IRISH

From 1845 until the 1850s, every harvest of potatoes, the sole crop for most Irish farmers, failed. The result was over a million deaths in Ireland from starvation and disease, and somewhere close to two million people emigrated, mostly to the United States. Protestant Irish had been immigrating to America since the 1700s, but the Irish Potato Famine led to the first large wave of Catholic immigrants, who for the most part were poorer, less educated, and less skilled than their Protestant counterparts. Additionally, sentiment against them was imported from England, and that, coupled with American anti-Catholicism, led to racism and prejudice.

POVERTY AND PREJUDICE

Irish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century tended to settle in such East Coast cities as Boston, New York, and Pittsburgh. Although some went west and a few became millionaires during the California gold rush of 1848 and 1849, most Irish immigrants refused to return to farming, defeated by the potato blight. These predominantly rural Irish chose the burgeoning metropolitan areas instead, adapting to urban life just as urban life was beginning to burst. Slums and ghettos developed, and a shantytown in the Upper West Side of Central Park was established by those who were either evicted from the slums or refused to live in them.

The immigrants quickly discovered that their treatment in America was no different than it had been in Ireland by the British, although historians have noted little material evidence of the infamous No Irish Need Apply signs and the job discrimination that were said to be rampant in the mid-to late nineteenth century—what Richard Jensen calls a "myth of victimization." However, no matter the extent of prejudice against Irish Catholics, they believed themselves to be oppressed. The only comfort was the church or, for some, alcohol. The stereotype of the Irish as heavy drinkers followed them from Ireland. In Ireland people drank, but the heavy drinker was seen as natural as fairies; in America the heavy drinker became the fat, bulbous-nosed, dirty Paddy of the contemporary cartoons. The drinking patterns from rural Ireland worsened in the urban immigrant slums and led to increased crime, violence, male desertion, and insanity among the immigrant Irish.

Men often worked in the coal mines or on railroads—dangerous work that forced them to leave their families for extended periods. Irish women were often more employable than men, especially those who already had a background supporting themselves in Ireland. In the United States they were able to work as maids and to earn a decent living, room and board included; in addition they were exposed to the values of middle- and upper-class Americans, thus easing acculturation. These women encouraged their daughters to be teachers and office workers: in 1870, 20 percent of New York City schoolteachers were Irish or Irish American women (Diner, p. 97). After marriage Irish immigrant women stayed home and ran the household, often alone. Thus the stereotype of the bossy Irish matriarch exists only in the United States: in 1875, 16 percent of Irish American households were headed by women (Biddle, p. 101). The Irish American matriarch was responsible for keeping her children inside the Catholic faith and civilizing the family, keeping the men from drinking, saving the money, and pushing her children toward middle-class professions such as teachers, policemen, or priests.

ANTI-CATHOLIC SENTIMENT

Anti-Catholicism had been a feature of American society since colonial times yet became increasingly virulent as more Irish and German Catholics entered the country from the 1820s onward. The Catholic Church and Catholic immigrants were seen as bowing to a foreign power, with priests and nuns portrayed in the popular press as immoral and unsavory. In the 1850s the antiforeign and anti-Catholic American Party, commonly called the Know-Nothing Party, advocated national unity, the exclusion of foreign-born people from voting or holding public office, and anti-Catholic legislation. However, the Know-Nothing Party eventually dissolved as a result of internal conflicts, and the force of the nativist movement declined after 1856.

Although anti-Catholicism did not disappear, the issue was subsumed by the Civil War. Large-scale Irish immigration to the United States only began with the famine generation. Between 1845 and 1870, 2.5 million Irish immigrated to the Untied States; and between 1871 and 1921, 2.1 million more came (Fanning, Irish Voice, p. 157). Unlike the famine generation, this second wave of immigrants arrived to find an economic, political, and social network that made their acculturation easier. Their knowledge of English as well as their "whiteness" made them eligible for citizenship and thus able to enter politics more quickly than other immigrant groups. In 1880 William R. Grace, who made his money in shipping, became New York City's first Irish Catholic mayor. Such growing political power, however, led to a new wave of nativism and anti-Catholic sentiment. The Immigration Restriction League was founded in Boston in 1894, mostly against new immigrants but particularly against Catholics. As late as the 1920s, Catholics, along with Jews and African Americans, bore the brunt of attacks from the Ku Klux Klan. Yet by 1900, although Irish ghettos still existed and unskilled Irish laborers continued to take dangerous jobs on the railroads and in mines, most first- and second-generation Irish had moved from the tenements to the suburbs and thus into greater contact with Protestant Americans.

