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Ireland and the Americas
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Other Titles in ABC-CLIO’s
Transatlantic Relations Series
Africa and the Americas, by Richard M. Juang and Noelle Morrissette Britain and the Americas, by Will Kaufman and Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson France and the Americas, by Bill Marshall Germany and the Americas, by Thomas Adam Iberia and the Americas, by J. Michael Francis
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Ireland and the Americas Culture, Politics, and History A Multidisciplinary Encyclopedia VOLUME I EDITED BY
James P. Byrne Philip Coleman Jason King
Transatlantic Relations Series Will Kaufman, Series Editor
Santa Barbara, California Denver, Colorado Oxford, England
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Copyright © 2008 by ABC-CLIO, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ireland and the Americas / edited by James P. Byrne, Philip Coleman, and Jason King. p. cm. — (Transatlantic relations series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-85109-614-5 (hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-85109-619-0 (ebook : alk. paper) 1. America—Relations—Ireland—Encyclopedias. 2. Ireland— Relations—America—Encyclopedias. 3. America—History—Encyclopedias. 4. Ireland—History—Encyclopedias. 5. North America—History—Encyclopedias. 6. Latin America—History—Encyclopedias. 7. South America—History— Encyclopedias. 8. America—Politics and government—Encyclopedias. 9. Ireland— Politics and government—Encyclopedias. I. Byrne, James P., 1968– II. Coleman, Philip Michael Joseph, 1972– III. King, Jason Francis, 1970– E18.75.I74 2008 327.730417—dc22 2007035381 12
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Senior Production Editor: Vicki Moran Editorial Assistant: Sara Springer Production Manager: Don Schmidt Media Editor: Jason Kniser Media Resources Coordinator: Ellen Brenna Dougherty Media Resources Manager: Caroline Price File Management Coordinator: Paula Gerard ABC-CLIO, Inc. 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an ebook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. This book is printed on acid-free paper ∞ Manufactured in the United States of America
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CONTENTS Advisory Board, xi Series Editor’s Preface, xiii Editors’ Preface, xv Topic Finder, xvii Chronologies of Ireland and the Americas, xxiii Ireland and Canada, xxiii Ireland and Latin America, xxv Ireland and the United States, xxxi Introductory Essays, 1 Introduction, 3 Ireland and Canada, 5 Ireland and Latin America, 15 Ireland and the Untied States of America, 27 Baltimore, 79 Barry, John, 80 Barry, Philip, 82 Bartholomew, Freddie, 83 Baseball, 84 Baseball Managers, Irish-American, 88 Baxter, José Luis “Joe,” 90 Beach, Amy Marcy, 92 Beach, Sylvia, 93 Beckett, Samuel, 94 Belize, 95 Bennett, William J., 97 Bergin, Patrick Connolly, 98 Boland, Eavan, 100 Bonney, William “Billy the Kid,” 101 Bord Fáilte Eireann, 103 Boston, 106 Bourke, John Gregory, 107 Boyle, Kathleen, 108 Brazil, 110
Abolitionism and Slavery, 41 Alabama, 44 Allen, Fred, 45 American Civil War, 47 American Conference for Irish Studies, 51 American Ireland Fund, 53 American Temperance Movement, 54 American War of Independence, 56 An Tóstal: Ireland at Home, 59 Ancient Order of Hibernians, 61 Anglin, Timothy Warren, 64 Appalachia, 65 Argentina, 66 Arkansas, 69 Armstrong, Thomas St. George, 70 Arthur, Chester A., 71 Baggot, King, 75 Balfe, Michael William, 76 Ball, Ernest R., 78 v www.abc-clio.com
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vi CONTENTS Brendan, Saint, “The Navigator,” 112 Brennan, Maeve M., 113 Brennan, Walter, 115 Brennan, William J., Jr., 116 Brenon, Herbert, 117 Brent, George, 119 Broderick, David Colbreth, 120 Brophy, John, 122 Brosnan, Pierce, 123 Brown, Alexander, 127 Brown, Clarence Leon, 128 Brown, William, 129 Bryan, George, 130 Buchanan, James, 131 Buckley, William F., Jr., 133 Bulfin, Eamon, 134 Bulfin, William, 135 Bulger, James “Whitey,” 137 Bulger, William Michael, 138 Burke, Edmund, 139 Butler, Jean, 141 Byrne, Donn, 142 Byrne, Gabriel, 143 Cagney, James, 147 Campbell, Peter, 149 Canals and the Irish Involvement, 150 Carney, Andrew, 155 Carney, Art, 155 Carolan, Turloch, 157 Carroll, Charles, 158 Carroll, James P., 159 Carroll, Bishop John, 160 Casement, Rodger David, 162 Casey, Eduardo, 164 Catholic Church, the, 165 Chandler, Raymond Thornton, 169 Cherish the Ladies, 170 Chieftains, The, 172 Chopin, Kate, 174 Clancy Brothers, the, 175 Cleburne, Patrick Ronayne, 177 Clinton, William Jefferson, 179 Cockran, William Bourke, 186 Coffey, Brian, 188 Coghlan, Eduardo Aquilio, 189 Cohalan, Daniel F., 190 Cohan, George M., 192 Coleman, Michael, 193 Colombia, 195 www.abc-clio.com
Colum, Mary, 196 Colum, Padraic, 198 Conn, William David, 200 Connolly, James Brendan, 202 Cooke, John William, 203 Costa Rica, 206 Cotter, William, 207 Coughlin, Father Charles Edward, 208 Cowell, Henry Dixon, 210 Craig, John, 212 Creaghe, John “Juan,” 213 Creighton, Edward Charles, 215 Creighton, John Andrew, 216 Croker, Richard, 217 Crosby, Bing, 219 Crouch, Frederick Nicholls, 221 Curley, James Michael, 222 Curran, Mary Doyle, 223 Cusack, Cyril, 224 Cusack, Margaret Anna, 225 Dailey, Dan, 229 Daly, “John” Augustin, 230 Daly, Marcus, 231 Davin, Nicholas Flood, 232 Davitt, Michael, 234 Day, Dennis, 235 Day-Lewis, Daniel, 236 De Chastelain, John, 239 De Valera, Eamon, 240 Delanty, Greg, 243 Delaware, 245 Dempsey, George T., 246 Dempsey, Jack, 247 Derrane, Joe, 249 Devereux, John, 250 Devoy, John, 252 Dillon, Patrick Joseph, 254 Diplomatic Relations, Irish–Latin American, 255 Domestic Servants, Irish, 257 Dongan, Thomas, 260 Donleavy, J. P., 261 Donovan, Gerard, 263 Dorsey, Thomas Francis “Tommy,” 264 Douglass, Frederick, 265 Downey, Morton, 268 Doyle, Roddy, 269 Draft Riots, 270 Dresden Affair, 273 ABC-CLIO
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CONTENTS vii Duggan, Thomas, 275 Dunne, Finley Peter, 276 Dunne, Irene Marie, 278 Durcan, Paul, 279
Foster, Vere Henry Louis, 354 Furlong, Guillermo, 356
Eaton, Timothy E., 283 Egan, Desmond, 285 Eire Society of Boston, The, 286 El Salvador, 288 Ellman, Richard David, 289 Emigration, 290 Emmet, John Patten, 293 Emmet, Thomas Addis, 295 Ethnic and Race Relations, Irish and African Americans, 296 Ethnic and Race Relations, Irish and French Canadians, 300 Ethnic and Race Relations, Irish and Indigenous Peoples, 302 Ethnic and Race Relations, Irish and Italians, 306 Ethnic and Race Relations, Irish and Latinos, 309
Gaelic Athletic Association, 359 Gallagher, Tess, 361 Garland, Judy, 362 Garson, Greer, 366 Gaughren, Father Matthew, 367 Georgia, 368 Gibbons, Cedric, 369 Gilmore, Patrick Sarsfield, 370 Gleason, Jackie, 372 Gleeson, Brendan, 372 Gogarty, Oliver St. John, 373 Gordon, Mary, 374 Gore, Robert, 375 Grace, William Russell, 376 Gray, David, 378 Great Famine, The, 379 Grennan, Eamon, 385 Grosse Ile, 386 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 387 Guiney, Louise Imogene, 389
Faction Fighting, 313 Fahy (sometimes Fahey), Anthony Dominic, 316 Falkland/Malvinas Islands, 317 Farley, James Aloysius, 320 Farrell, Edelmiro Juan, 322 Farrell, Eileen, 323 Farrow, Mia, 324 Fay, Francis Anthony “Frank,” 326 Federal Theatre Project, 327 Feeney, Charles “Chuck,” 329 Fenians, 330 Fitzgerald, Barry, 332 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 333 Fitzsimons, Patrick, 336 Flaherty, Robert J., 336 Flanagan, Thomas, 338 Flatley, Michael, 340 Fleming, Thomas J., 340 Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 342 Foley (also Foli), Allan James, 343 Ford, Henry, 343 Ford, John, 346 Ford, Patrick, 348 Foreign Policy, Irish, 350 Foster, Stephen Collins, 352
Hackett, Francis, 391 Hanlon, Ned, 392 Harnett, William Michael, 394 Harrigan, Edward and Hart, Tony, 395 Harris, Richard, 398 Harrison, Frank Llewellyn, 401 Hayes, Catherine, 402 Hayes, Helen (Brown), 403 Hayes, Archbishop Patrick Joseph, 404 Healy, Michael Morris, 406 Heaney, Seamus, 407 Heffernan, Michael, 409 Henry, John, 410 Herbert, Victor August, 411 Hinds, Ciarán, 413 Hoban, James, 414 Hodgins, Jack, 415 Holkeri, Harri, 416 Holland, John Phillip, 416 Honduras, 418 Horgan, Paul George Vincent O’Shaughnessy, 419 Horse Racing, 421 Hovenden, Thomas, 424 Howard, Maureen, 426 Howe, Fanny Quincy, 427
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viii CONTENTS Hughes, Archbishop John, 430 Hurling in Argentina, 434 Huston, Angelica, 437 Huston, John, 438 Huston, Walter, 442 Illinois, 445 Indiana, 447 Ingram, Rex, 448 Iowa, 450 Ireland, John, 451 Irish Dancing in America, 453 Irish Festival Singers, 455 Irish Festivals in the United States, 456 Irish Linen in North America, 460 Irish Republican Army, 461 Irish Republican Brotherhood, 466 Irish Travelers in the United States, 468 Irish Yankees, 472 Jackson, Andrew, 473 James, Jesse Woodsom, 475 Jeanie Johnston, the, 476 Jeffers, Robinson, 477 Johnson, Sir William, 478 Jordan, Kate, 480 Jordan, Neil, 481 Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius, 482 Kearns, Thomas, 485 Kelly, Gene, 487 Kelly, George “Machine Gun,” 488 Kelly, Grace, 490 Kelly, “Honest” John, 491 Kennedy Family, 492 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 495 Kentucky, 497 Keough, Donald R., 499 Kilmer, (Alfred) Joyce, 502 King, John, 503 Kinsella, Thomas, 504 Knights of Labor, 505 Ladies’ Land League, 509 Land League, 510 Language, the Irish, 513 Lavin, Mary, 516 Law, Andrew Bonar, 517 Liddy, James, 518 Literature, American Children’s, 519 www.abc-clio.com
Literature, Irish-Argentine, 521 Lynch, Benito Eduardo, 523 Lynch, Elisa (Eliza), 524 Lynch, Archbishop John Joseph, 526 Lynch, P. J., 527 Lynch, Thomas, 528 MacDonald, Michael Patrick, 531 MacGowan, Michael, 532 MacGowan, Shane, 533 MacGowran, Jack, 535 Mack, Connie, 536 Mackenna, John, 538 Madden, Richard Robert, 539 Maguire, John Walter, 541 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 542 Maine, 544 Malone, Dorothy, 546 Maritime Provinces (Canada), 547 Maryland, 548 Massachusetts, 550 Massacre at Saint Patrick Church, the, 554 Mathew, Father Theobald, 554 Maury, Matthew Fontaine, 556 McCann, Colum, 557 McCann, Donal, 558 McCarey, Leo, 559 McCarthy, Joseph, 561 McCarthy, Joseph Vincent “Joe,” 563 McCarthy, Mary, 565 McCarthy, Patrick “Paddy,” 567 McCormack, John, 568 McCourt, Frank, 569 McDermott, Alice, 570 McDonald, Richard “Dick,” 570 McEnroe, John, 571 McGee, Thomas D’Arcy, 572 McGinley, Phyllis Louise, 574 McGonigle, Thomas, 575 McGraw, John Joseph, 576 McGuckian, Medbh, 578 McGuckin, Barton, 580 McGwire, Mark D., 581 McManus, George, 582 McNutt, Alexander, 583 McSwiney, Paul, 584 Meagher, Thomas Francis, 585 Mellon, Andrew William, 587 Mellon, Thomas, 589 Michigan, 590 ABC-CLIO
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CONTENTS ix Milwaukee Irish Fest, 592 Missouri, 593 Mitchel, John, 595 Mitchell, George J., 598 Mitchell, John, 599 Mitchell Principles, the, 601 Molly Maguires, 602 Moloney, Mick, 604 Montague, John, 605 Montreal, 606 Moore, Brian, 609 Moore, Christy, 610 Moore, Marianne, 611 Moore, Thomas, 613 Morrison, Bruce, 615 Morrison, Van, 616 Mott, Lucretia Coffin, 617 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 619 Muldoon, Paul, 621 Mulhall, Michael George, 622 Mulroney, Brian, 623 Mulvany, John, 624 Murphy, Charles Francis, 626 Murphy, Hermann Dudley, 627 Murphy, John James, 629 Murray, Luis Alberto, 631 Murray, Thomas, 631 Music, Country and Irish, 632 Music in America, Irish, 635 Myles, Eileen, 645 Nationalism, Irish-American, 647 Nationalism in the Twentieth Century, Irish-American, 653 Nativism and Anti-Catholicism, 658 Neeson, Liam, 660 Neilson, John, 661 Nelligan, Émile, 662 New Brunswick, 663 New Irish in America, 664 New Jersey, 666 New Orleans, 667 New York City, 669 Newfoundland and Labrador, 675 Niblo, William B., 677 Nicaragua, 678 No Irish Need Apply, 680 Noraid, 683 North Carolina, 685 Notre Dame University, 686 www.abc-clio.com
O’Brien, Charlotte Grace, 689 O’Brien, John Thomond, 690 O’Brien, Pat, 691 O’Brien, Tim, 693 O’Connell, Daniel, 694 O’Connor, Edwin, 700 O’Connor, “Mary” Flannery, 702 O’Connor, Francisco “Frank” Burdett, 704 O’Connor, Pat, 706 O’Faolain, Nuala, 707 O’Gorman, Camila, 708 O’Gorman, Edmundo and Juan, 709 O’Gorman, Michael, 710 O’Hara, Frank, 711 O’Hara, Maureen, 712 O’Herlihy, Dan, 714 O’Higgins, Ambrose (Ambrosio), 715 Ohio, 716 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 718 O’Kelly, Aloysius C., 720 Oklahoma, 721 Olcott, Chauncey (John Chancellor), 723 O’Leary, Daniel Florence, 724 O’Leary, Jane, 726 O’Leary, Juan Emiliano, 726 O’Mahony, John, 728 O’Malley, Walter, 729 O’Neill, Eugene, 731 O’Neill, Francis, 733 O’Neill, Rose Cecil, 734 O’Neill, Jr., Thomas “Tip,” 736 Ontario, 737 Orange Order, 739 Oregon, 740 O’Reilly, John Boyle, 743 O’Roarke, Julián “Huberto,” 745 O’Sullivan, Denis, 746 O’Sullivan, Timothy H., 746 Panama, 749 Paraguay, 750 Passenger Acts, 751 Patterson, Frank, 753 Pearson, Noel, 754 Peck, Gregory, 755 Pennsylvania, 757 Political Parties, Irish, 759 Powderly, Terence Vincent, 765 Power, Frederick Tyrone Sr., 767 Presbyterianism, 768 ABC-CLIO
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x CONTENTS Press, the Ethnic Irish, 770 Press, the Irish in Latin America, 774
Smurfit, Sir Michael W. J., KBE, 862 Soccer, Early Argentine, 865 Somerville, Edith Œnone, 867 South Carolina, 868 South Dakota, 869 Spellman, Archbishop Francis Joseph, 871 Stoker, Abraham “Bram,” 873 Sullivan, John L., 874
Quebec City, 779 Quill, Michael Joseph, 780 Quinn, Declan, 782 Quinn, Glenn, 783 Reagan, Ronald Wilson, 785 Redshaw, Thomas Dillon, 788 Re-emigrants within the Americas, 789 Repeal Movement, 789 Research Collections, Irish, in Canada, 791 Research Collections, Irish, in the United States, 798 Reynolds, Debbie, 804 Rhode Island, 806 Robinson, Mary, 808 Rowan, Stephen C., 814 Ryan, Abram Joseph, 815 Ryan, Cathie, 816 Sadlier, Mary Anne, 819 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 820 Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, 822 Saint Patrick’s Day Parades, 823 Sampson, Willliam, 828 San Francisco, 829 San Patricios Brigade, 832 Scanlan, William J., 833 Scots-Irish, 834 Scots-Irish and Military Conflict, 835 Scots-Irish Culture, 838 Scots-Irish Patterns of Settlement, Canada, 841 Scots-Irish Patterns of Settlement, United States, 846 Scots-Irish Politics, 848 Scully, William, 850 Shackleton, Ernest, 852 Shaw, George Bernard, 854 Sheridan, Jim, 856 Sheridan, Peter, 857 Smith, Alfred Emmanuel “Al,” 858
Tallchief, Maria, 877 Tammany Hall, 878 Tennessee, 881 Texas, 882 Titanic, Irish on the, 883 Travel Patterns from Ireland to South America, 886 Tully, Jim, 889 Tunney, James Joseph “Gene,” 890 Tuohy, Patrick J., 891 Tweed, William “Boss,” 893 U2, 895 United Irish League of America, 897 Uruguay, 899 Venezuela, 901 Vicuña Mackenna, Benjamín, 902 Virginia, 903 Wall, Eamonn, 905 Wallace, William Vincent, 906 Walsh, María Elena, 907 Walsh, Raoul, 908 Walsh, Rodolfo, 909 Washington, D.C., 910 Wayne, John, 912 Webb, Richard Davis, 914 Wellman, William A., 915 Wilson, Thomas Woodrow, 917 Winch, Terence, 919 Wright, Thomas Charles James, 921 Yeats, John Butler, 923 Yeats, William Butler, 924
Index, 929 About the Editors, 967
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ADVISORY BOARD Maureen E. Mulvihill, Fellow, Princeton Research Forum, Princeton, New Jersey Edmundo Murray, Society for Irish Latin American Studies Gwenda Young, University College Cork, Ireland
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SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE The transatlantic relationship has been one of the most dynamic of modern times. Since the great Age of Exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the encounters between the Old World and the New have determined the course of history, culture, and politics for billions of people. The destinies of Europe, Africa, North and South America, and all the islands in between have been intertwined to the extent that none of those areas can be said to exist in isolation. Out of these interconnections comes the concept of the “Atlantic world,” which Alan Karras describes in his introductory essay to Britain and the Americas in this series: “By looking at the Atlantic world as a single unit, rather than relying upon more traditional national (such as Britain) or regional (such as North or South America) units of analysis, scholars have more nearly been able to re-create the experiences of those who lived in the past.” This perspective attempts to redefine and respond to expanding (one might say globalizing) pressures and new ways of perceiving interconnections—not only those rooted in history (“the past”) but also those that are ongoing. Just one result of this conceptual redefinition has been the emergence of Transatlantic Studies as an area of enquiry in its own right, growing from the soil of separate area studies, whether European, North American, African, Caribbean, or Latin American. Students and scholars working in Transatlantic Studies are embarked on a new course of scholarship that places the transatlantic dynamic at its heart. In this spirit, the Transatlantic Relations Series is devoted to transcending, or at least challenging, the boundaries of nation/region as well as discipline: we are concerned in this series not only with history but also with culture and politics, race and economics, gender and migration; not only with the distant past but also with this morning. The aim, in a phrase, is to explore the myriad connections and interconnections of the Atlantic world. However, while the Atlantic world concept challenges the isolation of smaller, national perspectives, nations do continue to exist, with boundaries both physical and conceptual. Thus this series acknowledges the intractability of the national and the regional while consistently focusing on the transcending movements—the connections and interconnections—that go beyond the national and the regional. Our mode of operation has been to build an approach to the Atlantic world through attention to xiii www.abc-clio.com
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xiv SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
the separate vectors between the nations and regions on both sides of the Atlantic. We do this through offering the six titles within the series so far commissioned, devoted, respectively, to Africa, Britain, France, Germany, Iberia, and Ireland in their engagements with the Americas. In each case, the transatlantic exchanges are those of all kinds: cultural, political, and historical, from the moment of first contact to the present day. With that organizing principle in mind, the object is to offer an accessible, precisely focused means of entry into the various portals of the Atlantic world. Finally, a word about the origins of this series. In 1995, Professor Terry Rodenberg of Central Missouri State University invited scholars and teachers from 18 universities on both sides of the Atlantic to establish an educational and scholarly institution devoted to encouraging a transatlantic perspective. The result was the founding of the Maastricht Center for Transatlantic Studies (MCTS), located in the Dutch city whose name, through its eponymous treaty, resonates with transnational associations. Since its foundation, MCTS has continued to bring together students and scholars from a host of worldwide locations to explore the intricate web of Atlantic connections across all disciplines: it has been a dynamic encounter between cultures and people striving to transcend the limitations of separate area and disciplinary studies. I am pleased to acknowledge the extent to which the Transatlantic Relations Series grows out of the discussions and approaches articulated at MCTS. Therefore, while the separate titles in the series will carry their own dedications, the series as a whole is dedicated with great respect to Terry Rodenberg and the students and scholars at Maastricht. Will Kaufman University of Central Lancashire Maastricht Center for Transatlantic Studies
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EDITORS’ PREFACE Defined by the online Encarta Dictionary as “a reference work offering comprehensive information on all or specialized areas of knowledge,” an encyclopedia strives toward a form of inclusiveness that is ultimately unachievable in real terms. To provide even brief descriptions of all of the cultural, political, and historical figures from across the Americas who have had Irish connections would be an impossible task, not least because of the vast number of personalities involved—many of whom are “undocumented”—but also because “Irish-American relations” are currently being re-conceived by scholars of diasporic identities and area studies on both sides of the Atlantic. This work has benefited from the contributions of many individuals working in these and other fields, but in the same way that the process of defining the “Irish-American” experience remains the subject of intense debate and sometimes controversial negotiation, this work is also open-ended insofar as it aims to suggest pathways for further study, conversation, and research, and does not represent a “final” or “conclusive” statement in itself. It goes further than existing accounts of Irish-American relations in terms of its broadening of the scope of inquiry beyond the United States of America to include Canada and Latin American countries such as Argentina and Brazil, but this opening up of the field represents a first step towards a redescription of the multifaceted roles played by the Irish in the western hemisphere. For all of its tentativeness, however, it is a small step that demonstrates the profound influence the Irish have had far beyond the European frame of reference. The editors wish to thank all of those who contributed to the writing of these volumes—for their patience and goodwill—and the following individuals in particular: David Doyle, Andrew Goodspeed, Benjamin Keatinge, Maureen Mulvihill, Edmundo Murray, and Gwenda Young. Wendy Roseth and Alex Mikaberidze are also to be thanked for their efficient and patient assistance at various stages of the work’s development. The editors wish to thank the series editor, Will Kaufman, and all of those behind the scenes at ABC-CLIO who provided essential help along the way. James P. Byrne, Philip Coleman, Jason King Boston, Dublin, Concordia March 2007
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TOPIC FINDER
ART AND CULTURE Allen, Fred An Tóstal: Ireland at Home Baggot, King Balfe, Michael William Ball, Ernest R. Barry, Philip Bartholomew, Freddie Beach, Amy Marcy Beach, Sylvia Beckett, Samuel Bergin, Patrick Connolly Bord Fáilte Eireann Brennan, Maeve M. Brennan, Walter Brenon, Herbert Brent, George Brosnan, Pierce Brown, Clarence Leon Bulfin, William Butler, Jean Byrne, Donn Byrne, Gabriel Cagney, James Carney, Art Carolan, Turlough Carroll, James P.
Chandler, Raymond Thornton Cherish the Ladies Chieftains, The Chopin, Kate Clancy Brothers, the Coffey, Brian Cohan, George M. Coleman, Michael Colum, Mary Colum, Padraic Cowell, Henry Dixon Crosby, Bing Crouch, Frederick Nicholls Curran, Mary Doyle Cusack, Cyril Dailey, Dan Daly, “John” Augustin Day, Dennis Day-Lewis, Daniel Delanty, Greg Derrane, Joe Donleavy, J. P. Donovan, Gerard Dorsey, Thomas Francis “Tommy” Downey, Morton Doyle, Roddy
Dunne, Finley Peter Dunne, Irene Marie Durcan, Paul Egan, Desmond Ellman, Richard David Farrell, Eileen Farrow, Mia Fay, Francis Anthony “Frank” Federal Theatre Project Fitzgerald, Barry Fitzgerald, F. Scott Flaherty, Robert J. Flanagan, Thomas Flatley, Michael Fleming, Thomas J. Foley, (also Foli) Allan James Ford, John Foster, Stephen Collins Gallagher, Tess Garland, Judy Garson, Greer Gibbons, Cedric Gilmore, Patrick Sarsfield Gleason, Jackie Gleeson, Brendan Gogarty, Oliver St. John Gordon, Mary
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xviii TOPIC FINDER
Grennan, Eamon Guiney, Louise Imogene Hackett, Francis Harnett, William Michael Harrigan, Edward and Hart, Tony Harris, Richard Harrison, Frank Llewellyn Hayes, Catherine Hayes, Helen (Brown) Heaney, Seamus Heffernan, Michael Henry, John Herbert, Victor August Hinds, Ciarán Hoban, James Hodgins, Jack Horgan, Paul George Vincent O’Shaugnessy Hovenden, Thomas Howard, Maureen Howe, Fanny Quincy Huston, Angelica Huston, John Huston, Walter Ingram, Rex Ireland and Canada (See also DIPLOMATIC, NATIONAL . . .) Ireland and Latin America (See also DIPLOMATIC, NATIONAL . . .) Ireland and the United States (See also DIPLOMATIC, NATIONAL . . .) Irish Dancing in America Irish Festival Singers Irish Festivals in the United States Jeffers, Robinson Jordan, Kate
Jordan, Neil Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius Kelly, Gene Kilmer, Alfred (Joyce) Language, the Irish Lavin, Mary Liddy, James Literature, American Children’s Literature, Irish Argentine Lynch, Benito Eduardo Lynch, P. J. Lynch, Thomas MacDonald, Michael Patrick MacGowan, Michael MacGowan, Shane MacGowran, Jack Mack, Connie Maguire, John Walter Malone, Dorothy McCann, Colum McCann, Donal McCarey, Leo McCarthy, Mary McCormack, John McCourt, Frank McDermott, Alice McGinley, Phyllis Louise McGonigle, Thomas McGuckian, Medbh McGuckin, Barton McManus, George McSwiney, Paul Milwaukee Irish Fest Moloney, Mick Montague, John Moore, Brian Moore, Christy Moore, Marianne Moore, Thomas Morrison, Van
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Muldoon, Paul Mulhall, Michael George Mulvany, John Murphy, Hermann Dudley Murray, Luis Alberto Murray, Thomas Music, Country and Irish Music in America, Irish Myles, Eileen Neeson, Liam Neilson, John Nelligan, Émile Niblo, William O’Brien, Pat O’Brien, Tim O’Connor, Edwin O’Connor, “Mary” Flannery O’Connor, Pat O’Faolain, Nuala O’Herlihy, Dan O’Gorman, Edmundo and Juan O’Hara, Frank O’Hara, Maureen O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Kelly, Aloysius Olcott, Chauncey (John Chancellor) O’Leary Juan Emiliano O’Leary, Jane O’Neill, Eugene O’Neill, Francis O’Neill, Rose Cecil O’Reilly, John Boyle O’Sullivan, Denis O’Sullivan, Timothy H. Patterson, Frank Pearson, Noel Peck, Gregory Power, Frederick Tyrone Sr. Press, the Ethnic Irish 1-800-368-6868
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Press, the Irish in Latin-American Quinn, Declan Quinn, Glenn Redshaw, Thomas Dillon Reynolds, Debbie Ryan, Abram Joseph Ryan, Cathie Saint-Gaudens, Augustus Saint Patrick’s Day Parades Scanlan, William J. Scots-Irish Culture Shaw, George Bernard Sheridan, Jim Somerville, Edith Œnone Stoker, Abraham “Bram” Tallchief, Maria Titanic, Irish on the Tully, Jim Tuohy, Patrick J. U2 Vicuña Mackenna, Benjamin Wall, Eamonn Wallace, William Vincent Walsh, María Elena Walsh, Raoul Walsh, Rodolfo Wayne, John Wellman, William A. Winch, Terrance Yeats, John Butler Yeats, William Butler BUSINESS ACTIVITIES Armstrong, Thomas St. George Brown, Alexander Carney, Andrew Casey, Eduardo Creighton, Edward Charles Creighton, John Andrew Daly, Marcus www.abc-clio.com
Duggan, Thomas Eaton, Timothy E. Feeney, Charles “Chuck” Ford, Henry Grace, William Russell Kearns, Thomas Keough, Donald R. McDonald, Richard “Dick” Mellon, Thomas O’Brien, Charlotte Grace Scully, William Sheridan, Peter Smurfit, Sir Michael W.J., KBE DIPLOMATIC, NATIONAL AND RELATED AFFAIRS (SEE ALSO MILITARY . . .) Baxter, José Luis “Joe” Bulfin, Eamon Casement, Roger David Cohalan, Daniel F. Davitt, Michael De Chastelain, John Dempsey, George T. Diplomatic Relations, Irish–Latin American Emmet, Thomas Addis Fenians Ford, Patrick Foreign Policy, Irish Gray, David Holkeri, Harri Ladies Land League Land League Madden, Richard Robert Meagher, Thomas Francis Mitchel, John Mitchell, George J. Mitchell Principles, the Nationalism, IrishAmerican ABC-CLIO
Nationalism in the Twentieth Century, Irish-American Noraid O’Connell, Daniel O’Higgins, Ambrose O’Mahony, John United Irish League of America ECONOMICS (SEE ALSO DIPLOMATIC . . .) Great Famine, The Irish Linen in North America Mellon, Andrew EDUCATION American Conference for Irish Studies American Ireland Fund American Temperance Movement Boyle, Kathleen Fitzsimons, Patrick Foster, Vere Henry Louis Furlong, Guillermo Keough, Donald R. Notre Dame University O’Gorman, Michael Research Collections, Irish, in Canada Research Collections, Irish, in the United States EXPLORATION AND SETTLEMENT Dresden Affair Emigration Irish Travelers in the United States Irish Yankees Jeanie Johnston, the 1-800-368-6868
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McNutt, Alexander Murphy, John James New Irish in America Passenger Acts Re-emigrants within the Americas Scots-Irish Pattern of Settlement, Canada Scots-Irish Patterns of Settlement, United States Shackleton, Ernest Travel Patterns from Ireland to South America GOVERNMENT AND LAW Bonney, William “Billy the Kid” Brennan, William J., Jr. Bulger, James “Whitey” Creaghe, John “Juan” James, Jesse Woodsom Kelly, George (“Machine Gun”) Repeal Movement (See also DIPLOMATIC, NATIONAL . . .) Sampson, Willliam (See also DIPLMATIC, NATIONAL . . .) LABOR Brophy, John Canals and the Irish Involvement Domestic Servants, Irish Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley Knights of Labor Mitchell, John
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Molly Maguires No Irish Need Apply Powderly, Terence Vincent Quill, Michael Joseph MILITARY AND RELATED AFFAIRS (SEE ALSO DIPLOMATIC . . .) American Civil War Barry, John Bourke, John Gregory Brown, William Campbell, Peter Cleburne, Patrick Ronayne Cotter, William Devereux, John Guevara, Ernesto “Che” Irish Republican Army Irish Republican Brotherhood Johnson, Sir William King, John Kinsella, Thomas Mackenna, John Mahan, Alfred Thayer O’Brien, John Thomond O’Connor, Francisco “Frank” Burdett O’Leary, Daniel Florence Rowan, Stephen C. San Patricios Brigade Scots-Irish and Military Conflict Wright, Thomas Charles James PLACES Alabama Appalachia Argentina Arkansas
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San Francisco South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Uruguay Venezuela Virginia Washington D.C. POLITICS Anglin, Timothy Warren Arthur, Chester A. Bennett, William J. Broderick, David Colberth Bryan, George Buchanan, James Buckley, William F., Jr. Bulger, William Michael Burke, Edmund Carroll, Charles Clinton, William Jefferson Cockran, William Bourke Cooke, John William Croker, Richard Curley, James Michael Davin, Nicholas Flood De Valera, Eamon Dongan, Thomas Farley, James Aloysius Farrell, Edelmiro Juan Gore, Robert Jackson, Andrew Kelly, “Honest” John Kennedy Family Kennedy, John Fitzgerald Law, Andrew Bonar Lynch, Elisa (Eliza) McCarthy, Joseph McGee, Thomas D’Arcy Morrison, Bruce Moynihan, Daniel Patrick
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Mulroney, Brian Murphy, Charles Francis O’Neill, Jr., Thomas “Tip” O’Roarke, Julian “Huberto” Political Parties, Irish Reagan, Ronald Wilson Robinson, Mary Scots-Irish Politics Smith, Alfred Emmanuel “Al” Tammany Hall Tweed, William “Boss” Wilson, Thomas Woodrow RACE AND ETHNICITY Ancient Order of Hibernians Coghlan, Eduardo Aquilio Draft Riots Eire Society of Boston Ethnic and Race Relations, Irish and African Americans Ethnic and Race Relations, Irish and French Canadians Ethnic and Race Relations, Irish and Indigenous Peoples Ethnic and Race Relations, Irish and Italians Ethnic and Race Relations, Irish and Latinos Faction Fighting Press, the Ethnic Irish Scots-Irish RELIGION Brendan, Saint, “The Navigator” Carroll, Bishop John Catholic Church, the
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Connolly, James Brendan Dempsey, Jack Gaelic Athletic Association Hanlon, Ned Horse Racing Hurling in Argentina
McCarthy, Joseph Vincent “Joe” McCarthy, Patrick “Paddy” McEnroe, John McGraw, John Joseph McGwire, Mark D.
O’Malley, Walter Soccer, Early Argentine Sullivan, John L. Tunney, James Joseph “Gene”
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CHRONOLOGIES OF IRELAND AND THE AMERICAS IRELAND AND CANADA ca. 550
Legendary accounts, such as the Navagatio sancti Brendani Abbatis, tell of St. Brendan the Navigator reaching Newfoundland.
1622
First documentary record of Irish inhabitants in Newfoundland.
1663
First documentary record of Irish inhabitants in New France.
1789
1799
Future Irish revolutionary Lord Edward Fitzgerald travels through British North America and the United States. Publication of Irish traveler Isaac Weld’s Travels through the States of North America, and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada.
1825–1845 Half million Irish emigrants travel to British North America during years of mass-migration. 1825
Publication of Oliver Goldsmith Jr.’s The Rising Village.
1830
Publication of Adam Kidd’s The Huron Chief.
1830
Ogle Gowan establishes Orange Grand Lodge of British North America.
1832
Quarantine station established at Grosse Ile after outbreak of cholera afflicts Irish emigrants, over 5,000 of whom perished.
1834
Establishment of St. Patrick’s Society of Montreal.
1800
United Irish uprising in Newfoundland, following failure of 1798 rebellion.
1804
Ireland’s “National Poet” Thomas Moore travels to Upper and Lower Canada.
1835–1837 Shiner’s War in Ottawa Valley, in which Irish lumbermen used their collective power to intimidate their FrenchCanadian competitors.
1822
First Orange Parade in York (Toronto).
1836
1823–1825 Assisted emigration schemes led by Peter Robinson settle near Peterborough, Ontario. 1824
First St. Patrick’s Day parade in Montreal.
Ogle Gowan and his followers in the Orange Order of Canada orchestrate riots to intimidate political opponents during election.
1828–1837 Daniel Tracey and Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan editors of the radical Irish
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xxiv CHRONOLOGIES OF IRELAND AND THE AMERICAS Vindicator and Vindicator newspapers in Montreal.
1866
Fenian invasion of Canada and Battle of Ridgeway.
1837–1838 Irish radicals band together with French-Canadian Patriotes to instigate rebellion in Lower Canada in 1837 and in Upper Canada one year later, which other Irish-Canadians help to suppress.
1867
Thomas D’Arcy McGee helps to negotiate the British North America Act establishing Canadian Confederation.
1841
Publication of Standish O’Grady’s The Emigrants.
1847
More than 100,000 emigrants flee Ireland for British North America at the height of the Famine, most of whom are quarantined at Grosse Ile. At Grosse Ile some 5,000 die and a similar number are reputed to have perished in Montréal, with several hundred more dying in Kingston and Toronto.
1847
Completion of St. Patrick’s Church (now Basilica) in Montreal.
1848–1854 Changes in Navigation Act lead to steep decline in number of emigrants embarking for British North American ports. 1849
Ethno-religious violence, commonplace on St. Patrick’s Day and July 12, erupt in Saint John, New Brunswick, leaving 12 people dead.
1849
Timothy Warren Anglin emigrates from Clonakilty, Co. Cork, to Saint John, New Brunswick.
1855
Corrigan affair of sectarian violence erupts after murder of Orangeman Hugh Corrigan by Irish Catholic assailants in St. Sylvestre, Quebec.
1857
1858
Thomas D’Arcy McGee leaves the United States for Montreal to publish The New Era newspaper, elected to Parliament. Publication of Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s Canadian Ballads.
1860
John Joseph Lynch becomes Archbishop of Toronto.
1863
Patrick Boyle establishes the staunchly nationalist Irish Canadian that is sympathetic to Fenianism. www.abc-clio.com
1867–1882 There are 22 Orange and Green riots in Toronto. 1868
Assassination of Thomas D’Arcy McGee by Fenian activist Patrick James Whelan, followed by largest public funeral in Canadian history.
1869
Timothy Eaton establishes Eaton’s Department Store in Toronto.
1877
Publication of Nicholas Flood Davin’s The Irishman in Canada.
1880
Massacre of “Black Donnellys” in Biddulph Township, Ontario.
1884
Publication of Isabella Valancy Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie: A Love Story.
1891
Michael Davitt visits Manitoba, six years after the suppression of Louis Riel’s rebellion and execution.
1921
Anglo-Irish Treaty, largely modeled on Canadian Dominion status.
1948
Irish Taoiseach John A. Costello announces the intention to declare the Irish State a republic while on a state visit to Ottawa.
1960
Publication of Brian Moore’s novel The Luck of Ginger Coffey, winner of the Governor General’s Award.
1973
Founding of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies (CAIS).
1975
Establishment of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies.
1977
Publication of Jack Hodgins’s The Invention of the World.
1983
Publication of James Reaney’s dramatic trilogy The Donnellys, winner of the Governor General’s Award.
1985
Shamrock Summit at which Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and U.S. President Ronald Reagan sing
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CHRONOLOGIES OF IRELAND AND THE AMERICAS xxv “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” together in Quebec City on St. Patrick’s Day. 1986
Establishment of the D’Arcy McGee Chair of Irish Studies at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax.
1993
Publication of Jane Urquhart’s Away, winner of the Trillium Award.
1996
Publication of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, short listed for the Booker Prize.
1998
Retired Canadian General John de Chastelain appointed to supervise weapons decommissioning in the Belfast Agreement.
2000
Establishment of the Centre for Canadian Irish Studies at Concordia University in Montreal.
2006
Publication of Peter Behren’s The Law of Dreams, winner of Governor General’s Award.
IRELAND AND LATIN AMERICA ca. 550
Legendary call of St. Brendan of Ardfert and Clonfert (484–580) at Mexico during his American journey.
1477
Columbus visits Galway’s St. Nicholas of Myra.
1519–1522 Three Galway sailors follow Ferdinand Magellan in his circumnavigation of the world. 1536
Juan and Tomás Farel (Farrell) are among the first settlers of Buenos Aires in the expedition led by Pedro de Mendoza.
1577
Thomas Field, S. J. (1547–1626) of Limerick arrives in Brazil.
1593
1612
The Real Colegio de Nobles Irlandeses opens in Salamanca. Many of the students play religious, military, and administrative roles in colonial Latin America. Philip and James Purcell establish a plantation on the mouth of the Amazon river, followed by Bernardo O’Brien of Co. Clare.
1651
William Lamport is sentenced by the Mexican Inquisition to be executed in the Auto da Fé, or public execution.
1729
Several of the 5,855 slaves in the Caribbean island of Montserrat are owned by Irish families Farrill, Hussey, Lynch, Roach, and others.
1770
First recorded St. Patrick’s Day celebration in Latin America in a church built by Lancelot Belfort (1708–1775) at Kilrue plantation by the Itapecurú River, Maranhão State, in northern Brazil.
1762
John McNamara and his British 45th regiment attack without success Colonia del Sacramento in the northern bank of the River Plate.
1770
William Farmer (b. 1732) of Youghal, Co. Cork, commands the sloop Swift in West Falkland (Gran Malvina) waters, but is obliged to evacuate Port Egmont by a Spanish force.
1776
Michael O’Gorman (1749–1819) arrives in the River Plate as the official surgeon in the expedition of the Spanish viceroy Pedro de Ceballos.
1787
Ambrose O’Higgins (1721–1801) of Co. Sligo is made governor of Chile. Later he will be appointed viceroy of Peru.
1806–1807 British forces storm the Spanish viceroyalty of the River Plate. Irish soldiers remain in Argentina and Uruguay and start private migration networks from Westmeath. 1814
Peter Campbell (b. 1780), a veteran of the British campaigns in the River Plate, commands the first Uruguayan navy.
1768–1771 An Irish Regiment is established in Mexico by the Spanish government. www.abc-clio.com
William Brown (1777–1857) of Co. Mayo is appointed commander of the Argentine navy.
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xxvi CHRONOLOGIES OF IRELAND AND THE AMERICAS
1817
John MacKenna (1771–1814), officer in Chile and Peru, dies in a duel in Buenos Aires.
1831
Patrick J. O’Gorman arrives at Buenos Aires as the second chaplain of the Irish.
Businessman Thomas Armstrong (1797–1895) of Co. Offaly arrives in Buenos Aires.
1833
William Dickson of Dublin, storekeeper in the Falkland Islands, is entrusted with the care of the British flag by Captain Onslow, but is murdered by Antonio Rivera.
1818–1822 John Devereux (1778–1854) recruits soldiers in Ireland to join Simón Bolívar’s independence army in South America.
Patrick Fleming, a merchant in Buenos Aires, is kidnapped by Ranqueles.
1821
Juan Dumphi O’Donojú (1762–1821), arrives in Mexico as the last Spanish Viceroy.
1841
Total Irish population in Buenos Aires is 3,500. At least three-fourths are from Westmeath.
1823
Stephen Hallet, an Irish-born printer living in Buenos Aires, launches La Gaceta Mercantil.
1843
Father Anthony Fahy, the chaplain of the Irish Argentines, arrives in Buenos Aires.
1824
Bernard Kiernan (1780–1863), a surveyor and astronomer of Co. Derry, arrives in Buenos Aires from the United States with other “Irish Yankees.”
1844
The William Peile arrives in Buenos Aires with 114 emigrants from Co. Wexford.
1846
Wexford-born Robert Gore (1810–1854) is appointed as British chargé d’affaires in Montevideo and Buenos Aires.
1847
Camila O’Gorman and Father Uladislao Gutierrez elope from Buenos Aires and are executed the following year.
Francis Burdett O’Connor (1791–1871) is appointed chief of staff of the United Army of Liberation in Peru. 1826
Thomas Wright (1799–1868) of Drogheda founds the nautical school of Ecuador.
A Famine Relief Fund is sent by Father Fahy to the Archbishop of Dublin.
John King (1800–1857) of Newport, Co. Mayo, joins the Argentine forces during the war against Brazil. 1827
Col. William Cotter recruits 2,500 Irish men with their families, who arrive in Rio de Janeiro from Cork.
1828
John Thomond O’Brien (1786–1861) is commissioned by the government of Buenos Aires to promote Irish immigration.
September 10–13, more than 50 survivors of the San Patricio Battalion are flogged, branded, and some executed in Mexico by the U.S. military forces. 1848
The Irish Hospital opens in Buenos Aires.
1854
Four hundred Wexford emigrants settle in an Irish Colony in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.
1829–1836 Colonies are established in Mexican Texas by Irish empresarios John McMullen, James McGloin, James Power, and James Hewetson. 1830
St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated with dinner and dancing in Buenos Aires. John Dillon opens the first brewery in Argentina. www.abc-clio.com
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CHRONOLOGIES OF IRELAND AND THE AMERICAS xxvii 1855
1856 1858
1859
1861
1863
Eliza Lynch (1835–1886) arrives in Paraguay to join her lover, the dictator Francisco Solano López. The Sisters of Mercy arrive in Buenos Aires.
Wool merchant and landowner Thomas Duggan (1827–1913) of Ballymahon, Co. Longford, arrives in Buenos Aires.
A subscription is started to support the building of Daniel O’Connell’s monument in Dublin.
1865
Wexford-born Thomas J. Hutchinson’s Buenos Aires and Argentine Gleanings is published in London. William Scully (d. 1885) launches The Anglo-Brazilian Times in Rio de Janeiro. Michael Duffy is appointed Major of Carmen de Areco, and John Dowling, Military Commander of the same district in Buenos Aires. In England and the United States, agents of the Brazilian government actively promote Irish immigration to Santa Catarina. Race-meetings gather thousands of irlandeses in Luján, Navarro, and Capilla del Señor districts of Buenos Aires.
1869
Killallen (Allen’s Chapel) opens in Michael Allen’s estancia, Castilla.
1873
St. Patrick’s Society is founded as the first political undertaking of the Irish in Argentina. Stella Maris Chapel opens in Port Stanley, Falkland Islands.
1874
Dublin-born brothers Michael G. and Edward T. Mulhall launch the daily The Buenos Ayres Standard, the first Englishlanguage daily paper in South America.
M. O’Brien, consul of Buenos Aires in Dublin, returns to Argentina.
1867
1870
Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna launches La Asamblea Constitucional paper in Santiago, Chile.
1864
1866
Argentina, 8,623 of them bearing Irish surnames, and 5,246 Irish-born.
Patrick Fitzsimons (1802–1872), a teacher of Ennis, Co. Clare, is commissioned by the Argentine President Domingo F. Sarmiento to open the Colegio Nacional in Corrientes.
Nicholas Lowe (1827–1902) launches the Daily News, addressed to Protestant readers, and the Buenos Ayres News and River Plate Advertiser. 1875
First issue of The Southern Cross, founded by Fr. Patrick J. Dillon. Second edition of M. G. and E. T. Mulhall’s Handbook of the River Plate Republics published in Buenos Aires. Father James Foran is the first resident Catholic priest in Falkland Islands.
1876
Santa Lucía chapel opens on Juan Harrington’s estancia in San Pedro. Michael Mahon (1815–1881) is elected Vice-President of the Home Rule League in Capilla del Señor.
1877
Church of Ireland clergyman Lowther Brandon becomes Colonial Chaplain of the Falkland Islands.
1879
Businessman Eduardo Casey (1847– 1906) purchases 1,700 square miles of land from the Government of Santa Fe to start a colony.
1880
The Sisters of Mercy leave Argentina for political reasons. Most of them go to the Order’s mission in Mount Gambier, Australia.
1881
A great Land League meeting is held in Salto. The Irish Relief Fund is launched by Father Martin Byrne, of the Passionist Order.
The National Census returns include 10,709 British subjects residents in www.abc-clio.com
Anarchist physician John “Juan” Creaghe (1841–1920) of Limerick arrives in Buenos Aires from Sheffield.
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xxviii CHRONOLOGIES OF IRELAND AND THE AMERICAS 1882
Michael Dineen is appointed editor of The Southern Cross, succeeding Father Dillon.
1884
William Bulfin (1862–1910), journalist and writer, arrives in Buenos Aires. He contributes to, and later directs and owns, the Southern Cross newspaper. Bulfin also launches the first GAA in Latin America.
1886
The Pallotines establish in Argentina.
1888
The Venado Tuerto Polo and Athletic Club is founded. The Irish Argentine newspaper is founded by Father Bernard Feeney (1844–1919) in Azcuénaga, Buenos Aires.
1889
1895
Porteño Athletic Club is founded in Buenos Aires as the first Irish-Argentine soccer institution, with Santiago G. O’Farrell as president. 1896
Duggan railway station and town are founded in San Antonio de Areco.
1898
During the Spanish-American War, the head of the Milligan Guards of Arizona, William “Buckey” O’Neill, is killed at San Juan Hill, Cuba. Gahan railway station and town are founded in Salto.
1899
St. Brigid’s school opens in Buenos Aires.
1900
First official hurling match in Argentina, sponsored by the Buenos Aires Hurling Club, presided over by James P. Harte.
In Uruguay, Eduardo Casey purchases The River Plate Times paper. A branch of the Gaelic League is founded in the Passionist monastery of Capitán Sarmiento. The “Dresden Affair”: 1,774 Irish emigrants deceived by agents Buckley O’Meara and John S. Dillon are embarked in the steamer City of Dresden to Buenos Aires. Peter Gartland starts an Irish Colony with 700 of the Dresden emigrants.
In the Argentine census 18,617 individuals bear Irish surnames and 5,407 are born in Ireland.
William Bulfin’s Tales of the Pampas published in London by Fisher & Unwin. 1901
St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated by 9,000 Irish-Argentine pilgrims in Luján basilica.
1902
Dublin-born William Payne, an evangelist missionary, establishes a mission in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
1890
The Sisters of Mercy are back in Argentina.
1892
Thomas Mason founds Santa Rosa, in La Pampa.
1904
The Lobos Athletic Club is founded in the province of Buenos Aires. Tomás P. Moore is the first captain of the soccer team.
Paddy McCarthy (1871–1963) of Tipperary is hired by Club Atlético Gimnasia y Esgrima and Boca Juniors of Buenos Aires to train its junior players.
1906
Roger Casement (1864–1916) is appointed British consular official in Brazil. He is sent to the western Amazon to investigate treatment of the local Indian population.
1894
Dublin-born teacher Kathleen Boyle (née Jones) (1869–1941) founds the English School of San Martín, in the outskirts of Buenos Aires. It will later be renamed San Patricio. The Parnell Fund is remitted to Justin MacCarthy for the benefit of the Irish Evicted Tenants. www.abc-clio.com
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CHRONOLOGIES OF IRELAND AND THE AMERICAS xxix Arturo Kenny, wins a Gold Medal in the Olympic Games in Paris.
O’Brien railway station and town are founded in Bragado. 1907
Tomás Mullally founds Realicó, in La Pampa.
1926
The Passionist Sisters found the Michael Ham Memorial College for girls.
1910
John Lalor (1860–1931) establishes a cattle auctioneer business in Buenos Aires.
1930
Juan O’Leary’s El héroe del Paraguay published in Asunción.
1934
1911
Padraic MacManus launches Fianna, a nationalistic newspaper addressed to Irish Argentines.
Sean Healy (1894–1982), a chemist from Galway, opens St. Cyran’s School of Buenos Aires.
1914
Pedro Ricardo Meehan (1890–1972), Gerald I. N. Deane (1886–1962), and other Irish Argentines serve in the British Army in Europe.
1916
During the Easter Rising, Eamon Bulfin (1892–1968) raises the Irish Republic flag over Dublin’s General Post Office. His death sentence is pardoned owing to Bulfin’s Argentine citizenship.
1919
1921
1939
Guillermo Furlong, S. J. (1889–1974) is appointed member of the national academy of history.
1942
Carlos Viván “El Irlandesito” (born Miguel Rice Tracy) publishes his tango Moneda de cobre, with lyrics by Horacio Sanguinetti.
1944
Edelmiro Juan Farrell (1887–1980) is sworn in as Argentine President after leading a pro-Axe military coup d’état.
1946
Kathleen Nevin’s You’ll Never Go Back published in Boston by Bruce Humphries. The manuscript was completed by her sister Winnie.
Frank W. Egan is the Irish Republic representative in Chile.
1947
An Irish chargé d’affaires, Matthew Murphy, is appointed to Argentina.
After his mission in South Africa, Patrick J. Little is sent to Argentina, Brazil, and Chile as the diplomatic envoy of the Irish Free State.
1948
Christian Brothers’ Cardinal Newman boys school opens in Buenos Aires.
1951
James M. Ussher’s Father Fahy: a Biography of Anthony Dominic Fahy, O. P., Irish Missionary in Argentina (1805–1871) is published in Buenos Aires.
1953
Juan O’Gorman completes the painting of the Central Library in the campus of Universidad Autónoma de Mexico.
1955
Christian Brothers’ Stella Maris school opens in Uruguay.
Thomas Murray’s The Story of the Irish in Argentina is published in New York by P. J. Kenedy & Sons. The “Irish Race Congress in South America” is held in Buenos Aires with over 50 delegates. A grant is established for students of Spanish in the National University of Ireland.
1922
Hurling championship won by The Wanderers, seconded by the Capilla Boys.
1923
New wave of Irish immigration to Argentina due to social upheaval in Ireland, including Protestant young professionals and employees from Cork and Dublin.
1924
Edificio Kavanagh in Buenos Aires, the tallest building in Latin America at the time, is commissioned by Corina Cavanagh (b. 1910).
Lorenzo McGovern is appointed to the Argentine mission in Dublin.
The Argentine polo team, including Irish Argentines Juan Nelson and www.abc-clio.com
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Rodolfo Walsh’s Operación Masacre published in Buenos Aires.
Andanzas de un irlandés por el campo porteño.
1958
Edmundo O’Gorman’s La invención de América published in Mexico.
1964
Michael J. Siejes is appointed first honorary consul of Ireland in Rio de Janeiro. Padraig de Paor is the first nonresident Irish ambassador accredited to Brazil.
During the Falklands War, Irish and Irish-Argentine soldiers fight on both sides of the conflict. Translation is one particularly skilled service rendered by many Irish Argentines. In the European Commission, Ireland supports the removal of economic sanctions on Argentina.
Michael Leo Skentelberry appointed first Irish ambassador to Argentina. The Irish Argentine Miguel Fitzgerald (b. 1926) flies to the Falkland Islands as an act of Argentine sovereignty. 1966
Air Force officer Eduardo F. McLoughlin (b. 1918) is appointed Argentine ambassador to Britain. John Joseph Scanlan opens St. Brendan’s College in Buenos Aires.
1969
Christian Brothers open the school Mundo Mejor in Lima, Peru.
1975
The Irish diplomatic mission is established in Brazil.
1976
The Massacre at St. Patrick: in San Patricio parish church of Buenos Aires, a navy death squad kills five members of the Pallotine community, including Alfie Kelly (parish priest), Alfredo Leaden, Eduardo Dufau, Emilio Barletti and Salvador Barbeito.
1977
Writer and guerrilla fighter Rodolfo Walsh (1927–1977) is killed in a military operation.
1987
Eduardo A. Coghlan’s Los Irlandeses en Argentina: su Actuación y Descendencia is published in Buenos Aires.
1992
Peadar Kirby’s Ireland and Latin America: Links and Lessons is published by Trócaire in Dublin.
1993
Fernando O’Neill’s Anarquistas de acción en Montevideo 1927–1937 is published in Uruguay.
1999
The Associação Brasileira de Estudos Irlandeses at the University of São Paulo publishes the first issue of ABEI Journal: The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies.
2001
Martin Greene, first resident ambassador of Ireland to Brazil arrives in Brasilia.
2002
Two thousand Argentines with Irish ancestry submit a petition to the Irish government demanding Irish nationality based on ius sanguinis claims.
2004
John Cribbin O.M.I., of Shanagolden, Co. Limerick, is awarded honorary citizenship of Rio de Janeiro for his 40 years of missionary work in Brazil.
An Irish embassy is established in Mexico. 1981
Hilda Sabato and Juan Carlos Korol’s Cómo fue la inmigración irlandesa a la Argentina published in Buenos Aires.
1982
John Brabazon’s memoirs are published in Spanish by Eduardo Coghlan as
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IRA members Niall Connolly, Martin McCauley, and James Monaghan are sentenced to 17 years after an appeal court in Colombia which has found them guilty of training FARC guerrillas. 2006
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CHRONOLOGIES OF IRELAND AND THE AMERICAS xxxi
IRELAND AND THE UNITED STATES ca. 550
Legendary accounts, such as the Navagatio sancti Brendani Abbatis, tell of St. Brendan the Navigator reaching inhabited islands and preaching the Gospel to the natives.
1492
William Eris, or Ayers, a native of Galway, is reported to be one of Columbus’ sailors. He is among 40 volunteers left behind on Hispaniola, and subsequently killed by the Indians.
which comes from this assembly (also know as “Dongan’s Charter”) defines the form of government for the colony and recognizes basic political and personal rights (such as trial by jury and no taxation without representation). 1688
Charles Carroll, founder of one of the most distinguished and prosperous Irish-American families of the colonial era, becomes Attorney General of Maryland. His grandson, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, will be the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence.
1700
Protestant emigration, primarily from the province of Ulster, begins to constitute the majority of Irish immigration to the United States.
1704
Laws discouraging the immigration and importation of Catholics into Maryland, formerly the most tolerant of states, signal the growing anti-Catholicism of the British colonies.
1706
Reverend Francis Makemie (1658–1780), from Ulster, convenes a group of Presbyterian ministers in Philadelphia, and becomes the founder of American Presbyterianism.
1717
Large-scale emigration from Ulster begins in earnest. By 1775 possibly as many as a quarter of a million UlsterScots will have left Ireland for the United States. They will eventually become known as Scots-Irish in the United States.
1737
On St. Patrick’s Day in Boston, 26 Irishmen found the Charitable Irish Society, the oldest Irish society founded in the United States.
1560–1580 English colonization of the New World is precipitated and prepared for by Elizabethan colonization of Ireland. 1600s
Irish emigration to the U.S. is negligible and primarily consists of unmarried, Catholic males. They come as indentured servants, soldiers, sailors, convicts, and rebels.
1621
Daniel Gookin, a Quaker merchant from Cork, heads a party of Irish settlers, who arrive in Newport News, Virginia, on board the Flying Harte. His son, Daniel Gookin, the Younger, will become a member of the governor’s council of Massachusetts, and Superintendent of Indian affairs.
1630s
Greater religious tolerance in Maryland encourages increased Irish Catholic emigration to this state.
1649–1650 Cromwell’s campaign in and subsequent conquest of Ireland dramatically increases the number of Irish Catholics sold into servitude. While these are initially transported as laborers to the West Indies, some eventually make their way to British colonies on the North American mainland. 1682
Thomas Dongan (1634–1715) becomes the first Irish Catholic governor of New York. Dongan convenes the first representative assembly of New York Province on October 14, 1683. The ‘Charter of Libertyes and Privileges,’
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1740–1741 Crop failures in Ireland, caused by one of the most sustained cold periods in modern history, lead to starvation and disease on a scale similar to later famine
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xxxii CHRONOLOGIES OF IRELAND AND THE AMERICAS of 1845–1851. This year becomes known colloquially as the Year of the Slaughter, and one of its subsequent effects is an increase in emigration to the United States.
crease in Irish immigration and the subsequent competition in the job market. 1842
1770–1775 A decline in the linen trade, compounded by excessive rent increases, sets off a significant wave of Ulster-Scots immigration to the United States. 1776
British troops evacuate Boston on March 17; General Washington makes “St. Patrick” password for his army on this day.
Daniel O’Connell and Father Matthew sign “An Address of the Irish People to Their Countrymen in America” calling on Irish Americans to support the abolition of slavery. Irish Americans reject the call. 1845
A potato blight hits Ireland in September. This is the beginning of The Great Famine, An Gorta Mhór (The Great Hunger) as it is colloquially known, which leads to the deaths of as many as 1.5 million Irish people in less than a decade. It further uproots millions more and sends them, fleeing the terror, to the United States.
1848
Failed rebellion by Young Ireland movement, whose leaders had earlier broken with O’Connell’s Repeal Association because of their disenchantment with its slow and peaceful strategy. After the failed rebellion a number of its leaders flee to the United States in exile and become major players in Irish-American nationalism and journalism: Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Thomas F. Meagher, John Mitchell, John O’Mahony.
1851
Irish immigration to the United States peaks at 219,232. Between 1846 and 1855 over 1.5 million Irish men and women immigrate to the United States.
1858
Fenian Brotherhood is founded in New York by John O’Mahony, while the Brotherhood (later more popularly know as the Irish Republican Brotherhood) is founded in Dublin by James Stephens (1824–1901).
Declaration of Independence is signed by three Irish men and a further five men of Irish heritage. John Barry (1746–1803), who will later become known as the “Father of the United States Navy,” engages and captures the British vessel Edward on Arpil 7. 1798
Failed uprising of the Society of United Irishmen in Ireland. This sends a number of political exiles to the United States: Thomas Addis Emmet, William Sampson, and William MacNeven, among others.
1801
Act of Union creates United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Repeal of this act will become a major goal of Irish and Irish-American nationalism.
1814
Irish Emigrant society is founded in New York City to meet ever increasing numbers of Irish immigrants and aid them in adjusting to the New World.
1815
1834
End of Napoleonic Wars in Europe sends increasing numbers of Irish Catholic immigrants to the United States. Between now and 1845 well over half a million Irish people will immigrate to the United States. Burning down of Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, signals a growing anti-Catholic nativism in the United States., brought on by the inwww.abc-clio.com
National Repeal Convention inaugurates the Repeal movement as the first major Irish nationalist movement in the United States.
1861–1865 Nearly 200,000 immigrants and IrishAmericans serve in the American Civil
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CHRONOLOGIES OF IRELAND AND THE AMERICAS xxxiii Easter Rising in Dublin, at which The Proclamation of the Government of the Irish Republic to the People of Ireland is read by Pádraig Pearse from the steps of General Post Office (GPO). Britain’s execution of the leaders of the rebellion, following their surrender, outrages Irish and Irish-Americans who have until now been indifferent about Irish nationalism.
War, possibly as many as two-thirds of them in the Union forces. 1866
First of three failed Fenian invasions of Canada, in the hopes of engaging British and ultimately persuading the United States to get involved in the “Irish problem.”
1867
Failed Fenian Rising in Ireland. This will lead to a reorganization of the movement as Clan na Gael in the United States.
1871
Arrival of John Devoy, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, and a number of other prominent Irish Republican nationalists in New York City.
1880
Irish National Land League of the United States is founded, to support Parnell’s Land League in Ireland.
1886
Victor Herbert (1859–1924), a native of Dublin, arrives in New York. He goes on to become one of America’s best composers of light opera.
1872
“Honest John” Kelly becomes boss of Tammany Hall in New York. For the next 50 years control of the Tammany machine and, through it, municipal politics in New York City will remain almost exclusively in Irish hands.
1893
Gaelic League founded in Ireland and, subsequently, in the United States. The League seeks to promote the study of Irish and the revival of a distinct national culture.
1919
Eamon de Valera (1882–1975) visits the United States to raise funds and gain recognition for the republic. He ultimately raises about $5 million, but splits from Devoy and Cohalan, and the Friends of Irish Freedom, over a number of issues.
1921
Signing of Anglo-Irish Treaty brings an end to Anglo-Irish War, and establishes the Irish Free State. However, it also allows six heavily Protestant counties in Ulster to remain under British rule, as ‘Northern Ireland.’
1922
Outbreak of Civil War between de Valera’s Republicans and the Free State Government. When it ends a year later with de Valera’s surrender, it will leave many hard-line republicans disenchanted but the majority of Irish and Irish-American people looking to move beyond violence.
1928
Alfred Emmanuel Smith (1873–1944) is nominated by the Democratic Party for the Presidency of the United States. Of Irish origin, Smith is the first Catholic to be nominated by a national party. He will eventually lose to Republican Herbert Hoover, in part because of a recurrence of anti-Catholic bigotry.
1936
Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953), the son of actor James O’Neill, an Irish immigrant from Kilkenny, wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.
1949
The Proclamation of an Irish Republic establishes Ireland as a sovereign republic, but Northern Ireland remains a part of the United Kingdom. The United
First appearance of “Mr. Dooley” sketches by Finley Peter Dunne (1867–1936). 1903
1916
Henry Ford (1863–1907), the grandson of John Ford, an emigrant from Co. Cork, establishes the Ford Motor Co. Irish Race Convention in New York City, out of which come the Friends of Irish Freedom (FOIF), organized in part by John Devoy (1842–1928) and Judge Cohalan (1865–1946). www.abc-clio.com
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xxxiv CHRONOLOGIES OF IRELAND AND THE AMERICAS Hugh Carey of New York work with John Hume of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) in Northern Ireland to form a coherent position on Northern Ireland Hunger and issue a joint condemnation of the IRA. These four U.S. political figures become known as the “Four Horsemen” of IrishAmerican politics.
States establishes full diplomatic relations with Ireland. 1950
1960
At a Women’s Republican Club meeting in Wheeling, West Virginia, Joseph R. McCarthy (1908–1957), a little known senator from Wisconsin, holds up a piece a paper on which he claims are written the names of 205 known communists in the State Department. So begins the anti-communist “crusade” of McCarthyism, which will dominate U.S. political and public culture for the next five years and draw the IrishAmerican community further into the national spotlight.
U.S. President John F. Kennedy visits Ireland; later that year he is assassinated while driving through Dallas in his motorcade.
1968
Civil Rights marches by Catholics in Northern Ireland. Senator Robert Kennedy, the brother of and possible political successor to John F. Kennedy, is shot and killed in Los Angeles.
1972
1977
Illegal Irish immigration to the United States is estimated to be somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000.
1981
Irish republican prisoners in Northern Ireland initiate hunger strikes in an effort to have the British government grant them the status of “political prisoners.” In the end, 10 men die of starvation and support for Irish republicanism cause is galvanized in the United States.
John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) is elected President of the United States. He is the first Irish-American Catholic to win the presidency, and his election is seen as proof of the “arrival” of the Irish-American community on the American national stage.
1963
1970
1980s
Northern Ireland Aid Committee (NORAID) is founded in New York to aid the victims of violence in Northern Ireland. It will later be accused of funding arms shipments to the IRA. On a Sunday in January, British paratroopers fire upon civil rights marchers in Derry, killing 13. “Bloody Sunday,” as it becomes known, causes outrage in Ireland and the United States and leads to an escalation of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.
Daily demonstrations are held on the streets of New York City in support of the republican cause, with commemoration services being held in St. Patrick’s Cathedral for each of the 10 dead hunger strikers. 1982
Martyred hunger striker Bobby Sands (1954–1982), the first to die in the hunger strike, is elected grand marshal of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
1984
U.S. President Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) visits Ireland. His unearthing of Irish ancestry works to secure the support of an ever growing number of American Catholic Republican voters.
1994–2005 A series of scandals involving the sexual abuse of children rock the Catholic Church in both Ireland and the United States, severely affecting the Catholic Church’s attendance and finances in both countries. 1995
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CHRONOLOGIES OF IRELAND AND THE AMERICAS xxxv Riverdance, a theatrical show consisting of Irish dancing, opens in the Point Theatre in Dublin. From an intermission piece during the 1994 European Song Contest, held in Ireland, it goes on to achieve phenomenal success internationally. 1998
Signing of Belfast Agreement on April 10, hereafter known as the “Good Friday” Agreement; it is endorsed by the voters of both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland on May 23. U.S. President Clinton’s commitment to the achievement of this agreement plays a large part in its success; it remains a legacy of his administration. The effects of the “Celtic Tiger”— Ireland’s rising economy in the 1990s— result in a change in migration patterns. 21,200 people emigrate from Ireland
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but over 44,000 people immigrate into the country. Many of these are former emigrants returning from Britain and the United States. 2001
On September 21, 10 days after the September 11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center, the Irish government agrees to provide U.S. aircraft access to Irish airspace and Shannon airport.
2002
President Bush declares March 2002 Irish-American Heritage month and calls on all Americans to observe this month “by learning about and commemorating the contributions of Irish Americans.”
2003
U.S. President George W. Bush visits Ireland and receives mixed reception from Irish worried about America’s continued involvement in Iraq.
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xxxvi FMH
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INTRODUCTION
One of the most important public events in the annual calendar of the Taoiseach or Irish prime minister is the presentation of a bowl of shamrock to the president of the United States on Saint Patrick’s Day, March 17. The event symbolizes the special relationship that has existed for many decades between Ireland and the United States, but the fact that the Irish head of government should leave Ireland and travel across the Atlantic on the day of his own country’s national holiday also indicates the importance attached to the Irish-American bond in Irish political life. However, beyond Irish connections with the United States of America— beyond the shamrock bowl, as it were— other points of contact and exchange need to be acknowledged in an attempt to get a sense of Ireland’s transatlantic profile. Between Ireland and Canada and Latin American countries such as Argentina, President George W. Bush receives a gift of shamrock Mexico, Bolivia, and Brazil, important his- from Bertie Ahern, Ireland’s prime minister. (AP/Wide World Photos) torical, political, and cultural links exist that are rarely acknowledged in considerations of the so-called Irish-American nexus. In the three introductory essays that follow, therefore, the stories of Ireland’s contacts with Canada, Latin America, and the United States will be summarized as part of this work’s broader attempt to describe the ongoing process of exchange between Ireland and the Americas, the complexity of which is suggested by the entries in the main body of the work. These introductory essays indicate the multiplicity of locations out of which the narratives of Ireland’s relations with the Americas emerge. The central task of this work, then, is to identify some of those narrative threads in the knowledge that many others remain undocumented: the invisible, the anonymous,
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those left out or overlooked for one reason or another in the story of any nation’s development both inside and outside its borders need to be acknowledged even if they are not explicitly described. The gaps and discontinuities in this work speak to the vastness of the physical task involved in compiling these volumes, but they also represent the many women and men whose stories will be told in a longer, even more substantial account than the one presently offered as a first step toward a revised understanding of the relationships that exist between Ireland and the Americas.
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IRELAND AND CANADA Jason King
On the Celtic cross high above Grosse Ile, Quebec, reads the following inscription: Sacred to the memory of thousands of Irish emigrants, who, to preserve the faith, suffered hunger and exile in 1847–48, and stricken with fever, ended here their sorrowful pilgrimage.
The monument, erected by the Ancient Order of Hibernians in America, an expatriate Irish nationalist organization, makes a number of implicit assumptions about the emigrants’ social and political affiliations, their ethnic profile, religious orientation, attitudes toward migration, and reasons for leaving Ireland. They are in fact not emigrants at all but exiles, having left their homeland not through their own volition but from economic and political compulsion and under extreme duress. Thus, according to the monument, such “children of the Gael,” faced only with “foreign tyrannical laws and an artificial famine” if they remained in Ireland, had no choice but to embark for the United States or British North America. Furthermore, their migration is invested with a religious significance. It is a “pilgrimage,” a harrowing journey undertaken by famine-stricken Irish Catholics to preserve their faith, escape from English avarice, and maintain an imperiled Gaelic civilization: their mission is the retention and transplantation of an endangered set of cultural and religious values. For such migrants, then, emigration is a matter of strict necessity— hardly an opportunity for social advancement or the achievement of material prosperity and a better standard of living. The epic voyage of the Famine emigrants remains firmly lodged in Irish-Canadian popular memory and the literary imagination as the foundational event that brought the Irish to Canada. More than any other topic in Irish-Canadian historiography, the legacy of Grosse Ile continues to generate controversy with respect to how it is interpreted in popular memory and by professional historians and how it should be commemorated by the nation at large. The experiences of the Famine Irish have also become iconic in the Canadian literary imagination. Since 1970, Jack Hodgins’s novel The Invention of the World (1977), James Reaney’s trilogy of plays The Donnellys (1983), Jane Urquhart’s Away 5 www.abc-clio.com
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(1993), Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996), and Peter Behren’s The Law of Dreams (2006) have all featured the Famine Irish in their respective texts. Each of them imagines their struggles to represent the crucible upon which was forged such perennial themes in the Canadian psyche as the establishment of communality through adversity, perseverance against seemingly malevolent natural forces, and the quest for ethnic and social harmony through the repudiation of a violent past. This viewpoint in itself is highly significant, for it pits the creative charge of Irish Canadian historical fiction and drama against the current of professional historical scholarship on the Canadian Irish. The prevailing trend among professional historians of the Irish in Canada, for example, has been to stress the wide disjunction between the traumatic legacy of the Famine migrants enshrined within Irish-Canadian popular culture and the actual, more congenial and verifiable social and economic conditions encountered by the vast majority of nineteenth-century Irish emigrants to British North America upon their arrival. Recent Canadian historical scholarship has thus sought to minimize the impact of the Famine Irish in Canada and to dispel what Houston and Smyth term the romantic and epic aura that surrounds them, because it is seen to inhibit a wider understanding of the social processes of nineteenth-century Irish emigration and Canadian settlement. There is a general consensus among historians that the great misery of 1847 and the Famine exodus should be considered not as the linchpin but an anomaly in relation to larger trans-Atlantic migration movements. Historians such as Donald Akenson, Bruce Elliott, Cecil Houston, Mark MacGowan, William J. Smyth, Catharine Wilson, and David Wilson have all tended to emphasize the status of the Irish as part of a charter group in the foundation and development of Canadian society, rather than their destitution, recalcitrant nationalist inclinations, or more volatile political activities in the New World. They seek to revise the history of the Irish in nineteenth-century Canada, and stress the agency and relative affluence of the vast majority of Irish migrants upon their arrival in the country. They also insist that most of the Irish who came to Canada during the nineteenth century were of Protestant rather than Catholic or Gaelic descent, were inclined toward rural settlement on their own farmsteads, and experienced no more difficulty adapting to Canadian society than any other ethnic group. Irish-Canadian historical scholarship thus seeks to problematize received images and enduring stereotypes of the Irish in Canada, especially the Famine migrants, as embittered exiles, political outcasts, or vehemently nationalistic refugees. Yet it is only very recently that any historian has even begun to consider Irish Canadian popular culture as a legitimate object of inquiry in its own right, or to account for this wide rift that exists between Irish-Canadian professional historical scholarship and popular memory, with its iconic litany, as Houston and Smyth note, of “the Famine, typhus, cholera, and involuntary exile which have all grown to be the primary image symbolizing Irish emigration.” By the early nineteenth century, the social complexion of British North America was largely determined by emigration from Ireland; the Irish constituted the largest ethnic group in Canada after French Canadians. Approximately one million Irish emigrants traveled to Canada over the course of the nineteenth century, the majority of them in the www.abc-clio.com
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period before rather than after the Famine. In demographic terms, Irish migrants and their descendants in Canada outnumbered the English, Scottish, and Welsh population combined. In nineteenth-century Ontario, in particular, the concentration of Irish was more considerable than anywhere else in the global Irish diaspora with the exception of New Zealand. Patterns of Irish migration to British North America thus differed profoundly from those to the United States. For if the flood of Famine migrants provided the catalyst for a continuous influx of people into Irish America throughout the rest of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then their arrival in Canada marked the zenith or final crest rather than an initial surge of movement in the flow of mass migration. Although they peaked during the Famine, patterns of Irish migration to British North America can be traced back to the mid-eighteenth century. Discrete movements from Waterford to Newfoundland and Ulster to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island would lay the foundations for subsequent Irish communities that left their imprint on the collective identities of these provinces. By the 1830s, emigrants were traveling to British North America from every part of Ireland, although Ulster migrants would continue to be overrepresented. A decade later, in 1847, more than 100,000 emigrants traveled to British North America, 5,000 of whom were buried at the quarantine station at Grosse Ile, their mass graves marking the end of Irish mass migration to Canada. In 1848, the British Passenger Acts were changed to make Canada as expensive a destination to travel to as the United States, after which the outflow of Irish migrants to British North America considerably receded. By the twentieth century, only a tiny proportion of emigrants from Ireland continued to travel to Canada; the vast majority opted either for the United States or Great Britain instead. The Irish community in Canada comprises, of course, not only the migrants themselves but also their generations of descendants: it would be a serious error to extrapolate from the experiences of emigrants alone all of our knowledge about the Canadian Irish. Nevertheless, the huge decline in migration from Ireland to British North America after the Famine has meant that Canadian Irish communities have not been replenished in any meaningful way with substantial numbers of new arrivals from the homeland for well over a century. The question of when the Irish assimilated or integrated into the Canadian social mainstream continues to exercise historians, but there is no doubt that Irish-Canadian identity today is mainly a symbolic form of ethnicity, one that has long been detached from any lived experience in Ireland. Historians agree that there is a tremendous amount of regional variation in patterns of Irish migration and settlement in Canada, which makes it difficult to generalize about their experiences. Nevertheless, in every part of the fledgling nation Irish communities were deeply interwoven into the Canadian social fabric by the time of Confederation in 1867. For example, Canadian educational and policing institutions—including the iconic Royal Canadian Mounted Police—were directly imported from Irish models; the huge social constituency of Irish unskilled workers provided the impetus for the development of organized labor in Canada. As with Irish institutions, Irish culture also sank deep roots in Victorian British North America. The influence of Irish culture in Newfoundland appears unmistakable even today, although the province’s Irish community is the most venerable in Canada. By contrast, the outflow from Ireland to Ontario was considerably www.abc-clio.com
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later and larger in scope, but the Irish were so thoroughly integrated into the Upper Canadian social structure that they have left relatively little imprint on the region’s collective identity. More anomalous is the Irish community in Quebec: mainly Catholic, rather than Protestant, and often inclined to nationalist sympathies, occasionally in alliance with their French Canadian counterparts. Especially paradoxical is the political behavior of the Irish in Canada. Irish Protestants were more likely than Irish Catholics to identify with the interests of power, habitually defining themselves as British rather than Irish, which allowed them to assimilate more rapidly into the established social order. Symptomatic of this tendency was their transplantation of Orangeism from Ireland to British North America: the Canadian Orange Order was significantly transformed from a narrowly anti-Catholic sectarian organization into a broadly loyalist and Pan-British fraternal association, one that many historians argue was more benign than its Irish progenitor. Orange lodges could be found all across Canada but were most heavily concentrated in Ontario, where they came to function as a virtual organ of local governance. Less conspicuous, outside of Quebec, was the social infrastructure of Irish Catholicism; expressions of anticolonial nationalism were few and far between. Like its American counterpart, the Fenian movement had an underground existence in Canada, but its dedication to the annexation of British North America to the United States limited its possibilities for growth north of the border. Far more common was a compartmentalized outlook on the part of Irish nationalists in Canada that emphasized loyalty to the colony of British North America while desiring independence or some form of political devolution back in Ireland. Thus, Irish Canadian nationalists tended to regard British North America as a model dominion for Ireland to emulate rather than as a symbol of imperial oppression to instigate attacks against. The diffusion of Irish nationalism in Canada revealed the gradual acculturation of Irish Catholics into the British North American state. Over the course of the nineteenth century, while most of the Protestant and Catholic Irish population in British North America remained loyal to crown and colony, Irish revolutionary nationalism also found many Canadian outlets. In Quebec, in particular, Irish reformist and revolutionary aspirations were projected into the Lower Canadian sphere. Ethnic cooperation with French Canadians to undermine Anglo-Saxon hegemony was often advocated by Irish nationalist leaders. Yet in British North America, any anticipated alliance between the dislocated Irish and FrenchCanadian discontents to campaign for constitutional reform or foment revolutionary unrest failed fully to materialize. Instead, studies suggest that Irish Canadian political loyalties remained enigmatic, factious, fluctuating, and highly malleable throughout the nineteenth century, although there has been relatively little research on the issue to date. What research has been carried out on the ethnic newspapers of Irish Catholics in British North America indicates that they felt little sense of affinity toward their French Canadian coreligionists. The inculcation of anticolonial sentiment by Irish-Canadian newspapers such as The Irish Vindicator and The Vindicator did occur to some degree in the 1820s and 1830s; yet their clamor for reform was undermined by a combination of clerical reaction and deepened sectarian divisions both before and after the outbreak of rebellion in 1837. By the 1860s, the diminution of Irish Canadian political radicalism was largely complete, www.abc-clio.com
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as Canadian Irish communities had by then been absorbed into the hegemonic unifying vision of constitutional nationalism championed by Thomas D’Arcy McGee. In reality, the vast majority of Irish Catholics in British North America compartmentalized their cultural and political affiliations; they veered between a precarious sense of loyalty to the emergent British Canadian polity, oscillating degrees of sympathy and antipathy toward French Canada, and residual feelings of hostility toward British rule in Ireland that gave rise to some highly convoluted configurations of national identity. Sporadic outbreaks of sectarian conflict, labor agitations, rural unrest, and factional violence complicated the picture still further, although historians have tended to downplay and underestimate their significance. David Wilson notes that the Shiner’s War between rival Irish and French-Canadian lumbermen in the Ottawa Valley in 1835–1837, Orange intimidation of political rivals during the Upper Canadian election in 1836, and the clashes between Irish Protestants and Catholics during the Saint Patrick’s Day and Twelfth of July parades in Saint John, New Brunswick, which left twelve people dead, illustrate the types of social, political, and ethno-religious violence that occasionally convulsed Irish communities in British North America, culminating in the assassination of Thomas D’Arcy McGee by a Fenian rival in 1868. Such occurrences were by no means the norm, but neither were they so exceptional as to prove the rule of seamless integration for the Irish into Canadian society without ethnic discord or sectarian strife. Whatever their proclivities to occasional social discord, the Irish were heavily represented in the expansion of Canadian agriculture, industry, and the resource economy throughout the nineteenth century. They also played a vital role in clearing the wilderness and the settlement process in Upper Canada and points west. Patterns of regulated mobility saw the establishment of Irish settlements in the Canadian wilderness as footholds for future intergenerational chain migration, which leapfrogged ever farther westward. Their superior numbers and relative success in these endeavors prevented the Irish from becoming clustered in any particular geographical or occupational sector, and there is a consensus that they displayed considerable agency in pursuing the economic opportunities that were available to them rather than being buffeted across the continent by sweeping social and economic forces beyond their control. While Protestant and Catholic emigrants quickly achieved the same social standing and level of affluence as the Canadian population in general, various social and economic indicators suggest that the process took slightly longer for the latter group. Protestants also differed from Catholics in their tendency to settle disproportionately in rural rather than urban areas, whereas approximately one-third of Irish Catholic emigrants resided in Canadian cities. The mainly Catholic Irish in Quebec thus settled disproportionately in Montreal and Quebec City rather than in the countryside, while sizable Irish communities could be found in nineteenth-century Halifax, Saint John, and Toronto. In the late 1840s, tensions broke out in Saint John and Toronto between long-established Protestant Irish communities and the newly arrived Catholic Famine migrants. As noted, highly visible Irish cultural practices such as the annual Saint Patrick’s Day Parade and the “Glorious Twelfth” could provide flashpoints for intra-communal violence. More often though Irish collective identities found more peaceful forms of political expression in both rural and www.abc-clio.com
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urban settings; Thomas D’Arcy McGee was only the most famous of a number of IrishCanadian politicians. His role as a visionary founder and “Father of Confederation” attests to the place of the Irish in the very establishment rather than on the margins of the Canadian state. Aside from D’Arcy McGee’s literary and political achievements, however, relatively little is known about Irish-Canadian cultural life. Because the scholarship on the Canadian Irish is mainly empirical social history, we have a much better sense of where they came from and where they settled rather than how they saw the world. Irish-Canadian literature provides a partial corrective for this overreliance on quantitative analysis; used sensitively, it can help enable us to imaginatively reconstruct a culturally distinctive Canadian Irish collective outlook and world view. At the heart of this collective outlook was the idea that the Irish in Canada had renounced their ancestral quarrels and become the inhabitants of a peaceable kingdom in which social harmony between all forms of Irish identity prevailed. The quest for this peaceable kingdom provides a consistent refrain in Irish-Canadian literature that remains invisible to the quantitative methods of empirical social history. The origins of Irish writing in nineteenth-century British North America should be interpreted, then, within the context of this quest for the peaceable kingdom. The cultural nationalist aspirations of the Young Ireland movement were also transmitted by Thomas D’Arcy McGee into a Canadian literary context. As was the case in Ireland, the Canadian literary works of the period tend to be written in verse and often assumed the form of the long poem. Many writers considered the long poem’s relatively fluid structure to be the genre most amenable for conveying an idea of Canada’s daunting and seemingly unformed wilderness and its precarious state of civilization. In the hands of Irish-Canadian writers, it would also provide a suitable medium for reflecting on the experience of their displacement from Ireland and resettlement within British North America. Thus, the literary endeavors of various Irish authors resident in the Canadas, such as Oliver Goldsmith Jr.’s The Rising Village (1825), written in direct response to his uncle and namesake’s considerably more famous The Deserted Village (1770), Adam Kidd’s The Huron Chief (1830), (the Canadian) Standish O’Grady’s The Emigrant (1842), and Isabella Valancy Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie: A Love Story (1884), would all become incorporated into the annals of early Canadian writing. Although he was by no means the originator of this literary tradition, D’Arcy McGee consciously sought to cultivate and propagate it in order to facilitate the advancement of a genuinely Canadian national literature. In a wider sense, his program of cultural nationalism was little more than an extension of his involvement in the Young Ireland movement and its romantic attempt “to create and foster public opinion in Ireland,” through the development of a national body of verse, into a Canadian literary milieu—but one in which the poetic evocation of “the spirit of the nation” had become imbued with Victorian sentiments of propriety and respectability shorn of any radical political content. Writing in an entirely different vein, the early twentieth-century Quebec-Irish poet Emile Nelligan was inspired by the tradition of French symbolism, and his verse displays only the most tenuous connections with Irish literary themes. www.abc-clio.com
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By contrast, the majority of Irish-Canadian writers in the twentieth century have tended to work in prose rather than verse, and their literary endeavors can be schematically subdivided into two distinct forms and periods of composition. In the first half of the twentieth century, Irish-Canadian texts were often written in a biographical mode; were often based on personal, familial, or ancestral experiences of migration from Ireland to Canada; and employed the narrative conventions and generic framework of immigrant memoirs. Never conceived for a mass audience, generally written in an intimate, confessional style, and often understated in tone, these narratives would unconsciously expound upon many of the principal themes of Irish-Canadian literature originally found in the long poem, from the effusive medium of verse to the more private and restricted context of the lives they documented. Their tendency to transmute various individual and communal experiences of displacement into the form of Irish-Canadian immigrant memoirs reached its apotheosis, however, in Brian Moore’s novel The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960). Only very loosely autobiographical in origin; indebted more to the comic vision, modernist narrative techniques, and cuckolded hero of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) than his own personal recollection of emigration from Ireland; and preoccupied with the blinkered perceptions, urban misadventures, and irrepressible optimism of its bumbling protagonist, Ginger Coffey, Moore’s novel would enjoy considerable critical acclaim as well as popular success to distinguish him from the majority of his predecessors. Hence, it is only after the creation of The Luck of Ginger Coffey that one can speak of the full flowering of a literary tradition based on the experiences of the Irish in Canada, as writers in the latter part of the twentieth century have gravitated away from the form of the immigrant memoir toward the Irish-Canadian historical narrative. Unlike Moore’s text, however, the majority of distinguished works of Irish-Canadian fiction published after The Luck of Ginger Coffey, such as Jack Hodgins’s The Invention of the World (1977), James Reaney’s dramatic trilogy The Donnellys (1983), Jane Urquhart’s Away (1993), Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996), and Peter Behren’s The Law of Dreams (2006) have all tended to eschew personal experience or biographical convention and to frame their developing story lines against the backdrop of sweeping nineteenthcentury historical surroundings rather than more current narrative settings. Moreover, like many of the actual nineteenth-century Irish-Canadian literary works created in the form of the long poem, these Irish-Canadian historical novels and plays generally seek to reinforce an ideal of ethnic and social harmony through their various reconstructions of the myth of the Canadian “peaceable kingdom” into a more current narrative framework. Unlike their predecessors, however, what is implicit within their treatment of the historical experience of the Irish in Canada is a gradual realignment of the religious animus of sectarian conflict into the more current fault lines of ethnic friction and class tensions that threaten to undermine the equanimity of the modern, multicultural Canadian state. Their narrative design is premised upon an unfolding conflict between a normative process of social amelioration and the expectation of upward mobility for Irish emigrants in British North America, which becomes disrupted by the recrudescence of communal violence imported by Irish agitators or secret societies from the Old www.abc-clio.com
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World to the New. The central conflict that occurs and unfolds in each of these works can be perceived in terms of a form of tension that emerges between the persistence of the ideal of the “peaceable kingdom” and the potential outbreak or recurrence of various types of political violence. Such political violence threatens the stability of Irish communities and places them in deviant relation to the more placid historical development and temperate mores of Canadian society at large. More to the point, the Irish-Canadian historical novel or play also tends to signal its allegiance to the ideal of the peaceable kingdom by disparaging those antagonists who would attempt to disturb the placidity of Irish settlements in Canada for their own ends. For they portray their respective antagonists not only as agents of discord but as forces of anachrony as well, whose very willingness to countenance violence in the service of any ideal puts them firmly outside the norms of Canadian society. Each of these narratives thus appears inclined toward the propagation of a vision of Canada as a peaceful nation in which internecine ethnic, social, religious, and political conflicts that originated in Ireland or elsewhere, either in the nineteenth century or today, no longer have any place but are consigned to the dustheap of history. Few writers of Irish origin or descent in nineteenth-century British North America would have considered themselves to be the representatives of a culturally distinctive IrishCanadian community as such. In the latter half of the twentieth century, on the other hand, Irish-Canadian works of literature have become increasingly regarded as a coherent and distinguished literary corpus in its own right: one whose writers have received numerous accolades and literary prizes following the precedent set by Brian Moore’s The Luck of Ginger Coffey, which won the Canadian Governor General’s Award in 1960. Indeed, since 1970, both of Jack Hodgins’ works The Invention of the World and Spit Delaney’s Island have become incorporated into the prestigious New Canadian Library series; James Reaney—like Moore before him—has been awarded the Canadian Governor General’s Award no less than three times during his literary career, while The Donnellys has become widely regarded as a classic of Canadian theater; Jane Urquhart was corecipient of the Trillium Award for Away; and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1996. Peter Behren’s The Law of Dreams won the Governor General’s award in 2006. Moreover, in addition to these remarkable achievements, the Irish-Canadian community has also generated, in the same short time frame, its own institutions and literary organs for preserving its cultural heritage, including the founding of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies (1973), the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (1975), and, most recently, the establishment of the Centre for Canadian Irish Studies at Concordia University in Montreal (2000). Yet remarkably, this intensification of Irish-Canadian self-awareness and institutionalization of its cultural heritage have taken place against the backdrop of—or perhaps provide a means of compensation for—the continuing depletion of the Irish-Canadian community itself. As noted, since the mid-nineteenth century, the Irish proportion of the Canadian population has been steadily declining into a demographically insignificant minority. Nevertheless, the seemingly rapid advancement of Irish-Canadian writers into the mainstream of Canadian literature would appear indicative not only of their respective www.abc-clio.com
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individual achievements but also, on a broader scale, of the historical contribution of the Irish as a charter group in helping to define broader conceptions of Canadian cultural and national identity. In the short term, it would be interesting to consider the way in which this broader and more expansive conception of Canadian identity has laid the groundwork for the development of a literary tradition that is more readily receptive to newcomers and outside voices than has often been the case in Ireland. In the longer term, it may prove fruitful to speculate about the ways in which writers and scholars in Ireland might benefit and learn from the cultural experiences of their Canadian peers, as Ireland continues to undergo rapid demographic change and appears ever more like Canada to be in the process of becoming an increasingly multicultural and plural society. References Akenson, Donald. The Irish Diaspora: A Primer. Streetsville, Ontario: P. D. Meany, 1993. Akenson, Donald. The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History, 2nd ed. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. Behrens, Peter. The Law of Dreams. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2006. Elliott, Bruce S. Irish Migrants in the Canadas: A New Approach. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988. Grove-White, Elizabeth, William J. Smyth, Peter M. Toner, Cecil Houston, K. J. James, David A. Wilson, and Michele Holmgren. The Shamrock and the Maple Leaf: Irish Canadian Documentary Heritage at Library and Archives Canada. www.collectionscanada.ca/ireland/index-e.html (accessed October 26, 2007). Hodgins, Jack. The Invention of the World. 1977. Reprint, Toronto: New Canadian Library, 1994. Houston, Cecil, and William J. Smith. Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement: Patterns, Links, and Letters. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. James, Kevin, and Jason King, eds. “Irish-Canadian Connections.” Special issue, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 31, no. 1 (2005). McGowan, Mark. The Waning of the Green: Catholics, The Irish, and Identity in Toronto, 1887–1922. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. McGowan, Mark. Creating Canadian Historical Memory: The Case of the Famine Migration of 1847. Canada’s Ethnic Groups History Booklets 30. Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 2006. Moore, Brian. The Luck of Ginger Coffey. 1960. Reprint, Toronto: New Canadian Library, 1988. O’Gallagher, Marianna, and Rose Masson Dompierre. Eyewitness: Grosse Isle 1847. Sainte-Foy, Quebec: Carraig Books, 1995. Reaney, James. The Donnellys: a Trilogy. Edited by James Noonan. Victoria, British Columbia: Beach Holme Publishing, 1983. Urquhart, Jane. Away. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993. Wilson, Catharine Anne. A New Lease on Life: Landlords, Tenants, and Immigrants in Ireland and Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994. Wilson, David A. The Irish in Canada. Canada’s Ethnic Groups Series. Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1989.
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IRELAND AND LATIN AMERICA Edmundo Murray
INTRODUCTION Since the mythical visit of Saint Brendan the Navigator to Mexico in the sixth century, through the conviction in December 2004 of three Irishmen accused of training guerrillas in Colombia, the pattern of relations between Ireland and Latin America has been heterogeneous, fragmentary, and erratic. The Irish presence in this part of the world is frequently linked to colonial and postcolonial tensions in Europe and the Americas, which are generally connected to British, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and, more recently, U.S. imperialistic policies and discourses. Of the forty-odd countries and territories shaping the map of Latin America and the Caribbean, only Argentina and certain Caribbean islands developed recognizable Irish communities that have endured into recent times. Other places in the continent have been visited by Irish missionaries, soldiers, merchants, scientists, teachers, and others who either settled in the region and left their visible or subtle traces, or re-emigrated within the Americas or to other parts of the world (though Brazil, Mexico, and Cuba developed Irish communities that sooner or later disappeared). The number of Irish who emigrated to, or settled temporarily in, Latin America is still a matter of debate among scholars. However, it is significantly lower than that of the immigrants to the English-speaking countries of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, or New Zealand. Argentina, the country that has attracted the largest quantities of immigrants, received an inflow estimated by some scholars at between 45,000 and 50,000 Irish-born persons. In addition to this, thousands more scattered in the region, especially in Uruguay, Brazil, Venezuela, and Mexico, as a result of military operations, trade, and colonization schemes. It is also important to consider the significant rates of re-emigration within the Americas, especially to the United States, and to Australia, Great Britain, and back to Ireland, as well as from the United States to Argentina in the 1820s, to Cuba where they worked in slave-like 15 www.abc-clio.com
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conditions in sugar plantations, to Panama where they died among the multinational workforce constructing the Panama railway, and to Brazil where they were recruited in New York for land settlement schemes in the 1860s. Even in the most successful Irish settlement in the region, Argentina, approximately one of every two immigrants re-emigrated to other destinations, and this is an indication of the elevated mobility of the migrants. The chronicles of the Irish in Latin America often reveal epic qualities, whether from the victim’s or from the hero’s standpoint. The former expresses an attitude of real or perceived economic exploitation by, and political subordination to, powerful foreign forces, and typically includes the exile mentality by which the British rule in Ireland (or the United States has control over Mexico) led to emigration as the only secure way to ensure survival. The latter—the hero narrative—reveals the position (sometimes perceived as superior) of the Irish with respect to local Latin American ethnic groups. Both perspectives frequently neglect the everyday lives of the immigrants and their families, their settlement patterns, and their relations with other ethnic groups. As Graham Davis argues, “it is tempting in writing on the Irish pioneer settlers to isolate their story and to laud only their achievements. Such an approach distorts the Irish experience by suggesting a privileged contribution to history” (Davis 2002, 238). Furthermore, it neglects the social and economic relations of the Irish and their families with native Amerindians, Hispano-Creoles, Africans, Catalonians, Galicians, Scottish, English, Italians, Germans, French-Basque, and immigrants from other parts of the world, as well as the cultural transfers accomplished among them.
COLONIZED REALMS: IRELAND AND LATIN AMERICA (1500S–1700S) Details about early links between Ireland and Latin America are derived mainly from mythical sources. Some Mexican historians mention the possibility that Saint Brendan the Navigator of Co. Kerry (ca. 484–580) landed on Mexican shores, and the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl was identified as a white-skinned and bearded figure who had visited the region and promised to return. Another legend is that Columbus visited Galway on one of his voyages west and prayed there in the church of Saint Nicholas. However, there is historical evidence that Columbus made an earlier visit to Galway in about 1477. The first recorded Irish names in Latin America were the brothers Juan and Tomás Farrel, members of the expedition led by Pedro de Mendoza that arrived in the River Plate in 1536 and founded the city of Buenos Aires. The early Irish presence in Latin America seems to have been connected with religious, trade, and military relations between traditional families in Ireland and the Catholic establishment in continental Europe. In the last decades of the sixteenth century, many officers and administrators belonging to Old English Catholic families in Ireland withdrew their sons from Oxford and Cambridge colleges and sent them to Catholic universities in Continental Europe. With the Catholic Counter-Reformation at its height, these young members of traditional families were taught the reforming zeal and contributed to a flowering of Catholic spirituality at the popular level and to an anti-Protestant mentality. In Europe www.abc-clio.com
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the most notable champion of the Counter-Reformation was Philip II of Spain, son of the emperor Charles V, who sought to reestablish Roman Catholicism by force. During the rule of Philip II the first Irish college was opened in 1592 in Salamanca. Spain was at war with England from 1585 to 1604, and the connections of Gaelic and Old English families with Spanish Catholic priests and officers sometimes represented a real threat to England, as when a Spanish force of 4,000 men was established in 1601 at Kinsale in Munster. Unofficial contacts among Ireland, Spain, and Portugal continued thereafter, and thousands of Irish mercenaries (the “Wild Geese”) served in French, Spanish, and other foreign armies. Religious, military, and commercial links created an Iberian dimension of the Irish diaspora, which would have direct effects in eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century connections between Ireland and Latin America. The first Irish person to leave his mark in Latin America was Thomas Field, S.J. (1547–1626), born in Limerick, who entered the Jesuits in Rome in 1574. Father Field arrived in Brazil in late 1577 and spent three years in Piratininga (today’s São Paulo). Then he moved to Paraguay with two other Jesuits, and over the next ten years they established missions among the Guaraní people. Thomas Field, who died in Asunción, is credited with being the first Irish priest to celebrate the Roman Catholic rites in the Americas. Other priests who went to Latin America were born in Spain or Portugal of Irish parents. They were engaged by the Jesuits and the Franciscans because they spoke English and therefore they could work not only to protect the native populations from the Protestant English and Dutch colonizers but could also convert the heretics themselves. In about 1612 the Irish brothers Philip and James Purcell established a colony in Tauregue, on the mouth of the Amazon River, where English, Dutch, and French settlements were also installed. Huge profits were made by the colonists in tobacco, dyes, and hardwoods. A second group arrived in 1620 led by Bernardo O’Brien of Co. Clare. They built a wood and earth fort on the north bank of the Amazon and named the place Coconut Grove. O’Brien learnt the dialect of the Arruan people, and his colleagues became expert navigators of the maze of tributaries, canals, and islands that form the mouth of the Amazon. Other Irish tradesmen and priests worked in Latin America in the eighteenth century; however, most of the Irish presence in the region from the 1770s onwards was owing to military action.
REBELS IN IRELAND, MERCENARIES IN LATIN AMERICA (1770S–1820S) The Irish soldiers acting in the region by the end of the eighteenth century and during the wars of independence were members of British, Spanish, Portuguese, and South American armies. From 1768 to 1771 an Irish regiment played a role in the Spanish army that served in Mexico. All its companies were commanded by officers with Irish names, O’Hare, Barry, Fitzpatrick, Quinn, O’Brien, Healy, O’Leary, and Treby (Tracy). Some of them were Irish born, and others were the children of well-known Irish families settled in Spain. Ambrose O’Higgins (1721–1801) is the supreme example of an Irish emigrant to the Spanish-speaking world who reached the highest ranks in the imperial colonial service. www.abc-clio.com
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Born probably in Ballinary, Co. Sligo, O’Higgins was employed as an errand boy by Lady Bective in Dangan Castle, near Summerhill in Meath. An uncle sent him to Cadiz in Spain, from where he traveled to Peru. He first ran a small toy shop in Lima and after studying engineering was involved in improving the Andean roads and building houses for travelers. Recognized by the colonial authorities, O’Higgins was made administrator of the southern frontier of Chile, where he made contact with the Mapuche people. He was appointed governor of Chile in 1787 and set about modernizing the colonial administration. In 1795 Ambrosio O’Higgins was appointed viceroy of Peru, in which office he died in 1801 at the age of eighty. A tradition of enlisting in the British army developed in Ireland. The enlisting of Irish Protestants began in 1745 and Catholics were permitted to enroll after the Catholic Relief Act of 1793. In the Napoleonic Wars (1796–1815) an estimated 130,000 Irishmen served in the British army, and throughout the nineteenth century a sizable proportion of the British army was Irish, exceeding 40 percent in 1830. Lack of alternative employment opportunities at home (more than any alleged Irish fighting spirit or tradition) contributed to the high levels of Irish enlistment. As recently as in the Falklands/Malvinas War of 1982, the number of Irish names in the rolls of British units was significant. In November 1762 the Irish-born captain John McNamara and his British 45th regiment attacked Colonia del Sacramento on the northern bank of the River Plate (presentday Uruguay). The colonia was then under Spanish control, and the British intention was to return it to their Portuguese ally. McNamara and most of the crew were killed when the flagship Lord Clive blew up, but some waded ashore and were captured and interned in Córdoba, a province in the center of Argentina, and Mendoza in the Andean foothills. When finally released, many of these remained in Argentina. They and some of their descendents were to become involved with the Argentine army of José de San Martín, which gathered in Mendoza in 1816 to invade and liberate Chile. In 1806 and 1807, Britain made two unsuccessful attempts to displace Spain as the dominant power in the River Plate region. Of the 25,000 men directly involved in both invasions it is likely that a significant number of the officers and rank and file would have been Irish. The first expedition was commanded by William Carr Beresford (b. 1768), of the well-known Irish gentry family. On June 25, 1806, Bereford’s troops landed at Quilmes, south of Buenos Aires city. After a skirmish with a force of defenders, Buenos Aires capitulated, and Beresford’s men marched into the city to the sound of pipes and drums. The Spanish and Creole forces reacted, and Buenos Aires was recaptured by local regiments. Beresford surrendered in August 1806, but thousands of fighting men were soon dispatched to South America and placed under the command of John Whitelocke. This second British force invaded Montevideo in February 1807 and then attacked, and was repulsed by, Buenos Aires on July 5 of the same year. Some of the Irish soldiers deserted from the British army and settled and prospered in Argentina. After the 1820s they played a role in initiating emigration to Buenos Aires from the Irish midlands. The other major military involvement of Irish people in Latin America was in the Wars of Independence. As a result of the failed British campaigns in the River Plate, Viscount Castlereagh was of the opinion that the commercial penetration of Spanish America was www.abc-clio.com
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preferable to its military conquest. This policy came into effect in most parts of Latin America when merchants and their employees from Britain and Ireland invaded the Atlantic and Pacific ports of Latin America. However, the new policy did not prevent British subjects from enlisting in foreign armies. Most Irish saw military action as legionaries in Simón Bolívar’s army that liberated Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Recruited in Ireland by John Devereux and other officers, some 2,100 soldiers arrived in Colombia and Venezuela in 1817–1819. The Irish Legion, which received the support of Daniel O’Connell in Ireland, ended in mutinies, epidemics, and a high death toll in Venezuela. Bolívar said he was not surprised at the conduct of the Irish, and he was “pleased to be rid of these mercenaries who would do no killing until they had first been paid for it” (Hasbrouck 1928, 182–183). Devereux himself remained behind in England and Ireland, living sumptuously on the contributions of his dupes, until the return of some of those whom he had cheated exposed him to danger of being arrested or shot, so that he was forced to go to Venezuela many months after his Legion had departed. Many Irish soldiers took part in the celebrated march across the Andes in 1819 and in the decisive battles of Boyacá (Colombia) and Carabobo (Venezuela). William O’Connor, who came to be known as Francis Burdett O’Connor, served as chief of staff to Antonio José de Sucre (later first president of Bolivia) at the battle of Ayacucho, Peru, in December 1824. In this period Bolívar had a succession of Irish aides-de-camp, of whom the most prestigious was Cork-born Daniel Florence O’Leary, who sustained a serious wound in battle following the Andes march and was decorated with the Order of the Liberator. A recognized hero of the Venezuelan independence, O’Leary settled in Bogotá and held a number of diplomatic appointments for Venezuela and Britain. He died in 1854 in Bogotá and in 1882 his remains were interred in the National Pantheon in Caracas near those of Bolívar. The South American wars of independence are often regarded as the result of a military strategy developed by the British governing elites and executed by brilliant military and naval commanders. On a pincer movement, Simón Bolívar from the north, José de San Martín from the south, and admirals William Brown and Scottish-born Thomas Cochrane shelling from the Pacific, prevented the arrival of supplies and reinforcements for the Spanish forces and effectively overthrew the Spanish rule in the region. William Brown (1777–1857), founder of the Argentine navy, was born in Foxford, Co. Mayo. He began his naval career as a teenager in merchant ships in the United States, then enlisted in the British navy and was engaged in 1809 in commercial trading in Buenos Aires. Brown got involved when his ship was commandeered by the Spanish during the revolution of 1810. Appointed commander of the local fleet, he broke the Spanish blockade in the River Plate and ended the Spanish threat to the newly independent provinces of the River Plate. Wicklow-born John Thomond O’Brien (1786–1861) arrived in Argentina in 1814 and fought in the siege of Montevideo in that year. He was then appointed aide-decamp of General San Martín, the liberator of Argentina and Chile, and in this capacity took part in all major actions of the independence struggle in Chile and Peru. Other South American patriots who fought for the new republics were Bernardo O’Higgins (1778–1842), son of Peru’s viceroy Ambrose O’Higgins, and regarded as the father of www.abc-clio.com
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Chile’s independence; Thomas Charles Wright (1799–1868) of Drogheda, founder of the Ecuadorean navy; Peter Campbell (1780–c. 1832) of Tipperary, who organized the first Uruguayan naval force in 1814; George O’Brien, Charles Condell, and Patricio Lynch, naval heroes in Chile; and Diago Nicolau Keating, Diago O’Grady, and Jorge Cowan, who served in Brazilian armies.
ESCRAVOS BRANCOS AND EMPRESARIOS: PRE-FAMINE SETTLEMENTS IN LATIN AMERICA (1820S–1840S) In 1826, William Cotter, an Irish officer serving in the Brazilian army, was sent to Ireland to recruit a regiment for service against Argentina. He went to Co. Cork where he promised the local people that if they enlisted they would be given a grant of land after five years’ service. He left for Rio de Janeiro in 1827 with 2,686 men and their wives and children, but when they arrived they were completely neglected because the war with Argentina was over. The African-Brazilian people taunted them by calling them escravos brancos, white slaves. The Irish mutinied, together with a German regiment, and for a few days there was open warfare on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. While most were finally sent home or went to Canada or Argentina, some did stay and were sent to form a colony in the province of Bahia. A more celebrated military exploit involving Irish troops was that of the San Patricio Battalion made up of deserters from the U.S. army during the Mexican-American war of 1846–1848. Led by John O’Reilly, a deserter from the British army in Canada, hundreds of Irish crossed over to the Mexican side encouraged by Mexican offers of promotion to officer rank and assignment to the artillery unit, as well as offers of land (however, some historians argue that it was drink that lured them). The case shows the fluidity of loyalty and state boundaries at the time. Fighting under a green banner emblazoned with an Irish harp and a shamrock, the Irish won special decorations for their courage in the battle of Buena Vista, but suffered heavy casualties in the fierce battle of Churubusco. Seventy-two were court-martialed and fifty hanged. The bravery of the San Patricio battalion is widely known among Mexicans today, and every September 12 a ceremony in their honor takes place in the San Jacinto plaza in Mexico City. However, they were regarded as traitors in the United States. Successful Irish settlements were established in Mexican Texas in the period 1829–1836. San Patricio and Refugio colonies on the Gulf coast of Texas owe an important part of their history to the system of land grants allocated under the Mexican colonization law and to the Irish empresarios (entrepreneurs): John McMullen, James McGloin, James Power, and James Hewetson. They were men of vision who had perceived themselves as Mexicans through marriage, commercial contacts, and language (as Spanish speakers). During the Texas Revolution of 1835–1836 some of the Irish colonists were loyal to the Mexican government, to whom in law they owed allegiance as Mexican citizens and to whom they were obligated for the land grants bestowed upon them. Furthermore, the Irish colonists who had settled alongside Mexican neighbors acquired from them the skills and know-how of cattle ranching. www.abc-clio.com
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Land was the great opportunity that attracted thousands of emigrants from the center and southeast of Ireland to Argentina and Uruguay. This emigration commenced with the Irish soldiers left behind by the 1806–1807 British campaigns in the River Plate, along with the simultaneous settlement of a number of British and Irish merchants in the region. According to the 1822 census, there were 3,500 ingleses in the Buenos Aires province. At this time, they made up the majority of foreigners in the city of Buenos Aires. Merchants in Buenos Aires benefited from the policy of comercio libre (free trade), which sparked an economic revival in the River Plate area and established businesses to trade for silver from Potosí (Bolivia); maté from the plantations along the river Paraguay; and hides, talon, and jerked-beef from the pampas of Buenos Aires and Uruguay. One of the most influential of the Irish merchants in Buenos Aires was Thomas Armstrong (1797–1875), who came from a well-known Protestant landowning family of the Irish midlands. Together with Father Anthony Fahy (1805–1871), Armstrong was to lead the Irish immigrant community from its early stages in the 1830s until his death. Another influential merchant family in colonial and independent Buenos Aires was the O’Gormans of Ennis, Co. Clare. Members of other prosperous Irish families settled from the end of the eighteenth century in Latin American ports. These families not only wielded considerable economic and political power within Ireland but were also involved in Atlantic trade, with links to North America, Spain and Portugal, the West Indies, South Africa, and later, to Brazil and Argentina. Among these families, a number of Galway and Clare merchants served as agents in commercial houses in the Atlantic coasts and islands. They were Roman Catholics and loyal to the British Crown. Other Irish merchants in Buenos Aires were employed by British firms, like William Mooney and Patrick Bookey from Westmeath, and Patrick Brown and James Pettit from Wexford. They are recognized as the initiators of the early immigration chains from those counties to Argentina and Uruguay. In the 1820s the majority of foreign merchant ships entering the port of Buenos Aires were English, originating in Liverpool, London, Rio de Janeiro, Gibraltar, and Havana. Much of the loading, unloading, and ferrying was also conducted by British people, and Irish residents in the ports were employed as stevedores. After the signature of the Anglo-Argentine Treaty of Friendship, Navigation and Commerce in 1824, the British presence was further perpetuated, and Argentina followed the first steps to later become an important part of Britain’s informal empire. These were ideal circumstances for a massive welcome to ingleses, that is, English-speaking immigrants especially from Ireland.
IRISH LANDLORDS IN ARGENTINA AND THEIR WORKERS (1840S–1880S) The arrival in Buenos Aires of 114 Irish immigrants on board the William Peile on June 25, 1844, may be viewed as the beginning of the most important emigration from Ireland to Latin America and, indeed, to any Spanish-speaking country. The Peile emigration, though www.abc-clio.com
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arranged by Irish merchants in Buenos Aires, was not an organized colonization scheme. The successful integration of the immigrants led to the promotion of Latin America at home, with family members, neighbors, and friends in Ireland following them throughout the following decades. Although the number of immigrants to Argentina is still debated by historians, the latest estimates include 45,000–50,000 immigrants during the 100 years ending in 1929. At least 50 percent of the immigrants did not stay in the country and sooner or later re-emigrated to other destinations, most notably the United States, Australia, or back to Ireland. Arduous working conditions, accidents, and epidemics significantly increased the death rate among those who settled in Argentina, resulting in an Irish-born population of 10,000–15,000, who survived, founded families, and left descendants, forming the nucleus of the Irish-Argentine community. Among the latter group, the success ratio measured in ownership of their means of production was disproportionate compared with other communities of the Irish diaspora, although immigrants in Argentina from other European regions in the same period (especially French-Basque and Catalonian) were equally successful. Most of the emigrant candidates were the children of tenant farmers in the Irish midlands (Counties Westmeath 43 percent, Longford 15 percent, Offaly 3 percent) and Co. Wexford (16 percent). They were lured by the possibility—often imaginary—of becoming owners of 4,000 acres in Argentina instead of being tenants of 40 acres in Ireland; therefore, they imagined belonging to a fanciful Latin American landed gentry instead of to the Irish farmers’ circle. Most of the emigrants in this period were young men in their early twenties, and later young women, from families with Roman Catholic background. Upon arrival they were hired by British, Irish, or Hispano-Creole estancieros (ranchers) to work in their holdings, and sometimes to mind their flocks of sheep. Sheep farming and the impressive increase of international wool prices in 1830–1880, together with convenient sharecropping agreements with landowners, allowed a substantial number of the Irish immigrants to establish themselves securely in the countryside and progressively acquire sheep and, finally, land. A few of them, particularly in 1850–1870, managed to acquire large tracts of land from provincial governments in areas gained from Indian control or beyond the frontier. However, the vast majority of the Irish rural settlers were ranch hands, and shepherds on halves or on thirds, and never had access to landownership. Stories circulated in Ireland of poor emigrants who became wealthy landowners in the pampas of Argentina and Uruguay. These stories, frequently exaggerated, were sometimes fueled by those who failed to achieve a successful settlement in Argentina but did not want those at home to know it. Typically, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, members of the Argentine landowner class with Irish origins perceived themselves as English, and their identity was frequently balanced toward British rather than Irish traditions. At the same time, the middle and lower classes, which were composed of shepherds and ranch hands in the countryside and servants and laborers in the cities, began to be attracted by Irish nationalist appeals from the church and the press. The existence in Buenos Aires of two newspapers www.abc-clio.com
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owned by Irish-born people, The Standard and The Southern Cross, may be viewed as a consequence of these differentiated identities connected to diverse social groups.
NATIONALISM IN IRELAND AND IN SOUTH AMERICA (1880S–1930S) The massive European emigration to Argentina in 1880–1920 was an incentive to attract further emigration from Ireland. However, the failure of a government colonization scheme from Ireland in 1889 known as the Dresden Affair put an end to other official initiatives. Irish immigrants to Argentina in this period usually came from urban areas in Belfast, Cork, Dublin, and Limerick, or from cities in England or the British empire. Except those of the Dresden Affair (who were mostly laborers and servants), the immigrants in this period were professionals, technicians or administrative employees hired by railway companies, banks, or meatpacking plants, and several were from families with a Church of Ireland background. They rapidly integrated into the Anglo-Argentine community, following their social and economic patterns, while some of them actively worked to support Irish nationalism. At the turn of the nineteenth century, most Irish families were living in the provinces of Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, and Córdoba, as well as in Entre Ríos, Mendoza, and in distant Patagonia and Falklands/Malvinas Islands. The trend to move from the camp (sheepfarmers’ lingo for countryside) to the cities was led by the wealthiest families, thus imitating the residence patterns of the Argentine landed elite. A majority of the Argentine-born children of Irish immigrants spoke English as their mother tongue and learnt Spanish at school. Those who were bilingual English/Spanish had a linguistic advantage and were often employed by British and later U.S. companies. Their social activities were shared with Irish or British relations, with horseracing and later rugby football, cricket, and hurling being the most popular athletic activities for men, and lawn tennis for women. After World War I (in which some Irish Argentines fought in British regiments), there was a new peak of emigration from Ireland to Argentina, particularly in the period during and after the Anglo-Irish War of 1919–1921 and the Irish Civil War of 1922–1923. However, the financial crisis of 1929 as well as conflicts and political and social unrest in Europe and later in Latin America were serious barriers to emigration. After 1930 Irish emigration to Argentina virtually came to a halt. Many Irish Argentines did rather well out of World War II. Some thousands of Anglo Argentines (and a few Irish Argentines) joined the British armed forces, vacating jobs with British companies that needed to be filled by bilingual English/Spanish speakers. Paradoxically, Irish nationalism in Argentina represented a hindrance to new immigrants who did not want to be identified with chaos and turmoil in Ireland, but rather with a perceived notion of British organization and working habits. Furthermore, the newly rich Irish of Argentina, and particularly their Argentine-born sons and daughters, did not want to be considered by the anglophile Argentine elite as belonging to the same circles as their poor relatives in Ireland. A social hiatus arose between the Irish in Argentina and the Irish in Ireland, which gradually weakened the links among members www.abc-clio.com
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of the same communities—even of the same families—on both sides of the Atlantic. In other countries of the region, British commercial and investment predominance was gradually overtaken by U.S. companies and diplomacy. By the 1920s, most of the families with Irish surnames in Latin America and other countries were considered—and considered themselves—Brazilians, Chileans, Mexican, and other rather than Irish.
SOCIETY AND STATE BUILDING: DIPLOMATIC, RELIGIOUS, AND TRADE LINKS (1930S–2005) Some Irish diplomats were gaining experience in Latin America before 1930, including Robert Gore in Montevideo and Buenos Aires in the 1850s, Thomas Hutchinson in Rosario in the 1860s, the Irish-Americans Martin MacMahon and Patrick Egan who represented the United States in Paraguay in the 1860s and in Chile in 1889–1893 respectively, and Daniel R. O’Sullivan and the Irish patriot Roger Casement in Brazil in 1906–1911. The first diplomatic envoy from Ireland to Latin America was Buenos Aires–born Eamon Bulfin, who began working in Argentina in March 1920, after his participation in the Easter Rising and banishment from the British Isles. Bulfin established a contact network in South America and started an Irish Fund. In 1921, two of Ireland’s eight diplomats, Bulfin and Laurence Ginnell, were based in Latin America. Patrick J. Little arrived in 1922, being the first representative of the Irish Free State. The establishment of formal diplomatic relations with Latin America had to wait until the end of World War II. In 1947, Matthew Murphy was appointed as chargé d’affaires in Buenos Aires, with Lorenzo McGovern as the first Irish Argentine to be appointed to the Argentine mission in Dublin in 1955. Irish diplomatic missions were established in Brazil and Mexico in 1975 and 1977, respectively, and both countries opened embassies in Dublin in 1991. In other countries, ten honorary consuls of Ireland operate with the supervision of Buenos Aires, Brasilia, Mexico, and New York embassies. One of the recurring goals of Irish trade missions in Latin America is to foster mutual economic links. However, Ireland is still an almost completely insignificant market for Latin America. Irish exports to Latin America have increased more than 60 percent in 1996–2002. In this period, total Irish exports to Latin America averaged $711 million per annum, though this was only one percent of Ireland’s total exports. Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Costa Rica are some of the major Latin American markets for Irish products. Imports from the region remained at less than one half of the exports (Direction of Trade Statistics Yearbook 270–271). Some Irish companies have performed well in Latin America. A noteworthy example is Fyffes, an importer of fruit from Jamaica, Belize, Surinam, Honduras, and Ecuador into Europe since the 1920s. Powdered milk is an Irish product frequently exported to Central and South America. Smurfit has subsidiaries manufacturing paperboard and packaging products in Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico. Guinness Peat Aviation works with Latin American airlines in many countries. Travel and education are other aspects of the exchange, with a steady flow of students going to Ireland to boarding or day schools since the 1870s and, more recently, to study English as www.abc-clio.com
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a foreign language. Genealogical travel has been exploited sometimes by Argentine and Irish travel agents, and in the 1970s Aer Lingus ran a weekly flight to Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile. In more recent years Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and the Caribbean islands are increasingly attracting Irish visitors. Apart from the ever-present pseudo-Irish pubs in many Latin American cities, and the sporadic boom of Celtic music in Argentina and Brazil, very few manifestations of Irish popular culture have had much success in Latin America. The University of São Paulo offers a postgraduate course on Irish literature since 1977. The Associação Brasileira de Estudos Irlandeses has published the ABEI Journal: the Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies, edited by professors Munira H. Mutran and Laura P. Z. Izarra, since 1999. Quite apart from official diplomatic efforts and trade missions in the twentieth century, the most efficient Irish representatives in Latin America have been the religious missionaries. In many parts of Latin America to be Irish means to be a priest or a nun. Likewise, in Ireland a part of people’s knowledge of Latin America is derived from notices from these missionaries that were circulated through churches. Furthermore, returning missionaries have had an impact on the Catholic Church in Ireland as they seek to promote the new model of the post–Vatican II social church frequently associated with Latin America. The pioneering work of Father Fahy and other Irish chaplains in nineteenthcentury Argentina, Uruguay, and Falkland/Malvinas Islands was followed by religious orders. The Sisters of Mercy and the Passionist and Pallotine fathers served the Irish community and followed the pattern of the Irish missionary movement elsewhere in the nineteenth century—following the Irish diaspora or British colonization. Missionary work with Latin Americans was not established until 1951–1952, when the Columbans opened parishes in Peru and Chile. Furthermore, laypeople were sent to Bogotá in 1953 to establish the Legion of Mary. From Bogotá the work of the Legion extended to other parts of Colombia and then to Venezuela, Ecuador, and almost all countries of Latin America in subsequent years. The Redemptorists were established in Brazil in 1960, the Kiltegans also in Brazil in 1963, the Irish Dominicans in Argentina in 1965, the Holy Ghosts in Brazil in 1967, and the Irish Franciscans in Chile and El Salvador in 1968. The Saint James Society has worked in Peru since 1958. Priests and sisters from Cork were sent to work in Trujillo as an institutional initiative of the diocese of Cork and Ross. One of these Cork missionaries was Father Michael Murphy, who would later become bishop of Cork. The image of the Latin American church exercised a fascination among Irish people. In the early 1980s U.S. policy in El Salvador and Nicaragua occasioned widespread condemnation in Ireland. This culminated in the unprecedented wave of protests that greeted President Ronald Reagan when he visited Ireland in June 1984. Gradually, in a process that for the Irish in Argentina and other countries in the region may have ended during the Falklands/Malvinas War of 1982, the Irish in Latin American countries began to perceive themselves as Argentines, Brazilians, Uruguayans, or Mexicans with Irish family names, although a few among them held some distinct Irish family traditions. Present-day Latin Americans with Irish background are estimated by some to be between 300,000 and 500,000 persons. Although some may be residents of Mexico and Central America, the northern part of South America, Uruguay, and Brazil, www.abc-clio.com
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most live in Argentina. A vast majority among them does not speak English as their mother tongue nor do they keep the traditions brought from Ireland by their ancestors. Intercommunity marriage during the twentieth century has allowed most of the families to assert their local Latin American identities. Nevertheless, perhaps seeking some kind of recognition of their Irish identity, in 2002 a group of about 2,000 Irish Argentines submitted a petition to reside and work in Ireland to the Irish justice minister John O’Donoghue. The petition, which was accompanied by a press campaign targeting Irish politicians and policy-makers, did not obtain a favorable response from the Irish government. However, it demonstrates that the links between Ireland and Latin America, which were lost more than a century ago, can still be reshaped to accommodate the actual needs of Irish-Latin Americans. Attracting thousands from Latin America to Ireland, the present-day successful Celtic Tiger economy imposes both a public perception of “best place to live” and a government policy of restrictive immigration. However, Argentines who have secured an Irish passport rarely use it to live in Ireland but rather in other European Union countries. The one significant Latin American community in Ireland is a Brazilian one based in counties Galway and Roscommon. References Davis, Graham. Land! Irish Pioneers in Mexican and Revolutionary Texas. Dallas: Texas A&M University Press, 2002. Direction of Trade Statistics Yearbook. International Monetary Fund (IMF), 2003. Hasbrouck, Alfred. Foreign Legionaries in the Liberation of Spanish South America. New York: Columbia University, 1928. Kennedy, Michael. “‘Mr. Blythe, I Think, Hears from Him Occasionally’: The Experience of Irish Diplomats in Latin America, 1919–23.” In Irish Foreign Policy 1919–66: From Independence to Internationalism, edited by Michael Kennedy and J. M. Skelly. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000. Kirby, Peadar. Ireland and Latin America: Links and Lessons. Dublin: Trócaire, 1992. Marshall, Oliver. English, Irish and Irish-American Pioneer Settlers in Nineteenth-Century Brazil. Oxford: Centre for Brazilian Studies, 2005. McGinn, Brian. “The Irish in South America: A Bibliography.” Irish Diaspora Net. www.irishdiaspora.net (accessed February 7, 2005). McKenna, Patrick. “Irish Emigration to Argentina: A Different Model.” In The Irish Diaspora, edited by Andy Bielenberg. Essex: Pearson Education Ltd., 2000. Murray, Edmundo. Becoming “Irlandés”: Private Narratives of the Irish Emigration to Argentina, 1844–1912. Buenos Aires: Literature of Latin America, 2005. Sabato, Hilda, and Juan Carlos Korol. Cómo Fue la Inmigración Irlandesa en Argentina. Buenos Aires: Plus Ultra, 1981.
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IRELAND AND THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA James P. Byrne
INTRODUCTION By the turn of the twentieth century, the first- and second-generation Irish population of the United States exceeded that of Ireland by more than half a million people. This reveals many things, but two are of importance here. First, if we extend our understanding of Irish cultural identity to include not just those born in Ireland but also those born of Irish parents, then by 1900 more Irish people lived in the United States than in Ireland. Beyond their numerical significance lies their even more important cultural contribution to modern Irish identity. Second, it tells us that the history of Ireland and the United States is one defined by migration in all its forms: emigration, immigration, and even, in recent times, re-emigration. From mythical beginnings to modern relationship, migration continues to be the thread that interweaves and shapes the destiny of these two nations.
EARLY IRISH IMMIGRATION The origin of Ireland’s first encounter with what would become known as the United States is an event shrouded in myth. Early pre-Christian Irish legends tell of “enchanted Islands to the West”—Tír Na nÓg (“the land of eternal youth”) and Hy Brasil (the “island of great desire”)—which bespeak of knowledge of a land as yet undiscovered. Legendary accounts of Saint Brendan the Navigator’s voyages to inhabited lands in 550, where he preached the Gospel to the natives, have led to speculations as to whether or not Saint Brendan may have reached the New World almost 1,000 years before Christopher Columbus. With Columbus’s “discovery” of America in 1492, comes Ireland’s first recorded contact with the New World. According to William D. Griffin, William Eris, or Ayers, a native of 27 www.abc-clio.com
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Galway, was one of forty volunteers who remained behind on Hispaniola; they were all later killed by the Indians. By the 1580s, Griffin argues, Ireland had become both a training ground and a staging area for England’s empirical ambitions in North America. Elizabethans such as Richard Grenville and Walter Raleigh began adopting the “colonization” techniques of “plantation” practiced in Ireland as a means of establishing an English colony in the New World. By the seventeenth century, Irish migration to North America had begun in earnest, and between 50,000 and 100,000 Irish emigrants made their way to the American colonies. Most came as soldiers, sailors, convicts, or indentured servants, a consequence not only of the need for cheap labor in the new colonies but also, following Oliver Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland in 1649–1650, of the forced indenture of thousands of Irish people. However, Catholic gentry, such as Thomas Dongan and Charles Carroll, also emigrated and left a significant legacy: as governor of New York, Dongan oversaw the drafting of the “Charter of Libertyes,” while Carroll’s grandson—Charles Carroll III—was the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence. After the overthrow of King James II in 1689, the concerted Anglicization of the British colonies provoked laws, such as the ones in Maryland in 1704 and again in 1715, which discouraged the entry of Catholics. By the turn of the century, Protestant emigration, primarily from the province of Ulster, had begun to constitute the majority of Irish immigration to the United States. These immigrants were largely Scots-Irish—sometimes called Scotch-Irish, they had first been transplanted from Scotland to Ireland (where they were known as Ulster-Scots)—and Presbyterian, and emigrated in family and congregational groups, rather than individually. Kevin Kenny records that large-scale emigration from Ulster began in 1717 and that by 1775 possibly as many as 250,000 Ulster-Scots had left Ireland for North America. The Scots-Irish came to America for much the same reasons their ancestors had come to Ireland, in search of land and religious tolerance. However, just as in Ireland, they found both were harder to achieve than they originally expected. Before 1725, they immigrated in significant numbers to New England; however, religious intolerance and the search for land sent them outwards from Boston to the more remote parts of New England and Massachusetts. Because of its increasing transatlantic trade with Ulster and its religious tolerance, after 1720 Pennsylvania increasingly became the primary destination of Scots-Irish immigrants. Initially settling in significant numbers in the Southeast, they soon began to migrate westward and toward the frontier. In Ireland these Ulster-Scots had formed a Protestant rampart between the Anglican ascendancy and the native Irish; now, as Scots-Irish in America they performed a similar role for the Anglo-American settlers and their American Indian neighbors. In search of land and as a first defense against Indian attack, the Scots-Irish settled the southern backcountry from Pennsylvania to Georgia. By 1790 the numbers of Scots-Irish in the United States were second only to the English, and more than a quarter of them lived in Pennsylvania. While the American Revolution had temporarily affected immigration to the United States, reestablishment of the Atlantic shipping trade in 1783 ensured continued emigration from Ulster on into the early eighteenth www.abc-clio.com
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century. By the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, this resurgence would propel almost 150,000 Irish men, women, and children across the Atlantic to the United States. The Scots-Irish brought with them not just a religious legacy but also a cultural and political legacy of dissension: part of their significant contribution to the American Revolution. Added to this is the continuing legacy of their descendants: as many as fifteen American presidents, from John Adams to William Jefferson Clinton, have traced their lineage to Irish Protestant ancestors.
BEFORE THE FAMINE By the 1830s the ethnic and religious makeup of emigration from Ireland to North America had markedly altered: Catholic immigrants had begun to exceed Protestants, and emigration had changed not just in culture but also in scale. Between 1815 and 1845 more than 800,000 Irish people emigrated to North America, which, according to historian Kevin Kenny, “was twice as many as in the preceding two centuries” (45). In the United States, these new Catholic immigrants were thought to be of significantly lower character than their Scots-Irish predecessors; so much so that previous Irish immigrants now took to calling themselves Scots-Irish. Before the 1830s the Ulster-Scots who immigrated were commonly known as “Irish.” It was not until the 1830s that the Ulster-Scots began to appropriate the term “Scots-Irish,” and they did so, it seems, to differentiate themselves from the incoming Catholic immigrants. Hence, what was initially simply a difference in religion soon became a difference in ethnic makeup; henceforth, the term “Irish” was applied to the Catholic immigrants from Ireland. This attempt to distance themselves from the more lowly Catholic (and largely southern) Irish immigration also propelled Scots-Irish Americanization by promoting them as an ethnic group who held in common with the Anglo-Americans both a similar culture and a nativist rejection of the “foreign” Irish. This new emigration had been provoked by the changing nature of nineteenthcentury Ireland. Not only was the population increasing dramatically—from 2 million in 1732, it had quadrupled in a little over a century to 8.2 million in 1841—but this overpopulation, combined with a lack of diversification in the economy, was putting inordinate pressure on the land. Just over half of all rural dwellers in Ireland held less than two acres of land on a tenure basis and under precarious conditions. And yet, too poor, too remote, too fearful, or too unwilling to undertake the transatlantic journey, these rural poor did not constitute the majority of pre-Famine emigration. It seems the majority of preFamine emigrants came from the more successful Irish Catholics: the “strong” (30 acres or more) or “middling” (10–30 acres) farmers, the self-employed artisans, or urban shopkeepers and professionals. Compared with the Famine emigration of the following decade (1845–1855) these emigrants were not only economically better off, they were more independent and still perceived emigration as opportunity rather than exile. And yet they were still sufficiently different from the earlier immigrants to mark them as decidedly “other” to the Anglo-American public. In whatever city they came to live, poverty and disease distinguished these “Irish” immigrants from both their Scots-Irish www.abc-clio.com
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predecessors and the Anglo-American citizens. In 1834 alone, the Irish constituted half the foreign-born inmates in the almshouses of Philadelphia and New York. They gathered together and lived in ghettoes like the Five Points in New York, where they competed with African Americans for accommodation, employment, and recognition (as American). Irishmen provided an inexpensive and expendable labor force in New York and the industrial cities of the East Coast, in the South and on the canals, while Irish women went into domestic service and the so-called needle trades. They also continued the traditions of faction fighting and secret societies from the Old World. By the 1840s, the Irish were getting involved in labor agitation for better pay and working conditions. All of this only heightened native distrust of and antagonism for the “foreign” Irish. The downturn in the economy in the 1830s saw an upsurge in nativism and antiCatholicism directed toward the Irish. Orangemen and Irish Catholics had been clashing in cities like New York and Philadelphia since the 1820s. This escalated in the 1830s, with the burning of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1834, and the publication of Awful Disclosures in 1836. In 1844 mounting nativist anger came to a head when native-born workers and Orangemen attacked the Catholic communities in Kensington and Southwark in Philadelphia and burned three churches. These events only strengthened Irish association with Catholicism, which would grow to become the symbolic register of Irish ethnic identity in the following century. Forced to defend their religion in America, Catholic Irish Americans were also heavily involved in trying to secure the repeal of the Act of Union (1800) in Ireland. The National Repeal Convention, on February 22, 1842, inaugurated the repeal movement as the first major Irish nationalist movement in America. However, its existence was brief and, ironically, it was its hero—Daniel O’Connell—and his emancipatory leanings that perpetuated its downfall. Along with Father Theobald Mathew, in 1842 Daniel O’Connell signed “An Address of the Irish People to Their Countrymen in America,” which called on the American Irish to support the abolition of slavery in the United States. Read out at a mass meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society at Fanueil Hall in Boston on January 28, 1842, this address and O’Connell’s continued adherence to his antislavery principles ultimately led to the American Irish repudiating O’Connell’s cause. As the Irish in America turned inward toward their lives in the United States and away from their nostalgia for a romantic Ireland, an event of unimaginable proportions was about to unfold “at home” that would bring the tragic reality of life in Ireland to their very doorsteps.
THE FAMINE The Great Famine, or An Gorta Mhór (The Great Hunger) as it was colloquially known, hit Ireland in September 1845. In just a decade it ravaged the Irish population; radically altered Irish agrarian, social, and economic practice; and initiated emigration as the social solution to fiscal and national issues. From 1846 to 1855 between 1.1 and 1.5 million men, women, and children died of starvation in Ireland, another 2.1 million Irish people emigrated overseas (more than 1.5 million of them to the United States). Irish immigration peaked at 219,232 in 1851. www.abc-clio.com
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It was not just the dramatic increase in numbers from pre-Famine levels that frightened antebellum Americans but, more importantly, the corresponding decline in the physical, economic, and, for them, implicitly moral “character” of these new immigrants. The majority of Famine emigrants came from cottiers (less than 2 acres), small-holding, and middling farmers, and often with only money enough to pay their passage (many benefited from assisted emigration either from former landlords or through remittances from relatives in the United States). After a voyage of anything up to six weeks on board ships colloquially known as “coffin ships” because of their onboard mortality rate, these immigrants arrived in the United States penniless, hungry, diseased, and disheveled. More than 80 percent of them identified themselves to emigration authorities (or were identified) as laborers or servants. A largely rural people with little or no urban skills, they tended to settle in the larger cities. They lived in ethnic ghettoes, such as Seneca Village and the Sixth Ward in New York, which further alienated them from the Anglo-American citizenry of these cities. Still worse, these ethnic enclaves often suffered from the highest rates of crime, disease, and death in the city; the “Bloody Ould Sixth” had the highest death rate in New York City in 1850. As well as falling prey to disease and crime, the Irish also often had the highest levels of poverty and insanity; again in New York, in 1850 they accounted for 60 percent of the population of the almshouses and, in this decade, they made up twothirds of the foreign-born population of New York City’s Bellevue asylum. All of this meant that the Irish Famine immigrants were not just the most impoverished members of American society; they were, at times, regarded both popularly and politically as a race of people unfit for American citizenship. With the arrival of the Famine immigrants, nativist hostility to the Irish both intensified and became more popular. In 1854, the Native American Party (or the KnowNothing Party as it was commonly known) went public and carried the elections in Massachusetts and Delaware. It directed its ire against the Irish immigrant’s religion: Catholicism. By attacking Catholicism, nativists hoped to prevent the rise of the Catholic Church in the United States while also preventing its primary congregation from getting a foothold in working- and middle-class society. As the influx of Famine immigrants expanded the base of the Catholic Church in the 1840s, nativists attacked Irish Catholics in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Richmond, Virginia, and Charleston, South Carolina, but were, ultimately, unable to prevent the rise of the Church or its predominantly Irish congregation. They also attacked the Tammany Hall machine within the Democratic Party, which used Irish immigrants in its system of mass politics, but again though they sought to expose the corruption of democratic government they struggled and failed for many years to effect change. As the Famine immigrants settled into U.S. society, the Catholic Church, the Democratic Party, and Irish nationalism became the three-leafed clover of Irish Americanism.
POST-FAMINE Immigration to the United States continued into the post-Famine period, as the Irish continued to flee Ireland in the hopes of finding a life, and maybe even making their fortune. The changing rural economy in Ireland—the advance of commercial farming and the www.abc-clio.com
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introduction of primogeniture—offset by the appeal of high-paying jobs in the United States, the relatively cheap price of passage, and the reduced sailing time (with the introduction of steam ships in the 1850s), sent many young men and women to the United States in the post-Famine period. Post-Famine immigrants were generally young and single, as likely to be women as men, and more than one-quarter of them were Irish speakers (typically from the impoverished areas of Munster and Connaught). Unlike Italian and Eastern European immigrants, only about 10 percent of the Irish emigrants ever returned home. (One of these was Michael MacGowan, who related his experiences in the United States in The Hard Road to Klondike). This often led to the performance of the “American wake” in the post-Famine period; this followed the traditional form of the Irish wake, only now the departing son or daughter was there to experience the send-off. Post-Famine immigrants traveled a path already well-worn, continuing the patterns of Irish immigration and settlement in the United States set by earlier Irish Catholic immigrants. As with the earlier immigrants, they favored the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest and settled predominantly in large urban centers. Only a small number of Catholic Irish lived in the South, but a large number of first- and second-generation Catholic Irish went west in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This migration typically comprised younger men, those more skilled and literate; they favored California and particularly San Francisco. The Irish in the West tended to do much better than those on the East Coast. Also, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church sponsored resettlement schemes throughout the United States for impoverished and overcrowded Irish communities in the East, but these largely failed. The Draft Riots (1863) and the Orange and Green Riots (1870 and 1871) sustained and strengthened the popular stereotypical perception of the Irish as violent, drunken, unruly, and unfit for American citizenship. But the Irish were changing and diversifying as a social community as the century progressed, particularly after the Civil War, where their courage and service had won them new-found respect in the eyes of the native public. A new class of Irish was emerging from the ghettoes; these “lace curtain” Irish sought acceptance as middle-class Americans and struggled to disassociate themselves from the workingclass, “shanty” Irish mass. They looked for skilled or even professional jobs and moved out of the Irish enclaves and into middle-class American neighborhoods. Also, as a second generation of Irish Americans began to come of age they advanced further into American society and away from the ethnic origins of their parents. This second generation was typically more successful and more American than their forebears. The Irish also moved away from the more traditional forms of agitation carried over from Ireland—secret societies, faction fighting, rioting—and into the American labor movement. Again both men and women got involved, with Terence V. Powderly standing out as the leader of the Knights of Labor, the largest labor organization in the United States in the late 1870s and 1880s. Still suffering from nativist attack and rhetoric, the Irish themselves were also now heavily involved in similar attacks and charges against newer immigrants. In particular, the Irish dominated the nativist workingmen’s movement against the Chinese in California; they organized demonstrations and called for a series of stricter anti-Chinese measures (culminating in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act www.abc-clio.com
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suspending Chinese immigration for ten years). As with the Scots-Irish before them, this gave the Irish the opportunity to demonstrate their fitness for American citizenship by pointing to the presence of a minority immigrant community more alien than themselves. Racial ascendancy had been a fundamental part of American identity ever since the settlers’ first encounter with the Native Americans; in learning this, the Irish immigrants were becoming American. Possibly Irish America’s greatest advance in the post-Famine period, and the one that would both indemnify and demonize their social position well into the twentieth century, was their progression toward political agency, achieved through gaining outright control of Tammany Hall. While Tammany involved itself in municipal politics on a local level, the extent of its success in the United States—from San Francisco, to Chicago, to New York—made it a national concern for the reformers who worked to expose and destroy it. New York was the real seat of Tammany municipal power, and with the death of William Tweed in 1871 that power fell into the hands of the Irish. Between “Honest John” Kelly, Richard “Boss” Croker, and “Commissioner” Charles Francis Murphy, the Irish controlled municipal politics in New York City from 1871 to 1924, with only a few brief interruptions. For fifty years the Irish dominated city politics in America by adapting the mass mobilization practices of O’Connellism and what Kevin Kenny calls the “subterranean politics” of Irish tradition. This political power base helped support, promote, and secure Irish America’s ascension to the ranks of citizenship. Also, by the late nineteenth century the triumph of the liberal American Catholic movement (over the more conservative and radical theologies) in promoting a vision of Catholicism that emphasized American secular values such as self-reliance, industry, thrift, and temperance to and in its parishioners helped promote Catholics as American citizens. As these Irish Americans moved toward bourgeois respectability, nationalism—formerly an indication of the community’s non-American character—began to respond to and reflect the American conditions and concerns of the first- and second-generation ethnics; for Irish Americans moving into middle-class American society, it became what Kerby Miller calls “a means to ultimate assimilation.” However, Republican nationalists, such as John Devoy, Michael Davitt, and Patrick Ford, were still prominent within the movement and continued to direct their attention toward a free Irish republic.
EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY By the early twentieth century Irish Americans had left behind their “immigrant” identity and begun to merge into American society. This was certainly helped in part by the arrival in the early part of the twentieth century of “new immigrants,” such as the Italians and the Eastern European Jews, whose culture, religion, and lifestyle seemed more alien to the Anglo-American society than that of the Irish. At the same time, the number of Irish immigrating to the United States had significantly decreased, falling to just over 300,000 Irish arrivals between 1901 and 1910. With transatlantic emigration interrupted by World War I, Irish immigration to the United States dipped to under 150,000 in the teens and recovered to just under 250,000 in the twenties. The onslaught of the Great www.abc-clio.com
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Depression and then World War II drastically reduced the number of Irish emigrating; in the 1930s the number dropped to as little as 13,167, recovering to just double that in the 1940s, 26,967. The US Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924 effectively ended mass emigration to the United States as a possible solution to Irish problems, establishing an annual quota of 28,567 for immigrants from the Irish Free State, which was reduced to 17,853 in 1929. Though immigrant numbers were falling, the number of second-generation Irish Americans was rising. But Irish Americans were not just advancing in generations; they were also advancing socially. By 1900, first- and second-generation Irish Americans had begun to achieve parity with the native-born population in the field of employment. With the arrival of the “new immigrants” the Irish had begun to move out of manual labor and into skilled and blue-collar management jobs; a smaller amount had begun moving into white-collar jobs and professions. As they moved into the second generation, Irish American women, too, were moving out of their traditional employment of domestic service and into areas such as nursing, teaching, secretarial work, and stenography. At this time, the Irish involvement in the American labor movement continued to deepen, and Irish women were also beginning to take a leading role in the movement. One of the foremost labor activists in the U.S. in the early twentieth century was Mary Harris Jones, popularly known as “Mother Jones.” A native of Cork, she helped found the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905. Irish Americans were now spread across the spectrum of American society. Though they still accounted for a disproportionately large number of the indigent population, they were now also producing some of America’s best-known writers, dramatists, artists, singers, actors, and directors: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Finley Peter Dunne, James T. Farrell, Eugene O’Neill, Georgia O’Keefe, Chauncey Olcott, James Cagney, John Wayne, John Ford, Walter Huston, and Raoul Walsh, among many others. They made their impact felt in sports as well, particularly in baseball where along with supplying a whole host of players, managers like Ned Hanlon, John McGraw, and Connie Mack became some of the most successful and innovative the game has known. Catholicism was the fastest-growing religion in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, thanks in large part to the Irish; by 1915 there were 15 million Catholics in the United States, and this would more than double by 1950. While liberal Catholicism dominated U.S. Catholic thought in the early twentieth century, one of the most famous Catholics of the 1930s was the controversial figure Father Charles Coughlin. His weekly radio sermons against American banking, the Hoover administration, and subsequently President Franklin Roosevelt carried an undercurrent of anti-Semitism and proved very popular, drawing a regular weekly audience of more than 5 million during the Depression. Coughlin’s support was strongest among the working to middle-class Irish Americans—those Irish aspiring to become more successful Americans—who Andrew Greeley argues “were probably on the verge of making it when the Great Depression rolled the nation into a decade of economic stagnation” (Greeley 121). By World War II, Coughlin’s fascist sympathies had alienated his public, and his archbishop forced him to return to his parish duties. www.abc-clio.com
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In politics, Irish Americans continued to dominate on the municipal level through a second generation of “reformed” city machines that incorporated social reforms into their program. Even more powerful than their predecessors, these Irish-led Tammany machines continued to dominate city politics and provide patronage employment for a large number of Irish Americans. However, the birth of the New Deal in the 1930s marked the beginning of the end for these Irish-led political machines. But while Irish representation was declining at the local level, with Alfred Emmanuel Smith’s nomination as a presidential candidate in 1928 it was beginning to announce itself at the national level. Al Smith was the first-ever Catholic presidential candidate; unfortunately, due in large part to antiCatholic bigotry, he won only eight states (losing even in his own state of New York) and was defeated by Republican Herbert Hoover. Despite this defeat in the United States, by the 1920s Irish Americans had played their part in securing a major Irish achievement: independence. The 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland and the subsequent execution of the Irish “martyrs” by the British helped replace an ailing campaign for constitutional reform with a rejuvenated hard-line republicanism on both sides of the Atlantic. Irish American nationalism had provided much of the impetus for this rebellion; the New York-based organization Clan na Gael, under the leadership of John Devoy and Daniel Cohalan, provided money and support and even helped plan the 1916 insurrection.
POSTWAR IRISH AMERICA In the postwar era, the history of Irish America is one primarily concerned with the advance and assimilation of Irish Americans already in the United States. After World War II there were just two decades of significant Irish immigration to the United States—the 1950s and the 1980s; immigration would never again reach the numbers or public presence of the late nineteenth century. This decrease in the influx of new immigrants further loosened ties to an Old World heritage that had been receding with every generation, as the Irish became more and more American. Even the symbolic register of their ethnic identity—Catholicism—had since the end of World War II become a primary marker of their Americanness. During (Irish American) Senator Joseph McCarthy’s high-profile crusade against communism in the 1950s Catholicism was established as the antithesis to communism and, as such, became for the Irish Americans the very marker of their American identity. With John F. Kennedy’s ascension to the American presidency in 1960, Irish Americans achieved full acceptance as Americans, and Catholicism became the symbol of both their American and ethnic identity. By the time of Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, Catholicism had become an American religion and the Irish Americans had firmly become American. By the latter half of the century Irish power in municipal politics had faded. With the exception of Richard J. Daley in Chicago (mayor from 1955 until his death in 1976), the Irish municipal machine had succumbed to factors such as the loosening of ethnic ties and the rise of new immigrant communities. Along with this, their symbiotic relationship with www.abc-clio.com
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the Democratic Party, which had seen them advance from foreigners to citizens, had also begun to dissolve. No longer synonymous with the Democratic Party, as Irish Americans ascended into middle- and upper-class society their politics became correspondingly more conservative. By 1980 a majority of American Catholics voted Republican, helping to elect Ronald Reagan as president. As their relationship to Catholicism and the Democratic Party changed, so too did their relationship to nationalism. While Irish Americans continued to contribute to the cause of nationalism in Ireland in the postwar period, the form of that contribution changed significantly as the century progressed. Ireland’s neutrality in World War II had upset Irish Americans and led to a decline in interest in Irish affairs; however, the start of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s brought a renewed interest in Irish nationalism in the U.S. The American Congress for Irish Freedom was founded in 1967; the National Association for Irish Justice in 1969; and the most famous of these organizations, the Northern Ireland Aid Committee or NORAID was founded in 1970. Founded to assist the victims of violence in Northern Ireland, including political prisoners and their families, NORAID was repeatedly accused of sending guns to the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Concerned that violence was not the answer, the “Four Horsemen” of Irish American politics—Edward Kennedy, ‘Tip’ O’Neill, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Hugh Carey— worked closely with the Social Democratic Labour Party’s John Hume in the 1970s to find a political approach that would offer an alternative to violence. Though the hunger strikes of the early 1980s briefly escalated Irish American interest in physical-force nationalism and led to a resurgence in support for NORAID, by the mid-1980s (with Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams’s recognition that a political campaign could support the republican agenda) interest in both Ireland and the United States had turned toward finding a possible political solution to the troubles in Northern Ireland. This would lead to the declaration of cease-fires by the IRA in the 1990s, which would culminate in the Belfast (or Good Friday) Agreement in May 1998. President Clinton was one of the chief architects in bringing about this agreement and it remains a legacy of his administration, one that he still works to preserve. By the 1980s, stagnation in the Irish economy would send a new wave of immigrants to the United States. These immigrants generally consisted of two groups: the legal immigrants who availed of the Donnelly and Morrison visas (as well as the normal system) to find jobs and become recognized members of American society, and the illegal immigrants who were effectively economic refugees trying to escape the lack of opportunity in Ireland. Generally, illegal Irish immigrants entered the United States on tourist or student visas and remained in the country to become part of America’s undocumented aliens. The level of illegal Irish immigration to the United States in the 1980s is estimated to be somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000. Better educated and consisting of greater numbers of skilled and professional workers than previous waves, these “new Irish” of the 1980s—legal and illegal—rejuvenated and challenged traditional Irish American identity. One of the traditions the new Irish immigrants broke from was the established pattern of Irish immigrant settlement. Unlike their predecessors, these “new Irish” did not restrict their movement to ethnic Irish www.abc-clio.com
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neighborhoods; instead, they moved much more widely across both nation and state. While they still immigrated in significant numbers to the major cities of the East, West, and Midwest, they did so it seems not out of a sense of ethnic kinship but rather because these cities provided the best opportunities for the diverse range of employment they were seeking. With the sundering of old Irish neighborhoods came a significant weakening of ethnic identity among Irish Americans. The new Irish immigrants furthered this dissolution by bringing with them to the United States a modern sense of Irish identity that contradicted the older community’s nostalgic sense of a tragic Irish identity conditioned by religion and nationalism. These conflicting views of Ireland would lead to a mixed relationship between the established Irish American community and the new immigrants: while they supported each other on issues such as the Irish Immigration Reform Movement, they clashed on issues such as gay rights, with the new immigrants largely supporting the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization’s petition to march in New York City’s Saint Patrick’s Day parade. On key issues such as this and the continuing support for the IRA’s violent struggle in Northern Ireland, these two groups established their separate and antithetical visions of Irish cultural identity. Having witnessed the dissolution of the “special relationship” between church and state in Ireland and experienced at first hand the deadly consequences of armed resistance in Northern Ireland, the new immigrants had a far looser attachment to Catholicism and nationalism than their Irish American compatriots.
MODERN RELATIONS The 1990s and the new century have already seen crucial changes in the relationship between Ireland and the United States. One of the most significant changes so far has been the reversal in the traditional pattern of emigration and population loss in Ireland, a consequence of the rising Irish economy in the 1990s (dubbed the “Celtic Tiger”). In 1998, 21,200 people emigrated from Ireland but more than 44,000 people migrated into the country. This is part of a continuing trend. Ireland it seems is becoming a nation of immigrants rather than emigrants, and many of these immigrants are former emigrants returning from Britain and the United States. Catholicism has also suffered possibly irreparable damage in both Ireland and the United States in the new century. First in Ireland and then in the United States a series of scandals involving pedophiliac priests and the Catholic Church’s continued failure to report these criminal acts and their perpetrators have left the Catholic Church reeling not just financially but, more importantly, devotionally, as parishioners begin to question the Church’s failure to protect its flock. This controversy has forced the resignations of Brendan Comiskey as bishop of Ferns in Ireland and Bernard Cardinal Law as archbishop of Boston in the United States (for their failure to report incidents to the police) and forced Catholic dioceses in the United States to declare bankruptcy. In the twenty-first century Ireland has redefined its relationship with the United States. Building on the strong social, political, and economic ties the tradition of emigration has established between the two countries, Ireland has repositioned itself as the gateway to www.abc-clio.com
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Europe, and particularly to the lucrative European market for the United States. Rather than exporting its well-educated population to the United States, by the turn of the twentyfirst century Ireland was invested in importing major U.S. telecommunications, chemical, and technology companies into Ireland. The Irish government cut taxes on capital, corporate profit, and personal income in the hopes of attracting U.S. companies into Ireland. By 2000 this had resulted in an explosion of economic activity, making Ireland the fastestgrowing country in the developed world; with just 1 percent of Europe’s population it accounted for 27 percent of U.S. greenfield investment in Europe. This altered economic relationship—with Ireland playing host to U.S. companies rather than the United States playing host to Irish immigrants—has resulted in a reconsidered and refreshed understanding of Ireland and the Irish in the United States, making the relationship between Irish and American identity much more homeostatic and contemporaneous. While traditional markers such as Catholicism and nationalism may be fading as symbolic registers for Irish identity on both sides of the Atlantic, both Ireland and the United States are now engaged in more comprehensive, considered, and modern understanding of what it means to be Irish, American and Irish American. References Adams, William Forbes. Ireland and Irish Emigration to the New World from 1815 to the Famine. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1980. Akenson, D. H. “The Historiography of the Irish in the United States of America.” In The Irish World Wide. History, Heritage, Identity. Vol II. The Irish in New Communities, edited by Patrick O’Sullivan. Leicester, England: Leicester UniversityPress, 1992: 99–127. Bayor, Ronald H., and Timothy J. Meagher, eds. The New York Irish. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Blessing, Patrick J. “Irish.” In The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, edited by Stephan Thernstrom. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1980. Greeley, Andrew M. That Most Distressful Nation: The Taming of the American Irish. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972. Griffin, William D., ed. The Irish in America 550–1972: A Chronology & Fact Book. Dobbs Ferry, New York: Oceana Publications, 1973. Jones, Maldwyn A. “Scotch-Irish.” In The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, edited by Stephan Thernstrom. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1980. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. New York: Pearson Education, 2000. MacDonagh, Oliver. “The Irish Famine Emigration to the United States.” Perspectives in American History 10 (1976): 357–446. Miller, Kerby. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Shannon, William V. The American Irish: A Political and Social Portrait. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1966. Walsh, Victor A. “The Great Famine and Its Consequences.” Éire-Ireland 23, no. 4 (1988): 3–31. Witte, Carl. The Irish in America. New York: Russell & Russell, 1970.
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Belfast 1786), Irish merchants were very active in supplying slave plantations in the Caribbean. A black population did exist in Ireland, with the largest concentration in Dublin, and although no evidence of public slave markets exists, newspapers did sometimes carry advertisements of slaves for sale and notices of runaway slaves. Ireland also had an active abolitionist community, which paralleled the community in the United States. Its leadership was made up of middle- and upper-class evangelical Protestants, who saw the eradication of slavery as a necessary step toward bringing about God’s rule on earth. In America, Quakers had long opposed slavery, and in the eighteenth century there were more antislavery societies in the South than in the North, but that changed in the early nineteenth century with the increasing profitability of slavery. Organized agitation against slavery really began in 1831 when William Lloyd Garrison started publishing The Liberator in Boston. This newspaper soon became the leading organ of American abolitionism. In 1833 the American Anti-Slavery Society was organized in Philadelphia under Garrison’s leadership. This national organization was the most militant of all the antislavery organizations. Often seen as fanatics by the
Abolition is the generic name given to a variety of reform efforts dedicated to eliminating slavery immediately and opposed to gradual emancipation or colonization schemes. Although slavery and blacks were quite rare in Ireland, the millions of Irish who emigrated to America in the period before the Civil War could not avoid the issue of slavery given that it was so intertwined with the American political and economic system. Irish Americans, while generally not supporters of slavery, nevertheless had significant problems with abolitionism, which prevented them from ever becoming a force for the peaceful eradication of slavery. In addition, the fierce competition between blacks and Irish for the unskilled jobs at the bottom of the economic ladder brought these two despised groups into continual conflict. Eventually, the Irish played a major role in eliminating slavery through their contributions to the Union cause during the Civil War, even if most Irish saw the war as being fought to preserve the Union and not to end slavery. Slavery and slaves were rare in Ireland, although there is evidence that slaving ships operated out of ports like Dublin. Despite having failed twice at establishing slaving companies in Ireland (Limerick 1784; 41 www.abc-clio.com
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general public, the abolitionists were relatively few in number, but they had a significant impact on public discourse because of their profound commitment to the cause of antislavery. Many of the members of abolitionist groups were educated church people of middle-class New England or Quaker heritage, although strong antislavery sentiments could also be found in upstate New York and certain sections of the western states. The radical abolitionists differed from those of moderate antislavery feelings in that they called for an immediate end to slavery. The most extreme abolitionists denied the validity of any laws that recognized slavery as an institution; thus, they systematically violated the fugitive slave laws by organizing and operating the Underground Railroad, which was used to conceal and transport runaway slaves to Canada. The activities and propaganda of the abolitionists, although discredited in conservative northern quarters and violently opposed in the South, made slavery a national issue. Few Irish were involved in the antislavery movement and many openly opposed it. The Irish had an antipathy to abolitionism for a number of reasons. For one, locked in intense competition with free blacks and slaves for unskilled jobs, the poor Irish did not look on blacks as fellow sufferers of the free market system; rather, the Irish viewed blacks as having the jobs they needed to survive. Hence, the Irish would often band together to bar blacks from working on the docks and in other labor-intensive occupations. As for slavery, the Irish viewed it as unfair competition that drove down wages. Neither did the Irish have much sympathy for the treatment of slaves, as they saw their own reception in America as being scarcely better. In New Orleans, for example, Irish www.abc-clio.com
immigrants were used in place of slaves to perform the deadly work of filling in the swamps because slaves were seen as valuable property while the Irish were considered expendable. The antislavery movement, like all the antebellum reform movements, grew out of the evangelical Protestant reform impulse. Although other factors certainly played a part, it can be argued that evangelical Protestantism was the bedrock of the reform movements. A defining attribute of evangelical Protestantism was a strong and virulent anti-Catholicism. When the overwhelmingly Catholic Irish arrived in America in the years 1820–1860, they experienced an extremely negative reception. The attitudes of leaders and members of the reform movements were clearly not meant to be welcoming to the poverty-stricken Irish Catholics who were struggling to make their way in the big cities of the East Coast. Consider, for example, the attitude of the “father” of abolitionism, William Lloyd Garrison. Amazingly progressive for his time, Garrison supported the abolition of slavery, pacifism, and equal rights for free blacks and women and opposed the harsh treatment of Native Americans and Chinese workers. However, as progressive as he was, Garrison was violently anti-Catholic, often making reference to the whore of Babylon and popish plots. He supported the temperance work of Irish priest Father Theobald Mathew only until Mathew refused to speak out against slavery. With Garrison’s anti-Catholic prejudice being commonplace in mid-century America, it should not be surprising that Catholics ignored his appeals to oppose slavery. In addition, the antislavery movement was linked with all the other reform movements, including temperance and women’s
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rights. Taken together, many Catholics viewed the array of proposed reforms as a Protestant attempt to regulate the way they lived, worshipped, and went to school (keeping in mind that the King James Bible and anti-Catholic tracts were used to teach reading in the public schools). A fundamental difference existed between these groups over the meaning of freedom and democracy. For the abolitionists, it meant the freedom to work to improve the lot of your fellow citizens, whether they wanted these improvements or not. For the Irish, it meant freedom to improve your individual circumstances and to live your life the way you saw fit. The Catholic Church’s stance on slavery was also a factor in the Irish attitude toward abolition. Although the church spoke out against unjust slavery many times in its history, the presence of slavery in Catholic countries created the impression that the Vatican condoned or even supported the institution. The matter was further muddled by certain nineteenthcentury American clergy, including some bishops and theologians, who tried to defend the American slave system. They contended that the long-standing papal condemnations of slavery did not apply to the United States. The slave trade, some argued, had been condemned, but not slavery itself. However, papal teaching condemned both the slave trade and chattel slavery itself. One could argue noncompliance with the teachings of the papal magisterium as a key reason that slavery was not directly opposed by the Catholic Church in the United States. Another reason may have been the precarious position of the Catholic Church in America before the twentieth century. Catholics were a relatively small and muchdespised minority. They were subject to repeated, sometimes violent, attacks by www.abc-clio.com
Protestant “nativists.” In many ways, the American church was attempting to protect Catholic immigrants in the United States and may not have seen itself as in a position to become the leader in a major social crusade. Regardless, this confusion or complexity surrounding the issue of slavery in America left Irish Catholics less likely to consider opposing slavery as an important teaching of the Catholic Church. In the political realm, it might be expected that the poor Irish, discriminated against in so many aspects of American society, would be natural supporters of the Republican Party with its slogan of “free soil, free labor and free men.” However, the Republican Party and its predecessor, the Whig Party, scorned the immigrant Irish as ignorant and uncivilized and an actual threat to the future of the Republic because of their perceived slavish obedience to Rome. The Democratic Party, however, saw the waves of immigrants as a way to solidify their control over American politics and actively wooed the Irish. They opposed stricter qualifications for citizenship, temperance legislation, and other laws that the Irish saw as being aimed directly at controlling them. Thus, the Democratic Party—a party that did everything possible to avoid the slavery issue altogether—gained the loyalty of Irish Americans for many generations. In the end, one cannot argue convincingly that the Irish were pro-slavery, but then, neither were they antislavery. Slavery simply was not a high-priority issue for them. What is most amazing about the Irish attitude toward abolition and slavery is not so much the failure of many Irish to join the reform movements, but rather the fact that close to 200,000 of them were willing to enlist, fight, and risk death to save a Union that had done everything possible to make ABC-CLIO
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them feel unwelcome and unwanted. In the process of helping to save that Union, they also helped to end slavery. William B. Rogers See also: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR; DOUGLASS, Frederick; ETHNIC AND RACE RELATIONS (IRISH AND AFRICAN-AMERICANS); MATHEW, Father Theobald; WEBB, Richard Davis References Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery to Freedom. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1988. Mintz, Stephen. Moralists and Modernizers. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Rogers, William B. “We Are All Together Now”: Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and the Prophetic Tradition. New York: Garland, 1995. Walker, Robert. Reform in America. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1985. Walters, Ronald. American Reformers, 1815–1860. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978. Walters, Ronald. The Antislavery Appeal. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
ALABAMA In the 1900 census, in which there were more than one and a half million people in America whose parents had been born in Ireland, less than two thousand of these people were recorded as living in Alabama. Most of these were concentrated in the counties surrounding the three urban centers of Birmingham, Montgomery, and Mobile. Of these, Mobile had the largest concentration of Irish, as it had long been regarded as a Catholic center. This history dated back to the time of the Civil War when a parish priest, Father Abram Ryan, who was based in Mobile but who had been born in Ireland, was known as the “Poet of the Confederacy” because of the patriotic poems he had penned for the South. The Irish presence www.abc-clio.com
was also visible with Bishop John Quinlan, the second bishop of the diocese of Mobile from 1859 until 1883, who had been born in Cloyne, Co. Cork. After Quinlan’s death, he was succeeded by Jeremiah O’Sullivan, who was also born in Co. Cork. Bishop Edward Patrick Allen followed from 1897 to 1926 and Bishop Thomas Toolen from 1927 to 1969, both of whom were of Irish descent. Consequently, for more than a century, priests who were of Irish descent were the leaders of the Catholic Church in Mobile, Alabama. The Irish were visible not only in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Alabama but also in the establishment and administration of some educational institutions. Spring Hill College in Mobile, which was founded in 1830 and was later run by the Jesuits, became closely associated with the Irish. This was as a result of the four presidents of the college: Father David McKinery, S.J. (1883–1887), Father James Lonergan, S.J. (1887–1896), Father Michael S. Moynihan, S.J. (1896–1899) and Father William J. Tyrrell, S.J. (1899–1907). All of these were either born in Ireland or were firstgeneration Irish-Americans. This tradition has continued up to the present day— numerous other presidents of the college, including the current president, Father Gregory F. Lucey, S.J., have been of Irish descent. Later, with less than 5 percent of Alabama’s population declaring themselves to be Catholic, it became necessary for foreign priests, especially Irish ones, to be sent to Alabama. One of the bishops of Alabama, Raymond Boland, was born in Tipperary, trained in Dublin, and sent to Alabama after his ordination. The Irish in Birmingham were first attracted by the coal and iron mines there but one Dublin-born Irish immigrant,
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Frank P. O’Brien, eventually became the mayor of Birmingham and a representative to the state legislature. O’Brien built the city’s Opera House and helped establish the first Catholic parish in the city. In 1921, however, the Irish-born pastor of this parish, Father James E. Coyle, was involved in a controversy that attracted national attention and was reported by The New York Times as an example of the religious intolerance of the South. A Methodist minister, Edwin R. Stephenson, shot Coyle, who had been named dean of North Alabama in 1913, because he had performed the wedding ceremony of Stephenson’s daughter, a Catholic convert, to a black man. The feelings of racial and religious intolerance in the case were not helped when the jury found Stephenson not guilty and he was freed. An example of the way in which the position of the Irish in Alabama has changed since this case was seen in the 1990 census conducted in the state of Alabama: more than 350,000 people claimed that they were of Irish ancestry. Another instance of the change in the perception of the Irish was seen when the Irish singer Dana, also known as Rosemary Scallon, lived in Birmingham with her family in the 1980s. Having won the Eurovision Song Contest for Ireland in 1970, she moved to Alabama to become a talk show host on the Eternal World Television Network (EWTN). She returned to Ireland in 1997 to become a candidate in the Irish presidency election and was later elected as a member of the European Parliament. David Doyle
The University of Alabama, Birmingham, 1989. Boyle, Charles J. “Alabama.” In The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999. Gleeson, David T. The Irish in the South, 1815–1877. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
ALLEN, FRED (1894–1956) The comedian known as Fred Allen (a show name he came to use personally) was born John Florence Sullivan on May 31, 1894, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Allen’s Irish connections are largely genetic, although late in his life he and his wife, Portland, took—and relished—several vacations there. As a comedian, however, he irritated some culturally sensitive Irish Americans, who took offense at the “Allen’s Alley” caricature of an Irishman, Ajax Cassidy. Although the dialectical oddities and logical inconsistencies Cassidy uttered would now be considered unacceptably stereotypical, Allen’s
See also: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR; CATHOLIC CHURCH, the References Blalock, Kay J. “The Irish Catholic Experience in Birmingham, Alabama.” Master’s thesis, www.abc-clio.com
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work was unusually notable for its refusal to mock people merely for being themselves. Thus, although Ajax Cassidy occasionally bears unfortunate resemblances to the persona of the stage Irishman, it was neither Allen’s intention nor his achievement to present the Irish as inherently comic or derisible. In 1908 Allen’s father, a bookbinder, was able to obtain employment for his son in the Boston Public Library. Allen thus spent much of his adolescence there, where he read widely. He became interested in juggling and, after reading several books on the subject, decided to attempt it before an audience. Although he was a competent juggler, he realized that his patter was more original than his juggling; he switched the emphasis of his act to comedy, and began touring as “the world’s worst juggler.” He attained success as a comedian on the vaudeville circuit, even touring as far as Australia. In a 1922 revue he met his future wife, Portland Hoffa. Allen’s major professional break came in 1932, when he was offered a comedy variety show on the radio. For most of the next twenty years he was employed in radio comedy. The shows kept a basic format, although their titles changed as different sponsors assumed his contracts: The Linit Bath Club Revue, The Salad Bowl Revue, and The Sal Hepatica Revue. His most extensive associations, however, were with the two shows Town Hall Tonight and The Fred Allen Show. In an age when most radio comedy in the United States involved comically mismatched spouses or racial stereotypes, Allen was routinely topical. He read nine newspapers daily, and wrote much of his own material. Widely regarded as the best adlibber in American comedy at the time www.abc-clio.com
(with the possible exception of Groucho Marx), Allen pioneered comedic styles that are still regarded as risqué: he derided his network, mocked his sponsors’ products, harassed guest stars, and questioned the sanity and integrity of anyone who wants public office. He also became involved in the single most popular enduring joke in American radio history, a long-running comic feud with his fellow comedian, Jack Benny. (Benny and Allen were friends off the air). A character and dialect segment of The Fred Allen Show (entitled “Allen’s Alley”) became a widely admired, and widely imitated, comic format. From approximately 1935–1949 Allen was one of America’s premier comedians. Television, however, ate immediately into his appeal, and he felt incapable of integrating his topical style into the new medium. By the middle 1950s Allen had largely retired from radio, and he began writing humorous memoirs. He died suddenly in New York City on March 17, 1956. Allen’s humor is unfortunately dated by the very topicality that initially made it seem so daring. Although some of his remarks retain their power—“Imitation is the sincerest form of television”—jokes about Franklin Roosevelt, the Brooklyn Dodgers, or Amos and Andy are too distant to retain their immediate amusement. Yet Allen knew that his topicality would date his work, calling the comedian’s task a “treadmill to oblivion.” He felt, however, that it was better to amuse in the present than to attempt to reach a posterity one would never know. Andrew Goodspeed
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AMERICAN CIVIL WAR 47 Allen, Fred. Treadmill to Oblivion. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1954. Dunning, John. On The Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Taylor, Robert. Fred Allen: His Life and Wit. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1989.
AMERICAN CIVIL WAR (1861–1865) As the most bloody and devastating conflict in America’s history, the cost of the Civil War included more than 620,000 dead in a population of 32 million and losses of billions of dollars in resources and destroyed property, in addition to effecting the collapse of the slave economy. The immediate cause of the war was the secession of eleven southern states over their bitter disappointment with the outcome of the 1860 presidential election, in which Abraham Lincoln was elected despite his not even being allowed on the ballot in the southern states. However, scholars today recognize that the underlying cause was the institution of slavery and the key role it played in the widely varying cultures, economies, and worldviews of the different regions. Nearly 200,000 Irish immigrants and Irish Americans fought in the Civil War, and the great preponderance (180,000) supported the Union cause. Despite setbacks such as the New York City Draft Riots, the exploits of certain Irish units, particularly for the North, helped the Irish begin to establish themselves as loyal Americans deserving of full participation in the nation’s future. The Civil War ended with Irish heroes as household names and with the Irish further along the path to assimilation into American society. While Irish immigration had been underway for many decades, the nature of the immigrants began to change significantly www.abc-clio.com
in the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century. About three-fourths of the roughly 5 million Irish immigrants who entered the country after 1820 belonged to the Roman Catholic Church. Most of these Catholic immigrants were impoverished people from rural Ireland. Irish immigration to the United States increased greatly during the 1840s when Ireland suffered through the Great Potato Famine, otherwise known as the Great Hunger (1845–1852), a catastrophic failure of the nation’s staple food crop. The famine resulted in disease and starvation that killed at least 1 million people in Ireland and forced another 2 million to flee the country over the period of a decade. After the famine, poor Irish continued to leave the country to find economic opportunities unavailable to them in Ireland. Throughout the nineteenth century, unskilled and uneducated Irish immigrants settled in large cities on the eastern seaboard of the United States, especially New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston, along with medium-sized cities such as Albany, New York. Although some immigrants went to southern port cities, such as Savannah, Georgia and New Orleans, the great majority ended up in the northern states as these states possessed a much more vibrant economy and a greater demand for unskilled labor. Here Irish Americans often faced discrimination in jobs and housing. Many Americans supported anti-immigrant groups, such as the Know-Nothing political party, which regarded Catholicism as foreign and a danger to American society. They viewed the Irish as barbaric and uncivilized. For the most part, Irish Americans had no choice but to live in squalid conditions surrounded by their countrymen and women and were only able to obtain ABC-CLIO
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employment in the least desirable and most dangerous occupations. Irish-American men were usually employed as manual laborers, while Irish-American women often found work as domestic servants. A prevailing characteristic of the Irish immigrants to be somewhat withdrawn from mainstream American society was evident even in the months leading up to the Civil War. Many Irish Americans were seemingly more interested in events in Ireland than in the political turmoil in the United States. Only six months before the war began at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, the colonel of the 69th New York militia, which was composed of Irish Americans, refused to parade his regiment before the Prince of Wales during a state visit to the United States. The regiment refused to march because of the British role in the famine and what Irish Americans saw as the unlawful occupation of their homeland. All talk of court-martialing the
regiment’s commander, Colonel Michael Corcoran, or disbanding all Irish regiments, promptly ended with the commencement of hostilities at Fort Sumter in April 1862. The 69th added nearly 800 recruits to its numbers in ten days, and the regiment marched down Broadway on its way to the war on April 23, 1861, a scene famously captured in a well-known Currier and Ives print. Although ambivalent about the war, most Irish Americans believed the conflict to be centered on the issue of secession and the attempt by Southerners to invalidate the results of a legal election. The country had lawfully elected Abraham Lincoln, and although most Irish were Democrats, they supported the notion that if the losers in a legal election could overturn those results simply because they disagreed with them, then the future of democratic, republican government was doomed. Another important strand of Irish support for the Union
Colonel Michael Corcoran at the Battle of Bull Run, Virginia, on July 21, 1861. (Library of Congress) www.abc-clio.com
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was the perception that the slaveholding aristocracy in the South was similar to the Protestant, landlord aristocracy in Ireland. The Irish in the South who remained loyal to their region did so mainly for the same reason as most Southerners, which was that they viewed the northern attempt to enforce the election results and prevent secession as an invasion of their homes. Few Irish were of the slaveholding class, and proslavery arguments did not figure in their defense of the South. A prominent exception is John Mitchel, a leading figure in the Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848 (a failed Irish rebellion against the British colonial forces), who argued that slavery was a positive good despite his vehement opposition to the harsh treatment of the Irish by the British, and despite losing two sons fighting for the Confederacy. Catholics and Jews were more accepted in the South than the North, most likely because they were there in much smaller numbers and their common whiteness was more important than any denominational differences from their Protestant neighbors. For example, Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision (which ruled that Dred Scott, a slave who had sued for his freedom, was not a citizen of the U.S. and had no rights to sue in federal court, and hence must remain a slave), was Catholic. Some Southern Irish leaders, like Mitchel, viewed the South as a weak, agrarian underdog trying to free itself from the domineering, ruthless, and capitalistic North, thus attempting to place the South in the role of the Irish in the long struggle against Britain. The most critical aspect of the Civil War for Irish Americans was the formation and performance of a number of specifically Irish units on both sides, but primarily for www.abc-clio.com
the Union. The 69th New York militia performed well during the war’s first major battle at Bull Run, and, when subsequently discharged, most reenlisted in the 69th New York Volunteers to serve for a further three years. Colonel Thomas Francis Meagher, the most charismatic of all the 1848 Young Ireland rebels, launched a plan to recruit an entire brigade of Irish soldiers. The idea of an “Irish brigade” had powerful cultural connotations for the Irish, as many exiled Irish had fought for the kings of Europe in the past, particularly against the British. Meagher, his notoriety only enhanced by his brave performance at Bull Run, was able to successfully recruit the brigade and was made its first commander. Subsequently, other Irish brigades were formed in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, and a total of twelve regiments were deemed to be Irish regiments. A related reason behind this effort to recruit Irish regiments for some Irish-American leaders was that once the Civil War was over, the thousands of Irish combat veterans would be well prepared to liberate Ireland from what they saw as the tyranny of British rule. These units performed admirably during the war, suffering enormous casualties at such battles as Antietam, Gettysburg, and Spotsylvania Courthouse. Of the 14,000 men in these twelve regiments, more than 3,000 were killed and more than 4,300 were wounded, for total casualties of 53 percent. The 69th New York Volunteers suffered greater casualties than any other New York regiment, and the New York Irish Brigade’s loss of 961 men in action was exceeded by only two brigades in the entire Union army. These losses received great attention in the popular press, as did the exploits of the Irish Brigade at the “Bloody Lane” during the battle of Antietam and the “Wheatfield” at ABC-CLIO
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Gettysburg. These accomplishments did much to lessen the anti-Irish and antiCatholic prejudice rampant during the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the New York City Draft Riots of July 1863 were widely seen as examples of the worst characteristics of the Irish–violent, lawless, and bigoted. These riots, still the worst in American history, erupted only days after the battle of Gettysburg over the implementation of the new draft law. This law, passed in March 1863, made virtually all men between the ages of 20 and 45 liable for military duty in order to satisfy the ever-growing manpower needs of the Union war effort. Opponents criticized a provision that enabled draftees to obtain exemption from service by supplying a substitute or by paying $300, which made the war appear to be “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” As the date for enforcing the act approached, dissatisfaction with this provision became widespread among the poor of New York City, especially Irish immigrants. The city remained quiet on the day the draft came into effect (July 11), but its resumption on the following Monday was marked by the rapid gathering of an unruly crowd, which soon attacked and burned the draft headquarters. The crowds prevented the fire department from reaching the building, and the fire quickly spread. Efforts by the New York City police and small units of soldiers stationed in the city to disperse the rioters provoked them to even greater violence. The mob roamed through New York, destroying property and committing other outrages. These were directed especially against blacks, whom many in the mob considered responsible for the Civil War. Many blacks were lynched, and black
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neighborhoods and establishments were attacked. The rioting subsided late Monday night but was resumed with even greater violence on Tuesday, July 14. Rioting continued until July 15, when military detachments reached the city from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and West Point, New York. Some of these units were made up of Irish soldiers who had no compunction about opening fire on their fellow immigrants. By Thursday, July 16, the riots had been quelled and calm had been restored to the city. The death toll during the three days of rioting is estimated at more than 1,000; more than fifty large buildings were destroyed by fire and property damage was about $2 million. Although a setback for the acceptance of the Irish as truly American, the fact that most Americans did not strongly support, and many openly opposed, the draft somewhat mitigated the long-term impact of the riots. In this public relations contest, the bravery of the Irish men fighting and dying on the battlefields all across the nation trumped the negative images of the poor Irish immigrants who instigated the Draft Riots. In the end, the Civil War provided an opportunity for the Irish to prove their loyalty and worth as full American citizens. As other immigrant groups were to do in future wars, the Irish helped to cement their rights as Americans through the blood of their young men. After the Civil War, Irish Americans made greater progress in moving into the middle classes and in alleviating anti-Irish prejudice. Other factors of course came into play, including the waves of immigrants from countries such as Italy and Poland who seemed even more foreign to Anglo-Saxon Americans than did the Irish,
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and the fact that the wealth of the Northern states grew by 50 percent during the decade of the 1860s. Still, after the Civil War, it would become more difficult for nativists to make the claim that the Irish did not belong in America or had not earned the status of citizenship. While the hoped-for invasion of Ireland by American Irish veterans never materialized, Irish Americans were the first American ethnic group to become involved in the liberation of their native country. Irish-American financial contributions, personal participation, and political influence, all initiated by the Civil War generation, aided movements to secure Ireland’s independence from the United Kingdom. Irish Americans played an important part in creating the Irish Free State in 1921 and the subsequent founding of the Republic of Ireland in 1949. William B. Rogers See also: ABOLITIONISM AND SLAVERY; DRAFT RIOTS; EMIGRATION; ETHNIC AND RACE RELATIONS (IRISH AND AFRICAN AMERICANS) References Bilby, Joseph G. The Irish Brigade in the Civil War: The 69th New York and Other Irish Regiments of the Army of the Potomac. Conshohocken, PA: Combined Publishing, 1998. Boyle, Frank A. A Party of Mad Fellows: The Story of the Irish Regiments in the Army of the Potomac. Dayton, OH: Morningside Press, 1996. Conyngham, David Power. The Irish Brigade and Its Campaigns. New York: Fordham University Press, 1994. McPherson, James. Battle Cry of Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. McPherson, James. For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. O’Grady, Kelly J. Clear the Confederate Way: The Irish in the Army of Northern Virginia. New York: DaCapo Press, 1999.
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AMERICAN CONFERENCE FOR IRISH STUDIES The American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) is an American nonprofit organization devoted to discussing and promoting Irish Studies. According to the ACIS bylaws stipulated in its constitution, ACIS “exists to encourage research and writing in Irish Studies by establishing a means of communication between scholars interested in Irish Studies in all disciplines, and to promote Irish Studies as a legitimate and distinct course of studies in American colleges, universities and secondary schools, and to further the development and dissemination of research, teaching and scholarly and critical inquiry in Irish Studies.” Striving to support members’ interests through annual conferences, scholarships, and book awards, ACIS has been instrumental in creating a climate conducive to and respectful of Irish Studies scholarship in the United States. Before 1960, those scholars interested in Irish Studies found it difficult to disseminate the information that they had amassed to those most interested in their work, namely other Irish Studies scholars, because a national, American organization dedicated to such an endeavor simply did not exist. Gil Cahill, Emmet Larkin, and Lawrence McCaffrey, Irish Studies scholars frustrated by the situation, sought to fill this void, and, after much help from an academically centered grassroots effort, ACIS was born. From its inception, ACIS (known as the American Committee for Irish Studies from 1960 to 1987), was embraced by both scholars and nonacademics from all disciplines and all walks of life, and it has seen its membership blossom from a few hundred members during its fledgling
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years to a now thriving international community of more than 1,500. The executive committee, comprising a president, vice president, secretary, treasurer, regional representatives (Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, New England, Southern, and Western), discipline representatives (arts, Celtic studies, history, Irish language, literature, and social science), and a graduate representative, meets annually at the national conference and is elected on a two-year basis; the vice president succeeds the president, and the previous president remains as an ex-officio member (officially termed the international representative) of the executive committee for a subsequent term. The annual conferences (national and regional) seek to provide members with a forum in which to discuss and present myriad topics of Irish interest and include scholarly panel discussions, lectures, plays, films, live music, and, traditionally, an endof-the-conference banquet. Typically, only about a third of the members attend the conferences, but all members are invited and encouraged to attend. Since 1961, the annual national conferences have been held at various universities and colleges in the United States, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, while regional conferences remain contained to their specific regions. As an organization devoted to promoting intellectual pursuits, ACIS recognizes those worthy individuals who have made or promise to make a significant contribution to the discipline of Irish Studies by annually awarding the Adele Dalsimer Prize for Distinguished Dissertation, the James S. Donnelly, Sr., Prize for Books on History and Social Sciences, the Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books on Language or Culture, the Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature, and the Donald Murphy Prize www.abc-clio.com
for Distinguished First Book as well as a postgraduate scholarship in Irish Studies at the University of Limerick in Ireland. ACIS also participates annually in panels and conferences at the Modern Language Association conference and in joint sessions at the American Historical Association. ACIS has made a name for itself in international circles, particularly Irish ones. Since 1978, the Republic of Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs has provided distinguished scholars from both the Republic and the North with the means necessary to present their work at the organization’s annual conferences. Further, because of another international effort (this time between an Irish university professor named Roger McHugh and his very generous countrymen and women), ACIS was able to reprint a series of seminal essays devoted to Celtic studies, Irish history, and Anglo-Irish literature, known as The Reprint Series. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago presses published these selections of essays. But perhaps the most notable international effort involves a relationship between ACIS and the Holy See: ACIS was involved in an international effort to microfilm important Irish and British materials from the Vatican’s Propaganda Archives and house them in Chicago’s Newberry Library. This was made possible through the initiative of ACIS founder Emmet Larkin with financial assistance from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Newberry Library. In both small and large ways, ACIS has made significant contributions to the promulgation of Irish Studies in the United States. No longer considered simply a beloved hobby for academics with “real subjects to pursue,” Irish Studies has become a legitimate and
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respected course of study in American colleges and universities. Valerie A. Murrenus See also: IRISH RESEARCH COLLECTIONS IN THE UNITED STATES Reference The American Conference for Irish Studies website. www.acisweb.com/index.php (accessed June 21, 2005).
is to provide hope for the people of Ireland, and it stands against violence and supports peace, culture, education, and community development. The organization underwrites cultural festivals, historic preservation, peace initiatives, and integrated schools, and solicits donations in four key giving areas: •
AMERICAN IRELAND FUND The American Ireland Fund (AIF) is the United States–based arm of the Ireland Funds, a global network of people of Irish ancestry and friends of Ireland dedicated to raising funds to support programs of peace and reconciliation, arts and culture, education, and community development. The AIF is the largest of ten Ireland Funds worldwide. Headquartered in Boston, the AIF’s president and chief executive officer (CEO) is Kingsley Aikens. The AIF, first named the Ireland Fund, was founded in 1976 as a nonprofit and nonsectarian organization, by Sir Anthony O’Reilly, former president, chairman, and CEO of the H.J. Heinz Company and fellow Pittsburgh businessman Dan Rooney, owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers football team. On St. Patrick’s Day in 1987, The Ireland Fund and the American Irish Foundation, founded by Irish President Eamon De Valera and U.S. President John F. Kennedy, merged at a White House ceremony to form the AIF. As of 2005, the AIF has raised more than $200 million for more than 1,000 projects in Ireland. It is a nonpolitical and nonsectarian fund that assists groups whose initiatives directly serve the people of Ireland, both north and south. Its mission www.abc-clio.com
•
•
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Promoting peace and reconciliation: The Ireland Funds support communities in Northern Ireland working together and toward a shared future. The organization has prioritized programs supporting those affected by the troubles, promoting social inclusion, citizenship, and participation, and encouraging a greater understanding of cultural identity within and between communities. Fostering community development: As Ireland experiences extensive economic, social, and cultural changes, the Ireland Funds promote an inclusive and integrated society and ensure the regeneration of marginalized urban and rural communities. Advancing education: The Ireland Funds focus on programs supporting access and progression from second to third level, preschool education, lifelong learning, and programs promoting tolerance through education. Inspiring arts and culture: The Ireland Funds support excellence and innovation in arts activities. Programs applied in settings of socioeconomic disadvantage and educational and health as well as programs promoting tolerance and reconciliation have been prioritized for assistance.
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The fund annually publishes CONNECT magazine, which is distributed to all donors. Anyone with an interest in Ireland and the goals and mission of the AIF is welcome to support the fund’s work. Donors may make unrestricted gifts, set up donoradvised funds to accomplish individual or corporate charitable goals in Ireland, contribute to its endowment, include AIF in estate-planning programs, and participate in other giving formats such as sponsorship and advertising. The AIF staff also arranges “fly-ins” to Ireland, allowing donors to visit projects funded by the AIF and see aspects of Ireland not normally available to tourists. Susan Gedutis Lindsay See also: DE VALERA, Eamon; KENNEDY, John Fitzgerald Reference “Who We Are.” Ireland Funds website. www.irlfunds.org/who_we_are/ (accessed May 10, 2005). “Your Money at Work.” Ireland Funds website. www.irlfunds.org/your_money_at_work/ (accessed August 15, 2007).
AMERICAN TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT The temperance movement is a general term that catalogs a variety of approaches from reduced consumption of liquor to abstinence from all alcohol, and it encompasses a variety of definitions, from moderationists to teetotalers. This range of definitions reflects the internal evolution of the movement. Temperance is seen as part of the nineteenth-century social reform impulse. In reality, the temperance movement touched on many aspects of life in the relatively new American democracy, especially during a century of intense demographic, www.abc-clio.com
economic, and social change. Temperance was not a peculiarly American institution and its precepts traveled, particularly to Ireland, where it was one of the most popular reform movements of the nineteenth century. Women had an important role in temperance work. Many female activists found common cause with the temperance movement, including the national Women’s Christian Temperance Movement, founded in 1874. Later, some female reformers adopted a more militant stance in the AntiSaloon League, which was founded in 1893. The temperance movement provided women with the opportunity to articulate and direct personal, political, and social change, and it marked the beginnings of women as a political force. Similarly, African Americans like Frederick Douglass were very vocal on temperance matters. Despite its impact on contemporary American life, historians have neglected serious study of the temperance movement; however, in recent decades, an interest in social history and women’s studies has led to a deeper analysis of its role in American life. Temperance is particularly associated with the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the Volstead Act, ratified in 1919, which was the enforcement arm of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This Act introduced a nationwide ban on “the manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors.” Known as “Prohibition,” it was the culmination of nearly a century’s work by temperance advocates who wished to tackle the problems of alcohol abuse. However, recent analysts offer a variety of interpretations of the motives and results of temperance work. To challenge the excessive consumption of alcohol, especially liquor, was a condemnation of early American society, as the
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tavern and church were the principal meeting places of earlier communities and alcohol accompanied every social occasion. This led to a huge consumption of hard liquor and a large incidence of drunkenness. At the turn of the nineteenth century, a physician, Benjamin Rush, wrote “The Effects of Ardent Spirits Upon Man.” This essay contained a two-pronged attack on alcohol consumption. Rush used the increasingly scientific approach to medicine and illness to point out the hazards accompanying excessive alcohol consumption. He also cited the moral evils implicit in the overconsumption of liquor, and these scientific and moralistic approaches pervade temperance rhetoric. Initially, temperance societies encouraged people to avoid drunkenness and adopt moderation in their drinking habits. However, this evolved to advocating abstinence from hard liquor, and from the 1830s, a more radical approach was taken advocating total abstinence. As the century progressed the temperance movement grew increasingly vocal and organized in its approach, and moved from targeting individuals within the community to organized and effective political campaigns. This resulted in the Volstead Act and Prohibition. By its nature, the temperance movement has a wealth of primary resources. Those who sought to promote temperance relied not only on word of mouth, but also on the printed word to publicize anti-liquor propaganda, leaving countless pamphlets, newspaper articles, periodicals, and documents in archives, libraries, and collections around America. However, these resources were imbued with a rhetoric that emphasized the contrasting moral qualities of the temperate and intemperate. This rhetoric also mirrored the social concerns of those who were viewed as truly American and www.abc-clio.com
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truly respectable. Likewise, temperance inspired much popular temperance literature and drama, though of a sentimental nature. In the past decades, historians and critics have analyzed these primary resources and applied a variety of critical frameworks to the temperance movement; these in turn have yielded new interpretations. Temperance has inspired accounts of the individuals involved, histories of the various groups, and more recently, following on Joseph R. Gusfield’s work, the wider context is now scrutinized. He suggests that temperance activity was not merely a response to changes in alcohol consumption but temperance advocates were responding to what they regarded as a threat to their social and economic positions. One of these threats took the form of huge numbers of German and Irish immigrants, who were known to drink heavily. Temperance advocates believed these immigrant groups threatened the established social order and this was justified when the rural agricultural ideal was challenged and increasingly replaced with an urban commercial ideal. Gusfield sees temperance as offering an opportunity to consider how status conflict influenced the development of American society. Ann Coughlan See also: DOUGLASS, Frederick; MATHEW, Father Theobald References “Temperance and Prohibition Era Propaganda: A Study in Rhetoric.” The Brown University Library Digital Collection. http://dl.lib.brown.edu/temperance/ rhetoric.htm (accessed October 14, 2005). Dannenbaum, Jed. “The Crusade against Drink.” Reviews in American History 9, no. 4 (1981): 497–502. Gusfield, Joseph R. Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963. ABC-CLIO
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56 AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE Quinn, John F. Father Mathew’s Crusade: Temperance in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and Irish America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002.
AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE (1775–1781) Meeting in congress at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, representatives of the thirteen American colonies declared their independence from the British crown on July 4, 1776. Long-standing disputes over indirect political representation and colonial tax policy had festered for decades, leading ultimately to sufficient—though by no means total—public support for independence. Their declaration, written primarily by the Virginian Thomas Jefferson, is notable for its stirring eloquence in expressing a political philosophy heavily indebted to Enlightenment beliefs about human liberty: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” British and American troops had already engaged in sporadic battles, most notably the battle of Bunker Hill (on June 17, 1775, near Boston, Massachusetts). Contrary to later romantic notions of Americans unpreparedly stirring to arms, an American army of considerable ability already existed and was commanded by General George Washington, later the first president of the United States. To defeat them, therefore, the British deployed large numbers of their own troops, some already stationed in the colonies, and hired thousands of Hessian mercenaries to accompany fresh troop deployments. They also dispatched numerous Royal Navy ships to the Americas, www.abc-clio.com
particularly in attempts to take such harbors as New York. But the distances involved made coordination of the British effort troublesome, and they were hard pressed, on numerous diplomatic fronts, by France. These difficulties prevented the full use of all of Britain’s enormous military power against the colonists. Initial combat actions went against the Americans, and Washington’s men were driven south out of New York and into parts of New Jersey. Yet Washington, despite these reverses, understood that the tactical nature of the war favored him. The British were most powerful when they could mass and coordinate their efforts into large, setpiece fighting. Therefore, Washington did not set out to confront the British forces whenever they were near, but instead began a war of attrition and evasion, attacking when possible, then vanishing when the British began to pursue him. Although a somewhat misleading image of Washington retreating into victory has emerged, one of his great tactical strengths was undoubtedly this ability to withdraw aptly when conditions were disadvantageous for his type of fighting. He was also skilled at making unexpected strikes, the most famous of which was his nighttime Christmas attack on Trenton, New Jersey, in 1776. The year 1777 was marked by several difficult campaigns for New York State and Pennsylvania. Most notably, British troops from Canada, under the command of General John Burgoyne, marched into upper New York State and fought with the colonial armies there. Although the British soldiers fought well, Burgoyne made slow progress and eventually engaged in disastrously misconceived battles against American forces at Saratoga. After this fighting, Burgoyne became convinced that he could not press
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on, and he surrendered his army on October 17, 1777. This surrender had an electrifying effect: it not only encouraged the rebellious Americans and discouraged the British, but it also led France to seize upon Britain’s misfortune by negotiating an alliance with the Americans (February 1778). Spain too joined with France in 1779, seeking to use Britain’s present disadvantages to settle long-standing territorial disputes. What had begun as a war against rebellious colonists was now turning, for Britain, into a dangerously international conflict. Washington’s troops, meanwhile, spent the winter of 1777–1778 in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, in conditions of terrible cold and privation. But they were able to remain a credible army and emerged again to battle British troops. That winter experience is often—although probably with exaggeration—considered the crucible of suffering through which Washington was able to hold his army together; after that, although there were still significant incidents of desertion and insubordination, his army retained its martial ability and ultimate unity. The British had initially attempted to crush the rebellion by focusing their attention on the northern colonies, where the most significant hotbeds of revolution were to be found—notably Boston and Philadelphia. In late 1778 they began to try to make the southern colonies places of battle. They fought into Savannah, Georgia, at the very end of December 1778, and into Charleston, South Carolina, in 1780, using their significant naval advantage skillfully. They were not idle in the north, however, and continued campaigns there as well. For the next two years the Americans and the British traded blows, in North Carolina and Virginia particularly, neither being able to destroy the other. Yet as the www.abc-clio.com
war progressed, and French assistance began to tell, the British were losing their advantages. They proved unable to draw the American troops into truly decisive battles in which they could crush the revolution permanently. Nor were they able to develop a strategy with which to counteract the American tendency to use the enormous size of the territories to their own advantage. Furthermore, they had difficulty in making their presence hold, even in conquered territories. Although they met with some significant successes on the battlefield, they soon found that they were not truly conquering the lands. Their intention had been to crush and pacify known centers of revolt, then allow support for independence in the rural areas to die of starvation. Yet this strategy was not successful; the American troops proved able to use the rural areas without wholly alienating local support. Britain was winning some battles, but losing the war. Eventually Britain’s Lord Charles Cornwallis was pinned into Yorktown, Virginia, where Washington’s men pressed them by land and the powerful French fleet on the Atlantic coast prevented Royal Navy assistance from the seas. On October 19, 1781, Cornwallis surrendered. Although this was not total military defeat for the British war effort, it effectively ended the war. Unable to take the lands by sheer force, and incapable of using the dominating power of the Royal Navy to force coastal resupply and troop movement, they abandoned the effort to suppress American independence. A peace treaty—widely viewed as a skillful triumph of American diplomatic self-interest—was signed in Paris on September 3, 1783. The Irish played an important role in the American War of Independence—on both sides. Although the sentiment of Irish ABC-CLIO
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Americans endorsing the colonial side was substantial, it must be noted that significant numbers of Irish also fought among the British troops. At a time when many in Ireland did not control their own financial destinies, the British military offered regular employment and the possibility of advancement, both strong inducements to people without numerous other economic options. In Irish-American society, however, there appears to have been strong support for the revolution’s goals, and Irish Americans made substantive contributions to its success. Among the most notable Irish-born participants in the American revolution are Richard Montgomery, a general in the American army during the preDeclaration attack on Quebec in 1775; Charles Thomson, a Philadelphia-based firebrand who subsequently became the secretary of the Continental Congress and helped design the Great Seal of the United
States; and Matthew Thornton, who participated in the Continental Congress and signed the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps the most important element of the American Revolutionary War for Irish-American relations, however, was the example it provided of colonial subjects overthrowing their ties to Britain. Despite being engaged in numerous diplomatic contests with France and Spain, Britain was still widely considered the most powerful force in the world. That a group of colonials could overthrow this power, at least in their own territories, and then defend their independence with arms, appealed strongly to Irish nationalist sentiment. Many Irish also felt a keen sense of approval for the rhetorical expressions of liberty in which the American struggle was expressed. But these hopes for an Irish reenactment of American resistance were illusory, if alluring; in 1800 the Act of Union effectively
General Montgomery and his troops at Crown Point, New York in September 1775, en route to Canada. Despite the capture of Montreal, the subsequent assault on Quebec failed disastrously, leaving Montgomery dead and the invaders obliged to remain in winter quarters. www.abc-clio.com
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ended any real possibility, for more than 100 years, of an Irish nation wholly independent of Britain. Andrew Goodspeed See also: BARRY, John; BURKE, Edmund; SCOTS-IRISH CULTURE; SCOTSIRISH AND MILITARY CONFLICT References Bailyn, Bernard. Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge: Belknap,1967. Doyle, David Noel. Ireland, Irishmen, and Revolutionary America. Dublin and Cork: The Mercier Press, 1981. Hibbert, Christopher. Redcoats and Rebels. New York: Avon, 1990. McDonald, Forrest. E Pluribus Unum. Indianapolis: Liberty, 1979. Middledauf, Robert. The Glorious Cause. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Royster, Charles. A Revolutionary People at War. New York: Norton, 1981. Wood, Gordon S. The American Revolution. New York: Modern Library, 2002.
AN TÓSTAL: IRELAND AT HOME (1953–1958) An Tóstal: Ireland at Home was a nationwide tourism festival and the largest development project undertaken by Ireland’s statutory tourist boards during the 1950s. The national festival consisted of both centrally developed spectacles as well as regional events that were planned and executed by local Tóstal councils. Statutory authorities carried out all national and international marketing and publicity. Juan Trippe, president of Pan-American Airlines, proposed the Tóstal concept in 1951, the same year the British government held the Festival of Britain. Whereas the Festival of Britain was intended to reward the British people for their strength and steadfast determination during World War II and subsequent postwar deprivations, An www.abc-clio.com
Tóstal was designed to extend the tourist season while also attracting Irish emigrants, especially from North America, back to Ireland as tourists. An Tóstal, which means “a gathering,” was chosen as the name for the event in an effort to demonstrate the festival’s primordial connection to events reportedly from Ireland’s ancient past. Likewise, the An Tóstal emblem, created by Dutch designer Guss Melai and featuring an Irish harp and ornamentation inspired by the Book of Kells, was intended to further emphasize the imagined origins of the festival. The first An Tóstal was held between April 5 and 26, 1953. The scheduling was intended to extend the Irish tourist season, which traditionally runs from late June through August. While a sound idea in theory, the reality was that cold, damp weather dramatically reduced the number of visitors in attendance. In 1955, Tóstal was moved to May; however, there was little corresponding increase in tourist traffic. By 1958, it was clear that An Tóstal had failed to extend the tourist season or attract Irish emigrants back to their homeland, so organizers abandoned the original format, opting instead for a series of events, loosely connected by the name An Tóstal, that would be held from May through October. Ireland was to be rechristened, for marketing purposes, “Ireland of the Festivals.” Despite the failure of An Tóstal itself, the event nevertheless played a defining role for both touristic representation of Irish history and culture as well as the aesthetic reality of Irish landscape. Local Tóstal events were supposed to place “the strongest possible emphasis” on “Gaelic life, history, language, and culture” and were classified under the headings “nationality,” “culture,” and “constitutional and civic life.” Suitable ABC-CLIO
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themes included national traditions, language, music, art, drama, folklore, recreation, and leisure, while events ranged from sporting competitions (including fishing, equestrian, hurling, Gaelic football, as well as bicycle, foot, and automotive races) to parades, musical concerts, plays, pageants, and matchmaking festivals. A number of these local events remain a significant element of the contemporary tourist calendar. For example, the Rose of Tralee beauty pageant, Galway Oyster Festival, Dublin Theatre Festival, and Cork Film Festival were all originally held as Tóstal events. Pageants were a particularly important part of the Tóstal calendar and were used to stress the timeless nature of the event as well to present visitors with a narrative of key moments in Irish history. In 1953, the national pageant was based on the theme “four green fields,” which were to symbolize the four historic provinces of Ireland. The event was presented in the Theatre Royal in Dublin. The next year organizers planned a considerably more elaborate pageant that followed the life of Saint Patrick from his arrival in Ireland to his eventual peaceful conversion of the Brehons and Druids at Tara. It was a monumental undertaking, including 500 costumes, 1,300 volunteers, 1,000 pigeons, 24 wolfhounds, and 30 horses, as well as assorted deer and other game that were integrated into the spectacle. As many as 50,000 mostly Irish spectators braved bitterly cold weather to witness the event. In 1955, the Tóstal pageant was less elaborate and was held in the Croke Park Gaelic grounds in Dublin rather than the Boyne Valley. Beyond stressing Ireland’s impressive past, Tóstal organizers also used the festival to demonstrate economic and industrial progress made since independence. Before www.abc-clio.com
the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, organizers noted, there was “no systematic establishment of manufacturing industries,” yet afterwards hardworking Irish citizens made “considerable progress . . . towards the industrialization of Ireland.” Industrial parades and exhibitions such as the “Cork Makes It” display during the 1954 Tóstal further emphasized Irish progress. Finally, An Tóstal afforded an opportunity to reinvent the Irish countryside as a bright, welcoming, and cozy tourist paradise, a striking contrast to the obvious poverty of derelict buildings and deserted homesteads. From the first, Irish homeowners were urged to plant colorful window boxes, trim hedgerows, and repaint their homes. Initial aesthetic efforts often included window box competitions and town-sponsored decorative campaigns. Cork City, for example, was made up with extensive floral displays and colorful banners. In 1958, Bord Fáilte Eireann took further steps to encourage a redefinition of Irish townscapes by launching the Tidy Towns and Villages Competition— an annual event that rewarded communities that best reflected Ireland as a clean, inviting, and bright country. Although An Tóstal did not survive the 1950s, the Tidy Towns festival was expanded to include cities as well as rural farmsteads, and in 2005 more than 700 towns entered the competition. An Tóstal ultimately represents the beginning of a new stage of Irish tourism development. While the short-lived event failed to bring Irish emigrants back to Ireland, it nevertheless sparked the creation of a new image of the country. Eric G. E. Zuelow
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See also: BORD FÁILTE EIREANN References Conekin, Becky E. “The Autobiography of a Nation”: The 1951 Festival of Britain. 1-800-368-6868
ANCIENT ORDER OF HIBERNIANS 61 Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2003. Bord Fáilte. The Irish Tourist Board Report for the Year Ended March 31 1964. Dublin: Bord Fáilte Eireann, 1964. Fógra Fáilte. An Tóstal: Ireland at Home, 1953; National Programme. Dublin: Fógra Fáilte, 1953. Fógra Fáilte. An Tóstal: Official Souvenir Guide. Dublin: Fógra Fáilte, 1953. Furlong, Irene. “Tourism and the Irish State in the 1950s.” In The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s, edited by Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea, and Carmel Quinlan, 164–186. Cork: Douglas Village, 2004. Zuelow, Eric G. E. “The Tourism Nexus: Tourism and National Identity since the Irish Civil War.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004.
ANCIENT ORDER OF HIBERNIANS The Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) is one of the oldest Irish organizations in the United States. The AOH has played an important role for Irish Americans culturally, historically, politically, and socially. It was founded in 1836 at the Saint James Church in New York City as a Catholic lay organization for people born in Ireland, and later for people born of Irish descent in the United States. The roots of the AOH stretch back to Ireland where the precursor of the American AOH was founded in 1565 to defend Catholic Ireland against
A member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians plays the bagpipes during the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Clinton, Massachusetts in 2005. (AP/Wide World Photos) www.abc-clio.com
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Protestant Britain. The American AOH’s motto of “friendship, unity, and Christian charity” was based on that of the original Ancient Order of Hibernians in Ireland. The AOH was brought to New York by Irish immigrants in response to the rise of the Order of the Star Spangled Banner or the Native American Party’s (KnowNothings) bigotry against the Irish. To try and halt the Know-Nothings attacks on both Irish people and church property, the AOH served as guards to defend church property from attack. Most early AOH activities remain unknown as the society was founded on the basis of secrecy. In addition to defending church property, the organization assisted Irish immigrants financially who came to the United States as members of the Order back in Ireland and provided networks that facilitated employment and upward mobility for their members. The AOH was also instrumental in preserving Irish culture and traditions in America. As the Know-Nothing movement dissipated after the American Civil War, the AOH shifted its focus from defending property to “charitable activities in support of the church’s missions, community service, and the promotion of preservation of their Irish cultural heritage in America.” (AOH website) Organizations such as the AOH did not hinder assimilation into America, but felt “the development of an ethnic identity expressed through a rich institutional and associational life was the primary means through which the Irish assimilated” (Kenny 148–149). Between 1856 and 1921, more than 3 million Irish immigrated to the United States, increasing membership in the AOH. However, controversy developed over membership in the AOH. In 1884, the AOH debated over whether or not www.abc-clio.com
American-born Irish could be admitted as members. Members of the AOH decided that American-born Irish could be admitted to the order in addition to those who were born in Ireland. This decision ensured that AOH membership would remain strong after the Irish-born members died and their American-born children could carry on the traditions and work of the AOH. The order is organized at the local, state, and national levels. Divisions make up the local area, while county and state boards oversee the work of the order for that state; all are governed by a national board that is elected every two years. Although the national board provides overall direction for the organization, it is up to each individual state and its divisions to determine what activities that organization will focus on. Each division decides what activities they will pursue among the four goals of the AOH. The first goal is for Ireland to be united as a thirty-two-county republic. The AOH has played an important role in promoting the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. They began to collaborate with other IrishAmerican groups such as the Irish American Unity Conference (IAUC). The divisions provided opportunities to learn about the issues in the north so that they can find ways to get involved in the process. Some examples of this are the speakers’ forum, which brings in speakers to help divisions understand Irish political issues. Speakers have included Jim Gallagher of the IAUC and the teachers from the Holy Cross School in Belfast. The second goal is protecting and defending the Catholic faith. During the years that nativism was a force in American politics, the AOH had to address specific
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nativist threats and defend their churches from attack in cities such as Boston and New York. In other states, such as Ohio, the organization had to address claims about not being loyal Americans. They fought back against such claims by focusing on a campaign to honor Irish Americans who had fought for America’s freedom during the Revolutionary War. They also had to contend with defamation—the Irish were often perceived as drunken troublemakers. The AOH has been successful in proving Irish loyalty to America and took on defamation that is still present in today’s society. However, there is still work to be done on the defamation front, such as the continued perception of Irish as drunks. The third goal of the AOH is to preserve and promote Irish culture. Throughout the history of the organization, Hibernians have promoted and preserved Irish culture not only for its own members, but also for the communities in which they live. Irish history, music, literature, step dancing, and historic preservation are brought to the local communities by the divisions to illustrate the importance of preserving and promoting Irish culture so that future Irish Americans may have the chance to learn about their own unique cultural heritage as well. According to the AOH’s constitution, the organization “builds upon the past, present, and future of Irish culture in order to foster the ideals and perpetuate the history and traditions of the Irish people [and] to promote Irish culture.” The final goal is for divisions to embrace the AOH’s motto of “friendship, unity and Christian charity” by encouraging divisions to help out their local communities. In the beginning, the AOH provided financial assistance to Irish immigrants who were AOH members in good standing from the www.abc-clio.com
Irish Order. Local divisions helped immigrants obtain jobs and social services. While Irish immigration to the United States is no longer the major charitable cause of the AOH, divisions now focus on dealing with various Catholic action issues and supporting their local communities in a variety of ways, such as participating in Habitat for Humanity building projects, running Red Cross blood drives, visiting the sick, conducting fund-raising drives for charities, taking up donations for food banks, and becoming involved in other charitable activities within a division’s community. National Catholic action initiatives in which local divisions take part are projects such as religious vocations, pro-life, and hunger issues. At times, it can be a struggle for members to become involved in contentious issues such as abortion while others such as hunger are more easily defined and easier to be involved with. Historically, the AOH helped Irish immigrants to adjust to life in America through employment and housing while keeping the cultural traditions of Ireland alive in the hearts of their members. In the twenty-first century, the organization has helped Irish Americans to go beyond the green beer aspect of their Irish heritage and to use the organization as an eye-opener to the heritage that gives Irish Americans a unique identity. Many aspects of Irish culture, such as music, dance, literature, and history have exposed Americans to the culture of Ireland beyond celebrations of Saint. Patrick’s Day. As membership continues to increase and as new divisions form throughout the United States, the link between Ireland and the United States will continue to remain strong not only in the present, but in the future as well. Nicole Cassidy ABC-CLIO
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64 ANGLIN,TIMOTHY WARREN See also: CATHOLIC CHURCH, the; NATIVISM AND ANTICATHOLICISM; SAINT PATRICK’S DAY PARADES References Ancient Order of Hibernians website. http://www.aoh.com (accessed June 30, 2007). Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. London: Pearson Education Limited, 2000.
ANGLIN,TIMOTHY WARREN (1822–1896) Timothy Warren Anglin was a journalist, politician, and officeholder in New Brunswick. Born August 31, 1822, he was the son of middle-class Catholic parents, Francis Anglin and Johanna Warren. He received a classical education in his hometown of Clonakilty where he afterwards taught school. After the Great Famine struck Ireland, he left for North America. On Easter Monday in 1849, Anglin boarded a ship for Saint John, New Brunswick. Shortly after his arrival in Saint John, Anglin founded the Saint John Weekly Freeman, through which he sought to defend his fellow Irish Catholics in the city. Like so many other Irish communities of the diaspora, the Irish Catholics of Saint John were seen by ‘respectable’ citizens as prone to drunkenness and violence. They also faced discrimination on many levels in the British Protestant city of Saint John. Through the columns of the Freeman, Anglin not only defended Irish Catholics from attacks by the establishment but also chastised those of his compatriots whom he saw as idle and given to alcohol abuse. In 1853 Anglin married Margaret O’Regan but she died just two years later, in 1855. He soon became skilled and articulate in his profession as a political journalist, and this led him to seek elected office. Although www.abc-clio.com
an earlier attempt to enter municipal politics had failed, he was elected to the New Brunswick House of Assembly in 1861 as an independent for Saint John. While opposed to British domination of Ireland, Anglin viewed with favor the imperial connection for the British North American colonies, as a rampart against aggressive American policies. He was opposed to the project of the confederation of these colonies on the grounds that it was a bad deal for Saint John and New Brunswick. The anti-confederation arguments Anglin presented in the columns of the Freeman helped defeat the government in 1865. He became an executive councillor in the newly elected anti-confederate government. His opponents, the confederates, began to style him as the leader of the disloyal faction of Catholics in the colony. And while neither Anglin nor most of his fellow Irish Catholics in New Brunswick were active Fenians, they did support greater autonomy for Ireland. So when the Fenian menace became serious in the mid-1860s, the confederates seized the opportunity to brand Anglin and New Brunswick’s Irish Catholics generally as a band of disloyal, anti-confederate Fenians. Anglin resigned from government before the poorly organized Fenian raid on New Brunswick in April 1866; this appeared to give credence to the confederates and their project of political union. While Anglin was generally opposed to the specifics of the confederation proposal, he gave the new system a chance and was elected to a seat as an independent in the House of Commons in the first general election in 1867, a seat he would occupy for the next fifteen years. By 1872, Anglin had become a member of the fledgling Liberal Party in Ottawa. In 1874, he was appointed
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speaker of the House of Commons but continued his journalistic activities for the Freeman, which led to accusations of conflict of interest. These latter cost him his seat in 1877, although he was reelected in a by-election in the summer of 1878. In opposition from 1878 to 1882, Anglin became an outspoken critic of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald’s government and a supporter of Home Rule for Ireland. Defeated in the election of 1882, Anglin left the Freeman and Saint John in 1883, with his second wife, Ellen MacTavish (whom he had married in 1862) to take up residence in Toronto. After a prolonged period of unemployment interspersed with a few patronage appointments, Anglin finally obtained the position of chief clerk in an Ontario court of law, only to die one year later, in May 1896, from a blood clot to the brain. Although he was a social conservative who believed religion and morality were the cure for society’s ills, Anglin, unlike many of his middle-class contemporaries, was not opposed to trade unions, as long as workers’ organizations operated on legal principles. Anglin’s major contribution to his adopted country lay in his promotion of the interests of his fellow Irish Catholics, first in New Brunswick, then in Canada generally. While perhaps not the most flamboyant nor the most illustrious of Canada’s Irishmen, he was a skillful journalist and a competent and hardworking politician. Robert J. Grace See also: NEW BRUNSWICK References Baker, William M. “Anglin, Timothy Warren.” In Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Vol. 12. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Baker, William M. Timothy Warren Anglin, 1822–96, Irish Catholic Canadian. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977. www.abc-clio.com
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APPALACHIA Although Appalachia’s precise boundaries are subject to debate, all definitions link it to the eastern mountain chain that runs southwest to northeast for some 2,000 miles, from the hills of northern Alabama into Canada. The Appalachian Mountains are the oldest in North America and the highest east of the Mississippi River. Their ridgelines, some of which rise more than 6,000 feet, project a peninsula of northern climate, flora, and fauna deep into the American South. Their terrain made travel in and out of the region difficult and shaped its settlement patterns, creating a land of scattered farms and small towns. Appalachia has commonly, but mistakenly, been perceived as a homogeneous region. It is far better understood when its diversity is recognized. Subdividing it into northern and southern, or even into northern, central, and southern sections, based on environmental and cultural differences, provides for a more sophisticated appreciation of its complexity. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, European immigrants settled Appalachia from New Hampshire to Georgia. A significant number of them came from Ireland, predominantly Ulster, eventually becoming known in America as the ScotchIrish. Irish pioneers brought folkways that included house plans, livestock practices, Presbyterianism, music, and stories. They also adopted folkways from their new neighbors, including other Europeans, Native Americans, and, especially in southern Appalachia, African Americans, eventually making folkways hard to distinguish from others. This ethnic interaction in antebellum Appalachia created a cultural synthesis that has long been recognized as a valuable repository of American folk life. ABC-CLIO
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While some parts of Appalachia, like Pittsburgh, thrived after the Civil War, southern Appalachia was devastated by it. Its economy lay in ruins, its agriculture was further undermined by midwestern competition, and population growth created intense land hunger. Its resources of coal and timber offered rich opportunities for industrial exploitation, yet most of the profits were exported outside the region. For the first time Appalachia’s standard of living plunged far below that of the country in general, beginning a significant migration out of the region that continued to the 1960s. After the Civil War, a stereotype of Appalachia developed that has dominated perceptions of the region ever since. Created mainly by outsiders—local-color writers, home missionaries, teachers, business investors—it portrayed Appalachia as “a strange land and peculiar people.” This “hillbilly” image labeled Appalachian people as poverty-stricken, illiterate, and violent. It besmirches them to the present day. Appalachia’s nadir occurred in the middle of the twentieth century. With its economic difficulties exacerbated by the Great Depression, Appalachia became a national symbol of despair. President Johnson’s Great Society program identified it as a key target of the War on Poverty. Special funding from the federal Appalachian Regional Commission and a host of other government and private sources helped Appalachia turn the corner. But homegrown activism, growth in the American economy, steady migration to the Sun Belt, and burgeoning tourism have also helped put Appalachia on an upward path. While it still lags behind many national norms, the future of the region nevertheless now appears promising. H. Tyler Blethen www.abc-clio.com
See also: COUNTRY AND IRISH MUSIC; SCOTS-IRISH; SCOTS-IRISH PATTERNS OF SETTLEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES References Abramson, Rudy, and Jean Haskell, eds. Encyclopedia of Appalachia. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. Batteau, Allen W. The Invention of Appalachia. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990. Drake, Richard B. A History of Appalachia. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. Straw, Richard A., and H. Tyler Blethen, eds. High Mountains Rising: Appalachia in Time and Place. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Williams, John Alexander. Appalachia: A History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
ARGENTINA An independent republic since 1816, Argentina only reached relative institutional stability in 1853 after the promulgation of a national constitution. In the second half of the nineteenth century an agricultural revolution was followed by huge demographic expansion, originating in significant immigration inflows from Western and Central Europe, and later from the Middle and Far East and other Latin American countries. During the nineteenth and part of the twentieth centuries, Argentina was the most important destination for Irish emigrants outside the English-speaking world. It is estimated that between 1830 and 1930 at least 45,000–50,000 Irish-born persons immigrated to Argentina. About half of the immigrants settled in the country and the other half re-immigrated to the United States, Australia, England, and other countries, or went back to Ireland. Today, some authors estimate that 500,000 Argentines have Irish roots, making this the largest
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community with Irish origins in a Spanishspeaking country. Several Irish Argentines have contributed to the host country with their culture, shaping linguistic, social, and economic characteristics that are unique throughout the Irish Diaspora. (The term “Irish Argentine” was coined by writer William Bulfin in an editorial of the Southern Cross of November 10, 1882 to separate the identity of the Irish in Argentina from that of the Anglo Argentines.) Irish arrivals to Argentina before the nineteenth century were frequently linked to the Spanish colonial administration of the River Plate viceroyalty or to religious missions. Among the religious men, Father Thomas Field, S.J., of Co. Limerick pioneered the Jesuit missions among the Guarani Indians in Paraguay in 1587; Father Pedro José Sullivan, O.F., president of the University of Córdoba, participated in an open meeting of the Buenos Aires city council against the British invaders of 1806; also, naval Sub-lieutenant Jacinto Butler and Corporal Juan Carlos O’Donnell had roles in the defense of Buenos Aires. A number of officials in the Spanish administration in Buenos Aires had been born in Ireland, many coming from international Irish dynasties such as the O’Reillys in Cuba, the Martins on the Canary Islands, and the O’Higgins and Coughlans in Spain. Some of the Irish administrators who settled in the River Plate before 1810 were Carlos Murphy, Patricio French, Thomas Craig, Admiral William Brown, General John Thomond O’Brien, and brothers Thomas and Dr. Michael O’Gorman. Trade relations between British commercial houses, which had branches in many points of the North and South Atlantic, and Argentine-based merchants were essential for the development of the new River www.abc-clio.com
Plate republics. The exportation of hides and tallow, and later of jerked beef and wool, found markets in Liverpool and London. Conversely, Argentina increased its dependency on manufactured products imported from the British Isles. This increase in trade encouraged Irish-born merchants to settle in Buenos Aires and other cities of the new country. Thomas O’Reilly of Dublin, Thomas O’Gorman, Charles Stuart, Phillip Reilly, Daniel Donoghue of Cork, Robert MacCarthy, and C. O’Donnell were just some of the merchants who settled in Argentina. The Irish presence increased during the failed British campaigns of 1765 in Colonia del Sacramento, and of 1806 and 1807 in Buenos Aires, after which several Irish-born soldiers remained in the country, among them men by the names of Browne, Nugent, Kenny, Donnelly, Murray, Mahon, Cadogan, and Duff. It is likely that John Murray of Streamstown, Co. Westmeath, who was later employed in an Argentine ranch, initiated the first migration chain from the Irish midlands to Argentina. Other migration sequences, particularly from Co. Wexford, originated in the need for labor of Irish merchants who owned meat-curing plants in Buenos Aires. Gradually, with the advance over Indiancontrolled territories in Buenos Aires and Santa Fe provinces, Irish and Basque immigrants played a key role in sheep farming and in settling new areas in the pampas. Several Irish immigrants worked as shepherds in departments such as Mercedes, Luján, Capilla del Señor, San Pedro, San Andrés de Giles, San Antonio de Areco, Carmen de Areco, and Salto (Buenos Aires province) and by the 1880s in Venado Tuerto (Santa Fe province) and the south of Córdoba. Frequently, they shared the ABC-CLIO
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production with landowners or major tenants, and at the term of the agreement received a half or a third of total wool and lamb production without having to invest financial assets. In a time when return on investment of the wool industry was higher than the best financial opportunities in other markets, shepherds often became owners of relatively large flocks of sheep, a fact that allowed some of them to purchase land. From 1840 to 1880 the possibility of owning land—and the social wish to belong to a class that was conceived like the landed gentry in Ireland—attracted several thousand Irish emigrants to Argentina. Stories (sometimes exaggerated) of young tenant farmers who became owners of huge ranches in the pampas began circulating in Westmeath, Longford, Offaly, Wexford, and, to a lesser extent, Clare, Dublin, and Cork. The earliest settlers, who needed labor to help in their new ranches, did not have great difficulty convincing their brothers, cousins, or neighbors in Ireland to immigrate to Argentina. Female emigration, which was relatively low in the first half of the nineteenth century, began to increase in the 1860s with the prospect of marrying well-established landowners or tenant shepherds with promising futures. Finally, the central role played by Irish chaplains like Father Anthony Fahy and by Irish merchants like Thomas Armstrong provided cohesion to the newly formed community of Irish settlers through the development of an efficient social and economic network. The peak of the traditional emigration from the midlands and Wexford was in the 1860s and 1870s, and it declined after the 1880s. In 1889 a failed emigration scheme, the Dresden Affair, targeting poor emigrants from Dublin, Limerick and Cork cities, www.abc-clio.com
diminished the prestige of Argentina as a valid destination for Irish emigration. Later, in the 1920s a new peak was recorded after the War of Independence in Ireland; the final decline came with the international financial crisis of 1930. Not all of the Irish immigrants to Argentina worked as ranchers, sheep farmers, shepherds, and ranch hands, and not all of them were Catholics. After 1880, a significant proportion of the immigrants came from urban areas in Ireland and settled in Buenos Aires, Rosario, Bahía Blanca, Córdoba, and other Argentine cities, working as independent professionals or employees in merchant houses, railways, shipping companies, and cold-storage plants, most of them British owned. Many others worked in manual jobs, men as laborers and women as domestic service. Others settled in the sheep farms of Patagonia and the Falklands/Malvinas Islands, or in Chaco and other north-eastern provinces. A relatively high proportion of urban settlers had Church of Ireland background, particularly those who emigrated in the last years of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century. This group consisted largely of mobile emigrants who looked for opportunities in new countries; when they did not succeed, they went to the United States, Australia, England, or back to Ireland. In general terms, during the first half of the twentieth century the urban settlers with Protestant backgrounds integrated into the Anglo-Argentine community, while the Catholic rural settlers remained relatively isolated in a distinct Irish community for two or sometimes three generations. Ultimately, especially after the Falklands/ Malvinas War of 1982, both groups integrated into the larger Argentine society. Edmundo Murray
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ARKANSAS 69 See also: ARMSTRONG, Thomas St. George; BROWN, William; BULFIN, William; DRESDEN AFFAIR; FAHY, Father Anthony; FALKLANDS/MALVINAS ISLANDS; O’BRIEN, John Thomond; O’GORMAN, Michael; PARAGUAY. References Coghlan, Eduardo A. El Aporte de los Irlandeses a la Formación de la Nación Argentina. Buenos Aires: Author’s Edition, 1982. McKenna, Patrick. “Irish Emigration to Argentina: A Different Model.” In The Irish Diaspora, edited by Andy Bielenberg. London: Longman. 2000. Murray, Edmundo. Becoming “Irlandés”: Private Narratives of the Irish Emigration to Argentina, 1844–1912. Buenos Aires: Literature of Latin America Press, 2005. Murray, Thomas. The Story of the Irish in Argentina. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1919. Sabato, Hilda, and Juan Carlos Korol. Cómo Fue la Inmigración Irlandesa en Argentina. Buenos Aires: Plus Ultra, 1987.
ARKANSAS The first people of Irish descent in Arkansas were Scots-Irish settlers who formed the most sizable minority in that state. However, it was with the American Civil War that the most prominent Irishman to settle in Arkansas became known. Patrick Ronayne Cleburne was born in 1828 in Co. Cork. He immigrated to America and moved to Helena, Arkansas. In the Civil War he volunteered for the state militia. He fought in the battle of Shiloh and eventually rose to the rank of major-general, making him the highest-ranking Confederate officer of foreign birth. His status within the Confederacy was so great that Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, later called him “Stonewall of the West.” Cleburne later proposed that slaves be enlisted in the Confederate army to provide troops for a rapidly dwindling army. He was killed www.abc-clio.com
during the battle of Franklin, Tennessee, in November 1864. He was later buried in his adopted home of Helena, Arkansas. Although the Irish presence in Arkansas was always small compared with that of other ethnic groups in the state and with their numbers in other states, after the Civil War two governors of Arkansas, who had marked political differences, were both of Irish descent. Harris Flanagin, the last governor of Arkansas during the Civil War, was the first person of Irish ancestry to become the governor of an American state. His grandfather had been born in Ireland and had immigrated to America in 1765. Flanagin had been born in New Jersey and had migrated to Arkansas. He supported secession and served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. He was inaugurated as state governor in 1862, and he surrendered to the Union Army in Little Rock on May 27, 1865. The man who succeeded him as governor, Isaac Murphy, was born in 1800 in Pennsylvania to a family that had left Ireland in 1740. After settling in Arkansas, he represented voters at the secession convention, where he was the only delegate who opposed secession and later refused to change his vote. Having made contact with the Union Army, he was elected provisional governor and later governor in the Unioncontrolled parts of Arkansas. Murphy, in 1868, relinquished his position and died in 1882. In spite of the fact that two descendants of Irish immigrants had occupied such high positions at such a crucial time in the state’s history, there would never again be such a number of Irish descendants in public life in Arkansas as in those years. Although Arkansas elected another governor of Irish descent, George Washington Donahey in 1908, he failed to win his party’s nomination in 1912. Dan Hogan, the son of an ABC-CLIO
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Irish immigrant, became one of the founders of the Arkansas Socialist Party and ran twice for governor on the Socialist ticket. As in other states, however, there was a preponderance of Irish Americans in religious life in Arkansas. Over 150 years, four of the five Roman Catholic bishops have been either Irish immigrants or secondor third-generation Irish. The first bishop of the Little Rock diocese, Andrew Byrne, was born in Navan, Co. Meath in 1802. In 1844 he was consecrated as the bishop of Little Rock after the diocese was created. Later, he purchased a large amount of land near Fort Smith in the west of Arkansas, where he arranged for 1,000 Irish immigrants to be brought to escape the Great Famine and to bolster the number of Catholics in Arkansas. He died in Helena, Arkansas, in 1862. A few years later, Bishop Edward Mary Fitzgerald, who was born in Limerick City, was appointed as the second bishop of Arkansas in 1866. Earlier, he had become the youngest Catholic bishop in America at the age of thirty-four. In 1888 Fitzgerald opened Saint Vincent’s Infirmary, which, under the management of the Sisters of Charity, is the oldest medical institution in the state. The head of the diocese from 1906 to 1946, Bishop John B. Morris, was born in Tennessee of parents who were Irish immigrants, while Bishop Andrew J. McDonald, who was consecrated in 1972, was born in Georgia of two Irish parents. David Doyle See also: CLEBURNE, Patrick References Donovan, Timothy P., and Willard B. Gatewood Jr., eds. The Governors of Arkansas: Essays in Political Biography. Fayatteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1981. www.abc-clio.com
Symonds, Craig L. Stonewall of the West: Pat Cleburne and the Civil War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. Woods, James M. “Arkansas.” In The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America. Ed. Michael Glazier. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999.
ARMSTRONG,THOMAS ST. GEORGE (1797–1875) Thomas St. George Armstrong was a businessman, landowner, and benefactor of the Irish community in Argentina. Born on November 29, 1797, in Garrycastle, Co. Offaly (formerly King’s County), he was the son of Colonel Thomas St. George Armstrong and Elizabeth Priaulx. His father was county sheriff and had formerly served as an officer in the King’s 8th Regiment of Foot in North America from 1768 to 1785. In 1817, Colonel Armstrong sent his sons Thomas and John to Buenos Aires to run the merchant house Armstrong & Co. In 1826, Thomas Armstrong traveled back to Ireland with John Thomond O’Brien to try to recruit immigrants from Ballymahon, Ballymore, and Mullingar along the Westmeath-Longford border. The Armstrong family were the local landlords and were (and still are) highly respected in that locality. Many of the first Irish immigrants to Argentina were recruited by Armstrong. Thomas Armstrong was appointed director of the National Bank, the Bank of Buenos Aires Province, and the Bank of the Public Credit. In 1859 he founded the Argentine Insurance Company. He was financial agent of the national government and founding member of the Stranger’s Club. In 1863, the government of Buenos Aires province accepted a proposal to build the Southern Railway, signed by Thomas Armstrong, Federico Elortondo, and others. Armstrong was involved in constructing
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railways to Luján, Central Argentino, and Ensenada and served as their director. He also established rural colonies, particularly in Santa Fe province, where he managed a large estancia (ranch). When Father Anthony Fahy arrived in Argentina, he moved into Thomas Armstrong’s house, where he lived rent free for the rest of his life. Although being Protestant and Catholic, respectively, Thomas Armstrong and Father Fahy remained inseparable, lifelong friends. Armstrong had assimilated into the local community in typically Irish merchant fashion. He married Justa Villanueva, the daughter of the alcalde (chief officer under Spanish rule) of Buenos Aires of 1807. Being such a powerful business figure and because of his wife’s connections, Armstrong was also a very influential if unseen force in the political life of the country. He was the business counselor and close friend of almost every Argentine governmental administration from the directorship of Rodriguez to the presidency of Avellaneda, acting as honest broker between the British and Argentine governments in their commercial affairs for more than forty years. Thomas Armstrong was banker to Father Fahy, and this fact enabled Armstrong to become one of the leading business figures in Buenos Aires. He was a cofounder of the Buenos Aires Stock Exchange and a director of the Provincial Bank, which he made the central bank of Argentina. He was also the director and a substantial investor in the country’s major railway company and served on the boards of most of the major stock companies in the city. His connections with the local community were also beyond reproach. Armstrong died on June 1, 1875, in Buenos Aires. A city in Santa Fe was named after him by the government. Edmundo Murray www.abc-clio.com
See also: FAHY, Father Anthony; O’BRIEN, John Thomond References Coghlan, Eduardo A. Los Irlandeses en la Argentina: Su Actuación y Descendencia. Buenos Aires: Author’s Edition, 1987. McKenna, Patrick. Irish Emigration to Argentina: A Different Model. Cork: Irish Centre for Migration Studies, 2000. Newton, Jorge. Diccionario Biográfico del Campo Argentino. Buenos Aires: Artes Gráficas Bartolomé U. Chiesino SA., 1972.
ARTHUR, CHESTER A. (1829–1886) Chester Alan Arthur, the twenty-first president of the United States, was the first son of five children born to a Baptist abolitionist Irish immigrant. Born on October 5, 1829, in rural Fairfield, Vermont, he grew up in several parishes in Vermont and New
Chester Arthur, twenty-first president of the United States. (Library of Congress) ABC-CLIO
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York before attending Union College and graduating Phi Beta Kappa. Thereafter, Arthur served as principal of an academy from 1848 to 1851, hiring James Garfield in 1851 to teach penmanship before moving to another principal position in Cohoes, New York. He then began practicing law, taking an active role in the Lemmon v. New York case involving two Virginia slaves who sought their freedom. As far back as 1844 Arthur was a Whig, but he joined the Republicans at their inception and became a protégé of New York state boss Thurlow Weed. Standing six feet tall with a full physique and dark eyes, he had a strict code of personal ethics, contrasting sharply with his connections with the spoils system. Arthur became engineerin-chief of New York governor Edwin Morgan’s military staff, where he was so expert in providing supplies that he was appointed quartermaster general of New York State. Although he demonstrated honesty and ability, he returned to civilian life after Morgan lost in 1862. However, after the Civil War Arthur rose steadily in the Republican ranks, becoming the leading lieutenant of Roscoe Conkling and landing an appointment by President Ulysses S. Grant as collector of the New York Customs House. Here he presided over a large patronage empire that he tolerated and sometimes encouraged to the point where it erupted into a national scandal. Arthur’s overstaffing of his workforce with party workers eventually led to his suspension in 1878 and then removal by President Rutherford B. Hayes. In 1880, in a compromise designed to placate Republican Party divisions over nominating either James G. Blaine or Roscoe Conkling, the convention nominated darkhorse candidate James Garfield as presidential candidate and selected Arthur as his www.abc-clio.com
running mate to appease the Stalwarts (a conservative faction who saw themselves as “stalwart” in opposition to Hayes’s effort to reconcile with the South). As Conkling’s trusted friend, Arthur was expected to tow the Stalwart line in the Garfield administration. However, after only four months in office President Garfield was assassinated, and Arthur’s conduct during the assassination crisis won him public sympathy as he distanced himself from machine politics. Once Arthur assumed the presidency, he ceased to act like the “Gentleman Boss” and was scrupulously on guard against criticism. With a slim majority in Congress he could not accomplish much but surprised everyone by backing reformers, accusing the railroads of price collusion and rate discrimination, and endorsing the regulation of interstate commerce. His administration eschewed both the spoils system (which had made Arthur renowned as head of the New York Customs House) and pork barrel politics (the use of government funds for projects designed to win votes) by appointing both Stalwarts and Half-Breeds (a moderate faction that backed Hayes’s lenient treatment of the South and supported moderate civil service reform) and vetoing a pork-laden $18 million harbor and river bill that distanced him from the party faithful. In addition, he vigorously prosecuted the Star Route frauds in the Post Office Department and signed the first federal immigration law, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883. Known as a fastidious dresser with impeccable manners and a connoisseur of luxuries like Tiffany silver and Havana cigars, Arthur was a widower who cherished his privacy, did not trust the press, had disdain for the masses, and demonstrated apathy
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toward administrative tasks. Early in his administration he began his working days at 10:00 a.m. but by 1883 his daily meetings began at noon. However, what was viewed as lethargy was in fact the result of Bright’s disease, a fatal kidney ailment concealed from the public, press, and politicos. Although Arthur stoically sought renomination in 1884, the party passed him over in favor of James G. Blaine, who lost to Grover Cleveland. His ideologically rigid notions of economics prevented him from addressing the nation’s economic woes while driving Southerners and Westerners to the Democrats, but it is unclear what he was thinking or might have accomplished with a solid
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majority in Congress, given that he burned his personal papers the day before he died on November 18, 1886. Nevertheless, few men have assumed the office of president with such low expectations and left with such respect. Mark Connolly See also: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR; TAMMANY HALL References Doenecke, Justus D. The Presidencies of James Garfield and Chester Arthur. Lawrence: Regents University Press of Kansas, 1981. Howe, George F. Chester A. Arthur. 1934. Reprint, New York: Unger and Company, 1957. Reeves, Thomas C. Gentleman Boss: The Life of Chester Alan Arthur. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.
