Irish-American Autobiography

The Divided Hearts of Athletes, Priests, Pilgrims, and More

James Silas Rogers

• Publisher: The Catholic University of America Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813229195
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This lively survey of the ever-changing Irish-American experience contains "many perceptive, and sometimes surprising, observations" ( The Irish Times ). Irish-American Autobiography explores the evolution of Irishness in America through memoirs that describe, define, and redefine what it means to be Irish. From athletes and entertainers to saloon keepers, community activists, and Catholic priests, Irish-Americans of all stripes share their thoughts and perceptions on their ever-evolving ethnic identity. Poet and Irish studies specialist James Silas Rogers begins his evocative analysis with celebrity memoirs by athletes like boxer John L.Sullivan and ballplayer Connie Mack?written when the Irish were eager to put their raffish origins behind them. Later, he traces the many tensions registered by lesser-known Irish-Americans who've told their life stories. South Boston step dancers set themselves against the larger culture, framing their identity as outsiders looking in. Even the classic 1950s sitcom The Honeymooners speaks to the poignant sense of exclusion felt by its creator Jackie Gleason. Rogers also examines the changing role of Catholicism as a cultural touchstone for Irish Americans, and examines the painful diffidence of priest autobiographers. Irish-American Autobiography becomes, in the end, a story of a continued search for connection—documenting an "ethnic fade" that never quite happened.

1

Sporting Gentlemen

The Memoirs of John L. Sullivan, James J. Corbett, and Connie Mack

At its emotional core, Irish literature almost always returns to binaries, dualisms, and contradictions. Whether at home or abroad, Irish life seems to rest on one fault line after another. It is easy to compile a list of such fissures: for starters, the dual traditions of Gaelic and English; the happy-go-lucky comic versus the brooding pessimist; authoritarianism against a taste for anarchy; piety locked in battle with cynicism; home and exile; and immigrant or emigrant, which in the United States is followed by the unending negotiation of “Irish or Irish-American?”

The Irish-American community, during the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth, moved back and forth across another such divide: a complicated evolution of class and status that came to be known in shorthand as the clash of the “shanty Irish” and the “lace curtain Irish.” On the one hand, the Irish aspired to respectability, good citizenship, responsibility, and self-control; on the other, they were emerging from the near anarchy of the years that followed the famine immigration. One highly public site in which Irish Americans, eager to be accepted and recognized, set out to prove their all-American credentials was in the arena of sport.

And what athletes they were! As the nineteenth century wound down, the Irish were as visible in sports as African Americans are in our day. Traditional Irish games, such as hurling or handball, had only a spotty presence in the New World (or had not crossed the ocean in the first place; the Gaelic Athletic Association, so central to the “revival” of these games, was not founded until 1884). But the Irish dominated early baseball, track and field events, and most conspicuously, prizefighting.¹

In 1888, the poet and littérateur John Boyle O’Reilly published a high-minded defense of athleticism entitled The Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport.² The very idea that O’Reilly would write a book about a sport that confirmed all of the public’s worst fears about the Irish abounds with irony. Whereas the typical boxer of the day was presumed to be intemperate, uncouth, corrupt, and violent, O’Reilly was, at that point, the most respected Irishman in Boston. He served as almost the default orator at Irish social events and was a bright light in the literary and cultural world of his adopted home. As the editor of the diocesan paper The Pilot and a friend of Longfellow and Howells, O’Reilly embodied Irish-American gentility and social aspirations. His literary career bridged the Irish community and the world of high culture.³ After dramatically escaping an Australian prison colony where he had been sent for his revolutionary activities, O’Reilly had found his home and fame in America, and he fully embraced nineteenth-century American patriotism. His boxing book is in all ways an American treatise; O’Reilly boasts of American manliness and vigor, delivered in the spirit of moral uplift. But unsurprisingly, he also finds many occasions to praise specifically Irish contributions to the cult of athleticism. His insistence that prizefighting could also be ennobling amounted to making the same claim for the Irish, who, he asserts, are blessed with natural athleticism. He goes so far as to make the unvarnished claim that “there is no branch of athletics in which Irishmen, or the sons of Irishmen, do not hold first place in all the world.”⁴ The boast is subject to debate but, on the whole, was closer to true than many would realize.