ASSIMILATION

The Catholic Church played a significant role in hastening the assimilation of Irish immigrants and their children. Church reformers tried promoting American patriotism and capitalist values among their Irish parishioners. Irish journalists and clergy denounced drunkenness and attempted to teach what were defined as the Protestant habits of "industry, thrift, sobriety, and self-control" (Miller, p. 333). Between 1870 and 1921 the Catholics constructed thousands of churches, convents, colleges, and schools, including the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., which opened it doors to students in 1889. Saint Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue in New York City was completed in 1879, a powerful symbol of the success of the Irish.

However, some Irish Americans were insecure and anxious about their tenuous position within the middle class; these "lace-curtain Irish," as they were called, became the subject of much concern in the literature of the period. George McManus's popular cartoon strip "Bringing Up Father," which debuted in 1913 and became an instant hit, mocked an Irish American couple who wanted to Americanize at all costs. Their scars of poverty and social ostracism still palpable, the couple, Jiggs and Maggie, were particularly concerned with maintaining financial success and appearances. Maggie's characteristic exclamation "what will the neighbors think!" reflected a sensitivity to still perceived anti–Irish Catholic prejudice. A fear of poverty sometimes led to miserliness and identification as slum-lords, as Eugene O'Neill (1888–1953) depicts in Long Day's Journey into Night, his autobiographical play set in 1912 and published posthumously in 1956. Irish foremen in shops, no longer subject to the oppression of their former American superiors, treated their often Slavic workers worse than they themselves had been treated decades earlier, as Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) depicts in his novel The Jungle (1906). This dangerous tendency to lose one's values and culture during the process of assimilation was well represented by Irish American journalists and novelists.

THE IRISH AMERICAN LITERARY RESPONSE

Fiction by Irish American writers in the late nineteenth century often focused on this conflict: the desire for middle-class respectability in the face of ongoing poverty and economic depressions versus the fear of losing one's sense of Irish identity. The Irish American press played an important role by printing an abundance of short fiction written by Irish Americans in this period. Periodicals such as the New York Irish World and the Boston Pilot sought to counteract stereotypes yet in the process often ignored reality. They published stories that rarely showed tenement life or working conditions despite the fact that many Irish were still in the ghettos in the 1870s; instead, they emphasized success stories about Irish immigrants who Americanized without losing their ethnic identity. For the most part the Irish American press printed stories that, although unrealistic, provided early positive images of Irish Americans who worked hard but stayed Catholic in the process of assimilation.

However, fiction by first-generation writers, often in the form of domestic novels or fallen-women novels, did depict the struggles that immigrants faced, not always successfully, in the New World: the desire for economic security; the difficulty of maintaining one's faith; the power of the Irish immigrant mother; and a nostalgia for Ireland and for the supposed innocence of the past. Some of the titles emphasize these themes: The Lost Rosary; or, Our Irish Girls, Their Trials, Temptations, and Triumphs (1870) by Peter McCorry (writing under the pen name Con O'Leary) and Annie Reilly; or, The Fortunes of an Irish Girl in New York (1873) by John McElgun. These writers used popular literary conventions to address issues of concern to Irish immigrants and their children.

The second-generation writer Katherine E. Conway's best-selling Lalor's Maples (1901) argues that the ruthless search for the American Dream was ultimately self-destructive and, more importantly, could destroy Irish American family life, including traditional gender roles. Mary Lalor, an immigrant from a middle-class background, marries John Lalor, another immigrant who works his way from poverty to economic success during the late 1860s. Mary is domineering, obsessed with attaining and retaining middle-class respectability and objects, including the house named in the title. Her role as mother is tarnished as she uses her daughters as a means to upward mobility and then as a way to save the family from financial ruin.

