Subject: Ir-D Gary A. Richardson reviews...
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Gary A. Richardson reviews...

The Irish in America: Long Journey Home. Series Producer: Thomas Lennon.
Narrator: Michael Murphy. Walt Disney Studios, WGBH/Boston, and Lennon
Documentary Group. PBS, January 26-28, 1998.

This review article first appeared in the New Hibernia Review, 2:2
(Summer, 1998) 132-141, and appears here with the permission of its
author and through the courtesy of Thomas Dillon Redshaw, the editor,
and James Rogers, the publisher of New Hibernia Review. Note that
copyright of the review article remains with its author, Gary A.
Richardson.

The New Hibernia Review is based at the Center for Irish Studies,
University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, USA
http://www.stthomas.edu/www/CIS_http/index.html
Email James Rogers


Gary A. Richardson

Leaving the Old Neighborhood Behind:
The Irish in America

Representing the Irish to others and particularly to themselves has
always been a problematic venture. In 1911, 'The Irish Players', an
Abbey Theatre touring company led by Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats,
arrived in America to stage some of the vital theater that had developed
in Ireland since the turn of the century. Although works by Yeats,
Gregory, Shaw, Lennox Robinson, and others were generally well received
by both critics and audiences, some Irish immigrants and Irish Americans
loathed the Ireland and the Irish put forth by the players. Particularly
troubling to those still struggling for what they saw as American
respectability was J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, a
play perceived as degrading Irish womanhood and abusing the entire Irish
nation. Such fraternal orders as the Ancient Order of Hibernians joined
with Irish-language and literary groups to put political pressure on
local officials to prevent the plays' mountings or to guarantee their
financial failure. When those efforts failed, displeasure manifested
itself in boos and catcalls from Boston to Chicago. Feelings ran so high
at Playboy's New York City opening that a disturbance erupted in the
Maxine Elliott Theatre. The next day the New York daily newspapers
reported, predictably, an Irish 'riot' to the city at large.

Given an ethnic history in which issues of representation play an
enormous and at times devastating part, no one should be surprised that
any new attempt to present a group as varied as the Irish to a wider
audience should be met with skepticism, even hostility in certain
quarters. In the last two years alone, the mounting of a major
exhibition on the New York City Irish at the City Museum of New York and
the phenomenal success of Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning
Angela's Ashes (1996) have generated much soul-searching concerning what
constitutes an accurate Irish or Irish-American history and who should
control the story presented to the wider population. And, now, Walt
Disney Studios, WGBH/Boston, and the Lennon Documentary Group have
together provided another occasion to revisit these issues by producing
the nearly six-hour-long The Irish in America: Long Journey Home. While
not without its flaws, The Irish in America is certainly the most
comprehensive and in many ways the best video history to date of a
people whose contributions to the building of the United States remain
widely unknown by the American population at large.

The Irish in America is organized into four programs: 'The Great
Hunger', 'All Across America', 'Up From City Streets', and 'Success'.
As the installments' titles suggest, the series' chronological narrative
partakes of the traditional immigrant story of entry, dispersal,
struggle, and, eventually, successful assimilation. Although that
narrative still has its proponents, it is hardly unproblematic.
Historians, sociologists, psychologists, and ethnic and cultural studies
scholars working during the last three decades have amply demonstrated
that the complexity of immigrant experiences transcends such
straightforward description. Thus, on one level The Irish in America
must be faulted as ethnic scholarship. Despite ready resources, it too
neatly presents the Irish and their history as the prototypes of all
subsequent ethnic groups who have immigrated to the United States. On
the other hand, it is entirely plausible to argue that this series was
never intended as scholarship at all. If one acknowledges the
limitations of television as a scholarly medium and predicates the
audience as one not of specialists but interested members of the general
population who may know little or nothing of Irish America beyond annual
television footage of St. Patrick's Day parades, then the decision to
deploy a familiar story is understandable, if regrettable. Despite the
series' overextended general thesis, despite the awkward movement back
and forth between Ireland and America in the first episode, and despite
the sense of fragmentation that is, perhaps, the inevitable result of
each episode having its own writers and producers, the individual
segments have clear strengths that justify them individually and make
the series itself a welcome addition to the popular visual history of
ethnic groups.

