This chapter traces Irish America’s place in the lineage of today’s white nationalist movement, to help explain the remarkable prominence of Irish American Catholics in contemporary America’s racist, alt-right movement, as well as the far-right wing of the Republican Party. Irish American Catholics are prominent also among Democratic Party’s progressive left-wing, too. However, given the history of vilification of Irish Catholic immigrants by hard-right groups such as the Know-Nothings in the nineteenth century and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the twentieth, the sheer number of Irish American extreme right-wingers has puzzled and merits deeper investigation. The chapter investigates how the Catholic Irish transmuted from a redundant, expendable people in the British colonial state in Ireland, to valuable American citizens, and ultimately white American nationals, through an analysis of the work of the most accomplished and prolific of all Irish American writers, Eugene O’Neill and James T. Farrell.

When James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy is read today, it is typically read within limits. It serves as an example of proletarian, sociological, or naturalist fiction. In this view, it is emblematic of the post-Chicago Renaissance dark age of creativity, it demonstrates the influence of the University of Chicago’s sociology department’s focus on neighborhoods and juvenile delinquency, or it is an example of ethnic literature. With this chapter, I take the Chicago sociologists’s focus on “ecology” and broaden it to include human relationships with their non-human surroundings. Doing so demonstrates the wide potential of readings for Studs Lonigan, wherein the preceding circumscriptions give way to new forms of collaboration, contamination, and association more in line with ecological thinking of our own time. It is precisely Studs’s ability to take advantage of Chicago’s own ecological planning, with its large network of parks, that present these moments of what Donna Haraway calls “making kin.” It is up to us new readers, then, to understand why the potential remains unused.