Other late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century fiction, now mostly out of print but identified by the literary historian and critic Charles Fanning in his book The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish-American Fiction (2000), eschews sentimental plots for more realism and satire. Such works include Henry F. Keenan's The Aliens (1886), about the prejudices faced by famine immigrants in Rochester, New York; Maurice Francis Egan's The Disappearance of John Longworthy (1890), the satire of a corrupt, social-climbing Irish American politician and other lace-curtain Irish; James W. Sullivan's Tenement Tales of New York (1895), about a child called Slob Murphy, who lives and dies in the slums; Kate McPhelim Cleary's short story "The Stepmother" (1901), recounting the lonely experiences of an Irish immigrant woman in Nebraska; and Harvey J. O'Higgins's "The Exiles" (1906), detailing the harsh life of New York City servant girls. One of the few Irish American dramatists before Eugene O'Neill was Edward Harrigan, whose play Squatter Sovereignty (1881) takes place in New York's Central Park, site of the Irish shantytown created by evicted Irish immigrants. Unlike other plays of the period, which featured the so-called stage Irishman with a brogue that boomed in anger when drunk, Harrigan's play had more-realistic, less-stereotypical characters (Flynn, p. 10).

Few Irish American writers of the period reached a wide non–Irish American audience; however, one was able to bridge the ethnic reading gap. In the 1890s the Chicago journalist Finley Peter Dunne, who was American-born of Irish parents, created "the first fully realized ethnic neighborhood in American literature, Bridgeport on the South Side of Chicago" (Fanning, Irish Voice, p. 214), and its central character, Martin Dooley, a bachelor saloon keeper. Dunne's sketches, written in pure Irish dialect, satirize almost every aspect of Irish life in America, including drinking policemen and cheating local politicians. He sympathetically portrays the Irish American working class in Chicago yet also mocks the pretensions of the lace-curtain Irish while at the same time recognizing that assimilation is inevitable. In one sketch recounted by Charles Fanning there is a debate between a Mr. and Mrs. Hogan over the naming of their children:

After the births of Sarsfield, Lucy, Honoria, Veronica, and Charles Stewart Parnell Hogan, the old man tries to name his tenth child "Michael" after his father. "Ye'll be namin' no more children iv mine out iv dime novels," he declares. "An' ye'll name no more iv mine out iv th' payroll iv th' bridge depar-rtmint," says his wife. In the end, Mr. Dooley is on hand to watch the new baby christened—Augustus, "th' poor, poor child." (Fanning, Irish Voice, p. 227)

Another sketch shows the generation gap with teenager Molly Donahue worrying her parents with her feminist viewpoints and non-Irish music on the piano. Dunne is also critical of such Irish Americans as landlords and politicians who abuse other Irish Americans. But his power lies in his depiction of the everyday Irish American at the end of the century in characters such as Father Kelly, Fireman Shay, and workingmen like Malachi Hennessy.

THE IRISH IN MAINSTREAM AMERICAN LITERATURE

The Irish are not major characters in most mainstream American fiction during the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, and often their ethnicity is never explicitly emphasized. However, anti-Irish caricatures were popular with some readers after the Civil War and into the 1890s: Thomas Nast's cartoons were published in both the popular Harper's Weekly (1862–1880s) and in the short-lived America: A Journal for Americans out of Chicago (1888–1891), a journal that was both high-brow and anti-immigrant generally, anti–Irish Catholic specifically. Nast's "Simian Irishmen—St. Patrick's Day 1867" portrays the Irish as apes attacking the law, and his "Tammany Hall" series of cartoons in 1869–1871 helped topple the rule of the corrupt political boss William Marcy Tweed of Tammany Hall.

Several American novels had stereotypical Irish characters, though their Irishness was not always relevant to their roles in the plots. Henry James, whose ancestry was Irish, had few notable Irish characters in his fiction, with the exception of Mrs. Muldoon in his short story "The Jolly Corner" (1908). In Frank Norris's novel McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899), the main character has an Irish name, but the character himself is not explicitly identified as Irish, although one could argue that the portrait of the character includes negative stereotypes associated with Irishness: an apelike body, stupidity, violence, and drunkenness. In the same way, Mark Twain's Pap Finn, the notoriously drunk and abusive father of Huck Finn, is not explicitly identified as Irish despite his Irish surname, although Twain has said that the prototype of Pap was Jimmy Finn, a Hannibal town drunk (Smith, p. 197). Twain does briefly depict lace-curtain, social-climbing Irish Americans in The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873), with the characters of Mr. and Mrs. Patrique Oreille (O'Reilly) and their daughter Breezhay (Bridget) who pretend to be French rather than Irish; but they are relatively minor characters.

