Two brothers, full-length portrait, squatting, facing left, holding Erin Go Bragh banners, waiting for the Saint Patrick's Day Parade, New York City, 1951. Source: Library of Congress

Wherever Green is Worn

The Irish in America

03.16.18

On this St. Patrick’s Day special, Brian, Joanne and Nathan explore Irish American culture and identity.

Irish-Americans; irish immigrants

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Segments

A Spiritual Home

Writer John Loughery describes the history behind New York City’s stunning St. Patrick’s Cathedral. To the man behind its construction, Archbishop “Dagger” John Hughes, the cathedral wasn’t just a house of worship. It was the culmination of his vision of what Irish America should be.

Music:

Flute Fleet by Podington Bear

Roads that burned our boots by Jahzzar

sunday storm by Ketsa

Catholicism; Irish-Americans; John Hughes

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

JOANNE: Everyone knows Spotify is the place to go to stream the latest and greatest in music, but you can now also stream podcasts.

NATHAN: It’s easy. Open the app on your mobile device or desktop, click the browse channel, then click on the podcast section. You can also stream on your smart speaker.

BRIAN: They have all your favorites across news, entertainment, sports, and culture. Start streaming now.

JOANNE: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

BRIAN: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

NATHAN: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Nathan Connolly.

JOANNE: I’m Joanne Freeman.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh.

NATHAN: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians, and each week we explore the history of one topic that’s been in the news.

BRIAN: Every year, New York’s St. Patrick’s Day parade marches up Fifth Avenue and brushes past the steps of a world famous monument to Catholic piety, vision, and ambition.

JOANNE: So we’re going to start at a special ceremony on 51st Street in New York City. But it’s not the bustling midtown Manhattan that we know today, with its hotels, and banks, and glitzy shops. This is August 15th, 1858, and this part of the city is still woodsy and unpopulated. Here, the Archbishop of New York, John Hughes, is about to lay the cornerstone for his dream project– the construction of the greatest church in the United States.

JOHN LOUGHERY: So on this hot Sunday in the summer of 1858, he has a platform erected on the empty lot that is now St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

JOANNE: This is writer John Loughery. He says that an enormous number of people packed into the open space. 40,000, 60,000, or maybe even 100,000 people.

JOHN LOUGHERY: The omnibuses and trains that are heading uptown had been packed for three, four hours before to get everybody from the populated part of the city. Some newspaper said entire neighborhoods downtown are emptied that Sunday.

JOANNE: Hughes put together a ceremony worthy of the monumental crowd. Around 200 priests attended, and 100 choir boys sang throughout the procession. Plus, the archbishop adorned the area with flags representing the congregation. Banners from France, Spain, Russia, and the Netherlands. But one flag held a place of honor above the rest.

JOHN LOUGHERY: By the spot where the altar of the cathedral would be, he placed an Irish flag, a flag with a harp on it. And then he placed a cross above it. That was a kind of statement saying, we, the Irish, are building this cathedral.

JOANNE: John Hughes became archbishop of the New York diocese in 1850, an era of intense anti-Irish and anti-Catholic feeling in the United States. In the decades prior, nativist backlash had erupted as waves of Irish immigrants came to the United States. Many Americans saw the Irish as dirty and ignorant. In some cities, rioters had destroyed Catholic churches and convents. Hughes, an Irishman himself, wouldn’t take it.

JOHN LOUGHERY: Rather than turn the other cheek– he was not a turn the other cheek sort of person, really– he takes on all of these people in a polemical way in his own speeches and writings. He insists that if anything happens to the churches of New York, the Protestants had better look to their own churches. Of course, the Irish Catholics loved that. He was constantly trying to explain to the Vatican, this is what Americans respect. They respect confidence, and clarity, and strength.

JOANNE: His position and his rhetoric made Hughes the most famous Catholic in the country, and his militancy earned him a rather un-priestly nickname– Dagger John.

JOHN LOUGHERY: He would put a cross by his name, as bishops and archbishops do, more nowadays, especially. Enemies at the time said that wasn’t a cross, it was a dagger. And I think there were times when he almost took a strange pride in it. Let them be wary of me, yes. Let them not think because I am a man of the cloth, a man of God, that I’m not also someone to be reckoned with. I think he liked that aspect of his persona.

JOANNE: Other Catholic officials didn’t really appreciate his style.

JOHN LOUGHERY: But there was no doubt that without him, there would have been a void. There wouldn’t have been a person saying, we will feel a bond if we understand we are under attack, and you, the Irish, are not what the Protestant nativists of this country say you are. They say you’re uneducated, they say you’re hopeless, they say you don’t understand American values, they say you’re all vassals of the pope. You’ll never be true American citizens who will bring anything to this country.

