"A Most Distressful Nation": The American Irish

...We can think, for example, of men like John England, the first bishop of Charleston, who was sent to the United States at the age of thirty-four because he was too much of an Irish radical for the Church in Ireland...

...And yet the myth persists, bandied about both by the Irish self-critics and by those acaTABLE 6 DIFFERENCES IN ANTI-SEMITISM SCORES German Italian Poles Mean .394 .273 .871 Father's education and occupation .403 .370 .783 Father's education and occupation and own education .322 .256 .667 Father's education and occupation and own education and occupation .280 .238 .704 Father's education and occupation and own education and occupation and 1963 family income .271 .235 .698 TABLE 7 SCORE ON SCALE MEASURING SYMPATHY FOR POLITICAL MILITANCY (JUNE 1961) COLLEGE GRADUATES RESPONDING IN 1968 (SCALE: 0-18) All 9.5 (4,324) Jews 11.9 (100) Catholics Irish 10.6 (269) German 9.2 (280) Polish 10.5 (54) Italian 8.3 (168) demic liberals who bitterly resent the persistence of Irish political control in many cities and states...

...In religious affairs they have not been Americanized enough...

...In other words, this black leader saw progress inside the system as largely a matter of cooperation between blacks and the Irish minority that acts as a power broker between the blacks and other ethnic populations in the city...

...2 Nor did things improve as the nineteenth century went on and "Paddy" became a familiar cartoon figure, more gorilla than man, with a stovepipe hat, a jug of beer in one hand and a shillelagh in the other...

...4. Among Catholics, and particularly among the Catholic clergy, the most enthusiastic "interracialists" are Irish even though they may not speak for a majority of their colleagues...

...In cultural affairs they have not been the creative madmen, nor the halfintoxicated mystics as which the stereotype is so often portrayed...

...More than a century and a quarter before the Vatican Council he turned over the governance of his diocese to an elected board of five priests and ten laymen, and a few weeks after he became an American citizen he stood before the U.S...

...It may not rear its head as overt prejudice, it may not lead to political or occupational discrimination, it may coexist with a commitment to equality in American life, but it's still there...

...ANDREW M. GREELEY despite his unfortunate choice of language, he made it clear that he was not going to discriminate against his black employees even if his close friends pressured him to do so...

...It is not the intention of the present author to defend the mayor and his administration, but merely to argue that the bias against him is so great as to raise serious questions as to its origin...

...As one young Irish political leader put it to me, "A man who will not be loyal to his friends will never be loyal to an idea...

...TABLE 1 RETARDATION RATES AMONG CHILDREN IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN 30 AMERICAN CITIES IN 1910 BY ETHNICITY AND GENERATION Percent Retarded * Native born White 28 Negro 67 Indian 48 Foreign born English 27 Irish 29 German 32 Hebrew German 32 Hebrew Russian 42 Italian-Northern 42 Italian-Southern 63 Polish 58 • Two years or more older than normal for their grade...

...Dooley...

...No one has paid much attention to the subject in recent years (although the fact that nativist bigotry came within 110,000 votes of denying the presidency to John F. Kennedy but a decade ago would suggest that anti-Catholicism is still a factor in American society 4...

...A pragmatic political leadership ought to be able to do more to respond to the restlessness of the young blacks than the Irish political leadership in the American cities has been able to do...

...However, data obtained from NORC's study of 1961 college alumni indicate that on a scale measuring sympathy for student and black militancy, the Irish have a higher score than all other American groups save the Jews...

...Perhaps the problem is that the respectable well-to-do American Irish have forgotten their own past...

...For example, we that the Irish have not made more of this observe in Table 4 that when generation and advantage, that they have not in fact become TABLE 3 DIFFERENCES AMONG CERTAIN AMERICAN MALES Ethnic groups * Irish German Italian Poles Mean years at school Mean occupational prestige (1-100) Mean family income (Numbers of persons interviewed) 12.98 44.2 $8,530 (138) 11.60 36.2 $8,059 (153) 11.20 34.8 $8,159 (182) 11.25 32.2 $8,219 (80) * Father's main ethnic background...

...In addition to Boston, only Philadelphia and Brooklyn, of the major sees, are presided over by Southern or East European bishops...