'The Great Hunger' is in some ways both the most visually affecting and
intellectually debatable program in the series, for it attempts not only
to set out the series' overall themes but also to provide the background
of Irish immigration to America between 1607 and 1845. The instalment
begins with film of a contemporary New York City St. Patrick's Day
parade with voiceovers suggesting its enduring appeal even as it has
moved from a strictly ethnic celebration to what one commentator calls
'a Catholic festival'. The current parade quickly forms a historical
counterpoint to a turn-of-the-century antecedent, as black-and-white
footage is intercut to establish that the solid lines of police,
firefighters, pipers, and fraternal organizations seen in both parades
were once assertions of ethnic pride and political power rather than
benign emblems of religious solidarity. This retreat to the past
continues with an abbreviated survey of seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century Irish history, which is one of the least attractive elements of
the instalment.

Part of the ostensible justification for the brevity of the treatment
is, no doubt, the program's insistently American focus. For example,
Hugh O'Neill, the second earl of Tyrone, is presented not to allow for a
discussion of late-sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Irish
resistance to British imperialism but to link his 1607 self-exile with
the settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, and to date the first influx of
Irish to America. Similarly, while virtually ignoring Irish attempts to
regain independence during the eighteenth century, the program goes on
to argue the uncontroversial thesis that the colonial growth of America
throughout the same period was due in part to the arrival of significant
numbers of Irish indentured servants, both Protestant and Roman
Catholic, and displaced Ulster Protestants. Although the general
outlines of eighteenth-century Irish immigration are well known to
specialists, particularly since Kerby Miller's monumental Emigrants and
Exiles (1985), their rehearsal allows the producers to track the
immigrants to the American frontier. Along the way, they not only
discuss Irish contributions during the American Revolution but also
correct the widespread misconception that John F. Kennedy was the first
Irish-American president of the United States, an honor which rightfully
goes to Andrew Jackson, the son of Irish immigrants.

As these two examples suggest, however, the movement back and forth
between Irish and American historical narratives seems awkward,
especially as images of ships sailing one way or the other across the
screen hardly substitute for transitions in the script. Nevertheless, in
one of the strongest portions of the instalment, the producers set the
stage for the history of later nineteenth-century Irish immigration by
discussing the nativist activities of the Know-Nothing party, the anti-
Irish riots of 1844 in Philadelphia, and Archbishop John Hughes's threat
in the wake of events in Philadelphia to turn New York City into
'another Moscow' if a single Catholic church were destroyed. While
hardly vindicating their overall thesis that the Irish were prototypical
of all subsequent immigrant groups, 'The Great Hunger' does go a long
way toward suggesting that anti-immigrant sentiment has long been a
least an undercurrent of American economic, cultural, and political life
- - a theme to which the series returns in 'All Across America'.

As Peter Quinn notes, however, the defining historical event that
intertwined forever the fates of Ireland and the United States was the
Great Famine, or more accurately An Gorta Mor, or 'the Great Hunger'.
To establish the background for the mid-nineteenth-century flood of
Irish Catholic immigrants to America, this program outlines the
communal, agrarian nature of Irish society, briefly noting the tenant-
landlord agricultural system that pervaded the Irish countryside. While
romanticizing a bit the sense of collective community that characterized
provincial Ireland at midcentury, the instalment does make the critical
point that circumstances had coerced a third of Ireland's 1845
population of about nine million people into almost total dependence on
the New World import, the potato, as a food staple, even as grain
continued to be grown for export. It also reiterates that this Irish-
speaking, rural, Catholic population was substantially different from
earlier groups of immigrants. The story of the period 1845 to 1851 is
movingly rendered, although the constant reference to the rural Irish as
'potato people' begins to grate. While one might not be surprised to
hear that the phrase was used by an English colonial official to
describe the reliance of the rural Irish upon their subsistence crop,
its reiteration throughout this portion of the program seems a bit
gratuitous especially as the diet has formed one of the perennial
markers of humor directed at the Irish.

Naturally enough, the story begins with the peasants who suffered most
immediately and lastingly from the starvation and disease that became
the twin killers between 1845 and 1851-52 when the Famine was at its
peak. Building upon the pathos evoked by Paddy Moloney and Brian Keane's
moving 'Famine Theme', the producers rely upon the powerful storytelling
talents of Irish and Irish Americans to evoke the full misery of the
period. Juxtaposing the words of Patrick Campbell, James Monohan, Ciaran
Murchadha, and a host of others, with images of abandoned Irish
dwellings, ruined workhouses, graveyards, and road projects that the
starving population were forced to work on for relief, provides a
forceful rendering of a natural catastrophe compounded by the
alternatively enlightened and benighted policies of English Protestant
reformers led by Charles Edward Trevelyan, the assistant-secretary to
the treasury. The still occasionally heard reading of the Famine as an
act of genocide is silently refuted through a careful rendering of
successful initial English relief efforts and a contextualization of
later English actions as reflecting not a yearning to clear the land but
an ethnocentric desire to reshape Ireland's population in the image of
their English masters. The slow slide toward turning the problem of
famine relief over to Irish landlords not only reflected the callous
indifference that characterized upper-class English attitudes toward
their own, as well as Irish, poor but it also reflected a laissez-faire
capitalism reinforced with a steadfast belief that economic reform was
an opportunity for moral reform.