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Publicity of the time often referred to Baggot’s “Celtic temperament,” and the public’s familiarity with his Irish roots helped contribute to the box office success of one of his most popular films, Shamus O’Brien. This 1912 two-reeler was written by the Dublin born writer/director Herbert Brenon and told the story of an Irish patriot fighting for Home Rule in Ireland in 1789. Baggot would work with Brenon on a number of films in the years that followed. Baggot continued to develop as an actor and often took on dual or multiple roles, appearing in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1913, and playing ten roles in the 1914 film, Shadows. Although Baggot had achieved considerable success with IMP, in 1916 he decided to establish himself as an independent producer. This decision was prompted, in part, by his reluctance to relocate to California with other IMP employees who were now part of the larger Universal film group. Baggot’s efforts as an independent producer resulted in only one film, Absinthe, a remake of an earlier IMP film that he had made in 1914. By 1921, Baggot’s acting career was on the wane, and he decided to concentrate on establishing himself as a director. Over the next seven years he directed some of cinema’s biggest stars, including William Hart
A popular actor and director in Hollywood during the 1910s and 1920s, King Baggot was born on November 7, 1879, in St. Louis, Missouri. He was the son of William Baggot, who was born in Limerick, Ireland, in 1846, and Harriet King, who was born in Missouri in 1859. King Baggot attended the Christian Brothers College in St Louis and graduated in 1895. After stints working for his uncle in Chicago and playing football for the St. Louis Shamrocks, King Baggot joined an amateur theatrical group. By 1902 he was playing minor roles with professional touring companies; he would remain a traveling actor for the next four years. Attracted by the growing popularity of moving pictures and the opportunities the emerging industry offered actors, Baggot joined Carl Laemmle’s IMP (Independent Moving Pictures) company in 1909 and made his first screen appearance in The Awakening of Bess. Over the next two years, he appeared in a number of one- and tworeel films, slowly building a reputation as a solid actor within the industry. His position within the industry, and his growing fan base, was signaled by IMP’s decision to cast him in a series of detective films, the first of which, King, the Detective, was released in 1911. 75 www.abc-clio.com
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King Baggot (right) and William Hart (left) on the set of Tumbleweeds in 1925. (United Artists/The Kobal Collection)
(Tumbleweeds, 1925) and Marie Prevost (Moonlight Follies, 1921; Kissed, 1922). However, the emergence of sound films in 1927, as well as Baggot’s worsening alcoholism, hastened the end of his directing career. His last film as a director was released in 1928. He remained on the margins of the industry throughout the 1930s and 1940s, often acting in minor roles for Universal and MGM studios. He died in Hollywood on July 11, 1948. Gwenda Young See also: BRENON, Herbert Reference Dumaux, Sally A. King Baggot: A Biography and Filmography of the First King of the Movies. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002. www.abc-clio.com
BALFE, MICHAEL WILLIAM (1808–1870) During the nineteenth century there was probably no more popular opera in the United States than Michael Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl, which premiered in London in November 1843 with phenomenal results. While Dublin-born Balfe wrote twenty-eight operas, his Bohemian Girl seemed to have had universal appeal in America, where it is still performed. The opera had its New York premiere at the Park Theatre in November 1844, a year after the London premiere. Unlike a number of his contemporaries, Balfe never visited America, although in the 1850s he had considered a tour with his young daughter,
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Portrait of nineteenth-century composer Michael William Balfe. (Library of Congress)
Victoire, who was a well-established opera singer. In 1855 it was announced that Balfe was going to take over New York’s Academy of Music at 14th Street as director of the opera. However, this never happened. By that time Balfe’s fame as a composer had spread wide and far throughout Europe, where he was in demand, and his operas were being performed in different languages in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Prague, Trieste, Verona, Bologna, Madrid, and most capital cities in addition to London and Dublin. With the success of his Bohemian Girl in New York, a number of Balfe’s other operas were soon introduced there and along the East Coast of the United States. The ever-popular Bohemian Girl was also performed occasionally in an Italian version, La Zingara, in selected major American cities. Throughout the nineteenth century the original English version was heard www.abc-clio.com
across the country in Sacramento, San Francisco, Denver, Philadelphia, Boston, Providence, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Richmond, New Orleans, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Louisville, and many of the river towns, including Cincinnati and St. Louis. The opera’s influence reached far beyond its normal sphere and audience in America because of its beautiful soprano melody, “I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,” and a comparable tenor aria, “Then you’ll remember me,” which were being sung in the drawing rooms of America by budding young singers in small towns and large cities. Its influence was also seen in other venues. The lush soprano melody was being parodied in a music hall version as “I dreamt I had money to buy a shawl.” The opera’s title and story also attracted such parodies as The Bohea-Man’s Girl in the burlesque theatre. The American author Willa Cather was so influenced after seeing a performance as a teenager that it later featured in her writings, as it did in the work of Irish author James Joyce. Some considered the opera, with its memorable melodious tunes and romantic flavor, to be the bridge to what was to become the great American musical, which flourished in later decades. The Bohemian Girl was also adapted as a Broadway musical in 1902 with a production that ran for more than 100 nights, while a different adaptation in 1933 had a much shorter run. In 1936, silent film star Hal Roach produced a Hollywood version of The Bohemian Girl featuring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Some of the main Balfe themes were retained, but with its two featured slapstick comedy artists it was far removed from Balfe’s original romantic work. In recent times The Bohemian Girl has been performed in Nebraska and in New York ABC-CLIO
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both in a college version and at Carnegie Hall in a concert version with a professional cast. Michael Balfe was also a prolific songwriter with more than 250 works to his credit. Many of these became very popular in America, particularly when the great Irish tenor, John McCormack, sang them at his concerts in New York and elsewhere, and on recordings and films in the early decades of the twentieth century. William Balfe died in Ware, outside London, in October 1870. Basil Walsh See also: McCORMACK, John; WALLACE, William Vincent References Dizikes, John. Opera in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Lawrence, Vera Brodsky. Strong on Music: The New York Music Scene in the Days of George Templeton Strong. Vols. 2–3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Maretzek, Max. Crochets and Quavers or Revaluations of an Opera Manager in America. New York: S. French, 1855. Martin, George, Verdi at the Golden Gate: Opera and San Francisco in the Gold Rush Days. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. Preston, Katherine K. Opera on the Road: Traveling Opera Troupes in the United States, 1825–60. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
BALL, ERNEST R. (1878–1927) One of the most prolific and successful composers of the commercial Irish songs that flooded American popular music in the early decades of the twentieth century, Ernest Ball was no mere Tin Pan Alley tunesmith. His melodies ran the gamut from the tender sentimentality of “Let the Rest of the World Go By” (1919) to the dramatic masculine sweep of one of his early hits, www.abc-clio.com
“Love Me and the World Is Mine” (1906). He had the knack of turning even the sappiest lyrics into solid popular hits, as he did with an early success, “Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?” (1905), with words by Jimmy Walker, the future mayor of New York City. Ball was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 21, 1879. His musical talent developed early, and he attended the city’s conservatory. He spent most of his career as a staff composer for Witmark & Sons, one of the most successful publishing houses on Tin Pan Alley. This may have been one of the factors that attracted impresario Augustus Pitou to Witmark around 1910. Pitou was looking for lyricists and composers to supply material for his string of Irish musicals built around his new star, Chauncey Olcott. One of Ball’s first collaborations with Olcott and Pitou, The Barrys of Ballymore (1910), resulted in “Mother Machree,” the melody of which demonstrated the composer’s ability to showcase Olcott’s lyric tenor voice. Tin Pan Alley’s motto was that that one good hit deserves two or three more. Thus, Ball’s “She’s the Daughter of Mother Machree” (1915) and the wartime weeper, “Goodbye Mother Machree” (1918), both written with his frequent lyricist J. K. Brennan. Although he had success with a wide variety of songs, Ball became famous for his Irish songs, which both mirrored and helped to form the popular image of Irish America, as can be seen from their titles: “The Click of Her Little Brogans” (1906), “It’s the Twinkle in Her Eye” (1909), “I Love the Name of Mary” (1910), “Isle O’ Dreams” (1911), “With a Twinkle in Her Eye” (1911), “Irish Eyes of Love” (1914), “Ireland is Ireland to Me” (1915), “It is Irish to Me” (1915), “McCarty (What Else
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Could You Expect From a Man Named McCarty?)” (1915), “Never Let Yourself Forget That You Are Irish Too” (1915), “Somewhere in Ireland” (1917), “You Brought Ireland Right Over to Me” (1917), and “’Tis an Irish Girl I Love and She’s Just Like You” (1919). Most of these were written for Olcott vehicles, often with the star himself listed as a co-lyricist. While most of these songs have long gathered dust, Ball is credited with three of the most enduring Irish-American popular songs of all time. Along with “Mother Machree,” Ball wrote the music for “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” (1912) with Olcott and Geo. Graff, Jr., and “A Little Bit of Heaven, Shure They Call it Ireland” (1914) with J. K. Brennan. Ball was among a relatively small group of Tin Pan Alley composers who were successful on the vaudeville stage. In the 1920s he performed with his wife, Maude Lambert. At the age of 49 he suffered a fatal heart attack after leaving the stage of a vaudeville house in Santa Ana, California, on May 3, 1927. William H. A. Williams See also: MUSIC IN AMERICA, IRISH; OLCOTT, Chauncey
BALTIMORE The first allusions to Ireland and the Irish in Maryland tend to be notices of runaway indentured servants. Most references to Baltimore Irish refer to their general poverty and visible pauperism. Despite the Catholic origins of the Maryland colony, which was founded by Catholic Cecil Calvert in 1632, the Irish encountered discrimination in Maryland. Although the Act of Toleration granting religious freedom to www.abc-clio.com
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all Christians passed the Maryland Assembly in 1649, by the early 1700s, royal and Parliamentary acts by the Protestant monarchy of Great Britain disenfranchised and taxed Catholics in all the colonies, including Catholic-founded Maryland. In fact, aside from a few Catholic elites, the first Irish in the port city of Baltimore were indentured servants. Wealthier Catholics from Ireland chose the countryside estates of western Maryland. Charles Carroll, an Irish Catholic, arrived in Maryland in 1715 and came to own close to 3,000 acres in the Maryland panhandle. A distinct Irish ethnic identity did not emerge during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, as most servants left the city to farm land in the nearby countryside or assimilated into the larger, “American” culture. However, there were enough Irish immigrants arriving in Baltimore by the turn of the nineteenth century that the Hibernian Society of Baltimore, an immigrant aid society, was founded in 1803. The Hibernians, led by John Oliver, founded the Hibernian Free School in 1818 to educate recently arrived Irish immigrants. The slow trickle of Irish immigrants into the United States and Baltimore increased to a deluge after the Potato Famine of the late 1840s. Many Irish arrived in Baltimore ports, but they soon left for cities farther west. Of those who stayed, most were laborers who competed with free blacks and urban slaves for bricklaying and railroad-building jobs. A large percentage of these immigrants settled in the southwestern section of the city near Lemmon and Hollins Streets and went to work for the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad. Others settled in outlying towns. With names like Dundalk and Dublin, some Baltimore suburbs reveal ABC-CLIO
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their Irish roots. Unlike many East Coast port cities, and despite its Catholic heritage, Baltimore did not become an Irish city in the way Boston or New York did. By 1870, the Irish made up only 6 percent of Baltimore’s population, while 14 percent of Philadelphia’s population was Irish. Baltimore’s German population was a larger group and wielded more influence on the city’s business and political life. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, many Irish proved upwardly mobile through the cultivation of skilled trades and joining unions such as the Knights of Labor, and many others found more secure financial and social status with jobs as labor bosses and, later, politicians. After 1900, the stream of Irish immigrants began to fizzle out, except for small waves of immigrants in the 1950s and 1980s. Today little is left of the traditional Irish neighborhoods or way of life aside from a museum dedicated to Irish railroad workers, which today stands at 920 Lemmon Street, and an annual Irish festival. Chuck McShane See also: ANCIENT ORDER OF HIBERNIANS; KNIGHTS OF LABOR; MARYLAND References Jones, Maldwyn A. American Immigration. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Olson, Sherry. Baltimore: The Making of an American City. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
BARRY, JOHN (1746–1803) Born in Co. Wexford in 1746 to John and Catherine Barry, John Barry went to sea at an early age, as an apprentice on a merchant vessel in 1755. Applying himself to the naval profession, Barry immigrated to Philadelphia in 1761, where he became a www.abc-clio.com
Portrait of John Barry, father of the United States Navy. (National Archives)
successful shipbuilder. By the time he was 21, Barry was made captain of a coastal schooner; by age 29, he was master of a transatlantic trader, the 200-ton Black Prince. At the start of the American Revolution, Barry immediately offered his service to the patriots, and he was tasked with protecting American commerce along the midAtlantic coast. During these patrols, he became the first captain in the Continental navy to capture a British vessel when the Lexington captured the British tender Edward on April 7, 1776. By August, Barry had seized two more sloops, Lady Susan and Betsey, while preventing the capture of valuable caches of gunpowder and other war materiel. In recognition of his talents and contributions, Barry was promoted to captain in October 1776 and given command of the frigate Effingham, but a British blockade prevented the vessel from going to sea. Limited to engagements in the lower
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Delaware, Barry nonetheless proved his gallantry in several ship actions, harassing British supply and communication lines, confiscating many articles for the use of the Continental Army, and earning the acclaim of George Washington. Shortly thereafter, Barry volunteered for service in the American army, taking part in the battles of Trenton and Princeton. During these engagements, he led an artillery battery composed of volunteer seamen; their main armaments were cannon dragged from the Effingham. Barry returned to Philadelphia and assumed duties as the senior naval officer in February 1777. He took part in the illfated Penobscot Expedition of September 1778, where he was forced to run his vessel, the Raleigh, aground. A court-martial later acquitted him of any wrongdoing. Subsequent duties included ferrying American diplomats to Europe, combating privateers, and harassing British merchant vessels in the Atlantic. On March 23, 1780, a wounded Barry outmaneuvered and captured two British sloops, Atalanta and Trespass, in the eastern Atlantic. In 1782, Barry sailed to Havana, where he was responsible for convoying much needed specie to America; on his return voyage, Barry fought the last sea battle of the Revolutionary War when his Alliance engaged the British frigate Sybill in March 1783. At the conclusion of hostilities, Barry continued to work in the shipping business, championing the cause of seamen who were excluded from the postwar benefits afforded to soldiers. Active in politics, Barry petitioned Congress on this issue, and lobbied effectively for a new federal system to replace the ineffective Articles of Confederation. In addition, Barry participated in the Pacific trade in the immediate post-Revolution years, trading with China www.abc-clio.com
and other parts of Asia as master of the brig Asia. Congress created the United States Navy on March 27, 1794, and Barry accepted his appointment as senior captain on June 4, 1794. He also held a seagoing command, commanding the forty-fourgun frigate United States, from which he directed operations in the West Indies during the quasi-war with France. Under his leadership and direction, the fledgling United States Navy provided security for American commercial interests and displayed the emerging power of the United States. He further maintained the security of American commerce in the Caribbean during a period of revolutionary disturbances and increasing piracy, capturing the infamous French privateer L’Amour de La Patrie near Martinique on February 3, 1799. Barry was twice married, but neither union produced children. On October 13, 1767, he married Mary Cleary in Philadelphia; she died in 1774; on July 7, 1777, he married Sarah Austin. The most distinguished Irish American of his day, Barry died on September 13, 1803, while making preparations to lead a naval squadron to the Mediterranean to fight Barbary corsairs. John Barry, the “Father of the United States Navy,” was interred with full honors at St. Mary’s Church in Philadelphia, and commemorated by statues in his native Wexford, his adopted city of Philadelphia, and the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. Tim Lynch See also: AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE Reference Clark, William Bell. Gallant John Barry, 1745–1803: The Story of a Naval Hero of Two Wars. New York: Macmillan, 1938. ABC-CLIO 1-800-368-6868
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BARRY, PHILIP (1896–1949) Philip Barry was a playwright best known for works such as Philadelphia Story (1939), Holiday (1926), and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1931), plays that continue to be offered in repertories. His greatest successes came with plays that represented, often through comedy, the ways the upper classes managed their affairs, both financial and emotional. Yet he was not satisfied with reproducing a formula that would guarantee success. He experimented with form and ideas in his work but was often frustrated by the poor reception of some of his more creative and serious dramas, such as John (1929) and Here Come the Clowns (1937). An Irish American born in Rochester, New York, Barry was not part of the monied crowd, although his family was far from poor. Barry’s father, James Corbett Barry, had come from Ireland as a young boy and, after learning the stonecutting trade as a teen, he became a successful monument builder. James married Mary Agnes Quinn and they had four children. When James died of a ruptured appendix Philip was raised by his mother and his eldest brother, Edmund. Barry later went to Yale, despite relatively poor high school grades. There he joined the Yale Dramatic Association, and worked for the Yale Daily News. His studies were interrupted by World War I, but in 1919, after he returned to Yale, he soon won a Dramat competition with a new one-act play called Autonomy. “Meadow’s End,” a short story he had written while in London during the war, was later published in Scribner’s Magazine and still later became a play, In a Garden. This and War in Heaven, a novel based on his play, Here Come the Clowns, represent the only prose www.abc-clio.com
fiction that Barry published after leaving Yale. Drama was clearly his forte. His first recognized success was The Jilts, later renamed You and I, and this allowed him to marry the woman with whom he had fallen in love, Ellen Semple, on July 15, 1922. Barry and his wife had two sons, Philip S. Barry and Jonathan Peter Barry. They divided their time between homes in Manhattan and in Mount Kisco, New York, but they also had a villa in Cannes. Much of Barry’s drama reflects an anxiety about being outside accepted society. He believed wealth brings a kind of grace, as demonstrated in the great wit of his character’s dialogue, but he also recognized that wealth brings its own set of problems. Though his more popular plays offer little that is very surprising in our view of the wealthy, some of his other plays explore far more mystical and spiritual issues. Hotel Universe (1930), for example, presents a group of people whose smug security and clever repartee is challenged by a man who mysteriously knows all about their secret unhappiness; all of the lives are revealed and then changed. Several of his plays, such as In a Garden (1924) and The Youngest (1929), are loosely based on his own life, exploring relationships and responsibilities that he himself had experienced in life. Barry was working on his final play, The Second Threshold, when he died of a massive heart attack on December 3, 1949, in his Park Avenue apartment. Using revisions and notes, Robert E. Sherwood completed and produced the play in 1951. Barry was buried in the Catholic cemetery in East Hampton, and on his tombstone is a line from Hotel Universe : “All things are turned to a roundness. Wherever there is an end, from it springs the beginning.” Kathleen A. Heininge
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BARTHOLOMEW, FREDDIE 83 References Barry, Philip, and Elmer Rice. Cock Robin. New York: Samuel French, 1927 and 1929. Gill, Brendan. “The Dark Advantage.” In States of Grace: Eight Plays by Philip Barry, edited by Brendan Gill. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. Hamm, Gerald. “The Drama of Philip Barry.” PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1948. Roppolo, Joseph Patrick. Philip Barry. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1965.
BARTHOLOMEW, FREDDIE (1924–1992) According to his obituary published in The New York Times on January 24, 1992, Freddie Bartholomew was born Frederick Llewellyn March in Dublin on March 28, 1924, and brought up in London. Estranged from his parents, he was reared by his grandparents and his aunt, Millicent Bartholomew, whose name he later adopted. He began appearing in London theater in 1930, and his first film, Fascination, was released the same year. In 1934 he caught the attention of eminent American film director George Cukor, who was on a casting visit to Britain. Cukor was impressed by Bartholomew and believed him perfect for the title role in his production of David Copperfield. Although Louis B. Mayer favored the established child actor Jackie Cooper for the role, Cukor and his producer, David O. Selznick, persuaded Mayer to cast Bartholomew instead. His sensitive portrayal of the eponymous character won him widespread acclaim and, as a result, Selznick focused his attention on making him a star. Bartholomew’s gentility lent him a certain otherworldly quality, which determined the roles that he was given. In 1935 Selznick cast him as Anna’s son in Anna www.abc-clio.com
Karenina, costarring him with Greta Garbo, who was then MGM’s most illustrious star. Following a loan out to Twentieth Century for Professional Soldier (1936), Selznick gave him the title role in his prestigious production of Little Lord Fauntleroy, based on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1886 novel. During the next two years Bartholomew was usually showcased in roles that emphasized his refinement and sensitivity, although he was cast against type as a spoilt brat in Captains Courageous, which also starred Spencer Tracy. In 1938 he played the lead in a film adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and played his first teenage role opposite Judy Garland in Listen Darling. By the late 1930s, Bartholomew was one of the highest-paid child stars in America—second only to Shirley Temple—but his unstable family background resurfaced in 1937 when his mother initiated a legal challenge against his guardian aunt over his substantial earnings. The legal wrangling that ensued considerably reduced the fortune he had made at MGM. As so often happens with child actors, as Bartholomew grew up his popularity began to decline. Although he still acted in such major films as The Spirit of Culver, The Swiss Family Robinson, and Tom Brown’s Schooldays, he found himself eclipsed by other child stars such as Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, both of whom were deemed more “American” by wartime audiences. His decline is evidenced by his fourth billing in 1942’s A Yank At Eton. Having served in the U.S. Air Force, he returned to Hollywood but could only find roles in minor films, such as Sepia Cinderella (1947) and St. Benny the Dip (1951). Like many Hollywood actors in the postwar period, he branched into television ABC-CLIO
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in 1949, initially hosting a movie show, before becoming a director of television shows (mostly soap operas) and commercials in the 1950s. He followed his advertising career from television to New York, where he became a successful executive. Often bitter about the way in which Hollywood had used and discarded him, Bartholomew died of emphysema on January 23, 1992 in Sarasota, Florida. He was survived by his third wife, Elizabeth. Gwenda Young See also: GARLAND, Judy References Katz, Ephraim. The Film Encyclopedia. New York: Perigee Books, 1979. Shipman, David. The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years. New York: Da Capo, 1986.
BASEBALL Considered the great American pastime, baseball owes much to the influence of immigrant populations, particularly the Irish, for its development in the United States. Irish-American baseball players innovated the way the game was played and managed, how leagues were run, and how equipment was developed. Indeed, the popular view during the late nineteenth century was that the Irish were born to the game, in a manner similar to how African Americans dominated professional basketball a century later. Though Irish-American baseball players competed at the major league level in the 1870s, it was in the 1880s and 1890s that they emerged as the game’s biggest stars. Sources differ on the percentage of major leaguers who were of Irish descent during the 1880s, but it was at least 33 percent and possibly more than 40 percent; nearly forty players were born in Ireland. The St. Louis Browns of the American www.abc-clio.com
Association (AA) were a largely IrishAmerican team, yet enjoyed strong support among the city’s German-American population. The rosters of nearly all major and local minor league teams contained several Irish surnames, with players born in northeastern cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, and towns throughout New England helping encourage young Irish boys in strongly immigrant towns become fans and players. As the game evolved into a professional sport in the latter three decades of the century, Irish Americans became star players and even national celebrities. Moreover, many of the rough stereotypical attributes often ascribed to Irish Americans were manifested in many stars of the day and perpetuated the negative image. Reports of Irish ballplayers’ drunken, unruly behavior made it difficult for teams to book rooms at the best hotels. The Irish influence from the early years of professional baseball can still be seen in the song “Take Me Out To The Ballgame,” which features an Irish woman who roots for the home team, and Earnest Thayer’s poem “Casey At The Bat,” in which the Mudville Nine, including “Flynn” and “Jimmy Blake” lose when “Mighty Casey” strikes out. In the 1887 season, when eleven players achieved batting averages of .400 or better, St. Louis’s James “Tip” O’Neill led the AA with a .435 average. That season, averages were high partly because walks were recorded as hits as well as at bats (neither of which is true today), yet his achievements in 1887 were phenomenal, as he led the league in hits, doubles, triples, home runs, runs scored, slugging average, and batting average. His nickname arose from his skill at fouling off pitches to get a pitcher to walk him, and O’Neill’s fame led many
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adoring Irish-American fans to name their sons after him. During the National League’s (NL) first two seasons (1876–1877), James Devlin pitched every inning of his team’s games. Also in 1877, Terry Larkin and Irish-born Tommy Bond pitched every inning of their teams’ games. Devlin never played major league baseball after 1877, however, after allegedly losing games for gamblers. Frequently called baseball’s first superstar, Michael “King” Kelly was one of the first $10,000 players. Baseball fans (then known as “cranks”) often cheered “Slide, Kelly, slide!” when he ran the bases, which was then turned into a song. An Irish Catholic, Kelly attracted Irish fans to the game, which had seen several Englishdescended stars in its pre-NL days. Enshrined in baseball’s Hall of Fame, Kelly also innovated the game’s rules, sometimes by taking advantage of their lack of detail. Though four umpires working a game are the norm today, there were rarely more than two in Kelly’s era. When an umpire’s attention was elsewhere, Kelly was known to cut across the infield while running the bases. Kelly also receives credit for pioneering the injury decoy before stealing a base. When rules were changed to allow substitutions during the game, initially players were allowed to announce themselves. Sitting on the bench late in a game, Kelly reportedly once caught a foul ball when he announced himself while the ball was in flight. Born in Cork, Tony Mullane played for thirteen seasons, during which he won 285 games, ending his career in 1894. Baseball’s most notable ambidextrous pitcher, Mullane pitched without a glove, won more than thirty games for five consecutive seasons (1882–1887; he was declared ineligible for the 1885 season), and www.abc-clio.com
topped twenty wins another three times. Mullane’s good looks and popularity with female fans led to the institution of “ladies’ day” on Mondays when he pitched. A prime example of the labor battles during the period of baseball history, Mullane held out from playing in 1892 and was held in breach of contract in 1885. Arguably baseball’s best Irish-born player, Mullane is not in the Hall of Fame. Had he played in 1885, during his run of thirty-win seasons, he likely would have topped 300 for his career—a milestone that virtually guarantees entry into the Hall of Fame. Mullane also had a reputation as an irascible teammate and a gambler. He also revealed his racism when he admitted his racially motivated dislike of baseball’s first AfricanAmerican major league ballplayer, Moses “Fleet” Walker, his catcher. Mullane purposely crossed Walker’s signals, and the catcher went through the season not knowing what the pitcher would throw. Jimmy Collins revolutionized play at third base because he was unfamiliar with the traditions of the game, which had maintained that the shortstop fielded all grounders on the left side of the infield, leaving teams susceptible to bunts. An outfielder when he joined Louisville of the NL in 1895, Collins was moved to third and fielded the bunts barehanded. Soon all third basemen copied Collins. Sold to the Boston NL club, Collins became a fan favorite. When Collins signed with the new American League (AL) team in Boston in 1901, many NL fans changed their allegiance, following Collins. Collins also led Boston to victory in the first World Series in 1903. Though more than 100 players had hit 300 home runs by the end of the 2004 season, a century earlier the record stood at ABC-CLIO
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136, held by Roger Connor for nearly twenty-five years. In an era when some teams did not hit ten home runs all season, Connor hit more than ten seven times. Elected to the Hall of Fame in 1976, Connor also hit 233 triples, which remain among the most ever hit by one player. Credited with the NL’s first official hit, “Orator” Jim O’Rourke played for several championship teams during a career that touched four decades. The New York Giants manager, John McGraw, brought him out of retirement to catch a major league game when he was fifty-two years old. Short in stature, five-foot-seven-inch Hugh Duffy reached great heights, achieving a .440 batting average in 1894, which has never been matched. That season he also accomplished baseball’s first Triple Crown, leading the league in home runs, runs batted in, and batting average. Playing beside fellow Hall of Famer Tommy McCarthy in the Boston Beaneaters outfield, Duffy was one of the “Heavenly Twins” that led the team to championships. During the 1890s, Duffy played the most games, hit the most home runs, and drove in the most runs of all major leaguers. McCarthy’s Hall of Fame credentials have more to do with his defensive abilities and innovation of outfield play than his offense, yet he has been credited with perfecting, if not inventing, the hitand-run play, in which a runner goes into motion off first base as the pitch is delivered, in order to reach third base on a hit. Defensively McCarthy was known for freezing runners in the base paths, trapping the ball and getting either a force-out or a double play; offensively, as a runner, he passed signals to batters. Two of baseball’s greatest managers, and the winners of the most games in their leagues, were Irish Americans. John McGraw www.abc-clio.com
Portrait of Hugh Duffy (1866–1954), Hall of Fame outfielder around the turn of the century for a number of National League baseball teams. This photograph was taken in 1899, when Duffy was captain of the Boston Braves. (Corbis)
stood at the center of the creation of the AL, though he is best known today as the Hall of Fame manager of the New York Giants of the NL. As a third baseman playing with the Baltimore Orioles in the NL, McGraw is among those credited with developing the suicide squeeze play, where a runner on third base scores on a batter’s bunt. During thirty-one years as the Giants’ manager, McGraw’s teams won ten pennants, three World Series, and 2,840 victories—second only to Connie Mack. Before joining the Giants, however, McGraw was best known as one of the notorious Baltimore Orioles, whose aggressive, innovative play in the 1890s became legendary. McGraw spurned a chance to manage the Cincinnati Reds,
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accepting an offer from Byron “Ban” Johnson’s new AL, to manage a resurrected Orioles franchise. In developing the league, McGraw and Mack, who took over the Philadelphia Athletics franchise, and other managers helped sell players on the idea of jumping to the new league. Within two seasons, however, McGraw learned of Johnson’s intentions to move the Baltimore team to New York (where they would later be known as the Yankees), along with rumors of his being frozen out of the move. McGraw helped maneuver his own departure from the Baltimore club, becoming manager of the Giants and obtaining several of the star players from Baltimore, including pitcher “Iron” Joe McGinnity. Born Cornelius McGillicuddy, Connie Mack ran the Philadelphia Athletics for half a century, winning (and losing) more games than any other manager. Mack also owned the club, touting a famous “$100,000 infield” of players. Later, he ran the team into financial ruin, trading away many of his early stars. His A’s teams won or appeared in the World Series in five of the first twelve series. After losing the 1914 World Series, Mack sold many of his stars and saw his clubs languish at or near the bottom of the AL for the next decade, not winning a league championship again until 1929. The A’s won the World Series that year and in 1930, losing the World Series in 1931. Mack never appeared in another World Series. In the 1890s, the notorious Orioles were managed by Ned Hanlon, whose team of mainly Irish Americans innovated through aggressive play, creating the “Baltimore chop,” in which batters perfected a high bouncing hit leaving fielders to wait for the ball to land while the runner reached first base, and encouraging his www.abc-clio.com
players to refine or develop stratagems such as the hit-and-run and the suicide squeeze. Ed Delahanty’s star shone bright enough to earn him entry to the Hall of Fame in 1945. The oldest of five brothers who played major league baseball, “Big Ed” died in 1903, falling over Niagara Falls under mysterious circumstances. Whether he was robbed and pushed or fell due to intoxication remains a mystery more than a century later. Delahanty’s career included a four–home run game (1896), two six-hit games, and the batting average title in 1899. Delahanty has received credit for ordering the first intentional walk, in which four pitches are purposely thrown outside the strike zone to advance the batter to first base. N.Y. Giant Tom O’Brien’s lone claim to baseball fame is that he received that intentional pass, which led to a double play. Roger Bresnahan has been erroneously credited with inventing the face mask, which was in use in the minor leagues long before Bresnahan played, though he often faced ridicule for using it when he played. He is likely to have developed shin guards, however, which evolved from the guards used in cricket, and was among the first to use batting helmets more than a half century before they became common. Known as “Duke of Tralee,” Bresnahan was proud of his Irish heritage and known to slip into a brogue when the moment struck him; he was born and raised in Toledo, Ohio. Though baseball’s rosters became more diverse in the early decades of the twentieth century, Irish Americans continued to succeed and hold places of power within the game. John K. Tener served as NL president from 1914 to 1918. Born in Ireland, Tener’s major league pitching career did not amount to much; two seasons on Chicago’s NL team and one season in the ABC-CLIO
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ill-fated Player’s League (PL) franchise in Pittsburgh. Tener, who worked as an accountant in the off-season, became involved in the creation of baseball’s first attempt at a union, the Brotherhood of Professional Players, which led to the PL. In addition to pitching for Pittsburgh, Tener served as league secretary. The league folded, and his baseball career ended. His experience, however, led to a political career, including a term in Congress in 1908 and a four-year term as governor of Pennsylvania. While in Congress, he started an annual Congressional baseball game between Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill. Tener’s tenure as NL president occurred amid the emergence of the Federal League, which challenged the other two leagues by signing away star players. Tener helped drive the new league out of business. Joe Cronin achieved success at nearly every level of the game. A star player in the 1920s, player-manager in the 1930s (including leading the Washington Senators to their last AL championship in 1933), a manager in the 1940s, general manager in the 1940s and 1950s, and AL president during the 1950s and 1960s, Cronin was voted into the Hall of Fame in 1956. He oversaw two expansions of the AL, from eight teams to ten in 1961 and then two more teams in 1969. He objected to the players’ labor movement toward economic fairness within its system and fired two umpires in 1969 for incompetence, though they claimed it was because they tried to form an umpires’ union. Cronin’s tenure was over by the mid1970s, when baseball’s era of owners controlling player movement came to an end. Dave McNally was among the first players to be declared a free agent when the term of www.abc-clio.com
his contract expired, bringing about an end to the reserve clause, which had been a contentious part of baseball since the days of “King” Kelly. Matthew Sinclair See also: BASEBALL MANAGERS, IRISHAMERICAN; HANLON, Ned; MACK, Connie; McCARTHY, Joseph Vincent; McGRAW, John References Alexander, Charles C. Our Game: An American Baseball History. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1991. Ginsburg, Daniel E. The Fix Is In: A History of Baseball Gambling and Game-Fixing Scandals. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1995. Helyar, John. Lords of the Realm. New York: Villard Books, 1994. Levine, Peter, ed. Baseball History. Westport, CT: Meckler Books, 1989. Seymour, Harold. Baseball: The People’s Game. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Solomon, Burt. Where They Ain’t: The Fabled Life and Untimely Death of the Original Baltimore Orioles, the Team That Gave Birth To Modern Baseball. New York: Free Press, 1999. Sowell, Mike. The Mysterious Death of Hall of Famer Big Ed Delahanty. New York: Macmillan, 1992 Wolff, Rick, et al. The Baseball Encyclopedia. New York: Macmillan, 1993.
BASEBALL MANAGERS, IRISH-AMERICAN Though Irish Americans were professional baseball’s first star players, their influence was keenly felt emanating from the dugouts. From Ned Hanlon in the 1890s to his former players John McGraw and Connie Mack in the first half of the twentieth century, Irish Americans have been among the most successful and innovative managers the game has known. Stemming from Hanlon, today’s successful managers can be traced through
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McGraw and Miller Huggins like a family tree. For example, 1950s New York Yankees dynasty leader Casey Stengel played for McGraw, but he was also influenced by managers Bill Dahlen and Wilbert Robinson, who both played for Hanlon. Huggins, who played for Hanlon’s Joe Kelley, mentored Leo Durocher, whose influence upon Bill Rigney and Earl Weaver is still felt in the Major Leagues. Through Stengel, Hanlon’s “great-grandsons” and “great-great-grandsons” include Billy Martin and Lou Piniella. Even successful managers of the 1990s, such as Joe Torre and Tony LaRussa, can trace their managerial influences back to Hanlon. Best known for leading the Baltimore Orioles in the 1890s, Hanlon led his teams to five National League (NL) pennants from 1894 to 1901, and saw several of his players become successful managers. He directly assisted in the managerial development of McGraw, Hughie Jennings, Wilbert Robinson, and dozens of other successful managers. A Hanlon club was aggressive, bunting, running, and hitting to spots by design. While he may not have invented the plays, his teams perfected the hit-and-run and the sacrifice bunt; the Baltimore chop, where a batter purposely bounces the ball high enough so he can reach first base before a play is made, was developed by his Orioles. By 1910, most managers in both the American League (AL) and NL were men who had played for Hanlon during the 1890s. Taking what they learned from Hanlon, Mack and McGraw are largely responsible for the manager’s role as we know it today. McGraw expanded upon Hanlon’s aggressive style of “baseball as she is played,” pressuring his opponents into making mistakes and exhibiting personal www.abc-clio.com
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discipline (at least on the field), physical conditioning, speed, and aggressiveness. To McGraw, the manager had absolute authority, and that led to success. His Giants won the second modern World Series in 1905. In his twenty-nine years with the Giants, his teams won three World Series and ten NL pennants and were either first or second twenty-one times. John McGraw retired early in the 1932 season due to ill health. He managed the NL the next year in the inaugural All Star Game, against Connie Mack, who was still managing the Philadelphia Athletics. The antithesis of McGraw, Mack managed for more than fifty years with a grandfatherly calm and an analytical style for assessing talent and positioning players, which earned his players’ respect. Mack is best known for his longevity and for wearing street clothes (which precluded him by rule from entering the field), a throwback to the nineteenth century, but his Philadelphia Athletics won five World Series and four other AL championships during his half-century tenure. Mack owned the team and, during the nation’s economic doldrums, sold off star players he’d scouted and developed to manage the team’s finances. The “Tall Tactician” may have outlasted his managerial effectiveness, as his teams never finished higher than fourth place during his final seventeen years. Mack, who caught for Hanlon’s Pittsburgh club in the 1880s, led the A’s for the team’s first fifty years. Neither his record 3,731 wins nor his 3,948 losses will likely ever be matched. He has nearly 1,000 more victories than McGraw, who is second overall. While McGraw’s descendants can still be traced to current managers, Mack’s lineage has virtually died out. One of Mack’s most notable successors was Joe McCarthy, ABC-CLIO
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the first manager to take teams from the NL and the AL to the World Series. His Chicago Cubs lost the 1929 series to Mack’s A’s. “Marse Joe” joined the Yankees in 1931, taking them to a series victory in 1932 before three consecutive second-place finishes. His teams then won four consecutive World Series championships and six in eight years. McCarthy’s legacy as an innovator is not as well publicized as that of his predecessors, but he has been credited with making distinct the line between starting pitchers and relievers. Only McGraw disciple Casey Stengel equaled McCarthy’s seven championships. McCarthy’s .614 winning percentage (2,126–1,335 record) is the highest among all managers of at least 1,000 games. However, few of McCarthy’s players went on to become successful managers themselves. Matthew Sinclair See also: BASEBALL; HANLON, Ned; MACK, Connie; McCARTHY, Joe McGRAW, John References Alexander, Charles C. Our Game: An American Baseball History. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1991. James, Bill. Bill James’ Guide to Baseball Managers. New York: Scribner, 1997. Koppett, Leonard. The Man in the Dugout. New York: Random House, 1994. Wolff, Rick, et al. The Baseball Encyclopedia. New York: Macmillan, 1993.
BAXTER, JOSÉ LUIS “JOE” (1940–1973) José Luis “Joe” Baxter was born on May 24, 1940, at El Moro stud farm in Marcos Paz (Buenos Aires province of Argentina), the son of Joseph Baxter (1888–1952) and his wife María Luisa, née Denaro (1910–1996); they also had a daughter, Mary, born in 1947. A professional racehorse trainer, www.abc-clio.com
Joseph Baxter was born in London and immigrated to Argentina, probably with his Irish-born father Joseph Baxter, who found employment as a cattle rancher in Buenos Aires. The family had an Anglo-Irish protestant background. Joe Baxter learned English as his first language, and was a skilled horse rider at an early age. He was sent to elementary school in the English School of Córdoba, where he used to receive visits from his family every two weeks. At ten, Baxter had an accident in the school and broke his elbow. For this reason, he would not be able to move his right arm correctly. One of those physical types inclined to be rather corpulent, Joe was nicknamed el Gordo. When Joe Baxter’s father Joseph died in 1952 the family relocated to Buenos Aires and lived in the district of Villa Urquiza (Alvarez Thomas Avenue). Mrs. Baxter had to work as a children’s nurse to supplement the family’s income. Joe was sent to another English School in Lomas de Zamora, where he received a tuition grant and assisted younger pupils. Baxter was a good student and became a keen reader of adventure novels, history, and poetry. At fifteen, Baxter entered Instituto Martínez school of Buenos Aires, which was a mediocre secondary school. Joe had plenty of time to hang around the political debate meetings at Café Paulista together with pupils of Salvador and San Agustín Catholic schools. He was fascinated by their nationalist discourse and became an enthusiastic pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic activist. He rejected the Argentine bourgeois ideology that supported the fall of Juan Manuel de Rosas in 1852, and was against the conventional political practises. After the Soviet occupation of Hungary in November 1956, Baxter joined the
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Nationalist Union of Secondary Students (UNES), a high-school student branch of the right-wing Catholic organization Tacuara, led by Alberto Ezcurra Uriburu (1937–1993). Joe Baxter was an enthusiastic supporter of the weekly nationalist paper Azul y Blanco. Two years later, he was appointed Tacuara’s secretary-general. At the same time, he was studying in the School of Law and, thanks to his English skills, was working as international operator in the state-owned telephone company. His political activities, on top of the frequent meetings, included violent raids against the URSS consulate, synagogues, and other Jewish institutions. In spite of the fact that Tacuara was inspired by Catholic priests and modeled after Primo de Rivera’s Falange in Spain, Joe Baxter was distrustful of any religious ideology. He described himself as a nationalist and antiimperialist. An admirer of the poet Ezra Pound, in 1959 Baxter published the poem “Nüremberg” in the publication Tacuara. He supported a strong militarization of the movement. After the demonstrations during President Dwight Eisenhower’s visit to Argentina in February 1962, Joe Baxter was imprisoned, together with other nationalist activists. In prison he met Guillermo Patricio Kelly (1922–2005), with whom he disagreed ideologically, and José Luis Nell (1941–1974), who would be his companion in later years. When the Cuban president Osvaldo Dorticós visited Argentina in 1962, Joe Baxter was captivated with Castro’s revolution and its anti-imperialist challenge to the United States. Owing to the creation by Father Julio Menvielle of Guardia Restauradora—a Catholic segment within Tacuara—the organization split and Baxter and others set up Tacuara Revolutionary www.abc-clio.com
Nationalist Movement (MNRT). Thus began Joe Baxter’s metamorphosis from fascism to Marxism, a transformation that would be shared by several members of his generation. In his view, the Peronist labor structure was necessary to attain the national revolution. As an illustration of his ambiguous and complex ideological development, when policemen raided his house in Villa Urquiza, they were bewildered by portraits of Hitler, Mussolini, and Castro decorating his bedroom. By 1963 Joe Baxter was a full-time political activist. He admired Algeria’s nationalist revolution and rejected anti-Semitism. At the same time, his group received arms from Peronist army officers and was planning radical operations to finance their activities, which included among others a planned invasion of the Falkland/Malvinas Islands. Although he did not play a direct role (but was implicitly concerned) in the raid on the bank labor union’s hospital Policlínico Bancario on August 29, 1963— the first urban guerrilla operation in Argentina—Joe Baxter was responsible for laundering part of the booty in Brazil in 1964. That year was the start of Baxter’s international career. From Brazil he traveled to Madrid and met Juan Domingo Perón at his house. Perón introduced him to Héctor Villalón, a businessman with good connections in Cuba, China, and Egypt. Baxter then moved to Algeria and Egypt and worked with several revolutionaries. To avoid the Argentine authorities, he settled for some time in Uruguay and transformed the Tupamaros revolutionary group into an urban guerrilla organization. In 1965, he received training in northern Vietnam. During a sudden attack he ignored the withdrawal order and fired on the enemy, ABC-CLIO
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being rewarded for this action. Baxter also traveled to China to receive military and ideological training. In 1966 Joe Baxter entered Argentina clandestinely, and the following year went to Cuba thanks to his connection with the Tupamaros organization. In Havana he married Ruth Arrieta, daughter of a Bolivian nationalist officer. Joe Baxter was in Paris during the Fourth International of 1968, where he represented the Trotskyist groups. In these circumstances Baxter met Rubén P. Bonnet, Luis Pujals, and Mario R. Santucho, who would be founding members of the Peoples Revolutionary Army (ERP), a Trotskyist terrorist organization in Argentina. After the hijacking of Fiat Argentina’s chief executive Oberdan Sallustro that year, Baxter broke with ERP and created other radical groups like Leninist Trend and Red Fraction. By the early 1970s he was living in Chile with his wife and daughter Mariana, who was born in 1968 in Cuba. Political activist and revolutionary Joe Baxter died on July 11, 1973, when the Boeing 707 of Varig Airlines, en route to Rio de Janeiro, crashed while attempting an emergency landing near Paris Orly airport, killing 123 passengers. He was traveling on a false passport and carried with him $40,000, presumably to support the fighting of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) of Nicaragua. Joe Baxter was buried beside his father and mother at the British cemetery of Chacarita in Buenos Aires. The stone that marks his grave carries the inscription El no quiso nada para sí (he wanted nothing for himself ). Edmundo Murray See also: ARGENTINA; FALKLAND/MALVINAS ISLANDS www.abc-clio.com
References Bardini, Roberto, Tacuara: la Pólvora y la Sangre. Mexico: Océano, 2002). Bardini, Roberto, A 30 Años de la Muerte de Joe Baxter. Una Rosa Roja en un Casquillo de Obús Chino Disparado en Viet Nam. Entrevista a Alberto Pérez Iriarte. www.rodelu.net (accessed October 2, 2005). García, Karina. “Tacuara y el Asalto al Policlínico Bancario.” Todo es Historia (Buenos Aires) 373 (August 1998). Gutman, Daniel, Tacuara: Historia de la Primera Guerrilla Urbana Aargentina. Buenos Aires: Vergara, 2003. Kremer, Arnold, Hombres y Mujeres del PRTERP: La Pasión militante. Buenos Aires: Contrapunto, 1990. Navarro Gerassi, Marisa, Los Nacionalistas. Buenos Aires: Alvarez, 1968.
BEACH, AMY MARCY (1867–1944) Amy Marcy Cheney was the first significant American woman composer. Born in Henniker, New Hampshire, on September 5, 1867, she moved with her family to Chelsea, Massachusetts, in 1874 and to Boston in 1875. Beach displayed a remarkable musical talent from an early age, first appearing in public when she was seven years old. In 1883 she made her debut as a pianist in Boston. In 1885, she married Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach. Soon after, on her husband’s advice, she changed to composition, but she received little formal training. Amy Beach toured in Europe from 1911 to 1914, finally settling in Hillsborough, New Hampshire in 1916. She was an energetic promoter of her own works and of other female American composers, becoming the cofounder and first president of the Society of American Women Composers in 1925. Amy Beach mainly wrote art songs and piano music, but it was with her Mass in E flat op. 5 (1890) and Gaelic Symphony op. 32
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(1897) that she won acceptance and international success. In seeking an American style in art music she occasionally referred to Irish traditional music, which she considered the most traditional music in America. In works like the Gaelic Symphony and piano pieces like The Fair Hills of Eire op. 91 (1922) and the Suite for two Pianos Founded upon Old Irish Melodies op. 104 (1924) she used a number of Irish traditional melodies as thematic material, thereby expressing her conviction that American folk music was mainly derived from the Irish, a belief gained without any direct family connection to Ireland. Axel Klein See also: MUSIC IN AMERICA, IRISH References Block, Adrienne Fried. Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian: An American Composer’s Life and Work. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Jenkins, Walter S. The Remarkable Mrs. Beach: American Composer. Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 1994.
BEACH, SYLVIA (1887–1962) The daughter of a Presbyterian minister, Sylvia Beach (she was born Nancy, but preferred to be called Sylvia) spent much of her youth in Bridgeton, New Jersey. Youthful illness and impatience with tedious study left her erratically educated, despite her undoubted intellectual gifts. In 1902 she accompanied her father when he assumed a three-year mission to Paris, and this period of residence instilled in her a lifelong passion for France and French culture. A natural bohemianism of temperament led her to return to Paris in 1916, after working as a nurse during World War I. In November 1919 she decided to open a www.abc-clio.com
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bookshop and lending library. Located on the Rue de l’Odeon, Shakespeare and Company soon became the focus of Anglophonic literary life in Paris. Regular visitors included Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and most importantly, James Joyce. Despite the financial difficulties of her endeavor, Beach was able to keep the bookstore open until the Nazi occupation of Paris. She hid the store’s contents during the war, but decided against reopening it in the postwar years. Beach spent the remainder of her life in active retirement, occasionally taking part in public celebrations of her literary friends. She died in Paris in 1962. Her memoirs, Shakespeare and Company, contain engaging and intimate portraits of numerous great writers who frequented her shop; the somewhat uncritical portraits conform to her conviction that artists’ personal idiosyncrasies should not misbalance a proper recognition of their achievements. Sylvia Beach was probably James Joyce’s most important American benefactor. She befriended him, encouraged him, frequently advanced him needed money, and generously demonstrated her unstinting belief in the value and significance of his work. When Joyce despaired of Ulysses ever being published, she offered to publish it herself, under the Shakespeare & Co. colophon. This offer, as well as her extraordinary patience in permitting Joyce time for rewriting and revision, ensured that he was able to publish his work substantially as he wished it to appear. Beach also published his 1927 verse collection, Pomes Penyeach, and a series of essays in defense of his draft chapters that became Finnegans Wake, Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929). ABC-CLIO
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Although Joyce’s incessant personal demands and borrowing of money caused friction between them, he remained grateful to Beach for her kindness and assistance, and she always regarded him as the most important writer of his era. Andrew Goodspeed See also: JOYCE, James Augustine Aloysius References Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1959. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Fitch, Noel Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation. New York: W. W. Norton, 1983. Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribners, 1964. Monnier, Adrienne. The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier. New York: Scribners, 1976. Portrait of Irish writer, Samuel Beckett. (Corbis)
BECKETT, SAMUEL (1906–1989) Samuel Beckett achieved worldwide fame in 1953 with his play Waiting for Godot. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969 and was a hugely influential figure in twentieth-century drama. Also a major novelist, Beckett’s trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, is his most notable achievement in prose. Born in Ireland into an affluent, Protestant family, he was educated at Trinity College Dublin where he studied modern languages. A brilliant linguist, he would write many of his major works in French and had excellent Italian and German as well as adequate Spanish and Latin. After his graduation in 1927, he went to live in Paris for the first time, where he met Joyce and other writers and artists in the prewar avantgarde. He returned to Dublin in 1930 and took up a lecturing position in French at Trinity College Dublin. Academic life and www.abc-clio.com
the provincial philistinism of Dublin in the 1930s exasperated Beckett, and he resigned his position a year later. In poor health, he spent 1934–1935 in London undergoing psychoanalysis with W. R. Bion (1897–1979) at the Tavistock Clinic, and he also wrote his first novel, Murphy. After a year spent in Germany pursuing his deep interest in the visual arts, Beckett moved permanently to Paris in 1937. He would stay in France even during the war years (when he narrowly evaded arrest for his involvement in the French resistance), and it was in France that he gained recognition in the postwar years. Beckett was very much a European writer, involved as he was in the international trends of modernism. His work owes as much to continental writers as to those in the Anglo-American tradition, although he was not especially familiar with the
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literature of the Americas. He would only visit the United States once, in 1964, when he stayed for nearly a month in New York to work on his film project. Beckett had written his Film at the suggestion of his American publisher Barney Rosset who, with Alan Schneider (a long-standing friend of Beckett and director of his plays in America) had lured the reclusive author across the Atlantic for the filming. With Alan Schneider directing and Buster Keaton as the main protagonist, they shot Beckett’s Film in the sweltering heat of New York in July. Beckett was actively involved on the set, enjoying this foray into a new medium. According to one of Beckett’s biographers, Deirdre Bair, “Beckett was terrified of the city at first” (Bair, 572) but he soon found things to enjoy in Greenwich Village, visiting, for example, Cherry Lane Theatre, where many of his plays had first been performed in the United States under Alan Schneider’s direction. He was also able to see old friends, such as American novelist Kay Boyle and Irish poet and publisher George Reavey. However, Beckett’s overall impression of New York was negative and on leaving he confessed to his host, Barney Rosset, “This is somehow not the right country for me . . . the people are too strange” (cited in Knowlson, 525). It is ironic, therefore, that much of the critical exegesis of Beckett’s work has come from America. Important Beckett critics such as Stanley Gontarski and Ruby Cohn were part of the first wave of Beckett criticism, and many Beckett manuscripts have found their way to American universities, with major holdings at the Harry Ransom Research Center, Austin, Texas, and at Dartmouth College. Much important Beckett criticism continues to come from the United States. www.abc-clio.com
Beckett’s only link with the Latin American world came entirely by chance in 1949. He had applied to UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) for translation work to supplement his meager post-war income and was commissioned to translate an anthology of Mexican poetry edited by Octavio Paz. This was not published until 1958, by which time Beckett’s reputation (and financial security) had been made. Beckett regarded these particular translations as perfunctory and amounting to little more than hack work even though he was, as is universally recognized, a masterful translator of his own and other people’s work. Benjamin Keatinge See also: BOYLE, Kathleen; COFFEY, Brian; THEATER AND DRAMA, IRISH AMERICAN References Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978. Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber, 1986. Beckett, Samuel. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. London: John Calder, 1959. Harmon, Maurice, ed. No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1998. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 1996.
BELIZE Belize, which was formerly British Honduras, a colony on the Caribbean coast of Central America, is geographically a part of Central America, although administratively it is usually regarded as a Caribbean country. The area that now forms Belize had been popular with British pirates from the early ABC-CLIO
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seventeenth century as its coastline was protected by reefs. By the 1670s, many pirates had moved into logging, and a sizable timber industry developed, especially of logwood, which was used for a dye important for the European wool industry. With a population that was British by heritage and/or sympathy, it was not long before a British administrator was appointed, under the control of the governor of Jamaica. The defeat of a Spanish fleet in 1798 off St. George’s Caye ensured that the region would become British, which was confirmed in 1862 when the colony of British Honduras was formally established. Some of the colonial officials serving in British Honduras were Irish. Indeed, the superintendent from 1787 until 1790 was Edward Marcus Despard (1751–1803), born in Queen’s County, Ireland, the youngest of six brothers, all except one of whom joined the British Army. Despard was posted to Jamaica, where he left the 50th Regiment to work as an engineer under Captain (later Admiral) Horatio Nelson. He was initially put in charge of the offshore islands, before he was appointed to run British Honduras. After his return to London he was involved in a conspiracy to kill the king of England, and seize the Tower of London and the Bank of England. Despite a character reference by Nelson at his trial, Despard was sentenced to death and executed. In 1862, taking advantage of the American Civil War and the United States being unable to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, the colony of British Honduras was officially proclaimed. Irish-born Spaniard Juan Galindo had campaigned against British sovereignty some 25 years earlier, but his arguments had not been followed up by the Spanish. With British Honduras www.abc-clio.com
as a colony, the superintendent for the previous five years, Frederick Seymour (1820–1869), became the first governor. Seymour, born in Belfast, was the fourth and youngest son of Henry Augustus Seymour and Margaret (née Williams)— Henry being the illegitimate son of the second Marquis of Hertford. Frederick Seymour had been assistant colonial secretary of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), and when his position was abolished, he became magistrate of Antigua in 1848 and president of Nevis five years later, and finally was appointed to British Honduras and was superintendent and then lieutenant governor of the Bay Islands. He remained as lieutenant-governor until 1864. The lieutenant governor of British Honduras from 1870 until 1874, William Cairns (1828–1888), was also born in Belfast. On his return to the British Isles, William Cairns retired to Jersey. Another Irishman, Sir Cornelius Alfred Moloney (1848–1913), was the governor of British Honduras from 1891 until 1897. In addition to Despard, Seymour, Cairns, and Moloney, there were other Irish who served in the British administration or army in British Honduras, such as Dublinborn Luke Smythe O’Connor (1806–1873), who was involved in fighting the Yucatan Indians in British Honduras in 1848. In 1905 the pathologist Rupert (later Sir Rupert) Boyce (1863–1911), born in Carlow, visited the colony to study yellow fever; and in 1934 Alan Pinn (1871–1958), born in Dublin, was appointed to overhaul the colony’s finances. Others were involved in logging mahogany, forming the “settler class” of British Honduras. In the early twentieth century the growing of chicle for chewing gum also became important. In 1865, two groups of Americans, a few of
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whom were of Irish descent, also settled in British Honduras. From Louisiana and Mississippi, the groups formed two Confederate settlements in British Honduras after leaving America at the end of the Civil War. The first group had returned to America by 1870, but the second colony continued until 1925. In 1954, British Honduras was given a new constitution, and self-government came ten years later. With independence delayed many times on account of neighboring Guatemala’s claim on Belize, Sir John Rennie (1914–1981) was sent to the region in 1964 to try to resolve problems; in the early 1970s Rennie was to become involved in events in Northern Ireland. In 1972 the colony changed its name to Belize—the name of the major city. Belize was granted independence in 1981, and its capital was established at Belmopan, an inland town—Belize City having been devastated by a hurricane in 1961. Ireland has always recognised Belize’s sovereignty and Irish diplomatic representation in Belize is handled by the Irish Embassy to the United Nations, at New York. Justin Corfield See also: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR; HONDURAS Reference Moberg, Mark. Myths of Ethnicity and Nation: Immigration, Work, and Identity in the Belize Banana Industry. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997.
BENNETT, WILLIAM J. (1943–) Born July 3, 1943, William John Bennett spent his early childhood in Brooklyn, New York. Although a native of Brooklyn, Bennett did his preparatory studies in Washington, D.C., where he attended www.abc-clio.com
Gonzaga College High School. After his studies there, he pursued his undergraduate degree at Williams College, going on to receive a PhD in political philosophy from the University of Texas. He also obtained a degree in law from Harvard Law School. In 1976, Bennett attracted national recognition when he assumed his post as executive director of the National Humanities Center, a private research think tank located in North Carolina. Working with the center until 1981, Bennett was able to make many connections in Washington and was soon called upon to work there. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan appointed Bennett to lead the National Endowment for the Humanities, a post that he kept until 1985. Once again, he was called upon by President Reagan, this time to become secretary of education. Utilizing the powers of his post, Bennett put forward a platform firmly based on his conservative views, emphasizing school vouchers, curriculum reform, religion in education, and the removal of affirmative action policies. Being an overwhelmingly strong supporter of classical education, Bennett disliked education’s move toward multiculturalism, preferring a system of education based on Western culture, politics, and literature. Bennett believed standards were not effectively enforced on all levels of education. For example, he strongly criticized colleges and universities for failing to enforce alcohol and drinking laws on their campus and among their student bodies. On the primary and secondary levels of education, he criticized many schools for low standards. Bennett believed certain parts of the educational system caused the continuance of low standards and underachievement. He was in favor of regular competency ABC-CLIO
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testing for all teachers, allowing those who did not graduate from schools of education to teach if they were particularly experienced in a certain specialty, instating a performance-based pay scale, increased educator accountability, an end to tenure, and improved nationwide standardized tests to evaluate children’s performance. Bennett, however, was unable to avoid controversy for long. President George H. W. Bush appointed him to become the nation’s first “drug czar” as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Having established himself as one of the nation’s most well-known moral crusaders, Bennett’s selection was not a surprise to many on Capitol Hill, and he was confirmed in a 97 to 2 vote by the Senate. From the post, Bennett conducted the nation’s war on drugs, but soon after decided to leave the position in 1990. Drawing upon his many experiences in Washington, D.C., and his long career with the Republic Party, Bennett became a conservative writer and public speaker after leaving government office. Through his work, he has continued his moral crusade, attacking what he perceives as the lack of virtue in American society, particularly among the nation’s youth. He has continued his efforts to improve the nation’s public and private schools, basing his plans on what he calls the most important “Three C’s: Choice, Content, and Character.” He has also written and edited more than ten books, including The Book of Virtues, The Children’s Book of Virtues, and The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals, which was briefly number one on The New York Times’ best-seller list. In 2003, Bennett revealed that he was an extremely high-stakes gambler who had lost millions of dollars in Las Vegas and www.abc-clio.com
Atlantic City. This was clearly a contradiction with his public moral crusader image, and Bennett’s status as a conservative virtue and moral defender began to crumble, and he was no longer as highly sought after on the lecture circuit. Most recently, Bennett has given most of his attention to his daily radio show and a project known as Americans for Victory Over Terrorism. Bennett is also a director of Empower America and a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He works alongside former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn as a cochair of the National Commission on Civic Renewal. He continues his work in the war on drugs with the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, collaborating with former New York Governor Mario Cuomo. Bennett and his wife, Elayne, have two sons, John and Joseph. Arthur Holst See also: REAGAN, Ronald Wilson References “Bio—William Bennett.” The Heritage Foundation Online. www.heritage. org/About/Staff/WilliamBennett.cfm (accessed December 10, 2005). “GOP Moralist Bennett Gives Up Gambling.” May 5, 2003. CNN Online. www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/05/05/ bennett.gambling/ (accessed December 10, 2005). “William Bennett.” Empower America Online. www.empoweramerica.org/stories/ storyReader$120 (accessed December 10, 2005).
BERGIN, PATRICK CONNOLLY (1951–) Probably best known for his role as Julia Roberts’s terrorizing husband in the 1991 film Sleeping with the Enemy, Patrick Bergin is an actor who is adept at tackling a diversity of roles. Born on February 4, 1951, in Dublin, he is the son of Paddy Bergin, who
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was a trade union organizer and Labour Party senator in the Irish Seanad. Patrick and his three brothers, Sean, Pearse, and Emmet (also an actor), grew up in Co. Carlow and in the Dublin suburb of Drimnagh. He appeared in some school productions in Drimnagh and went to London at the age of seventeen to do a BA degree in London, after which he taught disadvantaged children. After some training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he made his debut in an adaptation of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party. He also acted in a National Film and Television School short film, No Man’s Land. His debut in feature films was in the Dublin crime film, The Courier (1988), in which he acted alongside Gabriel Byrne; he followed it with another Irish thriller, Taffin (1988), in which he had a small role opposite Pierce Brosnan. Soon after, Bergin secured television parts in the highly popular series The Real Charlotte, based on Somerville and Ross’s novel, and the Australian miniseries, Act of Betrayal (1988) in which he played an Irish Republican Army (IRA) informer. His acting in the latter caught the eye of the renowned film director, Bob Rafelson, who cast him as Sir Richard Burton in Mountains of the Moon (1991). His performance as the Victorian explorer won him critical praise and led to his casting in several Hollywood films, of which Sleeping with the Enemy (1991) was the most high profile. Despite the success of Sleeping with the Enemy, and the publicity that it earned for Bergin, the films that followed failed to elevate Bergin to A-list status in Hollywood. He played the title role in Robin Hood, produced in 1991, but the film was overshadowed by the release of the Kevin Costner www.abc-clio.com
big-budget vehicle, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, the same year. Many of the projects he took on were made-for-television films or art-house films such as Map of the Human Heart (1993). Bergin has appeared in many Irish films, or in American films with Irish themes. He had a role as an IRA man in the Hollywood blockbuster Patriot Games (1992), alongside fellow Irishman Richard Harris; and played a garda detective in When the Sky Falls (2000), the first of two American films based on the life of the murdered Irish journalist, Veronica Guerin (played by American actress Joan Allen). He also took a role in the 1996 film, Angela Mooney, directed by Tommy McArdle with a predominantly Irish cast, and played Saint Patrick in an American television film, The Legend of St. Patrick (2000). Another Irish-themed film, The Boys from County Clare, directed by British director John Irvin, followed in 2003. More recently, Bergin has ventured into writing and directing with his adaptation of three plays by William Butler Yeats, Some Other Place (2000). One of the segments, Calvary, was directed by his wife, Paula Fraser, with Bergin playing the role of Christ. He has also dabbled in music, releasing a song, “The Knacker,” about a legendary member of the Travelling community. The dubiously titled song was received with outrage by Pavee Point, the official representative body of the Travelling community in Ireland. One of Bergin’s latest projects was a stage production of a Ulick O’Connor play, A Trinity of Two, in which he played Edward Carson, the Dublin-born lawyer who led the defense case in the libel trial brought by Oscar Wilde in 1895. The production teamed him up with Fermanagh-born actor ABC-CLIO
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Adrian Dunbar, and in 2006 they announced plans to costar in a film about the life of Scottish-born Irish patriot and union leader James Connolly. Patrick Bergin is married to Paula Fraser and they have a daughter, Tatiana (born 1996). Gwenda Young See also: BROSNAN, Pierce; BYRNE, Gabriel; IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY; YEATS, William Butler References O’Connor, Aine. Leading Hollywood. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1996. O’Donoghue, Donal. “Man in Black.” RTÉ Guide, March 1, 2000, 10. Regan, Colin. “Patrick Bergin’s Boston Showcase.” The Irish Voice, April 18, 2001, 32. Sheehy, Ted. “Bergin Brassed Off.” Film Ireland, August/September 2000, 26–28.
BOLAND, EAVAN (1944–) Eavan Boland was born in Dublin to Frederick Boland, the first Irish diplomat to Britain and the United Nations, and Frances Kelly, a renowned post-expressionist painter. The Boland family lived in Ireland until 1950, when they moved to London. In 1956 Eavann’s father became the first permanent Irish representative to the United Nations, and the family moved to New York, where Eavan first came into close contact with American culture. Boland returned to Dublin for her studies and after her graduation in 1962 she published a pamphlet entitled 23 Poems. She received her BA in English and Latin from Trinity College Dublin in 1966. Three years later she married the novelist Kevin Casey and moved to the neighborhood of Dundrum, where she continued to write while raising their daughters Sarah Margaret and Eavan Francis. Boland started lecturing at Trinity College Dublin and University College www.abc-clio.com
Dublin when she was 23 years old, but in 1967, when her first book, New Territory, came out, she felt more suited for writing poetry than developing an academic career. In this period, she met the poets Patrick Kavanagh, Michael Longley, and Brendan Kennelly, and she worked as a columnist for RTÉ and The Irish Times, where she often took a firm stand on gender issues. During this period she also read and learned from American female models, especially Elizabeth Bishop, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, and Sylvia Plath. The War Horse (1975) shows her reflection on the violence affecting Irish history and her attempt to create her own poetic voice. The Boland family moved to the United States in 1979, where the poet attended the International Writing Program at Iowa University. Boland was also a cofounder of Arlen House, the feminist publishing company that published In Her Own Image (1980) and Night Feed (1982). In these collections Boland uses Rich’s poetry, in particular, as sustenance for her efforts to transform the Irish male poetic tradition, although their trajectories evolve in different ways. Plath’s Ariel provided Boland with a style characterized by short lines grouped in tercets and other useful aesthetic models for her poetics. Her next volumes were published by Carcanet in the United Kingdom and Ireland and W. W. Norton in the United States. The Journey (1987) marks the entrance to her more mature work. She has collected her poetry in three different volumes throughout her career: Selected Poems (1989), Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990 (1990), and An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967–87 (1996). In the 1990s, Boland was invited to lecture at a number of universities in the
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United States, including Bowdoin College, the University of Houston, the University of Utah, Washington University in St. Louis, where she was Hurst Professor, and the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she was Regent’s Lecturer. In a Time of Violence (1994) investigates the issues of womanhood in relation to tradition. Boland has also written Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (1995), in which she explains her poetical stance in depth. In 1996, the Stanford English department offered her a post where she would teach for a quarter of the academic year in their creative writing program. The following year she succeeded her friend, the poet Denise Levertov, in the post full-time as director of the program. Boland is currently the Melvin and Bill Lane Professor for Director of the Creative Writing Program and the Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities at Stanford. She divides her time between Dublin and Palo Alto, California. In 1997, Boland received the Irish Literature Prize, and in recent years her poetry has become part of the syllabus studied by high school students in Ireland. She has published The Lost Land (1998), Code (2001), and Against Love Poetry (2003). Her latest volume of poetry is Domestic Violence (2007). She received the Lannan Foundation Award for Poetry in 2004 and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award. That Boland is completely involved both in Irish and American literary culture is evident through her membership on the boards of the Irish Arts Council and the Irish Academy of Letters as well as the advisory board of the International Writers Center at Washington University. Cristina María Gámez-Fernández www.abc-clio.com
See also: GRENNAN, Eamon; HEANEY, Seamus; MONTAGUE, John; MULDOON, Paul References Allen-Randolph, Jody. “An Interview with Eavan Boland.” Irish University Review 23 (1993): 117–130. Fogarty, Anne. “‘The Influence of Absences’: Eavan Boland and the Silenced History of Irish Women’s Poetry.” Colby Quarterly 35, no. 4 (1999): 256–274. Gelpi, Albert. “‘Hazard and Death’: The Poetry of Eavan Boland.” Colby Quarterly 35, no. 4 (1999): 210–228. Grennan, Eamon. “American Relations.” In Irish Poetry since Kavanagh, edited by Theo Dorgan, 95–105. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996.
BONNEY, WILLIAM “BILLY THE KID” (CA. 1860–1881) The infamous Irish-American outlaw, born Henry McCarty or possibly William Henry Bonney, “Billy the Kid” also used the pseudonym of Kid Antrim. Very little is known about his birth and early childhood, and it has yet to be established whether he was born in Co. Limerick, Ireland, or in New York City, around 1860. His mother was an Irish immigrant named Catherine McCarty. His father, also an Irish immigrant, was named either William Bonney or Patrick Henry McCarty. Billy’s father died around 1865. Catherine then took Billy and his brother Joseph to Indiana, where she married Civil War veteran William H. Antrim in 1873. Because Catherine married Antrim in a Presbyterian church, she and her sons may have converted from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism at some point, but this is not certain. From Indiana the family moved to Silver City, New Mexico. Catherine died when Billy was 14, and after her death ABC-CLIO
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Infamous Irish-American outlaw William H. Bonney (aka Billy the Kid). (Library of Congress)
William Antrim left his stepsons and moved to Arizona. Billy began to work waiting tables and washing dishes in a hotel. First jailed at the age of fifteen for petty theft, he soon escaped and fled to southeastern Arizona, where he worked as a ranch hand and sheepherder. In 1877, Billy became a civilian teamster at Camp Grant Army Post. Later that year, he committed his first murder, shooting another camp worker, Francis Cahill (who according to some contemporary accounts had bullied Billy without provocation), during a fight. Whether Billy shot Cahill deliberately or his gun went off accidentally during their struggle is unclear. Jailed for “unjustifiable homicide,” Billy escaped and fled to New Mexico, where he eventually became involved in the Lincoln County War, a bitter www.abc-clio.com
dispute between cattle owners and a powerful group of local merchants over U.S. government beef contracts. After rivals murdered his employer, a local tycoon named John Tunstall, Billy decided to avenge Tunstall’s death. He joined a group of former Tunstall employees who called themselves the Regulators. The Regulators soon caught two men, who were promised their lives if they returned to town for a trial. Billy and another Regulator, however, killed both prisoners, as well as a member of the Regulators who tried to stop them. Billy escaped punishment and eventually gathered a small band of misfits around him. They began a life of cattle rustling and petty crime. When the new governor of Lincoln County offered a general amnesty for those involved in the Lincoln County War, Billy agreed to give evidence against others in return for a pardon. On March 17, 1879, he surrendered and was confined to the vicinity of Lincoln. After a few weeks, however, he broke parole and rejoined his former gang. A new sheriff in Lincoln County, Pat Garrett, determined to stop Billy’s career. After several failed attempts, Garrett, who knew Billy casually, caught up with him at a small ranch called Stinking Springs shortly before Christmas 1880, and, after a brief gunfight, brought him as a prisoner to Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Billy was later transferred to jail in Santa Fe, New Mexico. By the spring of 1881, Billy had become nationally infamous as Billy the Kid. Readers across the country followed his story as the Kid was tried in the southern New Mexico town of Mesilla, found guilty of a murder that he insisted he had not committed, and sentenced to hang. On April 22, 1881, Billy was taken to Lincoln to await execution. Six days later he overpowered his guards,
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killing them both, and escaped. On July 13, 1881, Garrett heard reports that Billy was hiding out on a ranch in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. When Billy showed up at the ranch house later that night, Garrett shot him dead. Billy was buried in Fort Sumner. The Kid’s exploits and death quickly became an indelible part of American legend. The first book about Billy the Kid, Thomas F. Daggett’s Billy Le Roy: The Colorado Bandit, appeared in 1881 shortly after Billy’s death. Between 1881 and 1882, seven more pulp fiction novels were published with some version of Billy the Kid as the lead character. Most depicted him as a cold-blooded killer who had committed as many murders as he had years, hence the persistent and most likely exaggerated claim that he had slain “21 men in his 21 years.” Irish writer Fintan O’Toole contends that “[I]n the hands of the bestselling dime novelist Emerson Hough, Pat Garrett was Anglo-Saxon civilization and Billy the Kid was the wildness of the inferior races” (O’Toole 1991). Sheriff Garrett produced his own memoir in 1882. Entitled Billy, the Kid: The Noted Desperado of the Southwest, Garrett’s account is most responsible for the enduring myths of Billy the Kid, repeating stories that the author knew to be untrue and inventing others. Billy the Kid remains a popular enigma. A study conducted in the early 1950s found that at least 437 books, major magazine articles, movies, plays, and songs had been produced about the Kid since his death, and many more have appeared since that time. Danielle Maze References O’Toole, Fintan. “The Many Stories of Billy the Kid.” The New Yorker, December 1999: 61–70. www.abc-clio.com
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Walker, Dale L. Legends and Lies: Great Mysteries of the American West. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1997.
BORD FÁILTE EIREANN (1955–2003) Bord Fáilte Eireann (BFE), the Republic of Ireland’s most successful semi-state tourism organization, was created in 1955. From its inception, the board handled tourism development, marketing, and hospitality training, although the latter function was devolved to a new organization, CERT, the State Tourism Training Agency, in 1963. Bord Fáilte was the product of an extended period of debate and discussion concerning how best to approach tourism development in southern Ireland. The first post-independence tourism dialogue began in 1923–1924 with the formation of a series of private tourism development organizations composed mainly of men representing business and tourism interests. In June 1924, these groups merged into a single organization, the Irish Tourist Association (ITA). Although the ITA was primarily a publicity body, it served as a pro-tourism lobby that pressured the Free State government, which faced tight spending restrictions, to invest heavily in tourism. Rather than provide state support, however, the 1925 and 1931 Tourism Traffic Acts encouraged county councils to fund ITA promotional efforts. The Irish government opted to support tourism more directly in 1939 by creating the Irish Tourist Board (ITB), a statutory tourism organization that was authorized to acquire land, conduct hotel inspections, set hotel standards, define “special tourist areas,” operate hotel training programs, provide development grants, and engage in ABC-CLIO
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publicity operations. Shortly after its creation, the ITB undertook a variety of development projects that were designed both to prepare Ireland for a predicted postwar tourism boom and to create jobs during the “Emergency” (the Irish government’s term for its position during World War II). At the same time, the board drew harsh criticism from many observers who rejected the government’s desire to support tourism development. As attacks grew more strident, the ITB was increasingly paralyzed and board efforts stalled. The inaction ended when the Economic Cooperation Administration demanded that Ireland either overhaul the country’s tourism development effort or face termination of Marshall Plan aid. In 1952, the government proposed the creation of two new statutory tourism bodies to replace the ITB. The first of these, An Bord Fáilte, was responsible for tourism development, including road signage, creation of tourist festivals, management of tourist sites, hotel ratings, and so forth. A second board, Fógra Fáilte, would handle all tourism publicity efforts, including publishing guidebooks and administering overseas marketing campaigns. The two-board structure quickly proved untenable and was formally replaced in 1955 by Bord Fáilte Eireann (BFE). BFE was responsible for all tourism development efforts, including publicity and development. Like its statutory predecessors, BFE was required to submit an annual report of its activities and accounts to the government. Day-to-day tourism operations were handled entirely by the board while larger tourism initiatives required state approval. Initially, BFE focused primarily on projects started during the two-board www.abc-clio.com
period. For example, production of publications such as the travel magazine Ireland of the Welcomes and the guidebook Ireland Guide continued under the new board. Likewise, the single largest tourism development project of the 1950s, a nationwide tourism festival called “An Tóstal: Ireland at Home,” first held in 1953, demanded much of the new board’s attention until the event was finally dropped in 1959. The new board also undertook an assortment of limited development efforts such as installing informational signage at various ancient sites and constructing car parks at tourism centers such as Glendalough, Mellifont Abbey, and Newgrange. An Tóstal, the board’s primary concern during the 1950s, drew together local committees responsible for organizing pageants, competitions, and displays while the central tourist board coordinated the scheduling and promotion of the various events. Although the festival largely failed to accomplish either of its stated aims—to either extend the tourist season (it was held in the early spring) or attract Irish Americans back to Ireland for a visit—it spawned numerous long-lasting events, including the Rose of Tralee, Wexford Opera Festival, Cork Film Festival, and Dublin Theatre Festival. Following the demise of An Tóstal, government grants administered by BFE kept these events alive. An Tóstal also generated the Tidy Towns and Villages Competition, which pitted Irish communities and even rural homesteads against one another in an effort to create the cleanest, prettiest, and most Irish community or farm possible. The pastel-painted towns of tourist postcards are largely the result of this event. By the late 1950s, tourism was widely acknowledged as one of Ireland’s most
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important industries. In 1958, tourism earnings reached £34.6 million and the industry was still growing; in 1960, earnings hit £42.4 million and topped £49 million in 1963. This upward trend prompted the government to include tourism in its Programmes for Economic Expansion beginning in 1958, making tourism a cornerstone of the government’s effort to revitalize the Irish economy. This added pressure led Bord Fáilte to revisit the administration of tourism yet again. Unlike previous reforms, however, the new concern was localized effectiveness, not the tourism board itself. In 1964, eight Regional Tourism Organisations (RTOs) were created to promote greater communication between the Bord Fáilte central office in Dublin and various regional development groups. In 1963, the government assigned Bord Fáilte a role in reviewing planning petitions under the 1963 Local Government (Planning and Development Act). Although tourism officials were long concerned with landscape aesthetics and environmental impact, the new role gave the tourist board an official role in approving building projects—a role that, in turn, prompted BFE to gradually shape itself into an environmental lobby, repeatedly pointing out that Irish tourism was dependent on an attractive environment. During the 1990s, and partly because of the board’s long-standing development and promotional effort, Ireland experienced a massive increase in tourism revenue. From 1994, tourism income increased by as much as 18 percent a year versus the international average of 4.5 percent growth during the same period. During the early 2000s, the Irish government became convinced that a new www.abc-clio.com
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tourism arrangement was required to ensure continued success. In 2000, it incorporated an all-Ireland tourism marketing company, Tourism Ireland Ltd., to handle publicity for both Northern Ireland and the Republic, largely usurping Bord Fáilte’s former publicity role. Increased North/ South cooperation on publicity demanded a similar expansion of cross-border development efforts, while at the same time the sheer number of tourists now visiting the island posed a threat to Ireland’s reputation as an untouched tourism mecca—a challenge that seemed to demand a whole new approach to tourism policy. To meet these challenges, and to facilitate cooperation with the recently established Tourism Ireland Ltd., the Irish government proposed the formation of a new tourism authority. The National Tourism Development Authority Act of 2003 created a new tourist board, Fáilte Ireland. This new body merged CERT and Bord Fáilte and is responsible for tourism training as well as strategic and practical development initiatives. Eric G. E. Zuelow See also: AN TÓSTAL: IRELAND AT HOME References Bord Fáilte. Bord Fáilte Report and Financial Statements 2000. Dublin: Bord Fáilte, 2000. Deegan, James, and Donal A. Dineen. Tourism Policy and Performance: The Irish Experience. London: International Thompson Business Press, 1997. Fáilte Ireland: The National Tourism Development Authority. November 2005. Fáilte Ireland website. www.failteireland.ie/ (accessed November 9, 2005). Zuelow, Eric G. E. “The Tourism Nexus: Tourism and National Identity since the Irish Civil War.” PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004. ABC-CLIO
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BOSTON Often described as the “capital of Irish America,” Boston, Massachusetts is a major center for Irish immigrants and Irish Americans in the United States. While actual numbers are smaller than in New York and other larger cities, people of Irish birth or descent make up 29 percent of greater Boston’s population—by far the largest national group in the area—compared with 12 percent in metropolitan New York. As such, despite entrenched memories of nativist discrimination, Irish immigrants and their descendants have played a large role in shaping Boston’s social, political, and cultural identity. Given its roots as the Puritan “city upon the hill,” Boston received few Irish immigrants before the mid-nineteenth century. Those who did come in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were mostly Presbyterian indentured servants and craftspeople from Ulster, who either quickly moved on to the frontier or assimilated into the native population. The Great Famine of the 1840s brought large numbers of Catholic Irish for the first time—increasing their population from 4,000 in 1820 to 117,000 in 1850. While nearly half arrived directly from Ireland, countless more traveled down from the quays at Quebec. By 1860, 26 percent of Boston’s population was Irish, in contrast to Germans and African Americans, who made up less than one percent each. Largely unskilled, Irish immigrants had few options in finding employment. For the most part, men became manual laborers, while women found work as domestic servants or in the nearby Lowell and Lawrence textile mills. Bostonians were initially sympathetic toward the starving immigrants, but their increasing numbers www.abc-clio.com
soon provoked anti-Catholic and anti-Irish hostility. This hostility sometimes turned into violence, such as in 1834 when nativist mobs burnt an Ursuline convent in nearby Charlestown. Work advertisements often stated “No Irish Need Apply,” while political parties like the Know-Nothings gained strength, winning statewide elections in 1854. These memories persisted in Irish minds, contributing to a separatist mentality long after they achieved success. To help them settle into city life, the Irish established various cultural, charitable, and religious institutions. For example, the Pilot, a newspaper founded in 1829 and edited by well-known Irishmen such as John Boyle O’Reilly, offered a “missing friends” column and kept immigrants informed of news from Ireland. The Charitable Irish Society, founded in 1737, served the dual purpose of charitable organization and social club. The most important institution was the Catholic Church. The diocese’s Irish-American bishops created a network of parishes, schools, hospitals, and orphanages designed to help immigrants maintain their religious identity while assimilating to American life. By the late 1800s, many Irish had become more economically mobile, moving out of North End slums to such “streetcar suburbs” as South Boston and Dorchester. This mobility was aided by Irish dominance of public education; by the first decade of the twentieth century 25 percent of the teachers were Irish and 75 percent of all Irish children attended public schools. Yet while many became teachers, lawyers, and priests, the community was still heavily concentrated in unskilled labor well into the 1960s. Because of the difficulty of penetrating the rigid Yankee social hierarchy, politics
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became one of the few ways for the Irish to advance. From Hugh O’Brien (1885–1888) to Raymond L. Flynn (1984–1993), the Irish dominated city government and slowly began to infiltrate the cultural establishment. Politicians like John “Honey Fitz”’ Fitzgerald and James Michael Curley practiced ward-based politics, playing on ethnic and racial tensions and constructing widespread patronage networks. This local success was duplicated on the national level in 1963 with the election of President John F. Kennedy—a symbol to Irish Americans everywhere that they had finally achieved acceptance. Following in his footsteps were his brother, Senator Edward Kennedy, and Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill (speaker of the House of Representatives from 1977 to 1987). Both worked not only for social, economic, and educational improvements in America but also for peace in Northern Ireland after the outbreak of the Troubles. While Boston’s Irish-born population decreased during the twentieth century— from 71,441 in 1890 to 57,011 in 1920— the American-born generations have maintained a strong regional Irish identity, strengthened through local events like the “Southie” Saint Patrick’s Day parade. In addition, such organizations as the Irish Cultural Centre and Boston College’s Irish Studies Program, both founded in the 1990s, work to foster greater connections with Ireland. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Boston continues to be a popular destination for Irish immigrants, businesspeople, and students, and remains a center of Irish culture in America. Meaghan Dwyer See also: GREAT FAMINE, THE; KENNEDY, John F.; O’NEILL, Thomas P.; O’REILLY, John Boyle www.abc-clio.com
References Connolly, James. The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900–1925. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. O’Connor, Thomas. The Boston Irish: A Political History. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995. Ryan, Denis P. Beyond the Ballot Box: A Social History of the Boston Irish. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983.
BOURKE, JOHN GREGORY (1846–1896) John Gregory Bourke, an Army officer and ethnologist who used his writings to advocate for Native Americans, was born in Philadelphia on June 23, 1846, to booksellers Edward Joseph Bourke and Anna Morton Bourke. Both parents were Irish immigrants and Roman Catholic. On August 12, 1862, following his father’s death and in a rush of excitement about the Civil War, Bourke lied about his age to join the 15th Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry. At the 1862 Battle of Stones River, he earned the Medal of Honor for rallying his fellow cavalrymen and leading a charge after all of their officers had been killed. He subsequently saw action at Chickamauga and Chattanooga before joining Sherman’s March through Georgia. Mustered out of the cavalry in July 1865, Bourke entered West Point. He graduated eleventh out of thirty-nine in June 1869. Posted to the 3rd Cavalry at Camp Grant in the Arizona Territory in 1870, Bourke found himself in the heart of Apache country and in the middle of the Indian Wars. Like many other soldiers, he initially saw nothing wrong with matching the Native Americans brutality for brutality. When a visitor nearly fainted after seeing two Indian ears and a scalp displayed ABC-CLIO
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on Bourke’s wall, the young soldier began to reconsider his views. However, he remained firm in his commitment to subdue the Indians and make the Far West safe for Anglo-American settlement. To divert his attention from warfare and the monotony of garrison life, Bourke began studying the history and culture of all the people of the West, including the Native Americans. In honor of his interest in Indian life, the Apaches nicknamed Bourke naltsus-bichidin or Paper Medicine Man. His opinions on the settlement of the West were far more critical than those of the other scholars of his era, such as Frederick Jackson Turner. Bourke saw a heritage of epic heroism but also of greed and the scandalous treatment of native culture. He was a staunch advocate of the Indians’ rights in an age when they had few friends or defenders. Bourke’s published writings on Indian life and culture brought him international acclaim, but his open and vocal concern for the Indians eventually crippled his military career. In 1871, Bourke became aide-de-camp to Brigadier General George Crook. He would remain in this position for the next fourteen years, serving in every major Indian campaign in Arizona and on the Northern Plains. A tall man with a heavy mustache, Bourke had a reputation as a raconteur. His memoir, On the Border with Crook, has since become a military history classic. In 1885, Bourke received command of Camp Rice (later Fort Hancock), Texas. In March 1886, he transferred to Washington, D.C. so that he could continue his ethnological studies. Bourke never advanced past the rank of captain. In 1891, he commanded Fort Ringgold in Texas, but complaints about his abusive treatment of private citizens during border troubles with Mexico led to www.abc-clio.com
his recall. Bourke finished his career at Fort Ethan Allen in Vermont. He died June 8, 1896, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetary. Caryn E. Neumann See also: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR References Porter, Joseph C. Paper Medicine Man: John Gregory Bourke and His American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. Robinson, Claude M., III, ed. The Diaries of John Gregory Bourke. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2003.
BOYLE, KATHLEEN (1869–1941) Kathleen Boyle was an educator and founder of the St. Patrick’s School in San Martín, a suburb of Buenos Aires. Born Kathleen Milton Jones in Dublin on October 18, 1869, she was the daughter of Francis P. Jones and Elizabeth Dowling. She was sent to England to study literature at the University of Cambridge. Her father died in 1886, and the family immigrated to Rio de Janeiro, where Kathleen taught English, music and arts in the Colegio Americano Brasileiro. A yellow fever outbreak forced them to travel to Argentina. Their cousins John and Robert Hallahan, sons of the Rev. John Hallahan of Castletown, Berehaven (Co. Cork), were physicians in the British Hospital of Buenos Aires, and in 1891 received Kathleen’s mother and her four children in Buenos Aires. Kathleen resumed her teaching profession in 1894 when she founded the English Schoool of San Martín, which was later renamed St. Patrick’s School. In 1899, she married Andrew T. S. Boyle (a former major in the British Army) at St. John’s Pro-Cathedral, the Anglican church of
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Portrait of award-winning writer, educator, and political activist Kathleen Boyle. (Library of Congress)
Buenos Aires. She later converted to Catholicism, and they both remarried and re-baptized their children. Unlike other Irish schools, from the beginning St. Patrick’s School was open to students of any origin or religion and was a laboratory to test the latest educational techniques. Boyle implemented new methods to teach English as a foreign language and, according to the examination results, there was a significant improvement of the students’ knowledge and enthusiasm. Her motivation schemes, including awards to the best students, prompted the children to work harder. When the number of students grew and she was not able to teach all of them personally, she hired qualified teachers who had graduated from prestigious Argentine schools. During Boyle’s lifetime, Argentina was a country whose population was growing www.abc-clio.com
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dramatically. Its postcolonial bourgeois structure was challenged by massive inflows of new immigrants from disparate cultures in Europe and the Middle East. On August 4, 1932, the Standard, the newspaper edited by Michael G. Mulhall, published a letter sent by Katheen Boyle but signed “Miss Justice.” In it she argued against the perspective of some readers who thought women should give up their jobs in favor of men to relieve unemployment. In her letter Boyle focused on gender imbalance in the contemporary Argentinean workplace and a proposed 10 percent cut on salaries, she argued, should be applied only to those with higher incomes, not to low-paid workers with large families. She ended with an appeal to wealthy men to sacrifice half of their salaries and see that those working under them earn a living salary. Kathleen Boyle died in October 1941. A street in the San Martín district Villa Piaggio was named after her, and a bronze bust was placed in Nueve de Julio and Mitre streets, and later moved to the cemetery. Her life challenges the traditional historical narrative of the Irish in Argentina, which frequently depicts Roman Catholic male emigrants from rural townlands in the Irish midlands or Wexford who settled in the countryside of Buenos Aires or other provinces to work in sheep farming. Edmundo Murray See also: MULHALL, Michael George References Coughlan, Eduardo A. Los Irlandeses en la Argentina: Su Actuación y Descendencia. Buenos Aires: Author’s Edition, 1987. Roger, María José. “The Children of the Diaspora: Irish Schools and Educators in Argentina, 1850–1950.” www.irishargentine.org (accessed March 12, 2004). ABC-CLIO
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BRAZIL The first Irish settler in Brazil was a missionary, Thomas Field, S.J. (1547–1626), born in Limerick, who entered the Jesuits in Rome in 1574. Father Field arrived in Brazil in late 1577 and spent three years in Piratininga (today’s São Paulo). Then he moved to Paraguay with two other Jesuits, and over the next ten years they established missions among the Guaraní people. Thomas Field, who died in Asunción, is credited with being the first priest to celebrate the Roman Catholic rites in the Americas. In about 1612 the Irish brothers Philip and James Purcell established a colony in Tauregue, on the mouth of the Amazon River, where English, Dutch, and French settlements were also installed. Huge profits were made by the colonists in tobacco, dyes, and hardwoods. A second group arrived in 1620 led by Bernardo O’Brien of Co. Clare. They built a wood and earthen fort on the north bank of the Amazon and named the place Coconut Grove. O’Brien learned the dialect of the Arruan people, and his colleagues became expert navigators of the maze of tributaries, canals, and islands that form the mouth of the Amazon. The first recorded Saint Patrick’s Day celebration was on March 17, 1770, at a church built in honor of the saint by Lancelot Belfort (1708–1775) on his estate known as Kilrue by the Itapecurú River, in the state of Maranhão, in northern Brazil. Several Irish soldiers served in Brazilian armies, including Diago Nicolau Keating, Diago O’Grady, and Jorge Cowan. Another Irish military man, William Cotter, was sent to Ireland in 1826 to recruit a regiment for service against Argentina. Cotter went to Co. Cork where he promised the local people that if they enlisted they would be given a grant of land after five years’ service. www.abc-clio.com
He left for Rio de Janeiro in 1827 with 2,400 men and their women and children, but they were completely neglected when they arrived. The Irish mutinied, together with a German regiment, and for a few days there was open warfare on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. While most were finally sent home or went to Canada or Argentina, some did stay and were sent to form a colony in the province of Bahia. In the 1850s the Brazilian government was anxious to raise agricultural production and to increase the population of its southern provinces, in particular with northern Europeans. After German and Swiss governments imposed restrictions on emigration to Brazil as the consequence of the poor conditions that many of these countries’ citizens had experienced there, Brazil turned its attention to other possible immigration sources. Father T. Donovan, an Irish Catholic priest, led up to 400 from Co. Wexford’s barony of Forth to Monte Bonito, near Pelotas in the then province of Rio Grande do Sul. The Irish colony rapidly collapsed, and most of the survivors made their way to Argentina or Uruguay, complaining of the lack of preparations for the reception, lack of agricultural tools, poor land, scarce water, and inadequacy of the local diet. Further colonization schemes in Brazil were also failures. In 1867, the Brazilian government sent Quintino Bocayuva, a Brazilian newspaper editor and future republican leader, to New York to recruit immigrants. His mission was to sign up former Confederates, but to help fill ships he also dispatched several hundred povertystricken Irish. Most of these were sent to Colônia Príncipe Dom Pedro, near presentday Brusque in the province of Santa Catarina. Father Joseph Lazenby, an Irish
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Jesuit living in the provincial capital, made his way to Príncipe Dom Pedro and declared that it would develop into an Irish Catholic colony. Lazenby soon entered into contact with Father George Montgomery, an Irish Catholic priest in the English “Black Country” town of Wednesbury, who arranged in 1868 for some 300 of his parishioners to be sent to Brazil. Montgomery held that the Irish had no future in England and saw in Brazil an opportunity to create Irish Catholic communities. He firmly believed that thousands more Irish living in England would soon be joining the first emigrants. But within just two years the new Irish colony failed. It was located far from any possible markets, and its land was subject to flooding. Many of the immigrants died, and the survivors soon moved to other parts of Brazil, Argentina, or the United States or returned to England. Irish immigration to Brazil was also the main objective of the Anglo-Brazilian Times newspaper, published weekly by William Scully in Rio de Janeiro between 1865 and 1884. Scully was also the founder of the Sociedade Internacional de Imigraçao in 1866, which represented his material support to the Brazilian government. A number of Irish diplomats served British interests in Brazil. Daniel Robert O’Sullivan (1865–1921), a medical doctor, army officer, and diplomat whose career was largely spent in East Africa and Brazil, served as British consul or consul-general in Bahia (1907), São Paulo (1910), and Rio de Janeiro (1907–1908, 1913–1915, 1919–1921). The Irish patriot Roger Casement (1864–1916) was a British consular official in Brazil in 1906–1911. In 1906 Casement was appointed consul in Santos, and in 1908 he became the consul in Pará (Belém). He was promoted to consul-general www.abc-clio.com
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in Rio de Janeiro in 1909, a position he retained until 1913. In 1910 the Foreign Office directed Casement to occupy a commission of enquiry sent to the rubberbearing Putumayo region of the western Amazon (an area straddling the PeruvianColombian frontier) to investigate treatment of the local Indian population by the Peruvian Amazon Company. He was knighted in 1911 for this and for similar work in Africa. During World War I, Casement sided with Germany as a tactic to achieve Irish independence, and in 1916 he was hanged by the British for treason. To damage his reputation, the British publicized the existence of Casement’s diaries, which included numerous graphic and coded accounts of his homosexual activities in Brazil and elsewhere. In 1964 Michael J. Siejes was appointed as the first honorary consul of Ireland in Rio de Janeiro, and later Padraig de Paor as nonresident Irish ambassador accredited to Brazil. In September 1975, an Irish trade mission led by Robin Bury visited São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The Irish diplomatic mission was established in Brazil in 1975, and Brazil opened its embassy in Dublin in 1991. The first resident ambassador of Ireland to Brazil, Martin Greene, arrived in Brasilia in December 2001. In Latin America, Brazil is the second trading partner of Ireland after Mexico, with an average of $154 million in exports and $80 million in imports per annum in 1996–2002 (International Monetary Fund, Direction of Trade Statistics, Yearbook 2003). In 1999, Kerry do Brasil was the first major Irish company with a $20 million investment in a production plant in Três Corações. There are also a significant number of missionary works of religious orders in ABC-CLIO
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Brazil. The Redemptorists were established in Brazil in 1960, the Kiltegans in 1963, and the Holy Ghost Fathers in 1967. In 2004, John Cribbin, O.M.I., of Shanagolden, Co. Limerick, was awarded honorary citizenship of Rio de Janeiro for his work since 1962. Among the academic initiatives in the region, since 1999, the Associação Brasileira de Estudos Irlandeses at the University of São Paulo has published the ABEI Journal: The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies, edited by Munira H. Mutran and Laura P. Z. Izarra. University of São Paulo has offered a postgraduate course on Irish literature since 1977. By the end of 2000, it was estimated that 925 Irish citizens were living in Brazil, 64 percent of them in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Bahia. Edmundo Murray See also: CASEMENT, Roger; COTTER, William; SCULLY, William J. References International Monetary Fund, Direction of Trade Statistics, Yearbook 2003. Marshall, Oliver. English, Irish and IrishAmerican Pioneer Settlers in NineteenthCentury Brazil. Oxford: Centre for Brazilian Studies, 2005. Marshall, Oliver. Brazil in British and Irish Archives. Oxford: Centre for Brazilian Studies, 2002. O’Neill, Peter. “Links Between Brazil and Ireland.” www.gogobrazil.com (accessed March 27, 2005). Platt, D. C. M. “British Agricultural Colonization in Latin America.” Inter-American Economic Affairs 28, no. 3 (Winter 1964): 3–38.
BRENDAN, SAINT, “THE NAVIGATOR” (CA. 484–CA. 577) Very little is known about the historical Saint Brendan. He was born in Kerry toward the end of the fifth century CE, and www.abc-clio.com
entered the church ca. 512, rising to become abbot of Clonfert in Co. Galway. He may have had a reputation as a traveler in his lifetime, as it is very likely that he visited Iona sometime after 563 and may also have made a journey to Wales. He was a powerful and influential figure in the early Irish church, and many religious houses claim him as a founder. Legendary versions of the saint’s life, however, are much more detailed and fantastic. Two principal sources exist: the Vita sancti Brendani, probably composed in the eighth or ninth century, and the Navagatio sancti Brendani Abbatis, perhaps composed a little later, but certainly in existence by 900. Matters are complicated by the interpolation of the Navagatio in all but two surviving copies of the Vita. Whereas the Vita includes numerous biographical details and accounts of other voyages, the Navagatio is the story of a single voyage, in which generations of enthusiasts have tried to discern the lineaments of a transatlantic crossing. The Navagatio is heavily influenced by folklore, particularly of the Irish immram type (literally “rowing around” or voyage tales). All the surviving immrama tell the story of a sea voyage punctuated by visits to amazing legendary islands. This is also the structure of the Navagatio, which may have been influenced by the seventh-century Voyage of Bran and in turn itself influenced the most well-known immram, the Voyage of Mael Duin. The Brendan legend was immensely popular in the Middle Ages, and versions exist in many European vernaculars, the most famous of which is perhaps Benedeit’s Anglo-Norman verse account. Versions in the Irish language, however, are late and often corrupt. Scholars and interested amateurs have long speculated on the question of whether
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Brendan reached the New World. Geoffrey Ashe, in his 1962 book Land to the West, links phenomena described in the Navagatio to locations along a conjectured transatlantic route. In 1976–1977 Tim Severin proved that it was possible for a leather boat to withstand an Atlantic crossing, captaining the small crew of the Brendan, a specially constructed seagoing curragh, from Kerry to Newfoundland. Severin offers a fascinating account of the journey in The Brendan Voyage (1978), claiming that his experiences aboard the small craft gave him access to a medieval worldview that made sense of many of the fantastical episodes in the Navagatio. Such claims, like Ashe’s geographical and climatological parallels, are by their nature unprovable. While it is possible that sixth-century Irish monks had the nautical technology and expertise to undertake long, even transatlantic voyages, there is no reliable evidence that the abbot of Clonfert ever did so. Kit Fryatt References Ashe, Geoffrey. Land to the West. London: Collins, 1962. Benedeit. The Anglo-Norman ‘Voyage of St Brendan’, ed. Ian Short and Brian Merrilees. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979. Burgess, Glyn S., and Clara Strijbosch. The Legend of St Brendan: A Critical Reference. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2000. Severin, Tim. The Brendan Voyage. London: Hutchinson, 1978. Webb, J. F., ed. and trans. Lives of the Saints. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965.
BRENNAN, MAEVE M. (1917–1993) A novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, Maeve Brennan was born in Dublin on January 6, 1917, the second daughter of www.abc-clio.com
Una (née Bolger) and Robert Brennan. Both her parents were active in Irish nationalism at the beginning of the century; Robert Brennan was imprisoned for his part in the Easter Rising at the time of Maeve’s birth. During the Anglo-Irish War, Robert Brennan worked as director of publicity for Sinn Féin, making him and his family a target for the Black and Tans. In the Civil War he took an anti-Treaty position, spending most of the war on the run. His daughter’s short story “The Day We Got Our Own Back,” recalls a raid on their home by agents of the Free State. After the upheavals of the Civil War the Brennans led a comfortable, middle-class life in suburban South Dublin, recorded in a number of autobiographical stories, including “The Morning After the Big Fire,” “The Lie,” and “The Clever One.” After a troubled period at a boarding school in Kildare (see her story “The Devil in Us”), Maeve completed her secondary education at Louise Gavan Duffy’s progressive, Irish-speaking Scoil Bhríghde. In 1933 Robert Brennan was appointed Secretary of the Irish Legation in Washington, D.C., and his family joined him in the United States the following year. Maeve attended college in Washington and in 1942 moved to New York, working first for Harper’s Bazaar and later joining The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1949. Her father and mother had returned to Ireland in 1947, but Maeve never lived in her home country again. However, most of her stories and her novella The Visitor, are set in Ireland and painstakingly recall local color and idiom. At The New Yorker, Brennan wrote book reviews and fashion pieces and contributed to the celebrated “Talk of the Town” column, under the pseudonym “The Long-Winded Lady.” The Long-Winded Lady’s style is both a ABC-CLIO
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parody and celebration of the inconsequential, overemphatic idiom of a privileged lady of leisure, a “forthright spendthrift as far as italics go.” Beneath this chatty persona the Long-Winded Lady exhibited, as Ben Yagoda notes, “a quality of observation, a connection to the city streets, a nonfacetious humour, a personality and an ineffable sadness.” At this time, Brennan was also publishing short stories, including her only work set in America, the “Herbert’s Retreat” stories, which deal with an affluent closeknit community of writers and artists in upstate New York. These stories are slighter than her Irish-based work and have received less critical approbation. In 1954 she married St. Clair McKelway and moved to the neighborhood on which she had based Herbert’s Retreat, Sneden’s Landing. The marriage was troubled: McKelway was an alcoholic, and the couple lived beyond their means, and more than once had to be bailed out of debt by the editor of The New Yorker. They separated in 1959 and subsequently divorced. Brennan’s divorce from McKelway began a period of increased instability in her life in which she rented or borrowed houses and apartments, or lived as “a traveller in residence” in a series of hotels. Toward the end of the 1960s she began to show the first signs of the mental illness that would trouble the last two decades of her life. In 1968 she published a collection of her Talk of the Town pieces, followed in 1969 by In and Out of Never-Never Land. In 1972 The New Yorker published her masterpiece, “The Springs of Affection,” an extended short story about the Bagot family of Wexford, who appear in a number of her other stories. “The Springs of Affection” is a brilliant exercise in free indirect style, comparable to James Joyce’s “The www.abc-clio.com
Dead” in its evocation of a particular Irish milieu and idiolect. Her last work of fiction to appear in the New Yorker, “Family Walls,” was published in 1973. In 1974 another collection, Christmas Eve, was published, and the following year her work was anthologized alongside such writers as Edith Wharton and Alice Munro. By this time, however, Brennan was suffering seriously from mental illness. She spent periods in hospital and recovered with the aid of medication, but increasingly relapsed during the later 1970s. Though she had occasional periods of lucidity, as evidenced by her last Long-Winded Lady piece, which appeared in 1981, she was also frequently homeless and disengaged from mainstream society. She died at the Lawrence Nursing Home in Arverne, New York on November 1, 1993. Since her death, her work has undergone something of a critical revival, with the publication of The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin in 1997, and the revised edition of The Long-Winded Lady in 1998. Her novella, The Visitor, was posthumously published in 2000, and a biography by Angela Bourke, Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the New Yorker, appeared in 2004. Kit Fryatt
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See also: JOYCE, James Augustine Aloysius References Bourke, Angela. Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the New Yorker Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2004. Brennan, Maeve. The Long-Winded Lady, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Brennan, Maeve. The Rose Garden: Short Stories, Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2000. Brennan, Maeve. The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Brennan, Maeve. The Visitor, Dublin, Ireland: New Island, 2001. Yagoda, Ben. About Town: The New Yorker and the World it Made, New York: Scribner, 2000. 1-800-368-6868
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BRENNAN, WALTER (1894–1972) Walter Andrew Brennan was the definitive character actor in American cinema of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Born on July 25, 1894 in Swampscott, Massachusetts, his parents, William John Brennan and Margaret Elizabeth Flanagan Brennan, were of Irish background. Brennan attended college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he studied engineering. During his time at college he became interested in acting and began to appear in roles in local vaudeville; he also took on jobs as a lumberjack and as a bank clerk. In 1917 he enlisted in the army. After his demobilization, he settled in Los Angeles, where he began to speculate in real estate. However, the lure of acting continued, and from 1923 on he was securing extra roles in films. By 1927 he was featured as a supporting actor in a variety of films, including many westerns and comedies, including Tearin’ Into Trouble and The Ridin’ Rowdy (both 1927), Silks and Saddles (1928), and The Long Trail (1929). Even in the early years of his career Brennan was a much favored character actor for directors such as Richard Thorpe, who gave him his earliest featured role in Tearin’ Into Trouble and who went on to direct him in six further films. Brennan’s popularity among directors continued in the 1930s, the decade that established him as a well-loved and popular character actor. Top directors such as William Wyler and George Stevens cast him in supporting roles in prestigious films and quite often Brennan’s natural, humorous performances stole the scenes in which he appeared. Even in this early stage of his career, Brennan was establishing the persona of the ornery sidekick or cantankerous antagonist that would serve him well for www.abc-clio.com
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four decades in films and television. He often played Irish-American roles in such films as The Shannons of Broadway and The Cohens and Kellys in Atlantic City (both 1929) as well as She’s Dangerous and Wild and Woolly (both 1937), but Brennan was never confined to Irish roles: more often than not, he was cast as crotchety Americans. Brennan’s outstanding character roles were in films directed by William Wyler and Howard Hawks. Both directors worked with him on one of his most memorable films, Barbary Coast, in 1935. Made for the independent producer, Sam Goldwyn, the film started shooting under the direction of William Wyler. Wyler had worked with Brennan on A House Divided in 1931 and cast him in an important role as Old Atrocity in Barbary Coast. Wyler was replaced by Hawks during the shoot, and Hawks later admitted he wasn’t sure about Brennan’s performance. Hawks’s reservations were allayed when he saw how warmly audiences and critics responded to Brennan’s perfectly pitched comic playing. The director worked with him again on Come and Get It in 1936 (this time it was Hawks who was replaced by Wyler during shooting!), which won Brennan his first Academy Award for supporting actor. Both Wyler and Hawks proved to be lucky charms for Brennan: he would win a third Academy Award (having won a second statue in 1938 for Kentucky) for his performance as Judge Roy Bean in Wyler’s The Westerner (1940), while Hawks cast him in a key role in the first Humphrey Bogart/ Lauren Bacall vehicle, To Have and Have Not (1944), and as an ornery toothless sidekick to John Wayne in Red River (1948) and Rio Bravo (1959). In a later interview with Joseph McBride, Hawks observed that ABC-CLIO
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Brennan had an “amazing quality, to be able to play anything and do it right.” Brennan remained one of a handful of outstanding character actors throughout the 1940s and 1950s and continued to work with prestigious directors such as John Ford (the 1946 My Darling Clementine in which he played a rare villainous role) and Frank Capra (in 1941’s Meet John Doe). In the 1950s, Brennan branched out into television and won a new audience with his role in the long-running television series, The Real McCoys (1957). He also had some success as a singer, releasing several records, the most memorable of which was 1962’s Old Rivers. Despite his prolific acting career, Brennan found time to be a successful businessman, and he owned several businesses and a ranch in Oregon. His close association with westerns throughout his career earned him a place in the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma in 1970. For the remaining two decades of his life Brennan continued to appear in many films and on television, demonstrating his versatility in the broad range of character roles he played. He worked right up until his death from emphysema on September 21, 1974. Brennan was married to Ruth Wells (1897–1997) from 1920 until his death and is survived by her and their children. Gwenda Young See also: FORD, John; WAYNE, John
BRENNAN, WILLIAM J., JR. (1906–1997) Born in Newark, New Jersey, on April 25, 1906, William Joseph Brennan, Jr., was the second of eight children born to Irish immigrants William Brennan and Agnes McDermott. Arriving from Co. Roscommon, Ireland, in 1893, William Brennan, Sr., had initially worked as a New Jersey laborer before rising to a position of labor leadership, and finally, commissioner of public safety for the city of Newark from 1917 to 1930. William J. Brennan, Jr., received his bachelor’s in economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1928 and went on to obtain his law degree from Harvard in 1931. Before his graduation from law school, Brennan would marry Marjorie Leonard, with whom he would go on to have three children. Upon completion of his studies, Brennan, largely influenced by his father’s experiences, practiced labor law in a private New Jersey practice. In 1942, Brennan entered the Army, where he served as Army Judge Advocate General until 1946. Upon his return to civilian life Brennan was appointed to a position on the Superior Court of New Jersey in 1949, followed by an appointment to the New Jersey Supreme Court in 1951. In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower appointed William J. Brennan, Jr., to the Supreme Court of the United States. Although Eisenhower was a Republican, he appointed Brennan, a Catholic Democrat, upon the guidance of his advisers, who believed Brennan’s religious and political affiliations would help sway the voters of the northeastern United States in an upcoming presidential election. However, Brennan’s appointment to the Supreme Court would become a decision that Eisenhower would reportedly come to regret as Brennan
References Carzo, Eileen Daney. “Walter Brennan.” The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America. Ed. Michael Glazier. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999. Katz, Ephraim. The Film Encyclopedia. New York: Perigee Books, 1979 McBride, Joseph. Hawks on Hawks. New York: Faber and Faber, 1996. www.abc-clio.com ABC-CLIO
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Portrait of U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, Jr. (Library of Congress)
proved to be one of the most liberal justices the Supreme Court had ever known. Brennan was a staunch supporter of individual liberties and one biographer referred to him as “the architect of much of the revolution in constitutional law that took place in the 1960s and 1970s.” Brennan was as a key member of what came to be known as the Warren Court, headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren. With a fiveperson liberal majority during the 1960s, the Warren Court redefined individual rights with important decisions on free speech, affirmative action, and school prayer. Brennan was a key voice in establishing the rights of all of society’s members, including welfare recipients and criminals. A 1966 decision in Miranda v. Arizona resulted in the creation of the Miranda rights, which established the right of the accused to due process and required members of law www.abc-clio.com
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enforcement to warn suspects of their right to a lawyer, and to the consequences of a confession. The Warren Court was also responsible for establishing a woman’s right to choose an abortion in Roe v. Wade (1972). Brennan was also an outspoken critic of capital punishment, dissenting in each case that passed before him while on the bench. By the late 1970s, Brennan’s voice was increasingly becoming one of dissent as the makeup of the Court underwent changes with more conservative appointments. Brennan finally retired from the Supreme Court of the United States on July 20, 1990, after handing down 1,360 opinions over the course of almost 34 years. His decisions on desegregation, criminal rights, welfare rights, and women’s rights helped to redefine constitutional law and the face of America. Brennan died on July 24, 1997, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. His second wife, Mary Fowler, survived him. Teresa Iacobelli References Hopkins, W. Wat. Mr. Justice Brennan and Freedom of Expression. New York: Praeger, 1991. Tribe, Laurence. “Common Sense and Uncommon Wisdom: A Tribute to Justice Brennan.” Harvard Law Review 1 (1990). www.law.harvard.edu/alumni/bulletin/backi ssues/fall97/brennan.html (accessed July 15, 2005). Wermiel, Stephen J. ‘William Joseph Brennan, Jr’. The Supreme Court Justices: A Biograhphical Dictionary, ed. Melvin I. Urofsky. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1994.
BRENON, HERBERT (1880–1958) Alexander Herbert Reginald St. John Brenon was born on January 13, 1880, in Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire), Co.
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Portrait of theater and film director Herbert Brenon. (Library of Congress)
Dublin. His family came from an AngloIrish background and both his parents, Edward and Frances, were involved in literary circles as writers and editors. In 1882 the family left Ireland and settled in London, where Herbert attended St. Paul’s school. By 1896 the family had moved to America, and within a year, Herbert had found employment in the office of Joseph Vion, a vaudeville booking agent based in New York. By the 1897–1898 season he was taking on small roles in vaudeville shows and serving as an assistant stage manager for touring shows. In 1904 he married a fellow actor, Helen Oberg, and their only child, Cyril Herbert Brenon, was born in 1906. In 1908 the Brenons bought a theater in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, which they operated successfully as a movie theater. This peripheral involvement, and success, www.abc-clio.com
in the film industry inspired him to switch from exhibition to production, and in 1910 he signed with the IMP Company as a scenario writer. Among his earliest credits as a writer was an early version of The Scarlet Letter, directed by George Loane Tucker. In 1912 Brenon received his first directing credit on a film called All For Her; this was soon followed by a version of Camille starring Gertrude Shipman. Reviews of the latter film praised Brenon’s handling of his star and the film’s fine pictorial qualities. During the five years that he spent with IMP Brenon directed more than forty films, including two adaptations from Dion Boucicault, The Long Strike (1912) and Kathleen Mavoureen (1913); critically acclaimed versions of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Ivanhoe, starring King Baggot; and the box office smash, Neptune’s Daughter, starring Olympic swimmer Annette Kellerman. His prolific output as a director during these years attracted the attention of other studios and stars, and after a short stint as an independent, Brenon signed a contract with Fox studios in 1915. At Fox Brenon directed a number of famous stars, most notably Theda Bara, the original screen vamp, and he reunited with Kellerman to direct a sequel to Neptune’s Daughter called A Daughter of the Gods. Following an argument over credit for A Daughter of the Gods, Brenon left Fox and signed with Lewis Selznick. They set up the Herbert Brenon Film Corporation and produced one of Brenon’s most famous and controversial films, War Brides, starring Alla Nazimova. The film was not a commerical success upon its initial release, possibly because of the unpopularity of its pacifist tone. In 1918 Brenon took American citizenship but returned to Europe to direct a propaganda film, The Invasion of Britain,
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which was shelved as World War I ended. By 1920 he was back in America, directing Norma Talmadge in The Passion Flower (1921), Pola Negri in The Spanish Dancer (1923), and Betty Compson in The Woman with Four Faces (1923). Brenon’s greatest success came in 1924 with his production of Peter Pan, still regarded by many critics as the best adaptation of J. M. Barrie’s play. The rights to the play had been bought by Famous-Players/Paramount back in 1918, but it was Brenon, along with screenwriter Willis Goldbeck and star Betty Bronson, who finally got the film made. The film was lavishly promoted, critically acclaimed, and commercially successful. Brenon’s output over the next four years tapped into the zeitgeist of the Jazz Age with flapper films (Dancing Mothers in 1926, which starred the “It Girl,” Clara Bow); gung-ho adventures (Beau Geste in 1926); and the first screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1926, starring Lois Wilson and Warner Baxter). After his departure from Paramount in 1927, Brenon joined United Artists where he directed Sorrell and Son, which won him a best director nomination in the first Academy Awards list. Brenon was critical of the introduction of sound in film, believing it “violated the pantomimic art,” and his reluctance to move into the talking pictures era may account for the decline in the numbers of films that he directed after 1927. Brenon’s reputation for temperament in his dealings with studios may also have had an impact on his career. By 1934 his Hollywood career was over, and he left America to work for a number of British studios. Although he had some moderate success in Britain, Brenon directed his last film, The Flying Squad, in 1940. He retired to Los Angeles where he lived with his wife, www.abc-clio.com
Helen Oberg, until his death on June 21, 1958. Gwenda Young See also: BAGGOT, King References Gillett, John. “Herbert Brenon.” In Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, edited by Richard Roud. Vol. 2, ed. New York: Secker & Warburg, 1978: 141. Lodge, Jack. “The Career of Herbert Brenon.” Griffithiana 57, no. 8 (1996): 5–133.
BRENT, GEORGE (CA. 1899–1979) Some confusion exists over the exact birth date of George Brendan Nolan (George Brent). Some sources list it as March 15, 1899 (www.imdb.com), while others list it as March 15, 1904 (Katz 1979). However, there is no doubt that he was born in Shannonbridge, Co. Offaly, the son of a British Army officer. According to his own account, his interest in acting was sparked by some experience working as a child actor at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. During the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921), he became involved in the Irish Republican Army, serving as a messenger boy for a unit headed by Michael Collins. He left Ireland, possibly under threat of imprisonment or execution from British forces, and traveled to Canada, where he continued his acting career in stock companies. By 1925 he was in the United States, touring with a production of Abie’s Irish Rose, and for the next two years he built up considerable experience as an actor in companies in Colorado, Rhode Island, Florida, and Massachusetts. In 1927 he appeared on Broadway, alongside Clark Gable (then an up-and-coming theater actor), in Love, Honor, and Betray. ABC-CLIO
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In 1930 Brent moved to Hollywood and shortly afterwards he was cast in his first film, Under Suspicion. This debut was followed by a number of appearances in minor films produced by Fox and Universal. In 1932 Brent was signed to a contract with Warner Brothers, and over the next decade his output was prolific. Initially cast in a variety of roles, which included a farmer (The Purchase Price, 1932), a sculptor (So Big, 1932), a police inspector (Miss Pinkerton, 1932) and a doctor (Luxury Liner, 1933), he found his niche as a romantic leading man opposite such major stars as Ruth Chatterton, with whom he starred in four films between 1932 and 1933. Their onscreen partnership led to a relationship that resulted in a brief marriage. Warner Brothers regarded Brent as ideal leading-man material: handsome and suave, he served as a useful romantic partner for the headstrong heroines of many Warner Brothers films. His most famous roles, in Jezebel, The Old Maid, In this Our Life, The Great Lie, and Dark Victory, saw him star opposite Bette Davis, Warner Brothers studio’s preeminent female star of the 1930s. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Brent continued to take roles opposite strong actresses such as Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, Mary Astor, and Barbara Stanwyck, and invariably suffered the typecasting that was common within the Hollywood studio system. In an effort to break free from the limited roles he was assigned, he took the role of a psychopathic killer in Robert Siodmak’s atmospheric noir melodrama, The Spiral Staircase (1946). Although the film remains a classic of its genre, Brent’s performance perhaps shows the limits of his acting abilities. Brent worked steadily throughout the 1940s but found that roles began to fall off www.abc-clio.com
as he grew older and audience tastes changed in the 1950s. He retired in 1956, announcing his intention to run a horsebreeding ranch. Although he made occasional guest appearances on such television shows as Rawhide and Studio 57 in the 1950s and 1960s, it wasn’t until 1978 that he returned to films. Coaxed back to Hollywood by director Irving Rapper, with whom he had worked on The Gay Sisters in 1942, he appeared as Judge Gesell in the 1978 film Born Again. It was to be his final film role. Married five times, George Brent died on May 26, 1979. He was survived by his children, Barry and Suzanne. Gwenda Young See also: IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY References “George Brent.” Internet Movie Database website. http://www.imdb.com/name/ nm0107575/ (accessed June 30, 2007). Katz, Ephraim. The Film Encyclopedia. New York: Perigee Books, 1979. Vinson, James. International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers: Actors and Actresses. Chicago: St. James Press, 1986.
BRODERICK, DAVID COLBRETH (1820–1859) Born in Washington, D.C., where his Irish immigrant father was working as a stonecutter on the U.S. Capitol building, Broderick moved to New York City with his parents when he was three. He attended free common schools until becoming an apprentice stonecutter. He later became a stonemason and a saloonkeeper. As a young man Broderick joined the Democratic Party’s Tammany Society, which was gaining power as Irish immigrants fleeing the Potato Famine flowed into the City. Broderick ran for Congress in New York in 1846 but lost. He headed
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Portrait of U.S. Senator David Colbreth Broderick. (Library of Congress)
West for Gold Rush California after the March 1849 inauguration of President Zachary Taylor, a Whig, temporarily ended Tammany’s federal patronage power. After arriving in San Francisco, Broderick worked as a smelter and seller of gold and silver and introduced Tammany’s ward system of political organization. He was elected to California’s new state senate in 1850, and became president of the state senate in 1851. Once the California legislature enacted a fugitive slave law in 1852, Broderick, who strongly opposed slavery, worked statewide to build up opposition to U.S. Senator William Gwin, the strongest force in California’s Democratic Party, and an outspoken propent of slavery. The result was Broderick’s exclusion from the 1852 convention that selected California delegates for the Democratic National Convention, www.abc-clio.com
and a decade-long split of the California Democratic Party between Gwin’s Chivalry and Broderick’s Northern factions. However, Broderick’s supporters won more seats than Gwin’s in California’s 1854 elections, and he succeeded in having the California legislature not reelect Gwin as U.S. senator after his term expired in March 1855. California’s other senator, Democrat John Weller, served alone for two years until his own term expired in March 1857. The 1857 California legislature elected Broderick to its six-year U.S. Senate seat, but could not decide whom to choose for the remaining four-year term of Gwin’s former seat. Broderick’s supporters finally agreed to Gwin’s reelection, but only after Gwin agreed that Broderick would control federal appointments in California. After they were sworn in as U.S. Senators, Gwin effectively double-crossed Broderick by taking control of federal patronage in California despite their agreement. Newly elected President James Buchanan liked Gwin and disliked the outspoken Broderick. In addition, Buchanan and most other Democrats held views closer to Gwin’s. Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, who supported Broderick, was one of the few Democratic senators with views close to his. By 1859, Broderick’s use of his sharp tongue to speak out against Buchanan and Gwin had angered Chief Justice David Terry of the California Supreme Court, a slavery sympathizer and friend of Gwin’s. Terry verbally attacked Broderick at an 1859 Democratic state convention, and when Broderick responded in kind, Terry demanded satisfaction. After Broderick refused, Terry resigned from the court and demanded a retraction, effectively requiring a duel once Broderick, inevitably, refused to ABC-CLIO
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retract anything. The two met at Lake Merced, outside San Francisco’s city limits, on September 13, 1859, with approximately seventy spectators present. Broderick’s pistol went off prematurely, firing into the ground before he aimed. Terry then took careful aim and shot Broderick in the chest. He died three days later, the first sitting U.S. senator to be killed in a duel. Broderick continued to be a political force, even in death. The split between Chivalry and Northern Democrats continued to divide California’s Democratic Party, and Abraham Lincoln’s California victory in the 1860 presidential election was attributed to Broderick supporters who voted for the antislavery Republican. Gwin’s public career soon ended. He did not seek reelection, and his senate term expired in March 1861. He was twice arrested for disloyalty during the Civil War. Terry himself met a violent end. A U.S. Marshal serving as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field’s bodyguard shot and killed Terry in 1889, after Terry, then 66, assaulted Field, a former Northern Democrat and a friend of Broderick’s, in a central California railway station. Steven B. Jacobson See also: SAN FRANCISCO; TAMMANY HALL References Davis, Winfield J. History of Political Conventions in California: 1849–1892. Sacramento: California State Library, 1893. Hargis, Donald E. “The Issues in the Broderick-Gwin Debates of 1859.” California Historical Society Quarterly 32 (1953): 313–325. Lynch, Jeremiah C. Senator of the Fifties: David C. Broderick of California. New York: Beck & Taylor, 1911. Quinn, Arthur. Rivals: William Gwin, David Broderick, and the Birth of California. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. www.abc-clio.com
Rolle, Andrew F. California: A History. 2nd ed. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1969. Williams, David A. David C. Broderick: A Political Portrait. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1969.
BROPHY, JOHN (1883–1963) Labor organizer John Brophy was born in St. Helens, Lancashire, England, to Irish immigrants; his father’s family was originally from Dublin. Brophy’s father worked as a miner before joining the British Army and serving in Ireland, Egypt, and South Africa. When he was discharged he married Mary Dagnall, whose family had come to England from Dundalk, Co. Louth. Together they had eleven children, five of whom survived until adulthood; John was the eldest. When he was nine years old, John emigrated with his family to America, where they eventually settled in Pennsylvania. For the next few years his family moved to different mining communities across Pennsylvania to earn a living. At the age of twelve John began working as his father’s helper in the mines in Urey, Pennsylvania. Within two years he had joined the United Mine Workers (UMW). After contracting typhoid fever, he was elected to the post of secretary of a UMW local in 1904, and later he was elected checkweighman at the Greenwich mine, a position that ensured that all the miners were paid the correct amount of money. In 1916, after having held a number of posts in the UMW, he was elected president of District 2, a position that covered all of the mines in central Pennsylvania. In 1918 he married Anita Anstead, and they had two children together. During this time he met John L. Lewis, the future UMW president and founder of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
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Brophy’s relationship with Lewis and their mutual rivalry would color much of his later career in the union. Lewis was elected president of the UMW in 1920, but six years later Brophy ran against him for the presidency. Brophy ran on a “Save the Union” slate and called for the nationalization of the coal industry, a demand that Lewis rejected. Brophy lost the election, although he probably would have won if the election had been truly democratic. Brophy was forced to leave the union in 1928, and Lewis accused him of dual unionism on the basis of the Communist Party’s support for his candidacy. After being driven from the UMW Brophy worked as a salesman for the Columbia Conserve Company. During this time he also studied economics and philosophy. In 1933, with the New Deal and the National Industrial Recovery Act, Lewis brought Brophy back into the UMW to help increase the membership. In 1938, Lewis appointed Brophy as one of the directors of the CIO, which was formed by a number of groups that had been expelled from the American Federation of Labor (AFL). However, Lewis was fearful of Brophy’s status and overlooked him for the position of secretary of the CIO. In 1940 Brophy suffered a heart attack, and the following year Lewis left the CIO after he opposed Franklin Roosevelt’s candidacy for president. That same year, President Roosevelt appointed Brophy to be a member of the Fair Employment Practices Commission. During World War II Brophy served as the labor representative on the National War Labor Board and the Wage Stabilization Board. Lewis’s successor, Philip Murray, appointed him as the director of Industrial Union Councils, and in that position he oversaw the expulsion of www.abc-clio.com
Communist-led unions from the CIO. He also served as the CIO representative to international labor organizations such as the World Federation of Trade Unions and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. Brophy continued to work for the CIO after it merged with the AFL in 1955. He was a religious man and he viewed Rerum Novarum, the papal encyclical of Pope Leo XIII that supported the right of workers to form unions, as a key document. Later he would advocate an industrial relations model based on the model set forth by Pope Pius XI in his 1931 encyclical Quadrogesimo Anno. He retired in 1961, and two years later he died in Falls Church, Virginia. David Doyle See also: PENNSYLVANIA References Brophy, John. A Miner’s Life: An Autobiography. Edited and Supplemented by John O. P. Hall. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964. O’Donnell, L. A. “John Brophy.” The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999.
BROSNAN, PIERCE (1953–) Possibly Ireland’s most commercially successful actor, Pierce Brendan Brosnan was born in Drogheda, Co. Louth on May 16, 1953, the only child of Thomas Brosnan (born 1915, Tralee, Co. Kerry) and May Brosnan (née Smith, born in 1932 in Navan, Co. Meath). He was brought up in Navan, Co. Meath, and lived with a succession of relatives after the breakdown of his parents’ marriage and his mother’s departure to London to train as a nurse. He was educated in Scoil Mhuire, Navan, and in interviews he has been critical of the ABC-CLIO
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frequent corporal punishment meted out to students there in the 1950s. In 1964 he moved to London to be reunited with his mother and her new husband, Bill Carmichael. He continued his education at Elliott Secondary School, where he was a mediocre student. After leaving school in 1969 he found work as a trainee commercial artist in a photographic studio and became involved in the Oval House Theatre. The Oval House had a reputation for mounting unusual, slightly avant-garde productions that included street theater. Among the productions that Brosnan appeared in were Pucka Ri and A Feast of Fools, both staged very much in the spirit of the counterculture so prominent at the time. In 1973 he enrolled in the Drama Centre, Camden, a school whose alumni included such leading stage actors as Simon Callow, Geraldine James, and Frances de la Tour. The centre was renowned for its tough teaching methods and a method approach to acting modeled on the theories of Konstantin Stanislavsky. Brosnan served his apprenticeship in an assortment of roles in the centre’s productions. Upon graduation in 1976 he became an assistant stage manager at the Theatre Royal in York and continued acting in plays (e.g., Wait Until Dark; The Red Devil Battery Sign) and pantomimes (The Wizard of Oz). He also appeared in regional theater in Westcliff and, more importantly, in Glasgow’s Citizens’ Theatre in a revival of Noel Coward’s SemiMonde. In the 1970s the Citizens’ Theatre was regarded as one of the most vibrant and innovative theaters in the United Kingdom, and Brosnan appeared in four productions there: he followed the Coward play with productions of No Orchids for Miss Blandish, based on the detective novel by James Hadley Chase; The Painter’s Palace www.abc-clio.com
of Pleasure, which was based on three Jacobean tragedies; and The Maid’s Tragedy. Each production attracted critical and public attention and proved that Brosnan was not afraid to take on challenging and controversial roles. In 1978 he met Cassandra Harris (née Gleeson), an Australian model and actress; the couple married in 1980 and Brosnan became adoptive father to her two children from a previous relationship. Cassandra proved to be a formative influence on the development of his career, and she also provided him with his first link to the James Bond franchise—in 1982 she appeared as a Bond girl in For Your Eyes Only. In 1979 Brosnan won a small role in a West End production of Filumena, directed by Italian maestro Franco Zeffirelli. The play was a commercial and critical success, and soon after he made his debut on television in Murphy’s Stroke, a story about four Irish builders’ adventures in the British horseracing world. Other screen roles followed, including a brief appearance as an Irish Republican Army hit man in a seminal British thriller of the 1980s, John Mackenzie’s The Long Good Friday (1980), and a supporting role in The Mirror Crack’d (1980), which featured an all-star cast that included Elizabeth Taylor. Brosnan’s work on Murphy’s Stroke attracted the attention of American television producers, and he was cast in a high profile miniseries, The Manions of America (1981), about the experiences of an Irish family of immigrants in America. Described by reviewers as an Irish-American Roots, the miniseries was panned by critics but proved popular with U.S audiences. It was an important break into the American market for Brosnan, and his profile continued to rise with his casting in a long-running television
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show, Remington Steele (1982–1986; 1987). The series was a popular hit in America, and although it never taxed Brosnan’s acting abilities, it did demonstrate his comedic skills. After Remington Steele was axed in 1986, rumors circulated that Brosnan might be in line for one of the most coveted roles in cinema: that of James Bond. Bond producer Cubby Broccoli clearly believed Brosnan had the necessary charisma, looks, and talent to take over from Roger Moore, and in late 1986 Brosnan was offered the part. However, the role that he was intent on securing was taken from him by the producers of Remington Steele: Brosnan had signed a seven-year contract with them in 1982, and even though the series had been canceled in 1986, producers decided to enforce the final year of his contract and make more episodes of the series to sell to another television network. Bitterly disillusioned by the loss of the Bond role, Brosnan honored his Remington Steele contract and appeared in six more episodes. Brosnan’s loss was Timothy Dalton’s gain, albeit temporarily. In spite of his disappointment at losing the Bond role, Brosnan’s film career progressed steadily in the late 1980s. He appeared in a number of big-budget films, including Nomads (1986) and The Fourth Protocol (1987), and reestablished his links with Ireland in 1987 by starring in a rather mediocre thriller, Taffin, with Ray McAnally. More interesting was his appearance in Mister Johnson, shot in Nigeria by acclaimed Australian director Bruce Beresford and adapted from Joyce Cary’s novel. The film, while not a box office hit, received positive reviews. Yet Brosnan’s career choices were not always wise: he followed Mister Johnson with a trite, conventional thriller, www.abc-clio.com
Live Wire, which won him few plaudits with critics. In 1987 Brosnan returned to television, appearing in a miniseries, Noble House, and as Phileas Fogg in a new version of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. Just as his career seemed to be advancing at a steady pace, Brosnan received the shocking news that his wife, Cassandra, had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. The Brosnan marriage was an unusual entity in Hollywood: it was a solid and happy partnership that had given Pierce a birth son, Sean, and two adopted children. Despite successive bouts of treatment, Cassandra died of ovarian cancer in 1991, and her death left him devastated. In interviews after her death he expressed his grief at the loss of his soul mate, and it seemed that his only remedy was to immerse himself in work. The films in which Brosnan appeared after his wife’s death were significant box office successes and again demonstrated his versatility: The Lawnmower Man (1997) featured him in an eccentric scientist role, while his performance in Mrs Doubtfire (1993) confirmed his talent for comedy. Following an appearance in Warren Beatty’s forgettable Love Affair (1994), a remake of the 1957 classic An Affair to Remember, Cubby Broccoli approached him again for the Bond role. Broccoli was not happy with the current Bond, Timothy Dalton, and was reluctant to make a third Bond film with him; in turn, Dalton was also anxious to move on from the Bond role. Brosnan may not have been the producer’s first choice for the role: there were rumors that the role had been offered to Mel Gibson, Liam Neeson, Harrison Ford, and Hugh Grant. Nevertheless, Brosnan was offered and accepted the role, and his first ABC-CLIO
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appearance as Bond was 1995’s Goldeneye, a film received by fans and reviewers as a return to form for the Bond franchise. Many commentators praised Brosnan as the “best Bond since Connery,” and he made a convincing action hero and romantic lead. While being cast as Bond undoubtedly established him as an A-list star, it had its disadvantages, too: Brosnan had always attempted to produce a varied body of work, and his experiences on Remington Steele alerted him to the pitfalls of typecasting. As a way of proving his star status and his versatility, he continued to take roles outside Bond, appearing in The Mirror Has Two Faces (1997), Dante’s Peak (1997), and in a comic role in Tim Burton’s science fiction spoof, Mars Attacks! (1997). Although Brosnan was now a full-time resident of the United States, he maintained connections with Ireland and referred more and more to his Irish birth and childhood in interviews. In 1997 he returned to Ireland to make a film financed by his own production company, Irish Dreamtime. Shot on location in Co. Wicklow, The Nephew featured Brosnan in an Irish role alongside Donal McCann. The film’s release was delayed until 1998, and it was received with mixed reviews. Another Bond outing, Tomorrow Never Dies, was released in 1998, but a bigger hit was his slick remake of the Steve McQueen film, The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), costarring Rene Russo and acclaimed for its style and sophistication. Having acted as suave Englishmen in the Bond films and The Thomas Crown Affair, Brosnan played another Englishman, albeit one in disguise, in Richard Attenborough’s Grey Owl. The film told the true story of an Englishman who masqueraded as a Native American in the 1930s, becoming a celebrity and a www.abc-clio.com
symbol of early conservationism. (Brosnan’s interest in conservation and ecological issues was further evident in his narration of a documentary on dolphins in 2000.) Although Grey Owl garnered critical praise, the film was given only a limited release in both Europe and America, much to the disappointment of both its director and star. Brosnan scored another box office hit with a third Bond film, The World is Not Enough (1999), and critical acclaim in John Boorman’s clever thriller, The Tailor of Panama (2001), in which he played an amoral English spy. More sympathetic was his role in Evelyn, shot in Dublin in 2002 and financed by his production company. Brosnan played Desmond Doyle, a Dublin father who fought the Irish state and the Catholic Church to have his children restored to him after his wife’s desertion. The film was a personal affair for Brosnan, evoking as it did his own fractured family background and his experience of the repressive society of Ireland in the 1950s. Brosnan’s most recent (and possibly last) outing as Bond was in 2002’s Die Another Day, directed by New Zealander Lee Tamahori. Since leaving the Bond role he has broadened his range still further by playing a fast-talking lawyer in the romantic comedy Laws of Attraction (2004), an aging thief in After the Sunset (2004), and an assassin in The Matador (2005). Brosnan has been the recipient of awards for his charitable and humanitarian work; has received an honorary Order of the British Empire from the Queen; an Honorary Doctorate from University College Cork (2004); and was made a Free Man of Navan in 1999. In 2001 he married his long-time partner, Keely Shaye Smith, and they have two children, Dylan (b. 1997) and Paris (b. 2001). His first marriage to
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Cassandra Harris resulted in one birth son, Sean (b. 1983) and two adopted children, Charlotte (b. 1971) and Christopher (b. 1973). Gwenda Young See also: BERGIN, Patrick Connolly References Caughie, John, and Kevin Rockett. The Companion to British and Irish Cinema.London: British Film Institute, 1996. Membery, York. Pierce Brosnan: The Biography. London: Virgin Books, 2002.
BROWN, ALEXANDER (1764–1834) Born in Ballymena, Co. Antrim, Ireland, Alexander Brown was raised by his parents, William Brown and Margaretta Davison. His work in the linen trade began at an early age, and he married in 1783. In 1800 Brown migrated to America, settling in the expanding port city of Baltimore (as had his brother, Stewart, earlier) with his wife, Grace, and their eldest son, William. There Alexander established the Irish Linen Warehouse. While his earliest business activities are best described as those of a general linen merchant, the enterprising and hardworking Brown was soon involved in other aspects of transatlantic trade, including the export of cotton, wheat, flour, and tobacco. Increasingly, too, he looked to financial services, such as insurance and, eventually, the opening of letters of credit. Especially important was the expanding American cotton industry, and by 1803 Brown was shipping raw cotton (secured through agents in Savannah and other American towns) to markets in England. In 1810 he arranged to have a sailing vessel, www.abc-clio.com
the Armata, built in New York. That was also the year William (his eldest son, who had been a business partner since 1805) went to England to set up a branch office in Liverpool. While mercantile transactions continued to form the backbone of Brown’s daily business activities, he also began to tap into the foreign exchange market. Brown’s financial capital grew with his business activities. The firm’s capital stood at over one quarter of a million dollars by 1814. By the beginning of the 1820s it had surpassed $1 million. By the end of the 1820s all of Brown’s four sons (William, George, John A., and James) were at the head of branch offices, giving Alexander Brown & Sons a solid presence not only in Baltimore and Liverpool but also in the growing cities of Philadelphia and New York. By the time Brown posed for his portrait by Sarah Peale in the early 1830s, his firm had become the second largest foreign exchange dealer in America, second only to the Second Bank of the United States. At the time of Alexander Brown’s death, in the spring of 1834, the Irish Linen Warehouse he had begun in the winter of 1800 was worth some $4.5 million, and Brown Brothers & Co. was situated to become the most significant merchant banking firm in the United States. Mark G. Spencer See also: IRISH LINEN IN NORTH AMERICA References Brown, John Crosby. A Hundred Years of Merchant Banking. 1909. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1978. Kent, Frank R. The Story of Alexander Brown & Sons. Baltimore, 1925. Kouwenhoven, John A. Partners in Banking: An Historical Portrait of a Great Private Bank, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. 1818–1968. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1968. ABC-CLIO
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128 BROWN, CLARENCE LEON Perkins, Edwin J. Financing Anglo-American Trade: The House of Brown, 1800–1880. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Perkins, Edwin J. “Alexander Brown.” In American National Biography, edited by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
BROWN, CLARENCE LEON (1890–1987) Clarence Leon Brown was born on May 10, 1890, in Clinton, Massachusetts, the son of Larkin Brown, a loom maker (born in Pennsylvania in 1866) and Catherine Brown (née Gaw, born in Greyabbey, Co. Down, in 1865). The Browns settled in Knoxville, Tennessee, where Clarence attended high school, graduating in 1905. Something of a child prodigy, Clarence enrolled in the University of Tennessee at the age of fifteen and graduated with a double major in electrical and mechanical engineering in 1910. During the next five years, Brown worked for the Stevens Duryea Company and established his own dealership, the Brown Motor Car Company, in Alabama. By 1915 he had grown restless with the automobile trade and, prompted by a developing fascination with the films that he saw in his leisure time, he traveled to the East Coast, then the center of the movie industry, to seek out opportunities in the film industry. Shortly after his arrival in New Jersey he became an assistant, then editor and codirector, to the great French director, Maurice Tourneur. Tourneur was an exacting employer, famous for meting out harsh treatment to his actors and crews, but Brown flourished under his tutelage and was soon promoted. In 1920 Brown directed his
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first feature film, a melodrama called The Great Redeemer, which received critical praise and attracted the interest of several producers and studios. Brown left Tourneur’s company in 1923, but he would always credit the French director as his greatest influence. The rich pictorial style that can be seen in Tourneur’s films is also present in many of Brown’s films in both the silent and sound eras. Brown quickly built up a reputation as a solid craftsman who could direct films in a variety of genres and who had a particular talent for eliciting strong performances from female stars, such as Laura LaPlante in Butterfly (1924) and Smoldering Fires (1925), Louise Dresser in The Goose Woman and The Eagle (both 1925), and Pauline Frederick in Smoldering Fires (1925). Brown’s versatility and flair landed him contracts with Universal (1923–1924), United Artists (1925–1926), and MetroGoldwyn-Mayer (1926–1952). During his time at United Artists he helped revive the careers of Rudolph Valentino (with The Eagle), Louise Dresser, and Pauline Frederick, while his long career at MGM saw him working with both established and emerging stars. Profiles and assessments of Brown usually refer to him as Greta Garbo’s favorite director, and indeed no other director worked as frequently with the Swedish actress as Brown. He directed her first American hit, Flesh and the Devil, as well as her first sound film, Anna Christie, and he was the first American director to realize Garbo’s full star potential. Brown was also influential in guiding the career of other stars, including Joan Crawford, whom he directed, credited and uncredited, in six films. Brown’s sensitive handling of actresses typed
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him as a “woman’s director,” but he proved equally adept at directing male stars, such as Clark Gable, James Stewart, and Walter Huston, and child actors, such as Elizabeth Taylor (National Velvet), Gene Reynolds (Of Human Hearts), and Mickey Rooney (in four films). However, his greatest success with a child actor came in 1946 when he directed twelve-year-old Claude Jarman Jr., whom he had discovered in a Nashville school, in an Academy Award–winning performance in The Yearling. Most of Brown’s career was spent working for MGM, and he was a close friend of Louis B. Mayer, MGM’s head of production. Brown’s commercial success and his reliability and versatility as a director enabled him to make more personal films such as Of Human Hearts, a sentimental paean to American values, and Intruder in the Dust, a stark meditation on the South and on race relations that many critics regard as his greatest film. Brown’s last film, The Plymouth Adventure, was produced in 1952, and he retired from the film industry shortly after its release. For the next thirty-five years he concentrated on managing his real estate investments and developing a relationship with the University of Tennessee that resulted in the naming of a theater in his honor. Brown died on August 17, 1987, and was survived by his fourth wife, Marian Brown (née Spies). Gwenda Young See also: HUSTON, Walter References Brownlow, Kevin. The Parade’s Gone By. New York: A. P. Knopf, 1968. Estrin, Allen. The Hollywood Professionals. Vol. 6, Capra, Cukor, Brown. Stamford, CT: A. S. Barnes, 1979.
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BROWN, WILLIAM (1777–1857) William Brown was one of the most important Irish military commanders in the Argentine War of Independence from Spain and the war against Brazil, and he was the founder of the Argentine navy. Born in Foxford, Co. Mayo, on June 22, 1777, he went with his father to settle in Pennsylvania in 1786 (though some historians argue that he was an illegitimate son of William Gannon and Mrs. Brown from Sligo). Brown began his naval career as a cabin boy in merchant ships, and he was pressed into service by the British navy in 1796. During the Napoleonic Wars he was imprisoned by the French and sent to Lorient. On being transferred to Metz he succeeded in escaping, disguised in a French officer’s uniform. Brown was recaptured, however, and then imprisoned in the fortress of Verdun. From there, in 1809, he escaped in the company of a British colonel named Clutchwell and eventually reached Germany, from where he traveled to England. That year he married Eliza Chitty in Kent. Later in 1809 William Brown was engaged in commercial business with the River Plate, chiefly trading arms and munitions on both sides of the river. Brown got involved in the War of Independence when he arrived in the Buenos Aires port during the revolution of 1810 to find it blockaded by Spanish ships. When his ship was commandeered by the Spanish, Brown organized an expedition that captured one of the blockading ships and brought it in triumph into port. Brown went back to England and returned to Buenos Aires definitively in 1812 with his wife and two children. Offered the command of a small fleet by the
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Argentine authorities, he defeated the Spanish in Martín García and broke their blockade of Montevideo in March 1814, allowing its capture by the patriot army and effectively ending the Spanish threat to the newly independent state. In 1815 the government of Buenos Aires sent Brown and his fleet to the Pacific. In 1816 he led the forces that during three weeks stormed the Peruvian port of Callao, a Spanish stronghold in South America. Brown then went on to capture the fort of Punta de las Piedras at the mouth of Guayaquil Bay in southern Ecuador. Before finding his way back to Buenos Aires, Brown was captured by the Spanish in Ecuador, and then his ship and cargo were seized by the British in Barbados, and he had to fight his case in a British court to obtain the return of his property. On return, he faced a government investigation into his exploits and was retired from active service in 1819. However, Brown was recalled to service upon the outbreak of war with Brazil in 1825–1828, during which he achieved a number of major victories in Montevideo, Pozos, Juncal, Quilmes and again in Martín García. In 1828 Brown was appointed governor of Buenos Aires. Later, in 1841, he led the successful campaign against Giuseppe Garibaldi and Admiral John H. Coe. In 1847 Brown visited his native Foxford accompanied by his daughter. On his death on March 4, 1857, in Buenos Aires, William Brown was given a public funeral and buried with full honors in Recoleta cemetery. Edmundo Murray See also: ARGENTINA; BRAZIL References De Courcy Ireland, John. The Admiral from Mayo: A Life of Almirante William Brown www.abc-clio.com
from Foxford. Dublin: Eamonn de Burca, 1995. Ratto, Héctor R. Historia del Almirante Brown. Buenos Aires: Instituto de Publicaciones Navales, 1985. Read, Jan. The New Conquistadors. London: Evans Brothers, 1980.
BRYAN, GEORGE (1731–1791) George Bryan was a Philadelphia merchant and politician and a leading defender of the radical Pennsylvania constitution of 1776. Bryan was born in Dublin, the oldest son of Samuel and Sarah Dennis Bryan. In 1752, Bryan moved to Philadelphia, where his father helped establish him in the firm of Wallace and Bryan. The partnership dissolved in 1755. Bryan was heavily engaged in the transatlantic and intercolonial trades, and by 1760 he owned six vessels. He was in the top fifth of Philadelphia’s merchants, but suffered financial reverses, leading to his bankruptcy in 1771. Bryan was an active Presbyterian throughout his adult life, and he helped heal the rift between the New Light and Old Light Presbyterian churches in 1758. His religious activism led him into politics. In 1764 Bryan and Thomas Willing ran on the Presbyterian ticket for Philadelphia’s two seats in the Pennsylvania Assembly, defeating the Quaker ticket of Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Galloway. In November 1764 Bryan was appointed a judge of the Philadelphia courts, a position he held until the outbreak of the American Revolution. Bryan was active in the resistance movement. He represented Pennsylvania in the Stamp Act Congress in 1765, and joined in the non-importation movements in 1765 and 1767. In 1768 he collaborated with John Dickinson and Francis Alison on
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a series of essays under the pseudonym Centinel, attacking plans to establish an Anglican bishop in the colonies. Financial problems drove him out of politics in the early 1770s, but by 1776 he recovered enough to resume his career as a leader in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania politics. One historian has called Bryan the “high priest” of Pennsylvania’s radicals. His most prominent role was as an officeholder under and defender of the 1776 state constitution. It was the most radical of all the state constitutions, placing almost all of the power in a unicameral assembly, with a limited executive power in the Supreme Executive Council. Bryan was elected to the council in February 1777, becoming vice president in March. Between Thomas Willing’s death in May and Joseph Reed’s election in December, Bryan acted as president. Bryan was elected to the assembly in 1779, and with Reed dominated the Constitutionalist Party until 1782, when Reed began to side with the Republicans, who opposed the constitution. While on the executive council, Bryan defended the constitution against an attack by Benjamin Rush. In 1777, Bryan, writing as Whitlocke, cheered Pennsylvania and rejected some of the main tenets of American political thought, including the need for an independent executive and a legislative upper house. Bryan argued that such balances were necessary only in a monarchy. The constitution made the people as a whole the executive power, and he believed a governor with a veto would act as a tyrant. Similarly, an upper house would mark the introduction of aristocratic privilege. As a member of the assembly, Bryan introduced a bill for the abolition of slavery. In 1780, Pennsylvania became the first state to approve such a measure. Also in www.abc-clio.com
that year, Reed appointed Bryan to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, where he served until his death in 1791. In 1784, Bryan was elected to the Council of Censors, a body consisting of two representatives from each county, which met every seven years to consider changes in the constitution. Later that year, the council issued a report that argued against changing the constitution. Bryan opposed the ratification of the United States Constitution in 1787, and he suffered a final defeat with the ratification of a new Pennsylvania constitution in 1790. In addition to his political offices, Bryan sat on the Board of Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania. Robert W. Smith See also: PENNSYLVANIA References Brunhouse, Robert. The Counter-Revolution in Pennsylvania 1776–1790. Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1942. Foster, Joseph S. In Pursuit of Equal Liberty: George Bryan and the Revolution in Pennsylvania. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Konkle, Burton Alva. George Bryan and the Constitution of Pennsylvania, 1731–1791. Philadelphia: W. J. Campbell, 1922.
BUCHANAN, JAMES (1791–1868) James Buchanan was the fifteenth president of the United States. During his presidency, between 1857 and 1861, the United States was facing a crisis that was to divide public opinion and lead to the Civil War. At the time of his death, the country was reunited, although the bitter legacy of the war took longer to fade. Buchanan was born in 1791 to a wealthy Pennsylvania family. He was one ABC-CLIO
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of eleven children. His parents, James Buchanan and Elizabeth Speer, were Presbyterian immigrants from Ireland. James Sr. was born in Donegal in 1761 and had moved to Deroran near Omagh in Co. Tyrone. He arrived in the United States in 1783 and initially worked as a storekeeper, but eventually amassed a considerable fortune. Buchanan’s family was part of a wave of Protestant immigrants from the north of Ireland who settled in America in the late eighteenth century. Like many other Ulster Scots, they had migrated to Ulster from Scotland in the seventeenth century. The Buchanans had probably left Dumbarton in Scotland in the 1670s and settled in Co. Donegal. Before becoming president, James Buchanan had a long and distinguished political career. He had trained as a lawyer and had a successful practice, but in 1814 he was elected to the Pennsylvanian legislature. In total, he served five terms in the House of Representatives and more than a decade in the Senate, from 1834 to 1845. Between 1832 and 1834 he was American Minister to Russia. President James K. Polk appointed Buchanan as Secretary of State in 1845, and the next few years were ones of diplomatic tension, dominated by the Oregon dispute and the conflict with Mexico. In 1848 Buchanan found himself at odds with the British government over their treatment of the Young Irelanders, who had led a small rebellion in Tipperary in July. During his meetings with British officials, he admitted that he had attended meetings of their supporters in New York and that he sympathized with their desire to achieve political independence. In the same year he also attempted unsuccessfully to be selected as the presidential candidate for the Democrat Party. From 1853 to www.abc-clio.com
1856 Buchanan served as minister to Great Britain under President Franklin Pierce. Being out of the country was to his advantage as it meant that he remained untainted by the bitter struggles emerging over the slave question. In March 1857 Buchanan became president of the United States. He served only one term, and did not seek reelection in 1860. As president Buchanan attempted to find a constitutional solution to the quandary caused by slavery, but he failed to recognize how deep the rift had become between the North and the South. It was left to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, to find a solution to the impasse. During the war, Buchanan supported the federal government. His critics, however, vilified him and accused Buchanan of not having done enough to avert a civil war. Consequently, he became a scapegoat for the country’s problems. In retirement, he wrote a defence of his actions, entitled Mr Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of Rebellion (1866). Buchanan died in Pennsylvania in June 1868. He was the only president who never married. He had, however, been engaged as a young man but his fiancée’s family regarded him as unsuitable. A few days after the relationship ended, his former fiancée died, possibly having committed suicide. Christine Kinealy
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See also: ABOLITIONISM AND SLAVERY; AMERICAN CIVIL WAR References Auchampaugh, Philip G. James Buchanan and His Cabinet on the Eve of Succession. Boston: Canner Press, 1965. Klein, Philip S. President James Buchanan. A Biography. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962. Smith, Elbert B. The Presidency of James Buchanan. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1975. 1-800-368-6868
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BUCKLEY, WILLIAM F., JR. (1925–) William F. Buckley, Jr., was born on November 24, 1925, in New York City, the sixth of ten children. Though he was of Irish ancestry, Buckley insisted—as his father had—that he was not “Irish American” but simply “American.” Buckley’s childhood was one of privilege; his early years were divided between Europe, where the family lived from 1929 through 1933, and Sharon, Connecticut, where the family’s 47-acre estate was located. Buckley’s father, William F. Buckley, Sr., had amassed considerable wealth in the oil business and was able to provide his children with private governesses, music teachers, rhetoric coaches, and language tutors. He ensured that his children lived a life far removed from the experiences of the stereotypical Irish Catholic immigrant to America. Bill Buckley graduated from Millbrook, a small Protestant preparatory school in New York, in June 1943. A year later he was inducted into the Army, where he qualified for Officer Candidate School. After he was honorably discharged from the Army, Buckley entered Yale University in September 1946. As a student at Yale, Buckley was a member of the debate team and chairman of the Yale Daily News. He was also inducted into the secret senior honor society, Skull and Bones. After graduating from Yale, Buckley wrote his first book, God and Man at Yale (1951), in which he rejects the laissez-faire theory of education and charges certain faculty members with fostering atheism and socialism. His first book launched him on a successful writing career, both as a political commentator and as a spy novelist. Buckley would go on to publish more than forty books. www.abc-clio.com
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During 1952–1953, Buckley spent nine months working for the Central Intelligence Agency in Mexico City. Ostensibly there to set up an import-export business, Buckley was put in charge of gathering information on the Mexican student movement. When he and his wife, Pat, returned to the United States, Buckley began work on his second book, McCarthy and His Enemies (1954), a lengthy defense of the controversial senator Joseph McCarthy. In 1955 Buckley launched the National Review, a journal of conservative thought and opinion. He served as editor until the early 1990s, after which time he continued to contribute articles. Buckley also began writing a very successful syndicated newspaper column in 1962; his column is now carried in more than 300 newspapers. In 1965 Buckley ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York City. While Buckley’s campaign did not land him the mayoralty, he did manage to garner 13.4 percent of the vote—a record for a conservative candidate in New York. Moreover, the campaign itself helped propel Buckley to celebrity status as he began to appear on national television with increasing regularity. Impressed by Buckley’s wit and talent during the mayoral debates, WOR-TV in New York City agreed to syndicate a new television show, Firing Line, which would feature Buckley debating prominent political opponents. The show was a huge success, winning an Emmy in 1968. Buckley continued to host Firing Line until 2000. In 1991, William F. Buckley received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush in recognition of all that Buckley has contributed to the intellectual foundation of the American conservative movement. Kathleen Ruppert See also: WASHINGTON, D.C. ABC-CLIO
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134 BULFIN, EAMON References Buckley, William F. Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2004. Judis, John B. William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.
BULFIN, EAMON (1892–1968) Eamon Bulfin was an Argentine-born patriot of the Irish Easter Rising of 1916, and a son of the writer William Bulfin (1864–1910) and Anne O’Rourke. Eamon was sent to Ireland to study at St. Enda’s in Rathfarnham, the bilingual school established by Padraic Pearse in 1908. In the School Roll of 1908–1909 Bulfin was one of the three pupils in Division I of First Class, together with Denis Gwyn and Frank Connolly. He was also the football captain and vice-captain of the students’ office. At eighteen he entered University College Dublin, where Pearse taught. In August 1909 Eamon Bulfin adhered to the Fianna Éireann, the Irish Republican youth movement founded by Countess Markievicz as a male youth organization for what would in 1914 become the Irish Volunteers. In 1912 Bulfin followed Con Colbert and others to form a special Fianna circle of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. By the end of 1915, Eamon Bulfin had become heavily influenced by Catholic nationalism and by Pearse’s idea that a personal blood sacrifice was necessary to gain Irish independence. He also became involved in organizing the Easter Rising. The rising began before noon on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, when 1,200 members of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army seized a number of strategic points in Dublin. Eamon Bulfin was charged with hoisting two Irish tricolor www.abc-clio.com
flags on the top of the General Post Office building, the rebels’ headquarters, at the same time Pearse was reading the proclamation of the Irish Republic’s provisional government. When the leaders faced certain defeat, they accepted unconditional surrender and were condemned to death by the British. Bulfin saved his life thanks to his Argentine passport (the Argentine ambassador in London interceded). Under the provisions of the Aliens Restriction Act of 1914, Bulfin was deported from the United Kingdom on March 21, 1916. Bulfin arrived in Buenos Aires, and the Argentine authorities convicted him of deserting from the military service. Finally freed in 1919, Bulfin was appointed by Eamon de Valera as the first representative of the Ireland Republic to the Argentine Government. Among the aims of his mission were to inaugurate direct trade between Ireland and the Argentine Republic, to influence Irish opinion in Argentina, and to bring it into line with the Irish demand for a republic. In this position, Bulfin established a contact network with government officials and Irish-Argentine leaders, launched the Irish Fund to collect funds for the republican struggle, and negotiated shipments of ammunitions from Argentina to the Irish Republican Army/Irish Volunteers. In 1922 Bulfin went back to Ireland and lived in Derrinlough, Birr, Co. Offaly. In 1920 he had been appointed chairman of the first Co. Offaly republican council (elected in absence, when he was in Argentina). He died in Ireland in 1968. His sister Catalina (1901–1976), also born in Argentina, was secretary to Austin Stack (a famuous Irish revolutionary and early Sinn Féin member of the Dáil) and married Seán MacBride (a prominent Irish international
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politician and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974). Edmundo Murray See also: BULFIN, William References Coghlan, Eduardo A. Los Irlandeses en la Argentina: Su Actuación Descendencia. Buenos Aires: Author’s Edition, 1987. Kennedy, Michael. “‘Mr Blythe, I Think, Hears from him Occasionally’: The Experiences of Irish Diplomats in Latin America, 1919–23.” In Irish Foreign Policy 1919–1966: From Independence to Internationalism, edited by Michael Kennedy and J. M. Skelly. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000, pp. 44–60.
BULFIN,WILLIAM (1863–1910) William Bulfin, the Irish writer, journalist, and founder of the Buenos Aires Branch of the Gaelic League, was born at Derrinlough near Birr, King’s County (Co. Offaly) in 1863. He immigrated to Argentina in 1884 where he lived for more than twenty-two years. The fourth of ten children of William Bulfin and Margaret Grogan, William Bulfin went to the national school at Cloghan, where it is believed he was taught by Seamus MacDonagh, father of Thomas, the 1916 Easter Rising leader. Bulfin was educated at the Classical Academy in Birr; he then went to Cuba College, the Royal Free School at Banagher founded by King Charles I and under the Catholic headmastership of Dr. King Joyce. When the Presentation Brothers opened a School in Birr, many of the Catholic pupils were sent to them but Bulfin was later sent back to Banagher. He finished his education at Galway Grammar School. In 1884 or 1885, Bulfin and his next eldest brother, Peter, immigrated to Argentina. Their uncle, the Passionate www.abc-clio.com
priest Father Vincent Grogan, arranged through his friend Father Victor Carolan in Salto Argentino, for William to get a position. He worked first as a gaucho, a mounted herdsman, on the pampas, and then as camp worker and capataz for John Dowling, a Longford man, at his Estancia Ranchos near Carmen de Areco (a province of Buenos Aires), where he met and fell in love with Annie O’Rourke, the governess of Dowling’s children, who had come from Ballacura, Ballymore, Co. Westmeath. They became engaged in 1887, were married in 1891, and had five children: Eamon (1892–1968), who joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood and was active in the lead up to the 1916 rising (he was one of the first to enter the General Post Office and raised one of the two flags to fly over it for Easter week); Mary (1894–1930); Ana (1897–1923); Eibhlínn (1899–1984); and Catalina (1901–1976), who took the Republican side in the Civil War, acting as dispatch carrier, and later worked with Seán MacBride, whom she married in 1926. In 1888, Bulfin started writing under the pen name of Bullfinch for the Irish Argentine and later for the New York Daily News, The United Irishman, and The Southern Cross, adopting the nom de plume Che Buono. In 1889, Bulfin moved to Buenos Aires to find Mr. Mariño who “promised him a situation in Buenos Aires in case The Irish Argentine went badly with him” (letter to Annie, February 23, 1889). After some vicissitudes he worked for H. C. Thompson, a furniture maker and retailer, and supported his family teaching English and doing translations. In 1892 he got a fulltime job on The Southern Cross, and became its editor and owner from 1896 until 1906, when he fell seriously ill with rheumatic fever. ABC-CLIO
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Bulfin’s episodic series of gaucho stories and sketches of rural and urban life illuminate the social history of the period of Argentine modernization. In a realistic style, he described the Irish settlers in Argentina between the 1880s and the 1900s, emphasizing the survival of their culture and character, the solidarity of the Irish community, and the hospitality and formal courtesy of the gaucho brotherhood. At the same time, he demonstrated how exile modified the Irish temperament in a series of paradoxical transformations that included practices of resistance, reproaches of assimilation, and the necessity of self-discrimination. Bulfin also reproduced “Irish-Porteño slang,” a comic mixture of English, Gaelic, and Spanish. In London, T. S. Fisher Unwin published Tales of the Pampas (1900), Bulfin’s collection of camp stories, in its Overseas Library Series. The collection was reprinted in Buenos Aires in 1997 by Literature of Latin America. Bulfin supported the Buenos Aires branch of the Gaelic League to aid the language movement in Ireland and to promote its national aspirations and traditions. He believed cultural nationalism could unite an immigrant community and support the development of an independent Irish state. He raised money periodically for the Oireachtas Fund in Dublin, and The Southern Cross did the Gaelic League printing free of charge. An Claidheamh Soluis acknowledged this support and identified The Southern Cross as the South American frontier of the Irish Ireland movement. Bulfin helped introduce the game of hurling to Argentina and promoted it enthusiastically in the newspaper. He advocated for the Irish Orphanage and recorded the controversy over the administration of the Irish Catholic Association property in The Southern Cross. In 1902 Bulfin returned to Ireland, where he met the Irish Irelanders at www.abc-clio.com
An Stad (The Stop), Cathal MacGarvey’s tobacco shop, a gathering place for nationalists. He admired Thomas Davis (Irish writer and chief organizer of the Young Ireland movement) and was a great friend of Arthur Griffith (founder and first leader of Sinn Féin) and Seamus MacManus (a noted Donegal writer). It is likely that Griffith introduced Bulfin to Maud Gonne and through her he became acquainted with W. B. Yeats and Dr. Douglas Hyde. Bulfin bicycled around the country and wrote his impressions in sketches that were published serially in The Southern Cross, the United Irishman, and in the New York Daily News before they appeared in book form as Rambles in Eirinn (1907). Rambles was written from an emigrant’s point of view for other exiles to keep alive the collective memories of home and to reassure them that they were remembered at home. He criticized the British government’s policy that failed to promote sound economic development, and he rejected the materialism of Dublin and Belfast; he complained about Anglicization, lack of religious devotion, education, land policy, and emigration. About 1905 Bulfin moved his family back to Derrinlough. He traveled back and forth between Ireland and Argentina with some stops in New York to raise money for the Gaelic League and, in 1909, to save Griffith’s paper Sinn Féin, which was in serious debt (it appeared for the last time on January 23, 1910). In 1906 Bulfin received the Cross “Pro Ecclesia et Pontífice” from Pope Pius X for his service to the poor, orphans, immigrants, and Chaco Indians. When Bulfin was in Ireland, he was reknowned for his spirited lectures to various branches of the Gaelic League and to schools and for promoting the cause of a National University. He was known as Che Buono, Señor Bulfin, and “the Argentine
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Republic Man.” He handled many requests for information about trade between the two countries: the sale of Argentinean wood to Robert Johnston in the north of Mahogany and the registration of the Irish Industrial Association’s Irish Trade Mark to sell linen in the country. Among Bulfin’s writings, which fall into several categories, are sketches; short stories; lectures on the national language movement, heraldry, the conditions of Ireland, Irish heritage, and general education; essays on Buenos Aires, the Latin American Church, and Argentinean patriots; reviews of Irish books; and two unpublished novels, A Man of the Pampas. A Story of Camp Life in The Argentine Republic (1901) and Rose of the Eskar. Maureen Murphy and Laura Izarra See also: ARGENTINA; BULFIN, Eamon; HURLING IN ARGENTINA; IRISHARGENTINE PRESS; IRISH LINEN IN NORTH AMERICA References Delaney, Juan José. “The Language and Literature of the Irish in Argentina.” ABEI Journal 2 (2000): 131–143. Izarra, Laura. “The Irish Diaspora in Argentina.” British Association for Irish Studies Newsletter 32 (October 2002): 5–9. Murphy, Maureen. “The Cultural Nationalism of William Bulfin.” In John Quinn: Selected Irish Writers from His Library, edited by Janis and Richard Londraville, 45–69. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 2001. Winder, Jeanne Bulfin. “Bulfin: A Derrinlough Family.” In English and Drumcullen: a Parish in Firceall, edited by Brian Pey. Fivealley, Birr: Firceall Heritage Group, 2003, pp. 305–323.
BULGER, JAMES “WHITEY” (1929–) James “Whitey” Bulger was born to a large Irish-American Catholic family in the Old Harbor projects of South Boston. His younger brother, William, would later www.abc-clio.com
become president of the Massachusetts Senate for seventeen years. Bulger had early run-ins with the police as a teenager before joining the United States Air Force. After his discharge he took part in a series of bank robberies in Indiana for which he was arrested and sentenced to a twenty-year prison term. During his incarceration at a federal penitentiary, Bulger was accused of conspiring to escape and was transferred to Alcatraz Prison to serve the remainder of his sentence. Upon his release Bulger returned to South Boston, where he worked for a bookmaker before transferring his loyalties to the predominantly Irish Summer Hill Gang of Somerville, Massachusetts. Bulger’s criminal career reached new heights after 1975 when he began a partnership with another product of the Old Harbor projects, John Connolly, who also happened to be an agent in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Remaining mindful of the long-standing strictures against informers among the South Boston Irish, Bulger provided Connolly with information that brought successful prosecutions against Boston’s Italian mob. Connolly soon enjoyed great success in the FBI, but Bulger’s cooperation came at a price: he skillfully used the FBI to target other Irish gangsters in South Boston, and then secured special protection through his connection with the increasingly influential Connolly. Bulger and his associate, Steve “The Rifleman” Flemmi, rose to the top of the organized crime scene in Boston through a tightly organized, ruthless syndicate that even used information from Connolly to murder potential informants. Bulger’s subterranean connections soon stretched far beyond South Boston, with the murder of a Tulsa businessman and a foiled transatlantic gunrunning operation with the Irish Republican Army. ABC-CLIO
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Bulger was as ruthless as he was resourceful, and he supplemented his image as a benevolent gangster in South Boston with a brutal willingness to dispatch even the most peripheral bystanders. Bulger kept his operation out of the public eye by playing off the bonds of ethnic loyalty among the marginalized residents of South Boston’s housing projects. He had a deep disdain for the ostentatious ways of his predecessors, he abstained from smoking and drinking, and he continued to reside with his mother in the Old Harbor projects, all of which helped him to cultivate the image of a loyal son of Southie. Continuing to manipulate Connolly and his supervisor, Jack Morris, Bulger maintained absolute discipline throughout his South Boston operation. This balancing act finally ended in the early 1990s when Connolly retired and other law-enforcement agencies and the Boston federal prosecutor’s office set their sights on Bulger. Flemmi was arrested in 1995 on racketeering charges, but Bulger escaped. In 1999 a federal judge indicted Connolly on five counts, one of which stemmed from allegations that the FBI agent’s warning had allowed Bulger to narrowly avert capture by the police after 1995. Whitey Bulger’s continued flight also brought down his brother: in 2003 William Bulger resigned his position as chancellor of the University of Massachusetts system after disclosing that he had talked with his fugitive brother. Meanwhile, in South Boston, the disclosure of Bulger’s career as an informant prompted a backlash against the former crime boss, which was presented with particular poignancy in Michael MacDonald’s memoir, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie. Whitey Bulger’s legend has continued to grow www.abc-clio.com
as more accounts of his ruthless operations continue to surface, but Bulger has managed to evade apprehension despite being placed on the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted List. Matthew J. O’Brien See also: BULGER, William; MacDONALD, Michael References Bulger, William. While the Music Lasts: My Life in Politics. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. Lehr, Dick, and Gerard O’Neill. Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the F.B.I., and a Devil’s Deal. New York: Public Affairs, 2000. MacDonald, Michael Patrick. All Souls: A Family Story from Southie. New York: Random House, 1999.
BULGER, WILLIAM MICHAEL (1934–) William Michael Bulger, born February 2, 1934, in Boston, Massachusetts, the second son of James and Jean (McCarthy) Bulger, has been a lawyer, politician, and college president. He is also the younger brother of one of Boston’s most notorious gangsters, James “Whitey” Bulger, a connection that has overshadowed his otherwise very successful career, for Billy Bulger represents the Irish-American rags-to-riches story. With his brother, Billy grew up in the Old Harbor Housing Projects, in South Boston, a heavily Irish section of Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Irish-Catholic working parents. He graduated from Boston College (BA) and its law school (JD), then served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives (1961–1970), and in the Massachusetts Senate, first as a member (1971–1996), then for nine terms as its very powerful president (1978–1996). In 1996, Bulger left the political arena to become president of the University of
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Massachusetts. He married Mary Foley in 1960; they had nine children. While working his way through law school, Bulger was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1960. He sponsored legislation to curb child abuse and to provide solar energy incentives and worked to create the Boston Housing Court and the Government Land Bank Commission, establish marine sanctuaries off the Massachusetts coast, and create a Massachusetts Water Resources Authority principally to assist in the Boston Harbor cleanup effort. He has also been chairman of the board of the State Legislative Leaders Foundation and was a former editor of the Boston College Law Annual Survey of Massachusetts Law. Bulger has been described as sharpwitted, devout, and loyal to his old neighborhood, a classical scholar, who follows traditional social and cultural values, and politically savvy; he has suffered few losses during his political career. In his public positions, he has been a firm foe of abortion and busing and an advocate of education vouchers. In June 2003, Thomas Reilly, the state attorney general, accused Bulger of choosing loyalty to his brother over duty to the public trust, charges that followed Bulger during his entire political career. Reilly wanted Bulger to resign from the University of Massachusetts (which Bulger eventually did) as did new Republican governor Mitt Romney, who proposed eliminating Bulger’s office. Bulger responded with what for him was a standard reply: He had told his brother, currently on the FBI’s ten-most-wanted list, to give up crime. To further undercut Billy Bulger, in April 2003, his younger brother, Jackie, pleaded guilty to perjury and obstruction of justice after he lied to a grand jury about a Florida safedeposit box Whitey had used. www.abc-clio.com
Billy Bulger has not been indicted or faced any criminal charges as a result of his brothers’ criminal activities, but he has been questioned about them. In 1990, Billy’s role in a real estate deal in the Boston business district was investigated by the Massachusetts attorney general’s office. In 2001, he testified, with immunity, before a federal grand jury that was interested in any possible contacts he had with brother Whitey. On June 19, 2003, the full committee of the U.S. House Government Reform Committee continued its hearings on the misuse of informants by the FBI. Bulger reasserted that he did not know where his brother was hiding as a fugitive, denied that he used his political office to get back at Whitey’s enemies, or that he benefited in any way from his relationship with Whitey. Martin J. Manning See also: BULGER, James “Whitey” References Bulger, William M. While the Music Lasts: My Life in Politics. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. Carr, Howie. The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized and Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century. New York: Warner Books, 2006. Lehr, Dick, and Gerard O’Neill. Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob. New York: Perennial, 2001. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Government Reform. The Next Step in the Investigation of the Use of Informants by the Department of Justice: The Testimony of William Bulger; hearing, 108th Congress, first Session. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2003.
BURKE, EDMUND (1729–1792) Edmund Burke was a major figure in eighteenth-century British politics and is also known to posterity as a philosopher ABC-CLIO
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Portrait of Irish statesman and author Edmund Burke, who served for many years in the British House of Commons as a member of the Whig Party. (Library of Congress)
and political thinker. His most famous work, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), was a contemporary condemnation of revolutionary France, and it remains a key text in ongoing debates about the events of 1789. A conservative thinker, Burke defended aristocracy, privilege, and tradition with such eloquence that his works have become foundational texts in political theory. Always preferring the tried and tested mechanisms of the State against speculative and idealistic innovations, Burke gave a rational defense of pragmatic and incremental change in the body politic. Paradoxically, Burke was vocal in his opposition to corruption and abuse of power, notably in his condemnation of colonial exploitation in India, embodied by the East India Company and Warren Hastings, against whom he drew up impeachment charges in 1786. His opposition to the Penal Laws in Ireland and his conciliatory speeches at the onset of the www.abc-clio.com
American Revolution show how his sense of justice and equity extended to a variety of causes. Born in Dublin in 1729, Burke was early on exposed to the religious and civil divisions in Ireland during the Ascendancy period. His mother may have been a Catholic, and Burke, in his subsequent political career, was regarded with suspicion by opponents for his supposedly Catholic origins and sympathies. Certainly, he forcefully condemned the exclusion of Catholics from civil freedoms in Ireland, pointing to the absurdity and injustice of “a law directed against the mass of a nation” (Tract on the Popery Laws, 1765). By emphasizing the magnitude of these “unjust, impolitic and inefficacious” exclusions, Burke successfully demonstrated the moral enormity of religious persecution in Ireland, its unprecedented scale and pernicious effects. Burke studied at Trinity College Dublin before embarking on a political career in England through the patronage of Whig magnate Lord Rockingham. Entering Parliament in 1765 and acting as Rockingham’s private secretary, Burke’s brilliant oratory and forensic intelligence made him a formidable parliamentarian. However, his manifest abilities were not fully compensated by the rewards of office, and his career as a practical politician was less distinguished than his abilities would suggest. Preferring opposition to power, his crusading intellect worked best in holding successive administrations to account. Foremost amongst his concerns were the worsening relations between Britain and America in the 1760s and 1770s. Based on his paternalistic view of colonialism, Burke urged conciliatory policies on the part of Britain toward her empire. In his celebrated Speech on American Taxation (1774) he identified the likely outcome of
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Lord North’s policies toward America as secession, and he urged a return to the moderation of the Rockingham administration. His advice went unheeded, however, leading to a breakdown of trust in America and to the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. Burke’s contribution to the debates of his day was immense. The analytical rigor of his prose illuminated knotty, practical problems with general insights and general principles that are of enduring value. The prophet of conservative Europe was also a spokesman against injustice and iniquity. His principled stands on Ireland and America can be seen as continuous with, rather than contradictory to, his views on the French Revolution. His “great melody,” as William Butler Yeats termed it, continues to be heard today. Benjamin Keatinge See also: AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE; YEATS, William Butler References Burke, Edmund. The Portable Edmund Burke, edited by Isaac Kramnick. London: Penguin, 1999. Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France, edited by Conor Cruise-O’Brien. London: Penguin, 1968. Crowe, Ian, ed. Edmund Burke: His Life and Legacy. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997. Gibbons, Luke. Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. O’Brien, Conor Cruise. The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992.
BUTLER, JEAN (1971–) Best known for her role in Riverdance, Jean Butler was born in Minneola, New York. Her mother, originally from Co. Mayo, enrolled her in Irish dance classes at age four www.abc-clio.com
under the tutelage of renowned teacher Donald Golden. Though trained in ballet and tap, she specialized in Irish dancing, and she won consecutive regional, national, and world championships. Her first largescale performance was with her dancing teacher and Mick Moloney’s band, Greenfields of America, and later with the wellknown Irish traditional group Cherish the Ladies. At 17, Butler debuted at Carnegie Hall with the Chieftains on Saint Patrick’s Day, and for several years after toured extensively with the band in America, Canada, Europe, and Japan. During this time, she and dancing partner Colin Dunne received a standing ovation for their interpretation of the Chieftains’ “CottonEyed Joe.” Butler can be seen on the video The Chieftains: Live From Belfast, with Roger Daltrey and Nanci Griffith. Her taps are heard on the Chieftains’ “The Long Black Veil” with Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones. Butler has also performed with the Pogues at Brixton Academy. She later rejoined Colin Dunne in the critically acclaimed show Dancing on Dangerous Ground. While studying drama at the University of Birmingham, Butler received an invitation to perform at the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest with Michael Flatley. The resulting piece, entitled Riverdance, caused a sensation in Europe, and producer Moya Doherty extended it into a full-scale show. Butler starred in and choreographed Riverdance—The Show, which toured the world in acclaimed sellout performances. Butler’s television credits include several appearances on The Late Late Show, with David Letterman and Jay Leno. In the United Kingdom, Butler has performed for the royal family on several occasions, most notably the Royal Variety Show. She also appeared in the Kennedy Honors in 1996, ABC-CLIO
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in her last public engagement for Riverdance. She made her acting debut in the film The Brylcreem Boys, alongside Gabriel Byrne, Bill Campbell, John Gordon Sinclair, and Angus McFadden. Butler has collaborated with Donal Lunny, recording on his latest album Coolfin and performing with the Japanese Kodo Drummers to a sellout audience at Dublin’s Royal Dublin Society. In April 1999, her contributions to the dancing world were honored with the prestigious Irish Post Award for “outstanding contribution to Irish Dance.” Since marrying in 2001, Butler has been involved in several different creative mediums, including film, television, and journalism. In 2004, she appeared in three different films: as Christopher Eccleston’s wife in The Revengers Tragedy, starring Eddie Izzard and Derek Jacobi; as Sean Champion’s girlfriend in the quirky Irish independent film Goldfish Memory; and as one half of a dysfunctional marriage in Old Friends, written and directed by John Breen (Alone It Stands). Butler also writes a monthly column for The Dubliner magazine. Butler was the artist in residence for the Irish World Music Centre at the University of Limerick 2003–2005, where she completed her master’s degree in contemporary dance. Susan Gedutis Lindsay See also: BYRNE, Gabriel; CHIEFTAINS, The; FLATLEY, Michael; MOLONEY, Mick Reference Jean Butler. “Biography.” www.jeanbutler.com (accessed May 5, 2005).
BYRNE, DONN (1889–1928) Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne was born on November 20, 1889, in New York City. After a few months the Byrne family www.abc-clio.com
returned home to Camlough, near Newry, South Armagh. Byrne, known in his teens as Brian O’Beirne, grew up speaking Irish and English. While studying romance languages and Irish literature at University College on a scholarship, Byrne came to the attention of Douglas Hyde. Hyde, the author of Songs of Raftery, a translation of the work of the balladeer Anthony Raftery (1784–1835), made a strong impression on Byrne. As a student Byrne helped found a literary journal, the National Student. He also won prizes for boxing, which he would later romanticize in his short story “Irish,” in Changeling and Other Stories (1923). After graduating in 1910, Byrne went to France and Germany, intending to earn a doctorate, but then went instead to New York in 1911, hoping to become a poet. There he married Dorothea Cadogan, a fellow student from Dublin. He worked as a dictionary editor, supplementing his income by writing verse, book reviews, and literary journalism. Byrne first tasted success when, writing for the first time under the name “Donn Byrne,” he submitted a story, “Battle,” to Smart Set, in February 1914, and was paid the considerable sum of $50. His first novel, The Stranger’s Banquet, was published in 1919. Reception both for this novel and his next, Foolish Matrons (1920), was mixed, although each brought him $10,000 for film rights. His third novel, Messer Marco Polo (1921), which retold the life of Marco Polo through the mouth of a ninety-year-old Irish balladeer named Malachai Campbell of the Long Glen, established his reputation in England and the United States. Among Byrne’s sources for the novel was a folk tale, “Turus Marc O’Polo,” which he had heard as a boy. As the world, and particularly Ireland, changed, the tone of Byrne’s writing moved
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from tragic-heroic to ironic. Yet Byrne rarely commented directly on the changes. In Hangman’s House (1926), a tale of fox hunting and horse racing, Byrne’s idea of Ireland is rooted in the past. Against the landscape of what he sees in Hangman’s House as the horrors of modern-day Ireland, Byrne sees himself as “the last traditional Irish novelist,” following on from Goldsmith and Sterne. This self-image informs Byrne’s novel Blind Raftery and His Wife, Hilaria (1924), in which Raftery is resurrected as an icon for modern Ireland. Byrne sold his Connecticut house in 1922 and moved his family to England, but the proceeds from the sale went to creditors. After 1922 he traveled through Europe and the United States, his itinerant and extravagant lifestyle reflecting his inability to settle into the 1920s. On May 31, 1928, in a letter to Lady Barker, Byrne claimed to have suffered “a complete breakdown.” Planning to rest, he bought Coolmain Castle in Cork and moved in on Friday, June 15, 1928. The following Monday, his car plunged over a bridge into Coutmacsherry Bay, West Cork. He was thirty-eight. Byrne’s tendency to romanticize Irish culture while dismissing contemporary issues came at the expense of lasting critical success. Now his work is rarely included in anthologies and, excepting a recent reappraisal by Ron Ebest, receives little attention from critics. But Byrne’s contemporaries viewed his work in a more positive light. Both his novel Field of Honor, received as one of the best novels of the year, and his unintentionally amusing “travel guide” Ireland: The Rock Whence I was Hewn, were brought out in 1929. The flurry of posthumous publications continued with several novels and short story www.abc-clio.com
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collections and a collection of Poems published in 1934. Tara Stubbs References Bannister, Henry S., Donn Byrne: A Descriptive Bibliography, 1912–1935. New York: Garland, 1982. Byrne, Donn. Blind Raftery and His Wife, Hilaria. New York: Century, 1924. Byrne, Donn. Changeling and Other Stories. New York: Century, 1923. Byrne, Donn. Field of Honor. New York: Century, 1929. Byrne, Donn. Hangman’s House. New York: Century, 1926. Byrne, Donn. Ireland: The Rock Whence I was Hewn. London: Low, Marston, 1929. Byrne, Donn. Messer Marco Polo. New York: Century, 1921. Byrne, Donn. Poems. London: Low, Marston, 1934. Ebest, Ron. “Donn Byrne: Bard of Armagh.” In New Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora, edited by Charles Fanning, 266–280. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 2000. Macauley, Thurston. Donn Byrne: Bard of Armagh. New York: Century, 1929.
BYRNE, GABRIEL (1950–) Born in Dublin in 1950, Gabriel Byrne grew up in a comfortable working-class Irish Catholic family, his father having a steady job working for the Guinness brewery. The Catholic influence was quite strong on Byrne in his early years: besides receiving his primary and secondary education from nuns and priests, he briefly considered the priesthood himself, departing Ireland at age 12 to become a Catholic novitiate in Birmingham, England. Byrne remained there for only four years, dismissed, as he himself recalls, for “smoking in the graveyard.” Abandoning his ambitions to become a priest, he returned to Dublin. Over the next several years he held a ABC-CLIO
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wide assortment of jobs, including plumber’s apprentice, insurance clerk, and even morgue attendant at St. James Hospital in Dublin. In 1969 Byrne entered University College Dublin as an undergraduate and began to explore a range of artistic pursuits. Chief among these were short-story writing and working as an editor for the literary magazine, The Bridge, which Byrne himself founded. The Bridge would go on to publish the work of a variety of now famous Irish authors and intellectuals, including Ulick O’Connor, John B. Keane, Mary Lavin, and Richard Kearney. It was also during this time that Byrne began to develop a passion for the theater and acting, which he added to his lifelong love for cinema. He was particularly drawn to the international fare of the Gate theatre in Dublin, and to the great actors who had performed there, including Mícheál MacLiammóir, Orson Welles, and James Mason. After acting in several amateur productions, Byrne had his professional debut in a production of Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm at Dublin’s Focus Theatre. Byrne’s acting career quickly accelerated, and he soon gave up a teaching position he had recently acquired to dedicate himself to acting full time. He quickly became affiliated with the Project Arts Centre, run by the future film director Jim Sheridan and his brother Peter. At that time the Project was already well on its way to becoming one of the most important avant-garde theatres in Dublin. At the Project Byrne not only formed a lifelong partnership with Jim Sheridan, but he also met many of the actors and directors who would become the most well-known of their generation, including Garreth Keogh, Liam Neeson, Susan Slott, Neil Jordan, and www.abc-clio.com
Alan Stanford. Throughout the 1970s Byrne appeared in numerous Project productions. He also took various roles on RTÉ, Ireland’s public television station, appearing in the long-running Irish serial The Riordans and subsequently in Bracken. It was also at this time that Byrne landed his first role in a feature film, playing Uther Pendragon, King Arthur’s father, in John Boorman’s epic film Excalibur (1981). The lack of a dynamic indigenous film industry forced Byrne to leave Ireland. In 1982, he relocated to London. He appeared there in various professional productions at venues such as the Royal Court before moving almost exclusively into film acting. During his four years in London he appeared in a variety of films, including Reflections (1983), Defense of the Realm (1985), and Gothic (1986). On the set of the film Siesta (1987), he met his future wife, the American actress Ellen Barkin, whom he would follow back to New York to settle there in the late 1980s. New York captivated Byrne, who felt “instantly at home and paradoxically alienated” walking its streets. Residing in New York, Byrne began to commute between Ireland and Los Angeles as his career continued to improve, purchasing the cottage White O’Morn, which had served as John Wayne’s ancestral home in John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952), as his own summer home in western Ireland. The 1990s saw Byrne become an international film star, appearing in a sizable number of works too numerous to summarize here. Among the highlights are Miller’s Crossing (1990), Little Women (1994), and the Oscar award–winning The Usual Suspects (1995). He also became an avid producer, using revenues from his own acting work to fund a series of Irish-themed
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films, including two collaborations with his long-time friend, director Jim Sheridan. Byrne served as executive producer for Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father (1993), which was nominated for seven Academy Awards, as well as associate producer for Into the West (1992), which Sheridan wrote. Both movies deal with darker sides of the Irish experience: In the Name of the Father stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Gerry Conlon, accused and wrongly imprisoned for fifteen years as one of the Guildford Four, the group charged with the 1975 IRA bombing campaign in London. Into the West, in which Byrne also starred, explores the day-to day racism that the Irish Traveler (gypsy) community faces as Ireland’s critically and culturally ignored underclass.
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Splitting his time between Ireland and the United States, Gabriel Byrne still remains a distinctly Irish presence in Hollywood, while at the same time remaining deeply involved in the cultural politics of his home country. Michael P. Jaros See also: DAY-LEWIS, Daniel; FORD, John; JORDAN, Neil; NEESON, Liam; SHERIDAN, Jim References Byrne, Gabriel. Pictures in My Head. Boulder, CO: Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 1995. Naughton, John. “Byrne, Baby, Byrne.” Premiere, June 1994, 86–90. Rockett, Kevin. Irish Filmography: Fiction Films 1896–1996. Dublin: Red Mountain Media, 1988. Sheehy, Ted. “Devil, actor, priest.” Film Ireland, February 2000, 18–19.
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C CAGNEY, JAMES (1899–1986) James Francis Cagney was one of the most recognized movie gangsters and popular culture icons of the twentieth century. Cagney was born on July 14, 1899, the son of an Irish-Norwegian mother and an alcoholic Irish father. After his father’s death, his strong-willed mother moved the family uptown to the Bronx. Growing up in a working-class, heavily Jewish neighborhood provided him with the notable gestures, speech mannerisms, and staccato delivery that he would later use in films— as well as an ability to speak Yiddish. Redhaired and muscular, the five-foot-eightinch Cagney was a scrappy street fighter, yet he somehow managed to escape the trap of alcoholism and crime into which so many of his neighborhood fell. After a series of odd jobs, Cagney began working as a vaudeville dancer on the New York circuit. Here he met his wife of 64 years, Frances “Bill” Vernon. His move to Hollywood came in 1930, with the offer of a small role in the film version of Sinner’s Holiday, in which he was performing on Broadway with Joan Blondell. Following this, he received a contract with Warner Brothers Studios, which assigned him supporting roles in several low-budget gangster films, a genre that had been gaining in
popularity since the start of the Depression. Like other contract actors at the studio, Cagney was kept working at a frenetic pace, making thirty-six films in the next decade alone. He finally received a chance to play a leading role in his fourth film, Public Enemy (1931). Cagney’s portrayal of the fearless but charismatic machine-gunning gangster Tom Powers made him a star. His quick delivery and humorous asides, as well as the famous scene in which he smashes a grapefruit in Mae Clarke’s face, sealed his on-screen persona as the fast-talking, womanizing gangster with the Irish smile. He perfected the character in the next few years in films like Smart Money (1931), Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), and The Roaring Twenties (1939). Critics have argued that Cagney created a new icon that resonated with the masses. As thoroughly American as the cowboy, yet set firmly in the ethnic neighborhoods of the city, the movie gangster as represented by Cagney became the new urban antihero, just right for the mood of the Depression. While violent, Cagney’s gangsters were not one-dimensional villains, but ordinary guys whom society had failed. They took matters into their own hands and shaped their own destinies, rather than waiting patiently for good things to come
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Movie poster for the 1934 film Jimmy the Gent, starring Jimmy Cagney and Bette Davis. (Library of Congress)
to them. Their unhappy, often violent endings represented the bitterness of a working class tired of the rough times. Gangsters were just one of many Irish characters present in the movies during the 1930s. In Angels With Dirty Faces, for example, Cagney’s gangster was paired with another Irish-American stock character of the period—the neighborhood priest, played by Pat O’Brien. Arguably Cagney’s best depiction of the gangster antihero and his best Irish-American role of the thirties is Rocky Sullivan, a criminal idolized by the neighborhood boys to the dismay of his childhood friend turned priest, Father Connolly. When Rocky is captured and sentenced to the electric chair, Connolly tries to convince Rocky to turn “yellow” in an attempt to lessen his mythos with the www.abc-clio.com
boys and teach them that crime does not pay. Cagney’s Oscar-nominated performance won the film critical acclaim and lasting success, but Spencer Tracy won the Academy Award that year for his portrayal of Father Flanagan in Boys Town. Ironically, Cagney’s association with gangster roles caused him not only to lose the Flanagan role to Tracy but also the lead in Knute Rockne, All-American to Pat O’Brien in 1940. While gangster films brought Cagney great financial and critical success, they also led to typecasting, as his on-screen persona and friendships with other actors in Hollywood’s “Irish Mafia” gave him a reputation as a carouser and heavy drinker. Off-screen, however, Cagney was a devoted family man content to stay at his ranch in upstate New York and his farm on Martha’s Vineyard. Wearying of the gangster theme and the ill treatment studios gave actors, Cagney left Warners to set up his own production company with his brother in the mid-thirties, but he had to return when they lost money on films. Cagney did play other roles during this period, including a hoofer in Footlight Parade (1933), a federal agent in G-Men (1935), and a soldier to O’Brien’s Father Duffy in The Fighting 69th (1940). However, the role that really changed his image, finally allowing him to break free of the gangster typecasting, was that of George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). While mainly a wartime vehicle to raise morale, the film also demonstrates the acceptance that Irish Americans had won by this period; respected as loyal Americans, they nevertheless maintained an ethnic identity. In many ways, Cagney was a logical choice to play Cohan: he resembled him in build and stature, his background as a dancer
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allowed him to completely capture Cohan’s distinctive stiff-legged style, and as one reviewer noted, “Irish Jimmy Cagney” was as “typically American” as Cohan himself. Cagney’s portrayal of the flag-waving IrishAmerican showman won him his only Oscar, and helped dispel rumors of his Communist leanings—accusations derived from his support of Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Popular Front in the Spanish Civil War. In 1942, Cagney became president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), of which he was a founding member. Warner Brothers had long considered Cagney a troublemaker because of his SAG involvement, his attempts to break out of his contract, and his lobbying for more money. He left Warner Brothers again in 1943, returning in 1949 for the commercially successful gangster film, White Heat, in which he uttered just one of his more memorable lines, “Top o’ the world, Ma!” Cagney broadened his range as an actor in the 1950s in such films as Love Me or Leave Me (1955), which earned him another Oscar nomination, Mr. Roberts (1955), A Man of a Thousand Faces (1957), and Shake Hands With the Devil (1959). By the 1960s, Cagney was losing his enthusiasm for the business. He retired after starring in Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three (1961), dividing his time between upstate New York and Martha’s Vineyard. In 1974, Cagney became the first actor honored with the American Film Institute’s prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. He returned to acting in 1981 to star in an adaptation of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. His last performance was with Art Carney in the television movie Terrible Joe Moran in 1984. Long troubled by diabetes, Cagney died on March 30, 1986, after a heart attack. Meaghan Dwyer www.abc-clio.com
See also: O’ BRIEN, Pat; COHAN, George M. References Cagney, James. Cagney by Cagney. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976. Curran, Joseph M. Hibernian Green on the Silver Screen: The Irish and American Movies. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. James, C. L. R. American Civilization. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1993. Warren, Doug. James Cagney, the Authorized Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983.
CAMPBELL, PETER (1780–Ca.1832) Born in Ireland in 1780, Peter Campbell enlisted in the 71st Highland Regiment that sailed in July 1805, with other divisions, for the Cape of Good Hope, and in 1806 invaded Buenos Aires under William Carr Beresford. After the British campaigns failed and the regiment withdrew, Campbell was one of the soldiers who managed to remain in the River Plate region. He joined the patriot ranks as a guerrilla leader, harassing Spanish forces both on land and on the Paraná River. He had a notorious dexterity in the gaucho form of dueling, wielding a long knife in one hand and wrapping a poncho around the other arm as a protective measure. Campbell carried two riding pistols, a sabre, and a large knife in a leather sheath, for his personal protection, and was assisted by a Tipperary-born gaucho. Campbell rose to prominence as a superb guerrilla fighter, serving under José Artigas, the caudillo of a region including today’s Argentine provinces of Entre Ríos and Corrientes, and much of Uruguay, and who is regarded as one of Uruguay’s founding fathers. Campbell played a prominent role in the affairs of Corrientes province, and for a period after 1819 acted as its deputy governor. He made a notable ABC-CLIO
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contribution to the tactics used by the local military forces, first against the Spaniards during the War of Independence, and later against Buenos Aires in the civil wars that followed Argentine sovereignty. Peter Campbell was responsible for establishing a regiment of mounted Tape Indians, who were feared as both a cavalry and an infantry force because their tactics were so difficult to counter. Armed with riffles with long bayonets attached, his Indian force was trained to charge the enemy on horseback at great speed and to dismount and open fire with their rifles. Campbell’s military prowess and organizational ability were not confined to terra firma. In 1814 he began building up a squadron of river vessels to support Artigas on the Paraná. In 1818 Peter Campbell was responsible for the second squadron of the Uruguayan naval forces, based on Goya and Esquina. He became naval commander-in-chief of the region and the scourge of the Paraguayan dictator Francia’s river fleet. On August 21, 1818, Artigas appointed Campbell as the first naval commander of the patriot fleet. For this reason, the Irishman is acknowledged as the founder of the Uruguayan navy. In September 1818 Peter Campbell managed to seize two vessels carrying arms for the Paraguayan army. In January-March 1819, together with the land forces of governor López, Campbell besieged the town of Capilla del Rosario. On March 10, 1919, the Uruguayan army won the battle of Barrancas against the army of Buenos Aires. Advancing over the Argentine city, the combined federalist forces defeated the porteños at Cepeda (February 1, 1820) and San Nicolás (February 13, 1820). However, in the last naval battle against Monteverde on July 30, 1820, Artigas was defeated by Ramírez, a rival warlord from www.abc-clio.com
Entre Ríos province. Campbell, who initially escaped, was captured and banished in shackles to Paraguay. Dictator Francia, instead of putting his former foe to death, spared Campbell’s life, possibly out of respect for his adversary’s courage and military prowess. Peter Campbell was allowed to settle in the Paraguayan town of Neembucú, where he returned to his old trade of tanner. There is disagreement over the location and date of his death, which occurred in or about 1832. After his burial place in Villa del Pilar was discovered in 1961, his remains were handed over to Uruguay for reinterment in Montevideo on May 18, 1961, as befitted the founder of that country’s navy. Edmundo Murray See also: URUGUAY Reference Pyne, Peter. The Invasions of Buenos Aires, 1806–1807: The Irish Dimension. Research Paper 20. Liverpool: University of Liverpool, Institute of Latin American Studies, 1996.
CANALS AND THE IRISH INVOLVEMENT A crucial factor in the commercial and industrial development of the United States was the construction of canals, artificially created waterways that were connected to natural bodies of water to transport goods and people; and the involvement of immigrant Irish labor was integral to the digging of those canals. These waterways had a profound effect on the exploration and modernization of the eastern part of the North American continent, especially in the early 1800s. The construction and usage of canals were important parts of the North American economy (which included both
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Canada and the United States) in the nineteenth century, although much of the construction came during a burst of activity from 1817 to 1850. The history of canal construction in the eastern Americas can be traced back to William Penn, who in 1676 signed a document authorizing surveyors to examine the possibility of constructing a canal that could handle vessels of 100 tons from the Delaware River, on the western side of New Jersey, to New York Bay, on the eastern side, as a way to facilitate the movement of goods from New York City to Philadelphia. No construction was undertaken, however, and no written report has been found. Canal, lockage, and river improvement projects were begun in the 1780s, but there were only 100 miles of canals in the United States by 1816. That changed with the construction of the Erie Canal, which is 340 miles long (originally 363) and crosses central New York State from Albany on the Hudson River in the east to Buffalo on Lake Erie and the Niagara River in the west. Construction on the Erie Canal lasted from 1817 to 1825, and once the Erie started being used, there was an outbreak of what some called “canal fever”—that is, a frenzy of canal construction brought on by visions of high profits and low freight rates. As a result, there were about 1,300 miles of canals in the United States by 1830, 3,325 miles by 1840, and 4,254 by 1860; this is referred to as the canal era. At the same time, the Welland and Rideau canals were dug in Canada, with distances of 27 and 120 miles, respectively. Engineering as a profession in North America traces its roots largely to the construction of canals, and the Erie Canal was a source of technical know-how for most canal building. In www.abc-clio.com
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addition, the Erie Canal is credited with giving an enormous boost to the economy of all of New York State and helping open the American Midwest to exploration. A major use of canals in the New York-New Jersey-Pennsylvania area was for shipping coal from mining areas to consumer markets, so that canals provided a huge boost to the prosperity associated with coal. The first canal workers, in both the United States and Canada, tended to be native-born Americans who went to canal work from farms on a casual or seasonal basis (mostly farm laborers but sometimes even farm owners). Thus, areas where farms were not doing well could see some surpluses of available laborers, but the presence of a canal project could also cause shortages on farms during planting or harvesting time. As time passed, the majority of canal workers came to be immigrants from Europe, for most of whom canal work was just a passing stage in their work career, although some Canadians worked on canals in the United States. Canal work lent itself to the system of working for a while and returning home periodically with money. In the late eighteenth and very early nineteenth centuries indentured servants sometimes worked on canals. They were required to work a number of years in return for passage and provisions during the time of indenture (at one point $12 steerage and $15 provision fee). The practice was never significant in New England, however, and was more important in the South and parts of the Mid-Atlantic states. Indenture as a practice on canals was already dying out by the end of the eighteenth century, although there were isolated cases in the 1820s. Most of the indentured servants were Irish, a few were English and German; newspaper ABC-CLIO
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advertisements for runaways, when giving ethnicity, always specified Irish. Runaways who were caught had their eyebrows shaved and a cross shaved in their scalp. Irish involvement in the construction of canals in North America may even be said to have begun in Ireland, with the construction of Dublin’s Grand Canal and the Royal Canal in the eighteenth century. In 1816, a group of American engineers who were working on plans for the Erie Canal made a fact-finding trip to England, and word spread about work opportunities in the United States. The following year, Canvass White, an engineer from New York State, went back to England and recruited a workforce of experienced Irish workers. By 1818, it was reported that of a canal workforce of about 4,000 on the Erie Canal, about one-quarter (1,000) were foreign born, and most of those were Irish. Thousands of Irish people moved into Albany in 1824, many of them involved in canal work. There is no reliable information on exactly how many canal workers were Irish, just as there is no reliable information about how many had already been living in the United States and how many had just arrived, or where they came from either in America or Ireland. This is because much canal construction in the United States was handled by contractors who agreed to build sections of each canal. These contractors were notorious for not keeping records; in fact, some were accused of absconding without paying their workers. For the most part, the employees were unable to read or write; and, even if they could, they had no time for record keeping. The nature of canal work remained largely the same throughout the entire canal-building period, powered by humans www.abc-clio.com
and beasts using traditional tools. The workday extended from before sunrise until after sunset, every day, weather permitting, with two-hour dinner breaks. Most workers lived in all-male barracks or family shanties on the work site or in nearby towns; accommodations were meant to be temporary and were limited in comfort. The shantytowns were the setting for much drinking, criminal activity, and violence and were looked down on by permanent residents, who avoided them as much as possible. Canal workers were thus set off from society by the kind of work they did as well as their ethnic background; so that they became further stigmatized even in the minds of other potential workers; canal work came to be seen as the lowest of the low labor, done only by Irishmen and slaves. In fact, many slave owners would not allow their slaves to perform canal work because it was too dangerous. Irish laborers became so numerous in canal construction that it was said that to build a canal four things were needed: a pick, a shovel, a wheelbarrow, and an Irishman. The workforce primarily consisted of unmarried males, although some were married. Women could often work as cooks, cleaners, and laundresses, and were often paid by the same contractors who paid the diggers. For married women, the income, although less than what the men received, could help a family make ends meet. The question arises as to why so many Irish people took part in constructing America’s canals. For one thing, no skills were needed, and most of the Irish coming to America in the nineteenth century were unskilled. Also, there appears to have been a kinship network of communication about canal work opportunities; for example, one group of workers on the Susquehanna
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Canal in Pennsylvania knew each other from the same place in Ireland. Similar networks have been discerned on the Miami Canal in Ohio as well as on the Blackstone Canal in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, where canal workers arrived after gaining experience in Britain and on the Erie Canal. It is also possible that taverns served as recruiting grounds. In addition, Irish immigrants found out about available work from agencies set up to help them, including the Irish Emigrant Association (founded 1825; its successor, was the Irish Emigrant Society, 1841) and the Union Emigrant Society (formed 1829) in New York. A publication, the New York Truth Teller, which addressed an immigrant audience, became an active promoter of public works employment. The Truth Teller directed readers to specific projects, providing detailed information on how these places could be reached, how much money they might pay, and where a Catholic priest would be available. It is also believed that Irish grocers, who also sold liquor, allowed their countrymen to run up bills and then bargained with contractors to supply laborers from among these debtors. Traditionally, it has been assumed that the Irish arrived as peasants, that is, people who had experience with the land but not with commercial relations and wage labor, but some scholars dispute that, noting that workers on the Rideau Canal in 1829 came mostly from Ulster and Leinster, the two most commercial parts of Ireland, as opposed to coming from the agrarian south and west. In 1832, laborers could earn $12 to $16 a month and board. For many in Ireland, this was considered a handsome sum. Wages were not always a certainty, however. For instance, in 1804 Irish laborers on the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal who were disgruntled about not receiving www.abc-clio.com
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wages, took their anger out by picking a fight with jockeys, gamblers, and residents of Elkton, Maryland, during a fair at a racetrack. This happened at a time of financial difficulties for the canal contractors that resulted in problems paying canal workers. In 1826 ground was broken for the Shubenacadie Canal, a 70-mile waterway that bisects Nova Scotia. Work ceased when the construction company ran out of money, but it was resumed in 1853. The money problems that caused the construction stoppage also led to a protest by Irish workers. After they had not been paid for a while, they were angered to learn that the Scottish masons (who could be considered skilled) had received a pay-and-hours adjustment that was denied to the Irish laborers. Despite difficulties, canal building continued. In 1830 ground was broken for the Delaware and Raritan Canal, which would cut across New Jersey on approximately the route William Penn had envisioned. Canvass White, the engineer who had traveled to England, was appointed chief engineer. The Delaware and Raritan Canal had a main canal 44 miles long in a northwesterly/southeasterly diagonal, linking New Brunswick to Trenton. To ensure a flow of water into the canal, a feeder canal 22 miles long was built to bring in water from the Delaware River. One of White’s associates was a man named Ashbel Lynch, who was put in charge of the feeder canal. The workforce on the Delaware and Raritan Canal has been estimated at between 3,000 and 5,000 workers, most of whom were Irish. As with other canals, it is impossible to ascertain any precise numbers because of a lack of records. Although most workers on the Delaware and Raritan did a lot of digging, they also built stone walls in ABC-CLIO
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certain sections, so that they came to be seen as having a skill above simple wielding of a pick or shovel. In 1832 there was another kind of canal fever at the Delaware and Raritan Canal— an outbreak of cholera, which some historians believe came from the Erie Canal and others from the West Indies. The outbreak spread rapidly, abetted by a lack of ordinary sanitary precaution in the squalid shantytowns, and spread to surrounding areas, including Princeton, New Jersey. An isolation hospital was set up in the Princeton municipal hall, and this, along with Ashbel Lynch’s work to improve sanitary conditions on the canal sites, helped bring the disease under control by 1833. Once again, it is impossible to know with any certainty how many laborers died from this outbreak of sickness. Few workers had family ties in the United States, and canal contractors made no attempt to notify relatives in Ireland about the death of a loved one. The dead were buried in unmarked graves, usually in hastily conducted funerals. In 1970, more than 50 graves with crude headstones were reported on Bull’s Island, a small island in the Delaware River; these graves are believed to be those of canal fever victims; but there is no knowing if each grave held one body or more. What may serve as an indication of how many died is an advertisement that appeared in the Truth Teller on May 4, 1833, calling for 2,000 laborers, who would receive free transportation to the work site. The figure of 2,000 may not be a reliable indicator of the actual number of employees needed, however, because historically canal contractors would inflate the number of worker vacancies in order to get a large applicant pool and thus depress wages. www.abc-clio.com
The Erie Canal continues to be used and is an important waterway in the northeastern United States, although it has been rerouted slightly. In 1933 the Delaware and Raritan Canal was abandoned because it was no longer serving a useful commercial purpose; this was the fate of most canals in the United States and Canada. Many canals were simply supplanted by railroads, which could move in a more direct line and were not subject to vagaries of the weather; many canals were useless in the winter because they froze over. Canals would be built after the canal era, but they were large shipnavigation systems that could compete with railroads, such as the St. Lawrence Seaway, and not towpath canals, such as the Delaware and Raritan. In 1973 the Delaware and Raritan Canal was named to the National Register of Historic places, and in 1974 it was made a state park. Today there are memorial tablets along the Delaware and Raritan, erected by the Ancient Order of Hibernians. These tablets commemorate the part played by Irish labor in the construction of the Delaware and Raritan. Donald McNamara
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See also: PENNSYLVANIA References Barth, Linda J. The Delaware and Raritan Canal. Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2002. Latta, Peter M. “Cabins and Protest on the Shubenacadie Canal.” Canal History and Technology Proceedings 25 (March 1996): 9–22. Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Potter, George. To the Golden Door: The Story of the Irish in Ireland and America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1960. Tobin, Catherine. “Irish Labor on American Canals.” Canal History and Technology Proceedings 9 (March 1990): 163–186. 1-800-368-6868
CARNEY, ART Way, Peter. Common Labour: Workers and the Digging of the North American Canals, 1780–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
CARNEY, ANDREW (1794–1864) An entrepreneur and philanthropist, Andrew Carney was one of Boston’s most famous Irish-American Catholics. Born in Co. Cavan in Northern Ireland, he immigrated to Boston in 1816 where he became a successful clothing manufacturer. He and his partner, Jacob Sleeper, a Methodist from Maine, earned their fortunes in the firm Carney & Sleeper Clothiers by manufacturing military uniforms in the 1830s. Carney was an organizer of the Montgomery Guards, an Irish-American company in the Massachusetts militia in 1837. Despite widespread nativism and anti-Catholicism, by the 1850s Carney increased his fortune with prudent investments in Boston real estate. He was a founder of the First National Bank of Boston and the John Hancock Insurance Company. Carney devoted much of his time and money to Catholic charities. He purchased a Unitarian church in the Irish Fort Hill neighborhood as St. Vincent’s Church. He was a major supporter of Father Theobold Mathew’s temperance crusade in 1850, and purchased the land in the South End on which the new Cathedral of the Holy Cross was built in 1860. Carney also supported the Jesuit priests who built the magnificent Church of the Immaculate Conception in Boston’s South End. With his close friend Bishop John B. Fitzpatrick, Carney’s home on Ann Street in Boston was a center of Irish-American community activities. Carney was also a founder of the St. Vincent Home for Girls (1858), and he www.abc-clio.com
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established the Carney Hospital in South Boston (1863), the first Catholic hospital in New England. During the Civil War, Carney was also a benefactor of Bishop John J. Williams’s orphanage, the Home for Destitute Catholic Children (1864), and the House of the Angel Guardian (1855) for homeless boys in Boston’s North End. With Bishop Fitzpatrick and the Reverend John McElroy, S. J., Carney founded Boston College (1863) and was its chief benefactor as early as 1858 when ground was broken in the South End of the city. His role in founding the college was remembered in the Boston College centennial year when a new campus building was named in his honor in 1963. Carney, the state’s leading Catholic philanthropist, died in Boston on April 4, 1864, and was buried at Forest Hills Cemetery. Peter C. Holloran See also: AMERICAN TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT; BOSTON; MATHEW, Father Theobald References Donovan, Charles F., David R. Dunigan, and Paul A. Fitzgerald. History of Boston College: From the Beginnings to 1990. Boston: University Press of Boston College, 1990. Holloran, Peter C. Boston’s Wayward Children: Social Services for Homeless Children, 1820 to 1920. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994. O’Connore, Thomas H. Fitzpatrick’s Boston, 1846–1866: John Bernard Fitzpatrick, Third Bishop of Boston. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984.
CARNEY, ART (1918–2003) Born Arthur William Matthew Carney in Mount Vernon, New York, Art Carney was the youngest of six sons born to Edward Michael and Helen (Farrell) Carney, who were both of Irish descent. In 1936 Art graduated from the A. B. Davis High ABC-CLIO
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School, where he had gained a reputation for impersonations and had won a talent contest. He never attended acting school but, after a period spent working in a jewelry store, his brother, who worked for the MCA agency, got him a job working with the Horace Heidt Orchestra. Carney spent three years on the road with the Heidt Orchestra, performing impersonations and novelty songs. In 1941 he appeared in the Heidt film Pot o’ Gold. He tried to make a career in stand-up comedy and provided one of the voices on Gangbusters, a popular radio series in the 1930s. In 1940 he married Jean Myers, and they had three children together. During World War II he was sent to France as an infantryman, where he was wounded in the right leg by shrapnel during the Battle of Normandy. This led to his spending nine months recovering in the hospital. As a result of this injury he walked with a limp for the rest of his life as one leg was shorter than the other. In the late 1940s Carney appeared on Henry Morgan’s radio show, and he provided the voice of Red Lantern on the radio show Land of the Lost. He also became a regular on Morey Amsterdam’s television show, in which he played a waiter. He worked with Jackie Gleason in his series Cavalcade of Stars, and from this emerged the role for which he is remembered most fondly, that of Ed Norton in The Honeymooners, one of the most popular television series of its time. Carney played the dim-witted sewer worker Norton opposite Gleason, who played his neighbor Ralph Kramden, the bus driver who always had a get-rich-quick scheme. The pair’s onscreen chemistry was summed up in Norton’s cry, “Hey, there, Ralphie Boy!” Set in an apartment building in Brooklyn,
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the show offered a comic look at urban working class life and ran for 39 episodes on CBS from 1955 until the following year. It was frequently shown again in later years. After The Honeymooners, Carney played opposite Siobhan McKenna in The Rope Dancers on Broadway, and he appeared in the television versions of Harvey and Our Town. In 1960 he appeared on Broadway in Take Her, She’s Mine, and in 1965 he starred as Felix Unger opposite Walter Matthau in the Broadway production of Neil Simon’s play The Odd Couple. However, he was forced to drop out of the show after he suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of which he became addicted to alcohol, amphetamines, and barbiturates. At this time his marriage to Jean Myers ended and they divorced. He recovered in a Connecticut sanatorium when his old friend Jackie Gleason helped him by casting him in new episodes of The Honeymooners. In 1966 he married Barbara Isaacs. He was nominated for Broadway’s 1969 Tony Award as Best Actor (Dramatic) for his performance in Brian Friel’s Lovers. For his first leading role in a film, in Harry and Tonto, he beat Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and Albert Finney to win the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1974. In 1977 he divorced Barbara Isaacs, and three years later he remarried Jean Myers, with whom he remained until his death. He was nominated for seven Emmy awards throughout his career. He won six times, five times for his work with Gleason and once for supporting James Cagney in Terrible Joe Moran. In 1985 he teamed up with Gleason again for the television movie Izzy and Moe, in which they played two prohibition agents. He was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6627
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Hollywood Boulevard. Carney died five days after his 85th birthday on November 9, 2003, in Chester, Conneticut. David Doyle See also: CAGNEY, James; GLEASON, John Herbert References Harrell, Joy. “Art Carney.” The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America. Ed. Michael Glazier. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999. Smith, Ronald L. Who’s Who in Comedy. New York: Facts on File, 1992. Starr, Michael Seth. Art Carney: A Biography. New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2002.
CAROLAN,TURLOCH (1670–1738) With more than 200 harp tunes attributed to him, Turloch Carolan is the best known Irish composer in the world. Born at Nobber, Co. Meath, Carolan was four when his parents moved to Co. Roscommon, where his father was employed by the Mac Dermott Roe family. Mrs. Mac Dermott Roe evidently saw some promise in the boy and had him educated along with her own children. When Carolan was blinded by smallpox at the age of eighteen, Mrs. Mac Dermott Roe apprenticed him to a harper. Three years later, the young man embarked on his career as an itinerant musician, playing in the houses of the aristocracy. According to one story, because Carolan had learned the harp too late in life to become a virtuoso performer, he was advised to specialize in writing songs dedicated to his upper-class patrons. Many of his airs, therefore, were created as settings for dedicatory songs, all of which were in Gaelic. Carolan’s travels took him to Dublin, where he encountered the popular Italian
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baroque music of the day. He was particularly taken with the music of Corelli and may have met violinist and composer Francesco Geminiani, who had settled in the city. Being blind, Carolan could not study, much less master, the theories and complex structures of baroque music. However, he became a kind of “fusion” artist, blending the tradition of Irish harp music and the melodic figures of the baroque with the popular dance tunes and rhythms of Irish traditional music. Carolan’s compositions were published throughout the eighteenth century. Some of his pieces were still in the repertory of the aging harpers assembled for the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792, where Edward Bunting noted and later published some of them in his various collections. When Chicago police superintendent Francis O’Neill published The Music of Ireland in 1903, he included 76 tunes that he attributed (sometimes inaccurately) to Carolan. Nevertheless, Carolan’s music was little known outside of the intimate circles of Irish music enthusiasts in Ireland and the United States. Then in 1958, Donal O’Sullivan published his biography of Carolan, along with 200 tunes. A few years later Irish composer Seán Ó Riada and his folk band Ceoltóirí Chualann began performing and recording Carolan’s music. Later, The Chieftains also included Carolan pieces in their recordings and concerts. Other traditional groups followed suit, and by the end of the twentieth century, Carolan favorites such as “Planxty Irwin,” “Sheebeg, Sheemore,” “George Brabazon,” “A Fine Toast to Hewlett,” “Lord Inchiquin,” and “Morgan Magan” had become part of the standard repertory for many Irish bands. Carolan’s music has become particularly
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popular in America, where many consider it emblematic of Celtic or even New Age music. William H. A. Williams See also: CHIEFTAINS, The Reference O’Sullivan, Donal. Carolan: The Life Times and Music of an Irish Harper. Cork: Ossian, 2001.
CARROLL, CHARLES (1737–1832) Charles Carroll of Carrollton was the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. Born on September 19, 1737, he was the son of Charles Carroll of Annapolis and Elizabeth Brooke. The Carroll family was descended from the O’Carroll’s of King’s County, Ireland. The first Charles Carroll came to Maryland in 1688 and briefly served as attorney general. In 1748, Carroll’s father sent him to college at his alma mater, St. Omer in France. He spent the next seventeen years abroad, living in London after finishing his studies in France. He always intended to return to Maryland and had to dissuade his father from migrating to a colony on the Arkansas River. Carroll returned to Maryland in February 1765. Although trained in the law, he did not practice, and lived as a country squire. As a Catholic, Carroll was barred from the political life of the province. Carroll entered public debate as a newspaper essayist in 1773. Three years before, Governor Robert Eden had issued a proclamation fixing fees charged by provincial officers and the clergy at a level higher than that approved by the assembly. Daniel Dulany, Jr., defended the move under the pseudonym Antilon. Carroll responded www.abc-clio.com
with a dialogue between First Citizen and Second Citizen in the February 4, 1773, Maryland Gazette. First Citizen, an Eden opponent, won the argument. Carroll abandoned the dialogue format and attacked the Eden administration as First Citizen. The articles established Carroll’s patriot credentials. In May 1774 he was appointed to the Annapolis Committee of Correspondence. It was his first political office. He was not elected to the first Continental Congress but accompanied the Maryland delegation as a private citizen. In February 1776, Congress chose Carroll, Benjamin Franklin, and Samuel Chase for a diplomatic mission designed to induce Canada to join the rebellion. Carroll’s fluency in French, his impeccable patriot credentials, and his religion all worked in his favor. Congress also asked Carroll to prevail upon his cousin John Carroll, the future bishop of Baltimore, to accompany the mission. Lack of money and troops from Congress and lack of interest from the people of Quebec doomed the mission. On June 11, 1776, Carroll and Chase reported the failure of the mission to Congress. On July 4 the Maryland legislature elected Carroll as a delegate to the Continental Congress. He arrived at Philadelphia on July 18, in time to vote for the embossment of the Declaration of Independence the next day. He signed the document on August 2. Soon after, Carroll left to attend the convention that drafted the Maryland Declaration of Rights and constitution. The constitution took effect in February 1777, and Carroll took office as a senator. He established himself as a conservative revolutionary, vehemently opposing a legal tender bill supported by Samuel Chase. Carroll returned to Congress in May 1777 and
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served until June 1778. He was on the board of war and was part of the investigation of conditions at Valley Forge. He was frequently mentioned for higher posts, such as minister to France or president of Congress. Carroll was elected to represent Maryland at the Constitutional Convention but did not attend. He supported ratification and became a Federalist of the Hamiltonian variety. He served as a U.S. senator from 1789 to 1792, while serving concurrently as a Maryland state senator. Carroll resigned from the United States Senate when Maryland outlawed dual office-holding. He remained a state senator until 1800. Carroll spent the rest of his life tending to his estates and promoting internal improvements. He served on the boards of the Potomac Company, which became the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company in 1823, and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Carroll died on November 14, 1832. Robert W. Smith See also: CARROLL, Bishop John; MARYLAND References Gurn, Joseph. Charles Carroll of Carrollton. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1932. Hanley, Thomas O’Brien. Revolutionary Statesman: Charles Carroll and the War. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1983. Smith, Ellen Hart. Charles Carroll of Carrollton. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942.
CARROLL, JAMES P. (1943–) Born in Chicago in 1943, James Carroll spent most of his formative years in Washington, D.C. where his father worked as an Air Force general and the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Typical of a son of a man in the military, Carroll spent www.abc-clio.com
some time abroad during his youth, which gave him a more worldly perspective despite his youth. Strong academically, he was educated at Washington’s Priory School and at an American high school in Wiesbaden, Germany, where his father was stationed. Carroll attended Georgetown University before he decided to move on and attend St. Paul’s College, also known as the Paulist Fathers’ seminary, where he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. After completing his education, Carroll was ordained to the priesthood in 1969, beginning his work within the church as the Catholic chaplain at Boston University from 1969 to 1974. While at Boston University, he was able to connect with many influential journalists, writers, and intellectuals, who helped to foster his own love of writing. He benefited from his time there by taking the opportunity to study poetry with George Starbuck. Making use of what he learned, Carroll published a book of poems as well as books dealing with religious subject matter. Additionally, in 1972 he began working as a columnist for the National Catholic Report. He worked with the Reporter until 1975 and received nationwide recognition when he was named best columnist by the Catholic Press Association. Not only was he a successful journalist, but Carroll soon also received praise for his writings on religion and politics, earning him the first Thomas Merton Award from Pittsburgh’s Thomas Merton Center in 1972. In light of growing success and his desire to more actively pursue his writing, he left the priesthood in 1974. Soon after, he became a playwright and was in residence at the Berkshire Theater Festival. His plays have been staged not only at the Berkshire Theater Festival but also at Boston’s Next Move Theater. Not simply ABC-CLIO
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satisfied with theater, Carroll published his first novel, Madonna Red, in 1976. He went on to publish a string of successful novels, and his works include Mortal Friends (1978), Prince of Peace (1984), Memorial Bridge (1991), and The City Below (1994). In 1997, Carroll achieved one of his greatest successes with the publication of An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us. It is the story about the effect of the Vietnam War on his family that is not only autobiographical but also able to speak about the experiences of an entire generation. Originally an ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) student at Georgetown, Carroll quickly changed his perspective on the war and decided to join the priesthood and become active in the protest movement, even though he was fearful of his father’s response. In recognition of his gripping work, Carroll was awarded the National Book Award. Carroll has maintained his antiwar stance and his love of writing and journalism. He has written for a number of different publications, most often The New Yorker. Additionally, he writes a weekly editorial piece for the Boston Globe newspaper. Most recently, he has strongly condemned President George W. Bush’s war on terror not only in his weekly columns but also in his latest book publication, Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War. Made up of his thoughts on the war on terror and some of his weekly columns from the Boston Globe, the book protests Bush’s conduct while offering Carroll’s beliefs on what America was meant to be. Currently, Carroll and his wife, novelist Alexandra Marshall, live in Boston with their two children. Arthur Holst See also: CATHOLIC CHURCH, the www.abc-clio.com
References Carroll, James. An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us. New York: Mariner Books, 2001. “Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War.” Written Voices Radio Online. www.writtenvoices.com/titlepage.asp? ISBN=0805077030 (accessed December 10, 2005). “James Carroll: Author/Illustrator Bio.” www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/ authordetail.cfm?authorID=1380 (accessed December 10, 2005).
CARROLL, BISHOP JOHN (1736–1815) John Carroll, the first Roman Catholic bishop in the United States, was born in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, on January 8, 1736, the son of Daniel Carroll and Eleanor Darnell. His grandfather was Keane O’Carroll, the oldest brother of Charles Carroll the attorney general. In 1748, Carroll and his cousin, another Charles Carroll, embarked for their studies at St. Omer in France. He began studies to enter the Jesuit order in 1753. He then studied at the English College at Liege and was ordained on February 14, 1761. Carroll spent the next decade teaching and touring Europe. His career came to a halt with the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773, and he returned to Maryland the next year, serving as priest to local Catholics. In 1776 Carroll accompanied his cousin Charles Carroll, Samuel Chase, and Benjamin Franklin on a diplomatic mission to Canada. The group arrived at Montreal on April 29, 1776. Carroll’s assignment was to administer the sacraments to proAmerican Quebecois who had been refused by pro-British priests. It was soon clear that the mission was doomed. Franklin was ill and left Canada on May 11. Carroll volunteered to accompany him back to
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Philadelphia. While the mission did not bring Canada into the union, it forged a friendship between John Carroll and Franklin that furthered Carroll’s career. Before independence, Catholics in the British colonies fell under the jurisdiction of the vicar apostolic of London. In 1783, Carroll and other former Jesuits in Maryland drew up plans for the structure of the American church and petitioned the pope for the authority to implement those plans. At the same time, Vatican diplomats in Paris approached Benjamin Franklin about the proper method of organizing the Catholic Church in the United States. Franklin replied that neither he nor the Continental Congress had any authority over religious matters but added that he would recommend Carroll for any appointment the pope might make. In June 1784 the pope appointed Carroll “head of the missions of the provinces of the new Republic of the United States of North America,” under the supervision of the Congregation of the Propaganda Fide. The same year, Carroll wrote his Address to the Roman Catholics of the United States of America, rebutting former Catholic priest Charles Henry Wharton’s charge that Catholicism was incompatible with liberty. Carroll had great difficulties handling such a geographically large and ethnically diverse church province. German Catholics in Philadelphia demanded a separate church, for instance. And a schism led by Andrew Nugent in New York convinced Carroll that the American church needed the greater authority of a bishop. On May 11, 1789, twenty-six priests met at White Marsh, Maryland, and voted 24–2 to elect Carroll bishop. On November 6, 1789, the pope named Carroll bishop of Baltimore. Carroll held his only synod www.abc-clio.com
November 7–10, 1791, ensuring uniformity of the Mass and clerical dress. Carroll founded Catholic seminaries and colleges, including Georgetown College in Washington, D.C. He also invited in various religious orders, such as the English Carmelites, the Sisters of the Visitation and the Sisters of Charity, the last led by Elizabeth Ann Seton. On July 6, 1806, Carroll laid the cornerstone for a new cathedral in Baltimore. Even as bishop, Carroll had a difficult task in administering a diocese scattered all over the United States. In June 1802 he formulated a plan to divide the United States into several suffragen dioceses, to be established in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Bardstown, Kentucky. The pope approved the plan on April 8, 1808, making Baltimore the metropolitan see, elevating it to the status of archdiocese. Carroll was appointed the first archbishop. Of the new sees, only New York had a bishop not recommended by Carroll. The leading historian of the Archdiocese of Baltimore portrays Carroll as the architect of the “Maryland tradition” of relative administrative autonomy from Rome and lay trustee control of church property, which he saw as most compatible with American life. He died on December 3, 1815. Robert W. Smith See also: CARROLL, Charles; CATHOLIC CHURCH, the; MARYLAND References Guilday, Peter. The Life and Times of John Carroll. Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1954. Melville, Annabelle M. John Carroll of Baltimore: Founder of the American CatholicHierarchy. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955. Spalding, Thomas W. The Premier See: A History of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, 1789–1994. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. ABC-CLIO
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CASEMENT, ROGER DAVID (1864–1916) An Irish revolutionary executed following his failed attempt to import arms from Germany, Roger Casement spent his early life serving the British Foreign Office in various places in Africa, Portugal, and South America. In that role he protected British subjects, formulated minor consular reforms, and furthered British interests, including the promotion of Irish trade. In Brazil, he was consul in Santos (1906–1907) and Belém do Pará (1908) and consul-general in Rio de Janeiro (1909). Among his famous antislavery reports are those about the atrocities committed in connection with the harvesting of wild rubber in Leopold II’s Congo Free State and in the Putumayo region. These cases were the subjects of Parliamentary Blue Books in 1904 and 1912, respectively. He also wrote about labor and health issues in building the Madeira-Mamoré Railway to develop the Amazonian Basin. When on leave, he always returned to England or Ireland, where he studied Irish, comparing it to the Tupi-Guarani language. Though a declared Protestant, he was involved with the nationalist movement and the Gaelic League. In 1914, he traveled to the United States seeking financial and political support for the Irish cause. Casement was one of the sixteen Irish revolutionary leaders tried, convicted, and executed after the Easter Rising. A controversy about the authenticity of his “Black” diaries with accounts of Casement’s supposed homosexuality, which circulated shortly before execution to blacken his reputation in the 1916 trial, is still being debated. Casement’s life was marked by the ambiguities of a divided Ireland. Born on September 1, 1864, in Kingstown, later www.abc-clio.com
Portrait of Irish revolutionary Roger Casement. (Library of Congress)
renamed its original Dun Laoghaire by the Irish Free State Government, he was the youngest of four children of a Protestant father, Roger Casement, and a Roman Catholic mother Anne Jephson. Brought up and educated a Protestant, Casement was baptized secretly by his mother when he was four and finally became a Roman Catholic a day before his execution. At the age of nine, he went to live with his uncle John Casement at Magherintemple in northern Co. Antrim. He was sent to the boarding Church of Ireland Diocesan School at Ballymena. He spent his holidays at his family home in Ulster or in Liverpool, where he stayed with his mother’s sister and her husband, Edward Bannister, who looked after the West African interests of a Liverpool trading company. Later Bannister
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preceded Casement in two West African appointments. In 1883 Casement was ship’s purser on the SS Bonny, which traded with West Africa. In 1884, he went out to Africa as an employee of the African International Association. In 1887, he joined the expedition of Henry Shelton Sanford, a rich American diplomat, to survey the Congo region for the development of African means of communication. He left the Sanford expedition when he realized its aims were commercial rather than the welfare of the Africans. Then he directed the construction of the Congo Railway from Matadi to Stanley Pool until the Belgian government actively intervened in the work. In 1892 he became a member of the British staff of the Survey Department of the Oil Rivers Protectorate, which later became Nigeria. In 1895 he took his first consular posting at Lorenzo Marques in Portuguese East Africa. He went on to serve the British government in Portuguese West Africa, South Africa, the Congo State, Portugal and Brazil. In all his posts, Casement insisted on representing Great Britain and Ireland; he advocated the provision of Irish manufactured goods to help Ireland’s overseas trade. According to Maud Gonne, Casement defended Ireland’s control of its own commerce and turned Cork and other privileged ports into centers of transatlantic trade. While in Santos, Casement considered possible openings for Irish ham and bacon dealers. His main complaint was that all goods coming from Great Britain and Ireland (with the exception of Guinness because of its famous brand name) were all labeled in Brazilian Customs as “Ingleze,” thus making it impossible to take Ireland into account for statistical report. He promoted trade on both sides and was www.abc-clio.com
particularly concerned with a wide range of Brazilian products seen in the context of world markets. He did not restrict his interest to rubber, cocoa, and Brazil nuts but gave emphasis to timber, which was a latent source of wealth. At Pará, he reported on health statistics and basic food problems recommending the use of banana flour as a wheat substitute for baking. Though he supported the development of a tourist industry, he also denounced the ways commerce and international trade were destroying the native way of life. During his trips, he kept journals and diaries, which contain contradictory descriptions of the Brazilian people, geographical and sociological accounts, and the history of the district of his consulate. Casement was knighted in 1911 for his investigations of the mistreatment of Barbadian British subjects and local rubber tappers by the British Peruvian Amazon Company under the command of Julio Cesar Araña in the Putumayo region of the western Amazon. In 1913, he resigned from the Consular Service. Though he was a British national hero, he soon became sympathetic toward the nationalist cause of the Irish Volunteers. When World War I broke out, he was fund-raising in the United States. He sought German help and arms to support the Easter Rising but the British Intelligence captured him off the Kerry coast. Stripped of his knighthood, he was executed for high treason against the British Crown on August 3, 1916. Laura Izarra See also: BRAZIL References Inglis, Brian. Roger Casement. London: Coronet Books, 1973. Mitchell, Angus, ed. The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement. London: Anaconda Editions, 1997. ABC-CLIO
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164 CASEY, EDUARDO Sawyer, Roger. Casement. The Flawed Hero. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. Sawyer, Roger, ed. Roger Casement’s Diaries. 1910: The Black & the White. London: Pimlico, 1997. Singleton-Gates, Peter, and Maurice Girodias, eds. The Black Diaries. An Account of Roger Casement’s Life and Times with a Collection of his Diaries and Public Writings. New York: Grove Press, 1959.
CASEY, EDUARDO (1847–1906) An Irish-Argentine businessman and landowner, Eduardo Casey was founder of Venado Tuerto in Santa Fe province. He was born on April 20, 1847 in Lobos, Buenos Aires, the son of Lawrence Casey (1803–1876) of Co. Westmeath, and Mary O’Neill (1806–1910) of Co. Wicklow. His father had been the first rancher to pay one million pesos for a league of land in an auction in Buenos Aires. Eduardo Casey followed his father into farm work. To improve the breeding of his ranch’s horses he founded a stud farm; in 1878, at the age of thirty, he owned a farming agent company. Casey was the first exporter of bovine cattle on the hoof to England, shipping 500 head on the Nestorian of Allan Lines company. He was one of the founders of La Blanca cold-storage plant, and served as a member of the board of the Western Railway Company and the Buenos Aires Provincial Bank. Casey’s best business achievement was the purchase, in 1881, of seventy-two leagues of land (130,000 hectares) in Venado Tuerto, southern Santa Fe province, together with William R. Gilmour. These lands had been recently taken from Indian control and were considered very productive by the Argentine public. In 1881, www.abc-clio.com
Casey also acquired 100 leagues of land in Curumalal, Coronel Suárez, south of Buenos Aires province. Two years later, this land was fenced and settled with 40,000 cows, 50,000 sheep, and 10,000 horses. As a member of the Sociedad de Elevadores y Depósitos de Granos del Riachuelo, and in partnership with Thomas Duggan, Casey made investments in Uruguay, a strategy that weakened his financial position. In 1890, the crisis of Uruguay seriously affected the company. Casey lost all his assets, and his private properties were put on auction. After this, he went to London to obtain funding and recover economically. When he returned to Buenos Aires with £100,000 fresh from loans, he repaid in its entirety the debt incurred with small investors who had deposited in his firm. In many ways Casey was the typical pioneer of 1880s Argentina. He was involved in the turbulence of business and financial speculation. He reached the top, and he experienced the madness of accumulating a colossal wealth and losing it in seconds during the economic crash of the 1890s. He was one of the founders of the Buenos Aires Jockey Club, together with Carlos Pellegrini and others. He built the Central Market in Avellaneda, the Customs House, the port, and Reus quarter in Montevideo, Uruguay. When his friends were visiting his ranch Curumalal, in Buenos Aires, Casey used to arrange for a railway convoy for guests and victuals. He was a handsome man, a very good dancer and singer, and a skilled impersonator. Casey met with Buffalo Bill, who asked him for gaucho horse-breakers for his circus; ten gauchos (among them, Gorosito of Melincué) were selected by Casey and sent to England. When he was declared bankrupt, however, all his properties
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were auctioned, including his personal furniture. His brother Santiago bought them anonymously and gave them back to him. By the end of his life, Casey was on his own, his wife having abandoned him in 1902. By 1906 he was promoting new projects but nobody wanted to hear about them. He wanted to build inexpensive houses for poor workers who were living in city tenements, like the Reus quarter of Montevideo. For sixteen years, Casey tried unsuccessfully to recover his financial losses. On June 16, 1906, he died on the railway tracks near the Central Market of Buenos Aires. He was fifty-eight years old, broken, and rejected by the society that owed so much to his contributions. Historians frequently do not mention the fact that he committed suicide. His remains were buried in Venado Tuerto, together with those of his wife and two children. Edmundo Murray See also: ARGENTINA; DUGGAN, Thomas References Landaburu, Roberto. Irlandeses: Eduardo Casey, Vida y Obra. Venado Tuerto: Fondo Editor Mutual de Venado Tuerto, 1995. Wallace, José Brendan. “Eduardo Casey: Perfil de un Adelantado.” www.irlandeses.com.ar (accessed January 13, 2005).
CATHOLIC CHURCH, THE The Catholic Church is the largest body of organized Christian worship in the world. According to Catholic doctrine, the Church was both foretold and formulated (Matthew 16:18–19) by Jesus himself: “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” www.abc-clio.com
The Catholic Church regards this proclamation as establishing the basic structure of the formal Church itself, as well as proclaiming the authority of the papacy, under the direction of the first Pope, Peter. The history of the Catholic Church is enormously complex and is, in many ways, the touchstone of postclassical European culture. Although the early Christian churches were objects of severe repression, the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Emperor Constantine led slowly to a predominantly Christian Europe. The 1,000-year rise (300–1300) of the Catholic Church eventually placed it at the center of European power. In the eras before and during the Italian Renaissance the Church directly influenced extraordinary artistic accomplishments (for example, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel), yet it also presided over frightfully severe repressions of unorthodoxy (as in the Spanish Inquisition, or in the specific suppressions of Galileo and Bruno). The Church has since lost much of its direct political power through a succession of theological and political disputes, the most notable of which are the schism (1054) between Western and Eastern Christianity, the development of Protestantism, the rise of nation states, and the general spread of rights-based Enlightenment political philosophy. The Church has had mixed results in attempting to use its political power in the modern world; the Church has been severely criticized for not adequately opposing the Nazi genocide of European Jewry, but it has also been widely praised for its prominent role in confronting totalitarian Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. The Church remains highly influential in political and social disputes, despite now possessing ABC-CLIO
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almost no coercive power beyond moral example. Although the temporal center of the Church is the sovereign state of Vatican City (entirely surrounded by Rome, Italy), and the Pope is accorded all honors appropriate to a head of state, the Catholic Church is today primarily a body of worship. The Church is worldwide in extent, and the word “Catholic” itself refers to the “universal” nature of the Church and to the universality of its message of salvation. The Catholic Church is hierarchical in structure, with spiritual guidance ultimately deriving from the proclamations of the pope; yet the vast majority of the Church’s spiritual ministries are undertaken by local Catholic leaders in their home communities. Tradition holds that it was the fifthcentury missionary Saint Patrick who brought Christianity to Ireland. This is a sentimental simplification, as Ireland had substantial trade and travel contacts with Britain and northern France before the fifth century. (The man considered Ireland’s first bishop is a figure named Palladius, who was ordered to Ireland by Pope Celestine in 431.) Despite not being the first missionary, Patrick is undoubtedly the figure with whom the conversion of Ireland to Christianity is associated. He remains a figure of unusual public affection and continues to hold a position of veneration and admiration perhaps unique among national patron saints. In the centuries after Patrick’s mission the Irish became determinedly devoted to the Church. Belying the notion of Ireland as distant, wild, and outlandish, research indicates that early Irish worshippers practiced Christianity with serious intent and built significant structures as centers of faith, such as the monastery at Clonmacnoise. Works of www.abc-clio.com
Irish devotion from this period remain admired for the beauty of their worshipful elaboration; most notable of these is the world-famous Book of Kells (an intricately decorated gospel now displayed in Trinity College Dublin). What is unclear is the degree of direct association between Roman and Irish Churches before the high middle ages. Indications suggest that the early Irish Church may have had several idiosyncratic peculiarities, which may have arisen simply through distance and isolation, but which may indicate more serious theological disagreement. (Of these, perhaps the heavy reliance of the Irish on monasticism is most prominent.) The political role of the Catholic Church in Ireland erupted with unforeseeable gravity as a consequence of the rise of English Protestantism. Ireland’s continuing adherence to Catholicism aligned the Irish with the Catholic continental powers (notably, the then-strongest Catholic power, Spain), leaving Protestant England feeling extremely vulnerable to a multinational Catholic attack. The Papal bull Regnans in Excelsis (1570) absolved English Catholics of their allegiance to Queen Elizabeth I, thereby marking them all as potential traitors or fifth columnists. With such antagonisms in the air, England watched overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland with a greater than usual suspicion. The wreck of the Spanish Armada (1588) largely ended the direct threat of Catholic invasion and the overthrow of English Protestantism, but feelings of suspicion and vulnerability lingered. Cromwell’s conquest (1649–1650) led to a decade of particularly intense suppression of Catholicism in Ireland, as well as to several centuries of diminished status for Irish Catholics. The post-Cromwellian period also brought increased Protestant
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settlement to Ireland. Although located throughout the island, the greatest portion of the Protestant settlement was in the northern territories. The social distinctions of power and wealth that often arose from conflicting national and religious allegiances laid the foundation for centuries of struggle, misery, and internecine conflict. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Catholic Church continued to provide both spiritual teaching and public education throughout Ireland. Sometimes this was necessarily covert, as in the famous “hedge schools,” (clandestine schools which sprung up in response to the Penal law which outlawed education for Catholics in Ireland) although as direct religious repression diminished the Catholics became more open in their activities. Because being Catholic was itself a cause of diminished social opportunity, during the period of the Penal Laws, Catholicism came to be increasingly associated with movements of political and social resistance. Most notable of these social protest organizations was perhaps the Catholic Association (1824–1825), which, by collecting small sums from a huge number of Catholics (“the Catholic Rent”), hoped to provide relief for their oppressed or disadvantaged correligionists. Although the Catholic Church itself was reluctant to embrace direct political subversion, many Catholic nationalists used the uniting bond of Catholicism for political purposes. Daniel O’Connell, for one, was exceptionally skilled at conflating appeals to Catholics and nationalists. Though frequently artificial, such conflations evoked significant popular enthusiasm. Particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many believed English power and Irish subordinacy divided a native, Catholic www.abc-clio.com
Ireland from a transplanted, inauthentic Protestantism. That this conception was a labored simplification has not mitigated the hatreds it unleashed. The division of Ireland (1921) left the Catholic Church in a position of extraordinary influence in the southern part of the island (today’s Republic of Ireland). There the Church was not only the religious home of the vast majority of the citizenry; it also wielded a social, educational, and censorial power on the civil government almost unprecedented elsewhere in the modern Catholic world. In Northern Ireland, however, the association of Catholicism with Irish independence movements further antagonized already painful social and cultural divisions. The period of the 1970s and 1980s saw staggering outbursts of religious and national hatreds known, with despairing brevity, as “The Troubles.” Subsequent negotiation has ameliorated those conflicts, without fully removing the abhorrent possibility of resumed violence. In the Republic of Ireland, however, religious circumstances were also changing. From the foundation of the independent nation until the 1980s, the Catholic Church was undoubtedly the most powerful nongovernmental agency in the Republic. But in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s a general sense of cultural strangulation, combined with shocking revelations of abuse, intolerance, and concealment by religious authorities, caused an unprecedented abandonment of the Catholic Church. The transformation was significant; although the Republic of Ireland remains a notably Catholic country, with a high level of Catholic social influence, the Irish are now united more by cultural and historical associations than by shared religious outlook or identity. ABC-CLIO
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In contrast to the extraordinary influence of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Catholicism has always been a distinctly minority religion in the United States. Although many of the initial explorers and settlers to the American continent were Catholic—particularly the Spanish, who built missions throughout Central and South America, as well as in what would become the states of New Mexico, Texas, and California—subsequent British, Scandinavian, and Germanic settlements tended to bring Protestantism instead of Catholicism. The solidification of British control over the eastern North American territories, followed by the near-complete Protestantism of the founding fathers of the American Revolution, fixed the ascendancy of Protestantism in the United States. Indeed, it was primarily the vast migrations of Irish and Italians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that brought substantial numbers of Catholics into the United States. Although there can be no doubt that Catholicism has flourished in North America, there can be equally little doubt that it has never had the social or religious predominance there that it held in Ireland. Irish-American Catholics have been uncommonly successful at simultaneously maintaining their cultural, ethnic, and religious identities while integrating into the larger body of the American populace. This has not been a painless process: Irish Catholics particularly were detested by the aggressive Know-Nothing movement of the nineteenth century. It is also true that, despite such important Irish-American Catholic leaders as John Carroll (first bishop of Baltimore) and John Connolly (influential early bishop of New York), the most notable Irish-American Catholic leader was the notorious Father Charles Coughlin, whose www.abc-clio.com
popular radio broadcasts of the 1930s helped him spread a noxious blend of antiSemitism and crankish economic theory. Yet the distinguishing feature of Irish-American Catholicism has long been the ease with which those three identities—Irish by ethnicity, American by citizenship, and Catholic by religious affiliation—cohere. The Irish remain among the most prominent American Catholics, and many Catholic institutions in the United States are distinctly Irish. The most notable cathedral in the United States, and perhaps the most famous in all North America, is Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. One of the foremost universities in North America is the University of Notre Dame, an institution that has long attracted Irish Americans, and which names its sports teams “The Fighting Irish.” The first Catholic president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, was of Irish descent; his brother Robert Kennedy was both attorney general of the United States and a senator for New York, and his brother Edward has enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a senator for Massachusetts. Although the influence of Catholicism has never been as strong in the United States as it was in Ireland, the Church would have had a much lesser role in American cultural life without the continuing adherence of Irish-Catholic immigrants and of their descendants. Andrew Goodspeed
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See also: CARROLL, John; COUGHLIN, Father Charles; KENNEDY, John F.; NATIVISM AND ANTICATHOLICISM; NOTRE DAME UNIVERSITY; O’CONNELL, Daniel; SAINT PATRICK’S CATHEDRAL References Bokenkotter, Thomas. A Concise History of the Catholic Church. New York: Doubleday, 2004. 1-800-368-6868
CHANDLER, RAYMOND THORNTON Corish, Patrick. The Irish Catholic Experience. Dublin: Gill & MacMillan, 1985. McAvoy, Thomas. The United States of America: The Irish Clergyman. Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1970. McCaffrey, Lawrence. The Irish Catholic Diaspora in America. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997. Mooney, Canice. The Church in Gaelic Ireland: Thirteenth through Fifteenth Centuries. Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1969.
