Gary A. Richardson reviews...
The Irish in America: Long Journey Home

Leaving the Old Neighborhood Behind:
The Irish in America

Representing the Irish to others and particularly to themselves has always been a problematic venture. In 1911, 'The Irish Players', an Abbey Theatre touring company led by Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats, arrived in America to stage some of the vital theater that had developed in Ireland since the turn of the century. Although works by Yeats, Gregory, Shaw, Lennox Robinson, and others were generally well received by both critics and audiences, some Irish immigrants and Irish Americans loathed the Ireland and the Irish put forth by the players. Particularly troubling to those still struggling for what they saw as American respectability was J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, a play perceived as degrading Irish womanhood and abusing the entire Irish nation. Such fraternal orders as the Ancient Order of Hibernians joined with Irish-language and literary groups to put political pressure on local officials to prevent the plays' mountings or to guarantee their financial failure. When those efforts failed, displeasure manifested itself in boos and catcalls from Boston to Chicago. Feelings ran so high at Playboy's New York City opening that a disturbance erupted in the Maxine Elliott Theatre. The next day the New York daily newspapers reported, predictably, an Irish 'riot' to the city at large.

Given an ethnic history in which issues of representation play an enormous and at times devastating part, no one should be surprised that any new attempt to present a group as varied as the Irish to a wider audience should be met with skepticism, even hostility in certain quarters. In the last two years alone, the mounting of a major exhibition on the New York City Irish at the City Museum of New York and the phenomenal success of Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning Angela's Ashes (1996) have generated much soul-searching concerning what constitutes an accurate Irish or Irish-American history and who should control the story presented to the wider population. And, now, Walt Disney Studios, WGBH/Boston, and the Lennon Documentary Group have together provided another occasion to revisit these issues by producing the nearly six-hour-long The Irish in America: Long Journey Home. While not without its flaws, The Irish in America is certainly the most comprehensive and in many ways the best video history to date of a people whose contributions to the building of the United States remain widely unknown by the American population at large.

The Irish in America is organized into four programs: 'The Great Hunger', 'All Across America', 'Up From City Streets', and 'Success'. As the installments' titles suggest, the series' chronological narrative partakes of the traditional immigrant story of entry, dispersal, struggle, and, eventually, successful assimilation. Although that narrative still has its proponents, it is hardly unproblematic. Historians, sociologists, psychologists, and ethnic and cultural studies scholars working during the last three decades have amply demonstrated that the complexity of immigrant experiences transcends such straightforward description. Thus, on one level The Irish in America must be faulted as ethnic scholarship. Despite ready resources, it too neatly presents the Irish and their history as the prototypes of all subsequent ethnic groups who have immigrated to the United States. On the other hand, it is entirely plausible to argue that this series was never intended as scholarship at all. If one acknowledges the limitations of television as a scholarly medium and predicates the audience as one not of specialists but interested members of the general population who may know little or nothing of Irish America beyond annual television footage of St. Patrick's Day parades, then the decision to deploy a familiar story is understandable, if regrettable. Despite the series' overextended general thesis, despite the awkward movement back and forth between Ireland and America in the first episode, and despite the sense of fragmentation that is, perhaps, the inevitable result of each episode having its own writers and producers, the individual segments have clear strengths that justify them individually and make the series itself a welcome addition to the popular visual history of ethnic groups.

'The Great Hunger' is in some ways both the most visually affecting and intellectually debatable program in the series, for it attempts not only to set out the series' overall themes but also to provide the background of Irish immigration to America between 1607 and 1845. The instalment begins with film of a contemporary New York City St. Patrick's Day parade with voiceovers suggesting its enduring appeal even as it has moved from a strictly ethnic celebration to what one commentator calls 'a Catholic festival'. The current parade quickly forms a historical counterpoint to a turn-of-the-century antecedent, as black-and-white footage is intercut to establish that the solid lines of police, firefighters, pipers, and fraternal organizations seen in both parades were once assertions of ethnic pride and political power rather than benign emblems of religious solidarity. This retreat to the past continues with an abbreviated survey of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Irish history, which is one of the least attractive elements of the instalment.

