Letters
Editor: Having recently read Andrew M. Greeley's "'A Most Distressful Nation"' [DISSENT, October 1971], and being a Massachusetts Irishman by birth and also being, among other things, a...
...Lenin must have turned over in his grave at the way in which the 100th anniversary of his birth was celebrated...
...This is correct—but not Lenin's fault...
...They have no foresight or prudence...
...In my childhood, in the 1920s, I could still hear the traces of the brogue and the characteristic phrases (many of them mordantly funny: "Is so and so dead...
...We die of starvation just the same...
...premeditatedcrime is very rare...
...From Journeys to England and Ireland [1835...
...Once the first or second generation took the initial pun ishment, there was no limit to what the sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons could do if they had the energy, brains, and ambition to climb...
...Well and Strong...
...So that if one says that the Irish had an initial advantage by virtue of speaking English, such an advantage could not have lasted for very long...
...Even the great Daniel O'Connell, who organized the mass weight of the great numbers of Irish peasants as had no Irish leader ever before, seemed quite remote to many of these folk...
...We did not anticipate how easy the transition from the dictatorship could be (although it took real guts on the part of Sik and a few others...
...But they basically lack the civilvirtues...
...They too are unmistakable...
...1. I have doubts about one of his central theses, namely that the Irish came to America with "immense advantages over any other ethnic immigrant: they spoke the language and they understood the political style...
...Perhaps we also overrate the ability of the present Soviet regime to block progress—or is that just an admission that I am an incurable optimist...
...They no more had a concept of—much less understood—politics than they had of the man in the moon...
...Raleigh and I may both be wrong about the language situation...
...In the first place, most of the immigrants were peasants, many from the west of Ireland...
...I hardly need add how disabling such intonations and phraseology would be in an Anglo-dominated culture in which, when jobs were announced, the announcement was accompanied by a sign "NINA" —"No Irish need apply...
...Lenin was not a democrat, and his dynamism is questionable...
...q Editor: I have just reread the article by Erazim V. Kohak, "Russia: The Fire Next Time...
...My point is that the contemporary Irish seem to have lost the flair, unless you want to count characters like Pete Hamill who has recently boasted with considerable pride that the "New Irish" now think like Jews...
...However, Professor Greeley still has a point, and it ties in with some other things he remarked on: that self-control or self-discipline have not been the strong point of the Irish...
...This fact has been shrouded in what has been called The Great Oblivion, since after the Easter Rebel lion of 1916 no Irishman wanted to admit having been in the trenches with the British, nor would his children or grandchildren or probably his greatgrandchildren wish to admit to the fact...
...Kronstadt is the most obvious example: under the circumstances (which, to be sure, Lenin helped create), it would be difficult to blame Lenin for deciding to crush the uprising with armed might...
...But I would doubt that the Irish warren then was quite as bad as the black warren appears to be now...
...It was, for example, a long-standing joke in the British Isles (especially in Ireland and Scotland) that for several centuries the backbone of the British army were the Scottish and the Irish, and their bravery and loyalty were uncontestable...
...He said to me: "I could train my soldiersto do anything, except be masters of themselves...
...I know an English general who had long commanded an Irishbrigade...
...there is no better Christian than theIrishman...
...When Eugene O'Neill's father, James, decided to become a Shakespearean actor, the first thing he had to do was to rid himself of his brogue...
...During his visit to Ireland de Tocqueville talked with Mgr...
...The English, for example, have always been hostile (more so than any other country in the world) to O'Neill's works...
...Q. What is forbidden by the fifth commandment...
...But when Lenin decided not to acknowledge that decision as bitter necessity but to cover it with a lie, with an ideological cloak, he undercut any revolutionary dynamism...
...I am dubious about the whole language argument...
...To quote de Tocqueville once more...
...The Englishman, on the contrary, coldly calculates chances, approaches danger slowly, but does not withdraw until he succeeds...
...Even as late as World War I there were over 200,000 Irish in the British army...
...But any other immigrant group knew this elemental fact too...
...Similarly, the west of Ireland rank and file understood very well the need for personal loyalty and group cohesiveness—it was deeply rooted in their past traditions...
...He was acting dynamically: the mistake is to try to apply what he said now, half a century later, to quite different conditions...
...As for his characteristic speech patterns, they have been immortalized by his son in Long Day's Journey Into Night...
...Even when the brogue was modified, certain habitual turns of speech and phrase hung on...
...At one time the Irish, in effect, "owned" New York...
...James Butler's Catechism (Cork, 1934), p. 55.] The elaboration speaks for itself...
...On p. 479 Kohak states that "Leninism is a profoundly static world view...
...I would, however, dispute reader Wheeler's first point...
...They will be released, as Kohak agrees, only with a democrati zation that touches and motivates all people...