Stephen Crane's Maggie, A Girl of the Streets: A Story of New York (1893) depicts the dismal lives of tenement immigrants in general rather than of the Irish specifically. A journalist, Crane (1871–1900) went to the Bowery, a squalid and violent slum, in 1891–1892 to see tenement life for himself; at the time 40 percent of the population in that area was Irish (Smith, p. 200). However, although the characters listen to Irish songs, they are not identified as Irish, and Johnson, Maggie's family name, is not particularly Irish. Some critics saw Crane's purpose as illustrating the effects of tenement living, which creates the conditions for a world of its own morality and values, a world where drunkenness leads to violence and too many children: "In the street infants played or fought with other infants or sat stupidly in the way of vehicles" (p. 6). Others argued that his depiction supported the fear that these immigrants and their children would become a threat to Americans. Yet Crane's Maggie, who has the humility and chastity of the ideal nineteenth-century woman, is foiled not by her ethnicity but by her environment. Unlike her mother, who adapts to her environment by becoming the antimother—violent, drunk, a destroyer rather than a nurturer—Maggie is unable to adjust to the tenement world and is unaware of a middle-class world outside her geographical boundaries. She falls into prostitution because she has no other way to survive. For Crane, Maggie's ethnicity is less relevant than her impoverished environment.

Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945), who like Crane is identified as part of the school of naturalism, a literary realism proposing that one's environment, not free will, determines one's fate, gives a realistic portrayal of an Irish American politician and political machine in his novels The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914), which are the first two volumes of his Trilogy of Desire. The first novel is set in Philadelphia in the 1870s and 1880s, when the Irish were gaining control of politics in that city. Edward Malia Butler arrives in the city an illiterate, unskilled immigrant who soon builds a successful business and becomes a politician. His stereo-typical brogue and temper is modified by love for his daughter, by the Catholic faith, and by sobriety. As with Crane, however, Dreiser blames the politician's corruption on urban America rather than on his ethnicity. Similarly in The Titan, the politician Cowperwood's corruption, while more crude and vicious than Butler's, is also depicted as a result of the Chicago Irish political machine, an American phenomenon, rather than purely on his ethnicity. Unlike Butler, Cowperwood does not maintain family or religious ties, thus his corruption is less sympathetically portrayed.

For Upton Sinclair in The Jungle it is the capitalistic system that is at fault rather than ethnicity. In one of the few novels where Irish Americans interact with other immigrants—in this case Lithuanians at a Chicago meatpacking factory—the Irish foremen are the victimizers. The stereotypical Irish characters—for instance, Phil Connor is a drunk who extorts sex from the immigrant women he supervises—only reinforce Sinclair's theme of capitalism's destruction of every-one's humanity.

Two non-Irish writers in the late nineteenth century who explicitly focused on ethnicity and the interaction between Irish and non-Irish were Harold Frederic (1856–1898), particularly in his novel The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), and Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909), in her stories from the 1880s and 1890s about Irish immigrants in coastal Maine. Frederic was a New York Times correspondent in London who wrote so sympathetically about Irish home rule that many readers assumed he was Irish Catholic. In his novel Theron Ware is a Methodist minister assigned to Octavius, a town with a large Irish Catholic population. At first the minister, like his wife and congregation, holds only negative opinions of the Irish. He views the priests, through his reading of anti-Catholic fiction and Thomas Nast's anti-Catholic cartoons, as "black-robed, tonsured men, with leering satanic masks, making a bonfire of the Bible in the public schools" (p. 50), though he admits to himself that "so far as personal acquaintance went, the Irish had been to him only a name" (p. 48). Yet his disillusionment with his congregation and his encounters with the Catholic sacrament of extreme unction as well as meeting the educated and cultured Celia Madden and Father Forbes eventually make him idealize the Irish as culturally and intellectually superior to the puritanical Methodists in Octavius. The ritual of extreme unction has a powerful effect on Ware, who sees it as more transformative than Protestant rituals.

