1 I am grateful to Professor Kelleher for allowing me to quote him. I am grateful also to Professor John Tracy Ellis and Helen Mulvey for comments and additions prompted by an earlier version of this paper.

2 The Irish-American experience: a guide to the literature. By Metress, Seamus. Pp 220. Washington: University Press of America, 1981. $10.25 softcover; $19.75 hardcover.Google Scholar

3 I have prepared bibliographies of the major critical titles on Irish America by topic for Doyle, David N. and Edwards, Owen Dudley (eds), America and Ireland, 1776-1976 (London and Westport, Conn., 1980), pp 89–91, 102-03, 123, 147-9, 132, 190-91, 203, 218, 227-8, 259, 326-8Google Scholar. These are surveyed, with others, in Burchell, R.A., ‘The historiography of the American Irish’ in Immigrants and Minorities, vol. 1 (1982), pp 281–305 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also noteworthy are the exhaustive bibliographies on literary and fictional sources in Casey, Daniel J. and Rhodes, Robert E., Irish-American fiction (New York, 1979), pp 173–343 Google Scholar, with an historian’s assessment by M. E. Connors on pp 1-12. Generalisations in this introduction are based upon the works listed in these works, in others cited in Metress, Irish-American experience, and those added in the accompanying bibliography here. Only specific and controversial points are annotated here. There is no adequate guide to primary sources. For studies of the Massachusetts Irish in Boston, Fall River, Chicopee, Worcester, Northampton, Lynn, Lowell, Lawrence, Newburyport, Springfield and Waltham, see Metress, ibid., pp 151–60, 214–15, and below, section 4.

4 Doyle, David N., Irish Americans, native rights and national empires, 1890-1901 (New York, 1976), pp 40–42, 59-60, 74-5.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., pp 38–90.

6 Biever, Bruce F., Religion, culture and values: native Irish and American Irish Catholicism (New York, 1976)Google Scholar; Greeley, Andrew, Ethnicity, denomination and inequality (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1976)Google Scholar and The American catholic: a social portrait (New York, 1977). These works would have benefited from better controls for regionalism, even granted its decline as a significant force after the Second World War.

7 Two recent anthologies of such studies are Cantor, Milton (ed.), American workingclass culture: explorations in American labor and social history (Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn., 1979)Google Scholar, and Ehrlich, Richard L., Immigrants in industrial America, 1850-1920 (Charlottesville, University of Virginia, 1977)Google Scholar. See Wilentz, Robert Sean, ‘Industrializing America and the Irish: towards the new departure’ in Labor History, vol. 20 (1979), pp 579-95CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Indeed, a more recent overemphasis on the factory ecology of substantially Irish communities owes some of its distortion, as well as much of its insight, to the isolation and class simplicities of the mill towns. Even here, however, one ought to distinguish between scholars, such as A. F. Wallace, William Millett, Daniel Walkowitz and Brian Mitchell, who pay attention to the roundedness of Irish experience, and those impatient to forge the lineaments of emergent class consciousness, who tend to leave aside sources not germane to their task, however revealing of their subjects, and even to ignore systematically the major works on Irish America. Paradoxically, the latter both debate continuously among themselves, and are subject to purist critiques from British and German scholars impatient of what deference they do make to American, and Irish-American, distinctiveness. Alan Dawley, Thomas Dublin, Paul Faler and John Cumbler are the best known of them. Others, such as Howard Gitelman, Philip Silvia, Anthony Coelho, Vincent Powers, Paul Dubovik, A. G. Mitchell and David Cole, are constrained by the limits of the mill and manufacturing centres, but range humanely nonetheless. It is a little unsettling to see the middle group predominate within the assigned readings in regional social history, and in some social sciences courses, at Harvard University (autumn 1982) where Oscar Handlin and Marcus Hansen pioneered the thorough-going understanding of immigrant history