The program's writers also attempt to broaden the discussion of the
disaster by examining the varied reactions of the ruling class,
exemplified by Dennis Mahon of County Roscommon and Lord Sligo. Mahon's
assassination, the program suggests, reinforced British attitudes about
the lawless 'wild Irish' and proved a portent of grassroots Irish
resistance to the abuses they suffered in industrial America. On the
other hand, Lord Sligo's initial attempts to sustain his tenants are
shown as eventually giving way in the face of potential ruin to his
cold-eyed acceptance of the inevitability of clearing the land of
tenants who could not pay rent. One is left with the haunting feeling
that all who survived - peasants and landlords alike - were scarred
beyond recovery by these events. The barely detectable defensiveness of
the Lord Jeremy Altamont, Lord Sligo's descendant, and Patrick
Campbell's story of his grandmother's guilt at having survived the
Famine while so many of her family's friends and neighbors starved to
death are both threads from the same fabric of history. Only chance and
constitution, the writers suggest, seem to have determined the fates of
those overtaken by the disaster. The communal life of prefamine Ireland
was gone. A million people had died. A million-and-a-half more had
immigrated, primarily to the United States. Once again, this program
argues, the Irish felt driven from their lands and sent wandering. The
loneliness of the exile and the restless search for the comfort of home
and hearth that had begun to color the Irish vision of themselves in the
wake of the Flight of the Earls in 1607 now became the dominant note of
the whole population, especially those who, like O'Neill, felt forced
into exile.

The second and at 115 minutes the longest instalment, 'All Across
America', seeks to portray the breadth of Irish penetration of all
regions and classes of the United States in the period between the 1845
and the turn of the century. Picking up the immigration story on the
docks and levees of New Orleans, the cheapest destination for the Irish,
the narrative charts the misery of debarking Irish sweltering in the
heat and humidity of the city's subtropical climate. Surprisingly frank
in admitting the racial antagonisms that arose between Irish and African
Americans - either slave or freeman - as a result of a system that did
not provide mechanisms for both to rise economically, Mark Zwonitzer,
the episode writer, charts the quick and ruthless rise of the Irish to
domination of the labor markets in the coastal and river cities' docks,
wharves, warehouses, and among its hackney and dray handlers. But the
subsistence existence that the New Orleans Irish wrested from the city
did not provide the means to leave its worst neighborhoods, districts
that were overtaken by the 1853 yellow fever epidemic that killed nearly
10,000 'newcomers', a polite euphemism for the Irish. Having established
a pattern of urban, ethnic isolation in the New Orleans segment, the
narrative progresses to Boston where the major difference for the Irish
seems to have been the weather. The return to the anti-immigrant theme
and an expanded view of Irish response to Protestant antagonism and the
Know-Nothing phenomenon is followed by a startling brief - less than
three minutes - narrative of Irish contributions to both North and South
during the Civil War. Given the writer's assertion that the bravery of
the Irish during the war went far to gaining them acceptance among
native citzens, it seems odd that this narrative did not provide more
details.

The postbellum Irish experience consumes the remainder of 'All Across
America' and allows for both examination of broad classes of people and
institutions as well as more intimate portraits of individuals selected,
one assumes, to represent the diversity of paths to Irish economic
power. One of the most interesting decisions that Zwonitzer makes is to
focus attention on the high percentage of single Irish females who
immigrated to the United States alone, a significant distinction between
Irish immigration and that of other groups. As the program points out,
these women reflected the diminishing economic and matrimonial
opportunities in Ireland, as fathers in the wake of the Famine no longer
subdivided their holdings, giving them instead to a single child,
usually the eldest son. Thus, the American middle class was treated to
an endless supply of Irish cooks and maids whose independence served as
one of the major components of the economic engine which perpetuated
Irish immigration to America. Additionally, the Roman Catholic church
and education benefited as many others of these women either took holy
orders or became teachers in public or Catholic schools.

