The Columbia Guide to Irish American History

Timothy J. Meagher

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9780231510707
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Once seen as threats to mainstream society, Irish Americans have become an integral part of the American story. More than 40 million Americans claim Irish descent, and the culture and traditions of Ireland and Irish Americans have left an indelible mark on U.S. society. Timothy J. Meagher fuses an overview of Irish American history with an analysis of historians' debates, an annotated bibliography, a chronology of critical events, and a glossary discussing crucial individuals, organizations, and dates. He addresses a range of key issues in Irish American history from the first Irish settlements in the seventeenth century through the famine years in the nineteenth century to the volatility of 1960s America and beyond. The result is a definitive guide to understanding the complexities and paradoxes that have defined the Irish American experience.

Throughout the work, Meagher invokes comparisons to Irish experiences in Canada, Britain, and Australia to challenge common perceptions of Irish American history. He examines the shifting patterns of Irish migration, discusses the role of the Catholic church in the Irish immigrant experience, and considers the Irish American influence in U.S. politics and modern urban popular culture.

Meagher pays special attention to Irish American families and the roles of men and women, the emergence of the Irish as a "governing class" in American politics, the paradox of their combination of fervent American patriotism and passionate Irish nationalism, and their complex and sometimes tragic relations with African and Asian Americans.

PART I

A History of Irish Americans from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-first Century

INTRODUCTION

The Irish as Immigrants and Ethnics

The first Irishman came to America in 1584 as part of Sir Walter Raleigh’s ill-fated expedition to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The last Irish man or woman has not yet arrived and may never come, because few things have been as constant in the histories of Ireland and America as Irish immigration to the United States. There may never be a last Irish immigrant as long as Ireland and the United States exist.

Between the early seventeenth century and the end of the twentieth century, about seven million Irish men and women came to North America, the vast bulk of them settling in the United States or what would become the United States. Most would come in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—from the 1820s to the 1920s alone, about five million Irish entered the United States—but Irish men and women were still pouring into America in the 1980s, when some estimates suggest that as many one hundred thousand illegal Irish settled in the United States. In 2000, the U.S. Census reported that over thirty-five million Americans claimed some Irish or Scotch-Irish ancestry, more than any other ethnic group except German Americans. Billy the Kid, Timothy Leary, Spencer Tracy, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, John C. Calhoun, Peggy Noonan, Philip Sheridan, Cardinal Spellman, Charles Carroll of Carrolton, Sam Houston, Margaret Bourke White, John McGraw, and many if not most of the firefighters who died in New York City on September 11, 2001, have traced some or all of their ancestry to immigrants from Ireland. There have probably been tens or even hundreds of thousands of Americans bearing the old Irish name of Sullivan or O’Sullivan, including the “Fighting” Sullivans, five brothers from Iowa who went down with their ship in a battle off the Solomon islands in World War II; John L. Sullivan, heavyweight boxing champion of the world in the 1880s; Louis Sullivan, the early-twentieth-century architect; Maureen O’ Sullivan, film star of the 1930s who, among other roles, played Jane opposite Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan; Harry Stack Sullivan, the noted psychiatrist; John Sullivan, the Revolutionary War general; Ed Sullivan, newspaper columnist and host of the television variety show that introduced Elvis Presley and the Beatles to America; and Kathleen Sullivan, the famed constitutional law scholar and dean of the Stanford Law School. Andrew Jackson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Woodrow Wilson, James Buchanan, and John F. Kennedy are among the presidents of the United States who had ancestors who emigrated from Ireland.

It is hard to conceive of an America without Irish Americans.

And yet it is also hard to tell their story. The late Dennis Clark wrote ten books and scores of articles about the Irish in America, mostly about the Irish in his beloved Philadelphia. Dennis Clark knew as much about the Irish in America as anyone, but after all that work, he confessed that it was hard to pin Irish Americans down: “Almost anything you can say about Irish Americans,” Clark once said, “is both true and false.”¹

Irish American history abounds in paradoxes, as Clark’s statement suggests. Routinely, for example, Irish and Irish Catholic are treated as synonymous in the American media, but the majority of Americans calling themselves Irish in recent surveys are either Protestant or had ancestors that were. Routinely, the Irish are treated as one of the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century peoples immigrating to northern American cities, but again, most of today’s self-identified Irish in America came here in the eighteenth century, most of them settled on the rural frontier, and most of them did so in the South. It is the mountainside and valley villages in places like Houston County, Tennessee (county seat, Erin), some historians claim, and not the narrow streets and triple-decker tenements in neighborhoods like South Boston, that make up the Irish American heartland. And when the nation tore itself apart in the Civil War in the 1860s, it was not the men of the legendary Irish brigade in the Union’s Army of the Potomac who embodied Irishness, so these same historians assert, but the ranks and ranks of men in butternut and gray from Tennessee hills or Mississippi plains.

