Introduction Interpreting Irish America1

Chapter 1 Introduction Interpreting Irish America1 J. J. Lee Ireland has had one of the most extraordinary histories in the world. Winston Churchill would bear unlikely witness in exhorting the House of Commons on 15 December 1921 to accept the Anglo-Irish Treaty by asking them: Whence does this mysterious power of Ireland come? It is a small, poor, sparsely popu- lated island, lapped about by British sea power, accessible on every side, without iron or coal. How is it that she sways our councils, shakes our parties and infects us with her bit- terness, convulses our passions and deranges our actions? How is it that she has forced generation after generation to stop the whole traffic of the British Empire in order to debate her domestic affairs?2 Churchill’s own answer was that “Ireland is not a daughter race. She is a parent nation.” This was, of course, a heavily coded message. Although Churchill himself pur- ported to be talking about the Irish in the British Empire, what he meant even more was that it was in the interests of England’s relations with America for it to make some concessions to Irish demands for independence. His listeners in the House of Commons knew perfectly well he meant that those for whom she was mainly “the parent nation” were the American Irish and that they were playing a crucial role in the struggle for independence. Eighty years later Peter Quinn could still observe that “Ire- land remains a canvas on which many of the broad brush strokes of the modern world’s formation—imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, revolution, emigration, democratization, et al.—can be fruitfully studied and examined.”3 This Irish background is crucial to an understanding of the historical role of the American Irish, however much that role may be adapting to the changing circum- stances of the present. Indeed, a popular version of the Irish story in America casts it as a saga, with refugees from the Great Famine of the 1840s flung on America’s shores, clawing their way up against powerful enemies to scale the heights they have since reached in politics, law, media, business, and culture—and this by a people who were for so long axiomatically dismissed by those who fancied themselves their “betters” as incapable of mastering any of the higher arts of life. It found its incarnation in the Kennedy story, summarized by Doris Kearns Goodwin: “My father was the son of Irish immigrants. His accounts of his heritage and his family’s struggle to establish a place for themselves in a strange, harsh and promising land, had illuminated my 1 2j.j.lee childhood musings and fueled my young ambition.” She discovered as she progressed that the story of the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys—despite its unique magnitude—was both symbol and substance of one of the most important themes of the second century of American life: the progress of the great wave of nineteenth-century immigration, the struggle of newcomers to force open the doors of American life so zealously guarded by those who had first settled the land. That story—in an undefinable sense, both real and metaphorical—culminated with the inauguration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”4 From Famine to the White House was an even more exotic symbol of a country open to talent than was Lincoln’s rise from the log cabin; it was a symbolic confirma- tion of the American Dream, of the “anybody can make it in America” image, admit- tedly with a certain time lag in this case, an image President John F. Kennedy himself was eager to endorse during his visit to Ireland in June 1963.But while genuinely inspiring, this story also has its darker, more somber, shades. It is both more complex and more nuanced than the popular version allows, and the manner in which its history has come to be written is itself an integral part of that story. How a people come to know themselves—how, in particular, a cadre of scholars emerges that seeks to probe how they came to be who they are—is itself, however distant from day-to-day concerns it may appear to be, a key issue in the formation of their sense of identity. The Struggle to Understand: The Pioneers The publication of the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups in 1980 marked the end of a phase in American immigrant historiography. It was the reaping of a harvest that had been ripening over several decades. The two contributions to the volume, by Patrick Blessing on the Irish and by Maldwyn Jones on the Scotch-Irish, both excellent summaries of the existing state of knowledge, provide a measuring rod against which to gauge the degree of progress recorded in the attempts to understand the Irish experience in America at that time. Both contributors confronted the chal- lenge that scholarly reflection on the Irish experience had been slow to develop. Art Mitchell has observed that “there was no serious work about the general sub- ject of the Irish in this country” until 1956,when Carl Wittke “produced the first acad- emically respectable history of the Irish in