Charles Fanning contemplates...
The Irish in America: Long Journey Home

The Irish in America:
Darby and Fievel Do Not Go West

Imagine, if you will, a hypothetical six-hour PBS 'documentary' series The Jews in America. Let me count the ten ways of a scenario so worst-case that it would never, ever happen.

First, the opening ninety minutes take place not 'in America' at all, but in Eastern Europe and Russia, where a detailed picture is presented of the antisemitic pogroms that began in 1882 and continued past the turn of the century. The focus of this opening is not on the culpability of the Cossacks, but on the sufferings of the Jews and the way the pogroms acted as catalyst for the experience of emigration, and, further, on how problems of overcrowding and poverty in the shtetls were 'solved' by the crisis. Second, throughout the six hours, the most persistent, repeating representation is the Jew as tightwad, sharper, moneylender. To reinforce this portrait, one of the recurrent talking heads in the series is a pawnbroker, whose comments on issues spanning the entire history of his 'people' are always filmed in his shop, the symbolic three linked balls over his head, and a clutter of other folks' unredeemed goods all around. Third, the series proceeds by means of a broad-brush, voiceover, generalizing text, punctuated with specific biographies of a few people carefully selected for their archetypal characters. The first of these is a 'good Cossack', the governor of a provincial town who sympathized with the Jews under his control, and who kept the troops and thugs away for as long as he could. But when things got too hot, he shrugged his compassionate shoulders, moved away to Moscow, and let the games begin. Others chosen for emphasis include Arnold Rothstein, the man who fixed the 1919 World Series, chosen for his legendary success as a shady dealer, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, controversially executed for treason, and Sandy Koufax, the wily left-hander.

Fourth, as for literary evidence of illuminating self-scrutiny, only one writer is even mentioned, Philip Roth, and only one of his novels, Portnoy's Complaint, which is praised for its breakthrough exposure of telling, though embarrassing, characteristics of all American Jews. The rest of the documentary passes without any indication that a significant Jewish-American literary tradition even exists. There occur no references to Philip Roth's twenty other books, nor to Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, Henry Roth, Delmore Schwartz, Tillie Olsen, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Stanley Elkin, Grace Paley, or Cynthia Ozick. Fifth, the other arts are similarly slighted. We see only a few clips from the crudest music hall and vaudeville self-stereotypes of the early 1900s. Wholly lacking is any indication of the pioneering Jewish self-definition and dialogue with America through drama, music, movies, radio, and television that have so shaped and enriched our popular culture. No Marx Brothers or Arthur Miller, no Irvin Berlin or Gershwins or Rodgers and Hammerstein or Bob Dylan, no Goldwyn and Mayer, no Jack Benny, Molly Goldberg, Sid Caesar, or Milton Berle, no Mel Brooks or Woody Allen.

Sixth, to the obvious, pervasive, and vital identification of the Jewish people with Judaism, as a religious and moral system, as the wellspring of a people's essence and solace for millenia, and as the great catalyst for prejudice against Jews in both Old and New Worlds, let us say that five minutes are allotted out of the 360 minutes of the series. And in this five minutes, we are given a look at one synagogue as an aesthetic object, not a place of worship, and one clip of Ku Klux Klansmen on the march. There is no engagement with Jewish spirituality and philosophy as primum mobile of this culture, no mention of the watchdog role of Bnai Brith, and no on-screen interview with a rabbi. With one exception. At a different spot in the film, in the category of Jewish-American contributions to political extremism, we are treated to a clip of an incendiary speech by Rabbi Meyer Kahane.

Seventh, what about gender? Well, let us say that references to women, their roles, challenges, accomplishments, are very few and further between in this hypothetical The Jews in America. Indeed, women are all but invisible. What we do have is one piece on immigrant Jewish women as sweatshop operatives. And in it tenement piecework is praised as an American opportunity to live independently while avoiding as long as possible marriage to selfish Jewish-American males. And, eighth, what about class? Here, there is no mention of the Jews as a new American proletariat, and none of their response to the challenges of that position with pioneering organization of unions and socialist initiatives. Emma Goldman's name never comes up. Nor do we hear about such journals as Partisan Review and Commentary that shaped Jewish and American social consciousness for generations.

Further, and ninth, what of Zionism and the role of American Jews in the development and defense of the state of Israel? Once again, virtually nothing appears here. No references to Jewish-American fundraising, to Congressional clout, or to overall moral force. No mention, for example, of the journey of Golda Meir from her Milwaukee upbringing to the prime ministry of Israel. Finally, as to geographical distribution and the spirit of place, our hypothetical The Jews in America is mostly a film about the Big Apple and Boston. Of the rest of the country - say, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, L.A., and Hollywood - there appears nary a word or image. Well, not quite. We do get two fifteen-minute segments on wildly aberrant but picturesque Jewish settlers in Las Vegas, look at a Casino with Jewish financing, and in Texas, Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys do a number.

