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Transatlantic Irish and the racial state
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Content
TRANSATLANTIC IRISH AND THE RACIAL STATE
by
Peter Desmond O’Neill
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
December 2010
Copyright 2010 Peter Desmond O'Neill
ii
DEDICATION
In loving memory of my parents,
Hugh O’Neill and Margaret Kerlin O’Neill;
My sister Trish and brother Hughie;
My father-in-law Bob Amann and mother-in-law Barbara Bruni Amann.
iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people contributed to the production of this dissertation––too many to list
here. However, some deserve my special thanks. First of all, I would like to thank David
Lloyd, who has been a constant source of support throughout my Ph.D. adventure. When
we met in Berkeley to discuss the possibilities of my return to study after a prolonged
absence, little did I know that my family and I would move to Los Angeles the following
year so that I could undertake coursework in the English Department of the University of
Southern California. As I note in my introductory chapter, I had a specific project in mind
when I enrolled at USC, but all that changed in my first semester, when I took a course in
19
th
Century American literature with John Carlos Rowe. John’s genius not to mention
his amazing teaching skills led me to embrace transnational American Studies with gusto.
The two classes I took with John resulted in two essays published in peer-reviewed
journals, giving Rowe’s mentorship a perfect batting average.
My first published article from John’s class centered on Frederick Douglass’s
1845 visit to Ireland at the beginning of the Great Famine, and involved an investigation
of Paul Gilroy’s notion of the Black Atlantic. Fruitful conversations with David on Green
Atlantic possibilities led to planning for a conference on the Black and Green Atlantic.
We invited leading and up-and-coming scholars in the fields of African, Caribbean,
American, and Irish Studies; the result was a brilliant conversation that morphed into a
collection of essays, The Black and Green Atlantic: Crosscurrents of the African and
Irish Diasporas, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009. I am most fortunate to have
co-edited this collection with David. Since my dissertation committee is headed by these
iv
giants in their fields––Rowe of American and Lloyd of Irish studies––it is perhaps of
little wonder that I should find myself swimming the theoretical depths of the broad
Atlantic.
At USC I benefitted from other superb teachers. Panivong Norindr, chair of
USC’s Comparative Literature Department and the “outside” member of my dissertation
committee, shared his wealth of knowledge of postcolonial theory in a memorable
seminar. I was fortunate also to have Ruthie Gilmore as a teacher. Her American studies
class provided me with intellectual nourishment that helped sustain this project. I am
truly honored to call Ruthie and Pani my friends and mentors. Other notable faculty at
USC include Rick Berg, Viet Nguyen, Judith Jackson Fossett, and David Rollo. Thanks
to you all.
I thank Black and Green Atlantic Conference keynote speakers Cedric J.
Robinson and Peter Linebaugh for their sage advice and encouragement. I would also like
to acknowledge Stacy Lettman, Mark Quigley, Amy Martin, Lee Jenkins, Michael
Malouf, Tony Hale, Denis O’Hearn, and Jon Niato for their contributions to the
conference and the book. At the suggestion of our fabulous editor at Palgrave, Christabel
Scaife, we broadened the essay collection. This proved a wise move. Marjorie Howes,
Fionnghuala Sweeney, Nini Rodgers, and Ann Gulick agreed to contribute chapters that
greatly enhanced the project. Thanks to you all.
My fellow graduate students Mike Cucher, Robert Stefanek, and Domino Torres,
assisted me in editing The Black and Green Atlantic, and have been great companions. I
am also grateful to Michael Colson, José Navarro and Domino Torres for their help at the
v
BGA conference. Special thanks also go to Michelle Har Kim, friend and editor
extraordinaire, to Katie Karlin and Stacy Lettman, fellow travelers on the rocky road,
and to my other fellow graduate students too numerous to name.
I was fortunate enough to take my final two graduate classes with Abdul
JanMohamed and José David Saldivar at the University of California-Berkeley. These
courses greatly aided this project. I am grateful to Abdul and José for their generosity of
spirit as well as their intellectual insight. Thanks are due to all the Berkeley graduate
students who offered critiques of my work, especially Katie Simon and the Transatlantic
Early American Society. I owe a word of thanks too to Berkeley English’s Ian Duncan,
who allowed me to sit in on his placement seminars.
The financial support I received at USC, especially my English Departmental
dissertation fellowship and my Feuchtwanger fellowship, allowed me to finish this
project in good time. I am grateful also for the Provost’s Humanities Initiative, which
helped fund the BGA conference, and to USC’s Professionalization Initiative, which
provided funds for our book’s three assistant editors. Thank you Mark Todd and all
others involved.
Librarians are the silent hands who guide us all through our teapot tempests, and
in the course of my research I received stellar help from a number of them. I hail them
all, but especially those at Doheny Library at USC; the Bancroft Library, the Gardner
Library, and the Newspapers and Microforms Room at UC Berkeley; the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.; and the California Historical Society Library and
DeYoung Museum Library, both in San Francisco. Special thanks are due to Thomas
vi
Carey and Andrea Grimes, of the wonderful San Francisco Public Library, for their
enthusiastic and generous help.
I have listed the conferences and conference participants from whom I benefitted
in the Introduction. A special thank you is due here, though, to those who commented on
various aspects of my work or who assisted in my research. In the latter category is Kevin
Mullan, who shared with me his extensive knowledge of the history of the San Francisco
Police Department. Donald Pease of Dartmouth College gave generously of his time and
advice, as did Liam Kennedy of the Clinton Institute at University College Dublin,
Winfried Fluck, Ulla Haselstein, and all at the Kennedy Institute at Free University
Berlin, Rüdiger Kunow at Pottsdam University, Reinhard Isensee of Humboldt
University Berlin, and Nancy Armstrong of Brown University. Kate Eagan shared her
time and her brilliant Boston College Ph.D. dissertation. At New York University, I
received tremendous support from Joe Lee, Eileen Reilly, and, especially, John Waters.
Over the years my longtime friend, Mick Moloney of NYU, has shared with me his
extensive knowledge of Irish American music and culture, and he was an invaluable
resource for this project. A very special thanks are due to the inimitable Margaret A and
all at the ECF who have been with me all the way along this winding path.
Last, but not least, I want to thank my family—my wife, Diane Marie Amann, my
editor-in-chief, and our brilliant son, Tiernan. They have had to put up with my manic
behavior throughout the entire Ph.D. process. Forgive the cliché, my family, but I could
not have done it without you. Diane has been more than generous with her time, as well
as her love, her patience, and her understanding, even as she fought deadlines of her own.
vii
Tiernan continually reminds me of what is really important in life. Tiernan, our own “Top
Chef,” you are the best son a parent could wish for…and the funniest.
While I have received all this help from so many people, all errors in the text are
mine and mine alone.
viii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
List of Figures xi
Abstract xii
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1
Chapter One Endnotes 17
CHAPTER TWO: JAMES JOYCE AND THE BIOPOLITICS OF STATE FORMATION 18
I. Theoretical Tools 19
Biopolitics, Governmentality and the Birth of the Modern Nomos 19
Metasovereignty: Nomos versus Hegemony 27
II. Colonial Discipline in Ireland and the Rise of Nomos Britannicus 29
Nomos Britannicus 30
Biopolitical Management in Ireland 37
Disciplinary Power 38
III. James Joyce and the Biopolitics of Paralysis 43
Servants of Two Masters 43
The Politics of Disciplinary Pedagogy 50
Joyce and the Famine 52
Feeding “The Dead” 55
East Meets West 57
Death and “The Dead” 60
Mr. Bloom’s Peripatetic Potato 64
Hunger in Ulysses 67
Homo Sacer in Hades 68
Lestrygonian Soup 75
Sea-Divided Gael 82
Chapter Two Endnotes 91
CHAPTER THREE: THE RACIAL STATE AND THE TRANSATLANTIC FAMINE IRISH 95
Bare Life in Cohasset 95
I. The Black and Green Atlantic 102
One Black Man’s Flight From America 103
Green Emigrants’ Flight From Ireland 105
Aboard Seafaring Coffins 107
Paul Gilroy and the Black and Green Atlantic 110
Douglass in Ireland 111
Dublin Narrative 112
Liberation and the Liberator 114
Disaster Dodge 115
ix
II. The Racial State and the Rise of Nomos Americanus 117
Nomos Americanus 118
Nomos Americanus and the Famine Irish 123
III. Journaling John Mitchel 129
John Mitchel and the Racial Contract 131
Mitchel the United States Citizen 139
IV. The Life and Times of Dagger John 146
The Early Years 147
Disciplining the Flock 151
The Schools Question: Hughes Leads the Way 157
The Catholic Church and the Military Apparatus 160
The “Scattered Debris of the Irish Nation.” 163
“I will suffer… no man I cannot control”: Irish
Nationalism and the Bishop 166
The Archbishop and the Racial State 171
Hughes and the Civil War 174
Chapter Three Endnotes 180
CHAPTER FOUR: RACE, CITIZENSHIP, AND CALIFORNIA’S
CHINESE AND IRISH WORKINGMEN 185
I. The Story of San Francisco’s Anti Chinese Movement 186
East Meets West Aboard the Transcontinental Railroad 189
The Irish “Off to Californy” and on to San Francisco 195
For the Chinese, a Rocky Road to Gold Mountain 199
Denis Kearney and the Anti-Chinese Workingmen in 1870s
San Francisco 205
II. Writing Racism into Layers of Law 214
In San Francisco: Irish Presence and Anti-Chinese Ordinances 214
In Sacramento: Investigation and Legislation 217
Congress Investigates the Irish as well as the Chinese 222
III. In the Service of the State, at the Mercy of State Services 233
Defending the State 234
Depending on the State 239
Chapter Four Endnotes 247
CHAPTER FIVE: GENDER LAUNDERING OF IRISH WOMEN AND
CHINESE MEN IN SAN FRANCISCO 254
I. Gender Laundering and the Imaginary of Popular Culture 255
Producers and Products in the Nineteenth-Century US
Culture Industry 257
Gender, Sexuality, and the Alchemy of Race 262
San Francisco Theater and the Irish 265
x
II. Coming Together From Oceans Apart 268
Woman Flees Famine Ireland 269
Cast as a Domestic, “Bridget” Makes Her Début 272
Man Exits China For Gold Mountain 278
Becoming “Hop Sing” 279
Bridget Meets Hop Sing 282
Bridget Gets the Brush 293
Irish Drawing White 303
III. A New Cycle of Acculturation to Assimilation 310
Bridget Says Goodbye 310
American Civics Class 312
Chapter Five Endnotes 317
CHAPTER SIX: THE WRITIN’ IRISH: OR RACE, CLASS, GENDER,
AND THE STATE IN CATHOLIC IRISH-AMERICAN FICTION, 1800-1910 323
I. Pre-Famine Generation 328
The Irish as Irish 329
The Irish as Catholics 331
An Attempt at Art, as Retaliation 334
II. Famine Generation 337
Mrs. J. Sadlier and a Catholic Ethic of Political Economy 341
Father Quigley and the Founding of (Irish) America 350
Class, a Cut Above Nation 354
Of Converts and Apostates 358
Writing For Bridget 360
III. Second Generation Famine Irish 373
Tempering the Irish Brute 374
Tatters in Lace Curtains 382
Chapter Six Endnotes 395
CHAPTER SEVEN: RED SAILS THE GREEN ATLANTIC:
THE AMERICAN JAMES CONNOLLY 400
I. Formative Years 406
Connolly Arrives in America 408
Differences with De Leon 412
The IWW 419
The Socialist Party of America 422
II. Writings in America 425
The Irish Socialist Federation’s The Harp 426
Socialism Made Easy 430
Labour in Irish History 431
Chapter Seven Endnotes 437
Works Cited 439
xi
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 5.1: captioned “The Ignorant Vote – Honors Are Easy,” appeared on
the cover of Harpers Weekly on December 9, 1876.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 261
Figure 5.2: appeared on the cover of Thistleton’s Illustrated Jolly Giant
on December 26, 1874. Courtesy of The San Francisco Public Library. 275
Figure 5.3: captioned “Another Bar Down,” appeared on the back cover
of The Wasp March 3, 1887. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley. 280
Figure 5.4: captioned “The Marriage of Loo Foh to Miss Mahoney in St. Patrick’s
Catholic Church,” appeared on page 320 of Thistleton’s Illustrated Jolly Giant
on February 12, 1876. Courtesy of The San Francisco Public Library. 283
Figure 5.5: captioned “The Great Fear of the Period,”
is a lithograph by White & Bauer, San Francisco, made between 1860 and 1869.
Courtesy of The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 290
Figure 5.6: captioned “The Servant Question,” appeared in The Wasp,
Volume 9, (July-Dec. 1882; Call No. 311:440-441).
Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 294
Figure 5.7: appeared on page 165 of Thistleton’s Illustrated Jolly Giant
on October 16, 1880. Courtesy of The San Francisco Public Library. 300
Figure 5.8: captioned “Immigration East and West,” appeared in pages 136-37
of The Wasp on August 26, 1881. Courtesy of The San Francisco Public Library. 303
Figure 5.9: captioned “The Consequences of Coolieism,” appeared in The Wasp
on November 7, 1887. Courtesy of The San Francisco Public Library. 306
xii
ABSTRACT
Many decades after the narrator in the “Cyclops” chapter of James Joyce’s
Ulysses lamented the loss of “the winged speech of the sea-divided Gael,” scholars have
come to realize that Irish travels on the Green Atlantic merit systematic study like that
given to the Black Atlantic. Yet it is only recently that any Irish Studies scholars have
considered the Atlantic world as a framework that exceeds the usual binational approach
to diaspora. In American Ethnic Studies, Irish America receives little consideration,
except perhaps within the unstable category of “whiteness studies.” My dissertation
assumes a different stance. It argues that comparison of the transnational experiences of
the Irish in two quite different racial states, Britain and America, enriches comprehension
of the racialization processes on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Irish not only fitted into the US racial state, I argue; they helped to form it.
The claim that the Irish “became white” over time in the United States, while justified
with regard to the shifting perceptions of race in US culture, does not account for the
legal position of the nineteenth-century US state, which deemed the Irish “white” upon
arrival. Till now, little heed has been paid either to the state’s role in the Americanization
of the Irish or to the Irish role in the development of US state institutions.
My dissertation contributes a significant rethinking of racial formation in the
United States, from a comparative and transnational perspective through a synthesis of
seldom-connected theories and theorists. My Introduction explores Carl Schmitt’s
concepts “sovereign power” and “nomos,” along with Giorgio Agamben’s concept of
“bare life” in relation to the victims of the Famine, to the nineteenth-century British
xiii
colonial state. Foucault’s concepts of biopower and governmentality in turn provoke
reconsideration of the classic works of Omi and Winant, and of David Theo Goldberg, on
the racial state. I undertake that task through the work of Nicos Poulantzas, whose
seminal concepts of the methodologies of state formation are especially useful to describe
the complex struggle between the economic and the political in the nineteenth-century
evolution of the US state. Although none of these thinkers ever squarely confronts race,
racialization, or colonialism, my synthesis and extension of their work furnish a more
nuanced location of the post-Famine Irish in racial formations in the Atlantic world.
Chapter 2 undertakes such a theoretical synthesis through the writing of James Joyce.
The oft-remarked rapidity with which the Irish Famine faded from historical and
popular memory is usually attributed to the emigration of so many Famine victims and to
the Famine’s role as an agent of the colonial modernization of Ireland. Yet the hidden
afterlife of the Famine may be discerned in Ireland’s preeminent literary work, Ulysses.
Joyce’s concern with the biopolitical management of life and death in what was then a
British colony is readily apparent in “Hades” and “Lestrygonians,” chapters seeded with
allusions to the Famine and emigration alike. Through close reading of such episodes,
Chapter 2 exposes the Famine’s wake in the Atlantic world and thus rearticulates the Irish
experience in the United States.
Chapter 3 compares Frederick Douglass’s liberating 1845 journey from America
to Ireland with the opposite transatlantic flight of two Famine-era Irishmen, John Hughes,
Archbishop of New York, and John Mitchel, the Irish revolutionary turned proslavery
activist. In Ireland on the eve of the Famine, Douglass wrote that for the first time in his
xiv
life he felt a complete human being. Mitchel, on the other hand, resisted British
colonialism yet supported US slavery. The comparison of such transatlantic encounters
frames not only racial subject formation but also church/religious power within a
distinctly transnational context. My investigation of Hughes reveals how, contrary to
received wisdom, Catholic religious imperialism flowed through the national
imperialisms of both Britain and the US.
Leaving the black/white binary that preoccupies many scholars of Irish America,
Chapter 4 continues west to California, the major “contact zone” between the Irish and
Chinese. Here I distinguish citizenship, for which the Irish qualified upon entry into the
United States, from nationality, which the Irish had to earn through two principal
conduits: the cultural imaginary and state apparatuses. This chapter exposes how US state
structures, infused with the ideological imperatives of Manifest Destiny, enabled the Irish
in the West to embody ideal American citizenship more quickly than did their
counterparts back East. An array of archival evidence –including government reports,
laws, speeches, and newspaper articles – supports this assertion. The chapter shows how
state political-legal disciplinary apparatuses provided extremely powerful conduits
through which the Irish attained ideal American citizenship by denying it to the Chinese.
Citizenship, gender, race, and class constitute the focus of Chapter 5. Through the
prism of popular culture – specifically, cartoons and theater – I contrast the feminization
of the Chinese man with a peculiarly overlooked phenomenon, the masculinization of the
Irish woman. Touching a theme that runs throughout the dissertation, the chapter further
xv
traces the acculturation-to-assimilation paths along which second-generation Irish women
embraced, and were embraced by, ideal American womanhood.
In Chapter 6 I examine forms of cultural production generally overlooked by
American Studies scholars: Irish American literature of the period. First were Famine
Irish writers who arrived in the US from 1845 onwards and published until about 1875.
Inspired by Archbishop Hughes, immigrants such as Mary Anne Sadlier and Father Hugh
Quigley wrote socially and politically conservative novels intended to confine their Irish
American readers to an insular, Catholic, Irish nationalist viewpoint, yet they claimed for
those same readers a place within the unfolding national narrative of the United States.
Particular attention is given in this chapter to the subgenre addressed specifically to Irish
woman servants. In addition, the chapter investigates the dramatic change in emphasis
that occurs in the work of certain second-generation Famine Irish American writers. Sons
and daughters of Famine Irish who published after 1875 to the turn of the century, these
authors fully embraced Catholic American citizenship while simultaneously rejecting
militant Irish nationalist ideology.
Embodying a quite different manifestation of the Green Atlantic’s possibilities is
James Connolly, one of the great unorthodox Marxist theorists of his time. Connolly
wrote some of his most important work, including Labour in Irish History, in the United
States, where he spent several years as a union organizer before returning to Ireland in
time to lead the doomed Easter Rising of 1916. Chapter 7 examines Connolly’s
transatlantic encounters with syndicalism and other political movements that deeply
influenced his political practice. His experiences confirm the assertion of Linebaugh and
xvi
Rediker that the Atlantic, that “many-headed hydra,” offers an alternative perspective on
the history of social and political movements. Like Douglass, Connolly is defined not by
motifs of settlement and assimilation, (reterritorialization,) but by movement and
circulation, (deterritorialization,) affording a distinctly postnational and “oceanic”
perspective.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
This dissertation has roots in an essay I wrote for Professor John Carlos Rowe’s
graduate seminar on Nineteenth-Century American Literature at the University of
Southern California. Its genealogy may be traced through a 2005 presentation at New
York University’s Grian Conference, later published as “Frederick Douglass and the
Irish” in the Irish studies journal Foilsiú. Investigation in that essay of Paul Gilroy’s 1993
seminal study, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness, led me to
evaluate the Green Atlantic concept. Seeing in Gilroy’s work a way to examine ethnicity
unconstrained by national borders, I began to ponder whether the Atlantic might serve as
a reliable frame within which to assess the transformation of Irish subjectivity in two
different nineteenth-century contexts, two different states in formation, the colonial state
of Britain and the United States of America.
Out of conversations with Professor David Lloyd developed a methodological
path for this inquiry. As a means to interrogate the suitability of the Atlantic frame,
among other issues, we decided to bring together leading and up-and-coming scholars of
African American, Caribbean, Irish, and Irish American studies for a conference on The
Black and Green Atlantic. Sponsored by a grant from the USC Provost’s Arts and
Humanities Initiative, the conference, the first of its kind held anywhere, was a
phenomenal success. I am particularly grateful to the two keynote speakers, Peter
Linebaugh and Cedric J. Robinson, for their generous input on my work. The excitement
2
generated by conference made clear that demand existed for more such collaborative
projects. Conference participants and other scholars in the field contributed to a
collection of essays entitled The Black and Green Atlantic: Crosscurrents of the African
and Irish Diasporas published last year by Palgrave Macmillan. I had the honor and
privilege of co-editing this collection with David Lloyd.
In this same period, John Carlos Rowe ensured that I continued to nurture my
interest in transnational American studies. A second Rowe class produced another
conference paper and another publication. The conference, entitled “America Without
Borders,” inaugurated a series of three Transnational American Studies Symposia funded
by the Humboldt Foundation in Germany. Held at USC in October 2006, this first
“Transcoop” Conference resulted in generous feedback on my presentation on James
Connolly from participants such as Don Pease, Liam Kennedy, Winfried Fluck, Ulla
Haselstein, and Rüdiger Kunow. My essay, “The Atlantic James Connolly,” was
published in The Internationalist Review of Irish Culture.
At the second Transcoop conference, held at Dartmouth College in 2007,
provided a venue for development of a good deal of the theoretical basis of this
dissertation. In particular, I began investigating the work of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio
Agamben, taking a special interest in Schmitt’s concept of nomos. The concept was
investigated further at a summer workshop at University College Dublin, headed by
Donald Pease. Much of this theoretical material will appear in an essay that I wrote for a
collection entitled Transnational American Studies, to be published by the University
Presses of New England in 2011, and edited by Professors Fluck, Pease, and Rowe.
3
The final, 2008 Transcoop conference took place in Berlin, where I presented
“Laundering Gender: Chinese Men and Irish Women in Late Nineteenth-Century San
Francisco.” This paper became a chapter in the above-mentioned Black and Green
Atlantic book. Again, the feedback in Berlin was invaluable, and I am extremely grateful
to all those involved in the magnificent Transcoop project. A special thanks is due to
John Carlos Rowe for involving me in the first place.
Even before I attended my first class at USC – returning to graduate school, as I
did, after a long absence – I had in mind a particular project. I wanted to write about the
curious collusion between historical revisionism and contemporary Irish literature. My
own experiences growing up in working-class Derry in the North of Ireland during the
worst of the “Troubles” clashed markedly with the fictional accounts being written about
the North, mainly by Southern Irish middle-class writers. I chose USC solely because of
David Lloyd, the most innovative scholar in Irish Studies, and without whom I probably
would not have gone back to college. At the time, I had no idea that I would end up
treading the waters of the nineteenth-century Atlantic to slake my intellectual thirst. It
took just one class with Professor Rowe to realize that my interests were much broader
than I first thought.
The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association began during my formative years
growing up in Derry. Nationalists (mostly Catholics) in the six-county statelet of
Northern Ireland were discriminated against in terms of employment and housing.
Electoral boundaries were gerrymandered to ensure permanent rule of the Unionist or
pro-British (and mostly Protestant) Northern Ireland government. Police were not police
4
in the ordinary sense, but instead were a paramilitary organization, backed by a Special
Powers Act that allowed them literally to get away with murder. Modeling themselves on
the Black civil rights movement in America, nationalist protesters sang “We Shall
Overcome” after each meeting, and quoted Martin Luther King, Jr. When police violently
attacked a peaceful civil rights march in Derry in October 5, 1968, the fuse was lit and
the North went up in flames.
1
I write about this because it is an important part of this project. I was politicized at
an early age, and quickly learned to look for the common denominators of any given
struggle. When I reached the age of fifteen or so, two things seemed politically obvious:
greed and corruption marked the methods of the dominant classes, and oppressed people
were the same the world over, irrespective of race or creed. Thus on my bedroom wall
was hung a collage, modeled, I suppose, on the Sgt. Pepper album cover, on which
Nelson Mandela appeared next to James Connolly, Steve Biko, George Jackson, and
Janis Joplin, to name but a few in this eclectic assembly.
President John F. Kennedy was revered as a saint in our house, of course, as was
that other John, Pope John XXIII. But following the emergence of the Northern Irish civil
rights movement, encounters with Irish America became less positive. The first such
encounter was TV footage of bigotry emanating from Irish South Boston during the
busing controversy in 1974. The imagery shocked and embarrassed me, as it did my
neighbors and family. How dared they to call themselves Irish when we “real Irish” were
seeking our civil rights just the same as Black people were in America? (The BBC
reports that we saw emphasized the Irish angle at every opportunity. The role of class in
5
the decision of Judge W. Arthur Garrity, Jr. to desegregate Boston’s public schools was
never mentioned.) My second encounter with Irish America also is a story of bigotry,
occurring when I worked in Boston in mid-1981. Following the deaths of the first four of
ten hunger strikers to die that summer, I was glad of the opportunity to come to America.
When a police detective – a frequent visitor to the bar that employed me – uttered a string
of racial epithets as a way of educating me to the “the ways of the world,” I kept quiet.
He was what Joyce would have called a “muscular Christian.” Intimidated by him and
ashamed of myself, I decided to leave Boston at the first opportunity.
These incidents and others left me wondering what happened to Irish people upon
crossing the cold Atlantic. Did they become bigots by themselves, did they learn bigotry
from others, or did a dormant bigotry awaken within them as soon as they set foot on
American soil? Looking back on my upbringing, I can say honestly that my most of my
acquaintances looked beyond the falsity of racial difference to find solidarity. But not
everyone in my town was politicized in that way. Racist “jokes” and general commentary
were far from uncommon, on TV or on the streets. When I think further back to my
primary school days, I recall the slogan “A penny for the black babies,” which
accompanied the weekly collection to fund the Irish Catholic missionaries in Africa and
other “third world” places. Modes of solidarity existed in Derry alright, but so too did
modes of difference. Surely we had a sense of Europeanness, a sense of “playing the
white man” as we put our pennies in the collection box. No, Irish people suddenly do not
become racists once they land in America. Like most things concerned with race, the
issue is more complicated than that.
6
Back at USC, those recollections led me to think about the state as a possible
answer to this conundrum. My first degree was in sociology at England’s Leeds
University. Zygmunt Bauman headed the Sociology Department at that time, so the
emphasis was on social theory. I first encountered the French school of social theory at
Leeds: Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Althusser, and Poulantzas come to mind. The last
theorist named, Nicos Poulantzas, interested me more than the others because I felt at the
time that his state theory allowed for resistance to the state, a posture that resonated. I
have reacquainted myself with Poulantzas along with many other theorists.
I hope that this genealogy of the dissertation helps the reader understand my
motives for writing this work. I now will outline each chapter, placing it within the
dissertation’s general theoretical framework.
* * * *
James Joyce often sat at the piano and sang his jaunty ballad, Dooleyprudence,
which he had written in protest of World War I:
Who is the man when all the gallant nations run to war
Goes home to have his dinner by the first cablecar
And as he eats his cantelope contorts himself in mirth
To read the blatant bulletins of the rulers of the earth?
It’s Mr Dooley,
Mr Dooley,
The coolest chap our country every knew
‘They are out to collar
the dime and the dollar’
Says Mr Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo.
Who is the funny fellow who declines to go to church
Since pope and priest and parson left the poor man in the lurch
And taught their flocks the only way to save all human souls
Was piercing human bodies through dumdum bulletholes?
7
It’s Mr Dooley,
Mr Dooley,
The mildest man our country ever knew
‘Who will release us
From Jingo Jesus’
Prays Mr Dooley-ooley-ooley-oo.
2
Friends and family were encouraged to join in the chorus. (Ellmann 352) While Joyce’s
love of music hall ballads is well documented, less well remarked is the name he chose
for his antihero: “Mr. Dooley,” the world-famous brainchild of Finley Peter Dunne. Born
in Chicago in 1867, to Irish immigrant parents, Dunne created Dooley as a cartoon
character who lampooned the Irish American middle class emergent in the late nineteenth
century. An irreverent resident of Chicago’s Irish working-class district of Bridgeport,
Dunne’s Dooley kept alive the memory of the Famine and the brutality of the Atlantic
crossing, among other things – and as Dunne showed the underbelly of the American
Dream, he took pleasure in butchering the English language along the way. Dooley was
the antithesis of “respectable” Irish America personified by the likes of the pretentious
Maurice Francis Egan, who is treated in Chapter 6. All of the above would have endeared
Dooley to Joyce. That Joyce borrowed from the work of an Irish American humorist in
fashioning what came to be his favorite anti-war creation indicates that Joyce took more
notice of the goings-on in Irish America than most people give him credit for.
Joyce’s work is the literary anchor of this dissertation, the ideal conduit through
which to examine the nature of the state in relation to the transatlantic Irish. He was
clearly aware of both the biopolitical management of life under the British colonial state
and the extent to which British governmentality was imbricated into everyday Irish life.
Recent scholarship has shown the extent to which the Great Irish Famine of 1845 to 1852
8
is a hidden presence in Joyce’s work, and I build on that contribution to examine not only
the memory of the Famine dead in Ulysses, but also the plight of the transatlantic Irish
who underwent the second death, that of emigration. Joyce, of course, exposed not only
the corrosive role of British colonialism in Ireland, but also that of Roman Catholicism.
The paralysis of post-Famine Dublin was as much a result of the “devotional revolution”
as it was of British biopower. Orchestrated by Archbishop Paul Cullen, the “devotional
revolution” took advantage of the Famine’s devastation to instill strict discipline within a
traumatized flock, and it consolidated power through reinforced and centralized
hierarchical structures in ways that complemented the aims of British colonial power in
Ireland.
Today, many decades after the narrator in the “Cyclops” chapter of Joyce’s
Ulysses lamented the loss of “the winged speech of the sea-divided Gael,” scholars
realize that Irish travels on the Green Atlantic merit study as systematic as that given to
the Black Atlantic. Yet it is only recently that any Irish Studies scholars have considered
the Atlantic world as a framework that exceeds the usual binational approach to diaspora.
In American Ethnic Studies, Irish America receives scant consideration, except perhaps
within the unstable category of “whiteness studies.” My dissertation assumes a different
stance. It argues that comparison of the transnational experiences of the Irish in two quite
different racial states, Britain and America, enriches comprehension of the racialization
processes on both sides of the Atlantic.
The claim that the Irish “became white” over time in the United States, while
justified with regard to the shifting perceptions of race in US culture, does not account
9
adequately for the legal position of the nineteenth-century US state, which deemed the
Irish “white” upon arrival. Till now, little heed has been paid either to the role of the state
in the Americanization of the Irish or to the role of the Irish in the development of US
state institutions. The Irish not only fit into the US racial state, I argue; they helped to
form it.
My dissertation contributes a significant rethinking of racial formation in the
United States from a comparative, transnational perspective through a synthesis of
seldom-connected theories and theorists. I apply Carl Schmitt’s concepts “sovereign
power” and “nomos,” along with Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life” in relation to
the victims of the Famine, to the nineteenth-century British colonial state. Michel
Foucault’s concepts of biopower and governmentality in turn provoke reconsideration of
the classic work of Michael Omi and David Winant, and of David Theo Goldberg on the
racial state. I undertake that task by further consideration of the work of Poulantzas,
whose seminal concepts of the methodologies of state formation are especially useful to
describe the complex struggle between the economic and the political in the 19th century
evolution of the US state. Although none of these thinkers ever squarely confronts race,
racialization, or colonialism, my synthesis and extension of their work in relation to the
racial state furnishes a more fully theorized location of the post-Famine Irish in racial
formations in the Atlantic world. Chapter 2 enables such a theoretical synthesis, through
a discussion of the work of Joyce.
The oft-remarked rapidity with which the Irish Famine appeared to fade from
historical and popular memory is usually attributed to the emigration of so many Famine
10
victims and to the Famine’s role in the colonial modernization of Ireland. Yet the hidden
afterlife of the Famine may be discerned in Ireland’s preeminent literary work, Ulysses.
Joyce’s concern with the biopolitical management of life and death in what was then a
British colony is readily apparent in “Hades” and “Lestrygonians,” chapters that are
seeded with allusions to both the Famine and emigration. Through close reading of such
episodes, Chapter 2 exposes the Famine’s wake in the Atlantic world and thus
rearticulates the Irish experience in the United States.
Chapter 2 lays down the theoretical foundations of the dissertation. The Famine
Irish journeyed upon the Green Atlantic between two different state forms – the imperial
and the racial – each with its own modes of governmentality and different exercises in
biopolitical power. Carl Schmitt’s concept of nomos, I maintain, allows us to distinguish
between sovereign power and state power, and can show how those distinct levels/aspects
of power are articulated in state formations. This, in turn, enables me to mold a theory
that explicates how, as the Irish journeyed across the Atlantic, from the entrenched but
transforming Nomos Britannicus to the emergent Nomos Americanus, their relationship to
racial state also shifted dramatically.
“Race,” argues Goldberg, “ is integral to the emergence, development, and
transformations (conceptually, philosophically, materially) of the modern nation-state.
Race marks and orders the modern nation-state, and so state projects, more or less from
its point of conceptual and institutional emergence” (4). I elaborate on how an external
colonial power like Britain differed from what was still an internal settler colony in terms
of “racial state formation.” I show that though contained within the thick carapace of the
11
Coercion Acts, Ireland was subject to numerous attempts to modernize its structures of
governmentality – schooling, policing, prisons, etc. – even before Britain was.
The intersection of the Black and Green Atlantic opens Chapter 3. Frederick
Douglass’s six-month stay in Ireland between 1845 and 1846 is situated with Paul
Gilroy’s work. Douglass proclaimed his modern subjectivity in Ireland. Having
experienced the brutality of capitalist primitive accumulation firsthand, he was able to
identify with the Irish subaltern, who also suffered from the effects of capitalist primitive
accumulation. But the contradictory Douglass also defined his modern subjectivity
against the starving Irish peasant, positing the Irish man or woman as a symbol of social
difference, and in so doing portraying himself as an enlightened expatriate American. In
stunning contrast, in his Jail Journal, Young Irelander John Mitchel defined his modern
subjectivity through a stated desire for ownership of a plantation full of African
American slaves.
Although the roots of each nomos are obscured in a misty, ahistorical Lockean
foundational myth regarding the establishment of property rights, each is, in fact, founded
as a result of brutal primitive accumulation. In the case of Nomos Americanus, the twin
foundational pillars are slavery and genocide. Racial state theorists such as Omi and
Winant, and Goldberg, are investigated here to ascertain the extent that racism is
embedded within the foundational structures of the state. I interrogate the contention that
the Irish “became white” in America. The 1790 Naturalization Act decreed that
citizenship was open to all “free white persons,” and the Irish fit that definition as far as
the state was concerned. Yet White Anglo Saxon Protestants did object to the presence of
12
Irish Catholics, often on racial grounds, and their objections intensified following the
massive influx of Famine Irish. I maintain that WASP nativist objections were based as
much on religious objections as they were on racial ones: what was really at stake was
cultural acceptability.
3
If only Irish Catholics could learn to live like WASPs, and thus
become true Americans all would be well. Catholicism’s apparent transnationalism
troubled nativists, as did such teachings as the doctrine of “papal infallibility.” How
could Catholicism’s divided loyalties be possibly included in the unfolding American
national narrative? Archbishop John Hughes of New York provided the answer. He not
only fought nativism vigorously, but also attempted to claim a place for Catholicism the
foundational myths of America. His promotion of the “devotional revolution” in the
United States, promoted disciplinary structures that complemented state disciplinary
structures.
The comparison of such transatlantic encounters frames not only racial subject
formation but also church/religious power and its different positions on either side of the
ocean. Contrary to received wisdom, my investigation of Hughes and other religious
leaders shows how Catholic religious imperialism acted in support of the national
imperialisms of both Britain and the United States. Archbishop Hughes, for example,
who worked as agent on behalf of the US state, criticized the British state when he
preached in America. However, on a visit to Ireland to lay the cornerstone of the Catholic
University in Dublin in 1862, he followed the lead of the Irish Church hierarchy and
expressed his support for British colonialism. My dissertation helps explain this apparent
contradiction.
13
Leaving the black/white binary that preoccupies many scholars of Irish America,
Chapter 4 travels west to California, the major “contact zone” between the Irish and
Chinese. San Francisco becomes the focus of my effort to show, through sustained
archival work, the degree to which racism infused the capillary structures of the state, not
only at the federal level but also at local and regional levels. The chapter centers on the
Irish-Chinese encounter in Northern California. There Irish people dominated the anti-
Chinese movement, and were prominent at various government agencies and political
parties as well as repressive apparatuses such as the San Francisco Police Department and
the local militias. Irish notions of ideal American citizenship were defined against the
otherization of Chinese people.
In this chapter I make the distinction between citizenship – for which the Irish
qualified upon entry into the United States – and nationality, which they had to earn
through two principal conduits – the cultural imaginary and state apparatuses. The
chapter exposes how US state structures, infused with the ideological imperatives of
Manifest Destiny, enabled the Irish in the West to rise to the ideal of American
citizenship more quickly than did their counterparts back East. This assertion is supported
by an array of archival evidence, including government reports, laws, speeches, and
newspaper articles. While the Irish certainly endured a modicum of WASP scrutiny in the
West, state political-legal disciplinary apparatuses provided extremely powerful
structures through which the Irish agitated for the denial of citizenship to the Chinese in
order to attain for themselves the status of ideal American citizens.
14
San Francisco remains the focus in Chapter 5, which investigates the intimate
relationship among race, gender, and class in the US cultural imaginary. In particular, I
compare the well-documented feminization of the Chinese male in popular culture with
the lesser known, but nonetheless real, masculinization of the Irish female.
4
The principal
areas of cultural production placed under the microscope are cartoons and popular
theater. In the latter, the Irish were both the producers and the products of derogatory
images involving the two highly gendered immigration groups, Irish and Chinese. This
chapter concludes by tracing the acculturation-to-assimilation paths along which second-
generation Irish women embraced and were embraced by ideal American womanhood.
Indeed, generational difference constitutes a major consideration throughout this
dissertation.
Chapter 6 examines forms of cultural production generally overlooked by
American Studies scholars: Irish American literature of the period. First were the Famine
Irish American writers who arrived in the United States from 1845 onwards and
published work up to about 1875. Inspired by Archbishop Hughes, immigrants such as
Mary Anne Sadlier and Father Hugh Quigley wrote socially and politically conservative
novels that attempted to confine their Irish American readers to an insular, Catholic, Irish
nationalist viewpoint, while at the same time claiming for them a place within the
unfolding national narrative of the United States. Particular attention is given in this
chapter to the subgenre of this fiction that writers addressed specifically to Irish woman
servants. Second, the chapter investigates the dramatic change in emphasis that occurs in
the work of certain second-generation Famine Irish American writers. Those sons and
15
daughters of Famine Irish, who published after 1875 to the turn of the century, fully
embraced Catholic citizenship in the United States even as they rejected militant Irish
nationalist ideology. The remarkable transformation in priorities between first- and
second-generation Famine Irish Catholic novelists is testament to the rapidity of Irish
acculturation into the dominant, WASP-infused American bourgeois culture. The chapter
also looks at how Church-approved literature urged Catholics to claim a place for
themselves in an apparently Protestant-dominated, capitalist economy.
Conservative Catholicism was not the only option that the Irish exercised.
Embodying an alternative manifestation of the Green Atlantic’s possibilities is James
Connolly, one of the great unorthodox Marxist theorists of his time. Connolly wrote some
of his most important work, including Labour in Irish History, in the United States,
where he spent several years as a One Big Union organizer, returning to Ireland in time to
lead the doomed Easter Rising of 1916. Chapter 7 examines Connolly’s transatlantic
encounters with syndicalism and other political movements that deeply influenced his
political practice. His experiences confirm the assertion of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus
Rediker that the Atlantic, that “many-headed hydra,” offers an alternative perspective on
the history of social and political movements. Like Douglass, Connolly is defined not by
motifs of settlement and assimilation but by movement and circulation, and that
definition affords alternative perspective that is distinctly postnational and “oceanic.”
Connolly’s writings offer a critical alternative to middle-class Irish American
cultural and political output of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His
narrative contrasts with the assimilationist one of many who travelled the Green Atlantic
16
during the period. Connolly represents mobility and displacement, or deterritorialization;
he refuses to be defined by a single journey or destination. Like Douglass, it is the
circulation of ideas that matters to Connolly. He brought his socialist principles to the
United States and returned to Ireland with a firm grasp of the principles of syndicalism,
which he then put into action in, for example, the Dublin Lock-out of 1913. Connolly
also brings this investigation full circle, back to Joyce, to the similar dialectic of the
homing desire (nostos), accompanied by issues of displacement, that underwrites both
“The Dead” and Ulysses. Such dialectics appear crucial to the very construction of the
Nomos in the first place. This dissertation will, I hope, contribute a better understanding
of all these phenomena.
17
CHAPTER ONE ENDNOTES
1
There have been many recent accounts of the foundation of the Northern Ireland state
and its workings but I have still to find one as detailed and convincing as Michael
Farrell’s 1976 work, The Orange State. For the best nonfiction account of growing up in
Derry, see Eamonn McCann’s War in an Irish Town. The best fictional account is beyond
any doubt – it is the bildungsroman by Seamus Deane entitled Reading in the Dark.
2
The full ballad is found in Ellmann, 436-38.
3
For more on this idea, see Kolchin.
4
I recently received a copy of Andrew Urban’s Ph.D. dissertation, approved by the
University of Minnesota in 2009. Entitled “An Intimate World: Race, Migration, and
Chinese and Irish Domestic Servants in the United States, 1850-1920,” this work
represents an important contribution to scholarship on Chinese/Irish relationships in the
nineteenth- to early twentieth-century United States. It may be downloaded at the
University of Minnesota’s Digital Conservancy website at http://conservancy.umn.edu.
18
CHAPTER TWO
JAMES JOYCE AND THE BIOPOLITICS OF STATE FORMATION
Amidst the array of Joycean scholarship over the past eighty years or so, the
impact of the United States upon James Joyce’s work is surprisingly underdeveloped and
undertheorized. Yet closer examination reveals that the impact in his writings is
considerable. Indeed, one of the claims of this dissertation is that Joyce’s work fits
comfortably within a transatlantic frame; this chapter represents a preliminary attempt to
reveal such important transnational connections.
Joyce took Dublin as the matériel from which he constructed a framework for
perceiving the universal. This chapter, in turn, takes Joyce’s writings as the lens through
which to examine the workings of the British colonialism in Ireland, with the broader aim
of gaining a clearer understanding of the emergence of state formations as they relate to
the concepts of biopower and governmentality. Britain and the United States, the
dominant superpowers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively, represent
distinct and even opposed state-forms: they each had differing modes of governmentality,
exercises of power, and biopolitical regimes. Until now, scholars have adopted a mostly
historicist approach to state formation, one that precludes an examination of structural
and practical differences between these two states. I propose that we can subsume those
differences under Carl Schmitt’s concept of nomos. Thus, in Part I of this chapter I
discuss Schmitt’s work in relation to Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. The
discussion lays the theoretical foundations not only of the chapter, but also of the
19
dissertation. In Part II, I apply these concepts to the British colonial regime in Ireland,
especially during the nineteenth century. These sections establish the groundwork for the
main section of the chapter, Part III, which analyzes Joyce’s work as it pertains to two
phenomena in particular: the memory of the Great Irish Famine, and the biopolitical
management of life (and death) under British colonialism. I build on recent scholarship
that has uncovered the Famine as a hidden presence in Joyce’s work, and extend the
scholarship to include the absence/presence of the transatlantic Famine Irish in Ulysses. I
contend that Joyce’s concerns with the nature of sovereign power are applicable in both
the colonial and the post-colonial contexts. He was painfully aware of the thorough
imbrication of British biopower in the everyday lives of his fellow Dubliners, much as he
was of the corrosive influence of the ultra-conservative Irish Catholic Church. I will show
that Rome and London, the two masters Joyce refused to serve, have, through Joyce and
the Green Atlantic, a transatlantic reach that hitherto has been unexamined.
I. Theoretical Tools
1
Biopolitics, Governmentality, and the Birth of the Modern Nomos
The ancient or medieval form of sovereign power was, according to Michel
Foucault, “essentially a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself;
it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress” (History 136).
Two separate but connected forms of power emerged with the rise of capitalism in the
seventeenth century to replace this medieval version. The first centered on the
disciplining of the individual body. The second, “formed somewhat later,” involved the
20
disciplining of the social body––the regulation and control of populations (139).
Existence, he writes, “is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the
biological existence of a population” (137). This management of biological existence–––
the life, death, health, life expectancy, etc, of a population––Foucault calls biopolitics. As
I hope to show, Foucault’s concept biopower is ideally suited to an analysis of the British
colonial regime in nineteenth-century Ireland.
However, Giorgio Agamben has challenged Foucault’s separation of the
traditional “juridico-institutional” and biopolitical models of power. Instead, he argues,
“the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power. In this
sense, biopolitics is as old as the sovereign exception” (Homo Sacer 6; original
emphasis). Agamben reaches back to the ancient Greek distinction between Zoë, meaning
“living common to all living beings (animals, men of gods), and bios, which indicated the
form or the way of living proper to the individual group” (1). In the classical world, he
argues, the former, bare (biological) life, is excluded from the latter, which is political life
(polis). (2) The key for Agamben is that political life is founded on the basis of the
“inclusive exclusion” of Zoë. Zoë or “bare life” is included because political life is not
possible without biological life, but at the same time it is excluded because political life is
defined against it. (7)
This concept of “bare life,” or homo sacer, embodies, according to Agamben, one
“who may be killed and yet not sacrificed” (8). The term describes “[a]n obscure figure
of archaic Roman law, in which human life is included in the juridical order … solely in
the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed)” (ibid.). Homo sacer
21
“belongs to God in the form of its unsacrificeability and is included in the community in
the form of being able to be killed” (82). Furthermore, “[b]are life remains included in
politics in the form of an exception, that is, something that is included solely through an
exclusion” (11). That which performs the act of excluding is “sovereign power.”
The notion of exceptionality echoes Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology, which opens
with the following sentence: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (5). The
sovereign also “decides whether there is an extreme emergency as well as what is to be
done to eliminate it. Although he stands outside the normally valid legal system, he
nevertheless belongs to it, for it is he who must decide whether the constitution needs to
be suspended in its entirety” (7). This understanding of the state of exception in turn aids
understanding of Agamben’s “bare life.” As Agamben puts it: “Bare life remains
included in politics in the form of the exception, that is, as something that is included
solely through exclusion” (11). This concept will help explain the nineteenth-century
process whereby the transatlantic Famine Irish status shifted according to the different
dictates of “sovereign [bio]power” wielded by Britain and, in turn, by the United States.
Agamben’s next move is somewhat trickier. He attempts to draw a direct, vertical
line of descent between the archaic state and the modern version. “Placing biological life
at the center of its calculations,” he writes, “the modern State therefore does nothing
other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life, thereby reaffirming the
bond (derived from a tenacious correspondence between the modern and the archaic
which one encounters in the most diverse spheres) between modern power and the most
immemorial of the arcana imperii” (6). Agamben is somewhat vague about the
22
“tenacious correspondence between the modern and the archaic.” Rather than reveal
“secret” ties, his “encounters in diverse spheres,” reveal gaps apparent, for example, in
his assertion that the Nazi concentration “camp––as the pure, absolute, and impassable
biopolitical space (insofar as it is founded solely on the state of exception)––will appear
as the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity, whose metamorphoses and
disguises we will have to learn to recognize” (122-23; my emphasis). According to this
formula, state metamorphoses appear to begin with the modern, but Agamben does not
account adequately for how we got to this point. His rather vertical conception of the
development of modern biopolitics, unlike Foucault’s, fails to recognize the historical
(and often horizontal) development of the nature of power, especially with regard to the
growth of technologies of surveillance and incarceration and the concomitant rise of
statistics, demographics, and various other disciplines and practices related to biological
life, that were spurred on by rapid nineteenth-century capitalist expansion, and
colonialism’s role in providing the laboratories for biopower as for the agencies of
governmentality. As Thomas Lemke points out, “while Foucault’s analysis and critiques
of the biopolitical project stresses the link between forms of subjectivation and political
technologies, this important dimension is completely lacking in Agamben’s work. To put
it shortly, Agamben subscribes to exactly the juridico-discursive concept of power that
Foucault has shown to be insufficient for the analysis of modern biopolitics” (2-3).
While there are significant shortcomings in Agamben’s work, (we will discover
some of Foucault’s a little later,) nevertheless, his notion of homo sacer as the product of
the state of exception can be applied instructively to the British colonial rule in
23
nineteenth-century Ireland, as I hope to show. Furthermore, his work linking of biopower
to questions of sovereignty provides a useful bridge between two other helpful concepts–
–Schmitt’s nomos and Foucault’s governmentality.
Foucault discussed his notion of governmentality in a series of lectures given at
the Collége de France between 1977 and 1978 and only published in English fairly
recently.
2
Following a brief summary of the eighteenth-century transition between “a
regime dominated by structures of sovereignty to a regime dominated by techniques of
government” (Security 106), he offers this caveat: “So we should not see things as the
replacement of a society of sovereignty by a society of discipline, and then of a society of
discipline by a society, say, of government. In fact we have a triangle: sovereignty,
discipline, and governmental management, which has population as its main target and
apparatuses of security as its essential mechanism” (107-08; my emphasis). My analysis
of British colonial biopower adopts this triangulated perspective.
Unlike Schmitt or Agamben, Foucault sees within sovereign power, a “counter-
conduct”––points of resistance that have the potential to usurp it––and so he wants “to
show the profound historical link between the movement that overturns the constants of
sovereignty consequent upon the major problem of good choices of government”
(108).
The problematics of “good choices of government” aside, Foucault defines
governmentality as “the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and
reflections, calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific, albeit
very complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major
form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument”
24
(108). In short, governmentality describes perfectly the administration of the colonial
state of exception in nineteenth-century Ireland. However, the concept does not quite
capture the global context within which British colonial power operated. For that I turn to
Schmitt’s nomos.
Schmitt states that nomos is “[t]he Greek word for the first measure of all
subsequent measures, for the first land-appropriation understood as the first partition and
classification of space, for the primeval division and distribution…” (Nomos of the Earth
67). Furthermore, it “is the immediate form in which the political and social order of a
people becomes spatially visible – the initial measure and division of pasture-land, i.e.,
the land-appropriation as well as the concrete order contained in it and following from
it.” (70). “In its original sense…” he continues, “nomos is precisely the full immediacy of
a legal power not mediated by laws; it is a constitutive historical event – an act of
legitimacy, whereby legality of a mere law first is made meaningful” (73; original
emphasis). It should be noted here that Schmitt’s concept of the legitimizing processes of
nomos appears closely related to those of Max Weber (Schmitt was a former student of
Weber) and Walter Benjamin, a contemporary of Schmitt’s in Berlin. All three
investigated, among other things, various aspects of sovereign power and political
theology.
3
Schmitt locates the first modern nomos at a single point in history: the “discovery”
in the late fifteenth century of an entire hemisphere, the so-called New World. Indeed,
Schmitt gives the birth of the modern nomos a precise date. “Shortly after the discovery
of America,” he writes, “the famous line in Pope Alexander VI’s edict Inter caetera
25
divinae (May 4, 1494) was drawn” (Nomos 88-9). The line drawn on that day ran along
the meridian from the North Pole to the South; it granted to Spain the right to what were
called “newly discovered lands” west of the line, and to Portugal the right to such lands
to the east. According to Schmitt, through this global land grab, the Pope established the
modern nomos as both a Christian and a Christianizing project.
This nomos, of course, is not only a Christian, but also an imperial project. As
Susan Buck-Morss
4
points out, Schmitt sees the founding of the modern nomos “in terms
not of sovereign legitimacy within European countries, but of imperial legitimacy
without” (section IV, para. 3; original emphasis). Unapologetically Eurocentric and
racist, Schmitt views modernity as the product of European colonial expansion – a project
that he deems to have been “civilizing.” Schmitt adjudges the “new world” to be “free
space,” devoid of people who matter, and available for the taking. Recognizing the
significance of the “conquest of America,” Omi and Winant describe the putative
discovery of the New World as “not simply an epochal historical event – however
unparalleled in importance.” They continue: “It was also the advent of a consolidated
social structure of exploitation, appropriation, domination. … The conquest, therefore,
was the first – and given the dramatic nature of the case, perhaps the greatest – racial
formation project” (2). Although they do not use the term, Omi and Winant thus seem to
endorse the concept of nomos as formulated by Schmitt – that is, the origins of the
modern nomos – even as they add that this particular land appropriation signaled the first
inherently racial state project. However, as Cedric J. Robinson notes: “Racism was not
simply a convention for ordering the relations of Europeans to non-European peoples but
26
has its genesis in the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples. As part of the inventory of
Western civilization it would reverberate within and without, transferring its toll from the
past to the present” (Black Marxism 2).
Yet the origins of the transcendent power of nomos remain somewhat hazy. “Every
ontonomous and ontological judgment,” writes Schmitt, “derives from the land. For this
reason, we will begin with land appropriation as primeval act in founding law” (Nomos
45). This point prompts Bruno Bosteels to note that “the act of land appropriation, far
from being a historical event that still somehow could be placed in a specific time and a
specific space, gradually turns into an obscure origin that is receding before our very
eyes, furrowing its way deeper and deeper into the order of the earth” (298). This
observation correlates with Srinivas Aravamudan’s critique of Schmitt’s work. One of the
four corollaries
5
that he identifies with The Nomos of the Earth is the idea that “myth is
the driving force behind the Schmittian” nomos (227). For Aravamudan though, the
mythic origins of nomos do not alter its value for the archaeology of knowledge.
However, it is crucial to point out here that the “myth” the misty origins of the nomos
obscure is entirely Lockean—the myth of the ahistorical establishment of property rights
that carefully avoids addressing primitive accumulation. It is a myth of political economy
that Marx sought to critique in Capital. The nomos is therefore also, even in its
disavowal, founded in primitive accumulation. The state whose parameters are given by
the nomos is a regime of accumulation.
David Lloyd sees the heuristic utility of myth as a way in which to confront the
repressive sweep of historicism:
27
In so far as historicism itself participates in the rationalization that represses the
past and reduces its multiple forms to a single, serial narrative, it must perforce
envisage the mythic as pathological. Where myth was, historical time must come: to
lay the past to rest and to cure its violence with reason and progress. The
therapeutic drive of historicism, which recounts the universal narrative of civility, is
thus peculiarly repressive, seeking less to release the past in the unruliness of its
ever-present possibilities than to discipline it. …Far from representing a culture’s
entrapment in a primitive and atavistic past, myth performs the constant
reinscription of the possibilities contained in the past that is grasped as perpetually
present and insistently unclosed. As against Western historicism, with its
determinate and singular unfolding of time as progress, myth allows for a continual
recurrence of and to a past that is conceived as a repertoire of redeemable
possibilities. (Irish Times 17)
Metasovereignty: Hegemony versus Nomos
Buck-Morss has outlined some of the difficulties in using the word “hegemony” to
describe global power and proposes employing the concept of nomos in its place. (Sec.
v.) She notes that the discourse of hegemony has “spun off” into at least three separate
areas of discussion: the economic, the cultural and the political. (Sec. v: para. i). The last
category is closest to what Gramsci meant by the term; however, as she points out,
Gramsci saw hegemony as an intra-state force, whereas “political hegemony is described
today as extending globally; it is an attempt to dominate politically without colonial
occupation” (ibid.). The word has become synonymous with the global power of the
United States. By this view, American hegemony stands for all the economic, cultural
and political evils in the world. Yet, as she notes, if the United States ceased to exist
altogether, none of the important issues of the day, such as poverty, exploitation,
ecological disaster, and so on, would disappear. “Lacking specific nation-state
embodiment, that vague enemy, ‘empire,’
6
would still dominate the global scene, and
28
critical theory would be left with the incomplete political agenda of exposing the
constructedness of subjects and the limits of their self-understandings” (v:ii).
“Hegemony,” though, still merits use in our analysis. Gramsci’s definition of the
term as set out in Prison Notebooks (12-13) describes effectively the relations of
domination within the state. Where it falls short, by Buck Morss’s reckoning, is in the
international arena. By adopting the concept of nomos, we avoid the imprecision of the
contemporary meanings of the term hegemony, particularly as it relates to the
machinations of global domination, without abandoning the utility of hegemony to
describe the “spontaneous” consent given by the masses to their domination by the ruling
class, a dominance that ultimately relies on coercion.
In addition, Schmitt’s concept of nomos enables us to distinguish between
sovereign power and mere state power with a greater clarity than hegemony permits. As
Buck-Morss maintains, it “allows us to see something that otherwise remains hidden”
(iv:ii). She explains further:
When as is common given the legal positivism that underlies liberal approaches to
political science and democratic theory, ‘sovereignty’ is equated with ‘autonomy,’
the distinction disappears. Autonomy – auto-nomos – seems to deny the existence
of any problem to be addressed, reducing sovereign power to a tautology: States
are said to be self-governing because they make their own laws (nomoi). Their
sovereignty is the power to render their legal system legitimate by enforcing
domestic obedience. The nation-state system would then be simply an aggregate
of independent units, each autochthonous, immanent to itself. (ibid.)
On this point Schmitt argues that although state power is sovereign, “sovereign power”
does not inhere – is not immanent – within any given state. Rather, in his view, sovereign
power exists outside of the state, as nomos, a transcendent power.
29
Aravamudan’s use of the term nomos is worth considering here. Writing from a
postcolonial perspective, he considers nomos to constitute a metasovereignty that exists
“alongside the flitting or smaller phantoms, specters, revenants and wraiths…. This
multiplication of paper tigers in the face of one real tiger is the other side of the logic of
the Schmittian nomos. The formal nature of Schmitt’s insights can thereby be extended to
analyze the differential outcomes for the dominated, rather than just focus, as he does, on
the dominant” (235-36). As metasovereignty, nomos incorporates not only the hegemonic
forces that develop as the colonial nation-state moves from coercion to hegemonic
control within its boundaries, but also the colonialist coercive forces that operate outside
of the boundaries of the colonial nation-state. Nomos captures this duality of colonial
sovereign power particularly well. Grasp of that duality greatly aids analysis of the
transnational relations of biopower in operation during the Irish Famine.
II. Colonial Discipline in Ireland and the Rise of Nomos Britannicus
“To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize ‘how it really was,’”
writes Benjamin. “It means to seize hold of a memory, as it flashes up in a moment of
danger” (Illuminations 255; qtg. Ranke). As soon will become evident, Joyce seizes
control of the memory of the Irish who had been excluded through the exercise of British
sovereign power. Neither Ulysses nor “The Dead,” his other work under particular
scrutiny here, purports to tell how the Great Hunger “really was.” Yet both flash with
scenes of feast and famine, with references to “[f]amished ghosts” (Ulysses 171) and
30
“vast hosts of the dead” (Dubliners 223). Textual scrutiny must, however, await the
following application of theories of nomos, sovereign power, governmentality, and bare
life to the history of Ireland from which Joyce conjured his spectral flashes.
Nomos Britannicus
The twin components of the Schmittian nomos are the appropriation of the so-
called “free space” or land and the placing of the indigenous peoples within the law only
to the extent that they might be excluded from it. Combined with concomitant racial
hierarchization are all the consequences of the very sovereign power that created the
nomos in the first place. All constituted the founding principles upon which England-as-
colonizer crossed the Irish Sea to claim Ireland for itself.
Schmitt names as the progenitor of modern nomos the notorious Rodrigo Borgia,
who lived from 1431 to 1503 – the last dozen years, as Pope Alexander VI. It is this pope
who demarcated colonial holdings on May 4, 1494. Even as Schmitt nods to Alexander,
he pretermits the “divinely inspired” intervention of his predecessor, Adrian IV, who
served from 1154 to 1159 as the only Englishman to hold the pontificate. In an 1155
papal bull entitled Laudabiliter (Wallace 28), Adrian authorized the ruler of England,
Henry II, to invade and conquer Ireland. This official authorization of the appropriation
of land from its indigenous people set the stage for the emergence of what I call here
Nomos Britannicus. The scholarship of, among others, Nicholas Canny, Clare Carroll,
and Theodore Allen,
7
has confirmed the idea that the English invasion of Ireland served
as blueprint for their colonization of the “New World.” Ireland, in effect, became a
31
laboratory in which various techniques of discipline, control, and punishment were tried
out. As these scholars have shown, many of the same people who led the colonization of
Ireland, led the colonization of America too. The laboratory status of Ireland remained
through the two centuries it took the English to emerge triumphant as Nomos Britannicus.
Nomos Britannicus emerged around 1815 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
Dario Battistella estimates that this was the point in time where Britain, through a
combination of industrial development, colonial expansion, technological innovation, and
military might, claimed the summit of an international political system decidedly unipolar
in structure. (34) Following the Vienna Congress of the same year, there followed three
decades of cooperation between the major European powers underwritten by British
economic and military supremacy. (38) For the “first two-thirds of the nineteenth century
London succeeded in expanding its global advantage, notably at the expense of Russia”
(42). However, during the height of expansion, while English bank vaults overflowed
with colonial loot, Irish financial resources were severely challenged.
The emergence of Nomos Britannicus was enabled in part by critical developments
in Ireland. Following the failure of the Presbyterian-led insurrection by the United
Irishmen in 1798, British politicians crushed all semblance of Irish independence via the
Act of Union of 1800. The Act dissolved the Irish Parliament and, in effect, moved
Ireland from a settler colony dominated by the rule of force, to one supposedly integrated
into the United Kingdom, an integration that relied on coercion when other methods
failed. Ireland thereafter sent Members of Parliament not to Dublin but to Westminster,
and London took full control of the island’s affairs. The Times of London articulated the
32
motivation for the Act: “[N]othing can tend to humanize the barbarous Irish as much as
an habitual and constant intercourse with this country and the opportunities of observing
the civilized manners of those who are in it” (qtd. in de Nie 78). Through “intercourse,”
then, the Irish were to be taught to behave like the English, whether they wanted to or
not. This idea of a civilizing mission would last well into the following century and
constitutes a central theme of Joyce’s work.
Britons were rather ambivalent about their “civilizing mission” in Ireland. “British
commentators in this period … had a clear sense that Ireland was less civilized than
Britain and that the barbarous Irish peasantry perhaps had more in common with
American Indians or other ‘savages’ than with themselves” (de Nie 80). De Nie writes of
the English elite’s lament that neither the Act of Union nor the Catholic Emancipation
Act that followed had “solved the Irish question” (81). The problem was seen to be the
Irish themselves: the British press “increasingly looked to Irishness as the ultimate
source of the island’s woes,” de Nie observes, adding that this “development ... had
catastrophic results for Ireland during the Great Famine” (ibid.).
As with many other atrocities, the scale of the suffering during the Famine defies
both description and full comprehension. Margaret Kelleher notes that even the best of
the period’s writers struggled to represent the tragedy before their eyes. One of them was
William Carleton, who based his novel, The Black Prophet, on his personal, harrowingly
up-close observations of An Gorta Mór.
8
He wrote that events in the worst year of the
Famine, known to this day as Black ’47, proved “how far the strongest imagery of fiction
is frequently transcended by the terrible realities of Truth” (qtd. in Kelleher, “Irish
33
Famine” 237).
The specter of the Famine victim that Lloyd calls the “indigent sublime”
was, he writes, located at the “threshold in the conception of human,” as a “form of the
unrepresentable in representation …” (Irish Times 44).
An Gorta Mór was Europe’s greatest demographic disaster. Historian Kevin Kenny
writes: “Between 1.1 and 1.5 million people Irish people died of starvation and famine-
related diseases in the famine decade, 1846-55, out of a population that stood at about 8.5
million at the beginning of the catastrophe. Another 2.1 million fled the country. …”
(American Irish 89-90). Kerby Miller counts “at least 500,000, and perhaps closer to 1
million, people evicted from their homes by landlords and strong farmers” (Ireland 67).
Ireland produced enough food for its people during this period, yet was unable to feed
them; its grains, livestock, and other produce were sent to feed the England of Queen
Victoria. (Woodham-Smith 123)
Treasury official Charles Trevelyan was among those with positions of power in
British society who saw the crisis in providential terms. Director of government relief
during the Famine, Trevelyan could control what food came into and left Ireland. But he
was loath to interfere in the laissez-faire operations of the economy: after all, the system
was God’s handiwork. As death darkened Ireland in late 1846, Trevelyan glimpsed “a
bright shining light shining through the dark cloud which at present hangs over Ireland”
(qtd. in Gray, “Ideology” 93). Yet he despaired that the Irish themselves were not yet
saved:
The deep and inveterate root of social evil remain[s], and I hope I am not guilty of
irreverence in thinking that, this being altogether beyond the power of man, the
cure has been applied by the direct stroke of all wise Providence in a manner as
unexpected and unthought of as it is likely to be effectual. God grant that we may
34
rightly perform our part and not turn into a curse what was intended as a blessing
(ibid., original emphasis).
As was the case with most British social sciences of the period, the rhetoric of
political economy was laced with a strong evangelical Christian element and as Peter
Gray has observed, “an evangelical providentialism played a large part in determining the
‘moralist’ response to the famine crisis in the 1840s and was strongly in evidence in the
words and actions of Charles Trevelyan, Charles Wood, and Sir George Grey” (Famine
16). We will return to this aspect of the Famine later on when we consider the British
biopolitical management of Irish life and death in more detail. Suffice to say here that
countless people died as Trevelyan’s government steadfastly refused to redirect food or
take adequate steps to nourish stricken members of its Irish dominion, and as aggressive
landlords evicted the same starving peasants. Thousands upon thousands of homeless
families were left to starve by the side of the road. “[A]n island, a social state, a race is to
be changed,” The Times wrote in October 1846. “[A]ll are to be created anew” (qtd. in
Kenny, American 96). By 1848, the paper was “[o]penly ‘embrac[ing] the idea that the
Irish Famine, if properly availed of, would prove a great blessing’ a ‘valuable opportunity
for settling the vexed question of Irish misery and discontent.’… The Times positively
exulted, ‘In a few years more, the Celtic Irishman will be as rare in Connemara as is the
Red Indian on the shores of Manhattan’” (qtd. in Miller, Emigrants 307). Thus had
hundreds of years of colonial rule reduced the indigenous people of Ireland to inferior
objects to be discarded by the sovereign power, England. The name given the vessels for
this discarding – “coffin ships,” as detailed in Chapter 3 – confirmed the “bare life” status
of Irish subalterns.
35
That the British approach to the Famine did not separate the realms of the divine,
the political, the racial, and the economic, but rather united them in the all-conquering
Nomos Britannicus, comports with the theory of Agamben who contends that at the
center of the nomos is located “its virtual rupture in the form of ‘the suspension of every
law.’” One should bear in mind James Fintan Lalor’s (1807-49) observation, made as the
Famine raged all around him, that Ireland “stands dissolved” (14), when considering
Agamben’s assertion that follows: “But what then appears (at the point in which society
is considered as tanquam dissoluta) is in fact not the state of nature (as an earlier stage
into which men would fall back) but the state of exception” (37; original punctuation).
These two states, of nature and of exception, blur the lines between the internal and the
external,” writes Agamben, adding “the sovereign power is this very impossibility of
distinguishing between outside and inside, nature and exception, physis and nomos. The
state of exception is thus not so much a spatiotemporal suspension as a complex
topological figure in which not only the exception and the rule but also the state of nature
and law, outside and inside, pass through one another” (ibid). It is this “topographical
zone of indistinction” – a zone that is hidden from justice – that in Agamben’s view
should be the focus of attention. Schmitt, Agamben maintains, had described this process
carefully, which “we are still living” (37-38). Agamben dates the appearance of the
process to the First World War, the event that marks the decline of Western Europe and
the emergence of the United States as world powers. Following the demise of the Soviet
Union, of course, the United States became the sole world power, the “new world order,”
the fully fledged Nomos Americanus. However, the process whereby the United States
36
became a world power started well before World War I. As John Carlos Rowe points out,
the United States “developed techniques of colonization in the course of breaking the
colonial rule of Great Britain and establishing its own national identity. Such colonial
practices emphasized the control of different peoples, their labor, and their means of
communal identification. Whether encouraged to assimilate to US culture or racially
targeted for exclusion, people and their social behaviors, as much as territory and
markets, were the focuses of US colonization” (Literary Culture 7). Later chapters in this
dissertation will consider state formation in the United States.
Long before World War I, and the first global war, an Agambenian
“topographical zone of indistinction” was evident in Ireland. During the Famine of the
mid-1800s, starvation and pestilence replicated a “state of nature”; moreover, moral
degeneracy and inhuman qualities imputed to the Irish, especially the Catholic Irish,
rendered Ireland itself a “state of exception.” Ireland was, therefore, a natural site for, as
Agamben put it, “the suspension of every law.” The fact that Ireland was subject to a
Coercion Act virtually every year from 1800 to 1922––a staggering 105 Coercion Acts in
all (Hanagan 63), confirmed its status as a state of exception. Famished Ireland, most
definitely tanquam dissoluta – that is, “as if dissolving,” constituted a “complex
topological zone of indistinction” through which Nomos Britannicus applied its power
over what Foucault called the “biopolitical”
management of Irish life and death. As Joyce
recognized, the spawn of that application were famished ghosts.
37
Biopolitical Management in Ireland
As noted earlier, Ireland became a laboratory for England’s colonial expansion to
the “new world” throughout the seventeenth century. This status remained in place for
well over 200 years, although the nature of the experimentation changed considerably by
the mid-nineteenth century as the needs of an expanding Nomos Britannicus changed.
Ireland emerged as a site of experimentation in biopolitical engineering calibrated for the
benefit of British government policy development, both foreign and domestic.
The genealogy of nineteenth-century British biopolitical policy stretches back to
one seventeenth-century Englishman in particular, William Petty. Petty arrived in Ireland
with Cromwell’s army in 1652. Within three years, he had left his position as physician
to Cromwell’s lieutenant general to take charge of the mapping of nearly eight million
acres of confiscated Irish land, and in the process, acquired nearly nineteen thousand
acres in Kerry for himself. Petty not only recorded topological features but also attached
such value judgments as “good” and “bad” to the land in his cartological creation. He
claimed the map as impartial despite the fact that he benefitted greatly from his own
proclamations of land value inscribed on the map.
9
As Mary Poovey shows, he was the first to promote the idea of the neutrality of
numbers, through what he called political arithmetic. “By representing expert
interpretation as superior to personal interests,” she writes, “Petty helped forge the
relationship between numbers and impartiality that has made the modern fact a crucial
instrument for policy-making. In a complex amalgam he created…expertise linked
particulars that seemed to be (but were not) observed to theories that seemed not to be
38
(but were) interested, for his representation of expertise made interpretation (and interest)
seem incidental to method and instrument” (123). Petty saw Ireland as a tabula rasa,
upon which he could conduct his experiments in political arithmetic. On behalf of the
colonial state, he pioneered the integration of geometric cartography, the Ordinance
Survey, census and land valuation, that resulted in a data bank of orthographic,
geographic and ethnographic information on the Irish people, the scope of which had
never been seen before in the world. Petty was, as Patrick Carroll asserts, “the harbinger
of the modern engineering state…a virtuoso of experimentalism, anatomy, economics,
statistics, cartography, and statecraft generally” (Science 167). Most of his ideas though,
would not be implemented for two hundred years, by which time Joyce’s paralyzed
Dubliners, disciplined and conditioned by both church and state, had for the most part,
internalized the moral and social codes of the colonizer.
Disciplinary Power
“The success of disciplinary power” writes Foucault “derives no doubt from the
use of simple instruments; hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment and their
combination in a procedure that is specific to it, the examination” (Discipline 170). All
three instruments operated in nineteenth-century Ireland on behalf of the colonial state.
The hierarchal observation was enabled not only through the police and other repressive
state apparatuses, but also through census and ordinance survey. The Ordinance Survey
of Ireland, begun in 1825 and conducted by the Royal Engineers of the British Army,
produced by 1836, “perhaps the most accurate of all national maps at that time” (P.
39
Carroll 4). Using experimental and innovative technologies, the Survey presented the
British Government an accurate, and detailed map of Ireland. It was as if, for the first
time, the colonial power had heard Petty’s argument of two centuries earlier. In order to
know and therefore govern a state, he had argued, one first had to acquire a map. (109)
The soldiers recorded “[a]ll aspects of land and people, from natural history to ‘social
economy’” (ibid.).
This Survey not only charted the land, but in a classic act of reterritorialization,
10
renamed it. In the course of their work, and with the help of local Gaelic scholars, Irish
names were either Anglicized or erased completely. Ireland was to be made-over in the
colonizer’s image, as “[g]overnance was grafted to the fibers of the body politic in
precisely the manner that Petty had envisaged” (110).
The Survey, as a continuation of Petty’s work, took careful note of boundaries or
the lack of them. This was an important objective of the Survey by a government
obsessed with “improvement.” Lloyd explains: “In Ireland, for well over a century, the
colonial state sought to extirpate what was at once an alternative ecology and an
alternative mentality, alternative forms whose trangressiveness from the perspective of
modernity was vividly figured in the glaring absence of proper boundaries” (Irish Times
19). Survey and census paved the way for the destruction of communal farming and other
“primitive” or recalcitrant customs that ran counter to “modern” agricultural practices.
The Famine would provided the state with the means to so this.
The census became a key instrument of hierarchical observation. When the 1812
census failed due mainly to poorly qualified enumerators and a suspicious population, the
40
government enlisted the help of the Catholic clergy, who urged their flock to cooperate
with the British administration. As a result, a much more successful census occurred in
1821. It signaled the beginning of a greater role for the Catholic Church in the governing
of Ireland, a point we will return to shortly. The censuses of 1831 and 1841 followed the
1821 template, and with each new census came a more efficient technology, and
crucially, a more detailed knowledge of the people.
Irish censuses were much more exacting than those conducted in England. As
well as the usual categories of the sex, age, and occupation of the people, the 1841 census
required information on marriage, education, literacy, religion, as well as “moral wants”
and “physical wants.” These last two categories relied on the value judgment of officers
of the recently established national police, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). This was
the first time anywhere that a state repressive apparatus engaged in census taking, and it
resulted in the accumulation of an unprecedented amount of police intelligence. (96)
Indeed, the intelligence-gathering operation proved so successful that in the worst year of
the Famine, 1847, the RIC conducted an agricultural census to assess the impact of the
calamity on the land. The information gathered was added to the 1851 census, giving the
state a solid baseline with which to assess the full effects of the Famine in pounds,
shillings, and pence.
Few aspects of Irish daily living eluded probing. As Patrick Carroll remarks,
“[t]he 1851 census was the most comprehensive social, nosological, necrological, and
bio-survey of Ireland to that date and perhaps also in any country in the world at that
time” (97). Every aspect of life, from death and disease, to farm size to family size, was
41
recorded, measured, and analyzed. A section of the final report “contained an
unprecedented ‘history of epidemic pestilences in Ireland,’” drawn up, incidently, by
William Wilde, Oscar’s grandfather (99). Police officers lurked at every port recording
the numbers emigrating. The census “represented the high point in the development of
the engines of political arithmetic in Ireland” (100). Like the canny shopkeeper executing
an inventory after a clearance sale, Britain, “a nation of shopkeepers,”
11
spared no
expense in acquiring an accurate assessment of the Famine’s impact.
As noted above, the Census came under the jurisdiction of the RIC, established as
a national police force under London’s direct control in 1836, Apart from Derry, Dublin,
and Belfast, cities that employed their own police, the RIC was responsible for policing
the entire island and were headquartered in Dublin Castle, the nerve center of the British
colonial operations. By 1850, the “Castle” had 14,000 police under its command. By
1870, Ireland “was twice as heavily policed as England and Wales, and two and a half
times as heavily policed as Scotland” (Carroll-Burke 83). Hierarchical surveillance was
well and truly established.
The reorganized RIC, like the Act of Union itself, represented the re-
appropriation of power by London over the Irish Ascendancy, the generally pro-British
Protestant elite who ruled Ireland. As the nineteenth century progressed, the Ascendancy
became a much less influential fraction of the British dominant class as its specific
interests diverged from the general interests of Nomos Britannicus. The British
administration, as Carroll-Burke points out in Colonial Discipline, was powered by “the
middle-class reforming ideology, which drew its legitimacy not from tradition or divine
42
appointment but from maxims of rationality, public utility, economy and accountability,”
(81). As the Empire expanded, so too did the sciences. The social sciences in particular,
became increasingly imbricated with the British state formation projects.
The British hoped that through direct rule they could make the Irish in their own
image. What was required was a “civilizing mission” under the supervision of their finest
political economists and other social scientists. As Carroll argues, “Ireland was the first
and greatest ‘living laboratory’ of English science and government and as such reveals
the emergence of modern state forms at the very point of experimental development”
(26).
Experimentation thrived in the biopolitical management of Ireland. Besides
introducing new technologies and innovations in police surveillance techniques, Carroll-
Burke has shown how novel approaches in carceral disciplinary practices were
introduced in Ireland long before they were attempted in England. “Indeed,” he writes,
“the state-of-the-art experiment known as the Irish Convict System was perhaps the first
fully national, comprehensive, and practiced system of individualized corrective
incarceration in the world” (236). And while developments in Irish penology
corresponded with Foucault’s findings in Discipline and Punishment, Carroll-Burke’s
research leads him to conclude that “Foucault’s implicit suggestion that disciplinary
power can be explained without reference to the mundane machinations of dominant
groups in a capitalist or colonial framework is not borne out by the Irish experience. In
Ireland, the crucial role of central government is undeniable, and cannot be understood
simply in terms of the codification of forms that emerged from without ‘the state’” (236).
43
This sovereign power of the state, and in particular, the biopolitical power of Nomos
Britannicus, along with the memory of its catastrophic collateral damage, the Famine, are
the major subtexts running through the pages of the Joyce’s works considered here.
III. James Joyce and the Biopolitics of Paralysis
Servants of Two Masters
The theme of subjugation infuses Joyce’s work. In the opening episode of
Ulysses, for example, Stephen Dedalus remarks that he is “the servant of two
masters…an English and an Italian” (20). Joyce was acutely aware of the intricate
relationship between London and Rome in the subjugation of the Irish, and the resultant
state of paralysis. In the memorable scene in Portrait, an argument about Parnell between
Dante on one side, and Mr. Dedalus, and Mr. Casey on the other, soon turns to the
Catholic Church. “We are an unfortunate priest ridden race,” complains Mr. Casey (37).
The angered Dante calls Charles Stewart Parnell a traitor because of his scandalous affair
with the married woman Kitty O’Shea. Angry at her insulting attitude towards his hero,
Casey retorts:
Didn’t the bishops of Ireland betray us in the time of the union when bishop
Lanigan presented an address of loyalty to the Marquess Cornwallis? Didn’t the
bishops and priests sell the aspirations of their country in 1829 in return for
catholic emancipation” Didn’t they denounce the fenian movement from the
pulpit and in the confessionbox? And didn’t they dishonour the ashes of Terence
Bellew McManus?... O, by God, he cried, I forgot little old Paul Cullen. Another
apple of God’s eye. (38)
44
Mr. Casey refers here to actual events. The 1800 Act of Union was opposed not only by
the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, who saw their power over Catholic Ireland diminish as a
result of the Act, but also by Irish nationalists such as Daniel O’Connell who wanted to
break the union with Britain. Bishop Lanigan did indeed address the Lord Lieutenant of
Ireland, the Marquess Cornwallis,
12
in Dublin Castle and, like many in the Catholic
hierarchy, urged Catholics to support the proposed union. Extremely conservative on
most issues, the hierarchy regularly voiced support for a strong class system. Their
sermons and edicts promoted “doctrines of subordination” to both church and civil
authorities. While they opposed all violence, (except those that they supported,) they
opposed nationalist violence especially. Despite Ascendancy objections, and the
existence of the anti-Catholic penal laws in Ireland, the British government saw a strong
ally in the Church, and even helped to finance the Irish national Catholic seminary at
Maynooth. (S. J. Connolly 219-63) Mr. Casey also asserted correctly that the Irish
Catholic authorities promoted fealty to the British Crown in return for the passing of the
Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, and Church leaders were indeed actively opposed to
the Fenians, none more so than the above named “apple of God’s eye,” Paul Cullen.
