The Irish Americans: A History

Jay P. Dolan “The Irish Americans: A History” Bloomsbury Press, 2008, 311 pp.

Author Jay P. Dolan is professor emeritus of history at the University of Notre Dame.  As the title states, the book is an account of Irish History in America, as well as much of the history of Ireland.  This is the first general history of Irish-Americans since the 1960s. 

 The first significant exodus of Irish to America began in 1729 because of a decline in the linen trade and a poor harvest in Ireland. The exodus resulted in 400,000 Irish taking up residence by 1784.  (As many as one-third of the Continental Army were Irish).  Millions more arrived after the 1840s potato famine.  For the next century after 1840 the American Catholic Church grew in prestige as did Irish-American political power exemplified by Al Smith’s 1928 presidential campaign and the eventual successful campaign of JFK.  The transition for the Irish was not easy, Irish immigrants were exclusively identified as Catholics and commonly viewed as inferior and un-American in their allegiance to the Pope rather than the US.

My Notes:

Pg. 5:  The Penal Laws against the Roman Catholic Irish go all the way back to the 1600’s.  To prevent the growth of the Catholic Church, Parliament passed laws that banned priests and bishops from Ireland, outlawed Catholic schools, prohibited Irish Catholics from studying at Catholic schools in Europe, prohibited marriages between Protestants and Catholics, excluded Catholics from the professions (except medicine), and did not allow them to vote.  In 1719 Irish legislators, frustrated at their inability to stem the growth of the clergy, sought to have them branded on the cheek.  Others even sought to have outlawed priests castrated, though this legislation was never enacted.  To weaken the power of Catholic landowners, Parliament also enacted laws forbidding Catholics to purchase land and forcing those who owned land to divide it up at their death among their sons.

Pg. 18:  After 1741, as famine and a failing economy plagued the countryside, most emigrants from Ireland traveled as indentured servants because they were unable to pay the cost of passage.  This meant they were bound by contract to serve their colonial masters for four years for their passage to the New World.  So common was this practice among the Irish that nine out of ten indentured servants in Pennsylvania in the 1740s were Irish.

Pg. 22:  As many as one third of the Continental Army was Irish.  A key reason for this was their resentment against the British.

Pg. 37:  A sizable number of Irish, as many as 60 percent, chose to sail to Canada because the fairs were cheaper.  From there most would then travel to the U.S.  Sailing to North America took about five to six weeks in ships built to carry timber or grain, not human cargo. 

Pg. 68:  The history of Ireland and Irish America changed forever when famine struck in the mid-1840s.  The Irish were mostly dependent on a single crop, the potato.  This reliance proved fatal. The famine of 1845-50 has become known as the Great Famine, the effects were most severe in the west and southwest, eventually claiming more than a million lives, another 2.1 million emigrated, 1.5 million to the U.S. (By 1920 87 percent of the foreign-born Irish lived in cities.)  For years its memory shaped the attitudes of the Irish toward the English, whom many blamed for the famine. 

Pg. 106: Catholicism became the central institution of Irish life and the primary source and expression of Irish identity.  This was true in the U.S. as well by the turn of the 20^th century.   

Pg. 109: In 1850 at the Synod of Thurles Ireland, edicts were passed establishing the parish church, not the holy well, as the center of religious practice.  No more baptisms at home or wakes and burials of the dead without a Mass at church. Regular attendance at Mass, and at least the annual reception of the sacraments, now became the norm for anyone who wanted to be a practicing Catholic. (The details of this synod are quite interesting.  I suggest a google search to get the details).

Pg. 111:  St. Patrick’s Cathedral:  Archbishop John Hughes decided to build a church to rival the grandeur of European churches on the outskirts of Manhattan in 1858.  It took twenty years before it was ready for use.  It was still unfinished when it was dedicated in 1879.

Pg. 130:  For Irish nuns a new era began when in 1884 the U.S. bishops mandated every parish in the country to establish a school.  Though this of course never happened, this decision did transform the ministry of Catholic sisters since they would staff the new schools.  The Catholic school system could not have existed without the cheap labor of these nuns. 

Pg. 177:  Mother Jones: She was born Mary Harris in Cork, Ireland, in 1837.  The Great Hunger of the 1840s drove her family to North America.  She married George Jones and had four children.  In 1867 her husband and all the children died from yellow fever.  She moved to Chicago to make a living as a seamstress, but tragedy struck once again as the great Chicago fire of 1871 wiped out her seamstress shop.  Thirty-four years old, she now began a new chapter in her life as a labor activist.  She adopted the moniker of “Mother Jones” in 1890 and worked as an organizer for the United Mine Workers.

Pg. 186:  Irish Fenians Invade Canada:  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 had 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.  (I suppose any potential rocket scientists in this group may have been lost).

Pg. 201:  The 1916 Dublin Easter Rising:  this lasted less than a week.  The vast majority of Irish looked upon the small band of revolutionaries as fools.  As the rebels were led off to prison, people booed and heckled them.  Then a few weeks later the British predictably turned a military victory into a political debacle by executing the leaders of the rebellion.

 

Pg. 210:  The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire:  this fire 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.  Trapped by the spreading flames, sixty-two women jumped to their death. 

Pg. 219:  The signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922 had silenced Irish American nationalism until it flared up again in the 1960s and ‘70s. 

Pg. 230:  The son of Irish immigrants, Cardinal Dennis Dougherty (1865-1951) would reign in Philadelphia like a Renaissance price for thirty-three years.  He lived in a sixteen-room mansion when many Catholics could hardly afford to pay their rent or mortgage.  In addition, he had a winter home in Florida and would take three-month trips to Europe.  His loyalty to the pope was unrivaled.  In 1934 he issued an edict forbidding Catholics to go to the movies, under pain of sin.  The people did as they were told, effectively shutting down the movie industry in the city.  Hollywood’s ignoring of the “Legion of Decency” precipitated his boycott edict.

Pg. 282:  The 1965 U.S. immigration law did away with the national-origin quota system that had been in place since the 1920s, replacing it with legislation in which family unification took precedence, along with a maximum quota of twenty thousand for each country.  Since so few new Irish had arrived in the 1950s and ‘60s, scarcely any Irish had relatives in the U.S. who could sponsor them. 

Pg. 295:  When Meany became president of the AFL-CIO in 1955, unions had reached their peak of influence with as many as 35 percent of workers carrying a union card.  At the time of his retirement in 1979, union membership had declined to 19 percent.