Part of the ostensible justification for the brevity of the treatment is, no doubt, the program's insistently American focus. For example, Hugh O'Neill, the second earl of Tyrone, is presented not to allow for a discussion of late-sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Irish resistance to British imperialism but to link his 1607 self-exile with the settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, and to date the first influx of Irish to America. Similarly, while virtually ignoring Irish attempts to regain independence during the eighteenth century, the program goes on to argue the uncontroversial thesis that the colonial growth of America throughout the same period was due in part to the arrival of significant numbers of Irish indentured servants, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, and displaced Ulster Protestants. Although the general outlines of eighteenth-century Irish immigration are well known to specialists, particularly since Kerby Miller's monumental Emigrants and Exiles (1985), their rehearsal allows the producers to track the immigrants to the American frontier. Along the way, they not only discuss Irish contributions during the American Revolution but also correct the widespread misconception that John F. Kennedy was the first Irish-American president of the United States, an honor which rightfully goes to Andrew Jackson, the son of Irish immigrants.

As these two examples suggest, however, the movement back and forth between Irish and American historical narratives seems awkward, especially as images of ships sailing one way or the other across the screen hardly substitute for transitions in the script. Nevertheless, in one of the strongest portions of the instalment, the producers set the stage for the history of later nineteenth-century Irish immigration by discussing the nativist activities of the Know-Nothing party, the anti-Irish riots of 1844 in Philadelphia, and Archbishop John Hughes's threat in the wake of events in Philadelphia to turn New York City into 'another Moscow' if a single Catholic church were destroyed. While hardly vindicating their overall thesis that the Irish were prototypical of all subsequent immigrant groups, 'The Great Hunger' does go a long way toward suggesting that anti-immigrant sentiment has long been a least an undercurrent of American economic, cultural, and political life - a theme to which the series returns in 'All Across America'.

As Peter Quinn notes, however, the defining historical event that intertwined forever the fates of Ireland and the United States was the Great Famine, or more accurately An Gorta Mor, or 'the Great Hunger'. To establish the background for the mid-nineteenth-century flood of Irish Catholic immigrants to America, this program outlines the communal, agrarian nature of Irish society, briefly noting the tenant-landlord agricultural system that pervaded the Irish countryside. While romanticizing a bit the sense of collective community that characterized provincial Ireland at midcentury, the instalment does make the critical point that circumstances had coerced a third of Ireland's 1845 population of about nine million people into almost total dependence on the New World import, the potato, as a food staple, even as grain continued to be grown for export. It also reiterates that this Irish-speaking, rural, Catholic population was substantially different from earlier groups of immigrants. The story of the period 1845 to 1851 is movingly rendered, although the constant reference to the rural Irish as 'potato people' begins to grate. While one might not be surprised to hear that the phrase was used by an English colonial official to describe the reliance of the rural Irish upon their subsistence crop, its reiteration throughout this portion of the program seems a bit gratuitous especially as the diet has formed one of the perennial markers of humor directed at the Irish.

Naturally enough, the story begins with the peasants who suffered most immediately and lastingly from the starvation and disease that became the twin killers between 1845 and 1851-52 when the Famine was at its peak. Building upon the pathos evoked by Paddy Moloney and Brian Keane's moving 'Famine Theme', the producers rely upon the powerful storytelling talents of Irish and Irish Americans to evoke the full misery of the period. Juxtaposing the words of Patrick Campbell, James Monohan, Ciaran Murchadha, and a host of others, with images of abandoned Irish dwellings, ruined workhouses, graveyards, and road projects that the starving population were forced to work on for relief, provides a forceful rendering of a natural catastrophe compounded by the alternatively enlightened and benighted policies of English Protestant reformers led by Charles Edward Trevelyan, the assistant-secretary to the treasury. The still occasionally heard reading of the Famine as an act of genocide is silently refuted through a careful rendering of successful initial English relief efforts and a contextualization of later English actions as reflecting not a yearning to clear the land but an ethnocentric desire to reshape Ireland's population in the image of their English masters. The slow slide toward turning the problem of famine relief over to Irish landlords not only reflected the callous indifference that characterized upper-class English attitudes toward their own, as well as Irish, poor but it also reflected a laissez-faire capitalism reinforced with a steadfast belief that economic reform was an opportunity for moral reform.

