How White Americans Became Irish (Part 2)

Above: Tom Hayden, President Joe Biden

The ethnic-national story of “a nation of immigrants” still has significant cultural and affective power in the US today but its appeal has been loosened by the white heat of conservative attacks on liberal hegemony. President Trump promoted an alternative story of American national identity, one that corresponds settler-colonialism with American exceptionalism and discredits the nation of immigrants narrative.  In this, the Trump administration’s demonization of (non-white) immigrants was key to its efforts to normalise illiberal democracy as reflective of national belonging.

For Irish-Americans the attacks on immigrants and promotion of white nationalism has drawn attention to their investments in the nation of immigrants story which has for several generations tied Irish-American identity to the national narrative. It has often been narrated in tandem with stories of Irish nationalism and anti-colonialism, signifying an identity born out of struggle and victimisation. However, the identification with a history of struggle against colonization can be embraced and articulated form very different ideological perspectives, informing opposing memories: it can be a source of empathy for those facing struggles as new immigrants in the present, or it can reinforce a blood-and-soil sense of nationalism - it can be inclusive or exclusive, turning it both to liberal and conservative worldviews.

In Part 2 of the story of how white Americans became Irish we will consider liberal/progressive perspectives and in Part 3 turn to conservative views.

We Cannot Stand Aside

In March 1964 Attorney General Robert Kennedy gave a speech at a St Patrick’s Day dinner organised by the Friendly Sons of St Patrick in Scranton, Pennsylvania. In it he asked his Irish audience to remember the famine in Ireland, the mass emigration to the US, and the hardships endured by the new Irish immigrants: “As the first of the racial minorities, our forefathers were subject to every discrimination found wherever discrimination is known.”

Turning to the contemporary American scene of racial injustice he references ongoing discrimination experienced by African Americans and exhorts his audience: “It is toward concern for these issues - and vigorous participation on the side of freedom - that our Irish heritage must impel us. If we are true to this heritage, we cannot stand aside.” 

We do not know how Kennedy’s Irish audience responded that night to his speech but as racial division and violence unfolded across the 1960s and early 1970s there is little evidence that Irish America did much other than “stand aside”. Indeed, far from empathetic action, Irish Americans hastened their movement away from the Democratic Party, partly in response to its perceived support for the civil rights movement. The long march rightwards by Irish America has strong roots in this period. By 1969 journalist Pete Hamill was reporting that white working-class Irish in New York were feeling increasingly alienated and resentful and “talking darkly about their grievances.”

Irish on the Inside

There were of course exceptions to that movement rightward, individuals who claimed an Irish left radicalism as an ethnic birthright. One such was Tom Hayden, a former leader of the New Left in the 1960s. In 2001 he published a memoir titled Irish on the Inside: In Search of the Soul of Irish America that purported to be an alternative history of Irish America, uncovering the “Irish radical past” in the US via his family history and his own political activism in the 1960s. Hayden tells of his ethnic awakening as a form of epiphany, connecting his protesting in Chicago in 1968 with televised scenes of civil rights protests in Northern Ireland:

I was transfixed by the sight of it. Suddenly I realized what had been denied, that these marchers were somehow kin to me, that under the void of my identity I was Irish, and that being Irish need not mean identifying with Cardinal Spellman, ‘Bull’ Connor, Charles Coughlin or Mayor Daley. It could mean being an American rebel not in spite of being Irish, but because of being Irish.

Hayden’s “discovery” that he was “Irish on the inside” is in line with the ethnic revivalism of the period, though he did more than most to sharpen this with a progressive political vision to the point where he argued that Irish-Americans should not claim their Irish roots unless they also claimed the radicalism of those roots. Hayden argues for a “new Irish revival” in the US that “means reassessing our racial identification with whiteness” and rejecting the comforts of assimilation. 

Irish Stand

Liberal and progressive Irish Americans continue to raise the flag of ethnic bad faith today though it is increasingly articulated in a defensive fashion against the aggressive nationalist visions of more conservative Irish-America. This is to say that Hayden’s progressive Irish American vision has become increasingly dimmed in relation to shifting class and race politics and allied cultural warfare.

Joan Walsh, a journalist with The Nation, provides a pertinent example in her 2012 book What’s the Problem With White People. In it she charts growing political divisions in the US through the story of her extended working-class New York Irish Catholic family, many of whom move from Democratic to Republican affiliations across two generations. It is at once a family and political memoir that maps the fears and aspirations of white ethnic Americans onto national discord, from the unravelling of the New Deal coalition and socio-political upheavals of the 1960s to the rising social inequality and racial tensions in the 2000s. It is also a story of personal frustrations for Walsh who struggles to square the claims of class and identity politics as a radicalised Irish American.