...If this observation means that no more than a handful of the Irish (such as the Kennedy clan) have achieved fabulous wealth, then the observation is valid...

...Those whose forebears were in the thick of the New York riots of 1863 and the Chicago riots of 1919 ought to understand the forces at the root of urban violence...

...Anyone who thinks that the treatment accorded the administration of Chicago's mayor in the official liberal journals bears any resemblance to what actually happens in Chicago politics is quite un 4 We here follow the conclusion of Professor Philip Converse and his colleagues that John Kennedy lost a net of 3 million votes because of his religion...

...It has been the purpose of the first section of this article to call into serious question the myth...

...They contend that it is necessary to understand the rhetoric and the vocabulary, particularly of the old time political leaders, to understand that while they may not use the approved categories of liberal ideology, their substantive positions are rather more problack than antiblack...

...Quite the contrary, they are likely to be ever more successful and they are also likely to break out of the narrow parochialism the descendants of Studs Lonigan brought from FiftySeventh and Indiana to Ninety-Third and Hoyne...

...shall we...

...When one points out that Daley has been elected and reelected with the overwhelming support of both the black and Polish populations of the city, one is told that this is merely a manifestation of "ethnic politics," as though that were an answer and not a mere restatement of the question...

...Pragmatic leadership—to say nothing of religiously committed leadership—would have been far more aware of the necessity of identifying with the aspirations of the poor, the oppressed in the core of the city...

...They don't get for everybody everything that they want but they do get enough to keep most groups happy most of the time, and that's the only way we're going to move ahead in this city...

...The Jewish involvement in, and contribution to the cultural and intellectual life in America has been far greater than that of the Irish...

...The "five points" district in New York was not a safe place to walk through at night, or even, for that matter, in the middle of the day...

...this is a tragedy of immense consequences both for the Irish and the rest of American society...

...TABLE 4 DIFFERENCES IN OCCUPATIONAL PRESTIGE BETWEEN IRISH AND OTHER ETHNIC GROUPS German Italian Poles Gross differences in prestige scores 8.0 9.4 12.2 Net differences when father's occupation and education, and generation are taken into account 6.4 8.6 13.8 Net differences when father's occupation and education, and generation and own education are taken into account .2 3.9 6.9 — "A MOST DISTRESSFUL NATION": THE AMERICAN IRISH financially successful...

...However, the NORC data not only do not confirm this myth but also call into very serious question whether the myth can ever possibly be confirmed...

...5 The willingness to slate black candidates in something resembling their proportion in the total population is characteristic of Irish political pragmatism...

...And those even today who honor Bernadette Devlin ought to sympathize with Julian Bond...

...If the Irish had really been political pragmatists they would have responded much more quickly to the aspirations and needs of the black and Spanish-speaking groups in the large cities...

...3. The Irish are not very likely to engage in obviously racist behavior or to join in obviously racist organizations...

...T IS COMMONLY ASSUMED among the IrishI self-critics that even though the Irish have been overwhelmingly loyal to the Democratic party, it is still a "conservative" style of Democracy...

...4. When all is said and done, there is, in my judgment no way to escape the fact that there is a strain of dislike of the blacks among the Irish...

...The conditions under which they migrated were perhaps better than those of the Middle Passage, but the conditions in which they had to live in the mid-nineteenth century American metropolis were far worse than virtually any American has to endure today...

...Conveniently for the Organization, the gentleman has a name that sounds Irish...

...C C ONTRARY TO THOSE who say that the Irish have not been successful enough in American society, I would be inclined to argue that they have been far too successful...

...Unfortunately, it has been very difficult for scholars to understand Irish politics "from the inside...

...In political affairs they have not been pragmatic enough...

...Comparison with most other ethnic groups is false, but one can legitimately criticize the Irish for not being radical enough when compared with their own ancestors...

...To some extent, this domination was inevitable, for the Irish did come with both the language and the political skills...

...Writers such as Edward Levine and James 0. Wilson have pointed out that the Irish political style is both pragmatic and informal...

...The Irish are also under serious fire from other Catholic ethnic groups who bitterly resent the domination of Catholic life in the United States by the Irish...

...By their own standards of pragmatism, this lack of understanding the new restlessness is a grave mistake...