CHANDLER, RAYMOND THORNTON (1888–1959) In the second half of the twentieth century, Raymond Chandler achieved world renown as a writer of detective fiction. He invented a new genre of crime writing that became known as the “hard-boiled” school. Along with Dashiell Hammett and Ross Macdonald, Chandler was the main exponent of this mold-breaking outgrowth of the traditional detective novel. Chandler created a character named Philip Marlowe who has become the archetype of the private detective. Marlowe’s gruff vernacular and hard-bitten exploits epitomize Chandler’s vision of the California he knew and wrote about. Chandler is widely regarded as an author who raised crime fiction to a higher level and enabled this genre to transcend its traditional separation from mainstream fiction. Chandler’s deeply felt combination of cynicism and sentimentalism, anarchy and justice, fraud and truth offered more profound insights than had been previously attained in the detective novel. Marlowe appears as a latter-day knight-errant casting his quizzical gaze over the corrupt world he works in. Chandler’s most famous works are The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), and The Long Goodbye (1953). www.abc-clio.com
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Chandler was born in 1888 in Chicago of Irish-American parentage. His mother was an Irishwoman from Co. Waterford who married an American engineer of Irish descent, so the young Chandler was at least half Irish by blood. Chandler’s parents divorced when he was still a young boy, and his mother returned to England with him in 1895. They settled in South London, where Chandler was educated at Dulwich College, a noted English public school. Chandler’s benefactor in these years was a wealthy Irish uncle called Ernest Thornton, a solicitor in Co. Waterford. Chandler spent his summer holidays there, and these experiences may have helped develop his sharp eye for social nuance and social distinctions. In California, the rigidities of class and religion counted for little, and Chandler’s novels reflect this. But as a man he could express snobbish attitudes, and he had a lifelong aversion to the dogmatic Roman Catholicism he witnessed in Ireland as well as an involuntary association of Irish-American identity with working-class Catholicism and poverty. For this reason he did not see himself as Irish American. His uncle, however, was Protestant, and Chandler was equally suspicious of the ossified gentility of his uncle’s household and class. The freedom of California and the relatively egalitarian nature of American society with regard to race and religion were, to Chandler, a welcome contrast to the cloistered and claustrophobic world of Ireland in particular and, to a lesser extent, his public school milieu. America was the country of Chandler’s birth and his adoptive country of residence. He returned there in 1912, working briefly in St. Louis and Omaha before finally moving to California. He left to serve in the Canadian Army during World War I but ABC-CLIO
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returned in 1919, spending most of the remainder of his life living in California, aside from some later trips to England. It is here, with the support of his wife (Pearl Cecily Hulbert), that Chandler began writing and perfecting the hard-boiled detective style that was to characterize his art. He was a slow writer who, unfortunately, suffered from bouts of heavy drinking (which became more frequent with the death of his wife in 1954), but his best works stand as testament to the art of detective fiction. Chandler died of pneumonia on March 26, 1959, in the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California. All of Chandler’s fiction is located in and around Los Angeles, California. He uses a taut, fiery American vernacular in a highly original prose style. Although Chandler’s work contains a smattering of characters with Irish names and occasional allusions to Ireland or the Irish, there is no more Irishness to be found than is appropriate to his American settings. However, Chandler’s European and Irish experiences may have sharpened his insight into crime, corruption, and sleaze, which he depicts so brilliantly. He wrote with the insider’s knowledge of the terrain and the outsider’s appreciation of its sordid and treacherous nature. Benjamin Keatinge References Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep and Other Novels. London: Penguin, 2000. Hiney, Tom. Raymond Chandler: A Biography. London: Chatto and Windus, 1997. Hiney, Tom, and Frank MacShane, eds. The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Non-Fiction 1909–1959. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000. MacShane, Frank. The Life of Raymond Chandler. London: Jonathan Cape, 1976. Skinner, Robert E., ed. The Hard-Boiled Explicator: A Guide to the Study of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1985. www.abc-clio.com
CHERISH THE LADIES (FORMED 1983) It began with several nights of concerts in New York City in 1983, “and I didn’t really think anyone would come,” said flute and whistle player Joanie Madden, who had been asked by folklorist Mick Moloney to help organize several shows featuring IrishAmerican women musicians. He had noticed that although female musicians were winning awards in prestigious All Ireland musical contests and other competitions, the main bands and solo artists—the ones receiving public notice and recognition— were all men. Those first shows sold out, which led the National Endowment for the Arts to fund the production of an album featuring more than a dozen women musicians. The recording was called Cherish the Ladies, taking its name from an Irish jig, and was chosen by the Library of Congress as the best folk album of 1985. That recording also led to the birth of a band, a group that over twenty years and a number of personnel shifts still continues to explore traditional and contemporary Celtic music and create new interpretations as well as new songs in the Celtic tradition. Madden as bandleader shepherded the change from an endowment-funded ensemble to an “in-the-trenches working band,” whose venues have included clubs, pubs, arts events, the Kennedy Center, the Celtic Connections Festival, and the 1996 Summer Olympics, and who have been named best musical group of the year by the BBC, and top North American Celtic Act by the National Public Radio program Thistle and Shamrock. In the early days, though, it was not easy going. “People thought we were the Celtic Spice Girls,” Madden recalls, “a group of women put together for show.” Once audiences and
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Portrait of Irish folk music group Cherish the Ladies in a field of wildflowers. (Corbis)
promoters began actually hearing the musicianship of Madden on flute and whistle, Mary Coogan (who had also played on the original recording) on guitar and banjo, Maureen Doherty on accordion, Siobhan Egan and Eileen Ivers on fiddle, and Cathie Ryan on vocals and bodhran, they realized this group was an important and unique pesence in Celtic music. The women toured constantly, offering a mix of jigs, reels, airs, and songs, often with the addition of step dancers. Their work reached wider audiences with the release of the first band recording, The Back www.abc-clio.com
Door, in 1992. By that time Ivers had left the group (though she coproduced the record) to be replaced by fiddler and step dancer Winifred Horan, and Ryan was establishing herself as a writer: the title track was an emigration song she had written. The eclectic selection of music on this collection underlined the fact that these were not just women together as a band, but talented, thoughtful musicians with creative views of what they could contribute to Celtic music. In addition to Ryan’s original song, which in the liner notes she dedicates to “all undocumented Irish aliens,” there’s ABC-CLIO
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“Character Polka,” composed by Madden, Horan, and Egan and played in a set with a traditional strathspey and two reels, a hornpipe and reels that are suited to step dancers; “Maire Mhor,” a traditional song about an independent, spirited woman that Ryan sings in Irish; the play party song “Coal Quay Market”; and “Carrigdhoun,” a poem of the Irish landscape set to a traditional air. Changing membership in the group through the years has brought out different colors and emphases in their music. It has also been a seedbed for talent: Horan went on to help form the group Solas; Ivers played with Riverdance and now fronts her own band; Aoife Clancy, who replaced Ryan as lead singer, now has a well-respected solo career of her own; and Ryan has established herself as a top singer and songwriter in Ireland and America. The current membership of the group, all of whom appear on the band’s most recent release, Woman of the House, comprises Heidi Talbot on vocals and bodhran, Roisin Dillon on fiddle, and Mirella Murray on accordion, along with Madden on flute and whistles and Coogan on guitar and banjo. The group has changed, too, from a group of women who were the first or second generations of their families in America to include musicians born in, and/or living in, Ireland alongside Irish Americans, a natural evolution of seeking the best musicians, Madden says. Their music retains the variety and independent spirit common through the band’s history. On Woman of the House, an original reel composed by Madden, “Bonkers in Yonkers,” stands in a set with the traditional “Rascal in the Haystack”; “Carolan’s Favorite Jig” kicks off a set of lesser-known tunes, which show the women in fast-flying musical conversation; www.abc-clio.com
Talbot trades leads with guests Kate Rusby and Karen Matheson on the Appalachian traditional ballad “Fair and Tender Ladies”; and both sides of the Irish and American equation join as the women support Talbot’s quiet singing on the emigration song “Green Fields of Canada.” Kerry Dexter See also: CHIEFTAINS, The; CLANCY BROTHERS, the; RYAN, Cathie Discography Cherish the Ladies. At Home (sound recording) RCA, 1999 Cherish the Ladies. The Back Door (sound recording). Green Linnet, 1992 Cherish the Ladies. On Christmas Night (sound recording). Rounder, 2004 Cherish the Ladies. Out and About (sound recording). Green Linnet, 1993 Cherish the Ladies. Woman of the House (sound recording). Rounder, 2005 References Madden, Joanie. Telephone interviews, September 1, 2005, and April 17, 2006. Parrish, Michael. “Cherish the Ladies,” Dirty Linen no. 120, October/November 2005, 36–39. Winich, Steve. “Cherish the Ladies,” Dirty Linen no. 59. August/September 1995, 48–53, 115.
CHIEFTAINS,THE (FORMED 1962) Originally members of Seán Ó Riada’s group Ceoltóiri Chualann, which was formed in the late 1950s, the Chieftains made their first recording in 1963. They quickly became popular in Ireland and by the 1970s were touring the United States, where they played a major role in creating an interest in Irish traditional instrumental music. While many bands have followed in their wake, The Chieftains remain the bestknown Irish traditional group, not only in America but also around the world.
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When formed to make a recording for Garech Browne’s new Claddagh Records in Dublin, the group consisted of Paddy Moloney on uilleann pipes, Seán Potts on tin whistle, Michael Tubridy on flute, and Martin Fay on fiddle. Although they had no interest in pursuing Ó Riada’s original idea of developing a form of modern Irish music based on traditional elements, The Chieftains continued to pursue the composer’s experiments in creating a new type of folk ensemble using traditional instruments. Until Ó Riada formed Ceoltóiri Chualann, ensemble playing, beyond informal combinations of a few local musicians, had been dominated by ceilidh bands. Created initially by the Irish in England to provide dance music for large halls, these bands mixed fiddles, flutes, and sometimes uilleann pipes with piccolos, accordions, pianos, and drum sets borrowed from the jazz band. The emphasis was on the melody with a strong rhythm pounding away for the dancers. The Chieftains followed Ó Riada’s example in dropping the less traditional instruments (they also dispensed with Ó Riada’s harpsichord), replacing the modern drum set with the bodhran, an Irish goatskin, single-frame drum. They slightly expanded Ó Riada’s use of harmony and occasional countermelodies and made other nontraditional attempts to arrange the music for a new urban audience. Like Ó Riada they included slow airs along with traditional dance pieces. A smaller group with no duplication of instruments, The Chieftains developed a crisp, clean style of playing, alternating a warm ensemble sound with opportunities for virtuoso solo playing. The resulting untraditional approach to traditional music caught the attention of Irish audiences just as the country was beginning to urbanize. www.abc-clio.com
The group began to tour abroad in the 1970s, first to Britain, then to North America. By the 1980s they were traveling the world, following their trademark custom of playing, whenever possible, with local musicians. Sometimes this resulted in unusual recordings, preserving encounters with musicians in Brittany, Galicia, and even China. Other musical combinations were better guaranteed to provide income and publicity for the group, which took on a full-time professional status after 1975. The Chieftain’s leader, Paddy Moloney, has been adept at getting international rock stars and American country musicians to record with the group. Film scores and television appearances have also helped keep the band busy. Over the years Potts and Tubridy left the group as other musicians joined; fiddler Seán Keane, flautist Matt Molloy, singer and percussionist Len Graham, and harpist Derek Bell. Bell brought to the ensemble performance of Irish music the sound that Ó Riada’s harpsichord was intended to suggest. The addition of the harp, never really a folk instrument, took The Chieftain’s sound to a new level. Except for their crossover recordings, their music was still traditional, but the band’s professionalism and their arrangements placed them far from the house and crossroads dances where the music had once been played. The Chieftains put the music on stage and took it into urban concert halls around the world. The success of the band helped open the doors to other Irish folk bands, such as The Bothy Band, De Dannen, and Planxty. However, only the Boys of the Lough (originally made up of performers from Ireland, England, and Shetland) have had anything like the staying power of The Chieftains, ABC-CLIO
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whose tours have taken the band into the twenty-first century. William H. A. Williams See also: CLANCY BROTHERS, The; Ó RIADA, Seán Reference Meek, Bill. Paddy Moloney and the Chieftains, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987.
CHOPIN, KATE (1850–1904) Biographers of American author Kate Chopin (born Katherine O’Flaherty) often allude to her French background when they attempt to explain the influences that created such a scandalous figure. Her very young mother, Eliza Faris, to whom Chopin was extraordinarily close, was from a poor Creole family, and was the source (along with Guy de Maupassant) of Chopin’s relatively sophisticated and liberal thinking. But Chopin was half Irish as well; her father, Thomas O’Flaherty, was born in Galway in 1805 and traveled to America in 1823, at a time when many still viewed the Irish as less than desirable. Though the family initially met with some success in St. Louis, Missouri, Chopin often found herself on the fringes of whatever society she was in because of the influences of both French and Irish cultures. As a five-yearold, she was a boarder at Sacred Heart Academy at an unusually young age. When her father died suddenly that same year in a railway accident, she was raised in a community of strong women, including her great-grandmother, an influence that is perhaps the reason biographers downplay her Irish background over her French. When she married Oscar Chopin, an older man who later became a cotton factor, she moved to New Orleans and then to Natchitoches
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Parish, Louisiana; in both places, her accent, her background, and her lack of Southern sensibilities created problems for her with her contemporaries. Despite having six children (five boys and one girl), Chopin was never content to be a homemaker, preferring instead to explore the world (often at night and with a cigarette in hand) and to watch people. Through her explorations, she became an important American writer. Many of her characterizations were taken from life, and occasionally her attempts to veil identities were transparent enough that she got into trouble for them, creating some lifelong enemies. Some of those enemies included the wife of the man she was purportedly having an affair with (though it remains unclear whether the affair was going on while Chopin’s husband was still alive), the editor of a local newspaper, and the parish priest, all of whom were parodied in her stories. Such behavior on Chopin’s part, while eminently amusing, did not win her friends in her town, and she was not a favorite there, failing to understand that things were done differently in the South. While Chopin’s short stories, especially “The Storm” and “The Story of an Hour,” are included in many literature anthologies and frequently taught in English classes, her novel, The Awakening (1899), is her most widely read and controversial work. Though it has quite a reputation, it was in fact never banned, but simply neglected because of the scathing reviews of the time and was only revived when women’s rights movements grew in strength in the 1960s. Her contemporaries’ objections, as with “The Storm,” (not published until 1969), had to do with the scandalous subject matter of unapologetic
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adultery, too daring for most publishers to tackle. The reviews at the time, in focusing on the subject of sex, generally missed the much larger (and potentially more transgressive) point that Chopin was making in many of her stories, including in her first short story collection, Bayou Folk: women are about more than marriage and children, and their perspective is more complicated than most writers allowed. Kathleen A. Heininge See also: NEW ORLEANS References Chopin, Kate. Chopin: Complete Novels and Stories, edited by Sandra Gilbert. New York: The Library of America, 2002. Toth, Emily. Kate Chopin. New York: William Morrow, 1990. Toth, Emily. The Unveiling of Kate Chopin. Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi, 1999.
CLANCY BROTHERS, THE (FORMED 1956) Although born and raised in Ireland, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem established themselves as ballad singers in the United States in the 1960s. In doing so they single-handedly revived interest in Irish ballads and contributed greatly to the post–World War II enthusiasm for folk music on both sides of the Atlantic. The Clancys came from Carrickon-Suir in Co. Tipperary. The elder brothers—Tom (1923–1990) and Pat (1923–1998)—had served in the Royal Air Force during the war and had then emigrated to the United States where they pursued careers in acting. Young Liam was also interested in acting. However, he fell in with Diane Hamilton (née Guggenheim), who was touring Ireland, recording folk
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songs. When he left Ireland in 1955 to join his brothers in New York City, Liam continued to work for a time with Hamilton’s Tradition Records. Although short lived, the record company produced a few classic albums of field recordings made in Ireland and in the American South as well as the first recording of the Clancys with Ulster singer Tommy Makem. Makem was born into a musical family in Keady, Co. Armagh. His mother, Sarah, had a repertory of some 500 songs and was well known to folk song collectors. Makem had become friends with Liam Clancy, during the latter’s collecting trips through Ulster with Diane Hamilton. Makem and Liam later emigrated to America at the same time. When the Clancy brothers began singing in New York bars for rent money between acting assignments, Makem helped them tap into a broader field of Irish folk song besides “rebel” songs. By the late 1950s the folk music revival was well on its way in America, and Makem and the Clancys, boosted by their first Tradition recording, The Rising of the Moon (1959), began to attract attention. As they became more professional, their singing never quite lost the boisterous, improvisational edge of enthusiastic pub singers. With their bouncy rhythms, shouts of encouragement to each other, and occasional harmonies—not to mention rugged good looks—they added zest and excitement to a folk scene that usually featured nasal-voiced guitar pickers and flutey sopranos with long, straight, ironed hair. By the time they had appeared on the popular Ed Sullivan television show on the CBS network and on the stage at Carnegie Hall, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem had become a folk music phenomenon.
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Irish traditional music group the Clancy Brothers perform in 1970. (Getty Images)
In the United States they managed to reintroduce Irish traditional Englishlanguage ballads to Irish Americans, who had long proclaimed their ethnic identity through Tin Pan Alley songs like “My Wild Irish Rose” or “Mother Machree.” At the same time they almost single-handedly introduced Irish folk music to Americans, regardless of ethnic background. One did not have to be Irish to enjoy the Clancys. They also helped to open the door through which other Irish groups, vocal and instrumental, would enter. In Ireland eyes and ears were opened by the fact that a bunch of country lads could put Ireland on the international musical map with a parcel of pub songs. Many of those then involved in salvaging and www.abc-clio.com
reviving interest in traditional Irish music did not always welcome the sudden emergence of scores of ballad bands with their guitars, tin whistles, and shouts of “fine girl you are.” When 76,000 young people, many with guitars and backpacks, turned up for the 1966 Fleadh Cheoil in Boyle, Co. Roscommon, the Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, fearful that Ireland’s pure musical tradition would be contaminated, decided to hide subsequent Fleadhs in the more remote parts of western Ireland. The Comhaltas need not have worried. Most of the Irish ballad bands that sprouted in the wake of the Clancy Brothers’ success faded quickly. However, some groups, such as The Dubliners and The Wolftones, established themselves in Ireland’s own folk
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revival. Even the success of instrumental groups, such as the Chieftains, owed something to the power of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem in helping to make Irish folk music interesting to the rising generation of urban Irish. Eventually, age and death ended the careers of the older Clancys. However, Liam and Tommy, with the help of young generations of Clancys and Makems, have continued to perform into the twenty-first century. William H. A. Williams See also: CHIEFTAINS, The Reference Clancy, Liam. The Mountain of the Woman: Memoirs of an Irish Troubadour. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Portrait of Confederate Army Major General Patrick Ronayne Cleburne. (Library of Congress)
CLEBURNE, PATRICK RONAYNE (1828–1870) Patrick Ronayne Cleburne rose to fame as a Confederate major-general and the highestranking Irish-born military leader in American history. He was born in Ovens, Co. Cork, on March 16, 1828, at Bride Park Cottage. His father, Joseph Cleburne, was a doctor at the local dispensary. His mother was Mary Anne Ronayne Cleburne, the daughter of landowner Patrick Ronayne of Annebrook on Great Island. She died when Cleburne was eighteen months old, and his father remarried Isabella Stewart, the children’s tutor. Cleburne received his early education at the boarding school of the Reverend William Spedding nearby. When he was eight, the family moved to Grange Farm, outside Ballincollig. However, when Dr. Cleburne died in November 1843, the young man’s future changed drastically. He www.abc-clio.com
was sent to Mallow for a two-year apprenticeship to Dr. Thomas Justice, and there were plans to enroll him in Apothecary Hall in Dublin so that he could follow his father’s profession. However, upon arriving in Dublin in February 1846 and taking the entrance exam, Cleburne promptly failed. Too humiliated to return a family failure, the seventeen-year-old enlisted in the 41st Regiment of Foot of Her Majesty’s army, expecting to be sent to India. His attempt at running away was foiled when the regiment was instead shipped to Mullingar for duties in Ireland associated with the crisis of the Famine. For the next three and a half years, Cleburne spent his army service posted at barracks in Limerick, Tarbert, Buttevant, and Spike Island in Cork Harbor. He served during the turbulent months of the 1848 Young Ireland Rebellion and received a promotion to corporal on July 1, 1849. ABC-CLIO
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After years of being estranged from his family, he obtained leave to visit Grange Farm. He found a desperate situation. The farm was in arrears for six months’ rent, and his stepmother suggested that the oldest four children emigrate. On November 5, 1849, Cleburne, his older sister Anne, and his brothers William and Joseph boarded the Bridgetown for America and landed in New Orleans, Louisiana, on Christmas Day. Employment was a priority, and while his siblings headed up the Mississippi River to Cincinnati, Cleburne obtained the situation of druggist at Nash and Grant’s Drugstore in Helena, Arkansas, arriving in April 1850. For the next decade, Cleburne pursued the study of law, and eventually passed the Arkansas bar examination in 1856. Around this time, the rest of his family moved to America and settled in Newport, Kentucky, near Cincinnati. Pat Cleburne left turbulent times in his own country only to find himself in the middle of the road to civil war in his new homeland. His politics mirrored those of the Southern states, which sought freedom from what they considered the oppression of the North and a trampling of their constitutional rights. While Cleburne never owned slaves, and voiced outright opposition to the institution, he valued the right and desire of a section of the country to govern itself. The local plantation owners and well-respected citizens formed a militia company called the Yell Rifles. Cleburne was elected captain, and the company was thoroughly drilled under the skills he learned in the British Army. Arkansas seceded in April 1861 and joined the Confederate States of America. The Yell Rifles became part of the 1st Arkansas Volunteer Infantry Regiment. www.abc-clio.com
On his own merit, Cleburne swiftly rose through the ranks. Elected colonel of the 1st Arkansas, his command was attached to what became known to history as the Army of Tennessee, the main Confederate army in the western theater. Cleburne was promoted to brigadier general in March 1862, less than a year into the war. His brigade exhibited exceptional bravery and competence at the Battle of Shiloh in April and in the Kentucky Campaign during the summer. At the Battle of Richmond, Cleburne was wounded in the face by shrapnel and forced to leave the field, but not before he put into motion a strategic plan leading to a Confederate victory. He was back in action for the Battle of Perryville in October. However, the Confederate army was forced to withdraw from Kentucky later that year. In December 1862, Cleburne was promoted to major general, and he commanded a division at the Battle of Murfreesboro in East Tennessee. Though his command attained its battlefield objectives, the army once more retreated to middle Tennessee by spring 1863, with a schism in its command. The constant retreats under General Braxton Bragg had begun to affect the army’s morale. Cleburne joined a group of officers led by General William J. Hardee in voicing their opinion that Bragg should resign for the sake of the army. Throughout 1863, Cleburne was present at some of the most famous battles of the war: Chickamauga in September and Missionary Ridge in November. On November 27, 1863, Cleburne’s division made a stand at Ringgold Gap, Georgia, as the rearguard protecting the retreating Confederate army while it fled south from Chattanooga. Here, 4,000 effectives (soldiers fit and available for service) under
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Cleburne’s careful direction held at bay 15,000 Union troops under General Joseph Hooker. Cleburne received a congressional citation from the Confederate capital for his victory. His fame spread throughout the South. He determined to use this confidence in his position to discuss a proposal he had long been considering. The southern army was short on supplies and, more important, men. Cleburne knew their only hope came from abroad and from the support of England and France. But both nations, though sympathetic, held the slavery issue up as a deterrent for official recognition of the Confederacy and economic support. Cleburne suggested that if the slaves in the South were offered military service in exchange for their freedom, the foreign support and personnel issues would be resolved, as well as the slavery dilemma, but his idea did not come to fruition. In January 1864, Cleburne met and fell in love with Susan Tarleton of Mobile, Alabama, when he attended the wedding of his commander, General Hardee. The two became engaged, and Cleburne returned to the front at Dalton, Georgia. In May 1864, the Atlanta Campaign began when Union General William T. Sherman launched a dogged assault, over four months, with a series of battles beginning at Resaca, Georgia. The summer was spent in heavy fighting, at Pickett’s Mill, Kennesaw Mountain, Peachtree Creek, and finally Jonesboro. Atlanta fell in September. While General Sherman cut a 60-mile-wide swath through Georgia on his way to Savannah, General John Bell Hood in command of the Confederate army proceeded north to Nashville to attack the Union army there under General George H. Thomas. Cleburne’s division led the vanguard into Tennessee. They encountered a small www.abc-clio.com
Union force at Spring Hill, Tennessee, late on the afternoon of November 29, 1864. Confusion ensued, and the Union force pulled back and regrouped at the fortified town of Franklin, 17 miles to the north. That night, Hood ordered an assault on Franklin. It would be a disaster. Again, Cleburne’s division led the charge. Fighting commenced at 4:00 p.m., just before sunset. When it ended five hours later, Patrick Cleburne was dead. He died leading a charge of his old regiment, mostly composed of Irish immigrants, on Union breastworks. That night the Union army pulled out of Franklin. At dawn Cleburne’s body was found in the Union lines. He was mourned by his troops and buried in a small churchyard cemetery at St. John’s Church in nearby Columbia. Later, in 1870, his body was reinterred in Helena, Arkansas. He was 36 years old. Mauriel Joslyn See also: ABOLITIONISM AND SLAVERY; AMERICAN CIVIL WAR References Buck, Irving S. Cleburne and His Command. Jackson, TN: McCowat-Mercer Press, 1957. Joslyn, Mauriel P. A Meteor Shining Brightly: Essays on Maj. Gen. Patrick R. Cleburne. Milledgeville, GA: Terrell House Publishing, 1998. Purdue, Howell, and Elizabeth Purdue. Pat Cleburne: Confederate General. Hillsboro, TX: Hill Junior College Press, 1973. Sword, Wiley. Embrace an Angry Wind. New York: Harper Collins, 1992.
CLINTON, WILLIAM JEFFERSON (1946–) William Jefferson Clinton, forty-second president of the United States, was a champion of the Northern Ireland peace process during the 1990s. By paying three official ABC-CLIO
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President Bill Clinton (second from left) stands with British Prime Minister Tony Blair (right), Northern Ireland’s First Minister David Trimble (left), and Deputy First Minister Seamus Mallon on the steps of Parliament in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on December 13, 2000. Clinton urged residents of Northern Ireland to protect the progress made toward peace and to build on it. (AP/World Wide Photos)
visits to Ireland, Clinton personally shaped and directed his administration’s Northern Ireland policy. He has described the Irish peace process as one of the great passions of his presidency. Born in Hope, Arkansas, on August 19, 1946, Clinton served as president between 1993 and 2001. In unseating the Republican Party incumbent George H. W. Bush, Clinton became the first Democratic Party president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to serve two terms. He is married to Hillary Rodham, and they have one child, Chelsea. Clinton’s presidency combined many successes in foreign and domestic policy with personal scandals. On the domestic front, Clinton is credited with generating www.abc-clio.com
economic prosperity and eliminating the public spending deficit. Apart from Northern Ireland, his foreign policy successes include the Middle East and Bosnia. These successes were, however, overshadowed by allegations of sleaze and corruption. Most notably, in 1998 Clinton became the first president since Andrew Johnson in 1868, to be impeached by the House of Representatives. In a highly charged political party atmosphere, the House impeached Clinton for perjury and obstruction regarding investigations into events surrounding extramarital relationships with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, and an Arkansas state employee,
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Paula Jones. Subsequently, the Senate found him not guilty of the charges leveled against him. During the impeachment crisis his approval ratings remained very high. He appointed Madeleine Albright as the first female secretary of state in 1997, and his presidency sought to include minority groups. Clinton’s passion for Ireland did not end after he left the White House during January 2001. On the contrary, he has maintained strong connections with Ireland. Clinton was born into a lower-middleclass family background, and his father died shortly before his birth. He excelled in school and college, becoming the first member of his family to be conferred a university degree. In 1963 he was selected as a Washington, D.C., delegate for the Boys Nation Leadership Camp. During his trip to Washington he famously shook hands with President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The moment was captured on film and provided an emotional and sentimental backdrop to the 1992 Democratic Party Convention in New York City. During 1966, Senator William Fulbright employed Clinton as a researcher for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Clinton attended both Georgetown and Yale Universities, and between 1968 and 1970 he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Qualifying as an attorney in 1973, his focus was firmly on a political career. At the age of twenty-eight he made a failed bid for the U.S. House of Representatives. Elected attorney general of Arkansas in 1976, he only had to wait a further two years before being elected governor. Showing an early interest in Irish affairs, he declared Saint Patrick’s Day 1978 Irish Human Rights Day in Arkansas. However, near political catastrophe befell the future president in www.abc-clio.com
1980. Defeated in the gubernatorial election, Clinton was suddenly without political office. However, two years later he was reelected governor and served until 1992. Clinton declared his candidacy for the White House during 1991. However, his strategic preparations had begun many years before his formal announcement. Placing a strong emphasis on networking, he gradually created a base within the Democratic Party, becoming a key figure in the National Governors Association. During the 1992 presidential primaries, the support of Democratic Party governors would prove to be of enormous electoral benefit to Clinton. He was also an important player in the Democratic Leadership Council founded during 1985 with the aim of making Democrats more electable by moving toward the political center. Similarly, Clinton cultivated Hollywood support. Nevertheless, as a little-known Arkansas governor, Clinton’s chances of winning the party nomination, let alone the presidency, were slim. However, Clinton’s skills as a quality candidate emerged at an early stage of his campaign. In particular, he possessed strong public-speaking skills, which allowed him to connect with audiences. Equally important, he loved mingling with crowds. But it was not all plain sailing for the future president. Allegations about serious flaws in his character soon emerged. It was suggested that Clinton had had a string of extramarital affairs. Similarly, he was accused of smoking marijuana during his student days. Most seriously for the future commander-in-chief of the United States military he was accused of being a draft dodger in the Vietnam War. Despite these allegations he emerged as the Democratic Party’s choice in 1992. In an effort to court the more conservative southern vote, ABC-CLIO
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Tennessee Senator Albert Gore was chosen as the party’s vice presidential candidate. Clinton faced an uphill battle to unseat the incumbent President George H. W. Bush. Bush’s approval ratings remained high, as he had recently enjoyed military victory in Kuwait and Iraq. The presence of independent candidate Ross Perot on the ticket complicated the race further. In the lead up to the 1992 election, Clinton adopted a clear strategy. First, sensing voter dissatisfaction with Bush’s economic policies, he focused on the economy. Second, adopting a centrist approach to economic policy, he tried to woo more conservative voters to support him. Third, relying on his communications and interactive skills. he adopted a different campaign style. Appearing on late-night television shows, he tried to appeal to a broader audience, particularly younger voters. Capitalizing on perceptions that President Bush was out of touch with the needs of ordinary citizens, Clinton kept emphasizing economic issues. As November 1992 approached, it was becoming evident that the obscure governor from Arkansas was on the verge of unseating the incumbent. On election day, Clinton secured 42 percent of the popular vote, Bush 37 percent and Perot 19 percent. In the electoral college this meant that Clinton secured 370 votes to Bush’s 160. Clinton was reelected for a second term four years later. On this occasion he secured 49 percent of the vote, which gave him a total of 379 Electoral College votes. The Republican Party’s candidate, Robert Dole, secured 41 percent of the vote, which translated into 159 electoral college votes. After twelve years of Republican occupation, Clinton and Gore entered the White House in January 1993, the first www.abc-clio.com
Democrats since Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale to do so. Being the first president born after World War II, Clinton’s presidency signaled a generational shift. During Clinton’s eight years in the White House the American economy grew significantly. While his presidency is associated with economic growth and prosperity, he nevertheless brought public spending under tight control. He inherited a fiscal deficit of $290 billion. By 2000 he had converted the deficit into a surplus of $167 billion. During his presidency Clinton highlighted the themes of opportunity, responsibility, and community. According to Clinton, with freedom came responsibility. Calling for a New Covenant, he emphasized that citizens were entitled to state support only if they gave something in return. Thus, Clinton sought to increase labor market participation and decrease reliance on welfare payments. His controversial welfare reforms were designed to meet these twin objectives. Unsurprisingly, left-wing democrats interpreted his welfare reforms as an attack on the poorer citizens of the United States. Electorally, Clinton’s political strategy was designed to increase the appeal of the Democratic Party beyond its traditional constituencies. Enjoying a majority in both Houses of Congress, Clinton immediately advocated radical reform in health policy. His Health Care Bill, which sought to provide health care for all Americans, was subjected to a massive anti-lobby by the health insurance industry. Their efforts succeeded. As his first term’s flagship policy proposal, its ultimate collapse was a significant political failure, although many point out that the policy proposal was drawn up under the personal direction of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Clinton’s majority in
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both houses of Congress disappeared in November 1994. The Republican Party gained 53 house seats and 9 senate seats. The Republican landslide was an almost fatal blow to Clinton’s presidency. Speaker Newt Gingrich, who had engineered the Republican landslide, launched a full-scale assault on the president’s program. Despite the speaker’s strong position, Clinton’s political tactics ultimately outmaneuvered him. Forcing the shutdown of federal services, the Republican Party got most of the blame for the budgetary crisis. In the foreign-policy sphere, Clinton was operating in a radically transformed international setting. With the collapse of Soviet communism, a bipolar world order had ceased. By the 1990s the United States was the world’s only superpower. Clinton faced a number of significant foreign policy challenges during his two terms. The most significant was the Bosnian crisis, which resulted in the return of genocide and widescale human rights abuses on the European continent. A new phrase, “ethnic cleansing” entered the vernacular. Initially, Clinton struggled to come up with a meaningful response to the Bosnian crisis. By 1995, however, Clinton began to assert his authority. On the urging of his United Nations ambassador, Madeleine Albright, he authorized air strikes against the Serbs. Four years later, because of Serbian repression of the Kosovars, Clinton authorized full-scale military action under the auspices of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Clinton also sought to end the crisis through peace negotiations. He appointed Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke, and all participants were eventually brought to Dayton, Ohio, for crucial negotiations. Applying considerable personal pressure, Clinton secured an agreement in www.abc-clio.com
1995. Known as the Dayton Accords, along with the Middle East and Northern Ireland agreements, it ranks as one his most significant foreign policy successes. Clinton’s involvement in the Northern Ireland peace process has helped define him as a truly international statesman. Clinton was very committed to bringing peace to Northern Ireland. Few would dispute the assertion that he was a central actor in the negotiations that led to the signing of the Good Friday Peace Agreement on April 10, 1998. The Good Friday Agreement was a truly historic political compromise. Apart from establishing inclusive and non-majoritarian institutional structures in Northern Ireland, it legally recognized an all-Ireland dimension to Northern Ireland’s future governance. Crucially, on May 22, 1998, the Good Friday Agreement was approved in referenda both in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. In the Republic of Ireland the agreement was approved by 94 percent of voters while in Northern Ireland 71 percent voted in favor. Throughout the night preceding the agreement, Clinton had telephone conversations with all the main players. His final conversation of the night took place at 5 a.m. with Gerry Adams, leader of the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) political wing, Sinn Fein. Many commentators consider this latenight conversation between Clinton and Adams to have sealed the agreement. Clinton made a number of key decisions, which facilitated successful negotiations. First, in January 1994, he granted Adams a visa. Adams was working with Social Democratic and Labour Party leader John Hume to create the political conditions for an IRA cease-fire. It was hoped that a cease-fire would create a space for all-party peace negotiations to commence. However, Adams ABC-CLIO
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and Hume were acutely aware that republican supporters in the United States needed to be convinced of the merits of a cease-fire. Clinton’s decision to grant the visa allowed Adams to canvass his American constituency. In granting Adams’s visa, Clinton went against the strong advice of State Department officials. In particular, Secretary of State Warren Christopher opposed the granting of a visa because he believed it would damage the United States’ special relationship with Britain. While the decision greatly perturbed both the British government and his own State Department, it was a crucial ingredient in a chain of events that led to the IRA cease-fire of August 31, 1994. Second, Clinton made two crucial appointments. Former U.S. senator George Mitchell was initially appointed as an economic envoy to Northern Ireland in deference to British political sensibilities. Mitchell ultimately became chairman of the multiparty talks that led to the Good Friday Agreement. Mitchell’s negotiating skills achieved what many commentators believed would be impossible. A multiplicity of different parties coming from radically different sides of the Northern Ireland conflict agreed to a set of institutional structures for the future governance of Northern Ireland. Known as the Good Friday Agreement, it has transformed Northern Ireland politics. Mitchell also formulated the Mitchell Principles, which required parties to commit themselves to the pursuit of politics by exclusively democratic and peaceful means. Clinton also appointed Jean Kennedy Smith as U.S. ambassador to Dublin. Sister of the assassinated John F. Kennedy, she proved a crucial link between the Irish government and the White House. Kennedy Smith strongly encouraged Clinton to grant Adams’s visa in January 1994. www.abc-clio.com
Apart from specific decisions and appointments, Clinton demonstrated an unswerving personal commitment to the Northern Ireland peace process. The White House operated a virtual open-door policy to representatives of all parties. Clinton’s Saint Patrick’s Day parties in the White House became legend within political and journalistic circles. Crucially, he established good working relationships with successive Irish and British governments. He worked closely with three successive Irish prime ministers, Albert Reynolds, John Bruton, and Bertie Ahern. Despite huge setbacks, such as the temporary collapse of the IRA cease-fire in February 1996, Clinton remained firmly focused on the possibility of achieving a durable peace. The murder of twenty-eight civilians by a dissident republican group in Omagh on August 15, 1998, increased Clinton’s determination to make the then four-month-old Good Friday Agreement work. Clinton had a particularly close relationship with Irish Foreign Minister Dick Spring. Spring enjoyed a level of direct access to Clinton that was the envy of other European foreign ministers. Clinton also developed a good working relationship with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair’s New Labour project incorporated much of Clinton’s third-way ideology. Blair’s huge parliamentary majority ensured that he could deliver on agreements reached with Clinton and the Irish government. Clinton’s commitment combined with Blair’s commanding parliamentary majority were crucial factors in facilitating the evolving peace talks. Clinton’s commitment to the peace talks was clearly illustrated by the fact that he made three official visits to Ireland. His first two visits in 1995 and 1998 were
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working trips designed to move the peace process forward. His final visit, during December 2000, took place when he only had a few weeks left in office. As an outgoing president his role as a facilitator was diminished. As such, his final official visit as president was a victory lap in recognition of his previous efforts. It provided parties both in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland with the opportunity to applaud Clinton for his efforts in the peace process. During all three visits Clinton brought thousands of well-wishers onto the streets. He made particularly memorable visits to Ballybunion Golf links in Co. Kerry and Dundalk, Co. Louth. Clinton of course was not the first sitting president to visit Ireland. However, apart from John F. Kennedy’s famous 1963 visit, none matched those of Clinton. It is no exaggeration to state that Clinton earned the affection of the Irish people during the 1990s as Kennedy had done in the 1960s. However, in tangible terms Clinton’s commitment and input into Irish affairs immeasurably surpassed those of Kennedy. How can Clinton’s commitment be explained? A variety of factors were at play. As a student at the Jesuit-managed Georgetown University he came into contact with the Boston–New York Irish. Perhaps more crucially, his period as an Oxford University Rhodes Scholar coincided with the emerging violence of Northern Ireland politics. The conflict would have been a major topic for political debate during his two years in Oxford. Having noted this, it is surprising to learn that he only paid one weekend trip to Ireland during this period. The Kennedy influence cannot be lightly disregarded. The Kennedy family’s Irish roots were no doubt important to the formative thinking of Clinton. Electoral www.abc-clio.com
factors were undoubtedly a major consideration, too. Clinton knew that in states like New York, the Irish-American vote would be of tremendous importance. In this regard he attended a crucial meeting of the Irish American Caucus in January 1992. Held in New York City during the rough and tumble of presidential primaries, this meeting proved to be a watershed for Clinton. Those in attendance included future Republican Congressman Peter King; Niall O’Dowd, editor of The Irish Voice; and senior representatives of New York’s Democratic Party. It was at this meeting that the then Governor Clinton gave his controversial undertaking to appoint a White House special representative to Northern Ireland should he be elected president in November 1992. While the proposal would inevitably alienate the British government, it had the effect of giving a boost to New York Democrats. The meeting appeared to have sealed Clinton’s commitment to the Northern Ireland Peace Process. Finally, the British Conservative Party, under the leadership of Prime Minister John Major, pushed Clinton closer to the Irish vote. During Clinton’s bid for the White House, two Conservative Party officials joined the flagging Bush campaign. Proposing what amounted to an antiClinton smear campaign, the officials alienated the future president. Clinton was slow to forgive the Conservative Party both for its interference and the tactics employed. Despite these explanatory factors the scale of his commitment remains somewhat mysterious. Time and time again he defied official advice. During the crises surrounding the issuing of visas to Gerry Adams and Joe Cahill, Clinton went out on a political limb. He exposed relationships with the ABC-CLIO
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John Major–led government in London to profound risk. In short, Clinton took political risks, which can only be explained on the basis that he was personally committed to the Irish peace process. During May 2001, the then expresident paid a private visit to the Ballybunion Golf Links in Co. Kerry. During July 2003 he signed an agreement to combat AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) with Prime Minister Bertie Ahern. And during 2004 he returned to Dublin for the Irish launch of his autobiography, My Life. Thousands of Clinton admirers queued for his book-signing event at O’Connell Street, Dublin. Clinton remains a hugely popular figure with the Irish public. Anthony O’Halloran See also: KENNEDY, John F.; MITCHELL, George J. References Adams, Gerry. Hope and History: Making Peace in Ireland. Dingle, Ireland: Brandon, 2003. Clinton, Bill. Between Hope and History: Meeting America’s Challenges for the 21st Century. New York: Random House, 1996. Clinton, Bill. My Life. London: Hutchinson, 2004 Coakley, John, and Michael Gallagher. Politics in the Republic of Ireland. London: Routledge, 2005. Conason, Joe, and Gene Lyons. The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton. London: Channel 4 Books, 2001. Drew, Elizabeth. On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. Mitchell, George. Making Peace. London: Heinemann, 1999. O’Clery, Conor. The Greening of the White House: The Inside Story of How America Tried to Bring Peace to Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1996. Patrick, John A., Richard M. Pious, and Donald A. Ritchie. The Oxford Essential Guide to the U.S. Government. New York: Berkley Books, 2000. www.abc-clio.com
Posner, Richard A. An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Stewart, James B. Blood Sport: The President and His Adversaries. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996 Walker, Martin. Clinton: The President They Deserve. London: Vintage, 1997.
COCKRAN, WILLIAM BOURKE (1854–1923) William Bourke Cockran, a noted orator and U.S. Representative from New York, was born in Carrowkeel, Ireland, on February 28, 1854. He was the third son of Roman Catholics Martin and Harriet Knight Cockran. When Martin Cockran, a prominent farmer, died in a horseback riding accident in 1862, the family moved to Sligo. At the age of nine, Cockran went to France to study at the Institute des Petits Fréres de Marie at Beuchamp. At 14, Cockran returned to Ireland to continue his schooling. He wanted to become an attorney but jobs for lawyers were few in Ireland. In 1871, Cockran immigrated to the United States to better his prospects. He loved the gaiety and excitement of life in New York City and, despite difficulties finding work, resolved to stay, although he briefly returned to Ireland in 1875 as a reporter for a New York newspaper. On September 15, 1876, Cockran passed the New York Bar and became an attorney. Cockran specialized in charming juries with his oratorical skills. He initially focused on criminal cases but his reputation as a trial attorney steadily won him new clients. He gained recognition in civil litigation and became well known among leaders of the financial district. Cockran amassed a substantial fortune but his
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runaway success did not extend to his personal life. Cockran married three times but remained childless. In 1876 he married Mary Jackson, who died in childbirth in 1877; in 1885 he married Rhoda Mack, who died in 1895; and in 1906 he married Anne L. Ide, who would survive him. In 1887 he bought an estate, the Cedars, at Sands Point, Long Island, which remained his chief residence. Cockran’s public speaking on behalf of the Democratic Party brought him to political prominence. One of the best speakers of his age, Cockran would entertain crowds of people for hours. Habitually speaking without a written text, Cockran employed classical and historical allusions, expansive logical arguments, and a rich vocabulary. His facial expressions and gesticulations added drama to the event. More importantly, in an age that lacked microphones, Cockran could project his Irish brogue into the farthest reaches of the largest amphitheaters. Cockran joined the Tammany Hall political organization in 1884. Although consulted by Tammany leaders, Cockran never played a major role in the organization, probably because of his independent tendencies. One Tammany leader, George Washington Plunkitt, admired Cockran’s speaking skills but condemned him as an unreliable politician. Aloof and too patrician to be comfortable with the workingclass base of Tammany, Cockran nevertheless played a crucial part in Democratic state and national conventions, rallies, and other party functions, particularly in drafting such legal documents as platforms and resolutions. Cockran was elected to Congress from New York City’s Twelfth Congressional District in 1886 and was in and out of www.abc-clio.com
Congress over the next thirty-five years (1887–1889, 1891–1895, 1904–1909, 1921–1923). When he was out of favor with Tammany, Cockran was out of office. As a minority member during most of his career, his opportunities to influence important legislation were few. Cockran used his powers of oratory to comment on the major issues of his day. On most economic issues Cockran sought only a very limited role for government. He denounced income tax, municipal ownership of public utilities, and the protective tariff as socialism. In 1900, Cockran denounced the imperialistic activities of the United States and opposed annexation of the recently acquired Philippine Islands. Perhaps making a connection to the history of Ireland, Cockran saw imperialism as a hostile act that imposed a foreign government on a conquered land and was contrary to American principles. Cockran’s political views were also heavily influenced by his Long Island neighbor, Theodore Roosevelt. In 1912 Cockran deserted the Democrats to join the Progressive party and support Roosevelt’s presidential bid. Cockran returned to the Democratic Party as World War I created new political issues. Unsympathetic to British interests, he supported neutrality in the early stages of the conflict. He would later support the declaration of war against Germany. The domestic attacks against hyphenated Americans as the war progressed disturbed Cockran, who was immensely proud of his Irish heritage. He opposed Prohibition, in company with many Irish Catholics who saw the proposed legislation as an attack upon their culture and customs. Cockran died of a brain hemorrhage in Washington, D.C., on March 1, 1923. Caryn E. Neumann ABC-CLIO
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188 COFFEY, BRIAN See also: TAMMANY HALL Reference McGurrin, James. Bourke Cockran: A Free Lance in American Politics. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948.
COFFEY, BRIAN (1905–1995) Brian Coffey was a noted figure in Irish poetic modernism whose career seemed to embody the emigré status of experimental writers in post-Independence Ireland. Born in 1905 to an affluent, Roman Catholic family, Coffey attended Clongowes Wood College before moving to the Continent to complete his secondary education with a baccalaureate. He returned to Ireland and studied sciences at University College Dublin, where his father was president of the College. Here he met fellow Irish modernist poet Denis Devlin, and together they published Poems (1930). Devlin joined the Irish diplomatic service, but Coffey returned to Paris to undertake postgraduate work, initially in physical chemistry. He became acquainted with exiled Irish writers such as Thomas MacGreevy and Samuel Beckett, and his poetry was much influenced by French models, notably those of Apollinaire, Mallarmé, and Verlaine, some among the many French poets Coffey would translate. Coffey’s Catholicism drew him to the Institut Catholique de Paris where he wrote a doctoral thesis on St. Thomas Aquinas under the supervision of noted Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain. Meanwhile, he published his first sole-author collection, Third Person (1938), which fellow expatriate George Reavey saw through his Europa Press, the same press that had published Beckett’s Echo’s Bones in 1935. Following the successful conclusion of his doctoral research in 1947, Coffey moved to the United States to take up a www.abc-clio.com
position as assistant professor at St. Louis University in Missouri. Here he brought his growing family and wife, Bridget Rosalind Baynes, whom he had married in 1938, and they settled in a farmhouse in Jefferson County, Missouri. Never a prolific poet, Coffey had remained largely silent since the publication of Third Person. But in 1952 this silence was broken when he composed perhaps his most memorable poem, Missouri Sequence, a long meditative poem that highlights Irish-American identity and Coffey’s own immigrant status. Drawing attention to the “Many Irish souls” who inhabit Missouri, people who “drifted in here from the river,/Irish, German, Bohemian,/more than one hundred years ago,/come to make homes,” Coffey reminds us of the migrations that have created American society. Acutely conscious of his outsider status, Coffey makes a virtue of his exile and explores its implications for his family and for himself as a poet. Coffey’s sense of the Missouri landscape and climate, of Irish-American history, and of his place within them, all contribute to a poetics of identity suffused with local color. His Missouri sojourn ended in 1954 when the Coffey family returned to Europe. Settling in England and working as a schoolteacher, Coffey continued writing and produced dense, cryptic works, such as the long poems Advent (1975) and Death of Hektor (1979). These brought him some recognition in Irish literary circles and led to the 1991 publication of Poems and Versions 1929–1990, introduced by noted Irish scholar and Coffey advocate J. C. C. Mays. Always a minority interest, Coffey’s poems are seen, in the eyes of some critics, to constitute an authentic avant-garde voice in the often claustrophobic and provincial Irish
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literary scene. Along with Denis Devlin, Thomas MacGreevy, and the more celebrated Samuel Beckett, Coffey’s work can be said to form part of an alternative line of development within post-Independence Irish writing. Brian Coffey died at his home in Southampton, England in 1995. Benjamin Keatinge See also: BECKETT, Samuel; MISSOURI References Coffey, Brian. Poems and Versions 1929–1990. Dublin: Dedalus Press, 1991. Coughlan, Patricia, and Alex Davis, eds. Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s. Cork: Cork University Press, 1995. Morgan, Jack. “Missouri Sequence: Brian Coffey’s St. Louis Years, 1947–1952,” ÉireIreland 28, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 100–114. Moriarty, Donal. The Art of Brian Coffey. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2000. Smith, Michael, ed. The Lace Curtain: A Magazine of Poetry and Criticism 4 (Summer 1971).
COGHLAN, EDUARDO AQUILIO (1912–1997) Eduardo Coghlan was born on October 29, 1912, in the province of Corrientes, son of Patricio Coghlan (1883–1952) and María Dolores Jantus. He was the grandson of Joseph Coghlan (1853–1892), from Ballylarkin, Co. Wicklow, and Elisa Byrne. In 1937 Coghlan graduated from the School of Law at the University of Buenos Aires. After a career in public service that included positions in the public records office and the national welfare system, Coghlan was appointed to the federal court of Buenos Aires in 1957. He retired as a judge of appeals in 1978. In 1979–1980 Coghlan was the president of the Argentine Genealogical Institute, during which time he published more than fifty articles about Irish and other families www.abc-clio.com
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in Argentina. He was also vice president of the Irish-Argentine Federation and a member of the Irish Catholic Association. As a judge, Eduardo Coghlan was appointed to the national court of appeals during the military dictatorship of 1976–1983. For this reason he is sometimes criticized by human rights organizations and included in lists of accused members of the Argentine judicial system. However, Coghlan’s activity as a magistrate focused exclusively on civil law, voting for example in cases of currency impacts of inflation (La Amistad v. Iriarte, September 9, 1977). During his career in public service, Coghlan published many technical papers and articles, for instance, “Hacia la Seguridad Social en la Argentina: Una Comparación Sugestiva” (1943) and “Los Resultados del Censo Escolar Ponen en Evidencia la Necesidad Urgente del Censo General de la Nación” (1944). (“Towards Social Security in Argentina: an Indicative Comparison” [1943] and “The Results of the Education Census Stress the Urgent Need for a National General Census” [1944].) Many Irish Argentines are in Coghlan’s debt as his research enabled them to pinpoint their Irish relations and often the county, parish, and townland from which their great-grandparents left for Argentina. Coghlan cooperated closely with Bill Meek of the Irish national radio service (RTÉ), when he visited Argentina in 1987 and produced a successful radio documentary series about the Irish Argentines. Coghlan’s pioneering research in public archives and records of Irish births, marriages, and deaths, which was published in the Southern Cross and the Standard, allowed him to establish a massive family history database. During an official appointment at the Archivo General de la Nación (Argentine public records ABC-CLIO
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office), Coghlan was able to transcribe arrivals to Buenos Aires and census data that referred to thousands of Irish immigrants and their families. He recorded persons with Irish names, people that were certain to be Irish born, and their children born in Argentina. Coghlan undertook a detailed and painstaking research over a lifetime of Irish emigrants and their descendants from the date of their arrival in Argentina through the succeeding generations. Coghlan published the following works about the Irish in Argentina: Fundadores de la Segunda Época: Los Irlandeses [Founders of the Second Period: the Irish ] (1967), Los Irlandeses [The Irish ] (1970), “Orígenes y Evolución de la Colectividad Hiberno-Argentina” in the Southern Cross [“Origins and Evolution of the HibernoArgentine Community” in the Southern Cross ] (1975), Andanzas de un Irlandés en el Campo Porteño 1845–1864 [An Irishman’s Adventures in the Countryside of Buenos Aires, 1845–1864 ] (1981), Linajes Argentinos de Origen Irlandés [Argentine Families of Irish Descent] (several articles between 1982 and 1985), El Aporte de los Irlandeses a la Formación de la Nación Argentina [The Irish Contribution to the Formation of the Argentine Nation] (1982), and the vast genealogical catalog of the Irish-Argentine community, Los Irlandeses en la Argentina: Su Actuación y Descendencia [The Irish in Argentina: Their Participation and Descendants] (1987). Coghlan’s master work, however, is his Los Irlandeses en la Argentina [The Irish in Argentina], a 963-page directory including detailed records of 4,350 Irish-born immigrants and their families up to the third and often fourth generation. Entries are arranged alphabetically by family name. Other contents include a chronicle of the Irish in Argentina, sketches of 413 livestock www.abc-clio.com
brands owned by Irish-Argentine ranchers (reproduced from Estevan Parle’s 1885 Registro de Marcas de Hacienda de la Provincia de Buenos Aires [Cattle Brands Register in the Province of Buenos Aires]), the article “La Heráldica Irlandesa” by Félix F. Martín y Herrera, and 182 Irish family coats of arms. There are also press clippings, photographs, and documents. The book was published privately, with contributions from the Cultural Relations Committee of the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and private supporters (who are listed in the final pages). Although the book is largely focused on the traditional segment of Catholic rural landowners and does not include a vast majority of re-emigrations to other countries, Los Irlandeses en Argentina is a key source of information for most studies of this particular migration. In 1987 the Irish Ministry of Foreign Affairs approved the purchase of copies of Coghlan’s genealogical catalog to be distributed to county libraries and institutions abroad. Eduardo Coghlan died on August 1, 1997. Edmundo Murray See also: ARGENTINA Reference MacLoughlin, Guillermo. “The Forgotten People: the Irish in Argentina and other South American Countries. In Memory of Edward A. Coghlan.” Paper delivered at The Scattering of Ireland and the Irish Diaspora: A Comparative Perspective Conference, University College Cork, Ireland, September 24–27, 1997.
COHALAN, DANIEL F. (1865–1946) The Irish nationalist, politician, and judge Daniel Cohalan, was one of the most influential Irish-American nationalist leaders of the early twentieth century. Born in 1865
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Portrait of Irish nationalist Daniel F. Cohalan. (Library of Congress)
in Middletown, New York, Cohalan graduated from Manhattan College in 1885 and went on to study law, ultimately being admitted to the New York bar in 1888. By 1900, Cohalan was heavily involved with the Democratic Party, serving as a delegate to both the 1904 and 1908 national conventions. Meanwhile, he became an influential adviser to New York’s Tammany Hall boss Charles F. Murphy and subsequently became the grand sachem of the Tammany Society from 1908–1911. Appointed an associate justice to the New York Supreme Court in 1911, Cohalan retained this post until his resignation in 1924. Cohalan and John Devoy collaborated in reuniting Clan na Gael in 1900. The Clan was a secret Irish-American revolutionary organization dedicated to the use of physical force to achieve full Irish independence and allied to the Irish Republican www.abc-clio.com
Brotherhood in Ireland. Devoy and Cohalan also helped organize the Irish Race Convention of March 4–5, 1916, in New York City. The Friends of Irish Freedom (FOIF) was formed at this convention. Founded as an open organization that protested British actions in Ireland and publicized Ireland’s case from within the United States, FOIF became a crucial fund-raising body for the Irish nationalist movement in America. Cohalan was a staunch isolationist, and his persistent support for the Irish cause during and after World War I, and his vigorous opposition to the League of Nations, drew the ire of President Woodrow Wilson. From June 1919 to December 1920, Eamon de Valera undertook a tour of the United States on behalf of the recently formed Dáil Éireann. His goal was to raise funds for the new government and to obtain diplomatic recognition for it from the United States. From the very beginning, de Valera clashed with Cohalan and Devoy because of his belief that he should have direct control of Irish and Irish-American efforts for Ireland. Specifically, Cohalan and Devoy argued that the money raised, more than $5 million, should remain in America and be used to promote Ireland’s cause in the United States and to resist the founding of the League of Nations. Cohalan and de Valera further clashed when both men led delegations to the 1920 Republican Convention in Chicago in an effort to obtain a plank (a fundamental part of a political program) on Irish freedom in the party’s platform. Their effort ultimately failed because of their inability to compromise on the wording for a resolution. The split with de Valera in 1920, and the outbreak of civil war in Ireland, would lead to a state of fractious and divided ABC-CLIO
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Irish-American nationalist politics in the 1920s and 1930s. Cohalan died on November 12, 1946. Ely Janis See also: De VALERA, Eamon; DEVOY, John; MURPHY, Charles Francis References Carroll, Francis M. Money for Ireland: Finance, Diplomacy, Politics and the First Dáil Éireann Loans, 1919–1936. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2002. Funchion, Michael, ed. Irish American Voluntary Organizations. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983. Tansill, Charles. America and the Fight for Irish Freedom 1866–1922. New York: The Devin Adair Co., 1957. Ward, Alan. Ireland and Anglo-American Relations 1899–1921. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1969.
COHAN, GEORGE M. (1878–1942) Although his birth certificate states that he was born on July 3, his mother always said that George M. Cohan was born on the 4th of July, and a mother ought to know. Anyway, given Cohan’s deft ability to knock off Tin Pan Alley and Broadway flag-waving hit songs, such as “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “You’ re A Grand Old Flag,” the convergence between parturition and patriotism is close enough. Back in Cork the family name had been Keohane, but it was changed to Cohan when George’s grandfather emigrated to America in the early nineteenth century. Jerry Cohan, the songwriter’s father, had been bitten by the theatrical bug early in life. He pursued blackface minstrelsy until 1874, when he organized a Hibernicon, a sort of Irish variety show, which for one glorious moment featured the great uilleann pipe virtuoso Patsy www.abc-clio.com
Touhey. Jerry Cohan moved on to writing and performing, with his wife, Nellie, in a series of comic Irish shows. Gradually, Jerry and Nellie worked their children, Josephine and George, into their acts. Josephine turned out to be a graceful skirt dancer, and she was sometimes in greater demand than the rest of the family. For his part young George substituted athleticism for grace. He would finish up a solo clog with a run up the sides of the proscenium arches. Part of his famous stifflegged tap style was the result of an accident, when the conductor in the pit substituted a slow piece in two-four time for Cohan’s customary six-eight “essence” dance. The exaggerated steps the dancer was forced to improvise were a hit with the audience and were incorporated into his later acts. Something of his unique dance style can be seen in James Cagney’s impersonation of Cohan in the 1942 bio-film Yankee Doodle Dandy. In 1891 Jerry Cohan made the important decision to go beyond Irish-American theater. The Four Cohans, as they billed themselves, performed Peck’s Bad Boy and His Pa. Soon they were part of B. F. Keith’s expanding vaudeville circuit. George began to take over from his father the task of writing material, and he soon had some modest success with several vaudeville sketches. However, it was his 1904 musical, Little Johnnie Jones, that launched him on his career. Apart from theater-savvy advice from his father, Cohan’s main influences were Dion Boucicault and Edward Harrigan. Cohan admired Harrigan’s work and gave him a musical tip of the hat in a 1908 song, “Harrigan.” Little Johnnie Jones, with its overly complicated plot and endless puns, has all the earmarks of a Harrigan musical, without the Irish-American setting and
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themes. However, it was the songs for the show that demonstrated that Cohan had mastered the new Tin Pan Alley idiom. Two of his most famous songs, “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Give My Regards to Broadway,” came out of his first theatrical hit. Many other successes followed. In 1906 he formed a partnership with Sam Harris, and together they produced all of Cohan’s musicals, reviews, and plays until 1920. Until then Cohan had paid little attention to Irish America. Perhaps it was the success of Abie’s Irish Rose in 1920s that encouraged him to revisit the IrishAmerican musical. Whatever the reason, Cohan wrote Little Nellie Kelly (1922), The Rise of Rosie O’Reilly (1923), and The Merry Malones (1927). All three were essentially celebrations of the Irish-American girl, a popular icon in the early decades of the twentieth century. Although Cohan had begun his career on the vaudeville stage as a song-and-dance man, over the years he developed considerable skill as an actor. In addition to appearing in his own plays, serious works as well as comedies, he received critical acclaim when he played Nat Miller in Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness (1933), and Rodgers and Hart tapped him to play the presidential role in I’d Rather Be Right (1937). By the mid-1920s Cohan’s musicals and plays had begun to lose their appeal for Broadway audiences. With the exception of a few of his dramatic works, Cohan had never excelled at, or even shown much interest in, his plots. If anything, he made fun of the conventions of the musical by using his songs to call attention to his creaky plot devices. The lines he gave his characters were slangy and unmemorable. However, no one www.abc-clio.com
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else better caught the brash, audacious, and energetic mood of early twentieth-century American. Diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1940, Cohan died on November 5, 1942. William H. A. Williams See also: CAGNEY, James; HARRIGAN AND HART References Cohan, George M. Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took to Get There. 1925. Reprint, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1971. McCabe, John. George M. Cohan: The Man Who Owned Broadway. New York: Doubleday, 1973.
COLEMAN, MICHAEL (1891–1945) Through his recordings, Sligo fiddler Michael Coleman, who immigrated to America as a young man, became the best known and most influential performer of traditional Irish music in the twentieth century. His recordings shaped the playing style of many fiddlers on both sides of the Atlantic. Coleman was born in Knockgrania in the Killavil district of southern Co. Sligo, which, by the late nineteenth century, had become an intensely musical area. Taking advantage of this situation, Coleman, from an early age, learned traditional Irish music from various skilled neighbors, uilleann pipers as well as fiddlers. Even as a boy he was considered talented. He was a good step dancer, as well as a fiddler. As he got older, Michael and his older brother, James, were in great demand to play for house dances. Like most farms in the area, the Coleman holding was small, and Michael, as the ABC-CLIO
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youngest of seven children, eventually had to leave home to seek a living. For a time he moved back and forth between England and Sligo. However, with his overriding interest in music, he picked up no particular trade or craft. Coleman finally immigrated to America in 1914. He lived for a time with an aunt in Boston, working at odd jobs. However, New York City, with its larger audience for Irish music, soon attracted him. There, the easiest and steadiest money for an Irish musician came from playing in the bands that performed in the city’s many Irish dance halls. However, Coleman, confident of his talent, was determined to be a solo artist. He played everywhere, from weddings to the vaudeville circuit. The resulting hand-to-mouth existence was eased a bit when he began to record in 1921. Very quickly, Coleman became established as the most popular Irish fiddler in America. Even after the Depression resulted in cutbacks by the record companies, Coleman was able to resume recording between 1934 and 1936. In all, Coleman cut some 80 sides, often for major labels, such as Victor, Columbia, and Decca. However, all of his records, along with those of hundreds of other Irish musicians, were aimed primarily at the IrishAmerican market. Coleman’s fiddling was grounded in the style of his native Sligo. His fast, smooth, long-bow style with its rapid ornamentations made him popular, especially after 1925, when the new electrical recording technique provided better fidelity than the original acoustical methods. Of course, Coleman was not the only talented fiddler from the region to have a successful recording career. James Morrison and Paddy Killoran, fellow Sligo immigrants, were also www.abc-clio.com
popular recording artists. As a result, the Sligo style became virtually the fiddling style for Irish Americans living in the great industrial cities. Popular as Coleman’s recordings were in America, they caused even greater excitement as they began to appear back in Ireland. Until then, traditional music had been primarily a local affair, dominated by regional playing styles. The repertory of tunes was also local, broadened only by the visits of occasional traveling musicians from outside of one’s area. Suddenly, coming out of the windup gramophones was the sound of a highly skilled, professional, his music propelled by the percussive sound of the piano. Major regional fiddling styles survived in Ireland, but the influence of Coleman and the other Sligo musicians was everywhere. Coleman’s stamp on the music is demonstrated by the extent to which tunes he recorded became the standard versions throughout much of the country. Indeed, the combination of the American recordings and Francis O’Neill’s printed tune collections resulted in a certain standardization within Irish traditional music. Nevertheless, the fact that the old music was being disseminated by the newest technology helped to valorize the music for the rural Irish. And if some tunes and local playing styles were lost, recordings such as Coleman’s helped raise the bar for the standards of musicianship and injected much excitement in a form of music that was facing the growing pressures of twentiethcentury popular culture. A talented musician, Coleman lacked the business skills that might have enabled him to increase his income and build for the future. The constant traveling and playing for parties took a toll on his family and,
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eventually perhaps, on his health. He died in New York City in 1945 at the age of 54. William H. A. Williams See also: O’NEILL, Francis; MUSIC IN AMERICA, IRISH Reference Bradshaw, Harry. Michael Coleman: 1891–1945. Dublin: Viva Voce, 1991.
COLOMBIA The only South American country with coasts on both the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans, Colombia was part of the Spanish viceroyalty of New Granada. The United States of Colombia, including also Panama, Venezuela, and Ecuador, was proclaimed in 1819 by Simón Bolívar, when he crossed the Andes and defeated the royalist forces at the Battle of Boyacá. In 1822 the four countries were united as Gran Colombia, which collapsed in 1830 with the separation of Venezuela and Ecuador. The republic of Colombia was established in 1886, but Panama separated in 1903, after the U.S.-encouraged War of the Thousand Days (1899–1902). Irish soldiers fought in Colombia during the War of Independence with Spain in 1816–1822. They were recruited in Dublin, London, and other cities by John Devereux, James T. English, William Walton, and others. The Irish Legion sailed from Liverpool in July 1819. Some of the officers were Major F. Anthony L’Estrange, Francisco Burdett O’Connor, and William Aylmer. They arrived at the island of Margarita, where they suffered hardships, sickness, and loss of life. In March 1820 the Legion sailed to Río Hacha, and after the attack on this city, their standard displaying the harp of Ireland was raised instead of the Spanish royal ensign. Weakened by lack of www.abc-clio.com
pay and proper food, and complaining about the native officers, some of the Irish mutinied, got drunk, and began to ransack the city for booty. The mutineers were transported to Jamaica and turned over to the British authorities. O’Connor’s lancers continued the campaign and reached Cartagena by the end of 1822, and they effectively assisted Bolívar at the decisive battle of Boyacá. The chief responsible for forming the Irish Legion, John Devereux, did not arrive at South America until 1821. He never took part in a single engagement with the legion, but he made a pretty profit in organizing it. However, Bolívar absolved Devereux from any blame and in 1822 attached him to the general staff at Bogotá. In 1823 John Devereux was appointed Colombian envoy to the courts of northern Europe. Some of the soldiers of the Irish Legion remained in Colombia after the War of Independence. After the battle of Boyacá, Daniel Florence O’Leary (1801–1854) was appointed Bolívar’s aide-de-camp and served in Venezuela, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. In 1828 O’Leary married Soledad Soublette in Bogotá and lent valuable services to Colombia and Venezuela. His memoirs, published posthumously by his son Simón Bolívar O’Leary, remain a basic reference for students of the South American Wars of Independence. Beatriz O’Connell, who was related to the Liberator Daniel O’Connell, married Manuel Pombo in 1795 in Madrid, and in 1819 was living in Bogotá. Other Irish settlers in Colombia related to the Wars of Independence were Thomas Murray (d. 1823), who married Estrada Callejas; John Hands; Francis O’Farrell (known as Francisco Puyana); Joseph Boylan; Robert Lee; James Rooke; and the ABC-CLIO
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physicians Hugh Blair Brown (surgeon of the Arthur Sandes’s Rifles in Peru), John Kennedy, Thomas Williamson, and Dr. McEwen. Among the visitors to Colombia who left detailed travel accounts, William John Duane (1780–1865), of Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, family, embarked in 1822 on a journey through Colombia and Venezuela. The product of these travels was A Visit to Colombia in the Years 1822 & 1823 (Philadelphia: Thomas H. Palmer, 1826), a book detailing a rather leisurely trip from Caracas to Cartagena de Indias, via Bogotá. A convinced supporter of South American independence from Spain, Duane used the trip to study the situation of the places he visited, and he made a number of interesting observations about contemporary social conditions and politics in Gran Colombia. Almost 150 years later, a new type of legion arrived in Colombia, though this time peacefully. In 1953 the Catholic lay movement Legion of Mary sent Seamus Grace and Alphie Lamb (1932–1959) to Bogotá to expand their mission in Colombia. From the capital, Grace and Lamb established many legion branches (praesidia) in other parts of the country. They visited bishops and obtained permission to set up in their dioceses. The legion flourished around Colombia, especially among the poor, and then expanded to Ecuador, Venezuela, and throughout South America. The most recent chapter in the history of Colombian-Irish relations connects the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). On August 11, 2001, Jim Monaghan, Niall Connolly, and Martin McCauley were arrested at Bogotá’s airport and accused of being IRA members providing explosives training to the FARC in the www.abc-clio.com
demilitarized zone of San Vicente del Caguán in southern Colombia. Established in 1964 as the military wing of the Colombian Communist Party, the FARC is the largest irregular army in Latin America. Washington accuses the FARC and other “narco-terrorists” of profiting from the illegal drug production and distribution business. The three Irishmen were traveling on false passports. At first they said they were bird-watching but later added that they were studying the Colombia peace process. Their initial acquittal in April 2004 was overturned by a higher court, which imposed sentences of seventeen years on each of them. They escaped from Colombia and in August 2005—a week after the IRA proclaimed the end of its military operations—they arrived safely in Ireland. The Colombian authorities have formally requested their extradition. Edmundo Murray See also: DEVEREUX, John; MURRAY, Thomas; O’CONNOR, Francisco Burdett; O’LEARY, Daniel Florence; VENEZUELA References Barnwell, David. “William Duane and his ‘Visit to Colombia’ of 1823.” Paper presented at the CAIS annual conference, Maynooth, June 22–26, 2005. Hasbrouck, Alfred. Foreign Legionaries in the Liberation of Spanish South America. New York: Columbia University, 1928. Kirby, Peadar. Ireland and Latin America: Links and Lessons. Dublin: Trócaire, 1992.
COLUM, MARY (1884–1957) Mary Catherine Gunning Maguire was born in 1884, in Collooney, Co. Sligo. The early deaths of her parents left her under first a grandmother’s care, then under the care of an aunt who resented being burdened by the young girl. When the aunt
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also died, Mary was sent to a boarding school in Monaghan, the Convent of Saint Louis. She disliked the regimentation there, but obtained a strong education, which she augmented by incessant reading. Her interest in, and facility with, languages distinguished her from an early age. Upon graduating from St. Louis she moved to Dublin, where she began studying at the National University, the precursor of the modern University College Dublin. Here she studied for, and obtained, a degree in modern languages; she was later to note that she and James Joyce had followed essentially the same curriculum at the university and had read many of the same textbooks. Although she enjoyed her coursework, the greater stimulus to Mary was that of Dublin itself, particularly its theatrical life. She formed a University theater appreciation club, and thereby met one of her heroes, William Butler Yeats, and saw another, John M. Synge. Upon graduation Mary decided to remain in Dublin, and she took a position at St. Enda’s School, one of Padraig Pearse’s inventive nationalist schools. She appears to have been happy there, and admired Pearse, through whom she met many other prominent nationalist leaders (such as Thomas MacDonagh). She also befriended another young teacher, and aspiring writer, Padraic Colum. In 1912, despite fears of being trapped in a routine or oppressive marriage, Mary wed Colum, and their marriage survived until her death. Although her memoirs describe their courtship in strangely unromantic terms, and despite her affair with the writer Van Wyck Brooks (of which Padraic may never have known), they seem to have enjoyed a companionable, if not engrossingly passionate, marriage. www.abc-clio.com
One result of their marriage was an opportunity to visit relatives in the United States. This trip is not thought to have been intended to be permanent, but they quickly decided to settle in America, once there. After moving in rapid succession from New York to Pittsburgh to Chicago, they moved again to New York City, where they began to establish themselves as teachers and essayists. It was in these dual roles that Mary showed her greatest skills. Having written numerous critical reviews for the press in Dublin—and having been praised as a critic by Yeats himself—she began writing reviews, essays, and critical appreciations that were published in both newspapers and magazines. Her personal knowledge of important literary figures, as well as her knowledge of several leaders of the 1916 Rising, gave her an unusual authority in American literary and political journals. This influence she often used, particularly in her reviews, to promote Irish writers whose work she admired to American audiences. In 1930 Mary and Padraic moved briefly to France, first living in Paris, then in Nice. During this extended stay the Colums met often with another of Mary’s literary heroes, James Joyce. She particularly relished trading words in odd languages with him, and recollecting National University professors whom they had both known. Mary also helped the Joyces tremendously by providing their daughter Lucia with friendship and sympathy as her mental difficulties became ever more difficult for Lucia and her family. On occasion she took Lucia into their home, giving her a place where she felt safe, and where Joyce and his wife Nora trusted Mary as Lucia’s guardian. Mary’s memoirs of Joyce were incomplete at the time of her death, but ABC-CLIO
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Padraic edited them in with his own, and the combined volume Our Friend James Joyce is an appealing, if slightly starstruck, view of the great writer. Upon returning to the United States, Mary and Padraic settled again in New York City. She continued her reviewing and essay work, and became even more influential than she had been earlier, as many of the writers she had championed earlier (Yeats, Joyce) were now entering their posthumous widespread American appreciation. She also published two well-regarded books: From These Roots (1937), a critical introduction to the ideas of modern literature, and Life and the Dream (1947), an autobiography. From 1946–1948 she served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Long-term ill health, however, made her last years of life difficult, and she was frequently weakened by persistent anemia. She died in 1957. Although now almost wholly overshadowed by her husband, Mary Colum may have been the better literary mind—she simply lacked Padraic’s lyrical gift. Despite the interest of her three major book publications (including the posthumous Joyce memoir), her real contribution to IrishAmerican relations lay in her articulate and perceptive advocacy of Irish writers who were just beginning to make names for themselves in the United States. Because of her interest and ability to explicate difficult literature, she helped writers, even those of Joyce’s stature find a greater reading public in the United States. Andrew Goodspeed See also: COLUM, Padraic; JOYCE, James Augustine Aloysius; YEATS, William Butler References Colum, Mary. From These Roots. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1938. www.abc-clio.com
Colum, Mary. Life and the Dream. London: Macmillan, 1947. Colum, Mary, and Padraic Colum. Our Friend James Joyce. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958. Sanford Sternlicht. “Declaration of Independence: Mary Colum as Autobiographer.” Syracuse University Library Associates Courier 32 (1997): 25–33.
COLUM, PADRAIC (1881–1972) Padraic Colum was born Patrick Collumb on December 8, 1881, in Columbkill, Co. Longford. The Longford landscape and local speech were important to Colum, and to his work, throughout his life. His father was the master of the Longford Workhouse, and Padraic therefore met many downtrodden people who were experiencing difficulties in life; it is perhaps from these early experiences that he developed the gentleness and sympathy with the unhappy that distinguishes his works. Colum studied for a time at St. Michael’s Boys’ National School in Longford, then at Glasthule National School when his father became rail manager of the station at Sandycove, in the outer suburbs of Dublin. His father resigned this position and left in a doomed pursuit of wealth in the Colorado gold mines; during his absence Padraic and his family lived in his mother’s family home in Co. Cavan. They returned to Dublin when his father returned goldless from America. Colum originally became a clerk for the Irish Railway Clearing House. Just after the turn of the century he began to write and publish poems, which gave him a local fame as a skilled young poet. Later, his abilities attracted an American patron (Thomas Hugh Kelly), who paid for him to
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attend University College Dublin. At this time he also became interested in theater and started to write plays. His 1902 play, The Saxon Shillin’, won a prestigious Cumann na nGaedheal drama prize. As it addressed the recruitment of Irishmen into the British army, it was precisely the type of drama that Dublin’s major dramatists desired: topical, somewhat controversial, and written by an Irishman. Colum found himself a success in Dublin’s theatrical society, and routinely associated with some of the artists he most admired: W. B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, and John M. Synge. He was an original founder of the Abbey Theatre in 1904, and the Abbey produced several more of his plays to considerable approbation: most notable of these were Broken Soil (1903), The Land (1905), and Thomas Muskerry (1910). His early dramas are generally considered his best, and subsequent plays did not fulfill the full promise of his earlier work. Later in life, however, he experimented skillfully with the Japanese Noh tradition (Moytura: A Play for Dancers [1963]). Colum was fascinated by the Irish cultural and linguistic revival; he joined the Gaelic League in 1901, and began to call himself not “Patrick Collumb” but “Padraic Colum.” He was also a supporter of Arthur Griffith (founder and first leader of Sinn Féin), and supported a policy of national independence. Although he was in the United States at the time of the Easter Rising in 1916, he published a volume of Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood poems in honor of the dead. In 1912 Colum married Mary Maguire, a thoughtful teacher who was just beginning a distinguished career as a reviewer and critic. He remained devoted to her for the rest of his life. Their early years together www.abc-clio.com
were troubled by financial difficulties, which may account for their decision to remain in the United States when they were on a vacation there in 1914. Some scholars believe they decided to emigrate permanently before leaving Ireland. Colum and Mary were to spend most of the rest of their lives in the United States (with the three-year exception of 1930–1933, when they resided in France and renewed their friendship with James Joyce; Colum occasionally helped Joyce by typing portions of Finnegans Wake ). They were to become instrumental figures in the Irish-American literary world; their personal knowledge of Irish writers and their ability to review the writers’ works clearly and sensitively gave them many opportunities to promote Irish writing. Among much other work, Colum wrote a particularly sensitive preface to the separately published installment of Finnegans Wake, Anna Livia Plurabelle. Settling in New York, both Colums taught and lectured. Mary became the more prominent critic, but Padraic began to find new creative strengths in his writings. He started to write a children’s column in a local newspaper, and found that writing for children was perhaps his strongest literary ability. He was pleased when, in 1922, the Legislature of Hawaii commissioned him to write a children’s book about Hawaiian folklore. He visited the islands, conducted researches, and produced several books, the best of which is likely The Bright Islands (1925). Colum’s skill as a writer of books for children ensured a small, steady income, and he became highly prolific. He was particularly interested in reinterpreting mythology for children, and many of his works involve mythological heroes: ABC-CLIO
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The Adventures of Odysseus (1918); The Children of Odin (1920); The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles (1921). He also continued to write poetry for adults. His verse is particularly strong in traditional ballad modes, and he wrote several poems that have been set to music effectively. His “She Moved Through the Fair” is still widely known in Ireland, as is “The Old Woman of the Roads.” His poems reveal a sensitivity to age, poverty, weariness, and sadness that is perhaps most closely comparable with elements of James Stephens’s work. (Stephens and Colum were close friends). After returning from their visit to France, the Colums again settled into Manhattan, where they began teaching at Columbia University. They later became American citizens. In 1957 Colum published his strongest novel, The Flying Swans. Padraic was heartbroken by Mary’s death in 1957, and set himself to editing her memoirs of Joyce with passages he had written: this was published in 1958 as Our Friend James Joyce. A year later he published his long-planned biography of Arthur Griffith, Ourselves Alone. In his last years Colum continued to publish prolifically and lecture often. He became something of a genial paternal figure to a younger generation of writers and frequently visited Ireland. He received numerous honors in both America and Ireland and served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets (1950–1951). Although Padraic died in Connecticut on January 11, 1972, he is buried in Dublin, with Mary. Colum was one of the major figures of Irish-American literature. Although much of his best work was done while still in Ireland, he remained a practicing poet of distinction in New York, and his books for www.abc-clio.com
children were works written with skill in a difficult genre. In his frequent role as critic, lecturer, or reviewer, he promoted Irish writing in the United States and offered particularly strong and thoughtful advocacy of James Joyce. He also edited an anthology of Irish verse that was popular in the United States. Andrew Goodspeed See also: COLUM, Mary; JOYCE, James Augustine Aloysius; YEATS, William Butler References Bowen, Zack. Padraic Colum. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970. Colum, Padraic. Collected Poems. New York: Devin-Adair, 1953. Colum, Padraic. The Flying Swans. New York: Crown, 1957. Colum, Padraic. Selected Plays of Padraic Colum. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986. Sternlicht, Sanford. Padraic Colum. Boston: Twayne, 1985.
CONN, WILLIAM DAVID (1917–1993) Born in East Liberty, Pennsylvania, on October 8, 1917, William David Conn was the oldest son of William Robert Conn, a steamfitter for the Westinghouse Corporation, and Irish-born Margaret McFarland Conn. Conn, who went by Billy instead of William, dropped out of the Sacred Heart Parochial School to pursue a boxing career at age seventeen. He had learned how to box as a means of self-defense at age sixteen, taking lessons from his father’s friend and former boxer, Johnny Ray, who eventually became his manager. Conn, who never boxed as an amateur, immediately entered the professional ranks as a light heavyweight, winning eight of his first fourteen fights. Although he lost
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his first bout against Dick Woodward, in Fairmont, West Virginia, on June 28, 1934, he won his second fight against Johnny Lewis, in Charleston, South Carolina, on July 20, 1934, by a knockout in the third round. Beginning September 9, 1935, Conn won twenty-seven consecutive bouts, including three knockouts and one decision. All of these fights occurred in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he acquired the moniker, the “Pittsburgh Kid.” Notable fighters, such as Vince Dundee, Babe Risko, Teddy Yarosz, and Fritzie Zivic, succumbed to Conn’s winning streak. His winning streak came to an end on August 13, 1937, in the tenth round of a fight against Young John Corbett III in San Francisco, California. Conn avenged his loss to Corbett on November 8, 1937, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, winning in the tenth round. By the spring of 1939, Conn was considered to be a leading contender for the light heavyweight world title. On February 4, 1939, Melio Bettina defeated Tiger Jack Fox for the light heavyweight world championship, a title recently vacated by Joe Louis, who had held the heavyweight title since June 22, 1937. Conn entered the ring against Bettina for the light heavyweight world title in New York, on July 13, 1939. He won the title on points, after going the entire fifteen rounds against Bettina. On September 25, 1939, Conn defended his title against Bettina, again winning a fifteenround bout on points in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Gus Lesnivich challenged the Pittsburgh Kid for the world light heavyweight title on November 17, 1939, in New York. Conn defended his title against Lesnivich in a fifteen-round bout decided on points. Conn’s bout against Lesnivich, his last of 1939, marked the end of the year www.abc-clio.com
in which he won the Edgar J. Neil Trophy, awarded to the person who had done the most to advance the sport of boxing during the year by the nation’s boxing writers. Conn remained the world’s light heavyweight champion through the spring of 1941. On June 5, 1940, he defended his title for the last time against Lesnivich, winning a fifteen-round bout on points in Detroit, Michigan. Conn’s next fight, on September 6, 1940, against Bob Pastor, was his first as a heavyweight. He won the fight, knocking Pastor out in the thirteenth round. Conn continued to fight as a heavyweight through the spring of 1941. In seven matches against the heavyweights, the light heavyweight champion remained undefeated, winning four bouts by knockouts. Conn, who won The Ring Magazine Merit Award in 1940, relinquished the world light heavyweight title in May 1941, in anticipation of challenging Joe Louis for the world heavyweight title. On June 18, 1941, he fought Louis for the world heavyweight title in New York, losing on points in the thirteenth round. Although a rematch against Louis was scheduled for October 12, 1941, in Yankee Stadium, in New York, Secretary of War Henry Stimson canceled the bout, ordering all boxers back to their respective service units. For Conn, that meant serving in the United States Army from 1942 to 1946. Much anticipated, the bout between Conn and Louis occurred on June 19, 1946, with Louis winning in the eighth round. Conn, who did not enter the ring in 1947, fought three times in 1948, before retiring from the sport after a six-round exhibition against Louis in Chicago, Illinois, on December 10, 1948. Conn, who earned $700,000 alone from his second fight with Louis, retired from boxing in good financial shape. By ABC-CLIO
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investing his savings wisely in oil, automobile, and other enterprises, he supported his wife and three sons comfortably. An inaugural inductee into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1990, Conn died of pneumonia in a Veterans Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on May 29, 1993. Adam R. Hornbuckle See also: PENNSYLVANIA References Grasso, John. “Conn, William David.” Biographical Dictionary of American Sports: Basketball and Other Indoor Sports, edited by David L. Porter. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989: 367–368. Menke, Frank G. The Encyclopedia of Sports. Rev. ed. New York: A. S. Barnes and Company, 1969. Sammons, Jeffrey T. Beyond The Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
CONNOLLY, JAMES BRENDAN (1868–1957) James Connolly was born in South Boston, Massachusetts, on October 28, 1868, one of twelve children of John and Ann O’Donnell Connolly, both Irish-born Catholics; his father worked as a fisherman on the “T” wharf of the Boston waterfront. Educated at the Notre Dame Academy and the Mather and Lawrence Grammar School, Connolly did not graduate from high school, but instead went to work as a clerk at a Boston insurance company. In 1892 he secured employment with the United States Army Corps of Engineers in Savannah, Georgia; his brother, Michael, who already worked for the Savannah District Army Corps of Engineers, helped James get a job at the Corps of Engineers, where he worked as a clerk, recorder, and inspector for three years. www.abc-clio.com
Portrait of 1896 Olympic track and field gold medal winner James Brendan Connolly. (Library of Congress)
In Savannah, Connolly became involved in local sports as a participant, organizer, and writer. He organized the Catholic Library Association (CLA) track and field and football teams, and as football captain, led CLA to a 36–0 win over the Young Hebrew Association, scoring three touchdowns himself. As the captain of the CLA cycling team, Connolly promoted cycling through the Savannah Wheelmen. His enthusiasm for cycling did not go unnoticed, as Savannah mayor John J. McDonough, proclaimed “that Mr. James B. Connolly is well and favorably known to me as the leader in Savannah in cycling and general athletic circles and that his reputation for integrity is unquestioned.” In addition to his work with the CLA and Savannah Wheelmen, Connolly also helped develop the Savannah Baseball Club and the Savannah Football Team, and he managed
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Pat Ready, a local prizefighter. Finally he wrote a weekly sports column for the Lamplighter. Despite not graduating from high school, Connolly continued his education through correspondence courses and, in 1895, passed the entrance examination to Harvard University. After a tryout for the Harvard football team resulted in a broken collarbone, he turned his attention to track and field, specializing in the triple jump. No novice to the triple jump, Connolly had won the U.S. national championship in the event in 1890, representing South Boston’s Trimount Athletic Club. With the revival of the Olympic Games in 1896, he requested a leave of absence from Harvard to compete in Athens, Greece. Harvard granted a leave of absence to Ellery Clark, a senior honors student, to join the U.S. Olympic team, but denied Connolly’s request. Informed that he would have to resign from the university to compete in the games and then apply for readmission, Connolly replied, “I am not resigning and I’m not making application to re-enter on my return. I am through with this college right now. Good day.” Winning the triple jump, he became the first Olympic champion of the modern era. Connolly also finished second in the high jump and third in the long jump in 1896 and second in the triple jump in 1900. In 1898 Connolly fought in the Spanish-American War as a member of the Ninth Massachusetts Infantry, formerly known as the Irish Fighting Ninth during the Civil War. The Boston Globe published his accounts of the war as Letters from the Front in Cuba. Connolly, who attended the 1904 Olympic Games as a journalist, became a prolific writer of maritime stories, many of which were based on his own www.abc-clio.com
experience working on ships and docks. Connolly also ran unsuccessful campaigns for the U.S. Congress as a Progressive in 1912 and 1914. As the commissioner for the American Committee for Relief in Ireland, Connolly spent much time in Ireland and became closely associated with the Irish Republican Army, which fought for independence from Great Britain. Adam R. Hornbuckle See also: BOSTON; IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY Reference Wilcox, Ralph C. “‘The English as Poor Losers’ and Other Thoughts on the Modernization of Sport: The Literary Works of James Brendan Connolly, First Modern Olympic Victor.” www.rms-republic.com/ connolly.html (accessed June 30, 2007).
COOKE, JOHN WILLIAM (1920–1968) Politician and ideologue of the Peronist movement, John William Cooke was born on November 14, 1920 (although 1919 has also been suggested) in La Plata, capital city of the Buenos Aires province. John William and his brother David were sons of Juan Isaac Cooke (1895–1957) and María Elvira Lenci. Juan Isaac Cooke, the son of a Dublin-born immigrant, was a distinguished member of the Junta Renovadora faction within the Radical Civic Union party, which supported Juan Domingo Perón’s standing in the 1946 presidential elections. Cooke’s father, Juan Isaac, was minister of foreign affairs, national member of parliament (MP), and ambassador to Brazil. From an early age John William Cooke was familiarized with political debate, so it was natural for him to be a politically committed student in secondary school. ABC-CLIO
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He studied in the school of law at the University of La Plata, and graduated in 1943. During his student years Cooke joined the radical forces of the Intransigent University Union, as well as FORJA (Fuerza de Orientación Radical de la Joven Argentina), an important nationalist and anti-imperialist political hub of its time. In 1946, at the early age of twenty-five, Cooke was elected MP for Junta Renovadora and would continue to serve in parliament up to 1951. Cooke was appointed secretary of the Peronist group of MPs and member of the Executive Committee of Partido Único (a coalition of the Labour Party, the Independent Party, and Junta Renovadora, which would become the Peronist Party). The Antitrust Act was one of the parliamentary projects submitted by John W. Cooke. In opposition to his own political party, he voted against the Chapultepec Act and the San Francisco Convention of 1945, which he considered against national sovereignty. Cooke coauthored with Ricardo Guardo one of the constitutional amendment projects that was proposed for voting. Additionally, he was a professor of political economics and constitutional law at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1950 Cooke joined the Juan Manuel de Rosas Historical Society, the most important meeting point for revisionist historians in the country, and in 1954 he was appointed its vice president. He edited the weekly paper De Frente and adopted a national stand opposing the contracts with the Standard Oil Company. After a failed revolt against Perón in June 1955, Cooke was offered the post of secretary of technical affairs, but refused and was therefore appointed to head the Peronist Party in Buenos Aires. Owing to the unstable political context he recommended the organization of www.abc-clio.com
popular militias to defend the democratic regime against a coup d’état. The coup took place on September 16, 1955, when the so-called Revolución Libertadora, led by Eduardo Lonardi, overthrew the Peronist rule. Juan D. Perón was exiled in Paraguay and later in Venezuela and Spain, and the Peronist Party (and even the word “Perón”) was banned. Cooke escaped and went into hiding for a time until he was seized and imprisoned in Buenos Aires and later in Patagonia. On November 2, 1956, Perón wrote the famous letter that entitled John W. Cooke, “who is now jailed for his loyalty to our cause and our movement, to represent myself in any circumstance or political activity. His decision will be my decision, and his word will be my word” (Perón to Cooke, 2 November 1956). Perón appointed Cooke his political envoy, a responsibility held by Cooke until 1959, and the Peronist movement’s head in case of Perón’s death. After 1955 Cooke became a key player of Resistencia Peronista, the organization created to recover the democratic government from the military rulers. From prison, Cooke led different efforts among students and workers, including strikes, sabotage, and operations using homemade bombs. In 1957 Cooke and other Peronist activists escaped from the prison of Río Gallegos and settled in Chile. That year Cooke married Alicia Graciana Eguren (1924–1977), a writer and professor of literature. She was abducted on January 26, 1977, by an Argentine Navy death squad and became one of the desaparecidos. Cooke’s correspondence with Perón was initiated in 1957 and did not end until 1966, when their relations began cooling off. Cooke was one of the negotiators of a secret pact between Perón and the leader of
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Unión Cívica Radical Intransigente (UCRI), Arturo Frondizi, who in the 1958 presidential elections obtained the Peronist votes in exchange for several appointments and other concessions to the Peronist movement. Once in power—acting between military and labor union pressures— Frondizi was reluctant to fulfill his commitment, and a series of strikes was organized. In January 1959 Cooke was an active leader in the actions against the privatization of Lisandro de la Torre meat-packing plant. After this he was banished to Uruguay. Cooke had an influential part in creating the first Argentine rural guerrilla Uturunco group, in the province of Tucumán. The group was responsible for the attack and capture of a police station at Christmas 1959. In 1960 Cooke settled in Havana, Cuba, and established a lifetime relation with Ernesto “Che” Guevara. On April 17, 1961, Cooke participated in the battle at Playa Girón (or Bay of Pigs, as it is referred to in the United States). Cooke wanted to make Peronism known in Cuba and to bring the Cuban revolution to Peronism. A project arranged by Cooke in 1962 included Fidel Castro’s proposal to Perón that he could permanently reside in Cuba. However Perón failed to answer Castro’s invitation. One of Cooke’s revolutionary undertakings was Acción Revolucionaria Peronista. In 1962 Cooke and Che Guevara backed the People’s Guerrilla Army of Jorge Ricardo Massetti, which engaged in attacks in Salta until 1964. In 1967–1968, Cooke organized guerrilla groups at Taco Ralo. When Guevara went to Bolivia, Cooke was fighting on the Argentine side of the border, presumably to unite with Guevara’s forces. In his last years, Cooke had a radical perspective that included www.abc-clio.com
direct action, and he was an important theorist of the left side within the Peronist movement. Cooke’s ideology was popular and inspiring among Argentine and other Latin American activists, in particular those who recognized labor movements like Peronism as the most efficient channels for class struggle and the fastest approach to attain the dictatorship of proletariat. Many of his books were published or reprinted posthumously, among them La Lucha por la Liberación Nacional. El Retorno de Perón. La Revolución y el Peronismo (1971), Correspondencia Perón-Cooke (1972), Apuntes para la Militancia (1973), and Peronismo y Revolución. El Peronismo y el Golpe de Estado. Informe a las Bases (1973). Cooke died of cancer in Buenos Aires on September 19, 1968. Edmundo Murray See also: BAXTER, José Luis; GUEVARA LYNCH, Ernesto “Che”; MURRAY, Luis Alberto; WALSH, Rodolfo. References Adelchanow, Melina Natalia. “John William Cooke y su Visión del Pasado Argentino. Reflexiones Entre la Historia y la Política.” Postgraduate dissertation, Universidad de Belgrano, Buenos Aires, 2005. Caro Figueroa, Gregorio. “John William Cooke: Ignorado, Condenado y Luego Mitificado. Todo es Historia 288 (June 1991): 8–9. Chávez, Fermín. John William Cooke, el Diputado y el Politico. Buenos Aires: Círculo de Legisladores de la Nación, 1998. Galasso, Norberto. Cooke: de Perón al Che. Una Biografía Política. Rosario: Homo Sapiens, 1997. Gillespie, Richard. J.W. Cooke: el Peronismo Alternativo. Buenos Aires: Cántaro Editores, 1989. Goldar, Ernesto. “John William Cooke: De Perón al Che Guevara.” Todo es Historia 288 (June 1991): 10–40. Mazzeo, Miguel. Cooke, de Vuelta. El Gran Descartado de la Historia Argentina. Buenos Aires: La Rosa Blindada, 1999. ABC-CLIO
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COSTA RICA Although Christopher Columbus did land on the coast of what became Costa Rica, it did not become an administrative unit until 1868 when it became a province under the “audiencia” of Guatemala. At that time it was known as Nuevo Cartago, and in 1821, as the Republic of Costa Rica, it gained its independence from Spain. After becoming a member of the Central American Federation from 1823 until 1838, it then became an independent republic. Costa Rica’s geographical position between Panama (to the south) and Nicaragua (to the north) has meant that it has been involved in disputes in both countries. The first of these was the attempts by the American William Walker to seize control of Nicaragua. Using volunteers to make up a mercenary army, Walker’s soldiers included a number of Irish adventurers. As it has long been relatively poor, Costa Rica was underpopulated and in the mid-nineteenth century encouraged settlers to take up land in the country. A large number of Germans had successfully settled in Costa Rica, but attempts by Irish activist Thomas Meagher to encourage Irish settlement in the country failed. When, on an exploratory expedition to Central America, Meagher visited the Costa Rican capital of San José in 1858, he found that the man in charge of the local hospital, Dr. Hogan, was Irish, and one of his patients was a seventeen-year-old Canadian soldier of Irish ancestry. The boy had come to Central America with William Walker but had been captured when Walker’s men had been overwhelmed in battle by the Costa Ricans. Meagher later advertised in New York newspapers for the teenager’s parents but none were traced. Meagher soon www.abc-clio.com
decided that Irish migration to Costa Rica was not practicable. During the early twentieth century there was still somewhat of an Irish presence in Costa Rica. Some Britons of Irish descent worked for the Anglo-Costa Rican Bank (founded 1863); and in 1937 the president of the Rotary Club in San José was an Irishman, Daniel Molloy. In addition, the botanist Paul Carpenter Standley (1884–1963) wrote Flora of Costa Rica, which was published in four volumes in Chicago in 1937–1938—Standley’s mother was of Irish descent. Kenneth Strachan, whose grandmother was a Beamish from Cork, worked as a missionary with the Latin American Mission, and was the subject of a biography, Who Shall Ascend, by Elisabeth Elliot. From the 1980s because of its beaches, climate, and wildlife, Costa Rica became a popular destination for tourists, including some from Ireland. Arguing that Costa Rica should concentrate on high-technology industry, Eva Paus wrote Foreign Investment, Development, and Globalization: Can Costa Rica Become Ireland?, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in New York in 2005. She urged that Costa Rica could develop in the same way that Ireland had transformed itself during the 1980s from a largely agricultural country to a modern economy by taking advantage of globalization. Mention should also be made of the French-Italian film Viva Maria! (1965), which relates the fictional story of an Irish nationalist who flees England after bombing an army base and a London club in 1907. He arrives in a Central American republic (possibly Costa Rica, Nicaragua, or Honduras) where he and his daughter continue attacking British interests. The man is killed soon afterwards but his daughter,
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Maria, joins with another girl also called Maria (played by Brigitte Bardot) to stage a revolution. Justin Corfield See also: MEAGHER, Thomas Francis; NICARAGUA; PANAMA References Elliot, Elisabeth, Who Shall Ascend: The Life of R. Kenneth Strachan of Costa Rica, London: Hodder & Stroughton, 1968. Meagher, Thomas Francis. Vacaciones en Costa Rica, San José: Tipgrafia Trejos Hermanos, 1923.
COTTER, WILLIAM (DATES UNKNOWN) Following the Brazilian scheme to encourage European immigration, mercenaries and colonists were recruited in the 1820s in Germany and Ireland. In 1823, the German governments forbade emigration to Brazil to neutralize the enterprise of Gregor von Schäffer, a colonel in Brazil who enlisted as many as 2,000 soldiers and 5,000 colonists from northern and western Germany. Dom Pedro I, the Brazilian emperor (1798–1834), who in 1822 had proclaimed Brazil’s independence from Portugal, then turned to Ireland, with equally poor results. William Cotter, an Irish-born colonel in the service of the Brazilian army, proved as unscrupulous as Schäffer. In October 1826, he was sent to Ireland and once in Cork hired between 2,400 and 2,800 Irish farmers with no military experience of any kind. The immigrants who sailed from Cork to Brazil (Rio de Janeiro, Espirito Santo, and São Paulo) in ten ships included 2,450 men, 335 women, 123 young men and women, and 230 children. Most were army recruits who enlisted because the contract promised them pay and www.abc-clio.com
allowances equal to one shilling per day and victuals, as well as fifty acres of land after five years of service in the army. They arrived in Rio de Janeiro between December 1827 and January 1828. Learning that the men would be press-ganged in Brazil’s Imperial army and realizing that Cotter’s promises were a bunch of lies, the immigrants complained to the British ambassador, Robert Gordon, who logged a strong protest about the unfair treatment of the families before Brazilian authorities to no avail. Fortunately, the diplomat did not give up and kept applying pressure on the Brazilian government on the Irishmen’s behalf. This resulted in minor improvements in their situation and allowed most to refuse enlistment. Eventually, only less than 400 of the men joined the Imperial army, and any thoughts of creating an Irish Legion had to be abandoned. Too few to become a separate unit, the Irishmen were integrated into the 3rd (German) Battalion of Grenadiers. This put them in contact with men who were as unhappy as themselves. War with Argentina over Banda Oriental (today known as Uruguay) had broken out in 1826, but the Irishmen never made it to the front. In 1827 Argentina and the rebellious province of Banda Oriental defeated the Brazilian forces. The British mediated the conclusion of the conflict, and the province became independent Uruguay. The Irish remained in Rio de Janeiro on garrison duty, but living conditions were precarious and many died of illness. Applications for medicines directed to the Brazilian officials fell upon deaf ears. Doctors Dixon and Coates of the British Legation provided medicines for the sick, largely at their own expense. The African slaves—called moleques— who formed the majority of the population ABC-CLIO
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of the Imperial capital profoundly disliked the German and Irish mercenaries. Being themselves the poorest class of people in Brazil, they took a fiendish delight in tormenting the Irish at every opportunity, and they called them escravos brancos. There were constant scuffles and brawls in the streets. The Irish were unarmed, and when they were attacked by the armed slaves they had only sticks and their fists with which to defend themselves. On March 15, 1828, Irish men, women, and children, 101 families in all of the Cork emigrants, left Rio on the Victoria for Salvador, a town on the Atlantic coast. They arrived on March 28 and in August 3 settled as farm laborers in Taperoa, near Valença. For those who remained in Rio, the sorry saga came to an end when in June 1828 seventy or eighty Irishmen serving the 3rd Grenadier Battalion mutinied. The mutineers took to the streets, where many Irish civilians swelled their ranks. Alcohol was flowing freely in a matter of minutes, and there was an orgy of destruction in the center of Rio, where the black slaves took advantage of the chaos to settle scores with the hated foreigners. In desperation, the authorities issued arms to the civilian population, including the slaves. Ferocious street combat followed and lasted for a whole day and night. Eventually, the mutineers withdrew to their barracks. Brazilian troops were rushed to the capital, and the authorities asked the British and French naval commanders to land sailors and marines to help them. On June 12 and 13 the rebel barracks were put under siege. The episode ended in carnage, with as many as 150 soldiers of fortune (both German and Irish) killed during the mutiny. Many of the Irish recruited by William Cotter (both military and civilian) were www.abc-clio.com
repatriated in July 1828, and it is known that at least 1,400 of them returned to the British Isles. The voyage home was organized at the insistence of Robert Gordon and was paid for by the Brazilian government. Perhaps as many as 400 others stayed in Brazil as farmers and eventually settled in the southern provinces of Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul. This leaves 600 Irish unaccounted for, most of whom probably died. The emperor Dom Pedro blamed the whole incident on the war minister, Barbozo, whom he accused of inciting the mutiny and doing nothing to suppress it. Barbozo was dismissed from his office. There were no further accounts of William Cotter. Edmundo Murray See also: ARGENTINA; BRAZIL; URUGUAY References Basto, Fernando L. B. Ex-combatentes Irlandeses em Taperoá. Rio de Janeiro: Editorial Vozes, 1971. Rodriguez, Moises Enrique. Freedom’s Mercenaries: British Volunteers in the Wars of Independence of Latin America. Vevey: Author’s Edition, 2004. Sullivan, Eileen A. “Irish Mercenaries in Nineteenth-Century Brazil.” http://gogobrazil.com (accessed March 28, 2005). Von Allendorfer, Frederic. “An Irish Regiment in Brazil, 1826–1828.” The Irish Sword 3 (1957–1958): 28–31.
COUGHLIN, FATHER CHARLES EDWARD (1891–1979) A Catholic priest who acquired large popularity in the 1930s with his Sunday radio sermons, Father Charles Coughlin became one of the most controversial figures of the New Deal era for his anti-Semitic pronouncements. Born in Canada of IrishAmerican parents, Coughlin founded a
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Father Charles Edward Coughlin at a microphone in New York in 1933. Coughlin gained controversial popularity for his anti-Semitic sermons. (Library of Congress).
parish in 1923, the Shrine of the Little Flower, in Royal Oak, Detroit. In 1926 he began radio preaching, focusing initially on exclusively religious topics but gradually shifting to topical subjects such as communism, prohibition, and especially the Depression, as he railed against the “banksters” and the Hoover administration. The interest of the subjects and Coughlin’s talent for broadcasting attracted an audience of about 10 million regular listeners and growing donations to his “radio parish,” the Radio League of the Little Flower. Coughlin was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), but his esteem was one-sided, and after the 1932 election he was not invited to join the president’s entourage. Coughlin’s www.abc-clio.com
disappointment with FDR became more and more vocal until, in 1936, he announced the formation of the Union Party (thus called after Lincoln’s antislavery party), a coalition of the main opponents to the New Deal. Coughlin’s partners in this were Gerald L. K. Smith (formerly one of Huey Long’s lieutenants) and Dr. Francis Townsend, and their presidential candidate was William Lemke. The campaign was characterized by extreme verbal violence and had some climactic moments but, ultimately, the Union Party received fewer than 900,000 votes in the election, about onetenth of the outcome they expected. After this, Coughlin retired from broadcasting, but in early 1937 he resumed his Sunday lectures, gradually turning the ABC-CLIO
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anti-Semitic tones that had previously remained in the background into rabid tirades that escalated to a climax in 1938–1939. In that period, Coughlin made a series of speeches in which he minimized the gravity of Kristallnacht and defined Fascism and Nazism as “defense movements” against “Jew-dominated Communism”; spoke, and was acclaimed, at a rally of the German-American Bund (an openly proNazi organization) at Madison Square Garden in New York; and encouraged the foundation of the Christian Front, a proFascist paramilitary organization that engaged in boycotts and attacks against Jewish shops and people. All of these activities were supported throughout by Social Justice, the weekly newspaper Coughlin had founded in 1936, whose circulation reached an estimated 300,000 copies and whose contributors included European fascists and champions of isolationism, anti-immigration movements, and anti-Semitism. Between August and November 1938, Social Justice published the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, introduced and annotated by Coughlin himself. Coughlin’s tirades, however, gradually alienated a public increasingly supportive of American intervention in World War II. Contributions and subscriptions collapsed, and in 1940 Coughlin abandoned broadcasting. He continued to publish until April 1942, when strong pressure from his ecclesiastic superiors forced him to return to his parish duties. He retired in 1966 and died of a heart attack in 1979. Coughlin, whose message sprang mainly from populism and social Catholicism, is widely considered to be the forefather of modern televangelism and hate radio. Lucilla Cremoni www.abc-clio.com
See also: CATHOLIC CHURCH, the; MICHIGAN References Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression. New York: Vintage Books, 1982. Cremoni, Lucilla. “Antisemitism and Populism in the United States in the 1930s: The Case of Father Coughlin.” Patterns of Prejudice 32, no. 1 (January 1998): 25–38. Warren, Donald. Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, the Father of Hate Radio. New York: The Free Press, 1997.
COWELL, HENRY DIXON (1897–1965) A second-generation Irish American, Henry Cowell was a composer, pianist, writer on music, and teacher. One of the greatest innovators in early twentieth-century art music, Cowell pioneered new techniques of piano playing that became avant-garde standards and combined these with elements of Irish traditional music and references to Celtic legends. He was born in Menlo Park, California, on March 11, 1897, the son of Harry Cowell, an immigrant Irishman, and the writer Clarissa Dixon Cowell. He grew up in a nonconformist social environment with a constant lack of financial resources. The musical talents of the widely read boy were discovered by two professors from Stanford University who enabled Cowell to take courses there (1914–1917) despite his lack of a formal education. Cowell’s first acknowledged compositions for the piano date from 1910, preceding his musical studies at Stanford with Charles Seeger. Apart from his father’s influence, Cowell’s interest in Irish culture evolved from his association with John Varian, a theosopher and translator of Irish mythological verse. Some of Cowell’s early music was written to accompany Varian’s plays and
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Composer Henry Cowell tuning a piano. Combining traditional Irish music with avant-garde arrangements, Cowell was one of the greatest innovators in early twentieth-century art music. (Bettmann/Corbis)
was later arranged as concert pieces. Among them is The Tides of Manaunaun (ca. 1912), the earliest piece involving his new technique of tone clusters—blocks of notes played simultaneously using the fist or the elbow. Another of his inventions is the play on the open strings of the piano, by stroking or plucking the strings in combination with silently pressed-down keys to change the sound spectrum. Important works using this technique were Aeolian Harp (1923) and The Banshee (1924) for solo piano and the Irish Suite (1929) for string piano and small orchestra. These techniques aroused great attention in musical circles in America and Europe, where he gave many recitals and lessons between www.abc-clio.com
1922 and 1932. Often his critics focused on the techniques only, describing his extraordinary style of playing with fists, elbows, and stirring inside the body of the instrument, and ignored his actual music. Cowell’s book New Musical Resources (1930), however, confirmed his reputation as an innovative and highly individual thinker on contemporary art music. His creative ideas were admired by Bartók, Schönberg, and other leading musical figures of his time. Following a court case on moral misconduct to which he pleaded guilty, Cowell was imprisoned in San Quentin from 1936 to 1940. On his release he moved to White Plains, New York, where he married the ABC-CLIO
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folklorist and photographer Sidney Hawkins Robertson in 1941. He made music broadcasts for the Office of War Information and later taught at Columbia University (1949–1965). He never stopped composing, even in difficult circumstances, and his enormous list of works includes 21 symphonies, 34 stage works, 42 choral works, over 100 songs, and hundreds of chamber music and solo instrumental pieces. In his later years he was increasingly occupied by his other great musical interest, ethnological studies of Asian music, which resulted in a number of research travels, commissioned by the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution, to Iran, India, and Japan. Cowell survived seven strokes and serious heart disease and eventually died of cancer in Shady, New York, on December 10, 1965. Axel Klein See also: MUSIC IN AMERICA, IRISH References Lichtenwanger, William. The Music of Henry Cowell: A Descriptive Catalog. New York: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1986. Mead, Rita H. Henry Cowell’s New Music, 1925–1936: The Society, the Music Editions, and the Recordings. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981. Nicholls, David, ed. The Whole World of Music: A Henry Cowell Symposium. London: Routledge, 1998. Sachs, Joel. Henry Cowell, a Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Saylor, Bruce. The Writings of Henry Cowell: A Descriptive Bibliography. New York: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1977.
CRAIG, JOHN (1709–1774) John Craig was born on August 17, 1709, into a middle-class family in the parish of Donegore, Co. Antrim, in the north of Ireland. His parents’ ancestors had helped www.abc-clio.com
set up the Donegore Presbyterian church during the first Ulster Plantation. The young Craig grew up feeling both indebted to these previous generations who had protected the church during turbulent periods of rebellion and persecution, and guilty that he had been born at a time of relative calm. Craig would later look to the American frontier as a place to prove his spiritual worth. Craig was educated in Ulster for nine years and completed his studies at the University of Edinburgh, taking an MA in 1732. However, Craig instead resolved secretly to study medicine. But his guilt at turning away from the church led him to attempt suicide, pleading with God that if by some miracle he should survive, he would do anything God wished. After six months Craig had recovered sufficiently to resolve to emigrate and seek ordination in America. In 1734, Craig apparently traveled alone to Pennsylvania where he studied theology under the Irish-born Reverend John Thomson of Chestnut Level. In 1738 Craig was licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Donegal, which then covered most of Pennsylvania west of Philadelphia and the whole southwestern frontier. After two years in temporary ministries in western Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, in 1740 Craig accepted a position at the Scotch-Irish settlement at Augusta County, Virginia. Augusta County had only just been established, making Craig the first permanently settled clergyman west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Craig preached and farmed in Augusta County, which was spread over 1,800 miles, for the rest of his life; he would preach on alternate Sundays at two churches, the Augusta Stone church near Staunton and the Tinkling Spring church
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near Fishville, which were 10 miles apart. He also established thirteen churches in western Virginia and North Carolina. Despite relinquishing the Tinkling Spring ministry in 1764, Craig continued to preach into old age, remaining at the Augusta Stone church until his death in 1774. From its very beginnings, the Presbyterian church of colonial America was reliant on foreign ministers, particularly those who, like Craig, were Ulster born and Scottish educated. Yet whereas in Ireland Presbyterian ministers received a regular stipend from the crown, clergymen in colonial America relied on the generosity of their parishioners. Craig struggled unsuccessfully to secure a regular salary from a disparate parish whose inhabitants had received little religious education back in Ulster. He also became entangled in a power struggle between two ruthless Tinkling Spring parishioners, John Lewis and James Patton. But difficult parishioners were the least of Craig’s problems. Between 1741 and 1748 the first Great Awakening, colonial America’s first wave of religious enthusiasm, split the Presbyterian Church in two, the revivalists making up the “New Side” and the traditionalists, like Craig, the “Old Side.” In 1741 Old Side clergymen Craig, Francis Alison, and John Thomson signed a protestation that expelled the New Side evangelists led by Gilbert Tennant, Samuel Blair, and Samuel Finlay from the Philadelphia Synod. Thomson and many other Old Side clergy were eventually expelled from their pulpits. However, Craig was able to retain control of his own churches, probably because the newly established parishes of the Western frontier were less ethnically and ideologically mixed than eastern congregations. Ironically, the threat of the FrenchIndian war (1755–1763) allowed Craig to www.abc-clio.com
strengthen his ministry further by using his own money to fortify his churches. However these upheavals only heightened Craig’s sense of isolation and selfdoubt, affecting his fragile mental state. In 1745 Craig suffered an acute depression in which he considered abandoning his family, church, and faith. But it was his faith that restored him once again. Indeed, Craig’s faith continued to inspire him in later life: first to become a champion of human rights during a crisis in colonialBritish relations from 1763, and second to write his memoir, an invaluable account of Scotch-Irish communities on the American frontier in 1769–1770. Tara Stubbs See also: ETHNIC AND RACE RELATIONS (Irish and Indigenous Peoples), PRESBYTERIANISM, SCOTS-IRISH CULTURE, SCOTS-IRISH AND MILITARY CONFLICT References Craig, John. Memoir (1769–1780). In the Historical Foundation of the Presbyterian and Reformed Churches, Montreat, North Carolina. Craig, L. K. Reverend John Craig, 1709–1774. New Orleans: Accurate Letter Company, 1963. Miller, Kerby A., Arnold Schier, Bruce D. Boling, and David N. Doyle, Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan— Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1617–1815. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
CREAGHE, JOHN “JUAN” (1841–1920) John “Juan” Creaghe, an international revolutionary anarchist whose name is most often associated with anarchism in England and Argentina (though he was also active in the United States in support of exiled Mexican anarchists), helped ABC-CLIO
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pioneer a movement of critical importance to Argentine and South American labor history. Born in 1841 in Limerick, Creaghe took up his medical practice at Mitchelstown, Co. Cork, a year after qualifying as a physician in 1865 at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin. He was fully licensed as a medical practitioner in 1869 from the King’s and Queen’s Colleges of Physicians in Ireland. Creaghe remained in practice in Mitchelstown until 1874, when he emigrated to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and quickly became a follower of anarchism. It is likely that he became an anarchist at least in part under the influence of Errico Malatesta (1853–1932), the seminal anarchist thinker and activist. By 1890, Creaghe had relocated to Sheffield, where he worked in a poor, working-class district of the English city, which was populated by a great many Irish immigrants from Dublin. He soon involved himself with the local branch of the famous designer William Morris’s Socialist League, but they broke away early in 1891 to form a specifically anarchist group in Sheffield. The Sheffield Anarchist newspaper was founded by Creaghe and Fred Charles. In 1892 Creaghe left Sheffield and traveled to Liverpool, London, Barcelona, and finally, Buenos Aires. Once there, he began another publishing venture with El Oprimido (1893–1897), which became La Protesta Humana (1897–1903), and the hugely influential La Protesta (1903 to present day). In each case, Creaghe invested considerable time, energy, and money into these propagandist ventures that would eventually bear fruit in the form of the Federación Obrera Regional Argentina (FORA), the mighty anarcho-syndicalist union that won the hearts and loyalties www.abc-clio.com
of 20,000 Argentine workers by the time of the events of the Tragic Week of January 1919, when the army fired against the crowd on strike and killed about 1,000 persons in eight days. Creaghe was also heavily involved in the Free School movement in Buenos Aires and was director of the Rationalist School in Luján, an anarchist educational experiment along the lines of those founded by the Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer (1859–1909). Creaghe also rallied to the defense of a young Polish immigrant who killed the chief of police in Buenos Aires at an anarchist demonstration in 1909. At the same time, he worked as a doctor from his base in Luján, combining easily the roles of local physician and anarchist militant. Creaghe took to his travels again in 1911, settling eventually in Los Angeles, California, among Mexican anarchists. He took part in producing yet another influential anarchist newspaper, La Regeneración, and struck up a good friendship with the leading Mexican anarchist, Ricardo Flores Magón (1874–1922), who eventually died in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas. Magón, along with Creaghe, was involved in the Baja, California, revolt of 1910 and gave support to the fragmented anarchist movement in Mexico in the years after the start of the Mexican revolution of 1910–1914. Creaghe died in utter poverty in Washington, D.C., on February 19, 1920. Edmundo Murray
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See also: ARGENTINA References Ó Catháin, Máirtín. “Dr. John O’Dwyer Creaghe: Irish-Argentine Anarchist (1841–1920).” www.irlandeses.org (accessed December 11, 2004). Pasini, Fransico José. Anecdotario Lujanero. Luján: Librería de Mayo, 1977. 1-800-368-6868
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CREIGHTON, EDWARD CHARLES (1820–1874) Edward Charles Creighton gained wealth and fame as the builder of the transcontinental telegraph. The construction of telegraph lines entailed the use of draft animals and wagons; thus, the entrepreneurial Creighton established thriving enterprises in the related businesses of freighting, street grading, preparing railroad rights-of-way, and raising draft animals. Once wealthy, he ventured into real estate, banking, mining, and railroading. Creighton was born on August 31, 1820, in Belmont County, Ohio, near the town of Barnesville. He was the fifth child of James and Bridget (Hughes) McCrarin (as he acquired land and worked to build the National Road through Ohio during the 1820s, James copied his brother Christopher, who had married a Methodist and changed his surname to a Scottish form, Creighton). Edward attended public elementary school and began work as a cart boy at age fourteen. Four years later, his father provided him with a wagon and a team of horses, and his career as a freighter commenced; he hauled goods between Cumberland, Maryland, and Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1847, Creighton observed two Irish Americans erecting telegraph lines for a company owned by Irish immigrant Henry O’Reilly. The ethnic connections presented satellite business opportunities. For the next decade and a half, he superintended the construction of telegraph lines crisscrossing the area between the Appalachian Mountains and the Missouri River. The work put him in partnership with the people who eventually organized the Western Union Company. Ultimately, Creighton single-handedly surveyed the route for the transcontinental telegraph, and between www.abc-clio.com
July 2 and October 17, 1861, he oversaw the construction of the segment from Julesburg, Colorado, to Salt Lake City, Utah (six days later the builders of the western portion reached the town). Creighton’s street grading, railroad roadway preparation, and telegraph construction businesses had brought him to the frontier town of Omaha in 1856. That same year, he married Lucretia Wareham of Dayton, Ohio. They had a son, Charles, who died as a toddler (1859–1863). From his new hometown, Creighton established a lucrative freighting business, supplying miners beginning with the Pike’s Peak gold rush, as well as Mormons established in the Salt Lake City area. Subsequently, the Montana mines increased the operation, which lasted for decades until the railroads supplanted wagons for long-distance hauling. Edward used the profits (1,600-mile expeditions from Omaha to Salt Lake City to Virginia City, Montana, and return to Omaha, netted between $30,000 and $50,000) to enter the banking business. He began making personal loans in Omaha during the Panic of 1857 and entered into a partnership with the Kountze brothers to provide credit to the gold rushers in Colorado. They established the Colorado National Bank in Denver and the Rocky Mountain National Bank in Central City. In 1863, with Creighton as president, they chartered the First National Bank in Omaha. Creighton also invested in railroads and real estate; he came to own thirteen lots in Omaha and several thousand acres in eight counties in eastern Nebraska. However, greater fame and fortune came from the “possession” of tens of thousands of acres of open-range land (owned by the federal government) in the unorganized ABC-CLIO
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areas of western Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and Montana on which he raised cattle, oxen, horses, and sheep (on free prairie grass). According to legend, Creighton spawned the cattle industry on the northern Great Plains; supposedly, a snowstorm trapped him (or one of his employees; the myth has several versions) around Laramie, Wyoming, and he had to abandon teams of oxen, while making his way back to Omaha. Returning in the spring, he found the animals fat and healthy, proving bovines could survive the harsh winters. Undeniably, he became the leading stockman in the United States and was subsequently inducted as a charter member of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. Creighton’s career ended suddenly; on November 3, 1874, he collapsed at his office at the First National Bank. He did not regain consciousness and died at home two days later. Virtually all business activity ceased in Omaha during his funeral. He had established himself as the city’s leading entrepreneur and philanthropist, and the state’s wealthiest citizen. While he lived, he gave generously to the poor and endowed a Catholic convent, hospital, and cathedral in Omaha. He had spoken of starting a school; therefore, in his honor and memory, his wife used part of his estate to endow a university that bears his name, Creighton University. Dennis Milehich See also: CREIGHTON, John Andrew References Johnson, Allen, and Dumas Malone, eds. Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930. Mullens, P. A. Biographical Sketches of Edward Creighton, John A. Creighton, Mary Lucretia Creighton, Sarah Emily Creighton. Omaha, NE: Creighton University, 1901. www.abc-clio.com
Nielson, P. Raymond. “Edward Creighton and the Pacific Telegraph.” Mid-America: An Historical Review 24 (January 1942): 61–74.
CREIGHTON, JOHN ANDREW (1831–1907) John Andrew Creighton was an entrepreneur and philanthropist, count of the Papal Court, and benefactor to many Catholic institutions in Omaha, Nebraska. His success as a wholesale and retail merchant, cattleman, and banker established him as Omaha’s leading businessman, and his investments in mining and real estate propelled him to the position of Nebraska’s wealthiest citizen. His legacy transformed a small school, established in honor of his brother Edward, into Creighton University, a Jesuit-operated complex of five professional and undergraduate colleges (currently nine). John Andrew, born on October 15, 1831, was the ninth and final child of James and Bridget (Hughes) McCrarin. John attended public school and studied for two years at St. Joseph’s College (Dominican) at Somerset, Ohio. In 1854, he abandoned higher education to join the flourishing freighting, street grading, and telegraph construction business established by his brother Edward. He worked as a crew chief during the construction of the transcontinental telegraph and subsequently became a wagon master for longdistance hauling to the mining areas of the West. In 1862, after leading an expedition that consisted of 35 four-oxen wagons on a 117-day trek to Virginia City, Montana, Creighton remained there for five years, becoming a leading merchant and banker. In 1868, he returned to Omaha and married Emma (Sarah Emily) Wareham
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(a younger sister of brother Edward’s wife); they had a daughter Lucretia, who died in infancy (1870). The brothers and sisters then resided together until the deaths of the older siblings in 1874 and 1876, respectively. John received a $300,000 bequest from Edward and served as an executor for Lucretia’s estate. He supplanted his brother as Nebraska’s wealthiest citizen, and his investments in banking, industry, railroads, mining, cattle, the Omaha Stockyards, and real estate far surpassed previous accumulations. He became a prodigious philanthropist, endowing the Good Shepherd Home for Troubled Girls, the Poor Clares Convent, St. John’s Church, and St. Joseph’s Hospital. For his benevolence, in 1895, Pope Leo XIII named him a count of the Papal Court. After the death of his wife on September 30, 1888, John Andrew adopted the fledgling school established in honor of his brother Edward as his child. As a tribute to his wife, he built a new Creighton Memorial St. Joseph’s Hospital, which became the teaching facility for the medical school he established as a part of Creighton University; both opened in 1892. Subsequently, he built a medical facility in 1895 and a School of Dentistry in 1905. In the latter year, he initiated a College of Pharmacy and, in 1907, erected for it a building attached to the medical school. In the meantime, he added L-shaped wings to the Arts College (1899–1900), built a library and auditorium (1902), and financed the construction of a law school (1904) and the erection of a dormitory (1906). Thus, by his death on February 7, 1907, he had officially become a cofounder of Creighton University, which received 40 percent of his $2.7 million estate. His benefice transformed a struggling institution, a college in www.abc-clio.com
name only, into a five-school university—a monument to the memory of his brother Edward, and Lucretia and Sarah Emily Wareham, as well as a testament to the entrepreneurial skill and philanthropy of John Andrew Creighton. Dennis Milehich See also: CREIGHTON, Edward References Dowling, M. P. Creighton University: Reminiscences of the First Twenty-Five Years. Omaha, NE: Press of Burkley Printing Company, 1903. Johnson, Allen, and Dumas Malone, eds. Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Charles Schribner’s Sons, 1930. 535–536. Mullens, P. A. Biographical Sketches of Edward Creighton, John A. Creighton, Mary Lucretia Creighton, Sarah Emily Creighton. Omaha, NE: Creighton University, 1901.
CROKER, RICHARD (1841–1922) Richard Croker, a leader of Tammany Hall and boss of New York City, was born in Blackrock, Dublin, Ireland on November 24, 1841. After immigrating with his Episcopalian Scots-Irish parents to New York in 1846, Croker never finished school. At thirteen, he became an apprentice machinist for the Harlem Railroad and later worked in the shops of the New York Central Railroad. A burly, bearded man wellknown for being good with his fists, Croker joined and soon led the Fourth Avenue Tunnel Gang. Attracting the attention of Tammany Hall Democrats, he became a boss “repeater,” directing members of his gang to vote repeatedly in elections. In 1865, Croker voted seventeen times in local elections. Fourth Avenue Tunnel Gang members would often battle political ABC-CLIO
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Portrait of Richard Croker, politician and leader of New York City’s Tammany Hall. (Library of Congress)
opponents in the streets, in an effort to block rival repeaters from casting ballots. Croker’s success in winning elections for Tammany Hall earned him rewards from the Democratic Party. In 1868, he was elected alderman and joined the reform faction of Tammany that opposed the corrupt rule of Boss William Tweed. An 1874 trial for shooting a political opponent in a street brawl almost derailed his career, but the trial resulted in a hung jury. Croker always denied responsibility for the murder, claiming that he preferred fists over firearms. After the incident, Croker could not find work and fell into poverty before Tammany Hall came to his aid. He served as coroner in 1876 and then as fire commissioner beginning in 1883. A protégé of “Honest” John Kelly, Croker replaced Kelly as boss of Tammany Hall upon his retirement in 1886. He now commanded an www.abc-clio.com
army of 90,000 Tammany party workers and thirty-five Tammany district leaders. As boss, Croker essentially ran New York City, serving as unelected mayor. He became a master in graft. He gave city jobs to supporters, told municipal judges to rule for his friends and interests, and pressured businesses to grant him favors. As he once publicly stated, Croker’s chief concern was his pocket, and he spent every moment looking for ways to increase his wealth. Croker made a fortune as boss but the city did not fare that well. A brief reform movement in the mid-1890s cost Croker control of City Hall. Mounting public dissatisfaction with corruption in the police department and the mayor’s office resulted in Tammany’s defeat in the election of 1901. The electoral loss cost Croker control of the Tammany organization and of New York City politics.
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Croker had already spent considerable time in England for health reasons, and he retired to his English manor. Having inherited a love of horses from his blacksmith/veterinarian father, Croker owned a stable of horses. One of his animals won the English Derby, the most famous horse race in England, in 1907. Croker died in Glencairn, Ireland, on April 29, 1922. Caryn E. Neumann See also: KELLY, “Honest” John; TAMMANY HALL; TWEED, William “Boss” References Hammack, David C. Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1982.
Stoddard, Lothrop. Master of Manhattan: The Life of Richard Croker. New York: Longmans and Green, 1931.
CROSBY, BING (1903–1977) Born Harry Lillis Crosby in Tacoma, Washington, in 1903, Crosby was nicknamed “Bing” at elementary school. On his father’s side he was descended from a signatory of the Mayflower Compact, while his mother’s family, the Harrigans, had emigrated from Co. Cork to Canada in 1831. While still a student in Spokane, Washington, Bing Crosby began performing with a local dance band, the Musicaladers, and in 1925, with Al Rinker, he went on the vaudeville
American singer Bing Crosby performs on NBC in 1940. (Library of Congress) www.abc-clio.com
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circuit. The next year the duo joined up with the highly popular Paul Whiteman band; from 1927, Crosby, Rinker, and Harry Barris were featured with Whiteman’s orchestra as the Rhythm Boys. In 1931 Crosby was offered and accepted a contract to do a radio show by the Columbia Broadcasting System. The Crosby radio show, first broadcast in September 1931, was an instant and lasting success (with contractual and format changes it continued until 1962), establishing him as a solo artist, and indeed as a star. Crosby’s status as a radio star was the cornerstone of his success as a recording artist and in movies. Between 1926 and 1977, Crosby recorded a total of around 2,000 titles and was by far the most successful recording artist of his era and, with sales of more than 400 million disks, arguably the most successful ever. His twenty-two gold records included “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral (That’s an Irish Lullaby),” “McNamara’s Band” and “Galway Bay.” Crosby’s film career began in 1930, but it was only after he teamed up with Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour in 1940 to make The Road to Singapore that he became a major box-office attraction. The Road to Singapore initiated a highly successful series of Road films, ending in 1952 with The Road to Bali (there was also an ill-advised attempt at a revival in 1962 with The Road to Hong Kong). Even more successful were Going My Way (1944) and The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945) in both of which Crosby played a Roman Catholic priest, Father Chuck O’Malley; Going My Way, which also starred Irish actor Barry Fitzgerald, won Crosby an Oscar for best actor. Crosby also worked with Fitzgerald in Top o’ the Morning (1949)—in which he played an insurance investigator sent to Ireland to www.abc-clio.com
look into the theft of the Blarney Stone. Any account of Crosby’s career in films must also mention his two major musicals of the 1950s: White Christmas (1954) and High Society (1956). Although Crosby did not, as a performer, dominate the new medium of television as he had earlier dominated radio and movies, by any standards other than his own, he did enjoy a successful television career; he made his television debut in 1948 and from the mid-1960s until his death starred in (and produced) a highly popular Christmas show. He also owned a television production company that was responsible for a number of hit series (for instance, Ben Casey and Hogan’s Heroes). Crosby’s earnings from records and films, and his judicious investments in oil, real estate and television (among other things) made him a rich man and allowed him to indulge his passion for sport, particularly golf and horse racing. Crosby’s first wife, Dixie Lee, died in 1952, and in 1957 he married Kathryn Grant; he had four children by his first wife and three by his second. Crosby died of a heart attack in October 1977 on a Spanish golf course. When Bing Crosby paid the first of a number of visits to Ireland in September 1961 he was met at Dublin airport by the Artane Boys Band. Most of his subsequent visits were golf or racing related but in 1966 he did, at the instigation of his friend and associate George O’Reilly, record an hour-long program for RTÉ, (“A Little Bit of Irish”). His last visit to Dublin, in July 1976, was for a charity performance at the Gaiety Theatre. Although, throughout his career, Irish, and even stage Irish, material was a significant element in Crosby’s repertoire, he was never a narrowly ‘Irish’ act. Rather, he
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was always very much in the mainstream of twentieth-century American popular music; indeed, for a time he was the mainstream. One of the first generation of singers to have learned to sing into a microphone, Crosby realized that technology had made possible a more relaxed, subtly phrased, intimate, and vernacular vocal idiom that came to be called “crooning.” Crosby greatly influenced Frank Sinatra who took up and developed the style; the Crosby-Sinatra duet in High Society (“Well, Did You Evah!”) is both an epitome and virtuoso exhibition of twentieth-century American popular vocal technique. Posthumous allegations of drinking, infidelity, and harsh (even violent) treatment of his children, although clearly at odds with the carefully crafted public image of the equable and easygoing pipe-smoking Bing, have apparently done little to diminish his still very considerable popularity. Stephen Wilson See also: FITZGERALD, Barry References Crosby, Bing. Call Me Lucky: Bing Crosby’s Own Story. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1993. Giddins, Gary. Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. 2001.
CROUCH, FREDERICK NICHOLLS (1808–1896) A composer, Frederick Nicholls Crouch was known as the “Irish Lecturer” and spent almost fifty years of his life in America. Born in London, in 1808, the son of a musician, Crouch’s talents as a child prodigy were apparent from the age of nine. He was a violoncellist and a vocalist and as a child he played in the Royal Coburg Court Orchestra. Around 1822, www.abc-clio.com
he attended the Royal Academy of Music. Later he joined the orchestra attached to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. He also played in the Royal Italian Opera orchestra in London and became musical supervisor to D’Almaine & Co., a leading London music publisher. Although Crouch was born in England he seemed to associate with things Irish more than English when it came to composing music. Around 1838 he organized a series of programs on the Songs and Legends of Ireland. As a result he became known as the “Irish Lecturer.” The series included a large number of songs, and one of the series, published around 1840 by D’Almaine, was called The Echoes of the Lakes. This group included the song “Kathleen Mavourneen,” which became immensely popular. Another song in the group, “Dermot Astore,” also gained prominence. The words for both of these works were by the Cavan-born poet, Julia Crawford (ca. 1800–1855), whose poetry had also been used by other composers. Much of the success of Crouch’s “Kathleen Mavourneen” can be attributed to the Irish soprano Catherine Hayes (1818–1861), who included it in almost every one of her concerts around the world in the mid-nineteenth century. She performed it as an encore for Queen Victoria and 500 guests in Buckingham Palace in 1849 and sang it in Dublin, Limerick, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Savannah, New Orleans, San Francisco, Sydney and Melbourne. The song has also been recorded by many great singers, such as soprano Adelina Patti and tenor John McCormack. In 1849 Crouch arrived in America, where he conducted orchestras in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., and ABC-CLIO
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Richmond, Virginia. He also became a music critic in New York. He later joined the Confederate army and served in the First Regiment Richmond Greys during the Civil War. After the war he returned to composing music. He wrote two operas, neither of which was successful. He also composed a number of Irish songs, such as “The Emigrant’s Lament,” “The Exile of Erin,” and “Sing to Me, Nora,” which were included in a successful book, Songs of Erin. As the years progressed, Crouch remained active as a vocalist, even singing “Kathleen Mavourneen” at a banquet given in his honor when he was 84 years old in Portland, Maine. He died in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1896. Like many other nineteenth-century songwriters his output was prodigious. However, “Kathleen Mavourneen” is the only one of his many works occasionally heard today, primarily in Ireland. Basil Walsh See also: HAYES, Catherine References Adair-Fitzgerald, S. J. Stories of Famous Songs. London: John C. Nimmo, 1898. Baltzell, W. J. Dictionary of Musicians. Boston: Oliver Ditson Company, 1891. Brown, J. D., and S. S. Stratton. British Musical Biography. Birmingham, England: S. S. Stratton, 1897.
CURLEY, JAMES MICHAEL (1874–1958) James Michael Curley was a renowned New England politician who held the position of governor of Massachusetts from 1935 to 1937. Born in Boston on November 20, 1874, Curley was the son of Irish-Catholic immigrants from Co. Galway. After leaving public school at age 14, he educated www.abc-clio.com
Portrait of James Michael Curley, Governor of Massachusetts (1935–1937). (Library of Congress)
himself at the public library and worked as a salesman. Active in local Roxbury Democratic politics, Curley began a long and tumultuous political career when he was elected to the Boston Common Council in 1900. He then served in the Massachusetts legislature (1902–1903), as a Boston alderman (1904–1909), and as a Boston city councilor (1912–1914). Elected to the House of Representatives (1912–1914), he resigned to serve as mayor of Boston (1914–1918), an office he also held in 1922–1926 and 1930–1934. His considerable oratorical skills and biting wit made the tall, handsome, and elegant Curley a dangerous opponent in debates. Unlike the Massachusetts ward boss politicians, he built a multiethnic political machine as a lone wolf in the Bay State Democratic Party.
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Curley was one of the few big-city Democratic leaders to abandon Alfred E. Smith to support Franklin D. Roosevelt for president in 1932. After breaking with President Roosevelt, who offered him the post of ambassador to Poland, much to Curley’s disdain, he served as governor of Massachusetts (1935–1937). Curley fashioned his own state New Deal program of extensive and expensive public works to cope with the Great Depression. Unsuccessful in campaigns for the Senate (1936) and for mayor (1938 and 1942), he was elected to the House of Representatives (1943–1947) and again as mayor (1946–1950). Sentenced to federal prison for mail fraud, Curley was paroled in 1947 after serving six months and was pardoned by President Harry Truman in 1950. Curley returned to the mayor’s office in triumph. Unsuccessful in “last hurrah” campaigns for mayor (1950 and 1954), the “Mayor of the Poor” retired to write his memoirs, I’d Do It Again (1957), and bask in the reflected glory of Edwin O’Connor’s subtle and sophisticated best-selling novel (1956) and John Ford’s film (1958), both called The Last Hurrah, said to be based loosely on his career. Curley threatened a lawsuit, but soon he adopted the charismatic Governor Frank Skeffington as his literary alter ego. He is fondly recalled as an ingenious rogue in Joseph Dineen’s biography The Purple Shamrock (1949) and in Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill’s memoirs, Man of the House. Jack Beatty’s biography, The Rascal King (1992), is a more critical assessment. Although suspected of graft and corruption while in office, Curley was not wealthy when he died in Boston on November 12, 1958. His body lay in state www.abc-clio.com
at the State House in Boston as large crowds waited to pay their last respects. Curley’s funeral at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross was followed by burial at Mount Calvary Cemetery in Boston. His colorful and controversial career obscures his legacy as a resourceful and innovative municipal leader during a time when Yankee Republicans were abandoning the deteriorating city. Two statues of Curley are located near Boston City Hall, and his elegant Jamaica Plain home is preserved by the city. Peter C. Holloran See also: BOSTON; O’CONNOR, Edwin; FORD, John References Beatty, Jack. The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley, 1874–1958. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1992. Curley, James M. I’d Do It Again: A Record of All My Uproarious Years. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1957. Dinneen, Joseph F. The Purple Shamrock: The Hon. James Michael Curley of Boston. New York: Norton, 1949. O’Neill, Thomas P., Jr., and William Novak. Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O’Neill. New York: Random House, 1987.
CURRAN, MARY DOYLE (1917–1981) Mary Doyle Curran was a novelist, poet, short story writer, and teacher. Her novel The Parish and the Hill (1948) depicts the experiences of Irish Americans who lived and worked in the mill town of Holyoke, Massachusetts, between the two world wars. Curran traces how issues of ethnicity, gender, and class affect the narrator’s family as its Irish-born generation gives way to its American-born offspring. The thirdgeneration narrator, Mary O’Connor, ABC-CLIO
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negotiates between the communityoriented “shanty” values and poverty of the first generation and the exclusionary aspirations of the “lace curtain” second generation as she struggles to find her voice within the restrictive community. The novel’s 1986 republication by the Feminist Press drew the attention of Curran’s Irish studies and feminist colleagues alike, who have recognized it as an important portrayal of Irish-American experience in the early twentieth century. Curran was born Mary Rita Doyle on May 10, 1917, in Holyoke, Massachusetts, known at that time as the “Paper City,” which is the title for one of Curran’s later short stories. Her parents, Edward Doyle and Mary Sullivan Doyle, both worked in local mills. Irish-born Edward was employed as a skilled wool-sorter while American-born Mary was one of the few Irish-American mothers of the period who worked outside the home. Curran had four older brothers but no sisters. She was the first in her family to attend college, and she worked her way through as a waitress, library assistant, and pay clerk in the mill before her graduation from Massachusetts State College in 1940. She earned a master’s degree in 1941 and a PhD in 1946, both from the State University of Iowa. Curran taught at Wellesley College from 1946 to 1955 and then at Queens College, New York, where she founded an Irish studies program. She remained at Queens College until 1967, when she became a professor of English and director of Irish studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Curran continued to write throughout her career and spent time at the Yaddo artists’ community during the 1950s. Curran married naval officer John Curran in 1942, although the couple divorced ten years later. She never remarried. Curran had no www.abc-clio.com
children and died of lung cancer in 1981. She left behind many unpublished novels, poems, and other projects. Kelly J. S. McGovern See also: MASSACHUSETTS References “Curran, Mary Doyle.” Directory of American Scholars. Vol. 2. 8th ed. Lancaster, PA: Science Press, 1982. Halley, Anne. Afterword to The Parish and the Hill, by Mary Doyle Curran. New York: The Feminist Press, 1986.
CUSACK, CYRIL (1910–1993) A stage and screen actor and a recognizable face of Hollywood films from 1960 to 1990, Cyril Cusack was born in South Africa in 1910 but moved to Ireland with his mother at the age of six. His first movie role, in
Portrait of actor Cyril Cusack, who appeared in over 100 films and television shows from 1960 to 1990. (Corbis)
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1918, was in the silent film Knocknagow, in which he played a starving child during the Irish famine. He studied history and politics at University College Dublin, but soon found himself involved in the Abbey Theatre. In the 1930s and early 1940s, Cusack appeared in more than sixty plays at the Abbey; his roles included Christy Mahon in The Playboy of the Western World and Fluther Good in The Plough and the Stars. Many of his performances took him to the London stage. In 1944, Cusack formed his own theater production company and continued to act and direct plays. A fluent speaker of Irish Gaelic, Cusack wrote and staged the play Tar Éis an Aifrinn (After the Mass) in 1942, and composed poetry in both Irish and English. He has three collections of published poetry: Timepieces (1970), Poems (1976), and “Between the Acts” and Other Poems (1990). He won the 1961 International Critics’ Award at the Paris Festival for his productions of Arms and the Man and Krapp’s Last Tape. He has also won awards in Britain and the United States for his radio and television work. Cusack had a lively film career, particularly in the United States and England, but almost always in supporting roles. From 1960 to 1990, he appeared in more than 100 films and television shows. His most significant film appearances include Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947), François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1967), The Day of the Jackal (1973), My Left Foot (1989), and Far and Away (1992). One of his briefest but most notable screen appearances is in the 1971 cult comedy hit Harold and Maude. Cusack worked mostly in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, but in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he made a series of Italian movies, www.abc-clio.com
playing his first film lead in 1969’s Galileo. He was involved in the breakthrough Irish film Poitín (1978)—Cusack played the poitín-maker. The film presented the west of Ireland in a starkly realistic, de-romanticized manner that stood in contrast to many Hollywood images of Ireland. In addition to stage, film, and television acting, Cusack also worked extensively in audio recordings of several Shakespeare plays, James Joyce novels, Sean O’Casey plays and the poetry and plays of William Butler Yeats. Although Cusack was a staple of Hollywood and European filmmaking, his stage career is considered more significant. He worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Old Vic, in addition to his noteworthy Abbey performances. On stage, Cusak played melodrama, comedy, tragedy, and farce with equal talent. In 1990, Cusack appeared to critical acclaim with his daughters Sinéad, Sorcha, and Niamh onstage in Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters at London’s Royal Court Theater and Dublin’s Gate Theater. Danine Farquharson See also: JOYCE, James Augustine Aloysius; YEATS, William Butler References Cusack, Cyril. “Between the Acts” and Other Poems. 1970. Reprint, London: Colin Smythe, 1990. Rockett, Kevin, Luke Gibbons, and John Hill. Cinema and Ireland. London: Routledge, 1987. Welch, Robert. The Abbey Theatre, 1899–1999: Form and Pressure. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
CUSACK, MARGARET ANNA (1829–1899) Also known as “the Nun of Kenmare” and Sister Mary Francis, Margaret Cusack led a life characterized by religious fluctuations ABC-CLIO
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between Anglicanism and Catholicism and a few brief flirtations with other Protestant faiths. She lived in Ireland, England, and the United States and visited other countries, too. Cusack was a controversialist who ran into trouble with church administrators throughout her religious career. She was also a prolific writer, a political commentator, and a businesswoman. Cusack was born in Coolock, Dublin, on May 6, 1829, the year of Catholic Emancipation, to Sarah and Dr. Samuel Cusack. She had one brother, Samuel. When she was in her early teens she moved with her mother and brother to England, after the breakup of her parents’ marriage, and went to boarding school in Exeter. When Cusack’s fiancé, Charles Holmes, died prematurely, she went into a depression and subsequently into an erratic yet productive religious and writing career. In 1852, Cusack became an Anglican nun after becoming interested in the Oxford Movement, a reform movement within that church. She communicated with significant members of the movement such as John Henry Newman and Edward Pusey. However, failing to find satisfaction after nearly five years in the Anglican sisterhood, she converted to Catholicism in 1858, and became a nun in that church. She joined the St. Clare convent in Newry, Co. Down, in 1860. The following year, she was sent to Kenmare, Co. Kerry, with five others to start up a Poor Clare Order there. During her twenty-year sojourn in Kerry, Cusack wrote a number of books and set up her own press, Kenmare Publications. Her dozens of publications over the course of her life included lives of Irish saints, advice manuals, religious treatises, nationalist works, histories, political and www.abc-clio.com
social commentaries, novels, letters to the newspapers, biographies, and autobiographies. One of the books she wrote at this time was a biography of Daniel O’Connell, The Liberator: His Life and Times, Political, Social and Religious (1872). She had access to the O’Connell family papers in nearby Derrynane. Another popular work that helped financially support her convent was An Illustrated History of Ireland; From the Earliest Period (1868). Cusack was also a social activist, a path that often led her into controversy. She considered herself an Irish nationalist, was a supporter of Home Rule and the Land League, and was a vocal critic of absentee landlords. After the bad harvests of the late 1870s, she organized a famine relief fund in 1879 and raised £15,000. Although Cusack wrote about women and their work and education (Woman’s Work in Modern Society appeared in 1872), she was not concerned with women’s rights per se. She subscribed to prevailing contemporary assumptions concerning their biology and intellectual abilities. Shortly after the first apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Knock (1879), Cusack moved to Mayo intending to establish a convent that would provide accommodation for visiting pilgrims. However, after she claimed the virgin was speaking to her and appeared to be increasingly difficult to deal with, she ran into problems with the local priest and local archbishop. Cusack subsequently left Knock and went back to England. After receiving a dispensation to leave the Poor Clare nuns in 1884, Cusack founded the order of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace (with the permission of Pope Leo XIII). She then went to New Jersey where she opened a hostel for Irish immigrant girls in 1885 in Jersey City.
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This was not a new concern for her; she had already written Advice to Irish Girls in America (1872). In Jersey City, however, she once again encountered controversy, this time by coming into conflict with the local Catholic hierarchy over funding and because she publicly supported a suspended priest. When she left the United States in the early 1890s, she also left the Catholic Church and wrote a number of antiCatholic books, including The Black Pope: A History of the Jesuits (1896). Her own record of her life is found in her two autobiographies: The Nun of Kenmare (1888) and The Story of My Life (1893). She died back in the Anglican faith in 1899 in Leamington, England. Cliona Murphy
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See also: CATHOLIC CHURCH, the; GREAT FAMINE, The; LADIES’ LAND LEAGUE; O’CONNELL, Daniel References Cusack, Mary F. Advice to Irish Girls in America. New York: McGee, 1872. Cusack, Mary F. The Story of My Life. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1891. French Eager, Irene. Margaret Anna Cusack, a Biography. Cork: Mercier Press, 1970. Luddy, Maria. Introduction to The Nun of Kenmare, Irish Women’s Writing, 1839–1888. Vol. 6. London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1998. Vidulch, Dorothy A. Peace Pays a Price, A Study of Margaret Anna Cusack, The Nun of Kenmare. Dublin: Center for Peace and Justice, 1975.
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D DAILEY, DAN (1913–1978) Born on December 14, 1913 (or 1917, as some sources give), in New York City, the son of a hotel man, Daniel James Dailey, Jr., began his show business career as a child in minstrel shows and vaudeville, appearing with Minsky’s burlesque troupe. Known for his stylish and affable personality, Irish good looks, and natural song-and-dance abilities, Dailey made his Broadway debut in 1937, playing a small part in the chorus of Rodgers and Hart’s Babes in Arms. After a lead role in Stars in Your Eyes (1939), starring Ethel Merman and Jimmy Durante, Dailey was signed by MGM, though he was first miscast as a Nazi in The Mortal Storm (1940). After World War II, where Dailey served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, he returned to Hollywood and began to get starring roles. Although he was highly acclaimed in such dramatic roles as Dizzy Dean in Pride of St. Louis (1956), it was in movie musicals, such as Mother Wore Tights (1947), opposite Betty Grable; Give My Regards to Broadway (1948); There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954), also starring Ethel Merman, Donald O’Connor, and Marilyn Monroe; It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), directed by and starring Gene Kelly; and Meet Me in Las Vegas (1957) that
Dailey devoted most of his time and talent. Dailey was nominated for an Academy Award for When My Baby Smiles at Me (1948), though he lost the Oscar to Laurence Olivier. When the popularity of big-budget musicals waned, Dailey worked as a stage actor, in cabaret rooms, and in various dramatic and comedic roles; he also directed films and television shows and appeared in numerous television episodes and miniseries, both as himself and in dramatic roles. Dailey starred in three television series in the last three decades of his career: The Four Just Men (1959), The Governor and J. J. (1969–1972), and Faraday and Company (1973–1974). For his best-known role, that of Governor William Drinkwater in The Governor and J. J., Dailey won a Golden Globe in 1970. Dailey was married and divorced three times, first to Esther Rodier, then Elizabeth Hofert, and then to Gwen Carter O’Connor. One son, Dan Dailey III, committed suicide in 1975, at the age of 28. Marital problems and heavy drinking led to a breakdown, and Dailey spent four months in a psychiatric hospital. A fall from the stage in the mid-1970s left Dailey with a slight limp; he retired, became somewhat of a recluse, and continued to drink heavily.
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Dan Dailey died of anemia at the age of 64 on October 6, 1978, in Los Angeles, California. He is buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California. Gary Kerley See also: NEW YORK CITY References Carzo, Eileen. “Dailey, Dan.” The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, ed. Michael Glazier. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999. Curran, Joseph M. Hiberian Green on the Silver Screen: The Irish and American Movies. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990. Quinlan, David. Quinlan’s Film Stars. 5th ed. Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2000. Walker, John, ed. Halliwell’s Who’s Who in the Movies. 5th ed. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
DALY, “JOHN” AUGUSTIN (1838–1899) Born in Plymouth, North Carolina, Augustin Daly moved to New York City at an early age with his mother when his father died. There, Daly developed his lifelong love of the theater. His first professional engagement with the theater was as a drama critic when he was 21. He wrote for five different New York periodicals: Sunday Courier, 1859–1867, Express, 1864–1867, Sun, 1866–1867, Citizen, 1867, and Times, 1867–1869. During this time he also began writing and adapting his own plays. Throughout his playwriting career, Daly was assisted by his brother Joseph, whose contribution was significant, but rarely acknowledged publicly. Daly had his first success with Leah the Forsaken. This work, liberally adapted from the German play Deborah by Salomon Hermann Ritter von Mosenthal, opened at the Howard Athenaeum in Boston in 1862 and then www.abc-clio.com
moved to New York where it was similarly well received. Daly’s next major success was with his original play, Under the Gaslight, which opened at the New York Theatre in 1867. Although a typical melodrama, this work drew wide acclaim with its series of sensational effects, each more thrilling than the last, including one in which the heroine saves a man who is strapped to railroad tracks as the train thunders near. By the end of his career, Daly saw more than 90 of his plays and adaptations performed throughout the world. Despite his prolificness, Daly produced no masterpieces. He was, however, effective at fulfilling his audience’s desire for special effects, sensational melodramas, and sentimental comedies. His most successful productions include A Flash of Lightning (1868), Frou-Frou (1870), Horizon (1871), Divorce (1871), Article 47 (1872), Needles and Pins (1880), Dollars and Sense (1883), Love on Crutches (1884), and The Lottery of Love (1888). Daly was also an important theater manager and director. In 1869, he rented the Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York and established his own company, which included such notable actors as Fanny Davenport, Mrs. George Gilbert, and James Lewis. In 1873, the Fifth Avenue Theatre burned down, and Daly leased the New York Theatre, renaming it Daly’s Fifth Avenue Theatre. For a time, Daly conducted this theater, the Grand Opera House, and the New Fifth Avenue Theatre which he built on Twenty-eighth St. However, he found the effort of maintaining three theaters too great and decided to focus his efforts exclusively on the newly built playhouse. Financial hardship and a difficult theatrical market forced Daly to give up the New Fifth Avenue Theatre in 1877, but in 1879 he took over the Old Broadway
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Theatre, renovated it extensively, and renamed it Daly’s Theatre. In this space, Daly maintained a consistently outstanding repertory company, including a group of actors known as the “Big Four”: John Drew, Ada Rehan, James Lewis, and Mrs. George H. Gilbert. In 1884, Daly’s company visited Europe, playing in London, Berlin, and Paris. After two additional trips in 1886 and 1890, Daly opened his own theater in London in 1893. Daly maintained his theaters in New York and London until his death in 1899. The merit and success of Daly’s shows derived largely from his demand that actors in his troupe work toward an ensemble effect, with no single individual receiving star billing. Consequently, Daly was able to maintain uniformly high standards of production and has come to be recognized as one of the first American directors or régisseurs. Robert I. Lublin See also: NEW YORK CITY References Daly, Augustin. Plays, edited by Rosemary Cullen and Don B. Wilmeth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Daly, Joseph. The Life of Augustin Daly. New York: Macmillan, 1984. Felheim, Marvin. The Theater of Augustin Daly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956.
DALY, MARCUS (1841–1900) Born in Ballyjamesduff, Co. Cavan, Marcus Daly spent his early years as a farm laborer before immigrating to the United States in 1856. He spent five years working in New York City and then moved to California to join his sister. After working in the California mines for a few years, he moved www.abc-clio.com
to Virginia City, Nevada, in 1865 and worked his way up through the ranks at the Comstock mine, until the mine was shut down after a fire in April 1869. In 1870 Daly was hired by the Walker Brothers to manage the Emma mine in Alta, Nevada, and later, to manage Walker Brothers mines at Ophir and Dry Canyon. While employed by the Walker Brothers, he met and married Margaret Evans (in 1872), who bore him two girls in Nevada, and later, another girl and a boy. Daly became a U.S. citizen in 1874. In 1876 the Walker Brothers sent Daly to the small enclave of Butte, Montana, to investigate purchasing a mine. Daly enthusiastically promoted the development of the Alice mine, to the point of putting up some of the money to buy it. It was in Butte that Daly made his name and his fortune. With the money he earned from the Alice mine, in 1880 he purchased the Anaconda mine and converted it from silver to copper mining. Very rapidly he built up the copper mine, bought adjoining property and other mines, built a large smelter to support the mine, and eventually, built the town of Anaconda to support the smelter. Some of his contemporaries had disdained his emphasis on copper mining (arguing that silver was more valuable), but his timing was perfect: he owned significant copper mining capabilities just as new demands for copper—for use in electrical, telegraph, and telephone wires—took off. In a short time Daly amassed a great fortune, and he became known as one of the “copper kings” of Butte. His contemporaries remembered Daly as a good businessman and a warmhearted and generous Irishman. He was known for hiring Irish miners to work in his mines, and as he became more famous, he helped spur a great ABC-CLIO
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deal of Irish immigration to Montana, and particularly, to Butte. He joined the Butte and Anaconda divisions of the Irish Catholic Ancient Order of Hibernians, and was nominated for membership in the Robert Emmett Literary society. Daly dabbled in state politics, although primarily to foil another Irishman, W. A. Clark, with whom he quarreled. The ClarkDaly feud, as it was known, centered on their competition for influence in state and national politics and their fight over the location of the new state capital. Both Irishmen spent millions of dollars in their efforts, which included using local newspapers as personal soapboxes (Daly had to start a newspaper—The Anaconda Standard—to battle Clark’s own Butte Miner), purchasing political influence, and buying votes for their causes. The feud between the two millionaires only ended with Daly’s death in 1900. Daly was known for his bloodstock horse farm. Over the course of many years, he purchased several racehorses and built up a well-known and respected stable. Among his most famous horses was Tammany, which won several races, including the Great Eclipse Stakes and the Jerome Handicap. His legacy, however, remains with his achievements in copper mining. By the time of his death the Anaconda Company was the largest producer of copper in the world. Korcaighe P. Hale See also: ANCIENT ORDER OF HIBERNIANS References Emmons, David. The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Glasscock, C. B. The War of the Copper Kings: Builders of Butte and Wolves of Wall Street. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1935. www.abc-clio.com
Marcosson, Isaac F. Anaconda. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1957. Shoebotham, H. Minar. Anaconda: Life of Marcus Daly the Copper King. Harrisburg, PA: The Stackpole Company, 1956. Works Projects Administration. Copper Camp: Stories of the World’s Greatest Mining Town, Butte, Montana. New York: Hasting House, 1943.
DAVIN, NICHOLAS FLOOD (1840–1901) Baptized Nicholas Francis, Nicholas Flood Davin was a journalist, lawyer, politician, and writer. Born January 13, 1840, in Kilfinane (Republic of Ireland), he was the eldest child of Nicholas Flood Davin and Eliza Lane. Davin’s early years in Ireland and England remain hidden in mystery because of his own efforts to disguise his past. He changed his middle name and concealed his Roman Catholic upbringing. Following the death of his father, Davin was raised with his Protestant uncle. He was apprenticed to an ironmonger at age 18. Six years later he spent one term at Queen’s College Cork. Like many of his contemporaries, Davin joined the stream of Irish migrants to London, where he studied law. He was called to the bar in 1868. Although he kept a legal practice in London during these years, he made his living as a journalist working for several different newspapers in England and Northern Ireland. He arrived in Toronto in 1872, ostensibly on an assignment to investigate the possibility of Canada’s annexation to the United States. Davin’s first noteworthy public appearance came in 1873. Accepting the invitation of the Saint George’s Society of Toronto, Davin gave a spirited lecture in which he strongly criticized American society while
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promoting what he saw as the superior type of British civilization. Although called to the bar in Ontario in 1876, he made his mark more as a lecturer and a writer. After the publication of a few rather minor pieces, Davin wrote what is generally considered his most significant addition to Canadian literature, The Irishman in Canada (1877). In this lengthy example of ethnic selfgratification, he deliberately ignores the Protestant-Catholic, Orange-Green divide among the Irish in the country, divisions he considered irrelevant to Canada A founding member of the Toronto Young Men’s Liberal-Conservative Association in 1876, Davin shortly thereafter stood for elected office for the Conservative party in the strong Liberal riding of Haldimand (Ontario) and lost by a very small margin. This near victory brought him a brief appointment in 1879 to examine industrial schools for native children in the United Sates. In his report later that year, Davin recommended that Canada adopt a similar course for its aboriginal population. However, his career as political journalist soon brought him to the western prairies. With the financial support of the Conservative party in the form of a series of Canadian Pacific Railroad lots in the town of Regina, Davin founded the Regina Leader in 1883. Although the paper got off to a good start, both the founder-editor and the paper soon fell upon hard times, which were only briefly relieved by Davin’s appointment as secretary of the royal commission on Chinese immigration. With news of the rebellion in the west in 1885 and especially the trial of its leader, Louis Riel, the nation’s eyes were focused on Regina. Davin even succeeded in obtaining an interview with Riel on the eve of his www.abc-clio.com
execution by entering the prison disguised as a priest. With such attention, the Leader’s circulation increased. During this period of relative prosperity, Davin began his liaison with Kate Simpson Hayes, which produced a son and a daughter, both of whom were “placed” outside Regina. In the general election of 1887, Davin easily won Assiniboia West for the Conservative party. Although he would be reelected in 1891, the much sought-after cabinet position eluded him. Yet his personal popularity was such that he was the only Conservative in the territories to be returned to Parliament in 1896. Davin sold the Leader in 1895 and married Eliza Jane Reid. From 1896 to 1900, from the opposition’s side of the House, he remained the imperialist he had always been, as is evidenced by his urging Canada to support Britain in its South African war. Defeated in the general election of 1900, Davin took his own life in his hotel room in Winnipeg the following year. Although Davin’s was a tragic life marked by alcoholism, Davin nonetheless had some literary talent. In addition to The Irishman in Canada, he also wrote some poetry and a novel. Yet he will likely be most remembered for his attempt to foster a national sentiment in the new territories of the west, a sentiment which he personally found intertwined with the larger imperial project. Robert J. Grace See also: ONTARIO References Koester, C. B., Mr. Davin, M.P.: A Biography of Nicholas Flood Davin. Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1980. Thompson, John Herd. “Davin, Nicholas Flood.” In Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Vol. 13. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. ABC-CLIO
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DAVITT, MICHAEL (1846–1906) The Irish nationalist, agrarian radical, and journalist Michael Davitt was one of the most influential leaders of Irish nationalism during the nineteenth century as well as a founder of the Irish National Land League. Born in 1846 in Straide, Co. Mayo, Davitt was the son of small farmers. In 1850 they were evicted from their home and immigrated to the industrial town of Haslingden in England. Davitt left school at the age of nine to work in the local cotton mills, but at the age of eleven he was the victim of an industrial accident that cost him his right arm. After his disability, Davitt was able to receive an education and obtained a job in the local post office In 1865, Davitt joined the Fenians, a secret Irish revolutionary organization dedicated to the forceful overthrow of British rule in Ireland. Three years later, in 1868, Davitt became the organizing secretary of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) for England and Scotland. In 1870, Davitt was caught in Britain attempting to export arms to Ireland and was sentenced to fifteen years of penal servitude. During the seven and a half years of his sentence, he was subject to poor conditions and abusive treatment. He managed to smuggle out an account of his imprisonment, which was published widely in British and Irish newspapers. Because of outside pressure on the British government, Davitt was released on parole in December of 1877. After his release, Davitt began to reformulate his earlier ideas about the usefulness of physical force, moving instead toward a belief in the need for cooperation between constitutional and physical force nationalists. Because of his rural background, he was also concerned about the plight of www.abc-clio.com
tenant farmers and the rural poor in Ireland. He undertook a tour of America in 1878 and came into contact with the American Clan na Gael leader, John Devoy. Devoy and Davitt began a discussion that would eventually lead to a shift in the Irish and Irish-American nationalist movement. The “New Departure” was an informal alliance among constitutional and physical force nationalists to work together peacefully under the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell. A severe crop failure and falling prices in 1879 led to rising agrarian discontent in the west of Ireland. A series of protest meetings was quickly organized in Co. Mayo, and Davitt was able to enlist Parnell’s aid in the struggle. On October 21, 1879, the Irish National Land League was formed with Parnell as president and Davitt as secretary. The Land League attempted to achieve the immediate reduction of rents and the eventual establishment of tenant ownership. Davitt also convinced Parnell to support the creation of a Ladies’ Land League under the leadership of Anna Parnell, Charles Parnell’s sister. As the Land League grew, agrarian disorder and conflict with the British government increased, and Davitt was arrested for violating his parole on February 3, 1881. The Land League movement ended when William Gladstone and Parnell concluded an informal pact in April of 1882, commonly known as the “Kilmainham Treaty,” to end rural agitation in Ireland in exchange for British concessions on tenants’ rights. Upon his release from prison in May of 1882, Davitt, with the encouragement of Henry George and Patrick Ford, briefly thought of embarking on a radical new phase of land agitation by pushing for land
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nationalization, but in the face of severe criticism from Parnell and others, he put the idea aside. For the rest of the 1880s, Davitt supported Parnell’s attempts to achieve Home Rule for Ireland. In 1887, Davitt defended Parnell’s and his own record before the Special Commission on Parnellism and Crime. When news of Parnell’s affair with Katherine O’Shea became public during her divorce proceedings in 1890, Davitt felt personally betrayed and called for Parnell’s resignation. After Parnell’s death in 1891, Davitt sided with the anti-Parnellite section of the now split Irish Parliamentary Party. During the 1890s, Davitt continued to work for various causes. He was elected to Parliament for North-East Cork in 1893 and for South Mayo in 1895. Throughout his life, he was actively engaged in labor activism, drawing praise not only from Irish but also from British working-class leaders. Eschewing only middle-class concerns, Davitt tried to connect the plight of the urban and rural laborers. In 1895, Davitt traveled to Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand on a seven-month lecture tour and published Life and Progress in Australasia (1895). With the outbreak of the AngloBoer War in 1899, Davitt resigned his seat in protest. Davitt traveled widely from 1900 to 1906, visiting South Africa, the United States, and Russia. He briefly served as a war correspondent in South Africa for William Randolph Hearst’s New York American Journal. He also published several books: The Boer Fight for Freedom (1902), Within the Pale: The True Story of AntiSemitic Persecutions in Russia (1903), and The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland (1904), his account of the Land War. Davitt died on May 30, 1906. Ely Janis www.abc-clio.com
See also: DEVOY, John; FENIANS; FORD, Patrick; IRISH REPUBLICAN BROTHERHOOD; LADIE’S LAND LEAGUE References Cashman, D. B. The Life of Michael Davitt. Glasgow: Cameron, Ferguson, & Co., 1882. Davitt, Michael. The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland: Or, the Story of the Land League. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1904. King, Carla. Michael Davitt. Dundalk: Dundalgan Press, 1999. Moody, T. W. Davitt and Irish Revolution, 1846–1882. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. Sheehy-Skeffington, Francis. Michael Davitt: Revolutionary, Agitator, and Labour Leader. London: T. F. Unwin, 1908.
DAY, DENNIS (1916–1988) Born Owen Patrick Eugene Dennis McNulty in the Bronx, New York, on May 21, 1916, Dennis Day was a successful popular singer, actor, and entertainer. He had a distinguished career in radio, film, and television, particularly in the 1940s and 1950s. In his best days, Day was known as “America’s Favorite Irish Tenor.” Day’s father hailed from Co. Armagh, and his mother (née Mary Grady) was from Charlestown, Co. Mayo. A former choir member of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, he developed a lyrical tenor voice and made his radio debut on the Jack Benny Show on October 8, 1939. Day became a popular attraction on the show, where he used to play a naive teenager known for his tagline “Gee, Mr. Benny!” Day followed Benny in his move to the television screen in 1950 and reappeared on the show occasionally until 1974. From 1946 to 1952 Day had his own radio show, A Day in the Life of Dennis Day, and the short-lived Dennis Day Show on television ABC-CLIO
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(1952). In the same year he also traveled to Ireland, performing August 1 in the parochial hall of his mother’s native town in Mayo. In the 1940s and 1950s Day starred in a number of Hollywood movies, including Music in Manhattan (1944), Melody Time (1948), and Golden Girl (1951), and he lent his voice to the Warner Brothers movie on Chauncey Olcott’s life, My Wild Irish Rose (1947), songs from which were released on an RCA album set. For much of the 1950s and 1960s Day disappeared from public view, but he returned in the mid1970s in a number of minor television and film roles. His sound recordings were also republished on records. Day died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in Bel Air, California, on June 22, 1988. Axel Klein See also: OLCOTT, Chauncey; SAINT PATRICK’S CATHEDRAL
DAY-LEWIS, DANIEL (1957–) Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis was born in London on April 29, 1957. He is the son of Irish-born poet, Cecil Day-Lewis (b. 1904 in Co. Laois), and Jill Balcon (b. 1924), daughter of leading British film producer, Sir Michael Balcon. Although Daniel and his sister Tamasin (b. 1953) were raised largely in London, the family has always maintained its Irish roots— Cecil Day-Lewis was best known for his collection of poems, The Whispering Roots, which alluded to his Irish lineage, and the family spent their summer holidays in the west of Ireland. Daniel Day-Lewis was educated at Invicta Junior School and Sherington www.abc-clio.com
Junior Boys School in London before becoming an unhappy student at the Sevenoaks Boarding School in 1968; he transferred to another school, Bedales, in 1970, the year his father became Britain’s poet laureate. During his time at Sevenoaks Boarding School Day-Lewis became interested in acting and appeared in a number of student productions. In 1971 he was cast in a bit part in John Schlesinger’s film, Sunday Bloody Sunday, and, following his father’s death in 1972, he joined the National Youth Theatre. After two years there he entered the Old Vic Bristol Stage School and began to appear in their productions after completing three years of training. DayLewis first attracted critical attention in 1980 when he played a troubled adolescent in a production of Nigel Williams’s play, Class Enemy; he followed this with a role as a mentally challenged man in Mike Stott’s Funny Peculiar. Day-Lewis’s performance in the Little Theatre’s production of John Osborne’s classic “angry young man” play, Look Back in Anger, was received with mixed reviews but undoubtedly helped to raise his profile among critics and the public. His next performance, the title role in Christopher Bond’s production of Stoker’s Dracula, also brought him publicity and interest from the BBC: soon after, he was cast in a supporting role in a BBC drama, Artemis 81, by David Rudkin. From 1980 Day-Lewis balanced film and television work with theater work. He was featured in a minor role in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi and could also be seen on television in one episode of the popular detective show Shoestring and in a 1982 BBC production of Antonia White’s A Frost in May. He traveled to Ireland to appear in a screen version of Jennifer Johnson’s How
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Many Miles to Babylon? (1982) and to New Zealand to act in a big-budget remake of Mutiny on the Bounty (renamed The Bounty) starring Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins. On stage Day-Lewis won critical acclaim for his role in Julian Mitchell’s Another Country, based on the life of British spy Guy Burgess (and later made into a film starring Rupert Everett) and appeared in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s touring productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet. Day-Lewis’s screen and theater work in this period certainly demonstrated his versatility and range as an actor, but it was his performance as a homosexual skinhead in Stephen Frears’s film of Hanif Kureshi’s script My Beautiful Laundrette that proved his willingness to essay challenging and controversial roles. Released in 1985, My Beautiful Laundrette was a scathing attack on the values of Thatcher’s Britain and is generally regarded as one of the most important British films of the 1980s, winning the BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award for Best Film in 1986. Day-Lewis’s next film part was a complete change from Frears’s film: he took on a historical role in the 1985 MerchantIvory production of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View. Playing Cecil Vyse, the priggish suitor of Helena Bonham-Carter’s Lucy Honeychurch, he gave a finely nuanced performance that helped to transform his character from an object of audience contempt to a figure of some poignancy. Following a brief return to theater to appear as the poet Vladimir Mayakovksy in Richard Eyre’s production of The Futurists, he took on a role in an Anglo-French film, Nanou (1986), which received mixed reviews. In 1987 he was cast in a major film, www.abc-clio.com
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Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), based on the novel by Milan Kundera. In preparing for his role as Tomas, a Czech doctor, Day-Lewis conducted extensive research on the historical period and even learnt some Czech. This meticulous preparation underlined his commitment to his craft and his belief in immersing himself entirely in the role at hand, qualities that would become even more pronounced in later films such as My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father. His next film role was in an American production of William Boyd’s novel, Stars and Bars (1988), which was directed by Irish director Pat O’Connor. The film was not well received and soon after Day-Lewis took a break from acting, retreating to Ireland (he had held an Irish passport since 1987). While he was living in Ireland he was approached by theater director Jim Sheridan with a script for a proposed film on the life of disabled Dublin writer Christy Brown. Sheridan had worked in theater in Ireland and America for almost a decade but this was to be his debut as a film director. Day-Lewis accepted the role as Christy in My Left Foot and immersed himself completely in it—on set he remained in character and in a wheelchair, and the result was a heartfelt, deeply authentic performance in a film that largely avoided excessive sentiment. It was said that Christy Brown’s friends and family were overcome when they saw the film, such was the effectiveness of his performance. Audiences in Europe and America embraced My Left Foot, and the film was nominated for a variety of awards, including the BAFTAs (winning awards for Day-Lewis and Ray McAnally) and the Academy Awards (nominated for five Oscars, it won two, for DayLewis and Brenda Fricker). ABC-CLIO
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Soon after filming My Left Foot, DayLewis took on another Irish role, a traveling dentist called Fergus O’Connell, in a film shot by Argentinean director Carlos Sorin. Eversmile, New Jersey was released in 1989 but failed to win the critical and commercial success that had been enjoyed by My Left Foot. Riding high on his film successes, DayLewis returned to the theater to take the lead role opposite Judi Dench in a prestigious production of Hamlet, directed by Richard Eyre for the National Theatre in London. During the play’s run, Day-Lewis suffered a nervous breakdown and withdrew from the production. Undoubtedly, the breakdown was brought on by the strain of his hectic work schedule, although rumors circulated that he had suffered a collapse after seeing his father’s ghost on the stage! Following a two-year hiatus from both theater and film work, Day-Lewis re-
emerged as an unusual action hero in Michael Mann’s film of The Last of the Mohicans (1992). Playing Hawkeye, the English settler gone native in James Fenimore Cooper’s wilderness tale, DayLewis won critical acclaim and commercial success. The role also established his credentials as a romantic lead, and this was underlined with his casting as Newland Archer in Martin Scorsese’s lavish film of Edith Wharton’s novel, The Age of Innocence. The film was released in 1993 to somewhat mixed reviews, but both actor and director enjoyed the collaboration and would work together again in The Gangs of New York (2002). Day-Lewis teamed up with another favorite director, Jim Sheridan, on two films in the 1990s: the first, In the Name of the Father, told the story of Gerry Conlon, one of the Guildford Four wrongly imprisoned for fifteen years by the British government
Actor Daniel Day-Lewis (right) speaks with director Jim Sheridan (left) on the set of In the Name of the Father in 1993. (Universal/The Kobal Collection) www.abc-clio.com
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on bomb charges; the second, The Boxer (1997) featured Day-Lewis as Danny Flynn in an archetypal boxing story of ambition, success, and failure. Of the two, In the Name of the Father sparked the most controversy and critical acclaim when it was released in 1993, and it further aligned Day-Lewis with Irish cinema. Although both films involved meticulous research and training, it was his grueling preparation for the role of Gerry Conlon—which involved starving himself in a bid to replicate the debilitating physical state experienced by Conlon on hunger strike—that proved his adherence to method-style acting. During this time Day-Lewis reaffirmed his Irish roots by purchasing Castlekevin, a Georgian mansion in Co. Wicklow once owned by playwright J. M. Synge. Henceforth, he would divide his time between there and New York. While making a film version of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1996) in America Day-Lewis met and married Rebecca Miller, the daughter of the playwright. Day-Lewis retreated again from the public eye, refusing roles in such high-profile films as Interview with a Vampire, Shakespeare in Love, and Philadelphia. Since 1997 he has appeared in only two films: The Gangs of New York (2002), Scorsese’s ambitious epic of Irish and English gangs in New York of the 1860s, and The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005), written and directed by his wife, Rebecca Miller. Day-Lewis divides his time between America and Ireland and has three children: Gabriel-Kane Adjani (b. April 9, 1995, from a relationship with the actress Isabelle Adjani), Ronan Cal Day-Lewis (b. June 14, 1998), and Cashel Blake DayLewis (b. May 2002). Gwenda Young www.abc-clio.com
See also: SHERIDAN, Jim References Barton, Ruth. Irish National Cinema. London: Routledge, 2004. Caughie, John, and Kevin Rockett. The Companion to British and Irish Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1996. Jenkins, Garry. Daniel Day-Lewis: The Fire Within. New York: St. Martin’s, 1994.
DE CHASTELAIN, JOHN (1937–) Born in Romania to a Scottish father and an American mother (both of whom had been involved in covert activities on behalf of the Allies during World War II), John de Chastelain was educated in Scotland and immigrated to Canada with his parents as a teenager. After military training, de Chastelain rose through the ranks of the Canadian Army to become chief of Defence Staff from 1989–1993. He also served as Canadian ambassador to the United States from 1993–1994 and was recalled to serve once again as chief of Defence Staff in 1994–1995. De Chastelain was appointed head of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning in 1997. Alongside former U.S. Senator George Mitchell and former Finnish Prime Minister Harri Holkeri, de Chatelain was part of an international team that played a key role in brokering the Good Friday Agreement (1998). Disagreements between the armed groups, principally the Irish Republican Army and assorted loyalist paramilitaries, and elected representatives in Northern Ireland, Britain, and the Republic of Ireland resulted in a protracted stalemate over the status of paramilitary arms, partly resolved by IRA decommissioning in 2005. ABC-CLIO
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De Chastelain’s leadership of the Commission has not been without controversy. Initially selected because of his perceived impartiality, de Chastelain attracted criticism from Unionist, Loyalist, Nationalist, and Republican quarters as initial high hopes for a speedy disarmament of paramilitaries (or the placement of their arms “beyond use”) were repeatedly disappointed. He is widely recognized as one of the major international figures engaged in the peace process in Northern Ireland. Kevin James See also: MITCHELL, George References MacGinty, Roger, and John Darby. Guns and Government: The Management of the Northern Ireland Peace Process. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Peatling, Gary K. “Conflict and Ireland, 1829–2003: Canadian and American Stories.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 31, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 52–59.
DE VALERA, EAMON (1882–1975) Eamon de Valera was an American-born politician and statesman who fought for Irish freedom and later became one of the main architects of the Irish state. He valued Ireland’s links with the United States and was convinced that, without the moral support of American opinion, the state could not have come into existence. Nevertheless, his call in the 1930s for League of Nations intervention in the Chaco War displeased Washington. And during World War II the Roosevelt administration strongly disapproved of his policy of Irish neutrality. Earlier, when he had toured the United States to win support for the fledgling Irish republic, he antagonized leading Irish Americans and left a legacy of division among www.abc-clio.com
Portrait of Eamon de Valera, President of Ireland (1959–1973). (Library of Congress)
the American friends of Ireland. He was proud to welcome President John F. Kennedy to Ireland in June 1963, the first such visit by a serving American president. At the invitation of President Lyndon Johnson he made his last visit to the United States in 1964, during which he addressed a joint session of Congress. The people of Ireland, he said, had constantly looked to the United States as the champion of human liberty, the liberty of nations, and the liberty of individuals. Born in New York to Catherine Coll and Vivion Juan de Valera, he was raised by relatives in Bruree, Co. Limerick. He was educated by the Christian Brothers in Charleville, Co. Cork, and by the Holy Ghost Fathers at Blackrock College, Co. Dublin. He graduated with a degree in mathematics from the Royal University, after which he taught at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth. He married Sinéad Ní Fhlannagáin in 1910.
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A member of both the Irish Volunteers and the oath-bound Irish Republican Brotherhood, he commanded the Boland’s Mill garrison in the 1916 Rising. Though he was sentenced to death by the British authorities, representations were made on his behalf, citing his American citizenship. The death penalty was commuted to life imprisonment, but de Valera was released in 1917, the year in which he was elected member of parliament for East Clare. Arrested during the anti-conscription campaign and imprisoned in Lincoln Jail, he was reelected to Westminster in the Sinn Féin landslide of 1918. With the help of Michael Collins, he escaped from prison and was elected Príomh Aire (First Minister) of the Irish Republic in April 1919. To let Irish Americans know who was boss, de Valera styled himself president of the Irish Republic for his visit to the United States in 1919. His mission was to raise funds and gain recognition for the Republic. On a coast-to-coast tour he addressed audiences totaling more than 500,000 people in venues such as Fenway Park, Boston, Madison Square Gardens, New York, and Soldier Field, Chicago, raising more than $5 million. But he clashed with IrishAmerican leaders Judge Daniel Cohalan and John Devoy, over his handling of the recognition issue, contending that they were not seeking formal recognition of the republic, as he was, but were merely calling for recognition of the Irish people’s right to self-determination. And de Valera caused a furor when he unilaterally offered Britain a guarantee similar to the Platt Amendment, which gave the United States the right to intervene in Cuba’s affairs. He further antagonized Cohalan and Devoy by attempting to establish himself as a power broker in U.S. politics. Portraying himself as the man www.abc-clio.com
who could deliver Irish-American support for the League of Nations, de Valera also gave the impression that he could influence the Irish-American vote in the 1920 presidential election. But when he went to lobby Republicans at their convention in Chicago, he was refused a hearing. The election of Warren G. Harding ended any hope of recognition. On de Valera’s return to Ireland he disagreed with Michael Collins over the conduct of the War of Independence, arguing that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) should fight a conventional war rather than use guerrilla tactics against the British. He insisted Collins should attend the treaty negotiations while he remained in Dublin. He then opposed the treaty, proposing instead document No. 2, a version of the external association model that the British had previously rejected. His opposition centered not on partition but on the Oath of Allegiance. The Dáil voted in favor of the treaty and pro-treaty candidates won an overwhelming majority in the 1922 general election. However, continued opposition by republican hardliners led to a civil war (1922–1923) in which 3,000 people died, among them Michael Collins. De Valera spent most of the war in prison followed by a further four years in the political wilderness. In 1926, having failed to overturn Sinn Féin’s abstentionist policy, he and his followers left the party to form Fianna Fáil. The party entered the Dáil in 1927 and quickly became a well-organized, highly disciplined political machine that enjoyed the tacit support of the IRA. Members of the Dáil were required to take the Oath of Allegiance, which de Valera now dismissed as an empty formula. Between 1927 and 1929 de Valera was busy fund-raising in the United States, and ABC-CLIO
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in 1931 he used American bonds to launch the Irish Press. After the 1932 general election, he was elected head of a government pledged to an independent, self-sufficient rural republic. Committed to ending free trade, de Valera sought to foster indigenous industries, but sufficient private investment was not forthcoming, thereby forcing the state to increase its involvement in industry. Some modest progress was made, but the home market was too small to enable domestic industry to expand significantly. Exports were uncompetitive because of high costs. His abolition of the Oath of Allegiance and removal of the governorgeneral led to the economic war with Britain, exacerbating the problems caused by his protectionist policies. The cattle trade in particular suffered, which in turn contributed to the emergence of the Blueshirts, who fought street battles with both the IRA and members of Fianna Fáil. De Valera’s government neutralized the Blueshirts and in 1936 banned the IRA. In 1937 de Valera unveiled a new constitution. It reflected his firm belief that Ireland was a Catholic nation. Certainly, it included elements of the liberal tradition, but Catholic social teaching was to the forefront, and a vocational dimension was most in evidence in the composition of the senate. The constitution recognized “the special position of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Roman Catholic Church as the guardian of the faith professed by the great majority of its [Ireland’s] citizens.” It defined the national territory as the whole island of Ireland and distinguished the jurisdiction of the twenty-six-county state from the territory of the nation, “pending the integration of the national territory.” Fidelity to the nation was demanded of citizens, Irish was nominated as the first official language, www.abc-clio.com
women’s place was in the home, and marriage was indissoluble. (In 1972 the Article relating to the Catholic Church was deleted by referendum; a wafer-thin majority voted in 1996 to remove the prohibition on divorce; and Articles 2 and 3 defining the national territory were amended in 1998 as a result of the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement.) The constitution was adopted by a majority of 56.5 percent of the vote to 43.5 percent on a turnout of 75.8 percent. The ending of the economic war in 1938 made it possible for the seaports that had been retained by Britain under the terms of the treaty to be placed under Irish control. This was essential to maintaining Irish neutrality in World War II. The policy enjoyed all-party support in the Dáil, but the IRA took the opportunity to declare war on Britain. During the Emergency de Valera cracked down on militant republicans. Six IRA men were executed, three died on hunger strike, 500 were interned, and 600 were committed under the Offences against the State Act. Censorship was tightened to an extraordinary degree so that war news was effectively blacked out in Irish newspapers. De Valera accepted the assurance of the German minister in Dublin, Edouard Hempel, that Germany would respect Irish neutrality. Aware that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had little sympathy for Ireland’s position, he welcomed the formation in 1940 of the American Friends of Irish Neutrality. When the United States expressed its support for British efforts to obtain the use of the Irish ports, de Valera sent Frank Aiken to explain to Roosevelt why he could not oblige. In an acrimonious meeting Roosevelt rejected the explanation.
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From 1941 onwards, David Gray, the American envoy to Dublin, was increasingly outspoken in his criticism of de Valera, on one occasion appealing to a group of cabinet ministers to abandon neutrality. When the United States entered the war, Roosevelt pointedly said that Ireland’s freedom was also at stake. De Valera ruled out the possibility of U.S. bases being located in Ireland and expressed disapproval of bases in Northern Ireland, causing much anger in the United States—even among Irish Americans. Nonetheless, the Irish defence forces continued to supply valuable intelligence information to the Office of Strategic Services. De Valera attracted widespread criticism when he visited the German Legation in Dublin to express condolences on the death of Hitler. As the war drew to a close, a New York Times columnist commented that de Valera’s conduct had cost him U.S. political support in his quarrel with the British. On losing office in 1948, de Valera embarked on a four-week tour of the United States to campaign against partition, complaining that British behavior in Northern Ireland was worse than that of communist regimes in Eastern Europe. He had told Gray that people in Northern Ireland who objected to a united Ireland should be physically transferred to the country to which they wished to adhere. He later modified his position, saying that unionists would be given the choice of staying or moving to Britain. The British government responded to Ireland’s 1948 declaration of the republic by guaranteeing that Northern Ireland would remain a part of the United Kingdom so long as a majority of its population so desired. Fianna Fáil governed between 1951 and 1954. Having spent a further www.abc-clio.com
three years (1954–1957) in opposition, de Valera returned to serve his last term as taoiseach. In 1958, the introduction of the First Programme for Economic Development marked the end of economic nationalism. De Valera resigned as Taoiseach a year later. In 1959 he was elected president, but his party’s proposal to abolish proportional representation (which would have permanently tipped the electoral balance in favor of Fianna Fáil) was defeated in a referendum. De Valera served two terms as president, leaving public life in 1973. He died on August 29, 1975. His primary political aims, the political unification of Ireland and the restoration of the Irish language, are no longer actively pursued by any major political party. Patrick Gillan See also: COHALAN, Daniel; DEVOY, John; GRAY, David; IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY; IRISH REPUBLICAN BROTHERHOOD References Brown, Terence. Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–79. London: Fontana, 1981. Cronin, Seán. Irish Nationalism: A History of Its Roots and Ideology. New York: Continuum, 1980. Lee, J. J. Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Ryle, Dwyer T. De Valera: The Man and the Myth. Dublin, Ireland: Poolbeg, 1991.
DELANTY, GREG (1958–) Born in Cork City, Ireland, on July 19, 1958, Greg Delanty was educated at Colaiste Chriost Ri and at University College Cork, where he received his bachelor’s degree in English literature and history in 1980, followed by a higher diploma in 1982. During his time at university, he edited the arts magazine and published his ABC-CLIO
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first poems in The Examiner newspaper. In 1983 Delanty received the Patrick Kavanagh Memorial Award for poetry. In total he has published six collections of poetry. His first poetry collection, Cast in the Fire, was published by Dolmen Press in 1986. In the same year Delanty left his native Cork to settle in America. Much of his work since his first volume has concentrated on the experience of exile. This preoccupation continued with Southward (1992), his second collection, which includes some of the poems included in his first volume. Poems such as “Epistle from a Room in Winston-Salem, North Carolina” and “The Emigrant’s Apology,” which is dedicated “to my mother,” reflect this growing awareness of America. However, there is also a consciousness of his native Cork in a poem such as “Home from Home.” The presence of America reaches its height with American Wake (1995), his third collection. The title, with its evocation of the rural communal gatherings that were held before people emigrated from Ireland to America, directly refers to the sense of exile and loss engendered by emigration. Poems such as “The Fifth Province,” “Economic Pressure,” “America,” and “On the Renovation of Ellis Island” explore the history of emigration from Ireland to America, while the poem “In the Land of the Eagle” relates this history to the experience of Irish immigrants to America in the 1980s. In addition to the importance of America and the experience of the emigrant, Delanty has returned to the theme of printing and the role of the printer. He was born into a family of printers—his father, grandfather, uncles, and cousins all worked in the trade. Delanty worked in the Eagle Printing Company in Cork, and this www.abc-clio.com
awareness of the trade is reflected in his poetry. It is first visible in “The Master Printer,” a poem from his debut collection. However, it is in his fourth book, The Hellbox (1998), that this becomes a dominant theme with poems like “The Compositor,” “The Composing Room,” “Striped Ink,” and “The Printer’s Devil.” In 1986, the year his first volume of poetry was published, Delanty was awarded the Allan Dowling Poetry Fellowship in the United States. He received the Austin Clarke Centenary Poetry Award in 1997, and two years later he was a prizewinner in the National Poetry Competition. He has also received an Irish Arts Council Bursary. Delanty’s work has been widely anthologized in publications such as Poetry Ireland Review, The Southern Review, and The Irish Times. With Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, he edited Jumping Off Shadows: Selected Contemporary Irish Poets. He also edited The Selected Poems of Patrick Galvin with Robert Welch. He has translated Aristophanes’ The Suits, Euripides’ Orestes, and Selected Poems of Kyriakos Charalambides. His most recent publication is the volume Collected Poems 1986–2006 (2006). Delanty currently lives with his American wife, Patricia Ferreira, in Vermont, where he teaches at St. Michael’s College. He ran for the Vermont Green Party in the U.S. elections. For three months each year he returns to his Irish home in Derrynane, Co. Kerry. David Doyle
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See also: EMIGRATION References Delanty, Greg. Collected Poems 1986–2006. Manchester: Carcanet, 2006. Hearon, Todd. “Greg Delanty.” In The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America. Ed. Michael Glazier. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1999. 1-800-368-6868
DELAWARE
DELAWARE Before European contact and settlement, the region was inhabited predominantly by the Delaware tribe. The British explorer John Cabot laid claim to the area in 1497, but the first settlements were Dutch and subsequently Swedish before the British reasserted their initial claim in 1664. Presbyterian Scots-Irish were the first Irish settlers, and immigration was steady in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The numbers spiked in the 1720s, the early 1740s and 1760s, and finally in the years immediately preceding the Revolution, when approximately 30,000 people left Ulster, and large numbers sailed from Northern Ireland ports of Belfast, Londonderry, Larne, and Portrush. Many of the Scots Irish would leave in family groups, many as indentured servants, and would settle in the Delaware estuary; their numbers spread across both Delaware and, especially, Pennsylvania. Presbyterian churches were established regionwide from the early 1700s The Mason-Dixon Line was surveyed between 1764 and 1767 to resolve standing disputes over borders involving what would become Delaware. The Scots Irish contributed significantly to the Revolutionary War for the patriot cause. Also prominent in the area’s contribution was John Dickinson, “penman of the Revolution” and Delaware’s regiment, the Blue Hen Chickens. Delaware subsequently became the first of the original thirteen states to ratify the Constitution and is thus known as the First State. From the late eighteenth century, Irish Catholics began to settle in northern Delaware, many drawn to the gunpowder factory established by E. I. DuPont in 1802. The DuPonts regularly contributed www.abc-clio.com
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to costs of migration, assisted with low-cost housing, and provided savings accounts and widows’ pensions. The Know-Nothing campaigns of the 1850s, based on a raw appeal to antiimmigration and anti-Catholicism, had success in Delaware as elsewhere. Peter Causey was elected on the nativist ticket as governor of the state from 1855 to 1859 but proved unpopular, not least because he introduced prohibition. Delaware was a slave state (with relatively very few slaves) but did not vote to secede from the Union, and the majority of men fought for the state, but many crossed the border to fight with Virginia. The last Union general killed in the war was Irishman General Alfred Smyth from Co. Cork, who had emigrated to Delaware in 1854. Largely because of the influence of the DuPont family, the Republican party was politically dominant for much of the twentieth century until more recent gubernatorial victories by the Democrats. DuPont is the second largest chemical company in the world because of its success in developing polymers. Because of the very strong ScotsIrish roots, followed by Irish Catholic arrivals, and coupled with the fact that many Germans settled in the nearby Pennsylvania area, Delaware is one of three states in the country in which Irish is today the leading ancestry group. Sam Hitchmough References Doyle, David Noel, and Owen Dudley Edwards, eds. America and Ireland, 1776–1976: The American Identity and the Irish Connection. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish, Longman, 2000. Miller, Kerby A., Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. ABC-CLIO
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246 DEMPSEY, GEORGE T. Mulrooney, Margaret M. Black Power, White Lace: The Du Pont Irish and Cultural Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. Durham: University of New Hampshire, 2002.
DEMPSEY, GEORGE T. (1943–) Born in 1943, George Dempsey was educated at St. Pius X Seminary in Sacramento, the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, and St. John’s College of Oxford. He joined the U.S. diplomatic service in 1973 because he was “seduced by George F. Kennan,” the diplomat with the greatest impact on American cold war strategy. Dempsey often cited Kennan as his professional and ideological role model, expressing a desire to write about his six host capitals (Madrid, Vienna, Geneva, the Hague, Dublin, and Caracas) with the same precision as Kennan had addressed his Soviet posting. Dempsey’s formal diplomatic career in Ireland (as first secretary for politcal affairs) lasted only four years (1988–1992), but his association with the island and its polity was much longer. He lived in Blackrock, Co. Dublin from 1994 to 2003, before an unbearable disgruntlement with the Irish political class and media forced him back to Sacramento, California. Dempsey’s contribution to IrishAmerican diplomatic relations lay in his recurrent advocacy of a less hostile approach to Washington’s global posture. He was chargé d’affaires beginning during the 1991 Gulf War. Throughout this conflict, a central concern of U.S. diplomats in Dublin, Dempsey later wrote, was to check “a certain Irish governmental inclination toward pusillanimity in the face of public disquiet.” The Irish ministers would support the American government often in www.abc-clio.com
private, little in public. This frustrated Dempsey greatly. In 1993 he sparred with Taoiseach Charles Haughey, who complained that the British Foreign Office had been running the U.S. State Department for years. “Fair’s fair,” replied Dempsey, “Iveagh House [the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs] has taken over the American Embassy.” Despite considerable, and not untypical, State Department reservations over Clinton’s tolerance of Sinn Féin (“They were the dark side of the moon”), Dempsey remained cautiously optimistic about the Northern Ireland peace process. Indeed, he saw it as a good illustration of how the United States did its business. Why, he puzzled, did the Irish trust American intentions toward Northern Ireland and yet persist in believing the worst of American foreign policy elsewhere? In several respects, Dempsey’s postdiplomatic career in Ireland, rather than his formal tenure in the U.S. embassy, offers the more reliable barometer of what he saw as a “reflexive” Irish anti-Americanism: “a determination . . . to brush aside both complexities and simple truths and to cast the United States as a sinister villain.” His trenchant retrospective (From the Embassy: A U.S. Foreign Policy Primer, 2004), written “from the perspective of a working-level professional diplomat,” is a case-by-case study of what he saw as a wilful misrepresentation of America by the “vociferous nutters [who] dominated the public foreign policy debate in Ireland.” He is particularly harsh about The Irish Times’ “resident moralizer,” Fintan O’Toole, who, observed Dempsey in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, saw a moral equivalency between al Qaeda and the United States. Such thinking revolted him: “The hatred of America
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which drove the suicidal terrorists,” said Dempsey, “doesn’t flourish in a global vacuum.” Dempsey’s increasing disaffection was fueled by his self-identification as ethnically Irish (he was, he claimed proudly, “one of the tens of millions of Americans with Irish ancestry”). He had arrived in Dublin in 1988 “with a sense of anticipation akin to a homecoming.” This soon gave way to a deep pessimism when he realized “that the prevailing attitude in Ireland towards American foreign policy was not the friendly understanding and support I had every right to expect but an overtlyexpressed contempt.” Dempsey labored to change this state of affairs—with limited success, confirming his belief that antiAmericanism was innate to Irish political discourse. A regular speaker, broadcaster and society dinner guest, until his self-imposed exile in 2003, Dempsey never fought shy of defending American policies and condemning their distortion in the Irish media. He was a man of considerable erudition and classical learning, and the foreclosure of “rational debate” in Ireland inspired him to open it—and forced on him the regrettable admission that he could not. Timothy J. Lynch See also: CLINTON, William Jefferson; FOREIGN POLICY, IRISH Reference Dempsey, George. From the Embassy: A U.S. Foreign Policy Primer. Dublin: Open Republic Institute, 2004.
DEMPSEY, JACK (1895–1983) Jack Dempsey was born William Harrison Dempsey on June 14, 1895, in Manassa, Colorado, to Hyrum Dempsey, a rancher www.abc-clio.com
Portrait of boxer Jack Dempsey. Considered one of America’s first great sports heroes, Dempsey held the world heavyweight title between 1919 and 1926 (Library of Congress)
and shopkeeper, and Mary Celia (Smoot). Jack was one of eleven children, and the family moved from one western mining community to another, so that Jack (who was known as Harry until he began fighting professionally) never went to school beyond the eighth grade. Dempsey began his career as a saloon fighter, challenging all patrons to a fight. From 1911 to 1916, he tramped across the western United States, never earning more than was needed for basic survival. By late 1914 he was fighting professionally in Salt Lake City under the pseudonym “Kid Blackie.” Known as “the Manassa Mauler,” Dempsey quickly gained a reputation as a knockout artist and feared pugilist. In 1916 Dempsey married Maxine Cates, a piano player and sometime ABC-CLIO
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prostitute fifteen years his senior; the union ended in divorce in 1919. In 1917 and 1918, Dempsey won a number of bouts against highly regarded heavyweights and signed on with Jack Kearns, an ex-fighter who became Dempsey’s manager. Kearns took Dempsey east and introduced him to boxing promoter Tex Rickard, who recognized the potential windfall Dempsey could produce. Dempsey would soon become one of America’s first great sports heroes; his savage style captivated the public and made him as popular a figure as Babe Ruth or Red Grange. His legend was secured on July 4, 1919, at an outdoor arena in Toledo, Ohio, when Dempsey beat heavyweight champ Jess Willard. Temperatures in the ring reached 100 degrees that day, as Dempsey knocked the champ to the canvas seven times in the first round. The fight ended when Willard, nursing a broken jaw and two broken ribs, failed to answer the bell for the fourth round. Dempsey’s reign as heavyweight champion had begun. A title defense against Georges Carpentier is widely regarded as boxing’s first milliondollar gate. Profiled as a match between the Frenchman’s civilized urbanity and Dempsey’s savage ferocity, the bout was an instant sellout. A giant stadium constructed for the event housed seats for 80,000 who watched Dempsey dispatch the challenger in four rounds. On September 14, 1923, Dempsey faced Argentina’s Luis Angel Firpo at the Polo Grounds in New York. Known as the “Wild Bull of the Pampas,” Firpo was dropped seven times in the first round; he gave as good as he got, though, flooring Dempsey twice in the first three minutes. But before the first round ended, the challenger sent Dempsey through the ropes www.abc-clio.com
with a single right hand, silencing the 80,000 in attendance. Dempsey made it back into the ring, barely beating the tencount. The fight ended 57 seconds into the second round with Dempsey a knockout winner. Dempsey was a tremendously popular commodity, who cashed in on his fame and good looks by starring in several Hollywood movies. A constant fixture on the celebrity pages, Dempsey toured Europe and marketed himself as well as any contemporary athlete. In 1925, he moved to Los Angeles, where he met and married the actress Estelle Taylor. Their complicated and stormy relationship, coupled with Dempsey’s growing independence, led to a split with Kearns. After three years of inactivity, Dempsey defended his title against Gene Tunney on September 23, 1926, in Philadelphia. Rusty from the layoff, the six-foot-one-inch and 180-pound Dempsey received fewer points than the larger, more tactical Tunney. In a rematch on September 22, 1927, before the largest crowd ever to see a fight, Dempsey and Tunney met in Chicago’s Soldier Field. For six rounds Tunney bested Dempsey, but in the seventh, a smashing punch sent the champ to the canvas. Instead of retiring to a neutral corner, Dempsey stood over the fallen Tunney, delaying the referee’s count and allowing the champ precious time to recover. After some 17 seconds, the fight resumed and Tunney regained sufficiently to win the contest. This was Dempsey’s last bout, and the controversy over the long count remains one of the most famous in the history of professional boxing. Dempsey lost most of the fortune he had amassed in boxing during the stock market crash of 1929; for the next twelve years he eked out a meager existence by
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boxing in exhibitions and refereeing amateur bouts. He divorced his wife in 1930; three years later he married Hannah Williams. They had two daughters before the union dissolved in 1940. During World War II, Dempsey joined the Coast Guard, earning the rank of commander and directing that unit’s physical fitness program. After the war, he retired to New York City, where he owned and operated a restaurant. Married to Deanna Piatelli in 1959, he lived happily with her until his death on May 31, 1983. In his 78 bout career, Dempsey compiled 49 knockouts, 25 of them in the first round. Elected to the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1990, Dempsey is arguably the most wellknown boxer of all time. Tim Lynch See also: TUNNEY, James Joseph “Gene” References Kahn, Roger. A Flame of Pure Fire: Jack Dempsey and the Roaring Twenties. New York: Harcourt, 1999. Roberts, Randi. Jack Dempsey: The Manassa Mauler. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.
DERRANE, JOE (1930–) Joe Derrane was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1930 to Irish immigrant parents. With a father from Inis Mór (the Aran Islands) and a mother from Roscommon, he exhibited a love for the accordion and traditional Irish music from a very early age. Around 1940, his parents sought tutelage for him on the ten-key melodeon with Jerry O’Brien (1899–1968), an accordionist who had immigrated from Kinsale, Co. Cork in the early 1920s. By the time Derrane was fourteen years old, O’Brien was bringing him along to perform at Irish www.abc-clio.com
“kitchen rackets”—a euphemism for popular parties of that time, held in homes or apartments, where dancing was usually confined to linoleum-floored kitchens to avoid damage to rugs or hardwood floors. By age 17, he had purchased a two-row chromatic diatonic instrument and had begun to perform steadily in the legendary ballroom scene in Roxbury, which boasted five dance halls dotting Dudley Street. He was also performing regularly on WVOM’s original “Irish Hour,” a live Sunday night radio program hosted by impresario Tommy Shields. His performances came to the attention of Justus DeWitt, owner of the Copley Records label, who invited him to make a recording. This would be the first of 16 solo sides on 78 rpm media. The recording series began at Ace Recording Studios on Boylston Street, Boston, while Derrane was still a senior at Roxbury’s Mission High School. He also recorded with his accordion teacher, Jerry O’Brien, and with the All-Star Ceili Band, and the Irish All-Stars, which also featured his younger brother George (1932–2003) on tenor banjo. By the late 1950s the showband era had taken hold, and a mass exodus to the suburbs had siphoned off a great portion of the former dance hall patrons. By 1960, the dance hall scene had all but collapsed, resulting in a major income drop for Derrane. With few venues left, and unwilling to perform in barrooms, Derrane sold his button box, took up piano accordion, and quickly adapted to new styles. He soon found himself solidly entrenched in the pop music field. By 1980, however, the piano accordion had lost its appeal to many people, and Derrane again had to make a transition, this time to piano/synthesizer keyboards in the Top 40 idiom. He and his ABC-CLIO
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son, Joe Jr., formed Nightlife, a popular group that featured Joe Jr. on bass guitar and vocals. Around 1990, Derrane retired from music altogether. In 1993, Rego Records bought the rights to Derrane’s 78 rpm recordings and reissued them on CD and cassette, sparking a new wave of interest in his music. He was invited to perform on button accordion at the prestigious Wolf Trap Irish Folk Festival in Vienna, Virginia. He had not performed on button box for more than thirty years; indeed, he did not even have one. Using a 15-key Walters (D/C#) recently given to him by his friend Jack Martin, he set about preparing a limited repertoire of eight tune medleys (with a few more in reserve) for what he viewed as one last performance for old times’ sake, to be performed with the great piano accompanist Felix Dolan. On May 29, 1994, his stage performance at Wolf Trap before approximately 1,200 people drew standing ovations, and a career was reborn. His return to the button accordion is widely recognized as the greatest comeback in the history of Irish music. Since then, Derrane has recorded six new albums: Give Us Another and Return To Inis Mor for the Green Linnet label; The Tie That Binds for the Shanachie label; Ireland’s Harvest with Frankie Gavin, The Boston Edge with Seamus Connolly and John McGann, and The Man Behind The Box with John McGann for the Mapleshade label. In 1998 Derrane was inducted into the Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann North American Province Hall of Fame in recognition of his impact on, and contribution to, Irish traditional music. In 2000, he was chosen by Chicago’s Irish-American News as the Best Male Musician of the Decade 1990–2000 for outstanding achievement
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in Irish traditional music. In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts chose Derrane as a National Fellowship recipient. Susan Gedutis Lindsay See also: MUSIC IN AMERICA, IRISH Reference Gedutis, Susan. See You at the Hall: Boston’s Golden Era of Irish Music and Dance. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004.
DEVEREUX, JOHN (1778–1860) Wexford-born John Devereux, thought by some to be a veteran of the 1798 rising at New Ross, was living in the 1810s in the United States in voluntary exile and as a US citizen. He joined a business firm in Baltimore, Maryland, from which he ran a cargo of coffee through the British blockade to France in 1812. In 1815, Devereux arrived in Cartagena, Colombia, from the United States with a cargo of arms just as Simón Bolívar was going into exile. Devereux then made an offer to the patriots to obtain support for them in Britain, where he alleged that he had many friends in parliament, and to raise an Irish Legion of 5,000 men with the requisite arms, ammunition, and military stores. He was to be paid $175 for each soldier he imported into Venezuela. Devereux untruthfully boasted that he was a general in the Irish army and had led the Irish Catholics in the fight for Emancipation. After a visit to Buenos Aires, where he tried to convince the authorities he could raise a loan of 2 million pesos backed by the U.S. government, he arrived in Haiti to stay with Robert Sutherland, a British merchant in Port au Prince. In July 1817 Sutherland forwarded to Bolívar “General” Devereux’s offer to raise the Irish Legion,
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which he strongly recommended. Bolívar accepted the offer, and Devereux went to Ireland in 1818 and started recruitment for his legion. Although many of the noncommissioned officers and privates recruited by Devereux were veterans, little care was exercised in selecting the best candidates, and nearly all who applied were accepted. The force was noted more for its bravery than for its discipline. Thousands of returned soldiers from the British army in France enlisted for service in Venezuela. They sought not only the certainty of an immediate livelihood but also the prospect of further excitement and adventure, and a chance of making their fortunes in South America. With Daniel O’Connell’s support and the aid of the Irish Friends of South American Independence, Devereux sold commissions in his legion by forging a letter from Bolívar to give him the authority. O’Connell’s son Morgan and a near relative from Ennis, Maurice, were among the officers. The first contingent of Devereux’s Irish Legion landed in Margarita between September and December 1819, and the rest arrived in Angostura (today’s Ciudad Bolívar) in April and May 1820. From the beginning the expedition was plagued with problems as they were given little food and no pay. They suffered a number of mutinies, particularly after an attack on the Legion at Rio Hacha soon after they landed. This left huge casualties and afterwards most of the Irish were evacuated to Jamaica for shipment home. The commander of the Irish Legion, Devereux himself, remained behind his men in England and Ireland, living sumptuously on the contributions of his dupes, until the return of some of those whom he
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had cheated exposed him to danger of being arrested or shot, so that he was forced at last to go. He landed on Margarita Island many months after his legion had departed. The Irish blamed the Venezuelan authorities for the terrible hardships they were forced to endure, but the responsibility should have been placed entirely on Devereux, who sent his troops off without making any arrangements for their reception, designated Margarita as their destination without consulting or notifying the military authorities of Venezuela, and above all, failed to accompany his men to look after their needs. In Margarita, Devereux was received with great distinction by the governor Juan Bautista Arismendi. At a banquet in his honor, Devereux is reported to have spoken for two hours, promising that all Ireland was aroused in the cause of the South American patriots. It was an eloquent speech; however, its effect was somewhat marred by the fact that Devereux spoke in English, which none of his hearers was able to understand. In 1821 Bolívar confirmed Devereux in the grade of major general. He remained in military service for two years longer, and in December 1823 he was appointed Colombian envoy extraordinary to the courts of northern Europe. In 1825 he was arrested by the Austrian authorities and confined in Venice on charges of spying for the British. Devereux was eventually released, and he returned to the United States, where he lived upon a pension he received from the government of Venezuela. He returned to live in London, and died on February 25, 1860. Edmundo Murray See also: COLOMBIA; O’CONNELL, Daniel; O’LEARY, Daniel Florence; VENEZUELA
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252 DEVOY, JOHN References Hasbrouck, Alfred. Foreign Legionaries in the Liberation of Spanish South America. New York: Columbia University, 1928. Lambert, Eric. “Irish Soldiers in South America, 1810–30.” The Irish Sword 26, no. 62 (1984): 22–35.
DEVOY, JOHN (1842–1928) Born in Kill, Co. Kildare, on September 3, 1842, Devoy joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) at age eighteen. A year later, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion and spent a year in Algeria. Upon his return to Ireland, Devoy was appointed the chief Fenian organizer for the British army, his mission being to recruit disaffected Irish soldiers from the British army in Ireland. He also arranged for the escape of the Fenian leader James Stephens from an English prison. In February 1866, however, Devoy was arrested and sentenced to 15 years penal servitude. He was released five years later on the condition that he settle outside the United Kingdom, so on January 18, 1871, Devoy arrived in New York City aboard the SS Cuba along with four other Fenian exiles, including Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. Shortly after arriving in New York, Devoy got a job as a reporter for the New York Herald and later became its foreign editor. He also joined the Clan na Gael, a secret Irish-American revolutionary organization dedicated to achieving Irish independence. He quickly moved through the ranks, and in 1874, Devoy became chairman of a Clan na Gael rescue committee whose purpose was to free Fenian prisoners in Australia. To carry out this plan, Devoy purchased the whaling ship Catalpa and, on April, 1875, set out for Australia. On
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Portrait of Fenian leader John Devoy. (Library of Congress)
April 18, 1876, six Fenian prisoners boarded the Catalpa and escaped their British captors, arriving in New York four months later. Upon their arrival, the escaped convicts were greeted with much fanfare, and this public defiance of British authority greatly boosted Clan na Gael’s reputation. Michael Davitt, the Irish radical agitator, undertook a tour of the United States in 1878 and was befriended by Devoy. Davitt and Devoy began a discussion that would eventually lead to a shift in the Irish and Irish-American nationalist movement. The “New Departure’” was an informal alliance among constitutional and physical force nationalists to work together peacefully under the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell. In 1882, Devoy founded
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the newspaper, the Irish Nation, and published the Land of Eire, his account of the Land League movement in Ireland and America. He also devoted himself to several other projects, including financing the construction of the Fenian Ram, a failed experimental submarine by John Holland, the later inventor of the first modern-day submarine. Devoy and Clan na Gael were racked by internal strife and faction throughout the rest of the 1880s and 1890s. In 1900, Devoy, together with longtime ally Daniel Cohalan, reorganized the Clan na Gael. Devoy founded the newspaper the Gaelic American in 1903 and for the next 20 years, he would remain at the forefront of Irish-American nationalism, contributing and participating in every major effort and campaign for Irish freedom. Thomas Clarke, the former Fenian, came to New York in 1901 and worked for Devoy before returning to Ireland to begin reorganizing the IRB in 1907. Devoy also provided financial support for Arthur Griffith’s United Irishman and contributed to Patrick Pearse’s school, St. Edna’s. With the outbreak of World War I and the belief that “England’s difficulty was Ireland’s opportunity,” Devoy was at the forefront of the conspiracy that led to the Easter Rising of 1916. Devoy, together with Sir Roger Casement, came into contact with the German ambassador to the United States and was able to obtain a promise of 20,000 German rifles to support the rebellion. However, a miscommunication between Devoy and those in Ireland led to the arms languishing off the coast of Ireland for two days on the German ship Aud before the captain scuttled the boat and arms after being discovered by a British patrol. Despite this failure, the
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leaders of the rebellion carried through with their plans, but were eventually crushed by the British. After the establishment of Dáil Éireann and the outbreak of the Anglo-Irish War in 1919, Devoy welcomed the president of the Dáil Éireann, Eamon de Valera, on his fund-raising tour to America. Relations between the two men quickly soured because of de Valera’s belief that he should have direct control of Irish and Irish-American efforts for Ireland. Specifically, de Valera and his supporters wanted the money raised during his tour to be sent directly to the Dáil while Devoy and Cohalan favored using the money to win support for Ireland in the United States and to oppose Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations. After the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, Devoy supported the treaty, seeing it as a necessary first step in the movement toward Irish independence. Devoy visited Ireland in 1924 as a guest of the Irish Free State. He died on September 29, 1928, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, unmarried and nearly penniless. His remains were taken to Ireland, and he was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin. Ely Janis See also: CASEMENT, Roger; COHALAN, Daniel; DAVITT, Michael; DE VALERA, Eamon References Devoy, John. Recollections of an Irish Rebel. New York: Chase P. Young & Co., 1929. Golway, Terry. Irish Rebel: John Devoy and America’s Fight for Irish Freedom. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Ryan, Desmond. The Phoenix Flame: A Study of Fenianism and John Devoy. London: A Barker, 1937. Ryan, Desmond, and William O’Brian, eds. Devoy’s Post Bag, 1871–1928, 2 vols. Dublin: Fallon, 1948.
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DILLON, PATRICK JOSEPH (1842–1889) Born 1842 in Tuam, Co. Galway to John Dillon and Julia Rign(e)y, Patrick Joseph Dillon went to school in Banagher and then entered All Hallows in Dublin to study for the priesthood. He was ordained in Dublin on October 25, 1863, and arrived in Argentina a few weeks later. Initially, he was appointed the Irish chaplain in Merlo and later in Cañuelas. At the end of 1865, Father Dillon traveled on mission to the Falkland/Malvinas Islands to attend the Catholic residents. A year later, he was appointed as professor of theology, canon law, and sacred scripture in the diocesan seminary. In 1869 Dillon was made canon of the cathedral of Buenos Aires and accompanied Archbishop Escalada as a theological consultant to Rome and the first Vatican Council. He returned to Argentina and in 1871 replaced Anthony Fahy, O.P., as principal Irish chaplain in Buenos Aires. Dillon opened St. Brigid’s chapel in La Choza in 1872, and a year later was named chaplain of the Irish Hospital in Buenos Aires and of the Irish Sisters of Mercy. In 1876 he founded St. George’s school for boys of Irish and other English-speaking families. The first issue of the Southern Cross was distributed in Buenos Aires on January 16, 1875, and was characterized by its founder, Dillon as “Catholic and Irish.” The main English-language paper at the time, the Standard, was British-oriented despite being owned by Irish-born brothers Edward and Michael G. Mulhall. Therefore, Dillon decided to create a paper to represent IrishCatholic interests. Since 1875 the Southern Cross has served as the main record of the Irish-Argentine community. Dillon remained its editor until 1882. www.abc-clio.com
Dillon participated in several political activities and groups, all of them within the social circles of the growing Irish-Argentine landed elite. On March 1, 1879, during a meeting led by Dillon, the General Brown Club was founded to put forward candidates at the provincial and national elections. Some of the club’s goals were economic reform, encouragement of European immigration, and the moral restoration of the gauchos (the cowboys of the pampas). With the sponsorship of the most conservative political forces, Patrick J. Dillon and Eduardo Murphy were elected members of parliament in the province of Buenos Aires. In 1883 Dillon was elected national senator representing Buenos Aires province. Some historians argue that Dillon was more popular with the rich than with the poor among the Irish in Argentina. He is also accused of having been too much involved in politics for a priest. Dillon had to face conflicts with a group of women in the community who wished to have independent management for Irish charities. In 1879 Mary Brennan (née Colclough), of the Ladies’ Irish Beneficent Society, complained that Dillon refused to turn over a large sum of money belonging to the society. Others disapproved of his maneuvering to auction the properties of the St. Patrick’s Society. In all of these cases the Southern Cross was effectively used to support Dillon’s position. Through his influential positions in politics, the press, and official religion, Dillon played an important role in the government policy to attract massive immigration from Europe to Argentina in the 1880s. On April 18, 1881, parliament commissioned Dillon to promote emigration from Ireland. He went to Europe on an official mission and returned in January 1882.
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His recommendations to the government included the payment of tickets to attract emigrants, as well as granting lands and facilitating internal transport. Dillon committed himself to travel back to Ireland to personally guarantee the success of the project. As a result, with the support of President Juarez Celman, the government decided to grant 50,000 free or assisted tickets to European emigrants. In this context occurred the tragic episode that would become known as the Dresden Affair of 1889. Dillon’s role in the Dresden Affair is unclear. His brother, John Stephen Dillon, was appointed as one of the immigration agents in Ireland and was paid a bonus plus commissions from the shipping companies. The steamer City of Dresden was crowded with poor emigrants mainly from Irish cities. They arrived at Buenos Aires on February 1889, but many of them died during the crossing, while others re-emigrated or vanished after a few years in Argentina. Early in 1889, Dillon returned to Ireland because of ill health, and died in Dublin on June 11, 1889. He was buried in Glasnevin, near Daniel O’Connell’s monument. Edmundo Murray See also: DRESDEN AFFAIR; FAHY, Anthony; FALKLANDS/MALVINAS ISLANDS; PRESS, THE IRISH IN LATIN AMERICA; MULHALL, Michael George References Coghlan, Eduardo A. Los Irlandeses en la Argentina: Su Actuación y Descendencia. Buenos Aires, 1987. Marshall, Oliver. The English-Language Press in Latin America. London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 1996. Murray, Thomas. The Story of the Irish in Argentina. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1919. “Número del Centenario.” Special issue. The Southern Cross (1975). “Special Golden Jubilee Number 1875–1925.” Special issue. The Southern Cross (1925). www.abc-clio.com
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DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS, IRISH–LATIN AMERICAN Relations between Irish authorities and Latin American governments have been driven by consular, economic, political and, more recently, trade factors. The lack of an articulated Irish policy on Latin America until the last decades of the twentieth century is evidence of the changing priorities of foreign affairs in Ireland. During the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth century, Ireland’s foreign affairs were handled by the English government. Therefore, the diplomatic representation of the Irish throughout Latin America was in the charge of British consuls. The British presence in the area intensified during the independence period (1806–1825), and the consuls had to deal with a diversity of situations, in particular the protection of English subjects and their property, as well the delicate relations with the weakening Spanish colonial administrations. Irish settlers in the River Plate and Brazil, and ex-soldiers in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico were increasingly relating to other English subjects through the consuls, who issued passports, arbitrated disputes, and registered some private events (such as birth, marriage, and death records, a responsibility of the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and other churches). The network of British consulates and vice consulates was extended in the second half of the nineteenth century with the development of railways, mining companies, cold-storage plants, and other British-owned businesses. Among the Irish-born British consuls, Robert Gore (1820–1854), of Saunders Court, Co. Wexford, was appointed chargé d’affaires at Montevideo (1846) and Buenos Aires (1851) and played an important role ABC-CLIO
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during the last years of Juan Manuel de Rosas’s government in Buenos Aires. Thomas J. Hutchinson, vice consul in Montevideo and then in Rosario, had a heroic role as a physician during the cholera outbreak of 1867. Hutchinson published geographical and economic essays about Argentina, Paraguay, and Peru. In 1906, Roger Casement (1864–1916) accepted the consular post in Rio de Janeiro and other Brazilian cities until 1911. He investigated and made charges against the Peruvian Amazon Company and its brutal exploitation of Putumayo indigenous people in Amazonian Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Casement calculated that in the first decade of the twentieth century at least 30,000 natives had been directly murdered or killed by deliberate starvation. He was knighted for his services. When the young American republics developed their diplomatic representations in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, some of them established honorary consulates in Dublin and Liverpool under the supervision of the ambassadors in London. In the early 1860s, the consul of Buenos Aires in Dublin was Michael O’Brien, who returned to Argentina in May 1864. In the 1880s, at the time of the Dresden Affair, the Argentine embassy in the United Kingdom had consuls in Dublin and Cork, who worked together with government agents to sign up immigrants to Argentina. In the first decades of the twentieth century the Irish declared their independence from England. Swiftly, the new government procured direct diplomatic relations with the United States and Argentina. The members of the first Dáil Éireann (1919–1922) recognized that in both countries, probably owing to the existence of influential Irish communities, it would www.abc-clio.com
be relatively easier to obtain international recognition and financial support, as well as to develop direct trade for the new state. On May 6, 1919, Eamon Bulfin (1892–1968) was appointed as representative to the government of the Argentine Republic; this was the first-ever mission of the Irish diplomatic service. Bulfin, who began working in Buenos Aires in March 1920, established a contact network with government officials and Irish-Argentine leaders. He also launched the Irish Fund to raise funds for Ireland, and negotiated shipments of ammunitions for the Irish Republican Army. In 1921 the Republic had eight representatives, two of them in Latin America (Bulfin in Argentina and Frank W. Egan in Chile). On July 25, 1921, Laurence Ginnell (1852–1923) arrived in Buenos Aires to help raise a loan for the Republic. He met with the Argentine foreign minister, Honorio Pueyrredon, and effectively campaigned among Irish Argentines in Buenos Aires and the provinces. Ginnell remained in Argentina until April 1922, when he joined the second Dáil as the only anti-Treatyite member. Patrick J. Little was the third diplomatic envoy to South America, after his mission in South Africa. He visited Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. In his report of December 4, 1921, Little observed that the Irish in South America were prejudiced against diplomatic missions from Ireland, because there was a shared belief that the Irish only went there for money and did not care about what happened to the emigrants. In Chile, Frank Egan was an effective representative to the authorities. He had good connections in government and society and actively used Irish propaganda in the Chilean press. Both in Chile and Argentina, the Irish envoys had to counterbalance the
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strong British influence in railways, meat exports, mining, and trade. Patrick J. Little also reported a network of unofficial representatives and informers in Latin American countries, including Donald Buckley and John Tobin in Brazil, Richard Nicholls in Bolivia, James O’Durnin in Paraguay, and William Morgan in Uruguay. In 1923, Ireland’s representative to the League of Nations, Michael MacWhite, intensively cultivated Irish–Latin American historical links. He was successful in this policy, and by 1930 Ireland was able to canvas support from the Latin American republics at Geneva and was elected to the League of Nations as a nonpermanent member. However, formal diplomatic relations between Ireland and Latin America were not established until 1947, when an Irish commercial mission led by L. H. Kerney went to Argentina to buy wheat. A chargé d’affaires, Matthew Murphy, was appointed in December 17, 1947. In early 1964, the mission was upgraded to ambassador level, and Michael Leo Skentelberry was appointed as the first ambassador. One of the most complete and detailed reports on the Irish Argentines that exists (July 22, 1958) was sent to Dublin by Timothy Horan, the chargé d’affaires in 1955–1959; it included a complete description of the community and their attitudes and social divisions. Among the Argentine envoys in Ireland, Lorenzo McGovern was the first Irish Argentine to be appointed to the mission in Dublin (1955). Peadar Kirby remarked that the opening of relations with Argentina had more to do with historical links with that country than with any particular Irish interest in Latin America. In fact, it was not until the Irish foreign service was expanded after European Community (EC) membership www.abc-clio.com
in 1973 that Ireland established diplomatic relations with Brazil (1975) and Mexico (1977). Exceptions to the fluctuating Irish policy in Latin America have been the support to human rights solidarity groups in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980s and the support to removing EC economic sanctions on Argentina during the Falklands-Malvinas War in 1982. When it failed to get a unified EC decision, Ireland (together with Italy) broke ranks in refusing to continue with the sanctions, a stand warmly welcomed and still remembered in Argentina. Edmundo Murray See also: BULFIN, Eamon; CASEMENT, Roger; DRESDEN AFFAIR; FALKLAND/MALVINAS ISLANDS References Ferns, H. S. Britain and Argentina in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960. Kennedy, Michael. “‘Mr. Blythe, I Think, Hears from him Occasionally’: The Experiences of Irish Diplomats in Latin America, 1919–23.” In Irish Foreign Policy 1919–1966: From Independence to Internationalism, edited by Michael Kennedy and J. M. Skelly. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000: 44–60. Kirby, Peadar. Ireland and Latin America: Links and Lessons. Dublin: Trócaire, 1992.
DOMESTIC SERVANTS, IRISH During the nineteenth century, an expanding American middle class led to a greater demand for female domestic servants. As a result, English-speaking immigrant women without any training or experience could readily find employment in American homes. The majority of domestic servants in the United States during the nineteenth century were either African Americans (slaves in the southern states before Emancipation, and free blacks in the Northern ABC-CLIO
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states) or Irish immigrants. Domestic servants contributed essential labor to the household and, equally important, were also a symbol of social status for their employers. While conditions varied among employers and from rural to urban households, Irish domestic servants often worked in isolation, and the treatment they received in the households where they lived underscored their low social status. Although some Irish women had worked as domestics in Ireland before immigrating, they were unfamiliar with American household practices and unprepared for the frequent isolation of their new life. (Male Irish immigrants were rarely employed as domestic workers; male domestic servants in nineteenth-century America were usually African American.) Many Irish women came from a background of rural poverty and were accustomed to a very limited diet, to preparing food on a turf fire, and to living with sparse furnishings in a tiny home. They did not have the knowledge required to cook in middle-class American kitchens or to clean multiple rooms filled with elaborate Victorian knickknacks and furnishings. Their employers, almost invariably Protestants, were often uncomfortable with, if not hostile to their hires’ Catholicism and were sometimes unwilling to allow Irish employees time to attend Catholic services. Nonetheless, the benefits of “living out” or “going into service” far outweighed the downsides for most Irish female immigrants. Historian Hasia R. Diner has noted that nineteenth-century white domestics could earn 50 percent more than saleswomen and 25 percent more than textile works; did not have to pay for food, housing, shelter, heat, water, or transportation; and lived in comfortable, pleasant homes as www.abc-clio.com
opposed to the overcrowded, unsanitary tenements occupied by factory workers. As a result of their relatively high pay and low living expenses, Irish women could save up to several thousand dollars as domestics, most of which they sent home to their impoverished families. In fact, most of the money remitted by Irish immigrants to post-Famine Ireland came not from men but from women, many of whom were also able to earn enough to later establish their own households in the United States. This, in addition, gave Irish women a greater degree of autonomy than many female immigrants from other countries, who not only lacked English skills but also were often discouraged or prevented by their families from working outside the home. The Catholic Church in the United States also benefited from the piety and industriousness of these women—many Catholic churches were built in large part with donations from the earnings of Irish female domestics. Such was the demand for female domestics that most American employers were as dependent upon their Irish servants as these women were upon them. In fact, in many cases, it was the Irish domestic who held the upper hand, aware of the demand for her labor. Nineteenth-century households were usually large, and for any woman who could afford to hire help, shouldering the huge burden of cleaning, cooking, laundry, and child-rearing on her own was not practical. As Irish domestics became an all but ubiquitous fixture of middle- and upper-class American homes, employers were forced into the often uncomfortable position of having to tolerate members of an alien culture and religion living under the same roof. Many Americans also grumbled about their hires’
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self-importance. One employer complained that when her sister was ill, their Irish maid refused to bring the woman her meal on a tray, saying that she had not been hired as a nurse. It was not uncommon for women’s magazines of the era to carry articles advising how to cope with the incompetence and quirks of one’s Irish maid or cook, as well as short stories and jokes lampooning “Bridget’s” shortcomings as a housekeeper, her quaint Irish accent and turns of phrase, and her “superstitious” Catholic practices. American magazines of the era, such as Godey’s Lady’s Book, and popular domestic novels with titles such as That Bridget of Ours!, generally portrayed Irish domestics as garrulous and good-hearted, but also dimwitted and incompetent. It is worth contrasting briefly the attitudes of American employers toward African-American domestics as opposed to Irish servants. Not surprisingly, some employers preferred to hire African-American domestics, not only because they would work for less pay but also because black servants were often perceived as more “cheerful,” “obedient,” and “agreeable” by employers than their Irish coworkers. The African-American scholar and activist W. E. B. DuBois, in an 1899 study of black domestic servants in Philadelphia, quoted one employer: “If you get a good class of colored people they are the most faithful, honest and biddable servants in the world.” DuBois observed, “This docility which is a recognized trait of the Negro character has doubtless been developed by slavery, and it is not unlikely that it has been still further cultivated in these later days by their knowledge that losing their places in service may mean inability to get work of any kind for an indefinite period.” Unlike African-American domestics, Irish women www.abc-clio.com
knew that they generally had more choices and could demand more pay; consequently, many refused to tolerate poor treatment. As might be expected, Irish female domestics themselves had a very different view of their work experiences than their employers. The Irish-born author Mary Anne Sadlier drew on her experiences as a domestic in American homes in her novels such as Bessy Conway: or, an Irish Girl Living in New York. Sadlier, a deeply devout Catholic, used her novels to warn her readership of the potential pitfalls they faced in their new homeland, including such temptations as missing Mass, drinking alcohol, or going dancing rather than attending to their employers’ needs. “The father and mother who suffer their young daughters to come out unprotected to America in search of imaginary goods,” said Sadlier, “would rather see them laid in their graves than lose sight of them, did they know the dangers which beset their path in the New World.” While Sadlier’s words were doubtless somewhat hyperbolic, her novels reveal that Irish female domestics were keenly aware of their lower social status and the necessity not only of learning to thrive in a new, alien culture but also of keeping their traditional values and religious faith intact as a source of strength. Unlike their American employers, who often viewed hiring an Irish domestic as an unwelcome necessity, for Irish immigrant women going into service was a welcome opportunity to better their lives and those of their loved ones in Ireland. Eventually, as the Irish became further assimilated to the larger American culture and had more opportunities open to them, fewer Irish women chose to go into service. The United States’ eventual entry into World War I was the biggest factor in the ABC-CLIO
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decline in the number of domestic servants generally, not because middle-class women did not continue to clamor for servants, but because the war opened up a wider range of occupations to female workers, such as clerical work. As the twentieth century progressed, the decline in domestic servants was also furthered by the proliferation of domestic appliances. However, the decline in the numbers of all women entering domestic service can be attributed mostly to the advantages the new types of employment offered women over domestic work: higher wages, more independence, often better working conditions, and more interesting and challenging work. Danielle Maze See also: EMIGRATION References Diner, Hasia R. Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. DuBois, W. E. B. The Philadelphia Negro. New York: Lippincott, 1899. Milner, Nina. “Savoir Faire: Documenting the Immigrant Experience.” Canada Library and Archives. www.collectionscanada.ca/ bulletin/015017–0101–11-e.html (accessed January 7, 2004). Morris, Charles R. American Catholic. New York: Vintage, 1997. Wilson, Harriet. Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. Boston: Rand & Avery, 1859.
DONGAN,THOMAS (1634–1715) Thomas Dongan was the first Irish Catholic governor of New York. Born in 1634, at Casletown Kildrought, now Cellbridge, Co. Kildare, Thomas Dongan was the youngest son of Sir John Dongan, baronet and member of the Irish www.abc-clio.com
Parliament. Devoted to the Stuarts, after the death of Charles I, the family removed to France, where Thomas served in an Irish regiment of the French army under Turenne, rising to the rank of colonel in 1674. After the Treaty of Nimeguen (1678), he returned to England and, through the influence of the Duke of York—a fellow officer under Turenne—was appointed lieutenant governor of Tangiers. In 1682, with the province of New York bankrupt and in a state of rebellion, James, Duke of York, appointed Dongan as its governor. Arriving in 1683, Dongan was well received by Manhattan’s Anglo-Dutch oligarchs, who, it seems, admired his “knowledge, refinement, and modesty.” Dongan began his administration by convening the first representative assembly of New York Province on October 14, 1683. The eighteen assembly members met for three weeks at Fort James; their main accomplishment being a “Charter of Libertyes and Privileges.” This charter defined the form of government for the colony, recognized basic political and personal rights (such as trial by jury and no taxation without representation), and affirmed religious liberty for Christians. It also divided the colony into twelve “shires” or counties and, as in England, these were to be the basic units of local government. Dongan further issued a new charter for the government of New York, known as Dongan’s Charter, which made New York a self-governing corporation, one of little more than a dozen communities ever incorporated in British America. In 1685, with the Duke of York’s ascension to the throne as King James II, he would form a new super-colony incorporating all of New England, plus New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, thus disallowing New York’s Charter of Libertyes and
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its provincial legislature. However, the charter’s presence would continue to be felt throughout the eighteenth century, as New York colonists used its system of government as a program for continuous political agitation. Indeed, many of its principles passed into the framework of American federal government. Dongan also established the boundary lines of the New York colony by settling disputes with Connecticut on the east, Canada on the north, and Pennsylvania on the south. And, in 1684, in a treaty with the Indians at Albany, New York, Dongan obtained the written submission of the Iroquois to the Great Sachem Charles, and outlined the policy that would keep the Five Nations friends of England and a barrier between French and English possessions in North America. However, by this time, there was growing unrest toward Dongan in New York. Not only was he giving baronial land grants to a select group of favored insiders, and lining his own pockets along the way (in Manhattan he used dummy partners to accumulate hefty slices of real estate along both sides of the city wall), but his public demonstration and support of his Catholic faith rankled the largely Protestant citizenry. Several Jesuit priests had accompanied Dongan to New York and, for the first time in the city’s history, mass had been celebrated in Fort James. Further, Dongan had appointed Catholics to strategic positions in his administration and authorized Jesuits to open a Roman Catholic school. However, before any of this began to seriously affect Dongan’s administration, Sir Edmund Andros (a former governor of the New York colony) returned to New York in 1688; on the authority of King James II, he removed Dongan from office, www.abc-clio.com
broke the provincial seal, seized all provincial records, and hoisted the flag of New England over the fort. Refusing command of a regiment with the rank of major general, Dongan retired to his estate on Staten Island until anti-Catholic prejudice (after the overthrow of James II in 1689) forced him to flee to England. With the death of his brother in 1698, Dongan became the second earl of Limerick. However, failing to recover his ancestral lands from antiCatholic confiscation, Dongan died a poor man on December 14, 1715. James P. Byrne See also: NEW YORK CITY References Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Driscoll, John T. “Thomas Dongan.” From the Catholic Encyclopedia. www. catholicity.com/encyclopedia/d/dongan, thomas.html (accessed June 30, 2007). Harrell, Joy. “Dongan, Thomas.” In The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America. Ed. Michael Glazier. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999: 219.
DONLEAVY, J. P. (1926–) James Patrick Donleavy was born on April 23, 1926, in Brooklyn, New York, to parents who were Irish immigrants. After serving in the United States Navy during World War II, Donleavy applied to a number of American colleges, but because of his poor academic record he was turned down. Eventually accepted by Trinity College Dublin, he spent three years there, ostensibly studying microbiology but in reality spending much of his time frequenting Dublin’s pubs and meeting many of its literary figures, among them the writer ABC-CLIO
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Portrait of author J. P. Donleavy, who is best known for his first novel The Ginger Man. (Library of Congress)
Brendan Behan. Training as a painter before he became a writer, he exhibited paintings in several Dublin galleries. In 2006 a sixtyyear retrospective of his paintings was held at the Molesworth Gallery in Dublin. As well as his own Irish ancestry, Donleavy said that one of the principal reasons for his settling in Ireland and becoming an Irish citizen in 1967 was because of the country’s policy of exempting writers from paying income tax. Donleavy is best known for his first novel The Ginger Man (1950). Set in Ireland just after World War II, it tells the story of Sebastian Dangerfield, a young American of Irish descent who is a thinly fictionalized version of Donleavy himself. Like the author, Dangerfield is a student at Trinity College Dublin where he leads a rowdy, drunken existence based on fornication and philosophizing. In his autobiographical The History of the Ginger Man (1994), www.abc-clio.com
Donleavy recounted how his friend Gainor Stephen Crist was also one of the models for Dangerfield. In the same book, Donleavy detailed the complex circumstances of the novel’s publication. Because of its bawdy content, Donleavy had trouble finding a publisher for the novel. On Behan’s advice, he submitted it to Maurice Girodias at the Olympia Press, a Parisian publishing house, which as well as publishing writers such as Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett also published pornographic novels. Donleavy was shocked to find his novel published as part of the Traveler’s Companion Series, the publisher’s series of pornographic novels. Because of the damage being associated with such novels might do to his career, Donleavy sued the publishers. The case was settled twenty-two years later when Donleavy purchased Olympia Press. Upon its publication, the novel was banned in Ireland and the United States because of obscenity. Since it was first published the novel has sold more than 45 million copies in two dozen languages, and it was included in the Modern Library’s Best 100 Novels of the 20th Century. In 2005 it was reprinted in its first Irish-only edition. Although Donleavy’s reputation mainly rests on his debut novel, he has written many other works. His other novels include The Saddest Summer of Samuel S (1966), The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B (1970), The Onion Eaters (1971), and The Destinies of Darby Dancer, Gentleman (1977). Another novel, A Fairy Tale of New York, is frequently cited as being the inspiration for the popular Christmas song of the same name, which was recorded by The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl. He has also published nonfiction, including The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete Manual of Survival & Manners and De Alphonse Tennis:
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The Superlative Game of Eccentric Champions. Several of his novels have been adapted for the stage, and a collection of his short stories, Meet My Maker the Mad Molecule, has also been published. He wrote, narrated, and was featured in a television documentary entitled J. P. Donleavy’s Ireland in All Her Sins and Graces (1992) which was coproduced by the Discovery Channel and the Irish national broadcaster RTÉ. Based on his book of the same title, the documentary featured the author traveling around Ireland and reading passages from his work. The documentary won the Worldfest Houston Gold Award in 1992 and a Cine Golden Eagle in 1993. Donleavy currently lives alone in Levington House, an old mansion on the outskirts of Mullingar, Co. Westmeath. Dressed in his tweed suits, he has long been a recognizable figure in Ireland. After previous failed attempts, a film adaptation of “The Ginger Man” starring Johnny Depp and directed by Laurence Dunmore is said to be in the works. David Doyle References Donleavy, J. P. The Ginger Man. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988. Donleavy, J. P. The History of the Ginger Man. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. Ryan, John. Remembering How We Stood: Bohemian Dublin at the Mid Century. New York: Taplinger, 1975. Shea, Peter G. “J. P. Donleavy.” In The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America. Ed. Michael Glazier. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1999.
DONOVAN, GERARD (1959–) Gerard Donovan was born in 1959 in Wexford, Ireland, and grew up in Galway. Donovan studied at Trinity College Dublin, and at Johns Hopkins University www.abc-clio.com
in Baltimore, Maryland. He has taught at Johns Hopkins and the University of Arkansas and is currently teaching at Southampton College in New York, dividing his time between New York and Ireland. Best known as a poet, Donovan has also published numerous short stories and two intriguing novels. The collections are published by Salmon Press and include Columbus Rides Again (1992), Kings and Bicycles (1995), and The Lighthouse (2000). The latter collection was short-listed for the prestigious Irish Times Literature Prize. Donovan’s poems are difficult to classify and cover a range of topics and approaches. While some are distinctly grappling with the conflict of belonging to two different nationalisms (“They Write,” “On a Trawler to the Mainland,” “Suitcase Poems”), others are historical ponderings about the postcolonial condition (“Columbus Rides Again,” “Caribbean Queen,” “The Reykjavik Wife”). Some are deeply personal (“The Fate of Mothers,” “Having Forgotten to Water the Anniversary Flowers,” “Anniversary: To a Father”) while others speak of place (“Two Seasons in Connemara,” “Long Island Rush Hour Report,” “Mr. Henderson’s Bicycle Shop”). In The Lighthouse, however, Donovan has framed the collection with poems that have differing perspectives about lighthouses, and somehow the lighthouses come to represent the border between the elements he considers to be at work in his life. The lighthouses are the space between countries, between land and sea, between those who travel and those who are immobile, between light and dark. Their position as bookends, with such a variety of poems in between, serves to nicely define the way that Donovan situates his poetry. Donovan’s novels have much of the poetic about them. His first novel, ABC-CLIO
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Schopenhauer’s Telescope (2003), is an unusual and unsettling book that demonstrates Donovan’s interest in the overlap between the mundane and the horrible. Set during a civil war somewhere in Europe, the two characters speak while one of them digs a hole in a field in the middle of winter; the purpose for the hole is veiled but sinister. The Baker and the Teacher discuss the relevance of history, telling details of historical tales via various narrative devices, while they are watched by a group of citizens who are held at gunpoint on the field’s edge. The novel won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction award, and was long-listed for the Booker Prize. His second novel, Dr. Salt (2005), is a satirical look at the way American culture deals with emotions (or refuses to deal with emotions) and the way pharmaceutical companies try to erase any possible emotions with chemicals. Alternately hilarious, horrifying, and sad, the book follows the life of a character who has never been allowed to grieve for the events of his life, and whose efforts to find help through doctors and drugs have all failed. In all of his work so far, Donovan takes us through the range of emotions himself, so that we laugh at the same time that we think, and we cry while we relish the manipulation of the words on the page. It is not work to be skimmed through, but to be carefully considered. Rather, it is, as he says, in “The Body Lights,” as the lighthouse: “Its steel steps draft short breaths.” Kathleen A. Heininge References Donovan, Gerard. Columbus Rides Again. Co. Clare: Salmon Press, 1992. Donovan, Gerard. Dr. Salt. Great Britain: Scribner, 2006. Donovan Gerard. Kings and Bicycles. Co. Clare: Salmon Press, 1995. www.abc-clio.com
Donovan Gerard. The Lighthouse. Co. Clare: Salmon Press, 2000. Donovan Gerard. Schopenhauer’s Telescope. Great Britain: Scribner, 2003.
DORSEY, THOMAS FRANCIS “TOMMY” (1905–1956) Thomas Francis “Tommy” Dorsey was a prominent swing/big band leader who helped to define the genre and became one of its most successful practitioners. Dorsey was born in 1905 to Thomas Francis Dorsey, Sr., and Theresa Langton Dorsey. Thomas Sr., in addition to being a coal miner, was also the town bandleader in Lansford, Pennsylvania, and acted as a music instructor to his sons, Tommy and Jimmy. Tommy and his brother experimented with several instruments before Tommy focused on the trombone and Jimmy focused on the cornet and saxophone. The brothers began to form various outfits to showcase their talents, including such acts as Dorsey’s Novelty Six and Dorsey’s Wild Canaries in the early 1920s. Their paths, although sometimes separated, would continue to cross often over the next three decades. Together the brothers first garnered widespread attention as The Dorsey Brothers Orchestra, recording for Okeh Records in the late 1920s. Before this the two brothers had relocated to New York City as session musicians. In 1934 they signed to Decca Records, where they enjoyed several hits, including “Lullaby of Broadway,” which featured Bob Crosby, Bing’s younger brother; the Dorseys had worked with Bing on “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love).” Tommy left the band in the spring of 1935 to embark on a solo career. Recording mostly for RCA Victor, Dorsey would find incredible success as a
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Portrait of Tommy Dorsey playing the saxophone. (Corbis)
solo act throughout the remainder of the decade, with such hits as “Marie” and “On Treasure Island.” Over the years his orchestra would feature such names as Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Jack Leonard, Connie Haines, and Frank Sinatra. Dorsey also successfully hosted a radio program, “The Tommy Dorsey Show” in which he was faithfully introduced as ‘“the Sentimental Gentleman of Swing,” a moniker that would stay with him throughout the rest of his career. Despite a musicians’ strike that prevented acts from recording in the early 1940s, Dorsey still managed to score numerous top-ten hits with songs recorded before the strike, including “There Are Such Things.” Dorsey was also featured, along with an ever-changing lineup in his orchestra, in such motion pictures as Las Vegas Nights, Ship Ahoy, Presenting Lily Mars, and Girl Crazy in the 1940s and 1950s. www.abc-clio.com
Dorsey would also find fame on television. His brother Jimmy joined Tommy’s orchestra in 1953, which was soon again billed as the Dorsey Brothers Band. In 1954 they were given the opportunity to host their own television show, Stage Show. Along with featuring the brothers and their orchestra, the show was a national showcase for numerous acts, including, in 1956, the first nationally broadcast appearances of Elvis Presley. Dorsey passed away in 1956 at the age of 51; his brother Jimmy died at the age of 53 the following year. Throughout his career Tommy Dorsey became one of the most successful names in the big band era. Dorsey proved to be one of the most commercially viable practitioners of the genre, while also acting as a mentor of sorts for artists who would become influential in the following decades, like Sinatra and numerous others. Dorsey’s combination of jazz and sentimentality made him famous not only in his own lifetime but also long after; like others such as Benny Goodman, Count Basie, and Glen Miller, Dorsey became one of the legendary names of big band music. Mathew Joseph Bartkowiak See also: CROSBY, Bing References Sanford, Herb. Tommy and Jimmy: The Dorsey Years. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1972. Stockdale, Robert L. Tommy Dorsey: On the Side. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1995.