Anyone who watched The Irish in America on January 26-28, 1998, probably gets the picture by now. But here is a key for those who did not catch what was, in my opinion, a thoroughly disastrous series.

First, most of the opening ninety minutes of The Irish in America deal with the Great Hunger of the late 1840s. For the 'good Cossack', read the marquess of Sligo, an improving landlord and supporter of his tenants during the first part of the Famine. We hear a lot from Lord Altamont, descendant of the marquess, but little or nothing about the less tenant-friendly landlords, the numerous enthusiastic evictions, or about the export of tons of food from Ireland during the Famine years. One small detail sticks in my mind as undermining the credibility of this opening section. We are told that elsewhere in Europe the pre-Famine Irish were known as 'the potato people', a trivializing phrase that I have never heard before, anywhere. Second, for congenital parsimony and the pawnbroker, read heavy drinking. Throughout the six hours of the series, a recurrent talking head is a Boston bartender who delivers his commentaries from behind the bar at Doyle's Cafe, against a backdrop of sparkling bottles reflected off the mirror. Third, as for the other biographical sketches, for Arnold Rothstein, read Joseph P. Kennedy. For the Rosenbergs, read Alexander Campbell and John Kehoe, executed leaders of the Mollie Maguires, the antimanagement secret society of miners in the Pennsylvania coal fields. And for Sandy Koufax, read boxing legend John L. Sullivan, whose career in this telling rests on the twin stereotypes of belligerence and boozing.

In addition, the largest single chunk of series time is given to the career of Al Smith, whose story, we are told, 'is the story of the Irish in New York'. I am less than convinced of this by the historians who line up to tell us so: Robert Caro, Annalise Orleck, Geraldine Maschio, and Elizabeth Israels Perry. Where, pray tell, are any of the folks involved in The New York Irish, edited by Ronald Bayer and Timothy Meagher and published in 1996 by Johns Hopkins? That project set a new high standard for urban historical scholarship. As for the parting image of the not-so-happy warrior sitting by the window with 'a big drink' in his hand - music over: the strains of 'Danny Boy'. Could we at least have been spared that?

On the literary side, fourth, for Philip Roth and Portnoy's Complaint, substitute Eugene O'Neill and Long Day's Journey into Night, virtually the only writer and work given attention in The Irish in America. Here, the narrator and commentators agree that O'Neill's great play constitutes 'a reckoning' for the American Irish with their 'haunted past' of land hunger, violence, and alcoholism. We get no sense that there are other such reckonings, some of them - mirabile dictu - positive. There is not a clue to the existence of the two-hundred-year tradition of Irish-American literary self-scrutiny dating from such nineteenth-century pioneers as James McHenry, John McDermott Moore, Mary Anne Sadlier, James W. Sullivan, Kate M. Cleary, Myra Kelly, Kathleen Norris, and dozens more, to such twentieth-century notables as Finley Peter Dunne, James T. Farrell, John O'Hara, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edward McSorley, Edwin O'Connor, J. F. Powers, J. P. Donleavy, Brendan Gill, Mary McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor, Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, Thomas Flanagan, John Gregory Dunne, Frank Conroy, Maureen Howard, Elizabeth Cullinan, or Alice McDermott, whose recent Charming Billy is a crystalline novel of compassionate understanding of Irish-American culture after World War II. Indeed, a sad, unintentional irony of The Irish in America is the use as commentators of such accomplished fictional chroniclers of the American Irish as Thomas Fleming, Peter Quinn, and William Kennedy. Their own books are never mentioned. And, fifth, as for theater, there is no Dion Boucicault, Tyrone Power, John Brougham, Augustin Daly, or the Abbey Theatre in America, or anything on into the new century - excepting the one O'Neill play. As for music, the movies, radio, and TV, we hear and see nothing at all. No John McCormack, Victor Herbert, or Bing Crosby, much less Captain Francis O'Neill, the McNultys and the Flanagans, Joe Derrane, Liz Carroll, or Celtic Thunder. There is no Spencer Tracy, John Ford, or Maureen O'Hara, either. And no Art Carney or Jackie Gleason.

Sixth, religion - Irish American Catholicism, in this case - gets five minutes, max. We look inside one Roman Catholic church, only to admire the stained glass. There are no interviews with priests and, naturally, there is nothing here to do with nuns. There is, in fact, only one speaking clip of a cleric. For Rabbi Kahane, read Father Charles Coughlin, the right-wing radio demagogue of the Depression era.