The Church’s generally pro-British positions were strengthened with the
appointment of Cullen as Archbishop of Armagh in 1849. He became the driving force
behind the “devotional revolution” that followed the Famine, the consequences of which
left Joyce in despair. In his essay, “Ireland: Island of Saints and Scholars,” he writes: “I
confess I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the
tyranny of Rome still holds the dwelling place in my soul” (“Ireland” 125). Undoubtedly,
45
the Roman Catholic tryrannization of Joyce’s soul had its roots in Cullen’s cunning. An
understanding of the “devotional revolution,” a term coined by Emmet Larkin in 1972,
13
will not only help us understand the roots of Joyce’s despair, but will shed light on the
complex machinations of British biopolitical power in Ireland, as well as offer
transatlantic dimensions that will be useful later in the dissertation.
The Fenians, Terence Bellew McManus, and the devotional revolution, itself, all
have distinctly transatlantic/transnational dimensions. Amy Martin has noted that the
Fenians, active on both sides of the Atlantic, “signaled a radical critique of and challenge
to…the modern state form, a critique that has distinctly transnational and internationalist
dimensions” (“Fenian Fever” 22).
14
McManus, a former Young Irelander, and Fenian
supporter, died in San Francisco in 1861 and was buried in Dublin amid much
controversy revolving around the Catholic Church. In the US his body travelled east by
both road and rail, stopping at every major center of Irish population, was blessed by
Catholic clergymen all along the way. Both Archbishop Alemany of San Francisco, who
had given McManus the last rites of the Church personally, and Archbishop Hughes of
New York, said Requiem Masses for him. (Rafferty, Church, State 28)
15
In Ireland,
Archbishop Cullen of Dublin banned McManus’s body from Church property, and
condemned the many thousands who paid their respects to McManus on the final leg of
his journey from Cork to Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin. The funeral highlights how the
Catholic Church supported the disciplinary power of each national state irrespective of
any consistent moral principal. The attitude of the Catholic hierarchy internationally was
46
summed up by Archbishop Cullen: “The first duty of every Catholic is to support the
government unless it attacked the Church”(qtd, in Rafferty, Church, State 5).
Rowe has alerted us to “nineteenth-century religion’s powerful transnational
reach and the forces it employed” in its global outreach (“Religious” 45). Until now, the
remarkable transnational reach of the devotional revolution has been overlooked by
American Studies scholars. It evolved into a transatlantic socio-religious disciplinary
movement tied to notions of strict religious devotion, respectability, strong work ethic,
“family values,” and an unquestioning obedience to the laws the capitalist state, as well
as to those of God. Born in Ireland, with Rome’s imprimatur, it spread across to America
with the Irish emigrants of the Green Atlantic and was personified in the figure of
Archbishop John Hughes of New York, a major subject of investigation in Chapters 3.
The well-connected Cullen arrived from Rome where he had served as rector of
the Irish College and as a professor at the College of the Propaganda. In a remarkably
short period, he had vanquished the nationalist wing of the Church led by Connaught’s
Archbishop McHale of Tuam, centralized the hierarchical structure, enforced strict
discipline within the priestly ranks, significantly boosted the recruitment of priests and
nuns, and followed every dictate of his benefactor, Pope Pius IX. The Pope made
Cullen’s appointment from Gaeta, where he had fled following the Mazzini-led Italian
revolution that eventually led to the downfall of the Papal States in 1870. While he lost
the temporal power of the papacy, Pius IX reinforced the Church’s spiritual domain
through a stricter hierarchical structure and the declaration of doctrines that reinforced the
devotional revolution, namely, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed
47
Virgin, the Doctrine of the Sacred Heart, and most significant of all, the metadogma of
Papal Infallibility, the ideological basis of which, August Bernhard Hassler
16
has
observed, is found in European counter-revolutionary conservativism and monarchism.
17
Cullen, following Pius IX’s instructions opposed British attempts to establish the
non-denominational, third level Queen’s Colleges in Ireland, on the basis that they would
be detrimental to religion of Catholics who attended them. He united and rallied all wings
of the Church around the cause, and urged instead the establishment of what would soon
be Joyce’s alma mater, the Catholic University of Ireland. This stance made him popular
with his flock and priests alike, but he would soon lose much of that popularity through
his collaborative policies towards the British authorities. While he enthusiastically
endorsed Catholic Emancipation, he was distinctly unenthused about O’Connell’s Repeal
movement, instead directing Irish Church’s efforts at disciplining the flock. Mass
attendance soared under his watch. Pius IX’s doctrines of the Virgin Mary and the Sacred
Heart, dramatically altered Irish Catholic material culture, as pictures and statues of the
two competed with crucifixes for space on the walls of Irish Catholic homes. In several
places in Ulysses, Leopold Bloom muses on the Church’s reliance on such iconography,
and in the Nausicaa chapter he links it with commercialism. “And pray for us. And pray
for us. Good idea that repetition. Same thing with ads. Buy from us. And buy from us.
Yes, there’s a light in the priest’s house” (377).
18
Initially McHale welcomed Cullen to Ireland, especially after his apparently anti-
British response to the Queen’s College proposal, but they soon saw themselves on
opposite sides of most of the political issues of the day. Cullen was an ardent
48
ultramontanist, whereas McHale was not quite. For example, unlike Cullen, McHale
opposed the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. Joyce paid particular interest to their quarrel
and lampooned it in the short story “Grace.” Four men, visit Tom Kernan, the tea
merchant, determined to encourage him to lead a more virtuous life. The men themselves
are far from virtuous. Kernan is in bed recovering from having bitten off part of his
tongue, the result of his falling down the stairs of a pub. The men reckon that attendance
at Father Purdon’s retreat would help Kernan confront his drink problem. During their
chat, Martin Cunningham, an official at Dublin Castle, tells a hilariously inaccurate story
about Archbishop McHale at the Vatican Council. As Cunningham would have it, only
McHale and “a German cardinal by the name of Dolling…or Dowling”
19
are the only two
to voice objections to the doctrine.
20
There they were at it, all the cardinals and bishops and archbishops from all the
ends of the earth and these two fighting dog and devil until at last the Pope
himself stood up and declared infallibility a dogma of the Church ex cathedra. On
the very moment John McHale, who had arguing and arguing against it, stood up
and shouted with the voice of a lion: Credo! (Dubliners 169-70.)
21
Cunningham is not the only employee of the British administration in the room.
Mr. Power also works in Dublin Castle with the RIC, the chief disciplinary and
surveillance weapon of the colonial state. Throughout his work and in may subtle ways,
Joyce shows not only how the British biopolitical power is imbricated into everyday
Dublin life, but that such power is tied in intimately with the Catholic Church.
Before turning to the disciplinary functions of the Irish education system in
colonial Ireland, two points should be made here about Archbishop Hughes. First, he is in
a way, a composite of McHale and Cullen. He railed against British colonial injustice on
49
the one hand, on the other he was a committed ultramontanist who demanded strict
adherence to the hierarchical structure of both Church and state. While he espoused Irish
nationalism in the United States, he did so partly as a result of his early years in Ireland
under the penal laws, but partly because it gave him credibility among his Irish American
flock. Yet like Cullen he vehemently opposed secret societies such as the Fenians on both
sides of the Atlantic. On visits to Ireland he was careful not compromise the chain of
authority of the Irish Catholic hierarchy by speaking out publicly against the British
administration of Ireland, and thus compromising the Church’s supporting role in the
running of the British colonial state. On the contrary, he offered his support for British
colonialism as long as they in turn, supported the Irish Catholic Church. In his speech at
the laying of the cornerstone at the new Catholic University of Ireland in Dublin in July
20, 1862, he noted that conditions were changing for the better in Ireland under the
British administration. Speaking of Irish Catholics he stated that “the period cannot be far
distant when the British empire will need their services, whether in the cabinet or in the
field, and will avail itself of the cultivated intellect of the whole of the Irish people,
without distinction of creed” (Complete Works 2: 360).
Hughes is significant to the development of the devotional revolution in Ireland
for another crucial reason. He led the fight in the United States against state non-
denominational education as far back as 1840, and was the first in the English-speaking
world at least, to found not only Catholic Church-run parochial schools, but secondary
schools and universities also. Pope Pius IX, and his representative in Ireland, Cullen, in
opposing the Queen’s colleges in Ireland, were following Hughes’ lead. Control over
50
education meant control over the flock––the essence of the devotional revolution on both
sides of the Atlantic.
The Politics of Disciplinary Pedagogy
When Stephen Dedalus proclaims “History…is a nightmare from which I am
trying to awake” (Ulysses 34), he is not just talking about abstract Irish history, nor even
British or Irish historiography, but also his own personal history within the intertwining
institutions of family, church, and school. His Catholic education represents an open sore
in his critical consciousness, and he links it with British colonialism in several places in
his writing. Joyce was well aware of the collusion between these disciplinary powers.
In Colonial Discipline, Carroll-Burke investigates the disciplinary pedagogy of
the whole gamut of educational institutions in nineteenth-century Ireland and comes to
the conclusion that whether it’s a convent school, a national school, Maynooth seminary
or the Irish Convict System, he detects “the striking similarities of motive and method”
(19). All of these institutions aimed to “morally improve” their charges through a strict
disciplinary regime based on total obedience to authority. In Portrait, Joyce describes in
terrifying detail the violence of Catholic disciplinary pedagogy when he is beaten with
pandybat by the merciless prefect of studies. (51-52)
The British introduced the Irish National School system in 1835, barely a few
years after the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act. It was “the first national system
of government-funded school popular education in the world” (P. Carroll 159). Their
introduction signaled the beginning of a struggle for control over the hearts and minds of
51
Irish schoolchildren. While the British and the Catholic Church liaised regularly on the
subject, arguing politely but firmly on various issues of control, members of the
Protestant Ascendancy railed against the dangers of “papist education.” Of the roughly
1,400,000 Catholic school-age children in the 1821 census, about half did not receive an
education. The Church, through its various schools and convents estimated it taught a
total of 300,000 children, and a further 400,000 Catholic children attended hedge
schools––so called because they originated in fields beyond the sight of British
authorities during the time of the penal laws prohibiting Catholic education. Those laws
had since disappeared and hedge schools no longer met in secret. They were fee paying––
the pupils bringing a small weekly sum to pay the teacher. (S. J. Connolly 81-83)
While each group jockeyed for advantage, all fractions of the dominant classes,
whether Protestant or Catholic, British or Irish, agreed on one thing. As Carroll-Burke
puts it: “Most members of the middle-classes agreed that education was a means to
control the working and peasant classes, not to mention their own progeny” (140).
McHale and others Church leaders opposed the non-denominational National School
system too, but Cullen computed the political arithmetic and realized that given the
demographic reality of Ireland, these schools would be non-denominational in name only.
He adopted a gradualist approach that, from the Church’s point of view, was proved
successful eventually. In 1853, textbooks deemed objectionable by the Catholic Church
were withdrawn from circulation, and by 1860 Catholics comprised half the national
education board. Other advances included the appointment of Catholic chaplains to the
British Army, the approval of Catholic Church-run “reformatory schools” (or prisons) for
52
juveniles, and the appointment of a Catholic as a director of the Irish Convict System.
(134-36) With the disestablishment of the Anglican Church of Ireland in 1869, and the
increase in Catholic influence in various branches of the British colonial government, it
was easy for Cullen “to conclude that the Catholic Irish ‘nation-state’ could be built into
a de facto reality awaiting formal recognition” (136) The scene was set for the two
masters, London and Rome, to rule over their loyal servants.
Joyce and the Famine
In The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias traces how the “civilizing” of manners
and personality were intimately tied to state formation and the monopolization of power
within states. The imposition of a strict code of manners for the upper class/colonial
power was important because such a code functioned not only as an instrument of
prestige, but also as an instrument of power. Civilization became the “watchword” of
colonial discourse, especially following the Famine. (431) Europe’s greatest demographic
catastrophe represents a critical turning point of British biopolitical state formation in
Ireland. Joyce delved into the psychic aftereffects of the Famine on Irish everyday life,
aware of its impact on the emergence of the British nomos in Ireland. In the following I
will try to show through a detailed examination of a selection of his work, not only the
memory of the Famine, but also how his portrayal of Dublin reveals the extent of the
imbrication of British biopower in everyday Irish life. The rather long excerpt below
from Elias’s The Civilizing Process, describes perfectly the cultural forms that British
biopower instilled in the Irish people and which Joyce was determined to reveal.
53
For people of a society with a high division of functions, it is not enough simply
to rule subject people and countries by force of arms like a warrior caste––
although the old, simple goals of most of the earlier expansionist movements, the
expulsion of other peoples from their land, the acquisition of new soil for
cultivation and settlement, doubtless play no small part in Western expansion. But
it is not only the land that is needed but the people; these must be integrated,
whether as workers or consumers, into the web of the hegemonial, upper-class
country, with its highly developed differentiation of functions. This in turn
requires both a certain raising of living standards and the cultivation of self-
control or super-ego functions in the subject peoples on the Western models; it
demands a “civilization” of the colonized. …[I]t also became necessary, in
maintaining an empire that went beyond mere plantation-land and plantation-
labour, to rule people in part through themselves, through the moulding of super-
egos. (431-32)
The colonized absorb the code of the colonizer as they undergo a process of assimilation.
In their conduct they obey the colonizer’s rules, but their identification is partial, they
may show ambivalence, “still their own conscience, their whole super-ego apparatus,
more or less follows the pattern of the established groups” (432). Elias’s formula here
echoes the work of post-colonial theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Cesaire, and
Albert Memmi, not to mention Gramsci and his notion of hegemony. The Famine
accelerated this “civilizing process” in Ireland whereby, as Luke Gibbons observes, “an
unruly premodern culture [was purged] from a new constituted bourgeois public sphere”
(“No Homes” 153).
The Famine Irish defied “the forms of subjectification that political economy
assumed to be universal” (Lloyd, “Political Economy” 324). Nassau Senior, the first
occupant of the chair in political economy at Oxford, held the view that:
It is easy, at least comparatively so, to describe the Moral and Material defects of
Ireland. It is easy to show how mutually they act and react. It is easy to show how
insecurity occasions want of capital––how want of capital occasions idleness and
misery––and how idleness and misery lead to turbulence and insecurity, until the
54
result is a circle of calamities, each in turn creating, aggravating, and recreating
the others. (Qtd. in Lloyd, “Political Economy” 323)
As Lloyd notes, for Senior (and his fellow political economists) the potato-fed Irish, with
their colossal excess of population over obtainable capital, “pose a theoretical problem
for the political economy that is intrinsically linked to the practical problems it poses for
the disciplinary apparatuses of the state” (324). Senior’s remedies for Ireland’s “material
and moral evils” were found in government projects, whether they stemmed from the
coercive force of the national police force, or ideological force of the national schools
system. “Theoretical and governmental discourse” writes Lloyd, “are at one in the need
to contain the Irish, to civilize and modernize them” (332). The failure of the Irish potato
crop in 1845, offered a timely solution to the problems that haunted the ideologues of the
political economy.
Consideration of “The Dead,” finished in 1907, and Ulysses, published in 1922,
lays bare the lingering presence of An Gorta Mór in Irish lives lived decades after that
tragedy. The short story “The Dead” revolves around a Dublin Christmas party thrown by
the Misses Morkan, devoted aunts of Gabriel Conroy, a journalist caught between
alliance with the present colonialist establishment and attraction to an absent Irish past,
exactly as described above by Elias. The sprawling novel Ulysses also is situated in the
singular city of Joyce’s birth, Dublin. Its story begins about 8 in the morning of June 16,
1904, and ends scant hours later, about 3 the following morning. Within this time-frame
three main characters – the young man Stephen Dedalus, the middle-aged salesman
Leopold Bloom, and his wife Molly Bloom – eke out lives marked by the presence and
55
absence of an array of hungers. The narratives in which these characters exist speak
volumes about the effects of the mid-1800s Famine on the Irish women and men who
would, for decades thereafter, emigrate from Ireland to America.
Feeding “The Dead”
Completed some six decades after the Great Hunger and fourteen years before
part of Ireland would win independence, “The Dead” was the last in order of composition
in Joyce’s celebrated short story collection Dubliners (Gifford, Joyce 110). Among the
inspirations for the story was one of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies, “O, Ye Dead!”
(Ellmann 253), in which the following verses appear:
Oh, ye Dead! oh, ye Dead! whom we know by the light you give
From your cold gleaming eyes, though you move like men who live.
Why leave you thus your graves,
In far off fields and waves,
Where the worm and the sea-bird only know your bed,
To haunt this spot where all
Those eyes that wept your fall,
And hearts that wail’d you, like your own, lie dead?
(Qtd. in Gifford, Joyce 111-2)
Moore’s melody captures an Irish fixation with death, one to which Joyce readily
subscribed. Richard Ellmann states that by infusing his Dubliners with a theme of the
interrelationship between the living and the dead, Joyce provided “in one sense an answer
to his university friends who mocked his remark that death is the most beautiful form of
life by saying that absence is the highest form of presence. Joyce did not think either idea
absurd” (262). In his, dare I say, groundbreaking 2002 essay entitled “The Memories of
‘The Dead,’” Kevin Whelan performs a superbly “sustained excavation of the historical
56
layers––biographical, literary, historical, geographical, musical––of…‘The Dead.’ One of
the chief discoveries of this excavation is the buried history of the Famine embedded at
its center ” (59). This chapter takes its cue from Whelan’s work to look at the
absence/presence of the Famine in Ulysses. It is not possible to include all of the layers
and intricacies of Whelan’s essay here, but some features of it are worth examining at this
time. In particular, I would like to note the key absence/presence binary that Whelan’s
work exposes, and around which the story revolves.
“‘The Dead’ begins with a party and ends with a corpse,” Ellmann notes (254).
The corpse will be exhumed in due course; first, attention must be directed to the party.
Gabriel Conroy, the Morkans’ favorite nephew, attends with his wife Gretta every year,
and every year he is called upon to give the after-dinner speech. On this occasion he
chooses to praise the Irish tradition of hospitality.
22
“As long as this one roof shelters the
good ladies aforesaid,” Gabriel intones, “the tradition of genuine warm-hearted courteous
Irish hospitality, which our forefathers have handed down to us and which we in turn
must hand down to our descendants, is still alive among us” (Dubliners 203). Ellmann
well may be right when he says that in this speech Joyce makes amends for his many
public criticisms of Ireland (254); however, the speech also draws a positive connection
between the living and dead generations, to indicate important role that the dead will play
in the larger narrative.
The dinner itself is a lush buffet, laden with the delectables. The detail lavished on
this Christmas table inspired one critic to call the scene “almost pornographic in its vision
of pure pleasure” (Maddox 79). Though by then they spoke little of the Great Hunger,
57
Irish readers would have recognized at once the stark contrast between these sated
partygoers and the famished dead of a half-century earlier. They may also have noted that
amid the luscious descriptions of fine food, including a goose, (symbolizing perhaps the
“Wild Geese,” the name given the Irish who left Ireland to fight for various European
armies following defeat at the Battle of Aughrim,) the absence of the quintessential
symbol of the Irish Famine––the potato, a subject to which I will return later in the essay.
This juxtaposition of abundance and deprivation establishes a second binary, that of
gluttony/starvation or feast/famine.
East Meets West
A third binary in “The Dead” – that of east/west – is as much political as it is
geographic. It centers on Gabriel’s encounter with Miss Ivors, “a frank-mannered
talkative young lady” (Dubliners 187). Like Gabriel, Miss Ivors is a teacher. They
attended university together and “were friends of many years standing.” She objects to
Gabriel writing for The Daily Express, a fiercely pro-British newspaper printed in
Dublin. “Well I’m ashamed of you, said Miss Ivors frankly. To say that you’d write for a
rag like that. I didn’t think you were a West Briton” (188). “West Briton” is a derogatory
term for an Irish person whose allegiance, political and cultural, is toward England.
Although Miss Ivors’ banter seems friendly, the barb in her remark perplexes Gabriel.
His weekly literary column “did not make him a West Briton surely” (Dubliners 188).
After claiming just to have made a joke, Miss Ivors invites Gabriel to holiday with her
and her friends in the Aran Islands, off Ireland’s west coast. “It would be splendid for
58
Gretta too if she’d come. She’s from Connacht, isn’t she? – Her people are, said Gabriel
shortly” (189). Gabriel “has rescued” Gretta from “that bog,” as Ellmann puts it. “It is an
element in his wife’s past that he wishes to forget. During most of the story, the west of
Ireland is connected in Gabriel’s mind with a dark and rather painful primitivism. ... The
west is savagery” (257). Though he makes the point, Ellmann fails to elaborate
sufficiently on the darkness and pain of the primitivism that the West of Ireland evokes in
Gabriel.
The “West Briton” epithet indicates the presence of English “sovereign power”
and Gabriel’s relation to it. It functions similarly to the term, “Castle Catholic,” an epithet
for an Irish Catholic who aligns with Dublin Castle, the center of British colonial power
in Ireland. Joyce’s Dublin teems with such people. One can see that Gabriel has
internalized, has consented to, or at least resigned himself to, the “civilizing process” of
Nomos Britannicus. Yet on hearing himself insulted as a “West Briton,” Gabriel is
moved to reconsider. As Elias has pointed out, people in Gabriel’s situation” attempt to
reconcile and fuse … [the British civilization process] with the habits and traditions of
their own society with greater or lesser success” (432). In Gabriel’s case, success is
questionable. In the subsequent dinner speech he praises Irish tradition rather than British
colonialism; he is being nudged in a westward direction. Yet he evinces shame for his
wife’s roots and for all the West of Ireland – the birthplace of Joyce’s wife Nora as well
as Joyce’s own clan, a place that Gabriel considers “savage.”
Gabriel’s attitude towards the west requires further contextualization here. Oliver
Cromwell is said to have cried, “To hell or Connaught!” The phrase encapsulates his
59
ruthless policy of deterritorialization, the seizing rich and arable lands belonging Irish
Catholics in the provinces of Ulster, Munster, and Leinster, then banishing the
dispossessed to Connaught, Ireland’s poorest, westernmost, and in many ways most
desolate, province. Forcibly displaced, many native Irish made their homes in the West.
Eventually, in British “civilizing” discourse, their location there itself was deemed
evidence of their inferiority. Joyce may well have been aware of the 1885 publication,
The Races of Britain by John Beddoe, a founding member of the British Ethnological
Society and a president of the Anthropological Institute. Placing himself foremost among
academics who promoted the idea of Anglo-Saxon “civilization” over Irish savagery,
Beddoe postulated a scientifically specious “Index of Nigrescence.” At the inferior far
end of Beddoe’s scale lay the people of the West of Ireland, whom he perceived as darker
in skin and more pronounced in jaw than the Anglo-Saxons to the east.
Gabriel informs Miss Ivors that he prefers to holiday on the continent “to keep in
touch with the languages and partly for a change.” At this she asks him, “And haven’t
you your own language to keep in touch with – Irish?” Gabriel replies, “Well … if it
comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language” (Dubliners 189). Exasperated, he tells
Miss Ivors that he is “sick of my own country, sick of it,” but is rendered speechless
when asked by Miss Ivors the reason for this sickness. He has “[n]o words” for her (ibid.
189-91).
In his analysis of “The Dead,” Whelan rightly maintains “that an account of
writing in post-Famine Ireland which neglects the linguistic transition in the period is
fatally flawed. The language – Irish – in which the experience of the Famine was actually
60
lived by the bulk of its victims was itself one of its casualties” (87). Gabriel is among the
many Irish who by the dawn of the twentieth century have forgotten their native
language. He writes, in English, for The Daily Express, a mouthpiece for the sovereign
power that rules Ireland. His invective against the West adopts the prevailing Nomos
Britannicus view of the Irish – particularly of the barely anglicized Irish men and women
residing west of the River Shannon. In siding with the British, Gabriel has effectively
declared the right of dispossession against the dispossessed, though ironically it does also
leave him somewhat culturally dispossessed and exilic in his own turn.
Death and “The Dead”
Performance of a song at the party transmutes east/west into the foundational
binary of the story, life/death – an alter ego, of course, of presence/absence. “The Lass of
Aughrim” is in the same fine Irish tradition as “Oh, Ye Dead!”: both ballads are morbid,
melancholic, melodramatic. Aughrim is a small town in Connaught, thirty miles east of
Galway, and site of the Battle of Aughrim, the 1690 event that spelt the end of the old
Gaelic order and resulted in the flight of the Wild Geese referred to earlier. The “lass” in
the song is a young peasant woman who, having been impregnated by Lord Gregory,
attempts to enter his manor with their babe in her arms. The following verse is from the
original ballad, a fragment of which Joyce includes in “The Dead”:
The rain falls on my yellow locks
And the dew it wets my skin;
My babe lies cold within my arms:
Lord Gregory let me in.
(Qtd. in Gifford, Joyce 124)
61
As the singer brings the song to its inevitably unhappy end, Gabriel stares silently at his
wife, who stands transfixed by the imagery. (Dubliners 210)
Back at their hotel, Gretta confesses to Gabriel that the song reminded her of a
young boy she used to know “named Michael Furey. He used to sing that song…” (219).
Gabriel tries in vain to wrest control of the conversation. He learns that Furey is dead,
and that this seventeen year old, this rival for his wife’s heart, was a lowly laborer.
“Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure
from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret
life together … she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful
consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure,
acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to
vulgarians and idealizing his own clownish lusts. …” (219-20) Gabriel thus is introduced
to a humility that he much needs. But further revelations are to come. “And what did he
die of so young, Gretta? Consumption was it?” he asks, and is gripped by a “vague
terror” at her reply: “I think he died for me…” (220). She relates that young Furey, upon
learning that she was leaving Galway for Dublin and that he might never see her again,
left his sickbed and to stand in the driving rain outside her bedroom window. After
hearing gravel rattle against her window, she discovered Michael outside by the back
garden, shivering with cold. “I implored him to go home at once and told him he would
get his death in the rain. But he said he did not want to live … And when I was only a
week in the convent he died and he was buried in Oughterard where his people came
from” (221). Thus Furey, like the lass of the song, has perished, a “bare life” excluded
62
from and by the beloved society where he once thrived. Ironically, in relation to the song,
a gender reversal takes place, as Gretta/Gregory will not let Furey/the Lass in.
Furthermore, Joyce may have had in mind here yet another Lord Gregory, Lady
Gregory’s husband and Connaught landlord, who was responsible for the infamous
Gregory clause that led to the dispossession of many famine victims. (Kinealy, Great
Calamity 218-19)
Gretta, overcome with emotion, cries herself to sleep. “[S]hy of intruding in her
grief,” Gabriel lies besides her, compares himself with Furey, and realizes that his own
relationship with Gretta cannot rival that earlier passion. “He had never felt like that
himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love” (223). Images
of death become visible. First of the departed Furey: “The tears gathered thickly in his
eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing
under a dripping tree” (ibid.). Then of all the dead of Ireland: “Other forms were near.
His soul was approaching that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was
conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own
identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself was dissolving
and dwindling” (ibid.). It is time, Gabriel thinks, to make his own trek westward, to
determine what about his life in the east has made him sick.
One source of his sickness is evident. He suffers from his disconnection with the
“vast hosts” of the dead, symbolized by the departed laborer. Like most aspects of
Joyce’s complex writing, there is never just one interpretation of anything. Thus, in
proposing that the vast host of the dead as being symbolic of the Famine, which I will do
63
presently, indubitably there are other very viable interpretations. For example, Whelan
points out that “Furey can also be taken as symbolic of a vibrant, passionate life which
has vanished––it is now ‘barren’––the dynamic life of the pre-Famine Gaelic countryside,
subsequently safely paled by ‘crooked crosses’ (Roman Catholicism)” (70). His shallow
bourgeois life in Dublin is no match for the rich cultural history that Furey represents.
Paradoxically, then, Furey represents vitality contrasted against Gabriel’s lethargy.
Gabriel is not just disconnected from the dead, but from the living also. This last scene
has him looking through a window, a recurring metaphor for separation throughout the
story (ibid.) His spectacles too symbolize his separation from life, and from Gretta.
Gabriel is not fully alive.
As Whelan has shown the story contains many literary references that offer clues,
some of which point towards the “vast hosts” being symbolic of the Famine dead. The
following clue has transatlantic connotations also. When Joyce began work on “The
Dead,” he was reading Bret Harte’s Gabriel Conroy (1875), and undoubtedly named his
protagonist after Harte’s creation. The story opens in the snowy High Sierra’s of 1848
California, where a party of emigrants are trapped and immobilized by heavy snow.
Captain Gabriel Conroy, initially the leader of the trek, had died at this point in the story.
Harte based his novel on the real life story of the Donner Party, trapped in the Sierra
snow during “the winter of 1846-47––also the worst season––Black ’47––of the Famine.”
The Donner Party, which included two Irish families, the Reids and the Breens,
reportedly resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. (71-72) That the brutal experiences
64
of the Irish emigrants in California mirrored that of the Famine victims back in Ireland,
even down to reports of cannibalism (Ó Grada 12), was not lost to Joyce.
The surname Furey is another clue that points us towards the Famine. In Greek
mythology, the Furies “represented the spirit of the dead, notably the avenging souls of
murdered men” (Whelan 69). Many in Ireland considered the catastrophe to be
deliberately manipulated by Nomos Britannicus, and the Famine victims, in effect
murdered. Furey’s family came from the Connaught village of Oughterard, at the dead-
center of the Famine, and one among the poorest and hardest hit in the country during the
period. (Kinealy 276) It is also located at the center of Joyce country, and within An
Gaeltacht, an Irish-speaking area that to this day preserves the language and culture that
Nomos Britannicus despised and Gabriel shunned. Like many victims of An Gorta Mór,
moreover, Furey was struck down before his time. Like Furey, many died in the open,
inclement weather. He died hungry for love, they for food.
By applying to themes of feast/famine, east/west, and life/death the concepts of
nomos, of “sovereign power,” and of “bare life,” a new picture may be discerned in the
oft-analyzed story “The Dead.”
Mr. Bloom’s Peripatetic Potato
Leopold Bloom, Joyce writes early in Ulysses, “felt in his hip pocket for the
latchkey. Not there. In the trousers I left off. Must get it. Potato I have” (57). Joyce thus
discloses that Bloom carries a shriveled spud that will remain with him as he traverses the
streets of Dublin on June 16, 1904. Like much in Ulysses, the hidden presence of the
65
potato invites numerous interpretations. For one thing, it is a Jewish symbol of the
continuity of life. (Gifford, Ulysses 71) It also represents – in the text no less than in
Irish life to this day – the ubiquitously present yet superficially absent Famine. Yet as
Joyce well knew, the potato represented much more than that.
To Adam Smith the potato represented a prodigious source of vitality. In The
Wealth of Nations, he wrote:
The chairmen, porters and coal-heavers in London, and those unfortunate women
who live by prostitution, the strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps
in the British dominions, are said to be, the greater part of them, from the lowest
rank of people in Ireland, who are generally fed on this root [potatoes]. No food can
afford a more decisive proof of its nourishing quality, or of its being particularly
suitable to the health of the human constitution. (161)
Smith, regarded as the “father” of political economy, could hardly have praised the potato
more. Certainly, the Irish had proved the veracity of his statement in the aftermath of the
English Plantation of Ireland. Dispossessed by settler colonialism, as noted earlier, the
natives were driven to the boglands, and the rocky, mountainous terrain of the western
seaboard where they “developed a sophisticated and ecologically inventive means of
survival” based on the adaptable, nutritious potato. (Lloyd, “Political Economy” 311)
Despite the occasional crop failure, the potato successfully sustained the population,
generated “both a high rate of population increase and the progressive subdivision of
landholdings” (ibid.). Its success was its downfall in the eyes to the new breed of political
economists who followed Smith, and who would play such a major role in the
biopolitical management of life and death in Ireland.
In “The Potato in Materialist Imagination,” Catherine Gallagher and Stephen
Greenblatt, outline the substance of the great potato debate that raged in Britain in
66
the1790s to the 1830s––a public controversy linked to political economy that revolved
around the relative merits of potatoes as opposed to those of grain. (110-11) Adam
Smith’s most prominent disciple, Thomas Malthus,
23
had a much different opinion of the
potato than his mentor. Instead of being a food source capable of producing healthy
people, the potato, for Malthus and his cohorts, was the root of all evil. Political
economist discourse began to anthropomorphize the plant. “If we take a look at the
rhetoric of this debate,” writes Gallagher and Greenblatt, “we can see that potato eaters
often undergo a peculiarly quick transition from plant to person, as if they were
literalizing the political economists’ equations. In this debate, anxieties about the tuber
generally sprout from this quick transition, from the perception of the potato’s primeval,
archaic power to conjure people right out of the ground” (111). Wheat, unlike the dirty,
lumpish, subterranean spud, grows above ground, its golden stalks swaying annually in
the English summer sunshine. Wheat was sophisticated, modern, beautiful, even. It
required several processes before it could be consumed––harvested, threshed, ground at
the mill, baked, and eaten, whereas, potatoes went straight from dirt into humans. In a
letter to the Times in October 1847, the height of the Famine, Charles Trevelyan,
justifying limiting relief for the starving Irish, wrote: “The change from an idle barbarous
isolated potato cultivation, to corn cultivation, which frees industry, and binds together
employer and employee in mutually beneficial relations … requires capital an a new class
of men” (qtd in Kinealy, Calamity 182). In short, while corn represented culture and
proper capitalist relations of production, “the potato represented a presocial state of
isolation in which the poor were cut off from civilization and undifferentiated both from
67
each other and from nature. The English had a word for this state: Ireland” (Gallagher
and Greenblatt 114).
Ireland represented political economy’s greatest challenge––one that its theorists
could never overcome on purely economic grounds, so instead they had rely on notions
of cultural and racial difference. The hardiness of the potato, its ability to grow almost
anywhere and with a minimum of effort and expense, coupled with its ability to sustain a
burgeoning population, placed the pre-Famine Irish peasantry outside the laws of
capitalist economy, and therefore premodern, savage, uncivilized.
Hunger in Ulysses
Hunger manifests itself in many ways in Ulysses. The most obvious pertain overtly
to the need for food; however, it is necessary to point out another evident desire. In “The
Dead,” Furey dies from unrequited love, and Gabriel and Gretta long for loves they never
will know. In Ulysses, characters hunger for sex. One example occurs in the evening of
Bloom’s day, during the “Nausicaa” episode. Leopold sits on Sandymount Strand and
masturbates while a similarly starved Gerty McDowell flashes her thighs and underwear
for him. Perhaps the most renowned example appears in “Penelope,” the novel’s final
episode. Molly lies abed, alone, and recalls a day that included an adulterous rendezvous
in that same boudoir. She rambles in an unspeaking unconscious that, freed from
punctuation or any of the normal appurtenances of reading, serves as a lure into her
powerfully libidinal world. At novel’s end Molly is full:
…and how he kissed under the Moorish wall and I though well as well him as
another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me
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would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him
yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his
heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes. (783)
Significantly, Bloom and Molly’s kiss involves a transfer of seed. They eat seedcake
immediately prior to the kiss and transfer it mouth to mouth. The two hungers are thus
connected. Molly’s surfeit counsels a turn away from the boudoir and toward
consideration of three episodes key to the present analysis of Ulysses. Famine-related
themes in the first two, “Hades” and “Lestrygonians,” will aid definition of “homo sacer
in Hibernia,” the pivotal phenomenon considered in this chapter. In turn the third episode,
“Cyclops,” offers insights into the question of sovereign power, and its relation to
racialization processes on both sides of the Green Atlantic.
Homo Sacer in “Hades”
Ulysses’s “Hades” episode derives from Book 11 of The Odyssey, in which the
hero descends into the ancient Greek world of the dead. Leopold Bloom rides with
Martin Cunningham, Simon Dedalus, and Jack Power in a carriage bound for the burial
of Paddy Dignam in Glasnevin Cemetery. (See Gifford, Ulysses 104) Simon Dedalus,
(the name is almost an anagram of dead us,) is modeled on the author’s father;
Cunningham and Power, on two friends of that father, whom we encountered earlier in
“Grace.” Cunningham serves as chief clerk in the crown solicitor’s office; Power with the
Royal Irish Constabulary. Both are “Castle” men. Their presence in Joyce’s work once
again indicates the deep imbrication of biopolitical administration in everyday life of
Dublin. The extent of that imbrication is insinuated throughout the text.
69
Along the road the carriage men meet one Reuben J. Dodd. “Of the tribe of
Reuben,” remarks Cunningham (93), hinting at an anti-Semitism that will become patent
in the “Cyclops” episode. Far more present than racism in “Hades” is, of course, death,
and Dodd’s presence help make the punning link between debt and death. The subject
returns to Paddy Dignam.
Mr Power gazed at the passing houses with rueful appreciation.
––He had a sudden death, poor fellow.
––The best death, Mr Bloom said.
Their wide open eyes looked at him.
––No suffering, he said. A moment and all is over. Like dying in sleep.
No-one spoke.
Dead side of street this. Dull business by day, land agents… (95)
As the narrative thus moves from sudden death, to the dead side of the street, it is
surely no coincidence that “land agents” heads Bloom’s list of passing offices. Land
agents are a reminder of slow, and painful death. The term signifies the despised
nineteenth-century middlemen who acted on behalf of absentee English landlords. Land
agents were responsible for collecting rents, evicting starving families, demolishing
homes, and in some cases, arranging assisted passage to America for tenants. They were
displaced as a class through as series of land reforms, climaxing in 1903, one year before
Bloom passes these particular offices. (Gifford, Ulysses 110) The irony then is that these
particular land agents offices were more than likely dead too.
While a child’s funeral provokes painful reminders of the infant death of Bloom’s
son Rudy and of the suicide of Bloom’s father, (95-96; 96-97) Cunningham’s tale of a
capsized coffin as “the corpse fell about the road,” evokes Famine images of whole
families dying by the side of the road. Also perhaps the hinged bottoms of famine coffins
70
designed to be reused for further corpses. Bloom’s thoughts turn quickly to the
decomposition of bodies. (98) A passing scene of alleged fratricide inspires meditation on
killing. “Murder will out,” Bloom thinks to himself (100). A little later he muses: “The
Irishman’s house is his coffin. … Shame of death. They hide. … The death struggle”
(110). Here is a possible reference to the Irish cabins that were demolished on top of the
Famine dead within when it became impossible to bury all the dead.
24
As the funeral cortège proceeds, one more memory of the Famine presents itself:
A divided drove of branded cattle passed the windows, lowing, slouching by on
padded hoofs, whisking their tails slowly on their clotted bony croups. Outside
them and through them ran raddled sheep bleating their fear.
––Emigrants, Mr Power said. (97)
The cattle and sheep are on their way to slaughter across the Irish Sea. “Roast beef for old
England,” thinks Bloom (ibid.). Joyce thus recalls the fact that despite the Famine,
Trevelyan and other British government officials permitted the export of great amounts of
food from Ireland to England. Power’s linking of these livestock to Famine emigrants
also underlines a deadly consequence of the catastrophe. “Emigration, coming in the
wake of the Famine, is, as it were, a second death,” Lloyd explains, “a more gradual but
no less inexorable destruction of culture and social relations” (Irish Times 67). The
slaughter-bound herds, death-bound subjects,
25
thus appear as bare lives.
Furthermore, as Marx points out, Irish emigration allowed the development of more
grazing and land: the intense crop cultivation of pre-Famine Ireland gives way to an
increase in livestock farming, while Irish exports tended to be raw materials, live cattle,
sheep, pigs and other livestock, in other words material that did not require labor-
intensive production processes, and thus underdeveloping Irish agricultural based
71
industry. These particular “emigrants” above, are off to be finally fattened and
slaughtered/processed in England. Hence the export of cattle is intimately linked to the
emigration of “unemployable” Irish workers. (Capital Vol. 1: 854-70) The cattle and
sheep are the counterparts of the people whom they have displaced.
At the cemetery, Bloom observes the portly and prosperous caretaker, John
O’Connell, at home among his gravestones. “Quietly sure of his ground,” writes Joyce of
O’Connell, “he traversed the dismal fields” (111). The sentence constitutes perhaps the
cleverest of the several allusions to An Gorta Mór in this episode. Its ten words
encompass references to Malthus, and Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), to racism and
population control, to the Famine dead, and to those made prosperous by their deaths.
Carlyle coined the term “dismal science” as a reference to economics; in particular, to the
theories of John Stuart Mill.
26
The phrase first surfaced in Carlyle’s infamous 1849
essay, “An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” soon renamed “An Occasional
Discourse on the Nigger Question.” Writing at a time when the Great Hunger was at its
height, Carlyle both extols the virtues of slavery in the West Indies and associates Black
emancipation with the devastating consequences of the Irish Famine:
To have ‘emancipated’ the West Indies into a black Ireland – ‘free,’ indeed, but an
Ireland, and black! The world may yet see prodigies, and reality be stranger than a
nightmare dream. Our own white or sallow Ireland, sluttishly starving from age to
age on its act-of parliament ‘freedom,’ was hitherto the flower of mismanagement
among the nations: but what will this be to a new Negro Ireland, with pumpkins
themselves fallen scarce like potatoes! (Carlyle and Mill 7-8)
Carlyle’s “dismal science” critique of Mill quickly transmogrified in the public
imagination into a critique of dreary economics in general, and of Malthus, the dreariest
of all economists, in particular.
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Embracing a tradition by which British sovereign power linked “the economy”
to morality is Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population. In this amalgam of
evangelical and conservative thought, Malthus advocates Providence as the sole solution
to capitalist society’s inevitable problems. He campaigned against the Poor Laws and the
notorious workhouses supposed to alleviate the suffering of the destitute – but he did so
for all the wrong reasons. Poor laws “may have alleviated a little the intensity of
individual misfortune,” Malthus wrote, but “they spread the general evil over a much
larger surface” (Malthus 94). He argued for abolition of such laws on the grounds that
welfare tends to “increase population without increasing the food for its support,” and,
furthermore, “the quantity of provisions consumed in workhouses upon the part of the
society that cannot in general be considered as the most valuable part diminishes the
share that would otherwise belong to more industrious and more worthy members. …”
(97). As a preferred alternative the reverend gentleman pointed to starvation, which,
along with “hard labour and unwholesome habitations, must operate as a constant check
to incipient population” (103).
Buck-Morss traces to Malthus “the whole notion of the economy as a self-
regulating sphere of material life that can be considered as separate from political
practice” (vii:iv). For it was Malthus who proclaimed that scarcity “provided natural
restraints, keeping the ‘economy’ in balance by its own internal bio-mechanism” (ibid.).
Malthus’ separation of “material life from the political realm, the encapsulation of
political economy as a science, indeed, an ontological first principle,” she argues further,
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“was the source of a second forgetting, this time of the nomic origins of the economy”
(vii:v).
Time and time again, Ireland proves the undoing of Malthusian theory. Lloyd
points out this major flaw in his argument:
We may say that the problem of Ireland was paradoxically not scarcity, but
abundance: abundance of population and abundance of the means to support that
population, an abundance notoriously supplied by the potato. It is the specter of
abundance, rather than distress, that haunts political economy and makes Irish
conditions a scandal in theory and a nightmare for practical policy. In that sense,
the event of the Famine is a godsend not only to the administrator but to the
theorists too… (“Political Economy” 316; original emphasis)
Malthusian views had to veer more towards moral grounds rather than economic
ones, otherwise his theories collapse. Therefore he combined divine authority and state
authority as one, just as the Reformation had confirmed, and affirmed that famine,
pestilence, and poverty were God-sent blessings rather than problems needing solution––
indeed, famine and pestilence were the solution: God’s way of limiting population. This
deadly mixture of providentialism and economics provided Nomos Britannicus with “a
moralistic reading of the Irish crisis … Consequently, the famine was welcomed as a
God-given opportunity to enforce policy that would transform Irish behavior” (Gray,
“Ideology” 92-93). Malthus’s views of the biopolitical management of life and death
became central to the operations of Nomos Britannicus in Ireland.
When Joyce writes “of dismal fields” he makes reference not only to the field on
which lies Glasnevin Cemetery, but also perhaps, to the field of economics and to
Malthusian theories of population control in particular. To similar effect, population
control features prominently in Bloom’s thoughts in “Hades”: “Funerals all over the
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world every minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands
every hour. Too many in the world” (101). Ghosts are everywhere. There is the ghost of
Charles Stuart Parnell, Joyce’s fallen hero, as well as that of the newly departed Paddy
Dignam. The dead commune with the living in sadness. “Faithful departed,” thinks
Bloom. “As you are now, so once were we” (113). But Bloom also thinks: “I will appear
to you after death. You will see my ghost after death. My ghost will haunt you after
death. There is another world after death named hell” (115). The latter thoughts display
anger, doubtless stoked by memories of the deadly disease and mass burials that
accompanied the Famine. To similar effect: “Time of the plague. Quicklime fever pits to
eat them. Lethal chamber. Ashes to ashes” (114). This is a possible reference to the
quicklime pits in which Famine victims were sometimes buried to speed up the
decomposition process, especially in the face of disease such as cholera or typhoid. It is
estimated that three quarters of the roughly one million Famine Irish who died between
1845 and 1850, succumbed to such diseases rather than to actual starvation. (Carroll 132)
By these emotions, coupled with the Famine references, “Hades” forces reflection
upon the catastrophic consequences of the “bare life” status of the Irish during An Gorta
Mór. For when the ghosts appear in Ulysses, hunger is never far behind. Bloom thinks:
“In the midst of death we are life. Both ends meet. Tantalizing for the poor dead. Smell of
frilled beefsteaks to the starving gnawing at their vitals. … It’s the blood sinking into the
earth gives new life. … I daresay the soil would be quite fat with corpse manure, bones,
flesh, nails, charnelhouses. Dreadful. Turning green and pink, decomposing. Rot quick in
damp earth” (108). Lethal fertilizer has made people like O’Connell portly and
75
prosperous, and “quietly sure of his ground.” By the logic of Nomos Britannicus,
however, the Famine dead cannot be sacrificed. As Agamben states, the homo sacer
belongs to God. Labeled “disposable populations” by Malthus, the Famine Irish had no
legal rights. In the view of Malthus and his ilk their suffering – mass evictions from their
homes, deaths from starvation and disease – was God’s work.
27
They suffered what
Zygmunt Baumann calls “moral eviction” before they suffered actual eviction.
28
Lestrygonian Soup
Scenes of mass suffering pervade the “Lestrygonian” episode, which transpires two
hours after Bloom’s sojourn in the cemetery. The title comes from Book 10 of The
Odyssey, in which the hero’s fleet encounters an island tribe. A tribal girl lures the
scouting party to the home of her father, King Antiphanes. Odysseus’s men discover to
their horror that the Lestrygonians are cannibalistic giants. A terrifying chase ensues, and
only Odysseus and the crew of his ship escape slaughter. In the Gilbert schema,
29
King
Antiphanes represents hunger; his daughter, food; other Lestrygonians, teeth.
The opening of Ulysses’s “Lestrygonians” finds Leopold Bloom in the commercial
belly of Dublin. He walks first along the street then known as Sackville, now O’Connell;
later, he proceeds to the area immediately east of busy Grafton Street. As they did in
“Hades,” metaphors of hunger, food consumption, and population control dominate
metaphors in “Lestrygonians.” To cite one example, Bloom muses: “Increase and
multiply. Did you ever hear such an idea? Eat you out of house and home” (151). Later,
while feeding a flock of gulls, he thinks: “One born every second somewhere. Others
76
dying every second. Since I fed the birds five minutes. Three hundred kicked the bucket.
Other three hundred born…” (164). Bloom sees hunger everywhere, among the living as
well as the dead. He’s also obsessed with statistics in both chapters—the foundation in
population measurement of biopower. Even as the gulls that Joyce calls “famished”
scavenge for “grub,” children wither in full view. The sight of Simon Dedalus’s daughter
waiting outside Dillon’s auction house prompts Bloom to think: “Good Lord, the poor
child’s dress is in flitters. Underfed she looks too. Potatoes and marge, marge and
potatoes” (152). Near a confectionery he observes: “A barefoot arab stood over the
grating, breathing in the fumes. Deaden the gnaw of hunger that way” (157). Bloom
himself is overcome: “With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore,”
revealing the conjunction of hunger and desire (168). Cravings lead Bloom to partake of
one of Ulysses’s most memorable scenes, a scene of unremittant gluttony:
His heart astir he pushed in the door of the Burton restaurant. Stink gripped his
trembling breath: pungent meatjuice, slop of greens. See the animals feed.
Men, men, men.
Perched on high stools by the bar, hats shoved back, at the tables calling for more
bread no charge, swilling, wolfing gobfuls of sloppy food, their eyes bulging,
wiping wetted moustaches. (169)
The frenzied consumption of food repulses Bloom. He backs towards the door trying to
make sense of the spectacle before him:
I hate dirty eaters. … Every fellow for his own, tooth and nail. Gulp. Grub. Gulp.
Gobstuff.
He came into the cleaner air and turned back towards Grafton street. Eat or be
eaten. Kill! Kill! ... (170)
77
The scene brings us to the core theme of Lestrygonians, the emergence of the “civilizing”
discourse in the post-Famine Ireland in the face of a stubborn “savagery.” Here indeed
reside the Lestrygonians, the savage Irish, in need of proper manners. As noted earlier,
discourse centered on “improvement” is central to administration of the colonial power.
British officials continually emphasized the need to instill table manners to “improve”
Irish moral standards. One of the ways in which the British colonial administration tried
to “teach the Irish manners” was literally by teaching them first to their Irish civil
servants with the idea that they then could lead by example. The police, for example,
were urged to discard ‘slovenly and irregular’ habits. As well as instilling strict
discipline, the police hierarchy tried to instill good manners in the lower ranks. A visitor
to Dublin’s Kevin Street RIC barracks observed that recruits were “ not only learning to
eat a good meal, but how to eat it in clean clothes, with a clean knife and fork, off a clean
tablecloth; in short they undergoing the agreeable process of being introduced to a new
system of life, in which they were not only to display good behavior, but … to be the
cause of good behavior in others” (Qtd. in P. Carroll 86-87).
Having avoided the Lestrygonian trap, Bloom sets out for the relative safety of
“Davy Byrnes, Moral Pub.” On his short journey there, more possible Famine references
surface. His stream of consciousness gushes “communal kitchens years to come perhaps.
All trotting down with porringers and tommycans to be filled. Devour contents in the
street. … north Dublin union…” (170). The North Dublin Union
30
was one of the 130
administrative units known as “unions,” set up following the extension of the Poor Law
to Ireland in 1838. It may also look forward to the soup kitchens set up during the 1913
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lockout. Unions were the interfaces between British biopower and Irish bare life, the
frontline in the biopolitical management of life. Supposedly modeled on the English Poor
Law enacted to alleviate pauperism, the Irish version differed significantly. Kinealy
writes: “Ireland provided a blank page in terms of poor relief, upon which the
government could impose policies that would have proved unacceptable in England”
(Calamity 23). Because poverty and pauperism was much more extensive in Ireland, “it
was felt that only a stringent application of a draconian law would keep the problem
under control” (ibid.). Unlike in England, no provision was made for outdoor relief, all
had to take place within the confines of a workhouse; unlike the English, the Irish had no
right to relief; if a workhouse was full, the government had no legal obligation to provide
alternative help.
The Irish Poor Law was passed to help prevent England from being overrun by
Irish paupers. Like most of the lrish-related laws ferried through in Westminister, it was
seen also as a means of turning Ireland into a more “productive” society. Significantly
though, the Act stipulated that Poor Law had to be financed through a new local tax
known as poor rates. This stipulation had disastrous consequences when the Famine
struck seven years after the Act’s passage. The areas most devastated by the Famine were
also the poorest, but despite this, were expected to carry the financial burden of all local
devastation on their own meager and dwindling resources. “By making the tax burden a
local charge,” writes Kinealy, “it was hoped to encourage the landlords to either take a
greater interest in the management of their estates or sell them to people who would.
Local involvement was also an important aspect of political economy” (24). When the
79
Famine struck it was local unions, like the North Dublin Union, that ran the infamous
workhouses, and administered British biopower at the ground level. It was governed by
the Poor Law Commission, which ran both the Irish and the English relief systems,
working through intermediaries in the Home Office in London, and the Executive in
Dublin Castle. “During the Famine, however, the roles played by officials in Dublin
Castle, the Home Office, the Poor Law Commission and all other relief agencies were
minimized, as the Treasury became the primary agent of the government” (24). The
Treasury was the domain of Charles Trevelyan, leading disciple of political economy.
In the same paragraph Bloom muses, “All for number one. Children fighting for the
scrapings of the pot. Want a soup pot as big as Phoenix Park” (170). In 1847, when the
demand for relief overwhelmed the unions, the British announced a major change in
policy; among the provisions of the Temporary Relief Act (1847) was the establishment
of outdoor relief in the form of what quickly became known as “soup kitchens.” By July
of that year, in a single day, over three million people received rations from these
kitchens. (150) We shall return to soup kitchens shortly. Bloom, meanwhile, having just
left carnivore hell, ponders the slaughter of cattle and the butchering of sheep, and then,
just before he enters Davy Byrnes, is confronted by ghosts. In Book 11 of the Odyssey,
bloodthirsty ghosts confront Ulysses: Bloom’s ghosts are (like himself at this point,)
“Famished.” (171).
In Nomos Britannicus the weak perish and the state endures through repressive
apparatuses emanating from Dublin Castle. By this point in “Lestrygonians” Bloom
already has looked upon these repressive state forces with scorn:
80
A squad of constables debauched from College street, marching in Indian file.
Goose step. Foodheated faces, sweating helmets, patting their truncheons. After
their feed with a good load of fat soup under their belts. Policeman’s lot is oft a
happy one. They split into groups and scattered, saluting towards their beats. Let
out to graze. Best moment to attack one in pudding time. A punch in his dinner. A
squad of others, marching irregularly, rounded Trinity railings, making for the
station. Bound for their troughs. Prepare to receive cavalry. Prepare to receive
soup. (162)
Here Joyce presents an unflattering account of police “table manners,” the British
civilizing process seemingly having limited success with these constables. He appears to
situate Bloom in the midst of a police state; moreover, the reference to “Indian file”
pinpoints it as colonial police state. The scene prods memory of a riot outside of Trinity
College, then the intellectual center of Nomos Britannicus in Ireland. This, in turn, leads
to musing about informers for Dublin Castle’s secret service. The inhabitants of the
Castle, like the police who protected it, were, unlike the ghosts of Ulysses, well fed.
Deserving special note is Joyce’s invocation of “soup,” in this passage and
elsewhere in the text, for it pertains directly to the Famine. In the land of the “harp that
once did starve us all” (168), some evangelical Christian organizations offered the
Famine Irish soup in exchange for conversion to Protestantism, and those who converted
were said to have “taken the soup,” a phrase still in use today in Ireland to indicate a
person who has sold out his or her principles. The well-fed Irish police officers whom
Bloom observes, have taken the soup of British colonial power. Towards the end of
“Lestrygonians” Joyce returns to the subject:
Mr Bloom turned at Gray’s confectioner’s window of unbought tarts and passed
the reverend Thomas Connellan’s bookstore. Why I left the church of Rome?
Bird’s Nest. Women run him. They say they used to give pauper children soup to
change to protestants in the time of the potato blight. (180; emphasis in original)
81
Connellan’s in Dawson Street specialized in evangelical Protestant propaganda.
Why I left the Church, was an actual pamphlet by a former Catholic Canadian. Bird’s
Nest refers to a Protestant women’s missionary organization. (Gifford, Ulysses 186) All
of the above were associated with Famine soup kitchens, one way or another. Soup
kitchens and other forms of “outdoor relief” were not only designed to prevent the
famished from overwhelming the workhouses in Ireland, or for that matter, crossing over
to England to overwhelm the workhouses there, but also they served in principle as a way
to wean the childish Irish from potatoes to the more “civilized” grain-based food.
Nutritional science and government population management united as various British
food experts debated the relative merits of cooked versus uncooked foods. The colonial
state insisted in carefully outlining the procedures and monitoring the results of the soup
kitchen program. They articulated strict rules regarding the contents of the soup, and
stipulated how it was to be served. “Soup was to be made according to one of the various
prescribed recipes and was to be accompanied by either one and a half pounds of bread,
or one pound of biscuit, flour, grain, or meal. If the soup had been thickened by grain,
only a quarter ration of these was provided” (Kinealy, Calamity 148).
As Foucault maintains in “The Politics of Health,” the medical industry and the
political economy of bodies in the eighteenth century involved a “double-sided process”
that combined private practice and the government intervention. The containment of
disease quickly evolved into a political and economic issue that required a police-
enforced maintenance of hygiene standards. He writes, “the problem of sickness among
the poor is identified in its economic specificity, the health and physical well-being of
82
populations comes to figure as a political objective which the ‘police’ of the social body
must ensure along with those of economic resolution and the needs of order” (Foucault
Reader 278). From this arose the “medical police.”
Building on Foucault’s insights, Patrick Carroll investigates the “medical police”
who operated on behalf of the state throughout the nineteenth century Ireland. Whether in
hospitals, clinics, workhouses, schools, or other government-run institutions, or
associated with the nutritional science mentioned above, British colonial medical police
monitored, studied, charted, and tried to contain disease in their Irish laboratory. The new
workhouses established under the Irish Poor Law Act of 1838, “were meant from the start
to form part of the medical police system” (Carroll, Science 135-36). Medical officers
attached to each workhouse were empowered to “inspect and examine” government-
funded hospitals. The medical police, through as series of Westminister laws, became the
police of the poor. (136, 137) Since around three quarters of the estimated one million
Famine victims died not of starvation precisely but to disease, the catastrophe propelled
them even further into the politico-legal structure of the colonial state. (132)
Sea-Divided Gael
Among the many vestiges of the Great Hunger is language. Having unearthed the
significance of the fact that the Irish language was one of the casualties of the Famine,
Whelan adds that for the Irish of Gabriel Conroy’s generation and all generations to
follow, “[t]he trauma was to be increasingly remembered in a different language to the
one in which it was experientially endured” (87). Whelan’s insight into what he calls a
83
“linguistic transition” – albeit “linguistic rupture” appears more apt –has a transnational
dimension also. Just as most Irish at home found themselves in an English-speaking
Ireland after the Famine, Irish emigrants found that transition to full American citizenship
required abandonment of Irish language. Kirby Miller estimates that perhaps as many as
one third of the Famine Irish who emigrated to North America––around half a million
people––were Irish speakers. (Emigrants 297) American nativist demands created a
cultural vortex that sapped the Irish of memories of the Famine – and of possibilities for
empathy with other groups, to which America ascribed “bare life” or homo sacer status. I
will return to this point later in the dissertation. At this juncture, I wish to treat one of the
sites at which Joyce displays awareness of this rupture and how it relates to not only to
language, but also to citizenship and nationality. The site is the Ulysses’s “Cyclops”
episode.
The model for this episode is Book 9 of The Odyssey, in which the hero escapes
from the land of the one-eyed Cyclopes. In Ulysses Joyce sketches a character who
corresponds to the Cyclopean King Polyphemus, (“very famous”) naming him with
characteristic irony, “the citizen.” Based on Michael Cusack, founder of the Gaelic
Athletic Association, this citizen appears at first glance, narrow-minded and racist. This
is indeed, the commonly held view of many Joycean critics. But as Nolan has shown, the
citizen is much more complicated than that. She identifies “presuppositions which
prejudge criticism of the citizen’s discourse” (James Joyce 118). She frames the citizen
more within Joyce’s parodic intent in this chapter.
The citizen is obsessed with the
survival of the Irish language – in his soaring words, “the winged speech of the sea-
84
divided Gael” (Ulysses 324). It is an obsession matched only by his rampant xenophobia.
Like American nativists, the citizen sees immigrants – Jews in particular – as contagion:
––Those are nice things, says the citizen, coming over here to Ireland filling the
country with bugs. …
––Swindling the peasants, says the citizen, and the poor of Ireland. We want no
more strangers in our house. (323)
As we shall see in Chapter 4, a similar transposition occurs with Denis Kearney and
the Chinese––while capitalists are responsible for the exploitation of white labor, the
Chinese get the blame. Here, the “strangers” should be the colonists, but become the
Jews. The debt-collector who narrates “Cyclops” repeatedly ridicules Bloom in anti-
Semitic terms, exposing one of great ironies of the chapter––one that surfaces in Hades
with the character Reuben J. Dodd, among other places––the racist myth of the Jew as
usurer/accumulator of debts, despite the pervasiveness of Irish debt and debt-collectors
throughout the text. Several other characters likewise lodge racist remarks, and Bloom is
painfully aware of all of them. Through such pervasiveness Joyce proclaims that racism
is not a trait the Irish acquired only upon arrival in the United States. Rather, Irish people
in Ireland, among them the characters in “Cyclops” and Bloom’s companions in the
funeral carriage to Glasnevin, mimic their colonizer’s racist attitudes with aplomb.
Perversely, the citizen and his cohort excoriate the English by exaggerating Ireland’s
natural assets, its history, and with pride they point to Ireland’s imperial potential. In the
words of Terrence Killen, “the citizen posits against the hated British empire a notional
Irish empire that sounds very like the one it is supposed to supplant…” (139).
85
When the subject turns to the Famine, the citizen asks: “Where are our missing
twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of four, our lost tribes?” (326). In
doing so he is actually citing Malthus’s own projection for the Irish population. He had
estimated before the Famine struck, that if it continued to unhindered, the Irish
population would reach twenty million. (Lloyd, “Political Economy” 316)
Notwithstanding the citizen’s bombast, he clearly gives voice to the author’s own views
on the subject. In “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages,” Joyce wrote, “Ireland is poor
because English laws destroyed the industries of the country … because in the years in
which the potato crop failed, the negligence of the English government left the flower of
the people to die of hunger” (Occasional 119).
Meanwhile, the citizen of Ulysses roars at Bloom: “We’ll put force against force.
We have our greater Ireland beyond the sea,” then adds: “They were driven out of house
and home in black 47. Their mudcabins and their shielings by the roadside were laid low
by the batteringram and the Times rubbed its hands and told the whitelivered Saxons
there would soon be as few Irish in Ireland as redskins in America” (329). As we have
already seen, advocates of the annihilation of the Irish abounded within the British
establishment during the Famine. Their relegation of the Famine victims to bare life
status piqued anger. The Times did in fact crow in celebration of the mass destruction of
Irish life. These are not exaggerations: they are true.
“But the Sassenach tried to starve the nation at home,” the citizen bawls, “while
the land full of crops that the British hyenas bought and sold in Rio de Janeiro. As they
drove out the peasants in hordes. Twenty thousand of them died in the coffinships. But
86
those that came to the land of the free remember the land of bondage. And they will come
again and with a vengeance, no cravens, the sons of Granuaile, the champions of
Kathleen ni Houlihan” (330).
31
The subtext behind the citizen’s speech here (as well as
for Ulysses in general,) is the transnational Fenian movement that emerged following the
Famine. They are “our greater Ireland beyond the sea.” Members infiltrated the British
army and navy, and were essentially parasitic on the institutions of Empire, learning the
killing trade in anticipation of a victorious return to the homeland. As we will see later in
the chapter, the Fenians also joined the US Army in large numbers and following the
Civil War, organized themselves into regiments and attacked (rather unsuccessfully)
British positions in Canada. The Fenians aimed to mobilize the diaspora for Ireland’s
cause.
Irish American memory is selective, of course. Irish bondage under British
colonial rule in Ireland is remembered. Forgotten, ignored or applauded are Native
American genocide, Chinese indentured servitude, and African American slavery “in the
land of the free.” This absence of memory owes much to self-interest, but for some as
well to the emotional rupture required by the process of Americanization. This process
demands the sacrificing of a future in the land of one’s birth, and the permanent
separation from family and friends. It is, as noted earlier, another form of death necessary
for a full and equal membership of the US racial state, with all its attendant feelings of
racial entitlement.
The “Cyclops” episode is of particular interest, since it speaks directly to issues of
sovereign power. We can see this exemplified in the following two incidents, both of
87
which have transatlantic links. In the first reference the narrator, while complaining about
Terry the barman’s penchant for reading the newspaper while ignoring thirsty customers,
makes note of a headline that Terry is reading: “Black Beast Burned in Omaha Ga.”
32
Of this news item respecting an incident in the American South, the narrator
ponders: “A lot of Deadwood Dicks in slouch hats and they firing at a sambo strung up
on a tree with his tongue out and a bonfire under him. Gob, they ought to drown him in
the sea after and electrocute and crucify him to make sure of the job” (328). Even as the
narrator condemns the Omaha lynch mob for its literal overkill, he shows little
compassion for the victim, whom he calls by the derogatory word “sambo.” The incident
offers a counter-point to an earlier discussion of Rumbold, the English hangman recently
arrived in Dublin to ply his trade. In a reversal of the “civilizing” discourse, the “citizen”
says of Rumbold: “And a barbarous bloody barbarian he is too…” (303). Their discussion
of capital punishment, when contrasted with the lynching of an African American,
implicitly refers to questions of sovereign power over life and its relation to race, as well
as to questions of inclusion/exclusion that are essential to emerging biological definitions
of racial nationality. The two incidents occur in two different moments of state formation:
the English hangman is a state functionary, while the lynch mobs are not, but, as “private
bodies,” they do the work of the racial state nonetheless. In their discussion of race the
assembled crew show some awareness of two state forms—lynching being the
synecdochical counterpart to public hanging, just as the “sambo” and the Zulu chief also
expresses alternative nomoi—the imperial versus the racial state.
88
This racial subtext is present also in an incident near the end of the episode. Just
before the citizen flings a biscuit tin at the retreating Bloom, Joyce writes: “And a loafer
with a patch over his eye starts singing, If the man in the moon were a jew, jew,
jew…(342). According to Gifford this line adapts the title of a popular 1906 song, “If the
Man in the Moon were a Coon,” written by the Tin Pan Alley songwriter Fred Fisher
(378). That is only half the story – and not only because a character in “Hades,” John
Henry Menton, had likened Bloom to a “coon,” a slur typically reserved forAfricans, and
African Americans alike. (Ulysses 106) Fisher was himself a German Jew who
immigrated to the United States in 1900. His song became so popular that it sold three
million copies, on both sides of the Atlantic. Among those who sang it were the Nichols
Sisters, who performed in blackface.
33
These evocations by characters situated in Dublin
of a racist American song and a racist American crime emphasize the transatlantic and
multiethnic contours of racism.
Race, citizenship, and nation also feature in the following passage from “Cyclops”:
–Persecution, says he, all the history of the world is full of it. Perpetuating
national hatred among nations.
––But do you know what a nation means? Says John Wyse.
––A nation? Says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place.
––By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the
same place for the past five years.
So of course everyone had a laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck out of it:
––Or also living in different places.
––That covers my case, says Joe.
––What is your nation if I may ask, says the citizen.
––Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland. (331)
The colloquy recalls the Irish soldier Macmorris in Shakespeare’s Henry V, who asks:
“Of my nation! What ish my nation? Ish a villain, and a bastard, and a knave, and a
89
rascal. What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation?” ( III:ii) Here is another confused
Irishman working on behalf of the British Crown, like many of the patrons of Barney
Kiernan’s Pub. It further registers both Bloom’s confusion over the nature of the nation-
state and the citizen’s view that even though Bloom is Irish-born, as a Jew he cannot be a
real Irish citizen.
34
Bloom recovers his composure with clarity, replying to the citizen:
––And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted. Also now.
This very moment. This very instant. (332)
Once again, biopower in linked to the state and is manifested in notions of racial
belonging and citizenship.
Underscoring Bloom’s point is the following passage resonant
with the way the sexuality of Chinese men was ridiculed by Irish people in nineteenth-
century California – treatment explored later in this dissertation.
35
Having challenging
his nationhood, the citizen and his cronies next question Bloom’s manhood:
––Do you call that a man? says the citizen.
––I wonder did he ever put it out of sight, says Joe.
––Well there are two children born anyhow, says Jack Power.
––And who does he suspect? says the citizen. (338)
The narrator says to himself: “Gob, there’s many a true word spoken in jest. One of those
mixed middlings he is. … It would be an act of God to take hold of a fellow the like of
that and throw him in the bloody sea. Justifiable homicide so it would” (ibid.). This is
precisely how Agamben describes the fate of homo sacer. So ends the scene in Barney
Kiernan’s pub, stone’s throw from Dublin Castle, and frequented by those Irish servants
awaiting their chance to inherit the Irish biopolitical state from their colonial masters.
* * *
90
“People talk about you a bit; forget you,” Leopold Bloom mutters to himself while
standing in Glasnevin Cemetery (Ulysses 111). Consideration of Ulysses and “The Dead”
give the lie to Bloom’s thought: James Joyce, at least, has not forgotten the unnamed
Irish who lie in paupers’ plots in Ireland and along America’s coast, or who were cast
overboard from transatlantic coffin ships. A theme of presence/absence, east/west, and, of
course, feast/famine, constructs fictions that also constitute historical analysis. Joyce
fixes attention on Ireland, often more effectively than historiography has done.
His gaze illuminates what the Irish endured in the past, and so eases understanding
of how the Irish fared after the Great Famine. Ulysses and “The Dead” not only divine
the political, cultural, and psychological implications of Nomos Britannicus, and the
biopolitical management of life, but also document the ghosts of homo sacer in Hibernia,
whose absent presence haunts the country. Joyce insists that the Irish did not acquire
intolerance or xenophobia solely after sailing the Green Atlantic. He is very aware of the
“sea-divided Gael” and the transatlantic implications of that—as he is aware of Irish
folks’ awareness of the emigrants. The loss of family and friends to emigration is a daily
fact of life. He is also aware of the two different state forms, the US racial state, and the
British imperial (and equally racist) state, between which the Irish traveled in the
nineteenth century. The remainder of the dissertation follows the Irish across the Atlantic,
then across the Great Plains to California, and back over the Atlantic to Joyce’s Dublin
once more. However, before the Irish journey can put in its appropriate context, we must
examine first the Black Atlantic encounter with the Green.
91
CHAPTER TWO ENDNOTES
1
Sections of this chapter, particularly those concerned with Agamben, Schmitt, and
Buck-Morss, and the concepts of nomos, “sovereign power,” and homo sacer, will be
included in my essay entitled “The Racial State and the Transatlantic Irish,” a chapter in
the collection Transnational American Studies, edited by Fluck, Pease and Rowe, to be
published by Universities Presses of New England in 2011.
2
These were published in English in 2007 under the title, Security, Territory, Population.
3
In his classic essay, “Politics as a Vocation,” published four years prior to Schmitt’s
Political Theology, Weber writes “that the state is that human community which within a
defined territory successfully claims for itself the monopoly of legitimate physical force;
and ‘territory it should be noted is a characteristic of the state” (Essential Weber 131;
original emphasis). A little further on he argues: “The state…is an instrument of
legitimate violence (or rather, is seen as legitimate) supporting the relationship of
domination (Herrenschaft) of human being over human being. For a state to exist, it has
to force those who are ruled to comply with the claimed authority of those actually
ruling” (132). These essential elements of the Weberian concept of the state––violence,
coercion, and territoriality–– are encompassed in Schmitt’s nomos. But perhaps more
surprisingly, given their diametrically opposed political views, Benjamin appears as an
influence on Schmitt, and whose “Critique of Violence,” (Zur Kritik der Gewalt) was
published just one year before Political Theology. The essay title provides a telling pun:
the German word Gewalt means “force, or power of coercion,” or “sovereignty.”
Benjamin, like Schmitt, is concerned with sovereign power and its mythic origins, and
like Weber, he sees that “power…is what is guaranteed by all lawmaking violence”
(Reflections 295). He differs from the other two in his recognition of organized labor as
“apart from the state, probably today the only legal subject entitled to exercise violence”
(281). However, organized labor uses the force of numbers rather than force of arms
when it strikes or threatens to, and thus uses coercion non-violently. Hence it is read as
“violent” irrespective of the means it uses. Not surprisingly, this puts Benjamin much
closer to Foucault and his notion of “counter-conduct” than either of his contemporaries.
4
All Susan Buck-Morss quotes in the main text and below are from her unpublished
paper, “Sovereign Right and the Global Left,” presented at The Townsend Centre,
University of California Berkeley, on December 6th, 2006. All citations name the section
number first, followed by the paragraph number. I am grateful to Professor Buck-Morss
for permission to quote from her paper.
5
The other corollaries are: “The myth of nomos reveals that of the personified
intelligence of the state replacing that of the self-revealed Mother Earth” (229); “The
mythical personifications of nomos and Earth overemphasize state-centered power in a
manner that subordinates language and, indirectly, economics. Both language and
economics are weapons of the strong for Schmitt, who doesn’t anticipate that they can be,
92
at least sometimes, weapons of the weak” (231). He cites as an example, the Non-
Aligned Movement meeting in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955; His fourth corollary, perhaps
the most useful for our purposes states: “If the concept of nomos is something like a
metasovereignty, it is also accompanied by the postcolonial technology of sovereignty as
a weak shadow of nomos” (234).
6
An obvious attack on Hardt and Negri’s Empire here.
7
See Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race Vols. 1 & 2; Nicholas Canny,
“Ideology,” and Kingdom and Colony; and Clare Carroll, Circe’s Cup.
8
The term Irish language name, An Gorta Mór and its English translation, the Great
Hunger, together with the term, the Great Irish Famine, or simply, the Famine, will all be
used at various times to describe the same devastating famine that occurred in Ireland
between 1845 and 1852. Famine is capitalized in the text when it refers specifically to
this event.
9
See Poovey, Chapter 3.
10
I use Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of ‘reterritorialization’ and ‘deterritorialization’
in this dissertation.
11
This term was coined by Benjamin Disraeli in his novel, Young Duke (49).
12
Here is yet another American-Irish colonial connection here. This is the same
Cornwallis who surrendered on behalf of the British to George Washington at Yorktown,
thus ending the American War of Independence. He also served as Governor General of
India.
13
Larkin’s essay, “The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850-75,” appeared in the
American Historical Review, in June, 1972.
14
Se also Martin’s essay “Nationalism as Blasphemy.”
15
For a Fenian account of the McManus incident see Devoy, Ch. 3.
16
See Hasler, How the Pope Became Infallible. For a helpful review of Hasler, see Roger
O’Toole.
17
For the definitive investigation into Ireland’s devotional revolution see Larkin, The
Making of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, and also his essay “Before the
Devotional Revolution.”
93
18
See Nolan, Catholic Emancipations 160.
19
Cunningham is thinking of Cardinal Dollinger, who was excommunicated for refusing
to accept Papal Infallibility in 1871. (Gifford, Joyce 108.)
20
While McHale did oppose the doctrine, he did not speak against it for he was in Ireland
at the time of the debate. When it was accepted as dogma at the Vatican Council, he is
supposed to have accepted the decision with the words “so be it.” Thereafter he preached
papal infallibility as an obediate servant of the Church. (107-08).
21
For more on this story see Emer Nolan’s Catholic Emancipations, Ch. 5.
22
For insight into how Irish cultural nationalism at the turn of the century attempted to
pervert notions of native Irish “hospitality” for its own ends, see Lloyd, “Counterparts”
132-33).
23
Karl Marx, who rarely missed an opportunity to ridicule the man he called a plagiarist,
offers the following quote from Malthus: “Since the population threatens unceasingly to
exceed the available means of subsistence, benevolence is folly, an open encouragement
to misery. The state, therefore, can do nothing but leave misery to its fate, and at best,
facilitate the death of those in want” (Early Writings 408). Marx may, as Buck-Morss
says, have had “too much faith in the scientific objectivity” of economics; nonetheless, he
obliterated the Malthusian reading of the economy. Marx and his collaborator, Friedrich
Engels, seemed to speak to Malthus when they wrote in The Communist Manifesto: “The
selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of
reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of
property – historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production – this
misconception you share with every ruling class that preceded you”(100). This is also a
pertinent critique of Schmitt’s account of the origins of nomos, of course.
24
See para. 17 at: http://www.victorianweb.org/history/famine2.html Accessed 08/16/10.
25
I borrow the term from Abdul JanMohamed’s Death-Bound Subjects, albeit in a very
different context here.
26
For the Carlyle-Mill-Malthus issue, see Gavin Kennedy. For Carlyle and the Famine
Irish, see the “Indigent Sublime” chapter in Lloyd’s Irish Times.
27
For more on providentialism and the Famine see Peter Grey, Famine, Land and
Politics, and “Ideology and the Famine.”
28
See Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust.
94
29
Stuart Gilbert wrote James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” the first significant critical work on the
text, in 1930. Gilbert included a “schema” that Joyce supplied him, which listed the
various symbols, narrative techniques, and correspondences to Homer’s work, among
other things, contained in each episode. For more on the schema and the controversies
surrounding it, see Killen, vii-ix.
30
For specific study on the workings of the North Dublin Union during the Famine, see
Ó Grada, Ch. 5.
31
The 20,000 figure for deaths aboard coffins ships cannot be verified. However, as will
be discussed in Chapter Three, the number was brutally high. For a full explanation of
various names and events listed in this quote, see Gifford, Ulysses Annotated 359.
32
Joyce based this on a London Times report on an actual lynching that took place in
Omaha, Nebraska, and not in Georgia, as the newspaper reported. For further details, see
Gifford 357.
33
For an image of the song sheet cover complete with a photograph of the “blacked up”
Nichols sisters, go to:
http://www.thehackley.org/viewer/?nam=If+the+man+in+the+moon+were+a+coon&im1
=1&imN=8&img=0001&ext=.jpg&url=http://www.thehackley.org//dplhacsm/display/dpl
-hac-11739-, accessed November 29, 2009. For more on blackface and the Jews, see
Rogin.
34
For an account of racism in contemporary Ireland see Garner, Ch. 6.
35
See Joseph Valente’s essay “ ‘Neither Fish nor Flesh’; or How ‘Cyclops’ Stages the
Double Bind of Irish Manhood” for an excellent analysis of the relationship between
gender, sexuality, and race in the “Cyclops” episode. See also David Lloyd’s,
“Counterparts: Dubliners, Masculinity, and Temperance Nationalism.”
95
CHAPTER THREE
THE RACIAL STATE AND THE TRANSATLANTIC FAMINE IRISH
Bare Life in Cohasset
Arriving in Boston in October 1849 to catch a steamer to Cape Cod, Henry David
Thoreau encountered the Irish Famine. Stormy weather, he writes in “The Shipwreck,”
not only delayed his steamer, but also claimed the lives of 145 passengers of a “coffin
ship.” “The brig St. John, from Galway, Ireland, laden with emigrants,” Thoreau reports,
“was wrecked on Sunday morning” (6). He travels by train to Cohasset, the scene of the
disaster, in the company of “several hundred” concerned Irish people who hasten to the
shore on arrival. For them, passing of a freshly dug mass grave waiting to be filled
constitutes an eerie reminder of Famine scenes all across Ireland. Thoreau misses the
connection. Reaching the shore, he writes:
I saw many marble feet and matted heads…and one, livid, swollen and mangled
body of a drowned girl, –– who probably had intended to go out to service in
some America family, –– to which some rags still adhered, with a string, half
concealed by the flesh, about its swollen neck; the coiled up wreck of a human
hulk, gashed by the rocks or fishes, so that the bone and the muscle were exposed,
but quite bloodless, –– merely red and white, –– with wide-open and staring eyes,
yet lusterless, deadlights: or like cabin windows of a stranded vessel filled with
sand. (7)
Dead bodies crammed into “boxes” await removal from the beach. “Sometimes there
were two or more children, or a parent and child, in the same box, and on the lid would
perhaps be written with red chalk, ‘Bridget such-a-one, and sister’s child” (ibid.).