DOUGLASS, FREDERICK (1817–1895) Frederick Douglass was the most famous African-American abolitionist, social reformer, and political leader of the nineteenth century. Douglass, who escaped from slavery ABC-CLIO
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Portrait of Frederick Douglass, leader in the abolitionist movement (1817–1895). (Library of Congress)
at the age of 21, devoted his entire life to fighting slavery and race prejudice in all its forms. In 1845, after the publication of his autobiography made his return to slavery a real possibility, Douglass embarked on a two-year lecture tour of Great Britain, which included an extended visit in Ireland. While there Douglass spoke out against slavery at a series of well-attended events. Despite anti-black feeling among Irish Americans, Douglass refused to return the animosity, arguing that the poor Irish in America and African Americans were natural allies, not enemies. He also rejected the anti-Catholic sentiment popular at the time. He remained active in Irish affairs right up until his death in 1895. Douglass had little knowledge of his age and family. The reality that he had been a slave was the central fact of Douglass’ life. Douglass never knew his father (although www.abc-clio.com
he believed him to be his white master), and his knowledge of his mother, who worked on a plantation twelve miles away, was very scanty. Douglass was raised by his grandparents and then lived in Baltimore, Maryland, for seven years, first working as a house servant and then as an unskilled laborer in a shipyard. Life in Baltimore was far superior to anything Douglass had previously experienced. Douglass saw that the path to freedom lay in knowledge—in learning to read and write and in learning as much as possible about the world outside of slavery. Eventually, Douglass was returned to the plantation, and he had a difficult time adjusting to the strictness of slave life on the plantation after the relative freedom of living in the city. In September 1838, Douglass escaped to freedom and moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts. Soon, he was speaking out at local antislavery meetings and attracting notice from area abolitionists. On August 9, 1841, he attended the annual meeting of the Bristol Anti-Slavery Society held in New Bedford. He spoke that night and was heard by William Lloyd Garrison and made an enormously positive impression on the older man. Within three days Douglass was asked to become an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1845 Douglass published his autobiography to much acclaim and public attention, in the North and the South. With this notoriety, Douglass’s friends feared that his owners might take legal action to return him to slavery. It was agreed that he would travel to Great Britain for an extended speaking tour, as black American abolitionists had been well received in England. Plans were also made for him to spend time in Ireland. As slavery had been abolished in
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Britain in 1833, it had become a relatively common practice for black American abolitionists to travel there on speaking tours. The antislavery lobby in Great Britain had begun working to end slavery in America once it had been abolished at home. Douglass’s tour was a turning point in his life for a variety of reasons. It was also quite successful as he gave countless lectures, 50 in Ireland alone, and met all the leading Irish reformers of his day. It was almost two years before he returned to the United States. Although often overlooked in modern works on the abolitionist cause, a lively abolitionist movement existed in Ireland. The Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society was founded in Dublin in 1837, and one of its most prominent members was Richard Davis Webb, a printer, publisher, and Quaker. One of the main reasons for Douglass’s visit to Ireland was to confirm the details of Webb’s plan to publish an Irish edition of his autobiography. While there he spoke on a variety of topics, including temperance. Douglass argued the one of the main causes of poverty in Ireland was the abuse of alcohol, and he personally made the pledge to abstain from alcohol to Father Theobald Mathew, the famous Irish temperance leader. But he would always link his topic back to his main interest— the eradication of slavery. When he arrived in Ireland, the Great Irish Famine had already begun, although it had by no means reached its worst levels. Douglass was well aware of the suffering of the Irish peasants and the hypocrisy of Irish abolitionists who stepped around the starving poor even as they made their way into one of his lectures about the evils of slavery in America. Douglass’s visit to Ireland gave him an opportunity to meet one of his heroes—the www.abc-clio.com
great Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell. O’Connell was responsible for the Great Irish Address of 1841, a petition signed by 60,000 people in Ireland calling for Irish Americans to oppose slavery in America. Douglass had an extremely positive view of O’Connell, which was only strengthened by the warm reception he received from the older man during his Ireland visit. O’Connell returned the admiration, calling Douglass the “black O’Connell.” Douglass’s links to O’Connell and Mathew might lead one to see him as mainly connected to the nationalist movement, but his closest contacts were with evangelical Protestants, who were most active in supporting reform movements in Ireland and America. An important aspect of the tour for Douglass was the fact that he was almost universally treated as an equal by the people with whom he came into contact. The freedom to ride the train or walk into any restaurant was an exhilarating experience for the young reformer. The memory of this treatment, along with the suffering he had witnessed among the poor Irish Catholics, goes far in explaining Douglass’s sympathy with the Irish in their attempts to gain independence from Great Britain. He consistently saw the treatment of Irish Catholics as analogous to the treatment of blacks in America, and as late as 1883 he responded to a Supreme Court decision denying blacks the right to be served in any public establishment by saying, “We want no black Ireland in America” (McFeely 1991, 318). Despite the antagonism of many Irish Americans toward both freed and enslaved blacks, with whom they were competing for jobs at the low end of the economic scale, Douglass refused to criticize Irish Catholics as a group. While he would ABC-CLIO
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recognize the color prejudice of many Irish Americans, he was very aware of the abuses that group had suffered in Ireland and, indeed, in the United States. Douglass remained politically active for the rest of his life, recruiting black troops for the Union in the Civil War, working for the Civil War amendments to the Constitution, and speaking out against prejudice and bigotry toward any group of people. A major supporter of the Republican Party, Douglass was rewarded after the Civil War with posts as United States marshal, and then later as the recorder of deeds of the District of Columbia. In the late 1880s, Douglass served as consul to Haiti and played a key role in helping prevent American annexation of the island nation. To the end of his life, Douglass remained engaged with events in Ireland. On a trip there in 1886 he lamented the oppressed state of the Irish. When Charles Stewart Parnell came to America seeking support for his Home Rule campaign, Douglass appeared on platforms with him and spoke in favor of the program. Unfortunately, Douglass did not live to see either black equality in America or Irish independence, but he devoted his remarkable life to these goals, among many others, and helped as much as any one individual in making them a reality. William B. Rogers See also: ABOLITIONISM AND SLAVERY; MATHEW, Father Theobald; O’CONNELL, Daniel; WEBB, Richard Davis References Douglass, Frederick. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: Written By Himself. New York: Pathway Press, 1941. McFeely, William. Frederick Douglass. New York: Norton, 1991. www.abc-clio.com
Rogers, William B. “We Are All Together Now”: Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and the Prophetic Tradition. New York: Garland, 1995. Rolston, Bill. “Frederick Douglass: A Black Abolitionist in Ireland.” History Today 53, no. 6 (June 2003): 45–51.
DOWNEY, MORTON (1901–1985) Morton Downey was a singer, composer, and businessman of Irish immigrant parentage. As a broadcaster and entertainer, his performances were popular on the stage as well as on radio and during the early television years. Born in Wallingford, Connecticut, on November 14, 1901, Downey began his singing career in a Greenwich Village movie theater and became a vocalist with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. His first commercial recordings were made in 1923 for Edison Records, and he also recorded for the Victor and Brunswick (1920s), ARC and Decca (1930s), and Columbia (1940s) companies. In 1927 he toured Europe, appearing in London, Paris, and Berlin. Downey became a popular radio singer as well, voted the U.S. “Radio Singer of the Year” in 1932. His mainly (pseudo-) Irish repertory earned him the nickname “Irish Nightingale.” His most successful numbers were “All I Need is Someone Like You,” “California Skies,” “In the Valley of the Roses,” “That’s How I Spell Ireland,” and “Wabash Moon.” In 1963, he published a collection of Morton Downey’s Favorite Irish Songs for voice and piano, which included a number of popular traditional tunes. From 1929, Downey appeared occasionally on the movie screen, starring as Danny O’Neill in Dublin in Brass (1935). In 1950–1951 he hosted the television
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show Star of the Family. Later, he entered a successful business career and became a member of the board of Coca-Cola and other corporations. He married the dancer Barbara Bennett in 1929, but they divorced in 1941. His son, Morton Downey Jr. (1933–2001), was a popular talk show host (known as “Television’s Ultimate Loudmouth”). Morton Downey died in Palm Beach, Florida, on October 25, 1985. Axel Klein See also: MUSIC IN AMERICA, IRISH Reference Official Morton Downey Jr. Website. http://mortondowneyjr.com (accessed May 4, 2004).
DOYLE, RODDY (1958–) Born in Kilbarrack, North Dublin, on May 8, 1958, Roddy Doyle was raised with two sisters and a brother by his lower middle-class parents. He attended National School in Kilbarrack before going on to a National School in Raheny and St. Fintan’s Christian Brothers School in Sutton, Co. Dublin. Doyle graduated from University College Dublin with a bachelor’s degree in English and geography and a higher diploma in education. During his time at university, Doyle traveled to communist Poland and joined the Socialist Labour Party, a sociopolitical engagement that is obvious in both him and his work. From 1980 to 1993 he taught English and geography at Greendale Community School in Kilbarrack, retiring from the profession once he was successful enough to earn a living from his writing. Doyle has been celebrated as one of contemporary Ireland’s greatest social analysts. This is apparent in his depiction of the urban poor, alcoholism, drug addiction, www.abc-clio.com
and the treatment of women. His work is most defined by a dark portrayal of poor working-class life that simultaneously delights in a rambunctious and often profanity-laced humor. This is most evident in his earliest works, the novels of The Barrytown Trilogy (The Commitments, The Snapper, and The Van) and the Booker Prize–winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. This last book brought him international fame, along with Alan Parker’s popular film adaptation of The Commitments, which also spawned a hit soundtrack. In later years Doyle’s work has been the source of some controversy, from the public outcry at the domestic violence and drug addiction of his television drama Family, which became the source for his novel The Woman Who Walked into Doors, to the revisionist history of A Star Called Henry. This last work has formed the beginning of a second trilogy, The Last Roundup, which also includes Oh, Play That Thing. Though he is best known as a novelist, Doyle has also written plays, short stories, film scripts, and children’s books. Doyle has been particularly adept at noting the influence of America and American culture on Irish society. In The Commitments, an aspiring rock band dreams of fame and fortune through the medium of rhythm and blues music from the 1960s, specifically that produced by Motown and the band’s hero, James Brown. While relating to American blacks through the memorable phrase that “the Irish are the niggers of Europe, Dubliners the niggers of Ireland, and Northsiders the niggers of Dublin,” the group fuses American black culture into a localized, hybrid American pop culture. This same culture also defines characters in his other works, such as the young Paddy Clarke’s identification with ABC-CLIO
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Geronimo as opposed to Daniel Boone. American multinational corporations and transnational capital, and the coming wave of change and financial growth that would mark the Celtic Tiger, are implicitly blamed for the unemployment of the men in The Van. In his play Brownbread, Doyle satirizes not only American pop culture but also American politics: when a few local lads, bored from their daily life, kidnap a priest, they are attacked by the American marines when it is discovered that the priest is an American citizen by birth. Doyle finally leaves Dublin and Ireland behind in Oh, Play That Thing, taking his protagonist, Henry Smart, on the run from the Irish Republican Army and post-independence forces, to America where he identifies and associates with American blacks, most notably as Louis Armstrong’s right-hand man. It is interesting that it is always the specter of America that lurks in the background of Doyle’s work and, save for a few moments, rarely England. In recent years, Doyle has been actively involved with the publishers of Metro, a multicultural publication edited by Nigerian immigrants that confronts, among other issues, race and citizenship in Ireland. In addition to his writing, Doyle has also been a prominent activist, most vocally during the divorce referenda of 1986 and 1995 and in campaigns for immigrant and minority rights. Brad Kent See also: LITERATURE, AMERICAN CHILDREN’S References McCarthy, Dermot. Roddy Doyle: Raining on the Parade. Dublin: The Liffey Press, 2003. White, Caramine. Reading Roddy Doyle. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001. www.abc-clio.com
DRAFT RIOTS Over five days in the summer of 1863, from July 13 to 18, New York and America were rocked by a riot that was more than just an uprising of the mob; it threatened to overthrow the city, the state, and national order. Represented on one level as a race riot enacted by poor, Irish-Catholic immigrants upon freed blacks, the Draft Riots were much more than this; they were the outpourings of an impoverished and destitute American working class against a system and a representative government that they believed further victimized their already miserable existence. Although rioting had been increasing as a form of social demonstration since the middle of the century—there had been ethnic riots, race riots, working-class riots, theater riots, and Orange riots—nothing of the scale and devastation of the Draft Riots had ever been experienced by the people of New York. The spark that would ignite the Draft Riots was the federal Conscription Act passed by Congress in March 1863. This act was designed to reinforce a hemorrhaging Union Army at a low point in Northern fortunes in the Civil War. The law was an attempt to sustain the flow of men into the army; it made all men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five and all unmarried men between thirtyfive and forty-five liable for enlistment. Names were collected from a house-tohouse census and then a lottery in each congressional district determined who went to war. The act contained a provision, however, that allowed drafted men who presented an “acceptable substitute” or paid $300 to be exempt. Effectively, this meant that the burden of the Act fell on the poor workingclass immigrant population, and the freed black population was exempt from
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Rioters sack the Brownstone Houses in New York during the Draft Riots of 1863. The riots erupted during the Union Army’s attempt at drafting individuals (primarily poor immigrants) during the American Civil War. (Library of Congress)
conscription because of the call for draftees to be “citizens of the United States.” Consequently, the destitute population of lower New York would see themselves as opposed to the wealthier classes above Broadway and the blacks who lived among them. The draft lottery began on Saturday, July 11, in the uptown Ninth District and passed without incident. By Sunday, however, the first plans of resistance had been formed as the people gathered in saloons and on street corners to discuss the resumption of the lottery on Monday. Specifically, several Irish members of the Black Joke Volunteer Fire Company, learning that that the name of one of their own had been drawn on Saturday, began to conspire to prevent Monday’s resumption of the draft www.abc-clio.com
process and to destroy any records of selection. By 8:00 on Monday morning, a large, angry crowd had begun to make its way uptown toward the draft office. They cut down telegraph poles, pulled up train tracks, and attacked several policemen on the way. Draft selection began in the Ninth District Office at 10:30 a.m. After about 50 names had been drawn, the Black Joke Engine Company arrived, burst into the office, destroyed the selection wheel, and set fire to the building. By 11:30 a.m. orders had been given to suspend the draft, but by now the mob had swelled to more than 12,000 and had begun to spread out toward sites at which they could vent their anger against emblematic agents of the war ABC-CLIO
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and proponents of the draft, such as Horace Greeley’s Tribune (the voice of abolition) and the Republican Times (an ardent supporter of Lincoln’s campaign). Along the way they burned and plundered at will, meeting little resistance as the army was away fighting the war at Gettysburg. What began as an antidraft demonstration quickly turned into groups of marauding mobs, largely Irish, rampaging and burning at will throughout the city: the Armory on Twenty-First Street, the Harlem Temperance Room, the Magdalene Asylum for Aged Prostitutes, and Brooks Brothers on Fifth Avenue. By the afternoon they had begun to turn their attention toward those they viewed as opposed to them and their rights; they began to loot and burn the homes of police officials, prominent Republicans, and the wealthy of New York. They attacked both well-dressed gentlemen on the street and the houses of the wealthy at Gramercy Park and other places. They also turned their attention toward a less fortunate group of New Yorkers they held symbolically responsible for their situation— the blacks; after all, with the Emancipation Act at the beginning of the year this had become a war about slavery and its abolition. A mob attacked a nine-year-old black boy on the corner of Broadway and Chamber Street; another set fire to the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue (home to more than 200 African-American children; luckily they all escaped). By nightfall, America’s leading metropolitan city had fallen into anarchy. By Tuesday the riot had entered a new phase; from a somewhat organized demonstration against conscription it soon became a war raged along working-class and racial lines. Many of the early antidraft demonstrators of Monday morning had, by www.abc-clio.com
now, repudiated the violence of the mob and were engaged in protecting property and suppressing the riot. The volunteer fire companies, prominent in the antidraft demonstration of early Monday morning, were now actively engaged in protecting their local districts against the rioters. On an ethnic level, the prominence of German immigrants in Monday’s demonstration had, by Tuesday, given way to largely Irish and Catholic mobs. As the make-up of the rioters changed, so did its focus, on Eighth Avenue a mob of 5,000 men went from house to house in search of black men and interracial couples. On Roosevelt Street, tenements that housed black families were torched, and their furniture was burned in street bonfires; by midweek, the harbor front had been virtually emptied of people of color by rioters. Laborers, largely Irish, attacked and hanged black men, such as James Costello and Abraham Franklin, on the streets. They also continued their assault on what they saw as representatives of Republican power: the police, the militia, the Union Steam Works, and houses and offices of prominent Republicans and abolitionists. By midweek, the rioters began to cordon off waterfront neighborhoods from the bourgeois districts in the center of the island. This was, in part, a response to the arrival of the army in the city; the 56th New York regiment—the first Union reinforcements— arrived in the city on Wednesday night, and the 7th New York regiment arrived the next morning. By Thursday the tide had begun to turn, and the city had begun to be reclaimed by the forces of law and order. Like the police, a lot of the Union soldiers were, in fact, local boys of Irish families who were ordered to fire on their own. By Friday, New York was completely occupied by Federal troops, but the city lay
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in ruins. Hundreds of buildings were burned or demolished and the cost of property damage was estimated at $5 million. The death toll from the riots can never be accurately estimated—some claim that as many as 2,000 died—but there were at least 119 verified deaths: 18 African Americans, 16 soldiers, and 85 rioters (most of them Irish). Although not the only ethnic community involved in the Draft Riots, the disproportionate number involved, killed, and arrested (of 184 people of known ethnicity arrested, 117 were Irish) ensured that the Irish became synonymous with the riots. The Irish involvement in the Draft Riots would undo a lot of the goodwill generated toward them by their impressive service and immense sacrifice in the Civil War. James P. Byrne See also: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR; NEW YORK CITY References Bernstein, Iver. The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Cook, Adrian. The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1974.
DRESDEN AFFAIR On February 15, 1889, the steamer City of Dresden arrived in Buenos Aires with 1,774 passengers on board, most of them from Ireland. They had been enticed to make the trip by an immigration scheme promoted by the Argentine government and executed www.abc-clio.com
by members of the Irish community in that country. The project was a complete failure, and several immigrants died or had to re-emigrate in the few years after their arrival. This immigration brought a fresh influx of Irish domestic service and laborers to affluent households and ranches in Buenos Aires. However, for the Irish in Argentina, the Dresden Affair represented a significant loss of prestige in the political and institutional arena. Furthermore, the negative reports from the government and Roman Catholic Church in the British Isles put an end to organized emigration from Ireland to Argentina. Father Patrick Dillon, chaplain of the Irish in Buenos Aires since 1863, was elected the member of parliament for Buenos Aires province in 1880. Dillon advocated in parliament for the assisted immigration of European settlers, and in April 18, 1881, he went on an official mission to Ireland to establish an immigration scheme. Back in Argentina, he recommended that the government pay free or assisted tickets and grant land to new immigrants. The administration of President Juarez Celman actively encouraged immigration, and approved the granting of 50,000 assisted passages to prospective emigrants. They also established a network of resident agents in Europe, who received a commission of about £5 for every emigrant landed in Buenos Aires, plus commissions from the shipping companies. In 1887, Irish Argentines Buckley O’Meara and John Stephen Dillon, brother of Father Dillon, were appointed immigration agents in Ireland. To get their commissions they overlooked the government rules regarding the desirable characteristics of immigrants, and they lied to prospective emigrants, telling them they would receive land, ABC-CLIO
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houses, machinery, and seed. Therefore, they managed to collect all the people needed to fill a large steamer, the City of Dresden. The Dresden, a new 4,527-ton steamer, weighed anchor on January 25, 1889, in Cobh (formerly Queenstown), Co. Cork. The ship carried the largest number of immigrants ever to arrive in Argentina from any one destination and in any one vessel. Though the immigrants were in general young laborers and servants from poorer urban districts in Dublin, Cork, and Limerick, there were also several large families, aged people, prostitutes, and convicts undergoing terms of imprisonment in Limerick and Cork jails. Some of the passengers died at sea, probably due to nontreated sicknesses. When the immigrants landed in Buenos Aires, they were accommodated in the old Hotel de Inmigrantes, which did not have enough room for them. Most children were naked. Sickness, hunger, and exhaustion were appalling. The food provided by the officials of the Immigration Department was insufficient. The Irish and English communities, as well as the British consulate, immediately formed a British Immigrations Committee to provide better conditions and, eventually, jobs to the newly arrived immigrants. Among the committee members were John Drysdale, Samuel Hale, Eduardo Casey, Father Matthew Gaughren, Edward Mulhall of The Standard, and Michael Dineen of The Southern Cross. Some families were moved to the filthy stables in Paseo de Julio and then to a hotel near the Southern Railway station in Plaza Constitución. Some of the young single women were sent to the Irish Convent, where ladies could hire them as domestic service. But others began the long tradition of Irish prostitution in Buenos Aires. www.abc-clio.com
Father Matthew Gaughren, O.M.I., who was in Argentina on a fund-raising mission, aided the immigrants and worked to improve their circumstances in Buenos Aires and later in the Irish Colony in Bahía Blanca. He published several letters in the newspapers to collect funds and personally accompanied them in their distressful situation in Bahía Blanca. Peter A. Gartland, an ex-soldier of the American Civil War, together with John S. Dillon, offered to let the immigrants occupy 40-hectare parcels in Napostá, a remote place near Bahía Blanca (400 miles south of Buenos Aires). Seven hundred were carried by railway to Napostá station. When they arrived, their luggage was lost. There were no houses to live in, and no way to build them, because Gartland did not have enough funds to finance the project. Families lived in tents, under the trees, or in ditches. The death rate reached 100 in two years; children were particularly affected. In March 1891 the Irish Colony was broken up and 520 colonists trekked the 400 miles back to Buenos Aires. The effects of the Dresden Affair on further Irish immigration to Argentina were devastating. Tim Healy (1855–1931) denounced the affair in the British parliament and created a negative perception among English officials and diplomatic envoys in South America. In 1889, Thomas W. Croke, Archbishop of Cashel, wrote in a letter published by The Freeman’s Journal (and quoted in Michael Geraghty’s “Argentina: Land of Broken Promises” [1999]) about the corrupt scheme implemented by Argentine government officials and agents: “I most solemnly conjure my poorer countrymen, as they value their happiness hereafter, never to set foot on the Argentine Republic.” Among the immigrants, the
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survivors encountered many difficulties in adapting to the country. A few years after the City of Dresden arrived in Buenos Aires, as it was impossible to find favorable economic situations in the country, most of the emigrants returned to Ireland or reemigrated to the United States, Australia, and other countries. Because of the lack of recognition from the larger part of the Irish-Argentine community, those who stayed had a higher rate of integration in the local society. Edmundo Murray See also: CASEY, Eduardo; DILLON, Patrick Joseph; GAUGHREN, Father Matthew References Gaynor, Juan Santos. The Story of St. Joseph’s Society. Buenos Aires: The Southern Cross, 1941. Geraghty, Michael. “Argentina: Land of Broken Promises.” The Buenos Aires Herald, March 17, 1999. Murray, Thomas. The Story of the Irish in Argentina. New York: P. J. Kenedy and Sons, 1919.
DUGGAN,THOMAS (1827–1913) Thomas Duggan, a businessman and benefactor of the Irish-Argentine community, was reputed in Argentina to be one of the wealthiest Irish-born persons of his time. He was born on November 18, 1827 in Ballymahon, Co. Longford, the son of Hugh Duggan and Jane Kelly. Duggan emigrated to Argentina in 1859, as did his brothers Michael, John, Daniel, and Hugh as well as several members of his family and neighbors. They worked together in sheep farming, and as wool and hides agents, and made an immense fortune that was chiefly invested in land in San Antonio de Areco, Chacabuco, and Lincoln (departments of www.abc-clio.com
Buenos Aires province). In total they owned more than 300,000 hectares of the best land. La Primavera, one of their ranches in Lincoln, alone had an extension of 65,000 hectares. Duggan Brothers storehouses of Buenos Aires were in Calle Victoria, Constitución, and Once. Duggan married Marcela Casey (1845–1922) in 1869 and was a visible representative of the Irish community in Argentine public life. In 1876 he was a member of the education council in Balvanera. One year later he was present at the reconciliation banquet celebrated after the political agreement between Buenos Aires governor Adolfo Alsina and president Nicolás Avellaneda. In 1879 Duggan supported the establishment of the Passionist Fathers in Argentina, though later he led the campaign against their Italianization of the order, that is, their links with the Italian immigrant community. In 1889 and 1892 he was invited to the banquet of the ecclesiastical council presided over by the apostolic nuncio, and in the latter year he was also honored during the Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations. Duggan owned the property occupied by the Irish orphanage, which was sold in 1897. Together with his brothers, Duggan was one of the most generous donators to charity among the Irish in Argentina, and he was a great benefactor of the Irish hospital and other works developed by the Sisters of Mercy. He was also very active in supporting Catholic charities in Ireland and England. As a businessman and risk capitalist Thomas Duggan was a partner of Eduardo Casey, his brother-in-law, in many undertakings. The construction of a central market in Barracas, Buenos Aires, in 1887 was one of their most important undertakings. Once erected in 1889, the building was the ABC-CLIO
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largest public market in the world. They also invested in Sindicato Argentino, a company in Buenos Aires and Uruguay with interests in banks, mining, cattle ranching, railways, immigration, building, and the press. Gradually, these businesses became more speculative, and in August 1890 a crisis of the Montevideo stock exchange deeply affected the company. Duggan was forced to obtain fresh cash using his eighteen ranches as collateral for a loan, which creditors did not allow to be longer than ten years. Daniel and Michael Duggan died in 1888 and 1896, respectively, leaving their brother Thomas a fortune calculated of at least £6 million sterling. Immediately the creditors asked Duggan to cancel the total debt, but he answered that since they did not give him extended credit when he needed it he would take the time of the loan to repay the capital. The creditors had to wait until the end of the ten-year term to recover their capital. Duggan used to entertain visitors to the central market in Barracas telling them that every brick in that building represented a dollar in his pocket. In contrast to his brothers and to most of the large Irish landowners in Argentina, Thomas Duggan favored Irish nationalism. For this reason he avoided doing business with English-owned banks and coldstorage plants. Roger Casement was invited to his ranch in San Antonio de Areco. In 1888 Duggan bought Shorthorn bulls and cows in Sittyton, Scotland, and established a breeding ranch in Argentina. Thereafter, Duggan’s Sittyton ranch was awarded the Grand Award in Palermo’s rural fair twentyeight times. Thomas Duggan owned more registered Shorthorn, Hereford, and Angus breeding cattle than any other Argentine breeder. On September 18, 1896, Thomas www.abc-clio.com
Duggan sold forty-one hectares of his land in San Antonio de Areco to the Western Railway Company. A station was built and the town that grew up nearby was named “Duggan.” Thomas Duggan died on June 8, 1913. Edmundo Murray See also: CASEMENT, Roger; CASEY, Eduardo References Coghlan, Eduardo A. Los Irlandeses en la Argentina: Su Actuación y Descendencia. Buenos Aires: Author’s Edition, 1987. Murray, Thomas. The Story of the Irish in Argentina. New York, P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1919.
DUNNE, FINLEY PETER, (1867–1936) Newspaper columnist Finley Peter Dunne created a cast of fictional characters in order to express his political and social views more forcefully. Most famous of these was Martin J. Dooley, a saloonkeeper with strong opinions on everything and everyone. Dunne’s columns vividly portrayed the turn-of-the-century Irish-American world while advocating a progressive political agenda. The columns grew to be nationally popular, and many of them were reprinted in book collections. Born in Chicago of Irish immigrants, Dunne took a job as an errand boy at the Chicago Telegram at the age of 16. Over the next few years he worked at a variety of newspapers, gradually working his way up the journalistic ladder. At the age of 21, he surprised everyone by becoming the city editor of the Chicago Times. In 1893, at the age of 26, Dunne started his column in the Evening Post, commenting on society and politics using Martin J. Dooley and the
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Portrait of newspaper editor and columnist Finley Peter Dunne. (Library of Congress)
other invented residents of Archey Road to express his opinions. Dooley and the other characters spoke with strong Irish accents as can be seen in Dooley’s view of school: “Childher shudden’t be sint to school to larn, but to larn how to larn. I don’t care what ye larn thim so long as ‘tis onpleasant to thim. Tis thrainin’ they need, that’s all. I never could make use iv what I larned in colledge about thrigojoomethry an’—an’— grammar an’ the’ welts I got on the’ skull fr’m the schoolmasther’s cane I have never been able to turn to anny account in the’ business, but ‘twas th’ bein’ there and havin’ to get things to heart without askin’ th’ meanin’ iv thim an’ goin’ to school cold an’ comin’ home hungry, that made th’ man iv me ye see before ye” (The Education of the Young). Dooley, with his distinctive Irish brogue and humorous outlook on life, www.abc-clio.com
could get away with social commentary on Dunne’s Chicago and America that the columnist often couldn’t risk when writing as himself. For example, he had Dooley say, “Big business is much like murder,” and “The Supreme Court follows the election returns.” Dooley’s honesty, cynicism, and humor made Dunne a major spokesman for the little guy in American society. Dunne used Dooley and the lively action at his South Side saloon to expose hypocrisy and scandals in politics, poke fun at the self-centered egotism of politicians and robber barons, and provide a voice for the opinions of the common man. He also promoted a consistently progressive message, whether concerning the right of organized labor, women’s suffrage, or tolerance toward the masses of new immigrants flooding into the country. The Pullman Strike of 1894 particularly stirred Dunne’s efforts. Sometimes, in essays like “When the Trust is at Work” and “The Idle Apprentice,” he went beyond humor into a new tragic dimension in his compassion for the sufferings of the poor, but more frequently he made use of the just as potent weapon of comedy and satire. Dunne became nationally famous when several papers began carrying Dooley’s hilarious observations of Admiral George Dewey’s victory at Manila Bay (“On His Cousin George”) in 1898 at the start of the Spanish-American War. Dunne was opposed to the imperialism he saw in Theodore Roosevelt before and during the war, and he had Mr. Dooley launch a campaign against it. By 1899 the country had gone crazy for Dooley: popular songs were being written, college presidents were quoting him, and no less a social commentator than Henry Adams was recommending him to his friends. ABC-CLIO
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The column became hugely popular and a fixture of American culture during its long run. In all Dunne wrote more than 700 columns, many of which were reprinted in nine books of collected works. There was wisdom as well as laughter in the Dooley columns, and some critics at the time recognized this. Both William Dean Howells and Van Wyck Brooks admired Dunne’s writing. Brooks argued that Dunne was one of the writers responsible for creating a distinctive American form of the English language, separate from England’s. Dunne is also important because he is one of the first successful IrishAmerican authors to use unabashedly— even proudly—his ethnicity in his writing. Dunne retired Dooley early in the 20th century, turning instead to more serious writing when he joined the editorial staff of The American Magazine. Many critics see these writings as his most profound writings, but the public wanted Dooley. Dunne refused to revive him, even for World War I. After he retired in 1927, when a bequest made it possible for him to do so, he wrote very little. William B. Rogers See also: ETHNIC AND RACE RELATIONS (Irish and African Americans) References Dunne, Finley Peter. Mr. Dooley in Peace and War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Dunne, Finley Peter. Observations by Mr. Dooley. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2005. Ellis, Elmer. Mr. Dooley’s America: A Life of Finley Peter Dunne. New York: Knopf, 1941. Fanning, Charles. The Irish Voice in America: Irish-American Fiction from the Eighteenth Century to the Present. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999.
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DUNNE, IRENE MARIE (1898–1990) Irene Marie Dunne was born on December 20, 1898, in Louisville, Kentucky, the daughter of Joseph and Adeline Dunne. Joseph died when Dunne was 12, and mother and daughter then lived with relatives. Dunne inherited her mother’s artistic talent and became a trained singer and pianist. She toured with a theatrical company in 1920, and made her Broadway debut in The Clinging Vine in 1922. Thereafter, she obtained a number of roles in a variety of musicals. Dunne earned a scholarship and graduated from the Chicago Musical College in 1926. However, she failed her audition with the prestigious Metropolitan Opera Company because of her inexperience. Dunne married dentist Dr. Francis Griffin in 1928. The staunchly Roman Catholic couple remained happily married and adopted a daughter named Mary Frances. Dunne was spotted by Florenz Ziegfeld, who cast her in Showboat in 1929. She was awarded a contract by RKO in 1930 and relocated to Hollywood. She appeared in Leathernecking in 1930 and won a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for Cimarron in 1931. Back Street in 1932 was followed by Magnificent Obsession, Sweet Adeline and Roberta in 1935, and Show Boat in 1936. Dunne’s career took a major turn when she began accepting comedic roles. She appeared in Theodora Goes Wild in 1936 and received a Best Actress Academy Award nomination. This success was followed by Best Actress Academy Award nominations for The Awful Truth in 1937, Love Affair in 1939, and My Favorite Wife in 1940. Dunne appeared in Penny Serenade in 1941, The White Cliffs of Dover in 1944,
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also a member of the board of Technicolor. Dunne’s husband, Dr. Griffin, died in 1965. Dunne never remarried. Dunne received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Kennedy Center Honors in 1985 but did not attend the event because of ill health. Dunne was 91 when she died on September 4, 1990, in Beverly Hills, California, where she is buried in the Calvary Cemetery. Dunne has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Annette Richardson References Gerhring, Wes D. First Lady of Hollywood. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003. DiBattista, Maria. Fast-talking Dames. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.
Irene Dunne was a motion picture actress who achieved fame during Hollywood’s golden era. Her work in film ranged from melodramas to screwball comedies and earned her five Academy Award nominations for best actress. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Anna and the King of Siam in 1946, and Life with Father in 1947. She received an Academy Award nomination for I Remember Mama in 1948 and yet another Academy Award nomination for The Mudlark in 1950. Her last film was It Grows on Trees in 1952. Dunne retired from acting in films in 1952 but appeared in a variety of television programs. By this time Dunne had become wealthy because of sound investments. She was a devoted Republican and served on numerous political and socially oriented boards and became active in philanthropic endeavors. Dunne was one of five alternate members to the United Nations. She was
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DURCAN, PAUL (1944–) Paul Durcan was born in Dublin in 1944. His childhood was divided between the family home in Ranelagh and summer vacations with his aunt and maternal grandmother in the west of Ireland. The importance of these and other key locales is a definitive feature of Durcan’s poetry and informs a poetics of place that includes Russia, Australia, and the Americas. After graduating from Gonzaga College Dublin in 1962, Durcan enrolled in economics and history at University College Dublin. During the following year he established lasting friendships with a group of writers and intellectuals, including Michael Hartnett, Leland Bardwell, Macdara Woods, John Moriarty, and most importantly in terms of his writing, Patrick Kavanagh. An initial collection of poetry, Endsville, was published in 1967. After a short period in London, Durcan married Nessa O’Neill, and the couple returned to Ireland with their two
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daughters to live in Cork. In 1974 he graduated with first-class honors in archaeology and medieval history from University College Cork, and in the same year was the recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Award, an honor that enabled him to publish his first major collection, O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor (1975). Over the past 30 years, Durcan has published 18 volumes of poetry, each one charting new territory in terms of its attitude to form and subject matter. While he is frequently regarded as an iconoclastic social critic of Irish, and latterly American, social, political, and religious institutions and hypocrisies, Durcan is as much a poet of praise as he is a satirist. Complex, incantatory hymns laud society’s unacknowledged “holy souls” and extol exemplary individuals, many of them women. Durcan’s recitals of his work, a unique blend of oratory and theatrics, rapidly gained him a wide audience in Ireland and Europe during the 1980s. A residency at the Frost Place at Franconia, New Hampshire, in May 1985 followed by reading tours in Canada, the United States, and Brazil, introduced him to a new and enthusiastic readership. In 1989 he received the Irish American Cultural Institute Poetry Award and in 1995 was a recipient of the Heinemann Award. Durcan has been writer in residence at Trinity College Dublin (1990) and University College Dublin (2003), and in 2004 he was appointed to the prestigious Ireland Chair of Poetry. While the focus of Durcan’s poetry is Ireland, he is equally attuned to international politics and social change, and his engagement with all things American, in particular, has been passionate and lifelong. As he confirmed in a recent radio www.abc-clio.com
broadcast: “since I saw my first Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy films, I have been a devotee at the shrine of American culture.” This devotion is manifest in his poetry in a number of ways. Formally, his long lines and open, variable metrics salute Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, while his bluesy refrains and lyrics of social protest owe as much to Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf as they do to Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. In terms of subject matter, early poems such as “Were He Alive” and “Black Sister” implicitly engage with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, championing as they do humanist values and racial equality. Later works show an acute awareness of the painful legacy of Irish emigration to the Americas, poems such as “Backside to the Wind”; “The Girl with the Keys to Pearse’s Cottage,” which speaks of a Connemara postman’s daughter who “was America-bound at summer’s end. / She had no choice but to leave her home”; and “Loosestrife in Ballyferriter” which voices one woman’s plaintive keen— “Iowa doesn’t want me and I don’t want Iowa. / Why must I forsake Ireland for Iowa?” Whether chronicling his trans-Atlantic crossings (“EI Flight 106: New YorkDublin,” “Flying Over the Kamloops”), evoking media figures from Bugs Bunny to Ronald Reagan, or comically positioning himself in Dublin as “the centre of the universe,” phone-counseling acquaintances as far away as Los Angeles, São Paulo, and New York, Durcan has built up a network of connections between Ireland and the Americas that bespeaks a rich and complex postmodern fabric of cultural exchange. It is in Greeting to Our Friends in Brazil (1999), however, that Durcan enters into his most full-blown poetic dialogue with North and South America. As the title
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poem signals, the volume is a plea for intercultural communication and, by extension, the kinds of conversations that destabilize fixed notions about gender, race, and nationality. A reading tour of Brazil in the spring of 1995 occasioned the opening sequence, which explores literary, social, and religious connections between Ireland and Brazil. The book also includes a series of self-portraits, among them “The Chicago Waterstones,” a characteristically humorous recollection of a reunion with the young woman who was the poet’s monitor at the Frost Place, but also a frank account of the frequently fraught discourse between men and women. The book’s final section, devoted as it is to the years of Mary Robinson’s presidency, contains three poems honoring Jean Kennedy Smith, American ambassador to Ireland from 1993 to 1998. While paying tribute to Kennedy Smith, Durcan also aligns her role as ambassador with that of the poet: “A poet . . . is an ambassador / Who is the carrier of the significant messages / Across frontiers, checkpoints, walls, controls.” Throughout his writing career Durcan has
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sought to convey that imperative precisely. His indignation at the Bush administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East, the invasion of Iraq, and the incarceration of political prisoners at Guantanamo Bay constitute his harshest criticism of, and his most sustained engagement with, the United States to date. At the same time, he is as magnanimous in his admiration for a Manhattan Yellow Cab driver and the courteous customs of the citizens of St. John’s, Newfoundland, as he is in his respect for the pacifist politics of the American Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray. Kathleen McCracken See also: KENNEDY FAMILY; ROBINSON, Mary References Durcan, Paul. Cries of an Irish Caveman. London: Harvill, 2001. Durcan, Paul. Greetings to Our Friends in Brazil. London: Harvill, 1999. Durcan, Paul. Paul Durcan’s Diary. Dublin: New Island Books, 2003. Durcan, Paul. A Snail in My Prime: New and Selected Poems. London: Harvill, 1993. Tóibín, Colm, ed. The Kilfenora Teaboy: A Study of Paul Durcan. Dublin: New Island Books, 1996.
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E EATON,TIMOTHY E. (1834–1907) Preserved now only in name, the T. Eaton Company was Canada’s foremost retailer through most of the twentieth century. Its founder, Timothy Eaton, was born into a rural heartland of Presbyterian Ulster, the ninth child of the recently widowed Margaret Craig Eaton. The Presbyterian Church, the family farm and a network of kin and neighbor were deeply interwoven into the fabric of community in rural Mid Antrim. Eaton began his retailing career by tapping into this culture, apprenticing in dry goods retail to a distant relative in the village of Portglenone, in an area west of Ballymena notorious for sectarian conflict. Although spared the worst ravages of the Famine that visited other parts of Ireland in the late 1840s, the experience of distress in Mid Antrim was nonetheless acute, and the prosperity of the New World enticed many people to leave Ireland, especially those with the means to emigrate who had family connections capable of providing assistance on their arrival. In 1854, Timothy Eaton followed a brother and three sisters, as well as members of his extended family, to Canada, becoming a clerk in Glen Williams, outside Georgetown, Canada West (now Ontario), where a number of
his relatives had settled. Eaton was not a Famine immigrant of popular imagination, but rather a more typical Irish immigrant to British North America—possessing some capital and goods and arriving with £10, a new suit, and a silver watch. Building on his retail experience, Eaton took up the grocery and dry goods trade, opening two stores in Kirktown, near St. Mary’s, in 1857 in partnership with his brother James. Retail in small-town Canada West revolved around structures of personal credit: retailers purchased goods from wholesalers on credit, sold the goods in their shops, and the value of articles was negotiated through bargaining. Retailers serving a wider agricultural community frequently extended credit to customers on a seasonal basis and were often compelled to accept payment in kind: the fortunes of the retail trade were intimately connected to those of the land. Under these delicate and at times trying circumstances, Timothy Eaton’s brothers, Robert and John, suffered a series of setbacks with their retail partnership in St. Mary’s. In 1860–1861, one of Timothy’s enterprises failed—a bakery that ceased trading in St. Mary’s only a few months after opening. Eaton married Mary Beattie—a woman of Ulster Protestant stock—in 1862. In 1869
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he entered into a retail partnership briefly on Front Street in Toronto; later that year, he purchased the assets of the Britannia House on Queen Street in the city, and he opened a dry goods store on the small premises. Although often erroneously identified as the originator of cash-only retail in Canada, Timothy Eaton was undoubtedly a pioneer in adopting fixed prices and cash payments—departures from the practices of retail in the small villages and towns where he had learned the trade. “Goods satisfactory or money refunded” was another policy adopted by Eaton—an innovation facilitated by mandating cash-only purchases. This fledgling Queen Street concern, later relocated to larger premises, became the cornerstone of a nationwide retailing empire—two years younger than Canada itself—which progressively expanded through the last decades of the nineteenth century, although facing stiff competition from a neighboring business owned by the Scots immigrant Robert Simpson. Although he hailed from a rural area of strong Presbyterian sympathies, Eaton became a Methodist soon after his arrival in Canada and was one of the denomination’s most generous local benefactors. In his business life, Eaton became famous for exerting a resolutely paternalist and strictly Sabbatarian influence over his company’s business practices, banning the sale of playing cards, tobacco, and liquor and progressively limiting shopping hours, which were long through much of the nineteenth century, often stretching from eight o’clock in the morning until late into the evening. At Eaton’s store, however, store opening was reduced to daylight hours Monday to Saturday (closing on Saturday afternoons in the summer months). On Sundays, the www.abc-clio.com
store curtains were drawn in deference to the stricture of Sunday observance widely followed in Toronto and especially promoted by Eaton himself. In a city profoundly shaped by the culture of Ulster Protestantism and often described as the “Belfast of the New World,” Ballymena immigrants, and Protestants particularly, were rumored to find work easily in departments of Timothy Eaton’s expanding concern. Indeed, the company’s officers retained links to the region of Timothy’s birth. On his death, Timothy Eaton was succeeded as company president by his son John (later Sir John) Eaton. Sir John was in turn succeeded by his cousin Robert Young Eaton, who had been born in the Ballymena area and had immigrated to Canada to help run the Eaton family business. Before his death, Sir John visited the district of his father’s birth and paid for the refurbishment of his grandparents’ graves in the local cemetery. Such strong personal and cultural identifications with a world across the Atlantic informed the development of Canada’s foremost retail chain and were part of a broader narrative of Protestantism, commerce, and Empire in which connections between an Ulster family and the district from which it hailed shaped the retail culture of Toronto and the new Dominion. Kevin James
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See also: EMIGRATION; GREAT FAMINE, The References Macpherson, Mary Etta. Shopkeepers to a Nation: The Eatons. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963. Santink, Joy L. Timothy Eaton and the Rise of his Department Store. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. The Life Story of Canada’s Greatest Merchant. Toronto, 1907. 1-800-368-6868
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EGAN, DESMOND (1936–) An Irish poet with a substantial critical reputation in the United States, Desmond Egan was born July 15, 1936, in Athlone, Ireland, to Thomas and Kathleen (Garland) Egan. He was educated by the Marist Brothers of Athlone, graduated with a BA from Maynooth University, and received an MA in 1965 from University College Dublin. He married the writer Vivienne Abbot, and they have two daughters. He taught at Mullingar (Greek and English) secondary school, then at Newbridge College. One of the founders of the Goldsmith Press, Egan originated and edited Era, a quarterly magazine of the arts from 1974–1984. His first volume, Midland (1972), announced a modern minimalist (somewhat like e. e. cummings) who disdained rhyme or punctuation, dramatizing deep images augmented by inward meditation and contextualized by transience and informal phrasing. With Michael Harnett he edited Choice (1973), an anthology of contemporary Irish poetry. Leaves (1974) chronicles a failed love affair. In modernist fragments, Siege! (1976) examines the pathology of politics in Ireland as it connects to a kidnapping. Woodcutter (1978) features a tribute to Ezra Pound. Athlone? (1980) puts an empathetic magnifying lens to Egan’s neighborhood. Snapdragon (1983) articulates tender poems of love tempered by loneliness amid the vagaries of time and memory. Seeing Double (1983) exhibits a postmodern simultaneity; poems are presented in a double-column format, and the echoing motif creates an unexpected musical harmony or dissonance. This volume also contains memorable elegies for Eugene Watters and Francis Ledwidge. In 1983 Carroll F. Terrell, describing Egan as www.abc-clio.com
“the finest Irish poet since Patrick Kavanagh,” awarded Egan the National Poetry Foundation of America Prize, a breakthrough that earned him a wider audience and led to the appearance of Collected Poems (1983). That same year he won the Muir Award. In 1987 Egan won the American Society for Poetry Award and the Chicago Haymarket Award, and in 1988 the Farrell Literary Award. Sean McBride penned the introduction for Egan’s Poems for Peace (1986). A Song for My Father (1989) contains the polyphonic title sequence and a haunting poem about the tenor John McCormack. Peninsula (1992) meditates on the landscape of Dingle with poems of haiku-like elegance and beauty addressing a tragic event of the sixteenth century. Hugh Kenner edited Selected Poems in 1992. In the Holocaust of Autumn (1994) laments the Jewish tragedy with heartfelt anguish. Famine (1997) plunges into the Irish historical disaster. Elegies (1997) contains poems selected by the author. Music (2000) provides subtle Leopardi-like meditations on various modalities of the art, high and low. The Outdoor Light (2005) is an impassioned, extended elegiac sequence that achieves epic scope. In 1993 Egan received an honorary doctorate of letters from Stanford University and another from Washburn University in 1996. He received the Bologna Literary Award in 1998 and the Literature of Macedonia Award in 2004. Since 1988 Egan has been the artistic director of the Gerard Manley Hopkins International Summer School. Egan has published translations of Euripides’ Medea and Sophocles’ Philoctetes; his poems have been published in French, Dutch, Italian, German, Japanese, Czech, Hungarian, Russian, Polish, Greek, ABC-CLIO
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Bulgarian, and Albanian. He often reads at international poetry symposiums. John Hunter has made a one-hour video documentary, Through the Eyes of a Poet (1995), and the CD Needing the Sea (2001) records the author’s voice. For more than two decades he has made spring reading tours in America. As a writer Egan’s strength is twofold: intimate poems that display sensitive musical phrasing with a simplicity possessing the lyric quality of Schubert’s music and a robust capacity for public elegy that touches a raw, emotional nerve in the audience. Nearly all of his books offer poems arranged in a disciplined sequence. Several of his double-column sequence poems from 1989 and later are not meant to be read on the page, but are scripts for performance pieces featuring three or four voices that pay particular attention to the blending of voices and rhythms, as in chamber music. Egan is an accomplished tenor with a substantial repertoire of folk songs; he remains a knowledgeable fan of progressive jazz and classical music. More recently, he has been painting. Kevin T. McEneaney See also: GREAT FAMINE, The; McCORMACK, John References Arkins, Brian. Desmond Egan: A Critical Study. Little Rock, AR: Milestone Press, 1990. Egan, Desmond. The Death of Metaphor: Selected Prose. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1986. Kenner, Hugh, ed., Desmond Egan. Orono, ME: Northern Lights, 1990.
EIRE SOCIETY OF BOSTON, THE Founded in 1937, The Eire Society of Boston was organized and functions for the purpose of spreading awareness of the cultural www.abc-clio.com
achievements of the Irish people. The Eire Society promotes knowledge of Irish culture through the encouragement of study in the arts, sciences, literature, language, and history of Ireland; the contributions to civilization made by the Irish and those of Irish ancestry; networking between all Irish and Americans; and raising awareness of the Irish people’s actions in advancing American ideals. The Eire Society, by its constitution, is nonsectarian and nonpolitical: no individual holding or seeking public office may serve as an officer or member of the board of directors. The Eire Society was established by a group of 82 adults who had just completed a 16-lecture Irish history course presented by the Massachusetts Department of Education. After the conclusion of lecture series, alumni met on May 11, 1937, for a $1.50 a plate dinner, during which the Eire Society was formally launched. The Society was formed to complement other Irish organizations, such as the Charitable Irish Society, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Clover Club—while consciously distancing itself from things stereotypically Irish. It has never held a function on Saint Patrick’s Day, and its letterhead is printed in black or royal blue. Today, the Eire Society touts that it is “more than green beer and shamrocks,” and it provides the Boston community with events and resources that celebrate the true contributions of Irish heritage and culture to the world. The Eire Society has historically been very active in Boston. Monthly meetings are held September through June, and it hosts an annual Gold Medal dinner. Its official periodical, published several times a year, is the Bulletin. It also maintains a website, www.eiresociety.org. Society meetings
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provide a forum for Irish singers, musicians, fashion designers, dancers, artists, actors, poets, filmmakers, writers, and statesmen. Eamon de Valera, former taoiseach and president of Ireland, appreciated the Society and its work and welcomed members to Áras an Uachtaráin (The Irish presidential home). Honored guests have included Hugh Leonard, Sean McBride, Michael MacLiammoir, Desmond Guinness, Roy Johnston, Thomas McAnna, Brian Friel, Brendan Behan, Grainne Yeats, Mary Manning, John Montague, Thomas Flanagan, Charles Bowen, and Thomas Kinsella. Each year, the society offers a gold medal to an individual whose efforts have significantly fulfilled society ideals. Past recipients have included scholars, architects, teachers, lawyers, sportsmen, politicians, philanthropists, critics, and artists. Past members and gold medal honorees have included John F. Kennedy, Seamus Heaney, the Chieftains, John Hume, Siobhan McKenna, Sean McBride, George Mitchell, John Huston, William Bulger, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, Maureen O’Hara, John Ford, Padraic Colum, Joseph Cannon, John W. McCormack, Eugene McCarthy, and Mary Lavin. The Bulletin series amounts now to several volumes, which are archived with the Eire Society’s records, at the Honorable John J. Burns Library of Rare Books and Special Collections at Boston College. Throughout its history the Eire Society has hosted nearly 1,000 lectures, screenings, opening nights, and receptions, cooperated with four decades of Irish consular and diplomatic missions, and given its support to numerous Irish hospitals, educational ventures, ecumenical and peace-seeking projects, and creative enterprises. In 1978, during its 41st season, the society and other www.abc-clio.com
local Irish organizations supported the exhibit called Irish Legacy: 1500 BC/1500 AD at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In January 1980, the society arranged a special viewing for members and friends of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library on Boston’s Columbia Point. To mark the Eire Society’s 50th anniversary, five gold medals were awarded, and the society commissioned the Irish artist Val McGannto to create a painting of Joyce’s Tower. Dedicated to the people of Massachusetts, the painting now hangs in the reading room of the State House. In 1989 the Eire Society presented a facsimile of The Book of Kells to the Irish collection at the Burns Library at Boston College. The society has been a charitable, nonprofit organization since its inception. In 1945, the society donated $1,000 to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts to purchase ancient gold Celtic ornaments, and in 1950, it presented $1,000 to Richard Cardinal Cushing, archbishop of Boston. Cardinal Cushing endorsed the check to Ireland’s Muintir na Tire for use in its back-to-the-land movement. In 1953, the Society presented three Fergus O’Ryan oils to local institutions: one each to the Boston Public Library, Harvard’s Fogg Museum, and Boston College High School. Boston College received works of literature, history, and law (including $2,300 worth of Irish legal documents in facsimile), as well as several portraits and landscapes of Mountmellick and Tramore Bay. Harvard University accepted an eighteenth-century Perry violin in addition to $5,000 to underwrite acquisition of treasures on microfilm from the National Library of Ireland. The society donated a rare A. J. Potter score to the Boston Symphony Orchestra to fund a tour of Europe in Dublin and Cork. In 1966, ABC-CLIO
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the society formed a delegation for Dublin to march in the Easter Sunday parade of 1966, which is depicted in Cuimhneachan, the official record of Ireland’s commemoration of the 1916 Rising. Susan Gedutis Lindsay See also: DE VALERA, Eamon; FORD, John; HEANEY, Seamus; HUSTON, John; MONTAGUE, John Reference History of the Eire Society: Adapted from the work of the late George E. Ryan. www.eiresociety.org/esmission.html (accessed July 27, 2007).
EL SALVADOR Although Ireland has had historical links with many countries in Central America and South America, its connections with El Salvador only came to the fore during the 1980s. From 1979, El Salvador had been experiencing a bloody civil war in which the government forces were fighting against left-wing rebels of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). This was at a time when President Ronald Reagan had declared the Soviet Union to be “the evil empire” and when he thought its influence was spreading across Latin America. This was true not only of Cuba and later of Grenada, but also of El Salvador’s neighbor Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas toppled the Somoza regime in 1979. To counter Soviet and Cuban influence in the region, Reagan began to supply anticommunist governments with arms and money. The El Salvadoran military, because the country was in a civil war against rebels said to be receiving support from the Soviet Union, became the recipient of large amounts of military and financial aid from the United States. One of the critics of this www.abc-clio.com
arrangement between America and the El Salvadoran government was Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, who criticized the El Salvadoran government’s abuse of human rights in many of his weekly homilies at Mass. In this way he became a focus for some of the discontent against the government, and he began to attract international attention because of his statements. Once, at a sermon delivered at a mass in the city’s cathedral, he called on soldiers in the army to disobey orders that oppressed the human rights of others. The next day, while he was celebrating Mass in a chapel near the cathedral in the capital, he was assassinated. It was suspected, and later confirmed by a United Nations report, that his assassination had been ordered by Major Roberto d’Aubisson, a vehemently anticommunist army officer who had received some military training in the United States and was the head of military intelligence. The funeral of Archbishop Romero, as well as being attended by thousands of El Salvadorans, was also attended by Bishop Eamonn Casey, the bishop of Galway in Ireland and the head of the Catholic charity Trócaire. A charismatic figure, who had been appointed as a bishop at a relatively young age, he later gave an emotional account on Irish television of being in the crowd when the crowds at the funeral were fired upon by government troops. President Ronald Reagan’s visit to Ireland in 1984 was surrounded by more controversy than the visit of any other American president. There were large demonstrations opposed to his visit. Most of this opposition was due to U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, particularly in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and U.S. support to military and undemocratic governments there. As well as visiting the ancestral home
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of his family in Ballyporeen, Co. Tipperary, Reagan was awarded an honorary degree by University College Galway. However, the bishop of Galway, Eamonn Casey, refused to meet Reagan, citing America’s support for military regimes, in particular Reagan’s support for the Nicaraguan contras and El Salvador’s military government. The connections between Ireland and El Salvador continued in November 1989 when six Jesuit priests, who had been working in the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas in San Salvador, were taken out and shot dead along with their housekeeper and her daughter. Although it was made to look as if they had been killed by left-wing guerrillas, death squads linked to the El Salvadoran army were suspected. As a result of these killings, there were commemorations held in Ireland by the Jesuits and in the schools which they administered. David Doyle References In Memoriam: The Jesuit Martyrs of El Salvador. CIIR: Trócaire, 1990. Jesuit Communication Centre. El Salvador: Chronicle of a Cover-Up: Jesuit University Murders, 16th November 1989. Swords, Ireland: Irish El Salvador Support Committee, 1991.
ELLMAN, RICHARD DAVID (1918–1987) Richard Ellmann was born on March 15, 1918, in Highland Park, Michigan, where he spent his youth. After obtaining both his BA and MA degrees from Yale, he taught for a year at Harvard. In 1943 he began war service, working in both the Office of Strategic Services (the wartime precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency) and the U.S. Navy’s construction battalions (popularly called the “Seabees”). While on assignment www.abc-clio.com
Winners of the National Book Award in 1960, (left to right) for poetry, Life Studies, Robert Lowell; for biography, James Joyce, Richard Ellman; and for short novels, Goodbye Columbus, Philip Roth. (Bettmann/Corbis)
to London, Ellmann took time off to visit the Anglo-Irish poet W. B. Yeats’s widow George, who gave him primary access to her husband’s manuscript materials. Ellmann’s study of these resulted in two influential interpretations of the poet, The Man and the Masks (1948)—which was essentially his 1947 PhD thesis at Yale—and The Identity of Yeats (1954). After teaching for several years at Harvard, Ellmann taught from 1951 to 1968 at Northwestern University. In 1959 he published his most highly acclaimed work, a biography of James Joyce, which he revised in 1982, and he also edited important collections of Joyce’s letters and critical writings. He taught again at Yale from 1968 to 1970, after which he accepted a post at New College of Oxford University, which he held from 1970 to 1984. From 1982 until 1986 he also taught at Emory University. With the exception of Harvard (where he was employed as instructor and assistant ABC-CLIO
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professor), all of Ellmann’s postwar appointments were professorships or named professorships. He was one of America’s most influential and internationally renowned scholars of modern Irish literature. Ellmann’s works on Yeats and Joyce helped establish them as subjects in American academia, and his interpretations of their work continue to attract widespread concurrence. His biographies of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde are notably accomplished, blending astute artistic criticism with enormous biographical comprehensiveness. His critics suggest that he displays an excessive interest in his subjects’ sexual peculiarities, and that his fascination with his subjects occasionally leads him to an unscholarly acceptance of their views (as in his antagonistic depiction of Oliver St. John Gogarty in James Joyce ). Nevertheless, his works remain the touchstones from which other critics depart, and which even detractors acknowledge to be important contributions to scholarship. Ellmann died on May 13, 1987. Andrew Goodspeed See also: GOGARTY, Oliver St. John; JOYCE, James Augustine Aloysius; YEATS, William Butler References Dick, Susan, et al., eds. Essays for Richard Ellmann: Omnium Gatherum. Quebec and Gerrards Cross, ON: McGill-Queens University Press and Colin Smythe, 1989. Ellmann, Richard. Four Dubliners. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1986. Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Knopf, 1988.
EMIGRATION Emigration refers to leaving one’s country of residence to assume residency in another land. It usually implies an extended period abroad, but it is not strictly dependent on www.abc-clio.com
the permanency of the departure. The primary sense of emigration, however, most often describes an attempt to live in another country and to attain citizenship there. It is also commonly held to refer to leaving one’s native land, yet may exceptionally apply to one leaving a country in which one has resided, but which was not the country of one’s birth. The term emigration may refer to the actions of an individual, a family, or a larger social group. Forced abandonment of one’s country, either through coercive expulsion or judicially imposed exile, is a form of emigration, but the terms more commonly used in these instances are expulsion or exile. ( Judicial exportation has also been referred to as “transportation,” but that term has now an almost exclusively historical usage.) A person who lives abroad by choice, but who retains the citizenship of the land of his or her birth, is frequently referred to as an expatriate. These distinctions, however, are fluid, and the strict application of the terms emigrant, exile, and expatriate often depends on the person’s self-identification. Ireland is famously a nation of emigrants. A strong sense remains of “the Irish” as incorporating both the native-born residents of Ireland and the emigrants and descendants of emigrants (sometimes known as the “Irish Diaspora”). Yet there are immediate complications inherent in the notion of the Irish as an emigrant nation. Ireland has long been a home to many who were not born there: repeated attack, settlement, and intermarriage have brought large numbers of non-Irish to Ireland, tremendously complicating the notion of what it means to be Irish or to settle abroad. The Ireland-born descendants of such migrants have historically
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struggled with questions of Irish identity and divided notions of homeland. Evidence suggests that the native-born Irish (of whatever descent) have been similarly migratory. As just one example, the initial Viking settlers of Iceland encountered hermits who are thought to have been religious eremites from Ireland who had come to Iceland seeking solitude. The early migration patterns of Irish settlers are difficult now to reconstruct; what seems certain is that the early Irish were not isolated and must have settled outside the island in appreciable numbers, just as numerous outsiders came to Ireland and stayed. However one defines Irish identity, it is indubitable that emigration has long taken residents of Ireland away from the island. Mass movements of people, of course, are a commonplace of history; Ireland, therefore, ought not be seen as unique, but as an unusual extreme in the extent of its emigratory patterns. Yet the numbers of emigrants from Ireland can be difficult to establish. The main body of mass Irish emigration is commonly considered to belong to the years 1800–2000 (dates chosen more for their general utility than for exact historical delineations). Reputable guesses frequently suggest that 5 or 6 million Irish emigrated during this period, and several responsible estimates have reached as high as 7 or 8 millions. Whatever the exact number may be, the emigratory depletion of Ireland between 1800 and 2000 is one of the most significant nonmilitary depopulations in modern history. Perhaps the single most important mass emigration during this period was caused by the Potato Famine of 1845–1849. The terrible conditions of starvation, sickness, and poverty that followed upon the failure of the potato crops produced a grim and astonishing modern exodus. Although www.abc-clio.com
exact numbers are not available, the famous proposition that the famine led to “one million dead, one million fled” does not seem suspiciously inaccurate. Irish emigrants during and after the famine went largely to four main destinations: the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia. (However, numerous other destinations received smaller groups of Irish emigrant settlers.) The most important group of emigrants was likely those who went to the United States, for they created significant bodies of Irish in the major cities of the American Northeast, most notably in Boston and New York. These ethnic Irish enclaves encouraged other Irish to emigrate, as the later migrants could be reasonably certain of encountering people of similar backgrounds and culture in their new homeland. This was frequently a wishful dream, however; many Irish emigrants to the United States encountered hostility and outright prejudice upon their arrival. Yet their collective success contributed to the Irish becoming one of the most prominent, successful, and politically important ethnic identities in the United States. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Irish emigrants went abroad for an enormous variety of reasons. Significant debates exist among historians as to whether the Irish emigrants of the period 1800–2000 did so because they were the most entrepreneurial and daring, or whether instead they left because they were simply the most disadvantaged, hopeless, and desperate. It is likely that a true understanding of Irish emigration must accommodate both intrepidity and despair: many left in the hope of better economic opportunities; others left to rejoin brothers, parents, or spouses already abroad; some presumably ABC-CLIO
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left simply for the sake of adventure; many fled because there was no viable alternative to departure; and a notably large number of artistic figures went into self-imposed exile. Yet most Irish emigrants were not prominent artists or accomplished individuals, and they simply left for years, or a lifetime, to work and settle outside Ireland. Only in the 1960s did this trend diminish significantly. By the late 1990s the improving economy of the Republic of Ireland, combined with the lessening of hostilities in Northern Ireland, rendered the urge to emigrate less necessitous than it had been for the two previous centuries. Today many Irish still choose to live abroad, yet such a choice has ceased to be felt as economically unavoidable or politically imperative. If Ireland is famously a nation of emigrants, the United States is equally a nation of immigrants (people moving into a country). The significant majority of modern American citizenry is descended from immigrants. The foundations of the country’s political organization and legal structure originate in European intellectual traditions and political ideals. Much of America’s artistic and aesthetic work continues to reveal strong affiliations with European culture, and American artists have long found receptive audiences for their works in Europe. The United States is, in many ways, the most generally successful nation of immigrants in the modern world. Yet, although the United States may reasonably express pride in the widespread acceptance of immigrants into its population (the famous melting pot of America metaphor), such assimilation has not been without difficulties. The initial overwhelming of Native Americans by outside settlers essentially destroyed the native ways of life and www.abc-clio.com
almost invariably dispossessed the indigenous peoples of their traditional lands. Many modern African Americans are descended directly from the most pitiable of immigrants to America, the slaves. Ethnic prejudices have been widespread throughout the history of the United States; although these rarely reached the levels of organized hatred attained by the pogroms of Eastern Europe, large bodies of Americans have nonetheless been deprived of their dignity and opportunities because of ethnic bias. Immigration quotas have also denied potential immigrants or refugees the chance to reside in America. In the United States a widespread paradox remains regarding immigration: there is a strong sense of identification with the ethnicity of immigrant ancestors, combined with a politically volatile suspicion of modern immigrants, particularly of those who are not legally permitted to reside in the United States. It is almost impossible to assess fully the influence of Irish immigrants to the United States and Canada. Irish immigrants to England and Australia certainly attained significant accomplishments, yet the achievements of the Irish in North America, and particularly in the United States, have been nation forming. The Irish remain one of the most recognizable ethnic elements in American culture, and their traditions have become essentially indistinguishable from American traditions. (The largest Saint Patrick’s Day parade in the world is not in Dublin, but New York City.) The Irish have played an extensive role in American political life; the famed Irish Brigade of the American Civil War was combative and highly decorated, and the Kennedys of Massachusetts are one of the most politically prominent families in American history. Yet the major connections between
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the Irish and the North Americans have always been established by undistinguished, normal migrants and by the affections for “the old country” they have instilled in their descendants. Similarly, the economic prosperity that the Irish have for centuries found in North America has brought generation after generation of Irish emigrants, each of which establishes its own interrelations between Ireland and the Americas. To this day many Irish who have never visited Canada or the United States have friends or family who are Irish immigrants there. Andrew Goodspeed See also: BOSTON; GREAT FAMINE, The; NEW YORK CITY References Coogan, Tim Pat. Wherever Green is Worn. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Drudy, P. J., ed. The Irish in America: Emigration, Assimilation and Impact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Houston, Cecil, and William Smyth. Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. McCaffrey, Lawrence. Textures of Irish America. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992. Miller, Kirby. Emigrants and Exiles. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Miller, Kirby, et al. Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
EMMET, JOHN PATTEN (1796–1842) Born in Dublin on April 8, 1796, Dr. John Patten Emmet was the second son of lawyer and United Irishman Thomas Addis Emmet (1764–1827). John’s uncle and Thomas’s brother was the famous revolutionary and United Irishman Robert Emmet (1778–1803), who was half hanged and beheaded by the British for sedition in www.abc-clio.com
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September 1803. Furthermore, John’s grandfather was the respected Dr. Robert Emmet, who served as the late eighteenthcentury personal physician to Ireland’s lord lieutenant, Britain’s official representative in Ireland. Because of Thomas Addis Emmet’s anti-British activities in Ireland during the run-up to the Rebellion of 1798, John’s father was imprisoned in Scotland from 1798 to 1802. Upon his release, the Emmet family first moved to Brussels, then Paris, during the following two years. In 1804, the Emmets immigrated to the United States. Thomas practiced law in New York City, often representing a growing and needy Irish immigrant population. He also served as New York state attorney general (1812–1813). During his early years in America, John Patten Emmet received a classical education at a Long Island academy. After graduation, he entered the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. His growing reputation as a mathematician earned him a position on the faculty while he was still pursuing his undergraduate degree. In 1817, John’s poor health forced him to leave school. (Emmet was plagued with chronic ill health throughout his life.) He spent most of the next two years in Italy studying music, sculpture, and painting. Returning to New York in 1819, he entered medical school. Upon graduation in 1822, Dr. Emmet practiced medicine for three years in Charleston, South Carolina. His emergent reputation as a chemist and inventor attracted the interest of former president Thomas Jefferson. In 1825, Jefferson offered Emmet the chair of professor of natural history at the newly established University of Virginia in ABC-CLIO
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Charlottesville. As a professor, Emmet lectured on a wide range of subjects, including zoology, botany, mineralogy, chemistry, geology, and rural economy. In addition to his students, Emmet’s classes were often attended by fellow colleagues and curious townspeople. Two years later, with his teaching responsibilities reduced to permit him more time for his special interests, Dr. Emmet became the university’s first professor of chemistry and materia medica. During that same year, 1827, he married Mary Byrd Tucker, the daughter of a prominent Virginia family. Together, they had three children. In 1831, Emmet purchased a 106-acre farm near the university. He wanted the land for building a family home and space for pursuing his silk-making, horticulture, and wine production ventures. Three years later, Emmet began overseeing the construction of his family’s new home. Completed a year later, at a cost of $2,500, the two-and-a-half-story brick vernacular structure incorporated many Jeffersonian architectural features. Emmet christened this new home Morea House, after the botanical name for the Chinese mulberry tree, Morus multicaulis, whose leaves form the staple diet of the silkworm. Located near the university’s original Academical Village, on what is now Sprigg Lane, the house is the only surviving structure built by an original faculty member. Today, the building is owned and used by the University of Virginia. Dr. Emmet lived only seven years in Morea House. He died suddenly on August 15, 1842, at the age of forty-six, while on a journey to New York. He was buried in New York City’s Marble Cemetery. That year, his fellow faculty members paid him special tribute. They recognized www.abc-clio.com
his 17 years of distinguished service to the University of Virginia, the community, and the world of science and learning. Later, Charlottesville further honored Emmet by naming one of its main thoroughfares after him. As a postscript, the Emmet family’s Irish heritage was actively pursued by John’s third son, Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet (1829–1919). This younger Dr. Emmet became a noted physician, lawyer, and writer. Among his written efforts were a detailed family history and a comprehensive volume on Irish immigration. (Copies of his works are available in the University of Virginia library.) Additionally, Dr. Emmet spent the later years of his life tracing Irish records, trying to locate the grave of his famous relative, Robert Emmet. In 1905, he found the headless skeleton of a man in Dublin’s St. Michan’s cemetery which was believed to be that of his great-uncle. Thomas Emmet died on March 1, 1919. Three years after his death, the doctor’s body was finally reinterred in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery. During the interval since his death, the British government had refused his family’s request to have Thomas’s body buried in Ireland. It was only after the establishment of the Irish Free State that Ireland welcomed home another of its noble champions. Cathal Liam See also: EMMET, Thomas Addis; NATIONALISM, IRISH-AMERICAN
References Emmet, Thomas Addis. The Emmet Family, with Some Incidents Relating to Irish History and a Biographical Sketch of Prof. John Patten Emmet, M.D., and Other Members. New York: Bradstreet Press, 1898. Emmet, Thomas Addis. Incidents of My life; Professional—Literary—Social, with Service in the Cause of Ireland. New York: G. P. Putman’s Sons, 1911. ABC-CLIO 1-800-368-6868
EMMET,THOMAS ADDIS Emmet, Thomas Addis. Ireland under English Rule; or, A Plea for the Plaintiff. New York: Putnam, 1903. Emmet, Thomas Addis. Irish Emigration During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. New York: 1899. Emmet, Thomas Addis. A Memoir of John Patten Emmet, M.D., Formerly Professor of Chemistry and Materia Medica in the University of Virginia, with a Brief Outline of the Emmet Family History. New York: Bradstreet Press, 1898. Emmet, Thomas Addis. Memoir of Thomas Addis and Robert Emmet, with their Ancestors and Immediate Family. New York: The Emmet Press, 1915. Liam, Cathal. Forever Green: Ireland Now & Again. Cincinnati, OH: St. Pádraic Press, 2003.
EMMET,THOMAS ADDIS (1764–1827) Thomas Addis Emmet has often been ignored because of the enormous presence in Irish history of his brother, Robert Emmet. Thomas Emmet, however, was one of the
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core members of the Dublin Society of the United Irishmen, and after the failed Rebellion of 1798, he had an extremely successful and influential public career in the United States. Like William Sampson, Thomas Addis Emmet started his career with the United Irishmen by representing them in law courts during the mid-1790s. He became a member of the Directory of the United Irishmen in 1797, but he was arrested just before the rebellion broke out and sent to Fort George in Scotland, where his cellmates included William Sampson and William James Macneven. Following Lord Cornwallis’s policy of conciliation, the imprisoned United Irishman leadership struck a deal with the British authorities: in exchange for a full disclosure of the Revolution plans, and especially those involving Irish cooperation with the French, the prisoners would be allowed to immigrate to any country that was not at war with Great Britain at the time. Emmet immigrated to the United States. Emmet’s success as a lawyer in Ireland followed him over the Atlantic, and after he landed in Philadelphia in late 1803, the city’s mayor, DeWitt Clinton, personally asked him to take up practice in New York City, surpassing the residency restrictions of practicing law for Emmet and for William Sampson. With help from Clinton, Emmet launched his legal career in the United States. The law firm that Emmet founded is still operating in New York City under the name Emmet & Marvin; Theodore Roosevelt was a partner in the firm. Unlike the career of his friend, William Sampson, Thomas Addis Emmet’s career was successful from the beginning. In 1806 Emmet was part of the successful defense team for William Smith and Samuel Ogden for violating the Neutrality Act of 1794; this ended in a not-guilty verdict. In 1809 Emmet was
Portrait of political activist and lawyer Thomas Addis Emmet. (Library of Congress) www.abc-clio.com ABC-CLIO
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prosecuting a criminal conspiracy case against the Journeymen Cordwainers of New York, who were defended by William Sampson. Emmet narrowly won the heated case. By using very skilled and eloquent argumentation in the courtroom, Emmet had a string of successes, and from 1812 to 1813 he served as the attorney general for the State of New York. In 1815 he argued a case for his friend, the steamboat inventor Robert Fulton, before the Supreme Court. Emmet continued with his legal career until the end, as he died amidst legal proceedings in 1827. In addition to his legal career, Emmet was closely involved with the Irish community in New York. He supported Daniel O’Connell’s campaign for Catholic emancipation but fell out of favor with O’Connell over his denunciation of the United Irishmen and armed struggle. Emmet’s status in the Irish community helped to make the concerted effort against Rufus King’s campaigns for political office in 1807 into a personal vendetta, which destroyed King’s campaign. He also had a close relationship with Theobald Wolfe Tone’s widow Matilda, whom he held in high regard. When he died in 1827, Emmet’s burial procession was one of the largest New York had ever seen at that time. He is buried at St. Paul’s Chapel in the Bowery on Broadway. The monument for him, which was commissioned and paid for by the Irish community on the East Coast, still stands to this day by the chapel entrance. Aki Kalliomäki See also: EMMET, John Patten; O’CONNELL, Daniel; SAMPSON, William References Emmet, Thomas Addis. Memoir of Thomas Addis Emmet and Robert Emmet. New York: Emmet Press, 1915. www.abc-clio.com
Madden, Richard R. The United Irishmen, Their Lives and Times. Dublin: James Duffy, 1887. O’Donnell, Ruan. Robert Emmet and the Rebellion of 1798. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2003. O’Donnell, Ruan. Robert Emmet and the Rebellion of 1803. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2003. Wilson, David. United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.
ETHNIC AND RACE RELATIONS, IRISH AND AFRICAN AMERICANS The history of Irish and African-American relations in the United States includes much conflict, but it was not always as negative as has often been portrayed. It was in the Caribbean, rather than in what would become the United States, that the two peoples first encountered each other in substantial numbers in the New World. Most Irish immigrants to the Caribbean were impoverished Catholic peasants who had been deported or exiled for various crimes, or kidnapped or sold into servitude. With the introduction of sugar plantations in the Caribbean, voluntary indentured servants could not meet the demand for increased labor; consequently, prisoners from Oliver Cromwell’s Scottish and Irish campaigns, as well as Africans, began to be imported for slave labor. Beginning as early as the 1650s, as many as 60,000 Irish were brought to the New World in this way. Many historians argue that both European and African slaves were treated so badly in the Caribbean that there was little appreciable distinction among them, regardless of differences in skin color and ethnicity. When in the 1830s the Catholic Irish began immigrating to America in substantially greater numbers than previously, early
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indicators are that the Irish, if anything, got along better with African Americans than with native-born white Americans. Numerous neighborhoods and districts in large cities, such as New York City’s Seneca Village and Five Points District, were well-known—sometimes infamous—for their large numbers of African Americans and Irish immigrants living side by side. There were several instances of African Americans and Irish immigrants marrying or cohabitating, although concrete numbers are hard to come by. In 1849, Quakers conducting an inquiry into the living conditions of African Americans in Philadelphia commented that African Americans frequently lived in the same houses, and often the same rooms, as Irish immigrants. Even as late as 1899, one study of African Americans in the same city noted that of blackwhite married couples in one neighborhood, the majority of immigrant women married to black men were Irish, significantly outnumbering women from any other country married to black men. Blacks and the Irish, as they had in the Caribbean in previous centuries, also worked together frequently; for example, many canals were dug and railroad lines laid by African Americans and the Irish toiling side by side. However, although many historians and social scientists have suggested that Irish racism against African Americans was motivated mainly by competition for low-wage jobs as the number of Irish immigrants increased, more recent scholarship has challenged this notion. For one thing, the Irish in the South during the antebellum period tended to be as racist toward blacks, if not even more so, as their compatriots in the Northern states. Given that African Americans were enslaved in the South at this time, the Irish were not www.abc-clio.com
in direct competition with them for paid work. However, the connection in the minds of higher-class whites between blacks and the Irish had begun long before the two peoples began to live and work together in great numbers. Popular magazines, novels, plays, and songs from the late eighteenth century contain examples of African and Irish characters cavorting together, with both portrayed as hilariously childlike buffoons. Even in the minds of sympathetic observers, the extreme poverty and degradation many African Americans and Irish immigrants shared tended to conflate the two peoples. The Quakers who conducted the 1849 Philadelphia study of black neighborhoods remarked that of the African Americans and Irish there, “it is hard to tell which has sunk the lowest in filth and misery.” These long-extant prejudices and stereotypes reached a peak in the mid-nineteenth century and made many Irish immigrants begin to distance themselves from the blacks they were often connected with not only literally in their neighborhoods and working quarters, but also in the minds of native-born white Americans. Many Irish recognized that they were linked with blacks, whether they liked it or not, in the perceptions of white Protestant Americans, so their antiblack racism has been viewed by many historians as a defense mechanism to ensure their place—however low—in the “white” strata of nineteenth-century American society. This led to many Irish adopting general American antiblack and pro-slavery beliefs with more fervor than even the most ardent native-born white racists. The Catholic Irish Freedman’s Journal, an otherwise respectable publication, frequently printed articles disparaging African Americans. Even when the Irish ABC-CLIO
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patriot Daniel O’Connell denounced American slavery, several Irish immigrants rallied against him, penning public letters rebuking their hero. Undoubtedly, part of the distaste of many Irish for abolitionism was the movement’s roots in Protestant evangelicalism, but that alone does not explain the wholesale support for slavery of so many Irish, especially given that many, though not all, abolitionists also decried prejudice and discrimination against Catholics and immigrants. Another reason many Irish immigrants strongly opposed abolitionism is that most white Americans, even those theoretically opposed to slavery, viewed abolitionists and their unsparing discourse with mistrust and dislike, at best. Even a few African Americans publicly declared that they were antislavery but “not necessarily abolitionists” as the historian Benjamin Quarles noted. By opposing abolitionism, Irish immigrants were arguably proclaiming their “Americanness” rather than trumpeting their racism. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that many Irish, both men and women, were also among the most enthusiastic participants in riots targeting African Americans, the savagery of their attacks frequently horrifying other whites. (In one incident, both Irish men and women cut off pieces of the body of a crippled black lynching victim as gruesome souvenirs; in another, Irish female rioters beat to death, over a six-hour period, an Irish militiaman who tried to stop their attacks.) Not surprisingly, many antislavery novels of the period portray Irish characters as violent, uncouth “nagur” haters, in contrast to peaceful, good-natured blacks. By giving full vent to the worst racism of native-born whites, some Irish undoubtedly hoped to secure recognition of their own www.abc-clio.com
“whiteness.” They may have lacked money, education, and social status, but at least they possessed the “white” privilege of attacking blacks. One reason so many Irish treated African Americans horribly was simply because they, like other whites, could usually do so with impunity. Rioters who attacked blacks were seldom punished severely, even when they had committed the most horrific acts of violence against their victims. (Many policemen, firemen, and militia members in large cities were Irish Catholic themselves, which may have exacerbated matters.) Irish immigrants could also show their hatred of blacks in nonviolent but equally blatant ways, as when Irish longshoremen campaigned in New Orleans for the right to work on an “all-white waterfront.” As Irish immigrants made greater inroads in the workforce, Irish workers, like many other whites, sometimes refused to work alongside African Americans, forcing employers who otherwise would have hired blacks to change their practices. Because the actions of a minority of Irish immigrants against African Americans were so odious, the fact that many Irish did not share such racist attitudes has frequently been overlooked. Frederick Douglass recalled in his memoirs that during his childhood, Irish immigrants who learned he was a slave expressed genuine pity for him. During one riot targeting African Americans in New York in 1863, an Irish Catholic family took an African American family into their house and fed and sheltered them for several days, and there are many reports of similar occurrences. Given the often fearsome reprisals suffered by whites who tried to defend African Americans from attacks, it is no exaggeration to say such Irish immigrants acted heroically.
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While they abhorred white Protestant Americans comparing them to blacks, the Irish in America were not reluctant to compare themselves to African Americans, or to slaves, to call attention to their own grievances. A play staged in New York around 1860 by Irish actors was entitled Uncle Pat’s Cabin, or Lights and Shades of Life in Ireland, in an explicit reference to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The play highlighted the oppression faced by the Catholic Irish in their native land at the hands of Protestant landowners. African Americans were also keenly aware of native-born whites’ linking them to Irish immigrants, and they were no happier about this than the Irish. African-American journalists complained of the poorest, most ignorant European— and Catholic—immigrants being more welcome in America than native-born, Protestant residents of African descent. Many African Americans could not help resenting the often virulent prejudice against them that the Irish so readily adopted in the United States. Some, like Frederick Douglass and Marcus Garvey, perceived clearly that the two peoples in fact had much in common and hoped that the Irish, given their long history of oppression in their homeland and the discrimination and difficulties they continued to face in the United Stares, would show more solidarity with the plight of slaves and free blacks. The oppression of the Irish by the English for more than 500 years, though systematic and often brutal, was not the equal of American slavery and subsequent antiblack Jim Crow laws. However, there were numerous clear similarities between the oppression suffered by the two peoples: eviction or bodily removal from native lands; indiscriminate abuse; hellish Atlantic www.abc-clio.com
crossings on overcrowded, unsanitary ships; stereotyping in the media and popular literature as apelike brutes or childlike fools; and discrimination in employment and housing. Some black and white observers were insightful enough to postulate that the racial conflict between the Irish and African Americans might in part have been created, or at least encouraged, by higher-class whites looking to maintain control over their social inferiors, whether African Americans or poor whites. One of the first novels published by an African American, Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends, portrays a wealthy, racist white lawyer who cunningly exploits the poverty and ignorance of Irish immigrants to enlist them in intimidating and even murdering African Americans. Webb’s novel is notable for its relatively sympathetic treatment of the Irish and their exploitation. The famed English actress Fanny Kemble, who lived on a slaveholding plantation in Georgia during her brief marriage to a Southern planter, wrote in her widely read memoirs that wealthy whites in the South deliberately exacerbated tensions between AfricanAmerican slavers and Irish immigrant laborers to prevent the two groups from developing a natural alliance with each other based on their shared experiences of oppression. Gradually, relations between the Irish and African Americans began to improve, largely as a result of Irish Americans’ slow acceptance by and assimilation into the dominant white American culture. Despite white Protestant Americans’ general approbation of their Catholicism and culture, the Irish shared the most important factor in common with them: skin color. Although dislike of the Irish lingered into the twentieth ABC-CLIO
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century, they did not face the barriers African Americans did such as the Jim Crow laws in the South, which were not abolished until the 1960s. In addition, their sheer numbers, far higher than the AfricanAmerican population, made it impossible for white Protestant Americans to continue to marginalize Irish Catholics completely. As Irish Americans felt more accepted as true Americans, they felt less need to differentiate themselves so vehemently from the African Americans with whom they had previously, and disparagingly, been conflated. Irish-American politicians, most notably President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy, stood up to white racist politicians and helped to implement civil rights for African Americans. Although racial tensions remained between many Irish and African Americans throughout the twentieth century, most notably the school busing protests that occurred in largely Irish-American South Boston during the early 1970s, these were mainly general white-black racial problems rather than specifically Irish-African conflicts. It is interesting to note, however, that despite the history of previously tense race relations between African and Irish Americans, the successes of the African American civil rights movement were a direct influence on Irish Nationalists who wished to gain full civil rights for Catholics in Northern Ireland in the 1960s and later. Danielle Maze See also: ABOLITIONISM AND SLAVERY; DOUGLASS, Frederick; DRAFT RIOTS; EMIGRATION; KENNEDY, John Fitzgerald; O’CONNELL, Daniel References Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. 1855. Reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. www.abc-clio.com
DuBois, W. E. B. The Philadelphia Negro. New York: Lippincott, 1899. Kemble, Frances Anne. Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839. London: Longman, Roberts and Green, 1863. Osofsky, Gilbert. Harlem: the Making of a Ghetto. Negro New York, 1890–1930. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968. Quarles, Benjamin. Black Abolitionists. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969. Report of the Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People Suffering from the Late Riots in the City of New York. New York: G. A. Whitehorne, 1863. A Statistical Inquiry into the Condition of People of Colour, of the City and Districts of Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Kite and Walton, 1849. Webb, Frank J. The Garies and Their Friends. 1857. Reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1971.
ETHNIC AND RACE RELATIONS, IRISH AND FRENCH CANADIANS Ethnic relations between Irish and French Canadians have been historically shaped by intense struggles for power within the Canadian Catholic Church among Irish and French Catholics and by sectarian sentiment, which has aroused conflict between Irish Protestants and the largely French Catholic population. Reaching their peak in the nineteenth century, such tensions have diminished markedly in the twentieth century, as Irish- and French-Canadian populations have become largely secularized and their conflicts have been subsumed within wider linguistic struggles between English and French Canada. To focus on the frequent conflict between Protestants and Catholics both within the Irish immigrant cohort and in the wider context of British North American and Canadian society at the expense of
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intra-confessional conflicts would be to neglect a major dynamic within Canadian history. Although there were several families of Irish extraction in New France, after the conquest of New France in 1759, there was an influx both of Protestants and (largely Irish) Catholics. In the eastern parts of what is now Canada, a sizable Frenchspeaking population, the Acadians, were subject to expulsion by an order in 1755, and the colonial legislature in Nova Scotia proscribed the Roman Catholic religion. The Church there and elsewhere in British North America through most of the first half of the nineteenth century remained dominated in its highest episcopal positions by French Canadians, though they ministered to an increasingly ethnically diverse Catholic population, comprising Scottish Catholics in the maritime colonies; large Irish Catholic populations in Upper Canada, especially in major urban centers such as Halifax, Montreal, and York; and sizable numbers of German and other Catholics. If the episcopacy remained in French-Canadian hands through the first decades of the nineteenth century in much of British North America, Irish Canadians developed a hold on parts of the Church in maritime Canada (especially in parts of Nova Scotia) to the exclusion of many Acadian church leaders until the early twentieth century. In the first decades of the nineteenth century Catholics in the maritime colonies won full political rights, and the ethnic complexion of the clergy became more varied, but key positions within the Church remained in French-Canadian hands. In places such as New Brunswick and Quebec, conflict between English- and Frenchspeaking Catholics centered on administrative control of the Church, schooling, and www.abc-clio.com
a range of disputes that revealed deep ethnoreligious cleavages within the Church, especially as figures such as Bishop MacDonnell (the Scottish-born bishop of Kingston from 1826) and Bishop Michael Power (the Irish-born Bishop of Toronto in 1840) represented the changing face of the episcopacy in British North America. While English-speaking Catholics faced an adversarial Orange press and frequent outbursts of anti-Catholicism, their integration within the mainstream of British North American society was marked. Irish Protestants, meanwhile, found a frequent bête noir in ultramontane Catholicism, which in different but pronounced ways had influenced the development of French-Canadian and IrishCanadian Catholicism in the Victorian era. In colonial politics, too much stress has been placed on viewing the Rebellions of 1837–1838 as ethnic revolts of the French and Irish. In Lower Canada especially the Irish-born community was deeply split between those who allied themselves with the Patriot leader Louis-Joseph Papineau, and those who, in such groups as Saint Patrick’s Society of Montreal (established 1834), offered robust support to colonial authorities in suppression of the rebellions. As French-Canadians’ influence over the Church as a whole waned, confessionalism became intertwined with politics to produce a vessel of ethno-religious politics in places such as Lower Canada, from which Irish Catholics felt increasingly isolated. In Montreal, for instance, the influx of Famine Irish arrived in a city with a vibrant Irish-Catholic associational culture—and a church, Saint Patrick’s, that served as the center of the English-speaking Catholic community. As the demographics of Canadian Catholicism changed, with influxes of French-speaking Catholics into ABC-CLIO
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Ontario in the later nineteenth century, the growth of English- and French-speaking métis populations in the West, and the immigration of thousands of Catholics of other ethnic backgrounds, conflicts intensified over the control of dioceses in Ontario, languages of instruction in Catholic schools (this became especially virulent in the first decades of the twentieth century), and continuing tensions between congregations which served as effective custodians of ethno-religious identity within the Church. The Irish Catholics’ propensity to decouple linguistic and confessional issues in education disputes, and continuing wrestling over episcopal control of some diocese, have colored relations between the Irish and French Canadians in the early twentieth century. From the 1930s, these conflicts have been much less pronounced: the Acadians have won considerable control over the Church in areas of high Frenchspeaking populations, and Irish-Canadians in Quebec and elsewhere, while not generally supportive of Quebec nationalism, have professed a “special relationship” with French Canada on the basis of shared confessional ties. This representation of communal binds demands closer scholarly attention. We know much more now, thanks to the ongoing work of Sherry Olson and others, about the comparative demographic behavior and social position of Irish and French Canadians in urban centers; rural communities demand further attention as we expand our knowledge of the complex interactions between these populations. Kevin James See also: EMIGRATION References James, K. J. “Dynamics of Ethnic Associational Culture in a Nineteenth-Century City: www.abc-clio.com
Saint Patrick’s Society of Montreal, 1834–56.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 26, no. 1 (2001): 47–66. Murphy, Terrence, and Gerald Stortz, eds. Creed and Culture: The Place of EnglishSpeaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750–1930. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1993. Olson, Sherry. Website of Professor Sherry Olson. www.geog.mcgill.ca/faculty/olson/ welcome.html (accessed August 23, 2007). Trigger, Rosalyn. ‘The geopolitics of the Irish Catholic parish in nineteenth-century Montreal.’ Journal of Historical Geography 27.4 (2001): 553–572.
ETHNIC AND RACE RELATIONS, IRISH AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES The relationship between the Irish and indigenous peoples has always been uneasy. From its beginnings in the sixteenth century to its demise in the twentieth century, Protestant and Catholic Irish have poured into all reaches of the British Empire. There is no one mold for the nature of Irish participation in colonial activities. Some immigrants became actively involved in dispossessing and slaughtering indigenous populations while others blended into well-established settler societies. Ultimately, these subjects of imperialism became agents as they pursued self or family interest and wealth. Their involvement has been referred to by Hiram Morgan as an “unwelcome heritage” where the Irish, “far from empathising with indigenous peoples overseas . . . were as brutal as any other white colonisers.” In the United States, Scotch-Irish immigrants first rose to prominence as they followed the promise of land ownership and greater religious freedom. They settled first in the middle colonies and then began a process of internal migration, using the
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main route for settling the interior southern colonies, the Great Philadelphia Road. The settlement behavior of the Protestant Irish in colonial American resembled that of their German, English, and Scots counterparts, all of whom shared the colonial outlook. Such settlers memorialize their role as frontiersmen and so-called Indian fighters. As a dominant pioneering group, their pattern of settlement and land use altered the landscape and brought them into conflict with indigenous populations whose subsistence base was increasingly undermined. After the American War of Independence, Britain reacted to the loss of its colonies by staking a tighter claim on British North America. This involved formalizing land claims and subduing the indigenous population through restriction of movement and religious conversion. Throughout North America, the French had already taken the lead in converting Native Americans to Catholicism. Wherever Irish missionaries participated in missions, they brought to their work a combination of egalitarianism and cultural imperialism. As time progressed the influence of Irish Catholicism on Native Americans was increasingly felt through the number of lay Irish immigrants arriving and requiring increased church infrastructure, as occurred in nineteenth-century New Brunswick when an influx of Irish immigrants afforded the presence of resident priests to minister to the Irish, Acadian, and Micmac Indians in the area. Elsewhere in America, similar processes were at work. The Catholic Church authorities made the fledgling nation of Texas a separate jurisdiction from the Catholic Church in 1840 and sent Jean Marie Odin, a Vincentian priest, to supervise the www.abc-clio.com
transition. He became the first vicar apostolic of Texas in 1842 and made efforts to recruit priests from Ireland. One such recruit was Father John Joseph Lynch, future archbishop of Toronto. In the Northwest Territories, administrational intervention was requested when a colony of Scotch Presbyterians and Irish Catholics at the junction of the Assiniboine and Red rivers, which the Earl of Selkirk founded in 1812, aroused the ire of the Northwest Company and resulted in the Battle of Seven Oaks ( June 19, 1816). In response, Selkirk obtained from the bishop of Quebec two missionaries to found a church mission, the express purpose of which was to convert the local aborigines. As the nineteenth century progressed, such administrational tactics were increasingly relied on to subdue Indian nations of the Plains culture area, which included the territories of the Stoneys/Assiniboine, Sarcee, Blackfoot, Blood, Peigan, Plains Cree, Sioux tribes. Heavy-handed interference in Native American society was the norm at the time, and numerous individual Irish men and women were involved in the process as treaties were settled, reservations established, and Indian agents dispatched. Other Irish individuals in contact with Native Americans became intermediaries who encouraged better European understanding of indigenous art and culture. John Mullanphy of Enniskillen (1758– 1833), the so-called first millionaire of the American West, sent his son Bryan to be educated at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, in 1825. The 16-year-old boy brought 15 Native American artworks to his new school, where they remained until 1977, when they were lent to the British Museum. They are now part of a touring collection on Native American art and Irish ABC-CLIO
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commerce. Bryan Mullanphy (1809–1851) would go on to become a successful entrepreneur and philanthropist in the Midwest, endowing a hospital and other charities. Paul Kane (1810–1871), originally of Co. Cork, was an Irish Canadian who became famous for his paintings of First Nations peoples in the Canadian West and in the Oregon Country. In his youth Kane met George Catlin, an American painter who had depicted the Native Americans in the prairies and who was on a promotion tour for his book, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians. Kane decided to similarly document the Canadian Native Americans and undertook two voyages through the Canadian Northwest in the 1840s. Upon his return to Toronto, he produced more than 100 oil paintings from sketches he made during the journeys. The oil paintings departed from the accuracy of his field sketches in favor of more dramatic scenes; however, Kane’s field sketches have proven a valuable resource for ethnographers. He also brought back from his trips a collection of artifacts, including masks, pipe stems, and crafts. Kane’s travel report, published originally in London in 1859, was condescending but a success in its time. It has since been reported that Kane’s travel notes were written in a style very different from the published text, and the book seems to have been heavily edited by others in order to package Kane’s notes as a typical Victorian travel account. It is difficult to ascribe racism to the artist himself. Contact between the Irish and indigenous people could also result in intermarriage. The Canadian métis developed a social style that freely borrowed from their aboriginal and European—including
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Irish—backgrounds to provide them with the cultural fabric of a new and colorful culture. They caught the imagination of many early writers with their genius for creating unique patterns and solutions for meeting day-to-day needs. For example, they adopted the multicolored sashes of the coureur de bois, the fiddling and jigging of the French and Irish, and mixed these cultural icons with the haunting chants and songs of the First Nation peoples. They had built settlements and created a complex network of communication patterns sufficient for the successful interrelationship of their members and outsiders. The nineteenth century métis had established a coherent and cohesive community. The Irish Potato Famine, which culminated in “Black ’47,” did not directly affect Irish-indigenous relations on a large scale, although it greatly increased the presence of Irish Catholics in North America. The response from North America gave rise to an exceptional instance of goodwill expressed by the Choctaw Indian Nation. In dire straits themselves, they empathized when they heard of the plight of the Irish and collected the considerable sum of US$710 to buy much needed food for the starving Irish. Sixteen years before this, the Choctaw and four other tribes, including the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole, had endured the Trail of Tears, a devastating forced trek from their ancestral lands to Oklahoma, to make room for new settlers. More than half perished from the exposure, malnutrition and diseases. New postcolonial conceptualizations have sought to readdress the understanding of the Irish in North America. American writer Fintan O’Toole has discussed the complex cultural entanglement between
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Ireland and the Wild West. Racist depictions of the Irish in the nineteenth-century English press would offer unflattering comparisons of native Irish and Native Americans. It has been rightly acknowledged that the Irish would come to play a central role in the near extermination of Native Americans, in a new environment where “the Irish cease to be the Indians and become the cowboys.” However, it is increasingly highlighted how the historical realities of the western lifestyle were more complex. Cowboys tended to be young men and, unlike in Hollywood representations, were a mix of ethnic groups that reflected American society, including African Americans and Hispanics as well as English, Irish, German, and French immigrants; near the top of the profession were indigenous peoples. This diverse grouping was bound together through the necessity of upholding the reputation of their employers, the teamwork and shared adversity of working cattle on roundups and trail drives, and personal pride in what they did. Irish and aboriginal historians, heritage workers, and political activists are increasingly drawing parallels between the Irish experience and that of First Nations peoples. Vernon Bellecourt, member of the Chippewa tribe of the Lakota nation and a founding member of the American Indian Movement (AIM), has suggested that the many struggles facing his people echo the struggles of the Irish against British oppression. For example, he identifies similarities between the Heart of the Earth Survival schools the AIM has started and the Irish hedge schools of the colonial period. He has also conducted a mission to Ireland that included attending Sinn Féin’s Ard Fheis and speaking and providing interviews on
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behalf of his organization. Such activities indicate the potential for a rapidly expanding new area of study dedicated to examining native-newcomer relationships in a variety of contexts. Mike Cottrell See also: LYNCH, Archbishop John Joseph References Akenson, Donald Harman. “Irish Migration to North America, 1800–1920.” In The Irish Diaspora, edited by Andy Bielenberg. New York: Longman, 2000. American Indian Movement website. www.aimovement.org/ (accessed July 28, 2007). Bielenberg, Andy, ed. The Irish Diaspora. New York: Longman, 2000. Bielenburg, Andy. “Irish Emigration to the British Empire, 1700–1914.” In The Irish Diaspora, edited by Andy Bielenberg. New York: Longman, 2000. British Museum. “Native American Art: Irish American Trade: The Stonyhurst Mullanphy Collection.” www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/explore/ online_tours/americas/native_north_ america/native_north_america.aspx (accessed August 23, 2007). Cinefocus Canada. “The Art of Paul Kane.” www.paulkane.ca (accessed July 28, 2007). Irish Famine Curriculum Committee. The Great Irish Famine. [curriculum guide] Moorestown, New Jersey. 1996; revised 1998. www.nde.state.ne.us/SS/pdf/irish.pdf (accessed July 28, 2007). Kenny, Kevin. “The Irish in the Empire.” In Ireland and the British Empire, edited by Kevin Kenny. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Morgan, Hiram. “An Unwelcome Heritage: Ireland’s Role in British Empire-Building.” History of European Ideas 19 (1994): 619. O’Toole, Fintan. A Mass for Jesse James: A Journey through 1980’s Ireland. Dublin: Raven Arts, 1990: 134. Tallgrass Prairie National Reserve website. “Cowboys and Cattle.” U.S. Department of the Interior. www.nps.gov/tapr/ cowboys.htm (accessed August 23, 2007).
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ETHNIC AND RACE RELATIONS, IRISH AND ITALIANS The history of Irish American and Italian American relations originates between 1880 and 1924, the period when more than 4.5 million Italians entered the United States. Not long after Italy became a nation in 1871, the poor people of the cities led the way to America, followed by the impoverished peasants of the rural, interior regions. Eighty percent of those who emigrated came from the South, or the Mezzogiorno. The exodus was partly precipitated by an agricultural crisis and the resultant widespread poverty. The Italian immigrants were morti di fame—dying of hunger. Just as it was in Ireland, hunger was the symptom of a larger issue: the people of the Mezzogiorno were subjected to a long history of colonization by Northern Italy: military occupation, racist oppression, economic and political disenfranchisement, and a corrupt system of absentee landlords, coupled with natural disasters, cholera epidemics, and famine. Despite the similar histories of oppression that led to mass migration, the relations between the IrishAmerican community and the immigrants from southern Italy were tense, and conflicts overshadowed the desire for alliance. The massive influx of immigrants to the United States reignited not only widespread anti-Catholic nativism and xenophobia, but it also exacerbated tensions between the newly arrived immigrant groups and the prior immigrant groups that were already firmly established, particularly the Irish. By the time the Italians started immigrating in large numbers, around 1880, the Irish-American community had a certain amount of social stability, as many were making economic advances, www.abc-clio.com
moving from the working classes to the middle classes. For the most part, when the southern Italian immigrants began to compete with Irish laborers for jobs, a portion of the Irish were moved into the managerial ranks to make room for the cheap Italian labor. Because Irish Americans now controlled the managerial jobs, they had powerful networks and the necessary resources to offer economic advancement to their own Irish communities. Even though many Irish Americans had moved up the economic ladder and now held many of the managerial posts, there was still a considerable Irish-American working class in direct competition with recently arrived southern Italian laborers. The clashes between the two groups were many and spanned different industries. The Italians would agree to work for less money than the Irish, thus making them more attractive as a group to capitalists looking to maximize profits. The Irish laborers harbored resentment toward this cheap labor pool and considered it a threat to their attempts to organize and empower rank-and-file workers. And, indeed, it did threaten their unionizing efforts on occasion, as many American companies used Italian immigrants as union busters. Thus, the Italians developed a deserved reputation as strikebreakers; when Irish laborers would go on strike, the Italians were considered a simple solution to the issue. The tensions concerning labor often led to violence. Job competition led to fierce discrimination that eventually led to rioting. In 1874, the coal-mining region of Armstrong, Pennsylvania, was the site of a bloody confrontation between these two groups. The Irish laborers were on strike. As was common, Italian laborers were brought in as unwitting scabs, desperate for
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work. The 150 Italians were greeted with gunfire, killing four. The Irish miners proceeded to burn the huts that housed the Italians. Because of this violent episode, the employers chose to provide weapons to the Italian workers as a protective measure against aggressive Irish-American forces. Relations between the two laboring groups remained strained well into the twentieth century. One of the most well-known conflicts between Irish Americans and Italian Americans took place in 1891 in New Orleans. At that time, the Irish monopolized the jobs on the waterfront as well as the police force. When the Italians arrived in the late 1880s, they started running a fish and fruit trade, providing unwelcome competition for the Irish and initiating a rivalry. In addition, animosities flared between the two groups when it became apparent that a number of Italians were members of antidiscrimination groups and had been making alliances and developing commercial relationships with the African-American community, a transgressive development in the white supremacist South. The already strained relationship between the Irish and Italians in New Orleans rose to a fever pitch when the Irish police chief, 32-year-old David Hennessey, was gunned down on March 15, 1890. Hennessey was one of the youngest police chiefs in the country and was well known throughout the nation for having an aggressive reputation. On his deathbed, Hennessey allegedly told his friend, Bill O’Connor, that the Italians were responsible for the shooting. O’Connor, a former policeman and captain of the Boylan Protective Police, a powerful local group that patrolled the streets of New Orleans with vigilante authority, led the investigation that www.abc-clio.com
resulted in more than 100 Italians being arrested. Ultimately, 19 Italian men were indicted for Hennessey’s murder and were found innocent by the jury. This verdict ignited a fury among the Irish of New Orleans. On March 14, 1891, a mob bombarded the prison and lynched every Italian they found, murdering 11. Vicious antiItalian hysteria ensued for quite some time, continuing through 1892, when widows of those lynched filed a federal lawsuit claiming that city officials purposefully failed to protect the victims from the violent mob. The claims were dismissed and no one was ever prosecuted for the 11 murders. In addition to the sometimes volatile labor relations between the groups, the Catholic Church was another contentious site where the Irish and Italians encountered each other. As the first Catholic immigrant group to come to the United States in great numbers, the Irish were positioned early on to dominate the American Catholic Church hierarchy. When the Catholic immigrants from southern and eastern Europe arrived on U.S. soil a long period of internal dissension within the Catholic Church ensued. Consequently, for the Italians, the Church was yet another location where they were forced to confront Irish domination. The Irish stronghold in the Church confirmed Catholicism as an integral part of Irish-American identity. For the southern Italians, on the other hand, their nationalism and their Catholicism were not so linked. The Italians perceived themselves to be under Irish control, as many Italians were essentially blocked from making progress in the American Catholic hierarchy. Irish America was quickly identified as the American equivalent to the latifondisti, the group of people in league with the Catholic Church, whose goal was to exploit ABC-CLIO
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the southern Italians. Thus, Irish America was perceived as being part of the ruling class, who would, on occasion, become convenient allies with the Yankee elite. The perception that the Irish were part of the established power structure, in the church, the labor market, and allied with the Yankee elite, fueled the antagonism between the Irish and Italians in the most crucial areas of their lives. When the southern Italians arrived in the United States there were no Italian churches. For the most part, the churches were controlled by Irish Americans who were not 100 percent welcoming of their fellow Catholics. The new immigrants had their own unique rituals and wanted to continue practicing their faith as they had done in their homeland. The church-related rituals of the Italians were suspect in the eyes of the Irish-American Catholic hierarchy. The rituals were perceived as pagan, and therefore threatening to the traditions being practiced in the United States. Of particular suspicion were the Italian tradition of processions, their perceived superstitions, the amount of attention paid to saints’ feast days, and the importance of the Virgin Mary in their devotions. At the time, the church hierarchy did not approve of the special devotion to Mary, as they feared it took the focus away from the Blessed Trinity. Within the church and within the larger xenophobic U.S. context, the new immigrants’ “Old World” traditions were perceived as being hindrances to their successful assimilation. The religious and class-based animosities between the Irish Americans and the Italian Americans fueled massive anti-Italian discrimination, which was accompanied by a fierce racial discourse. As is widely noted, the Irish considered Italians a different race, and would call them “niggers,” “dagoes,” and “wops.” It was during the economic www.abc-clio.com
calamities of the 1960s, coupled with the 1965 Immigration Act, that Italian Americans began to develop a “white” identity, joining the “white” ranks with Irish Americans, (whose ethnic and racial status had been consecrated with the election of John F. Kennedy as president). For Italian Americans it occurred as a transformation in their self-perception as a community originally organized around a national heritage began to understand itself by way of a new racialized white identity. This transformation marked a major shift in Irish- and ItalianAmerican relations, as they were no longer firmly at odds with each other according to this system of racial codification. Consequently, the two groups forged a common identity based on their inclination to blame African Americans for the decline of their own living standards. The hostilities that ensued reached their height in 1974 with the antibusing riots in Boston, Massachusetts. Busing occurred in 24 other cities that same year, but it was in Boston where the violence most severely erupted and where the antagonism continued for years. Common representations of the antibusing riots tend to lay the blame with the Irish Americans alone, depicting them as the epitome of white ethnic racists. Although the location of the riots and most of the controversy surrounded the Irish neighborhood of South Boston, the Irish were not alone in their opposition to busing; the Italian community, despite its history of interethnic conflict, worked together with the Irish against busing. Along with the Irish residents of South Boston and Charlestown, the Italians of East Boston and the North End constituted much of the membership of Restore Our Alienated Rights, the area’s primary antibusing organization. In this context these two formerly antagonistic ethnic
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groups joined forces in blaming African Americans for their own economic hardships and poor standards of living, resulting in both Italian and Irish Americans being considered the epitome of white, ethnic, working-class, right-wing conservatism. Liz Burke See also: NATIVISM AND ANTICATHOLICISM; ETHNIC AND RACE RELATIONS, IRISH AND AFRICAN AMERICANS References Gambino, Richard. Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of the Italian-Americans. New York: Doubleday and Co., 1974. Gambino, Richard. Vendetta: The True Story of the Largest Lynching in U.S. History. Toronto: Guernica, 1998. Guglielmo, Jennifer, and Salvatore Salerno, eds. Are Italians White?: How Race is Made in America. New York: Routledge, 2003. Iorizzo, Luciano J., and Salvatore Mondello. The Italian-Americans. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971. Jacobsen, Matthew Frye. Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000. Mangione, Jerre, and Ben Morreale. La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience. New York: Harper Collins, 1992. Nelli, Humbert S. From Immigrants to Ethnics: The Italian Americans. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Rolle, Andrew F. The American Italians: Their History and Culture. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1972. Tager, Jack. Boston Riots: Three Centuries of Social Violence. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001.
ETHNIC AND RACE RELATIONS, IRISH AND LATINOS The vast majority of Latinos encountered by the Irish immigrants upon their arrival in Latin America belonged to societies with relatively high degrees of miscegenation. Three groups predominated, including www.abc-clio.com
Europeans (Spanish, Portuguese, and to a lesser extent, French, German, British, and others), Amerindians (a vague term to designate thousands of groups with a probable common origin in Asia), and Africans (diverse groups particularly from eastern Africa). Traditionally, Paraguay and Mexico have been the most important mestizo countries in the region—the result of intense crossbreeding between Europeans and Amerindians. The most important Amerindian communities can be found in Central America and the Andean area, especially in Bolivia, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Peru. Argentina and Uruguay have the largest European populations in Latin America, although until the last decades of the nineteenth century mixed EuropeanAmerindians predominated in both countries. Likewise, important African communities live in the Caribbean, Brazil, and Suriname, countries that up to the eighteenth century also included significant Amerindian groups. In general terms, the Irish followed the same relational patterns as other British immigrants in Latin America, and the local residents in their destination countries received them as so-called ingleses. These patterns were determined by the demographic, social, and religious factors of the Irish and other ethnic categories. In eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury emigration from Ireland to Latin America there was a remarkable absence of women. With the exception of certain soldiers in the expeditions to Venezuela and Brazil who were accompanied by their families, Irish female emigration almost always began several years after male emigration. Women were generally willing to emigrate only once men who were known to them became established in a potential settlement ABC-CLIO
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region. Passenger list records in Argentina show that the first Irish female immigrants landed in Buenos Aires in 1828 whereas the first men arrived in 1776. Furthermore, it was not until the 1880s that the percentage of women reached 40.4 percent of the total arrivals, and for this reason the proportion of women among Irish-born residents in Argentina was still only 41.2 percent in 1895. The direct effect of this female shortage was that up to the mid-nineteenth century in Argentina and Uruguay, and before that time in Mexico, Venezuela, and Colombia, it was not uncommon for Irish men to marry members of other ethnic groups. Their offspring were therefore mixed between Irish and Hispano-Creoles or Irish and Amerindians; the former were more frequent among merchants and successful urban settlers, and the latter among poor and isolated Irish rural workers. In the 1860s, with the arrival from Ireland of greater numbers of women, endogamy rates increased in the Irish community, particularly among rural middle classes with a Roman Catholic background. In Argentina, marriages between Irish immigrants reached uncommonly high peaks in the second half of the nineteenth century. In one place, the parish of Luján in Buenos Aires province, intermarriage among Irish-born settlers was 77 percent in the period 1850–1879, compared with 56 percent among French and 42 percent among Spanish. In the early twentieth century, preoccupied with the social isolation and biological risks derived from such a high endogamy, some Irish priests were recommending that their flock marry Italian, Spanish, or other women. However, it is known that some male youngsters preferred to remain celibate rather than marry outside the community. www.abc-clio.com
Protestant immigrants from Ireland usually associated with Argentines up to the 1880s, and with Britons and AngloArgentines thereafter, but were particularly closer to the latter groups in the period of massive European immigration. From the marriage records of Anglican and Presbyterian churches in Argentina, it seems the relations of Protestant Irish settlers with other Protestants possibly followed more of a social stratification than any theological distinctions. Independently of their Church of Ireland common background, wealthy and well-established merchants and landowners often belonged to the local Anglican community while middle-class urban employees and rural workers tended to be connected with the Presbyterian Church. Nevertheless, a number of Irish Protestants married Irish and Irish-Argentine Catholic women. County divisions were significant among settlers from different parts of Ireland, and this was another factor in their relations with the other ethnic groups. John Brabazon, a settler in Argentina from a Protestant family of Co. Westmeath who left a journal relating his experience in Buenos Aires province in 1842–1852, wrote that “some of the Westmeath and Longford people were respectable, . . . the Wexford people were all respectable people [but] Ballymore people were such divils as ever filled the Jail of Mullingar” (cited by McKenna 2000, 101). The emigrants from Ballymore and Ballinacarrigy (Westmeath) and Ballymahon (Longford) mixed with the gaucho class—mestizo from old Spanish and Amerindians—which was seen as an unforgivable sin among the Irish community. Irish Midlands immigrants drank and gambled with gauchos, and had the highest degrees of cultural transfers with them.
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This was never heard of in “Wexfordians,” who used to look down on “Ballinacarrias” (emigrants from Ballinacarrigy or from the Irish Midlands in general) in horse races, at Mass, or on other occasions. The perceived lower status of the Midlands immigrants may have been derived from the arrangements made between the merchant Thomas Armstrong of Buenos Aires and the authorities of the workhouse in Ballymahon for the purpose of securing working-class immigrants in Buenos Aires. Whether in Mexican Texas or in Argentina, the relations between Irish and Amerindians were at least tense—and often violent. Although the Irish were rarely engaged in direct military campaigns against the Indians, before the 1880s many landhungry immigrants from Ireland were residing outside the frontier lines. They supported, and sometimes actively engaged in, the fight against the Indians, and therefore ensured the settlement and later acquisition of cheap land. Land did not belong to the Indians, who did not conceive it as property but as a hunting ground to be used by everybody. The Irish, as well as the Argentine elites and other European immigrants, were conscious of the potential value of land, and invested in purchasing or long-term leasing their properties. Consequently, they perceived that they had all the rights to defend their newly acquired holdings from “the wild children of the pampas” (as the indigenous peoples were styled by the Irish Argentine Southern Cross newspaper in 1875). Indian raids of small groups—called malónes in Argentina— invaded the area of ranches and sacked the cattle and pillaged the houses. Sometimes the Irish people were taken captives for a number of years in the Indian tolderías. Certain accounts by first settlers show that www.abc-clio.com
both Indians and Irish had little respect for human life. James Gaynor, who acquired an enormous tract of land in the department of Nueve de Julio, west of Buenos Aires province, boasted of having killed several “savages” who invaded his property. A counterexample to this rule of violent relations between the Amerindian and Irish is the number of unions—both legal and informal—that several Irish workmen and ranch hands consummated with Indian women. Often the men were unmarried laborers in large ranches who resided in isolated places, and the women were chiefs’ daughters from docile Indian tribes. This was relatively frequent in the department of General Viamonte, where the Coliqueo Indian family was granted lands for service to the Argentine army, and along the Paraná and Uruguay rivers, with a number of unions between Irish males and Guaraní women. There are no accounts of Irish women marrying Indian males. There is ample evidence of the Irish showing a marked contempt for mestizo natives, who often were viewed by the Irish and the local landed elites as barbarian savages belonging to an inferior race. However, there have been intense cultural transfers between the Irish empresarios and Mexicans in Texas, and the Irish sheep farmers and the gauchos of the pampas in the River Plate region. There were efficient alliances between both groups, from which the Irish learned to speak Spanish, could hire efficient workforces for gathering cotton or for shearing, and acquired specific technical skills in cattle-breeding and related businesses. In the mid-1860s John Murphy of Salto department in Buenos Aires described how the gauchos at his neighbor’s ranch taught him and his Irish hands to extinguish enormous fires using ABC-CLIO
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312 ETHNIC AND RACE RELATIONS, IRISH AND LATINOS
the carcass of a recently killed mare. In Texas, some Irish colonists became Spanish/ English bilinguals, and in the Mexican Revolution perceived themselves more as Mexicans than U.S. Americans. The creolization of the Irish in their relations with Latin American societies was generally driven by class factors. In contrast to other immigrants from the British Isles, the Irish merchants and the most successful rural settlers struggled to be accepted sooner or later as members of the local landed elites. Examples of this are the marriages of Thomas Armstrong in Buenos Aires and John MacKenna in Santiago, Chile, with members of well-known traditional families of the local bourgeoisie, as well as the viceroy Ambrose O’Higgins’s union with a young woman of the Chilean upper-class. In their turn, the Irish workers, both in the cities and the countryside, related with natives of the same social category, in particular when these were mixed race. However, there are no accounts of Irish immigrants relating with Africans or African-Creoles. In Trinidad Island the rank and file of Devereux’s Irish Legion in Bolívar’s army sacked the houses of Africans and terrorized their families. The families recruited by Col. William Cotter for the Brazilian army were called escravos brancos (white slaves) by the Africans of Rio de Janeiro. The Irish united with German mercenaries against the Brazilians. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, when mass European immigration flooded over Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, tensions arose between the established local bourgeoisie and the immigrants, and among newly arrived immigrants of diverse
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ethnic origins. The immigration scheme of 1889 financed by the Argentine government and carried out by its Irish-Argentine agents in Ireland (that came to be known as the Dresden Affair), had its origins in a government policy conceived to offset what was considered to be the excessive influx of Italians of the poorer classes. The arrival of the Passionist order in Argentina represents an example of bigotry among members of the Irish Catholic community—an attitude that was not uncommon among the larger part of its middle classes. The Irish leaders considered that because the community had paid to establish the order, the priests should have been mostly Irish and should have worked exclusively with their Irish flock. They accused the Passionists of Italianization of the order, and even submitted their claims to Rome. Another manifestation of the IrishArgentine auto-exclusion from other immigrant communities was during the celebration of sports spectacles. Both in Buenos Aires in 1909 and in Pergamino in 1929 boxing matches were organized between Irish or Irish-Argentine boxers and their Italian opponents. Edmundo Murray
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See also: DRESDEN AFFAIR References Coghlan, Eduardo A. Los Irlandeses en la Argentina: Su Actuación y Descendencia. Buenos Aires: Author’s Edition, 1987. Graham-Yooll, Andrew. The Forgotten Colony: A History of the English-Speaking Communities in Argentina. Buenos Aires: Literature of Latin America, 1999. McKenna, Patrick. “Irish Emigration to Argentina: A Different Model.” In The Irish Diaspora, edited by Andy Bielenberg. Essex: Pearson Education Ltd., 2000.
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Ireland and the Americas
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Other Titles in ABC-CLIO’s
Transatlantic Relations Series
Africa and the Americas, by Richard M. Juang and Noelle Morrissette Britain and the Americas, by Will Kaufman and Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson France and the Americas, by Bill Marshall Germany and the Americas, by Thomas Adam Iberia and the Americas, by J. Michael Francis
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Ireland and the Americas Culture, Politics, and History A Multidisciplinary Encyclopedia VOLUME II EDITED BY
James P. Byrne Philip Coleman Jason King
Transatlantic Relations Series Will Kaufman, Series Editor
Santa Barbara, California Denver, Colorado Oxford, England
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Copyright © 2008 by ABC-CLIO, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ireland and the Americas / edited by James P. Byrne, Philip Coleman, and Jason King. p. cm. — (Transatlantic relations series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-85109-614-5 (hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-85109-619-0 (ebook : alk. paper) 1. America—Relations—Ireland—Encyclopedias. 2. Ireland— Relations—America—Encyclopedias. 3. America—History—Encyclopedias. 4. Ireland—History—Encyclopedias. 5. North America—History—Encyclopedias. 6. Latin America—History—Encyclopedias. 7. South America—History— Encyclopedias. 8. America—Politics and government—Encyclopedias. 9. Ireland— Politics and government—Encyclopedias. I. Byrne, James P., 1968– II. Coleman, Philip Michael Joseph, 1972– III. King, Jason Francis, 1970– E18.75.I74 2008 327.730417—dc22 2007035381 12
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Senior Production Editor: Vicki Moran Editorial Assistant: Sara Springer Production Manager: Don Schmidt Media Editor: Jason Kniser Media Resources Coordinator: Ellen Brenna Dougherty Media Resources Manager: Caroline Price File Management Coordinator: Paula Gerard ABC-CLIO, Inc. 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an ebook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. This book is printed on acid-free paper ∞ Manufactured in the United States of America
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CONTENTS Advisory Board, xi Series Editor’s Preface, xiii Editors’ Preface, xv Topic Finder, xvii Chronologies of Ireland and the Americas, xxiii Ireland and Canada, xxiii Ireland and Latin America, xxv Ireland and the United States, xxxi Introductory Essays, 1 Introduction, 3 Ireland and Canada, 5 Ireland and Latin America, 15 Ireland and the Untied States of America, 27 Baltimore, 79 Barry, John, 80 Barry, Philip, 82 Bartholomew, Freddie, 83 Baseball, 84 Baseball Managers, Irish-American, 88 Baxter, José Luis “Joe,” 90 Beach, Amy Marcy, 92 Beach, Sylvia, 93 Beckett, Samuel, 94 Belize, 95 Bennett, William J., 97 Bergin, Patrick Connolly, 98 Boland, Eavan, 100 Bonney, William “Billy the Kid,” 101 Bord Fáilte Eireann, 103 Boston, 106 Bourke, John Gregory, 107 Boyle, Kathleen, 108 Brazil, 110
Abolitionism and Slavery, 41 Alabama, 44 Allen, Fred, 45 American Civil War, 47 American Conference for Irish Studies, 51 American Ireland Fund, 53 American Temperance Movement, 54 American War of Independence, 56 An Tóstal: Ireland at Home, 59 Ancient Order of Hibernians, 61 Anglin, Timothy Warren, 64 Appalachia, 65 Argentina, 66 Arkansas, 69 Armstrong, Thomas St. George, 70 Arthur, Chester A., 71 Baggot, King, 75 Balfe, Michael William, 76 Ball, Ernest R., 78 v www.abc-clio.com
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vi CONTENTS Brendan, Saint, “The Navigator,” 112 Brennan, Maeve M., 113 Brennan, Walter, 115 Brennan, William J., Jr., 116 Brenon, Herbert, 117 Brent, George, 119 Broderick, David Colbreth, 120 Brophy, John, 122 Brosnan, Pierce, 123 Brown, Alexander, 127 Brown, Clarence Leon, 128 Brown, William, 129 Bryan, George, 130 Buchanan, James, 131 Buckley, William F., Jr., 133 Bulfin, Eamon, 134 Bulfin, William, 135 Bulger, James “Whitey,” 137 Bulger, William Michael, 138 Burke, Edmund, 139 Butler, Jean, 141 Byrne, Donn, 142 Byrne, Gabriel, 143 Cagney, James, 147 Campbell, Peter, 149 Canals and the Irish Involvement, 150 Carney, Andrew, 155 Carney, Art, 155 Carolan, Turloch, 157 Carroll, Charles, 158 Carroll, James P., 159 Carroll, Bishop John, 160 Casement, Rodger David, 162 Casey, Eduardo, 164 Catholic Church, the, 165 Chandler, Raymond Thornton, 169 Cherish the Ladies, 170 Chieftains, The, 172 Chopin, Kate, 174 Clancy Brothers, the, 175 Cleburne, Patrick Ronayne, 177 Clinton, William Jefferson, 179 Cockran, William Bourke, 186 Coffey, Brian, 188 Coghlan, Eduardo Aquilio, 189 Cohalan, Daniel F., 190 Cohan, George M., 192 Coleman, Michael, 193 Colombia, 195 www.abc-clio.com
Colum, Mary, 196 Colum, Padraic, 198 Conn, William David, 200 Connolly, James Brendan, 202 Cooke, John William, 203 Costa Rica, 206 Cotter, William, 207 Coughlin, Father Charles Edward, 208 Cowell, Henry Dixon, 210 Craig, John, 212 Creaghe, John “Juan,” 213 Creighton, Edward Charles, 215 Creighton, John Andrew, 216 Croker, Richard, 217 Crosby, Bing, 219 Crouch, Frederick Nicholls, 221 Curley, James Michael, 222 Curran, Mary Doyle, 223 Cusack, Cyril, 224 Cusack, Margaret Anna, 225 Dailey, Dan, 229 Daly, “John” Augustin, 230 Daly, Marcus, 231 Davin, Nicholas Flood, 232 Davitt, Michael, 234 Day, Dennis, 235 Day-Lewis, Daniel, 236 De Chastelain, John, 239 De Valera, Eamon, 240 Delanty, Greg, 243 Delaware, 245 Dempsey, George T., 246 Dempsey, Jack, 247 Derrane, Joe, 249 Devereux, John, 250 Devoy, John, 252 Dillon, Patrick Joseph, 254 Diplomatic Relations, Irish–Latin American, 255 Domestic Servants, Irish, 257 Dongan, Thomas, 260 Donleavy, J. P., 261 Donovan, Gerard, 263 Dorsey, Thomas Francis “Tommy,” 264 Douglass, Frederick, 265 Downey, Morton, 268 Doyle, Roddy, 269 Draft Riots, 270 Dresden Affair, 273 ABC-CLIO
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CONTENTS vii Duggan, Thomas, 275 Dunne, Finley Peter, 276 Dunne, Irene Marie, 278 Durcan, Paul, 279
Foster, Vere Henry Louis, 354 Furlong, Guillermo, 356
Eaton, Timothy E., 283 Egan, Desmond, 285 Eire Society of Boston, The, 286 El Salvador, 288 Ellman, Richard David, 289 Emigration, 290 Emmet, John Patten, 293 Emmet, Thomas Addis, 295 Ethnic and Race Relations, Irish and African Americans, 296 Ethnic and Race Relations, Irish and French Canadians, 300 Ethnic and Race Relations, Irish and Indigenous Peoples, 302 Ethnic and Race Relations, Irish and Italians, 306 Ethnic and Race Relations, Irish and Latinos, 309
Gaelic Athletic Association, 359 Gallagher, Tess, 361 Garland, Judy, 362 Garson, Greer, 366 Gaughren, Father Matthew, 367 Georgia, 368 Gibbons, Cedric, 369 Gilmore, Patrick Sarsfield, 370 Gleason, Jackie, 372 Gleeson, Brendan, 372 Gogarty, Oliver St. John, 373 Gordon, Mary, 374 Gore, Robert, 375 Grace, William Russell, 376 Gray, David, 378 Great Famine, The, 379 Grennan, Eamon, 385 Grosse Ile, 386 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 387 Guiney, Louise Imogene, 389
Faction Fighting, 313 Fahy (sometimes Fahey), Anthony Dominic, 316 Falkland/Malvinas Islands, 317 Farley, James Aloysius, 320 Farrell, Edelmiro Juan, 322 Farrell, Eileen, 323 Farrow, Mia, 324 Fay, Francis Anthony “Frank,” 326 Federal Theatre Project, 327 Feeney, Charles “Chuck,” 329 Fenians, 330 Fitzgerald, Barry, 332 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 333 Fitzsimons, Patrick, 336 Flaherty, Robert J., 336 Flanagan, Thomas, 338 Flatley, Michael, 340 Fleming, Thomas J., 340 Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 342 Foley (also Foli), Allan James, 343 Ford, Henry, 343 Ford, John, 346 Ford, Patrick, 348 Foreign Policy, Irish, 350 Foster, Stephen Collins, 352
Hackett, Francis, 391 Hanlon, Ned, 392 Harnett, William Michael, 394 Harrigan, Edward and Hart, Tony, 395 Harris, Richard, 398 Harrison, Frank Llewellyn, 401 Hayes, Catherine, 402 Hayes, Helen (Brown), 403 Hayes, Archbishop Patrick Joseph, 404 Healy, Michael Morris, 406 Heaney, Seamus, 407 Heffernan, Michael, 409 Henry, John, 410 Herbert, Victor August, 411 Hinds, Ciarán, 413 Hoban, James, 414 Hodgins, Jack, 415 Holkeri, Harri, 416 Holland, John Phillip, 416 Honduras, 418 Horgan, Paul George Vincent O’Shaughnessy, 419 Horse Racing, 421 Hovenden, Thomas, 424 Howard, Maureen, 426 Howe, Fanny Quincy, 427
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viii CONTENTS Hughes, Archbishop John, 430 Hurling in Argentina, 434 Huston, Angelica, 437 Huston, John, 438 Huston, Walter, 442 Illinois, 445 Indiana, 447 Ingram, Rex, 448 Iowa, 450 Ireland, John, 451 Irish Dancing in America, 453 Irish Festival Singers, 455 Irish Festivals in the United States, 456 Irish Linen in North America, 460 Irish Republican Army, 461 Irish Republican Brotherhood, 466 Irish Travelers in the United States, 468 Irish Yankees, 472 Jackson, Andrew, 473 James, Jesse Woodsom, 475 Jeanie Johnston, the, 476 Jeffers, Robinson, 477 Johnson, Sir William, 478 Jordan, Kate, 480 Jordan, Neil, 481 Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius, 482 Kearns, Thomas, 485 Kelly, Gene, 487 Kelly, George “Machine Gun,” 488 Kelly, Grace, 490 Kelly, “Honest” John, 491 Kennedy Family, 492 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 495 Kentucky, 497 Keough, Donald R., 499 Kilmer, (Alfred) Joyce, 502 King, John, 503 Kinsella, Thomas, 504 Knights of Labor, 505 Ladies’ Land League, 509 Land League, 510 Language, the Irish, 513 Lavin, Mary, 516 Law, Andrew Bonar, 517 Liddy, James, 518 Literature, American Children’s, 519 www.abc-clio.com
Literature, Irish-Argentine, 521 Lynch, Benito Eduardo, 523 Lynch, Elisa (Eliza), 524 Lynch, Archbishop John Joseph, 526 Lynch, P. J., 527 Lynch, Thomas, 528 MacDonald, Michael Patrick, 531 MacGowan, Michael, 532 MacGowan, Shane, 533 MacGowran, Jack, 535 Mack, Connie, 536 Mackenna, John, 538 Madden, Richard Robert, 539 Maguire, John Walter, 541 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 542 Maine, 544 Malone, Dorothy, 546 Maritime Provinces (Canada), 547 Maryland, 548 Massachusetts, 550 Massacre at Saint Patrick Church, the, 554 Mathew, Father Theobald, 554 Maury, Matthew Fontaine, 556 McCann, Colum, 557 McCann, Donal, 558 McCarey, Leo, 559 McCarthy, Joseph, 561 McCarthy, Joseph Vincent “Joe,” 563 McCarthy, Mary, 565 McCarthy, Patrick “Paddy,” 567 McCormack, John, 568 McCourt, Frank, 569 McDermott, Alice, 570 McDonald, Richard “Dick,” 570 McEnroe, John, 571 McGee, Thomas D’Arcy, 572 McGinley, Phyllis Louise, 574 McGonigle, Thomas, 575 McGraw, John Joseph, 576 McGuckian, Medbh, 578 McGuckin, Barton, 580 McGwire, Mark D., 581 McManus, George, 582 McNutt, Alexander, 583 McSwiney, Paul, 584 Meagher, Thomas Francis, 585 Mellon, Andrew William, 587 Mellon, Thomas, 589 Michigan, 590 ABC-CLIO
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CONTENTS ix Milwaukee Irish Fest, 592 Missouri, 593 Mitchel, John, 595 Mitchell, George J., 598 Mitchell, John, 599 Mitchell Principles, the, 601 Molly Maguires, 602 Moloney, Mick, 604 Montague, John, 605 Montreal, 606 Moore, Brian, 609 Moore, Christy, 610 Moore, Marianne, 611 Moore, Thomas, 613 Morrison, Bruce, 615 Morrison, Van, 616 Mott, Lucretia Coffin, 617 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 619 Muldoon, Paul, 621 Mulhall, Michael George, 622 Mulroney, Brian, 623 Mulvany, John, 624 Murphy, Charles Francis, 626 Murphy, Hermann Dudley, 627 Murphy, John James, 629 Murray, Luis Alberto, 631 Murray, Thomas, 631 Music, Country and Irish, 632 Music in America, Irish, 635 Myles, Eileen, 645 Nationalism, Irish-American, 647 Nationalism in the Twentieth Century, Irish-American, 653 Nativism and Anti-Catholicism, 658 Neeson, Liam, 660 Neilson, John, 661 Nelligan, Émile, 662 New Brunswick, 663 New Irish in America, 664 New Jersey, 666 New Orleans, 667 New York City, 669 Newfoundland and Labrador, 675 Niblo, William B., 677 Nicaragua, 678 No Irish Need Apply, 680 Noraid, 683 North Carolina, 685 Notre Dame University, 686 www.abc-clio.com
O’Brien, Charlotte Grace, 689 O’Brien, John Thomond, 690 O’Brien, Pat, 691 O’Brien, Tim, 693 O’Connell, Daniel, 694 O’Connor, Edwin, 700 O’Connor, “Mary” Flannery, 702 O’Connor, Francisco “Frank” Burdett, 704 O’Connor, Pat, 706 O’Faolain, Nuala, 707 O’Gorman, Camila, 708 O’Gorman, Edmundo and Juan, 709 O’Gorman, Michael, 710 O’Hara, Frank, 711 O’Hara, Maureen, 712 O’Herlihy, Dan, 714 O’Higgins, Ambrose (Ambrosio), 715 Ohio, 716 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 718 O’Kelly, Aloysius C., 720 Oklahoma, 721 Olcott, Chauncey (John Chancellor), 723 O’Leary, Daniel Florence, 724 O’Leary, Jane, 726 O’Leary, Juan Emiliano, 726 O’Mahony, John, 728 O’Malley, Walter, 729 O’Neill, Eugene, 731 O’Neill, Francis, 733 O’Neill, Rose Cecil, 734 O’Neill, Jr., Thomas “Tip,” 736 Ontario, 737 Orange Order, 739 Oregon, 740 O’Reilly, John Boyle, 743 O’Roarke, Julián “Huberto,” 745 O’Sullivan, Denis, 746 O’Sullivan, Timothy H., 746 Panama, 749 Paraguay, 750 Passenger Acts, 751 Patterson, Frank, 753 Pearson, Noel, 754 Peck, Gregory, 755 Pennsylvania, 757 Political Parties, Irish, 759 Powderly, Terence Vincent, 765 Power, Frederick Tyrone Sr., 767 Presbyterianism, 768 ABC-CLIO
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x CONTENTS Press, the Ethnic Irish, 770 Press, the Irish in Latin America, 774
Smurfit, Sir Michael W. J., KBE, 862 Soccer, Early Argentine, 865 Somerville, Edith Œnone, 867 South Carolina, 868 South Dakota, 869 Spellman, Archbishop Francis Joseph, 871 Stoker, Abraham “Bram,” 873 Sullivan, John L., 874
Quebec City, 779 Quill, Michael Joseph, 780 Quinn, Declan, 782 Quinn, Glenn, 783 Reagan, Ronald Wilson, 785 Redshaw, Thomas Dillon, 788 Re-emigrants within the Americas, 789 Repeal Movement, 789 Research Collections, Irish, in Canada, 791 Research Collections, Irish, in the United States, 798 Reynolds, Debbie, 804 Rhode Island, 806 Robinson, Mary, 808 Rowan, Stephen C., 814 Ryan, Abram Joseph, 815 Ryan, Cathie, 816 Sadlier, Mary Anne, 819 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 820 Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, 822 Saint Patrick’s Day Parades, 823 Sampson, Willliam, 828 San Francisco, 829 San Patricios Brigade, 832 Scanlan, William J., 833 Scots-Irish, 834 Scots-Irish and Military Conflict, 835 Scots-Irish Culture, 838 Scots-Irish Patterns of Settlement, Canada, 841 Scots-Irish Patterns of Settlement, United States, 846 Scots-Irish Politics, 848 Scully, William, 850 Shackleton, Ernest, 852 Shaw, George Bernard, 854 Sheridan, Jim, 856 Sheridan, Peter, 857 Smith, Alfred Emmanuel “Al,” 858
Tallchief, Maria, 877 Tammany Hall, 878 Tennessee, 881 Texas, 882 Titanic, Irish on the, 883 Travel Patterns from Ireland to South America, 886 Tully, Jim, 889 Tunney, James Joseph “Gene,” 890 Tuohy, Patrick J., 891 Tweed, William “Boss,” 893 U2, 895 United Irish League of America, 897 Uruguay, 899 Venezuela, 901 Vicuña Mackenna, Benjamín, 902 Virginia, 903 Wall, Eamonn, 905 Wallace, William Vincent, 906 Walsh, María Elena, 907 Walsh, Raoul, 908 Walsh, Rodolfo, 909 Washington, D.C., 910 Wayne, John, 912 Webb, Richard Davis, 914 Wellman, William A., 915 Wilson, Thomas Woodrow, 917 Winch, Terence, 919 Wright, Thomas Charles James, 921 Yeats, John Butler, 923 Yeats, William Butler, 924
Index, 929 About the Editors, 967
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F FACTION FIGHTING The Oxford Companion to Irish History (Connolly 1998, 184) defines faction fighting as follows: “fighting between rival groups who met at fairs, patterns and other venues to engage in pitched battles.” Echoes of the Irish tradition of faction fighting continue to exist today. The small, shiny, black-painted sticks that are the staple purchases of the Irish diaspora— popularly referred to as “genuine Irish shillelaghs”—are resonant of another era. While the imagery of the “Fighting Irish” is universal in stereotype and cliché, the real social history and functions of faction fighting are an aspect of Irish culture that remains shrouded in mystery. Relatively little historical research has been undertaken into the phenomenon of faction fighting, and students of the subject are still heavily reliant on accounts of faction fights as described by travel writers and members of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, for example, Le Fanu (1893), Inglis (1838), Hall (1843). Once-famous factions, such as the Carabhats and the Seanbheists, who fought bloody battles in Irish provinces such as Leinster and Munster, continue to be recalled in Irish song and story. The heyday of faction fighting in Ireland occurred during the nineteenth century when it became a major social
headache for the British colonial administration then in Ireland. The available evidence provided by historical and social records indicates, however, that faction fighting was a relatively short-lived phenomenon that peaked and died out as a practice within a span of about four decades. The term “faction” originated with the factiones, those fifth- and sixth-century groups of gladiators who fought and raced in the Roman Circus and in the Hippodrome of Constantinople. Two of the most famous of these factions were those referred to as the Greens and the Blues. There was a strong element of social-class delineation between each of these groups, the Blues supporters consisting of members of the wealthier upper classes while the Greens were primarily members of the poorer lower class. Each of these factions dressed differently and had thousands of supporters who fought one another on a regular basis. They were considered such a threat to the state that the Emperor Justinian felt obliged to crush them. The historian Procopius says that the phenomenon was wiped out when Justinian ordered the deaths of 30,000 Blues and Greens in the Hippodrome in the late sixth century. In Ireland it is not clear when faction fighting began, although there are references to faction fights taking place in the
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314 FACTION FIGHTING
early eighteenth century. Some surmise that it may have originally been an offshoot of the stick fighting or fencing that Continental armies practiced to hone their sword-fighting skills as long ago as the era of the ancien régime. Nineteenth-century colonial commentators frequently viewed Irish faction fighting as a remnant of a “barbarous” clan system or as evidence that Irish society was backward and less evolved than others. However, this underestimates the complex social dynamics that underlay this form of organized fighting. In Ireland factions appear to have generally comprised large groups of people who were related through their ties to a particular parish or region or to a particular extended family. Concepts such as family and regional honor were incorporated in the functioning of these groups so that factions frequently formed a separate society within a society in the era when Ireland was rebelling against its colonial masters. These groups had their own rules and regulations, and the fights frequently included a range of rituals, such as the use of particular war cries, insults, and challenges, or the practice whereby the faction leaders engaged in single combat before the fight proper. Faction fighting was also a phenomenon that had a strong social and economic basis. The nineteenth century saw vast segments of the Irish population living a precarious and poverty-stricken existence on tiny landholdings that were commonly no more than 15 acres in size. The slightest deterioration in the economy brought severe hardship on an already oppressed Irish population, among whom were large numbers of rootless and semiliterate males. Crime was frequent and was a phenomenon that had a strong antiestablishment edge to it, and there are frequent references www.abc-clio.com
to riots between local civilians and the police and the army of the British colonists. A large social, cultural, and economic gap existed between the majority of the Irish populace and their colonial masters, a fact that meant the cogs of the state apparatus, whether in the form of the police or the courts, were little respected. A significant proportion of the Irish population was involved in antiauthoritarian activities, which included rebelling against the authorities, distilling whiskey, faction fighting, and joining agrarian secret societies such as the Whiteboys. In such an atmosphere, Irish people tended to leave their communities’ resolution of public disputes or personal vendettas to the faction fight that took place at the fair, the country funeral, the pattern, the pilgrimage, or any similar public event where large numbers of people gathered. Faction fighting crossed religious lines and particular fights, known as “party fights,” and were especially common in the north of Ireland where groups of Catholics and Protestants such as the Ribbonmen and the Orangemen fought one another for sectarian and/or economic reasons. A wide range of factors could initiate faction fighting—a personal vendetta, economic jealousy between different groups of tradesmen, sectarian tension, and tensions or grievances between different townlands, parishes, or families. On occasion there was no ostensible reason as to why a fight would begin, a fact that is reinforced by the ritualized nature of these fights and the fact that people would prepare their weapons months in advance in the sure anticipation that a fight would take place. Fairs and markets were an important location for these fights, which were frequently conducted in an atmosphere of heavy drinking
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FACTION FIGHTING 315
where illegal whiskey (poitín) was cheap and widely available. There is plenty of evidence that the local authorities actively encouraged these fights on occasion and some landlords even organized faction fighting, perhaps as a steam-valve process that might enable them to evade the anger and sense of grievance of the local peasantry. Many factions were an offshoot of the secret and agrarian societies common in nineteenth-century Ireland, societies that were agitating for change in land reform and the rights of the Irish population to self-determination. These secret societies became particularly active at times of severe poverty and economic upheaval, and it is no surprise to find that the faction fighting tended to die down at these junctures. For instance, groups such as the Peep O’ Day Boys and the Defenders in the north of Ireland evolved from two factions known as the Nappach Fleet and the Bawn Fleet. Faction fighting was not only a rural phenomenon but was also to be found in the cities with groups of tradesmen such as the Liberty Boys (tailors and weavers by trade) and the Ormond Boys (butchers) notorious as faction fighters in Dublin. The Irish also brought faction fighting with them upon emigration. In Scotland sectarian fights and fights between factions of Irish migratory workers and local Scottish factions were common. In the United States, where anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bigotry was common, the large immigrant populations of cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia frequently formed themselves into communities within communities so as to agitate for labor reform and religious freedom, communities that had many similarities to the factions and secret societies they had left behind in their homeland. www.abc-clio.com
Some Irish-American faction fights were fought on religious or economic grounds, with groups such as the Molly Maguires (named after a nineteenth century Irish secret society) faction fighting on the railroads. The practice of faction fighting also continued within Irish communities long after many Irish emigrants had resettled in the New World and were particularly associated with the followers of boxing where many aspiring Irish-Americans found an escape route from poverty. In Ireland faction fighting came to an abrupt end because of a number of factors that occurred almost contemporaneously. These included opposition from the Irish Catholic Church (including the threat of excommunication) and the advance of Father Mathew’s temperance movement from the 1830s onwards. The influence of a new British under-secretary for Ireland named Thomas Drummond who was appointed in 1835 was not without significance also. He instituted increased controls on the sale of alcohol and imposed very severe prison sentences on those convicted of faction fighting in an effort to increase British administrative control in Ireland. The campaigns of Daniel O’Connell for Catholic Emancipation also had a strong effect on bringing an end to the phenomenon of faction fighting, and there are records of peace deals being brokered between different factions at the behest of O’Connell himself. A combination of increased governmental and clerical influence and a tightening of the state’s grip on people’s everyday lives and behavior seem to have brought an end to faction fighting in Ireland as some of the last references to large faction fights occurred in the late 1880s. Michael O’hAodha
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316 FAHY (SOMETIMES FAHEY), ANTHONY DOMINIC See also: MATHEW, Father Theobald; MOLLY MAGUIRES; O’CONNELL, Daniel References Bourke, E. “‘The Irishman is no lazzarone’: German Travel Writers in Ireland, 1828–1850.” History Ireland 5, no. 3 (Autumn 1997): 21–25. Connolly, S. J. The Oxford Companion to Irish History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Donnelly, James S. “Factions in Pre-Famine Ireland.” In The Uses of the Past: Essays on Irish Culture, edited by Audrey S. Eyle and Robert F. Garrott. London and Newark: Associated University Presses/University of Delaware Press, 1988. Donnelly, James S. “Pastorini and Captain Rock.” In Irish Peasants, Violence and Political Unrest, 1780–1914, edited by S. Clark and James S. Donnelly. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983: 102–139. Hall, Mr. S. C., and Mrs. S. C. Hall. Ireland, its Scenery, Character &c. London: How and Parsons, 1843. Inglis, Henry. A Journey Through Ireland. London: Whittaker, 1838. Le Fanu, William R. Seventy Years of Irish Life. London: Arnold, 1893. O’Donnell, Patrick. The Irish Faction Fighters of the Nineteenth Century. Dublin: Anvil Press, 1975. Owens, Gary. “A Moral Insurrection: Faction Fighters, Public Demonstrations and the O’Connellite Campaign, 1828.” Irish Historical Studies 30, no. 120 (1997): 513–539.
FAHY (SOMETIMES FAHEY), ANTHONY DOMINIC (1805–1871) Born in Loughrea, Co. Galway, son of Patrick Fahy (d. 1810) and Belinda Cloran (d. 1843), Fahy joined the order of Saint Dominic when he was about 20 years old, and received the habit on August 4, 1828. Immediately after profession he was sent to Rome to study for the priesthood in www.abc-clio.com
Saint Clement’s College. Ordained a priest on March 19, 1831, he completed his studies in 1834. He left Rome for St. Joseph’s convent (Somerset, Ohio), where he worked until 1836. Fahy returned to Ireland and in 1839 he was nominated prior of Black Abbey in Kilkenny. In 1843 Fahy was appointed by archbishop of Dublin, Daniel Murray, to the Irish chaplaincy of Buenos Aires, replacing Father O’Gorman. From his arrival in Buenos Aires and up to his death twentyeight years later, Father Fahy became the indisputable leader of the Irish Catholics in Argentina. He promoted a fund-raising campaign in 1847 for the victims of the Irish Famine. The following year, during the events leading to the execution of Camila O’Gorman, Fahy demanded an exemplary punishment. Perhaps to gain support from Buenos Aires governor Juan Manuel de Rosas, in 1849 Fahy made public his support of the government and acknowledged Rosas’s favor toward the Irish of Buenos Aires. Fahy organized his followers in chaplainries in Buenos Aires city and province, and appointed 12 Irish priests to these areas. He personally paid for their studies at All Hallows, Dublin. Sometimes there were conflicts between these chaplains and Fahy. Some of them recommended the use of the British Hospital instead of the Irish infirmary founded by Father Fahy. He also had to face accusations from the local clergy, in part under the influence of jealousy caused by his custom to isolate the Irish parishioners from the Spanish-speaking Catholic Church. Fahy had a reputation as a matchmaker. During five years ending in 1856 he blessed 185 marriages among Irish settlers. He introduced newly arrived girls from Ireland to their potential matches in Buenos
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Aires, trying to respect their counties and towns of origin. Father Fahy’s chief mission was to create a Catholic English-speaking community in Argentina. He was also recognized by the Argentines for his role in public life. On May 19, 1864, President Bartolomé Mitre appointed Anthony Fahy as honorary canon of the Cathedral Church of Buenos Aires. On July 12, 1865, Fahy received a gift of about £600 as an evidence of the esteem of Irish, Anglo-Irish, and English settlers in Buenos Aires. Fahy died of a heart attack on February 20, 1871, though chronicles report that he died a victim of the yellow fever owing to his attending to the sick. He suffered from heart problems long before his death. Edmundo Murray See also: O’GORMAN, Camila References Julianello, Maria Teresa. The Scarlet Trinity: The Doomed Struggle of Camila O’Gorman against Family, Church and State in Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires. Cork: Irish Centre for Migration Studies, 2000. Murray, Thomas. The Story of the Irish in Argentina. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1919. Ussher, James M. Father Fahy: A Biography of Anthony Dominic Fahy, O.P., Irish Missionary in Argentina, 1805–1871. Buenos Aires: Author’s Edition, 1951.
FALKLAND/MALVINAS ISLANDS The Falkland (the British name) or Malvinas Islands (the Argentinean name) are an archipelago in the south Atlantic, about 300 miles off the continental coast of South America. The islands were first occupied in 1764 by the French, who handed over their settlement to the Spanish naval flotilla on April 1, 1767. In 1820 Argentina www.abc-clio.com
claimed sovereignty as Spain’s successor and has disputed Britain’s claim to the islands since 1833, the year in which the British took possession of the archipelago. Irishmen may have been among the crew of John Davies’s ship, the Desire, when he discovered the islands in 1592 or in the Welfare of John Strong, the first man to land on the Falklands/Malvinas in 1690. But if so, we have no record of their names. The first recorded Irish visitor was Commander William Farmer, born in Youghal, Co. Cork, in 1732, who commanded the sloop Swift in West Falkland (Gran Malvina) waters in 1770 and was obliged to evacuate Port Egmont by a much larger Spanish force. The next Irish name in Falkland/Malvinas history is that of William Dickson of Dublin who was storekeeper for Louis Vernet’s colonists and was entrusted with the care of the British flag by Captain Onslow after he landed at Port Louis in 1833. Dickson was among those murdered by the gauchos led by Antonio Rivera on August 26, 1833. The first Falkland/Malvinas census, taken by Lt. Governor Richard Moody in 1842, noted five colonists who had been born in Ireland. But the Irish population was to increase sharply with the arrival of the military pensioners in 1849. A large proportion of the Victorian army came from Ireland, and the 1851 census counts 74 persons of the Irish nation: 15 were military pensioners and many of the rest their wives and children. During the late 1840s, the second official in the islands was the magistrate, William Henry Moore, who had left his practice (and his wife) in Belturbet, Co. Cavan, and armed with a testimonial signed by many of the Dublin legal establishment, arrived in Port Louis in March 1845.
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Moore was a caricature of a provincial lawyer: argumentative, self important, and a heavy drinker. He argued violently with the first two governors, Lt. Richard Clement Moody and Lt. George Rennie, and the former reported to London on June 25, 1846: “there are many Irishmen here, Mr. Moore is an Irishman, and the observation has been made that we have a ‘Daniel O’Connell’ among us.” Moore eventually returned to London on leave in 1849 and was discovered offering legal advice to a company in dispute with the Colonial Office. He was sacked and disappears from view in a minor post in the Customs Office. In the late 1830s some Irish began sheep farming in the Falkland/Malvinas Islands. Among others, Thomas Murray (aka “Thomas the Devil”) owned a large flock, which he sold a few years later to purchase land on the continent. Most of the Irish were Catholics, but other Catholics in the islands were English, Chilean, French, and from other countries. A fundamental part of the life of Catholic islanders was the presence of priests among them. The islands were (and still are) under the jurisdiction of Propaganda Fide in Rome. In 1857 they wrote to Cardinal Wiseman, archbishop of Westminster, and to Cardinal Alessandro Barnabo, secretary of Propaganda Fide, to ask for a priest to attend their souls. The archbishop of Buenos Aires, Dr. Mariano J. Escalada, requested Anthony Fahy, O.P., to find a solution for the islanders, and he proposed that a priest from Buenos Aires visit them once every seven years. That same year, Father Lawrence Kirwan visited the islands and organized a committee to build a chapel and obtain land for a cemetery. Among the committee members were P. D. Lynch, www.abc-clio.com
Thomas Havers, Christopher Murray, and Patrick Maguire. In 1861, land was acquired to build a Catholic chapel. In 1865 Father Patrick J. Dillon visited the islands. At that time there were about 200 Catholics, and they had no priest. Father Dillon spent a few months among them and administered the sacraments. In 1872 Father William Walsh made a short visit to the islands, and before the end of the year he was gone on his way to his diocese of Brisbane in Australia. Father James Foran was the first resident priest, and he was fundamental in establishing a Catholic position in the islands. He arrived in October 1875 and, after receiving permission from ecclesiastical authority, from 1880 to 1886 he spent half the year on the islands and the other half on the mainland. On June 15, 1873, Stella Maris chapel in Port Stanley was completed by the islanders, and later Father Foran moved it to a better location. Father Foran also started a school for Catholic children in the islands. When Father Foran finally left the islands in April 1886 he traveled to Buenos Aires and eventually returned to England. After 1888, the Catholics of the Falkland/ Malvinas Islands were attended by the Salesian Fathers, beginning with Father Patrick J. Diamond, who arrived on April 19, 1888, in Port Stanley, together with Monsignor José Fagnano. Father Diamond was able to continue the work that was carried out by Father Foran. Father Diamond built the parish priest house and directed the children’s school. He also baptized sub conditione more than 25 Protestant adults. Father Diamond was followed in 1890 by Father Patrick O’Grady, who had been in Argentina since 1884. Father O’Grady replaced the old chapel with a new building,
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which opened in 1899. Other chaplains were Father Mignone, who remained in the islands until 1937, and Irish-born Fathers Drumm and Kelly. In addition, other priests assisted the resident clergy, including Monsignor Santiago M. Ussher in 1930, the Passionists Father Domingo Moore and Father Santiago Deane, and the Pallotine Father Celestino Butterly. The Salesian sisters Hijas de María Auxiliadora, among them Sister Mary Jane Ussher, established a mission in the islands and remained there for many years. However, the Irishman who made the greatest impact on the history of the islands was certainly the Reverend Lowther Brandon, a Church of Ireland clergyman from Carlow who became colonial chaplain in 1877. A man of faith and drive, he was remarkable for tackling the social problems of Stanley, the capitol of the Falkand/ Malvinas, in a series of practical steps. He founded the first savings bank, established abstinence societies to combat drunkenness, and launched the Falklands Islands Magazine, which he typeset and printed himself. He rode tirelessly around his broad parish, dragging after him a pack horse (carguero) laden with his magic lantern for shows to the camp settlements. Brandon also served as inspector of the government schools and was a constant advocate of better teaching for children in camp. He returned to Ireland in 1907 and died in Slaney, Co. Wicklow, in 1933. Another Irishman in a senior post in government was Dr. Samuel Hamilton who arrived on the islands from Dublin in 1879 and served there for 25 years, returning to Ireland to retire. Prominent explorers who visited the islands included Captain Francis Crozier, from Banbridge, Co. Down, who commanded one of the ships (Terror) on www.abc-clio.com
the Antarctic expedition of 1841–1843 and Sir Ernest Shackleton, born in Athy, Co. Kildare, who visited Stanley on numerous occasions on his way to or from Antarctica. Another explorer, the Irish yachtsman Conor O’Brian, called at Stanley, and his boat remained in use in Falklands/Malvinas waters until she was returned to the Irish Maritime museum. Two British governors came from Ireland, Thomas Fitzgerald Callaghan from 1877 to 1880 and Sir Cosmo Haskard, who served from 1964 to 1970 and then retired to Ireland. A third governor, Sir James O’Grady (1931–1935), was the son of an Irish family living in England. He started life as a jobbing carpenter, moved into trade union politics, was sent on a diplomatic mission to Bolshevik Russia, and was finally appointed colonial governor, first to one of the Australian states and then to the Falkland/Malvinas Islands. During the opening decades of the twentieth century, the conflict between Argentina and England for the control of the Falkland/Malvinas Islands gained a wider awareness among the Irish in Buenos Aires and other provinces. The controversial and nationalistically opinionated Fianna newspaper never missed an opportunity to attack Britain’s occupation of the islands. The integration process of Irish Argentines to a larger and wider society signified that most of them thought their loyalty was toward Argentina rather than Britain. Miguel Fitzgerald (b. 1926) perhaps best epitomized that general Irish-Argentine attitude, when twice flying from the mainland to the islands in 1964 and 1968. On both occasions he landed near Stanley, raised the Argentine flag, and with accompanying journalists tried (unsuccessfully) to interview British authorities. Nothing was achieved
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by these individual actions, but they do reveal the increasing nationalistic feelings of the Irish Argentines toward the adopted country of their forebears. In August 1966, another Irish Argentine, Eduardo F. McLoughlin (b. 1918), a former Air Force officer, was appointed Argentine ambassador to Britain; he would remain in London until 1970. Following Argentine policy, McLoughlin interfered with a British plan to hand sovereignty over to Falkland/Malvinas Islanders before 1982, which would have opened the way to a pacific settlement of the conflict. The Falkland/Malvinas War (April 2–June 14, 1982) began when the Argentine military junta sent warships to land a party of scrap dealers on South Georgia with the intention of reclaiming the Falkland/ Malvinas Islands. A full-scale military invasion followed. Attempts by the United Nations, the United States, and Peru to secure a peaceful resolution to the conflict failed. Britain dispatched a task force comprising some thirty warships, two aircraft carriers, assorted fleet auxiliaries, the Canberra (a requisitioned passenger liner), roll-on/roll-off ferries, and container ships to recover the islands. The 10-week conflict claimed the lives of nearly 1,000 British and Argentine military personel and civilians and ended with the surrender of the Argentine forces on June 14. The British victory contributed to the downfall of the Argentine military dictatorship and the reelection of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. Argentina officially declared a cessation of hostilities in 1989. Irish and Irish-Argentine soldiers were among those who fought on both sides of the war. Translation was one particularly skilled service rendered by many Irish Argentines during the Falkland/Malvinas www.abc-clio.com
War. For instance, Private Ronnie Quinn translated messages and Private Miguel Savage facilitated communications with the islanders and, after the surrender, onboard the Canberra. In the immediate aftermath of the Argentine invasion, Major Patricio Dowling acted as interpreter during the meeting with Governor Rex Hunt at his official residence. Dowling’s hatred of all things British was remarkable, and he was later sent back to the continent in disgrace for overstepping his authority. The Falkland/ Malvinas War was a turning point in the identity of most Irish Argentines. After decades of being ingleses and living voluntarily isolated in their own country, Irish Argentines finally began to feel truly Argentine. Edmundo Murray See also: DILLON, Patrick Joseph; FAHY, Anthony; SHACKLETON, Sir Ernest References Cawkell, Mary. The History of the Falkland Islands. Shropshire, England: Anthony Nelson, 2001. Coghlan, Eduardo A., Los Irlandeses en Argentina: Su Actuación y Descendencia. Buenos Aires: Author’s Edition, 1987. Paul, James, and Martin Spirit. “Honour Regained: Naval Party 8901 and the Argentine Invasion.” The Falklands War 1982 index. www.britains-smallwars .com/Falklands/NP8901.html (accessed August 23, 2007). Tatham, David E. “A Coincidence of Incidents.” The Falklands Islands Journal (1995): 117–135.
FARLEY, JAMES ALOYSIUS (1888–1976) James Farley was born in 1888 in Grassy Point, New York, the son of Irish Catholic immigrants. His brickmaker father died when Farley was 10, and he and his four
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A prosperous businessman, James Farley managed the key political campaigns that brought Franklin D. Roosevelt national attention. In appreciation of his political talent and efforts, President Roosevelt appointed Farley postmaster general in 1933. (Library of Congress)
brothers had to work to help support the family. Farley first became involved in politics in 1911, when he was elected town clerk of Grassy Point. In 1922–1923, he served on the state legislature. By 1928, he had risen to become secretary of the Democratic State Committee. He started in bookkeeping and went on to start his own building supply company. He became a close friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who at that time was in the New York State Assembly. Farley was instrumental in helping FDR win the governorship of New York State in 1928, even though it was widely www.abc-clio.com
expected FDR would lose if the Democrats lost the presidential election. Farley was again behind the scenes when FDR was reelected governor in 1930. In 1932, Farley was instrumental in winning Roosevelt the Democratic nomination by convincing delegates for an opposing candidate, John Nance Garner, to throw their support to Roosevelt. Once Farley accomplished this, Garner gave his support to Roosevelt, ensuring his candidacy. Farley was again important in guiding Roosevelt to victory in the presidential election in November 1932, against the incumbent Herbert Hoover. Farley worked with Roosevelt’s other confidant and strategist, Louis Howe. Farley was later named chairman of the Democratic National Committee. As a reward for his loyalty, Farley was named to the position of postmaster general. During his time as postmaster (1933–1940), Farley worked closely with President Roosevelt, who was an enthusiastic stamp collector. Among stamps issued under his tenure were a series of colorful National Parks stamps and a National Recovery Act stamp that Roosevelt hoped would help promote his New Deal. Besides serving as postmaster general, Farley was a key adviser to Roosevelt, and helped end Prohibition. He wrote an autobiography in 1938. By 1940, there was friction between Farley and Roosevelt, stemming from a combination of Farley’s belief that Roosevelt should not seek reelection and Farley’s own desire to run for president. By this point, Farley had resigned as postmaster general. Farley was unsuccessful in his bid for higher office; the wildly popular Roosevelt was the Democratic nominee again in the summer of 1940. Farley did not mend fences with Roosevelt at that time, and he was not officially a
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supporter of FDR’s 1940 reelection bid. Farley unsuccessfully attempted to win the nomination for governor of New York in 1958 and 1962. Farley died in 1976 in New York City, at the age of 88. The main post office in New York City is named after him. Richard Panchyk References Burns, James MacGregor. Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, 1882–1940. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1956. Farley, James. Behind the Ballots: The Personal History of a Politician. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938. Rollins, Alfred B., Jr. Roosevelt and Howe. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962.
FARRELL, EDELMIRO JUAN (1887–1980) Born on August 12, 1887, in Avellaneda, Buenos Aires, Edelmiro Juan Farrell was the grandson of Matthew Farrell (d. 1860) of Co. Longford and Mónica Ibañez. Farrell joined the army in 1905 and graduated as second lieutenant of the infantry regiment. He spent most of his career in Mendoza, where he specialized in mountaineering fighting units. In 1924 Farrell traveled to Italy to receive special instruction with the Alpine regiments of the Italian army. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1927, colonel in 1931, and general in 1941, and was appointed director of the military mountaineering school. Farrell was one of the main figures of the military coup d’état of June 4, 1943, led by Pedro Pablo Ramírez, which replaced the discredited administration headed by Ramón Castillo. Ramírez was appointed de facto president and Farrell his war minister. When the vice president, Rear Admiral Sabá Sueyro, died, Farrell was www.abc-clio.com
named in his stead. In February 1944, General Ramírez was deposed by the proGerman military group after announcing that Argentina would comply with U.S. requirements against the Axis governments. Farrell took over as president and was sworn in on March 12, 1944. A leading figure of Farrell’s administration was Col. Juan D. Perón. Perón became the most powerful man in Argentina by cornering such appointments as vice president, minister of war, head of the labor and welfare secretariat, and chairman of the council for postwar planning. Farrell and Perón were part of a secretive group of officers who came to be known as the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos. They were strong supporters of the Axis, sympathizing not only with the war efforts of Germany and Italy but also with the social model that Hitler and Mussolini had introduced in their countries (Franco’s Spain was another source of inspiration). These officers conformed to a long tradition of nationalism, contempt for democracy, and pro-German sentiment in the Argentine army. Perón, as Farrell before him, had spent time in Italy training, and was deeply impressed above all with the personality and social policies of Mussolini. Both men found in European fascism a formula they believed could turn Argentina into a powerful nation capable of asserting its independence against the most powerful countries. The end of the war and hopes for better times led to a dramatic rise in labor disputes. Civil war was in the air, and Farrell began to realize that the hour of defeat was near at hand. The pressure became too great, and the controversial vice president Juan Perón was forced to resign and was arrested on October 12, 1945. But Perón was no longer just an army officer, he was also
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Argentina’s foremost labor leader. Union leaders and young officers loyal to Perón began, with his wife Eva (known as Evita) Duarte’s help, to mobilize resistance. Farrell’s moment of truth came on October 17, 1945, when the working population of Buenos Aires took to the streets en masse, filled the Plaza de Mayo in front of the presidential palace, and demanded Perón’s release. Farrell took the opportunity to resume control of the situation. Perón was instantly released, reinstated in all his appointments, and addressed a jubilant crowd of about 300,000 persons from the balcony of the presidential palace. This was the victory of the Argentine poor; los descamisados (the shirtless) and the despised cabecitas negras (small black heads) had now become a force to reckon with in Argentina’s history. Edelmiro Farrell was forced to announce that a presidential election would be held in February 1946. Perón was the obvious candidate and, with 54 percent of the votes cast, he defeated the candidate of the united opposition. Farrell gave way to Perón, who was sworn in as the new president on June 4, 1946. Edelmiro Farrell retired and died in 1980. Edmundo Murray References Coghlan, Eduardo A. Los Irlandeses en la Argentina: Su Actuación y Descendencia. Buenos Aires: Author’s Edition, 1987. Rojas, Mauricio. The Sorrows of Carmecita: Argentina’s Crisis in a Historical Perspective. Stockholm: AB Timbro, 2002.
FARRELL, EILEEN (1920–2002) Eileen Farrell, who is of Irish ancestry, was born in Willimantic, Connecticut, in February 1920. Farrell’s early musical studies were with her mother. She later studied singing with Merle Alcock and then with www.abc-clio.com
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Portrait of Eileen Farrell, American opera and concert singer. (Library of Congress)
Eleanor McClellan, initially concentrating on concert work before joining a CBS radio show in 1940. Her vocal talent was soon recognized, and she gained her own radio show. In the late 1940s she went back to concert tours and traveled throughout the United States and South America, always receiving acclaim for her style and performance. In 1951 she sang a concert version of Berg’s Wozzeck with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall that created a sensation among the conservative patrons. However, her real breakthrough came when she was selected for the dubbed voice in the 1955 movie Interrupted Melody, which was the life story of the famous Australian Wagnerian soprano Marjorie Lawrence. Eleanor Parker played Lawrence. Operatic engagements quickly followed and Farrell made her debut in the role of Santuzza in the opera Cavalleria Rusticana in Tampa,
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Florida. She then sang in Verdi’s Il Trovatore at the San Francisco opera, where she was partnered with the great Swedish tenor Jussi Björling. She returned to San Francisco in 1958 where she sang in Cherubini’s Medea. Throughout, the critics gave great praise to her vocal style and her vocal excellence. In December 1960 the New York audience saw Farrell make her Metropolitan Opera debut in Gluck’s Alceste. She was 40 years old. She only sang for five seasons at the Metropolitan Opera; however, her performances caused quite a sensation in New York and on tour where her large exciting voice placed her opposite some of the greatest Italian singers of the period. Her recording career blossomed. However, her relationship with the opera’s management at the Metropolitan was not tranquil. Her vocal style and physical size were ideally suited for Wagner’s operas, yet the Metropolitan’s management continued to place her in the Italian repertory. Farrell was one of the early successful crossover artists. Her temperament and unique talent made her comfortable with various music styles in addition to opera. She frequently performed jazz and pop music and even worked with Louis Armstrong’s musicians on one occasion. She made many records of popular song tunes. Her last recording was made in 1993, just before her seventy-third birthday. In the 1970s she moved into teaching at the Indiana University Music School. Later she also taught at the University of Maine, where she had moved in 1980. In 1999 she coauthored her autobiography, Can’t Help Singing, with writer Brian Kellow. It was published by Northeastern University Press. Farrell continued giving concerts until health problems slowed her www.abc-clio.com
down. She died in a nursing home in Park Ridge, New Jersey, in March 2002 at the age of eighty-two. Basil Walsh See also: HERBERT, Victor August; MUSIC IN AMERICA, IRISH References Davis, Peter G. The American Opera Singer. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Steane, J. B. The Grand Tradition: Seventy Years of Singing on Record. New York: Scribner’s, 1974. Walsh, Basil. “Eileen Farrell.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. Vol. 1, edited by Stanley Sadie. London: Macmillan Press, 1992: 127–128.
FARROW, MIA (1946–) Maria (Mia) de Lourdes Villiers Farrow was born in Los Angeles, California, on February 9, 1945, the daughter of Australian filmmaker and writer John Farrow and Irish actress Maureen O’Sullivan (who was born in Roscommon, Ireland on May 17, 1911). One of seven children, Mia was educated in Catholic schools in Spain, the United Kingdom, and California. Farrow made her film debut in a small role in one of her father’s films, John Paul Jones, in 1959, but began to establish herself with a well-received role in an offBroadway production of The Importance of Being Earnest in 1963. Between 1964 and 1966 she starred in the hit TV show Peyton Place, and it was during this period that she met and married Frank Sinatra, who was almost 30 years her senior. Although the marriage ended in 1968 (reportedly over her refusal to turn down the role in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby), they stayed on good terms until his death in 1998.
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Farrow’s breakthrough role was in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby in 1968. Adapted from Ira Levin’s best-selling novel, the film cast Farrow as the young wife who unsuspectingly becomes involved in a satanic plot when her husband (John Cassavetes) promises their unborn baby to a group of New York Satanists, in exchange for success in his career. Farrow’s waif persona, and her apparent physical fragility (possibly the result of a bout with childhood polio), accentuated her character’s vulnerability. The role in Rosemary’s Baby was well received, and the film remains a seminal horror film. The film also brought her to the attention of a number of interesting directors, and in the 10 years that followed, she worked with veteran filmmakers such as Joseph Losey (Secret Ceremony), Claude Chabrol (Docteur Popaul ), Jack Clayton (as Daisy in a poorly received film of F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby), and Robert Altman (A Wedding ). Even though she took on roles that were often challenging and complex, she largely failed to win audience and critical acclaim in this period. In 1982 she accepted a role in Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. Although her performance received mixed critical reviews, it initiated a personal and professional relationship with Allen that lasted a decade. Their partnership was mutually productive: in the 10 years that followed, Allen produced films (Broadway Danny Rose, Radio Days, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Husbands and Wives) that are generally regarded by critics as his best work; Farrow’s roles in these films revealed her to be an actress of depth, humor, and versatility. The partnership came to an abrupt and dramatic end in 1992, when it was revealed
Mia Farrow (right) and Woody Allen (left) on the set of Allen’s film, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, in 1982. (Orion/The Kobal Collection) www.abc-clio.com
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that Allen, with whom Farrow had three children (a birth son, Satchel, and two adopted children, Moses and Dylan), had begun a relationship with Farrow’s adopted daughter (with second husband André Previn), Soon-Yi Previn. The breakdown of their relationship culminated in a protracted custody battle and well-publicized child molestation charges against Allen (subsequently dismissed by a U.S. court). Although there has been some falling off in her career after the Allen controversy, Farrow has continued to take roles in films, often in Irish productions (e.g., Widow’s Peak [1994] and Angela Mooney [1996]). Farrow is also well known for her charity work, and has served as a UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) special representative. She has been closely associated with the issue of adoption, having adopted (at last count) nine children from within the United States and abroad, as well as raising her birth children, Matthew, Sascha, and Fletcher (from her marriage with Previn), and Satchel (with Allen). Gwenda Young References Groteke, Kristi (with Marjorie Rosen). Woody and Mia. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1994. Katz, Ephraim. The Film Encyclopedia. New York: Perigee Books, 1979. Vinson, James. International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers: Actors and Actresses. Chicago: St. James Press, 1986.
FAY, FRANCIS ANTHONY “FRANK” (1897–1961) Frank Fay was born Francis Anthony Donner in San Francisco to parents of Irish ancestry who were both in the entertainment business. He attended school in New York until the fifth grade, when he left to www.abc-clio.com
work in a Shakespearean company. He appeared as a child actor in Babes in Toyland in 1903, and three years later he appeared on Broadway in a production of Redemption of David Corson. After a period spent working with Johnny Dyer, Fay became a solo performer in 1917. His solo act was one of the first that did not rely on costumes, and the focus of the show was entirely on Fay himself. Dressed in hat and tails, his interactions with the audience anticipated the comedy sketches of later stand-up comedians. In 1918 he appeared in Girl o’ Mine, and four years later the show Frank Fay’s Fables, which he both wrote and starred in, ran on Broadway for one month. He was responsible for discovering the actress Patsy Kelly when she performed a song-and-dance routine as a teen in his vaudeville act. Fay married Barbara Stanwyck in 1928, and they both moved to Hollywood to pursue their acting careers. However, it was a turbulent marriage, and Fay’s heavy drinking led to allegations of physical abuse being made against him by his wife. In 1932, in an attempt to rescue their marriage, they adopted a son named Dion. When Fay, in a drunken rage, threw their son into a swimming pool it eventually led to the end of their marriage, and they divorced in 1935. That same year Fay wrote his autobiography, entitled How To Be Poor. Later he married Frances White. Fay starred in a total of 13 films throughout his career. His first, The Show of Shows (which he cowrote with J. Keirn Brennan), saw him playing the master of ceremonies, a role with which he felt at home and which drew on his earlier experience in vaudeville. He would repeat this role in the 1937 film Nothing Sacred. He played Irish Catholic priests in the films
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They Knew What They Wanted and Tom and Jerry. As well as being an actor, he occasionally worked as a producer and writer. He both starred in and produced the film A Fool’s Advice, which was later reissued under the title Meet the Mayor. In 1936 Fay had a very successful radio program in which he recited the lyrics to popular songs and lampooned them. In the 1940s he revived his flagging career when he appeared as the alcoholic Elwood P. Dowd in Mary Chase’s play Harvey, playing a man whose imaginary best friend was a six-foot-tall invisible white rabbit. The play won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and it ran for more than four years on Broadway. However it was to be his last appearance on Broadway. Five years later James Stewart was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance as the character in the film adaptation. When Fay was once asked during a court appearance what his profession was, he replied, “I’m the greatest comedian in the world.” He later turned to his lawyer and said, “I was under oath, wasn’t I?” Although he was a vivacious character, his alcoholism not only contributed to the failure of his marriage but also led to increasingly unpredictable behavior and tensions with others, prompting Milton Berle to comment that “Fay’s friends could be counted on the missing arm of a one-armed man.” Toward the end of his life he worked in nightclubs and occasionally in television roles. He died in Santa Monica in 1961, having been declared legally incompetent and confined to a hospital a week before his death. He is buried in Calvary Cemetery, Los Angeles. David Doyle References Fay, Frank. How To Be Poor. 1935. Reprint, New York: Prentice Hall, 1945. www.abc-clio.com
Harrell, Joy. “Frank Fay.” In Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, edited by Michael Glazier. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999. Smith, Ronald L. Who’s Who in Comedy. New York: Facts on File, 1992.
FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT The Federal Theatre Project (FTP) was part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Depressionera Works Progress Administration, and its goal was both to employ unemployed theater workers and establish an American national theater, one modeled partially after Ireland’s national theater, The Abbey. Because of its nationalist agenda, the FTP strove to stage the American experience, a
Poster for The Living Newspaper dramatic production One-Third of a Nation, produced by the Federal Theater Project. (Library of Congress) ABC-CLIO
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goal that was a result of FTP director Hallie Flanagan’s research on the Abbey. The FTP’s goals made the Abbey and Irish playwrights a likely influence. Together with President Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, the Federal Arts Project director, Hallie Flanagan outlined the goals of the FTP: to employ unemployed theater workers, to express American culture through theatrical performances, and to bring theater to every corner of America. The FTP easily met its employment goal by staging 924 separate productions that employed 12,700 theater workers in 40 states during its four-year run. Irish playwrights helped the FTP meet its nationalistic and canvassing goals. In 1935, when Flanagan began to create the structure for the FTP, she looked to Europe for national theater models; she and her research staff reviewed most European national theaters. Yet, there was only one national theater she and her staff turned to first and continually researched during the FTP’s four-year tenure: The Abbey. The Abbey’s own cultural nationalist agenda of dramatizing Irish culture by staging plays written by native Irish playwrights provided Flanagan with a practical structure for capturing the American experience. Initially, Flanagan met with former and current Abbey Theatre directors to understand how they made their nationalist goals a dramatic reality. From these meetings, Flanagan conceived of the idea of producing plays written by Americans and that expressed American cultural moments. The most notable dramatic legacy was The Living Newspaper. These plays staged culturally significant events that the American people were currently experiencing. As a result of their subject matter, they came to be collectively and appropriately named The Living www.abc-clio.com
Newspaper because, like a newspaper, they reported the American peoples’ 1930s narrative. And, much like how Sean O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy has left Ireland and the world with detailed narratives of the tragedy of Irish nationalism, The Living Newspaper has left America and all those who read them with moving portraits of depression-era life. Additionally, Flanagan corresponded with George Bernard Shaw as she developed the FTP, and through this correspondence came the FTP’s greatest gift: Shaw gave them unrestricted access to produce all of his plays. Shaw’s support for the FTP is partially what gave the project its credibility and ultimate success. Through Flanagan’s relationship with Shaw, the FTP attained its goal of bringing theater to every part of the American countryside. In a letter dated May 22, 1937, Shaw granted Flanagan and the FTP blanket permission to produce any of his plays as long as they kept the price of admission at 50 cents, thus allowing every American access to these federally sponsored dramas. Because of Shaw’s artistic importance, each of the 158 federal theaters operating across America asked to produce a Shaw play. And when a Shaw play went up, audiences not only transformed federal theaters into standing-room-only experiences but also demanded that the performance runs be extended. Shaw’s plays also instigated a new FTP phenomenon: play productions touring nationally. Of the nine Shaw plays the FTP produced, four of them toured nationally: Arms and the Man, The Devil’s Disciple, Pygmalion, and Androcles and the Lion. In total, during the final two years of the FTP, American audiences enjoyed several thousand performances of Shaw’s plays. By including Shaw’s plays in the
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FTP’s canon, the American and worldwide opinion of the FTP changed from a second-rate theater project to one of an elite caliber and international acclaim. Today, the FTP is remembered for its Living Newspaper and Shaw productions, exemplifying the influence Irish theater had on the FTP. Diane M. Hotten-Somers See also: SHAW, George Bernard References Federal Theatre Project Papers. The Library of Congress. Washington, DC. Flanagan, Hallie. Arena: The History of the Federal Theatre. Rahway: Quinn Boden, 1940. Matthews, Jane De Hart. The Federal Theatre, 1935–1939: Plays, Relief, and Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967. O’Connor, John and Lorraine Brown, eds. Free, Adult, Uncensored: The Living History of the Federal Theatre Project. Washington, DC: New Republic Books, 1978.
FEENEY, CHARLES “CHUCK” (1931–) Born into a working-class family in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Chuck Feeney was the son of an insurance underwriter and a nurse. His paternal grandmother originally came from near Kinawley in Co. Fermanagh. Feeney enlisted in the army after World War II and served in Japan and Korea. Upon his discharge he received a GI scholarship and studied hotel administration at Cornell University. After studying in Grenoble, France, and traveling in Europe, he ran a camp in southern France for children from the U.S. naval fleet. He met a fellow Cornell student, Robert Miller, in Barcelona and they agreed to go into business together to take advantage of the fleet’s demand to purchase consumer goods. In 1960 they opened their first duty-free shops in Honolulu and Hong Kong. They www.abc-clio.com
called their company Duty Free Shoppers, and within the next few years they had opened dozens of shops around the world exploiting the rise in postwar tourism and tourists’ demand for consumer goods. In 1988 Forbes magazine placed Feeney in the top 20 in its list of the 400 richest people in America. They estimated his fortune at $1.3 billion, thereby making him the wealthiest Irish American of his generation. However, in 1982, after donating $700,000 to Cornell University, he set up Atlantic Philanthropies. This charitable foundation allowed him to fund projects while also preserving his anonymity. He then secretly arranged for his share of the company to be transferred to this charitable foundation, keeping less than $5 million for himself. He spent his time running the various businesses that constituted General Atlantic Group, Ltd. In 1997 when Duty Free Shoppers was purchased, and his relationship with his cofounder ended acrimoniously, he was forced to go public as the benefactor of the charity. The sale of his share of the company meant that Atlantic Philanthropies, the fourth largest charity in America, was worth $3.5 billion. Recently, it has moved away from its earlier project of funding universities and has focused on health and helping disadvantaged children in such countries as the United States, the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Vietnam, and Bermuda. His links with Ireland stretch back to the time when he grew up in an IrishAmerican neighborhood in New Jersey. He also traveled to Ireland during the 1970s to order whiskey for his duty-free shops. He holds both Irish and American citizenship. Following the Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombing in Enniskillen in 1987, he began to play an important role in the
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peace process, helping to bring about the first IRA ceasefire in 1994. Recently he has financed the establishment of a new Sinn Féin office in Washington, D.C. He also embarked on a program of funding Irish universities. He donated $10 million to Trinity College Dublin as well as $15 million to the University of Limerick. In total, he has donated more than $100 million to Irish universities while refusing all honorary degrees. In 1998 he organized a 50th reunion for the class of 1948 of St. Mary’s High School in his hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, which took place in the Castletroy Hotel in Limerick. In 2005 Feeney was embroiled in a political controversy in Ireland. He had announced that he would fund the Centre for Public Inquiry, an organization that was set up to investigate claims of corruption. The Centre included Justice Fergus Flood and broadcaster Damien Kiberd among its members. Its chief executive was the Sunday Business Post journalist Frank Connolly. However, Minister for Justice Michael McDowell, using parliamentary privilege, announced to Dáil Éireann that Connolly had travelled to Colombia on a false passport in April 2001 along with his brother Niall and Padraig Wilson, the former head of the IRA prisoners in the Maze Prison. McDowell said the purpose of their journey was to meet with Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas and share expertise in explosives. Connolly, whose brother Niall had been the Sinn Féin representative in Havana and had been arrested in Colombia on suspicion of training FARC guerrillas in 2001, denied the accusation. After meeting the minister for justice, Chuck Feeney decided to withdraw his funding for the Centre. David Doyle www.abc-clio.com
Reference Molloy, Darina. “Charles Feeney.” In Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, edited by Michael Glazier. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999.
FENIANS The Fenians constituted a nineteenthcentury revolutionary movement that was active in the United States and Ireland. Adapting their name from the Fianna, the legendary warrior army led by Finn MacCool, the Fenians rejected constitutional efforts to achieve Irish home rule. Although the Fenian designation originally served to distinguish the American cohort from the parallel Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood (IRB), the term became popular for militants on both sides of the Atlantic. Fenians sought a democratic and independent Irish republic. From exile in Paris, James Stephens (1824–1901, born in Kilkenny), a participant in the Young Ireland 1848 Rebellion, began to plan—with John O’Mahony (1816–1877), Michael Doheny (1805– 1863), and Joseph Denieffe—an insurrection that would be funded from abroad. With the promise of financial support from Irish Americans, Stephens, in Dublin on March 17, 1858, founded a group of oathbound conspirators initially referred to only as the Organization, the Brotherhood, or the Society. In early 1859, Stephens took control of the group’s parallel American faction, that under O’Mahony had taken the name of the Fenians. The tensions between the Fenians in America and Britain and those in Ireland would undermine their insurgent aims; while 1861–1866 would bring Fenian recruits from all three fronts, the attempts of Stephens at
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Fenian banner, ca. 1866. The Fenians were Irish nationalists who harshly opposed British rule in Ireland. (Library of Congress)
dominating his comrades eventually weakened their plans for rebellion when, after the American Civil War, Irish and IrishAmerican veterans wished to continue fighting against the British for Irish independence. Stephens, lacking funds to battle, became shouldered aside by diehards eager to fight—no matter what their chances for nationwide success against the Crown. American Fenians argued over how best to foment Irish revolution. A. M. Sullivan (1829–1884) published the newspaper Nation (1855–1874) to promote the Young Irelanders’ advocacy of constitutional nationalism. Stephens opposed what he regarded as Sullivan’s compromise, and countered with his own newspaper, not only as propaganda but as a personal investment. This action resulted in his demotion to European organizer. His publishing venture attracted unwelcome attention and www.abc-clio.com
penetration by the government. Stephens alienated support for the movement, however, when he started the Irish People newspaper; American Fenians believed this compromised the organization’s secret, cellular hierarchy. This European-styled structure failed to prevent infiltration by spies, and the Fenians were never as secure as they believed from surveillance. In Ireland, Stephens joined with Thomas C. Luby (1821–1901) to build a nationwide network of support. Opposition from the Catholic Church, nationalist politicians, and law enforcement limited Fenian success. In 1863, a “Fenian Congress” in Chicago resolved that the Irish Republic desired by the Brotherhood be proclaimed as “virtually established.” By 1865, the movement boasted 250,000 followers. In Philadelphia, a model Irish republican government had been proclaimed. After the end of the American Civil War, 50,000 veterans from both sides supported the Fenians. British suppression of revolutionary activity led to imprisonment for Luby and Stephens and dissidents such as Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa (1831–1915). The Irish People was suppressed in 1865. The British crackdown prevented a Fenian uprising. In Britain, there had been many rebel volunteers among Crown troops and the Irish emigrants, but Stephens, sprung from jail by his comrades in September 1865, would diminish hopes that a rising could succeed. Back in the United States, Stephens regained control over the Fenians, but without sufficient ammunition and funds, he lost the opportunity to spark an Irish insurrection. Later in 1866, hardline militants and Civil War veterans replaced Stephens. He failed to return for the 1867 rising they prepared. Their insurrection, with a minor February action and a larger,
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if still miniscule, attempt at a nationwide revolt on the night of March 4, met with defeat because of informers, a waiting array of British troops, and inclement weather. American Fenians had sent the ship the Erin’s Hope; it arrived in Sligo Bay only after the rebellion had been crushed. The year 1866 also marked the first of three abortive invasions of Canada by American-based Fenians. During the 1866 invasion the term “Irish Republican Army” was coined for the first time. Whether or not the British could be more easily defeated in Canada or Ireland divided the Fenians; a failed 1870 Canadian incursion ended the debate. Discredited, Stephens remained in exile again until his return to Dublin in 1891. After the Irish defeats of 1867, Fenian prisoners would revive agitation as their supporters rallied for their release. In September, 29 men were apprehended on charges of shooting an unarmed policeman who was transporting two prisoners. The November execution of three suspects (William Allen, Michael Larkin, Michael O’Brien), the “Manchester Martyrs,” gained the insurgents not only popular sympathy but also a measure of condolence from the Catholic Church in Ireland. Home Rule efforts energized a counterrevolutionary campaign against such violence. The spread of Fenian sympathies would sway Gladstone to back this reform measure. Whether the Fenians were more accurately described as zealous revolutionaries or revelers seeking Irish camaraderie has been argued recently between revisionist and nationalist Irish historians. The Fenian legacy, nonetheless, endures in the popularity of their name and their mystique among their republican successors. Subsequently, the clandestine movement would reorganize, in America through Clan www.abc-clio.com
Na Gael and in Ireland as the IRB, both of which promoted physical-force separatism against the British Crown. John L. Murphy See also: IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY; IRISH REPUBLICAN BROTHERHOOD References Comerford, R. V. The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics and Society, 1848–92. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1985. Harmon, Maurice, ed. Fenians and Fenianism. Dublin: Scepter Publishers Ltd., 1968. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. New York: Pearson, 2000. Miller, Kerby. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Moody, T. W., ed. The Fenian Movement. Cork: Mercier Press, 1968. Newsinger, John. Fenianism in Mid-Victorian Britain. London: Pluto Press, 1994. Ó Broin, Léon. Fenian Fever: An AngloAmerican Dilemma. London: Chatto & Windus, 1971. Rafferty, Oliver. The Church, the State, and the Fenian Threat, 1861–75. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
FITZGERALD, BARRY (1888–1961) William Joseph Shields, later known as Barry Fitzgerald, was born in Dublin on March 10, 1888. He attended the Civil Service College and obtained a position as a junior executive with the Unemployment Insurance Division in Dublin. He simultaneously worked as a supernumerary at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Fitzgerald first acted in 1915 but flubbed his only line. He consequently turned to comedic acting as a vocation. In 1929 he left his executive job to become a full-time character actor. He shared lodgings with the Irish playwright Sean O’Casey, who wrote The Silver Tassie for his roommate. He also stared in O’Casey’s play
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The Juno and the Paycock. In 1930 Alfred Hitchcock offered Fitzgerald the same role for the movie version. John Ford brought Fitzgerald to Hollywood in 1936 to act in the film version of The Plough and the Stars, a role he had played on stage. The diminutive (five-feet four-inches) Fitzgerald presented outstanding performances as Cocky in The Long Voyage Home with John Wayne in 1940 and as Henry Twite in None but the Lonely Heart with Cary Grant in 1944. Fitzgerald, whose ethnicity was illustrated with his distinctive Irish brogue, was a lifelong Protestant nationalist. Ironically, his masterful acting as Roman Catholic priest Father Fitzgibbon in Going My Way garnered him an Academy Award. He made cinematic history when he was doubly nominated in 1944 for both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor for Going My Way. He won for the Best Supporting Actor category. The Academy revised its classification system thereafter. He is also among the elite group of actors who have received Academy Award nominations for two films in one year. He appeared in And Then There Were None in 1945 as Judge Francis J. Quinncannon with Walter Huston and as Dooley in Two Years Before the Mast in 1946. After 1944 Fitzgerald played variations of the earlier Father Fitzgibbon role. He appeared in Duffy’s Tavern in 1945, Two Years Before the Mast in 1946, Variety Girl and Welcome Stranger in 1947, Miss Tatlock’s Millions in 1948, and Top o’ the Morning in 1949. His role in The Naked City in 1948 cast him against type. Fitzgerald is mostly remembered for his memorable performance as Michaleen Oge Flynn in The Quiet Man with John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in 1952. This www.abc-clio.com
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was his last collaboration with Ford, who had also directed him in How Green Was My Valley. Fitzgerald never became a famous movie star; rather, he always remained a character actor. His last role was in Broth of a Boy in 1959 in which he portrayed a 110year-old man. Fitzgerald has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in films and another for his television performances. Fitzgerald died in Dublin on January 14, 1961. Annette Richardson
FITZGERALD, F. SCOTT (1896–1940) F. Scott Fitzgerald is ranked among the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. His parents, Edward and Mary (Mollie) Fitzgerald, were both of Irish descent. Edward Fitzgerald was a distant cousin of Francis Scott Key, composer of the American national anthem. The genteel Fitzgerald family left Maryland shortly after the Civil War to settle in St. Paul, Minnesota. Mollie Fitzgerald was of more recent Irish stock; her father, Philip Francis McQuillan, had emigrated from Ireland in 1843 and amassed considerable wealth as a wholesale grocer. The author, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, was born in St. Paul on September 24, 1896. When Edward Fitzgerald’s wicker furniture business went bankrupt in 1898, he moved his family to New York State and went to work for Procter & Gamble. Young Scott Fitzgerald attended Catholic grammar schools in Buffalo, New York. The family returned to St. Paul in 1908, after Edward Fitzgerald once again lost his job. Mollie’s family helped to support the Fitzgeralds, who
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Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald on their honeymoon in 1920. Fitzgerald is best known for his novel The Great Gatsby. (Library of Congress)
struggled to maintain their social standing in highly stratified St. Paul. Scott Fitzgerald was always acutely aware of his father’s professional failings and of the contrast in his parents’ social backgrounds. The combination of factors, he later reported, gave him a ‘“two-cylinder inferiority complex.” A private-school education, followed by his acceptance at Princeton, did little to quell Fitzgerald’s inferiority complex. He attended the nonsectarian St. Paul Academy from 1908 until 1911. As an Irish Catholic whose family lacked the social standing of many of his classmates’ families, Fitzgerald felt like an outsider—a feeling that was to stay with him throughout much of his life and feature prominently in his fiction. A preoccupation with class and social standing is apparent in Fitzgerald’s novels, particularly his masterpiece The Great Gatsby, and throughout many of his short stories. Fitzgerald’s academic record at St. Paul Academy was www.abc-clio.com
mediocre at best. He apparently had little interest in schoolwork, devoting his time instead to writing stories for the school newspaper and plays for the drama club. His poor academic performance prompted his parents to send him to the Newman School, a Catholic boarding school in Hackensack, New Jersey. There, too, he felt isolated and unhappy; he later wrote about the experience in his semi-autobiographical novel, This Side of Paradise. While at the Newman School, Fitzgerald set his sights on attending Princeton. Above all, he was interested in the Princeton Triangle Club, an undergraduate club that wrote and performed a musical comedy each year. Despite his poor academic track record, Fitzgerald was accepted at Princeton in 1913. His maternal grandmother, Louise McQuillan, died that summer, leaving enough money to cover her grandson’s college expenses. Fitzgerald struggled academically at Princeton as well, and feelings of
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social inferiority continued to plague him. He wrote musical comedies for the Triangle Club, but academic probation kept him sidelined during performances. In December 1914, while home on Christmas break, Fitzgerald met and fell in love with the very beautiful and wealthy–and ultimately unattainable–Ginevra King. He would later create a number of fictional characters patterned on Ginevra King, including the title character in “The Debutante” (1917), Isabelle in This Side of Paradise (1920), and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby (1925). While at Princeton, Fitzgerald formed close ties with two Irish Catholic intellectuals, Shane Leslie and Monsignor Sigourney Fay, both of whom encouraged Fitzgerald to embrace his Irish ethnicity. Under their influence, according to one Fitzgerald scholar, “from mid-May 1917 until early 1918, Fitzgerald was everywhere proclaiming himself Irish.” When, in This Side of Paradise, the socially ambitious protagonist Amory Blaine expresses his concern that “being Irish was being somewhat common,” Monsignor Darcy assures him that “Ireland was a romantic lost cause and Irish people quite charming, and that it should, by all means, be one of his principal biases.” In November 1915, a mild case of malaria provided Fitzgerald with an excuse to leave school rather than face his midyear exams. He returned a year later to repeat his junior year but never graduated from Princeton, choosing instead to enlist in the army. He received his commission as a second lieutenant in infantry in October 1917; a month later, he reported to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for training. Within three months Fitzgerald had completed a 120,000-word novel, The Romantic Egoist. www.abc-clio.com
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The manuscript was rejected by Scribner’s but later became the basis for This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald’s first successful novel. In June 1918 Fitzgerald reported to Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama, to prepare for overseas service. It was in Montgomery that he met his future wife, Zelda Sayre. The war ended before Fitzgerald could be sent overseas, and he was discharged from the army in 1919. After working for a short time in an advertising agency in New York City, Fitzgerald returned to St. Paul to revise his manuscript. The novel was published as This Side of Paradise on March 26, 1920; Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were married a week later. The novel was an overnight success, and the couple lived what appeared to be the charmed life of young celebrities, appearing on magazine covers and at high-profile social functions and dividing their time between the United States and Europe. In 1921 Zelda gave birth to a baby girl, Frances Scott (Scottie), and Fitzgerald began work on his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922). In 1925 he published his best known work, The Great Gatsby. Beneath their glamorous image, the Fitzgeralds struggled with mounting financial pressures; Scott showed signs of alcoholism and Zelda of mental illness. Scott Fitzgerald turned his attention more and more to writing short stories, first to pay for their lavish lifestyle and later to cover his wife’s medical expenses. By the time Fitzgerald published his fourth novel, Tender is the Night (1934), Zelda had already suffered several breakdowns and had been in and out of mental hospitals. The following year Fitzgerald began to write his three autobiographical “CrackUp” essays in which he explores his own
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suffering and personal decay. After having Zelda transferred to Highland Hospital in Ashland, North Carolina (where she would eventually perish in a fire), Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood to begin work on a screenplay contract. While in Hollywood, Fitzgerald began an affair with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. It was in her apartment that he suffered a fatal heart attack on December 21, 1940. Fitzgerald left his final novel, The Last Tycoon, unfinished at his death. Kathleen Ruppert See also: FARROW, Mia References Casey, Donald J., and Robert E. Rhodes, eds. Modern Irish-American Fiction: A Reader. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989. Myers, Jeffrey. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography. New York: Harper Collins, 1994. Prigozy, Ruth. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2001.
achievement. A number of other institutions were annexed to it, including an elementary school, a model school for elementary teachers (which was based on the Irish national education system), and a normal school for teacher training. Fitzsimons also engaged in pioneering work in organizing night courses for workers and a special school for soldiers in the army. His two sons, Santiago and Guillermo (born James and William Fitzsimons in Ennis in 1849 and 1851, respectively), were appointed to positions of authority in these schools. Los Tres Fitzsimons are remembered in Corrientes as pioneering figures in the history of the city. Patrick Fitzsimons, his wife, Bidelia Kelly, and a son died during an outbreak of yellow fever in April 1872. Edmundo Murray See also: TRAVEL PATTERNS FROM IRELAND TO SOUTH AMERICA References Murray, Thomas. The Story of the Irish in Argentina. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1919. Ó Murchadha, Ciarán. “Springfield People: New Material on the History of Springfield College.” The Other Clare 18 (April 1994). Roger, María José. “The Children of the Diaspora: Irish Schools and Educators in Argentina, 1850–1950.” Irish Migration Studies in Latin America. www.irishargentine.org (accessed October 21, 2004).
FITZSIMONS, PATRICK (1802–1872) Patrick Fitzsimons was a schoolmaster and educator born in Ennis, Co. Clare. In 1843, together with Cuthbert Collingwood Power, he founded the Springfield College for Catholic boys in Ennis and became its headmaster for about 20 years. Because of debts owed to their many creditors, Fitzsimons, his family, and Power left Ireland aboard the Raymond, and they arrived in Buenos Aires on October 1, 1862. They settled in Lobos, where Fitzsimons opened the Irish School. After this, he started schools in Flores and Paraná. In 1869 the Argentine President Domingo F. Sarmiento commissioned Fitzsimons to open the new Colegio Nacional in Corrientes, which became an educational www.abc-clio.com
FLAHERTY, ROBERT J. (1884–1951) Often called the father of the documentary film, Robert Joseph Flaherty was born on February 16, 1884, in Iron Mountain, Michigan. He was the oldest of seven children born to Robert Henry Flaherty (who was of Irish Protestant descent) and Susan Klöckner (who was of German descent).
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Portrait of American filmmaker Robert Flaherty, who is most well known for his documentary Nanook of the North in 1923. (Library of Congress)
Robert Flaherty senior had mining interests in the United States and Canada, and he often traveled to remote mines accompanied by his eldest son. These early explorations and the nomadic nature of his childhood left Robert J. Flaherty with a taste for adventure. Following sporadic attempts at education in Upper Canada College and Michigan College of Mines, Flaherty left his family to explore and prospect on the east coast of Hudson Bay. Many of the trips that he embarked upon between 1906 and 1913 were funded by large business interests, such as the engineering firm MacKenzie & Mann, and it was upon the request of William MacKenzie that Flaherty first used film to record his explorations. In 1913 he filmed his expedition to the Belcher Islands, an archipelago in Hudson Bay, but the footage was damaged through Flaherty’s www.abc-clio.com
carelessness and lack of experience. In 1920 Flaherty was employed by a fur trading company, Revillion Frères, to film an expedition to a remote Inuit settlement on the northeast coast of Hudson Bay. Filming continued for nearly a year, during which time Flaherty’s fascination with native cultures, lifestyles, and traditions deepened. Working with his editor, Charlie Gelb, Flaherty edited the vast amounts of footage, making a young Inuit, Nanook, the focus of the narrative. The resulting film, Nanook of the North, was released in 1923 and met with critical praise. Robert Sherwood, writing in The Best Moving Pictures of 1922–3, claimed that the film offered “drama rendered far more vital than any trumped-up drama could ever be by the fact that it was all real.” Although other critics echoed Sherwood’s sentiments, Nanook of the North was never more than a romantic, poetic interpretation of the lives of the Inuits. During filming Flaherty had insisted that the Inuits wear traditional costumes—which they had ceased wearing many years before—to deepen the “authenticity” of the film’s presentation of their lives. Despite the overt manipulation of reality that this entailed, Nanook of the North remains one of the cornerstones of the documentary film. Following the success of Nanook Flaherty signed a contract with Paramount pictures to direct a South Seas film on location in Samoa. The result, Moana, was released in 1926, and its stunning cinematography was praised by critics. Flaherty returned to the South Seas in 1929 to shoot a film, Tabu, with German director F. W. Murnau, but the collaboration was fractious and ended before filming was completed. In 1931 Flaherty traveled to Britain and was contracted by John Grierson, the
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creative organizer of the Empire Marketing Board and the father of the British documentary movement, to direct a documentary called Industrial Britain, which was released in November of that year. His next venture, financed by Michael Balcon of Gaumont pictures, was a film about the lives of the Aran Islanders living off the west coast of Ireland. Location filming took more than a year and the resulting film, Man of Aran, was a bleak but poetic film about the everyday hardships endured by the islanders. In 1935 Flaherty worked with Zoltan Korda on Elephant Boy, an adventure film set in India and starring the Indian boy actor, Sabu. Flaherty shot much of the exterior footage in India, and Korda was responsible for interior scenes. Flaherty was disappointed that the finished film did not contain much of his footage and when it was released it met with mixed reviews. As war broke out in Europe, Flaherty and his family returned to America and began work on one of his most important and controversial films, The Land. Produced for the U.S. Film Service and shot on location in the southern and eastern United States, The Land showed how the Depression affected rural communities. Flaherty spent two years working on the film (1939–1941), but when he presented his footage to his employers he was dismayed by the lukewarm reaction he received: Flaherty’s film had become a victim of history and was considered out of date. The Land received a limited release in 1942, but it was withdrawn shortly after. Flaherty’s final film was Louisiana Story, produced for the Standard Oil Company and shot on location in Louisiana in 1946. Combining a fictional narrative with documentary-style footage, www.abc-clio.com
the film received warm reviews on its release in 1948. For the remaining three years of his life, Flaherty traveled around America and Europe promoting his films, being honored at universities and film festivals, and pitching ideas for new films. However, Louisiana Story was his last venture into filmmaking, and on July 23, 1951, he died of cerebral thrombosis at his home in Black Mountain, Vermont. He was survived by his wife and creative collaborator, Frances, and their three daughters. Gwenda Young References Brownlow, Kevin. The War, The West and the Wilderness. London: Secker & Warburg, 1979. Calder-Marshall, Arthur. The Innocent Eye: The Life of Robert J. Flaherty. London: W. H. Allen, 1963.
FLANAGAN,THOMAS (1923–2002) Thomas (James Bonner) Flanagan was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, in November 1923, to Irish-American parents. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and after the war studied at Amherst College. He taught at Columbia University from 1948 until 1960, and obtained his PhD from Columbia in 1958. His dissertation, The Irish Novelists 1800–1850, was published the following year. In 1960, he was appointed professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley; he was also awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, which enabled him to undertake the first of many visits to Ireland. Flanagan was an accomplished teacher and remained at Berkeley for 18 years before taking up the chair of English at State University of New York, Stony Brook. He was the author of numerous essays and
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reviews, and a posthumous selection of his criticism, There You Are: Writings on Irish and American Literature and History, was published by the New York Review of Books in 2004. In addition to these critical pieces, Flanagan was also the author of three historical novels set in Ireland: The Year of the French (1979), which deals with the failed Rebellion of 1798; The Tenants of Time (1988), which is set against the backdrop of the Land War; and The End of the Hunt (1994), which explores the troubled 1919–1923 period. Flanagan died in March 2002. History is a central concern in all of Flanagan’s work, and the narrative of history—and Irish history in particular— is always represented as something that is complex, profound, and uncertain. This point was registered early in Flanagan’s career, in The Irish Novelists, when he described pre-Famine Ireland as “a fragmented culture, a dismaying and complicated tangle of classes, creeds, loyalties, and aspirations.” To illustrate this point, The Irish Novelists comprises five extended essays on nineteenth-century authors who had different allegiances and who wrote in contrasting styles for specific audiences. Maria Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, Gerald Griffin, John Banim, and William Carleton receive detailed attention in this seminal piece of scholarship, and their manifold differences are used to underscore Flanagan’s basic argument that his study should be considered “a study of five Irelands” rather than one. The Irish Novelists also argues against the idea of an established tradition of the novel in Ireland and suggests that literature and politics have always been intimately interrelated in Irish society. Questions of politics, audience, history, and style are also explored by Flanagan in his lengthy www.abc-clio.com
introduction to a 1982 edition of John Mitchel’s classic Jail Journal. Although Flanagan is well known for his academic work, he is perhaps more widely celebrated as the author of The Year of the French. This novel won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and was a commercial bestseller. It was subsequently adapted to the television screen by the Irish national broadcasting service, Radio Telefís Éireann, in association with the French station FR3 and Britain’s Channel 4. The Year of the French takes as its theme the Rebellion of 1798—a much-mythologized episode in Irish history—when Catholics and Presbyterians joined forces and, with the assistance of a French expeditionary force, attempted to overthrow British rule in Ireland. Flanagan’s treatment of this subject is subtle and sophisticated and gives the lie to any easy reading of this pivotal historical event. His novel is told by several conflicting narrators (a Protestant rector, a British army officer, a Gaelic schoolmaster, a Protestant United Irishman and his English patriot wife, and a conventional third-person storyteller), and it also includes a large cast of carefully delineated characters who have different aims and ambitions and who speak at cross-purposes, sometimes in different languages. By refusing to privilege any single perspective, Flanagan eloquently demonstrates that history is riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions and that any single narrative of the past, however valuable, is only ever partial. Paul Delaney See also: MITCHEL, John References Donoghue, Denis. “The Year of the French.” In We Irish: The Selected Essays of Denis Donoghue. Vol. 1. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986: 258–266.
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340 FLATLEY, MICHAEL Kiely, Benedict. “Thomas Flanagan: The Lessons of History.” In A Raid into Dark Corners and Other Essays. Cork: Cork University Press, 1999: 161–168. Morrissey, Thomas J. “The Year of the French and the Language of Multiple Truths.” Éire-Ireland 19, no. 3 (Fall 1984): 6–17. Ward, Catherine. “Thomas Flanagan’s The Year of the French: A Cautionary Tale.” ÉireIreland 22, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 59–71.
FLATLEY, MICHAEL (1958–) Michael Flatley was born in Chicago in 1958. His parents had emigrated from Ireland in 1947 and had established a successful construction business in Chicago. Flatley’s early interest was boxing, for which he won a Golden Gloves Championship at the age of seventeen. His parents were determined that their children would retain a sense of their Irish heritage, so from the age of eleven, he was enrolled in the Dennehy School of Irish Dance. At the age of 17, he became the first American to win the title of All-World Irish Dancing Champion. After graduating from high school, Flatley opened an Irish Dancing School. Although successful, Flatley’s ambition was to perform rather than to teach. Eventually, he closed the school and began to forge a career for himself as a professional Irish dancer. In 1993, he was invited to dance at the Spirit of Mayo in Dublin, a unique festival of Irish dance and music. His performance caught the attention of the show’s producers. He was subsequently commissioned to help create an interval act for the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest. Riverdance propelled Irish dance to worldwide attention and made Flatley a star overnight. He went on to star in the extended version of the show, which premiered in Dublin’s Point Theatre in February 1995, www.abc-clio.com
before embarking on a number of international tours. Flatley left the show after a number of creative and financial difficulties arose and began choreographing, producing, and directing his own production, Lord of the Dance. This premiered in Dublin’s Point Theatre in July 1996. It was an instant success, playing to sold-out venues, receiving standing ovations, and eventually setting records all over the world. Flatley followed Lord of the Dance with Feet of Flames in 2000. This was another astounding success, both in Europe and in the United States. Flatley has a number of entries in the Guinness Book of World Records for tap dancing speed, highest-paid dancer, and highest insurance premium placed on a dancer’s legs. He retired from touring in 2001, and in 2004 he was awarded an honorary degree from University College Dublin for his contribution to Irish culture. Aoileann Ní Eigeartaigh See also: BUTLER, Jean References Lalor, Brian, ed. The Encyclopaedia of Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Ltd., 2003. Vallely, Fintan. The Companion to Irish Traditional Music. Cork: Cork University Press, 1999.
FLEMING,THOMAS J. (1927–) Born on July 5, 1927 in Jersey City, New Jersey, Thomas J. Fleming was the son of Thomas James and Katherine (Dolan) Fleming, both of whom were of Irish ancestry. Fleming’s father was a popular political ward leader in Jersey City who had a great influence on his son; Fleming recalled his father’s impact on him in Mysteries of My Father: An Irish-American Memoir (2006). At an early age Fleming was exposed to
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politics, and this affected his later understanding of political and historical events. Fleming was educated in Catholic schools and later at Fordham University and the School of Social Work, after which he worked as a reporter for the Herald Statesman. Later he became executive editor of Cosmopolitan magazine from 1954 to 1961. He became a full-time writer in 1961 when he published his first novel, All Good Men. Since then he has written works ranging from biographies and historical works to novels and other pieces that have appeared in a variety of publications. His most recent book, The Secret Trial of Robert E. Lee, was published in 2006. He has received numerous literary awards for his work. Fleming is a fellow of the New Jersey Historical Society and the Society of American Historians and was the president of the American PEN from 1971 to 1973. He contributed to the PBS documentary The Irish in America: The Long Journey Home, which was broadcast in 1998. He is married, and his wife, Alice Mulcahey Fleming, also of Irish descent, is a writer. They have three sons and live in New York City. Fleming’s first published novel, All Good Men, deals with Irish-American city politics after World War II in a city that resembles Fleming’s hometown of Jersey City. The same subject is explored in the later novels King of the Hill and Rulers of the City. Fleming has also explored his Catholic identity as an Irish American in some of his work. His 1970 novel The Sandbox Tree—which took him 17 years to write—aroused controversy on its publication because of its criticism of the preVatican II Roman Catholic Church and the Church’s repression of individual choice. His novel, The Good Shepherd, published four years later, depicts an archbishop’s www.abc-clio.com
struggle between loyalty to the Catholic Church and his disagreement with some of the Church’s teachings. In spite of Fleming’s use of Irish and Catholic themes and concerns in his novels, he has stated that his Catholicism is incidental to his American identity. He has also said that growing up in an Irish-American community and with an Irish-Catholic identity has cut him off from the complete experience of being an American that others have enjoyed. As well as exploring certain aspects of Irish-American life, Fleming has also written extensively about various periods in American history. His work, even when it is fiction, is intensely historical and relates the personal stories of individuals to the wider historical and political developments. He has focused on the American Revolution as a crucial moment in the country’s history. His first published work, Now We Are Enemies, was a historical account of the battle of Bunker Hill. Three years later he published Beat the Last Drum: The Siege of Yorktown. Later, both For Liberty Tavern and Dreams of Glory dealt with the Revolutionary War. Recently, his work Liberty! The American Revolution accompanied the PBS series of the same name. His historical works not only deal with the public history of facts and events but also incorporate personal accounts written in diaries, letters, and journals. His interest in the events of this time continued with his biography of Thomas Jefferson entitled The Man from Monticello, which won a Christopher Award. He has also written biographies of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Harry Truman. He has written about twentiethcentury American history, and World War II formed the subject of his novels Time and Tide, Over There, and Loyalties. In his
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best-selling novel The Officers’ Wives he traces the history of postwar America by depicting the relationships among three women whose husbands graduate from West Point in 1950. He has also explored more recent American history in his novel A Cry of Whiteness, which is an account of the post-civil rights era busing of children for school integration. David Doyle See also: FLANAGAN, Thomas Reference Donnelly, Anna M. “Thomas J. Fleming.” In Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, edited by Michael Glazier. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999.
FLYNN, ELIZABETH GURLEY (1890–1964) Born in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1890, to an Irish-American working-class family whose identification with its Irish roots was strong, Elizabeth Flynn embraced socialism in her youth and by 1907 was an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (a radical group opposed to the perceived tameness of the American Federation of Labor and commonly known as the “Wobblies”). Among those with whom she developed personal bonds through labor activism was the Irish labor leader James Connolly. Flynn retained a lifelong affinity with the Irish nation, nurtured by parents with whom she remained close. Amongst her many associations as an activist were founding membership in the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and, in 1937, the Communist Party. She faced criticism and even expulsion from the ACLU in 1940 as a result of her Communist sympathies. A renowned orator and energetic proponent of workers’ organization, she www.abc-clio.com
was nonetheless, as a campaigner for women’s rights, a frequent critic of male domination of formal trade unions. A Communist candidate for New York State representative in 1942, Flynn also held senior positions within the Communist Party. Caught up in the intense concern over communism in America after World War II, Flynn was arrested in 1951, tried, and convicted of violating the Alien Registration Act. After 28 months of incarceration, she resumed an active role in the Communist Party, becoming its chairman in 1961. Flynn died while on a trip to the Soviet Union in 1964. She was accorded a state funeral, with leading international Communist figures in attendance, including Nikita Khrushchev and Delores Ibarruri. She was an energetic figure who inspired both devotion and hatred, a tireless writer and speaker on behalf of various causes, and a figure whose prominence as a labor campaigner was coupled with a tumultuous private life. Flynn is remembered as a pioneer for labor and women’s rights, an extraordinary orator, and one of the leading female labor leaders in twentieth-century America. Kevin James
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See also: BROPHY, John; CANALS AND THE IRISH INVOLVEMENT; DOMESTIC SERVANTS, IRISH; KNIGHTS OF LABOR; MITCHELL, John; MOLLY MAGUIRES; NO IRISH NEED APPLY; POWDERLY, Terence; QUILL, Michael Joseph References Baxandall, Rosalyn Fraad. Words on Fire: The Life and Writings of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Camp, Helen C. Iron in Her Soul: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the American Left. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1995. 1-800-368-6868
FORD, HENRY 343 Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley. The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography, My First Life 1906–1926. New York: International Publishers, 1973.
FOLEY (ALSO FOLI), ALLAN JAMES (1835–1899) Born in Cahir, Co. Tipperary, in 1835, Allan Foley moved to America in 1853 at the age of 18 and settled in Hartford, Connecticut, at his uncle’s home. Shortly afterwards he joined a local church choir and took vocal lessons. In 1861, on the recommendation of his New York vocal coach, Foley left for Naples, Italy, to commence vocal studies with Giovanni Bisaccia at the conservatory of San Pietro a Maiella. He made his operatic debut as Elmiro in Rossini’s Otello, at Catania, Sicily, in December 1862. Engagements quickly followed at Modena, Turin, and Milan. During this period, Foley also became known as “Signor Foli,” a title he retained to the end of his life. In 1864, he appeared at the Théâtre des Italiens in Paris, and in June 1865 he made his London debut as Saint-Bris, in Les Huguenots. Later that year he sang in Norma in Dublin. In London in July 1870, he created the role of Daland in the first English performance of Der Fliegende Hollander. In 1873, he appeared in Russia in Mose, Der Freischutz and Auber’s Masaniello and in Italy in 1874. He participated in the first English performance of Berlioz’s L’enfance du Christ in Manchester in December 1880. He also sang in oratorios and concerts. In 1878 Foley joined with the Mapleson Opera Company on an American tour as their principal bass vocalist. He was a great success in New York at the Academy of Music, where he performed leading roles in several operas. Foley later made an extended www.abc-clio.com
concert tour of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa during 1892–1893. He had 60 roles in his repertoire, including Bertram in Robert le Diable, Caspar in Der Freischutz, Mephisto in Faust, Assur in Semiramide, and Rodolfo in La Sonnambula. Foley had a tall, imposing stage presence, and his large bass voice extended over two octaves in range. His career lasted 35 years. He died in Southport, England, in 1899. Basil Walsh See also: BALFE, Michael William References Brown J. D., and S. S. Stratton. British Musical Biography. Birmingham, UK: S. S. Stratton, 1897. The Hartford Courant, March 18, 1859; October 21, 1899. Mapleson, J. H. The Mapleson Memoirs 1848–1888. 2 vols. London: Remington & Co., 1888. Reynolds, D. A Neighbor’s Child: The Life and Times of the Irishman Signor Foli. Dublin: Millington Books Ltd., 1994.
FORD, HENRY (1863–1947) In 1847 the Great Irish Famine drove William Ford from his farm in Clonakilty, Co. Cork, to SpringfieldTownship, Michigan. There he built a log cabin and married Mary Litogot, who on July 30, 1863, gave birth to their second child, Henry Ford. Between 1871 and 1879 Ford attended school, absorbing from his teachers the values of diligence, self-reliance, and thrift. Despite his father’s encouragement, Ford did not wish to be a farmer but instead became in 1879 an apprentice in a machine shop in Detroit. He worked nights for a jeweler and the next year began repairing steam engines for the Detroit Drydock Company. Ford credited his work on these
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engines with stoking his interest in the gasoline engine. In 1884 he returned to the family farm and in 1888 married Clara Bryant. In September 1891, the couple moved to Detroit, where Ford became an engineer for Edison Illuminating Company. In 1893 he began designing a lightweight gasoline engine and on June 4, 1896, building on the work of Detroit engineer Charles B. King, tested his first automobile. Ford built a second automobile in 1899 and with capital from local investors founded the Detroit Automobile Company. Bankrupt the next year, Ford revived his fortunes by designing a 26-horsepower racing car and, in 1901, winning a race against Cleveland, Ohio, automaker Alexander Winton. Investors returned to Ford, helping him found the Henry Ford Company that year. Ford proposed to build another racer but investors wanted a commercial model. The rift led Ford to resign in 1902, and the remaining shareholders reorganized the firm as the Cadillac Motor Car Company. Ford built two racers and in 1902 set an American record of 5 minutes 28 seconds on the five-mile track at Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Ford now turned, as investors had urged in 1901, to the manufacture of a commercial automobile. The decision marked a critical moment in the industry. Cadillac and the German automakers envisioned the automobile as a luxury and priced it beyond the means of most consumers. The American manufacturer Oldsmobile undercut these prices, and Ford proposed to price the automobile cheaper still. In pursuit of this aim Ford founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903. By manufacturing a standardized, inexpensive automobile Ford hoped to profit by the volume of sales. Implicit in this hope was the belief that a large market existed for www.abc-clio.com
the automobile. All an automaker needed to do was expand supply to meet demand. To stimulate sales he charged his office manager, James Couzens, with advertising, while Ford set himself the tasks of design, engineering, and production. In June 1903 Ford introduced the Model A at $850 and sold 1,708 cars by September 1904. To meet demand Ford enlarged his Mack Avenue plant in Detroit. Despite this success, Ford treasurer Alexander Malcolmson, clinging to the old vision of the automobile as a luxury, persuaded Henry Ford in 1905 to sell the Model B for $2,000. Profits the next year totaled $290,000 but Ford, ignoring Malcolmson, abandoned production of the high-end models B, C, and F. In July 1906 Ford bought Malcolmson’s 255 shares and thereafter concentrated on the manufacture of inexpensive cars. That year Ford introduced the Model N at $600, although by year’s end he had raised the price to $700. In 1906 Ford manufactured 10,000 Model Ns and grossed $1 million. On October 1, 1908, Ford unveiled the Model T. The initial price of $850 made it more expensive than the Model N, but by August 1916 Ford had driven down the price to $325. By then he had revolutionized production. In 1913 he had introduced the assembly line. Rather than shuttle workers from place to place Ford moved automobiles in various stages of completion to them. Workers specialized in a small number of tasks that they repeated ad nauseam. Wherever possible Ford mechanized production, making the worker less a craftsman than a machine operator. As a result the assembly line and its machines set the pace of work. After touring a Ford plant Charlie Chaplin would distill the drudgery of the assembly line in Modern Times (1936). So high was turnover in 1913 that
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Ford hired 52,000 workers just to maintain a workforce of 13,600. To attract and keep workers, in 1914 Ford reduced the workday from 9 to 8 hours and raised wages to $5 a day, double the rate in other industries. Yet not all workers were eligible for this pay. Ford established a sociology department to enforce his ideal of clean living at home and at work. Only workers who lived up to the values of diligence, selfreliance, and frugality that Ford had prized since childhood made $5 a day. By paying workers more than the prevailing rate Ford helped create a class of consumers able to afford the automobile. The durable Model T could travel poor rural roads, and farmers, prosperous during World War I as never before, made the Model T ubiquitous in the Midwest and Great Plains. Mass production had at last come to the masses. In 1921 the Model T accounted for 55 percent of U.S. auto sales, and by 1927 Ford had sold 15 million Model Ts. By then General Motors (GM) rivaled Ford. In contrast to Ford, GM offered a range of styles and prices and unveiled new models each year to stoke demand. GM aimed to keep consumers dissatisfied with their current model. To fuel the purchase of expensive cars GM extended credit to consumers. Ford responded in May 1927 by halting production of the Model T and on December 1, 1927, unveiling his second Model A. Within two weeks Ford had 400,000 orders. Unable to meet demand, by the end of 1928 Ford held only 15 percent of the U.S. auto market and that year lost $74 million. In 1929 Ford rebounded, capturing 44 percent of U.S. auto sales. The Great Depression, however, cut sales and Ford shelved the Model A in August 1931. Between 1931 and 1933 Ford lost $125 million. www.abc-clio.com
During the Depression Ford emerged as a spokesman for individualism as a counterweight to collectivism. Ford abhorred labor unions and the New Deal as antithetical to the value of self-reliance. To Ford the past was a saga of the pioneer and frontiersman. His upbringing on a farm, Ford believed, represented all that was good about the United States. To promote this idyllic vision of America, in 1933 Ford opened the Edison Institute and Greenfield Museum, an agrarian community. Ford turned against Congress in 1935 when it passed the Wagner Labor Relations Act, which allowed workers to bargain collectively. The formation that year of the United Auto Workers (UAW) exacerbated Ford’s fear that government, labor, and communism were conspiring against him. Although GM and Chrysler signed contracts with the UAW in 1937, Ford refused and was criticized by the National Labor Relations Board for oppressing labor. Only in 1941 did Ford sign a contract with the UAW and then only because his wife threatened divorce. World War II drew Ford into the production of armaments. The plant near Ypsilanti, Michigan, manufactured B-24 bombers for the U.S. Army Air Corps. Despite his role in wartime production Ford declared himself an isolationist. In 1938 he had accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from Germany, leading critics to charge that Ford sympathized with Nazism. His anti-Semitism strengthened this charge as did Ford’s refusal to manufacture engines for Great Britain. Ford suffered strokes in 1938 and 1941. His only son Edsel died in 1943, and in September 1945 grandson Henry Ford II coaxed Henry Ford into retirement. He split his time between a mansion in
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Michigan and a plantation in Georgia. Ford died of a cerebral hemorrhage at his Michigan estate. More than 100,000 mourners viewed his body at Greenfield Village. The family held a funeral service at Saint Paul’s Cathedral in Detroit. Ford is buried at the farm his father had settled. Christopher Cumo See also: GREAT FAMINE, The; MICHIGAN References Brinkley, Douglas. Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company and a Century of Progress. New York: Viking, 2003. Ford, Carin T. Henry Ford: The Car Man. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow, 2003. Shores, Erika L. Henry Ford: A Photo-Illustrated Biography. Mankato, MN: Bridgestone Books, 2004. Wood, John C., and Michael C. Wood, eds. Henry Ford: Critical Evaluations in Business and Management. New York: Routledge, 2003. Zarzycki, Daryl. Henry Ford: Cars for Everyone. Hockessin, DE: Mitchell Lane, 2005.
FORD, JOHN (1895–1973) An American film director with more than 100 productions, some of which are among the most influential films of the twentieth century, John Ford is one of Hollywood’s best-known directors of westerns, but his career was complex and various. Whether his films are set in the majestic Monument Valley on the Arizona-Utah border or in the grimy streets of early twentieth-century Dublin, Ford’s visions of rugged but disillusioned heroes (embodied in the actor John Wayne, who was made a star through Ford’s films) are part of the American consciousness. He mastered a Hollywood narrative style, using sweeping images of a dangerous but profound moral landscape. Films such as Stagecoach (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My www.abc-clio.com
Valley (1941), The Quiet Man (1952), The Searchers (1957), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) depict protagonists who are outsiders struggling to maintain bonds of family and community with courage, perseverance, duty, and honor. His work has influenced other directors, including Orson Welles, Stephen Spielberg, and Akira Kurosawa. Ford won the Academy Award for best direction four times (he was nominated six times) and was granted the first American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1973. Born John Martin Feeney in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, in 1895, Ford alternately claimed his original name was Sean Aloysius O’Feeney, or O’Fearna, as a tribute to his Irish immigrant parents (his father came to the United States from Ireland in 1872). In 1914, Ford traveled to Hollywood to join his brother Francis (who had already taken the name “Ford”), who was then working with Universal Studios. John did some acting and had a few jobs as a prop man, but in 1917 he directed his first feature-length silent film, Straight Shooting. From that point on, John Ford and the Hollywood sound film matured in unison. The year 1923, when “John Ford” became his official screen name, saw the production of The Iron Horse (1924), an epic American frontier drama detailing the building of the transcontinental railroad. This silent film established Ford in the top ranks of Hollywood directors and introduced the recognizable Ford elements of an idealized pioneer West and the rugged hero. The 1930s and early 1940s, however, were banner years for Ford. In 1935, The Informer (based on the novel by Irish writer Liam O’Flaherty) was released to critical acclaim and gave audiences a taste of Ford’s more expressionistic style. Starring Victor
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McLaglan as the dispossessed and hunted Gypo Nolan, The Informer and its Dublin location (shot on Hollywood sound stages) are presented in the texture and style of early film noir. The Informer won Academy Awards for best screenplay, best actor, and best picture. Ford’s images of Dublin as a fogbound, dark, and despairing city of devastation echo the atmosphere of danger and destruction in many of his other films. In 1939 Stagecoach netted Ford another Oscar nomination and the film, with its open-air expansiveness of the West embodied in Monument Valley, revitalized the western genre for American audiences. Stagecoach also established John Wayne as a major Hollywood actor, and Wayne would continue to work on several films with Ford. The permanence and power of nature, and resolute men fighting for justice, became trademark Ford elements with his next two major films, both of which won Academy Awards: The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and How Green Was My Valley (1941). These years saw Ford bring together a group of actors, writers, and film creators who would become known, unofficially, as Ford’s stock company. The Hollywood careers of John Wayne, Henry Fonda, John Carradine, Ward Bond, and Dudley Nichols were interwoven with Ford’s. Ford was on active duty during World War II with the U.S. Navy as head of the Naval Field Photographic Unit. He was commissioned in the Naval Reserve with the rank of lieutenant commander and retired with the honorary rank of rear admiral (Ford’s tombstone is inscribed “Admiral John Ford”). During the war, Ford made several documentaries, and two of them— Battle of Midway (1942) and December 7th (1943)—won Oscars. Battle of Midway won the Academy Award for feature-length www.abc-clio.com
documentary, a special award for the film’s historical value in offering a camera record of one of World War II’s most decisive battles. December 7th won for best documentary, short subject. The military ethos would find expression in several of Ford’s fiction films. John Wayne’s Lt. Col. Kirby Yorke in Rio Grande (1950) is but one such staunch army hero. Yorke, the leader of a military outpost in the years following the Civil War, faces his toughest battle against Apache warriors. Yorke’s military training and discipline sustain his fight to redeem his honor and save his family’s lives. The postwar years saw an increasingly bleak vision in Ford’s films, with the notable exception of The Quiet Man in 1952. Starring John Wayne (who always called Ford “Coach”) as Sean Thornton, the film depicts Thornton’s move from America back to Ireland to reclaim an ancestral homestead and find love with Mary Kate, played by Maureen O’Hara. The Quiet Man is well known for its use of stereotypical Irish icons from Celtic crosses and verdant glades to stormy weather and rollicking pub scenes. The film was popular in both the United States and the Republic of Ireland, although some Irish reviewers at the time were critical of what they saw as Ford’s retreat into pastoral and sentimental images of Ireland. Nonetheless, The Quiet Man brought Ford an unprecedented fourth Academy Award. Four years later, Ford made what many consider his best film, The Searchers (1956). Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) is a bitter, ruthless Civil War veteran on an epic quest for on orphaned niece kidnapped by Comanche natives. The hatred that propels his years-long search is made questionable and problematic as he realizes his niece has found family and community with the
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Comanche. The power of family bonds and notions of military honor are more intricate in this late Ford classic. Ford’s last film is Seven Women (1966), starring Anne Bancroft. The film holds true to signature Ford elements: an emphasis on action, colorful characters, a romanticized vision of the past, and a celebration of family or community ties. Danine Farquharson See also: FITZGERALD, Barry; O’HARA, Maureen; WAYNE, John References Bogdanovich, Peter. John Ford. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Eyman, Scott. Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. Gallagher, Tag. John Ford: the Man and His Films. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. McBride, Joseph. Searching for John Ford. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001. Rockett, Kevin, Luke Gibbons, and John Hill, eds. Cinema and Ireland. London: Routledge, 1987. Sarris, Andrew. The John Ford Movie Mystery. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975.
FORD, PATRICK (1837–1913) Born in Galway on April 12, 1837, Patrick Ford immigrated with his parents to Boston in 1845. At the age of 15, Ford became a printer’s devil at the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper The Liberator and remained there until he was 24. His experiences with Garrison had a lasting effect on his belief and advocacy for social reform. During the American Civil War, he fought on the side of the Union army in the Ninth Massachusetts Regiment. After the war, he spent a couple of years in Charleston, South Carolina, editing a Republican newspaper before moving to New York. In 1870, Ford settled in New www.abc-clio.com
Portrait of Patrick Ford, Irish American nationalist and founder of the newspaper Irish World. (Library of Congress)
York City and founded his own newspaper, the Irish World. In the pages of the Irish World, Ford championed the need for radical social change. An advocate for various reform issues, Ford was a strong supporter of temperance, was against imperialism (both American and British), and argued for women’s and African-American rights. After the outbreak of economic depression in America in 1873, he became a staunch defender of the rights of labor and industrial agitation. He backed labor union organization, the eight-hour work day, and the income tax, and he supported GreenbackLabor candidates and land nationalization. Ford argued that the root cause of the exploitation of the laboring poor was the monopolization of land and wealth by the privileged and nonproducing class of speculators and cartels. His adding the
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words and American Industrial Liberator to the title of the Irish World in 1878 is evidence of this new emphasis. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Ford’s belief in Irish independence went hand in hand with his struggle for social reform in America. He linked the cause of the industrial poor in America with that of the rural poor in Ireland, arguing that “the cause of the poor in Donegal is the cause of the factory slave in Fall River.” His linkage of Irish nationalism and American radical social reform raised the ire of both moderate Irish-American nationalists like John Boyle O’Reilly and Patrick Collins, who argued for Irish-American middle-class respectability, and single-minded nationalists like John Devoy, who believed any focus away from Irish freedom was a dangerous diversion. Ford’s troubled relations with other Irish-American leaders would prevent him from maintaining close and lasting relationships with contemporaries. The outbreak of crop failure and agrarian unrest in Ireland in 1879 led to the formation of the Irish Land League by Michael Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell, and the rise of this movement allowed Ford to be most influential during this period. The Land League was an attempt to use the rural unrest in Ireland to achieve political reform in Ireland by placing pressure on the British government. Both Davitt and Parnell undertook extensive fund-raising tours of the United States during 1880 and raised substantial funds for the Land League in Ireland. Another effect of the trip was the creation of an American branch of the Land League in May 1880. The Irish National Land League of America would provide for the most significant cooperation, albeit briefly, amongst Irish-American working-class, middle-class, www.abc-clio.com
and doctrinaire nationalists until the aftermath of the Easter Rising of 1916. In January 1880, on his own volition, sensing the opportunity that the Land League and Parnell’s visit presented, Ford placed a small ad in the Irish World telling readers that he would accept contributions to the Land League and would forward them to Ireland. Soon after, the Irish World began acknowledging donations and tabulating the amounts weekly under the heading “Land League Fund.” In March, collections averaged more than $1,000 per week and were up to $2,500 per week the next month. By May, the Irish World had collected close to $25,000 for the Land League. Contributions came from a variety of sources, and local Land League branches began to sprout up across America. With the formation of the official American Land League in May, donations to the Irish World began to fall off. Ford countered this by drastically expanding coverage of local Land Leagues, detailing the formation of new branches, and following closely the activities of the League in Ireland. Regaining its earlier momentum, the Irish World, between January and September 1881, collected more than $100,000. Ford also established a “Spread the Light Fund,” which allowed for the free distribution of thousands of copies of the Irish World in Ireland. The amount of funds collected and the transatlantic readership of the Irish World greatly increased Ford’s influence. The British Prime Minister William Gladstone would later claim that without the Irish World and the money it collected, there would have been no agitation in Ireland. In April 1882, Parnell and Gladstone reached an agreement to end Land League agitation, commonly known as the Kilmainham Treaty. Parnell, anxious to
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retain the momentum caused by the Land League, shifted his focus to achieving Irish Home Rule. This movement was dominated by middle-class Irish and IrishAmerican moderates, however, and more radical nationalists like Ford were pushed to the fringe. Because of this change, Ford concentrated more on achieving social reform in America than Ireland. In 1886, Ford supported social reformer Henry George’s campaign for mayor of New York City. George had been a special correspondent for the Irish World in Ireland during the early 1880s, and George’s book Progress and Poverty, which argued for land nationalization, was a major influence on Ford. After 1886, however, in the aftermath of the Haymarket Riot and the increasingly militant labor movement, Ford retreated from his earlier radicalism, espousing more moderate, respectable reform until his death. Remaining editor of the Irish World until 1911, Ford became a supporter of John Redmond and Irish Home Rule, championed the Republican Party, and became a vehement opponent of socialism. He died at his home in Brooklyn in 1913. Ely Janis See also: DAVITT, Michael; PRESS, THE ETHNIC IRISH
FOREIGN POLICY, IRISH Article 29 of the Irish Constitution of 1937 directs that the Republic of Ireland’s foreign policy follow a clear moral purpose in the pursuit of peaceful cooperation, international arbitration of disputes, and adherence to international law. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the Republic of Ireland continues to follow this mandate by focusing attention on international disarmament, human rights, and peace in Northern Ireland and by working through the United Nations (UN) and European Union (EU) to achieve these goals. The most important objective of Irish foreign policy in the twenty-first century is to end the cycle of violence in Northern Ireland through a program of disarming the paramilitary groups and building democratic institutions for self-government. The Good Friday Accords of 1998, which were signed by the Irish and British governments as well as the representatives of the major sectarian parties, established the framework to meet these objectives. In May 1998 popular referenda in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland approved the Accords. While the Accords have been successful in stopping the violence that had held the people of Northern Ireland in a state of terror since 1969, the agreement has stalled on the development of self-rule. In October 2002 Britain suspended the assembly of Northern Ireland. The Irish and British governments worked to get the process started again, but to no avail. Even though the assembly did not meet, elections were held in November 2003 and the voters moved away from the moderate parties on both sides toward the more hard-line positions. In April 2004 the Irish and British governments issued a joint report critical of the stance taken by the
References Brown, Thomas N. Irish-American Nationalism 1870–1890. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1966. Foner, Eric. Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Funchion, Michael. Irish American Voluntary Organizations. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983. Joyce, William L. Editors and Ethnicity: A History of the Irish-American Press, 1848–1883. New York: Arno Press, 1976. Rodechko, James. Patrick Ford and His Search for America: A Case Study of Irish-American Journalism 1870–1913. New York: Arno Press, 1976. www.abc-clio.com ABC-CLIO
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sectarian extremists. Ireland welcomed the announcement in July 2005 that the Irish Republican Army was giving up its armed struggle. Proud of the progress made so far, the Irish government is still very concerned about the future of the Good Friday Accords and the long-term prospects of achieving a permanent peace in Northern Ireland. To build better relations between the citizens of the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, in 1979 the Irish government established Cooperation Ireland, an aid program that promotes cross-border cultural ties. Between 1999 and 2004 the Irish government provided almost 14 million euros to 450 different groups as part of the program. After issues in the north, Ireland has pursued several other important objectives with vigor. Primary among them is the cause of disarmament, including nuclear nonproliferation and the Ottawa Convention of 1997 to ban the use of antipersonnel landmines. The Irish government dedicates resources to the removal of land mines and education on the dangers of land mines in many parts of the world. A second objective is fostering human rights. Ireland stands firmly against the death penalty, torture, and terrorism. In 2002 Ireland ratified the UN convention against torture. In 2004 Ireland used its term of presidency of the EU to call for abolishing the death penalty. Later in the year the UN Committee on Human Rights adopted the resolution as well. The primary method of Irish foreign policy is to act through international organizations. Representing a small country with a population of slightly less than 4 million persons, the Irish government feels it can only push its agenda by voicing its goals through larger organizations. In www.abc-clio.com
1955 Ireland abandoned its neutrality and joined the UN. From 2002 to 2005 Ireland was a member of the UN Committee on Human Rights, which played an important part in Irish foreign policy goals. Ireland served on the UN Security Council in 2002 and worked to get resolution 1409 passed. Resolution 1409 sought to lessen the burden of sanctions against Iraq on its people, and focus the punishment instead on the regime of Saddam Hussein. Although Ireland is a peaceful nation, it is willing to allow, as a sign of its commitment to the UN, units of the Permanent Defense Force (PDF) to serve as peacekeepers. Between 2000 and 2006 more than 1,200 Irish UN peacekeepers were deployed to Cypress, East Timor, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Liberia. In addition, individual members and smaller units of the PDF participate as observers in UN operations around the world. Ireland contributes forces to EU peacekeeping operations as well. Between 1999 and 2006 about 1,200 PDF peacekeepers served in Kosovo and the former Yugoslavia. Membership in the EU has been a difficult balancing act for the Irish government. The government supports membership and full commitment to the EU. However, changes in the past decade have caused the Irish public to view the EU with considerably more suspicion. Throughout the 1990s Ireland moved toward meeting EU standards, including adopting the Euro with enthusiasm. The booming economy and double-digit economic growth bolstered the popularity of the EU. As the EU centralized, however, Ireland experienced some problems. It increasingly lost control of its agriculture policy, an important segment of its economy, and found itself in violation of many EU standards. Ireland also made clear that despite her commitment to the rapid
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deployment force, she did not consider the union a military alliance and reserved judgment on when her forces would be committed to action. In 2001 Irish voters rejected the Treaty of Nice, which called for the expansion of the EU into southern and central Europe. Ireland was only the European country to reject this treaty. The government resubmitted the treaty the following year and it was ratified. Ironically, it was during the Irish term of the EU presidency, in May 2004, that the 10 nations were added to the union. Since that time, the rift between the position of the government and the sentiment of the public continues to grow. In 2005, after the failure of France and the Netherlands to ratify the EU constitution, the Irish government suspended a referendum scheduled for the fall. It is conducting a public relations campaign to persuade a noncommittal Irish electorate that ratification would benefit the country. In a poll conducted in January 2006, 78 percent of Irish respondents stated that they wanted to see work permits reestablished as a way of preventing immigrants from southern and eastern Europe from taking jobs and driving down wages. Under the Irish Aid Program (IAP) established in 1974, Ireland actively provides funds to underdeveloped countries around the world. In 2006 the total estimated amount of aid is about 750 million euros. IAP specifically targets education, medical care, and hunger in sub-Saharan Africa and East Timor. Aid is also distributed to other troubled places, such as recovery efforts from the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of December 26, 2004. In 2006 the Irish government announced plans to place greater emphasis on environmental concerns in the distribution of IAP funds. IAP funds are distributed by approved Irish www.abc-clio.com
nongovernmental organizations, such as Trócaire, and international organizations, such as the Red Cross. Like all governments, Ireland seeks to expand trade relations with other nations. In the last several years, Ireland has undertaken significant initiatives to establish trade and business agreements with a coordinated Asian strategy, focusing on China, a difficult task considering Ireland’s support of human rights. Gregory J. Dehler References Department of Foreign Affairs. Annual Report 2003. http://foreignaffairs.gov.ie (accessed May 1, 2006). Department of Foreign Affairs. Annual Report 2004. http://foreignaffairs.gov.ie (accessed May 1, 2006). Department of Foreign Affairs. Challenges and Opportunities Abroad: White Paper on Foreign Policy. http://foreignaffairs.gov.ie (accessed May 1, 2006). Laffan, Brigid, and Ben Tonra. “Europe and the International Dimension.” In Politics in the Republic of Ireland, edited by John Coakley and Michelle Gallagher. 4th ed. New York: Routledge, 2004. Tonra, Ben, and Eilias Ward, eds. Ireland in International Affairs: Interests, Institutions, and Identities, Essays in Honour of Professor N. P. Keatinge, FTCD and MRIA. Dublin: Institute for Public Administration, 2002.