And he constantly was saying to the Irish, don’t believe that. You are a great people in many ways. Maybe greater even than you know. And I’m here to tell you that, and I’m here to lead you to a proper place in this society.

JOANNE: He encouraged his flock to adopt a threefold identity– be loyal Catholics, good Americans, and also be proud of their Irish heritage.

JOHN LOUGHERY: In some ways, he could be seen as one of the originators of the idea of the hyphenated identity. So in that sense, he really is a kind of galvanizing force for an ethnic, as well as a religious, community.

JOANNE: And Hughes had a vision for the construction of a building which would symbolize faith, community, and religious devotion. He was inspired by a trip to Europe.

JOHN LOUGHERY: He went to Paris, and Rome, Florence, Vienna, soliciting funds and meeting figures at the Vatican. But he also worshipped in those great cathedrals in Paris, and Florence, Venice, and Rome, and came back feeling if we are to come together as a Catholic community, we need our own cathedral here.

JOANNE: Loughery says that the construction of St. Patrick’s Cathedral was the culmination of this goal.

JOHN LOUGHERY: It was going to be more Irish Catholics who contributed the funds. There were going to be Irish Catholic workers who built it. The majority of his parishioners were Irish Catholic. That this was going to make them feel very good about themselves as Catholics and as Irish people, as Irish-Americans. He thought the cathedral would be a wonderful symbol reinforcing those different parts of an identity that he was trying to cultivate.

JOANNE: Dagger John Hughes didn’t live to see the completion of the cathedral. He died in 1864 and St. Patrick’s wasn’t finished until 1878. But the great church survives as a testament to Hughes’s vision.

JOHN LOUGHERY: It is an awesome building still. I mean, when one goes today, it’s full of both worshippers and tourists who are in awe of the beauty and complexity of this building. And that would have been deeply satisfying to him, definitely.

The Molly Maguires

Nathan tells the story of the Molly Maguires, an Irish secret society in Pennsylvania coal country. Historian Kevin Kenny explains how the 19th-century Mollies are related to a long history of violence-as-resistance, born in the Irish countryside.

Music:

Banjo music by Seth Swingle

Down Along the Volga by Podington Bear

Irish-Americans; organized labor (unions); vigilantism

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

BRIAN: So today on the show, we’ll celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by exploring Irish culture in America. We’ll hear some Irish-American music made at the birth of the recording industry. We’ll revisit our story on the Irish Brigade, a legendary federal union in the Civil War known for its bravery. And we’ll talk about Irish-American identity and ask, why does everybody get to be Irish on St. Patrick’s Day?

JOANNE: Now of course, it’s hard to see, but trust us, we’re all dressed in green here at BackStory and looking forward to telling the story of the Irish in America.

NATHAN: At the same time that New York’s visionary archbishop was constructing a symbol of spiritual grace and Irish benevolence, 135 miles west of New York City, Irish mineworkers were up in arms in a manner and under a banner that reached back to the old country.

KEVIN KENNY: The Molly Maguires really, in one sense, were the last of their line, because that secret society tradition, rooted in very old culture in rural Ireland, is an unlikely fit for the American Industrial Revolution.

NATHAN: Kevin Kenny is a history professor at Boston College. This is a story of a secret society, and a mystery that’s still roils the blood in eastern Pennsylvania. By the mid-19th century, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing. It was like an unstoppable engine, and it ran on coal. Particularly hard coal known as anthracite, good for use in factories and in homes. And the world’s largest supply happens to be in eastern Pennsylvania.

KEVIN KENNY: It’s a very rapidly developing industrial region. Very wild, very rugged, and very violent.

NATHAN: In the 1860s, the anthracite region of Pennsylvania could be divided into two halves– the upper region around the town of Scranton, and the lower region around the town of Pottsville.

KEVIN KENNY: In the upper region, the railroads, the big corporations, already have a monopoly over the production and distribution of coal. In other words, they own the coal mines and they’re shipping the product out to New York City.

NATHAN: This monopoly is enviable to one Franklin B. Gowen, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad. It’s his dream to replicate this model in the southern region. But he has one major obstacle– a powerful labor union known as the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association.

KEVIN KENNY: What’s distinctive about the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association– known for short as the WBA– is that it’s open to mineworkers of all kinds. In other words, the most skilled and the least skilled Protestant and Catholic British and Irish.

NATHAN: The WBA wants fair wages and better working conditions. With their 35,000 members, they could bring coal production to a halt with a single strike. But striking wasn’t the only weapon used against mine owners, and the WBA wasn’t the only player in the game.

KEVIN KENNY: A smaller, shadowy, obscure form of labor organizing that has much the same goal, which is decent wages and working conditions, but goes about the task very differently. And that group we refer to as the Molly Maguires.

