Erin’s Inheritance: Irish-American Children, Ethnic Identity, and the Meaning of Being Irish, 1845-1890

By Jonathan Keljik

B.A. in History, December 2005, University of Minnesota M.Phil. in History, May 2011, The George Washington University

A Dissertation Submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

May 18, 2014

Dissertation directed by

Tyler Anbinder Professor of History

The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Jonathan James Keljik has passed the Final Examination for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy as of February 12, 2014. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

Erin’s Inheritance: Irish-American Children, Ethnic Identity, and the Meaning of Being Irish, 1845-1890

Jonathan Keljik

Dissertation Research Committee:

Tyler Anbinder, Professor of History, Dissertation Director

Richard Stott, Professor of History, Committee Member

Thomas A. Guglielmo, Associate Professor of American Studies, Committee Member

ii

© Copyright 2014 by Jonathan Keljik All Rights Reserved

iii Acknowledgements

Writing a dissertation is an incredibly difficult task. Yet it would be more difficult if one had to do it alone. Thankfully, many people helped me complete this huge project.

First of all, I thank my dissertation director Tyler Anbinder. He has been supportive of my studies and research from the beginning. He read multiple drafts of each chapter and offered incisive criticism that has made my writing and argumentation much better. The dissertation would not be complete without Tyler’s help.

I also want to thank my committee members at George Washington University,

Richard Stott and Tom Guglielmo. I’ve benefited from discussions with them about my research and from their questions and comments on my work. I am also indebted to my readers Tim Meagher and Jenna Weissman Joselit for giving me helpful tips and ideas when I was beginning the dissertation. They also deserve thanks for agreeing to take the time to read my dissertation and offer their insights.

A number of other historians and archivists have enthusiastically shared their knowledge and expertise with me. My conversations with Mary Kelly have been extremely helpful. She gave me useful advice on my project and provided great suggestions about my research focus and how to shape myself as a historian. Archivists and librarians at numerous collections, notably Kathleen Williams at Boston College,

Edward Copenhagen at Harvard, Sister Maryellen Blumlein of the Sisters of Charity,

Sister Esther MacCarthy of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, and Father Michael

Morris at the New York Archdiocesan archives, helped me find research materials. The

GW history department also provided two summer grants, enabling me to conduct this research outside D.C.

iv I also found a welcome place to stay during these research trips. In Ottawa, John and Suzette Cheng cheerfully hosted me. Suzette also helped inspire the subject of my dissertation by sending me a clip of a Canadian “Heritage Minute” about Irish orphans who wanted to keep their Irish names in 1840s Québec. In Boston, I could always count on Chris and Vanessa Templeman for a place to stay. My research trips to New York surely would’ve been more expensive without the hospitality of Phu Pham and Dimple

Manka. Friends helped me in other innumerable ways. To all those who read drafts of chapters and asked great questions, thank you: Dan Peltzman, Shaadi Khoury, Bo Peery,

Britta Anderson, Allen Little, Chris Hickman, Richard Boles, Stephen Jackson, Felix

Harcourt, Mary McPartland, Seth LaShier, Nick Alexandrov, Matt Bias, Bell Clement,

Jack Garratt, Kelsey Flynn, and Charles Richter.

My parents, Jeff and Susan Keljik, not only proofread chapters for me and offered feedback, but also encouraged me to keep writing when it was tough. Their moral and financial support has been invaluable and their visits to D.C. were a welcome distraction.

I also have them to thank for taking me to numerous historical sites as a child and igniting my interest in history. Thanks also to Chaplin the cat for reminding me that I should work less and pay more attention to him.

My partner Kimberly Rosenfield deserves a large part of my gratitude. She read every chapter and shared with me, always with candid honesty, her opinions about all the parts that made perfect sense to me. She understood of my odd work schedule and grudgingly accepted all the times I couldn’t spend time with her because I had to write. I finished the dissertation largely because of her love and encouragement.

v Abstract of Dissertation

Erin’s Inheritance: Irish-American Children, Ethnic Identity, and the Meaning of Being Irish, 1845-1890

This dissertation explores the concerns and discussions about lessons of Irish identity for the children of Irish immigrants in mid to late nineteenth-century New York and New England. The author argues that there were recurrent efforts to maintain Irish identity by ensuring the young would understand their Irish and Catholic heritage and that adults often based this identity on the themes of Irish nationalism. Yet Irish-

Americans understood that they had to demonstrate Irish loyalty to the United States, so they attempted to blend Irish and American identities in their progeny, articulating an early vision of cultural pluralism for American society. This research contributes to understandings of the invention of ethnicity and ethnic endurance in the United States and how immigrants use conceptions of the meaning of “American” with their national backgrounds as they create identities for their descendants. This dissertation also illuminates the importance of children and ideas about childhood to the development of ethnicity in the United States. But it also has broader meanings for the ways in which religion, ethnicity, and nationality affect the transition of immigrant progeny from the world of their parents to that of the United States and how the children of immigrants eventually become American ethnic groups.

vi Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ...... iv

Abstract of Dissertation ...... vi

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1: From a “Little Yankee Rowdy” to a “Genuine Irish Boy:”

Catholicism, Irish Heritage, and American Freedom for Irish-American

Children ...... 19

Chapter 2: No Room for Irish Lessons: Irish-themed Education and the

Successes and Failures of Irish-American Confrontations with Public Schools ...... 61

Chapter 3: American Minds, Irish-Catholic Souls: Irish-American Children,

Irishness, and Parochial Schools ...... 103

Chapter 4: Playing in the Streets, Writing in the Parlor: Social Networks, The

Children’s Column, and Irish and American Identities ...... 137

Chapter 5: Saving the “Savor of Irish Nationality:” Irish Language Education,

Festivals, and Children ...... 176

Chapter 6: Venerable Heroes, Ancestral Woes, and Fairy Tales: Family Life and Heritage for Irish-American Children ...... 199

Conclusion ...... 231

Bibliography ...... 240

vii Introduction

“I might as well have been born in Boston,” Patrick Ford, Irish nationalist and newspaper editor, told a reporter at his Brooklyn home in 1886. “I brought nothing with me from Ireland – nothing tangible to make me what I am. I had, consciously at least, only what I found and grew up in here.” Born in Galway in 1837, Ford came with his father to Boston at the age of eight, on the eve of the Great Famine that devastated

Ireland, prompted massive emigration, and profoundly affected Irish and American societies. By the time he was thirteen, finished with school and looking for work, Boston was flooded with impoverished Irish immigrants who had fled their homes to escape starvation and disease. Searching for jobs, Ford claimed he saw signs that read, “No Irish

Need Apply,” which helped him realize that his Irish background was a disadvantage.

Ford believed that “the atrocious system under which the Irish people suffered reached and helped to form me” as a child in America.1

Ford’s story of his childhood in Boston demonstrated one way that Irish identity influenced children in the United States. Considering Ford’s later career as an outspoken supporter of Irish nationalism and a prominent advocate of maintaining Irish identity for immigrants and their children, one might think he grew to manhood in Ireland. There, he could have witnessed the hardships that British governance brought to the Irish. But Ford learned to identify with his Irish heritage through experiences in Boston, indicating that

Irish ethnic identity could be a powerful factor in the maturation of the children of Irish immigrants. Ford became an influential proponent of teaching young Irish Americans to appreciate their Irish ancestry so that all those of “Irish blood” would support the mission

1 “The ‘Irish World:’ An Interview with Mr. Patrick Ford,” The Pilot, September 25, 1886.

1 to free Ireland from the British. Ford even mentioned “NINA” signs, important components to a tale of victimization intended to maintain Irish group solidarity. This discrimination helped convince some Irish Americans that building ethnic pride in their children would help achieve the goals of Irish nationalism, which could remove the stigma under which Irish Catholics lived in the United States. An independent homeland, thought some Irish Americans, would garner the Irish more respect than a home with colonial status. In particular, the social standing of the Irish in the U.S. Northeast, such as in Boston where Ford grew up, led some Irish Americans to redouble their efforts to prevent children from becoming ashamed of their Irish heritage.2

Due to the importance of Irish ancestry to the region’s Irish immigrants, this study examines the substance and sources of Irish identity for the children of Irish immigrants primarily in New England and New York from 1845 to 1890. This time period, when

Irish nationalism was popular in many Irish-American circles, corresponded with burgeoning concerns from Irish Americans about children’s Irish heritage, as well as the growth of the children of famine and post-famine immigrants. The Great Famine of 1845-

1852 changed the character of Irish immigration, affected the collective memories of

Irish Catholics for generations, and helped give new inspiration to Irish nationalism. The massive influx of poor Catholics fleeing from famine also triggered a strong reaction against immigrants and Catholicism in the United States.3 Nativist reactions thus put

2 Richard Jensen, “’No Irish Need Apply:’ A Myth of Victimization,” Journal of Social History 36, no. 2 (2002): 417; Kerby Miller, “Class, Culture, and Immigrant Group Identity in the United States: The Case of Irish-American Ethnicity,” in Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics, ed. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 117; Thomas Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 1870-1890 (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1966), 23. 3 Timothy J. Meagher, “From the World to the Village and the Beginning to the End and After: Research Opportunities in Irish American History,” Journal of Ethnic History 28, no. 4 (2009): 118; Kenneth Moss, “St. Patrick’s Day Celebrations and the Formation of Irish-American Identity,” Journal of Social History 29, no. 1 (1995): 126; Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America

2 Irish-Catholic immigrants of the famine generation in a tenuous position, bringing out concerns about children’s ethnic identities from various sources. Even after a generation of assimilation and as Irish Americans were moving up socio-economically in the 1870s and 80s, new arrivals continued to feel lingering prejudices, sustaining the besieged mentality of a people who felt under attack from Anglo-American Protestants. These cultural and political contentions over religion and ethnicity, the memory of nativism, and continued prejudice caused them to act as a rejected and embattled group that feared for the continuance of their identity. Many Irish Americans believed that Anglo-Saxons on either side of the Atlantic were trying to eradicate Irish Catholicism and transform the

Irish into people resembling British or Yankee Protestants, making them guard their

Irishness and Catholicism more closely.4

By the 1890s, however, the American landscape and the Irish place within it were beginning to change. The number of foreign-born Irish peaked in 1890; thereafter

American-born Irish people would outnumber those born in Ireland. By then, because of their leadership roles in the Catholic Church, organized labor, and urban politics, Irish

Americans were also positioned to act as intermediaries between the increasing numbers of Southern and Eastern Europeans and native-stock Americans.5 Irish nationalism also faded in influence in the 1890s because of the death of Home Rule leader Charles Stewart

Parnell and infighting among Irish nationalist leaders in the United States. Nationalists

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 334-337; Lawrence McCaffrey, The Irish Catholic Diaspora in America (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 60, 93, 96. 4 Joseph P. O’Grady, How the Irish Became Americans (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1973), 57-58; Moss, “St. Patrick’s Day Celebrations,” 136-137; Thomas Archdeacon, Becoming American: An Ethnic History (New York: The Free Press, 1983), xv; Dale Knobel, Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality and Antebellum America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986), 180-181; David Gerber, The Making of an American Pluralism: Buffalo, New York, 1825-60 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 136; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 502; Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 19. 5 See James Barrett, The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic City (New York: Penguin Press, 2012); see also Patrick Ford’s remarks in 1890, quoted in chapter four.

3 then turned their attention to cultural nationalism, supporting such movements as the

Gaelic Revival, which inspired efforts to help youngsters in the United States and Ireland learn about their heritage. Yet before the cultural nationalism of the 1890s, Irish

Americans had intense debates about children’s ethnic and national identities.6

New York and New England were some of the most significant sites for these discussions because their sizeable concentrations of Irish immigrants and their descendants made them centers of Irish-American leadership.7 Communities in New

England and New York were important to Irish-American politics, culture, and nationalism, produced Irish newspapers with a national audience, and Irish ethnicity in these places played a role in social relationships, politics, and economics for generations.

Because many Irish Americans were slower to move up economically in the Northeast than those in locations farther west, they often formed a distinct ethnic-class in eastern cities for many years. When antagonistic relationships formed the basis of their social experience in the east, Irish Americans continued to cling to their ethnicity even in the midst of changes in the ethnic composition of cities like New York and Boston after

1890. Their social and class status informed their political solidarity, so that Irish-

American politicians and voting blocs influenced local politics well into the twentieth century. These relationships were also important because of the large percentage of Irish

Americans in New York and Boston. The New York City area had a large percentage of

6 Kevin Kenny, The American Irish: A History (New York: Pearson Education, Ltd., 2000), 131, 179; Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 18, 173-177; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 29-31; O’Grady, How the Irish Became Americans, 77, 103. 7 Maureen Dezell, Irish America: Coming into Clover: The Evolution of a People and a Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 40; Barrett, Irish Way, 297, n 33. By the turn of the twentieth century, New York had the largest Irish-American population in the country. Philadelphia had the second largest and Boston the fourth. As proportions, however, Boston had one the largest shares of people of Irish descent, largely owing to few other immigrant groups there until the late nineteenth century.

4 Irish Americans, with the Irish-born alone making up 21.4 per cent of the total population of Manhattan and 17.6 per cent of Brooklyn by 1870. In 1880, approximately one-third of the population of Manhattan was of Irish parentage. With a smaller population, Boston did not have as many Irish Americans, but their proportion in the city was even larger. In

1870, nearly a quarter of the population of Boston had been born in Ireland. Accounting for everyone of Irish descent, the figure was almost 40 per cent in 1880.8

With such large numbers, Irish immigrants and their descendants fit into a variety of self-identifications connected with their responses to life in the United States.

Separated by such categories as geographic origin, place of settlement, gender, age, political beliefs, religion, and class, Irish Americans were never completely united, particularly in opinions about the proper way to remember Ireland. Not only were there disagreements about how to be Irish in America, but there were also large numbers of

Irish immigrants and their descendants for whom Irish heritage probably meant little.9

At the same time, however, a substantial number of immigrants likely felt the importance of their Irish-Catholic identity because of experiences with anti-Irish-

Catholicism in Ireland and America. Many native stock Yankee Protestants did not see how Irish Catholics could become part of the prevailing American culture. Principally where strict ethnic boundaries separated them from Yankees, the influential minority of

Irish and their descendants in New England and New York found ethnic identity pertinent

8 Hasia Diner, “The Most Irish City in the Union,” in The New York Irish, ed. Ronald Bayor and Timothy Meagher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 92-93; “The Census of the Cities,” The Pilot, August 28, 1880; “The Irish Element in Boston,” The Pilot, October 24, 1885; Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 18; Archdeacon, Becoming American, 47. 9 Miller, “Class, Culture, and Immigrant Group Identity in the United States,” 97-98; Reginald Byron, Irish America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 258; Richard Alba, Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), xiii; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 511-512.

5 because ethnicization developed at least partially from a feeling that nativist Anglo-

American prejudices threatened Irish identity. As Northeast Irish Americans were invested in their ethnic identity because of their separation from Yankees, the demands of defensive ethnicity helped preserve Irish identity. Those in other regions often found cooperation with their neighbors more feasible, principally in communities where social lines were less rigid than back east. The Irish-American communities of Boston and New

York came to represent many Irish Americans across the country by the nineteenth century, as Irish-American politicians and clergy in the Northeast rose to national prominence and newspapers published in Boston and New York set the tone and agenda for Irish Americans who paid attention to ethnic issues. Studying the experiences and expectations of Northeastern Irish Americans about preserving Irish identity is useful because of the importance that Irish ethnicity held for them.10

Ethnicity can be an elusive quality to discover, but a relatively straightforward definition is possible. Ethnicity is a feeling that unites people of common origin who believe they share values and beliefs and who distinctly identify themselves and co- ethnics because of an attachment to a shared conception of culture.11 Irish immigrants

10 Thomas O’Connor, The Boston Irish: A Political History (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), xvi; William Griffin, The Book of Irish Americans (New York: Times Books, 1990), 49; Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001), 148, 151; Byron, Irish America, 54, 205, 269, 148, 151; Dezell, Irish America, 40-43, 50-63; Archdeacon, Becoming American, 98, 103; McCaffrey, Irish Catholic Diaspora, 84-85; Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 37, 53. 11 Timothy Meagher, Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880-1928 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 132, 273; Carola Suárez- Orozco and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, Children of Immigration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 118, 119; Thomas Archdeacon, “Hansen’s Hypothesis as a Model of Immigrant Assimilation” and Peter Kivisto, “Ethnicity and the Problem of Generations in American History,” in American Immigrants and Their Generations: Studies and Commentaries on the Hansen Thesis after Fifty Years, ed. Peter Kivisto and Dag Blanck (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 1, 4, 49; Milton Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 23-24; Virginia Yans, “On ‘Groupness,’” Journal of American Ethnic History 25, no. 4 (2006): 127; Portes and Rumbaut, Legacies, 151, 156.

6 usually defined Irishness in this way, although they used phrases like “the Irish race,” people of “Irish blood,” and “the Irish element” to define people of Irish ancestry.12

Though Irish blood implies Irish identity was in-born, ethnicity is created over time and is an acquired conception rather than a natural quality.13 Identifying with a culture was the result of a deliberate construction of ethnicity and an individual’s decisions about identity. Irish immigrants mostly built ideas about ethnicity once they arrived in the country and many Irish immigrants in the early nineteenth century had a more provincial identity, associating with a home county, town, or parish. However, the creation of Irish national identity, as well as its linkages with Catholicism, occurred in Ireland over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through religious and political opposition to English and Anglo-Irish Protestants. Irish immigrants increasingly had ideas of themselves in national terms, often based on Irish nationalism, as the nineteenth century progressed.

Creating Irish ethnicity was also partly a response to Americans and other immigrants who viewed national origins as important determinants for character.14

12 Thomas Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). The Irish, like other peoples in the nineteenth century, often used the term “race” as synonymous with their national origin. Many Irish Americans likely thought of race as a national identity in similar ways as the Italian immigrants in historian Thomas Guglielmo’s book White on Arrival. Yet the idea of race as a color category was also taking shape over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and this whiteness included the Irish and later Italians and Jews. Irish Americans by the Civil War, for example, had already learned they had the rights of whites in America, in contrast to blacks. When Irish Americans used the term “race” to refer to the Irish in the nineteenth century, however, they were not usually thinking of race as color but race as a nation (or sometimes more expansively as a Celtic race, distinctive from Anglo-Saxons). Their idea of race and nation came with all the religious-cultural identities they believed the Irish nation-race embodied. Their use of the term, then, is a close approximation of the more modern usage of ethnicity. For some discussion of Irish immigrants and race, see Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), and David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991). 13 Kathleen Neils Conzen, David Gerber, Ewa Morawska, George E. Pozzetta, and Rudolph J. Vecoli, “The Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective from the USA,” Journal of American Ethnic History 12, no. 1 (1992): 4-5. 14 John T. Ridge, Erin’s Sons in America: the Ancient Order of Hirbernians (New York: AOH 150th Anniversary Committee, 1986), 28; Dale Light, Jr., “The Role of Irish-American Organisations in Assimilation and Community Formation,” in The Irish in America: Emigration, Assimilation, and Impact,

7 Over the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Irish were defining who they were and who they were not, efforts that demonstrated that boundaries were essential to demarcate ethnicity. Because ethnic identity was the result of social interactions, the defining characteristics of Irishness changed based on how people saw themselves and those around them. But many Irish felt it was imperative to separate themselves from

English or Anglo-Saxon people to preserve their distinctiveness and, through that identity, their religious faith and claims to the rights of national autonomy. Irish nationalists also helped draw the borders of Irish ethnicity, as they increasingly made

Irish identity contingent on a desire for self-government. Though many Irish nationalists were Protestants, the Catholic religion became connected to Irishness through anti-

Catholicism in Ireland and the United States. Many factors went into the creation of Irish identity, but concern over children’s Irish heritage became central to the construction of particular styles of Irishness based on Irish nationalism.15

Although ethnic identity could be strongest in places where Irish Americans felt less integrated, ethnic identity and Americanization did not always preclude one another.

Creating ethnicity, and learning to see oneself in ethnic terms, could be part of becoming

American. Some Irish Americans thought ethnicization and Americanization were

ed. P.J. Drudy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 113-114; Moss, “St. Patrick’s Day Celebrations,” 128; Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 34-35. Fights between Irishmen from different counties in Ireland were common in the 1830s and 1840s, when groups battled over jobs on work projects. Marjorie Fallows, Irish Americans: Identity and Assimilation (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979), 10; Meagher, Inventing Irish America, 6, 9; Byron, Irish America, 17, 78, 288-289; Portes and Rumbaut, Legacies, 156; Russel A. Kazal, “Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Concept in American Ethnic History,” The American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (1995): 460. Because of Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic emancipation movement and organized attempts at Irish rebellion, a national identity based on ideas of Irish nationalism was in an advanced state of development by the late nineteenth century. Knobel, Paddy and the Republic, 74, 99. Notions about ethnicity based on national origin occurred at the same time that native-stock Americans were inventing a unique American nationality based on belief in American ideals, such as democracy or liberty. 15 Conzen, et al., “The Invention of Ethnicity,” 12; Andereck, Ethnic Awareness and the School, 10, 13; Portes and Rumbaut, Legacies, 151, 156; Gerber, American Pluralism, 121; Kenny, American Irish, 3.

8 compatible, yet they viewed Anglo-Americans’ conceptions of assimilation warily.

Theories of assimilation, such as those Milton Gordon discussed in his seminal

Assimilation in American Life, include “Anglo-conformity,” “the melting pot,” and

“cultural pluralism.” Scholars today recognize various models of assimilation and some argue that an “American core ideology” evolves as the society changes, meaning there is no fixed guideline to which all groups must assimilate. But many Irish immigrants perceived Yankee demands to assimilate to be firmly part of the “Anglo-conformity” model. An alternative was cultural pluralism, the notion that immigrants could preserve ethnic identities while accommodating to certain American values, like democracy and religious freedom. Although the term cultural pluralism had not yet been coined, the concept was popular with Irish Americans. Some ethnic and religious leaders hoped that the Irish would adapt to American nationality while resisting complete assimilation by retaining strong ethnic sensibilities.16

Questions of ethnic endurance among immigrants and their descendants have long intrigued scholars of immigration history. Starting with his theory about ethnic fade and regeneration in 1938, Marcus Less Hansen hypothesized that the children of immigrants rejected their ethnic heritage, and only in the third generation did the grandchildren of immigrants wish to remember it. Other scholars, including those who advanced the theory of the second-generation “marginal man” believed that cultural characteristics and discrimination kept immigrant offspring from complete assimilation, resulting in an “in-

16 Jacobson, Special Sorrows, 20; Kenny, American Irish, 148-149; Kazal, “Revisiting Assimilation,” 438- 439; Gordon, Assimilation in American Life, 132-133; Andereck, Ethnic Awareness and the School, 12; Byron, Irish America, 5; Conzen, et al., “The Invention of Ethnicity,” 10.

9 between” status for those who felt little connection to their parents’ homeland.17 Others have questioned whether Hansen’s theory would be true across different groups in various geographic and temporal contexts.18 Some scholars, such as Milton Gordon,

Andrew Greeley, and John Duffy Ibson, have found that cultural transmission to later generations affected immigrants’ descendants, while others contended that ethnicity has become an optional identity for white Americans of European descent.19 Generational conflict over assimilation and ethnic retention has also intrigued scholars. Ethnic enclaves, politics, social activities, and religious rituals served to reinforce ethnicity in the second generation, but the idealization of the old country and its culture could also place an insurmountable distance between immigrants and their children. Many of these studies focused on generational conflict and ethnic identity influences for immigrant progeny in groups like Jews or Italians, however.20 Scholars have yet to apply the same detailed analysis to Irish immigrants’ children.

17 Everett Stonequist, The Marginal Man: A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965). See also Timothy Meagher’s excellent discussion of the literature in Timothy Meagher, “Irish All the Time: Ethnic Consciousness Among the Irish in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1880-1905,” Journal of Social History 19, no. 2 (1985): 273-274. 18 Kivisto and Blanck, American Immigrants and their Generations. 19 Gordon, Assimilation in American Life, 25; Andrew Greeley, Ethnicity in the United States: A Preliminary Reconnaissance (New York: Wiley, 1974), 31, 64; Andrew Greeley and William McCready, “The Transmission of Cultural Heritages: The Case of the Irish and the Italians,” in Ethnicity: Theory and Experience, ed. Nathan Glazer, Daniel P Moynihan, and Corinne Saposs Schelling (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 209-2229; John Duffy Ibson, Will the World Break Your Heart? Dimensions and Consequences of Irish-American Assimilation (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990), 10; Mary C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1990); Alba, Ethnic Identity. 20 Robert Orsi, “The Fault of Memory: ‘Southern Italy’ in the Imagination of Immigrants and the Lives of their Children in Italian Harlem, 1920-1945,” in Family and Society in American History, ed. Joseph Hawes and Elizabeth Nybakken (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 226-239. See also Robert Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Jordan Stanger-Ross, Staying Italian: Urban Change and Ethnic Life in Postwar Toronto and Philadelphia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).

10 Despite the many studies on the Irish, there is still a paucity of material specifically about Irish-American children. When studies mention children, little consensus exists about the extent to which they learned Irish identity. Some academics, such as Kerby Miller, Marjorie Fallows, and Reginald Byron, claimed that Irish immigrants made few substantial efforts to see that their children gained a sense of Irish identity. Reginald Byron, in particular, warned historians against essentializing Irish-

American ethnicity and assuming that all Irish immigrants were embodiments of an Irish ethnic or cultural type. This warning is fair, but these studies overlooked or ignored the numerous conscious efforts that Irish immigrants made in the nineteenth century to preserve their cultural legacy or the reasons behind these endeavors.21

Though other scholars have claimed that Irish identity passed from one generation to the next, none of them have detailed the “how” or the “why” of lessons on Irish ethnicity. In one important early work, for example, William Shannon claimed that the ethnic past exerted its influence on children along with the knowledge of being Irish, but left the statement to others to investigate further. Writers Maureen Dezell, Margaret

Hallissy, and Catherine Nash have commented on an Irish-American cultural legacy.

Dezell concluded that Irish ethnicity was selective and superficial. Hallissy identified common motifs in Irish-American songs and stories to argue that Irish culture in America was based on an extremely “sentimentalized version of Irishness.” Catherine Nash mentioned that Irish nationalists wanted to unite all Irish people through a concept of shared descent, but did not explore this proposition further. While these observations are useful in considerations of Irish identity, these scholars mostly concentrated on either

21 Kerby Miller, “Assimilation and Alienation: Irish Emigrants’ Responses to Industrial America, 1871- 1921,” in The Irish in America, ed. Drudy, 98-100; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 511-512; Fallows, Irish Americans, 7, 9, 135, 146; Byron, Irish America, 1, 54, 57, 120, 123-124.

11 literature or popular culture, or focused on twentieth century expressions by more distant descendants, and mainly left children’s identities on the periphery of their studies.22

Timothy Meagher has done some of the most extensive work about generational changes and ethnic identities in Irish-American communities. But in his article “Irish All the Time” and book Inventing Irish America he did not concentrate on children or the efforts of immigrant adults to teach children about Irish identity. While Meagher focused on the sense of Irishness that came to the American generation in Worcester,

Massachusetts, he did not thoroughly explore how Irishness was passed from one generation to the next during childhood.23

Immigrant children have received attention recently, but most studies provided a general overview about immigrant children from many backgrounds and did not focus on ethnic identity. These synopses of immigrant children’s experiences addressed work, school, and home life and did an admirable job of describing typical lives of children, but usually only briefly mentioned ethnic socialization for immigrant youth of any ethnicity.24 Other studies have included immigrants and their children within larger stories about childhood experiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

These studies often accentuated the new urban-American-adolescent identities that children forged for themselves and the cultural distance that began to separate children

22 William V. Shannon, The American Irish (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1963), vii-viii; Dezell, Irish America, 69, 211, 219-220; Margaret Hallissy, Reading Irish-American Fiction: The Hyphenated Self (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 45-46; Catherine Nash, Of Irish Descent: Origin Stories, Genealogy, and the Politics of Belonging (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 3-4, 66. 23 Meagher, Inventing Irish America, 246-251; Meagher, “Irish All the Time,” 284. 24 Selma Cantor Berrol, Growing Up American: Immigrant Children in America Then and Now (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995); Melissa Klapper, Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in America, 1880-1925 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007); Priscilla Ferguson Clement, Growing Pains: Children in the Industrial Age, 1850-1890 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997).

12 from their immigrant parents.25 While I agree that Americanization was part of youthful socialization, I see the efforts to add Irish heritage to the process of Americanization of immigrant youth as just as significant.

As studies of immigrant children have included the experiences of the children of

Irish immigrants, educational histories have also discussed Irish-American youth in the nineteenth century. These studies occasionally considered how Irish Americans felt about education, the religious conflicts over public education, and the Americanization efforts of public and parochial schools. But they rarely mentioned how some Irish Americans tried to use schools to teach their children about Irish ethnic identities.26 An exception is

Howard Weisz’s study of Irish-American views on education, which is now over forty years old. He concluded that Irish Americans made little effort to preserve Irish culture through education and he focused mainly on explaining anti-Catholicism in schools.

Examining sources more closely, I have found that Weisz’s conclusions do not display the nuances of concerns that Irish Americans felt for their children’s education.27

My study complicates our understanding of Irish-American childhood and helps answer questions that other works have left unexplored about the origins of Irish-

25 David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and At Play (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1985); Sarah Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence: The Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009). 26 Joel Perlmann, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure among the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Blacks in an American City, 1880-1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: A History of the New York City Public Schools (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000; James Fraser, Henry Allen, and Sam Barnes, eds., From Common School to Magnet School: Selected Essays in the History of Boston’s Schools (Boston: Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, 1979); Stanley Shultz, The Culture Factory: Boston Public Schools, 1789-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); Timothy Walch, Parish School: American Catholic Parochial Education from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Crossroad Publication Company, 1996); Lloyd Jorgenson, The State and the Non-Public School, 1825-1925 (Columbia, MO.: University of Missouri Press, 1987); Ward McAfee, Race, Religion, and Reconstruction: The Public School in the Politics of the 1870s (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). 27 Ralph Howard Weisz, Irish-American and Italian-American Educational Views, 1870-1900: A Comparison (New York: Arno Press, 1976).

13 American ethnicity. This project explores the time period missing from much of the current literature between American-born or -raised children and the maturation of second-generation Irish Americans. My research contributes to the current scholarship on

Irish-American ethnicity and cultural inheritance by explaining how members of the immigrant generation strove to teach their children to value their Irish heritage and identify with an Irish religio-cultural tradition. Looking at lessons for children’s ethnicities is important because childhood is a crucial time of identity development and children can be important symbols for ideas about a group’s future. In the words of childhood studies scholars Paula Fass and Mary Ann Mason, “we define ourselves by how we approach the idea of childhood,” so the way that Irish Americans thought about children’s loyalties also exposes how the Irish conceived of their place in their communities.28 Modern psychologists and sociologists have asserted that people begin to learn the importance of ethnicity as youths, particularly in contexts where they are members of “ethnic groups with lower status or power.”29 Research into the thoughts of

Irish Americans about their children’s heritage provides a more complete picture of the processes of change in Irish culture in America and the methods and meanings behind the formation of Irish ethnicity.30

28 Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 152; Jean Phinney, Gabriel Horenczyk, Karmela Liebkind, and Paul Vedder, “Ethnic Identity, Immigration, and Well-Being: An Interactional Perspective,” Journal of Social Issues 57, no. 3 (2001): 496; Paula Fass and Mary Ann Mason, “Introduction: Childhood in America: Past and Present,” in Childhood in America, ed. Paula Fass and Mary Ann Mason (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 7. 29 Jean Phinney, et. al., “Ethnic Identity,” 496; Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco, Children of Immigration, 94-101; Portes and Rumbaut, Legacies, 148, 151. 30 Marion R. Casey, “Family, History, and Irish America,” Journal of American Ethnic History 28, no. 4 (2009): 110-117: Casey identified Irish-American family life and genealogy as one of the most fruitful avenues for Irish-American Studies; Klapper, Small Strangers, xiii; Caroline Levander, Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child, and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 4-8; Sanchez-Eppler, Dependent States, 187.

14 Many in the first waves of immigrants who arrived in the United States after the

Great Famine tried to give their children an Irish identity. Like many other immigrant groups, Irish immigrants wanted to maintain certain values and culture from the old country. For some, it was particularly crucial that their children keep an Irish identity because they felt their culture, religion, and identity were under attack from Anglo-

Saxons in Ireland and America.31 When Thomas Addis Emmet, an exile in America after his participation in the failed United Irishmen uprising in 1798, wrote to his daughter

Jane in 1818, he told her that he wanted her to be “entirely Irish (except so far as you ought to be American)” and “I meant to make you Irish, in spite of your birthplace, when

I gave you the name of Erin [her middle name].”32 Emmet’s words, though coming from an early date, showed how the nationalist sentiments of parents colored their hopes for their American children. The desire for children to be thoroughly Irish but also American appeared frequently in recorded Irish-American thoughts about their progeny. Later in the nineteenth century, because Irish Americans wanted children to value their Irish ancestry, they pushed for children to learn about their heritage through Irish literature, history, religion, and legends. When Irish Americans worried about developing Irish ethnic identity in America, they were mainly interested in maintaining it for the next generation.

Remembering the ancestral homeland went beyond ensuring that Irish-American children would not grow ashamed of their background and their families. Irish nationalists wanted to make sure that children growing up in America would recognize

31 McCaffrey, Irish Catholic Diaspora, 34, 42, 97; Jacobson, Special Sorrows, 25; Gerber, American Pluralism, 123. 32 Thomas Addis Emmet to his daughter Jane, March 2, 1818, Whitlock Family Papers, New-York Historical Society, New York, NY, quoted in “From the Stacks: The N-YHS Library Blog,” http://blog.nyhistory.org/however-be-you-scotch-or-irish-thomas-addis-emmets-letter-to-his-daughter- jane/. A given name of Erin, for either a boy or a girl, was rather unusual in the nineteenth century.

15 the necessity of aiding the nationalist movement. Nationalists understood that Irish

Americans would have a role to play in the eventual fight to liberate Ireland, either through their monetary contributions or their physical assistance. After the famine, Irish nationalists largely took over the narrative about Irish identity, history, and calls for justice. Irish nationalism also dominated the messages about Irish identity emanating from places where nationalism was popular, such as Boston and New York, especially through nationally distributed newspapers. The nationalist movement raised the stakes for perpetuating Irish identity because the future of nationalism depended on the Hibernian identities of the next generation. The nationalist impetus to teach the young to treasure their ancestry shaped the messages that children received about Irish identity into cultural, religious, and political concepts of Irishness.33

Yet Irish Americans also understood that children raised in the United States would be Americans. So they attempted to incorporate Americanization into their children’s loyalties, but on their own terms. Irish Americans ensured that children learned that they should be loyal to the United States because of nativist questions about the true patriotism of the Catholic Irish and because many Irish immigrants seemed to truly believe in American values. But Irish Americans resisted the type of assimilation that they perceived native-stock Protestants demanded, instead insisting that ethnic and

American identities could exist side by side. While Irish Americans could not prevent their children from acquiring American identities, they advocated a model of assimilation for their children that would not erase ethnicity. In hopes for their children to be loyally

33 Patrick Ford, Criminal History of the British Empire (New York: The Irish World, 1915), 29; Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 25, 27, 83; O’Grady, How the Irish Became Americans, 27; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 340-344; McCaffrey, Irish Catholic Diaspora, 162; Barrett, Irish Way, 243, 255; Moss, “St. Patrick’s Day Celebrations,” 126, 129, 131; Jacobson, Special Sorrows, 57-59; “Public Lectures,” Irish World, December 4, 1875; “Irish Classes,” Irish-American, September 6, 1890.

16 American and value their Irish background, some Irish Americans in the late nineteenth century expressed an early form of cultural pluralism.34

This “multiculturalism,” as some have called this idea, was also important for other ethnic groups later in history. By the time of emigration from Southern and Eastern

Europe, many Irish Americans had thought deeply about their meaning of “American.”

The kind of identity that Irish Americans pronounced for their children in the nineteenth century formed the basis for Irish-American ethnicity, but also influenced the assimilation of Irish Americans. In Catholic children’s literature, in schools, in youngsters’ social lives and correspondence, in Gaelic language classes, and families, adults hoped that young Irish Americans would absorb a love for Ireland. These ideas of

Irish identity created an opportunity to fashion a multiethnic America that allowed immigrant heritage and American nationality to exist simultaneously. Studying the methods and messages of lessons in Irish heritage for children allows one to more fully understand the creation of Irish American ethnicity and the development of ethnic groups in the United States. Irish-Catholic migrants epitomized immigrant desires to maintain their culture and not lose their children to excess Americanization. A similar story would appear often in the history of immigration to the United States.35

34 Gilbert Osofsky, “Abolitionists, Irish Immigrants, and the Dilemmas of Romantic Nationalism,” American Historical Review 80, no. 4 (1975): 900; Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 28; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 337-338; Moss, “St. Patrick’s Day Celebrations,” 133. 35 Russell Kazal, “The Lost World of Pennsylvania Pluralism,” Journal of American Ethnic History 27, no. 3 (2008): 7-42; Diana Selig, Americans All: The Cultural Gifts Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 3. Recently, scholars have argued that ideas of multiculturalism and cultural pluralism are older than academics have traditionally believed. Russell Kazal, for instance, asserted in 2008 that instead of seeing the idea of cultural pluralism first articulated in the early twentieth century, certain historians and ethnographers were advocating the idea in the years just before the turn of the twentieth century. Similarly, Diana Selig wrote about the “cultural gifts” movement that flourished in the years after World War I to demonstrate that multiculturalism was in fashion much earlier than the 1960s. In another recent book, Jeffrey Mirel examined the intersections of education and Americanization for “new immigrants” beginning in the 1890s to argue that immigrant interactions with Americanization programs

17 Irish Americans did not succeed in teaching children to love their heritage in precisely the way they hoped. The forces of Americanization were sometimes too strong to allow children to acquire deep ethnic sensibilities. Irish Americans found they had little power to ensure, for instance, that children would learn to value Celtic heritage in public schools or their social lives. In spaces where Irish-American parents had more control over their children, such as in parochial schools or at home, many tried to include reminders of Irish identity in childhood lessons. In order to explain how latter-generation

Irish Americans identified with their Irish ancestry, it is necessary to look at the cultural values and lessons the second generation learned growing up. The identification with

Irishness that so many second-generation Irish Americans exhibited through their marriage choices, living patterns, religious affiliation, and attitudes toward life in

America did not come about accidentally.36 Adults actively encouraged and created Irish identity for their children and hoped to see “Irish American” as a distinct identity within the broader panoply of American people.

began to replace “the narrow Anglo-Saxon conception of the country with a vision of the United States as a nation enriched by its diversity.” Jeffrey Mirel, Patriotic Pluralism: Americanization Education and European Immigrants (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 12. My study traces expressions of “ethnic pluralism” to the ideas that Irish Americans had about their children’s Irish and American identities in the nineteenth century. 36 Timothy Meagher, The Columbia Guide to Irish American History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 96.

18 Chapter 1: From a “Little Yankee Rowdy” to a “Genuine Irish Boy:” Catholicism, Irish Heritage, and American Freedom for Irish-American Children

In one of Irish-Catholic author Mary Anne Sadlier’s most popular novels, The

Blakes and the Flanagans, two adolescent boys argue about their Irish, Catholic, and

American identities. Hugh Dillon and Harry Blake, sons of Irish immigrants, attend public school in mid-nineteenth century New York. Harry has been getting into fights at school defending his Catholic faith and his parental homeland against the insults of his classmates. Hugh, in contrast, refuses to identify as Irish, calling Harry a “Paddy” and telling him that “fighting for religion was ‘too Irish-like.’” When Harry responds that he is not a Paddy because he was born in the United States, Hugh asks him why he would fight for the Irish and their religion if he was not Irish himself. “A’n’t your father and mother Irish and Catholic as well as mine?” Harry asks. “Why yes,” Hugh answers, “I guess they are, but that is no rule for me. I’m an American born, and, as for religion, I have as much right to choose for myself as anyone else. If I were you, I wouldn’t fight for the name of a country you never saw, or for any religion in particular; just wait till you choose one for yourself, as a free-born American ought to do.”1

Hugh Dillon epitomized what might happen to the children of Irish immigrants if they did not learn to love Catholicism and, for Sadlier, was the model for an Irishman’s son to avoid. A decline in religious conviction, so the author thought, could lead to a lack of respect for one’s people. For Sadlier, American notions of freedom could corrupt young Irish Americans, causing them to reject their Irish and Catholic heritage and become ashamed of their foreign-born parents. With its messages about the connection

1 Mary Anne Sadlier, The Blakes and the Flanagans, A Tale. Illustrative of Irish Life in the United States (New York: P.J. Kenedy and Sons, 1855), 22-23, 27.

19 between Catholicism and Irishness and its warnings concerning the need for Irish-

American children to learn respect for both ancestral religion and homeland, The Blakes and the Flanagans found a responsive audience and went through five editions from

1855 to 1863.2

The Blakes and the Flanagans, like much Irish-Catholic literature of the time, implored Irish immigrant parents to teach their children a strong faith in order to perpetuate Irish Catholicism and Irish identity in America. Yet while Irish-Catholic leaders wanted their children to be good Catholics and proud of their Irish descent, they also wanted them to be loyal American citizens. Irish-American writings from the Civil

War era therefore reflected struggles in Irish-American communities about protecting children’s religious and national heritage while, at the same time, answering nativist charges that one could not be a good American while identifying as an Irish Catholic. As

Irish Americans grappled with the meanings of identifications like “Irish,” “Catholic,” and “American,” five main themes frequently appeared in Irish-Catholic novels and periodicals in the 1850s, 60s, and 70s.

First, Irish Americans viewed Catholicism as a significant way to perpetuate Irish heritage and culture in the United States for their children. Irish Americans saw books and periodicals as important means to convey this message because this informal education was a valuable and often necessary addition to more formal methods of

2 Charles Fanning, The Irish Voice in America: Irish-American Fiction from the 1760s to the 1980s (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1990), 126. Although novels illuminate the interests and worries of their authors, a book’s popularity also reveals that the story stirred the feelings of the novelist’s audience. Aside from references to certain novels in newspapers, the best indication that readers liked a book is the number of editions through which it passed. The popularity of a novel could also reveal the beliefs of a large part of its readers. Because these novels’ plots centered around tales of emigration, Irishness, and Catholicism and because they were written in English, it is very likely that the majority of readers were Irish Americans, the largest portion of English-speaking Catholics in the country by the mid nineteenth century.

20 religious instruction at home or through the church.3 Some novelists believed that weekly mass and occasional home lessons were not enough to teach children about the association between Irishness and Catholicism because the influences of community and parish were weaker in the United States than in Ireland. Religious influence was strong in

Ireland because the Irish grew into more devout Catholics and Catholicism became fused with a political identity in the mid nineteenth century.4 Due to the religious element in their ethnicity, many Irish Catholics thought Irish identity was connected to Catholicism so inextricably that obligation to religion was synonymous with duty to ancestral land.

Catholicism made the Irish people Irish, as priest Thomas Burke asserted in a lecture in

1872, because “the very first principle” in the mind of an Irishman was “I am not an

Englishman, because I am a Catholic!” Being an Irishman made one a Catholic, Burke

3 Jay Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company, 1985), 205-206, 213, 252-254. Like their Protestant counterparts, Irish Catholics believed one of the most important tasks for mothers was to impart religious principles at home, which for Catholics included teaching children prayers, instructing them in catechism lessons, and practicing devotional exercises. In addition to regular masses, parishes in Irish-American neighborhoods also sponsored activities such as entertainment, fairs, picnics, and sodalities for both adults and children. Although ethnic parishes could provide a sense of Irish-Catholic community and both Church and home were meant to instruct children about their faith, many Irish Catholics worried about Irish-American children beyond the reach of these methods. 4 R.V. Comerford, “Nation, Nationalism, and the Irish Language,” and Lawrence McCaffrey, “Components of Irish Nationalism,” in Perspectives on Irish Nationalism, ed. Thomas E. Hachey and Lawrence McCaffrey (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1989), 9, 38; Jay Dolan, The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 1815-1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 6, 21, 67; Emmet Larkin, The Historical Dimensions of Irish Catholicism (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1984), 68-69, 72-73, 77, 82-83. Early in the century, Irish Catholicism loosely operated under Vatican authority and a minority of Irish people attended church. Religion in Ireland changed when a devotional revolution swept the country in the years surrounding the famine in the 1840s, reshaping the Irish into the most devout Catholics in Western Europe. The devotional revolution overlapped with Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic emancipation movement, which demanded the British repeal laws restricting Catholic political representation, land ownership, and freedom of worship. O’Connell’s campaign, the devotional revolution, and the rise of organized Irish nationalist elements coincided to create a sense of shared identity and unique ethnicity for Irish Catholics, and anti-Catholicism in the United States strengthened the association between Irishness and Catholicism. Emmet Larkin found that only thirty-three percent of Catholics in Ireland attended mass regularly before the famine. Almost fifty years later, in the late nineteenth century, the figure was over ninety percent. The number of priests in Ireland increased from slightly more than 2,000 before the famine to 3,200 twenty years later. There were approximately 1,500 nuns in Ireland in 1850, while in 1870 there were more than 3,700.

21 said, “the two go together.”5 For a number of Irish-Catholic leaders, denying Irish heritage led to a rejection of Catholicism (and vice versa). The unification of Catholicism with Irish patriotism and pride was an important component of the message of some Irish nationalists. Though Irish nationalism ostensibly sought to rally both Catholics and

Protestants for Ireland’s cause, other nationalists, such as the Fenians, framed the Irish issue as one of Catholics versus Protestants and communicated the idea that Catholicism supported Irish identity. Many Irish-Catholic authors subscribed to this idea. They believed that remembering faith and fatherland were mutually reinforcing and that reverence for Catholicism translated to a healthy respect for Irish ancestry.6

Second, the necessity of ensuring Catholicism was compatible with American principles caused Irish-Catholic authors to proclaim their esteem for U.S. institutions and discount anti-Catholic bigotry as unrepresentative of American sentiments. Many

American Protestants claimed that Catholicism was an undemocratic religion based on hierarchical authority whose adherents slavishly followed priests. Irish Catholics thus had to establish Catholicism as a religion that supported American values and allowed Irish

Catholics to be good citizens. The task was to make children proud of their religion and

Irish progenitors while also demonstrating that Catholicism was compatible with republicanism. Irish-American fiction reveals how Irish Catholics struggled to balance the creation of American patriotism with guarding Irish identities in their children.7

5 Thomas H. Burke, O.P., “The Supernatural Life of the Irish People,” in Lectures on Faith and Fatherland (London, n.d.), 117, quoted in Larkin, Historical Dimensions of Irish Catholicism, 85. 6 Timothy Smith, “Religion and Ethnicity in America,” The American Historical Review 83, no. 5 (1978): 1167; Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 164, 297-258. 7 John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1963), 5-7; Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), xiii, 19; Thomas Brown, Irish-American Nationalism,

22 Third, writers believed that Irish children could misconstrue the meaning of

American freedom and use it as license to break with their parents’ religious and cultural traditions. The liberty that Americans “breathed with the air” did not always have salubrious effects on the Irish faith, according to some. The belief that Irish Catholics ignored their religion as soon as they arrived in the United States was so widespread that in a book published in 1868, Irish author and Member of Parliament John Francis

Maguire sought to disprove the notion that “the moment the Irish touch the free soil of

America, they lose the old faith” and “there is something in the very nature of republican institutions fatal to the Church of Rome.”8 The concern applied to children too. Youth bred in the United States, many Catholics feared, would feel free to choose their own religion. Imbedded in this anxiety was the idea that children would see family members as foreigners, whose customs and faith were irrelevant to their American world.9

Fourth, authors saw cities such as Boston and New York as dangers to Irish-

American children’s religious and ethnic identities. Living in an urban environment meant that parents could not easily isolate their children from wayward Protestant youth and other corrupting influences, which could cause Irish children to reject their heritage.

Although some authors observed that cities were overcrowded, dirty, and hindered social or financial advancement, urban spaces posed the most danger because they inhibited

1870-1890 (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1966), 28; Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 294- 298; Fanning, The Irish Voice in America, 140. 8 John Francis Maguire, The Irish in America (New York: D. and J. Sadlier and Co., 1868), 346. 9 Maureen Fitzgerald, Habits of Compassion: Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins of New York’s Welfare System, 1830-1920 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 4, 79; Timothy Walch, Parish School: American Catholic Parochial Education from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Crossroad Publication Co, 1996), 3, 67; Howard Ralph Weisz, Irish-American and Italian-American Educational Views and Activities, 1870-1900: A Comparison (New York: Arno Press, 1976), 45; McCaffrey, Textures of Irish America, 70; Reginald Byron, Irish America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 197; Philip Gleason, Keeping the Faith: American Catholicism, Past and Present (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), 43; Margaret Hallissy, Reading Irish-American Fiction: The Hyphenated Self (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 20-23.

23 traditional Irish ways of life, disrupted Irish virtues, and the iniquity, independence, and anonymity allowed in cities encouraged Irish-American children to abandon their religious and ethnic identities.

Lastly, a number of authors believed that Catholicism was a belief system capable of uniting Irish heritage with American patriotism. Although writers thought that

Catholicism would help perpetuate Irish identity in America and guard against the assimilation of Irish-American children into Yankee Protestants, they expected that devotion to both Catholicism and the memory of Ireland could make Irish-American children patriotic Americans as well. The concerns about children expressed in Irish-

American fiction reinforce the view that many Irish Catholics in the Civil War era thought they could combine Irish-Catholic heritage with American identity. This idea showed some of the early manifestations of a cultural pluralist approach to American nationality. The five main themes indicated that many Irish Americans were persistently concerned about not only the state of Catholicism in the United States, but also the uses of religion for their children’s Irish identity.

These concerns were often prominent in places where Irish-Yankee struggles were strongest, such as New York and New England. Although Irish-Catholic literature and advice manuals reached families across the United States, this story focuses on Irish

Americans in the Northeast. New York or Boston publications, like the Irish-Catholic newspaper the Boston Pilot (later called The Pilot), first serialized many of the novels, and The Pilot’s editor, Patrick Donahoe, published many novels’ first editions.10

10 The Pilot, which changed its name from the Boston Pilot in 1858, was a Catholic newspaper that appealed to the interests of Irish Americans. The Pilot not only ran news from Ireland and covered Catholic and Irish events in America, but it also referred to itself as an Irish-American newspaper. In an October 1870 editorial, the editor [likely Patrick Donahoe, an Irish immigrant who had a part in publishing the

24 Furthermore, with a few exceptions, the fiction explicitly or implicitly takes place in New

York, Boston, or other New England locales. The settings of these novels appealed to a specific audience: Irish-Catholic immigrants in the northeastern United States surrounded by Yankees. Newspapers published in Boston and New York reached many Irish

Americans across the country, but editorials and readers’ letters often showed a particular concern for the urban Irish of the east coast, making Irish-American parents and children in New York and New England the primary targets of the content in this chapter. Because east coast urban centers attracted so many Irish immigrants, Mary Anne Sadlier chose

New York as the setting for her first novel to take place in the United States, Willy Burke.