FOSTER, STEPHEN COLLINS (1826–1864) The Fosters were of Ulster stock, the composer’s great-grandfather having emigrated from Co. Derry to Pennsylvania in 1728. The family moved to Virginia and then back to Pennsylvania where Stephen Foster was born in Lawrenceville, near Pittsburgh, on July 4, 1826. His father tried a variety of ventures in business and politics with
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Composer Stephen Collins Foster’s songs speak of nineteenth-century dreams and nostalgia. Foster is famous for songs such as “Oh! Susanna” and “My Old Kentucky Home,” the Kentucky state song. These familiar tunes, once popularized by blackface minstrel show performers are now prized Americana. (Library of Congress)
limited success, leaving the family with a somewhat tenuous hold on middle-class status. Yet there was a piano in the home, at least in the good times, and the young Foster learned to play guitar, flute, and the piano. He received formal musical training from a skilled German immigrant teacher in Pittsburgh. Whatever Foster learned from studying the classics, however, it was popular music that claimed his talents. By the time he started writing songs, around 1844, the minstrel movement had begun, introducing two types of songs to the American public. The first was the fast-paced comic dance song that combined Scottish and Irish fiddle tunes with African-American banjo rhythms. It is not clear how much of www.abc-clio.com
this new American musical vernacular Foster picked up from the streets, so to speak, and how much was in imitation of the first minstrel performers. Nevertheless, his “Oh! Susanna” (1848) and “The Camptown Races” (1850) are among the few minstrel dance songs remembered today. The minstrel stage also popularized the sentimental plantation songs, which projected onto African-American slaves white nostalgia for the lost childhood home, as in “My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night” (1853); for departed parents in the guise of “Massa’s in the Cold Ground” (1852); for the separation of lovers, as in “Farewell My Lilly Dear” (1851); and for the death of the beloved, as in “Nelly Was a Lady” (1849). Improbable and embarrassing as these black-face conceits seem today, Foster’s plantation songs were not as racist as many people assume. As Charles Hamm argues, the pieces bestow a level of human emotions and even nobility on the slaves depicted in the songs. Although Foster had considerable success with his minstrel music, he wrote his best songs for another popular genus, the so-called parlor ballad, which at its best combined the strong flowing melodies of the Anglo-Celtic folk-song tradition with echoes of classical harmonies and decorations. Although requiring some formal training, most of these songs were within the vocal and pianistic range of a musically talented member (usually female) of the average middle-class family. From the beginning Foster’s songs showed the influences of the British and Irish songwriters such as C. F. Horn, Thomas Linley, Samuel Lover, and, most important of all, Thomas Moore. Moore’s poetry and songs, especially his Irish Melodies, were very popular in the United States. His music was the
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principal source in America for the traditional Gaelic airs upon which all of Moore’s Irish songs were based. Charles Hamm finds Moore’s influence in the structure of some of Foster’s best melodies. In songs such as “Gentle Annie” (1856), “Old Folks at Home” (1851), and “Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair” (1854), Foster’s melodic lines, like so many of the Irish airs Moore used, often contain an octave jump within the first phrase. Foster, like many other American poets and songwriters, may also have been influenced by one of Moore’s major themes— what William W. Austin has identified as “the dream of home.” Many of Foster’s parlor and plantation songs echo Moore’s sense of nostalgia for the loss of the places and friends of childhood and youth. Although part of international popular culture, songs like Foster’s “Old Dog Tray” (1853) had special meaning for restless Americans, who were ever on the move, always tearing down the physical reminders of the past to make way for the future. Although Moore’s influence was significant, Foster assimilated many of the styles that shaped American popular music during his lifetime. He easily incorporated Scottish, German, and Italian elements into his songs, and this versatility helped make him one of America’s best-loved and most respected songwriters during the nineteenth century. William H. A. Williams See also: MOORE, Thomas References Austin, William W. “Susanna” “Jeanie,” and “The Old Folks At Home”: The Songs of Stephen C. Foster from His Time to Ours. 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1989. Hamm, Charles. Yesterdays: Popular Song in America, New York: W. W. Norton, 1983. www.abc-clio.com
FOSTER,VERE HENRY LOUIS (1819–1900) Born in Copenhagen on April 25, 1819, Vere Foster was a younger son of Sir Augustus John Foster, diplomat and plenipotentiary to the United States (1811–1812) and Denmark (1814–1824). After an education at Eton and Oxford, Vere Foster served as attaché at Rio de Janeiro (1842–1843) and Montevideo (1845–1847). During 1847, the worst of the Great Famine years, the 28-year-old bachelor visited Ireland for the first time and was deeply affected by the misery he witnessed. Leaving the diplomatic service to work for the poor on his brother’s estate at Ardee, Co. Louth, he concluded that Ireland’s problem derived from “excessive competition for employment.” With this in mind, he sought immediately to remove from Ireland those who could profit from the greater opportunities available in America. His aim, as he said in the journal Irish Female Emigration in June 1855, was the “raising [of ] the condition of the poorest families in the poorest districts of Ireland, by assisting the emigration to North America of one able-bodied member of each family (in most cases a woman), specially selected on account of her poverty, good character, and industrious habits, with the expectation that she will herself take the remaining members of her family out of poverty.” Despite opposition—including at least one threatening letter from the notorious “Captain Rock”—Vere Foster persisted in his purpose to encourage female emigration, believing as he did that the demand for women in America exceeded that for men. Before encouraging emigration, Foster set about collecting information on conditions, both on the emigrant ships and in North America. Following that, in 1850 he
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went to America, traveling more than 10,000 miles in an effort to ascertain the position of the working classes and the prospects for immigrants. He gave £25,000 to Irish women and men to assist their emigration. During the first phase of his emigration schemes he traveled steerage to New York on an emigrant boat. The conditions he and others experienced on the voyage led to public exposure in the newspapers and parliamentary inquiries, which resulted in transformative emigration laws. The publicity was very damaging to shipowners seeking to profit from shortchanging emigrants. As a result of the incident Vere Foster found the cause that would occupy the rest of his life. Once having found a goal for his life Foster expended all his abilities toward the best way to improve the lives of his countrypeople. A firm believer in education, he gave grants and helped in building several hundred new parish schoolhouses throughout Ireland. He also became the first president of the Irish National Teachers Organization and devised a series of copybooks, used widely by schools into the 1970s, which gave instruction in penmanship, drawing, and water coloring, skills he considered important for all children. Foster’s travels in Illinois in the 1850s were recounted in a fund-raising lecture that he gave years later. He described traveling at his own expense, accompanied by the ladies of an immigration society in “Incidents of Travel in America,” a lecture delivered in the Rosemary Street Lecture Hall, Belfast, on January 27, 1879. In Springfield, Illinois, Foster placed one young woman with a distinguished Springfield lawyer, Abraham Lincoln. Throughout his career Foster collected systematic information on conditions in www.abc-clio.com
North America by soliciting information through journals such as The Freeman’s Journal. He gave away 250,000 copies of his Penny Emigrant’s Guide before being forced to charge one penny apiece for it. Foster’s papers in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland attest to a singleminded, somewhat eccentric individual, who brooked no interference in his life mission. Despite the originality of his approach, however, Foster never became a controversialist and his papers show him always retaining a personal touch. His papers are full of correspondence with those he helped as well as those who solicited his help. Many distinguished people provided Foster with information about conditions in America, among them Horace Greeley, the well-known editor of the New York Tribune. Another was John Boyle O’Reilly, the distinguished editor of the Boston Pilot newspaper whose leadership of the Boston Irish-American community is still recalled in a statue of him in the Fenway area of the city. Foster was entirely true to his principle of keeping any influence of religion or religious bias from influencing his efforts, and so he opposed proselytizing in any form. It was a view consistent with the concept of separation of church and state that influenced the Founding Fathers in the United States. Between 1880 and 1886 Foster estimated that he assisted almost 20,000 women between the ages of 18 and 30 to emigrate from the west of Ireland to the United States. In real terms this accounted for approximately 9.6 percent of the total female migration from Connaught from 1851 to 1856. Foster spent his last years in Belfast in charitable work. He died there, unmarried, on December 21, 1900, having spent his entire personal fortune on his life
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dream of helping Irish emigrants go to America. Foster’s papers are on deposit in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. Ruth-Ann M. Harris See also: EMIGRATION; O’REILLY, John Boyle References Foster, Vere. Origin and History of Vere Foster’s Writing and Drawing Copy-books. Privately printed, 1882. Hall, Brendan. “Vere Foster and the City of Mobile.” Journal of the Genealogical Society of Ireland 3, No. 1 (Spring 2002). Harris, Ruth-Ann M. “‘Where the Poor Man Is Not Crushed Down to Exalt the Aristocrat’: Vere Foster’s Programmes of Assisted Emigration in the Aftermath of the Irish Famine.” In The Meaning of the Famine, edited by Patrick O’Sullivan, 172–194. London: Leicester University Press, 1997. Harris, Ruth-Ann M. “Introduction.” In Search for Missing Friends: Irish Immigrant Advertisements Placed in the Boston Pilot, edited by Ruth-Ann M. Harris and B. Emer O’Keeffe. Vol. IV, 1857–1860. Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1995: i-xxxiv. Kohli, Marjorie. The Golden Bridge: Young Immigrants to Canada 1833–1939. Waterloo, Ontario: Natural Heritage Books, 2003. McNeill, Mary. Vere Foster 1819–1900: An Irish Benefactor. Newton Abbot, UK: David and Charles, 1971. Mullinger, Emma. “Cargoes of Virtue: The Work of Vere Foster and Charlotte Grace O’Brien for Nineteenth-Century Women Emigrants.” Dissertation. University of Dublin, Trinity College, Dublin, 1996. O’Connell, Anne. “Assisted Female Emigration: Vere Foster’s Scheme 1880–1896.” Dissertation. University of Limerick, 1998.
FURLONG, GUILLERMO (1889–1974) Guillermo Furlong was born on June 21, 1889, in Arroyo Seco—a settlement of Irish and other sheep farmers in southern www.abc-clio.com
Santa Fe province in Argentina—to James Joseph Furlong and Anne Cardiff of Kilrane, Co. Wexford. He was educated in Rosario, in Mr. Woods’s Protestant school and Mr. Robb’s St. Bartholomew’s School. Thanks to the Irish chaplain in Rosario, Father John Sheehy, Furlong entered the Colegio de la Inmaculada in the city of Santa Fe, where he began learning Spanish at the age of 13. In 1903, encouraged by Julián Hurley, S.J., he joined the Jesuit order as minor seminarian in Córdoba. In 1905 Furlong was sent to study in Spain, at the Monastery of Veruela (Aragón). He completed his studies in the United States, where he stayed from 1911 through 1913, studying in Woodstock College, Maryland, and obtaining a doctorate from the University of Georgetown, Washington, D.C. Furlong returned to Argentina after his graduation, and in 1916 he was employed as a teacher of history at the Jesuit Colegio del Salvador in Buenos Aires and Colegio del Sagrado Corazón in Montevideo, Uruguay. He traveled to Spain and studied theology in Colegio Máximo of Sarriá, Barcelona, and was ordained in 1924. He returned to Argentina and taught literature, history, English, and other subjects in Colegio del Salvador. In 1939 Furlong was appointed a member of the national academy of history, and in 1942 he was one of the founders of the Society of Ecclesiastical History. In 1956 he founded the Society of Geography and became its first president. In 1970 he was appointed a member of the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica of Madrid. As these details suggest, Furlong was interested in a wide range of subjects and disciplines. He was also involved in geographic explorations and conducted ethnological and linguistic studies of Indian peoples in Argentina, based on writings by
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missionaries of the colonial period. His publications included studies on music, libraries, architecture, mathematics, medicine, and natural history. He also did some work on the role of women in society at a time when women’s history was just beginning to elicit some interest from the maledominated history profession. In all his published work he relied heavily on the archival material available in Argentina, and this enabled him to resurrect some important individuals from the colonial time. He stoutly defended the Catholic religion and Argentina and wanted to revive faithfully the colonial period in the Rio de la Plata region. Father Furlong was against historical revisionism in Argentina, although he considered the Rosas regime as the first competent Argentine administration in the country. His quality research enabled him to produce numerous groundwork studies on colonial Argentina. Furlong was awarded the National History Award (1952), the Spanish Order of Isabel la Católica, and honoris causa doctorates by Universidad del Salvador (1962) and Universidad de Buenos Aires (1971). He directed the history journals Estudios (1947–1952) and Anales (1957–1974). He was a remarkably productive writer, having published more than 2,000 studies— including more than 100 books—before
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his death. Frequently, he signed articles and reviews with pseudonyms or initials. Among his most notable books are Glorias Santafecinas: Buenaventura Suárez S.J., Francisco Javier Iturri S.J., Cristóbal Altamirano S.J. Estudios Biobibliográficos (1929), El P. Pedro Lozano S.J.: Su Personalidad y Su Obra. Biobibliografía (1930), Los Jesuitas y la Cultura Rioplatense (1933), Nacimiento y Desarrollo de la Filosofía en el Río de la Plata, 1536–1810 (1952), Historia y Bibliografía de las Primeras Imprentas Rioplatenses, 1700–1850 (1953), and Historia Social y Cultural del Río de la Plata, 1536–1810 (1969). He died in Buenos Aires on May 20, 1974. Edmundo Murray See also: MURRAY, Luis Alberto; O’GORMAN, Edmundo and Juan; O’LEARY, Juan Emiliano; VICUÑA McKENNA, Benjamín References Auza, Néstor Tomás. “Guillermo Furlong: El Hombre, el Sacerdote y el Historiador.” In Homenaje de las Academias Nacionales al R. P. Guillermo Furlong S.J., 29–47. Buenos Aires: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1992. Geoghegan, Abel Rodolfo. “Apuntes para una biografía de Guillermo Furlong” Archivum: Revista de la Junta de Historia Eclesiástica Argentina 13 (1979): 31–41. Larroca, Jorge. El Padre Furlong: Proletario de la Cultura. Buenos Aires: Editorial Retorno, 1969.
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G GAELIC ATHLETIC ASSOCIATION The Gaelic Athletic Association for the Preservation and Cultivation of National Pastimes was founded in November 1884. Within weeks, the rather cumbersome name was shortened to the Gaelic Athletic Association, or GAA. The driving force behind the organization was Michael Cusack, an Irish-speaking civil servant and native of Co. Cork. Like other proponents of the Irish-Ireland movement, Cusack sought to preserve the native culture and halt the incursion of English habits and customs. In addition, he hoped that a revival of native Irish games would reverse what he perceived to be the moral and physical degeneration of the Irish countryside. In an anonymous letter printed in two prominent national weeklies, United Ireland and Irishman, on October 11, 1884, Cusack appealed to the Irish people to reject English sports and customs in favor of such distinctively Irish games as Gaelic football and hurling. Maurice Davin, a farmer near Carrick-on-Suir and a former athlete of international standing, responded with a letter supporting Cusack’s ideas and offering to help establish a new sporting organization to promote national games. Near the
end of October Cusack and Davin issued a circular announcing an organizational meeting for what would become the GAA; the meeting would be held at Hayes Hotel in Thurles on November 1, 1884. The turnout at the first meeting was small—only 13 or 14 attended. Those present voted Davin president of the organization and agreed to invite Dr. Thomas William Croke, Charles Stewart Parnell, and Michael Davitt to become patrons. The subsequent acceptance by all three men— archbishop of Cashel, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, and head of the Land League, respectively—provided the GAA with nationalist credentials and contributed to the almost instant popularity and success of the GAA. Archbishop Croke’s letter of acceptance was widely published in Irish newspapers supportive of the GAA. In the letter, Croke decries the fact that Ireland had begun importing from England not only manufactured goods but also fashions, literature, mannerisms, and “alien” games and pastimes. It is up to such organizations as the GAA, Croke maintained, to reverse the betrayal of Irish culture and nationality. Croke’s letter continues to be reprinted in most GAA publications as a statement of the Association’s founding principles.
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Almost immediately upon its foundation, the GAA entered into controversy with a rival organization, the Irish Amateur Athletic Association (IAAA). At the third meeting of the GAA, held in January 1885, officers drew up rules for hurling and Gaelic football to codify and standardize those traditional games. When the GAA published the rules for those sports in the United Ireland newspaper on February 7, 1885 (and rules for weight-throwing and athletics in the two subsequent weeks), the IAAA, an AngloIrish body, roundly criticized the GAA for presuming to govern all athletic sports. As relations between the two groups deteriorated, the GAA banned members of any other sporting organization from joining its ranks. The following year, members of the GAA were banned from playing or attending English games, including football and rugby, on pain of expulsion from the Association. Despite the controversial bans, the GAA continued to expand quickly throughout Ireland. At the annual general meeting of 1886, 84 clubs were represented. The rapid expansion was due in large part to the decision to structure the GAA along parish lines, thus using an already familiar framework around which to organize clubs. Recognizing the GAA as a potential recruiting ground for physical force nationalists, Dublin Castle took an immediate interest in the organization. The Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) monitored GAA activities and kept detailed reports of information provided by local policemen, government agents, and informers from within the GAA. In response to such surveillance, the GAA banned members of the RIC from participating in Gaelic games. The link between the GAA and the extreme wing of the nationalist movement, while perhaps exaggerated by police at the www.abc-clio.com
time, was not without substance. As early as 1886, P. T. Hoctor, a well-known leftwing nationalist and a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), was elected vice president of the GAA. The following year tension between the constitutional and physical force nationalists within the organization ran high as the IRB gained substantial control of the central executive board. The increased politicization of the GAA prompted Davin to resign as president in May 1887, though he was reinstated the following January. In addition to fostering local patriotism and national feeling in Ireland, the GAA also helped to promote and preserve a distinctively Irish ethnic identity among emigrants bound for North America and elsewhere. In the late nineteenth century especially, the GAA was one of a number of social, cultural, and political organizations that helped Irish immigrants adapt to life in urban America. In late September 1888, at the suggestion of Maurice Davin, a group of more than 50 athletes, hurlers, and officials embarked upon a six-week tour of American cities. Although the exhibition hurling games and athletic contests were less successful as fund-raisers than Davin had hoped, they did raise the profile of Gaelic games in America. Before long a number of clubs had been organized in areas with large Irish immigrant communities. Playing Gaelic sports eased the transition from Ireland to America (and elsewhere) by allowing participants to maintain a link to Ireland and thus preserve a sense of ethnic distinctiveness while adjusting to American life. The North American County Board of the GAA continues to promote hurling, Gaelic football, and camogie (hurling for women) throughout the United States.
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Since the partition of Ireland, the GAA’s political profile has remained high north of the border, as the organization has continued to espouse the goal of a united 32-county Ireland. So controversial has the GAA’s presence in the north been that in October 1991 the Ulster Defence Association, a Protestant paramilitary group, added the GAA to its list of legitimate targets because of the Association’s alleged sectarianism and support for the republican movement. Many criticized the retention of Rule 21, the controversial ban on members of the British security forces playing Gaelic games, as evidence that the GAA was unwilling to work toward a peaceful inclusive society. The ban was finally lifted, however, in November 2001. Kathleen Ruppert References Darby, Paul. “Gaelic Sport and the Irish Diaspora in Boston, 1879–90.” Irish Historical Studies 33, no. 132 (November 2003): 387–403. Doherty, Gillian M., and Tomás O’Riordan. “History of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA).” http://multitext.ucc.ie/d/ History_of_the_Gaelic_Athletic_ Association_GAA (accessed July 30, 2007). Lyons, F. S. L. Ireland Since the Famine. London: Fontana Press, 1985.
GALLAGHER,TESS (1943–) Tess Gallagher was born Tess Bond to Leslie Bond, longshoreman and logger, and Georgia Morris, on July 21, 1943, in Port Angeles, Washington. Gallagher graduated from the University of Washington with a BA in 1963; she attended American poet Theodore Roethke’s last writing workshop. That June she married Lawrence Gallagher, a Marine pilot; she worked as a hospital nurse, and they divorced in 1968. She www.abc-clio.com
received an MA from the University of Washington, studying under David Waggoner, in 1970. While at Iowa State, she married the poet Michael Burkard in 1973, but they divorced in 1977. In 1974 she received an MFA from Iowa State, where she worked with Mark Strand and Stanley Kunitz; that same year she began a series of teaching appointments at various colleges in New York State. Gallagher’s first full-length collection, Instructions for the Double (1976), probes the searing scars inherent in the process of love as it explores various dimensions of doubling. Under Stars (1978), which is dedicated to the poet and musician Ciaran Carson, contains anecdotes about her experiences in Ireland and the people she met there. The enlarged edition of Portable Kisses (1978; 1992) exhibits astonishing metaphysical conceits and the ebullient force of its psychology and style. Gallagher had first met fellow Washingtonian Raymond Carver at a writer’s conference in 1977, and she began living with him in 1979. They became inseparable, symbiotic writers who tirelessly collaborated with each other like tenor and soprano. Willingly (1984) paints longer narrative episodes in the lives of her mother, father, and lover—all set amid the forest landscape of the American Northwest. Carver encouraged her to write short stories, and her first collection, The Lover of Horses and Other Stories, appeared in 1986, followed by The Owl-Woman Saloon in 1999. Just before Carver’s death in 1988, they married. After Carver’s death, Gallagher was afflicted with silence, but eventually began penning the startling elegies to Carver contained in Moon Crossing Bridge (1992); some of these poems are set in Japan and reveal
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the slight influence of an Eastern aesthetic. Owl-Spirit Dwelling (1994) further explores elegiac meditation, yet it contains a glimmer of fey humor. Gallagher worked with photographer Bob Adelman to produce Carver Country (1991) and collaborated with Robert Altman on the critically acclaimed movie Short Cuts (1993), based on Raymond Carver’s stories. Soul Barnacles (2000) presents a miscellany of journal entries, mutual letters, and interviews with Gallagher and Carver. Gallagher has a committed interest in the poetry of Eastern Europe, and she often gives readings there. She collaborated with Adam J. Sorkin on translating the selected poems of the Romanian poet Liliana Ursu, The Sky Behind the Forest (1996). In 2004 a selection of her poems appeared in Croatian. As an essayist, she published A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry (1986). The largest collection of her poems remains My Black Horse (1995). Gallagher has received an honorary doctorate from both Whitman University and the University of Hartford. Gallagher’s poems recollect telling incidents in life when pathos, romance, and memory collide, breaking the planes of ordinary time. Her focus shadows the intuitive, emotional difficulties between the sexes, in this life and even in the afterlife, weaving together the ordinary and the ecstatic. During childhood she frequently rode horses on her uncle’s Missouri farm, and she has written many poems with horse metaphors or themes. Her later meditative poems—lithely capable of nimble, sudden leaps or oblique introspection—employ a sinuous flowing syntax depicting a woman who has discovered strength of voice through vulnerability. Gallagher’s autobiographical eloquence resides in a spontaneous exploration of the stream-of-consciousness www.abc-clio.com
interstices between events and the capricious journeys of the imagination. Her short stories display a warmly engaging investigation into the improvisatory qualities of life and conversation. Deep characterization, atmospheric detail, and witty dialogue remain the hallmarks of her stories. At her best, her work rises to lyric heights that transcend the phenomenological circumstances of this intimate and densely dramatic writer who can transform the ordinary into the hauntingly strange. Kevin T. McEneaney References McFarland, Ron. Tess Gallagher. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1995. O’Neill, Charles. “Tess Gallagher and Irish Poetry.” Newsletter of the Poetry Society of America 41 (Winter 1993): 8–12.
GARLAND, JUDY (1922–1969) One of America’s greatest performers, Judy Garland was born Frances Ethel Gumm on June 10, 1922, in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. She was the youngest daughter of former vaudevillians Frank Avent Gumm (b. 1886) and Ethel Marian Milne (b. 1893). Although in later interviews Judy would refer to her father as a “charming Irishman,” he was, in fact, born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, of mixed Scottish, French, and German ancestry. Judy’s mother had direct, though distant, Irish lineage. She was born to John Milne and Eva Fitzpatrick in Michigamme, Michigan, in 1893. Although some of Garland’s biographers have recorded that Eva Fitzpatrick was born in Dublin, Ireland, according to www.genealogy.com, she was actually born in Massena, New York, in 1865 and it was her grandfather, Peter Fitzpatrick (b. 1752) who could claim Irish birth. Despite this more remote Irish connection,
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Garland remained proud of her Irish ancestry and would sometimes refer to it in interviews. Soon after their marriage, Ethel and Frank became managers of a Grand Rapids cinema, and Ethel encouraged her two eldest daughters, Mary Jane and Virginia, to perform songs in the intervals of the film screenings. However, the arrival of Frances in 1922 changed the direction and focus of the Gumm Sisters act. From the age of two, Baby Gumm, as Judy was called, displayed a natural talent for performing, and very soon it was clear that she was the star of the show. Ethel was determined to pursue a theatrical career for her three daughters, and it was her ambition and drive that brought the family to California in 1927. Settling in Lancaster, California, Ethel built up connections within the entertainment industry, and the Gumm sisters made their professional debut on the bill of the “Meglin Kiddies Show” in Loew’s State Theatre, Los Angeles, in December 1927. For the next five years, the Gumm sisters spent their childhood performing in vaudeville and auditioning for films. In later years Judy would recall her childhood as both exciting and unsettling: she loved the performing but the traveling and stress it brought took its toll on her already precarious health. Her parents’ marital breakdown and unrelenting pressure from her ambitious mother would also contribute to the formation of a fragile and insecure young woman. By 1933 Ethel had moved her daughters to Los Angeles and had enrolled Frances in the Lawlor School for Professional Children. Many of her classmates would go on to secure film contracts with varying degrees of success. It was at “Mom Lawlor’s” that she first met Mickey Rooney, who would become a close friend and associate www.abc-clio.com
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in Hollywood, and who signed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studios in late 1933. In 1934 Ethel brought her three daughters to perform at a restaurant/club on the outskirts of Chicago’s World Fair. While there, they met George Jessel, a major vaudeville star, and performed on stage with him at Chicago’s Oriental Theatre. He was impressed by the Gumm sisters, particularly by 12-year-old Frances, and he suggested that they should change their name to Garland. Almost a year later, Frances became Judy and her professional career began a steady ascent. In 1934, she was spotted by leading producer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and he brought her to the attention of MGM’s boss, Louis B. Mayer. Following an informal audition for Mayer, during which she sang a number of songs, including “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart,” she was signed to a longterm contract. Her cinematic debut was in a short film starring Deanna Durbin, Every Sunday, in 1936. More significant were her appearances in Pigskin Parade (1936) and Broadway Melody of 1938 (1937), and her films with her former classmate Mickey Rooney, Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry (1937) and Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938). Her breakthrough came when a reluctant Mayer agreed to producer Arthur Freed’s request that she be cast in a big-budget adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s book The Wizard of Oz (1939). It turned out to be an inspired choice and the film, which won Garland rave reviews (and a special Academy Award) for both her acting and her singing, remains one of the most loved and most important films in Hollywood’s history. MGM teamed her with Rooney in three further films, Babes in Arms, Andy Hardy Meets Debutante, and Strike up the
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Band (all 1940); the success of these films confirmed the popularity of the two performers, who were rapidly becoming MGM’s most lucrative investments. In 1940, Garland branched out to star alongside George Murphy in the sentimental, Irish-themed film Little Nellie Kelly (1940); she followed it with a role opposite Lana Turner in Ziegfield Girl (1941). With audiences demanding a reteaming of Garland and Rooney, the two stars played together in Life Begins for Andy Hardy and Babes on Broadway (both 1942). During this time, she met and married the conductor/bandleader, David Rose. Although the marriage disintegrated within months, the couple did not divorce until 1945. The 1940s saw Garland’s physical and mental health constantly compromised by her gruelling work schedule and increasing reliance on prescription drugs. Yet this was the most fruitful time of her professional life, and she excelled in films that have remained much-loved classics. She acted with Gene Kelly in For Me and My Gal (1942), starred with Rooney again in Girl Crazy (1943), and entertained the troops for the USO. In 1944 she was cast, against her will, in Meet Me in St. Louis, a bittersweet musical drama about a family living in turn-of-the-century St. Louis. The film boasted strong performances from Mary Astor and Margaret O’Brien, but it was Garland who stole the show with her heartfelt portrayal of Esther Smith. The film featured some of her best known songs, such as “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “The Trolley Song,” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” The production also inaugurated a romance with the film’s director, Vincente Minnelli, resulting in a marriage in 1945 and the birth of a daughter, Liza, in
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1946. Minnelli and Garland worked again the following year on a nonmusical film, The Clock. Garland’s hectic production schedule slowed down some after the birth of her daughter: she appeared in The Harvey Girls in 1946 and made a guest appearance as singer Marilyn Miller in Till the Clouds Roll By in 1947. She returned to a starring role in another Minnelli film, The Pirate (1948), in which she was cast opposite Gene Kelly, who was now a major star. The film was a troubled production, due mainly to Garland’s mental problems and her increasingly fractious relationship with Minnelli. Although the film performed disappointingly at the box office, it remains a classic musical that features another Garland classic, “Be a Clown.” Garland and Minnelli’s marriage was crumbling by the time they were teamed to make the Irving Berlin musical, Easter Parade, in 1948. The shoot was plagued with problems: Minnelli was replaced by Charles Walters, and the original male lead, Gene Kelly, was replaced by Fred Astaire. Garland’s increasingly erratic behavior was becoming more difficult to hide, and her next two productions, In the Good Old Summertime (1949) and Summer Stock (1950), were difficult shoots. In between production of these two films, she was cast in Annie get Your Gun but was fired halfway through the shoot. Soon after, she was hospitalized with a mental breakdown but within weeks she had (inadvisably) returned to work on Summer Stock. In 1950 she was cast in another film with Fred Astaire, Royal Wedding, but her unreliability resulted in her being replaced by Jane Powell during the shoot. In a devastating blow, MGM terminated her
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contract soon after. Garland was again hospitalized, and many commentators filed her among the ranks of washed-up stars. In what must have been one of the bleakest periods of her life, Garland met and married a theatrical impresario, Sid Luft, and he was instrumental in encouraging her to revive her live career. She began doing radio appearances, and in 1951 audiences flocked to see her sell-out shows at London’s Palladium Theatre and New York’s Palace Theatre. In July 1951 she appeared for a number of sold-out shows at the Theatre Royal in Dublin. According to her biographer Gerold Frank, Garland sang to crowds outside the theater who had been unable to buy tickets. Her performances were greeted with rapture by Irish audiences and critics, and the press nicknamed her “America’s Colleen.” The success of her live appearances reignited Hollywood’s interest, and she was cast in the 1962 Warner Brothers production of A Star is Born, directed by George Cukor and costarring James Mason. The film was an apparently torturous shoot: the budget spiraled out of control, Garland was frequently absent or ill, and the film was extensively recut before its release. In spite of the problems of the shoot, the film was a complex, cynical, and deeply affecting portrait of Hollywood and the fragility of fame. With knowledge of Garland’s subsequent tragic life, her performance becomes difficult to watch; its rawness and vulnerability seem to be more than mere acting. Although Luft and Garland may have had high hopes for the renewal of her film career following the release of A Star is Born, Warner Brothers failed to fulfill the terms of her three-film contract and the
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remaining two films were not made. Garland returned to live performances for the next six years, with varying degrees of success. Her most triumphant runs were in London’s Palladium Theatre in 1960 and, later that year, in New York’s Carnegie Hall. Her performance at Carnegie Hall was later released as an album and won her five Grammy Awards. By 1961, Hollywood was showing renewed interested in the enduring Garland, and she was cast in a small role in a prestigious Stanley Kramer film, Judgment at Nuremberg. Garland was featured in a cast of top actors that included Burt Lancaster, Spencer Tracy, Montgomery Clift, and Marlene Dietrich and her nine-minute appearance earned her an Academy Award nomination. She appeared again with Lancaster in a 1962 film, A Child is Waiting, and the following year signed with CBS television to make her own show. Unfortunately, the television show wasn’t the popular success expected and, upon completion of I Could Go on Singing (her final film, made in Britain in 1963), she went back on the road. By the mid-1960s Garland’s life was beset by mental and financial problems, alcohol and drug abuse, and a turbulent private life. Following the breakdown of her marriage to Luft in 1963, she married an aspiring actor, Mark Herron, in 1964, but the marriage ended rapidly in divorce. She continued to tour in America and Europe throughout the 1960s and while appearing in London in 1969 she married her fifth husband, Mickey Deans. On June 22, 1969, Judy Garland was found dead of an overdose, which was ruled accidental by the London coroner. She was survived by her three children, Liza
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Minnelli (b. 1946), Lorna Luft (b. 1952), and Joey Luft (b. 1955). Gwenda Young References Frank, Gerold. Judy. New York: Harper & Row. 1975. Katz, Ephraim. The Film Encyclopedia. New York: Perigee Books, 1979. “Liza Minnelli.” www.genealogy.com (accessed May 15, 2006). Morley, Sheridan. Beyond the Rainbow. London: Pavilion, 1999. Shipman, David. The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years. New York: Da Capo, 1986. Vinson, James. International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers: Actors and Actresses. Chicago: St. James Press, 1986.
GARSON, GREER (1904–1996) Eileen Evelyn Greer Garson was born on September 29, 1904, in London, not Co. Down, Ireland, as is often believed. She was named after her mother Nina’s ancestral name, MacGregor. Garson received an honors distinction in education at the University of London and began postgraduate studies at the University of Grenoble. At age 24 she left academia to pursue an advertising career and to experiment with drama as a hobby. Garson made her acting debut in 1932 with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. She subsequently appeared in 13 plays on London’s West End stages. She was noticed by Laurence Olivier, who offered her guidance to hone her talents. Garson left London in 1934 for Hollywood after signing a contract with Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Garson’s natural red hair, flawless complexion, and elegant manner allowed her an opportune entrance into Hollywood, www.abc-clio.com
because a number of leading actresses had resigned, leaving a void. Her first film for MGM, in 1939, was Goodbye Mr. Chips with Robert Donat. It earned enthusiastic reviews. Appearing at the beginning of World War II, it quickly became a classic. Garson had married Edward Snelson on September 28, 1933, but she divorced him on May 8, 1940. Her role as Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, opposite her mentor Olivier in 1940, earned her increasing popularity. She appeared as the mother in the 1941 film Blossoms in the Dust, with Walter Pidgeon, and earned an Academy Award nomination. In 1942, Garson won her first Academy Award in Mrs. Miniver, starring again with Walter Pidgeon, for her role as British housewife Kay Miniver enduring the Blitz. It catapulted her to global fame. Garson’s striking performance as Marie Curie in the 1943 film garnered her yet another Academy Award nomination. On July 24, 1943, she married Richard Ney, who had played her son in Mrs. Miniver. Her role in Mrs. Parkington with Walter Pidgeon in 1944 earned her another Academy Award nomination. She repeated this feat for her performance as Irish housemaid Mary Rafferty in The Valley of Decision in 1945 opposite Gregory Peck. Her typecasting ensured great success during World War II. The caliber of her projects waned post–World War II. In 1946, Garson played the love interest to Clark Gable in Adventure, but she was critically panned, although the advertising tag line “Gable’s back and Garson’s got him!” earned the film significant public interest. Her next role in Desire Me opposite Robert Mitchum in 1947 proved to be a humiliating disaster. Meanwhile, conflicting career pressures doomed the Ney/Garson marriage; they
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could not weather their problems and divorced on September 25, 1947. The 1948 film Julia Misbehaves was well received. In 1949 Garson rebounded with That Forsyte Woman opposite Errol Flynn and Walter Pigeon, but the 1950 reprisal of The Miniver Story proved unpopular. Garson’s life took a major turn when she married wealthy Texan Colonel Elijah “Buddy” Fogelson, and she semiretired from acting. The happy couple spent their time on their ranch in New Mexico and a home in Dallas where she respectively devoted her energy to ranch life and community affairs. Garson’s contract with MGM ended in 1954. She appeared on stage in Auntie Mame in 1957. Her last major role, as Eleanor Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello, earned her another Academy Award nomination in 1960. She also appeared in small roles in The Singing Nun in 1966 and in The Happiest Millionaire in 1967. Garson also accepted select television roles. The philanthropic Fogelsons contributed to Santa Fe College by donating the E. E. Fogelson Library and the Greer Garson Theatre. Garson served as adjunct professor and received an honorary degree from Santa Fe College. Fogelson died on December 1, 1987. Garson kept busy with administering their massive wealth by giving huge financial grants to various charities. She also gave considerable amounts of money to Southern Methodist University, her late husband’s alma mater. Garson suffered a minor stroke in 1980 and endured several heart problems. She moved into a suite in the Dallas Presbyterian Hospital where she died on April 6, 1996. She was buried beside Fogelson in Sparkman-Hillcrest Memorial Park in Dallas. Annette Richardson www.abc-clio.com
References Broderick, Marian. Wild Irish Women: Extraordinary Lives from History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Maltin, Leonard, and Spencer Green. Leonard Maltin’s Movie Encyclopedia: Career Profiles of More Than 2,000 Actors and Filmmakers, Past and Present. New York: Plume Books, 1995. Troyan, Michele. A Rose for Mrs. Miniver: The Life of Greer Garson. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998.
GAUGHREN, FATHER MATTHEW (1843–1914) Main champion of and benefactor for the victims of the Dresden Affair, Matthew Gaughren was born in Dublin in 1843. He was one of three brothers who became Roman Catholic priests. Two of these, Matthew and Anthony, became bishops in the same vicariate. Their only sister was a Holy Faith Sister in Ireland. Gaughren joined the Oblates of Mary Immaculate and was ordained a priest in 1867. He had appointments successively in Holy Cross, Liverpool, St. Kevin’s Reformatory in Glencree (Ireland), and Tower Hill, London, before becoming a provincial. After his term of office as provincial he became a superior in Leith. During his ministry in London, Father Gaughren visited Argentina and collected funds in South America for lessening the debt on the church of Tower Hill. In February 1889, Gaughren met the Irish immigrants of the ship City of Dresden in Uruguay, when she called on Montevideo. He went onboard the steamer and shared the distresses experienced by settlers in Buenos Aires and later in the Irish Colony in Napostá, near Bahía Blanca. Father Matthew Gaughren was the only true friend of the immigrants. He discontinued
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his fund-raising, traveled to Napostá, and lived for some months with the poor unfortunates, attending to their spiritual needs. Father Gaughren went back to Ireland and was appointed provincial, and in 1892 he established the Oblates in Australia. He remained as parish priest of Fremantle for a year. After serving as provincial he became a bishop in South Africa. On March 16, 1902, Father Gaughren was consecrated bishop in the parish church of Leith, Scotland, where he succeeded his brother. At the same time he was appointed administrator of the vicariate of Transvaal. He died on June 1, 1914, in Capetown, and was buried in Kimberly. Edmundo Murray See also: DRESDEN AFFAIR Reference Geraghty, Michael John. “Argentina: A Land of Broken Promises.” Buenos Aires Herald, March 17, 1999.
GEORGIA The best-known Irishman who settled in Georgia is a fictional character: Gerald O’Hara, the father of Scarlett, in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. In spite of this and the fact that Georgia was not the destination for Irish immigrants to the same extent as other states were, those who did choose to emigrate there played a significant role in its development from a settlement to a state. Although Catholics were prohibited from settling in Georgia, in 1733 a ship carrying forty Irish convicts was allowed to dock at Savannah. However, as in many other states, particularly those in the South, the majority of early Irish immigrants to Georgia were Scots-Irish who came from an Ulster Presbyterian background. According to some reports, there were www.abc-clio.com
certain parts of Georgia where more than half the population were Ulster Presbyterians. In the 1820s a new wave of immigrants from Ireland was attracted by the various projects designed to develop the state’s infrastructure. In 1834, after four years of construction, the state pulled out of the canal linking the port of Brunswick with the Altamaha River. To complete the project, a Boston firm brought in Irish Catholic workers whose roots lay not in Ulster like the previous immigrants, but in the south of Ireland. When the construction of the canal was completed, some of them returned to the north while others settled in Savannah. Soon, railways that were being built to link towns in Georgia were constructed by Irish immigrants in harsh working conditions. By the mid-1800s, Savannah was home to the greatest number of Irish immigrants in Georgia. Savannah and Co. Wexford in Ireland had a particularly strong connection, and a number of families originally from there later rose to prominence in the city. There was, however, a sharp division between the Scots-Irish who had settled there earlier and who were now established in society and the more recent, mainly Catholic, arrivals who were performing many of the menial tasks in the city. The new immigrants, particularly in Savannah, set about establishing their own associations and societies to protect their interests and assert their identity. In 1812 the Hibernian Society had been founded in Savannah as an association for men of property. A sign of the changed nature of Irish immigration was seen when the Hibernian Society in Savannah elected its first Catholic president in 1856. Although it collected funds to provide help to poorer members the whole year round, one of its main focuses was Saint Patrick’s Day,
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which provided an opportunity to bring together different parts of the community. In 1824 Bishop John England of Charleston, South Carolina, who had been born in Co. Cork, was the keynote speaker of the Society, and he was made an honorary member. There was also a chapter of Daniel O’Connell’s Irish Repeal Association in both Savannah and Milledgeville during the 1840s. However, after O’Connell’s condemnation of slavery in 1843, the chapters disintegrated. Later, the Civil War provided an opportunity for Irish immigrants to assert their loyalty to their new state, and many Irish volunteered to fight for the Confederacy and formed militias to do so. However, Irish immigration to Georgia never regained the numbers it had once held before the war. As with Irish immigrants in other states, religious life provided one of the principal routes for Irish Catholics to occupy positions of authority. Georgia was no different; Bishop Francis X. Gartland, who was born in Dublin, became the first head of the diocese of Georgia in 1850. His successor, Bishop John Barry, was also born in Ireland. At the time, many of the parish priests ministering to Catholics in the state were either born in Ireland or were firstgeneration Irish Americans. To this day, and partly because of the influence of the Hibernian Society and other Irish organizations, the legacy of the Irish has continued in Savannah. Each year, it holds the third largest Saint Patrick’s Day parade in America after New York and Boston, and a statue of the Irish patriot Robert Emmet was erected in Savannah and a park was renamed Emmet Park in 1902. David Doyle See also: O’CONNELL, Daniel; SAINT PATRICK’S DAY PARADES www.abc-clio.com
References Gleeson, David T. The Irish in the South, 1815–1877. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Shoemaker, Edward M. “Georgia.” In The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, edited by Michael Glazier. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999.
GIBBONS, CEDRIC (1893–1960) According to most sources, Austin Cedric Gibbons was born on March 23, 1893, in Dublin, Ireland, although in his 2005 biography of Louis B. Mayer, Scott Eyman records Gibbons’s birthplace as Brooklyn and his birth year as 1890. The son of an architect, Gibbons studied painting at New York’s Art Students League and became involved in the film industry when he took a job as an art director at the Edison studio in 1915. He was at the forefront of the movement toward greater realism in film set design, favoring the use of three-dimensional sets instead of theater-style painted backdrops. During the 1910s he worked for Edison and Goldwyn studios, but he rose to prominence after his 1924 appointment as head of the art department in the newly formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studios. For the next four decades he would shape the look of MGM films and, as stipulated in his contract, he received art direction credit for all MGM films released between 1924 and 1956, although he personally only designed a relatively small proportion of them. As head of the art department, Gibbons worked most closely with his team of skilled art directors, but ultimately 70 percent of all MGM staff was answerable to him (Balio 1995). The look Gibbons pioneered was strongly influenced by the Moderne style
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(now more popularly known as Art Deco), a style that he had encountered when he attended the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels in Paris in 1925. The impact of Art Deco’s clean lines can be seen in some of the earliest films he designed for MGM, for example Our Dancing Daughters (1928) and Grand Hotel (1932), which feature lofty, streamlined sets and Art Deco furniture and props. Gibbons’s importance in MGM is underlined by the fact that his sculptural sets often dictated the lighting styles used in MGM films—he favored high key lighting, which eliminated shadows and showcased the impressive set designs—and it was this glossy, sleek look that became the distinguishing feature of the MGM brand. Nominated for 22 Academy Awards for art direction, Gibbons won Oscars for The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1929), The Merry Widow (1934), Pride and Prejudice (1940), Blossoms in the Dust (1941), Gaslight (1944), The Yearling (1946), Little Women (1949), An American in Paris (1951), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Julius Caesar (1953), and Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956). He retired shortly after winning his final Academy Award. In addition to the sets that he designed/ supervised for MGM films, Gibbons directed one feature for MGM, 1934’s Tarzan and His Mate, perhaps a surprising choice for a man known for his sophisticated taste. Gibbons was also instrumental in establishing the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and he personally designed the Oscar statuette, which continues to be used by the Academy. Gibbons was married twice, to actress Dolores Del Rio and to actress Hazel Brooks. He died on July 26, 1960. Gwenda Young www.abc-clio.com
References Balio, Tino. Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Eyman, Scott. The Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Katz, Ephraim. The Film Encyclopedia. New York: Perigee Books, 1979. Vinson, James. International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers: Writers and Production Assistants. Chicago: St. James Press, 1987.
GILMORE, PATRICK SARSFIELD (1829–1892) Born in Ballygar, Co. Galway, or Mullingar, Co. Westmeath, on December 25, 1829, Gilmore was a highly successful conductor of military bands, including his own
Portrait of Irish-born American composer Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore. (Library of Congress)
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Gilmore’s Band, and assembled thousands of performers that attracted enormous crowds at festivals in Boston in 1869 and 1872. Beginning in 1873 he was based in New York, and popular success never failed him throughout his distinguished career. While his exact place of birth cannot be established, Gilmore grew up in Ballygar, Co. Galway. He began his musical career as a cornet player in an amateur band in Athlone, Co. Westmeath. In October 1849 he immigrated to Boston, initially working for the music dealer and publisher John P. Ordway. He began to lead a number of Massachusetts bands, including the Charlestown, Boston Brigade, and Salem Brass bands, the latter becoming famous under his direction (1855–1858) and performing at the inaugural parade for President James Buchanan in Washington in 1857. In 1858, he established his own Gilmore’s Band, performing for the first time in the Boston Music Hall on April 9, 1859. His regular appearances were always favorably received. During the Civil War the band became attached to the 24th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment as part of the Union Army. Gilmore’s national reputation for mass events became established in 1864 at the inauguration of Governor Michael Hahn of Lousiana, when he assembled a band of 500 and a chorus of 6,000, plus 50 cannons and 40 soldiers to strike anvils. He also arranged for the simultaneous ringing of all the church bells in the city. For the National Peace Jubilee and Musical Festival at Boston in 1869, he organized a concert of 1,000 musicians (led by Ole Bull), including six military bands, and a chorus of 10,000. Of even larger dimensions was the World Peace Jubilee and International Music Festival www.abc-clio.com
in 1872, also at Boston, which featured 20,000 performers, including ensembles from England, France, and Prussia. In 1873 Gilmore moved to New York to take up a position with the 22nd Regiment, which he turned into the foremost professional band of the United States for the next 19 years. Converting a popular hippodrome into Gilmore’s Garden, he gave a series of more than 150 successful concerts there, also performing annually from 1879 at Manhattan Beach in the summer. The band toured to various locations all over the city and other states, including tours to the West Coast in 1876 and 1878. Gilmore also had an annual residency at the St. Louis Exposition, and it was during one such engagement that he died. Gilmore was buried in New York with many dignitaries and social leaders of the time attending the funeral. As a composer, Gilmore is remembered for his many military arrangements of traditional music and for his own band marches and songs, which included the famous “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” as well as popular titles such as “Freedom on the Old Plantation,” “The Spirit of the North,” “God Save the Union,” and the “Twenty-Second Regiment March.” He also founded his own publishing company and engaged as a partner in brass instrument manufacturing businesses. Axel Klein See also: EMIGRATION; MUSIC IN AMERICA, IRISH References Damon, F. C. “P. S. Gilmore, Bandmaster.” Salem Evening News, April 5, 1936 to July 2, 1937 (series of 23 articles). Darlington, Marwood. Irish Orpheus: The Life of Patrick Gilmore, Bandmaster Extraordinary. Philadelphia: Olivier Maney Klein Co., 1950.
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References Klein, Fred, and Ronald Dean Nolan, eds. The Macmillan and International Film Encyclopaedia. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2001. Quinlan, David. Quinlan’s Illustrated Directory of Film Stars. London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1996.
GLEASON, JACKIE (1916–1987) Born Herbert John Gleason, this comedianactor was fondly nicknamed “The Great One,” a reference both to his girth and his considerable comedic talents. In 1940, after spending a number of years performing on the vaudeville and cabaret circuits, Gleason was signed to a film contract by Warner Brothers. His screen debut was in Navy Blues (1941). His career was interrupted by World War II, but at the war’s end Gleason returned to Hollywood, this time playing character roles in a number of films. He also performed in several Broadway shows. His major success was as the star of such television comedy series as The Life of Riley, The Honeymooners (which ran for only one season, 1955–1956, but achieved cult status as a result of reruns), and The Jackie Gleason Show. Gleason created a number of memorable comedic characters, such as Ralph Kramden (the loudmouth bus driver from The Honeymooners), Reggie Van Gleason, and Joe the Bartender. In 1959, Gleason returned to Broadway, winning a Tony Award for Take Me Along. He also continued to star in a number of films, including The Hustler (1961), for which he earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor; and the Smokey and the Bandit series of action comedies. His long career also included a period when he composed, arranged, and conducted recordings of mood music. Gleason died of cancer in 1987. Aoileann Ní Eigeartaigh www.abc-clio.com
GLEESON, BRENDAN (1954–) Brendan Gleeson was born in Dublin in 1954 and started performing as a child in local stage productions. After auditioning unsuccessfully for the National Theatre of Ireland, the Abbey Theatre, he became a secondary school teacher. During his 10-year teaching career, he continued to act and appeared in several productions, including King of the Castle at the Abbey Theatre and Home with the Passion Machine Company. In 1989, at the age of 34, Gleeson gave up his teaching job and began acting full time. In 1990, he made his film debut starring alongside Richard Harris in Jim Sheridan’s The Field. Over the next five years, Gleeson played a number of supporting roles in movies such as Far and Away (1992), with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Into the West (1992) with Gabriel Byrne, and The Snapper (1993), based on the novel by Roddy Doyle. He also won critical acclaim for his portrayal of Michael Collins in the television production The Treaty (1991, shown in the United States in 1998). His role as Hamish, William Wallace’s closest friend and ally, in Mel Gibson’s epic Braveheart (1995) first brought Gleeson to international attention. He also starred in a supporting role to Liam Neeson in Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins (1996). His status as an actor was enhanced by his first starring role in the black comedy I Went Down (1997), which was critically acclaimed on
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both sides of the Atlantic. It was his role as Martin Cahill, the real-life Irish criminal in John Boorman’s The General, however, that garnered recognition and respect for the actor. Gleeson won several awards for his portrayal, including the Boston Society Film Critics Award for Best Actor, the Golden Satellite Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, and the London Critics’ Circle film award for British Actor of the Year. Gleeson balances his roles carefully between mainstream action and more low-key character driven roles. He has worked with many top directors, including John Woo, Stephen Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and has played roles in major Hollywood films such as Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007), The Tiger’s Tail (2006), Studs (2006), Black Irish (2006), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), and many more. Aoileann Ní Eigeartaigh See also: HARRIS, Richard; JORDAN, Neil; NEESON, Liam; SHERIDAN, Jim References IMDB: Earth’s Biggest Movie Database. www.imdb.com/name/nm0322407/ (accessed August 23, 2007). Lalor, Brian, ed. The Encyclopaedia of Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Ltd., 2003. Pettit, Lance. Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000.
GOGARTY, OLIVER ST. JOHN (1878–1957) A native Dubliner, Oliver St. John Gogarty was educated at Oxford University and Trinity College Dublin. In 1907 Trinity conferred a medical degree upon him, and he subsequently enjoyed a successful career in Dublin as a surgeon. Distinguished by his enormous vitality, Gogarty became prominent more for the variety of his www.abc-clio.com
accomplishments than for any single achievement. He was, among other things, a champion bicyclist, a surgeon, a poet, a memoirist, a celebrated “wit,” an aviator, an Irish senator, an enthusiast of archery, a hotel owner, and a skilled amateur classicist. His escape from Irish Republican Army kidnappers (he leapt into the Liffey and swam free of his assailants) added to his reputation for resourcefulness and good fortune. His greatest renown derived, however, from his social ubiquity; he enjoyed friendships with (to note only the most prominent) Æ (George Russell), Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith, Augustus John, James Joyce, George Moore, James Stephens, and W. B. Yeats. Despite maintaining generally good relations with these men, Gogarty’s youthful friendship with Joyce famously soured into mutual suspicion, envy, and fascination. Joyce’s depiction of Gogarty as the exuberant but frivolous Buck Mulligan in Ulysses is evocative, recognizable, and ungenerous. Joyce’s skill in capturing elements of Gogarty’s personality, and his accomplishment in translating them from reality to the fictional Buck Mulligan, saddled Gogarty with an unwanted, yet ineradicable, alter ego. Gogarty spent almost the last two decades of his life in the United States. Having given lecture tours of North America in 1933 and 1937, he was engaged in a third lecture tour in 1939 when the eruption of World War II rendered a return voyage across the Atlantic impracticable. Gogarty’s abiding detestation of Eamon de Valera further diminished the appeal of attempting a return to the British Isles, so in late 1939 Gogarty settled in Manhattan. He was to reside there for the rest of his life and, while living in New York City, he became an American citizen.
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In the United States, Gogarty found a large and wealthy public interested in his reminiscences of the famous people he had known in Ireland and England. He accordingly wrote numerous memoirs, essays, and recollections about his friends and published them in popular American periodicals. He later gathered these pieces into book-length collections of inconsistent merit; they are impeccably entertaining and immoderately unreliable. Gogarty also gave occasional lectures to university audiences and literary societies throughout the United States and Canada. On at least four occasions he appeared on radio programs broadcast from New York City. From these lectures, essays, and reminiscences Gogarty derived a comfortable, if not lavish, retirement income. Although late in life he contemplated returning to Ireland, he died in Manhattan in 1957 of complications from a heart attack. Gogarty’s American period is often considered a dispiriting denouement to an otherwise distinguished and exciting life. Yet it was largely this period in which he wrote the memoirs that preserve some of the most intimate extant portraits of Ireland’s twentieth-century cultural elite. Andrew Goodspeed See also: DE VALERA, Eamon; JOYCE, James Augustine Aloysius; YEATS, William Butler References Gogarty, Oliver St. John. As I was Going Down Sackville Street. London: Rich & Cowan, 1937. Gogarty, Oliver St. John. It Isn’t This Time of Year At All! New York: Doubleday, 1954. Gogarty, Oliver St. John. Rolling Down the Lea. London: Constable. 1950. Gogarty, Oliver St. John. The Poems and Plays, edited by A. Norman Jeffares. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2001. Gogarty, Oliver St. John. Tumbling in the Hay. London: Constable, 1939. www.abc-clio.com
Lyons, J. B. The Man of Many Talents. Dublin: Blackwater, 1980. O’Connor, Ulick. The Times I’ve Seen. New York: Ivan Obolensky, 1963.
GORDON, MARY (1948–) With her 1978 debut novel, Final Payments, and its provocative emphasis on sexual politics and the Americanizing of Old World Catholic values, Mary Gordon established herself as a clear-eyed, unsentimental interpreter of the Irish-American experience. Since the popular and critical success of this first book, Gordon has published regularly and has honed her stylistic precision in a variety of genres. By turns lyrical and impassioned, cerebral and reflective, Gordon writes about such distinctly American themes as class and identity with an IrishCatholic preoccupation with morality and faith. Born in Queens, New York, and raised on Long Island’s South Shore, Mary Catherine Gordon was a bookish child, keenly aware of being an outsider in her working-class family and parish. When she was seven, her father, David Gordon, died—a devastating event that left the precocious child bereft of a father and intellectual guide. A complex, literary, charismatic man whom Mary idolized, David Gordon was a Jew who had converted to Catholicism in 1937. In her 1996 memoir, The Shadow Man: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father, Gordon’s wrenching historical and emotional investigation uncovers her father’s deep duplicity and grandiose self-invention. Remade as a devout Catholic, with an aristocratic pedigree and stints at Harvard and Oxford, David Gordon was actually a Lithuanian immigrant who dropped out of high school at 16. The truth revealed an
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overweening sense of her father’s failure and diminishment, which was both “pathetic” and “tragic,” but most horrific and unforgivable was the evidence of his raging anti-Semitism. “I had lost him as the figure in history I thought he was; I had lost my place in America,” Gordon writes in the memoir with searching earnestness. She early found that language was the “place” to freely assert her powers, and she equates writing with consciousness itself. She read voraciously and describes Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway as inspiring her movement from poetry to lyrical, poetically charged prose. Gordon was educated at Barnard and Syracuse University. She lives in Manhattan with second husband Arthur Cash—who is Laurence Sterne’s biographer—and their two children and is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of Writing at Barnard. The vexed “place” of religious life in a temptingly secular culture, the outmoded dictates of a church at odds with feminism and sexual liberty, and the need for selfdetermination and moral action are thematic mainstays in her work, although she is troubled by being labeled as a Catholic writer. “I guess when they start calling John Updike ‘the Protestant writer,’ then they can start calling me ‘the Catholic writer,’” she says in a 1997 interview in the literary magazine Ploughshares. Yet the “formal beauty in Catholic liturgy” (Ploughshares 1997) informs her deepest sense of beauty and order in art. Her Catholic girlhood, her later disillusionment with Church teachings, and her subsequent, if conflicted, return to familiar religious ground all find their way into the internal and domestic dramas of her fictional characters. In the 1981 novel, The Company of Women, the central character, Felicitas, is cautioned by www.abc-clio.com
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her mentor, Father Cyprian, to be wary of crass, unholy Americanism and its insipid, self-serving reduction of thorny spiritual truths. American mercantilism makes for shoddy spiritual goods, “an Elk’s Club spirituality” that promotes false sentiment instead of deliverance from evil. Though Felicitas rebels against Cyprian’s dour, hairshirt diatribe against the way of the flesh, she ultimately can’t escape her Irish Catholic past. The defining restraints of sin and servitude compete against the lush promise of expansive American worldliness, and though Gordon criticizes Church constriction, she is equally critical of American excess. Her novel Pearl (2005), is set in Dublin. Twenty-year-old Pearl is dangerously close to dying after starving herself for six weeks in support of a barely discernable political, humanistic cause. Her mother, Maria, a take-charge New York liberal, journeys to Ireland to try to save her child and, in the process, is forced to cede control and confront her own ideals. Gordon’s latest novel is Circling My Mother (2007). This book chronicles her mother’s challenges with polio, alcoholism, and finally dementia, and describes her experience of caring for her mother in old age. Kate Falvey References Bennett, Alma. Mary Gordon. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. Gordon, Mary. Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity. New York: Scribner, 2000. Lee, Don. “About Mary Gordon: A Profile.” Ploughshares, Fall 1997, 218–226.
GORE, ROBERT (1810–1854) British consul to Buenos Aires, member of Parliament, and officer of the British Royal Navy, Robert Gore was the fourth son of
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the 3rd Earl of Arran, William J. Gore (1767–1836), and Caroline Pym-Hale (d. 1853). He was born in Saunders Court in Co. Wexford, near the town of Crossabeg. On September 4, 1823, he entered the Royal Navy, and in 1832 he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant. From 1832 to 1834 Gore sailed in the Melville and the Andromache under Admiral Henry Ducie Chads, during which time he engaged in action with the Malay pirates. On July 15, 1837, grateful merchants and underwriters of Bombay presented him with a sword (which is now on exhibition in the National Maritime Museum, London). On May 9, 1839, Gore was promoted to commander, and he was put in charge of the Serpent on the West India Station. He was elected member of Parliament for New Ross, Co. Wexford, being a supporter of the Melbourne ministry and an advocate for free trade and abolition of monopolies. He returned to Ireland in 1841, and on October 23, 1846, was appointed as chargé d’affaires at Montevideo, Uruguay. His most important intervention in the River Plate was in March 1848, when he successfully put an end to the Buenos Aires blockade that the British had carried out since 1845 together with the French. On August 29, 1851, Gore was appointed as British consul in Buenos Aires. Gore is remembered in Argentina for saving the life of the governor of Buenos Aires, Juan Manuel de Rosas, after the battle of Caseros, and for making possible his subsequent exile in Southampton. When he arrived home in the afternoon of February 4, 1852, Gore found Rosas sleeping in his bed. He spoke to Admiral Henderson, who allowed Rosas to board the Locust. With Rosas’s daughter Manuelita disguised as a sailor, on the night of February 8 the www.abc-clio.com
family abandoned Buenos Aires. The British merchants, who had a poor relationship with the consul, accused Gore of receiving a sum of money to help Rosas. After the fall of Rosas, Gore met with General Justo José de Urquiza, who told him about his plans to develop the country, to open its rivers to all nations, and to attract “Saxon” (i.e., English-speaking) immigrants. In the fight between Buenos Aires and the Argentine Confederation that followed the battle of Caseros, Gore was perceived to be a friend of the provinces. However, in January 1853, when Gore complained that arms and ammunitions were being distributed among British subjects, he was expelled from Buenos Aires and returned to Montevideo. He died on August 4, 1854. Edmundo Murray See also: EMIGRATION References Escudé, Carlos, and Andrés Cisneros, eds. Historia de las Relaciones Exteriores Argentinas. www.argentina-rree.com/ home_nueva.htm (accessed August 25, 2007). Stenton, Michael. Who’s Who of British Members of Parliament, A Biographical Dictionary of the House of Commons. Vol. 1, 1832–1885. Hassocks: The Harvestry Press, 1976.
GRACE, WILLIAM RUSSELL (1832–1904) Born in Queenstown, Co. Laois, on May 10, 1832, to James Grace and Ellen Russell, William R. Grace had a boyhood ambition to gain a commission in the Royal Navy. His father would not allow him to join up, however, so he ran away to sea and spent two years sailing around the world. His father then bought him an interest in a firm
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Portrait of William Russell Grace, philanthropist, entrepreneur, and New York mayor for two terms in the 1880s.
of ship chandlers in Liverpool and, becoming attracted by opportunities in South America, in the 1850s Grace went to Callao in Peru, where his father helped him to find a job. His brother Michael joined him, and in 1854 the firm Bryce & Co. became Bryce, Grace & Co., and finally Grace Bros. In 1860 the firm established a merchant steamship line to serve the Americas. Their fortunes increased but William Grace was forced to leave Peru on account of his health, leaving Michael in charge. In 1865 Grace settled in New York and founded W. R. Grace & Co. to serve as a front for Grace Bros. of Callao, trading fabric, fertilizer, machinery, and other products. When Peru built its railway system, Grace secured practically all contracts for supplying iron, timber, food, and other www.abc-clio.com
elements to the builders of the railway. In 1875 he became adviser to the government of Peru, and handled the business of arming the Peruvian army. In 1879 he supplied munitions and battleships during the illfated war with Chile. Peru lost the war and Grace resigned as adviser. Peru was left owing $250 million to English bondholders. With another Irishman, John Luke Heley-Hutchinson (Earl of Donaghmore), Grace bought up all the English and American bonds, and with the Grace Donaghmore contract of 1890 they secured a mortgage on the Republic of Peru, taking over the national debt and receiving many concessions in return. The Peruvian Corporation was formed to manage the concessions; it was directed by Heley-Hutchinson, but Grace was the power behind it. The company received outright the valuable silver mines of Cerro de Pasco, the entire output of the guano deposits, 5 million acres of land containing valuable oil and mineral deposits, the lease of two railways for 66 years, and the right to hold in perpetuity a road with generous grants for constructing it. In 1895 the Grace companies united under an American charter and became William R. Grace & Co. The firm opened offices in all major Latin American countries and went into importing and exporting and establishing world contracts. Grace’s exploits in Peru earned him the nickname of “The Pirate of Peru.” On September 11, 1895, Grace married Lilly Gilchrist, the daughter of a shipbuilder. He returned home to Ireland with his bride and later went on a grand tour of Europe. In Chile, William R. Grace & Co. developed the Nitrate Properties, built cotton and sugar mills, and set up traction, light, and power companies. In 1890, Grace acquired the New York and Pacific Steamship Co.,
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which became the Grace Steamship Co., with regular services between New York and the west coast of South America. In 1900, Grace opened offices in Argentina. Grace was elected mayor of New York in 1880, the first Roman Catholic appointed to this post. Opposing the famous Tammany Hall, Grace conducted a reform administration, attacking police scandals, patronage, and organized crime; reducing the tax rate; and breaking up the Louisiana Lottery. Defeated the following year, he was reelected in 1884 on an independent ticket, and lost again the following year. In 1897, he founded the Grace Institute to give young girls a practical education in stenography, dressmaking, and the domestic arts. William R. Grace died on March 21, 1904. His company became a worldwide network with a particular focus on chemicals and packaging, but over time the company diversified into everything from sporting goods to tacos. Edmundo Murray See also: EMIGRATION; TAMMANY HALL Reference Marquis, James. Merchant Adventurer: the Story of W. R. Grace. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1993.
GRAY, DAVID (1870–1968) David Gray was the American minister to Ireland from 1940 to 1947, one of the most tumultuous periods in AmericanIrish relations. Gray had no previous diplomatic experience before his appointment, and his Scottish Presbyterian background did not endear him to Eamon de Valera or the Irish political establishment. His ambition throughout his tenure was to cajole Ireland to aid Britain by any means possible. After 1943, Gary became increasingly www.abc-clio.com
concerned about Irish-American postwar efforts to end partition and the possible effects of those efforts on Anglo-American relations. Gray was born on August 8, 1870, in Buffalo, New York. His early career included stints in the newspaper business and as a criminal lawyer. He eventually found some success as a writer, mostly of short stories, but also as a playwright. In 1914 he married Eleanor Roosevelt’s aunt, Maude Waterbury. The Grays and the Roosevelts had a close relationship because Maude was only six years older than Eleanor and they were raised in the same house. Gray probably owed his appointment to Dublin to this relationship with the Roosevelts. Gray’s first efforts to engage Ireland in the war involved pressuring the Irish government to abandon its neutrality, an especially thorny proposition before December 1941, given American neutrality to that point. When it became clear to Gray that neutrality was so supported by the Irish people and the Irish government that there was no chance they would abandon it, his priority changed to finding ways to have the Irish government allow the British to use the treaty ports of Cobh, Berehaven, and Lough Swilly. These were ports that the British government maintained possession of after the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty until the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1938. At that time, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain thought that because it would be almost impossible to use the ports effectively without Ireland being an active ally in a future war, returning the ports to Ireland might engender enough goodwill from the Irish government to allow that to happen. De Valera stressed that the return of the ports was the most important aspect of the agreement, one that finally allowed
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for Irish sovereignty over all the territory of the island that was not part of Northern Ireland. De Valera also reiterated a pledge he made years earlier that he would not allow Ireland to be used as a base by other states against Britain. By 1943, realizing that his efforts to have Ireland join the Allies or relinquish the ports had failed, Gray hatched a plan that he hoped would discredit and isolate the Irish government, set up a scapegoat in case of failed Allied military plans, and shortcircuit Irish-American postwar political efforts. This last point was especially important to Gray. He believed Irish-American influence after World War I had scuttled the League of Nations, and he feared that a similar lobbying effort by Irish Americans after World War II to end partition would drive a wedge in postwar Anglo-American relations. Having de Valera publicly deny a request from the Allies would serve all three of Gray’s goals. Gray delivered “The American Note,” as it has come to be called, to de Valera in February 1944. Gray’s first drafts included a demand for the ports, but State Department revisions simply made it a request that the Irish government expel the Axis representatives in Dublin because of the threat of espionage. Gray argued that allowing even the limited personnel from Germany and Japan to remain in Dublin, close to Allied bases, gave the Axis an advantage that the Allies did not have, thus constituting a breach in Irish neutrality. De Valera rejected the proposal and its assumptions about the level of Axis espionage, which Gray also knew to be overblown. Gray’s hopes for the note came to fruition when news of it and the Irish refusal became public in March 1944. American and British newspapers and magazines widely www.abc-clio.com
condemned the Irish government, and Gallup Poll results showed that most Americans knew of the incident and believed Ireland should comply with the Allied request. De Valera, however, rode the wave of Irish support for his stand to an electoral victory later that year. After the war, Gray worked actively to persuade Irish-American leaders that any efforts to lobby on behalf of ending partition would produce a Protestant backlash. He left his post as minister to Ireland in 1947, but continued to write on Irish issues. Gray died on April 12, 1968. John Tully See also: De VALERA, Eamon; WILSON, Woodrow References Cronin, Seán. Washington’s Irish Policy, 1916–1986: Independence, Partition, Neutrality. Dublin: Anvil Books, 1987. Davis, Troy D. Dublin’s American Policy: Irish-American Diplomatic Relations, 1945–1952. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1998. Dwyer, T. Ryle. Irish Neutrality and the USA, 1939–1947. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1977.
GREAT FAMINE, THE The Irish Famine of 1845 to 1852 is central to understanding the development of modern Ireland. The deaths of more than 1 million people and the emigration of an even higher number within the space of five years made it one of the greatest catastrophes in Irish history. The tragic consequences of the crop failure were also unique within modern Europe, where famine had largely been eradicated by the midnineteenth century. The Famine’s imprint, moreover, was also visible in the development of countries where famine refugees
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settled, particularly the United States, the main destination of the emigrants. Within the United States, the Irish Famine is commonly referred to as The Great Hunger, or its Irish name An Gorta Mhór. No part of Ireland escaped the consequences of the Famine, although there were some marked regional variations; areas in the south and west, notably Skibbereen (Co. Cork) and Kilrush (Co. Clare), were indelibly linked with the Famine suffering. Even Ulster, the most industrially advanced part of the country, was affected, including Belfast, the flagship of Ireland’s manufacturing and commercial progress. By 1847, there were daily accounts of dead bodies on the streets of Belfast, the local workhouse and hospitals were full, and the three major cemeteries (including the Protestant Shankill graveyard) were overflowing. The tragedy was triggered by a mysterious blight that appeared on potatoes in the late summer of 1845, destroying approximately one-third of the crop. Potatoes were an important subsistence crop, and more than half of the population of 8.5 million people depended on this vegetable for their survival. The prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, responded swiftly by putting into place a series of measures that would become effective the following spring, when the shortages began to be felt. They included importing Indian corn (maize) from the United States and providing matching grants to local relief committees for the purchase of food or the establishment of public works. These measures, although short term and limited, were successful. In the year following the first appearance of blight, despite severe suffering, there was no excess mortality in Ireland. Many localities expressed their gratitude to Peel and his government for their intervention. www.abc-clio.com
Peel used the Irish food shortages as an opportunity to repeal the Corn Laws, protective legislation that kept the price of imported corn artificially high. This action lost him support of many members of his Tory (Conservative) Party and ultimately led to the end of his premiership. The Tory government was also replaced in the summer of 1846 by a Whig (Liberal) administration led by Lord John Russell. The Whigs had been traditional allies of Daniel O’Connell, and within Ireland there was optimism that the Whigs would live up to their promise of “justice for Ireland.” Political aspirations were pushed aside, however, as within a few weeks of coming into power, Russell’s government was confronted by the reappearance of potato blight, even earlier than in the previous year. By September 1846, more than three-quarters of the crop had been destroyed, which meant the extent of distress would be far higher than in the previous year, and the impact of food shortages would be felt immediately. Russell was anxious not to alienate his British supporters by endorsing high expenditures on Ireland. Consequently, his relief measures placed a higher financial burden on Irish taxpayers than on the central government. Public works, based on hard, physical labor, were the main form of relief provision, and the cost of the works was repayable by the localities. This philosophy was in keeping with a widely held belief that “Irish property must support Irish poverty.” As a system of providing emergency relief, however, the public works system was flawed: the wages were kept deliberately low despite the steep rise in food prices; the hard physical labor and long hours of employment weakened the health of a people already debilitated by hunger;
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the many layers of bureaucracy slowed down their effectiveness as a mechanism for relief and diverted money from the poor; and, moreover, the works undertaken served little purpose, resulting in their popular portrayal as “roads that led nowhere and walls that surrounded nothing.” Despite the expense of the public works—by March 1847 outlay had reached more than £5 million, much of which was to be repaid by Irish taxpayers—they patently failed to save lives or maintain a basic level of health. The new Whig government did not have a majority in parliament and, unlike the Tory Party, it derived a substantial part of its support from corn merchants and traders. One of the first things it did upon learning about the reappearance of blight was to assure the merchants that the government would keep its interventions in the Irish trade (both imports and exports) to a minimum. Nonetheless, a number of local corporations and prominent individuals asked for the Irish ports to be closed as a short-term expedient to keep food within the country. Although food imports did increase, most did not arrive until the following spring, by which time many people had already died or emigrated, or their health had been seriously jeopardized. The fact that Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, which was the richest and most industrialized empire in the world, did not protect the Irish poor at a time of deprivation and starvation. In spring 1847, the government’s policies again changed, indicating that the measures introduced only six months earlier had failed. The new procedures marked the most liberal phase of famine relief. Import duties were removed from corn, the restrictive Navigation Laws were temporarily relaxed, which meant that food could be www.abc-clio.com
carried on ships not registered in Britain, and sugar was allowed to be used in distillation in place of grain. All of these measures meant that more food was available and this, in turn, helped to bring prices down. The most important change in policy was that—for the first and only time during the Famine—for a limited period only, poor people could receive free food in specially opened soup kitchens. Although the portions given were meager, the soup kitchens meant that the poor had direct access to free food. The scale of demand provided a measure of the extent of need in Ireland. By July 1847 more than 3 million people were receiving free food rations daily while thousands of others, considered to be above destitution levels, were able to buy rations of food. Consequently, more than 40 percent of the Irish population was kept alive by the soup kitchens. Moreover, the soup kitchens demonstrated that the British government possessed both the administrative and logistical capability to feed the Irish poor. However, it lacked the political will or courage to do so for a prolonged period, despite unequivocal evidence of extensive need. Furthermore, the giving of gratuitous relief—especially to the Irish poor—was regarded with horror not only by orthodox supporters of political economy but also by British and Irish taxpayers who believed they were financing a flawed system of relief. Despite being cheap and effective, therefore, the soup kitchens were closed in the fall of 1847, and a more draconian phase of relief commenced. Providentialist interpretations of the Famine were favored by leading Protestant British statesmen and administrators such as Charles Trevelyan of the Treasury and Charles Wood, the chancellor of the exchequer. This interpretation was enthusiastically
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supported by the London Times. Initially, some Catholic clergy viewed the food shortages as a judgment of God, requiring moral atonement by the population. However, this viewpoint was rejected by other Catholic clergy, including Archbishop Hughes of New York. At a fund-raising lecture given at the Broadway Tabernacle in March 1847, he averred that it was “blasphemy” to blame the tragedy on God, as the Famine was man’s doing. He also pointed out that only one crop had failed in Ireland, while there was an abundance of other foodstuffs. Hughes, at a distance of 3,000 miles, was highlighting the central paradox of the Famine—how could people starve while vast amounts of foodstuffs were being grown and exported from Ireland? There was little evidence of blight in the 1847 potato harvest, although the crop was very small. Nevertheless, the British government used the apparent disappearance of the blight to announce that the Famine was over and suggest that if further relief was necessary, it had to come totally from Irish sources. All relief, both permanent and emergency, was to be transferred to the Poor Law. The Poor Law had been introduced to Ireland in 1838 and was based on a system of workhouses, which were authoritarian, regimented institutions that provided a minimal amount of relief to families who were destitute. As the name implied, relief was given in return for work undertaken by the inmates, who were categorized as paupers. The 130 workhouses in Ireland could only hold a total of 110,000 inmates, but since 1846 they had been allowed to rent extra accommodation. After 1847, to deal with the additional demands placed on it, the Poor Law was also permitted to give a limited form of outside relief, thus allowing some paupers www.abc-clio.com
to remain in their own homes. For the British government, the key advantage of this form of relief was that each workhouse was supported by local taxation, which meant that the government could reduce its involvement in providing relief. The Famine, however, was far from over and, despite stringent regulations, in 1848 more than 1 million people were dependent on the Poor Law for survival. Moreover, the increase in local taxation and the inability of tenants to pay their rents on time had resulted in a policy of mass evictions. Consequently, the Irish poor now faced homelessness. In 1848, the blight returned just as virulently as in 1846, yet the British government refused to deviate from its policies introduced in the previous year, determined that relief should be financed from Ireland, and not by British taxpayers. The result of this minimal intervention was disastrous, and in 1849 proportionally as many people died as in “Black ’47.” Again, the British government demonstrated its determination that the Irish poor would not be a financial drain on British resources. At the beginning of 1848 the British government gave a small grant of £50,000 for Irish relief, while insisting that no more money would come from the central government. Even this small contribution angered some British taxpayers whose sympathies toward Ireland had hardened as a result of the Young Ireland uprising in July 1848. To cope with the ongoing distress in Ireland a new tax was imposed on Irish ratepayers known as the “Rate-in-Aid.” This taxation aroused the anger of some Protestant ratepayers in Ulster who argued—incorrectly—that they were being forced to subsidize the laziness and improvidence of paupers in the west of Ireland.
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The impact of the Famine was not confined to Ireland. Newspapers throughout the world carried reports of the suffering, and by the end of 1846 an international fund-raising effort had commenced. Reports of the food shortages first reached the United States and Canada at the end of 1845, but the coverage about the seriousness of the scarcity was mixed. Within a few months, news from Ireland was dominated by the repeal movement and divisions between Young and Old Ireland. The second, more serious crop failure in 1846 appeared in the international press as early as October 1846. Even at this early stage it was clear that the situation was far more serious than in the previous year. It resulted in relief committees being organized in a number of cities. Their priority was to raise money to send to Ireland rather than alleviate the condition of famine refugees in America. In 1847 the usual Saint Patrick’s Day dinners were canceled and the money sent to Ireland. Individual churches also raised money and sent it through the Society of Friends. In New York three ships were commissioned to take money and supplies to Ireland, the New Haven, the Duncan and the Boston. The Macedonia, donated by the secretary of the Navy, also included supplies for Scotland. It subsequently sailed from Boston, together with the Jamestown, which sailed directly to Queenstown (Cobh) in Cork. Paradoxically, as supplies left for Ireland, food was arriving in the United States from Irish ports, the British government having refused to close the Irish ports and keep food in the country. In the summer of 1847 conditions improved in Ireland, and mortality slowed down. This was partly attributable to the introduction of soup kitchens, but it was also because large donations and supplies of www.abc-clio.com
provisions were arriving from all over the world. At the end of 1847, however, private donations to Ireland dried up. This was attributable to a combination of factors: the British government’s declaration that the Famine was over; compassion fatigue; and frustration that despite large amounts of aid being sent to Ireland, paupers were emigrating and becoming an immediate burden on the taxpayers of their new country. These sentiments were evident in New York, which had raised money so generously for famine relief at the beginning of 1847. At the end of the year, the local authorities passed legislation making landing more difficult and introduced tighter housing legislation, which included restrictions on cellar dwellings. Nonetheless, the generosity of the American people following the second crop failure had been remarkable, not only in terms of the amount of aid raised, but also for the fact that donations had cut across national, religious, and ethnic boundaries, money being given by individuals and groups as diverse as the president of the United States, the Choctaw Indians, the Shakers of Albany, and Jewish synagogues in New York. In total, almost $2 million of relief was raised for Ireland, and its importance in saving lives was immeasurable. Mass emigration extended the suffering of the Irish people beyond Ireland. Since the second crop failure in 1846, thousands of people had fled Ireland, selling what few possessions they owned to afford the fare. Their preferred destination was North America, often via the circuitous route of Liverpool and Canada, to obtain the cheapest fares. The journey across the Atlantic could vary between 17 and 90 days. Because the British-registered ships were subject to few regulations, many of the Irish
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immigrants arrived in a debilitated state. Ship fever had become commonplace, and so the immigrants inadvertently brought fever into the city. More than any other European immigrants, the Irish were undernourished, flea-ridden, and ill; they had little capital or the skills or robust health to ensure that they could find employment quickly. As early as November 1846 immigrants were arriving who were escaping from the destitution in Ireland. Because of their poverty many became applicants for relief, but the city authorities found it difficult to cope with the increased demands on their limited resources. In New York, for example, the city’s almshouse could only hold 1,671 inmates, and it quickly became overcrowded. The ill health of many immigrants also meant that they filled up the hospitals and quarantine stations at the ports in which they landed. Although Irish immigrants were evident in all walks of life, they predominated amongst the poorer classes. Despite being mostly from rural areas, many famine immigrants settled in East Coast cities. In New York, they congregated in the slums of the Lower East Side and Upper East and West sides. Ironically, they escaped the poverty of Ireland to live in overcrowded, polluted, unsanitary slums, where they were exploited by greedy landlords and corrupt city officials. Mortality was high, caused by ship fever or typhoid, and the Irish were also overrepresented in mortality resulting from the 1849 cholera epidemic. The Irish poor had exchanged one form of poverty for another. In 1850, approximately one-third of the Irish were living in cellar dwellings. The better-off Irish emigrants, who tended to be healthier and have some capital, generally escaped from the cities to
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move westward. Politically, however, Irish immigrants had more rights than they had had in their own country. The rise of antiIrish nativism in the 1850s disguised the support and help given to the thousands of Irish arrivals who had fled from the Famine in the 1840s. The United States offered them a lifeline for survival and, without this safety valve, an even higher number of Irish people would have died. Good potato harvests did not return to Ireland until after 1851. By then, more than 1 million people had died and an even higher number had emigrated. The return of good harvests, however, did not mark an end to hunger or social dislocation, and levels of disease, mortality, and emigration remained higher throughout the 1850s than they had been before 1845. The Great Hunger had not only changed Ireland dramatically; its repercussions also changed the development of other countries to which Irish people had fled. Christine Kinealy
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See also: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR; BOSTON; DOUGLASS, Frederick; EMIGRATION; FOSTER, Vere Henry Louis; GROSSE ILE; MITCHELL, John; NATIVISM AND ANTICATHOLICISM; NEW YORK CITY; O’CONNELL, Daniel References Hayden, Tom, ed. Irish Hunger: Personal Reflections on the Legacy of the Famine. Denver: Roberts Rinehart, 1997. Hickey, Patrick. Famine in West Cork: The Mizen Land and People 1800–1852. Cork: Mercier Press, 2002. Kinealy, Christine, and Gerard MacAtasney. The Forgotten Famine: Hunger, Poverty and Sectarianism in Belfast 1840–1850. London: Pluto Press, 2000. Kinealy, Christine. The Irish Famine: Impact, Ideology and Rebellion. London: Palgrave, 2002.
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GRENNAN, EAMON 385 Ó Gráda, Cormac. Ireland: Before and After the Famine. Explorations in Economic History, 1800–1925. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993. Póirtéir, Cathal. The Irish Famine. Cork: Mercier Press, 1995.
GRENNAN, EAMON (1941–) Born November 13, 1941, in Dublin to Thomas, an educational administrator, and Evelyn (Yourell) Grennan, Eamon was educated by the Cistercians at Roscrea and attended University College Dublin (BA, 1963; MA, 1964), where he studied English and Italian; he received a doctorate in English from Harvard University (1973). In 1972 he married Joan Perkins; they divorced in 1986, and he later married Rachel Kitzinger. Since 1974 Grennan has taught at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and on occasion has been guest professor at Columbia, NYU, and Villanova. His slim collection Wildly for Days (1983) announced a pastoral poet who etched in minimalist fashion an interior life open to appreciating the unexpected. What Light There Is (1987) attunes itself to poetry as visual painting with a broader syntactical brush that verges on the prose poem, displaying patrician approval of construction workers at their job or the way deer graze on a golf course. Grennan’s breakthrough for a wider American audience occurred with the publication of What Light There Is & Other Selected Poems (1989). As If It Matters (1992) explores family outings, animals, insects, and an earnest attention to nature that recalls Cezanne’s shifting planes or the affectionate detail of Bonnard’s colorful interiors. The midlife poems in So It Goes (1995) mark a notable advance, both in the sensuality of their sinuous syntax and
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their porous exploration of memory, evoking Dantean inflections to meditate on childhood, daubing memorable portraits of his parents, especially his mother. Still Life with Waterfall (2001), which won the Lenore Marshall Award for Poetry in 2003 from the American Academy of Poets, returns to landscape sketches with more meditations on weather and landscape; here the poems are like a cornucopia bursting, more surreal and prolix in a profusion of lists that ramble with emotional predictability while the syntax engenders suspense. Quick of It (2004) delves into a more inward contemplation on landscape and reflection in densely textured, untitled, 10line prose poems that push the boundaries of syntax, creating the frisson of collage, blurring the distinction between subject and object. Many of his landscape sketches are inspired by living on the west coast of Ireland near Tully Mountain. Grennan’s gently idiomatic and limpid translations of Leopardi’s poetry earned him the 1997 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Grennan was also the recipient of a 1991 National Endowment for the Arts award and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995. His poems have won several Pushcart Prizes. With Rachael Kitzinger Grennan he has translated Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (2005). Grennan’s poetry exults in the casual: a cat listening to Mozart, his children’s efforts at collecting mussels, cows in a field, the flight of a bird into a window; he often uses windows as framing devices. Occasionally, he experiments with second-person narration. The real virtue of his poetry resides in his affable voice: a charming immediacy, inquisitive about the small things in life, optimistic about the possibilities of dealing
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with difficulties, contemplatively shading nuances of mood in a landscape, as in a watercolor. Both tone and voice rejoice in intimate turns of phrase, couched in a genial appreciation of colloquial speech that effortlessly blends American and Anglo-Irish patterns with echoes of Dante and Leopardi. While devoid of Leopardi’s pessimism and plangent self-pity, Grennan’s approach shows the paramount influence of Leopardi’s beguiling simplicity and impressionistic landscapes, especially in his gift for dramatizing tender empathy for the domestic ordinary, the delicate coloring of a pheasant, cobbled light off water, pale ambiance of a gentian sky. In Facing the Music (1999), Grennan casts a poet’s appreciative eye over the work of W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Austin Clarke, Padraic Fallon, Patrick Kavanagh, Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, and Derek Mahon, emphasizing the effect of emotion and affection in their work within their historical context and the broader palette of Irish poetry; more recent poets garner brief reviews. Grennan remains a poet of insouciant buoyancy and visual delight in nature, cherishing familial events, the breathing of leaves, and birds. Kevin T. McEneaney See also: JOYCE, James Augustine Aloysius; KINSELLA, Thomas; MONTAGUE, John; YEATS, William Butler References Fitzgerald-Hoyt, Mary. “Vermeer in Verse: Eamon Grennan’s Domestic Interior.” New Hibernia Review 2, no. 1 (1998): 121–131. Fleming, Deborah. “The ‘Common Ground’ of Eamon Grennan.” Eire-Ireland 28, no. 4 (1993): 133–149. Grennan, Eamon. Leopardi: Selected Poems. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Grennan, Eamon. Relations: New & Selected Poems. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1998. www.abc-clio.com
GROSSE ILE Formerly known as Ile de Grâce, Grosse Ile is a small island about two miles long by a half mile wide in the Saint Lawrence River approximately thirty miles downstream from Quebec City; from 1832 to 1937, the island served as a quarantine station for immigrants coming to Canada and was the scene of a major typhus epidemic in 1847 caused by the famine emigration from Ireland. Secret bacterial research was conducted there beginning in 1947; today the island is a Canadian historic site featuring the Irish Memorial and operated by the Canadian Parks Service. Fearing contagion from Asiatic cholera, British colonial authorities established a quarantine station on the uninhabited island of Grosse Ile in 1832. Most of the 50,000 immigrants of that season were Irish. A hurried and generally inefficient system of quarantine that year resulted in the spread of cholera to the cities of Quebec and Montreal, where several thousand died of the disease. Cholera would again hit the colony in 1834, 1849, and 1854. However, Grosse Ile is infamously known as an Irish burial ground following the tragic events of the famine year of 1847, during which some 17,000 to 20,000 Irish immigrants lost their lives. Two main reasons help explain the extremely high death toll at sea and on Grosse Ile during the 1847 season. First, being a British colony, Canada had little or no control over immigration to its shores, that being the responsibility of the imperial government. Unlike the independent United States, which saw the massive Irish exodus approaching on the horizon and took steps to curb the tide by refusing entry to the most overcrowded ships, Canada, via Grosse Ile, could do little but care for the
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sick and dying immigrants after they disembarked. Second, up to 1847, the average size of a season’s immigration by the Saint Lawrence stood at 30,000 to 50,000. In 1847, no less than 100,000 immigrants came by way of the Grosse Ile quarantine station, many of them weak from starvation and diseased with typhus that they had contracted in ports of embarkation such as Liverpool or Cork. Their situation was further aggravated by cramped and unsanitary conditions on board ship and by the length of some passages; those vessels refused at American ports such as New York and Philadelphia made their way to Quebec. Some 5,000 were buried at sea that year and at least 5,424 found a grave on Grosse Ile. Another 6,000 Irish immigrants died and were buried at Pointe Saint-Charles in Montreal. Several doctors, priests, nurses, and employees of the quarantine station also became victims of the typhus epidemic that season. With changes to ocean navigation, notably the development of faster transatlantic steamers, conditions on board and at the quarantine station generally improved. From 1869 to 1899, a bacteriologist, Dr. Frederick Montizambert, was medical superintendent of the quarantine station; he introduced the inspection and disinfection of vessels and luggage and saw to the examination and vaccination of passengers. Hospitals and hotels were erected on the island to treat and comfort passengers. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of “Black ’47,” the Ancient Order of Hibernians of North America erected a Celtic cross on Grosse Ile. The cross, with inscriptions in French, English, and Irish, was displayed in 1909. Although immigration reached new highs in the early twentieth century (225,000 immigrants arrived www.abc-clio.com
at Quebec in 1914), the outbreak of World War I put a stop to the movement from Europe, and the quarantine station closed in 1937. Shortly after World War II, secret bacterial research was conducted on Grosse Ile and the island was shut off from public scrutiny. The Canadian government declared the island a national historic site in 1984. An Irish Memorial was established in 1998 to mark the 150th anniversary of the catastrophic events of 1847. The site is today open to the public. Robert J. Grace See also: ANCIENT ORDER OF HIBERNIANS; EMIGRATION; GREAT FAMINE, The References Charbonneau, André, and André Sévigny. 1847, Grosse Île: A Record of Daily Events. Quebec: Minister of Public Works, 1997. O’Gallagher, Marianna, Grosse Île: Gateway to Canada. Quebec: Carraig Books, 1984.
GUEVARA, ERNESTO “CHE” (1928–1967) One of the most famous revolutionary fighters of the twentieth century, Ernesto “Che” Guevara was the son of Ernesto Guevara Lynch and Celia de la Serna. A physician, better known for his role in the revolutionary forces in Cuba, Congo, and Bolivia, Che was born on June 14, 1928, in Rosario, Argentina. Owing to his poor health (he suffered from asthma), in 1932 the family moved to Altagracia, Córdoba province. In 1947, Guevara began studying medicine in the University of Buenos Aires and graduated in 1953. During this period he traveled throughout Latin America, including Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. The year of his graduation
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he went to Guatemala and got acquainted with the revolutionist Antonio Ñico López. After the fall of Jacobo Arbenz, Guevara settled in Mexico. In July 1955 he enrolled in Fidel Castro’s Granma expedition, which left Tuxpan on November 25, 1956, and landed a week later in Cuba. The rebels were defeated, but on January 17, 1957, they overpowered the regular army in Uvero (a battle that Guevara considered the maturity of the revolution). In June 1957, Guevara was appointed chief of the rebels’ fourth regiment, which arrived the following year at Camagüey. By year end they occupied the city of Santa Clara, entering Havana on January 2, 1959. Guevara was awarded Cuban citizenship and on November 26 was appointed president of the national bank. Between 1960 and 1965 Guevara traveled in commercial missions to countries in Europe, Asia, and Latin America to increase Cuban international trade, foster ideological dialogue, and support a military alliance against the threat of the United States. He also represented Cuba in international conferences and bodies. To resume military action, Guevara resigned his official appointments, left Cuba on October 3, 1965, and arrived in Bolivia with a Uruguayan passport and under the name of Adolfo Mena González. He joined the local guerrilla movement in November and after an encounter in Quebrada del Yuro he was seriously injured. On October 9, 1965, Che Guevara was executed in Higuera together with six other rebels. His body was discovered in 1997, and the remains were buried in Cuba. On the belief that successful revolutions were only possible with the material support of well-organized armies, Guevara developed the primacy of military struggle www.abc-clio.com
and the guerilla foci, by which cumulative attacks over relatively small targets would develop the people’s revolutionary awareness. Privately, he was critical of the Soviet Union and claimed that the world’s northern hemisphere, including the United States and the Soviet Union, exploited the southern hemisphere. He supported the Vietnamese revolution and urged his comrades in South America to create “many Vietnams.” Guevara’s published works include The Bolivian Diary, Guerrilla Warfare, The African Dream: the Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo, and The Motorcycle Diaries. In Ireland and other places with Irish immigration, Guevara’s life and thinking are sometimes linked with his ancestry. However, Guevara’s family and cultural connections with Ireland were in fact far and remote. His paternal grandmother, Ana Isabel Lynch was the great-greatgranddaughter of Patrick Lynch, born in 1715 in Lydican Castle, Co. Galway, and a member of a merchant family prominent in Jamaica and elsewhere in the West Indies. Patrick Lynch left Ireland in the 1740s and after traveling throughout the Americas settled in Buenos Aires in 1749. There is no evidence that Guevara identified with Irish culture. He was proud of his Argentine origin and Cuban nationality and regarded himself as Latin American. One of the possible sources of misinformation was an interview on March 13, 1965, by journalist Arthur Quinlan. Guevara was on his way back to Havana from Prague, and the Cuban Airlines aircraft developed mechanical trouble and landed in Shannon Airport. According to Quinlan, Guevara spoke in English and talked of his Irish connections through the name Lynch. He went with friends to Limerick and stayed in the
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Hanratty’s Hotel on Glentworth Street. Most likely, this was the closest connection that Che Guevara had with Ireland. Edmundo Murray See also: ARGENTINA; FARRELL, Edelmiro Juan References Anderson, John Lee. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Grove Press, 1997. Castañeda, Jorge G. Compañero: Vida y Muerte de Che Guevara. Mexico: Grijalbo, 1997. Coghlan, Eduardo A. Los Irlandeses en la Argentina: Su Actuación y Descendencia. Buenos Aires: Author’s Edition, 1987.
GUINEY, LOUISE IMOGENE (1861–1920) A poet, essayist, and literary critic, Guiney was among the group of artists associated with the aesthetic revival in Boston during
Portrait of poet, essayist, and literary critic Louise Imogene Guiney. (Library of Congress) www.abc-clio.com
the 1890s. Her father, Patrick Robert Guiney, was born in Parkstown, Co. Tipperary, in 1835, and as a boy immigrated with his father to the United States. After briefly considering a career in the theater, Patrick Guiney decided to pursue a law career and was admitted to the bar in 1856. He later served with distinction as a Union soldier in the Civil War, winning a promotion to the rank of brigadier general from President Andrew Johnson. In 1859, he married Jeannette Margaret Doyle. Their daughter Louise Imogen Guiney was born in Roxbury, a prosperous Boston suburb, on January 7, 1861. As an Irish-American Catholic, Guiney has been called “the ambassador between Boston’s two cultures”: the Boston Brahmin intelligentsia and the Irish. Her first published poem, “Charles Sumner,” appeared in 1880 in the Boston newspaper the Pilot, edited by the prominent Irish-American journalist John Boyle O’Reilly, her father’s close friend. Other poems, collected in Songs at the Start (1884) and The White Sail and Other Poems (1887), and her essays, collected in Goose Quill Papers (1885), soon attracted the attention of the Boston literary establishment, and by the mid1890s she was firmly established in Boston artistic circles. Her well-known friends and patrons included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Edmund Clarence Stedman. Her sentimental writing style, harking back to Romantic, seventeenth-century, and Civil War poets, reflects her Roman Catholicism and literary conservatism. As the daughter of a well-off lawyer who held (unusually for an Irish immigrant at the time) politically liberal, antislavery views, Guiney’s experience of growing up as an Irish Catholic in nineteenth-century
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America was in some ways atypical. However, Guiney was proud of her Irish heritage, and many of her writings reflect her attempt to portray the Irish in a more positive light than was common at the time. In the late 1890s, Guiney turned to scholarship, focusing on the seventeenth-century Cavalier poets, but also writing on a variety of other subjects, including an entry on Chaucer for the Catholic Encyclopedia and a study of Robert Louis Stevenson on which she collaborated with her close friend, the writer Alice Brown. Today, Guiney may be best remembered for her part in “discovering” the artist and writer Kahlil Gibran. Gibran had emigrated from Lebanon to the United States with his family at the age of 12, and in the 1890s his talent for drawing attracted the notice of local artists, including Guiney, who introduced him to the established artists of the aesthetic movement. Guiney
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was also generous in introducing other young writers, including the Canadian poet Wilfred Campbell, to American publishers. Although Guiney was a popular writer in her lifetime, by her own admission she did not take her own writing or fame very seriously. Her main ambition seems to have been to rescue the eclipsed reputations of other writers and notables, such as Robert Emmet, Hurrell Froude, Henry Vaughan, Lady Danvers, and Katherine Philips. After years of regular travel to and from England, Guiney settled there in 1901, dying in Gloucestershire in 1920. Danielle Maze
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See also: O’REILLY, John Boyle Reference Guiney, Louise Imogen, Patrins: to Which Is Added an Inquirendo Into the Wit & Other Good Parts of His Late Majesty King Charles the Second. Boston: Copeland and Day, 1897.
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H HACKETT, FRANCIS (1883–1962) Francis Hackett was born in Kilkenny, Ireland, on January 21, 1883. At St. Kieran’s College he met Thomas MacDonagh (1878–1916), the teacher and nationalist poet who was executed for his part in the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916. MacDonagh and Hackett became regular correspondents after Hackett immigrated to the United States, aged eighteen. Hackett began his journalistic career at the Chicago Evening Post, eventually becoming editor of the literary review. In 1914, he became literary critic of the recently established New Republic: one memorable review, from March 1917, praises James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In 1918, Hackett married Danish-born Signe Toksvig, also a promising writer, and completed his first full-length work, Ireland: A Study in Nationalism (1918). In it, Hackett blames British treatment of the Irish for the Easter Rising of 1916 and reasons that Home Rule, while not ideal, might herald “the beginnings of appropriate administration for Ireland.” In a new preface for the third edition (1920), Hackett advocates complete separation from Britain. The Story of the Irish Nation, a romp through the history of Ireland, followed in 1922. Hackett also
compiled two collections of criticism and reviews—Horizons (1918) and The Invisible Censor (1921). In one review Hackett affirms his “complete identification” with the United States. Nevertheless, in 1922 Hackett and Toksvig left the United States for the South of France to start work on his first novel, That Nice Young Couple (1925). In 1926, the couple moved to Co. Wexford, Ireland, and then on to Co. Wicklow in 1929. Hackett worked as a freelance political writer to fund four years of research into his first historical biography. Henry the Eighth (1929) is a playful retelling of the Tudor monarch’s life that simultaneously condemns his cruelty and praises his flair for leadership. Hackett produced another biography of a fallible but inspirational king, Francis the First: Gentleman of France, in 1934. In 1936 he finished his second novel, The Green Lion. The novel is semiautobiographical, describing the horrific childhood of a young boy in Kilkenny. However, it was banned by the Irish censors because the central character is the illegitimate offspring of a peasant girl and a church neophyte and because it condemns the Jesuit education system. Toksvig’s second novel, Eve’s Doctor (1937), was also banned in Ireland. In protest Hackett and
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moments of the life of a dissolute Washington senator—followed in 1943. Hackett returned to Copenhagen after the war, producing Books in General and Particular, a collection of essays and reviews, in 1947. He lived in Denmark until his death, on April 25 1962, aged seventy-nine. In 1971, Toksvig published some of Hackett’s early reminiscences, written in 1922–1923 about his life until 1913, under Hackett’s self-penned title American Rainbow. Hackett’s “rainbow” refracts his Irish past through the prism of his American present. American Rainbow commemorates Hackett’s colorful life, counteracting his concern that “The rainbow does not vanish, but it recedes.” Tara Stubbs See also: NATIONALISM, IRISHAMERICAN Portrait of author Francis Hackett, ca. 1935. (Library of Congress)
Toksvig left Wexford for Toksvig’s native Denmark, settling in Copenhagen. Meanwhile, The Green Lion had been published in London. In 1939, Hackett and Toksvig traveled to New York for a proposed dramatization of Hackett’s fictional work, Queen Anne Boleyn (1939). However, the play was canceled, and the German occupation of Denmark had meant moving to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, rather than back to Copenhagen. Hackett began contributing biweekly literary reviews to the New York Times and wrote his semiautobiographical political and social commentary, I Choose Denmark (1940), which extols the virtues of Denmark’s constitution, suggesting a possible model for Ireland. Hackett’s last novel, The Senator’s Last Night—which details, with characteristic relish, the last www.abc-clio.com
Reference Toksvig, Signe, ed. American Rainbow. New York: Liveright, 1971.
HANLON, NED (1857–1937) Although his Irish name was enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame roughly 90 years after his managerial career ended, Ned Hanlon’s influence on the way baseball is played remains evident to this day. His 1,313 wins as a manager were notable in his day, but they pale in comparison to other Hall of Fame managers. Hanlon’s influence, however, is best measured by the impression he left on his players who followed him as managers. Hanlon, best known for leading the Baltimore Orioles in the 1890s when it was a National League team, saw several of his players become successful managers in the major leagues, creating a legacy that remains vibrant. The managerial mentor of John McGraw,
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Hanlon directly assisted in the managerial development of Hughie Jennings, Wilbert Robinson, Kid Gleason, and Miller Huggins. Although a mediocre hitter, Hanlon was among the many Irish-American ballplayers that spurred the burgeoning sport during the 1880s. Hanlon joined the Orioles midseason in 1892 when they were among the worst teams in the league. He bought stock in the club and was elected president, which allowed him the freedom to acquire stars such as Dan Brouthers (with whom Hanlon earlier had formed a precursor to the baseball player’s union), Jennings, Joe Kelley, and “Wee” Willie Keeler to join established players Robinson, McGraw, and Sadie McMahon. Hanlon’s Orioles won their first pennant in 1894, and over the next six seasons his teams won four more pennants (two additional in Baltimore and Brooklyn during his first two seasons there). If Hanlon was not considered the most combative manager, he likely placed among the top during an era renowned for rowdiness. Befitting the rules of the time, however, Hanlon was not allowed to leave the bench in his street clothes, which was the way nonplaying managers dressed. Hanlon’s early legacy was in drilling his clubs in “baseball as she is played,” which included players running into opposing fielders, holding or bumping base runners, interfering with catchers, and throwing equipment in front of opponents trying to score. Rules now preclude such tactics, yet the notion of aggressive baseball found its historic foothold in Hanlon’s Orioles. Plays such as the hit-and-run and the sacrifice bunt, which he did not invent but his team implemented consistently well, did not always find favor with those players under his tutelage. McGraw detested the sacrifice. Hanlon’s www.abc-clio.com
Orioles were among the first to have fielders back up each other on plays to reduce the opposition’s advancement on errors. His development and innovation of “inside baseball” (the outguessing and outmaneuvering of the opposing team) found fertile soil in those managers who followed him, especially McGraw, who took inside baseball to a higher level and passed it further through the sport. When Hanlon’s Baltimore club and attendance began to wane, Hanlon added a half interest in the Brooklyn franchise in 1899, trading himself several star players and establishing McGraw, who refused to leave, as his managerial successor and protégé in Baltimore. Managed by Hanlon, the Brooklyn Superbas won their first ever pennant and repeated the win in 1900. By 1910, most managers in both the American and National Leagues were men who had played for Hanlon during the 1890s. Among these was Connie Mack, an Irish American who began managing in the National League in 1894 and retired after 1950, following half a century at the helm of the Philadelphia Athletics. Like McGraw, Mack was inducted into the Hall of Fame decades before Hanlon, who was selected in 1996. Despite Mack’s unprecedented tenure, his legacy of successful managers has essentially died out. Among Hanlon’s other protégés, Gleason (who pitched for Hanlon before becoming a second baseman), was the ill-fated manager of the 1919 White Sox, which lost the World Series when several players conspired with gamblers. Far more successful was Huggins, who led the New York Yankees to numerous American League pennants and World Championships during the 1920s. Like a family tree, successful managers trace through McGraw and Huggins particularly. For example, later Yankee
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dynasty leader Casey Stengel played for McGraw, but was also influenced by managers Bill Dahlen and Robinson, who both played for Hanlon. Huggins mentored Leo Durocher, whose influence upon Bill Rigney and Earl Weaver is still felt in the major leagues. Through Stengel, Hanlon’s “greatgrandsons” and “great-great-grandsons” include Billy Martin and Lou Piniella. Even successful managers of the 1990s such as Joe Torre and Tony LaRussa can trace their managerial influences back to Hanlon. Matthew Sinclair See also: BASEBALL; BASEBALL MANAGERS, IRISH-AMERICAN; MACK, Connie; McGRAW, John References Alexander, Charles C. Our Game: An American Baseball History. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1991. Solomon, Burt. Where They Ain’t: The Fabled Life and Untimely Death of the Original Baltimore Orioles. New York: Free Press. 1999.
HARNETT, WILLIAM MICHAEL (1848–1892) William Harnett was born in Clonakilty, Co. Cork, but his family moved to Philadelphia. He worked there as an engraver from 1865 until 1871 when he moved to New York, to study at the National Academy of Design and Cooper Union, returning to Philadelphia in 1876 where he continued his studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 1880, he went to London, Frankfurt, and Munich, remaining in Munich until 1885. He returned to the United States via Paris, where he exhibited his paintings most successfully at the Salon. In 1886, he moved permanently to New York. Initially, Harnett worked in the tradition of Raphaelle Peale, whose work, in www.abc-clio.com
turn, was rooted in seventeenth-century Dutch art. His early work brings together the significant elements of the artist’s everyday life. His preferred still-life objects (fruit and vegetables, beer mugs and tobacco, books and musical instruments, writing materials and skulls) were additionally selected for their symbolic resonance. In his work, conceptual realism explores tactile and intellectual considerations, as opposed to other such traditions in which the object is a vehicle for exploring formal, optical, and perceptual contemplation. Trompe l’oeil, at which Harnett excelled, is a further refinement of the former category of still-life painting in which the artist seeks illusionistically to re-create material reality. Harnett’s mastery of trompe l’oeil challenged the new powers of the photographic age. His virtuosity was alternately acclaimed as the ultimate skill and derided as mere imitation. On the one hand, the content of still-life painting appealed to middle-class audiences, and the commodification of the art market facilitated the development of a middle-class consumer; thus, still-life painting can be credited with contributing to the democratization of art. On the other hand, the quotidian nature of the object, coupled with its mimetic execution, revealed the absence of those high moral qualities traditionally associated with great history painting. Such was Harnett’s skill in hyperrealism that anecdotes abounded about the need to place guards beside his paintings to prevent anyone, for example, trying to take down the fiddle and bow, so illusionistically painted in The Old Violin. On another occasion, federal agents, disturbed by its remarkable illusionism, confiscated Harnett’s painting of treasury bills in a New York saloon. Some indignantly went so far as to suggest that
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such imagery was actually intended to deceive the viewer Harnett, however, described his work as one of “selective imitation,” insisting that he did “not closely imitate nature.” He believed the selection of objects was intended to convey states of mind. One such state was nostalgia, which in the late nineteenth century was understood as a way of either creating a sense of the past or holding on to values that were under threat. The objects he selected focused on a preindustrialized age; handmade objects were given added significance in the knowledge that they would soon be obsolete, amounting to what Robert Hughes called “a virtual fetishization of the mundane.” Harnett used predominantly male objects—drinking utensils, revolvers, pipes, and horseshoes—corresponding to his predominantly white, male, and middle-class audiences. Indeed, David Lubin argues that trompe l’oeil still lives were psychologically affirmative, and that these paintings “aesthetically demarcated gender and encouraged its stabilisation.” Stylistically, the visual effect is achieved by the use of a flat background pressing close to the picture plane, the shallowness of the depth heightening the illusion of three-dimensionality. The paint is applied in invisible strokes, worked to a hard-edged, highly polished finish. In contrast to the growing interest in sketchiness and spontaneity, which increased toward the end of the nineteenth century, the very perfection of the trompe l’oeil technique was almost enough to ensure its extinction. Other Harnett paintings include The Banker’s Table, Golden Horseshoe, Old Refrain and, most famously, After the Hunt. Niamh O’Sullivan www.abc-clio.com
References Bolger, Doreen, et al., eds. William M. Harnett. New York: Amon Carter Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Harry N. Abrams, 1992. Frankenstein, Alfred. After the Hunt: William Harnett and Other American Still-life Painters, 1870–1900. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Lubin, David M. Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994.
HARRIGAN, EDWARD (1844–1911) AND HART, TONY (1855–1891) Harrigan and Hart were one of the most successful comic teams in the history of the American theater. Hart was a gifted actor, specializing in transvestite roles. Harrigan, one of the fathers of the American musical, wrote more than 80 sketches, 36 plays and musicals, and the lyrics to some 200 songs. Starting as a vaudeville duo, the two men developed a variety of comic ethnic types, including Germans, Italians, African Americans, and especially Irish characters. They placed the urban Irish immigrant on center stage of the late nineteenth-century popular American theater. Born into an Irish family in Worcester, Massachusetts, Tony Hart (whose real name was Anthony Cannon) left home at an early age and found his way into show business. In 1871, at the age of 16, he teamed up with Edward Harrigan in Chicago. Hart’s slight frame and light lyric tenor voice, combined with his acting talents, enabled him to play “wench” or “skirt” roles, as well as juvenile characters. His female impersonations were so successful that he is said to have once fooled the famous detective Allen Pinkerton.
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Harrigan was third-generation Irish. His family migrated from Cork to Newfoundland and finally to New York City. He was born in the Corlear’s Hook section on the Lower East Side. As a young man, he worked his way to San Francisco, following his father’s trade as a ship’s caulker. While there he began performing at the city’s famous Bella Union variety theater in 1867. The satiric distance from which Harrigan would later view the New York Irish may have been influenced by his experience among the self-confident Irish of the Bay City, who had suffered none of the discrimination and hostility that characterized the Irish immigrant experience on the East Coast. Working his way back East, Harrigan tried out several partners until he met Hart. The two had immediate successes with Harrigan’s earlier material. However, they had a hit on their hands when they performed the sketch and song “The Mulligan Guards” at Pastor’s Theater in New York City in 1873. The song became immensely popular. Unfortunately, Harrigan and British immigrant David Braham, who wrote the music, sold the rights to the publisher for only $50. It was a mistake they never made again. Braham, a skillful composer who set all of Harrigan’s songs, soon became his musical director and eventually his father-in-law. Braham was in many ways the third partner in the Harrigan and Hart phenomenon. Harrigan expanded the Mulligan Guard sketch, a satire of the Irish militia or “target companies” that proliferated around New York City. Finally, in 1879 he staged The Mulligan Guard Ball, the first of 11 musicals based on characters from the original Guard sketches. Set in the Five Points section of New York City, the series featured the comic and sometimes fractious rivalry among www.abc-clio.com
the district’s Irish, German, and AfricanAmerican residents. Following the lives of Irish immigrant Dan Mulligan, his wife Cordelia, and their friends and neighbors (played by Harrigan’s repertory company), the musicals had many of the qualities of a modern situation comedy. Harrigan’s shows shared another characteristic with today’s sitcoms: the placing of stereotypical characters within highly realistic settings. Contemporary critics commented on the striking realism of Harrigan’s stage sets and the convincing behavior and appearance of the various urban types who peopled them. To ensure the authenticity of their wardrobe, Harrigan and his cast sometimes visited Castle Gardens, where they bought the clothes off the backs of arriving immigrants. Other Harrigan musicals also featured the same ethnic mix that characterized the Mulligan Guard series. Harrigan was among the first playwrights to acknowledge the multiethnic character of America’s rapidly growing cities, epitomized in the chorus of “McNally’s Row of Flats’”(from McSorley’s Inflation, 1883): It’s Ireland and Italy, Jerusalem and Germany, O Chinamen and Nagers and a paradise for cats, All jumbled up together in snow and raging weather, They represent the tenants of McNally’s Row of Flats.
Unfortunately, Harrigan’s shows reflect the racism that was so characteristic of America in his day. With only a few exceptions, the African-American characters, played by white actors (including Harrigan and Hart) in blackface, were essentially products of the minstrel stage. However, this enabled Harrigan to allow his black characters to trade insults with the Irish on
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stage and to engage in dustups or melees, as Harrigan called them, a feature of most of the Mulligan Guard shows. Yet, Harrigan also depicted a remarkably free and easy relationship between the two races. In his plays they seem used to and familiar with each other, and if blacks were stereotyped, so too were the Germans and most of Harrigan’s Irish characters. At a time when many observers of urban America were becoming increasingly disturbed at the variety of races and nationalities pouring into the cities, Harrigan seemed to accept the emerging multiethnic America with uncommon optimism. When someone asked Harrigan if all the ethnic groups in New York really lived “sort of thick an’ mixed like the innards of a mince pie,” Harrigan assured the man that they were even thicker, and with “more spice in ’em” (Moody 109). When criticized for having so many immigrants and blacks in his plays, he responded: “Whoever votes the Republican or Democratic ticket in the United States must be an American, no matter what may be his mother tongue or color” (Kahn, Jr. 263–264). However, it was the Irish who dominated most of Harrigan’s plays and musicals. As one of his characters, an alderman says: “My district is the Tower of Babel, and the Irish flag floats from the top” (Kahn, Jr. 64). Although he satirized many aspects of Irish immigrant life, Harrigan also knew the New York Irish and had sympathy for their efforts to establish themselves amid the chaos and poverty of raw urban life. Many of his songs celebrated the more positive aspects of the Irish experience. Dan Mulligan’s song “My Dad’s Dinner Pail” (Cordelia’s Aspirations, 1883) commemorated a working-class father who shared his lunch with his workmates. In “Babies on Our Block” (The www.abc-clio.com
Mulligan Guard Ball, 1879) the Irish fathers, in supporting their families, were not only “Quite easy with the shovel” but were also “handy with the pen.” Although he made frequent use of the old Irish stereotypes, Harrigan could also depict, as he did in “Maggie Murphy’s Home” (Reilly and the 400, 1890), the Sunday night dances in immigrant flats, without reference to either fighting or drinking. Harrigan was also one of the first American writers to fully embrace urban life and to see the Irish as an integral part of the city. In “Going Home With Nelly After Five” from The Mulligan Guard’s Picnic (1883), one of his Irish characters describes himself and his girlfriend as part of the great urban throng: “It’s laboring men and working girls like bees out of a hive / Among the crowd I’m going home with Nelly after five.” Thanks to his company’s annual tours, Harrigan’s enormous popularity extended beyond New York City. Even the departure of Hart in 1886 did not impede his success. However, by the mid-1890s, New York had tired of Harrigan’s multiethnic workingclass comedies. By the time he died in 1911, Tin Pan Alley’s Emerald Isles had replaced the crowded city as the preferred setting for “Irish” musicals and songs. William H. A. Williams See also: COHAN, George M.; McMANUS, George References Kahn, E. J., Jr. The Merry Partners: The Age and Stage of Harrigan and Hart. New York: Random House, 1955. Moody, Richard. Ned Harrigan: From Corlear’s Hook to Herald Square. Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1980. Williams, William H. A. ’Twas Only an Irishman’s Dream: The Image of the Irish and Ireland in American Popular Song Lyrics, 1800–1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996: 158–172.
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HARRIS, RICHARD (1930–2002) Richard Harris, along with Peter O’Toole, was part of a new generation of Irish actors to achieve international stardom in the 1960s. Of Welsh ancestry, he was born in Limerick on October 1, 1930, to Ivan Harris and Mildred Harris (née Harty) and was one of five children. Ivan Harris owned a well-known flour mill in Limerick, which he had inherited from his father. Although Richard mainly experienced a solidly middle class upbringing, the family mill was in constant financial difficulties in the 1920s and 1930s and would eventually close down in the 1950s. Harris attended St. Philomena’s junior school, which was run by the Jesuit order, and later enrolled in another Jesuit school, the Crescent Comprehensive. Although he did not excel in his academic studies (he was later diagnosed as dyslexic), he did stand out on the rugby pitch, and the sport would remain one of his great passions. He also became interested in acting and joined Limerick’s Playhouse Theatre in 1947. Following a bout with tuberculosis in 1952, he resolved to pursue acting seriously and traveled to London to enroll in the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts; while there he met and married Elizabeth Rees Williams. During his time at the Academy he acted in plays and directed a 1956 production of Clifford Odets’s Winter Journey, which received poor reviews. Harris’s big break was being spotted by Theatre Royal director Joan Littlewood, who cast him as Mickser in her 1956 production of Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow. Signing him to her company, she cast him in a major role in You Won’t Always Be on Top, an “angry young man” play written by Henry Chapman that received www.abc-clio.com
mixed reviews but gained publicity for both Littlewood and Harris when it was brought to court by the British censors. This performance was followed by a role in a Pirandello play, Man, Beast and Virtue, which won Harris more critical attention. In 1959 he made his screen debut in a television production of an Irish play called The Irish Harp; more significant was his appearance in an Associated British Picture, Alive and Kicking, which was made under contract to the film company. In 1959 Harris returned to Ireland to take a role as an Irish Republican Army (IRA) gunrunner in a major American film, Shake Hands with the Devil, starring James Cagney. The film, while not a huge success, was important in the development of Harris’s film career, and it attracted the attention of other American producers; soon after, he was cast in a supporting role in The Wreck of the Mary Deare, alongside two major Hollywood stars, Gary Cooper and Charlton Heston. The film received much publicity and was commercially successful. Although Harris had certainly set his film career in motion, he also continued working in theater. He appeared in a number of Littlewood productions: a musical called Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be; a play, The Dutch Courtesan; and a minor role in Brendan Behan’s The Hostage, staged by Littlewood in Paris. Returning to films in 1960, he took on another Americanproduced, IRA-themed film, A Terrible Beauty, shot in Dublin by Tay Garnett and starring Robert Mitchum. Searching for challenging acting roles, Harris pursued the part of the Ginger Man in the play adapted from J. P. Donleavy’s novel of the same name. Having scored a critical and commercial success during its
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London run in 1960, it was transferred to Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre, where it attracted a storm of criticism for its perceived sexual and religious profanity. The Dublin run was subsequently cut short, much to Harris’s disappointment (and glee at having offended the moral majority). Returning to London, and still under contract to Associated British Pictures, he acted alongside Richard Burton and Laurence Harvey in The Long and the Short and the Tall, directed by Leslie Norman in 1960. Yet, despite having appeared in a range of American and British films, Harris was still not a widely recognized actor. This would change with his appearance in the troubled production of Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard and shot in Tahiti in 1961. Brando clashed with all his costars, including Harris, as well as his director, Carol Reed. Reed was replaced by Hollywood veteran Lewis Milestone, and the film was eventually released to a mixed critical reaction. Back in Britain, Harris was approached by film writer and documentary director Lindsay Anderson, who was preparing his first feature film, This Sporting Life (1963). The subject and the director appealed to Harris, and he accepted the lead role. The part of Frank Machin, the young rugby-playing protagonist, required weeks of intensive physical training, with the result that Harris delivered a performance that became the defining one of his career. Shortly after the film was released to critical acclaim he worked again with Anderson on a stage production of Gogol’s Diary of a Madman at the Royal Court in London. This was to be his last stage role for 18 years. Throughout the 1960s Harris divided his time among Ireland, Britain, and the United States, working with www.abc-clio.com
major Hollywood directors such as Sam Peckinpah (Major Dundee in 1965) and John Huston (The Bible: In the Beginning in 1965), as well as with emerging European auteurs such as Michelangelo Antonioni (Deserto Rosso in 1964). An important film was Camelot, in which he played King Arthur, a role that had already won Richard Burton considerable success on stage. Camelot was a musical, and Harris developed a lucrative side career as singer, releasing a number of successful albums between 1968 and 1974. Soon after the release of Camelot in 1967, Harris accepted a role in The Molly Maguires (1968). Based on an Irish-themed script by the blacklisted Hollywood writer Walter Bernstein and directed by acclaimed director Martin Ritt, it was set in a mining community in nineteenth-century Pennsylvania and was notable for its sympathetic portrayal of the labor struggle. Harris was disappointed with the poor performance of the film at the box office, although he remained proud of the film and of his part. Harris’s next choice surprised many who regarded him as a republican sympathizer. He took on the title role in Ken Hughes’s Cromwell (1970), the story of the seventeenth-century soldier and brutal oppressor of Catholic Ireland. Harris explained that he was drawn to the role because of his interest in Ireland’s history and because he felt paradoxically drawn to the character of Cromwell, whom he regarded as a complex, tormented man. In 1970 he traveled to Israel to shoot Bloomfield. The shoot was a difficult one, and the original director, Uri Zohar, was fired and replaced by Harris himself. This would prove to be Harris’s first and only venture into directing and when the film was released it was dismissed by many critics
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as an ego trip for its director and star. His output was prolific in the 1960s and 1970s and, although his choices were not always governed by artistic ambition, he did star in a number of hit films such as Caprice (1967), The Cassandra Crossing (1976), and A Man Called Horse (released in 1969, it spawned two sequels: Return of a Man Called Horse in 1976 and Triumphs of a Man Called Horse in 1982). By the mid-1970s, Harris was an international star with a reputation for hard drinking and a volatile temper, if not for outstanding films. He battled personal problems that included tax debts, drug and alcohol abuse, and the breakdown of his marriages to Elizabeth and his second wife, Ann Turkel. After a decade of starring in mostly forgettable films, Harris returned to Camelot, this time in a stage production that traveled throughout the United States, Australia, and London in 1981–1982. As with the 1967 film, Harris took over the King Arthur role from Richard Burton, who had been forced to bow out because of ill health. Harris’s return to the stage after an absence of nearly two decades was almost his last performance: after years of alcohol and drug abuse his health was deteriorating rapidly, and he was warned by doctors that his body could not withstand much more ill treatment. Soon after, he resolved to stop drinking, and for the last two decades of his life he remained a moderate drinker. The 1980s saw Harris taking on fewer roles: there were some appearances on television and in moderately budgeted films, but to many it appeared that Harris was washed up as an actor. This perception changed, and Harris’s career emerged from the doldrums, when he met Irish producer Noel Pearson in 1989. Pearson had just achieved a major hit with My Left Foot, his www.abc-clio.com
film of the life of Irish writer Christy Brown, which was directed by Jim Sheridan. Having scored five Academy Award nominations for My Left Foot, the winning team of Pearson and Sheridan was set for their next project: a film version of John B. Keane’s complex play of Irish identity and the land, The Field. Pearson had already cast veteran Irish stage and screen actor Ray McAnally in the central role of Bull McCabe, and he offered Harris a supporting role as a priest. However, as the film was going into production McAnally died suddenly and Harris sought to take over his part. Despite the initial reluctance of the film’s financiers, Granada television, Harris succeeded in winning the role, resulting in a performance that was rated as a career high point. For Harris, winning the role of Bull McCabe was his last chance to prove that he was a great actor, that he had fulfilled the promise so evident in This Sporting Life. It proved to be a role that reconnected him to his country, to its troubled and complex history, and it caused him to reassess his own attitudes to work, roots, and family. In an interview during the making of the film, he observed that “This Sporting Life was my Hamlet. The Field will be my Lear.” And indeed the role of Bull McCabe had many parallels with the story of Shakespeare’s doomed king: both were abrasive and ruthless characters whose own flaws led to their pathetic downfall. Tellingly, many of Harris’s friends and colleagues believed it was a self-revelatory performance, a view tacitly endorsed by Harris himself. Harris’s Bull McCabe was heralded as a return to form and garnered him Academy Award and BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) nominations. (Much to his disappointment, he won neither.)
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Harris’s performance also rekindled the interest of leading producers and directors and in the 10 years that followed, he acted in 22 films and made a triumphant return to the stage in a production of Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV in 1990. Many of the films he made in the last decade of his life were high-profile and traded on the public’s perception of him as an aging hell-raiser and raconteur. He appeared as a flamboyant rogue, English Bob, in Clint Eastwood’s acclaimed western, Unforgiven (1992), and as a Sinn Féin leader in Philip Noyce’s film of a Tom Clancy novel, Patriot Games (1992). He also appeared in several Irish films, including Trojan Eddie (1996) and This Is the Sea (1998). In 2001 Harris had the opportunity to play another Lear-like role, in Dan Boyd’s independent film, My Kingdom, which recast Shakespeare’s king as a dying criminal boss in Liverpool. Although the film did not receive a wide release, it won critical praise, particularly for Harris’s performance. The last two years of Harris’s life brought him to an even wider, younger audience. He appeared in a major role in Ridley Scott’s 2000 blockbuster, Gladiator, and as Professor Dumbledore in two Harry Potter films, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002). Soon after he completed the shoot on Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. Although he went through a course of chemotherapy, the prognosis was terminal. He died in London on October 25, 2002. He was survived by his two ex-wives, Elizabeth and Ann, and his three children with Elizabeth, Damian (b. 1958), Jared (b. 1961), and Jamie (b. 1963). Gwenda Young www.abc-clio.com
References Callan, Michael Feeney. Richard Harris: Sex, Death & the Movies. London: Robson Books, 2003. Caughie, John, and Kevin Rockett. The Companion to British and Irish Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1996. Katz, Ephraim. The Film Encyclopedia. New York: Perigee Books, 1979.
HARRISON, FRANK LLEWELLYN (1905–1987) Born in Dublin on September 29, 1905, Frank Harrison was one of the most important Irish musicologists of the twentieth century. He taught at Kingston (Canada); Yale, Stanford, and Princeton (the United States), Oxford (United Kingdom), and Amsterdam and Utrecht (the Netherlands). Harrison’s career began as a musician, singing in the choir of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, studying at the Royal Irish Academy of Music and at Trinity College Dublin (Bachelor of Music, 1926; Doctor of Music, 1929). He won prizes for his organ playing at the Feis Ceoil (festival of music) and became the organist at Kilkenny before emigrating to Nova Scotia in 1930. He also contemplated a career as a composer, and studied with Marcel Dupré (1933) and later with Paul Hindemith at Yale (1945–1946). Harrison was the first professor of music at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario (1935–1945). With an interruption to study with Hindemith at Yale, he continued to teach at Colgate University at Hamilton, New York (1946–1947), and at Washington University, St. Louis (1947–1952), a position he left early for political differences of opinion in 1950. Following this, he took another doctorate in musicology at Oxford (1951), where he became senior lecturer in
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1956. It was here that he developed his specialization in medieval music, which he continued while teaching at Amsterdam (1970–1980) and Utrecht (1976–1980). Harrison’s main research interests lay in the medieval music of the British Isles and continental Europe as well as in ethnomusicology. His Music in Medieval Britain (1958) has been a standard reference work for many years, while his anthology Time, Place and Music (1973) represents a culmination of his ethnomusicological achievements. In all his published books and essays he achieves a remarkable combination of positivistic research and anthropological and sociological interpretations. Later in life he increasingly worked on Irish music, contributing important research on music in the age of Swift (published in EighteenthCentury Ireland, 1 [1986]) and on traditional music in Irish Traditional Music—Fossil or Resource? (1988). In 2004, the Society for Musicology in Ireland began to award an annual Harrison Medal in the memory of this first internationally renowned Irish musicologist. Axel Klein References Chadd, David F. L. “Francis Llewellyn Harrison, 1905–1987.” Proceedings of the British Academy 75 (1989): 361–380. Klein, Axel. Die Musik Irlands im 20. Jahrhundert. Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms, 1996. White, Harry. “Frank Llewellyn Harrison and the Development of Postwar Musicological Thought.” Hermathena 146 (1989): 39–47.
HAYES, CATHERINE (1818–1861) Ireland’s first internationally renowned soprano, Catherine Hayes was born on October 25, 1818, in Limerick. Her musical www.abc-clio.com
talents were recognized at an early age by the bishop of Limerick, who sponsored her. She initially studied singing in Dublin, then in 1842 she went to Paris to study with famed teacher Manuel Garcia, who had trained the soprano Jenny Lind. After two years with Garcia and at his direction she moved to Milan for further study and coaching with Felice Ronconi. She made a successful debut at the Italian Opera in Marseille in May 1845 in Bellini’s I Puritani. In November that year she appeared at La Scala in Milan, in the title role in Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix. Her career immediately blossomed. She was invited to La Fenice opera in Venice and later to the opera in Vienna where she sang opposite leading singers of the day. By now she had the most famous Lucia di Lammermoor of the period. In 1846, Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) became interested in Hayes for one of his new operas. Hayes was awarded a diploma from the Academy of St. Cecilia in Rome in 1848. Toward the end of that year, she accepted a contract offered by the Italian representative of the Royal Italian Opera at Covent Garden in London. Her London debut took place in April 1849. The critics praised her performances highly. Hayes returned to Ireland in November 1849 to great acclaim as she was the first Irish woman to achieve such international fame. She gave performances in Dublin, Limerick, Cork, and Waterford before returning to London for more operatic activity and concerts tours in the provinces over the next twelve months. Her mother traveled with her everywhere throughout her career. In September 1851, Hayes arrived in New York, where Jenny Lind had been creating sensational headlines under the
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sponsorship of showman P. T. Barnum. Hayes initially gave a series of concerts at Tripler Hall, on Broadway and Mercer Street. She went on tour to more than 40 cities, to places such as Hartford, Connecticut; Albany and Syracuse, New York; Toronto; Philadelphia; and Boston, (where Daniel Webster attended her concerts). President Millard Fillmore attended her Washington, D.C., concert with his family. Wherever she went she was acclaimed. She traveled on to Richmond, Virginia; Savannah, Georgia; Augusta, Georgia; and Mobile, Alabama, eventually arriving in New Orleans where she gave an extended series of concerts. Two of the sold-out concerts were performed at the urging of Father James Mullon, an Irish priest who had the responsibility for raising funds to complete the construction of Saint Patrick’s Church. The church, which still stands today, is now a U.S. historic landmark and is known as Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Hayes went up the Mississippi River giving concerts on river boats and in river towns. She eventually arrived in St. Louis, where she gave more concerts before traveling on to Chicago, Detroit, and the Great Lakes towns, eventually returning to New York. In New York she gave a benefit concert for Father Theobald Mathew (1790–1856), who was on a fund-raising trip in America. P. T. Barnum invited Hayes’s mother to his home and to his daughter’s wedding. Through Barnum Hayes met her future husband, William Avery Bushnell, a former Jenny Lind manager. Her plans, sponsored by Barnum, next took her to San Francisco via Panama. In San Francisco she performed in costumed concert versions of various Donizetti and Rossini operas, sometimes traveling to the goldfields to sing for the miners and www.abc-clio.com
leading politicians of the day. She amassed a great fortune, and in July 1854, along with her mother and Bushnell, she left for Australia. In Sydney her arrival was greeted by an enormous turnout of leading politicians, businessmen, and others. She performed in Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, and the Bendigo goldfields to sold-out houses. After two years in Australia and side trips to Calcutta, Java, and Singapore Hayes returned to London in August 1856. Two years later her husband Bushnell died of consumption. In August 1861, Hayes suffered a stroke in a friend’s home in Sydenham, just outside London, where she died on August 11. Her signature song throughout her career was “Kathleen Mavourneen.” In pursuit of her career she traveled around the globe, perhaps being the first prima donna to do so. Basil Walsh See also: EMIGRATION; MATHEW, Fr. Theobald References Sadie, Stanley, ed. The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. London, Macmillan Press: 1992. Walsh, Basil. Catherine Hayes: The Hibernian Prima Donna. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000.
HAYES, HELEN (BROWN) (1900–1993) The “First Lady of American Theater” was born on October 10, 1900, in Washington, D.C. Her mother was Catherine Estelle Hayes, whose father, Patrick Hayes, was the nephew of the Irish singer Catherine Hayes, “The Swan of Erin.” Helen Hayes’s father, Francis Brown, worked as a salesman for a meat producer. Failing in her own attempts to succeed as an actress, Hayes’s
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mother encouraged her daughter to try out for child roles in regional theater. At the age of nine Helen made her professional debut in a New York production of Old Dutch produced by Lew Fields. More stage roles followed, and in 1910 she made her film debut in a two-reeler for Vitagraph called Jean and the Calico Doll. Despite her early foray into cinema, Hayes stayed mainly in theater for the next two decades, initially building up a reputation as a child actress, before maturing into ingenue and flapper roles in the 1920s. Her theater successes in the 1920s included Pollyanna (1917–1918), Clarence (1919) with Alfred Lunt, Babs (1920), and a 1928 production of George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. In 1928 she met and married Charles MacArthur, a journalist, wit, and noted playwright (The Front Page, with Ben Hecht). In 1930 both Hayes and MacArthur signed contracts with major Hollywood studios and moved to California; MacArthur wrote the script for Hayes’s debut in sound films, The Sin of Madelon Claudet, a maternal melodrama that won her a Best Actress Oscar in 1932. She followed it with roles in a number of prestigious productions, such as John Ford’s film of Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, Clarence Brown’s adaptation of Antoine de SaintExupéry’s Night Flight, and Frank Borzage’s film of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1932). These films, while worthy, failed to show off her talents as an actress and, more importantly, failed to appeal to movie audiences. Hayes herself admitted that films were not her best medium, and in 1934 she announced that she was “leaving the screen because I don’t think I am very good in the pictures and I have a beautiful dream that I am elegant on the stage.” Hayes’s elegance on stage was confirmed with her highly acclaimed perforwww.abc-clio.com
mance as Queen Victoria in the longrunning Broadway show Victoria Regina (1935–1939). At the peak of her career in the 1930s and 1940s she tackled a diversity of roles, from Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams. In 1949 Hayes and MacArthur suffered the loss of their only daughter, Mary, to polio; henceforth, Hayes would be actively involved in fund-raising for a number of charities. In 1952 she returned to films with an appearance in the anticommunist film My Son John. After the death of MacArthur in 1956, she occasionally appeared in films and television, earning a second Academy Award for her role in Airport in 1971. However, her first love remained theater, and the respect and admiration she inspired in theater circles was underscored in 1955 when a New York playhouse was renamed in her honor. Hayes’s last great theater triumph was in a 1972 production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. She published several volumes of autobiography, including On Reflection (1968) and My Life in Three Acts (1990). She died on March 17, 1993, at her home in Nyack, New York, and is survived by her adopted son, James MacArthur. Gwenda Young See also: FORD, John; O’NEILL, Eugene References Hayes, Helen. On Reflection: An Autobiography. New York: Evans Press, 1968. Moore, Stephen, and Donn Murphy. Helen Hayes: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995
HAYES, ARCHBISHOP PATRICK JOSEPH (1867–1938) Patrick Hayes was born in New York City on the site of Saint Andrew’s Church rectory in Manhattan. His parents, Daniel and
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Portrait of Patrick Joseph Hayes, Archbishop of New York, 1931. (Library of Congress)
Mary (Gleason) Hayes, were both Irish immigrants from Killarney, Co. Kerry. When he was five years old his mother died, and his mother’s sister and her husband raised him. He attended Transfiguration School, the De La Salle Institute, and Manhattan College in New York City. In 1888 he entered St. Joseph’s Provincial Seminary in Troy, New York. He was ordained on September 8, 1892, by Archbishop Michael A. Corrigan. He then attended the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Hayes was appointed curate to St. Gabriel’s parish on East 37th Street in New York City, where he became the secretary to the pastor, John Murphy Farley. When Farley was named archbishop of New York in 1902, he appointed Hayes as chancellor of the archdiocese and president of Cathedral College in 1903. Hayes remained in these positions until October 28, 1914, when Cardinal Farley consecrated www.abc-clio.com
him titular bishop of Tagaste. He served as pastor of St. Stephen’s parish on East 29th Street in New York City from 1915 until America’s entry into World War I in 1917. The war required a rapid growth in the number of army chaplains ministering to American troops. Because of this situation, Pope Benedict XV created a new American military ordinariate and appointed Hayes as its first head on November 24, 1917. Within a year the number of chaplains in the U.S. Army had increased from 25 to nearly 900. Although Hayes did not visit the Western Front in Europe, he toured military camps in America during this time. He was one of the four signatories of the Program of Social Reconstruction in 1919 that was issued by the National Catholic War Council. Later, he strongly supported its successor, the National Catholic Welfare Conference. On March 10, 1919, Hayes succeeded Cardinal Farley as the fifth archbishop of New York. Five years later, on March 24, 1924, he was made a cardinal. The most significant legacy of his administration was the founding in 1920 of Catholic Charities, an organization set up to unify and strengthen Catholic charitable works. Because of this he was often referred to as the “Cardinal of Charities.” Although he supported the temperance movement he opposed the child labor amendment on the grounds that it infringed states’ rights. Apart from these issues, his administration was marked by a shunning of controversial issues and a limited involvement in public affairs. An exception was in 1935 when he preached against Margaret Sanger’s proposal that poor people be urged to use birth control. One of his principal legacies was the expansion of the archdiocese; it had grown by sixty new parishes by the end of 1929.
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Although Hayes was friendly with the Irish-American politician Alfred E. Smith, he avoided commenting directly on politics. He celebrated a Memorial Mass for the Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney who died on hunger strike in Brixton Prison in London in 1920. He donated $5,000 to the Catholic Charities fund, but he maintained that political violence in Ireland would only weaken the cause in America. He attended the International Eucharistic Congress, which was held in Dublin in 1932. However, the day after the congress closed, at the home of his host, Frederick A. Sterling, he suffered a heart attack. Over the next six years until his death on September 4, 1938, he was to be stricken by his weakened health and lingering illness. In spite of his illness, he retained his position as military ordinary until his death and he attended the National Eucharistic Congress at Cleveland, Ohio, in 1935 as the personal representative of Pope Pius XI. He also served as president of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association. He was succeeded as archbishop of New York and military ordinary by Cardinal Spellman. Since the time of Cardinal Hayes, the archbishop of New York has always held the position of military ordinary. He is buried in the crypt under the altar at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. David Doyle References Brown, Mary Joseph. “Cardinal Hayes.” In The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, edited by Michael Glazier. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999. Kelly, J. B. Cardinal Hayes: One of Ourselves. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1940. Walsh, James J. Our American Cardinals. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1926. www.abc-clio.com
HEALY, MICHAEL MORRIS (1796–1850) Born in Ireland, Michael Healy emigrated from Co. Roscommon, arriving in New York in 1815. He settled in Jones County, Georgia, near the city of Macon. In 1818 he took the oath of allegiance to his adopted country at the courthouse in Jones County. Healy participated in the lotteries that were redistributing land that had been seized from the Cherokees, the Creeks, and other Native American tribes. In the lotteries of 1823 and 1832 he won land just across the Ocmulgee River from the town of Macon. He prospered as a cotton farmer and a landowner, eventually owning 1,500 acres of land. At a time when the average number of slaves was only 14, Healy owned 49 slaves. The value of these was $34,000, roughly equivalent to half a million dollars today. In 1829 he took Mary Eliza Smith, a 16-year-old mulatto slave girl from Georgia, as his common-law wife. She had been a domestic slave on the plantation of cotton magnate Sam Griswold until Healy purchased her. Although it was common for slave owners to have sexual relations with their female slaves, neither Healy nor Smith ever married anyone else, and they lived together until their deaths within a few months of each other in 1850. Although they did not formally marry, as such a union would have been impossible in Georgia at that time, they considered each other man and wife in all but name. Consequently, the relationship went directly against the strong attitudes held by the antebellum South regarding the idea of interracial marriage. Together they had 10 children, nine of whom survived until adulthood. Because the children were of mixed race and were
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considered slaves, they were denied the opportunity to be educated in the South. Consequently, Healy sent each of the boys to the North to receive their education. At first they were educated by the Quakers in Long Island, New York, and then in Burlington, New Jersey. Later, in 1844, Healy had a chance meeting on a steamboat with the Roman Catholic bishop of Boston, John Bernard Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick encouraged Healy to send his sons to the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where the younger boys could receive their primary education and the older ones could finish their secondary education and then proceed to college. While attending the school, the boys were baptized as Catholics. In spite of the restrictions placed on children of interracial marriages, many of Healy’s nine children found success in their chosen fields, and a number opted to become Catholic priests or nuns. Healy’s eldest son, James Augustine Healy (1830–1900), was perhaps the best known. He became a priest in Boston and eventually rose to become the second bishop of the diocese of Portland from 1875 to 1900. Hugh Clark Healy (1832–1853) became involved in the hardware business in New York City and was later killed in a boating accident. Patrick Francis Healy (1834–1910) became a Jesuit and was the first African American to hold a doctorate. He became the president of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., revitalizing and restructuring the campus and the student curriculum to such an extent that he is called the second founder of the university. Alexander Sherwood Healy (1836–1875) became the rector of the Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston. Martha Ann Healy (1838–1920) became a housewife in www.abc-clio.com
Boston, and Michael Augustine Healy (1839–1904) was a captain in the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service. Two sisters became nuns in Montreal, Amanda Josephine Healy (1845–1879) in the Religious Hospitallers of Saint Joseph and Eliza Dunamore Healy (1846–1919) in the Congregation de Notre Dame. The youngest surviving child, Eugene (1849–1914) became a salesman. David Doyle References Foley, Albert S. Bishop Healy: Beloved Outcaste. New York: Arno Press, 1969. O’Toole, James M. “Michael Morris Healy.” In The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, edited by Michael Glazier. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1999. O’Toole, James M. Passing for White: Race, Religion and the Healy Family, 1820–1920. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002.
HEANEY, SEAMUS (1939–) The eldest of nine children, Seamus Heaney was born on April 13, 1939, to Patrick and Margaret Kathleen (née McCann) Heaney. The 50-acre family farm, Mossbawn—located near Castledawson, County Derry—provides the backdrop for several of Heaney’s early poems. From 1945 until 1951, Heaney attended the local Anahorish School, a “mixed” elementary school that enrolled both Catholic and Protestant students. At the age of 12, Heaney won a scholarship to St. Columb’s College, a Catholic boarding school in Derry. After attending St. Columb’s from 1951 to 1957, Heaney went on to study at Queen’s University, Belfast. His first poems were published in the university’s literary magazine in 1959. Heaney graduated from Queen’s in 1961 with a first-class degree in
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English Language and Literature, and he earned a Teacher’s Training Diploma the following year from St. Joseph’s College of Education in Belfast. During his first year of teaching Heaney was introduced to the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, an encounter that would significantly influence the direction of Heaney’s early writing. Following Kavanagh’s example, Heaney chose as his subject matter his own quotidian experiences growing up in the rural north of Ireland. In 1963, while teaching English at St. Joseph’s College, Heaney joined the “Belfast Group,” a poetry workshop established that year by Philip Hobsbaum. The group was part of a larger effort among Northern Irish intellectuals to preserve and rehabilitate Ulster’s cultural traditions. In the summer of 1965 Heaney married Marie Devlin, a native of Co. Tyrone and a graduate of St. Mary’s College of Education in Belfast. The following year Heaney joined the faculty at Queen’s University, published his first collection of poems, Death of a Naturalist, and took over Hobsbaum’s role as leader of the Belfast Group. His wife also gave birth to the first of their three children. Heaney’s first two volumes of poetry, Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969), are largely autobiographical and reveal a great deal about the importance of place and cultural traditions with which the poet at once identifies and feels estranged. With the renewal of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and especially after the escalation of violence surrounding Bloody Sunday (January 30, 1972), Heaney felt called upon to confront the contemporary political situation both in his poetry and in several collections of prose writing. The essays in The Government www.abc-clio.com
of the Tongue (1988) and The Redress of Poetry (1995), in particular, address the question of the poet’s responsibility to respond to immediate political and social concerns. It was a question that exercised Heaney for much of his career, as he found himself thrust into the role of a public commentator on affairs in Northern Ireland. Having grown up a Catholic in the Protestantdominated North, Heaney was well positioned to observe his society’s divisions along religious and political lines. The intensification of the crisis in Northern Ireland is reflected in much of Heaney’s poetry from the 1970s and early 1980s, most notably among the poems in Wintering Out (1972), North (1975), Field Work (1979), and Station Island (1984). During the academic year 1970–1971 Heaney taught as a guest lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. In July 1972, he resigned his lectureship at Queen’s University and moved with his family to a cottage in Glanmore, Co. Wicklow, where he worked full time as a freelance writer. Heaney accepted a faculty position at Carysfort Teaching Training College in Dublin in 1975 and moved his family to Sandymount shortly thereafter. It was at this point in his career, while hosting a program called Imprint for Radio Eireann, that Heaney struck up a friendship with American poet Robert Lowell. In 1979 Heaney spent a semester at Harvard, beginning what would become a long-term relationship with the American institution. After publishing Field Work in 1979 and Preoccupations, his first collection of essays, in 1980, Heaney left Carysfort in 1981 to accept a post as a visiting professor at Harvard. He divided his time between the United States and Ireland for the next five years, teaching workshops in creative
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writing and courses in British and Irish modern poetry at Harvard for one semester of each year. In the meantime Heaney coedited The Rattle Bag: An Anthology of Poetry (1982) with Ted Hughes and cofounded Field Day Publishing—an outgrowth of Field Day Theatre—in 1983 with playwright Brian Friel and others. During his tenure at Harvard Heaney also continued to publish his own prose and poetry, including An Open Letter (1983) and The Haw Lantern (1987). He also gained recognition as a translator with Sweeney Astray (1984), his version of a medieval Irish text. After five years at Harvard, Heaney became a professor of poetry at Oxford University. He published his second collection of essays, The Government of the Tongue, in 1988 and Seeing Things in 1991. The position at Oxford, also a fiveyear post, required Heaney to deliver three public lectures each year. The Oxford lectures were published in 1995 under the title The Redress of Poetry. In that same year Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Heaney has remained prolific in the years since; recent publications include The Spirit Level (1996), Opened Ground (1998), Beowulf (2000, translation), Electric Light (2001), and District and Circle (2006). He has also maintained ties with Harvard as the Ralph Waldo Emerson poet-in-residence. Heaney has been the recipient of honorary degrees from numerous American universities and is a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Kathleen Ruppert References Collins, Floyd. Seamus Heaney: The Crisis of Identity. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2003. www.abc-clio.com
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Foster, Thomas C. Seamus Heaney. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989. Murphy, Andrew. Seamus Heaney. Plymouth, UK: Northcote House Publishers, 1996. Vendler, Helen. Seamus Heaney. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
HEFFERNAN, MICHAEL (1942–) Born and raised in a working-class area of Detroit, Michael Heffernan is the son of parents of Irish descent. As a child he attended Catholic schools in Detroit. He attended the University of Detroit for his undergraduate degree before proceeding to graduate school at the University of Massachusetts, where he received his MA and his doctorate. Heffernan has combined his work as a poet with teaching at various universities. He has taught at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, as well as Pittsburgh State University. He is currently professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Fayatteville, and he teaches creative writing there. He codirects the International Writers’ Course at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He helped to establish this course in 1990 and since then has taught there on three occasions. Heffernan has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. His verse has appeared in such publications as the American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Crazyhorse, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, and Shenandoah. He has also published some short stories. Heffernan currently lives in Elkin, Arkansas. Heffernan’s first poetry collection, The Cry of Oliver Hardy, was published in 1979. Five years later To The Wreakers of Havoc was published. This was followed in 1989
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by The Man at Home. Love’s Answer, which was published in 1993, was the winner of that year’s Iowa Poetry Prize. The following year, Heffernan published The Back Road to Arcadia. This was his first collection of poetry to be published by Salmon Press, an independent Irish publishing house based in Co. Clare and founded by an American, Jessie Lendennie. His most recent collection of poetry, The Night Breeze off the Ocean, was also published by Salmon Press in 2005. Heffernan traces his decision to become a poet to the time when, aged 13, he discovered his mother’s copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. He also credits his parents and the love of language that existed in their household as being a major influence on his decision to become a poet and on all of his subsequent work. Citing W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens as the major influences on his work, he has drawn upon both poets in his own work. As if to illustrate this, one of his poems “Land of Heart’s Desire” is named after Yeats’s play of the same name. In his more recent work, with his decision to publish his poetry with an Irish publisher and his involvement with the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland as a place has become much more evident in his work. This presence has primarily taken the form of an examination of Irish rural life and the people who populate it. David Doyle References Heffernan, Michael. Another Part of the Island. Cliffs of Moher, Clare, Ireland: Salmon Publications, 1999. Wall, Eamonn. The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, edited by Michael Glazier. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1999. www.abc-clio.com
HENRY, JOHN (1746–1794) John Henry’s early years are not well documented. He was born in Dublin Ireland, but little is known about his parents, upbringing, or earliest professional acting. He performed in Dublin and London, at Drury Lane, and possibly at Belfast. In 1762 Henry departed Ireland, accompanying the performer Charles Storer and his family to Jamaica, where some time before 1767 Henry married Storer’s daughter, Helen. In 1767 Henry set out for the mainland colonies intending to join the American Company of Comedians of David Douglass. Disaster struck when their ship, the Dolphin, caught fire, killing Henry’s wife and their two children. In October 1767 Henry performed for Douglass’s American Company in Philadelphia at the recently constructed Southwark Theatre (also known as the South Street Theatre) and then at the new John Street Theatre in New York, the first permanent theater in that city. He also appears to have become intimate with another of Storer’s daughters, Ann, who bore Henry’s third child. Henry later married the youngest Storer sister, Maria. Henry’s career blossmed in America, in part because his acting talents were complemented by his good looks, acrobatic abilities, and musical talents. His most important acting performances included a number of lead roles from Shakespeare (he played both Othello and Shylock), but also others from plays by Richard Brinsley, George Farquhar, and Thomas Otway. Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School of Scandal (1777) provided Henry with the role of Sir Peter Teazle. The disruptions of the War for American Independence (1776–1783) saw Henry return to Jamaica and then sail to London, in 1777, where he performed at Drury Lane. He returned to
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America in 1782, and by 1785 he and Lewis Hallam, Jr. (Douglass’s stepson) were comanaging the Old American Company. The company did well, mostly performing tried-and-true classics and expanding its geographical base beyond the centers of New York and Philadelphia. For instance, a theater was opened in Baltimore, Maryland, and the company performed as far south as Richmond, Virginia. Henry’s ostentatious lifestyle (his private coach, with driver and coat of arms, was noted by contemporaries) was frequently the source of gossip during these years, as was his unconventional relationship with the Storer sisters. Henry’s activities and interests progressed naturally from performing to managing, promoting, and writing. He wrote School for Soldiers; or, the Deserters, which had been performed in Jamaica before it was printed in 1783, and which was also performed in New York, until at least 1788. Other plays written by Henry include The American Soldier, a Comedy, The Convention; or, the Columbian Father, and True Blue; or, the Sailor’s Festival: A Farce. Henry was involved with reprintings of Sheridan’s School of Scandal, by Hugh Gaine (New York, 1786) and Prichard & Hall (Philadelphia, 1789). He also helped promote American playwrights, such as Royall Tyler whose The Contrast, which was modeled on Sheridan’s School of Scandal, the Old American Company produced in 1787, celebrating Tyler as “A citizen of the United States.” In 1790 Henry aimed to have Boston repeal its anti-theatrical legislation. In the early 1790s Henry also traveled to England with the aim of encouraging talented actors to return with him to America. That task was not always an easy one, and Henry’s relationships with some of the rising stars he promoted were not always congenial. His www.abc-clio.com
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conflicts over roles with the British-born actor John Hodgkinson, whom Henry had encouraged to come to America, for instance, were well known. Those tensions played a part in Henry’s decision to quit the company in 1794, selling out to Hallam for about $10,000. He died in 1794, on board a ship sailing for Rhode Island. Mark G. Spencer References Brown, Jared. “John Henry.” In American National Biography, edited by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Dunlap, William. A History of the American Theatre. 2 vols. New York, 1832. Hornblow, Arthur. A History of the Theatre in America from its Beginnings to the Present Time, 1919. Hughes, Glenn. A History of the American Theatre, 1700–1950. New York: S. French, 1951. Nathans, Heather S. Early American Theatre from the Revoution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the Hands of the People. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Rankin, Hugh F. The Theater in Colonial America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964. Taubman, Howard. The Making of the American Theatre. New York: Coward McCann, 1965. Wilmeth, Don B., and Christopher Bigsby, eds. The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Volume One: Beginnings to 1870. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
HERBERT, VICTOR AUGUST (1859–1924) Victor Herbert was one of America’s best composers of light opera. Although born in Dublin, Herbert was raised in Germany, where he received his musical training. When his wife, the singer Terese Förster, was recruited for New York City’s Metropolitan Opera in 1886, Herbert was given
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Portrait of Victor August Herbert, composer and conductor of light opera. (Library of Congress)
the first chair as cellist in the company’s orchestra. He quickly established himself as a soloist and conductor, leading a number of ensembles. In addition to the Victor Herbert Orchestra, he also directed Patrick S. Gilmore’s 22nd Regimental Band and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. He continued to compose works for the cello, frequently performing his successful Second Cello Concerto, op. 30 (1894). Herbert also began composing operettas, starting with Prince Ananias in 1894. However, he did not really concentrate on that genre until 1903, when he brought out his successful Babes in Toyland. His most popular operettas, such as the Red Mill, Naughty Marietta (1910), and Sweethearts (1913), were made into films and continued to appear in revivals, especially www.abc-clio.com
in summer stock, well into the middle of the century. Hit songs from his operettas and later comic Broadway musicals became standard repertory items for singers. Although Herbert’s family left Ireland shortly after he was born, he maintained a strong, public attachment to the land of his birth. This was due in large part to childhood visits with his grandfather, the Irish writer Samuel Lover. There are interesting parallels between grandfather and grandson. Both lived outside Ireland, Lover spending much of his adult life in England. Both wrote songs and performed, Lover being famous in England and America for his “Irish Evenings.” Finally, both were romantic nationalists. Herbert’s sense of himself as an Irishman was probably encouraged after he arrived in the United States. Given his training in the great tradition of German musical culture, he could have easily associated himself with German America. Yet it was the New York Irish who benefited from his attention and talents. Of course, Herbert did not frequent the Five Points in Manhattan. He moved in the upper echelons of the city’s Irish society. He conducted the glee club for the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, and in 1914 became the society’s president. By that time the Home Rule crisis had become a major concern among Irish Americans, and Herbert was outspoken in his support for Irish nationalism and in his criticism of the British government. In May 1916 he opened the Irish Race Convention where he was elected president of the Friends of Irish Freedom. The following year when Peadar Kearney’s “The Soldier’s Song” (destined to become Ireland’s national anthem) was published in New York, Victor Herbert was listed as the arranger. Although Herbert wrote fiery newspaper articles condemning
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Britain and, at lest by implication, supporting Germany, once the United States entered World War I, the composer loyally supported his adopted country. He continued, however, to publicly support the cause of Irish nationalism into the early 1920s. Given his dedication to Ireland, it is not surprising that Herbert was interested in writing an operetta with an Irish theme. In 1915 he had staged Princess Pat, a romantic fantasy that featured the song “Two Laughing Irish Eyes.” His major effort to present a musical vision of Ireland, however, was Heart of Erin (later renamed Eileen), which debuted on New Year’s Day in Cleveland in 1917. A romance set amid the Rising of 1798, the show was as musically strong as anything Herbert had written. Instead of drawing upon traditional Irish tunes, he followed his grandfather in composing his own material. Although his power as a popular composer rested in large part on his mastery of the Viennese tradition, Herbert tried to write in the “characteristic spirit of the music of my native country—Ireland.” Although successful at the time, the show did not become established on the American stage. This was partly because tastes were changing in the postwar years and operettas were falling out of fashion. Herbert shifted to writing musical comedies for Broadway, including songs for the Ziegfeld Follies, but he produced little that had the charm and musicality of his earlier operetta pieces. He died suddenly in New York City on May 26, 1924. William H. A. Williams See also: FARRELL, Eileen References Kaye, Joseph. Victor Herbert: The Biography of America’s Greatest Composer of Romantic Music. New York: G. Howard Watt, 1931. Waters, Edward N. Victor Herbert: A Life in Music. New York: Macmillan, 1955. www.abc-clio.com
HINDS, CIARÁN (1953–) Ciarán Hinds was born in Belfast in 1953 and has played starring roles on screen and stage. He studied law in Queen’s University Belfast, before leaving to study acting at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. His first professional job was with the Glasgow Citizen’s Theatre. Hinds stayed with the company for several years and starred in a number of productions, including Arms and the Man (1983), Arsenic and Old Lace (1985), and Faust (1985). He also worked and toured with the Field Day Company, starring in Antigone (1984) and High Time (1984). In 1987, Hinds had one of his big breaks when he was spotted by acclaimed English director Peter Brook, who cast him in The Mahabharata, a production that toured the world. Hinds also starred in the film version of The Mahabharata (1989). He played lead roles in The Cuchulaine Cycle in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Assassins (1992) at the Donmar Warehouse in London, and Machinal (1993) and Closer (1997) at the Royal National Theatre in London. Roles at London’s Greenwich Theatre included The Way of the World (1984) and leads in Richard III and The Lady From the Sea. He has starred in several productions with the Royal Shakespeare Company, including Edward II (1990–1991), Troilus and Cressida (1990–1991), Two Shakespearian Actors (1990–1991), The Last Days of Don Juan (1990–1991), and the title role of Richard III (1993), which also went on a world tour. Hinds made his film debut in 1981, in John Boorman’s Excalibur, but he did not make another film until 1989, when he played a supporting role in Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. This was followed by roles in Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s December Bride
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(1990) and Pat O’Connor’s Circle of Friends (1995), which finally brought him to the attention of an international audience. More substantial roles followed in Roger Mitchell’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1995), Terry George’s Some Mother’s Son (1996), a drama based on the 1981 hunger strike in a Belfast prison, and Gillian Armstrong’s Oscar and Lucinda (1997). Recent films have included The Tale of Despereaux (2008), Hallam Foe (2007), Rome—13 episodes (2005–2007), The Nativity Story (2006), Munich (2005), and The Phantom of the Opera (2004). In addition to his film work, Hinds has also continued to star in both television and stage productions, including the popular English series Prime Suspect (1994 season) and the BBC television serialization of Ivanhoe (1997). Aoileann Ní Eigeartaigh See also: O’CONNOR, Pat Reference Pettit, Lance. Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000.
HOBAN, JAMES (1762–1831) James Hoban’s most lasting effect on the United States is found in his design of the president’s residence, the White House, in Washington, D.C. Three centuries after he submitted his original plans, the core of the structure still functions as a home and a place of business and statecraft for America’s first families, a place where they welcome leaders from all over the world as well as live out their private and public family lives. Hoban was born in Desart, near Callan, Co. Kilkenny. He studied at the Dublin Society of Architecture School, www.abc-clio.com
where he learned the neoclassical style of Robert Adam, a style that emphasized clean lines and spare proportions along with classical detail, and which came to be known as Georgian after the reigning British monarch of the period. Crossing the ocean in the minds and pattern books of craftsmen, builders, and architects such as Hoban, in the United States it would become the Federal style. Hoban came to the United States in the 1780s, first settling in Philadelphia and then moving to South Carolina. In South Carolina he designed the state capitol building, which was built in 1792 and burned during the American Civil War in 1865. This design was based in part on Pierre L’Enfant’s proposed design for Federal Hall in New York City. In incorporating ideas from a published design or pattern book, Hoban was following common architectural practice of his day, and it was a practice he turned to again when in 1792 he decided to enter a competition to design a house for the president of the new republic of the United States of America. Leinster House in Dublin was one building to which he turned, and he is also believed to have referred to drawings in James Gibbs’s Book of Architecture (London, 1728). George Washington had encouraged the Irishman to enter the competition, and his design beat out a number of entries, including one believed to be from Thomas Jefferson, who entered under an assumed name. Hoban won the commission to build the presidential home, which would come to be called the White House because of its white painted front walls, as well as a $500 prize and a lot for himself in the District of Columbia. Work on the White House lasted from 1793 to 1801, and President John Adams
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and his family were the first to live in the newly completed building. They found a design that reflected an interest in proportion and balance as was common in Georgian architecture, and use of fanlights and window details that combined both Georgian ideas and republican and federal motifs. From 1793 to 1802, Hoban also worked as one of the superintendents of the building of the United States Capitol building designed by William Thornton. Hoban also designed several hotels in Washingon, D.C. When the White House was burned by the British during the War of 1812, James Hoban was called on to supervise its reconstruction, and in 1818, his last federal commission was the design of the State and War Department offices. Kerry Dexter See also: WASHINGTON, D.C. References Grace, Catherine. The White House: An Illustrated History. New York: Scholastic, 2003. McDermott, Matthew. Ireland’s Architectural Heritage. Dublin: Folens, 1975. Truman, Margaret. The President’s House. New York: Ballantine, 2003.
HODGINS, JACK (1938–) Jack Hodgins is an award-winning Canadian novelist and short story writer of Irish ancestry. He was born in 1938 in the town of Merville, in the Comoz Valley of Vancouver Island. He studied English literature at the University of British Columbia, where he took a course in creative writing. He graduated from the University of British Columbia with a Bachelor of Education degree, and taught English in a Vancouver High School until 1979. His first publication was in 1968. Thereafter, he began to regularly publish short stories www.abc-clio.com
in a number of publications, including Descant, The Capilano Review, and Canadian Forum. His first volume of short stories, entitled Spit Delaney’s Island, was published in 1976. It was nominated for the 1976 Governor General’s Award. His first novel, The Invention of the World, was published a year later to critical and commercial success. It won the Gibson’s First Novel Award. The publication of The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne in 1979 marked a turning point in Hodgins’s career. The novel won the 1979 Governor General’s Literary Award for English Language Fiction. Hodgins resigned from his teaching post and began to write full-time. He published another collection of short stories, The Barclay Family Theatre, in 1981, and a collection of excerpts from unpublished and unfinished works, Beginnings: Samplings from a Long Apprenticeship, in 1983. Later that year, he accepted a full-time position as a professor of creative writing at the University of Victoria, a decision that allowed him and his family to return to Vancouver Island. Since then, he has continued to publish regularly. He has written a guide to writing fiction entitled A Passion for Narrative: A Guide for Writing Fiction (1994, revised and reprinted 2001), a children’s book entitled Left Behind in Squabble Bay (1988), and a book about his own travels in Australia entitled Over Forty in Broken Hill (1992). He also published a number of novels: The Honorary Patron (1987), Innocent Cities (1990), The Macken Charm (1995), Broken Ground (1998), and Distance (2003), and a collection of short stories entitled Damage Done by the Storm (2004). Many of his stories have also been televised or adapted for radio and the stage. His work has been translated into a number of languages, including Dutch, Hungarian,
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Japanese, German, Russian, Italian, Polish, and Norwegian. In June 1995, the University of British Columbia awarded Hodgins an honorary DLitt for—according to the UBC Chronicle—bringing “renown to the university and the province as one of Canada’s finest fiction writers and as an innovative stylist and distinguished academic.” In the spring of 1998 he was given an honorary DLitt by Malaspina University-College, and in 2004 he received an honorary DLitt from the University of Victoria. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1999. Aoileann Ní Eigeartaigh
Agreement, which was signed in April 1998. After his mission in Northern Ireland, Mr. Holkeri has acted as president of the 55th United Nations General Congress, and in the summer of 2003 he assumed the position of head of the United Nations Interim Administration in Kosovo. For his efforts in the Northern Ireland peace process, Holkeri was made a knight of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1998. Aki Kalliomäki See also: MITCHELL, George References Holkeri, Harri. “The Ten Commandments of Peace Talks.” Public Lecture at University of Helsinki, April 28, 2000. Iloniemi, Jaakko. Harri Holkeri: Former Prime Minister of Finland, Peacemaker. Virtual Finland, 2000. www.finland.fi/netcomm/ news/showarticle.asp?intNWSAID=26160 (accessed August 25, 2007).
HOLKERI, HARRI (1937–) In 1995, Harri Holkeri, the former prime minister of Finland in the late 1980s and member of the board of Bank of Finland, was invited to participate in an international body headed by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, to find a way to conduct negotiations that might provide the basis for a peace agreement in Northern Ireland. The Mitchell Commission was given the task of holding the multiparty talks in which the Unionist and Nationalist parties of Northern Ireland discussed the peace plan themselves without the national (British and Irish) governments. Under Holkeri’s chairmanship, multiparty negotiations started in June 1996. Holkeri’s most important task in the beginning, as he recalls, was to build up an environment of trust so that the negotiations could go ahead. After two difficult years, Holkeri and rest of the commission managed to bring the negotiations to a successful conclusion with the Belfast or Good Friday www.abc-clio.com
HOLLAND, JOHN PHILLIP (1841–1914) Born February 24, 1841, in Liscanore, Co. Clare, the son of Mary (Scanlon) and John Holland, John Phillip Holland was an officer in the British Coastguard Service. Educated at St. Macreehy’s National School and the Christian Brothers’ school at Ennistymon, he showed an aptitude for science. He joined the teaching order of the Irish Christian Brothers in 1858 and taught music and science at various institutions across Ireland until 1872. Holland immigrated to America in 1873, where he took a job teaching in Patterson, New Jersey, while continuing his work on underwater propulsion. Holland had read the scanty literature on submarines, including the works of Robert
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Portrait of inventor John Phillip Holland climbing up the hatch of the USS Holland. (Library of Congress)
Fulton and David Bushnell: their failures did not deter his plans. In 1875 he introduced his design to the U.S. Navy, which rejected his scheme as the fanciful dreamings of a shore-bound civilian. Searching for a backer, Holland was introduced to the Fenian Brotherhood in 1876 by his younger brother, Michael; unlike the U.S. Navy, the Irish nationalist group was intrigued with his plans and agreed to finance construction of a prototype. The Fenians supplied Holland with some $23,000 from their Skirmishing Fund; it was hoped Holland could construct a fleet of submarines to harass British shipping and lead to the creation of an independent Ireland. The first experimental craft, a 14-foot-long, steam-powered, single-person craft, was tested on the Passaic River in 1878. A more sophisticated version of this vessel, The Fenian Ram, was launched from New York City’s Delameter www.abc-clio.com
Iron Works into the Hudson River in May 1881. In effect, The Fenian Ram embodied the chief principles of the modern submarine in terms of balance and control, and it was able to dive by inclining its axis and plunging to the desired depth. At 31 feet long, The Fenian Ram was a three-person vessel that displaced 19 tons and was powered by an internal combustion engine. The vessel made several practice runs in New York harbor, once diving to the depth of 60 feet and remaining submerged for an hour. Disagreements over the disbursement of the Skirmishing Fund led the Fenians to steal Holland’s prototype, and he severed all relationships with the nationalist group. In 1888, Holland won a U.S. Navy–sponsored competition for his design of a submarine torpedo boat, a feat he repeated in 1889 and 1893. Unfortunately, no appropriations were attached to these honors. Undeterred, Holland founded the Holland Torpedo Boat Company in 1893; in 1895 he was awarded a government contract to build a submarine, The Plunger, to Navy specifications. Naval engineers largely controlled the design of the vessel, and Holland, although made manager, was excluded from many design decisions. Not surprisingly, the design floundered and was never adopted. Returning to a design he had envisioned years before, Holland launched a self-named submarine, the Holland VI, in 1897. At over 53 feet long, and with a displacement of some 75 tons, the Holland VI was fitted with torpedoes, dynamite guns, and a hybrid motor, using gasoline for surface propulsion and electric storage batteries for underwater propulsion. The Holland was the first boat to be designed in such a manner and, in fact, was the first
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submarine that could be run to any significant distance when submerged. Furthermore, the Holland was capable of remaining underwater for some 40 hours. While this was by far Holland’s most impressive submarine, its success was due largely to elements in his earlier designs, namely its fixed center of gravity, rapid diving capability, and positive reserve buoyancy. After several rigorous tests, the U.S. Navy purchased the Holland and six additional submarines from the inventor. Holland later designed submarines for Japan and was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun in 1910. Holland’s company became a subsidiary of Electric Boat in 1899; forced out by shrewd lawyers, Holland retired from active life in 1907. Holland died of pneumonia August 12, 1914, so he never saw the disastrous effect his vessels would have on shipping during World War I. Holland had always hoped his invention would be used for peaceful exploration of the ocean depths for the good of humankind. He was survived by his wife of 20 years, Margaret (Foley), and their four children. Tim Lynch See also: FENIANS Reference Morris, Richard K. John P. Holland, 1841–1914: Inventor of the Modern Submarine. Annapolis, MD: United States Naval Institute Press, 1966.
HONDURAS The region of Central America that became Honduras was discovered by Christopher Columbus on his last voyage to the Americas in 1502. It became a Spanish colony in 1526 and within 50 years was www.abc-clio.com
under attack by pirates from the British Isles. English and Irish seafarers continued to attack Spanish ships and settlements for more than a century and occupied the Bay Islands off the north coast of Honduras. One of the ship captains, Sir Nathaniel Butler (1557–ca. 1643), who was based in Ireland during the 1620s, seized the town of Trujillo close to the Bay Islands, in 1639. In 1779, when Spain, to support the American declaration of independence, declared war on Britain, the Royal Navy was sent to attack Spanish interests, and in October the Irishman Sir Peter Parker (1721–1811) was involved in an attack on the Spanish at Omoa, Honduras. During the nineteenth century, Irish involvement with Honduras was intermittent. Honduras gained its independence in 1821, and in the 1830s Juan Galindo, an Irish-born Roman Catholic of Spanish descent, went to Central America to try to get the republics to stop encroachment from the British. He served with the Liberals in Honduras and was killed at the battle of El Petrero on January 30, 1840—Juan Galindo is still regarded as a national hero in Honduras. Seventeen years later, Honduran forces were involved in crushing the forces of American adventurer William Walker, who included some Irishmen in his band of adventurers. During the early twentieth century, two doctors of Irish descent made major advances in the study of tropical medicine in Central America. Rupert (later Sir Rupert) Boyce (1863–1911), son of an engineer from Carlow, made some discoveries in the spread of yellow fever in 1905, and Dr. Daniel Murrah Molloy (1882–1944) continued this work in 1918. Molloy worked on providing supplies of clean water for Tegucigalpa, the Honduran
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capital, and by teaching basic hygiene to local doctors, he helped reduce infection from hookworm and lowered the infant mortality rate in the country. In late 1900s, an American of Irish descent, Guy Ross Molony (1883–1972), arrived in Honduras fresh from his exploits in South Africa during the Anglo-Boer War. In 1910 Molony joined with another adventurer, Lee Christmas, and the two supported a banana exporter, Samuel Zemurray, in his bid to take over the country and reinstate a former president, Manuel Bonilla, who was in exile in New Orleans. This was successful, and U.S. banana interests in Honduras were protected—Molony served in the U.S. forces in World War I, and then he returned to New Orleans where he was elected mayor. Molony later became chief of police in New Orleans but in 1925 quarrelled with the new city administration and left for Honduras where he established a brewery. In 1932, when rebels supporting the Liberal faction tried to take over the country, Molony flew an aircraft with New Zealander Lowell Yerex (1895–1968) as observer and bomber. Together they took part in the first ground-air battle in Honduran history. However, the fight was unnerving and Molony was only just able to land the plane before losing consciousness. Molony then involved himself in the rice industry in Honduras before retiring to New Orleans in 1961. In the mid-1930s, while Molony was still a household name to many in Honduras, Walter Edward Guiness, Lord Moyne (1880–1944) visited the Bay Islands. He described his visit there in his 1938 book Atlantic Circle. Since then, there has been limited Irish contact with Honduras. Irish diplomatic representation www.abc-clio.com
in Honduras is handled by the Irish Embassy to the United Nations in New York. Justin Corfield See also: BELIZE Reference Griffith, William J. “Juan Galindo: Central American Chauvinist.” Hispanic American Historical Review 40, no. 1 (1960): 25–52.
HORGAN, PAUL GEORGE VINCENT O’SHAUGHNESSY (1903–1995) On August 1, 1903, Paul Horgan was born into a Buffalo, New York, family with strong interests in music, art, theater, and language. Horgan later recalled that he was writing for and acting in family theatricals by the time he was six. His father, a business executive of Irish descent, was employed by the Erie Railroad, and then by insurance and printing companies. His mother came from a large family of German immigrants, which included his maternal grandfather, an established journalist, poet, and businessman, who, along with his mother and a German nurse, taught him German at an early age. Members of his extended family, and their experiences, were to be reflected in many of Horgan’s subsequent writings. So was his fascination with the catafalque on display in the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society Museum. This catafalque had been used to transport Abraham Lincoln’s coffin to and from Buffalo’s St. James Hall so his body could be viewed by an estimated 100,000 mourners, during a 15-hour stop of the funeral train taking him home to Springfield after his assassination. Horgan was a precocious young student in Buffalo’s private French-Catholic
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Miss Nardin’s Academy before his family moved in 1915 to Albuquerque, then a town of 10,000 in the new state of New Mexico, because of his father’s tuberculosis. There he attended public schools for the first time, in a strikingly different environment, although his freshman English teacher at Albuquerque High was to be Willa Cather’s sister Elsie. The culture was mixed Hispanic-Anglo-Native American. The setting was the broad, dry, sand-andsoil colored Rio Grande Valley, situated between two visible mountain ranges. Horgan spent his two middle years of high school at New Mexico Military Institute (NMMI) in Roswell, from 1919 to 1921, before returning home upon his father’s death. He became a junior reporter for the Albuquerque Journal, where he worked under city editor and later U.S. Senator Clinton Anderson. After a year at the Journal, where he had also become a book reviewer and the music, art, literary, and drama critic and had managed to offend some of the local gentry with occasional lampoons, he returned to NMMI for a combined senior year of high school and first year of college. By this time Horgan’s friends included fellow NMMI student Peter Hurd, later a Southwestern artist and the husband of artist Henriette Wyeth of the Pennsylvania art family, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Horgan returned to the East in 1923, to study voice at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. He stayed there until 1926, designing scenery for the opera department; becoming production assistant to Rouben Mamoulian, director of the Eastman School of Dance and Dramatic Action; and acting and singing in productions of the Eastman Theatre. He then returned to the NMMI as its librarian, taking www.abc-clio.com
his mornings off to write. This time Horgan stayed until he joined the army’s Information and Education Division in 1942. His NMMI activities during this period included teaching, advising student publications, designing sets for student balls, coaching the tennis team, and starting his own magazine of book reviews, poems, and translations. His army duties included working on films with director Frank Capra. After his army service, which also included time in the Pentagon with the army’s General Staff Corps, Horgan briefly taught at the University of Iowa, then returned to NMMI as a faculty member from 1947 to 1962. He went East again in 1960, for semesters as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, before leaving NMMI for the final time to become the Center’s director from 1962 to 1967. Horgan also lectured as a Hoyt Fellow of Yale’s Saybrook College in 1965. He remained at Wesleyan for the remainder of his life, as an adjunct and then a professor of English from 1967 to 1971, and thereafter— while making frequent trips back to the West—as Wesleyan’s permanent author in residence. He died on March 8, 1995, in Middletown. He never married. Horgan was highly prolific, the author of more than forty books and numerous short stories, articles, poems, and librettos. Many of his works concerned the Southwest, from Texas to California. Lawrence Clerk Powell called him the “Dean of Southwestern Writers.” His Great River: The Rio Grande in American History won a Pulitzer Prize for history, and his Lamy of Santa Fe, about the archbishop who had been the subject of an earlier Willa Cather novel, won a Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
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But Horgan also wrote of Lincoln (including Citizen of New Salem); of the loses of childhood innocence in a novel set in upstate New York (Things as They Are); of artists, architects, and musicians; and of the writing process itself. Although he had many prominent friends, he remained ready to skewer attitudes and acts he found pretentious, notably those of Buffalo heiress and Southwestern art patron Mabel Dodge. The Clerihews of Paul Horgan, first published when he was eighty, is a set of drawings and short poems lampooning historical figures from Achilles and the Emperor Tiberius to Maria Montessori and Howard Hughes. Steven B. Jacobson References Gish, Robert Franklin, Paul Horgan. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Horgan, Paul. Nueva Granada: Paul Horgan and the Southwest. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995. Horgan, Paul. Approaches to Writing. 2nd ed. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988. Horgan, Paul. A Certain Climate: Essays in History, Arts, and Letters. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1990. Horgan, Paul. Of America East and West: Selections from the Writings of Paul Horgan. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1884. Horgan, Paul. The Richard Trilogy: Things as They Are, Everything to Live For, The Thin Mountain Air. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1990. Horgan, Paul. Tracings: A Book of Partial Portraits. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993. Horgan, Paul. Whitewater. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987. Horgan, Paul. Writer’s Eye: Field Notes and Watercolors. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988. McCullough, David C. “Historian, Novelist, and Much, Much More.” New York Times Book Review, April 4, 1984. www.abc-clio.com
HORSE RACING Racehorses and racecourses have frequently brought Ireland and America into competition and collaboration. The most famous of British (and Irish) traditional sporting ballads, “Skewball” (sometimes “Stewball”), which celebrates the victory of Mr. Marvin’s Skewball over Sir Ralph Gore’s gray mare (usually identified, almost certainly incorrectly, as Griselda) in a match at the Curragh in March 1752, crossed the Atlantic early on. It exists in a number of American versions, and in some of these the race is presented as an affair of transatlantic rivalry. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Irish emigrants took their skills in horsemanship in all its aspects to America. One of the most influential of early American breeders, James Jackson of Alabama, was born in 1782 in Co. Monaghan. The traffic has not, however, all been one way— wealthy American patrons have always been welcome in Irish racing and noteworthy successes have been recorded. The controversial Democratic politician Boss Croker relocated to Ireland and funded a racing empire at Glencairn, winning the English and Irish derbies of 1907 with Orby. After some decades of inactivity, Glencairn would be revived as a racing stable by Joe McGrath, an Irishman who made his fortune selling the Irish Sweepstakes lottery to the U.S. market. An American of a very different type, Republican grandee J. H. “Jock” Whitney, won the Cheltenham Gold Cup in 1929 and 1930 with the Irish-bred Easter Hero (and might well have made it three in a row had the race not been canceled in 1931). Later came Bing Crosby’s notable triumph in the 1965 Irish Sweeps Derby (a race that attracted more financial interest in the United States than it did in Ireland) as co-owner of
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Meadow Court. In the late twentieth century, other Americans to have enjoyed success with horses trained in Ireland include Bertram R. Firestone, Allen Paulson, Bob Fluor, Franklin Groves, Henry de Kwiatowski, and Virginia Kraft Payson. Occasionally, American trainers have enjoyed success in Ireland as well, most notably when Michael O’Brien sent out the New York–based Fourstar’s Allstar to win the 1991 Irish 2000 Guineas at the Curragh. Although his horses were bred in the United States and trained in England, Paul Mellon demands a mention as an Irish American who has enjoyed considerable success in Irish racing, notably with Forest Flower in the 1987 Irish 1000 Guineas. American owners and Irish trainers have also combined to win big in Britain, as with Betty Moran’s Papillon in the 2000 Aintree Grand National. Irish-bred horses have also enjoyed considerable success in the United States, both at stud and on the track, such as Round Table, the 1958 Horse of the Year in the United States, and the endlessly influential (and famously temperamental) stallion Nasrullah. However, from the 1970s onward the story of Irish-American exchange in horse racing is essentially the story of two Irishmen, trainer Dr. Vincent O’Brien and stallion master John Magnier, and their systematic acquisition of American-bred racehorses, with a view to racing them in Europe and making them into globally attractive stallions. By doing this, O’Brien and Magnier revolutionized the world bloodstock industry and made Ireland into Europe’s foremost producer of thoroughbreds, capable of competing with the previously all-powerful American industry. O’Brien had been Ireland’s most successful trainer from the late 1940s, at first www.abc-clio.com
in National Hunt racing and then on the Flat, winning a succession of big races for American owners across Europe and beyond. For John McShain, O’Brien trained Ballymoss (winner of the Irish Derby and King George and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot in 1957, followed by the 1958 Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe) and Gladness (winner of the 1958 Ascot Gold Cup). In 1962 he sent out Larkspur to win the 1962 Epsom Derby for the then U.S. ambassador to Ireland, Raymond Guest, before recording a series of triumphs with the brilliant Sir Ivor (the English 2000 Guineas and Derby, the Eclipse Stakes, and the first Irish-trained winner of the Washington International) for the same owner in 1968. Guest is also notable as the owner of L’Escargot—the only horse to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup (1970 and 1971) and the Grand National (1975). In 1970, O’Brien won the English Triple Crown for Charles Engelhard with the peerless Nijinsky (bred in Canada). For John Galbreath, he won the 1972 English Derby with Roberto, who went on to inflict an unprecedented defeat at York on the undisputed English Champion, Brigadier Gerard. In the York race the positive U.S. riding tactics of Roberto’s Panamanian jockey, Braulio Baeza, caused a sensation. In 1973, O’Brien and his future sonin-law Magnier bought a substantial share of a relatively modest stud farm, Coolmore. The two men had determined that the future of Irish racing and breeding lay in buying the choice lots at the yearling sales in Kentucky, bringing them back to Ireland for racing, and then standing them at stud in Ireland or selling shares in them back to the American market at a substantial profit. This high-risk policy was founded on a total faith in O’Brien’s ability to identify
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potential champions in their infancy and Magnier’s instinct for what would make a marketable stallion pedigree. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, they enjoyed remarkable success on the racecourses of Europe. Running in the colors of their most substantial backer, Robert Sangster, and usually ridden by top jockey of the day Lester Piggott, horses trained by O’Brien won all of the major European races: the English Derby with The Minstrel (1977) and Golden Fleece (1983), the King George at Ascot with The Minstrel (1977), consecutive Prix de l’Arc de Triomphes with Alleged (1977 and 1978), and the English 2000 Guineas with Lomond (1983) and El Gran Señor (1984). Many of these expensively bought horses went on to be successful at stud, but the policy’s success attracted imitators, and by the mid-1980s the yearling market had become ludicrously inflated, notably by the emergence of oil-wealthy owners such as Khalid Abdullah and Sheikh Mohammed bin Maktoum of Dubai. Mistakes of judgment became even more expensive, and the Coolmore operation consolidated. O’Brien’s last great triumph came in improbably romantic circumstances in the United States, when Royal Academy won the 1990 Breeder’s Cup Mile, ridden by the veteran jockey Lester Piggott, who was lured out of retirement by O’Brien to win yet another big prize for the Coolmore connections. With O’Brien in semiretirement, Magnier set about expanding Coolmore’s stud operation into the United States and Australia. Shrewd and adroit financial management, aligned with good luck, ensured his success. In Australia, the relatively modest and inexpensive racehorse Danehill turned out champion after champion, www.abc-clio.com
while in Europe, Sadler’s Wells began in short order to sire one top-class racehorse after another. More significantly, Sadler’s Wells was a homebred, a sire of sires who had cost Coolmore nothing. A winner of the Irish 2000 Guineas, Eclipse Stakes, and Irish Champion Stakes in 1984, he had nevertheless been rated second in O’Brien’s stable to the brilliant El Gran Senor (famously defeated in the English Derby by Secreto, trained by Vincent O’Brien’s son, David), but Sadler’s Wells provided Coolmore with a stallion of global renown. With the acquisition of the Ashford Stud in Kentucky, Coolmore also established a stronghold in the United States that set the scene for greater expansion. In the mid-1990s, a young Irish trainer, Aidan O’Brien, exploded into racing consciousness, producing record numbers of winners in Ireland over jumps and on the flat. Magnier and his coinvestors quickly decided that Aidan O’Brien was a worthy successor to Vincent (although no relation), and installed him in the latter’s training headquarters, Ballydoyle. Coolmore also went back to the now-deflated yearling sales and reinvested in another generation of American yearlings by new stallions, notably Storm Cat. Instantly, O’Brien produced a multiple Group One winner for Coolmore, Desert King (Irish 2000 Guineas and Derby in 1997), and since then a succession of top-class racehorses and potential stallions has been produced. Coolmore’s global scale of ambition can be measured in its range of successes on the international stage, and particularly in that many of O’Brien’s horses’ finest performances have come at the Breeder’s Cup, the meeting that crowns and culminates the U.S. season. Johannesburg won the Breeder’s Cup Juvenile in 2001 and High
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Chaparral the Breeder’s Cup Turf in 2002 and 2003. In addition, Rock of Gibraltar narrowly lost the 2002 Breeder’s Cup Mile (ending a run of seven consecutive wins in Group One races) and Giant’s Causeway just lost out to Tiznow in the finish of the 2000 Breeder’s Cup Classic, the richest horse race in the world. Ballydoyle and Coolmore look set to continue their dominance, but it is also important to recognize that other Irish trainers have done equally well in U.S. racing in recent years. John Oxx won the Breeder’s Cup Mile with Ridgewood Pearl in 1995 and other big American prizes with Timarida in 1996. Most notably, however, Dermot Weld remains the only trainer from outside the United States to have won an American Triple Crown race; Go and Go’s victory in the Belmont Stakes of 1990 confirmed Weld’s unrivaled gift for producing horses to win anywhere in the world. Weld has since produced many other winners in America from his base on the Curragh, including Pine Dance (2002) and Dimitrova (2003). Michael Hinds and Stephen Wilson See also: CROKER, Richard; CROSBY, Bing References O’Brien, Jacqueline, and Ivor Herbert. Vincent O’Brien: The Official Biography. London: Bantam, 2005. Robinson, Nick. Horsetrader: Robert Sangster and the Rise and the Fall of the Sport of Kings. London: Harper Collins, 1994. Thoroughbred Times. www.thoroughbredtimes .com (accessed February 12, 2005).
HOVENDEN,THOMAS (1840–1895) Thomas Hovenden was born in Dunmanway, Co. Cork, to parents who died during the Great Famine. He was brought up in an orphanage until he was apprenticed to www.abc-clio.com
The Last Moments of John Brown by Thomas Hovenden. (©The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
George Tolerton, a carver and gilder, who recommended him to the Cork School of Design in 1858. Hovenden emigrated to New York in 1863, where he worked as a photographic colorist. Here he entered the school of the National Academy of Design. He moved to Baltimore in 1868. Hovenden worked across a range of genres: history painting, genre painting, paintings of literary themes, landscapes, and portraits. In 1874, he went to France for six years. In Paris, he studied at the premier school, the École des Beaux-Arts, under Alexandre Cabanel, bringing his work to the level of sophistication associated with the European experience. He also painted in Pont-Aven, Brittany, where he joined other Irish and American artists. Here he met the painter Helen Corson (1846–1935), whom he married in 1881. In Pont-Aven, he painted The Hunter’s Tale, The Poacher’s Story (1880), The One Who Can Read (1877), and In Hoc Signo Vinces
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(1880). The latter, based on the Wars of the Vendée (1793–1795), treated the peasant uprisings against the revolutionary government in western France. The reemergence of the historical antagonism between clericalism and republicanism in Brittany in the 1870s revived the War of the Vendée as a theme, allowing artists to comment politically on contemporary events without appearing to do so. The painting was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1880 and made his name. Hovenden returned to New York and showed the picture at the National Academy of Design to great acclaim. He was elected academician of the National Academy of Design and member of the Society of American Artists, the New York Water Color Society, the New York Etching Club, and the Philadelphia Society of Artists. In 1881, he and Helen Corson moved to Plymouth Meeting, where the Corsons were established as Quakers. Robbins Battell commissioned Hovenden to paint John Brown, the renowned abolitionist, in The Last Moments of John Brown (1882–1884), now in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Although the incident, showing Brown kissing a black child on his way to the scaffold, transpired to be apocryphal, Hovenden imbued it with high moral purpose. His wife’s family was involved in the abolitionist movement, and Hovenden’s own studio was used as a stop along the Underground Railroad. He painted several African-American subjects that, to our eyes, may be somewhat patronizing, but he had significant links with the black artist, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and both produced visually defining images that challenged racial stereotypes In the Hands of the Enemy (1889) depicts an imaginary Union family caring for a wounded Confederate soldier after the Battle of Gettysburg. The theme of www.abc-clio.com
Christian, fraternal reconciliation transcending political or racial difference earned Hovenden a record $5,500. His largest and last painting, The Founders of a State (1895), remained unfinished at his death. It shows the opening of the Southwest in response to the pressure from frontiersmen and the resulting occupation of Cherokee land by homesteaders. Although renowned in his own time, Hovenden was undeservedly overshadowed by painters such as Thomas Eakins and Thomas Anshutz, who also taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where Hovenden taught from 1886 to 1888. Hovenden’s blend of history/narrative/genre painting went out of critical favor. His reputation, however, was revived with a major exhibition at the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia in 1995. Hovenden sought to uphold the traditional American values that appealed to the morality of his age. Breaking Home Ties (1890) enshrined his ideas about the home hearth—where the virtues of loyalty in a traditional God-fearing rural family are promoted—but the stylistic characteristics of his work were now less rapturously received as the influence of Impressionism increasingly modernized American painting. But if the critics were less than enthusiastic, the public was ecstatic. Exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, it was considered the most popular of all 1,000 paintings on show. Niamh O’Sullivan
References Gregory, Anne, Sylvia Young, and Naurice Frank Woods, Jr. Thomas Hovenden (1840–1895): American Painter of Hearth and Homeland. Philadelphia: Woodmere Art Museum, 1995. Wunderlich, R. “Thomas Hovenden and the American Genre Painters.” Kennedy Quarterly 3, no. 1 (April 1962): 2–11. ABC-CLIO 1-800-368-6868
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HOWARD, MAUREEN (1930–) Born on June 30, 1930, Maureen Howard was raised in an Irish neighborhood in the industrial town of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Her father was an Irish immigrant to America who later became the detective for Fairfield County. Like her mother, Howard was educated at Smith College and received her bachelor’s degree in 1952. After graduating, she worked for advertising and publishing firms before becoming a full-time writer. She published her first novel, Not a Word About Nightingales, in 1960. Five years later her second novel, Bridgeport Bus, was published. Her third, Before My Time, appeared in 1975. Two years later, she edited Seven American Women Writers of the Twentieth Century before publishing Facts of Life, a memoir of her childhood and early adulthood, in 1978. For this work, she was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction in 1980. She also edited The Penguin Book of Contemporary American Essays in 1984. Her novels Grace Abounding, Expensive Habits, and Natural History were all nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1983, 1987, and 1993, respectively. A Lover’s Almanac appeared in 1998, and three years later she published Big as Life: Three Tales for Spring, a collection of short stories and memories. Howard has contributed to Irish-American fiction by writing the foreword for Cabbage and Bones: An Anthology of Irish American Women’s Fiction. She has combined her writing with teaching, and from 1967 to 1968 she taught English and creative writing at the New York School for Social Research. She has also held positions at Amherst College, Brooklyn College, Yale, Princeton, and the University of California at Santa Barbara. Howard is currently on the faculty of the writing program at www.abc-clio.com
Columbia University. She was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1967. She has contributed articles to the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Yale Review. She is married and has one daughter. Currently, she lives in New York City. Much of Howard’s work involves women characters who are at odds with society and who are searching for their own sense of identity and place in a hostile world. This has led some critics to accuse her of being a woman’s writer, confining her work to issues that only concern women. Her upbringing in an Irish-Catholic community in Bridgeport has formed the basis for much of her work. In many ways, Bridgeport is a character in all her work, and Howard has drawn upon experiences from her own childhood and incorporated them into her novels. In Bridgeport Bus, she tells the story of 35-year old Mary Agnes Keely, an Irish-Catholic girl who leaves her widowed mother in Bridgeport and travels to Manhattan to begin a life of her own. The novel ends with the protagonist, pregnant and unmarried, returning home to her mother and forced to deal with the change in the circumstances of her life. The consequences of Howard’s own upbringing in an Irish Catholic community are examined in her memoir Fact of Life. This work also explores her parents’ relationship with each other, their attitude toward their children, and what Howard has termed their “diseased attitude towards money.” Bridgeport also forms the setting of Natural History, a work that combines a fictional narrative with a collection of facts about Bridgeport. It mixes different literary genres, combining a screenplay, the encyclopedia, diary entries, and historical narratives to tell the story. The plot deals with a county detective who bears a resemblance to Howard’s
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own father and his life in Bridgeport. This mixing of different literary genres continued with Big as Life: Three Tales for Spring, which was published in 2001. This work combines short stories with memoirs and, as the second part of a proposed quartet of novels dealing with the seasons, focuses on themes of renewal and regeneration. The Silver Screen, her most recent novel and the third in the quartet, continues this concern with Irish-American themes by dealing with Isabel Maher, a star of silent movies and her relationship with her children. David Doyle Reference Kearns, Caledonia. “Maureen Howard.” In The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, edited by Michael Glazier. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999.
HOWE, FANNY QUINCY (1940–) Born in Buffalo, New York, on October 15, 1940, Fanny Howe was reared in an intellectual household in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was the daughter of a distinguished Harvard Law School professor, Mark DeWolfe Howe, and an Irish immigrant from Dublin, Mary Manning Howe, later known as Molly Howe, who was an actress, novelist, playwright, and cofounder of the Poets Theater. Fanny was the middle child, and her elder sister Susan Howe also became known as a poet and a playwright. Starting at age 14, Fanny Howe would meet and become a part of the poetic community through the Poets Theater. There, also, Howe fell in love with Irish singer and actor Liam Clancy. Through the Poets Theater she was exposed to performances of Irish poetry and drama but also developed www.abc-clio.com
an appreciation for American poets of the time. Fanny Howe was dismissed from Buckingham School in Cambridge in 1957; she subsequently studied at Stanford from 1958–1961, but did not obtain a degree. Howe returned to the East to write and became involved in the civil rights movement. She assisted in the birth of a literary magazine called Fire Exit. There she met Carl Senna, a writer of mixed Chicano and black ancestry, who was also an activist. On October 27, 1968, Howe and Senna married. They had three children: Annlucien, Danzy, and Maceo. This interracial marriage, the process of bearing and rearing children of African-American-ChicanoIrish descent, and the racial turmoil of Boston during the 1960s and 1970s influenced her experience and writing deeply. Howe began writing novels and poetry that dealt with issues of race relations, class, and social justice in Boston during those decades. However, even before her marriage, Howe believed she was from mixed ancestry, referring to her powerful, charismatic, artistic Irish mother and her retiring, unexpressive, academic father. Howe was reared in an unreligious Protestant household, but she began attending Mass with her mother-in-law. She eventually converted to Roman Catholicism, though she never became an orthodox Catholic. Howe describes herself as an atheist Catholic and says she is attracted to Catholicism because of its many contradictions, and her spiritual beliefs are often explored through her poetry in which she probes matters of the material and spiritual world. Howe worked at Tufts University as a lecturer in creative writing from 1968 through 1971. Then in 1973 Howe worked with the Massachusetts Poetry-inthe-Schools program. In 1974 she lectured
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in creative writing at Emerson College in Boston. That same year, Senna and Howe divorced. Then from 1975 through 1978 Howe lectured, again in creative writing, for the Columbia University Extension and School of the Arts in New York City. In 1976 Howe was a lecturer in poetry at Yale University, and then in 1977 she lectured in fiction at the Harvard Extension. From 1978 though 1987 Howe was a visiting writer and lecturer in fiction and poetry at MIT. In 1987 she became a professor at the University of California in San Diego. In 1991 Howe was a professor of language and literature and codirector of the MFA program in writing at Bard College. From 1993 through 1995 Howe was the associate director of the University of California Study Center in London, England. In 1996 and 1997 she was the distinguished visiting writer-in-residence at Mills College. In 1998 Howe was writer-in-residence at Small Press Traffic in San Francisco. Howe is known as an experimental poet with an extraordinary sense of the sound of language and an exacting use of words. Her work is considered strong, yet quiet and passionate, often with no identifiable voice or persona. Howe’s work has been called unclassifiable and avant-garde. She frequently deals with issues of race, religion, social justice, politics, and metaphysics in her writings, often leaving questions unanswered. In her novels, Howe writes of troubled, lonely, ethical women of poverty, most often in the setting of Boston, the environment where she experienced the day-to-day challenges of racism. Howe has published more than 20 books of fiction and poetry. Her work has been most frequently compared with that of Emily Dickinson. Howe feels a closeness to early www.abc-clio.com
Celtic poetry with its four-line stanzas and first-person observer viewpoint. “O’Clock,” a series of poems published first as a work in 1995, then in an almost complete form as part of Selected Poems in 2000, is set in Ireland, the birthplace of Howe’s mother. However, most of Howe’s work is set in America, most commonly New England and particularly in Boston where Howe was reared. The influence of Howe’s Irish heritage seems to manifest itself most often in her interest in mixed heritage and race relations in America in general. Race, poverty, and class relationships became a primary concern for Howe after her marriage. The recurrent themes of homelessness and loneliness revealed through Howe’s characters originated when Howe and Senna’s Irish-African-American family were ostracized during the explosive times they lived in the Boston area. After her divorce, Howe began moving with her children, and she has been moving ever since, working at numerous institutions and changing apartments often. She says she is most comfortable when she is traveling from place to place. Even her style of working reflects this. Rather than write in an office setting, she prefers to carry her work in her pocket, writing and revising as she moves throughout the day. Howe considers herself a modern-day nomad, a wanderer, as are many of her characters. Robeson Street is a book of poetry set on Robeson Street in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, where she and Senna purchased a dilapidated Victorian home after living in the racially troubled West Roxbury. In West Roxbury, Howe and her family were continually assaulted by racial prejudice and confronted with violence. In the house on Robeson Street, Howe and Senna would
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entertain people from their diverse ethnic backgrounds. In Robeson Street, Howe expresses a multitude of feelings and perspectives: of isolation and fear, “with white boys banging the lids of garbage cans, calling racial zingers into our artificial lights.” “On Robeson Street anonymous was best. . . .” Sometimes the feeling is ambiguity: “This America is a wonderful place, one immigrant said. If it’s a cage, then it’s safe.” Many of her works deal with characters facing loneliness or homelessness as Howe, herself the mother of three ethnically mixed children, felt alienated and alone—outside white middle-class society, but not accepted in black neighborhoods. One Crossed Out, published in 1997, tells the story of May, a homeless madwoman. Even the jumbled ramblings of May contain passages referring to the metaphysical, a constant in Howe’s writing. Many consider Howe to be a religious author. May, like some of Howe’s other characters is a wanderer—homeless, nomadic, and lonely. These themes are recurrent in Howe’s writings. Howe’s 1980 novel The White Slave is based on a true manuscript. A white baby is taken from his mother and given to a black slave to rear as her own. The child experiences the life of a slave firsthand, as well as the love and compassion of his adopted mother. Again, through this book, Howe deals with the racial dichotomy of American society. In “The Right Thing” Howe tells the story of a white liberal couple in Boston who adopt a black boy as a social obligation and three years later return him, believing it is the right thing to do, but condemning him to a future of foster homes and life on the streets. One of Howe’s common themes is that of white, middle-class hypocrisy. www.abc-clio.com
In Howe’s poem “Jasmine and the Gypsies,” she addresses being lost, alone, destitute, abandoned, and nomadic. In the following line she expresses nomadism in the global terms of her family ethnic makeup: “I’m walking the globe from Africa to Ireland. . . .” Howe is known to write the story of the outsider, one not fully accepted into American society. Howe has been the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships with the McDowell Colony in 1965 and 1990 and the Bunting Institute in 1974. She received the St. Botolph Award for fiction in 1976 and the Writers Choice Award for Fiction in 1984. Howe was the recipient of the Village Voice Award for Fiction in 1988 and the California Council on the Arts Award for poetry in 1993. She received the National Poetry Foundation Award and the Chancellor’s Associates Faculty Award for Excellence in the Arts from the University of California in San Diego in 1998. Also in 1998, Howe received the Best of the Small Presses Award for Standards. In 1999 Howe received the America Award for Nod, and in 2001 she won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Selected Poems. That same year she was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Howe’s writing offers extreme and poignant portraits of the American urban landscape and the real cultural and class battles encountered by the poor and forgotten in American. But Howe is often most concerned with what occurs inside, emotionally and spiritually, and the loneliness of the outsider, the one who has not fit in or been accepted by main stream society. She is known as one of the most important experimental American poets today. Howe has spent more than 30 years exploring her cultural background in relationship to American society and against the backdrop
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of American inner-city settings. Her Irish heritage has been crucial to her unique perspective on American social class, race relations, and her view on homelessness and loneliness. Melanie Zimmer References Clancy, Liam. The Mountain of the Women: Memoirs of an Irish Troubadour. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Kane, Daniel. What Is Poetry? New York: Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 2003.
HUGHES, ARCHBISHOP JOHN (1797–1864) John Joseph Hughes was born in Co. Tyrone in Ireland, but he is indelibly linked with Catholicism in the United States. For 26 years, from 1838 until his death in 1864, Hughes led the Catholic Church in New York. In some respects, he was the embodiment of the Irish-American dream. His father was a poor farmer in Co. Tyrone. Hughes, who had little formal education or money, immigrated to the United States in 1817. After his arrival he worked as a builder and a gardener, but when he died he was archbishop of New York. Through the intervention of Mother Elizabeth Seton the uneducated Hughes was admitted to Mount Saint Mary’s seminary in 1820. Hughes’s success and rise to prominence was rapid. He was ordained in Philadelphia in 1826, and by 1838 he had been consecrated a bishop. Unlike that of his predecessors, Hughes’s style of leadership was energetic and forceful rather than contemplative. In 1840 he helped to found the Freeman’s Journal in New York, which provided a vehicle for expressing his views to a wide audience. His forceful personality was particularly evident in his handling of www.abc-clio.com
Portrait of Archbishop John Hughes, Catholic archbishop of New York from 1838 to 1864 and founder of Freeman’s Journal. (National Archives)
anti-Catholic bigotry and Protestant attempts at proselytism, both of which were widespread. The movement by fundamental Protestants to promote their religion and maintain Anglo-Saxon supremacy in the States was referred to as “nativism.” It was a powerful movement and appeared unassailable as Protestantism permeated many institutions in the United States. Moreover, schools were Protestant controlled, and reading the Protestant bible was prevalent in the curriculum. In 1843, the American Protestant Society had been formed for the purpose of converting Catholic immigrants. In 1847 Hughes issued a pastoral letter condemning the Protestant clergy’s attempts to convert Catholics in institutions. He believed
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Catholics had the right to defend themselves against Protestant attacks. In the 1840s also, Catholic churches and convents were burnt in Philadelphia and Boston. In 1842, the year Hughes became bishop of New York, his house was stoned and ransacked by nativists, and the windows of the Catholic cathedral were smashed. Hughes responded with characteristic vigor. He issued a robust admonition to Protestant extremists, warning them that “if a single Catholic church were burned in New York, the city would become a Moscow.” Significantly, no churches were burnt in New York. In 1844 he again called on Catholics to physically defend themselves and church property against nativist rioters. Three thousand Irishmen answered his call, armed with a variety of weapons ranging from shillelaghs to guns, and he formed them into cadres. In addition to using physical force, Hughes realized the political potential of Irish Catholics. A number of politicians were aware of the power of the Irish vote and made attempts to woo them at election time. By 1839, there were about 60,000 Catholics in New York, many of whom were Irish. This number increased substantially in the wake of the Famine exodus. Hughes believed education was the key to unlocking the opportunities available in the United States to Irish immigrants, and one of his enduring aspirations was for Catholics to have their own parochial schools, financed by the government. Hughes therefore challenged the New York Public School Society, which was responsible for providing an exclusively Protestant education system. He was supported by Governor William Seward but opposed by powerful nativists, including John Quincy Adams and John Calhoun. www.abc-clio.com
After the 1841 New York City election, Hughes was successful in getting the authorities to introduce legislation allowing wards to run their own Catholic schools. This legislation angered nativists, and their vehement opposition meant the bill was not passed and no money was made available for Catholic schools. After 1842, however, religious education was barred from public schools. Hughes’s victory at winning public funds for Catholic parochial education was short lived, but defeat made him more determined. Following this disappointment, Hughes threw his energies into creating a separate Catholic school system in New York. One of his greatest achievements was the creation of a parochial school system paid for by Catholic parishioners, which ran parallel with the official system. At the time of his death, there were 100 such Catholic schools within his diocese. Moreover, he was instrumental in founding Fordham University and Mount St. Vincent College. In 1850, largely because of Hughes’s reputation, New York became an archdiocese and he became archbishop. This was not only an achievement for Hughes personally, but it was also a tribute to the success of the Catholic Church in America. As archbishop, Hughes continued to fight for separate Catholic education. Hughes remained concerned with the fact that many public and private establishments were Protestant, and sometimes priests were denied access to patients in hospitals and other institutions. In some cases, Protestant authorities even took advantage of their monopoly by seeking to convert the inmates. Hughes therefore wanted distinctive Catholic institutes, such as orphanages, hospitals, banks, and social societies. In 1846 Hughes invited the Sisters of Mercy
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from Ireland to New York—to increase the number of clergy and create a female workforce for hospitals and schools. Hughes’s sister, Sister Mary Angela Hughes, was also in religious orders, and she and her fellow Sisters of Charity ran St. Vincent’s Hospital, which opened in 1849 in Lower Manhattan. As the Famine Irish arrived in New York, however, it was hard for such institutions to keep pace with the demands made on them. By the 1850s, various religious bodies, including the St. Vincent de Paul Society and the Sisters of Mercy, were operating a network of welfare provision for the poorest members of society, providing alms, medical support, shelter, clothing, and advice about education, employment, and saving. The nuns within the New York diocese also organized employment agencies, finding work for female immigrants from Ireland, who outnumbered male immigrants. Hughes encouraged the foundation of the Society for the Protection of Destitute Catholic Children, which was known as the Catholic Protectory. Hughes’s growing power coincided with the massive Irish Catholic immigration triggered by the Great Famine. More than any earlier generation of immigrants, the latest influx viewed themselves as exiles, and their religion and their ethnicity fused to give them a new social identity. As Hughes realized, the Church allowed the immigrants to bridge the gap between Ireland and America, while providing them with an outlet for expressing their Irish identity. To ensure that the Church played a central role in their new homes, Catholic institutions were established to look after their social as well as their spiritual needs. The establishment of parochial schools gave the Catholic Church more visibility in everyday life, as did the increased number www.abc-clio.com
of parish churches, all of which made the Catholic Church more accessible to ordinary people. The Catholic clergy undertook missions to the worst slum districts in New York, where they attempted to bring the poorest immigrants back to the Church. Chastity, temperance, avoidance of sin, and piety were at the core of the Church’s teachings. Significantly, many Irish Americans defined themselves by their parishes, which became a centers of their lives. Overall, Irish Catholics were more devout in the United States than they had been in Ireland. Devotion to the Catholic Church was also helped by nativist opposition, which was histrionically antiCatholic. However, Hughes was an integrationalist, and he wanted the immigrants to combine their Irishness with American patriotism. He described himself as being “an American by choice, not by chance.” Despite his love of Ireland, he supported a program of Americanizing Irish immigrants, although he rejected the idea that this process should involve a move to Protestantism. The creation of a Catholic Irish-American identity, however, excluded Irish immigrants who were Protestants, and it was contrary to the secular, nonsectarian view of the radicals of both 1798 and 1848. For Irish people throughout the world, the late 1840s were dominated by the unfolding of a prolonged famine in Ireland. Within the United States, massive amounts of money were raised by individuals and specially formed committees for the distressed poor in Ireland. On March 20, 1847, Hughes spoke at a fund-raising event on behalf of the New York Famine Relief Committee. His impassioned speech indicated that he was more critical of the British government than many of his fellow bishops in Ireland. His lecture was entitled
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“Antecedent Causes of the Irish Famine” and made it clear that the Famine was not attributable merely to the potato blight, but that it was necessary to ask why the lives of so many had been “left dependent on the capricious growth of a single root?” He attributed the Famine to a number of causes that he classified as the incompleteness of conquest, bad government, and a defective or vicious system of social economy. Although Hughes laid many of the ills of Ireland at the door of the British government, he did not support rebellion, even in the midst of a famine. Essentially, Hughes was a social conservative, although he had been an admirer of the constitutional methods of Daniel O’Connell, the leader of the Irish Repeal Movement. After O’Connell’s death in 1847, the political vacuum was filled by a group of radical intellectuals, known as “Young Ireland.” In 1848, believing Ireland could never get justice from a British government, the Young Ireland leadership prepared for a rebellion. Yet, despite his advocacy of physical force in New York, Hughes opposed it in Ireland, continuing to support constitutional methods. He believed the 1798 uprising had been an unmitigated catastrophe for Ireland and that a fresh one would be similarly disastrous. Nonetheless, in August 1848 Hughes attended a meeting in New York on behalf of the Irish republican movement, and he even made a donation, which he insisted should be used to purchase shields and not weapons should there be an uprising in Ireland. At this stage, supporters in the United States were unaware that a small uprising had already taken place in Ballingarry in Co. Tipperary and that it had been easily defeated by the Irish Constabulary, with www.abc-clio.com
only two casualties. Following the failure of the 1848 uprising Hughes once again became an implacable enemy of the Young Ireland movement. His antagonism was most apparent in his attacks on Thomas D’Arcy McGee, who had escaped from Ireland in 1848 and founded the New York Nation. McGee opposed Hughes’s attempts to involve the Catholic Church in education, as he believed education should be secular. As more Young Irelanders sought exile in the United States, including the renowned leaders, Thomas Francis Meagher and John Mitchel, Hughes remained a firm opponent of Irish republicanism, secret societies, and radical movements. The success of the Catholic Church in the United States was apparent in August 1858 when, in front of more than 100,000 people, the cornerstone of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral was laid. It was to replace the smaller, original Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. This project was completed in 1879, by which time Hughes was dead. Nonetheless, it remained a tribute to his imagination and vision. The building of the cathedral was suspended during the Civil War. Hughes supported the Union in this conflict, and he believed the involvement of Irish soldiers in the war would link the Irish with American patriotism. He gave his blessing to the formation of Irish brigades, seeing it as a way of protecting Catholics in an overwhelmingly Protestant army. Hughes supported the war in a less obvious way. In the early months of 1862 he undertook a covert visit to Europe on behalf of the American government to raise support for the Union. However, Hughes opposed the Conscription Act of 1863, which was an attempt to bring more men into the Union Army. It required 200,000 men to be drafted, but permitted people to buy
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exclusion for $300. Hughes opposed the act on the grounds that it discriminated against the poor. In the violent riots that followed the introduction of the act, Catholic priests mediated between police and rioters, both sides being predominantly Irish. Although ill, Hughes attempted to mediate between the different sides in the riot, but he was saddened by what he viewed as the reemergence of nativism in the midst of a war. Archbishop Hughes died January 3, 1864, unaware that the riots marked an end rather than a continuation of nativism, which he had so vigorously opposed during his lifetime. Christine Kinealy See also: CATHOLIC CHURCH, the; GREAT FAMINE, The; McGEE, Thomas D’Arcy; NATIVISM AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM References Bayor, Ronald H., and Timothy J. Meagher. The New York Irish. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Billington, Ray Allen. The Protestant Crusade: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism. New York: Macmillan, 1938. Carthy, Margaret. A Cathedral of Suitable Magnificence. St Patrick’s Cathedral, New York. New York: Health Policy Advisory Center, 1983. Hassard, John R. G.. Life of the Most Reverend John Hughes D.D. First Archbishop of New York with Extracts from His Private Correspondence. 1866. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969. Shaw, Richard. Dagger John. The Unquiet Life and Times of Archbishop John Hughes of New York. New York: Paulist Press, 1977.
HURLING IN ARGENTINA In 1887, just three years after the founding of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in Ireland, hurling was being widely played in www.abc-clio.com
Argentina, particularly in Mercedes and Capitán Sarmiento. However, the game was not played on any competitive basis. The first organized game was played on May 1900 in a field belonging to the Irish Catholic Association in Caballito, a district of Buenos Aires, which is today a public square known as Plaza Irlanda. Another game was played on July 15, 1900, between Palermo and Almagro. Each team had only nine players because of the shortage of hurleys. The Buenos Aires Hurling Club—the local branch of the GAA—was founded on August 5, 1900; James P. Harte (d. 1932) of Co. Cork was its first president and William Bulfin was a committee member. Bulfin was a key sponsor of hurling in Argentina through his articles in the Southern Cross newspaper, which published hurling rules, a plan of the hurling field, and indications on how teams were to be placed. Initially, teams were to be formed by 17 players a side. However, in practice games played in Caballito there were as many as 30 players a side. Enthusiasm for the game spread rapidly, and soon clubs were founded in departments with significant Irish populations. The most noteworthy were in towns such as San Andrés de Giles, Rojas, and Chacabuco. Hurling was introduced in the 1930s to the Fahy Institute, a boarding school for Irish Argentines in Capilla del Señor, and its ex-pupils were to form two of the outstanding teams of the countryside, the Capilla Boys and the Fahy Boys. Up to 1914, games were organized every weekend on a regular basis. These games received good coverage from the local press, including La Nación newspaper. The playing of hurling declined when it became difficult to import hurleys from
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Ireland during World War I, but resumed after the end of the war. In 1919 the hurling field in Buenos Aires was located in the corner of Neuquén and Bellavista. One of the persons who did most to further the game in Argentina was Miguel E. Ballesty (1876–1950) of Salto, son of Patrick Ballesty and Ann Kelly of Co. Westmeath. On August 16 and 27, 1920, Miguel Ballesty organized meetings with representatives of three clubs, St. Patrick’s College, Capilla Boys, and Bearna Baoghail, and founded the Argentine Hurling Federation. On October 21, 1921, a special game was played in Mercedes in honor of Laurence Guinell, diplomatic envoy of the Irish Republic, who was on special mission in Argentina. Another game was played at the same place on October 31, 1921, when a team of Irish Argentines defeated a team of Irish-born players. On October 15, 1922, the first hurling championship was won by the Wanderers, followed by Capilla Boys. From October 1922 the playing field was rented from Club Banco Nación in Vélez Sarsfield, a suburb of Buenos Aires, where a fine wooden clubhouse was erected and painted green, white, and orange. Because of the construction of a new street, the club was moved to Villa Devoto. These grounds were to witness the golden age of hurling in Argentina during the next 22 years. Most of the great games between the leading teams were played there, and it also held many of the great Irish-Argentine gatherings. The club made one further move in 1948 and settled in Hurlingham, where it still continues to flourish through rugby and field hockey. On October 18, 1923, the Hurling Club celebrated its Silver Jubilee with hurling games, speeches, and a barbecue. Gerald Foley (1868–1927) of Co. Offaly, www.abc-clio.com
Bulfin’s successor as editor of the Southern Cross and supporter of the GAA in Argentina, paid tribute to all those who had worked hard to keep hurling alive, especially James P. Harte, Miguel Ballesty, and Patricio F. Byrne. Numerous clubs were formed during the 40 years the game prospered in Argentina: Buenos Aires, Almirante Brown, Fahy Boys, Capilla Boys (Capilla del Señor), St. Patrick’s College (Mercedes), St. Paul’s College (Capitán Sarmiento), Juniors Hurling Club, and National Hurling Club. Frequently, the idea to establish these and other clubs came from Roman Catholic priests. The Irish chaplain Father Edmund Flannery promoted the first games played in 1900 in the grounds of the Argentine Catholic Association in Caballito. Father Santiago Ussher was an ardent supporter of hurling, as were many of the Passionist and Pallotine fathers established in Argentina. Passionist Brother Clement Roche coached St. Paul’s College pupils and they soon became proficient in the game. Father Stanislaus Gill, C.P., director of the same school in 1938, was an outstanding hurler in his youth and even in ripe old age was not slow to challenge the skill of men of a younger generation. Some of these priests used their contacts in Ireland to promote hurling in Argentina. In the 1930s Father Vincent O’Sullivan, S.C.A., was given 100 hurleys and six sliothars (hurling balls) by the Cork County Board for the boys of the Fahy Institute. Thurles Sarsfield Club sent hurleys to Father Tony Kelly, S.C.A., an ex-member of the club who labored many years in Buenos Aires. Father Pat O’Brien, born in Argentina, became a skilful hurler while studying in Ireland. It is commonly accepted that World War II put an end to hurling in Argentina,
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when it became very difficult or impossible to import hurleys from Ireland. However, there were other reasons. Some members of the Irish-Argentine community thought that hurling, instead of being a uniting factor, was causing quite an amount of discord and division in the community. Some old players still remember the scandal of some fights among hurlers after the game. Hurling was almost entirely confined to people of Irish origin, the number of people playing hurling was relatively small, and clubs were few in number. Clubs were playing each other too often, which was not a happy state of affairs, and it often led to tension and even bitterness among members of a community that was small in relation to the population of the country. From the 1930s onward there was a steady transference of players, resources, and enthusiasm from hurling to field hockey, a sport popular in England and that some historians claim had its origins in hurling. The Hurling Club won the national hockey championship for five years. Half of the players on the Argentine hockey team that played in the 1948 Olympic Games in London were from the Hurling Club. In Argentina, hurling and teaching the Irish language did not follow the same patterns of success. The Argentine branch of the Gaelic League was founded on May 1889 in the Passionist monastery of Capitán Sarmiento; J. E. O’Curry was its first president. Initially, the Gaelic movement took strong hold among many Irish and Irish-Argentine residents in the countryside of Buenos Aires and Santa Fe. However, on October 28, 1902, the Southern Cross editor Gerald Foley wrote to William Bulfin and remarked that although hurling was very successful the Gaelic League was advancing very slowly. As they came from www.abc-clio.com
English-speaking areas in Ireland, most of the Irish settlers in Argentina were not native speakers of Irish. Additionally, their interest in Irish nationalism was socially driven and motivated by the opportunities to make connections in their circles. Furthermore, in the first decades of the twentieth century the majority of the upper segment in the Irish-Argentine community was already incorporated into the Argentine landed bourgeoisie, which was markedly Anglophile, and thus had little interest in supporting Irish nationalists and their efforts to teach the Irish language. In Argentina the nationalist discourse behind the practice of hurling and learning the Irish language was more popular among young members of the Irish landless proletariat, particularly the sons of waged rural laborers and railway company employees, who felt a need to be recognized as different from other immigrants’ children, and belonging to a culture perceived by many as superior to that of the Italian or Spanish settlers. Hurling was an important element in building the identity of this segment, a process in which members of the Roman Catholic clergy saw an opportunity to differentiate their flock from the upper social segments influenced by Protestant cultures. Hurling represented a factor of identity against that characterized by cricket, soccer, and polo, which were predominantly played by English, Anglo Argentines, and wealthy Irish Argentines. Hurling was also viewed as a masculine entertainment, in contrast to lawn tennis, which in the beginning was practiced primarily by women. Perceptions changed in the second half of the twentieth century, when rugby football began to be regarded as the ultimate masculine sport, and field hockey was adopted as a
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popular entertainment among Irish and other private schools for girls. Edmundo Murray See also: BULFIN, William; EMIGRATION References Hayes, Seán S. “Hurling in Argentina.” Gaelic Athletic Association: A Century of Service, 1884–1984. Dublin: Cumann Luthcleas Gael, 1984 King, Seamus J. The Clash of the Ash in Foreign Fields: Hurling Abroad. Cashel: Author’s Edition, 1998. Passionist Fathers of Argentina. Golden Jubilee of the Monastery Saint Paul’s Retreat of the Passionist Fathers. Capitán Sarmiento: Passionist Fathers, 1938. Raffo, Víctor. El Origen Británico del Deporte Argentino: Atletismo, Cricket, Fútbol, Polo, Remo y Rugby Durante las Presidencias de Mitre, Sarmiento y Avellaneda. Buenos Aires: Author’s Edition, 2004.
HUSTON, ANJELICA (1951–) Anjelica Huston was born in Santa Monica, California, on July 8, 1951, the first daughter of film director John Huston (1906–1987) and ballet dancer Enrica (Ricki) Soma (1929–1969). She spent most of her childhood at St. Cleran’s, Huston’s country house outside Galway, and attended Kylemore Abbey School. From an early age she had aspirations of becoming an actress and, at the age of 18, was cast in the lead role in her father’s production of A Walk with Love and Death (1969), which was adapted from a short story by Hans Koningsberger. The film was neither a critical nor a commerical success, and Anjelica’s performance was particularly panned. The devastating reviews that she received led to the curtailment of her acting career and for a number of years she focused her attention on her modeling career. Although unconventional in the context of www.abc-clio.com
ideals of beauty within 1970s fashion, her statuesque looks attracted the attention of top photographers, including Richard Avedon. During the 1970s Huston took a variety of minor roles and cameos in films (e.g., The Last Tycoon [1976], The Postman Always Rings Twice [1981], Frances [1982], and This Is Spinal Tap [1984]), but it was her major role in Prizzi’s Honor (1985), directed by John Huston and starring her partner, Jack Nicholson, that propelled her back into the limelight. Her superb performance as the scheming Maerose Prizzi won her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Two years later she took the lead role in her father’s final film, The Dead (1987), based on James Joyce’s short story. The film was one of the high points of John Huston’s career, and Anjelica’s performance as Gretta Conroy won her much critical acclaim. Her subsequent career has seen her taking on mainstream projects such as The Witches (1990), The Addams Family (1991), The Addams Family Values (1995), and gritty film noirs and dramas like The Grifters (1990), which earned her a Best Actress Oscar nomination. She also appeared in The Crossing Guard (1995), and in a number of nonmainstream and independent films such as Buffalo 66 (1998). In recent years Huston has started to direct and produce her own films. Her directorial debut, a searing and courageous drama about child abuse called Bastard Out of Carolina (1996), though critically praised, was shelved by its original production company following concerns about its uncompromising, controversial material. She returned to directing—and to Ireland— with her 1999 adaptation of Brendan O’Carroll’s comic play, The Mammy (retitled Agnes Browne), in which she also
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took the lead role. The film received mixed reviews. Throughout her career as an actress she has worked with many of the top established directors, including John Huston, Woody Allen, and Francis Ford Coppola, as well as working with actordirectors such as Sean Penn and Vincent Gallo. Her acting range has also developed, and she has proved herself equally adept at comic and dramatic roles. After her long-term relationship with Jack Nicholson ended, she married the distinguished Mexican-born American sculptor, Robert Graham, in 1992. Her latest directorial effort was Riding the Bus with My Sister in 2005. Gwenda Young See also: HUSTON, John References Huston, John. An Open Book. London: Columbus Books, 1988. Grobel, Lawrence. The Hustons. Revised ed. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000.
HUSTON, JOHN (1906–1987) John Marcellus Huston was born on August 5, 1906, in Nevada, Missouri, the son of actor Walter Huston and journalist Rhea. Brought up by his mother after his parents’ divorce, John only established a closer relationship with his father during his teenage years. At the age of 10 Huston was diagnosed with Bright’s disease, a diagnosis that limited his physical activities for two years. However, in 1920 he entered the San Diego Army and Military Academy and soon developed an interest in boxing (as a teenager John even toyed with the idea of training to be a professional boxer). Huston made his stage debut in a minor role in a New York production of www.abc-clio.com
The Easy Mark, starring his father, Walter. He continued to take small roles in productions for the Provincetown Playhouse Theater, during which time his father established himself as one of the American theater’s most important actors. By 1929 John Huston was dabbling in writing: he published his first short story, “Fool,” in the prestigious The American Mercury magazine; worked as a journalist for The New York Graphic; and wrote a short play for marionettes, Frankie and Johnny. In 1931, John followed his father to Hollywood, where he secured a screenwriting job at Universal studios. His first credit was for work on one of his father’s films, A House Divided, work that caught the attention of the film’s director, William Wyler, and Universal’s boss, Carl Laemmle Jr. More films followed, including Law and Order (starring Walter Huston) and an uncredited contribution to the screenplay of the influential horror film Murders in the Rue Morgue. Despite some initial success at Universal, Huston found the life of a Hollywood screenwriter frustrating: many of his ideas and treatments remained unproduced, and in the early 1930s he also battled with personal problems (including involvement in a car accident that resulted in the death of a female pedestrian). Huston left Hollywood in 1934 and moved to Britain, where he signed a contract with British-Gaumont. However, his experiences with British studios—he also worked, very briefly, for Ealing studios—were largely unproductive, and in 1935 he returned to the United States. In 1935 Huston starred in a Works Progress Administration (WPA) theater production of Howard Koch’s The Lonely
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Man in Chicago, but by 1937 he had returned to Hollywood, where he secured a screenwriting contract with Warner Brothers. The period 1937–1941 was immensely productive for him: he contributed to or cowrote eight A-budget films, including William Wyler’s production of Jezebel, starring Bette Davis; The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse and Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, both starring Edward G. Robinson; Wuthering Heights, with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon; High Sierra, with Humphrey Bogart; and Sergeant York, starring Gary Cooper. Huston’s work on Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet garnered him an Academy Award nomination for best screenwriter (with Norman Burnstine and Heinz Herald). In 1941 Huston made his directorial debut with an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. This was the third film adaptation of Hammett’s 1931 novel, and it proved to be the most effective at depicting the noir world of Sam Spade. The film’s star, Humphrey Bogart, had already worked with Huston on High Sierra and The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, and despite not being the studio’s first choice for the role of Sam Spade (Warner Brothers favored George Raft), his performance firmly established him in the first rank of American screen stars. The film also featured a cameo from Walter Huston (as the dying sea captain, Jacobi), and supporting performances from Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre. Huston also took a screenwriting credit for the adaptation (which followed Hammett’s novel very faithfully), and his work earned him a second Academy Award nomination. Huston’s next directing effort, an adaptation of Ellen Glasgow’s crime melodrama, In This Our Life, was generally considered www.abc-clio.com
to be less successful than The Maltese Falcon, but its sympathetic depiction of African Americans was evidence of Huston’s liberal politics. Huston’s third film, Across the Pacific, reunited him with Bogart and Greenstreet and successfully injected the action genre with wartime ideology. Soon after completing production on Across the Pacific, Huston left Hollywood to join the U.S. Signal Corps and was stationed in the remote Aleutian Islands. Huston spent the war years directing documentaries, beginning with Report from the Aleutians in 1943 and followed by San Pietro (aka The Battle of San Pietro), which was filmed in Italy in 1943–1944. He completed his wartime trilogy with the controversial and moving Let There Be Light, which depicted the troubles of soldiers suffering from mental illnesses as a result of war service. The U.S. Army deemed the film too disturbing and controversial, and it was not theatrically released until 1980. In 1947 Huston returned to Warner Brothers and began production on one of his most acclaimed films, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Shot on locations in Mexico and California, the film showed how gold fever affects three prospectors; the grueling production tested the endurance of its cast and crew (including Bogart and Walter Huston). The film also made Academy Award history in 1949 when both Walter and John won awards for acting, directing, and screenwriting. Huston worked with Bogart again the following year on his production of Key Largo, which also reunited him with Edward G. Robinson. Huston’s liberal politics were increasingly challenged in the growing conservatism of postwar America, and in 1947 he was instrumental in establishing the Committee for the First Amendment, a group
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comprising leading Hollywood writers, actors, and directors, protesting the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC) treatment of the Hollywood Ten. Although the Committee for the First Amendmet traveled to Washington as HUAC was questioning the Hollywood Ten, they were not successful in preventing the jail sentences imposed on them. Despite this setback, Huston remained supportive of the Hollywood Ten and would continue to lend his name to a variety of liberal causes. Huston’s next film, an adaptation of W. R Burnett’s crime novel The Asphalt Jungle, featured a strong cast, including Sterling Hayden, Sam Jaffe, and Marilyn Monroe in a small role. The film remains one of the seminal examples of the heist genre. Soon after the film was released, Huston was dealt a personal blow with the sudden death of his father, Walter. While The Asphalt Jungle had been a relatively modest production, his next film, an ambitious production of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, was anything but: the film’s troubled shoot and edit were the subject of a series of articles by Lillian Ross that were later collected and published as a book, Picture, in 1952. The film, which starred real-life war hero Audie Murphy in a lead role, was drastically cut down and released to lukewarm reviews. The rise of McCarthyism and greater opportunities for filming in Europe spurred Huston to base himself outside the United States for most of the 1950s. In 1951 he traveled to the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) to shoot a film of C. S. Forester’s novel The African Queen. Featuring a script by acclaimed writer (and Huston fan) James Agee, the film costarred Humphrey Bogart as Charlie Allnutt, a rogue riverboat captain, and Katharine Hepburn as Rose www.abc-clio.com
Sayer, a straitlaced missionary. The film’s shoot, which was later fictionalized by Peter Viertel in his novel White Hunter, Black Heart, was a taxing experience for the cast and crew, many of whom were struck down with malaria and dysentery. The production was also marked by personal happiness for Huston: during the shoot he received news that his wife, Ricki Soma, had given birth to his first child, Anjelica. The next few years saw Huston work mainly in Europe. In 1952 he shot a film about fin de siècle Paris and the life of Toulouse Lautrec (Moulin Rouge), and the following year Beat the Devil, a crime caper comedy based on a script by Truman Capote and featuring an all-star cast that included Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Peter Lorre, and Gina Lollobrigida. The reviews for both films were mixed: Beat the Devil divided critics, who either loved or loathed its freewheeling style. Huston’s European sojourn became more permanent when he purchased a rundown mansion called St. Cleran’s in Co. Galway in 1957. The next few years were spent restoring the house, and the Huston family—which now included a son, Tony (b. 1952)—relocated to St. Cleran’s in 1959. Ireland was the main location for Huston’s next project, an ambitious film of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, adapted by Ray Bradbury and starring Gregory Peck in the role of Captain Ahab. Filmed mainly in Youghal, Co. Cork, the film performed disappointingly at the box office, despite some positive reviews. Huston’s next location was the Caribbean island of Tobago, where he shot Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, the story of a nun (Deborah Kerr) and a marine (Robert Mitchum) stranded on a remote island during World War II. The film made effective use of Mitchum and Kerr—both favorite actors of Huston’s—and remains
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one of Huston’s most underrated films. Huston’s experience of working in Japan with John Wayne on his next film, The Barbarian and the Geisha, was less happy: director and actor clashed, and the resulting film was poorly received by critics and the public. In addition, 1958 saw the release of another Huston film, The Roots of Heaven, another production that fared badly at the box office. Huston’s last film of the decade was The Unforgiven, starring Burt Lancaster, Audrey Hepburn, and veteran actress Lillian Gish. The film’s western theme anticipated his next production, The Misfits, which was shot in Nevada the following year. Based on Arthur Miller’s screenplay and featuring a heavyweight cast that included Miller’s then wife, Marilyn Monroe, screen icon Clark Gable, and Montgomery Clift, the film was a complex and perceptive treatment of broken dreams and troubled lives. The film shoot was difficult for all involved, and Gable died shortly after the film was completed. Upon its release in 1961, the film garnered positive reviews, and the performances by all three leads were highly praised. Huston worked again with Montgomery Clift the following year on Freud, another troubled production that resulted in a film that received mixed reviews. Huston returned to Europe in 1963 to shoot The List of Adrian Messenger, which featured cameos by Frank Sinatra, Burt Lancaster, and Robert Mitchum, cameos that were not enough to win the film critical praise or box office success. Despite Huston’s busy directing schedule throughout the 1960s, he continued to pursue other interests: he took several acting jobs in large productions (e.g., appearing in Otto Preminger’s The Cardinal in 1963, in a performance that won him an Academy www.abc-clio.com
Award); he took out Irish citizenship in 1964 and began making representations to the Irish government in an effort to establish an Irish Film Board. Huston’s collaborations with leading American writers continued through the 1960s: he directed an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana in 1964 and a film version of Carson McCullers’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, featuring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor, in 1967. Huston’s next collaboration was with his daughter, Anjelica, on the 1969 film, A Walk with Love and Death, but the experience was difficult for the young and inexperienced Anjelica, and her performance was poorly received. After the release of his next film, a thriller called The Kremlin Letter, Huston began production on Fat City, the story of a down-and-out boxer (played by Stacy Keach). The film’s assured representation of the boxing world reflected Huston’s familiarity with that milieu, and its gritty urban noir look and strong performances won it acclaim upon its release in 1972. During the 1970s Huston continued to be prolific: he released seven films in all, including a Paul Newman western, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean in 1972, a big-budget version of Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, partly shot in Morocco and starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine, and a well-received adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothic novel Wise Blood. Huston’s output slowed down in the 1980s, becaue of increasing health problems (he was diagnosed with emphysema), and some of the film choices he made were surprising (e.g., his production of the musical Annie in 1982), but he was back on form with his comic gangster film, Prizzi’s Honor, in 1985. The film featured strong
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performances by the leads, Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner, but the film’s revelation was the superb performance by Anjelica Huston, a performance that won her an Academy Award for Best Actress. Anjelica Huston took the lead in Huston’s final film, a subtle, moving adaptation of James Joyce’s short story The Dead. Huston had been a long-time admirer of Joyce, and the production of the film was the fulfillment of a long-cherished ambition to successfully adapt Joyce to the screen. He was helped in this task by his son Tony, who took the screenwriting credit. The film was released soon after Huston’s death and received positive reviews. John Huston died of emphysema on August 28, 1987, in Rhode Island. He was survived by his children, Pablo (whom he adopted in the 1940s), Anjelica, Tony, Danny, and Allegra (Ricki Soma’s daughter, whom he adopted after Soma’s death in 1969). Gwenda Young See also: HUSTON, Angelica; HUSTON, Walter; JOYCE, James Augustine Aloysius; O’CONNOR, Flannery; PECK, Gregory; WAYNE, John References Desser, David, and Gaylyn Studlar. Reflections in a Male Eye: John Huston and the American Experience. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1993. Grobel, Lawrence. The Hustons. New York: Scribners, 1989. Huston, John. An Open Book. London: Columbus Books, 1988.
HUSTON, WALTER (1884–1950) Walter Huston (born Walter Houghston) was born in Toronto, Canada, on April 6, 1884, the fourth child of Elizabeth www.abc-clio.com
McGibbon (b. 1848) and Robert Houghston (b. 1848, of Irish descent). From an early age Walter showed an interest in performing, and at the age of 16 he took his first role in a traveling production of The White Heather, a popular nineteenth-century melodrama. Over the next four years he appeared in minor roles in a number of theater productions in Canada and America, the most notable of which were In Convict Stripes, with Lillian Gish, and The Sign of the Cross. In 1904 he met and married Rhea Gore (b. 1881); they had one son, John Huston (b. 1906). Soon after, Walter was appointed an operating engineer for the Union Electric Power Company, and by 1909 he was running a power plant in Weatherford, Texas. The lure of acting remained strong, however, and having separated from his wife at the end of 1909, he returned to popular theater and vaudeville shows. For the next 14 years Huston built up a vaudeville act alongside his second wife, Bayonne Whipple. In 1923 he gave up his Canadian citizenship to become an American citizen; in the same year he moved into legitimate theater, starring in a play called Mr. Pitt that won him good reviews. However, his big break came when he accepted the role of 75-year-old patriarch Ephraim Cabot in a New York production of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms. Critics praised Huston’s ability to transform himself into O’Neill’s character; this chameleon-like quality would become a trademark of Huston’s acting persona in theater and in films. During the 1920s Huston found further success in the theater, starring in plays such as The Barker (1926), Elmer the Great (1928), and The Commodore Marries (1929). In 1928 he also appeared in his first
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film, Paramount’s production of Ward Morehouse’s Gentleman of the Press. In the spring of 1929 he received $20,000 for four weeks’ work as a villain in Victor Fleming’s film of Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian, starring Gary Cooper; this was followed by his lead role in D. W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (1930). Throughout the 1930s Huston divided his time between New York theater and Hollywood films, winning critical acclaim on stage with Dodsworth (1933) and Knickerbocker Holiday (1938), as well as in films such as The Criminal Code (1931), American Madness (1932), Beast of the City (1932), The Wet Parade (1932), Rain (1932), and Of Human Hearts (1938). Huston’s on-screen persona was often that of a man of integrity, holding simple values and adhering to a (sometimes inflexible) moral code. Huston’s commitment to his craft and his unfailing professionalism won him the respect and affection of leading directors, actors, and producers in Hollywood. In 1941 he took an uncredited cameo role as the dying sea captain Jacobi in The Maltese Falcon, the directorial debut of his son, John; he would also take another unbilled role in John Huston’s second film, In This Our Life. This was followed by one of his most humorous roles, that of the puckish Mr. Scratch in William Diertele’s 1942 adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benet’s The Devil and Daniel Webster. Although not eligible for active war service
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during World War II, he nonetheless played an important role in promoting the efforts of America and its allies by appearing in a number of patriotic films, including Edge of Darkness, Mission to Moscow, and The North Star (all 1943) and Dragon Seed (1944). Following the end of the war, Huston’s film output slowed somewhat, though he found time to appear in Joseph Mankiewicz’s Dragonwyck (1946), as well as King Vidor’s epic western melodrama, Duel in the Sun (1946). His most memorable role came in a fourth collaboration with his son, this time in an Oscar-winning lead role as the greedy, amoral prospector Howard in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. His final film, a western called The Furies, was released in 1950. Though primarily a stage and screen actor, Huston also acted on radio and recorded a popular song, “September Song,” which became a major hit in the 1940s. After a party to mark his sixty-sixth birthday, Huston suffered an abdominal aneurysm and died in California on April 7, 1950. Gwenda Young See also: HUSTON, Angelica; HUSTON, John; O’NEILL, Eugene References Huston, John. An Open Book. London: Columbus Books, 1988. Grobel, Lawrence. The Hustons. Revised ed. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000.
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I ILLINOIS The state of Illinois, named after the native Illiniwek or Illini, became part of the French empire in the late seventeenth century before passing to the British in 1763 as a result of the Seven Years’ War. In the aftermath of the American Revolution the area became part of the Northwest Territory (1783), Illinois Territory (1809), and finally the 21st U.S. state in 1818. A significant proportion of the early settlement in southern Illinois comprised Irish republicans who made a deep impression on the emerging political and cultural landscape. Eight of the first 16 governors were of Irish descent, and other notable descendants included Stephen A. Douglas. The population then spread north, displacing tribes in the process (e.g., the Black Hawk War, 1832). Chicago was organized in 1833 and soon became a popular destination for immigrants moving out west. An Irish population of a few hundred was already established in Chicago by the time a significant growth in the number of Irish immigrants occurred in the 1830s. Chicago was incorporated as a city in 1837 and consolidated itself rapidly, destination for many thousands escaping the Potato Famine. By 1850, Irish immigrants made up approximately one-fifth of the city’s
population (54 percent of the city’s population was foreign born), and by 1860 Chicago had the fourth largest Irish population in the United States. Chicago soon became one of the most important transport hubs in the country, with canals and particularly railroads, and from the late nineteenth century it grew into a powerful city industrially and politically. Its population grew rapidly, making it, by the turn of the century, the nation’s second largest city after New York. Chicago’s population growth was attributable to large-scale immigration to the United States and the migration of thousands of African Americans from the southern states from the 1910s onwards. The Irish population in Illinois was 27,786 in 1850 and 87,000 in 1860, but a large proportion lived in the city. Thousands of Irish laborers worked in railroad construction, and many settled along the new routes that were established, especially in Illinois. Many also came by river, and while the prospect of cheap midwestern land attracted some, the vast majority gravitated to urban centers. Irish laborers worked on the Illinois and Michigan Canal (1836–1848) and were strongly represented in the police and fire services and in the public school system. Margaret
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Haley’s Chicago Teachers’ Federation became the first teachers’ union in the country. From the 1830s onwards, the majority of Irish in the city were working class, many of whom lived in depressed neighborhoods, often on the South Side of the city. (The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 started at a property owned by Irish immigrants Patrick and Catherine O’Leary.) Slums led to a variety of organizations forming to alleviate conditions. In 1839, Chicago’s Mayor Buckner Stith Morris donated his salary to relief for Irish workers. While the number of Irish immigrants did not dramatically decline in the second half of the nineteenth century, their proportion within the state, and particularly Chicago, did decrease, because of the large influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The Irish community in Chicago remained fairly cohesive, owing first to a strong involvement in local politics, which would result in one of the most famous city mayoral dynasties in Richard J. Daley (1955–1976) and his son, Richard M. Daley (1989–present) Overwhelmingly Democratic, the Irish became the most significant and influential ethnic group in the city’s political machine. In addition to the Daleys, Irish-American mayors were John Hopkins (1893–1895), Edward F. Dunne (1905–1907), William Dever (1923–1927), Edward Kelly (1933–1947), Martin Kennelly (1947–1955), and Jane Byrne (1979–1983). Second, Irish and German Catholics established the foundations of the city’s Catholic churches in the 1830s and 1840s, including Saint Patrick’s for the Irish in 1846. Until 1916 all of Chicago’s Catholic bishops except one were either of Irish birth or first-generation Irish. The smaller number of Irish Protestants www.abc-clio.com
tended to distance themselves from the Catholics. Third, among many Irish immigrants there was a strong sense of Irish nationalism, which manifested itself in providing financial support and sometimes volunteering for various nationalist campaigns, notably the Fenians in the 1860s. The fusion of Irish and Catholic identities at a real or perceived level meant the Irish suffered from the national wave of anti-immigration and anti-Catholic sentiment spearheaded by the Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s. This resulted in Chicago electing a Know-Nothing mayor in 1855 and a Know-Nothing–controlled city council, and waves of anti-Catholicism would hit the city again in the 1890s and again with the second phase of Ku Klux Klan activity in the 1910s. Illinois would receive much of its popular recognition through its association with Abraham Lincoln, who lived and worked in Springfield (which became state capital in 1837) before becoming the 16th president. During the Civil War Illinois often provided troops by ethnicity or occupation, including Irish, German, Scottish, and Jewish units. James Mulligan, an IrishAmerican lawyer in Chicago, capitalizing on the famed Fighting Irish regiment from New York, was instrumental in forming the Illinois Irish Brigade, which became the first Irish regiment, followed by a second, the Irish Legion. Interracial and interethnic conflict, often over job competition, spilled over on several occasions (as well as general labor unrest as seen in the Haymarket Riot in 1886), such as the Springfield race riot of 1908, the East St. Louis race riots of 1917, and the Chicago race riot of 1919 in which much of the violence was Irish against blacks, although there was also
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friction with Italian immigrants over the same period. Irish immigration slowed in the first half of the twentieth century because of quota systems generally applied to immigration in 1921 and again in 1924 (although aimed primarily at reducing new immigration) and also because of the Depression. The numbers of Irish immigrants resumed in the 1950s and rose significantly again in the 1980s. In the 2000 census people of Irish ancestry represented 12.2% of the state’s 12,419,293 inhabitants, and Chicago had the fourth largest concentration of Irish in the United States. The city is famous today, among other things, for its Saint Patrick’s Day parades, which involve dyeing the river green, and the city’s Irish culture has been highlighted by the success of Michael Flatley, the Chicago-born dancer who featured in Riverdance. Sam Hitchmough
INDIANA Modern-day Indiana was for hundreds of years a part of the Mississippian culture that stretched across large tracts of America. The area was claimed as part of the French empire in the seventeenth century before passing to the British as part of the postSeven Years’ War settlement in 1763. In turn, the area became part of the new American Republic after the Revolution, within the Northwest Territory. With such turbulence, many Native American tribes throughout this period, especially the Shawnee and the Miami, faced dilemmas regarding issues of loyalty and neutrality, and these often resulted in internal disagreement. Organized as Indiana Territory in 1800, Indiana became the nineteenth state on December 11, 1816. www.abc-clio.com
The first Irish settlers before statehood were predominantly Scotch-Irish, often from other states, such as Kentucky. These settlers established a number of Presbyterian churches. The town of Ireland would later be the natural consolidation of some of the land informally known as the “Irish Settlement.” Emigration over the first few years of statehood saw the population mushroom to more than 145,000. Early Irish settlements were in the southern portion of the state along the Ohio River as workers began moving into the state in pursuit of canal and road construction work beginning in the 1830s. These settlers resied in rural worker camps, before a process of urbanization and increased immigration led to more permanent settlement patterns and movement into the central areas of the state. Indiana was not a state that saw particularly large numbers of immigrants as a result of the Famine in the 1840s, although the state population grew significantly during the decade as people relocated from the East Coast, including many Germans (who form the largest ancestry group in modern-day Indiana). From the late 1840s onward, railroad construction would also attract Irish workers (the first large railroad project was completed in 1847). Irish immigration doubled in the 1850s before peaking between 1860 and 1920; the year 1870 witnessed the largest number of Irish when around 29,000 Irish-born immigrants lived in the state. Compared with other states, this population was relatively small, as the state’s total population was nearly 1.7 million, but the number nevertheless made up around 14 percent of the foreign-born immigrant population. When, in 1860, 8.8 percent of the population was foreign born, the Irish, perceived as being overwhelmingly
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Catholic, were a noticeable element of society, and one that was often subject to a significant level of discrimination. It was, however, a population large enough to shape the community around it, and a range of organizations and societies were formed in the 1870s onward. The Catholic population from different countries had also been influential, and had established, for example, Notre Dame, a Catholic university founded in 1842. The sporting teams from the university famously bear the name the Fighting Irish, but the genuine origin of the name is vague and open to competing stories. Although most Irish regiments in the Civil War were mustered in the East, Indiana was asked to produce an Irish and a German regiment in addition to regular recruitment (more than 180 regiments). Efforts focused around cities such as Terre Haute and Indianapolis but also the smaller Ohio River communities and, interestingly, tried to allay fears about discrimination by suggesting that proven loyalty would have long-term social benefits. The 35th Indiana Infantry, or the 1st Irish, prominently involved at the Battle of Stones River, were notable for the fact that they were issued emeraldgreen wool kepis (caps) with a shamrock wreath on the front, adopted for the entire service of the unit from December 11, 1861, to October 23, 1865, as well as a green regimental flag that was presented at a gathering of Irish women and leading Democrats. While many other states witnessed a further rise in Irish immigration in the 1920s, Indiana once again did not share the same experience; the Irish population proportionally fell across the state, with the exception of a few areas, such as the Lake County mill industry. Indiana’s modern economy relies heavily on corn, soybeans, www.abc-clio.com
dairy products, melons, tomatoes, and tobacco, as well as manufacturing, including a large steel industry. Indiana’s population in the 2000 census was 6,080,485; those of Irish heritage numbered 656,369 and represented 10.8 percent of the state population, the third largest ancestry group in the state. Sam Hitchmough References Doyle, David Noel, and Owen Dudley Edwards, eds. America and Ireland, 1776–1976: The American Identity and the Irish Connection. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. Giffin, William W. The Irish. Peopling Indiana, Volume 1. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2006. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish. London and New York: Pearson Education Ltd., 2000. Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. 1985. Reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Peckham, Howard Henry. Indiana: A History. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003.