NATHAN: The Molly Maguires consisted of the most alienated of the Irish mineworkers.

KEVIN KENNY: They were the unskilled laborers. The ones who came from the most remote parts of Ireland. The ones who were most likely to speak the Irish language.

NATHAN: And as Kenny referred to earlier, they have their own ideas about how to obtain better working conditions.

KEVIN KENNY: If there was a problem in a particular mine, they would approach the mine owner and they might post a coffin notice. And a coffin notice was a crudely sketched image of a coffin on a piece of paper that would be nailed to somebody’s door with the words, “This will be yours.”

NATHAN: This form of rural secret society violence had a long history in the Irish countryside. In fact, the American Molly Maguires were inspired by an Irish group in the 1840s with the same name.

KEVIN KENNY: Molly Maguire, obviously, is a woman. And there are various stories told in Ireland that there was a real woman, Mistress Molly Maguire, who was to be evicted from her household and refused to leave, and that the house was leveled on top of her. And then a group of people got together to avenge her memory.

That’s folklore. We don’t know of any particular woman called Molly Maguire. What we do know is that groups of young men engaged in this pattern of secret society violence, and to protect their anonymity, they dressed as women. They took the image of Molly Maguire as the emblem of their struggle for social justice in the Irish countryside.

NATHAN: The American Molly Maguires didn’t dress as women, but they did carry out the assassinations of mine owners, foremen, and supervisors. And at the Reading Railroad headquarters in Philadelphia, Franklin B. Gowen saw an opportunity. He would use these assassinations to dismantle all forms of labor organization in the mines.

KEVIN KENNY: Although the WBA steadfastly opposes Molly Maguire-ism, Franklin B. Gowen argues consistently that the two are related. That the Molly Maguires, in effect, are the terrorist wing of the trade union. And it’s on that basis that he sets out to destroy both.

NATHAN: In October of 1873, Gowen holds a meeting with Allan Pinkerton, the founder of America’s first detective agency. He asked Pinkerton to help him get to the bottom of what he describes as the Molly Maguire conspiracy. Pinkerton dispatched an Irish born agent, James McParland, to go undercover in the mining community.

KEVIN KENNY: And he masquerades as a good fellow, having lots of escapades, and throwing his money around. Ingratiates himself with the local community.

NATHAN: For two and a half years, McParland sends frequent reports back to the agency with his findings. He tells Pinkerton the Molly Maguires have connections to yet another Irish organization.

KEVIN KENNY: McParland’s first move is to connect them to another organization, and that is the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the AOH. The AOH is a Catholic fraternal society, a working class fraternal society, that exists not only in Pennsylvania, but nationally and, indeed, internationally. On the one hand, it’s absurd to say that because some Molly Maguires belong to the AOH, Molly Maguire-ism was a national or international conspiracy.

That was said repeatedly in the 1870s, but it doesn’t wash. But at the same time, it seems quite clear on the basis of my research that local lodges of the Ancient Order of Hibernians were used for violent purposes. In other words, in a handful of lodges of the AOH, in the heart of the lower anthracite region, crimes were plotted, arranged, and put into execution.

NATHAN: Now that Gowen and the Pinkertons had their evidence, all they needed was the right moment to swoop in and crush the Molly Maguires. That moment came in 1875, in the middle of the most severe economic depression the United States had seen. The WBA was waging what would be their final labor struggle, known as the Long Strike.

KEVIN KENNY: It draws national attention in the newspapers. There are scenes of near starvation that are reported by the end of that strike. And by June or so of 1875, the union goes down to final and total defeat. So the labor movement is gone. Into the vacuum left by the labor movement step the Molly Maguires.

NATHAN: Six more assassinations occur that summer, but the Pinkerton agency now has several undercover detectives on the case, and soon the arrests begin.

KEVIN KENNY: About 50 people are put on trial accused of Molly Maguire crimes and activities. All of them are members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. The trials draw enormous attention nationally for a number of reasons, not least being the evidence of McParland himself, who is revealed as an undercover detective. He walks into the courtroom and there is their friend and confidant for the last two and a half years, now revealed as an undercover detective.

The evidence of informers who turned state’s evidence to save their necks. The wife of one of these informers denounced him from the witness stand as a dirty little rat. Catholics, we know, were excluded from the juries. But perhaps most extraordinarily of all is that the lead prosecutors in these showcase trials were railroad and coal mine attorneys, and the most spectacular and prominent of all of them was Franklin B. Gowen, who came up from Philadelphia to deliver the arguments for the prosecution at several of the trials in Pottsville.

NATHAN: And on June 21, 1877– known locally as Black Thursday, or the Day of the Rope– 10 men are executed. Over the next two years, 10 more men are hanged. But how many of them were innocent? How many were guilty? Kenny says we’ll never know for sure.

