Foreword

Daniel Mulhall, Ireland’s Ambassador to the United States

I arrived in Washington in August 2017 and have since immersed myself in discharging my responsibilities as Ireland’s eighteenth ambassador to the United States. Among those responsibilities is, of course, an active engagement with the phenomenon that is Irish America, by which I mean the thirty-three million Americans who in 2015 identified themselves as Irish American. Those thirty-three million represent 10 percent of the American population and amount to seven times the population of Ireland (4.8 million).¹ This large and diverse Irish American community is a distinct asset to Ireland and a linchpin of our strong contemporary relationship with the United States.

As someone who had not previously served in any of our nine US-located diplomatic missions (although I did spend the summer of 1974 in Kansas City as a J1 student), my exploration of Irish America has been both a revelation and a joy. Although there are those who believe that Irish America is in decline as successive generations feel less of a connection with Ireland, on the contrary I have been buoyed by the continued interest in, and affection for, Ireland on the part of those Irish Americans I have met in the course of my official engagements right across the United States.

A question that has intrigued me is how this Irish heritage has been transferred down the generations so that Americans I meet whose Irish roots are often to be found in the Ireland of the 1840s and 1850s continue to cherish an association with their ancestral homeland. As, I suspect, most Irish people, I have only the dimmest appreciation of my own ancestral background beyond the three grandparents in whose presence my earliest memories were created. By contrast, many Irish Americans can name the Irish counties and even the villages from which their nineteenth-century Irish-born ancestors came.

This book, for which its editors and contributors deserve great credit, goes some way in furnishing an explanation of the durability of Irish identity in the United States. Their work lends credence to the claims of political scientist and historian Benedict Anderson that print culture—and particularly newspapers—are essential to the creation and maintenance of national identity.² Hence it was with pleasure and enthusiasm that I have read its diverse, wide-ranging chapters that view the history of Irish America through the lens of journalism, one of the many walks of American life in which Irish immigrants and their offspring have achieved distinction.

It is, of course, true that the degree of identification with Ireland displayed by Americans of Irish descent varies widely from case to case. For most Irish Americans it consists, no doubt, of a fairly passive acknowledgement of an Irish heritage. That is hardly surprising. What impresses me, however, is the number of Americans who feel their Irish heritage quite strongly and for whom it is an important part of their identity. It was an eye-opener for me, for example, to attend the biannual convention of the Ancient Order of Hibernians and Ladies AOH in Louisville, Kentucky, in July 2018 and to meet some of the one-thousand delegates who had taken the trouble to travel from all over the United States to celebrate their Irish heritage.

I have come across a wide range of Irish American organizations, and not just in the well-known strongholds of Irish immigrant settlement—New York, Boston, and Chicago—but everywhere I have been, that keep the flame of Irish identity alight in today’s America. My European colleagues in Washington, including those who represent countries from which significant numbers of immigrants came to America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are invariably impressed by the scale and intensity of Irish America’s devotion to Ireland.

How to explain this enduring identification with Ireland? In the words of Kevin Kenny, quoted later in this book, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish found in America a mirror of their homeland, “a nation of immigrants for a nation of emigrants.” The scale of nineteenth-century Irish emigration to America is striking and deserves to be called to mind. Between 1841 and 1900, a total of four million Irish people crossed the Atlantic, adding to the almost one million who had arrived in the first four decades of the century. Although other European countries exported people to America in significant numbers, none did so with such demographic impact at home in that Ireland’s nineteenth-century population declined sharply on account of the sheer scale of emigration.

A further important point is that from the late eighteenth century onward, the Irish came with a sharp sense of political grievance, from a country wracked with political upheaval to a country that was itself being forged out of the molten material of the American Revolution. It seems to me that Irish America’s continued affinity with Ireland has much to do with the particular political makeup of Ireland and America during the nineteenth century. The Irish had a political cause to pursue, and America provided a fruitful setting in which it could be pursued.