Seeming oblivious are Cohasset’s locals who, Thoreau observes, collect seaweed
regardless. “Drown who might, they did not forget that this weed was a valuable
96
manure”; indeed, “[t]his shipwreck had not produced a visible vibration in the fabric of
society” (9). One local had spoken of the wreck “as if he had a bet depending on it, but
had no humane interest in the matter” (11). Thoreau explains that enormity of the disaster
had deadened his feelings: “On the whole, it was not so impressive a scene as I might
have expected. If I had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely place, it
would have affected me more. I sympathized rather with the winds and waves, as if to
toss and mangle those poor human bodies was the order of the day. If this was the law of
Nature, why waste any time in awe and pity? ... It is the individual and private that
demands our sympathy” (13).
Although this précis cannot capture all the intricacy of “The Shipwreck,” it
exposes a number of points that demand consideration here. For Thoreau, the sheer scale
of the disaster lessens its impact upon him. Only death that is “private” and “individual”
provokes his sympathy; thus he managed to describe his discovery of the “drowned girl,”
she of the “wide-open and staring eyes,” with remarkable detachment. For the reader,
sympathy is stirred because the author has rendered the girl’s death “individual” – and,
contrary to his own claim, public. Yet the actual encounter with so many of the St. John
drowning victims left the author with what today might be called compassion fatigue. It
seems not unlike the “famine fatigue” that had developed in Britain during An Gorta
Mór. Or perhaps Thoreau’s reaction is symptomatic of something else – something closer
to home. I shall return to this in a moment.
On several occasions Thoreau portrays the local people as being emotionally
detached from their deadly surroundings. At other points he contradicts himself: “Yet I
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saw that the inhabitants of the shore would be not a little affected by this event. They
would watch there for many days and nights for the sea to give up its dead, and their
imaginations and sympathies would supply the place of mourners far away, who as yet
knew not of the wreck” (13). Thoreau admires these local people for their humane
empathy but makes clear his belief that they lack his philosophical depth. He alone can
comprehend sublime beauty when the sea coughs up a woman’s body. The dead woman
“had risen in an upright position, whose white cap is blown back with the wind. I saw
that the beauty of the shore itself was wrecked for many a lonely walker there, until he
could perceive at last, how its beauty was enhanced by wrecks like this, and it acquired
thus a rarer and sublimer beauty still” (13-14). Like the drowned girl whom he earlier
compared to “a coiled up wreck of a human hulk” and a vessel’s sand-filled cabin
windows, the drowned woman is reified, blended into the rugged landscape. “Why care
for these dead bodies?” he asks. “They really have no friends but the worms and fishes”
(14). Their “hulks” of bodies may have been washed onto the shore, but their spirits are
in a better place. The transcendental journey is what matters to Thoreau. “The strongest
wind cannot stagger a Spirit…. A just man’s purpose cannot be split on any … material
rock…” (15). To quote again an earlier passage: “If this was the law of Nature, why
waste any time in awe and pity?” Thoreau’s philosophy allows him to naturalize the gross
destruction of human life.
Perhaps unwittingly, the term “hulk” not only conjures the ruin from which the
spirit has fled, the “husk” without its kernel, but also the “hulks” to which many Famine
Irish were consigned for the crime of stealing food —as John Mitchel discovered in his
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brief sojourn in the West Indies on the way to Australia. (Jail Journal 123) In this
respect, hulk is both metaphor for dead bare life and a precise metonym for the Famine
Irish.
Compared to the life of domestic “service in some America family” that lay ahead
of them, these drowned “Bridgets” of the St. John may be better off dead, Thoreau
muses. The claim adumbrates the class dimension of this tragedy, differentiating the
author’s American, middle-class readership from the subservient, feminized Irish victims.
“No doubt,” he writes, “we have reason to thank God that they have not been
‘shipwrecked in life again’” (14; my emphasis).
Thoreau’s attention to the female victims of the shipwreck, particularly the half-
naked girl and the upright, white-capped woman’s body, suggests what Jack Morgan calls
the “female embodiment of catastrophe.” Inspired by the work of Margaret Kelleher,
whose The Feminization of the Famine identifies a transgressive, voyeuristic, male gaze
in many of the written accounts of the Famine, Morgan shows how “The Shipwreck,”
written by the American Thoreau, charts a feminizing course similar to the Famine
journals written by British men.
What of all the “Paddies” aboard the St. John? Thoreau gives them not a
mention.
1
What little he says elsewhere displays the anti-Irish prejudices prevalent among
his contemporaries in the New England intellectual community. For example, Thoreau
writes of David Field, his Irish neighbor at Walden Pond: “With his horizon all his own,
yet he a poor man, born to be poor, with his inherited Irish poverty or poor life, his
Adam’s grandmother and boggy ways, not to rise in this world, he nor his posterity, till
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their wading webbed bog-trotting feet get talaria to their heels” (Walden 156). As Helen
Lojek notes, Thoreau’s prejudicial “attitude towards the Irish is revealed not in a
developed essay nor even in any extended analysis in the pages of his journal; rather it
comes in bits and pieces; in casual references, in narratives included in longer works, in
incidental descriptions” (280).
2
Thoreau’s casual racism demonstrates the extent to which
anti-Irish prejudice constituted an integral part of popular belief in nineteenth-century
America, and it shows also how the intellectual elite uttered such beliefs unquestioningly.
For other American intellectuals, anti-Irish prejudices may have run deeper than
those of Thoreau. In a 1837 sermon in the Second Church in Concord, Ralph Waldo
Emerson offered this assessment of the state of the races:
3
“I think it cannot be
maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied or do promise
ever to occupy any very high place in the human family. The Irish cannot; the American
Indian cannot; the Chinese cannot. Before the energy of the Caucasian race all the other
races have quailed and done obeisance” (Emerson, Journals 152).
4
This chapter will
investigate notions of Irish whiteness later: suffice to say here that at the time of his
sermon, Emerson was forming the ideas that he would later develop into his English
Traits. Published in 1856, it became a transatlantic bestseller. While the American state
had decreed the Irish to be white, for Emerson, the true American was of Anglo-Saxon
stock, something an Irish person could never be. Later on, though, as the needs of the
racial state took precedence over WASP cultural objections, the term would fade from
American nationalist rhetoric, but not before it became a more capacious term for
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incorporating some ethnic groups, including the Irish, into a larger European framework
while consigning others quasi-permanently to racial otherness.
5
Thoreau’s detached meditation on the St. John tragedy is in keeping with the
Emersonian tradition that Rowe calls “aesthetic dissent”; that is, “the romantic idealist
assumption that rigorous reflection on the processes of thought and representation
constitutes in itself a critique of social reality and effects a transformation of the naïve
realism that confuses truth with social convention” (Emerson’s Tomb 1). As Rowe shows,
American transcendentalists privileged “rigorous reflection” over political engagement in
their aesthetic evaluations. Thoreau found it easier to naturalize the disaster than to
interrogate the political context that led these Irish Famine escapees to founder on the
rocks of Cape Cod. Disaster on a grand scale “deadens one’s capacity for sympathy”; in
this claim is evident the way that transcendentalism lent itself to an emerging American
exceptionalist ideology deadened to the horrors of primitive accumulation that lurked at
the foundations of the United States. “Rigorous reflection” on nature’s wonders enables
Thoreau and his like to avoid contemplating either the twin pillars of American
capitalism, Native American genocide and African American slavery, or the once-human
flotsam and jetsam that has been cast off by the British colonial state. As Rowe
maintains, “the great emancipatory movements of the American nineteenth century ––
women’s rights and the abolition of slavery –– were unquestionably subordinated by this
aesthetic ideology to the ‘higher laws’ of an American Romanticism established firmly
by Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman and institutionalized by several generations of
professional interpreters” (5).
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This chapter situates such cultural objections to the Irish in relation to the needs of
the state. It looks both at Irish immigrant responses to the nineteenth-century’s
emancipatory movements and at how those movements responded to the Irish. Like some
recent scholars, I challenge the theory that the Irish “became white” upon arrival in the
United States. If one examines this phenomenon from the perspective of the state, the
Irish were white from the moment they set foot on American soil. The 1890
Naturalization Act and all subsequent immigration legislation affirm this. Part II
investigates the dramatic transformation of the transatlantic Irish’s relationship to the
state––from bare life in Nomos Britannicus, to membership of the “white family” in the
emerging Nomos Americanus. Critical to this transformation is the intersection of the
Black and the Green Atlantic – of the relationship, often violent, between the Irish
immigrant and the Black American. Part III compares Frederick Douglass’s Black
Atlantic writings with the Jail Journal of John Mitchel, the diary of his experiences on
his oceanic journey to the United States that began with his deportation from Ireland in
1848, his time spend aboard a prison ship to Van Diemen’s Land, his incarceration and
dramatic escape from there, and his hero’s welcome in San Francisco in 1853. Also
crucial is a second intersection, that of religion. Part IV thus will look at the attitude of
the Catholic Church toward race, religion, and citizenship in America, through the hugely
significant but often-overlooked figure of Archbishop John Hughes of New York. It will
investigate anti-Catholic sentiment prevalent on both sides of the Atlantic during the
nineteenth century, and how Protestantism helped shape Douglass’s distinct views about
the Irish and Irish Americans. The chapter shows how both the state and Catholic Church
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disciplinary regimes complimented each other, and how the Irish answered the needs of
the state, not only through their labor, but also through their bolstering of what W. E. B.
DuBois famously called the “color line.” The story begins by tracing two transatlantic
sojourns: the Black Atlantic journey of one man, Frederick Douglass, and the Green
Atlantic journey of myriad Irish emigrants.
I. The Black and Green Atlantic
6
This is the story of two journeys, one Black, one Green. Each was undertaken
within the same space and along the same transatlantic route. Each took place in the
1840s, each aboard the ultimate nineteenth century vehicle of transnationality, the
transatlantic ship. Each transformed its travelers, although these transformations, like the
ships on which they occurred, moved in opposite directions. Traveling on the Black
Atlantic journey, to Ireland and Britain, was Frederick Douglass, a runaway American
slave already famous as an abolitionist writer; on the Green, the thousands of unlettered
peasants who fled the Great Hunger in their native Ireland. For Douglass, the crossing
signified escape from an enslaving experience into a liberating one. In Cork and Belfast
his speeches were well received; in Dublin, he wrote a new preface for an Irish edition of
his autobiography and spent time with other supporters of abolition. Douglass himself
reported that during the almost six months that he spent in Ireland, he was treated as a
human being for the first time in his life. In stark contrast was the westward journey of
the Irish. No less than Douglass on the ocean liner, these peasants, on board what were
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called coffin ships, were fleeing nightmare. Travel meant escape to them, too, from
chronic poverty and oppression, and from a famine that would reach its crescendo in
1847 – “Black ’47.” But liberation did not always lie ahead. Many died en route. Those
who survived arrived, often penniless, at an America whose hostile reception compelled
them quickly to adapt their ways.
One Black Man's Flight from America
By the summer of 1845, Frederick Douglass was a well-known figure in the
American political and literary world. His powerful anti-slavery tract, The Narrative of
the Life of Frederick Douglass, had just been published, and he was much in demand as a
public speaker at anti-slavery rallies. The Narrative tells the story of Douglass’ life as a
slave in Maryland and his escape to the North, ending with his first public address in
front of a white audience, in Nantucket in August 1841. Based on this work and two other
autobiographies, My Bondage and My Freedom, (1855) and Life and Times of Frederick
Douglass (1893), Douglass has come to be regarded among the most remarkable figures
in the history of American letters. “In his writing,” William S. McFeely wrote, “Douglass
outran being a runaway” (115). But he remained a wanted man, whose risk of being
returned to slavery grew as his fame grew. Wisely accepting an invitation from
abolitionists to visit Britain and Ireland, in late August of 1845 Douglass boarded the
Cunard liner Cambria, bound for Liverpool.
Second only to his escape from Maryland, Douglass’ voyage onboard the
Cambria was a most transformative journey. In My Bondage, My Freedom, he wrote that
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he was forced to travel in steerage because “American prejudice against color triumphed
over British liberality and civilization, and erected a color test and condition for crossing
the sea in the cabin of a British vessel” (Autobiographies 370). Douglass was not unduly
perturbed, however; soon he began receiving callers from first class in his second-class
quarters. He seemed to enjoy himself for the most part, and was quite the center of
attraction during the voyage. Perhaps responding to requests, the captain of the ship,
Captain Judkins, invited Douglass to deliver a lecture on slavery. (371) According to
McFeely, “Douglass delivered a fiery oration denouncing the merchants who had used
ships, like the one he was on, to haul human cargo from Africa” (120). Some inebriated
Southern slaveholders in the audience objected to Douglass’ speech and threatened to
throw him overboard. They were subdued by Captain Judkins, who, in a wonderfully
ironic gesture, threatened “to put the salt water mobocrats in irons” (Autobiographies
371). For the first time in Douglass’ life, authority had come to his rescue. As Alan J.
Rice and Martin Crawford wrote in the introductory chapter to their collection of essays
on Douglass’ visit to Ireland and Britain, Liberating Sojourn, “On the Cambria, the racial
world is turned upside down in a carnivalesque picture of enchained slaveholders and
free-speaking African Americans that only becomes possible away from American mores
in the liminal zone of the sea” (3). Douglass often recalled this incident, expressing his
gratitude that the slaveholders on the Cambria had unwittingly performed him a huge
favor. “Men, in their senses,” he wrote, “do not take bowie knives to kill mosquitoes, nor
pistols to shoot flies; and the American passengers on board the Cambria took the most
effective method of telling the British public that I had something to say” (381). Thanks
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in no small part to the publicity that surrounded the incident, Douglass’ appearances
attracted large and enthusiastic crowds in both Britain and Ireland. But the event had a
much deeper significance, according to Rice and Crawford:
What Douglass achieved through the recounting of his triumph aboard the
Cambria was a refiguring of the Atlantic crossing from a historically enslaving
experience into a literally liberating one. The old Atlantic triangular trade had
taken slaves to the Americas and brought back cotton and other raw materials that
were turned into finished goods to be traded for slaves in Africa. Douglass’s trip
could be seen symbolically to mirror aspects of this trade. He came to Britain as
raw material of a great black figure; he would leave in April 1847 the finished
independent man, cut from a whole cloth and able to make his own decisions
about the strategies and ideologies of the abolitionist movement. (3)
It is noteworthy that Douglass stayed only a few days in England before he sailed back
west, to Ireland. There he was to spend almost six months before journeying onwards to
Scotland and then England. It was in Ireland, not England, that Douglass first noticed a
change in himself. “I can truly say,” he wrote in one of several public letters he sent New
England abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison from Ireland, “I have spent some of the
happiest moments of my life in this country. I seemed to have undergone a
transformation, I live a new life” (Autobiographies 373).
Green Emigrants' Flight from Ireland
While Douglass underwent transformation in Ireland, Irish people scrambled to
leave mounting hunger and poverty behind them. They headed for the country of
Douglass’ birth. The ethnic cleansing of Ireland had begun long before famine hit in
1845. As early as 1395, Britain’s King Richard II, “[s]eeking to conquer the Irish ... had
condemned them as ‘savage Irish, our enemies’” – thus using a label, “savage,” later
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applied to Native Americans (Takaki, Different 26). During the reign of Elizabeth I in the
1500s, native Irish had been forced off their lands; those who were neither killed nor
transported abroad were consigned to the boglands of the West of Ireland. These
practices intensified during the Cromwellian rule that followed. Somewhere between
35,000 and 40,000 Irish men were sold to serve in armies in the continent. (Allen 1: 50)
Sean O’Callaghan estimates that between 1652 and 1659, more than 50,000 men, women,
and children were transported from their Irish homeland to Barbados and Virginia.
7
O’Callaghan’s research reveals that the same English-owned slave ships that had
transported African slaves to the West Indies were among those used to transport Irish
slaves to the sugar and tobacco plantations of the New World. In his words, “The
merchants simply switched to the Irish slave trade at a considerable profit to themselves”
(O’Callaghan 80). However, as Michael Malouf points out, O’Callaghan’s claim is
inaccurate: the transported Irish were indentured servants, not slaves.
8
Most were sent to
the colonies and sold to plantation owners for a fixed period of time, usually five to ten
years. Indentured servitude of the Irish had abated by the nineteenth century. But then
came An Gorta Mór.
In the summer of 1845, as Douglass was making his way across the Atlantic, Irish
farmers were noticing something peculiar with their crop of potatoes, the staple food of
the peasantry. A strange new disease had befallen, and a third of the crop of that year
would be destroyed. So began the single most destructive event of nineteenth century
Europe: An Gorta Mór, Irish for “the Great Hunger.” The potato crop would fail, or
partially fail, every year for the next decade. The human cost was enormous. As noted in
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the previous chapter, “[b]etween 1.1 and 1.5 million people Irish people died of
starvation and famine-related diseases in the famine decade, 1846-55, out of a population
that stood at about 8.5 million at the beginning of the catastrophe. Another 2.1 million
fled the country, 1.8 million of them to North America (all but 300,000 of these to the
United States)” (Kenny, American 89-90).
Aboard Seafaring Coffins
During the Great Hunger, English and Anglo-Irish landlords eager to unburden
themselves offered their starving Irish tenants free passage to America. This option was
much cheaper than funding the workhouses to which the destitute otherwise might have
drifted and which were in any case overcrowded beyond their capacity. It had the added
advantage of permanently eliminating a surplus of impoverished people, for few Irish
who went to America ever returned. Some landowners endeavored to assure that their
tenants’ journey would be humane. Many did not. Often the weakest and the poorest were
dispatched across the Atlantic unready for the dreadful conditions they would encounter
on cheaply commissioned, poorly provisioned, and ill-equipped vessels. Many never
made it.
Emigration to America had begun in earnest a century earlier; however, “the
Famine years, from 1846 to 1851 were marked by an urgency to get away as never seen
before” (Laxton 5). Edward Laxton estimated that in that period 5,000 Irish-emigrant-
laden ships sailed across the Atlantic. (7) Some in the 1840s sailed directly to America
from Ireland. “More often, however, they were ferried across the Irish Sea to Liverpool
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on the hated British mainland, to seek bigger ships for the Atlantic crossing” (ibid.).
Liverpool had been a premier center for slave trafficking until Britain abolished slavery
in its colonies in 1833. The owners, crews, and agents of the old slave ships had suffered
financially ever since. “Whereas in previous years they had operated a lucrative three-
sided business – timber, iron, tolls, salt and varied cargo down to West Africa; slaves out
to America; cotton, tobacco, wheat and provisions back to Europe – outbound-passages
had been losing money” (ibid.). Ireland’s misfortune proved their stroke of good luck.
Barely a dozen years their slaving activities had been terminated, these same British ships
were called into service to help cope with the explosion of Irish runaways. (8) Once
again, human cargo was transported west, while Canadian timber was transported back to
England on the return leg.
By 1847 the former slave ships and other, even less seaworthy vessels had come
to be called “coffin ships” because of the shockingly high rate at which their Irish
emigrant passengers perished. In the time of the slave trade “a loss of 20 per cent was
acceptable” (Laxton 86); Irish losses exceeded this number. In 1847 about 32 percent of
Irish emigrants who sailed to British North America – approximately 30,000 people –
died (Kenny, American 103). Fully “20 per cent of the total number of Irish transatlantic
emigrants who crossed the Atlantic that year died either at sea or shortly after arrival”
(ibid.). Transatlantic voyages, typically made only during spring or summer, were
undertaken year ’round. Obsession with profit trumped common sense and decency as
lives were thrown upon the mercy of the elements. The British Queen, a one-time slave
ship carrying 228 Irish passengers, ran aground in the height of the winter of 1851 off the
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coast of Nantucket, the same place where, ten years earlier, Frederick Douglass had made
his first speech to a white audience. Due to the islanders’ perseverance and bravery, all
the shipwrecked were saved (224). Passengers on other vessels – like St. John, the fate of
which opened this chapter – were not so lucky.
Typifying the absentee landlords of the time was Lord Palmerston, the former
Prime Minister of Britain. He spent most of his time in London and so never witnessed
firsthand the suffering of his Irish tenantry. He did, however, see his Irish profit-and-loss
columns. In the summer of 1847, Palmerston dispatched 2,000 of his poorest tenants to
North America by the cheapest means available. When the nine vessels carrying his
former tenants reached Saint John, New Brunswick, the horror of the coffin ships was
plain to see. On arrival of the first ship, the Canadian authorities were enraged; most
persons on board were too old, too young, or too sick to work. Worse was to come. On
the next Palmerston ship, 107 had died of fever, and sixty were seriously ill. Of a third
ship the chief surgeon at the Canadian quarantine station reported, “[M]any are almost in
a state of nudity; 99 percent of the passengers on this ship must become public charges
immediately” (Laxton 77). More death, illness, and starvation ensued on these ships,
never meant for the transportation of human beings, which Palmerston had sent west in
Black ’47, the worst year of the disaster, and the same year that Frederick Douglass
returned home from Britain and Ireland.
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Paul Gilroy and the Black and Green Atlantic
Paul Gilroy defines the “Black Atlantic” “as an intercultural and transnational
formation” (ix) that defies nationalist paradigms for cultural history because of its
“inescapable hybridity and intermixture of ideas” (xi). “Dealing equally with roots and
routes,” Gilroy says, “should undermine the purified appeal of Africentricism or
Eurocentricisms it struggles to answer.” The Black Atlantic “is more concerned with the
flows, exchanges and in-between elements…” (190). Gilroy’s view jibes well with that of
Lee Jenkins, who maintains that an examination of Douglass’s visit to Ireland “extends
the field of African American studies, and at the same time reveals the dynamics of a
cultural interchange that remains relevant to us today, on both sides of the Atlantic” (22).
The same may be said for the visit – more precisely, for the permanent move – of Irish to
America.
Both the Black and the Green travelers in this story sojourned on transatlantic
ships; in Gilroy’s words, “mobile elements that stood for shifting spaces in between fixed
places they connected” (16). Transatlantic ships were about “the circulation of ideas and
activists” (4). “Accordingly, they need to be thought of as cultural and political units
rather than abstract embodiments” (16-17). The meshing of ideas and activists, of culture
and politics, was evident during Douglass’s Black Atlantic trip on the Cambria, and it
continued throughout his subsequent stay in Ireland. Far less is known about what ideas,
what activism, might have circulated among those who struggled to survive the Green
Atlantic hell of the coffin ships. Once arrived in America, Irish emigrants found
hybridization inevitable. But it was a process that, like the ships on which they and
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Douglass traveled, went in different directions. Douglass moved toward development of
an individual selfhood, even as many Irish moved toward submergent assimilation into a
white American culture.
Douglass in Ireland
A year before the Palmerston tragedy, Douglass had written Garrison:
Instead of the bright blue sky of America, I am covered with the soft grey
fog of the Emerald Isle. I breathe and lo! the chattel becomes a man. I
gaze around in vain for one who will question my equal humanity, claim
me as a slave, or offer me an insult. I employ a cab—I am seated beside
white people—I reach the hotel—I enter the same door—I am shown into
the same parlor—I dine at the same table—and no one is offended. No
delicate nose deforms in my presence (P. Foner 1:127-8).
In the same letter, written from Belfast on the first day of the year 1846, Douglass added,
“My opportunities for learning the character and condition of the people of this land have
been very great” (1:126). He had traveled all over Ireland, and while he undoubtedly
learned a lot about the Irish people, he learned perhaps even more about himself. His
observations in Ireland stand in marked contrast to some he made about England. Later in
his tour, for example, Douglass would comment, “I find I am hardly Black enough for
British taste” (qtd. in Jenkins 27). “If Victorian Britain found in Douglass an answer to its
need for an exotic Other,” Lee Jenkins has observed, “Douglass himself seems to have
found the full complement of his selfhood – in Victorian Ireland” (27).
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Dublin Narrative
Douglass’ Irish sojourn began in Dublin, in the home of Quaker Richard Webb,
publisher of the Irish edition of Douglass’s Narrative. Webb and Douglass argued
vehemently over many aspects of publication. One row concerned the inclusion of
articles by two Belfast clergymen in the Dublin edition. Webb did not want to include
them, but Douglass insisted and, in the end, prevailed. In contrast to many American
abolitionists “Webb was an honorable foe,” according to McFeely. “He was one of the
few of Douglass’ anti-slavery antagonists who did not prefer to smile benignly and then
do their undercutting offstage. Webb was brave enough to disagree with Douglass to his
face” (122). This crucial difference between Webb and the New England abolitionists did
not go unnoticed by Douglass.
The Irish edition of the Narrative contains a new preface and other emendations.
Until recently, scholars for the most part overlooked or ignored the changes that Douglass
made in Ireland; most considered the first American printing of The Narrative to be the
authoritative version. But in the same year, 2001, Fionnghuala Sweeney and Patricia
Ferreira published separate journal articles, each of which highlighted the personal and
literary opportunities of which Douglass had availed himself while in Ireland. Sweeney
thus wrote that “the reprinting of the Narrative in Ireland marks the beginning of a stage
in Douglass’ career that has profound implications for contemporary reading of his life
and work…the Irish Narratives mark a transitional phase in Douglass’ emergence as a
modern subject and in his negotiation of nineteenth century models of socio-cultural
identity” (“Republic” 47). Ferreira in turn pointed out that Douglass’ use in the Irish
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edition of specific, discursive methodologies marked a profound change: it
“demonstrates his assertion of command over his own destiny” (60). Part of his new
preface and the entire appendix are devoted to an exchange between Douglass and a
supporter of slavery, A. C. C. Thompson. Originally a set of letters in newspapers,
Douglass crafted them into a dialogue “that speaks to his desire to seize and manage his
own affairs” (Ferreira 60). Douglass’ dialogic use of Thompson skillfully subverts the
practice in nineteenth century America according to which the slave narrative would not
be deemed authentic unless it granted discursive authority to white people of a certain
social standing. The Dublin version mocks this practice of privileging one writer’s words
over another on account of social standing and race.
The Dublin edition thus marks a turning point in Douglass’ literary and political
life, a time when he took self-confident steps to get out from underneath the suffocating,
paternalistic attempts of the New England anti-slavery establishment to control him. In
Ireland, Douglass was becoming his own man. “In literary terms this involved the
recreation of Ireland as a space of social mobility that allowed the crystallization of
modern subjectivity that Douglass was so painstakingly constructing. Ireland, a liminal
and empowering space—like Douglass himself, on the margin of modernity—provided
the context of his political and literary evolution” (Sweeney, “Republic” 56). Besides his
literary endeavors in Ireland, Douglass met with people who would inspire him for a
lifetime, and no one inspired him more during his visit than Daniel O’Connell, known in
Ireland as The Liberator.
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Liberation and The Liberator
In his Life and Times, Douglass wrote of the great Irish Nationalist leader and
gifted orator Daniel O’Connell:
Until I heard this man I had thought that the story of his oratory was
greatly exaggerated…His eloquence came down upon the vast assembly
like a summer thunder-shower upon a dusty road. He could at will stir the
multitude to a tempest of wrath or reduce it to the silence with which a
mother leaves the cradle-side of her sleeping babe. Such tenderness, such
pathos, such world-embracing love!—and, on the other hand, such
indignation, such fiery and thunderous denunciation, such wit and humor,
I never heard surpassed, if equaled at home or abroad. He held Ireland
within the grasp of his strong hand, and could lead it whithersoever he
would, for Ireland believed in him and loved him as she loved and
believed in no leader since” (Autobiographies 682).
Douglass was deeply moved by Daniel O’Connell. The former idolized the latter, to the
extent that Douglass even visited Kilmainham Jail in Dublin solely to see the cell where
O’Connell once had been held. (Rolston 79) O’Connell was known primarily for his
political agitation around two main issues: the repeal of the 1801 Act of Union that
purported to join Ireland with Britain, and the winning of a modicum of status for Irish
Catholics, whom British Penal Laws denied even the most basic legal standing. (Nowlan
10) O’Connell had won partial success in the latter campaign with the passing of the
Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, which gave Irish Catholics limited voting and
property rights. The failure of the Repeal movement, however, would have disastrous
consequences in terms of prolonging the bloodshed.
O’Connell was conservative on many issues, yet liberal on others. He spoke
eloquently in the British Parliament in favor of the abolition of slavery. He refused
money offered him by Southern slaveholders.
9
And he set forth the famous O’Connell
115
test: “That one should ascertain where an Englishman or Irishman stood on slavery
before shaking hands with him” (Rolston 78-9). These exploits endeared him not only to
Douglass, but also to Garrison, to Robert Purvis, and to many other abolitionists active on
both sides of the Atlantic. Not so enamored were the Irish who crossed the Atlantic to
settle in America; O’Connell’s unwavering support for the anti-slavery cause would sap
support for Irish causes in the United States.
Disaster Dodge
In My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass recalls the songs that the slaves were
made to sing on the plantation. “I have never heard any songs like those anywhere since I
left slavery, except when in Ireland. There I heard the same wailing notes, and was much
affected by them. It was during the famine of 1845-6” (Autobiographies 184). In an
extraordinary letter to Garrison dated February 26
1846, Douglass described some of the
harrowing tableaux he had encountered. In Dublin “the scenes I there witnessed were
such to make me ‘blush and hang my head to think myself a man’” (P. Foner 1:139) He
wrote of a visit to a windowless, mud-walled hut, filthy and scum-covered, a place where
men, women and children “lie down together, in much the same degradation as the
American slaves. I see much here to remind me of my former condition, and I confess I
should be ashamed to lift up my voice against American slavery, but that I know the
cause of humanity is one the world over” (1:141). Douglass, unlike the transatlantic
Famine Irish, could connect his bare life experiences under the brutality of primitive
accumulation of capital, to bare life in Ireland under British colonial rule.
116
Though newspaper reports of the growing famine appeared alongside notices for
Douglass’ public meetings, Douglass’ hosts in Ireland, most of whom were middle- to
upper-class Protestants, seemed blind to the suffering all around them. “Douglass did not
entirely miss this tragic irony,” writes McFeely, “though he never brought it up in public
addresses” (126). Perhaps not wishing to offend his hosts, Douglass did not offer any
solutions to the problems that he saw in Ireland. “In lieu of explanation,” McFeely
concludes, “he resorted to the familiar dodge of blaming drunkenness” (ibid.). It was a
dodge, a convenient scapegoat-stereotype, to which he would return often when it came
to the Irish. While he intermittently expressed sympathy for the suffering all around him,
Douglass, as Sweeney shows in her recent book, Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic
World, he posited the starving Irish peasant as a symbol of social difference – a
difference that results in a self-portrayal of the enlightened expatriate American.
Nevertheless, as McFeely rightly comments, his February 1846 letter to Garrison
“demonstrated how real for him was the chain that linked all suffering people” (ibid.).
Douglass would draw comparison between Irish and Black throughout his life.
For example, in a lecture entitled “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically
Considered,”
10
he told the audience about “a large meeting of the common people” that
he had attended in Dublin nine years before. “More than five thousand were assembled;
and I say, with no wish to wound the feelings of any Irishman, that these people lacked
only a black skin and wooly hair, to complete their likeness to the plantation negro.” He
went on to say that, unlike the educated Irishman, “the Irishman ignorant and degraded,
compares in form and feature, with the Negro” (P. Foner 2: 305).
117
II. The Racial State and the Rise of Nomos Americanus
In their seminal work, Racial Formation in the United States, Omi and Winant
stress that “the state is inherently racial…the preeminent site of racial conflict” (82).
Indeed as Goldberg points out in his book, The Racial State, “[r]ace is integral to the
emergence, development and transformations (conceptually, philosophically, materially)
of the modern nation-state. Race marks and orders the modern nation-state, and so state
projects, more or less from its point of conceptual and institutional emergence” (4).
Goldberg expands on this further:
States are racial more deeply because of the structural position they
occupy in producing and reproducing, constituting and effecting racially-
shaped spaces and places, groups and events, life worlds and
possibilities… They are racial, in short, in virtue of their modes of
population definition, determination and structuration. And they are racist
to the extent such definition, determination and structuration operate to
exclude or privilege racial terms, and in so far as they circulate in and
reproduce a world whose meanings and effects are racist. This world we
might identify as a racial world order. (104; original emphasis)
This section examines the notion of the racial state in relation to Irish migration
to the United States, and the development of Nomos Americanus. It is estimated that more
than 2 million migrated to North America during the mid-to-late-nineteenth century.
Most went to the United States, which, through its laws, was a self-defined racial state, as
scholars such as Omi and Winant, and Lisa Lowe has shown.
11
The status of these Irish
altered radically upon arrival in America. No longer a “redundant population,” as Thomas
Malthus called the subaltern people he considered superfluous to the needs of capital, the
118
Famine Irish provided much needed labor for the nascent American economy.
12
As we
will be discussed in detail in the next chapter, they flooded the ranks of government
sponsored agencies––police, fire, civil service, etc––while actively shaping the political
institutions such as the Democratic Party, and the trade unions, bodies that helped define
the parameters of American citizenship. Their transatlantic journey transformed them
from the status of being the “excluded,” to that of the “excluders.” This shifting of
relationship to the state that the Famine Irish experienced offers unique insights into how
the racial state operates, on either side of the Atlantic.
Nomos Americanus
As noted in the previous chapter, scholars have written extensively on the
relationship between America and early, colonized Ireland. Nicholas Canny, for example,
maintains that Ireland, England’s first colony, served as a training ground for later
colonial conquest. “The involvement in Irish colonization of men who afterwards
ventured to the New World,” he writes, “suggests that their years in Ireland were years of
apprenticeship” (“Ideology” 595). Many of the same personnel were involved in both
conquests, and many of the same rationales were used. Colonists, for example, used the
similar justifications to exterminate Native Americans that they had used in “the 1560s
and 1570s for the slaughter of a number of Irish” (596). So the seeds of Nomos
Americanus, sown by Nomos Britannicus, had been first incubated in the laboratory
called Ireland.
13
119
From the very beginning, the status of indigenous peoples of America constituted
bare life––the appropriation of Native American land was not theft; the violence used to
quell Native American resistance was not murder; indigenous people were, in fact, not
recognized as people in the eyes of the colonial sovereign power. Following the
Revolution and the transfer of sovereign power from Nomos Britannicus to the fledgling
Nomos Americanus, the bare life status of the indigenous peoples remained just as before,
as the new nation struggled to establish a nationalist ideology that would bind the state
together. Colonialism, however, did not depart American shores along with the British.
As Rowe points out: “Early United States nationalism is … a colonial project, [itself]
insofar as the formation of the nation depend crucially on the transformation of British
colonialism into national institutions and practices in a rapid, defensive manner”
(“Nineteenth-Century” 80). From the social psychology of this defensive nationalism
sprang Manifest Destiny according to Rowe. (ibid.) Hence, the techniques and practices
of colonialism were inherited by the nascent state from its former sovereign power, and
the new state adapted them to suit its internal needs. “Such colonial practices,” writes
Rowe, “emphasized the control of different peoples, their labor, and their means of
communal identification. Whether encouraged to assimilate to US culture or racially
targeted for exclusion, people and their social behaviors, as much as territory and
markets, were the focuses of US colonization. The internal colonization of different
peoples depended centrally on hierarchies of race, class, and gender to do the work of
subjugation and domination” (Literary Culture 7).
120
Beside the colonialist drive for land appropriation, the other solid pillar upon
which the prosperity of the United States rested, was, of course, slavery. African
American slaves were regarded in American law as property, rather than as people. Their
existence was subject only to the laws of commerce. The emergent sovereign power
included them only so that they could be excluded from its legal framework. Like the
indigenous peoples, they could be killed, raped, and tortured with impunity. Thus with
the genocide of native peoples to the west, and the enslavement of African Americans to
the south, the urbane elite in the Northeast, grappled with the egalitarian notions of
Enlightenment, wrapped themselves in their evangelical blankets, to proselytize, and to
count the money.
Brought to America by English settlers at the beginning of the seventeenth
century, the fiction of a pure Anglo-Saxon church, the source of so much evangelical
zeal, remained solidly in place after the Revolution. According to Reginald Horsman, the
Reformation produced an English enthusiasm for their Anglo-Saxon roots, and the
questionable claims of Anglo-Saxon and Protestant purity coalesced into a lethal
ideological weapon that became a major driving force in the American colonies in
general, and in the American revolutionary movement in particular, well before
Emerson’s pronouncements on Anglo-Saxonism. By the nineteenth-century, this
particular brand of American Christianity had developed “transnational and transcultural
ambitions [that] were profoundly invoked in nationalism…” (Rowe “Religious
Transnationalism” 45) And by the time the Famine Irish reached the United States, it had,
121
as Horsman notes, combined with the emerging field of scientific racism to justify
notions of racial hierarchy. (5)
Just as it was necessary for Nomos Britannicus to invent an Anglo-Saxon lineage
to bolster its claims to superiority, Nomos Americanus had to invent a past that relied
upon another bad case of historical amnesia. Amnesia, according to Ali Behdad, is “a
form of cultural disavowal that simultaneously denies certain historical facts and
produces a pseudo-historical consciousness of the present” (4). Behdad argues that the
development of American national culture crucially depends upon the forgetting of its
violent past. Behdad challenges the myth of America as a hospitable refuge for
immigrants. He points out that this myth disavows what he calls the “economics of
immigration, i.e., the political economy of immigration as a socio-legal phenomenon”
(xii). He also argues that nativism “has been overlooked as a driving force behind much
of the nation’s immigration policy” (xiii). The evident ambivalence over immigration
seems to bear these observations out. As nativism and monopoly capitalism, ideologies
dominant in two factions of the state’s dominant classes, competed for control of US
immigration policy, the law vacillated between hospitality and hostility with some
regularity. Bedhad sees such struggles as essential to the development of the nation-state
in America. “Immigration,” he writes, “…is both a necessary mechanism of social
control to legitimate state apparatuses and an essential contribution to the formation of
national culture––paradoxically, since it is so often cast as a threat to national culture”
(22).
122
Competing interests surfaced, for example, during the building of the
Transcontinental Railroad. On one side were oligarchs like Leland Stanford, who
demanded US entry for workers from China, a prodigious source of cheap labor. On the
opposite side were nativist politicians who, in alliance with labor organizations, saw
Chinese immigration as a threat to livelihood. The struggle played out on the streets of
California, where countless Chinese people were beaten, robbed, killed, or driven out by
white mobs. It also played out through various state apparatuses, operating at city, state,
and federal governmental levels. Whether by violence or legal maneuver, the Irish were
at the forefront of this anti-Chinese movement, as the next chapter shows.
The ambivalences and contradictions that Behdad detects in his study of
immigration and American cultural identity can best be explained by the too-often-
overlooked work of Nicos Poulantzas. In State, Power, Socialism, Poulantzas writes that
the capitalist state is a “relationship of forces, or more precisely the material
condensation of such a relationship among classes and class fractions, this is expressed
within the State in a necessarily specific form” (128-9; emphasis original). Poulantzas,
utilizing Gramscian theory, explains that the state organizes the “unstable equilibrium” of
compromises between various apparatuses; it filters information given and measures
taken; it is a contradictory movement of decisions and equally important, non-decisions;
it prioritizes according to the specific interest it represents: policy is established through a
real process of intra-state contradictions. (134) The state’s “autonomy is concretely
manifested in the diverse, contradictory measures that each of these classes and
fractions,” he continues, “through its specific presence in the State and the resulting play
123
of contradictions, manages to have integrated into state policy. This is true even of
negative measures:” (135)
Poulantzas shares traits with many of his contemporary European Marxist
theorists: firstly, Poulantzas does not account for race in his theory of the state;
14
and
secondly Poulantzas, as did Gramsci with his own theory of hegemony, devotes attention
to hegemonic forces that are intra-national. Nevertheless, Poulantzas’s work can be
constructively employed in conjunction with the work of Omi and Winant, and Goldberg
to explain the nation state in America. When added to Schmitt’s concept of Nomos and
Agamben’s notion of sovereign power, a clearer picture of the United States as a nation-
state emerges.
Nomos Americanus and the Famine Irish
Of the 2 million Irish people who immigrated to the United States between 1840
and 1870, most arrived between 1845 and 1855. Their demographic impact was
considerable. In the 1840s the Irish made up 45.6 percent of all immigrants to the United
States: in the 1850s, 35.2 percent. (Kenny, American Irish 97-8, 104, 121) As Kenny
notes, “[T]he immigrants of the famine generation were close to the bottom of the
American social scale. There were many individual exceptions, of course, but American
Irish in the period 1845 to 1870 were clearly the least successful of all European
Americans” (109). These were the Famine Irish––the people that had to leave Ireland as a
matter of survival, rather than choice. For all the waves of Irish immigrants to the United
States, these were the least prepared for the transition. The American Protestant elite
124
were horrified, and, as in Britain, simianized images of “Paddy” and “Bridget” became
commonplace in American cultural production.
Undoubtedly, discriminatory practices due to their status as “white-if-not-quite”
15
in the American cultural imaginary caused considerable hardship for the newly arrived,
subaltern Irish. It also heightened the anxiety that Irish Americans, even the more well-
to-do Irish Catholic immigrants, harbored with respect to race. As I show in Chapter 6,
this anxiety was reflected in the cultural production of the Famine Irish generation in the
United States.
16
Irish anxiety about race often surfaced in more violent and sinister ways
as well. During the 1863 Draft Riots in New York, for example, Irish mobs burned down
the city’s Colored Orphan Asylum and murdered and mutilated scores of African
Americans. In California, the Irish led the often-violent anti-Chinese movement in the
1870s and 1880s. (Kenny 124-5, 157) Examples of solidarity between the Irish and other
ethnicities exist – the San Patricio Battalion
17
is one – but they were exceptions.
For all the hostility that the Irish had encountered on arrival in the United States,
the fact is that by the late nineteenth century the bare life status of the Famine Irish no
longer applied. They were beyond the sovereign power of Nomos Britannicus. Instead
they entered a new calculus of race being formulated in Nomos Americanus, one in which
they had a major role in defining. Regardless of the words and actions of various
nineteenth-century American ideological state apparatuses, (the press, the academy,
Protestant churches, political bodies, etc.) as defined by the state, the Irish were white.
Their Northern European heritage guaranteed them the opportunity to become American
citizens under US immigration laws.
125
Much has been made in the field of “whiteness studies,” of the Irish “becoming”
white upon arrival. David R. Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness (1991), Theodore W.
Allen’s The Invention of the White Race (1994), and Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish
Became White (1995), are three prime examples of such foundational texts. These
scholars have argued that the Irish “chose” whiteness upon arrival in the United States, as
it was to their economic advantage to do so. Allen and Ignatiev, in particular, assume that
the Irish had no conception of their whiteness until they arrived in America. This is a
rather questionable assumption given the way the colonized Irish internalized the
attitudes of the British colonizer. These authors also err in presuming racism as a strictly
American phenomenon. Slightly more recently, Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a
Different Color (1998) attempts to move away from what he perceives as an overreliance
on class and economics in his forerunners’ work. He looks at racial construction from a
mainly cultural perspective.
18
While I have benefited much of the scholarship of the above-mentioned, I am
attracted to the simplicity of Peter Kolchin’s approach to the complicated question of
whiteness in the United States. He sees a “persistent dualism” in the work of these
scholars. “At times, race––and more specifically, whiteness––is treated as an artificial
construct with no real meaning aside from its particular social setting and at other times it
becomes not only real, but omnipresent and unchanging, deserving our attention as an
independent force. Race appears both real and unreal, transitory and permanent,
ubiquitous and invisible, everywhere and nowhere, everything and nothing” (para. 16).
As the last section of this chapter shows, religion figured more often than race as a
126
motive for the discrimination against Catholics in the United States. The nineteenth-
century Irish, unlike African Americans and Asian Americans, could vote, and their
offspring claim both political and cultural citizenship without much trouble. As the
evidence to be presented later in this dissertation shows, the “white-but-not-quite”
category was essentially meaningless. Accordingly, I adopt Kolchin’s view that
“becoming white” is a metaphorical expression for “becoming acceptable.” Whiteness
studies scholars, he writes, “clearly intend the term to serve as more than a metaphor;
indeed, if it is understood only metaphorically, much of their analysis collapses” (para
23). The remainder of my dissertation supports Kolchin’s view, especially my
investigation of the role of the state in the Americanization of the Irish.
Indeed, it is within the various apparatuses of the state that the Irish acquired
positions of prominence. They rose quickly in the American Catholic Church, which, in
resisting the rampant nativist attacks upon it, became nativist itself. As Miller reveals, the
Church extolled the virtues of American patriotism and promoted the values of the
American bourgeoisie––thrift, sobriety, industry, self-control––values normally
associated with the so-called Protestant ethic. Church leaders declared that the Irish made
the best Americans by stressing that the Irish, like the Pilgrims, had come to America to
seek refuge from religious persecution. Some priests even demanded that parishioners
Anglicize their “unpronounceable” Gaelic names. (Miller, Emigrants 332-3) In short, the
Catholic Church became a major vehicle of assimilation; it could not have been more
supportive of the ideological aims of the state. My section on Archbishop Hughes
confirms this.
127
As we shall see, the Irish rapidly established themselves in police and fire
departments across the country, and had a significant presence in all ranks of the US
military. They were adept at gaining employment with city, county, state, and federal
agencies of various kinds, no doubt due, in part, their well documented ascent within the
Democratic Party.
19
This membership also had the effect of bolstering the claims of
Southern slaveholders. In other words, the more American the Irish became, the more
reinforced became the institutions of racism.
As Lloyd points out, what the Irish offered all these various organizations, and
hence the state itself, were the experiences learned in Ireland: how to organize at a group
level, and how to engage in clandestine practices that included the use of violence. These
practices had been outlawed under British rule but were welcomed as invaluable tools in
the United States, a state-in-formation.
20
They were put to work to maintain the racial
state, through the policing and containment of the African American population and the
exclusion of the Chinese and other “non-whites” from citizenship. Indeed, rather than
simply “becoming white,” the Irish began to define what whiteness was.
Cork-born Denis Kearney, the subject of a section of Chapter 4, led the California
Workingmen’s Party to electoral success in San Francisco and other parts of California
on an anti-Chinese immigration ticket. Another Irish-born labor leader, Frank Roney, also
figured prominently in the movement. The rank and file of the Party swelled with Irish
people as the violent campaign compelled the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
21
Indeed,
the Irish were active in the trade union movement throughout the United States, helping
to shape its nativist platform. One such notable was Terence Powderly.
128
One of twelve children, Terence was born in Pennsylvania of Irish-born parents in
1849. He was an ardent Irish nationalist and joined several fraternal Irish organizations.
Powderly became an activist in the trade union movement, rising eventually to the
national leadership of the Knights of Labor, a major labor union with an Irish
membership that reached at about 50 percent by the mid-1880s. (Dolan 168) Through his
political connections he became Commissioner for Immigration in the federal
government. Powderly declared his outlook on the task in a 1902 article entitled
“Immigration’s Menace to the National Health.” Using phrases similar to those the
British had used against the Irish, Powderly warned the nation of the dangers of physical
contamination from “new” immigrants. He targeted in particular people from Southern
Europe and Asia, who, he maintained, brought sickness and disease to America.
According to Ali Behdad, the article marked “a decisive shift in the discourse of nativism
from politics to medicine, from ideology to health” (130).
“Included within a liberal democracy,” Donald Pease writes, “exceptions name
what democracy must exclude to achieve unity and coherence. Because they name the
limit to democratic inclusiveness, exceptions also produce what might be described as the
illusion of an enveloping border for the members of the national democracy who have not
been excluded” (145). Through their active involvement in the anti-Chinese movement
and their antipathy to people of other ethnicities, the Irish helped promote this “illusion of
an enveloping border” that defined American citizenship.
129
III. Journaling John Mitchel
In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) described her
despair and anger one particular Sunday morning in New York as she hid from those
seeking to return her to slavery. “John Mitchell [sic],” she wrote, “was free to proclaim in
the City Hall his desire for ‘a plantation well stocked with slaves’; but there I sat, an
oppressed American, not daring to show my face” (162). Jacobs was hardly alone in her
contempt for Mitchel. Frederick Douglass commented bitterly on the same Mitchel
statement in his Life and Times: Mitchel and others like him in the Young Ireland
movement were “men who loved liberty for themselves and their country, but were
utterly destitute of sympathy with the cause of liberty in countries other than their own”
(Autobiographies 683).
Mitchel arrived in New York in 1853, having escaped from a British penal colony
in Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania. He received a hero’s welcome from the Irish
community and from American politicians eager to please the Irish voting bloc. In Jail
Journal, his account of imprisonment, transportation to an Australian penal colony, and
eventual escape to the United States, he stated that while he supported slavery as an
institution, he had no desire to own slaves himself. Yet here he was in New York
proclaiming the opposite view. Suffice to say here that through his infamous statement,
Mitchel declared his credentials for citizenship in the US racial state, defining his
personal liberty by the denial of liberty to others. Toni Morrison wrote of this
phenomenon in Playing in the Dark. She draws our attention to American historian
130
Bernard Bailyn’s assessment of nineteenth-century Scottish immigrant William Dunbar.
Of Dunbar Bailyn wrote: “Endlessly enterprising and resourceful, his finer sensibilities
dulled by the abrasions of frontier life, and feeling within himself a sense of authority and
autonomy he had not known before, a force that flowed from his absolute control over the
lives of others, he emerged a distinctive new man, a borderland gentleman, a man of
property in a raw, half-savage world” (qtd. in Morrison 42). Like Mitchel, Dunbar was a
university-educated intellectual, well versed in sophisticated, theological, and scientific
thought. He was also a slaveholder, and as Bailyn’s observation above reveals, it was
through his slaveholder status that he defined his modern American subjectivity.
Morrison observes that Bailyn’s account is “a succinct portrait of the process by which
the American as new, white, and male was constituted” (43). Although Mitchel never
actually owned slaves he, like Dunbar, understood perfectly the meaning of citizenship
within the US racial state. The irony that, as an Irish-born newcomer, Mitchel was
deemed suitable for American citizenship while American-born Blacks were not, was not
lost on Jacobs and Douglass. The story of Mitchel, therefore, presents an interesting
contrast between the Black and Green Atlantics, but one, I hasten to add, that does not
reflect that contrast accurately. Mitchel, after all, was a well-to-do journalist and
nationalist from Northern Irish Protestant stock, and could not in any way constitute
Famine Irish “bare life.” Mitchel’s trajectory was quite different.
In addition, a distinction can be made between act and statement here. The poor
Irish enact their accession to the US racial state, while Mitchel gets to declare his in
speech and writing, even though there would never have been any doubt that this “Scotch
131
Irish” immigrant was both a legally “white” citizen and a culturally “American” national.
In short, Mitchel does not need to accept slavery to become culturally acceptable, that is,
to be a US national.
22
However, Mitchel clearly identifies with Irish bare life, as the
following passage demonstrates. In his Jail Journal he wrote of his transportation to Van
Dieman’s Land as “utter exsilium…the loss of citizenship, if citizenship I had; the brand
of whatsoever ignominy law can inflict, if law there be…. There are no citizens in
Ireland; there is no citizenship––no law” (15; original emphasis). His recognition of and
strong identification with Irish bare life, then, makes Mitchel’s contrastive
juxtapositionality in terms of the racial state worthy of our interest, especially given his
prominence within Irish nationalist discourse.
John Mitchel and the Racial Contract
When Douglass wrote of his visit to Ireland, “Lo! I breathe and the chattel
becomes the man,” he claimed modern subjectivity in the same country that produced
Mitchel, who in turn, claimed American citizenship through the denial of human rights of
American-born people such as Douglass. How could this paradox be so? The answer is
found in the nature of the state. But it is also found in the cultural sphere that yielded
such men as Dunbar and Mitchel. This cultural sphere was based on skewered
philosophical assumptions that underpinned the racial state on either side of the Atlantic.
In the Racial Contract, Charles W. Mills eviscerates the political, moral, and
epistemological assumptions of modern European thought with surgical precision. He
shows, for example, that for philosophers such as Rousseau and Hobbes, undoubted
132
influences on men such as Dunbar and Mitchel, the “social contract” was derived from
the crucial human metamorphosis from the “state of nature” to “civil society.” In this
schema, the “state of nature” was supposedly the condition of all humans, and the
metamorphosis affected everyone the same way. Mills argues that the “social contract”
upon which Hobbes and Rousseau expounded is, in reality, “the racial contract,” one that
partitioned humanity into “white” and “non-white” men. The “state of nature” has a very
different role in the racial contract. According to Mills:
In the white settler state, its role is not primarily to demarcate the
(temporarily) prepolitical state of “all” men (who are really white men),
but rather the permanently…nonpolitical state…of nonwhite men. The
establishment of society thus implies the denial that a society already
existed; the creation of society requires the intervention of white men,
who are thereby positioned as already sociopolitical beings. White men
who are (definitionally) already part of society encounter non-whites who
are not, who are ‘savage’ residents of a state of nature characterized in
terms of wilderness, jungle, wasteland. These the white men bring
partially into society as subordinate citizens or exclude on reservations or
deny the existence of or exterminate. (13; original emphasis)
In these few sentences, Mills encapsulates the basis of the justificatory discourse for
colonialism, slavery, and manifest destiny, an “enlightened” philosophy that completely
masks the sheer brutality of primitive accumulation. This discourse weaves through the
Mitchel’s writings.
Mitchel was born near Dungiven, County Derry, in 1815. After attending Trinity
College, Dublin, he practiced law in Banbridge, County Down, and he became attracted
to the Young Irelanders’ brand of cultural nationalism. In 1843, he joined the Repeal
Association, an organization set up to challenge the 1800 Act of Union. “As an Ulster
Protestant,” writes Bryan McGovern, “Mitchel’s views reflected the ecumenical
133
nationalism of Young Ireland, as well as the Ulster radicalism that was handed down
from the United Irishmen, mainly Presbyterian nationalists who advocated a union of
Irish people of different faiths” (xii). Mitchel acted against the grain of Irish
Presbyterianism, which had grown increasingly hostile to the Irish nationalist cause.
Mitchel contributed to Young Ireland’s Nation newspaper, and in 1848, as the
Great Famine raged around him, published the United Irishman. The revolutionary
rhetoric of the paper soon drew the attention of the British authorities. The opening lines
of Jail Journal tell the tale: “May 27, 1848. — On this day, about four o’clock in the
afternoon, I, John Mitchel, was kidnapped, and carried off from Dublin, in chains, as a
convicted ‘Felon’” (1). After conviction by a “packed jury” he was turned over to a
Captain Wingrove, who “took a receipt for my body (on which it became the property of
the man in blue)…” (39).
Mitchel’s “kidnapped” claim, and his transformation into a “property” invoke the
bare life experiences of Frederick Douglass, of Olaudah Equiano, whose kidnapping in
Africa and arrival in America in chains is described in his The Interesting Narrative of
Olaudah Equiano (1798), and of every other African kidnapped by slavers. Mitchel,
however, did not have to endure either the brutality of the plantation or the horrors of the
Middle Passage. Far from it. Sentenced to exile, he was transported to Van Diemen’s
Land in a style suitable for someone of his lofty station. He had his own cabin and was
served the same food as the officers of the ship. He was not required to perform manual
labor and was treated with the utmost care by the ship’s physician. Supplied with books
and writing material, Mitchel was allowed to record his thoughts and experiences during
134
his imprisonment. Much to his relief, he was not required to mix with the other felons and
convicts aboard the prison ship. His circuitous journey to the Southern hemisphere took
him on a tour that reflected British imperial reach. As he remarked wittily in Jail Journal,
“on British convict ships, the sun never sets” (191). Stops along the way included
Bermuda, Brazil, South Africa, and Australia. On arrival in Van Diemen’s Land, he was
allowed to send for his family and live in relative freedom in a cottage near the town of
Hobart. He reunited with old Young Ireland comrades also exiled there. These included
William Smith O’Brien, Thomas Francis Meagher, Kevin O’Doherty, Patrick
O’Donoghue, John Martin, and Terence Bellow McManus. All determined to escape
confinement.
Mitchel recorded these events in Jail Journal, including his daring escape on a
series of ships that brought him to San Francisco. On his final leg to California, he
boarded a ship called the Julia Ann. American-owned and -operated, it became for
Mitchel a significant stage in his transition to US citizenship. “I set foot on deck,” he
wrote, “and took off my hat to the Stars and Stripes…. The passengers and crew are all
Americans, and I already feel almost a citizen” (349). His “plantation” statement at New
York’s City Hall appears to have completed a process that began on board an Australia-
bound British prison ship.
Mitchel’s narrative voice in Jail Journal represents, as Lloyd maintains, a process
of reconstruction into a new subjectivity. (Nationalism 49-52) Pivotal is the section
featuring a dialogue between Ego and Doppelganger. The latter, I would argue,
represents Mitchel as American-citizen-in-formation; the former, Mitchel as an obsessed-
135
with-the-failure-of-the-Irish-rebellion persona. Tony Hale asserts that this dialogue
within “the divided subject at the heart of Jail Journal…” hinges “…on issues raised by a
confrontation with slavery”; notably, it occurs well before Mitchel encounters firsthand,
actual slavery in Brazil (202). Hale cites the following excerpt from Ego’s argument with
Doppelganger to make this point:
Nature has its laws. Because the Irish have been taught peaceful agitation
in their slavery, therefore they have been swept by a plague of hunger
worse than many years of bloody fighting. Because they would not fight,
they have been made to rot off the face of the earth, that so they might
learn at last how deadly a sin is patience and perseverance under a
stranger’s yoke. (Jail Journal 88; original emphasis)
In this obvious attack on Daniel O’Connell’s pacifism, which Mitchel held partly
responsible for the Great Famine, Mitchel revealed his belief in the workings of “natural
laws,” and thus the flawed thinking that Mills exposes above. As Hale points out, Mitchel
believed slavery to be “a punishment for those without the will to assert their ‘natural’
rights. Implicitly, chattel slavery is an expression of inferiority in its ‘natural’ form”
(202).
The word “slavery” was commonly used in nineteenth-century Ireland to describe
the plight of the Irish peasantry under British colonialism. In Jail Journal, for example,
Mitchel wrote of Irish Catholics being “deliberately, ostentatiously debarred from
executing the common civic office of jurors in any case of public concernment—that is to
say, that they were not citizens in their own land—that is the say, that they are slaves—
for there is no middle term” (5). This notion of “slavery” was, as Hale puts it, the
“conspicuous opposite of ‘manhood’” (204), and, as applied by Eurocentric ideologues
136
like Mitchel, employed to feminize African Americans and other “non-white”
populations in the United States and elsewhere.
23
Mitchel further differentiated Irish “slavery” from African slavery by transferring
the latter from the domain of moral philosophy to the world of commerce, a world in
which the African slave becomes a dehumanized object of capitalist exchange, a piece of
merchandise. He encountered for the first time what he termed the “merchantable slave”
in the Brazilian port of Pernambuco, where his prison ship had docked for fresh supplies.
At one point during his almost month-long stay in Pernambuco, Mitchel contemplated the
differences between Irish “slaves” and Afro-Brazilian slaves, and found the latter better
off. “These slaves in Brazil are fat and merry, obviously not overworked or underfed, and
it is a pleasure to see the lazy rogues lolling about in their boats, sucking a piece of green
sugar-cane…” (154). As Hale notes, this scene of Mitchel’s simultaneous attraction and
repulsion of Black men has sexual undertones that conjure the work of Eric Lott in Love
and Theft. The condition of the slaves led Mitchel to wonder: “Is it better to be the slave
of a merciful master and a just man, or to be serf to an Irish land appropriator? God
knoweth” (154). Harriet Jacobs had an answer for him. In Incidents she wrote: “I would
ten thousands times rather that my children should be half-starved paupers of Ireland than
to be the most pampered among the slaves of America” (28). Because of his blind
obsession with Ireland’s plight under Nomos Britannicus, Mitchel would have found her
viewpoint impossible to fathom. Nothing compared with Irish suffering as far as he was
concerned. In fairness, this viewpoint must be put in the context of the Famine and the
terrible suffering that Mitchel witnessed firsthand. His description of slaves was often
137
accompanied with the compound adjective “well-fed.” Since slaves constituted properties
who were “cared for” by their owners, their food and shelter provided, as far as he was
concerned, they lived their lives in greater comfort than the famished peasants of Ireland,
whose lives were considered redundant by the British state. Mitchel, unlike Douglass,
confirms the existence of homo sacer in Hibernia. But in the process he denies the homo
sacer status of American slaves. Mitchel condemned the British racial state, but
supported the American racial state. In this he follows closely the logic of his mentor
Thomas Carlyle, who believed slavery better than the soul-less cash nexus that linked
capitalist and wage-earner.
24
In the paragraph immediately following his comparison in Pernambuco, Mitchel
wrote that he detested the sight of the Afro-Brazilian slaves, proclaiming: “If I were a
rich man I would prefer to have my wealth in any other kind of commodity or
investment…” (154). Hale remarks that by discussing the possibility of slave ownership,
even when rejecting the idea, Mitchel reasserts his whiteness as a potential slave master.
Hale further maintains that Mitchel’s earlier comparison of Irish and Black oppression
may have made him uncomfortable. (208) Mitchel’s ambivalence towards the Black
slaves stems both from the debate between his Ego and Doppelganger and from the
contradictory position vis á vis imperialism.
His entry for August 9
th
offers further evidence of these contradictory views:
Let me not omit, after all, to chronicle here the fact that Brazil cannot be
an absolute paradise either for white, black, brown or red. But a few
months have passed by since there was a bloody insurrection of the slaves
in this Pernambuco. And, Dr. Dees tells me, the city bears ample witness
to its violence in wrecked houses and the like. In the other two great cities
of Rio and Bahia, also, there have been formidable insurrections of late. I
138
see no great harm in this: the moment black and brown people are able,
they have a clear right to exchange positions with the Portuguese race.
That is to say if the Portuguese have now any right to hold the others in
slavery at all. (159)
Mitchel thus conceded human agency to the African slaves through his recognition of
their “clear right to exchange positions with the Portuguese race.” But this agency is
granted Black slaves only when they are in opposition to Portuguese imperialism, and not
when considered through the institution of slavery. His notion of anti-imperialism would
undergo further refinement in Jail Journal, and as Niamh Lynch points out, would
become “sharpened and hardened in the context of the great ideological struggle taking
place not in Ireland, but in America” (94). However, Mitchel had yet to endure an
arduous, eighteen-month journey to Van Diemen’s Land, over three-and-a-half years’
exile in the Southern Hemisphere, and a further three months at sea before he set foot in
the United States.
The horrors of the Famine accompanied Mitchel wherever he went. On his prison
ship he estimated that there were nearly 200 Irish Famine victims, “many of them not a
word of English, and most of them so shattered in constitution by mere hunger and
hardship, that all the deaths among the prisoners, ever since we embarked, have been
Irish” (170). Like Douglass in his autobiography, Mitchel was struck by the mournfulness
of the singing from the Irish peasants down below in the belly of the ship. (171) He
described the Famine Irish prisoners:
They were born, these men, to a heritage of unquenched hunger, amongst
the teeming plenty of their motherland––hunted like noxious beasts from
all shelter on her hospitable bosom––driven to stay their gnawing enemy
with what certain respectable fed men call their “property.” And so they
139
are traversing the deep under bayonet-points, to be shot out like rubbish on
a bare foreign strand… (170-71)
Again Mitchel describes eloquently the bare life status of the Irish peasantry, and in so
doing explicates one method that the British state used to dispose of them: exile to
Australia, for stealing food to feed themselves and their families. His recognition of Irish
bare life status blinded him from other possibilities.
Until his escape, his time spent in Australia was largely uneventful. He recorded
in Jail Journal that he and his family lived in a cottage near Hobart, and that he was
allowed to travel in the immediate vicinity without hindrance. He associated with other
Young Ireland exiles without too much trouble, and when an escape plan was hatched, it
was relatively easy to organize. A support team arrived from the United States to assist in
the arrangements, and the escape successfully executed. A new life awaited Mitchel in
America.
Mitchel the United States Citizen
On Sunday morning October 16, 1853, the forty-fourth edition of the San
Francisco weekly, The Golden Era, announced the arrival of an unusual family of
celebrities, in a brief report tucked among its thickly inked columns: “John Mitchell [sic],
the Irish patriot, with his family, arrived in this city on Wednesday last in the Julia Ann
from Australia. He had previously escaped to Tahiti, and was brought from that place by
the Julia Ann, on board of which were his wife and children, who had embarked in the
vessel at Melbourne. Welcome to the noble Mitchell.”
25
Welcomed the Mitchels certainly
were. According to Jail Journal, the family spent around three weeks in California being
140
wined and dined by members of the Bay Area Irish community as well as prominent
politicians, from San Francisco to San Jose. He was reunited with old comrades such as
Terence Bellew McManus, and feted by the Governor of California John Bigler. (350;
McGovern 94) His California sojourn passed without the controversy that would
surround him shortly after his arrival on the East Coast. To get to there, the Mitchels
shipped out of San Francisco on November 1 for a journey that would take them through
Nicaragua and Cuba, countries beheld by the lustful gaze of American colonialism.
After their arrival at San Juan del Sur, the party travelled fifteen miles by mule to
Lake Nicaragua, where they caught a steamer for the ninety-mile journey across the lake
to the mouth of the San Juan River. They boarded another steamer and floated down the
San Juan to the port of Greytown, where they awaited their ship to New York, the
Prometheus. The British had seized the city in 1848, and were locked in a struggle with
the Americans for control of the Nicaraguan coastline. (350-52; McGovern 94) Mitchel
leaves his readers in no doubt which imperial power he supports in this dispute, all the
while revealing his disdain for the indigenous people: “In the meantime, to maintain a
foothold on the soil of Central America, the Downing Street men keep up the
protectorate, and, as if to mock American Republicanism, they insist on a poor, diseased,
abject, drunken, idiot Indian, being called his majesty the king” (352).
Mitchel recorded a revealing conversation with a fellow passenger, an American,
on the merits of American claims on Cuba. When he asked whether the Americans had a
right to Cuba, the American replied: “No; but the Cubans have a right to Cuba, even as
the Irish have the right to Ireland; and Spain holds it against the rightful owners with a
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monstrous garrison, as England holds Ireland against you. Would a filibuster expedition
of Americans to Ireland, to aid you and your friends in driving out the British, appear to
you as an act of piracy and robbery?” (353-54). But the same American passenger,
shortly after claiming he supported a “Cuba for the Cubans,” remarked that Havana was
“a beauteous and stately city, destined to become the Southern center of American
commerce, as New York is the northern” (354).
Both Mitchel and his American friend commented on the bravery of an American
named Crittenden, a filibuster executed by the Spanish for his part in an invasion of Cuba
in 1851. The Crittenden in question was Colonel William Crittenden, who led a party of
American filibusters in a raid organized by Narciso López, who himself was captured and
executed at the same time. In exile in the United States, López had befriended politicians
such as John L. Sullivan, the man who coined the term “Manifest Destiny,” and he had
cultivated the support of many Southern political figures. López, a strong supporter of
slavery, hoped that with American help he could “liberate” Cuba, and incorporate it into
the United States as a slave state, hence strengthening the Southern slave state cause.
Mitchel makes no mention of these facts in his journal.
26
Another indication of Mitchel’s changing view on imperialism appears in his
conversation onboard the Prometheus with fellow-Irishman P. J. Smyth, one of the
American-based Young Irelanders who had travelled to Australia to help orchestrate
Mitchel’s escape. Smyth had spent the past five years in the United States and had
become “a thorough American” according to Mitchel. (358) While they journeyed
through Nicaragua together, Smyth, whom Mitchel nicknamed “Nicaragua” because he
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had spent time there agitating for war between the United States and Britain over control
of Central America, “gazed curiously and keenly at whatsoever was visible, with a view
to future American colonization, so as to make it and its facilities of traffic a sure and
inexpugnable possession of the American Republic for ever more” (358). Mitchel
recalled approvingly that Smyth proposed that once the US took control of Nicaragua,
they should sell the British-installed king, the “drunken, diseased Sambo,” to a sugar
planter, “who would give him his proper work to do” (ibid.). Undoubtedly, the fact that
the United States opposed British imperialist plans greatly enamored Mitchel to the
American colonial cause; Mitchel supported anything that was anti-British. But by the
time the Prometheus left Havana for New York, it was clear that the American brand of
imperialism had become more than acceptable to him. The following entry in Jail
Journal confirms this. Writing on the palace of the Captain-General, the center of
Spanish colonial power in Havana: “There I stood awhile, and looked up at the palace
with horror and hatred, as at another Dublin Castle” (361). While his opposition to British
imperialism never wavered, his support of American imperialism grew the nearer he got
to the United States. Jail Journal ends shortly after the Prometheus docked in New York.
Mitchel received a hero’s welcome in New York, from both the Irish community
and prominent politicians, just as he did in California. The pages of the New York Daily
Times confirm this. The paper reported excitedly on Mitchel’s immanent arrival on
November 28, and the following day, as if to stoke the passionate flames of the waiting
masses, devoted almost its entire first page to a report on a dinner held in Mitchel’s honor
in San Francisco and first reported in the San Francisco Herald on November 1.
27
143
Gotham City always loved a hero and Mitchel seemed to fit the bill. With admirable
speed, he established his own newspaper, the Citizen, launched with great fanfare on
January 7, 1854, just a few weeks following his arrival in New York. The New York
Tribune opined: “John Mitchel’s new paper appears this morning—a handsome well-
filled weekly of sixteen large pages. Of the spirit and vigor wherewith the Editor enters
upon his work…”
28
However, he did not waste time changing his heroic image in the
eyes of certain people. By the second edition of the Citizen, published on January 14, he
wrote the words that so inflamed Jacobs and other abolitionists. Addressing a letter to
Dublin Quaker and abolitionist James Haughton, from whom he received a letter
criticizing his position on slavery, Mitchel wrote: “‘By your silence,’ says Mr. Haughton,
‘you will become a participant in their wrongs.’ But we will not be silent, when occasion
calls for speech; and as far as being a participant in the wrongs, we for our part, wish we
had a good plantation well-stocked with healthy negroes in Alabama. There now––is Mr.
Haughton content?”
29
Reprinted in several New York newspapers and in publications
throughout the United States, the letter caused the uproar that Mitchel intended. A series
of letters appeared in newspapers both North and South, either in support of or
vehemently against his vitriol. Mitchel’s target was the abolitionist movement on both
sides of the Atlantic. He decreed it to be hypocritical and pro-British, and the abolitionists
took the bait. Henry Ward Beecher led the charge in a scathing article in his Independent
newspaper. Beecher pointed out the contradictory positions of Mitchel, who on the one
hand advocated Irish freedom, while on the other Black slavery. Newspapers reprinted it,
no doubt eagerly anticipating Mitchel’s response, which came in the next issue of the
144
Citizen. The New York Daily Tribune in turn, reprinted that in full on January 26.
30
The
Freeman’s Journal also weighed in: “If the concern of the true friends of liberty does not
disturb the mind of Mr. Mitchel, he may, perhaps, doubt the correctness of his views of
slavery when he finds them endorsed by the unscrupulous supporters of despotism.”
31
Beecher and Mitchel exchanged several more letters as part of their widely publicized
feud, neither side able to convince the other of the folly of his argument. After a year,
Mitchel had had enough of New York so he moved to Tennessee, starting a newspaper,
the Southern Citizen, in October 1857. In it he compared “the oppression of the Irish by
British with that of the South by the North” (McGovern 156). It was also fiercely pro-
slavery and pro-Confederate States. Mitchel’s main aim with the paper was to convince
Southerners that Britain was as much their enemy as the Yankee North. He had limited
success in that regard. In an effort to increase influence, he moved the paper to
Washington DC, publishing the first edition there on December 4, 1858. Southern
Congressmen and Irish American politicians alike regularly frequented his home near the
Capitol. (164-65) Mitchel was in Paris when the Civil War erupted. Two of his sons
enlisted in the Confederate Army, a third joined up later; two would die for the cause, the
other seriously wounded. Mitchel returned to New York and then managed to sneak back
South without being arrested. He worked for the Richmond Enquirer, an organ of the
Jefferson Davis administration, but in late 1863 he switched to the Richmond Examiner,
an anti-Davis publication. (176, 178) The ending of the War in 1865 left Mitchel without
an income. He made an ill-advised return north and took a position as editor of the New
York Daily News, a pro-Confederacy organ. The Daily Times, and the Evening Post
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among other newspapers, called for his arrest and on June 14, 1865 he was taken into
custody on the orders of Ulysses S. Grant, for aiding the Confederate rebellion. He was
held for several months in a cell next to Jefferson Davis at Fort Monroe, in Virginia but
was released without charge after his health deteriorated. For the last ten years of his life,
he concentrated his political energies solely on Ireland’s liberation. (185-86) He moved
to Paris to become a financial agent to the Fenian Brotherhood but soon became
disillusioned with the internal bickering and returned to the US. (xvi) He started his third
Irish American publication, the Irish Citizen, in New York in October 1867; it folded in
July 1872. (201, 216) In 1875, he returned to Ireland after a quarter of a century in exile,
was elected M.P. for Tipperary, denied his seat by the British Parliament because he was
a convicted felon. Nevertheless, he won the ensuing by-election by a wider margin than
in his original election, only to die before this electoral crisis reached fruition. (209)
Although there have been at least nine books written on Mitchel,
32
McGovern’s
2009 work, John Mitchel: Irish Nationalist, Southern Secessionist, is the first major
biography in nearly sixty years, and the only one to give serious attention to Mitchel’s
time in the United States. While his explanation of Mitchel’s support for slavery falls
short because he does not take into account the racialism inherent in the European
philosophy upon which Mitchel’s beliefs relied, nevertheless, McGovern’s assessment of
Mitchel’s impact upon Irish America is worth quoting at length here:
As a publisher of several expatriate newspapers, Mitchel was able to echo the
sentiments of his audience, and perhaps more important, shape the prevailing
attitudes of Irish Americans attempting to adjust to a hostile society. He was able
to articulate a motif of exile by blaming the British Empire for the emigration of
the Irish people to the United States….While in America, Mitchel was able to
help expatriates adjust to their new home by providing them hope that they could
146
achieve individual success in the United States and also abet the creation of an
independent Irish republic. Thus, John Mitchel’s primary accomplishment as an
emigrant was that he aided Irish Americans in the formation of their own cultural
identity within the context of an alien society. (xi)
Interestingly, as a Protestant himself, though one who identified with the “poor Irish,” if
only abstractly, he stood as a mediator of American ideas of good subjecthood for
Catholic Irish immigrants. However, in doing so, he incurred the wrath of the self-styled
leader of Irish Catholicism in America––John Hughes. Hughes resented Mitchel’s
interference in what he considered his political and cultural terrain, especially since, as a
Protestant, he acted beyond the Archbishop’s control.
IV. The Life and Times of Dagger John
John Hughes, the most influential individual behind the Americanization of the
Irish during the nineteenth century, was New York’s the first Roman Catholic
Archbishop. Born in 1797 in the townland of Annaloghan, in the diocese of Clogher,
County Tyrone, Hughes crossed the Atlantic in 1817 to join his father and a brother
already in the United States. His mother, Margaret, and the rest of the family emigrated
the following year. Although an undereducated laborer, he managed to gain entry into a
seminary in Maryland and was ordained a priest in 1826. His illustrious career coincided
with the most critical period in the history of the Roman Catholic Church in the United
States, as Catholics sought to cement their place within state structures, despite virulent,
nativist Protestant opposition. He was given the moniker “Dagger John” by his nativist
enemies ostensibly because of his Episcopal signature, “† John,” but more because it
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represented a backhanded complement inspired by Hughes’s combativeness. Hughes
became the internationally recognized leader of the US Church in its battle for the
recognition of Catholics as “patriotic Americans.” As he rose to prominence, he realigned
his views on slavery to conform to the strictures of the US racial state. Furthermore, as
the Famine Irish arrived in droves into the United States, Hughes strove to discipline
them, and engender in them absolute loyalty to both the Roman Catholic Church and the
US state. To achieve this, he argued persistently for a place for Catholicism in the
unfolding originary narrative of Nomos Americanus. The Archbishop achieved
extraordinary success in all of these objectives.
The Early Years
Hughes came from a large, close-knit family teetering on the brink of poverty. His
father, Patrick, a tenant farmer, appears to have eschewed politics.
33
John, though, was
well aware of the injustices of the Penal Laws and other repressive anti-Irish Catholic
measures of the British colonial state. They invoked an anger in him that would remain
for years to come. “They told me, when I was a boy,” he wrote in 1861, “that for five
days I was on a social and civil equality with the most favored subjects of the British
Empire. These five days would be the interval between my birth and my baptism. The
early information of this fact…left a sting in my memory that has cost me much to
remove” (qtd. in Hassard 18).
The devoutly Catholic Hughes family lived in possibly one of the least devout
Catholic dioceses in Ireland. According to Emmet Larkin, in 1800, there were 3,200
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parishioners for every priest in the Clogher Diocese, the second-highest ratio on the
island. (“Before” 22) Disciplining the Catholic population, therefore, must have been
difficult for the understaffed Church officials in the area. Given the history of British
suppression of Irish Catholic religious practice, the shortage of priests, and the general
scarcity of Church buildings, it is little wonder that Clogher remained a stronghold for
old Gaelic customs at the time of John’s birth. The Gaelic language was still spoken in
large parts of the county and the widespread exercise of generally raucous, Gaelic
customs thrived in the diocese, as confirmed by the writings, both fictional and non-
fictional, of William Carleton, (1794-1869) another native of Clogher and contemporary
of Hughes.
34
Of course, the old Gaelic customs were anathema to the Tridentine practice of the
Catholic Church in the rest of Europe. As noted in the previous chapter, it was not until
the Great Famine and the subsequent devastation to both the population and the Gaelic
language and customs, that Catholic Church authorities were able to take firm control of
their Irish flock and eradicate, (although not completely,) these older, non-Christian,
rituals, usually evident at weddings, wakes, and various other social gatherings. Hughes
barely mentioned these rituals and customs in his writings, even though they must have
flourished all around him in his native County Tyrone.
35
The Catholic Church in North America at the turn of the nineteenth century could
be best described as a frontier church dominated by French missionary priests in the East
and North and Spanish priests in the Far West. Both Spanish and French missionaries
operated in parts of the South. It was in disarray organizationally, to the point where “the
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United States Catholics …[were] oftentimes dependent on the wandering friars and
unconnected clerics who had left Europe to seek their fortunes” (Shaw 205). The swath
of land situated between these two forces of Catholicism constituted the frontier, and
home to tribes of Native Americans, so-called “heathens” ripe for conversion to the
Catholic doctrine. The disciples of the doctrine called Manifest Destiny had their own
plans that embraced the extermination of Native tribes and the theft of their lands. The
slaughter and theft continued well into the nineteenth century to the point where few
Native people remained alive for missionaries to convert.
The numbers of teeming masses arriving from Europe to the Eastern and later, the
Western seaboards, surged during this period, presenting the American Catholic Church
with followers that it seemed ill-equipped to lead. As in Ireland, a lack of priests and
Church buildings made disciplining the flock difficult. When these factors were
combined with the cultural barriers separating the American Church leadership and the
mainly Irish Catholic immigrant population––in particular the tendency of French
bishops to recruit French priests, irrespective of the ethnic make-up of any particular
congregation–– Church growth was stymied. Rome, not entirely blind to the problem,
appointed Irish-born John Connolly as New York’s first resident bishop in 1815.
36
Yet
the growing pains continued. In a letter to the Vatican dated February 26, 1818, Bishop
Connolly warned: “If bishops continued to prefer priests from the continent to those of
Ireland it will harm the Church…. The Catholic population consists mainly of Irishmen;
they build churches and expect priests who understand them” (qtd. in Shaw 17).