KEVIN KENNY: I would say some were guilty as charged. Some were not guilty as charged but may have been involved in other things. And I’d say one or two were very unlucky. Interestingly, the ringleader, the alleged ringleader of the Molly Maguire conspiracy, a man called John Kehoe, in 1979, he received a posthumous pardon from the governor of Pennsylvania.

NATHAN: Because of the miscarriage of justice, the Molly Maguires have been remembered as working class heroes, victims of capitalist and nativist oppression. But Kenny says he’s not satisfied with that interpretation.

KEVIN KENNY: And I suppose the reason why that’s not satisfactory is that in the end of the day, there are 16 dead bodies on the stage, and somebody killed them. Right? And so I remember giving a lecture out in the mining region in the prison where four of the men were hanged, and I was standing, giving a public lecture just outside their cells. And I said that the Molly Maguires killed people, and that the historians task is to explain why.

And I paused deliberately to hear that pin drop, because it was a very silent room, and most of my audience didn’t want to hear that. But I think that the explanation lies in Irish history. So what I see happening is under really desperate conditions, that a certain kind of Irish coworker, desperate and alienated, drew on Irish rural traditions to fight back in industrial America.

NATHAN: Kevin Kenny is a history professor at Boston College and the author of Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. Earlier in the show, we heard from John Loughery. He is the author of Dagger John– Archbishop Hughes and the Making of Irish America.

A Reel Good Time

Brian talks to music scholar Scott Spencer about early 20th century recordings made by Irish Americans — and how influential those recordings have been for Irish musicians since.

Music:

Cunningham’s Fancy Reel by Patsy Touhey

Stack of Barley by Edward Herborn and James Wheeler

Macushla by John McCormack

Lord McDonald’s Reel by Michael Coleman

Miss Thornton’s/My Love is in America from Live at Mona’s

Irish-Americans; folk music; tradition

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

[MUSIC – SETH SWINGLE]

JOANNE: One of the most notable and beloved aspects of Irish-American culture is the traditional music scene, and the story of how Irish music became popular in America goes hand in hand with the history of Ireland in the 19th and 20th centuries.

BRIAN: In 1845, a massive famine devastated Ireland. It lasted five years, and in its wake, the population of Ireland had been reduced by roughly 25% from deaths or emigration. Many of those who left the island came to the United States.

SCOTT SPENCER: Any group of people that are forcibly moved from somewhere, they are incredibly nostalgic about where they come from.

BRIAN: Scott Spencer is an ethnomusicologist who runs the music library at the University of Southern California.

SCOTT SPENCER: This was a group of people that had really been ripped away from a place that they loved.

BRIAN: One generation later, Irish-Americans were distant spectators to a nationalist uprising for Irish independence. Known today as the Easter Rising, it was forcibly suppressed by British troops, resulting in over 2,000 casualties. By then, one fifth of the US population claimed Irish heritage through immigration or ancestry, and a strong community was forming around the shared sense of identity, especially through music.

SCOTT SPENCER: You have hundreds of people getting together in this big nostalgic thing of people from all over Ireland, instead of just a regional area, all collecting together for this music, this dance, this social event. And there’s no microphones. So how do you get the sound across to everybody who’s dancing? Be loud.

[MUSIC – PATSY TOUHEY, “CUNNINGHAM’S FANCY REEL”]

BRIAN: Well, I’d love to drill down into some of those musicians. Tell me about this guy Patsy Touhey. What did he play?

SCOTT SPENCER: So Patsy Touhey is a really interesting character. He played a thing called the uilleann pipes, which is U-I-L-L-E-A-N-N, Irish for elbow. It’s a bellows-driven bagpipe. Instead of one that you blow into a bag, you actually use a bellows to inflate it.

What he’s doing is really loud. It’s built for dance halls. But he’s still being really incredibly flexible with the music. He’s doing a lot of really intricate runs and ornamentation. So he’s doing something that’s really traditional, but it’s also got kind of an American flair to it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BRIAN: Well, another very important character in the story of Irish music at this time was a woman by the name of Ellen O’Byrne. Tell me something about her.

SCOTT SPENCER: So Ellen O’Byrne, she’s another person that’s a kind of amazing character in the recording industry here. She’s thinking outside of the box. So she’s born in County Leitrim in 1875. She moves at age 15 to New York City, and marries a Dutchman by the name of Justus DeWitt.

They open together a store in 1900– probably, I think, 1360 Third Avenue in New York City. And it’s a real estate business and a travel business. And they’re doing a lot of work with steamer ships going back to Ireland. And she’s capitalizing on the nostalgia around this.