The program's writers also attempt to broaden the discussion of the disaster by examining the varied reactions of the ruling class, exemplified by Dennis Mahon of County Roscommon and Lord Sligo. Mahon's assassination, the program suggests, reinforced British attitudes about the lawless 'wild Irish' and proved a portent of grassroots Irish resistance to the abuses they suffered in industrial America. On the other hand, Lord Sligo's initial attempts to sustain his tenants are shown as eventually giving way in the face of potential ruin to his cold-eyed acceptance of the inevitability of clearing the land of tenants who could not pay rent. One is left with the haunting feeling that all who survived - peasants and landlords alike - were scarred beyond recovery by these events. The barely detectable defensiveness of the Lord Jeremy Altamont, Lord Sligo's descendant, and Patrick Campbell's story of his grandmother's guilt at having survived the Famine while so many of her family's friends and neighbors starved to death are both threads from the same fabric of history. Only chance and constitution, the writers suggest, seem to have determined the fates of those overtaken by the disaster. The communal life of prefamine Ireland was gone. A million people had died. A million-and-a-half more had immigrated, primarily to the United States. Once again, this program argues, the Irish felt driven from their lands and sent wandering. The loneliness of the exile and the restless search for the comfort of home and hearth that had begun to color the Irish vision of themselves in the wake of the Flight of the Earls in 1607 now became the dominant note of the whole population, especially those who, like O'Neill, felt forced into exile.

The second and at 115 minutes the longest instalment, 'All Across America', seeks to portray the breadth of Irish penetration of all regions and classes of the United States in the period between the 1845 and the turn of the century. Picking up the immigration story on the docks and levees of New Orleans, the cheapest destination for the Irish, the narrative charts the misery of debarking Irish sweltering in the heat and humidity of the city's subtropical climate. Surprisingly frank in admitting the racial antagonisms that arose between Irish and African Americans - either slave or freeman - as a result of a system that did not provide mechanisms for both to rise economically, Mark Zwonitzer, the episode writer, charts the quick and ruthless rise of the Irish to domination of the labor markets in the coastal and river cities' docks, wharves, warehouses, and among its hackney and dray handlers. But the subsistence existence that the New Orleans Irish wrested from the city did not provide the means to leave its worst neighborhoods, districts that were overtaken by the 1853 yellow fever epidemic that killed nearly 10,000 'newcomers', a polite euphemism for the Irish. Having established a pattern of urban, ethnic isolation in the New Orleans segment, the narrative progresses to Boston where the major difference for the Irish seems to have been the weather. The return to the anti-immigrant theme and an expanded view of Irish response to Protestant antagonism and the Know-Nothing phenomenon is followed by a startling brief - less than three minutes - narrative of Irish contributions to both North and South during the Civil War. Given the writer's assertion that the bravery of the Irish during the war went far to gaining them acceptance among native citzens, it seems odd that this narrative did not provide more details.

The postbellum Irish experience consumes the remainder of 'All Across America' and allows for both examination of broad classes of people and institutions as well as more intimate portraits of individuals selected, one assumes, to represent the diversity of paths to Irish economic power. One of the most interesting decisions that Zwonitzer makes is to focus attention on the high percentage of single Irish females who immigrated to the United States alone, a significant distinction between Irish immigration and that of other groups. As the program points out, these women reflected the diminishing economic and matrimonial opportunities in Ireland, as fathers in the wake of the Famine no longer subdivided their holdings, giving them instead to a single child, usually the eldest son. Thus, the American middle class was treated to an endless supply of Irish cooks and maids whose independence served as one of the major components of the economic engine which perpetuated Irish immigration to America. Additionally, the Roman Catholic church and education benefited as many others of these women either took holy orders or became teachers in public or Catholic schools.

Another such minisegment involves the place of the Roman Catholic church in the life of Catholic immigrants. As Lawrence McCaffrey notes here, the Roman Catholic Church served the Irish as 'the bridge of familiarity between the old world and the new'. The carefully selected narratives and the images from the period aptly reflect the immigrants' attempt to render physically in massive, solid substance their formidable sense of psychological and spiritual refuge provided by the church. After having reflected on the Irish impulse toward spiritual improvement, 'All Across America' turns to Irish attempts in the temporal realm to obtain economic justice. Examining the 1877-79 Molly Maguire episode in the anthracite fields of western Pennsylvania, this program suggests the beginnings of the long involvement of the Irish with labor movements. But in the quick distancing of the Roman Catholic Church and the Ancient Order of Hibernians from those accused of being members of the Molly Maguires, the episode makes evident how tenuous was the hold that the Irish of the era had on acceptance by their native-born neighbors. The remainder of 'All Across America' is devoted to the lives of three men: heavyweight boxing champion, John L. Sullivan; the 'King of the Comstock', John Mackay; and the man who helped electrify America by providing copper from his Anaconda Mining Company, Marcus Daly. Each helped to redefine the Irish in America, and in the process each showed their contemporaries and those who followed them that the Irish could be successful in America.

