narrator hears the whistle of his flight feathers and sees “the/naked red head between the great wings/Beak downward staring.” Josephine Donovan’s argument that other animals be represented as “a living presence, one located in a particular, knowable environment who has a history and is capable of dialogical communication” appears in Jeffers’ poem as the speaker addresses the vulture: “My dear bird we are wasting our time here./These old bones will still work; they are not for you.” Appar‑ ently agreeing, the vulture “veer[s] away in the sea‑light/over the precipice,” leaving in his wake the speaker’s meditation on the cyclical and interdependent processes of nature and his own active desire to be a part of them.14 The poem thus moves beyond the human/animal binary in a striking way, closing in multispecies apotheosis: I tell you solemnly/That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that beak and/ become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes—/What a sublime end of one’s body, what an enskyment; what a life after death. In this late poem at the end of his life, Jeffers adopts the ancient Irish trope of shape‑shifting by seek‑ ing to become, literally and figuratively, another creature of his chosen place. While engagement with the natural world is a feature of many poems across time, space, and cultures, Jeffers’ interspecies dialog in this poem might tentatively be called a feature of Irish‑American poetry. This kind of dialog between two subjects, one human animal, the other nonhuman animal, will emerge later in the work of Brendan Galvin, as well.15

Marianne Moore, Literalist of the Imagination Although Robinson Jeffers and Marianne Moore are sometimes cast as opposites, an animal poetics perspective might find them more aligned than they are usually considered to be. Tobin finds them both manifesting “a kind of invisible Irishness”—both monkish, Jeffers in the wild out‑of‑doors and Moore “bent over an illuminated manuscript obsessively working over one of her fantastic creatures.” Though Moore is widely remarked for her “formal interest in the precision of syllabic verse,” Jeffers, according to Isaac Cates, was also seriously engaged with form, more than his description as the prac‑ titioner of a robust free verse would allow. Cates argues that Jeffers’ prosody actually overlaps with Moore’s in surprising ways: “Jeffers’s ‘metrical intention’… relies on four factors, . … his purely ac‑ centual meter, his alternation of varying line lengths within a stanza, his long line, and his adaptation of classical quantitative measures to English rhythm.” These metrical devices, like Moore’s, Were essentially inaudible to a reader accustomed to the accentual‑syllabic norm. Marianne Moore’s pure syllabic meter, also measured out in irregular stanzas of sometimes unusually long lines, is likewise very difficult to hear, and likewise requires an eccentric reattunement of the ear. Does an “invisible Irishness” inform an inaudible metrics in the work of both poets? Such a stylistic intervention might support Tobin’s contention that “taken together their work comprises a significant Irish American contribution to American modernism.” We might wonder if indeed Jeffers and Moore 515

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metrically retuned their own ears to the spirits of the land that Ghosh suggests are at the heart of ­reinhabiting, with a difference, new places with a history of razing indigenous cultures.16 One of Moore’s most discussed poems, “Poetry,” brings actual animals into the heart of her practice. The poem opens by deriding the presumed artifice of the genre before asserting that “one ­discovers in/it, after all, a place for the genuine.” And the point is reiterated later when, in the longer and most favored version of the poem, Moore asserts: “nor till the poets among us can be/‘literalists of/the imagination’—above/insolence and triviality and can present//for inspection, ‘imaginary gar‑ dens with real toads in them’, shall we have it.” As an undergraduate biology major at Bryn Mawr (1905–1909), Moore knew very well what she meant by “real toads.” Emma Felin argues that while at the college, Moore found herself immersed in the heady debates among faculty about Darwin’s theory of evolution, an experience that profoundly marked her poetry: “Eager to perceive other living organisms with precision, Moore rejected the demands of wider vision and focused her inquisitive in‑ tensity on the particular properties of individuals.” Thus, attentiveness to actual creatures, including individual animal lives, is central to Moore’s poetics. Dublin poet Paula Meehan clearly read Moore’s poem in this way when she adapted the line from “Poetry” for her published Poetry Professor of Ireland Lectures, Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them (2016). Meehan creatively appropri‑ ates Moore’s line to riff on the colloquialism “you have a bee in your bonnet,” a charge leveled at ­Meehan’s rebellious spirit in the Catholic school from which she was eventually expelled. Her lecture by the same name follows Moore’s lead in taking up the concerns of actual animals, in Meehan’s case the bees struggling in the face of neonicotinoid pesticides, “manufactured and peddled by corpora‑ tions that are so powerful they can override the sovereignty of states.” An Irish poet who foregrounds human relationships with other animals, Meehan, like Moore, also attests to the value of individual animal lives and thus highlights a commonality between these Irish and Irish‑American poets.17 In the context of our contemporary associations with pangolins in the aftermath of Covid‑19, Moore’s “The Pangolin” continues to do the cultural work of knowing this rare mammalian scaled eater of ants as a fellow creature with a life that matters. “The Pangolin” charts the narrator’s rising comprehension of what manner of being a pangolin might be by meticulously measuring the differ‑ ence between who the creature is and how human expectations must be addressed to apprehend it. For example, the line “Armor seems extra” plays audibly with the difference between what armor for humans signifies and how intrinsic “scale/lapping scale” is for the pangolin. Line by syllabic line, the poem builds to a panegyric: the marvel of patterned scales made “with spruce‑coned regularity until they/form the uninterrupted central/tail row!,” the impressive stamina of “exhausting solitary trips through unfamiliar ground at night,” the ingenuity of a body that “rolls himself into a ball that has/ power to defy all effort to unroll it.” In this poem, Moore is as dismissive of human foibles as Jeffers as she defies human exceptionalism: “Sun and moon and day and night and man and beast/each with a splendor/which man in all his vileness cannot/set aside; each with an excellence!” This narrator has no time for human hierarchies of value as the poem builds its case for the astonishing “armored/ ant‑eater,” “this ant‑ and stone‑swallowing uninjurable/artichoke which simpletons thought a living fable/whom the stones had nourished, whereas ants had done/so.” Though sometimes called a fabulist, Moore here demystifies the pangolin, supplying the empirical corrective so that another animal may be seen. Srikanth Reddy observes, “‘The Pangolin’ opens with a naturalist’s (as opposed to a fabulist’s) epistemological approach to this curious Other.” Moreover, wrapped in its own syllabic scales, the poem, as Ormsby suggests, is shaped in its language and formal devices by its pangolin subject: Moore’s words overlap in verbal plates and scales. The verse is imbricated, the compound words stitched together by hyphens in a way suggestive of a pangolin’s scales or a “wrought‑iron vine” … . But what augments their strangeness is in fact the way in which they are patterned, syllable by syllable, and bound with hoops of rhyme. 516

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This attentiveness to the ways the experience of a nonhuman animal’s presence shapes the formal devices of a poem is among the refined intricacies possible when a poet practices what I have been calling animal poetics.18 Moore’s poem does not introduce humans as figures of comparison until the last third of this long poem. Already thoroughly established as the subject of the poem, the pangolin is made so thoroughly known that if we regard the poem metaphorically, it is humans who occupy the tenor, pangolins the vehicle. That is, the lesser‑known side of the comparison is human rather than the other animal. In these terms, the last third of the poem models a critical anthropomorphism, the pangolin’s radical difference both celebrated and connected to human locomotion: “A sailboat//was the first machine. Pangolins made/for moving quietly also, are models of exactness,/on four legs; on hind feet planti‑ grade,/with certain postures of man” Here is an unranked difference, both human and pangolin evolu‑ tion and ingenuity accomplishing the needs of creaturely locomotion in their own ways. Then, by the last stanzas of the poem, human and animal intermingle again like pangolin scales. Moore is another Irish‑American poet whose work is heavily in conversation with animal poetics.19

Brendan Galvin’s Reciprocal Echoes If indeed Brendan Galvin is the living Irish‑American poet “whose work achieves an almost perfect imaginative commerce between Irish and American traditions,” then sustained engagement with rep‑ resentations of nonhuman animals must surely be a significant feature of Irish‑American poetry. Like Jeffers and Moore, Galvin’s poems work to apprehend the actual animal rather than succumbing to the reduction of another creature as a symbol for purely human concerns. Peter Makuck observes that Galvin’s work engages in “reciprocal echoes between the natural and human, self assertion never taking priority over the natural world.” Another poet trained as a biologist, Galvin’s poems raise the question of whether detailed knowledge of flora and fauna is one means available to settler poets (among whom Irish‑American poets must surely count themselves) of attentively inhabiting the land. In this sense, Galvin’s description of a poet’s charge is apt: “To write about the natural world with any success, … you actually have to know something about it because what you say can be verified by an attentive reader.” Far from the perspective of human exceptionalism, Makuck finds in Galvin a poet who “effaces himself in favor of the thing seen; he is nothing in himself, he allows other things to be, or to come into being, through him.” For Tobin, “Galvin’s embrace of the natural world is as vital as Jeffers’, though more palliative in its recognition of the human presence in nature and the value of human work.” The humility of Galvin’s narrators allows them to engage in a reciprocal way with nature and other creatures.20 Responding to the spirits of the land he occupies in New England, Galvin registers the relatively enclosed spaces of New England, which shape the intimate exchanges between human and non‑­ human in his poetry. The quarters are too close for idealized relations, the befuddled interventions of humans in the affairs of nature acknowledged and sometimes mocked. For example, “A Mile Down the Road From Home” decenters human primacy, in this case through a self‑doubting narrative voice. Galvin’s narrator finds his own whistled tune picked up by a catbird; his human music becomes part of a medley of birdsong. I’ve caught myself whistling a bumpy version of “Take the A Train” and only because this catbird in a beachplum thicket has taken me up on it.21 517

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A mile down the road from home, a tune about a fast subway to get from here to there: proximity turns out to be the subject of this poem, as the catbird sings across the human‑nonhuman animal abyss, weaving the narrator’s tune into his own song. Galvin’s catbird is bursting with his sense of himself as the subject of his own life, and it is he who initiates what becomes an engaged di‑ alog before the human narrator is fully aware of it. The poem opens with a humble human narrator ­indeed—he is only half conscious, catching himself at a tune he didn’t know he’d been whistling. A catbird with intention draws him up short, but once addressed, Galvin’s narrator pays attention—he has enough previous knowledge about the catbird’s capacities and habits to see what he’s up to— back from his migration south and looking for a mate. Galvin’s poem suggests it’s a readiness with our reserves of human knowledge about fellow creatures that sometimes both makes relationship possible and complicates the choices. Ornithologists theorize that the catbird with the most varied repertoire demonstrates that he’s been around and hardily survived for many seasons. What reinserts the abyssal rupture the catbird has sung across are the narrator’s self‑conscious doubts about his right to intervene. Like Peter Grimes’ ill‑fated relationships with his apprentices, this narrator worries his influence might lead to no good. He is a human well aware he has an impact on his environment and accountability, yet the poem brings up the question of how interconnectedness and interdependence can work any other way. He is a narrator with something beyond humility—unsure if he has a role at all in this enterprise. Having worked through the possible consequences, Galvin chooses the indi‑ vidual if mockingly clandestine relationship. His empathy is such that he “donates” what he can to this one bird’s mating enterprise, a “ragged thread” from a complex operatic score. The encounter has become an engagement. Galvin’s dialogs in other poems between humans and an animate non‑human world are spontane‑ ous and unpredictable. In “Splash,” an encounter between the narrator and a river otter is mutually felt, “each in our way treading water,/supporting an end of our/sixty‑foot stream of astonishment.” In “Ocean Effects,” the narrator turns for guidance to a January‑flowering amaryllis “looking as if any minute it might crackle into speech/issue instructions for survival.” More striking is the com‑ plex series of dramatic monologs—one series among many throughout Galvin’s career—“Horse of Chernobyl, Horse of Lascaux.” Juxtaposing three distinctive voices—a paleolithic artist making one of the cave drawings of Lascaux, a nineteenth‑century Russian soldier‑scientist classifying an ar‑ cheological finding, and a contemporary schoolteacher returning to his home near the radioactive land of ­Chernobyl—these poems are compellingly linked by the elusive and adaptable wild horses of ­Mongolia. “Horse of Chernobyl, Horse of Lascaux” represents a myriad of possible relations between humans and nature, including the magico‑religious and totemic, the empirically scientific and colonial, and the postapocalyptic with its ironic leveling. Indeed, in the Chernobyl section of the poem, “Zone of Alienation,” a wolf asks the narrator, “Well, squatter/what shall we do with this bum‑ bledump/technology has made for us?” In the fallen, toxic landscape with which the poem concludes, human and horse eat irradiated vegetables and grass, toughly resilient and surviving as best they can. How do humans live in right relation with nature and the non‑human? With humor and humility, Galvin suggests. Like the other Irish‑American poets explored here, Galvin’s poems display many of the features of animal poetics: an interspecies dialog that refuses to reduce the other animal to a symbol; an assertion that animal lives, including individual animal lives, matter; and a recognition of the radical differences between species even as a multi‑species engagement ensues.22

Tess Gallagher and the Double Describing herself as “a poet of two Northwests,” Tess Gallagher makes her ethnic doubleness visible with the title of her first collection of poetry, Instructions to the Double (1976). And as well as her Irish‑American heritage, she also claims Native American ancestors. If her poems “move with ease 518

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between both Irish and American subjects, enjoining each with a lyricism that borders on the vision‑ ary,” that textual fluidity finds its double in geographical hybridity. Approving of Drucilla Wall’s description of her work as informed by “an edge‑ of‑everything sensibility,” Gallagher describes My attempt to bind up my two Northwests: their animals, my neighbors, Lough Arrow in County Sligo in the Northwest of Ireland with the high ridge of Bricklieve and its Neolithic passage graves reaching out to America and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the snow‑covered Olympic Mountain range behind Port Angeles, Washington. Calling both places home and residing in each during the year, Gallagher is remarkably intentional about her double life: “I assume some cross‑pollination of empathy and attentiveness must be taking place through bringing these disparate inhabitants together in one consciousness. In the process, and through my poems, I feel I am being transformed from the inside out.” In this way, Gallagher invites a biocentric agency attentive to the spirits of the places she dwells. When after the death of her hus‑ band, Raymond Carver, she visited a Kyoto temple and wondered aloud to a Buddhist nun why she had come, the nun responded: “Because the spirits of this place have asked for you.”23 Gallagher extends this receptiveness to other animals. Mary Ann Ryan describes an affinity in both her short stories and her poems for characters who “identify with animals and birds—for ex‑ ample, horses, bears, and hummingbirds.” Her approach actively seeks multi‑species engagements, and her experience of the fauna of two continents invites an almost otherworldly transpersonal and transspecies intermingling: “I want my worlds to interpenetrate—for sky to merge with water, for fish and birds to exchange habitations so we re‑experience them freshly and feel our differences, our interdependence, our kinships.” This willingness to work in dimensions seen and unseen allows Gallagher to work explicitly with not only the spirits of one land, but both, by virtue of her frequent literal contact with both Ireland and the US. 24 Gallagher’s “Lie Down with the Lamb” is a poem that addresses another animal as the subject of an individual life that matters in a striking co‑mingling of the two distinct places the poet inhabits. While the title evokes a strictly metaphorical reading of Biblical lambs, it is appropriate for the com‑ mencement of the human war (in Iraq) the narrator mourns. This narrator is preparing herself for literal and emotional slaughter as she mourns the lives she knows will be lost in the war and also the shame of holding citizenship in the country enacting the violence. Yet the lamb in question is very much an actual lamb, albeit one who is thousands of miles from the narrator. The initial doubling of places begins with the naming of Ireland through an “old Irish saying”; “lie down with the lamb/and rise with the bird,” before we learn that neighbor David’s lambs in Ballindoon, the narrator’s Irish locale, are being readied for market and therefore slaughter: “When the man/is late a week to carry them/to market, I decide to save one./For eighty euro I buy her back/from the slaughterhouse.” The saving of the one lamb on the other, kindred shore brings solace to the narrator though she knows “your brother and sisters/are gone to table.” Her beloved describes the particular, individual lamb: “She/is white with a black head,/Josie writes, and sixteen mothers/are looking after her.” The ges‑ ture matters because the lamb’s life matters, as all the lives that are about to be lost matter. While Gallagher has here made use of the animal as a symbol, she has not reduced her for this exclusive purpose nor are the concerns the poem addresses purely human. Rather, the animal life has been gathered up with human life and all life as valuable and entirely worth saving. But in the face of a world where “my country makes war” the value of life itself has been lost: “So are we all/bought and sold in the coin of the realm.” The poem manages to implicate an economic system in which all life is instrumentalized as a part of its anti‑war position. In this context, what breaks through is “the white funnel/of joy you make on a bank of green/for no one’s sake.” What brings joy is a life beyond instrumentalized use, the lamb “[s]aved and with no use/except to run free on a hillside.” 519

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Gallagher’s poem like Galvin’s doesn’t try to choose between the lives of humans and other animals in a hierarchized system of value. In this sense, animal poetics sits comfortably with her large project of rewilding human beings: My aim has been to unseat what we assume about time, about the verities of love and death, of the consciousness of those other sentient beings next to us on the planet. We must put aside the glib assumptions we make just to domesticate our walking‑around days. Here Gallagher suggests that living in an era of the sixth mass extinction amid climate crisis requires nothing short of a radical rethink of what it means to be human among other creatures.25

Conclusion Ten years ago, Jim Rogers wrote in a review of Dan Tobin’s Awake in America that the field of Irish‑American poetry was just emerging. The critical animal studies lens employed here is also an emerging theoretical field, and my own intervention in this new field, animal poetics, is newer still. For these reasons and others, this essay has tried to make its case in a more inductive, explora‑ tory way. These are first steps, and in this sense, a more declaratory, deductive mode has not felt appropriate. Nonetheless, this argument does contend that we treat other humans as animals because we treat animals as animals. Speciesism can make such an approach hard to comprehend, even when the degradation of other animals is used to degrade Other peoples. Yet, working beyond the Cartesian dualisms that demonize other animals and then animalize human Others, the Irish‑American poets discussed here have engaged, however imperfectly, in the work of shifting anthropocentric represen‑ tations of other animals in a biocentric direction. While Tobin’s Awake in America includes among the qualities of Irish‑American poetry attention to relations with the natural world, I have focused on poems of animal encounter using an animal poetics informed by what Josephine Donovan describes as “attentive love directed toward animals as moral beings—as subjects—in literature and art.” My interpretive reading practice finds in the work of these Irish‑American poets a refusal to reduce the animal exclusively to a symbol for purely hu‑ man concerns; an undermining of our human exceptionalist tradition through poems in which animal lives, including individual animal lives, matter; a willingness to acknowledge radical differences between species but at the same time embraces empathetic multi‑species engagements. Donovan contends that such examples of human/animal encounter in literature, though much to be desired, are rare. But I have found them here and also among Irish poets. If there is something enduring across migrations from Ireland to the US, perhaps it is an openness to be changed by the land on which one lives and the creatures with which one shares it.26

Notes 1 Curtis, Apes and Angels, 59, 60, xxiv. 2 DeMello, Animals and Society, 216. Here, and in an earlier argument, I enact a strategy to demystify this skewed politics of representation. See Kirkpatrick, “Doing the Human,” 76–94. 3 Tobin, Irish American Poetry, xlii; Tobin, Awake, 46. 4 Wheeler and Gavaler, “Imposters and Chameleons,” 54–56. 5 Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse, 218. 6 Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse, 220, 221.

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Animals in Irish‑American Poetry 7 Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse, 220, 223, 219. 8 Tobin, Irish American Poetry, xxxiii, xlv. 9 Tobin, Irish American Poetry, xlvi. 10 Hunt, Selected Poetry, 6; Cates, “Inhumanist Poetics,” 6; Felstiner, Can Poetry Save the Earth?, 172. 11 Tobin, Irish American Poetry, xxxvii; Tobin, Awake, 40; Tobin, Irish American Poetry, xxxvii. 12 Jeffers, Selected Poetry, 587–588. 13 Jeffers, Selected Poetry, 588. 14 Jeffers, Selected Poetry, 697; Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, 239. 15 Jeffers, Selected Poetry, 697. 16 Tobin, Awake, 39; Tobin, Irish American Poetry, xxxvii; Cates, Inhumanist Poetics, 119, 134; Tobin, Irish American Poetry, xxxviii. 17 Felin, “A Peculiar Kind,” 43; Meehan, Imaginary Bonnets, 11. 18 Moore, The Poems, 224–225; Reddy, Changing Subjects, 7; Ormsby, “Armored Animal,” 22. 19 Moore, The Poems, 225. 20 Tobin, Awake, 50.; Makuck, “Sense of Otherness,” 612, 611, 616; Tobin, Irish American Poetry, xliii. 21 Galvin, Ocean Effects, 67. 22 Galvin, Ocean Effects, 6, 10, 32. 23 Tobin, Irish American Poetry, xliii; Gallagher, “Writing from the Edge,” 21, 22. 24 Ryan, “A Network,” 143; Gallagher, “Edge,” 21. 25 Gallagher, Dear Ghosts, 54–55; Gallagher, “Writing from the Edge,” 21. 26 Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, 97.

Bibliography Cates, Isaac. “The Inhumanist Poetics of Robinson Jeffers.” Raritan 30, no. 3 (2001): 110–135. Curtis, L. Perry. Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institu‑ tion Press, 1971. DeMello, Margo. Animals and Society: An Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Derry, Alice. “Urgent Stories: Tess Gallagher’s Dear Ghosts.” Northwest Review 45, no. 2 (2007): 152–158. Donovan, Josephine. The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Felin, Emma. “A Peculiar Kind of Particularity: Plants and Animals in Marianne Moore’s Early Poetry.” Mod‑ ernist Cultures 18, no. 1 (2023): 43–67. Felstiner, John. Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Gallagher, Tess. Dear Ghosts. Saint Paul, MN: Greywolf Press, 2006. Gallagher, Tess. “Writing from the Edge: A Poet of Two Northwests.” The American Poetry Review 48, no. 3 (2019): 21–22. Galvin, Brendan. Ocean Effects: Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Ghosh, Amitav. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Hunt, Tim. “Introduction.” The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, edited by Tim Hunt, 1–11. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995. Jeffers, Robinson. The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, edited by Tim Hunt. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer‑ sity Press, 2001. Kirkpatrick, Kathryn. “Doing the Human Differently: Rabbits and Hares in Contemporary Irish Poetry.” In Contemporary Irish Poetry and Climate Crisis, edited by Andrew J. Auge and Eugene O’Brien, 75–94. New York: Routledge, 2022. Makuck, Peter. “Brendan Galvin’s Sense of Otherness.” Sewanee Review 117, no. 4 (2009): 611 627. Meehan, Paula. Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2016. Moore, Marianne. The Poems of Marianne Moore, edited by Grace Schulman. New York: Viking Penguin, 2003. Ormsby, Eric. “Armored Animal.” The New Criterion 36, no. 8 (2018): 20–23. Reddy, Srikanth. Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

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Kathryn Kirkpatrick Ryan, Mary Ann. “Tess Gallagher: A Network of Sympathies and Distant Connections.” In Too Smart to Be Sen‑ timental: Contemporary Irish American Women Writers, edited by Sally B. Ebest and Kathleen McInerney, 139–156. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. Tobin, Daniel. Awake in America: On Irish American Poetry. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011. Tobin, Daniel. “Introduction: Irish American Poetry and the Question of Tradition.” In The Book of Irish Ameri‑ can Poetry, edited by Daniel Tobin, xxxiii–xlix. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Wheeler, Lesley, and Chris Gavaler. “Imposters and Chameleons: Marianne Moore and the Carlisle Indian School.” Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 33, nos. 2/3 (2004): 53–82.