8 Benson, Lee, The concept of Jacksonian democracy (Princeton, 1961)Google Scholar; Formisano, Ronald, The birth of mass political parties: Michigan, 1827-1861 (Princeton, 1971)Google Scholar; Holt, Michael, Forging a majority: Pittsburg, 1848-1860 (New Haven, 1969)Google Scholar; Jensen, Richard, The winning of the Midwest, 1888-1896 (Chicago, 1971)Google Scholar; Kleppner, Paul, The cross of culture: a social analysis of Midwestern politics, 1850-1900 (New York, 1970)Google Scholar; on prohibition specifically, see Gusfield, Joseph, Symbolic crusade (Urbana, III., 1966)Google Scholar; Timberlake, J. H., Prohibition and the progressive movement, 1900-1920 (New York, 1970)Google Scholar; and Clark, Norman, Deliver us from evil (New York, 1977)Google Scholar; education conflicts are summarised in Buetow, Harold, Of singular benefit: the story of catholic education in the United States (New York, 1970)Google Scholar. Scholars trying to emphasise the class bases of even antebellum Irish communities react with scorn to such findings, even to the quest for them. Retrospectively and rhetorically listing what plainly should be the priorities, Sean Wilentz thus asks, ‘Did, for example, an Irish hod carrier and his friends vote Democratic because they were poor, wage laborers, Irish, catholic, or a combination of all four? The revisionists could not say.’ (‘On class and politics in Jacksonian America’ in Reviews in American History, vol. 10 (1982), p. 48). See also Richard P. Latner and P. Levine, ‘Perspectives on antebellum pietistic politics’ in ibid., vol. 5 (1976), pp 15–24, or Wright, James E., ‘The ethno-cultural model of voting: a behavioral and historical critique’ in American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 16 (1973), pp 653-74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 See particularly Buenker, John D., Urban liberalism and progressive reform (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; Ebner, M. H. and Tobin, E. M. (ed.), The age of urban reform (Port Washington, N.Y., 1977)Google Scholar; Stave, Bruve M. (ed.), Urban bosses, machines and progressive reformers (Lexington, Mass., 1972)Google Scholar; Allswang, J. M., Bosses, machines and urban votes (Port Washington, N.Y., 1977)Google Scholar; and on labour Ramirez, Bruno, When workers fight: the politics of industrial relations, 1898-1916 (Westport, Conn., 1978)Google Scholar; Yellowitz, Irwin, Labor and the progressive movement in New York State, 1897-1916 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1968)Google Scholar; Karson, Marc, American labor unions and politics, 1900-1918 (Boston, 1965), esp. pp 212 ff.Google Scholar; Fink, Gary (ed.), A biographical dictionary of American labor leaders (Westport, Conn., 1974), with guide to relevant Irish-American entries at pp 434-5 and 455-6Google Scholar. On the other side, constructive reinterpretation cannot negate empirical findings that Irish involvement in politics aided careers, facilitated contracts and even corrupted voting, if no more than was commonplace: q.v. Erie, S.P., ‘Politics, the public sector and Irish social mobility: San Francisco, 1870-1900’ in Western Political Quarterly, vol. 31 (1978), pp 274-89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tarr, Joel A., ‘J. R. Walsh of Chicago’ in Business History Review, vol. 40 (1966), pp 451-66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reynolds, John ‘“The silent dollar”: vote-buying in New Jersey’ in New Jersey History, vol. 98 (1980), pp 191–211 Google Scholar (this last practice there ended by the young politicians under Joe Tumulty, who turned to Woodrow Wilson).

10 I have listed the major studies in America and Ireland, p. 328; Metress, Irish-American experience, pp 135–50, 211–13, lists many further works for Canada; as does the Innes Review, vol. 29 (1978), passim, for Scotland; Inglis, K. S., ‘Catholic historiography in Australia’ in Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, vol. 8 (1958), pp 233-53Google Scholar, for Australia, with further additions in O’Farrell, Patrick, The catholic church and community in Australia: a history (West Melbourne, 1977)Google Scholar; D’Arcy, Fergus, ‘The Irish in 19th-century Britain’ in Irish History Workshop, vol. 1 (1981), pp 11–12 Google Scholar, lists the chief items for England, omitting theses. I have not been able to examine a bibliography of Irish-Canadiana of the 1960/70s: Stort, G. J., ‘Irish immigration to Canada in the 19th century’ in Immigration History Newsletter, vol. 11 (1979), pp 4–13.Google Scholar

