Becoming Irish American: The Making and Remaking of a People from Roanoke to JFK, Meagher - B

                    Ireland in the first millennium of the Christian era was Celtic, rural and Catholic. The Normans came to southeastern Ireland from England in the late 12th century, and revolutionized and reorganized all aspects of Irish society. Over time, they settled into a rapprochement with the Celts. In the 15th century, Tudor England sought to assert control over Ireland. England's victories in the north led to the introduction of Scottish Protestant settlers. A century later when the Civil War spread to Ireland, Cromwell reallocated most of the land in the country to the English Protestants. By 1770, Catholics owned only 5% of Ireland's land. The English Anglican elites diminished not only the Catholics, but also the Ulster Presbyterians who in the 18th century began to flee to America. By the time of the American Revolution, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 had left Ireland for the new world. The vast majority were Protestants, and they settled throughout Appalachia. They supported independence and afterwards leaned toward the Democratic-Republican party. Initially non-sectarian, the Ulster Irish began to resent the newcomer Irish Catholics in the beginning of the 19th century.

                   The Napoleonic Wars had seen England rely heavily on Irish exports, thus bringing prosperity, and a significant population increase to the island. After 1815, that boom ended. In the thirty years preceding the famine, almost a million left Ireland for North America. "As the huge Protestant Irish immigration seemed to disappear into thin air, Irish Catholics, were growing rapidly and becoming more noticeable." The newcomers to America were met with increasing nativist opposition and violence. A million and a half Irish immigrants came to the US in the decade after the famine began in 1845. They were impoverished laborers. The 1860 census showed only 7% of Irish immigrants had white collar jobs. They stayed in the big cities of the east, because they could not afford to travel to the midwest and beyond. They struggled because of their "simple lack of money, craft skills, or even familiarity with a modern commercial society." The Irish faced the fierce hostility of the Order of the Star Spangled Banner (OSSB ie., the Know Nothings). Because the Protestant hierarchy championed abolitionism and opposed the Irish, the Irish wound up supporting the Democrats and slavery. Indeed the antagonism of the abolitionists and Protestant establishment assured that virtually no Irishman outside of Illinois voted for Lincoln. They worried that the Republicans wanted to free the slaves and impoverish and disenfranchise them. The Irish fought bravely for the US, and after the war, they memorialized their commitment to the union to adhere to the American mainstream.  Nonetheless, they still faced anti-Irish racism on every front.   

                The Irish continued to arrive in America. In the half century after 1880, 1.7 million more came. They joined the burgeoning second generation Irish who were making substantial economic progress. By 1900, a quarter of them had white collar jobs. A third of the second generation women were schoolteachers. Nonetheless, the Irish seldom owned businesses or rose to upper management. "Irish American Catholics had significant advantages over other groups, being white and Christian, of course, but the Protestant establishment did set an upper limit to the Irish rise that would frustrate the most ambitious among them through much of the twentieth century." As they could not be insiders, they became the leaders of those looking in. They dominated big city politics and the labor unions. They adjusted to the influx of central Europeans, Italians and Jews by bringing them into the urban Progressive movement of the Democratic Party. The party rose in stature, began to put more and more men in Congress, and elected a president in 1912. But, pushing against liberalism in the public arena was, of course, the Catholic Church, which preferred that the Catholics remain separate. The Knights of Columbus, a pan-ethnic religious group, fostered a vision of a Catholic world as an alternative to Protestant America. The 1920's saw a "rebirth of religious and ethnic nativism." The Ku Klux Klan exploded in popularity, and a new immigration law enshrined America as an Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation.  The divisions in America were embodied in the 1928 presidential election, which pitted Catholics v. Protestants, cities v. the countryside, immigrant v. native, and wets v. drys. 

                   The Depression hurt all, particularly the urban working classes. However, the circumstances of the Irish improved throughout the 1930's thanks to the New Deal and the renaissance of the labor movement.  Irish politicians grew in numbers and influence. There was, however, conflict between the inherently conservative Catholic churchmen, and the elites in Roosevelt's administration. Irish Catholics supported the war and a higher percentage of the Irish population served than any other ethnic group.  Pius XII's obsession with communism permeated the church after the war. "Third generation Irish Joe McCarthy" fanned the red scare from the Senate. Another conservative Irish Catholic, William Buckley, battled the liberal elites. During the postwar years,  the Irish focused on riding "the postwar prosperity economic boom that the war had prompted to college educations, new and better jobs, and homes in rapidly growing suburbs." But they were still not assimilated. A writer observed that for the Protestants "it was their county, handed down to them by the Pilgrims." Throughout the 40's, 50's and 60's, Irish Americans had larger families than other ethnic groups, and were more religious than they had ever been.  The election of one of their own to the presidency sealed their acceptance as part of the American establishment. They no longer faced structural prejudices. The Vatican Council took some of the edge off Catholic solidarity and encouraged reconciliation with all faiths.  Increasingly conservative, the Irish have drifted away from the Democratic Party and attend church less frequently than their ancestors.  They marry non-Irish and non-Catholics more and more. Fully assimilated, the Irish Catholics are fully American.