Although they are relatively minor characters, Jeremiah Madden, said to be the wealthiest man in Octavius, and his son Michael Madden affirm the nobility and morality of the Irish. Jeremiah built himself up but never turned his back on his fellow Irishmen. Michael is kind and religious, recognizing that Ware's transformation is self-destructive. Frederic seems to suggest with the drunken younger brother, Theodore, that the second generation of Irish were at risk of contamination by America. Theodore (who has thus Americanized his Irish name Terence) is described as "the product of a wholly different race" (p. 87), and his alcoholism is the result of both his becoming too assimilated and his involvement in the corrupt politics of Tammany Hall. Frederic's novel echoes themes seen in Dreiser and Dunne, particularly the potentially negative effect of Americanization on Irish immigrants.

Sarah Orne Jewett's "Irish" stories also sympathetically depict the effects of assimilation on Irish immigrants and their children. In several stories Jewett describes the Irish immigrants' homesickness as well as their yearning to succeed in America, sometimes at great cost. In "Between Mass and Vespers," Dan Nolan travels west to seek his fortune but becomes instead a con man turning his back on the value system of Irish community until he is saved by Father Ryan, the village priest back in the New England mill town. Yet Jewett does not always blame Americanization specifically. In "Luck of the Bogans" the immigrants Mike and Biddy Bogan leave their farm in Ireland to immigrate to America so their son can become upwardly mobile. Instead, he is corrupted at the public school, becomes a drunk, and finally gets killed in a fight. However, the son's egoism and his parents' pushing him to succeed are identified as the causes of his death, with the narrator ironically noting that the climate in America brings out the best in the Irish, a sentiment also noted with sarcasm by Father Forbes in The Damnation of Theron Ware.

Eugene O'Neill, a pivotal figure in American drama, effectively brings Irish and Irish American family life into the mainstream with Beyond the Horizon (1920), a Cain and Abel story (influenced by the Irishman T. C. Murray's 1911 play Birthright) set on a small New England farm. Despite their Irish name, Mayo, the ethnicity of the characters is subsumed by their humanity, echoing the position of Irish Americans by 1920. World War I and the Easter Rising (24 April 1916) occurred at the same time that the third- and fourth-generation Irish ceased yearning for a long ago, idealized past, choosing instead to take part in America's future.

See alsoAssimilation; Catholics; The Damnation of Theron Ware; Immigration; Maggie, A Girl of the Streets; Poverty

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Conway, Katherine E. Lalor's Maples. Boston: Pilot, 1901.

Crane, Stephen. Maggie, A Girl of the Streets: A Story of New York. 1893. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999.

Dreiser, Theodore. Trilogy of Desire: Three Novels. New York: World, 1972. Contains The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic (1947).

Fanning, Charles, ed. The Exiles of Erin: Nineteenth-Century Irish-American Fiction. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987. This anthology contains several of the works, or excerpts from them, that are mentioned in this article.

Frederic, Harold. The Damnation of Theron Ware. 1896. Introduction by Scott Donaldson. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Jewett, Sarah Orne. The Irish Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett. Edited by Jack Morgan and Louis A. Renza. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996.

O'Neill, Eugene. Beyond the Horizon: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920.

Secondary Works

Biddle, Ellen Horgan. "The American Catholic Irish Family." In Ethnic Families in America: Patterns and Variations, edited by Charles H. Mindel and Robert W. Habenstein, pp. 89–123. New York: Elsevier, 1976.

Bramen, Carrie Tirado. "The Americanization of Theron Ware." Novel: A Forum on Fiction 31, no. 1 (1997): 63–86.

Casey, Daniel J., and Robert E. Rhodes, eds. Modern Irish-American Fiction: A Reader. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1989.

Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

Diner, Hasia R. Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, 101st ser., no. 2. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.

Drewniany, Peter. "Not Marionettes: The American Irish in The Damnation of Theron Ware." Eire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies 16, no. 4 (1981): 48–58.

Fanning, Charles. The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish-American Fiction. 2nd ed. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. The first edition was subtitled Irish-American Fiction from the 1760s to the 1980s.

Flynn, Joyce. "Sites and Sights: The Iconology of the Subterranean in Late Nineteenth-Century Irish-American Drama." MELUS 18, no. 1 (1993): 5–19.

Jensen, Richard. "'No Irish Need Apply': A Myth of Victimization." Journal of Social History 36, no. 2 (2002): 405–429.

Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Smith, Herbert Joseph. "From Stereotype to Acculturation: The Irish-American's Fictional Heritage from Brackenridge to Farrell." Ph.D. diss., Kent State University, 1980.

Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993.

Stacey L. Donohue