...There are some of us, however, who will feel that something has been lost...

...It is legitimate, then, to ask the reason for the persistence of the myth, because the answer to such a question may give us some hint as to the peculiar and ambivalent role of the Irish in American life...

...Indeed, from the point of view of the Protes tant Ascendency, they understood the political style all too well, and in many large American cities the Irish promptly seized political control and have, in some instances, maintained it ever since...

...German 2.45 1.23 (153) Italian 2.60 1.11 (182) Poles 2.61 1.71 (80) 453 ANDREW M. GREELEY not change, even when a control is made for the number of years of graduate school attendance by the 1961 graduates...

...And yet, one can legitimately raise the question whether the intense hatred for Mayor Daley to be found among Jewish and Protestant academic intellectuals does not have something to do with the fact that he is not merely a politician but an Irish politician...

...As the first of the non-Anglo-Saxon groups, it is the one, with the possible exception of the Jews, that has been most successful in adjusting to the American environment, and it would seem that the Irish ought to have been uniquely able to dream visions of what American cities could have become, but they have been too busy with their golf and their cocktails at the country club...

...There were, you can depend on it, no pictures of him in campaign posters in Cicero or Berwyn...

...however, at this point in the city about which he spoke, it is clear that the vast majority of blacks are willing to bet on working within the system instead of outside it...

...servation is not that the Irish enjoy any Nor has that initial advantage been lost...

...You can't fire a family man even if he happens to be a nigger...

...Antagonism toward the Irish has never really been hidden in these groups but as some of their members begin to move out into the mainstream of American intellectual and journalistic life, the resentment comes into the open...

...It is stated first precisely so that the judgments implied on the negative side will not be seen as one-sided condemnations...

...The Irish politician is much more interested in winning elections than in taking the politically "pure" position and he also much prefers informal, off-the-record solutions to difficult problems than neat, orderly, and formal solutions...

...And ence was over...

...but the Irish took it anyhow...

...If there is anything that research on political attitudes demonstrates, it is that there is not a high correlation, save among ideologues of the Left or the Right, between a conservative position on one set of issues and a conservative position on other sets of issues...

...Here the words "conservative" and "liberal" are obscure in their meaning...

...While there are some German bish ANDREW M. GREELEY ops in the American Church, a handful of Slavic bishops, and one or two Italian bishops (and recently a Portuguese-American was named archbishop of Boston), the Irish domination of the hierarchy is still almost complete...

...The fundamental tragedy of the American Irish, it seems to me, is that they have not been precisely those things which everybody says they are...

...They were lazy, shiftless, dirty, savage (as early as the Revolutionary War there were considerable doubts as to whether you could trust an Irish soldier) . The Irish soldiers abounded in our armies, and have fought in some of our battles...

...kind of cultural or biological superiority According to data collected 50 years after over the Germans, the Italians, and the the Dillingham Commission report in the Poles, but rather to stress that the advanmid1960s, the Irish still enjoyed a sub-tage of being familiar with the language and stantial lead in education, occupational pres-the political system apparently persisted tige, and family income over the other three many long years after the immigrant experiprincipal Catholic immigrant groups...

...Although it is true that the fall from power of the Irish in New York City can in part be explained by the failure of the Irish to respond sympathetically to the problems of the blacks, New York in this respect, is not, typical...

...Two tables adapted from the report of the Dillingham Commission give some evidence of what this advantage meant to the Irish...

...2. Many of the myths about the Irish attitudes toward the blacks must certainly be called into question in view of the data presented at the beginning of this article...

...Clearly, Jews have been more successful in the United States than the Irish economically and educationally...

...And the data available to us at the National Opinion Research Center's ethnic program fails to substantiate the myth of Irish conservatism...

...There aren't that many jobs this summer," he said to me, "and if I hired all those kids I'd have to lay off some of my regular people who have families...

...Young priest that I was at the time, I was horrified by what I thought was an obviously racist comment, but upon reflection, I'm not so sure...

...The thought has occurred to rather few liberals that the Kennedys might both very well have believed in racial justice before 1960 but decided to do something about their convictions only when changing political pressures and attitudes made such action politically feasible...