Using Catholicism to Communicate Irishness

Published in 1850 after serialization in the Boston Pilot, Sadlier’s Willy Burke; or, the Irish Orphan in America, sold approximately 7,000 copies in its first weeks of publication and went through three editions by the end of 1851. The story follows Willy

Burke, a twelve-year-old boy from Ireland, as he travels to the United States with his family. After his father dies on the voyage and his mother later succumbs to illness, Willy is left with an older brother of fifteen, Peter, and two younger sisters. The story centers on Peter and Willy, as the boys’ lives and their views of Catholicism take different paths.

paper from 1838 to 1901] wrote that, after the demise of other older American Catholic newspapers, The Pilot was left with “the seniority of all the Irish-American Catholic journals now in existence,” and that the editor meant to “make each successive issue of THE PILOT more and more worthy of our great Irish- American element, who look to it, and point to it, as their chief organ and advocate.” “Catholic Journalism: A Retrospective,” The Pilot, October 1, 1870. By the 1890s, the newspaper claimed that “the elevation of the Irish race, materially, socially, and morally, is the aim of THE PILOT” and “to keep the Irish-American people acquainted with the best that is being done in all lands by the men and women who own Ireland as a mother” was The Pilot’s objective. “The Pilot,” The Pilot, June 7, 1890. In the twentieth-century, Pilot journalists recognized the paper’s long history of advancing issues important to Irish-American Catholics. A special supplement to the 1979 edition to mark the paper’s one hundred and fiftieth anniversary also discussed the paper’s Irish associations. On the subject of the paper’s role in nineteenth-century Boston, an article stated that “The Pilot was an integral part of Irish-American life in the nineteenth century and…it also mirrors…the Celtic experience in their adopted country.” “From ‘The Jesuit’ to ‘The Pilot,’” The Pilot, September 14, 1979.

25 Using one of her favorite literary techniques, Sadlier presented contrasting characters to show the correct and incorrect ways to be Irish and Catholic in the United States.11

Though he did not use character contrast to convey his points as often as Sadlier, a missionary priest from Ireland, Hugh Quigley, also wrote novels about the threats to both Catholicism and Irish heritage that children faced in America. Quigley, born in

County Clare in 1819, became a priest just before the Irish famine began in the 1840s.

Outspoken in his opinions against the British government, Quigley left Ireland for New

York in 1849 and did missionary work in the United States until his death in 1883.

Quigley’s earliest novel, The Cross and the Shamrock (1853), was popular and sold around 250,000 copies by the 1870s.12 The novel follows the children of the O’Clery family, who must leave Ireland because a Catholic clergyman uncle exposes the cruelty of their Protestant landlords. They settle in Vermont, and the O’Clery children become orphans soon after the story begins, at which time a Protestant family interested in converting them begins to care for the orphans. As Protestants in their community attempt to “save” them from Catholicism, the orphans have only some local Irish laborers to defend their religion. In the course of championing their faith, the children and their adult allies must also vindicate the Irish people against the insults of the Yankees.

In both Willy Burke and The Cross and the Shamrock, the special connection of the Irish people to Catholicism because of centuries of Irish-Catholic self-sacrifice is a prominent theme. Sadlier wrote Willy Burke for Irish-Catholic boys as they struggled with Protestant influences in America, hoping they would identify Catholicism with their brave Irish ancestors. In the book’s first pages, Sadlier used a familiar refrain of Irish-

11 Fanning, Irish Voice in America, 118-120, 122. 12 Ibid., 141, 145.

26 Catholic writers and clergy, telling her youthful readers that it was the Irish people’s special mission to spread Catholicism because of “the ages of suffering and persecution which their fathers have endured for the sake of conscience and religion.”13 Quigley also wrote The Cross and the Shamrock in an effort to teach Irish-American Catholic youth not to forsake their faith or heritage in the anti-Catholic climate of 1850s America. In the story, one of the O’Clery orphans named Eugene dies from the beatings he receives from his Protestant adoptive family for refusing to abandon Catholicism. Quigley called

Eugene a sacrificial victim and told readers that “Erin, even in America, [is] still true to her heaven-appointed destiny – which is, that of being a missionary and a martyr.”14 By keeping their Catholic faith, the Irish in America were fulfilling the duty of the Irish people and maintaining their ancestors’ proud traditions. These ideas strongly established the connection between Catholicism and Irish identity, the very attitudes that some Irish nationalists also promoted.

Thus Catholicism was the religion that tied Irish children in America to their past and their ancestral land. Sadlier supported the notion that respect for Catholicism translated to a reverence for the land of one’s ancestors and family. When Mrs. Burke dies in Willy Burke, she states that she wants her children raised in the same religion as their forefathers. Although the children meet some kind-hearted Protestants and Catholics in America, they form the strongest bonds with priests who are familiar with their Irish

13 Mary Anne Sadlier, Willy Burke; or, The Irish Orphan in America (Boston: Patrick Donahoe, 1850), iii, iv. 14 Hugh Quigley, The Cross and Shamrock; or How to Defend the Faith (Boston: Patrick Donahoe, 1853), 211-212. A letter to The Pilot in February 1885 from an Irish-American child mentioned reading The Cross and the Shamrock, giving evidence that children read the book. “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, February 21, 1885.

27 hometown.15 Sadlier consequently demonstrated that to reject Catholicism would disconnect the children of Irish immigrants from family, friends, and community. In The

Cross and the Shamrock, Quigley also indicated that the Irish in America should regard

Catholicism and Irishness with equal devotion. Writing that the O’Clery orphans’ religious loyalty proved that they were proper Irish children, Quigley attempted to show that maintaining Catholicism was a duty to Ireland. The “cross” of the title and the symbol of familial heritage of faith and nationality is a silver crucifix left to the orphans by their grandfather, which Paul, the eldest child, vows to defend. The titular “shamrock” also communicated the association between Catholicism and Irishness. When Eugene

O’Clery’s adoptive parents confiscate his religious objects, such as a rosary, they also take away a vase of shamrocks that reminded him of Ireland and St. Patrick. Because the elimination of Catholic devotional objects alone did not erase Eugene’s Catholicism, it was also necessary to remove reminders that he was Irish. According to Quigley, denying

Irishness was the first step to shunning the Catholic creed, and he hoped that his novel would inspire young American Irish Catholics to keep their faith and remain proud of their ethnic heritage.16

The significance of the shamrock to Quigley’s message about the cross was not lost on Catholic intellectual and writer Orestes Brownson, who criticized the idea that

Irish-American children should identify Catholicism with Irish heritage. Brownson was a prominent American convert to Catholicism, but as a New England Yankee by birth he disapproved of attempts to tie American Catholicism to Irish Catholicism. In his review of Quigley’s book, Brownson prophesized that the efforts of authors like Sadlier and

15 Sadlier, Willy Burke, 100, 177; Fanning, The Irish Voice in America, 117. 16 Quigley, The Cross and the Shamrock, 8, 53, 59.

28 Quigley to create a love for Ireland in Irish immigrants’ children would end in failure.

Because “the children of Irish parents” sought to rid themselves of their Irishness after they “very naturally fall into the American habits of thought and action,” thought

Brownson, they would also abandon Catholicism if they associated the faith with their

Irish background. For Brownson, Irish nationality in America would inevitably disappear, and he preferred Catholicism not automatically go with it.17 He failed to realize, however, that it was important to Irish parents that their children preserve both religion and heritage to create a bond between generations that immigration threatened to break. As immigrants, Sadlier and Quigley had firsthand experience that Brownson did not possess.

The message that Catholicism forged a connection between Irish children and their ancestry is also present in Sadlier’s The Blakes and the Flanagans. The novel was a widely published book by Mary Anne Sadlier, one of the most prolific and popular writers of nineteenth-century Catholic fiction. Born in County Cavan, she immigrated to

Montreal in the 1840s, where she married James Sadlier, a partner in a firm that became the largest Catholic publishers in the United States; the Sadliers later moved to New York in 1860. She died in 1903, having written more than eighteen novels and collections of stories, each one focusing on an issue she considered important for Irish Catholics.

Sadlier wrote Catholic children’s literature as well as novels for mixed audiences of adults and young people.18 As Catholic scholar John O’Kane Murray wrote in 1886 about

17 Orestes Brownson, “Literary Notices and Criticisms,” Brownson Quarterly Review, Volume II, Third Series (Boston: Benjamin H. Green, July 1854), 269-270. 18 Fanning, The Irish Voice in America, 114-115. Though some of Sadlier’s novels occasionally spoke to Irish-Catholic parents, children mentioned reading her books in The Pilot in the 1880s. One girl wrote to the newspaper’s children’s column to say that The Blakes and the Flanagans was “a splendid story and very instructive.” The column’s editor, Agnes Smiley, agreed and wrote that the novel would be good reading for public school students because it discussed the specific dangers of public schools to Catholic faith and Irish identity. “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, February 21, 1885; “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, March 7, 1885.

29 Sadlier, her work had “a special object in view bearing on the moral and religious well- being of her fellow-Catholics, especially those of the Irish race, to which it is her pride to belong by sympathy as well as by blood.”19 Sadlier’s edifying goals for Irish Catholics are clear in The Blakes and the Flanagans, which focuses on two Irish families who raise their American-born children very differently. While the Blake patriarch, Miles, sends his children to the local ward school in New York City, his brother-in-law Tim Flanagan refuses to send his children to public schools. Much of the story depends on this differentiation, as Sadlier attempted to convince her readers that American common schools caused Irish-Catholic children to revile the Irish, Catholicism, and their parents, while parochial schools created loyalty to Catholicism and respect for Irish heritage.

Thus the Flanagan offspring who attend parochial schools stay true to their religion and the Irish people. Sadlier described the schoolmaster at the parochial school,

Mr. Lanigan, as a staunch Irishman who tries to make his pupils “as thoroughly Irish as himself.” Because of his Irish-themed education, the Flanagan son Ned becomes intensely interested in Irish history and Ireland’s “unequalled fidelity to the faith of

Christ.” The results of a Catholic education for the Flanagan children are not only beneficial for their religious feelings, but also for their pride in their Irish ancestry.20

The idea of the inherent connection between religion and being Irish is a part of

Quigley’s 1873 novel Profit and Loss. The storyline of Profit and Loss, which revolves around a boy named Patrick Mulroony who grows to manhood and rejects his Irish heritage and family because of his education amongst Protestant Yankees, reflected

Quigley’s belief that drifting away from family, nationality, and heritage caused a

19 John O’Kane Murray, A Popular History of the Catholic Church in the United States (New York: J.&D. Sadlier, 1886), 512-513. 20 Sadlier, The Blakes and the Flanagans, 31, 121-122.

30 repudiation of ancestral religion. The story begins in Ireland, where the children of the

Mulroony family learn to value their Irish lineage. The father, Michael Mulroony, spends many evenings in the family’s home in County Kildare “relating to his children the brave exploits of their forefathers.” Michael is even prouder of his living relatives, who have a high position in the Catholic Church, and instructs his children not to disgrace their noble name.21 Quigley thereby demonstrated his belief that esteeming one’s honorable surname stemmed from an Irish and a Catholic identity.

Annie Reilly; or the Fortunes of an Irish Girl in New York, by Irish author John

McElgun, also associated Catholicism with Irishness. The story follows the title character, a teenage Irish girl, from her happy, yet poor, Irish homestead to the United

States. In New York, Annie works as a servant and defends Catholicism against numerous temptations and threats. McElgun attempted to show how clinging to

Catholicism would help immigrants retain Irish virtues. Before Annie leaves home, her mother ensures that Annie knows the tenets of Catholicism because every Irish mother knew the necessity of teaching strong religious values to children who were leaving home.22 The theme, similar to other devotional literature of the time, was that a reliance on Catholicism would preserve the Irish character of young Irish Americans and provide a spiritual link with their ancestral home.

The insistence of the fictional Irish mother that her child understand Catholicism had many parallels in the real world, and the notes that destitute or unmarried mothers left with their children at the doorstep of the New York Foundling Asylum provide

21 Hugh Quigley, Profit and Loss: A Story of the Life of a Genteel Irish-American, Illustrative of Godless Education (New York: T. O’Kane, 1873), 7-8. 22 John McElgun, Annie Reilly; or, The Fortunes of an Irish Girl in New York (New York: J.A. McGee, 1873), 10, 79, 86-87.

31 evidence of mothers’ concerns for both the Catholic and Irish heritage of the children.

When the Sisters of Charity established the New York Foundling Asylum in 1869, they placed a crib in the building’s entranceway so that mothers could leave their infants there anonymously.23 Mothers often added notes with the child’s name, birth date, and baptism.

The majority of these messages from the early 1870s asked the sisters to baptize the child a Catholic, but a significant number also specifically informed the sisters that the child had Irish parents. One such note read: “this child is of Irish parentage, born Sept. 11th,

1870, not Christened, its name is George R. Burke.” Someone left Mary Ellen McLear with a note that said she was “born Dec. 14th, 1870 of Irish parentage, in this city of New

York, not yet christened.” A note from 1873 told the Sisters that a child’s father was a

“wicked Orangeman” and the mother told him the baby was dead but she wanted it raised a Roman Catholic. Willie Lane was “born in the city of New York on April 1st, 1871 of

Irish parents.”24 The majority of mothers leaving babies at the Foundling Asylum believed it was most important that the children were brought up in “the right faith.” But a minority also pointed out the national heritage of the infant, specifically informing the

Sisters that the child had Irish parents. That information would have been largely irrelevant unless the mothers who left babies hoped that their children would grow to understand his or her Irish ancestry.

Letters of Irish Americans to the Irish World newspaper in the 1870s more explicitly stated the belief in the strong association between religion and Irish nationality.

The radical Catholic and Irish-American editor and journalist Patrick Ford started

23 George Paul Jacoby, Catholic Child Care in Nineteenth Century New York: With a Correlated Summary of Public and Protestant Child Welfare (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1941), 177-179. 24 “Notes Left with Children,” Series XIII, Records of the New York Foundling Hospital, New-York Historical Society, New York.

32 publication of the Irish World, one of the most popular Irish-American weekly journals in the late nineteenth century, in New York in 1870. Ford, born in 1837, was only a child when he arrived with his parents in Boston in 1845. Ford served in a Massachusetts regiment in the Civil War and later married a Canadian-born woman of part Irish descent named Odelle McDonald. After editing a few newspapers in Charleston, South Carolina after the Civil War, Ford relocated to New York, where he began publication of the Irish

World. Ford took on the duty of defending Irish-Americans and ensuring they remained proud of their national heritage in the face of discrimination. His paper advocated a radical version of Irish nationalism and he was also an outspoken supporter of political, economic, and labor reform in the United States. He settled in Brooklyn with his family and operated his newspaper until his death in 1913.25 Upon his death at the age of seventy-siz, the New York Times called Ford “one of the foremost champions of the Irish cause” and the “personification of Irish opposition to English rule.”26 With faith in both

Catholicism and Irish nationalism, Ford provided a forum for letter writers to express their hopes and fears about the future for Catholicism and the Irish in the United States.

In the mid-1870s, a number of people sent the World letters about Catholicism and young Irish Americans. Likely referring to the clash between the Catholic Church and the Fenian movement characterized by the papal condemnation of Fenianism in

1870, one man named Conor O’Driscoll sent a letter blaming Catholic clergymen who excommunicated those who supported Irish nationalism for the declining interest in

Catholicism among Irish Americans. These actions resulted in descendants of Irish-

25 James Paul Rodechko, Patrick Ford and His Search for America: A Case Study of Irish-American Journalism, 1870-1913 (New York: Arno Press, 1976), 34, 271-273; James P. Rodechko, “An Irish- American Journalist and Catholicism: Patrick Ford of the Irish World,” Church History 39, no. 4 (1970): 524-525. 26 “Patrick Ford Dead at 76,” New York Times, September 24, 1913.

33 Catholics who left the Church or felt enmity for priests.27 Another editorial in late 1874 theorized why existing Catholic organizations for young men were not more successful, claiming that these societies did not prosper because they were “used to combat and put down Irish nationality.”28

An additional correspondent who signed his name “Alderman” concurred that good Irish-Catholics should also be Irish nationalists. “Alderman” wrote that he hoped

Irishmen in America would not “neglect to teach their children [Catholicism], as they themselves have been taught, and, while they remain true Catholics, let them also remain true Irish rebels to British law in their native land.”29 Identifying Catholicism with Irish patriotism, “Alderman” hoped that teaching Irish-American children to be Catholic would also inculcate an opposition to British rule on which he based Irish identity. In the wake of conflict between Irish nationalists and the Church, these correspondents believed that Catholicism and Irish identity were so intertwined that the Church should have worked with Irish nationalists instead of against them. They also thought that Catholicism should promote Irish nationalist goals. In many ways, Irish-Catholic literature also expressed Irish nationalist ideas, especially concerning the belief that serving Catholicism would also serve Ireland. The Irish World and some of its readers claimed that interest in

Ireland was so strong among young Catholics in the United States that they would stay away from Catholic societies that opposed organizations for Irish independence.

Concomitant with the hope that Catholicism could teach Irish-American children to love Ireland was the fear that children of Irish immigrants too often grew ashamed of

27 “The Growth of Indifferentism,” Irish World, October 3, 1874. 28 “Y.M. Catholic Associations,” Irish World, November 21, 1874. 29 “Progress of Catholicity,” Irish World, October 3, 1874.

34 being Irish Catholic. As nativism became a national political force in the 1850s, both

Sadlier and an Irish-American priest and author named John Roddan expressed their worries in fiction that Irish-American children would shun their religious and ethnic heritage because of contact with nativists. Early in Willy Burke, the children’s schoolmaster admonishes them before they leave Ireland to “never be ashamed of your country, as they say some grow to be, but always be proud of being born in poor old

Ireland…the Island of Saints.”30 John O’Brien; or, The Orphan of Boston (1856), by

Father John Roddan also reflected the fear that Protestant influences would cause children to reject Catholic faith and national ancestry out of shame. Near the novel’s end, when the narrator John O’Brien has grown up and survived myriad attempts to deprive him of Catholicism in bigoted Boston, he meets a twelve-year-old orphan named Patrick

Gallagher. When questioned, Patrick reveals that he does not attend church because he would be ashamed to go to a “Paddy church.” Because he was born in Boston, Patrick claims he is not Irish, but O’Brien lectures him about the respect he should give his parents’ homeland. “But your parents were Irish,” O’Brien tells Patrick, adding that if they were alive again, “would they not say, Is this our boy? and it is thus he insults God, disgraces our Church, scandalizes our country, and tears our hearts?”31 An anti-Irish-

Catholic atmosphere in America might cause some Irish-American children to become ashamed of where their parents had come from, and according to a number of Irish-

Catholic authors, children’s shame about Ireland was all too common.

In other stories, Quigley and Sadlier editorialized directly to their audiences, expressing disgust with those of Irish descent in the United States who hid their heritage

30 Sadlier, Willy Burke, 10. 31 Rev. John T. Roddan, John O’Brien; or, The Orphan of Boston (Boston: Patrick Donahoe, 1856), 258- 259

35 and shunned everything Irish. Quigley, for instance, declared that the purpose of The

Cross and the Shamrock was to defend Ireland’s “glorious old faith” and for “the vindication of his native land – his beloved ‘Erin-go-braugh.’” He hoped to exhibit the merits of Irish Catholicism because so many Irish who came to America immediately began to “endeavor to clip the musical and rich brogue of fatherland, to make room for the bastard barbarisms and vulgar slang of Yankeedom.” The book would teach Irish parents in the United States, Quigley hoped, to save their children from the temptations of

Protestantism and irreligiousness and keep them proud of their Irish heritage.32 Another of Sadlier’s popular novels, Old and New; or Taste versus Fashion (1862), concerned the dangers that Irish Americans’ ambitious desires to reach the middle class posed to Irish customs and religion. At the end of her novel, Sadlier directed her readers’ attention to a major issue in Irish-American society, which was “contempt of everything Irish.” Sadlier detested those who sneered at Irish people and their own ancestry, writing “the ‘Pa and

Ma’s Irish, but I can’t help that,’ is disgustingly prevalent in this country [the United

States].” She pleaded for “all intelligent Irish parents, teachers, and, above all, priests, to set their faces against these ridiculous airs.”33 If only Irish-American children would learn what Ireland had done for civilization and particularly for worldwide Catholicism,

Sadlier believed, they would cease to disclaim Irish identity in America.

In their fiction, authors of the mid nineteenth century such as Sadlier, Quigley, and Roddan hoped to arrest not only the loss of religious faith for Irish-American children, but also prevent children’s disgrace about their Irish origins. For many Irish

Catholics in the United States in the nineteenth century, Catholicism was the link that

32 Quigley, The Cross and Shamrock, title page, 7-8. 33 Mary Anne Sadlier, Old and New; or Taste versus Fashion (New York: D. and J. Sadlier and Co., 1862), 480-484.

36 united children with their parents and forebears. In fact, Sadlier wrote in Old and New if the “young sons and daughters of the Irish race in America” were practicing Catholics, “it will be easy to make them love and honor Ireland.”34 One of the main messages of

Catholic fiction was that inculcating Catholicism created children who respected their parents and remained proud of their Irish heritage.

Catholicism: Compatible with American Values

Catholic writers not only wanted Catholicism to help perpetuate Irish culture for the children of Irish immigrants, but they also felt it was necessary to assert the compatibility of Catholicism and American patriotism. Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, Catholic writers often included admiration for American republicanism in their narratives, expressing their belief that Catholic religion, Irish ethnicity, and American nationality were reconcilable. Hugh Quigley’s Profit and Loss

(1873) lauded American principles. The lack of an established church for the country was beneficial to a Catholic’s freedom of conscience and no landed aristocracy could usurp the land Irishmen owned in America. Quigley wrote that the United States was a land of abundance, where “the necessaries and luxuries of life are…within the reach of all men,” and the American people were the most hospitable on earth.35 The advantages of

American liberty were part of McElgun’s Annie Reilly as well. As he described the mood of migrants onboard ships when they first saw land, McElgun wrote that in America the immigrants “know tyranny can claim them no more, and that every advantage, every justice allowed an honest people on earth” will be theirs.36 Although Irish-Catholic

34 Ibid., 484. 35 Quigley, Profit and Loss, 284-287. 36 McElgun, Annie Reilly, 129

37 authors realized that their co-religionists were obliged to show their love of the United

States, their admiration was not necessarily merely flattery. Rather, it likely reflected the real value that Irish Catholics often placed on the blessings of American freedom.

Another aspect of the union of Catholicism with love for America was the assertion of the substantial role of Catholics in American history. In Quigley’s story The

Cross and the Shamrock, an Irish laborer named O’Dwyer who lives near the O’Clery orphans in their rural Vermont town takes issue with a Protestant character’s claim that

Catholicism does not belong in the United States. Saying that America was “the land of liberty, where no form of religion is dominant, and where all are equally protected,”

O’Dwyer adds that Catholics discovered America and Catholic nations supported the

American revolutionaries against their Protestant English and German enemies.37 These statements were a common part of American Catholic efforts in the nineteenth century to demonstrate that Catholics had played an integral and patriotic part in American history.

Teaching children about the important involvement of Catholics in the American past was also a prominent component of a children’s magazine called The Young

Catholic, which first appeared in October 1870. Father Isaac Hecker, a Catholic writer and lecturer, created and edited The Young Catholic, and the views in the magazine reflected Hecker’s beliefs that the United States would play an important role in Catholic development.38 The magazine recognized that the children of Irish immigrants should learn American patriotism, and so the magazine’s writers placed great importance on the

Catholic history of the United States. In each issue, a writer known as Uncle Ned also answered letters and provided riddles and puzzles to solve. Some of these puzzles, for

37 Quigley, The Cross and the Shamrock, 175. 38 Dolan, The American Catholic Experience, 308.

38 example, asked the children for places in the United States named after Catholic saints. In one of Uncle Ned’s letters to children, he told them to pray that they would become more faithful to the Catholic Church and “more true and noble citizens of this glorious republic…under whose flag it is a blessing to live.”39 Hecker and the writers for The

Young Catholic believed Catholicism had a special mission in the United States and also knew that they should cultivate the American loyalty of Catholic children to show that

Catholics were good citizens.

Catholic writers and prelates who wanted to express their love for the United

States also had to reconcile the apparent contradictions between a land of religious freedom and the bigotry of anti-Catholic and anti-Irish nativists. During the decade prior to the Civil War, the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing party gained notoriety while emigration from Ireland continued on a large scale in the aftermath of the Irish famine.

Many Irish Catholics hoped that the spirit of Know-Nothingism would fade once

Catholics established themselves as devoted Americans, but they also did not want to lose their Irish identity. An editorial from Orestes Brownson in his publication Brownson’s

Quarterly Review in July 1854 that suggested Irish Americans cease being Irish consequently drew severe criticism from many Irish Catholics. Commenting on the current nativist agitation, Brownson told the Irish and other immigrants that they “must ultimately lose their own nationality and become assimilated in general character to the

Anglo-American race.”40

39 “Uncle Ned’s Letters,” The Young Catholic, Vol. 1, No. 12, September 1871. Special Collections, Georgetown University Library, Washington, D.C. 40 Orestes Brownson, “Native Americanism,” Brownson Quarterly Review (July 1854), 336-337. In the same passage, Brownson seemed to speak directly to those Irish Americans who hoped for their children to carry on Irish heritage in America. He wrote: “no nationality here can stand a moment before the Anglo-

39 Transformation into Anglo-Americans was exactly what many Irish Catholics resisted, instead holding out hope that they could be Irish and American. Although he did not directly reference Brownson’s idea, in August 1854 the Archbishop of Baltimore,

Irish-born Francis Kenrick, penned a letter to Bishop of Boston John Fitzpatrick, the son of Irish immigrants. Kenrick wrote about American loyalties and Irish lineage, perhaps feeling the need to contest Brownson’s comment. Kenrick stated that it was difficult for the Irish to “divest ourselves of our Nationality,” but that the Irish in America nonetheless “love the free institutions of this country.” With either wishful thinking or a genuine confidence in the American people, Kenrick added that the bigots and “bankrupt politicians are not the fair representations of American feeling.”41 Kenrick wanted to combine Irish and American nationality within the Catholic Church, but recognized that foreign-born Catholics would have to profess their loyalty to the United States.

The hope that American people would prove accepting and generous characterized the feelings of many Catholic clergy and lay people. Sadlier showed that she believed as much in her conclusion to Old and New. She wrote that the children of

Irish parents who displayed their dislike of Irish people and ideas would only inspire pity and scorn because respect for one’s heritage was important to being a good American.42

John McElgun expressed similar sentiments in Annie Reilly. McElgun acknowledged that many people insulted the religion of Irish Catholics, but claimed that the feelings that prompted those insults were “as far from being American as cowardice is.” McElgun also wrote that it was a mistake for Irish people to repudiate their heritage to become

American…there is, therefore, no use for any other nationality to strive to preserve itself on our soil.” Brownson, “Native Americanism,” 336. 41 Francis Patrick Kenrick to Right Reverend and Dear Sir [Bishop John Fitzpatrick], August 26, 1854, John Fitzpatrick Papers, RG I.5.1, Archives of the Archdiocese of Boston, Braintree, Massachusetts. 42 Sadlier, Old and New, 480-481.

40 acceptable to Americans. After a character denies being Irish or Catholic to ingratiate herself with the American upper class, despite her Irish-Catholic parentage, another character claims that Americans would not accept her because “none despise the mean and false-hearted more than the Americans.”43 Kenrick, Sadlier, and McElgun chose to square anti-Irish-Catholic prejudice with Irish Americans’ patriotism by claiming that religious discrimination and nativism were not truly American principles. These Irish

Catholics agreed that they and Irish-American children should profess faithfulness to

American institutions and maintained a confidence that they could integrate with open- minded Americans.

Another way for Irish immigrants and their children to become more American, asserted Bishop John Lancaster Spalding, was to own land in western states. Spalding’s

The Religious Mission of the Irish People and Catholic Colonization appeared in 1880 and reiterated arguments about the unity of the Catholic religion and Irish people. While not of Irish immigrant stock himself, Spalding, the Bishop of Peoria, Illinois and the author of numerous parochial school textbooks, wanted to see the Catholic Church perpetuate Irish culture. He also knew that the Irish should firmly establish themselves as

Americans. In his argument to convince Irish immigrants to leave eastern cities and move west, Spalding claimed that the Irish were intensely American and that owning American land - rather than renting ramshackle tenements - would tie them more strongly to the country. The Catholic Church, furthermore, was capable of redeeming the Irish city dwellers, restoring their native morals and inculcating American patriotism by helping

43 McElgun, Annie Reilly, viii, 129, 212.

41 settle them on their own land.44 Spalding appealed to Irish-Catholic families with his argument about the relationship between land and American loyalty, but he likely also addressed Americans who doubted the true commitments of Irish-Catholics and their children. The messages about Catholicism and Americanism to Irish-American children, then, were integral to the larger goal of Irish-Catholics in the United States to prove their allegiance to the country and unite their admiration for America with their adherence to their faith and ancestry.

The Dangers of American Freedom for Irish-Catholic Faith

Even if many Irish-Catholic writers wanted children to believe in the benefits of

American freedom and hoped cynical nativists would see that republicanism and

Catholicism were reconcilable, literature often portrayed Irish-Catholic children who believe that American values like freedom of thought and conscience liberated them from following Irish-Catholic traditions. In her novel Willy Burke, Sadlier compared the older brother, Peter, who is susceptible to mockery of his religion and promises of wealth in exchange for conversion, with Willy, the pious Catholic boy who proudly defends his faith and Irish heritage. Sadlier depicted Peter’s choices as wrong because they were led by desire of monetary success and superficial social acceptance. Instead of listening to the advice of his priest, Peter vows: “I’ll just begin to think and speak for myself.”45 He compares his Protestant friends, whom he wants to emulate because they are native-born

Americans and independently minded, with Irish Catholics, who Peter believes unthinkingly follow their parents’ religious convictions.

44 John Lancaster Spalding, The Religious Mission of the Irish People and Catholic Colonization (New York: Catholic Publication Society, 1880), 142, 148, 151, 155. 45 Sadlier, Willy Burke, 195.

42 McElgun also employed contrasting characters to illustrate the idea that it was possible to take the concept of American freedom too far. In the novel, the titular character’s love interest, James O’Rourke, has to flee Ireland because of false criminal charges against him and meets a lapsed Irish Catholic in America. Inquiring for a nearby chapel, James finds a young man named Dooley who claims that he cares nothing for chapels or religion. James believes Dooley is a Catholic because Dooley had come from

Ireland. Dooley replies, in a thick Irish brogue, that he had been Catholic, but in the

United States he lost all respect for religion because “a man soon gets brave in America.”

James says he believes it is cowardly to deny the religion of one’s forefathers, to which

Dooley answers: “what do I care what me forefathers belaved, or what me father or mother belaves either. I must look out for meself now.”46 Dooley epitomizes the selfishness and disdain for family history that could seize Irish Catholics in the United

States. As Dooley’s apathy about his ancestors’ faith reveals, Catholicism connected an immigrant to his family and served as a link to his past. By breaking with Catholicism,

Dooley was also breaking with his Irish background and attempting to forge a new

American identity that valued personal liberty above ties to others. Dooley speaks in a think Irish accent, however, which McElgun may have included to show the foolishness of Dooley’s assertion that he was American, capable of rejecting his identity and its religious associations. Dooley’s accent betrayed him as Irish, so trying to blend in with

Americans by rejecting Catholicism was misguided and weak.

Advice manuals to American Catholic parents imparted similar messages as

Catholic fiction about the need for Irish-American children to learn respect for Irish

46 McElgun, Annie Reilly, 180-181.

43 Catholicism amidst American freedoms. One such manual from 1877, Bernard O’Reilly’s

The Mirror of True Womanhood, discussed the traditions of Ireland and explained the differences between the homes of English-speaking Catholics in the United States and those “in the Old Country.” O’Reilly wrote that the Irish people had carefully preserved the traditions of Catholicism, particularly reverence for parents and religious teachings. It was too easy, however, for Irish-Catholic families in American cities to neglect these lessons of tradition and faith. O’Reilly urged his readers to follow the old ways “amid the civil and religious freedom enjoyed in their adopted country.” O’Reilly believed that the

Irish had an in-born quality of civility, yet this politeness had “been sadly forgotten in the new” homes of immigrants and their descendants. These traits had been present in Ireland because of Catholicism and the people’s religiosity, but without Catholic atmosphere in which to foster these manners, O’Reilly warned that this behavior would be more difficult to teach young people.47 The idea that American concepts of individual liberty and religious openness threatened Irish values carried through from the 1850s in Sadlier’s novels to the 1870s in McElgun’s fiction and O’Reilly’s advice to mothers. While

Catholics valued many American institutions and rights, some Irish-Catholic writers warned that promiscuous religious ideas and American emphasis on personal freedom could tempt Irish-American children to abandon Irish traditions.48

In addition to the potential dangers of American notions of individual religious choice, Catholic writers like Sadlier worried about an American obsession with “the

47 Bernard O’Reilly, The Mirror of True Womanhood; A Book of Instruction for Women in the World (New York: P.J. Kenedy and Sons, 1894), 171-173, 176-177, 278-279. Originally published in 1877, the book went through fifteen editions in its first five years and by 1894, was in the twenty-eighth edition. 48 John McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003), 36-37. As McGreevy argues, Catholics believed freedom was less a matter of personal autonomy and more one of making choices that benefitted society and community. In this context, using freedom to break away from one’s community was dangerous.

44 new” and disdain for Old World ways. In Willy Burke, for example, Willy’s older brother

Peter decides to stop arguing about religion with his Protestant peers and co-workers, saying that he will leave the arguing to his younger brother “if he chooses to make a fool of himself with his old Irish notions.” Sadlier continued the idea in The Blakes and the

Flanagans as she described the Blakes’ daughter Eliza, who learns to ignore Ireland in her education. Attending what Sadlier ironically deemed a fashionable academy, Eliza asks about the history of Ireland. Her teacher shouts that Eliza knows enough about

Ireland (which is very little) and that if the teacher “had the misfortune…to be born of

Irish parents – which is, happily, not the case – I would endeavor to forget it myself, and make others forget it too.” Eliza also learns that Irish poet Thomas Moore’s melodies are outdated. Most Americans in Sadlier’s story thought Irishness and Catholicism were antiquated and old-fashioned, with no place in modern America.49 Americans felt they had no need of the past, Sadlier suggested, and the foundation of Protestantism included disdain for tradition. As its title would suggest, Old and New pronounced this theme even more, highlighting the tasteless and costly fashion of newly middle class Irish-American teenage girls who refuse all associations with Irishness. As the girls fawn over two non-

Irish, but rakish, gentlemen, a friend comments that the girls believe “that everything

Irish is low and vulgar…and nothing’s right, or nobody’s worth knowing that isn’t rale

American, or doesn’t look American-like.”50 The folly of new fashions, Sadlier tried to show, caused the children of Irish immigrants to discard their Irish past, as they idolized what they considered to be fully American people or ideas without foreign connotations.

49 Sadlier, The Blakes and the Flanagans, 129-130. 50 Sadlier, Old and New, 229.

45 Irish-American children who disregarded their ancestors’ cultural customs because of new American methods of conduct worried Hugh Quigley as well. As Patrick

Mulroony, the main character in Quigley’s novel Profit and Loss, grows into adolescence, he begins going on picnics and taking sleigh rides with Protestant girls, alarming his mother. He uses both American self-government and the progressive nature of American society to excuse his fraternization with young women. Thinking of his mother’s admonitions to stay away from female company and non-Catholics, Patrick believes these notions “may do very well in Ireland, where people were oppressed by

English laws…but here we make the laws ourselves.” When his mother tells him how the

Irish court a girl, Patrick tells her that “the old country…is old and antiquated in its notions,” adding that “this is a new country, and new ideas prevail in all things.”51

Conceptions of the originality of American society, Quigley warned, could cause children to ignore the traditions of the parents’ homeland.

The dangers of an obsession with modernity and fashion also influenced Bernard

O’Reilly’s advice manual for women, as he cautioned parents against choosing popular

American names for their children instead of the names of saints. Catholic families in the

United States, wrote O’Reilly, were neglecting the “traditions dear to the ‘Old Land.’”

O’Reilly feared that the children of these families “in this liberty and novelty loving generation would blush to bear the name of Patrick…while young girls are ashamed of being called Bridget.”52 O’Reilly combined the idea that the freedom and newness of the

United States threatened Catholics and that living in America would compel Irish-

American children to desire a modern, non-Irish name. While American culture held out

51 Quigley, Profit and Loss, 180 52 O’Reilly, Mirror of True Womanhood, 168.

46 plenty of promises for Irish Catholics, then, some writers thought that ideas about the irrelevance of old country traditions would break the link that Catholicism could provide between Irish-American children and their forebears.

Because Catholicism created a bond between the children of Irish immigrants and their families, some Irish Catholics believed that with weak religious sentiment came a lack of respect for parents or familial background. American-born children were particularly susceptible to becoming ashamed of their Irish parents, Sadlier thought, and too little Catholic education exacerbated the problem. This idea is present in Sadlier’s novel Con O’Regan (1864). The story takes place in a large New England city in the

1840s (probably Boston) and follows Con O’Regan, a recently-arrived Irish immigrant, as he tries to help his friends the Bergen family. The Bergens live in a dirty cellar and have trouble with their irreligious and disrespectful children, especially their oldest son

Patrick, or Patsey. With Patsey as an example, Sadlier warned her readers that an

Irishman’s son born in America thinks himself a native American and considers his parents “mere Irish.” Having had little contact with religion, Patsey refuses to be called

Irish even when he speaks to a priest. When the priest tells him Patrick is a good name for an Irish boy, Patsey says that he is not Irish because he was born in Boston. When asked what name he would rather have, Patsey says that Washington is the best. Though

Sadlier likely would not have begrudged admiration of George Washington, she hoped that becoming American would not mean completely rejecting Irish roots.53

Repudiating Catholicism was part of refusing to be Irish, and without either identification, some asserted, children would not listen to their parents. In Quigley’s book

53 Mary Anne Sadlier, Con O’Regan; or, Emigrant Life in the New World (New York: Sadlier, 1864), 252- 253, 305, 340.

47 The Cross and the Shamrock, the local laborer Murty O’Dwyer discusses how

Catholicism fosters parental respect. O’Dwyer distinguishes the Catholic faith from

Protestantism by asserting that Catholicism teaches obedience and faithfulness and pointing out that Protestants’ children were out of control, irreligious, and disrespectful.54

Toward the end of The Blakes and the Flanagans, Sadlier again argued that once

Catholicism was weak, children grew ashamed of their Irish-Catholic parents. As both

Blake children reach adulthood, they associate with Protestants, eventually marry

Protestant Americans who scorn Catholics, and lack respect for their parents or the traditions, music, or religion of Ireland. Harry Blake only acknowledges his heritage by proclaiming esteem for his Irish background for political purposes. Showing the juxtaposition between Harry’s disdain for Irish Catholics and his fake pride to gain votes from Irish Americans, Sadlier warned voters to beware false Irishmen who spouted patriotism for profit.55 But the larger message was that without a strong Catholic education for Irish-American children, offspring would become disobedient and haughty, betray their virtuous ethno-religious heritage with duplicitous behavior, and grow ashamed of their Irish family.

As Irish-American children severed the connection with their Irish relations, many Irish Catholics believed that their progeny would seek to change their names and divest themselves of markers of Irish identity. Faithfulness to Catholicism, some hoped, could prevent that disassociation. A letter to the Irish World in late 1874 exhibited the fear that Irish Americans and their children would lose their heritage trying to adapt to

American life. A “Catholic M.D.” wrote to warn Irish American New Yorkers that Irish

54 Quigley, The Cross and the Shamrock, 133-134. 55 Sadlier, The Blakes and the Flanagans, 132, 245-246, 248, 333-334, 365, 368.

48 immigrants were not accustomed to living amongst so many non-Catholics and did not have the necessary willpower to defend their religion. Their desire to assimilate was too strong, the writer thought, and in New York, “their lot is cast amongst those who hate them…both for their being Irish and Catholic, [and] they find it expedient to lapse into the ways of their neighbors or employers.”56 Quigley’s Profit and Loss also showed great concern over losing traditional Irish-Catholic culture among the descendants of ambitious

Irishmen. Once the Mulroonys are in the United States, the patriarch Michael begins dabbling in local politics and sends his children to public school. They settle in

Minnesota and Michael’s son Patrick attends a Yankee academy to meet the children of some powerful local families and “get the real refined Yankee nasal accent.” Michael’s wife tries to reason with him that going to a Yankee school will cause their son to turn in shame from his family, religion, and ancestry, but Michael insists that Patrick can learn

Catechism and his prayers at church and at home.57

As Patrick Mulroony goes through his schooling, a Yankee-Protestant identity replaces his Irish self. It begins, predictably, with his Irish name. Once he announces his appellation to the class, his classmates laugh, asking him if he is related to Saint Patrick,

“how many potatoes it took to make the saint’s beads” or if he has a sister named Biddy.

The schoolmaster tries to convince Michael to let his son change his name, because after he had the proper accent, Patrick could pretend to be a native American and “rid himself of the odium of having been of Irish parentage or birth.” Quigley seized upon many Irish

Americans’ fear and anger about those who changed their Irish names in the United

56 “The Church’s Loss,” Irish World, October 3, 1874. 57 Quigley, Profit and Loss, 32-36.

49 States to pass as non-Irish. Once an Irishman changed his name, the moral degradation accompanying the denial of Irish heritage was sure to follow.

But an additional influence on Patrick’s decision to change his Irish name is feminine persuasion. Once the teenage Patrick begins attending the co-educational academy, feminine charms draw him further from his pious parents. Patrick has difficulty resisting the flattery of a female admirer who prevails upon him to change his name to

P.M. Ronay. Quigley conspicuously included allusions to dangerous American notions about sex roles, writing that one character attended a women’s rights convention and a friend of Patrick’s is associated with Victoria Woodhull. The co-education practiced in non-parochial schools was at issue because Protestant temptresses lured Patrick away from saying his prayers, helping with family chores, or attending the Catholic church.

These American Protestant women also brought him into contact with risky ideas about the equality of the sexes that threatened to disrupt traditional Irish views on marriage, divorce, and women’s rights.58

This common fear of Irish immigrants, and indeed many immigrant parents, about their children’s socialization and romantic habits thus played a large role in Quigley’s storyline. Quigley contrasted Irish conceptions about devotion to family with supposedly

American ideas of freedom from such obligations. Young Irish Americans could take the idea of liberty too far and think they could decide for themselves what name to have,

58 Quigley, Profit and Loss, 59, 70, 187. Victoria Woodhull was a well-known free-thinker and women’s rights advocate who ran for president in 1872. Sadlier, Old and New, 127-130. Quigley was certainly not the only Irish-Catholic to denigrate women’s rights movements, such as suffrage. Sadlier included a scene in Old and New in which two ladies, Julietta Fireproof and Dorothea Mary Wolfstoncroft Brown, pay a visit to an Irish-Catholic woman collecting signatures on a petition for women’s suffrage. The Irish- Catholic woman refuses to sign, saying that she sees nothing wrong with customs that relegate women to domestic life. O’Reilly, Mirror of True Womanhood, 63-64. O’Reilly also asserted that no Catholic woman thought seriously about women’s rights movements because she understood her place was in the home and enjoyed her station in life.

50 what ethnicity with which to identify, and which religion to practice. Refusing to be bound by Irish traditions, Patrick imbibes harmful notions about his Irish identity from

American girls and distances himself further from what he considers his outmoded family, religion, and heritage.59 But there was an extra element here to the conventional generational divide between immigrant parents and their children. American romance not only threatened children’s respect for family traditions, but concerned Irish-American children’s willingness to identify as Irish at all.

The Dangers of Urban Life to Children’s Irish-Catholic Identities

The urban environments in which many Irish immigrants were attempting to bring up families contributed to widening the generational divide, some Catholic writers believed, because poor and overworked Irish parents could not keep their children from learning disobedience and disdain for the Irish from Yankee children in their midst.

Efforts to convince Irish immigrants to leave cities such as Boston and New York and settle on farmland farther west began as early as the 1850s, when leading Irish-American figures met in Buffalo in 1856 to decide how they would convince their countrymen to move west. Catholic writers, from Mary Anne Sadlier to Bernard O’Reilly to John

Lancaster Spalding, told Irish-American readers that cities were inhospitable places to raise families because children would fail to learn proper Irish-Catholicism and corrupting influences would turn Irish-American children into Yankee troublemakers.

The express purpose of Sadlier’s novel Con O’Regan was to exhort Irish immigrants to move west. Although published in 1864, Sadlier indicated that she wrote the story in connection with the 1856 Buffalo convention. Through Con O’Regan’s

59 Quigley, Profit and Loss, 123, 180, 274.

51 friends the Bergen family and their problems with their five-year-old son Patsey, Sadlier illustrated the challenges to children’s faith and Irish pride awaiting Irish immigrants if they remained in cities. Early in the novel, the mother Nora Bergen says to Con that urban America is not the right place in which to raise children. Con tells her that in

Ireland, parents would physically discipline their wayward offspring. Overhearing the conversation, Patsey laughs, saying he is “real glad I wasn’t born in Ireland.” Thinking

American freedom applies to everyone, Patsey declares that “there a’nt any whipping allowed here, you know, and I often heard boys say that if Irish Paddies had their way they’d give their children awful usage.” When Con asks if children often speak disrespectfully in America, Nora responds by saying “there’s little respect here for parents.” Sadlier thus criticized the way that American Protestants raised children and lamented that Irish-Catholic methods in controlling children were lost in American cities.

But she also connected children’s insolence with their association with Yankee children. From his time in the common schools and on the streets of Boston, Patsey learns that Patrick is “a nasty Irish name.” After another instance of misbehavior,

Patsey’s father Paul Bergen explains to a guest that Patsey has “been amongst Yankee children so long…that poor Patsey has got some Yankee notions of independence into his head and thinks himself as good…as his Irish father or mother.” Sadlier wrote at length about the negative aspects of American cities, but poor living conditions, unsustainable wages, disease, and crime were only secondary considerations to the threat that urban spaces posed to Irish children’s religion and heritage. For Sadlier, urban conditions contributed to making Irish-American children rebellious, disobedient, and ashamed of their family’s faith and name. Time and again, the Bergens lament that their son runs

52 around on the streets, associates with Protestant Yankee boys, and learns to hate the Irish and their values.60

Moving west causes a complete change in the Bergen children. Once the family settles on farmland in Iowa near the end of the novel, Patsey is proud of being Irish.

Significantly, Patsey also begins attending a parochial school, where he learns to be both a self-respecting Catholic and pleased with his heritage. Con, who lives near the Bergens in Iowa, at one point mentions a bunch of shamrocks to Patsey, who grows excited at the prospect of real shamrocks from Ireland. Con is content that moving out of the city

“changed the little Yankee rowdy into a genuine Irish boy, full of the traditionary [sic] virtues of his people, and susceptible to every noble and generous feeling.” By concentrating on the calm demeanor and kind attitude of Patsey after his move to Iowa,

Sadlier showed how American cities prevented the children of Irish immigrants from inheriting conventional Irish ideals. In one of the final scenes of the book, Patsey tells his family that he is proud of the name Patrick and thinks it better than the names of his former Yankee friends in Boston, displaying his transformation back into an Irish boy. If parents wanted to keep their children devoted to them, the novel taught, they would inculcate an Irish identity and respect for the old country’s traditions. Sadlier made it clear that religion was inextricably connected to Irish identity and would enable parents to command respect from their progeny.61

Later in the nineteenth century, other Irish Catholics and Catholic clergymen expressed their concerns about the corruption of American city life and its influence on children. Cities endangered the faith of young Irish Americans in particular, according to

60 Sadlier, Con O’Regan, 21, 24, 25, 73, 325. 61 Ibid., 372-373, 381.

53 some who wrote to the Irish World, because the urban Irish were the poorest Catholics and unable watch over their offspring. Parents were so busy working that the children were free to run and play unsupervised in the streets of New York. Crime and truancy brought the Irish children into contact with the agents of such organizations as the

Children’s Aid Society, which converted them and turned “the sons or grandsons of Irish and Catholic parents” into “the bitterest and most vindictive enemies of their fathers’ race and creed.”62 One article exclaimed that “England’s diabolical oppression of Ireland,” which forced the Irish from Ireland, led to the large number of poor Irish children in New

York and most cities of the northeast.63 John Lancaster Spalding’s The Religious Mission of the Irish People and Catholic Colonization (1880) also concentrated on the dangers of

American city life for traditional Irish ways. Because he wanted Irish immigrants to take up farming, Spalding centered his arguments on the perils that urban America posed to the religion, morals, and heritage of Irish immigrants’ children. Claiming that an appropriate family life was not possible in cities, Spalding wrote that urban youth learned foul language, lacked the traditions that children obeyed in Ireland, and lost their moral inheritance. Spalding added that children had too much independence in cities and the temptations and stimuli of urban life took power away from the family and buried the ancestral customs of Ireland.64

Irish-Catholic critiques of American urban environments were common, but taking these criticisms together with expressions of admiration for American institutions showed mixed opinions about life in the United States for Irish immigrant families.

62 “Kidnapping – Sectarian Recruiting Agencies in New York and Elsewhere,” Irish World, May 9, 1874. 63 “Hints from the Enemy,” Irish World, August 1, 1874. 64 Spalding, Religious Mission of the Irish People, 87-88, 93.

54 Quigley’s occasional praise for the country evinced this conflicting attitude about

American freedom. The United States furnished Catholicism with legal protections and

Catholicism had a long history in the country, but American children behaved irreligiously and Catholic children did not have examples of faith surrounding them as in

Ireland. Like Quigley, John McElgun was of two minds about the country’s costs and benefits. McElgun understood that America provided Irish immigrants a refuge from the poverty and suffering of Ireland. Americans were not mean-spirited, the author claimed, and the country offered prosperity to those willing to earn it.

At the same time, however, Catholic writers remained skeptical of the freedom that Americans allowed and the assimilation they appeared to require. As Sadlier put it in the preface to her 1863 novel Bessy Conway, dangers awaited Irish youth after they left the safety of “the old Christian land, where virtue and religion are the basis of society.”65

The ties of family and land that existed in Ireland were broken in the United States and, these authors feared, it gave young Irish Catholics leave to deny their religion, their family, and their heritage. Bernard O’Reilly also discussed his mixed feelings on the

United States, writing that he did not undervalue “the many priceless blessings which flow from American liberty and the working of our free institutions,” but that he also believed that Irish immigrants needed special instruction for preserving the “ancestral inheritance of faith, of morality, of honor, of honesty” in their children.66 Although Irish-

Catholic writers often stated that they valued American liberty, they also believed that

American life could be dangerous for Catholicism and that without the faith the association with Ireland and ancestors would be lost on the children of Irish immigrants.