More recently, in the wake of Trump’s election, Walsh participated in a coalition of Irish and Irish-American politicians, activists and artists under the banner “Irish Stand,” with the aim of “Reminding Irish-America we are an immigrant people.” On St Patrick’s Day, 17 March 2017, they organised an event at Riverside Church in Manhattan, advertised as “Irish, American and Global voices raised in unity for justice and equality.” Irish Stand has continued as an active online presence and also organised follow-up events in Ireland, including support for protests in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. However, efforts to organise a similar event in New York in March 2018 fizzled out due to insufficient funding and organisational challenges, though the biggest challenge, not yet overcome, has been to galvanise Irish-American communities with radical messaging.

A Politics of Empathy

While Hayden’s progressive vision of Irishness has not taken significant political hold in Irish America, there has evolved a more mainstreamed liberal Irishness that draws on the immigrant past to buttress narratives of ethnic identity in the present.

Throughout his political career Joe Biden has been one of the most expressive examples of this liberal Irishness, personifying a politics of empathy in which his Irish ancestry and Catholicism function as moral touchstones. As George Blaustein notes: “What is distinctive about [Biden] is not his politics but something more elusive: the chords of grief and mourning that he plays in the culture and that the culture hears in him.” Biden articulates this clearly both in relation to his personal tragedy (the deaths of family members) and to his Irish Catholic identity.

In his run for the presidency Biden promised to be a redemptive figure, healing the wounds of a disunited and fractious nation, and frequently connected his sense of tragedy and suffering with current social crises and traumas. In his first press conference as president, on 25th March 2021, when asked about the plight of migrants at the US-Mexico border, Biden said:

When my great grandfather got on a coffin ship in the Irish Sea, expectation was: Was he going to live long enough on that ship to get to the United States of America? But they left because of what the Brits had been doing. They were in real, real trouble. They didn’t want to leave. But they had no choice.

This promotion of empathy can have powerful political as well as moral appeal but it also elides more structural and material realities of suffering and injustice. In this regard, the Irish element of the Irish Catholic identity does significant ideological and emotional work in disavowing burdens of historical responsibility and guilt. The radical reclamation of an Irish past projected by Hayden is hollowed out in Biden’s tellings of his Irishness, producing a deradicalized ethnicity, a benign and redemptive political narrative that bespeaks and promises to restore the hegemony of liberal whiteness.

Comfortably on the Sidelines

In the wake of protests in the summer of 2020, Irish-American organisations were stirred to voice support for Black Lives Matter. A notable statement in this regard is a public letter signed by 60 Irish-American political and cultural figures, sent to Representative Karen Bass, the Head of the Congressional Black Caucus, following the death of the civil rights leader John Lewis in July that year. The letter outlines the influence of the American civil rights movement in the formation of the Northern Irish Civil Rights Association in the 1960s, and the inspiration of Martin Luther King on leaders of the Peace Process in Northern Ireland. It states:

Irish America still has much to learn about the depths of discrimination faced by our African American brothers and sisters. And we have our own history of racial prejudice that we must examine and acknowledge. 

We urge the great institutions of Irish America, particularly our colleges and universities, as well as our civic and fraternal organizations to address their role in maintaining the institutional racism that has plagued this nation.

The letter concludes that “Irish America cannot remain comfortably on the sidelines as America seeks to finally put an end to the racial discrimination that has haunted our country.”

These are tentative but symbolic steps by what might be viewed as the liberal wing of the  Irish-American establishment. Whether it signals a fulsome review of Irish America’s investments in institutional racism in the US, past and present, is too early to determine but seems unlikely. The reference to Irish-America residing “comfortably on the sidelines” glosses the realities and costs of those investments (and recalls Robert Kennedy’s plea to Irish America to not “stand aside” at a time of racial crisis in the US).

This is not to gainsay the intentions and efforts of Irish-Americans to promote anti-racist actions and solidarities, but there is little evidence that the mainstream of Irish-America supports a reckoning with racial injustice in the US. Those that do yet need to forge a compelling political messaging and agenda that moves beyond chastising Irish-Americans for their bad faith and failure to live up to their values and history. While such calls can illuminate hypocrisies in claims to Irishness, they are an insufficient politics.

To be continued…

Liam Kennedy is Professor of American Studies and Director of the Clinton Institute at University College Dublin.