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40 WHITENESS AND THE CONTEMPORARY IRISH-AMERICAN FAMILY SAGA Sinéad Moynihan

Richard Michael Cawley actually stepped ashore on Ellis Island as a young man on April 11, 1923. And that’s how Michael Richard Pence grew up to be Vice President of the United States of America. That young man made his way to Chicago [….] drove a bus for 40 years, and he was […] the best man I ever knew. --Mike Pence, March 10, 20171 All of our ancestors, yours and mine, they came equipped with only one thing. The only thing they had in their pocket was hope. --Joe Biden, September 15, 20202

The cataloguing of Irish ancestors is a familiar trope in US political life, as these recent examples recounted by former Vice President Mike Pence and President Joe Biden demonstrate. However, as Matthew Frye Jacobson argues, the “immigrant saga”—whether narrativized in a political speech, a novel, or a film—is a deeply racialized form. In a discussion of immigrant sagas that emerged during the “ethnic revival” of the 1960s, Jacobson notes “the ways in which the saga of European ethnic fortitude was built in close conjunction with a particular—if often tacit—understanding of African Americans,” specifically that articulated in the Moynihan Report of 1965. In The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Assistant Secretary of Labour Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase “tangle of pathology” to account for the cycles of poverty in which many African Americans found themselves caught, and he specifically located African-American family structures “at the center of the tangle of pathology.” The immigrant saga, according to Jacobson, “supplied the normative ver‑ sion of the family, against which the ‘pathologies’ of Moynihan’s black family might be highlighted.” As a result, Jacobson claims, the immigrant saga is “made to carry tremendous symbolic freight in conservative arguments concerning the amelioration of poverty, the role of the state, the importance of the family, and the perversity of policies such as welfare and affirmative action.”3 Updating and extending Jacobson’s argument for the contemporary moment in relation to Irish America, Liam Kennedy argues that origin stories such as those recounted by Pence and Biden are “animated and mobilized as reactionary and progressive strands of Irish-American culture and poli‑ tics clash on the grounds of white privilege, immigration, and what it means to be American in the

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-48

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era of Trump.” Kennedy cites a number of memoirs of Irish America to consider how the immigrant ancestor narrative can inform Opposing memories: it can be a source of empathy for those facing struggles as new immi‑ grants in the present, or it can reinforce a blood-and-soil sense of nationalism—it can be inclu‑ sive or exclusive, turning it to both liberal and conservative worldviews. Because the immigrant ancestor narrative has been deployed, since at least the 1960s, explicitly or implicitly to valorize the white ethnic family over the non-white family, novelists working within this framework face a number of thorny rhetorical challenges.4 In this context, how should one read contemporary Irish-American fiction that takes the form of the “family saga” or “immigrant saga,” while acknowledging, at the outset, the inevitable slippage between the two terms? (These two forms are not synonymous with one another, though they overlap consid‑ erably, and it is possible for one novel to be both a “family saga” and an “immigrant saga”). Taking its cues from Jacobson and Kennedy, this essay explores two contemporary family sagas by younger Irish-American writers, Matthew Thomas (b. 1975) and Kathleen Donohoe (b. 1972). It begins by set‑ ting the scene with reference to the growing body of scholarship on whiteness and Irish America and earlier family sagas by Irish-American writers. It moves on to analyse Thomas’ We Are Not Ourselves (2014) and Donohoe’s Ashes of Fiery Weather (2016), both set in New York City, to consider the extent to which these contemporary family sagas grapple with the racial politics of the form. In other words, because roots, genealogy, and generational legacies perform important ideological work in narratives of ethnic America, broadly, and white Irish America more specifically, the family saga is inevitably bound up with the related issues of race, power, and privilege. Unpacking both the progressive and reactionary impulses that underpin these contemporary family sagas, this essay ultimately argues that the form remains a politically ambivalent framework for narratives of Irish America. In the past three decades, a vibrant body of work on whiteness, racialization, and Irish America has emerged. This essay is particularly interested in “the contingent and relational” nature of US whiteness as it has manifested itself during the white ethnic revival of the 1960s up to the present day. When the term “whiteness” is used in this essay, it refers to a racial category whose power and privilege derive from its ability to promote itself as unmarked and normative (unlike non-white subjects who are supposedly “raced” or “of color”). Because of its status as norm, the privileges at‑ tached to whiteness are often conferred in insidious and unacknowledged ways. That is not to say that whiteness is a monolithic category, however. Jacobson, for example, refers to “variegated whiteness” to capture the reality that even those considered white in a given historical moment might be deemed less-than-white or off-white. A particular challenge for literary scholars considering white-authored texts is the fact that the normative status of whiteness often translates into “the absence of reference to whiteness in the habitual speech and writing of white people” or what Toni Morrison calls the “racial ‘unconsciousness’” of white writers. In close readings of the primary texts discussed in this chapter, therefore, particular attention is paid to the encoded ways in which whiteness is marked through de‑ scriptions of characters’ complexion and other physical features, especially blue eyes.5 Historians of race and class have, since the early 1990s, traced how ethnic groups such as Irish, Italians, Greeks—whose claims to whiteness were arguably not assured when they arrived in the United States—eventually achieved “whiteness.” By the 1960s, a reverse tendency emerged. “After decades of striving to conform to the Anglo-Saxon standard, descendants of earlier European immi‑ grants quit the melting pot,” observes Jacobson. “Italianness, Jewishness, Greekness, and Irishness had become badges of pride, not shame.”6 In at least the past six decades, then, white ethnic subjects (including Irish Americans) have been able both to benefit from the privileges of whiteness and to distance themselves from its associations 524

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with racial violence, discrimination, and oppression. The two key works of scholarship with which this essay is in conversation are Jacobson’s Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America (2006) and Diane Negra’s edited collection The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity and Popular Culture (2006), which considers the status of Irishness in contemporary America as form of “enriched whiteness.” Focusing specifically on the 1990s and early 2000s, Negra argues that identify‑ ing oneself as Irish or affiliating with Irishness in contemporary America became a means of “speak‑ ing a whiteness that would otherwise be taboo,” a way of laying claim to a white identity that is also guilt-free. Because of the “flexible racial status of Irishness” in contemporary America, subjects such as Eileen Tumulty in Thomas’ We Are Not Ourselves can derive a sense of pride from recalling her family’s historical allyship with oppressed subjects while simultaneously nurturing a profound sense of white victimhood in the present moment.7 While this study concentrates on two family sagas that feature white, Irish-American families, efforts to consider and recuperate consanguineous and/or volitional family connections between white Irish-American and non-white, especially African-American, subjects do exist. These have ranged from the “roots journeys” to Ireland undertaken by Muhammad Ali (2009) and Barack Obama (2011)8 to the formation of the Irish African American Diaspora Network (2020) to fiction and mem‑ oir such as Gish Jen’s short story “Who’s Irish?” (1998), Danzy Senna’s memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (2009), and a number of novels, including Ann Patchett’s Run (2007), Michael Thomas’ Man Gone Down (2007), and Mat Johnson’s Loving Day (2015). Nonetheless, white Irish origin stories and multigenerational narratives continue to dominate Irish-American fiction of the twenty-first century.

The Irish-American Family Saga In this essay, “family saga” is used as a capacious term that encompasses—but is not limited to—the “immigrant saga,” the latter being an ill-defined subgenre that overlaps with several others such as the “ethnic trilogy,” “immigrant trilogy,” and “immigrant novel.” In his study of family sagas of the US South, Robert O. Stephens provides a useful working definition of the saga as a form that “shows a consanguine family through history measured in generations, at least three, and populous enough to serve as a microcosm of its times.” In the form of the stand-alone novel, the family saga contin‑ ues to exert a considerable influence on American writers of ethnic descent and on immigrant writ‑ ers. Prominent twenty-first-century examples include Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex (2002), Jhumpa ­Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003), and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). For some critics, the family saga can be an enabling formal choice. Eva Pelayo Sañudo, writing about Laurie Fabiano’s Elizabeth Street (2006), argues that the novel revises the masculinist emphasis of the ur-narrative of Italian-American family sagas: Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969). Capitalizing on “the heterogeneity provided by the family saga,” the novel integrates “a variety of sources such as legendary and familial narratives, migration and ethnic records, as well as feminist theory” to construct “a feminist revisionist history.”9 However, others are sceptical of the form’s emancipatory possibilities. Crystal Parikh observes that the family saga is “never simply about the heroics or fortunes of an individual protagonist, not even the paterfamilias; rather, it concerns the reproduction and status of a family line.” If this is the case, then the family saga is a conservative form, one underwritten by anxiety about the transmission (or erosion) of power and privilege to subsequent generations. In other words, because the family saga, by definition, foregrounds the reproduction and/or decline of the family line, wealth, and status, the form is inevitably implicated in questions of race and privilege.10 Indeed, a number of the Southern family saga’s features, as defined by Stephens, suggest the reactionary underpinnings of the form: “continuity of the consanguine family through multiple 525

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generations; […] displacement of the inheritance; decline in later generations when compared to the strength or nobility of the earlier.” The “decline in later generations”—specifically the deficient fecundity of the family—is arguably the signature trope of the Irish-American family saga in the second half of the twentieth century and the one that confirms its preoccupation with race and ra‑ cialization. As early as the 1920s, American commentators were drawing attention to Irish-American Catholics’ population decline, particularly in the pages of the Jesuit weekly magazine, America. In the first of three articles that appeared in 1922, James J. Walsh found that “Irish Catholic families [in the United States] are not only failing to reproduce themselves in our generation, but they are disap‑ pearing rapidly.” He attributed this not only to the reproduction of significantly smaller families as Irish Catholics became embedded into US society, but also the likelihood of some offspring becom‑ ing priests and nuns and the “large number of old maids and old bachelors who are to be found in Irish families” in the United States. In Walsh’s second article for America, the racial implications of the failure of the Irish to reproduce themselves are made explicit. Sounding a cautionary note about low birth rates among white Australians and New Zealanders, Walsh observed that the “teeming yellow and brown races of the Asiatic continent” are so attracted to the space offered by Australia and New Zealand to accommodate “their multiplying populations” that “special laws had to be enacted to pre‑ vent their entrance in large numbers.” Walsh’s comments make explicit the stakes of low-reproducing white families: they might be overtaken and supplanted by “teeming yellow and brown races.”11 Six years later, M. V. Kelly wrote a series of three articles for America titled “The Suicide of the Irish Race.” Kelly noted the infertility of Irish Americans compared with their French-Canadian counterparts and attributed the difference to the concentration of Irish Americans in urban settings. In addition to the economic and social factors characteristic of urban living that might mitigate against large families, Kelly pointed to “the more or less debilitated physique of city-bred young people, young women in particular” that “results in incapacity for parenthood.” In his 1953 edited collection, The Vanishing Irish: The Enigma of the Modern World, the University of Notre Dame-based scholar John A. O’Brien surveyed research by Walsh, Kelly, and others to suggest that Irish Americans have a curious reluctance to marry, which is traceable to the failure of “many Irish families to give their children the training that would dispose them, if they have no religious vocation, toward marriage as their goal and prompt them to take the practical steps to achieve it.” “Not much progress will be made to stem the tendency of the Irish to die out until that attitude is changed,” O’Brien warned.12 Walsh’s delineation of the typical reduction in the size of Irish-American families from genera‑ tion to generation (an Irish migrant couple has nine children; these nine children produce a further nine; the next generation, only four) resonates with a number of Irish-American family sagas from the second half of the twentieth century. In Mary Doyle Curran’s The Parish and the Hill (1948), the migrant couple, John O’Sullivan (1838–1922) and Johanna Sheehan (1840–1890), has 17 children. (Indeed, we learn that Johanna died of “excessive childbearing”). Of these, one son, Jim, has nine children; the narrator’s mother, Mamie, has four; the narrator’s Aunt Josie has one child, “a doll-like girl looking more china than human.” Her Aunt Hannah, unhappily married to a Yankee and realizing that her pregnancy will secure the future of the Dickinson family line, spends “her time wishing for [the baby’s] death, cursing its conception.” No other grandchildren are mentioned.13 Similarly, in Elizabeth Cullinan’s House of Gold (1969), matriarch Julia Devlin gave birth to nine children but only has four grandchildren: just two of her children have reproduced. She had “given four of her children to God, two nuns and two priests.” Her son Francis was “married 12 yrs. but except for a son, stillborn in the 2nd. year there were no children of the Union.” Another son, Michael, was engaged to a young woman who died during a botched abortion. In Mary Gordon’s The Other Side (1989), Ellen MacNamara migrated from Ireland in the 1910s. As she lies on her deathbed in Au‑ gust 1985, she recalls the trauma of having witnessed her mother, Marin, endure several miscarriages,

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“bloodying the bedsheets with the family blood.” (She was the only child to survive her mother’s nine pregnancies). Her mother eventually experiences a psychological breakdown and is abandoned by Ellen’s father for another woman, a situation partly responsible for spurring middle-class Ellen to emigrate to the US. Marin’s affliction is revisited upon her great-granddaughter, Camille, who suffers from endometriosis and is also, as her cousin Sheilah frames it, “barren.” Camille, an only child, and her husband, one of seven children, fail to produce a single child. All three of these families exem‑ plify the deficient fecundity of which America’s commentators warned.14 If declining fertility is a feature of the families foregrounded in these sagas, they are also—­ relatedly—preoccupied with what Ruth Maxey calls the “the varying chromatic aspects of Caucasian American physicality.” The writers mark Irish whiteness as pink, red, yellow, or olive, thus sug‑ gesting their characters’ off-whiteness. In The Parish and the Hill, red skin connotes manual and domestic labour (the tenement women’s hands are “red and stiff with the cold”), ethnically marked Irishness (the narrator Mary’s Irish-American kin are “many red-faced people”) and the ravages of alcoholism (Uncle Smiley’s face is “red and blotched”; her brother Tabby has a “tense, red face”). It also, ultimately, exemplifies white Irish-American rage at what they see as the incursion of non-white Others in Boston. When Tabby verbally abuses an African-American man at a political rally, he is supported in his efforts by a “red-faced policeman.”15 The dominant colour in Cullinan’s novel is, as the title suggests, gold. The family home bears the traces of gold décor designed to mark the Golden Wedding anniversary of the novel’s central couple, Julia and Francis. But in this novel, too, whiteness is signified, paradoxically, through its not-whiteness: oliveness and pinkness. Julia tells the Spanish nun who has been caring for her that her husband’s “olive skin” led her to mistake him for “one of the Latin races” when they first met. It took “the whole of an evening for him to persuade me that he was the same as ourselves.” All of their children “have a touch of their father’s Spanish blood, so that makes you one of us,” she tells Sister Sebastian, “doesn’t it?” The off-whiteness of Julia’s son, Justin, is particularly emphasized. His alco‑ holism bestows on him “a yellow face, bloodshot eyes, bloodless mouth.” The “reddish-pink wall” of the bathroom gives his “pale body a rosy cast that darkened as he drew the rubberized pink curtain along the inside of the tub.” These narratives thus suggest two threats to their characters’ whiteness: deficient fecundity, especially when juxtaposed with the more prolific childbearing of non-white others; and the fact that these characters have quite a precarious claim to whiteness in the first place, with their redness, oliveness, and pinkness emphasized over adjectives more usually associated with whiteness: ivory, alabaster, milky, and so on.16

“The Forgetting Could Be Wonderful”: Matthew Thomas’ We Are Not Ourselves (2014) Spanning seven decades, We Are Not Ourselves focuses on Eileen Leary (née Tumulty, 1941), the daughter of Irish migrants to the US; her marriage to scientist Ed Leary (1967) and family life with their son, Connell (b. 1977); the challenges the family faces after Ed is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease (1992); and Eileen’s and Connell’s lives after Ed dies in 1999. Published to widespread ac‑ claim in 2014, We Are Not Ourselves is extensively cited in scholarship on dementia narratives. How‑ ever, the novel’s interest in impaired memory—most obviously and heartbreakingly foregrounded in Ed’s early onset Alzheimer’s—is more capacious than this scholarly emphasis would suggest. Focal‑ ized predominantly through Eileen’s perspective (but also, at times, through Connell’s), the novel raises provocative questions about Irishness and white privilege by encouraging readers to identify and critique Eileen’s own lapses in (historical) memory in respect of more recent, non-white migrants to the United States. These lapses manifest themselves, in Kennedy’s words, in a politics “not of

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empathy but of resentment and grievance.” It is only at the end of the novel that Eileen becomes open to the possibility of “making a new memory” that might enable her to relinquish her sense of white victimhood and forge alliances with non-white subjects of migrant backgrounds.17 In We Are Not Ourselves, the connection between genealogy and memory is both literal and meta‑ phorical. Sarah Falcus and Katsura Sako note that a parent with dementia “threatens the genealogical line.” Because the cognitive and physical changes wrought by dementia necessitate the redefinition of familial roles, dementia often brings about “the premature succession of generation” which is experienced as “untimely and anachronistic.” Moreover, the fear of a parent’s loss of memory “en‑ dangers the transmission of family memories and stories to the next generation.” Examining what they term “familial narratives” of dementia, Falcus and Sako consider the ways in which such narra‑ tives are invested in “generational succession to overcome the threat posed by dementia.” In Thomas’ novel, Alzheimer’s appears as a literal breach that is linked, metaphorically, to migration as a form of temporal, genealogical, and national rupture. Eileen’s father, Mike, would have been content to work the rest of his days on the family farm in Co. Galway. However, when Mike’s younger brother, Willie, becomes blind in one eye, Willie’s plan to migrate to the United States is thwarted by his “in‑ firmity.” The farm cannot provide livelihoods for both brothers and, as a result, Mike departs instead of Willie.18 Like the Irish-American family sagas discussed above, We Are Not Ourselves is preoccupied with the deficient fecundity of the family at its heart. Indeed, the fact that the Tumulty-Leary family is not really “populous enough to serve as a microcosm of its times” only serves to underscore that point. The novel contrasts the fruitfulness of Eileen’s Irish forebears (her father was 1 of 12; her mother, 13) with the comparative sterility of her parents (one child and a miscarriage) and Eileen and Ed (one child and a miscarriage). Towards the end of the novel, she reflects that “She hadn’t built a dynasty. She wasn’t even sure there would be a continuation of the line.” Connell’s anxieties about bringing a child into the world are bound up with his fear that early onset Alzheimer’s might be hereditary, though the novel concludes with the suggestion that childless Connell and his Nicaraguan-American wife, Michelle, might produce a grandchild for Eileen after all. The family’s relative sterility be‑ comes linked to larger changes wrought on New York city’s geography and demography.19 The family’s deficient fecundity is clearly related to Eileen’s anxieties about race. As Eileen notes the arrival in her Queens neighbourhood of large numbers of non-white migrants, she imagines a lo‑ cal apartment building inhabited by “gaunt bachelors presiding over dwindling fortunes, long lines coming to a silent end.” Her desire to flee Queens for a suburban “buffer” from “black crime, black retribution, black vigilante justice” is framed as a wish “not to have to watch a neighborhood go to ruin again and preside over the memory of it like a monk guarding the scrolls of a dwindling people.” The “dwindling fortunes” of the first quotation and the “dwindling people” of the second suggest the extent to which Eileen’s class aspirations are inextricable from her sense of being displaced in the ethnic habitus by non-white migrants. (The historical parallel, recounted by a teacher who tells Eileen that the WASP inhabitants of Woodside, Queens were eventually displaced by Irish migrants such as Eileen’s parents, is lost on her).20 The novel, then, traces Eileen’s aspirations to upgrade from Woodside to Jackson Heights and on‑ wards to suburban New York state. As white ethnic families in Jackson Heights are joined by Colum‑ bians, Bolivians, Nicaraguans, Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis, and Persians, Eileen finds the resulting changes to the commercial landscape—“restaurants suggestive of opium dens, bodegas stocked with produce she would never consider eating”—alienating. The Irish bar “was the last stand against the invasion.” In 1991, the family eventually moves to Lawrence Park West because they cannot afford “better” Bronxville, which had long been on Eileen’s radar. In an image reminiscent of nativist cartoons of the early twentieth century, Eileen is relieved to be leaving “the big cauldron” that was “spitting her out in a bubble pushed up by heat.” She wants to be “surrounded 528

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by people who looked like her family,” a turn of phrase which underscores the connection the ­family saga makes between the individual family saga and ethnic (or national) identity more broadly.21 But even suburban living does not provide the comfort for which Eileen hopes. The Bronxville hair salon she now patronizes, though “fancier,” makes her feel “intimidated” and is a poor substitute for Curt’s in Jackson Heights. Eileen’s perspective exemplifies what Catherine Jurca terms “senti‑ mental dispossession”: “the affective dislocation by which white middle-class suburbanites begin to see themselves as spiritually and culturally impoverished by prosperity.” No sooner has Eileen relocated to the suburbs than she feels nostalgic for an experience—in this case Curt’s hair salon— she recalls as “understated” and therefore more authentic than what she gets at the Bronxville salon, whose “chilly perfection” leaves her “cold.” Eileen’s developing nostalgia for Jackson Heights after she moves to the suburbs is juxtaposed with her desire to erase the memory of ever having lived there at all.22 We Are Not Ourselves, then, encourages readers to consider the complexities of memory far be‑ yond Ed’s Alzheimer’s. Indeed, Eileen often reflects very self-consciously on the workings of mem‑ ory. As an expectant mother, she “seldom thought” about her own alcoholic mother’s physical abuse of her “both because the memory was so unpleasant and because it was woven so thoroughly into the fabric of her childhood that it barely merited conscious thought.” Nonetheless, memories of her mother’s alcoholism lead her to curtail her own drinking, especially because she recognizes its po‑ tentially seductive power to obliterate memory: “the preoccupation with something as simple as the next drink, the forgetting. The forgetting could be wonderful.” The possibility that forgetting might be “wonderful” is suggestive in the larger context of the novel, which intimates that Irish Americans’ access to whiteness and the middle class relied, to an extent, on a wilful forgetting of the struggles they (or their ancestors) faced as recent migrants to the US.23 In another example of the fallibility of memory, Eileen, desperate to persuade her husband to move to the suburbs, recounts an incident in Jackson Heights whereby she was jostled on the side‑ walk by a group of Hispanic youths. One of the young men apologizes and counters her accusation that he and his kind are “taking over” the neighbourhood by responding: “I was born here. There’s room for all of us.” More perturbed by the young man’s politeness than by the possibility that he might be aggressive, Eileen wants to “forget the encounter.” A “vision of the future loitered in it, an intimation of her obsolescence.” In a sense, she does “forget” what happened, though consciously so. In her retelling of the incident to Ed, she substitutes the actual events for “a bowdlerized version of the slurs she’d anticipated hearing—which was, in any case, closer to the truth of her lived experience than this inexplicable aberration.” While the lie is a deliberate one, within days, Eileen has “begun to consider the possibility that they’d actually said some of the things she’d put in their mouths […], memory being such a slippery thing.”24 Like some of the earlier Irish-American novels cited above, We Are Not Ourselves foregrounds the ambivalent status of white skin that carries with it a range of oscillating and paradoxical associations. Eileen’s “alabaster skin” and that of her mother, “smooth and full and porcelain white,” connote idealized beauty. Ed’s white complexion, however, is less positively inflected: he has “pasty legs” and his skin is a “blank, ridiculous canvas flecked by freckles and scraggly hairs.” His white skin is also suggestive of illness and death: almost immediately after Ed’s diagnosis, “the black-Irish touch of olive coloring in his face retreated, replaced by a gaunt, dusty pallor” which, of course, links Ed to the “gaunt bachelors” of Eileen’s childhood imagination. By the time he dies, his skin has “turned hoary from lack of exposure.”25 Other white ethnic subjects, such as the Russian Sergei whom Eileen employs as Ed’s carer, is distinguished by both “alabaster” skin and a “ruddy” complexion. Eileen’s perception of non-white subjects in the novel is notable for how they are rendered either in terms of their contrast with white‑ ness or their somehow being excessively white. Father Choudhary—who replaces Father Finnegan 529

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in the Learys’ parish—is a “dark figure” who looks “spooky under his stark-white vestments.” Ed’s physician, Dr. Khalifa, has hair that “was too perfect, his teeth gleamed too white.” The lack of certainty about exactly what kind of complexion constitutes whiteness bears out Dyer’s claim that “the category of whiteness is unclear and unstable, yet this has proved its strength.” If whiteness can encompass olive, alabaster, porcelain, and ruddiness—and non-whiteness can also be white—this only emphasizes the extent to which belonging to this category might be regarded as a competition, a race to the top.26 After Ed’s death, Eileen feels a powerful pull back to the house they sold in Jackson Heights in 1991. In the meantime, however, her perspective has changed. In 1991, the fact that the family buy‑ ing her home was Indian “and were going to fill it with their entire extended family floor to ceiling” reminds her why she wants to move to the suburbs. She is bewildered by the husband’s middle name, “a tangled thicket of consonants and vowels.” In 1999, she joins the family for dinner, despite her hatred of Indian food—never having tried it—which is inextricably bound up with her anger at her (white) friends having been displaced. As she perceives it, “Then the last of her friends had left, and the Indian restaurants had remained and seemed to multiply.” But when she tries the food, she likes it. There is “no competing memory with which to dull the vibrancy of this experience.” If to taste forgot‑ ten foods is “to reanimate the past, then a different kind of reminder, a reminder of future possibil‑ ity, waited in unfamiliar flavors.” Only when Eileen relinquishes her attachment to memory and the past—which have, after all, activated her sense of white grievance and dispossession—can she be‑ come open to the “future possibility” of making a meaningful connection with non-white subjects.27

