The Irish and the Origins of American Popular Culture

Christopher Dowd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351767361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This book focuses on the intersection between the assimilation of the Irish into American life and the emergence of an American popular culture, which took place at the same historical moment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During this period, the Irish in America underwent a period of radical change. Initially existing as a marginalized, urban-dwelling, immigrant community largely comprised of survivors of the Great Famine and those escaping its aftermath, Irish Americans became an increasingly assimilated group with new social, political, economic, and cultural opportunities open to them. Within just a few generations, Irish-American life transformed so significantly that grandchildren hardly recognized the world in which their grandparents had lived. This pivotal period of transformation for Irish Americans was heavily shaped and influenced by emerging popular culture, and in turn, the Irish-American experience helped shape the foundations of American popular culture in such a way that the effects are still noticeable today. Dowd investigates the primary segments of early American popular culture—circuses, stage shows, professional sports, pulp fiction, celebrity culture, and comic strips—and uncovers the entanglements these segments had with the development of Irish-American identity.

1 Setting the Stage

Minstrelsy, Vaudeville, Circuses, and Other Entertainments

The historical confluence of three things in the second half of the nineteenth century entwine the origins of Irish America and popular culture: the ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments, the arrival of Irish immigrants escaping the conditions created by the Great Famine, and the explosion of technological innovation prompted by industrialization.

The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which abolished slavery and better defined the parameters of citizenship, were passed in the years after the Civil War. They prompted a fundamental reorientation in thinking about American identity in two ways. First, they encouraged individuals to start imagining themselves as members of a national community more so than members of fragmented regional communities. Second, they forced individuals to reconsider who was eligible for American citizenship, and by extension who was eligible to claim American identity. Of course, these legal clarifications prompted more, not less, debate about what it meant to be American and who could legitimately claim membership in the community. Defining the privileges of citizenship and extending it to those who previously did not have it achieved some practical unification in the country, but also created new anxieties for large segments of society. Over the next several decades, Americans debated the limits of citizenship and national identity, questioning (among other things) the place of immigrants in the nation. The rise of late-century nativism gives evidence to just how contested issues of American national identity remained long after the Reconstruction era was over.

During this same period, millions of Irishmen and women arrived in the United States as part of an immigration wave of unprecedented scale. The catastrophe of the Great Famine in Ireland created long-lasting conditions which forced many to seek refuge in America. The Irish were poor, uneducated, and insular. They did not seem compatible with American society, and even more worrisome to many, they appeared to threaten the social order. In addition, the rise of Irish nationalism after the Famine prompted many Americans to question the loyalties of the millions of Irish now living in the United States. In the middle of an already tumultuous period in which Americans worried about defining their identity, the Irish arrived and presented new complications to ongoing conversations about inclusion and otherness.

Again during this same period, America experienced an era of profound technological innovation that, among other things, accelerated the formation of American mass culture. New and emerging technologies like the telegraph, the telephone, the automobile, and the transcontinental railroad connected previously isolated communities in new ways and pushed the entire country towards a more unified national culture. These technologies created an infrastructure that could effectively and efficiently distribute culture and that could enable national conversations about social issues to take place. Not only did they facilitate the mass dissemination of news and print culture, but they allowed live entertainments to become nationalized. Minstrel shows, vaudeville acts, and circuses could use the trains to reach more distant audiences. No longer constrained to local and regional performances, such shows could cultivate national audiences. For the first time in the United States, entertainments became national phenomena appealing to, and reflective of, the entire country.

Representations of Irishness in early show business existed at a nexus of a variety of social, historical, and technological concerns. These representations were transported across the new railways, exhibited with increasing frequency in public amusements, presented with greater consistency from coast to coast, and institutionalized by early mass entertainment and mass publishing. The Irish spectacle featured in rapidly growing and expanding national amusements allowed audiences to imagine ways that their nation could be in relation with the Irish. As they witnessed Joel Walker Sweeney play his banjo or P. T. Barnum’s “Colossal Irish Giant” walk across stage, they participated in the early formation of an American popular culture that would come to define the Irish in America. At the same time, the Irish elements of early show business reciprocally shaped the development of popular culture well into the next century.

Nationalism and the Ethnic Other

The emergence of American nationalism in the latter half of the nineteenth century framed the Irish immigrant experience and the formation of popular culture. Citizens struggled to conceive of themselves as having national allegiance, as opposed to provincial allegiances, and could not agree on what it actually meant to be American. The arrival of the Irish immigrants prompted Americans to want to define their identity more urgently, and whereas some wanted to expand the definition to include newcomers, many others wanted to double-down on nativism and position the Irish as outside threats. The growth of popular culture provided a powerful means for testing such definitions, whether they were inclusive or exclusive. In this way, the origins of Irish America, American popular culture, and American nationalism are inextricably bound.

Nationalism has become so pervasive and is perceived as so fundamental at both the global and the personal levels that it can be easy to lose sight of it as a social construct of relatively modern origins. Nation-ness is now a political necessity without which a state cannot get a seat at the table and be heard, and nationalism is now a marker of personal identity assumed to be as innate as gender or race. Although nationalism presents itself as eternal and inherent, many scholars have revealed how this is not the case. Chief among them is Ernest Gellner, who describes nationalism as “not the awakening of an old, latent, dormant force,” but instead “the consequence of a new form of social organization.”¹ Gellner views nationalism as a function of modernity, something that helps to homogenize culture so that a society can better industrialize. The rise of American nationalism in the nineteenth century, then, should be understood not as the emergence (or reemergence) of a true essence within the bodies and souls of Americans, but instead as a sociological phenomenon consequential to the United States’ shift from an agrarian economy to an industrial one. American nationalism necessarily pushed towards cultural homogeneity, which helps to explain the deep social anxieties of the nineteenth century regarding immigrants. Immigrants introduced more difference and threatened efforts to achieve cultural uniformity.

