Following the 'boat people'

Recent books relate the Irish American experience
By Thomas Gildea Cannon

The past four centuries have witnessed one of the largest migrations in human history: the emptying out of Ireland and the filling up of America with more than seven million immigrants from the Emerald Isle. This migration was part of a mass movement known as the Irish diaspora. 

The Irish who fled their native land, primarily during the 19th century, were the original "boat people." Their descendants numbered 44 million people, according to the 1990 census of the United States. The story of the Irish (whether by birth or by ancestry) in America continues to be a subject of fascination as reflected in the profusion of recent books on the subject.

The most comprehensive portrait of their experience can be found in The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, ed. Michael Glazier (University of Notre Dame Press, 1999). This massive single-volume work of reference contains nearly a thousand pages. Contributions by a team of more than 200 scholars include some five hundred biographies. 

Perhaps most important are the entries providing historical surveys of the Irish in each of the 50 states and most of the major American cities. These state surveys provide an important corrective to the general impression that the Irish American experience is confined to urban dwellers in a handful of major metropolises (Boston, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia). 

The historical fact is that, for a sizable minority, the Irish American experience was an agricultural one. In Wisconsin, for example, 80% of the 50,000 Irish-born pioneers tallied there in the 1860 census lived on farms. The choice of a rural home was also representative of the Irish settlement in neighboring states, but this experience had been generally overlooked by historians and cultural anthropologists. Glazier's encyclopedia contains a rich cornucopia of detail that will delight readers; it is especially strong on Irish contributions to politics, literature and the Catholic Church in America.

Unfortunately, the book contains a significant lapse: the failure to cover the story of Irish traditional music and dance and their remarkable revivals in the late 20th century. The encyclopedia lacks a major theme article on either mode of artistic expression of Ireland's distinctive cultural heritage. 

Moreover, the book should have, at a minimum, included biographical entries on Francis O'Neill, the Cork-born chief of police in Chicago who collected and published a massive quantity of Irish traditional music; Michael Coleman, the enormously influential Sligo-born fiddler who was the first traditional Irish musician to be widely recorded; and Mick Moloney, the Limerick-born ethnologist and musician who has been the catalyst behind the recent rediscovery of this rich musical legacy. The next edition of this encyclopedia should also contain entries on Mark Howard and his Trinity Irish Dance Company, as well as entries on some of more venerable performing institutions like the Cashel-Dennehy School of Irish Dance (both based in Chicago and Milwaukee). 
 
New Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora, ed. Charles Fanning (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000) contains a valuable collection of 18 academic studies on the Irish in America. The articles cover the disciplines of history, sociology, literary criticism, folklore, and cultural studies. Especially noteworthy is the first essay by Lawrence J. McCaffrey, a renowned historian and popular professor at Marquette University and Loyola University. His article is a concise, but magisterial, survey of the world-wide Irish diaspora.

He places the American Irish settlement firmly in the larger context of 19th century Irish emigration to Canada, Australia, Argentina, New Zealand and Britain. McCaffrey gives due credit to the Midwestern farm experience while correctly pointing out the predominantly urban character of the Irish American immigration. This volume is well worth reading. 

The non-academic general reader will find a lucid survey of the Irish American experience in Maureen Dezell, Irish America: Coming into Clover (New York: Doubleday, 2000). The author trumpets her bona fides by assuring her readers early on that "Dezell is a derivation of an Irish surname," but she doesn't reveal which surname (her mother's maiden name was Eileen Sullivan). Dezell, a journalist on the staff of the Boston Globe, was frustrated by the St. Patrick's Day booze and blarney kitsch and decided to explore what substance, if any, lay behind her heritage. A lot, she discovered, although none of it would come as a surprise to readers of the first two books reviewed here.

Dezell relies on standard academic portraits of Irish America written in the 1970s by Fr. Andrew Greeley, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Prof. McCaffrey. She has supplemented their research by more recent works and by interviewing an interesting cast of characters that includes scholar Eoin McKiernan, author Peter Quinn and psychotherapist Monica McGoldrick. Dezell repeats the conclusions of other social scientists that the Irish are the most financially successful, best educated and politically most liberal white ethnic group after Jewish Americans. In some respects, study of this Irish experience might offer a useful paradigm for other immigrant groups seeking assimilation in American society. 

Dezell's survey examines such topics as the portrayal of Irish Americans in film and popular entertainment (Spencer Tracy, Pat O'Brien and Grace Kelly), their success in politics and literature (from JFK to Eugene O'Neill), their love of language, and such less-desirable traits as racism, homophobia, alcohol abuse, and emotional distance. 

The role of formidable Irishwomen is given due prominence, especially labor organizer Mother Jones, social activist Dorothy Day and those tens of thousands of courageous nuns who built the second largest school system in the world without a penny of public funding. Finally, she notes that the Irish are difficult to pigeon-hole. For every Fr. Charles Coughlin there is a Fr. Daniel Berrigan; for every Sen. Joseph McCarthy there is a Sen. Eugene McCarthy. Dezell's breezy, informal survey is a useful introduction for those who know little about their Irish American background, but would like to discover more.

Ray O'Hanlon, The New Irish Americans (Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 1998), reminds readers that Irish immigration in not just a phenomenon of the Great Famine era. The last 20 years have seen the greatest influx of new arrivals from Ireland since the early years of the 20th century. Today's Irish immigrants are well educated, politically sophisticated, computer literate and possess a mobility (social, economic, and geographic) that their 19th century forebears could never have dreamed of. The current wave of Irish are not dominated by the Church and, thus, they fit in easily to America's secular society. 

They are just as apt to pick up and fly back to Ireland for Christmas as most Americans who travel back to their hometowns for the holidays. The new Irish are less committed to becoming Americans; they reserve their option to return to Ireland or, perhaps, emigrate to a more favorable situation in yet another country. Their world view marks a radical departure from that of their predecessors who landed on America's shores starving, diseased and impoverished in the 1840s. 

Journalist O'Hanlon is a Dublin native and senior editor of the Irish Echo newspaper published in New York. His book represents an important contribution to our understanding of the changing face of Irish immigration.