Another such minisegment involves the place of the Roman Catholic church
in the life of Catholic immigrants. As Lawrence McCaffrey notes here,
the Roman Catholic Church served the Irish as 'the bridge of familiarity
between the old world and the new'. The carefully selected narratives
and the images from the period aptly reflect the immigrants' attempt to
render physically in massive, solid substance their formidable sense of
psychological and spiritual refuge provided by the church. After having
reflected on the Irish impulse toward spiritual improvement, 'All Across
America' turns to Irish attempts in the temporal realm to obtain
economic justice. Examining the 1877-79 Molly Maguire episode in the
anthracite fields of western Pennsylvania, this program suggests the
beginnings of the long involvement of the Irish with labor movements.
But in the quick distancing of the Roman Catholic Church and the Ancient
Order of Hibernians from those accused of being members of the Molly
Maguires, the episode makes evident how tenuous was the hold that the
Irish of the era had on acceptance by their native-born neighbors. The
remainder of 'All Across America' is devoted to the lives of three men:
heavyweight boxing champion, John L. Sullivan; the 'King of the
Comstock', John Mackay; and the man who helped electrify America by
providing copper from his Anaconda Mining Company, Marcus Daly. Each
helped to redefine the Irish in America, and in the process each showed
their contemporaries and those who followed them that the Irish could be
successful in America.

'Up From City Streets', the third program in the series, focuses on the
urban Irish, particularly those in New York City, and explores the
heyday of Irish political power in New York, institutionalized as
Tammany Hall and personified by Alfred E. Smith. This episode's tight
focus, which moves in rapid order from generalities about the urban life
of Irish immigrants and their children living in Tammany's Fourth Ward
mainstay to the career of Smith, makes for a discreetly satisfying,
contextualized biography that can and is read by the producers as the
last moment of general resistance to full Irish integration into the
broader society. As this program's focal point, Smith proves a
fascinating character. As one of the politicians whose career spanned
the period between still photography and newsreels, and as a person
given to the theatrical, Smith's life provides a host of wonderfully
evocative images.

By turns paperboy, Fulton Fish Market laborer, Tammany underling,
assemblyman, sheriff of New York, president of the New York City Board
of Aldermen, governor, and, ultimately, presidential aspirant, Smith is
presented in surprising detail. To the credit of writer Richard Ben
Cramer, the script does not seek to excuse or explain away his early
career as a cog in a corrupt big city political machine. Smith and
Tammany are shown as products of the same era and circumstances. For
years a Tammany Hall functionary, Smith was elected to the state
assembly, rising to a position of authority in time to confront the
moral and political aftermath of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
fire. As a self-appointed member of the commission set up to explore
labor conditions in New York state, Smith broadened his perspective
beyond the patronage politics of a city machine, finding issues that
linked the sidewalks of New York to the state as a whole. With the
acquiescence of 'Silent' Charlie Murphy, Tammany's boss, Smith
subsequently drove reform bills through the state assembly with the same
determination that he had once used to defeat them. Obtaining the
governor's mansion in 1920 with the aid of Tammany Hall, Smith secured
enough freedom from his old New York City machine supporters to become
one of the most able governors of the era. Working steadily through a
progressive agenda, Smith laid the groundwork for his final political
challenge - election to the presidency of the United States.

If a Catholic Irishman could become governor of a predominately urban,
immigrant-dominated state, he could not, however, become president. As
the episode makes clear, Smith's Roman Catholicism, his antiprohibition
stance, and his Tammany background were simply too much for the 'happy
warrior' to overcome. Crushed by his defeat and embittered by the
Democratic Party's 1932 presidential nomination of his old protege
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Smith retired from public life. Stung by Smith's
defeat, the despairing American Irish were upbraided by the Catholic
church for seeking temporal rather than spiritual triumphs. Once again
harboring their sense of rejection by their adopted country, Irish
Americans nursed their collective wounds for another generation.

'Success', the final program, seeks to define that term in sixty brief
minutes by looking at the legacies of two Irish Americans who turned
fifty in 1938. The episode suggests that Joseph P. Kennedy found success
in masterminding the political career of his son, John F. Kennedy.
Charting the senior Kennedy's own failed political aspirations,
'Success' details the positioning of John as the family banner carrier
in the wake of his older brother's death, his run for the House of
Representatives, and his presidential campaign. Overcoming the barriers
that had frustrated Smith's run at the presidency thirty years before,
father and son managed to neutralize the religious issue by staunchly
asserting that any president's religion is an irrelevancy in a country
in which religion is separated from statecraft. Similarly, JFK's Irish
ethnicity had become not a marker of his identity, but something he
learned in order to better interact with his constituencies. Finally,
removed from overt ties to the traditional powers of the Democratic
party, John Kennedy was able to present himself as a man of principle
rather a politician carrying an agenda fashioned by others. Like most
Irish Americans after World War II, Kennedy and his family had left the
old neighborhood far behind. Without everyday reminders of what had once
constituted Irishness, Kennedy served as a fantasy version of what
Irish-Americans might become. Thus, Kennedy was propelled to the White
House to the euphoric joy of Irish Americans at the very moment when the
traditional ethnic markers - Roman Catholicism, restricted
neighborhoods, lower economic status, and a pervasive sense of
alienation from mainstream culture - were loosing their constrictive
hold on what it meant to be Irish in the United States.