“The Weight of Hunger and Fire”: Kathleen Donohoe’s Ashes of Fiery Weather (2016) Ashes of Fiery Weather traces the Keegan-O’Reillys, an Irish-American family with strong con‑ nections to the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) Brooklyn company known as the “Glory ­Devlins,” through six generations of women. Sections of the novel are focalized through the perspec‑ tives of Irish migrant Norah O’Reilly (b. 1949); her mother-in-law, Delia Keegan-O’Reilly (b. 1918); Delia’s mother, Annie-Rose Devlin-Keegan (b. 1884); Norah’s daughter Maggie (b. 1973); Delia’s daughter Eileen, adopted from Ireland (b. 1949); and Katie McKenna (b. 1992), the daughter Maggie gave up for adoption. The family’s origin story echoes Kevin O’Neill’s emphasis on the Great Famine and the US Civil War as foundational moments in Irish-American ethnic formation—a centrality ad‑ dressed by chapters elsewhere in the present volume. Annie-Rose’s mother, Bridie Cavanaugh Devlin (b. 1839), “came over from Ireland, when she was about nine years old.” The refrain “The potatoes died. There was nothing to eat” is repeated several times in this section. Her father, Patrick Devlin (b. 1837), migrated in 1862, inspired by hearing that “Lincoln was putting on a war” and determined to “get on it.” The other origin story traced is that of the family’s connection, through Patrick Devlin, to the FDNY, which predates both the professional fire service (1865) and the consolidation of the Greater City of New York (1898). Indeed, the “Glory Devlins” firehouse is nicknamed for Patrick Devlin and fellow fireman Jeremiah McGlory. The novel is concerned, then, with familial and pro‑ fessional genealogies which, of course, overlap because several generations of the family become firefighters: Patrick’s son-in-law Jack Keegan; Jack’s son Michael; Jack’s grandchildren, Sean and Eileen; and Sean’s son Aidan.28 The novel critiques the FDNY’s masculine bias by privileging the perspectives of FDNY wives, daughters, and sisters and, indeed, female firefighters such as Eileen O’Reilly-Maddox, who gradu‑ ated from the fire academy in the first class to include women. The “brotherhood” that is the FDNY and the homosocial space of the firehouse are displaced in favour of the “sisterhood” of St. Maren’s, the local cloistered convent that itself owes its origin story to Famine-era Ireland. The (fictional) 530

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Saint Maren “founded a contemplative order in Galway in 17-something” and is the patron “of those in danger of fire or drowning, or bakers, knitters and bell makers.” During the 1840s, the nuns in New York broke cloister to provide refuge to orphaned Irish children (including Bridie Cavanaugh) evacuated to the US by the nuns’ Irish counterparts. They set up the Brooklyn outpost to their upstate convent in recognition of the fact that the Irish children arriving at New York harbour were too weak and unwell to travel upstate. The Irish nuns themselves “died out in the decade after the Famine.” While the firefighters’ patron is Saint Florian, the Glory Devlin wives had “adopted Saint Maren as their patron.”29 However, as one would expect of a family saga, the novel remains deeply invested in blood re‑ lationships and heredity. The last section, focalized through the perspective of the daughter Maggie gave up for adoption in 1992, sees Katie McKenna, now 20, searching for her birth mother. The death of her adoptive mother, Laurel, on 9/11—and the fact that any DNA sample provided to help identify Laurel’s remains must come from a blood relative—impresses on Katie that despite her mother’s insistence that “It’s love that matters, not blood,” blood was “the only thing that would find her.” The mark of Katie’s Irish ethnicity is her blue eyes, transmitted to her by Maggie who, along with her siblings Aidan, Brendan, and Rose, inherited her father Sean’s eyes, “a striking blue a shade darker” than their mother’s. When Katie asks Laurel about her birth mother, she is particularly curious about whether Maggie had blue eyes and whether she had “the map of Ireland on her face.” The vagueness of the latter turn-of-phrase is notable: it does not necessarily connote whiteness but, because of the overwhelming whiteness of Ireland’s population, it most likely does. Therefore, blue eyes must also be seen here as synecdoche for whiteness. It is Sean’s blue eyes that Eileen sought out on 9/11 when searching for Sean’s firefighter son and her nephew, Aidan. It is Aidan’s and Sean’s blue eyes that Katie sees in a book of photography about Brooklyn firefighters. Katie’s blue eyes, then, are a family trait that reinforces her biological connection to the Keegan-O’Reillys.30 The novel also endorses the idea that being a FDNY firefighter is “in the blood.” Jack Keegan’s illegitimate son, Michael, becomes a firefighter even though he never knew his putative or actual firefighter father, was raised in upstate New York, and experienced no childhood connection to the FDNY. After he announces his intention to take the test, his mother “began to believe that something did pass between fathers and sons. Some innate understanding that it is not every man who can run into fire, and if you can, then it’s your responsibility to make it your life’s work.” Several characters subscribe to and repeat the idea that firefighting is “in the blood.” When Maggie and Danny, the children of firefighters both, meet the prospective adoptive parents of their unborn child, Laurel commends them as “brave.” “Oh, the bravest,” Maggie thinks, recalling the motto of the FDNY, “It’s in the blood.” It is in this respect that the novel upholds, perhaps unwittingly, the conflation of Irishness, whiteness, and the FDNY that was framed as heroic in the aftermath of 9/11. For if being a FDNY firefighter is “in the blood,” then the organization tacitly excludes those who cannot claim a blood connection to it, a gesture certain to ensure the indefinite reproduction of its longstanding ethnic make-up.31 Some compelling scholarship has examined the conflation of the Irishness of the FDNY with heroic white masculinity, particularly in the aftermath of 9/11. For example, Diane Negra draws at‑ tention to FDNY firefighter Mike Moran’s invitation to Osama Bin Laden to “kiss [his] royal Irish ass” at VH1’s Concert for New York City on 20 October 2001. At this time, the FDNY remained 93 percent white, but by proclaiming an Irish identity rather than a white one, Moran “insulates himself from any perception of racism.” Moran’s statement was endlessly referenced in post-9/11 culture. In 25th Hour (dir. Spike Lee, 2002), Monty Brogan’s (Edward Norton) “Fuck this city” rant, in which he launches into a racist, xenophobic, homophobic diatribe against fellow New Yorkers, ends with “you can kiss my royal Irish Ass,” provoking viewers to make a connection between Moran’s seem‑ ingly innocuous statement and the virulent racism of Brogan, himself clearly coded as a white Irish 531

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American. Moran’s statement was also riffed upon several times in the television drama Rescue Me (FX, 2004–2011). Hamilton Carroll argues, meanwhile, that “a reactionary national logic of gender and ethnic identity” in the post-9/11 moment “coalesced around the production of an exemplary white ethnic, working-class hero, figured most completely in the image of the New York City fireman.” The valorization of the fireman “required a willed amnesia in which the earlier resistance of urban fire departments to both gender- and race-based affirmative action could be forgotten.” For Carroll, as for Negra, the association between Irishness and the FDNY—Carroll points to the ubiquity of Irish tenor Ronan Tynan’s performances after 9/11—enabled the reformulation of “whiteness as a nostalgic form of ethnic identity,” allowing “the more troubling associations that might exist [to be] subordinated.”32 The “troubling associations” of gender bias within the FDNY are prominent in Ashes of Fiery Weather. When Eileen passes the revised physical exam in the aftermath of the Berkman v. City of New York (1982) ruling that the previous test was discriminatory, her brother Sean scoffs that she and her cohort only passed “the soft test.” However, the racial biases of those same tests remain un‑ derexplored. (In 2009, a federal judge found that the FDNY used exams that discriminated against Black and Hispanic applicants). In the early 1970s, when Norah and Sean are dating, they meet an acquaintance of Sean’s from the neighbourhood. Freddy is not marked as Black in the narrative but, when he tells Sean “Maybe I’ll be a fireman too. Maybe I’ll change my name to McLewis and make that my career,” Sean bristles. He tells Norah afterwards: “he needs to shut up about the fire depart‑ ment. They think there should be more black guys on the job, they should take the fucking test. They talk like there’s some secret committee slipping white guys the answers.”33 Sean’s perception of the matter is, of course, simplistic. As David Goldberg recounts, through “contacts with members of the personnel department or headquarters,” white firefighters were privy to “insider information that gave them an unfair advantage” in the FDNY testing regime. The Vulcan Society, a fraternal organization of Black firefighters in New York City founded in 1940, provided test training for Black firefighters in the hope that they might “offset some of the disadvantages that Black firemen faced as ‘outsiders within’ the department’s ‘old-boy’ network.” Years later, the perception and reality of the FDNY’s racially biased testing persists. When Eileen consoles a bereaved mother about the death of her Latino firefighter son on 9/11, the mother regrets encouraging Alex to take the entrance test in the first place. When she suggested it, he replied: “Oh Mommy, that’s for the Irish. They don’t let anybody else on.”34 Second, in the only section of the novel not focalized through a woman conjugally, adoptively, or consanguineously related to the Cavanaugh-Devlin progenitors, we learn fleetingly about a “Negro” firefighter named Micah Barnes. This section reveals that, in the early 1930s, Captain Jack Keegan, husband to Annie-Rose and father to Delia, fathered a child of whom he and they were unaware. Mattie’s abusive first husband, Irish-American firefighter Teddy Cullen, is a subordinate of Jack’s at the Glory Devlins’ firehouse. In 1931, Teddy subjects Mattie to a particularly violent attack after he has been humiliated by Micah Barnes, “the Negro fireman who’d been assigned to the company two months ago.” After repeated mistreatment by his colleagues, Barnes challenges to a fight any man who makes trouble for him. On the night Teddy attacks his wife, his “bruises spoke of [Barnes’s] skill.” Jack eventually agrees to transfer Teddy and two other firemen out of the Glory Devlins and, not long afterwards, Teddy dies in the line of duty. Jack and Mattie begin the affair that leads to the birth of Michael, who himself becomes a firefighter. We learn nothing more about Micah Barnes.35 In the end, the privileged relationship that the novel asserts between Irishness and FDNY heroism situates a series of New York fires and emergencies, culminating in 9/11, as moments of tragedy on an historical continuum with the “scarring historical event” that propelled Bridie Cavanaugh on her journey from Ireland in the 1840s. This is “[t]he weight of hunger and fire,” as Annie-Rose puts it. Indeed, at a 9/11 memorial service in Ireland a few days after the events—notably in a Garden of

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Remembrance that is planted over a “cemetery where the dead were buried in mass graves during the famine”—Maggie is “afraid she will see that the famine dead have come to stand and listen among the living.” The fact that the St. Maren’s convent, which owes its existence to the Great Famine, even‑ tually becomes the Brooklyn Firefighters’ Museum reinforces this link. The power of the historical connection suggested by Donohoe is that it unites victimhood and heroism in ways that confirm what Negra calls the “discursive currency” of white Irish identities in the contemporary United States. Bri‑ die Cavanaugh was a victim but also a survivor of the Great Famine; the 9/11 FDNY firefighter was, as Carroll puts it, “an everyday hero [who] became both victim and survivor of the attacks, and thus the exemplary U.S. citizen.” The novel does attempt to move beyond the exceptionalism of Irish nar‑ ratives of victimhood by emphasizing as well other histories of trauma and loss (notably through the story of Polish migrant Nathaniel Kwiatkowski). However, it leaves intact a potent—and ultimately exclusionary—intertwining of white victimhood and heroism, on the one hand, and white genealo‑ gies of descent (the family) and consent (the FDNY), on the other.36

Conclusion The family saga, then, remains an ambivalent framework for narratives of Irish America. In her study of Irish genealogy, Catherine Nash warns against “defining it as necessarily reactionary because of its origins in claims of pedigree and privilege, or alternatively affirming it as a natural innocent im‑ pulse or stressing its radical potential.” Instead, she emphasizes that genealogy has “diverse uses and effects.” Similarly, the two novels explored in this essay suggest the ways in which the family saga might do both. On the one hand, Donohoe’s novel provides a way into “recovering conventionally insignificant ‘ordinary’ histories”; here, FDNY wives, mothers, daughters, and female firefighters. On the other, it elides the historical whiteness of the FDNY and efforts, deliberate or insidious, to maintain that whiteness through subsequent generations. Meanwhile, Thomas’ novel reflects selfconsciously on the family saga’s preoccupation with a “decline in later generations” by foreground‑ ing how white Irish-American historical memory might both activate and foreclose solidarity with non-white migrants.37

Notes 1 Pence, “Remarks by the Vice President to the Latino Coalition Policy Summit.” 2 Biden, “Speech at Hispanic Heritage Month.” 3 Jacobson, Roots Too, 149; D.P. Moynihan, The Negro Family, 29, 30; Jacobson, Roots Too, 204, 182. 4 Kennedy, “How White Americans Became Irish,” 425, 431. 5 S. Moynihan, “‘None of Us Will Always Be Here,’” 40; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 41. Dyer, for his part, writes that there are “gradations of whiteness: some people are whiter than others” (12); Dyer, White, 2; Morrison, Playing in the Dark, xii. 6 On debates about whiteness as a category, see Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, McMahon, “The Pages of Whiteness”; Jacobson, Roots Too, 2. 7 Negra, “The Irish in Us,” 1–2; Negra, “Irishness, Innocence, and American Identity,” 355. 8 See S. Moynihan, “The Lost Apostrophe?” 38–54. 9 Stephens, The Family Saga in the South, 4; Sañudo, “History’s Attic,” 368, 367. The term “ethnic trilogy” was coined by William Boelhower in 1985 to describe works by a number of ethnic or immigrant writers that appeared roughly between 1900 and 1940. 10 Parikh, Writing Human Rights, 23. 11 Stephens, The Family Saga in the South, 6; Walsh, “Are Irish Catholics Dying Out in This Country? 365–366; Walsh, “Catholic Bachelors and Old Maids,” 390. 12 Kelly, “The Suicide of the Irish Race,” 156; O’Brien, “Disappearing Irish in America,” 107, 109. 13 Curran, The Parish and the Hill, 16, 143, 158.

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Sinéad Moynihan 14 Cullinan, House of Gold, 3, 153, 146; Gordon, The Other Side, 88, 100. For a discussion of deficient fecun‑ dity in Alice McDermott’s At Weddings and Wakes, see S. Moynihan, “‘None of us Will Always Be Here.’” 15 Maxey, “‘Who Wants Pale, Thin, Pink Flesh?,’” 530; Curran, The Parish and the Hill, 9, 220, 129, 182, 178. 16 Cullinan, House of Gold, 36–37, 84, 212, 129, 130, 30, 202. 17 Kennedy, “How White Americans Became Irish,” 435; Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves, 609. 18 Falcus and Sako, Contemporary Narratives of Dementia, 145, 144; Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves, 31. 19 Ibid., 603. 20 Ibid., 128, 203. 21 Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves, 127, 276. 22 Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves, 328; Jurca, White Diaspora, 7; Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves, 328–329, 275. 23 Ibid., 82, 96, 422. 24 Ibid., 201–202. 25 Ibid., 28, 20, 70, 166, 325, 570. 26 Thomas, We Are Not Ourselves, 472, 529, 177–178, 317; Dyer, White, 19. 27 Ibid., 276, 275, 609. 28 O’Neill, “The Star-Spangled Shamrock,” 118, 122; Donohoe, Ashes of Fiery Weather, 180, 181, 186, 190. 29 Donohoe, Ashes of Fiery Weather, 289, 38, 15–16. 30 Donohoe, Ashes of Fiery Weather, 375, 3, 397; The turn of phrase, or a version of it, is relatively common in Irish-American literature. See examples in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1956) and Alice McDermott’s At Weddings and Wakes (1992); Donohue, Ashes of Fiery Weather, 308, 364, 384. 31 Donohoe, Ashes of Fiery Weather, 171, 26, 46, 52, 263. 32 Negra, “Irishness, Innocence, and American Identity Politics before and after September 11,” 362; Carroll, Affirmative Reaction, 58–59. 33 Donohoe, Ashes of Fiery Weather, 11; Michael Schwirtz, “For New York City Fire Department, More Diver‑ sity Amid Tension”; Donohoe, Ashes of Fiery Weather, 56. 34 Ibid., 333. 35 Donohoe, Ashes of Fiery Weather, 147. 36 The term “scarring historical event”—here, the Great Famine—is Robin Cohen’s term for what precipitates the dispersal of what he calls “victim diasporas” such as the Irish, Jewish, Armenian, Palestinian and African diasporas. It is what “lends [them] a particular colouring.” Cohen, Global Diasporas, 28; Donohoe, Ashes of Fiery Weather, 200, 213–214, 282; Negra, “The Irish in Us,” 1; Carroll, Affirmative Reaction, 50. My un‑ derstanding of the terms “consent” and “descent” is derived from Werner Sollors’s influential book, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (1987). 37 Nash, Of Irish Descent, 19, 8.

Bibliography Primary Sources Biden, Joe. “Speech at Hispanic Heritage Month.” September 15, 2020. Accessed online via: rev.com. Cullinan, Elizabeth. House of Gold. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1969. Curran, Mary Doyle. The Parish and the Hill. 1948. New York: CUNY Press, 2002. Donohoe, Kathleen. Ashes of Fiery Weather. 2016. New York: First Mariner, 2017. Gordon, Mary. The Other Side. 1989. New York: Penguin, 1990. Johnson, Mat. Loving Day. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015. Kelly, M.V. “The Suicide of the Irish Race.” America November 24, 1928: 156. Pence, Mike. “Remarks by the Vice President to the Latino Coalition Policy Summit.” March 10, 2017. Accessed online via: trumpwhitehousearchives.gov. Thomas, Matthew. We Are Not Ourselves. 2014. London: Fourth Estate, 2015. Thomas, Michael. Man Gone Down. 2007. London: Atlantic, 2009. Walsh, James J. “Are Irish Catholics Dying Out in This Country?” America August 5, 1922: 365–366. Walsh, James J. “Catholic Bachelors and Old Maids.” America August 12, 1922: 389–390.

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Secondary Sources Boelhower, William. “The Ethnic Trilogy: A Poetics of Cultural Passage.” MELUS 12, no. 4 (1985): 7–23. Carroll, Hamilton. Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997. Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture. Abingdon: Routledge, 1997. Falcus, Sarah, and Katsura Sako. Contemporary Narratives of Dementia: Ethics, Ageing, Politics. New York: Routledge, 2019. Goldberg, David A. Black Firefighters and the FDNY: The Struggle for Jobs, Justice, and Equity in New York City. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post‑Civil Rights America. Cambridge, MA: Har‑ vard University Press, 2006. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cam‑ bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Jurca, Catherine. White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth‑Century American Novel. Princeton, NC: Princeton University Press, 2001. Kennedy, Liam. “How White Americans Became Irish: Race, Ethnicity and the Politics of Whiteness.” Journal of American Studies 56, no. 3 (2022): 424–446. Maxey, Ruth. “‘Who Wants Pale, Thin, Pink Flesh?’: Bharati Mukherjee, Whiteness, and South Asian American Writing.” Textual Practice 20, no. 3 (2006): 529–547. McMahon, Cian T. “The Pages of Whiteness: Theory, Evidence, and the American Immigration debate.” Race & Class 56, no. 4 (2015): 40–55. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1992. Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington, DC: United States Office of Policy Planning and Research, 1965. Moynihan, Sinéad. “‘None of Us Will Always Be Here’: Whiteness, Loss and Alice McDermott’s At Weddings and Wakes.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 4, no. 1 (2010): 40–54. Moynihan, Sinéad. “‘The Lost Apostrophe’?: Race, the Roots Journey and the ‘Rose of Tralee’ Pageant.” Irish Studies Review 26, no. 1 (2018): 38–54. Nash, Catherine. Of Irish Descent: Origin Stories, Genealogy, and the Politics of Belonging. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008. Negra, Diane. “Irishness, Innocence, and American Identity Politics before and after September 11.” In The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity and Popular Culture, edited by Diane Negra, 355–371. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Negra, Diane. “The Irish in Us.” In The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity and Popular Culture, edited by Diane Negra, 1–19. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. O’Brien, John A. “Disappearing Irish in America.” In The Vanishing Irish: The Enigma of the Modern World, edited by John A. O’Brien, 88–110. New York: McGraw‑Hill, 1953. O’Neill, Kevin. “The Star‑Spangled Shamrock: Memory and Meaning in Irish America.” In History and Memory in Modern Ireland, edited by Ian McBride, 118–138. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Parikh, Crystal. Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color. Minneapolis, MN: Uni‑ versity of Minnesota Press, 2017. Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 1991. Sañudo, Eva Pelayo. “‘History’s Attic’: The Role of Legends and Family Stories in Gendering and Decolonizing US Immigration and Ethnic History Through Laurie Fabiano’s Family Saga Elizabeth Street (2006).” Eng‑ lish: Journal of the English Association 68, no. 263 (2019): 366–388. Schwirtz, Michael. “For New York City Fire Department, More Diversity Amid Tension.” New York Times, De‑ cember 4, 2013. Accessed online via: nytimes.com Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Sollors, Werner. Ethnic Modernism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Stephens, Robert O. The Family Saga in the South: Generations and Destinies. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995.

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41 CONTEMPORARY IRISH AMERICA AND THE ENVIRONMENT Christine Cusick

I want my worlds to interpenetrate—for sky to merge with water, for fish and birds to exchange habitations so we reexperience them freshly and feel our differences, our interdependence, our kinships. —Tess Gallagher, “Writing from the Edge: A Poet of Two Northwests”1

In Tess Gallagher’s “Afterword” to her most recent collection Is, Is Not, the author reflects on what it is to inhabit the Pacific Northwest of America (Port Angeles, Washington), and the Northwest of Ireland (Lough Arrow in County Sligo) simultaneously. Both places contain stories of her losses, her loves, and her hand held out to language as she inhabits the edges of these landscapes. The result, Drucilla Wall has argued, is that “the nonlinear roundness of life well experienced and observed from the western edge resonates throughout the work, especially in intersections with the hard lessons of loss and grief.” A study of the reciprocity of place and person comprehended through the lens of loss has long been worthwhile in Irish‑American studies. It is the aim of this essay to extend this to our present moment by arguing that Irish‑American experience illuminates the inherent role of cultural texts and experiences in shaping environmental values.2

Landscape, Loss, and Legacy As the human species confronts the reality of a rapidly changing and threatened planet, there is a quiet quest to find the language to express our moment, and the human encounter of it. The word solastalgia has emerged in our lexicon of climate despair in an attempt to capture the grief humans hold as they acknowledge that the landscapes they know and count on are forever changing. “To feel solastalgia is to feel pain, sorry, and grief (from the Greek algos), but it is also to recognize that the source of this pain is our love for the places of which we are part.” With tribute to the discourse stud‑ ies of Glen Albrecht’s Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World (2019), Paul Bogard acknowl‑ edges that our contemporary moment calls for a radical shift in vision and perspective: and in some instances, this means finding the vocabulary to articulate the unprecedented climate crisis. While there is a need for the new, this gesture to innovate might be enriched if it occurs as a correlative to a study of the past, even if a recent past, in which humans have grappled with loss, displacement, and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278153-49

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grief. While the Irish diaspora’s experience of displacement is hardly unique to those of Irish identity and association, its core cultural and natural histories warrant a closer study of its expression.3 Moreover, as we study language as a diachronic expression of human experience of the planet, this expression must honor past articulations of the ways humans inhabit the physical and cultural con‑ tours of place. This nonlinear dialog with the past serves as a reminder that the human experience of the environment has always been characterized by a navigation of change and loss, that perhaps there is an opportunity to use this crisis to understand more deeply understand what has and will allow the human animal to exist in a generative relationship with the planet. The Ecological Society of America identifies the etymology of the word ecotone: eco from the Greek oikos, “house/dwelling” and ~tone from the Greek tonos, “tension,” describing it as “Two houses in tension: an ecotone is a border zone, where ecological systems meet and mingle, sometimes forming a new and different community.” American poet and critic Camille Dungy writes of the ways this biological term resonates with her as a writer: I feel an affinity for what ecologists call ecotones, areas at the margins between one zone and another—like the tidal zone where beach and ocean overlap, or the treed and grassy band where forest becomes meadow—spaces that are often robustly productive and alive. These are overlaps rich with possibility and also, often, danger. […] They are spaces that reward study, revealing diverse possibilities for what it might mean to be alive. Writing takes off for me when I stop separating human experiences from the realities of the greater‑than‑human world. All writing identifies a tension point, a point of not knowing, seeking to know.4 Dungy’s astute observation that such confluences reward study speaks to the purpose of this essay. The Irish‑American experience might broadly be defined by its own manifestation of ecotones—the entangled overlap of histories, politics, languages, identities, and indeed, geographies. And while it is difficult to cull one of these realities from the others, there is a certain value, and indeed necessity, to study more closely how a human experience or memory of immigration, their own or that of ances‑ tors, shapes their wayfinding of physical place and landscape; more often than not, this navigation is defined by displacement, grief, and evolving insight on what it means to dwell amidst these tensions. Human experience can never be severed from its? implicit attachment to environment, and for the human species living in the Anthropocene, this connection to place is necessarily defined by change and loss.