America.”5 Carl Wittke is hardly a name to make the rafters ring with instant recognition in Irish America. But Irish America should be grateful to him. The son of an immigrant German mechanic, who taught at Ohio State, Oberlin, and Case Western Reserve Universities, he gave generous atten- tion to the Irish in his prolific writing on the American immigrant experience, particularly in his 1939 textbook We Who Built America.The fact that he published The Irish in America sixteen years later, because he could find nothing remotely adequate in the existing literature as late as the 1950s, itself indicates how much remained to be done.6 The Irish, it is true, were not quite as relatively backward as this would suggest at first glance. But the few attempts that predate Wittke—like Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s History of the Irish Settlers in North America (1850), John Francis Maguire’s The Irish in Introduction 3 America (1868), and Edward O’Meagher Condon’s The Irish Race in America (1887)— were written prior to the professionalization of history as a discipline. And scholarly American writing about immigration in general has been remarkably slow to develop. Most historians came from old-stock British backgrounds, belonged to comfort- able classes, usually attended universities where few immigrant faces were to be seen except as servants, and for practical purposes lived in a different country from the bulk of the immigrants. It was not until the 1920s that even a small section of the mainstream historical profession began to think of immigrants as an integral part of American history. Up until then, and in many cases long afterward, immigrant peoples in general in- dulged mainly in filiopietism, a polite term for ancestor worship. Dismissively though the term was normally used, this was a quite natural response to the lack of recognition that many immigrant groups felt. They sought to compensate for their sense of neglect by extolling the exploits, real or imagined, of any of their number who could be claimed to have made a “contribution” to America, and particularly to the Ameri- can Revolution. Excavation of ancestors could reach archaeological intensity at times. The problem in the Irish case was that because of the Catholic/Protestant divide, by the late nineteenth century there were two Irish filiopietisms, Irish Catholic and Scotch-Irish, in far from harmonious relationship with one another. If relations be- tween the two identities had been strained since at least the 1820s, they had worsened further by the end of the century. Consumed by fear that the contributions of the Scotch-Irish—“a people whose music, religious fundamentalism, individualism and suspicion of authority remain prominent elements in the culture of the American South”7—were being submerged beneath the torrent of Irish Catholic newcomers, the Scotch-Irish Society, established in 1889 and growing in political strength, was first in the field. While nominally neutral in the denominational stakes, its publications could not be accused of understating Scotch-Irish contributions to America. It was largely in reaction to the Scotch-Irish initiative that the American Irish Historical Society (AIHS) was established in 1897. While also ostensibly nondenominational, the AIHS proceeded to produce a jour- nal devoted to filiopietistic inquiry and responded to the taunts of Protestant critics about the essential paucity of Catholic Irish contributions to the American Revo- lution with counterclaims, inevitably exaggerated, about their own prominent role. They made this simpler for themselves by the convenient device of insisting that the Scotch-Irish were Irish, whereas the Scotch-Irish were equally adamant that they were not. The writings therefore tend to focus obsessively on those who marched with Washington’s army, seeking to stake their filiopietistic claims especially by surname analysis. Although valuable material can be found in the publications of the two soci- eties, it was generally deployed in a manner designed to serve the conflicting propa- gandistic purposes of the ethnic belligerents, and it must be rescued from its context to yield its full scholarly potential.8 R. J. Dickson, author of a standard work on Scotch-Irish emigration to America in the eighteenth century, felt that the indefatigable Michael J. O’Brien (who in the midst of a job in insurance worked tirelessly to dig out every possible, and some impossible, Irish contributors to Washington’s victories) and Charles Hanna (author of a massive 4j.j.lee compilation on the Scotch-Irish in 1902) both treated the immigrant as “a pawn in a game he sought no part in,” marching him in battle formation under flags of author- ial convenience.9 In their defense it may be said they would not be the only ones to do that, however carefully their findings must be handled, and that at least they did leave posterity with something to engage with—a compass to the very sources of primary evidence that must inform our own endeavors—which is more than can be said of many of their contemporaries and critics.

Load more