65 Mary Anne Sadlier, Bessy Conway; or, The Irish Girl in America (New York: P.J. Kenedy and Sons, 1863), iv. 66 O’Reilly, Mirror of True Womanhood, 180-181.

55 Catholicism: Combining Love for Ireland with Loyalty to the United States

Irish-Catholics’ conflicting attitudes toward American civil and religious liberties combined with the necessities for Catholics to prove their commitment to the United

States, resulting in efforts to create a synthetic identity that would incorporate Irish,

American, and Catholic loyalties. The efforts serve as examples of early Irish-American articulations of an idea that would come to be known as cultural pluralism. Likely in response to the nativism of the 1850s and comments such as those by Orestes Brownson,

Sadlier tried to show that Catholicism left room for both Irish and American feelings in

The Blakes and the Flanagans (1855). Though Sadlier stated that young Ned Flanagan’s

Catholic education made him more Irish, she also pointed out that practicing Catholicism and respecting Ireland did not detract from American fidelity. Ned Flanagan’s parochial education taught him the details of American history with a “proper estimate of the honor of American citizenship.” But echoing a common claim of many nativists, Miles Blake, the head of the Blake family who sends his children to public school, says that the sons of

Irishmen in America must become Americans and public schools were the only place to learn Americanism. “My idea is that men can’t be Irishmen and Americans at the same time,” Miles explained, “they must be either one or the other.” His nephew Ned disagrees, saying:

I was brought up…under Catholic – nay, more, under Irish training; I am Irish in heart – Catholic, I hope, in faith and practice, and yet I am fully prepared to stand by this great republic, the land of my birth, even to shedding the last drop of my blood…I love America; it is, as it were, the land of my adoption, as well as of my birth, but I cannot, or will not, forget Ireland. I pity the Irishman’s son who can or does…Yes, my dear uncle, I am both Irish and American.67

67 Sadlier, The Blakes and the Flanagans, 164.

56 Sadlier thought that children should learn to be Irish and American, as she attempted to combat some common charges against Catholic schools, such as their inability to provide good business education or failure to make loyal American citizens.

A similar speech appeared in Sadlier’s Old and New, asserting again that Irish-American

Catholics should have loyalties to two countries. A conversation among military officers in the story leads to talk about patriotism, prompting one American-born young man of

Irish descent to say: “I have two countries: - Ireland, the cradle of my race, the grave of my fathers, the most faithful of Christian nations,” and “the United States of America, the land of my birth…the freest under the sun.”68 Through these ideas, Sadlier argued against nativists who declared that American allegiance left no room for expressions of foreign identities. These speeches illustrated the efforts of American Catholics to combine Irish and American identities for the descendants of Irish immigrants.

The Young Catholic, the youth magazine that Father Isaac Hecker started in 1870, also expressed the possibility that Catholicism could simultaneously teach the children of

Irish immigrants about American patriotism and fidelity to Ireland. In its first issue, the magazine explained what the symbols on the masthead signified. The cross taught the children to love their religion and Jesus Christ, the opening article explained. There was a harp, which was “to show you how much we owe to Ireland for the gift of faith.” An

American flag also appeared to express the idea that “love of country comes next to love of our holy Church.” Significantly, the cross loomed above a globe marked “America” to show that someday Catholicism would triumph in the United States.69 Together, the

68 Sadlier, Old and New, 186-187. 69 The Young Catholic, Vol. 1, No. 1, October 1870.

57 symbols illustrated the most important identities children should adopt: American,

Catholic, and Irish.

Because Ireland was an important part of religious heritage for American Catholic children, The Young Catholic also ran articles about Irish Catholicism. The first issues of the magazine contained numerous articles about the history of Catholicism in Ireland, including the apparently obligatory story of St. Patrick. St. Bridget and Irish churches, along with stories of the English suppression of Catholics in Ireland, also figured prominently in the magazine’s pages. Telling the story of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in

Dublin, the article’s author explained to young readers that Protestants had seized the church from the “Catholic people of Ireland, to whom it rightfully belongs.” Connecting the Irish past with the United States, the author wrote that if the Catholics of Ireland could claim the cathedral as their own, it “would make many hearts beat quick with joy, not only in old Ireland, but also here in Young America.”70 Although Hecker was an

American Catholic of German descent, he understood that Irish heritage was an essential ingredient in American Catholicism. Hecker’s youth magazine exemplified the efforts of many Catholic writers and thinkers to teach young American Catholics respect their Irish background but also devote themselves to the United States.

Many Irish Catholics believed that religion would help children respect their families and ancestors, but numerous Catholic leaders also thought that Catholicism had a legitimate role in American society and were eager to prove that the children of Catholic immigrants would be loyal to the United States. But Catholic literature from the 1850s to the 1870s also showed that authors paired Irishness with Catholic faith as analogous

70 “The Captive Boy, or Ireland’s Saint,” The Young Catholic, Vol. 1, No. 1, Oct 1870; “Saint Bridget and Her Seven Sisters,” The Young Catholic, Vol. 1, No. 3, December 1870; “St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin,” The Young Catholic, Vol. 1, No. 6, March 1871.

58 identities. The children who read these novels heard about the dangers to their faith in the

United States and saw that those who wanted to rob them of Catholicism also wanted to take away their connection to Ireland and their Irish family. For parents, the danger was even more palpable. Their children’s religious apostasy would cause them to become ashamed of their ethnic heritage and disrespectful. As the novels suggest, however, Irish

Catholics had to tread a fine line between encouraging their children’s allegiance to their new home and not allowing them to become too American by adopting Yankee modes of conduct, cultural patterns, or religious ideas.

Various Irish-American adults, including writers, editors, and parents, expected children to learn a version of Catholicism that corresponded with Irish traditions, Irish nationality, and Irish pride in heritage. Catholicism was much more than a religion for many Irish-Catholic immigrants; it was a belief system capable of teaching American children to respect the customs of their foreign-born parents. Many hoped that fostering a strong sense of Catholicism in their children would prevent the shame that youth might feel about their ancestry. Devout Catholics wanted their children to remain true to religion for the benefit of their immortal souls. But there was also the sense that in life children would remain obedient to their family if religion taught them to respect their ancestors. Some Irish Catholics believed that Ireland and the United States could occupy equal places in the loyalties and identities of Irish-American children. Mary Anne Sadlier stated it well at the end of her novel Old and New: “why, then, should not the descendants of the Catholic Irish in America love and honor the Old Land…not that I would have them love America less…but I would have them respect Ireland more.”71

71 Sadlier, Old and New, 485.

59 Numerous Irish-American Catholics hoped for the same. Writers like Sadlier and

Quigley, who began their novels for American audiences in the 1850s, wrote in a context of nativist suspicion of the loyalties of Irish Catholics and also felt that, during the rise in

Know-Nothingism and a general onslaught against Irish Catholic culture, Irish-American children needed special knowledge to defend themselves and their people. These feelings continued in Sadlier and Quigley’s later novels, as well as those of other authors, as the shadow of nativism colored subsequent publications in the 1860s and 1870s.

Though they had not given up the hope that Catholicism could encourage an Irish identity by the 1870s, the need for Catholics to prove their American patriotism was still present and many Irish Catholics understood that the United States would claim an ever- larger place in their children’s hearts. Irish-Catholic literature represents some common hopes and fears about Irish-American children’s sense of Irish identity and shows how some adults wanted to keep Irish heritage alive. But, although many children read these novels, it is difficult to prove that children always took the stories’ lessons to heart.

Religion, then, would not be the only method that Irish-Catholics used to communicate

Irish heritage to Irish-American children. Others attempted to utilize schools to teach children about Irish culture, hoping, perhaps, these lessons would be more effective.

60 Chapter 2: No Room for Irish Lessons: Irish-themed Education and the Successes and Failures of Irish-American Confrontations with Public Schools

Members of Boston’s school board received a lengthy petition from hundreds of

Irish Bostonians in September 1883. The leading petitioner, an Irish-American resident of

Boston named Dan Carroll, and two-hundred-and-three others of “Irish birth or descent” asked the school board to add a course in the “study of the Irish language and literature at the next ensuing term of the evening high school.” The petitioners argued that though they were deprived of learning Irish as they grew, they were anxious for their children to

“have the inestimable pleasure of learning something of their ancestors from pure and unpolluted sources.” To convince the school board to adopt this new course, Carroll and his co-signers claimed that the children’s knowledge of Irish would make them “better citizens of a free and enlightened Republic…where the educational facilities are free and accessible to all.”1 These arguments failed to convince the school board’s Committee on

Examinations. In its decision nearly a month later, the committee stated that knowledge of the Irish language and literature had value, but it was “not of necessary or immediate utility in the affairs of the petitioners, or of the citizens whom they profess to represent.”

The committee rejected the petition, forcing the children of Irish immigrants in Boston, and their parents, to look elsewhere for education about Irish heritage.2

Dan Carroll’s petition demonstrated how these Irish Americans in Boston searched for ways to teach their offspring about Ireland’s cultural legacy through

1 “Petition for a Class in Irish in the Evening High School,” September 11, 1883, City of Boston School Committee Reports, 1883, p. 188-190, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Boston Public Library, Boston (hereafter cited as BPL). 2 “Report of the Committee on Examinations on Petition to Form a Class in Irish in the Evening High Schools,” October 9, 1883, City of Boston School Committee Reports, 1883, p. 221-222, BPL.

61 American public education. The petition and the response from the school board signaled that the goals of Irish parents were not always in line with the objectives of local school boards. Because most public school officials had a mission to Americanize the children of immigrants, teaching pupils about Irish subjects would not form part of their plan. Irish

Catholics sometimes tried to alter these agendas, however, as religion and culture in

American public schools become contentious national issues in the 1870s and 1880s.

Nationalist activity in Ireland and the United States, as well as local and national political developments, caused Irish Americans in New York and New England to push for more education about Ireland in public schools or resist anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiments in local classrooms. The references of Dan Carroll’s petition to pure and unpolluted sources indicated the fear that Irish-American children were learning negatively biased information from English or Protestant-influenced materials. Opinions about public education’s connection to Irish-American children revealed that some Irish Americans imagined that public schools with large numbers of Irish-American students could promote the brand of Irish identity put forward by Irish nationalists. Irish Catholics’ relationship to public schools therefore demonstrated that Irish Americans attempted to create Irish culture in America for children and that worries about children played a large role in that cultural production.

Yet even in Boston and New York in the 1870s and 1880s where Irish Americans were becoming culturally and politically powerful, Irish Americans found that they could not distract educators from their Americanizing mission. So they took part in that mission, but on their own terms. Those concerned with ethnic identity argued that schools should teach children to value their American citizenship, but did not want public school

62 educators to compel Irish children to mix with other Americans so that cultural, ethnic, and possibly religious differences would be unnoticeable. The efforts by Irish-American communities and American educators to foster national and ethnic loyalties in public school pupils showed that opinion leaders, parents, and educators understood the crucial importance of education and hoped to utilize schools to shape the identities of the children of Irish immigrants. But although Irish Americans were able to rid many school systems of anti-Catholic and anti-Irish books and lessons, endeavors to include lessons about Irish heritage were less successful in public than in parochial schools.

To understand the context of Irish Americans’ issues with American public schooling, this chapter briefly examines the development of public school systems. The study then concentrates on the period from 1869 to 1876 because it was a time when controversy about religious issues and sectarian funding in the United States was strongest. Irish Catholics frequently complained about textbooks’ and teachers’ portrayals of the Irish and Catholicism. Fears about Irish-American children neglecting their Irish ancestry became pronounced during the national school controversy in the 1870s and led to numerous local efforts to add Irish subjects to public schools while removing negative biases against Irish Catholicism that continued into the 1880s. But because public schools were so concentrated on Americanization, Irish proponents found it easier to minimize anti-Catholicism than to add lessons on Celtic history and culture.

Beginning from a mix of educational institutions and charities run by various

Protestant denominations, early American school systems began to develop in the

Northeast shortly after U.S. independence. The Town of Boston established a local school committee in 1789 and opened a system of primary schools in 1820.

63 Massachusetts, due to the immense efforts of educational reformer Horace Mann, was an early leader in providing state-wide public schooling in the 1830s. New York City’s

Public School Society, begun in 1805, was a private charitable organization but received government funds to run what were essentially the city’s public schools until the 1850s.

By the years after the Civil War, tax-funded schools were common in the northeastern

United States. Most school systems in northern cities included a primary school, which children typically attended from ages five to eight or nine. Students then graduated to a grammar school, which many left at age eleven or twelve. Those who stayed began to attend high school or a manual training school at fourteen, from which they could graduate at eighteen. It was not the norm to attend high school to receive a classical education, especially for the children of immigrants, both because they often left school to work and because there were few public high schools in many communities. Although by 1888 New York City had three-hundred-and-one schools, there was no public high school in the city until 1898. As an exception to many other locations, Boston had five high schools operated by the city in the early 1870s, and the number had doubled by the early 1880s.3

3 James Fraser, “Reform, Immigration, and Bureaucracy, 1820-1870,” in From Common School to Magnet School: Selected Essays in the History of Boston’s Schools, ed. James Fraser, Henry Allen, and Sam Barnes (Boston: Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, 1979), 29; Sheila Curran Bernard and Sarah Mondale, “The Educated Citizen,” in School: The Story of American Public Education, ed. Sarah Mondale and Sarah B. Patton (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 27-31; William Reese, America’s Public Schools: From the Common School to “No Child Left Behind” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 10-16, 25-38; Lloyd P. Jorgenson, The State and the Non-Public School: 1825-1925 (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 14-15; Selma Berrol, “Who Went to School in Mid-Nineteenth Century New York? An Essay in the New Urban History” in Essays in the History of New York City: A Memorial to Sidney Pomerantz, ed. Irwin Yellowitz (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1978), 44; Joel Perlmann, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure among the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Blacks in an American City, 1880-1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 46; Melissa Klapper, Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in America, 1880-1925 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007), 121; Martin E. Dann, “Little Citizens: Working Class and Immigrant Childhood in New York City, 1890- 1915,” Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1978, 334, n. 6; “The Public Schools,” Irish-American, June 1, 1889; Annual Report of the School Committee of the City of Boston. 1871 (Boston: Rockwell and

64 Despite the numerous educational opportunities in Boston, school administrators often reported the large number of children on the streets and not at school in the 1840s.

A Boston School Committee report in 1848 found that truancy occurred “principally among the very poorest class of the population, and more especially among the Irish.”

Children “of the most squalid appearance” swarmed the city streets daily to sell newspapers and other items and to collect firewood from demolished buildings. In response to the city’s increasing foreign and pauper population, the school board of

Boston passed the first compulsory school attendance law in the nation in 1852.4 New

York City followed suit years later in 1873, but it proved largely unsuccessful because children’s employers and parents who wanted their children to work found ways to circumvent the law. Critics also tended to claim the law was moot because the city’s schools could not accommodate all the school-age children.5

Aside from only pecuniary and space issues, children’s schooling was controversial for Catholics because of education’s connection with religion. As Irish-

Catholic immigrants began to pour into Boston and New York in the years surrounding the Irish famine of the 1840s, they noticed that non-denominational Protestantism dominated American public schools. Teachers required children to read selections from the Protestant King James’ version of the Bible, say the Protestant form of the Lord’s

Prayer and commandments, and often read anti-Catholic or pro-English and Protestant

Churchill, 1872), 249-250, Special Collections, Monroe C. Gutman Library, Harvard University (hereafter cited as Gutman Library, Harvard); Annual Report of the School Committee of the City of Boston. 1883 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1884), 136, Gutman Library, Harvard. 4 Report of the Annual Examinations of the Public Schools of the City of Boston. 1848 (Boston: J.H. Eastburn, City Printers, 1849), 31, Archives of the City of Boston, West Roxbury, Massachusetts (hereafter cited as City Archives, Boston); George H. Martin, The Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System: A Historical Sketch (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904), 210-211. 5 “Compulsory Education,” Irish-American, January 9, 1875.

65 passages in textbooks.6 The overtly Protestant New York Public School Society, funded by the city to provide education, ran many of the city’s schools before the New York board of education absorbed it in 1853. In the 1840s, the militant bishop of New York,

John Hughes, demanded that Catholics receive a share of the common school fund to educate their children in separate schools because they claimed that the public schools were teaching Protestant Christianity. By the end of the 1840s, Hughes had lost the fight over the common school fund, but disputes over the role of religion in education continued throughout the nation in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Many Irish

Catholics remained wary of American public schools.7

Notwithstanding some parents’ wariness, numerous Irish-American children attended public school in the 1870s and 1880s. The Irish in New York and Boston were particularly slow to enroll their children in Catholic schools. With the Irish-American

Catholic press widely commenting on educational issues, articles in the Boston Pilot

(hereafter The Pilot), an Irish-Catholic weekly, help explain why Boston’s parochial school attendance was so low. Beginning publication in 1829, The Pilot had a self-

6 Thomas O’Connor, in his book on the Irish in Boston, briefly described the anti-Catholicism of many textbooks. “Textbooks presented a Protestant view of world history that was decidedly anti-Catholic; primers were critical of Papist ideas and practices; geography books made disparaging remarks about Catholic countries; literary works almost always portrayed Catholics in disrespectful terms.” Thomas H. O’Connor, The Boston Irish: A Political History (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), 80. 7 Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: A History of the New York City Public Schools (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 26, 32-64; Daniel Murphy, A History of Irish Emigrant and Missionary Education (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 211-212; Stanley K. Schultz, The Culture Factory: Boston Public Schools, 1789-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 306; Jay P. Dolan, The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 1815-1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 104; John McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003), 39-40; James Sanders, “Boston Catholics and the School Question, 1825-1907,” in From Common School to Magnet School, 46. Boston’s schools taught Protestant forms of Christianity until as late as 1862, when the law prevented them from openly discriminating against Catholics. The report from the Boston school board read, in part: “Specific instruction in matters pertaining to religious faith and worship is properly left to the family, the parochial or Sunday-school, the catechetical class and the Bible class.” Annual Report of the School Committee of the City of Boston (Boston: J.E. Farwell and Co., 1862), Gutman Library, Harvard.

66 claimed circulation of at least 103,000 by 1872. It was one of the most widespread

Catholic papers in the United States and a major organ of opinion about Irish Americans and education both in Boston and nationwide.8 One Catholic, calling himself “Veritas,” wrote to the paper in 1879 to complain that he found “more apathy manifested in Boston regarding Catholic schools than in any of our large cities, East or West,” citing the fact that three schools for boys and five or six for girls could not accommodate all the city’s

Irish-Catholic children.9

The small number of Catholic schools in Boston was due, at least partially, to the attitude of Archbishop John Williams, leader of the Boston archdiocese from 1866 to

1907. A few months after Veritas wrote his letter, The Pilot clarified some of Archbishop

Williams’ instructions regarding building Catholic schools. Williams urged Catholics to build parish schools in Boston, but only if their construction did not cause financial difficulty. Parents could send their children to public schools instead of allowing them to grow up illiterate, Williams said, but then youngsters should attend religious instruction outside of school. The article indicated that Williams was not an enthusiastic supporter of parochial schools, explaining why priests and parents in his archdiocese did not make building schools a priority and the reason why so many of Boston’s Catholic children attended public school. By 1880, approximately ten per cent of Boston’s school children were enrolled at Catholic schools and the percentage was barely higher ten years later for the whole state of Massachusetts. Because of the efforts of John Hughes and his successors John McCloskey and Michael Corrigan in encouraging parochial school

8 Francis R. Walsh, “The Boston Pilot: A Newspaper for the Irish Immigrant, 1829-1908,” Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1968, 197. Patrick Donahoe published and edited The Pilot for many years and by 1870, the paper’s main editor was Irish poet and orator John Boyle O’Reilly, who edited the paper until his death in 1890. 9 “Where Are Our Catholic Youths Educated?” The Pilot, October 25, 1879.

67 construction, the number of Catholic children in New York City who attended Catholic schools was higher, but also approaching only fifty per cent by the turn of the twentieth century.10

Despite the large number of parochial schools in New York, it is likely that many

Irish immigrants there used the public schools because voters and the politicians who represented them exercised considerable control over local schools. New York City adopted a ward-controlled system of public schools in 1842, which meant that each city ward effectively worked as its own school district. Wards could nominate school committee members who appointed teachers and decided textbooks. In wards with high numbers of Irish immigrants, the Irish could control their local public schools.11

In New York in 1871, those with distinctly Irish names appeared on the roster as teachers and principals in all twenty-two wards, with Irish Americans in the majority in five wards. In the heavily Irish fourth and sixth wards, between seventy-five and eighty-

10 Ward McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction: The Public School in the Politics of the 1870s (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 60; Timothy J. Meagher, Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880-1928 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 158, 160; Perlmann, Ethnic Differences, 56; James Sanders, “Roman Catholics and the School Question in New York City,” in Educating an Urban People, ed. Diane Ravitch and Ronald Goodenow (New York: Teachers College Press, 1981), 120; Harold Buetow, Of Singular Benefit: The Story of Catholic Education in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 132; Dolan, Immigrant Church, 105-106, 111; Howard Ralph Weisz, Irish-American and Italian-American Educational Views, 1870-1900: A Comparison (New York: Arno Press, 1976), 95; Dennis P. Ryan, Beyond the Ballot Box: A Social History of the Boston Irish, 1845-1917 (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983), 76; Martin, Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System, 235; “Catholics in Boston Schools,” The Pilot, April 1, 1876; “Archbishop Williams on the School Question,” The Pilot, December 6, 1879; Sanders, “Boston Catholics and the School Question,” 48-49. 56. James Sanders presented a compelling argument for the reason Boston’s Irish-Catholics seemed to take little interest in building parochial schools. Citing the expensive churches that Catholic erected in Boston from the 1850s to the early twentieth century, Sanders claimed that Irish Bostonians could have afforded to build and maintain schools, but instead preferred to erect large and impressive churches as a psychological expression of their presence and permanency in a city known for its unwelcoming attitude to all that was Irish and Catholic. 11 James Sanders, “Roman Catholics and the School Question in New York City,” in Educating an Urban People, 124; Perlmann, Ethnic Differences, 56; Kenneth Nilsen, “The Irish Language in New York, 1850- 1900,” in The New York Irish, ed. Ronald Bayor and Timothy Meagher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 336; Ravitch, Great School Wars, 83, 102; Weisz, Irish-American and Italian- American Educational Views, 71, 79; “Irish and American Schools: An Interesting Comparison,” The Pilot, February 7, 1874.

68 five per cent of the teachers and administrators had recognizably Irish surnames. Looking specifically at two schools’ staffs, eighty-six per cent of employees at Public School One in the fourth ward and eighty-two per cent at Public School Twenty-Three in the city’s sixth ward had Hibernian names.12 The ability to eliminate anti-Catholic material through

Irish administrators made public schools more acceptable to Irish Catholics in New York.

Many Irish Catholics across the country, not just in Boston and New York, sent their children to local public schools. The New York City-based Irish World newspaper argued against the popular notion, apparently held by parents who grew up attending

American public schools, that their children’s religion would be safe in them too.13

Though he supported Catholic education, Thomas Rey, writing to the Irish World from

Worcester, Massachusetts, also believed that “the prevailing opinion among many of our people is that their children receive a better and more thorough education” at public school.14 Letters also came to the Irish World defending public schools. An Irish

American who signed his name ‘Mul’ thought that without these schools, Irish

Americans might not have any education, arguing that “hundreds of thousands of our

Catholic fellow-citizens today owe to the public schools whatever education they possess.” Another believed that Catholic schools were unnecessary because there was ample time at home and at Mass on Sundays for a Catholic child to receive religious instruction. “That a child will have more veneration and more piety in his heart, repeating a prayer that he learned at his mother’s knee,” one writer claimed, “than he will for one

12 Journal of the Board of Education of the City of New York (New York: The New York Printing Company, 1871), 368-374; Thirtieth Annual Report of the Board of Public Instruction of the City and County of New York, for the Official Year Ending December 31, 1871, with addenda to May 1872 (New York: N.Y. School Journal Print, 1872), 77, 88, Gutman Library, Harvard. 13 “Origin and Aim of the ‘Free’ Schools,” Irish World, May 11, 1872. 14 “Catholic Education,” Irish World, July 25, 1874.

69 he learned to sing off in a class at school, no man will deny.” In the 1870s, then, Catholic schools were by no means the overwhelmingly popular choice among Irish Americans, as many preferred American public schools for their children’s education.15

Some Irish Americans believed that public education would serve their children well, but others used public schools mainly because they could not afford the cost of parochial schools. Most Catholic schools charged tuition, so because property owners were already taxed to fund public schools, many who desired an education for their children chose the cheaper option. Particularly in economic hard times, enrollments at parochial schools suffered. A nationwide economic depression beginning in 1873 caused falling enrollments in parochial schools as lower wages, less work, and unemployment made more families choose free public schools over tuition-based Catholic schools. In

1875, in the midst of the national depression, a low-income laborer wrote a letter to the

Irish World asking how he could, with his small wages of a dollar a day, “spare a couple of dollars per month to pay for schooling our little ones.” Another Irish-Catholic parent claimed he did not wish his children to lose the faith, but he could not afford the parochial school expense with five or six children and $25 to $50 per quarter for their education.16 Though the depression ended in 1879 and parochial school enrollment in some places began to increase, public schools continued to be the choice for many Irish

Americans in the Northeast for the nineteenth century.17

15 “Shall the Public School System Be Sustained By Catholics?,” Irish World, January 3, 1874; “The Educational Problem,” Irish World, February 14, 1874; “State Schools Defended,” Irish World, February 21, 1874. 16 “Catholic Free Schools,” Irish World, February 6, 1875; “Public Schools,” Irish World, May 1, 1875. 17 Timothy Walch, Parish School: American Catholic Parochial Education from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Crossroad Publication Company, 1996), 37-38; Janet Nolan, Servants of the Poor: Teachers and Mobility in Ireland and Irish-America (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 92; Robert D. Cross, “Origins of Catholic Parochial Schools in America,” in Enlightening the Next

70 Educators in the United States made it clear that their task was to Americanize the large number of Irish-American children in public schools. Irish Americans understood, and accepted, that a big part of the mission of public education was to create intelligent and responsible American citizens. But some school officials wanted to Americanize the children of immigrants so thoroughly that they would seamlessly mix with Anglo-

Americans. Before massive waves of Irish immigrants began to arrive, a teacher in Ohio hoped that immigrants would “cease to be Europeans and become American,” meaning

“substantially Anglo-American.”18 Boston school authorities also declared their intention to Americanize the children of foreigners. The school committee of Boston reported in

1848 that Irish children should attend public schools because the “influence of our common school system…will, sooner than anything else, tend to domesticate them, and to give them American feelings, and identify them with ourselves as one people, with common interests.”19

The public school officials hoped that the children of Irish immigrants would not only learn to love the United States, but also that they would shed their old identities.

Indeed, the common school movement in the Northeast was often tied to anti-Catholic nativist values because of its foundation in American Protestantism. The way foreign children spoke, for example, had to change. The Boston school board wrote that the primary school teacher should correct such low-class errors as “the brogue of the Irish

Generation: Catholics and Their Schools, 1830-1980, ed. F. Michael Perko (New York: Garland, 1988), 324; Murphy, A History of Irish Emigrant and Missionary Education, 219. 18 “Transactions of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Western Literary Institute and College of Professional Teachers” in Turning Points in America Educational History, ed. David Tyack (Waltham, Mass.: Blaisdell Publishing Company, 1967), 148-150. 19 Report of the Annual Examinations of the Public Schools of the City of Boston. 1848 (Boston: J.H. Eastburn, 1848), 22, City Archives, Boston.

71 child” and should teach her young pupils to speak like Americans.20 The foreign brogue was a reminder of non-American identities, which these school officials hoped to erase.

A report from Boston’s school committee in 1867 established the high stakes of public education for the future of the United States. Likely remembering the recent war, the board members asserted that citizens’ rights and liberties were constantly in danger, and that the republic’s “only safeguard is in teaching the young what liberty and self- government really signify” so that the children, upon reaching adulthood, would not “be misled, or defrauded of their birthright by designing politicians.”21 The goal was to teach

Irish children that they had common cause with Americans of other ethnic origins and make all children appreciate their duty to the United States. As some educators said, however, they wanted the children of immigrants to forget their ethnic loyalties, becoming indistinguishable from other Americans and one in thought and feeling.22

New York’s school officials had similar objectives. A New York City Board of

Education report in 1849 stated that teaching immigrants and their children was the patriotic duty of educators. The poorly clad and ignorant immigrant children were

“destined to form an integral portion of the next generation,” the report read, and so the school board should undertake their education as a “pressing, urgent, and imperative duty.”23 After the Civil War, Board of Education Secretary Thomas Boese celebrated the patriotism that school children had shown during the conflict. The pupils, Boese stated, showed that they had imbibed the “grand lessons of love of country” and he believed the

20 Annual Report of the School Committee of the City of Boston. 1858 (Boston: George C. Rand & Avery, 1859), 40, 41, City Archives, Boston. 21 Annual Report of the School Committee of the City of Boston, 1867 (Boston: Alfred Mudge and Son, 1868), 77, City Archives, Boston. 22 Jorgenson, The State and the Non-Public School, 22-23, 28, 33. 23 Annual Report of the Board of Education of the City and County of New York (New York: Wm. C. Bryant and Company, 1849), 85-86, Gutman Library, Harvard.

72 schools would secure “the future continuance of the republic.” Like his contemporaries,

Boese thought that educating the foreign element was essential.24 The reports from

Boston and New York showed a concern for the children of immigrants for the welfare of

American society in general, illustrating the interconnections between public education and American nationalism. Yet the idea of their children becoming Anglo-Americans or losing their Irish ethnicity worried Irish Americans who wanted to maintain a distinct identity for the Irish in the United States. They knew they should become Americans, but did not want to transform into Anglo-Saxons.

American public school educators’ goals to create a common culture among students, removing ethnic identities and replacing them with American nationality, continued during the 1870s, when clashes over the religious content of public education made the “school question” a contentious national issue. While Archbishop John

Hughes’s conflict over the division of the common school fund in New York City in the

1840s was mostly confined to a local matter, an event in Cincinnati in late 1869 ignited national debate over religious issues and education, especially across the urban north.

After failing to reach an agreement that would have combined the city’s public and parochial schools, Cincinnati’s school board decided to ban Bible reading and hymn singing in the public schools regardless of a school system merger. The Protestant backlash was intense, as ministers across the country accused Catholics of a conspiracy to ruin American public education, and in doing so, subvert the basis of democracy. At the same time, New York state legislation that proposed to provide government money for

24 Thomas Boese, Public Education in the City of New York; Its History, Condition, and Statistics: An Official Report to the Board of Education (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1869), 92-93, 132.

73 religious schools reactivated the conflict over dividing school funds in New York and caused even more Protestant and Republican reaction.25

The anti-Catholicism that the school controversy inspired was widespread.

According to historian Ward McAfee, the “anti-Catholic movement that effectively began with the Cincinnati Bible War was of greater intensity than any similar outburst since the Know-Nothing crusade of the 1850s.” After the Cincinnati event, the

Republican newspaper the New York Tribune, according to the Irish-American, had

“declared that the very foundations of our Republican institutions were menaced” and

“now sounds the alarm in New York, and calls on the supporters of the public school system to rally to its aid.” As McAfee argued, the Republican Party hoped to use common schools in the 1870s to shape the children of Irish immigrants into a homogenous American cultural norm, so it was imperative to many old-stock American

Protestants that Irish-Catholic children attend public schools.26

The mission of public education to foster loyalty to the United States, furthermore, was important during Fenian activity and raids into British North America.

An Irish immigrant named John O’Mahoney founded the Fenians, an organization devoted to freeing Ireland from British rule, in New York in 1858, and it grew in the years after the Civil War as many Irish-American veterans hoped to use their military training in a war for Irish independence. In the late 1860s, Fenians launched failed invasions of Canada, as the movement’s leaders hoped to exploit post-Civil War tensions between the United States and Great Britain to provoke a war between the two nations, freeing Ireland in the process. In June 1870, Fenians crossed the border from St. Albans,

25 McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction, 27-29, 57-59. 26 McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction, 28-29, 71; “The School Question,” Irish-American, January 15, 1870.

74 Vermont to participate in the final Fenian invasion, which ended with the U.S. government arresting most of the leaders.27 For many in the Republican party and the country in general, it was consequently imperative that children learned devotion to the

United States so they would avoid the foreign loyalties that caused Fenians to attempt to foment war between the United States and England. The declining power of Fenianism and many Americans’ opposition to it in the early 1870s also provided more reasons for

Irish Americans to worry about their children’s Irish identities in schools. In this context, they may have hoped that if children learned about their Irish heritage, they would come to support Irish nationalism despite the failures of the Fenian movement.

By the early 1870s, however, Fenianism was dying out, while the school question was gaining prominence. Irish Catholics noticed the anti-Catholic furor over the public schools and offered their opinions on education, for which Irish-American journals gave ample space. It was in the atmosphere of the school controversy that Patrick Ford established the Irish World in 1870. Older Irish-American newspapers paid great attention to the school question too, including The Pilot and the Irish-American, edited by

Patrick Meehan. Meehan had taken over editorship of the Irish-American, a weekly started in 1849 in New York City, upon the death of his stepfather and the paper’s first editor Patrick Lynch in 1857.28 Lynch claimed in one of the first issues that the Irish-

American would be neutral in religion and politics, but in selecting material and editorializing about the education issue in the 1870s, the journal under Meehan’s

27 Thomas N. Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 1870-1890 (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1966), 38-41. 28 “Patrick J. Meehan. The Editor of the Irish-American Passes Away After A Severe Illness,” Irish- American, April 28, 1906.

75 guidance could not avoid taking sides with other Irish Americans in support of parochial education and the rights of Irish Catholics.29

The comments that Meehan made in the Irish-American concerning President

Ulysses S. Grant’s speech about sectarian education, for example, indicated that the journal was as supportive of public funding for parochial schools as newspapers like The

Pilot and the Irish World. In a speech to a reunion of the Association of the Union Army of the Tennessee in September 1875, Grant told the Civil War veterans that they should

“resolve that not one dollar…shall be appropriated for the support of any sectarian schools.” Aside from pointing out the irrelevancy of the school issue to a veterans’ reunion, the editorial accompanying the speech excerpt accused Grant of implying that

Catholics were attacking the nation’s public schools and of courting a revived Know-

Nothing political faction to distract Americans from the rights of Catholics to share in public school funds.30 As this commentary and other articles showed, Meehan joined his contemporaries Patrick Ford, Patrick Donahoe, and John Boyle O’Reilly in supporting

Catholic objections to Protestant influences in public schools.

Despite warnings from newspaper editors and a majority of Catholic clergymen about the anti-Catholic atmosphere in the public schools, in most subjects of the public school curriculum, save a few such as history or geography, students did not have to deal directly with religion. Courses of study for the sixth class of public grammar schools in

Boston and New York looked similar to one another in the early 1870s. The course, for

29 “To the Irish Americans of the United States,” Irish-American, September 9, 1849. 30 “Grant on the School Question,” Irish-American, October 9, 1875. At the beginning of the controversy in 1870, the Irish-American ran stories with headlines such as “The Public Schools Sectarian” and opining that Catholics believed American common schools were unfair to them as tax-paying citizens. See “The School Question,” Irish-American, January 15, 1870, “The Public Schools Sectarian,” Irish-American, January 22, 1870, “The ‘Bible War,’” Irish-American, December 16, 1871, and “Public Education,” Irish- American, December 23, 1871.

76 children approximately ten to twelve, included reading, spelling, writing, arithmetic, geography, grammar, and drawing. The New York schools taught U.S. history starting with later grammar school grades, while in Boston students studied history in conjunction with literature. Later in the decade, Boston school officials added separate history classes back to courses of study. In its suggestions to primary and grammar school teachers, the

Boston school committee wrote that the American Revolution and recent U.S. history were particularly important. In 1880, New York’s board of education placed ancient history lessons in the reading curriculum and decided that students would learn United

States history beginning in the upper grades of grammar school. History classes culminated in a thorough lesson on the U.S. Constitution in the final grade of grammar school – for children about thirteen or fourteen years of age - which was as far as many students went in their education.31

Studying the history and government of the United States was one of the primary ways that schools attempted to foster patriotism and affinity with American nationality.

Through the 1870s and 1880s, school and government officials continued to believe that education could create an American cultural standard among children from diverse

European backgrounds. In public school history textbooks, the lessons imparted pride in the United States. In William Swinton’s First Lessons in Our Country’s History, a common textbook used in public schools in the 1870s, the author described colonial

31 Annual Report of the School Committee of the City of Boston. 1870 (Alfred Mudge & Son, 1871), 11-12, City Archives, Boston; Annual Report of the School Committee of the City of Boston. 1872 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1873), 158, City Archives, Boston; New York Board of Education, Journal of the Board of Education of the City of New York, 1871 (New York: The New York Publishing Company, 1871), 304-305; “Suggestions Accompanying the Course of Study for Grammar and Primary Schools, School Document No. 17,” Annual Report of the School Committee of the City of Boston. 1878 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1879), 28-29, City Archives, Boston; “Course of Instruction Prescribed for Grammar Schools,” Thirty-Ninth Annual Report of the Board of Public Instruction of the City and County of New York, for the Official Year Ending December 31, 1880 (New York: Hall of the Board of Education, 1881), 239-243, Gutman Library, Harvard.

77 settlers as “brave pioneers…struggling hard with savage nature and more savage man” and hoped the students’ hearts would “beat with patriotic emotion at the words

‘American Revolution.’” In accounts of the recently ended Civil War, Swinton also waxed patriotic. The war saved the Union, Swinton asserted, “which is far beyond the price of money or of lives!”32

Also published seven years after the war’s end and used in public schools, Joel

Steele’s A Brief History of the United States was careful not to continue any sectional animosity and created a united American identity. Steele finished the account of the war by claiming that “the bitter feelings engendered by fraternal strife fast melted away.”

Steele made his goal clear at the book’s beginning. The students’ “patriotism must be kindled,” he wrote, when “they study the wonderful history of their native land,” and he believed that they would “learn to prize their birthright more highly, and treasure it more carefully” if they knew U.S. history.33 With this book, the author thought he could increase students’ appreciation for American citizenship. Though neither book contained any obvious slurs against Catholics or gratuitous praise for Protestants, these books hardly concentrated on Catholic achievements in American history as much as some

Catholics hoped. The main point of textbooks like Swinton’s and Steele’s was to create a feeling of American unity and shared destiny among school children through teaching the proud moments in American history.

In addition to American history lessons, some Irish Americans in New York wanted to teach children about Irish culture. In February 1870, reacting to the addition of

32 McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction, 71; William Swinton, First Lessons in Our Country’s History: Bringing Out its Salient Points, and Aiming to Combine Simplicity with Sense (New York: Ivison, Blakeman, & Co., 1872), 34, 124, 188, Gutman Library, Harvard. 33 Joel D. Steele, A Brief History of the United States: For Schools (New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1872), 267, 288, vi, Gutman Library, Harvard.

78 the German language to grammar schools in New York City, the Seventh Ward Board of

Trustees petitioned the Board of Education to add Irish to courses of instruction. Feeling that the Board of Education was favoring the German population, the petitioners stated that they represented the claims of “a very large and highly deserving portion of the community” and hoped that students’ knowledge of Irish would “unfold to their astonished gaze treasures of poetry and prose unequaled by that of any other land.”34

Though Irish Americans decided many issues in their wards’ public schools and succeeded in gaining positions in New York’s schools throughout the 1870s, they nonetheless had to petition the city board for major additions to the curriculum. This effort, like subsequent efforts both in New York and Boston, would not succeed. But in places where Irish numbers made them a powerful force in politics and the community, they believed their children should learn about their Irish cultural heritage and hoped to use local public schools to teach that legacy. Likely spurred by the school controversy, the waning fortunes of Irish nationalism in the Fenian movement, and reacting to the idea that German-American children would learn their ancestral patrimony more thoroughly than Irish children, the petitioners hoped that the city’s children would understand the gifts that Ireland gave the world. They anticipated that this information would reverse the attacks that many perceived against the character of Irish people, both in public schools and in wider American society.

The school controversy, though it centered on religion, also brought out these concerns for children’s Irish identity, including the idea that lessons would cause Irish-

American children to be ashamed of their families. As the school question propelled

34 “Irish in the Public Schools – Copy of the Letter from the Seventh Ward Trustees,” New York Times, February 18, 1870.

79 debates about education in the early 1870s, plenty of newspaper editors, Catholic leaders, and Irish-American parents argued that public schools were not only teaching

Protestantism (or, alternatively, atheism), but also giving lessons that portrayed Irish and

Catholic people negatively. Part of the self-appointed mission of newspaper editors like

Patrick Ford of the Irish World and Patrick Donohue or John Boyle O’Reilly of The Pilot was to expose and disprove the negative stereotypes about Catholics and Irish.

The English and the Anglo-Saxon ethnic element in the United States who created textbooks and usually ran boards of education received the majority of blame for these representations. Carrying a story in the early 1870s calling for an end to Anglo-Saxonism in the state schools, the Irish World thought the prejudice of English Anglo-Saxons to

Celts and Catholicism had infiltrated American schools. The schools taught children, the article charged, that Catholic nations were backward and ignorant and Protestant nations were advanced and intelligent, ideas imported from England and thrust onto “poorly instructed Celts – particularly the young.” The result, bemoaned the author, was that the

“empty-headed youths of our race…strive their best to Saxonize themselves in thought, speech, and outward appearance” thereby losing their Irish identity.35 To combat this trend, the newspaper started a series comparing Anglo-Saxon with Celtic civilization

(with the latter appearing more advanced) and admonished priests, editors, teachers, and schoolbook makers to show the true worth of the Celtic people and Catholic religion.

35 “Anglo-Saxonism in the State Schools,” Irish World, November 18, 1871. In Lloyd Jorgenson’s study, The State and the Non-Public School, he found abundant evidence of anti-Catholicism in early nineteenth century school readers. Accentuating the fact that many common school readers, histories, and geographies were written by Protestant clergymen, Jorgenson argued that “these works…were saturated with anti- Catholicism,” and cites many of the same complaints that the Irish World article claimed in the 1870s. Though Jorgenson was writing of textbooks from the antebellum period, it is possible that more recently published editions of many of these books were still in use in public schools in the 1870s. Jorgenson, The State and the Non-Public School, 62-63.

80 Irish Americans who wanted more Irish pride in their children pointed out evidence that young Irish Americans were ashamed of being Irish. Helping to substantiate the claims that his mother made in her novels, teenage student Francis X.

Sadlier, the Canadian-born son of Mary Anne Sadlier and publisher James Sadlier, wrote to his parents that his college classmates denied being Irish. The fifteen-year-old Francis, in school at Manhattan College in New York, wrote that at his college “many of the Irish

New Yorkers there are ashamed of being thought Irish, but I hope never to be.”36

Others noticed those who changed their names and identities to fit in with Anglo-

Saxons. Archbishop of Boston William O’Connell grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts as the son of Irish immigrant parents. Speaking of his childhood in public schools in the early 1870s, he reiterated the claim that Irish-American children were ashamed of their families, writing that he knew Irish-descended schoolmates who were “willing to compromise or even to conceal…their racial and religious inheritance.” O’Connell saw it happen, he said, “in a ludicrous attempt to change Celtic names into Anglo-Saxon names, and the laughable effort to imitate the Yankee nasal twang as a disguise.”37 The Irish

World published articles and letters about the sons of Irishmen in America who became ashamed of their religious and ethnic heritage, dropping the O’ from their names and

“mastering the art of speaking through the nose” to ‘Yankeefy’ themselves.38 Though

O’Connell characterized these denials of Irish heritage as laughable, the fear that children

36 F. X. Sadlier to Dear Mamma, November 1, 1867, Sadlier/Chadwick Family Fonds, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada (hereafter Archives Canada). Less than a year later, Francis wrote about what he thought was impending war between the United States and England, trying to convince his parents to let him join the U.S. navy. “Though born under the English flag,” he said, referring to his birth in Canada, “I would readily assist in tearing it down.” It seems probable that he learned to dislike England through his Irish heritage and the Irish nationalist atmosphere of New York. F.X. Sadlier to Dear Mother, March 5, 1868, Sadlier/Chadwick Family Fonds, Archives Canada. 37 William O’Connell, Recollections of Seventy Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 9. 38 “Why Are We Ashamed of Our Irish Names?” Irish World, February 3, 1872.

81 would grow to hate their Irish and Catholic roots because of public education was serious enough in Irish-American communities to evoke numerous comments and complaints.

Some Irish Americans believed that negative portrayals of Catholics and Irish people were damaging their children’s sense of Irishness; but others charged that instead of learning biased information, youths were not learning enough about Ireland. For these

Irish Americans, it seemed that Anglo-Saxons had triumphed on both sides of the

Atlantic in largely eliminating Irish history from school books and teaching Irish youth, in Ireland and America, that they had no distinct national homeland. This idea was particularly noticeable in the early 1870s, as Irish-American nationalism appeared to be collapsing, and newspapers like the Irish World and The Pilot argued against the

American public school system. Schoolboys who knew nothing of Ireland, the World wrote, would be unprepared to stand up for the Irish people when they left school and would accept the vile slander against them, meaning that nationalism would have no future in America.39 Some Irish-American parents added that Irish ethnic children would forget their ancestry because of public school education. A Boston parent who signed his name ‘Thrawn’ believed that “if Irishmen want to have their sons brought up as rowdies, dandies, and renegades to their creed and country, the only place to send them is to the public schools.”40 Another parent, pointing out that the history of Ireland warranted barely a mention in a public school textbook in Philadelphia, told Irish World readers that it was no surprise that children of Irish parents in public schools became ashamed of their

Hibernian origins when they learned that Ireland was unimportant.41 Irish Americans,

39 “Triumph of the Saxon Enemy – Our Colleges,” Irish World, August 2, 1873. 40 “The Public Schools,” Irish World, December 27, 1873. When the writer mentioned the children’s country, he was referring to their ancestral homeland rather than the United States. 41 “The Sort of Text Books in the State Schools,” Irish World, January 17, 1874.

82 seeking to avoid allowing their children to neglect their Irish and Catholic identities, believed that public education was a primary cause of that neglect.

Another perceived danger to Irish children’s sense of ethnic identity was the hostility of instructors in charge of children’s classrooms. Teachers particularly in New

England gained a reputation as prejudiced against the Irish. In his memoirs, William

O’Connell described his teachers in Lowell, writing that he and his Irish-Catholic classmates “sensed the bitter antipathy, which nearly all these good women in charge of the schools felt toward those of us who had Catholic faith and Irish names.”

Remembering how his teacher punished him for being absent to attend mass on Good

Friday, O’Connell described his school days as dreary, dry, and severe, “with only the apprehension that without any excuse at all we Catholic boys would be made to understand our inferiority to the other children, blessed with the prop of Protestant inheritance or English or Puritan blood.”42 A “Catholic girl” writing to The Pilot stated that, riding a train the day after St. Patrick’s Day, 1874, she overheard two Boston public school teachers complaining that they had had to dismiss school early for the Irish-

Catholic holiday. The two ladies hoped Americans would check the power and boldness of the Irish, who they believed were becoming too numerous and influential in Boston.43

Though the Irish were becoming quite plentiful in Boston, Irish Americans nonetheless had to contend with anti-Irish Catholic teachers if they wanted to remove biases against their people and add Irish-themed content to the schools.

The teachers who pushed their Yankee Protestant values onto Irish-American children, however, did not always have the intended effect. According to O’Connell, the

42 O’Connell, Recollections, 5-6. 43 “Yankee Prejudice and Catholic Schools,” The Pilot, April 4, 1874.

83 attempts to “show that the children of foreigners and Papists were a pitiable and deluded lot” only strengthened “their Catholic faith and their pride of race.” When O’Connell and his Irish classmates felt persecuted for who they were, they believed they had to defend their parents’ religion and Irish names.44 Similarly, students at a school in 1875 in

Newtown, Connecticut began to divide into Protestant and Catholic groups when they had recreational time after their teacher insisted on reading the Bible and saying

Protestant prayers in school. After a physical altercation between a local priest and the public school teacher, the school board ordered the teacher to allow Catholic students to read their textbooks while he and the Protestant children said their prayers.45 As the children’s division on the playground showed, this kind of treatment could make Irish

Catholic children more aware of their difference from the Yankee Protestants in their class and, with the encouragement of their parents and priests, stand up for their religious rights. Yet many Catholics worried that Irish children with weaker spirits would not react to teachers who attacked their religion or Irish heritage with increased dignity, but would instead believe that Irish Catholics were ‘pitiable and deluded’ and distance themselves from their families and their Irish roots.

To guard against that eventuality, some Irish Catholics thought it was time to add the Irish language to public schools in both Boston and New York. After the failure to insert Irish into New York’s schools in 1870, a small number of Irish New Yorkers again asked the Board of Education in 1874 to allow the schools to teach Irish. One of the many reasons in favor of teaching the language was that the Irish were “obliged to hear and

44 O’Connell, Recollections, 9. 45 “A Fight in a School,” The Pilot, November 18, 1875.

84 speak the language of the nation that has wronged and scourged and outraged our race.”46

An Irishman also wrote to the Irish-American in 1874, expressing similar hope that before long “the Irish language must be introduced into the public schools of the city” of

Boston.47 There were only a small minority of Irish Americans who were interested in perpetuating the Irish language, so their opinions did not have a great influence on local school boards and there was no introduction of Irish in New York and Boston.

As the school controversy continued and Irish Americans found it difficult to add any Irish studies to public schools, concerns about Irish children being ashamed of where they, or their parents, had come from were still strong in the mid-1870s. P.J. O’Daly of

Boston wrote to The Pilot in early 1876 to warn parents that children in public schools were learning that the Irish people had recently been a barbarous people, an idea that would surely make the children “disclaim their Irish connection altogether” and cause

“poor parents of Irish birth and extraction” to be “looked at with scorn and disgrace by the child who learns at school that they are descended from barbarians.”48 O’Daly, the secretary for an Irish language society in Boston, believed that the solution was to revive

Irish language and literature to show the world, and especially Irish-American children, that the Celts had culture. In a speech by Patrick Walsh of the Irish Literary Association of Cleveland, he told parents to educate their children and “acquaint them of their ancestry, for…there is dignity of character to be drawn from the study.”49 Walsh thought exposing Irish-American children to Irish literature was the best way to instill pride in

Ireland. In the battle over the hearts and minds of Irish-American children, proponents of

46 No Title, New York Times, April 27, 1874. 47 “The Irish Language,” Irish-American, May 30, 1874. 48 “Irish Language,” The Pilot, January 22, 1876; “The Irish Language,” Irish World, April 15, 1876. The Irish World reprinted O’Daly’s letter in its April 15, 1876 issue. 49 “Irish Literature,” Irish World, April 8, 1876.

