New York, New York
Review Article
by Patrick O'Sullivan

Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher, eds, The New York Irish, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1996, 743 pp

Ann M. Shea and Marion R. Casey, The Irish Experience in New York City: A Select Bibliography, New York Irish History Roundtable, New York, 1995, 130 pp

One of the highlights of the Parnell Summer School, 1996 - in a week that was full of highlights - was the unscheduled appearance of Marion R. Casey and her colleague, the archaeologist Heather Griggs, to report on recent developments in the study of the Irish in New York. We have here, now, for review, two books mentioned then by Marion Casey: the New York Irish bibliography compiled by Ann Shea and Marion Casey, and the Bayor and Meagher collection

When people ask me why the American sections of my series The Irish World Wide contain so little about New York, and so much about Boston, I explain that I had chosen Boston as one of my 'mythopoetic cities': I stress the importance of the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, Boston's special place in Famine relief, the Playboy controversy. True enough. All true enough. But also - I can reveal now - when I began planning The Irish World Wide project I quickly became aware that the New York Irish History Roundtable had got New York sewn up: most of the scholars who write about the Irish in New York were committed to Bayor and Meagher.

The New York Irish History Roundtable was founded in 1984, a non-profit membership organisation for people interested in their family, their city and their heritage. The Roundtable was thus always an inclusive rather than an exclusive organisation, managing to combine popular interest with scholarly standards. No doubt the Roundtable benefited from being based within a dynamic city with a reasonably efficient public transport system. The Roundtable's journal, New York Irish History, is now well-established. And these two books, the bibliography and the multi-authored history, represent the successful completion of two major Roundtable projects.

Let me deal with the Shea and Casey bibliography first. It is a tradition in reviewing books like this bibliography that the reviewer recall some work, minor/major, obscure/distinguished, and express surprise that it is omitted. I happen to know that a 1991 self-published pamphlet by John Cullinane, the Cork dancemaster, deals with the history of Irish dance in New York: I looked for it in this bibliography. It is there, page 45, with a just and accurate summary of its usefulness. In fact Shea and Casey have managed to see most of the material they record, and their comments are always concise and helpful. This bibliography is about as good as bibliographies get.

That being said, of course it suffers from the limitations of the bibliography in printed book form. The 1996 Bayor and Meagher volume is thoroughly covered - as you would expect, given the inter-connections between the two projects. But, that apart, the latest reference I have been able to find is to a 1992 chapter by Linda Dowling Almeida

So, what we have in effect is a very helpful survey of writing about the Irish in New York, from about 1900 to about 1990. I would have liked to have seen more analysis of the patterns within this literature - perhaps such analysis will appear elsewhere. Shea and Casey hope that their bibliography will help scholars find obvious gaps, but they themselves mention only one gap - the history of the Protestant Irish community in New York. Scholars, of course, will turn to the index, which is very well thought through. For in a volume of bibliography like this the indexer must second-guess the scholars of the future.

In the end I believe that this is the last time we should see a work of bibliography published, like this, in book form. Technology has moved on, since this bibliography project began in 1988. Those of us, like Piaras Mac Éinri in Cork, and Bruce Stewart in Coleraine, who are trying to make bibliographic and research material available on the Internet, can only wish that resources were available to immediately turn this volume into a computerised database, freely available on the Web. (1)

Other American cities have their histories of 'The Irish in...' - Boston, Butte, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Lowell, New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Francisco, St. Louis. But there is nothing like that about New York. In part, this is because the history of the Irish in New York is so long, so complex, and so important. The multi-authored approach is clearly the right one here - and is in keeping with the New York Roundtable's ethos. Bayor and Meagher offer a substantial and important volume of over 700 pages, 20 focused chapters, arranged into 5 sections. Each section is prefaced with an 'Overview', a chapter of discursive analysis, by scholars like Hasia R. Diner and Laurence J. McCaffrey.

I can have quibbles of course. There are gaps. There is nothing substantial on the importance of the religious orders in maintaining a Catholic Irish identity, and in themselves offering migration routes and a career structure - a difficult issue I know. The editorial team are clearly aware of the gap - as a photo-caption on page 336 indicates. There is nothing about those Irish people who actively dislike the United States - a long and honourable tradition, running from at least Thomas D'Arcy McGee, through Nora Lavin (Mary Lavin's mother), to my own postbag yesterday.

On the world-wide stage we need to be aware of those groups specifically excluded from 'an Irish-American identity'. You may ask, do we really expect reflection and self-criticism from Irish-Americans? And the answer is, Yes, we do - for here we have, in David M. Reimers, 'Overview' on 'The modern era', an account of the banning of the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organisation from New York's Saint Patrick's Day Parade, and similar, but not directly connected, difficulties about the participation of Noraid.

And there are some indications of an isolation, by this group of scholars of the Irish Diaspora, from discussion taking place elsewhere. For example, there is a recurring tendency for a writer to think - usually in the third sentence of the second paragraph - 'I have used the word Irish six times already - time for a little variation.' And so words like Hibernian, Gael, and, most commonly, Celt or Celtic, creep in. When scholars of early Europe increasingly put the word 'Celtic' into 'scare quotes' this usage must be questioned. Such words are not synonyms - each usage carries its own history, and agenda.

Quibbles aside, this Bayor and Meagher collection repays slow, careful reading, from beginning to end, notes and all. The notes and references are excellent. The Bayor and Meagher bibliography, quite legitimately, directs us on to the Shea & Casey bibliography. And here too, as in the Shea & Casey volume, we have a real researcher's index, an index that has the courage to take us into the notes when we might otherwise miss important material. I see that the tradition of criticising Kerby Miller's Emigrants and Exiles in footnotes continues - Laurence McCaffrey's Note 72 is an efficient summing-up of the debate.