INGRAM, REX (1893–1950) Born on January 15, 1893 in Rathmines, Dublin, Reginald Ingram Hitchcock would become famous as one of the great film directors of the 1920s. Reginald, or “Rex” as he was more commonly known, was the first of two children born to Francis Hitchcock, an Anglican minister, and his wife, Kathleen Ingram. Francis Hitchcock’s ministering duties meant that the family moved several times during Rex’s childhood, and by the time Rex was 12 years old he had lived in Offaly, Tipperary, and Dublin. Educated at St. Columba’s College in Dublin, Rex’s skills as an artist and sportsman attracted more attention than his academic record. His mother’s sudden death in 1908 had a
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profound effect on him, and he would later adopt her maiden name as his surname. In 1911 Rex abandoned plans to study at Trinity College Dublin and boarded the American-bound White Star liner Celtic at Queenstown (Cobh) in Cork. Ingram would never return to Ireland, though he remained fiercely proud of his Irish identity. After some initial employment in New Haven, Connecticut, Ingram enrolled in a fine arts program at Yale University in 1912. During his time at Yale he met Charles Edison, son of Thomas Edison, and this encounter seems to have sparked a new, more serious interest in films. By 1913 Ingram had decided that his future lay in filmmaking, and he joined the Edison Company as a general helper. His work there included scriptwriting, set design, acting, and even painting portraits of the actors. After serving his apprenticeship at Edison, Ingram moved on to stints at Vitagraph and Fox before signing with Carl Laemmle, head of Universal studios, in 1916. Laemmle was a veteran of the film industry. He had entered films in 1906 and was known as a risk taker. Laemmle offered Ingram what the other studios would not: a chance to direct his first feature. Ingram’s debut as a director was a melodrama, The Great Problem, starring Violet Mersereau. He followed this with a number of dramas, most of which were set in foreign locales and boasted exotic themes. These films attracted the attention of film critics who particularly praised Ingram’s sophisticated pictorialism and attention to detail. Some months after America’s entrance into World War I, Ingram suspended his promising film career and joined the Canadian Flying Corps, but he returned to the film industry at the end of 1918. Although he directed two more films for Universal, he had grown www.abc-clio.com
dissatisfied with the studio, and in 1920 he signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). In the eight years that followed, he established himself as one of the top directors in the American film industry, balancing critical acclaim with box office success. Foremost amongst his films of the 1920s was The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), based on a novel by Vincente Blasco Ibanez and adapted for the screen by June Mathis. This film propelled a minor actor, Rudolph Valentino, to stardom. Though debate continues to rage about who precisely discovered Valentino, there can be no doubt that Ingram was the first director to recognize the charisma and star quality of the Italian actor. The female lead in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was given to Alice Terry, an actress who had been in films since 1916 and who would become Ingram’s second wife in 1921, after his divorce from Doris Pawn. Terry was herself from an Irish-American background: her father was born in Kildare but immigrated to America as a young man. The success of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was due, in part, to its superior production values and the charisma of Valentino, but the careful attention paid to the presentation of the film in theaters also helped to draw audiences in. Critics lavished praise on the film, and Robert Sherwood claimed that the film “lifts the silent drama to an artistic plane that it has never touched before.” Following the critical and commercial success of Four Horsemen, Ingram brought a number of classics to the screen, including a version of Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet, which was filmed as The Conquering Power in 1921, and The Prisoner of Zenda with Alice Terry and Lewis Stone in 1922.
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Ingram’s prolific output and commercial success meant that he initially flourished in the film industry. However, as the 1920s wore on and Hollywood became an industry dominated by producers, not directors, he increasingly resented what he perceived to be the intrusions of the so-called “money men” in the making of his films. His resentment toward the studio system was exacerbated by MGM’s failure to award him the contract to direct Ben Hur, a prestigious project that would have a turbulent production history. In 1924 he traveled to Europe to shoot The Arab at the Victorine studios in Nice, France, and on location in North Africa. The positive experience of shooting away from Hollywood convinced Ingram that his future now lay in Europe, and he continued to shoot in Europe and North Africa throughout the 1920s. His last project, a sound film called Baroud, was released in 1932. Although Ingram never returned to directing, he remained interested in cinema and the fine arts and was an accomplished painter and sculptor. He died in Hollywood on July 21, 1950. Gwenda Young References Brownlow, Kevin. The Parade’s Gone By. London: Columbus Books, 1989. O’Leary, Liam. Rex Ingram: Master of the Silent Cinema. 1980. Reprint, London: British Film Institute, 1993.
IOWA Iowa was first explored in 1673 by French explorers (Joliet and Marquette). From this point forward the numerous local Indian tribes lost land through a blend of forced land sales, encroachment, and removal, some in the fallout of the Black Hawk War (1832). The first official American settlement was established in 1833 on some of the land www.abc-clio.com
gained in the latter conflict. Many families settled in the area from a number of states, including Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Ohio. Less official settlements before this date included a small community of fifty miners, approximately 35 of them Irish, in Dubuque in 1830. This group was notable for writing the Miner’s Compact, which was one of the state’s first written laws. Numbers of settlers increased in the early to mid-1830s, as did trade using the Mississippi River. With consolidated communities many Irish settlers were able to establish positions of some prominence. Patrick Quigley became the first justice of the peace. F. K. O’Farrell was mayor from 1844 to 1846. Iowa became the twenty-ninth state on December 28, 1846, and significant increases in the new state’s population occurred in the ensuing decades. The Irish population grew from 4,885 in 1850 to 28,072 in 1860. Many Irish were encouraged to settle in the area by those already established in the state both before and after the Civil War, having been urged to avoid the heavily overcrowded cities in the East. This included many letters sent to Ireland, often by religious leaders, urging emigration and discussing the possibilities of settling predominantly Irish towns. Consequently, a number of prominently Irish settlements emerged, such as Keokuk and Temple Hill, and the southern part of Dubuque quickly became known as Little Dublin. Many, including Irish migrants from Pennsylvania and St. Louis, were attracted by the prospect of canal and railroad jobs, as well as cheap land at $1.25 per acre. In 1853, the Reverend Timothy Mullen brought a number of Irish families to an area south of Des Moines that would become known as the Irish Settlement,
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which soon embraced several townships. In 1874, a handful of Irish families settled in northern Iowa and established what would become Emmetsburg. Named after the Irish patriot Robert Emmet, the town became the Irish capital of Iowa, and the small town today commemorates its past with a bronze statue of Emmet. However, such numbers attracted a level of resistance reflecting the Know-Nothing knee-jerk popularity of the 1850s, and many Irish experienced discrimination from the antiCatholic and anti-immigrant group. In 1856, for example, a group of Irish in Des Moines built a new church out of the town center in order to avoid confrontation with Know-Nothings. By 1860, only a portion of the state could be considered frontier any longer, as the population swelled from 674,913 in 1860 to a postwar 1,194,020 in 1870 (Iowa did not experience any Civil War battles but provided approximately 75,000 men for the Union Army). Indeed, the post–Civil War immigration boom was encouraged by the state itself, which dubbed itself “The Home of Immigrants,” and the call was answered by large numbers of Germans and notable numbers of Scandinavians among many others. After a brief surge in the popularity of the Fenian movement in the years immediately after the Civil War, mostly centered around Baltimore, Iowa continued to attract a steady stream of immigrants. However, immigration reflected the nationwide trend of attracting new immigrants in the latter half of the century onward; many Italians and Croats, for example, came to work in the state’s small number of coal mines. Agriculture continued, and still does, to form the economic foundation of the state, with companies such as Quaker Oats www.abc-clio.com
originating in the area. Despite being supplemented by a manufacturing base, the state has been involved in the phenomenon of rural flight that has affected several Great Plains states, witnessing population losses. Of the 2000 population, those of Irish ancestry accounted for 13.5 percent of the total, the second largest group behind those of German descent (35.7 percent) Sam Hitchmough References Doyle, David Noel, and Owen Dudley Edwards, eds. America and Ireland, 1776–1976: American Identity and the Irish Connection. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. 1985. Reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish. London and New York: Pearson Education Ltd, 2000. Schweider, Dorothy. Iowa. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1996.
IRELAND, JOHN (1838–1918) Born in Co. Kilkenny, John Ireland was raised in Minnesota. He received his early education at local cathedral schools and completed theological studies at Meximieux and Toulon. In 1867 Father Ireland was appointed rector of St. Paul’s Cathedral, where he organized the first total alcohol abstinence society in the state. He represented Bishop Grace of St. Paul at Vatican Council I (1869–1870). Pope Pius IX appointed him coadjutor with the right of succession for Bishop Grace. After his consecration in 1875, Ireland initiated a Minnesota settlement scheme for Catholic immigrants in eastern cities, the most successful rural colonization program ever sponsored by the Catholic Church in the United States.
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Portrait of John Ireland, archbishop of St. Paul, Minnesota, and founder of the University of Saint Thomas. (Library of Congress)
Bishop Ireland went on to represent his diocese at a number of high-profile church councils. His address on “The Catholic Church and Civil Society,” given at the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore (1884), has since been cited as a fundamental tenet of the progressive position in church-state discussions. In 1886, at the Provincial Council of Milwaukee, Ireland successfully petitioned the Holy See to create a new archdiocese west of Milwaukee to accommodate the growth of his diocese. Shortly thereafter, Archbishop Ireland instituted a plan where parochial schools could be rented to local public school boards for use during the school day but be retained for religious instruction outside public school hours. Critics within the Church argued that his plan weakened the position of Catholic education recommended by the Plenary Council, and opponents outside the Church charged him with violating the principle of www.abc-clio.com
separation of church and state. Yet he clearly supported the decisions of the Council in other ways, for example, in his assistance in establishing what would become the Catholic University of America. Within his own archdiocese he also founded the College of St. Thomas (1885) and St. Paul Seminary (1894). Archbishop Ireland’s forthright opinions often drew him into controversy. A tireless patriot, he urged the laity to accept the ways and language of their new country and stifled activities, such as those of Peter Paul Cahensly, a zealous lay leader who lobbied for the establishment of dioceses staffed with German-speaking clergy. Ireland’s interest in politics, and his allegiance with the Republican party drew some criticism but also the opportunity to perform additional diplomatic duties. In 1887, Ireland was entrusted with a delicate mission to negotiate with the Holy See on behalf of American archbishops who were concerned that the Vatican’s censure of the Knights of Labor would alienate a significant portion of their laity. In 1898 the Holy See asked Ireland to use his influence to intercede and possibly avert the impending Spanish-American War. His attempts were in vain, but upon the conclusion of the war he served on the commission that negotiated a settlement between the United States and the Vatican for the friars’ lands in the Philippine Islands. As an official guest of the French government, Ireland preached a sermon in Orléans honoring the anniversary of the raising of the siege of that city by St. Joan of Arc. A year later he returned to France at the request of President McKinley to present a statue on behalf of the American people. In return he was invested with the Cross of the Legion of Honor.
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In spite of his considerable administrative duties, Ireland produced a significant body of essays, which provide a thoughtful, coherent statement on the challenges the Church faces in a pluralistic and democratic society. His final great project was the construction of a cathedral in St. Paul that was commensurate with the growth and dignity of his archdiocese. Mike Cottrell See also: KNIGHTS OF LABOR References Barry, Colman James. The Catholic Church and German Americans. Milwaukee, WI: Bruce, 1953. Browne, Henry. “The Catholic Church and the Knights of Labor.” Studies in American Church History 38 (1949). Ireland, John. The Church and Modern Society: Lecture and Addresses. Chicago: D. H. McBride & Co., 1896.
Moyhnihan, James. The Life of Archbishop John Ireland. New York: Harper, 1953. O’Gorman, Thomas. “The Educational Policy of Archbishop Ireland.” Educational Review 3 (1892): 462–471. Reardon, James Michael. The Catholic Church in the Diocese of St. Paul. St. Paul, MN: North Central Publishing Co., 1952.
IRISH DANCING IN AMERICA Records of Irish dancing among the diaspora start with the emigrant ships, which transported hundreds of thousands of people to the United States and Australia during the mid-nineteenth century. Musicians and dancing masters are listed among the ships’ crews on long crossings. Dancing was a common feature of the departure parties in Ireland, often called “American wakes.” Evidence suggests that as well as constituting a form of entertainment, dancing on board
Dancer Michael Flatley leaps in the air against the Chicago skyline. Flatley, a former Golden Glove boxer, became an international star through the production of Riverdance and Lord of the Dance. (Time & Life Pictures/ Getty Images) www.abc-clio.com
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the emigrant ships was used to express homesickness and fear of what lay ahead. Dancing continued to be an important part of cultural expression among communities where newly arrived immigrant lived. Some of the oldest forms of Irish dancing are still found in the areas first settled by these immigrants, for example the Appalachian Mountains. Historians suggest that Irish dancing was more readily accepted in the United States than in other countries like Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, where the powerful British influence suppressed Irish culture. The lack of British influence, combined with the contribution Irish immigrants had made to American independence, meant that Irish music and dance were readily accepted and quickly became popular. As the dances were handed down as part of an oral tradition, their origins can be difficult to trace. There are few written references to the specifics of Irish dancing in North America in the nineteenth century, and even in the twentieth century little has been published. Many of the traditional elements of Irish dance have persisted, but it also evolved and absorbed elements of the existing American culture. This integration of old and new can be found in certain forms of folk dance, such as the Kerry Four-Hand in Florida, American tap dance, and popular minstrel dances. The interest in Irish dance was helpful to many early nineteenth-century immigrants. With discrimination against the Irish common at this time (signs reading “No Irish Need Apply” were common in some eastern cities), many turned to careers in show business. On Broadway, Irish step dancers were commonly included in vaudeville shows. In the early 1900s, Irish show bands www.abc-clio.com
traveled around the country and entertained their audiences with Irish music and dance. Festivals of Irish dance (céilí) became common in Appalachia during the 1930s, when the first of the great Irish dance masters came to America to teach. In the 1950s, Irish dancing continued to flourish as a performance medium and was featured on such popular television shows as The Ed Sullivan Show. The rapid growth of Irish dancing in the late 1950s and early 1960s meant that there was an urgent need to organize and standardize its teaching. Almost every major North American city with a significant Irish population was hosting annual competitions (known as feiseanna). The need to standardize syllabus content and other fundamental elements of the dances became obvious. In March 1964, the first meeting of what became the Irish Dancing Teachers Association of North America (IDTANA) was held in the Irish Institute in New York City. The charter members of the association were Cyril McNiff, Peter Smith, Mae Butler, Anna O’Sullivan, Fidelma Davis, and Kevin McKenna. Their aim was to preserve and promote the best in Irish dancing. Lower air fares made it possible for them to work closely with dancing teachers in Ireland, who were organized through the Irish Dancing Commission (or An Coimisiún as it was commonly known). The first commission exams for dancing teachers were held in New York in 1967. Around 50 candidates sat the exams. These teachers formed the backbone of the development of Irish dancing in North America. In 1968, the North American Feis Commission was founded to regulate competitions in North America. Discussions began about the possibility of running a national championship every
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autumn, in which the winners of the regional summer Feiseanna could compete for National Honors. The syllabus was approved by the commission in Dublin, and there was agreement that the nationals would serve as a qualifying event for the Irish Dance World Championships that had been inaugurated in Dublin in 1969. On Thanksgiving weekend 1969, the first National Oireachtas was held in New York. The following spring, the committee brought the qualifers to Dublin for the first all-world championship. Donny Golden was the first North American dancer to place in the world competition. In 1975, Michael Flatley of Chicago became the first North American to win the World Championships. In 1976, steadily increasing participation in Irish dancing competitions necessitated the division of IDTANA into five regional branches: Eastern, New England, Canadian, Mid-Western, and Western. The nationals are rotated among the regions in turn. Irish dancing has continued to provide the diaspora with a sense of community and heritage. Irish dancing continues to be supported and developed through dancing classes, competitions, and festivals. Research indicates that these events constitute important social gatherings for Irish communities outside Ireland and that they continue to attract participation from those of Irish descent. Irish dance also provides participants with the opportunity to compete in national dancing championships and, through participation in international events, to forge closer links with Ireland. Aoileann Ní Eigeartaigh See also: BUTLER, Jean; FLATLEY, Michael; MUSIC, COUNTRY AND IRISH; MUSIC IN AMERICA, IRISH www.abc-clio.com
References Cullinane, John P. Aspects of the History of Irish Dancing in the New York Area. Produced as Part of a St. Patrick’s Day Lecture Series Delivered In New York, 1991. Cork: Ballineaspaig Publications, 1991. Cullinane, John P. Aspects of the History of Irish Dancing. Produced as a Souvenir of the World Irish Dancing Championships, Galway City, Ireland, 1987. Cork: Ballineaspaig Publications, 1987. Cullinane, John P. Further Aspects of the History of Irish Dancing (Ireland, Scotland, Canada, America, New Zealand and Australia). Cork: Ballineaspaig Publications, 1990. Lalor, Brian, ed. The Encyclopedia of Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Ltd., 2003. Morrison, J’aime. “Dancing Between Decks: Choreographies of Transition During Irish Migrations to America.” Éire-Ireland: Journal of Irish Studies 36, no. 1–2 (Spring-Summer 2001): 83–97.
IRISH FESTIVAL SINGERS Alternatively named Feis Éireann, the Irish Festival Singers are a group of Irish professional singers of varying members that gathered under this name for successful U.S. concert tours and long-playing records in the 1950s and 1960s. Most members of the group were well-known professional singers of their time in Ireland. Mainly recruited from the RTÉ Singers, the first group included the well-known Dublin soprano Veronica Dunne as soloist, Sylvia O’Brien, Claire Kelleher, Celestine Kelly, and Ethna McGrath. The male section was headed by the tenor Dermot Troy, the baritones Austin Gaffney and Tomás Ó Súilleabháin, plus James Cuthbert, Arthur Agnew, and Liam Devally. Further members were Sheila Larchet (harp) and Terry O’Connor (violin), the former director of the Irish String Orchestra. The ensemble was directed by Kitty O’Callaghan, who also accompanied at the piano.
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The group was formed in 1955 to undertake a concert tour through the United States—culminating in a recital at New York’s Carnegie Hall—and to sell the purpose-made LP record on the New Yorkbased Angel Records label. The record is remarkable for its combination of traditional music in both English and Irish and for its selection of skillful arrangements by acknowledged Irish composers such as Herbert Hughes, John F. Larchet, Carl Hardebeck, and Seóirse Bodley. After the success of the first such venture, it was repeated in the following year, again accompanied by an LP, with some personnel changes for the concert tour. In 1966, the group was re-formed under the name of Feis Éireann Group of Singers. This time the group comprised 10 male singers (among them the young Frank Patterson) and nine female singers and was conducted by Eileen (Eily) O’Grady. By this time, however, audiences had changed, and both the American tour and the LP record were less ambitious. Axel Klein
IRISH FESTIVALS IN THE UNITED STATES Festivals have been celebrated through the ages to mark births, weddings, anniversaries, battles, good harvests, and religious events. Festivals also celebrate the visual and performing arts, flowers, folklore customs, and seasons, and just anything that people want to celebrate. Irish festivals promote Irish culture. Some of the festivals and events are well established and internationally renowned, provide a showcase for the best of Irish and international talent, and draw large audiences that create a festive atmosphere in the towns and cities in which they are www.abc-clio.com
held. Others are small, local events, full of character and charm, which usually include lots of music and dancing, sporting events, lectures and singsongs, beer and food tents, carnival attractions, and vendors hawking shamrock-green merchandise. Most have the celebration of the Mass sometime during the festival. These Irish festivals are regional; many are more tolerated than officially accepted and are often categorized as carnival events. They stand apart from the usually accepted definition of festive events and celebrations but many have been a part of the American landscape since the Puritans. They now wind their way through Fairfield, Glastonbury, and New Haven, Connecticut; Billerica, Boston, Easton, and Malden, Massachusetts; Newport and Providence, Rhode Island; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Philadelphia; Phoenix; Brooklyn, New York; and Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Saint Patrick’s Day The best known is Saint Patrick’s Day. This major event, held on March 17, has been observed by the Irish as both an ethnic festival and a national celebration for thousands of years on St. Patrick’s religious feast day and the anniversary of his death in the fifth century. It is not a national holiday in the United States, but it is nationally observed. Today, St. Patrick’s Day is a boisterous festival of parading and revelry, dancing and drinking, emblazoned with shamrocks and harps, all in emerald green. The parades are perhaps America’s most public display of ethnic pride, often with political overtones disguising the strong Irish nationalism.
Non-Holiday Events Other festivals, usually less boisterous than the Saint Patrick’s Day parades, exist
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on a more local or regional level, and most are held in the summer. They have gained in popularity since the 1980s and many have begun to replace parades as better representations of Irish folk life. With its large Irish population, many of these festivals are especially prominent in the Northeast. Beginning in New England, there is the Burlington Irish Heritage Festival, usually held in March; it offers a week packed with activities, both fun-filled and informative, which celebrate Irish-American culture and community. The combination of music, lectures, movies, drama, and dance provides a little something for everyone. Most of the festival events are presented with free admission, making the fund-raising raffle a great draw, with wonderful prizes to win. In Canton, Massachusetts, there is an annual Irish Connections Festival, sponsored by the Irish Culture Centre of New England at its headquarters outside Boston; it is usually held in June. First started in 1991, this event is considered an open house for the region’s large Irish community. The main stage is sponsored by Compass Records, which supports many new Celtic artists. Other stages throughout the festival grounds include The Point, which celebrates contemporary Celtic music with Celtic rock bands and an “Urban Ceili.” A new addition is the Abbey Theatre, which highlights dramatic performances, poetry readings, and other literary presentations. Sports activities include Gaelic football and hurling matches, along with the traditional aspects of the festival, such as an Irish tea house, children’s entertainment, pipe bands, Irish cottage exhibition, and music sessions. (Web site: http://irishculture.org/festival.) Also in Massachusetts, the Lowell National Historical Park, Lowell Festival www.abc-clio.com
Foundation, National Council for the Traditional Arts, and the City of Lowell sponsor the Lowell Folk Festival, considered the largest free folk festival in the nation. It is three days of traditional music, dance, craft demonstrations, street parades, dance parties, and ethnic foods, presented on six outdoor stages throughout the city of Lowell, usually in late July. (Web site: http://lowellfolkfestival.org.) A festival held at summer’s end, over the Labor Day weekend, is the Newport Waterfront Irish Festival, a popular threeday event in Rhode Island, at the historic Newport Yachting Center. The festival, which started in 1998, celebrates both the Irish culture of arts, music, dance, and food and the beautiful, historic town of Newport, with its famous waterfront. Entertainers have included Tommy Makem, Screaming Orphans, and the Barley Boys. The Midwest hosts a well-known, very popular Irish festival in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the Irish Fest, sponsored by the Sioux Falls Irish Club. This festival, which only began in 1999, celebrates the traditions of Irish music, song, and dance and provides continual food feasts and Irish dancing. (Web site: www.irish.org/ SFICmenu.htm.) Further west, the Colorado Irish Festival is operated by the Colorado United Irish Societies, a qualified nonprofit organization incorporated in 1995 as a 501(c)(3). Currently it comprises 12 individual organizations, many of which are also nonprofit organizations. The festival is usually held in July. (Web site: www .coloradoirishfestival.org.) Another major festival has been the Milwaukee Irish Fest, held in August. It is renowned as the world’s largest Irish culture festival and was established in 1980 by members of Milwaukee’s Irish community
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to showcase its rich Irish heritage and to establish an Irish cultural center in that city. Under the direction of Ed Ward, curator of the Irish Music Archives, Irish Fest premiered in Milwaukee, the city of festivals, in 1981. Irish Fest showcases Irish music, history, dance, drama, sports, and culture. The festival features Irish and IrishAmerican talent and serves as a stage for upand-coming local performers. Located on Milwaukee’s Lake Michigan shoreline, Irish Fest is held annually during the third weekend of August. During its four-day run, the event annually hosts more than 100,000 guests from around the globe. (Web site: www.irishfest.org.)
Further Developments Mostly, these Irish festivals are traditional annual events that are named for their locations and designated as Irish festivals or simply Irish fests. At most of these festivals, music and dance are a main element, featuring top Irish and Irish American entertainers from around the world, along with numerous regional groups that perform on the festival’s stages. In addition, roaming performers dressed in traditional costumes entertain guests as they stroll the grounds. With the recent surge of interest in Irish dance, stages featuring step dancing have become a popular attraction, and guests can also learn ceilidh and set dancing at daily workshops. Cultural exhibits, displays, theater, poetry readings, and demonstrations bring alive the spirit of Old Ireland’s folklore and charm while contests, raffles, sporting events, and comedy shows add to the levity. To promote traditional Irish culture, many groups and organizations get assistance from local government, businesses, and media, as well www.abc-clio.com
as from organizations in Ireland, such as the National Gallery of Ireland, the National Museum of Ireland, Arts Council, and the Irish Tourist Boards, including Galway, Sligo and Lisburn, the Shannon Development Corporation, RTE, and Aer Lingus. With the increase of interest in family lineage and heraldry, genealogical resources and organizations have become an increasingly popular attraction, with many Irish genealogical societies. For those with a competitive nature, Irish fests offer plenty of sports contests, such as rugby, hurling, currach racing, Gaelic football, and games, which can range from children’s red hair and freckle contests to bingo, treasure hunts, and a baking contest. Many festivals were established as small community events to promote Irish culture. The Phoenix Irish Festival started in 1984 with the support of the valley Irish organizations. Its sole purpose was to promote and encourage all forms of Irish culture. Grand National Irish Fair and Music Festival, sponsored by the Irish Fair Foundation, Pasadena, California, began in 1974 at Notre Dame High School as a small ethnic fair that grew to a large festival held in the Rose Bowl. The Irish Heritage Weekend was created by the Heritage Foundation as a bicentennial committee that was formed to promote the ethnic heritage of Louisville, Kentucky. It began having ethnic weekends in 1979. The Fitchburg Irish Festival, set up by the Irish American Association of Fitchburg in 1982, claims to be the first Irish festival in New England. Two years later, the New England Irish Festival celebrated its first event in Sullivan Stadium, in Foxboro, Massachusetts; it was started by the IrishAmerican family who owned the stadium,
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home of the New England Patriots. The family wanted to create a family event. The Great Irish Fair, sponsored by the Ancient Order of Hibernians, began in 1981 in Brooklyn, New York, as a fund-raiser for Brooklyn Catholic Charities. Further upstate, the Buffalo Irish Festival was created in 1982 as an offshoot of Irish music programs held at the Shannon Pub to benefit Buffalo Irish organizations. The Irish Cultural Festival of Cleveland, Ohio, was established in 1983 to raise money for Project Children to bring children from Northern Ireland to the United States. Proceeds also went to students of Irish music. In Pennsylvania, the Irish Center of Pittsburgh Feis was set up in 1968 to bring together participants from the Northeast, Midwest, and Canada for a dancing competition, while in Wilkes-Barre the Donegal Society started Irish Days in 1980 to support local ceilidh dancers who wanted to go to a competition. Profits from the festival benefited most groups from Wilkes-Barre but also others from the Philadelphia area, upstate New York, and Ireland. The North Texas Irish Fest was begun in 1983 by the Southwest Celtic Music Association in Dallas, Texas, as a ceilidh, and it was held on the state fairgrounds. In San Antonio, the Texas Irish Festival began as a multiethnic event in 1985 to benefit St. Mary’s Catholic Church.
Rose of Tralee Probably the best-known Irish festival is the Rose of Tralee International Festival, held annually at the end of August in Tralee, Co. Kerry, Ireland. This international Irish festival, the premiere festival of the Emerald Isle, now includes representation www.abc-clio.com
from the United States. It hosts approximately 150,000 visitors annually. Started in 1959 to promote Co. Kerry, the now 10-day festival boasts nonstop street entertainment, concerts, parades, and horse racing leading up to the final televised twonight competition, the crowning of the Rose. In 2005, it was considered the number one television attraction in Ireland and drew 1.6 million viewers. The festival queens, the Roses of Tralee, are always Irish but not necessarily Ireland-born. In 2007, some Roses were Katie Crean (London), Grainnie Fox (Longford), Jackie Maher (Luxembourg), and Rosie Dempre (New Orleans). (Web site: http://www.roseoftralee.ie.) American centers for the festival are located in Boston/New England, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Southern California, Texas, and Washington, D.C. Martin J. Manning See also: NATIONALISM, IRISHAMERICAN; SAINT PATRICK’S DAY PARADES References Eleuterio-Comer, Susan K. Irish American Material Culture: A Directory of Collections, Sites, and Festivals in the United States and Canada. New York: Greenwood, 1988. Feintuch, Burt, and David H. Watters, eds. Encyclopedia of New England Culture: The Culture and History of an American Region. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Glazier, Michael, ed. Encyclopedia of the Irish in America. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1999. Heideking, Jurgen, Genevieve Fabre, and Kai Dreisbach, eds. Celebrating Ethnicity and Nation: American Festive Culture from the Revolution to the Early Twentieth Century. New York: Berghahn Books, 2001. Henderson, Helene, and Sue Ellen Thompson, eds. Holidays, Festivals, and Celebrations of the World Dictionary. 2nd ed. Detroit, MI: Omnigraphics, 1997.
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460 IRISH LINEN IN NORTH AMERICA Roy, Christian. Traditional Festivals: A Multicultural Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005. Shemanski, Frances. A Guide to Fairs and Festivals in the United States. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984.
IRISH LINEN IN NORTH AMERICA Irish linen was a fine cloth made, with some reputation in Ulster, from flax fibers; but more than that, it was an object that deepened the story of Irish-American connections. The migration of Irish people to North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was accompanied by a translocation of culture, in both the anthropological and agricultural senses of the word. Before linen production was even a critical industry in Ireland, Irish immigrants brought flax to the New World. They grew it for making linen and for exporting seed to Ireland. In the nineteenth century, demand for North American seed declined, even though the Irish linen industry required vast new quantities of flax. Irish linen, however, grew increasingly popular among consumers in North America. The Scots-Irish in New England and Pennsylvania were the first Irish Americans to grow flax and produce linen in significant quantities in the eighteenth century. Many were skilled linen weavers when they migrated from Ulster. Because of English protective tariffs on the wool trade, linen had become a popular alternative for weavers in Ireland. The linen industry in Ulster has a long history of its own, but its influence on Irish-American relations is not well-known. The Ulster Scots who migrated to North America in the eighteenth century carried with them knowledge of flax production and a use for home-manufactured www.abc-clio.com
linen. Probate records show that Irish immigrants on the Pennsylvanian frontier in the 1720s and 1730s had linen cloth in abundance, and people of almost all specializations raised some flax and owned spinning wheels and other tools of linen making. Linen production did exist in the colony before Irish immigration, especially in areas like Germantown, but the Scots-Irish stimulated the trade. In New England, one center of linen production and Irish immigration was Londonderry, New Hampshire. By the mid-eighteenth century, the town was known for its linen. Scots-Irish immigrants played important roles in the cultivation and production of flax fibers and linen fabrics, although it is incorrect to think they introduced the trade to this region. Domestic linen found wider markets in New England than it did in Pennsylvania, but still, consumers relied heavily on imported linen. In fact, families sold home-produced linen so they could afford fancier materials manufactured in the British Isles. Women were the active producers in this exchange, and flax production often involved deeply gendered divisions of labor. Cloth was extremely valuable in the colonies, and both the processing equipment and the skills of the trade were assets to these early migrants. In the 1760s, when Irish migrants from New England resettled in the Truro area of Nova Scotia, they grew flax, built flax mills, and produced enough linen to sell in neighboring towns. British officials, however, encouraged the export of North American flax and flaxseed to the mother country. In 1770, one of the first settlement projects to what would become Prince Edward Island attempted to establish a flax colony based on the mercantilist
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model. The project failed, but the export of flaxseed from North America did form an important connection to the Irish linen industry. Ireland imported seed because its flax crop was harvested before maturity to produce finer linen fibers. Colonials met part of this need by tolerating a coarser fiber and exporting surplus seed to Ireland. In the nineteenth century, flax cultivation declined, and cotton produced a more efficient textile. Much of the massive immigration movement to British North America came out of Ulster’s declining linen industry, but at this point the skills of the trade were less useful in the New World. Immigrants who claimed to be farmers and weavers usually turned their full attention to farming. Yet, when the home production of linen began to be regularly recorded in censuses, we see a more complicated pattern of Irish North American linen makers. As the history of Scots-Irish settlers in Canada suggests, in 1871 large concentrations of linen producers and Scots-Irish settlers were coincidental but not co-related. The earlier 1842 census shows townships in Johnstown District, later part of Ontario, where both Irish immigration and home production of linen were high. Linen production amounted to 1.52 yards per person in Bastard Township, in a district where the average person produced only 0.59 yards. Bastard had among the highest Irish immigrant per capita in the district, but further research is necessary to determine if those immigrants were responsible for the linen production and if the connections were based on skills and farm strategies developed in Ireland. Industrial linen production grew slowly in North America, and the influences of the Irish linen industry were sometimes abstruse. Three brothers from New York www.abc-clio.com
started the first linen mills in Canada in the 1850s, and their longtime mill foreman was Robert Printer, an Irish Presbyterian immigrant. A few years later, the American Civil War raised the price of cotton in the United States, and the linen industry began to grow faster. The large linen thread manufacturer, William Barbour and Sons of Lisburn, upgraded its American agency in Patterson, New Jersey, to a full thread factory. The expansion was profitable because of import tariffs implemented in the United States during the Civil War, and the infrastructure was possible because of large injections of machinery and labor from Lisburn to New Jersey. Josh MacFadyen See also: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR; PENNSYLVANIA; SCOTS-IRISH; SCOTS-IRISH PATTERNS OF SETTLEMENT, CANADA; SCOTSIRISH PATTERNS OF SETTLEMENT, UNITED STATES References Collins, Brenda, and Philip Ollerenshaw, eds. The European Linen Industry in Historical Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Coons, Martha. All Sorts of Good Sufficient Cloth: Linen-Making in New England, 1640–1860. North Andover, MA: Merrimack Valley Textile Museum, 1980. Griffin, Patrick. The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1784. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.
IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY The Irish Republican Army (IRA) is seen as a militant separatist group of the physical force tradition for establishing a fully
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Irish Republican Army takes over Dublin barracks in 1922. (Corbis)
independent, 32-county Irish republic. With the old IRA emerging from the separatist Irish Volunteers in the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising, the continuity of the armed struggle granted, for those who fought for complete freedom from British rule, the IRA legitimacy to again take up a guerrilla campaign against the Crown forces. In 1917 and 1918 the Irish Volunteers began active maneuvers that sparked suppressive measures by British authorities. Resentful at Sinn Féin politicians who increasingly took credit for the Easter Rising and the subsequent republican movement, the Volunteers determined to return to physical force. After all-Ireland elections obtained a mandate for Sinn Féin in December 1918, which led to the www.abc-clio.com
inauguration of the first Dáil Éireann in January 1919, the Irish Volunteers assumed an unsanctioned role as the Irish Republican Army, whose members took an oath of allegiance to the Dáil and who claimed to act as the Republic’s military wing. In fact, the Dáil and the Army headquarters never gained complete control over the Volunteers. This ambiguous relationship between political governance and militant operations would characterize the IRA throughout its evolution during the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. After the end of the Anglo-Irish War, the Treaty divided the IRA. The subsequent civil war pitted “irregulars” against the Free State army, and IRA veterans were found on both sides of the battle. Those loyal to
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the opposition lost the effort to achieve complete Irish freedom from British control. The anti-Treaty forces refused recognition not only of the six Ulster counties under the Crown, but also of the Dáil at Leinster House as a “partitionist assembly.” Denouncing any collaboration with what republican purists saw as an illegitimate Free State within the British Commonwealth, the defeated IRA asserted itself as the army of the 1918 First and the 1921 Second Dáil, the last governing bodies elected throughout all of Ireland which had voted in Sinn Féin as the majority party. Although the Treaty had led to a Third Dáil Éireann, the IRA and Sinn Féin abstained from entering this assembly if elected—unless they had enough members to engineer its overthrow for a return to a 32-county republic faithful to the broadly socialist policy asserted in the 1916 Proclamation and the 1919 Democratic Programme. This emphasis on abstaining from entering into the government’s convening in Dublin, Stormont, or Westminster became not only Sinn Féin’s policy but a justification for the IRA to assert itself as the legitimate army of the pre-Treaty, 1916–1922 Irish Republic. The IRA believed this republic could not be disestablished by the Free State. Opposed to constitutional compromise with what the IRA perceived as pro-British sympathizers, the IRA split from Sinn Féin. In 1925, Eamon de Valera decided to seek entry into the Dáil for his Sinn Féin faction, who would in 1926 become Fianna Fáil. This party, once it gained power in 1932, suppressed or co-opted the activities of many former comrades-in-arms. De Valera banned the IRA in 1936. Throughout the 1930s, republicans became divided as Fianna Fáil’s success grew. www.abc-clio.com
Leftist and right-wing divisions weakened the remaining IRA and Sinn Féin activists. Saor Éire and the Republican Congress attempted to mobilize a socialist popular front. The Spanish Civil War attracted IRA veterans to both factions. Physical force proponents revived a bombing campaign in Britain. By 1938, the surviving Second Dáil members delegated to a dwindling cadre within the IRA the powers of government until the All-Ireland Republic could be restored. Although this transfer of authority attracted few adherents, this mantle of succession ensured that the revival of the IRA and Sinn Féin in future decades would gain moral and political approval among a significant number of Irish at home and abroad, as IRA emigrants sustained republican loyalists throughout America. In 1939, Seán Russell led the hardline IRA to revive a Fenian-style bombing war in England, but this inept operation resulted in a crackdown by both the British and the Free State, which led to the imprisonment of many IRA members at the Curragh in Kildare during what was called “the Emergency.” By 1944, its leaders betrayed, incarcerated, or retired, the IRA had ceased to function. After World War II, the dormant IRA reestablished links with Sinn Féin; an armed campaign in the North of Ireland from 1956 to 1962 again failed. By 1964, a remnant of the IRA, recently released from jail, began to rethink strategy. Guided by British Marxists, and expanding ideological and community effort through the Wolfe Tone Society, the IRA and Sinn Féin revised their methods. They now determined to spark political, economic, and military agitation to rouse popular solidarity. They also built networks with third world anticolonial liberation
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movements. Under the Stalinist-influenced stages theory, organizers among 1960s republicans endorsed an end to abstentionism so they could be voted into government assemblies to promote socialism. This new departure from republican doctrine split the IRA and Sinn Féin in 1969–1970 into an official Marxist group claiming to be the true inheritors of doctrinal legitimacy to the Republic of Pearse and especially Connolly, against what would soon be the dominant Provisional traditionalist wing, which was bent on continuing the armed struggle. Along with this formal disagreement over republican policy, the renewal of violence in the north had contributed to this latest fracture within the IRA. The Provisionals emphasized the physical force tradition and proclaimed that they alone continued as legitimate heirs of 1916, the Second Dáil, and as an all-Ireland army and governing body. The Officials distrusted Catholic-directed militancy and asserted that support could be drawn from the Unionist community, as their party would eventually attain a nonsectarian worker’s republic. After infighting between the Officials and the Provisionals damaged both their military and political aims, the Officials retreated from the armed struggle in 1972; a militant faction founded the Irish National Liberation Army in 1974. By now, the few hundred active volunteers attracted international attention to their fight for freedom from British rule of the north. The all-Ireland base of the IRA predecessors—who ironically had lacked an effective force in Ulster during the 1919–1921 war—now shifted to Belfast, Derry, and rural areas along the border. The leadership in Dublin supported a fullscale military campaign as the Troubles mounted; their counterparts in Belfast, www.abc-clio.com
now acting as defenders of Catholic enclaves there and in Derry, faced stalemate. Failing to quickly oust the British or to hasten a united Ireland, the IRA fought an attenuated guerrilla war against not only an occupying army but also provincial police, informants, spies, undercover units, and Loyalist brigades. Their attacks against high-profile targets such as Lord Mountbatten in 1979 and Margaret Thatcher in 1984 gained notoriety for the IRA. Army, police, and sectarian retaliation for thousands of less publicized victims of the armed struggle ensured that the IRA itself declined on a military front and in media sympathy. Counting all casualties of the Troubles, the Provisional IRA killed the most—about 1,770 of more than 3,660 civilians, state representatives, and military personnel—during the 1969–1998 armed campaign. Under the policies of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, the IRA’s northern command eased out Dublin’s faction. After the H-Block and hunger strikers’ protests galvanized widespread popular support for republicans, a move emerged pairing, in Danny Morrison’s phrase, “the armalite and the ballot box.” Although the 1969 Provisionals had rejected entering constitutional politics, by the 1980s IRA commanders prepared for negotiations to transform the guerrilla war into a broader effort. Through a revived Sinn Féin, republican tacticians argued that they could achieve justice for the nationalist minority in the north by agreeing to a settlement with the governments that they had earlier derided as “partitionist assemblies.” This shift again alienated physicalforce adherents. Republican Sinn Féin had split from the main movement in 1986
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over abstentionism; the Continuity IRA allied with this purist faction. Many IRA members in rural areas, such as Louth, South Armagh, and Fermanagh, resisted such a compromise as leading to the decommissioning of arms and the practical—as well as symbolic—end to their armed struggle. This led to another break in the late 1990s, of a group calling itself the “Real IRA,” which became allied with the 32-County Sovereignty Movement, and rejected the end of the physical-force tradition. For the majority in the IRA, the appeals of the leadership to enter into the peace process convinced volunteers that the military campaign was at a standstill and that the British occupiers could not be removed by force. The 1994 ceasefire preceded a brief return to the bombing war, but with the 1997 truce, the AdamsMcGuinness policy has ensured the publicized dominance of Sinn Féin’s ballot boxes over the IRA’s hidden armalites. The future of the IRA, in the wake of its suspension since 1998’s Good Friday Agreement, remains uncertain. Some within its ranks continue to delay full and irrevocable decommissioning of their weaponry, and political uncertainty continues as various entities attempt to integrate Sinn Féin into Stormont, the Dáil, and Westminster while excluding their IRA comrades. Allegations that IRA volunteers since the peace process have remained armed—to intimidate community activists, smugglers, pushers, and those labeled as criminal elements—persist. Throughout the history of the IRA, North American support has provided clout for its republican aims. Fund-raising appeals have continued from the rise of the Fenians in the 1860s to the founding of Irish Northern Aid in 1970. After the www.abc-clio.com
defeats of the old IRA in the 1920s, many volunteers, rejecting the Free State and on the run (or prevented from seeking employment), left for the United States. Their loyalty to physical-force strategies ensured that at times more support for the cause would come from America rather than Ireland. Arms and finances both flowed east. In the 1980s, a Federal Bureau of Investigation crackdown on gunrunning from U.S. ports effectively put an end to large-scale smuggling to Irish republicans. Media stereotypes also flourished: the image of the bomb-throwing, rosaryclutching “Paddy” would become as common on screens as it was in Fenian caricatures for earlier American audiences. By the mid-1990s, Gerry Adams would bring a more diplomatic approach to the White House of the Clinton administration. The Irish Voice newspaper, its sister magazine Irish America, and Irish-American philanthropists have crafted a respectable role for the mainstream Irish republican that has supplanted the terrorist thug cartoons of previous decades. Today, Friends of Sinn Féin, based in Washington D.C., lobbies for the party; critics have alleged that, as with Noraid (Irish Northern Aid Committee) and earlier organizations, many of its donations have directly funded the IRA. John L. Murphy See also: CLINTON, William Jefferson; De VALERA, Eamon; IRISH REPUBLICAN BROTHERHOOD; MITCHELL, George J.; MITCHELL PRINCIPLES, The; NATIONALISM, IRISH-AMERICAN; NATIONALISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, IRISH-AMERICAN; NORAID References Bell, J. Bowyer. The Secret Army: The IRA. 3rd ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996.
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466 IRISH REPUBLICAN BROTHERHOOD English, Richard. Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Feeney, Brian. Sinn Féin: A Hundred Turbulent Years. Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2002. Holland, Jack. The American Connection: U.S. Guns, Money, and Influence in Northern Ireland. Niwot, CO: Roberts Rinehart, 1999. Moloney, Ed. The Secret History of the IRA. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002. Patterson, Henry. The Politics of Illusion: A Political History of the IRA. London: Serif, 1997. Smith, M. L. R. Fighting for Ireland? The Military Strategy of the Irish Republican Movement. London: Routledge, 1997.
IRISH REPUBLICAN BROTHERHOOD A revolutionary movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, emerging from the Fenians, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) continued the oath-bound, clandestine, and physicalforce separatist agitation that had characterized the earlier factions that had coalesced after the Young Ireland defeat in 1848. The Fenians had established networks not only in Ireland but also in the United States, Britain, and Australia—from which funds, personnel, and ammunition supplied the international organization, which was hierarchically structured but designed around small cells of activists to discourage infiltration. As with the Fenians, however, the IRB was compromised—most infamously by the “Prince of Spies,” Henri Le Caron (the Englishman Thomas Beach, 1841–1894). But the IRB persisted longer than the Fenians, as Brotherhood members supported the Land War of 1879–1882, led bombing campaigns in England in the 1880s, revived to assist Sinn Féin, directed the 1916 Easter Rising, and endured under
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their leader, Michael Collins, through the Anglo-Irish war until the founding of the Free State. Its origins intertwined with the Fenians, the IRB gradually superseded the earlier organization after the defeat of the Irish uprising of 1867. After the arrests later that year of Fenian insurgents, the death of the “Manchester Martyrs” (William Allen, Michael Larkin, and Michael O’Brien), and the spread of support for the rebels from not only the Irish people but also from some within the Catholic establishment, the IRB began to regroup. In 1871, it emerged under Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa (1831–1915) and John Devoy (1842–1928). Two years later, a constitution for the IRB determined its function as a secret society democratically governed by a partially elected supreme council. Agrarian activism attracted many of its members during the 1870s populist struggle against large landholders; however, it was not until the 1880s that the IRB leadership directed a bombing campaign in Liverpool, Glasgow, and especially London, where for five years attacks were carried out against prominent targets. Operating from America, Devoy organized the secret Clan Na Gael while O’Donovan Rossa gathered the “skirmishers” to sustain the dynamite war in Britain. Devoy backed the New Departure negotiated by Michael Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell in which they agreed on a unified front to bring parliamentary nationalists together with revolutionary agents to further the causes of Home Rule and land reform. Devoy supported moderation; O’Donovan Rossa asserted physical-force strategies. The division between the two leaders weakened the American movement
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as Parnellism and Home Rule appealed more to many in the 1880s than the perpetuation of Fenian aggression. With the demise of Parnell in the 1890s, the constitutional nationalists weakened too, but the prospect of revolution remained distant until the appearance of Sinn Féin in the new century inspired Clan Na Gael veteran and convicted skirmisher Tom Clarke (1857–1916) to return to Ireland in 1907, after 15 years in a British prison and a long American residence. Under Clarke and Irish Freedom, a paper appearing in 1910, separatism invigorated both old Fenians and young militants. Home Rule failed to satisfy a generation inspired by the Celtic Revival and radicalized against John Redmond’s commitment of the Irish Volunteers to aid the British military in 1914. With Home Rule postponed when World War I began, the IRB planned for action. The next year, Patrick Pearse gave his famous Glasnevin oration evoking Fenian continuity over O’Donovan Rossa’s grave, the body having been returned from New York. The connection between American support and Irish responsibility endured as the IRB calculated its opportunity. Under Pearse, with the cooperation of James Connolly’s Citizen Army, the IRB resolved to rebel while World War I divided the attention of the Crown. Despite the failure of the Easter Rising, the aftermath echoed that of the 1867 defeat. The deaths of Fenians then had provoked widespread support; the executions of Pearse, Connolly, and their comrades angered many Irish people who felt little sympathy for the Easter Rising but now acclaimed them martyrs for a new cause, that of yet another guerrilla assault against the British.
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The IRB, however, now found itself part of a larger revolution. The Irish Republican Army, under the leadership of IRB president Michael Collins, edged out the IRB during the War of Independence from 1919 to 1921. After the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and the ensuing civil war between treaty proponents and opponents, the IRB found itself increasingly relegated to a nominal role after the death of Collins in 1921. Three years later, military members of the IRB demanded an end to post–Civil War demobilization and renewed progress toward a full republic. This March 1924 aborted mutiny of Irish Republican Army veterans within the Irish army resulted in the Free State’s disbandment of the Brotherhood. John L. Murphy See also: DAVITT, Michael; DEVOY, John; FENIANS, The; IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY; NATIONALISM, IRISHAMERICAN References Brennan, Michael. The War in Clare, 1911–1921: Personal Memoirs of the Irish War of Independence. Dublin: Four Courts Press, Irish Academic Press, 1980. Cole, J. A. Prince of Spies: Henri Le Caron. London: Faber and Faber, 1984. Denieffe, Joseph. A Personal Narrative of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood. New York: The Gael Publishing Co., 1904. Devoy, John. Recollections of an Irish Rebel. 1929. Reprint, Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1969. Golway, Terry. Irish Rebel: John Devoy and America’s Fight for Irish Freedom. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. O’Donovan Rossa, Jeremiah. Irish Rebels in English Prisons. Dingle, Ireland: Brandon, 1991. Ó Broin, Léon. Revolutionary Underground: The Story of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, 1858–1924. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1976.
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468 IRISH TRAVELERS IN THE UNITED STATES O’Leary, John. Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism. 2 vols. London: Downey & Co., 1896. Smart, K. R. M. The Dynamite War: IrishAmerican Bombers in Victorian Britain. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1979.
IRISH TRAVELERS IN THE UNITED STATES Irish Travelers constitute a small population of scattered groups that have resided predominantly in the southern United States since emigrating from Ireland in the 1800s. Members of the community divide themselves based on historical residence in Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, and Ohio. Those identified as Northern Travelers include all Travelers who work along the eastern seaboard. Contemporary Traveler men earn their living traveling in all-male family groups for most of the year, asphalting, laying linoleum, and spray painting. Travelers are descendants of a historically nomadic Irish community known as “tinkers” or, more recently, “Travellers,” which were defined as an ethnic minority in British and Irish law in 1998 and 2000, respectively, and with whom they share many cultural traits. The term “tinker”— currently derogatory—and its English and Irish-language cognates were used in Ireland for perhaps centuries to refer to indigenous itinerant people who provided tinsmithing, peddling, horse-trading, and craft services to the majority culture. Certain oral accounts suggest that eight Traveler families, led by a pioneer named Tom Carroll (1830–1910), who is buried in Westview Cemetery, Atlanta, emigrated from either Ireland or England sometime soon after the midnineteenth century, and spread throughout the urban Northeast, where they practiced their ancestral occupations. Oral tradition www.abc-clio.com
also enshrines the memories of other nineteenth-century Traveler founding fathers such as Peter Sherlock and Pat O’Hara. Numbers increased through ongoing Traveler emigration from Ireland, and intermarriage within the community. Before the Civil War, Travelers had begun to winter in the southern states, where they very successfully traded mules and horses. Travelers appear to have been one of the more successful segments of Irish emigrants to America at this point. When the demand for these animals decreased in the North in the late 1800s, Travelers ceased summering there and took up permanent bases in Nashville, Tennessee, Fort Worth, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia, migrating thence to Mississippi and other parts of the South. The less documented Ohio Travelers migrated to the Midwest as other Travelers went south. Contact between the southern communities continues, but has lessened somewhat in recent decades. Although Travelers provided mules for the government during World War II, a 1927 Georgia law that heavily taxed traveling horse traders and the increasing mechanization of American agriculture after the Depression era caused the trade to dwindle among members of the group. Strikingly, the twentieth-century economic and occupational patterns of Travelers in Ireland followed the model of American Travelers somewhat, although there was no formal contact between the groups until the 1990s. Since the 1960s, Travelers have abandoned the tents, brightly colored covered wagons, and trucks of previous generations for camps or villages of luxury mobile homes and, increasingly, houses. Despite these adaptations to sedentary norms, business transactions continue to be cash based, and trading and bartering are still used in
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dealings. Contemporary Travelers appear to have remained more seasonally nomadic than their Irish counterparts. Overall, Traveler culture remains as independent, self-reliant, and enclosed as when it first emerged in the United States, a tendency that sometimes leads to mutual suspicion between Travelers and members of the wider society.
Culture and Ethnicity Although allusions to tinkers abound in Ireland and Britain before the nineteenth century, Sharon Gmelch’s discovery of references to the tinker lifestyle in an 1835 report on Irish indigence is understood to be the earliest description of tinkers as what would currently be recognized as an ethnic, as opposed to an occupational minority. American anthropologists generally describe Travelers in the United States as an ethnic minority, although this has yet to be acknowledged in U.S. law. Irish Travelers are occasionally identified as Irish Gypsies by non-Travelers and the U.S. media because of their semi-itinerant lifestyle, but they reject this ascription. A minority of contemporary Travelers is aware of their Irish roots and keeps abreast of Traveler issues in “the old country.” Like their Irish counterparts, Travelers in the United States share common descent and have discrete cultural practices: boundary rules against most nonTravelers, early marriage, an aspiration to be mobile, a tradition of self-employment and involvement in trades or services not generally pursued by members of the settled community, a unique material culture, customs surrounding cleansing, and an oral culture. They also use a cryptolect called “Cant” or “Gammon,” which is traditionally used instead of or alongside English in certain trading situations and www.abc-clio.com
has been variously theorized as deriving from a lost pre-Celtic language, Irish, Romani, English, or various combinations of these languages. Most importantly, in both Traveler cultures, the extended family was and remains the key unit of social and cultural reproduction. Traveler men alone are involved in business dealings and traditional trades requiring seasonal traveling in groups. In the past, peddling and bartering were the only occupations allowed to women, although young women have begun to enter the unskilled mainstream labor force for short periods before marriage. Additionally, in recent years a small proportion of young Traveler women have taken up administrative and nursing posts. Upon marriage, women take responsibility for the home, family, finances, all aspects of religious observance, and dealings with outside agencies such as schools and hospitals. Although Traveler settlements are effectively matriarchal when the men take to the road for months on end, Traveler gender roles are rigid. Girls are thrust into caretaking roles from an early age, and boys are encouraged to assist their fathers. Marriages are endogamous; they are initially arranged by the mothers and occur at a very young age. Substantial dowry payments are involved when the families are affluent. Marriage between second cousins is allowed by Traveler culture and is within the law of most southern states. Divorce is rare among Travelers, and the birthrate is lower than that of their Irish counterparts, with an average of two to three children per family. Elderly women help rear grandchildren. Travelers appear to have always practiced Catholicism, and the culture remains predisposed to public displays of religiosity. In line with Catholic teaching, all Travelers are baptized and receive the sacraments of first
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communion and confirmation. In the past, having arranged for the storage of bodies with funeral homes, southern Travelers buried their dead once a year in spectacular and large funeral ceremonies in Atlanta and Nashville so that kin from various states could reaffirm Traveler ties. This practice has been discontinued, but Catholic Church funerals with a Mass remain the norm. In contemporary Traveler culture, large gettogethers continue to be organized around Christmas, weddings and other family occasions.
Status in American Society Travelers are generally markedly wealthier and better educated than their Irish counterparts, and this appears to make them less visible and liable to public scrutiny. No formal Traveler organizations exist, and unlike their Irish counterparts, Travelers have not founded any Traveler-specific organizations, or allied themselves with broader national or international Roma political and cultural networks, despite the fact that they have been victims of prejudice since their early itinerant days. Travelers have little inclination toward integration, and for this reason the community appears to be unknown in mainstream American society, bar a handful of recent popular culture representations centering on alleged Traveler sharp business practices in which the minority has been presented as a kind of mysterious grifter subculture. In 1889, Frederick Arnold first drew attention to members of a culturally and linguistically distinct Gypsy-like Irish tinker “caste” he encountered in New York State who were, he stressed, not Gypsies. However, despite the fact that it was American author Charles Godfrey Leland who first revealed www.abc-clio.com
the existence of the “Irish tinkers’ tongue” in 1880 (prompting a flood of material on the subject of the Irish tinker in the Victorian period), and although IrishAmerican Travelers sporadically came to attention as a peculiar and picturesque Irish Gypsy culture throughout the twentieth century in popular folklore, ephemeral animal trade and trailer lifestyle publications, Catholic periodicals, and tourist guides, they were largely undocumented by serious commentators in the United States until the 1970s. Academic studies of the community remain scant, due in part to Traveler itinerancy and the community’s suspicion regarding researchers from majority culture. For these reasons, and also because the U.S. Census does not recognize Travelers as a unique ethnic group, population figures are unavailable. Relatively recent estimates suggest that the Georgia Traveler community consists of approximately 500 families, the Mississippi Traveler camp consists of approximately 200 families, and the Texas Traveler community, which emerged of late, has fewer families. Ian Hancock, an expert in Romany culture based at the University of Texas at Austin, has suggested that there are upwards of 30,000 Irish Travelers in the United States, although estimates of 5,000–10,000 are more usual.
Transatlantic Travel(l)er ties The Traveller community in Ireland has been and continues to be discriminated against by mainstream society to a huge extent, but a growing awareness of marginalization led to the politicization of the minority during the 1960s and 1970s, and the increasing assertion of Traveller ethnicity. The awareness of a worldwide fraternity of
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nomadic peoples engendered by the involvement of Irish Traveller leaders with the founding of the international Romani rights lobby in the 1960s laid the groundwork for formal contacts between the Travel(l)er communities in Ireland and America. In 1994, and with the assistance of the pioneering scholar of southern Traveller culture, Jared Vincent Harper, Irish Traveller activist Michael McDonagh accompanied Belfast anthropologist Robbie McVeigh to Murphy Village, a noted and prosperous Georgia Traveler settlement of about 2,000 people established in the 1960s near North Augusta, South Carolina, with the assistance of Father Joseph Murphy. This was the first of a number of cross-Atlantic fact-finding missions between the Traveller communities. Irish Traveller leaders are anxious to disseminate knowledge of their American counterparts in mainstream culture in Ireland as they believe the survival and development of Traveler culture in America counters arguments (particularly prominent in Ireland during the 1970s) that rather than being a distinct ethnic group, Travellers were merely post-Great Famine dropouts from sedentary society who require reintegration. This belief is, of course, contradicted by the fact that Irish Travellers first immigrated to America as a distinct group just after the Famine period and have maintained their ethnic identity there since. (Numerous nineteenth-century Catholic Church registries in the South record the baptism and marriages of “Irish Tinkers.”) Significantly, the largest body of research on Traveller culture in Ireland to emerge in the late twentieth century was generated by the American anthropologists, George and Sharon Gmelch, who produced valuable scholarship on the community in the 1970s www.abc-clio.com
and 1980s, a period when it was largely ignored in Irish academic circles. The Republic of Ireland government’s first official report on the minority in 1963, which claimed to be a comprehensive investigation of Traveller culture and lifestyle, made no mention of the related community in the United States. Despite a handful of scholarly and popular articles and television documentaries on the subject in recent decades, awareness of or interest in this Irish minority abroad among the non-Traveller population in Ireland remains scant. Likewise, the Traveler tradition has yet to be generally recognized or claimed by Irish America. Mary Burke See also: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR; CATHOLIC CHURCH, the; GREAT FAMINE, The References Andereck, Mary E. Ethnic Awareness and the School: An Ethnographic Study. Sage Series on Race and Ethnic Relations, Vol. 5. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992. Arnold, Frederick S. “Our Old Poets and the Tinkers.” The Journal of American Folklore 11, no. 42 (1898): 210–220. Bond, Pat. “The Irish Travellers in the United States.” Sinsear: The Folklore Journal 5 (1988): 45–58. Gmelch, Sharon. Tinkers and Travellers. Dublin, Ireland: O’Brien, 1975. Harper, Jared Vincent, and Charles Hudson. “Irish Traveller Cant in its Social Setting.” Southern Folklore Quarterly 37, no. 2 (1973): 101–114. Leland, Charles Godfrey. “Shelta, the Tinkers’ Talk.” New Quarterly Magazine 3 (1880): 136–141. McDonagh, Michael, and Robbie McVeigh. Minceir Neeja in the Thome Munkra: Irish Travellers in the USA. Belfast, Ireland: Belfast Travellers’ Education and Development Group, 1996. Radharc: Stories from Irish America. “Travellers of Murphy Village.” Directed by Joe Dunn. Transmitted on RTE (Ireland), April 23, 1995.
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IRISH YANKEES In the 1820s, particularly in Argentina and imperial Brazil, there was a current of Irish from North America emigrating to Latin America, who were collectively styled as the “Irish Yankees.” Some were born in Ireland, emigrated to Canada or the United States, and after a period of settlement there traveled to the Atlantic coast of South America. Although the numbers of immigrants were not significant (in 1827 there were only 150 Irish residents in Buenos Aires), they often pioneered new trades in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro as tailors, cobblers, or coach builders, and they shaped the first prosperous urban middle classes in South American cities. Some of the Irish Yankees became well known in Buenos Aires. Bernard Kiernan was a renowned astronomer who arrived from the United States in 1824. Kiernan was born in 1780 in Ballybougham, Moneymore (Co. Derry). In 1810 he settled in St. John, New Brunswick, with his family, and then went to Argentina with his own ship. He worked in the countryside as a surveyor, mathematician, and astronomer, and died in 1863 in Morón. His son James Kiernan (1806–1850) was a well-known journalist and owner and director of the Gaceta Mercantil newspaper together with Stephen Hallett. John Hayes arrived in Argentina from New York and settled in Esquina in the Corrientes province as a cattle rancher and sheep farmer. During the Triple Alliance War with Paraguay, Hayes was correspondent for The Standard, with the pseudonym Simbad. Patrick Fleming, brother of Dr. Michael A. Fleming, bishop of Newfoundland (1829–1850), established a naval store and a coffee shop that
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was the meeting point for the Irish residents up to the 1850s. On his way to Cuyo Patrick Fleming was kidnapped by Ranqueles Indians and rescued by the Rosas expedition of 1833. The merchant Patrick Lynch emigrated from the United States to Buenos Aires and had good commercial connections with North America. Mrs. Hanlon, who came in 1822, as well as Bartholomew Foley, James McGuire, Richard Sutton, Patrick Donohue, and physicians Conyngham and Brown of the republican army were other immigrants of this group in Argentina. John Devereux was under the influence of this group when he visited Buenos Aires in 1816, but returned to North America when he could not convince the Argentine authorities to obtain a loan in London. In Bolivia Edmond Temple was involved in the mining industry, and the Garrett family in the import of textiles. The Irish Yankees also had some rural settlers. The first three Irishmen to tend flocks of sheep in the province of Navarro were from North America. Also, some of the first sheep farmers in Mercedes, near the city of Luján, were North Americans with Irish names. Edmundo Murray
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See also: DEVEREUX, John References MacLoughlin, Guillermo. “The Forgotten People: The Irish in Argentina and other South American countries.” Paper read at the conference The Scattering of Ireland and the Irish Diaspora: A Comparative Perspective. University College Cork, September 24–27, 1997. Murray, Thomas. The Story of the Irish in Argentina. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1919.
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J JACKSON, ANDREW (1767–1845) In 1765, Andrew Jackson, Sr., Elizabeth (Hutchinson) Jackson, and their two eldest sons emigrated from Carrickfergus, Ireland, to Waxhaw, South Carolina, where Mrs. Jackson gave birth to her third son, Andrew Jackson, in March 1767, a month after his father died. Elizabeth inculcated a hatred of the British in her son, an emotion natural given centuries of British oppression of Ireland. In 1779, the eldest son Hugh died in battle against the British, and the two surviving sons, Andrew and Robert, joined the local militia, fought at the battle of Hanging Rock, and were taken prisoner in 1781. While captive Andrew Jackson enraged a British officer by refusing to shine his boots, and the latter slashed Jackson across the face with a sword. The brothers contracted smallpox and both Robert and Mrs. Jackson died in 1781, leaving Andrew Jackson an orphan. In 1784, he settled in Salisbury, North Carolina, to study law in the office of local attorney Spruce McCay and later with Col. John Stokes. In September 1787 Jackson was admitted to the bar, and in October 1788 he settled in Nashville, which was then part of North Carolina. In 1791 Jackson married Rachel (Donelson) Robards, who was separated from, but had
not divorced, her husband Lewis Robards. Only later did Jackson learn this fact, and upon her divorce Jackson and Rachel Robards held a second wedding in 1794. The circumstances of their courtship and marriage led opponents to defame them throughout their lives. The taint of scandal never alienated Jackson from his friends, and they created opportunities for Jackson at critical junctures in his life. In 1788 Superior Court Judge John McNairy, who had studied law with Jackson, appointed him prosecuting attorney, and in 1791 William Blount, governor of the western counties of North Carolina (what would become the state of Tennessee in 1796), named him attorney general of the Mero District. In 1796 Jackson won election as Tennessee’s first congressman. That year he was the only congressman to vote against a tribute to President George Washington; he did so because Washington had supported the 1794 Jay Treaty. Critics condemned Jackson’s vote as unpatriotic. In 1797 the Tennessee legislature appointed Jackson to the U.S. Senate but he resigned in April 1798 to become a superior court judge. In 1802 he ran against former Tennessee governor John Sevier in the election for major general of the state militia. The contest was even until Tennessee
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governor Archibald Roane, a supporter of Jackson, broke the deadlock by voting for his friend. In 1804 Jackson resigned as judge, keeping only his commission in the militia. That year he bought the Hermitage, a 640-acre plantation, and adopted the lifestyle of a cotton planter. A penchant for settling scores by violence led him to kill slave trader Charles Dickinson in a duel in 1806. Jackson himself nearly bled to death from the gunshot wound Dickinson inflicted near Jackson’s heart. In 1813 Jackson took a bullet in his left shoulder after having been a second in another duel. The War of 1812 elevated Jackson to fame. In command of the Tennessee militia he defeated the Creek Indians at the battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814. The victory won him the rank of major general in the U.S. Army. In 1814 he defended New Orleans against a British assault. The battle coincided with news that the United States and Great Britain had signed a peace treaty, leading Americans to mistakenly believe Jackson had won the war. Commander of the Seventh Military District, in 1817 he pursued the Seminole Indians into Spanish Florida and captured St. Marks; then in 1818 he captured Pensacola, declared Florida a U.S. possession, and executed two British citizens for inciting the Seminoles against the United States. These actions brought the United States to the brink of war with Spain and Britain. President Monroe countermanded Jackson and returned Florida to Spain, though Secretary of State John Quincy Adams persuaded Monroe not to rebuke Jackson. In 1819 Spain sold Florida to the United States, and in 1821 Monroe appointed Jackson the first governor. That November Jackson resigned, as he had his seats in the House and Senate, and returned to the Hermitage, but his www.abc-clio.com
friends would not countenance his retirement. In October 1823 the Tennessee legislature returned him to the U.S. Senate, and in the 1824 presidential election he won the popular vote and carried the Electoral College. His total, however, was not decisive, throwing the election into the House of Representatives, where Speaker of the House Henry Clay tilted the vote to Adams. In return Adams named Clay secretary of state, infuriating Jackson and his supporters. The 1828 election again pitted the populist Jackson against the aristocrat Adams. As he had in 1824, Jackson styled himself the champion of the common people. This time his electoral tally of 178 won him the presidency. Jackson appointed his friends, among them Martin Van Buren, to the cabinet, though Jackson and Vice President John C. Calhoun drifted apart over the tariff. Calhoun sided with South Carolina against the tariff of 1828 and even suggested that states had the right to nullify unpopular laws. This position emboldened some South Carolinians to speak of secession, but Jackson threatened to hold the state by force. In 1832 Congress followed Jackson’s recommendation to lower the tariff, but it was not enough to satisfy South Carolina. In 1830 he disappointed the proponents of economic growth by vetoing a bill to fund construction of a road between Maysville and Lexington, Kentucky. The Second Bank of the United States suffered the same fate. With the charter due to expire in 1836 bank president Nicholas Biddle, calculating that Jackson would not risk a veto in an election year, asked Congress to recharter the bank in 1832. Congress obliged but Jackson vetoed the bill, charging that the bank benefited the wealthy and foreign investors but hurt ordinary farmers and debtors. The veto cast the 1832 election,
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in the mold of the previous election, as a contest between Jackson the champion of democracy and Clay the defender of privilege. Jackson totaled 124,000 more votes than Clay and the third party, the AntiMason Party, combined. The victory left Jackson free to erode the rights of Native Americans. In 1835 he permitted Georgia to defy the U.S. Supreme Court by taking land from the Cherokee and settling them in Arkansas. In 1836 Jackson secured the nomination of Van Buren, then his vice president, as the Democratic presidential candidate. In 1837 he returned to the Hermitage, where he died in 1845. He is buried in its garden beside his wife. Christopher Cumo See also: SCOTS-IRISH AND MILITARY CONFLICT; SCOTS-IRISH POLITICS; TAMMANY HALL References Behrman, Carol H. Andrew Jackson. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 2003. Brands, H. W. Andrew Jackson, His Life and Times. New York: Doubleday, 2005. Burstein, Andrew. The Passions of Andrew Jackson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Ellis, Richard E. Andrew Jackson. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2003.
JAMES, JESSE WOODSOM (1847–1882) Arguably the most infamous outlaw in American history, save perhaps Billy the Kid, Jesse Woodsom James was born in 1847 in Centraville (now Kearny), Missouri. His father was Robert Sallee James, a Baptist minister, who is sometimes described as an immigrant from Ireland, but who in fact was born in Missouri. His mother was Zerelda Cole, who had been educated in a Catholic convent and so may have been Roman Catholic. Cole’s family’s presence www.abc-clio.com
Portrait of Jesse James, one of the most infamous outlaws in American history. (Library of Congress)
in the United States dated back to the Revolutionary War, according to her grandson Jesse James, Jr. These and other facts make it unclear whether James’s ancestry was Irish or Scots-Irish. Some confusion undoubtedly has arisen because of a false claim in recent years that Robert Sallee James was an immigrant from Co. Kerry, a fabrication that attracted some international publicity. At the age of 15, during the Civil War, Jesse James joined a band of pro-Confederate guerrillas led by William C. Quantrill. The guerrillas raided farms and communities sympathetic to the Union. In 1862 Quantrill was commissioned a captain in the Confederate Army; that same year Union authorities declared him an outlaw. On August 21, 1863, Quantrill and his guerrillas, including James, burned and pillaged the town of Lawrence, Kansas, slaughtering more than
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150 unarmed men, women, and children. In October, they killed about 100 Union soldiers at Baxter Springs, Kansas. Two years later the guerrillas were looting in Kentucky when a small force of Union soldiers surprised them and fatally wounded Quantrill, which led to the dissolution of his gang. After the Civil War, James formed his own gang with his brother Frank James and several other men. They held up banks, stagecoaches, and trains until 1876, when the gang was decimated while attempting to rob a bank in Northfield, Minnesota. The James brothers escaped and formed a new gang. In 1875, James married his cousin Zerelda after a nine-year courtship. They had two children, Mary and Jesse. On April 3, 1882, in St. Joseph, Missouri, James was shot and killed by Robert Ford, a fellow gang member motivated by the substantial reward money that had been offered for James’s death. James was buried at his childhood home in Missouri. Rumors persist that James faked his death and lived until the 1940s under an assumed name, usually that of Frank Dalton. These were definitively proven false in 1995 when DNA tests of James’s exhumed body determined that it was indeed his corpse that had been buried in 1882. The facts and myths of Jesse James’s life are an enduring part of American legend and have been treated in numerous books, films, and popular songs. Some recent historical assessments of James have cast a more critical eye upon his character and exploits, but there are still many for whom he remains a hero of the Confederacy. A longstanding, popular myth contends that James was an Old West Robin Hood who bestowed part of the proceeds of his robberies to needy family members and former
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neighbors, but there is no historical evidence for this. Danielle Maze See also: BONNEY, William “Billy the Kid”; SCOTS-IRISH References James, Jesse Edwards. Jesse James My Father, written by Jesse James, Jr.: The First and Only True Story of His Adventures Ever Written. New York, 1899. Walker, Dale L. Legends and Lies: Great Mysteries of the American West. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, Inc., 1997.
JEANIE JOHNSTON, THE The Jeanie Johnston is a full-size replica of a sailing vessel of three masts used to transport Irish immigrants from Tralee, Co. Kerry, to Baltimore, New York, and Quebec during the Irish Famine. The original vessel was built in Québec in 1847 by the Scottishborn shipbuilder John Munn and made a total of 16 voyages to North America between 1848 and 1855 carrying over 2,500 Irish people across the Atlantic; the ship has the enviable reputation of having never lost a passenger or crew member to death or disease; in 1858 en route from Québec to Hull, the ship became waterlogged and sank, but the crew was saved. Today, the recreated Jeanie Johnston is a floating museum that recalls the momentous Irish migration that saw some 1.8 million people leave their homes between 1845 and 1855 because of the ravages of famine. More than 100 sailing vessels were built at John Munn’s shipyard in Québec City between 1821 and 1857. The Jeanie Johnston, launched in 1847, was purchased one year later by Nicholas Donovan, a Tralee hardware merchant. The ship made
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her maiden voyage in April 1848 transporting a total of 193 passengers from Tralee to Québec. During the panic-driven migration caused by the Great Irish Famine of the late 1840s, it is remarkable that the Jeanie Johnston never lost a life as many “coffin ships” out of Liverpool and Cork were noted for their extremely high death tolls, which at times reached 50 percent. The Jeanie Johnston’s happy record is no doubt attributable to the sturdiness of the ship; the experience of Captain James Attridge, who had been at sea 28 years when he joined the ship in 1848; and to the presence on board of Dr. Richard Blennerhassett, who had been educated in Edinburgh. While on average the voyage from Tralee to Québec aboard the Jeanie Johnston took 47 days, in October 1853 the passengers had already been at sea nearly two months when the ship was blown out of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence twice by gale force winds, and the captain put in at Saint Andrews, New Brunswick. The modern full-size replica was designed by Fred M. Walker, chief naval architect with the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, who had supervised the recreation of the eighteenth-century Captain Cook Endeavour II ship. The re-creation of the Jeanie Johnston followed closely the restoration of the seventeenth-century Dutch East India ship, the Batavia, in Lelystad, Holland. Born in the early 1990s as a project to recall the great migrations of the Famine years in Ireland, the $6.6 million (U.S.) undertaking involved the employment of a group of 300 young people from the United States and Canada and from the nationalist and unionist traditions in Belfast as well as some from Dublin and
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Kerry. Completed in 2002, the Jeanie Johnston undertook a series of visits to ports in the United Sates and Canada in the summer and fall of 2003. In September 2003, a commemorative plaque was unveiled in John-Munn Park in Québec City, which recalls the city’s shipbuilding past and the contributions of its Scottish and Irish inhabitants. The modern Jeanie Johnston is 123 feet long by 26 feet of beam and 14 feet of draft. She is 510 tonnes and her rigging consists of three masts with four square sails each and single topsails. Robert J. Grace See also: EMIGRATION; GREAT FAMINE, The Reference Marcil, Eileen. The Charley-Man: A History of Wooden Shipbuilding at Quebec, 1763–1893. Kingston, ON: Quarry Press, 1993.
JEFFERS, ROBINSON (1887–1962) Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Robinson Jeffers was the son of a Presbyterian minister who was of Irish ancestry. Jeffers’s paternal grandfather had immigrated to America from Co. Monaghan in 1810. Jeffers was educated at the University of Western Pennsylvania and Occidental College, where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1905. After graduation he studied medicine at the University of Southern California, where he met Una Call Kuster, who was also of Irish lineage. In 1913 they married and had four children together. At the height of his popularity, Jeffers was the first American poet to appear on the cover of Time magazine, on April 4, 1932. However, after World War II there was a change in the critical reception to Jeffers’s work.
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Although his staunch opposition to American involvement in the war can account for part of this, his postwar work was also received negatively by several influential literary critics such as Yvor Winters and Kenneth Rexroth. Jeffers died in Carmel on January 20, 1962. A posthumous collection of his poems, The Beginning and the End appeared the following year. Along with the Carmel coastline and Big Sur Mountain, Ireland had a considerable influence upon Jeffers’s work. He visited Ireland with his wife on a number of occasions. In 1929 they spent six months traveling around Ireland, England, and Scotland. He returned to Ireland in 1937, traveling around the country from June to October. His final journey there was in 1956. The principal work in which Ireland is visible is Descent to the Dead: Poems Written in Ireland and Great Britain (1931), which contains poems that were inspired by his travels there and his stay on the northeastern coast. The poems in this collection were included in the later collections Give Your Heart to the Hawks (1933) and Selected Poetry (1938). Ireland is also present in Visit to Ireland (1954), a prose work that includes excerpts from Una’s diaries recounting her travels in Ireland. This volume was edited by Jeffers, and it includes some entries by him. Evidence of their trips to Ireland and the influence the country exerted over Jeffers and his wife can be seen in the granite house where they lived in Carmel, California, and which formed the setting for many of his poems. Overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Tor House was partly built by Jeffers himself and he continued to add to the structure throughout his life. (Tor is a Celtic term for a large outcropping of rock.) Jeffers built a large four-story, 40-foot stone tower www.abc-clio.com
called Hawk Tower on the same site. The tower was named after a hawk that appeared while Jeffers was working on the structure and disappeared the day it was completed. The structure was based on similar structures Jeffers and his wife had seen while traveling through Ireland and reflected his wife’s interest in stone towers and Irish literature. In addition, a Celtic cross without an inscription was taken from a gravestone in Co. Donegal during one of their visits there and was embedded in the walkway to the gardens of their house in Carmel. David Doyle Reference McLean, Andrew M. “Robinson Jeffers.” In The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, edited by Michael Glazier. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999.
JOHNSON, SIR WILLIAM (1715–1774) William Johnson was a pivotal figure in British colonial and early Native American fortunes. Born in 1715, in Smithstown, Co. Meath, Johnson was the eldest son of Christopher and Anne Johnson. His father was a Catholic middleman and tenant farmer, while his mother was the descendant of Catholic Irish gentry, the Warrens. Johnson’s uncle, Sir Peter Warren, had been raised as a Protestant and had gained fame and fortune with the Royal Navy. As Peter Warren began to accumulate vast properties in New York, he encouraged William to emigrate and help him in managing these properties. In 1738, at the age of 23, Johnson emigrated to America with 12 Protestant families to settle and manage his uncle’s estate in New York’s Mohawk River Valley. He quickly established a trading post for
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white settlers and native Indians, and it was through these dealings that he was to develop the relationship of trust and goodwill with the Indians that would become the focal point of his later life in America. As he became a major landowner in his own right, he began to learn the Indians’ language, dress in their clothes, and welcome them into his own home. This intimacy led to his being appointed superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Six Nations by the governor of New York in 1744. As tensions with the French escalated, Johnson’s role became instrumental to the success of British affairs in America. In 1746 he was made “Colonel of the Forces to be raised out of the Six Nations” and, as a diplomat for British colonial interests, managed to keep the tribes of the Six Nations from aligning with the French in King George’s War (1744–1748). Johnson’s position and abilities were crucial to British success in the French and Indian War (1754–1763). In 1754 he led the negotiations with the Indians at the Albany Congress. In 1755, commissioned as a major general, he led the British forces in the expedition against Crown Point. Though he failed to capture Crown Point, his defeat of the French at Lake George and subsequent capture of the French commander, Baron de Dieskau, was the only success in a campaign that had been disastrous thus far. Feted in London as a British hero, he received the thanks of Parliament and a baronetcy. In 1756 Johnson was appointed as sole agent and superintendent of Indians and their affairs; now only subordinate, he recruited 700 Iroquois for the Niagara campaign and, when the commander of the British forces was killed, took command and seized Fort Niagara, the key to the West. The following year he raised a force www.abc-clio.com
of 600 Indians and served under Jeffrey Amherst in the campaign to take Montreal. The success of this campaign helped end French power in Canada, and Johnson was rewarded with a king’s grant of 100,000 acres of land north of the Mohawk Valley. This addition to his already substantial land holdings made him one of the largest landholders in the English colonies. After the war, Johnson retired to his large estate to live in the style of an English baron, with many servants and slaves. In 1762, he founded the community that would become Johnstown, by building Johnson Hall and a village three miles north of Fort Johnson (which he had fortified in 1743). In 1763 and 1764, he again won approbation for persuading the Iroquois to stay out of Pontiac’s Rebellion. In 1768, Johnson was the lead negotiator in the first Treaty of Fort Stanwix, in which the Iroquois ceded lands in western Pennsylvania and New York (as well as dubious claims to territory in Ohio) for a payment of £10,000. Johnson displayed genuine respect and love for the Indians of the Six Nations, particularly the Mohawks. In turn, they adopted him into the tribe, making him a sachem and naming him Warraghiaghy, meaning “he who has charge of affairs.” After the death of Catharine Weisenberg, a German servant girl who may or may not have been his wife, Johnson first took Caroline and then Molly Brant, two Mohawk women, into his home and fathered several children by them. Though he had been ill for several years, Johnson’s actual death resulted, fittingly, from overexertion in addressing an Indian council on a very warm day. His paper on “The Language, Customs, and Manners of the Six Nations,” published by the Philosophical society of Philadelphia in 1772, remains an invaluable
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insight into the Indian nations of the North American territories. James P. Byrne References Deedy, John. “Johnson, Sir William.” In The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, edited by Michael Glazier. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999: 482–483. Drew, Paul Redmond. “Sir William Johnson— Indian Superintendent.” The Early America Review. Fall 1996. www.earlyamerica.com/ review/fall96/johnson.html (accessed July 31, 2007). O’Toole, Fintan. White Savage: William Johnston and the Invention of America. London: Faber and Faber, 2005.
JORDAN, KATE (1862–1926) Born on December 23, 1862, in Dublin, Kate Jordan was the daughter of Michael James and Katherine Jordan. Her father was a professor who traced his ancestry back to an artist in the court of King Henry VIII of England. His family had a rich tradition of the arts, and nearly all his relations were either writers, professors, singers, or artists of one type or another. As a one-year-old child, Kate left Dublin and immigrated with her family to America, eventually settling in New York. She was educated in public and private schools as well as at home by private tutors. When she was only 12 years old her first short story was published, and this motivated her to become a full-time writer. In 1897 Jordan married Frederic M. Vermilye, a broker from New York. They had no children. Although she took his name as her surname, because of her fame as a writer she continued to publish her works under her maiden name. Throughout her life Jordan contributed many stories to different magazines. One of her most popular stories was www.abc-clio.com
“The Kiss of Gold,” which was published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in October 1892. She published seven novels in total, including The Other House (1892), A Circle in the Sand (1898), Time the Comedian (1905), The Creeping Tides (1913), Against the Winds (1919), and The Next Corner (1921). Her final book, Trouble-theHouse (1921), consisted of true stories remembered from the author’s own childhood. As well as writing novels, Jordan also wrote plays. Her plays include A Luncheon at Nick’s and The Pompadour’s Protégé, both of which were written in 1903; Mrs. Dakon, which was written in 1909; and two years later, The Right Road. Her final play, Secret Strings, was published in 1914. Jordan traveled all over the world and spent extended periods living in England and France. When she lived in London she was a member of the Lyceum, the Pen and Brush Club, and the Writers’ Club. In America she was a member of the Society of American Dramatists and the Authors’ League of America. Jordan’s work, both in drama and fiction, exhibited a wide breadth, which showed her to be at ease in her depiction of diverse characters inhabiting different worlds. For several years toward the end of her life she suffered failing health. Because of anxiety partly caused by her inability to complete a novel, she suffered from insomnia in her final years. In the spring of 1926 she left her home in New York and traveled with her niece to Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, where she spent a couple of months. There, on the morning of Sunday, June 20, 1926, in the woods near her niece’s home, she committed suicide by poisoning herself. After her death her body was cremated, and her ashes were buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. David Doyle
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JORDAN, NEIL 481 Reference Harrell, Joy. “Kate Jordan.” In The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, edited by Michael Glazier. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999.
JORDAN, NEIL (1950–) One of Ireland’s most well-known and leading contemporary filmmakers, Neil Jordan began his artistic career as a writer, but he has established himself as a filmmaker with an original and affecting style. His stories have mythic underpinnings, folkloric sensibilities, and characters capable of abiding passions; the tales will often have a gothic or horrific twist. Recurring themes in his films deal with alienation and freedom, the violence at the heart of humankind, and the potential hope in emotional connections between people. His most celebrated film, and one that embodies so many of his signature elements, is The Crying Game (1992). Issues of race, sexuality, national tensions, and political violence are all woven into this unconventional romantic tale that surprised international audiences. Born in Sligo, Jordan grew up in Dublin and studied Irish history and literature at University College Dublin. He began writing at an early age and became involved in fringe theater while at university. Jordan’s writing career was established with the publication of Night in Tunisia (1976), a collection of short stories that won the prestigious Guardian Fiction Prize. He then went on to publish two novels, The Past in 1980 and The Dream of a Beast in 1983, both of which are erotic and lyrical depictions of different states of desire. It would be film, however, that brought Neil Jordan’s name to international audiences. Jordan’s first involvement in film www.abc-clio.com
came when he worked as a creative assistant on John Boorman’s 1981 Excalibur, and Jordan went on to make a documentary on the making of the film. His first full-length feature was Angel (1982), which was released in the United States under the title Danny Boy. Starring Irish actor Stephen Rea, who would have a career-long association with Jordan’s films, Angel is a bleak and violent revenge story about a musician who inadvertently becomes embroiled in sectarian killings in Northern Ireland. The stark surrealism of Angel was followed by The Company of Wolves (1984), a cinematic adaptation of the fairytale-inspired story by Angela Carter. Full of symbolic imagery and expressionistic cinematography, this reworking of the Little Red Riding Hood story brought Jordan the Best Film and Best Director awards from the London Critics Circle. His next film was even more successful at the box office and pulled Jordan into the international spotlight, winning the Best Picture at Cannes: Mona Lisa (1986) stars Bob Hoskins as an ex-con who falls in love with a chic prostitute, played by Cathy Tyson. The late 1980s saw Jordan direct two unremarkable Hollywood-financed films. Despite the involvement of major Hollywood stars such as Sean Penn and Robert De Niro, High Spirits (1988) and We’re No Angels (1989) were not commercial successes. However, the 1990s proved to be Jordan’s most successful decade so far. The Miracle (1991) is a darkly sensuous coming-of-age story set in Ireland. The film is modestly produced compared with his earlier films and returns to the world of psychosexual dynamics. His most critically acclaimed and popular film came out the following year. The Crying Game reunited Stephen Rea and Neil Jordan and became the most
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talked about film of that year, due in no small part to the surprising plot twist near the end. Jordan’s direction is convincing as he worked with his own script. The film returns Jordan to the struggle of complex characters who find love in a politically and racially complicated world. The Crying Game was nominated for six Academy Awards, and Jordan won the award for best original screenplay. The success of The Crying Game led Jordan to adapt Anne Rice’s cult classic, Interview With a Vampire, in 1994, but Jordan soon returned to Irish content with Michael Collins (1997) and The Butcher Boy (1998), based on the novel by fellow Irishman Patrick McCabe. Both Michael Collins and The Butcher Boy showcase Jordan’s skill at adaptation: either of historical events (the 1916 Easter Rising and later War of Independence) or of literary works. After The Butcher Boy, a disturbing portrait of mental disintegration, Jordan adapted Graham Greene’s novel of London during the blitz, The End of the Affair (1999). One of Jordan’s most ambitious projects was the 2002 remake of the 1955 film noir by Jean-Pierre Melville, Bob le Flambeur. Casting Nick Nolte in the lead as an American drug addict and art thief, Jordan’s version (titled The Good Thief ) is considered his best adaptation. Neil Jordan’s career continues in both film and fiction. In 2004 he published his third novel, Shade, and 2006 saw the release of Breakfast on Pluto. He has two films in production at the time of writing. Danine Farquharson See also: BYRNE, Gabriel; GLEESON, Brendan; NEESON, Liam; O’CONNOR, Pat; PATTERSON, Frank
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References Jordan, Neil. A Neil Jordan Reader. New York: Vintage, 1992. Rockett, Emer, and Kevin Rockett, Neil Jordan: Exploring Boundaries. Dublin: Liffey, 2003. Rockett, Kevin, Luke Gibbons, and John Hill, eds. Cinema and Ireland. London: Routledge, 1987. Rogers, Lori. Feminine Nation: Performance, Gender, and Resistance in the Works of John McGahern and Neil Jordan. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998.
JOYCE, JAMES AUGUSTINE ALOYSIUS (1882–1941) James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin. His youth was spent in numerous homes throughout the city, as declining family circumstances
Portrait of Irish author James Joyce, whose work includes Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. (Library of Congress)
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brought ever greater privations. He nonetheless developed a formidable intellect, attending Clongowes Wood College, Belvedere College, and University College Dublin. In 1904 he met the woman who would be his lifelong companion, Nora Barnacle (1884–1951); they married in 1931 and had two children, Giorgio (1905–1976) and Lucia (1907–1982). Joyce and Nora left Ireland in 1904. After brief periods in Zurich and Pola, they settled for a decade in Trieste. There Joyce taught languages by day and wrote at night. The family spent much of World War I in Zurich, then in 1920 made their most significant move, to Paris. While in Paris Joyce became world famous upon the 1922 publication of his novel Ulysses. Joyce spent most of the rest of his life writing the experimental novel Finnegans Wake. Critical incomprehension, worsening eye disease, chronic poverty, and his beloved daughter’s degenerative mental condition tormented his last years. After the Nazi invasion of France the Joyces fled to Zurich, where Joyce died of a duodenal ulcer on January 13, 1941. He is buried in the Flunturn Cemetery there. Joyce is one of the most important prose writers of the twentieth century. His 1914 collection of short stories, Dubliners, exposes the spiritual paralysis he saw at the center of Dublin life, using tightly written episodes that suggest the influence of George Moore. His next work, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), depicts the Joyce-like Stephen Dedalus in an experimental bildungsroman, as he grows from Dublin youth to the first stirrings of artistic endeavor. Dedalus reappears in Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses (1922), which is widely considered the greatest novel of the twentieth
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century. With relentless stylistic invention, Ulysses tells the story of Leopold Bloom, a Dublin Jew whose wanderings on June 16, 1904—Bloomsday—echo the wanderings of Odysseus in the Odyssey. Despite its complexities, Ulysses remains one of the most admired and accomplished novels in modern literature. Joyce’s last work, Finnegans Wake (1939), is often considered alienatingly indecipherable. In it Joyce mutates words into multilingual puns, attempting to recreate (or at least to suggest) the flood of images and cross-references encountered in dreams. The resultant novel is a technical accomplishment of merit, yet one in which the plot is, for many readers, incomprehensible. Joyce never visited North America, nor is that continent a significant element in his writings. Yet Joyce has several important connections to the United States, as he received irreplaceable support from several Americans. His most prominent benefactor was the poet Ezra Pound, who promoted Joyce to publishers with his characteristic volcanic generosity. His most important American acquaintance, however, was the bookseller Sylvia Beach. She not only befriended Joyce, but also published Ulysses from her Paris bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, and then advanced him funds from the proceeds in his frequent periods of insolvency. Finally, Joyce made legal history in the United States, as Ulysses was at the center of an important legal case, The United States v. One Book Entitled Ulysses. This 1933 decision, which held that Ulysses was not obscene and was therefore not legally excludable from the United States, has continued to influence American legal discrimination between artistry and obscenity. Andrew Goodspeed
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484 JOYCE, JAMES AUGUSTINE ALOYSIUS See also: BEACH, Sylvia; COLUM, Mary; COLUM, Padraic; ELLMANN, Richard David; GOGARTY, Oliver St. John; HUSTON, John; RESEARCH COLLECTIONS, IRISH, IN CANADA; RESEARCH COLLECTIONS, IRISH, IN THE UNITED STATES
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References Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Joyce, Stanislaus. My Brother’s Keeper. London: Faber and Faber, 1958. McCourt, John. The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste. Dublin: Lilliput, 2001.
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K KEARNS,THOMAS (1862–1918) Born in Oxford County, Ontario, the fourth child of recently arrived Irish Catholic immigrant parents, Thomas Kearns moved with his family to the IrishAmerican agricultural colony of O’Neill, Nebraska, when he was seven or eight. His education was limited to grammar school. He left the family farm at 17 to work as a prospector and teamster in the Black Hills, Tombstone (Arizona), and Tintic (Utah) mining areas, before settling in the silver mining town of Park City, Utah, in 1883. Upon arriving in Park City, Kearns went to work in its Ontario Mine as a shaft man and mucker, while self-studying geology and mineralogy in the evenings and prospecting on his own. In late 1888 he became a tunneling contractor for a new mine, where he soon observed that its vein of silver ore came from the direction of an adjacent abandoned property. He quickly leased the abandoned property with partners, and by early 1889 they had struck silver. Noticing that the silver vein in the newly leased property similarly came from the direction of other properties, Kearns acquired them, too, and with his partners organized the Silver King Mining Company in 1892. The Silver King soon became one of the West’s
most profitable silver mines, making Kearns and his remaining partner multimillionaires. Kearns himself managed the Silver King mine, which featured state-of-the-art equipment, including a 7,300-foot aerial tramway taking buckets of silver-lead concentrate from the mine to railway cars near Park City’s rail station. Another feature was excellent employer-employee relations. Kearns and his partner refused to cooperate with other mine owners who sought to lower wage rates when silver prices fell in 1897. They recognized their employees’ comparative seniority and how many dependents they had when making necessary layoffs, and they created their own form of in-house workers’ compensation. During the tempestuous 1890s, there were no strikes at the Silver King. Kearns’s mining interests further expanded in 1907 when the Silver King was combined with other mines as part of the newly formed Silver King Coalition Mining Co. Kearns used some of his millions to build a French Renaissance mansion for himself, his wife (the former Jennie Judge), and his three children, on Salt Lake City’s South Temple Street. Their home, which now houses Utah’s governor, included nine turrets, nine fireplaces, and a bowling alley. Kearns also became involved in other
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businesses, organizing a railway between Salt Lake City and Southern California with other western business and political figures in 1900, acquiring Salt Lake City’s largest newspaper—the Tribune—in 1901, and financing an 11-story office building— still called the Kearns Building—to house Utah’s leading corporations. Kearns’s political career began with his election as a Park City alderman in 1893. He was chair of the committee on mines and mining at Utah’s 1895 constitutional convention, held in anticipation of Utah’s 1896 statehood, where he successfully sponsored a constitutional provision establishing an eight-hour day for persons working on public works, together with an instruction to Utah’s first legislature to pass occupational health and safety laws protecting factory, mine, and smelter workers. Kearns joined other western delegates in leaving the 1896 Republican National Convention after it endorsed the gold standard and refused a proposed plank calling for the free coinage of silver. He then joined other independent or “silver” Republicans in campaigning for Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, who easily carried Utah in 1896. Kearns was a delegate to the Republican National Convention again in 1900. That year he supported the Republican’s national ticket of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Kearns was elected by Utah’s legislature to a vacant U.S. Senate seat in 1901, after 22 ballots, with the support of the Latterday Saints (LDS or Mormon) church’s president. His senate candidacy was controversial because of concerns over his rough manner and knowledge level (he had described Alaska as an island and Utah’s rivers as flowing into the Gulf of Mexico) and an www.abc-clio.com
1897 lawsuit by a woman who claimed he had fathered her child. He was elected, in large part, because of LDS influence. Kearns served in the Senate for four years, during which he advocated reclaiming agricultural lands, expanding Utah’s Fort Douglas, and making part of northwestern Arizona Territory a part of Utah. He was, however, defeated when he sought reelection in 1905. He had angered LDS leaders by opposing LDS businessman and apostle Reed Smoot, a fellow organizer of the Salt Lake and Los Angeles Railroad, in Utah’s 1903 U.S. Senate election— although Smoot had stepped aside at the urging of LDS leaders to allow Kearns’s election in 1901. He had also upset Utah’s sugar industry by supporting a sugar reciprocity agreement for Cuban sugar. His successor in the Senate was George Sutherland, another non-Mormon, who later became a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Kearns remained active in politics until 1912. Bitter over his reelection defeat, and despite his LDS support in 1901, he lashed out at LDS leaders as having too much statewide political and economic influence and in speeches and on the pages of his Salt Lake Tribune accused some of them of continuing polygamous relationships. He became a supporter of the antiLDS American Party, which held municipal offices in Salt Lake City from 1905 through 1911, but then disbanded. Kearns returned to the Republican Party, supporting President Taft for reelection in 1912, and cutting back the Tribune’s anti-LDS rhetoric. Kearns spent his last years tending to his business interests. He died in 1918 after being hit by a car while crossing through downtown Salt Lake City’s main intersection. Steven B. Jacobson
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KELLY, GENE 487 References Alexander, Thomas G. Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-Day Saints, 1890–1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Alexander, Thomas G., and James B. Allen. Mormons and Gentiles: A History of Salt Lake City. Boulder, CO: Pruett Publishing Company, 1984. Bringhurst, Newell G. “Thomas Kearns: IrishAmerican Builder of Modern Utah.” Journal of the West 31 (April 1992): 24–32. Malmquist, O. N. The First Hundred Years: A History of the Salt Lake Tribune, 1871–1971. Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1971. Peterson, Richard H.,The Bonanza Kings: The Social Origins and Business Behavior of Western Mining Entrepreneurs, 1870–1900. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977. Poll, Richard D., ed. Utah’s History. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1978. Thompson, George A., and Fraser Buck. Treasure Mountain Home: A Centennial History of Park City, Utah. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1968.
KELLY, GENE (1912–1996) Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1912 to parents of Irish descent, Eugene Curran Kelly started early in show business, appearing with his siblings as the Five Kellys. They sang and tap-danced while their mother Harriet served as their manager and booked their appearances. Young Gene soon became an expert dancer. By the age of 16, Harriet Kelly had opened two locations of the Gene Kelly Studio of Dance, where Gene taught pupils for 50 cents a lesson. Gene was now appearing with his brother Fred, billed as the Kelly Brothers. After graduating high school, he was educated at Penn State College and the University of Pittsburgh. He left for New York City in 1938. His first big break came that year when he appeared in the chorus of a Broadway show called Leave it to Me. In 1940 he www.abc-clio.com
Entertainer Gene Kelly in mid-air dance step. Best known for his role in Singin’ in the Rain, Kelly was an extremely talented and versatile entertainer in the twentieth century. (Library of Congress)
choreographed Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshow and had a starring role in a show called Pal Joey. In 1941, he choreographed a Broadway musical, Best Foot Forward. His first film appearance was in 1942, when he costarred with Judy Garland in For Me and My Gal. He rose in popularity during the 1940s after signing a contract with MetroGoldwyn-Mayer (MGM). After a stint in the military during World War II, he returned to Hollywood, more popular than ever. Along with Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly was considered among the top American dancers of the era. His dance routines were the highlights of his films, imaginatively choreographed and visually interesting. In 1945, Kelly was nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award for his role in the musical Anchors Aweigh (opposite Frank Sinatra). In 1946 he appeared in Ziegfeld
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Follies. In 1949, Kelly was the star, choreographer, and codirector of On the Town. In 1951, he appeared in An American in Paris, which showcased a 17-minute dance sequence. He was awarded a special Oscar for his work in that film. Perhaps his most famous film role was in the 1952 musical Singin’ in the Rain, which he codirected and co-choreographed. That film contained a lavish 14-minute dance sequence called “Broadway Ballet.” That sequence alone cost about $6 million to make, but the film was still a great moneymaker for MGM and is today considered one of the best musicals ever made. Kelly continued to appear in films after that, but by the end of the 1950s the decline of the musical led to fewer roles. His last MGM film was in 1957. In 1962, he appeared in Going My Way, a short-lived television situation comedy based on a 1944 film starring Bing Crosby. He was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1973’s drama Forty Carats. He remained in the spotlight for 1974’s That’s Entertainment and 1976’s That’s Entertainment, Part II, compilation films that he co-narrated. Richard Panchyk References Hay, Peter. MGM: When the Lion Roars. Atlanta: Turner Publishing, 1991. Karney, Robin, ed. The Movie Stars Story. New York: Crescent Books, 1984. Yudkoff, Alvin. Gene Kelly: A Life of Dance and Dreams. New York: Back Stage Books, 1999.
KELLY, GEORGE “MACHINE GUN” (CA. 1897–1954) George Kelly Barnes, who later became one of the most notorious gangsters in American history, is variously reported as having been born in 1895, 1897, and 1900. It is agreed that he was born in Memphis, Tennessee, www.abc-clio.com
to a prosperous middle-class family. Although he began criminal activities early in his life, particularly running liquor, he was nonetheless able to enroll in the predecessor institution of what is now Mississippi State University. He studied agriculture. Kelly continued a minor criminal career, including bank robbery and illegal liquor distribution, throughout the 1920s. He was apprehended several times and served sentences for punishment at both Leavenworth Penitentiary and the State Penitentiary in New Mexico. At some point in the late 1920s he met Kathryn Thorne who, although she was romantically involved with another small-time criminal, spotted George’s potential and began dating him regularly. They subsequently married. It is thought that it was she who bought him a machine gun, urged him to master it, and to promote himself as “Machine Gun” Kelly. This self-promotion scheme worked, and the public became fascinated and alarmed by the notion of a master machine gunner. He enjoyed the peculiar allure of a notorious criminal and eventually became Public Enemy Number One in the United States. On July 22, 1933, Kelly and Thorne perpetrated their most daring criminal action when they kidnapped one of the wealthiest citizens of Oklahoma City, Charles Urschel. They held him for ransom for more than a week and, when paid, released him near Norman, Oklahoma. Unfortunately for them, Urschel proved to be a cunning and attentive hostage; he was able to provide the authorities with good information about where Kelly and Thorne had taken him and where they might be heading. That information, combined with a trace run on the numbers of the money they were given, resulted in their apprehension by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
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George “Machine Gun” Kelly, handcuffed and shackled, is led under heavy guard in 1933 from Shelby County Jail to Oklahoma City to be tried for the kidnapping of Charles F. Urschel. (Library of Congress)
agents in cooperation with the Tennessee State Police. According to FBI lore, Kelly cried out to the arresting officers some variation of the phrase “Don’t shoot, G-men” (for government men), an appellation for FBI agents that the bureau happily appropriated. The story is likely untrue, but Kelly is still widely attributed with coining—or at least popularizing—the term. Kelly was sentenced to Leavenworth penitentiary in 1933, but was soon transferred to the famous prison island of Alcatraz, near the city of San Francisco. There he led an incongruously decorous life, earning the reputation of a model prisoner. He even served, for a time, as an altar boy in the prison chapel. He was retransferred back to www.abc-clio.com
Leavenworth in 1951, where he died of a heart attack on July 17, 1954. Kelly was not notable for his interest in, or contribution to, Irish-American relations. Only by heredity can he be considered a significant figure in Irish life in America. Yet he is perhaps the most notorious criminal figure in the life of Irish America, and was, for a time, the most wanted man in the nation. Andrew Goodspeed References Breuer, William. J. Edgar Hoover and His G-Men. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995. Burrough, Bryan. Public Enemies. New York: Penguin, 2004. Hamilton, Stanley. Machine Gun Kelly’s Last Stand. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2003.
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490 KELLY, GRACE Hoover, J. Edgar. Persons in Hiding. Boston: Little, Brown, 1938. Johnston, James A. Alcatraz Prison and the Men Who Live There. New York: Scribners, 1949.
KELLY, GRACE (1929–1982) Grace Patricia Kelly was born on November 12, 1929, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Irish Catholic John Brandon Kelly, Sr., who made his fortune in bricklaying, and his athletic wife, Margaret Majer Kelly. Kelly had one brother, John, and two sisters, Lizanne and Peggy. She was educated at the Academy of the Assumption at Ravenhill, Philadelphia, from 1934 to 1943. She graduated from the Stevens School in Germantown in May 1947. Thereafter she enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. She refused her father’s financial support and accepted modeling and television assignments. Kelly’s beauty and innate regal bearing worked to her advantage. She made her stage debut in a 1949 Broadway production, The Father, and her first film role was in Fourteen Hours. She gained considerable recognition in 1952 for her role as the wife of Gary Cooper’s character in High Noon. She signed a contract with MetroGoldwyn-Mayer and appeared as Linda Nordley in Mogambo, with Clark Gable and Ava Gardner, for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Alfred Hitchcock selected Kelly for roles in Dial M for Murder and Rear Window in 1954. She won the Best Actress Academy Award for her role as Georgie Elgin in The Country Girl, also in 1954. That same year she also played in Green Fire, and she appeared in The Bridges at Toki Ri and another Hitchcock film, To Catch a Thief, in 1955. www.abc-clio.com
Kelly met His Serene Highness Prince Rainier III (1928–2005) of Monaco on a publicity stunt during the Cannes Film Festival in 1955. The couple began a secret long-distance relationship. In 1956 she completed The Swan and High Society. Her duet with Bing Crosby, “True Love,” reached platinum status. Kelly is listed as 13th on the American Film Institute’s list of the greatest actresses of the classic era. On April 25, 1956, Kelly married Prince Rainier at the St. Nicholas Cathedral in Monaco. She gave up her film career to concentrate on being Monaco’s princess and raising a family. The couple had three children: Caroline Louise Marguerite was born on January 23, 1957; the heir to the throne, Albert Alexandre Louis Pierre, was born on March 14, 1958; and Stephanie Marie Elisabeth was born on February 1, 1965. As Princess Grace, she focused her energies on enhancing the principality. She established foundations, charities, and public buildings and supported the arts. Her constant media presence put Monaco on the world stage. She never acted again. Instead she gave poetry readings in aid of charitable causes. Her 1977 narration of the documentary Children of Theatre Street was well received. On September 12, 1982, Princess Grace and Princess Stephanie were returning to the palace after leaving the family farm Roc Agel, in the French mountains above Monaco. As Kelly was negotiating the last tricky hairpin curve of the Moyenne Corniche, she suffered a stroke, causing her vehicle to veer off the road. She was gravely injured, and Stephanie suffered minor back injuries. Princess Grace died after two days on life support. Her funeral was attended by luminaries from across the world and was televised globally. The sympathy for
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the grief-stricken Prince Rainier was astounding, but he never recovered from the shock. Princess Grace helped her husband revolutionize Monaco’s image; it is now an inviting country in which to conduct business and a delight to visit. Princess Grace is buried in St. Nicholas Cathedral in Monaco, the site of her wedding. Annette Richardson References Bradford, Sarah. Princess Grace. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984. Edwards, Anne. The Grimaldis of Monaco: The Centuries of Scandal, the Years of Grace. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1992. Eglund, Steven. Grace of Monaco: An Interpretive Biography. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1984. Robinson, Jeffrey. Rainier and Grace: An Intimate Portrait. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989. Taraborelli, J. Randy. Once Upon a Time: Behind the Fairy Tale of Princess Grace and Prince Rainier. New York: Rose Books, 2003.
KELLY, “HONEST” JOHN (1822–1886) Born on April 21, 1822, in New York City to poor Irish immigrant parents, John Kelly received little formal education. He worked from an early age, eventually prospering as a stone cutter. The religious Kelly was also an amateur boxer and actor. Drawn to politics, he joined Tammany Hall, the New York City Democratic Party machine. After a stint as an alderman, Kelly served two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, during which time he was the only Roman Catholic in Congress. In 1858 he left Congress to become the county sheriff, a position rich in patronage and financial rewards. Although Kelly was part of the leadership of Tammany Hall, he did not support www.abc-clio.com
Boss William Tweed. Kelly disapproved of Tweed’s extravagant corruption. After the deaths of his wife and son and a bitter quarrel with Tweed, Kelly resigned as sheriff in 1868 and took a tour of Europe. The exposure of the corruption of the Tweed ring led to the boss’s loss of political control of Tammany Hall. Kelly quickly emerged as the new leader because he was one of the few city Democrats who had no involvement in Tweed’s corruption. Kelly systematically removed known Tweed supporters from important positions and courted reformers. Kelly rationalized the political system he inherited and firmly established centralized control in his own hands. To hold the system together, Kelly replaced the Tweed method of corrupt business contracts with a greater reliance on political patronage. To pay for campaigns Kelly instituted a system of assessments from candidates and civil servants who owed their jobs to political connections. For the day, it was a standard, although controversial, practice used by both parties. Controlling two newspapers, Kelly ensured that he had direct communications with the grassroots voters. He was the first Catholic and Irish leader of Tammany Hall and permanently oriented its focus to the growing immigrant population. The strength and weakness of Kelly’s leadership was his attempt to win over the reformist elements inside the Democratic Party with some modest changes. He invited leading reformers to become members of Tammany. This policy aided him in making Tammany Hall stronger in the wake of the Tweed scandals than it had been before. A testament to Kelly’s leadership was his avoidance of scandal during his reign as boss. At the same time, however, he never did enough to satisfy the reformers and
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angered many of his own supporters who viewed him as giving away too much in search of approval that never came. This tension was no more evident than during the depression of 1877, when Kelly sided with the reformers and their policy of fiscal retrenchment while the Tammany faithful called for government-financed public works projects to put the unemployed to work. To the chagrin of many of his supporters, when Kelly received the appointment of comptroller of New York City he refused to open the treasury. If he disappointed his supporters, he still failed to win over the Protestant reformers, many of whom harbored xenophobic contempt for the Irish Catholics of Tammany Hall. Governor Tilden proposed an amendment to the state constitution that would have established a board to oversee all the city’s financial transactions. Although Kelly successfully defeated the measure, he did so at a great cost. Kelly showed his anger in 1878 when he stormed out of the Democratic state convention with the entire Tammany Hall delegation in tow. Kelly was able to broker a deal with the reformers in 1880, but it was only a temporary rapprochement. Kelly convinced the reformers to support his choice of mayor, William Grace, the first Roman Catholic to hold that office. However, Grace turned out to govern completely independently of Tammany Hall, which infuriated Kelly. In 1884, Kelly did what he could to defeat both Grace and the Democratic presidential candidate, Grover Cleveland, another anti-Tammany reformer. When both candidates won their respective elections, Kelly became a bitter and broken man. He effectively retired from politics and passed the torch to Richard Croker, a
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protégé he had groomed for the position. Kelly died on June 1, 1886. Gregory J. Dehler References Allen, Oliver. The Tiger: The Rise and Fall of Tammany Hall. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1993. Genen, Arthur. “John Kelly: New York’s First Irish Boss.” PhD dissertation, New York University, 1971. Mandlebaum, Seymour J. Boss Tweed’s New York. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1965. Werner, M. R. Tammany Hall. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, and Co., 1928.
KENNEDY FAMILY The Kennedy family dominated IrishAmerican politics for most of the twentieth century and continued to be influential into the twenty-first. The first prominent representative was John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald (1863–1950). A well-educated banker, Fitzgerald could not resist the lure of Boston ward politics. He served two terms as mayor of Boston but failed in comeback races for Congress, the Senate, and the governorship. Nevertheless, his high visibility in the Irish community guaranteed fast political tracks for his grandsons. In 1914 his daughter Rose (1890–1995) married Joseph P. Kennedy (1888–1969), the Harvard-educated son of a wealthy liquor dealer. Joe built the family fortune with brilliant forays into banking, shipbuilding, motion pictures, real estate, and (just before prohibition ended) a heavy investment in upscale imported liquor. He moved the family base from Boston to New York in 1927, where it remained until his son John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917–1963) returned to Boston in 1946. Joe was noted for his fierce devotion to promoting his children, his notorious love affairs, his ruthless
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business dealings, and his major roles in the New Deal. He built the new Securities and Exchange Commission into a powerful watchdog of Wall Street. Joe reached the pinnacle of esteem as ambassador to the Court of St. James (1938–1940), cruising elegantly in the highest circles of London society, in contrast to his maligned reputation in American high society. His daughter Kathleen (1920–1948), became Marchioness of Hartington when she married the heir to a dukedom; she later died in a plane crash. Recalled as ambassador because of his isolationism and support for Chamberlain’s appeasement of Germany, Joe nevertheless endorsed Franklin Roosevelt in the critical 1940 election. Unlike Al Smith and other prominent Irishmen, he refused to attack Roosevelt and thereby preserved presidential options for his sons. Joe was increasingly isolated after 1941, keeping his distance from the clubhouse politicians who clustered around Honey Fitz, as well as the Yankee businessmen he thought had denied him entry into the most elite Harvard circles. His business enterprises flourished, and he established daughter Eunice (1921–) in Chicago, where her husband Sargent Shriver (1915–) operated the family’s giant office building, the Merchandise Mart. Although Shriver led the antipoverty programs in President Johnson’s Great Society and was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 1972, as an in-law he never broke into the inner circle. The Chicago ties paid off handsomely when Mayor Richard J. Daley, boss of the city’s powerful Democratic machine, enthusiastically supported the Kennedys’ national political campaigns. Realizing his leadership status as one of the half dozen most powerful Irishmen in America, Joe played up his ties
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with Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York and with the nation’s most prominent Irish Republican, Senator Joseph McCarthy, even encouraging the bachelor senator to date his daughters. Joe and Rose instilled remarkably high levels of solidarity and competitiveness in their four sons and five daughters. Rosemary (1918–2005) was mentally retarded and institutionalized, which led to family involvement in numerous charities, such as the Special Olympics for athletes with disabilities. Of the sons, only Robert (1925–1968) followed his mother in becoming a devout Catholic with high moral standards regarding sexual behavior; he fathered 11 children. Joe never ran for office himself but devoted his political ambitions to putting Joseph Jr. (1915–1944) in the White House. But Joseph Jr. died before his father achieved his ambition; his Navy bomber exploded on a combat mission in Europe in 1944, and he became the first of many Kennedys to die violently. John (1917–1963) then became heir apparent, returning to Boston to take a seat in Congress in 1946 and defeating the prototypical Yankee, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., in 1952. Robert entered politics as an aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy, but he built his reputation as an aide to Senator Kennedy in highly publicized investigations into racketeering in the Teamsters Union, the largest labor union and one that had broken with the Democratic phalanx of the AFL-CIO unions. John Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1960 was a family affair, funded by the father and orchestrated by Robert. John preferred Ivy League policy advisers, but unlike his father he enjoyed the give and take of Massachusetts politics and built a largely Irish team of
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campaigners, headed by Larry O’Brien and Kenneth O’Donnell. The new president shook off nepotism charges and appointed his brother Robert attorney general in 1961. Meanwhile, First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (1929–1994) added fresh glamour to the family, even as she disdained the roughhousing of her in-laws. John Kennedy’s 1963 assassination turned him into a martyr and, indeed, a saint in the Catholic community. It also shifted the glare of publicity away from Joe (who had suffered an incapacitating stroke) and John’s surviving children, and onto widow Jacqueline. She remarried in 1968 to Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, and became in her own right a celebrity who overshadowed her in-laws. Robert, increasingly at odds with President Lyndon Johnson, resigned his cabinet post in 1964 to run for the Senate from New York. In 1968 he broke decisively with Johnson on the issue of the Vietnam War. Liberals who had long distrusted this former McCarthyite rallied to his side, fighting not just the forces of Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, but also those of Eugene McCarthy, an Irish senator who claimed primacy in the antiwar movement. Multiple chasms opened in the Democratic Party: the intellectual and radical student wings supported McCarthy, the conservative southern whites rallied to George Wallace, and Kennedy and Humphrey battled for control of the bluecollar white ethnics and the African-American voters. At the climax of a bruising, nasty, and often violent primary season Robert won the decisive California primary, but he was assassinated immediately after leaving the podium where he claimed victory. In the presidential election, the Irish Catholic vote splintered for the first time, www.abc-clio.com
showing that at long last the iron grip of the Democratic Party had been permanently broken. Edward (Ted) Kennedy (b. 1932) became the head of the Kennedy family and, to the surprise of critics who saw him as shallow and indecisive, emerged as the most successful politician in the family’s history. Entering the Senate in 1962, Ted succeeded because of his ability to build coalitions inside the Democratic Party and, on occasion, with Republicans. As a tireless campaigner and powerful orator, he used the family reputation to solidify his position as the strongest figure on the left of the Democratic Party. His own presidential aspirations collapsed in 1969 when he drove an automobile off a bridge, watching helplessly as his lady companion Mary Jo Kopechne drowned. When he finally did seek the nomination in 1980, he was badly outmaneuvered by incumbent president Jimmy Carter. The old city machines were long gone, the Irish were divided politically, and they no longer acknowledged a Kennedy as automatically entitled to a presidential nomination. Scandals and tragedy tarnished the third generation of Kennedys, Joe’s grandchildren. Two died in violent accidents, another of a drug overdose; one was acquitted in a highly publicized rape trial; an in-law was convicted of murder. Worst of all the younger generation did poorly at politics; none could move higher than the federal House of Representatives. The first woman in the family to run for high office, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (b. 1951) lost the traditional Democratic stronghold of Maryland when she ran for governor in 2002. Fresh blood was needed, and although the family had never promoted its in-laws, they were astonished to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican husband
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of Maria Shriver Schwarzenegger (b. 1951), seize the governorship of California in 2003 and emerge as the dominant politician on the West Coast. Richard Jensen See also: BOSTON; KENNEDY, John Fitzgerald; MASSACHUSETTS; McCARTHY, Joseph References Kearns Goodwin, Doris. The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. O’Brien, Michael. John F. Kennedy: A Biography. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2005. Smith, Amanda, ed. Hostage of Fortune: The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy. New York: Viking, 2001.
KENNEDY, JOHN FITZGERALD (1917–1963) John Fitzgerald Kennedy (often referred to as JFK) is widely regarded as the most important Irish-American figure in recent history. Educated at private schools and (following in the footsteps of numerous relatives) Harvard University, he was an indifferent student until the war in Europe focused his attention. Extensive interviews with major British politicians and observers led to an unusually precocious senior thesis that became an influential book: Why England Slept (1940). As second son in the Kennedy family, John was marked for an intellectual career as a writer or journalist, and his older brother Joseph was slated for politics by their hypermanipulative father, Joseph P. Kennedy. Yet the elder brother’s death in combat, combined with JFK’s heroic war record, set the stage for his political debut as a congressional candidate in 1946. Although the father had abandoned Boston, JFK’s return to the city restored the family’s traditional power base among www.abc-clio.com
the large and powerful Irish-American community in Massachusetts. Strong family connections with the Chicago Irish political community (led by Mayor Richard J. Daley) augmented his national Catholic base. JFK always had two sets of advisers, an inner circle of Irish politicians who planned his campaigns, and a Protestant-Jewish coterie of intellectuals (mostly from Harvard) who promoted his stature as the intellectual in politics. That image was solidified by the Pulitzer Prize awarded his book Profiles in Courage (1956). JFK possessed powerful assets: his ability as an excellent speaker and glib commentator on major issues, a middle-of-the-road political record that offended no one, strong expertise in foreign policy, articulate anticommunism, unfailing charm and stage presence, a national network of Irish allies, a Catholic base that comprised a fourth of the electorate, and an immense purse that was ready to fund his ambitions, not to mention innumerable relatives who campaigned endlessly on his behalf. JFK fought his way into the Senate in 1952 by defeating incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., the archetypical Yankee. With the national Democratic Party leaderless, JFK largely ignored the old-boy Senate (controlled by his rival Lyndon Johnson) to display his talents through newspaper and television interviews, magazine articles, and highly publicized speeches to Democratic Party gatherings in every part of the country. Aided by his closest adviser, his brother Robert, JFK appealed to conservatives by tolerating Joe McCarthy and instead launching relentless attacks on corrupt labor leaders, especially Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters. Many liberal Democrats, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, distrusted JFK, primarily because they could never forget his father’s break with Franklin
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Roosevelt or the family’s support for McCarthy. Yet with the fading away of Adlai Stevenson, liberals lacked a viable candidate of their own. By 1960 JFK was the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, and the biggest question remaining was whether his Catholic base of support would be outweighed by antiCatholicism of the sort that hurt Al Smith so badly in 1928. Of course prohibition was no longer an issue, and fear of Tammany-like bossism had faded away with the demise of most big city machines. The Kennedy juggernaut defeated rival Hubert Humphrey in the West Virginia primary, a state with so much poverty and so few Catholics that party leaders were convinced they had a winner. Kennedy won over the party’s intellectuals by his effective academic connections, while shaming doubters by a brilliant performance before the Protestant ministers of Houston. There he enunciated the position that he did not speak for the Catholic Church on matters of religion, and it did not speak for him on public affairs. He was able to take that position because there were no high-intensity moral issues such as abortion before the public. Although JFK’s religiosity consisted of nominal attendance at Sunday Mass, he excited tens of millions of Catholics who saw his election as president as confirmation of their full recognition as true Americans. With eight of 10 Catholics voting for Kennedy, he ran up majorities in ethnic strongholds like Chicago that barely provided the margin of victory against Richard Nixon. Apart from a few pockets of antipopery among some Midwestern Lutherans and Southern Baptists, fears of Catholicism had largely disappeared from the voting booth. President Kennedy was primarily interested in foreign policy. Weeks after his memorable inaugural address sounded the bell for www.abc-clio.com
vigorous anticommunism, he encountered disaster when his invasion of Cuba failed, and he was forced to ransom thousands of soldiers who were captured by Fidel Castro. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, sensing weakness, pushed hard on the Berlin issue, and was able to build the Berlin Wall despite Kennedy’s anguished rhetoric, “Ich bin ein Berliner!” Khrushchev and Castro went too far in 1962, secretly setting up mediumrange missiles in Cuba equipped with nuclear warheads that threatened the southeast United States as far inland as Atlanta. In his greatest moment, Kennedy rejected invasion plans but imposed a blockade and demanded that the missiles be removed immediately. Khrushchev publicly backed down, but privately got Kennedy to remove American missiles from Turkey, while Castro secured the promise that the United States would never invade his island. The Cuban Missile Crisis reversed JFK’s image of ineptness in foreign policy, but his quiet, continuous escalation of military involvement in Vietnam set the stage for the whirlwind reaped by his successor. As a senator, JFK had shown limited interest in domestic affairs apart from labor union corruption. As president he ignored that issue. Working with his high-powered economic advisers he proposed a Keynesian program to stimulate the economy, not by higher spending but by tax cuts, but none of his domestic policy initiatives went anywhere. Congress was effectively controlled by a conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats; the alignment remained unchanged after the status-quo midterm elections of 1962. A new issue that Kennedy had not anticipated blazed into view as the civil rights movement in the South, led by Martin Luther King, produced dramatic confrontations with segregationist Democrats, especially Governor George
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Wallace of Alabama and Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi. A month before the 1962 election, Kennedy sent federal marshals and army military police to enforce a federal court order that African-American student James Meredith be admitted to the University of Mississippi. Violent resistance by townspeople left two civilians dead, hundreds injured, and 166 federal agents injured. The confrontation in Alabama in 1963 was nonviolent and boosted Wallace’s visibility as a leader of southern Democrats. JFK ignored the risks to his southern base and spoke out in favor of civil rights legislation, but as in so many instances, no legislation was passed. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 was a stunning shock to all Americans. The Irish Catholic community took it hard, and immediately elevated JFK to a sort of sainthood status, celebrating the miracle that he had liberated them from second-class citizenship. Lyndon Johnson claimed Kennedy’s mantle, and pushed through most of the legislation that had languished for three years, together with new initiatives of his own. He successfully retained the Catholic base JFK had fostered, but that was the last hurrah. By 1966 Catholics started showing their disillusionment with Johnson, who never recovered from the wave after wave of urban riots that followed his civil rights bills, nor from the disillusionment of the intellectuals with his Vietnam policy. With the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968, and the failure of Ted Kennedy to recover his brothers’ national base, the Kennedy legacy increasingly became the romantic memory of Camelot. Disclosures of JFK’s astonishing sexual involvements and detailed reports of his multiple grave medical problems fascinated the public in recent years but failed to break the myth that if only JFK www.abc-clio.com
had lived his second term would have been a story of political triumphs that would restore the people’s faith in their government. Richard Jensen See also: AMERICAN IRELAND FUND; BOSTON; CATHOLIC CHURCH, The; CLINTON, William Jefferson; DE VALERA, Eamon; EIRE SOCIETY OF BOSTON, The; ETHNIC AND RACE RELATIONS (IRISH AND AFRICAN AMERICANS); KENNEDY FAMILY; MASSACHUSETTS; McCARTHY, Joseph; O’NEILL, Thomas “Tip,” Jr. References Dallek, Robert. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 2003. Maier, Thomas. The Kennedys: America’s Emerald Kings. New York: Basic Books, 2003. O’Brien, Michael. John F. Kennedy: A Biography. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2005. Parmet, Herbert S. JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy. New York: Dial Press, 1983.
KENTUCKY Although the Irish are recorded as being present in Kentucky from the earliest days, it was in the years around the American Revolution that they first rose to prominence in the state’s history. When the explorer Daniel Boone established Fort Boonesboro on the banks of the Kentucky River, some Irish were documented as being appointed trustees of the settlement. In the years before the Declaration of Independence the Scots-Irish in Kentucky began to play an increasingly important role in the leadership of the independence movement in the state. However, their influence in Kentucky was quite limited because of the isolated and fragmented nature of their settlements. When Harrod’s Fort was founded by Captain James Harrod in 1774, a number of Irish Catholic families
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were there. In 1792, the first Catholic church in Kentucky was built by Irish settlers at Pottinger’s Creek. By 1811, a Frenchman, Benedict Joseph Flaget, had been appointed the first bishop of Kentucky. With the establishment of Catholic settlements in the state, which were frequently populated by people with Irish surnames, there was an increase in the number of Catholic churches being built. In 1821 St. Mary’s College was founded and managed by Father William Byrne, who had been born in Co. Wicklow, Ireland. He ran the school for 12 years, during which time the school educated more than 1,000 children, including John Spalding, who later became the second bishop of Louisville and archbishop of Baltimore. Following Father Byrne’s death from cholera in 1833, the school was taken over by the Jesuits. In 1848, the Trappist monastery, the Abbey of Gethsemani, was founded in Nelson County, Kentucky. The land the monastery was built on had originally been donated to the monastery by the Sisters of Loretto. The monastery had a strong Irish presence: of the 176 monks who entered between 1848 and 1948, 32 monks were born in Ireland and 18 were of Irish descent. After the Great Famine in Ireland some Irish Catholics settled in Kentucky. Although their numbers were not on the scale of other states, they performed manual labor, mostly working in construction as stonemasons building fences but also as farm laborers and railroad workers. The ScotsIrish and Irish have also played an important role in horse breeding, for which Kentucky has become famous. Samuel Riddle was the Scots-Irish owner of Man O’War, who was regarded by many as the best racehorse ever. He also owned War Admiral, a horse who won the Triple Crown in 1937. An Irishman, Price McGrath, was the winner www.abc-clio.com
of the first Kentucky Derby, which was held in 1875. The home of the famed Kentucky Derby, Churchill Downs, was built by Matt J. Winn, who was the son of Patrick and Julia Flaherty, both of whom were of Irish ancestry. There has also been much speculation as to the links between Kentucky mountain music and Irish and Scottish traditional music. In spite of the relatively thin history of the Irish in Kentucky compared with other states—even other states in the South—in recent times there has been a growing awareness of Irish ancestry on the part of people living in Kentucky. In the 1990 census conducted in the state, 696,000 people, out of a total state population of 3.6 million, claimed to be of Irish ancestry. Kentucky’s newspapers have made an important contribution to the state’s documentation of its Irish demographic and ethnic activities. Chief among these is the Kentucky Irish American newspaper, established in 1898 by William M. Higgins. The paper was originally a four-page weekly, and its chief readership was the Irish community in Louisville, Kentucky. The paper flourished until 1968; its last issue is dated November 30, 1968. Issues of the Kentucky Irish American are preserved in microfilm at the University of Louisville Archives, Louisville, Kentucky. David Doyle
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References Clark, Thomas D. The Rampaging Frontier: Manners and Humors of Pioneer Days in the South and Middle West. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1939. Mattingly, Sister Mary Ramona. The Catholic Church on the Kentucky Frontier 1785–1812. Washington, DC: University of America, 1936. McLaughlin, Raymond F. “Kentucky.” The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, edited by Michael Glazier. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1999. special.library.louisville.edu/ 1-800-368-6868
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KEOUGH, DONALD R. (1926–) Horatio Alger could not have spun a better story than that of Donald R. Keough. The business legend grew up in the golden cornfields of northwest Iowa; within 30 years he was comfortable in corporate boardrooms in New York City. He helped mastermind what Forbes calls “one of the greatest growth stocks ever, the world’s best known brand—Coca Cola.” An inspiration to the Irish and Irish Americans, Keough’s long career is a dual model of ethical business practice and Irish studies patronage. In a December 15, 2005 interview, musing over his principles as a business leader, Keough said, “Maintaining a competitive, nervous edge is not only very Irish, it’s good for business. My associates and I at The Coca Cola Company had a huge challenge, absolutely daunting: we had to maintain sales around the world in one product over several decades of changing consumer tastes and demographics . . . and we did it. We had to change and adapt, just like Ireland now. And that whole process in Ireland is just starting up. It’s a fascinating situation, a whole new paradigm for that special island.” Keough is president emeritus of one of the world’s largest and most iconic multinational companies. His management record has drawn respectful attention from business leaders throughout the globe. When he accepted the 1993 Gold Medal of honor from the American Irish Historical Society in New York City, Keough observed, “It’s often been said that Ireland’s national emblem, the shamrock, is a good teaching tool because it’s all about unity in diversity. www.abc-clio.com
Donald Keough is president emeritus of The Coca Cola Company, Atlanta, Georgia, and also chairman of the board of Allen & Company, Inc., New York City. His patronage of Irish Studies resulted in the founding of educational institutes in Dublin and at Notre Dame University, Indiana. (Foster & Associates, Atlanta, 1994. With kind permission.)
How true! Why, a few decades ago, Ireland was but a spit of land in the Atlantic, a tiny exclamation mark. Who went there? A few ardent Irish Americans seeking their roots, I suppose, but it was mostly tourists who visited, tourists curious about ‘the Ol’ Sod’ or needing to play a little golf at Smurfit’s luxury digs in Kildare. Now, with Ireland’s new Financial Centre and the economy’s strong corporate backing, the unique isle of saints and scholars has joined the modern world—Ireland is happening, it’s earned a seat at the party. The thrill of my life is being a celebrant at that table. “Ireland’s challenges in 2006 are different: they’re facing ethnic identity issues, they’re negotiating the current influx of foreign cultures, and they’re smart enough to edu-
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cate their youth to the new bio-tech markets. These are serious undertakings.” Complementing his broad credits in corporate management, Keough has used his formidable resources and corporate savvy to distinguish himself as a valued patron of Irish studies. The KeoughNaughton Institute for Irish Studies at Notre Dame University in Indiana and the Keough-Naughton Notre Dame Centre in Dublin have swiftly become busy hubs of serious scholarship, teaching, and learning; they also serve as a visible working model of Irish-American relations. Martin Naughton of Ireland has been a co-builder of the Institute. At the Institute, scholars from Ireland, the United States, and points well beyond find archival resources for their projects, as well as a nurturing, cosmopolitan climate for collegial dialogue. Reflecting strong international interest in the KeoughNaughton Institute, Paris was the host city for the Keough Irish Seminar in the summer of 2006, under the directorship of Seamus Deane, Luke Gibbons, and Kevin Whelan. Donald R. Keough was born on September 4, 1926, in Maurice, Iowa, the third child of Leo Keough and Veronica (Henkels) Keough. His father was a farmer and a cattleman whose ancestral roots went back to Co. Wexford, Ireland. After graduating high school at the age of 16, Keough enlisted in the Navy in 1944. After World War II he attended Creighton University, in Omaha, Nebraska, on the G.I. Bill. Keough set his cap for a career in big business, but he began modestly, with small steps. After graduating from college in 1949, Keough worked as a talk show host in Omaha. Then he moved on to advertising for the Butter-Nut Coffee Company of Omaha, which was eventually sold to the www.abc-clio.com
Duncan Coffee Company of Houston, and acquired by The Coca-Cola Company in 1964. Keough rose to executive marketing and administrative positions at The Coca-Cola Company within a few years. By 1981, he was president of the world’s soft drink giant and chairman of the largest bottling system. Not overlooking his Irish roots, Keough and his managers established a Coca-Cola plant in Drogheda, Co. Louth, and later opened a larger, and more efficient plant in Ballyna in Connemara, the major supplier of the drink’s concentrate to Europe and elsewhere. Few were surprised when Keough was selected for the 1988 Horatio Alger Award in Washington, D.C. After a tenure of nearly 30 years at Coca-Cola, Keough stepped down in 1993, although he continues to serve as a member of the Board. In 1993, Keough was elected chairman of Allen & Company Inc., an investment banking firm in New York City. Keough names as his career models and mentors his father, Leo Keough, as well as Robert Woodruff, Clarke A. Swanson, and Warren Buffett; he also has great admiration for Tony O’Reilly, Martin Naughton, Herbert Allen, Michael Smurfit, and Fr. Theodore Hesburgh. Keough’s impressive business career notwithstanding, his most memorable legacy may well be his great contribution to Irish Studies, both in the United States and in Ireland. Not only did he serve as founder and patron of new Irish Studies institutes on two continents, but he was also personally instrumental in building the Institutes’ important scholarly resources through an ongoing commitment to rare book acquisition. At present, Hesburgh Library at Notre Dame University is a premier site for Irish Studies researchers.
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Determined to wear out, not rust out, Keough maintains a whirlwind schedule even into his eighth decade. In addition to frequent visits to the Keough-Naughton Irish Studies institutes in Flanner Hall at Notre Dame and at O’Connell House in Dublin, Keough serves on the boards of IAC/InterActive Corp, Global Yankee Holdings, Convera Corporation, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., and The Coca-Cola Company. He has also served for many years as a member of the boards of McDonald’s Corporation, the Washington Post Company, H. J. Heinz Company, and Home Depot. Maintaining strong ties to the scholarly community, Keough is chairman emeritus of the board of trustees, a life trustee of the University of Notre Dame, and co-chair of its Ireland Council with Martin Naughton of Ireland. He is also a trustee of several other educational, charitable, and civic organizations. Keough’s career achievements, as well as his broad philanthropic and patronal activities, have garnered many distinctions and awards over the years, including honorary doctorates from the University of Notre Dame, Creighton University, Emory University, Clark University, Trinity College Dublin, and University College Dublin. In 1993, Keough was given two prestigious awards: the Laetare Medal, the University of Notre Dame’s highest distinction; and the Gold Medal from the American Irish Historical Society in New York City. In 2002, he became an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In 2003, Keough was inducted into the Junior Achievement National Business Hall of Fame. In 2006, he was inducted into the American Advertising Hall of Fame. In 2007, Mr. and Mrs. Keough were awarded full Irish citizenship by the minister for www.abc-clio.com
justice at a ceremony at the University of Notre Dame; this award was celebrated at Slane Castle, Ireland, at an event hosted by Dr. Martin Naughton. Keough divides his time between his family office in Atlanta, Georgia, and Allen & Company Incorporated in New York City. He presently resides in suburban Atlanta with his wife of over 50 years, Marilyn or “Mickie” (Mulhall) Keough. “And don’t forget,” he enjoys reminding interviewers, “I’ve also been a busy father. I guess I did a few things right! Of my six children—Kathleen, Mary, Michael, Patrick, Eileen, Clarke—five graduated from Notre Dame University. Kathleen graduated from my alma mater, Creighton University, Nebraska. That’s a happy record of credits, sure to make any parent proud.” Donald R. Keough’s media image is that of a hard-working, no-nonsense professional, a sturdy Midwesterner who cherishes traditional ethical values of fair play and equal treatment. Those who know Keough best hasten to emphasize his affectionate spirit, capacity for humor, unstinting love of family and friends, inspirational advice, and need to launch a pipedream now and again. Maureen E. Mulvihill References Bergin, John. “Donald R. Keough: Irish American of the Year.” Irish American Magazine, March/April, 1993, 42–49. Forbes.com. Selected media coverage on Donald R. Keough and The Coca Cola Company. http://www.forbes.com/ finance/mktguideapps/personinfo/ FromMktGuideIdPersonTearsheet .jhtml?passedMktGuideId=74489 (accessed August 30, 2007). Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans website. Donald R. Keough. http://www.horatioalger.com/members/
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502 KILMER, (ALFRED) JOYCE member_info.cfm?memberid=keo88 (accessed August 1, 2007). Keough, Donald R. Acceptance speech. Gold Medal Awards, American Irish Historical Society, New York City, 1993. Keough, Donald R. Acceptance speech. Advertising Hall of Fame Awardee, New York City, 2006. http://www.advertisinghalloffame.org/ members/member_bio.php?memid=2420 (accessed August 1, 2007). Mulvihill, Maureen E. On site interviews with Donald R. Keough, Allen & Co., New York City. March 1997, December 2005. Mulvihill, Maureen E. “Wall Street Irish: The Making o’ the Green.” World of Hibernia, April 1995, 140–159. With photos. New York Times. “57th Annual Advertising Hall of Fame.” February 27, 2006, C5. Full-page ad, placed by American Advertising Federation for induction of Keough, March 17, 2006, Waldorf Astoria, New York City.
KILMER, (ALFRED) JOYCE (1886–1917) Joyce Kilmer was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on December 6, 1886, to Frederick Barnett Kilmer and an Irish mother, Annie (Kilburn). Educated at Rutgers University (1904–1906) and Columbia University, he graduated in 1908, and in the same year he married Aline Murray. Soon thereafter he took a job teaching in Morristown, New Jersey. Kilmer moved to New York City, where he found sporadic employment; from 1909 to 1912 he worked as an editor on the Funk and Wagnall’s dictionary. He served as literary editor of The Churchman, an Anglican newspaper (Kilmer converted to Catholicism toward the end of 1913), and in 1913 became a member of the staff of The New York Times. Kilmer supplemented his work on The New York Times with other activities. An www.abc-clio.com
avowed socialist, Kilmer often dined with emerging writers like Bliss Carman and Richard La Gallienne to discuss political radicalism. Poetry, though, was his passion. In 1914 he published Trees and Other Poems; two years later came The Circus, which was followed by Dreams and Images (1917), Main Street and Other Poems (1917), and Literature in the Making (1917), a series of interviews with literary personages. When the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, Kilmer was a family man with a wife and five children. Nevertheless, he enlisted as a private in the Seventh Regiment, New York National Guard. At his request, he was transferred into the 165th Infantry, the old Fighting 69th. Once in France he quickly attained the rank of sergeant and was attached to the newly organized Regimental Intelligence staff. His responsibilities included gathering information that would be of tactical importance to the Allied Forces. In his position on the Regiment’s Intelligence staff, Kilmer had no front-line responsibilities during combat operations, but on July 30, 1918, during the battle of the Ourcq, he attached himself as adjutant to Major William Donovan, who was commanding the First Battalion. It was a fateful decision; a sniper’s bullet ended the soldierpoet’s life at age 31. Posthumously, Kilmer was awarded the French Croix de Guerre for bravery, and for many Americans, he became the symbol of soldierly courage and poetic idealism. As a poet and author, Kilmer is remembered today mostly for the poem “Trees,” published in 1914. (The poem begins: “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree,” and ends “Poems are made by fools like me, / but only God can make a tree.”) At the time of his entry into military
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service Kilmer was considered the premier American Catholic poet alive, and much of his work expressed his deep religious beliefs. Examples of this include “Rouge Bouquet,” “Memorial Day” (which was written in 1917 shortly before his departure overseas), and “Prayer of a Soldier in France.” One can only wonder how Kilmer’s poetry would have developed, and what his position in the pantheon of American literature would be, had his talent not been cut down at so early an age. Tim Lynch Reference Covell, John E. Joyce Kilmer: A Literary Biography. Brunswick, GA: Write-Fit Communications, 2000.
KING, JOHN (1800–1857) A member of the Argentine naval forces that fought against Brazil under the command of William Brown, John King was born on October 26, 1800, in Newport, Co. Mayo, son of Miles and Mary King. He served in the British navy, and in 1820 was a midshipman in the frigate Heroine, under Captain David Jewett. King joined the Argentine forces in January 1826 as a second lieutenant during the war against Brazil. Given his experience, he was appointed master in the barque Congreso, under Captain William R. Mason. His first battle in the River Plate was on February 9, 1826, at Punta Colares, in which Congreso was hit by 13 shots from the Brazilian ships. During the attack on Colonia del Sacramento in February and March, King acted as the barque’s second commander and later captain. He was promoted to lieutenant on May 12, 1826. In this same year he married the Irish teacher Sarah McGaw
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(d. 1874), niece of the Buenos Aires shipwright James McGaw. On June 11, 1826, in the battle at Los Pozos, the powerful Brazilian fleet attacked, and was repulsed by, the Argentines. The subsequent action was in Quilmes, when Brown’s squadron was attacked by the Brazilian ships on July 29. King acted as second commander of Congreso, under the orders of Captain José Fisher. He then accompanied William Brown in his attacks at Brazilian coastal cities, and was transferred to the brig República, the Argentine flagship, as its second commander. In this facility King fought in the battle at Monte Santiago in April 1827. When surrounded by the enemy, he was ordered by Brown to evacuate and set fire to his ship to avoid its capture by the Brazilians. King retired from active service in May 1827. During the following months he successfully acted as privateer with the schooner Sin Par against Brazilian ships. On April 22, 1828, King reentered the naval service with the rank of captain and fought until the end of the war against Brazil in August of that year. He was discharged from service and during the next 10 years became a pilot in the River Plate and captain of the merchant ship Esperanza, sailing frequently to Carmen de Patagones and Rio de Janeiro. He also worked in a ranch in Corrientes. Reincorporated as sergeant-major in 1840, King was appointed by Brown as commander-in-chief of the Argentine squadron, in charge of the frigate 25 de Mayo, in which he fought in Montevideo and Punta Indio against the naval force of John H. Coe. Between 1842 and 1844 King participated in the blockade of Montevideo as captain of the brig General Belgrano. The following year he played a key role in the attack of Montevideo in
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combination with the land forces of general Oribe. Two scandals dishonored King’s public image. The first occurred in 1841, when he was accused of receiving 3,000 patacones (silver pesos) from Captain Coe to cross over to the Uruguayan side. This was rapidly denied by witnesses, and on October 3 of that year William Brown celebrated King’s reincorporation into service. The second was his lifetime addiction to alcohol. During the remainder of the Rosas régime, King worked in administrative positions in the maritime department of Buenos Aires. Considered partial to Rosas, King was discharged of service after the governor’s fall in 1852. He died penniless in Buenos Aires on August 22, 1857. A street in the district of Almagro has borne his name since 1904. Edmundo Murray See also: BROWN, William; CAMPBELL, Peter. References Cutolo, Vicente Osvaldo. Buenos Aires: Historia de las Calles y Sus Nombres. Buenos Aires: Elche, 1994. Rodríguez, Horacio, and Pablo E. Arguindeguy. King 1995, Buenos Aires: Instituto Browniano, 1995.
KINSELLA,THOMAS (1928–) Thomas Kinsella was born in 1928 in Inchicore to John Kinsella, a worker at the Guinness Brewery, and Agnes (Casserly). John Kinsella’s life and work are commemorated in a number of his son’s poems, most notably “The Messenger” (1976). Kinsella’s school education took place at the Inchicore Model School and with the Christian Brothers. He attended University College Dublin, initially as a science student, but he left shortly afterwards to join the Civil Service. From 1950 he worked in www.abc-clio.com
the finance department, a period of his life recorded and satirized in “Nightwalker” (1967/1968). During this time he also attended evening lectures in Arts at University College Dublin and wrote his first poems. Encouraged by Liam Miller of the Dolmen Press, he began to translate from the Irish, and some of these translations were published in the mid-1950s. He married Eleanor Walsh in 1955. A number of his early poems, culminating in “Phoenix Park” (1966), refer to her serious illness early in their relationship. His first book of original poetry, Poems, was published in 1956, followed by Another September (1958) and Moralities and Downstream (1962). By 1963 he had begun his translation of the Old Irish epic the Táin Bó Cuailnge, which was published six years later. In 1965 Kinsella left the civil service to pursue a full-time writing career, and he became writer-in-residence and, subsequently, professor of English at Southern Illinois University. In 1970 he moved to Temple University, Pennsylvania, where he remained as a professor of English until his retirement in 1990, dividing his time between Ireland and the United States. In 1973 he established Temple University’s program in Irish studies. Kinsella’s early poems are typically written in strict closed forms. A number of critics have seen the influence of W. H. Auden in the early work—other influences include W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and the Irish-language poetry Kinsella translated. During the 1960s, and particularly after his exposure to American poetry, Kinsella began to experiment with more open forms. Some critics have seen the influence of William Carlos Williams in these works. Even before Kinsella’s move to the United States, as early as 1962’s Downstream, Ezra
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Pound functioned as an influence and antagonist in his work. Nonetheless, Irish cultural geography is vital to works as different as Butcher’s Dozen (1972), a bitter satire on the Widgery Report, and New Poems (1973), a self-analysis that draws on Jungian psychology and Old Irish mythic texts. Kinsella established the Peppercanister Press in 1972 to facilitate the quick printing and distribution of Butcher’s Dozen. He subsequently used the press to issue limited-edition chapbooks of poetry, which were later collected in trade editions. Peppercanister pamphlets function as a kind of draft publication, showing the poet’s interest in matters of revision and renewal. The third Peppercanister chapbook, The Good Fight (1973), is of particular interest to students of Irish-American relations, as it commemorates the 10th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. As well as exploring the psychology of the president’s assassin, the poem examines Kennedy as a cultural icon particularly important to Irish Americans. Kinsella continued to publish Peppercanister pamphlets, mostly of poems, although the publications also included literary criticism in the form of The Dual Tradition (1995), throughout the next three decades. He was involved in two important anthologies in the 1980s: An Duanaire: Poems of the Dispossessed 1600– 1900, a collection of Irish-language poems edited by Seán Ó Tuama, for which Kinsella provided the translations, and in 1986 the Oxford Book of Irish Verse, controversial for Kinsella’s editorial dismissal of Northern Irish poetry and omission of women poets. Trade editions of his Collected Poems appeared in 1996 and 2001. In 2001 the poet left his Wicklow home and took up residence in Pennsylvania. www.abc-clio.com
With his exact contemporary John Montague, Kinsella is often credited with introducing the techniques of American modernism to Irish poetry. Exactly how influential he has been remains a matter for critical debate. Although he has spent long periods of his life in the United States and has engaged substantially with American culture, his main interests and sensibility remain Irish, and his particular contributions to the translation of Irish-language texts cannot be underestimated. In the words of Derval Tubridy, “Kinsella’s is a complex and dense poetry that, in its later years, eschews lyricism for a narrative development that relies on the poetic sequence and an engagement with sources as divergent as Irish mythology, European Enlightenment and contemporary US history.” Kit Fryatt References Abbate, Donatella. Thomas Kinsella. New York: Twayne, 1996. John, Brian. Reading the Ground: The Poetry of Thomas Kinsella. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1997. Tubridy, Derval. Thomas Kinsella: The Peppercanister Poems. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2001.
KNIGHTS OF LABOR The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor reached its apex of influence under the leadership of the son of Irish immigrants. By far the most significant of the early labor groups, in 1879 the Knights organized as a national industrial union under the leadership of Terrence V. Powderly, who led the organization from 1878 to 1893. The order was founded in 1869, as a secret society that was suspicious of modern industrial capitalism, by garment cutter and Freemason Uriah S. Stephens (1821–
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1882) and eight to 10 others at a tailors’ meeting in Philadelphia. Drawing freely from the Freemasons, the Knights used a complex set of rituals ranging from secret oaths and handshakes to signs and passwords to further their ends of reforming labor conditions from within specific industries. Emphasizing brotherhood that extolled virtues like family duty, personal integrity and responsibility, honesty, and activism, the Knights stressed organization, education, and political agitation as the best ways to build a new society. Organized into mixed local and district assemblies, the group aimed to forge the entire labor movement into a single disciplined army. Although its mottos “equal pay for equal work” and “an injury to one was a concern to all” were inclusive, the secrecies prevented the organization from becoming very large. At first the Knights of Labor was a kind of idealistic labor lodge and fraternal organization designed to organize individual workers, rather than uniting existing trade unions into one big union to which all gainfully employed skilled and unskilled persons, except bankers, lawyers, professional gamblers, stockbrokers, saloon keepers, and physicians, were eligible to join. However, skilled craftsmen remained aloof, and for a decade the Knights’ growth was only moderate. After 1878, when Terrence Powderly of Scranton, Pennsylvania, became its grand master, the Knights of Labor took on new life. Powderly, born in 1849, began working as a switch tender at the age of 13. As a machinist he took so prominent a part in the work of the Machinists’ and Blacksmiths’ Union that he not only lost his job but was also blacklisted by the employers, after which he was elected mayor of Scranton in 1878 on the Greenback-Labor ticket. When a meeting was held to reorganize the www.abc-clio.com
Knights, Powderly dominated the proceedings and for the next 15 years his name and the Knights of Labor were almost synonymous. Powderly took a small salary, traveling at his own expense wherever he felt he could gain more recruits. From a membership of only 28,000 in 1880 the organization increased to more than 700,000 in 1886. Its rapid growth was a result of dropping many of the secrecies that dominated the early organization and keeping membership open to all trades and skill levels. Favoring an eight-hour day, the use of arbitration as a substitute for strikes, and improvements in the legal status of labor had national appeal. Such women as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, as well as more than 90,000 African Americans, joined its ranks, enhancing its national appeal, which led to its being the first labor organization strong enough to challenge industry on its own ground. This occurred when New York financier Jay Gould conferred with the Knights’ executive board in 1884 and acceded to their demands during the great railroad strike in the Southwest. Moreover, the Knights won several minor victories in the mid-1880s, such as in 1885 when the Missouri-Pacific was forced to restore cut wages. However, the central organization’s control over the behavior of the local organizations disintegrated, and strikes were increasingly undertaken against the advice of the general executive board. In spite of trying to avoid strikes, the Knights were involved in a series of violent strikes like the 1886 Texas-Pacific strike led by Martin Irons. Events culminating in the Haymarket Riot (1886) resulted in loss of prestige, and internal disputes slowed its political and social agenda. As a result the skilled workers,
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alienated by the way unskilled workers precipitated conflicts, began to withdraw from the Knights to build up their own unions. Specifically, the 1881 formation of the Organized Trades and Labor Unions (called the American Federation of Labor after 1886), along with factional disputes, overcentralization, mismanagement, and squandering of financial resources through unsuccessful strikes led to the rapid demise
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of the Knights. By 1900 the Knights of Labor was virtually extinct. Mark Connolly See also: POWDERLY, Terence Vincent References Fink, Leon. Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985. Powderly, Terence. The Path I Trod: The Autobiography of Terrence V. Powderly, edited by Harry Carman, Henry David, and Paul Guthrie. 1940. Reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1968. Voss, Kim. The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. Weir, Robert. Beyond the Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor. College Station: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.
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L LADIES’ LAND LEAGUE (1880–1882) The Ladies’ Land League in Ireland and America allowed women to participate publicly in the Irish nationalist struggle for the first time. The Ladies’ League movement began in America after a request by Fanny Parnell (sister of Charles Stewart Parnell) for Irish-American women to revitalize the Land League’s fund raising. From this beginning, several Ladies’ Land League branches were founded across the United States. Buoyed by its success in America, Michael Davitt convinced Anna Parnell to head a Ladies’ Land League in Ireland. Parnell and her fellow Ladies’ Land Leaguers would play a prominent role in the land struggle after the arrest of the male leaders of the movement. The women attempted to implement the radical rhetoric emanating from the imprisoned male leaders and were successful in providing relief to evicted tenants and urging nonpayment of rent. Upon his release from prison and his agreement with the Prime Minister William Gladstone to end the land agitation, however, Charles Stewart Parnell attempted to rein in the Ladies’ Land League. Rather than be placed into a subservient and background position, the Ladies’ Land League voted to disband. With the end of
the Ladies’ Land League, women were effectively pushed out of the nationalist movement. The memory of the Ladies’ League, however, would provide an important inspiration to the next generation of Irish women nationalists and their participation in the struggle for Irish independence. Fanny and Anna Parnell were the guiding lights behind the formation of the Ladies’ Leagues of America and Ireland. Fanny was discouraged with the slow start of the Land League in America, and after consulting with Michael Davitt, decided to form a Ladies’ Land League of America (LLLA) in the hopes that competition from the women would spur both Leagues’ fundraising efforts. On August 12, 1880, she sent a letter entitled “The Coming Struggle” to the Irish World and several other newspapers calling on Irish-American women to organize. Responses to this letter began to trickle in and on October 15, 1880, a meeting was held to establish the New York Branch of the Ladies’ Irish National Land League. Branches were quickly established across the country, from Boston to Denver, and as far west as San Francisco; a branch was even formed in Montreal, Canada. Certain areas became strongholds of LLLA activity. Philadelphia was the home
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of eight ladies’ branches with a total membership of more than 600. New York City was another area of activity, where, because of their size, Ladies’ Land League branches were organized by wards. A mass meeting in Hartford, Connecticut, attracted 2,000 women, and it was unanimously voted that the turnout was too large for one league, so three branches were formed. The LLLA was not only a phenomenon in the eastern states but also in the Midwest and on the West Coast, especially in St. Louis and San Francisco. The Irish-American women involved in the LLLA took advantage of the opportunity offered to them by the land war in Ireland and took an active role in shaping local Irish-American nationalist politics. Inspired by the success of the Ladies’ Land League in America, a Ladies’ Land League in Ireland (LLLI) was formed on January 31, 1881. Most Irish leaders, with the exception of Davitt, were resistant to incorporating women into the Land League struggle but were persuaded by the argument that the women could carry on the struggle if the male leaders were arrested. Shortly after the establishment of the LLLI, almost all of the male national leaders, including Davitt and Parnell, were arrested under a new Coercion Bill. This left the Land League movement in Ireland primarily under the control of the LLLI. The women of the LLLI kept a strict record of finances, expenditures, and evictions and were fairly successful in continuing the land agitation. After his agreement with Gladstone to stop the land agitation, Parnell moved to undermine the LLLI. Disillusioned by the animosity toward them by the male leadership, the Ladies’ Land League disbanded. With the end of the LLLI, the American www.abc-clio.com
branches slowly died out. Unfortunately, the rise and fall of the LLLI would effectively push Irish women out of the political sphere until the twentieth century and would leave intact, though challenged, the male-dominated structure of Irish nationalist politics. Ely Janis See also: DAVITT, Michael; PENNSYLVANIA References Cote, Jane. Fanny and Anna Parnell: Ireland’s Patriot Sisters. London: Macmillan, 1990. Ward, Margaret. Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism. London: Pluto Press, 1995. Parnell, Anna. Tale of a Great Sham, edited by Dana Hearne. Dublin: Arlen House, 1986. Funchion, Michael, ed. Irish American Voluntary Organizations. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983.
LAND LEAGUE (1879–1882) The Land League movement in Ireland and America in the early 1880s had an enormous impact on the history and character of contemporary Ireland and Irish America. The Land Leagues of Ireland and America, as well as their sister Ladies’ Land Leagues, provided a stimulus and mobilization of Irish and Irish-American men and women in the cause of Irish nationalism that was unmatched until the period after the Easter Rebellion of 1916. In 1879–1880 several events in Ireland provided an impetus for the rise of a united front between Irish and Irish-American nationalists. In 1879 Ireland experienced its worst season since the Famine because of a combination of bad weather, poor harvests, and low prices. The value of the potato crop, valued at £12 million in 1876, dropped to £3.5 million. A slump in the U.S. economy from 1873 to 1879 curtailed
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Portrait of Michael Davitt, founder of the Land League. (Library of Congress)
immigration, while a poor harvest in Great Britain depressed the income of migratory laborers. Sensing an opportunity, John Devoy; the Irish-American Clan na Gael leader, Michael Davitt; and the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, Charles Stewart Parnell, arrived at the New Departure, an agreement that linked the land and national questions, providing for a united front between physical force and constitutional nationalists. On August 16, 1879, Michael Davitt and a convention of tenant farmers in Mayo founded the Land League of Mayo. Following this success, the Irish National Land League was formed in Dublin on October 21, 1879, with Parnell as president. From this beginning, Land League branches were quickly established across Ireland. The aim of the Land League was to www.abc-clio.com
exploit rural unrest in Ireland to gain what became known as the “three Fs”: fair rents, fixity of tenure, and free sale. The Land League committed itself to pursuing only nonviolent means to accomplish its goals. This distinction, however, was often blurred as Irish leaders spoke with increasingly forceful rhetoric and agrarian unrest spread in the rural districts. In 1880, both Davitt and Parnell undertook extensive fund-raising tours of the United States, and Parnell himself traveled more than 16,000 miles, spoke in 62 cities, addressed a joint session of Congress, and raised more than $300,000 for rural relief and the Land League. The movement quickly spread across the country, and thousands of Irish Americans participated in branches in their local communities. Patrick Ford, editor of the Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, devoted considerable space in his columns to the movement in America and raised more than $340,000 for the Land League. The Land League movement was the first transatlantic movement to unite all strands of Irish nationalist politics, bringing together agrarian radicals, physical force advocates, and parliamentary constitutionalists. In Ireland, small farmers and radical leaders like Davitt sought to overthrow the agrarian order through the use of boycotts and nonpayment of rent, while more prosperous farmers and Parnell sought Parliamentary land reform. Across the Atlantic, Irish Americans used IrishAmerican nationalism and the apparatus of the Land League to participate in a variety of American social movements. Workingclass Irish Americans were often members of both the Land League and the Knights of Labor. Henry George, the San Francisco author and land reformer, traveled to
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Ireland as a special correspondent for the Irish World and published a pamphlet on the Irish land question, linking Irish land reform to American struggles for land nationalization. Middle-class Irish Americans such as John Boyle O’Reilly and Patrick Collins, both of Boston, attempted to use Irish-American nationalism to raise the status of Irish Americans and to assert their fitness to participate in the American middle-class social and political world by freeing Ireland from England’s yoke and proving the Irish not to be a feckless and colonized people. Fanny Parnell, the sister of Charles Stewart Parnell, after consulting with Michael Davitt, decided to form a Ladies’ Land League of America (LLLA) in the hopes that competition from the women would spur the both Leagues’ fund-raising efforts. On October 15, 1880, a meeting was held to establish the New York Branch of the Ladies’ Land League. Inspired by the success of the LLLA, Michael Davitt asked Anna Parnell to form a Ladies’ Land League in Ireland, and it was founded in Dublin on January 31, 1881. The Land League was able to exert tremendous pressure on the British government to enact changes in the landholding system in Ireland. In August 1881, the government enacted a Land Act that established the three Fs the Land League had called for: fixity of tenure, fair rent, and free sale. However, leaseholders and those in arrears were left out of the bill, and the land courts set up to implement the bill heavily favored the landlords. The bill began to break down the class alliance within the Land League as tenant farmers, who had effectively reached their goals through the Land Act, began to accept the terms of the bill. Alongside this new www.abc-clio.com
legislation, the British Government introduced a new Coercion Bill and arrested Charles Stewart Parnell and most of the other Irish leadership. After the arrest of the male leaders in late 1881, Anna Parnell and the Ladies’ Land Leagure were left effectively leading the Land League and kept the movement going. The imprisoned leaders issued the “No Rent Manifesto,” which called on tenants to hold their rents until the British government released the prisoners. The manifesto put a major strain on the movement by putting an immense strain on the League’s finances, and it alienated the Catholic hierarchy and conservative elements of the Land League, both in Ireland and America. The Land League agitation was effectively ended when Parnell, increasingly anxious to leave prison, reached an informal agreement with Prime Minister William Gladstone known as the Kilmainham Treaty. Under the terms of the agreement, the government would amend the Land Bill to extend the fair rent provision to leaseholders, deal with rent arrears, and release the prisoners. For his part, Parnell agreed to rein in the agrarian discontent in the countryside. Though his actions were resisted by radical elements in the Land League, any further attempts to keep the agitation going were fatally undermined by the murder in Phoenix Park in Dublin of the new chief secretary Lord Frederick Davendish and undersecretary of Ireland Thomas Henry Burke, on May 6, 1882. In October 1882, a new organization, entitled the Irish National League, was formed to replace the Land League. Although it continued to receive support from many Irish nationalists, the Irish National League lacked the widespread appeal of the Land
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League, and its effectiveness never reached the same level as that of the Land League. Ely Janis References Brown, Thomas N. Irish-American Nationalism 1870–1890. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1966. Clark, Samuel. Social Origins of the Irish Land War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. Davitt, Michael. The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland; or, The Story of the Land League Revolution. Shannon: Irish University Press, 1970. Foner, Eric. “Class, Ethnicity, and Radicalism in the Gilded Age: The Land League and Irish-America.” In Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Jordan, Donald. Land and Popular Politics in Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Palmer, Norman. The Irish Land League Crisis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940.
LANGUAGE, THE IRISH Many early Irish immigrants to the United States spoke Irish, either as their only tongue or along with English. With the advantage of widespread familiarity with English, most immigrants abandoned the use of Irish, or conversed in Irish only with other first-generation arrivals. Unlike many ethnic groups, the Irish rarely passed on their language to their children. Today, use of Irish in America continues at an attenuated level. A mixture of Irish-born speakers and American learners challenge stereotypes of a method of communication long belittled as poor, isolated, and backward, working to refashion it into a relevant medium, allowing new generations to enter into the cyber-Gaeltacht, along with native and second-language users worldwide. To find out how many Irish came to America knowing Irish, estimates of how www.abc-clio.com
many departed from the Irish-speaking areas—Gaeltachtaí—must be examined. Up to and during the Famine, many who came to America would have spoken Irish. Kerby Miller estimates that one-fourth to one-third of all Famine-era emigrants spoke Irish; half of these left Connacht and Munster, where at least half the people used Irish as late as 1851. At this time Irish speakers, concentrated most heavily near the western seaboard, would be less likely to find the funds to emigrate. Education in Ireland enforced English. Irish became scorned. By the end of the 1870s, the collapse of subsistence farming and the traditional lifestyle spurred emigration from destitute Gaeltachtaí. More than half of later American arrivals from Ireland came from these areas, and half of them would have spoken Irish. By 1900, the peasant culture had eroded, and later emigrants to the United States likely knew English before they left Ireland. Reginald Byron, analyzing the Irish history of Albany, New York, questions Miller’s interpretation. He counters that the 1861 Irish census recorded 98 percent bilinguals or English monoglots. He criticizes Thomas Ihde’s pioneering work as overlooking bilingualism as the emigrant norm. Yet Miller notes that a quarter of the Irish emigrants after the Famine may not have been active speakers, but their children were passive listeners. In Albany, Byron found that the new Irish advanced more quickly than other Europeans because of their abilities in English. By contrast, Kevin Kenny observes how native Irish speakers formed the core of the Molly Maguires. Many of the immigrants, in whichever language, arrived as illiterate. Their efforts to read and write in their new county would necessarily emerge
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through English. Little pride in Irish could be found when so many of its people suffered discrimination and ridicule for their accents, dress, religion, and culture. Assimilation usually jettisoned Irish in favor of the practical reliance on English, however broken its mastery seems to have been by some who learned it only in America. Following the pattern of many immigrants, Irish newcomers depended on sponsors—often from the home county or community—for assistance before employment could be obtained. Therefore, patterns of settlement for nineteenth-century (or even later) Irish speakers tended to place emigrants into specific American locales. Kenneth Nilsen’s study of Portland, Maine, links Irish language use to arrivals from Corr na Móna and Cois Fharraige in Galway. Connemara and the Aran Islands supplied Boston; Dingle sent speakers to Hartford, Connecticut, and Springfield, Massachusetts. Donegal supplied emigrants to Brooklyn and Staten Island, New York, as well as Bayonne, New Jersey. Achill Island and Cleveland were linked, as were Connemara and Pittsburgh. Around 1910, the language in Philadelphia’s Schuylkill district and in the mining towns near Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, survived. Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Butte, Montana, also gained speakers who left the traditional ports of arrival for Irish America to travel further west. For instance, Archbishop John Ireland arranged for 390 emigrants from the Mayo and Galway Gaeltachtaí to settle in Graceland, Minnesota. Here, an Irishspeaking community was attempted in 1880. Such efforts were few, however, as the practicality of using English rather than loyalty to Irish undermined long-term survival of the language in a sustained form. www.abc-clio.com
New immigrants ensured that some form of native language exposure to Irish marginally survived, in Boston and New York notably, but this failed to slow the pattern of language loss by the second generation. Often, the Catholic Church, dominated after 1795 by Maynooth-trained clergy, suspected the use of Irish at home and abroad. Unlike Hebrew, Greek, or Russian in liturgical functions by other emigrants, Irish played no necessary role for the survival of its communal religious tradition. Few followed the example of the German priest and linguist, St. John Neumann, who learned Irish to hear the confessions of his Pennsylvania congregation. Fenianism and agitation tainted the reaction to Irish by many other clerics. Ethnic pride in the post-Famine period contributed to cultural nurturing of the language. The Irish-American paper in 1857 began columns in Irish. The Ossianic and the Philo-Celtic learned societies and a New York preservation group formed over the next two decades. From 1881 to 1898, An Gaodhal/The Gael appeared monthly. As the Celtic Revival flourished, periodicals included learner’s lessons, and luminaries from Ireland began touring America, raising consciousness and gaining funds that would support both the nationalist and the linguistic campaigns for an Irish Ireland. Douglas Hyde’s deanglicization efforts and his founding of the Gaelic League in 1893 aided American retention of Irish. Branches grew all over America, and contributors came not only from the East Coast but also from San Francisco, Butte, and Denver. Hyde toured in 1905–1906 to fund his Gaelic League; missions followed in 1910–1912 and 1914–1915. Anticolonialism joined pro-Celtic promotion. As with the parent organization, Irish-American
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political and cultural divisions over how best to regain control of the homeland weakened the cohesion of the League. By the time of Ireland’s partial independence, Irish-language efforts reverted to the Free State. Government bureaucrats rather than bands of enthusiasts were entrusted with the revival of Irish, and its survival overseas came to be regarded as irrelevant. Miller maintains that the emphasis in Irish language expressions upon patience rather than action tainted the mentalities of those who spoke it. A conservative, dependent, and collective worldview limited personal responsibility and implied that fate trumped choice. This Whorfian analysis remains controversial, yet it represents one academic theory that explains the willing and rapid loss of Irish among so many of its speakers in the post-Famine period of emigration and demoralization. American immigrants, Miller suggests, sought attainment of a refined English to replace their humble accents and unfamiliar native tongue. The Irish language earned no status in the New World. This situation intensified as students in the Free State and the Republic often resented the regimen of compulsory Irish taught in the postindependence decades. Those emigrating brought fewer native speaker experiences and more memories of a language on life support, too often unimaginatively taught and frequently caricatured as a symbol of peasant poverty, clerical punishment, and fanatical jingoism. For Irish choosing to move into the cities, at home and abroad, English accompanied their global diaspora. By the 1980s, improved media, increased immigration, Irish cultural fairs and centers, republican activism, and a rebirth of ethnic pride among Irish Americans emphasized attainment of Irish. Dictionaries, www.abc-clio.com
tapes, and now software and Internet materials enable fluency within an international network. Distance from Ireland no longer prevents immersion. Organizations such as Daltaí na Gaeilge and An Teanga Mhartanach join the Gaelic League and classes, academic or less formal, that encourage learners from all backgrounds to learn the language. The National Association of Celtic Language Teachers ensures sophisticated instruction applying linguistic and sociological methods. Hartford, Connecticut, families have piloted an urban Gaeltacht program modeled on those in Belfast in their efforts to keep Irish as a chosen and maintained language today. John L. Murphy See also: CATHOLIC CHURCH, the; EMIGRATION; GREAT FAMINE, The; IRELAND, Archbishop John. References Connolly, Bridget. Forgetting Ireland: Uncovering a Family’s Secret History. St. Paul, MN: Borealis Press, 2003. Ihde, Thomas W., ed. The Irish Language in the United States: A Historical, Sociolinguistic, and Applied Linguistic Survey. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1994. Kenny, Kevin. Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Moran, Gerard. “‘In Search of the Promised Land’: The Connemara Colonization Scheme to Minnesota, 1880.” Éire-Ireland 31, no. 3–4 (Fall-Winter 1996): 130–149. Ní Bhroiméil, Úna. Building Irish Identity in America, 1870–1915: The Gaelic Revival. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003. Nilsen, Kenneth E. “Thinking of Monday: The Irish speakers of Portland, Maine.” ÉireIreland 25, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 6–19. Ó Annracháin, Stiofáin, ed. Go Meireceá Siar. Dublin: An Clóchomar, 1979. Uí Fhlannagáin, Fionnuala. Micheál Ó Lóchain agus “An Gaodhal.” Dublin: An Clóchomar, 1990.
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LAVIN, MARY (1912–1996) Mary Lavin was born in East Walpole, Massachusetts, in 1912, and was the only child of Irish parents. Her mother was unhappy with life in America, and the young Lavin accompanied her on her return to Ireland in 1921. They moved initially to Athenry, Co. Galway, and subsequently (after her father’s return from the United States), to Dublin and then Bective, Co. Meath. Each of these Irish locations is important to the stories that Lavin wrote from the time she was a student in the 1930s. Her first collection of short stories, Tales from Bective Bridge, was published to popular and critical acclaim in America in 1942. It was reissued the following year in England, and included a prefatory note by Lord Dunsany in which the elder writer generously remarked that Lavin was one of the finest young writers to have ever come to his attention. Tales from Bective Bridge won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the year’s best work of fiction in 1943 and was selected as a Readers’ Union choice. It marked the beginning of an auspicious career, and over the next four decades Lavin published many volumes of stories, including The Becker Wives (1946), A Single Lady (1951), A Likely Story (1957), The Great Wave (1961), In the Middle of the Fields (1967), A Memory (1972), and A Family Likeness (1985). Although Lavin also wrote two successful novels, The House in Clewe Street (1945) and Mary O’Grady (1950), she is principally remembered for her work as a short story writer. In the preface to her 1959 volume, Selected Stories, she defined her understanding of that craft in the following terms: “Short story writing—for me—is only looking closer than normal into the human heart. The vagaries and contrarieties www.abc-clio.com
there to be found have their own integral design.” Questions of love and the heart are central to Lavin’s writing, and her stories often engage with intimate relationships and domestic concerns. Often, though, these relationships are not as close as they initially appear, and characters who seem to be intimate or familiar (such as lovers, spouses, friends, or family members) are in danger of loneliness, betrayal, or misunderstanding. Many of Lavin’s stories are set in small-town provincial Ireland, and her work often dramatizes the conflict between the values of these communities and the convictions of an individual morality. This conflict is frequently underscored by questions of money, respectability, and class. The theme of loneliness and broken relationships is given an added significance in her work in her celebrated sequence of stories that explore the experiences of widowhood. Lavin herself was a young widow and a mother to three girls—her first husband died in 1954, and she didn’t remarry until the late 1960s. Relationships between women are particularly significant in her stories, and these relationships are variously arranged and often complex. Lavin’s work is predominantly realist in mode, and her best stories are subtle, restrained, or spare in style. Many of her stories are open-ended or ambivalent, and it has sometimes been suggested that this ambivalence is evidence of a “double vision” in Lavin’s eye, which enables her to move between tragedy and comedy and to fuse local issues with universal concerns. According to the critic Janet Egleson Dunleavy, this is a consequence of her twinned inheritance as an Irishwoman and an American. Whatever the truth of this claim, it is certainly the case that abstract or insular issues like
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nationalism and the nation occupy little place in her work. Lavin was the recipient of numerous awards and prizes in recognition of her work as a story writer. These included two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Ella Lynam Cabot Award, the Katherine Mansfield Prize, the Gregory Award, the Éire Society Gold Medal (Boston), and the Irish American Foundation Literature Prize. She was granted an honorary DLitt from her Alma Mater, University College Dublin, and she was a member of Aosdána, the affiliation of creative artists in Ireland. In 1992, the members of Aosdána elected her Saoi—that organization’s highest honor. Lavin died in Dublin in 1996. Paul Delaney References Bowen, Zack. Mary Lavin. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1975. Deane, Seamus. “Mary Lavin.” In The Irish Short Story, edited by Patrick Rafroidi and Terence Brown. Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe, 1979: 237–247. Egleson Dunleavy, Janet, “Mary Lavin, Elizabeth Bowen, and a New Generation.” In The Irish Short Story: A Critical History, edited by James F. Kilroy. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Harmon, Maurice, ed. “Mary Lavin Special Issue.” Irish University Review 9, no. 2 (Autumn 1979): 207–312. Kelly, A. A. Mary Lavin: A Quiet Rebel. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1980.
LAW, ANDREW BONAR (1858–1923) Often referred to as the “Unknown Prime Minister,” Andrew Bonar Law is perhaps more endearingly known as “Britain’s Canadian Prime Minister,” although Canada had yet to become a country at the time of his birth. The Ulster Presbyterian www.abc-clio.com
heritage of his father undoubtedly played a strong role in the political outlook Law had as an adult. Taken ill in 1877, James Law left New Brunswick to resettle in his native Ulster, where he died five years later; living in Glasgow, the young Law traveled nearly every weekend to visit his ailing father during this period, another aspect that might have further strengthened his political resolve on the “Irish Question” in later years. Law repeatedly defended the will of Ulster Unionists and regularly, in the pre–World War I days, campaigned with Edward Carson in Britain and Ulster, addressing crowds on the necessity of the Union. He viewed Home Rule as inevitably leading toward civil war and defended his support of Ulster Unionists in their position because of this threat. He was influential in ensuring that the six counties now composing Northern Ireland were left out of the Irish Free State Bill that enacted the arrangements of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. While detractors, and especially Irish nationalists, argue that Law was racist in his stance and rhetoric against Irish Catholics, his defenders argue that he was only against the politicians who claimed to be acting in the interests of the Irish while they ignored the desires of the majority of those in the northeast. Born on September 16, 1858, in Kingston (now Rexton), Kent County, New Brunswick, Law was the fourth of five children born to the Reverend James Law and his wife Eliza Anne (Kidston). James Law had immigrated from Co. Antrim to New Brunswick in 1845 after graduating from the University of Glasgow and spending a brief period as a minister in Coleraine. He administered the Free Church of Scotland’s St. Andrew’s Church in Kingston, where he had a formidable
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reputation for his sermons. His family had in turn emigrated from the Scottish Lowlands to Ulster in the late seventeenthcentury wave of the northeast’s plantation. Bonar Law (his first name was rarely used by family, friends, or others) left New Brunswick to live with his mother’s wealthy Kidston relations in Glasgow at the age of 12 following her death and his father’s remarriage. He would never return to the land of his birth. The Kidston branch of his family, who were Presbyterians and conservatives, took Law in as one of their own, sending him to Gilbertfield House in Hamilton and later the prestigious Glasgow High School. At 16 years old he left school to become a clerk in the Kidston’s family business, which would later merge with Clydesdale Bank. In 1885, with a loan from his relatives, he bought a partnership in an iron wholesale company that would in future provide him with the financial independence one needed to pursue public office. In 1891 he married Anne Pitcairn Robley, the daughter of a prosperous Glasgow merchant, with whom he would have six children before her premature death in 1909. Law was first elected as a member of Parliament for the Unionist Party during the “Khaki Election” (a national election where the outcome is strongly influenced by wartime or postwar sentiment) of 1900 for the working-class constituency of Glasgow Blackfriars. Over the years he would represent the ridings of Dulwich, Bootle, and Glasgow Central, the first two after election defeats and subsequent byelection victories. Law himself claimed that his two great concerns as a politician were tariff reform and Ireland, although his time and role in the wartime coalition government that helped to bring about Allied victory and British political stability has www.abc-clio.com
also had a significant impact on his legacy. He became leader of the Unionist Party in 1911 and prime minister in late 1922, achieving the former as a compromise candidate and the latter after the downfall of Prime Minister Lloyd George. He remained prime minister only until May 1923 because of failing health, finally succumbing to cancer on October 30, 1923. His 211 days spent in office represent the shortest British government of the twentieth century. Brad Kent See also: NEW BRUNSWICK References Adams, R. J. Q. Bonar Law. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Blake, Robert. The Unknown Prime Minister: The Life and Times of Andrew Bonar Law, 1858–1923. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1955.
LIDDY, JAMES (1934–) Born July 1, 1934, to a dispensary doctor in Dublin, James Liddy was raised in counties Clare and Wexford. Educated by the Benedictine monks of Glenstall Abbey in Co. Limerick, he graduated from King’s Inn (Dublin) and practiced as a barrister for some time before becoming disenchanted with law and acquiring an MA from University College Dublin. He considered his education capped by the company of Patrick Kavanagh, the bohemian poet-sage of McDaid’s pub. In the early 1960s he coedited Arena magazine with the poet Michael Hartnett; Arena, with its lively contents and attractive typography, became the leading venue for both established Irish writers like Austin Clarke and Patrick Kavanagh and emerging writers like John Montague and Derek Mahon. Liddy was also instrumental in
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founding the more long-lived periodical Poetry Ireland. Dolmen Press published Liddy’s Esau, My Kingdom for a Drink (1962), In a Blue Smoke (1964), and Blue Mountain (1968). These slender books promised a writer alive to unusual but graceful syntactical rhythms that avoided the awkward self-consciousness of projective verse, but Baudelaire’s Bar Flowers (1975) displayed an energy and vitality that melded the street with the library, as Liddy ran modern riffs on the French poet; he developed a humorous vision of the demimonde as the landscape of the saved rather than damned. Corca Bascinn (1977) turns to a more intimate, chatty style that investigates minimalism, culminating in Blakean parody and transformation. A White Thought in a White Shade (1987) professes an inward meditative style, combining the discursively confessional with an inscape of the numinous. Collected Poems (1994) gathers an immense body of work from fugitive chapbooks and selections from his principal books; as well as lyrics, the collection features letter poems, narratives, religious poems, epigrams, and prose poems. Many of Liddy’s preoccupations—Roman Catholicism, same-sex orientation, the telling family anecdote—shine at their brightest in Gold Set Dancing (2000), where the influences of his San Francisco and Milwaukee experiences bloom. Portraits of friends, living and dead, appear in I Only Know That I Love Strength in My Friends and Greatness (2003). Yeats: New Ways of Falling in Love (2003) contemplates the erotic. Liddy published an autobiographical novella set mostly in Spain, Young Men Go Walking, in the volume Triad (1986) and a short autobiography, The Doctor’s House (2004). His literary essays are found in numerous periodicals. www.abc-clio.com
Since 1976 Liddy has taught at University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, spending summers either writing at his family home in Wexford or teaching in Dublin. The landscape of his poems paints the countryside of Ireland and the streets of San Francisco and Milwaukee, as well as glancing glimpses of Cuba and New Orleans. He has written many vivid portraits of his mother. Like many Irish writers he has been haunted by the ghosts of W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Patrick Kavanagh, finding affinities with Yeats (folkloric appreciation), Joyce (musicality of phrasing), and Kavanagh (transformation of the ordinary). A literary outsider, he wittily peppers his memory-monologues with amusing asides and startling observations, while his exuberant and puckish personality floats an energetic spontaneity that avoids the trivial or hieratic, remaining richly layered with surreal juxtapositions and the raw emotion of heartfelt romance. A comic realist who unearths joy in extreme subjectivity, he provides a critique of the banal in culture both high and low, plundering memory like a picaresque pirate, raising casual or impulsive anecdote to near-liturgical significance. Kevin T. McEneaney See also: JOYCE, James Augustine Aloysius; YEATS, William Butler References Arkins, Brian. James Liddy: A Critical Study. Galway: Arlen House, 2001. Stanley, George. “Beyond the Sublime: Reading James Liddy.” Irish University Review 28, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 1998): 92–109.
LITERATURE, AMERICAN CHILDREN’S The range of Irish-related literature for children in America has gradually broadened since the nineteenth century. In children’s
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stories earlier than 1900, Irish male characters are generally superstitious and good humored, and they usually work with horses or pigs. Less visible are Irish women, often domestic servants in the background, referred to as “Bridget” with no other explanation. Irish children, such as the street urchins who are the “sworn enemies” of the March girls in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1869), are seldom portrayed in a favorable light. Irish fantasy, folk tales, and legends have had a greater impact in America than realist fiction. Granny’s Wonderful Chair, by Donegal-born Frances Browne (1816–1879), published in 1856, went through numerous editions and reprints, especially between 1890 and 1940. With Pádraic Colum’s emergence as a prominent writer of children’s books, the American view of Ireland changed. Colum (1881–1972) left Ireland in 1914 and spent most of his life in the United States. He was one of the most respected writers of children’s editions of Greek, Norse, Hawaiian, and Irish myths and legends. His work helped raise the image of Ireland from a land of poverty to one rich in oral tradition. Colum is one of only two Irish authors to have achieved Newbery Honor status, the other being Ella Young (1867–1956). The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived before Achilles was a Newbery Honor book in 1922, The Voyagers: Being Legends and Romances of Atlantic Discovery in 1926, and The Big Tree of Bunlahy: Stories of My Own Countryside in 1934. Colum’s work was featured on the Federal Bureau of Education List (1925) of 40 books “all children should read before they are 16 years of age.” Following the popularity of Colum’s stories, James Stephens (1882–1950) and www.abc-clio.com
Eileen O’Faolain (1900–1988) wrote stories of magic, leprechauns, and animals that helped to establish American expectations regarding Irish fiction. Fairies, leprechauns, and “wee folk” remain popular in American expectations of Irish literature. In fiction, by the mid-twentieth century, Irish surnames are no longer limited to characters in rural or domestic spheres, but they do stay with occupations that are more typically associated with Irish Americans. Clancy is a Boston policeman in Robert McCloskey’s classic, Make Way for Ducklings (1941), and the hero of Virginia Lee Burton’s Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (1939) also has an Irish surname. In recent years, collections of legends and folktales by Irish authors have been available in American editions, but editions of single stories based on tradition are usually American-written. Thus, Sheila McGill-Callahan’s The Children of Lir (1993), in which two pairs of twins are turned into swans by their stepmother and reunited with their father after seven years, is one of the most visible American versions of that story. Tomie dePaola has produced some of the picture books of Irish stories most readily available in America, including Fin M’Coul: The Giant of Knockmany Hill (1981) and Jamie O’Rourke and the Pooka (2000). Older collections of folktales are often used as source material for contemporary American retellings, such as Brave Margaret by Robert San Souci (1999) and Billy Beg and his Bull by Ellen Greene (1994). From the 1980s on, there has been an increasing interest in Irish historical fiction, both in Ireland and America. Most of the American historical fiction centers on the Famine and the ensuing immigration to
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America. One exception, A Family Apart (1987) by Joan Lowery Nixon, tells of an Irish immigrant family sent west on an Orphan Train in the mid-nineteenth century. In another exception, Gary Schmidt invents a young English soldier stationed in Dublin in the seventeenth century. In Anson’s Way (1999), Anson witnesses colonialism and the Penal Laws and chooses his own path. Nory Ryan’s Song (2000) by Patricia Reilly Giff, Beyond the Western Sea by Avi (1996), and The Grave by James Heneghan (2000) are all set in Famine times. Siobhán Parkinson critiques American famine novels with a rough guide to the “famine myth,” which concludes with “some lucky/plucky Irish people” who “escaped and were welcomed into America.” Heneghan’s The Grave does not conform to this pattern; this novel is one of time travel centering on a mass grave that was found in Liverpool in 1974. One of the most successful Irish-born authors of children’s books in the United States is Eve Bunting (b. 1928), who grew up in Maghera, Northern Ireland. She and her family settled in the United States in 1960. Of the wide range of books she has written, a few are set in Ireland. Dreaming of America (1999) is a story of Annie Moore, the first person to pass through the Ellis Island Station. Market Day (1996) is interesting as it does not conform to the image of rural isolation often associated with Ireland. It features a town rather than a village, and the market includes a cosmopolitan, even exotic cast of characters. A novel for older children, Spying on Miss Muller (1995) is a story of students in a Belfast girls’ boarding school during World War II who think their teacher is a German spy. www.abc-clio.com
The current large increase in the publishing of children’s books by Irish authors and their success in America (e.g., Martin Waddell, Sam McBratney, Eoin Colfer, Roddy Doyle) may influence the future range of representation of Irish in American children’s literature. Aedín Clements
LITERATURE, IRISHARGENTINE Irish-Argentine literature is the artistic representation of a unique array of cultural values expressed in English and Spanish, as they are portrayed by the Irish settlers in Argentina and their descendants. Recognizing a strong association with Southamericana literature of the English-speaking communities in Latin America, IrishArgentine writers historically demonstrated a distinct set of characteristics, including a preference for simple, yarn-type stories occurring in the rural milieu and presenting explicit divisions between the Irish and characters with other origins. One of the most frequent motifs in Irish-Argentine literature is the experience of the emigrants. The dominant subjects are the oppressive conditions in Ireland and British imperialism as the reason for their emigration as well as the transatlantic journey and the encounters with the otherness of Argentines and other immigrants. These recurrent subjects were present in spontaneous literary contributions sent to the editors of Irish and other newspapers that usually published short stories and poems contributed by readers. William Bulfin (1864–1910), who began publishing stories in Father Feeney’s Irish Argentine and then in the Southern Cross, appealed to his
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readers’ homesickness and their relations with gauchos, the cowboys of the pampas. In Tales of the Pampas, a collection of short stories published by Bulfin in London (1900), characters include gauchos, shepherds, scoundrels, Spanish immigrants, match-makers, and other persons typical of late nineteenth-century rural Argentina. These characters use a comic mixture of English, Irish, and Spanish, which reflects less a historical linguistic reality than the author’s nationalistic strategy to bring the Irish nearer to the Argentines and therefore to veer them away from the British. Kathleen Nevin’s novel You’ll Never Go Back, completed by her sister Winnie and published in Boston in 1946, is a fictionalized autobiography based on the oral memoirs of the author’s mother, Catherine Smyth of Ballymahon, Co. Longford (a traditional area of immigration to South America). The novel covers the time before emigration, the transatlantic journey, the initial settlement in the city of Buenos Aires and in the Irish sheep farms, and the narrator’s decision to stay in her new country after her engagement to another Irish immigrant. The text is full of reflections on the different culture that Kate, the principal character, is confronted with in the new country, and the gradually changing effect this contrast has on her feelings toward home. Another common theme in IrishArgentine literature is the scientific or pseudoscientific observation of nature and people, that is, the “traveler’s style” popular in the British Isles. John Brabazon (1828– 1914) of Mullingar, Co. Westmeath, left his memoir The Customs and Habits of the Country of Buenos Ayres from the Year 1845, which was translated into Spanish, edited, and published in 1982 by the genealogist www.abc-clio.com
Eduardo Coghlan (Andanzas de un irlandés por el campo porteño). The different meaning of the title in English and Spanish is an indication of the translator’s intention to add a Quixotic type of adventure to the original Brabazon’s purpose of describing the society and places he visited. Other examples of published travel accounts are William MacCann’s Two Thousand Miles’ Ride through the Argentine Provinces (1853), Thomas J. Hutchinson’s Buenos Ayres and Argentine Gleanings (1865), J. Macnie’s Work and Play in the Argentine (1925), and Barbara Peart’s Tia Barbarita: Memories of Barbara Peart (1933). Twentieth-century Irish-Argentine authors revealed diverse identities in their texts, with the increasing use of Spanish and of gauchesca themes indicating their connection with the newly created Argentine identity. Benito Lynch (1882–1951), descendant of a Galway family resident in Buenos Aires since the eighteenth century, published El Inglés de los Güesos (1922), a novel within the themes and styles of Argentine rural literature that adds the foreign (inglés, i.e., English-speaking) character to emphasize the Argentineness of the local culture. Maria Elena Walsh (b. 1930) enjoyed immediate success with her first collection of poems, Otoño Imperdonable (1947). But she is better-known for her children’s songs and stories, in which she recognizes the crossbred influence of her English, Irish, and Andalusian ancestors. In Novios de Antaño (1990), Maria Elena Walsh included a chapter with family letters describing the life of Anglo-Irish railway workers in 1880s Argentina. Rodolfo Walsh (1927– 1977), unrelated to the previous writer, was a journalist who published nonfiction novels (Operación Masacre, 1957) and short stories (including Irlandeses Detrás de un
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Gato, 1964). Rodolfo Walsh’s most popular texts occur in a political milieu and expose a political intention. As an intelligence officer of the Montoneros group, Walsh was involved in violent action against the military dictators. He was killed by a military death squad after publishing an Open Letter to the Military Junta, which, according to Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, is “one of the jewels of universal literature.” Enrique Anderson Imbert (1910–2000) published Mi Prima May, dealing with a mysterious leprechaun, Patricio O’Hara, el Libertador, comparing Celtic and Argentine mythologies, and Mi Hermana Rita, in which he used Irish folklore. Miguel Rice Treacy (1903–1971), known by tango musicians as “El irlandesito,” wrote tango lyrics under the pen name Carlos Viván. He published the famous Argentine tangos “Cómo se pianta la vida!” and “Moneda de cobre” and played jazz in the United States. Luis Alberto Murray (1923–2002), a poet and historian who was well-known for his radical positions within Argentine nationalism, published América Clavada en Mi Costado (1968) and De Pie Entre los Relámpagos (1980), among other works. He also translated poetry and tango lyrics into English. One of his poems, “A los Poetas Irlandeses” was published by the Southern Cross in the centenary edition (1975). John Walter Maguire (1906–1981), an antiquary and writer of rural stories, published special editions of Loncagüé (1967) and La Pezuña de Oro (1980). Juan José Delaney is one of the latest authors to publish short stories; Tréboles del Sur (1994), and the novel Moira Sullivan (1999) reflect the influence of Bulfin’s Tales of the Pampas and of Nevin’s You’ll Never Go Back, respectively. www.abc-clio.com
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Other Irish-Argentine writers include Guillermo Sullivan (1888–1927), a playwright and author of literary essays; Bernardo Carey, a short-story writer and a well-known playwright; Eduardo Carroll, a poet and novelist; Alfredo Casey, a poet, playwright, and translator of Pádraic Pearse’s texts; Patricio Gannon (1901–1977), an essayist in English literature; Luis Francisco Houlin, a poet; Esteban Moore, a poet and translator of Irish poetry; and Pacho O’Donnell, a playwright and historian. Edmundo Murray See also: BULFIN, William; COGHLAN, Eduardo Aquilio; WALSH, Rodolfo References Delaney, Juan José. The Language and Literature of the Irish in Argentina, 1999. Graham-Yooll, Andrew. The Forgotten Colony. Buenos Aires: Literature of Latin America, 1999. Izarra, Laura. “The Irish Diaspora in Argentina.” British Association for Irish Studies Newsletter No. 32, October 2002. Murray, Edmundo. “How the Irish became ‘Gauchos Ingleses’: Diasporic Models in Irish-Argentine Literature.” The Representation of Ireland/s: Images from Outside and from Within, edited by Rosa González, 369–380. Barcelona, Spain: Promociones y Publicaciones Universitarias, 2003.
LYNCH, BENITO EDUARDO (1882–1951) Benito Eduardo Lynch was born on July 25, 1880, in Buenos Aires, the second child of Benito Lynch (1852–1902) and Juana Beaulieu (d. 1937). Lynch’s fourth grandfather, Patrick Lynch, was born in Lydican Castle, Co. Galway, in 1715 and settled in Buenos Aires in 1749, where he founded a large and well-known family in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Benito Lynch, Jr., grew up in El Deseado, a ranch in Bolívar
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(Buenos Aires province). His father was Bolívar’s major, provincial member of Parliament, and mayor of the city of La Plata. The family belonged to the wealthy group of ranchers who owned lands in Buenos Aires province. Growing up on the family estancia (ranch), Benito Lynch learned the linguistic idiosyncrasy of the gaucho, the cowboy of the pampas, and acquired a firsthand knowledge of the life and work in the countryside, particularly in the use of horses. In the early 1890s the family moved to La Plata, and Lynch was educated by a private tutor. He stood out as a good sportsman (rowing, box, and fencing), and learned the lunfardo, the urban jargon of Buenos Aires. Lynch completed his studies in the Colegio Nacional of La Plata. In 1902, using the pen name Thyon Lebic, Lynch began writing as a journalist for El Día, a paper in which his father was a shareholder. In 1910 Lynch joined the Conservative Party in Buenos Aires province, and worked for the communications committee. Some of his first published works were “El Potrillo Roano,” a short story, and the novel Los Caranchos de la Florida (which was translated and published in Italy in 1916). The celebrated El Inglés de los Güesos appeared in 1924. On August 11, 1939, Lynch was sworn in as doctor honoris causa of the University of La Plata. In 1941 he published La Nación de Medallas de Oro, Nuestra Novela, a n d Cartas y Cartas, and retired from fictional writing. In 1949, blind and deaf, he was run over by a tramway in La Plata. He was hospitalized with concussion and died two years later on December 23, 1951. Between 1903 and 1941 Lynch published 34 short story volumes, six novels, and more than 100 articles and short fictional www.abc-clio.com
pieces. In addition to those mentioned, some of the published works are Plata Dorada (1909), Raquela (1918), and El Romance de un Gaucho (1933). In El Inglés de los Güesos, with a recognized influence of Charles Darwin’s Diary, the principal character Mr. James represents the contrast between the European culture and the native values of the pampas. In many of his books there are detailed descriptions of the life in Argentine ranches, and accurate depictions of the main attitudes of the ruling elites in the first decades of the twentieth century. Edmundo Murray See also: LITERATURE, IRISHARGENTINE References Coghlan, Eduardo A. Los Irlandeses en la Argentina: Su Actuación y Descendencia. Buenos Aires: Author’s Edition, 1987. Petit de Murat, U. Genio y Figura de Benito Lynch. Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1968.
LYNCH, ELISA (ELIZA) (1835– 1886) First lady of Paraguay and concubine of dictator Francisco Solano López until his death in 1870, Elisa Lynch was born in Co. Cork to a middle-class family that left Ireland and settled in France in 1845. In 1850, at the age of 15, she married Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages, a French military surgeon. The unhappy marriage dissolved after three years. Lynch was living in Paris with her mother, and perhaps a Russian nobleman, when she met López in 1853. It was love at first sight: López was overwhelmed by Lynch’s beauty and Lynch was attracted by the security López offered with his position as heir to Paraguayan first post. Despite arguments with his younger brother Benigno, who did not want the
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affair carried across the ocean, López left Lynch with funds and instructions on how to get to Paraguay, and he departed to South America. Lynch arrived at Buenos Aires in October 1855 and gave birth to a son, who was baptized in a private ceremony as Juan Francisco (“Panchito”) López after her arrival in Asunción in December. After an initial depression on encountering Paraguay and its people, Lynch learned to take political and financial advantage of her status, despite her unofficial position and the López family’s dislike of her. By 1858 she was the social leader of the community, even though she was almost always pregnant and perceived by the bigoted local elite—particularly by the patrician ladies— to be “living in sin.” “Madame Lynch”—as she styled herself, though she was popularly known as “La Lynch”—was something of a snob and delighted in displaying her new ways to the Paraguayans, refusing to ride sidesaddle and serving elegant French cuisine to guests. She became a lady to emulate if not like, and her social example almost placed her in the ranks of the foreign diplomats, for she did her part to modernize Paraguay and its fashion, and began a cultural transfer of French (not English or Irish) customs to replace the native ones. She set the style with her home and her lover’s house, as well as clothing, cuisine, champagne, cosmetics, sewing machines, certain music, formal dances, and lithographs and other objets d’art. Photographs taken around 1860 show Elisa Lynch looking less like a young lady and more like a matron. Between 1855 and 1861 she gave birth to five sons, all of whom openly carried the López name. She rose high in the world in a material sense, www.abc-clio.com
and received gift after gift from her admiring general. She became the world’s largest female landowner. By 1865 she owned several large ranches and at least 26 urban properties. During the Triple Alliance War against Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, perhaps to place in her name huge properties in order to protect some wealth in case he lost the conflict or had to abdicate, López ordered the sale to Lynch of more than 800,000 acres of land and forests of the state located in the Chaco. Furthermore, she acquired 12 million acres in eastern Paraguay and another 9 million acres of yerbales and forests in the contested area north of Rio Apa. All her properties were confiscated in 1869. In 1870, López was killed in Cerro Corá. Lynch buried her lover and their son Panchito and fled to Paris with more than $500,000 in jewels, gold, and cash. In 1875 she returned to Paraguay, invited by President Juan B. Gill, who supported her claims to lost properties. But she was deported again to France and finally settled in Paris, where she died in 1886, penniless and largely forgotten. Lynch’s life fascinated modern writers of fiction and biography in English and Spanish, and several books about her life were published. In the 1970s Lynch was proclaimed Paraguayan national heroine, and her remains were removed from a grave in Montmartre to her adopted country. A central street in Asunción was named “Madame Lynch.” Edmundo Murray See also: O’LEARY, Juan Emiliano References Baptista, Francisco. Elysa Lynch, Mujer de Mundo y de Guerra. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1987. Barrett, William. Una Amazona. Asunción: Servilibro, 2003.
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LYNCH, ARCHBISHOP JOHN JOSEPH Cawthorne, Nigel. The Empress of South America. London: Heinemann, 2003. Hoyt Williams, John. The Rise and Fall of the Paraguayan Republic, 1800–1870. Austin: University of Texas at Austin, 1979. O’Leary, Juan E. El Mariscal Solano López. Asunción: Ediciones de la Casa América,1920. Rees, Siân. The Shadows of Elisa Lynch: How a Nineteenth-Century Irish Courtesan Became the Most Powerful Woman in Paraguay. London: Review, 2003.
LYNCH, ARCHBISHOP JOHN JOSEPH (1816–1888) Born in Co. Monaghan, John Joseph Lynch was the son of a schoolteacher. After training at the College of St. Lazare in Paris, Lynch was ordained and served as a professor with the College of Castleknock. In 1846 he accepted a placement to conduct missionary work in the United States. Father Lynch’s health suffered during his labors in Texas, and he retreated to a Lazarist college in Missouri, where he was appointed president and first demonstrated his considerable abilities as an administrator. In 1857, Father Lynch founded the Seminary of Our Lady of Angels at Suspension Bridge. Accounts of his generosity and dedication reached the Vincentian Superior in Paris who recounted them to Bishop of Toronto Comte Armand de Charbonnel. Charbonnel thought Lynch would make an appropriate successor for the Toronto diocese and thus permit his own retirement. In 1859, Father Lynch was elected coadjutor to the bishop of Toronto with right of succession. He was consecrated in Toronto and became the third bishop of the diocese the following year. Bishop Lynch more than doubled the Catholic infrastructure in Ontario in order to combat the challenges of an industrializing society. He obtained the services of the www.abc-clio.com
Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul and the Sisters of the Good Shepherd to found the Notre Dame Institute, an industrial school for girls, and the Magdalen Asylum, a refuge for indigent and troubled women in the city. The Saint Nicholas Home, an Agricultural and Industrial School, was established for wayward boys. Lynch also provided the services of devout priests and teachers in penitentiaries and institutes for the insane. He vociferously fought for the economic and political interests of the urban Irish Catholics of Toronto. Lynch’s success in this regard is remarkable because Toronto was the strongest center of the Orange Order outside the British Isles. Lynch promoted the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and encouraged expressions of Marian devotion in the diocese. In doing so, he embodied and reflected a religious revival in Ireland that was being intensified through continuing emigration to North America. Lynch believed he had a duty as leader of a minority to promulgate the views of his faith and his people. In his role as spokesman for Irish Catholicism in Toronto, he often became embroiled in disputes with Protestant spokesmen. Lynch expected obedience within his diocese. He sought to reduce clerical problems with financial misconduct and excessive drinking by educating his own priests. He also hoped to improve the behavior of Catholic laypeople and thereby mitigate the prejudice of the Protestant majority. However, he did not fully appreciate the desire of the laity for greater freedom and ultimately proved powerless to halt an ongoing process of secularization. Particularly problematic were a series of attacks emanating from the city’s Separate School Board concerning his staunch opposition to the use of the ballot in Separate School Board elections.
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Lynch visited Rome and Ireland in 1862, using the opportunity to support Home Rule for Ireland. He was formally received by the Canadian high commissioner and became the first Roman Catholic bishop since the reign of James II to attend a royal levee. In 1869 he participated in the Vatican Council, where he delivered forcible arguments in favor of the dogma of papal infallibility. During the council, his diocese was raised to an archbishopric by Pope Pius IX. Mike Cottrell See also: ONTARIO; ORANGE ORDER References “Archbishop John Joseph Lynch, C.M.” Archives of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto website. www.archtoronto.org/archives/bishops/ lynch.htm (accessed August 5, 2007). Cottrell, Michael. “St. Patrick’s Day Parades in Nineteenth-Century Toronto: A Study of Immigrant Adjustment and Elite Control.” In A Nation of Immigrants: Women, Workers, and Communities in Canadian History, 1840s–1960s, edited by Franca Iacovetta, Paula Draper, and Robert Ventrescan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Kelly, Edward. “Archdiocese of Toronto.” In The Catholic Encyclopaedia, Volume 14, Robert Appleton Company, 1912. Online Edition K. Knight, 2003. www.newadvent.org/cathen/14781d.htm (accessed August 5, 2007). Nicolson, Murray W. “The Other Toronto: Irish Catholics in a Victorian City, 1850– 1900.” Polyphony (Summer 1984: 19–23. Stortz, Gerald J. “Archbishop John Joseph Lynch of Toronto: Twenty-eight Years of Commitment.” CCHA Study Sessions 49 (1982), 5–23.
LYNCH, P. J. (1962–) P. J. Lynch was born in Belfast on March 2, 1962, the son of Anna (McKillen) and Liam Lynch. Lynch attended Jordanstown Polytechnic and Brighton Art College, www.abc-clio.com
where he received his BA degree in 1984. Although he spent some years in England, he now lives in Dublin. His career as an illustrator began when he illustrated Alan Garner’s A Bag of Moonshine (1986), which won the Mother Goose Award in 1987. He later illustrated fairy tales and gave new life to stories by E. Nesbit, Oscar Wilde, Hans Andersen, and W. B. Yeats. His Oscar Wilde: Stories for Children (2000) was translated into many languages. Lynch’s witty style, fantastic settings, and expressive characters recall the illustrations of Arthur Rackham, whose influence Lynch acknowledges. Lynch received recognition in the United States with The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey, written by Susan Wojciechowski and published in 1995. It was the Bisto Book of the Year in Ireland, and in Britain it received the Kate Greenaway Medal, among other awards. Jonathan Toomey is a woodcarver, embittered by personal tragedy, whose love of humanity reemerges at Christmas when he carves a set of nativity figures for a widow and her son. Lynch traveled to the Shelburne Museum in Vermont to ensure the accuracy of his setting. His watercolor paintings combine realistic details with lighting effects that enhance the mood of the story. Among the strengths of the illustrations are the use of light and shade to mirror Jonathan Toomey’s psychological state, the evocative detail of the New England setting and the woodcarver’s home, and the facial expressions that depict the developing relationship between the adult and the child. Since this book, his style in realist painting has developed in tandem with his dramatic works of fantasy. Lynch’s next major award-winning work, When Jessie Came Across the Sea, by Amy Hest, won the Greenaway Medal in 1997. In Ireland it won a Bisto Merit
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Award, and in the United States it was an International Reading Association Notable Book for a Global Society. The book, with paintings in watercolor and gouache, contains a number of striking two-page spreads. The cover shows immigrating passengers, viewed from a lower point, standing on deck as their ship passes the Statue of Liberty. A review in The New Statesman comments that “Lynch clearly relishes the contrast between old faces and young ones.” Lynch has continued to bring new interpretations to old stories, with witty and fantastic illustrations for Marie Heaney’s The Names Upon the Harp, (2000), Brendan Behan’s The King of Ireland’s Son (1997), and Frank Stockton’s The Bee-Man of Orn (2004). His realist-style book, Grandad’s Prayers of the Earth (2000), by Douglas Wood, has received awards and critical recognition in the United States. The story of a boy’s experience of nature and prayer is illustrated in two-page spreads throughout. The close-up and lower points of view employed enhance the effect of the magnitude of nature, and again, Lynch has visited the setting, this time Minnesota, to ensure the accuracy of his art. His latest book is East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon (2006) by Naomi Lewis. Lynch’s cover illustration in For Every Child, a book on the United Nations Charter for the Rights of the Child, with illustrations by top illustrators from a number of countries, was a finalist in the Illustrator’s Ireland awards in 2002. This illustration shows a child in the embrace of an old woman. Illustrators Ireland selected Lynch’s Ignis, the story of a dragon, for the award for the best “series of illustrations” in a book for publication. This juxtaposition nicely demonstrates the two kinds of illustration Lynch has become well known www.abc-clio.com
for—sensitive portraits of people and exuberant works of fantasy. That he has been three times a recipient of the Christopher Medal, for works that “affirm the highest dignity of the human spirit” is a comment on the works he elects to illustrate as well as on the quality of his artistic interpretation. Aedín Clements See also: BEHAN, Brendan; WILDE, Oscar; YEATS, William Butler References Craig, Amanda. “Children’s Books.” New Statesman, December 5, 1997: 62. Lynch, P. J. “Digging for Story Gold.” Chalk Talk (Autumn 2002): 4–5.
LYNCH, THOMAS (1948–) A well-respected poet and award-winning essayist, Thomas Lynch has also been a funeral director in Milford, Michigan, for several decades. Lynch was born in Detroit in 1948. He was educated in Catholic schools before attending Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, during the late 1960s. He left the university without a degree but was later awarded an honorary doctorate of humanities. Lynch, whose father was also a funeral director, graduated from mortuary school in 1973 and took over the family’s funeral home in Milford. All four of Lynch’s children have attended mortuary school as well. In much of his writing, both poetry and prose, Lynch reflects on lessons learned in his life as an undertaker. Lynch published his first collection of poetry, Skating with Heather Grace, in 1987. He has since published two other collections of poetry—Grimalkin & Other Poems (1994) and Still Life in Milford (1998)—as well as three collections of essays. The first of these, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (1997),
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won an American Book Award and has been translated into seven languages. In his second collection of essays, Bodies in Motion and at Rest (2000), Lynch writes about American attitudes toward death and addresses a wide range of other topics from alcoholism to Catholicism to the breakup of his first marriage. In his most recent publication, Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans (2005), Lynch explores the ties that he and many Irish Americans feel to their ancestral homeland. Lynch first visited Ireland in 1970, when—having drawn a high enough lottery number to avoid the Vietnam draft—he decided to pursue an interest in reading Irish poetry and fiction. While in Ireland, he met and established close ties with his cousins Tommy and Nora Lynch in the small town of Moveen, Co. Clare. Lynch’s great-grandfather had left Moveen in 1890 and immigrated to America. Booking Passage documents Lynch’s search for family and his evolving relationship to his great-grandfather’s home country. Lynch now owns the ancestral cottage in Moveen; while pursuing his dual vocation as writer
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and mortician, he divides his time between West Clare and Milford. Lynch is a regular op-ed contributor to the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Times of London. He also writes for Beliefnet, a website unaffiliated with any particular religious organization or movement but dedicated to issues concerning spirituality. In addition, his work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Esquire, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Irish Times. Lynch has been a guest speaker at universities throughout the United States and Ireland, as well as elsewhere in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. He regards his two seemingly disparate vocations—poetry writing and funeral directing—as quite similar in that both represent attempts to articulate what is often difficult to put into words. Kathleen Ruppert Reference Wake Me When I’m Dead: A Documentary about Poet and Undertaker Thomas Lynch. Compiled by Seamus Kelly. First broadcast December 31, 2002.
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M MACDONALD, MICHAEL PATRICK (1966–) Michael Patrick MacDonald is both an award-winning author (his memoir, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, won an American Book Award and a New England Literary Lights Award) and an activist against crime and violence. MacDonald was born in Boston in 1966 and grew up in the Old Colony Housing Project of South Boston, an area with the highest concentration of impoverished whites in the United States. In All Souls (1999) MacDonald writes about growing up in the predominantly Irish Catholic neighborhood, which was plagued by drugs, organized crime, and extreme poverty. The ninth of 11 children, MacDonald lost one of his brothers to suicide and two others to crime-related violence. Another brother died of pneumonia as an infant, after he was denied emergency room treatment for lack of insurance, and MacDonald’s sister sustained permanent brain damage when she was thrown off a roof during an argument over drugs. Despite the heartbreak of his youth, MacDonald refers to Southie as “the best place in the world,” and his memoir encapsulates the fierce loyalty of its residents to their community.
MacDonald spent the first year of his life in the Columbia Point Project, a predominantly black housing development on the South Boston/Dorchester waterfront, an area characterized by heavy pollution and a large rodent population. In the mid-1960s, when the MacDonald family lived in Columbia Point, the neighborhood was a high crime area—drug dealings and shootings were common—and racial tensions ran extremely high. MacDonald’s mother struggled to raise her large family without the help of Dave MacDonald, her abusive and typically absent husband. In 1967 she moved with her children into her parents’ home in Jamaica Plain, where they lived for the next six years in a neighborhood of working-class Irish-American families. MacDonald’s mother, Helen MacDonald (later King), supplemented her welfare income by playing the Irish accordion at local barrooms. Although the family was not living in a housing project at the time, MacDonald recalls spending a great deal of time visiting the project nearby and playing with other children whose families were on welfare. When, in the summer of 1973, MacDonald’s grandfather decided to sell the house in Jamaica Plain, MacDonald and his
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siblings moved with their mother to the Old Colony Housing Project in Southie. MacDonald attended St. Augustine’s grammar school, where his mother struggled to make tuition payments so that her children would not be bused to primarily black neighborhoods. In his memoir, MacDonald chronicles the antibusing riots in Southie that made national news in the mid-1970s. He also writes about organized crime and specifically about James “Whitey” Bulger, a politically connected mobster and drug lord who ruled the streets of Southie and enforced a strict code of loyalty and silence among its residents. After all his family members either died or moved away, MacDonald relocated to downtown Boston in 1990 and began working as an antiviolence activist with Citizens for Safety. He helped to start Boston’s gun buyback program and worked with other activists and victims to give voice to survivors of violence and the drug trade. His early work connected him with families in Boston’s largely black and Latino neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. Those families, MacDonald discovered, had experienced many of the same tragedies and hardships as their counterparts in the predominantly Irish community of Southie. The difference was residents of Southie were typically unwilling to talk about the problems that plagued their neighborhood. In 1994 MacDonald broke the code of silence when he agreed to an interview with U.S. News & World Report about the “white underclass” in Southie. In the summer of 1994, MacDonald moved back to Southie and founded the South Boston Vigil Group for families who, like MacDonald, have lost loved ones to drugs, violence, or suicide. Kathleen Ruppert www.abc-clio.com
See also: Boston; Bulger, James “Whitey;” Ethnic and Race Relations (Irish and African American) Reference McNaught, Sarah. “No Place Like Home: Michael Patrick MacDonald Talks about His New Book, All Souls, and Changing Times in South Boston.” www.bostonphoenix .com/archive/features/99/10/14/ MACDONALD.html (accessed August 8, 2007).
MACGOWAN, MICHAEL (1865–1948) Michael MacGowan was a Donegal-born Irish speaker whose memoir offers an outstanding insight into the life of an immigrant laborer in late nineteenth-century North America. Published posthumously in 1959, Rotha Mór an tSaoil (The Great Wheel of Life) is a compilation of autobiographical stories collected from MacGowan by his son-in-law, Seán Ó hEochaidh, a folklorist with the Irish Folklore Commission. It was subsequently translated into English by Valentin Iremonger and published in 1962 as The Hard Road to Klondike. Born the eldest of twelve children in 1865 in Cloghaneely, Co. Donegal, MacGowan first left home at the age of eight via the hiring fairs in Letterkenny. At the age of 15 he departed for Scotland, and spent five years as a migrant worker before leaving for Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to join a relation who worked in the iron mills. He earned a dollar a day at his first job in Bethlehem: hauling sand for the construction of the then-expanding city, which was attracting Irish and other immigrants. While he soon moved to a job in the iron works, he found the long hours and low pay no more appealing than they had been in Scotland, so he ventured by rail to
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the rich silver and copper mines near Butte, Montana. He spent nearly a decade mining at Granite Mountain, alongside fellow Cloghaneely men. Economic forces moved him on, however: the price of silver collapsed in the mid-1890s, making work difficult to find. In 1897 MacGowan heard that gold had been discovered in the Klondike region in Canada’s Yukon Territory. The next year, he made the arduous, six-month journey to join friends who had already ventured north to Canada for the early days of the gold rush. He journeyed much of the way west to Seattle as a hobo, stealing train rides in freight cars. From Seattle, he traveled north, mostly by boat but sometimes on foot: first up the coast, then through the Bering Sea and finally up the Yukon, fighting the ice that became more of a menace as winter set in. After a series of life-threatening episodes, MacGowan reached the large miners’ settlement at Dawson City in December 1898. He spent the next three years in nearby All Gold Creek, working the tedious, difficult task of mining a claim. While the work was gruelling, MacGowan and his fellow Irish miners developed a strong sense of community and retained a sense of Irish identity. In his memoir, he describes an impromptu Saint Patrick’s Day parade: a crowd of miners marched behind a lone piper from their cabins to the town, where they celebrated the day in the hotel bars. MacGowan’s emigrant story was ultimately one of triumph: in 1901, he returned home to Cloghaneely for a visit, having earned enough money in the Klondike to travel first class. While at home, he fell in love with a local woman, Maire Bawn Dickson, and decided not to return to America. Instead, he married in www.abc-clio.com
1902 and bought the house of a local landlord, where the couple raised a family of 11 children, and where he lived until his death in 1848. The strength of MacGowan’s legacy is in the vividness of the account he provides of his migrant experience; he articulately explores such experiences as his homesickness, the camaraderie he felt with his fellow migrants, the excitement of the gold rush, and the difficulties of his work. In addition, his memoir provides insightful observations into the effects of larger historical forces on MacGowan and those he encounters. His depiction of Native Americans, for example, whom he portrays sympathetically, reveals his sensitivity to their suffering and his sense of commonality with them as colonized people. A video documentary entitled Rotha Mór an tSaoil, based on the work, was produced for RTÉ in 1998 and directed by Desmond Bell. Noreen Bowden See also: EMIGRATION; SAINT PATRICK’S DAY
MACGOWAN, SHANE (1957–) Shane MacGowan was lead vocalist and songwriter for 1980s London-Irish punkfolk band The Pogues. He subsequently fronted the Popes and worked as a solo singer and guest musician. MacGowan combines the content and craft of traditional Irish tunes with the style and delivery of punk and rock music. Born in Tonbridge, Kent, and raised in Puckaun, Co. Tipperary, MacGowan returned to England with his family in 1964. Accepted in 1971 to London’s Westminster public school on scholarship, he was ejected a year
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later for narcotics possession. Hospitalization for drug abuse preceded a combination of odd jobs, street living, and appearances as an early punk fan, “Shane O’Hooligan.” Press attention in The New Musical Express after a concert where his ear was bitten led to his singing for the Nipple Erectors, later called the Nips, from 1978 to 1981. By 1983, MacGowan cofounded Pogue Mahone, later the Pogues. This North London band pioneered a fusion of traditional ballads, chants, and anthems with MacGowan’s own original tunes, drawing on folk and contemporary influences. The band’s shambolic performances and MacGowan’s drug and alcohol abuses led to notoriety and success among British and American audiences. Their first album, Red Roses for Me (1984), revealed raw talent, while the Elvis Costello–produced Rum, Sodomy & the Lash (1985) introduced the band to the United States. On the fourtrack extended-play Poguetry in Motion (1986), “The Body of an American” chronicles the prejudices and stereotypes within the Irish-American community. American and worldwide tours and their next two albums heightened the band’s reputation as gritty chroniclers and celebrators of urban “Paddies.” If I Should Fall from Grace with God (1988) displays MacGowan’s ability to croon as well as bluster; “Fairytale of New York” is a duet with Kirsty MacColl, daughter of Ewan MacColl, himself a folksinger from the previous generation. By collaborating with the Dubliners, too, MacGowan sought to prove to younger listeners that the Irish musical tradition could survive in a contemporary milieu, even if it proved offensive to some purists. Touring and conflicts over musical direction weakened the band. Peace and Love www.abc-clio.com
(1989) and Hell’s Ditch (1990) diversified into Mediterranean, Latin, and American styles, which were at odds with MacGowan’s commitment to concentrate on Celtic themes. Increasingly under physical and mental strain, MacGowan failed to show up for dates on a 1989 U.S. tour supporting Bob Dylan. While “Five Green Queens and Jean” on the 1990 album produced by Joe Strummer (of the Clash) attests to MacGowan’s ability to assimilate Dylan’s attitude, the globalized itinerary and increasing interest in world music of his fellow musicians proved too diverse for MacGowan. He and the band parted in 1991. Duets with Nick Cave (“What a Wonderful World,” the Pogues’ “Rainy Night in Soho,” and Cave’s “Lucy”) appeared in 1992, but a solo album from MacGowan emerged only in 1994. He assembled some long-time friends into a sextet christened the Popes. The Snake mixed a more rock-oriented singer-songwriter approach with ballads like “Nancy Whiskey” and “The Rising of the Moon.” With guests ranging from Johnny Depp and Sinead O’Connor to members of the Pogues and the Dubliners, the range of this album boded well for MacGowan’s solo ambitions. A long-delayed successor, The Crock of Gold (2000), failed to sustain this energy, however. Live albums have followed; the Popes recorded Across the Broad Atlantic live from both Dublin and New York on Saint Patrick’s Day in 2001. Throughout his career, MacGowan has strived to express the plight of the emigrant Irish, as his English counterparts John Lydon (Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols), Morrissey (of the Smiths), and Kevin Rowland (of Dexy’s Midnight Runners) had done as punk crested and then
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subsided for their displaced generation. MacGowan’s recent work with diverse artists attests to his determination to express the Irish experience across the diaspora in both lyrics and music. Death-metal Irish band Cruachan, songwriter-activist Christy Moore, traditional singer Colm O’Donnell, noise-pop band the Jesus and Mary Chain, Boston punk-folk hardcore band Dropkick Murphys, Breton harpist Alan Stivell, and American country artist Steve Earle all have performed with MacGowan after his departure from the Pogues. John L. Murphy See also: MOORE, Christy References Clarke, Victoria Mary. A Drink With Shane MacGowan. New York: Macmillan, 2002. MacGowan, Shane. Poguetry: The Lyrics of Shane MacGowan. London: Faber & Faber, 1990. Merrick, Joe. Shane MacGowan: London Irish Punk Life and Music. London: Omnibus Press, 2001. Prendergast, Mark. Isle of Noises: Rock and Roll’s Roots in Ireland. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Stanage, Niall. Down All the Days: The Life and Times of Shane MacGowan. London: Omnibus Press, 1991.
MACGOWRAN, JACK (1918–1973) John Joseph McGowran (he later changed the spelling of his surname) was born on October 13, 1918, in Ranelagh, a southern suburb of Dublin. Growing up, he attended the Christian Brothers School where, despite his somewhat unstudious nature, he developed a love of literature that he maintained throughout his life. His first love, from early adolescence, was acting. In 1940 he debuted in the Gaiety Theatre, one of www.abc-clio.com
Dublin’s major theatrical venues. During the war years he worked at the Gaiety and, for several years after the war, at the Abbey Theatre, then the foremost Dublin venue. He began to develop reputations as both an astounding acting talent and an unreliable frequent drinker. He also began to appear in film roles, some undistinguished, but several that attained fame (his most famous film was The Quiet Man, opposite John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, although he later also appeared in several of Roman Polanski’s lesser films). But in the early 1950s theatrical work remained, as often in Dublin, scarce and uncertain, so MacGowran resolved to try his luck in London. In 1954 he debuted in London as The Young Covey in Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. He had become friendly with O’Casey, and MacGowran’s performances were notable for his extraordinary ability to replicate the simultaneous desperation and humanity of O’Casey’s Dubliners. Yet it was in 1957 that MacGowran made his most fruitful friendship with an Irish playwright—Samuel Beckett. MacGowran originally encountered the author through a vocal appearance on the radio play All That Fall, and he became intrigued by Beckett’s gloomy humor and lyrical genius. The men met, became friends, and for the rest of his life MacGowran remained the definitive male performer of Beckett’s works. His rumpled face and prominent nose—which had long worked against him in the theater—perfectly captured the ravaged looks the dramatist described. MacGowran performed in many of Beckett’s plays, including Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and the teleplay that was written expressly for him, Eh Joe. His greatest success, however, was a one-man show
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of excerpts from Beckett’s plays, novels, and short stories entitled Jack MacGowran in the Works of Samuel Beckett. This play was wildly popular on Broadway, making MacGowran a respected name in American theater and further encouraging Beckett’s fervent following in the United States. Although MacGowran was able to conquer his alcoholism, he still suffered from depressions and self-doubt. Compounding his health problems, MacGowran routinely overcommitted and overworked himself. He died on January 30, 1973, in New York City. His biographer ascribes his death to angina. MacGowran’s major contribution to Irish-American relations was his extraordinary embodiment of Beckett’s characters on the American stage. Although he had several failures in his American theater career—most notably, a disastrously misconceived version of O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock as a musical comedy—MacGowran did more to impress North American audiences with the theatrical value and moral humanity of Beckett’s work than any other actor. His complete faith in Beckett’s writings, combined with his nearly inhuman submersion of himself in the writer’s outcasts and tramps, made for performances that are still regarded as among the most accomplished ever given on an American stage. Andrew Goodspeed See also: BECKETT, Samuel References MacGowran, Jack. MacGowran Speaking Beckett. Dublin: Claddagh Records, 1966. MacGowran, Jack. “Working with Beckett.” In Beckett at 60: A Festschrift, edited by John Calder. London: Calder & Boyars, 1967. Toscan, Richard. “MacGowran on Beckett.” In On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, edited www.abc-clio.com
by S. E. Gontarski. New York: Grove Press, 1986. Young, Jordan R. The Beckett Actor: Jack MacGowran, Beginning to End. Beverly Hills, CA: Moonstone Press, 1987.
MACK, CONNIE (1862–1956) Connie Mack was born Cornelius McGillicuddy on December 22, 1862, in East Brookfield, Massachusetts, to Michael McGillicuddy, a wheelwright, and Mary (McKillop) McGillicuddy, both Irish immigrants. Mack was a catcher who was signed to a professional baseball contract in 1884, earning $90 per month to play for Meriden of the Connecticut State League. Two years later he made his major league debut with Washington of the National League. In 1887 he married his childhood sweetheart, Margaret Hogan; when she died five years later, she left him three children. After three years with Washington, Mack led a player’s revolt against the arbitrary salary limits used by National League clubs. He invested his savings in the new Players League, and spent two years with the Buffalo club. When the Players League folded, Mack was assigned to Pittsburgh of the National League, playing with them for six years (1891–1896). Mack’s style has been described as combative and crafty; he used such tactics as chatting with batters to distract them, conversing with umpires to influence them, and tipping bats so as to make swings ineffective. These attributes earned him managerial responsibilities in 1894, a position he held for three years. In 1897 he became manager and part owner of the Milwaukee franchise, learning the business side of the game, and reassessing his earlier stance on player-owner grievances.
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Portrait of professional baseball player and manager Cornelius “Connie Mack” McGillicuddy. (Library of Congress)
In 1901 Mack was named manager— and made 25 percent owner—of the expansion Philadelphia Athletics, of the new American League. He recruited star National League players to the fledgling club, and with the backing of investors such as Ben Shibe, he built one of the flagship franchises in all the game. Under Mack’s tutelage the Athletics won six of the first 14 American League pennants and four pennants in five years from 1910 to 1914. Known as “the grand old gentleman of the game,” Mack eschewed the uniform of his day and managed in a business suit, high starched collar, tie, and straw hat. He was a keen judge of talent who scouted colleges and high schools for players. He sought young, intelligent players who www.abc-clio.com
could pressure opponents with their athleticism and talents. His players were expected to be well behaved, and Mack treated them with deference and respect, attributes not seen in many managers. As he had promised his pious mother, who believed all ballplayers were profane gamblers, Mack exuded professionalism and tact. He banned smoking, card playing, and drinking from the clubhouse and rigidly enforced curfews during road trips. On the field, Mack introduced such innovations as pregame and postgame strategy sessions and defensive substitutions. He often coordinated his pitchers with his defense; knowing how his pitchers would fare against certain batters, he positioned his fielders accordingly, using his manager’s scorecard to wave players into position.
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For all his knowledge of the game, Mack was seen as a penurious, ruthless competitor. He was rumored to have employed special coaches whose job it was to steal signs from opposing players from a seat in the centerfield bleachers, and he routinely slashed salaries if the team lost money. During one such spree, Mack sold the contracts of many of his stars, and the Athletics finished last in every season from 1915 to 1922. The onset of the Great Depression forced Mack to liquidate even his most notable players, ending a run of three pennants from 1929 to 1931. Mack managed the Athletics until 1950 and remained principal owner until 1954. During his time at the helm, the Athletics won nine pennants and five world championships. In 1955, over Mack’s objections, the Athletics were sold and relocated to Kansas City. It was the end of a half-century association between Connie Mack and the Athletics. During his 53-year managerial career, Mack accumulated many records, including most games managed (7,755), won (3,776), and lost (3,948). Elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1937, Mack was survived by his second wife, Katherine Hallahan (whom he had wed in 1910), and his eight children when he died on February 8, 1956, in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Tim Lynch See also: BASEBALL; BASEBALL MANAGERS, IRISH-AMERICAN
MACKENNA, JOHN (1771–1814) Governor of Osorno and a general in the Chilean War of Independence, John Mackenna was born on October 26, 1771, in Clogher, Co. Tyrone, the son of William McKenna and Eleanor O’Reilly. He went to Spain with his uncle, the Count O’Reilly, and studied in the Royal School of Mathematics in Barcelona. In 1787 he was accepted in the Irish Brigade of the Spanish army and joined the army fighting in Ceuta in northern Africa. While there, Lt. Col. Luis Urbina promoted him to second lieutenant. In 1791 Mackenna resumed his studies in Barcelona and acted as liaison with mercenaries recruited in Europe. The following year he was promoted to lieutenant in the Royal Regiment of Engineers. In the war against the French, John Mackenna fought in Rosellón under General Ricardos and met the future liberator of Argentina, José de San Martín. For his merits in the defense of Plaza de Rozas, he was promoted to captain in 1795. Following a new assignment in October 1796, Mackenna left Spain for South America. He arrived in Buenos Aires and then traveled to Mendoza and to Chile across the Andes. Once in Lima, Viceroy Ambrose O’Higgins appointed Mackenna the governor of Osorno. In this capacity, John Mackenna convinced families of Castro, in the isle of Chiloé, to move to Osorno to found a colony there. He built a storehouse, two mills, and the road between Osorno and present-day Puerto Montt. His successful administration provoked jealously from Chile’s CaptainGeneral Gabriel de Avilés, who feared that John Mackenna and Ambrose O’Higgins would create an Irish colony in Osorno. Both Irishmen were loyal to the Spanish crown, however; John Mackenna had good
References Davis, Ted. Connie Mack: A Life in Baseball. Philadelphia: Writers Club Press, 2001. Jordan, David M. The Athletics of Philadelphia: Connie Mack’s White Elephants. New York: MacFarland and Company, 1999. Mack, Connie. My Sixty-Six Years in the Big Leagues. Philadelphia: Amereon Press, 1950. www.abc-clio.com ABC-CLIO
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relations with O’Higgins’s son Bernardo, the future emancipator of Chile, and was also connected with the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda and his group of supporters of South American independence. When Ambrose O’Higgins died in 1801, Avilés was appointed viceroy of Peru. It took him eight years to remove O’Higgins’s protégé John Mackenna from Osorno. In 1809 John Mackenna married Josefina Vicuña y Larraín, an 18-year-old Chilean woman from a family with revolutionary connections. The following year he was called to the defense committee of the new republic of Chile, and in 1811 he was appointed governor of Valparaíso. Owing to political feuds with José Miguel Carreras and his brothers, John Mackenna was dismissed from the post and imprisoned. He supported the faction of Bernardo O’Higgins, who appointed him one of the key officers to fight the Spanish army of General Antonio Pareja. Mackenna’s major military honor was achieved in 1814 in the battle of Membrillar, in which the general ensured a temporary breakdown of the royal forces. He was appointed commandantgeneral by Bernardo O’Higgins, but after a coup d’état led by José Luis Carreras both were banished to the Argentine province of Mendoza. John Mackenna died on November 21, 1814, in a duel with José Luis Carreras in Buenos Aires. Edmundo Murray See also: O’HIGGINS, Ambrose
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MADDEN, RICHARD ROBERT (1798–1886) Richard Madden was born in Dublin in August 1798, on the same day the French arrived off the Co. Mayo coast. On the night of his birth his father’s house was searched for arms by the notorious Major Sirr, attended by a company of yeomanry. The 1798 Rising became throughout his life what Madden called “a sort of ruling passion.” His seminal seven-volume The Lives and Times of the United Irishmen, the first of which was published in 1842, revived the memory of United Irish leaders such as Theobald Wolfe Tone and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, names that had lain in near oblivion if not disgrace for some 40 years. Madden is also associated with Anne Devlin, Robert Emmet’s housekeeper. Devlin had been imprisoned and tortured in 1803 and was alone and poor by the time Madden befriended her in the 1840s. Madden’s father, Edward Madden, was a descendent of an important Gaelic family that had held large tracts of land in the southern part of Co. Roscommon and the contiguous northern area of Galway. Edward Madden was a fairly prosperous silk and woolen manufacturer and merchant in Dublin. He had 21 children by two wives. Richard was the last of the 21; his mother was a woman by the name of Forde from Co. Leitrim. After attending various schools in Dublin as a boy, Madden’s contact with medicine began when he was apprenticed to a surgeon in Athy. While still a teenager he went to France in a bid to fight incipient tuberculosis. He worked and studied for a while in Paris and Bordeaux, before finding himself practicing for a while as doctor in Naples, Italy. In Naples he formed part of the British emigré set who lived in that city, developing contacts among elements of the
References Tellez Yañez, Raúl. El General Juan Mackenna: Héroe del Membrillar (Ensayo Histórico). Santiago, Chile: Alonso de Ovalle, 1952. Vicuña Mackenna, Benjamín. La Guerra a Muerte: Memoria Sobre las Últimas Campañasde la Independencia de Chile, 1819–1824. Santiago, Chile: Imprenta Nacional, 1868. www.abc-clio.com ABC-CLIO
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British liberal intelligentsia and aristocracy that were to survive throughout his life. From Naples he went on to live for some years in the Middle East before returning to practise as a doctor in England. In 1833 the British government named Madden as one of a group of magistrates to go to Jamaica “to carry out the liberation of the Jamaica slaves from their bondage.” Of the six special magistrates appointed, four were dead from disease within a year. Madden survived, but he left Jamaica in rather cloudy circumstances. He had made many enemies among the slave owners on the island and appears to have been the victim of death threats. On one occasion “a mere accident averted from him the assassin’s dagger.” From Jamaica Madden was posted to Cuba, where in 1836 he was appointed “Superintendent of Liberated Africans,” to serve in Cuba under the terms of the Anglo-Spanish Treaty of 1820, an agreement that had, on paper, put an end to the Spanish slave trade. In 1839 he received an additional duty, when he was named acting judge-advocate on the International Commission Court sitting at Cuba. During Madden’s three years in Cuba he traveled all over the island and became familiar with the slave system. He visited the barracoons (barracks-like structures) in Havana, where slaves were lodged when they arrived in Cuba, before they were dispersed throughout the island. He became acquainted with the Cuban slave-poet Juan Francisco Manzano and translated his poetry and autobiography to English. The knowledge of slavery Madden acquired in Cuba became the subject for his book The Island of Cuba, published after he left the island. In 1839 53 Africans were purchased by two Spanish sugar planters at Havana and www.abc-clio.com
put aboard the schooner Amistad for shipment as slaves to a plantation on the east of Cuba. Once at sea the Africans seized the ship and ordered the planters to sail to Africa. However, the vessel drifted for weeks and eventually was sighted off the coast of Long Island, New York. The Africans were detained and lodged in U.S. federal custody in Connecticut. Spain had abolished slavery in her possessions in 1820, but Africans in bondage before that date had to remain in slavery. The petition of the Spanish “owner” of the slaves for the return of his “property” prompted a landmark case in the United States courts. Essentially, the matter hinged on whether or not the African mutineers had been slaves before 1820, or whether they were recently kidnapped from Africa. Of his own initiative Richard Madden sailed from Cuba to Connecticut to take part in the U.S. Circuit Court proceedings. He gave his testimony before the U.S. District Court in Hartford, Connecticut, on November 20, 1839. His evidence focused on the question of whether these were Bozales—Africans recently and therefore illegally kidnapped from Africa— or Ladinos—slaves who had been brought to Cuba before 1820. Using linguistic and other evidence, supported by his intimate knowledge of the operation of Spanish slave markets in Cuba, Madden showed that the captives were recently kidnapped from Africa. He exposed the extent to which slave traffic was still occurring, even though it was supposedly outlawed. In January 1840, the presiding judge ruled that the Amistad captives were “born free” and kidnapped in violation of international law. The U.S. administration appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, but the high court agreed that the Amistad captives
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were “kidnapped Africans, who by the laws of Spain itself were entitled to their freedom.” Madden’s human rights work continued in the years after the Amistad case. In 1840 he went with others on a fact-finding mission to Egypt to investigate alleged persecution of Jews in that country. He then found himself sent to the British possessions in West Africa, enquiring into the treatment of blacks at the hands of the colonists. There are some indications that the publication of his Lives in the 1840s lost him favor with the British government, because after his stint in Africa he had to accept a job as Spain and Portugal correspondent of the Morning Chronicle. He spent three years in the Iberian Peninsula, mostly in Lisbon. Back in favor, he undertook one further brief colonial posting in Australia, before returning around 1850 to settle in his native Dublin for the remainder of his life. He had published dozens of books on a wide range of topics before his death in 1886. Madden always maintained that his support for justice and freedom abroad was another manifestation of his support for the same values in his native country. He saw his human rights advocacy as fully coherent with his Irish nationalism, a position that was restated a generation or two later by Roger Casement. David Barnwell See also: CASEMENT, Roger References Burton, Gera. Ambivalence in the Colonized Subject : The Counter-discourse of Richard Robert Madden and Juan Francisco Manzano. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Madden, Richard. The island of Cuba: its resources, progress, and prospects, considered in relation especially to the influence of its prosperity on the interests of the British West www.abc-clio.com
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India colonies. London: Partridge and Oakey, 1853. Madden, Richard. The memoirs (chiefly autobiographical) from 1798 to 1886 of Richard Robert Madden. Edited by his son Thomas More Madden. London: Ward & Downey, 1891. Madden, Richard. Poems by a slave in the island of Cuba, recently liberated; translated from the Spanish, by R. R. Madden M.D. With the history of the early life of the Negro poet, written by himself; to which are prefixed two pieces descriptive of Cuban slavery and the slave-traffic. London: Thomas Ward, 1840. Madden, Richard. The United Irishmen: Their Lives and Times. Dublin: Duffy, 1846. O Broin, Leon. An Maidíneach: starái na n´ Eireannach Aontaithe. Baile Átha Cliath (Dublin): Sairseal agus Dill, 1971.