...Thus, the notion that the Irish attitude toward blacks was conditioned by a competition between the Irish immigrants and freed slaves in the occupational market in the 1860s and 1870s remains to be proved...

...While some of the success of the Chicago coalition can be attributed to the astuteness of the Irish leadership—an astuteness that seems to be much superior to that of the Irish in New York—perhaps a more basic reason for the success of the Chicago Irish is that they have much smaller Jewish and WASP populations to contend with...

...The Irish, themselves the victims of long centuries of oppression, and heirs of an ancient revolutionary tradition, ought to have been pragmatic enough to know how to respond to other men's sense of oppression and to other men's struggle for freedom...

...However, if the implication is that the American Irish are, on the average, less successful economically than the typical white Anglo-Saxon Protestant living in the same cities as the Irish, the observation is quite invalid...

...The fundamental reasons the Jews replaced the Irish in political power "A MOST DISTRESSFUL NATION": THE AMERICAN IRISH in New York City was not, as Moynihan and Glazer imply, the cultural superiority of the Jews, but rather that the Jews were able— through their WASP ally, John Lindsay—to communicate a sense of responsiveness to the nonwhite groups in New York, something at which the Irish failed miserably...

...but the spiritual poverty persists and grows worse...

...There is no American Irish Committee to correspond to the American Jewish Committee, nor is there an Irish Anti-Defamation League which could sponsor research on anti-Irish or anti-Catholic sentiment...

...If the observation is meant to indicate that the Irish have not achieved the high level of financial success that characterized American Jews, then, too, the observation is valid...

...The man had employed black laborers in an industry that at the time was not conspicuous for its eagerness to provide jobs for blacks and, 5 One of the ironies of the 1970 election in Cook County is that Cicero and Berwyn, the most blatantly white suburbs in the county, are now represented in the U.S...

...Indeed, he is quite incapable of understanding why so many American liberals seem bent on going down to defeat for causes that are splendid but lost, while the American liberal, on his side, is shocked by what he thinks is the Irishman's unholy desire for victory, especially when victory seems to necessitate compromise...

...The editor added that the Irish made terrible soldiers anyway, and he rebuked them harshly for not parading to honor the Prince.8 Irish revolutionary organizations such as the Finnians (bent on freeing Ireland) and the Mollie Maguires (bent on seizing control of the coal fields) were cited as evidence of 2 Ibid., p. 171...

...One conjecture is possible concerning the differences: it may be that the long-standing political alliance between Irish and Jews in the Democratic party has reduced Irish anti-Semitism to a low level...

...Much more research will be required, of course, to put to rest the myth of the Irish political reactionary masquerading under the Democratic label...

...The point of this obIrish enjoyed...

...He is much more at home in the world of implicit compromise than in the world of explicit confrontation and, above all else, he prizes loyalty from his colleagues...

...but this has been true of all immigrant groups...

...H H OWEVER DIFFICULT THE TRANSITION to American life proved to be for the Irish, and however much they were resented by their Anglo-Saxon predecessors to American shores, the Irish still came with two immense advantages over any other ethnic immigrant group: they spoke the language and they understood the political style...

...Thus far, we have only been able to compare the Irish with other Catholic immigrant groups...

...This difference does TABLE 5 DIFFERENCES AMONG CERTAIN AMERICAN MALES Ethnic groups *Irish Mean score on racism scale (0-5) 2.42 Mean score on anti-Semitism scale (0-2) .84 (Numbers of persons interviewe d) (138) * Father's main ethnic background...

...The Irish position, then, is extremely awkward...

...Indeed, Moynihan has even suggested that the decision of the Irish to concentrate their energies on political power may have prevented them from achieving financial and social success in American society...

...There is no doubt that there was some such competition and that it was involved in the horrendous New York race riots of 1863, which had to be put down by troops summoned from the Battle of Gettysburg...

...indeed, he died of pneumonia contracted while seeking a job...

...The Irish volunteer fire associations usually spent more time fighting each other than putting out fires, and the bloody, vicious draft riots during the Civil War in New York City (which dwarf all urban violence since then) were basically a revolt of Irish rabble...

...1, Washington: U. S. Government Printing Off ice, 1911...

