The Irish Americans

I'm back from Italy. It was an especially good trip as my daughter and son-in-law accompanied us. I was able to complete this book during the 8.5 hour flight from Chicago to Rome and the 11 hour flight back from Rome to Chicago. I think any Irishman will like this book--I did.

Jay P. Dolan, “The Irish Americans” (A History), Bloomsbury Press, 2008; 352 Pages

Dolan quotes an old Chicago joke which has President Kennedy, Premier Khrushchev and Mayor Richard J. Daley as the only passengers on a sinking boat with one life jacket. Kennedy and Khrushchev each claim the jacket, the former as the leader of the free world, the latter as the head of the communist revolution, but Daley, that Irish Catholic boss of the old school, persuades them to put it to a vote. Daley wins, eight to two. This joke kind of summarizes the Irish approach and domination of large city politics.

Local machine politics in the 19th and 20th centuries were dominated by Irishmen. James Michael Curley, the king of Boston, ruled that city as mayor for a total of 16 years - including a few months from prison. The Richard Daleys, father and son, have so far run Chicago for a combined 40 years. William M. Tweed saw votes, not scum, when millions of hated Irish arrived in the 1860s in New York. He built up an alliance between the Irish and the Democratic Party that until recently was as durable as any in American politics.
Irish Americans' provincialism ended the day John Kennedy was elected president.

Kennedy's ascendance was as monumental to Irish Catholics as Barack Obama's recent election has been to African Americans. Historian Jay Dolan explains why in "The Irish Americans," arguing that perhaps no ethnic group in this country except for blacks has been more historically despised.

Many Irish came to America during the colonial era as indentured servants, destined to be auctioned off "like cattle in a market" if they survived the trans-Atlantic journey. Having escaped anti-Catholic penal laws in Ireland, they faced new ones in America; Maryland, for instance, denied them "the right to vote, worship publicly, hold office, practice law, and establish Catholic schools. But today Irish Americans are as prosperous and well educated as nearly any ethnic group.

Charles Stewart Parnell, the father of Irish Home Rule and land reform, energized a generation of Irish Americans during an 1880 visit in which he attacked the English landlord system that kept his countrymen in poverty. Eamon de Valera, Ireland's political leader for much of the 20th century, had a similar effect when he visited in 1919 to rally support for Irish independence. Later, Bill Clinton traveled to Belfast in a successful push to broker an end to the Northern Ireland troubles.

Notes:

Pg. 3: The Battle of the Boyne was the most famous of all Irish battles. It took place in July 1690 along the Boyne River, two miles west of Drogheda, where two kings, the Protestant William of Orange and the Catholic James II, fought the decisive battle that would crown the victor king of England and determine who would rule Ireland, Catholics or Protestants. The Protestant victory not only shaped the modern history of Ireland, but also laid the groundwork for the emigration of thousands of Irish to North America.

Pg. 22: As many as one third of the Continental Army was Irish. A key reason for this was their resentment against the British government and the elitist Anglican Church, which had discriminated against them.

Pg. 52: O’Connell launched a campaign in 1840 to repeal the Act of Union. However, he lost the support of most Irish Americans when he condemned the American institution of slavery.

Pg. 67: The failure of the potato crop in 1845 was only partial, since a large portion of the crop had been harvested before the blight struck. I 1846 there was total failure, with as much as 90 percent of the potato crop destroyed. An eyewitness left this description of what happened. “The leaves of the potato had been blighted, and from being green, parts of them were turned black and brown, and when these parts were felt between the fingers they would crumble into ashes…The air was laden with a sick odor of decay, as if the hand of death had stricken the potato field.”

Pg. 69: The effects of the famine were felt most deeply in the west and southwest, where many people were subsistence farmers, living on tiny plots of land. In May and Clare counties they died by the thousands. When famine struck the hardest, emigration was the heaviest, namely in Connacht and Munster, provinces in the west and southwest. In fact, Connacht lost half of its young population in the 1840’s because of emigration or death.

Pg. 77: Almost half of the emigrants in Black ’47 chose to sail to Canada since the cost of a ticket was about half of that to New York.

Pg. 92: By the turn of the 20th century, more Irish were living in the U.S. than in all of Ireland—half a million more.

Pg. 187: First in 1866 and again in 1870, a contingent of Fenians, mostly recruits from the Civil War, invaded Canada, only to be defeated both times by Canadian and British troops. Some Fenian leaders thought that if they could overthrow British rule in Canada, they could use this as a bargaining chip to persuade the British to give up their rule over Ireland. Such a victory might even persuade the U.S. to take up arms against England, thereby opening the door to a rebellion in Ireland while England was distracted by war with the Americans.

Pg. 198: The Kilmaninham Treaty began a long legislative process that would eventually give the land of Ireland back to the people of Ireland. It was finalized in 1903 with the Wyndham Act, whereby the government financed the transfer of land ownership from landlord to tenant. By 1920, outside of Ulster, which was mostly Protestant, Irish Catholics finally owned the land they lived on. Much of this was financially supported by Irish America.

Pg. 204: The Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 partitioned Ireland into two separate political entities: the six counties of Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State, which became the Republic of Ireland in 1948.

Pg. 210: Al Smith first gained widespread attention as a result of the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire on March 25, 1911, in New Your City, which claimed the lives of 146 workers, 125 of whom were young immigrant women. The factory, a sweatshop on the top three floors of a ten-story building, had too few fire exits, some of which were locked; narrow stairways; and fire escapes that collapsed under the weight of too many women, plunging them to their deaths.

Pg. 256: In the years following WWII the big-city political machine collapsed as the political climate changed. One major change was the introduction of civil service refrorm, which depleted the machine’s pool of jobs that it could give to faithful supporters. Unions also began to push for more collective bargaining, threatening the machine’s control over many public-sector jobs. Affirmative action programs in the 1960s further weakened the patronage system (Chicago a major exception).