85 the Irish wanted to prove that the Celts were a people of whom to be proud, but feared that public school education was seriously damaging Irish-American youth’s desire to identify as Irish. But because so many Irish-American children went to public school,

Irish Americans noticed every instance of slights against their people.

The English history textbooks that public schools used encapsulated Irish-

American concerns that their children were learning little about Ireland or that they were learning negative information about the Irish. In the early 1870s, while New York City schools taught U.S. history, Boston’s schools combined history with English literature and taught it in connection with works of almost exclusively English authors. When the

Boston schools added history back to courses of study, the school committee suggested that English history would be a valuable supplement to the history of the United States.

New York City schools did not include specifically English history in their courses of study, but prescribed courses in the history of the English language and literature.50

English history lessons in public schools were prime targets for those who noticed the treatment Irish and Catholics received. Histories of England sometimes included small discussions of Ireland, which, some Irish thought, gave the impression that the two were not distinct countries. In the late 1870s, Boston public schools were using Edward

Lancaster’s A Manual of English History. Lancaster’s book, published in 1877, had many clear anti-Catholic and anti-Irish biases. It praised Puritanism, castigated English Catholic monarchs while extolling the Protestant ones, and mentioned the murders of English people in Ireland in the seventeenth century while excusing the brutality of Oliver

50 “Suggestions Accompanying the Course of Study for Grammar and Primary Schools, School Document No. 17,” Annual Report of the School Committee of the City of Boston. 1878, 28-29, City Archives, Boston; Journal of the Board of Education of the City of New York. 1875 (New York: Cushing and Bardua, 1875), 199, Gutman Library, Harvard.

86 Cromwell toward the Irish. Yet Lancaster also showed some compassion for the Irish people. Lancaster wrote that in the face of religious and economic oppression, “we cannot wonder that the Irishman, as he saw his hungry children gather about the scanty board, sometimes turned, in rage or despair…upon the exacting tax-gatherer, or that violence and misery filled the beautiful, but misgoverned land.” Lancaster concluded his discussion of modern Irish conditions by writing that it was “doubtful if Ireland will ever be fully pacified, until she is allowed some form of self-government.”51 Lancaster’s book had anti-Catholic and anti-Irish phrases but called Ireland misgoverned and implicitly hoped for self-government in Ireland. Showing understanding for the Irish, however, likely did not excuse the book in the eyes of Irish Americans concerned with education, who took notice of every bias shown against their faith and people. They may have appreciated the sympathy for Ireland, but disagreed with the biased historical accounts.

A letter to Agnes Smiley, the editor of The Pilot’s children’s column, “Our Boys and Girls,” showed that children were apt to believe what they read in books, confirming some Irish-Catholic parents’ fears. Mary Brennan wrote to Smiley from Montville,

Connecticut to ask about whether statements in a book called “Annals in the Nations of

Modern Europe” about Pope Alexander VI were true. The book’s author claimed that the

Pope had bribed his way to the Papal throne and then tried to have a rival poisoned.52

Smiley advised Mary to “distrust all Catholic histories by Protestant historians” and wrote that she would “caution all Catholic parents to exercise strict care in regard to those

51 Edward Lancaster, A Manual of English History, for the use of schools (New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1877), 154, 162, 192, 205, 210, 285-286, Gutman Library, Harvard. 52 John G. Edgar, History for Boys; or Annals of the Nations of Modern Europe (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876), 360-361.

87 books that they allow to fall into the hands of their children.”53 It was letters like that from Mary Brennan that caused so much concern among Irish-American parents about the formation of their children’s opinions about the Irish people and Catholicism. They felt that children heard slanders on the Irish and Catholics all around them in public schools, and so parents needed to remain vigilant about what their children read.

Though some English history textbooks may have been objectionable to various

Irish Americans, they rarely objected to teaching American patriotism in public schools.

In fact, they understood and supported public education’s goal to teach love of the United

States. Those who supported adding more lessons on Ireland to public schools wanted

Irish-American children to appreciate their national heritage while also expressing loyalty to their country of residence. As an example, at the end of the 1870s, Boston’s schools were using former Civil War general Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Young Folks’

History of the United States. Higginson’s textbook reflected his background as an abolitionist and Union soldier, as it put a heavy focus on the horrors of slavery and the antebellum anti-slavery movement as well as the events of the Civil War. But it also contained, like other textbooks, lessons on the duty of Americans. It was essential,

Higginson wrote, for future Americans “to guard against internal as well as external dangers, to purify their own government, educate their own community, [and] give to the world an example of pure lives and noble purposes.”54 This text, as well as the others

53 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, April 28, 1877. Agnes Smiley was the pen name of Mary O’Reilly (née Murphy), the wife of Pilot editor and part-proprietor John Boyle O’Reilly. Smiley, and The Pilot’s children’s column, is discussed in more detail in chapter four. 54 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Young Folks’ History of the United States (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1879), 329, Gutman Library, Harvard. Years later, Higginson expressed his sympathy with Catholic schools and Irish Home Rule, meaning that his textbook would not have contained any slanders against the Irish or Catholics. See Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Dear Sir [John Boyle O’Reilly], May 31, 1888, John Boyle O’Reilly Papers, BPL, and “Anti-Catholic School Bill,” The Pilot, April 27, 1889.

88 used earlier in the decade in the Boston public schools, intended to impart American pride, national identity, and belonging to the large numbers of children of Irish descent in

Boston. As long as the textbook did not insult Irish or Catholic people, Irish Americans did not have a problem with their children learning to be Americans. They hoped, however, that becoming American would not exclude ethnic or religious identities.

As the 1870s came to a close, the school issue received less attention in Irish-

American newspapers. The agitation over the school question died down after the 1876 presidential election, which was so close that Democrats and Republicans reached a compromise in which Republican Rutherford Hayes became President but Reconstruction in the South ended. The closeness of the election signaled that the Republican party was no longer in the ascendancy, giving Democrats, the party to which a majority of Irish

Catholics adhered, a chance to offer resistance to Republican and Protestant plans for public education. The disruption of the Republican party’s hold on national power ended

Republican hegemony and meant the anti-Catholicism that some Republicans encouraged was less virulent after 1876, dimming the importance of the school question.55

Though comments about education were less frequent after the mid 1870s, Irish

Catholics continued to take note of anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiments in public school lessons. New York’s public schools were not particularly known for their anti-

Irishness, but The Pilot ran an article in 1881 about a “wicked distortion of Irish history” in New York. At issue were a book’s statements concerning Daniel O’Connell and the

British government’s handling of the Irish famine. The article’s author worried about the large number of Irish children in New York’s public schools, where “the seed of

55 McAfee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction, 220-222.

89 prejudice against their own country is planted in them.” Recognizing the strength of the

Irish in the city’s school administration, the author wondered why Irish teachers and principals would allow “England [to] use American schools to spread her lies about

Ireland.”56 Another parent wrote to The Pilot in late 1882 to complain about a geography lesson that students heard in the public schools of Weymouth Landing, Massachusetts that seemed to favor England. While the children learned that Great Britain was known for its “love of law, order, and fair dealings,” they were taught that Ireland was famous for “peat, potatoes, poverty, political disturbances, and decrease of population in recent years.” The Pilot editorialized that these lessons were particularly insidious because the majority of students in the Weymouth public schools were the offspring of Irish parents and the teacher did not mention that Ireland was in such a poor condition because of

English “conquest, rapacity, and brutality.” Again, the newspaper worried that the children of Irish parents would learn “disrespect and contempt for their own race” from school lessons such as these and claimed that the frequent denigrations of Ireland were too common in schools that contained Irish-American pupils.57 The end of widespread uproar over religion and schools in 1876 did not lessen the fear on the part of some Irish

Catholics that their children were learning to look down on the Irish.

Histories of England were still a source of concern as well, and Irish-American children continued to read English histories in Boston’s public schools in the 1880s. A.P.

Stone’s A History of England, published in 1883, seemed to correct some of the biases of

Lancaster’s earlier book and Boston’s schools alternated between the two in the middle of the 1880s. Stone discussed the Protestant reformation more evenly, avoiding any

56 “Irish History in American Schools,” The Pilot, January 29, 1881. 57 “What Is Taught in Some Public Schools,” The Pilot, November 25, 1882.

90 obviously negative statements about Catholics while describing the Catholic and

Protestant struggles in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Much of his passage on the Irish famine was neutral, saying that because of the failure of the potato crop, “most shocking scenes of suffering and death by starvation were witnessed on all sides.” Yet Irish nationalists would likely have characterized the assertion that “the government generously ministered to the relief of the suffering” as too pro-English. Stone also implied that most of Ireland’s trouble went away with the reform of land policies in

Ireland in 1869 and that there were currently (in the 1880s) few problems with Ireland’s government. Although in the early 1880s, anti-rent and Home Rule movements, violent resistance to British rule, periodical food shortages, and large-scale emigration were ongoing in Ireland, Stone’s textbook stated that land reform in 1869 had “conferred substantial benefit upon the country, lessened political excitement,” and “checked emigration.”58 Because it was the last statement the book made about the country, it left students with the impression that British rule was improving Ireland.

Comparing Stone’s textbook of 1883 with Lancaster’s 1877 book showed that public school English history lessons had changed regarding their treatment of Catholics.

Lancaster demonstrated his preference for Protestants while Stone described the

Protestant Reformation in neutral tones. In many ways, however, they had changed little.

Stone’s book appeared to condone British rule in Ireland while Lancaster’s book had called Ireland misgoverned. Thus while the book did not insult the Irish people or

Catholics, many Irish Americans would still have found it unacceptable for the way that

58 A.P. Stone, A History of England (Boston: Thompson, Brown, and Company, 1883), 102-103, 105, 109, 114, 190, 197, Gutman Library, Harvard.

91 it taught students that Ireland was improving under British rule and had little reason to desire independence.

English history books or Protestant teachers who, Irish Catholics claimed, misled children made Irish-American parents more eager to add positive information about

Ireland to their children’s schools. Boston’s public schools were particularly noted for focusing on English history, so in the 1880s Irish Catholics in Boston made at least five attempts to add Irish content to the public schools to correct the perceived imbalance.

Though petitioners had failed to convince New York’s Board of Education to teach Irish in the city’s schools, Irish Americans in Boston felt they had more political sway in the mid-1880s than ever before. The first attempt, in September 1883, was by petitioner Dan

Carroll and his fellow signers, which appeared at the beginning of this chapter. In the decision in their bound report for 1883, however, the members rejected a second petition from seventy-six others that the committee received in October 1883, asking for classes in Irish language and literature in the evening high school.59 It is likely that the petitioners concentrated on the addition of Irish classes to the city’s evening high school because

Irish-American teenagers were attending school in the evening so that they could perform wage labor during the day, helping to support their families.

In November 1884, just one month before the election of Boston’s first Irish-

Catholic mayor Hugh O’Brien, the Boston school committee received another petition.

This petition asked the committee to reconsider the English literature textbooks Boston’s schools were using because “they either intentionally or unintentionally ignore existing

Irish literature,” which the petitioners believed was too important “to meet with such

59 Proceedings of the School Committee of Boston, 1883 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1883), 166, 178, Gutman Library, Harvard.

92 ignominious treatment, particularly in view of the number of children of Irish parentage attending these schools.”60 In place of such textbooks as Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of

English Literature, which devoted ten pages out of four-hundred-seven to one Irish poet –

Thomas Moore, the petitioners recommended John O’Kane Murray’s Lessons in English

Literature, which gave equal attention to British, Irish, and American authors.61 Another petition, worded similarly as the request in November, arrived in February 1885, asking for a replacement of existing English literature textbooks, and added that Irish authors would be better models for children to imitate than writers like Shelley and Byron, presumably because of these authors’ radical views or scandalous lifestyles.62

A month later, in March 1885, concerned parents and citizens again attempted to convince the school board to add works on Irish history and literature by Irish authors.

This time by a Boston resident named John Shea and fifty-two other signers, the petition argued that the absence of works about Ireland “might be good English policy,” but claimed that it was “un-American” because it was “illiberal and unjust to the large numbers of children of Irish parentage attending the schools, and to their parents, who assist in paying the expenses.” The petitioners hoped that works on Ireland would go to schools “containing a large percentage of pupils of Irish descent.”63 The school

60 Proceedings of the School Committee of the City of Boston, 1884 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1884), 185-186, Gutman Library, Harvard. 61 Robert Chambers, Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of English Literature, ed. Robert Carruthers (New York: American Book Exchange, 1879), 203-213; John O’Kane Murray, Lessons in English Literature, with a Short Dictionary of British, Irish, and American Authors (Baltimore: John Murphy Co., 1877), 22; William Swinton, Studies in English Literature (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1880). The petitioners also mentioned their opposition to William Swinton’s Studies in English Literature, which included two Irish authors, Jonathan Swift and Edmund Burke, but also gave attention to Byron and Shelley. 62 Proceedings of the School Committee of the City of Boston, 1885 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1885), 39-40, Gutman Library, Harvard. 63 “Petition for Irish History,” March 24, 1885, City of Boston School Committee Reports, 1885, p. 68, BPL.

93 committee either did not consider these later petitions or their decisions are not extant, but it seems likely their verdict was the same as it had been in 1883.

Petitioners’ concerns demonstrated some of the numerous attempts that Irish

Americans made to teach their children about their Irish ancestry in addition to Catholic religion. Though only a minority of Boston’s Irish Catholics signed these petitions, the petitions came when Boston’s Irish Americans felt politically and culturally powerful in the capital of Yankee New England. Irish Catholics’ numbers had been growing in

Boston since the first famine immigrants began to arrive in the 1840s. By the 1870s, continued emigration from Ireland and natural growth put the Irish-American population of Boston around 90,000. By the mid-1880s, The Pilot calculated that the Irish element

(those born in Ireland and those with at least one Irish parent) included more than

150,000 people: forty-one per cent of the population of Boston. Although these numbers were only estimates, clearly some Irish Americans were boasting about their numerical strength in Boston by the 1880s. The city also absorbed surrounding communities like

Roxbury, Dorchester, and Charlestown and its infrastructure grew, offering new job opportunities in construction, municipal services, and utilities. The rising political power of the Boston Irish was just as important. By the 1880s, around half of the Boston school board was composed of Irish Catholics; it was also likely no coincidence that the majority of the petitions on record came either when Irish-Catholic Hugh O’Brien was running for mayor or had recently taken office, which he did at the beginning of 1885.64

It is also important to note that, although Irish nationalism was not dead in the

1870s, it was relatively quiet. The Clan-na-Gael, a nationalist organization that took over

64 Thomas H. O’Connor, The Boston Irish: A Political History (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), 112-115; “The Irish People in Boston,” The Pilot, November 10, 1877; “The Irish Element in Boston,” The Pilot, October 24, 1885.

94 leadership of Irish-American nationalism after the collapse of Fenianism, slowly raised money and gained supporters during the decade. The Home Rule party in Ireland, founded in 1874, also grew in prominence and power. By the late 1870s, Charles Stewart

Parnell, an Irish Protestant landlord and politician, emerged as its leader. A localized but dire famine in 1880 drew more attention to the demands of Irish nationalists, giving strength to both moderate Home Rulers – who asked for Irish autonomy within the

British empire – and more radical elements who wanted complete independence. The famine also provided impetus for Irish Americans to join with those in Ireland by founding Land Leagues to agitate for a reform of land policies in the Emerald Isle.

Because of these events, Irish nationalism was established again, and by the mid-1880s, the Home Rule movement, under the leadership of the popular Parnell, seemed closer to achieving its aims than ever before.65 Revived nationalism and publicized prospects for its success in the middle of the decade coincided with efforts to add Irish subjects to public schools in Boston, indicating the likelihood that success in local politics and increased nationalist agitation and prospects for achieving Irish autonomy influenced

Irish-American desires to convince school boards that Irish culture and heritage were pertinent and important for Irish-American children.

The wording of John Shea’s petition in particular indicated that the petitioners believed that because the Irish had triumphed politically in Boston, and would hopefully soon prevail in Ireland, they would be able to perpetuate their culture as well. They were careful, however, to make their claims as both Irish and Americans. The assertion that excluding studies of Ireland was more English than American fit with the way that Irish

65 Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 64-65, 74, 83, 101-103, 154-155, 164, 168-169.

95 Americans conceived of their children’s education. They framed their ideas around their vision of a country in which the children of Irish immigrants could be Irish, Catholic, and

American. The petitioners believed, as many Irish Americans did, that it was American to recognize one’s ethnicity and remain true to one’s heritage, demonstrating early ideas of cultural pluralism. Like petitioners in New York in 1870, those in Boston thought that it was an American value to serve the interests of all people in a community, and so Irish

Americans made their claims as a numerically powerful group who should receive equal attention as others. They also believed that because the United States was born from rebellion against England, opposing English policy was pro-American.

Irish-American leaders saw no conflict between being Irish and American at the same time. In fact, as early as 1871, Patrick Ford boasted in the Irish World that “already the destiny of New England is in the Irish race,” and “already the Irish race is the

American people.”66 The Irish felt that they should be considered Americans by the post-

Civil War years, and claimed the rights they believed Americans should receive – to ensure the endurance of their cultural heritage in America. This sentiment was particularly strong in Boston in the 1880s, because Irish-American children formed a large percentage of the student population, a number of Irish Catholics sat on the city’s school board, Irish Catholics had elected one of their own as mayor, and a respectable branch of Irish nationalism – Home Rule – seemed poised for success. But the Irish were also numerous in New York, as several articles about the Irish population in the city attested. New Yorkers had also elected an Irish-Catholic mayor in 1880, William Grace.

Although Republicans reportedly claimed that Grace would destroy the city’s public

66 “Who Are Americans,” Irish World, May 27, 1871.

96 schools if elected, education seemed to change little in New York City during Grace’s administration with no evidence of continued attempts to add Irish subjects to public schools. But in the 1880s in Boston, men like Dan Carroll or John Shea felt entitled to a share in the education of their children because Irish Americans in the city were powerful and numerous enough to exercise and claim their rights and because Irish Catholics in

Boston felt more insular and defensive of their identities due to cultural conflicts with

Boston’s Protestant Yankees. The likely decisions of the school board, however, showed that Irish Catholics were not influential enough to force Irish subjects into public schools.

As the 1880s closed, events surrounding an incident in a public high school in

Boston demonstrated to Irish Catholics that they were indeed not powerful enough to ask for special treatment in public schools. A controversy arose at the English High School in

Boston in May 1888 with a teacher of medieval history, Charles Travis. A complaint from Father Theodore Metcalf, a Catholic priest, asserted that Travis erroneously told his students that an indulgence from the Church was “a permission to commit sin.” Catholics in Boston also had a problem with the textbook that Travis used in his class, Swinton’s

Outlines of the World’s History. In a letter from school board member and Irish Catholic

Joseph Fallon to the Irish World, he gave readers examples of other offensive remarks in the book, concerning Galileo’s persecution by the Church or unseemly insinuations about the mother of Louis XIV. Fallon assured Bostonians that the school board would not allow sectarian or improper influences into the public schools.67

The school committee, half of whom were Catholics, rebuked Travis, transferred the teacher to a different subject, and voted to get rid of Swinton’s world history

67 “The Boston School Trouble,” Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, July 28, 1888.

97 textbook. But those actions only ignited the ire of Boston Protestants, who demanded that the city relieve the entire school committee of duty and that a new school board election be held. Protestants began organizing groups, such as one named The Evangelical

Alliance, who petitioned the school committee to restore Swinton’s book to the public schools in October.68 Women started registering to vote in the special election, and one person who wrote to The Pilot overheard a woman boast that “we Protestants are a going to show the Catholics of Boston that our public schools are far superior to those now maintained by their churches.” She insisted that the United States would stay a Protestant nation.69 In an article for Catholic World magazine, Mary Elizabeth Blake took the outcry as demonstrative of lingering anti-Catholicism and proof that Protestants wanted their form of religion to remain in the public schools, not just in Boston, but nationwide. “The parochial school,” Blake concluded, “is no longer a question of feasibility, but of necessity.” In 1889, the coalition of anti-Catholic groups in Boston led a political movement to rid Boston’s city government and school board of Catholic influence. Due to these efforts, by 1890, there were only two Catholic school board members out of twenty-four.70 Some Protestant newspapers, quoted in The Pilot, predicted that the results of the election would make Catholics leave the public schools and enter the parochial schools – exactly what most Protestants did not want.71

Some of Boston’s Yankee Protestants nonetheless gave Irish Catholics more reasons to turn strongly against public schools. Indeed, when the new school board voted to adopt certain so-called anti-Catholic textbooks for the city’s high schools in June 1890,

68 “Proposed Revision of Swinton’s Outlines,” The Pilot, October 6, 1888. 69 “A Conversation Overheard in Boston,” The Pilot, October 27, 1888. 70 Mary Elizabeth Blake, “The Trouble in the Boston Schools,” Catholic World, January 1889: 503, 508; Sanders, “Boston Catholics and the School Question,” 68. 71 “Calling a Halt,” The Pilot, January 25, 1890.

98 The Pilot believed that the only option left to Catholics in Boston was to remove their children from the public schools.72 In July, one of the only remaining Catholics on the board, Joseph Fallon, resigned his position, citing the new anti-Catholic bigotry of

Boston’s school committee.73

The prejudice also extended further than the school committee. It was likely no coincidence that an anti-Irish Catholic booklet was published in Boston in 1890, warning

Protestant New Englanders that if they did not limit the power of Irish Catholics, the Irish would flood New England with “paupers, thieves, and murderers.” The anonymously- written pamphlet The Past, Present, and Future of the Roman Catholic Irish in New

England contained typical nativist virulence, referring to Irish Catholics as lazy, drunken, criminal bogtrotters, expressing anger that “most of the Roman Catholics of to-day have taken their children from the public schools by order of their priests,” and hoping that

Protestants would not allow the Irish to weaken American public education.74 The pamphlet, with its references to the interference of Irish Catholics in public schools, was almost certainly written in the context of the Protestant backlash over the 1888 controversy at a Boston high school. A group called the Citizens Public School Union later helped create a compromise in which history classes could have two textbooks presenting both Protestant and Catholic viewpoints and the school committee’s members were more ethnically and religiously balanced later in the 1890s. But many Irish

Catholics interpreted the incident and reaction of Boston’s Protestants, spanning more

72 “Catholics Outraged in Boston Schools,” The Pilot, June 21, 1890. 73 “Judge Fallon’s Able Protest,” Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, July 5, 1890. 74 Uncle Sam, Jr., The Past, Present, and Future of the Roman Catholic Irish in New England (Boston: no publisher, 1890), 9, 65-66, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

99 than two years, to mean that they would not get fair treatment in public schools, even if those schools had tried to eliminate religious instruction.75

Although Irish Americans were often worried about the incorrect or insulting information offered to children in public schools, the supposed prejudice of public schools may not always have damaged a student’s Irish identity. Instead, the discrimination may have reminded Irish ethnic children to be proud of their heritage, igniting defensive or reactive ethnic identity. Reactive ethnicity, according to modern sociologists, occurs when a child encounters persecution of their identity.76 The intolerance of teachers that William O’Connell described as a child in Lowell helped form his ethnic identity in a reactive way. The other Irish-American school children who were punished or expelled for religious matters or heard negative information about the

Irish may also have formed a stronger Irish-Catholic identity by the perception that their religion and culture were under attack.

Reactive ethnicity is a modern theory, however, and proponents of the Irish in the nineteenth century worried more that Irish-Catholic children would succumb to the attacks on their people and refuse to acknowledge themselves Irish or Catholic. The desire of many children to fit in may explain the oft-cited occurrence of Irish-American children trying to change their names, refusing to be known as Catholics, and even speaking in accents like Yankee children. For many Irish Catholics in the United States, the defection of Irish-American children from their heritage and religion was an almost constant worry in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This fear influenced a number of Irish Catholics’ opinions about public schools. Ensuring that schools did not denigrate

75 Sanders, “Boston Catholics and the School Question,” 70. 76 Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001), 148, 151.

100 the Irish and Catholicism was particularly important in places like New York and Boston, where the majority of Irish-American children attended public schools.

But it was difficult to add positive information about being Irish to public school curricula whose main objective was to teach children to be good American citizens. The increasing influence and power of Irish Americans in the urban centers of the east coast and Irish nationalist agitation may have induced some to believe that they could convince local school boards to teach pupils about Irish subjects, but adding Irish content to the public schools met with few results. Public schools followed a general curriculum that allowed for little ethnic influence or special interests, yet some schools continued to use textbooks that some Irish Catholics considered biased against Irish faith and identity. The incident in Boston’s schools at the end of the 1880s illustrated the continual and recurring conflicts between Irish Catholics and American Protestants over the religious and ethnic topics in public schools. Even as Irish Catholics hoped public schools would not teach disrespect for Catholicism or Ireland, they could not escape the teaching of American pride and patriotism, a necessary ingredient that Irish Americans accepted as part of children’s education.

The views of some Irish Americans both corresponded and conflicted with the goals of American educators. Both sides saw the necessity of making the children of Irish immigrants into dedicated American citizens, but a number of Irish Americans did not want that Americanization to go so far that it eliminated Irish sensibilities. Newspaper editorials, letters, and speeches from the 1870s and 1880s demonstrated that Irish

Americans were trying to resist the complete transformation of their people into Anglo-

Americans, which was part of their argument against American public education. They

101 instead believed that education should teach their offspring that aside from being

American, they were also Irish and Catholic. These opinions about the uses of public schools for children’s identities exhibited the nascent multiculturalism that Irish

Americans hoped to add to American education. Unfortunately for concerned Irish

Americans in the Northeast, the majority of their children attended public schools, meaning that families who wanted their children to understand their heritage would have to seek alternatives for ethnic identity education. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, despite the efforts of many Irish Americans, the inclusion of Irish identity in public schools would be largely unsuccessful. But because Irish Catholics had almost exclusive control over parochial schools in New England and New York, they would find it easier to infuse Irish identity into parochial education.

102 Chapter 3: American Minds, Irish-Catholic Souls: Irish-American Children, Irishness, and Parochial Schools

In March 1879, the girls of St. Catherine’s Academy in Fall River, Massachusetts were busy composing essays about St. Patrick’s Day, proudly writing about the accomplishments of Irish people and commemorations of Ireland’s national holiday.

After the teacher awarded her work first in the class, a young girl using the pseudonym

“White Lilly” shared her essay with the Boston Pilot’s children’s column. She described

St. Patrick’s Day as the Fourth of July for Ireland, and outlined why Irish people should be so pleased. “Irishmen have reason to be louder in praise of their country than any other nation,” White Lilly’s paper read, “because of their firm, undimmed faith, because of the fire of patriotism which continually burns within them, and because of the genius of the sons of Ireland.”1 White Lilly’s acclaim for the Irish people indicated that she understood the intended messages of parochial school lessons about the strong nationalism and faith of the Celtic people. The teachers at St. Catherine’s Academy, like many other Catholic schools across New England and New York, used their autonomy from public school systems to teach Irish pride in addition to the tenets of Catholicism.

Compared to their efforts to use public schools to teach Irish heritage, Irish

Americans found it much easier to foster respect for Ireland in parochial schools.

American parochial schools did not only teach about Ireland and Catholicism, however.

Lessons also reflected a concern for creating American loyalties. As with Irish-American literature and in public schools, Irish Americans understood that parochial schools needed to prove their students were devoted to the United States. Parochial lessons thus mirrored

1 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, April 12, 1879.

103 in many ways the American patriotism that numerous public school administrators, teachers, and textbooks tried to impart. Because Irish Catholics understood that the teaching of American patriotism would be a component of parochial education, they hoped to blend the creation of patriotic Americans with the production of Irish culture for

Irish-American children. Some Irish Americans believed that if public schools would not, parochial schools could carry out their vision for an American nationality in which Irish

Americans could maintain a distinct identity.

Given the difficulty of infusing Irish studies into public schools, some Irish

Catholics saw parochial schools as essential to their efforts to preserve Irish culture in the

United States, even though a minority of Catholic youth in New York and Boston attended parochial schools in the late nineteenth century. Nonetheless, ideas concerning

American Irish-Catholic parochial schools and these schools’ lessons serve as important examples of the methods that Irish-American adults used to teach children Irish identity.2

The primary objective of parochial school lessons was to inculcate Catholicism, but readings also reflected goals to create Irish identity based on Irish nationalism’s images of Ireland. The school question of the 1870s elicited numerous opinions about the purpose of parochial school education, with many arguing that in addition to teaching pupils religious morals and requisite American citizenship lessons, Catholic education could also foster Irish identity. Sentiments about the uses of parochial schools continued, albeit less frequently, in the late 1870s and 1880s because Irish Americans believed

2 Jay Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company, 1985), 263; Harold Buetow, Of Singular Benefit: The Story of Catholic Education in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 132-133; Daniel Murphy, A History of Irish Emigrant and Missionary Education (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 219; James Sanders, “Boston Catholics and the School Question, 1825-1907,” in From Common School to Magnet School: Selected Essays in the History of Boston’s Schools, ed. James Fraser, Henry Allen, and Sam Barnes (Boston: Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, 1979), 48-49; see also chapter two.

104 ongoing nationalist agitation in Ireland showed the necessity of creating strong Irish allegiances in their children. But due to changing local and national politics and demographics, Irish Americans felt less pressure from American Protestants to defend their views about religious education. Irish-Catholics confronted the challenges of

Americanization by blending American and Irish-Catholic identities in Catholic education and in doing so, advanced an idea of multiculturalism for their schools. The opinions of clergy, parents, and journalists established that they hoped parochial schools would teach Irish-American children to be faithful Catholics, loyal Americans, and proud of their Irish lineage.

Chapter three first covers the growth of Catholic schools in the United States, noting that these schools were much slower to develop than public schools. Even though by the end of the 1880s, Catholic school use was on the rise, Irish Catholics in the United

States had a complicated relationship with these schools.3 Irish Americans, nonetheless, made many appeals to add lessons about Ireland to parochial schools. Parochial school education taught American patriotism alongside the Catholic faith, and attempted to create a feeling of Irish identity among mostly Irish-American pupils. By the end of the

1880s, however, fresh charges directed at the patriotism of parochial schools in

Massachusetts caused Irish Catholics to promote the image of their schools’

Americanism. The chapter ends in 1890, because by that time a new phase of controversy within the American Catholic Church that would reach all the way to the Vatican began,

3 Catholic schools and parochial schools were not strictly the same thing. The term Catholic school applies to academies, boarding schools, or colleges, unattached to any particular parish. Parochial schools, on the other hand, were schools connected to a parish, and were more often day schools comparable in most ways to local public schools. Parochial schools could be of any religious denomination, but in this chapter the term refers to Catholic parochial schools. To simplify the text and because there were no major differences in the curricula between these types of schools, however, parochial school is the term used most often here, although Catholic school and parochial school is sometimes used interchangeably.

105 largely drowning out discussions about Irish identities in Catholic schools. Although parochial schools, like other aspects of Irish-American life, underwent Americanization in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, many of these schools strove to teach students about significant aspects of Irish culture.

From the beginning of Catholic education in the United States, the Church faced some challenges. The first Catholic schools convened in parish church basements and often struggled with limited finances. Financial problems existed because the poverty of immigrant Catholics could prevent them from contributing to building schools and because sometimes parish priests and the diocesan hierarchy instead spent money on repairs or construction for church edifices. In areas in which the Irish, and Catholic population in general, was growing immensely, parishes were also often unable to accommodate the increasing number of Catholic children.

This lack of funding provided Catholics with a strong reason to ask for a share of the common school monies. From the 1840s through the 1870s, Catholics in the United

States argued that it was unfair for the government to tax parents for schools to which they could not conscientiously send their children. Those who used Catholic schools then, paid for two systems, and the financial burden was hard on many. As one parent who wrote to the Irish World put it: “one of the greatest obstacles to the successful working of the parochial school system is that they demand a fee.”4 Though they tried to convince the government to fund religious schools for most of the nineteenth century, Catholics also understood that they had to build schools at their own expense until the government provided the hoped-for assistance. Bishop John Hughes’s losing fight for public funds to

4 “Catholic Free Schools,” Irish World, February 6, 1875.

106 pay for parochial schools in New York City, for instance, led him to become a champion of parochial schools in his diocese. He declared that he wanted to “build the school-house first and the church afterwards.” The result was that by 1870, about fifty per cent of parishes in Manhattan had schools attached to them, and ten years later sixty-two per cent of Irish-Catholic parishes had schools.5 Though a majority of parishes had schools, a minority of Catholic children in New York attended parochial schools, with only about one-third of Catholic youth in parochial schools by the 1870s. Still, New York offered a contrast to Boston, where parochial school attendance stood between fifteen to twenty per cent of the Catholic school age population in the latter nineteenth century.6

Another reason that English-language parochial schools often had low attendance was that schools had to contend with limited interest on the part of many Irish Catholics, who did not utilize Catholic schools as much as their German co-religionists in the nineteenth century. Scholars have claimed that Germans were more concerned with parochial schooling because their desire for their children to learn German prompted them to choose schools where they could decide the language of instruction. German-

American Catholics also paid attention to events taking place in Prussia in the 1870s, where the country’s leader, Otto von Bismarck, undertook a program to reduce Catholic influence and power within the German state, known in German as the “Kulturkampf.”7

Watching the persecution of Catholics in Prussia, then, German-Americans likely felt that

5 Jay Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985), 263; Colleen McDannell, “Going to the Ladies’ Fair: Irish Catholics in New York City, 1870-1900,” in The New York Irish, ed. Ronald Bayor and Timothy Meagher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 234-251; Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: A History of the New York City Public Schools (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 80. 6 Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 263; Buetow, Of Singular Benefit, 132-133; Murphy, A History of Irish Emigrant and Missionary Education, 219; Sanders, “Boston Catholics and the School Question,” 48- 49; See also chapter two. 7 John McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003), 98-100.

107 establishing and patronizing parochial schools was all the more important. But non-

English speaking immigrants in general were also more inclined to use parochial schools, as research indicates that groups like Germans, Poles, and French Canadians were more enthusiastic about maintaining parochial schools than the Irish.8 Despite these obstacles, there were Irish-Catholic children in parochial school and a number of Irish Catholics paid attention to the quality, instruction, and attendance of the schools.

To demonstrate the quality of parochial schools in the face of some American

Catholics’ negative views of the curricula, many Catholic schools followed public school guidelines. Although there may have been variations in the teaching style and content between the religious orders who often ran parochial schools, such as the Christian

Brothers and the Sisters of Mercy, both from Ireland, and the Sisters of Notre Dame de

Namur, from Belgium, they largely used the same textbooks as other Catholic schools and employed similar curricula as the local public schools.9 Over the course of the nineteenth century, parochial schools emulated public schools in order to prove that these schools would prepare their students for American life as well as the public schools.

Catholic leaders also urged that parochial schools emphasize American patriotism and the duties of citizenship as much as public schools, both because they supported teaching

8 Joel Perlmann, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure among the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Blacks in an American City, 1880-1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 71; Timothy Walch, Parish School: American Catholic Parochial Education from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Crossroad Publication Company, 1996), 37; Robert D. Cross, “Origins of Catholic Parochial Schools in America,” in Enlightening the Next Generation: Catholics and Their Schools, 1830-1980, ed. F. Michael Perko (New York: Garland, 1988), 324; Sanders, “Boston Catholics and the School Question,” in From Common School to Magnet School, 72-73. 9 Howard Ralph Weisz, Irish-American and Italian-American Educational Views, 1870-1900: A Comparison (New York: Arno Press, 1976), 32; McDannell, “Going to the Ladies’ Fair,” in The New York Irish, 234-251; Jay P. Dolan, The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 1815-1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 113.

108 patriotism to American Catholic pupils and to counter anti-Catholic criticism, resulting in very similar parochial school and public school lessons.10

Parochial schools by the 1870s thus taught most of the same secular subjects as public schools. In 1880, seventeen-year-old Ettia Cooke wrote to The Pilot to list the subjects she studied at St. Mary’s School for girls in Brooklyn. At St. Mary’s, high school students studied astronomy, chemistry, physiology, ancient and modern history, and geometry.11 Boys had similar courses, suited to their age. In his book, John O’Kane

Murray took his readers inside the St. James Cathedral Free School for boys in Brooklyn in 1876, run by the Christian Brothers, to describe a typical school day. In the oldest class of students ten to twelve years old, after morning prayers, they learned arithmetic and algebra, bookkeeping, English composition and grammar, geography, and penmanship.

Though these subjects were often similar or identical to public schools,

Catholicism influenced the overall environment of parochial schools. Unlike public school readers and histories, Catholic schoolbooks included histories of saints and other

Catholic figures. The other main difference between Catholic schools and public schools was the half-hour of religious instruction given at the end of the day, plus the prayer before dismissal. Students also said short prayers throughout the school day. Signs on the wall that read “we must pray to God with piety in church and school” and pictures of saints, “the Most Blessed Virgin, and a crucifix – all hung in appropriate places,” according to Murray. Many Catholics believed that these emphases on Catholic religious practices, accomplishments, and morals were the crucial distinction between parochial

10 Weisz, Irish American and Italian American, 329-346; Buetow, Of Singular Benefit, 203; Timothy Walch, “Catholic School Books and American Values: The Nineteenth Century Experience,” in Enlightening the Next Generation, 267, 275-276; Phillip Gleason, Keeping the Faith: American Catholicism Past and Present (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), 41. 11 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, July 24, 1880.

109 and public schools. The religious surroundings of the school and classroom taught the children “to keep God in their minds all the days of their lives.”12 These schools were necessary for Catholics because for them, religion was the only force capable of teaching children respect for their families and their country.

Because religion was so important to many Irish Catholics, they argued that

Catholic schools were essential for the morality and respectability of young Irish

Americans. At the height of the school controversy in the early 1870s, the Irish World carried editorials, letters, and texts of sermons and speeches claiming that “there can be no sound system of education which does not accept the truths of the Catholic faith as a foundation,” and that “Catholics hold that the very absence of religious and moral instructions for their children is in itself an evil.”13 The idea that parents in the after-life would have to answer for the loss of their children’s souls because of public school education made some Catholics zealous advocates of religion’s role in education. As one letter from an Irish-Catholic New Yorker to the Irish World said: “there is nothing of greater importance to us Catholics than that our children should be thoroughly instructed in their religion,” because “parents will have to render an account for those children before the bar of Divine Justice.”14 The Irish-American also included numerous articles about Catholic objections to public and secular schooling and boasted about the benefits of Catholic schools to the community. In a July 1871 issue, the Irish-American reported on the annual commencement of “what we must call those Irish-American schools” in

12 John O’Kane Murray, A Popular History of the Catholic Church in the United States (New York: J.&D. Sadlier, 1886), 429-431. 13 “Heathenism in the State Schools,” Irish World, November 25, 1871; “Sectarianism,” Irish World, March 9, 1872; see also “‘Free’ Schools,” Irish World, April 27, 1872; “Godless Schools, No. 2,” Irish World, May 4, 1872; “Catholic Education,” Irish World, May 4, 1872. 14 “Catholics and the Godless Schools,” Irish World, May 17, 1873.

110 New York and added that some public school officials attested to the high quality of parochial schools.15 Many of these editorials and letters had a two-fold purpose: to convince Catholic parents that they should use Catholic schools because of their excellence, and to argue that Catholics should receive their share of school funds.

For some Irish Americans, it was also important that children went to parochial school because these schools could teach children about their heritage. Those who advocated for more education about Ireland believed that these schools were the logical place to begin inculcating an Irish affinity. The desires that many Irish Americans had to teach their children about Irish identity in parochial schools were concurrent with arguments that several offered against public schools. In the 1870s, when the school question was important to many Irish Catholics, they came to believe that they could use parochial schools to teach Irish identity in addition to religion.16

When parochial education became a venue in which to teach non-American identities, Catholic schools in the nineteenth century consequently gained a reputation as foreign. Christian Brothers’ schools were the focus of some of these worries. In the early

1870s, the Christian Brothers, an Irish-origin teaching order, ran sixteen schools in New

York and had between 8,000 and 9,000 pupils. David Lawlor, an Irish-American businessman who came from Ireland at age seven, remembered the Christian Brothers schools he attended in County Tipperary as bastions of Irish nationalism. In New York,

15 “Annual ‘Commencements,’” Irish-American, July 8, 1871. 16 Weisz, Irish-American and Italian-American, 40-41; Marvin Lazerson, “Understanding American Catholic Educational History,” in Enlightening the Next Generation, 339; Hasia Diner, “The Most Irish City in the Union,” in The New York Irish, 95; Timothy Smith, “Religion and Ethnicity in America,” American Historical Review 83, no. 5 (1978): 1167-1169. Catholicism itself could be an expression of Irish ethnicity. Irish World editor Patrick Ford made the equation clear. “The struggles for Catholic faith and the persecutions endured for its sake, on Irish soil,” he wrote, “have preserved the nationality of the Irish people.” The frequency with which Irish Catholics paired the terms ‘faith’ and ‘race’ shows that for these immigrants, the two were inseparable. “The Irish Language,” Irish World, May 10, 1873.

111 the Christian Brothers were also involved with Irish nationalist causes, teaching their students about Irish patriotism and their Irish heritage.17

The efforts to teach Irish content in parochial schools formed parts of the campaign in the 1870s to convince Irish parents to use Catholic schools, where Irish-

American children could learn to value their Irish background in addition to American nationality. The national school question, in which many American Protestants felt the need to defend the religious and cultural foundations of public education, further prompted Irish Catholics to make efforts to protect the religious and ethnic identities of their children by convincing parents to use Catholic schools. In their arguments in favor of parochial schools, many Irish Americans said that Irish culture and religion were under attack and so parochial schools needed to create devoted Catholics and proud Irish

Americans. Editorials and letters to the Irish World evinced this perception. One editorial believed that Anglo-Americans had shamed the Irish accent out of Irish Americans, so adults would have to ensure that their children studied Ireland in parochial schools.

Because the writer thought that Irishmen in America knew little about Ireland, it was necessary for those of Irish descent to “study the history of fatherland in the days of old…they must see Ireland in her saints, in her heroes, in her statesmen, in her martyrs, in

17 Walch, Parish School, 4, 29-32, 58, 63-67; Dolan, Immigrant Church, 102, 110, 119; Ravitch, Great School Wars, 80; Bernard Weiss, “Preface” in American Education and the European Immigrant, 1840- 1940, ed. Bernard Weiss (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1982), xvi; Maureen Dezell, Irish America: Coming into Clover: The Evolution of a People and a Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 82; Murphy, Irish Emigrant and Missionary Education, 212, Weisz, Irish American and Italian American, 30- 31; Buetow, Of Singular Benefit, 149, 161; JoEllen Vinyard, For Faith and Fortune: The Education of Catholic Immigrants in Detroit, 1805-1925 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 23, 31, 46, 63, 71; Kenneth Nilsen, “The Irish Language in New York, 1850-1900,” in The New York Irish, 252-274; Dennis Ryan, Beyond the Ballot Box: A Social History of the Boston Irish, 1845-1917 (Rutherford, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983), 68, 75; Irish World, May 6, 1871; David S. Lawlor, The Life and Struggles of an Irish Boy in America: An Autobiography (Newton, Mass.: Carroll Publishing Company, 1936), 17; Mary C. Kelly, The Shamrock and the Lily: the New York Irish and the Creation of a Transatlantic Identity, 1845-1921 (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 139, 140.

112 her long suffering and virtuous people.”18 The image of the Irish as a “long suffering and virtuous people” was a common trope of Irish nationalist rhetoric, showing that the Irish

World and many of its readers, at least, wanted nationalist messages in parochial education. Also, among Yankees who hated the Irish, the writer believed, the Irish would have to educate their young if they wanted to maintain Irish identity in America.

Patrick Ford agreed that Catholic education could preserve a distinct Irish ethnicity and contribute to Irish nationalism. An Irish World editorial, under the heading

“Americans, but not Yankees,” told readers that Irish Americans “shall remember our blood and the land of our fathers” as part of their Catholic education and, speaking particularly to young people, to “be always Americans, but never try to be Yankees.”19

Patrick Ford thought that being Irish and American were complimentary identities, but one could not be an Anglo-American Yankee and remain an Irish Catholic. To many Irish

Americans, the term Yankee carried a cultural and religious connotation and meant an

Anglo-Saxon Protestant American who had, in all likelihood, inherited an abhorrence for

Catholics from his Puritanical ancestors.

Preserving Irish identity in the United States might also aid the Emerald Isle. A lecturing priest from Ireland, Father Thomas Burke, told Irish Americans that it was through education that they could further the cause of Ireland. Burke hoped that education would advance the remembrance of Ireland in America and would teach the

Irish-American grandson to retain his grandfather’s love “for the old land.” Eventually, teaching Irish-American children to revere Ireland would lead Irish Americans to liberate

18 “Practical Suggestions for Irish-Americans,” Irish World, February 10, 1872. 19 “Americans, but not Yankees,” Irish World, March 2, 1872.

113 their ancestral country.20 For Burke and others, infusing Catholic education with Irish nationalism would not only keep Irish identity from blending into English, but was the hope for Ireland’s freedom and deliverance.

Those of Irish descent in America not only owed it to Ireland to attend parochial schools, but also had a duty to their Irish ancestors to maintain their inherited religious faith. An article in the Irish-American about St. Anna’s Academy in Brooklyn stated that the local public schools were half-deserted because so many children were attending

“Irish-American schools of solid learning.” The priest who initiated the construction of the school, Father Gleeson, told his parishioners that public schools exposed Irish-

American children to “the peril of losing the sacred legacy of Faith which they had inherited from their martyred fathers.”21 In its glowing descriptions of the useful lessons and the commodious classrooms at St. Anna’s, the article attempted to convince Irish

Americans that their children should discontinue attending the city’s public schools.

Parochial schools, for men like Father Gleeson, would preserve the heritage of Irish-

American children because Catholicism was an integral piece of the Irish legacy and part of staying faithful to one’s Irish ancestors.

Other Irish Americans had specific ideas about how to preserve a distinctive Irish character through Catholic education. For James Jones, a man who wrote to the Irish

World in 1873, reviving the Irish language would teach Irish-American youth that they were not the same as the English. Jones said that Irish Americans could refute those who grouped together all the country’s English-speakers by teaching the Irish language in

Catholic schools. Jones also took the opportunity to warn parents against the public

20 “Father Burke- Lecture on the Future of America in Connection with Catholic Education,” Irish World, June 22, 1872. 21 “Our Educational Institutes,” Irish-American, January 25, 1873.

114 schools, where he said children would learn to dishonor their faith and race.22 Numerous

Irish Americans, such as Jones, thought they could put the Irish language to good use in a variety of forums. For some, public schools were good places for Irish language lessons, while for others, parochial schools seemed the appropriate place to teach Irish-American children about their ancestral culture through its mother tongue. One solution to the potential of Irish-American children losing ethnic identity in public schools, a World article concluded, was schools “wherein our children will be molded in our own image and likeness.”23 The article expressed the common argument that parents needed to have more control over their children’s education because if the state had too much authority,

Irish-Catholic children could become too much like Anglo-Protestant-Americans in their behavior and beliefs.

The behavior that children learned in public schools, some Irish Americans believed, was unfit for children who, as Irish descendants, should have been respectable and virtuous. Articles in the Irish World and the Irish-American during the 1870s were filled with charges that the public schools were corrupting the ethics of Irish-Catholic youth and endangering American society. An Irishman called “Rambling Charley” wrote to the Irish World in March 1874 to comment on the bad state of the children of Irish parents in New York. Comparing Irish-American children with those who grew up in

Ireland, Charley found that children attending public schools “know more badness

[blasphemy and bad language] in one year than a young man or woman of thirty in

Ireland.” Charley, writing from Brooklyn, blamed public schools, where “everything Irish or Catholic is banned as being foreign,” but also the “many lukewarm, careless persons

22 “The Educational Problem,” Irish World, December 6, 1873. 23 “Education,” Irish World, December 13, 1873.

115 among our race.”24 Writers like Rambling Charley were trying to convince these lackadaisical Irishmen who cared little about religious education to use parochial schools by pointing out the damage that public schools caused to the morality of Irish-American children. Writers in The Pilot agreed that without religion, schools were unable to teach morality. The Pilot, for example, reported that the Manchester, New Hampshire public schools left their pupils “without morals and manners…and respect for the wisdom and authority of their elders.” The Catholic school students, by contrast, bowed to their priest when they met him in the streets.25 The message from many Irish Americans was clear: if

Irish parents wanted to impart to their children traditional Irish virtues, they would have to use Catholic schools.

To convince Irish parents of this idea, newspapers devoted a great deal of space to problems in public schools. The Pilot spent weeks in 1874 covering a case in Brattleboro,

Vermont in which Catholic pupils were expelled from the town’s schools for staying home on Corpus Christi Day.26 In the same year, the Irish-American reported on complaints in Brooklyn about co-education, with some asserting that the mixing of boys and girls in the same class produced immorality. The Brooklyn school committee, after investigating the matter, decided that mixed education was “pregnant with danger” and

24 “The Effects of Public School Training,” Irish World, March 14, 1874. See also, “Father Boylan,” Irish- American, February 8, 1873; “Education,” Irish-American, June 14, 1873; “Public Education: The Rights of the State and Family,” Irish-American, March 14, 1874; “Religion in Schools,” Irish World supplement, April 18, 1874; “Free Schools,” Irish World, May 9, 1874; “Catholic Free Schools,” Irish World, February 6, 1875; “Catholic Public Schools,” Irish World, March 27, 1875; “Public Schools” Irish World, May 1, 1875; “The Public School Question. A Protestant with Catholic Views on the Subject,” Irish-American, May 1, 1875; “Archbishop Purcell on the Public Schools,” Irish World, August 19, 1876. As seen in chapter two, however, Irish Catholics in the United States were not united in their opposition to public schools. One who wrote a letter to the Irish World in 1874, for example, said that although public schools had Protestant overtones, they would not harm Catholic students who had good parents and good Church education, “Shall the Public School System be Sustained by Catholics?,” Irish World, January 3, 1874. 25 “A Bad Report of Public School Education,” The Pilot, April 4, 1874. 26 “The Brattleboro Case,” The Pilot, August 29, 1874.

116 ordered co-education of boys and girls to cease.27 With so much trouble with public schools, an editorial in The Pilot in 1875 opined that the school question would never be settled until Catholics were allowed a share of the school fund.28 Yet the Irish World, the

Irish-American, and The Pilot did not represent all Irish Catholics, and a large number continued to send their children to public schools because they believed public education benefited their children or for economic reasons. But because parochial school proponents thought that religious schools were essential to learn proper morals, they did not want the cost of Catholic schooling to hold Irish-Catholic parents back.