...I consider it vain, however, to look for an original innocence, a "pure" Marxism somewhere in history...
...I do not think that Lenin would turn over in his grave...
...Their morals are pure...
...In the Irish Catechism the Fifth Commandment is defined as follows: Q. Say the fifth commandment...
...trans...
...Well, if he isn't they played a dirty trick on him...
...He recorded his conversation with Mgr...
...Their "politics" was a patch of land, potatoes, the local Catholic priest as a friend and the English in general—landowner, magistrate, land agent, soldier, what have you—as the enemy...
...He succeeded to a great extent but not totally, and reviewers sometimes joked about his Romeo or his Macbeth as having some of the flavor of the ` ould sod...
...they throw themselves onan obstacle with extraordinary violence and, ifthey do not succeed at the first attempt, give itup...
...My own grandfather, on my mother's side, who at various times in his Iife was a ward heeler, a constable, and finally lived out the bulk of his later life as a night watchman at the Springfield Armory, had once done a tour of duty in the army in the Indian "wars," if they can be called that, in the West (never saw an Indian or fired a shot in anger, sothe family legend had it...
...Nolan, Bishop of Carlow, who quoted a Whitefeet (these were secret gangs of Irish terrorists) as follows: "Emancipation [1829] has done nothing for us...
...4. Finally, the Irish as soldiers...
...They may not have LETTERS had civics-book understanding of American politics but they knew what it took to make a political machine work...
...From the Most Rev...
...My guess would be that it would take three generations rather than two to overcome the language problem...
...2. Professor Larkin has argued that it was precisely the skill at British rotten borough politics that made Daniel O'Connell an effective political leader...
...I consider it essential to discover the truth in Marxism, the truth which is and has been present in it all along...
...As for language, they did speak English but they spoke it with a brogue...
...Children born in this country might even grow up without much of an accent, Irish included, except when there were large concentrations of them, as in Massachusetts...
...a hypochondriac was "Mr...
...5. I will make no comments on Irish fighting qualities since I was hardly endorsing the quotes that questioned their abilities as soldiers...
...q 544 LETTERS...
...It is true that the experience of Ireland taught them the indelible necessity of always "taking care of your own...
...They took the liberty of burying him this morning...
...Second, he also wrote what is, to my mind anyway, the greatest single American drama, Long Day's Journey Into Night...
...in your October 1971 issue and wish to congratulate you and him...
...The brogue may have been a handicap but I daresay not nearly as much of a handicap as an Italian or a Polish accent...
...Hamill...
...The Irishman is unstable and loves excitementand fighting...
...it has faith...
...From de Tocqueville, op...
...GEORGE S. WHEELER Corresponding Member of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences ERAZIM Ko1AK replies: I did not mean to dispute the point that democratization could unlock vast productive potential in the "socialist" countries...
...An egotist was "full of himself...
...cit., p. 141.] JOHN HENRY RALEIGH ANDREW GREELEY replies: 1. Mr...
...Moreover, in Massachusetts anyway, the brogue hung on for some time, in fact, for generations...
...But the MP's who represented Ireland were about as far from the peasant-immigrants as Ireland was from America...
...Lenin lied a lot: he lied about Kronstadt, he lied before about the Party Congress at Stockholm, he lied afterwards about the dictatorship `of the proletariat...
...One of the purposes of compulsory, publicly supported education in the United States has been precisely to eradicate linguistic ethnic differences, although the attendance of Irish Catholic children in parochial schools may have perpetuated the "Irishisms...
...Rather, I meant to point out that political modernization would acknowledge its shift from the position of the most developed of the Third World countries to the position of the least developed of the Western ones: the stage of development, which is impressive when measured by Third World standards, becomes rather less so if measured by Western ones...
...3. One wonders if Mr...
...Theircourage is instinctive...
...This in a group that came to this country, some of my ancestors among them, in the middle of the 19th century...
...First, as everyone now agrees, he created, virtually singlehandedly, serious American drama and launched it on the stage of the literate world...
...But, historically, it is a dubious interpretation...
...I'm inclined to think that to have endured a millennium of British misrule and still not become AngloSaxon militarists is quite an accomplishment...
...The sentimentalism about Old New York—"East Side, West Side," "Sweet Rosie O'Grady," etc.—is Irish...
...2. I don't believe, as Greeley says, that the "conditions in which they [the Irish] had to live in the mid-19th century American metropolis were far worse than virtually any American has to endure today...
...Quite the contrary, the fact that Czechoslovakia manages to subsidize Soviet imperial interests with extensive arms shipments and loans to underdeveloped countries, that it subsidizes the Soviet Union through disadvantageous trade, that it supports totally disproportionate armed forces and a fantastically expensive secret police apparatus and still manages to survive testifies to that potential...