Easter Rising is 1916. There’s a lot of big splashy headlines in New York about what’s happening back in Ireland. The Irish diaspora is really interested in what’s happening and trying to keep connected, so they keep coming into the store and asking, do you have any recordings? There were a few, there weren’t that many.

And so at one point, Ellen O’Byrne-DeWitt goes to Columbia Records and says, we really need Irish recordings. There was another company, I think Genet, that had been doing some Irish recordings, but not much traditional stuff that you could do dances with. So she goes to Colombia and she says, I’ll tell you what– I will promise that I’ll buy 500 recordings if you record Irish music for me. And they say OK.

So her son, Justus Jr., goes out to Celtic Park and looks around for– it’s a sporting event institution, and there’s usually musicians that are doing busking around the area. So he goes to find musicians, and he runs into Eddie Herbhorn on accordion and John Wheeler on banjo and asks them if they would come into the studio and record.

[MUSIC – EDWARD HERBHORN AND JAMES WHEELER, “STACK OF BARLEY”]

So we just heard “The Stack of Barley,” and if you listen in really closely, you can hear that there’s a strong downbeat. There’s kind of a backbeat that’s going on there, too. But the music itself is really based on dancing.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So if you hear them playing, they’re really going for the downbeats, and they’re trying to get a little, as they say, “lift” going on, too. A little something that will get the dancers up off the ground.

[MUSIC – JOHN MCCORMACK, “MACUSHLA”]

JOHN MCCORMACK: (SINGING) Macushla, Macushla, your sweet voice is calling. Calling me softly again and again.

SCOTT SPENCER: John McCormack, probably one of the first international recording stars in history. Caruso might have been in there as well, but McCormack really captured hearts on multiple continents. I have to do the academic scholarly stuff here.

Born in 1884 in Athlone in Ireland, the fourth of 11 children. His parents worked at the Athlone woolen mills, so he came from a pretty working class background. A pretty rural, working class background.

I believe his first recording was in 1904 on the wax cylinder. But then his cherished and beloved things were recordings from Victor from the 1910s and ’20s.

JOHN MCCORMACK: (SINGING) Fling them out in the darkness, my lost love Macushla. Let them find me and bind me–

SCOTT SPENCER: He was absolutely known for singing those real heart-tearing songs. “Macushla” is actually “my heart.” And I think a lot of people in Irish America would know “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” or “The Wearing of the Green.” And again, he really benefited from political things happening in Ireland, the end of the war, this incredible feeling of nostalgia, and also the burgeoning recording scene. And he happened to be at the right place at the right time with a really good voice.

BRIAN: Yeah, with the right voice, that’s for sure.

SCOTT SPENCER: Yeah, a beautiful set of pipes.

BRIAN: Well, to move from pipes to strings, we don’t want to leave out the fiddle players, right? Who were some of the key fiddle players, and what was their style?

SCOTT SPENCER: So here’s a really funny story. So we have all of these people that had emigrated from Ireland to the US. And in the US, it didn’t really matter if you were from County Sligo or County Mayo or from Dublin.

BRIAN: Sure. It’s all Ireland.

SCOTT SPENCER: Yeah, it’s all Ireland. Exactly. And if you’re in a foreign land, you are kind of gravitating towards other people from your homeland. It doesn’t really matter where you’re from.

BRIAN: Even if you didn’t like them before.

SCOTT SPENCER: Right. You get together in New York and you’re all Irish.

BRIAN: Exactly.

SCOTT SPENCER: So you have this really interesting situation where you have two guys that had grown up literally a stone’s throw from each other. And really, I don’t think they even knew each other. This is James Morrison and Michael Coleman. Both were from County Sligo. Morrison born in 1893, Michael Coleman in 1891.

They both moved to the US in about the same time, 1914, 1915. And James Morrison was known as the professor. Very staid, dependable, excellent musician, and he was in huge demand for faster dances up and down the east coast.

Michael Coleman was a little bit more of a rakish paddy, he was a little bit more of a rogue. And he would sometimes double book himself for gigs. He was known for not showing up, or showing up in an inebriated state. But he was just a bombastic, amazing player.

[MUSIC – MICHAEL COLEMAN, “LORD MCDONALD’S REEL”]

Again, at the right place at the right time. Shannon, Vocalion, Columbia, Okeh, New Republic, Pathe, O’Byrne-DeWitt, Victor, Brunswick, Decca. Just a really prolific recording artist. Died unfortunately quite young, but you can still hear the Sligo style in New York City to this day, mainly because of these two musicians.

BRIAN: Do the musicians themselves, are they aware of that or, you know, that just doesn’t matter to them?