Building on the work of Gellner and others, Benedict Anderson defines the nation as “an imagined political community” and elaborates that, “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”² Anderson’s definition invites more focus on how individual minds participate in the social construction of nationalism and offers a way to talk about the means and materials that facilitate communal imagining. This approach proves useful for understanding the emergence of American nationalism in the nineteenth century and the impact Irish immigrants had upon it. It allows us to ask how the Irish participated in the imagining of the American community and how this communal imagining was facilitated by popular culture. Like Gellner, Anderson notes that despite the nation being a social construct of objective modernity, it is more often understood as something of subjective antiquity that commands “profound emotional legitimacy.”³ Examining this discrepancy between social construct and perception, as well as the deep personal attachments individuals make to their nations, is crucial to understanding the formation of both Irish-American identity and anti-Irish prejudices evident in early entertainments.

At the core of the discrepancy between construct and perception of American nationalism is the historical divide between those who viewed the country as unified through a political philosophy and those who viewed it as unified through ancestral heritage. The roots of American nationalism stretch back to the founding fathers who conceived of a nation unified by civic principles as opposed to common ethnic identity. It was an idea that radically distinguished the American nation from others, but it was not an idea that was easily or immediately made real. In the early years of the country, individuals more commonly conceived of themselves as part of regional or state communities, and indeed many of these communities did define themselves in part by ethnic and racial identities. An imagined national community did not take root prior to the Civil War. Local loyalties trumped national ones, and the cultural means for individuals to imagine themselves belonging to something more expansive did not exist yet.

Abraham Lincoln recognized the challenges of realizing the founding fathers’ vision of civic nationalism, but nonetheless made a strong argument in favor of it in an 1858 speech in Chicago. He stated that although many Americans “descended by blood” from ancestors who founded the country, those who did not—including, he notes, the Irish—were still “equals in all things.” He goes on:

If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration … and so they are.

Lincoln’s speech rejects the concept of American ethno-nationalism, specifically the belief that white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism formed the foundation of America. Instead, he proposes a national community connected by shared belief in civic principles, what he describes as an “electric cord” that “links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together.”⁴ Lincoln’s struggle is evident in the way that he is forced to explain national unity in biological terms, even as he tries to refute biological insiderism. His explanation of the unifying principle of American national identity, as well as his attempt to legitimatize immigrant access to that identity, required many Americans to reexamine supposed truisms that they assumed to be equally self-evident. Such a shift in thinking was not made easily. To achieve the American national community that Lincoln describes, individual members would need to commit to a social union that included those who were racially, ethnically, culturally, and religiously different than they were. They would need to accept the premise that their hearts were bound together by a patriotic “electric cord” with those to whom they might not want to imagine themselves bound. The incentive to make this cognitive leap was inadequate for many, but the Civil War and its fallout forced the issue.

Reconstruction required Americans to devote more effort to imagining national unity and to better defining what it meant to be American. Individuals from previously divided regions now had to imagine themselves in communion with each other despite any enduring underlying conflicts. They also had to imagine a community that included freed Blacks and non-Anglo immigrants. Gellner suggests that two individuals are of the same nation if and only if “they share the same culture” and if “they recognize each other as belonging to the same nation.”⁵ These requirements proved to be the real social hurdles after the Civil War. Historically, there had not been much sharing of culture between regions like the North and the South, or even between states within those regions, nor had there been substantial, pre-existent shared culture between Anglo Americans, freed Blacks, and immigrants. Many Americans did not recognize each other as belonging to the same nation. Even after the passing of the Reconstruction Amendments, some Americans did not want to equate legal citizenship with actual membership in the nation. The law made some people equal members of the community before some of those members were willing to recognize that equality in their own minds. In addition, a spike in nativism and the formation of organized xenophobic political groups like The American Party and The Know-Nothing Party created further fissures in the country. Nationalism might have been a necessary development for the era, but the prospect of including African Americans and the Irish in the nation complicated the process. Achieving the kind of civic unification imagined by the founding fathers and Lincoln would have been a difficult social feat in the best of times, and was all the more difficult given the history of the era. Yet, the push towards a shared common culture and recognition of mutual belonging to the national community continued, not without bumps, spasms, and occasional regressions, and the development of the earliest pieces of American popular culture illustrate the pressures towards—and resistance to—cultural unification.

The need for Americans to develop their national identity in the nineteenth century was urgent, and the means for them to do so finally existed. New technologies and cultural mediums opened up opportunities for popular culture to develop much more broadly than ever before. It finally became possible for the imagining of a community on a national scale. Only once the mechanisms to produce and distribute culture nationally were in place could individuals begin imagining themselves as part of a community that stretched across the continent and that included many people they would never directly meet or know. The growing areas of publishing, journalism, and (importantly for this chapter) show business provided individuals access to the communal cer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Setting the Stage: Minstrelsy, Vaudeville, Circuses, and Other Entertainments
• 2 Heavyweights, Sluggers, and Medalists: The Irish in American Sports
• 3 The Weird Tales, Spicy Detectives, and Startling Stories of Irish America: Pulp Magazines
• 4 The Famous and the Notorious: Irish-American Celebrities
• 5 Irish in the Panels and Gutters: Comic Strips
• Afterword
• Index