A History of Displacement Tim Robinson’s inscription of the Aran Islands in Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, maps the islands’ physical terrain, marking both the islands’ material form and their stories. He writes of a lee at the south‑east point of Sunda Ghriora where the nineteenth‑century emigrant ships sailing out of Galway for America had to wait for a favorable wind. Robinson writes: If there were Aran people on board their relatives and friends who had already said goodbye to them and may even have had a wake for them, knowing that in most cases the parting was forever, were given another sight of them by this chance that was perhaps more cruel than kind. Robinson explains the landscape’s entanglement in this loss: “The way by which the bereaved came down to the shore to wave and weep is a little valley called Gleann na nDeor. This phrase is the Irish equivalent of the old preachers’ platitude for this world as a place of sorrow, the “vale of tears.”

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Robinson also maps the ways in which this place name changes and shifts with its storyteller: the most recent account offered to him by an islander suggests that the name refers to “the dew which early morning fishermen sailing by see sparkling on the grassy plot among the grey stones—the dew, proverbially both fresh and fleeting, which still out‑cries all human tears.” Perhaps the sorrow begets resilience; in both stories, the physical terrain moves from backdrop to character in the narrative of departures. Stories are fluid forces across time, place, and memory, and representations of the land on a map, or in human imagination, are inevitably incomplete. Robinson’s account of Gleann na nDeor illustrates that the physicality of valley and lee both record and participate in a moment in time and that these stories cultivate human perception of and engagement with nonhuman environment. Emi‑ gration loss is a loss of stones, of humans, and of the cycle of story that ultimately connected one to the other. As is characteristic of Tim Robinson’s lens of perception, his description of this physical valley is attuned to the interplay of language and geography, to the losses of departure and to human vulnerability amidst forces of the sea and of circumstance that also have a pen in this story.5 As a nonfiction writer who engages with his community, Robinson creates a helpful record of Ireland’s topography and the stories that humans, in presence and departure, have given to it. He reminds a reader that a study of the diaspora’s experience of the environment presumes that place as a concept is always connected to the physical landscape as a reference, but often relies on memory to invoke its influence. For an Irish sense of place, one that is marked by geographical displacement, this is of distinct significance. Fintan O’Toole observes that the reality of emigration means That the people and the land are no longer co‑terminous. In this sense, the map of Ireland is a lie. The lie of the land is that there is a place called ‘Ireland’ inhabited by the Irish people, a place with a history […] Yet the central fact of that history is that […] much of it has happened elsewhere. Such displacement was not sufficiently recognized in Irish cultural history of the twentieth century. The voices of the Irish Literary Revival, for instance, were often more preoccupied with fixing the geography of Ireland, and its people upon it. As O’Toole observes: The fact of emigration, the fact that the immediate past of the revival period was one of ex‑ traordinary dispersion was glossed over in the revival’s emphasis on the authenticity of place. By taking place rather than people as the touchstone of Irishness, the revival was able to ap‑ peal to a sense of continuity and stability that were simply unavailable in contemporary Irish experience.6 The Revivalists’ inclination toward objectifying the landscape into icon contributed to a chasm be‑ tween person and environment. O’Toole further suggests that this positioning of place within a cul‑ tural vacuum neglected the fact that “the need to imagine in Irish culture comes from emptiness and nostalgia—the emptiness felt by those left behind on the one hand, and the nostalgia felt by those who left, on the other.” In this way, the efforts of the Revivalists were often so preoccupied with codify‑ ing a cultural identity that they did not fully recognize the losses that many working class and rural Irish experienced, which necessitated the construction in the first place. The nuances of this history inform even the twenty‑first‑century imaginative space of the Irish‑American perspective—one that, because of global economies and technological innovations, exists in a space that is less anchored in a simple linear and binary of existing here, Ireland, then there, America. An environmentally-informed study of the contemporary Irish‑American experience of place acknowledges that these present cir‑ cumstances are necessarily bound to a collective memory in which human experience of land has been fractured by cultural, political, and geological displacement.7 538

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Herein lies a point of generative confluence. As humans navigate a changing sense of planetary home, an ethical and cultural framework for how to carry loss and uncertainty anchors both action and rumination. A reading of the Irish‑American experience of physical geography might begin to give us a language for this loss of place, one that is both personal and global, one that we are eager to understand more carefully in the face of climate crisis and the grief that ensues. The sense of loss and displacement that we read in contemporary Irish‑American voices prescribes how we might better understand a global sense of disconnection and displacement that we are experiencing as planetary beings. The Irish‑American experience is one that is inherently displaced and thus a sense of a stable physical anchor for what it means to inhabit this planet is also literally and existentially implausible. While these writings are not each and all explicitly writing about what it means to grieve a rapidly changing planet, they do offer an epistemological framework for what it means to seek and to grieve a sense of place, a loss that is as much about physical displacement from the material earth as it is about a way of existing with and representing this place.

Rebecca Solnit: A Visitor at Home In poet, essayist, and critic Eamonn Wall’s navigation of what it means to identify a voice as Irish American, he writes: “It is not a writer’s place of birth that is important; instead, we must look at the kinds of experiences that authors embrace rather than the places where they were born.” In a study of a writer’s relationship with environment, access to the physical terrain of Ireland seems eminent, even, and perhaps especially, if this access manifests in memory. Daniel Tobin argues that, for some Irish‑American poets, in particular, Ireland is not so much an ancestral allure as it is taking Ireland as inspiration for imaginative work. Citing American poets such as Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens, Tobin thoughtfully writes that “Ireland again becomes the prism through which an American poet at once envisions and defines his work.” In each of these instances, whether spoken or not, the “place” of Ireland inspires a nuanced and intentional seeking that is inextricably connected to the physical environment as a source of meaning and knowledge.8 In Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby, she reflects on story as a tool for this meaning‑making: What’s your story? It’s all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. In these opening words, Solnit invites the reader into narrative as a way of knowing place, both literal and figurative: “Stories are compasses,” they orient our steps, but they are also “architecture,” they are a vehicle of design, piecing together the parts of the whole for a common quest. This paradigm is an important tool for the Irish‑American experience of Ireland as it is one that relies on the synthesis of parts against an always shifting story.9 Solnit is a prolific and eclectic San Francisco‑based writer and activist who, for decades, has offered a prominent voice on a range of social issues, the climate crisis at the forefront of this ad‑ vocacy. In addition to writing about social activism, Solnit’s work has a distilled focus on acts of movement, both literal and figurative, with Wanderlust: A History of Walking and A Field Guide to Getting Lost among the most overt. Her Irish‑American identity has arguably not been a cen‑ tral theme or focus of her writing; however, what it means to seek stories and meaning through a physical encounter with the planet has been. In 1997, after receiving dual citizenship in Ireland, she published a series of travel essays about her extended travels throughout Ireland, an encounter 539

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with the terrain and history that embodied a sort of confluence of American and Irish ways of knowing the human experience of place. Solnit’s experience of Ireland exists at a remove that is not often typical of Irish‑American perspectives. While her own Irish ancestry is perhaps the cata‑ lyst for her travels, there is not a sense that this identity has deep emotional resonance. And yet, this distance serves her narrative. In Pat Boran’s introduction to Writing Home: The “New Irish” Poets, he writes, One thing is sure, we never see our home place as clearly as when we see it in the company of a stranger, a visitor or new arrival who notices and questions the things that, for us, have long since become invisible. Solnit’s keenly observant eye is that of such a stranger, noticing and observing what it means to trek this terrain and seeing, in many cases for the first time, the ways it is inseparable from its cultural and political histories.10 In his compelling study of Irish America, Wall writes that Solnit Allows the road ahead to serve as her guide with the result that she absorbs Irish thought, topography and belonging, both from the physical locations she has chosen to visit and from engagements forged by accidental encounters […] At no time does she wish to claim owner‑ ship of Irish space, whether physical, psychological or literary. With this cultural humility, Solnit’s self‑aware meditation enacts the common human inclination to understand through analogy, positioning her encounter with the Irish experience against what she knows and experiences as an American.11 The reader witnesses this, for instance, in her essay titled “The War between the Birds and the Trees.” In this essay, Solnit accepts an invitation to learn more about local environmental activism, an encounter which, to her surprise, led her to the Sisters of Mercy convent in Portumna where Solnit’s new friend, Kathleen, had been funded by the Diocese to work as an environmental activist. Sur‑ prised that a convent was the hub of such activism and warmed by the welcome she received within its walls, Solnit realized that so too would she likely find points of dissonance: To welcome me, they opened a bottle of elderberry wine a local had brought by and slipped hot water bottles into my bed in one of the abandoned student cubicles. The enormous differences between their beliefs and mine never came up; it’s easy not to talk about sexual morality. With subtle ease, Solnit refuses to simplify this hospitality, even against her sincere appreciation for it. In this encounter, Solnit uncovers the complexity of what it means, as Wall suggests, to belong to place, and in doing so she honors the nuances of a cultural and physical landscape.12 Solnit also brings to this encounter an astute sense of historical context for this activism. She notes of Kathleen, a schoolteacher turned activist: She had a fine tradition behind her. Early medieval Irish monks had once written nature poetry that took such pleasure in the birds, berries, trees, and wolves around them that they seemed more like the Zen‑monk painters and poets of Japan than like the more familiar world‑denying ascetic elsewhere in Europe […] This minority tradition whose most famous continental expo‑ nent is Saint Francis may always have existed, though the church is often spoken of as though it had been a monolith of nature‑hating throughout its history.

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Solnit’s narrative is both honest and self‑reflective, placing her experience against the larger contexts of Irish religious traditions, her own presuppositions, and the immediacy of this moment in time, a sense of time that travel necessitates. She finally concludes: “whether or not an environmental activist nun in jeans was an anomaly, I was her guest.” In this brief encounter, the reader witnesses the realities that quite often impede dialog about environmental issues: forces such as conflicting views on religious teachings or an inadequate understanding of historical context become upended by Solnit’s capacity for self‑reflection coupled with the practical necessities of wine and a place to sleep as a weary trave‑ ler. Solnit’s narrative suggests that productive environmental engagement relies on a certain embrace of the inevitable contradictions that define encounters with a physical place and its people.13 Solnit was an empathic listener of to this town’s activism and had clearly won the trust of her hosts, but as she listened more deeply to their evolving concerns about development and the loss of local farming, she was also learning that what was at stake for this community, their sense of place, was not what she had expected: I realized that this was a place where Europeans were indigenous and my own criteria about nature and culture were meaningless, since nature or wilderness in America means the state of things before white people showed up or a condition in which human beings are a minority population. In such places, one can at least daydream of a primordial world, however inaccu‑ rately, but this was a historical world. The stone walls had the same authority of antiquity as the oldest trees and were not an imposition on them, and the place, whether tended or neglected, was nothing but a garden […] the story I had barged in on wasn’t about the preservation of the wild but of the local. While Solnit’s observations in this passage are a bit of an oversimplification of Ireland’s natural and geologic history, her realization reminds us of the both/and that is inherent in environmental action. What communities are fighting for always exists in the context of a past, one that is simultaneously illuminated and evaded by a stranger’s perspective. In this sense, Solnit’s experiences as an obser‑ vant reader of the land, perhaps more attuned because of her newness to it, highlights the fact that all stories of the environment are hinged together. It is this long view of place history that grants humans the necessary perspective to discern the contours of truly sustainable action.14 In time, Solnit’s understanding evolves to express that what is at stake is also always local. Her narrative comes to know this reality precisely because of her lens as a traveler: To be local is to merge into your world and become vulnerable as it is vulnerable; to be a traveler is to become the pared‑back person I was beginning to recognize, free to invent and learn, but not to live in that local correspondence between memory and landscape. It may be that memory requires a locale and a community, the continuity of reminders in the landscape and people with a shared frame of reference. Through her own metacognition, then, Solnit maps what it means to experience this material earth as a traveler, perhaps too as a migrant. When a shared frame of reference becomes fragmented by distance from a community, so too does collective memory shift. And though it is not entirely lost, it is reformed through the lens of displacement, whether it is chosen or imposed.15 While her allusions to it are often subtle, Solnit’s travels to Ireland, with a passport in hand, began with a sense that she was returning to something, placing herself in context of a past, her past. In James Silas Rogers’ introduction to his anthology of Irish‑American essays, Rogers observes that the contributors

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Seek to locate their experience in a story, in a place, and in a time other than their immediate world—a common and humanizing impulse. Such ‘extension’ is one of the under‑recognized benefits of an ethnic identity in our times, and at its best, [the identity] offers an antidote to the placelessness and obsession with the present that marks modern life. What Solnit’s nonfiction illuminates is just how precarious this location of self can be. She writes with humility as her chapter comes to a close: The rocklike foundation for identity an ancestral land is supposed to be was dissolving before my eyes into a river of transformations. The longer I passed through the Ireland that both the Irish and the Irish‑Americans seem to imagine as a solid foundation, the more it seemed instead to be made up of a continuous flow of discontinuities and accelerating movements, of coloni‑ zations and decolonizations, liberations, exiles, emigrations, invasions, economic pendulums, developments, abandonments, acculturations, simulations. The precarity that Solnit articulates is in part because she is transient and temporary through this landscape, but at the same time it is realized as she encounters the vulnerability of the planet and sits beside other humans as they work to protect their way of living and caring for it. Human inhabitation of earth is never actually fixed: it is always in context because of the paradox that human action both impacts the earth and is dependent on it.16

Eamonn Wall: The Duality of Place While the work and experience of Eamonn Wall are distinct from those of Rebecca Solnit in signifi‑ cant ways, his articulation of what it means to inhabit place resonates with her sensibility. Wall, born in County Wexford, emigrated to America as a young man where, though returning often to Ireland, he has lived for the decades since. Reflecting on this arrival, Wall writes: On one level my knowledge of American culture prepared me for America; however it in no way schooled me to live here as an immigrant. Each day I work to make up this deficit. It is likely that I understand America better now and Ireland not as well as I used to. Even after decades of traveling between Ireland and America, Wall’s insight that he remains only slightly more a part of America than Ireland is testimony to how elusive firm footing can be for an Irish American.17 This tenuousness is exacerbated by human innovations that purport to “connect” humans across time and space. As early as the 1990s, Wall reflected on the way technology complicated the immi‑ grant’s experience of place, keeping one anchored to a home they could no longer sense through their bodies and yet somehow knew: The Internet provides us with information, but it doesn’t allow us the illusion of forgetting and fails to nourish us. We are reminded that we are not over there, which makes adjustment to America more difficult. To survive, we need to be able to begin the process of forgetting. Paradoxically, being Irish, our deepest desire is to remember and re‑create everything. Emilie Pine argues that contemporary voices are turning to the past with a new and distinct vigor, explaining this in part by the “conditions of global modernity and capitalism [that] have fostered a sense of social progress and advancement” and “have at the same time engendered a feeling of 542

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insecurity. As technology and culture make themselves “new,” the necessity of keeping up‑to‑date is both relentless and impossible.” Breadth of access creates a sort of obligation for the human who inevitably grapples with a lost sense of place. More recently, responding to Pine, scholars Deirdre Flynn and Eugene O’Brien connect this insecurity fueled by virtual connection to physical place to larger existential anxiety about climate change: This new relationship impacts our own identity, as we imagine home and the self as both tan‑ gible and virtual; as both present and absent at the same time. On a grander scale, the world is also responding to our place within it as the threat of climate change grows. The idyllic Ireland as a rural paradise is threatened by development, and by global warming. Even at the time of the Revivalists, this “rural paradise” was never more than a cultural and political trope; however, the consequences of such imaginative tricks become more urgent in face of a climate crisis that puts all that we know of place at risk. The Irish American’s memory of place is thus shifting in nuanced ways alongside the expansive global economy, enhanced reliance on virtual communica‑ tion, and increasing anxiety about the state of the planet. In Wall’s keen observation, against these changes, memory fails to provide nourishment for the human animal trying to make its way.18 Wall’s close critical study of what it means to be Irish American honors this complexity, noting: “The writers, artists and musicians that I write about in this book are women and men defined by their complex attachments to place and places.” Proceeding to reference Solnit himself, he expresses an affinity for her sense of duality, of existing in “two places at once” as she writes in Migrations. Wall’s stated goal in his study In Search of America is to explore the work of writers who “resist simple binary notions of belonging” to serve his desire to “complicate engagement to place. Binaries such as Irish American are broken down and, at least in part, revised or replaced by interdependence and exchange between Ireland and America.” This dismantling of binaries, of local and global, of human and nonhuman, is precisely the kind of epistemological shift that is necessary for new plan‑ etary thinking. Wall’s critical study is successful in demonstrating the nuances of Irish America in this study, and it is not surprising. His own work as a poet and essayist gives voice to the synergy of this dialog, particularly as he captures what it is to dwell on this planet. As a critic, an essayist, and a poet, Wall’s work is characterized by an emphasis on the interdependence and exchange of place and identities.19 In Wall’s work, the interplay between place and person is often actualized through movement. The poem “All the Worshippers” from Wall’s A Tour of Your Country begins with the speaker’s neighborhood walk against the Sunday services in an American city. Quickly, the speaker frames his movement as an offering not so different from what stirs in the church walls: “I am walking through/ our leafy city, dodging worshippers’ parked cars./To walk is a form of worship as to sit and listen/is a form of walking.” The poem unfolds against the ambulating speaker, who, offering a litany of faith traditions, reflects on the arbitrary borders humans assign to the sacred: I/remain part of the broken world which only at your/peril can you forget. My Methodists, Presbyterians,/Baptists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Jubilee Christians,/so many fill and warm your cool places two thous‑/and years on, five hundred since the Reformation. Reflecting on the delicate line between what is whole and who is broken, the speaker’s introspection in a Missouri city is interrupted by a turn to Ireland: “In another time, I heard old monks chant from high/ benches between bogland and evergreens and taped/their song of the sun, retained the blas of their wine.” The speaker’s feet are steady on the cement, present to the surroundings and simultaneously imagining Ireland, remembering distinctive terrain of “bogland and evergreen” and naming sensorial 543

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memories in Irish that are more entwined in the speaker’s experience of the holy than the Missouri churches just in front of him. The poem quickly integrates these details and returns to its present rumi‑ nation on the multiplicity of devotion: “As all of our ministers pray hard for peace, peals of/laughter are carried from opened garages and early/backyard barbecues. To cook is a form of worship,/to laugh a hymn of exuberant annunciation.” In this poem, human impulses of movement, laughter, and eating are given a place among the “holy” acts of Sunday worship in a Missouri city neighborhood and the chant of Irish monks. It is a poem about walking, a poem about the divine, a poem about America, a poem about an Ireland that is a breath away. The speaker places himself in context and is attentive to the long view of time. As the human species navigates what it means to live with volatile climate swings, increasing rates of climate displacement, and a dependence on memory to understand how we reached this point, the impulse of Wall’s poetry serves as a needed prescriptive.20 In Wall’s most recent collection of poems, My Aunts at Twilight Poker (2023), the reader en‑ counters more poignant interruptions of time and place, highlighting the urgency of this climate ­moment. In “Morning, La Cross,” the speaker is again walking near the Mississippi river, this time in ­Wisconsin, where observations of immediate surroundings quickly shift time: Riverside & La Crosse at breakfast hour: […] runners on the promenade, like guiding bones light craft shifting indigently down the Mississippi. Though distant, my father sings out from the treetop eagles await, owls are falling into shadow. The father’s voice, set against eagle and owl, moves the speaker into a reflection on the hallowed and humbled: “All breath is sacred, on our buckled knees/our buildings stand proud breathing our/aspira‑ tions […] Sweet world, do you/love me still?” And yet the speaker in this poem is always entangled with the larger scope of this place and of time: “wrench/of land fall bearing breath of indigenous/ people who claiming nothing possessed all.” The speaker continues to place himself on earth and into an otherworld, in built and natural environments, looking deeply into this place to wonder at his own significance and to anguish in the loss of culture and people that created space for modernization and “progress.” The poem quickly takes the reader back to the cityscape, to the riverside bench, where the father now is on the earth beside the speaker, offering a cigarette as the earth releases its own flame: “my father descended from his tree offers me/a wild woodbine. I catch in the red stone/on a far hill a glow of liquid, fiery, breathing/life.” With this cigarette, and from this park bench, the poem leaves the Mississippi for Ireland; the line after the breathing life turns to the past when the earth, the trees, carried human voice: “In Ireland long ago with ash and oak/we wrote our poems out on the waking land.” A reference to Ogham, Ireland’s earliest form of writing in which letters are named after trees, this poem of longing finds rest in the deep time of Ireland. Through time and place shifting, this poem reveals that the Irish‑American speaker’s ways of knowing are characterized by an imaginative space that contains images, memories, and histories of past and present place sensibilities. Under‑ standing of environment, particularly when it is destabilized by displacement and loss, comes from an openness to these influences. In a moment of environmental crisis, when humans are literally and figuratively losing ground, this capacity to find meaning in the confluence of what was and what is, just might be a source of agency and of hope.21 A similar confluence is found in “Manhattan Wood,” also an urban walking poem, this time in an Inwood Hill park of New York. Beneath a city canopy of oaks, the poem is interrupted by a “robin on a long ledge/of an upraised limb” which the speaker follows with “Hello my father/Michael.” The poem quickly returns to mapping, naming a landmark rock that commemorates the place where the 544

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Dutch “acquired” the island of Manhattan from the indigenous, and then shifting in time and place to a Wexford site of chieftain burial. Nine Stones Bluebell Wood we walked one April day you say, the trees— you emphasize—are an alphabet laced across our land.22 As in “Morning, La Crosse,” American indigenous history moves the speaker to recall a “long ago” Irish history of the land, place marked by memory of a walk with the named father who is teaching his child how to read the ancient story of the land. Walking in these poems is never against just one place or one history. The speaker inhabits and knows a present story and moment that exists in concert with a past sense of place, thus unraveling any presumption of linearity. In these poems, and beyond, walk‑ ing is not merely a context for discovery. Walking makes knowing possible and this knowing is richer because of the speaker’s openness to being moved by what he sees. In Dacher Keltner’s recent study of awe, he invokes Rebecca Solnit’s theories recorded in her cultural history of walking, Wanderlust: “different kinds of walking, ranging from the more collective to the solitary, produce, in Solnit’s theorizing, an awe‑like form of consciousness in which we extend the self into the environment.” For Keltner’s purposes, collaborating with neuroscientists, he argues that we can thus create intentional spaces in our lives that open us to awe. Although a helpful context, Wall’s poems themselves create this capaciousness as the humble speaker, held in the palm of movement, treks into deep time and with the wingbeat of a bird, traverses oceans. Wall’s poems are an intentional space that record the extension of self into the environment, and an openness to the possibilities of this might be under‑ stood as a generative sense of awe.23