...give this monstrous multitude instantaneous possession of every political prerogative, letting it storm our ballot-boxes with its drift of mad votes, and fill our offices with its unnaturalized fanatics...

...Congress seats and as many as 15 aldermen, to say nothing of a host of other elected and appointed jobs, blacks have something to display for their efforts...

...tering with ignorance, inflamed with rancors, elated with blind expectations has sprung upon this continent...

...The Irish ecclesiastical leaders, however, have consistently displayed much less imagination and skill at playing the game of ethnic politics than did their brothers and cousins in the world of secular politics...

...These facets of the Irish political style can be seen clearly in the careers of John and Robert Kennedy—that is, the real Kennedys and not the Kennedys of liberal myth...

...They [the Irish] have so behaved themselves that nearly 75% of our criminals are Irish, that fully 75% of the crimes of violence committed among us are the work of Irishmen, that the system of universal suffrage in large cities has fallen into discredit through the incapacity of the Irish for selfgovernment...

...8 Leonard Patrick O'Connor Wibberley, The Coming of the Green (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1958), p. 49...

...but sir, they have only fought as they were commanded, they have never led in any skirmish that I know of, and if they had known how to do anything but fight, they would never have been commanded to fight some of the battles that are the glory of our annals...

...A basic tragedy of the American Irish is that the WASPs will finally have won and the grandchildren and the greatgrandchildren of the immigrants will cease to be Irish in any meaningful way...

...they are simply less prejudiced, if our data are to be believed, than other groups...

...Research carried on over a decade at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) has shown that, holding region of the country and city size constant, the Irish are not merely on the average as financially successful as the WASP, but perhaps a trifle more so...

...It is vain for them or their friends to say anything of their patriotism and love of their adopted country—they needed the bounty and the pay and risked their lives for that.' Irish convents were burned, Irish citizens were killed, an occasional Irish priest was martyred, and while they were tolerated on the American shore, the Irish certainly were not welcomed...

...As Table 6 demonstrates, the basic difference between the Irish and the other three principal Catholic ethnic groups on the anti-Semitism score diminishes only slightly even when father's education and occupation and own education and occupation and family income is held constant...

...In Chicago, the Irish have been much more successful in holding their coalition of Slavic and black supporters together, and arrived at a much better modus vivendi with the Poles than the New York Irish have been able to do with the Italians...

...It is of course not my intention to argue that the Irish should not be criticized but rather to argue that they ought to be criticized for the things in which they have really failed...

...The Irish are not unprejudiced...

...There have been serious failures, indeed on occasion, tragic failures among the American Irish...

...This is convenient for them, but from the point of view of historical imagination quite unacceptable...

...To make the picture complete, the Irish personality has never been marked by self-confidence (save, perhaps, when under the influence of John Barleycorn—and the Irish alcoholism rate, according to studies done at the Yale Alcoholic Center, is 25 times higher than that of the national population...

...Under such circumstances, just about everyone has a vested interest in suggesting that the Irish are political reactionaries who have failed in American society...

...I am grateful to Daniel Patrick Moynihan for bringing this passage to myattention...

...As one black leader in Chicago said to me, "I'm sticking with the Organization because for all its faults I don't see any other system likely to get as much for us as the Organization can...

...And there was little support from the elite classes for the plight of the Irish immigrant...

...It might be difficult for any but the most sophisticated research to discover such sentiment, for those who are most likely to hold it probably know all about the authoritarian personality...

...Their failure to do so is a failure to honor the best of their own principles...

...But this is not to argue that the writer intends a panegyric for Irish ethnics...

...Yet, I remember talking to one grizzled and tough—and very wealthy—general contractor about the pressure that he was receiving from his welltodo friends to provide summer employment for their sons on college vacation...

...A MOST DISTRESSFUL NATION": THE AMERICAN IRISH familiar with the realities of Chicago life...

...With two U.S...

...Any myth that can play such an important function is not likely to die easily...

...Indeed, on the two critical issues of racism and anti-Semitism, the Irish are the most enlightened of the Catholic immigrant groups as Table 5 indicates...

...Finally, with their own past record of shrewd and pragmatic political and social advancement, the Irish may be quite intolerant toward other groups whose cultural background does not equip them quite so well for the competitive struggle in American society...