Fortunately for the Church, the waves of Irish immigrants arriving in the United States
150
during this time included young men and women eager to serve the Catholic cause.
Among them, of course, was one John Hughes.
As his parents struggled economically in Ireland, John had to leave school early to
become a gardener and help support his family. Migration to the United States seemed
the best solution to their problems. He continued at manual jobs in America. When the
young laborer found work in a convent, he befriended its founder Mother Elizabeth Seton
who recommended him for entry into the seminary at Mount St. Mary’s at Emmitsburg,
Maryland. The Rector of Mount St. Mary’s, Fr. Dubois, not impressed by Hughes’s lowly
laborer status and insufficient education, but not wishing to upset Mother Seton, allowed
Hughes to work as a gardener and overseer of the seminary’s slaves,
37
in return for
occasional tutoring. (22) Undoubtedly Hughes disliked his position as overseer and wrote
“a long, bitter (and badly composed) poem on the shamefulness of black slavery” (22-
23). The opening verse below gives the flavor of Hughes’s creation:
Hard is the lot of him who’s doomed to toil,
Without one slender hope to soothe his pain,
Whose sweat and labor are a master’s spoil,
Whose sad reward a master’s proud disdain.
Wipe from thy code, Columbia, wipe the stain;
Be free as air, but yet be kind as free,
And chase foul bondage from thy Southern plain:
If such the right of man, by heaven’s decree,
Oh let Afric’s sons feel what it is—to be. (Qtd. in Hassard 42)
As even his adoring biographer, his former aide Father Hassard noted: “Those acquainted
with the political sentiments of the archbishop in the prime and evening of his life will
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hardly be prepared” for this poem (42). The saliency of this statement will be examined
shortly.
Young Hughes must have kept his anti-slavery views from Father Dubois, for the
rector admitted him to the seminary full-time in the Fall of 1820. Only then did Hughes
pen the above poem “The Slave,” and publish it in a Gettysburg weekly under a
pseudonym.
38
Ordained a deacon in 1825, the 28-year-old began to divide his time
between Mount St. Mary’s and his appointed parish in Philadelphia. There he
encountered a problem that would shape the core foundations of his strict beliefs—the
suppression of trusteeism.
Disciplining the Flock
In his letter to the Vatican cited above, Bishop Connolly wrote: “Here no church,
Catholic or Protestant can possess temporal goods nor income in its name. If it is built by
public money the congregation must yearly elect trustees to administer the property and
priests as such have no right to interfere with this property” (qtd. in Shaw 27). Connolly
wanted guidance but it was not forthcoming. Rome seemed unsure as to how to handle
the constitutional politics of the fledgling United States, and having more pressing
matters in Europe to contend with, left the American Church to fend for itself. The
Vatican added to the problems by neglecting to fill vacancies in senior positions, for
example, They failed to appoint a bishop for the Philadelphia diocese for six years
following the death of its first bishop in 1814. (Shaw 27) This lack of direction and
leadership in the American Catholic Church created a vacuum into which flowed the
152
subversive idea that the lay congregation––through its representatives, the trustees––
could play a major role in the running of the Catholic parishes. Hierarchical power and
people power were about to collide.
The conflict arose first in Philadelphia in 1820, five years before Hughes arrived
there. At its center was a certain renegade priest, Father William Hogan.
39
Suspended
from the priesthood in Dublin, Hogan managed to conceal his past in the United States,
and with his dapper dress and sparkling personality, impressed the trustees of
Philadelphia’s most prestigious Catholic Church, St. Mary’s, who duly appointed him
their deacon. His apparently secular lifestyle, however, appalled another Irish immigrant,
the newly appointed Bishop of Philadelphia, the cantankerous Doctor Henry Conwell. He
ordered Hogan to reform his ways. The indignant pastor refused to do so and as a result,
was suspended, and eventually excommunicated. (Shaw 29) The trustees of St. Mary’s
sided with Hogan against the authoritarian Conwell, and set in motion a battle between
Church authority and trustee power that would rage for years. It would define the
administrative separation of church and state, while simultaneously forging an
ideological unity between the two. Hughes would become the main architect of this
movement.
Later on in life, as he reflected upon the spiritual life of his early years, Hughes’
major complaint against the Irish Catholic Church of his youth was that it lacked
effective leadership. (Shaw 15) Perhaps this is not surprising given that the belief in
strong leadership constituted Hughes’ guiding principle. Throughout his Church career,
from his tenure as a low-ranking priest in Philadelphia to his position as Archbishop of
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New York, he remained a committed ultramontanist, an ardent believer papal authority
and the hierarchical chain-of-command structure of the Catholic Church.
40
He displayed
these beliefs as soon as he arrived in Philadelphia where the battle between the trustees
and the bishop was in full throttle. Appalled at the lack of respect afforded Conwell,
Hughes supported his bishop in the dispute assiduously. By this time Hogan had left
Philadelphia, his role assumed by Father William Vincent Harold, also from Ireland. The
ambitious Harold, aided by his sidekick, the Irish-born Father John Ryan, saw Conwell as
an impediment to his quest for power, so attempted to use the trustee issue at St. Mary’s
to his advantage. However, by 1828, the Congregation of the Propaganda at the Vatican,
the body responsible for American church affairs, had had enough of both the crotchety
Conwell and the scheming Harold; they ordered the former to Rome and the latter to
Cincinnati. (50) Conwell reluctantly obeyed his superiors but Harold did not. Instead, he
wrote to Cardinal Cappellari of the Propaganda to argue that the order to remove him to
Cincinnati constituted a “sentence of removal which no foreign prince is allowed to pass
on an American citizen…. We could not obey without violating the loyalty we have
sworn to the Republic” (qtd. in Shaw 51). On July 2, 1828, he wrote to the then US
Secretary of State Henry Clay, asking for US state protection against the Court of Rome.
The anti-Catholic President John Quincy Adams expressed great sympathy for the Harold
cause; the legal position of the Catholic Church authority teetered precariously. Urgent
talks took place in Paris between the American minister to France, James Brown, and the
French papal nuncio, Monsignor Luigi Lambruschini. The Italian shrewdly argued that
the Church held no civil power over Harold and his cohort Ryan. They were free to leave
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the Church at any time. However, if they wished to remain within the fold then they were
expected to obey orders just like any other employee in the United States. (Shaw 52-53)
Lambruscini’s argument not only aligned Church disciplinary structures with the
disciplinary structures of capitalism, it invoked the First Amendment of the US Bill of
Rights. Secretary of State Clay and the rest of the US political elite found the argument
impossible to resist, and an important precedent was established in Roman Catholic
Church-US state relations––the separation of their respective powers. Indeed, John
Hughes saw the legal separation of church and state as essential to the future of the
Catholic Church in the United States. The First Amendment, Hughes argued, contradicted
nativist claims that the United States was a Protestant country, and he would return to this
theme many times during his career.
Crucially, Hughes recognized that if Catholicism was to survive in this nation-in-
formation, an ideological unity between the Catholic Church and the US State was
crucial. Loyalty to the Church had to be accompanied by loyalty to the state. The Church
had to be not only compatible with, but also fully supportive of state apparatuses. Hence
he devised a multilayered strategy. He set about cultivating influence among the power
elite in order to change their negative views of Catholicism. An influential nativist
fraction saw Catholicism as being not only atavistic, and anti-modern, and therefore anti-
American, but an organization whose transnationalism represented an impediment to the
national narrative they were composing. They saw it also as a security threat since its
practitioners as subjects to a foreign power in the form of the Pope, temporal leader of the
Papal States. Catholics could not be loyal to both the Pope and the US nation state, they
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argued. Hughes’ task was to dispel all such fears. At the same time, he had to exercise
full control over the Catholic laity by solidifying the Church’s hierarchy. Trusteeism,
with its dangerous democratic notions, threatened the Church’s autocratic structure and
had to be crushed. Simultaneously though, he had to achieve what had not been achieved
anywhere in the world up to that point; to align Catholic political ideology with that of
the liberal democratic state. Hughes, in short, had to promote the ideals of liberal
democracy outside the Church doors, while denying it within. Perhaps no other cleric in
America was better suited for this tricky task.
Rome appointed him as a coadjutor bishop in 1838, to assist the man who
succeeded John Connolly as Bishop of New York, the ailing Bishop Dubois. The
Frenchman’s aloofness had gained him many enemies among New York’s Catholics.
(Shaw 115-18) Hughes himself had an uneasy relationship with his former rector, but, as
he did with Bishop Conwell, he remained loyal to his superior and the chain-of-command
structure throughout his tenure as coadjutor bishop, even as Dubois’s health deteriorated
further.
Initially, Hughes’s appointment proved unpopular among the Catholic clergy and
some of the laity of the New York diocese. It wasn’t personal. He had established a good
name among America’s Catholics as ardent defender of the faith, but nevertheless
Catholic New Yorkers viewed him as an outsider from Philadelphia. Most of the clergy
had favored the appointment of yet another Irishman, the popular John Power, Vicar
General of New York, and “a mutinous foe of John Dubois” (Shaw 107). However,
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Dubois would never have agreed to this appointment. Hughes was a much better option
as far as the hierarchy was concerned.
As he did in Philadelphia, Hughes arrived in town in the middle of a dispute
involving trustee power. It began with a firing of a teacher at the cathedral’s Sunday
school. The teacher had been hired by Dubois, but fired by Father Thomas Levins, an
Irish priest whom had been suspended earlier by Dubois for insubordination. To make
matters worse, Levins called in the police to remove the teacher after he refused to leave
the school. The cathedral trustees infuriated Hughes by backing Levins over Dubois. To
Hughes, Levins not only tried to subvert the sacred chain of command, but dared to
involve state forces in Church affairs. The bishop set about teaching all those involved
some lessons of his own. At Masses the following Sunday he demanded an apology from
the trustees but no apology came. He then called a meeting attended by between 500 and
700 people. Knowing his audience better than his foes, Hughes appealed to them on the
grounds of their mutual Irishness, their shared history of oppression at the hands of
English Protestantism. He equated the actions of the trustees with English oppression,
only it was worse. If the audience sided with the trustees then, he said: “What Protestant
England could never accomplish they were now willing to do to themselves” (qtd. in
130). Having stirred up Irish nationalist feelings as well as any skilled demagogue, for a
finale, he offered up a series of resolutions that supported the bishop’s authority, the most
significant of which is worth quoting here in full:
Resolved, that we know no difference between the authority of the Holy Church
and that authority with which she has invested her bishops, for carrying on her
mission and for our spiritual good; and that we hold it as unworthy of our
profession as Roman Catholics to oppose ourselves or to suffer any one in our
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name to oppose any let, obstacle, or hindrance––no matter how legal such act
may be––which would hinder or prevent our bishop from the full, free, and entire
exercise of the rights, powers, and duties which God has appointed as inherent in
his office, and the Church authorized him to preserve, exercise and fulfil [sic].
(Qtd. in Hassard 195; my emphasis.)
The resolution was passed without any voiced dissent, and in one fell swoop, Hughes
achieved a remarkable number of things. He firmly established his authority, paving the
way for a return of total hierarchical power; he publicly proved his loyalty to Dubois,
earning him his complete confidence; he emphatically crushed trustee power within the
Church to the point where it would never again present a serious or sustained challenge to
the hierarchy; he vanquished nearly all his foes and rivals within the Diocese in one go;
he established an immediate, strong rapport with his New York Irish congregation, who
for the first time, saw a bishop made in the same mold as themselves; he impressed the
powers in Rome; but, most significant of all, he established within the Church hierarchal
authority of the over civil authority, as the catch-all clause “no matter how legal such an
act may be,” implies. Catholic New York was in Hughes’s pocket.
The Schools Question: Hughes Leads the Way
Public education in the early nineteenth century was very much a Protestant
affair. Government textbooks abounded with anti-Catholic rhetoric, and Protestant
teachers often engaged in the proselytizing of their Catholic students. As a result, many
Irish Catholic immigrant parents withheld their children from school. Incensed at this
situation, Hughes led a campaign to have such sectarian practice removed from the State
of New York’s school curriculum and demanded that Catholics be given access to public
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funds so that they could educate their children themselves. The development of the
American parochial school system is in large part a result of Hughes’s work.
41
In the
course of this campaign he befriended members of the American political elite including
Thurlow Weed, the influential Whig and later, Republican Party member, and William
Seward, Governor of New York, and later, US Senator, Presidential candidate, and
Secretary of State under both Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnston. Weed and Seward
supported Hughes campaign but were unable to deliver the support of the Whig Party.
The Democrats balked at supporting the Catholic cause also––opposition from Protestant
nativists proved too fierce for them. To the nativists, Hughes’ campaign represented the
un-American desires of ungrateful recent Irish immigrants. Yet Hughes persisted and in
an astonishing move, organized a slate of candidates who favored his policies for the
November 1841 elections. (Hamburger 219-229) He presented the slate at a meeting in
the Carroll Hall, New York City, on October 29. In a typically rousing speech, Hughes
told the crowd:
You now, for the first time, find yourselves in a position to at least vote for
yourselves. …Will you then stand by the rights of your offspring, who have for so
long a period, from generation to generation, suffered under the operation of this
injurious system? [Renewed Cheering.] Will you adhere to the nomination made?
[Loud cries of “we will,” “we will,” and vociferous applause.] Will you be
united? [Tremendous cheering––the whole immense assembly rising en masse,
waving of hats, handkerchiefs, and every possible demonstration of applause.]
Will you let all men see that you are worthy sons of the nation to which you
belong? [Cries of “Never fear––we will!” “We will to death!” and terrific
cheering.] Will you prove yourself worthy of friends? [Tremendous cheering.]
Will none of you flinch? [The scene that followed this emphatic query is
indescribable, and exceeding all the enthusiastic, and almost frenzied displays of
passionate feeling we have sometimes witnessed at Irish meetings. The cheering–
–the shouting––the stamping of feet––waving of hats and handkerchiefs beggared
all powers of description.] Very well then, the tickets will be prepared and
distributed among you, and on the day of the election go like freemen, with
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dignity and calmness, entertaining due respect for your fellow-citizens and their
opinions, and deposit your votes. (Hughes, Collected Works 1: 283)
This somewhat lengthy excerpt above reveals at least two significant points. First, the
speech represents the first real attempt at organizing the Irish as a unified voting block in
the United States. Up until then, the Democratic Party had taken the Irish vote for
granted, but in 1841 election in New York City, only those Democratic candidates on
Hughes’s “Carroll Hall” slate were elected, those not on it, failed. Realizing their
mistake, the Democrats in Albany quickly changed course and successfully curbed the
power of Protestant “Public School Society.” The event, widely reported in Europe and
throughout the United States, constituted a massive victory for Hughes. It earned him the
enmity of America’s restless nativists, but it also cemented his support among Irish
Americans. As Shaw observes, “The hyphenated American was not yet a great force to be
reckoned with in United States politics, but during 1841 John Hughes had done much to
teach them that they were not merely a conglomeration of votes, but a unified voice as
well” (169).
The excerpt above is useful for another reason: the reporter’s commentary
interspersed throughout the text offers an excellent firsthand view of the cleric’s
oratorical power, and its effects upon his audience. We can see for example, how Hughes
used his carefully constructed question-and-answer routine to its full effect here, building
it to a frenzied climax as skillfully as any demagogue. One can assume from the
comments that the reporter was a seasoned veteran of Irish political meetings, yet he had
never witnessed anything like this display of oratorical skill nor the frantic response it
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solicited. In a few short years Hughes would put these skills to great use when the largest
ever wave of immigrants to the United States, the Famine Irish, began coming ashore.
The Catholic Church and the Military Apparatus
If the nativist element within the ruling elite of the US state saw Catholic Church as a
threat to ideals of Americanism, other elements saw it as a boon to the state. The Mexican
War brought the collision of these elements to the fore. Fissures appeared two years
before the hostilities commenced when an army lieutenant named O’Brien was court-
martialed for refusing to lead his soldiers in Protestant prayer. (Shaw 213) Since Catholic
chaplains were forbidden in the US Army at the time, tensions among the Catholic
members in the ranks rose considerably by the time the Mexican War commenced in the
spring of 1846. Nativists had long railed against the priest-ridden nation to the South, and
the rhetoric only increased as the war began. They feared that the conquest of Mexico
would flood the Union with hordes of Papists, dark-skinned Papists at that. Their fear was
compounded by the increasing presence of Irish Catholics in the US Army. How could
these Irish be trusted to attack their co-religionists on the Mexican side? These fears were
not without some foundation. Discontent among the Irish in the US Army during the
conflict raged, and an estimated 1,000 Irishmen deserted during the period. (Stevens 3)
Approximately 120 of these joined forces with the Mexican Army to form the San
Patricio Battalion, a reputedly brave and effective group of combatants.
42
The US state had a Catholic problem that required careful consideration. On the
one hand, the strong nativist element within the ruling elite needed to be appeased. On
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the other hand the state needed bodies to fill army ranks. In such a situation, Poulantzas
has argued in Political Power and Social Classes, the long-term needs of the state trump
any one particular faction of its ruling power bloc. The US racial state needed Irish
Catholics not just for the Mexican War effort, but, as this dissertation shows, for its very
survival as a “white republic.”
43
President James K. Polk, “a practical-minded businessman” (Shaw 216) moved to
solve the fractional fight. He instructed Secretary of State James Buchanan to invite a
Catholic bishop to Washington for talks. Buchanan chose, not Archbishop Eccleston, the
official head of the Catholic Church in the United States, but Bishop Hughes, the leader
of the Catholics in the public domain. Hughes, accompanied by Bishop Loras of
Dubuque, listened at the State Department as Buchanan asked if the Church would be
willing to supply priests as army chaplains in the event of the ban on Catholic chaplains
being lifted? The bishops eagerly agreed to do so, despite the fact that the chaplains
would not be accorded “official” status. Here was an ideal opportunity to provide for the
spiritual needs of Church members in the army, while simultaneously catering to the
Church’s political needs. Keen to prove their fealty to the state, the two churchmen sped
to Georgetown to recruit Jesuits for the job.
President Polk subsequently invited Hughes to the White House and asked him to
journey to Mexico as his personal envoy in order to reassure the Mexicans that following
an American victory, all occupying US Army units would respect Mexican religious
institutions. Hughes agreed to do so, but later reconsidered, uncomfortable with an
“unofficial” envoy status. However, he maintained a cordial relationship with Polk,
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impressed no doubt at how the President steadfastly endured bitter nativist wrath when
news of their meetings leaked out. (216-19) Nativists could fume all they wanted for all
Hughes cared. He could look back with satisfaction on his meetings in Washington as
positive signs that Catholics were gaining ground in the patriotic stakes.
Further encouraging news came in November 1847 when the US announced it
would be establishing a legation to the papal court of the newly elected pope, the
“liberal” Pius IX. (239) The new pope’s efforts to establish civil and religious liberty
throughout the Papal States proved to be extremely popular among America’s Protestant
elite. (Pius IX would not hold the “liberal” tag for long.)
Hughes received extraordinary invitations. First, he was invited as the guest
speaker at the annual dinner commemorating the Pilgrims’ landing. (240) Then in
December he received an even bigger stamp of approval from the American
establishment when he was invited to sermonize in the House of Representatives. There,
before the state’s leaders––such staunch Protestants as John Quincy Adams, Stephen
Douglas, John Calhoun, and Lewis Cass––he preached bland ecumenicalism. (249)
Entitled “Christianity The Only Source of Moral, Social, and Political Regeneration,” his
sermon assiduously avoided controversy and accordingly struck the perfect tone.
44
He
had proved himself to be as good a politician as any that sat before him.
Increasingly, Hughes was seen not only as the personification of the Catholic
Church in America, but also as the ideal template for the Irish-Catholic-as-loyal-US-
citizen. Following his triumph in Congress, a succession of Presidents and US Secretaries
of State invited him regularly for consultations. His fame spread. On trips to Europe, he
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met with various heads of state and members of the European aristocracy, leading
intellectuals, and of course, all of the Vatican’s leading luminaries.
While most of his transatlantic journeys were on Church business, one in
particular, was on behalf of the state. When the Civil War broke out, President Lincoln
asked him to pay an unofficial visit to France while his friend, Thurlow Weed journeyed
to England. The object was to counteract the effects of a possible visit of Southern States
emissaries, John Slidell and James Mason, who had recently eluded a Union blockade
and reportedly were on their way to Europe to muster support for their cause. Lincoln
framed his request as a special personal favor and Hughes accepted immediately. Shortly
thereafter, he set sail across the Atlantic with Weed and his personal entourage of a
secretary and a manuensis. (Hassard 448-49) The mission itself was of limited success,
but Hughes saw the immense value of his diplomatic foray. In a letter to Cardinal
Bernabo, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Propaganda, he wrote:
The Government at Washington were pleased to think that, in requesting me to
accept this mission, they were paying a great compliment to the whole Catholic
people of the United States; and they wished to give me also a mark of their
confidence which might go far, as an example for future administrations to be
well disposed towards Catholics, and by this act to condemn the spurious factions,
who, but a few years ago, under the name of the Know-Nothings, attempted to
treat the Catholics of America as disloyal citizens, unworthy of the equal
privileges which the laws of the country extend to all its inhabitants. (Qtd. in
Hassard 451)
The “Scattered Debris of the Irish Nation.”
The Mexican War effectively ended in the late summer of 1847 with the Battle of
Chapultepec Hill. Across the Atlantic a battle of a different nature raged in Ireland as the
Famine reached its deadly zenith. In the US, nativist fears of Catholic Mexicans flooding
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north quickly gave way to a growing alarm at the countless numbers of poverty-stricken
and disease-ridden Irish Catholics streaming ashore in ghostly legions all along the
Eastern seaboard. 52,946 Irish arrived in New York City alone in 1847; the following
year the figure jumped to 91,061; by 1849 it was over 100,000, and by 1851, the number
peaked at 163,306. (231) By 1860, over a quarter of New York’s total population of
800,000 was Irish-born. (Diner, “Most Irish” 92) One end result of this massive Irish
migration was, to the nativist’s further horror, the creation of America’s first inner city
slums.
45
Certainly not all of the Famine Irish were destitute, but the more affluent tended
not to remain long in the large Eastern cities. While German Catholic immigrants––
generally wealthier and healthier than the Irish––settled predominantly in the mid-west,
the better-off Irish immigrants, relatively speaking, left the likes of New York,
Philadelphia and Boston for the smaller nearby towns of the Northeastern states.
Following the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, a significant number made it as far as
California, but relatively few moved to the American South.
Those who settled in New York City inhabited such neighborhoods as the Five
Points, the notoriously violent and depraved slum that featured so prominently in Herbert
Asbury’s 1927 work, The Gangs of New York.
46
These were the poorest of the poor.
According to Hughes, they were comprised of “the destitute, the disabled, the broken-
down, the very aged and the very young, and I had almost added the depraved of all
nations…” (qtd. in Shaw 222). The bishop was well aware that the vast majority of the
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“depraved of all nations,” in the late 1840s were the Famine Irish, whom he called “the
scattered debris of the Irish Nation” (ibid). As Shaw notes:
The centuries of illegitimacy endured by the Catholic Church under England’s
rule had left Christianity in Ireland weak, both morally and intellectually. Many of
the Irish barely knew the basic rudiments of their faith––‘not by any willful
apostacy of their own’––Hughes knew. Nonetheless [he noted] they had ‘passed
away from the faith of their ancestors.’…“Spiritually uneducated they may have
been,” the greatest social factor in the lives of most Irish was the Roman Catholic
Church. (ibid)
Hasia Diner urges caution when assessing the Irish population of the period. She
notes that New York’s Irish community comprised of several generations and contained
many economic layers. (“Most Irish” 94). The community, for example, included wealthy
Irish Catholics such as William James Macneven and Richard O’Gorman, both former
United Irishmen, and well-established New Yorkers who strove to acculturate the new
Irish arrivals. This was the common goal of well-heeled Irish New Yorkers. They had
reasons to do this besides philanthropy’s feel-good factor. According to Kirby Miller:
the Irish-American bourgeoisie had to gain acceptance from and access to the
classes and institutions that governed native society; more immediately, it also
had to assert a social and cultural hegemony over its own lower classes…. Middle
class immigrants could not gain status in American society until they both
mobilized the Irish-American masses, to demonstrate their political leverage, and
imposed bourgeois norms on them, to reassure the host society’s governing
classes that the group was sufficiently civilized to warrant incorporation.
Moreover, only the prospect of such assimilation would enable the Irish
bourgeoisie to provide ‘successful models’ for lower-class emulation, which in
turn would enable them to exercise effective hegemony. (Ireland 260)
The Irish-American bourgeoisie achieved these goals in a number of ways. As Diner
notes, “successful and longer-term New York Irish created benevolent associations to
help their distressed countrypeople, both in Ireland and in New York. They made up the
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backbone of organizations like the Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick, the Irish Emigrant
Society, and other such groupings” (“Most Irish” 94). Hughes himself helped form the
Irish Emigrant Society, and in 1850, he became the first depositor with the Emigrant
Saving Bank, a successful Irish-run and owned financial institution that catered to new
arrivals.
47
However, as Miller points out, the road to Irish American respectability mainly
followed three principal, complementary paths: the Democratic Party, the Catholic
Church, and Irish-American nationalism. Either directly or indirectly, John Hughes had a
hand in all three paths, but of all the organizations that catered to the needs of the newly
arrived refugees of the Great Famine, none was as effective as the Catholic Church.
To Irish refugees, the Catholic Church represented the familiar. It offered both
community and solace in an alien and often-hostile land. It offered leadership also, and in
John Hughes the Famine Irish discovered an authority figure to whom they could relate.
A pugnacious former laborer, both in Ireland and the US, Hughes, they deemed, was one
of their own. He fought vigorously to improve their lot, both spiritual and material, and
he quickly gained their respect and loyalty. By 1847, Bishop Hughes commanded the
widespread support of New York’s substantial Irish community. No one in that
community could seriously challenge him and expect success, as the leaders of the Young
Ireland movement soon found out to their cost.
“I will suffer no man… that I cannot control”: Irish Nationalism and the Bishop
Throughout his life, in letters, sermons, and speeches, Hughes never shirked from
criticizing British policy in Ireland, as a casual perusal of the table of contents of his two-
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volume Complete Works shows. Early in his career, for example, he preached a sermon
entitled “On the Emancipation of Irish Catholics,” in St. Augustine’s Church,
Philadelphia, in which he clearly sympathized with, though never condoned, violent
resistance to British rule.
So if a people are oppressed, if their treaties are violated, if their generous
confidence is abused, and their professions disbelieved, and their honor doubted,
and their sacred rights invaded, and their liberties trodden under foot––if, in a
word, they have lost everything except a paltry life, which, but for the hope of
religion, would not be worth endurance, then it is not to be wondered at, if such a
people sometimes turn on their oppressors in the spirit of vindictive retribution.
This has been the case more than once in unhappy Ireland. (Complete Works 1:
38)
When the Young Ireland rebellion erupted in July 29, 1848, in the village of
Ballingarry, Co. Tipperary, revolutionary fever soon gripped Irish America. Bishop
Hughes caught the bug. To wild applause, he arose to address a meeting called by the
“Directory of the Friends of Ireland,” and held at Vauxhall Garden on August 14. The
situation demanded that he speak out, he told them. He proceeded to lay the blame for
“the death by starvation of one million Irishmen” (Complete Works 2:791) on the English
Government. He was speaking, he said, not as a bishop, nor as an Irishman, but as an
American citizen who would do nothing in contravention of United States laws.
Nevertheless, he urged them to support the fundraising efforts of the Directory, a group
bent on supporting armed resurrection, stressing that he himself would contribute “for a
shield, not for a sword; but you can contribute for what you choose” (2:793). Though
fearful of much Irish bloodshed he expressed his hopes for the Young Ireland movement:
“Let them sustain themselves but four weeks, until the news of this struggle shall have
spread abroad, and then gold will flow in upon them from the four quarters of the globe”
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(ibid.). Little did the bishop or anyone in New York know it at the time, but the 1848
Rebellion had barely lasted four hours, let alone four weeks. The news of its abject
failure had not yet reached America. At his speech’s end, Hughes laid the astounding sum
of $500 on the table before leaving the platform. The Directory could hardly have
received a better endorsement. (Shaw 234)
Writing in December 1915, just a few months before the doomed Easter Uprising
and his subsequent execution, James Connolly called the Young Ireland Rebellion, “the
most sordid, squalid, meanest fiasco in all her [Ireland’s] history” (Lost Writings 185).
Connolly was critical not of the idea behind the rebellion, but of its bourgeois leadership.
Led by the wealthy, aristocratic, William Smith O’Brien, and other members of his class
of well-educated gentlemen––men such as John Mitchel, John Martin, Terence Bellew
McManus, and Thomas Francis Meagher––the Young Irelanders participated in a short-
lived skirmish with the Royal Irish Constabulary at Ballingarry, after which their
“rebellion” fizzled out like a damp squid. The British Army was not even involved. The
well-educated gentlemen, who had been so critical of Daniel O’Connell and his Repeal
Association had, unlike O’Connell, failed to involve the masses in their plan despite the
fact, according to Connolly, that the masses were ready to rise and sought only effective
leadership.
48
The ineptitude of the Young Irelanders enraged Hughes soon enough. In an
article, “The Question of Ireland,” published in the Freeman’s Journal on September 8,
he attacked them for choosing to blame the Catholic Church for their failures, and he
urged Irish American Catholics not to contribute further to this cause. Severely
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questioning the motives of the leadership in Ireland, he wrote: “We fear that of the
amount which reached that country much has been absorbed by numerous officials
laboring in he cause of patriotism, as if it were a profession from which pecuniary
recompense was to be derived” (Complete Works 793-94). He later demanded that the
Directory divert his $500 donation to the Sisters of Charity instead of to Young Ireland.
(Hassard 309) Meanwhile most of the Young Ireland leadership was captured quickly and
transported to Van Diemen’s Land. Others, such as Thomas D’Arcy McGee, escaped to
the United States, where he soon ran afoul of Bishop Hughes.
Evading a British arrest warrant, McGee arrived in New York shortly after the
Rebellion. Almost immediately he established The Nation newspaper, named after the
original Dublin-based organ of the Young Ireland movement. McGee at once launched an
attack on the Irish Catholic clergy who, he claimed, urged their parishioners not to
participate in the Rebellion. Hughes swiftly branded McGee an anti-Catholic, and
demanded “every diocese, every parish, every Catholic door” be closed against his paper.
(Qtd. in Hassard 310-11) Hughes’ campaign allied with McGee’s reputed condescension
towards the Irish in the city, soon forced the demise of the paper. McGee left for Boston
shortly thereafter. (Shaw 236)
The dispute with McGee and other Young Irelanders who arrived in New York,
such as John Mitchel and Thomas Francis Meagher, was the first time that Hughes had to
confront the serious consequences of Irish revolutionary politics on American soil. He
arrived in New York well after the last wave of Irish revolutionaries, the escapees of the
1798 Rebellion of the United Irishmen, reached the city. These Irish republicans were
170
welcomed as heroes in Jeffersonian America. Both Catholic and Presbyterian, these
Irishmen were quickly integrated into the City’s establishment.
49
The Young Irelanders
proved to be not quite as palatable.
The Young Ireland Rebellion marked a turning point for Hughes. While he
remained critical of British policy in Ireland, he became increasing hostile to militant
republican Irish political groups operating in the US. There were several reasons for this.
Elsewhere in Europe during 1848, successful revolutions shook the foundations of the
political establishment of which the Catholic Church was a part. Hughes was disturbed
that Irish republicanism adopted the rhetoric of the “red republicanism” of mainland
Europe, and their anti-clerical stance confirmed his fears. These fears intensified with the
news of the Pope’s flight from Rome in December 1848. (Hassard 312)
However, the Young Irelanders raised another important issue regarding the
relationship between Irish America and Ireland, one that would be echoed by other Irish
Americans who immersed themselves in American politics. In reference to McGee,
Hughes observed that “[t]he Irish do not require the strong doses of patriotism which he
administers….His countrymen [an illuminating choice of words] here should mind first
their duty to God, to their families, and to the country in which they live” (qtd. in Hassard
311; original ellipsis). As Hassard observed of his former boss, “he wished the
naturalized Irishman of the United States to regard themselves as American citizens–not
as exiles; and he deprecated every thing that tended to separate them from the rest of the
people. He was no friend to Irish ‘military societies,’ ‘trade societies,’ ‘clubs,’
‘institutes,’ and similar organizations––among other reasons, because they were apt to
171
prevent their members from coalescing with their native-born fellow citizens” (311-12).
Hughes himself put it more bluntly: “In your social and political relations you must
become merged in the country of your adoption” (312; my emphasis). In other words, he
wanted the Irish in America to consider themselves Americans first and foremost, and not
as the exiles that the Young Irelanders and later, the Fenians suggested they were.
Finally, the bishop himself candidly revealed another crucial reason for his
opposition to such societies and political groups. In a comment made to Orestes
Brownson, he flatly stated: “I will suffer no man in my diocese that I cannot control”
(qtd. in Shaw 304-05). His autocratic style thrived in the most autocratic of churches. Just
as he demanded absolute loyalty from his priests, he gave absolute loyalty to those men
above him in rank. Rome rewarded his loyalty in 1850 when they elevated the diocese of
New York to an archdiocese, and made Hughes its first archbishop. From his lofty
position, Hughes began to solidify the Irish position within the US racial state just as the
fissures of the slavery question began rending the country in two.
The Archbishop and the Racial State
To say that John Hughes’ attitude towards slavery changed over the years is to
thoroughly understate the case. His first most personal and sustained encounter with
slavery was as a slave overseer a Maryland seminary, and it repulsed the young
immigrant, and inspired him publish his anti-slavery doggerel. By the time he was
consecrated Archbishop of New York, he had become one of “the most outspoken
defenders of slavery…. Abolitionism, for Hughes, was an abomination, a form of treason
172
and violent extremism…” (Kenny, American Irish 119). What accounts for such a
dramatic change in viewpoint?
Hughes himself recalled his change of heart began with his close friendship with
the Rodrique family in Philadelphia. The friendship solidified when his sister Margaret
married William Rodrigue, a young architect whom Hughes employed frequently in his
church building program. The patriarch of the family was a former slaveholder in Haiti
driven out by the revolution. Hughes heard Haitian horror stories from the Rodriques that
changed his opinion on the issue. (Shaw 334) His visits to the Southern states and beyond
had the same effect. On his 1853 sojourn to Cuba, for example, he maintained he saw
nothing but plantation benevolence everywhere he went. (Hassard 435)
His views on slavery brought him into disagreement with one of his Irish political
heroes. Hughes admired Daniel O’Connell. In a lecture delivered on “The Life and Times
of Daniel O’Connell,” in New York in 1856, he praised O’Connell’s patriotism and
Catholicism in almost equal measure.
50
He recalled for the audience his first meeting with
O’Connell in London.
I was introduced with a determination to have a struggle with him on a certain
question…. “You are not surprised, Mr. O’Connell, that while you have many
friends in America, you have some who are much displeased with certain of your
public remarks.” And he asked, “Which?” “Well,” I replied, “they think you are
too severe upon an institution for which the present generation or the present
government of America is by no means responsible––I mean slavery.” He paused,
and said, “It would be strange indeed if I should not be the friend of the slave
throughout the world––I, who was born a slave myself.” He silenced me although
he did not convince me. I afterwards heard him in the House of Commons, and
there he was the great, grave senator. You would suppose he had been brought up
from childhood an Englishman, he was so calm and unimpassioned. (Complete
Works 2:142)
173
Hughes, like most Irish Americans, resented O’Connell’s strong abolitionist
views. He perceived such views as unwanted meddling in the affairs of his adopted
country by a “foreigner” from the country of his birth. Slavery was an American
institution, and as an American, he would defend it from attacks from “foreign” places
such as Ireland. The peculiarity of this identification is a founding aspect of Nomos
Americanus. He identified with the US racial state and all its intricacies; such support
helped define his Americanness, just as abolitionist views defined the foreignness of
O’Connell for the Bishop. American patriotism always trumped Irish nationalism in
Hughes’ world. He chose to follow this recollection of his first meeting with O’Connell
with his impressions of him in the House of Commons. As if to show the ridiculousness
of O’Connell’s claim that he was a slave, Hughes describes him as “great, grave senator,”
at home in the power center of Protestant England––O’Connell was a person closer to
sovereign power, than bare life. He even suggested an element of Englishness to
O’Connell’s persona. Here, I would argue, Hughes equated not so much O’Connell’s
manners or mannerisms with Englishness, but with his views on slavery. He aligned
abolitionist views with Protestant Englishness, the very antithesis of Catholic Irishness.
New York audiences would have understood perfectly.
Nineteenth-century Irish immigrants to the United States, mostly viewed
abolitionism as a British and Protestant phenomenon. The British had emancipated the
slaves in their Caribbean colonies, and became the inspiration for the American
abolitionist movement. In the United States, the abolitionists were led by Protestants, in
many cases Protestant clergymen, and the language of abolitionism “was shot through
174
with the language of Protestant evangelical reform, rendering it highly suspicious to Irish
immigrants” (Kenny, American Irish 85). Hughes’ reference to O’Connell speaking in
the House of Commons constituted a clear signal to his audience that “the Liberator’s”
abolitionist views were symptomatic of a contamination derived from his interactions
with British Protestant power.
Undoubtedly, Hughes was guided in part by Catholic Church tradition that held
slavery in itself not to be sinful––hence, for example, the Church considered slave
ownership by priests in Maryland permissible. Only the slave trade and the abuse of
slaves constituted sin. “In other words,” writes Kenny, “there was no sin in slavery so
long as the master did not mistreat or sell his slaves” (American Irish 79). However, in an
ongoing feud with Orestes Brownson over the triangulated relationship between the Irish,
slavery, and the Civil War, he went well beyond his Church’s questionable moral
distinctions. While strongly voicing his objection to the hereditary element of slavery in
America, he wrote:
[W]e cannot discover a crime, even of the slaver, in snatching them from the
butcheries prepared for them in their native land. When they arrive in those
colonies, would it be a crime for humane masters to purchase them at a sum
which prospectively might cover the annual or semi-annual wages given to
laborers in other parts of the world? Those purchasers should be bound, and, if
they are men of conscience, they would be bound to take care of these unfortunate
people. Under the circumstances, it is very difficult to discover in the purchasers,
any moral transgression of the law of God, or of the law of man where that traffic
is authorized.” (Qtd. in Hassard 436)
Hughes and the Civil War
Hughes saw the outbreak of the Civil War as a deeply sad affair; the “melancholy
war” he called it. He had no quarrel with the South. He maintained good relations with
175
two fellow Irish-born clerics, Bishop Lynch of New Orleans and Bishop England of
Charleston, both vocal supporters of the Confederacy. Furthermore, due no doubt to his
views on slavery, he had gained a following among Southern Protestants. To his delight,
he was chosen as the commencement speaker at the Protestant University of North
Carolina’s 1860 graduation ceremonies. (Shaw 338) Nevertheless he also saw it as an
ideal opportunity for Irish people in the North to both prove their loyalty to the United
States and quell the nativist bile. He had no issue with slavery. He simply condemned the
South for breaking away from the Union and forming its own state under its own flag.
While he supported the idea of an individual state’s right to decide its own position on
slavery, the Southern Secessionist move to break with the Union he considered
treasonous. He became a most vocal supporter of the war effort. He even went so far as to
fly the Stars and Stripes outside of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, the first time that such a
thing had ever been done in the United States. (Shaw 339-40) Clearly, he saw the goals of
Church and state as convergent.
Irish New York had prepared to defend the Union well before the attack on Fort
Sumter on April 12, 1861. Various Irish militias were combined to form the Sixty-ninth
Regiment, under the command of Donegal-born General Michael Corcoran. A Famine
immigrant––he had arrived in the US in 1849––Corcoran won the admiration of Irish-
American Catholics by refusing to parade his regiment in honor of the Prince of Wales’
visit to New York in 1860. He was court-martialed but the charges were quickly dropped
with the outbreak of the war. He was demoted to colonel however. (Spann 194) The
Sixty-ninth suffered heavy losses at the Battle of Bull Run––39 were killed and many
176
more captured including Corcoran. (196) By late July, when the regiment returned home,
it had “lost 20 percent of its 1,276 men” (197).
Middle-class Irish New York organized relief committees for soldiers’ families,
as the community got behind the war effort and recruitment drive. By the end of 1861, an
Irish Brigade had been formed that comprised of three New York City regiments, the
63
rd
, 69
th
, and the 88
th
, under the command of General Thomas Francis Meagher, the
former Young Ireland leader. (198) The Irish community made special regimental flags
that promoted their Irishness, and these were carried into battle alongside the Stars and
Stripes. One of its chaplain’s and future president of Notre Dame University, Father
William Corby described the Irish Brigade as a “body of about 4,000 Catholics
marching–most of them–to death but also to the glory of their Church and country” (qtd.
in Spann 199).
Shortly after his return from his European diplomatic mission on President
Lincoln’s behalf he gave a typically long-winded sermon in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral
New York. The New York Times named it his “War Sermon.” (Spann 200) In it he
advocated that “the people themselves should insist upon being drafted, and be allowed to
bring this unnatural strife to a close” (Complete Works 2:373). The following month,
Corcoran was released on a prisoner exchange and returned to New York a hero. Within a
month he had formed his own brigade, the “Corcoran’s Legion,” over 4,000 mainly Irish
Catholics from all over the Union states. They saw little action for a year, but Meagher’s
Irish Brigade was not so fortunate. They were slaughtered at Antietam; of the 3,000 in the
Brigade, 506 were either killed or wounded. Less than two months later, half the
177
remaining men of the brigade was either killed or wounded at Fredericksburg. (Spann
200-01) Meagher’s name soon became poison among the army widows of the Irish New
York. Resentment grew apace of the rapidly growing casualty list. The belief simmered
that the US Army command was using Irish regiments as cannon fodder. Resentment
grew further with the Emancipation Proclamation, announced in two stages, in September
1862 and January 1863. “Where the early war had invited patriotic efforts to defend the
traditional Union, writes Spann, “it now seemed to demand acceptance of a hated
abolitionism” (203). Prophetically, Hughes had predicted trouble two years earlier in a
letter to Simon Cameron and dated October 18, 1861. He wrote:
There is being insinuated in this part of the country an idea to the effect that the
purpose of this war is the abolition of slavery in the south. If that idea should
prevail among a certain class, it would make the business of recruiting slack
indeed. The Catholics so far as I know, whether of native or foreign birth are
willing to fight to the death for the support of the constitution, the Government,
and the laws of the country. But if it should be understood that, with or without
knowing, they are to fight for abolition of slavery, then, indeed, they will turn
away in disgust from the discharge of what would otherwise be a patriotic duty.
(Qtd. in Shaw 344.)
Anger reached boiling point with the passing of the Conscription Act of March
1863. One provision in particular caused much bitterness within the Irish wards of the
City. It exempted men from service who either could pay $300 or provide a suitable
substitute. The impoverished Irish regarded this the final straw. When an attempt was
made to begin the draft in July 11, a riot erupted that lasted four bloody days. Mobs
vented their anger on the African Americans of the city. They lynched, drowned, and/or
brutally beat any Black person unfortunate enough to cross their path. They also attacked
those in authority that they perceived to be against them; hence they killed several Irish
178
American police and army officers. They burned many buildings including the Colored
Orphan’s Asylum. Fortunately the children were rescued from the baying mobs by a
young Irishman named Paddy McCafferty. He was one of a number of Irish who opposed
the violence. (Spann 204) However “many of the identifiable rioters were Irish” (ibid.)
resulting in the 1863 Draft Riots damaging Irish America’s reputation, despite all the
heroics and sacrifices of the Irish regiments of the Union Army. WASP commentators
such as George Templeton Strong once again questioned Irish suitability for American
citizenship. (Ibid.)
Hughes had a significant role in ending the Draft Riots. After Governor Seymour
appealed to him for help in quelling the pandemonium, he called a meeting to be held
outside his residence, and urged to all rioters to attend. Over 5,000 people showed up,
although it is unclear how many of these were actual rioters. They listened intently as a
feeble Hughes spoke. (Shaw 368) At the end of his hour-long speech, he asked the crowd
to disperse peaceably and they did. The riots ended. “While it may be that the
insurrection had very nearly spent its force,” writes Rena Mazyck Andrews, “and that
military coercion and the promise of the suspension of the draft were the most effective
arguments, yet the rambling speech of the fast-aging prelate was not without its
significance” (12). Andrews maintains that by his intervention, Hughes had moved to
steady an Irish allegiance to the US state that was faltering. “Equally significant” she
argues, “in view of the rabid intolerance bequeathed by the Pilgrim Fathers, was the
Governor’s recognition of a son of Rome as a positive factor in restoring law and order
and loyalty to the government” (ibid.) His intervention on the Governor’s behalf turned
179
out to be his last public appearance. He died on January 3, 1864. On the day of his
funeral, New York’s Common Council closed all its offices as a mark of respect. Flags
on public buildings flew at half-mast. Many private businesses closed and over 100,000
people stood in an around Saint Patrick’s Cathedral during the mass. The New York
Herald declared that such respect “has never been accorded to any other ecclesiastic
since the Declaration of Independence” (qtd. in Shaw 370).
It is difficult to overestimate the significance of Archbishop John Hughes to the
Americanization process of the Irish in nineteenth-century America. From his humble
beginnings in Tyrone, he rose to international prominence. He was an avid scholar who
spoke several languages. His formidable debating skills and combative manner helped
him sway many audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. He put all these talents to use on
behalf of his Church and his country, the United States. Ireland represented the bitter past
for him, the turbulent present and hopeful future belonged to his America, and he saw it
part of his responsibility to ensure that his fellow immigrants knew this. He wanted them
to become patriotic Americans who gave unquestioned loyalty to the state. He realized
that Irish immigrants did not have to be WASPs to become good Americans; they just
had to act like them.
180
CHAPTER THREE ENDNOTES
1
The evidence suggests that a total of 98 passengers and 16 crew were aboard the St. John
when it sailed from Galway. Roughly ninety people were lost, of which about one-third
were men. Nineteen of victims were classified as children. For further information see:
http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclare/history/passlist_stjohn.htm
2
For a more sympathetic treatment of Thoreau’s “The Shipwreck” as it relates to the
Irish, see Jack Morgan.
3
For an excellent account of Emerson’s racism, see Nell Irvin Painter’s History of White
People.
4
I first discovered this quote in Luke Gibbon’s Transformations of Irish Culture, 176.
5
The term “Anglo-Saxon” became somewhat of a joke by the turn of the Twentieth
Century. For example, Irish-American journalist Peter Finlay Dunne lampooned it
mercilessly in his popular syndicated newspaper column, “Mr. Dooley.” Writing at the
conclusion of the Spanish-American War in 1898, Mr. Dooley pontificates thus: “Mack is
an Anglo-Saxon. His folks come fr’m th’ Country Armagh, an’ their naytional Anglo-
Saxon hymn is ‘O’Donnell Aboo.’ Teddy Rosenfelt is another Anglo-Saxon. An’ I’m an
Anglo-Saxon. I’m wan iv th’ thottest Anglo-Saxons that iver come out iv Anglo-Saxony.
The name iv Dooley has been th’ proudest Anglo-Saxon name in th’ County
Rosecommon f’r many years” (In Mr. Dooley in Peace and War 54-55).
6
An earlier version of this section was published in Foilsiú (Spring 2006) under the title
“Frederick Douglass and the Irish.”
7
No knows for sure the exact number of of the Irish send to the West Indies. For an
excellent account the Irish indentured servitude in the West Indies, see Beckles.
8
For more on O’Callaghan and the slave-indentured servant controversy see Malouf,
Transatlantic Solidarities, 192-94.
9
Although as Angela Murphy’s recent scholarship shows, O’Connell refused the money
from New Orleans-based repealers because of the violent anti-British language of the
accompanying letter, and not, as has been claimed, because of its pro-slavery views. See
Angela F. Murphy’s American Slavery, Irish Freedom.
10
Delivered on July 12, 1854, at Western Reserve College, Cleveland.
11
See Omi and Winant’s Racial Formation and Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts.
181
12
See Malthus, The Principle of Population, Ch. 7.
13
For a detailed account see Nicolas Canny’s Kingdom and Colony.
14
For a superb exposé of Marx and Marxism’s blindness in relation to race, see Cedric
Robinson’s Anthropology of Marxism.
15
I am grateful to Catherine Eagan for this adaptation of Homi Bhabha’s well-known
phrase concerning difference––“almost the same, but not quite”––in “Of Mimicry and
Man” 86. See Eagan, “‘White,’ If ‘Not Quite.’”
16
For additional analysis of this literature see above; and also Eagan, “I Did Imagine,”
Chapter 4.
17
The San Patricio or St Patrick’s Battalion, was comprised of Irish immigrants who
deserted the Union Army to fight for the Mexicans during the Mexican-American War.
For more see Peter Steven’s Rogue’s March: see also n. 42 below.
18
For an excellent discussion on the weaknesses of the “whiteness studies” approach to
Irish America, see Eagan’s Introduction to “I Did Imagine.”
19
See Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White.
20
See Lloyd, “Black Irish.”
21
See Shumsky, The Evolution of Political Protest.
22
I will return to this crucial distinction between citzenship and nationality at the
beginning of Chapter 4.
23
The gender politics involved here will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5.
24
Carlyle discusses “cash nexus” in his essay “Chartism.”
25
The Golden Era. Vol. 1. No. 44. Sunday Morning October 16
th
1853.
26
Much of the information on Crittenden and Lopez was gleaned from Robert E. May’s
two scholarly works on the antebellum south, Manifest Destiny's Underworld, and The
Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire.
27
New York Daily News, November 28 p.1, & 29, p. 1. Proquest Historical Newspapers:
The New York Times (1851-2006). Accessed February 9, 2010.
182
28
New York Daily Tribune, Jan 7 1854, pg. 4. Proquest Historical Newspapers: The New
York Tribune (1841-1922). Accessed February 9, 2010.
29
The letter appeared in the Citizen January 14, 1854, excerpts of which were reprinted
in the New York Daily News January 13, 1854. Proquest Historical Newspapers: The
New York Times (1851-2006). Accessed February 9, 2010.
30
The New York Daily Tribune, January 26, 1854, pg 8. Proquest Historical
Newspapers: The New York Tribune (1841-1922). Accessed February 9, 2010.
31
The New York Daily Tribune, January 30, 1854, pg 3. Proquest Historical
Newspapers: The New York Tribune (1841-1922). Accessed February 9, 2010.
32
The most significant, and worthwhile biography of Mitchel, besides McGovern’s work,
is the two-volume study, Life of John Mitchel, by William Dillon, son of Mitchel’s good
friend and fellow Young Irelander John Blake Dillon. Dillon undertook the task at the
request of Mitchel’s family. For a list of the other works, see McGovern, 291.
33
Patrick Hughes was not deemed a threat by Protestant neighbors, a fact that John
credits with saving his life once. When he was fifteen years old, bayonet-wielding
Orangemen apprehended him. However, “when I told them my name the men let me go,
saying, ‘Alright; we know his father’” (qtd. in Hassard 14).
34
The two men came from a strikingly similar backgrounds––both sons of poor Catholic,
tenant farmers, both from large families, and both highly intelligent and articulate men of
remarkable ambition. The similarity between them ends dramatically by the time they
reached adulthood. While Hughes migrated to the US and became a priest, Carleton
stayed in Ireland, converted to Protestantism, and became an impoverished writer. For
further information on Carleton’s life, see Robert Lee Wolff. For accounts of life in
Clogher see Carleton’s Autobiography, and Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry.
35
For the evidence of the persistence of the old Gaelic belief systems, see Bourke, The
Burning of Bridget Cleary.
36
See http://www.officialcatholicdirectory.com/special-feature-article/archdiocese-of-
new-york-city-bicentennial.html Accessed May 6, 2010.
37
His former assistant, Father John Hassard, neglected to mention the slave status of
Hughes charges when covering this period in Hughes’ life in his 1866, 500-page
panegyric, Life of the Most Reverend John Hughes, D.D. Hassard wrote of the workforce
under Hughes’ command: “His force of laborers consisted chiefly of two negroes,
Timothy and Peter, well-known characters, who are still remembered by old students of
183
the Mountain” (24). The author somehow overlooked the memory of Timothy and Peter’s
slave status. (For confirmation of the existence of slavery at he seminary, see Shaw 22).
Hassard’s work is one of only two biographies of this crucially important figure. Richard
Shaw wrote the other. Entitled Dagger John, and published in 1977 by the Paulist Press,
it is somewhat more critical of its subject than Hassard’s 1866 work. Not a difficult task
it must be said.
38
The paper was called the Adams Centinel. Hughes wrote under the nom de plume
“Leander.” (Hassard 39)
39
After converting to Protestantism and becoming a minister, Hogan began a career that
centered on his militant anti-Catholic rhetoric. His name surfaces continually throughout
the career span of Hughes. The Irish-born-priest-turned-American-nativist rarely missed
an opportunity to seek the limelight and make money while he was at it. He even played a
role in the Maria Monk story, discussed later in chapter 6.
40
As Hughes rose through the ranks of the priesthood in America, imposing a strict
discipline on American Catholics, back in his native Ireland, a “devotional revolution,” as
Emmet Larkin calls it, was taking place that would provide the strict discipline and
leadership in the Catholic Church in Ireland that Hughes so desperately wanted. See
Larkin, “Devotional Revolution,” and The Making of the Roman Catholic Church. For a
detailed examination of the Pre-Famine Irish Roman Catholic Church, see Larkin, The
Pastoral Role of the Roman Catholic Church in Pre-Famine Ireland. See also S. J.
Connolly.
41
Hughes also founded a number of important Catholic centers of higher education
including Manhattan College, St. John’s College (now Fordham University), and the
Academy of Mount St. Vincent (now College of Mount St. Vincent).
42
For the story of the San Patricio’s see Stevens. The names of the members of the
battalion are listed on pages. 302-03. See also http://www.stpatricksbattalion.org
Accessed 5/13/10
43
This, of course, is the title of one of Alexander Saxton’s books on the American racial
state.
44
See Hughes, Selected Writings 1: 558-73.
45
The etymology of the word “slum” is a mystery according to most Anglo-American
dictionaries. However, for a convincing argument for the Irish language origins of the
word, see Daniel Cassidy, Ch. 3.
46
For a more accurate portrayal of the Five Points neighborhood, See Tyler Anbinder.
184
47
For an excellent examination of the Emigrant Savings Bank see Marion Casey’s
“Refractive History.”
48
I am not convinced that Connolly is right here since it is fair to speculate that
impoverished poor Irish were doubtless by 1848 entirely demoralized by successive
years of Famine.
49
For an account of the impact of the United Irishmen who settled in New York, see
Walter J. Walsh. See also Paul A. Gilje.
50
The entire lecture may be found in Complete Works, 2: 132-43.
185
CHAPTER FOUR
RACE, CITIZENSHIP,
AND CALIFORNIA’S IRISH AND CHINESE WORKINGMEN
On a sweltering day in May 1969, tens of thousands gathered at Promontory Point
in the Utah wilderness to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the completion of the
transcontinental railroad. Speaking “in a flat, nasal Bostonian accent,” US Transportation
Secretary John A. Volpe posed stirring questions: “‘Who else but Americans could chisel
through miles of solid granite? Who else but Americans could have laid ten miles of
track in 12 hours?’” (Champion 14-15)
“Sitting in angry silence at the rear of the bunting draped platform,” it was noted,
were community leaders of Asian ancestry: Philip P. Choy, chairman of the Chinese
Historical Society of America; San Franciscan Thomas W. Chinn, the Society’s founder
and executive director; and Chou Tung-hua, Consul General in San Francisco for the
Republic of China. “Unlike Volpe, the three were well aware that none of the Chinese
railroad workers were Americans. In fact, foreign-born Chinese were barred for years
from becoming citizens” (ibid.). By ignoring the tens of thousands of foreign-born
workers –– including 8,000 – 10,000 Irish, and 12,000 or more Chinese,
1
countless
numbers of whom lost their lives laying rails to Promontory –– Secretary Volpe played
the great game of historical revisionism. It is a game well-suited to the telling of tall tales
from the wild, wild West.
186
“Who else but Americans,” Volpe droned on, “could drill ten tunnels in
mountains 30 feet deep in snow?” Who else, indeed?
I. The Story of San Francisco’s Anti-Chinese Movement
The state is not a static phenomenon; rather, as Poulantzas recognized, it evolves
constantly to meet conditions at each conjuncture. In a nineteenth-century America
rattled by each technological advance, each shift in the mode of production, certain
elements within the state structure scrambled ruthlessly for political dominance and
economic power. The Poulantzian term “material condensation” well describes the
process. As discussed previously, Poulantzas maintained that the “State should not be
regarded as an intrinsic entity: like ‘capital’, it is rather a relationship of forces, or more
precisely the material condensation of such a relationship among classes and class
fractions, such as this is expressed within the State in a necessarily specific form” (State
128-29; original emphasis). The concept of “material condensation” allows a nuanced
look at the workings of the state in nineteenth-century America, when monopoly capital
clashed not only with the interests of the middle and working classes, but also with those
of various factions within its ruling elite. This chapter looks at specific state forms in
which these conflicts played out; specifically, at the politico-legal structure as it operated
through hierarchically structured layers of government. Of particular interest is
citizenship, the subject position that the state confers upon the individual. Nineteenth-
century America resolved the question of citizenship status through such political and
187
legal structures; that is, an evolving racialization process helped the state maintain public
order and social control while simultaneously accommodating capital’s incessant need for
workers and consumers.
As notions of citizenship changed to meet the needs of capital, the state, charged
with defining and controlling those persons who were to be included within its polity,
found that monopoly capital’s incessant demands often upset the state’s “unequal
equilibrium.” Indeed, the needs of capital often clashed with the state’s long-term
interests. Through the “material condensation” of relationships that facilitated capital
through immigration control, on the one hand, yet on the other hand provided specific
structures of social control that acted as outlets for the demands of the lower classes, the
state preserved and maintained the unequal equilibrium necessary for its survival. This
chapter will examine such structures of social control as they operated through various
“ideological state apparatuses” and “repressive state apparatuses.”
2
An examination of what constitutes ideal American citizenship is key to our
understanding of the racialization processes at work in nineteenth-century California. The
dominant elements of popular culture –– news and entertainment media, theater, music
hall, fictional and non-fictional literature, as well as general political discourse ––
obsessively struggled to define American nationality. The American state, on the other
hand, through its first immigration laws in 1790, had defined American citizenship as
being the prerogative of “free white persons.” As Omi and Winant argue, the state,
despite nativist efforts to classify the Irish, the Jews and the Southern European as “non-
white,” effectively institutionalized “a racial order that drew the color line around rather
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than within Europe” (65; original emphasis). The contradiction between American
citizenship as defined by the state, on the one hand, and American nationality, as defined
by popular culture on the other, is explained succinctly by Robert G. Lee:
American citizenship and American nationality are not synonymous; citizenship
carries an implicit assumption or promise of equality at least in political and legal
terms, while nationality contains and manages the contradictions of the
hierarchies and inequalities of social formation. Nationality is a constantly
shifting and contested terrain that organizes the ideological struggle over
hierarchies and inequalities. (6)
Ideal American citizenship, then, was constituted through the unification of these
concepts of American citizenship and American nationality. In terms of American
citizenship as defined by the state, the Irish did not simply “become white,” they were
white from the start; however, in terms of American nationality, the Irish had to prove
their whiteness. As we shall see in the following chapter, this battle for recognition took
place primarily within the realms of popular culture. The Irish, unlike the Chinese, were
sure to win this battle for right to claim American nationality as well as citizenship,
because of the needs of the racial state. The crucial distinction between “ethnicity” and
“race” helps clarify this point. “In ethnicity,” writes Robert Lee, “boundaries of
difference are constructed as permeable, and therefore ethnic differences are conceived as
assimilable and nonpolluting; in race, boundaries are constructed as impermeable and
therefore racial difference is conceived as unassimilable and polluting” (31). Nowhere
was this distinction clearer than in early California. As Reginald Horsman has put it, an
“Irishman might be described as a lazy, ragged, dirty Celt when he landed in New York
but if his children settled in California they might well be praised as part of the vanguard
of the energetic Anglo-Saxon people poised for the plunge into Asia” (4). The Chinaman
189
on the other hand, would always be a Chinaman no matter where he went in America.
The Chinese were regarded as “pollutants,” and a threat to the “white” race. The Irish, on
the other hand, despite various WASP reservations, were considered assimilable, open to
acculturation, if only they could eradicate their Irishness.
In the 1850s, California was considered the site of the Jacksonian dream: a land of
rugged pioneers, independent small producers, and hardy Gold Rush miners. Slavery was
seen as another pollutant by European settlers, another threat to the “free white labor”
3
that “created” the state. This notion of “free white labor” was closely tied to the “free-
soil” movement that urged the opening of “territories for the development by non-
slaveholding settlers” (Saxton, Indispensable 33). Settlers, in this case, of course, meant
white settlers. White supremacist ideology guided utterly the free soil movement. Thus
California was seen as an ideal theater for the construction of the “white republic,” to use
Saxton’s apt phrase. Hence the extermination of the Native Americans, and the
subordination of the Mexicans, set the stage for the creation of the ideal citizen of this
“white republic.” The arrival into California of two quite different groups of people
greatly contributed to this creation: Enter stage left, the Chinese; enter stage right, the
Irish.
East Meets West aboard the Transcontinental Railroad
“Race,” writes Toni Morrison, “now functions as a metaphor so necessary to the
construction of ‘Americanness’” (Reading 47). The long history of this metaphor twists
through nearly every event of national significance in America, and in the process spins
190
off other metaphoric constructions. One is the joining of the transcontinental railway in
1869 at Promontory Point. Admittedly obvious, the metaphor nonetheless is revelatory of
how certain nineteenth-century constructions of race emerged out of a crucible of fierce
inter-ethnic competition.
This account of the transcontinental railroad as the site for the first major clash
between the Irish and the Chinese relies heavily on The Big Four, the 1938 study by
historian Oscar Lewis that remains the preeminent authority on the building of the
railroad’s western portion.
4
Lewis’s story begins on a June night in 1861 when four
canny capitalists sat in a Sacramento hardware store and listened intently as construction
engineer Theodore Judah related his dream of a railroad that would unite America’s East
and West coasts. San Franciscans regarded his ideas so fanciful that they had nicknamed
the Connecticut native “Crazy Judah.” In Sacramento, therefore, Judah was cautious,
stressing local features such as the leg from Sacramento over the Sierra that would give
the railroad’s owners effective control of the Nevada mining trade. Wholesale grocer
Leland Stanford, dry goods merchant Charles Crocker, and hardware store partners Mark
Hopkins and Collis P. Huntington recognized the plan’s potential, and soon formed the
Central Pacific Railroad Company that would lay track from the West toward the East.
The men, all WASPs from upstate New York, would become known as the Big Four.
Lewis reports that they achieved their goals by milking the state through expert
application of extortion, bribery, and shrewd public relations. With such invaluable skills,
it was little wonder that later in 1861, nearly eight years before the railroad’s completion,
Californians elected one of the Four, Republican Leland Stanford, their governor. As for
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Chief Engineer Judah, he died of yellow fever before completion, his role in the building
of the transcontinental railroad shunted from public memory no less than the roles of
foreign-born laborers.
The railroad charged with laying track from East to West–the Union Pacific–
found the muscle it needed in rather desperate gangs of workers. These were the Irish. In
these post-Famine years, the Irish still flooded Eastern seaports, still landed in squalid
Eastern slums; eagerly they enlisted for this trek across America’s Great Plains (Saxton,
Indispensable 62). But the work was grueling, a fact depicted in the following verses
from a folk song popular on both sides of the Atlantic at mid-century. Entitled “Paddy
Works on the Railway,” the ballad was published in the US, according to Carl Sandberg
in his folksong collection, American Songbag, sometime in the 1850s:
In eighteen hundred and forty-three
I sailed away across the sea
I sailed away across the sea
To work upon the railway, the railway
I’m weary of the railway
Poor Paddy works on the railway
In eighteen hundred and forty-four
I landed on Columbia’s shore
I landed on Columbia’s shore
To work upon the railway, the railway
I’m weary of the railway
Poor Paddy works on the railway. (Sandberg 356, 357)
The Big Four’s Central Pacific Railroad proceeded from the opposite direction
and relied on a very different labor pool. In contrast with the roughly 9,000 Irish who
worked for Union Pacific, the Irish are estimated to have made up only about a tenth of
all Central Pacific workers in 1869, perhaps 1,000 men; furthermore, the Irish who made
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up this fractional element for the most part performed supervisory roles. (O’Connor 82)
At the root of this relative dearth was the fact that Irishmen in the West could pursue the
potentially far more lucrative occupation of gold prospector. Pressed for a pool of cheap
labor, the Big Four tried to persuade the federal government to let them use Confederate
prisoners of war as mountain track-layers; the Civil War ended before the scheme could
be realized. (73) Thus the Four turned to Chinese labor. They did so reluctantly, uncertain
whether the Chinese would make good workers.
As late as his 1862 gubernatorial inauguration, Stanford had condemned the
Chinese as “the dregs of Asia” and called for their exclusion from the United States. But
by 1865 the former governor had changed his tune, declaring the Chinese to be “quiet,
peaceable, industrious, economical – ready to learn all the different types of work” that
the railroad company required (Takaki, Different 196).
5
Stanford’s colleague Crocker
had a similar epiphany. A day after hiring his first fifty Chinese workers, an impressed
Crocker wired Sacramento for more Chinese. “We can’t get enough white labor to build
this railroad, and build it we must, so we are forced to hire them,” he is said to have
informed his white workers, adding: “If you can’t get along with them we have only one
alternative. We’ll let you go and hire nobody but them” (197). Central Pacific recruiting
agents combed California’s Chinatowns. Then, with the help of the San Francisco-based
association known as the Chinese Six Companies,
6
recruiters secured workers from China
itself. It was through these means that Central Pacific’s workforce soon was nearly nine-
tenths Chinese. (O’Connor 75)
193
In the three years before the 1869 completion of the railroad, somewhere between
10,000 and 12,000 Chinese were put to work “boring the Sierra tunnel and driving the
line east across the deserts of Nevada and Utah” (Saxton, Indispensable 4).
7
Their
employment entailed huge savings: hiring the same number of white workers would have
increased labor costs by about a third. (Takaki, Different 197) And Chinese men provided
not only muscle, but also expertise in engineering and explosives. In short, though
conventional historiography rarely recognizes the fact, the building of the Central Pacific
line was largely a Chinese accomplishment.
As the east- and west-bound tracks neared one another, disputes broke out. Each
company “sent surveyors beyond the other’s rails – the Union Pacific almost to the
California line, the Central hundreds of miles east of Ogden, Utah. Track-laying
continued until the graded lines paralleled each other for miles; Chinese and Irish crews
regarded one another curiously and with mutual distaste” (Lewis 92). The Irish workers
of the Union Pacific, claiming racial superiority, physically attacked the Chinese of the
Central Pacific in an effort to prove their claim. (O’Conner 83) The Chinese fought back
with rocks, boulders, and on occasion, explosives. Dozens of workers on either side died
while their employers fought to control as much track as possible. Eventually, the federal
government brokered a deal. Congress set a date and designated the place as Promontory
Point, fifty-six miles west of Ogden. Prenuptial nerves calmed, so that on May 10, 1869,
with much pomp and ceremony, the great union took place. After seven years’ slog and
many workers’ deaths,
8
the transcontinental railroad, hailed as “one of the greatest
engineering feats of the nineteenth century,”
9
opened for business. Although antagonism
194
between the Irish and the Chinese had begun well before, that combustible joining of the
two groups, as workers in a remote corner of Utah, set the stage for what would be an
explosive climax eight years later in San Francisco.
As would be expected, the Big Four figure prominently in depictions of the 1869
ceremony at Promontory Point. The Chinese figure not at all.
10
But the story is different
for the Irish. Among those who appear in the front row of “The Last Spike,” the Thomas
Hill painting now at the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento,
11
is County
Galway native John Conness, who had just finished a term as one of California’s US
Senators. A Union Democrat turned Union Republican, and the namesake of a
locomotive, Conness was said to have been “the first to promote the idea of a
transcontinental railway” (Dowling, Irish Dream 111). Nor was he the only Irishman
present. Alongside the Crockers, Stanfords, Huntingtons, and Hopkinses stood William
O’Brien, James Flood, James Fair, and John Mackey, San Francisco-based Irish-born
multimillionaires. Also prominent: the Irish-born San Francisco banker James Phelan;
the Irish-born former governor, John Downey, a Unionist Democrat; and Conness’
successor, the newly sworn-in, and Irish-born US Senator, Eugene Casserly, a Democrat.
Yet another Democrat, San Francisco’s Irish-born Mayor Frank McCoppin, “opened the
program by introducing the celebrated Irish songster, O.P. Kennedy, who rendered the
‘Star Spangled Banner’ with such power that he was called back for a repeat
performance” (Dowling, Irish Californians 198). The path that had brought these Irish
elites to that Point of power is a story in itself.
195
The Irish “Off to Californy” and on to San Francisco
An Irish folk ballad of the time captured the pull that California had on Irish
laborers:
So, Good Bye Murshin Durkin
I’m sick and tired of workin’
No more I’ll dig the praties
and no longer I’ll be fooled
But as sure my name is Carney
I’ll be off to Californy
And instead of digging praties
I’ll be digging lumps of gold. (O’Lochlainn 72)
Thus “Carney” and his kin came to “Californy,” typically from waystations in their
migrant journey. The 1852 Census reveals that only 5.1 percent of San Francisco’s Irish
population came directly from Ireland; the rest arrived in roughly equal numbers either
from the East Coast or from Australasia. Discovery of gold in New South Wales stanched
the flow of Australasian Irish,
12
so that America’s Eastern cities soon became the biggest
source of the Irish people who would make San Francisco their home. (Burchell 34)
As “Carney’s” story suggests, it was the discovery of gold in 1848 that lured
Irishmen,
13
and many others. In San Francisco “during the 1850s, everyone was uprooted,
Americans and foreigners alike,” James P. Walsh writes, yet adds that the Irish “enjoyed
the distinct advantage of having had experience in that condition…their intervening
experience had been urban, a characteristic not shared by older Americans” (“Irish in
Early San Fran.” 21). The Irish fled cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and
New Orleans in massive numbers to settle in San Francisco. “Most of them had … made
their westward trek in family units. Stabilized and experienced, the Irish – numerous,
196
urbanized immigrant families – competed well in an early San Francisco that was
dominated by young and single males without urban experience” (Sarbaugh 163).
A new beginning did not mean a complete end to the old prejudices that the Irish
had endured back East. “Anti-Catholic and anti-Irish feeling seethed through the
Vigilance committee of 1851 and 1856,” historian Kevin Starr writes of this early period
in San Francisco, adding that “Irish immigrants from Australia and New York were
branded wholesale as a criminal class” (94). The threat they posed required concerted
action even by groups that disagreed on the key national controversy of the day:
Yankees and Southerners put aside their quarrels, including the slavery issue, to
unite behind the Know-Nothing party, and the Vigilance Committee of 1856 (an
organization redolent of Masonry) in the fight against the growing Irish political
power. A Know-Nothing Citizen’s reform Ticket defeated the Irish machine in the
San Francisco election of 1854, even to the point of getting one mayoralty
candidate dropped from the ballot because he was a Roman Catholic. (ibid.)
Anti-Irish and anti-Catholic strains would persist among WASP leaders in nineteenth-
century San Francisco; nevertheless, financial and societal opportunities, coupled with
the sheer influx of Irish and other “foreigners,” would overwhelm anti-Irish nativist
efforts. In this fledgling city that lacked an entrenched elite, Irish people found it easier to
assimilate and be assimilated –– far easier to be sure than it was back East.
14
That the Roman Catholic Church was already established in California through
Spanish colonialism represented another significant factor in the ascent of the Irish in the
region. The New England Protestant elite had regarded California a battleground in their
fight to stop the spread of Catholicism in the United States, but by the 1850s, there were
signs that they were fighting a losing battle –– “the Roman Catholic presence was too
strong” (Starr 93). From its earliest days, Anglo-American settlers in California were
197
forced to seek alliances with the Catholic Californios, whose Christianity set them apart
from native American and Chinese populations. “Mexican Catholics,” writes Tomás
Almaguer, “were at least God-fearing people and were seen as more closely
approximating European-American notions of civility” (62). That the Catholic hierarchy
in the State was comprised of highly cultured, bourgeois, Spanish-born men helped eased
the threat somewhat. And as was the case elsewhere in the United States, the hierarchy’s
eager embrace of the “Americanization” process for its flock (63), granted it
unimpeachable authority with regard to the promotion of United States citizenship.
Unlike back East, then, the Catholic Irish arrived into a region with their church already
firmly established, and with their arrival, the New England Protestant cause was all but
lost. The Irish, though, did not merely increase the sheer numbers of Catholics in the
State, they contributed significantly to the Church’s financial wellbeing, and provided a
steady supply of priests and nuns to bolster its organization. The first Archbishop of San
Francisco, Catalonia-born, Joseph Alameny, relied heavily upon the Irish financial
muscle to provide the funds for the churches, meetings halls, schools, convents, and so
on, deemed necessary to accommodate his rapidly expanding flock.
15
Some Irish did indeed find fabulous wealth and social status in San Francisco,
offering proof of R.A. Burchell’s point that the “effect and force of nativism were much
blunted in the spread of Anglo-American culture to the Pacific coast” (14). Four Irish
tycoons present at the driving of the Golden Spike – O’Brien, Flood, Fair, and Mackey,
known as the “Bonanza Kings” or the “Silver Kings” because they made their fortunes in
the silver mines of Nevada – were among the city’s very richest men.
16
Other Irish
198
millionaires included Hibernia Bank founders John Sullivan, Richard Tobin, and Myles
Sweeney, as well as the Donahue brothers, leaders in the iron foundry business.
17
The Irish excelled particularly in the political arena. The first major politician in
Irish California, according to Timothy Sarbaugh, was David Broderick, born in
Washington, D.C. to Irish immigrant parents. (162) A Democrat, Broderick was elected a
US Senator from California in 1856 and held that post until a fatal duel in 1859.
18
As for
three of the politicians who later would attend the Promontory Point ceremony, “John
Downey, an Irish Catholic from Roscommon County, became the first Irish Governor of
the State” in 1860 (ibid.), while in 1863 Conness became “the first Irish-born United
States Senator of the post-Famine years” (Burchell 134), to be succeeded in 1869 by
Casserly. (7) At the local level, “Frank McCoppin became the first Irish Catholic mayor
of San Francisco” (Sarbaugh 162). McCoppin’s election in 1867 occurred “eighteen years
before Hugh O’Brien became mayor of Boston and thirteen years before William Grace
became mayor of New York” (ibid.). Thus just twenty years after the Gold Rush that had
brought them there, the Irish in California occupied positions of power and wealth that
most of their East Coast compatriots could only dream of.
19
Fueling Irish electoral success no doubt was the Irish element in San Francisco’s
population. “By 1852 there were over 4,200 first generation Irish in the city; by 1880
over 30,000,” Burchell writes, adding, “In 1852 there were over 1,400 Irish children in
the city, not born in Ireland, and by 1870 there were 20,015 of this second generation”
(Burchell 3). He continues:
In 1880 the city officially contained 30,721 first-generation Irish, 13.1 percent of
the population, but a study of the manuscript schedules of the census of that year
199
shows at least another 43,000 second-generation, 4,700 third-generation, and even
– if for the moment Irishness can be taken to survive the passage of so many
generations – some eighteen fourth-generation Irish. Thus in 1880 one-third of the
city’s inhabitants belonged to the Irish community, or about 37 percent of the
city’s white population. This made the group the largest of any in San Francisco;
its history becomes a major part of the history of the city in the period. (3-4)
This demographic amounted to an electoral hornet’s nest that the nativist elites were
reluctant to disturb. Increasingly the Irish ceded their place as the object of popular scorn
to another group. In popular imaginings about the Chinese, the Irish workingman would
find a path to proving his whiteness and, thus, his American nationality.
For the Chinese, a Rocky Road to Gold Mountain
Prior to the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, “the characteristic
situation of California was one of labor shortage” (Saxton, Rise 295). Few white people
wished to perform the most menial of jobs when better-paying work was available. The
Chinese filled the vacuum. Initially, most white workers benefited from the Chinese
presence. But once “the completion of the railroad enabled white workingmen to migrate
in large numbers,” Saxton notes, “[j]ob competition would then become significant”
(ibid).
Soon after the 1848 discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada, Chinese prospectors
from South China’s Pearl River Delta arrived in San Francisco eager to make fortunes in
“‘Jinsan’ (meaning ‘Gold Mountain’ or ‘Country of Gold’)” their name for California
(Chen 37). Historian Yong Chen argues that Western historiography has misrepresented
Chinese migration to America. For example, he disputes “the prevailing interpretation,
200
which views Chinese emigration as a panic-stricken, hunger-driven flight from poverty
and other socioeconomic difficulties” (13). In Chen’s view, overemphasis on hardships
emigrants had suffered distorts the motivations of Chinese persons who set out on the
road to Gold Mountain.
20
The Pearl Delta and California had enjoyed lively commercial
exchanges for decades leading up to the Gold Rush. The southern port of Canton, or
Guangzhou, capital of a prosperous and economically vital province was China’s main
port of trade with the West. When news of the gold strike reached China, many in the
province already possessed the economic resources and maritime experience necessary to
make the difficult journey across the Pacific.
21
On the other hand, Irish Chang presents a
convincing argument that economic hardship and sheer desperation spurred many
Chinese to migrate to California.
22
The stream of Chinese, though steady, was small. The percentage of Chinese
persons in California decreased, moreover, from 9 percent in 1860 to 8.6 percent in 1870
and 7.5 percent in 1880. (Saxton, Indispensable 3) Yet in the city on which this study
centers, San Francisco, it grew, from 8 percent, or 12,022 persons, in 1870 to 9.3 percent,
or 21,745 persons, in 1880. (Shumsky 81) This increase coincided with rapid growth
among all segments of San Francisco’s population.
In 1870, the city had about 150,000 inhabitants, 49.3 percent of whom were
foreign-born; it swelled to about 234,000 persons in 1880 with the foreign-born
percentage at 44.6. (Shumsky 38) The completion of the railroad and diminished
opportunities in mining had left in California a vast army of unemployed workers from
201
all ethnic groups. Many sought relief in San Francisco; without money, they had no other
alternative. With jobs scarce, wages declined as the labor pool expanded.
Increased industrialization only compounded the problems. The city was moving
away from its early “producer ethic,”
23
heavily reliant on artisans and mechanics, to what
might be called a manufacturing ethic, largely dependent on corporations and
monopolies. All industries, including mining and agriculture, mechanized. The dramatic
transformation of the mode of production sapped skills-based trades of their utility and,
therefore, their power.
24
In demand was unskilled labor –– and the Chinese, nearly three-
quarters of whom were not skilled –– stood at the ready to meet this demand. By 1880
nearly 4,000 of them worked as domestic servants, followed by about 2,600 cigar makers
and tobacco workers, nearly 2,500 laundry workers, 2,200 laborers, and nearly 2,000
boot-makers and shoemakers (Shumsky 83.)
But the avidity with which the Chinese seized such opportunities was seen by
white workers as the reason they were out of work, and by opportunistic white employers
as a tool for dividing workers in order to weaken trade unions. The Chinese entry into the
cobbling industry exemplified this divide-and-conquer strategy: as early as 1869,
“simultaneous to the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, the first Chinese were
introduced into San Francisco’s boot and shoe industry to break a strike by workers”
(Nee 44). The innovation was so profitable, from the standpoint of employers, that within
four years “at least half of the boots and shoes made in California were made by Chinese”
(ibid.). Such events point to a perhaps not unexpected reason for the proportional decline
in Chinese population statewide between 1860 and 1880: causing decline was not only
202
the growing popularity of California to non-Chinese people, but also the increased
effectiveness of a vicious campaign to drive the Chinese out. Job competition stoked that
campaign, yet in truth, as Saxton points out, “racial hostility in words and actions
preceded that development by twenty years” (Rise 295).