The paradoxes do not disappear even if we focus only on the heavily Catholic nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish migrants. Easy generalizations continue to unravel. What does one say about Irish American Catholic men, who had a fearsome reputation as brawlers but were more likely than the men of almost any other ethnic group—even native-stock Yankees—to show up regularly for church? Or what do we say about Irish American women, who were fiercely independent, upwardly mobile, ambitious, committed to education and self-improvement, battlers for the interests of working women, and fighters for the cause of the homeland, but strangely passive or even hostile to the cause of their own right to vote or other rights for women? Or Irish voters, often liberal in their support of government intervention in the economy but often conservative in backing restrictions on free speech or sexual expression? Or Irish American men and women, who made themselves symbols of American patriotism but have been among the most enduringly loyal, brashly vocal, and extravagantly generous supporters of the many nationalist causes of their Irish homeland? Or Irish men and women who were among the fiercest enemies of people of color in America, but in the racist hothouse of nineteenth-century America were the whites most likely to marry Asians or Blacks in most cities where they settled in large enough numbers? Thus, just a year before the Irish-born Denis Kearney barnstormed across America in a campaign to exclude the Chinese from the United States, at the end of every speech booming in his thick Cork brogue “the Chinese must go,” an Irish immigrant woman turned indignantly on a startled reporter who dared question why she and her friends had married Chinese immigrants: “Because we liked ’em, of course; why shouldn’t we?”²

Irish Americans, therefore, have been hard to categorize and hard to pin down. Little wonder, then, that historians attempting to make sense of the history of Irish Americans have rarely agreed.

In recent years, for example, a long overdue renewal of interest in Irish migrations during the colonial era and the American republic’s early years has sparked a lively debate over that migration’s long-term effect on American history. Some historians—Grady McWhiney and Forrest McDonald being the most vocal and persistent—believe that those migrations created a “Celtic” South, in some ways more akin in its customs and values to ancient or medieval Ireland than to its neighboring Anglo-Saxon American North. Others dispute such a claim as so much “Celtic mist over the South,” a possibly “pernicious” “patent elixir” of a historical theory.³

Debates over the great, largely Catholic migration of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its meaning have been going on longer and have been just as heated. For some, the story of Irish Catholic Americans since the Great Famine seems a tragedy. They see an Irish Catholic America born in the horrors of the famine catastrophe in the nineteenth century, long frustrated by slow upward economic progress, wracked by the pathologies of broken families and repressed sexuality, mired in benighted and corrupt politics, bewitched by nationalist pipe dreams for the old country, and throbbing with vicious racism. The assassinations of both John and Robert Kennedy seem to be appropriate caps to a history both painful and disillusioning. Slices of this perception of post-famine Irish American history as tragedy appear in the works of scholars as diverse as Oscar Handlin, Stephan Thernstrom, Steven Erie, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Thomas N. Brown, Thomas Sowell, David Roediger, Noel Ignatiev, and Kerby Miller. Kerby Miller, who has written the fullest, richest account of Irish immigration to America, paints a harsh picture of the Irish American experience. “In spite of the diminutive size of their homeland the Irish played an important role in the commercial and industrial revolutions that transformed the North Atlantic world,” he acknowledged, “however, that role was ambiguous, turbulent, even tragic, for the Irish made no easy accommodation to the changing conditions that buffeted them both at home and in North America.”⁴ Andrew Greeley, James Walsh, Tyler Anbinder, D. W. Brogan, David Gleeson, Jay Dolan, Dennis Clark himself, and Lawrence McCaffrey see an experience troubled with hardships, but more hopeful—even a triumph of sorts more than a tragedy. McCaffrey says, “The fact that twentieth-century descendants of nineteenth-century tenant farmers and agricultural laborers have become university professors; elementary and secondary school teachers; distinguished novelists, playwrights, and poets; important figures on stage and screen; physicians; political leaders and corporation executives classifies the Irish American Catholic experience as a tremendous success story.” Indeed, McCaffrey argues, “the Irish Catholic journey from ghetto to suburbs, from despised aliens to valued members of the community has been arduous, but in historical time, relatively brief… less than three generations after the famine washed hundreds of thousands of unwanted human refuse onto the American shore, Irish Catholics controlled the Catholic Church, most of the major cities, and a large portion of the organized labor movement in the United States.”⁵

In the end, it is perhaps impossible to sort out this long and complex history and stamp a single meaning, triumph or tragedy, on it. It is better simply to recognize that an ethnic group like the Irish in America is a historical phenomenon. Irish Americans are neither inherently flawed nor gifted; neither destined for triumph nor for tragedy. They have no immutable Irish essence, and their history had no inevitable outcome in America. On the contrary, any ethnic group like Irish Americans is dynamic—it changes—and its history is contingent, not preordained.