'Up From City Streets', the third program in the series, focuses on the urban Irish, particularly those in New York City, and explores the heyday of Irish political power in New York, institutionalized as Tammany Hall and personified by Alfred E. Smith. This episode's tight focus, which moves in rapid order from generalities about the urban life of Irish immigrants and their children living in Tammany's Fourth Ward mainstay to the career of Smith, makes for a discreetly satisfying, contextualized biography that can and is read by the producers as the last moment of general resistance to full Irish integration into the broader society. As this program's focal point, Smith proves a fascinating character. As one of the politicians whose career spanned the period between still photography and newsreels, and as a person given to the theatrical, Smith's life provides a host of wonderfully evocative images.

By turns paperboy, Fulton Fish Market laborer, Tammany underling, assemblyman, sheriff of New York, president of the New York City Board of Aldermen, governor, and, ultimately, presidential aspirant, Smith is presented in surprising detail. To the credit of writer Richard Ben Cramer, the script does not seek to excuse or explain away his early career as a cog in a corrupt big city political machine. Smith and Tammany are shown as products of the same era and circumstances. For years a Tammany Hall functionary, Smith was elected to the state assembly, rising to a position of authority in time to confront the moral and political aftermath of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. As a self-appointed member of the commission set up to explore labor conditions in New York state, Smith broadened his perspective beyond the patronage politics of a city machine, finding issues that linked the sidewalks of New York to the state as a whole. With the acquiescence of 'Silent' Charlie Murphy, Tammany's boss, Smith subsequently drove reform bills through the state assembly with the same determination that he had once used to defeat them. Obtaining the governor's mansion in 1920 with the aid of Tammany Hall, Smith secured enough freedom from his old New York City machine supporters to become one of the most able governors of the era. Working steadily through a progressive agenda, Smith laid the groundwork for his final political challenge - election to the presidency of the United States.

If a Catholic Irishman could become governor of a predominately urban, immigrant-dominated state, he could not, however, become president. As the episode makes clear, Smith's Roman Catholicism, his antiprohibition stance, and his Tammany background were simply too much for the 'happy warrior' to overcome. Crushed by his defeat and embittered by the Democratic Party's 1932 presidential nomination of his old protege Franklin D. Roosevelt, Smith retired from public life. Stung by Smith's defeat, the despairing American Irish were upbraided by the Catholic church for seeking temporal rather than spiritual triumphs. Once again harboring their sense of rejection by their adopted country, Irish Americans nursed their collective wounds for another generation.

'Success', the final program, seeks to define that term in sixty brief minutes by looking at the legacies of two Irish Americans who turned fifty in 1938. The episode suggests that Joseph P. Kennedy found success in masterminding the political career of his son, John F. Kennedy. Charting the senior Kennedy's own failed political aspirations, 'Success' details the positioning of John as the family banner carrier in the wake of his older brother's death, his run for the House of Representatives, and his presidential campaign. Overcoming the barriers that had frustrated Smith's run at the presidency thirty years before, father and son managed to neutralize the religious issue by staunchly asserting that any president's religion is an irrelevancy in a country in which religion is separated from statecraft. Similarly, JFK's Irish ethnicity had become not a marker of his identity, but something he learned in order to better interact with his constituencies. Finally, removed from overt ties to the traditional powers of the Democratic party, John Kennedy was able to present himself as a man of principle rather a politician carrying an agenda fashioned by others. Like most Irish Americans after World War II, Kennedy and his family had left the old neighborhood far behind. Without everyday reminders of what had once constituted Irishness, Kennedy served as a fantasy version of what Irish-Americans might become. Thus, Kennedy was propelled to the White House to the euphoric joy of Irish Americans at the very moment when the traditional ethnic markers - Roman Catholicism, restricted neighborhoods, lower economic status, and a pervasive sense of alienation from mainstream culture - were loosing their constrictive hold on what it meant to be Irish in the United States.