Conclusion A study of an evolving sense of Irish‑American identity in the context of physical environment in‑ vites us to a broader examination of what it means to inhabit this planet. The Irish‑American experi‑ ence embodies the truth that our way of dwelling in place has never been permanent, that in the scope of deep time the human animal has always been a guest, a migrant, upon this earth, simultaneously anchoring itself to community and locality while the earth continues to spin on its axis. Though just a modest sampling, the voices of writers like Solnit and Wall, and in particular their willingness to map a sense of place that is inevitably coterminous, articulate the precise epistemology that the climate crisis beckons. The planet has always been spinning, but human action has accelerated its pace and its volatility and because of this, humans will never inhabit the earth with the same sense of security that was once possible. The political, cultural, even geographical borders that have so often been our compass of meaning‑making no longer hold, and so the human animal is a new kind of migrant, learning how to anticipate natural disasters, kneeling to the ground in face of our insignificance that is held in tension with our capacity to destroy. In Manchán Magan’s book Listen to the Land Speak: A Journey into the Wisdom of What Lies Beneath Us, he maps the contours of the Irish terrain, tracing the ancient mythologies that once helped ancestors make sense of this planet and their humble step upon it. In the preface to this study, he speaks to this inherent humility referencing the inadequacies of language, calling it the “opposite of land” in its utter dependence on humans: 545

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Without our minds and our bodies, it [language] doesn’t exist. It has no life beyond that which humans have bestowed on it. Yet the land has always existed. It just is […] The choice is ours whether we wish to engage with it in a meaningful way or merely accept it as a backdrop to our lives. The voices of Irish Americans such as Wall and Solnit choose the former, and they do so precisely because they befriend displacement and the longing, understanding, and clarity that it reveals.24 Magan is right. The dependence of language on human animals renders it desperately inadequate against the vastness of a planet in crisis. Yet, it is our tool of survival. In the words of Jonathan Gottschall, “we are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.”25 We must write them; we must seek them; we must listen to them. As scholars expand the scope of how we understand the Irish‑American experience, there is an op‑ portunity for the human animal to listen to its stories. The displacement, the exile, the remembering, the forgetting, the grief, are all bound to a particular understanding, and most importantly, the accept‑ ance of, the fragility of the human step. Nonfiction writer and immigrant Julian Hoffman observes: Place can be powerfully transformative. It helps shape who we are, impressing itself upon us with all the force of a sea‑storm, or as subtly as the unfurling of oak leaves by luminous degrees in spring, recalibrating our lives in conjunction with new and ever‑deepening relationships. The contemporary Irish‑American voice might be characterized by its attentiveness to deepening relationships, understanding them as nonlinear, and even more than interconnected, enmeshed. A close reading of the Irish‑American experience of natural and built environments might begin to give us a language for loss of place, one that is both very personal and global, one that we are eager to understand more carefully in the face rising sea levels, rampant forest fires, and changing cycles of season. If as human animals it is our instinct, our contribution, to tell the stories of this planet, we need the language and the lens through which to do so.26 While not monolithic, the Irish‑American experience is always embedded in a changing physical and cultural environment. The distinct significance of human connection to place in the Irish cultural, colonial, and imaginative space of Irish history renders a sensitivity to this embeddedness. The Irish cultural imagination has been shaped by human dependence upon nonhuman nature, and this col‑ lective memory is never far from the Irish‑American perspective and way of being on this planet. A close study of how Irish‑American voices have navigated the duality of place uncovers for the human species a particular way of knowing that finds meaning in displacement and change. As the human species faces the reality of climate crisis, it must find the language and ethic of care To cover produc‑ tively make sense of, steward, and survive upon a rapidly changing planet. Because of the ways they uncover the simultaneity of time and place, writers such as Solnit and Wall give readers a model for how to navigate, to mourn, and to piece together the stories of this uncertain terrain. Moreover, in closely reading the Irish‑American story of physical environment, critics gain important insight into the intricacies of this undercurrent of the story and its sometimes quiet but ever‑present contribution to the pulse of Irish Studies.

Notes 1 Gallagher, Is, Is Not, 127. 2 Wall, “Life,” 287. 3 Bogard, Solastalgia, xxi. 4 “Ecotone Explained”; Dungy, “Is All Writing.”

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Contemporary Irish America and the Environment 5 Robinson, Stones of Aran, 33–34. 6 O’Toole, The Lie of, 5; O’Toole, “Perpetual,” 84. 7 O’Toole, “Perpetual,” 84. 8 Wall, E., From Oven Lane, 135; Tobin, The Book of Irish, xxxv. 9 Solnit, The Faraway Nearby, 1. 10 Boran, Writing Home, xvi. 11 Wall, From Oven Lane, 71–72. 12 Solnit, A Book of Migrations, 176. 13 Solnit, Migrations, 176. 14 Solnit, Migrations, 180–181. 15 Solnit, Migrations, 182. 16 In the Preface to Solnit’s new edition of Migrations she writes of her intentions: “I went not to confirm but to complicate and dissolve the definitions I’d been handed, about Europeanness, whiteness, Irishness, about travel, place, and time […] it was a great excuse to wander around and pay attention to interior and exterior geographies, to the ways people read me, and to the way my readings inflected by adventure.” (xiii); Rogers, Extended Family, 12; Solnit, Migrations, 182–183. 17 Wall, E., From Oven Lane, 11. 18 Wall, E., From the Sin‑é café, 25; Pine, The Politics of Irish Memory, 5; Flynn, Representations of Loss, 8. 19 Flynn, Representations of Loss, 12; It is perhaps fitting that Wall’s critical scholarship also breaks down scholarly rhetorical boundaries. In both Writing the Irish West (2011) and In Search of Irish America (2019) he consciously invokes the tradition of narrative scholarship often embraced by ecocritics as a means of demonstrating our inherent embeddedness in place. 20 Wall, E., A Tour of, 15. 21 Wall, E., My Aunts at, 21. 22 Wall, E., My Aunts at, 35. 23 Wall, E., My Aunts at, 35. In a seminal essay of ecocriticism in which biologist Neil Evernden argues for the necessity of the humanities in understanding ecological praxis he writes: “There is no such thing as an individual, only an individual‑in‑context, individual as component of place, defined by place.” Evernden, “Beyond Ecology,” 102; Keltner, Awe, 105. 24 Magan, Listen to the Land Speak, 5. 25 Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal, xiv. 26 Hoffman, Irreplaceable, 8.

Bibliography Bogard, Paul. Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2023. Boran, Pat, Chiamaka Enyi‑Amadi, eds. Writing Home: The ‘New Irish’ Poets. Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2019. Dungy, Camille. “Is All Writing Environmental Writing?” The Georgia Review, Fall/Winter 2018. Accessed June 22, 2023. https://thegeorgiareview.com/posts/is‑all‑writing‑environmental‑writing/Evernden, Neil. “Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy.” In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, 92–104. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Flynn, Deirdre, and Eugene O’Brien, eds. Representations of Loss in Irish Literature. London: Palgrave Macmil‑ lan, 2018. Gallagher, Tess. Is, Is Not. Dublin: Graywolf Press, 2019. Gottschall, Jonathan. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Boston, MA: Mariner Books, 2013. Hoffman, Julian. Irreplaceable: The Fight to Save Our Wild Places. London: Hamish Hamilton of Penguin Press, 2019. Keltner, Dacher. Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life. New York: Penguin Press, 2023. Magan, Machán. Listen to the Land Speak: A Journey into the Wisdom of What Lies Beneath Us. Dublin: Gill Books, 2022. Muldoon, Paul. Why Brownlee Left. Winston‑Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1980. O’Toole, Fintan. “Perpetual Motion.” In Arguing at the Crossroads: Essays on a Changing Ireland, edited by Paul Brennan and Catherine de Sainte Phalle, 77–97. Dublin: New Island Books, 1997. O’Toole, Fintan. The Lie of the Land. London: Verso, 1997.

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Christine Cusick Pine, Emilie. The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Robinson, Tim. Stones of Aran: Pilgrimmage. London: Faber and Faber, 1983. Rogers, James Silas, ed. Extended Family: Essays on Being Irish American from New Hibernia Review. Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions, 2013. Solnit, Rebecca. A Book of Migrations. New York: Verso, 2011. Solnit, Rebecca. The Faraway Nearby. New York: Penguin, 2013. The Ecological Society of America. “Ecotone Explained.” Accessed July 6, 2023. www.esa.org. Tobin, Daniel, ed. The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Wall, Drucilla. “Life on the Western Edge of it All: Conceptions of Place in Tess Gallagher’s Lough Arrow ­Poems.” In Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time, edited by Tom Lynch, Susan Nara‑ more Maher, Drucilla Wall, and O. Alan Weltzien, 274–288. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Wall, Eamonn. A Tour of Your Country. Cliffs of Moher, County Clare: Salmon Poetry, 2008. Wall, Eamonn. From Oven Lane to Sun Prairie: In Search of Irish America. Dublin: Arlen House, 2019. Wall, Eamonn. From the Sin‑é café to the Black Hills: Notes on the New Irish. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. Wall, Eamonn. My Aunts at Twilight Poker. Cliffs of Moher, County Clare: Salmon Poetry, 2023. Wall, Eamonn. Writing the Irish West: Ecologies and Traditions. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011.

548

AFTERWORD The Remarkable Persistence of Irish America Daniel Mulhall

As I prepared for my assignment as Ireland’s 18th Ambassador to the United States, I anticipated that Irish America might be a waning asset for Ireland in a changing America. I arrived in Washington seven months after the inauguration of Donald J. Trump, to whom I presented my diplomatic creden‑ tials on 8 September 2017. At that time, there was an inclination for Irish people to recoil from the realization that many Irish Americans had supported Trump as a candidate for the US presidency in 2016. Was Irish America still a fitting ally for an increasingly progressive Ireland? There was a fear too that Trump, with his affection for Brexit, might be a less‑than‑reliable listener to Ireland’s point of view. What struck me during five eventful years in America was the extraordinary resilience of Irish identity, and the continued willingness of Irish Americans to wield influence in Ireland’s favor. How to explain the longevity of Irishness in the United States more than a century after the peak period of Irish emigration had passed? The Great Famine was formative, for it created a community convinced that the misfortunes of exile had been inflicted on them by governmental malfeasance in their homeland. It so happened that the Famine‑driven exodus occurred at a time when America was under strain as the antebellum era ground to its violent end. American anxieties gave rise to a surge of nativist sentiment that tem‑ porarily made America unfriendly terrain for immigrants. The nativist moment waned on the back of North‑South divisions about slavery, but the sharp resentment directed toward Irish immigrants (which is well documented by Anelise Hanson Shrout and Hidetaka Hirota in their chapters in this volume) meant that they developed a defensive cohesion anchored in their embattled Irish and Catho‑ lic heritage. Moreover, as Ted Smyth has observed in his chapter, Irish Americans quickly displayed a “love of and aptitude for politics” that has endured. Irish immigrants and their descendants began to acquire high political office in the latter part of the nineteenth century. John F. Fitzgerald, the son of Irish immigrants and grandfather to John F. Kennedy, was a prime example, becoming a US Con‑ gressman in 1895 and Mayor of Boston in 1906. It is fascinating and ironic that Irish political success became most manifest in the northeastern portion of the US, where mid‑nineteenth‑century anti‑Irish nativism had been at its most vehement. Unwelcoming Boston gradually became an “Irish” citadel. One wonders if Irish America would have cohered the way it did had antebellum America been more welcoming to the newcomers.

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The post‑Famine decades when emigration from Ireland was at its heaviest was also a time when improvements in transportation facilitated transnational connections between Irish immigrants and the land they had left behind. Why did Irish immigrants keep the politics of their ancestral homeland in their hearts for longer and perhaps more strongly than other immigrant groups? It was because they had a cause—Irish freedom—that connected them with each other and with “home.” That cause went through successive nineteenth‑century iterations: Repeal, Fenianism, land reform, Home Rule, and cultural nationalism. All of these found significant support within Irish America. Transnational influence scaled the heights during Ireland’s revolutionary period, which caused Joe Lee to write epigrammatically, “No America, no New York, no Easter Rising.” From the late‑­ nineteenth century onwards, the British political establishment became acutely conscious of the potential for Irish Americans to damage Britain’s increasingly important ties with, and interests in, the USA. The climb toward independence in 1922 would undoubtedly have been a more arduous one without the helping hand supplied by Irish‑American influence in Washington DC. Any transnational phenomenon needs two legs to sustain it. Whereas Irish immigrants had good reason to transmit their grievances down the generations, Irish political leaders from O’Connell to de Valera were conscious of the value of Irish‑American support, which they cultivated assiduously—as do their successors today! Touring America became a lucrative pursuit for Irish public figures in the decades prior to the achievement of independence. It is a remarkable fact that five of the seven signatories of the 1916 Proclamation (Ceannt, Clarke, Connolly, MacDiarmada, and Pearse) spent time in the USA, as immigrants or as visitors. A notable feature of Irish‑American history is the way in which that community, after decades of relative quiet, was roused into action by the outbreak of conflict in Northern Ireland. When trouble flared in Belfast and Derry in 1969, Irish diplomats were instructed to approach the administration in Washington, only to be told that the US had no basis for intervening in a domestic British affair. It took a lot of assiduous lobbying to secure that intervention, but when it came (gradually and tentatively through the Carter and Reagan years), it turned out to be highly effective, especially under President Clinton. Astute input from Clinton and his envoy, Senator George Mitchell, was instrumental in tipping the scales in favor of peaceful political agreement. It must also be said that Irish‑American funding of the IRA had a baleful impact that probably prolonged the violence. Ultimately, however, the idea of a negotiated settlement articulated by John Hume, and supported by such political titans as Ted Kennedy and Tip O’Neill, captured the high ground in Irish America. A feature of the past 25 years has been the sustained engagement of the United States through successive administrations and via their special envoys. In the messy aftermath of the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union, Irish‑American influence came into play once again. In 2019, the Co‑Chair of the Congressional Friends of Ireland, Congressman Richie Neal of Massachusetts, arranged for a delegation from the powerful House Committee on Ways and Means to visit Britain and Ireland. What’s more, he persuaded House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to lead the delegation. In what was treated like a State Visit, the Speaker was fully fêted in Dublin but received a less‑than‑­ enthusiastic welcome in London, where fear of offending President Trump was paramount in British calculations. The Speaker made it plain that, should the UK’s departure from the EU imperil “the seamless border in Ireland,” there would be “no chance of a US‑UK trade agreement,” a prize that was keenly sought after by the more ardent supporters of Brexit. Pelosi’s message was heard loud and clear in London and evidently fed into the ensuing negotiations with the EU, which produced agreement on a Protocol on Northern Ireland designed to retain an open Irish border. Nothing can be future‑proofed and, with immigration from Ireland now down to a trickle, the continued transmission of Irish‑American identity to future generations cannot be guaranteed, and may require reinforcement through transatlantic cultural, academic, and people‑to‑people initiatives. There is, however, every chance that Irish America will continue to be a political asset to Ireland. 550

Afterword

First, while the demographic weight of 30 million Irish Americans does not mean that Ireland always gets its way in Washington, it has secured a hearing for Irish issues in the White House and especially on Capitol Hill, which is a big deal for a country of Ireland’s size. With a pattern now firmly established, I expect that America’s ear will stay open to Irish concerns in the future. Second, there is now a long tradition of US involvement with Northern Ireland, one of the few areas of public policy where there is genuine bipartisan consensus. It would take a major shift to dislodge that US interest in protecting the gains of the Good Friday Agreement. A highly conservative Republican Congressman once told me that Ireland was perhaps the only issue about which he agreed with Democrats. Third, there is an increasing awareness of the scale of America’s economic nexus with Ireland. While that could potentially put Ireland in the sights of “America First” advocates, in fact the number of jobs in American companies in Ireland (170,000 or so) is simply not meaningful in terms of the US labor market. What’s more, significant profits are now being repatriated across the Atlantic by American companies to the benefit of the US economy. Ireland has become a favorite European partner for the US business community. Fourth, as a country with a unique set of ties with the US, Ireland may have a role to play in the broader arena of transatlantic relations. Systemic changes in the global arena present major challenges to Atlanticism, but they also highlight continuing importance of an active EU‑US‑NATO partnership in advancing the interests of Europeans and Americans. At the same time, political developments on both sides of the Atlantic put that traditional partnership in greater jeopardy than ever before. Can Ireland be part of a bridge of values connecting Washington and Brussels? Finally, the impressive tourism numbers (almost two million US visitors to Ireland in 2019, the last pre‑pandemic year) point to a real American affinity with Ireland that looks set to endure. Is it not remarkable that President Biden, descended from immigrants who left Ireland in the nineteenth century, and with other ethnicities in his family background, still proudly describes himself as “Irish” and is enthusiastic about his heritage? As a prominent Irish American once remarked to me, “historical memory is a real thing.” It certainly is for so many Americans of Irish descent who display a genuine pride in their often‑distant ancestral roots. It would take some unimaginable development to have Americans stop celebrating their Irish heritage, or to have future US Presidents cease inviting Ireland’s Taoiseach to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in a Washington greened for the occasion. That yearly canvas carries the imprint of the myriad tales that wend their way through the pages of this collection, recounting the epic journey of Irish America from the Atlantic world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the transatlantic domain of the twenty‑first century.

551

INDEX

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. 1798 Rebellion (Rising) 36, 37, 63, 83, 164, 195, 259, 260, 273, 286, 371 1848 Rebellion (Revolt) 130, 178, 180, 258, 273, 275 1848 Revolutions 119 1916 Easter Rising xxiii, 196, 232, 240, 250, 273, 279–280, 291, 299, 304, 305, 315, 316, 320–321, 324, 375, 380, 408, 465, 550 25th Hour 531 2by4 399 9‑11 Terrorist Attacks 340, 402, 414, 436, 531–533 Abbey Theatre 382 abolitionism see slavery abortion 4, 133, 418, 432–433, 437–438, 448, 536 absurdism 381, 387 Academy Awards 394 Act for the English Order, Habit, and Language (1537) 16 Act of Union (1801) 63, 245, 273 ACT‑UP 460, 467 activism: African‑American 323; environmental 540, 541; political 227, 275, 299, 303; religious 445–446, 462; social 385, 397, 459, 460–464, 467, 539; transnational/diasporic 274, 277, 323; women’s 8, 276, 277–300, 303; working‑class 227, 280–281, 300, 302, 304 Ad Hoc Committee for Irish Affairs 359 Ad Hoc Committee to Protect the Good Friday Agreement 434 Adams, John 127, 342 adoption 179, 530, 531 African Americans: connections/collaborations with 2, 9, 72, 220, 225–226, 313, 315, 323–325, 335, 490, 523; Irish(‑American) attitudes/racism toward 6, 7, 74, 140, 145, 148, 171, 209, 217,

218, 228; Irish‑American competition with 4, 73, 220, 225, 227, 248, 313, 511; social conditions/ constructions of 389, 489, 523; and women 221, 224–226 African‑American Irish Network 441 agrarian secret societies 63, 64, 212, 245 agrarian violence 35, 185 Ahern, Bertie 424, 428 Aiken, Frank 409 Albrecht, Glen 536 alcohol 2, 51, 415, 512; abuse of 325–326, 346, 412, 465, 527, 529 Alecheim, Sholem 383 Ali, Muhammad 335, 525 Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) 127, 342–343 Alrichs, Hermanus 54 Alzheimer’s Disease 527–529 Amazon, The 19, 20, 21 American Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic 279 American Celt and Adopted Citizen 129, 130, 176 American Civil War 4, 8, 131–133, 205–216, 261, 267, 275, 276, 436, 447, 473, 491, 496, 530 American Commission on Irish Independence 306 American Federation of Labor (AFL) 4, 331 American Indians see Native Americans American Irish National Immigration Committee (AINIC) 336–342 American Irish State Legislators Caucus 435 American Legion 350 American Negro Theatre (ANT) 382, 384, 388, 390n9 American Party 140, 144, 145, 147 American Patriot 99, 106 American Protestant Association 285, 287, 288

553

Index American Revolution, The 29, 32, 36, 51, 54, 59, 61, 64–66, 68, 164, 286, 290, 432 American War of Independence 60 American Women Pickets for the Enforcement of America’s War Aims 305, 306 Americanization 29, 77, 250, 251, 311, 313, 397 Americans for a New Irish Agenda 359 Anbinder, Tyler xxiii, 107 Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) 4, 240, 305, 341, 344, 346, 398, 434 Anderson, Benedict 6, 135, 324, 407 Anglo‑Irish 52, 181, 186, 222, 286, 290, 292 Anglo‑Irish Agreement (1985) 358, 433 Anglo‑Irish Treaty 281 Anglo‑Irish War 294, 380 animal poetics 510–522 antebellum America 7, 71–82, 135, 146, 153, 205, 234, 490, 549 anthropocene 537 anti‑Catholicism 38, 116, 118, 141–142, 180, 287 anti‑Irish bias 21, 87, 99, 121, 130–131, 140–151, 328n12; see also nativism anti‑colonialism 323 anti‑communism 248, 345, 347, 348 Antipodes 99, 103 antisemitism 347, 410, 433 Antrim, town of 36 Appalachia 3, 7, 164, 169, 228, 233, 315, 486, 487, 488, 489 Apple Computer Inc. 426 Armstrong Jr., John 86 Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU) 314, 315, 316 Aurora 83, 86, 87 Australian Catholic Data Project 450 Bagenal, Phillip 236 Baker, Benjamin 153; A Glance at New York 153 Baldwin, Clara 87, 90 Ballads 35, 165, 208, 487, 496 Ballykissangel 415 Baltimore 233, 249 Bancroft, Hubert Howe 239 Bandelj, Nina 421 Banshees of Inisherin, The 394 Baraka, Amiri 380 Barbados 23, 324, 327 Barber, Catherine 263, 265–266 Barlow, Joel 87, 92 Barlow, Ruth 87 Barlow, Thomas 87 Barnet, Isaac Cox 87 Barr, Colin 3, 447 Barry, Leonora 225, 228, 301 Bassano, Duc de 87 Battle of Kinsale (1601) 17, 19 Battle of the Somme (1916) 291

Bedini, Gaetano 120 Belafonte, Harry 382–384, 388 Belfast 32, 34–35 Bell, David 134 Bell, The 408 Berkeley, George 235 Berlin, Ellin 368, 372 Berrigan brothers (Daniel and Phillip) 440 Bibles 21, 144, 179, 481, 502 Biden, Joseph (Joe) 341, 342, 356, 360, 362, 434, 436, 438, 440, 523 Billings, Mathieu 245 Black, John 38 Black Americans see African Americans Black Arts Movement 381 Black Star (shipping company) 323, 326 Blaine, Barbara 453 Blown Away 399–402 Bocock, John Paul 244 bon mots 163, 167 Bonaparte, Napoleon 89, 92 Boondock Saints, The 399 Boran, Pat 540 Bord Fáilte 410 Boston 32, 266, 368, 372, 399, 413, 440, 461; and abolition 73, 118, 143; and Catholicism 116, 118, 121, 163, 163, 247, 249, 250, 314; and economics 428; and ethnic history 346; and immigration 2, 32, 72, 104–108, 126, 142, 143, 144, 165, 185, 191, 195, 228, 233, 488, 491; and labor movement/ unions 293, 301, 312, 313, 316; and music 491, 493, 495; and newspapers 99, 128, 129, 130, 415; and parades/homophobia 459, 461, 463; and politics 143, 146, 244, 245, 247, 347–351, 549; and racism 171, 527; and sex abuse scandal 445–449, 454; and women’s activism 304, 306, 312 Boston College xxii, 119 Boston Daily Bee 118, 143 Boston Free Dispensary 142 Boston Globe 445–449, 452, 454 Boston House of Industry 142 Boston Pilot (Jesuit, or Catholic Sentinel) 118, 128, 130, 131, 133, 134, 169, 176–178, 181, 185, 193, 206 Boston University 373 Boucicault, Dion 7, 152, 153, 157–161; Colleen Bawn, The 159–161; Octoroon, or, Life in Louisiana, The 158; Poor of New York, The 158–159 Bourke, Ulick 481 Bowles, Emily 178; Irish Diamonds; or the Chronicles of Peterstown 178 boycotts 277, 306, 311, 312, 315, 316 Boyle, Richard 21 “Brexit” 356, 360–362, 419, 424–425, 428, 434, 549–550 “Bridget/Brigid,” stereotypes of 169, 219, 221, 239