In part to help Irish-American children learn the morals that were an important part of Irish heritage, Irish Catholics advocated free Catholic schools. Likely inspired by the “Poughkeepsie Plan” of 1873, in which the public schools of Poughkeepsie, New

York absorbed the Catholic schools and funded them through public funds while retaining Catholic teachers, Catholics in New York City attempted the same move. On St.

Patrick’s Day, 1875, the trustees of the city’s parochial schools presented a letter to the

New York City Board of Education proposing to admit New York’s parochial schools to the public education system. The committee wrote that they wanted to give “the thirty thousand children who now attend the Parochial Schools…the benefits of the Common or

Free School System.”29 The schools would still teach Catholic principles, but would be under the authority of the public schools.30 The parochial schools in New York did not merge with the public school system, but Irish and Catholic leaders in the United States

27 “Public Schools,” Irish-American, May 16, 1874; “Brooklyn Public Schools,” Irish-American, June 13, 1874. 28 “The Pilot and Catholic Schools,” The Pilot, November 27, 1875. 29 Journal of the Board of Education of the City of New York, 1875 (New York: Cushing and Bardua, 1875), 203-205, Gutman Library, Harvard. 30 “Catholic Public Schools,” Irish World, March 27, 1875.

117 continued to attempt to find ways for poor children to attend Catholic schools.31 Though

Catholic schooling was growing in Boston and New York as Irish Americans became more successful, the price of Catholic schooling was still beyond the reach of many, meaning that the Irish cultural values taught in parochial schools would not reach the number of children that some Irish Catholics hoped.

Although the school question lessened in importance after 1876 because of the loss of Republican hegemony in many places, there were still reasons for concerned Irish

Americans to advocate Catholic education at the end of the 1870s. While Irish nationalist organizations like the Clan-na-Gael were building up membership and finances and the

Home Rule party was gaining strength in Ireland, many Irish Americans concentrated on events in the United States, as continued economic depression gave rise to explosive labor disputes across the industrial North. By the end of 1877, the trial and execution of

Irish miners in Pennsylvania known as Molly Maguires because of labor violence had taken place and the massive and violent railroad strikes of mid-1877 had shocked the country. Corruption in national politics, embodied by the Grant administration, and municipal government, with critics pointing to New York’s Tammany Hall as a prime example, was also well-known. Some Americans in the North, furthermore, blamed Irish immigrants for the immorality, corruption, and violence in American society.32

31 See, “How to Make Public Schools for Catholics,” The Pilot, December 18, 1875. One of the most well known experiments to share education with public schools was in two towns in Minnesota in the 1890s, when Archbishop of St. Paul, John Ireland, conceived of a plan. Under the so-called Faribault Plan, Catholic children would attend regular public school classes with other students and only receive Catholic religious instruction before or after regular school hours. Ireland faced strong opposition from conservative members of the American Catholic Church such as Bishop of Rochester, New York Bernard McQuaid and Archbishop of New York, Michael Corrigan. The experiment failed. See Marvin O’Connell, John Ireland and the American Catholic Church (St. Paul, Minn.: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1988). 32 Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987), 9-10, 15-17; Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after

118 It is unsurprising, then, that Irish Americans would concentrate on teaching their children morality, to help erase the image of the Irish as lawless and prevent the widespread unrest that took place in the country from recurring. In 1877, The Pilot published a letter asserting that “no Catholic can send his child to a public school without trembling for the ‘pious and moral’ training of his boy or girl.”33 Others continued to take issue with boys and girls in the same class. Father Henry Hughes wrote to The Pilot from

Boston that mixed education of the sexes did not teach boys gentlemanly respect for females and caused the girls to become tomboys. As evidence, Hughes said Boston girls

“smoke and chew, play top with the boys, and sometimes even give them a back at leap- frog,” which hardly fit with “Christian notions of womanly modesty and decorum.”34 The

Pilot also reminded its readers that, according to the Catholic hierarchy, Catholics should only use public schools if these schools were not obviously anti-Catholic and if no nearby

Catholic schools existed.35 Even after the school question lessened in importance, religion and morality in American society seemed to be just as vital as ever. For advocates of

Catholic education, only by attending parochial schools could Irish-American children prove the Irish were respectable people and contribute to the forces of law and order.

Any increase in parochial school use likely gratified the Irish Americans who wanted to use Catholic education to encourage morality in children. The Sisters of Notre

the Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 171, 178; Thomas N. Brown, Irish- American Nationalism, 1870-1890 (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1966), 47, 65-77. 33 “A Letter from ‘A Catholic’ on ‘Teaching Morality in Public Schools,’” The Pilot, October 13, 1877. 34 “Mixed Education of the Sexes,” The Pilot, October 4, 1879. The Pilot had made complaint about mixed education earlier in the 1870s as well, writing that mixed schools, especially in the evening, were dangerous to decency and morality. “Facts about Boston Public Schools,” The Pilot, February 20, 1875. 35 “Church and School: The Attitude of the Catholic Church to American Public Schools,” The Pilot, November 15, 1879; Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 270. The Vatican had intervened in the public school debate in 1876 to decree that it did not approve of secular public schooling. The instruction that the Vatican sent to American bishops also stated that if parents sent their children to public schools without sufficient cause, priests could deny these parents absolution in confession.

119 Dame ran most of the parochial schools in the Boston area by the 1880s, and more and more Catholic children began attending them in this decade. The Sisters, who had a mission and school in South Boston, reported that the school year opened in September

1882 with “50 new pupils from the public schools and 135 little children for first grade, thus in all 185 new pupils added to our number.” The school had more students two years later, with more than 1,000 pupils “not withstanding all the efforts made by the

Protestants to attract the children.”36 Though the majority of Catholic children in Boston attended public schools, the use of parochial schools in Boston was increasing, perhaps because of the constant reminders from the pulpit and the press about the value of

Catholic schools and the corruption of public schools. By the 1880s, Irish Catholics in

Boston were also gaining in wealth and status, becoming assertive of their rights and power, and more could afford parochial schools and felt comfortable insisting on a separate Irish-Catholic identity within American nationality. It is interesting to note, moreover, that these reports of rising attendance came before the Third Baltimore Plenary

Council provided its directives to increase parochial education in 1884.

The Third Plenary Council of American bishops and archbishops met in

Baltimore at the end of 1884 and gave the laity and clergy of the United States directions, a great deal of which concerned increasing parochial school use. Though the announcement did not include any particularities about Irish identity, the message from the American Catholic hierarchy was a significant pronouncement about the importance of Catholic education for all Catholic children in the United States. The instructions commanded Catholic parents to give their children a “truly Christian and Catholic

36 Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, Annals of South Boston Mission, 1871-1888 (electronic document received by email from Sister Esther MacCarthy, October 14, 2011, unpublished data), 27, 30.

120 education, and to defend and safeguard them from the dangers of an education merely secular” in the public schools.37 The pastoral also directed parish priests to “multiply and improve the parochial schools.”38 These decrees spurred many Irish-Catholic parishes to exert more effort to establish affordable Catholic schools. The annals of the Sisters of

Notre Dame showed that some parochial schools were indeed growing even before the council issued its decrees. These parochial schools needed Catholic textbooks, and a few publishers did their best to meet the demand.

Before Catholic publishers began publishing textbooks directly for U.S. parochial schools in the 1870s, there were few books made for American Catholic students, and

Irish-American parochial schools usually used textbooks for English-Catholic or public school students, which did not emphasize Ireland or Irish history. But even as Catholic publishers began to supply schools with Catholic textbooks, many parochial schools were still using public school textbooks. These textbooks, even if not clearly anti-Catholic, were unacceptable to many Catholics, as an article in the August 1880 issue of the monthly magazine Catholic World explained. The author warned readers that non-

Catholic books – those written by authors who were not Catholic – ignored Catholic historical and cultural accomplishments. The writer thought that the textbooks that did not treat any Catholic issues laid the basis for indifferentism in children, causing them to believe that Catholics had done nothing good in history. Recounting a common anecdote about the ignorance of American Catholic children about their own history, the writer stated he visited a class at a Catholic school in which students “knew no fact in the

37 Concilii Plenarii Baltimorensis Tertii, Acta et Decreta, 196, quoted in United States Bureau of Education, Report of the Commissioner of Education made to the Secretary of the Interior for the year ended June 30, 1913, Volume I (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1914), 345. 38 “The Plenary Council,” Irish-American, December 20, 1884.

121 history of this country [the United States] which could redound to the glory of their church or of Catholics” because the textbook used made no mention of Catholic roles in

American history.39 To teach the value of Catholicism, the author concluded, children had to read texts that concentrated on Catholicism in both world and American history.

Various Catholic publishers thus tried to fill the need for good Catholics books in the 1870s. The D. and J. Sadlier firm in New York began publishing textbooks for

American students in 1870-1871. Bishop of Peoria John Spalding compiled selections for many of Sadliers’ books as well as for the Catholic Publication Society, which began publishing their series in 1875. The Catholic publishing firm Benziger Brothers also put forth their series of Catholic National Readers in the 1870s, most of them arranged by

Bishop of Cleveland Richard Gilmour. These series of textbooks were some of the most popular in most parochial schools through the 1870s and 1880s. The Sisters of Notre

Dame, for example, utilized Sadlier’s textbooks extensively in their parochial schools in

40 the Boston area in the 1880s.

The content of history textbooks such as Sadlier’s showed that the Sisters were willing to teach their students about both American and Catholic identities. Many U.S. history textbooks written for Catholic schools explained that their purpose was to correct the injustices and slights offered to Catholics in public school history books. The statement in the preface to Sadlier’s Excelsior Studies in the History of the United States

(1879) was typical of many textbooks. William H. Sadlier, the author, wrote that textbook writers ignored the role of Catholics in American history, “so that, from this very silence, a child of even ordinary intellect could not fail to infer that Catholicity has

39 “Non-Catholic School Books and Catholic Schools,” Catholic World (Vol. 31, Issue 185, August 1880), pp. 641-647, 641-643. 40 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, 6 October 1883.

122 done little, or nothing, for our country; whereas, the reverse is singularly and emphatically the case.” The book emphasized the Catholic discovery and exploration of

America, Catholic kindnesses to, and Protestant abuses of, American Indians, and

Catholic roles in the American Revolution.41 Catholic history texts meant to inculcate

American pride and patriotism just as much as public school books, but it was a simultaneous pride in both Catholicism and the United States.

U.S. history books for Catholic schools also included a wealth of information on the progress and setbacks of Catholicism in the United States. Mentioning the “great difficulties” that the church overcame, Sadlier’s textbook included a brief account of the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing political movement of the 1850s. After a catalogue of ill treatment the Catholics received, Sadlier ensured students did not have a poor impression of Americans, writing that it showed the “good sense of the American people, that the

Know Nothings secured in the ensuing Presidential election only a single State, after which the entire movement soon faded out of existence.”42 This schoolbook assured students that anti-Catholics were a minority, claiming that the majority of Americans were more open-minded. A Catholic Publication Society U.S. history book from 1881 also included the contributions of American Catholics, writing that they “have given to the country a long line of illustrious men” and, pointing to the pride that Catholic students should feel for their schools, added that “Catholic schools have been founded in almost every city, and a system of Christian education has been sustained in the face of great

41 William H. Sadlier, Sadlier’s Excelsior Studies in the History of the United States for schools (New York: W.H. Sadlier, 1879), iii, 370. 42 Ibid., 293.

123 difficulties.”43 Calling Catholic education Christian was likely strategic, because it showed the contrast between public school education, which was largely secular by the

1880s, and Catholic education, which was the only true Christian system according to

Catholics. Most of all, Catholic school history books were intended to foster a specifically Catholic pride in the United States.

Simply blending Catholicism and Americanism would not be enough for some

Irish Americans, however, as they hoped children’s education would include the ways in which Irish and American history overlapped. In fact, the interweaving of Irish and

American identities exemplified the lessons that many Irish Americans wanted parochial schools to teach. In one of her “chats” with Irish-American children in The Pilot’s children’s column in 1878, the column’s editor Agnes Smiley recommended good subjects to study. Going through all the interesting nations of history about which to learn, Smiley told the children that it “would be a shame for you not to know the history of the United States best, because that is your country, and of Ireland next best, because that was the country of your fathers.”44 George Plant, writing to the Irish World a year later, thought that Irish-American children should learn not only the history of Ireland, but also the part that the Irish played in American history. Plant thought that if Irish people demanded that their children learn Irish history, it would become a popular subject in parochial school curricula. He also believed that students should be more aware of the substantial accomplishments of the Irish in American history.45 Whether trying to

43 John R. G. Hassard, History of the United States of America for the use of schools, Fourth Edition (New York: Catholic Publication Society Company, 1881), 379, Gutman Library, Harvard. 44 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, September 21, 1878. 45 “Irish History,” Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, March 8, 1879.

124 convince children or parents of appropriate subjects of study, some Irish Americans thought that Irish and American identities could be mutually reinforcing in education.

Parochial school ceremonies were a venue in which Irishness and Americanism could combine. Though Irish songs and speeches were regularly a part of many school ceremonies and entertainment fund-raisers, there were also ever-present reminders of

American patriotism. These programs could artfully interweave Irish and American themes, such as that at St. Gabriel’s grammar school in New York in 1874, which included the songs “Green Flag” and “American War,” plus recitations titled “Defenders of Limerick,” “John Burns of Gettysburg,” and “Gerald Barry: A Story of Ninety-

Eight.”46 The flags at St. Patrick’s Academy in Brooklyn also expressed students’ expected dual loyalties. At commencement exercises in 1875, Irish and American flags decorated the main hall.47 At the school’s entertainment given in early 1876, the program included the academy band playing Irish airs and a speech on injustice done to Ireland.48

As flags, songs, and speeches in these schools showed, American nationality was an integral part of Catholic school programs. But current and historical events in Ireland were also popular topics in parochial school performances.

Teaching Irishness was important, and the content of children’s lessons was more central than décor. Peter O’Reilly, writing from Hoboken in 1875, suggested how parochial education could be more Irish and follow Irish nationalist themes. O’Reilly believed that hostility to British power marked all true Irishmen. By studying Irish history in schools, O’Reilly wrote, Irish-American students would learn their duty to Ireland and

46 “Our Educational Institutes,” Irish-American, August 1, 1874. 47 “Our Educational Institutes,” Irish-American, June 19, 1875. 48 “St. Patrick’s Academy, Brooklyn,” Irish-American, February 26, 1876.

125 to resist British rule. O’Reilly hoped that churches, newspapers, and schools would teach

Irish-American children a duty to their ancestral land and religion, and advised Irish parents to “see that their children learn something of their country’s rights and wrongs.”49

The hope that schools would teach the history of British repression reflected Irish nationalist goals and was an essential component of one particular image of Irish identity that some Irish Americans hoped to communicate to their progeny. This image was based upon the nationalist message that communicated the antagonism between Irish and

British identities, a vision of Irishness that those with nationalist sympathies like Peter

O’Reilly wanted to include in parochial school lessons.

In some parochial school classrooms, students used textbooks to teach reading skills (known as readers) that included selections about Ireland, Irish history, and the

Catholic saints of the Emerald Isle with messages that matched many of those of Irish nationalism. Frequently beginning with advanced fourth, fifth, or sixth readers, students encountered a variety of themes that often matched Irish nationalist messages about

Catholicism, history, and Irish identity. One idea that students consistently saw was the importance of Catholicism to Irish identity, which taught students about their ethno- religious inheritance. A poem by Thomas D’Arcy McGee, “The Dying Celt in his

American Son” in The Young Catholic’s Illustrated Fifth Reader, communicated this idea to parochial school students. The poem, advice to keep Catholicism alive within Irish-

American communities, made it clear that Irish-Catholicism came directly from St.

Patrick and the Irish carried their religion across the Atlantic to the wilds of America.50

Intricately tying together Irish nationalist themes and Catholic perseverance, the poem

49 “Ireland in the Schools,” Irish World, September 4, 1875. 50 “The Dying Celt to his American Son,” Young Catholic’s Illustrated Fifth Reader (New York: Catholic Publication Society, 1875), 423-424.

126 told students that by staying true to their Catholic faith they were staying true to their ethnic heritage. An essay on Irish-Catholic emancipation expressed the idea that historical suffering bonded Catholicism and Irishness. In its suggestion that the schoolboys and girls keep the memories of Ireland’s hardships proudly in their minds, the selection tired to create a sense among Irish-American children of their people’s history.51 The Irish-Catholic students at parochial schools who recited lessons such as these from their school readers could hardly avoid the message that their ancestors had braved dangers to pass on religious and ethnic sensibilities to their progeny. The idea that

Catholicism was an important, if not essential, component of Irish identity and that this religion tied Irish people together in common cause was a significant part of the nationalist message and one found in parochial school textbooks.

Other lessons told Catholic pupils that the history of Ireland was a proud one because of the country’s religious devotion, another nationalist message for Irish-

American children to learn about their heritage. Students who studied such passages as

“The Round Towers and Ruined Abbeys of Ireland” in Bishop Gilmour’s Fifth Reader learned about the connection of Irish people to Catholicism and read that the ruins of

Irish antiquity demonstrated “the piety of her children and their early advancement in civilization.” Most of all the selection taught Irish-American students to cling to their faith the way their Irish forebears had done and exhibited an idealized image of the Irish past in which the Irish people were models of learning and culture.52 Making the message clearer, a selection titled “The Birth of a People” argued that faithfulness to Catholicism

51 “St. Patrick and St. Bridget,” and “Universal Emancipation,” John Lancaster Spalding, Young Catholic’s Illustrated Sixth Reader and Speaker (New York: Catholic Publication Society, 1887), 334-337, 356-358. 52 “The Round Towers and Ruined Abbeys of Ireland,” in Richard Gilmour, The Catholic National Series: The Fifth Reader (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1876), 129-131, Gutman Library, Harvard.

127 created a united Irish people out of diverse and warring clans. It was “the blows of religious persecution” that “welded them [the Irish] into one people,” the selection read.

The author claimed that religion was so important to the Irish because “their religion was the only legacy left to them” after “everything else had been taken away.” In using the

Irish people as exemplars of the simultaneity of religious and national identity, the reading taught Catholic students about the sacrifices and triumphs of the Irish people, thereby increasing an awareness and pride in students’ Irish ancestry.

These readers did not simply concentrate on the linkages between Catholicism and the Irish nation, however, but also included selections about the need to vindicate the

Irish people because of the myriad injustices they had suffered, which was another important nationalist message. A popular essay found in the Young Catholics’ Illustrated series, the Catholic National series, and Sadlier’s Metropolitan series concerned the traits of common Irish people. Though the original title was “Character of the Irish Peasantry,” the Young Catholics’ series changed “peasantry” to “people” to remove the image of the

Irish as impoverished and ignorant. The lesson told children that other information they had heard about the Irish was not necessarily true. The selection began by explaining that

“histories replete with falsehood…form…a mass of the most cruel calumnies that ever weighed down the character of a meritorious people.” To prove the falsehoods wrong, the writer described the Irish peasantry with adjectives like inquisitive, artful, stoic, witty, hospitable, generous, cheerful, and heroic. Helping children understand their parents’ longing for Ireland, the writer added that “an enthusiastic attachment to the place of their nativity is another striking trait of the Irish character.” With knowledge of the truth about

Irish people, many Irish Catholics hoped Irish-American youth would learn an affinity

128 with their parents’ birthplace and Irish-American children would not distance themselves from the Irish people.

Older students also encountered poems and speeches that taught them about the past wrongs committed on the Irish, intended to inspire indignation and defense of their assailed people and culture. The Young Catholic’s Illustrated Sixth Reader and Speaker, for children about twelve or thirteen years old, added elocution to its lessons and included a large variety of poems and speeches, presumably to be recited aloud. The sixth readers in both the Young Catholics’ Illustrated series and the Catholic National series included the sad poem “Exile of Erin,” which evoked the familiar themes of sentimental remembrance of Ireland by those driven across the sea, ending each stanza with “Erin Go

Braugh,” meaning “Ireland Forever.”53 The poem drew heavily on the themes of kinship, asking about sisters, brothers, and mother, and promising to always be true to the land of one’s fathers. Immediately preceding the poem in the Catholic National series was the text of a speech by Thomas Francis Meagher titled “Vindication for Treason.” Many would have been familiar with Meagher as the commander of the Union Army’s Irish

Brigade in the Civil War, but others also would have known him as an Irish patriot involved in the Young Ireland movement’s failed uprising in 1848. The speech’s main message was that it was an Irishman’s duty to fight for his native land and oppose unjust

English governance.54 The poem “Exile of Erin” and Meagher’s speech tried to educate parochial school students about recent Irish history and the myriad offences that the Irish people suffered at the hands of the English. These pieces’ main message was that Irish

53 “The Exile of Erin,” and “Appeal to the People of Meath in 1834,” John Lancaster Spalding, Young Catholic’s Illustrated Sixth Reader and Speaker (New York: Catholic Publication Society, 1887), 128-129, 236-238. 54 “Vindication from Treason,” and “Exile of Erin,” Gilmour, Sixth Reader, 178-182.

129 history, which informed students’ Irish identities, was tragically sentimental and inspiring.

In addition to more overt nationalist messages about the need to defend the Irish against English occupiers, readers also included selections that extolled the beauty of the

Irish landscape. In the Catholic National series, for instance, a poem about the beautiful scenery of Ireland immediately followed the story about Irish peasantry. Similarly, verse about “The Holy Wells of Ireland” in Sadlier’s Metropolitan Fifth Reader claimed that the ancient springs of Ireland were “one blessing which no tyrant hand can taint.”

Descriptions of Irish landscapes were also important to Irish nationalists because they exhibited the land’s idyllic nature. Irish patriots felt that the Irish should be proud of the beauty of their island, which they claimed God had given the Irish people and which itself needed protection from the despoiling modernity of British conquerors.55

Parochial school readers for children at upper reading levels also contained many stories about famous Irishmen and stirring events in Irish history. In The Young

Catholic’s Illustrated Fifth Reader, children read about the life of Archbishop John

Hughes, telling of his fight for Catholic schools in New York and his bold defiance of

Know-Nothing rioters. In a lengthy account of the life of Daniel O’Connell, the author recounted numerous abuses that the Irish people suffered at the hands of the English, including the penal laws against Catholics and the “dire famine” which drove millions of

Irish “into perpetual exile.” The students learned that O’Connell was an “illustrious

55 “Character of the Irish People,” Young Catholic’s Illustrated Fourth Reader (New York: Catholic Publication Society, 1888), 281-284; “Character of the Irish Peasantry,” and “The Holy Wells of Ireland,” The Metropolitan Fifth Reader: Compiled for the Use of Colleges, Academies, and the Higher Classes of Select and Parish Schools (New York: D. and J. Sadlier and Co., 1871), 182-184, 388-390; “Character of the Irish Peasantry,” and “Gougaune Barra,” Richard Gilmour, The Catholic National Series: The Sixth Reader (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1877), 249-254, Gutman Library, Harvard. To help young people understand some of the more complex words, the lesson included definitions of words like “replete,” “calumny,” and “meritorious” before the selection.

130 champion of the faith, and defender of a persecuted race.” Sympathy mingled with pride for the Irish in these accounts, as the lesson tried to help Irish-American pupils identify with Irish heroes of recent memory.56

Lessons about the gallantry of Irish-Catholic soldiers in history also formed prominent parts in both readers. The Young Catholic’s Illustrated Sixth Reader and

Speaker concluded with a selection of poems about heroic battles, in which Irish soldiers had either bravely won a victory or valiantly defended their position until an unavoidable defeat. Both readers included “The Battle of Fontenoy,” which portrayed the Irish

Brigade in the service of France, charging against the English lines in vengeance for the exile that England imposed on them. “The Bridge at Athlone” and “A Ballad of Athlone” in the Young Catholic’s Illustrated series were accounts of Irish Catholics fighting against invading Protestant armies in the seventeenth century.57 The messages were unmistakable. Young Irish Americans, upon learning of the sacrifices their ancestors made for both faith and fatherland, whether on battlefields or in politics, would cherish their inheritance more dearly and proudly say that they were Catholics of Irish descent.

The themes of parochial school lessons about Irish heritage and history, including the link between Catholicism and Irishness, the necessity of defending the virtuous Irish people and landscape against the iniquity of the British, and the illustrious prelates, statesmen, and soldiers that Ireland had given the world, were all important nationalist messages.

The Irish nationalist themes contained in many parochial school readers consequently

56 “John Hughes,” and “Daniel O’Connell,” Young Catholic’s Illustrated Fifth Reader (New York: Catholic Publication Society, 1875), 154-155, 425-430. 57 “The Battle of Fontenoy,” “The Bridge at Athlone,” and “A Ballad of Athlone,” Young Catholic’s Illustrated Sixth Reader and Speaker, 1887, 380-381, 348-354.

131 demonstrated that those who advocated for an Irish identity based on nationalism achieved many of their goals for parochial education by the 1870s and 1880s.

There was little conflict between Irish nationalism and American patriotism, though, and so like Catholic school history books, school readers for American Catholic students also had some lessons to convey about American nationality. With a different message than the usual one about Daniel O’Connell, the Fifth Reader in the Catholic

National series imparted a lesson about patriotism and Catholicism that Catholic pupils could apply to their American experience. Likely in response to American Protestant notions that Catholics could not be genuine American patriots, the textbook told students to take a lesson from O’Connell, who was both a true Catholic and a patriot for Ireland.

“We must never accept the loose doctrine now so prevalent, that patriotism conflicts with

Catholicity,” the reader stated, “or that we must give up our religion for our country.”58

Like other textbooks and literature of the time, the lesson on O’Connell interweaved

Catholic, Irish, and American identities, using an example from Irish history to explain that being a good Catholic need not detract from being proud of one’s country. Although

Gilmour’s fifth reader included some stories about English and French history, selections about Irish history and modern Ireland were second only to essays about the United

States. Gilmour himself was known as a conservative Catholic who opposed radical Irish nationalism, such as the Land League of the 1880s, but his selections for his readers still communicated many of the same messages as mainstream Irish nationalism.59 The selections hence bespoke the importance of the loyalties Gilmour hoped American

Catholic children would adopt.

58 “The Birth of a People,” and “Daniel O’Connell,” Gilmour, The Fifth Reader, 225-227, 190-192. 59 Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 57, 122.

132 These textbooks and readers were in use in parochial schools throughout the

1870s and 1880s, communicating the important identities that many Irish-American

Catholics believed their children should learn, but as the 1880s drew to a close, some

Catholics accentuated the American character of parochial schools more and more.

Although many Irish Americans still criticized American public schools, an uneasy truce prevailed in the late 1870s and into the 1880s. By the end of the 1880s, at the same time that Protestants and Catholics in Boston were arguing over who should have control of the city’s public schools, a bill in the Massachusetts state legislature fueled further debates about the ability of parochial schools to create patriotic American citizens.

Catholics believed that the bill, which concerned state oversight over private schools and imposed a penalty for attempts to influence parents about the proper school for their children, was a veiled attempt for the state to interfere with these schools and to compel priests to stop exhorting their parishioners to send their children to parochial schools.

Although French-Canadian parochial schools in Massachusetts and their supposed unwillingness to teach the English language inspired the bill, Bay State Irish Catholics felt the need to testify that parochial schools made good American citizens. Answering the charge that “parochial schools were un-Americanizing” school children, a priest testified that “Catholic children raised in these parochial schools will be the most loyal

[to the United States], and their religion will increase their loyalty.”60 The Pilot, a few months later, included part of a commencement speech by New York judge Richard

O’Gorman, in which he told students that they should make loyalty to the United States

60 “Anti-Catholic School Bill,” The Pilot, April 27, 1889.

133 “a part of your religion.”61 Thus, as Irish Catholics in Boston tried to stake a claim in the city’s public schools, Catholics were also trying to prove their loyalty, with both words and deeds, to the United States. To further accentuate the Americanization of parochial schools, many schools in Massachusetts acquired American flags. In March 1890, The

Pilot covered elaborate flag-raising ceremonies at parochial schools across the state that included patriotic speeches and music. Accompanying each description of the ceremony were statements about the loyalty of Catholics to the United States and how much they loved the Stars and Stripes. In some places, such as Malden, the local parochial school was the first to display the American flag outside, proving the “loyalty and patriotism of

Catholic children.”62 By 1890, though parochial school readers still taught children about

Irish history and its connection to Catholicism, most Irish Catholics understood the necessity of countering charges that parochial schools were un-American and that they were uninterested (or unequipped) to teach loyalty to the United States.

Discussions about how Catholicism fit into American society were simply preludes to a controversy that embroiled the American Catholic Church in the 1890s, which came to be known as the Americanist controversy. On one side, liberal Catholic prelates, such as Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul, Minnesota and James Cardinal

Gibbons of Baltimore, advocated that the Catholic Church should adapt itself to

American society to keep up with changing times and Catholic laypeople could be more individualistic. On the other side, conservative Catholics, like Bernard McQuaid of

Rochester, New York and Michael Corrigan of New York, believed that parishioners should remain obedient to their priests and that liberalizing tendencies in American

61 “Splendid Results of the Catholic Schools,” The Pilot, July 6, 1889. 62 “Flags on Catholic Schools,” The Pilot, March 1, 1890, No Title, The Pilot, March 15, 1890.

134 society and its underlying Protestant character would corrupt the Church. Eventually,

Pope Leo XIII sent an encyclical letter to Cardinal Gibbons warning against

“Americanism” in 1899.63 In the 1890s, then, the American Catholic church entered a different phase of its history, as Church leaders argued with each other about the proper way to relate to life in the United States. Though Catholic education would continue to be a concern, larger issues would occupy American Catholics’ attention.

Despite the growing controversy, American Catholic educators consistently understood that parochial schools should teach American nationality in addition to religious and ethnic identities. A motivation for Catholics to make their schools more

American was to lay claim to patriotism when they felt their national loyalty was in doubt.64 Irish Americans wanted to others to understand that they did not disagree with public schools’ missions to make students appreciate American nationality. The “school question” of the 1870s, rather, was an opportunity for Irish Catholics in the United States to offer criticism about public schools’ inability to teach morality or religious principles.

But the school question also prompted some Irish Catholics to explore whether parochial schools could teach Irish-American children to value their Irish heritage. Because some

Irish Americans believed public schools were attempting to erase Irish sensibilities in their children, for Irish-Catholics who cared about the endurance of ethnic and religious identities, it was essential to remove Irish-Catholic children from common schools.

Editorials and letters in the years of the school controversy and beyond represented the sentiment that parochial education should add more Irish language, cultural, and

63 Dolan, American Catholic Experience, 273-275. 64 McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 120-122; Marjorie R. Fallows, Irish Americans: Identity and Assimilation (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979), 135; Timothy Walch, “Catholic School Books and American Values: The Nineteenth Century Experience,” in Enlightening the Next Generation, 276; Weisz, Irish-American and Italian-American, 329, 332, 334, 338, 346, 358.

135 historical studies to the curriculum. Teaching Catholicism was also a way in which some

Irish-Catholic immigrants expressed Irish ethnic identity, as many Irish Americans believed that Irishness and Catholicism were inseparable.

Though Irish-American parochial schools were important venues for teaching

Irish-American children about their ethnic heritage, American Catholics also saw the necessity of Americanizing their children. Parochial school texts took a more magnanimous approach to foreign cultures and taught the children under their care about

Ireland, but Catholics nonetheless boasted that their pupils graduated into patriotic

American citizens. Irish Americans consequently found that they could infuse parochial school curricula with more Irish topics in addition to teaching American patriotism.

Textbooks used in parochial schools in the 1880s reflected the blending of American,

Catholic, and Irish themes, displaying a sort of cultural pluralism in parochial schools. In schools that were almost entirely under Irish-Catholic control, champions of Irish ethnic consciousness in the United States could insist on lessons in Irish history and celebrations of Ireland and its people in textbooks. The messages in these textbooks matched with part of the image that many Irish nationalists wanted to use to reach youth. This identity was based on Irish nationalism’s definition of what it meant to be Irish. Irish Catholics who controlled the educational content of parochial schools were able to achieve more by their efforts to infuse American Catholic education with pride in Ireland than similar efforts in public schools. The social interactions of Irish-American children, whether in school or elsewhere, however, were more difficult to control. Nonetheless, that difficulty did not stop Irish identity from blending with American sensibilities in children’s social worlds.

136 Chapter 4: Playing in the Streets, Writing in the Parlor: Social Networks, The Children’s Column, and Irish and American Identities

Just before Christmas 1878, “Our Boys and Girls,” the children’s column in the

Irish-Catholic newspaper the Boston Pilot, announced that a few lucky children would receive prizes for correct and well-written solutions to word puzzles. For the Christmas prize puzzle, Agnes Smiley, the column’s editor, published a riddle written by John

Ahern, an Irish boy writing from County Cork. Smiley told the children that John Ahern believed that he was going to “puzzle my Ants [the nickname for the children] just because they were not born on the old sod.” Smiley recommended that the children send in “such a perfect cloud of answers as will show Master John that Irish wits are not dulled by American air.”1 Some children responded to the challenge by acknowledging the friendly rivalry between the youngsters while recognizing that many were Irish and

American. One sixteen-year-old girl named Joanna Hyde wrote from Pennsylvania to say she hoped “John Ahern doesn’t think our first puzzle is going to conquer his Irish-

American friends,” because “some of our boys and girls come from Ireland…so I hope someone will do credit to the ‘dear old spot’ by carrying off the prize.” With American pride, Ella Kennedy wrote from Michigan that she felt “confident that our PILOT Boys and Girls will rally to John’s call, and send in such a number of correct answers that will

2 echo across the water: ‘Triumph for American PILOT Ants!’”

The social network created by this column sometimes fostered a sense of ethnic identity for the children of Irish immigrants, as they corresponded, played games, and

1 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, November 9, 1878. John’s puzzle consisted of the names of European cities hidden in a verse that he had written. 2 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, December 14, 1878.

137 participated in competitions for the honor of their respective homes. When faced with a friendly contest from “the old sod,” children recognized the importance of Irish and

American identities. Girls also typically addressed issues of Irish heritage in their letters, and this case was no exception. These girls’ responses to John Ahern’s challenge showed the ways in which some Irish-American children chose their allegiances; while Joanna

Hyde’s letter underscored her partisanship for Ireland (she hinted she was born in County

Cork), Ella Kennedy’s note represented her American loyalty.

Children’s social lives and leisure time, including the network children and adults built in “Our Boys and Girls,” were areas in which children formed their ethnic and national identities. The games that children played, the fights they fought, and their recreational activities accentuated Irish or American identifications for some, but also could combine Irish heritage with American nationality. Even solitary pastimes, like reading a book or writing a letter to Agnes Smiley at The Pilot, connected children to

Irish ethnicity or American nationality. Although children sometimes thought about ethnicity and nationality on their own and likely composed their own letters, adults exercised control over the topics discussed in The Pilot’s children’s column.

Adults helped shape children’s identities, while other aspects were beyond their supervision. Gender and class, as important determinants of childhood experience, also molded the expectations about how children should behave and how they understood their heritage or nationality. A newspaper like The Pilot pushed American middle class values, but hoped that the Irish would be faithful to both the United States and Ireland.

Through the pages of The Pilot, nationalist themes also continued to exert an influence on

Irish identities in children’s social interactions. Though lower-income families sometimes

138 retained more elements of Irishness, such as involvement with Irish nationalism and living in largely Irish neighborhoods, the children of poorer Irish immigrants could fervently assert their American nationality. Adults also had different expectations for boys and girls; boys had to understand their civic duty to the United States while girls could more freely express their sympathy for a suffering Ireland. Adults could not always control the identifications that children absorbed through social activities, as Irish ethnicity or American nationality had varying influences on children’s identifications in different social contexts. Reminders of Irish heritage came through in some children’s social lives, though the pull of American nationality was strong. Although many youths led largely American social lives occasionally infused with Irish heritage, some Irish

Americans attempted to advance their vision for a multicultural society through children’s social interactions, demonstrating that children’s social lives were significant areas for early expressions of cultural pluralism by Irish immigrants for their progeny.

Examining the recreational lives of Irish-American children through their late teens, chapter four explores how children’s gender and class status shaped adults’ expectations and children’s experiences with Irish and American identities. It focuses on the socialization, play, and leisure time of children from the time that The Pilot’s children’s column appeared in 1875 to the early 1890s. By 1892, The Pilot’s editor John

Boyle O’Reilly was dead, the United States had opened Ellis Island as more Southern and

Eastern Europeans remade the ethnic composition of U.S. cities, and Irish Americans as a group had turned a demographic corner with the American-born outnumbering the Irish- born. Gender and class created different social experiences in children’s lives, but Irish-

American children of all kinds usually looked on play, peers, and amusement as

139 important parts of their lives. The chapter then examines the ways in which Irish identity entered the letters and editorial “chats” of The Pilot’s children’s column. In admonishing its readers to become loyal Americans, The Pilot and the children’s column also promoted middle class values. Children of lower-income backgrounds also had plenty of opportunity to learn about Irish heritage and proclaim their American nationality. In their social interactions, Irish-American children had a variety of influences to inspire Irish pride or make American loyalty a priority.

Ethnic or national identities could be influential in children’s social lives because peers, play, and recreational culture were significant aspects of most children’s experiences. Many adults who left accounts of boyhood or girlhood in New York in the late nineteenth century recalled their childhood with nostalgia for old playmates and improvised fun. Poor children were most noticeable in New York, and a lot of these children were of Irish descent. These children populated the sidewalks and played games in the streets. The thoroughfares were virtually the only place to play for poor children, as tenements were too cramped and city parks and playgrounds were scarce in low-income districts. Even by the early twentieth century, there were few green spaces in the heavily

Irish neighborhoods on the west side of Manhattan. In the street, children attempted to create their own world, seeking autonomy away from parental supervision. Boys often searched for daring and dangerous feats and their games could turn into fights with rival groups. Girls, though not immune to conflicts and risky activities, did not play the same sports among themselves and some were charged with attending to younger siblings, which limited girls’ independence.3

3 Selma Cantor Berrol, Growing Up American: Immigrant Children in America, Then and Now (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), 72; James Barrett, The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic

140 Entertainment and recreation were part of the daily lives of children, whether they worked for a living or went to school regularly.4 During adolescence, young people sometimes had spare money from a part-time or full-time job, and they sought the latest fashions and amusements. Many Irish teens would have frequented the Bowery, a center of working-class recreation, with shops, dime museums, theatres, beer gardens, and dance halls. By the 1890s, dancing was also an important aspect of adolescent urban culture and the children of immigrants were particularly fond of dancing.5 Growing up in New York was unique, but the children of the American metropolis shared many of these experiences that were common to other children who played on the streets of cities.

Playing was not the only thing that occupied the leisure time of some Irish-

American children, who also took part in petty crime, truancy, and gang activity. Annual reports from the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor detailed the plight of poor children and the life of crime into which many of them fell. Typical adolescent crimes in the antebellum years were, “the pickpocket, the thief, the burglar…the juvenile delinquents, the wharf-thieves, the robbers of shop-tills and counters.”6 Charles Loring Brace, the director of the Children’s Aid Society, also

City (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 35; David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and At Play (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1985), 17, 19, 24, 106, 118; Melissa Klapper, Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in America, 1880-1925 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007), 15; Priscilla Ferguson Clement, Growing Pains: Children in the Industrial Age, 1850-1890 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997), 168, 182-183; Howard Chudacoff, Children at Play: An American History (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 81, 88. 4 Nasaw, Children of the City, 120, 127. 5 Sarah Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence: The Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 85, 103-104. 6 The 1852 annual report of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor stated: “If the relieved were divided into eight parts, as near as can be estimated, four parts would be Irish, three German and miscellaneous, and but one part American. If divided according to religion, it would be found that at least three-fourths of those asking aid are Roman Catholics, while the remainder are mostly indifferent.” Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, The Ninth Annual Report of the New- York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, for the Year 1852, with the By-Laws and a List of Members (New York: John F. Trow, 1852), 25; Seventeenth Annual Report of the New-York Association

141 described the large number of Irish-American children who lived a social life that revolved around crime, truancy, and delinquency.7 After the Civil War a large number of

Irish were still struggling in low-wage occupations and poor housing, and some Irish-

American children led a life of crime. But by the 1870s, other Irish families were attaining middle-class incomes and lifestyles.

Under the editorial control of Patrick Donahoe and then John Boyle O’Reilly, The

Pilot was a good example of the effort to promote American bourgeois values, yet maintain a respectable outlet for expressions of Irish identity and hopes for the Irish nation. Many readers of The Pilot were likely not in the middle class, so the newspaper also targeted poor recent arrivals from Ireland. Though it had begun in 1829, the decades after the Civil War saw the newspaper’s subscriptions flourish, with readers across the

United States, Canada, and the British Isles. In the children’s column too, American,

Canadian, and Irish children interacted. The Pilot’s readers were almost exclusively

Catholic and largely Irish-American. John Boyle O’Reilly, The Pilot’s primary editor by

1875, believed that the Irish in America would have to adopt American attitudes to gain respect from fellow Americans and escape poverty and prejudice in their adopted country. Once Irish Americans were wealthy enough to contribute to Irish causes and respected enough to convince other Americans of Ireland’s right to be free, thought

for Improving the Condition of the Poor, for the Year 1860, with the By-Laws and a List of Members (New York: John F. Trow, 1860), 35, Box 71, Community Service Society records, Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscript Library. 7 Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years Work Among Them (New York: Wynkoop and Hallenbeck, 1872), 27, 34-36; Joseph R. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 89. Protestant reformers’ accounts were often biased and could succumb to stereotypes about the lawlessness of poor Irish immigrants, so Charles Loring Brace or the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor may have overstated the extent of criminal activity among Irish children. Nonetheless, even if the reports were exaggerated, they contained some truth about New York’s poor and the condition of Irish immigrants’ children.

142 O’Reilly, they would do a real service to Irish nationalism. “We can do Ireland more good by our Americanism,” O’Reilly told Irish Americans, “than by our Irishism.”8

Historians have assessed O’Reilly as a man forced to placate different factions both within and outside Irish-American groups in Boston and the nation. In fact, according to one scholar, O’Reilly reflected the tensions inherent in “the attempt to retain

Irishness while becoming Americanized.”9 These circumstances made him a supporter of

“conservative Irish nationalism,” a term used to describe hopes for constitutional reform in Ireland within the law. O’Reilly’s goal, clear from the pages of the newspaper, was to aid in Irish acculturation without compromising their adherence to Catholicism or Irish identity. O’Reilly did not see radicalism in labor, economic, or land issues in the United

States as the answer to Irish problems, but instead saw himself and his paper’s position as

“calm, rational, and respectable” and thought government should take a limited role in correcting social ills.10

During his years as editor of The Pilot, John Boyle O’Reilly made a name for himself as a champion of the Irish cause in America and as a leader of his Irish-American community. O’Reilly was born in County Meath in 1844, just before the Great Famine struck the country. The memory of the famine, the rebellion of 1848, and older rebellions against British rule formed many of the stories and songs he heard in his childhood.11

Joining the British army in the 1860s, O’Reilly became a recruiter for the Fenians, and

8 John Boyle O’Reilly, Watchwords from John Boyle O’Reilly, ed. Katherine Conway (Boston: J.G. Cupples, 1891), 7. 9 John Duffy Ibson, Will the World Break Your Heart? Dimensions and Consequences of Irish-American Assimilation (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990), 64-65. 10 Ian Kenneally, From the Earth, A Cry: The Story of John Boyle O’Reilly (Cork, Ireland: Collins, 2011), 200-204. 11 Francis McManamin, The American Years of John Boyle O’Reilly, 1870-1890 (New York: Arno Press, 1976), 4, 6.

143 was arrested in 1866 and transported to a penal colony in Western Australia. He made a daring escape aboard an American whaling ship in 1869 and landed in the United States later that year. He started working for Patrick Donahoe’s The Pilot in Boston in the spring of 1870 and in 1876 O’Reilly became sole editor and part owner, with the Boston

Archdiocese, of the paper. O’Reilly married a daughter of Irish immigrants named Mary

Murphy, who was writing for a children’s publication called the Young Crusader under the pseudonym Agnes Smiley, in 1872. When the children’s column began in The Pilot, his wife Mary would edit the column as Agnes Smiley.12 During his time as editor,

O’Reilly cultivated important relationships with Boston’s literary men and became an example of an acceptable Irishman to many in Boston Yankee society. Writing about

O’Reilly speech at the dedication of a monument to the pilgrims in Plymouth, one journalist even called O’Reilly a “great Irishman and a great Yankee.”13 O’Reilly edited

The Pilot until he died from an accidental medicinal overdose at the age of 46 in 1890.

The Pilot, under O’Reilly’s leadership, became a force for helping Irish

Americans gain acceptance and respectability through reaching a middle-class status. The newspaper was one of many media that the Irish read. Irish Americans by the end of the nineteenth century were generally literate, with as many as 90 per cent able to read in the

1890s.14 The middle class was also continually growing, and at the end of the nineteenth

12 Kenneally, From the Earth, 140-142. 13 John Boyle O’Reilly scrapbook, no page number, Box 3, John Boyle O’Reilly Papers, John J. Burns Library, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts (hereafter Burns Library, Boston College). O’Reilly also impressed the prominent critic of “hyphenated Americanism,” Theodore Roosevelt, with his commitment to American ideals. In a letter to James Jeffrey Roche, who took over editing The Pilot after O’Reilly death, Roosevelt praised the “American side of O’Reilly’s character” and took pride in claiming O’Reilly as a fellow countryman. Theodore Roosevelt to “Dear Sir [James Jeffrey Roche],” November 10, 1891, Folder 45, Box 1, James Jeffrey Roche Papers, Burns Library, Boston College. 14 Patrick Blessing, “Irish Emigration to the United States, 1800-1920: An Overview,” in The Irish in America: Emigration, Assimilation, and Impact, ed. P.J. Drudy (New York: Cambridge University Press,

144 century, many lower-income families were striving to move up in society. The advertisements that the paper carried and the advice that it published about parenting, work, and even fashion hinted that the editors hoped to cultivate middle class sensibilities. In a segment called “Our Ladies’ Column” that appeared in 1876, for example, the paper gave recommendations about clothing for boys and girls and commented on current fashions for children. The fine clothes that the article described were likely beyond the reach of most low-income Irish parents.15

A family’s class status had a significant impact on a child’s life. Class affected leisure pursuits, for instance, because it defined the range of objects with which children could play and how much spare time they had for fun. The middle and upper classes, in which Irish Americans were a growing component in the 1870s and 1880s, could give their children a variety of toys and more time for recreation.16 Class differences in views of children also became more apparent in the nineteenth century. While the American middle class no longer needed children’s labor to help support the family, lower-income families continued to rely on children’s wages for financial assistance. Many low-income

1985), 19; Lawrence McCaffrey, “Forging Forward and Looking Back,” in The New York Irish, ed. Ronald Bayor and Timothy Meagher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 213. 15 Francis R. Walsh, “The Boston Pilot: A Newspaper for the Irish Immigrant, 1829-1908” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1968), 197; Francis Walsh, “John Boyle O’Reilly, the Boston Pilot, and Irish-American Assimilation, 1870-1890,” in Massachusetts in the Gilded Age: Selected Essays, ed. Jack Tager and John W. Ifkovic (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 151; Patrick Donahoe was the editor of the Pilot in its earlier years and continued to have a role in the paper until the early twentieth century. John Boyle O’Reilly, however, was the main editor by 1875. Demonstrating his belief in the necessity of assimilation, O’Reilly once wrote to a friend about a shamrock he had received from Ireland. It was no longer an Irish shamrock in America, O’Reilly said, but had changed its nature. “So with the people: they are gradually and inevitably assimilating, by absorbing American principles from the physical, social, and political air.” Quoted in Francis G. McManamin, The American Years of John Boyle O’Reilly, 1870-1890 (New York: Arno Press, 1976), 123; “Our Ladies’ Column,” The Pilot, January 1, 1876. 16 Chudacoff, Children at Play, 96; Thomas H. O’Connor, The Boston Irish: A Political History (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), 137, 141. O’Connor detailed the move of many of Boston’s Irish- Catholics into better housing and neighborhoods in the 1870s and 1880s, though these rising Irish Americans still formed a minority of the whole Irish-ethnic population of Boston. Second-generation and later Irish Americans spurred much of this social advancement in the later nineteenth century.

145 Irish-American families in Massachusetts at the end of the 1880s, for example, found the income from children’s labor necessary to approach the spending habits of Yankee families because Irish fathers did not make as much money as native-born Protestants.17

Low-income Irish families loved their children as much as others, but they relied more on child labor than higher-income families, who began to value children more for their emotional contribution to the home. Even the idea that children had a right to play was a construction of the middle class, largely solidified by the late nineteenth century.

With the children of lower-income families quite often at work, there were fewer opportunities for entertainment. These children had to improvise with play spaces and play things, often in crowded city environments. Yet working-class children had greater access to urban amusements because theatres and dance halls were usually within reach and parents could not watch their children as closely as those in the middle class.18

Class also helped determine the way in which a child learned about Irish identity.

As scholars have asserted about numerous ethnic groups, reaching the middle class often brought one closer to an American self-identification and further from one’s original cultural roots. Historian Timothy Meagher has argued that poorer Irish-American hopes for advancement may have rested with their ethnic group’s economic and social progress in American society, causing a stronger attachment to ethnic identity. On the other hand,

17 John Modell, “Patterns of Consumption, Acculturation, and Family Income Strategies in Late- Nineteenth Century America,” in Family and Population in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Tamara Harevan and Maris Vinovskis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 217-218, 221, 225; Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 76-77. 18 Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), xviii, xx, 152-153; Paula Fass and Mary Ann Mason, “Introduction,” in Childhood in America, ed. Paula Fass and Mary Ann Mason (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 5; Chudacoff, Children at Play, 81, 85, 95-97; Clement, Growing Pains, 165, 169, 184, 220; Richard Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York City (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 96-97; O’Connor, The Boston Irish, 112-115; Klapper, Small Strangers, 62; Nasaw, Children of the City, 19, 196.

146 as historian Kerby Miller has argued, the growing Irish-American middle class at the end of the nineteenth century combined elements of conservative Irish Catholicism and constitutional nationalism with American bourgeois norms. These included respect for law, anti-radicalism, thriftiness, and temperance. These ideals and models of decorum in males and females that projected “respectability” and gender norms became the hallmarks of the middle class culture that the better classes of Irish Americans promoted.