MAGUIRE, JOHN WALTER (1906–1981) Writer, rancher, and notable collector of old books, coins, silver artifacts, and Argentine traditional artwork, John Walter Maguire was born in 1906, son of Eduardo Pedro Maguire (1865–1929), a large landowner in Buenos Aires province, and Catalina Murray (1866–1940). He was the grandson of John Maguire (1825–1905). He later became the president of the Buenos Aires Institute of Numismatics and Antiques. Maguire’s unique collection of horse-driven carriages was stored in his ranch, Tres Bonetes, of Lincoln department, Buenos Aires province. He was also the author of Loncagüé (1967) and La Pezuña de Oro (1980). Loncagüé includes stories of the frontier and the Indians, folklore tradition of the pampas, and an essay about Argentine silverwork by E. Greslebin. In La Pezuña de Oro (the golden hoof ) Maguire describes the pampas of Buenos Aires province and the life in old vaquerías (ranches), including information
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about livestock brands of Buenos Aires and Santa Fe; relations among gauchos, politicians, bandits, Indians, and landowners; work with cattle; and the cattle business. The volume contains a glossary and color illustrations. Maguire’s books are full of anecdotes and stories that reflect everyday life of pioneer Irish settlers in the west of Buenos Aires province. In the early 1860s John Walter’s grandfather, John Maguire, James Gaynor, and Patrick MacDonnell visited the area of Loncagüé and La Unión lagoons, in today’s department of Nueve de Julio. They began sheep farming with a flock of 3,400 sheep in 1865, facing frequent attacks by Indians. In 1876 they obtained a lease contract from the provincial government (by the system of emphytheusis) and in 1882 Maguire and Gaynor owned approximately 18,000 hectares each in the area. In a language typical of Argentine traditionalist narrative, Maguire recounts in his book Loncagüé the encounters with the Indians, and how the first Irish estancieros (ranchers) regarded Indian and gaucho culture and life. Maguire’s writing was influenced by the nationalist ideology that developed in the last decades of the nineteenth century. He conceived gauchos and their life as a central part of Argentine identity. Maguire’s writings also reflect the era of massive immigration, by which the contribution of the immigrants to the development of their new country was given literary expression. Edmundo Murray
MAHAN, ALFRED THAYER (1840–1914) Alfred Thayer Mahan was born September 27, 1840, in West Point, New York, to noted military theorist and tactician Dennis Hart Mahan and Mary (Okill). After attending Columbia College for two years, he graduated second in his class from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1859. Mahan was made a lieutenant in August 1861 and served aboard the Pocahantas, Macedonian, and Seminole, where he was primarily engaged in blockade duty throughout the American Civil War. Promoted to lieutenant-commander in 1865, he undertook a long cruise in the Iroquois to Japan via Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Capetown, South Africa; Aden (now part
See also: ARGENTINA Reference Coghlan, Eduardo A. Los Irlandeses en la Argentina: Su Actuación y Descendencia. Buenos Aires: Author’s Edition, 1987. www.abc-clio.com
Portrait of Alfred Thayer Mahan, author and naval strategist during the American Civil War. (Library of Congress)
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of Yemen); and Bombay, India. Returning to the United States in 1869, he served on shore patrol for the next 20 years, a not unwelcome relief from the seasickness that constantly ailed him. In 1872, the same year in which he was promoted to the rank of commander, he married Ellen Evans; the union produced three children. In 1885 he was promoted to captain. In 1883, while serving in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Mahan composed The Gulf and Inland Waters for Charles Scribner’s series The Navy in the Civil War. The book caught the eye of Stephen Luce, founder and president of the new U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Mahan was invited to join the faculty, where he lectured extensively on naval history and tactics, linking international relations with naval operations and the broad issues of military thought. From 1886 to 1889 he served as president of the college; the following year, he published his lecture notes as The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, a tome that revolutionized the study of international affairs and the role of the armed forces in shaping them. A second volume, The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793–1812, was published in 1892. Together, the volumes served as perfect propaganda for the international naval expansion then taking shape. The volumes were translated into many languages and were required readings for all naval officers. Mahan’s work emphasized the role that merchant and naval fleets played in establishing overseas empires; he effectively expanded naval thinking beyond battle tactics and technical issues, linking naval affairs to wider national and international themes. According to his interpretation, a nation that had a vibrant merchant fleet www.abc-clio.com
and a strong navy to protect it would be prosperous in times of peace and invulnerable in times of war. By necessity this meant modernizing and expanding America’s naval capabilities and acquiring overseas territories to support a two-ocean, coal-dependent fleet. In addition to his espousal of a modern navy and the related coaling stations to support it, Mahan believed in the importance of major fleet battles to win command of the sea, drawing attention to the sea lanes of communication. Many found in Mahan and his theory a prophet who could show them the way to international respectability via economic, military, and diplomatic power. Appearing at a time of expansionist fervor, Mahan’s work exercised tremendous influence over United States and international foreign policy and is widely regarded as the motivating force behind the growth of the battleship navy in the late nineteenth century. Feted around the world, Mahan received honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. Mahan again served as president of the Naval War College in 1892, and he was given command of the cruiser Chicago the following year. Mahan retired with the rank of rear admiral in 1896, although he was recalled to service two years later to serve on the strategy board directing naval operations during the Spanish-American War. In 1902 he was elected president of the American Historical Association, where he continually expounded the need for historical study as the foundation for all knowledge. Few other historians so widely influenced the political thought and policies of their own time as did Mahan, and his theories still hold currency today. Alfred Thayer Mahan died from heart failure in Washington,
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D.C., on December 1, 1914. He is interred at Quogue, New York. Tim Lynch See also: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR References Livesay, William E. Mahan on Sea Power. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981. Mahan, Alfred Thayer. The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783. New York: Dover Publications, 1987.
MAINE Maine is a frontier state. The present boundary of the northern part of the state was not formally settled until the WebsterAshburton Treaty of 1842. Maine’s isolation and peripheral location within the United States as a whole is similar to Ireland’s historical geographical isolation relative to the rest of Europe. In each case there are conflicting notions of inclusion and exclusion, of commonality and distinctiveness. The first Irish to visit Maine, long before it became a separate state in 1820, were Scots-Irish emigrants from Ulster. They were largely Presbyterian and were fleeing from what they perceived to be discriminatory treatment by the Anglican establishment, both British and Irish, in their native Ulster. As early as 1718 there is a record of the arrival in Casco Bay (Falmouth, later known as Portland) of the ship McCallum bearing 20 families, largely from (London)Derry. Subsequently, other Scots-Irish immigrants would settle the mid-coast region east of Brunswick and Topsham. The first prominent Irish Catholic community in Maine was in Newcastle (Damariscotta Mills), centered on two successful merchant families, the Kavanaghs www.abc-clio.com
and the Cottrills. Saint Patrick’s Church, erected in 1808 by these families, is the oldest standing continuously used Catholic church in New England. These families dominated the local lumber and merchant trade, and in 1843 Edward Kavanagh, son of James, became the first Catholic governor in New England. One intriguing variation from the norm in Irish immigration to America occurred in the southern part of Aroostook County in far northern Maine. Here, after 1833, Bishop Benedict Fenwick of Boston financed and initiated an Irish rural enclave in the heart of this potato-growing region. Fenwick’s idea was to recreate an American environment for these immigrants similar in nature to the region they were leaving in Ireland, as opposed to their more traditional arrival in the overcrowded urban landscapes of America, such as Boston and New York. He also hoped to create a seminary that would educate future generations of Catholic priests to serve the spiritual needs of the Irish, French, and Native American inhabitants of this part of Maine. The settlement was named Benedicta in Fenwick’s honor, and to this day a strong Irish presence is in evidence there, with dominant family names such as Qualey and McAvoy. The greater numbers of these Irish immigrants, however, were lured to Maine’s major cities, such as Portland, Lewiston, and Bangor. These urban centers offered the magnet of promised employment for men along the various waterfronts, railroads, mills, and canals, and in forest-related industries, and for the Irish women work in hotels and as domestics in the homes of the wealthy. This mid-nineteenth-century period was marked by economic opportunity for these newcomers. Many Yankees (Maine-born
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Protestants, usually of English heritage) had recently left or were leaving Maine for the more fertile farmlands of the Midwest. Often their farming daughters were drawn further south in New England by the lure of jobs in the mills of Lawrence or Lowell, or other mills and factories in Connecticut or Rhode Island. This same period marked a time of economic and demographic catastrophe in Ireland known as the Great Hunger or the Potato Famine of 1845–1850. Negative factors pushed emigrants out of Ireland just as positive factors pulled these immigrants to Maine and elsewhere in America. The Irish in Maine seized these economic opportunities. The Irish were not universally welcomed in nineteenth-century Maine. Their Catholic religion set them apart from the majority in this nearly universally Protestant state and region. In terms of social class the Irish were largely unskilled laborers, both male and female, and some of these families needed assistance upon arrival. Opposition to immigration in Maine and elsewhere in America took the form of the American Party (better known as the Know-Nothings). These so-called “native Americans” feared the loss of control and the degree of change being fostered by these new arrivals. An anti-Catholic nativist movement locally resulted in the tarring and feathering of Father John Bapst in Ellsworth (1854) and the burning of the Old South Church in Bath, which was then being used for Catholic services (1854). Perhaps the Irish in Maine got off lightly when one considers what was happening just to the south of Maine. These nativist episodes included the burning of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, near Boston, in 1834, and the Irish-nativist riots in the Five Points area of New York City, www.abc-clio.com
recently made famous by Martin Scorsese’s film, The Gangs of New York (2001). By the early twentieth century the Irish in Maine were better established. They had proven their willingness to fight and die for their adopted country in the Civil War and World War I. Now, however, another nativist threat appeared in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, whose targets in Maine included Catholics, Jews, and immigrants in general. Another difference from the Yankee majority had since evolved. Most Irish in Maine were loyal Democrats in a state that had been dominated by the Republican Party since the time of Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln’s first vice president (1861–1865). By the late twentieth century, this Irish adherence to the Democratic Party would result in the election of Joseph Brennan, whose parents came from Co. Galway, as two-term governor of Maine (served 1979–1987). A nationally known figure from Maine emerged in the form of Senator George Mitchell who served as the Senate majority leader (1989–1995) and was subsequently asked by President Bill Clinton to help shepherd the search for peace in Northern Ireland; his actions resulted in the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Another Maine-born celebrity was the movie director John Ford. He won Academy Awards for several films: The Informer (1935); The Grapes of Wrath (1940); How Green Was My Valley (1941); two documentaries, The Battle of Midway (1942) and December 7th (1943); and finally the quintessential Irish nostalgia film, The Quiet Man (1952). Ford was born John Feeney and grew up in Irish neighborhoods of Portland, such as Gorham’s Corner and Munjoy Hill. He was known as “Bull” Feeney when he played football at Portland High School (1910–1914). The
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Americanization of his surname is an indication of ethnic and religious tensions that still existed in this period, and certainly there is no indication that the name Ford hindered in his search for fame. By the late twentieth century the Irish in Maine had become largely assimilated. However, the state would continue to reflect clear lines of demarcation between a predominantly rural, conservative, Republican, Protestant constituency versus an urban, liberal, Democratic, Catholic constituency. Perhaps these lines are blurring at the start of the twenty-first century with the spread of suburbia and an ever-increasing mobility, both physical and social, even in a frontier state like Maine. The Irish in Maine have faced some particular challenges, but, like their counterparts in the rest of America, they have largely succeeded in living the American dream. Michael Connolly See also: EMIGRATION; FORD, John; NATIVISM AND ANTICATHOLICISM; MITCHELL, George J. References Connolly, Michael C., ed. They Change Their Sky: The Irish in Maine. Orono: University of Maine Press, 2004. Lapomarda, Vincent A. The Catholic Church in the Land of the Holy Cross: A History of the Diocese of Portland, Maine. Strasbourg, France: Les Editions du Signe, 2003. Lucey, William L. The Catholic Church in Maine. Francestown, NH: Marshall Jones, 1957. Mundy, James H. Hard Times, Hard Men: Maine and the Irish 1830–1860. Scarborough, ME: Harp Publications, 1990. Syrett, John. “Principle and Expediency: The Ku Klux Klan and Ralph Owen Brewster in 1924.” Maine History 39, no. 4 (Winter 2000–2001): 215–239. Whitmore, Allan R. “‘A Guard of Faithful Sentinels’: The Know-Nothing Appeal in Maine, 1854–1855.” Maine Historical Society Quarterly 20, no. 3 (Winter 1981): 151–197. www.abc-clio.com
MALONE, DOROTHY (1925–) Dorothy Malone was born Eloise Maloney on January 30, 1925, in Chicago. She was a child model, and at age 18 she was noticed by an RKO talent scout when she appeared in a play at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. She signed on as an actress and moved to California with her mother, deeming the experience to be a paid vacation because she did not expect a strong career, and indeed, her earliest parts were nonverbal. However, in 1945 she signed a contract with Warner Brothers and subsequently changed her name. Malone had a speaking part in The Big Sleep and Night and Day in 1946. She appeared in One Sunday Afternoon and Two Guys from Texas in 1948 and South of St. Louis, filmed in 1949. No longer contracted to Warner Brothers, she appeared in The Nevadan, Saddle Legion, and The Bushwackers from 1950 to 1952. Private Hell 36 was filmed in 1954. In 1955 she appeared in Five Guns West, Artists and Models, and Battle Cry, which brought her fame. Her most famous role was in Written on the Wind in 1957, for which she won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award and a Golden Globe. She also appeared in The Tarnished Angels and Tip on a Dead Jockey in 1957. That year she also had roles in Man of a Thousand Faces, Tarnished Angel, and The Last Voyage. Malone married French actor Jacques Bergerac in 1959. The couple had two daughters, Mimi and Diane. They divorced in highly publicized proceedings in 1963. Thereafter Malone married Robert Tomarkin, but she divorced him and then married Charles Huston Bell whom she also divorced. Malone’s career fell into a downward spiral because of a lack of parts for mature
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actresses. Malone appeared in Beach Party in 1963. In 1964 her career was revived when she starred for four years as Constance Mackenzie Carson in Peyton Place, a popular nighttime soap opera. When she was removed from the cast, she sued the production company for breach of contract and won a $1.6 million settlement. Malone next played the role of Patty Hearst’s mother in Abducted in 1975 and appeared in one scene in The Man Who Could Not Die, also in 1975. She filmed Winter Kills in 1979. Meanwhile, she appeared in numerous television movies. Malone continued to act in a variety of television shows and appeared in the series High Hopes (1978). She made numerous appearances in B movies in the 1980s and ended her acting career with her last noteworthy role in Basic Instinct in 1991. Annette Richardson Reference Maltin, Leonard. Leonard Maltin’s Movie Encyclopedia. New York: Plume, 1994.
MARITIME PROVINCES (CANADA) Located on the eastern coast of Canada, the Maritime Provinces consist of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. The Irish experience in this region dates back to the latter part of the eighteenth century, shortly after the British conquest of the territory was complete. Although their proportion of the population within the growing colonies was rather small, Irish Protestants played a prominent role within their administrations. The unsuccessful attempts to apply the name “New Ireland” to Prince Edward Island (known as St. John’s Island until 1799) in 1779, and New Brunswick in 1780, reflect www.abc-clio.com
the influence of Irish-born Walter Patterson and Thomas Carleton, the first governors of these colonies. Large-scale emigration by the Irish to the Maritime Provinces commenced in the early 1800s. Lured by the promise of opportunity, tens of thousands would pour into the region during the first half of the century. While immigration to North America is often viewed as a response to famine in the motherland, it should be noted that immigration to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island during the famine years was minimal; only a single “coffin ship,” the Lady Constable, docked in the latter colony. The status of Saint John as a major port of entry, on the other hand, led to a substantial increase in Irish immigration to New Brunswick in this period, peaking at 15,279 in 1847. The Irish influx during the first half of the 1800s had a significant impact on the ethnic composition of the Maritime Provinces. Formerly dominated by the Scots, English, and French, by the 1870s approximately 35 percent of New Brunswick, 25 percent of Prince Edward Island, and 15 percent of Nova Scotia were of Irish origin. While Protestants dominated the eighteenth-century Irish population within the region, the nineteenthcentury immigrants shifted the dynamic: Roman Catholics formed approximately 53, 66, and 90 percent of the total Irish population within New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, respectively. The arrival of the Irish led to the emergence of a variety of socio-fraternal organizations. The Charitable Irish Society in Halifax (1786), the Saint Patrick’s Society in Saint John (1819), and Prince Edward Island’s Benevolent Irish Society (1825) were established to provide immigrant aid
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and cultural support within their respective communities. All three continue to play the latter role. Irish immigration also gave rise to nativist tensions, directed toward the Roman Catholic component and articulated through the rapid expansion of the Orange Order throughout the region. Not to be discouraged, Irish Roman Catholics flourished in the region and became noted for their prodigious output of clergy. Likewise, the Irish, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, would go on to play an important role in the fields of business, politics, and education. Irish culture has played an important role in the social fabric of the Maritime Provinces. Although the language and sporting traditions of Ireland failed to take root, the same cannot be said for the musical tradition. Celebrated annually in a series of festivals, most notably the Irish Festival on the Miramichi (founded in 1973), it is also an important component of the region’s popular Celtic amalgam, known widely as “East Coast” music. Ryan O’Connor See also: EMIGRATION
References Houston, Cecil J., and William J. Smyth. Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement: Patterns, Links, and Letters. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. O’Driscoll, Robert, and Lorna Reynolds. The Untold Story: The Irish in Canada. Toronto: Celtic Arts of Canada, 1988. O’Grady, Brendan. Exiles and Islanders: The Irish Settlers of Prince Edward Island. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004. Power, Thomas P. The Irish in Atlantic Canada, 1780–1900. Fredericton, New Brunswick: New Ireland Press, 1991. Toner, P. M., ed. New Ireland Remembered. Fredericton, New Brunswick: New Ireland Press, 1988. www.abc-clio.com
MARYLAND John Cabot explored some of the area that would become Maryland as early as 1498, but it was not until 1632 that Cecilius Calvert inherited the charter for the area of Maryland given to his father by King Charles I and named it after the king’s wife, Henrietta Maria. His brother, Leonard Calvert, led the first group of settlers on the Ark and the Dove in 1633, and his Roman Catholicism led him to envisage Maryland as a progressive place of religious toleration, an escape from the popular anti-Catholicism in England. Indeed, in 1649 a religious Act of Toleration was passed and while it became one of the few predominantly Catholic areas in the colonies, the Catholicism of the area would be subject to fairly frequent opposition, including a Puritan revolt. Early Irish immigrants settled continuously, one of the earliest being Daniel Carroll, who arrived in 1659 from Littemourna. His family would become one of the most influential families in U.S. political history as his grandson, Charles Carroll (1737–1832), was a delegate to the Continental Congress, signed the Declaration of Independence, and became a Maryland senator. Maryland would also be represented at the Continental Congress by a recent Scots-Irish immigrant from Ulster, James McHenry. He was a Revolutionary War army medic before being elected to the Maryland legislature and, like Carroll, attended the Continental Congress before representing Maryland at the Constitutional Convention. For a short period, November 26, 1783, to June 3, 1784, Annapolis was the country’s capital. It was the last state to ratify the Articles of Confederation, and the seventh state to ratify the Constitution.
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The state had a significant strategic involvement in the War of 1812. Two major encounters occurred, the second of which, the defence of Fort McHenry, inspired a local Baltimore resident, Francis Scott Key, to write the “Star Spangled Banner.” Discrimination flared up intermittently, early signs manifesting themselves in 1704 when a tax of 20 shillings was levied on Irish immigrants arriving in Maryland as servants. In the same year Catholic masses were outlawed. The main brunt was borne during the 1840s–1850s as the Know-Nothings gained popular currency with a campaign resting on a crude blend of anti-Catholicism, anti-immigration, and a fear of being overwhelmed by waves of people. In 1856 there was street fighting between Know-Nothing supporters and Irish democrats. “No Irish need apply” signs were reported, and the state gave its electoral votes to the KnowNothing presidential candidate, Millard Fillmore. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the restrictions on Catholic worship were significantly relaxed in a number of states, Maryland included, and in 1784, John Carroll, of Irish descent and cousin to Charles Carroll, became the superior of missions in the United States of North America. He subsequently became America’s first bishop (bishop of Baltimore) in 1789, helped establish the first Catholic cathedral in America (Baltimore, 1806), and became archbishop in 1808 of the new Baltimore archdiocese. (John Carroll also established the Catholic Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.) The church, as well as a host of social organizations, helped new immigrants settle into the community, particularly www.abc-clio.com
important in the periods of heightened discrimination. The Hibernian Sons of Baltimore was, for example, established in 1803 and provided limited financial assistance. The group established the Hibernian Free School and met annually on Saint Patrick’s Day. In time, the majority of Irish immigrants, who were mostly unskilled, would either seek out work in the western half of the state in the coal mines, start laying track for the B&O Railroad (the first commercial long-distance railroad in the country), dig the Chesapeake and Ohio Canals, and establish mining and railroad towns such as Frostburg and Cumberland or they would settle, as most did, around Baltimore in the emerging shipbuilding and ironwork industries. Baltimore, planned in 1730, became the second-largest port of entry for Irish immigration in the nineteenth century. Large numbers arrived during the Famine years, and of a state population of 418,000 in 1850, 20,000 were Irish born. The B&O railroad constructed “immigrant pier” to help move numbers further into the state and beyond. Immigrants on the infamous coffin ships that transported people to the United States could suffer anything up to a 40 percent loss of life in the crossing, but a replica of the Jeanie Johnston, which included Baltimore on its route, was recently rebuilt in 2000 to celebrate the fact that it made 16 transatlantic voyages without the loss of a single life. Baltimore offered a myriad of jobs from sweatshops to the large sugar-refining trade in the city, and Irish workers became involved in union activity such as the Knights of Labor, organized in Baltimore in 1878. Many thousands lived close to their places of work, such as Locust Point
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near the port and Fells Point (Fells Point had a Catholic church as early as 1796), often enduring severe overcrowding. Thousands of terraced houses were built throughout the 1880s to accommodate growing numbers. A number of companies, such as B&O, whose owners were of Irish descent, provided a limited number of benefits for employees, such as savings plans. Maryland was a slave state and had strong Confederate support, but it did not secede. As a result, significant numbers of men volunteered to fight with the Confederacy, but the majority fought for the Union. The state witnessed the bloodiest single day in U.S. military history—the dual-named Battle of Sharpsburg (as known in the South) or the Battle of Antietam (as known in the North) on September 17, 1862. Meagher’s New York Irish Brigade suffered particularly heavy losses at “Bloody Lane.” The battle proved influential on two counts: first, it marked the end of General Lee’s attempt at taking the offensive into the north, and second, the victory allowed Lincoln the position of strength he required from which to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Today the proportion of Maryland’s population with Irish ancestry stands at 11.8 percent (2000), and the Irish are the second largest group after Germans. Catholicism remains the largest single denomination in the state. The majority of the population is relatively in the Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area, and the eastern and southern areas have a much more scattered populace. There has been a general trend of out-migration of whites in the 1990s, and more have left the state than moved into it throughout the decade. Its politics have been historically www.abc-clio.com
Democratic, and it is widely regarded as one of the most liberal states in the Union. Sam Hitchmough References Brugger, Robert J. Maryland, A Middle Temperament. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Doyle, David Noel, and Owen Dudley Edwards, eds. America and Ireland, 1776–1976: The American Identity and the Irish Connection. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish. London: Longman, 2000. Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
MASSACHUSETTS Contrary to the myth of a wholly English colonial Massachusetts, people from Ireland were among the earliest settlers in New England. The Irish have a long and distinguished history in the Bay State despite the inveterate hostility of the Puritans and Yankees. Colonial Massachusetts militia muster rolls and town, church, and court records include many Irish names. Indentured servants from Ireland were common, and uncounted numbers of children kidnapped from Irish ports were bound out as servants in Massachusetts. By 1660, more than 10,000 Irish immigrants lived in the American colonies, and so many arrived in Massachusetts that the colonial legislature banned them in 1654. Anne Glover, an elderly Irish servant, was the last woman hanged in Boston as a witch (1688), probably for speaking Gaelic and mumbling Catholic prayers in her senility. Although Catholics were the first Europeans in America, anti-Catholic
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prejudice was deeply rooted in New England Protestants. It reflects the bitter conflict between England and its Catholic rivals, France and Spain. French and Indian raids from Quebec on Massachusetts towns like Deerfield in 1704 aroused bitter resentment. Massachusetts at times disarmed or barred Catholics from the militia, public office, voting, and jury service, and it expelled all priests. Even the 250,000 Protestants from Ireland who immigrated to America by 1750 were unwelcome in Massachusetts. In 1720 the legislature passed an ordinance directing that “certain families recently arrived from Ireland be warned to move off,” and later ordered Ulster immigrants to register with the town selectmen in 1723. Hostile Yankees in Worcester burned a Scots-Irish Presbyterian church in 1734. The Irish settled in more remote communities; some had moved to Maine by 1718, then part of Massachusetts, and introduced flax and potatoes to Yankee farmers. However, the need for labor and the profits from selling indentured servants’ contracts overcame Yankee prejudice. The Boston News-Letter announced the auction of Irish boys in 1730. Women transported from Belfast as convicts were sold in Boston in 1749. Twenty-six Protestant Irish gentlemen in Boston established the Charitable Irish Society in 1737 to assist 1,000 Irish immigrants who arrived on more than 50 ships from 1714 to 1738. By 1750, Irish Catholic men joined this oldest Irish organization in the nation. These Irish pioneers founded many New England towns and counties named for their homeland: Antrim, Bangor, Belfast, Colerain, Derry, Dublin, Keegan, Kilkenny, Limerick, Orange, and Sullivan. Famine in Ireland in 1740 prompted more Irish Catholics and www.abc-clio.com
Protestants to immigrate to Boston, but most settled in western Massachusetts or other parts of New England. Patrick Carr, another Boston Irishman, was one of the five colonists killed by British troops in the Boston Massacre in 1770. At least one of the Sons of Liberty involved in the Boston Tea Party (1773) was Irish, William Molineux from Dublin. Boston’s first Saint Patrick’s Day celebration by Irish soldiers in the British army outraged patriots in 1775. However, the hero of the siege of Boston on March 17, 1776, General Henry Knox, was the son of Irish immigrants to Massachusetts, and this event is celebrated in Boston as Evacuation Day on Saint Patrick’s Day. Massachusetts elected Governor James Sullivan in 1808, the son of Irish immigrants to Maine. His brother, General John Sullivan, was governor of New Hampshire in 1786. A memorial (1949) on Boston Common honors Commodore John Barry, the father of the U.S. Navy, who was born in Ireland in 1745 and served in Boston during the Revolution, when as many as 450,000 Irish lived in America. General George Washington condemned the nativist and anti-Catholic Pope’s Day riots in 1776 at Boston, Salem, Marblehead, and Newburyport, but prejudice subsided only slightly after the Revolution despite loyal service in the army and navy by countless Irishmen. The failed Revolution of 1798 sent more Irish refugees to Massachusetts, and many contributed to the state’s economic development by building canals and roads in the 1820s. Irish workers built the Pawtucket Canal in Lowell in 1822, and walked 50 miles from Boston to Worcester to build the Blackstone Canal in 1826, and the new railroads in the 1840s. Many subscribed to
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the Catholic Sentinel, the first Catholic newspaper in the United States in 1829, and later to the Boston Pilot published by Patrick Donahoe in 1835. They worshipped at the first Catholic church in Boston, the Cathedral of the Holy Cross built in 1800. The Celtic cross in Lowell (1979) and Worcester (1976) and the Irish Round Tower in Milford (1857) honors these Irish settlers. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Irish were the first impoverished group to leave Europe in large numbers, prompted by the enclosure movement favored by British landlords, discriminatory penal laws, and rising poverty. By 1825, about 125,000 people left Ireland for the United States, and Boston had 8,000 Irish residents in 1830. The Potato Famine (1845–1850) forced a million Irish refugees to flee to America, often on disease-ridden and unsafe Irish “coffin ships.” Rest Haven Cemetery at Deer Island contains the graves of 850 Irish immigrants who died at the quarantine station in Boston Harbor in 1847. A memorial in Cohasset recalls the wreck of the brig St. John in 1849, when 104 immigrants from Galway drowned. Memorials to the contributions of the Famine Irish are located in Cambridge (1997) and Boston (1998). Because of the 4 million Irish immigrants who had entered the United States by the end of the nineteenth century, Boston’s population increased rapidly from 136,881 in 1850 to 250,000 in 1870, of whom 56,900 were Irish. By 1850, the Irish were the largest ethnic group in Boston, Cambridge, Fall River, Lawrence, Lowell, Lynn, and Worcester, which made Roman Catholics the state’s largest denomination. Young Irish women found work in domestic service, and by 1860 two-thirds www.abc-clio.com
of the servants in Boston were Irish. Irish men worked in construction jobs, building railroads, streets, sewers, and water lines, or in quarries and on the docks. Their labor modernized the state in the Industrial Revolution. Irish immigration stimulated religious intolerance, however, when the dynamic Congregational preacher Lyman Beecher aroused a Charlestown mob that burned the Ursuline convent in 1834. A Yankee fire company rioted for days after an Irish Catholic funeral procession on Boston’s Broad Street in 1837, and John Bapst, a Jesuit missionary to Native Americans, was tarred and feathered by a Protestant mob in Ellsworth, Maine, in 1854. Father Bapst survived to become the first president of Boston College in 1863. Even the Civil War Draft Riots revealed nativism and antiCatholicism, when Irish men and boys clashed with the police and Union Army troops in Boston’s North End on July 14, 1863. Col. Thomas Cass and Col. Patrick R. Guiney inspired loyal service in the Civil War by Irish soldiers of the Ninth Regiment. They and other Irish regiments formed in Massachusetts, including the 15th, 19th, and 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiments, did much to reduce ethnic and religious intolerance. However, after the war newspaper want ads still read “Americans only” or “No Irish Need Apply.” Discrimination in employment persisted, and most Irish remained in low-paid jobs as laborers, but many worked as teachers or in public utilities and municipal fire and police departments and as priests. However, their descendants would prosper to make Massachusetts the most Irish state in the nation: 26 percent of the residents claimed Irish origins in 2004.
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The Boston Catholic diocese offered effective Irish leadership with bishops John B. Fitzpatrick, John J. Williams, and William H. O’Connell. A new leader appeared in 1869 with John Boyle O’Reilly, an Irish rebel who escaped from the penal colony in Australia. As a popular poet, orator and editor of the Boston Pilot, he bridged the gap between Boston Brahmins and Hibernian Boston until his sudden death in 1890. This most influential Irishman of the era, an eloquent spokesman for the downtrodden, was honored by Daniel Chester French’s memorial sculpture on the Fenway in 1896. Irish contributions were varied, and many Bay State Irish men and women were prominent in art (John Singleton Copley), music (Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore), sculpture (Augustus Saint Gaudens), sports (John L. Sullivan and James B. Connolly), poetry (Louise Imogen Guiney), architecture (Charles D. Maginnis and Louis Sullivan), vaudeville (Jeremiah Cohan), comedy (Fred Allen), education (Annie Sullivan), and women’s rights (Mary Kenny O’Sullivan and Margaret L. Foley). Other leaders arose from the Irish immigrants and their offspring, and they transformed the Democratic Party after the Civil War. The Irish penchant for politics was evident when Lawrence (1881), Lowell (1882), and Boston (1884) elected the first Irish Catholic mayors. The 1880s saw an increasing number of Irish candidates elected to public office. Patrick Collins (1844–1905), a Democrat in the state legislature and in Congress (1883–89) was the mayor of Boston (1902–1905) and played roles in presidential campaigns by 1876. Joseph H. O’Neil (1853–1935) served Boston in the House of Representatives (1889–1895) until he was succeeded by www.abc-clio.com
John F. Fitzgerald (1895–1901), the grandfather of President John F. Kennedy. David I. Walsh (1872–1947) was the first Irish Catholic to serve as governor (1914–1916) and as U.S. Senator (1919–1925, 1926–1947) in Republican-dominated Massachusetts. The son of immigrants from Co. Cork who settled in Leominster, Walsh was the first Democrat elected governor in 1914. A statue on the Charles River Esplanade (1954) honors Walsh. The state’s most memorable Irish politician may be James M. Curley (1874–1958), who served as mayor of Boston four times and as congressman and governor in a colorful half-century career. The man Senator Walsh dubbed the mayor of the poor is remembered in Edwin O’Connor’s novel (1956) and John Ford’s movie The Last Hurrah (1958), and by two statues at Boston City Hall (1980). Curley was a fierce critic of the anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan that revived in Worcester and other New England communities in the 1920s. In national politics, Massachusetts has been a unique breeding ground for political leaders and party operatives at all levels, and among these Irish names stand out. John W. McCormack was Speaker of the House (1962–1970), and mentor to Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr. (1977–1987). Senator John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic elected president (1961–1963), and his brother, Edward M. Kennedy, succeeded him as Democratic U.S. senator from Massachusetts. Their brother Robert F. Kennedy served as attorney general and as senator from New York. Lawrence F. O’Brien, a Springfield Democrat, served as a key Kennedy White House adviser, was postmaster general, and was twice chairman of the Democratic National
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Committee. The rise of Irish Americans to positions of power in Massachusetts and in national government was a hallmark of the twentieth century. The election of Boston’s Jack Kennedy, a turning point in Irish-American history, marked the end of a long, hard road to acceptance and integration in mainstream American society. Peter C. Holloran See also: CURLEY, James Michael; EMIGRATION; FORD, John; KENNEDY FAMILY; KENNEDY, John Fitzgerald; O’CONNOR, Edwin References Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. New York: Longman, 2000. O’Connor, Thomas H. The Boston Irish: A Political History. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995. O’Connor, Thomas H., Marie E. Daly, and Edward L. Galvin. The Irish in New England. Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1985. Quinlin, Michael P. Irish in Boston: A Lively Look at Boston’s Colorful Irish Past. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press, 2004. Savage, Neil J. Extraordinary Tenure: Massachusetts and the Making of the Nation. Worcester, MA: Ambassador Books, 2004.
rorism, and those who were against it. The bodies of three priests, Alfie Kelly (parish priest), Alfredo Leaden, and Eduardo Dufau, and two seminarians, Emilio Barletti and Salvador Barbeito, were found later that day lying in a pool of blood in the living room of the parish house. Slogans were written on the walls and on the carpet: “For our colleagues of Federal Police headquarters,” and “This is what happens if you poison the minds of the young.” The victims were tortured between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. and ultimately gunned down with more then 65 bullets. Their killers were members of a death squad composed of six members of the armed forces. According to the declaration of a witness before the International Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Navy Lieutenant Antonio Pernias was their commander. The local police had knowledge of the killers’ plans but did nothing to prevent the crime. No one was charged with responsibility, although the journalist Eduardo Kimel, author of a book denouncing the judge Guillermo Rivarola’s complicity with the killers, was condemned for libel. Edmundo Murray
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See also: WALSH, Rodolfo
In the early hours of Sunday, July 4, 1976, a few months after the military ousted the democratic government of Argentina, a navy death squad gunned down five members of the Pallotine community in Saint Patrick’s Church of Buenos Aires. The killing was a major tragedy, one of the worst in the 400-year history of the Roman Catholic Church in Argentina. It was the product of an ideological division between Irish Argentines in favor of the armed forces and their illegal methods to fight terwww.abc-clio.com
References Kimel, Eduardo. La Masacre de San Patricio. Buenos Aires: Lohle-Lumen Editores, 1986. O’Neill, Kevin. Apuntes Históricos Pallotinos. Buenos Aires: Editora Palloti, 1995. Seisdedos, Gabriel. El Honor de Dios. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Paulinas, 1986.
MATHEW, FATHER THEOBALD (1790–1856) Father Theobald Mathew (1790–1856) spearheaded the national temperance movement that swept Ireland in the late
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1830s to the mid-1840s. He also took his temperance message to the emigrant Irish in Scotland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Mathew is a much-neglected figure in Irish history, but in the past 20 years, his life and work have received more considered study. Several biographies have been written about him; however, some were motivated to remember Mathew in the most glowing terms. They ignored his character flaws, his poor organizational skills, his financial difficulties, and his strained relationships with some of the Irish Catholic hierarchy. More recently, Colm Kerrigan and John F. Quinn have examined the roles of Father Mathew and the temperance movement in Irish history. Kerrigan has focused on the Irish context, while Quinn has expanded this to discuss Mathew’s trip to America in 1849–1851. Theobald Mathew was born at Thomastown, Co. Tipperary, on October 10, 1790, to James Mathew and Anne Whyte. Elizabeth Malcolm (1986) gives a detailed account of the family in her chapter on Mathew. James Mathew worked as an agent for his relation, the first Earl of Llandaff. During his childhood, Theobald spent much time at Thomastown Castle, the original family seat, and developed a close relationship with the earl’s family. Mathew studied briefly at the seminary in Maynooth in 1807. He joined the Capuchin Order in Dublin. In 1814 he was ordained a priest and was sent to Cork. The Quaker, William Martin, with a group of like-minded reformers was attempting to promote temperance in Cork, and he guessed the young friar would attract the Catholic masses to the cause. With Mathew’s dedication, temperance fever spread around Ireland and millions www.abc-clio.com
took the pledge. Handsome and mannerly, Mathew was generous and a very hard worker, renowned for his dedication to his parishioners’ spiritual and material needs. Likewise, the wealth and interdenominational nature of his family allowed him the confidence to move within wealthier circles and gave him an ecumenical outlook on the work of the temperance movement. Mathew was interested in the social and economic welfare of the members, and reading rooms and temperance bands were established. Mathew avoided political associations, yet the temperance movement allowed Daniel O’Connell to have peaceful monster meetings and to spread the idea of repeal among the network of temperance groups. Mathew took his temperance work to Scotland in 1842, England in 1843, and, despite very poor health, America from 1849 to 1851. In America, he wished to travel both in the northern and southern states and did not want a political issue to impede his independence. However, Mathew became embroiled in the slavery controversy. He declined William Lloyd Garrison’s offer to speak at an antislavery commemoration. This led to an outcry in the northern states. The southern states were also concerned when they learned that Mathew had signed the “Anti-Slavery Address to Irish Americans in 1841,” but Mathew explained that he would not become involved in any discussions of American institutions and was accepted there. In Washington, D.C., he was honored by the House of Representatives and admitted to a seat in the House. After some objections and a subsequent vote, the honor was repeated in the Senate. Following this exhausting tour his health continued to decline, and when he died on December 8,
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1856, the temperance organization was in a weak and disorganized state. Ann Coughlan See also: DOUGLASS, Frederick; O’CONNELL, Daniel References Kerrigan, Colm. Father Mathew and the Irish Temperance Movement 1838–1849. Cork: Cork University Press, 1992. Maguire, John Francis. Father Mathew: A Biography. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1865. Malcolm, Elizabeth. “Mathew the Martyr.” In Ireland Sober, Ireland Free: Drink and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, 101–150. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1986. Quinn, John F. Father Mathew’s Crusade: Temperance in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and Irish America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002.
MAURY, MATTHEW FONTAINE (1806–1873) Matthew Fontaine Maury, who became known as the “Father of Oceanography,” was born in Virginia on January 14, 1806, to Richard and Diana Maury. Maury joined the navy in 1824, and between 1825 and 1834 he sailed on three expeditions, visiting the South Pacific and Europe as well as traveling around the world aboard the Vincennes. It was likely during these voyages that he realized the importance of understanding global patterns of winds and ocean currents for commerce and warfare. In 1834, upon his return to Virginia, he married Ann Herndon and began work on A New Theoretical and Practical Treatise on Navigation, a tome that received positive reviews when it was published in 1836. The following year, he was promoted to lieutenant and assigned as surveyor on the www.abc-clio.com
Portrait of Matthew Fontaine Maury, oceanographer and author of Physical Geography of the Sea, which is considered the first comprehensive book on oceanography to be published. (Library of Congress)
famous Charles Wilkes expedition to the Pacific. Upset at his appointment, Maury begged off the exploring expedition to the South Seas and instead was assigned to surveying duties along the Gulf Coast. During this time he penned a series of anonymous attacks on the secretary of the Navy, regarding inefficiency and suggesting reforms, including the establishment of a naval academy. It was also during this time that Maury was seriously injured in a stagecoach accident and made permanently lame. Ineligible for sea duty, in 1842 Maury was appointed superintendent of the Depot of Charts and Instruments of the Navy Department at Washington. It was here that Maury began to study the huge
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assemblage of ship’s reports in the Depot’s archives. From this information, be began to put together a global database on currents, winds, and weather patterns, devoting nearly all his time to assembling information on the physical properties of the ocean across the globe. His charts revealed for the first time the worldwide patterns of oceanic currents and winds. In 1847, Maury issued his famous Wind and Current Charts of the North Atlantic, which he added to by using data sent to him by ship captains all over the world. His compendium of ocean currents, surface temperatures, and wind patterns sliced transportation times and costs appreciably: as a result of his work, sailing times between New York and San Francisco were reduced from 180 to 133 days. In the fall of 1853, he was appointed the U.S. Representative to the International Congress in Brussels, where he urged the recording of oceanographic data aboard naval and merchant marine vessels; soon his system of recording currents and winds was adopted worldwide. In 1855, Maury published what is considered to be his greatest contribution to oceanography, The Physical Geography of the Seas. The book contained detailed information on the Gulf Stream, bathymetric maps with contours at depths exceeding 4.5 miles, and a wealth of information on currents and meteorology. The tome, which some call the first textbook of modern physical oceanography, was translated into many languages and brought the author international fame. At the outbreak of the American Civil War, Maury resigned his commission and proceeded to Richmond, where he was sworn in as commander in the Confederate States Navy. Assigned to harbor defense, www.abc-clio.com
Maury devised riverine fortifications for the Confederacy and developed underwater mines to disable Union ships. Recognizing his international reputation, the Confederacy sent Maury as an emissary to England and France, where he worked to gain recognition for the rebels. At the conclusion of the war, Maury espoused the settlement of former Confederates in Mexico, a plan that met with little support. He subsequently lived in England for two years, publishing a series of geography textbooks and earning an honorary degree from Oxford. Returning to the United States in 1868, Maury taught meteorology at the Virginia Military Institute until his death in 1872. He was survived by his wife and eight children and is interred at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia. Tim Lynch See also: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR Reference Williams, Frances Leigh. Matthew Fontaine Maury: Scientist of the Sea. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963.
MCCANN, COLUM (1965–) Irish-born short story writer and novelist Colum McCann has achieved critical and popular success in Ireland and America with his vivid, symbolic prose style. McCann elucidates the stories of those who live at the margins of society—often exiles, immigrants, the homeless, homosexuals, or the incarcerated. McCann is one of five children born to journalist, author, and editor Sean McCann and Sally (McGonigle) McCann, a housewife. He grew up in south Co. Dublin and frequently summered with family in rural
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Co. Derry. McCann was an excellent student, studying communications at Rathmines and later pursuing graduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He worked as a freelance journalist for several newspapers in Dublin and then in New York City, where he first moved in the early 1980s. As he made the transition from journalist to author, he took various jobs, such as taxi driver in Cape Cod, bartender, and volunteer for a troubled youth program in Texas. He spent two years on a bicycle tour of the United States and taught English in Japan to broaden his range of life experience. McCann’s early success followed upon the heels of the short story “Tresses,” which garnered two Hennessy Awards in 1991. His first collection of short stories, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, earned him the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1994. His first novel, Songdogs, was published the following year. Songdogs features a son who recreates his father’s life via a series of flashbacks evoked by the father’s photographs. McCann’s next novel, This Side of Brightness (1998), is set in New York City in the twentieth century, and features a cast of characters that ranges from the “sandhogs” who built the subway tunnels below the Hudson River, up to the construction workers who bolted the steel girders of the city’s skyscrapers together, and back down to the “mole people” who inhabit New York’s underground network of abandoned tunnels. In 1999, McCann won a Pushcart Prize for the short story “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” In Everything in This Country Must: A Novella and Two Stories (2000), McCann turns to an Irish landscape as he writes about the Troubles through teenage eyes. His acclaimed novel, Dancer (2003), traces the life of renowned ballet dancer www.abc-clio.com
Rudolf Nureyev from World War II Russia up to his AIDS-related death in the early 1990s by way of Leningrad, France, Italy, and New York’s discos of the 1970s and 1980s. His latest novel, Zoli (2007), is the story of a Gypsy girl in Slovakia who flees Nazi persecution during World War II. She teaches herself to read and write and becomes a poet. McCann has also been involved in adapting his writing to screen and stage, and served as the Sidney Harman writer-in-residence at Baruch College, City University of New York, in the spring of 2004. He lives in New York with his wife, Allison Hawke, and their two children. Kelly J. S. McGovern References Lennon, Joseph. “McCann, Colum.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 267: Twenty-First-Century British and Irish Novelists. Detroit: Gale, 2002. “McCann, Colum.” In Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series. Vol. 99. Detroit: Gale, 2002.
MCCANN, DONAL (1943–1999) Born in Dublin, Donal McCann was the son of John J. McCann, who was a playwright and the lord mayor of Dublin on two occasions. He was educated at Terenure College, and while he was there he acted in a production of his father’s play Give Me a Bed of Roses. He studied architecture before taking a position as a subeditor in the Evening Press. He also began to take classes at the Abbey School of Actors before joining the Abbey Players. His first major performances were in W. B. Yeats plays—On Baile’s Strand and Cathleen Ni Houlihan
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in the Abbey Theatre. He soon became identified with roles in plays by Irish writers, especially the theatrical adaptation of Patrick Kavanagh’s Tarry Flynn, Dion Bouccicault’s The Shaughran, J. M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea, and Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. In 1969 he appeared in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, in which he played Estragon opposite Peter O’Toole as Vladimir. In 1981 he embarked on an American tour in Sean O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman, and in 1986 he played the part of Captain Boyle alongside Geraldine Plunkett as Juno and John Kavanagh as Joxer in the Gate Theatre’s landmark production of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. Later he became associated with Brian Friel’s work, particularly with the 1974 film version of Philadelphia, Here I Come, in which he played the public self of Gar, who is preparing to leave Ireland and emigrate to America. He also appeared in other Friel plays, such as Translations and Wonderful Tennessee, as well as giving a much praised performance in Faith Healer in the Abbey Theatre in 1980. His most celebrated role in the theater was in Sebastian Barry’s play The Steward of Christendom. For his performance in the Royal Court in London he was awarded the London Critics’ Circle Theatre Award (Drama Theatre) in 1995. The play later had a 12-week run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. There, his performance was praised by the New York Times, which called him “an astonishing Irish actor . . . widely regarded as the finest of them all” and he was hailed by Newsweek as a “world-class star.” As well as working in the theatre, he played numerous roles in films, beginning with Disney’s The Fighting Prince of Donegal (1966). He also starred in John www.abc-clio.com
Huston’s Sinful Davey (1969), Neil Jordan’s Angel (1982), and played the father of the title character in Pat O’Connor’s Cal (1984). The film for which he is best remembered is the adaptation of James Joyce’s short story The Dead (1987), which was directed by John Huston and in which he played the part of Gabriel Conroy with Anjelica Huston as his wife. He appeared in a television adaptation of Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie, as well as in Granada Television’s Who Bombed Birmingham? One of his most celebrated performances was as Barney Mulhall in RTÉ’s adaptation of James Plunkett’s Strumpet City (1980). He appeared in Bob Quinn’s Irish language film Poitin (1979) and later in his experimental drama The Bishop’s Story (1995). In 1999 he was the subject of a documentary made by Quinn entitled It Must Be Done Right, which was broadcast on RTÉ. In 1997 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Trinity College Dublin for his contribution to acting in Ireland. After battling both alcoholism and depression, he died of pancreatic cancer in 1999. David Doyle Reference Laffan, Pat, and Faith O’Grady, eds. Donal McCann Remembered. Dublin: New Island, 2000.
MCCAREY, LEO (1898–1969) Leo McCarey was one of American cinema’s most distinguished film directors, a recipient of multiple Academy Awards for writing and directing, and the man credited with teaming Stan Laurel with Oliver Hardy. He was born in Los Angeles on October 3, 1898, the son of Thomas McCarey, a boxing promoter of Irish lineage,
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and Edna Mistral. He attended St Joseph’s Catholic School and Los Angeles High School, before entering the University of Southern California to study law. Although he did practice briefly he was, on his own admission, a poor lawyer, telling Peter Bogdanovich in 1969 that “a discouraging factor in my legal career is that I lost every case.” In 1919 McCarey abandoned the legal profession to take up work in Universal studios, where he became third assistant to film director Tod Browning on The Virgin of Stamboul. In 1921 he made his debut as a film director with a film called Society Secrets, which was not well received. McCarey left Universal to work for Hal Roach who, along with Mack Sennett, was the leading producer of comedies in American cinema of the 1920s. McCarey initially worked as a gagman on the Our Gang comedies, before graduating to directing Charley Chase films beginning in 1924. It was during this time that he first worked with Oliver Hardy; three years later he made the highly successful decision to team Hardy with Stan Laurel and, by his own estimate, he directed or supervised at least 100 films featuring the pair. In 1930, he left the Hal Roach studios and, after some work with Fox studios and the independent producer Samuel Goldwyn, he signed with Paramount. Here his experience as a comedy director proved essential: his initial assignments saw him direct the Marx Brothers (Duck Soup, 1933), Mae West (Belle of the Nineties, 1934), W. C. Fields (Six of a Kind, 1934), and Harold Lloyd (The Milky Way, 1937). By the end of the 1930s, McCarey had established himself as one of American cinema’s most distinguished writer-directors. Although he is traditionally associated with www.abc-clio.com
comedies, including the classic screwball comedy, The Awful Truth (1937), his versatility can be seen in his bittersweet 1937 drama about aging, Make Way for Tomorrow, and in the classic melodrama, Love Affair (which he remade in 1957 as An Affair to Remember). McCarey always excelled at directing actors, and his work with stars such as Cary Grant and Irene Dunne proved seminal in the development of their careers. McCarey’s Catholic faith found expression in a duo of films that he made in the 1940s: Going My Way (1944) and The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945) cast Bing Crosby as a Catholic priest, and the successful fusion of humor and sentiment ensured the films’ success at the box office. McCarey, always a political conservative, became increasingly right wing in the later 1940s, and in 1952 he directed the red-baiting My Son John, which featured the last performance of Robert Walker (who died before the film’s completion). McCarey’s later career seems to have been beset by a number of personal and professional problems, and he directed his last film, Satan Never Sleeps, in 1962. McCarey died of emphysema in Los Angeles on July 5, 1969. He was survived by his wife, Stella, whom he married in 1920, and their daughter, Mary Virginia. Gwenda Young
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See also: CROSBY, Bing References Bogdanovich, Peter. “Interview with Leo McCarey.” In Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors. New York: Ballantine, 1997. Poague, Leland. “Leo McCarey.” In Hollywood Professionals. Vol. 7. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1980. Wood, Robin. “Leo McCarey.” In Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, edited by Richard Roud. Vol 2. New York: Secker and Warburg, 1978. 1-800-368-6868
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MCCARTHY, JOSEPH (1908–1957) Born to a poor Irish farm family in Appleton, Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy was a hyperactive, extroverted youth who dropped out of school after eighth grade to start his own poultry business. After the chickens all died, he enrolled in the local public high school. Thanks to enormous energy and a retentive mind, he finished his coursework in less than a year at age 20. After two undergraduate years at Marquette University, a leading Jesuit school in Milwaukee, McCarthy entered Marquette Law School, acquiring the rudiments of the profession as he knit together a statewide network among Irish and German Catholics. McCarthy was a practicing Catholic his entire life but rarely referred to religion or ethnicity in his speeches. He actively supported President Franklin Roosevelt in the Young Democrats, but he did not join Irish organizations. Although he was defeated in his 1936 race for district attorney, McCarthy displayed remarkable campaign abilities and an astonishing memory for faces. He had the energy and determination to meet every voter in person, exuding charm and a concern for each voter as an individual. The same tactics paid off in 1939, when he was successful in a nonpartisan contest for a regional judgeship. In 1942, McCarthy volunteered for the Marine Corps (as a judge he was draft exempt), becoming an intelligence officer in an aviation unit heavily engaged in combat in the South Pacific. Although assigned a desk job, McCarthy flew numerous combat missions as a tail gunner—he exaggerated the number to qualify for a Distinguished Flying Cross. McCarthy had his name entered in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in 1944, opposing a well-entrenched www.abc-clio.com
incumbent. The absentee war hero ran a strong second, making a name for himself statewide. Why McCarthy suddenly changed parties was never explained, but prospects for ambitious Wisconsin politicians were dim inside the poorly organized Democratic party, for most New Dealers supported the state’s Progressive Party. During the war, however, the Progressive Party collapsed, torn apart between its New Deal domestic liberalism and its intensely isolationist opposition to Roosevelt’s foreign policy. Increasingly out of touch with Wisconsin, its leader, Robert LaFollette, Jr., looked to his family’s past glories and made the blunder of trying for reelection to the Senate in 1946 as a Republican. “Tail Gunner Joe,” who endlessly crisscrossed the state while his opponent stayed in Washington, offered an alternative in the Republican primary to old-guard Republicans who had opposed the Lafollettes for a half century. McCarthy brilliantly captured the frustrations citizens felt about massive strikes, unstable economy, price controls, severe shortages of housing and meat, and the growing threat from the far left. He narrowly defeated LaFollette in the primary. The slogan “Had Enough?—Vote Republican” gave the Republicans a landslide victory all across the state, electing a new junior senator from Wisconsin. In Washington, McCarthy was a mainstream conservative in domestic policy, and, like many veterans, was an internationalist in foreign affairs, supporting the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. His speeches rarely mentioned domestic communism or flaming issues like the Alger Hiss espionage case, but that suddenly changed in early 1950 when his vivid anticommunist rhetoric drew national attention. Alleging
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there were many card-carrying communists in Truman’s State Department, McCarthy forced a Senate investigation led by Millard Tydings, Democrat of Maryland. McCarthy named numerous suspect diplomats but failed to convince the three Democrats on the panel; they concluded his allegations were “a fraud and a hoax,” while the two Republicans dissented. McCarthy retaliated by campaigning against Tydings, who was defeated for reelection in November 1950. What the senator himself called McCarthyism was a factor in key races across the country; all of the McCarthysupported candidates won, and his stock soared. A few weeks later American forces were crushed by the Chinese in Korea, and in the spring of 1951 Truman tried to shift the blame by firing General Douglas MacArthur. McCarthy now became the dominant figure in American politics, with strong support among both Republicans and Catholic Democrats, as he alleged that Truman’s top people had betrayed America. He singled out Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Secretary of Defense George Marshall. Liberals were aghast; Truman had picked General Marshall to head the defense department precisely because he thought the elderly statesman would always be above criticism, no matter that China turned from a staunch ally to a bitter enemy on his watch. McCarthy’s blistering attacks on Marshall as “part of a conspiracy so immense, an infamy so black, as to dwarf any in the history of man” fueled the belief McCarthy was a wild man, a pathological liar who overstepped the bounds of political discourse. With Eisenhower crusading against “Korea, Communism and Corruption” in the 1952 presidential campaign, Republican victory was ensured. As a senior member of www.abc-clio.com
the majority party McCarthy for the first time became a committee chairman, with control of staffing and agenda. He used his Government Operations Committee to open highly publicized hearings in 1953–1954 alleging disloyalty in the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Information Agency, and finally the Army. His furious attacks on the Army led to the televised “ArmyMcCarthy” hearings in spring 1954, which exposed his bullying tactics to a national audience. As McCarthy’s poll rating plunged, his enemies finally pulled together to introduce a censure resolution focused on McCarthy’s contempt for the federal government and especially for his fellow senators. McCarthy’s charges that overeducated liberals tolerated Communism at home and abroad had baffled the liberals. He alleged that they had corruptly sold out the national interest to protect their upperclass privileges and were so idealistic about world affairs that they radically underestimated the threat posed by Stalin, his spies, and the worldwide Communist movement. Instead of refuting the allegations, liberals tried one of two approaches. Some became intensely anticommunist and claimed they were more effective than McCarthy and the Republicans in eliminating communism in the unions and Democratic Party and containing the Stalinist menace in Europe. The other approach was to counterattack, to charge that “McCarthyism” had never found a single spy but had only hurt innocent people in hunting for nonexistent witches; thus, it represented an evil betrayal of American values. In an appeal to upscale conservatives and liberal intellectuals, critics ignored the Communist infiltration of labor unions and liberal causes and focused
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on stereotyping anticommunists as illmannered ignorant troglodytes, oblivious to American traditions of free speech and free association. McCarthy’s exaggerations and false charges encouraged opponents to stress the second approach, but it escalated the controversy to a pitch of hatreds and fears unprecedented since the days of reconstruction. McCarthy’s superb sense of timing and his media instincts kept his partisan attacks on the front page every day; his willingness to do battle in the election campaigns with Democratic opponents across the country strengthened his base in the Republican Party. His religion and ethnicity, refreshed with highly visible friendships with leading Irish Catholics, especially the Kennedy family, bolstered his standing among Democrats. According to Gallup polls, McCarthy’s popularity crested in January 1954. His core support came from Republicans and Catholics who had not attended college. McCarthy, however, failed to create any sort of grassroots organization. He had no organizational skills; he did not effectively use his talented staffers (such as Robert Kennedy). He was a loner who lurched from issue to issue, misled by the enormous media publicity into believing a one-man crusade was possible in a complex society honeycombed with local, regional, and national organizations. By operating within the Republican Party apparatus he lost the opportunity to create an independent grassroots political crusade in the style of Teddy Roosevelt, Huey Long, or Ross Perot. He never launched his own magazine or radio show, nor did he form alliances with publishers who agreed with him. McCarthy’s strained relations with Senate colleagues created a trapdoor. It was sprung after many Republicans realized www.abc-clio.com
that he had shifted the attack away from the Democrats. What use was his slogan “20 Years of Treason” once Eisenhower was in office? McCarthy’s answer was “21 Years of Treason!” Eisenhower’s supporters could no longer tolerate such a loose cannon, and as McCarthy unwisely shifted his attacks to Eisenhower’s beloved army, his cause was doomed. Although many Americans distrusted Ivy League, “striped pants” diplomats, soldiers were held in high regard; McCarthy’s charges of subversion were flimsy (one communist dentist had been automatically promoted); he sabotaged his own reputation by finagling favors for an aide who had been drafted. The televised hearings proved fatal to an ill-prepared bully. After the Democrats regained control of Congress in 1954 the censure motion carried, 67–22. McCarthy’s appeal, so widespread yet superficial, evaporated overnight and the senator faded into the shadows. Richard Jensen See also: KENNEDY FAMILY References Crosby, Donald F. God, Church and Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church, 1950–1957. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978. Herman, Arthur. Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator. New York: Free Press, 2000. Reeves, Thomas C. The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography. New York: Stein and Day, 1982.
MCCARTHY, JOSEPH VINCENT “JOE” (1887–1978) Joe McCarthy, the son of Benjamin McCarthy and Susan Connolly Bradley, was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania.
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McCarthy played college baseball at Niagara University in 1905 and 1906, before beginning his professional career. He played for Wilmington of the Class B TriState League in 1907, moving up to Toledo of the American Association in 1908. He played various infield and outfield positions, but spent most of his time at second base. By his own admission, he was a mediocre player, wielding a more powerful glove than bat. McCarthy joined his last team, Louisville of the American Association, in 1916. He became the player-manager in 1919 and ended his playing career in 1921, after an on-field collision. The closest he came to playing in the majors was in 1916, when he signed with Brooklyn of the Federal League. The league collapsed before the season began. As manager, McCarthy led Louisville to the pennant in 1921 and again in 1925. The second pennant brought him to the attention of Cubs owner William Wrigley, who hired McCarthy for the 1926 season. The Cubs finished fourth in 1926 and 1927, rising to third in 1928. McCarthy promised a pennant if the Cubs obtained second baseman Rogers Hornsby from the Boston Braves. The Cubs made the trade and won their first pennant since 1918, but lost the World Series in five games to the Philadelphia Athletics. The Cubs faltered slightly the next year, and McCarthy was fired toward the end of the season with the club in second place. In 1931, Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert hired McCarthy. McCarthy led them to the World Series in 1932, culminating in a four-game sweep of the Cubs. It was their last championship of the Babe Ruth era. The Yankees released Ruth in February 1935, leaving McCarthy as the undisputed leader of the team. Beginning in 1936, www.abc-clio.com
McCarthy’s Yankees dominated the baseball world in a way not seen again until the 1950s. Between 1936 and 1943 the Yankees won the pennant every year but 1940, finishing behind Detroit and Cleveland. Of those eight World Series, the Yankees won seven, only losing to the Cardinals in 1942, in five games. The Yankees needed six games to dispatch the Dodgers in 1941, but needed no more than five games in the other six. The Yankees, like every other team, lost stars to military service during World War II and finished third in 1944 and fourth in 1945, McCarthy’s worst year as Yankees’ manager. Illness aggravated by drinking and interference from the front office led McCarthy to resign at the start of the 1946 season. In 1948, McCarthy replaced Joe Cronin as manager of the Red Sox. He came within one game of first place in each of his two full seasons. The Red Sox and the Indians tied in 1948, but Cleveland won a one-game playoff to win the pennant. McCarthy started journeyman Denny Galehouse in the game, defending the move on the grounds that no other pitcher was available. In 1949 the Yankees defeated the Red Sox in the last two games of the season to win the pennant. After a mediocre start in 1950, McCarthy retired for good. A Chicago sportswriter gave McCarthy the nickname “Marse Joe,” noting McCarthy’s reputation as a taskmaster. McCarthy did not hesitate to crack the whip or get rid of players. In 1926 he had the Cubs trade future Hall of Famer Grover Cleveland Alexander because McCarthy concluded the pitcher was a troublemaker. McCarthy’s first action in the Yankee clubhouse in 1931 was to have a card table chopped up and hauled away in full view of
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the players. He may be considered the father of the idea of “Yankee pride.” He got along with anyone who played hard. As Cubs manager, McCarthy got the most out of the talented but heavy-drinking outfielder Hack Wilson. McCarthy’s tensions with Babe Ruth came not from Ruth’s offfield antics, which McCarthy ignored, but from Ruth’s unfulfilled desire to manage the Yankees. McCarthy was famous for requiring players to wear neckties in public. Ted Williams was equally famous for refusing to wear neckties. To defuse a potential conflict, McCarthy came to spring training in 1948 wearing an open-collared shirt with no necktie. McCarthy ended his career with a winning percentage of .615, the highest of all time. In 1957 he was elected to the Hall of Fame, the first manager to be elected without any major league playing experience. Robert Smith See also: BASEBALL; BASEBALL MANAGERS, IRISH-AMERICAN References Graham, Frank. The New York Yankees: An Informal History. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1943. Honig, Donald. The Man in the Dugout. Chicago: Follett Publishing Co., 1977.
MCCARTHY, MARY (1912–1989) Mary McCarthy was born in Seattle, Washington, into a privileged family of Irish Catholic, New England Protestant, and Jewish descent. When she was six years old her parents died of Spanish influenza. For the next five years Mary and her three younger brothers were raised in Minneapolis by her aunt and her husband, where they were treated harshly and subject to frequent www.abc-clio.com
Portrait of Mary McCarthy, author of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood and The Group. (Library of Congress)
physical abuse. When Mary was still in school she won a state essay contest, including $25 in prize money, for her essay “The Irish in America.” When her treatment at the hands of her aunt and uncle became intolerable, she was taken in by her maternal grandparents, who sent her to Annie Wright Seminary in Tacoma. McCarthy credited her grandfather, a lawyer from Seattle, with the liberal views she later espoused in her writings. The events of her childhood were explored in her best-selling memoir, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957). She attended Vassar College where she majored in English before graduating as a Phi Beta Kappa in 1933. Vassar was the setting for her hugely successful novel, The Group (1963), which dealt with eight female graduates and their subsequent lives in 1930s America. The book remained on the New York Times best-seller list for almost two
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years and was later adapted as a movie of the same name. In the same year McCarthy graduated from Vassar she married Harold Johnsrud. She also began to review novels for The Nation and The New Republic. By 1936 she had divorced Johnsrud and moved to Greenwich Village in New York City, where she became active on the American left, mingling with Dwight McDonald, Fred Dupee, William Phillips, and other antiStalinist writers associated with Partisan Review. She became the drama critic for Partisan Review, a position she held from 1938 until 1962, and she lived with the periodical’s editor Philip Rahv. McCarthy. She married the writer Edmund Wilson in 1938, and he encouraged her to write fiction. Later that same year she gave birth to her only child, a son named Ruel. Her first stories appeared in publications such as Harper’s Bazaar and Partisan Review. Her debut novel, The Company She Keeps (1942), was a collection of loosely connected stories that depicted a group of New York intellectuals in the late 1930s. In 1946, while teaching at Bard College, she divorced Wilson and married Bowden Broadwater. They were married until 1960, during which time they traveled to Europe together. This period was one of McCarthy’s most productive, during which she published some of her most important work. She also taught at Sarah Lawrence College and won two Guggenheim Awards in 1949 and 1959. After World War II, McCarthy opposed both the Stalinism of Russian communism and the anticommunism of McCarthyism, and she became known as one of the most prominent liberal intellectual voices in postwar America. She married her fourth
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husband, James Raymond, in 1962, and they spent most of their time living in Paris. In 1968 she went to Hanoi to write about the Vietnam War for the New York Review of Books. Her writings on the war were published as Report from Vietnam (1967) and Hanoi (1968). She also wrote about Watergate, publishing The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits (1974). She enjoyed a particularly warm relationship with Hannah Arendt, and their correspondence was later published. Her final novel, Cannibals and Christians (1979), explored the psychology of terrorism. Late in life McCarthy was touched by scandal when, as a guest on the Dick Cavett Show on television, she accused the writer Lillian Hellman of lying, saying “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” Hellmann filed a $2.5 million lawsuit against McCarthy but died before the case came to trial. McCarthy was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and she won the National Medal for Literature, the Edward MacDowell Medal, and the first Rochester Literary Award. McCarthy died of lung cancer in New York City on October 25, 1989, and she is buried in Castine, Maine, where she and her fourth husband had a summer vacation home. David Doyle
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References Brightman, Carol. Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1994. Gelderman, Carol, ed. Conversations with Mary McCarthy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. Gelderman, Carol. Mary McCarthy: A Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Kiernan, Frances. Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000.
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MCCARTHY, PATRICK “PADDY” (1871–1963) A professional boxer, soccer player, and pioneer athletics coach in Argentina, Patrick McCarthy, kown as “Paddy,” was born on March 17, 1871, in Cashel, Co. Tipperary, where he studied with the Christian Brothers and obtained sound marks in swimming and other sports. He arrived in Buenos Aires in 1900 to teach English and athletic activities in the Escuela Superior de Comercio, directed by Co. Clare–born James FitzSimons (1849–1944). McCarthy coached professional and amateur boxers at the Boxing Club of Buenos Aires in Florida. The activity was still unlawful, but he managed to train and hire several professionals. Sparring amateur boxers were recruited among sailors on call in Buenos Aires, who were invited to boxing festivals by the Reverend Henry Brady, assistant chaplain in Saint John the Baptist Anglican church, who was responsible for the Missions to Seamen in the port of Buenos Aires. The first professional boxing match in Argentina was fought on October 9, 1903, by Paddy McCarthy and the Italian Abelardo Robassio. The match to finish— with no preset number of rounds—was organized by El Gladiador magazine in their rooms. Carlos Delcasse was the referee, and the chief of police, Francisco Beazley, acted as timekeeper (though boxing was still banned). Paddy won the match by knockout in the fourth round, collecting the gate money, a record $500. McCarthy abandoned boxing because of family reasons, but he was appointed member of the sports municipal committee in Buenos Aires together with James FitzSimons’s son Juan and others.
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McCarthy began playing soccer in Argentina with several Irish Argentines in Lobos Athletic Club. When some players joined those of Lanús Athletic Club to form the team of the English High School, McCarthy left and joined Club Atlético Estudiantes. He also played in Central Athletic Club, a small institution in the port of Buenos Aires. In 1904 McCarthy was hired by Club Atlético Gimnasia y Esgrima of Buenos Aires to train its players. He was also coach of Boca Juniors, and referee of the Argentine Association Football League for 18 years. Soccer and boxing were some of the athletic activities of the upper classes of Buenos Aires and other Argentine cities. They were considered restricted to men and perceived as manly activities. Although in the beginning these activities were limited to the English-speaking community, by the time McCarthy and other professional players and trainers were active in Argentina, members of the local elite were actively involved in these sports. McCarthy not only taught hundreds of Argentines the techniques and rules of these and other athletic activities, but he also helped to popularize these sports among humbler children in the first decades of the twentieth century through his job in the Dirección de Deportes of Buenos Aires municipality. McCarthy retired in 1943 and died on August 10, 1963, at the British Hospital of Buenos Aires; he is buried in Chacarita cemetery. Edmundo Murray See also: SOCCER, EARLY ARGENTINE Reference Raffo, Víctor. El Origen Británico del Deporte Argentino: Atletismo, Cricket, Fútbol, Polo, Remo y Rugby Durante las Presidencias de Mitre, Sarmiento y Avellaneda. Buenos Aires: Author’s Edition, 2004.
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MCCORMACK, JOHN (1884–1945) John Francis McCormack was born in Athlone, Ireland, in 1884. His interest in singing was evident from a very young age. In 1903, he was offered a salaried position in the Palestrina Choir of the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin. The choir was directed by Vincent O’Brien, who recognized McCormack’s potential immediately. O’Brien encouraged him to enter the Irish National Music Festival, the Feis Ceoil, in 1903. With very little formal training, McCormack won the gold medal in the tenor competition. This commendation was a turning point for McCormack, and he began to give recitals in different parts of Ireland. In 1904, McCormack also began to make some recordings. Realizing that he would benefit from further training, he began to save up until he could go to Milan, Italy, to study under Vincenzo Sabatini. With Sabatini’s encouragement, McCormack made his operatic debut in 1906, singing under the pseudonym Giovanni Foli (the pseudonym being a marketing ploy). In 1906, he went to live in London, seeking opportunities to sing professionally. He signed a recording contract with Odeon and played a number of minor operatic roles. His breakthrough came in 1907, when he met Albert Vesetti, a professor of singing at the Royal College of Music. In 1907, he made his debut at Covent Garden. At age 23, he was the youngest principal tenor ever to sing there. By 1910, he was singing opera in the United States. He also began a career on the recital stage that would make him one of the most successful singers of all time. Between 1914 and 1919, McCormack gave more than 400 concerts in the United States. During World War I, he toured widely on behalf of the Red Cross. He also www.abc-clio.com
Portrait of world-famous Irish tenor John McCormack. (Library of Congress)
performed for servicemen at military bases and hospitals. In 1919, he became a citizen of the United States. At the end of the war, McCormack began to tour Europe again. After a series of concerts and operatic appearances in the early 1920s, McCormack achieved celebrity status. He continued to tour widely but returned to New York regularly. He also continued to record. In addition, he began to broadcast regularly on the radio in the United States. He continued to perform for a number of charitable organizations, paying particular attention to Catholic charities, and he made a point of including religious music in his recitals whenever he could. The Church bestowed a number of honors on McCarthy in recognition of his
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contributions. In 1928, the pope made him a count of the Holy Roman Empire, a title of which McCormack was very proud. In 1930, he starred in a musical film, Song o’ My Heart. He became a Hollywood celebrity after the film was released. Tired of the onerous touring, by 1936 McCormack was ready for a change. He gave his last concerts in the United States during 1937, although he continued to make radio broadcasts throughout 1938. He moved to London in 1938 to be nearer to his family. His farewell tour of Ireland and the United Kingdom took place at the end of that year, culminating with an appearance in London’s Albert Hall. With the outbreak of World War II, McCormack resumed his charitable work. From 1939 to early 1942, he toured on behalf of the Red Cross. He also made regular broadcasts for the BBC. His activities on behalf of the war effort greatly endeared him to the British public. Ill health forced him to retire in 1943, and he died in 1945. Aoileann Ní Eigeartaigh References Boylan, Henry. A Dictionary of Irish Biography. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1998. Lalor, Brian, ed. The Encyclopaedia of Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Ltd., 2003. McRedmond, Louis, ed. Modern Irish Lives. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Ltd., 1996. Randel, Don Michael, ed. The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996.
MCCOURT, FRANK (1930–) Frank McCourt was born in 1930, in Brooklyn, New York. He was the first of seven children of immigrant parents. In 1934, unable to find work in the depths of the Depression, the family decided to leave New York and return to their native Ireland. They settled in Limerick in southwest Ireland. McCourt’s father, an alcoholic, www.abc-clio.com
was unable to hold down a job. He eventually abandoned the family, leaving them penniless. Three of the seven children died of poverty-related diseases. Frank McCourt himself contracted tuberculosis at the age of 10 and spent a number of months in a sanatorium. He left school at the age of 13 and worked at various menial jobs until he had saved enough money to return to New York when he was 19. McCourt was drafted into the U.S. Army at the start of the Korean War and spent the war stationed in Germany. At the end of his tour of duty, he took advantage of the GI Bill to go to New York University—in spite of failing to complete his secondary education. After graduation, he went to work for the New York City public school system, and spent almost 30 years teaching creative writing in a number of schools. After his retirement, McCourt worked on his own memoirs. Angela’s Ashes was published in 1996 and spent 117 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. It was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography/Autobiography (1996), the Los Angeles Times Book Award (1996), the ABBY Award (1997), and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography (1997). Time Magazine and Newsweek chose Angela’s Ashes as the best nonfiction book of 1996. The second volume of McCourt’s memoir’s, ’Tis, was published in 2000. It was also a best seller. The film of Angela’s Ashes, directed by Alan Parker, was released in 1999. McCourt provided a voiceover for much of the film. McCourt’s 2005 book Teacher Man, describes his experiences as a teacher in New York schools. Aoileann Ní Eigeartaigh Reference Lalor, Brian, ed. The Encyclopaedia of Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Ltd., 2003.
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MCDERMOTT, ALICE (1953–) Alice McDermott was born on June 27, 1953, in Brooklyn, New York. Inspired by her childhood on New York’s Long Island, most of McDermott’s works explore the complex lives of characters within tight-knit Irish-American communities. Of her frequent choice of subject matter, McDermott has said, “Being Irish-American myself, Irish-American material is readily at hand to me. I know Irish-American people.” McDermott’s writing has garnered both popular success and critical acclaim. Critics have especially praised her rich prose style and keenly observed characters. In 1978, McDermott’s first published stories appeared in Ms. and Seventeen magazines. Her first novel, A Bigamist’s Daughter (1982), was widely acclaimed. That Night (1987), her second book, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. At Weddings and Wakes (1992), her third novel, was a New York Times best-seller. McDermott won the National Book Award for her fourth novel, Charming Billy (1998), with its tragic tale of the alcoholic Billy Lynch. Her most recent novel (2006) is After This. McDermott received her BA in 1975 from the State University of New York at Oswego, and her MA in 1978 from the University of New Hampshire. She has taught at the University of California at San Diego, American University, and the University of New Hampshire. She also has been a writer-in-residence at Lynchburg and Hollins colleges in Virginia. McDermott currently resides in Bethesda, Maryland, and is a writer-in-residence at Johns Hopkins University. Danielle Maze www.abc-clio.com
Reference Fanning, Charles. The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish-American Fiction. 2nd ed. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000.
MCDONALD, RICHARD “DICK” (1909–1998) Born in New Hampshire to Patrick and Margaret McDonald, both of whom were Irish immigrants, Dick McDonald attended Manchester High School West before moving to California. There, he and his brother Maurice “Mac,” opened a hot dog stand near the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia in 1937. The business prospered, and the brothers decided to open a drive-in barbecue restaurant in San Bernardino in 1940. Realizing that the majority of their sales were hamburgers, they decided to focus on this aspect of the restaurant’s business. In December 1948 they opened a hamburger restaurant that they named McDonald’s; it was one of the first of the new breed of fast-food restaurants that began to appear in the United States after World War II. In many ways, the success story that later became McDonald’s represents the postwar economic boom in America. The restaurant offered cheap food in an environment that was easily accessible and family friendly. The brothers also developed the concept of a self-service, highvolume, drive-in restaurant. The menu was fixed and consisted of 15¢ hamburgers, 19¢ cheeseburgers, 20¢ malts, and 10¢ French fries. Dick designed the Golden Arches logo and the red and white tiles for which McDonald’s later became famous. He also devised the “Millions Served” signs outside the restaurant. While he focused on the
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marketing of the restaurant, his brother was in charge of the day-to-day running of the restaurant. In 1952 the success of the brothers’ restaurant led to their being featured on the cover of American Restaurant magazine. Soon after, they proceeded to franchise eight of the restaurants. In 1955, Ray Kroc, a salesman who owned the rights to the mixers the brothers used to make the milkshakes, was granted the exclusive rights to develop the McDonald’s franchise in the United States. He formed McDonald’s System Inc., and in the same year he opened his first franchise and the ninth restaurant altogether, in Des Plaines, Illinois. In 1961, Dick and Mac sold their rights in the business to Ray Kroc for $2.7 million. Dick retired to live in New Bedford, New Hampshire, and his brother Mac died in 1971. In Kroc’s biography, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s, he traced the origins of the fast-food giant to his takeover of the company. Later, however, he would come to an agreement with Dick McDonald in which he acknowledged the contribution Dick and his brother had made to the global franchise. Today McDonald’s has more than 23,000 restaurants and 4,500 franchisees in more than 111 countries. The first branch of the McDonald’s franchise opened in Dick and Mac McDonald’s ancestral home of Ireland in May 1977. In 1984, Dick, who had grilled the first hamburger in the restaurant in San Bernardino, was served the 50 billionth hamburger by Ed Rensi, the president of McDonald’s USA, in a public ceremony in New York City. In 1992 he attended a ceremony where a plaque was unveiled at the site of the original McDonald’s restaurant at 14th and E Street in San Bernardino. Dick McDonald www.abc-clio.com
died in Manchester, New Hampshire, on July 14, 1998. David Doyle References Halberstam, David. The Fifties. New York: Villard Books, 1993. Harrell, Joy. “Richard McDonald.” In The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, edited by Michael Glazier. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999. Kroc, Ray. Grinding it Out: The Making of McDonald’s. Chicago: H. Regnery, 1977.
MCENROE, JOHN (1959–) John Patrick McEnroe, Jr., was born in Wiesbaden, Hessen, Germany, on February 16, 1959, where his father was stationed while serving with the Air Force. Before McEnroe’s first birthday the family returned to the United States, eventually settling in Douglaston, New York. In 1977, McEnroe shot to worldwide prominence when at the age of 18 he became the youngest player and the first qualifier to reach a Wimbledon semifinal, where he was beaten by Jimmy Connors. In 1978, McEnroe attended Stanford University, where he led the team to an NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) title and won the men’s singles. Although he was born in Germany, McEnroe is of Irish Catholic descent, and his fiery antics on the court were sometimes attributed—especially in the British press— to his Irish ancestry. In 1979, McEnroe won his first of four U.S. Open Titles, beating Vitas Gerulaitis in straight sets. However McEnroe’s talent was quickly ignored, in particular by the British tabloid press, which labeled him “Superbrat” and concentrated on his on-court antics rather than his talent as a player. His temper, emotional outbursts, and the constant comparisons and competition
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between him and the calmer, crowd-pleasing Björn Borg meant that when McEnroe did beat Borg and win Wimbledon for the first time in 1981, he was the first player in history not granted honorary membership to the All-England Club. During this tournament he was fined by the All-England Club, and it was here that he used the phrase “you cannot be serious” for the first time when he disagreed with an umpire’s decision. McEnroe’s response was his refusal to attend the champion’s dinner the same night. McEnroe won Wimbledon twice more for a total of three times, and he appeared in two other singles finals: in 1979 he was beaten by Borg and in 1982 he was beaten by Jimmy Connors. He was eventually granted membership. McEnroe’s combination of shots and volleying skills continued to be masked by his volatile makeup, which resulted in outbursts and temper tantrums on court. McEnroe’s temper also meant that he failed to get many of the lucrative endorsement contracts that other players of his generation obtained. Yet he was one of the first sports professionals to sign a deal with Nike. By the time McEnroe retired in 1992 he had won 77 singles titles, including 17 Grand slams—nine in men’s doubles and one in mixed doubles. He also helped the United States to five Davis Cup wins, and became the then-youngest player to be ranked number one. McEnroe has been married twice, the first time to actress Tatum O’Neal in 1986 (daughter of actor Ryan O’Neal). They had three children before they divorced in 1994. In 1997 he married the singer Patty Smyth, and they have two children. McEnroe is also stepfather to Patty’s daughter. Since retiring, McEnroe has been recognized for his unique blend of talents: in www.abc-clio.com
1996 he was named Father of the Year by the National Father’s Day committee, and in 1999 his name was enshrined in the Tennis Hall of Fame in Rhode Island. McEnroe has continued to work in the world of sports. He managed the U.S. Davis Cup team for 14 months in 1999–2000, he works as a television commentator for major tennis events, and in 2003 he published his autobiography, You Cannot Be Serious. Brid Nicholson Reference Harbridge, John. Please Play On: A Biography of John McEnroe. London: Central Publishing, 2001.
MCGEE, THOMAS D’ARCY (1825–1868) Thomas D’Arcy McGee was known as an ardent supporter of Irish republicanism in his youth, an agitator for better treatment of Irish immigrants to North America, and a founding figure and visionary of Canadian Confederation. His changed views regarding Irish republicanism in later life resulted in his assassination in 1868. McGee was born in Carlingford, Co. Louth, on April 13, 1825 to James McGee and Dorcas Catherine Morgan. His family moved to Wexford when he was a child. In 1842, at the age of 17, McGee went to the United States. A speech he made soon after at Providence, Rhode Island, on the repeal of the Union between England and Ireland, brought him an offer to join the staff of the Boston Pilot, a Catholic newspaper. His editorial and other contributions to the paper and his public addresses gained the attention of the famed Irish revolutionary
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leader Daniel O’Connell, who called them “the inspired utterances of a young exiled Irish boy in America.” When he was only 19 years old, McGee became the Pilot’s editor, using his position to lobby for Irish independence from Great Britain and the rights of Irish Catholic immigrants in the United States. He also supported the American annexation of Canada. The young McGee was also a prolific poet and historian. Most of his poems, such as “Home Sonnets Addressed to Ireland,” treat subjects such as Irish independence, Irish patriotism, and emigration. His historical works include Irish Writers of the Seventeenth Century (1846), History of the Irish Settlers in North America (1854), History of the Attempt to Establish the Protestant Reformation in Ireland (1853), Catholic History of North America (1854), and History of Ireland (1862). In 1845 McGee returned to Ireland, where he worked at the Freeman’s Journal. In 1847 he married Mary Teresa Caffrey in Dublin. He became involved in the Young Ireland movement, serving as secretary of the Irish Confederation, and was arrested and imprisoned for a short time for one of his political speeches. When the British government began to suppress the movement and to arrest its leaders, McGee escaped to the United States disguised as a priest. In New York he started a paper called The Nation but soon had a run-in with the local bishop over his violent revolutionary ideas and diatribes against the Catholic priesthood in their relation to Irish politics. Changing the name of the paper to The American Celt, he moved to Boston, then to Buffalo, and finally back to New York City. In 1857, McGee moved to Montreal, Canada, at the invitation of the local Irish community. www.abc-clio.com
McGee’s attitudes toward Canada had changed by the time he came to Montreal. He no longer supported American annexation, and in fact he urged new Irish immigrants to choose Canada over the United States. In Montreal, McGee became editor of the New Era, which he used to discuss Irish politics and the future of Canada. McGee’s editorship of the New Era was a springboard for his start in Canadian politics. In December 1857, he was elected to the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, in which his ability as a speaker put him at once in the front rank. His political views changed radically during this time; as he advanced in official prominence, he advocated British supremacy as loyally as he had formerly promoted the revolutionary doctrines of his youth. The Confederation of the British colonies of North America as the Dominion of Canada in 1867 was due largely to McGee’s initiative. He also supported issues such as constructing a railroad and creating a province for Canada’s Indian tribes. As he grew older, McGee’s views on Irish republicanism also altered, and he became vehemently opposed to it. His outspoken criticism of the Irish independence movement and Irish republicanism alienated many in the Irish community, in Canada and elsewhere. McGee’s religious views changed, too, and he became a devout Catholic. By 1866, McGee was planning to leave politics for a job in the civil service. On April 7, 1868, he attended a late-night session in the Canadian House of Commons in Ottawa, where he gave a passionate speech in favor of national unity. Returning home, he was shot and killed as he entered his rooming house. It is generally believed McGee was killed for his anti-Republican views. However, although Patrick James Whelan was convicted and hanged for
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McGee’s murder, the prosecutor never accused Whelan of being an Irish Republican. McGee was given a state funeral. See also: O’CONNELL, Daniel
Danielle Maze References Burns, Robin G. “McGee, Thomas D’Arcy.” In Dictionary of Canadian Biography, edited by Frances G. Halpenny. Vol. 9. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976: 489–494. McGee, Thomas D’Arcy. The Poems of Thomas D’Arcy McGee, edited by James Sadlier. London: D. & J. Sadlier, 1869.
MCGINLEY, PHYLLIS LOUISE (1905–1978) A prolific, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of light verse, essays, and children’s stories, Phyllis McGinley celebrates the seemingly mundane lives of ordinary women and finds plenitude and worth in the challenges and moral complexities of the domestic sphere. As a woman’s lot was being redefined during the first wave of postwar feminism, McGinley remained a steadfast advocate of the domestic arts and traditional gender roles. She dignifies the choices of housewife and mother, cherishes homes and homemaking, and recognizes the creative and spiritual purpose in the quiet little dramas of day-to-day living. Beneath her glib and glittering poetic surfaces—her attention to form, her verbal dexterity, her incisive intelligence, her artful and playful precision—is an abiding belief that our deepest humanity lies within and responds to right behavior. To McGinley, manners, as well as a mother’s responsibility to translate and teach ethical rules to her children, are the pathways to joy and the foundations of an honest and honorable life. www.abc-clio.com
McGinley was born in Ontario, Oregon, and lived in various far western towns until, after her father’s death in 1917, her family settled in Ogden, Utah. The stability she prized in her own married life certainly owes something to this unsettling early loss. Her deep affection for her “charming” and imperfect suburban homes in Larchmont, New York, and, after her two daughters were grown, Weston, Connecticut, is made poignantly comprehensible when contrasted with the rootlessness of her earliest years. “But we were happy as meadowlarks,” she writes in the 1964 paean to the American housewife, Sixpence in Her Shoe. “We married our house for love.” Her father’s business as a land speculator may have forced a peripatetic life, but Julia and Daniel McGinley also provided roots in Catholicism and an Irish inclination toward the life of the mind. McGinley graduated from the University of Utah in 1927, taught school, and then moved to New York in 1929, where she began her writing career in earnest. Here she taught English in a suburban junior high, joined the staff of Town and Country, wrote advertising copy, and devoted herself to honing her craft. She published widely and regularly in a host of popular magazines, such as The New Yorker, Vogue, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Reader’s Digest, establishing herself as a canny humorist and social commentator. Throughout her five-decade-long career, she was a familiar and reliable fixture of the American literary scene, and she had a large and loyal readership. She married Charles L. Hayden in 1936, two years after her first collection of poetry, On the Contrary, was published. Ten more volumes of poetry would follow, including the 1960 collection Times Three: Selected Verse from
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Three Decades with Seventy New Poems, for which she was awarded the 1961 Pulitzer Prize. She also published 17 children’s books and four essay collections and wrote the lyrics for a Broadway musical revue. Though after her marriage she maintained that housekeeping was her “native vocation,” her steadily determined devotion to the “occupation” of writing produced a remarkable body of work—a veritable chronicle of twentieth-century life. Light verse has often been relegated to a kind of poetic substatus; the term itself is often used dismissively to denote insubstantial, if clever and amusing, verbal parlor tricks. More recently, especially with the Library of America’s 2003 publication of American Wits: An Anthology of Light Verse, the term has been applied with a generic distinction and broader inclusiveness. McGinley shares space in this volume not only with well-known wits Dorothy Parker and Ogden Nash but also with the serious likes of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ezra Pound, and James Merrill. In The Writer Observed, McGinley distinguishes between poetic types and intents: “the appeal of light verse is to the intellect and the appeal of serious verse is to the emotions.” In a 1965 essay in The American Scholar, she describes herself as “a technician” whose “virtue is to beguile.” Her work’s mass appeal, she goes on to say, in wistful deference to poetry more “serious” than her own, may urge unsuspecting readers along the road to true poetic perception. Yet despite her somewhat arch protestations to the contrary, her work yields more than wry surprises. In much the same way that “manners are morals,” as she says in Sixpence in Her Shoe, McGinley’s “lightness” contains glimmers of what Marianne Moore calls “the genuine.” W. H. Auden wrote an www.abc-clio.com
appreciative introduction to “Times Three” in which he compares McGinley to Moore, Jane Austen, and Virginia Woolf. Though her work has fallen out of favor in the wake of the feminist revolution of the sixties (she wrote Sixpence in Her Shoe in direct response to Betty Friedan’s 1963 classic, The Feminist Mystique), the time is ripe for a reevaluation of her work, especially in light of more expansive, postfeminist attitudes toward women’s roles and choices. Kate Falvey References Auden, W. H. The Dyer’s Hand. New York: Random House, 1962. Breit, Harvey. The Writer Observed. New York: Collier Books, 1961. Hollander, John, ed. The American Wits: An Anthology of Light Verse. New York: Library of America, 2003. McGinley, Phyllis. “The Light Side of the Moon.” The American Scholar 34, no. 4 (Autumn 1965): 555–568. McGinley, Phyllis. Saint-Watching. New York: Viking, 1969. Wagner, Linda W. Phyllis McGinley. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971.
MCGONIGLE, THOMAS (1944–) Born on October 25, 1944, to Hugh and Marion (Whitney) McGonigle in Patchogue, Long Island, New York, McGonigle attended Hollins College, but transferred to Beloit College for his BA. He then received an MA from University College Dublin. McGonigle frequently writes about the theme of the writer as an exile. All three of his novels treat this theme: St. Patrick’s Day, Dublin, 1974 (only fragments have appeared in journals) paints one day in the life of an Irish-American exile in a bohemian Dublin setting; Going to
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Patchogue (1992) depicts a New York writer’s ironic pilgrimage to the hometown he grew up in and left in the mundane suburban setting of Patchogue, which would seem uncongenial to literary treatment; The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov (1997) presents a surreal journey into the mentality of fascism, dramatizing the absurd rationalizations of tyranny within a hallucinatory framework. This novel mixes fantasy and fact about an exile returning home to Sofia to challenge the communist leadership who tried, tortured, and hung Petkov in 1947. The novel was made possible by a traveling fellowship to Bulgaria from the International Research and Exchange Board. As a personality, McGonigle remains uniquely himself: a dry absurdist humor permeates his portrayal of conversations, memories, observations, newspaper clippings, and even narcissistic self-meditations. His work abounds in temporal discontinuities, as in the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, whom he has interviewed for the Village Voice. His fascination with the rootless wanderings of the Dutch novelist Nees Cootebaum led to a BookForum interview with the Dutch master. McGonigle has written introductions to books by Julian Green and E. M. Cioran. For the Review of Contemporary Fiction he has written articles on Charles Bukowski, Aidan Higgins, B. S. Johnson, Jack Kerouac, and Jack Spicer. McGonigle remains fixated with the selfimposed German exile of the Irish novelist Francis Stuart and the voluntary exile of the Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov. Stylistically, McGonigle exhibits the influence of both the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard and the bleaker broodings of Samuel Beckett. For several years in the 1980s, McGonigle edited Adrift, an Irish-American www.abc-clio.com
magazine that published a wide variety of Irish-American prose and poetry of merit; the magazine was launched at the nowdefunct Facsimile Book Shop in midtown Manhattan, where books from Ireland were found in abundance between 1978 and 1988. Clearly belonging to the postmodern European tradition, McGonigle lives his life as an exile in America with a public hardly familiar with the nouveau roman tradition, nor able to comprehend how an American, much less an Irish-American, could possibly consider himself alienated in the United States. But there is no commercial market for writing that eschews complex plot, romance, or easy rewards for readers impatient with parody, sarcasm, satire, surreal organization, and panoptic irony. McGonigle’s genial book reviews on non-American novelists frequently appear in such newspapers as New York Newsday, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. Kevin T. McEneaney See also: BECKETT, Samuel References Fanning, Charles. The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish American Fiction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. Wall, Eamonn. From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills: Notes on the New Irish. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.
MCGRAW, JOHN JOSEPH (1873–1934) John McGraw was born in Truxton, New York, on April 7, 1873, to John McGraw, an Irish immigrant railroad laborer, and Ellen (Comerfort). After losing his mother and four siblings to a diphtheria epidemic, McGraw devoted himself to athletics; by
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Portrait of professional baseball player and manager John Joseph McGraw. (Library of Congress)
age 16 he was playing baseball professionally for Olean of the New YorkPennsylvania League. In August 1891, after a stint with several minor league teams, McGraw joined the Baltimore Orioles, then a member of the American Association. In 1892, the American Association disbanded and the Orioles entered a reorganized National League. McGraw became the league’s foremost third baseman and one of its top hitters as the Orioles won three consecutive championships www.abc-clio.com
(1894–1896). His playing style has been described as everything from hard-nosed to dirty: typically, he would obstruct base runners, intimidate umpires, and otherwise distract opponents. Standing only 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighing but 120 pounds, McGraw made up in determination and tenacity what he lacked in size. In 1897 McGraw batted .391, still the highest single-season batting average for a third baseman; he ended his career with a lifetime batting average of .334 and a remarkable .465 on-base percentage. He averaged more than 40 stolen bases throughout his career and twice led his league in both bases on balls and runs scored (1898 and 1899). In 1899 McGraw became the Orioles manager and began to develop his reputation for genius. When the National League reorganized the following year, dropping Baltimore and three other franchises, McGraw joined the St. Louis Cardinals. He returned as player-manager of the new American League Baltimore franchise in 1901, but frequent clashes with owner Ban Johnson ended the reunion. In 1902 McGraw signed a four-year contract to manage the New York Giants for an annual salary of $11,000, the highest in baseball history to that point. McGraw served as player-manager of the Giants from 1902 to 1906, winning his first pennant in 1904. Dubbed “Little Napoleon” by New York sportswriters, and working in the spotlight of America’s media capital, McGraw became one of the sport’s most dominating personalities. International fame followed off-season tours of Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America. From 1904 to 1924 the Giants won 10 pennants and three world championships as McGraw—a master tactician, bullier of umpires without equal, and martinet with
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his players—solidified his reputation as baseball’s best manager. An innovative tactician credited with implementing the hit and run, squeeze play, and other strategic moves, McGraw is seen by many as being responsible for baseball’s growing popularity and success before the appearance of Babe Ruth and other home run champions. Despite having more future Hall of Famers on his roster than any other manager, McGraw never won another pennant after 1924. In 1932, McGraw—in failing health and unable to rally his team into contention—yielded the managerial reins to Bill Terry, ending a 30-year tenure with the Giants. Despite his retirement, McGraw was named the manager of the National League squad in the following year’s inaugural all-star game. McGraw currently ranks second alltime in games managed with 4,845 and in wins with 2,840 wins. Though known for his combative style, McGraw gave away much of his baseball income (which reached $70,000 per annum) to needy former ballplayers and others who were down and out. Having lost as much as $100,000 on real estate speculation, McGraw died broke in New Rochelle, New York, on February 25, 1933. Twice married (in 1897 to Minne Doyle, who passed away two years later, and in 1902 to Blanch Sindall), McGraw had no children. Tim Lynch See also: BASEBALL; BASEBALL MANAGERS, IRISH-AMERICAN References Alexander, Charles. John McGraw. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. McGraw, John. My Thirty Years in Baseball. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
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MCGUCKIAN, MEDBH (1950–) A widely recognized Northern Irish Catholic poet, translator, editor, and teacher, Medbh McGuckian is best known for her poems, which evoke an enigmatic personal mythology as they challenge linguistic conventions through ambiguous syntax and pronoun usage. McGuckian derives much of her symbolism from nature and from the home, both of which she frequently evokes through images of plants, flowers, weather, motherhood, domestic spaces, and colors. Unlike the work of many Northern Irish poets, McGuckian’s does not overtly engage with the political atmosphere. Instead, she opts for a covert, indirect exploration of the role of language, territory, gender, and art in the Northern Irish arena. Though she does not profess to be a feminist, her fluid, sensual poetry is often associated with French feminist Hélène Cixous’ concept of women’s language and writing called écriture féminine. McGuckian’s poetic style alternately fascinates, frustrates, and challenges readers and critics. McGuckian has produced more than a dozen collections of poems since 1980, including The Flower Master (1982), On Ballycastle Beach (1988), Marconi’s Cottage (1991), Captain Lavender (1994), Shelmalier (1998), Drawing Ballerinas (2001), The Face of the Earth (2002), and The Book of the Angel (2004). She has also edited Fortnight and an anthology, The Big Striped Golfing Umbrella: Poems by Young People from Northern Ireland (1985), translated Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s The Water Horse from Irish into English in collaboration with Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and authored a study of Seamus Heaney’s poetry entitled Horsepower Pass By! (1999).
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McGuckian is the third of six children born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to Hugh Albert McCaughan, a schoolteacher, and Margaret (Fergus) McCaughan. She attended Holy Family Primary School in Newington and the Dominican Convent in Fortwilliam Park from 1961 to 1968. McGuckian earned a Sullivan Scholarship to Queen’s University Belfast, where she earned her BA in 1972. She continued her studies there, earning an MA in Anglo-Irish literature and a DipEd in 1974. At Queens, McGuckian studied under Seamus Heaney, who was already a significant Irish poet by that time. She attended classes with poets Paul Muldoon and Frank Ormsby, although McGuckian declined the invitation to join their poetry group, which Heaney moderated. McGuckian taught English at Dominican Convent and at St. Patrick’s College, Knock, Belfast. She soon returned to Queens, serving as the first female writer-in-residence from 1986 to 1988. In 1991, McGuckian was a visiting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. She taught creative writing to suspected or accused paramilitaries held in the Maze prison in 1994. She was a writer fellow at Trinity College Dublin in 1999–2000 and maintains her involvement with the creative writing department at Queens. In 1979, McGuckian won the National Poetry Competition with her poem, “The Flitting,” which she submitted under a male pseudonym. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 1980, the year her poetry appeared in two pamphlets, Portrait of Joanna and Single Ladies: Sixteen Poems. Her first book of poems, The Flower Master, earned her a Rooney prize (1982), the Irish Arts Council Award (1982), and the Alice Hunt
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Bartlett Award (1983). The collection probes generativity and postnatal experience, and arrived shortly after McGuckian gave birth to her first child. By the time Venus and the Rain appeared in 1984, her poetic reputation was firmly established. In this collection, McGuckian writes of borders, boundaries, and obliquely gendered relationships where Venus and the Moon symbolize femininity while Mars, the Sun, and the rain represent masculinity. Geographical locality and history echo in On Ballycastle Beach (1988). As both McGuckian and her father were born in Ballycastle, this locale is linked to her anticipation of and reaction to her father’s approaching death. Likewise, McGuckian is interested in generational relation and transmission in Marconi’s Cottage (1991), which involves themes of birth sparked by the arrival of McGuckian’s first daughter Emer Mary Charlotte Rose. The collection takes its title from the Ballycastle beach house where Nobel Prize winner Guglielmo Marconi transmitted from Rathlin Island to the mainland with his wireless telegraph. McGuckian won the Cheltenham Prize for On Ballycastle Beach in 1989 and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry for Marconi’s Cottage in 1992, the same year she was awarded the Helen Waddell Award. Captain Lavender (1994) grieves the 1992 death of her father and for a society she proves increasingly willing to confront more openly. Her work in the latter 1990s and early 2000s had consolidated her stellar reputation. Kelly J. S. McGovern See also: HEANEY, Seamus; MULDOON, Paul
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580 MCGUCKIN, BARTON References Hogan, Robert, ed. Dictionary of Irish Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996. O’Connor, Mary. “Medbh McGuckian.” In Modern Irish Writers: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook, edited by Alexander G. Gonzalez, 182–187. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997. Olendorf, Donna, ed. Contemporary Authors. Vol. 143. Detroit: Gale, 1994. Riggs, Thomas, ed. Contemporary Poets. 7th ed. Detroit: St. James, 2001.
MCGUCKIN, BARTON (1852–1913) Barton McGuckin spent a year in America in 1887 singing in opera and concerts. In his early career, he started as a chorister in the Armagh Cathedral, where he received vocal training and studied the organ, violin, and piano. In 1871 he became the principal tenor soloist at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. Here he also studied with Joseph Robinson, a prominent local musician and vocalist. McGuckin made a successful appearance at the Crystal Palace concerts in 1875. McGuckin went to Milan toward the end of 1875, where he pursued his vocal studies further for the next year, returning to England to perform in the Crystal Palace concerts in October 1876. In November 1876 he again appeared in Dublin, this time at the Ancient Concert Rooms in Great Brunswick Street. His operatic debut was made as Thaddeus in Balfe’s The Bohemian Girl at Birmingham in September 1880 with the Carl Rosa Opera Company. Invitations quickly followed to sing at various leading musical festivals in Bristol, Hereford, Leeds, Norwich, and elsewhere in England. During this period he also sang in oratorios. His first operatic role in Dublin was as William Meister in Mignon in 1881. He successfully www.abc-clio.com
premiered Balfe’s opera Morro, the Painter of Antwerp at Her Majesty’s Theatre in January 1882. He continued to sing with the Carl Rosa Opera Company in London and the provinces, taking on the leading tenor roles in, Faust, Carmen, Mignon Lohengrin, and Manon. During the years 1883–1887, while at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in London, McGuckin created a number of new operas by English composers, such as A. G. Thomas, A. C. Mackenzie, and F. Corder. In 1887, McGuckin visited New York with the National Opera Company. He sang various operatic roles from the standard repertoire at the Academy of Music on 14th Street. He then went on tour to Boston and other places in New England, performing in opera and concerts before returning to New York. In 1888 he returned to London to rejoin the Carl Rosa Opera Company. He continued to sing principal parts with the company until 1896. It was during this period that he reached his peak when he sang the title role in the first English-language version of Verdi’s Otello at Manchester in 1892. In later life McGuckin became associated with the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin, where he endeavored to set up a competition in his name. This association was brief when he disagreed with the constraints placed on his involvement. McGuckin did live long enough to be able to make some recordings of Irish songs at the dawn of the recording industry in 1905. In recent years one of these recordings, a ballad by Irish composer Thomas Moore, Avenging the Bright, was reissued on the Symposium label in London. Basil Walsh
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MCGWIRE, MARK D. 581 References Brown, J. D., and S. S. Stratton. British Musical Biography. Birmingham: S. S. Stratton, 1897. Grove, George, ed. Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Vol. 4. Philadelphia: Theodore Presser, 1889. Pine, Richard, and Charles Action, To Talent Alone. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1998. White, Eric Walter. A Register of First Performances of English Opera. London: The Society for Theatre Research, 1983.
MCGWIRE, MARK D. (1963–) Mark David McGwire—“Big Mac”—was born in Pomana, California, on October 1, 1963. Although McGwire is not usually regarded as Irish American, he is of Irish descent and had a large fan base in Ireland. McGwire was a first baseman who starred initially at the college level, with the University of Southern California (he had been drafted by the Montreal Expos but declined in favor of USC for financial reasons), and at the Olympic level, winning a silver medal with the USA amateur team in Los Angeles in 1984. He left USC after three years, signing with the Oakland Athletics. He played his first Major League game for them in August 1986. The following year, 1987, he was named Rookie of the Year after hitting a rookie record 49 home runs for the Oakland Athletics. The previous record of 38 had been jointly held by Frank Robinson and Wally Berger. He won his only World Series with Oakland in 1989, when they swept the San Francisco Giants. During this time with Oakland McGwire would form a colorful and successful relationship with Jose Canseco—one that would later prove controversial. With McGwire about to become a free agent at the end of the 1997 season, he was traded midseason to the St. Louis Cardinals, where he completed a second successive seawww.abc-clio.com
son with 50 or more home runs—a deed only accomplished previously by Babe Ruth. In 1998 McGwire and Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs began their attempt to beat Roger Maris’s 1961 home run record of 61 in a single season. McGwire equaled the record on September 7 and broke it September 8. Extra drama was added to the night by the fact that Sammy Sosa was playing right field, Maris’s family was in the stands, and McGwire’s young son, Matthew, was the Cardinal’s batboy. The game was delayed 11 minutes for the celebration that followed. Sosa would hit his 60th home run on September 12. McGwire finished the season with 70 home runs, having hit two in the last game. Sosa finished with 66. Both men shared Sports Illustrated magazine’s “Sportsman of the Year” award. The following year McGwire hit 65 runs, and Sosa hit 63; both men became the only people in baseball history to hit 60 home runs in successive seasons. That same season McGwire became only the 17th player to hit more than 500 home runs in his career. McGwire’s record was eventually beaten in 2001 by Barry Bonds, who hit 73 home runs in a season. McGwire retired from baseball in 2001, finishing with 583 lifetime home runs. Despite his records McGwire will also always be controversially linked with the use of steroids. He admitted using androstenedione, a bodybuilding drug banned in most sports but allowed in baseball. He later stopped taking the supplement, saying he did not want to encourage young people to take it. However, the publication of Canseco’s 2005 autobiography, Juiced, brought such a public outcry that President George W. Bush mentioned steroids and their abuse in baseball as part of his State of the Union address. Congress
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responded by asking McGwire and others to testify. McGwire under oath refused to deny or confirm that he had used performanceenhancing drugs during his career and instead asked that Congress concentrate on the future rather than the past. The controversy continues to blight his record. McGwire married Stephanie Slemer in 2002, and the couple has a son, Max. McGwire has another son, Matthew, from his first marriage. Brid Nicholson References Hall, Jonathan. Mark McGwire: A Biography. New Jersey: Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2001. Miklasz, Bernie. Celebrating 70: Mark McGwire’s Historic Season. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998.
MCMANUS, GEORGE (1884–1954) Corned beef and cabbage, Dinty Moore’s stew, a gimlet-eyed wife, and a husband entering his house carrying his shoes or leaving it amid a hail of dishes—these were everyday occurrences in George McManus’s long-running comic strip, Bringing Up Father, featuring the adventures of Jiggs and Maggie. McManus was born on January 23, 1884, into an immigrant Irish family living in St. Louis, Missouri. His father was a theater manager, and McManus had many opportunities to absorb the elements of stage comedy and vaudeville humor that he would later work into this comic strip. He started cartooning at the age of 16, and in 1904 he went to New York City, where he eventually landed a position at Joseph Pulitzer’s The World. One of his early strips, Nibsy the Newsboy in Funny Fairyland, shared some of the fantastic, dreamlike qualities of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland. www.abc-clio.com
In 1912, McManus moved over to The World ’s rival, the Journal American, run by William Randolph Hearst. A year later he started the strip that made his name, Bringing Up Father, syndicated by King Features. Part of the strip’s success was based on McManus’s ability to turn into humor three themes that dominated early twentiethcentury American popular culture: the tensions between husband and wife, between the generations, and between the classes. Interestingly, all of these themes had particular meaning within the Irish-American community. The inspiration for Bringing Up Father was an 1893 lace-curtain comedy, The Rising Generation, by William Gills, which McManus had seen during his days in St. Louis. McManus had already experimented with satire on marriage and the family in an earlier strip, The Newlyweds, which he had brought with him from The World. In Bringing Up Father, McManus set his comedy within an Irish-American family. His character Jiggs was a hod carrier who, having come into money, wanted to retain the comfortable habits and friends of his working-class background. On the other hand, Maggie, his wife, and Nora, the daughter, eagerly sought to emulate the life of the upper class. The interplay between father and daughter reflected the comedy of Will M. Cresey’s popular Mag Haggerty vaudeville sketches. However, the focus of the strip was on Jiggs’s and Maggie’s version of the battle of the sexes as fought out over lace-curtain aspirations. In Irish-American popular culture, wives were frequently depicted as the engines of social ambitions, while their working-class husbands shrank from the embarrassments of living beyond their means. This theme first emerged in Edward Harrigan’s Mulligan
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Guard musicals in the 1870s and 1880s, and became a staple in Tin Pan Alley comic Irish songs, vaudeville sketches, and some of Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley pieces. The success of Bringing Up Father extended beyond the funny papers. In the 1920s Father, a play based on the strip, toured America, with McManus occasionally playing the leading role. After first appearing in silent animated cartoons, Jiggs and Maggie were featured in at least eight films. McManus, playing himself, appeared in several of those produced in the 1940s. A more unlikely by-product of the comic strip derived from Jiggs’s legendary addiction to the beef stew served in Dinty Moore’s saloon. The establishment and the stew were allegedly inspired by one of McManus’s favorite eateries, run by a friend, James Moore. Moore tacked the name “Dinty” onto his establishment. Eventually, “Dinty Moore” appeared as a brand of canned goods. As a comic strip artist, McManus combined stereotypes and caricatures with a high level of fashionable decorative draftsmanship. Jiggs, the father, was drawn with a long-upper lip and a pug nose, inherited from anti-Irish nineteenth-century political cartoons and from the vaudeville stage. However, McManus’s scenes of upper-class life were filled with art deco–style architecture and decorations. At the same time, the zaniness that characterized the early comic strips was evident in the pictures on the walls, in which figures broke out of the frame and seemed to be leading a life of their own. McManus retired from the strip in the 1940s. By that time, some of the early comic strips had become habitual fare for many newspaper readers. Jiggs and Maggie continued their marital combat for another www.abc-clio.com
60 years, an unlikely remnant of the once ubiquitous Irish-American humor. Bring Up Father was last published on May 28, 2000, in its 87th year, a world record among comic strips. William H. A. Williams See also: DUNNE, Finley Peter; HARRIGAN, Edward, and HART, Tony References McManus, George. Bringing Up Father, edited by Herb Galewitze. New York: Scribner’s, 1973. McManus, George. Jiggs Is Back. California: Celtic Book Company, 1986. Williams, William H. A. “Green Again: Irish-American Lace-Curtain Satire.” New Hibernia Review 6, no.2 (Summer 2002): 9–24.
MCNUTT, ALEXANDER (1725–1811) The details of Alexander McNutt’s birth, including the identity of his parents and earliest years, are unclear. Born in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, he first came to North America as a young man, around 1753, at which point his life becomes better documented. His first place of American settlement was Staunton, Virginia. There, as a militia officer under Major Andrew Lewis, he fought against the Shawnee of the Ohio River Valley. By 1758 McNutt had moved north, settling in Londonderry, New Hampshire. The next year his attention had turned further north yet, when he became involved in schemes for colonizing Nova Scotia, for which he is best remembered today. The earliest settlers that McNutt attracted to Nova Scotia came from New Hampshire. But in his effort to populate Acadia with Protestants, and to turn a profit doing so, he soon turned his gaze
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across the Atlantic to Ireland. In the spring of 1761 McNutt actively sought immigrants from Londonderry and its hinterland. News of his settlement scheme spread further afield by word of mouth and in print, in newspapers such as the Belfast News-Letter. Some 300 colonists acted on his offer to relocate to Nova Scotia, where the head of each migrating family would receive 200 acres as well as 50 acres for each member of the family. While McNutt acted on his scheme with support from Lt. Gov. Jonathan Belcher (with whom McNutt had a good relationship), and the Board of Trade in London, the Privy Council turned him down. Fearing the consequences of a declining Protestant population in Ireland, the Privy Council looked no more favorably on McNutt’s grander scheme hatched in 1762. Without support from the Privy Council, McNutt could not succeed in his plans. However, in 1765, he was compensated with 13,500 acres for the losses he reportedly incurred in 1761. After the French and Indian War ended, McNutt aimed to take advantage of the consequences of the Proclamation of 1763 by attracting potential settlers to Nova Scotia from other (Pennsylvania in particular) colonies in British North America. In late 1765 he secured several land grants, but for several reasons little colonization followed. McNutt himself lived in Nova Scotia for a time in the late 1760s and early 1770s. During the War for American Independence (1776–1783) he was suspected by both the British government and the American rebels of being sympathetic toward the other side. McNutt lived on McNutt Island during the late 1780s, but he moved to Virginia in 1794, and that is where he spent his final years. Mark G. Spencer www.abc-clio.com
References Blakeley, Phyllis R. “Alexander McNutt.” In Dictionary of Canadian Biography, edited by Ramsay Cook. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2005. Dickson, R. J. Ulster Emigration to Colonial America, 1718–1775. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966. Eaton, A. W. H. “Alexander McNutt, the Colonizer.” Americana 8 (1913): 1065–1106. Wright, Esther Clark, The Petitcodiac: A Study of the New Brunswick River and of the People Who Settled Along it. Sackville, New Brunswick: The Tribute Press, 1945.
MCSWINEY, PAUL (1856–1890) Nothing is known about Paul McSwiney’s early life and education before the first performance of his opera Amergen in the Cork Opera House on February 23, 1881. A significant event in local music history, the opera to his own libretto was praised for its drama and melodic content, but less so for its musical craftsmanship. Soon after the successful week of performances, McSwiney went to London and then in 1883 to New York, where he became the musical director of the New York branch of the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language. The first work he produced in that capacity was An Bárd ‘gus an Fó, subtitled A Gaelic Idyll, a dramatic cantata for soloists, choir, and orchestra, first performed at Steinway Hall on November 28, 1884. However, it was not until 1885, when the work was produced in an English version as The Bard and the Knight, that it could attract a larger audience. Other works to which he contributed both music and words were Alexander, a Musical Drama and John McHale (unfinished). He further produced a number of plays, such as Brian, The
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Fairies Doll, and a novel called Nirvana. McSwiney’s failure with An Bárd ‘gus an Fó is significant as it shows the diminishing importance of the Irish language among the immigrant Irish. Axel Klein References Klein, Axel. “Stage-Irish, or the National in Irish Opera, 1780–1925.” Opera Quarterly 21 (2005): 1–41. O’Donoghue, David J. The Poets of Ireland. Dublin: [for the author], 1912.
MEAGHER,THOMAS FRANCIS (1823–1867) A Young Ireland revolutionary, orator, politician, and American Civil War hero, Thomas Meagher was born in Waterford in 1823, the son of a distinguished citizen. His father, a member of the Repeal Association, served twice as mayor and as the parliamentary representative from that district. Meagher attended the Jesuit school at Clongowes, Co. Kildare, where he fashioned his future as an orator. He then attended Stonyhurst, a Catholic college in Lancastershire where his interest in Irish history was stimulated by the anti-Irish atmosphere. Joining his father in the Repeal Association back in Waterford, he served a short term as secretary and then left for Dublin, where he intended to study for the bar. His involvement in the Repeal Association fostered his friendships with Young Irelanders Gavan Duffy and Thomas Davis, among others. His talents as an orator brought him quick notice, despite his English accent, disciplined through elocution at the English boarding school. There he had also developed suspicions of the Whig government, whose leaders were courted by Daniel O’Connell. www.abc-clio.com
Thomas Francis Meagher, hero of the American Civil War and Irish revolutionary. (Library of Congress)
On July 28, 1846, Meagher delivered his famous “Sword Speech” at Dublin’s Conciliation Hall, wherein he argued against the O’Connell peace resolution before the Repeal Association. Although Meagher agreed that peaceful means of achieving repeal were most preferred, the British parliament had repeatedly thwarted efforts to give Ireland its own representative government. Arguing that independence could be won only through a show of strength, Meagher cited violent rebellions that had led to independence. His allusions included Judith’s assassination of the Assyrian invader and a rebellion by Belgian priests. John O’Connell, son of the Liberator, interrupted Meagher, and after a dispute, the Young Irelanders walked out of the meeting, resulting in the rift between Young Ireland and Old Ireland over repeal
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strategy. The Sword Speech became legendary and made Meagher an international celebrity. In February 1847, Meagher lost an election in his home district, Waterford, where the seat went to a Tory, the repeal ticket having been split between Old and Young Ireland. In February 1848, widespread revolutions in continental Europe excited Young Irelanders’ imaginations, and Meagher with other leaders formed a delegation to enlist French support for a planned Irish revolt. The new French President Alfonse de Lamartine, a poetpolitician, refused. The new French government had no intention of engaging England in a war over Ireland. Meagher, however, did return with a gift crafted by an admirer, the Irish tricolor flag, fashioned after the French flag. In March, a demonstration against British rule resulted in Meagher’s arrest along with William Smith-O’Brien and John Mitchel. The resulting trials for sedition resulted in not guilty verdicts for Meagher and Smith-O’Brien, but Mitchel’s jury was packed in favor of the prosecution, and he was convicted. That July, Meagher organized a demonstration fashioned after O’Connell’s “monster meetings.” It was held on Slievenamon, a mountain in Co. Tipperary, where a reported 50,000 attended. The British response was to suspend habeas corpus and to arrest Meagher and others for treason. His trial resulted in conviction for high treason, which demanded hanging followed by drawing and quartering, but the government, uneasy that Meagher and others might be hailed as martyrs and thus further inflame hostilities, had the sentence commuted. Meagher was transported to Van Dieman Land, Australia, on July 29, 1849. www.abc-clio.com
Meagher’s confidence and jovial nature enhanced his popularity. He won friends in the colony and joined other Young Ireland felons. He was awarded a ticket of leave, which allowed him to live freely in that land on his honor that he would not try to escape. Escape, however, he did, returning his ticket to the police in Ross district—a matter of honor. The Irish chief constable, however, refused to arrest Meagher, and English settlers threatened to shoot any constable who dared to make the arrest. While in Tasmania, Meagher married Catherine Bennet, whom he called Bennie. They had a son, Henry Emmett Fitzgerald, born while the father was making his escape to the United States. Bennie sailed to Ireland, where she was cared for by the Meagher family in Waterford. The elder Thomas Meagher escorted her to New York to join her husband, but after four months, Meagher undertook a speaking tour and insisted that she return to Ireland. Bennie bore a second son, Thomas Francis Meagher III, but she died of typhus shortly after giving birth in 1854. Meagher arrived in New York in May 1852. He gave lectures for the following two years on the subjects of Australia, Irish history, literature, and politics. He also assisted John Mitchel in establishing an Irish-American newspaper, the Citizen. In 1856, he married Elizabeth Townsend, and he established his own newspaper, the Irish News. He soon lost interest in journalism, and the paper closed in 1860. In 1857, Meagher left the Irish News in the hands of Richard J. and Gerald R. Lalor while he joined an exploratory expedition to Central America, from which he published two articles: “Holidays in Costa Rica” and “The New Route Through Chirigus.” When the U.S. Civil War broke out,
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Meagher organized a company of Irish volunteers, serving under Colonel Michael Corcoran’s 69th New York Regiment. Meagher saw action in Virginia, at the first Battle of Bull Run (Manassas, July 21, 1861) where his horse was struck by cannon shot and fell from beneath him. He organized the Irish Brigade that same year and became a colonel. On February 3, 1862, in command of the 69th Regiment, he was appointed brigadier-general. He fought at the second Battle of Bull Run in August and at Antietam in September, where he again lost his horse to gunfire. He received high praise for his fierceness in battle from his opponent General Robert E. Lee. At the Battle of Fredericksburg, in December, Meagher incurred a gunshot wound to the leg and saw many of his men fall in battle. In 1863, Meagher ran into conflict with the Union Army command when he insisted that he be allowed to recruit for his regiment. Refused, he tendered his resignation in protest but was again refused. He served in several other campaigns before resigning on May 15, 1865. After the war, President Andrew Johnson appointed Meagher to serve as temporary governor of the Montana territory, a post in which he served from 1865 to July 1, 1867. During his career in the American West, Meagher wrote “Rides through Montana,” reprinted in The River We Carry With Us: Two Centuries of Writing from the Clark Fork Basin. Meagher’s term in office ended with his fall into the Missouri River from a steamboat near Fort Benton. His death was reported in the American press as caused by drunkenness, but in Waterford, a popular story contends that he was attacked by Know-Nothings, an anti-immigrant society www.abc-clio.com
aimed at preventing immigrants from serving in political office. Meagher published two books: Recollections of Ireland and the Irish and The Last Days of the 69th in Virginia, a Civil War history. Katherine Parr See also: MITCHEL, John References Davis, Richard. The Young Ireland Movement. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987. Meagher, Thomas F. “Rides through Montana.” In The River We Carry With Us: Two Centuries of Writing from the Clark Fork Basin. Clark City, MT: Clark City Press, 2002. O’Sullivan, T. F. “Thomas Francis Meagher.” The Young Irelanders. Tralee: Kerryman, 1944: 191–207.
MELLON, ANDREW WILLIAM (1855–1937) The fourth son of Thomas Mellon and Sarah Jane Negley, Andrew Mellon was born March 24, 1855, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1868 he enrolled in the Western University of Pennsylvania, the forerunner of the University of Pittsburgh, but left in 1872, three months before graduation, to open a lumber and construction company. The dislocations of the Panic of 1873 led Mellon to believe bankers and businessmen best served the United States by imparting order to the economy, and in 1874 he entered T. Mellon and Sons, the bank his father had founded. In January 1882 Mellon’s father was so impressed with his son’s abilities that he gave him the bank. During the next four decades Mellon would use the bank to finance the growth of industry. In January 1890 he invested in the operations of chemist Charles M. Hall, which would grow into the Aluminum Company of America. In the 1890s he
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President Warren Harding (left) receives treasury savings certificates from Andrew Mellon (right). Mellon was a successful banker and treasury secretary to Presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. (Library of Congress)
invested in oil wells in western Pennsylvania and in 1891 founded with local investors what would become the Gulf Oil Corporation. In 1902, in his capacity as bank president, Mellon reorganized T. Mellon and Sons as the Mellon National Bank. Bank associate and industrialist Henry Clay Frick had in 1898 introduced Mellon to Nora Mary McMullen, the daughter of a wealthy brewer, and the two married in 1900. Mrs. Mellon gave birth to Ailsa in 1901 and Paul in 1907. Although the couple vacationed every year but one in England, Andrew Mellon otherwise immersed himself in work. Nora Mellon resented his absence, disliked Pittsburgh, and in 1909 separated from her husband. The two www.abc-clio.com
divorced in 1910, deepening Mellon’s absorption in work. By then Mellon had turned toward politics. He disapproved of government intervention in the economy in the belief that only bankers and businessmen were adept at managing the economy. He supported a high tariff to protect industry despite the harm tariffs did to agriculture. Mellon opposed a minimum wage as a burden to business and favored low corporate and individual taxes. These views led him to finance the campaigns of local Republicans and in 1916 of Republican presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes. Warren G. Harding’s election as president in 1920 brought Mellon to the fore. Friend and
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former Secretary of State Philander C. Knox recommended Mellon to Harding, who in 1921 named him secretary of the treasury. Accustomed to austerity in his own life Mellon demanded the same of government. Not content merely to balance the budget, Mellon aimed for a surplus to pay down the country’s $24 billion debt. To achieve this goal Mellon proposed to reduce federal expenditures faster than taxes. In the name of economy Mellon opposed the payment of a bonus to World War I veterans, writing the text of Harding’s 1922 veto. For the same reason he opposed aid to farmers, writing the 1926 and 1928 vetoes of the McNary-Haugen Bill. His central aim as treasury secretary was to reduce taxes on the wealthy in the belief that business, free from the burden of taxes, would generate more money and thus more revenue for government and more jobs. The benefits of low taxes on the wealthy would therefore trickle down to the poor. The emergency of Word War I at an end, in 1921 Mellon sought to repeal the Excess Profits Act, which taxed corporate profits above 8 percent. Congress obliged and heeded Mellon’s counsel in reducing the tax rate on incomes above $1 million from 66 to 50 percent. Mellon sought a second round of cuts in 1923 and a third in 1926. As a consequence, an individual who paid $663,000 in income taxes on $1 million in 1921 paid less than $200,000 in 1929. Mellon offset these reductions with increases in taxes on stamps, cars, and bank checks and an increase in postage. Critics charged that these actions benefited the wealthy at the expense of the poor. Defenders lauded him the greatest treasury secretary since Alexander Hamilton. Treasury secretary to presidents Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, Mellon has www.abc-clio.com
had the longest tenure in that role to date. In 1932 Hoover named Mellon ambassador to Great Britain. In 1933 Pennsylvania Congressman Louis T. McFadden charged Mellon with underpaying his taxes by more than $2 million in 1931. After Mellon’s death the Board of Tax Appeals set the amount at $485,809 rather than $2 million. In 1937 Mellon bequeathed his art collection, $15 million for the construction of a building, and $5 million for an endowment to establish and maintain the National Gallery of Art. Mellon died of pneumonia on August 26, 1937. Christopher Cumo See also: MELLON, Thomas References Hersh, Burton. The Mellon Family: A Fortune in History. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1978. Koskoff, David E. The Mellons: The Chronicle of America’s Richest Family. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1978. Murray, Lawrence Leon. “Andrew W. Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury, 1921–1932: A Study in Policy.” PhD thesis. Michigan State University, Lansing, 1970.
MELLON, THOMAS (1813–1908) The son of Andrew Mellon and Rebecca Wauchob, Thomas Mellon was born February 3, 1813, in Co. Tyrone, Ireland. In October 1818 the family left Ireland for Baltimore, Maryland, and then Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, which Mellon read as a teen, fired his ambition to be more than a farmer. In 1834 he enrolled at Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, transferring that October to the Western University of Pennsylvania, the forerunner of the University of Pittsburgh.
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In September 1837 Mellon graduated from the university and that fall was its Latin professor. In 1838 he studied law with Charles Shaler, former judge of the Court of Common Pleas of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. In December 1838 Mellon passed the bar examination and opened an office in Pittsburgh. In 1843 he married Sarah Jane Negley, the daughter of a wealthy landowner. She gave birth to Thomas Alexander Mellon in 1844, to James Ross Mellon in 1846, to Sarah Emma Mellon in 1847, to Annie Rebecca Mellon in 1851, to Samuel Selwyn Mellon in 1853, to Andrew William Mellon in 1855, to Richard Beatty Mellon in 1858, and to George Negley Mellon in 1860. To stimulate their work ethic, Thomas Mellon paid his children for their chores. Discontented with public schools because students were unruly and with private schools because parents interfered in the curriculum, Mellon built a schoolhouse and hired a tutor for his children. Now a father Mellon sought to increase his income. Chiding himself for charging too little for his services, in the 1840s Mellon loaned money at 10 to 15 percent interest. After fire swept Pittsburgh in 1845 he bought land at discount. In 1846 alone he built 18 apartments. In 1849 he bought a 60-acre coal mine. In 1859 he became partner in J. B. Corey and Company, opening mines in Braddock and Sandy Creek, Pennsylvania. That year he won election as the Republican candidate for judge of the Court of Common Pleas in Allegheny County. In his decade on the bench he came to distrust juries, believing the common man incapable of reaching the correct verdict. As he had as a lawyer, Mellon grew dissatisfied with the pay and yearned to make his mark in business. www.abc-clio.com
In 1869 he did not run for reelection but instead opened a bank, T. Mellon and Sons. Business was brisk until the Panic of 1873 reduced the bank’s holdings that October to $12,000. Unlike many other banks, however, T. Mellon and Sons did not close its doors. In 1877 Mellon financed completion of the Ligonier Valley Railroad, linking Ligonier and Latrobe, Pennsylvania. To ensure a compliant labor force, Mellon paid $1 a day, 10¢ above the prevailing wage. Between 1881 and 1887 he sat on the Pittsburgh City Council. In the name of economy he opposed an increase in property taxes for public schools and the construction of a public library. In 1882 Mellon retired from the bank, giving it to his son Andrew. In 1890 Mellon transferred his assets to Andrew to hold in trust for the family. That year Mellon moved to Kansas City, Missouri, to consult a medium in hopes of communicating with his deceased children. In 1895 he returned to Pittsburgh and died on his 95th birthday, February 3, 1908. Christopher Cumo See also: MELLON, Andrew William References Hersh, Burton. The Mellon Family: A Fortune in History. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1978. Koskoff, David E. The Mellons: The Chronicle of America’s Richest Family. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1978. Mellon, Thomas. Thomas Mellon and His Times. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994.
MICHIGAN In the early 1700s, Irish immigrants arrived on the peninsulas that now make up the state of Michigan, initiating three centuries of Irish-Michigan relations. The Irish were
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one of the first groups to settle Michigan, soon after the French, and long before the Germans and Dutch who later became the dominant ethnic groups. Michigan’s European population was small until largescale immigration began in the 1820s, totaling just 4,000 when the Michigan Territory was created in 1805. After statehood in 1837, the number of Irish immigrants steadily increased, reaching a peak during the middle of the century, coinciding with the Potato Famine. Until the late 1850s, the Irish were the largest ethnic group in Michigan, making up about a third of the population. Irish immigrants widely practiced “chain migration,” a process by which an individual immigrant established a new life and then helped family and friends to follow. Immigrants usually settled in established Irish communities centered on the church and workplace. Because of the expense and harshness of the journey from Ireland to Michigan, returning to Ireland was often impossible. Thus, until the latter half of the twentieth century, relationships between Irish immigrants and their family and friends in Ireland were conducted almost solely by means of written correspondence. Catholic Church records indicate that by 1879 more than 3,000 Irish families were in the Detroit area, with a further 12,000 families throughout the state. The 1870 Mortality Schedule includes many Irish surnames, such as O’Reilly, Sullivan, Ryan, McLaughlin, Caffrey, Coleman, O’Brien, Murphy, and Quinn. More than 2,500 Irish surnames are currently represented in Michigan. Irish settlers ensured that Michigan has many Irish place-names, naming four of Michigan’s counties Clare, Wexford, Roscommon, and Antrim; establishing the towns of Bangor, Dublin, www.abc-clio.com
Buckley, Dundee, Sullivan, and Tyrone; and naming an area of Lenawee County the Irish Hills. Irish immigrants were instrumental in building and governing Michigan. The Irish worked as miners, laborers, farmers, sailors, engineers, carpenters, lawyers, and stonemasons. Irish workers opened up the state to settlement by constructing railroads and digging canals, while those who settled in urban areas often worked for fire and police departments. The Irish were predominantly drawn to the Democratic Party and dominated Detroit politics until the end of the nineteenth century. During the twentieth century, Frank Murphy, Frank Fitzgerald, Frank Kelley, and Patrick McNamara were influential politicians. Frank Murphy, a Democrat, was elected mayor of Detroit in 1931 and governor in 1936. Frank Fitzgerald, a Republican, was governor from 1935 to 1937, and defeated Murphy to serve again in 1939. Harry Kelly was governor from 1943 to 1947, and Jerry Cavanagh was mayor of Detroit from 1962 to 1969. Henry Ford, arguably Michigan’s most famous and powerful citizen, was descended from Irish immigrants from Co. Cork. The Irish have maintained a strong presence within Michigan society. The Corktown area, settled in 1834 by Cork immigrants, is Detroit’s oldest surviving neighborhood. Detroit’s annual Saint Patrick’s Day Parade is the state’s oldest continuing ethnic parade. A number of Irish festivals are held annually, such as the Clare Michigan Irish Festival and the Michigan Irish Music Festival in Muskegon. Michigan contains dozens of Irish organizations, such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which aims to help newly arrived immigrants, both socially and politically, and to preserve Irish arts, dance,
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music, and sports. The Muskegon Irish American Society promotes Irish culture through education, activities, and gatherings and by providing lessons in Irish language, dance, and music. Recent guest speakers include Myles O’Reilly, senior vice president of the Irish Development Agency, the Irish government’s office in charge of recruiting business to Ireland. Although the Irish-American community in Michigan is large—1,067,474 people identified themselves as Irish in the 2000 census (almost 11 percent of the state’s population)—the number of Irishborn Michigan residents has decreased since the 1940s, numbering just 2,303 in 1990. Historically, the Michigan-Ireland relationship has been one-sided: the Irish immigrated to Michigan and contributed significantly to the state’s industrial, economic, and social development, but Michigan’s contributions to Ireland have been relatively few, including motor vehicle exports and music from Motown to Madonna and Eminem. However, during recent decades, increasing numbers of Michigan’s citizens have engaged more directly with Ireland and its culture, from attending Irish festivals, U2 concerts, and productions of Riverdance, to reading Irish literature, or actually traveling to Ireland for vacations. Many Michigan universities, such as the University of Michigan and Michigan State University have study abroad arrangements with Irish universities, such as University College Dublin and University College Cork, allowing Michigan students to spend a semester living in Ireland, studying the culture, and forging relationships with their Irish peers. Nathanael O’Reilly
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See also: ANCIENT ORDER OF HIBERNIANS; CATHOLIC CHURCH, the; FORD, Henry; GREAT FAMINE, The; IRISH DANCING IN AMERICA References Bak, Richard. Detroit Across Three Centuries. Chelsea, MI: Sleeping Bear Press, 2001. Coffey, Michael, ed. The Irish in America. New York: Hyperion, 1997. Glazier, Jack, and Arthur W. Helweg. Ethnicity in Michigan: Issues and People. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001. McGee, John Whalen. The Passing of the Gael: Our Irish Ancestors, Their History & Exodus. Grand Rapids, MI: Wolverine, 1975. Rubenstein, Bruce A., and Lawrence E Ziewacz. Michigan: A History of the Great Lakes State. 3rd ed. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2002. Vinyard, Jo Ellen. The Irish on the Urban Frontier: Nineteenth-Century Detroit, 1850–1880. New York: Arno Press, 1976.
MILWAUKEE IRISH FEST (FOUNDED 1981) Milwaukee, Wisconsin, once famous for its beer, has always been perceived as a predominantly German city. In the early 1980s, however, the city’s Irish residents decided to assert their presence in the community. As a result, the Milwaukee Irish Fest was founded in 1981 under the direction of Ed Ward. Since 2000, attendance figures have run from around 127,000 to more than 132,000. Apart from its size, three things make Irish Fest unique: the wide diversity of Irish music presented, the emphasis on Irish and Irish-American culture, and the evolution of auxiliary events and organizations that complement the festival and extend its impact throughout the year and beyond Milwaukee. Musically, the festival presentations range from Celtic rock bands and Riverdance-style dancing on large stages to seán nós singers and
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traditional solo performers from Ireland and North America in more intimate settings. The elongated shape of Milwaukee’s festival park, which curls along the western shore line at the end of Lake Michigan, provides sufficient space and separation to minimize the type of sound bleeding that often plagues traditional singers and instrumentalists. The same availability of space allows the festival to present a variety of opportunities for visitors to become acquainted with different aspects of Irish culture. Traditional crafts are demonstrated in some areas and currachs are raced in others. Every year there are special exhibitions built around themes, such as the Irish Famine or the history of Irish radio. Experts are brought from Ireland to curate the exhibits and to talk about the displays. A community-based Irish repertory company presents Irish and Irish-American plays at the theater on the festival grounds. During the week preceding the festival, Irish Fest Summer School, held at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, provides a multigenerational program of lectures on Irish history and culture and workshops in the Gaelic language and Irish music, dance, and crafts. Finally, the dynamics of Irish Fest have led to the creation of several entities that have extended the organization’s efforts beyond the annual festival. The Irish Fest Foundation, established in 1993, channels some of the festival’s revenue to organizations and activities that further Irish culture in the United States and Ireland. In 1998, the Irish Fest Center opened its doors, offering a year-round venue for lectures, concerts, and workshops. The center’s School of Music began in 2002, providing instruction in Irish instrumental music and www.abc-clio.com
singing. The center also houses the John J. Ward, Jr., Irish Music Archives, named after the father of the festival’s founder. The archives have more than 50,000 artifacts, most of them relating to Irish and IrishAmerican music and entertainment. The collection includes songbooks, sheet music, and sound recordings ranging from cylinders to CDs and covering Irish traditional and popular music. In a little more than two decades, the Milwaukee Irish Fest has evolved into an organization that is unique in the history of Irish-American culture. William H. A. Williams
MISSOURI The region of Missouri formed part of an ancient Native American culture located around Cahokia, the largest pre-Columbian settlement north of Mexico. In 1764, St. Louis was chosen as the site of a trading post by Pierre Laclède Liguest, who had been given a land grant by the French king Louis XV. The area became part of the United States in 1803 after the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of America. St. Louis subsequently became famous for being the springboard for the Meriwether Lewis and William Clark expedition, tasked with exploring the vast, newly acquired lands. Missouri grew as emigrants moved westward from the coast and New England, but it retained an early French character. Much of the growing activity was based around the Mississippi River and the growing number of steamboats. The emerging sectionalism between the free North and slave South flared up around the issue of Missouri’s statehood, and the dispute was addressed with the Missouri Compromise
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of 1820, wherein Missouri was admitted as a slave state while Maine was simultaneously admitted as a free state to preserve the balance of power. The state population continued to grow, particularly rapidly from 1835 to 1860. Many Scots-Irish arrived in this period, both from Ireland and the upper South, all groups settling in cities and farmland along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, some of the latter group being slave owners. Both Mark Twain, whose childhood home was in Hannibal, and Ulysses S. Grant, who had a Missouri farm, were descended from the Scots-Irish. As numbers grew, Irish farming communities were both consolidated and established, one of the earliest being Saint Patrick’s in Clark County, established in 1833. Part of southern Missouri was known as the Irish Wilderness; this included an 1859 settlement of 40 Irish families that did not survive the Civil War. The majority of Irish immigrants settled in the urban centers of Kansas City and St. Louis (43 percent of the St. Louis population was Irish or German in 1850 and on the eve of Civil War St. Louis had the largest non–American-born city population in the country). Many new arrivals in Kansas City were aided by Bernard Donnelly, an immigrant and Catholic priest who established a quarry and a brickyard, providing jobs for hundreds of Irish immigrants paving early roads and in construction work. A small group, known as the Irish Crowd, constituted part of the upper-class society in St. Louis before the Civil War and included John O’Fallon, Robert Campbell, Joseph Charles, who edited the city’s first newspaper, and John Mullanphy. Mullanphy was born near Enniskillen www.abc-clio.com
(in 1758), immigrated to America in 1778, and settled in St. Louis in 1804. Various business interests yielded enough money for him to become a prominent philanthropist; he established convents, churches, and a hospital and donated a tract of land to ease the overcrowded Irish settlement. One of his 15 children became mayor of the city in 1847 and left a sizable amount of money to provide relief for poor emigrants moving west. The urban experience for the vast majority, however, was characterized by living in a city struggling to accommodate so many people. Many Irish immigrants were unskilled or semiskilled, were subject to high levels of nativist resentment in the 1840s and 1850s, and in many cases competed for lower-level jobs with the city’s free black population or with slaves who were contracted out by their owners. Consequently, many Irish workers were pro-slavery largely out of fear of a large pool of free labor undercutting their wages. Many lived in riverfront districts or the Irish shantytowns that quickly spread on the city’s edge and became known as the Kerry Patch. This area was considered a dangerous community that essentially became a slum after the Civil War. Many of those who had fled conditions in Ireland would be affected by a severe cholera epidemic that swept St. Louis in 1849, killing an estimated 10 percent of the population. The overall population increase was mirrored by the growth in churches that helped provide cohesiveness and identity for the communities. In mid-century many Irish laborers worked within the city political machines that gripped Kansas City and St. Louis into the first half of the twentieth centuries, both of which were controlled for differing periods by Irishmen—Ed Butler
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in St. Louis and the notorious Tom Pendergast in Kansas City in the 1920s–1930s. Despite deep-rooted civic corruption involving gambling and prostitution, Pendergast held substantial influence within the Democratic Party nationally and would help elect Missourian Harry S. Truman to the Senate in 1934. During the American Civil War Missouri Irish fought for both sides—many perceived similarities between the Confederate cause and the Irish independence movement. For example, Joseph Kelly, an Irish immigrant and grocer in St. Louis, organised an Irish militia in 1857 and would lead them as part of the Confederate 5th Missouri during the war, known as Kelly’s Boys. In a postwar Missourian landscape, taking advantage of industrial opportunity, Irish in the area began to move into trades and professions. In a geographically central location, with rail and water transportation, industries flourished and St. Louis became the nation’s fourth largest city by the 1890s. The city hosted the 1904 World’s Fair (and Olympics), which included an exhibition showcasing Ireland, replete with singers, fiddlers, harpists, pipers, bands, dancers, and a visit from the poet W. B. Yeats, who traveled from Ireland for the event. St. Louis is famed for its large steel arch in downtown, completed in 1965 to commemorate the city’s historical importance as the “Gateway to the West,” especially in regard to being used as a springboard during the gold rush. St. Louis has seen a steady suburbanization of residents, losing half its population between 1950 and 1990, and has been overtaken in size by Kansas City. The state’s population as a whole continues to grow, and of its population of www.abc-clio.com
5,595,211, 23.5 percent claim German ancestry (the largest ethnic ancestry group) and 12.7 percent claim Irish descent (the second largest). Sam Hitchmough References Doyle, David Noel, and Owen Dudley Edwards, eds. America and Ireland, 1776–1976: The American Identity and the Irish Connection, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish. New York: Longman, 2000. Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. 1985. Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Spencer, Thomas M. The Other Missouri History. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005.
MITCHEL, JOHN (1815–1875) The Young Ireland revolutionary, journalist, and author John Mitchel was regarded as a hero-martyr for Irish nationalism in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland. Born November 3, 1815, in Camish, Co. Derry, the son of a Unitarian minister and member of the United Irishmen, Mitchel entered Trinity College in 1840, where he received his BA degree. He then studied law and became a solicitor, practicing in Newry, where he married Jenny Verner. He moved to Bainbridge and continued to practice law. Here he met the founders of Young Ireland, a politically active group of Trinity students who supported Daniel O’Connell. Mitchel was already a member of O’Connell’s Repeal Association, and his friendships with Thomas Davis and Charles Gavan Duffy resulted in his editorial career for the pro-repeal newspaper the Nation. At Davis’s request, Mitchel wrote the Life of Aodh O’Neal for a literary series,
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Portrait of Irish nationalist activist and political journalist John Mitchel. (Library of Congress)
the Library of Ireland. When Davis died suddenly of scarletina in 1845, Mitchel joined Duffy as coeditor. During the Famine, Mitchel wrote anti-British editorials that demanded radical opposition to colonial rule. His militant political leanings eventually caused him to break from Young Ireland’s leadership, because he was angered at their reluctance to endorse violent insurrection. Further, he believed the Famine was deliberately orchestrated to diminish the dependent Irish population and thereby increase colonial coffers. Mitchel argued that Ireland had no choice but to engage in armed resistance against landlords and exports of Irish commodities. In February 1848, Mitchel broke with Duffy and established his own newspaper, the United Irishman, wherein he continued to assail English officials and their representatives in Ireland. www.abc-clio.com
In early 1848, Mitchel and Young Ireland leaders William Smith-O’Brien and Thomas F. Meagher were arrested for treasonfelony. Smith-O’Brien’s and Meagher’s trials resulted in acquittal, because substantive evidence of treason was lacking, but the prosecution successfully packed Mitchel’s jury, and he was found guilty. The trial generated anti-British sentiment in Dublin, and Mitchel’s planned rescue would have been followed by an uprising. Young Ireland leaders, however, feared that a preemptive insurrection would fail and determined instead to delay the uprising until the fall harvest. To the dismay of many, and to Mitchel, he was led from the prison on May 27, placed in a police van, and carried to the Dublin docks where he boarded a prison ship. He would find himself in Bermuda before being shipped a second time to Van Diemen Island in Australia. Over the course of his imprisonment, he kept a detailed journal beginning with the date of his deportation. His Jail Journal became an important statement of Irish nationalism. Mitchel enjoyed celebrity status and at various ports he was hailed by the public as a hero. On arrival in Australia, in ill health from recurring asthma, he was able to obtain a ticket of leave, a permit to live freely under his promise that he would not try to escape. His wife, Jenny Verner, and five children joined him, and they moved to a farm in Bothwell where he served his sentence as a sheep rancher. He maintained friendships with other Young Irelanders who had also been deported, many after the 1848 Rising: Smith-O’Brien and Meagher, Kevin O’Doherty, John Martin, Terrence B. McManus, and Patrick O’Donoghue. In 1853, however, the journalist P. J. Smyth arrived with a plan to aid
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in Mitchel’s escape. The ticket of leave required that should he renege on his promise, he must turn himself into authorities, a question of honor with which Mitchel complied. He and Smyth entered the constabulary in Bothwell where Mitchel declared his intention. The police were slow to absorb the implication of his declaration, and Mitchel, with Smyth, escaped by horseback. Mitchel found shelter among Irish patriots, including Irish priests who disguised him as a cleric. Meanwhile, Smyth arranged for Mitchel and his family to sail first to Tahiti and then to San Francisco. On August 2, 1853, six weeks after turning in his ticket, having served five years of his 14-year sentence, Mitchel sailed from Australia. His wife sold the farm and household belongings and joined him in Tahiti. There the family boarded a U.S. ship bound for San Francisco on September 13. The Mitchel family arrived in New York on November 29, 1853, where they settled in Brooklyn. John Mitchel declined an invitation to practice law and returned instead to journalism, serving as publisher and editor of the Citizen, assisted by Thomas Meagher. Mitchel continued his editorial style established years earlier in the Nation and in the United Irishman. He fiercely defended Irish Catholics against Know-Nothings (National Council of the U.S. of North America), a political organization engaged in defamatory practices against immigrants. Mitchel also embroiled himself in a controversy with the Roman Catholic Church when he criticized church doctrine regarding the infallibility of the pope. New York’s Archbishop Hughes successfully debated Mitchel in the New York press. Mitchel later expressed regret over the dispute. www.abc-clio.com
In yet another controversy, Mitchel supported southern slavery. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher argued that Mitchel’s stance was inconsistent with his position on Irish independence, yet Mitchel argued that slaveholding was not a crime and that Negroes enjoyed the protection of their southern owners, unlike tenants in Ireland. In 1854, Mitchel received an invitation to address the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. His popularity in the North had diminished, and his reception in the South brought about his decision to move to Tennessee. In Tuckaleechee, he again turned to farming, supplementing his income with lectures. He then moved to Knoxville, and in October 1857 established the Southern Citizen, an antiabolitionist newspaper that he later moved to Washington, D.C., where he published a series of articles on Young Ireland. At that time, Mitchel was approached by the Fenians, but he refused to use his newspaper as a means of Fenian fund-raising because, as he later explained, he distrusted the secretive nature of the organization. In 1859, Mitchel pulled up roots again and moved to Paris, where he reported for the Charleston Standard, the Irish-American, and the Irishman, a Dublin publication. He returned to New York in 1862 during the War Between the States. Mitchel’s southern sympathies took him to Richmond, Virginia, where he served in the Confederate ambulance corps and where his three sons joined Confederate forces. Both James and William died in service; John served on the staff of General John B. Gordon. While serving in the ambulance corps, Mitchel edited the Richmond Examiner. After the war, Mitchel returned with his remaining family to New York and became editor of the Daily News. He had
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lost three children, yet his misfortunes continued. His defense of the South, and especially of Jefferson Davis, caused General Ulysses S. Grant to order his arrest. Again faced with a treasonable offense, Mitchel served five months at Fort Monroe. His health failed him, and through the efforts of the Fenians, he was released in October 1865. Mitchel joined the Fenian organization and served as treasurer, returning to Paris with the hope that another planned insurrection in Ireland would succeed where Young Ireland had failed. In Paris, Mitchel realized that the Fenians had misrepresented their capacity to organize and fund another Irish revolt. Upon his return to New York, Mitchel began the Irish Citizen, assisted by his son John. He continued to lecture, wrote articles on Irish history, and published his collection of articles on Ireland, The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps). He also contributed to Appleton’s Cyclopaedia. With his health continuing to fail, Mitchel determined to visit his homeland, which he had left 26 years before. In July 1874, he landed with his daughter and a physician-friend at Queenstown (Cobh). Once again on Irish soil, he was concerned that he might be arrested. Mitchel, however, moved freely across the island and returned to Dublin, where he met old friends and his family. Before returning to the United States, he agreed to allow his name to be place in nomination for a parliamentary seat, although he stated that he would never sit in the House of Commons. In February 1875, he was elected to represent Tipperary. The vote was challenged by the Tory parliament, a new election was called, yet Mitchel was confirmed by a 2,368 majority vote in a second election held March 11. www.abc-clio.com
Mitchel traveled to Tipperary with his son John on the initial news that he had been elected and was in Tipperary for the second vote. Exhausted, he spoke to crowds in Tipperary and Clonmel, but he grew too weak to continue. A speech scheduled at the Theatre Royal in Cork on February 26, was given by his friend John Dillon who read from notes. In those notes, Mitchel stated that the significant aspect of his election was its defiance of Parliament: a convicted Irish felon had been elected to a parliamentary seat. After a period of rest, Mitchel determine to revisit his home in Newry. It was there he received news of the second election results. On March 20, 1875, John Mitchel passed away. He is buried in the Newry Unitarian cemetery. Katherine Parr See also: MEAGHER, Thomas Francis References Davis, Richard. The Young Ireland Movement. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987. Kearns, G. “‘Educate That Holy Hatred’: Place, Trauma and Identity in the Irish Nationalism of John Mitchel.” Political Geography 20, no. 7 (2001): 885. McGovern, Bryan. “John Mitchel: Ecumenical Nationalist in the Old South.” New Hibernia Review 5, no. 2 (2001): 99–110. O’Sullivan, T. F. “John Mitchel.” In The Young Irelanders. Tralee: Kerryman, 1944: 191–207.
MITCHELL, GEORGE J. (1933–) Senator George J. Mitchell was born on August 20, 1933, in Waterville, Maine. His father, George Mitchell, Sr., was a laborer of Irish ancestry and his mother, Mary Saad, a textile worker of Lebanese ancestry. After graduating from Bowdoin College in 1954, Mitchell served for two years as an
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officer in the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps in Berlin. He earned a law degree from Georgetown University in 1960 and then worked as a trial lawyer in the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., for two years. From 1962 to 1965, Mitchell served as executive assistant to Senator Edmund S. Muskie, whom Mitchell would later replace in the Senate. In 1965 Mitchell returned to Maine and engaged in the private practice of law. He ran unsuccessfully for governor of Maine in 1974 but was appointed U.S. attorney for Maine in 1977 and U.S. district judge for Maine two years later. Mitchell was initially appointed to the U.S. Senate in 1980 to complete the term of Senator Muskie, who had resigned to become secretary of state. Mitchell was elected to his first full term in the Senate in 1982 and went on to a distinguished career that included positions on the Finance, Veterans Affairs, and Environment and Public Works committees. Among other notable work in the Senate, Mitchell played an instrumental role in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the creation of the World Trade Organization. He also served as Senate majority leader from 1989 until he left the Senate in 1995. After retiring from the Senate, Mitchell returned to the private practice of law but remained active in international politics. In 1995 President Bill Clinton appointed Mitchell special adviser to the president and secretary of state for economic initiatives in Ireland. The former senate majority leader then chaired the peace negotiations in Northern Ireland that culminated in the historic Good Friday accord of 1998, an agreement reached by the governments of www.abc-clio.com
Ireland and the United Kingdom and the political parties of Northern Ireland. In a May 1998 referendum the voters of Ireland overwhelmingly endorsed the agreement. Mitchell recounts his experience in the Northern Ireland peace negotiations in his 1999 book, Making Peace. President Clinton awarded Mitchell the Presidential Medal of Freedom on March 17, 1999, in recognition of the former senator’s role in the Northern Ireland peace process. Senator Mitchell’s experience as a negotiator in international conflicts was not limited to Northern Ireland. He served as chairman of the International Crisis Group, an independent, nonprofit conflict resolution organization founded in 1995. In 2000, President Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and Palestinian Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat asked Mitchell to chair an International Fact Finding Committee on violence in the Middle East. The Bush administration, the European Union, and many other governments endorsed the committee’s recommendation, widely known as the Mitchell Report. Kathleen Ruppert References George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections. “Biography.” http://library .bowdoin.edu/arch/mitchell/research/bio.htm (accessed August 13, 2007). “Mitchell, George John, (1933).” Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/ biodisplay.pl?index=M000811 (accessed August 13, 2007).
MITCHELL, JOHN (1870–1919) John Mitchell, president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), was one of the most prominent and successful
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American labor leaders of the early twentieth century. Born on February 4, 1870, in Braidwood, Illinois, the son of Martha Halley and Robert Mitchell, a Protestant native of Dublin, Mitchell became an orphan at age six and began mining work six years later. He had little formal education and left home at 16 to work in Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming coal mines before returning to Illinois. He married Katherine O’Rourke, a Catholic, in 1892 and their marriage produced six children. Mitchell successfully organized miners in southern Illinois for the UMWA and by 1897 had a national reputation in the union. When UMWA President Michael Ratchford resigned in 1898, Mitchell took over leadership of the organization and served for 10 years. As a labor leader Mitchell favored collective bargaining agreements, which he believed would end labor violence and class warfare. Unlike radical labor leaders and socialists, Mitchell rejected the inevitability of class conflict. He presented a public image of a politically and socially conservative labor leader dedicated to caution. He did, however, create a highly centralized union organization to guarantee the union’s commitment to negotiated agreements. Mitchell achieved success in regional collective bargaining with the Interstate Joint Agreement in 1898, which covered the bituminous coal region between western Pennsylvania and Illinois known as the Central Competitive Field. Mine operators agreed to increase pay for the miners and to institute an eight-hour workday. This success spurred a great increase in union membership and convinced Mitchell of the value of trade agreements. Mitchell’s fame as a labor leader came during the Anthracite Strike of 1902 in the www.abc-clio.com
anthracite coal regions of eastern Pennsylvania. Here Mitchell demonstrated his abilities and political sophistication. Mitchell’s union became a model of industrial unionism, enlisting the membership of all occupations in the mining industry, unlike the narrowly enrolled craft unionism prevalent in its parent organization, the American Federation of Labor. It also strove to overcome ethnic, religious, and linguistic divisions among the miners, recruiting heavily among recently arrived immigrant miners from Italy and Eastern Europe. Mitchell also courted journalists, who responded with favorable stories, as well as local religious leaders such as Bishop Michael Hoban of Scranton and Father John J. Curran of Wilkes-Barre. Mitchell handled the strike of some 150,000 miners for more than five months to near tactical perfection. Not only did he maintain effective control over the striking miners and prevent violence, but he also masterfully won over American public opinion through the press. Rejecting any calls for revolutionary social change, Mitchell set the standard for future labor leaders as a reasonable, respectable, and peaceful figure who placed labor’s demands in the context of the public interest. President Theodore Roosevelt ultimately encouraged government arbitration to settle the strike that had paralyzed the anthracite industry. The Anthracite Coal Strike Commission of 1903 granted a 10 percent wage increase, a nine-hour workday, and the creation of a board to arbitrate labor-management disputes. For the first time the government had intervened in an American labor dispute to settle a strike peacefully rather than simply to break the strike. Mitchell had achieved the only major American labor victory over a monopolized industry before the 1930s.
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During his presidency coal miners gained higher pay, shorter working hours, and safer working conditions, and the UMWA went from 30,000 members to 300,000 members, becoming the largest labor union in the United States. Mitchell had become a national figure with the Anthracite Strike and the leading spokesman for organized labor, but after 1902 his natural conservatism and commitment to mutual agreements made him increasingly cautious in protecting the institutional gains of the United Mine Workers. He never again threatened massive labor action. The strains of office eventually caught up with Mitchell, who battled problems with alcohol, insomnia, and chronic illnesses. Mitchell sought spiritual relief in 1907 by converting to Catholicism. He retired from his UMWA presidency in 1908 to become head of the Trade Agreement Department of the National Civic Federation, a coalition of capitalist, labor, and public officials, a post he held until 1911. Mitchell later became the chairman of the New York Industrial Commission, which he headed until he died of pneumonia in 1919 at age 49. Joseph P. Finnan See also: MOLLY MAGUIRES
MITCHELL PRINCIPLES, THE The principles of democracy and nonviolence, or the “Mitchell Principles,” were issued in January 1996 as part of the ongoing peace process in Northern Ireland. Named for former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, chairman of the peace negotiations in Northern Ireland from 1996 to 1998, the Mitchell Principles helped pave the way for the Good Friday Agreement reached by the governments of Ireland and the United Kingdom and the political parties of Northern Ireland in 1998. Following a 1994 ceasefire by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the main loyalist paramilitary organizations in Northern Ireland, Taoiseach Albert Reynolds, Social Democratic and Labour Party leader John Hume, and Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams met in Dublin and all declared their commitment to solving the Northern Ireland question peacefully and democratically. An impasse was reached, however, when the two main Unionist parties in Northern Ireland (the Ulster Unionist Party and the Democratic Unionist Party) refused to enter negotiations with Sinn Féin until the latter had demonstrated its commitment to democracy through the decommissioning of IRA arms. Sinn Féin considered such a demand unacceptable, and the opening of all-party negotiations was therefore put on hold. The governments of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland invited former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, who had served for a year as special adviser on economic initiatives in Northern Ireland, to chair the peace negotiations. Mitchell was given the task of exploring how paramilitary arms might be decommissioned and all-party negotiations advanced. In a January 1996 report, Mitchell concluded that decommissioning
References Gowaskie, Joseph M. “John Mitchell and the Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902: A Century Later.” In ‘The Great Strike’: Perspectives on the 1902 Athracite Coal Strike. Easton, PA: Canal History and Technology Press, 2002. Laslett, John H. M., ed. The United Mine Workers of America: A Model of Industrial Solidarity? University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Phelan, Craig. Divided Loyalties: The Public and Private Life of Labor Leader John Mitchell. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Taft, Philip. Organized Labor in American History. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. www.abc-clio.com ABC-CLIO
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in advance of talks was unrealistic. He recommended instead a twin-track approach in which all parties to the negotiations would affirm their total and absolute commitment to democracy and nonviolence. The decommissioning of arms could then move forward once talks had begun. In addition to discussing the decommissioning process and suggesting a number of confidence-building gestures, Mitchell’s report outlined six principles that each party must accept before reaching the negotiating table. The acceptance of the so-called Mitchell Principles would indicate a commitment to democracy and nonviolence and so, it was hoped, take the gun out of Irish politics once and for all. As a test of their bona fides in the peace process, all parties were asked to affirm their total commitment to the following six principles: (1) democratic and exclusively peaceful means of resolving political disputes; (2) the complete disarmament of paramilitary organizations; (3) the use of an independent commission to verify that disarmament was satisfactorily completed; (4) the renunciation of the use of force (or the threat of force) to influence the course of negotiations; (5) an agreement to abide by the terms of any agreement reached in allparty negotiations; and (6) an end to “punishment” killings and beatings. Even after the release of Mitchell’s report, the peace process in Northern Ireland continued to be beset by controversy, delays, and occasional bouts of violence. The British government under Prime Minister John Major agreed to the Mitchell Principles but insisted that elections be held for a negotiating convention before talks could begin. Interpreting Major’s request as a delaying tactic, republicans were outraged. On February 9, 1996, just two www.abc-clio.com
and a half weeks after the Mitchell Commission published its report, an IRA bomb killed two people and injured more than 100 in the Docklands area of London. Sinn Féin’s leader Gerry Adams voiced his willingness to adhere to the Mitchell principles on May 20, but other parties insisted in the wake of the Docklands bombing that nothing short of an IRA cease-fire would suffice. When talks opened on June 10, 1996, Sinn Féin, the political arm of the IRA, was therefore excluded. Progress was slow during the first year of talks, and little significant advance occurred for some time. When a new Labour government under Tony Blair was elected in May 1997, however, renewed attention was given to the Northern Ireland peace process and a schedule was set for substantive talks over the course of the next year. The IRA restored its cease-fire in July and Sinn Féin was admitted to the talks six weeks later. After considerably more wrangling, an agreement was finally reached at approximately 5 p.m. on Good Friday, April 10, 1998. The Mitchell Principles had laid the foundation for the negotiations that eventually culminated in this historic Good Friday Agreement. Kathleen Ruppert References Cox, Michael, et al., eds. A Farewell to Arms? From “Long War” to Long Peace in Northern Ireland. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000. Mulholland, Marc. The Longest War: Northern Ireland’s Troubled History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
MOLLY MAGUIRES The term Molly Maguires was applied in Ireland to those who used violence against landlords and their agents. No evidence has
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ever been found to connect the Molly Maguires of the anthracite coal region of eastern Pennsylvania with those in Ireland, however, other than common use of the name. Both the Molly Maguires in Ireland and Pennsylvania shared a common belief that the use of violence was justified because economic and political power was overwhelmingly against them. Members of the Molly Maguires who were convicted were also members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA), even though these groups and the majority of their members opposed violence. Between 1862 and 1875 16 murders in the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania were attributed to the Molly Maguires. Targets included mine owners, foremen, a judge, a police officer, and others. Ethnic rivalry and competition for jobs with Welsh miners contributed to the violence. The patterns of assassinations can be broken down into two distinct periods. The first lasted from 1862 to 1868 and was a reaction to the Civil War era draft and the difficulty in organizing a union during the national crisis. The immigrant Irish miners resisted the draft, and during the war, mine operators fought unionization, charging that it was unpatriotic. These unpopular positions permanently damaged the standing of the Irish miners in the eyes of the public. In the following decade the public was receptive to exaggerated stories of Irish terrorism and secret societies on the coalfields. In 1869 the WBA got the operators to agree to a contract favored by the miners, including a sliding pay scale. When the price of coal fell, the operators wanted to lower wages. In addition, Franklin B. Gowen of the Reading Railroad was consolidating www.abc-clio.com
ownership of the mines, and the smaller operators thought they had to cut costs to remain competitive. Having heard rumors that the Irish miners had a terrorist organization called the Molly Maguires, Gowen hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to infiltrate the alleged secret society. Pinkerton assigned the task to James McParlan, an Ulster Catholic, who believed the Molly Maguires were an organization imported from Ireland. After stockpiling coal throughout 1874, the operators presented the miners with a new contract, complete with a significant pay cut. In January 1875 the WBA called a strike. Over the next six months, in what was called “the long strike,” the WBA failed to obtain any concessions from the operators. In June the operators invited the miners who so desired to return to work with the pay cut. Many accepted the offer. Such a devastating loss virtually destroyed the WBA. It also caused a group of men to consider that violence was the only tool available to achieve social justice for the workers. On the inside, McParlan, as he reported later on the stand, witnessed the planning of assassinations and beatings. In the summer of 1875 the pattern of assassinations resumed, initiating the second period of violence, drawing national attention and feeding anti-Irish sentiment. In addition to the nativists and businessmen, the Catholic Church and organized labor unions condemned the Molly Maguires. The trials began in January 1876 and lasted until August 1878. McParlan abandoned his undercover operations and immediately gave his testimony to the prosecutors. In all, fifty Molly Maguires were indicted, based almost exclusively on McParlan’s word. The prosecutors were mostly corporation lawyers and Franklin
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Gowen was their leading witness. The prosecutors used the trials to convict all labor organizing as antidemocratic, un-American and potentially murderous. When the verdicts were finally tallied, 20 were hanged and another 20 imprisoned. Ten had received amnesty for providing evidence against the others. Gregory J. Dehler References Bimba, Anthony. The Molly Maguires. New York: International Publishers, 1932. Broehl, Wayne G., Jr. The Molly Maguires. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964. Gudelunas, William A., and William G. Shade. Before the Molly Maguires: The Emergence of the Ethno-Religious Factor in the Politics of the Lower Anthracite Region, 1844–1872. New York: Arno Books, 1976. Kenny, Kevin. Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
MOLONEY, MICK (1944–) For more than 30 years Mick Moloney has been at the center of the revival of interest in traditional Irish music in the United States. A gifted musician, steeped in the tradition, a scholar with years of experience in fieldwork, and a tireless organizer of recording sessions and concerts, Moloney has been uniquely situated to bring Irish music to America and America to Irish music. Like many young urban Irish of his generation, young Moloney’s initial interest in folk music was sparked by the British “skiffle” movement of the 1950s and then by the phenomenal international success of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. Drawn to the tenor banjo, Moloney sought out the rich musical tradition on the other side of the Shannon in Co. Clare. By the www.abc-clio.com
early 1960s, when he enrolled in University College Dublin, he was an active musician. While completing his bachelor’s (politics) and master’s (economics) degrees, he played in a variety of folk groups and organized several folk clubs. He eventually joined the Johnsons, bringing his flatmate, guitarist Paul Brady, into the group. The Johnsons were an international success, but five years of touring was enough for Moloney. After a stint in education in Norway and social work in London, he took up a suggestion by Dr. Kenneth Goldstein and enrolled in the doctoral program in Goldstein’s department of folklore at the University of Pennsylvania. With Irish traditional music in the United States as his thesis subject, Moloney found himself traveling around the country recording the tunes and memories of a generation of aging immigrant musicians. In spite of the obscurity that had overtaken it after World War II, the music had been kept alive by the likes of Mike Flanagan and Ed Reavy. Drawing on his background as a professional musician, Moloney was soon producing recordings of IrishAmerican musicians of the rising, as well as the passing, generation. By 2000, Moloney had produced almost 50 recordings. In 1976, Moloney was asked to organize the Irish section of the Smithsonian Institution’s Festival of American Folklife, bringing Irish and Irish-American musicians of all ages together on the Mall in Washington, D.C. It was partly for this event that Moloney put together the Greenfields of America, a group of traditional musicians and dancers who have brought Irish music to almost every corner of the country. Over the years, Moloney has continued to perform and record with the Greenfields, Eugene O’Donnell,
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Robbie O’Connell, Jimmy Keane, and Séamus Egan. He has accompanied numerous other musicians on their recordings. Keenly aware of the relationship between music and society in America, Moloney has worked hard to bring Irish music and dance into contact with other ethnic cultures. He has directed and coordinated American multicultural dance festivals that have been sent to West Africa and South and Central America by the United States Information Agency. Moloney’s talents as a musician and a scholar, combined with his extraordinary range of contacts among Irish-American musicians, have involved him in various projects for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System. Among these are the PBS documentaries Out of Ireland (1998) and The Irish in America: Long Journey Home (1999). He was also a consultant for the BBC/RTÉ series Bringing It All Back Home (1991). The academic side of Moloney’s career has involved him in teaching ethnomusicology, folklore, and Irish studies courses at the University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, Villanova University, and New York University. He is the author of numerous articles and a combination book and CD, Far From the Shamrock Shore: The Story of Irish American History through Song (2002). William H. A. Williams See also: CLANCY BROTHERS, the References “A Conversation with Mick Moloney: Part I.” The Folk Life 1, no. 9 (July 1977). “A Conversation with Mick Moloney: Part II.” The Folk Life 1, no. 10 (August, 1977). Winick, Steve. “From Limerick to Solid Man: The Musical Life of Mick Moloney.” Dirty Linen 48 (October/November 1993). www.abc-clio.com
MONTAGUE, JOHN (1929–) John Montague was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1929. His father, James Montague, an Ulster Catholic from Co. Tyrone, had moved to America in 1925. He was joined in 1928 by his wife and their two elder sons. Unable to find steady work during the Depression, the children were sent back to Ireland in 1933. John went to live with his aunts in Garvaghey, Co. Tyrone. He was educated in St. Patrick’s College, Armagh, the junior Diocesan Seminary. One of his teachers was Sean O’ Boyle, one of the leading experts on Ulster folk song and Irish poetry. He encouraged Montague’s exploration of Irish poetry. In 1946, Montague won a Co. Tyrone scholarship to attend University College Dublin. Inspired by the example of other student poets (including Thomas Kinsella) he began to publish his first poems in The Dublin Magazine, Envoy, and The Bell, edited by Peadar O’Donnell. In 1952, Montague left for Yale on a Fulbright Fellowship. He worked at the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1954–1955. After a further year of graduate study in Berkeley, he returned to Dublin, where he married and began to work in the Irish Tourist Office. Montague continued to write poetry and published his first collection, Poisoned Lands, in 1961. He lived for a number of years in Paris, where he befriended Samuel Beckett. His first book of stories, Death of a Chieftain, was published in 1964. Further collections of poetry, A Chosen Light (1967) and Tides (1970), followed. During the 1960s, Montague continued to work on a long autobiographical poem about Northern Ireland, The Rough Field, which was finally published in 1972. The Rough Field was slowly recognized as a major achievement. Hymn to the New Omagh
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Road (1968) and The Bread God (1972) also reflect his interest in Northern Ireland’s affairs. In 1976, Montague was presented with the Award of the Irish American Cultural Institute, the first Marten Toonder Award in 1977, and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award for The Great Cloak in 1978. A Guggenheim fellowship in 1979–1980 enabled Montague to complete his Selected Poems (1982) and his second long poem, The Dead Kingdom (1984), which were published in Ireland, Britain, the United States, and Canada. In 1987, New York’s governor, Mario Cuomo, presented Montague with a citation for his literary achievements and contributions to the people of New York. Montague taught for two decades at University College Cork, influencing a generation of Irish poets in the Republic—among them Tom McCarthy, Greg Delanty, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Author of 10 major collections of poems dating from Poisoned Lands (1961) to Smashing the Piano (2001), Montague was the first holder of the Ireland Chair of Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. Aoileann Ní Eigeartaigh References Brady, Anne M., and Brian Cleeve. A Biographical Dictionary of Irish Writers. Dublin: The Lilliput Press Ltd., 1985. Gonzales, Alexander G., ed. Modern Irish Writers: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997.
MONTREAL The flag of the city of Montreal is a Christian cross on a white background with a flower in each quadrant representing the four founding communities of the city. In the lower right-hand quadrant is the shamrock. The significance of this homage to the Irish community rests on their presence www.abc-clio.com
and their contribution for over a century, in making Montreal a modern economic center for the northeastern part of North America. Before the first wave of Irish immigration of the 1840s, there was a small Irish community within Montreal and parts of the surrounding areas. Imbued with the ideas of republicanism and progressive politics, many in this burgeoning community supported the 1837–1838 Patriot Rebellion in Lower Canada. This rebellion, lead by French Canadian elites such as Louis Joseph Papineau, rejected British colonialism, wanted to establish a republican form of government, and wanted to implement progressive ideas such as separation of church and state, rights for women, and equality for aboriginals. Irishmen such as Daniel Tracy and Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan joined the cause of the rebellion. Both members of the fils de la liberté; Tracy was the founder in 1828 of the Irish newspaper The Vindicator, which espoused republican ideals and supported the “92 resolutions,” the political manifesto for the Patriot Rebellion. O’Callaghan, who later became the editor of The Vindicator, was also an instigator with Louis Joseph Papineau of the rebellion. Both supported and were also members of the Patriot Party and worked to forge unity between the Irish and French Canadians against the British colonialists. The wave of Irish immigrants that came to Montreal settled in the southwestern part of the city. The vast majority settled in areas around the Lachine Canal. Because the Lachine Canal, built in 1825, was the link between the Saint Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, this area quickly became in the mid-nineteenth century the center of Canada’s and in particular Montreal’s industrial revolution. The Irish
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immigrants therefore settled where the jobs were. They quickly became part of Montreal’s working class. Because of the Irish influx into the city, Saint Patrick’s Church (now named a Basilica) was built in 1847 to fulfill the religious needs of Irish Catholicism. But Saint Patrick’s was a little far removed (placed in the center core of the city) from the concentration of the working-class Irish. Working in the industries around the Lachine Canal (railways, the port of Montreal, textiles, steel foundries), the Irish concentrated in St. Ann’s ward (near the port) and later in Point St. Charles (along the Lachine Canal). Saint Ann’s, or, as it came to be named, Giffintown, quickly became the largest area of Irish settlement and a beacon of Irish working class culture for the city of Montreal. By 1845 there were approximately 500,000 Irish in Canada; 30,000 of these lived in Griffintown, making it the largest Englishspeaking community in Quebec. Thomas D’Arcy McGee would become the member of Parliament for the area. Because of these numbers a new Irish Catholic Church, Saint Ann’s, was built in 1854. The Irish workers of Griffintown would build the Victoria Bridge (the first railway bridge across the Saint Lawrence River that would link Montreal’s industrial sector to the New England States), and would erect at the entrance of the bridge, seen until this day, a monument (the Black Rock) to all Irish immigrants who had died coming to Canada. Griffintown was transformed beyond all recognition by municipal planning initiatives in 1970, depriving the city’s working class Irish community of its traditional environs. As industrialization proceeded west and east along the Saint Lawrence, Irish www.abc-clio.com
workers started to inhabit new areas of Montreal. The Lachine Canal was still a focal point for the Irish community, which increasingly moved towards the Point St. Charles neighborhood. In 1895, a new Irish Catholic Church, Saint Gabriel’s, was built, and it is still the center of cultural activity for the Irish community of Montreal. Here, as in Griffintown, the Irish working class would provide the labor for the railway yards, the port, and the rising steel industry in southwest Montreal. Industrial expansion by the turn of the twentieth century turned eastward, along the Saint Lawrence to areas around Maisonneuve and Rosemont. Again, as in the past, Irish workers would go to where the jobs were. In 1911, Canadian Vickers, a subsidiary of British Vickers of Northern Ireland, constructed a shipbuilding plant in East End Montreal. This plant built ships for the British navy and had the largest dry dock in the world. Here again job opportunities for Irish workers led to their migration to the eastern part of the city. The management of Canadian Vickers was British and Scots-Irish, while the workers were French Canadian and Irish. At the height of its activity between 1930 and 1960, Vickers employed up to 10,000 people, working in three shifts. By 1920, because of their growing numbers, a new Irish Catholic parish was created. Saint Aloysius was built in 1927, and, until its demolition in 1980, it was the focal point of the Irish cultural community in the eastern part of the city. A little north of Maisonneuve was an area called Rosemont. Here the Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR), Canada’s oldest and largest railway, established its main Canadian plant, named the Angus Shops
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after one of the Canadian Pacific Railroad’s presidents. The Angus Shops built and repaired railway cars for the entire Canadian Pacific Railroad network; during World War II. It also produced a large number of tanks for the Allies. As before, Irish workers followed the employment opportunities. To work for the CPR guaranteed a family’s future. The same pattern prevailed with the construction of Saint Brendan’s church (still in operation today), built to fulfill the religious needs of the Irish workers who now worked and lived in Rosemont. The peculiarity that marked these early Irish working-class parishes was that for more than 100 years the parish priests came from Ireland. This policy was instituted by the Irish branch of the Catholic Church to promote and protect Irish Catholicism and culture in a sea of French Canadian culture and French Catholicism. Each parish had its corresponding elementary school (grades one through seven) where the curriculum was taught by the Presentation Brothers brought over from Ireland. With the Irish churches and schools, the preservation of Irish culture and religious practices was rooted in Canadian society and permitted to grow. Many other ethnic and cultural groups (Italians, Poles, Ukrainian Catholics, French Canadians who wished to learn English) who practiced Catholicism and lived in these neighborhoods profited from this Irish presence by attending the only English-language schools in these workingclass areas. They learned about Irish culture and history, and in many ways their schools were forerunners of a multicultural Canadian society. The last brother of the Presentation order in Canada left in the mid-1990s. Certain Irish Catholic high www.abc-clio.com
schools, such as Cardinal Newman High School and Thomas D’Arcy McGee High School, were more regional and catered to a wide English-speaking Catholic clientele. Many of these schools, as with the parishes, no longer exist, because of the Irish community’s displacement to the suburbs or Toronto. There were other Irish Catholic parishes, which were built over the years, always following the movement of the Irish community into different sections of Montreal and into suburbs. Some examples would be Saint Mark’s and Saint Anthony’s in the Mile End district, Saint Mary’s in the lower city, and Transfiguration of Our Lord in the West Island. As of 2005 the core of the Irish community of Montreal is now dispersed throughout the city and surrounding suburbs, but the energy of the community persists in the form of numerous organizations such as the United Irish Societies of Montreal (who organize the annual Saint Patrick’s Day parade), Cine Gael (Irish film society), Canadian Association for Irish Studies, and the Concordia University Centre for Canadian Irish Studies to name but a few. An excellent example of this continued vivacity and contribution of the Irish community to cosmopolitan Montreal is the Saint Patrick’s Day parade, started in 1824, which has become the longest uninterrupted Irish festivity in North America. Donald Cuccioletta
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References Bradbury, Bettina. Working Families, Age, Gender and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993. 1-800-368-6868
MOORE, BRIAN 609 Burns, Patrica. The Shamrock and the Shield: An Oral History of the Irish in Montreal. Montreal: Véchicule Press, 1998. Trigger, Rosalyn. “The Role of the Parish, Fostering Irish Catholic Identity in the 19th Century.” Master’s thesis, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, 1997.
MOORE, BRIAN (1921–1999) Brian Moore’s first novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1956), established this Irish expatriate and conservative stylist as a significant voice in the modern novel tradition. A Belfast-born author of almost 30 novels, Moore has been labeled Irish, British, Canadian, and American during the course of his career, as a consequence of his self-imposed exile from Ulster to North America. During his lifetime, he was admired in the writing community, especially by Graham Greene, and was thrice shortlisted for the Booker Prize for The Doctor’s Wife (1976), The Colour of Blood (1987), and Lies of Silence (1990). His second novel, The Luck of Ginger Coffey, won the prestigious Canadian Governor General’s Award in 1960. Several of his other works—including Catholics (1972), The Temptation of Eileen Hughes (1981), and Cold Heaven (1983)—have also appeared in film. The protagonist’s motto delivered in I Am Mary Dunne (1968), “memento ergo sum” (“I remember, therefore I am”), epitomizes Moore’s ultimate concern: the influence of the cultural and religious past on existence in the present and future. Exile and emigration emerge as consistent themes in Moore’s writing, along with explorations of memory, loss of faith, ordinary lives, loneliness, and spiritual paralysis. Catholicism also haunts his novels, although Moore opposed being labeled a Catholic writer on the grounds www.abc-clio.com
that he falls short of the ideal. Many of Moore’s earlier characters and situations are drawn from his own experience. The Emperor of Ice-Cream (1965), with its protagonist who fails his Leaving Certificate, takes a job with the Air Raid Precautions Unit, and serves as a paramedic coffining bodies during the Blitz of Belfast, is Moore at his most clearly autobiographical. Later character renderings, such as the missionary priest in Black Robe (1985) or the nineteenth-century French woman who travels to Algeria in The Magician’s Wife (1997) display Moore’s increasingly broad interest in the aftereffects of colonialism and religion. Moore was born August 25, 1921 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the fourth of nine children that were conceived by James Bernard Moore, a doctor and converted Catholic, and Eileen McFadden Moore, a former nurse. Like his father, Moore studied at St. Malachy’s College Belfast. Unlike his father, he was unable to pass mathematics and, consequently, failed the school Leaving Certificate, to his father’s displeasure. It was his mother who regarded him as a favorite son. Their warm relationship helped balance the repressive atmosphere of his father’s rigid Catholicism. Moore lost his own Catholic faith while still a young man, and regarded the Catholic Belfast society of his youth as stifling; only after emigrating could Moore begin his authorial career. Moore became a Canadian citizen and later moved to the United States. He never returned to Ireland. After serving as a paramedic during World War II and a postwar stint with the United Nations, Moore decided to immigrate to Montreal, Canada, in 1948, and soon found a position at the Montreal Gazette. He married Jacqueline (Scully) Siros, a talented staff
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writer at the Montreal Standard in 1951. The couple would have one son, Michael Brian, in 1953 and would divorce in 1967. Moore’s later marriage to Jean Denney, another Canadian, would last the rest of his life. Moore left his position as a reporter in 1952 to become a full-time writer of books, and he authored several pulp novels under pseudonyms such as Michael Bryan and Bernard Mara before Judith Hearne, Moore’s first literary novel, appeared in 1955. It was issued in the United States under the longer title the following year. The Feast of Lupercal (1957) soon followed. The family moved to New York City in 1959, where he wrote The Luck of Ginger Coffey, for which he won the GovernorGeneral’s Award in 1960. He would also earn the same award, Canada’s highest literary honor, for The Great Victorian Collection (1975). In 1964, Moore converted The Luck of Ginger Coffey into screenplay form, prompting an admiring Alfred Hitchcock to ask Moore to write another screenplay. The film Torn Curtain (1966) was a disappointment for Moore, though the project did induce his permanent move to Malibu, California, which he found a beneficial climate for his writing. He accepted a position teaching in the English department at the University of California-Los Angeles and continued to produce novels every two or three years until his death. Kelly J. S. McGovern
MOORE, CHRISTY (1945–) Born in Newbridge, Co. Kildare, Christy Moore was steeped in music and politics from an early age. Moore graduated from the folk circuits of Ireland and England during the 1960s and became a solo performer of iconic status, with a string of successful albums and a discography that spans more than 500 songs and 30 albums. He has been recording and performing his music for more than 40 years and has collaborated with other legendry figures along the way, such as Shane McGowan, Sinead O’Connor, Elvis Costello, and Bono among others. Moore has been a central figure in two of the most influential Irish bands of the past 30 years, namely Planxty and Moving Hearts, along with his key musical collaborator Donal Lunny. His repertoire is both wide ranging and eclectic, and it can move seamlessly from bawdy entertainment to biting political and social protest songs aimed at events in Ireland and on the international stage. The breadth of Moore’s repertoire reflects the personal and political development of the man himself and the span of time across which he has been writing and performing. During the course of his career, Moore has been a regular visitor to North America and has a large following among Irish diaspora communities in large cities such as Boston and New York. In musical terms, Moore was initially influenced by the Clancy Brothers (he would later follow in their footsteps to play Carnegie Hall in New York) but was also infused with the more radical tradition of singers such as Ewan MacColl, Bob Dylan, and Woody Guthrie. In 1988, Atlantic Records capitalized on U.S. interest after the sold-out Carnegie Hall gig by releasing a special Compilation USA album.
References Blades, John. “Brian Moore: Travels of a Literary Infidel.” Publishers Weekly 245, no. 1 (January 5, 1998): 44–45. Gonzales, Alexander G. Modern Irish Writers: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997. Moritz, Charles, ed. Current Biography Yearbook. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1986. O’Donoghue, Jo. Brian Moore: A Critical Study. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1990. www.abc-clio.com ABC-CLIO
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Moore has created a substantial body of work in the recording studio; his albums include Prosperous, The Spirit of Freedom, H-Block, Ride On, Ordinary Man, This Is The Day, and the recently released Burning Times in 2005. Many of these albums have revitalized songs that had nearly been lost by the Irish folk tradition, and some of his own early albums have become collectors, items in their own right. Perhaps more importantly, Moore has functioned as an aural archive of his political and social times, writing and singing about the H-Block protests and republican hunger strikes in Northern Ireland in the 1980s with “90 Miles From Dublin”; attacking the abuses of the Catholic Church in Strange Ways; and critiquing U.S. foreign policy with such songs as “El Salvador,” “America, We Love You,” and more humorously “Hey Ronnie Reagan.” Moore’s music has also reflected concerns about unemployment in “Ordinary Man”; the nuclear arms race in “Hiroshima, Nagasaki Russian Roulette”; and international human rights abuses in “Biko Drum.” In recent years, Moore has campaigned against the U.S.-led War in Iraq and President George W. Bush’s visit to Ireland. In June 2004 he headlined a group of Irish acts at a concert in Dublin organized by the Irish Anti-War Movement entitled When Bush Comes to Shove. In the past, Moore has had to cancel concerts in Northern Ireland because of bomb threats from loyalist paramilitary groups. More recently, he was controversially detained for more than two hours in October 2004 by British police under the Prevention of Terrorism Act at Holyhead while on his way to a concert in Liverpool. While often pigeonholed as an Irish folksinger, Moore has transcended this categorization and has emerged as a political, social, and cultural commentator with an www.abc-clio.com
international relevance. Apart from his studio recording, Moore will also be remembered by those who have seen him in concert, for a number of electric live performances charged with humor, political anger, and emotional connections with an audience for whom the pain of migration is infused into the national consciousness. These concerts are built on a powerful roller coaster of affection and connection between Moore and his audience, along with periodic admonishments by the singer for overenthusiastic audience participation. His music has inspired and consoled the Irish diaspora, as well as his audience within Ireland, and is built upon a deep spirituality, humanitarianism, intelligence, wit, and poetic talent. Feargal Cochrane See also: CLANCY BROTHERS, the References Connolly, Frank, ed. The Christy Moore Songbook. Tralee: Brandon Books, 1984. Moore, Christy. One Voice: My Life in Song. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2000.
MOORE, MARIANNE (1887–1972) Marianne Moore was one of the most innovative and idiosyncratic of modern American poets, an original and influential editor and reviewer, and a prolific correspondent. Her writing spans a crucial period in twentieth-century literature, forming a bridge between the inventiveness of early modernist peers (H.D., Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot) and the lyrical voices of her successors (including Sylvia Plath, whom she met in 1958, and Elizabeth Bishop). Moore has been described as a “Kleptomaniac of the mind” (Costello, 5),
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Portrait of poet Marianne Moore who, during the course of her career, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize. (Library of Congress)
and it is evident that her interests were varied, ranging from the Brooklyn Dodgers to zoology. T. S. Eliot suggests that Moore’s art is the product of “many soils” (Costello, 12), and although she is typically regarded as an American writer, she expresses a persistent affinity with the Ireland of her distant inheritance. Moore did not actually visit Ireland until 1964 and, after she had done so, enthused about its ability to live up to her expectations (Willis, 665). Moore was born in 1887 in Kirkwood, Missouri, and she and her older brother were raised by their mother and their grandfather, a Presbyterian pastor. In a letter to Ezra Pound, Moore elaborates on these origins, suggesting that she is of Irish, and possibly Scottish, but certainly Celtic ancestry (Tomlinson, 16). Moore studied at www.abc-clio.com
Bryn Mawr from 1905 until 1909 and then taught at an Indian School in Pennsylvania before moving to New York in 1918. By this time, she had become acquainted with avant-garde poets, and her work had begun to appear in literary magazines. In 1921 her first volume, Poems, was published, without Moore’s knowledge, by acquaintances H.D. and Winifred Bryher. This was followed by numerous other collections, including Observations (1924), Selected Poems (1935), The Pangolin and Other Verse (1936), What Are Years (1941), Like a Bulwark (1956), and Complete Poems (1967). Moore also wrote a play, The Absentee (1962), based on Maria Edgeworth’s novel of the same title. Moore became a familiar and iconoclastic figure on the New York poetry scene. She edited the magazine The Dial during the 1920s, and it was in this capacity that she published some of W. B. Yeats’s work, including autobiographical essays and one poem, “Among School Children.” Yeats is a poet to whom Moore repeatedly turns. His complaint from Ideas of Good and Evil about William Blake’s imaginative reach informs Moore’s thoughts about truth, language, and the imagination in ‘Poetry’— one of her best-known works. Moore values sincerity and commitment in poetry, and it is a similar attentive directness that she recognizes and approves in Yeats’s work. Moore is critical, though, about Yeats’s complex and often-shifting views about women (Willis, 314). The association of Ireland with femininity, of national with gender identity, reemerges in Moore’s “Sojourn in the Whale” (1917)—a poem that takes Ireland and Irishness as explicit themes. The poem originates in and reflects on Moore’s early struggle to gain admission to the New York poetry establishment. It draws on the
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mythology, rhetoric, and imagery of the Ireland with which Moore claimed kinship to fully figure experiences of exclusion, circumscription, and frustration. Ireland, here, is personified as female and is addressed directly in a heartfelt appeal for solidarity in resistance to oppressive forces. This is particularly resonant, given both Moore’s history as a supporter of the suffragettes, and the genesis of the poem in the period after the Easter Rising of 1916. “Spenser’s Ireland” (1941), too, takes Ireland as its subject (and Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland [1596] as its stimulus). It is frank, even defiant, in its acknowledgment that this is an Ireland that the speaker knows only in her imagination. It is an idealized place that is available to her only through folklore and literature. The poem is complex in its sympathies, both delighting in and skeptical about the Irish habits and customs that it describes. Like “Sojourn in the Whale,” it strives to envisage individual and collective freedom but is frustrated by an inability to broach the multiple forms of enslavement that pertain in the culture. “Spenser’s Ireland” closes on an ambiguous note that yokes the uncertainty and dissatisfaction of the speaker’s position with her Irish identity. Fiona Green cites the opening line of an early draft of the poem, which sees the speaker falling out of love with Ireland (181), and suggests that the text as a whole reflects a growing ambivalence on Moore’s part about Irish neutrality during the World War II period. Arguably, the final line of the published version reflects Marianne Moore’s own troubling situation of being simultaneously committed to, and dissatisfied with, her identity as an Irish-American writer. Jo Gill www.abc-clio.com
See also: YEATS, William Butler References Costello, Bonnie. Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Green, Fiona. “‘Your trouble is their trouble’: Marianne Moore, Maria Engeworth and Ireland.” Symbiosis 1, no. 2 (October 1997): 173–185. Moore, Marianne. Complete Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1984. Tomlinson, Charles, ed. Marianne Moore: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969. Willis, Patricia C., ed. The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore. London: Faber and Faber, 1987.
MOORE,THOMAS (1779–1852) Thomas Moore was one of the most popular poets writing in English in the nineteenth century. He helped to establish
Title page from a collection of ballads by Thomas Moore. (Library of Congress)
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the themes of nineteenth-century romantic poetry and song. He was the bard of nostalgia, the half-pleasurable, half-sad emotional recollection of bygone days and departed friends, as seen through “the light of other days” (from “Oft in the Stilly Night”). However, he was best known for his Irish Melodies (issued from 1808 to 1834), which were acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. These poems, which Moore set to his adaptations of traditional Irish airs, helped to establish the romantic, sentimental image of Ireland in Victorian parlor ballads. Few American households boasting an organ or a piano would have been without their copy of Moore’s Melodies. Although a Roman Catholic, Moore attended Protestant Trinity College in his native Dublin. While a student there he befriended Robert Emmet and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who became leaders of the United Irishmen. Moore did not join the radical group or take part in its risings in 1798 and 1803, but he mourned the deaths of his friends, evoking their memories in the Melodies. However, because he feared being labeled as a republican, Moore never mentioned the names of the rebels he memorialized in such songs as “Oh! Breath Not His Name” or “When He Who Adores Thee.” When he did celebrate Irish heroism and national sacrifice, he was careful to set his poems in the long dead, half-mythologized past. His odes to freedom did not rage against the English power of his own day. As a consequence, Moore has been criticized for having popularized images of Ireland as glorious in defeat and pitiable in subordination, as represented by the self-sacrificing warrior bard of “The Minstrel Boy” or the helpless maiden of “Erin! The Tear and Smile in Thine Eyes.” Yet this last song also invoked www.abc-clio.com
a hope for Irish unity, symbolized by a “rainbow—One Arch of peace.” Moore had married a Protestant (his “heretic girl” of “Come, Send Round the Wine”), and in several songs he called for an end to Ireland’s sectarian discord. He was, nevertheless, a strong supporter of Catholic Emancipation. The political subtleties of Moore’s popular songs were probably lost on their many admirers in the United States, Irish and non-Irish alike. Yet even those Yankees who were unmoved by Moore’s stirring celebrations of Irish patriotism embraced the sentimental romanticism of his love songs, which held their place in the popular repertory well into the twentieth century. Today, however, when placed alongside modern poetry, even Moore’s best efforts may seem effusive and conventional. The close readings of academic critics find little to engage them, while postcolonial theorists fret about how accommodating Moore’s brand of Irish nationalism was to British imperialism. Whatever his shortcomings as a poet, Moore’s true genius lay in his ability as a songwriter. Drawing on the traditional Irish airs published by Edward Bunting and others, Moore was highly skilled in adapting them to his poems, uniting melody and lyrics into smooth flowing lines. Part of this ability was due to the fact that he performed his own material and so brought a singer’s sense to the construction of his songs. The musicality of his melodies even survived the often fussy piano arrangements of the composers his publishers hired to provide settings for the songs. Even though they were far removed from their folk sources, Moore’s songs were one of the principal conduits for Irish traditional music into Anglo-American popular
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music. His influence can easily be seen in the melodies of Stephen Foster. William H. A. Williams References Flannery, James W. Dear Harp of My Country: The Irish Melodies of Thomas Moore. Nashville, TN: J. S. Sanders, 1997. Tessuier, Thérèse. The Bard of Erin: A Study of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies, 1808–1834, translated by George P. Mutch. Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1981. White, Harry. The Keeper’s Recital: Music and Cultural History in Irish Music, 1770–1970. Critical Conditions. Field Day Essays. Cork: Cork University Press, 1998. Williams, William H. A. ’Twas Only An Irishman’s Dream: The Image of the Irish and Ireland in American Popular Song Lyrics, 1800–1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.
MORRISON, BRUCE (1944–) Born in New York City, Bruce Morrison was brought up in Northport, New York, on Long Island. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated with a degree in chemistry before going on to receive a master’s degree in organic chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He later attended Yale Law School. He worked for New Haven Legal Services before running for the United States Congress in 1982. From 1983 until 1991 he represented the Third District of Connecticut (New Haven) in the House of Representatives, having narrowly defeated his opponent in both the primary and the congressional elections. During his time in the House of Representatives he served on the Judiciary Committee and the Banking Committee. He also served on the Committee for Veterans Affairs and the Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families. He visited www.abc-clio.com
Cuba, Paraguay, and Chile to promote human rights and democracy. He left Congress to run as the Democratic candidate for governor of Connecticut but finished third behind the Independent candidate, Lowell Weicker, and the Republican, John Rowland. In 1995 President Clinton appointed Morrison as the chairman of the Federal Housing Finance Board, in charge of the 12 Federal Home Loan Banks. He oversaw the passing of the Federal Home Loan Bank Modernization Act of 1999, and he remained in this position until 2000. In 2001 he founded Morrison Public Affairs Group, a lobby group of which he is currently the chairman. Links with Ireland have been visible at different stages of his career. As a member of the House of Representatives he was chairman of the Immigration Subcommittee. In 1990, along with prominent IrishAmerican Senator Edward Kennedy, he sponsored the Immigration Act. This act granted 48,000 visas to Irish emigrants who wished to live and work in America. Many of the Irish people who availed themselves of these visas later ended up becoming American citizens. At a time when the Irish economy was in recession and large numbers of Irish illegal immigrants were in America, his role in this legislation was important, and it made his name well known in Ireland. This led to the visas in question being commonly referred to as “Morrison visas.” However, some in America claimed that as opposed to those immigrants from other countries, there was special treatment for the Irish as a result of the Irish-American lobby. Because of this alleged favoritism, they maintained that Ireland, a country with a relatively small population, had received a disproportionately high allotment of visas. In spite of
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these claims, many in Ireland regarded the visa program as a success. In 1994 the Irish national television station RTÉ broadcast a program called The Morrison Tapes, which followed three groups of Irish emigrants to America who had availed themselves of the Morrison visas. Ten years later, they revisited the same people—a family, two young men, and a single mother—to track the changes in their lives over the intervening period. Later Morrison also played an important role in the Irish peace process, and he was a key adviser to President Bill Clinton in the negotiations that took place both before and after the Irish Republican Army cease-fires. He was the cochairman of Irish-Americans for Clinton-Gore in the two presidential elections. From 1991 to 1995 he was a partner in the law firm Morrison & Swaine, where he specialized in immigration. From 1992 to 1997 he also served on the U.S. Commission for Immigration Reform. With the growth of the Irish “Celtic Tiger” economy in the 1990s, the drop in Irish people immigrating to America was accompanied by a rise in the number of people from other countries coming to live and work in Ireland. In 2003, at a conference of the Immigrant Council of Ireland, Morrison urged the Irish government to bring in a new immigration system in Ireland. He envisaged that the country would need more immigrants to maintain its current rate of economic growth and that there would have to be large-scale reform of Ireland’s immigration system. He called for a coherent immigration policy that would allow people to settle in Ireland with the possibility of their eventually becoming Irish citizens. In 2004 he criticized the citizenship referendum that was being held in www.abc-clio.com
Ireland, calling it “dangerous,” “unnecessary,” and “premature.” David Doyle Reference “Bruce Morrison.” Stennis Center for Public Service website. www.stennis.gov/ Congressional%20Bios/brucemorrison.htm (accessed August 13, 2007).
MORRISON,VAN (1945–) Singer,composer,andmusicianVanMorrison has proven that an Irish artist can assimilate and reinvent in an original way the essence of American music from the 1950s and 1960s, especially the African-American tradition and rhythm and blues. He has recorded more than 20 albums over four decades, remaining Ireland’s most durable popular singer and a respected songwriter worldwide. At age 18, Van Morrison began his recording career with a pop group named Them (from 1963), having a debut success with a single titled “Don’t Start Crying Now” (1964), followed by a cover of a blues classic, “Baby Please Don’t Go” (1964), first recorded by U.S. blues legend Big Joe Williams. The group combined covers of American music and original compositions. As a composer for Them, Morrison released his first classic, the hit song “Gloria,” in 1965, which would later become a major anthem for U.S. singer Patti Smith in 1978. When the group Them disbanded in 1966, after a successful American tour, Van Morrison immigrated to the United States, where he stayed and recorded as a solo artist from 1967 until 1973. Under his own name (from 1967), Van Morrison has had a long, successful career
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as a solo performer and songwriter, with classic albums such as his debut for Warner Records (and second album as a solo artist), Astral Weeks (1968), and his third as a solo artist, titled Moondance (1970), which featured songs like “Caravan,” “Into the Mystic,” and the title song, in a fine synthesis of jazz, pop, and rock. In 1973 Morrison confirmed his attachment to AfricanAmerican music, covering many bluesy standards on a live album titled It’s Too Late to Stop Now (1973), which was recorded in Los Angeles and London. Among the blues and soul songs covered by Van Morrison on his 1973 tour were Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home,” Ray Charles’s “I Believe To My Soul,” Willie Dixon’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” and two older tracks composed by Sonny Boy Williamson: “Help Me” and “Take Your Hand Out Of My Pocket.” Back in Ireland from 1973 to 1976, Van Morrison recorded a new album almost every two years, although some of those went unnoticed. On film, Morrison briefly appeared in Martin Scorsese’s documentary The Last Waltz (1978), about the farewell concert of Canadian group the Band, with whom he performed one of his most famous songs, “Caravan.” Van Morrison also appeared onstage as a guest star with U.S. legend Bob Dylan at a London concert in 1984, doing a duet of Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.” Exploring his own roots from the mid1980s, Van Morrison traveled Ireland and recorded 10 Irish folk songs with the Irish folk ensemble the Chieftains in 1988 (on a CD titled Irish Heartbeat), featuring Gaelic lyrics like “Carrickfergus,” “Ta Mo Chleamhnas Deanta (My Match It Is Made),” and the title song. That celebrated www.abc-clio.com
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collaboration exposed Van Morrison to a new, younger audience. Van Morrison’s interest in AfricanAmerican music, which his own father collected, led him to record with his long-time idol, bluesman John Lee Hooker, who did two duets with him for Morrison’s CD Too Long In Exile (1993). In 2000, Van Morrison recorded a whole duet album titled You Win Again with Linda Gail Lewis, the younger sister of rock-and-roll singer Jerry Lee Lewis; the album included standards like Hank Williams’s country song “Jambalaya,” and John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen.” After more than 40 years of song writing, Van Morrison remains a distinctive, powerful singer and sometimes a spiritual lyricist, who can create moody atmospheres and intense performances (see his underrated LP Poetic Champions Compose, from 1987). He also recorded two live albums in Belfast: Live at the Grand Opera House, Belfast (1985) and The Skiffle Sessions: Live in Belfast 1998 (2000), on which he included traditional folk songs like “Goodnight Irene,” composed in 1935 by African-American songster Huddie Leadbelly. Yves Laberge See also: CHIEFTAINS, The Reference Hinton, Brian, Celtic Road: The Art of Van Morrison. London: Sanctuary Publishing Limited, 2003.
MOTT, LUCRETIA COFFIN (1793–1880) Lucretia Coffin Mott was a Quaker minister and reformer whose transatlantic experience contributed to the expression of her reform impulses; likewise, her presence at
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the first World Anti-Slavery Convention, held in London in 1840, encouraged and challenged both local reformers, for example Richard Davis Webb and, to a lesser extent, the Irish politician Daniel O’Connell. These contacts, made and fostered within the Quaker and reform circles, formed part of a transatlantic network of like-minded reformers who refined and circulated their ideals and traded reform news in their letters and pamphlets. These primary documents give insights into the advances and conflicts that accompanied involvement in reform groups. Mott attended the 1840 World AntiSlavery Convention as an American delegate but was refused admission to the proceedings. Frederick Tolles explains that the religious and political beliefs that inspired Mott demanded that she take sides in both Quaker and abolitionist circles. In both cases, her choice was less favored amongst English Quakers. Lucretia Mott and her husband were Hicksite Quakers, who “emphasized the inward more than the historic Christ” (Tolles 1952, 4), whereas the English Quakers favored the more orthodox approach to their religious experience. Lucretia supported the abolitionist leader, William Lloyd Garrison, and his call for immediate emancipation of the black slaves through peaceful means, rather than the gradualist approach of the more militant American Anti-Slavery Society. Consequently, the English mistrusted Mott and refused to admit her to the proceedings. While sitting outside the door, Mott met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and most commentators suggest that this meeting inspired the beginning of the first Women’s Rights Convention, held at Seneca Falls in 1848. While at the first World Anti-Slavery Convention, Mott met the Irish leader www.abc-clio.com
Daniel O’Connell, who was not a delegate but attended the conference. Mott asked O’Connell to respond to the fact that she had been snubbed. This challenged O’Connell to reconsider his initial misgivings about the place of female delegates at this conference. After the conference, Mott visited Ireland and met with several Quaker and abolitionist reformers she had previously met in London. One of these was the Quaker printer from Dublin, Richard Davis Webb. Lucretia and Webb became firm friends; indeed, Webb was so impressed by Mott, he described her as the “Lioness of the Convention” (Harrison 1993, 24). They discussed matters of a philanthropic and reform nature. Despite such pleasant company, Mott was very conscious of Irish poverty and noted it in her diary. She was also interested in the education of women, and this topic also appears in her diary. These are just some of the many reform issues that inspired her to speak for the freedom of those marginalized by race or gender, education of boys and girls, and temperance; her 49 public addresses dwell on these themes. However, she is most commonly associated with the twin causes of the abolition of slavery and women’s rights. Ann Coughlan
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See also: ABOLITIONISM AND SLAVERY; WEBB, Richard Davis References Harrison, Richard S. Richard Davis Webb: Dublin Quaker Printer (1805–1872). Cork: Red Barn Publishing, 1993. Tolles, Frederick. Slavery and the Woman Question: Lucretia Mott’s Diary of Her Visit to Great Britain to Attend the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840. London: Friends Historical Society, 1952. 1-800-368-6868
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MOYNIHAN, DANIEL PATRICK (1927–2003) Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Daniel Patrick Moynihan grew up in New York City. He was educated at Benjamin Franklin High School in Harlem, from which he graduated first in his class. His father deserted the family when Daniel was young, leaving his mother to raise the children by herself. After a series of odd jobs, which included working as a longshoreman and shining shoes, he briefly attended the City College of New York before joining the Navy in 1944. After the war he attended Tufts University and received a bachelor’s degree in 1948. He received a master’s degree in 1949 and a doctorate in 1961 from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
He also studied at the London School of Economics as a Fulbright Fellow in 1950–1951. He worked as assistant and secretary to Governor W. Averell Harriman of New York, and he was a member of the New York State Tenure Commission before writing papers for the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy. When Kennedy was elected president, Moynihan was appointed special assistant to Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg. Later, he became assistant secretary of labor and helped draft legislation that would become President Johnson’s Equal Opportunities Act. Following an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination for president of the New York City Council, he was named director of the Joint Center for Urban
Former United States Democratic senator for New York Daniel Patrick Moynihan is sworn in as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations by Justice Byron White (left). United States President Gerald Ford (right) stands nearby at the White House on June 30, 1975. (Getty Images) www.abc-clio.com
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Affairs at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard in 1966. He subsequently became a professor of government at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, a position he left to join the Nixon administration as adviser to the president for urban affairs. He resigned this position in 1971 and returned to Harvard, where he was a professor of sociology until 1973, when he was appointed ambassador to India, a position he remained in for two years. Before returning briefly to Harvard, he was named as permanent representative to the United Nations in 1975. He resigned his post and returned to Harvard before being elected the U.S. senator for the state of New York in November 1976. He was reelected as senator on three occasions: in 1982, 1988, and 1994. In 2000 he declared that he would not seek reelection to the Senate. In the same year, President Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Moynihan was professor at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, and for the final year of his life he was senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He died of complications from a ruptured appendix on March 26, 2003, and he is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. In addition to his career in public service, Moynihan was a noted author. His 19 books include Beyond the Melting Point (1963), a study of American ethnicity that he coauthored with Nathan Glazer, and The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, which became popularly known as the Moynihan Report. Other publications included The Politics of a Guaranteed Income (1963), Family and Nation (1986), Came the Revolution (1988), On the Law of Nations (1990), and Secrecy: The American Experience (1998). www.abc-clio.com
Moynihan, along with New York Governor Hugh Carey, Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, and Senator Edward Kennedy, was known as one of the “Four Horsemen,” an informal group of senior Irish-American politicians who promoted Irish interests in Washington. He was also known as a supporter of the moderate nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party and its leader John Hume, and he became a vocal opponent of violent Irish republicanism. He joined forces with other Irish American politicians to appeal to Irish Americans to stop sending money to the Provisional Irish Republican Army. However, in 1994, with the emergence of the Irish peace process, along with Senator Kennedy, he appealed to President Clinton to grant the Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams a visa to enter America. On his death tributes were paid to him by the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, who said he was “a great intellectual and a great friend to Ireland.” Enda Kenny, the leader of Fine Gael, the main oppostion party in Ireland, said “his tireless commitment to finding a peaceful solution to the conflict in Northern Ireland was instrumental in encouraging the U.S. government to become involved in supporting the peace process.” David Doyle
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References Deedy, John. “Daniel Patrick Moynihan.” In The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, edited by Michael Glazier. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1999. Hodgson, Godfrey. The Gentleman from New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan—A Biography. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Katzmann, Robert A., ed. Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The Intellectual in Public Life. Washington, DC: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1998. 1-800-368-6868
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MULDOON, PAUL (1951–) Born in Eglish, Co. Tyrone, Paul Muldoon grew up on a farm near the Moy, Co. Armagh. He was educated at St. Patrick’s College Armagh and Queen’s University Belfast. At Queen’s he established relationships with members of the Belfast Group, including Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and Michael Longley. From 1973 to 1986 he worked for BBC Northern Ireland in Belfast. The collections published during this time—Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980) and Quoof (1983)—reflect turbulence in Muldoon’s personal life and escalating political violence in Northern Ireland. After short periods spent living in Co. Kerry and in England, Muldoon settled permanently in the United States with his second wife, Jean Hanff Korelitz. Between 1987 and 1990, he lectured at Columbia University, the University of California, and the University of Massachusetts and since 1990 has worked at Princeton University. In 1999, he was appointed Oxford Professor of Poetry. Since his immigration to the United States, Muldoon has published several collections of poetry, including the important books Madoc (1990) and The Annals of Chile (1994). He has also written for the opera (his three libretti are all concerned with American themes), stage, and television. His collected Poems 1968–1998 was published in 2001. America, North and South, has always assumed a large place in Muldoon’s poetry. “Lunch with Pancho Villa,” in Mules, represents an early excursion into a fantasy South America that Muldoon revisited and expanded upon two decades later. “Immram,” an experiment in combining Irish and American idiom, appears in Why Brownlee Left. In Quoof the sonnet sequence www.abc-clio.com
“The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants,” follows the fortunes of a terrorist mercenary, Gallogly, and his vengeful nemesis and alter ego, an “Oglala Sioux” named Mangas Jones. A note to the poem claims it is “loosely based on the Trickster cycle of the Winnebago Indians.” “7, Middagh Street,” in Meeting the British (1987), concerns transatlantic exchange of a different kind. This densely allusive poem is a sequence of interlinked dramatic monologues spoken by the inhabitants of the house on Thanksgiving Day 1940; these inhabitants included W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Salvador Dali, and Louis MacNeice. These literary concerns combine with the picaresque narrative of earlier poems in Madoc. The 233-poem sequence, “Madoc—A Mystery,” which occupies almost all of this volume, mixes various genres (literary and philosophical history, science fiction, the western adventure story) to imagine what might have happened had Coleridge and Robert Southey (Muldoon’s poem is a ‘“re-make” of Southey’s 1806 epic) succeeded in their scheme to establish a utopian pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna. These oblique, linguistically playful poems, each “surtitled” by the name of a philosopher in brackets, confront issues of gender, race, conquest, and colonization, by implication in their Irish as well as American contexts. Muldoon’s poetry of the mid-1990s is characterized by a growing interest in South American–Irish cultural exchange. Throughout The Annals of Chile, Muldoon’s childhood home is associated with South American landscapes; while the poems’ formal and thematic preoccupation with repetition is influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, particularly his essay “A New Refutation of Time.”
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Muldoon’s three latest collections, Hay (1998), Moy Sand and Gravel (2001), and Horse Latitudes (2006), continue to draw parallels between the Ireland of his childhood and youth and his adopted home in the United States. Muldoon’s commitment to a historical understanding of the Irish diaspora, his dismantling of prevailing notions of the importance of place in Irish poetry, his combination of American experimental idiom with a more traditionalist post-Romantic Irish poetic confirm his important place in any survey of IrishAmerican cultural exchange. See also: HEANEY, Seamus
Kit Fryatt References Kendall, Tim. Paul Muldoon. Bridgend: Seren, 1996. Wills, Clair. Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Wills, Clair. Reading Paul Muldoon. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Bloodaxe, 1998.
MULHALL, MICHAEL GEORGE (1836–1900) Michael G. Mulhall, a writer, journalist, and statistician born in Dublin in 1836, was the son of Thomas Mulhall (1803–1856) and Catherine Flood (1807–1849). Mulhall studied for the priesthood at the Irish College in Rome. He abandoned the idea of religious life, and then went to Buenos Aires in 1860, where his brother Edward Thomas Mulhall (1832–1899) had already been settled since the mid-1850s. In May 1861, Michael and Edward Mulhall founded the Standard, which became the first daily newspaper in English published in South America (though the weekly British Packet had been published since 1810). The Standard was www.abc-clio.com
founded, as it declared in the first issue, “not as the emblem of a party or the watchword of rivalry, but as the bond of fellowship between the various members of our Anglo-Celtic race [. . .]. We have all come from the British Isles and English, Irish, Scotch, and American acknowledge one mother tongue. Monopoly is unjust and bigotry hateful. To crush one and prevent the other is our object.” Although in fact Irish, the Mulhall brothers usually referred to themselves as English, championing the interests of the British community; these views were reflected in the paper, and the brothers were often criticized for this stance. The Standard ceased publication in 1959, but its archives remain one of the most important sources for the history of English-speaking communities in Argentina. In 1863 Mulhall published The Handbook of the River Plate, allegedly the first book in English printed in South America; it was followed by five subsequent editions in 1869, 1875, 1876, 1885, and 1892, reaching a total of 11,500 copies sold. In 1876 an edition in Spanish was ordered by President Sarmiento. The 1892 edition of the Handbook offers 686 pages full of plenty of minute information about Argentina—its natural features, population, industries, railways, finance and commerce—and a detailed description of provinces, departments, and cities. Abundant information about Uruguay and Paraguay is also included. The inclusion of elaborate information about the journey from Europe to Argentina and routes in the latter country suggests that the main readers were potential English-speaking emigrants. A separate edition for Brazil (Handbook of Brazil ) was published by the brothers Mulhall in 1877. Other books published by Michael G. Mulhall were The
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English in South America (1878), Progress of the World in Arts, Agriculture, Commerce, Manufactures, Instruction Railways, and Public Wealth Since the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century (1880), Balance Sheet of the World for Ten Years, 1870–1880 (1881), History of Prices Since the Year 1850 (1885), and his famous Mulhall’s Dictionary of Statistics (1883). In fact a compilation of statistics rather than a dictionary, the Dictionary of Statistics is valuable for its contents of the nineteenth century and unique for this period, including statistics arranged alphabetically by specific subject—accidents, age, crime, debt, drunkenness, eggs, fires, insane, and so on—for the United States, Europe, and other countries. It was published in seven editions up to 1911. In 1878 Pope Leo XIII decorated Mulhall in recognition of his literary work. He traveled extensively in Europe collecting material for a committee of the English parliament reporting on a proposed department of agriculture for Ireland in 1896. Mulhall died in Dublin on December 12, 1900. His wife Marion MacMurrogh Murphy was also a writer and the first president of the St. Joseph Ladies Society in Buenos Aires. Edmundo Murray See also: PRESS, THE IRISH IN LATIN AMERICA References Coghlan, Eduardo A. Los Irlandeses en la Argentina: Su Actuación y Descendencia. Buenos Aires: Author’s Edition, 1987. Marshall, Oliver. The English-Language Press in Latin America. London: Institute of Latin AmericanStudies,UniversityofLondon,1996. Meehan, Thomas F. “Michael George Mulhall.” In The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. X. Murray, Thomas. The Story of the Irish in Argentina. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1919. www.abc-clio.com
MULRONEY, BRIAN (1939–) Although Brian Mulroney was Canada’s prime minister for almost a decade, for many people the most defining moment of his political career was perhaps not legislation signed or a speech given, but a duet. In March, 1985, Mulroney met with Ronald Reagan in Quebec City in what became known as the Shamrock Summit—socalled because of the two leaders’ shared Irish heritage and the meeting’s coincidence with Saint Patrick’s Day. Irishness was played up by all involved, most delegates wearing green somewhere on their person. At the conclusion of the summit, Mulroney, Reagan, and their wives, in a televised broadcast, appeared on stage to sing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” Mulroney’s defenders would claim that the event was a success, marking a rapprochement between the United States and Canada after years of stressed relations under Pierre Trudeau’s governance. Detractors, and most public opinion, considered the event to be symbolic of Mulroney’s willingness to play lapdog to Reagan’s neoconservative program, which was actualized in the negotiations that took place behind closed doors and would lead to the North American accord. The Irish heritage and friendship of the two was reinforced at Reagan’s funeral in 2004, where Mulroney was an official pallbearer and gave a eulogy quoting from the poetry of W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney. Brian Mulroney was born in Baie Comeau, a paper-mill town on the northeastern shore of Quebec’s Saint Lawrence River coast, on March 20, 1939. He is the eldest son and the third of six children born to Benedict Mulroney, an electrician employed at the paper mill, and his wife Irene (O’Shea). His parents met in the parish of
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Sainte-Catherine-de-Portneuf, a small town to the west of Quebec City that was home to both Irish and French Canadian Catholics. It was in this parish that the Mulroney family originally settled upon their arrival in the 1840s, after emigrating from Ireland during the Famine. Despite his working-class origins, Mulroney was sent to St. Thomas, a wellrespected Catholic boarding school in Chatham, New Brunswick. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree from St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and a law degree from Laval University in Quebec. Upon graduation from Laval, he was employed by a prestigious Montreal law firm where he practiced labor law, settling several high-profile labor disputes for management teams who would remain grateful and loyal to him in his future life as a politician. From 1977 until 1983 he was the head of Iron Ore Company of Canada. In 1976, Mulroney made a failed attempt to lead the federal Progressive Conservative Party, losing out to Joe Clark because of what many viewed as a campaign that was too flashy and arrogant. When Clark resigned as the party’s leader in 1983, a more mature and better organized Mulroney took over the leadership reigns of the party. Buoyed by general public discontent after more than a decade and a half of Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal rule, Mulroney was elected in September 1984; it was the largest landslide victory in Canadian federal political history. He led his party and the country as prime minister from 1984 until his resignation in 1993. Mulroney and his politics are often viewed in the context of the rule of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He led his government as a right-wing reformer, www.abc-clio.com
cutting social programs while dismantling impediments to international trade and Canadian business. His most memorable legislation includes the Goods and Services Tax and the North American accord, the latter of which would set the groundwork for the North American Free Trade Agreement. Although his government was rocked by successive scandals involving various members of Parliament, he himself was never found culpable despite his initial implication in what became known as the Airbus Scandal. Though Mulroney has officially retired from public life to practice law, he is still a major influence on the policies and direction of the Conservative Party and its leaders. Brad Kent See also: REAGAN, Ronald Wilson References McDonald, Marci. Yankee Doodle Dandy: Brian Mulroney and the American Agenda. Toronto: Stoddart, 1995. Murphy, Rae, Robert Chodos, and Nick Auf der Maur. Brian Mulroney: The Boy from Baie-Comeau. Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, 1984. Savoie, Donald. Thatcher, Reagan, Mulroney: In Search of a New Bureaucracy. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994.
MULVANY, JOHN (CA. 1839–1906) Born in Moynalty, Co. Meath, John Mulvany immigrated to the United States at about 12 years of age. After studying at the National Academy of Design in New York, from 1861 he worked in Chicago as a freelance artist for Irish newspapers. He was with the Union Army during the Civil War, returning pictorial records to newspapers in New York. At the end of the war, he
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went to Europe to study—to Düsseldorf and Munich, Germany, and Antwerp, Belgium—exposures that are stylistically evident in his work. In turn, he decisively influenced Frank Duveneck, William Merrit Chase, and Frederick Remington. On his return to the United States, Mulvany moved to Chicago, then Cincinnati, and from there to the IowaNebraska border, where he began his western paintings, such as The Preliminary Trial of a Horse Thief, which was shown to great acclaim at the National Academy of Design in 1876; Trappers of the Yellowstone (1877); and Lynch Law, A Comrade’s Appeal. Mulvany then moved to Kansas City, where he spent two years on the prototypical rendition of Custer’s Last Rally (1881), commemorating the defeat of General Custer by Native Americans in June 1876 at the Little Big Horn. The original painting is thought to be nonextant, but an artist’s copy has recently emerged. This dramatic painting depicts Custer at the center of a vivid and crowded canvas, holding a revolver in one hand and a saber in the other. Extraordinarily, the painting had a 17-year tour. At its first stop in Boston, it was commended for its realism, its fidelity to detail, and its knowledge of contemporary American warfare. In New York, Walt Whitman eulogized its “native,” “autochtonic” qualities at length in the New York Tribune. In Louisville, Kentucky, the Courier-Journal pronounced Mulvany “a genius,” and the painting’s popular appeal was such that, in Chicago, the painting was lithographed for mass distribution. Mulvany was also an accomplished portrait painter, painting portraits of, among others, Brigham Young, Robert Emmet, Mayor Dunne, and Sitting Bull. Nationalist views were inculcated in www.abc-clio.com
Mulvany during his early schooling in Ireland, furthered through his association with exiled Fenians, such as John Devoy, and his own association with Clan na Gael. His Irish political pictures, such as the Battle of Aughrim and The Anarchists, exemplify his exploration of momentous political events in Irish history. The Irish American Club in Chicago probably commissioned The Battle of Aughrim in 1883, leading to Mulvany’s return to Ireland between 1883 and 1885. In pursuit of authenticity, he applied to the Tower of London for permission to research the arms and uniforms of the time. While waiting for his permit, he was advised by a friend to get out of London fast. Days later, on January 25, 1885, a series of bombs exploded in the Tower, courtesy of Clan na Gael. According to Mulvany, had he not fled, he would have spent the rest of his life in jail. Because of his political connections, Mulvany’s work underwent a significant deterioration in status. And in his later years, he was variously described as “an eccentric,” “a down-and-out,” and “a drunkard.” Nonetheless, he continued to paint, producing, notably, The Anarchists, the political painting that would appear to have been his undoing. Dr P. H. Cronin’s role in the Clan na Gael crisis came to an end with Cronin’s murder in Chicago in 1889—a murder justified on the accusation of treason. In fact, Cronin was beaten to death with an ice hatchet to prevent his exposure of Alexander Sullivan. The Anarchists depicts six men cutting cards to select the murderer. This painting may have rendered the protagonists identifiable, so that, rather than committing suicide, as reported, Mulvany may have been “assisted” to his death in 1906.
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Mulvany is now almost totally forgotten, notwithstanding a major international reputation in his own lifetime. Other than an invaluable, unpublished monograph by Mulvany’s great-grand niece, Anne Weber, very little has been written about this important Irish-American artist. That so many paintings nodal to Irish and IrishAmerican history should remain unlocated is a tragedy. Niamh O’Sullivan References Taft, Robert. Artists and Illustrators of the Old West 1850–1900. New York, Charles Scribner, 1953. Tuite, Thomas P. “John Mulvany, Great Irish Painter.” Gaelic American (New York), March 6, April 3, and April 10, 1909. Weber-Scobie, Anne. The Life and Work of Irish-American Artist John Mulvany (1939–1906). Unpublished MS, 1993.
MURPHY, CHARLES FRANCIS (1858–1924) Charles Francis Murphy, one of the greatest Democratic political bosses of the early twentieth century, led Tammany Hall in New York City. He was born in a tenement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side on June 20, 1858, the second of nine children of Irish Roman Catholic immigrants Dennis (or John M.) and Mary Prendergrass (or Prendergast) Murphy. He attended public school until the age of 14, when family need forced him to find work. Murphy picked up money in wire factories and as a part-time handyman in a saloon. He left the factories to become a caulker along the East River waterfront, meeting many of the young Irish men who would later form the core of his political support. In 1875, Murphy became the driver of a public horsecar; his route covered most of lower www.abc-clio.com
Portrait of Charles Francis Murphy, New York City politician. (Library of Congress)
Manhattan, making him a familiar sight to many commuters. In 1878, Murphy purchased the first of his four saloons. The saloon, which did not serve women, was a gathering place for local dockworkers and laborers. The second floor of the building housed the Sylvan Social Club for young men ages 15 to 20, whose baseball team Murphy had organized in 1875. With the saloon, club, and baseball team as his anchors, Murphy began to emerge as a political figure. In 1892, he became the Democratic leader of the 18th Assembly District and a member of the executive committee of Tammany Hall. Politics brought Murphy social mobility and respectability. In 1897, Murphy was appointed commissioner of docks, the only paid position he ever held in government. He was proud of the position and retained
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the title “Commissioner” as his preferred form of address for the rest of his life. During his tenure in office, Murphy set up a system of dock leasing that greatly benefited Tammany Hall. Murphy, a taciturn and puritanical man, engaged only in socalled honest graft. He steadfastly refused to accept money connected to illegal activity such as prostitution or gambling but thought nothing of using inside information to profit and routinely demanded fees from contractors seeking to do business with the city. Murphy stayed in power by being accessible. He made it a practice to station himself beneath a gas lamp in front of a Democratic club for several hours each night. Anyone could approach him for assistance, and he won many votes by providing social services to families in need. On election day, he made sure that Democratic voters made it to the polls by sending messengers to anyone who had not cast a ballot by midafternoon. A model district leader, Murphy brought more votes for Tammany than any of his peers. On September 19, 1902, when the corrupt leader of Tammany was pushed out of office, the dependable and comparatively honest Murphy succeeded him. He remained leader of Tammany for the remainder of his days. Other than golf, he had few interests outside of politics. Earlier that year, in June 1902, Murphy married widow Margaret J. Graham and adopted her daughter. The Murphys had no other children. None of Murphy’s predecessors enjoyed his power on the municipal, state, or national level. He was responsible for the election of three New York City mayors and three New York State governors, including Al Smith. He helped advance the career of Robert Wagner, the U.S. senator www.abc-clio.com
from New York during the New Deal and a great advocate for organized labor. Unlike many political bosses, Murphy supported progressive legislation and efficiency in government. Widely commended for his mild rule, he nevertheless bore chief responsibility for the impeachment of corrupt Governor William Sulzer, whom he had helped to elect in 1912. At the time of his death Murphy planned to nominate Smith for president at the 1924 Democratic National Convention. Murphy died suddenly in New York City on April 25, 1924, from an ailment that the attending physician labeled as indigestion. He left an estate of more than $2 million, although his Tammany post was formally unsalaried and he never held elective office. A crowd estimated by newspapers at more than 50,000 attended Murphy’s funeral at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Caryn E. Neumann See also: NEW YORK CITY; TAMMANY HALL References Connable, Alfred, and Edward Silberfarb. Tigers of Tammany: Nine Men Who Ran New York. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967. Weiss, Nancy Joan. Charles Francis Murphy, 1858–1924: Respectability and Responsibility in Tammany Politics. Northampton, MA: Smith College, 1968.
MURPHY, HERMANN DUDLEY (1867–1945) Hermann Dudley Murphy was a secondgeneration Irish American who, at the turn of the twentieth century, was an influential artist and frame maker. A painter of portraits, landscapes, and still lifes, Murphy was a participant in the Boston School of Painting, a teacher at the Harvard School
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of Architecture, and a founding member of the Guild of Boston Artists. As a designer, carver, and gilder, working out of his shop, named Carrig-Rohane in tribute to his Celtic ancestry, he was a seminal figure in the history of framing and was chiefly responsible for Boston being the center of innovative frame design. Murphy was born in Marlborough, Massachusetts, on August 25, 1867. His father was a native of Cork and a shoe manufacturer in Stoneham, Massachusetts; his mother was descended from Royal Governor Joseph Dudley of New Hampshire. Hermann was educated at Boston’s Chauncy Hall School and the Boston Museum School. After a few years as an illustrator for newspapers and periodicals and a brief stint as artist and surveyor for a Nicaragua canal survey expedition, Murphy traveled to Paris in 1891. There he studied painting at the Academie Julian, garnering awards in drawing and composition. In 1895 he married fellow art student Caroline Bowles, and the couple settled in Winchester, Massachusetts, where, in 1903, he built a house and studio. Nearly 6 feet 6 inches tall with abundant red hair and a beard, Murphy was a lifelong sportsman, winning American Canoe Association championships in sliding deck-seat canoeing in 1902, 1909, 1910, and 1931. He belonged to the Union Boat Club of Boston and the Winchester Boat Club. In contrast to his size and athleticism, Murphy was considered an aesthete, and his art was noteworthy for its delicacy, subtlety, and refinement. Initially, he painted portraits and landscapes, but as his career in landscape painting flourished, he ceased to paint portraits except for family and friends. Much of his work focused on New
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England, as he recreated scenes from around Winchester and Marblehead, on Cape Cod, in Ogunquit, Maine, and at Mt. Monadnock. Later, he traveled and captured the landscapes of Italy, Holland, England, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. From the 1920s until his death in 1945, he primarily painted still lifes and florals, for which he received critical and popular acclaim. Murphy took his public artistic responsibilities seriously. From 1902 to 1937 he taught life drawing at the Harvard School of Architecture and taught at the Worcester (Massachusetts) Art Museum School. From 1916 to 1943 he was a member of the Massachusetts Arts Commission, and between 1928 and 1935 he led the art committee of the Boston Art Club. He was also a member of the National Academy of Design, the Copley Society, the Guild of Boston Artists, and the New York and Boston Watercolor Societies. Artistically, Murphy was most influenced by the work of James McNeill Whistler, and like Whistler, he was concerned with the totality of any artwork, including its framing. After learning to carve and gild to frame his own works appropriately, Murphy set up a frame shop at his home in Winchester. Two years later, he moved the shop to Boston where he designed and constructed frames for many leading artists of the period, including Childe Hassam and William Merrit Chase. Believing the frame itself was a work of art, Murphy signed his frames and, in 1907, participated in an exhibition devoted to frames as an art form held at Boston’s Copley Hall. Frames from Murphy’s studio were considered some of the most beautiful frames ever made. In 1917 he turned his
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Carrig-Rohane shares over to his studio artisans and sold the company to Vose Galleries of Boston. Throughout his career he exhibited widely and won many awards. One-man exhibitions of his work were held in such museums as the Wadsworth Athanaeum, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the St. Louis Museum of Art. His awards included a bronze medal at the PanAmerican Exposition of 1901 and a silver medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915. Following a lengthy estrangement, in 1915 Caroline and Hermann Murphy were divorced, and a year later Murphy married Nellie Littlehale Umbstaetter, a recent widow whom he had courted decades earlier. He and Nellie built a house and studio in Lexington, Massachusetts, where he died in 1945. Murphy’s paintings can be found in many public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Portland Art Museum. Patricia Fanning See also: BOSTON; MASSACHUSETTS
References Coles, William A. “Hermann Dudley Murphy: An Introduction.” Hermann Dudley Murphy (1867–1945): “Realism Married to Idealism Most Exquisitely.” New York: Graham Gallery, 1982. Cooke, Edward S., Jr. “The Aesthetics of Craftsmanship and the Prestige of the Past: Boston Furniture-Making and WoodCarving.” In Inspiring Reform: Boston’s Arts and Crafts Movement. Wellesley, MA: David Museum and Cultural Center, 1997: 42–56. Smeaton, Suzanne. “American Picture Frames of the Arts and Crafts Period, 1870–1920.” Antiques 136, no. 6 (November 1989): 1124–1137.
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MURPHY, JOHN JAMES (1822–1909) John James Murphy was born in 1822 in Haysland, Kilrane parish, Co. Wexford, to Nicholas Murphy and Catherine Sinnott. At age 22, he emigrated to South America together with his cousins John and Lawrence Murphy and neighbors John O’Connor, Nicholas Kavanagh, Thomas Saunders, James Pender, Patrick Howlin, and others. They were part of an emigration scheme arranged from Buenos Aires by Wexford-born merchant James Pettit. On April 13, 1844, they left home in Wexford and sailed directly to Liverpool, where they waited to depart in the brig William Peile. The ship left Liverpool on April 21, 1844, with 115 Irish passengers onboard, called at Cape Verde islands on May 13, and finally sailed into the mouth of the River Plate on June 25. A century later these emigrants and their journey—the first organized emigration from Ireland to Argentina— inspired Walter MacCormack’s epic ballad “The Kilrane Boys,” which was included by Joseph Ranson in his Songs of the Wexford Coast (Wexford: John English & Co., 1975). Once in Argentina, Murphy took advantage of his British citizenship and his Irish origin, which connected him to the British merchants and the Irish Catholic priests in Buenos Aires. Like many of his fellow countrymen he stayed a short time in the city and then he went to the campo or countryside. He and a friend worked near Chascomús with an Argentine family and left when they realized that they would never get paid for their work of digging ditches. The next years he spent in Chacabuco working as a shepherd in the profitable sheep business.
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In 1855, 11 years after his arrival, Murphy owned 1,750 hectares in Salto that he had purchased from John McKiernan, with whom he had been working in halves. He named his ranch La Flor del Uncalito. In 1864 he acquired La Caldera of 4,050 hectares in neighboring department Rojas. Murphy was the first landowner in Buenos Aires to enclose his property with wire. In 1859 he had a bad year because of want of water. Murphy saved his sheep by constantly throwing buckets of water over the parched land, and the sheep were able to eat the roots of grass or weeds they found, surviving on this and water. As his daughter recalled, Murphy “did this day and night and the sheep would rush towards him as soon as they saw him coming.” Murphy made every possible effort to convince family members, neighbors, and friends in Wexford to immigrate to Argentina. According to his letters it was “the best country under the sun.” In 1866, all the shepherds, hands, and laborers working in his ranches in Salto and Rojas were from Wexford except for one from Westmeath. Murphy sent so many passengers to Argentina through Lamport & Holt shipping company that his brother Martin Murphy, who remained in Wexford and acted as his representative in Ireland, received an agent commission for every ticket purchased. With the immigrants working for him, Murphy often paid their tickets in advance, and they committed to stay in their ranches for at least 14 months working to repay their passage. Murphy was also an ardent advocate of sheep farming in Argentina, and sometimes the Wexford People published his letters promoting the business and emigration to Argentina. In 1878 Murphy traveled with his family back to Ireland and rented his lands in www.abc-clio.com
Argentina. Being the elder brother, he had the idea of returning definitively to Ireland to take care of the family farm, and possibly be appointed as Argentine consul in Dublin. But two of his children died in Ireland, and the family returned to Argentina in January 1882. Under the favorable conditions created after the war against the Indians, on March 15, 1883, Murphy bought 18,600 hectares in Venado Tuerto (southern Santa Fe) from Eduardo Casey. With the help of his family and others, he immediately settled the new ranch, San Juan, and began wire fencing, building outposts, and planting trees. He paid off the last of his debts the year before his death. By the end of the century the prosperous wool business was declining and was replaced by cattle, and later by grain. Murphy started to let his land to Italian settlers, who dedicated it mostly to corn and wheat. Murphy died on July 13, 1909, in Buenos Aires, leaving a large family and an important estate to his heirs. A railway station in Santa Fe province was named after him, and most of the land was rented out to tenants. Some of these tenant farmers were evicted by the agents of his daughter Elisa Murphy Gahan, who was living in England, therefore confirming the remarks of Timothy Horan, Irish diplomatic envoy to Argentina in 1958: “It is one of history’s little ironies that our emigrants to Argentina [helped] to assist in building up a system and a class the creation of which in Ireland had led to their own emigration.” Edmundo Murray
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See also: ARGENTINA; CASEY, Eduardo References Coghlan, Eduardo A. Los Irlandeses en la Argentina: Su Actuación y Descendencia. Buenos Aires: Author’s Edition, 1987. 1-800-368-6868
MURRAY, THOMAS 631 Landaburu, Roberto. Irlandeses: Eduardo Casey, Vida y Obra. Venado Teureto: Fondo Editor Mutual Venado Teureto, 1995. Murray, Edmundo. “From Kilrane to the Irish Pampas: The Story of John James Murphy.” in The Southern Cross 127, no. 5860 (2002): 5. Ortigüela, Raúl. Murphy, en Tierras Benditas. Venado: Tuerto, 1991.
MURRAY, LUIS ALBERTO (1923–2002) Journalist, writer, historian, and poet born in Buenos Aires, Luis Alberto Murray was the son of Miguel Juan Murray and Teresa Munnier, and the great-grandson of John Murray (1826–1907) of Derraghanbeg, Newtowncashel parish (Co. Longford). A historian of the revisionist school, supporter of the Peronist movement founded by President Juan D. Perón, and supporter of the Roman Catholic tradition, Murray joined Crítica newspaper in 1948 and contributed to Democracia, Vea y Lea, El Pueblo, Confirmado, Mayoría, and Clarín in their political sections. He worked for the latter newspaper for more than 20 years. Murray began writing poetry in 1943 and published, among other works: Desintegrada voz, Tránsito, Una mujer y un hombre, América clavada en mi costado, and De pie, entre los relámpagos. He also translated Argentine poetry and tango lyrics into English. Together with Argentine intellectuals Fermín Chávez, José María Castiñeira de Dios, José María Rosa, and Osvaldo Guglielmino, Murray structured an ideological base for the Peronist movement. He was also a member of the Rosas Institute of Buenos Aires, and, in the line of historical revisionism, he defended the rule of Rosas as positive contribution for Argentina against the powers of British and other colonialist European nations. www.abc-clio.com
In Argentine historiography Murray represents the nationalist-revisionist trend of the 1940s, with his essays Pro y Contra de Alberdi, Pro y Contra de Sarmiento, Caseros y Pozo de Vargas: Dos Derrotas Argentinas, and Vida, Obra y Doctrina de Roberto Noble. Opposite to the perspectives of liberal historians, who wished to replace the native cultures with European (especially British) enlightenment, Murray envisioned a new reading of postindependence texts, in which he searched the elements of the proposed Argentine nation, including the Spanish language, Catholicism, and Hispano-Creole cultural tradition. His religious traditionalism within the Roman Catholic doctrine was parallel to that proposed in times of the “Santa Federación” of Buenos Aires governor Juan Manuel de Rosas, focusing on the ideological relations between religion and state instead of dogmatic matters. Although a vast majority of the Irish-Argentine elite (to which Murray’s family belonged) followed the Argentine landed class in its noticeable anti-Peronist attitudes, Murray found in the nationalist aspect of Peronism similar values of conservatism and defense of the Catholic culture. Murray died on August 1, 2002. Edmundo Murray See also: PRESS, the Irish in Latin America References Coghlan, Eduardo A. Los Irlandeses en la Argentina: Su Actuación y Descendencia. Buenos Aires: Author’s Edition, 1987. www.academiaperiodismo.org.ar/ (accessed January 20, 2004).
MURRAY, THOMAS (1871–) Thomas Murray was a historian and author of the first and only history of the Irish in Argentina published in English to date. It is
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generally thought that Murray was born in 1871 in Kilbeggan, Co. Westmeath, the son of Patrick Murray and Anne Molloy. In 1897 he emigrated with his family to the United States, and in the early 1900s he went to Buenos Aires. He probably remained in the city and worked with records and files related to the Irish in Argentina. The main circle of Murray’s friends included some of the most notorious Irish nationalists of the time: Francis O’Grady, P. F. Byrne, McCorry, Michael (Mícheal Ban) Murphy, and the Southern Cross’s editor Gerald Foley. In 1913, he left Argentina for New York, where he published The Story of the Irish in Argentina (1919) and some of his poems. Murray returned to Buenos Aires in 1924 to promote his book, which was received unsympathetically by the Irish-Argentine media and the community in general. According to the first reviews in the Southern Cross, the author “has devoted a great deal of time and concentration to his work, and his sources of information are copious.” But some weeks later the same paper remarked that “there are some assertions, when the author advances his own personal opinions, with which we are not in agreement.” Murray’s 512-page book describes the history of the Irish community from the perspective of an outside observer intimately familiar with Irish Argentina’s people and places, in the language characteristic of early twentieth century Irish Catholic nationalism. Criticism of the Standard’s Dublin-born publisher Michael G. Mulhall as a shoneen (or West Briton) illustrates how contemporary political divisions in Ireland were reflected in Argentina’s Irish community. The book includes an account of the first Irish visitors to the River Plate, the initial Irish settlers in Buenos Aires during www.abc-clio.com
colonial times, Irish in the British campaigns of 1806 and 1807, military men in the wars of independence like William Brown, Peter Campbell, and John T. O’Brien, Irish sheep farmers, the account of William McCann’s trips through Buenos Aires province, Father Anthony Fahy and his relations, useful lists of contributors to Irish charities within Argentina and Ireland, as well as individual chronicles for each Irish community in the provinces, Irish chaplains and religious orders, schoolmasters, the press, and Irish societies. Among the sources Murray consulted were the Standard, the Southern Cross, Fianna review, the British Packet, La Gaceta Mercantil, La Nación, Revista del Plata, and many works of Argentine political and social writers like Mariano Moreno, Domingo F. Sarmiento, Bartolomé Mitre, Adolfo Alsina, and Vicente F. Lopez. Murray’s work remains the only published history (in English) of the Irish emigration to Argentina. Edmundo Murray See also: ARGENTINA; FAHY, Anthony; MULHALL, Michael George
MUSIC, COUNTRY AND IRISH Country and Irish music is a popular music genre that first appeared in Ireland in the 1960s and is still popular in Ireland today. The term “country and Irish music” is an allusion to American country and western music, a hybrid popular music genre that grew out of traditional folk music idioms played by settlers living in the rural southeastern United States in the 1800s. By the early twentieth century, American country music began to be featured on commercial recordings, and throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries it was tremendously
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successful on a global scale. American country music was popular in Ireland from the early twentieth century, and by the 1960s Irish artists began performing and recording country music in Ireland and the United States, Britain, and Europe. Country and Irish music differs very little in sound, instrumentation, or lyrical content from its American counterpart; instead, the phrase exists primarily as a marketing term to differentiate between country music created by Irish-born artists and country music imported to Ireland from the United States or other regions of the world. Ireland has had a connection to American country music from its earliest inception, which can be largely attributed to the fact that the roots of early American country music share much in common with Irish traditional music and folk song. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thousands of Scots-Irish, Scots, and English immigrated to the United States, many of whom settled in rural areas of the United States, including the Appalachian Mountain region. British, Scots, and Irish settlers continued performing musical traditions from their homelands, such as folksinging and instrumental dance tunes. In time, however, musicians came into contact with other styles and genres of music, and in Appalachia this ultimately resulted in the blending of British and Irish folk ballads and fiddle tunes, blues music of southern African Americans, southern religious hymns, and American popular music. The resultant melding of these seemingly disparate music traditions led in the 1800s to the birth of two music forerunners to country music: “hillbilly” music and old-time music—a type of music ensemble most commonly featuring a vocalist, fiddle, banjo, and guitar. www.abc-clio.com
In the early 1920s commercial recordings of old-time music first began to appear. The development of the recording industry in the 1920s as well as the establishment of radio stations throughout America in the early twentieth century helped transform country music from a regional vernacular music into a commercially successful popular music genre. As the country music recording industry grew, more and more recordings found their way to areas outside the United States, including Ireland. From the early 1900s Irish immigrants to the United States—whose ranks had by that time swelled to millions— sent American records home to their families, and country music was no exception. In addition, the establishment of a nationally funded radio network in Ireland by the early 1960s also furthered mass consumption of various American popular music styles, including country music. The first Irish country music artists emerged in Ireland in the 1960s, a time in which popular music genres, such as rock and roll, skiffle, ceilidh, showband, and folk were growing in popularity throughout Ireland because of newly formed radio and television media outlets as well as live music performances. Many early country artists got their start in other musical genres that were popular in Ireland at the time before finding a place in the burgeoning country music scene. Céilí music—a modern take on Irish traditional dance music that includes sound amplification, tighter orchestrations and fuller musical instrumentation— developed in the dance halls of New York, Britain, and Ireland in the 1920s and grew in popularity through the 1960s. Irish and country artist Philomena Begley, the “Queen of Irish Country” got her musical
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start as lead singer of the Old Cross Céilí Band in the 1960s, which later changed its name to Country Flavour to better suit its country music sound. In 1971 the band made the Irish Top 10 with “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow” and “Never Again.” Begley later formed her own band, the Ramblin’ Men, and she released several songs that topped the Irish charts, including “Ramblin’ Man,” “Blanket on the Ground,” “Wait a Little Longer,” “Once Around the Dance Floor,” and “Whiskey Drinkin’ You.” Country singer Susan McCann entered the music business as a teenager singing with the John Murphy Country Céilí Band. She embarked on a highly successful solo career as a country singer several years later and subsequently earned a place on the Irish charts with such hits as “Big Tom is Still King” and “String of Diamonds.” Showband music emerged in Ireland in the 1950s and featured lively, choreographed numbers in many musical idioms, including rock and roll, country, skiffle, and Dixieland, as well as slower love songs and ballads. Most of these performances took place in ballrooms and dance halls that were built throughout Ireland at that time to accommodate the booming interest in this popular music entertainment form. Showband groups such as the Capitol Showband and the Dixies often included country music in their acts. Artists such as Big Tom McBride, Larry Cunningham, and Brian Coll got their start in country music by fronting showbands. Big Tom first attracted attention by performing with the Mainliners on the Irish televised Showband Show and subsequently became one of the leading country acts of the 1970s. Big Tom also had a succession of hit singles in Ireland as a solo www.abc-clio.com
artist, including “Log Cabin for Sale,” and “Back to Castleblayney.” He also fronted the Travellers in the 1970s and rejoined the Mainliners in the late 1980s. Larry Cunningham entered the showband scene with the Mighty Avons, who released the hugely popular single “Lovely Leitrim.” He is also identified with many country singles, including “Pretty Little Girl from Omagh” and “Among the Wicklow Hills.” Cunningham left the Mighty Avons in the late 1960s to front the Country Blue Boys, a group that toured successfully for decades. Brian Coll began his musical career as lead vocalist with the Polka Dots and later performed with the highly successful showband group the Plattermen, before forming his own band, the Buckaroos, in 1968. Coll and the Plattermen had a number of hit singles, including “Give an Irish Girl to Me,” “These are My Mountains,” and “When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold.” Although the showband phenomenon lost its momentum in the early 1970s, showband artists who had specialized in country and western music continued to successfully tour and perform throughout Ireland after its demise. In addition, new artists emerged on the country and Irish music scene, including such superstars as Ray Lynam—the undisputed “King of Irish Country”—and Daniel O’Donnell. Lynam fronted the Hillbillies for many years and had hit singles on the Irish chart with “Sweet Rosie Jones” and ‘“Gypsy, Jo and Me.” Daniel O’Donnell got his start as guitar player for his sister Margo’s country group before embarking on a solo career in the early 1980s with the single “Donegal Shore.” He released his first album, Two Sides of Daniel O’Donnell, in 1985 and released numerous albums throughout the
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1980s and 1990s. O’Donnell has toured widely, produced several television shows in Ireland, and garnered numerous awards and accolades in Ireland, Britain, and the United States. Irish-language country and Irish music (referred to in Irish Gaelic as Gaelcheoil Tiré) emerged in the 1980s in the Conamara Gaeltacht and enjoyed popular success for years to follow. Singers such as John Beag Ó Flatharta, Peader Ó Flatharta, Martin Joe Ó Flatharta, Beairtle Ó Domhnaill, Pádraig Mac Donncha, Dara Bán Mac Donncha, Tomás Mac An Iomaire, Tomás Mac Eoin, and Annamaria Nic Dhonncha released Gaelcheoil Tiré recordings through the publishing company Chló Iar-Chonnachta, performed on Irish-language radio station Raidió na Gaeltachta, and appeared in local pubs and halls throughout Conamara. Numerous country and Irish artists enjoyed success in the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond, including Declan Nerney, Áine Cromie, Mick Flavin, Kathy Durkan, Anne Breen, Louise Morrissey, John Hogan, Michael O’Brien, Mary Duff, Paddy O’Brien, Mike Denver, Patrick Feeney, Barry Doyle, Helen McCabe, Michael English, and Kieran McGilligan. Although country and Irish music is not as popular as it was in its heyday, it still attracts a loyal following to the present day. Erin Stapleton-Corcoran See also: APPALACHIA References Carthy, Brian. The A-Z of Country and Irish Stars. Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1991. O’Connor, Nuala. Bringing it all Back Home: The Influence of Irish Music at Home and Overseas. 2nd ed. Dublin: Merlin Publishing, 2001. Power, Vincent. Send ’em Home Sweatin’: The Showbands’ Story. Dublin: Kildanore Press, 1990. www.abc-clio.com
MUSIC IN AMERICA, IRISH American music history owes much to its many immigrant populations, for the musical traditions they brought to their new homeland have made an undeniable impact on the American musical landscape. The musical relationship between the United States and Ireland is long, beginning with the first Irish settlers to the United States in the late seventeenth century. However, the greatest period of musical exchange between America and Ireland began in the mid-1800s and continued through the early 1900s, when millions of Irish immigrated to the United States. Many of these immigrants were amateur musicians and dancers, and they continued to play traditional music and to dance in their new homeland. Irish-American music and dance performance continue today, particularly in metropolitan centers. However, the American performance context had an undeniable impact upon Irish music, for it accelerated musical exchange among musicians from various regions of Ireland and created a demand for new styles of musical performance to mirror the ever-changing position of the Irish in American society. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the advent of new theatrical traditions and commercial sound recordings as well as the dissemination of music on radio and television further transformed Irish music in both the United States and Ireland, and Irish musicians in America have produced music in Irish traditional, folk, popular, and rock idioms. Today there remain strong cultural ties between Ireland and America, as evidenced by the active Irish festival circuit in the United States and the ongoing popularity of Irish traditional, rock, folk, and pop music in the United States today.