554

Index British Empire 103, 218, 222, 236, 273, 275, 287, 288, 292, 321, 458 British government 60, 61, 67, 99, 102–104, 118, 192, 194, 259, 286, 289, 292, 293, 358, 433 Broderick, David C. 240 brokers 48, 103, 104 Brooklyn (New York) 106, 225, 312, 316, 347, 351, 368, 401, 475, 481, 483, 496, 499, 501, 506, 530, 531, 533 Brooks, Erastus 145 Brophy, John 316 Brougham, John 7, 152, 153, 157; Game of Love, The 155–157; Temptation Or, The Irish Emigrant 154–155 Brown, Jerry 359, 435 Brown, Thomas N. 274 Brownlee, William C. 141 Brownson, Orestes 116, 119 Buel, Jesse 86 Buenker, John 247 Bullock, Sandra 442 Burk, John Daly 127 Burke, John 210 Burke, Kevin 448 Burke, Mary M. 197, 371, 375–376 Burke, Raymond 438 Burke, Thomas N. 196 Burns, Anna 499 Burns, Lucy 304 Burroughs, Nannie Helen 226, 228 Bush, George W. 341, 434 Butler, Judith 6, 460 Butler, Thomas O’Brien 482 Butt, Isaac 184 Butte, Montana 236–237 Byrne, Jane 278 Byrne, Miles 85 Cailín Ciúin, An (The Quiet Girl) 394, 442 Caldwell, John 356 California 8, 232–243, 373, 511, 514; Catholic church in 120; economics in 420; immigration to 105, 148, 232–243; Irish politics in 144, 245, 334, 359; music in 492; unionism in 294 Calvert, George (Lord Baltimore) 22 Campbell, Jane 304 Canada: and American Civil War 207; and Catholic Church 108; Fenian invasion of 61, 134, 211, 212, 236, 276, 281; immigration to 99–108, 129, 141, 146, 172, 277, 288, 414; Irish language in 474; Irish music in 491; and radio listeners 409 Captain Patrick Malony; Or, The Irishman in Alabama 177, 181, 185 Carey, Mathew 67 caricatures of Irish 99, 328n12, 396, 510 Carlisle, Pennsylvania 52–54, 511; Carlisle Commercial College 511

Carroll, John 115 Carroll, Charles 67 Carroll, Francis M. 287 Carroll, James 438, 439 Carson, Edward 292 Carter, James (Jimmy) 357, 358 Cashier, Albert (Jennie Hodgers) 208 Casement, Roger 328n12, 463 Casey, Marion R. 2 Catholic Church: and abolition/slavery 73, 78, 80, 117; and fiction 184, 186, 368; and global/ transnational entity 5, 16, 116, 186, 249, 251, 454; and immigrants 7, 38, 72, 114, 117, 121, 141, 233, 234, 248, 250, 409, 410, 447; and influence/power 7, 199, 120, 179, 236, 244, 251, 408, 448; and Irish identity 432, 503; and labor/unions 8, 317; and politics 9, 77, 114, 144, 240, 244–256, 276, 279, 281, 369, 438; response to Great Famine 191; and social support 4, 114, 195, 412 Catholic Committee 67 Catholic Emancipation (1829) 35, 71, 117, 128, 205, 245, 259, 432 Catholic Herald 133, 193 Catholic Relief 61, 62, 66, 67 Catholic Revival 248, 249 Catholic Schools 120, 144 Catholic Woman’s Suffrage League 304 Catholic World, The 177, 181–182 Catholics: and British government/Britain 61–68, 222, 286; and culture 169, 179, 196, 250, 371, 432, 526; and fiction 179–180, 182, 369; and French revolution 62; and immigration 4, 5, 7, 20, 36, 38, 65, 71–72, 83, 100, 114–125, 127, 219, 238, 249, 264, 513; and nativism/bias 115, 119–121, 205, 219–220, 222, 251; and news 129–133; and Penal laws/persecution 4, 20, 23, 35, 62, 67, 222, 286; and politics 37, 61–62, 67, 119–120, 132, 205, 245–256, 264, 281, 344–354, 438; and rebellion 35, 59, 60, 64; and sectarianism 5, 7, 22, 32, 36, 60, 62–63, 141, 286, 290; and sex abuse scandal 445–457; and slavery 71, 73; and transnationalism/ diaspora 60, 63, 67, 116, 543; see also nativism celibacy 450, 454 “Celtic Tiger, The” 4, 9, 395, 414, 419–431 chain migration 165 Chambers, John 89, 91 Chanfrau, Frank 153 changelings 168 Chapel of the Holy Family (Boston) 195 Charlemont, Lord 61 Charleston, South Carolina 32, 100, 115–116, 128, 144, 205–206, 211; Charleston Hibernian Society 107; University of 172 Charlestown, Massachusetts 140, 142, 349 Cheverus, John 116 Chicago: and Fenians 276; and fiction 372, 385; and immigration 165, 233–236, 336–337, 488, 523;

555

Index and labor/unions 301, 311–316; and music 492, 493, 496; and news 132–134, 413; and politics 132–133, 144, 244–248, 315, 369; and teachers 302–303, 314; University of 346 Chicago Federation of Labor 302, 314, 316 Chicago Teachers’ Federation 302 Child, Francis James 487 child abuse 1, 445–457; see also Boston; Catholics Childress, Alice 382, 388 Chile 464 China 280, 436 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) 278 Chinese immigrants 141, 147 Choctaw Nation see Native Americans Christian Brothers 347, 450 Church of Ireland 31, 36, 286, 290; see also Anglican; Protestantism Church of Scotland 30 Cincinnati 74, 117, 120, 161, 207, 244, 372, 375 Citizen, The 129–130 citizenship 219, 220, 228, 264, 277, 341, 381, 441, 519, 539 civil rights: African American 210, 211, 220, 226, 248–249, 388–389, 440; Catholic 35 Clan na Gael 195, 277, 279, 280 Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem 495 class migration 370 Cleburne, Patrick 131, 210 Clergy‑Perpetrated Child Sexual Abuse (CPCSA) 452 climate crisis 10, 423, 512, 520, 536–548 Clington, Allen H. 176; Frank O’Donnell 176; The Old House at Home; The Adventures of Frank O’Donnell 176 Clinton, Dewitt 90, 259, 260–261, 263 Clinton, George 259 Clinton, Hillary 361, 436–438 Clinton, William Jefferson (Bill) 9, 355–357, 359– 360, 362–363, 420, 433, 435, 440, 550 Clohessy, David 453 Coakley, Martha 448 “coffin ships” 104, 105, 109n15, 192 Cohalan, Daniel 281 Cohan, George M. 161 Cohen, Robin 408, 534n36 Cohn, Roy 347 Colbert, Stephen 437 Coleman, Michael 494 Coleman, William 86 Collins, John 338 colonialism: British 24, 64, 68, 226, 371, 458, 511; in Caribbean 20; and climate crisis 512; indigenous victims of 67; Irish complicity in 19–22, 51–52, 321–322; settler colonialism 51, 52, 64 colonization: and British 66; decolonization 320–321, 542; economic 384; and indigenous/other peoples 236, 278, 458; and North America 15, 180, 235, 513

Colonization Bureau 180 Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann (CCÉ) 496 commentary culture 415 Commissioners of Emigration (New York) 146 communism: affiliation with 386; and Catholicism 252, 415; and politics 335, 344, 346, 348 Communist Party 314–316, 440 Confederate Army, Irish in 131, 206, 211 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) 4, 314, 316–317 Congressional Friends of Ireland 434. 550 Connaught, Province of 22, 47 Connolly, Charles F. 409 Connolly, James xxiii, 314–315, 320 Conococheague Valley 50 consanguinity 525, 532 Conservative Party, British 286, 287, 360, 424, 425 consulates: British 306, 326; Irish 409 consumerism 370, 397 Conyngham, David Power 213 Conyngham, Francis Nathaniel 482 Cooper, Sophie 3, 369 Coote, William 293 Copley Records 495 Corby, William 213 Corcoran, Mary 411–412 Corless, Gertrude 306 corporate tax 302, 419–431 correspondence 3, 5, 83–95, 192, 193, 205, 290, 386, 500, 541 Cosgrave, W. T. 409 Costello‑Sullivan, Kathleen xxiii Coughlin, Charles 415 counties of Ireland: Antrim 17, 30, 34, 36–38, 49, 63, 116, 199, 264; Armagh 30, 31, 34, 63, 487, 495; Cavan 237, 257, 262, 267; Clare 103, 360, 490; Cork 18, 21, 99, 103, 115, 131, 199, 210, 239, 276, 306, 315, 372, 376, 475, 487, 492; Derry 30, 32, 362, 550; Donegal 30, 37–38, 278, 475, 478–479; Down 30, 34–36, 116, 266; Dublin 16, 53; Fermanagh 116; Galway 116, 211, 491, 528; Kerry 17, 18, 102–103, 116, 118, 166, 199, 224, 373, 514; Kildare 16; Laois 16–18, 240; Leitrim 465, 494; Limerick 18, 102, 103; Longford 22, 263, 266; Louth 116, 208; Mayo 102, 104, 109, 277; Meath 16, 116; Monaghan 206; Offaly 17, 18, 434; Roscommon 176; Sligo 52, 102, 321, 494, 519, 536; Tipperary 18, 102, 103, 127, 340, 434; Tyrone 30, 38, 194, 295; Waterford 45, 103, 206; Wexford 22, 63, 130, 235, 542, 545 courtship 169, 502 COVID‑19 361 Croghan, George 67 Cromwell, Oliver 22; transportation of prisoners 513 Cronin, Bess 487 Cronon, William 232

556

Index Crying Game, The 395 Cuba 66 Cullen, Paul 118, 447 Cullinan, Elizabeth 526–527 Cúndún, Pádraig Phiarais 475 Curley, James Michael 349–350 Curran, Edward Lodge 347 Curran, Joseph (Maritime Workers’ Leader) 316 Curran, Joseph (scholar) 398 Curran, Mary Doyle 368, 372, 373, 526; The Parish and the Hill 368, 373, 526 curses 163, 326 Curtis, L. Perry 510 Curtis, Robert 177, 182; “McCormack’s Grudge” 177, 182, 183, 184 Cushing, Richard 197, 348 Custis, Eliza Parke 88 Daibhéid, Seosamh 483 Daily News 341 Daly, Marcus 237 Daly, Mary 409, 410 dance bands 495 Davis, Jefferson 208–209 Davis, Thomas 197 Davitt, Michael 258, 277, 314 Day, Dorothy 440 Deasy, Mary 372–377; Boy Who Made Good, The 375; Hour of Spring, The 372–375; O’Shaughnessy’s Day 376–377 Dee, Ruby 382 Deer Island 143 Defenders 63 Delaney, Enda 3 dementia 527–528 Democratic Party: and abolition 37, 77, 117; and Catholicism 9, 244–256, 279, 351, 432; Irish‑American identity/involvement with 9, 73, 74, 114, 227, 132–134, 220, 245, 247–248, 337, 346, 358, 432, 440; Ulster Presbyterian involvement in 37 Democratic Unionist Party 356 Democratic Republican Party 89, 127 Demographics 152, 419, 441 Denver 236 Departed, The 399 Derry Girls 355, 356, 362, 442 Derry/Londonderry 19, 32, 34, 47, 52, 355, 357, 362, 550 Devereux, John 88, 92 Devil’s Own, The 399, 400–402 Devotional Revolution 120, 179, 248 Devoy, John 134, 277, 334 DeWitt, Justus 494–495 Dibeltulo, Silvia 399 Diner, Hasia 2, 166, 170, 300, 433 disability 10, 499–509

discrimination: and gender 220, 226; in Ireland 23, 163–164; and sexuality 458–470; in United States 48, 107, 121, 130, 141–142, 163–164, 171, 180, 186, 227, 275, 371, 464 displacement (dispossession): environmental 539, 541, 544; of indigenous Americans 20, 465; of Irish 192, 196, 274, 536–539, 546; and racism 239, 526; and resistance 467 Dissenters 31, 37, 486 Dolan, Timothy 438 domestic service: and African‑American women 6, 8, 217–231; and Irish women 6, 8, 72, 217–231, 300, 311, 477 Donahue, Patrick 177 Donegal, town of 19 Donoghue, Emma 499 Donohoe, Kathleen 524, 530–533; Ashes of Fiery Weather 524, 520–533 Doolittle, Isaac 86 Doorley, Michael 281 Dorsey, Anna Hanson 177–178; Nora Brady’s Vow 177 Douglas, Stephen A. 132 Douglass, Frederick 195, 226 Doyle, David 2, 49, 287 Doyle, Thomas 445–446 Dred Scott v. Sandford 145 drinking: alcoholism/alcohol abuse 346, 527, 529; culture of 38, 170; pubs, saloons, taverns 34, 59, 166, 170, 209, 395; stereotypes about 140, 227, 262, 415, 435; temperance 38, 78, 117, 154, 170, 285; see also alcohol, abuse of Driscol, Dennis 127 Du Bois, W. E. B. 217, 218, 226 Du Pont Chemicals 357 Duane, William 83, 86–89 Dublin, city of 16, 53, 61–63, 103, 116, 120, 128–130, 153, 176, 179, 206, 233, 257–261, 263, 265, 275–277, 279–280, 288, 290, 306, 320–321, 324–325, 327, 336, 357–358, 360, 380, 383, 385, 409, 433, 442, 447, 466–467, 481–482, 516, 550 Dudley Square 495 Dufferin, Lord 184 Duffy, James 176 Dunbar, Paul Lawrence 383 Dungannon 62 Dungy, Camille 537 Dunne, Finlay Peter 197 Dunne, Patrick William 134 Easter Rising see 1916 Easter Rising Eaton, Isabel 217–218 Ebest, Ron 370 economics 419–431; boom 408, 420, 423; competition 73–77; crises 208; “economic ladder” 1, 368, 370, 490; free trade 61, 362, 408, 411–412, 424, 434, 436; fur trade 54; model of (Ireland) 419, 423, 428; polycrisis 419; profit shifting

557

Index 425–426; socio‑economic 39, 194, 490; “WASP” v Catholic dominance of 217–231; and western expansion 232–243; see also “Celtic Tiger” ecotone 537 Edgeworth, Maria 92 education 91, 161, 165, 196, 198, 222–223, 226, 247, 49, 250, 261, 289, 295, 302–303, 306, 311, 340, 346–347, 369, 370, 386, 408, 411–412, 432, 442, 445, 447, 450, 453, 467, 477, 495; and Catholic Church 121, 179, 250, 447, 450, 453; and Catholic Clergy 115–117, 249, 445, 450; and labor 226; and Ulster Scots 289, 294–295; and women 302–303, 311, 386 Elizabethan Adventurers 15, 18 Ellis Island 100, 106, 224, 523 emancipation: African‑American (Thirteenth Amendment) 7, 209, 321, 324; Catholic 35, 71, 117, 128, 205, 245, 259, 432 Emancipation Proclamation 132–133, 209 embodiment (normative/non‑normative) 500, 502, 507 Emerald, The 177 Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank (Emigrant Savings Bank) 107, 108, 194 “Emigrant, The” 177, 181–182 emigration: causes of 101–103, 184, 196; in early nineteenth‑century 4, 233, 244, 257, 488; during Great Famine 99–108, 182, 192, 193, 194, 275, 473, 486, 489, 549; of Irish speakers 473, 476; of Ulster Presbyterians in eighteenth century 31–33, 34, 37, 64, 260, 264, 486, 513; of United Irishmen 84, 91–93, 261; post‑Famine period 232, 238, 486, 550; twentieth‑century 339, 408, 411–412, 419, 459, 495, 496; twenty‑first‑century 414, 421 Emmet, Lydia Field 265 Emmet, Richard Stockton 257–258 Emmet, Robert 196, 206, 257–259, 264–265, 268 Emmet, Robert Jr. 267 Emmet, Robert T. 257 Emmet, Thomas Addis 90, 257–270 Emmet, William Temple 258 Emmet Le Roy, Elizabeth 265 Emmet Sherwood, Rosina 265 Emmett, Dan 489 Emmons, David 232, 237 Empire State Campaign Committee 303 employment 4, 74, 107, 131, 134, 142, 158, 185, 218, 227, 234–240, 295, 301, 357–359, 412, 419–421, 426, 428, 477, 491 endogamy 165; linguistic 479–480 Engel, Eliot 362 England, John 115, 116, 120 Enright, Anne 499 environment(alism) 510–522, 536–548; see also climate crisis ephebolphilia 450–451 equality: economic/class 276, 278, 320, 389, 428, 436; gender 281, 302, 437; marriage 414–415,

437; political 4, 65, 71–72, 93, 264, 362, 433, 436–437; sexual 466–467; social 239, 407, 432–433 Erie, Steven 246 “Ethnic Revival” 523–525 “ethnic trilogy” 525 European Union (EU) 356, 361, 424, 434, 550 Everett, Edward 85 eviction 180, 183–185, 193, 258, 275–278 exile 1, 2, 4, 22, 23, 63–68, 74, 79, 83–85, 91–93, 101–103, 119–120, 128–130, 181, 259, 261–265, 273, 275, 277, 414, 513, 542, 546, 549; as motif 108, 192, 195–196, 206, 264, 274, 280 fairies 168–170, 415 family saga 523–535 Famine, The see Great Famine “Famine and Exhortation” 181 Fanning, Charles 372 Fanon, Frantz 458 Faragher, John Mack 235 Far and Away 398–399 Farrell, James T. 196–197 Fay, Brendan 462 Federalist Party 37, 65, 66, 86, 89, 127, 128, 260–261 Feighan, Michael 336 feminism 280–281, 303, 389, 412, 510 Fenian Volunteer 134 Fenians 8, 126, 133–135, 210, 273, 275–277, 281, 475, 482; Brotherhood 133, 195, 210, 273, 275, 277; Fair 276; Sisterhood 276–277 finance 419–431 Fire Department of the City of New York (FDNY) 530–533, 465 First Nations see Native Americans Fisk Jubilee Singers 491 Fitzgerald, John (“Honey Fitz”) 349–351 Fitzpatrick, John 314–316 Fitzpatrick, John Bernard 121 Five Points (New York) 72, 106, 142, 313, 490 Flaherty, Bernard 489 Flanagan, Thomas 197 “Flight of the Earls” 19 Flood, Henry 61–62 Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley 300, 315, 440 Foley, Margaret 247, 304 folklore 3, 7, 163–175, 177, 194, 198, 275, 475, 482 foodways 163, 166 Ford, Harrison 399–400 Ford, John 397 Ford, Patrick 129, 211, 277, 278, 299, 482 Fordham University 194 foreign direct investment (FDI) 421, 425 Foster, Stephen Collins 490 Foster, William Z. 314–315 “Four Horsemen” 357, 433

558

Index France 37, 59, 61–63, 84–93, 116, 119, 249, 259, 264, 275, 305, 342, 260 “free labor ideology” 143 Free Southern Theatre 388–389 Freeman’s Journal 90, 120, 129, 176 French Revolution, the 59, 62, 64 Fried, Rebecca A. 107, 142 Friends of Irish Freedom 240, 279, 316, 323 frontiers, American 33–34, 39, 49, 50–54, 64–65, 232, 235–236, 289, 290, 295, 339–340, 343, 490, 492 Gaelic American 279, 409 Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) 279 Gaelic Irish 16–17 Gaelic League 279, 475, 482, 494 Gaelic Revival 473–474 Gaelic Societies 474–475, 480, 482 Gallagher, Tess 511, 512, 518, 536 Gallatin, Albert 89 Gallicanism 115 Galvin, Brendan 511–512, 515–518 Galway, City of 21, 22, 116, 420, 475, 493, 531, 537; University of 101; Wardenship of 116 “Gang of Eight” 341 Gangs of New York 399 gangster films 395, 397, 401 An Gaodhal 475, 481 garment manufacturing 312 Garrison, William Lloyd 73, 129, 278 Garvey, Marcus 280, 316, 320–329 Gelman, Emmaia 464, 466 gender xxiii, 2, 5, 6, 16, 48–50, 153, 172, 217–231, 274, 278, 281, 299–309, 325, 397–398, 400, 423, 437, 448, 458–470 genealogy xxiii, 375, 524, 528, 533 General Committee for the Relief of the Suffering Poor in Ireland 194 General Synod of Ulster 32 Geoghan, John J. 445 George, Henry 315 German Americans 105, 117–121, 127, 143–144, 171, 217, 227, 250, 310, 315, 334, 336, 346, 347, 372, 494, 513 German language 474, 482 German music 494 Germans 347, 514; representation of 389, 492 Germany 119, 280, 292–293, 338 Ghosh, Amitav 512 Gibbons, James 249 Gilded Age, The 1, 299 Gilmore, Patrick Sarsfield 491 Gilmore’s Band 491 Giunta, Edvidge 370 Gladstone, William 277, 288 global intangible low‑tax income (GILTI) 427 Globe and Emerald 128

Goggins, Catherine 302 Gold in the Streets 399 Gold Rush, The 237–240 Golden, Helen 306 Golway, Terry 147, 334, 432 Good Friday Agreement see Peace Process Gookin, Daniel Jr 23 Gookin, Daniel Sr 21 Gookin, Vincent Jr 23 Gookin, Vincent Sr 22 Gordon, Mary 454, 526; The Other Side 526 An Gorta Mór see Great Famine Gothic (literature/traits) 371, 375 Government of Ireland Act (1920) 294 Grace, Thomas 300 Grant, Ulysses S. 38, 211, 432 Grattan, Henry 61 Great Britain xxii, 37, 45, 71, 73, 129, 134, 164, 207, 212, 236, 239, 240, 260, 286, 295, 342, 361 Great Depression 30, 369, 377 Great Famine: and Catholic Church 114–125, 248–249, 438–439; causes, interpretations of 275, 549; emigration/immigration 1, 7, 72, 78, 99–113, 129, 142, 164, 233–234, 275, 302, 432, 513, 533; memorials/memory of 3, 163, 191–204, 371, 409, 533; and press/media 129–131, 135; psycho‑social effect of 79, 100, 108, 170–171, 176, 233, 275–278, 310, 530; representation of 176–188, 198, 369; sesquicentennial of 197 Great Hunger see Great Famine Great Ulster Convention 289 Greeley, Andrew 346 Greenlee, James 49 Greenlee, Mary McDowell 49, 50, 52 Greenwich Mews Theatre 384, 390 Gregoire, Henri 85, 91–92 Gregory, Montgomery 381; “For a Negro Theatre” 381 Griffin, Patrick 2, 29, 36, 165, 286 Grimes, Patrick 410 Grosse Île 105, 198 Guyana 324 Haass, Richard 361, 434 Halbwachs, Maurice 370 Haley, Margaret 302, 312 Hallissy, Margaret 372 Halloween 166; see also Samhain Halpine, Charles G. 208 Hamill, Pete 197 Hamilton, Paul 92 Hampden Evans family 90 Handlin, Oscar 2, 344 Hanlon, Joseph 210 Hannity, Sean 415, 437 Hansberry, Lorraine 380–393, 390n2; “The Negro Writer and His Roots” 387; Raisin in the Sun,

559

Index A 380, 381, 384–389; To Be Young, Gifted, and Black 385; “Willie Loman, Walter Younger, and He Who Must Live” 387, 289 Hansen, Marcus Lee 371–372 Hariot, Thomas 17–18 Harlem Renaissance 381 Harper, James 144 Harrigan, Ed 160–161, 492 Harrington, John P. 153 Hart, Philip 336 Hart, Tony 160, 492 Harte, Bret 239 Hartranft, John F. 212 Harvard University 121, 345, 348–350 Haughton, James 78 Hayden, Tom 197 Hayes, Rutherford B. 212 Heaney, Joe 496 Heaney, Seamus 395 Hearne, John J. 409 Hearts of Oak 31 Hearts of Steel 31, 34–35 Hecker, Isaac Thomas 177 heteronormativity see sexuality Hibernian, The 495 Hibernian Anti‑Slavery Society 117 Hill, Abram 382 Hillquit, Morris 280 Hilton, G. H. 116–117 Hinchey, Margaret 304 Hincks, William xiii, 46 Hine, Robert 235 HIV/AIDS epidemic 460–461, 465, 467 Hoare, Mary Anne (née Pratt) 182; “Black Potatoes, The” 182; Shamrock Leaves 182 Hodnett, John Pope 236 Hoffman, Julian 546 Hogan, Katherine (Kate) E 303 Home Rule 263, 273, 277, 279, 285–298, 550 Homestead Act 236 homophobia see sexuality homosexuality see sexuality Hope Lodge 53 Hopkins, Stephen 399 Hot Press 408 household employment 218, 227; see also domestic service Hughes, John J. 114, 117–119, 120, 132, 147, 179, 193, 194, 205–206, 207, 234, 276; Lecture on the Antecedent Causes of the Irish Famine in 1847 194 human Others 510–513, 520 humanism 382, 513 Humboldt, Alexander 85 Hyde, Douglas 409, 475, 482 idealism 264, 387, 416 identity: African‑American 323; Afro‑Caribbean 324; American 2, 6, 32, 34, 84–85, 90, 161, 171, 286,