This was not always how scholars have viewed ethnic groups. For a long time, the study of ethnic groups in America was locked into what Rudolf Vecoli, a historian of Italian Americans, called an “assimilationist model.” According to this model, immigrants came to the United States and then they or their children or their children’s children became Americans, their foreignness draining out until at some point they became indistinguishable from “mainstream” Americans. Irish Americans’ Irishness, their “green” if you will, would be slowly diluted from bright Kelly to tepid variations of lime until they had no color at all that distinguished them from other (white) Americans. According to this model, this process is linear and unidimensional. It is linear in that it assumes only one outcome, ultimate assimilation, and a more or less steady and inevitable movement to that end. It is unidimensional in that it assumes that what defines an ethnic group in America is its distinctive culture and that as the group sheds its culture and absorbs its new American culture, it assimilates. Such a model also assumes that the progress of assimilation can be measured almost mathematically by the number of Irish customs and values given up, on the one hand, and the American ones taken up, on the other.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the African American civil rights revolution challenged not only the accuracy of the assimilationist model’s interpretation of ethnic group adjustment but the value of assimilation itself. In an age that prized authenticity and reviled conformity, the struggles of blacks, Latinos, and others to retain their culture and sense of self in the face of pressures from white society seemed heroic. The renewal of ethnic pride reopened the discussion of ethnic group history but did not significantly advance its conceptualization. Social scientists, historians, and ethnic and racial activists sympathetic to the new values of diversity merely denied the assimilation model, rather than offering an alternative to it. They argued that instead of assimilating, members of groups simply and stubbornly retained their culture, but this conception of ethnic group adjustment was still linear and unidimensional, and still assumed an opposition between two static cultures: Irish (or African, Asian, Latino, Italian, etc.) and American. The dichotomy also permitted only two outcomes: stubborn retention of the old inherited culture or its abandonment and absorption of American culture.

Neither the assumption of inevitable assimilation nor cultural resistance, however, is a very useful way to look at Irish American history. Clearly, people changed, and in profound ways. This is partly a product of the passing of generations. The sharpest divide, perhaps, was between immigrants and their American-born children, the second generation. Their relationship is often depicted in stark terms: the children’s unequivocal rejection of their parents’ world, the second generation’s deliberate “forgetting” of their immigrant parents’ pasts. Their relationship was much more complex than that, but there indeed have been profound differences between immigrants and their children. There is some evidence that Irish people have been particularly attached to the concretes of their native landscapes—the rocks and hedges, streams and fields—but all immigrants, Irish or not, as Vladimir Nahirny and Joshua Fishman pointed out long ago, understand the old country in a concrete way—thick with the details of the everyday—that their descendants never can. The second generation obviously can never share their parents’ experiences and culture in this way, even if they wished to do so. For them, the new land of America was natural. For most second-generation Irish Americans, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in particular, city streets, tenements, factories or mine shafts, corner saloons, and vaudeville houses—not fields, streams, and whitewashed cottages—were home. The second-generation Irish were born in America. America was home—they knew no other.

Yet change cannot be explained just by the passage of generations and the accumulating distance of a succession of American-born generations from Ireland. American culture changes constantly. Such a point is obvious but worth repeating, for often we treat the history of immigrants and ethnics in America as a passage from one unchanging essence to another, from some kind of Irishness to some kind of Americanness. There were undoubtedly powerful continuities in both Irish and American culture, but both were also dynamic. American identity and culture were changing and moving targets for immigrants and their descendants.

It is also important to remember that Irish Americans did not just passively adopt the American culture of their day; they helped make it. Second-generation Irish, for example, played a critical role in forging the new American urban popular culture of the late nineteenth century, the culture of professional sports and vaudeville. Children of Irish immigrants, like the baseball player and manager John McGraw or the singer Maggie Cline—not Yankee bluebloods from Boston’s Back Bay or Anglo-Saxon Protestant farmers from the Kansas plains—made this new but very American popular culture.