SCOTT SPENCER: It’s a really interesting thing, in fact. If you go to different sessions– and you can find a session in pretty much any major city in the US, and a lot of small towns too. This is where musicians just get together and play just for the fun of it. You can go down to an Irish bar and you’ll find musicians that are there every Tuesday or every Sunday.

So buy them a pint and go ask them about this, because they’ll tell you for every single tune that they play, they’ll tell you where they learned it from, from whom they learned it, what county it comes from, what its lineage is. They know all of this stuff. And some of them don’t read music, but they have all of these stories in their heads.

They can relate it back to a particular recording, or to a particular player, or even a particular day where they learned it from somebody in Ireland, or in New York, or in Boston, or Los Angeles. It’s pretty incredible. So all of that lineage is there, and they can tell you about the particular style that they play in, the particular people that they see as influences, and even the particular recordings. A lot of the musicians will look back to these recordings and say, this is a particular style, and this is a style that I adhere to.

[MUSIC – “MISS THORNTON’S/MY LOVE IS IN AMERICA”]

BRIAN: Scott, thanks so much for joining us on BackStory today.

SCOTT SPENCER: A pleasure. It was a pleasure to be with you.

BRIAN: Scott Spencer runs the music library at the University of Southern California. He’s the author of Wheels of the World– How Recordings of Irish Traditional Music Bridged the Gap Between Homeland and Diaspora.

Green Sprigs of Courage

Brian talks with English professor Craig Warren about the mythologizing of the Union Army’s Irish Brigade, and how it helped dispel anti-Irish sentiment in late-19th Century America.

Music:

Origin by Jahzzar

American Civil War; Irish-Americans

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NATHAN: In December 1862, northern and southern troops faced off on the slopes of Marye’s Heights in Fredericksburg, Virginia. The Union assault on the Confederate-protected hill would ultimately amount to a suicide mission. Among the northern troops was a unit called the Irish Brigade, known by the emerald green flag its soldiers would carry into battle. The brigade was formed at the beginning of the Civil War by Irish immigrants and Irish-Americans eager to show their support for the Union cause. They hoped their patriotism would combat anti-Irish sentiment that was so prevalent at the time.

BRIAN: That winter’s day in Fredericksburg, the brigade’s battle-worn emerald flag was actually up in New York getting repaired. And so the Irish troops instead put sprigs of boxwood in their caps to identify their Irish heritage. The northern troops lost the battle, but in the years after the war, it was commonly said that no one showed more bravery in the face of certain death than the troops with the green in their hats.

Back in 2014, I spoke with English professor Craig Warren about this mythic regiment. He said that this tale of Irish triumph hides a darker story.

CRAIG WARREN: In fact, it was the low point in the war for most of Irish America. Of the 1,200 soldiers who took part in the battle, 545 were killed, wounded, or missing. And because the brigade suffered such horrendous casualties, and because so many people on the homefront lost loved ones and neighbors, it was ultimately one of the reasons that many Irish turned against the war. And many Irish-Americans decided that what had happened was that the Irish Brigade had been wantonly sacrificed during the battle by generals who saw them simply as cannon fodder.

BRIAN: And that’s because of their Irish heritage? That’s just because they were seen as something less than full citizens?

CRAIG WARREN: That’s right. As a result, they just decided the war had nothing– there was nothing that would benefit them. The war effort wasn’t bringing people around to see the Irish as true Americans. And so they turned their backs on that war effort and decided that it was not worth investing further time, energy, lives, and money into. And it’s not too much to say that you can draw a straight line between the Battle of Fredericksburg and the New York City draft riots of 1863.

BRIAN: Really? Now those happened in the summer of 1863. So that’s roughly six or seven months after the battle?

CRAIG WARREN: That’s correct. There were mass riots in the streets of New York. There was a mob of white protesters who did a number of destructive things– smashing buildings, finding African-American freed men in the streets and lynching a number of them. It took, actually, a detachment of soldiers from the Army of the Potomac to come into the city and restore order.

And at the end of this encounter, the vast majority of the rioters who were killed or who were imprisoned were of Irish descent. And so this really was a black eye for the Irish-American population during the war, and convinced a number of other Americans that, in fact, they were not loyal to the war effort.

Now I’ve seen references to the Irish Brigade and the story of their heroism. I never see any reference to the draft riots or, actually, the response back home that you just described. So explain how that got erased from history.

CRAIG WARREN: What happened was after the war, Irish Brigade veterans forged a remarkable body of literature that took the low point of the Irish Brigade’s history– the Battle of Fredericksburg, after which they effectively ceased to operate as a brigade– and transformed it into the brigade’s most glorious moment. And they did this by publishing a series of memoirs that championed the Irish soldier, that portrayed him in the best light possible, and which showed his suffering and sacrifices at such places as Antietam, and especially at Fredericksburg, as his ultimate sacrifice on behalf of his American nation.