...If Irish Catholics are compared, for example, with German Lutherans —a comparison which historically and culturally would make much more sense—then their success in American life will not look at all small...

...Furthermore, in the Church, pragmatic leadership would have long ago recognized the legitimate complaints of the non-Irish ethnic groups...

...The various antiblack militant groups in northern American cities have no Irish leadership and, generally speaking, Irish membership...

...It seems that nativist antagonism to the Irish has not been completely purged from the American body politic...

...TABLE 2 ANNUAL INCOME OF MALES 18 YEARS AND OLDER IN 1910 BY ETHNICITY AND GENERATION • Native born of native parents White $666 Negro 445 Native born of foreign born parents Foreign born English 586 $673 Irish 612 636 Italian-Northern 402 480 Italian-Southern 408 396 Polish 537 428 German 619 579 Hebrew 492 513 • Ibid., Table 54, page 407...

...THIS is the positive side of the balance sheet...

...To the extent that any nativist bigotry survives, WASPs would resent the Irish as the most "pushy" of the Catholics...

...The Dillingham report, of father's occupation and education and gencourse, was not based on the sophisticated eration are held constant, but also one's probability-sampling methodology that is own educational achievement, the differavailable to us today, so one cannot put ences between the Irish and the Germans absolute confidence in the materials pre-and the differences between the Irish and sented in Tables 1 and 2; nevertheless, the the Italians and the Poles decline, but still tables do illustrate the initial advantages the differences do remain...

...Much further research will be necessary to explain this phenomenon, although one could tentatively hypothesize that their mastery of the language and their political success have given the Irish a stronger base of security from which to view other immigrants to American cities...

...1. As the data here presented indicates, the Irish are less likely to be antiblack than any other ethnic immigrant group, and indeed this difference seems to persist even when most relevant background variables are held constant...

...Nevertheless, antiblack sentiment seems stronger among other "A MOST DISTRESSFUL NATION": THE AMERICAN IRISH ethnic groups which did not have the Civil War experience...

...Nor is this more enlightened attitude merely the result of the occupational or educational achievement of the Irish...

...the Irish advantage is not merely the result A number of observers of the American of the fact that they came earlier and have Irish, such as William Shannon and Daniel had more opportunities for education than Patrick Moynihan, have lamented the fact other immigrant groups...

...A MOST DISTRESSFUL NATION": THE AMERICAN IRISH the inhuman savagery of the Irish...

...Real political pragmatists would not have failed to recognize and respond to this challenge...

...Another aspect of the puzzling difference between the Irish myth and the Irish reality is the tendency of both the American Irish and their critics to use the Jews as a reference group...

...Physical poverty was a very real thing for Studs Lonigan...

...I cannot escape the impression that in both cases the older, and even the middle-aged Irish political leadership, is not trying very hard...

...It would appear that between one-third and one-half of the Irish who were not buried by the British government in the potato famine of 1849 left the country to come to Canada or the United States...

...And they also developed an immensely sucessful ideology for their control by emphasizing the need of the immigrant group to become "Americanized," which often for other Catholic groups meant the same thing as becoming Hibernicized...

...On the contrary, there are a large number of them, but the paralyzing Irish quest for respectability combined with the American success ethic has succeeded in putting the creativity and the vision of the fourth generation Irish-Americans in chains...

...In the words of Reverend William Alger: When this naked mass of unkept and priestridden degradation, bruised with abuse, fes 1 Sister Marie Leonore Fell, The Foundations of Nativism in American Textbooks, 1783-1860 (Washington: Catholic University of AmericaPress, 1941), p. 170...

...Even if that militancy's public manifestations are limited, it does represent the smoldering sentiments of many blacks and particularly the younger blacks...

...Some observers from the inside of Irish politics claim that there is a good deal more sympathy toward blacks than is commonly supposed...

...Let there be no mistake about it: the questioning is done by a member of the Irish group who has his own bias against the myth...

...Harper's took particular delight in publishing the ape cartoons and was fond of pointing out how criminal the Irish were...

...One very militant community organization on Chicago's Southwest Side is presided over by a suspended Irish priest, but the strength of the membership is Eastern and Southern European rather than Celtic...