These values were not uniquely American, but the bourgeois principles that middle class

Irish Americans encouraged among their countrymen were part of the assimilative process of American society.19 Middle class Irish Americans did not seem to tie personal progress to their co-ethnics. Demonstrating this point, in the 1880s The Pilot published an editorial bemoaning Irish-American middle class neglect of Irish interests, asserting that those who cared about Ireland were mainly drawn from working class populations.20

Low-income families also appeared to have had a complex relationship with Irish and

American identities. The Irish poor in New York or Boston’s low-income neighborhoods may have kept Irish peasant traits more than the Irish-American middle class, yet poor children could be some of the most vocal about their American patriotism.21

19 Kerby Miller, “Class, Culture, and Immigrant Group Identity in the United States: The Case of Irish- American Ethnicity,” in Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics, ed. Virginia Yans- McLaughlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 110-111, 113, 120; Christina Ziegler-McPherson, Americanization in the States: Immigrant Social Welfare Policy, Citizenship, and National Identity in the United States, 1908-1929 (Gainesville, Fl.: University Press of Florida, 2009), 10. 20 Timothy Meagher, “Irish All the Time: Ethnic Consciousness Among the Irish in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1880-1905,” Journal of Social History 19, no. 2 (1985): 276; “The Irish in New York,” The Pilot, November 11, 1882. The Pilot article stated that of the approximately 400,000 Irish New Yorkers, only a fraction belonged to an Irish society, helped newly arrived immigrants, or read newspapers published for Irish Americans. Those who belonged to an Irish social club or patronized the Irish press were members of the working class, the article claimed, with only a smattering of middle class interested in Irish affairs. The wealthy Irish did proportionally little to help their fellow countrymen and did not look at the Irish papers, the article further stated. The editorialist drew the conclusion that once Irishmen achieved middle-class or upper-class status, they largely neglected the Irish-American community. 21 Klapper, Small Strangers, 86.

147 Even though Irish Americans with middle-class incomes or occupations were a distinct minority among their ethnic group, especially in Northeastern cities, children in middle class families seemed to form a significant proportion of the readership of The

Pilot’s children’s column.22 The children’s column first appeared in 1875 as a section to entertain and edify children in families who took the newspaper. Soon after Patrick

Donahoe sold controlling interest in The Pilot to O’Reilly and the Archdiocese of Boston in 1876, Agnes Smiley, the pen name of O’Reilly’s wife Mary Murphy O’Reilly, began editing the column. Soon thereafter she took stock of her young readers. Smiley wrote that most children went to school, with a significant number in Catholic schools. But some children, Smiley claimed, could not attend school and had to work to support themselves and other family members. Smiley reported that the young people who did not attend school planned to learn all they could from “Our Boys and Girls” column. She thought the efforts of the working children proved to the majority of her readers, those who had “parents able and willing to give you all the advantages of school education,” how much others were willing to work.23 From letters published in the column from time

22 Kevin Kenny, The American Irish: A History (New York: Pearson Education, Ltd., 2000), 149-150; Timothy Meagher, The Columbia Guide to Irish American History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 103-104; Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 35-36. Evidence of occupational status for Irish Americans at the end of the nineteenth century suggests that in places like Boston and New York, the great majority of Irish immigrants worked in unskilled labor or service. The concentration of Irish Americans in low-level occupations continued until at least 1890, when a growing second-generation began to rise in larger numbers into professional occupations and jobs such as clerks, teachers, and retail workers. Some data from Boston illustrate this trend. In 1890, less than one per cent of Irish worked in professional occupations like the law, medicine, or banking. Ten per cent of Irish- born men had any white-collar occupations in 1890, but in contrast, forty per cent of second-generation Irish Americans had white-collar jobs. In general, the Irish who went farther west advanced economically more quickly. Twenty per cent of Irish-born men worked in white-collar occupations in San Francisco in 1880, for example, a figure much higher than the figure in Boston ten years later. Taking averages such as these, one can estimate that ten to fifteen per cent of Irish Americans across the country were part of an Irish middle class in the years before the turn of twentieth century. 23 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, April 15, 1876.

148 to time, it is clear that children who worked for pay read the children’s column. But

Smiley usually spoke to young people whose parents could afford to send them to school.

Regardless of the class status of these children’s families, reading and writing to the column constituted a social and leisure activity for the many Irish-American children who read “Our Boys and Girls.” The hundreds of letters that came to The Pilot office addressed to “Our Tender” – Agnes Smiley – testified to the fact that children eagerly sought to answer the riddles, solve the puzzles, and try out the games and activities that

Smiley presented.24 They viewed reading the column and participating in its games as recreational. They also corresponded with the editor and found a network of children of

Irish heritage with whom they shared their thoughts. Verifying whether children wrote all the letters printed in the column or knowing all of the editorial choices that went into which letters to publish is difficult. The number and variety of children’s correspondence, in addition to their varying styles of voice and tone, however, point to the probability that youths were the authors and that elements of style rather than content helped determine which notes appeared.25 Though the children in “Our Boys and Girls” do not represent all

Irish-American children, the column nonetheless provides a significant source for

24 “Our Boys and Girls: What We Are Going to Do,” The Pilot, December 4, 1875; “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, March 4, 1876; A.G. Evans, Fanatic Heart: A Life of John Boyle O’Reilly, 1844-1890 (Nedlands, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 1997), 188. Agnes Smiley (Mary Murphy O’Reilly had been born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, the daughter of Irish immigrants. She took over the editorship of the column shortly after O’Reilly bought the paper. The column called the children “ants” because of a story it told when the column began, in which the insects worked together to build a great ant-hill out of many grains of sand. Smiley called herself “Our Tender” because she merely tended the ant-hill as the children built it. “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, June 3, 1876. To see that a vast majority of children reading and writing to the column were Irish Americans, all one has to do is look at the children’s names. In mid 1876, they included: Thomas Connolly, Maggie Dooley, Mary Doyle, Minnie McCarthy, William Riordan, Annie Hackett, Mary Ann Hayes, Mary McGirr, Lizzie O’Meara, Andrew Conlon, John Driscoll, Michael Burke, William Thomas Brennan, Rory O’Regan, and Alice Fitzpatrick. 25 Smiley, for instance, was very clear about the stylistic choices that determined a letter’s publication. Children were to write on only one side of the paper and must sign their real name, even if they asked to have a pseudonym published. It is also likely that out of a plethora of letters about the same subject in the same issue, only a few would be printed.

149 examining attitudes toward nationality and ethnicity in Irish-American children’s own voices. Because the children were interacting with Smiley and their peers through their letters, the column served as an imagined Irish-American social community.26

As part of an Irish-Catholic American newspaper, “Our Boys and Girls” was a natural space for American children to discuss Irish heritage. Girls’ letters were frequently the sources of conversation about Irishness. In September 1876, Smiley received a letter from a group of girls in Ireland. Smiley effusively wrote that she wanted all her Ants to read the letter from “four real little Irish girls – veritable little

Carrickadooye shamrocks.” But she also thought that the children’s parents would want to read the letter, because “anything direct from the ‘old sod’ is to them like a sweet rushing breath of happy times, long passed, yet fondly remembered.”27 The happiness that the letter elicited in Smiley, herself the progeny of Irish immigrants, and the excitement that she hoped it would bring out in the children conveyed her feelings that her young readership valued its Irish heritage. Another girl, Katie Tangney, wrote from

New York to encourage others to appreciate the attention that The Pilot gave to Irish issues and what the paper was doing “for the Irish boys and girls in America.”28 At another time, a discussion about good books prompted a girl named Maggie to write from

Roxbury to recommend that “we who are proud of our Irish descent should read all we

26 For an example of the social function of the column in children’s lives, see “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, July 29, 1876. Nellie Seyah wrote from South Hingham, Massachusetts to say that her mother had died and she had no brothers or sisters. Nellie said that she “would often be very lonely were it not for the combined influence of Agnes Smiley and her Ants,” which made her feel as good as did “the conversation of some valued friend.” 27 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, September 23, 1876. 28 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, March 3, 1877.

150 can of our national poets and orators.”29 Young people brought the issue of Irish heritage and patriotism into the children’s column and Smiley usually encouraged the kindly feelings that she hoped children had for the land of their parents’ birth.

By the late 1870s, the children’s column had begun to attract the attention of prominent adults in Ireland who were happy that Irish-American children had means to learn about their Irish identity. Sister Mary Francis Clare was known as the Nun of

Kenmare, famous in Ireland and America for her work among impoverished Irish, particularly children. She wrote a letter from Ireland published in “Our Boys and Girls” in January 1878. She was pleased, she said, that American Catholic children had The

Pilot to teach and entertain them.30 A few months after the Sister’s letter, a note appeared from Father Matthew Russell, editor of The Irish Monthly, a magazine published in

Dublin. Smiley told the children: “I am sure it would greatly please this true gentleman, did he only feel that here, in America, the Irish boys and girls of one generation have still preserved fresh and true, the special heritage of their race – that warm Celtic heart, that was given to their parents by mother land.”31 With the letters she presented from Ireland,

Smiley made the homeland a part of her readers’ social lives, encouraging them to maintain their appreciation of their Irish heritage. In speaking of Father Russell’s letter, she directed her children to keep the Irish traditions of kindness and hospitality alive, hoping they would demonstrate their “special heritage” by their thoughts and actions.

29 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, April 4, 1885; “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, July 25, 1885. Other children wrote in during 1885 to mention how they were reading Irish-themed books. James Morgan wrote in July to recommend books to read, saying that Carleton and Lever wrote good Irish stories. “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, September 12, 1885. An older “ant” wrote in September to say he had read History of Ireland and Ireland of Today. 30 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, February 23, 1878. 31 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, April 20, 1878.

151 Current events also brought Irish issues into the children’s lives, as a famine developing in Ireland forced a discussion about conditions in the Emerald Isle into the children’s column by 1880. It began when two girls named Catherine Donohoe and

Rosalie asked Smiley to begin a relief fund to which children could send money.

Catherine wrote that she had seen the news about the famine and thought that the Pilot children should help the victims. More letters came a week later asking Smiley to begin a fund to help famine sufferers.32

Smiley soon inaugurated the “Pilot Ant Irish Relief Fund.” She wrote that the children all knew there was famine in Ireland, because “you have heard your fathers and mothers talk about it; you have heard it mentioned from the altar, and you have seen long accounts of it in the newspapers.” She asked for whatever the children could afford to send. In her suggestions on ways to save money, Smiley appealed to the ethnic heritage of her readers and signaled that she was speaking to children in comfortable circumstances. Comparing the relief effort to the money that children had sent abolitionists before the Civil War, Smiley said:

Can you not do as much for a little white child, a child whose father and mother is of the same land as your own, as these little ones did for the stranger? Candy is good, but not a necessity of life; dark ribbons are cheaper than bright ones, and we can get along without them entirely; oranges and apples are nice, but many persons exist without them.33

Smiley reminded the children that their parents were from Ireland and they had an obligation to help children who were Irish like them. Smiley was calling on the children who knew little of want and poverty to help the suffering Irish, based on the Irish-

American children’s shared ethnic heritage and their middle class status. By contributing

32 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, March 27, and April 3, 1880. 33 “Our Boys and Girls: Pilot Ant Irish Relief Fund,” The Pilot, April 10, 1880.

152 to the fund, then, children would express both their Irish and American identities, artfully combining them by showing their American ability and Irish sensibility to aid Ireland.

The relief fund received a large number of donations from children across the country. Fourteen-year-old Katie Kelly sent in “40 cents…hoping it will give one meal to some starving child in the land where I was born,” while a five-year-old girl sent money for “the little children that are hungry.”34 Asking for more donations in June, Smiley told her readers that the starving children of Ireland would be grateful that their American brothers and sisters had gone without birthday presents or made other sacrifices to keep them from going hungry.35 In addition to the social network through The Pilot’s children’s column, Smiley was also creating a trans-Atlantic connection between the children of Irish immigrants in America and children in Ireland when she encouraged

Irish-American children to think of those in Ireland as kin. The famine helped children think about their links to the country of their ancestors.

Both boys and girls sent in money to the relief fund, but girls demonstrated more enthusiastic support for the charitable contributions. Two girls, in fact, wrote poems to go with their donations. One named Ellie Frances Whelan penned a few lines that expressed hope for the future of Erin. Another girl, Mary Worcester, wrote a longer poem called

“Irish Children” that ended with the lines:

Although born in a glorious land, We have heard our parents tell Heartrending tales, of the famine year, Which they remember well; So we children send to Ireland Three thousand miles away, Our mite to help keep

34 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, May 8, 1880. 35 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, June 5, 1880.

153 The famine wolf at bay.36

Mary’s poem illustrated the way in which children learned about Ireland and the memory of the famine from their parents, but also about how modern famine could bring these memories more forcefully into children’s minds. Girls, more comfortable expressing their sympathy for famine sufferers than boys, were again more interested in maintaining their

Irish identity by discussing Irish events and Irish heritage in “Our Boys and Girls.”37

In contributing to the relief fund and writing poems, children united as Irish

Americans. So when it was time to close the fund, Smiley was sure that the children would be happy to know that their contributions helped little ones in Ireland.38 In the

1880 Christmas issue, Smiley told her readers that they should take a moment from their

Christmas joy to think of the famine in Ireland.39 Though the column only touched on

Irish identity sometimes, current events in Ireland helped reinforce that individuality.

Smiley used the occasion to comment on being Irish in America, but the children, almost always girls, also brought up their stories of Irishness and reminded other children of

Irish immigrants that they had a responsibility to help Ireland. Irish-American youth also had this task because they could afford to help their co-ethnics in Ireland. There was thus a two-fold reason to contribute to the fund, and more affluent Irish-American children did so because they were Irish and American: able to help because they had the means and with a duty to assist because of their Irish blood.

36 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, June 12, 1880. Mary Worcester contributed another poem that appeared in the July 31st issue. Called “The Green Flag,” the poem was a typical lament for the misery of Ireland and hope that the country would someday be free. “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, July 31, 1880. 37 Between December 1875 and August 1890, 84 letters discussing Ireland or Irish identity appeared in the column from children who could be identified as either a boy or a girl. Out of these, 62 came from Irish- American girls, meaning girls wrote about 74 per cent of the letters published in The Pilot’s children’s column about Irishness. 38 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, August 7, 1880. 39 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, December 25, 1880.

154 The famine was largely over by 1881, but it helped push the nationalist cause to the forefront of Irish Americans’ minds. Irish-Catholic politicians also experienced local political victories in the 1880s, winning mayoral elections for the first time in New York and Boston. But some Irish Americans in these cities thought they saw the beginnings of a nativist backlash against Irish-Catholic success, causing them to focus even more on the importance of Irish identity.40 In the context of increased nationalist agitation in Ireland and Irish Americans’ retrenchment in their communities, letters from an Irish girl sparked debates in the pages of The Pilot about children’s Irish identities.

The first letter from fifteen-year-old Grace Byrne from Bray, County Wicklow inspired Smiley and other children to focus on the importance of Irish identity in

America. Again, girls were the most interested in proclaiming their love for Ireland, while boys’ letters responding to Grace’s notes did not appear in the column. Grace wrote to describe her home and town and recommend Charles Kickham’s novel Knockagow, writing, “such a story of Irish life I would recommend all your ants to read.”41 Children responded positively to Grace Byrne’s letters and wrote to say they wanted to hear more about “dear old Ireland.”42 Betsy Trotwood wrote to say that Grace’s letter’s ignited her imagination about Ireland, because “even though I did first ‘open my eye’ under the Stars and Stripes, I think I am as thoroughly Irish” as anyone born in Ireland.43 The clamor for more about Ireland and the enjoyment that Grace’s letters created illustrated that some

40 Thomas Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 1870-1890 (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippicott Company, 1966), 139-140. 41 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, April 25 1885; “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, July 18, 1885. 42 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, September 5, 1885; December 12, 1885. Mary Mackey wrote in September that she wanted to hear more from Grace. Cassie Devine also wrote in December asking to hear more about beautiful Ireland. 43 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, October 31, 1885.

155 children wanted to learn about their Irish heritage and share their love of Ireland with one another through the column.

Grace Byrne’s descriptions of Irish life elicited declarations from many Irish-

American girls about how much they loved Ireland and their Irish heritage. Grace usually described the scenery of Ireland in glowing terms, supporting an image that Irish nationalists propounded of a land famous for its superlative natural beauty. While

Grace’s letters had not yet touched on politics, other children brought the current political agitation in Ireland and the United States into the pages of the children’s column. An older girl wrote about her youth in Ireland and how much she enjoyed Grace’s letters.

Calling herself “An Exile from Erin,” the girl said she wanted to hear more from Grace about the Irish National Land League, a nationalist organization then working to reform land policies in Ireland.44 Grace’s letters inspired another girl, Libbie Quinlan from

Scottsville, New York, to discuss how much she loved Ireland and wished for its freedom. Libbie addressed Betsy Trotwood’s proclamation that she felt Irish although she was born in America, saying that Betsy’s letter “shows very plainly that she has not forgotten that love which is expected from children for the land of their fathers, and especially when it is such a glorious land as dear old Ireland.” She pointed out that she, too, was proud of her Irish heritage, and although she was an American, she would

“never cease to sigh for the day when Ireland, like America, will be styled the ‘Land of the Free.’”45 Responding to a letter from “Exile from Erin” claiming that an Irish

American’s love for Ireland could not be as strong as that of a real Irish girl, Betsy

44 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, December 12, 1885. 45 “Our Boys and Girls, The Pilot, December 19, 1885.

156 Trotwood wrote a letter to say that “‘the love of our isle’ may burn as brightly in the heart of an Irish-American girl as in that of her more fortunate sisters o’er the sea.”46

Grace Byrne’s letters not only made other children want to hear more about

Ireland, but also created a competition among Irish-American girls trying to claim who was proudest of their Irish ethnicity and, in effect, who could love Ireland most. Although it was the editor’s decision to print the letters, almost beyond the prompting of Smiley and other adults, girls used the children’s column to proclaim their pride in Irishness for the benefit of one another. Although boys sometimes took part in discussions about

Ireland and being Irish, girls enthusiastically responded to Grace’s letters and corresponded with each other about their desire to see Ireland an independent nation.

Although Irish-American culture touched both boys and girls, gender was possibly the greatest determinant of a child’s experience. Adults expected boys and girls to develop divergent skills, play with distinctive toys, learn diverse values, and participate in separate games. Adults therefore socialized children to behave according to their sex. Gender also influenced the development of children’s ethnic and national identities. Many American adults, including Irish Americans, wanted boys to think seriously about the responsibilities attending American citizenship, as they would become voters. Girls did not have the same civic duties, so many adults placed more emphasis on familial expectations for girls. Letters from children in The Pilot demonstrated that many girls seemed to be more comfortable with declaring their Irish

46 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, February 6, 1886. Consciously or not, Betsy was exaggerating when she called girls in Ireland more fortunate, as even Grace said that she dearly wanted to go to America some day.

157 identity than boys, likely as a result of divergent patterns of socialization.47 The sex segregation that boys and girls practiced and adults supported, as well as ideas of female camaraderie, may also explain why girls felt more comfortable corresponding with Grace than boys did. As their poetic and literary effusions showed as well, girls were also more willing to respond dramatically and sentimentally to romantic ideas about Irish independence and identity.48

At other times too, girls commented about Irishness in the column much more than boys. These girls were fulfilling certain gender roles by expressing the female traits of sentimentalism and charity. The roles of males and females in society prompted a greater interest in Ireland among females because both American and Irish values taught girls that their spheres were in the home, where they focused on Irish identity because familial Irish home culture surrounded them. Conversely, adults more commonly socialized boys to be more comfortable in an outdoor realm of sport in the streets and interactions with a wide variety of people, helping to reinforce an American identity necessary to get along in the wider world. Of course, many American girls still played on the streets and wandered far from their parlors, but bourgeois values dictated that girls should not be as daring, bold, or roam as far from home as boys.49

47 Charles Fanning, The Irish Voice in America: Irish-American Fiction from the 1760s to the 1980s (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1990), 139; Klapper, Small Strangers, 112; Chudacoff, Children at Play, 88; Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 83-85; Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence, 73. 48 Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 85-87. 49 Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 82-83; Nasaw, Children of the City, 131, 141. The idea that boys had unbounded energy that needed expression outside was still popular in 1909 when Jane Addams published her book The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. She devoted almost the entirety of her chapter “The Quest for Adventure” to the problems of controlling boys’ energies. She admitted, in only one paragraph, that “the desire for adventure also seizes girls.” Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 51-71. The McGuffey Readers, used in countless schools across the country in the nineteenth century, communicated distinct male and female values. According to historian Elliot Gorn in his analysis of the readers, “the height of womanly virtue…was expressed in…the private realm of the family” while men “went out into the world of business and public affairs.” The McGuffey

158 There may be another reason girls wrote more letters about Ireland. Girls found the children’s column a place where they could voice their support for Irish independence at a time when politics or nationalist organizations were beginning to open to middle class females. The Ladies’ Land League, for instance, had been established in 1880 in

New York and provided a public outlet for feminine nationalist expressions, perhaps inspiring young women to give their opinions in a newspaper column. The children’s column of The Pilot was also an acceptable place for girls to support Ireland. They found it particularly so after the Ladies’ Land League abruptly dissolved in 1882 because of increasing controversies with conservative nationalists and talk of founding a new organization, the National Land League, which began in 1883. Showing their support for

Ireland may have given these girls a sense of agency and political clout when power in the United States was less than forthcoming. Boys were given to understand that they would exercise authority upon growing up American, so their greater interest in their

American identity was a route to influence. Grace’s letters and the response they elicited showed the way in which adults directed, but did not control, the learning of Irish identity in social lives. Indeed, it appears from their letters that many girls thought of their pride in Irish heritage on their own.50

Smiley occasionally interjected her thoughts on the condition of Ireland and the boys and girls’ relationship to the country, but she may have interjected too much when

Readers: Selections from the 1879 Edition, ed. Elliot Gorn (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998), 102. See also Barrett, The Irish Way, 26-31, and Deirdre Moloney, American Catholic Lay Groups and Transatlantic Social Reform in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 180-204. Barrett discussed the Irish-American ethos of masculinity, shown through widespread Irish-American participation in sports, especially baseball and boxing; part of Moloney’s study highlighted Catholic women’s participation in Catholic lay groups and efforts at social reform beginning in the 1890s. Like these Catholic women involved in social reform, then, Irish-American girls in the 1880s saw charity and reform as one of their proper roles. 50 Margaret Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism (London: Pluto Press, 1983), 12-13, 34-35; Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 115, 122, 135; Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 88-89.

159 she responded to a letter from Grace Byrne about poorhouses in Ireland. Smiley told

Grace that the girl had been too harsh in her description of British authorities. A correction appeared the following week, apologizing for the scolding that Smiley gave

Grace. The correction, not in Smiley’s typical writing style, told the children that Grace’s letter was a truthful picture of Irish life. Moreover, Grace’s letters were valuable to

“young Americans, because they show you the difference between the conduct of affairs here and abroad.”51 The writer, possibly John Boyle O’Reilly, believed that Grace’s letters from Ireland, which had shifted away from describing merely scenery and toward a more forceful condemnation of British rule in Ireland, were valuable because they taught children a nationalist message about Ireland; this message extolled its natural landscape while claiming that the British government was ruining the country.52 In the writer’s opinion, the letters served a double purpose: to communicate the nationalist message to children from a source within children’s social lives and to help them appreciate their residence in America.

Because of the newspaper’s goal to help Irish immigrants and their progeny assimilate to American society, The Pilot’s children’s column pushed middle-class ideals and an appreciation of American nationality on numerous other occasions in the 1870s and 1880s. A number of Smiley’s messages to children, called chats, showed that she subscribed to middle class values when discussing gender roles for boys and girls. While boys could pursue any number of professions, girls had a duty to become nurturing women at home. Outlining the idea of separate spheres perfectly, Smiley told her girl

51 “Correction,” The Pilot, May 15, 1886. 52 In a letter from Grace Byrne published in the July 17 issue, for example, Grace recounted how laborers in Ireland could not find enough work or enough pay to cover their living expenses and blamed the lack of employment opportunities on British authorities who kept Ireland in a constant state of poverty. “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, July 17, 1886.

160 readers that she believed that “the ultimate design of God in sending us women folks into this world, was to make us great home comforts” and that women should attend to “the wants of those in her own particular sphere.”53 In another “chat,” Smiley asked why girls had to scream and shout while running or playing tag. Noting that girls should not quarrel in the streets, Smiley asked how boys could have respect “for girls whom they see flushed with anger, and whom they hear scolding and disputing in public.” Girls, in fact, should cease to play in the streets altogether when they got older, and neither sex should play outside after dark.54 Smiley hoped that her Irish-American readers would conform to middle class values, showing that the Irish could be calm and polite. A satirical column of tips for spoiling one’s child also demonstrated how The Pilot furthered American middle class behavior. The column recommended that parents have nothing to do with their children’s play time. Among the rules to ensure that a child turned bad were: “do not know or care who his companions may be; let the child, whether boy or girl, rove the streets in the evenings – a good school for both sexes,” and “do not be with him in hours of recreation.” The column suggested that Irish parents act as middle class parents, watching over children’s recreational activities.55 These columns illustrated the middle class identity that The Pilot encouraged for readers, which not only dealt with how parents conducted themselves and their children at home, but also how they attempted to control the social lives of their progeny.

Parents needed to monitor their children’s activities, some observers reminded them, because there were so many immoral ways for youth to spend their time. Part of the

53 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, May 20, 1876. 54 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, September 2, 1882. 55 “Rules for Spoiling a Child,” The Pilot, November 16, 1878.

161 problem was that Irish-American children were losing their Irish virtue through association with Yankee children. According to an article in the Irish World, children and adults learned nothing from socializing with Yankees except “lying, swearing, swindling, stealing, [and] robbing.”56 Young Catholic men, according to one concerned Irish

Catholic named James Sheehy who wrote to The Pilot, were also slipping into vice by spending time in liquor shops. The youth entered the saloon because he heard “the jingling of glasses, the ‘music’ of some rusty piano, fiddle, or banjo, mingling with the husky voice of some wayward boy.” The young man then spent all his money on cards, playing billiards, or drinking and ignored his prayers.57 Sheehy worried that these activities caused youth to neglect their religion and their families. The Bowery in New

York was also a site of temptation for young men. The Bowery “is the most thoroughly thronged thoroughfare in America,” an article in the Irish World began, “and on Saturday nights it shines in all its dazzling glory.” The concert halls and lager beer saloons

“emitted forth a bewildering medley of airs” and “shouters inform the passers-by that the finest sights in the world are to be seen inside.”58 The article, in the paper’s temperance column, indicated the way in which the Irish World worked to erase the stigma of drunkenness with which non-Irish Americans often associated the Irish. Articles about saloons and beer gardens warned Irish Americans that allowing the young to drink would only fulfill the image of the Irish as intemperate and hold back their rise to respectability.

The young Irish American frequented saloons or beer gardens with youth of many ethnic backgrounds, and a lot of activities in which the children of Irish immigrants

56 “The Irish in America Should Not Indiscriminately Follow Yankee Ways,” Irish World, August 9, 1873. 57 “How Young Men Spend Their Evenings,” The Pilot, November 23, 1878. 58 “A Walk Through the Bowery,” Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, January 10, 1880.

162 participated appeared no different from those of other American children. In one of her talks to children about quiet forms of play, Smiley described games that were similar to those in William Wells Newell’s Games and Songs of American Children, for instance.

Newell, a folklorist, minister, and educator, began observing and collecting details about children’s games in New York City in 1880.59 He thus had plenty of occasions to meet immigrants and their children. But, according to Newell, although “there are quarters of the great city of New York in which one hears the dialect, and meets the faces, of Cork or

Tipperary…[,] the children of these immigrants attend the public school…their language has seldom more than a trace of accent, and they adopt from schoolmates local formulas for games, differing more or less from those which their parents used on the other side of the sea.” As a major purpose of his work was to show the antiquity of many of the rhymes and diversions of American children, Newell asserted that the games that

Americans played were “almost entirely of old English origin” no matter the country from which the children or their parents came.60

The play of Irish-American children on the city streets was therefore much the same as that of other children across the United States. In fact, the games that Smiley mentioned corresponded with ones mentioned in Newell’s book, including “Hunt the

Squirrel,” “Old Man I’m in Your Castle,” and “Little Lucy Waters.”61 A son of Irish immigrants, James Michael Curley, mayor of Boston and governor of Massachusetts in the twentieth century, remembered a childhood in Boston’s Irish slums in the 1880s with

59 Carl Withers, “Introduction to Dover Edition,” in William Wells Newell, Games and Songs of American Children (New York: Dover Publications, 1963), v, ix. 60 Newell, Games and Songs, 1-2. 61 Newell, Games and Songs, 70, 164, 168. “Old Man I’m in Your Castle” and “Little Lucy Waters” Newell reported as “Defense of the Castle” and “Little Sally Waters” but the basic premise of the games seemed to be the same. The differences in names may have been due to regional variations between New York and New England.

163 activities typical of most poor urban boys at the time. For example, Curley reported competing in “duck-on-the-rock,” which Newell described as a sport of throwing rocks to knock another stone off a high point or boulder.62 Curley also went fishing, swimming, and “the gang played baseball and football on vacant lots.”63 William O’Connell, who became archbishop of Boston, also recalled the games he played with fellow sons of Irish immigrants in Lowell in the 1870s and 80s, mentioning boyhood games of football, baseball, cricket, and hockey.64 These Irish Americans’ recollections and Smiley’s descriptions supported Newell’s assertion that the pastimes of the children of immigrants were American and English-based, with few ethnic characteristics to playtime.

But periodically Irish neighborhoods and social groups could reinforce a sense of

Irish ethnicity for children. In smaller place like Lowell, Irish kids needed to stick together, according to William O’Connell. When Yankee children’s insults wore out the patience of Irish-American youngsters, O’Connell reported, “the boys of the Acre [the

Irish neighborhood] were the terror of the town.” The Irish children understood “too well the story of their race” to accept those taunts, O’Connell wrote, so through “cuffing and blows and bloody noses” the Yankee children learned that young Irish Americans had little tolerance for Yankee insults.65 In New York, with its myriad ethnicities, Irish-

American children also sometimes shunned non-Irish. Parents and other kids might pressure Irish children to stay with others of Irish descent in social activities, which made some Irish Americans remember their neighborhoods as almost entirely Irish, despite an

62 James Michael Curley, I’d Do It Again: A Record of All My Uproarious Years (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1957), 34-35; Newell, Games and Songs, 189. The games that Curley played were not associated with being Irish, but rather were common American games that Newell had recorded in this book. 63 Curley, I’d Do It Again, 35. 64 William Cardinal O’Connell, Recollections of Seventy Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 17. 65 Ibid., 34-35.

164 area’s diversity. Some Irish-American children grew up in a social world largely closed off to other groups, based on a local Catholic parish and dominated by mostly Irish social and cultural life.66 Children’s social lives and interactions with others were sometimes exclusively relegated to socialization within a distinctly Irish-American social sphere.

Some children, however, understood ethnic differences among families but decided that other loyalties and identifications were more important. In his autobiography, Curley revealed “plenty of gang fights, especially with the ‘toughies from

Southie,’ or with other ‘wise guys’ who came around.”67 In late nineteenth century

Boston children may have based loyalties more on neighborhood and community –

Curley lived in Roxbury – than on ethnic identity because his rivals from “Southie” were likely Irish-American boys too. Even if other children were aware of ethnic differences, the contrasts may not have mattered. A New Yorker named Catharine Brody, remembering her childhood at the end of the nineteenth century, declared that playing on the streets helped erase ethnic distinctions. Brody’s recollections revolved around play in the streets, which “were the true homes of the small guineas, micks, and sheenies, the small Italians, Irish, and Jews, the only classifications that seemed apparent at the time.”

Play in houses was not for the children of the working-class in New York’s tenements

“because there were insuperable obstacles of caste and religion to home visits between the three classes,” but “in the streets they all met on fairly equal terms.”68

Although O’Connell’s account indicated that the differences between Yankees and Irish boys led to fights, national backgrounds appeared to matter less in Curley and

66 Barrett, The Irish Way, 23, 39-40. 67 Curley, I’d Do It Again, 35. 68 Catharine Brody, “A New York Childhood,” in American Mercury 14 (May 1928): 57-60.

165 Brody’s memories. Differentiations between ethnicities were apparent in Brody’s recollection, for instance, but they did not prevent children from playing with one another. Given the importance of being Irish to Curley, it seems likely he would have mentioned Yankee-Irish fights in Boston, but he only discussed the social activities of his

Roxbury gang of chums and their fights with boys from a heavily Irish neighborhood like

South Boston. O’Connell concentrated on ethnicity, but he also mentioned the awareness of Irish youngsters of their American nationality. As they fought Yankees, O’Connell remembered, the Irish boys of Lowell “knew they were young Americans” and fought as much to defend their Irish heritage as to show that as Americans they would stand up for themselves.69 While social milieus could reinforce Irish ethnic identity, an awareness of being American seemed to come through quite often too.

In fact, children often concentrated simply on their immediate environment and everyday experiences, which often shared many commonalities with other American children. Al Smith, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1928 whose mother was a second-generation Irish American, also described a seemingly common American childhood on the east side of lower Manhattan in the 1880s. There were no playgrounds or gymnasiums in his immigrant neighborhood, Smith recounted in his autobiography, but he and his friends used “the bowsprit and the rigging of ships as a gymnasium.” For children lucky enough, “roller skating in City Hall Park was something of a luxury, and a trip to Central Park, with a ride in the goat wagon, was something that came to you on your birthday.”70 Like the children’s letters to “Our Boys and Girls” reveal, Smith’s childhood perspective on the world was largely relegated to his surrounding community,

69 O’Connell, Recollections of Seventy Years, 34. 70 Alfred E. Smith, Up to Now: An Autobiography (New York: Viking Press, 1929), 16-18.

166 the fun in his neighborhood, and the boys from his block. A large number of letters from children in The Pilot told of the quotidian interests of a child. Numerous letters that children wrote to “Our Boys and Girls” discussed where they went to school and church, what their hometown was like, and an important event in their educational or religious life.71 Children’s thoughts and lives were mostly centered in their American communities and they had typical concerns of many children. Many writers asked Smiley to publish the correspondence so that they could see their names in print, asking excuse for any errors the child committed in spelling or grammar. The majority of messages, then, contained the mundane and common cares of childhood.

The staff at The Pilot, however, sought to actively teach the children that they should care for more than just their neighborhood gangs, playtime, or schoolwork, telling the children about the value they should place on American nationality. One of the chats that Agnes Smiley had with her boy readers told them that they should study politics.

Explaining the reason, Smiley wrote that “when you grow up, you will be one of the sovereigns of America, for every citizen of the United States who votes is one of the rulers of the country.” Smiley recommended that the boys study American history, because “patriotism is one of the highest duties and…an ignorant patriot never existed.”72

She emphasized boys’ future duty to uphold the Constitution and to help the country make wise and just laws by voting. She excluded girls because she did not think they

71 For examples of the mundane contents of children’s letters, see “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, September 16, 1876, January 19, 1878, July 6, 1878, September 28, 1878, December 14, 1878, October 11, 1879, July 9, 1881, or August 27, 1881. In July 1881, for instance, children’s letters detailed where the children went to school, what church they attended, learning to play the piano, how girls were wearing their hair, or general facts about their town. In August that year, children wrote stories about the summer vacations they took in the countryside, where they went berry picking, fishing, and saw animals they could not see in the city. 72 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, April 24, 1880.

167 would grow up to become voters. Boys learned about American identity and the duties of

American citizenship in many places in their lives, including “Our Boys and Girls.”73 But at another time Smiley reminded both boys and girls that they should be proudly

American most of all. After a number of letters boasted of a particular state’s virtues and argued about which state was best, Smiley wrote that pride in one’s state was fine, but the nation mattered most. The United States was “the country for which each one of us must live, and for which we must pray to be willing to die if need be,” Smiley wrote.74

O’Reilly’s views began to appear in the children’s column with more regularity in the 1880s, and these observations usually concerned the American nationality of the young readers as well. O’Reilly, who had made it clear that he believed some assimilation was necessary, said that the children of Irish immigrants “may tenderly remember the lands of their fathers or grandfathers or great-grandfathers, but they must be intensely American.”75 O’Reilly was an Irish nationalist, former Fenian, and opinion leader in his Irish-American community, but also understood the value of acceptance in

American circles. By the middle 1880s, O’Reilly was a man who was capable of bridging the divide between Yankee Protestants and Irish Catholics, “moving more easily between the two worlds of Boston than any other individual in his time.”76 O’Reilly knew that he should promote the patriotic feelings of Irish-American children to show that they would be true Americans. But he also hoped the children would remember the land of their forefathers. His sentiments reflected how he conducted his journal: the Irish in America should be “intensely American” while remembering their ancestors.

73 Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 88-89. 74 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, December 22, 1883. 75 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, May 9, 1885. 76 O’Connor, The Boston Irish, 134-136; Walsh, “John Boyle O’Reilly, the Boston Pilot, and Irish- American Assimilation,” 149.

168 Another of O’Reilly’s ideas in “Our Boys and Girls” showed the progression of his thinking about Irish assimilation in the 1880s and what he hoped was the broad appeal of his newspaper. Smiley reported on a discussion among O’Reilly and his friends about what to name an organization of children who vowed to discontinue using fireworks.

They rejected naming the association after the shamrock, “because the shamrock stands for Ireland, and we want American children, no matter where from descended,” O’Reilly said. What followed was a statement by O’Reilly about the broad nature of The Pilot and its audience. O’Reilly insisted that “THE PILOT goes everywhere: among the French and

British Canadians, into Yankee and Virginian families where there is no drop of Irish blood, among the Spaniards of New Mexico and California, and it is read by those who were once slaves but are now free men.”77 Although O’Reilly ran The Pilot mainly in the interests of Irish Catholics in the United States, he also wanted Irish-American children to understand the common ideals that they had with other American children. O’Reilly’s sentiments about American identities again appeared in the children’s column only a few months before he died in 1890. As immigrants came to America, O’Reilly claimed, “the tenderness which they bore to their motherland is in time transferred to her, and a man is all the better citizen because he can understand the feelings of two countries – that to which he belongs by blood and that to which he has sworn allegiance.”78

The idea that Irish Americans’ fondness for their heritage made them better

American citizens was popular with Irish Americans throughout the nineteenth century, when Irish immigrants had to defend their loyalty to the United States. When current

77 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, September 14, 1889. Agnes Smiley and others were alarmed at the number of dangerous accidents that took place every Fourth of July, so planned to have children send in their assurances that they would not use fireworks for their celebrations. 78 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, June 14, 1890.

169 events or children’s letters made Ireland part of the column, discussion about Irish identity appeared, demonstrating that some children had a great deal of Irish pride and the editors were willing to encourage it. But although Smiley published the letters of the children who wanted to hear about Ireland, by the time of O’Reilly’s death in 1890, both

O’Reilly and his wife understood that the children were, and should be, Americans first.

Although expressions in the paper’s children’s column demonstrated the editors’ hopes that children would support American patriotism and appreciate their Irish heritage, some children from low-income families, many of Irish descent, wanted to proclaim their American identity. Jacob Riis, the reformer and pioneer photojournalist, noticed this tendency among many of New York’s poor children. Riis, in his 1892 publication The Children of the Poor, claimed that the children of immigrants insisted that they were Americans. These children did not “own their alien descent,” Riis wrote in the first pages of his book. In fact, said Riis, telling a boy that he was not American would be a mistake. “The ragged Avenue B boy, whose father at his age had barely heard, in his corner of the Fatherland, of America,” wrote Riis, would “be as prompt to resent the insinuation that he was a ‘Dutchman,’ as would the little ‘Mick’ the Teuton’s sore taunt.” Children of Irish immigrants, Riis wrote, “will not fail to convince” anyone of their American sensibilities. Instead of increasing ethnic self-identifications, the suggestion that one was a Mick or a Dutchman caused the children to disown their ethnic identity and strenuously contend that they were Americans.79

Even though some children did not want to identify as Irish, there were still distinctive characteristics that set the Irish apart. Riis saw many of the same problems

79 Jacob Riis, The Children of the Poor (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1892), 2-3, 67.

170 among the city’s Irish poor and their children that reformers had seen in the Civil War era. The street gang was strong wherever the “Celt [was] still supreme,” Riis asserted, and retained the unruly elements of Irish identity under “its ‘native’ guise.”80 Riis thought that the Irish youths were some of the most difficult to control because “the little

Irishman, brimful of mischief, is, like his father…‘ag’in’ the government’ on general principles.”81 Although Riis may have shared some of the prejudices of his predecessors among New York’s reformers when he highlighted the Irish as especially troublesome,

Historian James Barrett also found many of the same sentiments in the remembrances of non-Irish Americans who lived near the Irish. Barrett detailed the surprising longevity of

Irish youth gangs in New York well into the twentieth century. These gangs were often based just as much on neighborhood turf as ethnicity, which, of course, often coincided.

Youth gangs composed almost exclusively of Irish-American kids opposed those of any other ethnic or racial background coming into their neighborhood, with animosity directed at blacks, Italians, and Jews alike.82

The social worlds that revolved around neighborhood territory were distinctively

Irish to some outside observers, but judging from the way that Riis described the

“patriotism of the slums,” the children considered themselves pure Americans. For example, Stephen Crane’s novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, written in 1892, showed the simultaneous irony and sincerity of young foreign-born New Yorkers’ love for

America. Yet Crane, who wrote the story based on his observations of the Bowery poor in the late nineteenth century, also mentioned the appeals to Irish identity and heritage

80 Ibid., 10, 67. 81 Ibid., 192-193. 82 Riis, Children of the Poor, 84; Barrett, The Irish Way, 22-23, 31, 40-41.

171 that performances in working-class theatres included. The titular Maggie and her beau

Pete, who Crane hints are young Irish Americans, attend a Bowery theatre in which a ventriloquist causes his dummy to say “funny things about geography and Ireland,” and another singer “rendered some verses which described a vision of Britain annihilated by

America, and Ireland bursting her bonds.” Adding a final appeal to Americanism, the singer “threw out her arms and cried, ‘The star-spangled banner,’” at which “a great cheer swelled from the throats of this assemblage of the masses, most of them of foreign birth.”83 Crane wanted to point to the irony of a foreign audience cheering for the words

“star-spangled banner,” which seemed simply a phrase to evoke a reflexive patriotic response. But his decision to point out the Irish references in a patriotic song for New

York’s working-class youth also demonstrates how integrated American and Irish identities had become by the end of the nineteenth century.84

It was significant that Crane chose to reference a performance in which Irish and

American identities were entwined because Irish themes could frequently enter low- income youth’s social lives through Irish-American plays and music, especially by the last decades of the nineteenth century. Working children in New York’s Five Points district, for instance, founded a theatre for boys in a tenement basement in the mid nineteenth century that sometimes put on plays about Irish Americans. The theatre attracted attention in the 1870s, when Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper described it as a theatre “owned, built, and managed by boys” and included a drawing of the boys performing “The Mulligan Guard.” The comedy, written by Irish-American playwright

Edward Harrigan, portrayed an Irish-American militia company whose Irish pride causes

83 Stephen Crane, “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,” in Stephen Crane: Stories and Tales (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 61. 84 Barrett, The Irish Way, 15-16.

172 a riot.85 Harrigan’s plays, in part, spoke to the ubiquity of Irish characters in American theatre. But they also demonstrated how Irish Americans were a standard element of urban culture by this time and the subtle ways that Irish-American children imbibed ideas about being Irish in America.86

Though many Irish Americans continued to play major roles in American urban culture, American society had started to change in the early 1890s. By the time Riis and

Crane saw their books published, a new immigration station at Ellis Island had opened to process the growing numbers of Southern and Eastern Europeans. Irish Americans would have to learn how to coexist with these new people as they remade ethnic relations in urban America. Irish nationalism lacked clear direction after the death of Charles Stewart

Parnell in Ireland deprived the Home Rule movement of leadership. John Boyle

O’Reilly’s death in 1890 also ended his unique influence at the paper, despite his protégée James Jeffrey Roche taking over editing duties. Lastly, the American-born Irish outnumbered the Irish-born by the early 1890s, meaning that the second-generation would soon exert more influence as they matured and applied the lessons they learned as children in defining their group identity. For these reasons, then, the early 1890s marked a shift in Irish-American thoughts about their identity and the loss of some influential leaders in journalism and nationalism.

85 Tyler Anbinder, 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), 190; Gautam Dasgupta, “Harrigan, Edward,” in McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama, ed. Stanley Hochman, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), 447. 86 Barrett, The Irish Way, 161-166. Barrett asserts in his chapter “The Stage” that a deep Irish-American presence in American theatre served two functions. One was to help Americanize recent immigrants by teaching them about the ethnic diversity of American cities. But another result was that many immigrants came to learn about the United States through an Irish-American perspective, including pervasive Irish themes to theatrical routines.

173 Irish-American children in the Gilded Age were seeing many of these changes that Irish-American adults were experiencing. Some children were in upwardly mobile families who were reaching a middle class status. But a larger number of Irish-American children still had the poor and working class childhoods described by Al Smith, James

Michael Curley, William O’Connell, Jacob Riis, or Catharine Brody. Though children had different social experiences based on their class status, American children shared elements of recreational culture that were common across classes. Gender also separated children’s lives and translated to different lifestyles and hopes from adults about the ways that children would learn to be American or value their Irish heritage. By looking at The

Pilot’s children’s column as a social life for children, it is also possible to see how adults and children blended a sense of Irish and American identities within youth leisure activities. “Our Boys and Girls” was a forum for considering issues of import to both

Ireland and the United States. Notes expressing an interest in Irish literature or Irish heroes often came from girls, showing the gendered expressions of Irishness. Current events like famine in Ireland or reaction to an Irish girl’s letter also elicited discussions about love for Ireland. The increasing involvement of women in agitating for Ireland’s self-rule may also have inspired females to raise their voices for Ireland publicly. But

Smiley also wrote columns about how boys and girls should fulfill their gender roles, and these expressions of love for Ireland may have been a fulfillment of these roles. As the sex socialized to be more sentimental, girls found it acceptable to share their feelings for

Ireland, its history, and its current struggles.

Examining the relationship between the social lives of Irish-American children and identities in the 1870s and 1880s reveals that children’s socialization was one a

174 potent area for efforts to construct ethnic identities within American nationality. Despite their relative lack of control, adults attempted to direct social activities to blend children’s

American and Irish identities. The children also thought of ways of being Irish in

America, apparently without the direction of adults. The editors of The Pilot, and

Smiley’s children’s column, deliberately cultivated American middle class sensibilities among readers, but still left room for Irish heritage. This heritage, furthermore, was often based on nationalist ideas because of the context and the forum in which Smiley and her correspondents discussed Irishness. The way in which a newspaper like The Pilot socialized the young through its children’s column reflected the larger goal of an Irish-

American middle class, combining respect for Irish ancestors and hopes for Irish freedom with American nationality. Children heard often about the honor of being American.

They learned from a priest’s letter in the children’s column, for instance, that “the privilege of writing to a newspaper is a distinctly American one – indicative of our national spirit of liberty.”87 Children who read the column saw notes extolling American values while other letters discussed the importance of Ireland. Youth who did not read

The Pilot also had reminders of their Irish identity through play with friends of diverse backgrounds and popular theatre and music. Socializing for youth, therefore, was not completely devoid of Irish influences. Social lives, especially those parts supervised by adults, could combine Irish ethnic pride with American loyalty, exemplifying the early pluralist expressions of Irish Americans for their children. While Americanization was a significant component to childhood sociality and recreation, social activities could also support children’s ethnicity.

87 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, March 17, 1888.

175 Chapter 5: Saving the “Savor of Irish Nationality:” Irish Language Education, Festivals, and Children

Irish-American adults were often worried about how youngsters spent their leisure time, but promoters of the Irish language, known in Irish as Gaelic, thought instructing children in their ancestral tongue would give them a purpose and awaken their Irish identity. One article in the New York Irish-American in September 1878 pleaded with local Catholic clergy to support classes in Gaelic, because the language “might be the means of wresting our loved land from the foreign oppressor in the future.” The letter writer, Eamon, thought that language classes would keep men “out of the ale houses and gin shops, and our boys and girls from loafing about street corners.”1 Another advocate of

Gaelic wrote to the newspaper to say that “Irish parents would do well in sending their children to this school, as certainly there will not be any bad example set before them…and that, I am sure, is more than can be vouched for the streets, where too many of our young people spend their evenings.”2 Keeping children off the streets by reciting

Gaelic lessons appealed to parents’ desires to keep children out of mischief. But Irish language proponents also thought the language was capable of creating more Irish pride in Irish-American children and distinguishing the Irish from the English or Anglo-

Americans, preserving a distinct identity in America.

Although the resuscitation of the Irish language was a perennial issue throughout the nineteenth century, the 1870s and 1880s was a time of particular agitation by Gaelic advocates on both sides of the Atlantic. This collection of movements led to the more

1 “Help the Irish Schools,” Irish-American, September 14, 1878. 2 “The Irish Classes in America,” Irish-American, January 31, 1880.

176 widespread Gaelic language and cultural revival that began in the 1890s.3 Although the

Irish-American started a Gaelic column in 1857 to encourage its readers to learn the language, it disappeared after 1863.4 In the 1870s and 80s, Celtic societies were organized in New York and Boston, among other places, and some Irish Americans began to study Gaelic in large part because they saw it as integral to the Irish national cause. Campaigns for the Irish language were parts of an ongoing struggle among Celtic cultural champions to foster interest in traditional Celtic literature, music, language, and sports. This movement’s goals included creating more pride in Irish identity and teaching

Irish-American children to honor their heritage because of its cultural contributions to the world. The Irish language would also unify Irish people worldwide and help create an

Irish nation, some said, thereby aiding nationalism’s aims. Children’s Irish identities played an essential role in both the objectives of nationalists and the goals of proponents of the Irish language.5

Most Irish Americans and their children, however, would find Gaelic irrelevant to their lives. The popularity of Gaelic fluctuated in the 1870s and 1880s because of events in both the United States and Ireland. The small percentage of Irish-American children who learned Gaelic through formal and informal lessons established a connection with their Irish background by learning their ancestral tongue. But the language movement failed to gain more than a few supporters and most Gaelic speakers did not maintain their

3 Timothy Meagher, Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880-1928 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 34; Una Ni Bhroimeil, Building Irish Identity in America, 1870-1915: The Gaelic Revival (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 15- 16. The Gaelic League, founded in Ireland in 1893, was the main successor to many smaller organizations promoting Irish language learning in the 1870s and 1880s. 4 Kenneth Nilsen, “The Irish Language in New York, 1850-1900,” in The New York Irish, ed. Timothy Meagher and Ronald Bayor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 263-264. 5 Ni Bhroimeil, Building Irish Identity in America, 8-9, 30-31.

177 language in the United States. Although some Irishmen estimated that New York City had tens of thousands of Irish speakers, Irish immigrants transmitted their language to the next generation on a large scale only in remote regions. Even Catholic colleges and universities, with some exceptions, did not pursue the Irish language as part of their curricula.6 Gaelic lessons and ethnic activities likely helped inculcate Irish identity in children, but only for the small proportion these efforts were able to reach.

