Kiss Us, We're Irish?

[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.

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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]