And all of them wanted memory of Irish participation in the war to remember the Irish Brigade soldiers on the field, not rioting Irishmen back home in the city. And so they did everything they could to elevate and even mythologize the Irish soldier during the Civil War.

BRIAN: What do you mean elevate or mythologize? Do you have any examples?

CRAIG WARREN: One of the emphases that we find in the memoirs of Irish Brigade veterans is the story of the Irish Brigade encountering a full brigade of Confederate Irish who supposedly recognized their countrymen by those sprigs of boxwood in their caps, and who, though reluctant, fired into those ranks standing by their southern convictions. And that was enhanced and embellished in the post-war memoirs to be seen as this tragic, poignant, ironic conflict between Irishmen north and south.

BRIAN: So let me get this straight. Being loyal to the Confederacy proved that the southern Irish soldiers were true Americans, even though they were fighting against America.

CRAIG WARREN: That’s right.

BRIAN: How does that work?

CRAIG WARREN: In the late 19th century, there is this move towards reconciliation. And there became, over time, this understanding that as long as one had participated in the Civil War and fought for one’s section and had stood up for one’s beliefs, then that person had demonstrated their loyalty to the American experiment. And each were fighting for American ideals. Now maybe for the Union, maybe for the Confederacy. But the idea was that to have participated in the war was what mattered.

BRIAN: So in the mythology of what all of this meant– and again, we’re looking back at this from roughly, let’s say, the 1890s– what this was saying from the Irish perspective was, don’t worry, we will be loyal to the ideals and the principles of America. We are not going to be just loyal to our fellow Irishmen. We’re not going to participate in machine politics in the cities. We’re not going to hire Irish over other ethnicities. We are capable, as Irish, of being loyal, and in fact, dying for ideals and principles.

CRAIG WARREN: Exactly. Yeah, the message was that contrary to pre-war beliefs that the Irish were not true Americans, that they were interested only in the stake of Ireland across the Atlantic, that instead these men were willing to fight and die for their adopted country and for their homes, be it north or south. And that that was a stronger connection ultimately than the shared heritage.

BRIAN: And do you think that these memoirs helped with American acceptance of Irish immigrants in the late 19th century?

CRAIG WARREN: I believe so. And I think that their strategy worked. There was a wide scale celebration of the Civil War veteran during the late 19th century and early 20th, and there was a receptive audience for stories about soldiers in uniform and their adventures and achievements and sacrifices. And so this story folds the Irish-American story into the larger story that we so often hear about the Civil War, and that is that it was a brothers war. And Irish memoirists stress this as a way to show that they were as true Americans as any other citizens of the United States.

BRIAN: Craig Warren is a professor of English at Penn State Erie.

Kiss Us, We're Irish?

Brian, Joanne, and Nathan consider why Americans celebrate the Irish but not other ethnicities.

Irish-Americans; celebrations; holidays; identity

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

[MUSIC – JAHZZAR, “ORIGIN”]

BRIAN: Joanne, Nathan, every St. Patrick’s Day, I’m surrounded by people wearing green, they’re wearing buttons saying, “Kiss Me, I’m Irish.” Why not, “Kiss Me, I’m German,” or anything else? Why the Irish?

JOANNE: I think part of the answer has to do with the fact that the Irish have always been a really prominent major cultural immigrant group in America, all the way back to the beginning of the republic. In the early years, I think they were generally accepted. In slightly later years, when you move on into the 1820s and 1830s, then you begin to get people identifying and pointing to the Irish in a not so positive way. So that might not be a “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” phase in time, but quite the opposite.

BRIAN: Why is that? Is that numbers?

JOANNE: It’s partly numbers. There’s a huge increase in the 1830s and ’40s and ’50s. It’s partly because early Irish that came were Protestant, and the later wave were Catholic, and America had serious issues with Catholics. So anti-Catholicism reared its ugly head up. And the second wave of Irish also tended to be more agrarian. They found their way more into manual labor. I think Americans sort of pegged them as a separate group and sort of cast them out in a way.

NATHAN: Right. I think the Catholic identity is really major, both for them and for Italians especially in the late 19th and early 20th century. There are all kinds of nativist concerns about what Catholics connections to the pope are, whether they’re anti-democratic. It becomes really important for many Irish in American cities to assume a measure of political power through police organizations and fraternal groups, just in order to secure some stronger social footing. And again, I think relative to the way that migrations are changing cities in the progressive era, they’re able to at least mark themselves as being different from other browner populations that are coming into the cities in ways that would give them benefits going forward.

BRIAN: Ironically, the very thing that was held against them– they tended to concentrate in the cities, for instance, and create political machines– was the very thing that actually gave them some independent economic power.