Ireland’s culture was dynamic too. Ireland after the Great Famine, for example, was still predominantly rural, but the spread of an exceptional school system and the virtual eradication of illiteracy made it very different from pre-famine Ireland. Differences in background and experiences have, if anything, been even more profound among the many waves of Irish immigrants who came to America in the twentieth century. Many who came to the United States in the 1920s and 1950s, for example, became staunch advocates of Irish republicanism in Northern Ireland after the new “Troubles” erupted there in the 1960s, but the majority of Irish who arrived in America in the 1980s have been indifferent to the Ulster question.

Harder to understand, however, is the way in which Irish American culture changed. Traditionally, we have thought that what makes Irish Americans distinct—what puts the “Irish” in Irish American—is what they inherited from Ireland and preserved against the powerful tides of American culture. Yet if we think about cultures as being dynamic and changing, it is possible to conceive of Irish Americans inventing new customs or recasting old values and customs in new forms. The best example, perhaps, is the St. Patrick’s Day parade. St. Patrick’s Day parades drew on some antecedents in Ireland: Fair Day customs, O’Connellite political processions, and Dublin Castle military drills. On the whole, however, the Irish in America, Australia, and Canada invented the St. Patrick’s Day parades and would eventually export them back home to Ireland. Similarly, much of the music that came to stand for Irishness in the Irish American community through most of the twentieth century was written in the United States—not in Ireland: “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” “Galway Bay,” or “Who Threw the Overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder” were New York Tin Pan Alley or vaudeville tunes. Even so-called traditional Irish music has felt the hand of Irish American intervention, if not invention, in the twentieth century, as recordings from traditional musicians in America found their way back to Ireland to subtly influence fiddling or other instrumental styles in the homeland.

Plotting the changes in Irish American culture, therefore, is a messy business, more complicated than simply mechanically adding up American traits gained or Irish traits lost on some measuring stick of assimilation. Yet perhaps, when thinking about the Irish in America, or any American ethnic group for that matter, it is important to think of more than just culture. Indeed, some scholars of ethnicity believe that the role of an ethnic group’s distinctive culture as the source of its cohesion or the importance of cultural differences as the cause of ethnic conflicts have been overemphasized. Frederick Barth argued this point in a pathbreaking essay in 1969: “It is the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses,” he contended.⁶ Barth pointed out that cultural differences between an ethnic group and its rivals may be trivial and minor, but the group’s members will still often emphasize the minor differences to mark their distinctive group identity. Indeed, one of the principal reasons to invent new cultural customs, like St. Patrick’s Day parades, may be to self-consciously “invent traditions” that accent differences between a group and its neighbors and thus strengthen or, as anthropologists say, maintain boundaries. Jerry Seinfeld, the American comedian and an unlikely source of wisdom on American ethnic life, may, nonetheless, have suggested an appropriate analogy to the workings of boundaries and culture in ethnic loyalties and identities, when he lampooned sports fans’ enthusiasm for their favorite teams. Seinfeld pointed out that most fans cheer for their team, the Red Sox, the Giants, the Bears, or the Celtics, regardless of who the players are or even the athletes’ style of play (as long as they win). In Seinfeld’s words, fans root for the uniforms—“the laundry”—not the players in them. In Barth’s terms, ethnic group members rally first to a sense of “us,” defined by boundaries, not to the cultural “stuff” that “we” practice.

Among the other important characteristics of an ethnic group beyond a distinct culture and clear boundaries are ethnic group members’ sense of identity, or peoplehood, their sense of sharing a destiny, the same past and future triumphs and failures. Concretely filling out boundaries and embodying a sense of peoplehood are the networks of clubs, organizations, and institutions that group members create. If identifications are intense and boundaries embattled, an ethnic group or community might construct a virtual parallel society of organizations for its members, sheltering them within the group from cradle to grave.

People in any society, but particularly in America, with its traditions of free association, may hold to many identities at the same time, of course. People in America have a myriad number of potential identities or loyalties: man or woman; son or daughter; child or parent; gay or straight; poor, working, middle class, or rich; New Englander, Southerner, Midwesterner; Catholic, Methodist, Jew; or Democrat or Republican.

Irish Americans could be all these things and Irish American too. In studying ethnic groups like Irish Americans, historians want to know when ethnic identities are important: when a sense of ethnic peoplehood becomes emotional and stirring and ethnic boundaries so sharply drawn that they seem charged. They also want to know when such identities are not important, or better put, when group members ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• The Columbia Guides to American History and Cultures
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• Part I. A History of Irish Americans from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-first Century
• Part II. Issues and Themes in Irish American History
• Part III. Important People, Organizations, Events, and Terms
• Part IV. Chronology of Irish America
• Part V. Annotated Bibliography
• Index