Perspectives of Ireland II

A Mid-Atlantic People

29JAN1998

The number three is a constant within the structure of Irish myth and story. The Irish experience in America can be viewed within the context of the interaction of two specific triads. One of these triads was described by Padraig as three successive waves of the filthy modem tide; representing the three generations of Irish in America and the nature of their struggle to assimilate. The first generation, those fleeing the ravages of the Great Hunger were specifically concerned, as one would expect, with survival and establishing a place for themselves in the teeming metropolises where they disembarked. The second wave would be the immigrants of the post-Hunger Civil War period, or the children of the first wave of the Irish Diaspora. Theirs was a struggle with attainment or acceptance within the hostile Yankee culture. The last wave would be those immigrating at the turn of the century or shortly thereafter, or the children of the second generation. Their fate was wrapped up in the disillusionment of the Irish experience in America. The second triad represents the three institutions that the Irish established in their new land, the Catholic Church, the Labor Unions, and the Democratic Party.
An inevitability of immigration is that those earlier immigrants denigrate the latest group of immigrants. As scapegoats they are forced into the worst jobs and most dreadful of living situations. With the influx of new immigrants, the last group to immigrate by default gets pushed up the socioeconomic ladder. This created a pervasively hostile environment for the first generation of the Irish Diaspora; they were viewed as problematic in the economics of the day, yet more drastically for the Irish their religion was viewed with severe antagonism.
The first wave of women immigrants from Ireland, as shown in Erin's Daughters in America, found in domestic service an effective means to experience the middle class comforts of America; comforts which they increasingly viewed as desirable and attainable. The money they received in wages, which they weren't obligated to spend on room or board, allowed them to build the cornerstone of the Irish community in America, the Catholic Church. Domestic service and the convent were places where an Irish woman could escape the violence inherent in the strictly segregated sexual relations. The poem 'Battle of Ballymont' depicts one of the reasons these women either refused marriage or put it off till late in life, "may as well be a widow with the way he beats me to prove he is alive." Because of the antagonism they felt from the Protestant Ascendancy in America, these Irish women felt a keen sense of abandonment in regards to social services. There was little room for the deserted wives or orphaned children in the heart of the Yankee landscape. These problems for Irish women didn't begin with immigration, but in Ireland the social framework made it more problematic for the men and easier to bear for the women. The 'orphan trains' carried thousands of children a year and placed, or sold them into Protestant homes. In response the nuns began building an infrastructure of social services including orphanages, hospitals, and parochial schools, which were attached to the church. The centralizing body in the Irish community was the parish Church; it was also the first path by which the immigrants asserted political agency as can be seen by the Archbishop 'Dagger' John Hughes in Banished Children of Eve.
While the women immigrants of Ireland were developing what would become the greatest of the Irish gifts to America, the men were building the physical infrastructure of industrialization, the bridges, the canals, and the railroads. At first it wasn't an easy thing to find employment, in the first generation what jobs were available were the most dangerous or demeaning. As the song No Irish Need Apply shows, their nationality as well as their religion were in question where employment was concerned. Like the dock workers in Louisiana shown in The Irish in America, the song suggests how the Irish oft times beat their way into employment; and where there was one 'Paddy' their clannish insularity guaranteed others would follow. In the second generation, the abolitionists were a threat to this newly won job security and socioeconomic mobility. The Irish weren't about to let go of what little that they had attained clawing their way out of the shanty and into the tenement. In response to the institution of a draft in New York in 1863, the Irish left an indelible mark on American history with the deadliest insurrection in the Republic's history. It is regrettable that the Irish didn't heed the entreaties of Collins to back abolition. His social humanist stance can be seen in the words of Starkey a labor organizer in Banished Children of Eve, "Boys you got it half right. It's 'down with Niggerdom', not 'down with Niggers'. Down with the system that makes one man a serf and the other a slave, then sets them at each other's throat." This drive for socioeconomic attainment can best be summed up with the words of James McKenna in the film Molly Maguires, " I am tired of looking up, I want to look down." It is the brutally violent activities of this Donegal mining gang and others gangs like them, which fosters the move, from the strong-arm tactics of N.I N.A., to the Labor Unions. Where the Irish had originally worked through intimidation, they now worked through negotiation and collective bargaining in order to increase their take on the profits of doing business in America. In carving a larger piece of the socioeconomic pie for themselves, insuring their continued climb up the 'crystal ladder' towards lace curtains, they opened yet another path towards political agency and parity with the Yankee Ascendancy.
This striving for political agency was finally attained within the framework of the Democratic Party, especially in New York. By the third generation the number of Irish immigrants had created a numerical majority in some areas with regards to voting. The revolution of the shirtless and unwashed on democracy was the view of the Yankee establishment towards the rise of the Irish electorate. In other cities, like Boston the Irish controlled voting blocks large enough to insure the takeover of the city government. In New York every ward had their own man who got the vote out, the faithful and the recalcitrant. Muldoon the Solid Man, like the character Johnny 'Old Smoke' Morrissey in Quinn's novel are apt representations of the Tammany bosses. Their 'honest corruption' was respected and even admired by their constituents, they were modem-day Robin Hoods taking care of their own, greasing the wheels of democracy with greenbacks. When Al Smith the mayor and governor of New York first decided to take up politics, he went to his own precinct's 'Muldoon' to help get his foot in the door, as shown in The Irish In America. When he ran for President he showed just how far the immigrant's child could go, given the talent and the drive; as the documentary suggests though, he stirred the anti-papists sentiments within the country back into a boil from the low simmer they were at. In Al's staggering defeat are seen the seeds of disillusionment, which characterizes this final wave oft he filthy modem tide. For with Al's political fortunes so too in time would go Tammany's power and, in so going, would reveal the darker side of Irish politics. This fall is not dissimilar from the lost campaign of Frank Skeffington in The Last Hurrah, who collapses on the stairs beneath the picture of his beloved mother after losing to a Yankee with little personality and no experience. The factor bringing him down was the same that kept the Irish political machine from dominating life in Boston, Yankee money and their financial institutions.
This disillusionment was at the heart of Eugene O' Niell's play Long Days Journey Into Night, which focuses on the loss of Irishness at the hand of assimilation into American culture; or more importantly the loss of community cohesion which had shaped the early Irish immigrant experience in America. As Irish Americans they were desperate to find their place in the American landscape, yet it was bought at the price of their connection to their homeland and their insular communities. There is a correlation between the feelings expressed by Eugene in the statement, "I feel somehow incomplete and not necessarily liberated," and those expressed by the character of Molly Sweeney in Brian Friel's play of the same name, " the gift of everything I wanted at the cost of everything I loved." For the Irish upon immigrating could in no ways go back to Ireland and be Irish again, nor could they be at home in America as Americans. A mid-Atlantic people caught between the homeland they left and loved and their new land where they could not find acceptance because of their nationality and their religion. Even though the Irish viewed the emigrant as exile, less than 10% returned to Ireland; and when they did they were considered deserters and Yanks. The Irish Americans it is said became more Irish once they immigrated but one can see in their attempts at assimilation and cultural survival in the face of that assimilation a reflection of F. Scott Fitzgerald's words, (we) "run faster to catch up with a past we have already lost."
In a synchronous reflection of Linda Vail's discussion on Imbolc and the honoring of winter, the poem of Enya McKeman entitled Going Back suggests the rootlessness of the Irish in America.

Caught between two hungers