I read the book’s opening chapter by Debra Reddin van Tuyll with particular interest for it sketches the early history of Irish American journalism, using the experience of three late eighteenth-century figures, Mathew Carey, William Duane, and John Daly Burk, as illustrative of the forty or so Irish immigrants active in printing and publishing during those turbulent, formative years for the new American nation.

Two things strike me about their stories that may be symptomatic of the wider narrative of the Irish in America. I refer to their continued interest in the affairs of Ireland and their immersion in the politics of their new American home. All three featured journalists were sympathetic to the United Irishmen, whose uprising in 1798, by precipitating the Act of Union of 1800 and spawning a tradition of resistance, set the stage for Ireland’s unhappy nineteenth century, marked by dissension, defiance, deprivation, and, on the back of the Great Famine, mass emigration.

The three Irish journalists also delved headlong into the maelstrom of American politics, taking sides in the vitriolic debates between John Adams’s Federalists and Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party. William Duane gets, and deserves, an additional chapter of his own, written by David W. Bulla. Duane’s rollicking journalistic career in Britain, India, and America, often under hostile governmental scrutiny, provides a rattling good yarn that culminates in his trials under the Alien and Sedition Acts propagated by the Adams presidency. Carey fought valiantly for press freedom and against a prevailing anti-Irish sentiment rooted in a governmental phobia about the United Irishmen and their alleged infiltration of the American body politic.

In her depiction of the career of Mathew Carey, van Tuyll makes the important point that the Philadelphia Irish were seen by many within the more established community of English descent as “vagabonds and refugees of Ireland [as well as] outlaws, assassins, traitors, and fugitives from justice of every description.” Carey argued the case that Irish Americans were loyal to the United States, having proven their loyalty “with their blood during the American Revolution.” This points to another reason why an Irish American identity took root and persisted throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Irish were America’s first significant minority ethnicity and were made to see themselves as an embattled community subjected to periodic hostility from the more established parts of American society. Resentment at anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice helped instill a sense of community cohesion that had an impressive shelf life, and of which there are echoes to the present day.

This collection throws light on another issue that has intrigued me during my first year in the United States. I have in mind the exceptional profile enjoyed by Robert Emmet in the hearts and minds of nineteenth-century Irish Americans. A monument to Emmet stands not far from our embassy in Washington (there is another one in San Francisco) at which an annual commemoration is held in September. It was erected originally in the early twentieth century in the entrance to the Smithsonian Museum (a strikingly prominent location for a statue of someone who never set foot in America, although his brother, Thomas Addis Emmet, did have a distinguished legal and political career in New York) and transferred to its present location in 1966 on the fiftieth anniversary of Ireland’s Easter Rising. Emmet, executed in 1803, following a failed, fairly hopeless insurrection, came to epitomize for Irish Americans the spirit of resistance to British rule. In their chapter on the Irish in Savannah, Howard J. Keeley and Steven T. Engel show how the Irish in that southern city were toasting Emmet as early as 1817 as an exemplary Irish patriot whose martyrdom had exposed the reality of tyranny in Ireland, while in later decades he became a source of pride and community cohesion as Savannahans set up a Robert Emmet Association in 1877. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Irish community in Savannah had rallied to the memory of the 1798 uprising, due in large part to its strong connections with County Wexford, which had been at the epicenter of the rebellion.

The other great era of Irish American journalism came in the late nineteenth century when Irish exiles and their descendants exercised significant influence on developments in Ireland. Not only was Irish America an indispensable source of financial support for Irish movements, but Fenianism, especially after the failed uprising of 1867, was very largely an Irish American movement. It was support from across the Atlantic that helped spur this movement’s early twentieth-century revival in Ireland, one that helped pave the way for the Easter Rising. There are chapters on Patrick Ford’s Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, which had a circulation of twenty thousand in Ireland in 1880, and on the Gaelic American.

The Irish World’s full title brings home the extent to which, like Carey, Duane, and Burk a century before, Ford was both a committed Irish nationalist (he eclectically supported both the Home Rule Party and the Fenian dynamiting campaign in Britain in the late nineteenth century) and an active participant in contemporary American debates. His paper was a proponent of the rights of labor and a staunch advocate of American neutrality, an issue that convulsed US politics in the years prior to America’s entry into World War One.