Initially, the Chinese had found welcome in early Gold Rush San Francisco. The
editor of Alta California, the state’s first daily newspaper, wrote in 1850 that the Chinese
were “very useful, quiet, good citizens…deserving respect of all” (qtd. in Nee 33). As
they did during construction of the Central Pacific line, Chinese menial laborers in the
city freed the Irish to assume supervisory positions; these new, “white” foremen
simultaneously enjoyed a sense of racial superiority and avoided the most back-breaking
of work. Over time, however, the frenzy for fast fortune east of San Francisco upset this
equation.
“California for Americans!” came the nativist battle cry from the gold mines of
the Sierra foothills (Takaki, Different 195). The cry soon reached the state legislature,
which in 1850 imposed a tax on all “foreign-born” miners. “Irish, English, Canadian, and
German miners,” caught up in a measure aimed initially at miners from Mexico and
South America, “immediately protested, and the law was quickly rewritten to exempt any
‘free white person’ or any miner who could become an American citizen” (Pfaelzer 22).
Gold, it turned out, confirmed Irish whiteness, as citizenship paved the way to
nationality.
In the year before it was repealed, the tax succeeded in chasing off the so-called
“foreigners,” yet had an unintended consequence: certain mining towns were left nearly
203
deserted, and the Chinese stepped in to fill the void. The California legislature
consequently introduced two new taxes in 1852. First, in an effort to discourage further
Chinese immigration, a levy was imposed on captains of ships carrying foreign-born
passengers. (Chang 42) Second, in an effort to discourage Chinese already in the Sierras,
anyone who did not wish to become an American citizen was required to make a payment
of $3 a month. “Even if they wanted to, the Chinese could not become citizens, for they
had been rendered ineligible for citizenship by the 1790 federal law that reserved
naturalized citizenship for ‘white persons,’” Takaki writes. Thus they had to pay the
foreign miners’ tax, which “remained in force until the 1870 Civil Rights Act voided it.
By then, California had collected five million dollars from the Chinese, a sum
representing 25 to 50 percent of all state revenue” (Different 195).
Violence against Chinese, Sonoran, Peruvian, and Chilean miners intensified even
as these legislative measures were implemented. Chinese camps in particular were
incinerated. The Chinese fought back but were outnumbered and outgunned; eventually
they were driven out of the goldfields. In Shasta County in 1853, an estimated 3,000
Chinese had mined the riverbeds and creeks, but “[b]y the end of the decade only 160
remained” (Pfaelzer 16). For many Chinese, it had been the brutal treatment in the
goldfields that made attractive the arduous work of building the railroad.
Although no accurate statistical record exists, The Annals of San Francisco
estimated that by 1852, between 3,000 and 4,000 Chinese lived in San Francisco (Chen
55). This figure skyrocketed on account of various recessions that hit various industries
outside and inside the city, the untenable situation in the goldmines, daily arrivals of
204
Chinese from Guangdong, and the completion of the transcontinental railroad.
Accordingly, 12,922 lived in the city by 1870, “making Chinese San Francisco the largest
Chinese community in America” (ibid). Their proportionate share of San Francisco’s
population had almost doubled, from 5 percent in to 8 percent, in the decade during
which the transcontinental railroad was built. (57) The decade following railroad
completion in 1869 saw even more changes in San Francisco: in addition to waves of
Chinese, Irish, and other persons looking for work, merchendise from Eastern industries
that never before had access to markets in California began flooding the market. In
combination these changes touched off the most turbulent period in the sordid history of
California’s anti-Chinese movement.
The tradition of violence against immigrants of color was firmly established in the
Sierra foothills long before it spread to urban centers, but when it did reached the cities, it
seemed to attract greater national attention. Violence against San Francisco’s Chinese
residents became serious enough to merit mention in the 1871 inaugural speech of
Governor Newton Booth. “Mob violence is the most dangerous form in which law can be
violated,” inveighed Booth, a Sacramento merchant (qtd. in Nee 45). “[W]hen…banded
ruffianism selects for its victims a race notoriously defenseless,” he continued, “the
officials who stand supinely by without an effort to prevent the crime, are sharers in a
common disgrace…” (ibid.). But this warning to eschew “a common disgrace” gave way
to officials’ embrace of acts judged politically expedient amid nationwide economic
panics, first in 1873 and again in 1876. “A severe drought during the winter, the death of
thousands of cattle, and the decline by one-third of the output in mines, now added
205
unemployed farmhands and bankrupt miners to the mass if drifting workers in the city”
(46). Faced with mobs of jobless malcontents, politicians grounded strategy in
exploitation of the so-called Chinese question. California’s Senators made plans to
convene an inquiry into the matter of Chinese labor. San Francisco Mayor Andrew
Jackson Bryant aided organization of a California-wide anti-Chinese movement. As mass
meetings demanded an end to what was called “coolie labor,”
25
assaults on Chinese
people increased with alarming rapidity and viciousness. (46-47) At the center of this
maelstrom stood Irish Famine immigrant, Denis Kearney.
Denis Kearney and Anti-Chinese Irish Workingmen in 1870s San Francisco
Denis Kearney had been born in County Cork in 1847, the worst year of the Great
Hunger. Having migrated to the United States as a child,
26
in 1868 he arrived in San
Francisco as “first mate on the clipper ship Shooting Star” (Saxton, Indispensable 116).
For a time he worked on coastal steamers, then bought a drayage, or hauling firm in
1872. (Shumsky 55-56) According to Chang, Kearney “invested heavily in mining stocks
and lost everything in the crash” (125), and this failure soured him. Shumsky disagrees,
maintaining that the drayage business succeeded so well that by 1899, Kearney was
enjoying the fruits of a prosperous life. (56) Whatever its cause, bitterness –– albeit a
bitterness that blended easily with extraordinary opportunism –– consumed Kearney by
the mid-1870s.
At the Sand Lot, a barren patch of land close to City Hall, Kearney fired up San
Francisco’s disgruntled, many of them unemployed. A broad-faced man with prominent
206
nose and high cowlick,
27
Kearney “appeared in front of his audience in a workingman’s
garb, usually with uprolled sleeves,” The New York Times reported.
28
“A gifted
demagogue,” according to Chang, “Kearney soon became a crowd favorite, prescribing
violent solutions for those with the courage to take matters into their own hands” (Chang
125).
On July 23, a protest was organized by the San Francisco branch of the
Workingmen’s Party of the United States (WPUS), a Marxist-influenced party formed a
year earlier in Philadelphia, and a forerunner of the Socialist Labor Party. It was to have
been a peaceful demonstration, its intention to express solidarity with striking eastern
railroad workers, but the assembled mob had other ideas. “Shortly after nine o’clock,”
writes Shumsky, “someone on the fringe of the crowd yelled ‘on to Chinatown!’ and a
rush began” (13). The mob laid waste to one Chinese laundry, then another. By the end of
the night twenty laundries were razed. Rioting resumed the next night: armed militias
prevented an assault on a woolen mill that employed Chinese labor, so the mob destroyed
some washhouses instead. The third night left “in its wake four men dead, another
fourteen wounded, and $500,000 worth of property in ruins” (14). While there is no
direct evidence as to who participated in the riots,
29
Shumsky convincingly contends that
the most accurate means of determining the composition of the July crowd is to establish
the membership composition of the Workingmen’s Party of California (WPC), the local
political unit that soon succeeded the presumed-too-passive WPUS just weeks after the
July riots (18).
207
The WPC leadership was solidly Irish. As well as its chief organizer, Kearney,
other Irish luminaries in its leadership included J. T. Day, a Canadian carpenter of Irish
descent, and Frank Roney, a Belfast Fenian activist turned California “socialist.” It would
be an exaggeration to say that all Irish belonged to the WPC. Politicians like McCoppin,
Downey, and Casserly, for instance, were Democrats, and Burchell offers additional
evidence of disagreement within the community. (148) Likewise the San Francisco
Chronicle, a few months after the July riots, reported Father Joseph Gallagher’s dismay
over the WPC. “[A]lthough the Church is now and always has been the advocate and firm
friend of the laboring classes, still he could not say that it sanctioned the incendiary
speeches of communist orators,” the Irish-surnamed San Francisco priest
30
was quoted as
saying.
31
Labeling “their utterances as wild and irresponsible,” Gallagher “remarked,
with emphasis, that the Church would not countenance any acts of violence or rapine”
(ibid.) Belying the good Father’s Irish Catholic position is Shumsky’s analysis: city
election results suggest that “an Irishman who opposed the WPC in 1878 was rare
indeed” (28). Irish institutions also gave the WPC space – many of its meetings took
place in the Irish-American Hall, a 1,000-seat building at on Howard between Fourth and
Fifth streets, or in the Hibernia Hall, on Third Street
32
(Burchell 108, 149) And when the
WPC paraded, many of its legions adorned themselves with green ribbons. Poets like
Will P. Johnston further bound Kearney and the WPC to the “Auld Sod”:
Remember the ‘Sand Lot’, our native soil
It’s like the dirt of the dear green Isle;
Bury a few handfuls of the sand with me,
For it kills all snakes and reptiles. (Qtd. in Burchell 149.)
208
Available evidence regarding the WPC leads Burchell to muse: “If the Irish did not
comprise the bulk of membership, it is difficult to see who did” (150). By Shumsky’s
calculation, the crowds that gathered at the Sand Lot and the July 1877 rioters were
mostly the same people –– the Irish.
33
These Sand Lotters reveled in Kearney’s speeches. Chang sets out a sampling of
his sanguine rhetoric:
‘Before I starve in a country like this, I will cut a man’s throat and take whatever
he has got,’ he announced. He urged workers to ‘tear the masks from off these
tyrants, these lecherous bondholders, these political thieves and railroad robbers,
when they do that they will find that they are swine, hogs possessed of devils, and
then we will drive them into the sea.’ (Chang 125)
To similar effect were other Kearney speeches, transcribed by local news
reporters and collected in a volume published in 1878. Each speech is presented with the
realization that it is a secondhand text – that in each, a reporter has interceded between
the speaker and his audience. This intervention may be of less consequence here,
however. The words in these newspaper excerpts are consistent with those in Kearney
speeches that appear elsewhere, including the published collection, which Kearney
himself approved. This proviso permits consideration of a September 22, 1877 San
Francisco Chronicle report of a meeting at which Kearney, using language as florid as
that related by Chang above, insisted:
We don’t send little boys out to burn Chinese washhouses; no, we want an
organization to resist the regular army and the gray coats and the Committee of
Safety when the time comes…. A little judicious hanging right here and now will
be the best course to pursue with these capitalists and stock sharps who are all the
time robbing us.
34
209
On November 2, according to the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, Kearney
wreaked rhetorical havoc on two of the Big Four, Leland Stanford and Charles Crocker:
“‘I tell you, and I want Stanford and the press to understand, that if I give an order to
hang Crocker, it will be done…. The dignity of labor must be sustained, even if we have
to kill every wretch that opposes it’” (qtd. in Shumsky 175). Kearney was arrested for
this boastful threat, and for others, recorded in a Daily Evening Bulletin report of the
prosecution’s case against him:
The Central Pacific Railroad men are thieves, and will soon feel the power of the
workingmen. When I have thoroughly organized my party, we will march through
the city and compel the thieves to give up the plunder. I will lead you to the City
Hall, clean out the police force, hang the prosecuting attorney, burn every book
that has a particle of law in it, and then enact new laws of the workingmen. I will
give the Central Pacific just three months to discharge their Chinamen, and if it
not be done, Stanford and his crowd will have to take the consequences. (Ibid.)
Little wonder that some among San Francisco’s elite fretted over Kearney’s
rhetoric and the crowd’s response. Yet Shumsky makes the essential point that neither
Crocker nor any other elite was hanged as a result of Kearney’s rants. He posits two
reasons for this. First of all, Kearney hedged his harangues: “All the statements that
produced Kearney’s first arrest in early November were phrased in precisely the same
way: descriptions of situations as they would exist in the future, generally after another
situation had come into existence” (177). This is evident in the excerpts quoted above;
Kearney couches all his calls to violence in the language of condition, of what “will”
happen “if” or “when” he gives an order. But no direct and immediate order for violence
was in fact given, and this is Shumsky’s key second point: the way forward that Kearney
advocated was not the lawlessness of the insurrection, but rather the politics of the
210
Constitution. Soon after his arrest, for example, Kearney stated that “by organizing they
were endeavoring to prevent any riots from growing out of the movement” (qtd. in
Shumsky 179). Kearney employed a bullets-to-ballot approach to unrest; in effect, his
words absorbed the potentially violent thrust of the mob and redirected it into the political
arena. In other words, Kearney acted on behalf of the state, or at the very least in its best
interests.
Remarkably for a neophyte political party, in 1878 the WPC swept all thirty seats
for San Francisco’s delegation to the California Constitutional Convention. Joining them
were twenty-two members from elsewhere in the State, so that the WPC contingent
constituted about a third of all delegates. They bested a “non-partisan” slate of
Republican and Democratic candidates, who had united for the sole purpose of defeating
the WPC. As a result, the insurgent party “played a major role in writing the new state
constitution” (Shumsky 208). Only 20 percent of San Francisco’s Convention delegates
were Irish-born; however, as Burchell points out, this “unrepresentatively slight”
presence was offset by the number of Irish elected to the legislature itself. Three of the
San Francisco’s six state senators were Irish, and a five out of the city’s thirteen WPC
representatives in the state Assembly were Irish-born (150).
Opponents of the WPC – including all San Francisco’s establishment newspapers
– were quick to ridicule the party’s Irish element. The Alta even espied a papish plot
behind the party’s success. (151) San Francisco elites feared the anti-capitalist rhetoric of
Kearney and his WPC. But events at the Constitutional Convention would prove that they
need not have worried.
211
Besides sponsoring legislation banning Chinese employment and supporting the
Granger
35
program for tighter regulation of the railroads, WPC members did little to
advance the party’s platform in the course of the 1878-79 Convention. According to
Saxton, the delegates lacked not so much competence as motivation: “They were simply
content to be there – to draw their eight dollars per diem and mileage, to be accepted as
responsible participants in the governmental process” (Indispensable 131). The new
Constitution, according one commentator, “was totally without any shadow of reform”
(Shumsky 209). Nothing in it brought material comfort to the “workingman.”
Compounding this failure to capitalize on electoral success was politics back in San
Francisco; there, inexperience with City Hall chicanery cost dearly. Pitting himself
against the WPC was another Irish Famine escapee, Democrat Christopher Buckley. Born
in Ireland in 1845, Buckley immigrated to New York City shortly after his birth. (Callow
261) Arriving in the San Francisco in 1862, Buckley quickly established himself among
the political activists that frequented the Snugg Saloon, under Maguire’s Opera House in
Washington Street. Buckley eventually bought his own saloon, and became so fond of
sampling his the product that he lost his eyesight due to his alcoholism. (263)
Nevertheless, he was able to gain control of the San Francisco Democratic Party. He then
wrested control of the city from the WPC and retained it – so well that when British
author Rudyard Kipling visited the Californian city in 1889, what he observed moved
him to write:
In San Francisco, the gathering place of the races, there is a distinct Italian vote
to be considered, but the Irish vote is more important. For this reason the Irishman
does not kill himself with overwork. He is made for the cheery dispensing of
liquors, for everlasting blarney, and possesses a wonderfully keen appreciation of
212
the weaknesses of lesser human nature. Also he has no sort of conscience, and
only one strong conviction – that of deep-rooted hatred toward England. …Today
the city is governed by the Irish vote and the Irish influence, under the rule of a
gentleman whose sight is impaired, and who requires a man to lead him about the
streets. He is called officially ‘Boss Buckley,’ and unofficially the ‘Blind White
Devil.’ (Letters 46-47)
But before his fellow-Famine Irish immigrant Buckley could plot the electoral
downfall of the WPC, Kearney scored some significant successes. He gained national
attention when he toured the East Coast in 1878. Republican President Rutherford B.
Hayes even granted Kearney a fifteen-minute White House audience to discuss the issue
of Chinese labor. As many as 5,000 persons gathered at Boston Common to hear him
give what was described as “a sample of a sand lot meeting” (Kearney 10). The Boston
address certainly had all the elements of a San Francisco original. There were calls to
victory by means of “the paper knife, the ballot,” coupled with threats to resort to “our
bullets if our ballots fail” (Kearney 13). There was an appeal to a notion of citizenship
that exempted nonwhites from America’s history, one that recognized no division among
“Irish, English, Scotch, nor Dutch,” as long as all were “honest workingmen….” (ibid.).
There was a linkage of the Chinese with disease and filth, an association that rendered
them “foreign” and unworthy to stay in America:
They have a population of 450,000,000 in China, and I can smell them far off. I
said there was one with in 100 rods of me when I landed in Boston, and I ran
against one within 50 rods. [Laughter.] Let me caution workingmen not to employ
Chinese laundry men. They are filthy; they spit on clothes, and it they have any
disease it is transmitted to men and women through such washed clothing when
the body perspires. Do you want leprosy here? [Cries of ‘No.’] By not employing
them you can drive them from the country. (Ibid.)
213
There was, finally, Kearney’s signature cry “The Chinese must go,” delivered to
prolonged applause. In the end, however, Kearney’s efforts to lead a national anti-
Chinese movement did not bear fruit.
In vain Kearney attempted a comeback as an anti-Chinese agitator in 1888, before
a Congressional committee. “Not being successful in the East,” The New York Times
reported, “he denounced several members on the committee and gave up his work.”
36
By
the time that Kipling wrote in 1889, the WPC had faded away, its members absorbed into
America’s two-party system.
Like many demagogues, Kearney had always been a mass of contradictions. He
claimed to represent the “workingman,” for example, yet he himself was a boss. His
harangues jumped from the evils of the Chinese, to the evils of the corporate monopolies
that encouraged the Chinese to come to American to work, and back again. He urged the
bombing of Chinatown, yet rarely committed a violent act. Indeed, though he talked of
lynching railway barons, it is said that Kearney craved the barons’ company. (Chang 125;
Burchell 56) Of the pugnacious Corkonian Shumsky writes:
As early as the 1880s, he was on friendly terms with Leland Stanford. Jane
Stanford later recalled how the erstwhile drayman ‘became an ardent, most
devoted and loyal friend’ of her husband. … Kearney himself knew William H.
Crocker, the banker son of Charles, and he occasionally dropped in at the Crocker
Bank ‘to see his good friend Will.’…Denis Kearney was a man who wanted to do
well; he sought money, culture, and the company of successful men. (56)
He died a wealthy man in his Bay Area home in 1907. (ibid.)
214
II. Writing Racism into Layers of Law
A fundamental role of the state is to facilitate the accumulation of capital by the
ruling class; however, as Lisa Lowe argues:
Theoretically, in a racially differentiated nation such as the United States, capital
and state imperatives may be contradictory: capital with its supposed needs for
“abstract labor,” is said by Marx to be unconcerned by the “origins” of its labor
force, whereas the nation-state, with its need for abstract citizens’ formed by a
unified culture to participate in the political sphere, is precisely concerned to
maintain a national citizenry bound by race, language, and culture. In late
nineteenth century America, as the state sought to serve capital, this contradiction
between the economic and the political spheres was sublated through the legal
exclusion and disenfranchisement of Chinese immigrant laborers. Capital could
increase profit and benefit from the presence of a racialized and tractable labor
force up to the point at which the Chinese labor force grew large enough that it
threatened capital accumulation by whites. (13)
The following section takes its cue from Lowe’s insightful analysis.
In San Francisco, Irish Presence and Anti-Chinese Ordinances
No doubt having men like Denis Kearney in mind, in 1909 Mary Roberts
Coolidge wrote of the Irish: “Not only in California but elsewhere in the larger cities they
have shown violent antipathy to the darker races, and have brought with them from
Ireland the tradition of turbulency” (270). Coolidge’s treatise, Chinese Immigration,
further noted the “conspicuous” roles that Irish immigrants, “in the second, if not in the
first, generation,” played both in political and labor movements (ibid.). With respect to
late nineteenth-century California, the sociologist continued: “The preponderance of
Irish names in the leadership mobs, anti-coolie clubs, persons arrested for attacks upon
the Chinese, and also among legislators and municipal officers, bears witness to the
215
rapidity of their assimilation – but it was a great misfortune to the Chinaman” (ibid.). In
part this misfortune assumed the guise of law, which the Irish stood at the ready to
implement. “The enforcement of anti-Chinese legislation before 1882 by state officers
and the administration of the exclusion laws since that time,” Coolidge concluded, “has
also been in the hands of men of Irish birth or parentage” (ibid.).
37
As Coolidge correctly noted, the Irish were at the forefront of the state’s
campaign to use the repressive and ideological state apparatuses at work in the legal
system to resolve the economic and political contradictions inhering in Chinese
immigration – in effect, to legislate racism. Competition among elites hindered that
effort. An early such struggle had occurred when authorities in the Sierra foothills taxed
the Chinese and other nonwhites out of the goldfields. The levies benefited the local petit
bourgeoisie but contravened federal law; courts accordingly struck them down, though
not before they had their desired effect.
38
Study of subsequent legislative efforts will
enrich understanding of how competing interests among the ruling elites were made
manifest in the manipulation of local, state, and federal layers of government.
The local level – the City of San Francisco – provides the first venue for this
study of the anti-Chinese movement as an exercise in the writing of racism into law. Irish
membership on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors waxed and waned throughout the
1870s; nonetheless, the Irish political presence remained a constant in local government.
Indeed, the Irish drove adoption of ordinances intended to harass the Chinese. Four years
before he would be elected a US Senator, the Irish-born Casserly neatly summarized the
Irish viewpoint then prevalent in his own political faction: “The Democratic Party has
216
always held that our institutions contemplated only the white race” (qtd. in Burchell 136).
The extent to which Casserly and his cohorts legislated racism at the local level is evident
in this list compiled by researchers at the University of California, Hastings College of
the Law:
39
• 1870: City Commission announces that no Chinese workers will be hired to
improve Yerba Buena Park.
• 1870: Transporting goods on “yeo-ho” poles slung across the shoulders is
prohibited.
• 1870-1873?: Gongs may not be rung at theatrical performances. No plays may be
performed between midnight and daylight.
• 1873: Laundry Ordinance: Laundries with animal- drawn carts must pay a $2 fee,
but laundries without carts must pay a $15 fee. (Most Chinese launderers fell into
the latter category.)
• 1876: Queue Ordinance: Chinese prisoners must have their hair cut immediately
after arriving at the county jail.
• 1880-1883: Lotteries are forbidden. Building materials may not be imported from
China.
• 1890: Bingham Ordinance: Chinese people, including citizens, must not live or
work in San Francisco, except in “a portion set apart for the location of all the
Chinese.”
• 1900: All Chinese people must be placed under quarantine and inoculated for
Bubonic Plague. (UC Hastings).
Lawyers retained by the Chinese routinely challenged such ordinances. Courts
routinely declared many of them unconstitutional, but only after considerable hardship
had been endured. It must be added that despite the results reached, the reasoning of
federal judges did not indicate enlightenment. “Ironically enough,” notes Thomas Joo,
“even the federal judiciary, which upheld Chinese rights and struck down anti-Chinese
217
state and local laws, often reflected the same sentiment. These judges often openly
espoused the same racist beliefs that initially motivated state and local lawmakers to pass
the laws; they sometimes aired these views in the very opinions that vindicated Chinese
rights” (Joo 3).
In Sacramento, Investigation and Legislation
Although California had been enacting anti-Chinese laws since the 1850s, the
legislative act of convening an official inquiry offers especially salient evidence of the
way that the Chinese – and their rival ethnic group, the Irish – were seen in the state. The
1876 investigation by a committee of the California State Senate further serves as a point
of comparison with an 1877 inquiry conducted by Congress. These investigative texts
reveal much about how the governing class viewed the Irish at each venue. Charting the
Irish push for respectability, they demonstrate that by the 1870s the Irish had had seen
much success in San Francisco and Sacramento, yet far less farther East.
Of the seven State Senators who served on the committee formed to investigate
the “social, moral and political effect of Chinese immigration,” my research shows that at
least two –– Donovan, and McCoppin –– were Irish-born. The committee heard
testimony for fifteen days between April and June of 1876, in both San Francisco and
Sacramento. The most aggressive questioning was reserved for the fifteen Chinese
witnesses, out of a total of fifty-eight persons who testified. The Chinese immigrant was,
in effect, put on trial. Eleven of the forty-three non-Chinese witnesses – or 25 percent –
were Irish Americans; these included four police officers, a fire marshal, and a district
218
attorney.
40
The proceedings opened with the testimony of F.F. Low, a former Minister
Plenipotentiary from the United States to the Emperor of China. Senator McCoppin asked
Low to explain why Hong Kong was the major port from which Chinese embarked for
the United States. “Don’t the Chinese come from different parts of China to Hong-Kong
to take ships there,” McCoppin asked, “just as emigrants from England, Ireland, and
Scotland used to go to Liverpool?” (Cal. Sen. Rpt. 5). Low answered in the affirmative.
This marked the end of any comparisons that likened the Chinese to Europeans. From
that point on comparison stayed at the base level of racial slur. Nor was the remainder of
Low’s testimony well received. In the bland, obfuscatory language of diplomacy, he
confirmed that maintaining good relations with China benefited the US economy. The
committee was uninterested, and in ensuing days paid far greater heed to self-avowed
experts who expounded on the Chinese and prostitution, opium, gambling, marital
relations, domestic habits, work ethic, and hygiene.
Witnesses of Irish ancestry eagerly proffered such avowed expertise. An example
was one James Duffy, called on the eleventh day of testimony. “Do you know anything
about Chinatown?” Duffy was asked; he replied, “Yes, sir,” and without further ado, was
deemed qualified as an expert. Duffy was an “expressman,” or deliveryman, an
occupation that was supposed to give him special insights into Chinese culture. He
declared that Chinese houses were “horribly dirty. I have never been in a Chinese house
yet that wasn’t more like a water closet than a house…. They throw a great many slops
into the streets and into the back yards, and between them all there is a terrible mess”
(125).
41
Duffy, in short, told California’s Senators what they want to hear: the Chinese
219
were thieves, liars, perverts, degenerates, heartless coolies who turned their sick onto the
streets to die. (126) The stereotypes the Irish used against the Chinese in California are
virtually identical with those used against the Irish in Britain and on the east coast.
Another witness, George Duffield,
42
appeared slightly more qualified an expert
than Duffy. Due to a dire shortage of police officers, the San Francisco Police
Commission had appointed Special Police, paid not by the city but by local merchants, to
patrol specific beats (Chinatown 41-42). Chinatown was the beat of Special Officer
Duffield, whose testimony adhered to an anti-Chinese script. “The Chinese quarters, as a
whole, could not be much filthier or dirtier,” he told the committee (Cal. Sen. Rpt. 47).
Duffield described in great detail the many houses of prostitution that he visited, his
audience enthralled. Following some leading questions Duffield then compared San
Francisco’s Chinatown to New York’s Five Points.
43
Duffield’s choice for comparison is especially significant. In the heart of New
York’s notorious Sixth Ward, for most of the nineteenth century the Five Points, as noted
in the previous chapter, was a racially mixed neighborhood mired in poverty. According
to Graham Hodges, “by 1820, the greatest concentrations of blacks and Irish lived…in
the heart of the Five Points. Thirty years later, blacks and whites still coexisted” (Hodges
113). Census statistics show that “the proportion of Irish and African Americans in the
population of the Sixth Ward was about equal until 1845, accounting for 44 percent in
that census. After that the Irish proportion soared while African American declined
precipitously” (110). The infamy of the Five Points even crossed the Atlantic when, in
1842, Charles Dickens described the area as “reeking everywhere with dirt and filth….
220
Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how rotten beams are
tumbling down, and how patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes
that have been hurt in drunken frays” (99). As Famine Irish poured into the
neighborhood, conditions worsened. By 1856, the year to which Duffield referred, the
Five Points was regarded as an Irish enclave synonymous with poverty, squalor, and
immorality. Once again, the Irish-American witnesses and the questioners of the
California Senate committee foisted onto the Chinese degrading commentary that
Easterners typically reserved for the Sixth Ward Irish. Yet these Westerners did not seem
to include the Irish in this account of degradation. Quite to the contrary, no one on the
California committee ever questioned the “whiteness” of Irish witnesses; after all, two
Irish Americans were part of the investigation team, part of the status quo. Thus the
committee gave the Irish an opportunity not only to confirm the Chinese as nonwhites,
but also to paint themselves as white. The Irish witnesses reciprocated by espousing
nativist notions to deny to the Chinese any possibility of American citizenship.
Four Protestant clergymen testified. All four were scathing in their assessment of
the Chinese, although the Rev. Otis Gibson, a former missionary in China, did have one
or two positive things to say on their behalf. The final witness of the entire inquiry was an
Episcopalian minister, the Reverent J. H. C. Bonte. He declared his mission to convert
the heathen Chinese to Christianity, but said that his task was difficult on account of the
morals of his potential converts. In its very last question to Bonte the committee hinted at
its overall intentions. Referring to an initiative by Aaron Augustus Sargent, a Republican
who was then one of California’s representatives in the US Senate, it posed this question:
221
Q. –– What do you think of Senator Sargent’s proposition to restrict immigration
to ten on a ship?
A. –– It would be certainly a very desirable thing, if it can be done. If further
immigration were stopped, I think that the churches, by a concerted action, could
reach these Chinese here, and, perhaps, make our efforts in China of more avail.
There is hardly a Chinaman here that has not been in from ten or twenty places on
the coast, and it is very difficult to Christianize such roamers. (166)
Even before publication of the State Senate Committee’s report, legislators had
enacted statutes against the Chinese. The Hastings project’s list of such laws, along with
judicial reaction in parentheses, is as follows:
• 1852 Cal. Stat. 78: California Immigrant Bonding Law. Shipmasters must furnish
a $500 bond for all alien passengers landing in California. (Declared
unconstitutional in People v. SS Constitution, 42 Cal. 578 (1872)).
• 1855 Cal. Stat. 194: Capitation Tax required a $50 tax on the master or owner of a
vessel for the landing of each passenger who was not eligible for state or federal
citizenship by law. (Invalidated in People v. Downer, 7 Cal. 169 (1857), and
repealed in 1955).
• 1858 Cal. Stat. 295: Chinese Exclusion Law prevented the further immigration of
Chinese or Mongolians to this State. (Declared unconstitutional in 1862 and
repealed in 1955).
• 1862 Cal. Stat. 462: An Act to Protect Free White Labor against Competition with
Chinese Coolie Labor, and to Discourage the Immigration of Chinese...into
California: All Chinese people not employed in growing tea, rice, coffee or sugar
must pay a $2.50 license fee each month. (Declared unconstitutional in Lin Sing v.
Washburn, 20 Cal. 534 (1862)).
• 1870 Cal. Stat. 330: “Mongolian” women immigrating to California must prove
they are of good character. (UC Hastings).
The 1877 report served both to justify this prior legislative output and to establish a
foundation for additional anti-Chinese measures. Among them was California Statute
185, enacted in 1891, which prohibited “[t]he coming of Chinese persons into the State,
whether subjects of the Chinese Empire or otherwise” (ibid.). As with so many others of
222
these exclusionary measures, this statute was declared unconstitutional. (Ex Parte: Ah
Cue, 101 Cal. 197 (1894).)
44
Congress Investigates the Irish As Well As the Chinese
No branch of the federal government – not the executive, not the legislature, and not
the judiciary – displayed anti-Chinese sentiments anything like those evident in
California’s legislature. Foreign relations fell under Washington’s brief. The federal
political branches, unlike those in Sacramento, had to take into account delicate Sino-
American political and economic concerns. These were based on long decades of
extensive trade between the two countries, which had been memorialized in treaties
concluded in 1844 and 1858. (Chae Chan Ping, p. 590) Then had come the Burlingame
Treaty of 1868,
45
which established the right of Chinese citizens to migrate to the United
States and the reciprocal right of US citizens to migrate to China; by this agreement the
federal government had promised not to stop the Chinese from coming to America.
(ibid.) These federal policies represented the influence of one fraction of the ruling elite
in particular, the oligarchic monopoly capitalists who desired the cheapest possible labor
to maximize profits. But other fractions moved to counteract the influence of the
oligarchs. Political stability demanded they be heard forcing the US state to mediate to
ensure the long-term interests of the dominant classes.
Congress, hearing the ever-louder anti-Chinese clamor in California announced its
own joint inquiry into Chinese immigration just a month after the state’s Senate
committee excused its final witness. A committee of three Senators and three
223
Representatives – like the 44
th
Congress as a whole, all white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant
men – was formed. In October 1876 the six Washington politicians decamped to San
Francisco’s luxurious Palace Hotel for two months of testimony and fine dining.
As befitting their stature, the federal investigation was much more grandiose and
formal than California’s effort the year before. Among those officially recognized and
permitted to give evidence were State Senator McCoppin, who outlined the 1876 state
report for the Congressmen; outspoken nativist Frank Pixley, who represented the City of
San Francisco, where he published the influential Argonaut newspaper; and Colonel F.A.
Bee
46
and B. S. Brooks, hired by the Chinese Six Companies. Among those also officially
recorded as attending on October 19, the second day of the proceedings, were three
prominent San Francisco Irish Americans, John D. Condon, Joseph Monaghan, and one
M. Kelly, all officers in San Francisco “anti-coolie” clubs.
A hefty tome that reflected the congressional committee’s sense of its own
importance, the federal report ran to more than 1,200 pages, about seven times longer
than its measly 173-page California counterpart. Fully 128 federal witnesses were heard,
more than twice the number in the California investigation. Many persons who had
testified in California also appeared before the federal committee, with one notable
exception – the Washington politicians called no Chinese witnesses. It was left to Bee
and Brooks to plead the Chinese case, interrogating opponents and calling as their own
witnesses a small supporting cast, of clergy bent on converting persons they deemed
heathens and of capitalists eager to exploit them.
224
Irish Americans played a diminutive role in this inquiry, forming about 10 percent
of the total number of witnesses. Unlike in California affair, moreover, certain witnesses
subjected the Irish themselves to virulent racism. In this regard the Reverend Samuel
Blakeslee, orthodox Congregational minister and editor of the religious paper The
Pacific, stood out. Blakeslee had written the committee on November 8, (US Cong. Rpt.
1241-43) to warn of the perils of Chinese immigration; however, the pastor other
opinions he wished to share, including some on persons he called “poor white trash”
(1030).
Blakeslee’s opportunity to vent his views came when he was asked, “You say,
then, that labor in California has been made disreputable by Chinamen?” “I say that they
have contributed largely to make it disreputable,” he allowed, “but it is not entirely owing
to them” (1034). His questioner pursued the point:
Q. You think this idleness on the part of whites is not because there is no work to
do, but because they despise it, and will not do it?
A. That is one great cause. Another cause is the difficulty of getting permanent
homes. Hence they only care for labor for themselves. They have not interest in
the country; they no interest in their families, because they have no families;
hence they will drink and carouse, and do bad, many of them.
Q. Is there any class of foreign labor that you think has that effect also?
A. Yes, all who are really inferior to us; I mean whom we regard as inferior, to
whom we consign the work. (1034-35)
47
In an effort to pinpoint who besides the Chinese Blakeslee and his elite peers
“regard as inferior,” the questioner pressed Blakeslee to name any “other race” he would
include “in that category” (1035). Blakeslee complied:
225
A. If I were to mention names, I believe the Americans generally regard the Irish
as very much in that class, and very much inferior.
Q. Is that your judgment?
A. I believe if the priests were out of the way, if Romanism were out of the way,
the Irish would be equal to any people on earth. (ibid.)
Blakeslee’s concession that a change of religion could render the Irish “equal” did
not comfort his inquisitor, who reasoned, “But Romanism is not out of the way, and not
likely to be” (ibid.). If that was the case, Blakeslee replied, the Irish had no hope:
“Therefore they are, I think, inferior; inferior in intelligence, inferior in morality.” The
questioner then sought confirmation of Blakelee’s placement of the Irish at the same
social stratum as the loathed Chinese:
Q. You regard the presence of the Irish population therefore as injurious to some
extent in the same way that the Chinese are injurious?
A. I do, to some extent, in the same way; yet they can assimilate with us; they
have sympathies in common with us. The Chinese are different in religion,
different in tastes, different in habits, different in their clanish [sic] attachments,
different in their race prejudices, and essentially different in their language. It is a
language that we cannot acquire; it is impossible for us to acquire it. In all these
things they are kept separate, and always will be distinct (ibid.)
Having received the confirmation sought, the questioner asked about the extent of
the Irish threat. “You make the effect, therefore, of the Irish population and the Chinese
population as differing only in degree?” he asked Blakeslee, who repeated, “In degree,”
and then, when asked, “But having the same general effect?”, Blakeslee parroted again,
“The same general effect” (ibid.). The reverend then reiterated what he saw as
fundamentally different between the two groups:
But we could elevate the Irishmen. A great many of them become imbued with
American principles, American ideas, American enterprises, American tastes, and
226
they are thus assimilated with us and become homogeneous; but the Chinese
never will. (ibid.)
Blakeslee nevertheless stated that he would like to limit both Chinese and Irish
immigration. Committee Chair, Senator Morton then asked if there was any other foreign
population the reverend would like to limit entering the US. Blakeslee replied:
Yes, sir; I should like to limit all those who will not throw themselves open to a
full, free investigation. That would include, I think, the greater portion of the
Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Italians, and especially the Irish. I can welcome the
French pretty generally; especially do I welcome the Germans; and above all, I
welcome the English and the Scotch. They harmonize fully with us in all our
interests in a very short time. We have got to be homogeneous or else we are
ruined. We are becoming homogeneous with those nationalities; we assimilate
together. (ibid.)
The reverend’s testimony totaled fifteen pages, more than that of most witnesses. His
views served to remind the Irish of a major obstacle they faced on the path to American
citizenship: their religion. “Romanism” was distinctly un-American. Underscoring that
view is the response immediately above, in which Blakeslee relegates to the category of
least assimilable the European ethnic groups most noted for their adherence to
Catholicism. Blakeslee thus instructed that the way for the Irish to become American was
to become Protestant. But even Protestantism could not redeem the Chinese; in
Blakeslee’s view too wide a cultural divide separated them from the possibility of
American citizenship. Even in this foul business the Irish were better off than the
Chinese.
No mention of Blakeslee appears in the record of the California Senate
committee. Perhaps he did not write to it. Or perhaps he did, but the state’s Irish-
American politicians denied him a platform to air his anti-Catholic, anti-Irish views.
227
Whatever the reason for his absence at the California inquiry, he showed no fear of
offending anyone at the Congressional one. And Blakeslee was not the only one to utter
anti-Irish sentiment at the inquiry, as the following excerpt of the testimony of one
Cornelius Mahony reveals.
Mahony commenced his testimony by castigating one of the attorneys
representing the Chinese. “In regard to a statement made by Mr. Brooks a little while
ago,” Mahony began, “I wish to say that I do not know that Mr. Brooks has been to
Ireland, but I have been in Ireland and am an Irishman. He mentioned about pigs living
on the same floor as peasants. The fact of the matter is that that is a mere travelers’ tale”
(387). Mahony proceeded to defend Irish living standards, clearly binding the Irish to
whiteness and American citizenship at the expense of the Chinese: “I think the true labor
problem is not the cheapening of labor but its distribution,” he opined, adding “that its
solution is to be found, not in the bringing here of a worthless class to overwhelm white
labor, but in taking men who have no employment back East and bring them here, giving
all our own people meat and bread, and enabling every man to bring up his children as
good citizens” (ibid.).
Once the operator of a smelting business in Peru, Mahony had been asked to
testify about Chinese presence in that South American country. He informed the
committee that Chinese men were physically too weak to carry out the work of white
men. He questioned their sexual orientation. “They were in point of fact sodomites,” he
pronounced. Wanting to be sure of what he had heard, California’s Senator Sargent
asked, “You speak of the crimes committed among them in the absence of women. What
228
did you refer to, sodomy?” and received this answer: “Yes, of the worst kind” (383).
There the query ended.
48
The inquiry also exposed a major division within the structures of civil society: on
the one hand, railroad bosses and large landowners supported Chinese immigration; on
the other hand, the mass of California’s voters opposed it. Railroad baron Charles
Crocker – one of those who, to use the words of the committee’s eventual report, had
gained much by “the cheap, docile labor of the Chinese” (iv) – tried to convince the
committee that all white men had benefited. Crocker refuted the claim that the Chinese
stole jobs from “white men” and conjured up images of California as a free soil haven:
I think that their presence here affords to white men a more elevated class of
labor. As I said before, if you should drive these 75,000 Chinamen off you would
take 75,000 white men from an elevated class of work and put them down to
doing a low class of labor that the Chinamen are now doing, and instead of
elevating you would degrade white labor to that extent. For any man to ride
through California, from one end of this State to the other, and see the miles upon
miles of uncultivated land, and in the mountains millions of acres of timber, and
the foothills waiting for someone to go and cultivate them, and then talk about
there being too much labor here in the country is simply nonsense in my
estimation. There is labor for all, and the fact that the Chinamen are here gives an
opportunity to white men to go in and cultivate this land where they could not
cultivate it otherwise. (670)
His inquisitor, Senator Morton, persisted:
Q. You think, then, that there is no conflict between the interest of the white man
and the Chinese laborer?
A. No sir; I think if the white laborer understood and realized his true interest he
would be in favor of the present proportion of Chinese labor in this State. (ibid.)
Despite pro-immigration proclamations like this from Crocker and others, the
contrary outcome of the federal inquiry never was in doubt. The final report – which
contains a broad spectrum of nineteenth-century thinking, from racist pseudo-science to
229
Darwinism – condemned the Chinese as “[a]n indigestible mass in the community,
distinct in language, pagan in religion, inferior in mental and moral qualities, and all
peculiarities ….” (v). This “is an undesirable element in a republic, but becomes
especially so if political power is placed in their hands,” the report continued, and then
promised: “The safety of the State demands that such power shall not be so placed” (v).
The Chinese then became a frequent Congressional target after the 1877 inquiry.
As the century progressed, the US state stripped them of what little status, what scant
power, they had possessed. “The salutary view towards China and its people reflected in
the Burlingame Treaty,” Bill Ong Hing states, had “soon clashed head-on with the rising
anti-Chinese sentiment in California and the West. Eventually Sinophobic sentiment
prevailed, and the treaty’s provisions for free emigration were overrun by a series of laws
that first limited and then entirely excluded Chinese from the United States” (22-23).
Most devastating was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which not only curtailed
immigration, but also stated: “That hereafter no State court or court of the United States
shall admit Chinese to citizenship; and all laws in conflict with this act are hereby
repealed.”
49
In no uncertain terms this 1882 Act thus forbade any judge, whether federal
or state, from granting American citizenship to any Chinese person. It soon was followed
by further Congressional cutbacks on immigration, in 1884 and again in 1888 (Chae
Chan Ping 598-99). The US Supreme Court considered the validity of this last statute in
Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889), an immigration case that originated in San
Francisco.
50
A Chinese laborer had sailed home on the aptly named steamship Gaelic in
1887, only to find on return that as a result of the 1888 Act his papers no longer allowed
230
him to disembark at San Francisco (Chae Chan Ping, p. 582). Reflecting a new trend
throughout the judiciary, the Court rebuffed his challenge to the statute, and in so doing
granted Congress broad discretion “to exclude foreigners from the country, whenever, in
its judgment, the public interests require such exclusion ….” (Chae Chan Ping, pp. 606-
07) In so doing, moreover, it illuminated elite thinking about the Chinese. The
unanimous opinion began with a summary of Sino-American relations, one that its author
was well disposed to deliver.
A Connecticut lawyer, Justice Stephen Field had gone to California in the first
year of the Gold Rush, established himself initially as a justice of the peace, then as a
state Senator, and ultimately as Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court, a position
he held until President Abraham Lincoln placed his Republican colleague on the federal
Supreme Court. Ten years before reviewing Chae Chan Ping, Field had riled many in
San Francisco by ruling for a Chinese prisoner – represented by B. S. Brooks – who
sought damages from Irish-born Sheriff Matthew Nunan for having cut off his pigtail
pursuant to an 1876 ordinance (Ho Ah Kow v. Nunan, 12 Fed. Cas. 252 (1879)). Field’s
willingness then to invoke the Constitution against anti-Chinese measures did not now
extend to the statute under review in Chae Chan Ping, however. He cited “the experience
of years,” which taught “that a limitation to the immigration of certain classes from China
was essential to the peace of the community on the Pacific Coast, and possibility to the
preservation of our civilization there” (Chae Chan Ping, 594). Even after treaties
accorded Chinese subjects the privileges of citizens of a “most favored nation,” he
continued, “they remained strangers in the land, residing apart by themselves, and
231
adhering to the customs and usages of their own country. It seemed impossible for them
to assimilate with our people …” (595). Field added that Chinese “competition with our
artisans and mechanics, as well as our laborers in the field,” led to “open conflicts, to the
great disturbance of the peace” (594-95). These last comments underscored the shift in
federal political winds after passage of the Chinese Exclusion Acts.
In Washington the Irish, as they had in California, capitalized on this anti-Chinese
climate. A case in point was the Irish American US Representative Thomas Geary, a
Democrat from Sonoma County just north of San Francisco. Boston-born, he moved to
San Francisco with his parents in 1863, attended local Catholic schools, became a lawyer,
and served in Congress from 1890 to 1895. (Johnson & Brown, n.p.) Midway through
his tenure he leant his name to the Geary Act of 1892, perhaps the most fiercely contested
of the federal statutes. The Chinese called this Act the “Dog Tag Law” because it
required them to obtain and carry at all times identity cards with photographs (Pfaelzer
291). But that was not all. The Act also: ordered Chinese people to register with US
authorities before a year had elapsed or face deportation; extended the 1882 Chinese
Exclusion Act for another ten years; reaffirmed the ban on US citizenship for Chinese
people; and mandated that two white persons testify on behalf of a Chinese person’s
immigration status. “This,” writes Pfaelzer, “was the first time a federal statute included a
racial condition on the right to testify” (292).
The Geary Act emboldened local officials to harass the Chinese at will. The San
Francisco revenue collector charged with dispensing the identity cards – Irish American
John Quinn – quickly gained notoriety for his enthusiastic enforcement of the law. (298)
232
Yet the Chinese resisted the Geary Act with civil disobedience so widespread that
eventually the government rescinded the photograph requirement and halved the number
of “white” witnesses required in the Chinese immigration cases. (299) Even so, by the
May 1893 deadline, most Chinese had not registered. The Six Companies once again
hired lawyers to plead their case. As it had in Chae Chan Ping, the US Supreme Court
ruled in favor of the anti-Chinese lobby by upholding the draconian Geary Act in Fong
Yue Ting v. United States (1893). “Particularly troubling,” writes Pfaelzer, “was the
power the Supreme Court gave Congress to decide who was a ‘person,’ undermining the
Fourteenth Amendment’s protections of ‘all persons.’ Because the Chinese were no
longer ‘persons’ they lost any ‘absolute right to remain’” (304). In essence, the legislation
that Geary had spearheaded succeeded in defining Chinese people as nonpersons in the
eyes of the state: in Agamben’s terms, they were included in law solely so that they
could be excluded from it. With the Court’s endorsement in Fong Yue Ting, penetration
of the anti-Chinese agenda, from the local layer all the way through to the federal layer,
was complete. As a result many Chinese were driven out of their communities, and those
who remained were questioned, documented, photographed. Through mob violence,
armed government force, laws and court rulings, Chinese immigration suffered from a
blow from which it would not soon recover.
51
This account lays bare the way that the capitalist state in nineteenth-century
America accommodated the tensions between competing fractions – in this case the
oligarchic capitalists of California on the one hand, and the teeming mob of disgruntled
working- and middle-class whites on the other. The solution? Railroads would have their
233
Chinese labor as long as they were needed, but those Chinese laborers would be denied
American citizenship. Furthermore, the Congressional report, when examined alongside
its California state counterpart, shows that although the Irish had seen much success in
their Western campaign for recognition as model citizens, in the national political arena,
centered then and now in the East, they had quite a ways to go. This fact underscores a
point rarely recognized in the scholarly literature: recognition of the Irish as Americans
was most complete when emanating from the West, and San Francisco in particular,
where the Irish had quickly established themselves among the political and economic
elite; it lagged considerably farther East. Taken together, the two governmental reports
show an inverse relationship between the pro-Irish and the anti-Chinese agendas. Each
agenda followed a similar route to success, first permeating the local, then the state, and
finally the federal layer of government. The fulcrum role played by the City of San
Francisco puts in a new light a favorite catchphrase of an Irish-American political legend;
in his day Speaker of the US House of Representatives Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill was
wont to say, “All politics is local.”
52
III. In the Service of the State, at the Mercy of State Services
It is at the local level that the Irish moved from the fringes and into places of
power. As debate on citizenship and race became the central narrative of the state-in-
formation, many Irish used the anti-Chinese movement as the vehicle that transported
234
them to full, “white,” American citizenship. To focus solely on this movement would,
however, distract from the multidirectional complexity of the racialization process. The
state, through its various structures, played an essential part in this process. Four texts,
taken together, elucidate this role that the state, at its local and California levels, played in
Irish Americanization: The San Francisco Municipal Reports for 1878-79 and 1879-80
and Henry G. Langley’s San Francisco Directory for 1879 and 1880. Critical to Irish
Americanization were government jobs – especially those in the various repressive state
apparatuses. In this sense many Irish put themselves in the service of the state, and thus
bound themselves closer to the state’s own project. But many Irish were not so lucky, not
able to secure positions as police officers or school principals, and surely not able to
amass the wealth of men like the Bonanza Kings. These Irish were at the mercy of state
services, eking out in San Francisco lives of misery and poverty – different iterations of
those that they had left behind, in the Five Points and in Famine-bound Ireland. Their
presence leant grains of truth to aspersions cast by persons like Blakeslee, and thus
became a source of anxiety for all Irish striving to prove their mettle as “white”
Americans.
Defending the State
My research shows that Californians of Irish ancestry figured prominently in
repressive state apparatuses; indeed, the Irish population surge coincided with a growth
period for policing. On April 1, 1878, the California legislature voted that San
Franciscans could “increase the police force in their discretion to any number not
235
exceeding four hundred in all” (Langley, 1879 1057). Behind the new law was the
avowed concern that lawlessness on city streets threatened the entire system of social and
economic control; expressing concern was San Francisco’s representative in the state
Senate, Irish-born, former Mayor Frank McCoppin, after whom this statute was named.
McCoppin wanted not only to increase the size of the city’s Police Department, but also
to provide the mechanism to make the Department more effective. By voicing fear that
the WPC otherwise might seize control of the Department, McCoppin convinced both his
own Democratic colleagues and the Republicans in Sacramento to unite behind his
legislation. A key provision of the McCoppin Act thus removed control of the police
from municipal officials and gave it to a commission appointed by state judges (Mullen,
Chinatown Squad 13, 47, 50).
At the end of the fiscal year, June 30, 1878, the ranks of the San Francisco Police
Department numbered 172, plus the Chief of Police; as a result of the McCoppin Act this
figure jumped to 329 the following year. (S.F. Mun. Rpt. 1889-80 284) By the end of
1880, the Roman Catholic, Irish American Chief, Patrick Crowley, could report with
satisfaction that the Department had reached its goal of 400 members (ibid.).
The Municipal Report of 1878-79 helpfully sets out the name, rank, age, and
nativity of every San Francisco policeman (women would not be employed as police
officers until the turn of the century). Of the 329 officers there listed I estimate that
almost half – 152 – appear to have been Irish American.
53
Of these, 109 were born in
Ireland, 38 in the United States, and 5 in Canada, Australia, or elsewhere. Comparable
contingents from other ethnic groups lagged far behind: fifteen officers were born in what
236
is now Germany, scarcely more than a tenth the Irish number.
54
The total for American-
born officers with no apparent Irish ancestry was 125.
55
Clearly the Irish, most of whom
were Catholic, dominated San Francisco’s Police Department, as they had done since it
was launched in 1849 by the appointment of Athlone-born Malachi Fallon as its first
Chief. Indeed, the Department’s website notes that between 1850 and 1899, the city had
ten chiefs, five of whom were Irish.
56
When Crowley was appointed to his second stint as
Chief at the end of 1879 (his first had lasted from 1866 to 1873),
57
he joined Irish-born
clerks William Cullen and Alfred Clarke as the three highest-paid members of the force.
(Langley, 1879 1054)
According Kevin Mullen, a criminologist and historian who himself served in the
SFPD for more than a quarter-century, among Chief Crowley’s first 1879 initiatives was
to set up a Chinatown Squad. (Chinatown Squad 53) The move was a response to public
perceptions that the Special Police hired by merchants to patrol the area were corrupt;
that is, that some merchants engaged in unsavory activities, and it was these that the
Special Police served to protect. “The evils of the system of Special Police and its
scandalous abuse in Chinatown, are well known,” outgoing Mayor Bryant, the Kearney
ally who had helped organize a statewide anti-Chinese group, proclaimed in his 1879
farewell address (S.F. Mun. Rpt. 1889-80 829). Bryant expressed regret at his inability to
eradicate the problem during his tenure, despite the passing of 1878 law that had
bolstered the police force.
58
The Chinatown Squad, like the Department in general, had a decidedly Irish bent.
One of its most notorious members, Bill Price, was among the many new recruits of
237
1878. Born in impoverished County Leitrim at the beginning of the Famine in 1845, Price
attained a reputation as a violent individual not afraid to use illegal methods to discipline
the community.
59
Whenever the task of policing the Chinese and the rest of the community
overwhelmed, the Department could fall back on various local militias and California’s
National Guard. According to Jason Kaufman, up until 1903, defense in the United States
“was loosely divided between federal, state, and independent militias” (88; original
emphasis). These forces were tasked to maintain law and order and to protect America
from foreign invaders, wherever they might be found. In California my research reveals
that the Irish were well represented in such forces. Six companies of the San Francisco-
based, Second Brigade of the Third Infantry Regiment of the California National Guard–
to be precise, the McMahon, the Shields, the Montgomery, the Wolf Tone, the Meagher,
and the Emmet Life Guards – comprised 329 soldiers, almost all of them Irish. The same
was true in two of the five companies of the First Battalion Cavalry, the forty-eight-man
Jackson Dragoons and the one-hundred-and forty-nine-man Union Guard.
The history of independent militias in the United States, though interesting, is too
complex to detail here. These units operated outside of direct influence of the National
Guard but most received financial support either from state or from local authorities.
Many were organized along ethnic lines, and met regularly, dressed in fancy uniforms,
and drilled and drank with gusto. San Francisco had fifteen such independent militias,
including two distinctly Irish companies, the Independent McMahon Grenadier Guard,
whose 63 members drilled at the Irish American Hall, and the Sarsfield Guard, whose
238
103 members drilled in the Armory at 13
th
and Mission Streets (Langley, 1880 1139-40).
These Irish militias and National Guard units likely served a dual purpose. Surely they
exemplified Irish worthiness to full American citizenship; furthermore, as Kaufman
speculates, the presence of armed Irishmen may have deterred nativist, anti-Irish
violence. (95)
Another major government-sponsored source of Irish employment was the San
Francisco Fire Department. Of the 279 listed in the ranks in the Municipal Reports in
1879, 149 bore Irish surnames; many of the fire companies were composed entirely of
Irishmen. (308-337)
No less than in the Police Department, half the men who headed the San
Francisco Sheriff’s Department in this period were Irish American; specifically, out of
the twenty Sheriffs between 1850 and 1899 ten were Irish American, and at least five of
them were born in Ireland.
60
And as was the case in the Police Department, once Cork-
born Fenian hero Tomas Desmond
61
was elected Sheriff on the California Workingmen’s
Party ticket in 1879, the three highest-paid persons in the Sheriff’s Department were Irish
Americans. The Sheriff was paid $8,000 a year, twice the salary of the Police Chief, the
County Clerk, and most other senior city employees. The Sheriff’s Department –
responsible for, among other things, the local jail – was thoroughly Irish throughout its
ranks. According to a list in Langley’s Directory, twelve out of the twenty-one deputies
in 1880 had Irish surnames; among jailers the figure was ten out of fifteen. Other
employees listed include a Miss Kate Sheehan, the matron of the County Jail, who earned
$600 per annum, $300 less than the men who drove wagons and cleaned the jail. (1084)
239
Just as the Sheriff’s Department was paid to incarcerate adult prisoners, Irish-run
organizations received substantial government funding to house young offenders – and
orphans. The Magdalen Asylum received its first government grant as early as 1855. In
1862 the Asylum – located on the site where San Francisco General Hospital now stands
– was funded to detain young offenders, wards of the court, and girls previously sent to
the San Francisco Industrial School. In 1880, thirteen of the fifteen Sisters of Mercy at
the Asylum were Irish-born, and another nun had Irish-born parents. (Burchell 10, 11,
160)
The Irish further occupied positions at all branches of the civil service in
California, at local, state, and federal levels, and were prominent in the teaching corps, as
the next chapter will show. From the Census figures, Sarbaugh estimates that in “1880
there were 75,000 first and second generation Irish in the city,” making the Irish San
Francisco’s largest ethnic group. (164) By then firmly established in the city’s
bourgeoisie, the Irish immigrant population alone “could boast of forty-one lawyers,
thirty-two doctors, and seventy-one bankers and brokers. Among the middle class
occupations, they comprised almost five hundred clerks and salesman and nine hundred
traders and dealers” (162). By 1880, then, many Irish in San Francisco “had arrived.” But
many more had not.
Depending on the State
In the pivotal year of 1878, Father Hugh Quigley, a native of County Clare,
published The Irish Race in California, and on the Pacific Coast. In it he extolls the
240
achievements of the Irish in early California; every large landowner, capitalist, and
banker of Irish descent wins his praises. Their successes evince the racial superiority of
the Irish, Quigley suggests, and he lays at the feet of Ireland’s Anglo-Saxon conquerors
all responsibility the poverty and deprivation in his homeland. But the Irish Race scarcely
acknowledges a fact evident in the two Municipal Reports and the two Directories under
review: even though certain Irish men and women enjoyed prosperity and prestige in San
Francisco during this time, many more encountered nothing but hardships, hunger, and
miserable deaths.
Wards of the court and young offenders, as we have seen, were housed at the
Irish-run, state-funded, Magdalen Asylum. Meanwhile others of the city’s indigent –
persons who depended on others’ largess – often found their way to the Alms House in
the Laguna Honda neighborhood. In fiscal year 1878-79 it housed 938 inmates, of whom
505 were foreign-born. The Irish, at 249, made up nearly half of them. How many of
those dependents were Famine Irish difficult to say, but it is a fair bet that the number
was high. The same is true for American-born Irish, though that number does not appear
in the reports. (S. F. Mun. Rpts. 1878-79 293-94) In the city’s Hospital Report for the
same period, the total of US-born patients admitted for a wide variety of ailments stood at
928 and German-born at 369; Irish-born admittees numbered a staggering 964 persons.
(260)
The Irish likewise figured prominently in crime statistics. Of the 973 prisoners
listed the San Francisco Municipal Reports 1878-79, 446 were foreign-born. The biggest
241
proportion, 210, were Irish persons, followed by 125 Chinese persons and forty-seven
Germans. (734)
One major source of serious crime were the “hoodlums,” a term that originated in
San Francisco.
62
Much of the hoodlum violence was caused by the offspring of the city’s
Irish immigrants, and most of their venom was reserved for the Chinese (Mullen,
Dangerous 53). This phenomenon did not go unnoticed in the popular press and other
influential circles. H.C. Bennett, the Secretary of the Chinese Protection Society formed
in 1869 in San Francisco to defend the Chinese, put it bluntly: “It is a significant fact in
this connection that every person arrested is an Irishman and the children who give the
officers the most trouble are of Irish parentage” (qtd. in Dangerous 55). The Irish also
were on the receiving end of violence; Mullen estimates that between 1860 and 1900,
Irish-surnamed people were the victims of up to 48 percent of the criminal homicides in
San Francisco. (46)
The Irish led in the death columns as well. The “Health Officers Report” records
the nativity of 4,493 persons who died in the city in fiscal year 1878-79. The total of US-
born persons was 2,341, less than the foreign-born total of 2,152. In the latter group, 663
decedents were Irish, 504 Chinese, and 310 Germans. (222) The “Coroner’s Report on
the Autopsies,” typically performed on victims of violence, reveals that out of 386 deaths
investigated, among the foreign-born most, again, were Irish, at eighty-one, followed by
fifty-three Germans, thirty-three Chinese, and twenty English. (129) One of the few
crime categories in which the Irish did not lead was that of suicides: out of a total of
eighty-six reported, only five were Irish. (125) Terse entries in city crime ledgers tell
242
stories in sobering contrast to the giddy reports – delivered by Quigley and other Irish-
American authors both past and present – of Irish attainment in California. Such entries
suggest, moreover, a material source for the anxiety that fed both fears of joblessness and
hatred of the “other” group believed responsible for the economic ills of some of San
Francisco’s Irish.
63
* * *
The Irish immigrant, his Chinese counterpart, and the concept of ideal American
citizenship comprised a tense triangle in the 1870s. The ideal US citizen was exclusively
white, preferably Anglo-Saxon, preferably Protestant. The Chinese irrevocably were
denied this WASP standard of American citizenship. They could never be white, never be
American. But the Irish could attain full American citizenship, one that embraced
American nationality – if, that is, they jettisoned their least-favored traits. Like the
Chinese, the Irish had been otherized in popular American culture; unlike the Chinese,
however, America had not slammed the door to citizenship shut against them. The Irish
kept one foot in the door and with the other kicked their fellow immigrants from Asia.
The more they kicked, the wider the door opened.
This chapter first recounted the events that led to a violent climax in late 1870s
San Francisco. Mobs consisting primarily of the Irish and their Irish leaders attacked
Chinese people and property, and these attacks helped to spur legislation that built on
existing discriminatory laws to deny to people of Asian origin any hope of American
citizenship. The chapter then honed in on this dynamic, applying Poulantzian notions of
243
the state to aid understanding of how three layers of the American legal apparatus – local,
state, and federal – competed and often clashed with one another as the ideal of American
citizenship was battered into shape. This examination shows clearly that for the Irish, the
fast track to full American citizenship originated not on the Eastern seaboard but on the
Western frontier. Contrary to popular myths of American rugged individualism, explicit
state structures and practices proved an indispensable component of this Irish
Americanization track.
By situating the shifting status of the Irish in a specific region of America –
California – this examination enriches understanding of the role of the state in the process
by which certain individuals and groups are deemed to be suitable for citizenship at the
expense of unsuitable others. An intricate symbiosis operates through state structures.
Citizenship is defined as much by whom a person is not as by whom the person is. The
process was particularly salient in nineteenth-century California, where Irish inclusion
and Chinese exclusion advanced together; indeed, they depended on one another.
Illustrating the Chinese exclusion/Irish inclusion dichotomy were a number of
primary texts, among them an 1876 state and an 1877 federal governmental report, each
of which purported to investigate the Chinese in America, and each of which provided a
foundation for production and implementation of laws discriminating against the
Chinese. Close reading of these reports maps a trajectory: against the backdrop of a
demonized Chinese people, the Irishman emerged as the model Californian and then put
himself forward as a full-fledged ideal American citizen. In this latter, national effort, the
Irish at first proved less successful, as evinced in the testimony of some witnesses before
244
Congress. Eventually they would succeed, however, to the point that in 1960 an Irish-
American Catholic would be elected to lead the country as a whole.
Preceding that twentieth-century victory had been the placement of generations of
persons of Irish ancestry in a myriad of positions throughout governmental service – in
police and fire departments, in the military and in the teaching corps. Thus did the state,
by means of civil service employment in nineteenth-century San Francisco, play an active
role in the Americanization of the Irish.
Contrary to the conventional Marxist view that holds that the proletariat forms the
basis of the revolutionary vanguard against reactionary rule, investigation of the Irish in
California reveals that the proletariat was among the most reactionary and racist of all the
classes. Dennis Kearney eagerly performed the important ideological work of the racial
state as part and parcel of the embrace of an American citizenship that brought with it
white entitlement. Working-class racism was not restricted to the Irish, of course. As my
later chapter on James Connolly, will show, white supremacist ideology intimately tied to
notions of American exceptionalism, gripped the American socialist and trade union
movements.
The state had to intervene when certain modes of wealth accumulation threatened
the overall security of the class system that the state was charged with maintaining.
64
Rising street violence and anti-capitalist rhetoric in 1870s California, which emanated
from white middle- and working-class movements, appeared to threaten the existence of
the ruling class. In such a scenario, the need for political stability trumped the oligarchic
245
capitalists’ need for cheap labor. Victor Nee, in his discussion of events in 1876, captures
the dilemma confronting the ruling class:
That summer, the level of panic and agitation in San Francisco became high
enough that even the business class, which has consistently been in favor of
Chinese immigration, began to consider exclusion as the only way of regaining
domestic order. On July 31, Governor Irwin, of the traditionally pro-Chinese,
procapitalist Republican Party, analyzed the situation thus: ‘it is appalling to think
what he (the workingman) may attempt in his despair. In his desperation he may,
like blind Samson, lay hold of the pillars of the temple and seek relief in one
common, indiscriminate destruction. To be plain, the discontent of the
workingmen on the Chinese question is a constant menace. The danger from this
source can only be removed by removing its cause.’ (Nee 47)
Thus did the politico-legal apparatus set about restricting Chinese immigration.
“The state apparatuses,” Poulantzas explains, “consecrate and reproduce
hegemony by bringing the power bloc and certain dominated classes into a (variable)
game of provisional compromises. The state apparatuses organize – unify the power bloc
by permanently disorganizing – dividing the dominated classes, polarizing them towards
the power bloc, and short circuiting their own political organizations” (State 140).
Playing a crucial role in the nineteenth-century San Francisco “game of provisional
compromises” was Kearney. His achievement was to ensure the power bloc’s dominance
by diverting the threat that the mob posed into structures that the state had developed to
absorb such energy of mass protest; that is, the channels of political democracy. Agitation
through these channels blunted the cutting edge of the masses of demonstrators, short-
circuited initial electoral successes of his Workingmen’s Party of California, and
rendered the Democratic Party a primary ideological state apparatus. Like Kearney,
politicians in the mainstream parties harnessed mob energy for their own ends; moreover,
246
through the state-controlled electoral structures that favored two dominant fractions of
the power bloc, they pursued a policy of racial exclusion that reinforced the class system.
Despite his torrid anti-oligarchic rhetoric, despite his potential for arousing
violent mass action, Kearney was in fact not a threat to the state; rather, he worked
diligently on its behalf. Poulantzas recognized that the state’s autonomy is revealed
through a variety of contradictory measures that each class and fraction, “through its
specific presence in the State and the resulting play of contradictions, manages to have
integrated into state policy. This is true even of negative measures: that is to say,
opposition and resistance to the adoption or implementation of measures favouring other
factions of the power bloc” (State 135, emphasis original). Kearney railed against the
oligarchies, blaming them for Chinese immigration, even as he blamed the Chinese for all
social ills. But the state, whose very autonomy ensures the its stability, easily absorbs
such opposition. As indicated by the comments of Governor William Irwin to which Nee
referred above, the ruling elite recognized the need to accommodate Kearney and his
WPC, at the expense of the oligarchies, in order to maintain the state’s unequal
equilibrium. The first instinct of the ruling elite was to turn to more traditional means of
suppression; that is, to repressive state apparatuses like the police and the military. In San
Francisco, their ranks swelled with Hibernian zeal. The Irish workingman, it seemed,
patrolled both sides of the barricades.
247
CHAPTER FOUR ENDNOTES
1
The estimate for the number of Irish workers on the transcontinental railroad was culled
from O’Conner, chapters 2 & 3; The Chinese figure is taken from Takaki, Different
(197).
2
See Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy.
3
See Roediger, Wages 85-87
4
Lewis’s work is often copied and has not as yet been emulated. The most recent history
of the railroad, for example, Richard Rayner’s 2008 work, The Associates: Four
Capitalists who Created California, relies heavily on Lewis, and adds little to common
knowledge about the Big Four.
5
See also Takaki, Strangers 85.
6
The Chinese Six Companies is the known to Chinese people as Zhonghua Huiguan. It is
also known as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. Founded in San
Francisco in the early 1860s, the Six Companies comprised of six “companies” charged
with looking after the welfare of their members, who joined a particular “huighuan”
through geographic or familial ties. The Six Companies handled the internal affairs of
Chinese America. See Chen 71-73.
7
See also Takaki, Different 197.
8
No one knows for sure the exact figure. According to Jean Pfaelzer, “hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of Chinese had died building the railroad” (168).
9
See Transcontinental Railroad. A PBS “American Experience” Documentary.
Directors: Michael Chin and Mark Zwonitzer, 2003.
10
For an excellent analysis of the photography of the Promontory Point ceremony, see
Eng, Chapter One.
11
For a key to the portraits in the painting, visit website the California State Railroad
Museum in Sacramento at
http://cprr.org/Museum/Engravings/Last%20Spike+Key%20toPortraits.html.
12
The trans-Pacific Irish represent a fascinating phenomenon that deserves much more
scholarly attention than I grant it here. Scholarship in this area is unfortunately sparse;
however, there are hopeful signs that this may be changing. For example, see Malcolm
Campbell’s “Ireland’s Furthest Shores.”
248
13
Irish women emigrated in high numbers, and constituted a large percentage of Irish
population relative to that in other American cities, as will be discussed in the following
chapter. This chapter pointedly limits its discussion to “workingmen.”
14
See Walsh, San Francisco Irish; Sarbaugh (161).
15
For examples of Irish financial support of the Catholic Church in San Francisco, see
Burchell 9 – 11.
16
See Lewis, The Silver Kings.
17
For uncritical, glowing accounts of these Irish millionaires, see Prendergast’s Irish
Pioneers; Dowling’s California, The Irish Dream, and his Irish Californians: Historic,
Benevolent, Romantic. The titles say it all.
18
For more on Broderick, see Saxton, Rise 205-212.
19
For a detailed study of this period in San Francisco’s history also see Lotchin’s San
Francisco, 1846-56, and Mullen’s Let Justice Be Done.
20
See Chen (41). Chen’s views certainly contradict those of Takaki and of others such as
Zo (62) on this issue.
21
While the trans-Pacific journey was undoubtedly difficult, the ordeal was considerably
shorter for the Chinese argonauts than it was for most of those who traveled to California
by sea from New York. One of the first ships to bring Chinese prospectors from Hong
Kong to the port of San Francisco took sixty-three days (Chen 11). The journey around
the Horn took anywhere between five to eight months (Starr 52).
22
See Chang, Ch. 1.
23
See Saxton, Indispensable 51-53.
24
For a succinct discussion of the changing economy in 1870s San Francisco, see
Shumsky, Chapter 4.
25
The term “coolie labor” was frequently used by US trade unions and the like, to
accentuate the difference between the Chinese and so-called “free white labor.” The
coolie, by implication, was unfree, and servile and thus a threat to the white workingman.
See R.G. Lee Ch. 2.
26
Saxton states Kearney’s age at emigration at sixteen. (Saxton Indispensable, 116) But
his obituary in the New York Times says that he was only eleven when he came to the
249
United States. “Denis Kearney Dead. He Headed the ‘Sand Lot’ Agitation Against the
Chinese,” New York Times, April 26, 1907, p. 9, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-
free/pdf?res=9C01EED6123EE033A25755C2A9629C946697D6CF].
27
See undated photograph of Kearney accompanying Kenneth M. Johnson, “Progress
and Poverty – a Paradox,” The Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco, available at
http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist9/hgeorge.html, reprinted from California Historical
Society Quarterly, March 1963.
28
From “Denis Kearney Dead. He Headed the ‘Sand Lot’ Agitation Against the
Chinese,” New York Times, April 26, 1907, p. 9, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-
free/pdf?res=9C01EED6123EE033A25755C2A9629C946697D6CF].
29
See Shumsky 13-18.
30
Gallagher is described as a “zealous secular priest” in Riordan, 1905, 148.
31
“The Knotty Problem,” San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 3, 1877, (p. 1).
32
According to Bishop’s 1877 San Francisco Directory, the location of the Hibernia Hall
was 246 Third Street. By 1900, it had moved to 120 Ninth Street, according to the San
Francisco City Directory. I am grateful to Thomas Carey of the San Francisco Public
Library for providing this information.
33
Although the majority of these were men, women also took part. See Martha Mabie
Gardner’s “Working on White Womanhood.” See the following chapter of this
dissertation for more on Irish women activists in San Francisco.
34
This quote also appears in Shumsky (175).
35
Founded in the 1860s by Oliver Hudson Kelley, the Granger movement was an
organization of farmers united against the power of the monopolies and large
corporations, whose policies threatened farming communities across the United States.
For further details see Woods.
36
“Denis Kearney Dead. He Headed the ‘Sand Lot’ Agitation Against the Chinese,” New
York Times, April 26, 1907, p. 9, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-
free/pdf?res=9C01EED6123EE033A25755C2A9629C946697D6CF].
37
Contemporary scholars regard Coolidge’s tome as the foundational text on Chinese
immigration to the US; see for example, Hing 1993; Chen 2000. Her observations expose
many themes underpinning the study of the Famine Irish in California. Essential aspects
of Coolidge’s statement include: her discernment of generational differences within the
250
Irish-American community; her recognition of the crucial, multifaceted Irish role in the
anti-Chinese movement; and her WASP bias, reflective of how certain members of
America’s intellectual elite perceived the Irish at the dawning of the twentieth century.
38
See Pfaelzer (ch. 1).
39
The full list includes various anti-Chinese ordinances promoted through the Vigilance
Committee of San Francisco and others during the 1850s and 1860s; they are omitted
here as outside the period treated in this chapter.
40
This is an approximate, inexact figure based on the surnames of those involved. I will
return to this problem later in this chapter.
41
Senator Donovan pressed Duffy to say more: Mr. Donovan – Do you know of white
people being discharged to give place to Chinamen?
A. – I have heard white ladies say so. They said they would prefer white help, if
they would work for the same price as Chinamen.
Q. – Do you know of any boys being diseased by having visited the Chinese
quarter?
A. – No more than I have heard.
Q. – What is the common report?
A. – That no one goes there except that he gets diseased.
Q. – What is the common report as to truth telling among the Chinese?
A. – A Chinaman will tell a lie for ten cents and swear to it. (Cal. Sen. Rpt. 125)
42
Kevin Mullen has unearthed evidence that Duffield himself was in league with the
owners of various houses of vice in Chinatown. See Mullen’s Chinatown Squad 42.
43
State Senator Creed Haymond asked the witness:
Q. – Were you ever in New York City?
A. – Yes, sir.
Q. – Was there any part of that city, as existed twenty years ago, that could be
compared with the Chinese quarter?
A. – No, sir. The Five Points could not compare with it. The Chinese quarter is
dirtier and filthier than the Five Points were. (Cal State Rpt. 47)
44
See All Persons Born… website.
45
Named after Anson Burlingame, formerly the US representative in China.
46
Bee was a New York native of English-Scottish ancestry, who had set sail in 1848 for
San Francisco on same 22-month voyage as James Flood; was appointed attorney to
represent Chinese by US Sen. Oliver P. Morton of Indiana – not hired – and by 1892 was
251
Consul to China in SF, having been appointed by China’s emperor the year after the
congressional inquiry. See The Bay of San Francisco: vol. II, pp. 491-93.
47
In the record printed in 1877, “Q.” questions and “A.” answers appear in the same
paragraph, separated only by a dash. Here and elsewhere I have given each side of the
colloquy a distinct paragraph, a format that renders the transcript easier to read and thus
more comprehensible.
48
Another who articulated anti-Irish views was West Evans, a manufacturer and dealer of
railway ties and lumber who strongly favored importing Chinese labor. Evans
complained to the committee that he had trouble with his men “only during political
campaigns” (US Cong. Rpt. 721). Bee inquired further:
Q. What trouble did you have?
A. O, men get dissatisfied; and that is the time generally when they are opposed to
Chinamen.
Q. Do they find someone to lead them at those times?
A. Undoubtedly. (ibid.)
Representing the Chinese, Bee saw an opportunity to turn the tables of racism back on the
Irish. He asked Evans to name the “class of people” who “generally lead them on,” and
without delay Evans pointed his finger at the Irish: “I never had any trouble with white
men except with the Irish. I never had any Americans or Germans or Scandinavians to
meddle with the Chinamen at all” (ibid.). Bee then pursued the religion question:
Q. Protestant Irish?
A, No, sir; Catholic Irish.
Q. The Protestant Irish do not seem to interfere with them in any part of the State?
A. They never have with me; I never heard of their interfering with Chinamen.
Q. Then from what source does this opposition to the Chinese arise, in your
opinion periodically?
A. It comes from politicians and this class I speak of. (ibid.)
Like the testimony of Reverend Blakeslee, this colloquy exposed the WASP objections to
the Irish, were based not on racial terms, as with the Chinese, but on cultural objections,
and such differences, as Irish American politicians and Catholic Church officials knew
well, could be removed through proper acculturation. As noted earlier, the Roman
Catholic Church in America sought the rapid Americanization of their flock, and did not
hesitate to fly the Stars and Stripes at every opportunity. The road to power in the United
States, the bishops knew, was paved with fervent nationalist rhetoric.
49
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/angel/exclude.htm)
50
It should be noted that the attorney representing Chae Chan Ping throughout his
unsuccessful bid to avoid deportation was Thomas D. Riordan. This Irish American,
described by Jean Pfaelzer as “an aggressive San Francisco attorney,” (209) fought on
252
behalf of the Chinese on many occasions but, in relation to his ethnic background, he was
more the exception than the rule.
51
Although this chapter is concerned solely with the Chinese, these negative
consequences were visited on immigrants from elsewhere in Asia, too, as scholars such
as Lisa Lowe have made clear.
52
See generally Tip O’Neill & Gary Hymel, All Politics Is Local.
53
Although the text cited permits certainty with regard to Irish Americans born in
Ireland, of necessity I have in certain circumstances estimated the numbers of American-
born Irish through surnames. This method is admittedly fraught with peril. Undoubtedly,
it is difficult to guess the ethnicity or religion of the Irish solely through surnames,
especially those who are the focus of this dissertation, the Famine Irish, mainly Roman
Catholic, immigrants to America. Owing to invasions, plantations, and intermarriages,
“the Irish, to an extent not matched by other groups, shared surnames with other
nationalities” (Mullen, Dangerous 48). The widespread eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century practice of Anglicizing of old Gaelic names produced further ambiguity with
regard to the origins of certain names. “Smith,” for example, is common in Ireland, where
it is an Anglicized form of the Irish surname MacGowan, itself derived from the Gaelic
word “gabha,” meaning “smith.” The fact that “Smith” is also one of the most common
names in England serves to emphasize the challenge of determining nativity or ethnicity
by surname. Accordingly, I have exercised caution and made use of all available
evidence surrounding each individual listing, so that I am reasonably confident of the
accuracy of this and other surname-based lists compiled for this chapter.
54
Included in this figure are persons listed as “Bavarian,” “Prussian,” and “Hessian,” as
well as “German.”
55
See “Chief of Police Report, Schedule ‘I,’” 52-71, S.F. Mun. Rpt. 1878-79.
56
See http://www.sfgov.org/site/police
57
Mullen, “Appendix Chiefs,” 1-2.
58
Less than a decade later Bryant would drown – an apparent suicide – after falling off a
ferry bound from San Francisco to Oakland. “An Ex-Mayor’s Suicide; The Unhappy End
of One of San Francisco’s Old Citizens,” New York Times, May 12, 1888, p. 5. The Times
account stated that “Bryant’s affiliations with Denis Kearney and the sand lotters injured
him politically, and he never secured office again,” though he tried to run for Governor.
