NOTES ON IRISH AMERICA - Literature and Writing



NOTES ON IRISH AMERICA

"The Irish were the first major immigrant group to threaten the stability of American society. Out of their interaction with the host society came a more diverse and tolerant America. Facility in the English language and familiarity with representative politics allowed the Irish to translate cultural and religious cohesion into organizations that profoundly influenced American politics, labor organizations, and the Catholic Church while these institutions were in early stages of development." -- Patrick J. Blessing, "IRISH," Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980) 524-545, Stephan Thernstrom, Ann Orlov, Oscar Handlin, eds

"The Irish were uncommonly successful in politics. They ran the city. But the very parochialism and bureaucracy that enabled them to succeed in politics prevented them from doing much with government. In a sense the Irish did not know what to do with power once they got it. They never thought of politics as an instrument of social change." (146) -- Daniel Patrick Moynihan on “The Irish,” in Beyond the Melting Pot (1963)

"Have the Irish in their successful search for respectability been adequately compensated for abandoning their ethnic cultural identity? Has their trip from Irish Catholic, urban neighborhoods to suburban melting pots been a journey to achievement and contentment or an excursion from someplace to no place? Is the history of Irish-America an ethnic success story or a warning to other groups that they should be wary of surrendering ethnicity for the sake of assimilation?" (10) -- Lawrence J. McCaffrey, The Irish Diaspora in America (CUA, 1976, 1985)

"Without Irish America, nationalism in Ireland might not have survived. The Irish diaspora in America provided both the physical force and the constitutional nationalist movements in Ireland with the essential funds and passion that enabled them to force British governments to make major concessions regarding Irish religious, social and economic grievances. The democratic, egalitarian, and republican contents of Fenianism were manifestations of the Irish-American value system." (6)

"Is a sense of Irishness separate from Catholicism possible in the United States? Catholicism became the bedrock of Irish-American identity by instilling into Irish culture, not a lofty intellectual or aesthetic sense, but a unique sense of values and attitudes. It embodied Irish-American historical experience, signifying both persecution and preservation and providing a sense of community, nationality, and identity. What can take its place?" (9) -- Lawrence J. McCaffrey, Textures of Irish America (Syracuse Univ. Press., 1992)

In Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (1985), Kerby Miller argues that McCaffrey overstresses “suburbanization and embourgeoisment of the Irish that trivializes the immigrant and even the second generation experiences,” passing over “the pain of exile; poverty, exploitation, and the conflict (both inter-and intraethnic); the strains and disappointments of assimilation; and what Farrell (James T.) called the ‘tragedy of the worker.’” (xi) McCaffrey thinks Miller “exaggerates Irish-American misery” and isolation; Miller underplays immigrant commitment to America. In Out of Ireland (1994), co-authored with Paul Wagner, Miller points out that "fewer than 10 percent of Irish immigrants to the New World ever returned to 'Mother Ireland,'" (125) leading McCaffrey to conclude that "these figures seem to contradict the 'exile' and "sociologically and psychologically dysfunctional' Irish Catholic immigrant themes of Emigrants and Exiles." -- Lawrence J. McCaffrey, The Irish Catholic Diaspora in America (The Catholic University of America Press, 1997)

"After at least three generations of immigration and success, Irish cultural traits [such as gregariousness, gathering in a public house, religious intensity, and activity in religious organizations] have not been eliminated from Irish American Catholics. Nor made them unhappy. Their distant cousins in the South, Protestant now, Americans much longer, and not nearly so affluent, are not unhappy either…Irish-Americans[ that is, Irish Catholics in America] are still recognizably Irish, and predictions of their demise as an identifiable American sub-culture seem premature." -- Andrew Greeley, "Achievement of the Irish in America," The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, Michael Glazier, ed. (Univ. Notre Dame Press, 1999), 3-5.

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