While Kennedy's capture of the White House presaged Irish America's
discovery of and reconciliation to its new psychological home, Eugene
O'Neill was sounding a cautionary note. In such autobiographical progeny
as Long Day's Journey into Night, O'Neill lays bare the still-present
pain that exile has generated and warns against a too-easy acceptance of
personal and collective fulfillment in America's promise of economic
security. The Irish, O'Neill indicates, may become Americans, but in
doing so they may not be able to remain wholly Irish. Alone again on a
new psychic landscape, O[at]Neill cautions, individuals may this time find
themselves devoid of the ethnic solidarity that had once sustained them
even as they forged a new life among strangers. While this linking of
Joseph Kennedy and Eugene O'Neill seems somewhat strained, the program's
central theme - the sense of the American Irish of their acceptance in
the general population's symbolic embrace of John Kennedy - is solid. As
Arthur and Barbara Gelb and Robert Brustein make clear in their
interviews, Eugene O'Neill's crisis of Irish identity is also,
ironically, the crisis of humanity in modern America in which economic
wealth is paired with spiritual destitution, in which one too often
sells one's heritage for a bowl of pottage.

As this analysis of the individual programs should make clear, The Irish
in America is an ambitious project. Its sweep is such that one ends the
whole series aware of how much of the story is left to tell, how much
has not been covered either by the broad strokes of generality or the
finer lines of individual portrait. But for all its weaknesses, the
series is a fine beginning to both the descriptive and critical projects
that must now be undertaken. While some might decry the absence of some
well-known scholars often associated with Irish and Irish-American
Studies, the variety of commentators in the series suggests the
producers' intention to define expertise more broadly, a strategy I
found refreshing. Here were not only well-established academic
historians of the Irish and Irish America but also American and Irish
historians, writers, and individuals whose interests were often driven
by their personal links to the personalities and events that they
discussed. The grandson of Al Smith and the granddaughter of Belle
Moskowitz, to mention only two of the more obvious, brought slants to
their subject matters unavailable elsewhere. Especially in the last two
episodes, the perspectives of saloonkeepers, sports writers, and
political columnists are given equal time with those of political
scientists, literary scholars, and theatre practitioners. The balance of
popular with academic history, of lived immediacy with scholarly
distance, is stimulating. The legacy is revealed not only as available
for critical examination but also as a living resource that sustains a
still vital, if changing, community.

The technical merits of the production of The Irish in America are
equally impressive. The photography is superb. Slow, careful pans of
countryside and city providing a sense of broad perspective. Noteworthy
also is the careful integration of extracts from many films,
photographs, cartoons, illustrations, and sketches that form the visual
record of the Irish. Visual details from many sources find their way
into the series, but the broader original is almost always provided to
establish a context. Generally, the sound is of good quality with only a
few intrusions of the manufactured backgrounds that documentary film
makers in the wake of Ken Burns now seem to feel obligatory when
presenting still photographs. Even more impressive is the music of the
series, selected and recorded under the supervision of the legendary
Paddy Moloney. While much of the music in the series is traditional, it
is enlivened by such artists such as Van Morrison, Sinead O'Connor, Mary
Black, The Chieftains, and Mick Moloney. The musical themes - 'Main',
'Emigration', 'Famine', and 'American', and the anthem 'Long Journey
Home' - were composed especially for this project and bear the stamp of
Paddy Moloney, Brian Keane, and Elvis Costello.

The Irish in America: Long Journey Home provides a fine overview of the
impact of Irish on the United States and its colonial precursors over
the last three-hundred years. While some personalities and topics
received little or no attention - the impact of the Irish Americans on
Irish politics, culture and society; the Fenian movement; John Devoy;
Patrick Ford; the other Irish political 'bosses', including Daley of
Chicago and Curley of Boston; writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and
J.T. Farrell; and the fraternal and labor organizations of the Irish, to
name only a few - the cultural history provided in The Irish in America
allows for an understanding of the Irish experience in America from its
genesis in Ireland to its current state of transition in a much more
comprehensive way than previous video projects on roughly the same
material. If not a final word on this topic, the series certainly is a
promising beginning.


Gary A Richardson