59
See Mullen, Chinatown Squad ch.6. After a successful stint in the Mission district,
where he and his partner, William Burke, took on the hoodlum gangs, he was transferred
253
to the Chinatown Squad in 1888. Price, “the mere mention of whose name chills the
blood in highbinder’s veins,” (qtd. in Mullen, Chinatown Squad 73) became head of the
squad in 1890.
60
See http://www.sfsheriff.com/sheriffs
61
Desmond helped effect one of the most daring prison escapes in Irish political history,
if not the most transnational one. He was one of a band of Fenians who went to Australia
and orchestrated the liberation of several leading Fenian leaders imprisoned there by the
British. US-based Fenians commissioned a ship, The Catalpa, to carry our their daring
raid. The mission was successful and The Catalpa carried its cargo of Irish patriots to the
West Coast of the United States, where many of the escapees went on to live
extraordinary lives. See Devoy. An edited version of Fenian leader John Devoy’s full
account of the raid was recently published in the US––see Fennell and King.
62
According to Mullen, the likely origin of “hoodlum” stems from the Bavarian German
word hodalump, which means exactly the same thing. In the late 1860s and early
seventies, San Francisco had a large Southern German population many of whom were
small merchants who kept grocery/saloon combinations. These were the places where the
hoodlums frequented. (Dangerous Strangers 31, 160)
63
The following selections from the list of property returned to deceased’s next of kin in
the San Francisco Municipal Reports for the Fiscal Year 1878-79 tell their own story:
Aug. 30. T.H.A. McCarthy, seventy-five cents, pocket knife, comb, cigar holder
and two shells. … Delivered to Lizzie McCarthy, sister of deceased.
Nov. 7. Ann M. Barry. One dollar, fifteen cents, (coin), two door keys, passbook.
… Delivered to Richard Barry, husband of deceased.
Nov. 26. Joanna Murphy; gold ring delivered to her husband.
Mar 2. 1879. Michael McBride, ten cents and papers. Delivered to City Treasurer
Hubert.
April 21. Catherine O’Rourke, fifty cents …
Apr. 30. Timothy O’Sullivan, 25 cents, pocketknife, rosary and Bulldozer No. 2
revolver. … (142-55)
64
The railroad companies were not the only monopoly capitalists that the state had to rein
in. During this same period, the 1870s, John D. Rockefeller was aggressively building his
monopoly of the oil industry, a move that would eventually lead to the famous US
Supreme Court antitrust decision of 1911. For an excellent account of this see Weinberg.
254
CHAPTER FIVE
GENDER LAUNDERING OF IRISH WOMEN
AND CHINESE MEN IN SAN FRANCISCO
1
Even in the crammed columns of San Francisco’s Daily Alta California, the
December 9, 1890, the headline “A Girl's Predicament” no doubt caught the reader’s eye.
There followed this news:
Ella Hare, a young Irish girl, who arrived here from Ireland yesterday morning, is
in a sad predicament. Her brother had arranged to meet her immediately on her
arrival in this city, but he did not materialize. Being without funds the girl applied
to Sergeant Lungford for assistance and he escorted her to the New Western
Hotel, where she is now residing and will continue to remain until her brother
puts in an appearance.
Ella Hare had traveled alone across an ocean to place herself on arrival in
America at the mercy of someone from back in the “auld country.” In this she was like
many Irish women emigrants of her day yet unlike women from other immigrant groups.
Very few of the latter undertook the arduous journey alone; for many Irish women,
however, there was no other option but to sail the Atlantic route to a new and uncertain
life. Ella’s story differed only in that most Irish women at the time did not go to San
Francisco from Ireland but rather stayed a while at their original point of entry,
America’s East Coast. Only members of the Irish middle or upper class, plus a smattering
of Irish sailors, could afford full passage to California. An Irish person also might opt for
the direct route if a relative already established in California paid for the journey. This is
the most likely – yet not certain – scenario in Ella’s case.
255
The story prompts many questions. Did Ella’s brother eventually show up to
claim her? Had something happened to him? Was she left destitute on the street? Or did
Sergeant Lungford help her find work, perhaps as a domestic servant or as a
washerwoman in one of San Francisco’s ubiquitous laundries? Did Ella enter a more
tragic occupation? Later editions of the Alta offered no answers. To this day one can only
wonder what fate befell Ella Hare.
1. Gender Laundering and the Imaginary of Popular Culture
From the moment the Famine Irish landed in the United States, the state deemed
them white, and they solidified this status as white Americans through various state-
sponsored occupations and political apparatuses. In the cultural sphere, however, Irish
whiteness was continually challenged, especially during the late nineteenth century. This
chapter investigates the relationship between culture and the state during this period to
see how the material condensation of forces that constitute the state operated to serve its
longterm interests. These interests often took precedence over cultural objections unless
or until they threatened the state’s unequal equilibrium. Throughout the nineteen and
early-twentieth centuries, the state needed Irish labor; during the 1860s and 1870s in
particular, it also needed Chinese labor. Yet while Congress passed the Chinese
Exclusion Act in 1882, no Irish Exclusion Act ever became law in Washington. This
chapter helps to explain why this was so.
256
Examined will be the Irish struggle for recognition as American citizens in the
cultural sphere, a process that for the sake of argument I simply call here Irish-
Americanization. Irish-Americanization occurred at the expense of racial minorities in
general and the Chinese in particular. The chapter first shows how ideals of American
citizenship were intimately tied to issues of gender and sexuality, and then how the US
cultural imaginary defined American manhood by feminizing the Chinese man even as it
defined American womanhood by masculinizing the Irish woman. The chapter
foregrounds the significant Irish involvement in theatrical production that contributed to
the Irish-Americanization process. It closes with an examination of the paths to
acculturation and assimilation taken by Irish women.
The first section gives a brief account of nineteenth-century ethnic theater in
America in general, and the Irish and San Francisco in particular. Theoretical
considerations of gender, sexuality and race will be considered in order to explain not
only the well-documented feminization of the Chinese male in the US cultural imaginary,
but also the simultaneous, yet undertheorized, masculinization of the Irish woman.
Producers and Products in the Nineteenth-Century US Culture Industry.
The relationship between the producer and product, particularly with regard to
representations of race and gender, is especially salient in two modes of nineteenth-
century American cultural production: cartoons and popular theater. The relationship in
the first category is somewhat less complex than in the second, for the reason that the
products of racist and/or sexist cartoons had little control over the producers. Popular
257
cartoonists were the Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks of their day. From their
impregnable bully pulpits of print, they boosted sales of the newspapers and magazines in
part by generating acrimony and dissent. Their œuvre, which vacillated between
entertainment and politics, buffoonery and serious comment, helped shape the opinion of
the white, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon, male public. The politics of these cartoons
reflected that dominant culture; neither women nor ethnic minorities could gain access to
or influence over the mainstream media in which the caricaturists operated.
Most ethnic American newspapers and suffragist broadsheets of the era countered
racist images with impassioned words; relatively few employed cartoons. Minorities
turned instead to a much more accessible vehicle of influence, the theater. At this
juncture the producer/product relationship becomes more complex. Nearly every ethnic
group in nineteenth-century America had its own theater culture. Chinese opera, for
example, flourished in San Francisco’s Chinatown and beyond. While Chinese theatrical
and novelty acts performed before white audiences throughout the century,
2
the vast
majority of the audiences in these theaters were themselves Chinese.
3
Other ethnic
theaters that catered almost entirely to their own communities included Yiddish theater,
which first arrived in New York City in 1882 and quickly became a major source of
entertainment among working class Jews. (Nahshon 1-3) Any theatrical production
performed in a language other than English, however, was effectively denied mass
American audiences. Such a presentation was deemed “foreign” and therefore un-
American. Opera constituted the one exception to the rule. Regarded as the height of
European culture, Italian opera, as well as the German and French varieties, catered to
258
bourgeois American tastes, and such productions commanded large audiences
nationwide.
Black theater had an altogether different history. Its language, per se, was not
seen as a major barrier to white audiences.
4
Nor was religion a barrier, since Black
Americans were overwhelmingly Christian. Nor could African-American theater be
called foreign, since generations of American-born Blacks negated that claim. Rather,
Black theater was marginalized because of white feelings of racial superiority and of
racial anxiety. Even so, these feelings were not enough to prevent Black theater from
reaching white audiences from its very inception. The first such theater company opened
in New York City in 1821, with William Alexander Brown as its founder. Named the
African Theater, it opened with a production of Shakespeare’s Richard III. The theater’s
intended audience was African American; however, according to Brandi Wilkins
Catanese, the company became so popular among white New Yorkers that Brown had to
“create a segregated seating area for them at the back of his theater” (2). Brown’s success
in attracting white audiences eventually led to his downfall, as envious white theater
producers set out to sabotage his enterprise, and eventually drove him out of business
5
(3). Brown’s venture set in motion a movement within Black intellectual circles
6
that
would recognize theater as a vehicle to counteract the negative images of Black people
generated through blackface minstrelsy, vaudeville, and “serious” American theater.
7
Irish-language theater was virtually nonexistent in the United States. As noted in
Chapter 3, Irish immigrants, Catholic Church officials, and American nativists all saw the
language as backward, anti-modern, and therefore un-American. Irish was the language
259
of the Famine, of poverty and disease. English was the language of future prosperity, of
the American success story. The American sense of Irishness thrived through the medium
of English, albeit tempered by the demands of American citizenship. This chapter
concentrates on the popular, lowbrow forms of nineteenth century American theatrical
entertainment; namely, minstrelsy, and vaudeville, which, alongside cartoon art,
constituted the major sites in the cultural battle over racial/ethnic representation.
8
Some scholars have argued that Black performers in minstrel shows engaged in
acts of subversion.
9
Yet there is scant evidence to suggest that such performances
significantly influenced the way that white audiences perceived as Black people. Chinese
performers were similarly denied latitude. “As with African American vaudevillians,”
writes Krystyn Moon, “Chinese and Chinese Americans had to navigate carefully
between well-developed preconceptions and their own artistic desires in order to succeed
in vaudeville” (145). A Chinese performer might, for example, speak pidgin English in
one skit and in another assume an Irish or Scottish accent. According to Moon, such
moves “explicitly demonstrated the ability of performers of Chinese descent to reproduce
non-Chinese images on the stage and to refute Chinese stereotypes tied to race, national
identity, and musical ability” (ibid.). Moon refers to vaudeville between 1900 and 1920,
in particular. There is little to suggest such acts of subversion prior to that period on the
part of Chinese performers. Staged subversion and transformation of the ideals of
American citizenship in the middle to late nineteenth-century United States were the
domain of “white ethnic” performers, perhaps the most successfully
subversive/tranformative of whom were the Irish.
10
260
This chapter concentrates on “yellowface” performance, especially in San
Francisco from the 1870s to the 1890s, even as it recognizes the phenomenon’s roots in
blackface minstrelsy of the East Coast. In Love and Theft, Eric Lott maintains that
blackface “[m]instrelsy’s role as a mediator of northern class, racial, and ethnic conflict –
all largely grounded in a problematic of masculinity – has much to do with the equivocal
character of blackface representations” (35-36). “White” America, Lott argues, was
simultaneously attracted to and repelled by Black culture. Blackface mixed racial insult
with racial envy. His study concentrates on the antebellum period of 1846 to 1854, during
the height of minstrelsy’s popularity. The period was marked by the struggle of sectional
interests in the United States – Northern industrialists and Western farmers on the one
hand and southern slaveholders and their landless, Northern, working-class supporters on
the other–– that would lead ultimately to the Civil War. Lott argues that the divisions
created by the Civil War were reflected onstage by minstrelsy, where “class conflict and
racial strife continually intersected and contradicted each other” (106).
Fig. 5.1. “The Ignorant Vote – Honors Are Easy.”
261
Minstrelsy mediated between various class factions and helped construct class
identities “over the bodies of black people” (18), generating a common sense of
“whiteness” among the Northern working classes. Ideals of American citizenship were
worked out on stage through minstrelsy, and the Irish became a major driving force on
both sides of the proscenium (35). It was a time when the American media were
simianizing the Irish and equating them with Blacks – as for example, on the front cover
of Harpers Weekly, Dec. 9, 1876, reproduced above as Fig. 5.1.
11
Yet it was also a time
when minstrelsy presented the Irish an opportunity to redirect such images in the popular
imaginary entirely onto Blacks via blackface performances.
Robert Cantwell argues that “blackface acts had the effect of promoting socially
insecure Irishmen (actors as well as audiences), in an ‘Americanizing’ ritual by which
they distanced themselves from the people they parodied” (265).
12
While Lott rightly
maintains that the Irish and African American relations are more complex, Cantwell’s
point is well taken. Minstrelsy aided the acceptance of the Irish in the white American
cultural sphere; that is, it aided Irish-Americanization. Blackface surely helped spur this
process; however, I argue that yellowface confirmed it, just as Irish involvement in the
political apparatuses of the anti-Chinese movement enabled Irish acceptance into full
American nationality. “Acceptance” is the key word. Nativist challenges to the
“whiteness” of the Famine Irish pertained not so much to the color of Irish skin, but
rather to the cultural unacceptability of the Irish in white American culture. The rapid
acculturation and assimilation of the second-generation Irish Americans bears this out, as
262
we shall see. The Irish could become “white,” that is, culturally acceptable, within a
generation; African Americans and Chinese Americans could not.
Gender, Sexuality, and the Alchemy of Race in the Cultural Imaginary
Official inquiries into Chinese immigration exposed the preoccupation by non-
Chinese persons in California – Irish Americans among them – with questions of
sexuality. As detailed in Chapter 4, State Senator Donovan pressed witnesses at an 1876
state hearings to tell all about Chinese prostitution and sexually transmitted diseases. The
next year, moreover, San Franciscan Cornelius Mahony regaled a panel of Congressmen
with tales of Chinese homosexuality and effeminacy. These represent but two of many
Irish American contributions to be found in legal documents and statutes that, taken as a
whole, constitute what Lisa Lowe calls a “technology” of racialization and gendering in
the late nineteenth-century administration of United States citizenship. (11) Irish
questioning of Chinese manhood in relation to American citizenship, this chapter will
show, revealed Irishmen’s insecurities about their own status as “real American men.”
Chapters 4 utilized Omi and Winant’s vision of the US racial order as an
“unstable equilibrium … equilibrated by the state – encoded in law, organized through
policy-making, and enforced by a repressive apparatus” (Omi and Winant 84). That
equilibrium, however, “is unstable, for the great variety of conflicting interests
encapsulated in racial meanings and identities can be no more pacified – at best – by the
state” (84-85). This instability was evident in the time and place under review. The
Chinese immigrant to Gold Mountain embodied contradictions that enhanced instability:
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although situated “‘within’ the US nation-state, its workplaces, its markets,” in Lowe’s
words, nonetheless the Chinese immigrant was “linguistically, culturally, and racially
marked … as ‘foreign’ and ‘outside’ the national polity” (Lowe 8). Then as now, the
state’s inability to resolve such contradictions relegated the challenge of resolution to the
culture of the time. This chapter demonstrates the ways that nineteenth-century San
Francisco culture performed this task.
The feminization of the Chinese man recently has been the subject of excellent
scholarship, much of which will be considered below. Left largely unexamined, though,
is the concomitant masculinization of the Irish woman. Given that in San Francisco Irish
women competed with Chinese men for the same positions – in domestic service and in
laundries – the result is a tale half-told. This chapter endeavors to redress this asymmetry
in scholarship. Illustrative of the fuller story is the cultural production of the time, images
of relations between Chinese men and Irish women that add gender and sexuality to the
alchemy of race. Among the most salient surfaced in cartoon art and theatrical
performance, and so those artifacts of culture form the focus of this chapter. Emphasized
are representations in a particular “contact zone”; as Mary Louise Pratt defines the term,
in a “social spac[e] where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other,
often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination ….” (2).
13
Investigation of the cultural imaginary in one contact zone – nineteenth-century San
Francisco – illuminates overlooked and under-theorized intersections of gender,
sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class in a way that adds nuance to our understanding of the
racial state in America.
264
According to Nina Lykke, “the cultural imaginary refers to the intersections of
fantasy images and discursive forms in which cultural communities mirror and articulate
themselves, and which act as points of reference for their collective identity formations”
(Lykke Sct. 2).
14
Lykke incorporates the work of Graham Dawson into her definition.
Dawson sees the cultural imaginary as “those vast networks of interlinking discursive
themes, images, motifs and narrative forms that are publicly available within a culture at
any one time, and articulate its psychic and social dimensions.”
15
Lykke maintains that
the intersection of the social and the psychic is a crucial aspect of the cultural imaginary
concept. Furthermore, according to Dawson, “cultural imaginaries furnish public forms
which both organize knowledge of the social world and give shape to fantasies within the
apparently ‘internal’ domain of psychic life” (qtd. in Lykke Sect. 2; Dawson 48). This
chapter draws on these insights to assert that popular culture’s feminization of the
Chinese male and the concurrent masculinization of the Irish female evince the linkage of
such fantasies to an ideal of citizenship. In short, notions of American “rugged” male
individualism and “true” American female domestication found definition when
contrasted with otherized images of Chinese men and Irish women.
San Francisco Theater and the Irish
Irish Americans occupied positions of prominence in nineteenth century
American popular theater, particularly in minstrelsy. The prolific songwriter Stephen
Foster was from County Derry stock. The father of Joel Walker Sweeney, the man
credited for popularizing the banjo in minstrel shows, was from County Mayo. Dan
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Emmet, inventor of the archetypal blackface character Zip Coon, had a grandfather who
was also from Mayo. “The list,” musicologist Mick Moloney notes, “goes on and on”
(“Irish” 383).
Following the lead of Lott and other scholars of blackface minstrelsy, Moon’s
recent work, Yellowface, examines how white performers and producers portrayed the
Chinese in American popular theater and music between the 1850s and the 1920s. Moon
recognizes the central role in this portrayal played by Irish Americans, especially Irish
Americans in California. From Lola Montez – born Maria Dolores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert
in Limerick in 1818, whose famous “Spider Dance” was a theatrical sensation of the era
(Estavan 5:5) – to renowned Shakespearean actor Barry Sullivan (Berson 42), the Irish
presence was a constant and integral part of the San Francisco stage from the middle
through the late nineteenth century. Perhaps the most significant Irish presence of all
belonged to impresario Tom Maguire,
16
known as the “Napoleon of San Francisco’s
theatrical world” (Estavan 2:1).
Maguire’s date of birth presumed to be around 1820, and his place of birth
assumed to be New York City. In truth, little is known of Maguire’s origins except that
his father was Irish-born (deFord 97). By 1845, Maguire worked as a hackman in New
York, and later owned a saloon there. He was allied with the Tammany Hall ring, and
became a close friend of David Broderick, the future US Senator from California. In
September of the Gold Rush year of 1849, Maguire decamped for San Francisco, where
his friendship with Broderick blossomed. (deFord 97) Maguire opened a saloon, and in
the second floor installed the first of the three Jenny Lind Theaters that he built within
266
months of each other in the city. (99) Burned to the ground twice, the third incarnation of
the Jenny Lind, a grand two-thousand-seater made of brick and mortar, opened in
October 1851 with an aptly named production, All That Glistens is Not Gold (Estavan:
2:6).
For the next couple of decades, Maguire dominated the San Francisco scene,
owning various theaters including the Eureka Minstrel Hall and Maguire’s Opera House,
whose first manager was Junius Brutus Booth Jr., of the famous acting family. “The
entire Booth family, with the exception of the ill-starred John Wilkes Booth, appeared at
one time or another under Maguire’s aegis” (deFord 101). Indeed Maguire made “San
Francisco the training ground for many actors who later achieved world renown, and he
did present innumerable already established celebrities in the great classics” (103).
Among this list were the Irish-born actors John McCullough and James O’Neill; Kate
Hayes, the “Swan of Erin”; and the playwright Dion Boucicault whose work Maguire
regularly produced in San Francisco.
Among Maguire’s productions, The Black Crook, a melodrama complete with
music and dancing girls, stands out as “the great sensation” of his career. “It was said that
he had to go to the Barbary Coast to secure the ‘Amazons’ for the grand march; few
decent women, even actresses, would appear on the stage in tights” (104-05). As a result
of shows like The Black Crook, and through his founding of the San Francisco Minstrels
and other such companies, Maguire became closely identified with the development of
blackface minstrelsy in California. (R. Lee 34) Within the late 1870s San Francisco
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theater scene that Maguire had been instrumental in creating emerged a serious rival to
blackface: yellowface.
It is worth noting that, ironically, the beginning of Maguire’s downfall in San
Francisco coincided with the triumphant days for Workingmen’s Party of California in
1879. In partnership with E.J. “Lucky” Baldwin, Maguire staged a Passion Play at the
Grand Opera House. In the role of Christ appeared the famous Kilkenny-born actor,
James O’Neill, whose son Eugene would become an even more famous playwright.
17
James was an Irish Famine refugee. The blight had devastated the O’Neill family farm in
County Kilkenny, forcing emigration when James was eight, sometime around 1854 or
1855. (Estavan 20:4) The experience indelible marked his psyche. “Throughout his life
… James O’Neill managed his affairs in the manner of a man who feared hunger” (ibid.).
San Francisco audiences received the Passion Play enthusiastically; however,
local church authorities were not so enamored. “Catholics…were appalled by the
appearance of Christ and the Virgin on stage, Protestants…thought the Passion Play to be
Catholic propaganda, Jews…were afraid it was an attempt at proselytizing them,” even
though the playwright was Jewish (deFord 111). The Jewish concern was not without
grounds, as we shall see in a moment. The Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance
banning the portrayal of any scriptural character; nonetheless, Maguire continued to stage
the play. (ibid.) Eventually O’Neill and other members of the cast were arrested. At his
trial, “O’Neill,
18
the idol of San Francisco’s Irish element, had his supporters. At one
performance of The Passion, the Irish had interpreted the actor’s portrayal of the
sufferings of Jesus so literally that they stormed through the doors of the Opera House,
268
attacked passing Jews, and destroyed considerable property before they were quelled by
the police” (Estavan 20:2). As agitation by the Workingmen’s Party of California
described in Chapter 4 reached its peak, then, racial hatred erupted on more than one
stage.
Maguire left San Francisco and returned to New York for good a couple years
later. Like the French emperor for whom he was nicknamed, he died a broken man, far
from the scene of his greatest successes. (112) He bequeathed to San Francisco a thriving
theater scene, one that benefited greatly from his entrepreneurial endeavors, where issues
of race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship played out frequently and prominently upon its
wooden boards.
II. Coming Together from Oceans Apart
The following section examines the portrayal of Chinese men and Irish women in
both cartoon art and stage production, especially in San Francisco. It begins with an
outline of conditions women faced in Famine-era Ireland, and charts the path that many
of these women took across the Atlantic and into domestic service in America. Emergent
in the American cultural imaginary was a caricature that tagged the Irish woman as
“Bridget” and foisted upon her a role in a cartoon cast of racialized characters, all objects
of scorn and ridicule. Joining this retinue were the Chinese who crossed the Pacific
Ocean at about the same time; the Chinese man was dubbed “Hop Sing,” a feminized
antithesis of self-styled American manhood. Hop Sing and Bridget met in San Francisco,
where they competed for jobs in domestic service and laundries. Fear of economic ruin
269
mingled freely with fear of racial impurity as these two characters became the fodder for
both low and high cultural production. In detailing San Francisco’s theater productions at
that time, the section confirms the powerful Irish presence outlined earlier. Portrayals of
Chinese men and Irish women on the stage – not only vaudeville’s crude song-and-dance
routines, but also more substantial dramatic fare – offered unique insights into how,
through the intertwining of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and popular culture
created a negative through which was worked out an ideal of American citizenship.
Woman Flees Famine Ireland
Comparatively few women emigrated from Ireland before the Great Famine.
19
The economy of many families – especially farm families – benefited from the work of
women in dairy, in cottage industries, and in the raising of pigs and poultry (Miller et al.,
“For Love” 41). But in Ireland as in the rest of Europe, increased mechanization led to a
decline in many of these occupations. The onslaught of the Famine further changed the
work situation. As Robert E. Kennedy’s meticulous research shows, from 1871 to until
the end of the nineteenth century, female emigration was actually higher, if only slightly,
than male emigration (78). “Between 1885 and 1920,” writes Janet Nolan, “females
outnumbered males among the 1.4 million people leaving Ireland by almost twenty
thousand” (Ourselves 49). The causes for this surge in female migration varied. The
Famine put an end to the practice of partible inheritance, whereby Irish farmers
subdivided their land among their offspring. Instead, farms were left to only one son –
usually but not always the oldest. Only one daughter – usually but not always the oldest –
270
received a dowry. As a result, large numbers of men and women were left with no source
of income and little prospect of marriage. Marriage rates dropped dramatically, the age
that people married increased, and the number of people who did not marry at all rose
significantly (Diner, Erin’s 8-9). Both Diner and Nolan maintain that marriage became an
economic arrangement: matchmakers were hired to find suitable partners, and romance
faded into insignificance as the dowry’s importance soared. (11; Nolan, Ourselves 35)
Increases in unprovided-for daughters with few options increased emigration by
single young women. By the end of the century, the number of family members migrating
became so great that those who stayed behind to look after the farms became the
unfortunate ones; stuck in depressing Ireland, they read in siblings’ letters of the
excitement and glamour of faraway, modern places. (Diner 12) Family bonds were
extremely important to the Irish. Emigrants not only sent letters and parcels, but also
massive remittances home to family members in Ireland. From the cities across the world
in which they had settled, they also paid fares for family members – say, a sister like Ella
Hare – to join them. (13)
In the wake of the Famine the Catholic Church grew more powerful, as detailed in
earlier chapters. More than 90 percent of Ireland’s Catholic population attended mass
regularly in the early 1880s, and the nation became ever more segregated by sex. Priests
imposed on parishioners a strict moral code that reinforced the subordination of women.
(Nolan 36) Many young women found the changes suffocating. Thus, according to
Nolan, “women actively chose to abandon diminishing lives at home and to embrace
adventure abroad while seeking jobs, husbands, and an independent adult status” (73).
271
The rest of Europe, as Timothy Meagher points out, also experienced massive
upheaval and disruption of peasant life in the nineteenth century; however, relatively few
single, unaccompanied, young women emigrated from those other European countries.
“For ethnic groups like the Jews,” writes Meagher, “families migrated, so husbands
wives and young daughters and sons came to the United States together as a unit. …
Scandinavian immigrants included more single women than many other immigrant
groups, but the proportion of single women was not as high among Swedes or
Norwegians as it was among the Irish” (Columbia 174).
In considering reasons for the highly gendered nature of Irish migration to
America, it is perhaps advisable to heed another cautionary note sounded by Miller,
Doyle, and Kelleher. “[N]o single model or interpretation can apply to all female
emigrants from Ireland, either before or after the Great Famine,” they write, adding:
“Arguably, the ultimate determinants of gender roles and relationships are sexual
divisions of labor, which in turn vary greatly among different socio-economic classes and
cultures” (“For Love” 44). Thus they criticize works by historians who
inadvertently homogenized the lives and attitudes of the daughters of commercial
farmers in south Leinster, landless laborers in north Munster, mill workers in east
Ulster, and Irish-speaking peasants in west Connaught – thereby obscuring these
and other crucial distinctions which governed relationships and shaped outlooks
in a highly localistic, family-centered, and status-conscious society. (ibid.)
Incredibly, Irish women accounted for over half of the total number of Irish
immigrants to America in the late nineteenth century, compared with only 20 percent of
all Germans and Italians in the same period (Walter 35). Unlike in other ethnic immigrant
groups, a considerable number of the Irish women were young and single. From 1861 to
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1870, 21.1 percent of total Irish emigration was females between the ages of 15 and 24.
Males in the same age group composed 23.3 percent, so that 44.4 percent of all emigrants
were 15 to 24 years old. In the decade spanning 1891 to 1900, the portions were even
greater: females in the same age bracket had risen to 35.4 percent of total Irish
emigration, while males accounted for 24.5 percent. (Miller, Emigrants 352-53; 581-82)
The statistics suggest that Famine refugee families with children or elderly members went
to England rather than undertake the expensive and hazardous transatlantic journey.
America undoubtedly held the greatest attraction to young, single, Irish people (Diner
33). Most Irish women immigrants to the United States came from the more rural, poorer
parts of the west and south of Ireland (Turbin 36), where Irish was the primary
language.
20
The areas around Dublin to the east and Belfast to the north offered greater
female employment opportunities, so women there had less reason to leave. (Diner 33)
As Marjorie Howes notes, many Irish girls and women arrived in America with little
knowledge of urban life, and few marketable skills. (“Maids” 98) All but a few were well
acquainted with the drudgery of housework, however, even if American practices
differed greatly from their chores back home on the farm.
Cast As a Domestic, “Bridget” Makes Her Début
As the story of Ella Hare suggests, Irish immigration often adhered to a script by
which one member arrived first in America, saved money, and sent for another family
member, who would repeat the pattern until all who wished to come to America had done
so. Often sister followed sister over the Atlantic. (Diner 36-38) Whatever her situation on
arrival, the young Irish woman often considered domestic service as the best
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employment, given that such positions were plentiful in nineteenth-century America. The
work provided housing and food and thus made it easier to save earnings. Not only was
domestic service healthier than most other available occupations, but it also was
unaffected by the layoffs, strikes, and recessions that plagued manufacturing work.
Domestic service assured a steady flow of income to the young woman (84-94) – and she
often was quite young. According to Faye Dudden, more than half of all Irish-born
female servants in Buffalo in 1855 started before the age of seventeen, for example; some
started as young as eleven or twelve. (234)
Even as Irish immigration decreased towards the end of the century, the number
of Irish-born domestic servants increased, so that by 1900, an astonishing “54 percent of
all Irish-born working women in the United States were servants, and a further 6.5
percent were laundresses” (Katzman 67). While domestic service undoubtedly had its
advantages, Kenny cautions that it “was surely not the liberating safe haven it has been
portrayed to be” by some historians, Diner and Nolan included (American 154). Indeed,
Carole Turbin maintains that the huge numbers of Irish women in domestic service
indicate not a desire on the part of the women for personal independence, but quite the
opposite. In Turbin’s view, the trend points to these women’s “desires for protection,
which goes with subordination, and came at the expense of independence” (38). Kenny
similarly reminds us that, though better than other types of work available in America,
and markedly better than conditions back in Ireland, domestic service was repressive,
degrading, and lonely, an occupation in which sexual harassment and physical abuse
were not infrequent. (153) Meagher accepts Kenny’s argument, yet adds that Nolan “and
274
especially Diner make powerful points in their suggestion that the wages and security of
service, as well as the lessons in American culture learned in that work, help Irish
immigrant women establish themselves in their own communities and nourish the
independence and ambitions of their daughters” (Columbia 176). Full examination of
Irish women’s acculturation will occur later in this chapter.
Her transatlantic journey rendered the Irish woman a factor in the calculus of race
underlying the foundations of the United States. Her placement in domestic service not
infrequently effected the displacement of a US-born woman of African ancestry. The
African American women servant had been a US institution, typically stereotyped as the
stout, stalwart, common-sense “Mammy” familiar to any viewer of the Civil War epic
Gone With the Wind. Before the 1830s, African Americans had held most of the domestic
positions, not only in the South but also in northern cities like New York. (O’Leary 130)
A couple of decades later, however, Irish women accounted for three-quarters of all New
York’s women servants. By 1850, “domestic servant” and “Irish woman” had become
more or less synonyms. (Lynch-Brennan, “Ubiquitous” 333) “Even in the South,” writes
Daniel Sutherland, “where traditions of Negro servitude held sway, the Irish were
recognized as the typical white servant” (30).
Racial attitudes fueled this transformation: Irish women who competed against
African American women benefited from the white employer’s grudging assignment to
them of a modicum of membership in the “white race.” Law itself reinforced the
classification. Voting laws provide an example of this. Men of Irish ancestry who
attained US citizenship, by birth or naturalization, enjoyed suffrage without suffering the
275
impediments that kept African American men out of the polling booth. Moreover, Irish
women citizens, though not their African American counterparts, enjoyed full freedom to
vote in the United States as soon as other “white” women did. As was the case with other
European groups, moreover, no laws barred Irish immigrants from entering the United
States.
Fig. 5.2. Thistleton’s Illustrated Jolly Giant, December 26, 1874.
Equality under laws did not guarantee social equality, however. To the contrary,
elite and popular culture alike ascribed to Irish women a pervasive, pejorative identity
akin to the “Mammy” stereotype with which African American women were saddled.
Upon entering household service as a maid, cook, or cleaner, the Irish woman found
herself baptized “Bridget,” a beefy, blundering, bossy servant. By that name and its
276
diminutive, “Biddy,” she endured ridicule in newspaper columns, cartoons, songbooks,
joke books, popular plays, cheap and not-so-cheap novels.
21
Typical is Fig. 5.2 (above),
22
the cover cartoon for the December 26, 1874, edition
of a San Francisco periodical, the Jolly Giant. In it a masculinized mother – Bridget the
launderer – quarrels with her daughter.
“HO HO, METHER,” the daughter cries, “WONT YE BUY ME A NEW
DHRESS FOR CHRISHMUS.”
Mother responds: “BID, – HOWLD YER TONGUE AND NUN IF YER
CRYEN FER A DHRESS, YE KNOW I MUSHT HURRY UP ME WASHEN TO
MAKE A LETTLE MONEY FER THE PRISHT FER CHRISHMUS.”
Bridget is scorned not only for her afeminacy, but also for her priorities, for in
this caption the wants of Bridget’s Church take precedence over the needs of Bridget’s
family. In this aspect of the stereotype could be found some accuracy, for male priests
indeed depended on Bridget’s labor: according to Nolan, Irish working class women
were a major source of funding for the American Catholic Church in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.
23
They wielded economic power and influence that reached
from America back to Ireland. Dudden reports that British authorities calculated a
staggering £1.73 million were sent to Ireland from America in 1845 alone. Irish servant
girls, Dudden justifiably assumes, sent a large portion of this money. (61) The earning
power of girls and women was central not only to the welfare of many Irish families in
America, but also to the growth of the Catholic Church in the America.
277
Evidently some in the dominant class saw in the archetypal servant a threat. That
provokes a question: Why on earth did the number of servants expand more than fifty-
fold during the nineteenth century? Answers lie in the equally rapid expansion of the
American middle class and in the fact that as American women reached that status they
tended to leave the workplace and return home, where they remained. Yet at the same
time work that women once had performed at home – weaving, sewing, and the like –
moved out and on to the factory floor. A new ideology arose in the United States and in
Britain in order to justify, even to celebrate, this separation of home life from productive
labor. Variously called the “Cult of Domesticity,” the “Cult of True Womanhood,” or the
“feminine mystique,” this ideology insisted that the ideal woman cultivate four essential
traits: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness.
24
By definition this ideal woman
was languid, concerned only with her self. She performed no labor for pay, neither inside
nor outside the home. Apparent is the conflict between this ideal woman and her servant
– a conflict that arose, it should be noted, out of a transatlantic social dynamic.
Since the arrival in 1680 of the first Irish woman indentured servant, the Puritan
and Anglican settlers who recruited from Ireland complained that the recruits were
“temperamental foreigners, ill-suited for domestic service” (O’Leary 8, 111). Irish
women were said to lack hygiene and manners, to lie and cheat, to be unable to cook or
clean or have an intelligent thought. By the nineteenth century, blame for most problems
of American housekeeping was laid on Bridget’s broad shoulders. (113) The foundation
for the animosity was religious. “In hiring Catholic domestics,” writes Dudden,
“employers confronted an increasingly heterogeneous society, one in which threatening
278
foreigners could not even be excluded from ‘sacred’ home circles” (68). Fears of papish
plots, spiritual contamination, and even physical danger were common in northeastern
Protestant households. Yet in the end many employers had to overcome their qualms for
the simple reason that Irish women controlled the service market. (O’Leary 113) That
fact provoked even greater animosity against Bridget.
Man Exits China for Gold Mountain
Irish women were not, of course, the only immigrants who faced hostility in the
New World. Nor was their plight the worst among immigrant peoples. Profoundly harsh,
as the previous chapter shows, was the experience of trans-Pacific men. As discussed in
the previous chapter, when news of the California Gold Rush reached China, thousands
of Chinese men crossed the Pacific in search of their fortunes. What they found, instead,
was an intensely violent, intimidating environment that made the reception afforded the
Irish in America look like a July 4
th
picnic.
The same state whose laws gave welcome to the Irish operated to repel Chinese
women and children. “[F]ears about the future of white lives, cultural forms, and nation
became channeled into concerns about prostitution among Chinese immigrants,” Eithne
Luibhéid notes, adding that “such concerns became concretely incorporated into the
immigration control process through strategies that officials devised to try and identify
and exclude Chinese prostitutes” (31). Congress incorporated many such strategies into
the Page Act of 1875, which precluded the immigration to America of nearly all Chinese
women. Merchants’ wives alone were excepted. The ostensible purpose was to keep out
279
Chinese prostitutes, but the perverse effect, as Pfaelzer has written, was to entrench in the
popular mind the assumption that practically all Chinese women were prostitutes. (104-
05) Statutes like this, and there were many enacted in the late 1800s, effectively purged
Chinese communities of their women, so that their representation in the Chinese
population in the United States dropped from 7.2 percent in 1870 to half that in just
twenty years. (Chan, “Exclusion” 94) Exclusion of Chinese women was a boon to
American capitalists, who wanted Chinese labor but not a reproducing Chinese
population. As a result of these impediments, Chinese men who sought work in the
United States in the 1800s seldom brought their families. Their enforced single status
fueled further stereotypes.
Becoming “Hop Sing”
Lone Chinese men proved not only tolerant of longer hours, lower wages, cheaper
food, and rougher lodgings, but also amenable to the performance of household labor.
The 1880 census for San Francisco shows that more Chinese – 3,836 persons – worked in
domestic service than any other occupation. Cigar makers and tobacco workers followed
at 2,602, then launderers at 2,465. (Shumsky 83) The 1880 census put the total number of
Chinese in the city at 21,745, although Yong Chen speculates that the number may have
been closer to 30,000. (59) At any rate, approximately one-tenth of the city’s population
25
was Chinese, and roughly one-third of the Chinese workforce in the city worked as either
domestics or launderers.
280
Fig. 5.3. “Another Bar Down.”
Almost all Chinese domestics and launderers were men, a fact at odds with the
American social tradition that considered the tasks work for women, not men. Evincing
one means by which the relegation of men to such roles was rationalized was the cultural
imaginary, a phenomenon on which Lykke and Dawson have elaborated. Put simply, the
cultural imaginary rendered Chinese men’s performance of “feminine” work explicable
by rendering the Chinese man, often dubbed “Hop Sing,” as an effeminate. The depiction
is evident in Fig. 5.3 (above).
26
A cartoon published in San Francisco’s aptly named
periodical, The Wasp,
27
and entitled “Another Bar Down,” it protests an 1887 federal
decision that permitted Chinese nurses and servants to accompany other Chinese
immigrants approved for admission, despite the Exclusion Act. These bashful, finely
featured but beefy male nurses wear long, flowing, elaborately decorated gowns, heavy
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makeup, and earrings. They carry fans and babies or dolls. Their behavior bore no
resemblance to the ideal of American manhood.
In her 2001 work Fair Sex, Savage Dreams, Jean Walton pinpoints a major issue
facing scholars of gender and sexuality. While she acknowledges with reservations the
debt that feminism owes to Freud and psychoanalytic discourse, she rightly adds:
But psychoanalysis does not offer the same useful model for thinking
about racial difference. Indeed with few notable exceptions, little has been
asked throughout the history of psychoanalysis about what kind of
knowledge might be produced if articulations of gendered subjectivity
were considered in terms of being dependent on or imbricated in implicit
assumptions about ‘whiteness’ or ‘blackness’ in so far as perceptions and
fantasies of racial difference might shape a significant axis of identity
formation. (5)
In other words, formulations of psychoanalytical theory, and by extension
psychoanalytical-based feminist and queer theories, have not adequately accounted for
race. In the feminization of the Chinese male, however, several scholars, among them
David L. Eng, and Robert G. Lee, have identified linkages of gender, race, and sexuality
that seriously challenge conventional feminist and queer theory approaches. Eng suggests
that the solution to this difficulty that psychoanalysis has with race begins with moving
away from the “rather ahistorical and essentializing psychoanalytic formulations of the
construction of subjectivity, and toward a critical psychoanalytical approach that
embraces a serious analysis of racial difference. (Eng 5) In doing so, Eng resists “any
false opposition between the ‘psychological’ trajectory of the humanities and the
‘material’ emphasis of the social sciences.” Instead, he argues, “our conception of the real
and ‘reality’ of race occurs not on one side of the psychic or on the other side of the
282
material but at its very intersection” (20). This intersection of the psychology and
materiality of race is apparent in representations of the Chinese male like that in Fig. 5.3.
Particularly useful is Robert Lee’s assertion that “the Chinese represented a third
sex – an alternative or imagined sexuality that was potentially subversive and disruptive
to the emergent heterosexual orthodoxy” (88). In effect, “Hop Sing” joined “Bridget” and
“Mammy” in a liminal zone, a zone of racial “Others,” third-order identities that did not
fit in the two-dimensional gender binary postulated by the dominant group.
Bridget Meets Hop Sing
The Gold Rush occurred in the hypermasculine environment of midcentury
California, a time and place where men took notions of “manliness” to ludicrous
extremes. Rather than do the “women’s work” of laundering, for example, Forty-Niners
sent their dirty shirts on months-long journeys to have them cleaned at great cost in
Honolulu or Hong Kong. The practice ended only after Chinese men made their way to
the goldfields and submitted to the tasks that white men had snubbed. (Chang 49) The
Forty-Niners brought such notions of what ideal male citizens would and would not do
with them to San Francisco, where the population was predominantly young and male.
The demographic held among the Irish as well. San Francisco’s 1852 census reveals that
69.7 percent of Irish-born residents were men, and that 85.6 percent of the Irish were
under age 40. (Burchell 49) This altered rapidly, however; by 1880, roughly 48 percent of
the Irish were under 40, and women composed 51.8 percent of the Irish-born population.
(49-50) One of the most important factors accounting for this change is that, more than
any other ethnic group, the Irish came as families. Given the statistics revealed earlier
283
that most women who crossed the Atlantic were single and relatively young, it is
reasonable to assume that a vast majority of these marriages occurred on the East Coast
or elsewhere, rather than in Ireland.
Throughout the latter part of the century, more than 8 out of 10 Irish men married
Irish women. But for Irish women the story was different, and this difference tinged the
interrelation of Irish and Chinese immigrants in San Francisco. At first the pattern for
Irish women was the same as it was for Irish men: in 1852, fewer than 2 of every 10
married outside their group. But this would change.
Fig. 5.4. “The Marriage of Loo Foh to Miss Mahoney
in St. Patrick’s Catholic Church.”
284
As decades passed Irish women chose non-Irish husbands more frequently, so that
by 1880 the ratio of out-group marriages among Irish women was nearly 3 out of 10.
Out-group spouses usually were British or US-born. But not always. In 1870, 8 percent of
Irish women – compared with only three-tenths of a percent of Irish men – married
someone whom state records categorized as “Other.” (Burchell 79) This catchall group
no doubt included continental Europeans, Australians, and South Americans. It also
included Chinese, and in the San Francisco cultural imaginary, this last group constituted
a significant and significantly threatening portion of those “Others.” John Kuo Wei
Tchen has determined that in the mid-1800s “[o]ne of four Chinese men” in New York
City “were married to Irish women” (Tchen 128). Any occurrence of what was called
“miscegenation,” a term that owes its entry into America’s racist lexicon in part to an
Irish immigrant
28
– anything that equated the Irish with the Chinese or any other “non-
white” ethnic group – threatened Irish claims to American citizenship. According to
Robert Lee, such Chinese-Irish marriages occurred less often in San Francisco;
nonetheless, reports of such unions were common enough in the local press. An example
is the Chinese-Irish wedding in Fig. 5.4 (above),
29
which appeared in the May 13, 1876,
edition of The Jolly Giant.
30
Started by a Mexican War veteran, Colonel George Thistleton, in February 1873,
the mostly weekly but sometimes monthly or bimonthly journal was one of the first
illustrated publications in the city, predating The Wasp by three years. (West 5) Like The
Wasp, The Jolly Giant was rabidly anti-Catholic, but even more so. True to its nativist
spirit, it reserved much of its bile for Irish Catholic immigrants. But the magazine was
285
fiercely anti-Chinese also; indeed, within The Jolly Giant’s pages one discerns a perverse
rivalry for the status of most reviled ethnic group. Accompanying this cartoon of an Irish-
Chinese wedding was a “report” on a report that had appeared in “The Newsletter”
31
one
month earlier. This item gives details about the bridegroom, Loo Foh, “the well-known
Chinese merchant,” and of the bride, Mary Mahoney, daughter of a former employee in
the Customs House. The cartoon and report were designed both to stir up the
publication’s nativist base and to bait the local Irish community and Catholic priests. The
Jolly Giant notes that such a ceremony was against state law and that the officiating
priest, Father Paddy Powers, a frequent target of the journal, might be liable for a $300
fine. “The question would be for the law officers to determine whether Miss Mahoney is
white, and Loo Foh colored or not,” the report states.
Stories of the comings and goings in local Catholic churches were a regular
feature of The Jolly Giant. Often these reports were completely spurious or exaggerated,
although at other times they recounted real events. The interesting feature of this
particular cartoon, irrespective of its veracity, is the way in which the married couple is
portrayed. The groom and the other Chinese men present are shown as skeletal, barely
human creatures. In contrast, Miss Mahoney, although rather glum-faced, appears as a
“pretty, young, Irish girl,” to repeat the words quoted from the “Newsletter” itself.
“This,” the report continues, “is the first wedding on record in our city of a white person
and a Chinese.” Bestowal upon the Irish woman of the status of “white” will be treated in
depth later in this chapter. The assignment and depiction deserve note here nevertheless.
286
Suffice to say that the portrayal of an attractive Irish woman rarely graced the pages of
The Jolly Giant; far more typical was the beefy Bridget portrayed in Fig. 5.2 above.
The refined visage afforded Miss Mahoney in the wedding scene of Fig. 5.4
masks an ugly yet familiar theme: stereotype charged Chinese men not only with
competing economically against white women but also with having sexually perverse
intentions toward the same women. As Robert Lee puts it: “The presence of the Chinese
male disrupts the fragile balances between sexes within the household, both in the realm
of sexuality and in the realm of labor” (104). Which side of this ambiguous presence a
particular artifact of the cultural imaginary displayed – the feminized laborer or the
sexual predator – depended upon whether the artifact was intended to bolster the ideals of
American manhood, on the one hand, or American womanhood, on the other. Often both
ideals were in play, in both cartoons and theatrical productions.
As early as 1868, San Francisco songwriter and Irish impersonator J.W. Connor
was, according to Moon, “the most likely” composer of a song entitled “John Chinaman’s
Marriage,” which simultaneously feminized the Chinese male and presented him as a
threat to Irish women. As reported by Moon, the song was written as a comical piece to
tell the story of the red-headed woman named Cock-eyed Fan, who abuses her Chinese
husband Ching Chong. She drinks heavily, castigates rice as a food, and eventually
abandons Ching Chong for the wildness of the Sierra foothills from whence she came. As
Moon notes, while her name is ambiguous, with regard to her ethnicity, her “carroty” hair
and rowdy behavior would have made her instantly recognizable to contemporary
audiences as an Irish female immigrant. (37-38)
287
“John Chinaman’s Marriage” was one of a few anti-Chinese songs to appear
before 1870. Skits and songs on the subject did not take off until the completion of the
Transcontinental Railroad and the appearance of a certain poem by Bret Harte. Published
in September 1870 in the San Francisco journal the Overland Monthly, the verse,
originally titled “Plain Language from Truthful James,” came to be better known as “The
Heathen Chinee.” The selected verses below give the flavor of Harte’s work:
Which we had a small game,
And Ah Sin took a hand:
It was Euchre. The same
He did not understand;
But he smiled as he sat by the table,
With the smile that was childlike and bland.
Yet the cards they were stocked
In a way that I grieve,
And my feelings were shocked
At the state of Nye’s sleeve,
Which was stuffed full of aces and bowers,
And the same with intent to deceive.
But the hands that were played
By that heathen Chinee,
And the points that he made,
Were quite frightful to see, --
Till at last he put down a right bower,
Which the same Nye had dealt unto me.
Then I looked up at Nye,
And he gazed upon me;
And he rose with a sigh,
And said, “Can this be?
We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor,” --
And he went for that heathen Chinee.
In the scene that ensued
I did not take a hand,
But the floor it was strewed
Like the leaves on the strand
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With the cards that Ah Sin had been hiding,
In the game “he did not understand.” (etext.virginia.edu)
With more than a little justification, Harte thought his creation trash, and would
come to regret that he ever wrote it (Nissen 11, 111). Nevertheless it made him a
household name in the United States. Not only did it launch a lucrative career, it spawned
a whole genre of imitations on the anti-Chinese theme. Ironically Harte himself had not
intended the poem to be anti-Chinese, but rather anti-anti-Chinese. He wanted to depict
the growing animosity between the Irish and the “Celestial,” a common appellation given
to Asian people in this period. Ah Sin may have been the cunning untrustworthy Chinese
card sharp, but William Nye was an Irishman not clever enough to cheat his opponent
successfully. The violent Nye shouts, “We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor!” and
assaults Ah Sin. Iris Chang wonders which group Harte intended to ridicule more – the
inept Irish or the crafty Chinese? (118) Harte certainly had made plain his views on this
subject when he penned a report in the Massachusetts Springfield Republican in 1867,
three years before the poem quoted above appeared:
This supercilious ignoring of [Chinese] rights by the Americans and better class
of European residents, encouraged and fostered the blind hatred and active malice
of our Celtic citizens, who from the first regarded them with a jealousy and
malevolence equal only to their intolerance of the Negro. Convinced from the
beginning of the superiority of freckles, red hair, and a brickdusty epidermis, over
smooth, shining India ink washed faces of their Chinese rivals, they at once put
the Mongolians on the level of the African and abused them on theological
grounds.
There is no doubt that the Chinese are gradually deposing the Irish from their old,
recognized positions in the ranks of labor. The Chinese not only fill their places,
they fill them more acceptably. As servants they are quick-witted, patient,
obedient, and faithful, the old prerogatives of Bridget and Norah in her domestic
circle are seriously threatened by the advent of these quiet and orderly male
chambermaids and cooks. (Qtd. in R. Lee 68-69, original punctuation).
289
More docile and more servile than Bridget and Norah, the Chinese male, according to
Harte, made an excellent maid to boot. However, his use of the word “heathen” to
describe a Chinese person underscored the religious dimensions of the anti-Chinese
movement that the Irish were quick to exploit, as we have seen in Chapter 4. Whether
Catholic or Protestant, the Irish were Christian, the Chinese, in general, were not.
American notions of Christianity were decidedly Eurocentric. The Irish therefore could
unite with the American nativist in this common religious bond that when contrasted with
the “Heathen Chinee,” helped define the Irish as “white.”
Whatever Harte’s intention in writing the poem, it “struck a cord deep within the
American psyche and became the country’s most popular poem in the 1870s. It was set to
music and reprinted in virtually every newspaper … Newsstands sold illustrated copies of
the poem as pamphlets. The New York Globe published it twice…. Bret Harte and Mark
Twain
32
even collaborated to bring ‘The Heathen Chinee’ to the stage, under the title, Ah
Sin” (118-19).
One spinoff from Harte’s poem, a song by Harry R. Williams entitled “Ah Sin,
Chinee Song,” exploits on the then-familiar juxtaposition of Chinese male desire for
white women with Chinese male effeminacy. Williams’s Ah Sin is man enough to get
married to an Irishwoman, but not man enough to keep her from running off with a real
man. The latter is a full-blooded – read white – American:
My name Ah Sin, come from China,
Me like Irish gal, she like me;
Me from Hong Kong, Melican man come along,
Stealy Irish gal from poor Chinee. (Qtd. in Moon 52)
290
Written in 1877, the year in which the Workingmen’s Party of California came to the
fore, the song relates that when Ah Sin goes to the police after the American lover kicks
the drunken Irish woman down the stairs, it is Ah Sin, not the white man, who is arrested.
The scene both feminizes the Chinese male and erases the Irish male. The American man
alone counts, and the wild, untamed Irish woman can only be saved through violent
intercourse with him.
Figure 5.5. “The Great Fear of the Period.”
291
Frequently the dominant class depicted the Irish and Chinese as groups that were equally
menacing, or nearly so. A good early example of this is Fig. 5.5 (above),
33
a lithograph
produced in San Francisco sometime in the 1860s.
34
Entitled “The Great Fear of the
Period,” it proclaims, is “[t]hat Uncle Sam May be Swallowed by Foreigners.” Of
particular interest is that while both devour Uncle Sam, the Chinese stereotype appears in
the end to prevail, absorbing some Irish traits as he puts an end to the Irish man. It is a
fitting metaphor for a signal aspect of Irish-Chinese relations in San Francisco during this
period – the fierce competition for jobs.
The threat image, like the Irish-Chinese miscegenation narrative, must have
stoked fear and anger within the San Francisco Irish community, and undoubtedly helped
fuel the fierce Irish hostility towards the Chinese. Such images and narratives continued
in the cultural sphere through the end of the century, as the following 1895 play attests.
In Patsy O’Wang: An Irish Farce with a Chinese Mix-up, playwright T. S.
Denison constructs a racially ambiguous character inhabited by the double persona of
Chinaman and Irish Patsy. This device owes much, obviously, to Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, published nine years previously. O’Wang, the title
character, is a domestic servant who turns “Irish” when he drinks whisky, then reverts to
his Chinese persona when he drinks tea. According to Denison’s “Synopsis,” Patsy was
the son of a Chinese mother and an Irish soldier who served in the British Army in Hong
Kong. (126) This mixed-race man incurs the wrath of two Irish servants already in the
employ of physician Henry Fluke: Norah, the maid, and Mike, the brawn in the service of
292
the “midical” profession. No less than Chinese accents elsewhere in Patsy, Irish accents
are played for laughs:
Norah. What do you think, Mike, of havin’ a Chinee cook in the house?
Mike. Ah Norah, it’s an outrage, that’s the whole blissid truth. To think of a
blackgyard haythen cookin’ for dacint people.
Norah. It’s a disgrace, I’ll give notice, I will –
Mike. I’ll not ate a bit o’his dirthy cookin’, faith I’ll not. (131)
Inevitably, Patsy drinks whisky and mayhem ensues. Patsy resists ingesting tea, and in
the final scene declares that he wants to stay “Irish forever” (147). Patsy expresses the
realization that his path to full American citizenship requires jettisoning his Chinese half
for his Irish one: “I’m in America now, the land of opportunities. I’m goin’ into politics.
Me ambition is to be an alderman and die beloved and respected by all” (147). The play
ends with a song, “Patsy O’Wang,” sung to the air of “Pat Molloy” (ibid.). “My father
was a hooligan, me mother was Chinay,” it begins. It ends with the following lines:
A fool for luck, the proverb says, a fool O’Wang must be,
But now I’m turned true Irishman, bad cess to all Chinee.
And in this free Ameriky I’ll have a word to say;
I’m goin’ into politics, I’ll drink no more green tay.
And for the moral of this tale, I’m sure it’s very plain;
When tipple stirs your blood too much, you’d better just abstain. (147, 148)
In his commentary on Patsy O’Wang, Robert Lee, at times referring to Patsy by the name
of his Chinese alter ego, “Chin Sum,” observes:
However divided by class, accent, and religion the Irish might be, whiteness
confers upon them the freedom to create a unified ethnic identity as Irish
Americans and use it as the vehicle for political power and economic mobility.
Although Chin Sum may be preferable as an obedient, docile, and childlike
servant, as a Chinese barred from naturalization in 1870 and from entering the
293
country since 1882 he has no hope of becoming ‘amalgamated’ with the People
or, like Patsy, free to run for alderman. (80-81)
An interesting feature of Patsy is that the accent of the maid, Norah, though
definitely Irish, is not as pronounced as Mike’s. This is, perhaps, a tacit recognition of the
role that domestic service played in the acculturation of Irish women servants. As Nolan
and others have shown, these Irish women would ensure that their daughters did not
follow them into this line of work. One of the most popular alternatives to domestic
service for the daughters of Bridget and Norah was the teaching profession, a point to
which we will return in the final section of this chapter.
Bridget Gets the Brush
The hostile competition between the Chinese and the Irish worked to the
detriment of Irish women. The willingness of Chinese men to do laundry and to work as
domestic servants – and the process of feminization by which the dominant culture
imagined Chinese men to be uniquely suited to those tasks – challenged Irish women’s
domination of the domestic labor market.
294
Fig. 5.6. “The Servant Question,”
In Fig. 5.6 (above) from The Wasp, for example, the middle-class mistress is
peppered with bothersome questions by a bevy of “Biddies.”
35
They are servants not long
for their jobs. At the bottom left of the cartoon is the “Shorter Catechism,” a list of
questions that the Irish women have the nerve to ask: “Does the Masther kape late hours!
… Is the dishes put out to wash! … Have yez anny objections to me pore ould mither and
me husband’s lame nevvy slapin’ in the kitchen! …Wud ye mind givin me sisther’s pig a
run in the garden of a Sunday afthernoon!” and so on. Meanwhile, a smilingly compliant
Chinese servant hovers above the mistress’ shoulder, whispering a promise not to pose
any such demands.
Middle-class matrons’ concern about the militancy of their Irish women servants
was not without some foundation. Undoubtedly, some Irish women did not shy away
295
from organizing themselves around political and trade union issues. The first recorded
Irish women’s organization in San Francisco, the St. Mary’s Ladies’ Society, was
founded in 1859. (Burchell 96) While this was primarily a religious society, more
political women’s organizations, especially Irish nationalist ones such as the Fenian
Sisterhood, soon followed. (101)
Irish women and Chinese men clashed outside of domestic and laundry
workplaces. For example in San Francisco in 1870, 300 Chinese men crossed picket lines
and went to work, thus breaking a strike by Irish women factory workers. (Chang 118)
This event loomed large in Irish-Chinese relations. As late as an 1877 meeting of the
Workingmen’s Part of California, State Senator Philip A. Roach reminded those who
packed Union Hall that seven years before, in the Mechanics’ Pavilion, “10,000 men
marched into that vast hall to protest the displacement of 500 young women to make
room for the Chinese” (San Francisco Chronicle, 9/22/1877, p.1)
36
The speech reveals
not only a politician’s penchant for exaggerating numbers when it suited, but also the
wholly paternalistic approach to woman workers prevalent within the Workingmen’s
Party of California. Indeed, Martha Mabie Gardner’s research indicates that although
some women actively campaigned in the anti-Chinese movement, they played roles
secondary to those of men. Anecdotal evidence supports this assertion. For example,
WPC activist Frank Roney recalled in his autobiography that a number of women
activists formed the Ladies’ Auxiliary to the League of Deliverance, but added that “it
fell to pieces without accomplishing the least bit of good” (375).
37
Roney did concede,
however, that as a result of the Ladies’ Auxiliary he “gained an insight into the
296
employment of women as domestic servants, and also into reasons behind the
employment of Chinese in that capacity” (375). For Roney, the problem was San
Francisco’s nouveau riche, “ignorant parvenus,” matrons whose insufferable behavior
required docile servants and not, to use Roney’s term, “white domestics” (ibid.).
The competition between Chinese men and Irish women, portrayed in Fig. 5.6,
also provided Irish American performers and writers in both minstrelsy and vaudeville
with ample fodder. Ed Harrigan, whom Moloney calls “the nineteenth century’s foremost
dramatist of the life of the Irish in America,” (“Irish” 387) was the grandson of a County
Cork fisherman. He was born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, adjacent the Five
Points, in 1844. In 1867 he travelled to San Francisco, where he soon began a theatrical
career that would span more than forty years (Moloney, McNally’s 1, 2, 11). Harrigan
worked with a number of partners, including Tony Hart, whose real name was Anthony J.
Cannon, and who, like Joel Sweeney and Dan Emmet, was born to emigrants from Mayo,
in the West of Ireland. Harrigan’s main musical collaborator, however, was London-born
violinist David Braham. Together they would create some of the era’s most memorable
musical concoctions of the nineteenth-century American stage (“Irish” 387, 388). Indeed,
the duo’s songs became known throughout the world; no less a figure than Rudyard
Kipling included two verses of “The Mulligan Guards” by Harrigan and Braham in the
text of his classic novel, Kim. (Kim 129)
Harrigan left San Francisco to tour the country, arriving in 1870 in New York,
where he teamed with Hart. “One of their first major engagements was in Boston in the
Howard Athenaeum in 1871…. They were billed as the Famed California Artists:
297
Harrigan and Hart – though Tony had never been west of Chicago” (Moloney, McNally’s
4). Based in New York, Harrigan often returned to San Francisco to perform, and was
reputed a popular entertainer. Perhaps his greatest legacy, however, was his ability to
create memorable stage characters. Two of the most successful appear in his 1881 play,
Mulligan’s Silver Wedding. The first is Honora Dublin, an Irish washerwoman in
competition with the second, the Chinese laundryman Hog Eye. Mrs. Dublin’s
monologue below exemplifies the vicious dehumanization and feminization of the
Chinese male that ran through many such productions:
You’re not half a man. You’re a nagur, you eat your dinner with drumsticks.
You’re a monkey, you have a tail growing out of your head…. You’re a mongrel
Asiatic….Why don’t you have whiskers on your face like a man you baboon
you…. The likes of you coming to a free country and walking around in your
petticoats and calling yourself a man. Bah, ye omadoon you…. It’s the rotten pipe
you smoke. The neighbors are moving out of Mulligan Alley from the fume of it.
(Qtd. in Moon 53-54; original ellipsis)
The monologue “reflects the convergence within popular culture of older anti-
Chinese attitudes and new forms of scientific racism that began in the nineteenth
century,” Moon observes, adding that Mrs. Dublin’s “statement is not only about
competition but also about her fear of the degradation of whiteness and American
identity” (ibid.). Honora Dublin invokes a racial hierarchy that at first equates Chinese
with African Americans but in the end places the Chinese “even further down the
evolutionary scale by virtue of their racial inferiority and their inability to become
American” (ibid.). Harrigan thus deployed against the Chinese the very same scientific
racism that others used against the Irish. Of further interest is Mrs. Dublin’s use of
gender-freighted phrasing to describe Hog Eye. She criticizes him for lacking “whiskers
298
on your face like a man,” for “calling yourself a man” while “walking around in your
petticoats” (Qtd. in Moon 53-54). The ferocity with which Mrs. Dublin emasculates Hog
Eye – bereft of help from any Irish male – in effect enmasculates her.
Even though Harrigan set Mulligan’s Silver Wedding in the back alleys of lower
Manhattan, it was in Harrigan’s earlier home of San Francisco that America’s Mrs.
Dublins and Hog Eyes clashed the most. As stated, San Francisco constituted the primary
contact zone between the Chinese and the Irish, and the workplace, be it big house or
washhouse, was the primary site of conflict between the Chinese man and the Irish
woman. Thus it is that the narrator of the song “Since the Chinese Ruint the Thrade,”
published in San Francisco in 1871,
38
deplores developments in the laundry business. The
song begins:
From me shanty down on Sixth Street,
It’s meself have jist kim down;
I’ve lived there this eighteen year
It’s in path they call Cork Town.
I’m on the way to City Hall
To get a little aid;
It’s meself that has to ax it now
Since the Chinese ruint the thrade.
Then follows a chorus:
For I kin wash an’ iron a shirt,
An I kin scrub a flure;
An’ I kin starch a collar stiff
As any Chineseman, I’m shure;
But ther dhirty, pigtailed haythens,
An’ ther prices they are paid
Have brought me to the state you
See––
They’ve ontirely ruint ther thrade.
Subsequent verses proceed in similar vein. Verse 2 states:
299
I’m a widdy woman, I’d have ye know;
Poor Mike was kilt at wark.
He got a fall from City Hall,
For he was a mason’s clark.
An’ me daughter Ellen is gone this year
Wid a French bally troupe, ther jade,
So I find it hard to get along
Since the Chinese ruint the thrade.
Verse 3 likewise proclaims:
It makes me wild, whin I’m on the street,
To see those heathen signs:
Ah Sung, Ah Sing, Sam Lee, Ah Wing,
An’ther ilegant sprid on ther lines.
If iever I get me hands on Ah Sing,
I’ll make him Ah Sing indade––
On me clothesline I’ll pin the leather skin
Of the haythen that ruint the thrade.
It is difficult not to feel sympathy for the fight for existence of this impoverished, albeit
racist, woman. Her husband is dead from work. Her daughter is lost to prostitution –
“jade” then was a term for prostitute. Nonetheless the narrator is presented as a comic
figure, whose vitriolic rants against the Chinese are designed to solicit laughs. She
remains an unfeminine Bridget, an erstwhile menial laborer who hurls threats of violence
in the primitive accent of the uneducated. Even so, through her castigation of the Chinese
she, like the culture out of which her speech was produced, stands clearly aligned with
whiteness and American citizenship. It is an alignment sure to endear her audience of
Irish and other working class whites.
300
Fig. 5.7. Thistleton’s Illustrated Jolly Giant, October 16, 1880
While Fig. 5.6, “The Servant Question,” portrays its Bridgets as simian-faced
ingrates in fancy dresses who have trespassed well above their station and thus caused
trouble for white Protestant matrons like the one depicted in the cartoon. There was,
however, a far more common imagery respecting Irish women when in the presence of a
white American Protestant matron; this one bestowed on Bridget very few feminine
features. A typical example is Fig. 5.7 (above), a small column-sized drawing from The
Wasp of October 16, 1880.
39
Since magazines like The Jolly Giant and The Wasp
professed to lampoon political life in the city, the vast majority of their full-page cartoons
were, like most political events, all-male affairs. Just as women were relegated in real life
to the domestic sphere, portrayals of women were relegated to less prominent spaces. In
Fig. 5.7, Bridget looks like she might once have been a professional boxer. Her wide
mouth, cropped hair, flat chest, and huge hands both masculinize and simianize her. In
301
stark contrast, Mrs. Jones has the elegant features of the idealized American matron, her
femininity enhanced by comparison with her negative image, Bridget.
Racist and sexist sketches and portrayals continued unabated in popular theater
throughout the nineteenth century; indeed, it may be argued that they persist to the
present day. This is especially true when women and minorities are, as an entertainment
mogul might put it, played for laughs. Comedy provides a broad excuse for all sorts of
repugnant behavior. Nineteenth-century cartoons played for laughs too. Unlike
vaudevillians, however, cartoonists also saw themselves in a grander role of shapers of
public opinion. The contexts of the two modes of cultural productions often differed
dramatically. Audiences for music hall entertainment might be raucous and working
class, while a magazine which published cartoons, such as The Wasp, might have a
middle-class, educated, and sophisticated readership. Often audiences and readerships
were a combination of all of the above traits. Nevertheless, tracing of portrayals of
Bridget reveals deviation between the two mediums. In the lowbrow theater of nineteenth
century, Bridget was consistently an object of derision; nineteenth-century cartoons show
quite another trajectory.
The different cartoons portrayals of Bridget shown in this chapter form part of a
pattern. While the feminized images of Chinese males remain almost constant, Bridget
undergoes a dramatic metamorphosis. First there is Bridget in the house. She is at her
most masculine when portrayed at home or at work, and especially when she shares the
frame with an “American” woman like the Mrs. Jones of Fig. 5.7. Second, there is the
Bridget who vies with Hop Sing for work. Cartoons comparing the Irish woman and the
302
Chinese man in domestic service invariably portray her as uppity, a trait typically
expressed by the fancy dress she wears and the demands that she invariably places upon
the usually bewildered white American Anglo-Saxon Protestant lady. Bridget’s nice dress
cannot disguise unfeminine facial features that contrast jarringly with the finely featured
American beauty beside her. Finally, there is the Bridget who meets and marries Hop
Sing. In cartoons of weddings between a Chinese man and an Irish woman, Bridget is
always and clearly Americanized; that is, she is shown as an attractive white woman, in a
manner that underscores the threat to the “white” race posed by the lascivious Chinese
male. He, meanwhile, appears in contradictory and consistent manners: he is at once an
effeminate, homosexual threat to American manhood and a predatory, heterosexual threat
to American womanhood. A crucial difference between the two ethnicities thus is
exposed: Irish women and men, especially those born in the United States, were granted
full access to citizenship, and therefore whiteness. The same access was flatly denied
both Chinese people and Black Americans. In the nineteenth-century US cultural
imaginary, exposure to the refining influence of American culture could effect the
metamorphosis of an apelike Bridget, or at the very least her offspring, into a Mrs. Jones.
But Hop Sing always remained Hop Sing and “Mammy” always remained “Mammy,”
both threats to ideal American citizenship.
303
Irish Drawing White
The 1880s saw a transformation of Irish status in the pages of The Wasp. This
trajectory emerges from examination of two representative cartoons, one from 1881, the
other 1887.
Fig. 5.8. “Immigration East and West,”
Threats to ideal American citizenship appear in Fig. 5.8 (above), “Immigration East and
West,” published in a two-page spread that bespeaks the subject’s importance to the
editors.
40
The subcaption sums up the sentiments expressed in the cartoon: “Westward
the course of empire takes its way. Eastward, the march of national decay.” Representing
304
such “decay” on one page is Asia, in the shape of a towering, snake-like monster with
huge grasping hands, about to pounce upon the despairing Lady Liberty. Along its belly
is scrawled “Chinese Immigration.” Other signs on its body read: “Threat to white labor”;
“Beneficial to Corporations and Monopolies”; “Small Pox”; “Immorality”; “Selfish—”;
“The New Chinese Treaty.” This last slogan refers to proposals that preceded the passing
of the Chinese Exclusion Act the following year. The immigrants on the other page are
from Europe. Armed with shovels, rakes, moneybags, or bundles on sticks, these
newcomers are welcomed by Lady Liberty as Uncle Sam looks on approvingly. The
cartoon recognizes that such new arrivals change the dynamics of American citizenship,
for a tombstone reads: “In Memory of Puritanism,” an apparent reference to waning
influence of Protestantism upon the state. It is apparent also that this casualty is a price
that Uncle Sam will pay to ensure that America remains in “white” hands.
Only one woman besides the welcoming Lady Liberty appears in the cartoon. It is
Bridget. Along her side strides Pat, clay pipe in mouth, his simian facial features
matching his mate’s, his expression displaying the quiet confidence of one who “has
arrived.” These are the new American recruits from all over Europe, the white flight that
will counter the evil Chinese threat. With signs that read “Labor,” “Industry,” Capital,”
and “Agriculture,” they march united against the Asian threat that bears down on the
Pacific side of the continent. Called to mind is the inscription on the Statue of Liberty in
New York Harbor:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
305
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
The Statue of Liberty faces east, toward Europe. None looks westward toward the
Pacific. The only words confronting a Chinese newcomer were to be found in a barrage
of laws impairing immigration. The message is clear enough: despite certain cultural
reservations, the Irish, and the rest of Europe’s refugees, are needed to bolster white
American. WASP cultural objections are ceding to the practical needs of the state. Yet
this cartoon sums up the Irish American paradox perfectly: they are “white” according to
the state and “not quite” according to the cultural imaginary, but the state’s needs takes
precedence.
Six years later, the need for cultural acceptance of the Irish is depicted even more
urgently. An illustration in The Wasp boldly names the American institution that the
Chinese threaten most: the family. Appearing in the November 7, 1887, issue, Fig. 5.9
(below), captioned “The Consequences of Coolieism,”
41
shows a finely featured,
supposedly white family in ruins.
306
Fig. 5.9. “The Consequences of Coolieism.”
Father lies lifeless on the floor, a gun in his hand. Daughter languishes on a bed in the
corner; leering, half-naked, she grips an opium pipe. Son rushes into the room, a loaf of
bread under his arm, and a police officer in hot pursuit. Mother, face in hands, despairs
next to a window that affords a view. Outside, the neighborhood has been overrun by an
array of Chinese industries – a garment factory, a laundry, a cigar manufacturer – that
advertise beneath a large roof sign that reads “No White Men Wanted.” A note on page 3
of this edition of The Wasp reveals the purpose of the cartoon. “Surely,” the writer asks,
“such a spectacle must stir the blood in the veins of either Saxon or Celt.” This appeal for
the closing of white ranks in the face of the Chinese threat speaks directly to the needs of
307
the racial state. When set against the Chinese threat, the Irish are rendered as white as any
Anglo-Saxon in the nineteenth-century US cultural imaginary. Despite the persistence of
the Patsy O’Wangs of comedic theater, the Irish were gradually being melded into the
white American psyche. They were becoming increasingly accepted as true-blooded US
citizens, and the American stage constituted a major site for this process.
Irish performers and composers enthusiastically staked their claim of privilege in
the racial state at the expense of the Chinese by adapting and conflating Irish nationalism
with American nativism. Typical was the 1877 song “Twelve Hundred More,” a ballad
that paid homage to the Workingmen’s Party of California. The opening and closing
verses of this ballad render ballad’s bitter flavor:
O workingmen dear, and did you hear
The news that’s goin’ around?
Another Chinese steamer
Has landed here in town.
Today I read the papers
And it grieves my heart full sore
To see upon that title page
O Just “Twelve Hundred More!”
This state of things can never last
In this our golden land
For soon you’ll hear the avenging cry’
“Drive out the Chinaman!”
And then we’ll have the stirring times
We had in days of yore,
And the devil takes those dirty words,
They call “Twelve Hundred More!”
(R. Lee 62-63: The Blue and Grey Songster 16-17.)
Notably, “More” is sung to the tune of “Skibbereen: A Ballad of the Famine,” an Irish-
American song dating from the 1850s. (Miller, Emigrants 312) Still popular today, the
308
tune would have been recognized at once by Irish members of the audience. It is perhaps
the preeminent anthem of the Famine generation in America. Its dialogue between an
Irish immigrant and his son begins with an innocent inquiry that conveys a typical Irish
American sentimentalism:
O father dear, I oft-times hear, you speak of Erin’s Isle,
Her lofty scenes and valleys green, her mountains rude and wild.
They say it is a pretty place wherein a prince might dwell.
And why did you abandon it, – the reason to me tell.”
The father recounts his violent eviction by an English landlord and the death of the boy’s
mother as she lay in the snow outside her burning home, and then extols the virtues of the
Young Ireland rebellion of 1848, which turned him into a fugitive from British law. The
final verse contains the son’s solemn promise:
O father dear, the day will come when vengeance loud will call,
And when we will rise with Erin’s boys to rally one and all.
I’ll be the man to lead the van beneath our flag of green,
And loud and high will raise the cry “Revenge for Skibbereen!”
(Wright 54)
Consideration of “More” in light of “Skibbereen” exposes nuance. Militant Irish
nationalism lurks below the former’s surface, a surface text that is explicit in its militancy
against the Chinese. In “More” Irish nationalism thus is linked, not for the first time, “to
the construction of a racially exclusive white American nationalism” (R. Lee 64).
42
Such
double-thinking is evident in the life and writings of John Mitchel, as we have seen in
Chapter 3. Irish America is littered with many other examples, including one Frank
Roney, leading light in the anti-Chinese movement in California, and Fenian leader back
in Ireland.
309
In closing this section, let us return to the assertion that domestic service was a
kind of liminal zone, one that, as stated earlier, was a zone of racial “Others” situated in
between the gender binary posited by the dominant group. To this it must be added that
domestic service in America itself represented a highly gendered liminal racial
category
43
through which the Irish passed, and like African American passing such as
that described by Nella Larsen
44
and others, the “passing” triggered a threat. The
American cultural imaginary had originally designated the role of domestic servant to the
Black “Mammy,” and had it not been for Emancipation, perhaps Irish women might not
have been in such demand. But once Irish women did gain a foot in the door, they kicked
it wide open and crossed the threshold into full “white” citizenship. Neither Hop Sing nor
Mammy was permitted such a path. The Irish woman’s ability to cross over, or
assimilate, through domestic service made her otherness the insinuating menace that
neither Blacks nor Chinese could fully become. The antagonism of the WASP media to
Irish servants, then, highlighted an Irish Catholic whiteness that posed a miscegenative
threat of an altogether different kind to US society. Bridget was seen as a source of
potential contamination of the Protestant American household. Second-generation Irish,
on the other hand, sought to prove their worthiness as citizens in the white republic
45
not
only by bidding farewell to Bridget and all her brooms, but also by denying the humanity
of their Chinese and Black neighbors. The strangeness of Irish whiteness confounded
American WASP sensibilities. In the end, though, the needs of the state took precedence
over WASP cultural objections to the Irish, and so compelled WASPs to stress the
sameness between themselves and the Irish. As discussed earlier, the Irish presence in the
310
United States preserved the white racial order. Establishment interests were best served
by the cultural acceptance of the Irish as full American citizens. Such acceptance helped
accentuate and prolong the problem of “the color line,” as W.E.B. Du Bois once
famously called the racialization process in the United States. (Souls 16)
III. A New Cycle of Acculturation to Assimilation
The final section of this chapter examines the acculturation and assimilation of
Irish American women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Few
second-generation Irish American women were christened “Bridget”; their mothers
shunned the name. They did not wish to saddle their daughters with the stigma not only
of the name, but also the occupation of domestic servant. Mothers worked to ensure that
their daughters would not suffer the same humiliations as they had. The following charts
journeys that the daughters of Bridget took towards full American citizenship – journeys
emphatically denied Hop Sing.
Bridget Says Goodbye
Bridget’s liminality within the confluence of race, class, gender, and sexuality is
evident in Kipling’s account of his 1889 visit to San Francisco. “Kearny Street, at nine
o’clock, levels all distinctions of rank as impartially as the grave,” he wrote. “Again and
again I loitered at the heels of a couple of resplendent beings, only to overhear, when I
expected the level voice of culture, the staccato ‘Sez he,’ ‘Sez I,’ that is the mark of the
311
white servant-girl all the world over” (Letters 16). The resplendence of two Irish women
holds Kipling’s voyeuristic gaze, then fades upon his hearing of their “uncultured” and
distinctly lower class Irish voices. Yet their racial status as white women is never in
doubt. In dress and deportment, observes Kipling, the two “Bridgets” appear as imitations
of their American mistresses.
As Diane Hotten-Somers points out, the fate of the servant was tied intimately to
that of the mistress. She observes that most historians have treated the Irish servant and
her American mistress as entities whose actions and influences remained somehow apart.
When the two are brought together, Hotten-Somers argues, “what becomes apparent is
that the mistress-maid relationship not only defined the Irish woman’s process of
assimilation into American society, but also greatly helped American middle-class
women to renegotiate their identities in the public sphere that became increasingly open
to them during the second half of the nineteenth century” (228). In short, the Irish woman
became acculturated. Service in middle-class households became the most common way
for Irish women immigrants to learn about and adapted to the dominant culture. Letters
culled by scholars like Miller and Harris offer anecdotal evidence that the longer Bridget
worked in domestic service the more she assumed the domesticated airs of her employers.
Many American mistresses felt it their duty to instruct their Irish servants not only
on the ways of American housekeeping, but also on the values of middle class
Americans. The large number of articles and books on the various aspects of the “servant
question,” by such notable Americans as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catherine Beecher, and
Harriet Prescott Spofford, testify to a need for the instruction of the mistresses themselves
312
to ensure that they properly inculcated their Irish servants with American values.
46
All
these writers offered advice on the best way to approach the Irish help; most emphasized
“the mistress’ responsibility to build the moral and ethical character that Irish women
needed to adopt to become their surrogates” (Hotten-Somers 232).