11 Walsh, Victor, ‘“A fanatic heart”: the cause of Irish-American nationalism in Pittsburg during the gilded age’ in Journal of Social History, vol. 15 (1981), pp 187–204 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Foner, Eric, ‘Class, ethnicity and radicalism in the gilded age: the Land League and Irish America’ in Marxist Perspectives, vol. 1 (1978), pp 6–55 Google Scholar; Gordon, Michael A., ‘Studies in Irish and Irish-American thought and behaviour in the gilded age’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, 1977)Google Scholar; Bennett, John, ‘Iron workers in Woods Run and Johnstown: the union era, 1865-1895’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburg, pp 331-60)Google Scholar; but cf.Funchion, Michael F., Chicago’s Irish nationalists, 1881-1890 (New York, 1976), pp 23–41 Google Scholar, for another view; nor should the non-Irish, non-labour sources be forgotten: Reuter, W. C., ‘The anatomy of political anglophobia in the United States, 1865-1900’ in Mid-America, vol. 61 (1979), pp 117-32.Google Scholar

12 We know most about the coexistence of real álites and anti-Irish violence for Philadelphia; but historians divide sharply over the question as to whether the elites lacked the authority to curb riot, initially condoned its sources (in speeches, editorials, etc.), or simply existed in a vacuum in a disordered city: Warner, Sam Bass, The private city: Philadelphia in three periods of its growth (Philadelphia, 1968), ch. 7Google Scholar; Baltzell, E. Digby, Philadelphia gentlemen (Glencoe, III., 1958)Google Scholar; Whiteman, Maxwell, Gentlemen in crisis (Philadelphia, 1975)Google Scholar; Feldberg, Michael, The Philadelphia riots of 1844: a study of ethnic conflict (Westport, Conn., 1975)Google Scholar; Lannie, V. P. and Diethorn, B. C., ‘For the honor and glory of God: the Philadelphia bible riots of 1840’ in History of Education Quarterly, vol. 8 (1968), pp 44–106 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Montgomery, David, ‘The shuttle and the cross’in Journal of Social History, vol. 5 (1972), pp 411-46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schneider, J. C., ‘Community and order in Philadelphia, 1834-54’ in Maryland Historian, vol. 5 (1974), pp 15–21 Google Scholar, offer but a sample of an inflated literature. Did persistence of elite influence (not control) shown in Baltzell and Whiteman contribute to the continuing pattern of ethnic stratification and emotion into the 1920s shown in Shover, John L., ‘Ethnicity and religion in Philadelphia politics, 1924-1940’ in American Quarterly, vol. 25 (1973), pp 499–515?CrossRefGoogle Scholar Certainly, as in Oregon, Michigan and California, gentlemen of both political parties encouraged a measured ‘Americanism’ which put equal pressure on ‘Irish’, labour and catholic interests around 1920.

13 Michael F. Funchion is compiling an historical dictionary of Irish-American organisations for Greenwood Press. John D. Buenker is the historian of new generations’ politics (see n. 9 above, and citations below); but Timothy Meagher is completing a Ph.D. at Brown University on the Worcester (Massachusetts) Irish, 1860–1920, which will explicitly link the change to a generational transition, as does Casey, Marian, Charles McCarthy: librarianship and reform (Chicago, 1981)Google Scholar, a study of Robert La Follette’s work-horse.

14 Shaughnessy, Gerald, Has the immigrant kept the faith? (New York, 1925)Google Scholar; Wilcox, J. and Golden, H. H., ‘Prolific immigrants and dwindling natives: fertility patterns in Western Massachusetts, 1850 and 1880’ in Journal of Family History, vol. 7 (1982), pp 265-88CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Haines, M. R., ‘Fertility and marriage in a nineteenth-century industrial city: Philadelphia, 1850-1880’in Journal of Economic History, vol. 40 (1980), pp 151-8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gráda, Cormac Ó, ‘A note on nineteenth-century Irish emigration statistics’ in Population Studies, vol. 29 (1975), pp 143-9CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Hareven, T. K. and Vinovskis, M., ‘Marital fertility, ethnicity and occupation. … South Boston and the South End in 1880’ in Journal of Urban History, vol. 1 (1975), pp 293–315.Google Scholar

15 Shanabruch, Charles, Chicago’s catholics (Notre Dame, Ind., 1981) (on 1833-1924 period)Google Scholar; Hennessy, James S.J., American catholics (New York, 1981) (a full history)Google Scholar; Gaffey, James P., Citizen of no mean city: Archbishop Patrick Riordan of San Francisco (Wilmington, N.C., 1976)Google Scholar (archbishop, 1885–1914); and Francis Clement Kelley and the American dream (2 vols, Bensenville, III., 1980) (on church rural extension since 1905).