This chapter will look at memoirs by three of those “sons of Irishmen.” Their books open a window on this transitional era. John L. Sullivan, the last bare-knuckle champion and the first champion of the modern era, was born in Boston in 1858; he was a genuine superstar, an irresistible outsider in an age when the idea of celebrity was being refined and cultivated in the media. Connie Mack (whose real name was Cornelius McGillicuddy), baseball’s “Tall Tactician,” was born near Worcester in 1862; in his public life, he raised respectability to an art form. Boxer James J. Corbett, widely known as “Gentleman Jim” and the man who took the title from Sullivan, was born in San Francisco in 1866. His role in Irish-American life is a complex one, crossing both sides of the social gulf.

The not-so-hidden subtext of each of their autobiographies matches that of O’Reilly’s defense of pugilism: an assertion that, despite the poverty of their youths and the rough edges of their sporting lives, they were gentlemen. They understood, too, that as public figures, they were taking on the burden of representation for their ethnic group; Sullivan would write on one occasion that “My father and mother were Irish, and I always aim at upholding the honor of the Irish people, who are a brave race.”⁵

As literature, these memoirs are far from artful. Mack’s is particularly wooden. They are in almost all ways the stories of the authors’ lives in sports and not explorations of their private lives. Nor is it likely there could be interiority; even to call them autobiographies is a stretch, as the athletes themselves may not actually have written them. Sullivan’s Life and Reminiscences appears ghostwritten, with a great deal of it comprising reprints of press clippings.⁶ Corbett’s The Roar of the Crowd (first published in serial form in the Saturday Evening Post) is easily the most interesting of the three books, in part because it does show the hand of its author—though internal cues indicate it was written by dictation and revised on the fly.⁷ Mack’s My 66 Years in the Big Leagues appeared in 1950;⁸ according to his biographer, Norman Macht, Mack himself may never have read his own ghostwritten autobiography.⁹

Yet it hardly matters. Any insights about the inner lives of the authors (or putative authors) found in these books reveal themselves by indirection. Men who spent their professional lives in staging highly public athletic contests would naturally be inclined to approach life-writing as if it, too, were a performance. It is worth noting that the boxers also moved seamlessly into a life on the stage, and although Connie Mack never went on the vaudeville circuit, many of the stars whom he played with or managed routinely did so in the off-season; despite the complaints of purists, baseball has always included an element of show business.¹⁰

But it would be wrong to assume that the rowdiness and egotism of the earlier day were completely disowned or denied, or that these qualities did not also appeal to newly respectable Irish Americans at the time; the Irish exaltation of personality goes way back.

We should be on guard against presentism as we consider these texts. Their solemn professions of propriety may appear quaint to us, and our contemporary tastes are likely to find the flamboyant personality and raciness of Sullivan more attractive than the bourgeois figures who succeeded him. Faced with a prude like Connie Mack, we incline to sniff out repression and, by extension, to conclude that his decorousness includes a measure of covering-up and hypocrisy.

In fact, men like Sullivan, Corbett, and Mack were well aware of their capacity for disreputable conduct. They knew their “dark sides” full well and how recently they and their families were presumed to be outcasts. The factories, docks, and construction sites where they had worked as young men, or in which their fathers worked, were brutal, violent places, as were the saloons and brawls that comprised much of the social milieu. But they believed that they had a “better self” as well and carried the conviction that when in the public eye it was necessary to perform that better self. Manners, social codes, and the expectations of a gentleman were a way of regulating what they considered their own worst instincts—in a word, their sinfulness. In these books and in their lives they may have been “performing respectability”—but just because it was a performance, that doesn’t mean they didn’t believe it.