The second-generation Irish American woman jumped from acculturation to
assimilation, aided in no small part by her mother’s determination that her offspring not
undergo the hardship of servitude. In turn, the daughter shunned the brogue by which the
Kiplings of the world had branded her mother ignorant. She had less need for Bridget’s
brawn, and took on more of the appearance of Bridget’s mistress. The daughters left
domestic work, agreeing with other native-born women that it was “un-American.”
(Katzman 240) The transition was rapid. In 1880 such employment remained high in both
groups. By 1900, although 60.5 percent of Irish-born women still were servants or
laundry workers, only 18.9 percent of their daughters worked as domestics. (Katzman 70;
Burchell 57) In effect, the second generation abandoned the ways of its Irish-born parents
and embraced the American whiteness – that is, the full citizenship – that both the law
and the cultural imaginary extended to them. It is surely no coincidence that Mary
Mahoney, the “pretty and young Irish girl” whose marriage to Loo Foh is depicted in Fig.
5.3, is a second-generation Irish-American.
American Civics Class
In Servants of the Poor, Janet Nolan writes: “Despite its ambiguous status among
the middle classes in Ireland and the United States, teaching was held in high esteem by
313
the Irish servants whose American-born daughters flocked into public school teaching”
(3). Nowhere was this truer than in San Francisco in the middle to late nineteenth
century. Rather than attend parochial schools, most of the city’s working-class Irish
Catholics went through the public school system, where they were stood a good chance
of being taught by an Irish American women. Children who did attend parochial schools
were more than likely to be taught be Irish-born nuns (Servants 67-68).
As the school system in the city expanded, so too did the Irish American teaching
corps. Nolan estimates that by “1886, 245 of the 752 teachers in San Francisco, or about
a third of the total, had Irish last names. In 1910, 390 of the city’s primary school
teachers had Irish last names, an astonishing 49 percent of the total” (68). As Nolan
notes, this high percentage of Irish American woman teachers in “the city’s public
schools at the turn of the last century demonstrates an important point of the Irish
experience in San Francisco that has been too-long overlooked: by the turn of the
century, large numbers of Irish-American women had entered the lower middle class by
becoming teachers” (66). These Catholic Irish American women teachers withstood two
sources of hardship, sexism and sectarianism.
Sectarianism had a long history in San Francisco. During the brief reign of the
Know-Nothing Party in 1850, immigrant Alice Kennedy reputedly lost her teaching job
because of her Irish accent. (68) Throughout the 1860s and 1870s the WASP elite placed
many obstacles before Irish women who wished to teach, viewing them as a threat to
American civil society. Perhaps due to the increasing numbers of both Irish Catholic
teachers and pupils, however, “sectarianism in the classroom became more muted over
314
time” (74). The steady increase in Irish influence at all levels of local government,
including the city’s elected school board, proved to be too great an adversary to the
Protestant elite.
Less easy for these women to vanquish was San Francisco’s aggressive
patriarchy. Men occupied all the senior positions within the Education Department. All
school inspectors were men, and by 1880, they began a concerted effort to reduce
“female supervisory authority” (77). Increased surveillance and severely tightened rules
made the lives of these women teachers difficult, to say the least. But as Nolan points out,
despite the “attempts to limit access to teaching jobs and to curtail upward teacher
mobility into principalships, the daughters of Irish San Francisco overcame many of the
challenges imposed by the gatekeepers” (79). Their ability to do so depended in no small
way upon Irish women pioneers in the city’s teaching ranks, and one woman in
particular, Alice Kennedy’s sister, Kate, whose militancy shook the foundations of
patriarchal structures.
47
Then as now, teachers performed a precise ideological role on behalf of the state
within a closely monitored schools apparatus. Few teachers questioned their roles. The
Board of Education in San Francisco clearly saw that its function was to ensure that
teachers taught “American values” to its charges. In 1891, for example, the Board
published a pamphlet entitled “Course of Study,” which instructed teachers to “impress
on the minds of their pupils the principles of morality, truth, justice and patriotism; …
teach them to avoid idleness, profanity and falsehood; … instruct them on the principles
of free government, and … train them up to a true comprehension of the rights, duties and
315
dignity of American citizenship” (qtd in Nolan, Servants 74). Seven years later, a
directive required “every classroom be supplied with a national flag and the same should
be saluted every morning” (74-75). Every Monday pupils were required to utter the
pledge of “allegiance to my flag and to the Republic for which it stands – one people, one
language, one flag” (74-75). The school system, then, was charged with producing a
compliant, indoctrinated, ideal citizenry, at a time when ideal citizenry was being shaped
and defined at both local and national levels. Clashes were inevitable.
The passing of Chinese Exclusion Act, for example, reinforced for many San
Franciscans the idea that “one people, one language, one flag” did not apply to Chinese
Americans. One such person was teacher Jennie Hurley, principal of the city’s Spring
Valley School. In 1884, the forty-year-old Hurley, the daughter of an Irish immigrant,
barred eight-year-old Mamie Tape, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, from attending
class. The Tape family sued and the case was heard in the California Supreme Court in
1885. When the Court’s ruling favored the pupil over the teacher, Tape v. Hurley became
one of the most significant legal victories for Chinese Americans for many decades. The
case, notes Mae M. Ngai, “signaled an important shift in the status of the Chinese, for it
had in effect recognized their presence and elevated them to the status of African
Americans and American Indians. This may seem like a dubious promotion, but it was an
important concession that distinguished between exclusion as a policy goal and presence
as a social fact” (70). Most noteworthy for present purposes is the fact that in Tape as in
so many legal cases involving such discriminatory practices in California, it was an Irish
316
American who tried to bar the way to full rights for a Chinese person. Irish American
women, it seems, shared with their male counterparts an anti-Chinese vehemence.
* * *
If, as David Lloyd and Paul Thomas have argued, “culture is seen to provide the
ground for political citizenship” (1), then its full force was at work in late nineteenth-
century San Francisco. First, the cultural imaginary envisioned “true” womanhood and
rugged male individualism as the essence of ideal American citizenship. Any group that
departed from this ideal – for example, the Irish or the Chinese – was an “Other” whose
existence helped to reinforce the ideal. Other-ness initially was assigned on account of
race, ancestry, color, and religion. In the case of Irish women and Chinese men, it was
reinforced by assignment to a “third sex” – by the feminization of the Chinese male and
the masculinization of the Irish female, effected in the domestic workplace and
entrenched through cartoons, theatrical productions and other forms of popular culture.
Second, this complex was buttressed by the state, which embraced certain ideals of
“American” and “Other,” then inscribed them into laws that worked to keep the Chinese
on the outside yet to allow the Irish a path to the inside of the dominant culture. By
passing through the liminal racial zone of domestic service, embracing the dominant
cultural imaginary, and agreeing to what constituted a proper woman, a proper man, a
proper American, the first generation’s “Bridget” could become the second generation’s
“Sarah.” For many Irish American women, teaching provided such a path. But for many
more generations, the same transformation was denied to descendants of “Hop Sing.”
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CHAPTER FIVE ENDNOTES
1
A portion of this chapter has been published recently in The Black and Green Atlantic,
edited by O’Neill and Lloyd, under the chapter title: “Laundering Gender: Chinese Men
and Irish Women in Late Nineteenth-Century San Francisco.”
2
Irish American San Francisco impresario Thomas Maguire, who will be discussed a little
later in the chapter, and other white theater owners produced Americanized Chinese
operas in the city throughout the 1860s. (Moon 74)
3
For an excellent summary of Chinese theater in the United States from the 1830s to the
1920s, see Moon, Ch. 3.
4
Dialects, of course, were crucially important means of differentiating the African
American and the European-American. Exaggerated African American accents were
regarded as major source for laughs, and they played a prominent role in the denigration
of Black subjects. Similar tactics were employed against the Chinese, the Irish, and the
Jews, among others.
5
Brown is credited with writing the first play by a Black American author: The Drama of
King Shotaway (1823). No copies survive, but according to Brandi Wilkins Catanese, it
“is supposedly based on Brown’s own observances” on the island of St. Vincent during
the Second Carib War of 1795-1796. (3)
6
By the end of the century several prominent Black intellectuals, including W.E.B. Du
Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, regarded theater as a means to
elevate Black culture before mainstream American audiences. (Catanese 7-8)
7
Perhaps the most famous work of nineteenth-century African American theater was
William Wells Brown’s The Escape, or A Leap for Freedom (1856). The play completely
transformed the traditional slave narrative. “Ultimately,” writes Catanese, “the content of
the play and Wells Brown’s performance of it combined to prove that descriptions of the
races were backward: the whites who held slaves were immoral and undeserving of
special status within American society, whereas the blacks who were enslaved possessed
true moral integrity and deserved the freedoms that whites denied them” (4).
8
“The Great Divide,” as Eric Lott calls it, between highbrow and lowbrow culture in
nineteenth–century America turned violent during the Astor Place Riots in New York in
1949. Ignited by concurrent productions of Macbeth – one starring the British
Shakespearean actor Charles Macready, the other, the American Edwin Forrest – the
rivalry sparked a mini class war that resulted in twenty-two deaths. See Lott 64-66.
9
See Chude-Sokei, Louis. The Last “Darky”: Krasner, David. Resistance, Parody and
Double Consciousness.
318
10
It could justifiably be argued that Jews were just as successful as the Irish in this
regard. According to James Fisher, “no significant Jewish playwrights emerged in the
second half of the nineteenth century” (50); however, since the nineteenth-century
American theatre and music industry lacked a national corporate structure, the path
opened for Jews to become not only performers, but also producers, theater owners and
writers instead. Pamela Brown Lavitt argues that Jewish performers saw vaudeville as an
“aspirational platform … for consciously engaging, resisting, and reordering stereotypes
of themselves constructed by dominant culture” (15-16). They achieved this through the
mechanics of vaudeville itself. “Switching costumes, dialects, prop noses, or hats,” writes
Brown Lavitt, “flew in the face of accepted scientific theories of eugenics, phrenology,
and genetic fixity. In America, Jews had everything to gain from dismantling an ethnicity
that justified restricting opportunities and fueled anti-Semitism in the old regimes of
Europe” (18). Jewish entertainers who operated outside of the “un-American” Yiddish
theater, were permitted to join Italian, Irish, and other European immigrants performers
under the “white ethnic” umbrella, and “were rewarded considerable latitude in trying out
and trying on different ethnic and racial characters and refashioning condemning images
into more sympathetic ones” (17). For more on this subject see Rogin.
11
Fig. 5.1, captioned “The Ignorant Vote – Honors Are Easy,” appeared as the cover of
Harpers Weekly on December 9, 1976. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington,
D.C.
12
This quote is also in Lott, 96.
13
Pratt proceeds to name as examples of asymmetrical domination and subordination
“colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today” (2).
For an insightful interpretation of her concept of the “contact zone,” see Rowe, New
American Studies 7-16.
14
Thanks are due to Professor Nina Lykke, Department of Gender Studies, Linköping
University, Sweden, for permission to quote from her unpublished paper, Are Cyborgs
Queer?
15
See Dawson 48.
16
“Maguire” is spelled “McGuire” in some references to the impresario, e.g., in R. Lee.
17
For a brilliant archaeological examination of the racism in Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor
Jones, see Cedric J. Robinson’s “Ventriloquizing Blackness: Eugene O’Neill and Irish
American Racial Performance” in O’Neill and Lloyd, pp. 49-63.
319
18
James O’Neill and company were found guilty, fined, and the Passion Play
“withdrawn for good” (deFord 111).
19
Miller, Doyle and Kelleher urge caution in assuming that Irish women were better off
pre-Famine. The low rates of female immigration prior to the Famine may be due to the
fact that Irish society “was a more repressively patriarchal and male-dominated society
than it later became” (47).
20
An estimated one quarter to one third of all Famine immigrants spoke Irish, and this
trend continued into the early Twentieth Century (Kenny, American Irish 138).
21
For an excellent analysis of the various ways in which “Bridget” was portrayed during
this era in the New York-based magazine Puck, see M. Murphy, “Bridget.”
22
Fig. 5.2 appeared on December 26, 1874, as the cover of Thistleton’s Illustrated Jolly
Giant. Courtesy of The San Francisco Public Library.
23
See Nolan, Ourselves.
24
See Dudden; Matthews “Just a Housewife.”
25
Burchell puts the 1880 population in San Francisco and its suburbs at 250,000. (3)
26
Fig. 5.3, captioned “Another Bar Down,” appeared as the back cover of the March 3,
1887, edition of The Wasp. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California,
Berkeley.
27
Founded in 1876 by Bohemian-born Francis Korbel, The Wasp was a popular weekly
in San Francisco for more than a decade. Its influence plummeted in the 1890s. For
further details, see West.
28
The term “miscegenation” first entered the lexicon of American racism in a pamphlet
published in 1863, by George Wakefield and Irish immigrant D.G. Croly. Combining the
Latin word miscere (”to mix”) and genus (“race”), the term was supposed to replace
“amalgamation,” the old term for interracial sexual partnerships. As David Roediger
points out: “Miscegenation’s scientific ring gave it advantages, as did its success in
conjuring up the ‘mongrelization’ of the United States as a political issue” (156). While
the term initially was used to refer to black-white relations, it would not be long before
the Chinese were drawn into its poisonous claws. The “mis-” is an important component
of the word, suggesting, unlike the term “amalgamation,” something wrong.
320
29
Fig. 5.4, captioned “The Marriage of Loo Foh to Miss Mahoney in St. Patrick’s
Catholic Church,” appeared at page 320 of Thistleton’s Illustrated Jolly Giant on
February 12, 1876. Courtesy of The San Francisco Public Library.
30
The periodical also was called Thistleton’s Illustrated Jolly Giant, or Thistleton’s Jolly
Giant, at various times in its existence.
31
The “Newsletter” reference may be bogus or it may also be a reference to The Wasp.
32
Tom Maguire is credited with launching Mark Twain’s speaking career by inviting
Twain to lecture at San Francisco’s Academy of Music in 1866. (Berson 46)
33
Fig. 5.5, captioned “The Great Fear of the Period,” is a lithograph by White & Bauer,
San Francisco, made between 1860 and 1869. Courtesy of The Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.
34
The precise date is unknown.
35
Fig. 5.6, captioned “The Servant Question,” appeared in volume 9 of The Wasp (July-
Dec. 1882, CALL No. 311:440-441). Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley.
36
The September 22, 1877, San Francisco Examiner reported the same speech with
slight variations. It did not record a single word from Denis Kearney’s speech; in
contrast, the San Francisco Chronicle, which favored the Workingmen’s Party of
California, gave Kearney’s harangue the full treatment. For more on this speech, see
Chapter 4.
37
In Frank Roney: Irish Rebel and California Labor Leader, Roney asserts that it
disintegrated because “petty grafting was the true motive for its organization” (375).
38
Published in The Poor Little Man and the Man in the Moon Is Looking, Love Songster.
San Francisco: G. W. Green, 1871. See Moon 191, n 49.
39
Fig. 5.7 appeared at page 165 of Thistleton’s Illustrated Jolly Giant on October 16,
1880.Courtesy of The San Francisco Public Library.
40
Fig. 5.8, captioned “Immigration East and West,” appeared on pages 136-37 of The
Wasp on August 26, 1881. Courtesy of The San Francisco Public Library.
41
Fig. 5.9, captioned “The Consequences of Coolieism,” appeared in The Wasp on
November 7, 1887. Courtesy of The San Francisco Public Library.
321
42
Robert Lee notes that “Twelve Hundred More!” is sung to the tune of “O Mother
Dear,” a nationalist song sung to the tune as “Skibbereen.” The latter ballad though,
given its lasting popularity, is the most significant of the two in the Irish American
cultural imaginary.
43
I am grateful to David Lloyd for this insight.
44
See Larsen’s Passing.
45
See Saxton, Rise.
46
Harriet Prescott Spofford’s The Servant Girl Question. Boston: Houghton Miflin,
1881; Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Ireland’s Daughters in their New Homes,” Donahue’s
Magazine (Jan. 1879) 53-54; “Mistress and Maid,” Donahue’s Magazine (May 1885),
442; Catherine E. Beecher. Letters to Persons Who are Engaged in Domestic Service.
New York: Leavitt & Trow, 1842.
47
Kate Kennedy deserves more attention that I can give her here. (I am currently
conducting further research into her life.) A short biography is offered below to give the
reader an idea of her sharp intellect and indefatigable character of this most significant
but sadly forgotten feminist pioneer.
Kennedy was born in Co. Meath, Ireland, in 1827, into a family of substantial
farmers. She was educated at the Sisters of Loretto Convent, in Navan, which opened in
1833, shortly after Emancipation. (Dowling, Dream 241-42) Her father died when she
was thirteen. A few years later the Famine struck, devastating the Kennedy farm to such
an extent that emigration seemed the only path for the family. Thus in 1949, Kate, along
with a brother and sister, landed in New York with the rest of the Famine Irish. Kate’s
mother and four other sisters, followed them shortly after. (deFord 137) Alice Kennedy
was the first of the clan to arrive in San Francisco, where she soon gained employment as
a teacher. Lizzie and Kate joined her in 1856. Eventually the entire family reunited in San
Francisco. (Nolan, Teachers 68; deFord 138)
Kennedy began her teaching career in Suisun, near Vallejo in 1856. She started
teaching in San Francisco the following year. Appointed principal of a city grammar
school shortly afterwards, Kennedy became outraged upon learning that she was being
paid much less than male counterparts. (Dowling, Dream 243) A “pioneer woman
suffragist, and … probably the only teacher of her period who was a member of a
union—the Knights of Labor,” Kennedy campaigned for equal pay and emerged
victorious in 1874 when the California State legislation passed a law that required “equal
pay for equal work, regardless of sex” (deFord 138). Hence as Dowling notes, “Kate
Kennedy was without a doubt the first woman anywhere in America to receive as a
salaried employee equal pay for equal work” (244). Amongst her other remarkable
accomplishments, she was instrumental in achieving security of tenure for teachers in the
322
city. As deFord remarked in her 1941 portrait of Kennedy, the “organized teachers of
today ought to remember this woman, who fought their battles…” (138).
She was politicized from an early age. As a sixteen-year-old, she attended the
famous meeting on the Hill of Tara when Daniel O’Connell spoke to an estimated half-a-
million people on August 15
th
1843. Her experiences of the Famine left an indelible mark
on her. She fled not only the misery of Ireland but the Catholic Church “when a local
priest blamed the Famine on Providence rather than on what Kate insisted was British
misgovernment” (Nolan, Teachers 68). When she died in 1890, her family, while mostly
remaining devout Catholics, respected her wish to die “as she had lived, outside of church
or creed” (deFord 143). She was buried without ritual.
She remained single throughout her life, and her “simple living and wise
investment of her money had left her, for a teacher, very wealthy” (ibid). She left $10,000
to promote the cause dearest to her, the Single Tax movement. She also requested that her
“Short Sermons to Workingmen, seven simple articles on the single tax which had been
published in the San Francisco Star in 1887, under the pseudonym of ‘Cato the Censor,’
to be printed as a book for the benefit of the single tax. But in spite of the bequest to
Judge Maguire, [of the single tax movement] this was not done until 1906, and then it
was her uncle that paid for it” (144).
The single tax movement was the brainchild of Henry George. If Marx’s
economic theory rested upon the dictatorship of the proletariat, George’s could be said to
rest upon the aspirations of the middle class. According to deFord:
Its central thesis, however––that poverty increases with the progress of
civilization, that the central cause of this is the burden put by taxation on the use
and improvement of land, and that the only taxation should be on the land itself,
so that it would be no longer possible to hold property idle for speculation––has a
simplicity and hence an attractiveness (only slightly specious) that appeals to
many who would become bogged down in the complications of ‘value, price, and
profit’ or lost in the mazes of ‘dialectical materialism.’ (115).
DeFord rather grandly named George the American equivalent of Karl Marx. His close
political relationship with Kennedy developed during a lengthy stay in San Francisco.
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CHAPTER SIX
THE WRITIN’ IRISH; OR,
RACE, CLASS, GENDER, AND THE STATE
IN CATHOLIC IRISH-AMERICAN FICTION, 1800-1910
Swindles, at home and abroad. Doomed lovers and deadbeat dads. The perilous
lure of the new – new wealth, new values, in a new world – set against the nostalgic pull
of old comforts in an old country. Deathbed conversions and condemnations to hell.
No less than in other times and places, these were the staple ingredients of
literature in nineteenth-century America. They appeared in sentimentalist, Protestant
fiction from the beginning of the 1800s, and endured all the way through to industrial-era
novels like Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). These staples prevailed as well in an
emergent literature of the time – fiction, and to a smaller extent nonfiction, produced by
and for Irish Catholics in America. The genre grew in tandem with the Irish population,
both the masses of readers and the ever-more-educated pool of potential authors. The
particularized experiences of the Irish newcomers and, over time, their offspring, gave
this literature a peculiar purpose. It helped to forge for the Irish a Catholic and American
identity, and thus a firmer place in the state and its capitalist economy.
The United States’ territory tripled in the first half of the nineteenth century. Its
population quadrupled, from 5.3 million to more than 23.1 million.
1
Irish immigrants
accounted for a substantial portion of the latter increase. Between 1815 and 1845, an
estimated 800,000 to 1 million Irish sailed to North America, “about twice the total for
the preceding two hundred years” (Miller, Emigrants 193). Prior to 1815 the vast
324
majority of emigrating Irish had been Ulster Protestants. But as of “the 1830s, Catholics
exceeded Protestants in the transatlantic migration from Ireland for the first time since
1700. … By 1840 only about 10 percent of Irish emigrants to North America were
Protestant, a figure that would remain fairly constant for the remainder of the century”
(Kenny, American Irish 45, 46).
A good many of these newcomers could read. According to Charles Fanning, “as
many as seventy-five percent of the Irish immigrants to America in 1850 were probably
literate in English, and by 1910 the number exceeded ninety percent” (Irish Voice 77). In
this same time period, authorship emerged as a profession in America; techniques for
mass-publication were perfected; and communications, roads, railways, and postal
service improved markedly. Books, newspapers, and magazines became wildly popular
sources of entertainment and news for a wide array of readers in America (Baym 289),
the Irish among them. By midcentury nearly every major US city supported at least one
Irish-oriented newspaper. Most of these featured serialized Irish and Irish-American
fiction as well as news and opinions. Seven major Catholic publishing houses, every one
established by Irish Americans, operated in the United States. They produced prayer
books, catechisms, Catholic school readers, and other religious material, as would be
expected. Perhaps less expected was another product line: Irish and Irish-American
fiction, catering to an ever-growing market.
2
Even as national readership expanded to include Irish Catholic America, most
novelists of the period continued to cultivate an American narrative rooted in Puritanism,
an ideology that provided spiritual nutrients for the new nation’s “manifest destiny.”
325
Most novelists harbored militant hostility to Roman Catholicism, for it disrupted the
white, Anglo-Saxon, American Protestant story. Catholicism was seen as a foreign
infiltration, one that was symptomatic of the failings of the “old world” Europe.
Paradoxically, as Susan Griffin observes, nineteenth-century anti-Catholic writers also
depicted “Catholicism as dangerous because it is a religion without a country; indeed, a
religion inimical to nationhood” (4).
Fanning divides the nineteenth-century Irish American literary generations into
three groups: initially, there were the Irish immigrants who arrived in America before the
Famine; next, the Irish-born Famine-generation writers, who published between 1850 and
1875; and finally, the “second-generation Famine writers,” mostly American-born
authors of Irish parentage who published from 1875 into the early twentieth century.
(Irish Voice 1-3) This chapter will focus on the latter two generations. They spanned a
time when the Irish were present in American literature, as both subjects and producers,
to an extent never before seen. Steep rises in the Irish publishing industry and Irish
immigration intensified the cultural impact of these Irish writers. Their cultural
production contrasted, however, with a very different construction, by others, of the Irish.
A conjoined anti-Catholic and anti-Irish rhetoric emerged well-before the arrival of the
Famine Irish, but the catastrophe intensified it and it thrived well into the following
century, in the literary production of America as well as its cultural and political life in
general. That invective in turn provoked response from Irish-American Catholic writers.
The process as a whole offers valuable insights into the workings of the state in relation
to each fraction and genre.
326
Poulantzas’s notion of the state as “the material condensation of a relation of
forces between classes and fractions of class” is useful in explaining the dynamics of
Catholic-Protestant clashes in nineteenth-century America. In his essay, “The Political
Crisis and the Crisis of the State,” he writes that contradictions, “particularly those
between fractions of the power bloc that constitute the state…manifest themselves in the
form of internal contradictions between diverse branches and apparatuses of the state.”
These fractions of the power bloc include the “executive and parliament, army, justice,
regional-municipal and central apparatuses, various ideological apparatuses, and so forth”
(Poulantzas Reader 309). The state’s role is to administer “the unstable equilibrium of
compromises” between various fractions in order to ensure the power elite’s long-term
interest; in this case, the interest in promoting a nascent yet rapidly expanding nineteenth-
century US capitalism.
Fissures developed during this period, along lines that included but were not
simply limited to the matter of class. Consistent with the thinking of the majority of the
American power elite,
3
novels, newspapers, and other forms of ideological state
apparatuses were rife with expressions of WASP cultural and political objections to
Catholics in general and Famine Irish Catholics in particular. These objections, however,
did not represent the long-term interests of the state. If I may co-opt the words of
Gramsci from another context, nativist authors viewed Protestantism “as representing the
totality of civil society (whereas in fact it is only an element of diminishing importance
within it)” (245).
4
The state’s priority is to facilitate the accumulation of profit while
simultaneously it protects the long-term interests of the ruling elite. While nativist
327
fractions within that elite urged tighter restrictions on Irish Catholic immigration,
especially following the Famine, success in the process by which capital crystallized in
the United States required Irish Catholics – newcomers who would not only fill the ranks
of labor in the still-expanding territory, but also bolster what W. E. B. Du Bois famously
called “the color line.” Ultimately, overall state interests will trump the interests of one
fraction; in this instance, however, requisite class adjustment and racial realignment took
time. Irish Catholics had to prove their suitability for (white) US nationality. The
Catholic Church had to demonstrate fealty to the US state. WASP fears had to be
addressed. This chapter will show how Irish Catholics, and the Roman Catholic Church
leadership achieved their objectives through in the battleground of popular culture, or to
be precise, the marketplace of popular literature.
The undoubted leader of Irish Catholics in this battle was Archbishop John
Hughes. Through his policies, speeches, and writings, he offered a blueprint for others to
follow. Hughes’s strategy included meeting nativist attacks head-on; thus when an anti-
Catholic novel emerged from the nativist arsenal, he countered with a novel of his own, a
tactic that others would follow and develop further, producing novels that voiced
Catholic critiques of American capitalism. He operated skillfully in the political sphere,
as we have seen, but he also recognized that while external actions would win the battle,
internal troop discipline would win the war. Thus he embraced the zeal of the Devotional
Revolution that followed the Famine in Ireland, and instilled strict order and control
within the flock with remarkable success. A 1902 study, for example, showed that
approximately 90 percent of Irish-born New Yorkers “claimed membership in a specific
328
parish” (Dolan, Irish 119). While the Catholic critique of capitalism met with somewhat
limited success within state structures, Hughes’s disciplinary measures, with the full
support of a cadre of Irish American Catholic writers, presented the state with ideal
candidates for the ranks of its repressive apparatuses. The high percentage of Irish
Catholics in the San Francisco Police Department in the late nineteenth century, for
example, would appear to support this assertion.
5
The study of Irish American Catholic fiction from the mid-nineteenth century
onwards reveals a consistently conservative espousal of the status quo. All of the Famine
generation writers supported the idea of a paternalistic upper class ruling the lower ranks
in a fair and proper manner, provided that they adhered to the Catholic faith. The
assumption of Irish whiteness, and therefore the Irish right to American nationality,
infused all of these writers’ works, as the chapter will show. Finally, as noted in the
previous chapter, Irish immigration to American was a highly gendered phenomenon.
The literature under review shows gender’s crucial importance to these writers, especially
as it relates to issues of class and race in the United States.
I. Pre-Famine Generation
A survey of the Irish presence in US literature before the Famine will provide
context for tensions and fissures exposed in the literary output of the Famine and post-
Famine generations.
329
The Irish As Irish
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, exiles from the 1798 United Irishman
Rebellion dominated the ranks of Irish American writers. Mostly middle-class
intellectuals, of both Presbyterian and Catholic stock, they contributed to a range of
writing and styles. In New York, William James McNeven and Thomas Addis Emmet
wrote an apologia for the lost cause, entitled Pieces of Irish History, Illustrative of the
Condition of Catholics of Ireland, or the Origin and Progress of the Political System of
the United Irishmen; and of Their Transactions with the Anglo-Irish Government (1807).
James Reynolds wrote the novel Equality: A Political Romance (1802), which, according
to Fanning, was “America’s first communitarian tract” (Irish Voice 9). It described a
utopian fantasy Island of Lithconia, where everything is shared, and “marriage and
money have disappeared, as have priests, soldiers, and lawyers” (ibid.). Thomas
Brannigan penned Avenia: A Tragical Poem on the Oppression of the Human Species
(1805), a six-book abolitionist epic. In 1810, Thomas O’Connor founded The Shamrock,
or Hibernian Chronicle, a New York-based newspaper that included literary essays and
poetry. Other notable political exiles of the period include Matthew Carey, the
Philadelphia-based satirist and publisher, and the writer and newspaper publisher Thomas
D’Arcy McGee. Works centered on Ireland also became very popular with American
readers of the period. Castle Rackrent (1800), by the England-born, Anglo-Irish author
Maria Edgeworth, sold extremely well in the United States, and remained in print
throughout the century. Wild Irish Girl (1807), by Anglo-Irishwoman Sydney Owenson,
known as Lady Morgan, was published in New York and Philadelphia in five separate
330
editions. Other notable Irish successes include John Banim’s Tales of the O’Hara Family
(1825), published in Philadelphia in 1827 and again in 1838; Gerald Griffin’s The
Collegians (1829); and William Carleton’s Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry
(1830), published in the United States in 1833. One other Irish cultural import of note
was Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies, a book of ballads first published by Matthew Carey
in Philadelphia in 1825. By 1900, it had been printed in over thirty separate editions in
America. (Fanning, Irish Voice 12-14)
Although the success of these artists suggests the potential for Irish inclusion into
the unfolding American national narrative, cursory examination of early nineteenth-
century American theater suggests the potential for exclusion. The stage Irishman had
been around as long as Caliban; it is hardly surprising to find him shuffling along the
boards in the American theater in the early 1800s. According to Maurice Bourgeois, “he
habitually bears the generic name of Pat, Paddy, or Teague. He has an atrocious Irish
brogue, makes perpetual jokes, blunders and bulls in speaking, and never fails to
utter…some screech of Gaelic origin at every third word” (qtd. in M. Murphy,
“Scapegrace” 22). The stage Irishman, Bourgeois further notes, usually is boisterous,
pugnacious, and violent. According to Fanning, there were “no fewer than twenty-two
American plays before 1828 with Irish characters” (Irish Voice 13). Undoubtedly Paddy,
Pat, and Teague featured prominently in their ranks.
The Irish were not only objects of derision, however. Throughout the nineteenth
century they played significant roles on both sides of the proscenium in the development
of American theater from blackface minstrelsy to vaudeville to more “serious” fare, as
331
has been discussed in the previous chapter. However, some further comment of the
history of the Irish in American theater is merited here.
Born in County Waterford in 1795, Tyrone Power was the first prominent Irish
actor of the nineteenth century. He made his American debut as Sir Patrick O’Plenipo in
James Kenney’s The Irish Ambassador. The Minor Drama (1831). O’Plenipo, a wild,
raucous character popular with audiences, greatly advanced Power’s career. He became a
celebrity forbear of generations of actors – an Irish immigrant success story that
conformed to America’s image of itself. Power’s stage Irish persona was not so much a
threat as it was a potential target of reform. In her reading of The Irish Ambassador,
Catherine Eagan astutely points out that Kenney’s Irish gentlemen characters are wild but
brave, self-sacrificing and tameable. His peasant characters, although they often blunder,
are loyal and docile and best of all, potentially assimilable. While they create chaos, they
are essentially respectable men who restore order at the play’s end. “All of these traits
created a stage character that was superior to the stage African,” she writes, “and the
stage Irishman thus had the potential to fit neatly into a broadly defined white
herrenvolk” (“I Did Imagine,” 198-99).
The Irish As Catholics
While some works focused, for good or ill, on the presumed ethnic traits of the
Irish, others advanced assumptions about the Catholicism that most of these Irish
espoused. The salience of that religion was due not only to the Irish. Multiplying the
effect of the Irish influx was a simultaneous increase in the number of German Catholics,
332
who migrated to North America when the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815. On account
of these two immigrant groups, the American Catholic Church mushroomed – from
90,000 members in 1815 to 1.6 million in 1850. (Kenny, American Irish 75) Nativists
look on in horror, anger, and fear. Soon those fears surfaced in a series of sensationalist
novels.
Leading the period’s pack of anti-Catholic pulp-fiction bestsellers is Rebecca
Reed’s Six Months in a Convent (1835), “20,000 copies sold within the first week,
300,000 by 1860” (Griffin 29). Close behind was Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures of the
Hotel Dieu Nunnery (1836), “10,000 copies in the first week, and an estimated 200,000
within a month” (ibid.). The tale by Boston-born Reed of imprisonment in a Catholic
convent circulated widely in Massachusetts even before its publication, and the August
11, 1834, burning by a nativist mob of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown is blamed on
the story, as well as the sectarian rantings of the Reverend Lyman Beecher. Reed’s tale
was proved completely fallacious soon after its publication. In any event, it pales in
comparison to the sensationalist claims of Monk’s Awful Disclosures, a yarn that Richard
Hofstadler aptly describes as the “pornography of the Puritan” (21). Awful Disclosures
counted sexual slavery, rape, and infanticide among the many salacious practices of the
nuns and priests of the convent. Though quickly discredited, the book still managed to
make a considerable sum of money for its New York publishers, Howe and Bates.
Together the two books launched a voluminous series of Catholic captivity novels, which
remained popular decades after their publication.
6
While scholars have detected
fascinating strands of meaning at the core of this pulp fiction, the overwhelming raison
333
d’être for their publication was the attempt by American Protestantism to combat the
influence of Roman Catholicism in American society.
7
Roman Catholic writers did not stand idly by. A rejoinder to Reed’s imprisonment
narrative soon appeared; notably, the anonymously penned Six Months in a House of
Correction; or, the Narrative of Dorah Mahoney, Who Was Under the Influence of the
Protestants about a Year, and an Inmate of the House of Correction in Leavett St.,
Boston, Massachusetts, Nearly Six Months in the Years 18––, which gave a distinctly
Irish nationality to the Catholic who fell to ruin in Protestant hands. Details in this
putative autobiography mirrored those in Reed’s; for example, each featured several
pages of testimonials claiming the veracity of the text and an historical introduction. In
parody of the Protestant genre, Six Months in a House of Correction begins with the
upbringing of heroine Dorah in Ireland, in an Irish Catholic family. Tragedy follows her
wherever she goes. Her mother dies. Her father transported by the British. Her fiancée
has to flee the authorities after being implicated in the sacking of “a gentleman’s house.”
The couple decides to emigrate, but the fiancée falls overboard and drowns. Alone on
arrival in America, Dorah eventually becomes engaged to an Irish Protestant, a member
of Lyman Beecher’s congregation in Boston. Following an alcohol-fueled fight at her
engagement party, Dorah is arrested, framed, and given six months in jail; there, she
recounts, she suffered much the same tortures as Reed said she did in her own convent
tale.
8
Fanning sums up Six Months in the House of Correction thus: “Throughout, the full
range of anti-Irish prejudices is presented for ridicule: ignorance, drunkenness,
clannishness, belligerence…. the most zealous of Boston’s nativist clergymen, Lyman
334
Beecher and Jedediah Burchard, are characterized by name as ranting fanatics…. In the
face of the trauma of the convent burning, Six Months in a House of Correction is an
impressive response” (Irish Voice 26). Fanning, then, sees this book as a successful
retaliatory exercise on behalf of the Boston Irish Catholic community, as perhaps the
best-known rejoinder to the Protestant zealots’ convent-captivity tracts.
An Attempt at Art, As Retaliation
Yet Six Months in a House of Correction was neither the most significant nor was
the first of its kind. That title goes to a novel subtitled Guide to Truth and Peace.
Published in 1828, it too is distinctly Irish; indeed, it would provide the model for all
subsequent Catholic, Irish American, retaliatory texts. And in contrast with Six Months in
a House of Correction, the combative creator of Truth and Peace did not hide in
anonymity. His name was John Hughes. Born in 1797 in County Tyrone, he went on to
become Archbishop of New York – and, as we have seen, is recognized as one of Irish
America’s most influential figures. His influence on Famine generation Irish American
Catholic writers, however, has received less attention until now. Although his novel was
not widely circulated, nevertheless its aggressive foray into the public sphere provided a
groundbreaking example for others to follow. Its influence should not be underestimated
given Hughes’s influence overall on these writers.
Around 1827 an English Protestant tale began circulating about the cobbled
streets of Philadelphia. It concerned a young Irish boy named Andrew Dunn, who openly
questions the tenets of his family’s Catholic faith. Despite being horsewhipped by a
335
sadistic priest, he continues to question the “papist” religion, tying various Catholic
theologians in knots, until finally he converts and becomes a good Protestant. The story
caused so much consternation in Hughes, then a Philadelphia-based priest, that he penned
a rejoinder, which he entitled The Conversion and Edifying Death of Andrew Dunn: or, a
Guide to Truth and Peace.
In Hughes’s telling, Andrew is a young Protestant boy who grows up in rural
Ireland. All is well until he reaches the age of thirty, when he begins doubting his
Protestantism. These doubts – five theological quandaries in all – are expounded upon in
great detail. As in the original story, Hughes’s Andrew confronts theologians but gains
little satisfaction. He confides in a neighbor, John Smith, “a good liver” and a Catholic.
Smith gives Dunn the “real” history of the Catholic Church, and proceeds “to prove that
the Pastors of the Catholic Church are the true Pastors and Ministers of Christ…”
(Hughes, Conversion 54). Not surprisingly, Andrew is convinced. He tells the kindly
Smith that “the proofs you produce in favor of the CATHOLIC CHURCH are very strong
indeed, I can assure you I never expected to hear so much from you or from any other
Catholic” (67; original emphasis). After hearing that he visited a Catholic Church, “his
friends attacked him with every kind of abusive language, calling him Idolator, Roman,
and Papist. But he bore all their scoffs and abuse with meekness and patience; comforting
himself with the thought that Jesus had been treated so before him…” (75; original
emphasis).
Reflecting on this turgid prose, Richard Shaw reckons that Hughes wrote the
novel “apparently to prove that Catholics could write fiction in just as vulgar a tongue”
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(57) as their Protestant counterparts. Even Hughes’s former secretary and biographer,
Father John Hassard, had to concede: “Looked upon simply as a story, it certainly is not
well told.” However, Hassard continues, “his skill in argument and familiarity with the
best weapons of controversy were his already” (79). Hughes was excited by his creation.
He sent a copy to his friend and mentor, Father Simon Bruté, hoping that the Frenchman
would find a market for his work. In the accompanying letter he made it clear that he
wanted it distributed with minimum of fuss. “I do not wish the Protestants will take
alarm; but managed properly it will leave in the hands of the clergy the means of
diffusing the knowledge of religion in a way suited to the circumstances of the Catholics
at large” (82). A week later Bruté replied: “I have not been able to read Dunn’s happy
conversion, but I rejoice for it, and request that you send me a number of copies to the
charge of five dollars” (83). When the copies arrived, Bruté had a difficult time
offloading them, and although Hughes became a gifted and prodigious writer, he never
attempted fiction again.
The significance of Andrew Dunn, though, was not lost on Hassard. He identified
correctly, if rather hyperbolically, the point of the text: “Such is ‘Andrew Dunn’ – slight
enough compared with Mr. Hughes’s other writings; but there are persons yet living who
remember the effect produced by its appearance, especially among the poor people of the
country districts, for whom it was principally written” (82). Hughes was the first to
recognize the need to counter aggressively the myriad of Protestant conversion stories
that circulated in the country. Particularly vulnerable were rural Catholics who farmed in
isolation, prohibitively distant from the nearest church, in the middle of vast swaths of
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Protestantism. These Catholics required literature that would bolster their Catholic faith
and counter the threat of proselytizing Protestants. With the coming of the Famine Irish
and the correspondent coming of America’s first inner-city slums, the vulnerable portion
of the flock grew alarmingly. The template that Hughes had established would inspire the
next generation of writers.
II. Famine Generation
Hughes’ vision of American Catholicism inspired many in the Famine Generation
of Irish American authors. We have seen in Chapter 3 how he, more than any other
Catholic Church leader in nineteenth-century America, was responsible for organizing
Church disciplinary structures. He crushed trusteeism, among other threats to the
Church’s strict hierarchical structure. He advanced greater control over his flock through
his founding of the Catholic school system in the United States, and in the process
became the first to recognize the power of a united Irish voting bloc in American politics.
He initiated an ambitious Church building program that thrust Catholicism firmly into the
public sphere, achieving this through the development of a Catholic form of
communitarianism based on the highly structured parish system. More than any other
Catholic cleric, he embraced the Devotional Revolution initiated in post-Famine Ireland,
but quickly spread across the Atlantic, that saw Church attendance soar, and Irish folk
ways diminished as the century drew to a close. All of these issues feature prominently in
the Famine Generation writing that will be considered shortly. One other issue for which
Archbishop Hughes won renown, will be considered in detail here. The wily cleric often
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argued that the founding of the United States was as much a Catholic as it was a
Protestant project.
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber invokes the
writings of Benjamin Franklin to illustrate capitalism’s ethos. Citing such aphorisms as
“time is money,” “credit is money,” and “money is of the prolific, generating nature,”
from Franklin’s Necessary Hints to Those That Would be Rich (1736), and Advice to a
Young Tradesman (1748), (Weber 48-49) Weber shows how the New Englander’s
“philosophy of avarice” seamlessly united his moral beliefs with the belief accumulation
of profit. According to this Calvinist-inspired philosophy, accumulation is an end in itself
and it is a person’s duty to accumulate profit, rather than spend it on frivolous
commodities. Coupled with the firm belief in individualism, classic economic liberalism
and private striving, this ethos or spirit, was, for Weber, an important (but not the only)
factor in the development of capitalism. American nativists, on the other hand, regarded
United States capitalism as an exclusively Protestant affair. Hughes would soon attempt
to disabuse them of this view. His intervention is especially interesting given the
founding fallacy of Weber’s thesis––that Protestantism is linked to the rise of US
capitalism because Puritan mores allow for accumulation. Following in the footsteps of
Locke and Descartes, Weber masks the fact that accumulation was enabled by the
violence of primitive accumulation, slavery and conquest. Hughes insists on a Catholic
role in the promotion of these hazy mythic origins, even though they are in large part
rooted in anti-catholicism. He perceptively recognizes that the needs of the racial state
will eventually allow for a Catholic role in the invention of America’s past.
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In the Fall of 1832, five years after Hughes published Andrew Dunn, the
prominent nativist, the Reverend John Breckinridge, a Presbyterian minister whose father
had been attorney general in the Jefferson administration, challenged any member of the
Catholic clergy to a debate, and Hughes picked up the gauntlet. The debate began in 1833
in the form of a series of newspaper articles in which Breckinridge attacked “the
immoralities and cruelties of the Roman Church” (Shaw 89) while Hughes merely
dismissed the entire legitimacy of Protestantism.
The debate stalled in 1834, just as the “escaped nun” stories, and the Ursuline
Convent incident held the public’s attention, but it reignited in 1835, and in the following
year their arguments appeared in book form. While hardly able to compete with the
lascivious tales of Maria Monk, the book sold well enough to establish Hughes’ national
reputation as the leading defender of the faith among America’s Catholics, and evil
papist-in-chief among Protestant nativists.
One Hughes’s main objectives in his battles with nativists such as Breckinridge,
was to challenge the claim that the United States was a Protestant country. On the
contrary, the Catholic Church, he insisted, was as much part of the developing American
national narrative as Protestantism. He outlined his argument in a lecture given to the
Catholic Institute on March 8, 1852. Entitled “The Catholic Chapter in the History of the
United States,”
9
Hughes began the address with a familiar theme, praising the perception
of the framers of to the US Constitution for the clause in the First Amendment that states:
“Congress shall make no law on the subject of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof…” He rejected, however, claims that such a clause was a result of Protestant
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magnanimity. On the contrary, he argued, the clause owes its existence to Catholic
Maryland of the early colonial period. Founded by the Roman Catholic convert Lord
Baltimore in 1634, Maryland, according to Hughes, earned the highest praise from what
he considered an unimpeachable source–– the famous WASP historian, George
Bancroft––who had described the Colony as the only home of religious liberty in the
world. (Catholic 22) While everywhere else had laws persecuting one religion or another,
Maryland had none. Protestants were free to practice their religion in the Colony as much
as Catholics. “By all this it would seem that the provision in the Federal Constitution,
securing universal freedom of religion, corresponds, or might be regarded as having been
almost literally copied from the provision of the charter and statutes of the Catholic
Colony of Maryland” (24).
Furthermore, although their exploits predate the Reformation, the “discoverers” of
America––Columbus, Amerigo Verpucci, Verazzani and the Cabots––were all Italian,
and therefore, he argued, may be claimed by the Roman Catholic Church but not by the
followers of Luther or Calvin, since, he argued, Italy remained Catholic following the
Reformation. (30) In short, America owed its very existence to Catholicism. Hence,
Hughes maintained, Catholics had every right to the privileges of US citizenship, and
certainly just as much as right as had their Protestant neighbors. This firm belief in a
place for Catholics in the developing mythology of America’s origins laid further
groundwork for Famine generation writers to follow. These writers would not only
challenge the idea of America’s strictly Puritan origins, however, but also offer a
Catholic alternative to the Calvinist belief that the accumulation of wealth was a God-
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given duty. All of these Irish American Catholic writers reversed this formula to put duty
to God before the accumulation of wealth.
Two authors stand out among the Famine Irish writers who published in the
United States between 1850 and 1875: Mary Ann Sadlier
10
and Father Hugh Quigley.
Neither was a typical Famine Irish immigrant, though each aimed for readers among
typical Famine immigrants. Both writers were born in Ireland to relatively prosperous
families; both were well educated and socially mobile. One immigrated to North America
a year before the outbreak of the Famine; the other fled Ireland after having witnessed
firsthand the horrors of the catastrophe. Both regarded Archbishop Hughes as their
spiritual and political leader. Together they represent the most talented and influential
writers of the Famine Irish generation.
Mrs. J. Sadlier and a Catholic Ethic of Political Economy
Sadlier, a leading light in New York’s Catholic intellectual circles, was the most
prodigious author of the generation. Born Mary Ann Madden in Cootehill, County
Cavan, in 1820, she lost her mother when very young and so was raised by her father, a
prosperous merchant, who died when Mary Ann was still a teenager. She immigrated to
Montreal in 1844; two years later, she married Tipperary-born James Sadlier, manager of
the Canadian branch of D. & J. Sadlier, a Catholic publishing house he founded with his
brother Denis in New York City in 1837. By 1853, the house had become the largest
Catholic publisher in North America. The Sadliers lived in Montreal for fourteen years,
then moved to New York City in 1860. By that time, Mary Ann had not only borne six
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children, but also established a successful career as an essayist, novelist, and French
translator.
Using the name “Mrs. J. Sadlier,”
11
Sadlier penned more than sixty volumes, in a
variety of modes. Out of eighteen novels of Irish interest, seven concern Irish American
immigrant life; in order of publication, they are: Willy Burke; or the Irish Orphan in
America (1850); The Blakes and the Flanagans: A Tale Illustrative of Irish Life in
America (1855); Old and New; or, Taste Versus Fashion (1862); Bessy Conway; or an
Irish Girl in America (1861) Confessions of an Apostate (1864); Con O’Regan; or
Emigrant Life in the New World (1864); and Aunt Honor’s Keepsake: A Chapter from
Life (1866). All were published by D. & J. Sadlier, as well as by other companies,
including a German language edition of The Blakes and the Flanagans, and New York
publisher P. J. Kenedy reissued all these titles later on in the century. While reliable
figures are not available, it is fair to say that Sadlier’s work, by and large, enjoyed
considerable popularity.
12
Many a Famine Generation author aimed to write for Irish Catholic immigrants
who clung to the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. Sadlier was one such writer, as
were John McElgun, Father Bernard O’Reilly, and Peter McCorry. Typically the
preliminary pages of such novels indicated their objectives. The Preface of Sadlier’s
Willy Burke, for instance, opens as follows: “This little work was written for the express
purpose of being useful to the young sons of my native land, in the arduous struggle with
the tempter, whose nefarious design of bearing them from the faith of their fathers is so
artfully concealed under every possible disguise” (iii). Claiming as fallacy the notion that
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a person had to be Protestant to succeed financially in America, Sadlier wrote, “I have
endeavored to show … that a man may be a good Catholic, a sincere Christian, –– and
yet obtain both wealth and honor even here below” (ibid.). By such admonitions, Sadlier
endeavored to challenge the Protestant ethic in American capitalism that so disturbed her
in the mid-nineteenth century, and that Weber would come to identify in 1905. Sadlier’s
goal was to establish a Catholic ethic within that self-same spirit of capitalism that would
temper Franklinian materialist accumulation by placing “faith” before profit. In this, she
followed the political lead of Archbishop Hughes, foremost challenger to Protestantism’s
hold on the dream that in the United States, anyone, regardless of station, could become
wealthy.
As the name the “American Dream,” implies, this tenet reflects as much fantasy
as reality. “Anyone” meant any white, Anglo-Saxon male. Blacks and women, among
many others, were not entitled to dream. As immigration mounted in the early nineteenth
century, many US writers saw further need to limit the scope of the American Dream.
13
Two of the most influential works in this regard were Samuel Morse’s Foreign
Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States and Lyman Beecher’s A Plea for
the West. These 1835 efforts to exclude Irish Catholics from the American Dream were
part of a body of literature that Robert Dunne maintains “cautiously encourag[ed]
mainstream Americans that it was all right to strive to get ahead in the world…[but]
offered no such encouragement to marginalized groups and in fact, used pious or outright
Biblical fiat to state that it was God’s will that they should not” succeed (9). Hughes
knew these works well, as did other Irish Famine writers. They counter-argued that it
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God’s will that the Irish Catholic man or woman should, and would, get ahead in
America – provided, that is, that he or she avoided the perils of Protestantism and stood
firmly by Catholic values.
In her insightful study, “Discipline, Sentiment, and the Irish-American Public:
Mary Ann Sadlier’s Popular Fiction,” Marjorie Howes challenges those critics who view
Sadlier’s fiction as being devoid of anything but didactic value – “practical fiction for
immigrants,” as Fanning calls it. Howes urges looking beyond its sociological value.
14
“Her works do not merely reflect transatlantic experience or culture,” Howes writes of
Sadlier; rather, “they seek to theorize it, to intervene in it, to constitute it” (142). Just as
Hughes wrote his Andrew Dunn in reaction to 1820s Protestant didactic literature, Sadlier
wrote in response to the sentimental, didactic, and extremely popular, novels of her own
contemporaries; particularly, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Susan Warner.
15
Sadlier shared
many of the concerns of Stowe and Warner but often disagreed with their positions.
According to Lori Merish, the sentimental narratives of Stowe, Warner, and
others “instantiate a particular form of liberal political subjection in which agency and
subordination are intertwined” (3). Howes argues that Sadlier, particularly through her
novel The Blakes and the Flanagans, “offers a theory of Catholic political subjection”
(158) that differs from its Protestant counterparts in a number of crucial areas. In contrast
with the Protestant writers’ emphases on the autonomous individual and the nuclear
family, Sadlier stresses the community and the extended family. The Blakes and the
Flanagans advances “a theory of authority,” Howes writes. (158) This theory renders the
subjection of children, to cite a notable example, “ultimately dependent upon external,
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even coercive forces – corporal punishment and church authority. In Sadlier the
privatization of authority is incomplete or partially refused. The novel’s rejection of
concepts like individualism, freedom of choice, free will, individual rights, and individual
conscience enacts a similar insistence on the external, and, more important, still
externalized authority of the church” (158). Using Howes’s analysis as a guide, the
following section will investigate The Blakes and Flanagans in an effort to determine the
implications of Sadlier’s work for the state.
In the Preface, Sadlier foreshadows the moral of her story: “The world is, and I
believe has been, divided into two great classes, believers and unbelievers: the children of
one true Church, and the children of the world” (v). This Manichean view of the world is,
as Howe points out, entirely in keeping with the conventions of sentimentalist fiction.
Rather than using psychological portraits, Protestant sentimentalists like Stowe and
Warner portray their characters, as Jane Tompkins has shown, “soteriologically according
to whether they are saved or damned” (qtd. in Howes, “Discipline” 150).
The Blakes and Flanagans centers on the “schools issue,” a 1830s and 1840s
battle waged primarily in New York, with John Hughes the commander of the Catholic
troops, in the 1830s and 1840s. Thus set in a time about a quarter-century before its
publication, the novel transpires, in Howes’s words, “before Nativism had developed
itself into Know Nothingism” (10). Its Flanagans are an Irish immigrant family of seven
living in New York, “good old fashioned Catholics” who send their children to the
parochial school. “Tim Flanagan followed the trade of a leather-dresser, and had gained,
by his persevering industry, a position of ease and comfort” (Sadlier, Blakes 10). Nelly is
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a pious “home-loving woman.” The novel paints a different picture of the other, nearby
family, comprising Tim Flanagan’s sister, Mary, her husband, Miles Blake, and their
children. While the Blakes “professed to be good Catholics,” it is clear that making
money is more important to them than religion. They send their children to state school
because Miles believes that Catholic schools are a waste of time, not to mention expense.
His children get by with Catholic Sunday school, an option that in the author’s view puts
them in grave moral danger. In Sadlier’s world it is Catholic schools or nothing.
When the novel opens, two Blake children live at home: Eliza, a sickly child, and
Harry, a “wild” one who constantly fights other kids at the Ward school in order to
defend his Catholicism and ethnicity. Faring far better are the “sturdy and robust”
Flanagans who attend the Catholic boys’ school. The Flanagan girls go to St. Peters, a
“very good school” run by the Sisters of Charity. Sadlier acknowledges the ideological
and disciplinary role Catholic schools play in America when she writes: “Many and many
a valued citizen did it bring up for the State” (Blakes 15).
Miles and Tim argue about “the schools issue” regularly. Objecting vehemently to
Tim Flanagan’s calling state schools “Protestant schools,” Miles contends that they are
for all religions. Tim insists, “a school that’s for all religions, as you say, is, in fact, for no
religion, because no religion can be taught without giving offense to some parties
concerned” (19; original emphasis). In this statement is Sadlier’s fear of multicultural
secularism revealed.
Miles further praises the ability of his son Harry to defend himself, Catholicism,
and Ireland at school. Brother-in-law Tim claims to know better, remarking that “it’s all
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very well while he fights for his religion, but, just keep him at the same school for three
or four years longer, and you’ll see he’ll be readier to fight against it” (18; original
emphasis).
Soon enough, Harry Blake goes astray. The suitably named parish priest, Father
Power, visits the Blake home to deliver the tragic news to Miles that Harry has been seen
frequenting the theater. It is a den of iniquity, not only for the priest but also for Sadlier
who, like other Famine generation writers, regarded theater as a vulgar and lewd activity
that exposed Catholics to vice. It is on account of vice that Harry goes to such places,
Father Power asserts – to partake of “those forbidden pleasures in which precocious
Protestant children indulge,” a fate he would have avoided at St. Peter’s, a place of
innocent and “boyish sport” (89). Harry should be there along with his Flanagan cousins.
“God grant you the grace,” says Father Power, “to profit by my admonitions!” (89) The
intervention of one Mr. Thomson will thwart Power’s prayer.
In the novel’s treatment of violence lies contradiction. It is made clear that the
Church does not approve of Harry’s violent defense of faith and Ireland; the position
mirrors that of the Catholic Church, and Archbishop Hughes, with respect to violence by
adult Irish nationalists. It is violence that it cannot control. Yet even as such
uncontrollable violence is presented as peril, controlled violence – violence by which the
Church schools exercises control over its flock – is sanctioned. Embodying this
endorsement of discipline is the character Mr. Lanigan, the Irish-born teacher at St.
Peter’s, who is described as “a fine specimen of the good old Catholic teacher” (15). The
boys “had a wholesome fear of Mr. Lanigan, who knew how to administer the birch,
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when necessary…” (72). Like the Pope, Lanigan’s authority is absolute and infallible.
“Now mark my words Tom Reilly!” he warns one of his charges. “[N]ever dare, while
you are in this school, to give your own opinion contrary to mine, or insist that you are
right when I have pronounced you wrong…” (78). Later in life the Flanagan boys recall
the violence and humiliation wreaked by Lanigan with approval, as means by which they
learned lessons “worth gold.”
Sadlier’s endorsement of officially sanctioned violence echoes another Weberian
concept: that the essential element of the state is its monopoly of “legitimate” use of
violence. Lanigan’s legitimate violence may hurt, but in testament to the Church’s
hegemonic power, it meets the approval of its chastised victims. Lanigan’s pupils, are in
effect, conditioned for the state’s own repressive apparatuses. It is little wonder that
Catholic schools “bring up for the State” “[m]any and many a valued citizen,” citizens
conditioned to obey without question, the voices of authority, be they spiritual or
temporal, and that these students included “many and many” a valued police officer,
jailer, soldier, not to mention, political operative.
This Catholic stance on corporal punishment stands in stark contrast with the
Protestant approach. Sadlier underscores the point in an episode involving Mr. Thomson,
a Protestant business associate of Miles Blake. Learning that Miles plans to whip Harry
for his wayward behavior, Mr. Thomson intercedes: “‘Well! now Miles, … I ask it of you
as a particular favor not to whip Harry. I hate manual correction – it is a barbarous
practice’” (92). Thomson then extracts Miles’s promise to ignore Father Power’s
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admonitions and keep Harry at the state school. The die is cast. The Blakes are bound for
perdition, aided by soft-headed Protestant ideas about proper discipline.
Chapter Seven flashes forward seven years. Despite having shunned the sagacity
of Father Power, the now-rich Miles Blake remains a member of the trustees of St.
Peter’s, a group “wholly unfit for the office they held” (124-25). Sadlier writes that the
trustees “began to think themselves quite equal if not superior to the priests” (125). The
passage reprises a struggle waged by Archbishop Hughes, who saw danger in the rise of
lay trustees and so crushed the movement.
The main theme of The Blakes and the Flanagans concerns the other great
campaign of Hughes’s life, “the schools question.” Sadlier recognizes Hughes’s work
directly. Calling him, simply, “the Bishop,” the novel lauds Hughes as “the great
champion of Catholicity” (251), the “head of the Catholic party” (252). Hughes is
represented also by the character of Father Power. “Dr. Power was indeed a man ‘of
many gifts,’ endowed with a strong piecing intellect; a giant in the area of controversy, a
powerful and eloquent preacher…” (73) The Irish call him Father rather than “Doctor”
Power, the novel explains, “a thing very common with the Irish, who, with their
characteristic and most filial attachment to their clergy, merge all honorary and scholastic
titles in the patriarchal one of Father” (73; original emphasis). Sadlier’s account of
Power’s death reads as her premature obituary of Hughes. Doctor Power, she writes, was
responsible not only for the parochial schools system, but also for the various universities
and seminaries in the New York area. “Long may his memory live in the hearts of the
Catholics of New York as the man who stood by them in troubled times and soothed the
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sorrows of their struggling state with his mild eloquence and his gentle ministration”
(377).
At the novel’s end, Henry is miserable and bitter, “his sympathies are all with
confession-hating people” (386). He rails against the use of various relics, holy water,
prayers for the dead and other Catholic practices. He is particularly critical of the
temporal powers of on the Pope and is “holding a confidential correspondence with
Mazzini” (386-87), the revolutionary leader of the Italian Republic that in 1849 forced
Pope Pius IX to flee Vatican City. To Sadlier, Henry T. Blake is a lost cause; one perhaps
beyond the power of St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless cases, for she tells us that even
“his guardian angel covered his face and wept” at his betrayal of his religion.
Sadlier concludes her novel with a quote from the Rev. Dr. Bayley, prominent
convert and Hughes protégé. In case the message was not clear enough, he reiterates the
importance of giving one’s children a Catholic education, and acknowledges that the
Church’s future depends upon it. He writes: “In our present position, the school-house
has become second in importance only to the House of God itself.” (391). This view was
held by all of the Famine generation of Irish American writers, the most prominent of
these, after Sadlier, being the wandering priest Hugh Quigley.
Father Quigley and the Founding of (Irish) America
Like Sadlier, Father Hugh Quigley was a disciple of Archbishop Hughes. Born in
1819 near Tulla, County Clare, and educated at local hedge-schools, Quigley found his
priestly vocation sometime in the early 1830s. Ardent nationalism, however, proved an
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initial impediment: Quigley refused to take the oath of allegiance to the British crown
required of students at Ireland’s Catholic seminary, Maynooth in County Meath. He went
to Rome instead, and ordained following five years’ study at the Irish College. A young
man from an impoverished background would not have been able to afford such an
undertaking without the support of a wealthy patron, and there is no evidence that
Quigley enjoyed any such benefactor. Upon return to Ireland during the Famine, Quigley
became a vocal advocate for his starving parishioners – and even more embittered at the
British. As a consequence, he joined the Young Ireland movement. Following its
disastrous 1848 rebellion, Quigley departed for the United States, possibly to avoid
arrest. Archbishop Hughes appointed Quigley a missionary in upstate New York; in a
number of locations there, he ministered for ten years. Quigley then served in Wisconsin
– in Milwaukee and in La Crosse, “among the Chippewa Indians” – and California – in
Eureka, “among the miners” (Fanning, Irish Voice 141). For a time, he served as Rector
of the University of St. Mary in Chicago. Despite all his travels, Quigley found time to
write. His rather unusual historical treatise, The Irish Race in California (1878), was
featured in an earlier chapter of this dissertation. He also wrote three novels: The Cross
and Shamrock; or, How to Defend the Faith: An Irish American Catholic Tale of True
Life (1853); The Prophet of the Ruined Abbey; or, A Glance of the Future of Ireland: A
Narrative Founded on the Ancient ‘Prophecies of Culmkill’, and on Other Predictions
and Popular Traditions Among the Irish (1855); and Profit and Loss: A Story of the Life
of a Genteel Irish American, Illustrative of Godless Education (1873).
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As its title indicates, the last of these three novels dwelt on the same Hughesian
issues of schooling and materialism that animated much of Sadlier’s The Blakes and the
Flanagans. Quigley’s first novel illustrates another Hughesian postulation noted earlier;
that the founding of the United States was a Catholic no less than a Protestant project.
An exemplary episode in that first novel, Cross and Shamrock, involves Amanda,
the young woman of the household, Bridget, her domestic servant, and Murty, the hired
hand. Amanda virtually commands Bridget to attend Protestant Church. Bridget resists
valiantly, with Murty’s support. Amanda exclaims: “You Irish should learn to correspond
with the institutions of the country, and should not attempt to introduce Popery into a
Protestant land” (175). Murty retorts with an idea that Quigley’s mentor, Hughes,
championed, and that every Catholic school American history book subsequently
adopted:
16
“Protestant land!” said Murty. “We never dream of this being a Protestant
land when we land on its shores. We look on it as the land of liberty,
where no form of religion is dominant, and where all are equally
protected. Protestant land! Why this sounds odd in a world first trod on by
Catholics. This sounds bad in a republic established by the aid of Catholic
arms, blood and treasure, despite the tyranny of Protestant England. This
slang of Protestant land is intolerable in a people against whose liberties
no Catholic sword was ever unsheathed, though the founder of the sect of
which your friend Mr. Barker is preacher, John Wesley, offered George III
the services of his forty thousand Methodists to put down the American
rebellion” (ibid.).
Quigley thus outlines, albeit with exaggeration, the crucial roles that Catholic Spain and
France played in early American history, as well as the far different role played by
Wesley, a Protestant who preferred his English King to the American revolutionaries.
Quigley’s reference to a “land of liberty, where no form of religion is dominant,” invokes
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the First Amendment to the US Constitution in support of the Catholic cause. Both
themes mimic favorite tactics of Archbishop Hughes. A third allusion: the Catholic who
“first trod” on American soil is not Christopher Columbus, but rather the Irishman St.
Brendan the Navigator who, Quigley claims in The Irish Race in California, “discovered”
America in the sixth century, is one that remains popular in Ireland today.
17
The title page of Cross and Shamrock spells out Quigley’s objectives, claiming
the book to be “[a]n Irish-American Catholic tale of real life. Descriptive of the
temptations, suffering, trials and triumphs of the children of St. Patrick in the Great
Republic of Washington. A book for the entertainment and special instruction of the
Catholic male and female servants of the United States” (n.p.). The Preface opens with a
quote by Hughes, whom Quigley acknowledges as being a chief motivator for the work.
Quigley laments the corrupting influence of “cheap trash literature that is now ordinarily
supplied for the amusement and instruction of the American people” (6). The situation
“calls for some antidote, some remedy” (ibid.). Like Sadlier and other writers of the
Famine generation, Quigley expresses concern about Irishmen who, in the “scramble for
money and pleasures” in America, lose their Catholic faith. “Hence they no sooner land
on the shores of America than they endeavor to clip the musical and rich brogue of
fatherland, to make room for the bastard barbarisms and vulgar slang of Yankeedom” (8).
As did heroes of Sadlier and others, Quigley’s heroes usually return to live in holy
Ireland. Some critics construe this as anti-assimilationism, a view surely supported by
above quote from Quigley’s Preface. Yet these same critics also recognize this genre of
fiction to have constituted how-to guides on survival in America. That latter purpose
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likely mattered more to most Famine immigrants. For these readers return to Ireland was
not an option. Though often homesick for their birthplace, most had nothing to return to
and could not afford the journey in any event. As Kenny notes: “There was a grim
finality about Irish transoceanic emigration, even at the end of the nineteenth century.
While more than half of all Italians and East European immigrants in this era
…return[ed] to their homelands after only a few years, at most 10 percent of Irish
emigrants went back home” (American Irish 141). The percentage of Famine Irish who
were returnees is unavailable yet no doubt it was much much lower, given the dire straits
of the Irish poor at midcentury. These Irish thus resigned themselves to their new
situation. Sadlier, Quigley, and their peers knew this; indeed, their works adapted to this
reality. Discussion of a hero’s return to the old country tended to conflate Ireland and the
Roman Catholic Church, in much the same way that, as early as the 1830s, American
nativist writers had merged the Irish nationality with the Catholic religion. Irish Famine
generation writers urged their immigrant readers to effect a metaphorical return to Ireland
– a return to old-country values and a turning away from their new country’s immoral
temptations. By holding on to conservative mores, these readers could ensure that an Irish
community would flourish in America, under the patriarchical protection of a decidedly
American Catholic Church.
Class, A Cut Above Nation
In Dillon O’Brien’s tale of a returned Irish emigrant, The Dalys of Dalystown
(1866), the value of fidelity to a single nation, Ireland, is displaced by that of fidelity to
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class, to a structure of social relations that cuts across national boundaries. Pushing to
preserve an Irish Catholic hierarchical structure – in accord with the platform of
Archbishop Hughes – The Dalys exemplifies the Irish Catholic conservative novel of the
time.
To some extent the novel also reflects the author’s own life. O’Brien was born the
son of a wealthy landowner in Kilmore, County Roscommon, in 1817. He studied at
Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare, the exclusive, Jesuit-run boarding school
that James Joyce would attend decades later. After marrying Elizabeth Kelly, daughter of
a Galway magistrate, O’Brien assumed the life of a prosperous country squire. But the
Famine devastated the family fortune: “their generosity to Catholic tenants during those
years rendered them landless by 1850” (Loeber 990). Shortly afterwards O’Brien, his
wife, and their children immigrated to the United States. The author of three novels in
total, O’Brien wrote The Dalys of Dalystown while employed in an occupation that in
itself confirmed Irish whiteness––he was the principal of an Indian school in LaPointe, an
isolated island community at the northernmost tip of Wisconsin.
As did O’Brien’s own life, The Dalys revolves around a landed Irish family and
their patriarch, the kind-hearted landlord, Godfrey Daly. Their nemesis is O’Roarke, a
lower class middleman who holds mortgages to properties on the estate and drives many
honest tenants from their homes. Godfrey Daly forfeits the estate and dies heartbroken.
His son, Henry Daly, leaves in search of the woman he loves – Rose O’Donnell, who
earlier had fled to America partly out of fear that her impoverished status would prevent
Henry from regaining the family holdings.
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Through his characters in The Dalys, O’Brien expresses admiration for the United
States. In an early scene, for instance, the narrator of the Daly family story states: “I love
America, I love it for it has given my children a home; I love it because it is the sanctuary
where millions of my countrymen have found refuge; I love it for the atmosphere of
freedom which fills it from the Atlantic to the Pacific!” Yet when asked why he excluded
himself from those whom America had given a home,
18
the narrator replies sadly:
“Because I cannot wean my heart from my old home; it had struck its roots too deep in
my native land to allow of their taking hold with the vigor of new shoots in another soil;
it is different with my children, though I would not have you suppose I fail to impress
upon them that, wherever my bones may rest, their fortunes, their energies, their lives
should be ever at the disposal of our beloved and sorrowing country. I trust fidelity to
Ireland will not incapacitate them from being good citizens of this country” (8). As noted
by Fanning, the narrator’s ambivalence gives voice to the feelings of dislocation typical
of the Famine Generation. (Irish Voice 89)
The novel is far from ambivalent in its attitudes about class, however. To the
contrary, it depicts lower-class characters as coarse and inclined toward loathed violence,
while characters of the upper classes win approbation for their manners and restraint. A
graphic example is that of the unsavory Ribbonmen, the lower-class assassins of the evil
O’Roarke. Though the Daly family too has suffered at O’Roarke’s hands, it decries the
violent ways of the Ribbonmen. The untrustworthiness of those Irish men is exposed,
moreover, when a spy in the ostensibly secret society betrays his comrades to the British
authorities.
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The Daly family finds common ground, curiously enough, not with its Irish
compatriots but rather with British authorities. The scene plays out at the ancestral home.
A party arrives to evict the family: a lawyer named Lyons; the sheriff, Mr. Cuff; bailiffs;
a wonderfully named British officer, Cornet Fortescue; and some soldiers under his
command. The evil-hearted Lyons cannot disguise his desire to perform the deed with
dispatch, even though the family patriarch, Godfrey, lies dying in an upstairs bedroom.
Henry Daly threatens to tear Lyons “from limb to limb” (335). Then he is introduced to
Fortescue who, like the sheriff and British soldiers, evinces little enthusiasm for the task
he is duty-bound to discharge. “I deem myself fortunate sir to have a gentleman to
address,” Henry declares, and asks only that the officer and “the fine fellows under your
command” proceed as quietly as possible. (335, 336) “Mr. Daly,” replies the impeccably
mannered Fortescue, “I am but too happy to have even so slight an opportunity of
showing how entirely I sympathize with you” (336). Similarly in evidence is the
sympathy of the Dalys’ friend, Sheriff Cuff. Upper-class solidarity thus crosses all
religious and national boundaries. All gentlemen, the reader learns, behave everywhere as
gentlemen.
Affirmation of a social hierarchy that fixes the upper class at its apex is, in fact,
the novel’s final message. By the end of The Dalys Henry has acquired a fortune, and so
has lived the American Dream. He chooses also to live out the Irish American Dream by
returning to Ireland to buy back the old family home. The novel closes with Henry
walking up the driveway to his stately estate. His obsequious retainers run to greet him:
“Don’t you remember me, Mr. Henry? Oh but you’re welcome back
asthore. Praise be to God, we see a Daly in Dalystown once more!”
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Henry’s heart was touched to the very core…
“My friends: he said, “here on the threshold of my old home, standing in
the presence of God, I promise you that I shall wall round my property
with the smiling cottages of a tenantry whose interests and mine shall be
as one.”
The promise, thus made, has been fulfilled. (518)
In point of fact, neither O’Brien nor his children ever returned to live in Ireland.
Eventually he became editor of the Northwestern Chronicle, a Catholic weekly based in
St. Paul, Minnesota; there he died in 1882. For O’Brien as for many others, the realities
of the Irish American life varied greatly from Irish American fantasies.
Of Converts and Apostates
Driving the works of many Irish Catholic writers was a real fear of Catholic
apostasy in the face of Protestant proselytizing. These works also share certain
characteristics, such as structures, plotlines, tropes, and didacticism that mirror the
conventions of American sentimentalist fiction. Following the format that Hughes
established in Andrew Dunn, these writers in effect perform a literary conversion of the
American Protestant narrative into an American Irish Catholic perspective. Colleen
McDannell sees this as “literature that turns the tables on the oppressor” (“Devil” 52).
Take, for example, the deathbed motif. Like the Protestant tracts by their
counterparts, the Catholic tracts by Famine generation Irish immigrants assured readers
that “good” characters died happy and heaven-bound; the “bad,” miserable and bound for
hell. Who was good and who was bad might be inverted, however, as were characters’
wishes in their last moments. American sentimental and didactic fiction long had made
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Catholic-to-Protestant conversion a plot staple. An example occurs in Susan Warner’s
highly successful 1850 novel, Wide, Wide World.
Young John Dolan, an Irish Catholic, calls out from his deathbed for the
Presbyterian minister, Mr. Humphries. Dolan wants to die a Protestant. Humphries sets
out, on a stormy winter’s night, to do God’s work by converting little Johnny to the
“true” religion before he passes to the next world. (244).
19
A scant three years later,
Quigley published a scene that reversed Warner’s religious logic. In his Cross and
Shamrock, one Father O’Shane first administers the last rites to a good Catholic woman
and then sets out, on a stormy winter’s night, to the deathbed of a “Yankee” Protestant
woman who has called out for a priest. She wants to die a Catholic, and Father O’Shane
fulfills her wish (42-43), effecting a mirror-image Protestant-to-Catholic conversion.
Tracts by Famine Irish Catholics that feature immigrant themes adhere to myriad
other plot conventions. Nearly all stories begin in Ireland, and the emigrant(s) invariably
leave loving but aging parent(s) behind in the “old country.” Emigrants usually endure
miserable, tempest-tossed, sometimes deadly, Atlantic crossings. Upon arrival in New
York or some other American port, swindlers hound them. The emigrants become the
objects of – at times are held captive by – a proselytizing predator, usually personified by
an employer or clergyman associated with an employer, a prison or orphanage official, or
some other holder of power. Typically at least one couple succeeds in love after
overcoming almost insurmountable odds. Greedy and corrupt Catholics become
Protestants, and they or their family live in misery, and die horrible deaths; many see the
error of their ways only after it is too late to be saved. “Good” Protestants become
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Catholics, just as “bad” Catholics become Protestants. Meanwhile, hardworking and
faithful Catholics, who live honest, but often challenging lives, are generally blessed with
happy families and heavenly rewards. As noted earlier, novels tend to end in Ireland. As
in The Dalys, Ireland is nirvana for successful Irish American Catholics. It also serves as
sanctuary for the fortune squanderers, the sadder but wiser returnees. One is Simon
Kerrigan, protagonist of Sadlier’s Confessions of An Apostate, who has lived a wayward
life in America. At the end of this 1864 novel Kerrigan is relieved to have come “home”
in the old country where he can die in peace, a Catholic in good standing.
Writing for Bridget
Good Catholic standing was the invariable ambition of yet another subgenre of
Famine generation writing. Nearly forty years ago, Stephen Garrett Bolger found, in an
examination of dozens of books that feature servants, an Irish presence that is fleeting yet
fairly consistent. Most are women, often called “Bridget” or “Biddy,” with thick brogues
and a dual character: “noisy, careless, and untidy on the one hand, and good-hearted,
faithful, and shrewd on the other” (54). The Irish women of these novels thus differed
little from the cartoon and stage portrayals of Irish women domestic servants, discussed
in Chapter 5 of this dissertation.
20
But the literature under consideration in the present
section differs from many of the depictions in Bolger’s survey.
The literature analyzed here was written not about, but rather for, Irish Catholic
women domestic servants of the United States. It was written not by the working-class
women themselves, but rather by the middle-class, Catholic, Irish-born writers of the
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Irish Famine generation – men, for the most part, whose stated aim was to save the young
Irish woman from what they saw as the moral corruption of American Protestantism. One
of the works under consideration is nonfiction: The Mirror of True Womanhood, A Book
of Instruction for Women of the World (1877), by Father Bernard J. O’Reilly. The others
are novels: The Lost Rosary; or Our Irish Girls, Their Trials, Temptations and Triumphs
(1870) and Mount Benedict, or The Violated Tomb. A Tale of the Charlestown Convent
(1871), both by Peter McCorry; Bessy Conway; or, The Irish Girl in America (1861) and
Aunt Honor’s Keepsake, A Chapter From Life (1866), both by Mary Ann Sadlier; and
John McElgun’s Annie Reilly; or, The Fortunes of an Irish Girl in New York (1873).
McElgun’s Annie Reilly opens in 1850s Ireland. Annie’s family fall victim to a
wicked middleman named Ryan, and their eviction from their small Munster farm
follows. Annie’s sweetheart, James O’Rourke, flees to America after being accused of
conspiring to steal arms from a local police barracks. Annie flees as well. But they are on
different transatlantic ships, and consequently lose track of each other. It is a
manifestation of the star-crossed-lover theme common in this type of fiction.
According to Fanning, Annie Reilly “provides the fullest description available of
the Queenstown (Cork) to Liverpool to New York journey of the famine generation”
(Irish Voice 84). Squalid boarding houses of Liverpool are detailed, as are the despicable
“man-catchers” who work to lure passengers to them – or to dubious transatlantic vessels.
Painstakingly described are the unbearable conditions in the steerage quarters of those
“coffin ships.” At New York’s Castle Garden, a malevolent gang of con artists awaits the
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tired, naïve, immigrants who trudge ashore. Little is known about McElgun, but his
prefatory statement that he has witnessed these events has the ring of truth to it.
Protestant proselytizers accost the Irish newcomers at every opportunity;
especially vulnerable, according to the author, are young women. His Preface warns
against such religious reprobates: “However, sad to say, such wretches are not few, even
in free America; and, consequently, it devolves upon every intelligent Irish girl to study
thoroughly the truths of her religion, that she may be able to repel the foul slanders
against her creed, as Annie Reilly did” (viii). America is only “free” if one is white, of
course and McElgun harbors no doubt about that. He explains that the Irish can achieve
great material success in the “land of the free” but only if they remain loyal to the
Catholic Church. The employer of the devout James, we learn at the novel’s conclusion,
“in return for his industry and ability, had made him a partner like himself” (242). God
rewards Annie by reuniting her with James – at Mass, of course. They marry and buy a
fine house in a grand New York neighborhood. In McElgun’s world, God rewards those
women who follow Annie’s example, and punishes those who do not.
McElgun pays particular attention to second-generation Irish. If not given a
proper Catholic education, they risk denying their Irishness and religion, two traits that
for McElgun, and others in his generation of writers, are one and the same. Consider this
exchange between Annie and a stranger named Miss Talbot, like Annie a guest at the
home of Annie’s friends the Sweenys, whose home is presented as a haven of Irish
American Catholicism. Annie sizes up Talbot and vice versa:
“From Ireland, I’ll bet a dollar, come,” said she [Talbot], turning her eyes
to Mrs. Sweeny.
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“Yes; the lady is just as much Irish as you are yourself,” said that lady. “It
should not require much penetration on your part to tell that.”
The assessment provokes Miss Talbot to rebuke:
“Me Irish!” said she, with a short nod of great force. “I am no such a
thing. Is it because father and mother was rose there that I am Irish ?”
“Exactly; there could be no better reason,” said Mrs. Sweeny.