Language was not the only instrument that Irish Americans hoped to use to make children into nationalists. Language was only one part of an agenda of cultural lessons for

Irish-American children that included traditional Irish music, literature, lessons for youth through ethnic associations, and St. Patrick’s Day events. While the evidence suggests that societies like the Catholic fraternal association the Ancient Order of Hibernians

(AOH) or nationalist organizations like Clan-na-Gael did not actively try to reach the children of Irish immigrants at this time, these associations sponsored numerous picnics, lectures, and holiday celebrations, and promoted cultural events and lessons for people of

Irish ethnicity. The AOH, founded in New York in 1836 as a Catholic and Irish nationalist organization, regularly organized St. Patrick’s Day parades in American cities, and children took part in festivities both as participants and spectators. Irish organizations did not create branches for junior members until the twentieth century, but Irish societies reached children through marches and other events that celebrated common Irish roots

6 Tomás Ó hAilín, “Irish Revival Movements,” in A View of the Irish Language, ed. Brian Ó Cuív (Dublin: Dublin Stationary Office, 1969), 97-99; James Barrett, The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic City (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 32-33; Ni Bhroimeil, Building Irish Identity in America, 30; David Noel Doyle, “The Remaking of Irish Amierca,” in Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States, ed. J.J. Lee and Marion Casey (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 224; “Many Societies in New York Devoted to the Study of Gaelic,” New York Times, August 23, 1903. According to Ó hAilín, even the general public in Ireland had trouble seeing the value of the Irish language, and Gaelic societies devoted to the cause of extending the language in Ireland itself found it difficult to gain enough funds or adherents to have much success.

178 and the power and status of the Irish in America. St. Patrick’s Day processions communicated messages about Irish Americans’ commitment to the memory of Ireland and a permanent place in American society that often came through clearly to children.7

Ethnic associations celebrated the Irish place in, and contributions to, American society. Associations, as such, did not dissuade the Irish from accommodating themselves to their American surroundings, and the AOH already included American patriotism in their celebrations in the years before the Civil War. But these organizations and Irish language movements mostly concentrated on keeping ethnic identity alive, even as the

Irish were becoming American.8 Publications for Irish Americans also made it their mission to educate readers about their duty to the Irish race. Ethnic newspapers and associations helped Irish immigrants define who they were and what values they shared as a group.

While these spectacles and lessons had an effect on some children, the intended consequences were likely not widespread. Although Gaelic advocates tried to demonstrate that Irish Americans and their offspring were so devoted to their American nationality that they were free to cultivate their ethnic identity through Gaelic, the convoluted explanations about how the Irish language fit with American patriotism served to highlight the difficulty of uniting American nationality with Irish language. In fact, as Gaelic proponents would explain in the early years of the twentieth century, their

7 Howard Ralph Weisz, Irish-American and Italian-American Educational Views and Activities, 1870- 1900: A Comparison (New York: Arno Press, 1976), 29; Mike Cronin and Daryl Adair, The Wearing of the Green: A History of St. Patrick’s Day (New York: Routledge, 2002), 37-38. 8 Cronin and Adair, Wearing of the Green, 68; John Ridge, Erin’s Sons in America: The Ancient Order of Hibernians (Brooklyn: AOH Publications, 1986), 29; Reginald Byron, Irish America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 246-251; Dale Light, Jr., “The Role of Irish-American Organisations in Assimilation and Community Formation,” in The Irish in America: Emigration, Assimilation, and Impact, ed. P.J. Drudy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 122, 132.

179 organizations existed less to focus on the Irish language and more to foster a better public opinion of Irish Americans by combatting the image of the Irish as uncivilized and ignorant.9 The incongruity of Gaelic and American identity thus exposed the inapplicability of these issues to many Irish Americans.

The claim in the possibility of ethnic and American loyalties existing side by side made some Irish Americans feel confident that they could promote Gaelic language learning. Irish Americans in places such as Boston and New York had the numbers and the influence to found Gaelic language classes in the 1870s. These urban centers with high concentrations of Irish immigrants also had many Irish speakers. Historian David

Doyle has estimated that at the end of the nineteenth century there were nearly 70,000

Irish speakers in New York and about 30,000 in Boston. Most of these could be classified as unskilled laborers.10

Gaelic language proponents understood that language was a powerful symbol of ethnicity. But the ability to speak English separated the majority of Irish immigrants from many other immigrant groups. Though one-quarter to one-third of famine-era Irish immigrants were primarily Irish speakers, most immigrants who arrived after the 1850s were either monolingual English speakers or had English language skills. The British government established national schools in Ireland in the 1830s, which contributed to the overall decline of Irish language usage. Irish nationalists in the early 1870s complained that the Irish National Schools would not teach Irish and forbade its use among school

9 Ni Bhroimeil, Building Irish Identity in America, 53. 10 Ibid., 19.

180 children, which they believed fit with British plans to eradicate Irish and replace it with

English.11

Whether the schools were part of a larger campaign to erase native Irish culture, they did contribute to increasing use of English across Ireland. From the 1850s to the

1890s, the number of native-speakers of Irish declined from about one and a half million to less than three-quarters of a million and ninety-five per cent of Irish immigrants were literate in English by 1900. As Irish Americans recognized, their knowledge of English was an asset in a country where English was the dominant language. In the 1870s and

1880s, Irish language advocates faced a great challenge in trying to convince their countrymen to speak a mother tongue many had never learned and with no realistic value in daily American life.12

Irish language issues were part of many nationalists’ goals to increase Irish

Americans’ Celtic pride. Regarding language in particular, Irish Americans often looked to German immigrants for lessons in preserving their nationality and culture, believing

Germans were succeeding at ethnic retention better than the Irish. In one of the first issues of the Irish World, Ford made suggestions on how the Irish could be more like

Germans. Ford thought that German-Americans better preserved their identity in America

11 Daniel Murphy, A History of Irish Emigrant and Missionary Education (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 209; Lawrence McCaffrey, “Forging Forward and Looking Back,” in The New York Irish, ed. Ronald Bayor and Timothy Meagher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 213-233; Lawrence McCaffrey, Textures of Irish America (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 24; R.V. Comerford, “Nation, Nationalism, and the Irish Language,” in Perspectives on Irish Nationalism, ed. Thomas Hachey and Lawrence McCaffrey (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1989), 22; Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 297-298; Philip Gleason, Keeping the Faith: American Catholicism Past and Present (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), 50. 12 Ni Bhroimeil, Building Irish Identity in America, 15, 19-20; Christina Ziegler-McPherson, Americanization in the States: Immigrant Social Welfare Policy, Citizenship, and National Identity in the United States, 1908-1929 (Gainesville, Fl.: University Press of Florida, 2009), 17, 122, 126; Jay Dolan, The Irish Americans: A History (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 166.

181 because they had “a common language, that serves as an indissoluble bond.”13 But other

Irish Americans thought that the German example only showed the futility of efforts to teach Gaelic to Irish-American children. A letter to the president of the New York

Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language (NYSPIL) in 1884 asserted that getting young people in the United States to speak Irish would be nearly impossible, just as the

Germans found it to be. The New York society was founded in 1878 and modeled on the

Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language, founded in Dublin two years earlier.14

The letter to the society said that the children of German immigrants “speak English best, or even exclusively, not caring at all to remain Germans, but allowing themselves to become completely absorbed by the American nationality.”15 The same danger applied to the children of Irish immigrants. Many Irish feared that with so few Irish Americans speaking a distinct language, Irish identity in the United States would disappear.

There were many obstacles to convincing Irish Americans to learn Gaelic. One

Irish World reader arrived in the United States at the age of 13 and immediately

“adopted, as well as I could, the American pronunciation of the English language, the

‘nasal twang’ included,” because he “did not like or appreciate the Irish brogue, lest folks might suppose I was a ‘green-horn.’” Sigma thought that the movement to persuade Irish people in America to learn Gaelic would not succeed because, like himself at age 13, “the

13 “Practical Suggestions to Irishmen,” Irish World, November 12, 1870. 14 “The Irish Language – The Movement for Its Preservation,” Irish-American, July 20, 1878. 15 “The Irish Language,” Irish-American, May 17, 1884; Jon Gjerde, The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830-1917 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 235; Thomas Archdeacon, Becoming American: An Ethnic History (New York: The Free Press, 1983), 105-106, 154; and Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), 159-160. Despite what this letter writer claimed, Germans in the 1880s were still placing great importance on their native language and perpetuating it among later generations in America. Nonetheless, it was likely true that the children of German immigrants did not want to speak their ancestral tongue as much as their parents wanted them to because, as the nineteenth century went on, German immigrants increasingly recognized the need to learn English and see that their children learned it as well.

182 majority of the Irish people in this country are ashamed or disgusted with their language.”16 Noting similar patterns, an Irish visitor to the United States observed that there were “very few Irish people who do not pick up the American accent, and the

American form of speech.” He also thought that Irish Americans hid their accent to avoid association with the Irish.17 Another problem with the language’s continuation, moreover, was that parents “do not wish to teach it to their children, who will tell you that ‘father and mother speak Irish, only when they wish to conceal their remarks from their own children.’”18 Without the cooperation of parents, those in favor of perpetuating Irish had little hope of creating Irish-speaking youth.

Sigma’s letter drew responses that argued for the bright future of the Irish language in America. V.S., writing from Yonkers, New York stated that although he knew little Irish himself, he wanted to learn it, and hoped to “teach it or have it taught to my family before I die.”19 Another writer to the Irish World thought that Irish Americans should lead the Irish in learning Gaelic because they had the freedom to undertake such an endeavor. “Gael” from Brooklyn wrote that the Irish who had “breathed the pure air of liberty ought to cultivate it [Gaelic], and hand it down to their children.”20 Gael, actually named Michael J. Logan, later founded a bi-lingual monthly magazine called The Gael devoted to the Irish language, published from 1881 to 1904. In one of his first issues of

The Gael in 1881, Logan reiterated the “vital importance [of the language] to Americans

16 “The Irish Language” Irish World, February 8, 1873. 17 Michael Buckley, Diary of a Tour in America in 1870 and 1871 (Dublin: Sealy, Bryers, and Walker, 1889), 52, 151, quoted in Doyle, “Remaking of Irish America,” 224. 18 “The Irish Language” Irish World, February 8, 1873. 19 “The Revival ‘Necessary and Patriotic,’” Irish World, March 8, 1873. 20 “The Irish Language,” Irish World, August 31, 1872.

183 of Irish descent.”21 Logan was one of the first to start a language school in the New York area, with a class in Brooklyn in late 1872.22 By the next year, Irish language schools had also started in Boston and New York.23 As with many other endeavors, the Irish

Americans who were interested in bringing attention to the Irish language often concentrated on reaching young Irish immigrants and Irish-American children in the hopes of keeping the language alive for future generations.

These Gaelic language classes received even more attention after 1878, when events in Ireland inspired increased discussion about the language. That year, the British parliament approved plans to teach Irish in the National Schools of Ireland, encouraging

Gaelic advocates on both sides of the Atlantic.24 All the talk about Gaelic ignited an interest in one little boy named Daniel Hurley. He wrote to “Our Boys and Girls” in The

Pilot in mid 1878 to ask Agnes Smiley to recommend books to teach him the Irish language.25 Gaelic schools in Boston, New York, and Jersey City also attracted children.

The Pilot noted in 1878 that “men, women, and children, all anxious to learn the language,” were flocking to the Bowery school in New York.26 Proponents of the language were often particularly pleased that those born in America of Irish parents would learn the language of their forefathers. Gaelic proponents also knew that concentrating their efforts on children, both in Ireland and America, would help perpetuate Gaelic into the future. The note from Daniel Hurley and the youngsters in Irish

21 Michael J. Logan, The Gael/An Gaodhal, December 1881, quoted in Ni Bhroimeil, Building Irish Identity in America, 35. 22 “A Society Organized,” Irish World, March 8, 1873; Ni Bhroimeil, Building Irish Identity in America, 33. 23 “The Irish Language,” Irish World, November 15, 1873. 24 “The Irish Language – The Study of it will be ‘Fashionable’ Yet,” Irish-American, August 3, 1878; “The Irish Language,” The Pilot, August 24, 1878; Ó hAilín, “Irish Revival Movements,” 94-95. 25 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, May 11, 1878. 26 “The Irish Language,” The Pilot, August 31, 1878.

184 classes were signs that indicated to leaders of Gaelic societies that they should continue to strive to reach the children of Irish immigrants.

Gaelic organizations appealed specifically to parents to send their children to these language classes. The NYSPIL told parents that encouraging their children to learn

Irish would be evidence of the patriotism that parents hoped to impart to their children.27

An editorial in the Irish-American suggested that the best method to keep the language alive was by ensuring youths learned Irish.28 Similarly, the New York Philo-Celtic

Society asked Irish New Yorkers to continue bringing their children to the Gaelic classes, boasting that the society’s greatest success was “the large number of boys and girls from the age of seven to thirteen who attend [the Gaelic classes] regularly.”29 Irish parents who made no attempt to teach their children Irish would show themselves as “people who neglected to uphold Irish nationality.”30 In advancing their cause, these advocates claimed that reaching children with Gaelic was important not only for the sake of the language. It was also vital because it had the potential to make Irish-American children love Ireland and support nationalist efforts when they became adults.

The seemingly rapid progress of Gaelic appeared to encourage more Irish

Americans to enroll in classes. Participation in Irish classes grew, and newspaper articles announced with glee that Irish classes across the Northeast were full. The Irish-American populations of Boston, New York, and Brooklyn, it appeared, were taking a great interest in learning the language.31 In early 1879, “the great majority” of the members of the

27 “The Irish Language in New York,” Irish-American, May 25, 1878; “The Irish Language – The Movement for Its Preservation,” Irish-American, July 20, 1878. 28 “The Irish Language – The Study of it will be ‘Fashionable’ Yet,” Irish-American, August 3, 1878. 29 “The New York Philo-Celtic Society,” Irish-American, September 28, 1878. 30 Ibid. 31 “The Mother Tongue,” Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, March 29, 1879.

185 Gaelic school on Second Avenue were “small children…ranging in age from six to fourteen years.”32 Additionally, the arrival of thousands of Gaelic-speaking immigrants from the west of Ireland in the 1880s also helped the revival of the Irish language. As the famine of 1880 hit Gaelic-speaking regions particularly hard, native speakers of the language increased in cities like New York and Boston.33 The increase in native speakers appeared to draw more youth to language classes. The secretary for the Philo-Celtic society in Brooklyn wrote that recent new members were “mere children” and that it made the friends of the Irish language movement happy to see “parents desirous of having their children instructed in the ancient tongue.”34 The Irish school at St.

Columba’s parish in Chelsea on the west side of Manhattan also appealed specifically to children. The parish priest, Father McAleer, told an adult Irish class in June 1879 that “all the children attending the parochial schools of St. Columba’s parish are going to join the class and learn the ancient language of their ancestors.”35 For those who believed that

Gaelic could help create Irish identity for Irish-American children, the news that children were flocking to Gaelic classes was encouraging, because children needed to love their ancestral culture so they would later prove faithful Irish patriots.

Those who thought that the Irish language would create Irish patriots could point to those who learned Gaelic as children in the United States. A man who signed his name

Mac Garava wrote to the Irish World in 1873 to claim that he was born in Brooklyn and

32 “The Irish Classes in America,” Irish-American, March 1, 1879. 33 Barrett, The Irish Way, 32. 34 “Brooklyn Philo-Celtic Society,” Irish-American, January 28, 1882. 35 “Irish Classes in America,” Irish-American, June 14, 1879; “St. Columba’s School,” Irish-American, July 19, 1879; “Catholic Churches in the ‘Old City’ and in the ‘New City’ in 1865,” document received from Archives of the Archdiocese of New York, May 2012; Thomas J. Shelley, The Bicentennial History of the Archdiocese of New York: 1808-2008 (Strasbourg, France: Éditions du Signe, 2007), 139, 153. St. Columba was established as a parish for the growing Catholic population on Manhattan’s West Side in 1845. It was predominantly an Irish parish by the 1870s and 80s.

186 learned Irish growing up. His upbringing learning Irish also made him an Irish patriot, he claimed, and there were plenty of young American-born Irish who spoke the language and were “willing to fight for Erin’s freedom.”36 W. H. Meagher also wrote a letter to attest that learning the Irish language as a child led him to feelings of pride for his Irish ancestry. Though he had never seen Ireland, his mother’s lessons on the Irish language led him to study Irish culture when he grew older.37 Testimonials like those from

Meagher and Mac Garava encouraged the efforts to revive the language and gave nationalists hope that Gaelic would help Irish-American children become loyal Irish patriots when they grew up.

While learning Gaelic may not have always led to nationalist feelings, those who acquired some Gaelic words from their parents as children had a connection to their Irish heritage through their common linguistic knowledge. Well-known New York Catholic publisher Patrick John Kenedy grew up in the Five Points neighborhood in New York speaking Irish, and his fluency surprised Jeremiah O’Donovan-Rossa.38 O’Donovan-

Rossa, the outspoken Irish nationalist leader who advocated violent overthrow of the

British government in Ireland, was perhaps surprised because his own children only knew some Gaelic words. According to his daughter, Margaret O’Donovan-Rossa, his children learned to speak a little Gaelic and had to use Gaelic phrases to ask for pennies to buy candy.39 Boston political boss James Michael Curley, who grew up in the 1870s and 80s in the city’s Roxbury neighborhood, reported using language skills he learned from his parents to his advantage when he was running for office. He was able to address some

36 “A Family of Six, Americans by Birth, Speak the Irish Language,” Irish World, March 15, 1873. 37 “In the Far West,” Irish World, April 1, 1876. 38 Nilsen, “The Irish Language in New York, 1850-1900,” 258. 39 Margaret O’Donovan-Rossa, My Father and Mother Were Irish (New York: The Devin-Adair Co., 1939), 54.

187 potential voters in their own language because, he said, “I had learned a smattering of

Gaelic from my parents.”40 Other Irish-American boys born and raised in New York, recalled Michael O’Lenihan, grew up in an atmosphere so “thoroughly Irish” that they

“generally settled all their boyish arguments in the Gaelic.”41 The Irish language in

America was certainly not dead, then, and its usage carried an Irish identity with it. But the persistent problem was how to convince the many Irish Americans who did not know

Gaelic to learn the language.

There were as many disagreements about the efficacy of teaching Gaelic to Irish

Americans and their children as there were about other efforts to preserve and perpetuate

Irish identity. Some strenuously argued that the language was necessary for the cause of

Irish freedom and to create pride in Irish descent. Others were more realistic about the unlikelihood that immigrants and their children who already spoke English would commit to learn an additional language in the United States. Most others showed little interest in even discussing it, implicitly proving the naysayers right.

With general lack of concern, publishers of Irish language periodicals in the

United States struggled to attract subscribers and make a profit. Logan’s The Gael, for instance, had fewer than 3,000 subscribers for his monthly magazine by 1890, nine years after its first publication. Only a portion of this small number regularly paid their subscription fees, and Logan was at least a thousand dollars in debt in 1890.42

These struggles did not seem to discourage others from trying to propagate the language among Irish Americans and their children. Gaelic proponents believed that the

40 James Michael Curley, I’d Do It Again: A Record of All My Uproarious Years (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1957), 49. 41 The Gael/An Gaodhal, October 1900, quoted in Nilsen, “The Irish Language in New York, 1850-1900,” 259. 42 Ni Bhroimeil, Building Irish Identity in America, 45.

188 Irish language was one of the most powerful methods to keep Irish identity alive.43 To help Irish Americans of all ages remember their motherland, the Irish Echo appeared in

Boston in 1886. The monthly paper was the organ of the Boston Philo-Celtic Society and, as such, the articles reiterated messages about the necessity of the Irish language for the creation of Irish nationality. Yet during its run, the writers often complained about the low interest among most Irish Americans. The publishers’ attempts to admonish their countrymen to take more of an interest in Gaelic often seemed to fall on deaf ears.

The Irish Echo, however, effectively summarized the overall goals of the language movement in its pages. In its first issue, it set out one of its goals that would carry through until it stopped publication in 1894. The entire point of learning the Irish language, said the members of the Boston Philo-Celtic Society in the pages of the Irish

Echo, was to refute the lies of English writers who discussed the barbaric and meritless

Irish people, language, and literature. Throughout the paper’s run, the idea of combatting the slanders of the English and proving the value of Irish culture through its language were constant themes. Attempting to further convince readers to learn Irish, the society’s leaders wrote that it was every Irish person’s duty to vindicate their ancestors. The concepts of vindication and obligation to forefathers often appeared in the pages of the

Irish Echo, just as it did in parochial school textbooks and other Irish-American newspapers with nationalist themes. The Irish Echo called on Irish Americans to honor their ancestry and fulfill all the duties to their heritage.44

43 “The Gaelic Society,” Irish-American, May 8, 1886; Ni Bhroimeil, Building Irish Identity in America, 31. 44 “Prospectus,” Irish Echo, January 1886; Ni Bhroimeil, Building Irish Identity in America, 53. Working to refute the supposed lies of English writers about the Irish was part of the broader goals of the language movement in the United States. These goals, which also included ensuring Irish-American children learned

189 Near the end of its first full year of publication, the Irish Echo discussed another subject that would become a recurrent message in its pages. The title of its September editorial perfectly encapsulated the idea. It read: No Irish Language, No Irish Nation. In nearly every issue thereafter, the paper expressed the same point, telling readers that a people without a language of their own could never hope to have an independent nation.

The article, like many others in the publication, focused on the literature of Ireland, demonstrating how Irishmen should stay away from English literature if they wished to avoid learning falsehoods about the Irish.45 The big danger, however, was that Irish people without their language would only be West Britons and would not assert their independence – all because a different language did not keep the Irish distinct from the

British. The assertion that a people without their own language could not have an independent country ignored all the people who shared language across national borders and failed to account for the most obvious counter-example: the United States. The authors of the Irish Echo did not mention how Americans who spoke English were in fact separate from Great Britain. Perhaps they believed that because Ireland was so geographically close to Britain, the Irish were in more danger of appearing to be Britons than the distant Americans.

The trouble that the Irish Echo had with defining the Irish through language typified how difficult it was for Gaelic to draw much interest. Yet there was more than just language that would communicate cultural traditions to Irish-American children.

Traditional Irish music, thought some, could be the answer. In fact, an editorialist in the

Irish World believed that with so many Irish in America, “the soul-charming airs of our

Irish history and fighting against stereotypes of the “stage Irishman,” also corresponded with the overall goals of many other nationalist organizations. 45 “No Irish Language, No Irish Nation,” Irish Echo, September 1886.

190 country ought to be as familiar as ‘Yankee Doodle’ to the children born here.”46 Large

Irish numbers provided the justification for ensuring Irish music was well known in

America. Music, insisted the Irish World, would “prove of immense value in gaining for

Ireland the attention of the public mind.”47 Because of the appeal of music, most Irish classes included musical entertainment. These programs, sometimes held as special events that charged admission, often proved to be more popular than the regular Irish classes. Because of their wider appeal, Gaelic societies found them to be viable methods to fund the societies.48 Although some insisted singers performed in Irish, most realized that Irish music, even in English, would help Irish Americans of all ages become better acquainted with their home culture.

Inculcating an affinity for Ireland and Celtic culture was important because Irish-

American children could grow up to become a powerful force in the international fight for Ireland’s independence. An Irish parent named Michael Bohan wrote to the Irish

World from Pennsylvania to discuss the significance of St. Patrick’s Day parades for young people. Bohan thought that parades were necessary because “thousands of young men who march in these processions on St. Patrick’s Day never saw a sight of Ireland, and too much cannot be done to plant a love of that country in their hearts.” Speaking of his own family, he said he brought his three American-born sons to parades, and the marches did “more to impress on their minds a love for Ireland than all I could tell them in relation to it for a month.” Ultimately, he thought that everyone should prepare Irish-

American children to play a part in liberating Ireland, and St. Patrick’s Day parades could

46 “Timely Suggestions,” Irish World, February 21, 1874. 47 Irish World, November 29, 1884, quoted in Ni Bhroimeil, Building Irish Identity in America, 30. 48 Ni Bhroimeil, Building Irish Identity in America, 39-41.

191 accomplish that task by showing the number of people who were proud of the spirit and dignity of the Irish.49

Language, music, and St. Patrick’s Day parades were all ingredients in the systematic teaching of Irish patriotism to Irish-American children. Some, like Michael

Bohan, thought that teaching Irish-American children about their heritage would help

Ireland gain its freedom. Patrick Ford, in an editorial about St. Patrick’s Day parades in

1875, agreed that spectacles were important for inspiring more people to support nationalistic goals. “Ireland’s flag must be kept afloat,” wrote Ford, “and Ireland’s cause must be kept in view of the whole world.”50 Without the pomp of St. Patrick’s Day every year, Ford thought, people would forget Ireland’s need for independence. As Michael

Bohan asserted to Irish World readers, children needed to see celebrations of Irish nationality to impress upon them a love for their heritage. These parades had already transformed into communal expressions of Irish nationalism and collective memory over the mid-nineteenth century. These rituals could also have an impact on participants and observers, as they helped create group ethnic identity and sparked nationalist feelings in some Irish Americans who walked in parades.51 Each year as children thronged the streets or marched under green or star-spangled banners on March Seventeenth, some adults hoped that youngsters would witness the greatness, unity, and devotion of Irish people to their religion and nationality and have similar feelings toward Irish nationalism.52 Although St. Patrick’s Day parades almost certainly reached more

49 “Advancing Irish Interests,” Irish World, April 11, 1874. 50 “St. Patrick’s Day Celebration,” Irish World, February 20, 1875. 51 Kenneth Moss, “St. Patrick’s Day Celebrations and the Formation of Irish-American Identity,” Journal of Social History 29, no. 1 (1995): 130, 135, 140, 141. 52 In 1888, a boy calling himself “Irish-Canadian” wrote from Montreal to tell Agnes Smiley and the readers of The Pilot’s “Our Boys and Girls” about his experience on St. Patrick’s Day. He said he had been

192 youngsters than Irish language lessons, it remains difficult to tell whether they had the effect that some Irish-American adults intended.

Lectures and historical societies could serve similar purposes. One Irish American wrote to the Irish World to say that the “press, the pulpit, and the rostrum” inspired ideas in people, so Irish nationalists could easily use lectures to “preserve the young Irish-

American generation to the nationality of their fathers.” Directly demonstrating that nationalist goals were behind some of the desires to preserve Irish ethnicity, the writer thought that if Ireland were a free country, there would be no need teach American youth to value their Irish heritage.53 Another way to remind future generations of their family histories was through the founding of Irish-American historical societies. For a man named Richard Flynn from Worcester, Massachusetts, historical societies would be able to record the “history, struggles, [and] triumphs” of Irish Americans. Flynn looked forward to the day when people in America would feel proud to trace their descent to an

Irish family, believing the time would come when Ireland was a free nation. Flynn urged

Irish Americans in Boston and around the country to begin researching family histories in anticipation of the time when the descendants of Irishmen in America would feel proud of their Celtic heritage instead of being ashamed of it.54

With so much focus on Irish identity and heritage, Gaelic advocates did not want other Americans to believe Irish Americans were wavering in their loyalty to the United looking forward to the holiday for months because “all the little boys of the Irish schools ‘walk,’ and I am so fond of the fine Irish airs.” He then described a procession that seemed calculated to appeal to children just as much as it was meant to impress adults, complete with banners, horses, little girls in a sleigh, and a man dressed as an old Irish bard playing a harp. Though the celebration he described took place in Montreal, it was likely a fair representation of the St. Patrick’s Day spectacles and direct involvement that attracted children. The same issue also printed other letters from children about walking in the St. Patrick’s Day parade or from those who said they were too young to walk, but hoped to do so next year. “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, April 21, 1888. 53 “Public Lectures,” Irish World, December 4, 1875. 54 “Irish-American Historical Societies,” The Pilot, June 28, 1884.

193 States. In June 1889, the editors of the Irish Echo echoed virtually every other Irish author, editor, church leader, and nationalist in their message about the love of Irishmen for the United States:

Let no native American think for a moment that the Irishman’s warm love for the land of his birth detracts in the least from or diminishes by one iota his fidelity to, his zeal in the cause of, or his truth to, the principles of real American nationality.55

As the Irish language had nothing to do with American patriotism or nationality, the editors of the Irish Echo felt it was necessary to say that true patriots could be loyal to both countries. “Real American nationality,” then, could incorporate diverse elements of ethnic identity and linguistic heritage, and need not have a basis only in Anglo-Saxon and

Protestant culture. In this sense, the paper’s editors, like many other Irish Americans at the time, expressed an idea of cultural pluralism for their ethnic group and their progeny.

Learning the Irish language, however, did not also teach American patriotism, so it was difficult to effectively blend the two identities within Irish language circles. Therefore it was necessary to publicize the assertion that despite the concentration on Ireland and its language and culture, Irish Americans learning Gaelic would continue to cherish their

American nationality because of the ideas behind cultural pluralism.

Irish Americans like Patrick Ford also broadcast his belief in the multicultural aspects to Irish immigrants and their children, expressing their ability to be Irish and

American simultaneously. Ford thought that the Irish people were already Americans in spirit before they came to the country, so there was no need to teach them American patriotism when they arrived. They would then be free to foster respect for the memory of their land and learn its native tongue. A long editorial in 1887 by the Irish World editor

55 [No title], Irish Echo, June 1889.

194 told his readers that the Irish people in the United States had a mission to foster American nationalism. Other elements like Germans, Poles, or Italians came to the United States and retained their ethnic characteristics, resisting assimilation and refusing to become

Americans. But conversely, Ford wrote, “the Irish element…speaking the language of the country, and distributed in all parts, readily assimilates itself to the American type.” In fact, Ford believed, the Irish were most capable of uniting diverse elements of the country, both sectional and ethnic, and making Americans out of everyone.56 With the

Irish already patriotic Americans before they arrived, Irish Americans could feel proud of their heritage and teach children to identify with their ethnic group without endangering their allegiance to the nation. As American nationality was based upon commitment to

American ideas, a culturally pluralistic society, spearheaded by the Irish, was possible.

As these somewhat overwrought explanations in the Irish Echo and the Irish

World showed, laying a claim to American patriotism in the English language was much easier than it would have been in Irish. The ability to speak English, as Patrick Ford said, helped him make a claim that the Irish were Americans before they arrived. Irish

Americans were continually blending their faith with their ethnicity and nationality.

Numerous Irish Americans, from the 1840s to the last decade of the nineteenth century, argued that they could be fully American, fully Irish, and fully Catholic at the same time, demonstrating these early views of cultural pluralism. Patrick Ford and others who believed the same thus solved the problem that Gaelic and ethnic associations faced when they neglected teaching American patriotism to Irish-American children: these children

56 “The Irish World Greets Its Friends,” Irish World, December 31, 1887.

195 were free to learn a love for their ancestral land and their ethnic heritage because they were already devoted Americans.

Efforts to convince Irish Americans to teach their children Irish, the participation of children in parades and Irish festivals, and the beliefs that the Irish were devoted

Americans encapsulated the way that many Irish-American adults believed their children could become Irish-Catholic and American at the same time. Teaching children Gaelic had a variety of purposes: keeping them out of trouble, instructing them to love Ireland and appreciate their cultural heritage, and creating future Irish nationalists who would agitate, and perhaps even fight, to free Ireland from British rule. Joseph Cromien, the secretary for the New York Philo-Celtic Society, put it plainly when announcing plans in the summer of 1890 for a sports festival and picnic to promote Irish language learning for

Irish New Yorkers. The Society wanted children to attend the festival because “we want them for future use. They are the hope of the Irish exiles, and if they lose the savor of

Irish Nationality our present word is useless.”57 Irish nationalists, which included many of those who supported language schools, understood that future generations of Irish

Americans would have to continue the fight for Irish independence after the present immigrant generation was gone.

Ethnic associations, though they did not actively reach out to children in the nineteenth century, supported similar ideas with their festivities and cultural events. They exhibited the music or literature of Ireland, celebrated its devotion to faith, and showed that the Irish were claiming a place in American life. Like the New York Philo-Celtic

Society, many members of ethnic associations thought that picnics and parades would

57 “Irish Classes,” Irish-American, September 6, 1890.

196 show children that the Irish were a powerful, proud, and cheerful people who had a duty to honor their heritage.

In their endeavors to convince parents to teach children Irish, as well as persuade adults to learn it, numerous Philo-Celtic societies, newspaper editors, and nationalist supporters had trouble blending American identity with appreciation for Irish heritage.

The movement for Irish Americans to learn Gaelic concentrated on the language’s uses for nationalism’s purposes: establishing the separation of the Irish people from the

English, supporting claims for Irish self-governance, and increasing respect for Irish people when some Irish Americans felt ashamed of their native land. With support of nationalism as the ultimate objective of the Gaelic cultural movement, Irish-American children’s sense of Irishness had an important role to play. Yet Irish Americans in general showed little interest in learning a language with no practical value in American life.

Though Gaelic advocates said that learning the mother tongue would engender respect from American people, most Irish Americans had trouble believing that knowing anything but English would help them live in the United States. Boston and New York had numerous language schools and boasted about their popularity with Irish Americans of all ages, but Gaelic schools across the country struggled to attract students, and editorials in Irish-American publications bemoaned the apathetic attitude that the majority of Irish Americans took toward their language.

Unlike religion, education, or social lives, American identity did not seem to fit well with language education, so it was difficult to blend this identity with Irish-

Catholicism in the context of ethnic associations or language schools. Although some attempted to use expressions of cultural pluralism to argue for the compatibility of an

197 Irish nationalist or linguistic background and American nationality, reaching children through methods of language and ethnic celebrations often did not achieve the success for which Irish nationalists hoped. But the messages that language associations provided matched the nationalist ideas that many Irish Americans communicated to children through education in parochial schools, Catholic novels, and social activities. The proposed purpose of teaching children Irish identity, to further the cause of nationalism in future generations, also came through strongly and clearly in the Irish language movement. The Irish language and ethnic associations failed to reach many Irish-

American children. Luckily though, Irish parents had a much more fruitful method of teaching children about Irish heritage that included a relatively captive audience. At home and in family circles, the children of Irish immigrants had ample opportunity to understand their ancestral homeland, its culture, its injustices, and its need for vindication and liberation in nationalism’s cause.

198 Chapter 6: Venerable Heroes, Ancestral Woes, and Fairy Tales: Family Life and Heritage for Irish-American Children

Mary Anne Meehan, an Irish-American cook and housekeeper from

Massachusetts, was an old woman by the time an interviewer from the Federal Writers’

Project came to speak with her in 1939. As dusk settled in with the early evening of a spring day, Meehan recalled how her Irish mother recounted the legends of Ireland at a similar time of day, after the sun had set and the fire warmed the blue light in the kitchen of her childhood. Her mother had “loved th’ gloamin’, like she called it,” Meehan told her interviewer, Louise Bassett, in Brookfield, Massachusetts. Meehan, born the daughter of Irish immigrants in 1857, told Bassett about the Irish folklore her mother described to her as a little girl. “My mother said she knew lots of folks who had heard a banshee but she only knew one man who said he had actually seen one,” Meehan reported, adding

“but me mother said th' old people said they'd seen many a fairy in th' lonely places in th' hills, they was little wee folks.” Mary Anne Meehan was not born in Ireland, but she had

“all the wit, independence, and pride characteristic of her racial heritage,” according to

Bassett.1 Meehan apparently learned these ethnic traits from her parents and her mother’s stories from Ireland.

Though Mary Anne Meehan was not born in Ireland, her interviewer identified her as an Irish cook and wrote her speech in a recognizably Irish dialect. Meehan, who worked as a housekeeper well into her seventies, was retired and living with her cousin in

Brookfield when interviewed. Her parents were both famine-era immigrants, arriving in

1 Mary Anne Meehan, interviews by Louise Bassett, January 20, 1939 and June 15, 1939, in “American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1940,” WPA Federal Writers’ Project Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/wpaintro/wpahome.html (hereafter cited as WPA Federal Writers’ Project, LOC)

199 the mid-1850s at barely 20 years old. Meehan was, in her own words, “Irish and proud o’ it,” although she was born and raised in Massachusetts.2 Like many children of Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century, family stories helped Meehan learn about her Irish heritage. She heard a version of Irishness from her mother that was common to many

Irish-American children, one that accentuated the mythic past, legends, and superstitions of Ireland. Though fairy tales were predictably popular in family settings, the myths and legends of the Celts were parts of larger ideas that dominated lessons about Irish family heritage for Irish-American children.

Five themes about Irishness appeared in stories and childhood remembrances of

Irish Americans. First, as Mary Anne Meehan exemplified, many Irish-American children heard about the fairy tales, ghost stories, and ancient myths of Ireland from their parents. Second, some Irish Americans remembered the strong Catholic faith that their parents gave them and associated their religious beliefs with their Irish heritage and familial inheritance. A third theme in many recollections was the wrongs that British governance inflicted on the Irish people and stories of Yankee maltreatment of the Irish once they arrived in America. Fourth, children learned about their Irishness through hearing of the importance of family names, stories about Irish relatives, and absorbing distinctive speech patterns through personal observations and contact with family members. Fifth, some Irish-American youth received instruction from family members about the obligation to support Irish nationalism.

But whether the accounts concerned ancient legends or recent ill treatment from

Protestant Americans, the identity built through these tales fit with the conception that

2 Ibid., February 6, 1939, WPA Federal Writers’ Project, LOC.

200 Irish nationalists constructed of the Irish people. The stories that Irish Americans remembered hearing as children often matched the kinds of messages that Irish nationalists popularized in the post-Civil War era. Irish nationalists encouraged pride in ancient Celtic traditions and used memories of suffering at the hands of Protestants in

Ireland and, to a certain extent, nativist Anglo-Americans to further their cause. Irish nationalists created their own folkloric tradition that expanded upon already existing Irish culture. They used Irish cultural items such as ancient ballads and legends to inform their version of history. This interpretation combined an idealized image of old Ireland, heroic

Irish resistance to British rule, and collective memories of anti-Irish-Catholic prejudice.3

The themes of family stories were comparable to some of the ideas of Irish nationalism. For instance, children listened to stories of English oppression and

Protestant discrimination, which mirrored messages from nationalists about the need to defend Irish-Catholic identity against Anglo-Protestant opposition. The similarity suggests that the nationalist movement’s version of Irishness may have influenced the memories of family lore or the original stories. But in creating their version of Irishness, nationalists also included traditional Celtic themes and capitalized on recent hardships in

Ireland and the United States, drawing ancient folkways and actual events into their meaning of being Irish. These overlapping themes indicated that Irish nationalism had absorbed many of the meanings of Irishness by the late nineteenth century and

3 Mary Helen Thuente, “The Folklore of Irish Nationalism,” in Perspectives on Irish Nationalism, ed. Thomas Hachey and Lawrence McCaffrey (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1989), 42- 45; Lawrence McCaffrey, The Irish Catholic Diaspora in America (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 46, 139-141; Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 308-312; Thomas Brown, Irish- American Nationalism, 1870-1890 (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1966), 8-9; Joseph O’Grady, How the Irish Became American (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1973), 37-38. Brown and O’Grady have suggested that the Young Ireland movement was a part of the general European Romantic movement, and was at least a partial reaction to industrialization and urbanization, thus the reason why nationalism came to emphasize the idyllic natural landscape of pre-industrial Ireland.

201 increasingly dominated the version of ethnic identity that Irish-American children came to understand. The themes of Irish nationalism and the motifs of family tales coincided, supporting one another in forming a proud and defensive Irish ethnic inheritance.

Inside the immigrant home, parents could exercise control over what their children learned about Irish identity. Irish-American parents also encouraged strong

American patriotism in their children, who observed their family’s involvement with

American life through arguments about politics, job struggles, or interactions with their communities. Even so, many remembered a home life infused with Irishness, meaning the impetus toward cultural pluralism for Irish-American children was not as strong in

Irish immigrant home life. Irish families built Irish-Catholic culture in their homes through both overt and subtle means. One of the most conspicuous attempts at creating

Irish identity was through story telling, a practice that had an important function in both

Irish history and in creating an identity based on collective memories of the past.4

Because Irish-American adults often remembered specific reminders of their Irish heritage from interactions with family members, families proved to be some of the most effective influences in creating ethnic identity for the children of Irish immigrants.

Supernatural tales from the ancient Celtic past were an important part of Ireland’s cultural heritage. This theme is the first in Irish-American family stories and memories.

When the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) Federal Writers’ Project set out to interview Americans as part of the Folklore Project in the late 1930s, the older Irish

Americans to whom they spoke remembered a great deal about the folklore they heard from Irish relatives. James Hughes, a shoemaker from Lynn, Massachusetts who was

4 Catherine Nash, Of Irish Descent: Origin Stories, Genealogy, and the Politics of Belonging (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 48, 51.

202 born in County Monaghan in the 1860s and came to the United States as a child, recalled the stories of ghosts and fairies he heard from his uncles in Ireland. Hughes described how the supernatural was ever present to the Irish, and said “I niver seen iny ghosts or fairies maself, but sometames when I wuz a young man awalkin' out of a neight [night] alone whin it wuz dark an' misty all over the turf bogs I mighta thought I'd seen 'em.”

Hughes added that he was not scared of spirits in the United States, but in Ireland he was afraid of ghosts like everyone else. As an American, Hughes distanced himself from Irish peasant folkways.5 Another interviewee, New Yorker George Hale, also identified his

Irish ancestry with the legends he heard as a child. He began by referring to the popular notion that the Irish believed in the supernatural. Hale thought almost all Irish people had

“some kind of experience of their own, back in the old country…something uncanny and inexplicable.”6 Like many others, Hughes and Hale thought that one well-known trait of the Irish people was their belief in supernatural occurrences.

For Irish Americans remembering their childhoods, the wealth of Celtic fairy tales and ancient legends helped them feel a connection to Ireland. From the stories her mother told her, Mary Anne Meehan learned that a belief in Irish myths was a part of what made one Irish. The first thing that Meehan remembered about her mother, Margaret, was that she told stories about fairies.7 The Irish had a special connection to the supernatural, according to Meehan’s memories of her mother’s stories. Meehan said:

5 James Hughes, interview by Jane K. Leary, April 10, 1939, WPA Federal Writers’ Project, LOC. 6 George Hale, interview by A. Fitzpatrick, October 19, 1938, WPA Federal Writers’ Project, LOC. 7 Meehan interview, June 15, 1939, Federal Writers’ Project, LOC; 1940 United States Federal Census, Brookfield, Worcester, Massachusetts, Enumeration District 14-33, page 12B, www.ancestry.com; 1930 United States Federal Census: Brookfield, Worcester, Massachusetts, Enumeration District 144, page 6A, www.ancesty.com; 1920 United States Federal Census, Brookfield, Worcester, Massachusetts, Enumeration District 17, page 1B, www.ancestry.com; 1900 United States Federal Census, Brookfield,

203 some countries ain't over good to fairies, but th' Irish always have been. Youh see folks never know but what a stranger may be a fairy in disguise-besides th' Irish like 'em. That's why there are so many there, an' why they do be doin' so many good things for th' Irish.8

Meehan thus attributed Irish hospitality to their belief in fairies. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the labor leader and radical agitator for workers’ rights, also mentioned the stories she heard from her Irish-born mother in Flynn’s autobiography. Flynn, whose mother was an

Irish immigrant and father was American-born of Irish parents, was born in Concord,

New Hampshire in 1890. Flynn was connected to her Irish heritage because her mother

“knew all about fairies and leprechauns and ‘the little people’ who are supposed to inhabit Ireland.” Flynn’s mother read stories to her children from Irish history, poetry, fairy stories, and Irish literature.9 Both Meehan and Flynn learned about Ireland through its folklore and understood the connection between legends and Irish identity.

These Irish Americans believed that traditional tales about the supernatural set the

Irish apart from other people. Listening to and enjoying his grandfather’s stories helped give George Hale an important sense of his Irishness. These tales taught him the geography of the country, the folkways of its people, and the history of the common

Irishman and woman.10 Mary Anne Meehan also established a strong connection between

Irish superstitions and Irish traits. Even Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, outside of the context of an interview about folklore, brought up her connection to Ireland through her Irish mother’s renditions of Irish tales. In the case of James Hughes, he contrasted the superstitious Irish with more rational and practical Americans. Saying that the Irish

Worcester, Massachusetts, Enumeration District 1592, page 6A, www.ancestry.com. Meehan indicated in the 1920 federal census that both of her parents’ native tongues were Irish. 8 Meehan interview, June 15, 1939, WPA Federal Writers’ Project, LOC. 9 Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, I Speak My Own Piece: Autobiography of “The Rebel Girl” (New York: Masses and Mainstream, 1955), 17-18. 10 Hale Interview, October 19, 1938, WPA Federal Writers’ Project, LOC.

204 believed in ghosts or that “most folks said fir sartin' there's fairies all over Ireland,”

Hughes denoted that belief in the supernatural was an Irish trait.11 But Hughes told his interlocutor that his American beliefs were different from his Irish ideas, drawing lines between the Irish and Americans and even between Irish and American parts of himself.

Hughes’ distinction underscored the idea that Americans were more practical than the fanciful Irish. A belief in the other world of fairies and mythological creatures, an oft- recurring theme in Irish folk culture, created the image of the Irish as a pre-modern people and strengthened their sense of separation from modern industrial Britain or

America. These senses of Irishness were components to some Irish nationalist beliefs.12

The link between Irish folk memory and Irish identity reflected one of the messages of Irish nationalist folklore, which also stressed the indigenous traditions of

Ireland as markers of Irish identity. Nationalist folklore celebrated the mythology, legends, and ballads of ancient Ireland while also extolling its idyllic rural past.13 These narratives were important parts to the Celtic Myth, an idea that some Irish-American nationalists seized upon to claim that Celtic culture was advanced, civilized, and influential. Those who popularized the Celtic Myth argued that the Celts were more spiritual and imaginative than Anglo-Saxons. The myth in turn supported a concept of the

Irish as pre-modern people, rooted in a mystical landscape and ancient history. Some nationalists used Celtic spirituality to prove their superiority to materialistic Anglo-

Saxons and show that Ireland had a unique civilization replete with its own traditions and

11 James Hughes interview, April 10, 1939, WPA Federal Writers’ Project, LOC. 12 John Duffy Ibson, Will the World Break Your Heart? Dimensions and Consequences of Irish-American Assimilation (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990), 2-3. 13 Thuente, “The Folklore of Irish Nationalism,” 45; McCaffrey, Irish Catholic Diaspora, 46-47

205 legends.14 Many of these same messages, for instance, also appeared in parochial school textbooks in lessons that highlighted the antiquity of Celtic culture. By discussing the strong association between Celtic legends and heritage, Irish Americans demonstrated that stories of banshees and wee folk were inextricably linked with being Irish.15

Home was an ideal setting for these legends and fairy tales of Ireland. Families were important to children’s ethnic identities because they were primary sites of transmission of cultural legacy to the next generation. In Irish-American families, usually both mother and father were Irish because approximately ninety per cent of Irish immigrants in the late nineteenth century married others of Irish descent. Although religious factors played a part in this high rate of endogamy, some Irish immigrants seemed to prefer other Irish for ethnic reasons. One woman who left County Kerry in the

1880s expressed disapproval to an interviewer that her daughters had married Italians.

Another Irish-American woman said that she did not like “the Irish marrying people of other nationalities.” There were also numerous children in many Irish-American families because Irish mothers in America had children at higher rates than native-stock, and many other immigrant, women.16 The large size and ethnic homogeneity of most Irish families meant that family life created and reinforced an atmosphere conducive to transmitting Hibernian identities. Because many Irish-American families were also entirely Catholic, children received instruction in religious practices at home.

14 McCaffrey, Irish Catholic Diaspora, 46, 53; Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 8, 31-34. 15 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, December 25, 1875; “Jeremiah Curtin,” Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, March 24, 1888. Agnes Smiley wrote “A True Ghost Story” for the children’s column; In August and September 1877, The Pilot ran a continuing series of stories called “The Fairy Mythology of Ireland.” See also Chapter Three. 16 Janet Nolan, Ourselves Alone: Women’s Emigration from Ireland, 1885-1920 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1989), 75; Timothy Meagher, The Columbia Guide to Irish American History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 177; Andrew Greeley, Ethnicity in the United States: A Preliminary Reconnaissance (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1974), 157.

206 Children learned about Catholicism and Irish identity in their homes sometimes simultaneously, while Irish nationalists increasingly stressed the link between faithfulness to Catholicism and patriotism for Ireland during the nineteenth century. This association between religion and ethnicity is the second theme in Irish-American family stories and memories. In memoirs of Irish Americans, they often recalled distinct lessons in their childhood that communicated the need to defend Catholicism and the association of this defense with ethnic heritage. Maurice Francis Egan, who would become one of the most successful American Catholic writers of his generation, was born in Philadelphia in 1852 to an Irish immigrant father and Philadelphia-born mother. In his autobiography from

1924, he discussed the religious legacy left to him by his parents, especially his father’s adherence to Catholicism. Egan recalled a strong Catholic upbringing with stories of his father’s defense of Catholic churches against nativist mobs in the 1840s. Egan reported feeling “quite ready to undertake the defence [sic] of our religion in any way” as a child.17 The importance of Catholicism to ethnic heritage was a part of many childhood memories and a connection that Irish nationalists used in their mission to free Ireland from English Protestant rule.

Indeed, a defense of Catholicism was a long tradition for the Irish. When William

O’Connell, Archbishop of Boston, recounted his early days in Lowell, Massachusetts, he concentrated on how he had inherited his strong religious faith from his Irish ancestry.

O’Connell was born in 1859 and his father died when O’Connell was four.18 O’Connell

17 Maurice Francis Egan, Recollections of a Happy Life (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1924), 37. 18 Jay Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985), 243, 252-254; Hasia Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 43, 59-61; Meagher, Columbia Guide to Irish American History, 177-178; James Michael Curley, I’d Do It Again: A Record of All My Uproarious Years (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1957), 32. Losing a father was a common

207 reported learning firsthand how Catholicism sustained the Irish people through a great deal of tragedy and heartbreak by observing his mother’s faithful allegiance to religion after his father’s death.19 His mother also counseled her children when they came to complain about anti-Irish-Catholic insults from neighborhood youngsters, telling

O’Connell and his siblings that their ancestors had suffered for their faith, so they must be prepared to do the same.20 David Lawlor also learned about these connections while growing up in a New England mill town. Lawlor, born in Ireland in 1865, spent his first seven years in County Tipperary before coming with his family to Fall River and working in textile mills. Lawlor reported that, though he never met his father’s family, “they must have been good, because even now I can remember the prayers he [his father] taught me.” In his memoirs, he mentioned numerous instances where his mother also taught him

Catholic prayers and rituals and gave him books from Ireland on religious subjects. From stories his mother told him about his grandfather’s fight against English-Protestant landlords and Oliver Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland, Lawlor learned that defending

Catholicism equaled a defense of Ireland and came to understand that the Irish and the

English were traditional enemies. This idea became integral to nationalism as well.21

Adherence to Catholicism could also help sustain an Irish identity based on memories of historical injustices.

experience for Irish-American children. With a large number of Irish men clustered in dangerous jobs, there were many widows among Irish women. Other fathers left their families, several going to look for work elsewhere and never coming back. With all of these disruptions, there were a large number of female- headed households among Irish-American families. Boston politician James Michael Curley grew up in one such family, living in poor housing with a large family headed by his mother after his father died from a work accident in 1884 when James was ten. 19 William H. O’Connell, Recollections of Seventy Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 3, 12. 20 Ibid., 16. 21 David Lawlor, The Life and Struggles of an Irish Boy in America (Newton, Mass.: Carroll Publishing Company, 1936), 13, 20-21.