16 Linkh, Richard M., American catholics and the European immigrant, 1900-1924 (Staten Island, N.Y., 1974) (on New York essentially)Google Scholar; Henderson, T. McLean Tammany Hall and the new immigrants, 1910-1921 (New York, 1976)Google Scholar. For the contrast in Detroit see Janis, R., ‘Ethnic mixture and the persistence of cultural pluralism in the church communities of Detroit, 1880-1940’ in Mid-America, vol. 61 (1979), pp 99–115 Google Scholar, a summary of his 1972 Ph.D. dissertation; Shergold, Peter R., Working-class life: the ‘American standard’ in comparative perspective, 1899-1913 (Pittsburg, 1982)Google Scholar, on livelihoods.

17 ‘Races and politics’ and ‘Machines and bosses’ in Brogan, D. W., Politics in America (New York, 1954)Google Scholar; Anon., , ‘The Irish mafia’ in Times Literary Supplement, 11 Feb. 1965 Google Scholar; cf.Cummings, S., ‘A critical examination of the portrayal of catholic immigrants in American political life’ in Ethnicity, vol. 6 (1979), pp 197–214 Google Scholar, for further examples.

18 Syndegaard, Rex, ‘“Wild Irishmen” and the alien and sedition acts’ in Éire-Ireland, vol. 9, no. 1 (1974), pp 17–24 Google Scholar; Tanzer, L. (ed.), The Kennedy circle (Washington, 1961)Google Scholar; O’Connell, J. J., Catholicity in the Carolinas and Georgia, 1820-1857 (New York, 1879)Google Scholar; O’Connell, William, Recollections of seventy years (Boston, 1934).Google Scholar

19 Miller, K. A., Emigrants and exiles (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1977)Google Scholar; Clark, D. J., ‘Muted heritage: Gaelic in an American city’ in Éire-Ireland, vol. 6, no. 1 (1971), pp 3–7 Google Scholar; Shannon, J. F., ‘Bishop Ireland’s Connemara experiment’ in Minnesota History, Vol. 35 (1957), pp 205-13Google Scholar; Walsh, E. J., ‘Language problem of Irish immigrants at the time of the famine’ in St Meinrads Essays, vol. 12 (1959-60), pp 60–73 Google Scholar (also wrongly listed by Metress on p. 41 as by J. P. Walsh, 1973). Apart from the essays by Buachalla, Breandán Ó, Aonghusa, Proinsías Mac, Dochartaigh, Liam Ó and Conaire, Breandán Ó in hAnnracháin, Stiofán Ó (ed.), Go Meiriceá siar: na Gaeil agus Meiriceá: chusach aistí (Dublin, 1979)Google Scholar, see Ford, James J., ‘Some records of the Irish language in the greater Boston area’ in Bulletin: the Eire Society of Boston, vol. 32 (1973)Google Scholar, nn 2 and 3 passim; Waters, Martin, ‘Peasants and emigrants: considerations of the Gaelic League as a social movement’ in Casey, D. J. and Rhodes, R. E. (eds), Views of the Irish peasantry, 1800-1916 (Hamden, Conn., 1977), pp 160-77Google Scholar; Kenneth E. Nilsen, ‘Irish speakers in America: the neglected minority’ forthcoming (paper delivered at University of Massachusetts, Boston, 16 Oct. 1982); and for the figures on Irish speaking, apart from Nilsen’s summary of 1970 census data, see S. Ó hAnnracháin, Go Meiriceá siar, p. 10 (1890s); Doyle, D. N., Irish Americans, native rights and national empires (New York, 1976), p. 32 (1850s)Google Scholar; Miller, Kerby, ‘Emigrants and exiles’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1976), pp 379-80 incl. table VIII.Google Scholar