...Congress by a black representative...

...1. Despite all of the qualifications listed in the previous paragraphs, it must be said that the Irish, with a splendid and ancient revolutionary tradition of their own, have not been nearly as sympathetic to the black cause as one might have expected...

...For his descendants in the country club set physical poverty is no longer a very serious possibility...

...The Irish politician is prepared to believe that certain ideal goals must be postponed until they become feasible...

...However, there may be some realism in the comparison for, after all, the the Irish and the Jews do tend to concentrate in the same cities and frequently have engaged in a contest for political power in these cities...

...Slavic and Latin names are virtually invisible in the ranks of the Catholic leadership that are enthusiastically sympathetic to the cause of blacks...

...I am not suggesting that the Irish become "failures" in American society...

...And, on the other side, the more recent Catholic immigrant groups strongly resent Irish power...

...Much of the past is forgotten, and from the point of view of the present writer the most unfortunate part of it all is that the American Irish have lost the memory of the Finnians and the Mollie Maguires, the Regan Colts, the "five points," the draft riots, the ape with the booze and shillelagh, and even, and God forgive them for it, they have forgotten about Mr...

...When not only lish immigrants...

...The Irish and the Jews are locked in combat for political control of a number of cities, with the Irish tending to feel a sharp cultural inferiority toward the Jews...

...Yet the same comment could be made of every other immigrant group...

...5. In some cities the Irish political leadership has actively supported the development of black political leadership...

...Yes, we Irish still are good at dreaming —dreaming of all the splendid things that might have been...

...Daniel P. Moynihan has pointed out that while the Irish may not have been the largest immigrant group to American society, they were the largest proportion of any nation to emigrate...

...ANDREW M. GREELEY The Irish were, first of all, at no greater father's occupation and education are held educational disadvantage than English immi-constant, the gross differences in occupagrants or native-born whites, and in terms tional prestige between the Irish and the of annual income they did almost as well other three Catholic immigrant groups are as native-born whites and better than Eng-only somewhat modified...

...They will have lost their flair for political leadership and their knack of telling stories...

...2. The Irish political leadership, for all its pragmatic skills, even in Chicago where they are most skillful and pragmatic, still does not seem to be able to understand the new black militancy...

...Despite his vile way of expression his behavior could not be faulted...

...Many of the official lay intelligentsia of the American Catholic Church seem to have a vested interest in denouncing Irish Catholicism because it enables them to blame the failure of the so-called conservatism of the Irish on the hated institutional Church...

...Adapted from Table 15, page 31, Reports of the Immigration Commission: The Children of Immigrants in Schools...

...If there are no Jimmy Farrells arising at Ninety-Third and Hoyne it is not because there are not gifted and creative young people among the Chicago Irish...

...W W ITH THE BACKGROUND that has now been established it is possible to say some tentative things about the relationship between the American Irish and the American blacks...

...There may be some validity in this assertion, though one would need to know much more of the mysterious internal world of Irish politics to be sure...

...Thus, many members of the working class can be quite "liberal" on economic issues and still rather "conservative" on racial issues...

...See Tables 3 and 4.) The notion that the Irish have somehow or other failed financially in American society is completely mythological...

...3. By permitting the deterioration of their creative talents, the Irish have deprived the rest of the society of the poets, the philosophers, the mystics who might have created a vision of the good life in an urban setting, in which white and black alike would exist in an atmosphere of relative peace and trust, enjoying the variety and diversity of urban ethnic groups instead of being threatened by such variety and diversity...

...The Irish have provided some first-rate writers of fiction, some entertainers, and some topflight athletes but, compared to the Jews, Irish scholarship is almost infinitesimally small and Irish involvement in the fine and popular arts is almost invisible...

...Congress...

...One may disagree with his conclusion and argue that blacks should wreck the system or at least work outside it...

...To give them their credit, they have not necessarily discriminated against blacks in this respect because they don't seem to be able to understand the restlessness of the young whites, including their own offspring, either...

...James T. Farrell described Lonigan's story as a "tale of defeat endured in an atmosphere of spiritual poverty...

...THE MOST OBVIOUS THING one can say about the American Irish is that every accusation that is made against more recent immigrant groups to the large cities was made against the Irish first...