In a book of this size, with so many excellent chapters, the reviewer can only pick out favourite or particularly welcome contributions, and observations. Thus - a tiny detail - I welcome the Editors' observation that the on-off romance between Fleishman and O'Connell in the tv series, Northern Exposure, replays the Jewish-Irish romance of the 1920s play, Abie's Irish Rose, and all Abie's successors. Art imitates art, but apparently life does not - Jewish-Irish intermarriage is quite low in the United States.

I welcome John T. Ridge's chapter on the County Societies - the Societies are some of the most important structures within the Irish Diaspora, but very little studied. I value David Brundage's study of the social thought of New York's Irish nationalists - he helps us begin to understand the significance of Henry George. I value Rebecca S. Miller's study of the importance of Irish music within the creation and maintenance of identity.

These two excellent books are a credit to the slow, hard work of the New York Irish History Roundtable over more than a decade. So much hard work deserves reward - you might think - and a piece of good luck. And, as we learnt from Marion Casey and Heather Griggs, at the Parnell Summer School, scholars of the Irish in New York have been presented with two extraordinary opportunities.

The first opportunity was created by the discovery of the archives of the Emigrant Industral Savings Bank, founded in New York in 1850 as - effectively - a development of the work of the Irish Emigrant Society. These archives will allow us to examine - for example - the fine detail and the patterns of emigrants' remittances. But also the archives record many details about the individual person's life. In case the bank deposit book was lost the bank wanted ways of identifying its depositors - so it recorded details that could only be known to the individual person.

Thus, Account Number 1 was opened by Bridget White, a tailor's wife, originally from Ferrymount in Queen's County. She had arrived in New York in July 1841, on the Fairfield, from Liverpool. Her father, John Flanagan, still lived in Ireland - her mother was dead. She had three brothers in the United States. I will leave it to the methodologists to quarrel about the ways in which we can use this database, held within the bank's archives. But clearly there is here - potentially, were funds available - another computerised database, allowing us to create new 'record linkages', allowing us to track individuals like Bridget White across the many archives. (2)

The second opportunity was created by the clearance, for a new court building, of an area, in the heart of New York, that had once - in the second half of the nineteenth century - been the notorious 'Five Points' slum. 'Five Points' was one of those myth-making slums, as important, in its way, for scholars of the Irish Diaspora as the 'Irish Town' or the 'Little Ireland' of early nineteenth century Manchester. In fact, the connections may be very direct - for the 'discourse of the slum' moved intact across the Atlantic. And the comparison allows us to see what is demanded of the myth-making slum. First, the slum must be handy - the slum must be nearby, as Five Points is near the newspaper offices in New York's Park Row. Newspaper editors could quickly send reporters to lurk within its exotic and dangerous purlieus. The documentary record tells us of work-shy poverty, immorality, crime, drunkenness. (3)

Now, the historical archaeologists have moved into the Five Points site. Nearby was discovered an African Burial Ground, revealing the hidden world of New York's early black community. In the tips and middens of Five Points have been found the remnants of the material culture of these slum-dwellers. (4) Surprise, surprise - these people worked. On the docks, in the local factories, in family workshops - buttons, needles and fabrics recall the work of Bridget White, the tailor's wife. The diets of the slum-dwellers can be analysed, and comparisons made - the Italians liked fish, the Irish ate meat. Amongst the specifically Irish finds are a clay pipe, decorated with harps and shamrock, and a tea cup, bearing a picture of Father Mathew, the apostle of temperance.

Does the New York Irish History Roundtable offer a model for developments on this side of the Atlantic? I have mentioned one British city of major importance to our Diaspora, Manchester - and the Manchester Irish Education Group does very well. But the city whose relationship with the Irish Diaspora cries out for the Bayor and Meagher treatment is, of course, London - the magnet for migrants, and the political centre of the British Empire. Poor London now - so far from God, so near to Dublin. And with an increasingly inadequate public transport system. (5)

Patrick O'Sullivan
February 1997

A version of this review appeared in Irish Studies Review Volume 6, Number 1, 1998.

Notes

1. For Piaras Mac Einri see the Irish Centre for Migration Studies, University College, Cork (http://www.ucc.ie/icms)

   For Bruce Stewart see IASIL, the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (http://www.ulst.ac.uk/iasil)
   (return to text)
   

2. Indeed, I see in Ducas, the Newsletter of the Irish American Cultural Institute (Winter 1997, Vol. XXV, No. 1), that Eugene White, Professor of Economics at Rutgers University, has received a small grant to develop a project, 'The Emigrant Savings Bank: a study of Irish-American finance'. We wish him well, and await his report... with interest.
   (return to text)
   

3. Alan Mayne, of the University of Melbourne, Australia, argues, with case studies of Birmingham, England (in 1875), Sydney, Australia (1881), and San Francisco, USA (1900), that there is a genre of slumland representation in English language popular newspapers of the period, a genre which has mis-led historians and which has been misinterpreted by them. See, Alan Mayne, The Imagined Slum, Newspaper Representations in Three Cities, 1870-1914, Cassell/Pinter/Leicester University Press, London, 1993.
   (return to text)
   

4. For a report on the Five Ponts archaelogical excavation see Web Sites http://r2.gsa.gov/fivept/fphome.htm and http://www.archaeology.org:443/9703/abstracts/5points.html
   (return to text)
   

5. This is the full version of a review article written for the Irish Studies Review. The Irish Studies Review can be contacted at http://www.bathspa.ac.uk/hum/isr1.html (e-mail isr@bathspa.ac.uk)
   (return to text)