The internal clash of cultures in Irish America saw a mythic enactment in the famous match between John L. Sullivan and James J. Corbett in 1892. John V. Kelleher, who wrote as intelligently as anyone ever has about Irish America, opens his 1961 article “Irishness in America” precisely by discussing the Corbett-Sullivan bout. The transition from Sullivan to Corbett provided a perfect symbol of the transition that Kelleher’s father called the great “sorting out” of the Irish, when the sons of Irishmen “walked easily into jobs their fathers could never have dreamed of.”¹¹ As the century drew to a close, Sullivan, Corbett, and Mack, along with tens of thousands of other such sons and daughters of Irishmen, participated in a massive upward spike in Irish economic and social advancement. Kelleher quite specifically pinpoints 1904 to 1905 as the tipping point when the Irish community lost the last of its roughest edges. Sullivan, he writes, “was only eight years older than Corbett, but they stood on either side of a gulf of history neither their imagination nor their experience could bridge.”¹²

Boxing has always melded sophistication with brutishness; its ringside fans in tuxedoes assert as much at every title match. In the nineteenth century, that brutishness carried a distinctly Irish cast. The sport’s most prominent practitioner (and the recipient of effulgent praise in O’Reilly’s book), John L. Sullivan, was a man who—when not defending his championship—earned and squandered several fortunes, drank champagne by the bucket, left his wife to live openly with a chorus girl, and generally served as a walking affront to Victorian morality. In his drinking days, the champion routinely announced his entry into any saloon by striding up to the bar, bringing his fist down with a crash, and declaring “My name is John L Sullivan and I can lick any son-of-a-bitch in the house!”¹³

When, in 1979, a publisher spotted his Life and Reminiscences of a 19th-Century Gladiator in public domain and reissued it, the memoir was retitled I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch in the House¹⁴—a celebration of loutishness that would have horrified O’Reilly and, for that matter, Sullivan himself when he was on his good behavior. Again, the Irish gift for contradiction leaps out. The fact that the same book could appear under two titles, one evoking classic courage and the other hooliganism, is, in a way, the point: Sullivan knew that certain behaviors were unacceptable, but at the same time he delighted in his own transgressiveness and knew that the public delighted in it, too.

The authors were much in the public eye at this moment of “sorting out,” though Mack’s longevity as a manager (more than fifty years; it helps to own the ball club) kept him a public figure for much longer than the two prizefighters. All three grew up in and, in Sullivan’s case, became the celebrated exemplar of the old Irish-American community of rough-and-tumble street life, part of what Kelleher describes as “a huge fund of poor, unskilled, cheap, almost infinitely exploitable labor . . . [that was expended] with a callousness now hard to comprehend.”¹⁵ And all three—in their well-constructed public personae and in these texts—deliberately shed the association with disreputable origins. To a considerable extent each approached his autobiography as an exercise in performing respectability

Aware of John L.’s raffish reputation, O’Reilly’s defense of boxing had nonetheless proudly noted that Sullivan, by insisting on Marquis of Queensbury rules, effectively put an end to the bare-knuckle era. “In America,” he wrote, “Sullivan’s example has done much to bring glove contests into professional practice; and when the man’s faults are rehearsed, it is only fair that this should be remembered.”¹⁶ His roundhouse style of fighting remained a matter of raw strength, but it was civilized.

Sullivan announces in the early pages of Life and Reminiscences that his goal is to show that he can hold his own in respectable society:

I wish to show to my readers and to the public in general, that there is one, who, while in the line of a professional pugilist and boxer, is quite capable of informing them through the medium of this book, that he is gifted with ordinary ability, and is conscious of being something more than a pugilist. I want them also to understand that, while not of an egotistical nature, I have a fair amount of common sense, and, with a Boston public school education, can give an intelligent opinion on almost any subject, and conduct myself as a gentleman in any company.¹⁷

The word “gentleman” is key. In the late nineteenth century, to be a gentleman entailed a number of virtues: intelligence, certainly, but also integrity, well-regulated emotion, respect for women, dutifulness, and, highly important, an avoidance of rough language; in a word, manners. Irish Catholic respectability stressed further elements: religious observance coupled with an exalted view of the priesthood and a “filial piety,” which often meant a home life focused on an idealized version of motherhood. Less familiar to present-day sensibilities, the Victorian ideal of gentlemanliness to which the athletes aspired unapologetically involved breeding, as well. John Ruskin had written, “The essence of a gentleman, is what the word says, that he comes from a pure gens, or is perfectly bred.”¹⁸ Sullivan, Corbett, and Mack’s affectionate portrayals of their parents amount to more than sentiment; they are a claim of the social, cultural, and genetic legitimacy that—however much it may have been thwarted in Irish history—was now allowed to display itself in America.

Sullivan says little about his mother, who was from Athlone, County Westmeath, though he does give ...