...To be sure, in the '60s we invented a democratic Lenin as a counterweight to Stalin, for good reason...
...Even if one is taught English in school (and by no means all Poles or Germans were in the parochial schools), one still is at a disadvantage in the use of the language if it is not spoken in the home...
...Professor Greeiey cited instances in American history when they were regarded simply as unreliable mercenaries...
...The practical possibilities for really great increases in productivity lie unused in the Soviet economy...
...3. Professor Greeley thinks that Irish-descended creative talent has not been actualized as it might have been...
...I am dubious too about Mr...
...But my point was not about O'Neill or Powers or the O'Connors or Fitzgerald or O'Hara...
...My point was not that the Soviet Union (assuming it survived the centrifugal tension of its national minorities) would become "least developed" in an absolute sense—I presume it would develop more rapidly...
...So that while it is true that the political situation, and the opportunities, in American cities in the 19th century may have been uniquely suited for the particular talents of the Irish, I doubt that they had any prior experience in the process itself...
...But in the larger sense, this was not generally the case...
...Kinsley, Bishop of Kilkenny: [the Irish nation has] all the virtues dear to God...
...It is true that since 1800 Irish representatives were elected to places in the English Parliament and before that had had their own Parliament in Dublin...
...4. Eugene O'Neill does not a literary movement make...
...I do not intend nit-picking when I question a few formulations...
...and the careers of people like Charles Murphy (the Tammany leader) Jimmie Walker, and Al Smith tell you why...
...My colleague, Professor Emmet Larkin, tells me that the "famine Irish" immigrants came from counties where Irish was still the first language...
...But the real reason was, as usual, economic: being in the army meant one could eat regularly and even have a career, neither of which was a certainty or even a probability on home grounds...
...The WASPs owned it and still do...
...But the fact that at present Sir Lawrence Olivier is playing James Tyrone, which combination must constitute one of the dramatic high points of the 20th century, in the London production of Long Day's Journey Into Night is an indication of the weight and staying power of the play itself, now recognized as an authentic classic in the repertory of the drama of our civilization...
...It is a splendid and profound piece of philosophical political economy...
...Thus, the early immigrants may well have been Irish-speaking—though by 1870 this situation had unquestionably changed and most immigrants spoke English as their first language...
...Greeley's proposition that the Irish understood the "political style" of America...
...Having lived in Czechoslovakia for many years before 1968, it is a great satisfaction to find such a correct interpretation of the developments there...
...The children of any non-English-speaking group would be brought up speaking English...
...An Irishman, a contemporary, once told me that his own father—in the 20th century—had two choices for a way of life: the Irish police or the British army...
...Everything is relative, and unmeasurable, to be sure...
...It is also the classical and quintessential statement about the American Irish on their darker or tragic side...
...George Lawrence and K. P. Meyer [London, 1958], p. 132...
...He could never have had his professional career, had he not escaped from the brogue...
...The thinking is close to that of Eduard Goldsti cker, and that is, to my mind, close to the highest compliment...
...Reality can be dynamic—a lie ("mystified ideology," if you wish) is necessarily entirely static, because it has no foundation in reality and so cannot admit the criticism necessary for change...
...I personally would prefer not to count Mr...
...A. All wilful murder, quarrelling, fighting, hatred, anger, revenge, and drunkenness...
...O'Neill covered this aspect in A Touch of the Poet in his picture of Con Melody, who had fought under Wellington at Talavera in the Peninsular War...
...Raleigh is aware of how many of today's urban poor lack inside toilets, central heating, and running water...
...A. Thou shalt not kill...
...And he really must be kidding if he thinks the Irish ever "owned" New York...
...Editor: Having recently read Andrew M. Greeley's "'A Most Distressful Nation"' [DISSENT, October 1971], and being a Massachusetts Irishman by birth and also being, among other things, a student and scholar of Irish literature and Irish history, I'd like to offer a few criticisms and suggested corrections to Greeley's piece, which I much enjoyed reading...
...More important, I do not believe that it necessarily follows that, if the Soviet Union dismantled its overcentralized controls, it would move to the status of a least developed country...
...Furthermore, insofar as any Irishman in the nineteenth century had any concept of politics, it was that of Westminster Hall, not Washington or Chicago or Boston or New York...
...Similarly, in America the army was often a simple economic "out...
...Of course we do not know what would happen, but the Czechoslovak experience certainly lets us hope that it might, on the contrary, generate an immense new enthusiasm for socialism...
...This may be true, but an American of Irish descent (of the first generation too), namely Eugene O'Neill, has been the seminal figure in American drama, and in two respects...
...One of the reasons given for the Irish being in the army in such great numbers was that it suited their natural bellicosity...
...O'Connell and the rich Catholics go to Parliament...
Vol. 19 • July 1972 • No. 3