295, 372, 383, 512; Catholic Church/religion, influence of 121, 170, 179, 300, 408, 432, 438; construction of 510–512, 514; cultural/ethnic 164, 167, 171–172, 394–404, 425, 487, 490, 529, 230–233, 536–548; diasporic/transnational 274, 323–324, 327, 397, 414, 442, 512–513, 536–548; elasticity/malleability of xxiii, 458–470; gender/ sexuality 228, 459–467; Irish 2, 37, 62, 114, 119, 121, 129, 132, 171, 199, 257, 261, 263, 322, 323, 327, 343, 397, 432, 435, 482, 531, 549; Irish‑American 3, 6–10, 37, 73–79, 153, 164–166, 169, 179, 185, 191–204, 262–264, 278, 299, 338, 345–346, 351–352, 369, 372–375, 397, 401, 425, 432, 444, 459–467, 476, 482, 512, 539, 550; and language 473–474; national 93, 285, 474, 529; racial 39, 76, 79, 140, 145–146, 171, 206, 218, 242, 525, 531; representations of 6, 9–10, 140, 152–162, 368–379, 394–404, 499–509, 523–535; Scotch‑Irish 5, 6, 29–44, 285–290, 294, 357, 439–441; see also “imagined communities”; nationalism; race; whiteness Ignatiev, Noel 75, 511; How the Irish Became White 75, 511 “imagined communities” 324, 407, 416, 461 immigrant saga 10, 523–525 immigration: academic studies of xxii, 3, 74–78, 146–148, 218, 344, 432, 459; depots 100; in early nineteenth‑century 36, 38, 72, 117, 287; during Great Famine 99–108, 114, 127, 129–130, 141, 142, 144, 177, 219; of Irish speakers 476, 479, 482, 483; post‑Famine period 250, 257; reform of 436; restriction of 74, 140, 141, 146–148, 227, 238, 240, 250, 251, 294, 313, 365, 369, 466; twentieth‑century 4, 8, 251, 313, 333–343, 344, 369, 412, 421, 461, 465; twenty‑first‑century 419, 550; of Ulster Presbyterians in eighteenth century 4, 29, 32, 37, 126, 286, 287; visas 333, 335–337, 339–342; see also Irish Immigration Reform Movement; Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform Immigration and Nationality Act (1965) 4, 8, 333–343, 411 Immigration and Naturalization Service 340 Immigration Reform and Control Act (1986) 340 imperialism: British 224, 383, 458, 500; economic 462; experience of 7, 9, 177, 371, 500 In Dublin 408 Indian Rebellion (1857) 257 Indigenous Peoples see Native Americans individualism 34, 115, 144, 235, 237, 370 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) 315 “industrious revolution” 47 information and communication technologies (ICTs) 422–423 Inishbofin 22–23 integration showcase 384 Interborough Association of Women Teachers 303 International Glove Workers’ Union 301 intersectionality 6, 228n4

560

Index Ireland, John 235, 249 “Ireland’s Mission” 182 “Irish Address, The” 71, 73–74 Irish America 337, 339, 413, 422 Irish American, The 131 Irish Americans for Biden 435 Irish brigades 131, 206–209, 213 Irish Catholics: abolition and racism 37, 73, 219; colonization by 60; discrimination against/ persecution of 20, 60, 63, 71, 179, 182, 205, 220, 222, 371; integration of 114–125, 196, 281, 371, 526; and politics 67, 224, 245–246, 249, 251, 281, 350, 369; stereotypes of 121; see also caricatures of Irish; stereotypes Irish Central 415, 435 Irish Central Statistics Office 411, 425 Irish Citizen 177 Irish Confederation 78 Irish Echo 341, 409, 410–413 Irish Emigrant Aid Society 194 Irish Film Board (Bord Scannán na hÉireann) 395 Irish government 336, 339, 409–411, 414, 426, 428, 433, 440, 446; diplomats 433, 550 Irish Immigration Reform Movement (IIRM) 340–342 Irish language: in Ireland 22, 65, 145, 147, 167; in the United States 9, 62, 473–485 Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization (ILGO) 458–459, 462–463, 467 Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform (ILIR) 341–342 Irish Loyal and Patriotic Union (ILPU) 288 Irish News 129–130, 134, 395, 482 Irish Parliamentary Party 273, 279, 280, 305 Irish Patriots 61 Irish People 134, 412, 482 Irish Post 413 Irish Progressive League 280, 305, 306, 315–316 Irish Renaissance 382 Irish Repeal 71, 77–79 Irish Republican Army (IRA): in film 399, 400, 550; during Irish War of Independence 306, 314; New 362; Provisional 355 Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) 133–134, 275–277, 279 Irish Shield 128 Irish Times 408, 411, 414, 440 Irish Unionism 285–298, 371 Irish Unionist Alliance 290 Irish Voice xxii, 341, 359, 413 Irish Volunteers: in American army 206; in Ireland 279 Irish War of Independence 249, 279–280 Irish Women’s Purchasing League 306 Irish World and American Industrial Liberator 277 Irish‑American Democrats 433–437 Irish‑American Republicans 435 Irish‑American Colonization Company 235 Irisleabhar na Gaeilge 481

Irvine, Baptiste 86, 89 Italian Americans 399, 525 Ivers, Eileen 496 Jacobson, Matthew Frye 76, 523 James, Alice 262–264, 268 James, Henry 265–268 James, Henry Senior 263 James, William (Albany) 262 James, William (Cavan) 262, 266 Jamestown 19, 21 Janis, Ely 277 Jansenism 115 Jeffers, Robinson 511, 513–515 Jefferson, Miles 384; “The Negro on Broadway” 384 Jefferson, Thomas 127, 219, 259, 264, 342 Jeffersonians 65, 66 Jen, Gish 525; “Who’s Irish?” 525 Jensen, Richard 107 Jersey City 211, 246, 311 “Jim Crow” 227, 489 John Jay Report 449–450 Johnson, Andrew 38, 121, 210–211 Johnson, Guy 67 Johnson, John 67 Johnson, Mat 525; Loving Day 525 Johnson, William 67 Jones, Mary (“Mother”) 224, 300, 315, 400 Jordan, Neil 395 Joyce, James 320, 324–326, 288; Dubliners 320, 324 Kalem Company 394 Kane, Richard Rutledge 288–289 Kavanaugh, Brett 437 Kearney, Denis 239, 313 Keating, Geoffrey 482 Keenan, Marie 450 Keene, Laura 159 Kelleher, John V. 196–197, 345, 352, 368, 369 Kelley, Florence 301 Kelly, Gertrude 306 Kelly, Mary C. 8, 119, 170, 176, 299, 371 Keltner, Dachner 545 Kennedy, Edward (Ted) 236, 237, 339, 341, 357, 358, 433, 550 Kennedy, Hugh 210 Kennedy, John F. 1, 4, 9, 197, 333, 335, 344–346, 348–352, 357, 411, 433, 435, 496, 549; A Nation of Immigrants 335, 336 Kennedy, Joseph P. 196, 344, 346, 348, 351, 358, 369 Kennedy, Joseph III (Joe) 362 Kennedy, Kate 302, 312 Kennedy, Liam 523–524, 527 Kennedy, Robert F. (Bobby) 336, 351 Kennedy, William 197 Kenny, Kevin xxiii, 3, 76, 264, 274, 287, 410, 411, 441 Kensington Riots (1844) 140, 142 Kiernan, James Lawlor 195

561

Index King Henry VIII 16 King Louis XVIII 116 King William III (William of Orange) 23, 61, 295n8 King, Rufus 259–260 Kissinger, Henry 357–358 Knights of Columbus 249, 250, 251, 346 Knights of Labor 212, 225, 278, 279, 301, 311, 312, 315 Know Nothings 79, 120–121, 130, 144–145, 147, 179, 205, 248, 287, 333; see also nativism Ku Klux Klan (KKK) 251, 287 labor: activism 4, 6, 8, 9, 17, 212, 213, 220, 225, 227, 239, 247, 251, 276, 278, 280, 281, 299–307, 310–317, 320, 322–328, 432, 436, 437, 440, 441; bound 33, 47, 48, 50; casual/unskilled 72, 75, 106, 117, 148, 155, 191, 194, 234, 236, 237, 261, 262, 310, 311; colonial 19–21, 23, 30, 34, 45–55; competition 4, 38, 73, 75, 77, 78, 226, 247, 310, 311, 316, 317; domestic 6, 106, 72, 217–228, 239, 276, 300, 301, 311; family 4, 7, 45–55; industrial 2, 165, 211, 225, 226, 236, 237, 240, 278, 300, 310–317, 369, 397; race 1, 7, 71–80, 118, 143, 217–228, 238, 239, 261, 262, 310, 311; studies of 145, 274, 300; women 6, 45–55, 103, 107, 217–228, 247, 278, 280, 299–307, 311–313 Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Ancient Order of Hibernians 305 Ladies’ Land League 277–278, 299–300, 303, 305 Land League 3, 195–196, 273, 277–279, 280, 299– 300, 311, 315, 432 Land War 277–278, 281, 311 Lander, William 209 landlords 20, 31, 35, 38, 47, 50, 65, 101, 102, 104, 155, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 199, 222–223, 277, 311 Lane, Ralph 15, 17–18 Larkin, James 315 Lavender and Green Alliance 463, 466, 467 Law, Bernard F. 445, 447, 449, 452 Lawless, William 91 League of Oppressed Peoples 280 Leahy, Patrick 437 Lee, J. J. (Joe) xxiii, 2, 194, 195, 550 Lee, William 87, 89 Leinster, Province of 63 Lemass, Seán 399, 410–411 Leyburn, James 29, 33, 36 liberation 133, 320–321, 323, 325, 327–328, 383, 459, 462, 542 Liberty Hall 320–321, 323, 327 Liberty Island 333, 336, 341 Limerick, city of 18, 102, 103 Lincoln, Abraham 121, 132–133, 207, 209, 210, 236, 530 linen 3, 31–32, 33, 36, 45, 47, 50–51, 53, 322 Liverpool 52, 103, 192, 326

Lloyd George, David 292 London Companies 19 Londonderry see Derry/Londonderry Londonderry Plantation see Plantations longshoremen 306, 312, 316, 232 Louisville Riots 120 Lowell, Josephine Shaw 301 Lowrey, Alexander 54 loyalism 64, 68 Loyal National Repeal Association (LNRA) 71, 73–74 Lynch, Patrick 206–207 Lynch, Jack 358 Lynch‑Brennan, Margaret 107, 142 Mac a’ Ghoill, Pádruig 479 Mac Gabhann, Micí 478 Mac Swiney, Paul 482 MacDevitt, James 482 MacHale, John 193 MacManus, Terence Bellew 276 MacNeven, William 85, 91, 93, 260–261 MacSwiney, Terence 226, 306 Madison, Dolly 87 Madison, James 87–90, 93 Magan, Manchán 545 Magill 408 Magraw, James 49, 51 Magraw, Jane 49 Maguire, John Francis 179; The Irish in America 179 Major, John 359 Makem, Sarah 487 Makem, Tommy see Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem Malone, Maud 304 Maloney, Elizabeth 301, 312 Maloney, William 305–306 Malte‑Brun, Conrad 85 Manning, Paul 448 Maréchal, Ambrose 116 Margaret Brent Suffrage Guild 304 Mark‑FitzGerald, Emily 3 marriage 32, 52, 54, 145, 156, 160, 168, 169, 184, 227, 265, 267, 325–326, 375, 397, 414, 437, 460, 479–480, 502, 526, 527 Maryland 22, 52, 65, 67, 115, 245, 401 Mason Bill 305–306 Massachusetts 21, 32, 105, 115, 118, 120, 140–142, 144–148, 165–166, 169, 198–199, 205, 233, 245, 294, 300, 304, 342, 348–350, 368–369, 434–435, 448–449, 451–452, 478, 492, 500; 11th US Congressional House District 349, 451 material culture 30, 163, 164 Mathew, Theobald 78, 117 McBride, Eimear 499 McCaffrey, Lawrence 180, 369, 373 McCain, John 341, 435

562

Index McCartan, Patrick 305 McCarthy, John 436 McCarthy, Joseph 9, 344, 346–349, 351, 369 McCarthy, Kevin 437 McCarthy, Mary 197 McCarthy, Tara M. 8, 225, 247, 281, 311, 315 McClellan, George 133, 209 McConnell, Mitch 437 McCormack, John 494 McCourt, Frank 399; Angela’s Ashes 399, 415 McCourt, Malachy 466 McCullough, James 50–52 McCullough, Martha 50–52 McDermott, Alice 10, 197, 499, 500, 503, 505–508; Someone 499, 500, 502, 506 McDonnell, Joseph Patrick 315 McElroy, Robert 438 McFeely, Deirdre 153, 160 McGarry, Fearghal 279 McGee, Thomas D’Arcy 119, 129, 130, 176, 193, 234 McGregor, James 32 McGuire, Peter J. 315 McLoone, Martin 399 McMahon, Cian T. xxiii, 76, 79, 104, 129, 177, 218 McPike, Sarah 304 McSorley, Edward 368, 372, 373, 377; Our Own Kind 368, 373, 377 McSweeney, Siobhán 355, 360 McWhorter, Mary 305 Meagher, Thomas Francis 129–131, 134, 206, 207, 209 Meagher, Timothy J. xxiii, 2, 8, 165, 220, 369, 372, 395, 397, 398, 412 Meagher, William 179 Meaney, Gerardine 399 Meaney, Mary 180; The Confessors of Connaught; or the Tenants of a Lord Bishop 180 melodrama 157–158, 161, 183 memory 101, 105, 107, 118–119, 163, 167, 169, 176–178, 180, 184, 191, 194–199, 210, 220, 343, 345, 370, 371, 374–375, 377, 409, 489, 505–506, 527–530, 533, 537–538, 541, 543–546, 551; Memory Studies 370; postmemory 177 Memphis 206, 209–211 metrocoloniality 500, 508n3 Metropolitan Record 132 Mexican‑American War 119, 466 Midwest 8, 106, 232, 244, 246, 249, 311, 344, 347, 369, 372, 373, 436, 473, 480 Mill, John Stuart 6 Miller, Kerby A. xxiii, 2, 32, 34, 35, 38, 101, 108, 109n9, 114, 165, 264, 274, 287, 342 Milwaukee 106, 346 Milwaukee Irish Fest 496 mining 72, 233, 234, 236–237, 278, 311, 312, 315, 316, 477–478 Minnesota 105, 176, 180, 234–236, 300, 316, 477

minstrel shows 161n1, 488–490, 491–492, 495 Mitchel, John 74, 78, 118, 129–130, 181, 196, 210, 275; Jail Journal; Or Five Years in British Prisons 181 Mitchell, George 360, 433, 550 multinational corporations (MNCs) 420, 425, 428 Modernization Theory 2 Molly Maguires 212, 311 Moloney, Deirdre 2 Moloney, Mick 441, 490, 496 Monk, Maria 141; Awful Disclosures by Maria Monk of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal 141 Monitor 240, 475 Montgomery, David 312 Montserrat 20–21, 321 monuments 193, 198; Grosse Île 198; Cohasset 198 Moore, Marguerite 299, 303 Moore, Marianne 511–513, 515–517 Moore, Thomas 92, 208, 490, 494 Moran, Mike 531–532 Morrison, Bruce 359, 434 Morse, Samuel F. B. 141 “Mose” 153, 159 Mountain states 236–237, 240 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick 345, 346, 352, 357, 523; “Moynihan Report” 523 Muldoon, Paul 441 Mulholland, St. Clair 213 Mullaly, John 132–133 multiple interface periphery 420, 423–424, 428 Mulvaney, Michael (Mick) 361, 420, 437 Mulvihill, Martin 496 Munster, Province of 20, 476; see also Plantations Murphy, Charles (Charlie) Francis 246, 247 Murphy, Martin 235 Murphy, Maureen O’Rourke 107, 198 Murray, Daniel 179 Murray, Phil 316 music 3, 10, 30, 163, 166, 171, 198, 199, 208, 310, 372, 400, 401, 402, 413, 435, 439, 441–442, 482, 483, 486–497, 517, 543 musical instruments 401, 489, 494, 495; banjo 489, 494; fiddle 166, 171, 184, 267, 402, 488, 489, 494, 496; flute 493; guitar 495 na Copaleen, Myles 159–160 Napoleonic Wars 48, 72, 233 Nason, Geraldine Byrne 442 Nast, Thomas 510 Nathans, Heather 153 National American Woman Suffrage Association 304 National Geographic 410 National Peace Jubilee 491 National Quota System 335–336 National Woman’s Party 304 nationalism: American 54, 65–67, 164, 165, 206, 209, 211, 250, 305, 344, 347, 348, 351, 398; Irish

563

Index 3, 4, 6, 59, 71, 73–74, 78, 79, 104, 118, 154, 171, 192, 193, 250, 259, 288–295, 356, 408, 412, 413, 433, 473, 476, 550; Irish‑American 4, 8, 73–74, 79, 114, 117, 121, 129, 131, 133, 134, 157, 164, 171, 192, 193, 195–197, 198, 199, 207, 236, 237, 240, 251, 273–282, 285–286, 288–295, 299–300, 304–307, 311–312, 313, 315–316, 323, 375, 409, 420, 458–459, 462–463, 465, 476, 480, 482, 493, 512, 524; studies of 6, 77, 135, 324, 407, 416, 461 Native American Democratic Association 144 Native Americans 1, 6, 115, 148, 250, 376, 511; Algonquian 17, 21; First Nations 233, 236; Nansemond 21; “Praying Indians” 21; Roanoke 17; Tupi 20 native‑born, white Americans 116, 133, 140–144, 147, 197, 248 nativism 38, 72–73, 74, 79, 84, 86, 87, 90, 120, 129– 132, 140–148, 179, 206, 212, 237, 247–248, 251, 275, 286, 294, 410, 549 naturalism 325, 381, 383, 387, 516 Naturalization Act (1790) 37, 145 Neal, Richie 550 Negra, Diane 395, 402, 402n3, 415, 525, 531–533 Negro Ensemble Company 383, 389 Nelligan, James 210 Nelson, Bruce 310, 316 Nemiroff, Robert 385 Nestor, Agnes 301, 311 networks 2, 5, 101, 102, 185, 287, 306, 310, 320, 328; communication 5, 7, 8, 23, 66, 83–93, 101, 131, 289, 411; economic 34, 46, 47, 52, 54, 56n16, 102, 419–421, 423, 427, 428, 434, 532; family 46, 54, 56n16, 83, 246, 477; musical 493–494, 496; nationalist 273, 295; political 66, 83, 90, 91, 434, 435, 495; religious 5, 8, 176, 179, 311; social 106, 107, 166, 313, 314, 316, 414, 453, 493; transportation 72, 234, 236 New Deal, The 245, 248, 315, 316, 347 New England 21, 23, 32, 106, 107, 133, 163–167, 169–171, 232, 234, 244, 245, 266, 278, 289, 316, 339, 440, 478, 517 New Jersey 105, 106, 211, 245, 247, 304, 315, 333, 411, 435, 458, 478, 496 New Orleans 100, 104–106, 144, 205–206, 208–210, 316 New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor 143 New York City 233, 240; Catholic Church in 114, 117, 118, 120, 179, 194, 234, 249, 251, 368, 438, 440, 449; during Civil War 205–207, 208–209, 210–211, 212, 213; domestic labor in 219, 224, 225, 226, 227; “draft riots” (1863) 133, 208, 209, 210, 211, 220, 313; Irish language in 475, 478, 482, 483; Irish music in 488–490, 491–492, 494–496; Irish nationalism in 196, 273, 275–280, 320, 334, 550; Irish press in 120, 127–135, 176, 193; Irish settlement in 72, 83, 100, 101, 103,

104–108, 115, 117, 140, 142–145, 146–148, 152, 153, 165, 166, 191, 192, 334, 372; Irish unionism in 285, 287, 289, 292, 293, 294; labor activism in 311–316, 323; literature set in 524, 528, 530–532; New York University xxii‑xxiii, 172, 441; politics in 220, 244–247, 433, 434, 435, 437, 510; queer activism in 458–467; St. Patrick’s Day parade 4, 166, 357, 358, 437, 458–459, 460, 463, 464–467; theatre 158–161, 439; in twentieth century 340–341, 345, 349, 357, 358, 359, 409, 413, 462; United Irishmen in 86, 89, 91, 92, 257–261, 263, 264–267, 268; women’s activism in 299, 301–304, 306–307 New York Freeman’s Journal 90, 120, 129 New York Ossianic Society 482 New York State Great Irish Famine Curriculum 198 New York Tablet 176, 347 New York Times 334, 341, 384, 386, 395, 410, 442, 458 New York Transit Workers 316 Ngugi, wa Thiong’o 371 Nixon, Richard 357, 358, 435 “No Irish Need Apply” (NINA) 100, 107, 142, 339 Noah, Mordecai Manuel 88 Nolan, Alice 177–178, 183–184; The Byrnes of Glengoulah 177–178, 183–184 Nolan, Janet 2, 302 Noraid 420 Northern Ireland 29, 39n1, 197, 294, 342, 355–362, 408, 409, 412–413, 419–420, 424, 425, 432, 437, 440, 441, 467, 551; see also Peace Process; “Troubles, The” nostalgia 3, 6, 9, 10, 159, 184, 262, 373, 375, 415, 461, 467, 529, 538 Noyce, Phillip 398–401 Nugent, Edward 17 Nugent, Walter 232 Nunnery Committee 144 nuns 3, 142, 144, 208, 249, 311, 409, 440, 446–448, 504, 508, 526, 531 Obama, Barack 335, 341, 360, 427, 434, 435, 439, 440, 525 Ó Beirn, Pádraig 475 O’Boyle, Andrew J. 483 O’Brennan, Kathleen 306 O’Brien, Dillon 176, 180; The Dalys of Dalystown 180 O’Brien, Matthew J. 9, 361, 369, 433, 496 O’Brien, M. N. 381; “Negro Folk Drama” 381 O’Brien, Richard Baptist 178; Ailey Moore 178 O’Byrne DeWitt, Ellen 494–495 O’Callaghan, Donald 338 O’Casey, Sean 9, 380–381, 382–390; “Behind the Curtained World” 383; Dublin Trilogy 380–381, 383, 385, 389–390, 390n12; “Juno and the Paycock” 382–385, 388, 390n12; Red Roses for

564

Index Me 385; Shadow of a Gunman, The 385, 388, 390n12; Within the Gates 385 O’Connell, Daniel 71, 73–74, 78, 117, 154, 196, 245, 273, 432 O’Connor, Arthur 90 O’Connor, Edwin 368, 372, 375; The Last Hurrah 368, 375 O’Connor, Sinéad 198 O’Connor, Thomas (historian) 447–448 O’Connor, Thomas (United Irishman) 128 O’Conor, Charles (of Belanagare) 67 O’Donnell, Kenneth 345, 351 O’Dowd, Niall 359, 413, 436, 439–440 O’Dwyer, Paul 440 Ó Gráda, Cormac 107, 198 O’Hara, John 197 Ó Hehir, Micheál 409 O’Higgins, Bernardo 464 O’Higgins, Harvey J. 197 O’Higgins, Patrick 410 Olcott, Sidney 394; Lad from Old Ireland, The 394, 395 Old English 16–17, 18, 21, 22 Old Line (shipping company) 103 O’Leary, Stella 435 Ó Lócháin, Micheál 475, 481, 483n3 O’Mahony, John 275, 276, 482 Omi, Michael 6 O’Neal, Frederick 382, 384 O’Neill, Eugene 197 O’Neill, Francis 492–494 O’Neill, Hugh 19 O’Neill, James 161 O’Neill, John 134, 212 O’Neill, Terence 357 O’Neill, Thomas P. (Tip) 339, 357, 358, 420, 433, 434, 550 “open borders myth” 146 Orange Order 36, 63, 120, 135, 287, 294, 295n8 Orange Riots 285, 287 O’Reilly, Alejandro 66 O’Reilly, John Boyle 134–135, 177; “Our Own Green Island Home” 177 O’Reilly, Leonora 226, 228, 247, 281, 301, 304, 306, 315 Ó Súilleabháin, Eoghan Rua 67–68 O’Sullivan, John 199 O’Toole, Fintan 440, 446, 447, 450, 538 Out of Ireland Television 415 Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan) 85, 92 Paine, Thomas 59, 90 Pakula, Alan J. 399, 400 “Pale, The” 16 Panama Canal 326 Panama Canal Zone 320, 323, 324 Panel of Parties (Northern Ireland Executive) 361