While Kennedy's capture of the White House presaged Irish America's discovery of and reconciliation to its new psychological home, Eugene O'Neill was sounding a cautionary note. In such autobiographical progeny as Long Day's Journey into Night, O'Neill lays bare the still-present pain that exile has generated and warns against a too-easy acceptance of personal and collective fulfillment in America's promise of economic security. The Irish, O'Neill indicates, may become Americans, but in doing so they may not be able to remain wholly Irish. Alone again on a new psychic landscape, OĠNeill cautions, individuals may this time find themselves devoid of the ethnic solidarity that had once sustained them even as they forged a new life among strangers. While this linking of Joseph Kennedy and Eugene O'Neill seems somewhat strained, the program's central theme - the sense of the American Irish of their acceptance in the general population's symbolic embrace of John Kennedy - is solid. As Arthur and Barbara Gelb and Robert Brustein make clear in their interviews, Eugene O'Neill's crisis of Irish identity is also, ironically, the crisis of humanity in modern America in which economic wealth is paired with spiritual destitution, in which one too often sells one's heritage for a bowl of pottage.

As this analysis of the individual programs should make clear, The Irish in America is an ambitious project. Its sweep is such that one ends the whole series aware of how much of the story is left to tell, how much has not been covered either by the broad strokes of generality or the finer lines of individual portrait. But for all its weaknesses, the series is a fine beginning to both the descriptive and critical projects that must now be undertaken. While some might decry the absence of some well-known scholars often associated with Irish and Irish-American Studies, the variety of commentators in the series suggests the producers' intention to define expertise more broadly, a strategy I found refreshing. Here were not only well-established academic historians of the Irish and Irish America but also American and Irish historians, writers, and individuals whose interests were often driven by their personal links to the personalities and events that they discussed. The grandson of Al Smith and the granddaughter of Belle Moskowitz, to mention only two of the more obvious, brought slants to their subject matters unavailable elsewhere. Especially in the last two episodes, the perspectives of saloonkeepers, sports writers, and political columnists are given equal time with those of political scientists, literary scholars, and theatre practitioners. The balance of popular with academic history, of lived immediacy with scholarly distance, is stimulating. The legacy is revealed not only as available for critical examination but also as a living resource that sustains a still vital, if changing, community.

The technical merits of the production of The Irish in America are equally impressive. The photography is superb. Slow, careful pans of countryside and city providing a sense of broad perspective. Noteworthy also is the careful integration of extracts from many films, photographs, cartoons, illustrations, and sketches that form the visual record of the Irish. Visual details from many sources find their way into the series, but the broader original is almost always provided to establish a context. Generally, the sound is of good quality with only a few intrusions of the manufactured backgrounds that documentary film makers in the wake of Ken Burns now seem to feel obligatory when presenting still photographs. Even more impressive is the music of the series, selected and recorded under the supervision of the legendary Paddy Moloney. While much of the music in the series is traditional, it is enlivened by such artists such as Van Morrison, Sinead O'Connor, Mary Black, The Chieftains, and Mick Moloney. The musical themes - 'Main', 'Emigration', 'Famine', and 'American', and the anthem 'Long Journey Home' - were composed especially for this project and bear the stamp of Paddy Moloney, Brian Keane, and Elvis Costello.

The Irish in America: Long Journey Home provides a fine overview of the impact of Irish on the United States and its colonial precursors over the last three-hundred years. While some personalities and topics received little or no attention - the impact of the Irish Americans on Irish politics, culture and society; the Fenian movement; John Devoy; Patrick Ford; the other Irish political 'bosses', including Daley of Chicago and Curley of Boston; writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and J.T. Farrell; and the fraternal and labor organizations of the Irish, to name only a few - the cultural history provided in The Irish in America allows for an understanding of the Irish experience in America from its genesis in Ireland to its current state of transition in a much more comprehensive way than previous video projects on roughly the same material. If not a final word on this topic, the series certainly is a promising beginning.

This review article first appeared in the New Hibernia Review, 2:2 (Summer, 1998) 132-141, 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, Gary A. Richardson.

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)

Gary A. Richardson