NATHAN: The other thing that I think is key with the Irish case is we never went to war with Ireland. So if you look at what happened in the Germans in the 19-teens, and again in the 1940s, there is a clear sense that many people are trying to distance themselves from a German identity. The Irish are obviously a much smaller group, but they also come into our history as workers, as people who are part of unions, as people who are in some ways the kind of scrappy underbelly of American society.

And so it certainly, this sense of these Irish ethnic neighborhoods in places like Boston and New York that are beginning to show themselves in cinema and in plays– I mean, you have a variety of ways in which you can reassert a working class-ness that is in some ways a kind of counterpoint to, obviously, elites in major cities, but in some cases even other complaining minority groups coming out of the civil rights movement.

BRIAN: That’s absolutely right. They were called the rise of the unmeltable ethnics, and the Irish led that charge.

NATHAN: Yeah, it’s a funny thing about ethnicity though, because my last name is an Irish last name, Connolly. And I can honestly tell you that I never really adopted a sense of connection to Ireland or the Irish. I mean, there was a coat of arms in the house, but it was almost like a kind of tongue in cheek, this black family with an Irish coat of arms.

Culture has to be practiced, and in my family, we never practiced Irish celebrations. We never had any association with Gaelic. I went to a Catholic church with an Irish pastor for 20 years and that was never part of my identity. That was Father Sean McCaughy’s identity, right? And so that’s just the nature, I think, of ethnicity.

And still I think St. Patrick’s Day is a great holiday, I loved listening to House of Pain growing up, a great Irish rap group. So a lot of that, I think, is still broadly acceptable in mainstream. But I think that the utility of the Irish identity didn’t come with my particular go around with an Irish last name.

BRIAN: So I do think that today it is easier to practice a bit of cultural experimentation or appropriation. One can take Irish folk dancing if they want. And the big difference is that one’s ethnic identity is not wrapped up as intricately with where they live and what their occupation is as it used to be at the turn of the 20th century. So it allows you to disaggregate cultural practice, ethnic practices, if you will, from occupational and residential choices.

JOANNE: You’re suggesting this sort of free and easy cultural atmosphere where everybody can switch hats, and I’m not sure that’s true of all ethnicities. And I wonder if there is something different about the Irish.

BRIAN: Great, great point. What is it?

[ALL LAUGHING]

JOANNE: Darn. Let’s come up with that.

NATHAN: We have folks who celebrate Cinco de Mayo and they’ll wear a sombrero or something, but there’ll be a lot more pushback in something like that. Or folks who want to don blackface costumes for Halloween, there’s pushback on that. And we’re much more generous with people who wear Irish plastic hats, bowler hats, or drink green beer because it’s one day a year and you get to get drunk and all that.

But it doesn’t seem to carry the same fraught history, in part because a lot of the groups that are considered to be on society’s margins tend to have more of a hands off policy when it comes to cultural appropriation. By most conventional measures, the Irish are part of the quote unquote “mainstream.” Few people would know that there are over 100,000 Irish immigrants who came to this country quote unquote “illegally,” violating tourist visas and the like in the 1980s.

It didn’t create a panic in the same way we think about Muslims coming into America, or Mexicans coming into America. In fact, just the opposite. Churches, the mayor of New York, Ed Koch, a bunch of people made it very easy for them to kind of ease into American society on legal terms.

BRIAN: But Nathan, taking your examples, isn’t the distinguishing factor race? Isn’t that what distinguishes the Irish? They passed into whiteness sometime around the beginning of the 20th century or so.

NATHAN: I think that’s absolutely the difference. But I will say, too, that we’re in a moment now where obviously there is more redrawing of various fault lines, and the possibilities of more people being considered mainstream is never off the table. But I think we should be very mindful of the distinctive place that the Irish have enjoyed as having made a really marked transition between the early 19th, late 19th, and now early 21st century is one way to make sense of why their symbolism and the pageantry around them, for at least one time during the year, seems far less threatening than some other examples.

JOANNE: Right. I mean, in a sense, what we’re saying is that the Irish have become quintessentially American.

[THEME MUSIC]

BRIAN: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode, or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter at BackStory Radio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

NATHAN: This episode of BackStory was produced by David Stenhouse, Nina Earnest, Emily Gadek, and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Millner is our technical director, Diana Williams is our digital editor, and Joey Thompson is our researcher. Additional help came from Angeli Bishosh, Sequoia Carrillo, Corean Thomas, Courtney Spania, and Aaron Teiling. Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from Ketsa, Podington Bear, and Jahzzar. And as always, thanks to the Johns Hopkins studios in Baltimore.

JOANNE: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the provost’s office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

MALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Windham for Virginia Humanities.

[THEME MUSIC]