Papacy 114; “Papal aggression” 120; papism 141 parades 163, 164, 166, 288, 361, 459, 461, 463, 465, 467 Paris 83, 84–87, 88, 90–92, 93, 259, 260, 265, 268, 275, 280 Paris Peace Conference 280, 292 parishes 8, 38, 115, 156, 195, 248, 249, 251, 310–311, 315, 316, 410, 438, 446–449, 451, 454, 503–506, 530 Parker, Alan 399 Parker, Alexander 55 Parker, Rebecca 55 Parker, Theodore 143 Parnell, Charles Stewart 277, 278, 279, 281 Parnell, Fanny 278, 299 Parsons, Cóilín 442 partition 292, 295, 320, 324, 325, 326, 328, 409 Passenger Acts 103, 104, 141, 146 Patchett, Ann 525 Patriot Games 398, 399–402 Patterson, Johnny 490 pauper removal law 105 paupers 140, 142–147 pauperism 142, 143, 145 Peace Process 4, 5, 9, 355–356, 361–362, 395, 420, 423, 424, 433–434, 435, 436, 439, 466, 550; in film 399; see also Northern Ireland; “Troubles, The” Pearse, Patrick 196, 280, 550 pedophilia 446, 449, 452 Pelosi, Nancy 356, 360, 361, 434, 550 Pence, Mike 437, 523 Penn, William 23 Pennsylvania 23, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 49–50, 53, 55, 65, 73, 100, 105, 107, 115, 144, 164, 206, 212, 278, 290, 294, 301, 434, 478–479, 486, 490, 511 Pennsylvania Scotch‑Irish Society 290 “people’s theatre” 382, 388 Perry, Caitriona 442 Peyton, Patrick 410, 415 pharmaceuticals 426, 460 Phelan, James 209 Phelan, James D. 240 Philadelphia 32, 34, 48, 49, 52–53, 65, 72, 83, 86, 104, 106, 107, 118, 120, 128, 133, 134, 140, 142, 144, 164, 193, 206, 217, 233, 245, 287, 291, 293, 294, 301, 304, 306, 316, 415, 479, 488, 496 Philadelphia Working Woman’s Society 301 Philo‑Celtic societies 474, 475, 480, 483 Phoenix 133–134, 482 phytophthora infestans 99 Pickering, Timothy 89 Pilot, The see Boston Pilot Pine, Emilie 542 piracy 18 Pittsburgh 36, 37–38, 53, 106–107, 248, 289, 311, 439 Plantations: Laois and Offaly 17, 18; Londonderry 19; Munster 18–19, 21, 23; Ulster 19, 21, 23

565

Index Plunkett, Horace 240 Poitier, Sidney 382 policy capture 427 Polish Americans 246, 251, 312, 335, 382, 533 politics: during American Civil War 205, 206, 209–213; in American West 237, 239–240; animals represented in 510–511; and fiction 369– 371, 375–377, 523–524, 527; in film 395, 398– 399; international 5, 9, 59, 61, 86–93, 320–321, 323, 381, 382, 386, 419–421, 423–428, 549–551; of Ireland 6, 9, 16, 29, 30, 32, 35, 36, 62, 63, 71– 74, 114, 191, 273–274; and labor 218–220, 222, 224–226, 227–228; and media 407–409, 413; and music 495; national 34, 37, 39, 61, 64–66, 74–76, 77, 78, 90, 99–100, 105, 114–115, 117, 120–121, 126, 127, 131–135, 140–148, 151–152, 161, 163–165, 218, 257–265, 276–277, 333–343, 344–352, 523, 549–551; queer politics 459–461, 465, 466, 467; in twenty‑first century 432–442; urban machines 4, 38, 100, 211, 212, 220, 245–247, 248, 312, 314, 317; see also immigration; nationalism; Peace Process; unionism Pope (Emeritus) Benedict XVI 452 Pope Francis I 438, 452, 454 Pope Gregory XVI 116, 117 Pope John XXIII 445 Pope John Paul II 452 Pope Leo X 445 Pope Leo XIII 249 Pope Pius IX 118, 120, 121 population decline 526 postcolonialism 381, 512 poverty xxiv, 32, 72, 74, 106, 116, 118, 121, 142, 143, 145, 147, 148, 158, 167, 220, 258, 261, 275, 278, 349, 371, 380, 383, 386, 389, 461, 477, 510, 523 Powderly, Terence 212 Powers, Dave 345, 350–351 prayer 115, 163, 166, 179, 410, 438, 501, 506 Presbyterianism 29, 30, 32, 34, 37, 38, 64, 262 Presbyterians: in Ireland 3, 29, 30, 31, 286, 290; and revolutionary politics 59, 63, 64, 66; in Scotland 29, 30, 48; in the United States 3, 4, 7, 23, 29, 32– 39, 48, 120, 264, 286, 486, 543; see also religion; Scotch Irish; Scots Irish priests 3, 5, 23, 32, 99, 192, 199, 208, 369, 396–398, 440, 465, 503, 506, 526; in the Americas 20–21, 114–121, 169, 179, 218, 248–249, 252; and the media 128, 347, 409–410; and politics 63, 67, 121, 314, 315, 316, 338; and sexual abuse 144, 438, 445–454 Proclamation issued by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (2023) 199 Progressive Era 299–301, 307 progressivism xxiii, 4, 237, 247, 257, 280, 313–314, 316, 317, 352, 370, 381, 385, 437, 439, 440, 523, 524, 549

proselytism 178, 186 prostitution 325 Protestantism 5, 19, 22, 29, 48, 79, 140, 144, 164, 178, 180, 221, 287, 449; Anglicans 30–32, 65, 91, 119, 264, 286, 290; Baptists 543; Episcopalians 31, 53, 115, 543; Methodists 290, 543; see also Presbyterianism; religion proverbs 163, 164, 166–167, 168, 169, 172 psycho‑existential crisis 371 public works 72 Purcell, John Baptist 117 Quebec 104, 105, 106, 108, 130, 193, 198, 235 Queen Victoria 181, 207, 265 Queens (New York) 340, 409, 462, 463, 466, 467, 528 Queer Nation 460 Queer Theory 459–460, 462, 463, 466, 467 Quigley, Hugh 176, 178 Quiet Man, The 1, 397 quiet politics 424 Quill, Mike 316 Quinn, E. Moore 7, 107, 191, 194, 275 Quinn, Peter 170, 197, 439 race xxiii, 6, 7, 8, 10, 15, 20, 71, 74–80, 140, 146, 148, 153, 180, 205, 217–224, 228, 228n3, 237– 240, 267, 274, 305, 312, 322, 324, 351, 381, 382, 384, 386–389, 397, 403n7, 439–441, 458, 459, 460, 514, 524, 525–527, 528–530, 532; see also slavery; whiteness; Whiteness Studies race riots 74; Chicago 312; Detroit 133; Memphis 211; San Francisco 239; see also New York City racialization 313, 524, 526 racism 6, 33, 37, 74, 75, 121, 140, 145–147, 161n1, 163, 213, 226, 238, 251, 294, 317, 384, 385, 389, 398, 440, 461, 462, 463, 467, 489, 505, 510, 512, 531; white supremacy 1, 79, 440, 500 Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) 407 Rains, Stephanie 395, 397–398, 400–401, 410, 412 Raleigh, Walter 15, 17, 18, 21 Rand Emmet, Ellen (Bay) 265 Rankin, Jeannette 304 Ratzinger, Joseph 452 Reagan, Ronald 340, 346, 358, 420, 433, 435, 439, 550 Rebel Scenes 177, 180 reclamation 460, 466 Reconstruction 114, 147, 210–213, 239, 249, 510; Presidential 210; Radical 211–213 Red Scare 248, 314, 346 Redmond, John 258, 279–280, 290, 305 religion xxii, 4, 7, 8, 16, 30, 72, 88, 114, 115, 118, 167, 168, 184, 185, 186, 196, 209, 219, 221, 225, 251, 274, 285, 287, 289, 314, 334, 371, 408, 410, 449, 451, 501, 502 remembrance 92, 170–171, 191–194, 196–199, 322, 371, 374

566

Index Remond, Charles Lenox 71 Republican Party 74, 86, 89, 127, 134, 144, 205, 209, 424, 432–433, 438 Rescue Me 415, 532 restrictive housing covenants 385 Rice, Thomas 489 Richmond 206, 208, 210; “bread riots” 208 Ricoeur, Paul 370 Riddle, David Hunter 38 Ritchie, Jean 487 Riverdance 395, 415, 442, 486, 496 Roanoke Project 17–18, 24 Roberts, William 276 Robertson, Agnes 157, 159 Robeson, Paul 383–385 Robinson, Tim 537–538; Stones of Aran Pilgrimage 537–538 Rockett, Kevin 394, 396–397, 402 Rodman, John 91 Roe v Wade 437 Roediger, David 75–76, 145; Wages of Whiteness, The 75–76, 145 Rogers, James Silas 369, 520, 541–542 Roman Catholicism see Catholicism Romantic Nationalism 74, 77–80 Romantic Realism 381, 387 Roney, Frank 239, 313 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 245, 265 “roots journeys” 525 Rossa, Jeremiah O’Donovan 196, 258, 299 Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) 358 rural settlement 235 Russell, Francis 350 Russell, John 180 Russell, Thomas O’Neill 481 Ryan, Pat M. 153 Sadlier, D. & J. 176 Sadlier, Mary Anne (“Mrs. J.”) 176, 178, 183–184, 197; Bessy Conway; or the Irish Girl in America 183–184; New Lights; or Life in Galway 178–179 Salinger, Pierre 345 Samhain 166; see also Halloween Sampson, William 83–86, 90–93 Sarsfield, Patrick 206 Savannah 206 Scanlan, Michael 134 Scanlon, Mary Gay 434, 438 Scotch Irish 4, 5, 7, 29–39, 59, 64–66, 72, 132, 164, 165, 171, 264, 266, 285–291, 293–295, 338, 357, 437, 439–440; see also identity Scotch‑Irish Society of America (SISA) 285–287, 289, 290, 294 Scotland 6, 23, 29, 30, 32, 64, 259, 286, 486, 487, 488 Scots Irish 29, 49, 52, 165, 171, 192, 287, 294, 338, 439, 440, 486–469

Scranton 212 Sears, Thomas W. 143 seasonal migration 102 Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act (2005) 341 Seitz, Raymond 360 Senna, Danzy 525 “sensation scenes” 157, 159, 160 Servants of the Paraclete 450 settler colonialism 49–54, 64, 144, 240 sexuality 412, 458, 461, 462, 466, 467, 502, 540; binary gender roles 460; bisexuality 461, 463; child sexual abuse 1, 9, 144, 438, 445–454; femininity 92, 219, 325; heteronormativity 9, 458–464, 466; heterosexuality 6, 450, 460, 461, 467, 500; homophobia 5, 548, 462; homosexuality 267, 412, 435, 437, 451, 452, 458–467, 503, 506, 508; homosocial spaces 530; masculinity 5, 164, 170, 219, 221, 325, 397–398, 400–401, 415, 466, 525, 530, 531; psychosexuality 450, 452, 508; sexism 6, 161n1, 218, 227, 510; sexual activity 325–326; sexual exploitation 219, 225; sexual identity 467, 506; sexual violence 510; taboos 386 Shamrock, or Hibernian Chronicle 127–128 “Shanty Irish” 349, 504 sharecropping 228 Sharp, Cecil 487 Shaw, George Bernard 384, 388, 390n2 Sheahan, James W. 131 Sheehy Skeffington, Hanna 232, 240 Shenandoah Valley 4, 49 Sheridan, General Philip 236 Sherling, Rankin 287 Sim, David 276 Simpsons, The 415 Sinn Féin 232, 240, 250, 280, 292–294, 356, 363n4 Sisters of Mercy 120, 540 slavery 210–211, 218–220, 228, 235, 259, 321–322, 512; abolitionism/antislavery/emancipation 6, 7, 8, 38, 47, 71, 73–79, 80, 85, 117, 118, 131–133, 143–144, 158, 209, 217, 220, 278, 489; antebellum 37, 71–80, 117, 120, 130–133, 143– 145, 157–158, 261, 489, 496, 549; colonial 15, 20, 21, 23, 34, 47–55, 60, 68, 321–322, 326; “Irish Address” (1841) 71, 73–74; “Irish slaves” myth 104, 109n15, 441; “white slavery” myth 224–225 Sligo, town of 52, 53; Marquess of 321 socialism 280, 314–315, 369 Socialist Party of America 313–316 Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language 481, 482 solastalgia 536 Sollors, Werner 397 Solnit, Rebecca 539–542, 543, 545–546; The Faraway Nearby 539; Wanderlust 539, 545 Sorensen, Theodore (Ted) 345 Soule, Frank 239

567

Index Sousa, John 491 “Southie” 350, 399 Spalding, Martin John 121 Spanish Empire 66 Sparrow, Edward 209 speculators 34, 45, 49, 52, 53, 54 Spellissy, James M. 132 St. Catherine’s Welfare Society 304 St. Christopher (St Kitts) 20 St. John’s College 194 St. Patrick’s Cathedral (New York) 195, 205 St. Patrick’s Day 4, 37, 164, 166, 172n3, 300, 322, 357, 362, 409, 410, 413, 420, 441, 551; parades 4, 166, 350, 357, 358, 437, 458–459, 460, 461, 463– 467; St. Pat’s for All Parade 459, 463, 465–467 “Stage Irish” 7, 153, 489, 491 Star Trek 415 State of Grace 398, 399 Stephens, James 275 stereotypes 3, 180, 347, 377, 491, 505, 508; African Americans, of 218, 219, 221, 489; disability, of 500; Irish‑Americans, of xxiii, 1, 5, 6, 9, 33, 48, 99, 121, 140, 148, 153, 156, 163, 194, 197, 218, 239, 285, 377, 381, 396, 398, 399, 412, 435, 489; women 8, 161n1, 223, 311; see also caricatures of Irish Stormont 356 Strachan, Grace 303 strikes 212, 220, 277, 278, 281, 301, 304, 306, 310, 311, 312–313, 314, 316, 323 suffrage 4, 6, 74, 141, 148, 246; women’s 220, 237, 247, 280, 281, 299, 300, 303–305, 307 Sullivan, Jake 437 Sunset and Evening Star 385 Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) 453 Sweeney, Constance 448 “Sydney Ducks” 238 Sylvester, Harry 368, 372; Moon Gaffney 368 Synge, John Millington 382, 390n9; The Playboy of the Western World 390n9; Riders to the Sea 382, 384, 390n9 Synod of Thurles 120 Tammany Hall 117, 120, 211, 220, 246, 248, 314 Tapscott’s Private Hospital and Poor House 104 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (2017) 426 Temple Emmet, Christopher 267 tenant farming 30–32, 33–36, 39, 47–49, 101, 178, 182, 192, 220, 222, 311 Terkel, Studs 385 Terrell, Mary Church 220, 226, 228 Territory Northwest of the River Ohio (Old Northwest) 232 terrorism 360, 399, 436 Testem Benvolentiae 250

Thomas, Matthew 524–525, 527–530, 533 Thomas, Michael 525 Thomson, Samuel 83, 93n1 Tin Pan Alley 490–492 Tipperary, town of 359, 495 T. L. N. 177, 181 toasts 163, 164, 166, 170, 172n3, 348 Tobin, Daniel 511, 513–514, 515, 517, 520, 539 Tóibín, Colm 8, 413 Tone, Arthur 92 Tone, Matilda 83–84, 91–92, 93 Tone, Theobald Wolfe 62, 83–84, 91–92, 93, 273; An Argument on behalf of the Roman Catholics of Ireland 62 Tone, William 84, 92, 93 Touhey, Patsy 493–494 tourism 294, 394, 397, 410, 411, 412, 421, 423, 551 Tracy, Tony 397–398, 403n7 transnational technical communities 420, 422 Treaty of Versailles 293 Treaty of Washington 212 “Troubles, The” 24, 341, 395, 397, 398, 402, 413; see also Northern Ireland; Peace Process Truman, Harry 335, 348, 352n9, 357 Trump, Donald 341–342, 360–361, 415, 420, 424, 425, 426, 434, 435, 436–438, 439, 440, 442n7, 524, 549, 550 Truth Teller 128 Trusteeism 115–116, 120 Tumulty, Joseph 246, 247 Twain, Mark 238, 239 UK see United Kingdom Ulster, Province of 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 19, 22, 23, 29–39, 45, 47–51, 64, 66, 72, 100, 120, 233, 286–295, 357, 433, 486–488, 513 Ulster Covenant 290, 291, 292 “Ulster Custom” 33, 36 Ulster heritage 514 Ulster Loyalist Anti‑Repeal Union 288 Ulster Plantation see Plantations Ulster Unionist Council (UUC) 290, 292, 293, 294 Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) 291, 292 Ulster Women’s Unionist Council (UWUC) 293 “undeserving poor” 143 Unionism 8, 285–295, 371 United Electrical Workers 316 United Irish League of America 305 United Irishmen 35–38, 62–63, 65, 66, 84, 89, 91, 92, 93, 93n1, 94n6, 126–127, 164, 259–260, 262, 264, 273, 286, 342, 371 United Kingdom 8, 63, 176, 286, 289, 293, 356, 357, 361, 420, 508n3, 550 United States Catholic Miscellany 128, 206 Universal Negro Improvement Association 280 universalism 83, 93, 388–389

568

Index University of Ulster 360, 362 urbanization 235, 239, 240, 408, 411, 476 US Census Bureau 338 US Citizenship Act (2021) 341 US Chamber of Commerce 427, 436, 440 US Congress 37, 39, 120, 132, 144, 209–211, 233, 245–248, 276, 292, 293, 304, 305–306, 314, 335–336, 340, 341, 348–350, 356, 358, 361, 420, 433–436, 438, 440 US House of Representatives 144, 244–246, 248, 293, 306, 341, 350, 356, 361, 424, 434, 437 US military: army 54, 65, 66, 134, 195, 236, 346, 347; navy 92, 134, 207 US Senate 87, 240, 248, 292, 293, 306, 335–336, 341, 346–347, 420, 424, 426, 437, 439 US South 32, 37, 49, 50, 72–74, 78, 105, 115–118, 128, 132, 143, 145, 259, 261, 388, 389, 436, 439–440, 510, 525, 549; during American Civil War 205–208, 210–212, 276; domestic labor in 217–220, 227; folklore in 163, 164, 172; music in 486–488, 490, 493; unionists in 292, 294; see also Ku Klux Klan; music; slavery US Special Envoy to Northern Ireland 359–360, 364n16, 364n17, 433–435, 437, 550 US‑Ireland Research and Development (R&D) Partnership 421 de Valera, Éamon 197, 240, 279, 281, 293, 358, 409 Vance, J. D. 439 Vanishing Irish, The 526 Varadkar, Leo 362, 437 variety theatre 490, 491 Vatican 116, 244, 248–252, 445, 449; First Vatican Council 121; Second Vatican Council 438; see also Catholic Church; Papacy vaudeville 165, 490–492, 493 Vicksburg 206 Vidal, Gore 345 Vietnam 337, 341, 345, 360 Virginia 17, 19, 21–22, 49–50, 105, 116, 210, 244, 264, 342, 439, 513 Virginia Minstrels 489 Vogue 410 Voices of the Faithful (VOTF) 452–454 volatile statistics 425 Volunteer Movement 35, 64 Volunteers 61–62 wakes 170, 350 Wall, Drucilla 519, 536 Wall, Eamonn 453, 539–540, 542–546; “Manhattan Wood” 544; My Aunts at Twilight Poker 544; In Search of Irish America 543; A Tour of Your Country 543 Wall, Ricardo 66 Wall Street Journal 341

Walrond, Eric 320, 324–327, 328 Walsh, David 246 Walsh, Frank P. 280 Walsh, James P. 237 Walsh, James T. 434 Walsh, Thomas 246 War of 1812 72 War of Three Kingdoms 22, 23 “War on Terror” 436 Ward, Douglas Turner 383–384, 388, 389 Warden, David Bailie 7, 83–93, 94n5 Washington, George 213 Washington, Martha 88 Washington DC 86–91, 128, 132, 134, 210, 235, 259, 304, 305, 306, 333, 334, 335, 339, 340, 341, 347, 348, 350, 362, 384, 409, 420, 433, 436, 549, 551 Washington Memorial 120 Webb, Jim 294, 439 Wegge, Simone 107 West, Ann 52–54 West, Francis 52–54 West, William 52–54, 55n17 West Indies 20, 23, 71, 322 West Virginia 171, 347, 486 westward expansion 21, 133, 232, 233, 235–236 Whelehan, Niall 3 White, Richard 232 white Christian nationalism 440 whiteness 75–76, 77, 79–80, 140, 145–146, 171, 218, 219, 225, 227, 228, 274, 346, 371, 376, 397, 402, 403n7, 461, 500, 513, 524–525, 527, 529–533 Whiteness Studies 76, 140, 145, 228n3, 346, 403n7 Whitney, Thomas R. 145 “Wild Geese” 206 Williamite Wars 23, 206 Williams, Helen Maria 92 Wills, Clair 325, 446 Wilson, David 83, 93, 342 Wilson, Woodrow 246, 247, 280, 290, 292–293, 305, 357 Winant, Howard 6 Wingina (Pemisapan) 17 Winter, William 157 Wisconsin 206, 234, 244, 346, 347, 348, 544 Woman’s Journal 303 women: and activism 5, 247, 249, 276–281, 299–307, 312–317, 408, 412, 462; during American Civil War 207–208; and American West 235, 237, 239; and Catholic Church 448, 450, 451; and family 4, 45, 46, 47–48, 53, 54, 264–265, 268, 386, 396, 397, 435, 526, 530; and folklore 163–164, 167–170; during Great Famine 99, 101–104, 106–108, 193, 199; and labor 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 31, 45, 46, 47–48, 50, 71–72, 103, 106, 107, 142, 185, 217–228, 300–303, 311, 312–317, 422, 527, 530; and music 494; and nationalism 276–281,

569

Index 305–307; and race 4, 5, 47, 50, 53, 71–72, 217–218; and religion 115, 179, 249, 252, 348, 504; during revolutionary era 59, 60, 64, 65; studies of 2, 5, 8, 23, 47–48, 459; in twentieth century 350, 352, 401; in twenty‑first century 437, 441; and unionism 291, 293 Women’s Irish Education League 306 Women’s Trade Union League 226, 300, 301, 312, 315 Wood, Fernando 209 Woodham‑Smith, Cecil 197 work see labor Working Women’s Society 301 Workingman’s Party of California 239 World War I 207, 245, 248, 250, 273, 277, 279, 280, 290–294, 304, 305, 313, 316, 334, 369, 377, 482, 494, 505

World War II 9, 248, 252, 311, 334, 344, 348, 352, 369, 370–372, 377, 410, 435, 503, 505, 514 World’s Peace Jubilee 491 Works Progress Administration (WPA) 382; Federal Theatre Project 382 Wright, Joseph 233–234 Yeats, William Butler 514 yeomen 35, 63 Yorke, Peter 240 Young Ireland 74, 78–79, 80, 119, 126, 129–130, 133, 178, 180, 181, 197, 206, 210, 240, 258; see also 1848 Rebellion Zionism 280–281 Zizek, Slavoj 499–500

570