20 I have listed the bones of this scholarship in Ireland, Irishmen and revolutionary America, 1760–1820 (Dublin, 1981), pp 237–8, 241–2, 245–9, to which should be added Schlenther, Boyd S., The life and writings of Francis Makemie (Philadelphia, 1971)Google Scholar; Nybakken, Elizabeth I. (ed.), The Centinel: warnings of a revolution (Newark, Del., 1980)Google Scholar (on George Bryan and Francis Alison); Nybakken, Elizabeth I., ‘New light on the old side: Irish influence on colonial presbyterianism’ in Journal of American History, vol. 68 (1982), pp 814-32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blake, J. W. (ed.), The Ulster American connection: a series of lectures delivered in the autumn of 1976 (Coleraine, 1981)Google Scholar, including of original value S. J. S. Ickringill, ‘The Scotch-Irish and the American revolution’, pp 19–25, and P. D. Marshall, ‘A founding minority: Scotch-Irish contributions to the growth of the American republic’, pp 26–32; Ireland, Owen, ‘Partisanship and the constitution: Pennsylvania, 1787’ in Pennsylvania History, vol. 45 (1977), pp 315-32Google Scholar; Peeling, James H., ‘Governor McKean and the Pennsylvania Jacobins, (1799-1808)’ in Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 54 (1930), pp 320-54Google Scholar; Everett, Edward G., ‘Some aspects of pro-French sentiment in Pennsylvania, 1790-1800’ in Western Pennsylvania Magazine of History, vol. 43 (1960), pp 23–41 Google Scholar. I am grateful to Steve Ickringill, Elizabeth Nybakken and Maurice Bric for these additions. Deirdre Mageean of the Open University, Milton Keynes, and Frank D’Arcy of Magee University College, Londonderry, amongst others, are examining nineteenth-century Ulster migration to America. The equivalent Anglo-Irish later migration, from Harman Blennerhasset to Rex Ingram, would make a valuable counterpoint to the studies of mass flows from Ireland. Some lesser aspects of protestant migration are revealed in Miller, Howard, The revolutionary college: American presbyterian higher education, 1707-1837 (New York, 1976)Google Scholar, and Goodbody, Olive (ed.), ‘The letters of Benjamin Chandlee’ in Quaker History, vol. 64 (1975), pp 110-15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Jones, Maldwyn Allen, ‘The Scotch-Irish’ in Thernstrom, S., Handlin, O. and Orlov, Ann (ed.), Harvard encyclopedia of American ethnic groups (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), pp 896–908 Google Scholar; Marshall as cited above, n. 20.

22 These are easily traced; to list them would be too extensive here.

23 Higham, John, ‘Les deux Irlandes en Amérique’ in Critique (Paris), vols 421-2 (1982), pp 612-20Google Scholar; Klein, Maury, ‘The Scotch-Irish’ in American History Illustrated, vol. 13 (1979), no. 9, pp 30–38 Google Scholar; no. 10, pp 32–9; vol. 14 (1979–80), no. l, pp 8–12 and 15–17; and, popularly, Welch, Richard F., ‘The Scotch-Irish’ in Early American Life, vol. 10 (1979), pp 32-3, 66-8Google Scholar. For Metress’s attitude to this, see Metress, Seamus, Listen, Irish people! (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; personal correspondence, Eóin McKiernan to author, 1980-81. I might suggest, after wide study, that there were two distinct but interactive communities, less divided between 1780 and 1840 than afterwards.

24 A group at the University of Alabama has been detailing the controversial ‘Celtic south’ thesis. In addition to articles by Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney, see McWhiney, Grady and Jamieson, Perry D., Attack and die (University, Ala., 1981)Google Scholar. Although this school tends to overstatement, its intemperate opponents neglect the solidity of the demographic and cultural evidence it is turning up. This evidence is enhanced even by the findings of critics such as Thomas Purvis and supported by the work of geographers and ethnologists, such as Richard Gerlach, analysing residual ‘Scotch-Irish’ areas. There is also a considerably larger historiography of both Irish and Ulster Irish presence in the American south than is usually supposed (see below, section 5).

25 Willging, Eugene and Hatzfeld, Herta, Catholic serials of the nineteenth century (15 vols, Washington, 1959-68)Google Scholar; Joyce, William L., Editors and ethnicity: a history of the Irish-American press, 1848-1883 (New York, 1976).Google Scholar

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