Miss Talbot stood up as if to depart, which would have been a great
calamity just then; but after twisting her face a few times like a short-
sighted man with a bad razor, she went to the window and began beating a
tune with her fingers on the glass. Annie and Miss Sweeny had a hard task
to restrain laughter. (205-06; original emphasis)
Apparent in this excerpt is not only McElgun’s concern for the offspring of Famine
immigrants, but also his fine turn of phrase, a talent that makes Annie Reilly, at times,
entertaining reading. Not quite as entertaining is the writing of Peter McCorry, who wrote
under the pseudonym Con O’Leary.
Two the three novels that McCorry
21
wrote follow the lives of Irish women who
work as domestic servants in the United States. One of the novels, Mount Benedict; or
The Violated Tomb (1871), takes as its main subject the burning of the Ursuline Convent
in Boston in 1834. It also records the trials and tribulations of Kate Crolly, a servant in
the Protestant Morton home. Kate survives proselytizing, becomes a nun, and persuades
Cecelia Morton, the young lady of the house, to convert to Catholicism. The novel thus
presents another example to the inverted-conversion motif previously discussed in regard
to Quigley’s Cross and Shamrock.
McCorry aimed his 1870 novel The Lost Rosary; or Our Irish Girls, Their Trials,
Temptations, and Triumphs squarely at the Irish women immigrant. His Dedication page
reads: “To the ever faithful Irish girls in America, whose affectionate devotion to their
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kith and kin in the old land, has proved that virtue and charity, the results of pious and
careful training in youth, are unlessened by distance and end only with life itself…” The
Preface informs us that the work was suggested by “Patrick Donahoe Esq., the eminent
Irish and Catholic publisher” (v). It surveys what the author considers the mixed results
of emigration from Ireland: “True it has given to many the means of a better material
existence, sometimes, it must be acknowledged, at a fearful cost, namely – the loss of
faith” (ibid.). Allowing that “[t]he majority of our IRISH GIRLS are honest hard
workers,” McCorry expresses “hope that out IRISH GIRLS will profit by every line of
what is written specially for their benefit” (vii). Like other Famine generation writers,
McCorry is concerned that the American Catholics are oblivious to “the enormity of the
evils that result from impure literature” (viii). The author states his hope that his novel
will help banish “some portion of the prevalent bad literature from the family circle,
where it might inadvertently have obtained admission” (ibid.). High on McCorry’s list of
“impure” or “bad” literature is anything that suggests women enjoy rights equal to those
of men, as The Lost Rosary makes clear.
The Lost Rosary recounts the fortunes of four emigrants from Donegal: Barney
McAuley and Tim Heggarty, who set sail for America in 1845, and their girlfriends, the
cousins Mary and Ailey O’Donnell, who follow them three years later, after the Famine
devastated their lives. The O’Donnell women encounter a stormy crossing; thus McCorry
employs a metaphor commonly used by Famine generation writers to represent the
difficult immigrant life ahead. Inevitably the women and the men lose track of each other,
and inevitably too the story contrasts the lives of the good Catholic immigrants with those
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who turn out bad. Among the good is Mary O’Donnell, who becomes an exemplar of
Catholic womanly virtue and self-sacrifice; in the author’s view, these are virtues sorely
lacking among American suffragists like the character Miss Longbow, an activist with
the Women’s Rights Association. This viewpoint surfaces in a one memorable scene in
which Mary attends to inmates of the Famine fever hospital where she has just taken her
ailing cousin Ailey and her aunt Biddy. McCorry writes of Mary:
Look on that weak suffering girl! Ye who are lifted into high places by the
means of sin. Look on her bended form inhaling the breath of disease and
death, ye loud-mouthed creatures of her sex, who disturb society by your
ranting and canting about women’s rights. Cast your eyes, each haughty
dame, from the glare of the ball-room, and behold Mary O’Donnell the
embodiment of a glory you can never possess. (112)
He prattles for several more paragraphs, praising the chastity, modesty, honesty, and self-
abnegation of “our Irish girls.” While in the hospital, Mary catches a glimpse of “the lost
Rosary” of the title. Given to her by her dying father, this rosary had mysteriously
disappeared earlier in the novel. Circumstances prevent Mary from retrieving it at the
hospital. But like magic it reappears later athwart a New York tombstone, which leads
Mary and Ailey to the O’Meara family, and eventually to a miraculous eventual reunion
with Tim and Barney, men who have “kept the faith.” A double wedding follows.
McCorry returns to the issue of women’s rights in his Conclusion to Lost Rosary.
In a conversation with publisher Peter Donahoe, whom McCorry calls “Mac,” the author
ridicules the women’s rights activist, Miss Longbow. In his view, her actions are “chiefly
dictated by revenge” for her “disappointment in marriage” (218). The author claims to
have “shown by a kind of a negative process the way to win ‘Women’s Rights,’ as they
are falsely termed” (219). After all, “[t]here are more ways of killing a dog than by
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hanging him…. Show a woman what we men admire most in another woman, and a
thousand chances to one she will perform that which we admire. Prove to them that the
sweet, retiring nature of modesty wins upon us, and conquers us, and she will quit her
bawling and screaming on public platforms” (ibid.).
McCorry’s attack on the suffragist movement was not an isolated one; rather, it
was a hallmark of Famine generation fiction. Mary Ann Sadlier often portrayed the
movement for women’s rights – as well as the movement for the abolition of slavery – as
harmful consequences of an even more harmful Protestantism. Thus in Sadlier’s 1862
novel Old and New, Protestant missionaries who visit the wealthy Mrs. Von Wiegel and
her daughter Bertha, whom they presume to be Protestant, are soon lampooned and
disabused of their presumption. In fact, Mrs. Von Wiegel is an Irish-born Catholic
married to a German. Later two more women pay a visit: the Rev. Julietta Fireproof,
B.A., and Dorothea May Wolstoncroft Brown––clearly a play on Mary Wollestonecraft,
protofeminist in England and mother of Mary Shelley. Sadlier makes clear her opinion
that the visitors’ dress and ideas are equally ludicrous. They ask Mrs. Von Wiegel to sign
a petition in favor of women’s rights and offer tickets to a lecture on women’s rights,
spiritualism, and Negro slavery. Her characters, the Von Wiegels, refuse all invitations
and tell their visitors, as McDannell puts it, “their church teaches that women should
obey their husbands and not speak in public assemblies. Women’s relegation to the
‘shades of domestic life’ is a ‘merciful dispensation’ not an injustice or oppression.
Domestic life for women is a ‘wise provision of the Divine Ruler for the wants of the
human family’” (‘The Devil” 59). As told, the incident thus instructs the Irish Catholic
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immigrant woman reader on how to resist enticement by notions of equality and
individual rights.
Sadlier was the first to perceive a need for just this kind of instructional fiction for
Irish Catholic working class women in America. The Preface to her Bessy Conway, an
1861 novel that enjoyed six US editions (Fanning, Irish Voice 134), states Sadlier’s
purpose: “It is simply an attempt to point out to Irish girls in America – especially that
numerous class whose lot it is to hire themselves out for work, the true and never-failing
path to success in this world, and happiness in the next” (5).
Bessy Conway opens in 1838 in Ireland, on the happy Conway family farm in
Tipperary. Bessy informs her father, Denis, that she has had a job offer in America and
has decided to emigrate, not out of desperation but “to see the world.” By the end of the
novel she will return home to save her family from Famine-era eviction. It is to be noted
that in Sadlier’s fiction, families are nearly always saved not by men but by women. On
the journey across the Atlantic, Bessy discovers that Henry Herbert, a Protestant and son
of the Conway’s landlord, is also on board. He confesses his love for her, but Bessy tells
him that marriage is impossible because of religious differences. Before the end of the
novel, Henry will endure guilt-ridden torment of Gothic proportions, convert to
Catholicism, marry Bessy, and become a landlord beloved by his tenants; in short, he
evolves into the paterfamilias figure, the preserver of a patriarchal class system, often
found in Famine generation fiction. In the meantime, Bessy resists temptation admirably,
setting an example for other Irish Catholic women. Also exemplary is the Manichean
contrast (another device common to this literature) that Sadlier draws between two men
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who make the Atlantic voyage with Bessy. Ned Finigan, Bessy’s neighbor in Ireland,
buys a bar in America; needless to say, it becomes a launching pad for a degenerate life.
Meanwhile, the mysterious, hunchbacked Paul Brannigan remains a devout Catholic and
lives a fulfilling life.
Bessy Conway treats important issues of the time. One scene takes place in the
kitchen of Bessy’s employers. Bridget, the Irish cook, and Wash, the Black handyman,
are embroiled in an argument when Bessy walks in:
[T]hey had been discussing certain points of morality in connection with
religion, and the subject being an exciting one they had grown quite hot
upon it, Bridget, of course, having the best of the argument as far as talk
went. Wash was not slow in appealing to Bessy as one who ought to
know. The point under discussion was whether people did not pay to go to
confession, or as Wash phrased it, “to get whitewashed.”
Wash’s voicing of an allegation often levied by anti-Catholic nativists – that confession
was some kind of blasphemous racket – incenses Bessy:
“Why nonsense, Wash,” said Bessy very seriously, “what puts the like of
that in your head?”
“By Gosh, it’s true enough,” said the nigger with a grave shake of the
head, “didn’t I hear Rose Hagerty ask Missis for money to go to
confession.”
“Now, Bessy, how can we stand that?” said Bridget with a wrathful look
at Wash. “There’s a story for you!”
“Guess, I didn’t make it,” returned the nigger, “Rose knew what she was
about tell as most people, and I hear her say dat ever so often just wait I
tell you. ’Spose the priest don’t charge much for lying or stealing.” This
home-thrust made Bridget wince.
Bessy winces, of course, at Wash’s insinuation that she, or her countrywoman, Rose
Hagerty, must be either a liar or a thief.
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“You black devil,” she said with rising choler, “you don’t mean to say any
one here does one or the other?”
“Can’t say, Bridget,” returned Wash with provoking coolness, “it an’t far
from stealing to throw good bread in the dirtbox and butter in the
greasepot. Den for lies. Gosh!” and he chuckled to himself at the thought,
“Golly! I hear as many told in dis kitchen as would fill a barrel!” Bridget
was speechless with anger, but Bessy assured the old man that no one ever
paid anything for going to confession, adding that those who were capable
of making such an assertion seldom troubled a priest at all.
Bessy draws a line separating herself and other Irish persons in the domestic service of
the household:
“If they went to confession regularly,” said she, “as they ought to do,
Wash! You’d never see them wasteful or extravagant about other people's
things, or makin’ free in any way with what didn’t belong to them! no, nor
you’d never hear them speakin’ anything but the truth, or askin’ for money
to go to confession.” (88-89)
The scene fixes Bessy’s status as the superior of all in the room.
She is patently their moral superior. Bessy, aware of the pitfalls of American life,
as the reader knows by this point in the novel, continues to go to confession and Mass
regularly. Other Irish women servants in the house, such as Bridget, do not; eventually,
they fall painfully by the wayside. Bessy tries to show them the error of their ways but
they laugh at her, unaware of the hell that lies in store for those who wander from the
faith. Bessy remains resolute. She tells Wash that if the others went to confession
regularly, they would make better employees; they would be more honest and less
wasteful workers. Sadlier’s point is that American capitalism would benefit from a
devout, Catholic labor force.
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Bessy also stands out as intellectually superior. Unlike Wash, her grammar and
diction are free from dialect. Unlike Bridget, she has both answers to Wash’s questions
and the last, emphatic word in the debate.
Finally, the passage portrays Bessy as the obvious racial superior of Wash. Eagan
notes that “the Irish-American novel, particularly as written by the embattled famine
generation of immigrants, makes it clear that whiteness was an identity to which Irish
Americans, not only felt entitled but actively pursued” (“White” 140). Certainly this is
the case with Sadlier’s writing. The just-quoted passage, in particular, deploys speech
patterns and language to underscore racial difference. The handyman’s syntax strays
irrevocably from standard English. The aim of confession, as the Black man named Wash
understands it, is “to get whitewashed,” a goal worth paying for. And the narrator calls
him a “nigger,” eschewing “negro,” the more respectful term of the period. The gist of
Sadlier’s unsubtle clues is evident: The Irish are white, and thus superior to Blacks.
Even so, according to this literature Irish women and Irish men face different
destinies. As Maureen Murphy has pointed out, “Irish male emigrants are expected to
succeed; the female is expected to sacrifice: for her parents, her siblings, her extended
family, her employer’s family and her church. While the servant girl is often rewarded
with marriage to a kind, steady man, and sometimes with return to Ireland, it is the
survival and prosperity of her family, her father, mother and siblings, that promises the
greatest satisfaction” (“Irish Servant” 136). Murphy finds reinforcement of this notion of
virtuous self-sacrifice in Irish folklore and mythology, and, of course, in the paragon of
self-sacrificing virtue, St. Bridget herself.
22
371
As the Famine Generation gave way to the second-generation Famine Irish,
writers stressed religion more than ethnicity as the medium for the policing of Catholic
women’s behavior. A significant turning point came in 1877, when fictional manuals
made way for a nonfiction newcomer, Bernard O’Reilly’s The Mirror of True
Womanhood; A Book of Instruction for Women in the World. With at least eighteen
editions printed, O’Reilly’s book became a best-seller for New York-based P. J. Kenedy,
self-avowed “Publisher to the Holy See.” An emigrant from County Mayo, Father
O’Reilly had served as minister amid some of the most traumatic events in Irish
American history: in the aftermath of Black ’47, the quarantine of typhus-ridden Famine
immigrants along the St. Lawrence River, and in the Civil War of the 1860s, the suffering
of troops in the Irish Brigade.
23
O’Reilly also held the post of Professor of Rhetoric at St.
John’s College, one of several colleges founded by Archbishop John Hughes.
O’Reilly’s True Womanhood lists a variety of occupations typically held by Irish
Catholic immigrants, and offers advice to women in each occupation. He counsels factory
girls, for instance, to find girlfriends their own age, to refresh their minds with music and
reading, to dress moderately, to save their earnings, and to be both pure and brave of
heart. (427-434) O’Reilly seeks to hearten his readers who are “dressmakers and
saleswomen”: “That you are dependent on your labor is not a shame, nor a disgrace, nor a
sin; your poverty is honorable; your anxious desire to make your labor yield aid and
support to the dear ones at home as well as yourself is most honorable to you…” (408) At
first blush this equation of poverty with honor, like O’Reilly’s espousal elsewhere of
better working conditions, might seem anathema to an advocate of the work-ethic
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ideology of the American Dream. Closer examination reveals otherwise. Captains of
industry could take comfort in True Womanhood’s admonition to be content with one’s
lot no matter how small it might be. Promoters of patriarchy could rest assured with its
promise that women should expect reward not in this life, but the next.
While O’Reilly acknowledges the tendency of some immigrant women to cast
glances back at Ireland, he encourages them instead to look forward to an American
Catholic family life. No matter the financial circumstances, a good Catholic family will
thrive, O’Reilly assures; that is, as long as the wife accepts that her first duty is to her
husband. (57) Though he also conjures St. Zita, patron saint of servants, and St. Margaret
of Louvain, patron saint of tavern workers (443), O’Reilly urges emulation of the Virgin
Mary: even though an Irish immigrant woman must play a role in the workplace, her true
place is in her home. O’Reilly calls the home “Paradise,” from which the wifely reader
no doubt is to infer that her husband is the equivalent of God.
Such advice is redoubled in the case of women in domestic service. Working as
most do in Protestant households, they must, in O’Reilly’s view, remain extra vigilant to
protect their Catholic faith.
Even so, Father O’Reilly’s attitude toward Catholic-Protestant interaction is more
nuanced than that of the Irish Catholic writers who preceded him. By 1877 a generation
of well-schooled Irish Americans with loyalties to the middle class they inhabit emerged
from shadows in the post-Famine era. The priest adjusts doctrine to this change.
“Although American society is not divided into distinct and acknowledged classes, there
has been…a well-defined and recognized ‘good society,’ which is almost if not quite as
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exclusive in its intercourse as any of the aristocracies of Europe,” he writes in True
Womanhood. “Nevertheless, there is in every large city throughout the country a steadily
increasing population, whose educated classes could form among themselves very
creditable social gatherings, but who, very properly, prefer to mingle on all social
occasions with families belonging to other religious denominations” (341-42). O’Reilly’s
1877 accommodation of multidenominational mingling departs markedly from the
hostility of earlier Famine Irish writers. Social advancement no longer has to be seen as
an unwavering path toward a Protestant cesspool.
“O’Reilly’s American is a new breed: the Irish-American woman,” Eva Roa
White writes. “The Mirror of True Womanhood addresses both the prefamine immigrant,
who by that point would be well-established matron with a family and a home of her
own, and the new postfamine immigrant, the single woman who is hoping to follow in
her footsteps” (103). This change in emphasis was confirmed the following year. With
the blessings of the Brooklyn-born John McCloskey, who had succeeded the Irish-born
Hughes as the Archbishop of New York, O’Reilly published his True Men as We Need
Them; A Book of Instruction For Men in the World.
III. Second-Generation Famine Irish
By 1870s the Catholic Church in the United States had accumulated enough
resources to turn its attention to other issues besides the ministering to immigrant masses
still pouring into Eastern seaports. The Church’s meteoric growth had spawned a still-
expanding network of educational establishments that were turning out eager recruits to
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American middle-class life. Out of elite Catholic institutions like Georgetown College,
St. John’s at Fordham, and the University of Notre Dame emerged a cadre of
intellectuals, both lay and clerical. They perceived a need for the Catholic Church – an
institution dominated since midcentury by bishops of Irish heritage – to assume a national
identity more compatible with that of the American state. The new Catholic elites thus
undertook to rework the image of American Catholicism.
Tempering the Irish Brute
Among the images from which Church leaders sought distance was that of the
brawling, alcoholic, simianized Irishman. As demonstrated, in the American imaginary
Irishness had been merged with Catholicism. Within the simian stereotype, moreover,
lurked an unpalatable truth about a significant segment of the Catholic congregation:
many Irish men whiled away hours after work by drinking to excess in clubs, in lowbrow
theaters, and in various other centers of ill repute. An Irish tradition of homosociality was
further aided and abetted by men-only bars, male-dominated Irish nationalist groups, the
Democratic Party, trade unions, and secret societies. All these competed for men’s time
with the very institution upon whose survival the Catholic Church depended: the family.
Here once again we see the interests of the Catholic Church parallel the interests
of the state. Bars were not only seen as threats to the family, but also, as Lloyd has
pointed out, they are sites “out of kilter with modern disciplinary projects”
(“Counterparts” 138). A bar, while a product of modernity, “in its relation to the
increasingly disciplined rhythms of work and leisure, it is nonetheless a site which
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preserves and transforms according to its own spaces and rhythms long-standing popular
practices that will not be incorporated by discipline” (138-39). Practices resistant to
capitalist discipline include buying a round, engaging in song, yarn, rumor, and even
“conversation itself, which becomes increasingly a value in a society ever more subject to
the individuation and alienation of the worker within the system of production” (139).
While Lloyd applies these observations in relation to the Dublin of Joyce’s time, they can
just as easily be applied to nineteenth-century Irish America. By attacking the Irish
American male drinking culture, with all its attendant counter-modern shenanigans, the
Catholic Church, along with its supporting caste of writers, aimed to impose a discipline
more in line with a fully functioning modern state.
Following the previous year’s triumph, True Womanhood, in 1888 Father Bernard
O’Reilly turned his thoughts in the opposite direction. The result was True Men as We
Need Them; A Book of Instruction For Men in the World, the first concerted effort by a
leading Church intellectual to address the thorny subject of Catholicism and the Irish
American man. Previous work displayed the belief of O’Reilly (and of almost all his
contemporary Catholic writers) that Irish women were religious and respectable by
nature, while the nature of men needed to be made “true.” O’Reilly revisits this view in
his 1888 manual, “intended for laymen of all classes” (2). His ambitions take high aim:
“True men combine in their lives so many heroic and Godlike features, that, although
living in the turmoil of the worldly, they would be hailed as Saints by the holiest of
priests or the most unworthy of ascetics” (3). Apparently the “true man” received his
instructions came from God “himself.”
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Larded with such aphorisms – “Put your heart into your work,” “Create your
opportunities,” and “Have a purpose in Life” (15-16) are three of them – O’Reilly’s
manual offers advice on how a man can succeed in America. “Education, training,
discipline, cultivation of heart and mind, at home or at school, can only aim at one thing:
to prepare young men for the business of life, for conduct, self-improvement, self-control,
and success in work” (17).
According to O’Reilly, the true man’s duties reside at home. As the ultimate
authority in the household, he must be firm, yet fair. Interestingly, O’Reilly edges away
from the wholehearted endorsement that Famine Generation writers such as Sadlier gave
to corporal punishment. Although he does not condemn it outright, he cautions against
the use of violence in the disciplining of children. Such a position is in keeping with his
criticism in Chapter Nine of husbands who abuse their wives. It signals a move toward
the approach voiced by the American Protestant character Mr. Thomson in Sadlier’s The
Blakes and the Flanagans, one that considers leading by example, in a calm, controlled
manner, to be a more constructive way of parenting.
O’Reilly is aware that such control may pose challenges – that it may be difficult
for a man to behave as if he owes preeminent duties to the woman he has married. Thus
in Chapter Three O’Reilly offers advice on how to cope with “a weak or silly wife,” a
“vicious wife,” or “one inferior in culture” and even “perverse of disposition.” He
recounts useful parables, such as the one about how “a wise and generous husband, aided
by his mother, transformed a weak wife.” He states that women too have a duty, to enable
men to shun saloon life by creating a husband-friendly home environment. In so doing
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O’Reilly foreshadows the florid exhortation that Baltimore-born Cardinal James Gibbons,
archbishop of his birth city, delivered to “Christian women” in 1894: “[W]hen your
husbands and sons turn to you in the evening after buffeting with the waves of the world,
let them find in your homes a haven of rest. Do not pour into the bleeding wounds of
their hearts the gall of bitter words, but rather the oil of gladness and consolation” (qtd. in
McDannell, “True Men” 28). In similar vein is Chapter Four of True Men, in which
O’Reilly returns to the True Womanhood metaphor of home as Paradise – and thus also
to the implication that the man of the house is its God. These passages put forward an
image of a Christ-like man martyred daily by his toil, an embodiment of the ubiquitous
picture in which the bleeding Sacred Heart is encircled by a crown of thorns and framed
by Jesus’s stigmata-bearing hands and sad, all-knowing face. The woman who fails in her
wifely duties in effect crucifies her erstwhile savior on Earth.
24
Notwithstanding these entreaties to women, O’Reilly and his contemporary
reformers acknowledged that women were by no means the sole cause of the sorry state
of the Catholic family. Men too were at fault; specifically, the rituals and habits by which
the nineteenth-century Irish American man forged male bonds. Chief among these was
St. Patrick’s Day. Nominated a religious holiday to honor the patron saint of Ireland,
March 17
th
had evolved into an Irish nationalist rally, a once-a-year opportunity for the
Catholic Irish American man to publicly parade his recalcitrant defiance in the heart of a
hostile, WASP environs. Worse still in the eyes of Church leaders, St. Patrick’s Day had
become a green-tinsel occasion for “drowning the shamrock,” a ritual that marked
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excessive drinking and violence as definitive traits of Irish masculinity. Reform required
the Church to rain on the parade.
McDannell has documented the shift away from the rabble-rousing, working-class
image toward a more respectable, middle-class, modern image of St. Patrick’s Day. She
examines reports of late-nineteenth-century celebrations in the Boston Irish Catholic
newspaper, the Pilot, and in a source usually overlooked, parish bulletins. Letters and
editorials in the Pilot urged that St. Patrick’s Day money be spent on charity and good
works rather than revelry and bad behavior. They called upon Irish men to attend lectures
and masses celebrating the saint’s life, and not to participate in public drunkenness. The
campaign had its effects. In 1879, the Pilot reported that in Boston, “the most marked
feature of the celebration this year, even more than last, is the growing tendency to prefer
indoor to outdoor demonstrations” (“True Men” 26). No parades took place in that city in
1881, 1882, or 1884, and by 1885 marchers were parading “quietly” (ibid.) Philadelphia
gave up parading all together, opting for a St. Patrick’s Day lecture instead. No doubt the
anti-Catholic agitation, chronicled in other chapters, had a role to play in the quelling of
overt Hibernian boisterousness. But McDannell and others agree that major drivers of
this behavioral modification were temperance and other reform movements – movements
undertaken with Church support.
As early as 1838 Theobald Matthew, a Tipperary-born Capuchin friar, had
founded a temperance movement in Ireland. Matthew soon won praise from the likes of
Frederick Douglass, as well as other prominent members of the US Protestant
establishment. But the very fact that Matthew had support from such camps, coupled with
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a general dislike for abstinence, generated rancor among Irish Americans. On his first
visit to the United States, in 1849, the friar experienced the wrath of Archbishop Hughes,
“who warned Mathew that his given title, Apostle of Temperance, had made him
dangerously popular with Protestants” (Shaw 327). Wrath was short-lived, however.
Having met with the humble friar, and confident that his efforts could be channeled in a
manner more beneficial to Catholic than nativist interests, Hughes gave Matthew his
imprimatur. By the 1870s the Catholic Total Abstinence Union of America, as well as the
inimitable Confraternity of the Sacred Thirst, had spread across the United States. Soon a
new phrase entered the Irish American Catholic lexicon––“to take the pledge”––meaning
to swear before God (and priest), an oath to abstain from alcohol consumption for life.
These Catholic endeavors differed notably from those in other denominations. In keeping
with the “true man” admonitions of Father O’Reilly, “temperance for Catholics,” in
striking contrast with “its Protestant counterpart, … was very much a male affair –
organized and run by men and directed against male drinking” (McDannell, “True
Men” 24).
Men further organized around issues other than temperance. Men’s parish
societies, benevolent societies, and reading groups appeared, as did the Catholic Athletic
League and other sporting organizations. Many such organizations were Irish-led. For
example, in 1882, Irish-American priest Fr. Michael McGivney, founded the most
prominent and influential of Catholic fraternal organizations, the Knights of Columbus.
25
Efforts to masculinize Catholicism also included the setting aside of special times for
male-only confessions and Masses. Men’s confraternities formed, men’s retreats founded.
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In Church parlance regular Mass attendance was deemed a “manly” activity; drinking and
carousing, decidedly “unmanly.” (McDannell, “True Men” 23)
The True Men of O’Reilly’s 1878 treatise commemorated this shift by embracing
a new patron saint. Jesus’s beleaguered mortal father, Joseph, was posited as the ideal
role model for Irish Catholic males. O’Reilly asks, “Can we wonder that this man, so
holy, so true, so honored by God and his angels…should have been so reverenced in all
Christian lands, and that, in our own days, he should at length be solemnly proclaimed as
the Guardian of Protector of the whole Christian family?” (211). As McDannell remarks,
“Catholic true men, who followed in the footsteps of St. Joseph and not St. Patrick,
upheld the family ideals preached from pulpits and published in advice books” (“True
Men” 34). St. Patrick, who had been made unmanly by the immoral acts Irish Catholic
men committed in his name, merits but one mention in O’Reilly’s 460-page tome.
As did its predecessor, True Womanhood, True Men devotes whole chapters to
men in various occupations; O’Reilly’s list comprises, in order, lawyers, physicians,
statesmen, writers, journalists (handsomely described as “Toilers of the Pen”),
businessmen, and laborers. The latter two categories warrant particular attention.
Even as he scathes the business world, O’Reilly envisions capitalism’s potential
savior in the body of the principled Catholic participant. “Will you help bring back the
Divine Presence,” he asks of the Catholic businessman, “the ever-burning Light, and the
Voice that cannot be bought or silenced – to the counting house, the exchange, the
factory? Let the writer point the way…” (446). One imagines a young James Joyce in a
pew at his Clongowes school retreat, enduring the venting of this stern priest: “Modern
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industry, modern business, like Eve, when the forbidden fruit has been plucked and
tasted, finds that the sweet savor lasts but a moment, leaving behind the bitterness of
death. Even before the poison has wrought its worst on heart and brain, the sinner
discovers that conscience, not gain is the ‘best guide,’ and would give worlds to recall his
past ‘ignorance,’ and forget the pangs and terrors of the guilty knowledge he has
acquired” (447). O’Reilly’s wish – to weave a Catholic ethic into the spirit of capitalism
– is based on a grave suspicion of it. Like Sadlier and others, O’Reilly well knows the
evil influence of greed. Unlike them, however, he resists labeling American capitalism as
an instrument of Protestantism. Quixotically, he wants to give capitalism a Catholic
conscience.
Given pride of place is “The Laboring Man,” who, the title of O’Reilly’s final
chapter indicates, is “[r]eserved to the last place because the dearest of all” (xvii).
O’Reilly reminds us that Jesus was the son of a carpenter, and that Jesus’s disciples
likewise were workingmen. In a catalogue that stands out as the lone occasion for
mention of St. Patrick, a former slave, O’Reilly underscores that many saints who came
from humble origins. Having thus comforted his working-class readers O’Reilly, in his
book’s very last three paragraphs, applies the sting. His words would soothe any
businessman worried by admonitions of the previous chapter. Addressing the lowly, he
puts down labor agitators even as he reveals the path to upward mobility:
And you, O dearest brother, do not give your ear or your heart to this new
gospel of hate they would have you believe in. In a country such as this in
which you have cast your lot, you are free to rise, – you see so many rise
every day from your own level to sit, in Church and in State, with the
princes of the people. Be conscientious, God-fearing, sober, steady,
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persevering, lovers of truth, of honor, of honesty, and all true manliness –
and God will surely prosper you.
For the truly manly, the acquisition of fame and riches is not just a possibility. It is a
duty:
Do not believe in the ravings of a few madmen, about the abolition of
wealth, and all such idle, destructive fancies. Do your best, honestly and
honorably, to become independent, to become wealthy. What you get is
your own: God grant you to make a right use of it. And with to help others
around you rise.
Rising above current station will make the Irish man quintessentially American:
Look at our magnificent American forests, – see how by the side and
beneath the shade of these lordly trees, that are the admiration of the
whole earth, their juniors and successors shoot up, straight, vigorous, and
aiming at being one day the equals in height and stateliness of their elders,
But cut down the glorious forest or set fire to it, and never again until the
end of time will such a magnificent growth arise from the ashes. (460;
original punctuation)
Like fireworks on the Fourth of July, True Men as We Need Them ends in a grand finale.
It affirms the American Dream. Indeed, True Men defends the dream, warning gullible
workers against the detractors of capitalism. O’Reilly discounted the nostalgia for Ireland
long prevalent among many Catholics, and extolled instead the fertile promise of the new
land in which they lived. He aimed not only to nuture the expansion of Irish American
service to the emerging US state, but also anchor within society a reconstructed,
American-identified, Catholic Church.
26
In parishes across the United States, Joseph was
destined to win the duel of patron saints.
Tatters in Lace Curtains
Personifying a significant social development in this period is the life story of
Joseph P. Kennedy (1888-1969). Born in Boston, the grandson of Famine Irish
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immigrants, as a young man he spurned a seat at Catholic Boston College in favor of
Harvard. Kennedy kept quiet about his Irish background as he socialized with the elite
who attended that centuries-old American Protestant bastion. He would become
fabulously wealthy, and would serve in numerous positions as a high-ranking official of
the US government. In 1938 – by then the father of future President John F. Kennedy –
he was appointed US Ambassador to Britain’s Court of St. James’s.
27
Joseph P. Kennedy
became the avatar of the lace-curtain Irishman.
“Lace curtain” was the derogatory term given to those Irish Americans who
acquired white-collar jobs and bourgeois tastes, who moved to middle-class homes and
hung pricey curtains on the front windows. These American Irish preferred to leave
Ireland, and many aspects of their Irish backgrounds, behind them as they pushed for
WASP respectability and a full patriotic embrace of the United States. Anglophilia and
service to the American state were their emblems.
No fiction writer of the late nineteenth century captured this lace-curtain rebuff of
the old country better than Maurice Francis Egan. Born in Philadelphia in 1852, Egan
was the son of a County Tipperary man who had emigrated a decade or so before the
Great Famine. A successful businessman, the father had married a “high-toned”
Philadelphia Protestant, who later converted to Catholicism. The father became a
Democratic Party ward boss and a lifelong supporter of Irish nationalism. His son,
meanwhile, graduated from LaSalle College in Philadelphia, then commenced graduate
studies in English literature at Georgetown. Maurice Egan enjoyed “a long, distinguished
career in Catholic journalism and university teaching” (Fanning, Irish Voice 198). He
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became chair of English literature at the University of Notre Dame in 1888; in 1896, he
was appointed to a similar position at the Catholic University of America in Washington,
D.C.
Egan wrote at least ten works of literary criticism and was a co-editor of the ten-
volume Irish Literature (1904),
28
a forerunner of The Field Day Anthology.
29
He
published a collection of songs, sonnets and poems of dubious quality, and dozens of
short stories, some of which are examined below. Six of his ten or so novels feature Irish
and Irish American characters.
30
Egan exemplified the new, middle-class, Irish American
who emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century – a person whose Catholicism
congealed with an American patriotism and thus placed great distance between him and
his Famine-era ancestors.
Within the Famine’s second generation of Irish American fiction writers, Egan
stood out both in prominence and in Catholic fervor, the latter a construct built upon the
foundation laid by Famine immigrant writers. Discerning a nascent Catholic intellectual
movement upon his 1878 arrival in New York, Egan seized “a chance,” as he put it, “to
take a step forward in the evolution of Catholic literature of which Mrs. Sadlier, author of
The Blakes and the Flanagans and Dr. J. V. Huntington, author of Rosemary were the
principle interpreters” (qtd. in Irish Voice 200). Egan’s admiration for the just-named
novel by Mary Ann Sadlier is patent in the short story “Philistra,” part of his 1885
collection entitled The Life Around Us.
Philistra, a fictional “town in the middle states” ruled by an anti-Catholic WASP
elite, is home to the story’s protagonist, Philadelphia-raised Cornelius Blake. This Blake
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is a carbon copy of the wayward Henry T. Blake in Sadlier’s The Blakes and the
Flanagans. Like Henry, Cornelius is the son of a “frugal,” hard-working Irish father and
a weak-spirited Irish mother. Cornelius’s parents “done well” in America, and when they
died, bequeathed “a snug sum” to each of their six children. Like Henry, Cornelius
attended state school, after his father declared of his children, “Sunday-school’s enough
for them!” Needless to say, the story exposes the father’s decision as a dreadful error.
Eventually, Cornelius decides to become a lawyer, a profession for which the narrator has
little respect: Cornelius “mastered Blackstone and the other textbooks put into his hands
with a fatal facility that had been made second nature by the superficial training of the
public schools. He had never thought about anything in his life for more than three
minutes” (The Life Around Us 71).
No less than Henry Blake, Cornelius is ashamed of his Irish parents. He
“despised” his mother’s “‘Irish’ way of thinking,” a reference to her unsuccessful
argument that Cornelius should go to the local Catholic school. “It made him shiver to
think that if he had gone to the parochial school, mostly attended by the sons of Irish
people not yet Americanized, and taught by Irish Christian Brothers, he might never have
got rid of his Cork accent” (72-73). Here, Egan appears to be making a satirical comment
on a “lace curtain” Irish attitude that decreed Catholic education as inferior to state
schooling. However as he revealed in his memoir, Egan had mixed views on his own
parochial school education. At St. Philip’s school, the teachers were “excellent” but
“Miss Moloney, a quaint gentle person, would have been equally proficient had she not
been obliged to struggle against a terrific mob of youngsters from the docks and from
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those parts of the waterfront where the Irish stevedores lived and worked” (Recollections
53). Egan evidently was bullied by the “tough” crowd: “a small boy, well brought up and
well dressed was obliged to struggle for his life” (ibid.). He later attended “Mr. Roth’s
military academy,” a private institute run by refined “Irish gentleman.” His final
institution in Philadelphia was the very Christian Brother school that Cornelius
badmouthed in the above passage. Again, in his memoir he gave the school mixed
reviews; some subjects were well-taught but others were not, and the nativity of the
teachers seemed to count a great deal in this regard. Eventually, because of illness and a
grievance, he was taken out of La Salle and educated by private tutors. The illness was
anemia, while the grievance was revealed thus: “Among the Irish-born Brothers English
literature counted as almost negligible in comparison with mathematics” (55).
Cornelius moves from Philadelphia to the WASP bastion of Philistra, a double
play on the words “philistine” and “Philadelphia” perhaps.
31
His lawyer’s shingle reads,
“P. Cornelius Blake.” Tongue firmly in cheek, the narrators explains that Cornelius “had
a kind heart; good impulses constantly arose from it. He would have died rather than have
done anything dishonest or acknowledged that his Christian name was Patrick” (74). In
Sadlieresque fashion, Egan implies that Cornelius suffers from two shames in one: not
only shame of the Irish background that produced the archetypal Irish first name, but also
shame of the Catholicism that compelled him to be named after a man known everywhere
as a Catholic saint.
Cornelius encounters one Alice O’Brien in the home of Philistra’s two prominent
Presbyterians spinsters, Miss Catherwood and her sister Miss Tamar Ann. Alice is their
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niece, daughter of their sister, Rosalia, who had married an Irish “papist.” Alice was
raised Catholic, to the disgust of her aunts. It is not a fact that much thrills the snobbish
Alice, either. Catholic upbringing has relegated her, by association, to a class she
despises. Her attitude is revealed one day after vespers as she observes the congregation
departing her parish church, St. Bridget’s, and cries out: “Look at them! Servant-girls and
factory-hands! Look at the clothes of the men and the bonnets of the women! And yet we
are of those people; we can’t escape them. I am a Catholic; I have stuck fast to the church
in spite of all the jeers” (79). Alice will not stick fast for long.
Cornelius is not a very good Catholic, either, so Alice seems a good match for
him. She is impecunious, however, and cannot hope acquire money because her
Catholicism prevents her from advancing as a teacher. To secure promotion and a
financially sound future with her fiancé – “Neil,” as she calls Cornelius – Alice converts
to Protestantism. Her fiancé, meanwhile, accepts the support of Philista grandee
Sherwood Archer and joins the “masons,” an organization forbidden to Catholics.
Standing for office, Cornelius gives insincere voice to “Irish nationalist” slogans in order
to win the Irish vote for the WASP establishment. “We’ll let you work that racket!”
Archer enthuses (86). In the end, Archer works a racket on Cornelius, one that puts him
in hospital for seven weeks.
It is at this juncture that the stories of Henry and Cornelius Blake go different
ways. Unlike Henry, Cornelius genuinely embraces his Catholicism following this near-
death experience. Even so, all does not go well. Alice tells Cornelius that she cannot undo
her own apostasy. “I can’t go back Neil,” she tells him, “nobody can go out of hell – out
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of hell!” (92). With that, Alice collapses and dies in front of Cornelius – in the vestibule
of St. Bridget’s, yet too distant to be saved by a priest. The date is August 15
th
, a Holy
Day of Obligation that celebrates the Virgin Mary’s assumption into heaven – a journey
Alice will not be taking. From the church interior may be heard the strains of St. Thomas
Aquinas’s “Pange Linqua.” Two lines, from the part of the hymn called the “Tantum
Ergo,” appear thus on the final page of Egan’s story:
Praestet fides supplementum
Sensuum defectui
Loosely translated, the lines mean “faith supplies what the senses cannot.” Egan’s
message: the Catholic religion is not to be trifled with.
In this one short story, Egan ventilates topics that run through his entire œuvre –
passions and interests he shares with the Famine generation writers. Concern over the
Catholic “schools issue” includes warnings of the harmful effects of state schools on
second-generation Irish Americans. The ease with which politicians manipulate Irish
voters through insincere expressions of Irish nationalism is exposed. Warranting further
concern are the dangers of apostasy and, to a lesser extent, of lax religious practices.
Mixed marriages and materialism likewise carry peril. Repentance, the reader is
reminded, can come too late.
Another theme that runs through many of Egan’s stories constitutes an
endorsement of the viewpoint of Father O’Reilly; that is, the theme of temperance. It is
central, for example, to his short story, “From the Jaws of Death,” in which Nelly
O’Connor marries Pierce Toole even though his alcoholism is apparent. She tells her
skeptical parent that Pierce “has a good heart in spite of the whisky, and, father, I’ll make
389
him take the pledge” (The Life Around Us 383). Pierce manages to keep his “pledge”
long enough for Father Kevan to marry them. But Nellie’s father dies on the day their
child is born, and her life takes a disastrous turn. Pierce attends to his religious duties
with increasing irregularity, “and in consequence, his power of resisting temptation
became weaker. He attended Mass, but merely from the force of habit” (386). Pierce
takes to the drink, and the family fortunes spiral downwards. Forced from their home,
they move to the “suburbs” – a drafty, rat-infested barn. Pierce continues his destructive
drinking. One cold Christmas Eve, Nellie’s health finally gives out. Gripped by deadly
fever, she prays that the Virgin Mother will send a priest for her and her dying child.
“Blessed mother help me,” Nellie cries. Miraculously, Father Kevan’s gig breaks down
and he and his sexton, Mick, seek shelter in the barn where Nellie and child lay suffering.
In an inversion of the Nativity scene, they bear witness to the death of the mother and
child. The guilty father returns; in grief, he throws himself at the priest’s feet and, finally,
reforms. In the end Pierce – it is he who is saved from the titular “Jaws of Death” –
voices the story’s obvious moral: “‘Promise of pledge,’ he often repeats, when he has told
his story, ‘is nothing without God’s help. The drink is not bad. God made it. It’s the
forgetting of God that makes us misuse it. Mind that, boys’” (389).
All or most of the above issues surface in three other Egan novels: The
Disappearance of John Longworthy (1890), The Vocation of Edward Conway (1896),
and The Wiles of Sexton Maginnis (1909). Each illustrates the “division between residual,
declining Irishness and ascendant Catholicism” (Fanning, Irish Voice 209), which
delineated the second from the first Famine generation. After providing a brief summary
390
of the first two novels I will concentrate on the third, which explicates the generational
division most acutely.
The eponymous protagonist of Disappearance of John Longworthy is a wealthy
and prominent writer on “social issues” who disguises himself as a photographer in order
to observe the slums of New York firsthand. His friend, Esther Galligan, a middle-class,
Irish-American Catholic, aids him in this task. The novel contains many themes standard
to this genre, including that of alcoholism and its destructive power on the family.
Included as well is the familiar, sentimental death scene: the Virgin Mary again makes an
appearance while an unfortunate but good character – in this case, little Rose O’Connor –
dies in peace in the presence of a priest. O’Connor’s death spurs yet another convention
of the genre, conversion. Longworthy becomes a Catholic and, as again is typical,
marries into his now-true faith; in this instance, John marries Esther. Most salient in this
novel is the way that Egan’s descriptions contrast the squalor of the Irish working-class
slum in which Rose O’Connor perishes with the gentility of Irish American middle-class
life lived by Esther Galligan. As Fanning notes: “There is a realistic description of both
subcultures, but always in the didactic service of deploring slum life and presenting
bourgeois respectability as an unequivocal goal” (Irish Voice 203). The slum dwellers
Egan describes are mostly Irish immigrants. The middle-class Irish are the American-
born offspring of such immigrants – but only those offspring who used the right qualities,
such as hard work and honesty piety, as means to escape the poverty. Most Irish slum
dwellers seem to lack these means. Yet they are qualities that the newly converted
Longworthy possesses multifold: he would rather listen to music in the company of the
391
Galligan women than sit in the den with their brother, Miles, and drink sherry.
Longworthy is, as McDannell has noted, one of Father O’Reilly’s “true men.” (“True
Men” 28)
Published six years after Longworthy, Egan’s 1896 novel, The Vocation of
Edward Conway, features more riffs on the dangers of mixed marriages and non-Catholic
schooling. They play out in a cacophony of styles: sentimental romance does battle with
occasional bursts of realism. The principal character is Edward Conway, the cultured,
Georgetown-educated son of an Irish immigrant. On a visit home the devoutly Catholic
Edward discovers, to his deep shock, that his cousins have been brought up
Episcopalians. Their Catholic father, Edward’s uncle, had married a pretentious woman
and agreed that their children be brought up in her Protestant faith. There follows another
sickbed scene, another priest to the rescue, and more conversions than can be counted on
one hand. The key to The Vocation of Edward Conway, writes Fanning, is that “Edward
represents the thoroughly assimilated, cultured and sophisticated, upper-middle class
Irish American Catholic…. He neither asserts nor denies his Irishness, but it is as a
Catholic that he functions as Egan’s protagonist” (208). In this, Edward Conway too is a
“true man.”
All of Egan’s prejudices against the poor, working-class Irish immigrant come
together in the assemblage of stereotypes that fills his The Wiles of Sexton Maginnis. The
novel is composed of a number of short stories, each centering on Mr. Lewis “Sexton”
Maginnis, a sly, ill-educated, lying, racist from County Kerry; in short, a classic stage
Irishman. Originally published between 1902 and 1909 in an establishment journal,
392
Century Magazine, the stories no doubt delighted their WASPish readership. The
dedication page confirms that Egan himself had reached dizzying heights on the social
ladder: “To Theodore Roosevelt,” it reads, “A Man in Love with Life.” He had every
reason to be thankful to Roosevelt. In 1907, two years before Sexton Maginnis appeared
in book form, the twenty-sixth President of the United States had appointed Egan the US
Ambassador to Denmark. (Loeber 432)
32
Most of the action in Sexton Maginnis takes place in Bracton, an industrial suburb
of Baltimore. Reflective of contemporary immigration patterns, the town’s St. Kevin’s
parish is composed mainly of two warring ethnic factions, the Italians and the Irish. Into
the fray the Church sends Father Stephen Weatherill Blodgett, erudite scion of old-line
Anglo-Saxon stock and a convert to Catholicism. Maginnis, who has finagled his way
into the sexton’s job, agrees to be the new priest’s eyes and ears at St. Kevin’s. Conflict
occurs early on, when Maginnis is told to place on the mantelpiece of Blodgett’s house a
prized sculpture, the “Flying Mercury.” The narrator appears smitten; the sculpture
“seemed ready to float over the white lilacs, impelled by the motive of Spring” (43). Not
so impressed is Mrs. Magee, Maginnis’s termagant mother-in-law. She turns her head
away from the artwork. “A haythen god stone cut by the Eye-tal-ians,” she murmured.
“It’s this way the Dagos do be corruptin’ the innocent public. And he has put it where
Father Dooner used to have St. Patrick” (44). The tone is thus set for the depiction of
Bracton’s Irish working-class residents as crass, uncultured, and racist.
Maginnis invents two characters through which he can channel his mother-in-
law’s venom – Brother Gamborious and Miss Violet Kingswood. Whenever Mrs. Magee
393
takes issue with Father Blodgett’s actions, she vents to Maginnis, and he in turn passes
the complaints on to the priest through either one of his inventions. Mrs. Magee is
particularly upset that Blodgett ministers to his Italian parishioners, whom his
predecessor, Irishman Father Dooner, had ignored. Maginnis relays Mrs. Magee’s
complaint by telling Blodgett that “Miss Violet” had remarked to him, “If he goes on as
he does with the furrigners, he’ll be encouragin’ the nagurs next, and we will have missy-
genation among us” (56). “Pagan Chinee,” “nagurs,” “Eye-tal-ians,” and “Dagos” all
compete for laughs in Egan’s portrayal of Irish people. Egan denigrates the unassimilated
Irish as well throughout this novel. For example, at one point, Mrs. Magee’s ancestry is
compared with that of the “big, raw-boned” blacksmith, Reilly. Reilly’s “ancestors were
eating potato-skins and all in darkest Donegal, while hers on her paternal side were
respected citizens of Tralee, with lushings and leavings of pig’s head, greens, and tea
galore” (214).
Yet the upper-crust Blodgett is more than able to handle these small-minded Irish.
Even Maginnis allows that the priest is “not bad for a man born in this country … and a
convert at that” (55). Fanning makes the interesting observation that two of Egan’s
heroes, weathers-ill Blodgett in this novel, and the long-worthy Longworthy in another,
are both converts born into old Anglo-Saxon families. The characterization is evidence of
Anglophilia. It is scarcely coincidence that Sexton Maginnis was published about the
same time that Joseph P. Kennedy finished his first year at Harvard. Admiration of things
English was a trait that Egan shared with his peers, Irish Americans who aspired to the
upper class. An icon of the good virtues of his class, good Father Blodgett suffers insults,
394
ignorance, and racism stoically. His faith enables him to bring the Italians and the Irish
together. The Father Blodgett character in this early twentieth century story adopts a
pragmatic approach akin to the acceptance of multidenominational mingling heralded by
Father O’Reilly thirty years earlier.
These artifacts of literature endorse a more catholic, less tribal – more American –
Catholic Church, primed to succeed within the structures of the state. The success of their
efforts may be seen in the 1960 election of an Irish Catholic as President, but perhaps
even more in the current composition of the Supreme Court of the United States. Six of
nine members are Catholic. Just one of them has significant Irish heritage. No Justice is
Protestant.
33
Yet all attended either Harvard or Yale, the principal finishing schools of the
dominant elite.
395
CHAPTER SIX ENDNOTES
1
Lauter 1447 (citing statistics from 1800 to 1853, the year of the completion of the
Gadsden Purchase of territory now comprising the southernmost parts of Arizona and
New Mexico).
2
The publishing houses were as follows: Edward Dunigan and Brother, P. O’Shea, and
P.J. Kenedy & Sons in New York; Patrick Donahue in Boston; John Murphy and Hedian
& O’Brien in Baltimore, and last, but not least, D. & J. Sadlier of New York, Boston, and
Montreal. (Fanning, Irish Voice 77)
3
Sociologist C. Wright Mills first published The Power Elite in 1956. He defined the
term as follows: “The power elite is composed of men whose positions enable them to
transcend the ordinary environments of ordinary men and women; they are in positions to
make decisions having major consequences…. For they are in command of the major
hierarchies and organizations of modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run
the machinery of the state and its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment.
They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure in which are now
centered the effective means of the power and the wealth and the celebrity they enjoy”
(3-4). While Wright meant to describe the power elite of 1950s, the term certainly may be
transposed to nineteenth-century United States.
4
Gramsci was writing not about Protestantism, but rather about church/state relations
within the context of hegemony and the separations of powers. Nevertheless, I believe his
words are more than apt for the nineteenth-century US context that I describe.
5
See Chapter 4 of this dissertation.
6
Susan Griffin lists a just a few of the many captivity stories published in nineteenth-
century United States. These are worth perusing for the titles alone: Rosalind; or A
Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of an American Female under Popish Priests in
the Island of Cuba (1836); Father Eustace: A Tale of the Jesuits (1847) by Frances
Trollope; Six Hours in a Convent; or The Stolen Nuns! (1854) by Charles Frotheringham;
The Jesuit’s Daughter: A Novel For Americans to Read (1854) by Ned Buntline; The
Archbishop: or Romanism in the United States (1855) by Orvilla Belisle; Westward Ho!
(1855) by Charles Kingsley; and Overdale; or The Story of a Pervert: A Tale of the Times
(1869) by Emma Jane Worboise. (1)
7
For example, Jenny Franchot has traced the elements of these pulp-fiction anti-Catholic
captivity tales to the more elitist writing of Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville, while
Susan Griffin argues for a more conjunctural analysis of these escaped nun texts: “At the
historical moment,” she writes, “when American women were shaping Protestantism in
their own image, these publications called the testimony of the religious women into
doubt”(30).
396
8
See Fanning, Irish Voice 22-26.
9
This was subsequently put in booklet form and distributed throughout the United States
by publisher Edward Dunigan and Brother.
10
Fanning spells Sadlier’s middle name as “Anne.” I am following the convention of
more recent scholars, who spell the name without the “e.”
11
Remarkably, there is as yet no biography of Mary Ann Sadlier written. Most of the
biographical material presented here is based on the sterling work of Charles Fanning in
Irish Voice 114-15.
12
Fanning quotes Willard Thorp as having said of Sadlier: “her early novels were
evidently read to pieces” (Irish Voice 114).
13
I use the term in the full knowledge that it was not coined by James Truslow Adams
until 1931. The sentiments of the “American Dream,” however, have been expressed
incessantly since the inception of the United States.
14
Howes is not alone in challenging these conventional views of Sadlier’s work. Liz
Szabo argues that “Sadlier’s novels, while politically conservative, are in fact anything
but uncomplicated or naïve; far from positing what some have called the uncomplicated
‘happy ending’ of sentimental fiction, Sadlier harshly critiques many of the aspects of
American society of which its citizens are most proud, and casts a shadow on the promise
of immigration and assimilation for Irish immigrants” (para. 3). While I see Szabo’s
point, I think it is important to remember that Sadlier herself more than fulfilled the
promise of immigration and assimilation. She raised six children while leading a
comfortable and financially successful life, both in the United States and Canada. Nor did
she herself ever returned to live in Ireland.
15
Sadlier was encouraged in this endeavor by the circle of Catholic intellectuals of which
Hughes was a leader. Indeed, the men of the circle helped to launch her career. Orestes
Brownson, in a July 1849 article in his Quarterly Review, called for the creation of a
Catholic popular literature. Patrick Donahoe, publisher of the Boston Catholic paper the
Pilot, offered a prize of $50, plus serialization in his paper, for such a novel. Brownson
judged the contest and declared Sadlier the winner, with her first novel, Willie Burke.
(Howes, “Discipline” 146-47)
16
See, for example, Sadlier’s Elementary History of the United States by a Teacher of
History. New York: D. & J. Sadlier, 1896. Archive.org Accessed 07/14/10. See other
editions of the schoolbook at the same site.
397
17
See Severin; and also Ó Donnchadha.
18
At least two of O’Brien’s sons became lawyers. One, Thomas Dillon O’Brien, born in
1859 in LaPointe, served a time as a country prosecutor and as Minnesota’s insurance
commissioner, was Dean of the St. Thomas College of Law and author of a book on
individual rights in the US Constitution, and went on to be a Justice of the Minnesota
Supreme Court. See “Proceedings In Memory Of Associate Justices Charles Lundy
Lewis, Charles Burke Elliott, and Thomas Dillon O’Brien,” Nov. 25, 1936, Minnesota
Reports, vol. 8, pp. 1-8, available at:
http://www.lawlibrary.state.mn.us/judges/memorials/Mem198MinnOBrien.pdf.
Thus did the son follow the intergenerational path, toward Irish integration into the
American state apparatus, described in an earlier chapter of this dissertation.
19
John Carlos Rowe notes the transnational significance in the Dolan deathbed scene in
“Religious Transnationalism.” (45)
20
How these Irish women workers saw themselves, or their employers for that matter,
has until recently eluded scholarly work. Thankfully, recently undertaken archival work
has begun to address this anomaly. See Aífe Murray’s Maid as Muse, as well as Margaret
Lynch-Brennan’s The Irish Bridget, both published in 2009.
21
Peter McCorry, who wrote under the pseudonym of Shandy McSherry as well as Con
O’Leary, was born in the North of Ireland. Following a stint as editor of the Glasgow
Free Press in Scotland, he immigrated to the United States in 1869. He lived in Boston at
first, possibly working for the publisher Patrick Donahoe, and edited the city’s Catholic
World newspaper. He moved to New York City in the early 1870s, where he edited the
official newspaper of the Fenian Brotherhood, the Irish People, and wrote poetry and
prose for the Catholic World. His date and place of death, like those of his birth, are
unknown. (Loeber 809)
22
It is said of this saint: “Born in 451 or 452 of princely ancestors at Faughart, near
Dundalk, County Louth; d. 1 February, 525, at Kildare. Refusing many good offers of
marriage, she became a nun and received the veil from St. Macaille. With seven other
virgins she settled for a time at the foot of Croghan Hill, but removed thence to Druin
Criadh, in the plains of Magh Life, where under a large oak tree she erected her
subsequently famous Convent of Cill-Dara, that is, ‘the church of the oak’ (now Kildare),
in the present county of that name.” (William Grattan-Flood) “St. Brigid of Ireland.” The
Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907. 7/22/2010.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02784b.htm
23
For more information, see Thomas Meehan’s “Bernard O’Reilly.”
398
24
It is no coincidence that around this time the American Catholic Church, following the
practice of the post-Famine Devotional Revolution in Ireland, promoted both the Sacred
Heart and the Blessed Virgin Mary as the two iconic pillars to be displayed in very
Catholic home. (McDannell, “True Men” 21) These Irish folk customs had to be
replaced by American Catholic practice.
25
For more on Fr. McGivney see Brinkley and Fenster.
26
Inevitably, this literary tradition would encounter backlash from subsequent writers of
Irish heritage. Perhaps most notable is James T. Farrell (1904-1979), who grew up in a
“‘lower middle-class, Irish-American Catholic, environment’” on Chicago’s South Side.
See Farrell v; see also Eric Pace, “James T. Farrell, Realistic Novelist, Dies,” in the New
York Times, Aug. 23, 1979, p. A1. A Trotskyist, Farrell was active in US leftist politics.
His prodigious literary output included Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy. These 1930s novels
employed styles of naturalism and realism, including sexually explicit scenes that led to
the subjection of his work, like that of James Joyce, to prosecution, and eventual
acquittal, for obscenity. The styles served well to present Farrell’s critiques of the
American Catholic Church and American capitalist policies.
27
Joseph Kennedy’s biographical material was taken from:
xroads.virginia.edu/~ug03/omara-alwala/jpkennedy.htlm. Accessed 07/26/10.
28
Besides Egan, the editorial board, chaired by Justin McCarthy, M.P., included such
luminaries as Douglas Hyde, Lady Gregory, George Russell (“A. E.”), John Redmond
M.P., and Standish O’Grady.
29
See Deane, ed.
30
The exact number of books that Egan wrote is not known. He used several
pseudonyms, and is suspected of having written pulp-fiction novels anonymously. Much
of the information on Egan in this section comes from Fanning’s Irish Voice, Chapter
Seven. See also Loeber 432-33.
31
In his memoir, Recollections of a Happy Life, Egan confesses to a hatred of
Philistinism. (60)
32
Egan remained in the post until 1917 serving under both Taft and Wilson. The
appointment of Egan to be US Ambassador to Copenhagen, of all places, may have been
in part an inside joke between Roosevelt and himself. Egan regarded himself a
Shakespearean scholar and had just published a collection entitled The Ghost in Hamlet
and other Essays in Comparative Literature (1906). Copenhagen might have appeared
the perfect place for Teddy Roosevelt to send the Prince of Denmark expert.
Significantly, the appointment was Egan’s reward for his role as an unofficial US
399
ambassador to the Catholic hierarchy in regard to Church-State relations in the
Philippines and other countries. He was also actively involved in American expansionist
policies, supervising the sale to the US of the Danish West Indies (the Virgin Islands) in
1917. For more details on this see his memoir Recollections of a Happy Life. See also,
Shannon 328.
33
Lisa Wanganess. “If she’s confirmed, court would have no Protestants,” Boston Globe,
May, 11, 2010.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/05/11/protestants_may_no
_longer_number_among_supreme_court_justices/ (accessed Aug. 1, 2010).
400
CHAPTER SEVEN
RED SAILS THE GREEN ATLANTIC:
THE AMERICAN JAMES CONNOLLY
1
Irish history students of every political stripe can tell you a thing or two about
James Connolly. Many will say that he was a signer of The Proclamation of the Irish
Republic, one of the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916. Some will tell you that he led
the 200-strong, Marxist, Irish Citizens’ Army into an alliance with the 1,500-strong Irish
Republican Brotherhood, and that together, in the streets of Dublin, these allies took on
the might of the British Empire. You will be told that though the Rising was a short-term
failure, British reactions ensured its long-term success. As soon as news seeped out that
the signers of the Proclamation had been executed behind the heavily armored gates of
Kilmainham Gaol, the tide of public opinion turned in favor of the rebels.
Connolly, you will learn, was the last to be killed. Already dying from gangrenous
wounds, he faced court-martial propped up in his prison hospital bed. On conviction he
was carried by stretcher to the prison yard, lashed to a chair so that he would not keel
over, and shot dead. Like his comrades before him, Connolly was buried in quicklime
within the prison walls.
At this point someone might recite a few lines from Yeats’ Easter 1916:
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
401
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
A terrible beauty indeed. Not long after the smoke from firing squad rifles cleared there
came a new dustup, a struggle for power in an Irish “Free State.” Right-wing, petit-
bourgeois, Irish Catholic Nationalists won, and they made the signers of the
Proclamation, the heroes of the Rising, martyrs for their cause. Connolly the
revolutionary Marxist was transformed into Connolly the crucified saint. Some will note
that in death Connolly was hijacked by the very people he had despised in life.
There is more you should know. In the 1960s nationalists in Northern Ireland --
the part of the island excluded from the “Free State” -- rose to protest second-class
citizenship under British rule. As armed struggle resumed, certain elements of a
befuddled Left felt a need to distance themselves from what they considered the stain of
nationalism. They exhumed Connolly’s legacy and held it up to ridicule. Connolly, they
said, abandoned socialism when he joined with republicans in the ill-advised armed
uprising.
In the end, then, Connolly achieved a measure of equilibrium. Truly he had
become another J.C. on the cross, misrepresented by the coward on the left and the
scoundrel on the right. But not many will tell you that part of the story.
* * * *
The purpose of this chapter is to claim for James Connolly a place within both
postcolonial studies and American Studies. In Ireland and Britain Connolly’s writings
have, in the main, been ignored or misrepresented. In the United States Connolly, like
402
most American socialists, has, in the main, been forgotten. And yet Connolly was an
American socialist. As a member of the Socialist Labor Party, as an organizer for the
Wobblies, and as a political operative for the Socialist Party of America, he spent the
bulk of the first decade of the twentieth century in the United States.
While in the United States Connolly taught himself German and Italian so that he
could organize as many immigrant workers in New York as he could. It is possible,
therefore, that he read the work of Max Weber, but it is rather unlikely for he would have
surely have repudiated it publicly. It is safe to say that Connolly would have rejected
outright the Weberian thesis that contends that a Protestant ethic infused the “spirit” of
capitalism thus creating the conditions for the emergence of American capitalism.
Connolly was under no such illusion. He believed that primitive accumulation in the form
of genocide and slavery constituted the twin pillars upon which American capitalism was
built. Because of these views, he offers the perfect counterpoint to the conservative Irish
American Catholic writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century I examine in
Chapter 6, who insisted on a role for Catholicism in the invention of the America’s
origins and on the need to produce a Catholic version of the “spirit of Protestantism” in
order to assimilate Irish immigrants to the emerging American nomos.
Connolly arrived in America at a time when mass emigrations from Europe
rapidly were changing the demographics of American cities. Ethnicities feverishly were
being constructed and deconstructed in a crucible of naked, winner-take-all capitalism,
against a backdrop of shifting notions of “nationality,” “citizenship,” and “assimilation.”
It was a time of great social unrest: frantic trade union activity and socialist agitation;
403
state and state-sponsored violence; widespread unemployment and poverty; and rampant
racism marked by frequent lynching and Jim Crow laws. Connolly wrote down his
thoughts about this remarkable period of American history, on some subjects better than
others. But he was more than just an eyewitness to events.
Following his own immigration to America with his family, Connolly produced
some of his most significant writings on colonialism, socialism, and nationalism. His
experiences as a union organizer and political operative in the United States greatly
influenced his thinking. They helped him to develop innovative ideas on the colonial
subject decades before the discipline of postcolonial studies surfaced. He took the lessons
he learned from American syndicalists back across the Atlantic and applied them to the
Irish trade union struggles. His ideas are as relevant today as they were a hundred years
ago. This chapter cannot do full justice to the breadth and scope of Connolly’s works, but
it is a beginning, an investigation of the possibilities that these works present. Thankfully,
other scholars are awakening to the significance of Connolly; this chapter hopes to make
a small contribution to this growing interest.
Connolly writes from the position not only of a colonized subject, but also of a
transnational subject. David Lloyd notes the significance of this, declaring in his essay
entitled “Rethinking National Marxism: James Connolly and ‘Celtic Communism’”:
“[I]t seems probable that Connolly, who in his own life traversed more than once the
circuits of the North Atlantic and engaged in the myriad forms of labour that the
migratory Irish took on, had reason to assert the radical potential of an Irish working class
forged in the crucible of colonial capitalist dislocation” (“Rethinking” 368). Lloyd thus
404
invokes the recent scholarship of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, who, in The
Many-Headed Hydra, “have shown the crucial importance of a mobile, maritime
proletariat in the formation of revolutionary consciousness and practices … and made
specific the connection between mobility and radicalism” (“Rethinking” 367). In his
seminal work The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy also investigates the significance of
transatlantic ships that were about “the circulation of ideas and activists” (4). The “Black
Atlantic,” to Gilroy, is an attempt “to transcend both the structures of the nation state and
the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity” (19).
Both The Many Headed Hydra and The Black Atlantic suggest to me the
possibility of the “Green Atlantic,” which in its most rudimentary definition might be
described as the circulation of radical ideas and people between America and Ireland.
There is little doubt that while America benefited from Connolly’s political commitment
and expertise, Connolly in turn benefited from the American syndicalism and American
Marxist politics that he encountered in America. Thus James Connolly should certainly
figure large in any investigation of the “Green Atlantic.”
As I hope to show in this chapter, Connolly offers American Studies three crucial
perspectives that until now have been overlooked by scholarship. First, he offers a Green
Atlantic perspective that forces a rethinking the nation-centric bias of more traditional
Americanists. Second, his life and work suggests a reevaluation of American leftism from
the perspective of the immigrant organizers and participants, especially those who
maintained internationalist movement and worked in more than one place. In this regard
Connolly should be considered alongside important transnational figures such as José
405
Marti, and Ricardo Magon, among others. Finally, Connolly broadens our thinking about
race and US labor organization in terms of possibilities beyond the antagonism of “free
white labor” and non-white labor. His significance to postcolonial studies will be
considered a little later.
The chapter is divided into two sections. Part I is largely biographical, covering
both Connolly’s early life, which is crucial for understanding the positions that he took
later on, as well as the more than seven years that he spent in the United States. Part II
concentrates on a small but significant portion of the writings that Connolly undertook
while living in America. The chapter examines his Socialism Made Easy and his tour de
force, Labour in Irish History. The essay also examines some of his articles in The Harp,
the Connolly-edited journal published under the auspices of the Irish Socialist Federation
of America. From an American Studies point of view, it is essential to look upon
Connolly’s theoretical positions as, in many ways, crafted by his experiences in the
United States. The chapter, which, like the dissertation, is a work-in-progress to be sure,
will conclude with an all-too-brief examination of Connolly’s life and writings in the
light of our present-day understandings of the notions of nationalism, socialism,
colonialism, postcolonialism, and transnational practices. Particular attention will be paid
to the distinction between the struggles of anti-colonial movements fighting for national
self-determination on the one hand, and the actions of European and American Marxist
organizations and their notions of the “utopian socialist” nation on the other. In
examining these issues closely, I hope not only to rescue Connolly from the
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misrepresentations that his work has endured, but also to elevate this Red who sailed the
Green Atlantic to a well-deserved position of prominence within the field.
I. Formative Years
The youngest of three children, James Connolly was born on June 5, 1868, into an
Irish immigrant family mired in the extreme poverty of the slums of Edinburgh, Scotland.
The Connollys were among the poorest of the Scottish poor. His father John was
employed at night by Edinburgh Corporation to remove waste, both human and animal,
from city streets. The work was hard, the pay pittance, the conditions atrocious. His
mother Mary, occasionally employed as a domestic servant, suffered from chronic
bronchitis for most of her life. Despite such adversity, James learned to read “by the light
of the embers, whose charred sticks served him as pencils” (Greaves 18). According to
Connolly biographer Desmond Greaves,
2
young James started work “at the age of ten or
eleven,” first in a newspaper compositor’s office, and then in a bakery (ibid.). By the age
of fourteen, he made a decision not uncommon among impoverished youth who held the
Irish nationalist views that young Connolly, through his voracious reading habit, had
acquired by this time: he joined the British Army.
3
Thus Connolly’s first sight of his
beloved homeland was in the uniform of the King’s Liverpool Regiment that had been
shipped in July 1882 to Ireland, where it was to be based for over six years.
Relatively little is known of Connolly’s military life in Ireland,
4
except that he
continued to absorb the literature of the Irish political movements – in particular, the
Land League
5
– and that he met his future wife, Lilly Reynolds, in Dublin during an
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evening stroll. They married in Perth, Scotland, in 1889, shortly after James had left the
army. In Scotland, James immersed himself in socialist politics and trade union agitation,
and honed his skills as trade union organizer, effective writer, and public speaker. He
became secretary of the Scottish Socialist Federation, avidly studied history, literature,
economics, and the works of Marx and Engels, and in 1894 became secretary of the
Scottish Labour Party, an affiliate of Keir Hardy’s Independent Labour Party. All during
this time, Connolly, now the father of two daughters, struggled to provide for his family,
and at one particularly difficult period, decided to immigrate to Chile. (Reeve 14) Lilly,
herself an ardent socialist, fully supported James’s political work but balked at this idea.
She appealed to Connolly’s comrades for help. The upshot was a job offer as a paid
organizer for the Dublin Socialist Club, which was to become the Irish Socialist
Republican Party (ISRP) in May 1896, the month of Connolly’s return to Ireland. In
eighteen months the ISRP, Connolly proudly declared, had sprung out of “obscurity to
public recognition, and even approval” (qtd. in Greaves 101). Eleanor Marx, daughter of
Karl, offered her support, as did English socialist Edward Aveling. (Reeve 15) Connolly
also attracted the interest of Daniel De Leon, a leader of the Socialist Labor Party in the
United States. Furthermore, in 1900, the Congress of the Second International, meeting in
Paris, officially recognized the ISRP as an entity. (23) Later the party became one of only
thirty-nine organizations worldwide invited to participate at the Third International
Congress in 1919. (Young 127)
As was the case throughout his difficult life, political organizer was not an
occupation on which Connolly could rely to feed his family. The ISRP could not raise his
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one-pound-per-week wages with any regularity, and so Connolly had to find occasional
employment as a laborer with the Dublin Corporation. Often he went without food so that
his family could eat. A teetotaler, Connolly shunned the public houses of Dublin that
were popular with many of his comrades. Instead he passed his many days of
unemployment at the National Library, researching and writing articles for numerous left-
wing papers on both side of the Atlantic. Connolly conversed with W.B. Yeats and other
members of the Irish literati, and he befriended the remarkable Maud Gonne. By now a
highly skilled orator, he was invited to tour England and Scotland on several occasions. It
was not long before an invitation came for him to speak in America.
Connolly Arrives in America
Connolly was well known in America even before he uttered a word at the packed
meeting in the Cooper Union, New York, the first stop in his three-and-a-half-month,
coast-to-coast tour of the United States and Canada in 1902. His fame had preceded him
through reports of his activities in the Irish American press and through his writings in
the American socialist journal, Weekly People. Additionally, Connolly’s pamphlet, Erin’s
Hope, had recently published in full by the Socialist Labor Party (SLP). (Reeve 26)
The hopes of organizations on both sides of the Atlantic accompanied Connolly
on his visit. Daniel De Leon hoped that Connolly would act as a catalyst for Irish
American recruitment into his SLP. The ISRP hoped that Connolly might secure in
America badly needed finances by the selling of newspaper subscriptions. And
Connolly’s union, the United Labourers, hoped to learn more from him about the many
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American trade union struggles. No wonder then that all three organizations contributed
to Connolly’s travel expenses.
Connolly was in no doubt about his qualifications for this tour. In an editorial in
Workers’ Republic, the ISRP paper, he wrote the following: “The fact that our comrade
has spent so much of his own life (20 years) amongst the Irish exiles of Great Britain, fits
him in a peculiar manner for the task of understanding and speaking to those other exiles
in America” (qtd. in Nevin 156). His membership of the Irish diaspora was not his only
qualification, however. The editorial noted his expertise on the subject of “the revolt of
the working class” and signaled to his anticipated American audience his intention “to
remind them that the progress of capitalism brings for the American a slavery as grinding
and merciless as that we groan under today, even if many of their slaves be better fed and
housed than ours” (157). The use by Connolly of the term “slavery” here to describe the
conditions of the working class on both sides of the Atlantic seems unfortunate given his
knowledge of its particular role in American history, as well as his unequivocal position
on the issue. This may be ascertained for example, from a letter he wrote to Daniel
O’Brien, shortly after his arrival in America. During a visit to George Washington’s
home in Newburgh, New Jersey, he noted a memento, the will of Washington’s mother,
in which she leaves to one of her children, “‘my Negro wench, Little Bit, and all her
future increase’” (qtd. in Nevin 197). “Here,” he wrote, “we have the family of the
greatest patriot of Revolutionary America--a patriot passionate with love of ‘Freedom’--
consigning to perpetual servitude, not only the living Negro woman, but all her children
yet unborn. It forms another illustration of the necessity for insisting upon a clear
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definition of the term ‘freedom’ as of all other terms so glibly used in political warfare”
(ibid.).
The 1902 tour was exhausting but an overall success. Connolly indeed secured
many subscriptions to Workers’ Republic, the ISRP paper. His meetings were well
attended, so that he garnered much publicity for the cause and made useful contacts for
his Labourers’ Union. However, he began to notice traits within the SLP that greatly
disturbed him, and about which he was not afraid to speak. In a letter to the Weekly
People that Desmond Greaves claims may have marked the beginning of what would
become an intense dislike by De Leon of Connolly, Connolly wrote, “De Leon struck me
as a somewhat chirpy old gentleman with an inordinately developed bump of family
affection” (qtd. in Greaves 150). After this somewhat innocuous comment,
6
Connolly
turned his thoughts to Americans in general: “Allow me to say that in one respect the
SLP is thoroughly American. It has its full share of the American national disease --
Swellhead. When the average SLP man now asks me what I think of America I have got
into the habit of replying that I don’t think much of it, and it does me good to watch the
dazed, mystified expression that creeps across face” (qtd in Reeve 37).
The tone of the letter is one of scathing wit. But as with much humor, the tone
hardly disguises Connolly’s real aversion to what he saw as American chauvinism;
especially, the left-wing form of American exceptionalism to which we will return in Part
Two. During his farewell meeting at the Manhattan Lyceum in New York on December
26, on the eve of his departure for Ireland, Connolly was asked yet again what he thought
of America. After denying any expertise on the subject, Connolly went on to express
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surprise at the level of lawlessness displayed by the American capitalist class. According
to Carl Reeve, Connolly charged that in “the United States, more than any other country,
individualism is systematically practiced, ‘both as a theory and as a policy.’ Even trade
unions are affected by this general lawlessness … the country as a whole, was behind, in
its conception of the class struggle” (41). De Leon, who followed Connolly to the
podium, rejected Connolly’s assessment, stating, according to Reeves, “America was the
country upon which the emancipation of the workers of Europe depended and which,
therefore, they must learn to know” (ibid.). The next day Connolly set sail for Ireland. He
would not stay long there.
Connolly returned to a political party in disarray. Despite his great fund-raising
efforts in America, ISRP finances had been squandered foolishly in his absence; the
Workers’ Republic teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, unable to honor the subscriptions
that Connolly had raised. Annoyed at what he saw as a lack of commitment in his Dublin
comrades, and again unable to provide for his family, Connolly resigned from the party
and accepted an offer of a paid speaking tour of Scotland. During this time he helped set
up the Socialist Labour Party of Scotland, modeled after the American group. But after
three frustrating months in Scotland, working long hours for the cause of labor but with
little financial aid for his efforts, Connolly announced that he was returning to the United
States to live. As noted by Reeve, author of the only book-length study of Connolly’s
American period, James Connolly and the United States, the Irish socialist again had
“been unable to find in Ireland or Scotland the means with which to support his family”
(46).
412
A cousin in Troy, in upstate New York, sent Connolly the fare, and once more he
set out across the Atlantic to seek a means of caring for the needs of his now six children
and wife. Connolly had expected help from the SLP in finding work. But help was not
forthcoming, and so, after a demoralizing period in New York City, he moved to be with
his cousins in Troy. There he found work as an insurance collector. (Greaves 169) After
several months, Connolly was able to send the money for his family’s passage, but just
before the departure date, Lilly became dangerously ill. She had recovered sufficiently by
August 1904, and the family again prepared to join James. Further tragedy struck on the
eve of the voyage. Mona, their eldest daughter, died of burns she sustained when her
dress caught fire at the stove. The trip was delayed a further week, their eventual reunion
bittersweet.
Differences with De Leon
According to biographer Stephen Coleman, “Daniel De Leon was the most
outstanding American thinker, writer, orator and political organizer of the years from
1890 until the eve of the First World War” (1). Coleman’s 1990 study, Daniel De Leon,
the most recent of several De Leon biographies, attempts to rekindle serious interest in
the writings of a man to whom “[w]riters of history have not been kind…. Apart from
generally uncritical hagiographical accounts of his life written by De Leonists in defence
of their tradition, most historians have mentioned De Leon only in passing, usually
disparagingly and often inaccurately” (vi).
7
While it is not within the purview of this
essay to engage with the political philosophy of De Leon except as it relates to his
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disagreements with Connolly, it is worth noting the similarities between Coleman’s view
of the historiography regarding his subject, De Leon, and the views of some of the writers
considered later in this essay – scholars such as Dobbins, Lloyd, and Young – that
revisionist historiography has misrepresented or ignored crucial elements in the writings
of James Connolly.
8
As we turn now to the increasingly antagonistic relationship
between these two major but mostly overlooked figures in early Twentieth Century
American socialist history, the irony of Coleman’s statement that “Connolly was at one
time a professed revolutionary socialist,” should be kept in mind (106; my emphasis).
De Leon joined the SLP in 1890 and quickly became its dominant figure for the
next twenty-four years. In 1892, he became editor of the SLP’s Weekly People, for which
he was to write many articles on Marxist theory. De Leon also translated Marx and
Engels into English. He nurtured a large and fiercely loyal band of followers who
included not only American, but also British, and especially Scottish, socialists. Connolly
himself became an impassioned follower of De Leon; indeed, he increased De Leon’s
transatlantic influence among Scottish comrades by helping to establish the Scottish SLP.
Undoubtedly Connolly impressed De Leon too; thus he encouraged Connolly to write for
Weekly People. And De Leon had instigated Connolly’s American tour of 1902. But by
the time that Connolly returned to the United States in 1903, their relationship had
soured. Connolly was not given the same warm welcome that he had received on his first
visit; essentially, he was left to fend for himself. How the feud started no one is
absolutely certain, but there is little doubt that the personalities of both men were a factor.
On the one hand, De Leon, “known as ‘the Pope’ because of his claim to infallibility in
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matters of socialist faith and morals” (Nevin 207), liked to dominate, to have his own
way. On the other hand, Connolly, whom De Leon often accused of being “Jesuitical,”
refused to be dominated by anybody. Whatever its beginnings, the first public airing of
their differences began in the pages of the Weekly People.
On April 9
th
1904, the paper published a letter from Connolly entitled “Wages,
Marriage and the Church.” (Coleman 110) In it Connolly made three controversial
points.
9
First, Connolly attacked “a tendency among SLP members to argue that workers
could not benefit even temporarily from a wage increase because ‘every rise in wages
was offset by a rise in prices’” (Allen 60). Connolly rightly saw this as nonsensical and
politically dangerous. As Kieran Allen points out, “its logical outcome would be to
reduce the Socialist Trade and Labour Alliance to passivity” (ibid.).
Second, Connolly’s letter criticized the position of socialists on marriage. De
Leon had translated and serialized in the Weekly People August Bebel’s book, Women
and Socialism, in which, among other things, Bebel questioned the usefulness of
monogamy. Connolly believed this idea harmful to the socialist cause, “an excrescence
upon the movement” (qtd. in Coleman 111). Afraid both that Bebel’s position might turn
working class people away from socialism and that the advocacy of “free love” might
provide ammunition to socialism’s right-wing opponents, Connolly countered