208 Whether they were devout Catholics or not, some Irish Americans connected their ethnicity with the Catholic faith. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was aware that her ancestors had suffered for their adherence to Catholicism, but did not grow up Catholic. Flynn’s father, a second-generation Irish American, left the Church when it excommunicated a pro- labor-rights priest, Father Edward McGlynn of New York, for his involvement in political activities.22 Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, born Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald in 1890 in

Boston’s North End, was also raised with an awareness of the relationship between religion and her Irish ethnicity. She recounted in her memoirs her Irish ancestors, who had escaped the famine, “arrived [in Boston] with scarcely more than determination and faith…they worked hard, and raised their children in the love and care of God.” As Irish

Americans often remembered, women were largely responsible for religious instruction at home, and Kennedy learned a deep faith in the Catholic Church from her mother. Her mother “drilled us in our catechism and other religious lessons, and talked to us about the fasts and feasts and special seasons of the Church.”23 Catholicism became very important to Kennedy, who associated her faith with lessons from her parents and Irish ancestors.

The Catholic religion could communicate Irish ancestry to Irish-American children no matter their faithfulness to the Church, as children learned about the links between religion and ethnic heritage from their family members.

22 Flynn, I Speak My Own Piece, 30-31; Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 148-150; McCaffrey, Irish Catholic Diaspora, 122. Father Edward McGlynn was pastor of St. Stephen’s parish in lower Manhattan, one of the largest Catholic parishes in the city and composed of mostly Irish Americans. McGlynn endorsed American political reformer and author Henry George for the 1886 mayoral campaign in New York. His superior, Archbishop of New York Michael Corrigan, suspended McGlynn from his duties because of McGlynn’s refusal to withdraw his support for George. By mid-1887, papal authorities had excommunicated McGlynn for ignoring an order to appear at the Vatican to explain his involvement in American politics. Later, the church reversed its decision, but damage to the faiths of Irish Americans like Thomas Flynn had already been done. 23 Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, Times to Remember (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974), 19, 5-7, 14.

209 These associations between Catholicism and Irish nationalism were part of nationalist folklore. Many nationalist leaders, such as John Mitchel, Michael Davitt, and

Charles Stewart Parnell, tried to foster a non-sectarian Irish nationalism that would include Protestants and Catholics. Despite their efforts, Catholicism became closely associated with Irish nationalism. British laws proscribing Catholic rights and Daniel

O’Connell’s Catholic emancipation movement strengthened the connection between religion and nationalism. Some Anglo and Irish Protestants also did their best to convince fellow Protestants in Ireland that only Catholics would substantially benefit from Irish self-government. In the United States, anti-Catholicism further fortified the sectarian basis for Irish identity and nationalism.24 Stories for children about the need to defend

Catholicism and the long history of Irish ancestors who adhered to Catholicism were messages that many Irish nationalists stressed as well. Irish Americans heard stories as children that taught them that being Irish involved religious devotion and a pride in religious lineage. But Catholicism was also closely tied to themes of suffering in Irish history, as parents hoped children would understand how the Irish endured hardships because of their religion and Hibernian heritage.

The idea that the Irish had suffered from famine, English dominance, and Yankee

Protestant discrimination was a main message of Irish nationalism and also a theme that

Irish Americans frequently recalled. Memories of misfortune form the third theme in

Irish-American remembrances. Stories of such events as the famine, Yankee-Irish conflicts in New England, and the Irish reputation as rebels against greedy imperial authority helped form children’s ideas about Irishness. James Hughes, who grew up in

24 Lawrence McCaffrey, “Components of Irish Nationalism,” in Perspectives on Irish Nationalism, 9; McCaffrey, Irish Catholic Diaspora, 47; Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 34-35; Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 66-68.

210 Ireland in the 1860s and 70s, remembered listening to tales of the famine. Hughes perhaps thought he should speak about the famine during his interview because he was

Irish. He pointed out, unprompted, that he did not remember the “great potato famine…’cause that wuz befor I wuz born.”25 By the time Hughes was growing up, the memory of the famine was an integral part of Irish-Catholic identity on either side of the

Atlantic. William O’Connell also heard tales of the famine and emigration from his mother. He told how he had listened to his mother’s life story, which began in County

Cavan and included the “desolation which came with the blight of the crops…and then the heart-breaking resolution to leave it all” to go to America.26 O’Connell understood later in his childhood that the English shared a large part of the blame for Irish hardships.

Mary Anne Meehan also noted the traditional dislike of the Irish for the English. Among her mother’s sayings, Meehan related one warning - to beware of the smile of an

Englishman. Meehan added that “my mother used to say ‘I don’t like th’ English, God save their souls.’”27 By the time of these discussions, the famine and Irish opposition to the English were parts of the shared identity of Irish Americans. Hated of the English, in fact, sometimes seemed to compose a large part of the emotional impetus behind Irish nationalism. Often central to this anti-English attitude was the idea that the famine symbolized British cruelty.28

Parents described the terrible deeds of the English government in the hopes their children would associate their Irish heritage with opposition to the English, while also

25 Hughes interview, April 10, 1939, WPA Federal Writers’ Project, LOC. 26 O’Connell, Recollections, 2. 27 Meehan interview, June 15, 1939, WPA Federal Writers’ Project, LOC. 28 Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 305-309; McCaffrey, Irish Catholic Diaspora, 141; O’Grady, How the Irish Became Americans, 75.

211 seeing the necessity of defending their Irish identity. This relationship came through in

David Lawlor’s autobiography. Lawlor’s mother told him that his father was a Fenian and that during the Rising of 1867 soldiers had come to their house to search for him.

Lawlor’s father was not arrested, but Lawlor learned an important lesson about the ruthlessness of the English government when soldiers ripped apart his childhood home looking for his father.29 It is also likely that Lawlor learned Irish nationalist ideas and a stalwart faith because his father was a Fenian. Others heard tales as children that made them loathe Ireland’s enemies. One young man who wrote to the Irish World recalled sitting at his father’s knee and listening, “with feelings of wonder and awe, to the history of sorrows traced in the blood-stained records of the past,” such as “how Erin’s children

[were] butchered, starved, and ground by the iron heel of the robber Saxon.”30 The young man detailed how he yearned for revenge against the English. The memory of injustice took on aspects of an inherited ethnic trait and it became a fundamental component to

Irish national identity for some Irish Americans by the late nineteenth century.

Tales of the Irish fight against discrimination and anti-English sentiments could make deep impressions. Flynn used stories of her Irish heritage to help justify her life’s mission to struggle for the rights of laborers and the poor. According to Flynn, her hatred of imperialism, poverty, and persecution derived from her Irish heritage. In her autobiography, she recalled the story of her great-grandfather Paddy Flynn, known as

Paddy the Rebel because he aided French forces in the attempted Irish rebellion of 1798.

Rebellion against British imperial authorities was in her blood, claimed Flynn, because

“as children, we drew in a burning hated of British rule with our mother’s milk.” She

29 Lawlor, Life and Struggles of an Irish Boy, 13, 20-21. 30 “Voices from the Past,” Irish World, January 2, 1875.

212 added “until my father died, at over eighty, he never said England without adding, ‘God damn her!’” As a child, Flynn learned all about Irish freedom fighters such as Robert

Emmet, Wolfe Tone, Michael Davitt, and Jeremiah O’Donovan-Rossa.31 These ideas that

Flynn learned in her childhood were connected to the themes in Irish nationalism that stressed opposition to Protestant British authorities.32 The substance of what Flynn learned about her Irish heritage from her parents also demonstrates how Irish identity was passed from one generation to the next through family lore.

The children of Irish immigrants also heard plenty about the nativist treatment that Irish immigrants received in the United States. As a child, James Michael Curley learned about recent Irish hardships in Boston. Curley, born in Boston in 1874, eventually became mayor of Boston and governor of Massachusetts in the twentieth century. His immigrant parents arrived from Galway in 1864, settling in Roxbury. Curley’s identity as an Irish American was tied to his perspective of Boston’s political scene and Boston

Brahmin Yankees’ treatment of Irish immigrants.33 He spent the first chapters of his memoir detailing how, when the Irish “arrived on our hallowed shores, they encountered an even more provincial [than in Ireland], but no less acrimonious, kind of social, economic, religious, and racial persecution at the hands of the Yankee Brahmin employers and politicians.”34 The family history of his parents’ experience in Boston formed his ideas about Irish ethnicity and what Irish Americans had gone through to

31 Flynn, I Speak My Own Piece, 13. 32 Memories of rebellions played a large role in Irish nationalism. Brown wrote that “each generation [in the nineteenth century] added new names to an old martyrology.” Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 5-6, 15. McCaffrey claimed that second-generation Irish Americans listened in “awe, reverence, and pulsing anger as Irish-born fathers or grandfathers recited Robert Emmet’s” speech. McCaffrey, Irish Catholic Diaspora, 140. 33 McCaffrey, Irish Catholic Diaspora, 125-126. 34 Curley, I’d Do It Again, 11.

213 assert their rights. A 79-year-old Irishman named Francis (whose last name appeared illegible in the type-written transcript), who was born in Belfast in 1860, remembered his

Irish family having to stand up for their rights against Yankees in Bridgeport,

Connecticut in the 1870s. Being a Roman Catholic from Ireland, Francis understood that he belonged in the Irish community. He learned as a child that the Irish in Bridgeport stayed with the Irish because they did not like the Yankees.35 These men were able to view cultural lines that separated Yankees from the Irish in New England and learned from their families where their allegiances lay. Membership in an Irish-American community provided an identity and a defense against Yankees who would otherwise take advantage of the Irish, so Curley and Francis claimed.

Irish-American children learned from their parents and surroundings about poor treatment that Irish Catholics received in New England. Curley saw the contrast between the “feudal barons who exploited Irish labor” and his “gang around the waterfront slums of Ward Seventeen.” Curley, whose father was a hod-carrier for ten cents an hour and mother a domestic servant in the homes of wealthy Bostonians, grew up poor. These realities, Curley remembered, meant that “even as a boy, I knew I belonged to an Irish-

Catholic minority who were despised socially and discriminated against politically.”36

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn also heard of how the Irish had fared in America upon their arrival. Flynn’s father “was very bitter about the hard conditions which prevailed here [in

New England] in his youth among the Irish.” According to her father, he had seen signs that said ‘No Irish Need Apply’ and “they were ridiculed by the Protestant Yankees for their ‘Papist’ religion, for their large families, their fighting and drinking.” Although

35 Francis [last name illegible], interview by M.V. Rourke, December 29, 1938, Federal Writers’ Project, LOC. 36 Curley, I’d Do It Again, 32, 34.

214 Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s father was born in the United States and her mother was Irish- born, Flynn and her siblings believed their father had more Irish pride, saying “Papa is more Irish than Mama, and he never saw Ireland!”37

New England was a prime location for cultural conflicts between Irish Catholics and Yankee Protestants, but adult lives could also influence the importance of Irish ethnicity. Curley’s impressions of his Irish heritage were formed from his home life and surroundings growing up in a poor Irish neighborhood in Boston, where the split between the ruling class of Boston Brahmins and poor Irish Catholics was particularly acute. He also explicitly connected his story with the narratives of thousands of Irish who had come to Boston in the famine years and thereafter, making it clear that he was one of “the people.”38 But his life as a Boston politician also made him highly aware of ethnicity because his appeal to his constituency was based upon his Irish-American identity.

Although Curley exploited his humble, working-class origins to accentuate his rise from poverty to political power, his description of his youthful awareness of his Irishness was probably the result of real childhood experiences.39

From stories of parents’ hardships, Irish Americans learned that the Irish needed to make common cause to defend themselves against Yankees. Curley and Francis learned similar lessons in Boston and Bridgeport. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s father Tom felt like an outcast among New England Yankees because of his Irish descent. So he also developed a strong association with his Irish identity, which he passed along to his daughter. She chose to highlight Irish roles within her area of interest, mentioning how

37 Flynn, I Speak My Own Piece, 16-19. 38 Curley, I’d Do It Again, 11-14. 39 McCaffrey, Irish Catholic Diaspora, 124-125; William Shannon, The American Irish: A Political and Social Portrait (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1966), 231-232.

215 the Irish were early leaders in the labor movement and many defied the Catholic Church by joining labor unions before the Church gave its consent to trade unionism in 1891.40

But her strongest connection to her Irish heritage was the struggle against discrimination and fight for justice that defined the Irish in Flynn family stories. Though they did not involve the ancient legends of Ireland or tales of brave ancestors, these tales also fit with the nationalist motif about past suffering and discrimination. The idea of anti-Irish prejudice from Protestants that became stock stories in Irish-American nationalism, learned from family and community, influenced Francis, Curley, and Flynn’s thoughts about their Irish identity as they grew up among Irish Americans in New England.

Though Yankee prejudice might help children feel Irish, there were also other ways to discover Irish heritage through contact with family members.

Irish-American children absorbed and observed their Irish heritage because of their family’s interests, tales of Irish relatives and distinctive Irish names, and by picking up habits of speech from family members. These ideas form the fourth theme in Irish-

American familial identities. Children sometimes learned about their Irish heritage by observing its importance to relatives. When Flynn’s father Tom joined the Ancient Order of Hibernians and ran for political office in New Hampshire when Flynn was a young girl, he marched in a St. Patrick’s Day parade wearing a green sash with harps and shamrocks. Elizabeth remembered that “we children were terribly impressed” and they

“organized parades [of their own] and pranced around in that sash till we wore it out.”41

As a child, Maurice Francis Egan also knew about his connection to Ireland through his thoroughly Celtic father who read about the Irish Brigade in France and had his son read

40 Flynn, I Speak My Own Piece, 19-20. 41 Ibid., 21.

216 the Irish-American Weekly to him.42 From Rose Kennedy’s father, she heard stories about

Irish history and local Boston history when she was a little girl. She also learned about her Irish identity through her father’s involvement in politics, comparing “Boston politics of this era” to “Ireland before the Anglo-Norman conquest.”43 Her father’s ethnically based political appeals showed Kennedy that Irish and Yankee identities mattered in

Boston. From their family members, children learned about their Irish heritage through seeing their parents participate in Irish events or in reading stories of Ireland.

But hearing family histories about Irish ancestors could also ignite an interest in

Ireland among children. As with other descendants of Irish immigrants, Rose Kennedy knew a great deal about her Irish relatives, listing in her memoir where each ancestor had come from and when they arrived in the United States.44 Egan also learned about his Irish heritage from his father’s relatives and their stories. Egan recounted that his Yankee mother had to “suffer much from these weird Irish tales,” which mostly concerned celebrities to which his family was related. On one occasion, Egan heard from an Irish aunt that Daniel O’Connell was a relative.45 Family visits and ancestry tales served as reminders of Irish identity for children. Even when the information was less specific, children learned about their Irish heritage from their family activities and discussions.

The presence of Irish relatives, their interests, and parental directives also formed a sense of Irishness in some children. An Irish-American woman born in 1869 in

Bridgeport identified with her Irish background because relatives came to visit her family and “used to sing and dance to all the old Irish songs and ballads.” She added that her

42 Egan, Recollections of a Happy Life, 17, 19-20, 37, 51, 57. 43 Kennedy, Times to Remember, 5-7, 19. 44 Ibid., 5. 45 Egan, Recollections, 19-20.

217 parents always taught their children “to be proud of being Irish and Catholic.”46 Another

Irish-American man, who grew up in New York in the late nineteenth century, learned important lessons about his Irish identity from his parents. “Of course, we had teaching in our home,” he told WPA interviewers in Newark, who did not record his name. “The code we were taught was: first, be thankful for the religion you were lucky to be born in; second, be thankful you have been born an American; third, in your veins flows the blood of Irish ancestry.” As an adult this man joined many Irish cultural organizations, including founding an Irish-American veterans association with other men of Irish descent. Discussions from his parents about the importance of Irish ancestry worked to give him a sense of his proud heritage.47 Irish-American children, then, learned directly from their parents to value their Irish ancestry, but also understood their Irish identity through contact with Irish relatives and tales of ancestral origins.

Stories of Irish ancestry continued to influence some Irish Americans’ travels to

Ireland, where they searched for the genealogy they had heard as children. Though

Margaret O’Donovan-Rossa, the daughter of Irish nationalist Jeremiah O’Donovan-

Rossa, was nearly twenty on her first trip to her parents’ birthplace, the personal heritage she learned as a child made the vacation in Ireland more special. Her Irish identity caused her to take an interest in locations and people around her parents’ hometowns.48 Margaret

Sanger, the most prominent advocate of birth control in the early twentieth century, also attempted to use childhood stories about her heritage on a trip to Ireland when she was an

46 WPA Federal Writers’ Project, 1939 interview with Mrs. S., quoted in Marjorie Fallows, Irish Americans: Identity and Assimilation (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979), 87. 47 “The Blood of Irish Ancestry,” in America, the Dream of My Life: Selections from the Federal Writers’ Project’s New Jersey Ethnic Survey, ed. David Steven Cohen (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 46-50. 48 Margaret O’Donovan-Rossa, My Father and Mother Were Irish (New York: The Devin-Adair Co., 1939), 143-148.

218 adult. Because both of her parents were born in Ireland, Sanger went from Glengariff to

Killarney trying to find her distant relations. But it was difficult because, she reported, “I had no exact information – just tradition from childhood days.” Although Sanger received no specifics about her family genealogy as a child, the traditions she learned in her childhood taught her that being Irish made her mother courageous and encouraged her father’s non-conformism.49 Irish-American children learned about their Irish ethnicity through stories about Irish ancestors and some of them sought connections to relatives on trips to Ireland.

Irish-American children also acquired other markers of their Irish identity from family members, such as Irish accents. WPA interviewers in the 1930s noted the presence of Irish accents, even attempting to replicate Irish speech patterns in interview transcriptions. When Mary Anne Meehan recounted the idioms of her mother, for example, her interviewer Louise Bassett noted that Meehan’s brogue became pronounced. James Hughes, himself born in Ireland, also spoke in a heavy Irish accent according to his interview’s transcription. If Irish Americans like Hughes and Meehan had the veritable Irish accents with which their interviewers portrayed them, even the way they spoke would have been a marker of their Irish identity. It is unlikely that

Meehan picked up an Irish accent growing up in Massachusetts though. Meehan was probably copying her mother’s accent when she told Irish stories, causing WPA workers to transcribe her speech with Irish inflections. Interviewers or transcribers, however, may also have exaggerated accents to emphasize the ethnic heritage of the interviewees and underscore their connection to a folklore tradition.

49 Margaret Sanger, Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (New York: Dover Publications, 1971), 11-13, 277.

219 Understanding the Irish accent, moreover, could also mark one as Irish. Before recounting the fairy tales he heard from his grandfather, George Hale said his grandfather spoke English well when he wanted, but “in his story-telling, he would lapse into the dialect of the ‘Ould Sod,’ and one, unfamiliar with the vernacular, might find it difficult to understand.”50 The fact that he could comprehend his grandfather’s Irish accent as a child, when perhaps non-Irish people could not decipher it, made George Hale into someone with insider knowledge of the Irish, their customs, accents, and folk beliefs.

These Irish Americans who had become adults in New England understood the links between accent and Irish heritage. This accent could also serve as a reminder of the

Gaelic and Celtic ancestry that Irish nationalists hoped to keep alive in order to show the distinctiveness of the Irish people.51

Similarly, children’s distinct Irish names helped them understand more about their

Irish identity. One nine-year-old boy who began writing letters to The Pilot in the late

1880s was named John Boyle O’Reilly, so writing to The Pilot’s children’s column seemed appropriate. Although he reported not knowing he shared his name with the newspaper’s editor until his older brother Ned told him, he had always known he had an

Irish name. John’s parents were dead, but before his father died, John said his father told him “never to disgrace my name, as I was named after a great Irishman.”52 Clearly,

John’s father was an admirer of the Fenian and Pilot editor John Boyle O’Reilly, and made sure that his son understood the dignity of that name. In fact, in another letter John remembered a story he overheard his father tell others about the time he tried to meet the

50 Hale interview, October 19, 1938, WPA Federal Writers’ Project, LOC. 51 Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 33-34. 52 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, February 19, 1887.

220 elder O’Reilly back in Ireland.53 Margaret “Daisy” O’Donovan-Rossa, born in April 1887 in Brooklyn, knew her last name was famous in Irish nationalist circles. Her father,

Jeremiah O’Donovan-Rossa (often called simply Rossa), was an Irish nationalist and

Fenian leader. His children’s Irish heritage and personal family history, according to

Margaret’s memories, were essential elements in their upbringing. Their parents called nearly all of the O’Donovan-Rossa children by their Irish names from their birth to the time they went to school.54 Margaret understood the legacy she held with her name – she used her last name authoring her book My Father and Mother Were Irish, though she had changed it when she married – just as young John Boyle O’Reilly began to understand the significance of his name when he wrote to The Pilot.

That The Pilot helped nine-year-old John realize his name’s significance illustrates the importance that some Irish Americans attached to having newspapers in the home to teach children about Irish identity. An enthusiastic supporter of the Irish World named Stephen Doran wrote to that paper from Long Island to insist that every Catholic

Irish American should take the Irish World “every week to read for his family and to let his children read it.” Praising editor Patrick Ford, Doran thought that the paper would

“preserve a spirit of patriotism” in children’s hearts and declared that it was “the only way I see of preserving the nationality of our land.”55 A few months later, another subscriber wrote a letter from Rochester, New York to say that he had many expensive books in his home, but his children only wanted to read the Irish World.56 Through the paper, his children learned about the honor of being of Irish descent. Parents also

53 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, April 9, 1887. 54 O’Donovan-Rossa, My Father and Mother Were Irish, 45-47, 19, 27. 55 “How Irish Nationality Can be Kept Alive in America,” Irish World, December 27, 1873. 56 “What the People Say: The Family Instructor,” Irish World, February 21, 1874.

221 encouraged their children to read The Pilot in order to learn more about Irish affairs. A young man wrote to that paper in early 1875 from New York to say that his father, for as long as he could remember, taught him to consider The Pilot “as an indispensible article in our family.”57 The young correspondent thought that the newspaper was valuable because it had taught him to appreciate his Irish heritage as a child. For some parents, ethnic newspapers that advocated a strong Irish identity were also necessary reading material for Irish-American children at home. For those who were concerned with making American-born children feel Irish, immigrant families were also essential in perpetuating Irish ethnic identity in America.

To reach out to children and encourage families to discuss important subjects, such as Irish identity, in January 1879 Patrick Ford began a column titled “Household

Conversations for Family Reading” in the Irish World. For Ford, the most important subjects were those of “human rights, of governments, of the powers and duties of citizens, of labor, land, wealth, and money.”58 Ford intended these discussions to be simple explanations of economic and civic issues, written as a conversation between a father and his children. Though Ford used his children’s names, it seems unlikely that

Ford actually had discussions about complex topics like economic systems, labor rights, and the shortcomings of the U.S. government with his children. In 1879, Ellen, Mary, and

Thomas were seven, five, and two, respectively.59 Nonetheless, Ford hoped that children would learn about economic justice and social reform through his column.

57 “The Pilot in New York,” The Pilot, January 2, 1875. 58 “Household Conversations for Family Reading,” Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, January 11, 1879. Ford added the column to his newspaper at about the same time he added “American Industrial Liberator” to the paper’s title. 59 1880 United States Federal Census, Brooklyn, Kings, New York, Enumeration District 84, page 12, www.ancestry.com.

222 For Ford, with social justice came talk about the methods that the English used to oppress the Irish. In April 1883, Irish Americans were thinking about the system of land ownership in Ireland as the “Land War” continued and Home Rule hopes seemed to turn on agitation over land reform.60 Ford thus attempted to instruct children about the unequal and iniquitous Irish land system. Ford’s daughter Mary, who was nine years old at the time, likely did not actually say in response to Ford’s lecture: “the terrible condition to which the people of Ireland are now reduced proves the wisdom of their forefathers in opposing the incoming of the unnatural and impious land-holding system of

England.”61 So perhaps Ford erred when he thought these household conversations would be simple enough for children to understand. Still, the discussion about injustice in

Ireland fit with Ford’s message to the children of Irish immigrants, including his own, about the need to increase interest in events in Ireland and convince Irish-American children to do their part in seeking justice for the Emerald Isle.

As children were important to Irish nationalist efforts, some Irish Americans sought to make sure that youth paid attention to nationalist activities in Ireland and the

United States and the significance of nationalism is the fifth theme in Irish-American stories. Outside his “household conservations” column, Ford sometimes promoted news about the need for children to take an interest in Ireland. The 1880 famine, the Land War, and Home Rule agitation that ensued in its wake concentrated many Americans’ attentions on affairs across the ocean. Irish Americans followed Irish nationalist Michael

Davitt’s lead in establishing Land League branches in the United States, designed to

60 Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 104, 106; McCaffrey, Irish Catholic Diaspora, 159-162; Kevin Kenny, The American Irish (New York: Pearson Education, Inc., 2000), 174. 61 “Household Conversations – Some Passages in Irish History Discussed,” Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, April 14, 1883.

223 assist Irish tenants to resist their landlords’ attempts to evict them.62 The Michael Davitt

Boys’ Branch of the Land League, an Irish World article stated in 1882, was working with the girls’ branch in New York’s nineteenth ward to organize a strawberry festival as a fundraiser for the Land League in Ireland. Patrick Ford told Irish parents that every one of them “should be proud to see the children take an interest in these matters, and should feel it a duty to encourage them to join or form such organizations.”63 The World also publicized the speech of a lecturing priest the following year to suggest how children could become more involved in Irish affairs. When an Irish priest named Patrick Agnew came through New York to raise funds for Catholic schools, he lectured about training youth to uphold a nation’s culture, faith, and freedom. Agnew told Irish parents in New

York that it was their patriotic duty to ensure that their children became supporters of

Irish nationalism because the future of Ireland depended on the rising generation of Irish

Americans. These lessons should come from parents because, for Agnew, “the history of

Ireland taught by a mother’s lips could not fail to foster national feeling.”64 Mothers specifically should teach their children patriotism, because women taught children “the traditions of their race” and inspired “them with a hatred of…tyrants” according to a speech by an Irish-American veteran at an army reunion in the early 1880s.65

Just as Irish nationalist newspapers and organizations could help children develop a love for their Irish heritage, childhood memories demonstrated that children directly heard about the importance of nationalist goals in their homes. Over Christmas time in

1887, young John Boyle O’Reilly heard a lot of talk about Ireland from a party of

62 McCaffrey, Irish Catholic Diaspora, 159; Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 110-111. 63 “The Boys and Girls of New York,” Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, May 13, 1882. 64 “Father Agnew’s Lecture,” Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, February 17, 1883. 65 “A Tribute to Woman,” Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, October 14, 1882.

224 politicians who stayed at his home for about a week. John wrote to the column that he

“liked to hear them talk about Home Rule and Ireland, but I liked the music best.”66 In another letter John described how his older brother Ned sang some Irish songs, afterward telling John he wanted to show that Irish music was some of the best in the world. Before the visiting gentlemen left, Ned asked them to “help the cause of Ireland by voice or pen, till she got out of the clutches of England.”67 For Margaret O’Donovan-Rossa, the very nature of her upbringing also created a sense of Irishness in her house and allowed her to demonstrate that she came from a truly Irish family. She remembered understanding that

“Ireland was first in his [her father’s] heart” because her family life growing up “was arranged to allow him the greatest possible peace and quiet for his constant reading and writing and the receiving of his many associates in The Great Cause.” When Rossa was preparing to go back to Ireland after the term of his ban from the island expired in 1894,

Margaret remembered the “many Irish visitors in our house and night after night the sound of the Gaelic tongue would float softly from his room until the wee small hours of the morning.”68 For Margaret and her siblings, the nationalist goals that consumed so much of Rossa’s life also enveloped the children’s lives at home.

With Irish nationalists in the family though, it was perhaps inevitable that children would come to understand the importance of Irish independence from British rule.

Having a name like John Boyle O’Reilly, parents who had likely been nationalists, and a brother who exhibited his support for Irish independence, the nine-year-old boy seemed destined to understand his heritage in the context of nationalist desires. Similarly,

66 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, February 4, 1888. 67 “Our Boys and Girls,” The Pilot, February 25, 1888. 68 O’Donovan-Rossa, My Father and Mother Were Irish, 54, 85.

225 Jeremiah O’Donovan-Rossa’s children learned their Irish identity by seeing the events and circumstances around them. O’Donovan-Rossa landed in New York in 1870 after imprisonment in Britain for his Fenian activities in the 1860s. With his third wife Mary

Jane Irwin, he raised a large family in Brooklyn and Staten Island while editing his newspaper The United Irishman and advocating Irish nationalist causes in lectures and writings. His children learned Irish poetry from their poet mother, who taught them Irish nationalist Robert Emmet’s last speech and entertained her children reciting a poem called Molly Muldoon at Irish meetings and conventions. The children also heard tales of their mother’s childhood in Ireland and the Irish family she had left behind when she came to America.69 Because of her father and mother’s experiences, Margaret knew a great deal about the history of Irish resistance to British rule, the patriotic duty of

Irishmen and women to uphold nationalism, and her family history. While the situation in the O’Donovan-Rossa family may have been unique, Margaret discovered her Irishness at least partially through similar methods as many other children of Irish immigrants: the family stories of her parents, her name, and her family’s Irish customs. Learning to care about Irish identity through what they heard and witnessed at home, these children imbibed ethnic concepts for the exact reasons that so many Irish nationalists wanted to create and perpetuate an appreciation for Irish heritage in Irish-American children.

Many of the available records and memories provide examples of the ways that children learned about Irish ethnicity from their family members as well as the

69 O’Donovan-Rossa, My Father and Mother Were Irish, 105, 146; “Molly Muldoon,” in Martin Larkin, The Rival Collection of Prose and Poetry, for the Use of Schools, Colleges, and Public Readers (New York: J.W. Schermerhorn & Co., 1872), 160-164. Mully Muldoon was a humorous poem about an intended marriage between a beautiful Irish girl named Molly and a young Irishman named Jemmy O’Hare that made use of native Gaelic phrases and stock idyllic imagery about the Irish countryside and peasantry. It ended with Jemmy disappearing to America and abandoning Molly just as they were about to marry because he saw a hole in her stocking.

226 substantive components of that ethnicity. As one of the most significant conservators of

Irish culture and heritage, Irish immigrant families taught children about the importance of being Irish. While distinct families emphasized their cultural background to different extents, those who cared about Irish ethnicity found largely successful methods to pass on a sense of Irish ancestry to children and teach them lessons about the meaning of

Irishness that they remembered years after their childhoods ended.

Judging from the memories of these men and women, there were common themes in the folklore they heard about Ireland. Motifs included legends of the Celtic past, adherence to Catholicism, stories of British oppression in Ireland and Yankee prejudice in New England, the importance of Irish names and accents, and support for Irish nationalism. The tales of being Irish that helped inculcate Irish identity in Irish-American children were similar to the accounts that Irish nationalists both created and appropriated in the nineteenth century to assist the Irish independence movement. The nationalist movement likely borrowed various images of Irish identity that already existed to further their cause. Some of these subjects had long been a part of Irish folklore and culture. But others came about as a result of real events in the nineteenth century, such as the famine or Protestant-American discrimination against Irish Catholics.

Examining Irish Americans’ memories, it remains unclear whether Irish nationalism influenced the original parental stories and childhood perceptions or impacted the reported recollections of Irish identity. For those who wrote to publications about their intentions to foster nationalist ideas in their children, or youth who overheard talk about current events in Ireland at home, nationalist influences were more direct. For some Irish-American children, their parents and other family members tried to give them

227 nationalist feelings that would support their conception of an Irish identity. But nationalist themes of Irish identity had also permeated Irish and American culture thoroughly enough by the time the WPA conducted interviews and others wrote their memoirs that these ideas of being Irish could have colored the memories of Irish

Americans. One Irish-American woman, born in 1880 and interviewed by WPA workers in the 1930s, for example, mentioned Mass in dugout churches and police forces made up entirely of Englishmen to illustrate the idea that during her Irish childhood she felt “the hatred of the English Protestant for the Irish Roman Catholic.” Yet historian Marjorie

Fallows, who quoted this woman’s story, explained that the woman exaggerated, writing that such recollections “passed down in Irish families…are true in spirit but frequently inaccurate in detail.”70 Like this woman, Irish Americans who wrote a book or gave an interview were conscious of presenting a story about themselves and their memories of their heritage for an audience. Performing their Irishness may have inspired them to draw on popular Irish themes and ideas that non-Irish Americans associated with the Irish.

Although stories could be unreliable, they nonetheless reinforced a sense of group solidarity and continuity through generations.71 If storytellers had a purpose to stake a claim in the Irish past and explain a family’s place in it, nationalist themes would have served that motive well. Many of the prevalent understandings of Irishness had come from ideas that Irish nationalists had popularized and disseminated across much of the country, but particularly in New England and New York, by the twentieth century.

Characteristics of Irish identity also helped explain aspects of the personalities of adults telling stories. Ideas based on nationalist themes were malleable enough for a

70 Fallows, Irish Americans, 83. 71 Nash, Of Irish Descent, 53-56.

228 range of Irish Americans to fit Irishness to their own personality. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn found meaning in an Irish heritage of resistance to authority and a search for justice against rich, powerful, and brutal enemies. Similarly, Rose Kennedy concentrated on the strong Catholicism she inherited from her Irish-American parents. She informed her readers how her religion allowed her to survive much personal suffering – a theme of endurance and faith in the face of serial tragedies that also permeated Irish and Irish-

American culture. James Michael Curley pointed to an upbringing in the Irish slums of

Roxbury as the basis for his life, detailing how he understood the special trials of poor outcasts from Boston’s ruling classes and made a political career out of a quest for redemption for Irish Americans in Boston. Margaret O’Donovan-Rossa knew that with a name like O’Donovan-Rossa, she should concentrate on nationalist elements of her Irish heritage, like strong Catholicism and collective memories of British cruelty and oppression. Irish identity was inclusive enough to allow many different kinds of Irish

Americans to shape their heritage the way that suited them best, but still often predicated on bases of Irish nationalism. Yet this idea also speaks to the scope of Irish nationalism, a movement and notion that could encompass a variety of conceptions of Irishness while retaining a central theme of redemption and liberation for a deserving people.

Many of the stories that Irish-American children heard also concerned the position of the Irish upon their arrival in America. From the ethnic politics of Boston and the poverty and low social status of much of its Irish population, children learned that

New England was a place where Irish identity was particularly salient. But Irish immigrant families elsewhere also felt similar prejudice at times. Irish Americans along the east coast may have wanted to give their children a proud history of their own to

229 compare with American Protestant civilization. The stories the children heard, and their connection to the themes of Irish nationalism, were a result of living in an American society that seemed to look down on Irishness, and Irish families supplied their children with dignity in a heritage they considered under attack. It is no surprise, then, that the themes of Irish nationalism and the themes of Irish family stories were often so closely aligned. These narratives and memories would inspire their people to struggle for political, religious, and economic freedom in a hostile environment. The similarities between many family stories and aspects of Irish nationalism meant that much of Irish identity was closely linked to that which Irish nationalists promoted. Whether Irish nationalism’s message touched the family tales or the memories of the tales, the proud history and legends of Ireland and the struggles of Irish America produced the ethnic inheritance of quite a few Irish Americans in the U.S. Northeast. The conclusion that many Irish Americans remembered childhoods filled with lessons about their Irish heritage demonstrates that Irish-American families were usually successful at passing along ethnic inheritance to their children.

230 Conclusion

In 2013, the Republic of Ireland’s tourism board publicized a travel promotion called “The Gathering.” With cultural, musical, sporting, and festival events planned around the country throughout the year, “The Gathering” intended to welcome “hundreds of thousands of friends and family from all over the world…home to gatherings in villages, towns, and cities.”1 “The Gathering” was not the first tourist promotion to tap into the sentimental bonds that tied people of Irish ancestry to the Emerald Isle. Airlines in the 1970s worked to capitalize on the interest in genealogy that the Alex Haley book and television mini-series Roots sparked in Americans of many backgrounds. Ireland’s national carrier, Aer Lingus, printed advertisements in American newspapers with a map of Ireland with family names, telling Irish-Americans: “This is Your Ireland.”2 By the early twenty-first century, interest in Irish heritage had permeated American culture even more, and “The Gathering” also hoped to draw on the enthusiasm that many Americans, some of whom were only partially Irish, felt for their ancestral land.

The events of “The Gathering” aimed to “reach out to the descendants of those who left and invite them to their ancestral home.”3 Using the metaphor of “coming home” was meaningful because it advanced the idea that those of Irish descent should feel a familial affinity with Ireland. This form of heritage tourism showed the continued

1 The Gathering Ireland 2013, http://www.thegatheringireland.com/About.aspx#.Ug0l5VOoWxd (accessed November 17, 2013; as of January 6, 2014, the address links to an online magazine summarizing the events of The Gathering). 2 Stephanie Rains, “Irish Roots: Genealogy and the Performance of Irishness,” in The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture, ed. Diane Negra (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 131-133. 3 The Gathering, Ireland 2013 – Fionnula Flanagan, http://www.thegatheringireland.com/Create-a- Gathering/Get-inspired/Get-Inspired-Blog/November-2012/Fionnuala-Flanagan.aspx#.UokbzY2oWxc (accessed November 17, 2013; as of January 6, 2014, the address links to a webpage of “The Gathering in Pictures”).

231 significance of Irish ancestry to Irish Americans because messages for Irish immigrants’ children in the nineteenth century underscored the meaning behind “The Gathering.”

Without the process that Irish Americans undertook to create ethnicity for Irish-American children, the Irish tourist industry’s invitation for the Irish diaspora to return “home” would have had less resonance. Although Irish Americans’ sense of Irish identity has been diluted as Americans have moved away from immigrant forebears, it is helpful to examine the ways that children absorbed, and adults expected their children to learn, ethnicity in order to understand why modern-day descendants of Irish immigrants would symbolically return “home” on a trip to Ireland.

This sense of ethnicity originated in the post-famine era with Irish immigrants interested in maintaining a distinctive ethnic character for their progeny. The messages and purposes of this identity were important ingredients in forming the basis of Irishness, especially in the Northeast. In the context of nationalist agitation in Irish-American communities in New York and New England, Irish heritage for children became bound with nationalist ideas about Irish civilization, language, and oppression. Their experiences in Ireland and the United States served to strengthen their attachment to their national identity and religion. The discrimination that Irish Catholics encountered in the

United States in the wake of the Great Famine also convinced them to seek refuge in ethnic solidarity. Their national-religious ethos became ethnicity in the United States, and some Irish immigrants did their best to pass along ethnicity to their children.

The process of Irish ethnic identity formation owed a great deal to Irish nationalism and the anti-Irish-Catholic attitudes that many Irish confronted in the mid- nineteenth century. These events formed Irish ideas about the values and collective

232 memories they needed to pass along to their children. In what has become a classic trope of the immigrant narrative in America, Irish immigrants complained that their children did not care enough about the old country and tried to distance themselves from their immigrant roots. A number of prominent Irish immigrants used these common worries about children as extra proof that Irish-Catholic identity and culture were under threat.

But fears about children’s cultural identities were even more important to Irish immigrants in the years from the Great Famine to the beginning of the 1890s. During these years, Irish nationalism became an important part of many Irish-American communities and the struggle for Irish-Catholic rights exerted a significant influence on

Irish Americans’ ideas about their cultural legacy. Because children could grow to be crucial supports in the nationalist struggle, the idea that youngsters should develop Irish identity became imperative. Nationalism, nativist opposition, Catholicism, and collective memories of famine and injustice made the Irish into America’s first large ethnic group for whom major differences in religion and ethnic background separated them from most people where they settled. The combination of these factors made the Irish into a large group who had significant reasons to perpetuate their heritage to their children.4

Irish-American leaders also had to decide how they would effectively incorporate elements of American nationality into their ethnicity. This integration of American loyalties with Irishness became more critical for the second generation, who often thought and acted as other Americans because of participation in a common popular

4 Joseph P. O’Grady, How the Irish Became Americans (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1973), 57-58; Dale Knobel, Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality and Antebellum America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986), 180-181; David Gerber, The Making of an American Pluralism: Buffalo, New York, 1825-60 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 136; Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 502; Thomas Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 1870-1890 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966), 19; James Barrett, The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic City (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 3.

233 culture and interaction with peers of other backgrounds. Adults also ensured their children appropriately showed their patriotism because of the exigencies placed upon

Irish Catholics by American nativists who claimed that Catholics, and particularly the

Irish, would never make responsible U.S. citizens.

These demands of Irish ethnicity made immigrants advocate an early model of cultural pluralism. Instead of cultural pluralism finding expression for the first time in the twentieth century, Irish immigrants voiced the concept beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Various Irish-American authors, journalists, clergymen, and parents hoped that their children would grow up in a country where they could hold Ireland dear in their hearts while expressing devotion to American values. The attempts of Irish Americans to add studies in Irish culture and literature to public schools and their success in including

Irish-Catholic history in parochial schools are some of the clearest examples of these nascent visions of multiculturalism. Whether Irish-American Catholics were the first to advocate cultural pluralism remains in question, but their hopes for their progeny prove that concepts behind cultural pluralism were part of vernacular thought in some communities well before the early twentieth century.

Evaluating the relative successes and failures of infusing Irish heritage into children’s lives shows the opportunities and limits of creating ethnicity for the children of immigrants. While Irish-Catholic writers tried to foster children’s Irish heritage and

American loyalty in order to maintain the youths’ faith, it is difficult to ascertain whether novels successfully convinced young readers to appreciate their parentage. Although Irish

Catholics helped remove biases from public schools, American public schools had an agenda that stressed inculcating American loyalties, so specialized curriculum about

234 Ireland proved too much to ask. Irish Catholics who controlled parochial schools more easily added multiculturalist approaches to children’s education, stressing Irish history,

Catholicism, and American patriotism. Adults continued to advocate multiculturalism in children’s social lives; the imagined community of The Pilot’s children’s column and neighborhood play revealed many opportunities for children to think about their Irish ethnicity, but Americanization was also a pervasive factor in children’s sociality.

Children could also learn ethnic identity through Gaelic language classes or in Irish- themed events, but Gaelic and cultural societies had a limited reach. Irish immigrant progeny learned much about their heritage through family stories, showing the relative success of ethnicization at home. These methods of teaching children about Irishness show how ethnicity is constructed, but also help uncover some of the origins of Irish ethnicity in America.

The research in this dissertation shows how this identity came to be based upon

Catholic and nationalist themes. If Irish-American identity is sentimentalized and superficial, as writers like Maureen Dezell, Margaret Hallissy, and Reginald Byron have claimed, it is because the themes of this identity were based on the emotional appeals of

Irish nationalism.5 The political aspects of nationalism ultimately faded by the mid twentieth century as many Irish Americans integrated more with other Americans and much of Ireland became a republic. After the 1890s, Catholicism increasingly became the most significant marker of Irish heritage, as later generations of Irish Americans turned to

Catholicism and American patriotism as their cultural identifiers. Though the primacy of

5 Maurren Dezell, Irish America: Coming into Clover: The Evolution of a People and a Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 211, 214, 220; Margaret Hallissy, Reading Irish-American Fiction: The Hyphenated Self (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 18, 46; Reginald Byron, Irish America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 253, 255, 258.

235 Irish heritage and nationalist hopes continued into the early years of the twentieth century, many scholars have seen an ongoing fading of ethnicity with later generations.

Irish identity became gradually subsumed under Catholicism and Democratic Party loyalty in the twentieth century. Yet Irishness did not completely disappear. Rather, it lingered in the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors passed down from Irish-American parents to children. Irish culture, never a fixed concept, was and continues to be multifaceted.6

But popular understandings of Irish heritage on display in St. Patrick’s Day celebrations and Irish pubs draw from the meanings of Irishness that nationalists propagated.7 These expressions also connect to the Irish identities that children learned, and were expected to learn, in the nineteenth century. The construction of Irish identity in relation to religion,

Irish nationalism, and American loyalty preceded the modern interest in Irish heritage.

Without the politically charged aspects of nationalism, however, the cultural components of Irishness, like music, literature, and religion, came to represent Irish heritage.8 While the American experience undoubtedly affected what it meant to be Irish, the Irish immigrant experience with an ethnic legacy also affected the meaning of American.

The construction of Irish identity for the children of Irish immigrants thus provides insights into the building of ethnicity for other groups in America. As the first large and distinct ethnic group in the United States, Irish immigrants in the nineteenth

6 Timothy Meagher, Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880-1928 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 3, 9, 13; Byron, Irish America, 5, 14, 190, 199; Dezell, Irish America, 66-70; Kerby Miller, “Class, Culture, and Immigrant Group Identity in the United States: The Case of Irish-American Ethnicity,” in Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics, ed. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 122. 7 Peter Quinn, Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America (New York: The Overlook Press, 2007), 43- 44; Natasha Casey, “‘The Best Kept Secret in Retail:’ Selling Irishness in Contemporary America,” in The Irish in Us, 89; Dezell, Irish America, 211, 220. 8 Lawrence McCaffrey, Textures of Irish America (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 177; Catherine Nash, Of Irish Descent: Origin Stories, Genealogy, and the Politics of Belonging (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 2, 6-7; Diane Negra, “The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture,” in The Irish in Us, 2-12.

236 century began to contend with issues of assimilation and ethnic retention amid generational changes in ethnic identity, nationality, and class. In the middle and late nineteenth century, many Irish Americans thought they had found a solution to perpetuating their ancestral heritage with ideas that would become “cultural pluralism.”

This examination of how one group actively tried to teach children to value their ancestry uncovers common immigrant hopes and fears about ethnic retention and assimilation.

My study also invites comparison of the Irish experience to that of other immigrant groups. Because Irish immigrants had similar thoughts about cultural retention and interactions with the American nation as later immigrants, their concerns demonstrate the change and continuity in immigration history regarding ethnic groups’ experience with heritage for their progeny. Combined with knowledge about how the Irish integrated into American society, it is possible to better understand the larger account of immigrant incorporation in the United States. This research provides essential context to help understand immigrants’ conceptions of their places in local and national circumstances, the endurance of ethnicity in America, and the significance of ethnic heritage to immigrants’ descendants. The Irish are a paradigmatic group who fled disaster in their homeland to encounter intolerance and low-wage work in the United States, eventually climbing the social ladder to become, in the main, accepted white Americans. Patterns that the Irish set, consequently, display common perceptions about how immigrants think of their cultural legacy in the United States.9

9 Melissa Klapper, Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in America, 1880-1925 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007), 25, 43, 53; Carola Suárez-Orozco and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, Children of Immigration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 7-8, 14, 92, 98-104; Sarah Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence: The Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 5, 28, 77-81; Nancy Foner, Across Generations: Immigrant Families in America (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 17; Dezell, Irish America,

237 This dissertation also contributes to the growing field of childhood studies by adding critical information about the importance of childhood to studies of immigration and ethnicity. Understanding more about how a particular group expected children to appreciate their ethnic heritage and learn an American national identity helps prove that children and concepts of childhood were essential to creating and perpetuating ethnicity in the United States. My project also demonstrates the crucial role of children in the process of building identities based on ethnic origins, balancing ancestral culture and religion with a new American nationality, and producing narratives about heritage as the children of immigrants go through Americanization. This research therefore supports the claims of childhood studies scholars about the need to study children to understand a community and a society’s ideas about itself.

Studying the intentions of Irish Americans for the ethnic and national identities of their progeny adds an important piece to the study of Americans’ experiences with ethnicity. Today, the hopes and fears about whether the children of immigrants will value their ethnic heritage or become “too American” still must compete with children’s

Americanization through schools, social activities, and popular culture. Irish Americans had the same concerns about their children’s cultural sensibilities, though some Irish

214; Robert Orsi, “The Fault of Memory: ‘Southern Italy’ in the Imagination of Immigrants and the Lives of Their Children in Italian Harlem, 1920-45,” in Family and Society in American History, ed. Joseph Hawes and Elizabeth Nybakken (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 229, 236; Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001), 177, 181, 190. The words of one modern child of Korean immigrants seem to echo some of the ideas about Irish immigrants’ children in the nineteenth century. Caroline Hwang wrote: “my parents didn’t want their daughter to be Korean, but they don’t want her fully American, either. Children of immigrants are living paradoxes. We are the first generation and the last. We are in this country for opportunities, yet filial duty binds us.” Like Caroline’s Korean parents, Irish immigrants wanted their children to identify partially with their ethnic heritage and partially with American nationality. Irish immigrants and their children were some of the first to learn that this mixed identity was not always easy to traverse, but their ideas about how and why children should retain ethnic duties to their families while becoming American show us the possible fate of other groups confronting similar issues. Caroline Hwang, “The Good Daughter,” in Families in Later Life: Connections and Transitions, ed. Alexis Walker (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press, 2000), 39-40.

238 Americans considered the desire to make children proud of their heritage more imperative in the face of prejudice from Anglo-Saxons and the necessities of Irish nationalism. Like other immigrants, Irish Americans realized that their children would have loyalties to the American nation, so they tried to find ways for them to be Irish and

American. A study of how Irish immigrants hoped to teach their children to value their heritage, and the forms that Irish identity took in passing it from one generation to the next, reveals insights into the evolution of Irish culture in America, the bases for modern interpretations of Irishness, and the American process of ethnicization.10 But this study also exposes how immigrants have sought to build identities for their descendants that are able to incorporate the realities of Americanization. As long as immigration to the United

States continues, the processes of ethnic identity construction and Americanization will remain relevant to not only immigrants and their progeny, but to all those who are descendants of immigrants. Even more, in a globalized world of migration and dislocation, the story of how a significant ethnic group attempted to create a sense of ethnic heritage for their progeny reverberates in modern discussions about immigrants who build identities based on ethnic origins, try to reconcile cultural and religious heritage with new nationalities, and produce narratives for their children as those youth assimilate into host societies.

10 Marjorie Fallows, Irish Americans: Identity and Assimilation (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979), 107-110; Hallissy, Reading Irish-American Fiction, 34, 45, 52, 59.

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