The Gaelic American, founded by the Fenian John Devoy and New York lawyer Daniel Cohalan, was a strong supporter of Irish nationalism at a crucial time, in the run-up to, and aftermath of, the Easter Rising. New York–born Cohalan offers an interesting window on the world of Irish American nationalism in the early twentieth century. As Michael Doorley puts it, while “Cohalan prided himself on his Irish nationalism, he also possessed a strong sense of American patriotism and sincerely believed that the British Empire posed as much of a threat to the United States as it did to Ireland.” Doorley details Cohalan’s disputes with Éamon de Valera, which he says highlight “how the objectives of the paper were fundamentally shaped by American considerations rather than by the perceived needs of the Irish leader.” He quotes from a sharp exchange of letters between de Valera and Cohalan in which the latter questioned de Valera’s right to dictate policy to Americans and Irish Americans. If de Valera thought he could do so, he was “woefully out of touch with the spirit of the country in which [he was] sojourning.” Cohalan stressed that “it was always as an American, and for my countrymen, that I spoke.” This exchange brings home a key fact: Irish Americans are Americans, albeit with an impressively strong sense of their Irish heritage and an enduring interest in Ireland sustained by their perception of themselves as the heirs of a dispossessed people who have, in the face of adversity, made it good.

This book provides a wealth of other insights: for example, it offers a view into the controversial career of Young Ireland luminary John Mitchel who became a passionate supporter of the Confederate South in the American Civil War; the achievements of Margaret Sullivan, the most prominent female journalist of her time and a strong Irish republican; and Land League leader Michael Davitt’s contributions to William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper chain. There is also an account of twentieth-century American influence on Irish journalism in the form of Connecticut-born John J. Harrington’s role as general manager of the Irish Press during the paper’s formative years when he was credited with promoting its forays into investigative journalism.

Irish America has evolved significantly in recent decades. The conflict in Northern Ireland resulted in parts of our community being at odds for a time with the Irish government, which was unstinting in its pursuit of a peaceful solution. At the same time, senior figures in Congress exerted significant influence by encouraging successive US administrations to put their weight behind a political agreement between the parties in Northern Ireland and the Irish and British governments. Today, Irish America is impressively united in its support for Irish government policies with regard to Northern Ireland which are anchored in a deep commitment to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and its full implementation. Irish American politicians have long been a source of support for Ireland, especially in the run-up to the Good Friday Agreement, and they continue to take an active interest in our fortunes as a nation.

Irish America is very different today from what it was in the late nineteenth-century heyday of Irish American journalism. It is generationally more remote from Ireland, but perhaps also more knowledgeable about Ireland. Modern communications make it possible for people in America to keep abreast of Irish developments in ways that were not possible in the past. I have been impressed with the extent to which many Irish Americans I meet are relatively well versed in Irish affairs.

With the wide variety of air routes now available between America and Ireland and the more affordable fares that apply, far more Irish Americans now visit Ireland than ever before. A visit to Ireland is no longer necessarily a once-in-a-lifetime, late-in-life experience. I sometimes come across dismissals of Irish America, especially on social media, for being out of touch with the realities of contemporary Ireland. Such criticisms seem to me to be wide of the mark. For one thing, Irish America is a very diverse community, and it would be wrong to typecast it into traditional molds. Furthermore, Irish Americans are not Irish; they are Americans who have an affinity with Ireland. It is not for us to tell them how—and how not—to express their sense of Irishness, which is a product of the American environment in which their community was formed and in which it has evolved.

No book can ever paint a complete picture. This collection does, however, tell a number of important stories and provides invaluable insights about journalism, about Ireland, about America, and about the ethnicity of the Irish in America. In particular, this volume is an important contribution to the understanding of the Irish American experience through history, with its unique, compelling blend of Irish and American elements.

Washington, DC, July 2019