Seventh, what about gender? As to Irish-American women, The Irish in America gives us only a piece on servant girls narrowly seen as incipient parvenues coveting their employers' bourgeois status, while holding off marriage with besotted pick-and-shovel laborers as long as possible, and then suffering the inevitable consequence of abandonment to the saloon. As to issues of class, eighth, we have: 'No Irish Need Apply'. There is nothing here about labor organizing, in which the Irish were stalwarts early and late. We learn nothing about Terence Powderly, founder of the first national union, the Knights of Labor, or about James Larkin, who came from Dublin to support the Wobblies. And for Emma Goldman, read Mary Harris 'Mother' Jones, an Irish immigrant from Cork. She is not here either.

Further, ninth, we hear not a word in The Irish in America about Irish-American nationalism, so central to the formation of Irish ethnic identity in the nineteenth century, and so problematic to same in the twentieth. The program makes no mention of exiled Ninety-eighters or Forty-eighters, of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, John Boyle O'Reilly, O'Donovan Rossa, John Devoy, or of the Parnell family, of Fenianism, Clan na Gael, the Friends of Irish Freedom, or of the IRA. And for Golda Meir, read Eamon de Valera, born in New York in 1882 to an Irish mother and a Spanish father.

Finally, as to the crucial engagement of Irish immigrants with the spirit of place, the producer of The Irish in America has taken a leaf from Ken Burns's Baseball series. New York and Boston stand in for the urban Irish, coast to coast. Incredibly, nothing about Chicago appears in this six-hour film. Ditto, San Francisco. And just about everyplace else. Pieces on two of the more exotic Irish-American settlements do appear: Virginia City, Nevada, and Butte, Montana. It is all too appropriate that The Irish in America begins and ends with the St. Patrick's Day Parade in Manhattan. Searchers through archival footage would have been hard-pressed to come up with a set of place-specific images more full of sound and fury, and signifying less.

In sum, this would-be epic documentary of the Irish in America is a distorted hodge-podge of all-too-familiar and all-too-typical people and places. In my hypothetical film of The Jews in America, we would come away convinced of a highly stereotyped image of the Jews, one reinforced by a litany of well-known names: Arnold Rothstein, the Rosenbergs, Koufax, Philip Roth's Portnoy. We would assume that most Jews never left the Lower East Side, and we would be charmed by the insights into Las Vegas and Texas. In the real film of The Irish in America, alas, we come away convinced that the Irish are Old World victims and New World alcoholic toughs who operate on the outer fringes or outside the law, and we are reinforced in this judgment by images of the Mollie Maguires, John L. Sullivan, the O'Neill play, Al Smith, and, one more time, the Kennedys. Similarly, we are charmed by the Irish in Virginia City and Butte. As for religion, class, gender, Old World nationalism, literature and the arts, and just about any place outside the Northeast megalopolis - hey, who is counting? The real shame is that here was a chance for a visualization more complete than ever before attempted of an American immigrant, ethnic experience. Six hours of prime time is nothing to sneeze at.

Still, I find myself more disappointed than surprised. After all, The Irish in America is a Disney production. Come to think of it, what this hapless venture really needs to round off appropriately is a few clips from Uncle Walt's first crack at telling an Irish story - Darby O'Gill and the Little People. The leprechaun king and the banshee's wail would add a bit of harmless folksy local color, and we would also have the fresh-faced Sean Connery for a dash of sex appeal. Indeed, both films, my hypothetical one and the real PBS production one, could use the same clips from the feature-length cartoon An American Tail, which gives us the Jews as mice, Cossacks as cats, and the ghettoes of Russia and New York as picturesque warrens. How about that scene where Fievel wanders into an Irish Catholic wake, complete with a drunken ward boss, pathetically blubbering neighbors, and a corpse laid out with a crucifix on his chest? Now that would be good TV! - historical, clever, and so darned cute that no one would dream of taking offense.

This review article first appeared in the New Hibernia Review 2:2 (Summer, 1998) pp. 142-147, and appears here with the permission of its author and through the courtesy of Thomas Dillon Redshaw, the editor, and James Rogers, the publisher of New Hibernia Review. Note that copyright of the review article remains with its author, Charles Fanning.

The New Hibernia Review is based at the Center for Irish Studies,
University of St. Thomas,
Minnesota,
USA
http://www.stthomas.edu/www/CIS_http/index.html
e-mail, James Rogers (jrogers@stthomas.edu)