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.