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Irish Traditional Music in Ireland Traditionally, the Irish possess various styles and repertoires of vocal performance, all of which have found their way—although with varying degrees of success and visibility— into the Irish-American performance tradition. Irish traditional song, like Irish traditional instrumental music, is transmitted and performed orally and comprises regional repertoires and variations. Because of the bilingualism of the island the Irish song repertoire consists of songs in both the Irish and English languages. The oldest type of Irish traditional singing—called sean nós (meaning “old style”) is unaccompanied, unmetered, and highly ornamented. This style of singing is generally associated with rural regions of Ireland, is more frequently performed in the Irish language (although strong arguments may be made for the existence of English language sean nós), and was traditionally performed in small community gatherings. Most Irishlanguage songs are lyrical in nature, for they express personal stories in poetic language and imagery rather than in an explicit narrative form. Themes of love are the most common, although songs that praise specific locales or recount history and lore are also prevalent. Englishlanguage songs contain features from both the Irish-language song tradition and ballads imported from Britain. Themes found in English-language songs are as numerous as the experiences that may befall a person in the course of daily life; but broad categories of English-language song include lullabies, love songs, work songs, political songs, and religious songs. Irish instrumental music traditionally referred to a number of dance styles including jigs, reels, hornpipes, polkas, mazurkas, flings, barn dances and waltzes, as well as www.abc-clio.com
other instrumental pieces such as slow airs, marches, and planxties. The melodic line of Irish instrumental music was usually played on the fiddle, uilleann pipes, harp, wooden flute, tin whistle, accordion, or concertina, while the bodhrán and bones played Irish traditional dance music, which was originally intended for accompaniment to set, step, céilí, or sean-nós dance, but music was also performed solely for listening and entertainment at informal community contexts, such as sessions or céilídh. Traditionally, Irish songs and instrumental music were orally transmitted from one musician to another, and because of the personal nature of the music they featured stylistic features and repertoires that were tied to specific regions of Ireland.
The Arrival of Irish Musicians in America The first Irish musicians to arrive in the United States were among the nearly half million Irish who immigrated to the United States in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most of whom were of Scots-Irish descent. The Scots-Irish were predominantly Protestants from Ulster, and they settled in both rural and urban areas scattered throughout the United States. They made their most pronounced and recognizable musical contribution in the southeastern states of West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Scots-Irish settlers continued performing musical traditions from their homelands, such as folksinging and instrumental dance tunes, but over time their musical traditions melded with other styles and genres of music performed in the region, such as British ballads and fiddle tunes, AfricanAmerican vernacular music, southern
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religious hymns, and American popular music. This musical amalgam became the foundation for Appalachian folk, old time, and hillbilly music, ultimately leading in the twentieth century to the creation of country and bluegrass music. Between 1845 and 1920 over a million Irish emigrants arrived in the United States, mainly in the aftermath of the Great Irish Famine. Irish immigrants of this period were predominantly Catholics from rural, impoverished, and remote regions of Ireland. These areas of Ireland were known for their strong familial and community bonds as well as their wealth of folk traditions, including Irish traditional song, music, and dance. Many of the Irish emigrants of this period settled in urban areas such as New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Those who had been musicians and dancers in Ireland often continued to play traditional music and to dance in America. However, Irish musicians— many of whom were for the first time residing in close proximity to people from villages and counties outside their own—sang, played music, and danced together, which ultimately contributed to the exchange and assimilation of musical styles and repertories once associated with specific localities in Ireland. Irish traditional musicians continued to gather and perform together throughout the twentieth century, particularly in cities such as New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. In America Irish musicians would play at private house parties, pubs, taverns, at Irish music clubs, and for céilídh and feisanna (music and dance festivals that often included competitive events). In addition, new performance contexts had a definite impact on Irish traditional music. During the first half of www.abc-clio.com
the twentieth century, particularly in the 1930s, dance halls sprang up in all major American cities, and many of these featured Irish traditional musicians. Dance hall bands were often asked to play a variety of music styles, and because of the size of the halls and the number of participants they began playing music that featured a more forceful rhythm and louder dynamics. In the first half of the twentieth century Irish dance bands—such as the Four Provinces Orchestra (Philadelphia), Dan Sullivan’s Shamrock Band (Boston), the Harp and Shamrock Orchestra (Chicago), and the Flanagan Brothers (New York) performed in dance halls throughout the United States (e.g., Celtic Hall in New York City or Erin’s Isle in Chicago). These céilí bands forged a hybrid Irish-American musical idiom in which traditional instruments were combined with the piccolo, saxophone, piano, and drum set, the musical parts were arranged in a manner similar to mainstream big bands, and they played current hits of the days in addition to Irish music.
The Irish in American Musical Theater The emergence of popular theater in the early 1800s had a massive impact on various styles and genres of music in America at that time, including Irish music. A career in the burgeoning entertainment industry offered new employment opportunities to those—including the Irish—whose options had generally been limited to work in manual labor or civil service. As a result, numerous Irish who showed talent in music, singing, or dancing entered the theater business, thereby playing a pivotal role in the development of American popular
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theater forms of minstrelsy, variety shows, and vaudeville. In addition, the image of the Irish in America was deeply influenced by this newly emergent performance medium, for images of the Irish—both negative and humorous—were plentiful on stage from its early years. The minstrel show emerged in the 1830s and quickly became the most popular form of public entertainment in the United States. Early minstrel shows featured working-class white men who blackened their faces and performed music and dance, most commonly in parody of plantation slave culture. The Irish had a prominent role in minstrelsy from the beginning, as most minstrel companies featured Irish tenors and Irish dancers, many of the music and dances in the productions were based on or featured elements of Scottish and Irish dance tunes (e.g., “Jimmy Crack Corn” or “Blue Tail Fly” was based on an Irish hornpipe), and elements of Irish step dance were used to create soft shoe, the style of dancing often featured on stage. Daniel Decatur Emmett (1815–1904), a composer and performer of Irish ancestry, is credited, along with a performance group known as the Virginia Minstrels, with creating the first full-length minstrel show, entitled The Essence of Old Virginny (1833), and he wrote “Dixie,” perhaps the most successful song ever performed on the minstrel stage. Minstrelsy was very successful through the 1870s, but by the 1880s it declined in popularity because its racist overtones grew increasingly objectionable to audiences, particularly after the Civil War. Irish and Irish-American minstrel performers of note include George Primrose, Billy West, Edwin Kelly of Leon and Kelly’s Minstrels, R. M. Hooley, J. W. Raynor, Daniel www.abc-clio.com
Webster O’Brien, Matt Peel, Barney Fagen, Frank McNish, and Sam Decere. In addition, many Irish performers got their start in minstrelsy before moving on to a career in vaudeville, solo singing, or drama, including Dan Bryant, John Murphy of Murphy and Mack’s Minstrels, John Collins, Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore, and Chauncey Olcott. The variety show emerged in America by the 1840s. Variety shows were offered at variety saloons, and they shared common features with minstrelsy, in particular its use of loosely connected skits. However, variety shows differed from minstrelsy in that they featured a wider range of subject matters. Catering strictly to male audiences, variety saloons offered performances that were often unrefined in production and crude in tone. The stereotype of the stage Irishman—inebriated, overly sentimental, dense, illogical, and pugilistic— was born in variety saloons, and songs and stage numbers that reinforced the stereotype of the “Paddy” were plentiful. Irish entertainers played an important role in this theatrical genre, acting as singers, dancers, musicians, and sketch comedians. American variety saloons remained popular through the 1870s, when they were supplanted by vaudeville, a theatrical genre that evolved from the “oleo,” a short variety segment once showcased between numbers in minstrel performances. Theater owner and variety show performer Tony Pastor (1837–1908) saw the opportunity to draw larger audiences by creating a cleaner, more refined theatrical genre that catered to both genders. In 1865 Pastor opened Tony Pastor’s Opera House in New York City, and his theater productions quickly became wildly popular with middle-class audiences. A typical vaudeville show
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consisted of eight to 20 different acts, ranging from silent pantomime animal tricks, and contortionists to musical number, songs, comedy acts, and monologues. Other vaudeville theater houses opened as a result of Pastor’s success, a vaudeville circuit was created, and vaudeville grew to become the most popular form of entertainment from the 1860s through the mid-1920s. Most vaudeville productions featured a jovial, lighthearted atmosphere, which appealed to audiences seeking a release from the stress and tedium of daily life. Comedy teams, such as the Irish “double act,” and the Irish “four act” became a common feature on vaudeville stages, represented by duos such as McNulty and Murray, Clooney and Ryan, Needham and Kelly, and Kelly and Ryan, as well as quartets such as the Four Shamrocks, the Four Emeralds, the Four Mortons, and the Four Cohans. Many performers of Irish descent got their start in vaudeville, including performer and songwriter William J. Scanlan (1856–1908), actress and comedian Gracie Allen (1895–1964), Maggie Cline (1857–1934), and playwright and production team Edward (Ned) Harrigan (1844–1911) and Tony Hart (born Anthony Cannon, 1855–1891), as well as performer George M. Cohan (1878–1942). Ned Harrigan, a New York native of mixed English and Irish ancestry, performed banjo and acted in both minstrel shows and variety shows as a youth. Harrigan met Tony Hart in 1871, who was then a 16-year-old minstrel and variety show performer of Irish descent. Harrigan and Hart began their career together performing short humorous sketches that satirized various issues facing ethnic and immigrant groups in post–Civil War New York, www.abc-clio.com
such as political corruption, race relations and ethnic conflict, and issues of class and social standing. These skits soon evolved into multi-scene, stand-alone theatrical performances. The duo created more than three dozen original productions, but their most famous works featured the Mulligan Guards, a quasi-military unit that mocked military organizations sponsored by New York politicians in the 1870s. Focusing specifically on the politically ambitious saloon owner Dan Mulligan, these productions included comedic repartee, battles between various militia units, and musical numbers. Several songs from the Mulligan Guard franchise—in particular “St. Patrick’s Day” and “The Mulligan Guard”—were incredibly popular, with the latter finding its way to India, where British troops used it as a marching tune. After the phenomenal success of The Mulligan Guard (1873), Harrigan and Hart further explored the life of Dan Mulligan, his family, and friends in subsequent productions. They became household names among theatergoers of the late nineteenth century, and their musical productions are widely credited for setting the stage for the American musical comedy that emerged on Broadway in the 1920s. George M. Cohan was America’s first show business superstar, known coast to coast as a successful actor, singer, dancer, playwright, composer, librettist, director, and producer. Raised in a second-generation Irish-American theatrical family, Cohan began performing with the family vaudeville troupe the Four Cohans as a child. After successfully producing his first musical play, Cohan moved away from vaudeville and embarked on a career in the newly emerging theatrical form known as the musical, which differed from vaudeville in that
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each song or musical number was connected by a theme or story line. Cohan produced numerous plays and musicals during his lifetime, many of which contained Irish-themed numbers such as “Harrigan,” “Nellie Kelly, I Love You,” and “Molly Malone.” However, Cohan is probably better known for his songs “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” and “Over There,” all of which focused on American and patriotic themes. Countless Irish and Irish-American performers followed in Cohan’s path, making their name in musical theater—both on Broadway and on screen—including James Cagney (1899–1986), Gene Kelly (1912–1996), Judy Garland (1922–1969), and Debbie Reynolds (1932–).
The Popularization of Irish Music in America Various technological advances, such as music publishing and sound recordings, affected Irish music performance from the late 1700s onward. Within the American context music publishing permanently affected Irish musical performance and practice as well as the Irish traditional music and song repertoire in both the United States and Ireland, for the publication of music created an enduring, unchanging, written musical record within a musical practice that had previously been solely oral and ephemeral. By the early 1800s, the music publishing business was firmly established in the United States, due in part to the rising interest in music that could be played at home on the piano. Irish songs were popular with music publishers and their audiences from the very beginning of the music publishing enterprise, and many of these published pieces found www.abc-clio.com
their way back to Ireland, influencing the musical scene there as well. Throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thousands of American songbooks were published that featured Irish or Irish-themed songs. Indicative of the experiences of the Irish in America, Irish songs published in America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries included subjects such as emigration, the voyage to America from Ireland, the Irish involvement in the Revolutionary and Civil wars, the Irish involvement within politics and trade organizations, livelihood and employment of the Irish, familial and community life, stereotypical portrayals of the Irish in America, as well as nostalgic, romanticized odes to the “Auld Sod.” The most famous Irish songwriter of the early 1800s was Thomas Moore (1779–1852), whose music was characterized by resetting ancient Irish harp tunes to sentimental, oftentimes nationalistic lyrics. Moore’s music grew in currency as popular music entertainment in England, Ireland, and the United States soon after the publication of his Irish Melodies in 1808. Moore was the most popular songwriter in America throughout the 1820s and 1830s, and he was the leading contributor to American song collections published between 1825 and 1850. Moore’s Irish Melodies set the standard for countless songwriters; his music directly influenced the works of other Irish-born composers, including Samuel Lover (1797–1868), Peter Moran, William Balfe (1808–1870), and James Gaspard Maeder (1809–1876), as well as the American composer Stephen Foster (1826–1864). Foster, who was of Scots-Irish ancestry, produced music that appeared in songbooks and on the minstrel stage. Foster is most well-known for his
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songs “Oh! Susanna,” “Old Folks At Home,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” and “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair.” Irish instrumental music was also featured in collections of Irish music from the 1800s onward. Music collector Francis O’Neill (1848–1936) made a tremendous impact on Irish traditional music through his printed compilations of Irish dance music. O’Neill immigrated to America as a young man, joined the Chicago police force in the 1870s, and became chief of police by 1901. When O’Neill arrived in Chicago, he found a thriving musical community in which he was an active participant. Beginning in the 1880s, he began collecting music from Irish traditional musicians living in Chicago as well as other previously printed sources. He produced O’Neill’s Music of Ireland in 1803, which was the largest collection of Irish music ever published at that time. He followed this seminal work with several other tune collections, including The Dance Music of Ireland: 1001 Gems (1907) as well as two treatises on Irish music. By the early 1900s a sizable portion of the American population was foreign born. With the invention of the sound recording and the gramophone in the late 1800s, industrialists within the newly emerging recording industry seized on the opportunity to make a profit by producing ethnic recordings targeted for the immigrant population. Because of the sizable Irish-born population in America at that time, Irish and quasi-Irish recordings appeared on record from the very beginning of the industry. During this so-called “golden age of Irish music” of the early twentieth century, a vast body of Irish music was recorded by major recording labels. These recordings— first on wax cylinders and later on www.abc-clio.com
phonograph recordings—included instrumental music, vocal recordings, and Irishthemed musical numbers from theatrical productions. Irish music recordings were hugely successful with Irish Americans, non-Irish Americans, and the Irish in Ireland. Several Irish instrumentalists made names for themselves in the burgeoning Irish music recording industry in America, including such pivotal figures as uilleann piper Patsy Touhey (1865–1923), flutist John McKenna (1880–1947), and fiddlers James Morrison (1893–1947) and Michael Coleman (1891–1946). These artists as well as numerous others produced Irish instrumental recordings of such note in the early 1900s that they continue to guide Irish musicians in Ireland and America. Many styles of song were well received during the early years of the American recording industry, such as traditional ballads, stage skits, comic songs, vaudeville routines, and nostalgic compositions of Tin Pan Alley. However, the most popular type of Irish song recorded was that of the Irish tenor, a style of singing that was most typified by sentimental, melodramatic songs executed in an operatic singing style. Two formidable Irish tenors of this period were Chauncey Olcott (1860–1932; born Chancellor John Olcott) and John McCormack (1884–1945). Olcott was born in New York State to an Irish-born mother and grew up in an “Irish shanty” along the banks of the Erie River. Olcott made his debut on the minstrel stage in Chicago at age 19, after which he toured throughout the United States and Britain. Olcott was very successful in the minstrel shows, but he soon garnered special attention for his remarkable tenor voice and was encouraged to sing Irish ballads and to take
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leading roles in plays, operas, and operettas. Olcott acted in several Broadway plays, including Barry of Ballymore, Isle O’ Dreams, The Heart of Paddy Whack, and Machusla. Olcott collaborated with George Graff and Ernest Ball on the composition of many famous Irish ballads, including “Mother Machree,” “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” “Goodbye My Emerald Land,” “The Wearing of the Green,” and “Sure They Call It Ireland,” but he was wholly responsible for the lyrics to “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” and he composed both the melody and lyrics for “My Wild Irish Rose.” John McCormack (1884–1945) was an Irish-born choir and operatic singer who enjoyed tremendous success as a live performer and recording artist. After studying the bel canto style of operatic singing in Italy in the early 1900s McCormack made his opera debut (1906) and began presenting ballad concerts shortly thereafter. He spent time touring in America after World War I, and his concerts featured German lieder; works by Handel, Mozart, and various Italian composers; and Irish folk and popular songs. McCormack’s recordings of Irish songs such as “The Minstrel Boy,” “The Harp that Once through Tara’s Hall,” “Dear Harp of My Country,” “The Last Rose of Summer,” “The Rose of Tralee,” and “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms” made him a household name in Ireland and America, and his recordings sold several million copies. Although Irish traditional music has never disappeared from the American landscape, from the early 1900s on Irish music that was produced in America revealed increasingly closer ties to mainstream American popular culture. This may be partly explained by the rapidly expanding entertainment industry of that time, which www.abc-clio.com
offered many mediums of performance and dissemination, such as theater, film, radio, and television. In addition, the Irish themselves became more assimilated into American society over time and, as a result, their Irish ethnic identity—while still incredibly important—evolved from being an everyday reality to one that could be adopted or omitted at will. Now perceiving themselves as “Irish Americans” rather than as the ethnic Irish residing in America, Irish-American audiences craved productions by Irish-American performers that not only entertained, but that also reflected their newly emergent Irish-American identity while simultaneously keeping pace with developments in the American popular music scene. Throughout the twentieth century, Irish-American musicians made a name for themselves in American classical music as well as in every genre of American popular music. Elements of Irish traditional, folk, and theatrical music have found their way into the work of several American composers of classical music, such as Victor Herbert (1859–1924), Edward Collins (1886–1951), Henry Cowell (1897–1965), and Samuel Barber (1910–1981). Within the jazz scene, several musicians of Irish ethnicity enjoyed highly successful careers, including Jimmy Dorsey (1904–1957) and Tommy Dorsey (1905–1956) of the Dorsey Brothers, Gerry Mulligan (1927–1996), and Roland Bernard “Bunny” Berigan (1908–1942). Countless singers of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s sang sentimental, Irish-themed songs on the radio, in movies, and on television programs, and Irish-American singers Bing Crosby (1904–1978), Dennis Day (1918–1988), and Ruthie Morrissey in particular showcased their Irish identity through song.
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During the early 1960s, Irish folk song found a new audience base in the United States and Ireland, spurred by the commercial success of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. Influenced by the American folk revival of the late 1950s and 1960s, Makem and the Clancys updated Irish songs—particularly traditional Irish ballads—by adding guitar or banjo accompaniment, which resulted in the introduction of rhythm and harmonic accompaniment to the Irish singing tradition. The so-called “Irish Beatles” made their debut on the Ed Sullivan Show and performed at the White House during the John F. Kennedy administration. Numerous Irish “ballad bands” emerged in Ireland and the United States after the phenomenal success of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. Throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, various elements of Irish traditional music—from the lyrical style and melodic line of Irish traditional ballads and dance tunes to less tangible elements such as imagery and poetry that evoke Irish identity and sentiment— have become enmeshed in rock, pop, country, folk, jazz, new age, and punk music. Examples include groups and solo artists such as U2, Hothouse Flowers, Horslips, Thin Lizzy, Clannad, Afro Celt Sound System, Van Morrison, Sinéad O’Connor, Thin Lizzy, the Corrs, the Cranberries, the Pogues, Black 47, Flogging Molly, and the Dropkick Murphys. Although the music performed by these and countless groups often bears little resemblance to Irish traditional music, it has offered additional genres of music through which Americans of Irish ethnicity as well as non-Irish Americans may explore Irish culture or express their own Irish cultural identity. In www.abc-clio.com
addition, the reception and enjoyment of Irish popular music has at times served as the entry point through which individuals become involved with more traditional Irish cultural expressions such as Irish dance and music.
The Revival of Irish Traditional Music in America By the late 1960s, Irish immigration to America had lessened to a great degree, and this reality, combined with the continuing assimilation of the Irish in America and the popularization of Irish music, all had negative implications for Irish traditional music performance. Irish traditional music in America was in serious decline as a public musical form, instead being performed and enjoyed primarily by small groups of musicians in private settings. However, during the 1970s, government organizations such as the Smithsonian Institute and the National Endowment for the Arts began providing funds to promote Irish traditional musicians in America. These endeavors were significant, for they funded concerts by Irish traditional musicians; allowed notable, yet underrepresented Irish traditional musicians, such as Joe Shannon, John McGreevy, Eleanor Neary, James Keane, Frank Thornton, Terry Teahan, Sean McGlynn, Gus Collins, Gene Kelly, Eddie Cahill, and Maureen McGlynn, to be recorded for the first time on commercial recordings like Traditional Irish Music in America: Chicago (1978) and Traditional Irish Music in America: The East Coast (1970s); and supplied funds to support Irish organizations. During the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Irish traditional music study and performance reemerged and evolved in the United States because of the revival of Irish
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traditional culture under way at that time and a new wave of Irish immigration to America, as well as the universal movement to explore one’s ethnic roots that emerged in America in the 1970s. Many young American-born Irish and recent immigrants to America participated in Irish traditional music, with key figures such as Laurence Nugent, John Williams, Eileen Ivers, Martin Hayes, Joannie Madden, John Whelan, Jerry Sullivan, Seamus Egan, and Liz Carroll achieving particular success, either by winning musical competitions in America and Ireland, teaching and lecturing throughout the United States, or touring with traditional groups such as Solas, Cherish the Ladies, Trian, and many others. Folklorist, scholar, and musician Mick Moloney has contributed immensely to the ongoing revival of Irish traditional music through his research on IrishAmerican music, his frequent concert and lecture appearances pertaining to Irish music in America, and the 1977 founding of The Green Fields of America, a multiyear concert tour that has funded concerts of immigrant Irish and native-born players of Irish music. Today, Irish traditional music is highly visible in American society and people interested in attending Irish traditional music performances or taking up Irish traditional music or dance have a myriad of opportunities and means by which to do so. These include the multitude of Irish festivals and concerts sponsored by organizations throughout the country, countless music sessions held at Irish pubs throughout the United States, the growing number of Irish cultural centers and academic departments on university campuses, a booming Irish music recording industry, the appearance of Irish traditional music in commercial www.abc-clio.com
films (e.g., The Brothers McMullen and Michael Collins) and dance spectacles (e.g., Riverdance and Lord of the Dance), and the frequent performance of Irish traditional music on public radio and television. Links between Irish musicians in America and Ireland are stronger than ever before because of affordable and air travel, a vigorous, international Irish concert circuit, and advances in information technology, all of which encourage Irish musicians on both sides of the Atlantic to collaborate and exchange music more frequently, often in new and innovative ways. Today, Irish music in America successfully bridges popular and traditional realms of performance and draws audiences and participants regardless of their ethnic background. Erin Stapleton-Corcoran
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See also: BALFE, Michael W.; BALL, Ernest R.; BOSTON; CAGNEY, James; CLANCY BROTHERS, the; COHAN, George M.; COLEMAN, Michael; FOSTER, Stephen Collins; HARRIGAN, Edward, and HART, Tony; HERBERT, Victor August; KELLY, Gene; McCORMACK, John; MOLONEY, Mick; MOORE, Thomas; MORRISON, Van; NEW YORK CITY; OLCOTT, Chauncey; SAN FRANCISCO; SCANLAN, William J.; SCOTS-IRISH CULTURE; U2 References Carolan, Nick. A Harvest Saved: Francis O’Neill and Irish Music in Chicago. Cork: Ossian, 1997. Grimes, Robert R. How Shall We Sing in a Foreign Land: Music of Irish Catholic Immigrants in the Antebellum United States. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1996. McCullough, Lawrence. “Irish Music in Chicago: An Ethnomusicological Study.” PhD dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1978. Miller, Rebecca. “Irish Music.” In The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music: The United States and Canada, edited by Ellen Koskoff, 842–846. New York: Garland, 2001. 1-800-368-6868
MYLES, EILEEN Moloney, Mick. Far From the Shamrock Shore: The Story of Irish Immigration through Song. New York: Crown, 2002. Moloney, Mick. “Irish Ethnic Recordings and the Irish American Imagination.” In Ethnic Recordings in America: A Neglected Heritage. Washington, DC: American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, 1982. Moloney, Mick. “Irish Music in America: Continuity and Change.” PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1992. O’ Connor, Nuala. Bringing it all Back Home: The Influence of Irish Music at Home and Overseas, Dublin: Merlin Publishing, 2001. Williams, William H. A.’Twas Only an Irishman’s Dream: The Image of Ireland and the Irish in American Popular Song Lyrics, 1800–1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.
MYLES, EILEEN (1949–) Eileen Myles was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Terrence Myles, a postman with Irish ancestry, and Genevieve Preston Myles Hannibal, a secretary of Polish descent. She was educated in Catholic schools and went on to take her bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts (Boston) in 1971. She attended graduate school at Queens College in New York before embarking on a career as a full-time writer. She gave her first reading of her poetry in the famous New York music club CBGB’s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She became involved in the Poetry Project of Saint Mark’s Church, serving as artistic director there from 1984 to 1986. During her time there she cowrote two plays. The first, Joan of Arc, a Spiritual Entertainment, was written with Barbara McKay and Elinor Naven in 1979, and Patriarchy, a Play was written the following year. The Irony of the Leash (1978), which was her first published www.abc-clio.com
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collection of poetry, was followed by A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains (1982). She edited Ladies Museum: An Anthology of New Downtown Women Poets (1977) with Susie Timmons and Rochelle Kraut. She also edited a poetry magazine, dodgems, from 1977 to 1979, as well as a book with Liz Kotz entitled The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading, which won a Lambda Book Award in 1995. Her own work has been included in anthologies such as John Ashberry’s The Best American Poetry, 1988 and Postmodern American Poetry (1994). As well as writing on culture and literature for the Village Voice and The Nation, she has written art criticism for Art in America. Her poetry has been included in periodicals such as The New England Review, The Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, The Partisan Review, and many other publications. She has taught at New York University, the New School for Social Research, the California Institute of the Arts, and the Memphis College of Art, among other institutions. She ran for the office of U.S. president in the 1992 election. She is currently the professor of writing at the University of California, San Diego. Myles is one of the few lesbian poets in America today who is consistently able to attract a general readership as well as the interest of critics. She has worked in a wide array of media ranging from drama and autobiography to the public performance of her poetry, which makes it difficult to confine her work to any single category. In a poetry review written for The Nation Myles says, “poetry’s so tiny it’s universal: A famous painter might be invited by The New York Times to give us a tour of the Met, to show us what he knows, but for poets there’s no such building, or even the
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book-store. It’s simply the world.” Since she came out as a lesbian in 1977, her work has often been solely identified as that of a lesbian poet. However, it was only with her collection of poems entitled Sappho’s Boat (1982) that her lesbian identity was first explicitly expressed in her work. In her essay “The Lesbian Poet,” which is the clearest articulation of the way in which her sexuality is related to her poetry, she states that “more men ought to start unwriting themselves.” Most of the poems contained in her next collection, Bread and Water (1985), were written during an extended stay in
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Mexico. Her next work was an autobiographical memoir, Chelsea Girls (1994), in which she recounts her own upbringing in Boston and the effect of living with her alcoholic father. She also recalled her own struggles with alcoholism and drug use. In 1990 she took to the stage to perform Leaving New York, a fusion of different literary genres and her poetry and stories. Later, she saw her decision to run for the presidency in 1992 as an extension of her poetic and artistic interests. David Doyle
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Ireland and the Americas
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Other Titles in ABC-CLIO’s
Transatlantic Relations Series
Africa and the Americas, by Richard M. Juang and Noelle Morrissette Britain and the Americas, by Will Kaufman and Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson France and the Americas, by Bill Marshall Germany and the Americas, by Thomas Adam Iberia and the Americas, by J. Michael Francis
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Ireland and the Americas Culture, Politics, and History A Multidisciplinary Encyclopedia VOLUME III EDITED BY
James P. Byrne Philip Coleman Jason King
Transatlantic Relations Series Will Kaufman, Series Editor
Santa Barbara, California Denver, Colorado Oxford, England
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Copyright © 2008 by ABC-CLIO, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ireland and the Americas / edited by James P. Byrne, Philip Coleman, and Jason King. p. cm. — (Transatlantic relations series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-85109-614-5 (hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-85109-619-0 (ebook : alk. paper) 1. America—Relations—Ireland—Encyclopedias. 2. Ireland— Relations—America—Encyclopedias. 3. America—History—Encyclopedias. 4. Ireland—History—Encyclopedias. 5. North America—History—Encyclopedias. 6. Latin America—History—Encyclopedias. 7. South America—History— Encyclopedias. 8. America—Politics and government—Encyclopedias. 9. Ireland— Politics and government—Encyclopedias. I. Byrne, James P., 1968– II. Coleman, Philip Michael Joseph, 1972– III. King, Jason Francis, 1970– E18.75.I74 2008 327.730417—dc22 2007035381 12
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CONTENTS Advisory Board, xi Series Editor’s Preface, xiii Editors’ Preface, xv Topic Finder, xvii Chronologies of Ireland and the Americas, xxiii Ireland and Canada, xxiii Ireland and Latin America, xxv Ireland and the United States, xxxi Introductory Essays, 1 Introduction, 3 Ireland and Canada, 5 Ireland and Latin America, 15 Ireland and the Untied States of America, 27 Baltimore, 79 Barry, John, 80 Barry, Philip, 82 Bartholomew, Freddie, 83 Baseball, 84 Baseball Managers, Irish-American, 88 Baxter, José Luis “Joe,” 90 Beach, Amy Marcy, 92 Beach, Sylvia, 93 Beckett, Samuel, 94 Belize, 95 Bennett, William J., 97 Bergin, Patrick Connolly, 98 Boland, Eavan, 100 Bonney, William “Billy the Kid,” 101 Bord Fáilte Eireann, 103 Boston, 106 Bourke, John Gregory, 107 Boyle, Kathleen, 108 Brazil, 110
Abolitionism and Slavery, 41 Alabama, 44 Allen, Fred, 45 American Civil War, 47 American Conference for Irish Studies, 51 American Ireland Fund, 53 American Temperance Movement, 54 American War of Independence, 56 An Tóstal: Ireland at Home, 59 Ancient Order of Hibernians, 61 Anglin, Timothy Warren, 64 Appalachia, 65 Argentina, 66 Arkansas, 69 Armstrong, Thomas St. George, 70 Arthur, Chester A., 71 Baggot, King, 75 Balfe, Michael William, 76 Ball, Ernest R., 78 v www.abc-clio.com
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vi CONTENTS Brendan, Saint, “The Navigator,” 112 Brennan, Maeve M., 113 Brennan, Walter, 115 Brennan, William J., Jr., 116 Brenon, Herbert, 117 Brent, George, 119 Broderick, David Colbreth, 120 Brophy, John, 122 Brosnan, Pierce, 123 Brown, Alexander, 127 Brown, Clarence Leon, 128 Brown, William, 129 Bryan, George, 130 Buchanan, James, 131 Buckley, William F., Jr., 133 Bulfin, Eamon, 134 Bulfin, William, 135 Bulger, James “Whitey,” 137 Bulger, William Michael, 138 Burke, Edmund, 139 Butler, Jean, 141 Byrne, Donn, 142 Byrne, Gabriel, 143 Cagney, James, 147 Campbell, Peter, 149 Canals and the Irish Involvement, 150 Carney, Andrew, 155 Carney, Art, 155 Carolan, Turloch, 157 Carroll, Charles, 158 Carroll, James P., 159 Carroll, Bishop John, 160 Casement, Rodger David, 162 Casey, Eduardo, 164 Catholic Church, the, 165 Chandler, Raymond Thornton, 169 Cherish the Ladies, 170 Chieftains, The, 172 Chopin, Kate, 174 Clancy Brothers, the, 175 Cleburne, Patrick Ronayne, 177 Clinton, William Jefferson, 179 Cockran, William Bourke, 186 Coffey, Brian, 188 Coghlan, Eduardo Aquilio, 189 Cohalan, Daniel F., 190 Cohan, George M., 192 Coleman, Michael, 193 Colombia, 195 www.abc-clio.com
Colum, Mary, 196 Colum, Padraic, 198 Conn, William David, 200 Connolly, James Brendan, 202 Cooke, John William, 203 Costa Rica, 206 Cotter, William, 207 Coughlin, Father Charles Edward, 208 Cowell, Henry Dixon, 210 Craig, John, 212 Creaghe, John “Juan,” 213 Creighton, Edward Charles, 215 Creighton, John Andrew, 216 Croker, Richard, 217 Crosby, Bing, 219 Crouch, Frederick Nicholls, 221 Curley, James Michael, 222 Curran, Mary Doyle, 223 Cusack, Cyril, 224 Cusack, Margaret Anna, 225 Dailey, Dan, 229 Daly, “John” Augustin, 230 Daly, Marcus, 231 Davin, Nicholas Flood, 232 Davitt, Michael, 234 Day, Dennis, 235 Day-Lewis, Daniel, 236 De Chastelain, John, 239 De Valera, Eamon, 240 Delanty, Greg, 243 Delaware, 245 Dempsey, George T., 246 Dempsey, Jack, 247 Derrane, Joe, 249 Devereux, John, 250 Devoy, John, 252 Dillon, Patrick Joseph, 254 Diplomatic Relations, Irish–Latin American, 255 Domestic Servants, Irish, 257 Dongan, Thomas, 260 Donleavy, J. P., 261 Donovan, Gerard, 263 Dorsey, Thomas Francis “Tommy,” 264 Douglass, Frederick, 265 Downey, Morton, 268 Doyle, Roddy, 269 Draft Riots, 270 Dresden Affair, 273 ABC-CLIO
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CONTENTS vii Duggan, Thomas, 275 Dunne, Finley Peter, 276 Dunne, Irene Marie, 278 Durcan, Paul, 279
Foster, Vere Henry Louis, 354 Furlong, Guillermo, 356
Eaton, Timothy E., 283 Egan, Desmond, 285 Eire Society of Boston, The, 286 El Salvador, 288 Ellman, Richard David, 289 Emigration, 290 Emmet, John Patten, 293 Emmet, Thomas Addis, 295 Ethnic and Race Relations, Irish and African Americans, 296 Ethnic and Race Relations, Irish and French Canadians, 300 Ethnic and Race Relations, Irish and Indigenous Peoples, 302 Ethnic and Race Relations, Irish and Italians, 306 Ethnic and Race Relations, Irish and Latinos, 309
Gaelic Athletic Association, 359 Gallagher, Tess, 361 Garland, Judy, 362 Garson, Greer, 366 Gaughren, Father Matthew, 367 Georgia, 368 Gibbons, Cedric, 369 Gilmore, Patrick Sarsfield, 370 Gleason, Jackie, 372 Gleeson, Brendan, 372 Gogarty, Oliver St. John, 373 Gordon, Mary, 374 Gore, Robert, 375 Grace, William Russell, 376 Gray, David, 378 Great Famine, The, 379 Grennan, Eamon, 385 Grosse Ile, 386 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 387 Guiney, Louise Imogene, 389
Faction Fighting, 313 Fahy (sometimes Fahey), Anthony Dominic, 316 Falkland/Malvinas Islands, 317 Farley, James Aloysius, 320 Farrell, Edelmiro Juan, 322 Farrell, Eileen, 323 Farrow, Mia, 324 Fay, Francis Anthony “Frank,” 326 Federal Theatre Project, 327 Feeney, Charles “Chuck,” 329 Fenians, 330 Fitzgerald, Barry, 332 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 333 Fitzsimons, Patrick, 336 Flaherty, Robert J., 336 Flanagan, Thomas, 338 Flatley, Michael, 340 Fleming, Thomas J., 340 Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 342 Foley (also Foli), Allan James, 343 Ford, Henry, 343 Ford, John, 346 Ford, Patrick, 348 Foreign Policy, Irish, 350 Foster, Stephen Collins, 352
Hackett, Francis, 391 Hanlon, Ned, 392 Harnett, William Michael, 394 Harrigan, Edward and Hart, Tony, 395 Harris, Richard, 398 Harrison, Frank Llewellyn, 401 Hayes, Catherine, 402 Hayes, Helen (Brown), 403 Hayes, Archbishop Patrick Joseph, 404 Healy, Michael Morris, 406 Heaney, Seamus, 407 Heffernan, Michael, 409 Henry, John, 410 Herbert, Victor August, 411 Hinds, Ciarán, 413 Hoban, James, 414 Hodgins, Jack, 415 Holkeri, Harri, 416 Holland, John Phillip, 416 Honduras, 418 Horgan, Paul George Vincent O’Shaughnessy, 419 Horse Racing, 421 Hovenden, Thomas, 424 Howard, Maureen, 426 Howe, Fanny Quincy, 427
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viii CONTENTS Hughes, Archbishop John, 430 Hurling in Argentina, 434 Huston, Angelica, 437 Huston, John, 438 Huston, Walter, 442 Illinois, 445 Indiana, 447 Ingram, Rex, 448 Iowa, 450 Ireland, John, 451 Irish Dancing in America, 453 Irish Festival Singers, 455 Irish Festivals in the United States, 456 Irish Linen in North America, 460 Irish Republican Army, 461 Irish Republican Brotherhood, 466 Irish Travelers in the United States, 468 Irish Yankees, 472 Jackson, Andrew, 473 James, Jesse Woodsom, 475 Jeanie Johnston, the, 476 Jeffers, Robinson, 477 Johnson, Sir William, 478 Jordan, Kate, 480 Jordan, Neil, 481 Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius, 482 Kearns, Thomas, 485 Kelly, Gene, 487 Kelly, George “Machine Gun,” 488 Kelly, Grace, 490 Kelly, “Honest” John, 491 Kennedy Family, 492 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 495 Kentucky, 497 Keough, Donald R., 499 Kilmer, (Alfred) Joyce, 502 King, John, 503 Kinsella, Thomas, 504 Knights of Labor, 505 Ladies’ Land League, 509 Land League, 510 Language, the Irish, 513 Lavin, Mary, 516 Law, Andrew Bonar, 517 Liddy, James, 518 Literature, American Children’s, 519 www.abc-clio.com
Literature, Irish-Argentine, 521 Lynch, Benito Eduardo, 523 Lynch, Elisa (Eliza), 524 Lynch, Archbishop John Joseph, 526 Lynch, P. J., 527 Lynch, Thomas, 528 MacDonald, Michael Patrick, 531 MacGowan, Michael, 532 MacGowan, Shane, 533 MacGowran, Jack, 535 Mack, Connie, 536 Mackenna, John, 538 Madden, Richard Robert, 539 Maguire, John Walter, 541 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 542 Maine, 544 Malone, Dorothy, 546 Maritime Provinces (Canada), 547 Maryland, 548 Massachusetts, 550 Massacre at Saint Patrick Church, the, 554 Mathew, Father Theobald, 554 Maury, Matthew Fontaine, 556 McCann, Colum, 557 McCann, Donal, 558 McCarey, Leo, 559 McCarthy, Joseph, 561 McCarthy, Joseph Vincent “Joe,” 563 McCarthy, Mary, 565 McCarthy, Patrick “Paddy,” 567 McCormack, John, 568 McCourt, Frank, 569 McDermott, Alice, 570 McDonald, Richard “Dick,” 570 McEnroe, John, 571 McGee, Thomas D’Arcy, 572 McGinley, Phyllis Louise, 574 McGonigle, Thomas, 575 McGraw, John Joseph, 576 McGuckian, Medbh, 578 McGuckin, Barton, 580 McGwire, Mark D., 581 McManus, George, 582 McNutt, Alexander, 583 McSwiney, Paul, 584 Meagher, Thomas Francis, 585 Mellon, Andrew William, 587 Mellon, Thomas, 589 Michigan, 590 ABC-CLIO
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CONTENTS ix Milwaukee Irish Fest, 592 Missouri, 593 Mitchel, John, 595 Mitchell, George J., 598 Mitchell, John, 599 Mitchell Principles, the, 601 Molly Maguires, 602 Moloney, Mick, 604 Montague, John, 605 Montreal, 606 Moore, Brian, 609 Moore, Christy, 610 Moore, Marianne, 611 Moore, Thomas, 613 Morrison, Bruce, 615 Morrison, Van, 616 Mott, Lucretia Coffin, 617 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 619 Muldoon, Paul, 621 Mulhall, Michael George, 622 Mulroney, Brian, 623 Mulvany, John, 624 Murphy, Charles Francis, 626 Murphy, Hermann Dudley, 627 Murphy, John James, 629 Murray, Luis Alberto, 631 Murray, Thomas, 631 Music, Country and Irish, 632 Music in America, Irish, 635 Myles, Eileen, 645 Nationalism, Irish-American, 647 Nationalism in the Twentieth Century, Irish-American, 653 Nativism and Anti-Catholicism, 658 Neeson, Liam, 660 Neilson, John, 661 Nelligan, Émile, 662 New Brunswick, 663 New Irish in America, 664 New Jersey, 666 New Orleans, 667 New York City, 669 Newfoundland and Labrador, 675 Niblo, William B., 677 Nicaragua, 678 No Irish Need Apply, 680 Noraid, 683 North Carolina, 685 Notre Dame University, 686 www.abc-clio.com
O’Brien, Charlotte Grace, 689 O’Brien, John Thomond, 690 O’Brien, Pat, 691 O’Brien, Tim, 693 O’Connell, Daniel, 694 O’Connor, Edwin, 700 O’Connor, “Mary” Flannery, 702 O’Connor, Francisco “Frank” Burdett, 704 O’Connor, Pat, 706 O’Faolain, Nuala, 707 O’Gorman, Camila, 708 O’Gorman, Edmundo and Juan, 709 O’Gorman, Michael, 710 O’Hara, Frank, 711 O’Hara, Maureen, 712 O’Herlihy, Dan, 714 O’Higgins, Ambrose (Ambrosio), 715 Ohio, 716 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 718 O’Kelly, Aloysius C., 720 Oklahoma, 721 Olcott, Chauncey (John Chancellor), 723 O’Leary, Daniel Florence, 724 O’Leary, Jane, 726 O’Leary, Juan Emiliano, 726 O’Mahony, John, 728 O’Malley, Walter, 729 O’Neill, Eugene, 731 O’Neill, Francis, 733 O’Neill, Rose Cecil, 734 O’Neill, Jr., Thomas “Tip,” 736 Ontario, 737 Orange Order, 739 Oregon, 740 O’Reilly, John Boyle, 743 O’Roarke, Julián “Huberto,” 745 O’Sullivan, Denis, 746 O’Sullivan, Timothy H., 746 Panama, 749 Paraguay, 750 Passenger Acts, 751 Patterson, Frank, 753 Pearson, Noel, 754 Peck, Gregory, 755 Pennsylvania, 757 Political Parties, Irish, 759 Powderly, Terence Vincent, 765 Power, Frederick Tyrone Sr., 767 Presbyterianism, 768 ABC-CLIO
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x CONTENTS Press, the Ethnic Irish, 770 Press, the Irish in Latin America, 774
Smurfit, Sir Michael W. J., KBE, 862 Soccer, Early Argentine, 865 Somerville, Edith Œnone, 867 South Carolina, 868 South Dakota, 869 Spellman, Archbishop Francis Joseph, 871 Stoker, Abraham “Bram,” 873 Sullivan, John L., 874
Quebec City, 779 Quill, Michael Joseph, 780 Quinn, Declan, 782 Quinn, Glenn, 783 Reagan, Ronald Wilson, 785 Redshaw, Thomas Dillon, 788 Re-emigrants within the Americas, 789 Repeal Movement, 789 Research Collections, Irish, in Canada, 791 Research Collections, Irish, in the United States, 798 Reynolds, Debbie, 804 Rhode Island, 806 Robinson, Mary, 808 Rowan, Stephen C., 814 Ryan, Abram Joseph, 815 Ryan, Cathie, 816 Sadlier, Mary Anne, 819 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 820 Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, 822 Saint Patrick’s Day Parades, 823 Sampson, Willliam, 828 San Francisco, 829 San Patricios Brigade, 832 Scanlan, William J., 833 Scots-Irish, 834 Scots-Irish and Military Conflict, 835 Scots-Irish Culture, 838 Scots-Irish Patterns of Settlement, Canada, 841 Scots-Irish Patterns of Settlement, United States, 846 Scots-Irish Politics, 848 Scully, William, 850 Shackleton, Ernest, 852 Shaw, George Bernard, 854 Sheridan, Jim, 856 Sheridan, Peter, 857 Smith, Alfred Emmanuel “Al,” 858
Tallchief, Maria, 877 Tammany Hall, 878 Tennessee, 881 Texas, 882 Titanic, Irish on the, 883 Travel Patterns from Ireland to South America, 886 Tully, Jim, 889 Tunney, James Joseph “Gene,” 890 Tuohy, Patrick J., 891 Tweed, William “Boss,” 893 U2, 895 United Irish League of America, 897 Uruguay, 899 Venezuela, 901 Vicuña Mackenna, Benjamín, 902 Virginia, 903 Wall, Eamonn, 905 Wallace, William Vincent, 906 Walsh, María Elena, 907 Walsh, Raoul, 908 Walsh, Rodolfo, 909 Washington, D.C., 910 Wayne, John, 912 Webb, Richard Davis, 914 Wellman, William A., 915 Wilson, Thomas Woodrow, 917 Winch, Terence, 919 Wright, Thomas Charles James, 921 Yeats, John Butler, 923 Yeats, William Butler, 924
Index, 929 About the Editors, 967
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N NATIONALISM, IRISHAMERICAN Beginnings In American Opinion and the Irish Question, Thomas Carroll defines “Irish-American” as “referring to the Catholic Irish who immigrated to the United States in large numbers during the nineteenth century.” Three million Irish emigrated to America between the onset of the Great Famine in 1846 and the death of Charles Stewart Parnell in 1891. Although some came from Protestant Ulster, the majority came from the Catholic provinces of Munster and Connacht. This influx provided the impetus for the spread of Irish-American nationalism. The roots of Irish-American nationalism can be traced to early Irish republican movements, which looked to America for inspiration. In 1782, the Ascendancy Patriots, inspired by the American revolutionaries, assembled a militia known as the “Irish Volunteers,” which wrested from George III’s government an acceptance of Irish freedom under the crown. In the 1790s, Theobald Wolfe Tone used both America and France for inspiration for his attempt to establish an Irish Republic with his abortive Wexford Rising of 1798. Tone, among others, was sentenced to death, but
other patriots fled to America. Meanwhile Pitt the Younger’s British government pushed through the 1801 Act of Union, abolishing the independent Irish parliament and merging the kingdoms of England and Ireland. Irish nationalists needed to look to America once more for support. From the 1820s to the 1840s, Daniel O’Connell found funds and supporters in America for his campaigns for Catholic Emancipation— which was achieved in 1829—and to repeal the union. In this relatively welcoming environment, Irishmen were able to debate Irish issues before a sympathetic American audience. But American-Irish relations would become strained with the onset of mass immigration in the late 1840s.
Status Anxiety The Irish immigrants carried with them not just their homesickness but also the scars of their painful history. Arriving in America meant exposing those scars to the world. Moreover, although the Irish were angry with the English for creating the circumstances that forced them out of Ireland, they were also ashamed of themselves for letting it happen. As Thomas Brown emphasizes in Irish-American Nationalism, “for those living amongst Americans—the
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people of get-up-and-go to whom poverty was sinful—there was no escaping a sense of humiliation in reflecting on so much suffering so passively endured.” Anti-Irish feeling, which in America had been bubbling below the surface even before mass immigration, worsened with the establishment in America of the anti-Irish KnowNothing movement of the 1850s. Coupled with this was the problem that, as Francis Hackett underlines in Ireland: A Study in Nationalism, “Americans were frequently unable to reconcile the nationalistic Irishman’s account of England with their own impression of the English race and even the British empire. Such Americans may like their Irishman, they may want to be hospitable to his emotions, but they cannot belie the admiration and respect they have long given to England.” In this light, it is unsurprising that some of the most important Irish-American nationalist figures were second- or thirdgeneration Irish. Being both geographically and temporally removed from the anxieties of Irish history, they nevertheless identified with the ideal of an Irish national struggle.
Conflicting Nationalisms When Henry Grattan, leader of the Ascendancy Patriots, declared in 1782 that now “Ireland is a nation,” he gave voice to an ideal that would be interpreted and reinterpreted by subsequent generations of Irish nationalists. In 1840s Ireland, the nationalist movement was divided between the realistic constitutional aims of the aging, Catholic Daniel O’Connell and the potentially revolutionary idealism of a new group of middle-class Protestants calling themselves “Young Ireland.” This division would influence future generations of www.abc-clio.com
nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1846 Young Irelanders broke with the O’Connellites when O’Connell’s Repeal Association resolved to condemn taking violent action. It all ended in 1848 with another abortive rising, hastily arranged by the Young Ireland leaders, at Ballingarry, Co. Tipperary. Several of the conspirators fled, arriving eventually in the United States.
Revolutionary Nationalism In 1858, two members of Young Ireland, John O’Mahony and Michael Doheny, established the secret Fenian Brotherhood, the first significant movement in IrishAmerican nationalism. Members of the Brotherhood pledged allegiance to the Irish Republic and swore to take up arms when needed. The Fenian Movement was a precursor to Clan na Gael, the American sister organization of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. O’Mahony had escaped abroad after the Rising of 1848, settling in New York in 1952. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), the Fenians masterminded plans for insurrection while taking refuge in the United States. The 1867 Rising failed almost as disastrously as the last. The 1870s saw the emergence of new heroes of Irish-American revolutionary nationalism. Galway-born Patrick Ford became editor of Irish World. Although John O’Cleary called Ford a “totally ignorant, highly unscrupulous, and thoroughly ill-conditioned fanatic,” his idealism for the cause could not be mistaken. In 1871, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa and John Devoy arrived in New York, having been released from prison by the British government under the Amnesty Act of 1870. Rossa would boast of being in charge of dynamite attacks in English cities in the 1880s, while Devoy would found the influential Irish
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Nation (1881–1885) and later the Gaelic American (1903–1951). In 1878, Michael Davitt was released from prison after serving eight years for Fenian activities. Although he never lived in America, he visited it often and, like Ford, was eulogized for his attempts to understand the anxieties of the average Irish American. In the 1880s, revolutionary figures began to emerge from second- and thirdgeneration Irish groups. Canadian-born Alexander Sullivan became known publicly as the leading American Irish supporter of the Republican Party and privately as the head of the “Triangle” responsible for the campaign of dynamite terrorism in Britain. Captain John McCafferty from Ohio was reputed to be chief of the Invincibles who assassinated Lord Frederick Cavendish in Phoenix Park in 1882. Then, in 1884 William Mackey Lomasney from Cinciannati was blown up while attempting to dynamite London Bridge. By the beginning of the twentieth century, revolutionary groups were still smarting from the Parnell divorce scandal of 1890–1891, which had divided nationalist opinion. Apathy began to set in when in 1914 Irish republican groups failed to achieve Home Rule. The situation improved in March 1916, when the Friends of Irish Freedom (FOIF), the public face of Clan na Gael, became the main player in Irish nationalism. Clansmen used the huge membership of the FOIF—it had 270,000 at its peak—to muster popular support for those executed by the British after the Easter Rising of 1916 and later for the Irish Republican Army (IRA). However, in 1921 the Clan and the FOIF, like Sinn Féin in Ireland, split over the merits of the Anglo-Irish treaty. Whereas Irish Catholic nationalism gathered pace after www.abc-clio.com
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the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1921–1922, Irish-American nationalism began to lose momentum. As Andrew Wilson remarks in Irish America and the Ulster Conflict, “The degree of independence achieved by the twenty-six counties satisfied most of the diaspora.” Nevertheless, militant nationalists continued to play a part in Irish politics, particularly following the eruption of the Troubles in Ulster in 1968. In 1977 the Ad Hoc Committee on Irish Affairs was formed; it, along with other organizations, including the Irish National Caucus, Irish American Unity Conference, and the American Irish Political Education Committee, had barely concealed revolutionary sympathies. These groups, however, had little influence in Washington, and so they concentrated instead on publicizing human rights abuses by British forces in Ulster and working for a British withdrawal. By the late 1980s, however, influential figures in Irish-American republican organizations had concluded that the Ulster conflict had reached a stalemate: it was becoming increasingly unlikely that the British could be forced to withdraw. In Ireland, Sinn Féin was beginning to perceive the negative impact of the IRA’s military operations on its electoral support. Republican leaders began to look to negotiation rather than violence, signaling the beginning of the end for revolutionary Irish-American groups.
Cultural Nationalism Cultural nationalism was originally born out of the loneliness of Irish immigrants who came together in social clubs and firefighting brigades, literary clubs, militia companies, and corner saloons. Older allegiances found expression in Irish
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neighborhoods in American cities through Kerry Patches, Donegal Squares, and Corkmen’s Hollows. Meanwhile individuals tried, sometimes unsuccessfully, to establish literary communities for IrishAmericans. In 1848, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, another member of Young Ireland who had escaped after the rising, established a new Nation, but it was criticized by New York’s Catholic bishop John Hughes. In 1868 he was assassinated by a Fenian in Ottawa for his involvement in Canadian politics. Meanwhile, in 1854 John Mitchel, an Irishman who had been imprisoned in a penal colony for comments made in the United Irishman, arrived in New York. Like McGee, he also brought out a newspaper, the Citizen, and encountered the New York bishop’s enmity. In 1862 he returned to New York to publish the Irish Citizen but infuriated Fenians with his grandiloquent claims. John Boyle O’Reilly had more success. In 1869, O’Reilly, a convicted Fenian, arrived in Philadelphia after escaping from the British penal colony at Bunbury, Australia, via an American whaling ship. Within a few months of his arrival in Boston he had established himself as a lecturer, poet, and staff member of the Boston Pilot. By 1875 he had become editor and co-owned the paper with Archbishop John J. Williams. In the early part of the twentieth century, Irish-American literary communities continued to take an interest in Irish events. American periodicals like the Literary Digest debated the issue of Home Rule. After the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, the Washington Post carried short biographical sketches of some of the known leaders and an analysis of the rebellion by Pádraic Colum, an Irish writer living in New York. The poet Eleanor Cox arranged a meeting www.abc-clio.com
of New York poets to express sympathy for the rebels and Irish Americans in New York, and the FOIF collaborated with Clan na Gael to set up an “Irish Bazaar” to welcome Irish refugees like Nora Connolly, daughter of the executed rebel James Connolly. The Colums brought out The Irish Rebellion of 1916 and Its Martyrs, a book of short portraits of the leaders of the Rising, and Marianne Moore, an American poet of Irish heritage, published a prorepublican poem, “Sojourn in the Whale,” in 1917. Moore continued to promote Irish politics and culture when, editing the New York-based literary magazine The Dial from 1925–1929, she published original pieces by Irish and Irish-American writers, some of which had been banned by the Irish government. The 1920s also saw Irish writers such as James Joyce, Liam O’Flaherty, and Seán O’Faoláin turn to American publishers to publish their books that had been banned in Ireland. Irish-American sympathies had turned away from the newly established Sinn Féin government toward the individual Irish voice. With successive generations, Irish Americans began to be incorporated further into mainstream American society: a trend reflected in the election of President John F. Kennedy in 1960. But this incorporation generated a desire on the part of cultural nationalists to try to recreate something of their ancestral homeland. They contributed to the growing popularity of university courses in Irish literature and history in the 1970s. Some cultural societies also encouraged a revival of interest in traditional music and the Irish language. This trend persists today, and IrishAmerican societies exist in many towns and cities, and university courses offer programs in Irish language, literature, and culture.
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Constitutional Nationalism The beginning of the Troubles in Ulster in 1968 meant the increase of political involvement by more moderate Irish Americans. Most supported Irish unification but disagreed with the violent tactics of the IRA. From the mid-1970s this view was represented by Irish-American senators Edward Kennedy and Daniel Moynihan, Speaker of the House Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, and Governor Hugh Carey of New York—known, somewhat ambiguously, as the “Four Horsemen” of Irish politics. In 1971, Senator Kennedy courted political controversy by demanding the immediate withdrawal of troops from Ulster. John Hume, of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), contacted Kennedy to encourage him to adopt a more moderate approach. Ultimately the Four Horsemen, persuaded by such arguments, became a source of support for constitutional nationalism on Capitol Hill. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s American political pressure continued to affect British policy in Northern Ireland. On Saint Patrick’s Day 1977, the Four Horsemen issued the first of their annual joint statements, which they used to exert their influence in Washington to work for a new political initiative in Ulster. Then, in March 1981, the Four Horsemen formed the congressional group “Friends of Ireland.” Its membership included some of the most powerful politicians in America and marginalized the influence of the more revolutionary agenda of the Ad Hoc Committee on Irish Affairs. Although both groups would work together on certain campaigns, for example working for the release of the Birmingham Six in the 1980s, the Friends’ more moderate approach would win it considerable influence in American and Anglo-Irish political matters. www.abc-clio.com
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Indeed, the Friends proved instrumental in repairing Anglo-Irish relations in the 1980s and 1990s. When a November 1984 summit between Margaret Thatcher and Garret FitzGerald broke down, Fitzgerald’s Irish government appealed to the Friends for assistance. The Friends in turn obtained Ronald Reagan’s intervention, despite his close friendship with Thatcher, and AngloIrish discussions were resumed in January 1985. The Friends meanwhile helped block a potentially serious challenge to the forthcoming agreement from Fianna Fáil leader Charles Haughey. When the Anglo-Irish Agreement was signed in November, it represented not only a major achievement for Fitzgerald and the SDLP but also for the Friends. In 1989, the Ad Hoc Committee also achieved a degree of success when its “MacBride Principles Campaign,” which won support from a wide spectrum of political groups, and pushed the British government toward reforming its fair employment legislation in Northern Ireland. In the 1990s, Irish-American political groups also influenced U.S. policy concerning Northern Ireland. In April 1992, Bill Clinton pledged that if elected to the White House he would appoint a special envoy for Northern Ireland and grant a United States visa to Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams. However during the first few months of his presidency, bowing to strong opposition from Unionists and the British government, Clinton shelved plans for a special envoy and refused Adams’s plans for a U.S. book tour. Irish Americans were disgruntled, but they were able to use the events of 1993, beginning with the “blueprint for peace” drawn up by Gerry Adams and John Hume in April and the Downing Street Declaration of December, to drive home their advantage. Kennedy,
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Moynihan, and others, acting on behalf of Hume, suggested to Clinton that progress might be made by offering Adams a visa. Despite strong opposition from the British government, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, and Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Clinton allowed Adams into New York for forty-eight hours to address the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. Andrew Wilson argues that “Adams’ treatment as an international statesman in New York reinforced his position within the republican movement and helped generate greater momentum for peace.” On August 31, 1994, the IRA announced a complete cessation of violence, at least partly in response to an IrishAmerican delegation led by Bruce Morrison, chairman of the lobbying group Americans for a New Irish Agenda, which pressed for an unconditional ceasefire. Irish-American politicians had clearly been instrumental in constructing and maintaining the foundations for peace.
Postscript: Finance, Fireworks, and Forgery Between 1850 and 1900, steady collections of remittances were sent to families and Catholic parishes and institutions in Ireland. The Fenian Brotherhood also founded its own treasury to finance revolutionary work. In the 1880s, American contributions to Charles Stewart Parnell’s Land League greatly advanced his drive to obtain land reform. Although Americans of many backgrounds gave money to Parnell’s various funds, the actual subscription network was composed of immigrant Irish. Irish-American aid peaked again following the beginning of the Troubles in Ulster in 1968. As Dennis Clark puts it in Irish Blood, the Irish looked to America www.abc-clio.com
once more because “the American connection was traditional—almost habitual.” In 1968 the Irish-American republican George Harrison sent the first consignment of American rifles to Ireland: these were used during the sectarian riots of 1969. Then, in 1969, the Provisionals sent Seán Keenan to America to coordinate the gunrunning network. In 1970, the Irish Northern Aid Committee (Noraid) was formed, which Wilson describes as the “most prominent and controversial militant nationalist group in America.” Noraid’s reports to the U.S. Justice Department indicate that it sent nearly $3 million to republican agencies in Ireland from 1971 to 1990. The Justice Department also claimed that unspecified amounts of larger sums had been sent secretly to the Provisional IRA. In 1977, the British government claimed that 80 percent of the IRA’s weapons came from the United States; meanwhile, the Royal Ulster Constabulary released figures showing that American guns were used in 70 percent of Provisional IRA killings. American authorities acknowledged the problem but played down its significance. Ironically, 1977 was also the year that the Four Horsemen of Irish-American politics issued a joint statement suggesting that grassroots approaches, such as economic investment, would be the best means of bringing peace to Ulster. Their attitude heralded a gradual decline in funding in the late 1970s and 1980s. The IRA turned to Eastern Europe and the Middle East for weapons. Nevertheless, American weaponry still played an important part. In the 1980s, the Irish-American republican network worked to develop weapons to help the IRA’s new plan of trying to shoot down British helicopters. Meanwhile,
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Irish-American republicans gave assistance to the IRA through other means. In 1983, Noraid started the first of its annual tours of Northern Ireland. Militant nationalist organizations also smuggled IRA fugitives into the United States. For example, in 1983 IRA inmates Jimmy Smyth, Pol Brennan, Kevin Barry Artt, and Terence Kirby escaped from the Maze Prison and were supplied with forged identities, employment, and housing. They established ordinary lives in California until the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) caught up with them in 1992. Indeed, American financing still constituted a significant proportion of IRA funding until the ceasefire was declared on August 31, 1994. More moderate Irish Americans, such as the congressional group Friends of Ireland, provided promises of financial assistance to speed up the peace process. During the Anglo-Irish discussions of February 1985, the leader of the Friends traveled to Dublin and gave assurances of U.S. financial support for a political settlement. Following the signing of the AngloIrish agreement in November 1985, the Friends ensured the continuation of American financial contributions to the International Fund for Ireland. House Speaker Thomas Foley also gave much-needed assistance. After the cease-fire of August 1994, President Bill Clinton announced that a package of $30 million would be given to the International Fund for Ireland and in December appointed an adviser for Economic Initiatives for Ireland. A major conference was held in Washington, D.C., in May 1995 to lure American businesses to Ulster, cementing a financial relationship between Northern Ireland and America that continues today. Tara Stubbs www.abc-clio.com
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See also: CLINTON, William Jefferson; COLUM, Padraic; DAVITT, Michael; DEVOY, John; FENIANS; FORD, Patrick; HUGHES, Archbishop John; IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY; IRISH REPUBLICAN BROTHERHOOD; KENNEDY FAMILY; MCGEE, Thomas D’Arcy; MITCHEL, John; MOORE, Marianne; MOYNIHAN, Daniel Patrick; NATIONALISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, IRISH AMERICAN; NATIVISM AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM; NORAID; O’MAHONY, John; O’NEILL, Thomas P. “Tip”; O’REILLY, John Boyle; PRESS, THE ETHNIC IRISH References Brown, Thomas. Irish-American Nationalism 1870–1890. New York: Lippincott, 1966. Callan, Charles. America and the Fight for Irish Freedom, 1866–1922. New York: Devon Adair, 1957. Carroll, F. M., American Opinion and the Irish Question 1910–1923: A Study in Opinion and Policy. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1978. Clark, Dennis J. Irish Blood: Northern Ireland and the American Conscience. New York: Kennikat, 1977. Hackett, Francis. Ireland: A Study in Nationalism. New York: Huebsch, 1918. Holland, Jack. The American Connection. Swords: Poolbeg, 1989. Kenny, Kevin, ed. New Directions in IrishAmerican History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. O’Clery, Connor. The Greening of the White House: The Inside Story of How America Tried to Bring Peace to Ireland. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1996. Wilson, Andrew. Irish America and the Ulster Conflict 1968–1995. Belfast: Blackstaff, 1995.
NATIONALISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, IRISH-AMERICAN The story of Irish-American nationalism during the twentieth century encompasses a number of stages, with fluctuating fortunes that partially reflected the ebb and flow of Irish immigration to the United
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States. The common academic diagnosis of “ethnic fade” offers only a superficial understanding of the internal trends that took place within this transatlantic connection and fails to explain the continued fascination that so many millions of Americans continue to have with the fate of their ethnic homeland. The continued relevance of Irish-American nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic is best explained as a deeply ingrained result of American ethnic pluralism itself, reflecting American influences nearly as much as Irish events. The movement for Irish autonomy in the United States during the earliest years of the twentieth century was remarkably similar to that of its domestic counterpart in Ireland. Still recovering from the dashed hopes of Charles Parnell’s Home Rule movement, most expatriate nationalists adopted the cultural and political arguments of their transatlantic counterparts during the first decades of the twentieth century. Militant republican groups like Clan na Gael continued to struggle with internal bickering and transatlantic feuds, while the growing emergence of middleclass leadership in Irish America helped to channel energies toward most “respectable” pursuits through organizations such as the American Irish Historical Society and American branches of the Gaelic League. The Irish-American entrance into the middle class also encouraged welleducated nationalists to combine the hopes for a free Ireland with a number of other well-heeled causes, such as the campaign for women’s suffragism and anti-imperialist pursuits. When Padraig Pearse read his Declaration of an Irish Republic during the Easter Rising of 1916, few Irish Americans knew what to make of this seemingly futile effort. www.abc-clio.com
The British treatment of these Irish rebels soon produced a unique moment of convergence among expatriate nationalists, however, much like in Ireland. The predominantly Catholic cause took on an ecumenical flavor, generating support from previously uninterested groups. While the most outspoken advocates of physical force found themselves constrained by state censorship after the United States entered World War I in 1917, other groups of activists rallied to the cause to protest the execution of the leaders of the Easter Rising and the brutal British reprisals during the ensuing Anglo-Irish War. Irish-American leaders gathered more than 5,000 delegates in Philadelphia in 1919 under the auspices of the Third Irish Race Convention, raising more than $1 million in pledges. The newfound spirit of unanimity was even more striking than the generosity, given a wide variety of attendees that included sympathetic Irish Protestants, members of U.S. Catholic hierarchy, and Clan na Gael militants. The convention also drew letters of support from nationalists in San Francisco and Butte, Montana, as well as institutional endorsements from nonethnic bodies like the American Federation of Labor. This newfound cohesiveness was shortlived, however, and by the early 1920s the movement had splintered once again. The arrival of Eamon de Valera, the elected leader of the Irish Dáil, to lead a fundraising campaign for the fledgling Republic started out with great fanfare. But de Valera soon became embroiled in a dispute with the elder leaders of Clan na Gael, who insisted that any American contributions should be used to secure official recognition of the Irish Republic by the U.S. government. When de Valera seemed to make public concessions about the complete
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independence of the newly formed Irish Republic, Judge Daniel F. Cohalan called together a group of approximately 100 fellow nationalists to unceremoniously request that de Valera return to Ireland. De Valera’s stubborn refusal prompted the creation of separate and competing nationalist bodies: the American-led Friends of Irish Freedom (FOIF) and the pro–de Valera American Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic (AARIR). The split even ran through the American Catholic clergy, and when both sides sent representatives to the Democratic and Republican national conventions during the summer of 1920, neither party even mentioned Irish freedom in their respective platforms. The subsequent controversy over the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 only worsened matters. In 1922, Irish-American sympathizers were further frustrated and confused by an embarrassing spectacle when anti-treaty partisans launched an unsuccessful assault on the Irish Free State’s consulate in New York City. American activism soon gave way to confusion and apathy, and by the end of the decade the only legacy of the once-spirited campaign was an ongoing legal battle between the FOIF and the AARIR over the money that had been raised during de Valera’s contentious tour. The onset of the Great Depression during the early 1930s continued this dispiriting trend, depleting the rolls and resources of even the most venerable IrishAmerican ethnic institutions. As transatlantic ties waned, the leadership of the movement passed into the hands of an increasingly shrill group of Anglophobes who targeted not only Britain but also the longest-running president in American history, Franklin Roosevelt. Driven to the political margins by waning interest in www.abc-clio.com
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overseas events, the decimated leadership of Irish-American nationalist groups eventually pursued an association with the isolationist leadership of the America First organization. The outbreak of European hostilities in 1939 soon produced a rallying cause for expatriate nationalists, but this effort was soon cut short by more immediate American concerns. When British Prime Minister Winston Churchill reacted to Ireland’s refusal to budge from its prewar declarations of official neutrality, Eamon de Valera called to the remaining leadership of the AARIR to help protect Ireland against a possible British invasion. Irish-American leaders responded with impressive alacrity, reuniting the disparate branches of the movement in New York City under the new banner of the American Friends of Irish Neutrality. This time, however, IrishAmerican nationalists and Anglophobes encountered serious opposition from within their own ethnic circles. Within months a group of prominent IrishAmerican figures like boxer Gene Tunney and World War I hero William “Wild Bill” O’Donovan (the former commander of the famous “Fighting Irish” 69th Regiment) formed the American Irish Defense Association (AIDA), which called for increased direct assistance to Britain. The impact of a later congressional discovery that the AIDA received direct support from the Roosevelt administration in the fall of 1941 was soon muffled by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The ensuing sea change in American popular opinion even affected erstwhile supporters of Irish neutrality, who were now left with the embarrassing and nearly impossible task of explaining Ireland’s stubborn neutrality to a frustrated and unsympathetic American public.
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While Irish-American apologists were left to split hairs in their apology for Irish neutrality, a new generation of IrishAmerican leadership came of age during the war and achieved national prominence in the new battle against communism during the late 1940s. Stressing their Catholic, anticommunist credentials, the ethnic patriotism championed by dynamic young men like Jack Kennedy left little time for the continuation of the seemingly petty feuds of the Old World. Militant nationalists attempted to return to their Anglophobic appeals throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s. These leaders convened a series of annual Irish Race Conventions starting in 1947, but IrishAmerican attentions were elsewhere, and these partisans were faced with the daunting task of supporting claims that the Anglo-Irish struggle remained relevant with the new struggle against communism. The steadily diminishing circulation of the Gaelic American led to a reckless allegation in 1951 that Roosevelt had tricked the United States at the behest of the British Empire, and the ensuing furor over this claim only seemed to hasten the demise of this weekly after more than a half century of publication. Even mainstream IrishAmerican ethnic groups such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians reinvented themselves, stepping further away from the unseemly matter of Irish wartime neutrality. Abandoned by the Irish Republic as well as their upwardly mobile coethnics, the Anglophobes of the interwar era soon based their argument for continued relevance on the fortunes of doomed demagogues like General Douglas MacArthur and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Combined with a sustained decline in Irish transatlantic migration during the www.abc-clio.com
mid-twentieth century, this dispiriting turn helped account for the pitiable state of the Irish-American nationalist movement when the modern-day Troubles emerged in the late 1960s. The outbreak of violence that greeted Northern Irish civil rights marchers during the mid-1960s (who incidentally modeled themselves on AfricanAmerican leaders rather than their ethnic counterparts) quickly drew an emotional response from Irish America. Newsreels of violent attacks on Irish Catholic communities in Belfast and Derry provoked a mixture of outrage laced with guilt among later-generation ethnics, and American dollars flowed into the coffers of thinly disguised militant organizations. Yet even American dollars could not bridge the generational divide between American ethnic nationalists and younger Irish activists. The gap soon created a telling moment in the transatlantic nationalist relationship when young Irish activist Bernadette Devlin visited the United States in 1969. Feted by Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley during one fund-raiser, Devlin alleged that her host resembled her unionist opponents more than her fellow compatriots. As she professed an identification with the American radicals like those who had caused so much trouble in Daley’s city the year before, Devlin charged that Irish-American leaders had taken on the role of reactionary oppressors. Faced with this divisive charge that seemed substantiated by radical republican identification with Marxist revolutionary rhetoric, many Irish-American nationalists soon grew estranged from the Irish republican cause, especially after the increasingly violent tactics adopted by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) by the mid-1970s. Open support for militant nationalism receded to the marginalized ethnic
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neighborhoods of Boston, New York City, and other Irish-American urban areas. Meanwhile middle-class Irish Americans turned to the decidedly moderate leadership of the “Four Horsemen” (Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Hugh Carey, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, and Ted Kennedy), all of whom marshaled their political energies to insist on the recognition of equal rights for Northern Irish Catholics at the same time as they decried IRA violence. Following in the footsteps of Irish-American cold warriors in the late 1940s, these moderates offered a respectable voice for the increasingly suburbanized, middle-class population of Irish America. Even the Hunger Strikers’ protests in 1981 failed to substantially change Irish-American minds on the matter of Northern Ireland, apart from some emotional appeals immediately after the death of Bobby Sands. Ronald Reagan was left free to capitalize on his Irish-American ancestry without answering any challenges to his close cooperation with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Nevertheless, the 1990s offered an epilogue to the story of Irish-American nationalism in the twentieth century, one that contradicted the notion that the passage of time had reduced this sentiment to entirely superficial importance. This episode came as part of the larger story of Sinn Féin’s movement into the political arena, which drew particular assistance from Bill Clinton’s pledge to allow Gerry Adams admission to the United States during the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign. Clinton’s promise provoked vehement protests from the British diplomatic corps as well as indirect interference in the election by British Prime Minister John Major to aid Clinton’s opponent, President George H. W. Bush. www.abc-clio.com
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Nevertheless, once elected, President Clinton followed through on this pledge, providing a transatlantic forum from which Adams could make the case for a republican nationalist movement that would be weaned from militarism. Adams’s 1994 visit and subsequent American tours by other Sinn Féin leaders has been seen as encouraging the advocates of the IRA declaration of a unilateral ceasefire later that year. In fact, this transatlantic influence has even extended into the twenty-first century. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in New York City soon cast republican resistance to complete disarmament in ominous light, even among Irish-American nationalists. Combined with allegations about collaboration between former IRA members and Marxist revolutionaries in Colombia, a large bank robbery in December 2004 that was assumed to be carried out by the IRA, and the murder of Robert McCartney shortly afterwards, the pressure exerted by Irish-American nationalists has been seen as an important force in convincing the IRA to announce a complete and permanent decommissioning of weaponry in August 2005. Matthew J. O’Brien See also: ANCIENT ORDER OF HIBERNIANS; CLINTON, William Jefferson; COHALAN, Daniel F.; DE VALERA, Eamon; KENNEDY, John Fitzgerald; IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY; IRISH REPUBLICAN BROTHERHOOD; McCARTHY, Joseph; NATIONALISM, IRISHAMERICAN; O’NEILL, Thomas P. “Tip”; PRESS, THE ETHNIC IRISH; TUNNEY, James Joseph “Gene” References Blessing, Patrick. “The Irish.” In The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, edited by Stephen Thernstrom, 524–545. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.
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658 NATIVISM AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM Carroll, Francis. American Opinion and the Irish Question: A Study of Irish Opinion and Policy. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978. Clark, Dennis. Erin’s Heirs: Irish Bonds of Community. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1991. Cuddy, Joseph. Irish America and National Isolationism, 1914–1920. New York: Arno, 1976. Dwyer, T. Ryle. Strained Relations: Ireland at Peace and the U.S.A. at War, 1941–1945. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1988. Funchion, Michael, ed. Irish-American Voluntary Organizations. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. New York: Pearson, 2000. McCartan, Patrick. With de Valera in America. New York: Brentano, 1932. Shannon, William. The American Irish. New York: Macmillan, 1963. Wilson, Andrew. Irish America and the Ulster Conflict, 1968–1995. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1995.
NATIVISM AND ANTICATHOLICISM Nativism is a generic term for a cultural phenomenon, which though not particular to the nineteenth century and not restricted in its discrimination to just the Irish immigrants, certainly became defined by its response to the postfamine immigration of the peasant, pauperized Irish Catholics. Deriving from the term “native,” nativisim essentially espouses an antiforeign sentiment that, for the American republic from the nineteenth century to the present day, manifests itself in public antiimmigration sentiment and certain antiimmigration policies. Begun as a reactionary response to the fears of the native population that they would be overrun by immigration, nativism, in fact, came to reveal itself in a number of similar recurring movements. www.abc-clio.com
In 1798, faced with the problem, and fear, of mass immigration supplanting the “native” order (through wresting control of the public institutions) the Federalists, then in office, extended the term of residence before naturalization to 14 years. Once the Republicans—then seen as the party of the immigrant—were returned to office in 1801, they quickly repealed the law and reduced the term to five years. Thus began a debate over the rights of immigrants that would continue throughout the next century. By 1830, as the fledgling nation grew increasingly wary of the communion of church and state witnessed in the Catholic capitals of Europe, the “native” American spirit was fast becoming decidedly antiCatholic. During the 1830s, a decade of increasing immigration and rising antiimmigrant feeling, the debate over immigrants’ rights often descended into rioting and religious violence. In one incident in 1834, a convent was attacked and burned to the ground by “defenders of the Protestant faith.” Finally, in 1841, the American Republic Party, or, as it soon came to be called, the Native-American Party was founded (from which the term “nativism” comes) at a Louisiana State convention. The cardinal principles of the party were (1) to extend the term of naturalization to 21 years, (2) that the Catholic religion was dangerous to the country, (3) that the Protestant scriptures should be the foundation of all common-school education, and (4) to nominate no man to office who was not native born. At this stage, the party was still a secret order whose membership increased in fits and starts over the coming years, whenever the threat of immigration became public discussion; its members were often seen calling for the “No Catholic
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Irish Ticket” at polls. As immigration numbers waned, however, the party’s membership also fell off. By the 1850s, immigration had begun to climb rapidly again—reaching almost the total number for the previous decade in just three years—and, driven by the fear of having their public and charitable institutions swamped by pauperized Catholics, the native population rushed to join this anti-Catholic movement. Also at this time, the arrival in America of Father Gavazzi, an apostate Barnabite Monk, marked the beginning of a new anti-papal crusade. He declared that Sisters of Charity were prostitutes the world over and that priests were given to every form of debauchery. Under his influence street preaching was revived, and by 1854 most major cities had an antipopery preacher holding forth from the street corners. This greatly increased the feeling of fear and resentment toward the new immigrants, particularly the Irish, and swayed many uncommitted Americans over to the side of the nativists. In 1854, thanks in large part to its rapidly growing numbers, the organization declared itself publicly and politically as the Native-American party and, subsequently, carried elections in Massachusetts and Delaware, as well as securing congressmen elsewhere. At this time, it also got the name by which it became popularly known, “The Know-Nothings”—so-called because when members of the lower degrees were questioned about the Order’s purpose their usual response was, “I don’t know.” The success of the Know-Nothing Party was short-lived, however, and after little more than two years, with the threat of immigration receding again, it had gone into decline. From this point on, though often a party with little or no political strength, the www.abc-clio.com
Native American movement was recognized in the public arena and “nativism” became a byword for any and all antiimmigrant feeling. The postfamine period, which produced masses of brutalized Irish peasantry overloading the unskilled workforce and overcrowding the poorest quarters of the cities, crystallized for an American public the need for a nativist movement to regulate immigration and control the immigrants that had already arrived. In fact, it was a move to control the immigrants that had already arrived that initiated the next significant, public display of nativism. In 1891, driven by the increasing election of immigrants to political office and the subsequent fear this produced in the native population, a lawyer from Maryland named Henry F. Bowers formed a new secret society—the American Protective Association—to protect the public institutions from being overrun by foreigners. This order most affected the Irish immigrants, as they constituted the main body of immigrants of this period, and as this new nativist movement perceived the biggest threat to American identity as coming from their Catholicism. Though it spread slowly, from 1893 to 1896 it gained and retained varying degrees of political influence in many states, from California to Massachusetts. The main tenets of the American Protective Association were derived from the oath that the members of the order were bound to take and observe: first, that no member shall ever favor or aid the nomination, election, or appointment of a Roman Catholic to any political office; second, that he shall never employ a Roman Catholic in any capacity if a Protestant may be obtained to render the service required.
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Though declaring publicly that the organization “attack(s) no man’s religion so long as he does not attempt to make his religion an element of political power,” it is clear from the secret oath that this was, in fact, a hypocritical statement and that the American Protective Association actively sought the elimination of any and all Catholic men from public office, solely on the grounds of their religion, and, further than this, actually sought to deny men and women gainful employment, again based solely on their religious preferences. Due in large part to this order’s vilification of the immigrant Irish on the grounds of their religion, racism directed against the Irish became refined to a particular, distinguishable aspect of their character, their Catholicism. This is evident in the large body of articles printed in political and popular journals—such as “The Irish Conquest of our Cities” (1894), “The Threatening Conflict with Romanism” (1894), and “The Irish in American Life” (1896)—which all associated the corrupting nature of Irish immigrants with their absolute devotion to the Catholic creed. As well as this, noted political cartoonists, such as Thomas Nast, depicted the miters of Catholic bishops as coming to life as crocodiles to devour children, an obvious allusion to what he saw as Catholicism’s potential to corrupt the youth of America. By 1896, the American Protective Association had begun to disappear from public and political life, emphasized by the failure of its representative in Congress, William S. Linton, to secure reelection. However, even though its reign was brief, it had, along with the earlier incarnations of nativist sentiment, bound forever nativism and anti-Catholicism as almost synonymous movements and had registered Catholicism www.abc-clio.com
as the identifiable nonnative characteristic of the immigrant Irish. James P. Byrne See also: CATHOLIC CHURCH, the References “American Protective Association.” Catholic Encyclopedia. www.newadvent.org/ cathen/01426a.htm (accessed November 26, 2003). Coudert, Frederic R. “The American Protective Association.” Forum (July 1894): 513–523. Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. New York: Atheneum, 1963. Lee, John Hancock. The Origin and the Progress of the American Party in Politics. New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1970. “The Riotous Career of the Know-Nothings.” Forum (July 1894): 524–537.
NEESON, LIAM (1952–) Liam Neeson was born in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, in 1952. His interest in drama developed during his studies to become a teacher. In 1976, he joined the Belfast Lyric Players’ Theatre and made his professional acting debut in the play The Risen People by Joseph Plunkett. In 1979, he joined the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, where he appeared in Brian Friel’s Translations. He won the Best Actor Award at the Royal Exchange Theatre for his role in Seán O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. In 1981, Neeson appeared in Excalibur, a film directed by John Boorman. Throughout the 1980s, he enjoyed steady work as a film actor, appearing in supporting roles in films such as Krull (1983), The Bounty (1984), and The Mission (1986). His breakthrough came when he appeared in a Broadway production of Anna Christie in 1992, for which he received a Tony Award nomination (1993). As well as receiving critical acclaim for his performance, Neeson met his
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Actor Liam Neeson (center) on the set of Michael Collins with Alan Rickman (left) and Aidan Quinn (right) in 1996. (Geffen/Warner Bros./The Kobal Collection)
future wife Natasha Richardson during the production. His performance was also seen by Stephen Spielberg, who offered him the leading role in Schindler’s List (1993). This role finally brought Neeson to the attention of the public. He was nominated for both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for his performance. Neeson then took leading roles in two historical films, Rob Roy (1995) and Michael Collins (1996). In 1998 Liam starred as Jean Valjean in the screen adaptation of the Broadway hit Les Miserables. In 1999, he starred as a Jedi Knight in the Star Wars film Episode One: The Phantom Menace. Recent films include Gangs of New York (2002) and Love Actually (2003). He also starred in the 2002 revival of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, a performance that earned him a second Tony Award nomination for Best Actor. Aoileann Ní Eigeartaigh www.abc-clio.com
References Klein, Fred, and Ronald Dean Nolen, eds. The Macmillan International Film Encyclopaedia. London: Macmillan, 2001. Lalor, Brian, ed. The Encyclopaedia of Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Ltd., 2003. McRedmond, Louis, ed. Modern Irish Lives. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Ltd., 1996. Pettitt, Lance. Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000. Quinlan, David. Quinlan’s Illustrated Directory of Film Stars. London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1996.
NEILSON, JOHN (CA.1770–1827) Born in Ballycarry, Co. Antrim, John Neilson served an apprenticeship with an architect in Belfast. The three Neilson/ Nelson brothers became active in the United Irishman uprising: teenage Willie
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was hanged, and John and Sam were banished to the West Indies. Sam died en route; John escaped, to arrive in Philadelphia where in 1804 he was naturalized and was soon hired by President Thomas Jefferson. Neilson oversaw the building plans at two of Jefferson’s classical projects: Monticello, his home, and the University of Virginia where a Pantheon-like Rotunda heads a large quadrangle that is highlighted by spaced, two-story pavilions. Neilson’s best efforts here are seen at Pavilions IX and X. Overall, his finest work is manifest at Upper Bremo plantation in nearby Fluvanna County, where Neilson’s name as the architect is mentioned in the cornerstone. Alongside fellow Antrim builder James Dinsmore, Neilson did considerable work at Montpelier, estate of President James Madison. On the grounds, they erected a domed garden temple, encircled with 10 unfluted Doric columns with bases, which support an entablature of triglyphs and unadorned metopes, with guttae below and dentil molding above. The design stems from that of the Temple of Venus at Versailles. At his death, his effects included fiddle strings, a large library of classical and Restoration literature, many books on Irish culture, and his own paintings and architectural drawings. By the terms of his will, a “likeness” of Neilson was to have been sent to his Ballycarry widow, Mary. Another beneficiary was Mary Ann McCracken, “the friend of my family and sister of the late Henry Joy McCracken.” A cenotaph was erected in 1999 in Maplewood Cemetery in Charlottesville, Virginia, near the Vinegar Hill area where Neilson had lived. Among his several Irish friends in the community was the nephew www.abc-clio.com
of Robert Emmet, Professor John Patten Emmet, who had been appointed by Thomas Jefferson to the university faculty. Kevin Donleavy References Durey, Michael. Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. Hume, David, ed. The Broadisland Journal. Vol. 3. Ballycarry: 1997. Hume, David, ed. The Broadisland Journal. Vol. 5. Ballycarry: 1999. Lay, K. Edward. The Architecture of Jefferson Country. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Madden, Richard R. Antrim and Down in ’98. Glasgow: Cameron, Ferguson, 1844.
NELLIGAN, ÉMILE (1879–1941) Born out of the union of a modest Irish postal employee, David Nelligan, and a French Canadian housewife, Émilie Amanda Hudon, in 1879, Émile Nelligan became over time the uncontested pillar around which French Canadian and later Quebecois poetry flourished. Influenced by Paul Verlaine, Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, and Edgar Allan Poe, he was in many ways closer to John Keats, as his best and most voluminous work was written within a very short period when he was 17 to 19 years old. As his name illustrates, the Irish community in Quebec was well integrated into the host French-Canadian society. Being a poor student, Nelligan had embarked on a poetic career by the age of 16. By 17, he had already gained some notoriety; as a result of this, he was accepted by l’École littéraire de Montréal, where he became very quickly their best and most noted poet. His bohemian lifestyle led also to the mysticism of his poetry.
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Before Nelligan, French Canadian poetry relied heavily on the picturesque, on substantive realistic themes, which left very little to the imagination. Nelligan introduced the aesthetic of symbolism that projected and explored the imaginative world. With Nelligan, French-Canadian poetry and Canadian poetry in general became highly acclaimed. Unfortunately, one of the reasons Nelligan wrote with such intensity is because he suffered from a degenerative mental illness, which was diagnosed when he was 20. From the age of 20, Nelligan was committed by his father to various mental institutions, until his death in 1941. Even though his productive years were very short, his reputation as Quebec’s most influential poet has grown over the years. In 1979 le prix Émile Nelligan—Quebec’s most prestigious poetry award—was established, for young poets under the age of 35. As is the case for all distinguished people of Irish descent, there is a plaque in Montreal’s Saint Patrick Basilica commemorating the life and genius of Émile Nelligan. “Ah! Comme la neige à neigé!” Donald Cuccioletta See also: MONTREAL, QUEBEC CITY Reference Nelligan, Émile. Poésies Complètes (1896–1899). Montreal: Fides, 1952.
NEW BRUNSWICK During the nineteenth century, the Irish contribution to the Canadian province of New Brunswick was immense: the Irish became the largest ethnic group and, proportionately, New Brunswick was the most Irish province in British North America. www.abc-clio.com
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One of the proposed names for the province (created in 1784) was “New Ireland.” There were several waves of Irish immigration to New Brunswick. The Irish were among the very sparse and scattered settlers in the seventeenth century, when the region was still part of Nova Scotia. Overall, numbers were bolstered significantly when the Loyalists arrived during and after the American War of Independence; some of the Loyalists who fled the 13 colonies had Irish surnames. Many more came from Ireland after the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815. Initially, most of the Irish migrated as families but many more individuals came in the 1820s and 1830s. Before the 1840s most Irish immigrants were skilled Protestants from the northern counties. The largest single influx was from 1845 to 1854, during the Potato Famine: many of those who arrived were sick and impoverished. In 1847 alone approximately 2,000 died en route while another 15,000 sought entry through the port of Saint John. The local population was just over 30,000. The province was ill prepared for the onslaught and overwhelmed by it. During the 1840s most of those who arrived were poor Catholics from Ireland’s south and west. The Loyalists are credited as founding New Brunswick, but the Irish are recognized for building it. The Irish provided much of the workforce for the province’s major industries, whether in timber, the docks, foundries, mills, shipyards or railways. A large number became farmers, and New Brunswick had the reputation as “a good poorman’s country.” To a lesser extent they distinguished themselves in the professions. Many of the children of the first settlers became prominent in the
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political, religious, and economic life of the province. Several used New Brunswick as an entry point for other destinations, notably the United States. Those who stayed developed Irish religious institutions and Irish national societies. The Irish in New Brunswick were diverse: there were significant differences based on religion, skill set, place of origin, and where they settled. Just as in their homeland, denominationalism proved a source of conflict in New Brunswick. This is especially true of the 1840s when Irish Catholics began to swamp the Irish Protestants who had arrived earlier. By 1871 the Irish of New Brunswick numbered 100,000 out of a total population of 285,000 (35.2 percent). The majority lived in the main urban center, Saint John, which still claims to be the most Irish city in Canada. Many settled on the Miramichi, with various other pockets around the province. Catholics tended to predominate in the cities and the north shore while southwestern New Brunswick was mostly “Orange territory” with a sizable Irish Catholic population. There are many Irish place names in New Brunswick. By 1941 (the last census to deal with the Irish as a distinct ethnic group), those of Irish birth or descent had dropped to 20 percent of the population. The reasons for this have yet to be studied. It may be a reflection of the high degree of intermarriage and assimilation of Irish Protestants with the English and Scots. The Irish Catholics retained their ethnicity to a greater degree. The study of the Irish in New Brunswick is still in its infancy. This is one reason for the formation of the Irish Canadian Cultural Association of New Brunswick (ICCANB) in 1983. Its mission www.abc-clio.com
is to commemorate and celebrate the very significant Irish contribution in New Brunswick. Its six chapters undertake various projects such as Heritage Parks at Partridge Island, Middle Island, and Hospital Island, and the Belfast children’s vacation. The ICCANB works closely with the popular Miramichi Irish Festival as well. Cheryl Fury See also: AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE; EMIGRATION References Houston, Cecil J., and William J. Smyth. “New Brunswick and Irish Shipping: The Commissioning of the Londonderry, 1838.” Acadiensis 16, no. 2 (1987): 95–106. Mannion, John J. Irish Settlements in Eastern Canada: A Study of Cultural Transfer and Adaptation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974. O’Driscoll, Robert, and Lorna Reynolds, eds. The Untold Story: The Irish in Canada. 2 vols. Toronto: Celtic Arts of Canada, 1988. Toner, P. M., ed. New Ireland Remembered. Fredericton, New Brunswick: New Ireland Press, 1988. Toner, P. M. “The Origins of the New Brunswick Irish, 1851.” Journal of Canadian Studies 23 (1988):104–119.
NEW IRISH IN AMERICA The roots of the so-called “New Irish” migration extend to the international economic recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which drove Irish unemployment to record levels. Faced with few prospects at home, young Irish men and women turned to overseas opportunities once again. But this outflow seemed to be qualitatively different from the “push forces” that drove out earlier generations, as most commentators shared the perception that these latest émigrés were better educated and more personally ambitious than earlier leavers. Whether
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it was the fiscal conservatives bemoaning the lost fruits of Ireland’s recently expanded educational system, or career politicians who meant to reassure the parents of emigrants by attributing the outflow to wanderlust, there was a general consensus that the emigrants of the 1980s were qualitatively different than their predecessors. The novelty of the New Irish was much less apparent to the later-generation ethnics on the other side of the Atlantic, however. Irish Americans saw these immigrants as the latest installment in their proud tradition of immigrant contributors to the United States. Projecting their ethnic notions of the past onto this new influx, they eagerly welcomed the new arrivals as a much-needed infusion of new blood into their graying community. The true significance of this inflow defied both sets of expectations, however. The disproportionately well-educated outflow of the mid-1980s soon gave way to a more balanced exodus by the later years of that decade. Driven underground by their undocumented status, many New Irish immigrants set aside their educational qualifications to follow their predecessors with manual positions in familiar fields such as construction and bartending. On the other hand, most New Irish migrants resisted the invitation to take their places in traditional Irish-American institutions and instead formed their own groups to assert their more contemporary view of Irish identity. The struggle over naturalization initially papered over this division between immigrants and ethnics during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The 50-year hiatus in Irish immigration to the United States occasioned significant changes in American immigration policy that effectively denied legal residency for most of the New Irish. www.abc-clio.com
After an initial outburst of frustration with allegedly complacent Irish-American ethnic institutions, a new generation of Irish activists formed their own lobbying groups, such as the Irish Immigration Reform Movement (IIRM) and the Emerald Isle Immigration Center. The generational difference between young immigrants and older ethnics also manifested itself in the cultural expressions of New Irish immigrants, many of whom resisted and criticized ethnic views of Ireland as outdated and patronizing. This friction even broke out in public by the early 1990s with the highly charged controversy between the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization and the Ancient Order of Hibernians regarding inclusion in the Saint Patrick’s Day parade during the early 1990s. Instead of new blood, Irish-American leaders found themselves presented with new wine, which would not be easily contained in the old skins of their ethnic institutions. Nevertheless, the political acumen of the New Irish leaders soon led them to cooperate with the more experienced IrishAmerican lobby, and intergenerational tensions gave way to interagency cooperation in the campaign to secure entrance visas for the estimated 40,000 undocumented immigrants living subterranean lives in the United States. IIRM activists often adopted the rhetorical appeal advanced by their ethnic hosts, presenting the New Irish as young men and women who were willing to give up their old life to pursue their ambitions in the Land of Opportunity, much like their predecessors had done during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, helping to build the United States along the way. The campaign combined youthful energy with political sagacity to convince the United States Congress to set
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aside special visas for Irish applicants. This effort reached its apex in 1994 with the special recognition afforded to Irish applicants in the Diversity Visas program, which set aside 40,000 slots for would-be registrants from the Republic of Ireland. Ironically, the realization of these American dreams during the mid-1990s coincided with a domestic trend in the Republic of Ireland that rendered such political achievements anticlimactic. The emergence of the “Celtic Tiger” during the early 1990s soon stifled the net outflow from Ireland. Continued growth actually reversed migratory trends, and there was consistent net immigration during the rest of the decade. While many young Irish men and women continued to leave the Republic, their travels were now much more temporary: aimed at garnering professional experience in white-collar fields, rather than securing a permanent home and career in North America or elsewhere. The demand for American entrance visas soon slackened among the New Irish in the United States, and many visa holders, including one of the cofounders of the IIRM, actually returned to the Republic after securing a green card through the legalization programs. While the Irish commentators of the 1980s focused on the highly qualified backgrounds of recent migrants, and the Irish Americans of the early 1990s characterized Irish arrivals through their untraditional assertiveness, these attributes are best seen as reflections of the redefinition of the Irish migration experience by the New Irish. This new understanding of the transatlantic passage as transitory movement rather than permanent resettlement has shaken Irish nationality at home as well as expatriate ethnicity in the United States, www.abc-clio.com
providing a momentous point of departure in the ongoing relationship between these two communities. Matthew J. O’Brien See also: ANCIENT ORDER OF HIBERNIANS; SAINT PATRICK’S DAY PARADES References Almeida, Linda Dowling. Irish Immigrants in New York City, 1945–1995. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2001. Corcoran, Mary. Irish Illegals: Transients between Two Societies. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. New York: Pearson, 2000. O’Hanlon, Ray. The New Irish Americans. Niwot, CO: Roberts Rinehart, 1998. Sexton, J. J. “Recent Changes in the Irish Population and the Pattern of Emigration.” Irish Banking Review (Autumn 1987): 45–54.
NEW JERSEY The Irish have been traced to the earliest days in the history of New Jersey following its establishment as a colony in 1664. Throughout the seventeenth century, individual Irish skilled workers came to New Jersey and settled there. Immigration to the state at this time was not confined to the Scots-Irish or Ulster Protestants but drew from all those living in Ireland. In spite of this, Catholics were barred from holding public office by the state constitution of 1776. It was only with the drawing up of a new constitution in 1844 that this prohibition was removed. In the 1790 census, 11 percent of the white population was counted as being either Irish or Scots-Irish, and the majority came from Ulster. Compared with a state like Pennsylvania, this number was quite small. However, the Scots-Irish in particular were to play an important role in the Revolutionary War
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with Britain and many of them occupied important positions in George Washington’s army. It was with the Great Famine that the Irish really became a visible and tangible presence in New Jersey life; the largest influx of Irish took place during the 1840s. Unlike before, the majority of Irish immigrants at this time were Catholic and from rural Ireland. This led to more than 31,000 Irish, out of a total number of immigrants of 56,000, settling in New Jersey. In 1870, out of a total population of nearly one million in New Jersey, more than 80,000 had been born in Ireland. In 1900, 94,848 people in New Jersey had been born in Ireland. New Jersey’s proximity to New York, the principal port of entry to America, combined with the fact of a high demand for labor, motivated many to settle there. While many of the women were employed as domestic servants, there were high numbers of Irish men constructing canals and railroads as well as working in the textile mills in Paterson. Among these immigrants in Paterson an organization was formed called the Friends of Ireland. This group campaigned for Catholic Emancipation in Ireland and the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. However, with increasing Irish immigration to New Jersey, tensions increased between the Irish and the native population and clashes frequently broke out between them. In opposition to the Know-Nothing Party, which campaigned against immigration, the Irish supported the Democratic Party, which rewarded them with positions. With the increase in immigration from Italy and Eastern Europe the status of the Irish slowly began to change. Soon the Irish became identified with positions of power in local government. “Little Bob” Davis of www.abc-clio.com
Jersey City, “Big Jim” Smith of Newark, Thomas McCran of Paterson, and Frank Hague of Jersey City controlled political machines that dominated local politics. The fact that the Irish had a long presence in New Jersey, spoke English, and were used to political deal making in the Democratic Party meant that they were readily suited for this system. From 1917 to 1947, Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City ran Hudson County. Born in 1876, he had risen through local politics in city hall to become mayor. He appealed to the Catholic sensibilities of the voters and was courted by both priests and state politicians. His slate for the city commission never changed and always consisted of five Irishmen—four Catholics, and one Protestant. He resigned in 1947, and, in a move that smacked of nepotism, he handed power to his nephew, Frank Hague Eggers. Two years later, Eggers was defeated by an anti-Hague ticket supported by more recent immigrants. This symbolized the end of untrammeled Irish dominance of local politics in the city. With the rise in living standards among the Irish, they began to move out of the cities and to the suburbs after World War II. This upward movement was symbolized by the fact that from 1961 to 1970 the governor of New Jersey was Richard Hughes, who was the grandchild of an emigrant from County Clare who had first arrived in New Jersey in 1856. David Doyle
NEW ORLEANS The majority of academic histories of Irish immigrants to North America focus on the major cities of the East Coast and New England. However, the Irish immigrant experience does not conform to one uniform
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pattern and the story of the Irish experience in New Orleans provides an important counterpoint to the dominant narratives of the Irish in New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston. The Irish settled in Louisiana in the French colony’s founding years and this early presence included military mercenaries, trappers, scouts, and transatlantic slave traders. During the Spanish phase of colonial rule, Irish priests were sent to Louisiana to minister to the region’s growing English-speaking Catholic population, and Irish-born Alejandro (Alexander) O’Reilly ruled as governor. In the opening three decades of the nineteenth century, many of the Irish immigrants arriving in New Orleans belonged to the professional or merchant class. Irish teachers, lawyers, doctors, architects, and printers practiced throughout Louisiana. Many Irish in the city of New Orleans managed boardinghouses, hotels, and other small businesses, while others, such as John McDonogh, became cornerstones of the city’s slave-owning plantocracy. These new arrivals helped establish the Crescent City’s first Saint Patrick’s Day celebration in 1809 and founded Saint Patrick’s Church, the city’s second Catholic parish, on Camp Street in 1834. The major infusion of Irish, however, came after 1830, especially after the potato blight of the 1840s. By 1860 the Irish in New Orleans numbered more than 24,000, about one-fourteenth of the city’s total population. As the largest port city in the American South, and the second largest in the United States, New Orleans offered Irish immigrants the opportunity of plentiful food, a great variety of employment, and a much quicker and cheaper route to the interior, via the Mississippi River, than overland from New York, Boston, or www.abc-clio.com
Baltimore. Many of these new Irish arrivals in the Crescent City were employed building roads, levees, canals, and railroads. They also labored on the docks and warehouses, coming into direct competition with and often replacing African-American workers, both free and slave, in a number of waterfront trades. Mid-nineteenthcentury Irish waterfront workers in New Orleans lived in a neighborhood known as the Irish Channel District, several blocks of streets bounded by the Mississippi River in the city’s lower Garden District. The area was allegedly controlled by a variety of gangs and contained some of the city’s most notorious brothels and saloons. New Orleans’s reputation as the necropolis of the New World was wellearned, and repeated disease outbreaks in the 1840s and 1850s claimed the lives of thousands of Irish victims already drained by earlier trials in their diaspora journey. New Irish arrivals also suffered high rates of mortality because of their dangerous work. The Irish builders of the New Basin Canal, which connected the downtown American sector of New Orleans with Lake Pontchartrain, often labored in water up to their hips and were susceptible to typhus, malaria, and cholera. A Celtic Cross Monument was erected in 1990 by the Irish Cultural Society of New Orleans to honor an estimated 30,000 Irishmen who died while digging the New Basin Canal. Many young Irish women who migrated to New Orleans in the midnineteenth century worked as domestic servants. The most celebrated Irish female immigrant of this era was entrepreneur and philanthropist Margaret Haughery. Earning her reputation as a businesswoman through the success of her bakery, Haughery also helped establish and maintain several
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charitable institutions in the city, including the New Orleans Female Orphan Asylum and the Poydras Orphan Asylum. Known throughout the city by her nickname “the bread woman of New Orleans,” or more simply as “Margaret,” Haughery was commemorated by a statue erected in 1884, one of the first in North America to honor a woman. It stands in a small park two blocks away from the Ogden Museum of Southern Art on Camp Street. During the Civil War, large numbers of New Orleans Irish joined the Confederate ranks in defending the institution of slavery, forming volunteer companies and regiments, such as the “Louisiana Irish.” Irish immigration to New Orleans dramatically declined in the post–Civil War period and the distinctive Irish-born community was gradually replaced by a more anonymous white Southern identity, an ethnic transformation facilitating substantial political and economic gains from African Americans in the city after Reconstruction. Irish culture in New Orleans in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century was most visibly expressed in community festivals and parades, most notably those held in the Irish Channel on Saint Patrick’s Day. The city’s commodity culture and tourist economy also evidence a strong Irish theme by the numerous Irish-named public houses, such as Pat O’Brien’s in the French Quarter, which serves the celebrated Hurricane drink, and the Irish Shop of New Orleans on Toulouse Street. Stephen C. Kenny References Niehaus, Earl F. The Irish in New Orleans, 1800–1850. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965. Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 1999. www.abc-clio.com
NEW YORK CITY Introduction By the late nineteenth century, both the number of Irish in New York and their cultural presence exceeded that of any city in the world, even Dublin. By 1890 not only did the Irish-born population of New York exceed that of both Belfast and Dublin, but their cultural intrusion had been felt to such a degree in the city that both high and popular culture had recognized and responded to their presence: by 1842 one of the more popular attractions in Phineas T. Barnum’s American Museum, on the corner of Broadway and Printing House Row, was a scale model of Dublin; by1861 New York’s great poet, Walt Whitman, had included a poem to “Old Ireland” in his homage to American culture, Leaves of Grass.
Early Irish Involvement in New York The Irish presence in New York began almost with the origin of the city itself. In 1638, when it was still simply a trading post of the Dutch West India Company, Irish men were listed among its employees stationed in New Amsterdam. In 1683, Irish Catholic Thomas Dongan’s appointment as governor of the colony of New York (renamed after the Duke of York) would be the first occurrence of Irish involvement in the city’s municipal government, an involvement that would later come to characterize the Irish immigrant experience in New York and America. A native of Co. Kildare, Dongan brought both progressive reform (in the “Charter of Libertyes”) and public Catholic worship to New York (celebrating the first public Mass, in Fort James on October 30, 1683).
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His plans to bring colonists from Ireland never materialized; in 1688 he was removed from office, and in 1689 he fled the anti-Catholic backlash consuming New York. Irish immigration to New York would continue to be largely Protestant and numerically insignificant well into the next century. The Irish presence in New York began to resurface publicly in the latter half of the eighteenth century. On March 17, 1762, a group of Irish-born soldiers staged an impromptu march through the streets of colonial New York and, thus, initiated a celebration that would become the largest public display of ethnic identity in the United States in the next two centuries: New York’s Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. In 1784, James Duane, the son of an Irish immigrant, became the first mayor of New York City. The opening of Saint Peter’s Church on Barclay Street in 1786 marked the resurgence of Catholicism within the city. The failed Irish Rising of 1798 sent a number of political exiles, such as Thomas Addis Emmet, William Sampson, and William MacNeven, to New York; their arrival would precipitate the rise of Irish nationalism in the city and the country. In 1803, De Witt Clinton, the son of an Ulster immigrant, became first mayor (1803–1815) and then governor of New York (1817–1832, 1825–1828); he oversaw the building of the Erie Canal and ushered in New York as the commercial capital of the United States. By 1810, the first weekly Irish paper, The Shamrock, or Hibernian Chronicle, had appeared in the city to comment on life for the Irish immigrants in America and the continuing struggle for independence in Ireland. After the Napoleonic Wars, Irish immigration to New York not only increased www.abc-clio.com
significantly in numbers but also showed a marked change in religious denomination, shifting from the primarily Protestant emigration of the previous century to a more Catholic exodus. By 1815, New York had a bishop and its second church, Saint Patrick’s on Mott Street; a Catholic population of about 15,000 centered in the neighborhoods around the two churches. In just 10 years the numbers of Irish in the state swelled to 100,000, most of them poor laborers who found work in the city or on the Erie Canal. This increase in numbers excited anti-Irish and anti-Catholic feeling among the predominantly Protestant population of the city. Initially tame, AngloAmerican nativist demonstrations grew more serious as the Irish community increased. Disturbances began to escalate soon after Catholics were legally allowed to hold elective office in the state (1806), and clashes were often most severe around symbolic edifices or days. On July 12, 1824, Orangeman’s Day, a serious clash occurred in the Irish enclave of Greenwich Village; while in 1831 Saint Mary’s on Grand Street in the Lower East Side was destroyed by arson. Violent anti-Catholic and anti-Irish demonstrations were a sporadic feature of the early 1800s, as the city continued to expand to accommodate the “new” immigrants. In 1842, John Hughes, an immigrant from Co. Tyrone, became bishop of New York and began to organize the Catholic Irish into a politically distinctive and powerful voting bloc. Using similar organizational techniques to those of Daniel O’Connell in Ireland, Hughes molded the various Irish communities from Vinegar Hill to the Five Points into a significant political unit that could agitate for Catholic advancement. He oversaw a significant
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increase in the number of Catholic churches in New York and the erection of a spectacular new Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, and he was instrumental in creating a Catholic parochial school system (paid for by Catholic parishioners) and the founding of Fordham University and Mount St. Vincent College. By 1850, reflecting both the importance of New York to the Vatican and Hughes’ impressive achievements, the city was picked to be an archdiocese and Hughes was appointed its first archbishop.
The Famine Immigrants and Beyond Hughes’s growing power coincided with the Great Famine and the subsequent massive Irish Catholic immigration to North America and New York. Fleeing the devastation in Ireland, the famine immigrants poured into New York, for a time radically altering its demographic makeup. Not only did they arrive in numbers far exceeding those of any previous immigration, but they were also, in general, much more destitute than their predecessors. They soon overwhelmed charitable organizations, such as the Irish Emigrant Society (1841), which had been established to aid them. In 1855, in an effort to regulate immigrant reception, Castle Garden was converted into the Emigrant Landing Depot. Coming into the city, these largely destitute Irish immigrants found work in the lowest positions, often displacing African Americans. By 1855, Irish immigrants accounted for 87 percent of New York’s unskilled laborers. The famine immigrants also found themselves living in the poorest sections of the city, such as the Five Points, alongside and in competition with African Americans. This proximity would create harmony as well as www.abc-clio.com
discord, and American tap dance is reckoned to have originated from the fusion of Irish and African dance styles in the Five Points area. As the century progressed, however, New York would grow more ethnically diverse and more socially disharmonious. Fear that the Catholic Irish could wrest control of municipal and federal institutions led to the public and political success of the Native American party or the KnowNothing Party in 1854. This fear also led to anti-Irish riots on the streets as part of the larger recurrence of social unrest throughout the 1840s and 1850s. To support their anti-Irish platform nativists would point to Fernando Wood’s (and later William Tweed’s) manipulation of the large Irish voting bloc to gain power and, subsequently, corrupt public and city charters for personal ends. They also pointed to the Irish reputation for violence and criminality; in one citation 59 percent of all people arrested in New York City in 1859 were Irish. By the beginning of the Civil War, in 1861, almost a quarter of the city’s population was Irish. Unlike their Irish hero, O’Connell, they were probably largely antiabolitionist and, as such, held mixed views about the impending conflict. However, once the war began, they volunteered in large numbers, seeing it as their duty to help preserve the Union. An estimated 51,000 Irish volunteered from New York State, the majority serving under either Col. Michael Corcoran in the 69th Regiment or Thomas Francis Meagher (an exiled Young Ireland leader) in an Irish Brigade. They joined for many reasons—to repudiate nativist charges that they were unworthy of citizenship, to strike a blow against the English (as the supposed ally of the Confederate “cotton lords”), or simply
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for the adventure—but they fought and died as heroes of the Union. However, as the war progressed and the casualties mounted, initial Irish enthusiasm quickly began to wane. With the passing of the federal Conscription Act by Congress in March 1863, the Irish thought that in effect they were being victimized by the government. When the first list of draftees was posted on Saturday, July 11, in the uptown Ninth District of New York, it became clear that the Irish wards would supply the largest numbers of recruits. By Monday, when the draft office reopened, resentment had grown into anger and, led by the Black Joke Volunteer Fire Company, the gathered crowd attacked and destroyed the office. Over the next three days, New York City fell into anarchy, and the worst destruction was visited on those who could do least to defend themselves—African Americans. The chief part played by the Irish in the Draft Riots would undo a lot of the goodwill generated toward them by their impressive service and immense sacrifice in the Civil War. The failure of the 1848 Rising in Ireland had resulted in a number of important Irish nationalists being exiled in New York: Michael Doheny, John Mitchel, John O’Mahony, and Thomas Francis Meagher, among others. With the end of the Civil War, their thoughts turned once again to Irish freedom. The Fenian Brotherhood, a secret society that had been formed in 1859 for the purpose of bringing about a revolution in Ireland, now turned its thoughts toward invading Canada as a way of involving America in a war with England. Beginning in 1866, many New York Civil War veterans became involved in a series of minor and unsuccessful raids in Canada. After another failed rebellion in Ireland in www.abc-clio.com
1867 and the exile of two prominent nationalist leaders to New York—Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa and John Devoy—the Fenian movement was reorganized and remerged as Clan na Gael. After his arrival in New York in 1871, Devoy emerged as the dominant leader of Irish nationalist politics in America. He founded two newspapers, the Irish Nation (1882) and the Gaelic American (1903) and, along with Michael Davitt, began the shift in the Irish and Irish-American national movement to the “New Departure”—an informal alliance among constitutional and physical force nationalists to work together peacefully under the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell. Postbellum New York witnessed the rise of the Irish in Democratic politics. While “Boss” Tweed had used the Irish vote to win power, privilege, and wealth for himself, after the Civil War the Irish emerged to take over the reigns of the “Tammany machine” and, through it, to manipulate the Democratic politics in New York. With “Honest” John Kelly’s ascension to Tammany “boss” in 1872, control of Tammany Hall in New York fell into Irish hands and remained there well into the twentieth century, producing such renowned New York figures as “Commissioner” Murphy, Jimmy Walker, and Al Smith. While infamous for its corruption, Tammany provided the Irish immigrants with a way out of the slums and into civil service and public employment. In 1880 New York elected its first Irish Catholic mayor, William R. Grace, and by the turn of the century the Irish were well on the rise out of the ghettos and into the parlors of middle-class New York. With Irish female immigration equaling and even, at times, exceeding Irish male
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immigration to the United States, Irish women were a major part of New York’s Irish population; by the turn of the century almost 60 percent of Irish immigrants would be female, and most of these would come through New York. On January 1, 1892, Annie Moore, an emigrant from Cork, was the first immigrant to set foot on New York’s new federal immigration facility, Ellis Island. Domestic service offered the best opportunity for employment for Irish women in New York; by 1855 almost three quarters of all domestics in New York City were Irish. However, women were also employed outside the home, primarily in the “needle trades,” and they were often deeply involved in union and political organizations. In 1880 Fanny and Anna Parnell (sisters of Charles Stuart Parnell) formed the New York Branch of the Ladies’ Irish National Land League, in support of the Land League movement in Ireland. The Ladies’ Land League Association, as it became known, quickly spread across the country and even into Ireland in 1881. Although its tenure would be brief, the Ladies’ Land League was a stepping-stone to further involvement for Irish American women in political and labor organizations. By the twentieth century, Irish-American women like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (who ran as a Communist candidate for New York State representative) would become organizers and leading figures in New York labor and political movements, formerly exclusively male domains.
The Irish in Twentieth-Century New York By the early twentieth century, the New York Irish were moving from the margins to the mainstream of society and involving themselves in culture and sport. In 1897, www.abc-clio.com
Celtic Park was opened in Queens, New York; it offered a combination of track, field, and traditional Gaelic sports. By the start of World War I, the Gaelic Athletic Association was organized in the city, and it continues to operate as an active organization in the city to this day. Cultural perception of the New York (and American) Irish was influenced by theatrical representations of the Irish by playwrights such as Dion Boucicault (who took his major plays to New York) and Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart (whose The Mulligan Guard Ball, in 1879, was one of the first plays to show the Irish Americans in their urban environment); by popular Irish character actors from Tyrone Power to James O’Neill; and by popular Irish performers such as Chauncey Olcott and John McCormack. By the 1920s, with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s celebration as a great American writer, the second- and third-generation New York Irish were acknowledging themselves and being acknowledged as American. Two wars would clarify this for them: World War I and the Irish War of Independence. Although the New York Irish would again involve themselves in large numbers in a war not of their making, they would do so as American soldiers and not as Irishmen trying to affirm their American identity. While the New York Irish still joined the 69th Regiment of New York—now a nationally renowned fighting unit—in large numbers, they did so now more for local pride than for ethnic validation. The War of Independence, in certain ways an opportunistic endeavor on the part of the Irish (to rise up against the English while their forces were engaged in a major conflict in Europe), certainly energized the exiled nationalists in New York: John Devoy and Judge Cohalan formed the Friends of
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Irish Freedom (to gather American support for Irish Independence) at the first Irish Race Convention of March 4–5, 1916, just weeks before the Easter Rising. New York–born Irishman Eamon de Valera, whose death sentence was commuted because of his American citizenship, would go on to head the Irish Free State and become the most prominent figure in Ireland and Irish politics for the next half century. While de Valera was making history in Ireland, the New York Irish had their own “Irish” political figure to rally around: Al Smith. Born in 1873 on the Lower East Side, Smith was the champion of the working class because of his interest in labor legislation and social reform. Elected governor of New York in 1918, he would hold the office for four terms and become one of New York’s great governors. In 1928, he ran for president of the United States—the first Irish Catholic ever to do so—but lost to Herbert Hoover. After this loss, Smith became disillusioned and largely dropped out of politics. With the onset of the Depression in the 1930s, Irish immigration to New York diminished to almost imperceptible levels and did not recover until after World War II. But even then it was only a fraction of what it had been in the nineteenth century. During World War II, New York Irish Americans, once again, served bravely and honorably, while they were privately and publicly rankled that Ireland and the Irish government under de Valera remained neutral. In 1945, William O’Dwyer, a former native of Bohola, Co. Mayo, was elected mayor of New York City. But what looked like a glorious return to political power for the Irish proved to be nothing more than an aftershock to the Tammany Hall reign. Dogged by accusations of corruption www.abc-clio.com
(which had blighted the careers of so many New York Irish political figures before him), O’Dwyer resigned his mayoralty in 1950. O’Dwyer’s election as mayor of New York is a significant event in the history of Irish political power in the city; he stands as possibly the last Irish immigrant ever to win election to New York’s highest elective office. By the end of World War II, the Irish population of the city was greatly reduced. After 1945, as a result of new immigration from Ireland, it began to increase, but it would never again achieve the numbers or public presence of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Immigrants in the 1940s and 1950s proved largely invisible to the broader New York population as they settled into already well-established Irish neighborhoods within the city. The older generations of Irish Americans in the city had largely made the transition from working-class to middle-class and even upper-class citizens. With the help of the Catholic Church and their strong political base they had moved from laboring jobs into mercantile and professional careers and had moved their homes into the Upper West Side, the Bronx, and across the East River to Queens. They were defined by their parish, their church, and their faith, and ethnicity was no longer a primary register; they were now comfortably Catholic Americans. Although immigration died off in the 1960s and 1970s, the 1980s brought another significant wave of Irish immigrants to America and New York. These “new Irish” as they were known, were noticeably different from their earlier compatriots. In general, they were better educated than previous immigrants and consisted of more skilled laborers and professionals. They also proved to be more mobile than their
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predecessors (not committing themselves to established Irish neighborhoods but rather settling all over New York) and introduced to the city a modern Irish identity, not confined by the traditional markers of religion and nationalism. Because of new immigration restrictions, a significant percentage of these new Irish immigrated illegally and remained as undocumented aliens. In this and many ways, the new Irish have more in common with other new immigrant communities, such as those from Latin American and Asia, than they do with the older-generation Irish Americans. They have rejuvenated the Irish presence in New York and regenerated debate about what it means to be Irish American. One of the city’s oldest demonstrations of traditional Irish pride—the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade—has in recent times become the center of contentious debates surrounding Irish nationalism and the right of the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization to march in the parade. These debates have generally ranged the older generations of Irish Americans against the younger Irish Americans and newer immigrants. As New York moves into the twentyfirst century, the Irish continue to be a vital part of the intricate ethnic makeup of the city. From more traditional Irish symbols such as the Waterford crystal ball (which, since 2000, drops every year from the top of One Times Square to signal the start of the New Year) to a more active engagement in fostering a deepening understanding of Ireland and Irish America (signaled by New York University’s opening of Glucksman Ireland House at Washington Mews and Fifth Avenue in 1993), the Irish presence in New York continues to this day to be an active one. James P. Byrne www.abc-clio.com
See also: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR; CATHOLIC CHURCH, the; DE VALERA, Eamon; DEVOY, John; DONGAN, Thomas; DRAFT RIOTS; GREAT FAMINE, The; HARRIGAN, Edward, and HART, Tony; HUGHES, Archbishop John; MEAGHER, Thomas Francis; MITCHEL, John; NATIVISM AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM; SAINT PATRICK’S CATHEDRAL; SAINT PATRICK’S DAY PARADES References Almeida, Linda Dowling. Irish Immigrants in New York City, 1945–1995. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Bayor, Ronald H., and Timothy J. Meagher, eds. The New York Irish: Essays toward a History. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1995. Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Casey, Marion R. “Irish.” In The Encyclopedia of New York City, edited by Kenneth T. Jackson. London: Yale University Press, 1995. Ridge, John. “New York City.” In The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, edited by Michael Glazier, 678–686. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999.
NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR England’s oldest colony and now Canada’s most recent province, Newfoundland and Labrador sits on the most easterly edge of the North American continent. The tenth province to join Confederation with Canada in 1949, it consists of the island of Newfoundland, the adjacent islands (except St. Pierre and Miquelon, which are French possessions), and the coastal area of Labrador, which borders the province of Quebec. Aboriginal peoples have lived in the area since at least 7000 B.C. Today, Newfoundland and Labrador is home to
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four peoples of Aboriginal ancestry: the Inuit, the Innu, the Micmac, and the Métis. The island Beothuk became extinct in the early nineteenth century when Shanawdithit, the last known of her people, died in the capital city of St. John’s. According to some interpretations of Icelandic sagas, Newfoundland and Labrador was visited by Leif Eriksson who established a short-lived colony around A.D. 1010 in what is now a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) World Heritage Site at L’Anse aux Meadows, on the tip of the island’s northern peninsula. There are also strong indications that Newfoundland was the site of John Cabot’s landfall during his first voyage to North America in 1497. England’s King Henry VII awarded Cabot £10 for “finding the new isle.” In 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, with a charter from Queen Elizabeth I, landed and took possession of the island in the name of England. Throughout the sixteenth century French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Basque fishers established seasonal communities, harvesting the cod-rich waters off the coast of Newfoundland. Since the early seventeenth century, Newfoundland was a strategic geographic prize over which rival British and French interests fought in order to control and regulate the profitable fishery. Ancestors of most contemporary Newfoundlanders and Labradorians came from southeast Ireland (counties Wexford and Waterford, mostly) or the southwest of England, in one of the most significant waves of immigration in the nineteenth century. Most Irish migrants were young men working on temporary contract for English merchants, but eventually more permanent settlements developed. Almost all were Catholic and only spoke Irish on www.abc-clio.com
arrival. Significant aspects of Newfoundland and Labrador culture—music, art, folklore, linguistic peculiarities—remain a testament to these Irish immigrants. Newfoundland and Labrador’s colorful political history began in 1832 with the granting of representative government. A British-appointed governor and council held most of the power, but a House of Assembly was elected by open ballot. This unworkable arrangement was replaced in 1855 with responsible government based on the British parliamentary system. In 1934, after devastating losses in World War I and the crushing economic disaster of the Great Depression, the Dominion of Newfoundland reverted to crown colony status, governed by a British Commission. This political situation proved equally unworkable, and a contentious and bitter political referendum was held in 1949. The people of Newfoundland and Labrador were offered three choices: continuation of Commissional Government, return to Dominion status and responsible government, or confederation with Canada. Joseph R. Smallwood, who led the campaign for confederation, became Newfoundland and Labrador’s first premier when the close vote resulted in confederation with Canada. The late twentieth century has arguably seen the greatest changes in Newfoundland and Labradorian culture and society. After confederation with Canada, the new provincial government of Premier Smallwood pursued a number of modernization projects: building roads, water and sewer systems, hospitals, schools, and electric power lines. Many initiatives designed to diversify the industrial sector and economy proved less successful. The most controversial policy, however, was the Community Resettlement Program of
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the 1960s, under which people living in the small, outport fishing communities were induced to leave for larger centers. Many Newfoundlanders viewed this program with resentment, as the destruction of distinct culture and traditions. In the larger communities, most notably in the capital city of St. John’s, generations who grew up as Canadians began a revitalization of that culture, mostly in theater and music: a revitalization that questioned Newfoundland and Labrador’s past and its present role in Canada. In 1992 the centuries-old cod fishery collapsed and a moratorium on all cod fishing was established, resulting in economic crisis in many rural communities. A change in the political landscape of Labrador was seen in 2004, with the establishment of a new territory, Nunatsiavut, under a land claims agreement between the Inuit and the provincial government. The province as a whole has been forced to look beyond the fishery, and tourism and offshore oil are seen as the keys to economic development in the twenty-first century. Danine Farquharson See also: ETHNIC AND RACE RELATIONS, Irish and Indegenous Peoples References Hiller, James K., and Peter Neary, eds. Newfoundland in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980. Johnston, Wayne. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. Toronto: Knopf, 1998. Mannion, John J., ed. The Peopling of Newfoundland: Essays in Historical Geography. The Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage website. www.heritage.nf.ca/ home.html (accessed October 4, 2007). Prowse, D.W. A History of Newfoundland. London: Macmillian, 1895. Social and Economic Papers, 8. St. John’s, Newfoundland: Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1977. www.abc-clio.com
NIBLO, WILLIAM B. (1789–1878) William Niblo (whose name was probably originally Niblock) came to New York from Ireland as a young man around 1813, and he left an indelible mark on the city as one of the great pioneers of Broadway family entertainment. He initially worked in a tavern on Wall Street. In time he married the tavern owner’s daughter. Shortly after, around 1815, he went into business for himself and opened the Bank Coffee House at the rear of the Bank of New York building at William and Pine Streets in New York’s financial district. His patrons consisted of New York’s business elite. By the mid-1820s Niblo had made enough money to be able to expand to a new, bigger location. He took a lease on a much larger property located at the northeast corner of Pine Street and Broadway, known at the time as 537 Broadway, which he opened in 1828. Over the next few years Niblo developed his new property into a fashionable entertainment center for families and business people. It consisted of a major theatre, a hotel, a restaurant and saloon, and a public garden. The garden, with its casual atmosphere, was spacious. It had shrubbery, flowers, illuminated walkways, fountains, caged songbirds, seating, and ice-cream and lemonade stalls and was said to be a delightful place on summer evenings where families could visit and enjoy the music and outdoor social activity. The complex became known as Niblo’s Garden. The theater was reported to have 3,000 seats. Niblo’s philosophy of the finest entertainment at the lowest cost resulted in capacity audiences for almost every performance for decades. A seat at Niblo’s cost only $.50, compared with $1.50 to $3
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elsewhere. Niblo was credited with introducing people to the theater who had never before attended one. In the years that followed, he introduced all sorts of entertainment acts, from musicals, plays, singers, dancers, pantomimes, and circus and acrobatic troupes to Italian and English operatic performances. Leading actors and entertainers, such as Edwin Forrest, Charles Kean, Charles E. Horn, the notorious entertainer Lola Montez, the Ravel family, and Irish playwright and actor Dion Boucicault, performed there. Opera singers Anna Thillon, Henriette Sontag, Marietta Alboni, Adelina Patti, and others all appeared there at one time or another. During the 1850s Michael Balfe’s famed opera The Bohemian Girl, William Wallace’s popular Maritana, and other works by these two Irish composers were performed at Niblo’s. The New York Philharmonic performed there in its early days. The American Institute, a manufacturer’s and agricultural association, held its annual trade fair at Niblo’s every year. Niblo’s Garden became one of the most famous and fashionable entertainment centers on New York’s Broadway. The Metropolitan Hotel, a part of the complex, also became one of city’s best properties for business and family stays. In September 1846 most of the complex was destroyed by fire. Niblo’s was rebuilt within three years. In the meantime, Niblo, undaunted, became involved with another theater where he mounted important operatic performances and other forms of entertainment. Niblo’s Garden was also the venue for what was probably the premiere of the first American opera, Rip Van Winkle by George Frederick Bristow, in September 1855. Niblo was also a great friend of the famed Irish actor, Tyrone Power, the grandfather of the future movie star of the same www.abc-clio.com
name. Niblo retired from the business around 1858. In addition to his entertainment activities Niblo had also developed into an important collector of paintings. His gallery was said to contain one of the finest collections in the city. In his later years Niblo was known for his generosity and kindness. He donated a library of valuable books to the New York Historical Society. On his death in 1878, in his will he made a bequest of more than $150,000, an enormous amount for that time, for a library to the charitable Young Men’s Christian Association. It was during the second phase at the rebuilt Niblo’s Garden that the musical The Black Crook premiered. It was to become Broadway’s first musical show with dancing girls and other forms of exotic entertainment. The show ran for over 400 performances. Niblo’s Garden was closed and sold in 1895, and a new commercial building replaced it. By then Niblo and his wife of many years were long gone. He is buried in the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. Basil Walsh See also: BALFE, Michael W.; WALLACE, William Vincent References Lawrence, Vera Brodsky. Strong on Music: The New York Music Scene in the Days of George Templeton Strong, 1836–1875. Vol. 1. New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1988. Mason, R. Osgood, Sketches and Impressions, Musical, Theatrical and Social, 1799–1885. New York: G. F. Putnam & Sons, 1887. Ottenberg, June C. Opera Odyssey: Toward a History of Opera in Nineteenth-Century America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.
NICARAGUA The Republic of Nicaragua in Central America was proclaimed in 1821 after gaining its independence from Spain.
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Before that, parts of the country had been the target of British pirates, some of whom would have been from Irish families. Sir Peter Parker (1721–1811), who was probably born in Ireland, was involved in an abortive attack on the Spanish on the San Juan River in 1780. However, gradually interest in Nicaragua began to center on the possibility of building a canal through the country. Although the distance was longer than that through Panama, the route through Nicaragua was easier. Curiously, in 1853 when Patrick James Smyth (ca. 1823–1885) effected the release of another Irish nationalist from Australia, he used the code name “Nicaragua.” In 1855 one of the political factions, the Liberals, in the Nicaraguan city of León, decided to ask the American adventurer William Walker to raise an armed band and come to their aid. As a result, Walker, who had made a failed attempt to capture Mexico two years earlier, arrived in Nicaragua with 56 followers, including some Irishmen, and attacked the Conservative faction in the city of Granada. After being elected president of Nicaragua, and establishing a government recognized by the United States of America, Walker was defeated after announcing his intention of taking over the four other Central American republics. One of the armies sent against Walker was from Costa Rica, and among the Americans captured was a 17-year-old Canadian boy from Quebec, who was of Irish ancestry. The lad was taken as a prisoner to San José, the Costa Rican capital; he was later released after the intervention of the Irishman Thomas Meagher. In the late 1870s, when serious plans were drawn up for building the Panama Canal, the idea of a canal in Nicaragua was abandoned. Although travelers did visit the www.abc-clio.com
country over the next forty years, the next major Irish connection with the republic was in 1918 when Dr. Daniel Murrah Molloy (1882–1944) arrived in Managua, Nicaragua’s capital, to investigate the yellow fever epidemic that was sweeping through Nicaragua and neighboring Honduras and seek a cure. During the Nicaraguan rebellion of 1927–1933, organized by Augustino César Sandino (1895–1934), there was some sympathy in a few Irish newspapers, which compared Sandino’s exploits with those of earlier Irish nationalists. Indeed in the French-Italian film Viva Maria! (1965), a fictional Irish nationalist flees England in 1907 for a Central American republic (possibly Costa Rica, Nicaragua, or Honduras). There he is killed blowing up a bridge, but his daughter, Maria, joins with another girl also called Maria (played by Brigitte Bardot) to stage a revolution. After the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1978–1979, support in Ireland for the victorious Sandinistas led to criticism by the U.S. government, which set about trying to overthrow the Sandinista government. In the November 1984 elections, in which the Sandinistas won, an interparty parliamentary delegation from Ireland determined that the vote was “free and fair.” Three years earlier Ireland’s ambassador to the United Nations, Noel Dorr, had tried to broker a peace agreement between the Sandinistas and the Americans. Furthermore, during the late 1980s a number of prominent Irish writers visited Nicaragua. Joseph V. O’Connor (b. 1963) wrote Desperadoes, published in 1994; and T. Coraghessan Boyle included a short story set in Nicaragua, which was published in 1998 in an edition of his collected stories. Other recent books on Nicaragua by Irish observers have included Betty Purcell’s
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Light After Darkness: An Experience of Nicaragua, published by Attic in Dublin in 1989, and Marcus Arruda’s What Happened to Sandinista Nicaragua?, which was published by University College Cork in 1992. Purcell, an Irish journalist, spent much time traveling around the country; in her sensitive account she argues that most Western commentators on the country lack an appreciation of Nicaraguan political history. In recent years Irish aid workers in Agency for Personal Services Overseas and other nongovernment organizations have been prominent in helping people with health and education issues in Nicaragua. For Irish people visiting Managua, the Shannon, owned by Michael Damery from Cork, is billed as the only authentic Irish bar in Nicaragua. Justin Corfield The problems encountered by Irish immigrants are poignantly demonstrated by this song, “No Irish Need Apply,” published in the London Times in February 1862. (Library of Congress)
See also: MEAGHER, Thomas, Francis
NO IRISH NEED APPLY Irish Catholics in America have a vibrant memory of humiliating job discrimination against their menfolk, which glared out from omnipresent signs proclaiming “Help Wanted—No Irish Need Apply!” (NINA). These ads called out to non-Irish men: we have a job, and if you are English or German or anything but Irish come in and apply. No historian, archivist, or museum curator has ever been able to find a single genuine NINA sign, nor a photograph of one or a mention in a newspaper report or court case, nor even a recollection of a particular sign in a particular store. (Today anyone can buy fake NINA signs on Ebay.) No Protestant Irishman recalls seeing such a sign; there were no allegations that similar signs ever existed for other Catholic www.abc-clio.com
groups or for Jews. Historians using computerized databases have searched through million of pages of newspapers, including the want ads. Since its start in 1851, the daily New York Times published exactly one NINA ad for males: a livery stable in Brooklyn in 1854 advertised for a teenage boy who could write, and NINA. What we do have are all the signs of an urban legend: very probably no genuine NINA sign ever existed in America. The market for female household workers occasionally specified religion or nationality. Newspaper ads for women sometimes did include NINA, because a small proportion of hiring women (less than 10 percent) were reluctant to have a
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Catholic inside their home. Irish women in fact dominated the market for domestics in most large cities. They had considerable control over their working conditions because, if dissatisfied with terms, they would quit immediately, knowing their Irish servant network would quickly find them another job and would shun the offending housewife. Middle-class housewives termed the informal but strong Irish control over the market “the servant problem.” The NINA signs did exist in England and Canada. The slogan was commonplace in upper-class London by 1820—referring to English disdain for Irish Protestants (Catholics were beneath contempt). In the London Times from 1828 to 1862, NINA appeared in about one want ad a month (fewer than 1 percent) for female servants; it never appeared in the help wanted ads for men. In 1862 in London there was a song, “No Irish Need Apply,” purportedly by a maid looking for work who was distressed to see such a sign on a townhouse. The song quickly crossed the ocean where it was modified to depict a man recently arrived in New York who sees a NINA ad and confronts and beats up the miscreant. The song was an immediate hit and is the source of the myth. Hearing the song over and over again, the Irish incorporated it into their folklore, and by 1870, as Mark Twain noted, it had become a bit of stock Irish humor shared by everyone and never used maliciously. But the Irish started to believe some of their relatives had actually seen NINA signs, which proved they were the victims of systematic job discrimination. The NINA slogan was important because of the way the Irish used it. NINA was an emphatic warning telling fellow Irishmen they must stick together in the face of the enemy. In actual job practice, www.abc-clio.com
most Irish worked for other Irishmen, especially in work gangs hired by construction companies, in taverns, or in government jobs controlled by Irish politicians. They were the beneficiaries of strong pro-Irish hiring practices. Job discrimination against Irish men could have occurred without any NINA signs, and it did occur on a major scale in the United Kingdom, but there is no evidence of any systematic discrimination anywhere in America at any time. Statistical data from numerous census sources show no measurable discrimination against the Irish. Although it is of course possible that a particular firm here or there refused to hire Irish, not a single example of that has actually been documented. Outside their community the Irish took jobs with railroads and in textile mills owned by non-Catholics. Hiring for those jobs was bureaucratized and little leeway was allowed to foremen. Railroads—the biggest employers in the nineteenth century—insisted they did not discriminate, and research into payroll records shows the Irish were promoted at the same rate as other ethnics. Most employees of textile mills were Catholics, and no foreman could keep his job if he deliberately alienated a majority of his potential workforce. Labor unions, with their heavy emphasis on group solidarity and collective bargaining rather than individual achievement, were natural media for the Irish. From the 1870s through 2000 about half of all union leaders were Irish. Historians have found no record of a strike over antiIrish discrimination. By contrast, discrimination against blacks, Chinese, and (in the early twentieth century) Italians, and Poles is readily apparent in the census data, in newspaper files, and in the minutes of labor unions.
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Historians can find political hostility that was based on anti-Catholicism and on disgust with the corruption of Irish political machines. That tension does not seem to have affected the job market, however. A loud but small group of Protestants attacked all Catholics, claiming that their “papist” religion diverted them from true religion and made them politically subservient to bishops and especially to a foreign pope. Some reformers complained that the Irish were too drunk and too violent and that corrupt Irish bosses gangvoted ignorant men to subvert local politics and take control of the public payroll. The peak of these attacks came in 1854, when the Know-Nothing movement elected numerous officials, especially in New England. That movement quickly vanished and left no significant legislation and launched no political careers. By the end of the Civil War the old fears had largely subsided. The Irish had proven their patriotism; their many churches, schools, colleges, hospitals, and charitable agencies validated the Catholic commitment to civic betterment. The remarkable success of Irish politicians over the past 150 years afforded proof that they were better than anyone else at winning the votes of non-Irish. Although there were anti-Catholic attacks on Al Smith in 1928 and to a much lesser degree against John F. Kennedy in 1960, these were entirely based on the premise that a Catholic officeholder had to give his highest loyalty to the pope, rather than to the Constitution. (There were no antiCatholic attacks against John Kerry in 2004, even though he was a devout Catholic whom many people mistakenly thought was Irish.) Neither Smith nor Kennedy was attacked for being Irish. Indeed no major www.abc-clio.com
politicians in America (outside a few in the deep South like Tom Watson) ever made anti-Catholic arguments part of their platform. No American leader ever stood on an anti-Irish platform—in sharp contrast to the United Kingdom or to Canada, where “Orange” Irish Protestants routinely banded together against the “Green” Catholics. Congress never passed or considered legislation to exclude Irish immigrants; they were in fact needed and welcomed. The immigration restriction movement of the 1890–1940 period was led by Irishcontrolled labor unions and did not target the Irish in any way. The Irish were not individualists. They worked in gangs in job sites they could control by force. The NINA slogan told them they had to stick together against the Protestant enemy, in terms of jobs, religion, and politics. The NINA myth justified physical assaults, and it persisted because it aided ethnic solidarity. After 1940 the rapid increase in education made job solidarity a hindrance rather than a help; the city machines disappeared. In 1850 the Irish huddled near the bottom of the socioeconomic scale. By 1900 they were about average. By 1960 they were well above average. Thus, the Irish advanced steadily up the ladder of social success, but they did it as a group standing shoulder to shoulder, with surprisingly few mavericks who tried in individualistic fashion to become successful outside the tight-knit Irish community. After 1960 the labor unions declined in importance and lost most of their Irish members. The sense of being discriminated against faded, except for the old NINA slogan itself, which persisted as a lingering “memory” based on a false stereotype of supposedly hostile Protestants. Richard Jensen
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NORAID 683 Reference Jensen, Richard. “‘No Irish Need Apply’: A Myth of Victimization” Journal of Social History 36, no. 2 (2002): 405–429.
NORAID Noraid is the acronym for Irish Northern Aid, an Irish-American organization supporting Irish republicanism. The group was founded in April 1970 after Joe Cahill and Dáithí Ó Conaill of the new Provisional wing of Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) asked Michael Flannery, longtime Clan Na Gael activist and veteran of the War of Independence and the Irish Civil War—along with “old” IRA veterans John McGowan and Jack McCarthy—to aid the military campaign in the north of Ireland. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Noraid faced allegations that its assistance for the Provisionals found its recipients not among the families of imprisoned IRA members but rather among those buying the weapons to wage the armed struggle. Under Flannery’s leadership, Noraid organized dinner dances, collections in Irish-American bars, and direct-mail appeals for support of dependents of Provisional IRA volunteers jailed by the British. The funds gathered by Noraid went first to the Dublin-based Provisional relief program An Cumann Cabhrach, and then were conveyed to the Belfast organization the Green Cross, which had superseded that city’s Northern Aid Committee. However, Noraid did not limit the disbursement of American donations once they had reached Ireland. Therefore, critics from the American, Irish, and British governments all accused Noraid of funding IRA terrorism. www.abc-clio.com
These charges were difficult to prove. Five activists jailed in Fort Worth, Texas, refused to reveal information; a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) crackdown targeting Noraid under the Foreign Agents Registration Act met with opposition from politicians representing Irish-American constituents. Most prominent was Mario Biaggi of New York, and 130 members of Congress at one time joined him on a Northern Ireland action committee. In the 1970s, individual donations to Noraid were often as little as $10 or $20. The lack of easily obtainable financial records from Noraid because of its preferred conveyance of funds to An Cumann Cabhrach by personal courier prevented U.S. inspection along much of the activists’ money trail. The gunrunning network supplying Irish republicans drew bigger funds and existed more parallel to—rather than within—Noraid; the FBI, through informants and surveillance, all but eliminated arms smuggling to republicans. Media coverage and political attacks damaged Noraid’s reputation, and the organization suffered from guilt by association. As well as hostility from governmental and press agencies, Noraid met with opposition from within its membership, many of whom identified with an Irish ideology from an earlier era of republicanism. The IRA’s advocacy of third world radicalism clashed with an Irish-American stereotype of a more Gaelicized, Catholic defender of an embattled land. In New York City, the newspaper the Irish People reprinted many articles from the Provisional An Phoblacht/Republican News. Emphasizing continuity in the physicalforce tradition, the Irish People promoted an aggressive anti-British position. The paper also publicized Noraid activities
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throughout the United States. An estimated 10,000 members in 70 branches existed at its height in the early 1970s. As with the earlier Clan Na Gael, East Coast Irish enclaves contributed most to the organization; New York City—with 2,000 members—remained the dominant stronghold. Most members were from middleclass suburban and urban backgrounds. Each branch numbered between 25 and 50 members; about 10 of these supplied the most committed activists. Noraid supporters comprised a cross-section from Irish America. Although many of its leaders were Irish born, emigrants from the earlier century’s IRA campaigns, mixing with more recent arrivals and third- and fourthgeneration Irish-Americans, also joined. The question of whether, as in the case of the Fenians a century earlier, members sought social camaraderie more than political commitment has been debated by academics. Often overlooked have been Noraid and other Irish-American republican groups’ appeal to activists, sharing diverse political and ideological sympathies, from non–Irish American or mixed national origins. After the 1980s H-Block protests sparked renewed attention for the IRA, the Irish People sponsored solidarity missions, bringing Noraid supporters to the north of Ireland. While the issue of representation for the Marxist Irish National Liberation Army caused friction when families of the hunger strikers were brought by Noraid to raise funds and a media profile in the United States, the necessity for a united front for republicanism between leftists and traditionalists prevailed. The Irish Republican Clubs assisted the radical wing of republicanism, and both competed and
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cooperated with Noraid in the 1970s and 1980s. Noraid succumbed to Justice Department pressure and signed (with reservations) the Foreign Agents Registration Act in 1984. Flannery, in 1989, dissatisfied with the mainstream IRA’s rejection of abstention from the Dail Eireann, left for the Friends of Irish Freedom, backers of republican Sinn Féin. As the IRA leadership shifted republicans toward the peace process, the end of the armed struggle loomed. In 1994, Friends of Sinn Féin was established in Washington, D.C., as lobbyists for Sinn Féin. Diplomatic efforts to achieve Irish republican aims began to supersede those of physical force. Sinn Féin’s office in the national capital signaled a decline in the Fenian-inspired methods of gathering American funds for those associated with Irish militarism. With the peace process, IRA prisoners returned to their families. By the end of the 1990s, Noraid’s stated justification appeared increasingly obsolete. John L. Murphy
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See also: IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY References Clark, Dennis. Irish Blood: Northern Ireland and the American Conscience. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1977. Holland, Jack. The American Connection: U.S. Guns, Money, and Influence in Northern Ireland. Niwot, CO: Roberts Rinehart, 1997. McCarthy, John P. Dissent from Irish America. New York: University Press of America, 1993. McFerran, Douglass. IRA Man: Talking with the Rebels. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997. Wilson, Andrew J. Irish America and the Ulster Conflict, 1968–1995. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995.
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NORTH CAROLINA North Carolina was one of the original 13 colonies of the United States, and it became the 12th state, founded in 1789. The state of North Carolina covers 52,669 square miles, and its capital, Raleigh, is located in the center of the state. The state owes its name to the English kings Charles I and Charles II (Latin Carolus), who granted the first territories. The state earned its slogan, “First in Flight,” because the Wright brothers flew the first airplane in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903. Among the first settlers in the colony were the Scots-Irish, known in Ireland as the Ulster Scots. Many of those Scots-Irish, who mainly entered the colonies by the port of Philadelphia, established their settlements in the Appalachian Mountains of southwestern North Carolina. They left their homeland and traveled across the eastern coast of the United States into the present-day counties of Buncombe, Cherokee, Clay, Graham, Haywood, Henderson, Jackson, Macon, Madison, Mitchell, Swain, Transylvania, and Yancey. At a time when religious repression increased and work was precarious in eighteenth-century Ulster, the American colonies offered religious toleration and great opportunities for work. The first stop for the Scots-Irish was Pennsylvania. However, by the end of the eighteenth century, the growth of population, along with the economic problems it brought, led them to sell their lands and look for a better place to live. They traveled southwest into the Valley of Virginia and the mountains of western North Carolina. One of the Ulster families, the Catheys, is considered most representative of this trend. They sold their lands in Maryland
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and later in Orange County, Virginia. In 1749, they traveled to Rowan County in North Carolina, where they settled in an area known as the “Irish settlement.” They emigrated still further into an area known today as Haywood County in North Carolina. In 1746, the Scots-Irish pioneered settlement west of the Yadkin River. The Irish settlement was the largest community of the three established there before 1750. It was located at the head of the Second Creek of the South Yadkin River. By 1750, the Catheys had led some 14 families to the Irish settlement. Migration into the southern states was accelerated by Virginia’s policy of granting land to encourage settlement. Economic motivations likely inspired the Ulster families to sell their land in western Virginia and move into the mountains of North Carolina, where land was cheaper and they could make a fortune. One wealthy Ulster landowner, Arthur Dobbs from Co. Antrim, was granted large extensions of land in Mecklenburg and Cabarrus counties in North Carolina. He was a governor of the royal colony of North Carolina from 1754 to 1765, and he so enthusiastically promoted the colony among his former countrypeople in Ireland that North Carolina became a popular destination for Irish immigrants. Another leading figure in North Carolina was James Patton, a young weaver from Co. Derry who settled in the town of Asheville. He arrived in Pennsylvania in 1783 and after six years became a merchant who carried dry goods south along the Great Wagon Road. He also drove cattle north from the Carolinas to Philadelphia. According to H. Tyler Blethen and Curtis W. Wood Jr., those who inhabit the
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mountains still enjoy a practical and simple lifestyle, which largely stems from the attitudes concerning religion and agriculture introduced by the Scots-Irish. However, nowadays the heritage of the Scots-Irish is also present in the heraldic legacy of the people, the number of Presbyterian churches, and the speech and music of the inhabitants in the Appalachian Mountains. Some places and events also commemorate the historical presence of the Irish, such as the annual Mountain Dance and Folk Festival organized by the town of Asheville. At Montreat, the Presbyterian Historical Society shows the visitor the religious tradition of the Scots-Irish, and Old Fort exhibits how mountain life was from its early inhabitants through today. The northwestern town of Boone, the Firefly Capital of America, was named for Scots-Irish frontiersman Daniel Boone. In 2001, the Town Council in Cary, located in eastern North Carolina, decided to become a sister city with Co. Meath, Ireland. Marian Pozo Montano See also: SCOTS-IRISH; SCOTS-IRISH PATTERNS OF SETTLEMENT, UNITED STATES References Blethen, Tyler H., and Curtis W. Wood Jr. From Ulster to Carolina. The Migration of the Scotch-Irish to Southwestern North Carolina. Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1999. Miller, Kerby. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
NOTRE DAME UNIVERSITY The University of Notre Dame in northwestern Indiana, adjacent to South Bend, is one of the larger independent Catholic universities in the United States; it has an enrollment of approximately 11,500 www.abc-clio.com
students—8,300 undergraduates and 3,200 in its Graduate Division, Architecture School and Law School. Coeducational since 1972, Notre Dame’s male to female ratio is approaching 50:50. Its famed athletic teams are called the Fighting Irish, reflecting one aspect of the university’s ethnic and religious heritage. As one of the preeminent Catholic universities in the United States, Nortre Dame has always been highly regarded by Irish Americans as an elite institution that nurtured and represented the ethos of their community. Notre Dame was founded on November 26, 1842. Its founder was 28-year-old Rev. Edmund Sorin of the Congregation of the Holy Cross, formed a few years earlier in Mans, France, who sought to create a college conducted according to Catholic principles. Sorin was attended by seven other brothers of the Society of St. Joseph, one of the congregation’s three societies. Sorin had recently come to Indiana from France, in response to a call for mission volunteers from the bishop of Vincennes. The bishop provided approximately 500 acres for the university, along with plans for a four-story college building. The site had been purchased from the U.S. government and given to the bishop for a school by Rev. Stephen Badin, a missionary and the first Catholic priest ordained in the United States. It was thought to be less than a mile from the portage route between the Kankakee and St. Joseph rivers, connecting the Mississippi River and Lake Michigan watersheds, which Father Marquette had crossed shortly before his death in 1675. Despite an extraordinarily cold winter, the northwestern Indiana Catholic community was able to build a 20-foot ⫻ 46-foot log church in the clearing and have it open for services on March 19, 1843; A
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small two-story brick building was built during the summer of 1843, to temporarily hold classes and a bakery, and the university received its first student, Alexis Coquillard of South Bend, Indiana, that fall. The cornerstone for the college building itself was laid on August 28, 1843; the university was chartered by a special act of the Indiana Legislature on January 14, 1844, and that fall the college building opened. In Notre Dame’s early years its college curriculum attracted few students, less than a dozen a year. Most of its students attended its manual labor school, likewise chartered by the Indiana Legislature in 1844, or its elementary and preparatory levels. The first graduate to receive a bachelor’s degree, Neal Gillespie, graduated in 1849. He was later to return to Notre Dame as a priest and professor. Gillespie was the first cousin of subsequent U.S. Speaker of the House, secretary of state, and unsuccessful presidential candidate James Gillespie Blaine. Notre Dame’s teacher of mathematics and commercial subjects, Brother Gatain, was lost to the faculty in 1850 after he was sent to California to look for gold. He was left on his own and eventually returned to his family’s farm in France. His and Father Sorin’s biographies present the earliest views of Notre Dame’s first years. Notre Dame’s second catalog, printed in 1850 by Schuyler Colfax, a South Bend newspaperman, shows that Notre Dame had 69 students by that date. Colfax also became U.S. Speaker of the House and later President Grant’s first vice president. Notre Dame received its own post office in 1851 through the intervention of U.S. Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, a friend of Vincennes’s former Bishop and a former U.S. Speaker of the House. www.abc-clio.com
Originally reachable only by stage and wagon, or by boat down the St. Joseph River from Lake Michigan, Notre Dame’s campus became accessible by rail from the east when the Northern Indiana & Southern Michigan Railroad reached South Bend in 1851, and soon thereafter from the west when it reached Chicago. The availability of rail service essentially opened up Notre Dame to students from the Chicago area and points to the west. Few of Notre Dame’s students had come from anywhere west before that time. Notre Dame’s original college curriculum included four years of humanities, poetry, rhetoric, and philosophy. Early on it also offered French, German, Spanish, Italian, music, and drawing. Physics and geology courses were added in 1863, and a College of Science in 1865. Notre Dame opened the first Catholic law school in the United States in 1869, the first Catholic college of engineering in 1873, and the first Catholic program in architecture in 1898. Wings were added to Notre Dame’s college building in 1853, to accommodate increasing enrollment, but it soon proved inadequate and was replaced by a new sixstory Main Building, constructed during the summer of 1865. That building and several other structures were destroyed in a three-hour fire during a southwestern gale on April 23, 1879. But enough of a new Main Building had arisen by September 1879 that there was room for fall classes. The new Main Building includes the dome, completed in 1884 and gilded at Father Sorin’s insistence, which is Notre Dame’s landmark. Notre Dame’s history since Father Sorin’s death in 1893 has been one of physical growth and intellectual achievement. Notre Dame faculty members or graduates
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were among the early pioneers of aerodynamics, discovered the formula for synthetic rubber, and achieved the first wireless transmission in the United States. The law school was significantly expanded in the 1920s and the graduate school in the 1930s. Entrance requirements were raised after World War II, faculty hiring increased, and the number of campus buildings nearly doubled. Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, who served as university president from 1952 to 1987, became an internationally known public figure because of his work in civil rights and education. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (MA 1975) is among Notre Dame’s many graduates in public service. Its faculty includes both Catholics and non-Catholics, including historian George Marsden, a biographer of Protestant theologian Jonathan Edwards. Approximately 85 percent of its students identify themselves as Catholic. The others do not. Steven B. Jacobson References Ayo, Nicholas, Signs of Grace: Meditations on the Notre Dame Campus. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. Burns, Robert E. Being Catholic, Being American: The Notre Dame Story, 1842–1934. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999.
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Burns, Robert E. Being Catholic, Being American: The Notre Dame Story, 1934–1952. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000. Connelly, Joel R., and Howard J. Dooley. Hesburgh’s Notre Dame: Triumph in Transition. New York: Hawthorne Books, 1972. Hesburgh, Theodore M., God, Country, Notre Dame: The Autobiography of Theodore M. Hesburgh. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000. Klawitter, George. After Holy Cross, Only Notre Dame: The Life of Brother Gatain. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2003. Massa, Mark S., Catholics and American Culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team. New York: Crossroad, 1999. Mater, Alma (pseudonym). A Brief History of the University of Notre Dame du Lac Indiana from 1842 to 1892. Chicago: Werner, 1895. O’Connell, Marvin Richard. Edward Sorin. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. Rai, Karanjit Singh. Four Decades of Vector Biology at Notre Dame. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999. Robinson, Ray. Rockne of Notre Dame: The Making of a Football Legend. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Stritch, Thomas. My Notre Dame: Memories and Reflections of Sixty Years. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992. Tucker, Todd. Notre Dame vs. The Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan. Chicago: Loyola Press, 2004. Wallace, Francis. Notre Dame: Its People and Its Legends. New York: David McKay, 1969.
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O O’BRIEN, CHARLOTTE GRACE (1845–1909) Charlotte Grace O’Brien was born on November 23, 1845, and spent her early years at Cahirmoyle in Co. Limerick. Her father, William Smith O’Brien, was a Protestant landlord who joined the Young Ireland movement and led the 1848 rebellion at Ballingarry, Co. Tipperary. He was convicted of treason and transported to Tasmania when Charlotte was only three years old. Upon his release in 1854, Charlotte moved with her father to Wales, where they remained until his death in 1864. After her father’s death, O’Brien returned to Cahirmoyle to help her brother care for his three children over the next several years. While back at Cahirmoyle, O’Brien turned her attention to studying botany and writing. In 1878 she published Light and Shade, a novel about the 1867 Fenian uprising in Ireland. Two years later she published a volume of poetry entitled Drama and Lyrics. Her interest in botany led her to produce Wild Flowers of the Undercliffe, a study of the flora on the Isle of Wight, in 1881. By that point she had also begun publishing articles in support of the Land League in such journals as United Ireland, the Nation, and the Nineteenth
Century. Her writing became increasingly political in the 1880s and 1890s; she wrote in support of Home Rule, political reform, and women’s rights. O’Brien joined the Gaelic League shortly after its inception in 1893 and continued to support the Irish language and Irish industries for the remainder of her life. O’Brien is best remembered for her almost single-handed campaign to improve the conditions of Irish immigrants to America. In an article entitled “Horrors of an Emigrant Ship,” published in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1881, O’Brien called attention to the appalling conditions Irish emigrants, especially single women, suffered on board “coffin ships” to the United States. Her exposé prompted a public outcry and a Board of Trade investigation into the practices of the White Star shipping line, which grudgingly began to improve its facilities. O’Brien also set up a lodging house— O’Brien Emigrants’ Home—in Queenstown (now Cobh) to offer bed, breakfast, and an evening meal to prospective emigrants, especially women and children. In 1882 O’Brien traveled steerage to New York and lived for some time in a tenement to experience firsthand the conditions about which she was writing. Her experience convinced
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her that a widespread network of support was needed for Irish emigrants and immigrants on both sides of the Atlantic. She prevailed upon the Roman Catholic hierarchy in New York to establish a welcoming center for single female immigrants. The mission of Our Lady of the Rosary, which opened its doors on January 1, 1884, provided shelter and job assistance to 25,000 Irish immigrant women between 1884 and 1890. In a lecture tour of the United States, O’Brien galvanized support for the mission among Irish Americans. Suffering from poor health and progressive deafness, O’Brien returned to Ireland where she resumed her gardening and writing. She published another volume of poetry, Lyrics, in 1886 and a study of the flora of northwest Limerick in 1907. She died suddenly at her home in 1909. She had converted to Roman Catholicism some years earlier. Kathleen Ruppert See also: EMIGRATION; IRISH NATIONAL LAND LEAGUE References Diner, Hasia R. Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. Ó Céirín, Kit, and Cyril Ó Céirín, eds. Women of Ireland: A Biographic Dictionary. Kinvara: Tír Eolas, 1996. Rappaport, Helen. Encyclopedia of Women Social Reformers. Vol. 2. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2001
O’BRIEN, JOHN THOMOND (1786–1861) John Thomond O’Brien was an army general in the independence wars of Argentina, Chile, and Peru. Born in 1786 in Baltinglass, Co. Wicklow, the son of Martin O’Brien www.abc-clio.com
and Honoria O’Connor, O’Brien arrived in Buenos Aires in 1812 and opened a merchant house. He enrolled in the army, fought in Uruguay under General Soler, and was promoted to lieutenant. In 1816 he joined José de San Martin’s mounted grenadiers regiment in the Andes Army. After the battle of Chacabuco he was promoted to captain and appointed aide-decamp to San Martin. O’Brien fought in the battles of Cancha Rayada and Maipú, and in the campaign of Peru. In 1821 he was promoted to colonel and was awarded the Orden del Sol and Pizarro’s golden canopy, which have been borne by the viceroys of Peru in processions. In Peru, O’Brien turned his attention to the mining business. The Peruvian government gave him a grant for the famous silver mine of Salcedo, near Puno. O’Brien and his associate, Mr. Page, who represented Rundell and Bridge (London jewelers), embarked on an effort to provide food and supplies to their miners at Lake Chiquito, located at 5,500 meters above sea level, from the port of Arica, located 380 kilometers away in the Pacific coast. They purchased a boat in Arica, stripped it of anchor and rigging, and after two years of hard labor managed to launch her on the lake. This was the first attempt to establish regular communications between the valleys in Bolivia and the Pacific Coast. Unfortunately for O’Brien and Page, a storm destroyed the vessel and with it their hopes of carrying on the mining works. Other remarkable efforts of O’Brien included transporting a steam engine across the Andes, digging a canal 600 meters long and traversed by nine locks through the Laycayota Mountain, and laying a railroad for conveying ore. In the mid-1820s a group within the Irish elite of Buenos Aires, including doctors
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Michael O’Gorman and John Oughagan and the Irish chaplain Father Moran, attracted the interest of the local government to implement an immigration scheme from Ireland to Buenos Aires. They communicated with the archbishop of Dublin and in 1826 commissioned John T. O’Brien, who was back from Peru, to travel to Europe and recruit “moral and industrious” immigrants. He spent two years in Ireland trying to engage emigrants without success. However, he met John Mooney of Streamstown, Co. Westmeath, who went to Argentina in 1828 when O’Brien was returning. This was to be the start of the Irish emigration to Argentina from the Westmeath-LongfordOffaly area. In addition to John Mooney, his sister, Mary and her husband, Patrick Bookey, went with O’Brien. Back in South America in 1835, O’Brien was promoted to general in Peru. He returned to Ireland and died in Lisbon in 1861, on his way back to South America. Edmundo Murray See also: ARGENTINA; O’GORMAN, Michael References Hammond, Tony. “British Immigrants in South America (Industry, Commerce and Science).” www.hammond.swayne.com/ industry.htm#Mining (accessed August 19, 2007). Nally, Pat. “Los Irlandeses en la Argentina.” Familia 2, no. 8 (1992).
O’BRIEN, PAT (1899–1983) Pat O’Brien was born William Joseph Patrick O’Brien in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. All four of his grandparents were born in Ireland: his mother’s parents were from Co. Galway and his father’s family was from Co. Cork. He attended Marquette Academy in New York, where he met Spencer Tracy, www.abc-clio.com
with whom he would remain lifelong friends. After joining the Navy with Tracy during World War I, O’Brien decided against entering a seminary and attended law school at Marquette University. While there, he started acting in college productions. His big break came when he played the character of Walter Burns in the Broadway production of The Front Page. For Lewis Milestone’s film adaptation of the play, in only O’Brien’s second film, he was cast as Hildy Johnson. He married fellow actor Eloise Taylor in 1931. They had four children together, three of whom were adopted: Mavourneen, Brigid, Patrick Sean, and Terence Kevin. The Ancient Order of Hibernians awarded O’Brien the prestigious John F. Kennedy medal, and a testimonial dinner was held in his honor in 1983 by the United Irish Societies of Southern California. He died of a heart attack in Santa Monica in 1983. O’Brien became famous for playing Irish characters, particularly the roles of priests and policemen. Because of this he came to be known as Hollywood’s “Irishman in Residence.” He was a member of a group dubbed by Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky “the Irish Mafia,” which included James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, and Frank McHugh. O’Brien became associated with films starring James Cagney, and the pair appeared in a total of nine films together. In films such as Here Comes The Navy, Devil Dogs of the Air, Ceiling Zero, and Torrid Zone they played Navy or Air Force buddies forced to rely on each other. The Irish in Us told the story of three Irish brothers in New York in which the youngest brother (Cagney) steals the girlfriend of the eldest brother, played by O’Brien. They also appeared in Boy Meets Girl. Their most famous film was Angels with Dirty Faces in which
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Actors Pat O’Brien (right) and James Cagney (left) during a scene in Angels with Dirty Faces in 1938. (Warner Bros./First National/The Kobal Collection)
they play two childhood friends in Hell’s Kitchen in New York. After a robbery Cagney is sent to reform school while O’Brien escapes arrest. Cagney’s character grows up to be a gangster, while O’Brien’s becomes a priest, Father Jerry Connolly, who decides to fight against corruption and who ministers to him as he awaits execution. Two years later, the pair starred in The Fighting 69th, which told the story of two friends in the 69th Regiment during World War I. The regiment was composed mainly of Irish-American soldiers, and once again O’Brien played the straitlaced priest opposite Cagney’s cocky and brash character. Another one of his most celebrated parts at this time was the title character in Knute Rockne –All American in which he played www.abc-clio.com
the Notre Dame football coach who makes an inspirational locker-room speech to his players to encourage them to win a game. Like his friend Spencer Tracy in Boys Town, in Fighting Father Dunne O’Brien played the role of a priest who helps poor newsboys by founding an orphanage. The last film O’Brien and Cagney starred in together was Ragtime, the adaptation of the E. L. Doctorow novel in which O’Brien’s wife also starred. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s O’Brien mostly worked in television. He also developed a nightclub act in which he combined jokes, stories, and songs. He starred alongside Spencer Tracy in The Last Hurrah, in which Tracy played an IrishAmerican politician, loosely based on Boston Mayor James Michael Curley, who
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tries to get reelected for the last time. In 1959 he played the Irish-American policeman Mulligan in Prohibition-era Chicago in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot. David Doyle References Carzo, Eileen Daney. “Pat O’Brien.” The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, edited by Michael Glazier. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999. Curran, Joseph. Hibernian Green on the Silver Screen. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. O’Brien, Pat. The Wind at My Back: The Life and Times of Pat O’Brien by Himself. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1964.
O’BRIEN,TIM (1954–) Tim O’Brien is an Irish-American musician who has often said that for him the essence of music is making something new out of something old. At first he worked in American folk forms, as he still does, but as his career has progressed, O’Brien has gone more deeply into his Irish and IrishAmerican roots. Born in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1954, O’Brien grew up in the heart of bluegrass and mountain music country, at the tail end of the folk music revival. He heard country music from live shows at the WWVA Jamboree and popular music from the Beatles on the radio. With a gift for playing stringed instruments of all sorts and a high clear tenor signing voice, O’Brien found his own way into music, through singing folk and country songs in a duo with his sister Mollie (who also went on to make a career in music), and later, as the pull of bluegrass became stronger, by moving to Colorado and joining in the flourishing newgrass band bluegrass scene in the West. With guitarist Charles Sawtelle, banjo player Pete Wernick, and www.abc-clio.com
Musician Tim O’Brien performs on stage at Swallow Hill Music Association in Denver, Colorado in 2005. O’Brien won a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album for Fiddler’s Green in 2005. (Reggie Barrett Photography)
bass player Nick Forster, O’Brien, playing mandolin and sharing vocals with Foster, started the progressive bluegrass band Hot Rize in 1978. The men also formed a sort of alter ego band, Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers, in which they played country standards and western swing. In whichever form they appeared, the quality of their musicianship and their connection with their audiences was strong. Hot Rize was chosen for the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year Award in 1990, and O’Brien was named Male Vocalist of the Year by the same group in 1993. O’Brien wanted to explore even more aspects of his musical heritage. His first solo album, Hard Year Blues, found him
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using folk music and folk ideas as a starting point to connect with and explore country, blues, western music, jazz, and blues, in a wide-ranging and eclectic combination that would set the path for the next years of his career. As a writer, O’Brien connected with rising country star and fellow West Virginian Kathy Mattea, who would take several of his songs to country chart status; recorded several albums with his sister, Mollie; formed a jazz-based group called the O’Boys; cut an album of Bob Dylan covers called Red On Blonde; and engaged in a project of Appalachian music inspired by the novel Cold Mountain. O’Brien had been going further back to his roots than Appalachia, though, exploring his family’s history in Ireland. His great grandfather came from Kingscourt, Co. Cavan, to West Virginia in 1851 when he was in his early twenties, where he married a fellow Irish immigrant from Donegal. In looking back at his family history, O’Brien was impressed by both the geographical distance his great grandparents had traveled and the courage it took for them to make such changes. He visited Ireland a number of times and saw the landscapes and conditions in which his ancestors had lived. These experiences began to come out in his music. He composed an original instrumental, “Newgrange,” based on his visit to that ancient site, which became the title of an album and the name for the group that recorded it; in addition to O’Brien the group included top acoustic musicians—pianist Philip Aaberg, fiddler Darol Anger, and banjo player Alison Brown. O’Brien went more deeply into the Irish and Irish-American experience of history, emigration, assimilation, and change with his 1999 collection of traditional and www.abc-clio.com
original tunes called The Crossing, and followed the idea further in 2001 with Two Journeys. In 2005, O’Brien released two recordings: Cornbread Nation featured music of the American South and Fiddler’s Green focused more on the New England/ East Coast dynamic. Both include instrumental and lyrical ideas, as well as treatments of traditional songs, influenced by his Irish experience and his Irish-American background. He has described them as a continuation of the events and ideas of The Crossing and Two Journeys into what happened next. Kerry Dexter
O’CONNELL, DANIEL (1775–1847) Nineteenth-century Irish Catholic lawyer and nationalist leader Daniel O’Connell was born on August 6, 1775, near Cahirciveen, Co. Kerry. He once famously declared that he “formed the high resolve to leave my native land better after my death than I found it” (Gwynn 1947, 27). In the course of his career as the greatest advocate of his time, O’Connell firmly believed repeal of the Act of Union of 1800 and Catholic Emancipation were the only measures to improve the dire circumstances of a country without its own parliament and whose Catholic majority was denied fundamental human rights. The certainty with which he pursued these goals was born of the opportunities of an education in France and England, admiration for the liberal and nationalist philosophies that found their fullest expression in the revolutionary activities of the American colonists, and his legal background. O’Connell, a brilliant political strategist, used innovative tactics to achieve his political aims, and succeeded in creating
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the idea of a link between democracy and the moral force of the people. O’Connell’s political life was fraught with disappointments and contradictions as he attempted to win repeal and emancipation for Ireland. His trials and subsequent tribulations received widespread media attention in Europe and to a lesser degree America, and his liberal nationalism subsequently inspired many European causes. In a career founded on unpopular political goals, he was not afraid to champion other unpopular causes, and he was an unflinching supporter of abolition. Indeed, he was deemed an “Atlantic Revolutionary,” and his contact with America, Irish Americans, and the American antislavery movement also mirrors the challenges and contradictions that were so much part of his political career. O’Connell took liberal, democratic ideals from the Americans, and he gave to America a group, the Irish Americans, who were skilled in the practice of political and administrative life. The political causes automatically associated with O’Connell are Catholic Emancipation and repeal of the Act of Union of 1800. Ireland had been under British rule for centuries, but in 1782 Henry Grattan succeeded in obtaining an Irish parliament based in Dublin. However, the minority Protestant ascendency class dominated this parliament and was not subject to the penal code under which the Catholics lived. The statutes of this code, collectively known as the Penal Laws, imposed severe political, economic, religious, and educational restrictions on Irish Catholics. A failed Irish revolution in 1798 and the threat of a French invasion to help Irish Catholics compelled the British government to introduce the Act of Union, thereby uniting the Irish parliament with www.abc-clio.com
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the British parliament in London. The Irish parliamentarians, and indeed the Irish Catholic hierarchy, who were promised emancipation, supported the Union. O’Connell was singularly unconvinced, and he challenged the political and religious establishments by speaking against the Union in 1800. In the course of time, his fears were realized: Irish manufacturing suffered from the neglect of direct political attention, the cities and towns became dilapidated, Dublin languished as a regional rather than a national capitol, and Emancipation was not granted. This was O’Connell’s first speech on a political topic. He took an unpopular stance against a popular cause, and this was to be repeated throughout his long and distinguished career. In 1823, O’Connell began with a campaign for Catholic Emancipation. First, he organized the Catholic Association, and the following year he established the Catholic Rent to defray the costs he incurred. This rent prompted anti-O’Connellites to label him “King of the Beggermen”; however, it was singularly important as it gave to the masses a proprietary right to the organization and by extension to the democratic process of achieving a constitutional change. In 1829, O’Connell defied the political establishment and in an unprecedented move was elected to Parliament. O’Connell now took his campaign directly to the House of Commons, and by a process of blatant maneuvering in a volatile political climate he paved the way for Catholic Emancipation in 1829. However, Catholic Emancipation was a poisoned chalice, and the Irish electorate was reduced from 200,000 to 26,000 as the forty-shilling freeholders lost their votes. During the 1830s, O’Connell turned his attention to other questions. He “advocated male suffrage, the secret ballot and an
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elective House of Lords. He championed religious toleration and the abolition of slavery and he condemned discrimination against the Jews. He advocated the abolition of capital punishment and flogging in the army, and he pressed for various reforms of the legal system”(McCartney 1980, 4). The passage of time convinced O’Connell that union was detrimental to Ireland’s political and economic security. In 1840, he founded the Loyal National Repeal Association (LNRA) with the expressed aim of achieving repeal of the Act of Union. O’Connell further refined his administrative system: he launched a rent strike, and he identified the Catholic clergy as his best means of reaching the entire country and helping his local organizers. Through its network, the LNRA was in touch with local grievances and assistance was often given to local problems. As such, the LNRA bore a greater resemblance to a parliament than had heretofore existed. The Temperance movement under the guidance of Father Theobald Mathew was also sweeping the country at this time. Father Mathew tried to distance himself and his organization from political affairs; however, a reduction in alcoholic consumption and the establishment of Temperance reading rooms ensured the spread of the repeal message. The hallmark of this campaign was the enormous meetings held at locations chosen for their symbolic import. The dramatic reduction in the consumption of alcohol facilitated the orderly gathering of huge crowds, and O’Connell’s detractors labeled these meetings “monster meetings.” The title stuck, but O’Connell was more often identified by his supporters as the Liberator. O’Connell rashly declared 1843 the year of repeal, and huge monster meetings were
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held. However, fearing bloodshed after a government ban on a massive rally that was planned to be held at Clontarf, O’Connell canceled the meeting, to the disgust of the younger, rebellious members of his organization, collectively known as the Young Irelanders. O’Connell was then arrested for treason and sentenced before a packed jury. While the House of Lords overturned his conviction, the aged and ill O’Connell was in declining health. In 1847 he traveled to the Vatican, but died en route in Genoa. Historians have grappled with the difficulties of containing O’Connell’s active life, immense workload, and legacy within the confines of a text. Edwards claims he was “reflective of an era” (1975, 11). Gwynn had originally developed this identification of O’Connell with his time and place by pointing out that the economic progress of the O’Connell family paralleled the progress made by an emerging Catholic merchant class that responded to the restrictions of the Penal Laws. Riach, in common with modern American criticism, contends that only by considering the international context of O’Connell’s life and work can one fully appreciate O’Connell’s legacy to modern democracy and a modern Ireland. O’Connell was endowed with a variety of nicknames, and it is in these that the complexities and contradictions that beset his life’s work can best be seen. McCartney identifies O’Connell as an “Atlantic Revolutionary,” and this term identifies key aspects of O’Connell the man and the political activist. The extended O’Connell family was not limited by a parochial viewpoint as they responded to both the Penal Laws and the Macgillicuddy’s Reeks, which isolated the Iveagh Peninsula from the rest of the country, by looking
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seaward. Their physical proximity to continental Europe allowed them to develop trade, military, and educational links, especially with France. Many Kerry families settled there, establishing lucrative trading links with the Kerry coast, and others joined the Irish Brigade, carving out careers in the military. The sons of wealthy merchants were educated in France, and Daniel O’Connell attended English Colleges at St. Omer and Douai. O’Connell and his brother fled the French revolutionaries and escaped to England, where he finished his education and in 1794 entered Lincoln’s Inn. As he prepared for the bar, he read widely, and the works of Thomas Paine, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights provided the foundation for his liberal nationalist outlook. He was also impressed with the “libertarian and egalitarian principles of American Revolutionaries” (Edwards 1975, 13). The basic premise for the separation of America from England stated that “government exists through a social contract with the people based upon fundamental rights” (Edwards 1975, 81). O’Connell inferred from this that England had broken this contract with Irish Catholics, and this informed the principles and actions of his political career. America did not merely offer a philosophical backdrop to O’Connell. He commended the American abolitionists and subsequently had a disagreement with them and was also compelled to address the Irish Americans on their ambivalence about slavery. O’Connell was a revolutionary who sowed the seeds for a dramatic and farreaching change in the attitudes, democratic system, and conditions of Ireland. His personal experience of the French Revolutionaries forever colored his attitude to
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violence, and Gwynn points out that O’Connell maintained that a democracy built on bloodshed could never be stable. O’Connell was conscious that human nature placed limits on the scope of democracy, and he warned against “the profligation of corruption and violence of unreasonable patriotism” (Gwynn 1947, 55). This nonviolent revolutionary won the faith of the people by his inexhaustible capacity for hard work, his legal expertise, his innovative and dramatic victories in court, and his unshakable love for Ireland and the Irish. Within the confines of the courthouse, he defied the establishment and “he forced [them] to rule in accordance with law and the constitution” (Edwards 1975, 38). O’Connell became known as “the Counsellor,” and his name and exploits passed into folklore. His brand of liberal nationalism, his intimate knowledge of the people and the law brought him to identify constitutional agitation as the means to his ends. Indeed, constitutional agitation using the moral force of the disenfranchised provided the template for future democratic mobilizations. On a practical level, contact with America mirrors the difficulties and contradictions that accompanied his political work. The Irish masses were not directly involved in the antislavery movement. This was the preserve of a small group of liberal Protestants, Quakers, and nonconformists. The Irish, however, welcomed any black slaves or freedmen. Frederick Douglass, the then fugitive slave, arrived in Ireland in September 1845. He spoke highly of his visit and his cordial reception. Douglass and O’Connell met in Dublin, and Douglass, like O’Connell, was a renowned orator. They shared a platform in the Conciliation Hall at a meeting to promote repeal of the
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Act of Union. At this meeting O’Connell acknowledged Douglass and called him the “Black O’Connell of the United States” (Jenkins 1999, 82). Lee Jenkins gives an account of the “common vocabulary between the abolitionist rhetoric of Douglass and the liberation rhetoric of mid-nineteenthcentury Ireland” (Jenkins 1999, 82). At the end of this trip to the British Isles, Douglass’s final address contained an adaptation of O’Connell’s interpretation of the course of Irish history “which may be traced, like the track of a wounded man through a crowd” (Jenkins 1999, 83), and he applied it to American slavery. This was not O’Connell’s introduction to antislavery. In his article “O’Connell and Slavery,” Riach details O’Connell’s introduction to the antislavery movement by James Cropper, an English abolitionist who visited Ireland in 1824. Cropper hoped to ease the plight of the West Indian slave by revitalizing the textile industry in Ireland and simultaneously easing the plight of the Irish. It was not only the Irish dimension that attracted O’Connell; he was antislavery because as a humanitarian he considered slavery a sin, and as a utilitarian he recognized that slavery harmed both slave and master and was not a productive use of resources. In 1833 the British government voted to abolish slavery in the British colonies and replace it with a system of “negro apprenticeship.” O’Connell quickly identified this scheme as slavery under another guise and spoke against it. O’Connell became one of the British abolitionists’ best speakers, and when the Negro Apprenticeship scheme was abolished in 1838 he was invited to Birmingham to celebrate the event. While this event could have marked the conclusion of British abolitionist activities, O’Connell wrote to the organizers and advised them to tackle www.abc-clio.com
slavery and the slave trade in general and American slavery in particular. They followed his advice and from this moment, antislavery truly became a transatlantic reform movement. O’Connell was renowned for his theatrical performances and his shocking comments. Although he loved America and had learnt from her great institutions, he was not blind to her hypocrisy. “Of all men living,” he observed in 1829, “an American citizen who is the owner of slaves, is the most despicable” (Temperley 1962, 219). At the Birmingham celebrations, he identified George Washington as “a hypocrite par excellance for he had waited until his death before permitting his slaves to be emancipated” and declared the American ambassador to the Court of St. James, Andrew Stevenson, a slave breeder (Temperley 1962, 221). Stevenson challenged O’Connell to a duel, but O’Connell abhorred the practice having killed a Dublin man, D’Esterre, in a 1815 duel. While this was in effect a minor incident, it demonstrated how O’Connell, the political opportunist, managed to embarrass Stevenson during the affair, and the coverage it received in the American press hinted that Southern slavery was losing support amongst the public. O’Connell’s view of nationalism emphasized the emancipation of Irish Catholics, and one of his principal maneuvers was to locate the source of Ireland’s difficulties with England and not the Irish Protestant ascendency. O’Connell was also very loyal to the British monarchy. However, when the Potato Famine of 1845 led to starvation followed by mass emigration to America, the impoverished Irish emigrants found themselves in an Anglo-American society antagonistic to them, and they had to compete with free blacks for work and status.
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The successful Irish Americans on the other hand, “worked for an Irish nation-state to improve their relative position in America” (McCaffrey 1980, 101). Regardless, both groups carried with them a hatred of England as the source of their grief, and they could not understand O’Connell’s commitment to constitutional agitation and his aversion to revolutionary tactics. They identified with the youthful, revolutionary wing of the repeal movement, the Young Irelanders. The Irish Americans did not align with the American abolitionists as they saw the abolitionists as a radical group with ulterior motives for befriending the Irish Americans. The abolitionists recognized that the Irish in America were capable of influencing the election of the president and various members of the state legislatures. However, on the vexed question of slavery the Irish were at best indifferent and at worst supportive of slavery. At different times in 1838 and again in 1840 first Elizur Wright and then James Haughton, the English and Irish abolitionists, respectively, discussed this with O’Connell. Finally, after the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London, in June 1840, O’Connell was again asked to address the Irish in America. He replied that he had an address in mind; however, this was superseded by an address drawn up by a group of the abolitionists who visited Ireland after the World Convention. Charles Lenox Remond and John A. Collins, along with the Irishmen James Haughton, Richard Allen, and Richard Davis Webb, formulated the Address from the People of Ireland to Their Countrymen and Countrywomen in America. Up to 60,000 Irish people signed the Address. O’Connell was among the last to sign, as apparently he was unaware of its existence. www.abc-clio.com
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Father Theobald Mathew also signed it, and possibly to their dismay, their names carried more weight than the 60,000 others. The Address called attention to the vexed subject of slavery in America, and it advised the Irish Americans that neutrality was not an option in this subject: they either supported slavery or they did not. It proclaimed “America is cursed by slavery! WE CALL UPON YOU TO UNITE WITH THE ABOLITIONISTS,” as they “are the only consistent advocates of liberty,” and with a final flourish it advised the Irish men and women: “Treat the colored people as your equals, as brethren. By your memories of Ireland, continue to love liberty—hate slavery—CLING BY THE ABOLITIONISTS—and in America you will do honor to the name of Ireland” (Ignatiev 1995, 10). Charles Lenox Remond brought the Address back to America and presented it to an American audience on January 28, 1842, in Faneuil Hall, Boston. The abolitionists, spearheaded by William Lloyd Garrison, genuinely believed this would have a positive effect on the Irish Americans. During that meeting, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass complimented the Irish on their support; however, one Irish American informed the meeting that “the IrishAmericans were ruled neither from Home nor Rome” (Riach 1980, 180). The nation’s press took up the issue, and the Irish press in America, led by the Boston Pilot, began by questioning the Address, its authenticity, and its provenance and finally by declaring its annoyance at the audacity of a foreign, albeit Irish source under the signatures of the Liberator, Daniel O’Connell, and the Apostle of Temperance, Father Mathew, for daring to dictate policy to the Irish Americans. Ignatiev gives a detailed account of
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this event. The Irish Americans were sensitive about the subject of slavery: antislavery advocates were considered radicals, and O’Connell’s directions to support the abolitionists were seen as undermining the efforts of the Irish Americans to be accepted into American society. In an effort to appease abolitionists, O’Connell promised to return any repeal money sent from slaveholding states. While some repeal money was returned, it appears that this money had been accompanied with requests for violent agitation to achieve repeal. These requests contradicted O’Connell’s beliefs. O’Connell’s contribution to Irish-American ideology is limited; however, his legacy to America resides in the training the Irish received in the practice of democracy as they campaigned for Catholic Emancipation and repeal. The Irish Americans embraced political and administrative life in America and were considered the most productive political activists in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Ann Coughlan References Edwards, R. Dudley. Daniel O’Connell and His World. London: Thames and Hudson, 1975. Gwynn, Denis. Daniel O’Connell. Cork: Cork University Press, 1947. Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995 Jenkins, Lee. “Beyond the Pale: Frederick Douglass and Cork.” The Irish Review 24 (Autumn 1999): 80–95 McCaffrey, Lawrence J. “O’Connell and the Irish American Nationalist and Political Profiles.” In The World of Daniel O’Connell, edited by Donal McCartney, 100–111. Dublin: Mercier, 1980. McCartney, Donal. “The World of Daniel O’Connell.” In The World of Daniel O’Connell, edited by Donal McCartney, 1–18. Dublin: Mercier, 1980. Riach, Douglas C. “O’Connell and Slavery.” In The World of Daniel O’Connell, edited by www.abc-clio.com
Donal McCartney, 175–185. Dublin: Mercier, 1980. Temperley, Howard. “The O’ConnellStevenson Contretemps: A Reflection of the Anglo-American Slavery Issue. The Journal of Negro History 47, no. 4 (October 1962): 217–233.
O’CONNOR, EDWIN (1918–1968) Born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, on July 29, 1918, Edwin Greene O’Connor was the eldest son in a second-generation Irish-American family, the son of a local physician and a teacher. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame (1939) and worked at radio stations in Providence, Rhode Island; West Palm Beach, Florida; Buffalo, New York; and Hartford, Connecticut. After serving in the U.S. Coast Guard’s public relations office (1942–1945), he was a radio announcer in Boston. In 1946, the tall, robust O’Connor began his literary career in Boston with stories published in the Atlantic Monthly. When freelance writing proved unprofitable, he eked out a living as a television critic for the Boston Herald newspaper (1950–1952). His friend Edward Weeks, the Atlantic Monthly editor, hired O’Connor in 1953 to edit Treadmill to Oblivion (1954), a humorous memoir by the Boston Irish comedian Fred Allen. O’Connor, who became a close friend of Fred Allen, also edited Allen’s autobiography, Much Ado About Me (1956). Another Atlantic Monthly editor, Robert Manning, recalled that the Boston magazine office was O’Connor’s club, which he visited daily from his monastic apartment in the once genteel Back Bay and later on Beacon Hill. O’Connor’s first novel, The Oracle (1951), a satire on radio broadcasters, was not a success. He then earned a living as a Boston Post (1953–1956) newspaper
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columnist while writing his masterpiece, the best-selling novel The Last Hurrah (1956). Loosely based on the tumultuous political career of Massachusetts Governor James Michael Curley, this insightful book was adapted for director John Ford’s film (1958) by the same title. Although the talented Irish-American actor Spencer Tracy played the lead as Governor Frank Skeffington, O’Connor was bitterly disappointed by the movie. However, the public enjoyed this sentimental film so much that Carroll O’Connor remade it as a television film in 1977. The Last Hurrah reveals O’Connor’s fascination with rough-and-tumble ward politics so far removed from his own uppermiddle-class origins. Most critics were quite favorable, The New York Times book reviewer hailed it the “first successful Irish-American novel,” and the Book-of-the Month Club quickly selected the novel. The Last Hurrah remains a subtle, sophisticated, and humorous account of American municipal politics in the twentieth century. House Speaker Tip O’Neill recalled in his memoirs how he discovered that many politicians across the country were fascinated by the novel and by Curley’s (or Frank Skeffington’s) colorful career. O’Connor also wrote an unsuccessful children’s book, Benjy: A Ferocious Fairy Tale (1957), but then won the Pulitzer Prize for his best novel, The Edge of Sadness (1961), which describes three generations of IrishAmericans through the eyes of a troubled alcoholic priest, Father Hugh Kennedy. Many critics admired the dark and witty best seller’s convincing portrait of daily life in a Catholic rectory and its astute exploration of Irish-American middle-class family mores. O’Connor’s next novel, I Was Dancing (1964), reflects his love for vaudeville www.abc-clio.com
in the main character, the aged Waltzing Daniel Considine. He wrote the play first, but it was not produced on Broadway until 1966. Both the novel and play met with limited success. Central to O’Connor’s writing are the Catholic Church and Massachusetts politics, both dominated by Irish Americans and essential to their cultural identity. However, O’Connor’s image of Boston is one of profound defeat for the Irish and is best seen in his rogue hero, Frank Skeffington, an aged clan chieftain in political exile. Although Curley was initially critical of the novel and film, and threatened a lawsuit against O’Connor and Columbia Pictures, he came to embrace Frank Skeffington as his alter ego. With his last novel, All in the Family (1966), O’Connor returned to Massachusetts politics with some inspiration from the Kennedy clan. This book was only modestly successful in sales and reviews. O’Connor’s finest writing, in The Last Hurrah and The Edge of Sadness, represents a poignant account of the Irish-American journey from suffering, exile, survival, and the struggle to success. In The New Yorker, his friend John Kenneth Galbraith dubbed O’Connor “the leading prophet of the acculturation of the Irish.” Ed O’Connor, the witty, shy, and abstemious Beacon Hill bachelor, married Veniette Caswell Weil in 1962. He spent summers in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, a popular but reserved friend to the writers and scholars who vacationed there. He made frequent visits to Ireland, although he urged the Irish in America to assimilate more fully. Pointedly, he never joined IrishAmerican organizations or accepted their awards, and he avoided all Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations.
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Edwin O’Connor, a devout Catholic who never smoked or drank, died in a Boston hospital on March 23, 1968, and was buried at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline. Recognized as the foremost Irish-American writer, he worked steadily at his craft without grants, fellowships, or academic appointments. In 1970, his friend Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., edited an anthology of his work, The Best and Last of Edwin O’Connor. The O’Connor papers are preserved at the Boston Public Library. Peter C. Holloran See also: ALLEN, Fred; CURLEY, James Michael; FORD, John References Duffy, Charles F. A Family of His Own: A Life of Edwin O’Connor. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2003. O’Connell, Shaun. Imagining Boston: A Literary Landscape. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. ed. The Best and Last of Edwin O’Connor. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970.
O’CONNOR, “MARY” FLANNERY (1925–1964) In spite of her short career, modest output, and tragically young death, Flannery O’Connor’s literary reputation as one of the preeminent short story writers and novelists in the United States is firmly established. Despite her Irish-American background, however, she never appeared to reflect directly on the hyphenated significance that Irish-American identity might have held, either in her life or in her work. Perhaps there was complexity enough in those other definitions that were, and are still, commonly applied to her: southern writer, woman writer, Catholic writer, grotesque writer, and the many permutations and combinations thereof. O’Connor’s www.abc-clio.com
Portrait of Flannery O’Connor, author of Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, as well as many short stories. (Library of Congress)
work is characterized by an absolute and unflinching belief in Catholicism, though the workings of her God’s grace are presented paradoxically through the violence and desperation of “poor white” lives and attitudes that are typically Protestant, as befits the Bible Belt of O’Connor’s home region. Any apparent anomaly she addresses in one of her occasional essays, “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” collected in her only nonfiction publication, Mystery and Manners (1969). That title provides an apt synopsis of O’Connor’s work in general—the manners of those good country people who populate her stories and novels are used, frequently satirically, to reveal religious mysteries of redemption and grace. O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, only child of Edward F. O’Connor, a realtor by profession, and his wife Regina Cline O’Connor. In 1937 the family
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moved to Milledgeville, Georgia, where Regina’s father had been mayor for many years, apparently in search of greater job opportunities during the Depression, but also to seek family support when Flannery’s father died in 1938 of systemic lupus erythematosus, the disease that would in turn claim her own life at the early age of 39. She attended Georgia State College for Women and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she earned an MFA in creative writing in 1945. At Iowa, O’Connor met such luminaries of the southern literary tradition as Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren and impressed them with her emerging talent. In 1947, she won the Rinehart-Iowa Fiction Award for her thesis story collection, The Geranium. The following year she gained a place at Yaddo, the prestigious writers’ colony, where she worked on her first novel, Wise Blood, a task that continued when she moved first to New York City and then to the Connecticut home of friends, Robert and Sally Fitzgerald. Up to this point in her life, O’Connor seemed set on a successful literary career that would have taken her outside the South, but in 1950 she developed the first symptoms of lupus, which forced her to return to the care of her mother in Milledgeville. With the exception of a few short trips away from home, she remained on the family farm, Andalusia, for the rest of her life. Though Haze Motes, the protagonist of Wise Blood, appears thoroughly “down home” in his bearing and expression, the fundamentalist Protestantism that enrages him so—to the extent that he determines to found “the Church Without Christ”—is not dissimilar to that of the Scots-Irish settlers whose descendants continue to form a significant population group in the www.abc-clio.com
South. Indeed, John Huston’s 1979 film adaptation opens with a montage of tin signs bearing fundamentalist Christian slogans tacked to trees, an image not unfamiliar in many parts of Ulster even today. Despite the resistance of this “Christian malgré lui,” as O’Connor describes Haze, he is subject to the type of redemption that her muscularly beneficent Catholicism allows, and the paradox of his fate illustrates that God will not be gainsaid when He, not man, decides salvation is due. The humor with which O’Connor details Haze’s resistance, however, and the devious, dishonest, or downright sinful behavior of the novel’s minor characters explain why certain critics, notably John Hawkes, have suggested that O’Connor has at least a passing regard for transgression, a charge she strenuously denied. O’Connor’s first story collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find, was published in 1955. Her concerns with the grotesque, the religious, and the southern come together more successfully here than in Wise Blood, which had been greeted with fairly hostile reviews. The title story is perhaps O’Connor’s most anthologized piece, and a perfect example of her method. A sanctimonious, dominant grandmother, who displays all the negative “old South” traits of snobbishness and complacent racism, insists on detouring during a family motoring holiday and, leaving the highway, encounters The Misfit, a homicidal maniac, and his gang, who promptly massacre all the family members, ending with the old woman herself. Facing death, she discovers a moment’s revelation as her former narrow-mindedness falls away, and she finds human kinship with her executioner who, transformed thus into an agent of God’s grace, delivers her to her Heavenly Father with the savagely redemptive statement: “She would of been
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a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” The short story form suited O’Connor’s talents, and the influence of the ideas of New Criticism is apparent, both in the finely crafted stories themselves and in her self-interpretations in Mystery and Manners. A second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, appeared in 1960, but did not receive the acclaim that was given to the posthumously published story collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), which completed her modest output of work and consolidated her position as one of America’s leading short story writers. In this respect, her allusions in letters to the two major Irish figures who dominated the short story form through the twentieth century, Frank O’Connor and Seán O’Faoláin, are worth noting. Though she does not refer directly to their respective treatises on the genre, The Short Story and The Lonely Voice, her own short fiction bears all the hallmarks that the Irish masters praised as essential. Of O’Faoláin she announced with an uncharacteristic lack of reserve: “I like all that he writes”; while, more characteristically, and more humorously, she confessed of Frank O’Connor: “I keep waiting for some club lady to ask me if I am kin to [him]. At which I hope to reply, ‘I am his mother’” (The Habit of Being 1979, 121). By nature a private person, O’Connor directly revealed little about her own life. We can assume that she carried her Irish ancestry fairly lightly, but her deep concern for religious values in a relatively secular age, and a wicked wit that could be simultaneously mocking yet indulgent of her characters, are features that link her to an Irish tradition of writing, every bit as much as an American one. Bill Lazenbatt www.abc-clio.com
See also: HUSTON, John; SCOTS-IRISH References O’Connor, Flannery. A Good Man is Hard to Find. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1955. O’Connor, Flannery. The Habit of Being: Letters / Flannery O’Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979.
O’CONNOR, FRANCISCO “FRANK” BURDETT (1791–1871) Franciso (“Frank”) Burdett O’Connor was a colonel in the Irish Legion of Simón Bolívar’s army in Venezuela and later became chief of staff to Antonio José de Sucre and minister of war in Bolivia. Born on June 12, 1791, in the city of Cork, from a landowning Protestant family from England (originally named Conner), Frank O’Connor was the son of Roger O’Connor and Wilhamena Bowen, brother of the member of Parliament and Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor (1794–1855), and nephew of Arthur O’Connor (1763–1852), member of Parliament and hard-line leader of the United Irishmen. Frank O’Connor’s godfather was Sir Francis Burdett, a baronet and radical member of the English parliament. In July 1919, the lieutenant-colonel of the 10th Lancers Francisco Burdett O’Connor boarded the Hannah in Dublin together with 100 officers and 101 men of the Irish Legion in Simón Bolívar’s army of independence. The commanding officer of the 10th Lancers, Col. William Aylmer, was also second in command of the Irish Legion. They arrived in September 1819 in the island of Margarita near Venezuela. No preparations had been made to receive them, and the men of the Irish Legion suffered under the combined effects of the officers’ lack of experience, scarce victuals, and deficiency of
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buildings. Many of the officers died and others refused to remain and returned to Ireland. In December 1819 the Irish Legion was reorganized, and O’Connor was appointed commandant of a regiment formed by mixed forces. In March 1820 the regiment sailed for the mainland to attack the city of Rio Hacha together with other units. O’Connor’s lancers hauled down the Spanish royal ensign and raised in its place their own standard, displaying the harp of Ireland in the center. When on March 20, 1820, the enemy attacked the patriots near Laguna Salada, O’Connor’s lancers were the only ones to rush out of their barracks and to storm the royalist forces, forcing them to withdraw in flight. One hundred seventy Irishmen, supported by a company of sharpshooters and one small field gun, defeated 1,700 royalists. When the division was marching out of Rio Hacha the advance guard walked into an ambuscade. O’Connor was slightly wounded in the right shoulder when he and his lancers were charging the enemy with a terrible “hurrah.” After a mutiny, the Irish Legion was dispatched to Jamaica, but some hundred of the lancers O’Connor had managed to keep loyal disembarked again in the mainland and took an important part in the siege of Cartagena and the campaign against Santa Marta. Bolívar had quickly gained a high regard for the young Irish colonel, whom he appointed chief of staff of the United Army of Liberation in Peru within six months of his joining it from Panama early in 1824. It was O’Connor who kept the patriot forces coordinated and supplied as they maneuvered under Sucre’s command in distinctly hostile territory to bring the last Spanish viceroy in mainland America to battle and defeat. At the battle of Junín in August www.abc-clio.com
1824, O’Connor was chief of staff of the patriot army with 1,500 men against the viceroy’s 7,000 troops and nine artillery pieces. The engagement was confined to cavalry charges and ended within an hour with not a single shot fired. Once established in the area that is present-day Bolivia, almost 15 years later O’Connor rejoined forces with Otto Braun, ex-commander of the grenadiers at the battle of Junín, to aid the PeruvianBolivian army. On June 24, 1838, they defeated the invading Argentine army at the battle of Montenegro (known as Cuyambuyo by the Argentines). The battle of Montenegro consolidated the present southwest border of Bolivia and allowed O’Connor to retire from military service and dedicate himself to his farms. Since 1825 O’Connor had contributed to El Condor of Chuquisaca. In June 1827, he published a proclamation encouraging Irish people to settle in the “New Erin” of Tarija, “where the poor of my flesh and blood will be received with open arms.” O’Connor’s memoirs were published in 1895 by his grandson Tomás O’Connor d’Arlach with the title Independencia Americana: Recuerdos de Francisco Burdett O’Connor. They are an essential contemporary account of the South American wars of independence. In 1826, O’Connor was appointed military governor of Tarija. The congress of Bolivia awarded him 5,000 pesos as a “liberator,” but he himself never used that title despite the rare honor it bestowed. In 1827, he married Francisca Ruyloba, the 17-year-old daughter of a family of clerks and priests. O’Connor died in Tarija on October 5, 1871, at 81 years of age. An atheist while in Ireland, he became a devout Catholic in South America and died
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with the last rites. Although only one of his children survived—a daughter, Hercilia— O’Connor d’Arlach is still a recognized family name in southern Bolivia, and one of the provinces of the department of Tarija carries the name of O’Connor. Edmundo Murray See also: O’LEARY, Daniel Florence References Dunkerley, James. The Third Man: Francisco Burdett O’Connor and the Emancipation of the Americas. Occasional Papers No. 20. London: University of London, Institute of Latin American Studies, 1999. Hasbrouck, Alfred. Foreign Legionaries in the Liberation of Spanish South America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1928. McGinn, Brian. “St. Patrick’s Day in Peru, 1824.” Irish Roots 1 (1995): 26–27.
O’CONNOR, PAT (1943–) Since the 1980s Pat O’Connor has established a strong reputation on both sides of the Atlantic through a series of films that explore the reality of lives lived in twentiethcentury Ireland. Many of his films have a literary orientation recognizable to both Irish and American audiences; the screenplays for The Ballroom of Romance, Cal, Circle of Friends, and Dancing at Lughnasa are based on short stories, novels, and plays, all with the same titles, by William Trevor, Bernard MacLaverty, Maeve Binchy, and Brian Friel, respectively. Since his earliest work, O’Connor has proved himself more interested in the effects that a particular set of circumstances have upon characters and character interactions than in analyzing the political and social circumstances themselves. Many of his films have been categorized as examples of heritage filmmaking, a genre known for its nostalgic and often literary look at the conservative values and social world of the seemingly idyllic past. O’Connor films with more contemporary www.abc-clio.com
settings often portray social and familial circumstances as inescapable; characters cannot change events, but they can choose their response to them. O’Connor was born in Ardmore, Co. Waterford, into a family of six children. He left the Christian Brothers’ school at age 17 and held a series of menial jobs, such as road paver and wine corker. O’Connor moved to the United States to earn a BA in liberal arts at University of California at Los Angeles, but had to return to Ireland for familial reasons. He later took a degree in film and television at Ryerson Institute in Toronto, Canada, and again returned to Ireland after his graduation in 1969. In 1970, O’Connor accepted a position at Radio Telefís Éireann in the documentary and drama departments, where he spent the 1970s directing and producing more than 45 documentaries and dramas, including The Four Roads, The Shankhill, Kittyclogher, One of Ourselves, Night in Ginitia, Mobile Homes, and Miracles and Miss Langan, and also wrote episodes of RTÉ’s successful and long-running series The Riordans. The Ballroom of Romance (1981) was his breakout piece. The television movie depicted the repressive sexuality of rural Ireland in the 1950s and earned him a BAFTA and the New York Festival’s Silver Drama Award. Following this success, O’Connor commenced freelance work on a Neil Jordan script called Night in Tunisia and another project, One of Ourselves, both of which appeared in 1982. His first cinematic film, Cal, debuted in 1984 and depicts a reluctant Irish Republican Army driver in a relationship with a woman widowed by his unit. Helen Mirren won the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival for her work in the film. Other O’Connor film credits include a film version of J. R. Carr’s novel A Month in The Country (1987), a heritage film set
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in Yorkshire that helped launch the careers of Kenneth Branagh and Colin Firth. Stars and Bars (1988) and The January Man (1989) reveal O’Connor unsuccessfully trying his hand at black comedy and thriller, respectively, after O’Connor’s move back to the United States. He returned to the heritage film genre with Fools of Fortune (1990), a drama portraying an Anglo-Irish family during the Irish War of Independence that was honored with a Best Picture nod at the Barcelona Film Festival. O’Connor then went back to television in the first half of the 1990s, yielding Zelda (1993), a portrayal of the life of Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of author F. Scott Fitzgerald. He returned to the big screen with Circle of Friends (1995), which introduced actress Minnie Driver to American audiences and also stars Chris O’Donnell and Colin Firth. The story of three Irish girls coming of age in the 1950s was the highest grossing independent film in the United States that year. O’Connor’s next film, Inventing the Abbots (1997), is also set in the United States during that same period and features performances by Liv Tyler, Joaquin Phoenix, and Jennifer Connelly. In Dancing at Lughnasa (1998), starring Meryl Streep, Brid Brennan, and Michael Gambon, O’Connor returns to an Irish setting and continues his focus on family dynamics, this time by presenting five sisters in the 1930s. His most recent film, Sweet November (2001), featuring Charlize Theron and Keanu Reeves, presents a terminally-ill woman who temporarily escapes from her family to live and love before returning home. O’Connor is married to American actress Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, who played the lead female role in The January Man. The couple has two sons, Jack and Declan. Kelly J. S. McGovern www.abc-clio.com
See also: FITZGERALD, F. SCOTT; JORDAN, Neil; SHERIDAN, Jim References Aloon, Yoram, Del Cullen, and Hannah Patterson, eds. Contemporary British and Irish Film Directors. London: Wallflower, 2001. Lennon, E. “Inventing the Director.” Film Ireland 58 (April–May 1997): 12–17. MacKillop, James, ed. Contemporary Irish Cinema: From the Quiet Man to Dancing at Lughnasa. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Pettitt, Lance. Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000.
O’FAOLAIN, NUALA (1942–) A columnist and author made famous by her “accidental” memoir of life as a young woman from a large family in mid-twentiethcentury Ireland, Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman (1998) began as an introduction to a collection of her Irish Times columns but became a popularly acclaimed and critically accepted description of her path toward journalism and adult womanhood. The memoir’s success encouraged her to commence her next project, a novel entitled My Dream of You (2001), which ties together the story of an affair between an Anglo-Irish wife and servant in the decade of the Potato Famine and the experiences of a modern middle-aged female journalist who recently returned to Ireland from London to research the historic affair. O’Faolain returned to the memoir form in Almost There: The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman (2003), in which she documents how the publication of her memoir affected her outlook, relationships, and identity as an aging Irish woman. O’Faolain not only carves out an identity for older Irish women but also allows women past middle age a sexual identity.
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Are You Somebody records the trials of growing up in the 1950s as the second of nine children born to a philandering father and an alcoholic mother who had a penchant for escaping into novels. Her father’s occupation as a social columnist emphasized the discrepancy between his extravagant lifestyle and the family’s poverty and neglect. O’Faolain was sent to boarding school at age 14. She later attended both University College Dublin and Oxford on scholarships. She received a PhD in medieval literature from the University of Hull and returned to lecture at University College Dublin before becoming a television producer for the BBC. Her presentations on the progressive television series Women Talking caught the attention of the Irish Times and led it to offer her the columnist position. Though unmarried, O’Faolain has had a series of long-term relationships, including one with prominent Irish feminist Nell McCafferty. She has no children. She resides both in Ireland and in Brooklyn, New York with her boyfriend and his daughter. Kelly J. S. McGovern See also: GREAT FAMINE, The Reference Merkin, Daphne. “A Thorny Irish Rose.” New York Times Magazine, February 18, 2001, 22–25.
O’GORMAN, CAMILA (1828–1848), Camila O’Gorman, who was executed in 1848 after eloping with the Catholic priest Uladislao Gutierrez, was born in 1828, the daughter of Adolfo O’Gorman and Joaquina Ximénez Pinto. She was a granddaughter of Thomas O’Gorman, a merchant born in www.abc-clio.com
Ennis, Co. Clare, who settled in Buenos Aires in 1797. Thomas O’Gorman’s brother was the distinguished physician Dr. Michael O’Gorman (b. 1749), founder of the first school of medicine in Buenos Aires. Educated in the rigid rules of the Hispano-Creole elite of postindependence times, Camila O’Gorman belonged to a renowned family of Buenos Aires. At 19 years old she was a beautiful and intelligent young lady. She had good relations with the family of Juan Manuel de Rosas, the traditionalist and pro-Catholic governor of Buenos Aires, and his daughter Manuelita. Father Uladislao Gutierrez (1823–1848), nephew of the governor of northwestern province of Tucumán, entered the local theological school when he was a teenager. He was sent to the city of Buenos Aires, and, although he was only 24 years old, in August 1846 he was appointed as deputy parish priest of Nuestra Señora del Socorro church. Father Gutierrez, a friend of Camila’s brother Father Eduardo O’Gorman, was among those frequently invited to gatherings at the O’Gorman’s residence. On December 12, 1847, Camila O’Gorman and Father Gutierrez eloped, and using false names they left Buenos Aires on horseback with the idea to reach Rio de Janeiro some months later. However, when they arrived at Goya, Corrientes province (800 kilometers north of Buenos Aires) they decided to settle there. The couple worked as teachers and opened a school, but the parish priest, Irish-born Father Michael Gannon (who was Admiral William Brown’s uncle) informed the provincial authorities of Corrientes against them. On June 19, 1848, Governor Virasoro ordered them to be brought back to Buenos Aires province.
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Camila’s father Adolfo O’Gorman; the bishop of Buenos Aires, Dr. Medrano; the Irish chaplain Father Anthony Fahy; lawyer Dalmacio Vélez Sarsfield; and journalist Santiago Kiernan were some of those who demanded an exemplary punishment of the wayward daughter who was giving a bad name to the industrious and well-regarded Irish community. In a highly politicized case, after receiving the scorn of the opposition and signs of lack of allegiance from his followers, Governor Rosas condemned the couple to death. They were executed by firing squad on August 18, 1848, in Santos Lugares, near Buenos Aires. Camila was 20 old and eight months pregnant. This drama inspired many fictional books, poems, and other works of art, most notably the film Camila by Maria Luisa Bemberg (Buenos Aires, 1984), which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1985. Edmundo Murray See also: ARGENTINA; FAHY, Father Anthony; O’GORMAN, Michael References Julianello, Maria Teresa. The Scarlet Trinity: The Doomed Struggle of Camila O’Gorman against Family, Church and State in Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires. Cork: Irish Centre for Migration Studies, 2000. Luna, Félix, ed. Camila O’Gorman. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1999. Molina, Enrique. Una Sombra Donde Sueña Camila O’Gorman. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1973.
O’GORMAN, EDMUNDO (1906–1995) AND JUAN (1905–1982) Sons of the painter and engineer Cecil Crawford O’Gorman (1874–1943), who arrived in Mexico from Ireland in 1895, Edmundo, who became a historian, and www.abc-clio.com
Juan O’Gorman, who became an artist and architect, were the great-grandchildren of Charles O’Gorman, who in the 1820s was the first British consul to Mexico City. Charles O’Gorman and his Mexican wife returned to the British Isles with their son John, who attended Eton and returned to Mexico. Edmundo O’Gorman was born in Mexico City on December 24, 1906. He graduated from the school of law in 1928 but later decided to research and teach history. He obtained a PhD in philosophy in 1948 and a PhD in history in 1951. From 1932 to 1952, Edmundo worked in the Mexican public records office and contributed to the Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación. He was appointed member of the Mexican academies of literature (1969) and of history (1972). For his outstanding research Edmundo was awarded the Mexican national literature award (1964), the Rafael Heliodoro Valle history award (1983), the Humanities Teaching award of the Universidad Autónoma (1986), and the honoris causa doctorate of that university (1978). Among his works are “Historia de las Divisiones Territoriales de México” (1937), “Fundamentos de la Historia de América” (1951), “La Supervivencia Política Novohispana” (1961), “México: El Trauma de su Historia” (1977), “La Incógnita de la Llamada ‘Historia de los Indios de la Nueva España,’ Atribuida a Fray Toribio Molinia” (1982), and “Destierro de Sombras” (1986). However, his most popular book is La Invención de América (1958), in which Edmundo opposed the traditional concept of America’s “discovery” with an innovative reading of the primary sources from original perspectives. For his work with contemporary sources of Columbus and other conquistadors, Edmundo O’Gorman is often singled
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out as one of the pioneers of postcolonial studies in Latin America. Juan O’Gorman, the famous painter, muralist, and architect, was born in Coyoacán on July 6, 1905, and graduated from the school of architecture at Academia San Carlos in 1927. He entered the studio of Obregón, Tarditi, and Villagrán García and later Obregón Santacilia. Juan was one of the architects who worked on the reconstruction of Banco de México. In 1931 he frescoed the library of Azcapotzalco, and in 1937 he decorated and painted the murals of Mexico City’s first airport. In 1940, he was engaged in the great mural of Gertrudis Bocanegra library, including scenes of Michoacán conquest, and the struggle for independence from Spanish rule. Juan’s most important work was the painting of the Central Library in the campus of Universidad Autónoma. The works there lasted from 1949 to 1953 and covered 4,000 square meters of historical scenes. Other important works include the Social Security Center and the International Bank in Reforma Avenue, but he also created works for parks, theaters, museums, and private houses, most notably the painter Diego Rivera’s “functional house.” Juan strove to incorporate Mexican culture, history, and environment in his works. He studied the styles of Le Corbusier and Villagrán, and as a muralist he was a member of the group formed by Diego Rivera, Clemente Orozco, Pablo O’Higgins, and Rufino Tamayo. Edmundo Murray References Johnston, Henry McKenzie. Missions to Mexico. A Tale of British Diplomacy in the1820s. London: British Academic Press, 1992. Musacchio, Humberto. Gran Diccionario Enciclopédico de México Visual. México, 1989. www.abc-clio.com
O’GORMAN, MICHAEL (1749–1819) Michael O’Gorman, a physician and founder of the first school of medicine in Argentina, was born in Ennis, Co. Clare, son of Thomas O’Gorman and Mary Baria, who came from a well-known family in the west of Ireland. O’Gorman studied medicine in London, Paris, and Reims, where he graduated in 1773. The following year General Alejandro O’Reilly invited O’Gorman to join the Spanish academy of medicine. O’Gorman accompanied O’Reilly to Algeria as surgeon in the Hibernia Regiment and played an important role in establishing hospitals during the military campaigns at Orán and Alicante. In recognition of his medical experience and military merit, O’Gorman was appointed medical head of Viceroy Pedro de Cevallos’s expedition to the River Plate in 1776. Once in the River Plate area, O’Gorman practiced both in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. To improve the public health of the colony and to counter quack doctors who swarmed around the region, O’Gorman founded the first school of medicine in the country, which opened officially on August 17, 1780, under the rule of Viceroy Vértiz. The first authorities of the “Protomedicato” were O’Gorman, Cosme Argerich, and Capdevilla, and the school was installed in San Carlos College. On July 19, 1798, King Charles III of Spain formally approved the school of medicine and authorized its operations. On April 8, 1799, O’Gorman was appointed professor of medicine. All doctors were obliged to pass a test to qualify as able professionals and to demonstrate that they were not quacks, and a quarantine was established for arriving passengers to the port of Buenos Aires. Public works were undertaken to improve public health in the
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city. In 1799, the school of medicine was upgraded to university institute and the curricula were adapted to graduate studies. The new plan was extended to six years. In 1801 there were 13 students. O’Gorman was responsible for introducing in Spain and later in the River Plate the inoculation method he had learned in London. Since 1785 he had also tested many preventive treatments against smallpox, and wrote a guideline for cattle inoculation at the request of Viceroy Sobremonte. In 1804, to guarantee the health on board the arriving ships, O’Gorman was appointed member of the Health Committee together with Cosme Argerich. During the British campaigns in the River Plate in 1806–1807, O’Gorman was not able to help the wounded soldiers because of his own precarious health. When Mariano Moreno opened the national library in 1810, O’Gorman donated his own collection of books and three ounces of gold. In 1815 O’Gorman was blind and poor. In April of the following year the government awarded him a pension equivalent to two-thirds of his salary. He died in Buenos Aires on January 20, 1819, supported by his friends and disciples. A street in the the Buenos Aires district of Almirante Brown was named after him in 1904. Edmundo Murray See also: ARGENTINA; O’GORMAN, Camilla Reference Cutolo, Vicente Osvaldo. Buenos Aires: Historia de las Calles y Sus Nombres. Buenos Aires: Editorial Elche, 1994. “Número del Centenario.” Special issue, The Southern Cross (1975).
O’HARA, FRANK (1926–1966) Francis Russell O’Hara was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on March 27, 1926, and raised in the small farming town of www.abc-clio.com
Grafton, Massachusetts. His parents, Russell and Katherine Broderick O’Hara, both came from strict Irish-Catholic families. Russell O’Hara managed the family’s three farms and a farm machinery dealership. The eldest of three children, Frank O’Hara attended parochial schools throughout his childhood. He rejected Catholicism at a young age, however, perhaps in part because of his homosexuality, which the Catholic Church would not countenance. He began studying piano at the age of seven and aspired to become a great pianist and composer. After graduating from St. John’s High School in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1944, O’Hara enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He served on the USS Nicholas in the South Pacific during World War II but was not involved in actual combat. O’Hara was honorably discharged from the Navy in 1946 and enrolled at Harvard on the GI Bill. After majoring in music for his first year, he changed his major to English literature. O’Hara wrote several short stories, poems, and plays while at Harvard, some of which were published in the Harvard Advocate. He also read widely and sat in on as many art history classes as possible. His exposure to Dada and French surrealism would influence his writing for years to come. Following his graduation in 1950, O’Hara spent a year at the University of Michigan, where he earned an MA in comparative literature and won the coveted Hopwood Award for poetry. O’Hara moved to New York City in the autumn of 1951 and accepted a job as a desk clerk at the Museum of Modern Art. After working at the museum in a nonprofessional capacity for two years, O’Hara resigned to work instead as an editorial associate with Art News magazine. He
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quickly established a reputation as a talented art critic and was accepted as an insider in artistic circles. Before long, O’Hara occupied a central place in the avant-garde art scene of the 1950s. He returned to the Museum of Modern Art in 1955 as the assistant to the director of the museum’s international program. O’Hara advanced steadily in his career with the museum: he was made an assistant curator in 1960 and promoted to associate curator five years later. His work brought him into close contact with the painters of the New York School of abstract expressionism, and he collaborated on poem-paintings (paintings with word texts) with a number of painters, including Larry Rivers and Norman Bluhm. In addition to pursuing a successful career with the Museum of Modern Art, O’Hara continued to concentrate on his poetry. He published his first volume of poems, A City in Winter, in 1952. He followed this up with several other volumes, including Meditations in an Emergency (1957), Second Avenue (1960), and Lunch Poems (1964). Together with fellow poets John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, O’Hara was at the core of a group loosely known as the New York School of poets. O’Hara’s work first received national attention when Donald Allen selected 15 of his poems for inclusion in an anthology, The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 (1960). Much of O’Hara’s work falls under the heading of what he called “I do this I do that” poetry because his poems read like diary entries, capturing in a casual style but with great specificity the details of his daily life in the city. In O’Hara’s opinion, the purpose of poetry and art was not to convey timeless values or moral lessons but rather to capture the colors and textures of life’s ephemeral moments. www.abc-clio.com
O’Hara was struck by a beach buggy on Fire Island just before dawn on July 24, 1966; he died from his injuries the following day. Several more volumes of O’Hara’s poetry were published after his death, including The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (1971), The Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara (1974), and Poems Retrieved: 1950–1966 (1977). Kathleen Ruppert References Berkson, Bill, and Joe LeSueur, eds. Homage to Frank O’Hara. Bolinas: Big Sky, 1988. Feldman, Alan. Frank O’Hara. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979. Gooch, Brad. City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara. New York: Knopf, 1993. Perloff, Marjorie. Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
O’HARA, MAUREEN (1920–) Born Maureen FitzSimmons in Milltown, Ireland, near Dublin, O’Hara began acting as a child. While a member of the famed Abbey players, she was discovered by Charles Laughton, who chose her for the lead in Jamaica Inn (1939). She went on to star in almost 60 motion pictures throughout her career. She is best known for her roles in films directed by John Ford, such as How Green Was My Valley (1941), and opposite John Wayne in Ford’s Rio Grande (1950) and The Quiet Man (1952). Other memorable films include The Black Swan (1942), Miracle on 34th Street (1947), and The Parent Trap (1961). O’Hara retired in 1973, but she continues to appear occasionally in films and on television. O’Hara was born on August 17, 1920, the second of six children in a talented family. Her mother, a Dublin stage actress and singer, and her father, a retail clothing
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businessman and founding officer of Dublin’s Shamrock Rovers, encouraged her to pursue her love of acting at an early age. O’Hara attended the Abbey Theatre School, the Guildhall School of Music, and Trinity College. By age 17, she had won numerous awards, including the All-Ireland Cup for her performance as Portia in The Merchant of Venice. In addition, she performed on radio shows and had roles in several movies, including her first leading role in a British film, My Irish Molly, in 1938. In 1938, prominent actor and director Charles Laughton discovered O’Hara while she was performing with the Abbey Players. After giving her a screen test, Laughton chose her to play the female lead in Jamaica Inn, a period piece about the Caribbean. Realizing O’Hara’s potential, Laughton persuaded her to change her name (FitzSimmons was too long for a billboard) and leave the Abbey to pursue a career in Hollywood. She made her first U.S. film the next year, starring as Esmeralda to Laughton’s Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). She made several other films in the next few years, including Bill of Divorcement (1940), Dance, Girl, Dance! (1940), and They Met in Argentina (1941), all of which brought her greater attention and success. O’Hara filmed well in Technicolor action adventures and became one of the most sought-after actresses in Hollywood, particularly for prominent director John Ford. While many directors often underutilized her talents, Ford showcased her dramatic, singing, and comedic abilities to their best advantage in such films as How Green Was My Valley (1941). Her portrayal of Angharad in Ford’s Oscar-winning film about a Welsh coal-mining family won her critical acclaim for the first time, and www.abc-clio.com
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proved her range as an actress. Linked by their Irish backgrounds, Ford developed a lasting professional and personal relationship with O’Hara, using her in some of his best films, and pairing her with another of his favorites, John Wayne. The five-foot eightinch, athletic O’Hara was a good match for the Duke’s six-foot four-inch frame. Her quick wit mixed with his dry humor created a legendary onscreen partnership in such films as Fort Apache (1948), Rio Grande (1950), The Wings of Eagles (1957), and McLintock! (1963). The most famous film that Ford, O’Hara, and Wayne made was The Quiet Man (1952), adapted from Maurice Walsh’s short story. Ford first approached O’Hara and Wayne in the mid-1940s about his labor-of-love project, and he even worked on the script with O’Hara for several years, but Republic Pictures made him complete other projects first, hoping to recoup their losses with moneymaking Westerns. Filmed on location in Cong, Co. Mayo, The Quiet Man won Oscars for its lush Technicolor filming of the Irish landscape and for Best Director. The film contained an almost all-Irish cast, including family members of Ford, O’Hara, and Wayne. The chemistry created by Wayne’s portrayal of the ex-boxer Sean Thornton who has returned home to Ireland and O’Hara’s depiction of the fiery colleen Mary Kate Danaher whom Thornton falls in love with made the film an overwhelming success. They were supported with memorable performances by John Victor McLaglen, as Mary Kate’s bullheaded brother Squire “Red” Will Danaher, and Barry Fitzgerald, as the irrepressible matchmaker Michaeleen Flynn. While some critics have panned the film as a stereotypical, stage-Irish view of a nonexistent Ireland, others view it as a provocative, postmodern
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look at a romanticized Ireland as seen through the eyes of the “returned Yank,” consciously playing on subjects like the role of the church, political violence, gender, and tradition in modern Ireland. Regardless, The Quiet Man remains the most lasting filmic representation of Ireland to date and a classic romantic comedy. Between 1952 and 1973, O’Hara starred in more than 20 films, mainly period action adventures, with such legends as Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, James Stewart, and of course, John Wayne. Some notable films from the period include The Long Grey Line (1955), Spencer’s Mountain (1963), and a television adaptation of Steinbeck’s novel, The Red Pony (1973). By the 1960s O’Hara had graduated to playing mother roles, including memorable performances in Disney’s The Parent Trap (1961), with Brian Keith and Hayley Mills, and Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (1962), with James Stewart. O’Hara retired from acting in 1973 to enjoy time with her husband, aviator General Charles Blair, whom she had married in 1968. They moved to the Caribbean to manage a commuter seaplane service, made various trips around the world, and had a daughter Bronwyn. O’Hara also published a monthly magazine, The Virgin Islander, in which she wrote a column, “Maureen O’Hara Says.” She was also elected chief executive officer and president of her airlines, making her the first woman to gain that distinction in the United States. Since Blair’s death in 1978, she has returned to the screen periodically, most recently appearing as John Candy’s obstinate mother in Only the Lonely (1991) and several television movies, including The Christmas Box (1995) and The Last Dance (2000). O’Hara continues to live in semiretirement www.abc-clio.com
in St. Croix, although she maintains homes in New York, Los Angeles, and Ireland. Although O’Hara became a U.S. citizen in 1940, she retains close ties to her family and her roots in Ireland. She is a member of several Irish and Irish-American organizations, and has received various IrishAmerican awards, including the prestigious John F. Kennedy Memorial Award for an “outstanding American of Irish descent for service to God and country.” In 1999, she became only the third woman ever to lead the New York City Saint Patrick’s Day Parade as Grand Marshall. O’Hara remains one of the most enduring leading ladies of the screen, and certainly the most memorable Irish “colleen” of movie history. Meaghan Dwyer See also: FITZGERALD, Barry; FORD, John; SAINT PATRICK’S DAY PARADES; WAYNE, John References Curran, Joseph M. Hibernian Green on the Silver Screen: The Irish and American Movies. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. English, Thomas. “America’s Colleen: Maureen O’Hara.” Irish America Magazine (February 1987): 30–36. Gibbons, Luke. The Quiet Man. Cork: Cork University Press, 2002.
O’HERLIHY, DAN (1919–2005) Born in Wexford, Ireland on May 1, 1919, Dan O’Herlihy was educated at Blackrock College. Following in the footsteps of his father, he studied architecture at the National University of Ireland, later graduating. He soon gravitated toward the theater, however, and he began acting with the Abbey Players. Later, he moved to Dublin’s Gate Theatre, where he ended up appearing in more than 50 plays. He played the lead
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role in the first production of Sean O’Casey’s Red Roses For Me in 1943. His breakthrough role as a film actor came in Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out in 1947, in which he played an Irish Republican Army (IRA) gunman. The following year he made his first film in America, appearing with Orson Welles in Macbeth. Then he appeared in an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1948) opposite Roddy McDowall. After this he played a number of supporting roles in films such as At Sword’s Point, in which he played the son of one of the Three Musketeers, and The Black Shield of Falworth. In 1952 he starred in Luis Buñuel’s The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for this role, in which he was alone on the screen for 60 minutes out of the film’s 90 minutes running time and was only required to utter a few lines. It was said at the time that he hired a cinema to show the film to members of the Academy to persuade them to vote for him. Still, he lost out to Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront. O’Herlihy appeared in the Cold War–era B movie, Invasion USA, as well as adventure films such as Soldier’s Three and Bengal Brigade. The melodramatic Imitation of Life was followed by a reprise of his role as an IRA man in A Terrible Beauty as well as a remake of The Cabinet of Caligari in 1962. In 1964 he played Brigadier General Black opposite Henry Fonda in Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe, in which he is ordered to drop a nuclear bomb on New York City. He played Franklin Delano Roosevelt in MacArthur in 1977. He continued his love of theater after his move to America. He appeared alongside Orson Welles (another actor who had trained at Dublin’s Gate Theatre) in Macbeth at the Mercury Theatre www.abc-clio.com
as well as in John Houseman’s Measure for Measure in Los Angeles. He also appeared in The Life of Charles Dickens on Broadway, in King Lear at the Houston Shakespeare Festival, and in Mass Appeal at the Drury Lane Theatre. He starred as Mr. Brown in John Huston’s final film, The Dead, which was an adaptation of James Joyce’s short story in Dubliners. He also appeared in both Robocop and Robocop 2, playing the part of a ruthless executive. He has appeared in numerous television series, including The Travels of Jamie McPheeters, The Long Hot Summer, A Man Called Sloane, Whiz Kids, and Twin Peaks. He married Elsa Bennett in 1945, and they remained together for 50 years until his death. They had five children together, two daughters and three sons. Two of his sons, Gavan and Cormac, and one of his daughters, Patricia, followed their father by becoming actors. His son Cormac appeared alongside his father in The Dead. Dan’s brother Michael O’Herlihy was also involved in films as a director. Dan O’Herlihy died of natural causes at his home in Malibu, California, on February 17, 2005. David Doyle
O’HIGGINS, AMBROSE (AMBROSIO) (CA. 1721–1801) As governor and captain-general of Chile, and later viceroy of Peru, Ambrose O’Higgins was probably the eighteenth-century Irish emigrant who attained the highest position in the Spanish empire. The son of Charles O’Higgins and Margaret O’Higgins of Ballinary, Co. Sligo, and later of Summerhill, Co. Meath, Ambrose O’Higgins was educated in Ireland. His early instruction was in mathematics, and later he was trained to become a surveyor or draughtsman.
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O’Higgins went to Spain in about 1751 and worked for the Irish merchant firm of Butler in Cadiz. On the company’s behalf, he undertook a commercial journey to South America in 1756, where he visited his younger brother William, who was living in Asunción with a wife and two children. In 1761 Ambrose O’Higgins was back in Spain, where he joined the army as “ingeniero delineador” (engineer draughtsman, with the rank of lieutenant). Three years later he was sent again to South America as assistant to the military governor of Valdivia, the Irish John Garland. On his first journey across the Andes, O’Higgins conceived the idea of improving the route by constructing a chain of brick shelters, and by 1766 an all-year postal service was operating between the Atlantic Coast and Chile. He returned to Spain and wrote the Description of the Realm of Chile, a memorandum containing recommendations about the Indian population, agriculture, trade, and administration. Again in Chile in 1770, O’Higgins was named captain, lieutenant colonel, and field marshall. In the 1770s his troops were engaged in wars with the Llanos and Pehuenches, and he was twice wounded. In 1780 he was appointed commandant general of the Spanish army in Chile, defending the town of Concepción against the attacks of the British army. O’Higgins attained his highest titles in 1787 as governor and captain general of Chile, and in September 1795 as viceroy of Peru. In addition, the king of Spain granted him the titles of Baron of Ballenary and Marquis of Osorno. Among his most important achievements was the abolition in 1789 of the cruel encomienda system, whereby landowners kept Indian laborers in conditions close to slavery. He also pushed www.abc-clio.com
reforms with the Catholic Church to benefit the poor, exciting the antagonism of the reactionary Creole elite. He likewise performed his duties as viceroy most ably for nearly five years. O’Higgins never married, and his titles died with him. In his late fifties he had a romantic and illegitimate liaison with María Isabel Riquelme de la Barrera, an attractive 18-year-old Chilean woman from a wellknown local family. Their son, Bernardo O’Higgins, was born in Chile, but he was never on intimate terms with him. Bernardo was a leading figure in the Chilean War of Independence and is remembered as the emancipator of Chile. Ambrose O’Higgins died on March 19, 1801, in Lima, Peru, where he was buried in the church of San Pedro. Edmundo Murray See also: MACKENNA, John References De Breffny. “Ambrose O’Higgins: An Enquiry into his Origins and Ancestry.” The Irish Ancestor 2, no. 2 (1970): 81–89. Donoso, Ricardo. El Marqués de Osorno Don Ambrosio Higgins, 1720–1801. Santiago: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Chile, 1941.
OHIO The Native American population of the Ohio region changed significantly as a result of various epidemics, war, migration, and forced movement from the first contact with Europeans onward. The French claimed large amounts of the region in 1671, and in the eighteenth century the French established trade relations, particularly in fur. As a result of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), France ceded control of Ohio and the old Northwest to Great Britain. In the same year, the British issued
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the Proclamation of 1763, restricting white westward expansion beyond the Appalachian Mountains into Ohio country. Colonists’ resentment against the perceived restriction of westward expansion was one of many factors contributing to the list of grievances culminating in Revolution. In the new Republic, much Indian resistance was quelled in the 1794 Battle of Fallen Timbers and in campaigns against Tecumseh and his brother the Prophet, who led an uprising covering the Ohio Valley down to the Creek nation in the south. Cincinnati was established in 1788 and Cleveland in 1796. There was a marked influence of Scots-Irish as soon as the territory was opened to settlement: large numbers arrived from Pennsylvania. Ohio was admitted as a state in 1803, and from the earliest days to 1842 the vast majority of immigrants were German. From 1842 to 1860, the population grew very rapidly; the numbers of German immigrants continued to grow, although the new majority was Irish. In the last decades of the century immigrants from eastern and southern Europe became predominant. The digging of the Ohio Canal began in the same year work on the Erie Canal ended, and many of the laborers transferred from one job to the other while others signed up after disembarking from transatlantic crossings. More than 3,000 Irish “diggers” commenced work on July 4, 1825. By the late 1820s as many as 1,200 Irish immigrants were arriving in Northwest Ohio each month, most looking to work on the canals. The canal brought new strategic and economic importance to Cleveland and provided many Irish with new job opportunities on the myriad of canal boats now using the waterway, as well as the riverfront warehouses, storehouses, and dockyards. www.abc-clio.com
The Irish population spread along waterfront towns, and the city’s Irish population doubled in the 1830s. The gender imbalance began to level out as more women arrived, and the population would continue to grow rapidly in the Famine years as many escaped the overcrowded cities in the east. Ghettos emerged, however, often backing onto the water. Frequently unskilled, poor, illiterate, and discriminated against, many of these areas became large and distinct, such as Whiskey Island and Irishtown Bend. The dock settlements soon encompassed Saint Patrick Parish (1853) and the steel mills in the Parish of the Holy Name (1854). Work was secured for many through the emergence of the iron and steel and shipbuilding industries, a mainstay for Irish laborers for decades. Frustration about the poverty in some areas was vented through an 1863 riot in the Irish and black neighborhoods of Cincinnati, working-class communities detrimentally affected by the wartime loss in river traffic, trade, and work. The nineteenth century was often a turbulent time for the Irish communities for a variety of reasons. Largely urban (around 70 percent of Irish lived in Cleveland and Cincinnati), their large, visible communities and strongly perceived Catholicism drew a significant amount of discrimination that affected employment and residential area among other things. This underlying tension came to the surface in the 1850s with the popularity of the Know-Nothing Party, which was opposed to immigration and Catholicism and resented the competition for jobs, as Irish workers were seen to undercut wages. A number of city newspapers in Ohio ran notably anti-Irish propaganda, stirring up popular fears of overcrowding and crime while Know-Nothings rioted in German neighborhoods in 1855.
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Further turbulence was intra-racial/ intra-ethnic. Cincinnati, and indeed the state of Ohio, was a center of abolitionism, owing in part to being across the river from slaveholding Kentucky. It was also a common stop on the Underground Railroad. However, many Irish were fearful of competition over unskilled manual labor with blacks, whether slave or free, and this simmering tension occasionally flared up into confrontations. Irish immigrants were involved in riots in Cincinnati in 1829 over a growing black population and job competition, and in 1841 Irish immigrant dockworkers rioted against black dockworkers, an episode that involved a six-pound cannon. In 1853, intra-ethnic tension manifested itself in the Christmas riot. A group of radical Germans who had left Europe to escape religious persecution in the tumult of the late 1840s objected to the visit of a papal emissary. The mayor called in the police, who were mostly Irish, and a riot ensued. Most residents of Ohio fought for the Union during the Civil War but significant numbers left to support the Confederacy. Ohio experienced a notable level of support for the Copperheads, Unionists who opposed the war and any move to emancipate blacks, and the Irish figured strongly in their support base. Turbulence would continue to flare up. The 1884 Courthouse Riot was the state’s worst rioting over the sentence given to a German-American resident in Cincinnati. Later, in 1967, blacks rioted during the “long hot summers” that affected the nation from 1965 to 1968 and in the aftermath of Martin Luther King’s assassination in the spring of 1968. More recently, Cincinnati experienced race riots in April 2001 after police shot a 19-year-old black man, Timothy www.abc-clio.com
Thomas, highlighting tensions that had been strained for a number of years.Today the state is often regarded as a microcosm of the nation in terms of its politics and its demographics, which offer insights into the cross-section of America. Ohio is also considered a swing state. Most recently it supported both of Bill Clinton’s terms and both of George W. Bush’s terms in office, although the close finish between Bush and John Kerry in the 2004 election brought a national spotlight. Of the state’s 2000 population of 11,353,140, those reporting German ancestry made up 25.2 percent, while the second largest ancestry group was the Irish at 12.7 percent of the population. Sam Hitchmough References Doyle, David Noel, and Owen Dudley, eds. America and Ireland, 1776–1976: The American Identity and the Irish Connection, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. Havighurst, Walter. Ohio: A History. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. 1985. Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish, Longman, 2000.
O’KEEFFE, GEORGIA (1887–1986) Georgia Totto O’Keeffe was born in Wisconsin in 1887. By 1903, the O’Keeffe family had moved to Virginia. O’Keeffe attended private art lessons at a number of private schools in both Wisconsin and Virginia. In 1905, she moved to Chicago to attend the school of the Art Institute of Chicago; however, typhoid fever prevented her from returning in 1906. Instead, she
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Artist Georgia O’Keeffe poses for a portrait at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico in 1968. (Getty Images)
enrolled at the Art Student League in New York City in 1907. She began to work as a commercial artist in Chicago in 1908. She enrolled in a teacher training course at Columbia Teaching College in 1914 and taught drawing in a number of schools in Virginia, Texas, and South Carolina. In 1916, a number of her drawings were featured in an exhibition at the 291 Gallery, run by respected art critic Alfred Stieglitz. In 1916, she accepted a teaching job at the West Texas State College. During this period, she painted at least 50 watercolors inspired by the plants she found at the nearby Palo Duro Canyon. Her first solo exhibition opened in 1917. Most of the exhibits were watercolors from Texas. In 1918, she returned to New York with Stieglitz. They were married in 1924. During that same year, she also began to paint the large flowers with which she is primarily www.abc-clio.com
associated today. The giant flower paintings were first exhibited in 1925. With her paintings selling for about $25,000 in 1928, O’Keeffe became the focus of media attention. In 1925, she and Stieglitz moved to the Shelton Hotel in New York, taking an apartment on the 30th floor of the new building. They would live here for 12 years. Inspired by the views, O’Keeffe began to paint the city. In 1929, O’Keeffe began to make yearly visits to New Mexico, drawn to the open spaces and the light. The dried animal bones she found during her walks in the desert began to feature in her paintings. When Stieglitz died in 1946, she made New Mexico her permanent home. The Art Institute of Chicago held a retrospective of her work in 1943. However, her work went out of fashion, and she held only three solo shows during the 1950s.
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In 1962, O’Keeffe was elected to the 50-member American Academy of Arts and Letters, the nation’s highest honor society for people in the arts. By the 1970s, interest in her work began to grow again. She was invited to show at the Whitney Museum, and her retrospective exhibit traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Art. Her eyesight began to fail in 1971, and she stopped painting the following year. She became increasingly frail in her late 90s and moved to Santa Fe, where she would die in 1986, at the age of 98. Aoileann Ní Eigeartaigh Reference Osborne, Harold, ed. The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.
O’KELLY, ALOYSIUS C. (1853–CA. 1941) Born in Dublin, Aloysius Kelly immigrated to London in 1861, where he adopted the prefix “O.” He was the youngest of an extended political family, the most notable being James J. Kelly. O’Kelly, who saw active service in the French Foreign Legion, played a leading role in building up the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Britain, was a much respected journalist in America, was elected member of Parliament for Roscommon in 1880, and was active in the Land League. His other brothers, Stephen and Charles, were sculptors, and his sister, Julia, married Charles Hopper, brotherin-law of James Stephens, the founder or the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In 1874, O’Kelly was one of the first Irish artists to study at the École des BeauxArts in Paris, in the prestigious studio of www.abc-clio.com
the Orientalist, Jean-Léon Gérôme. Around the same time, he studied portraiture with Léon Bonnat. As well as working in Paris and Fontainbleau, he spent extended periods painting in Brittany. Here, under the influence of Jules Bastien-Lepage, he blended a form of rural realism and naturalism. In his interiors, he often reverted to a traditional genre style, but his landscapes displayed an understanding of the more avant-garde trends of the time. O’Kelly had a clear understanding of Breton separatism, and perceived underlying similarities with Ireland. Somewhat eclectic, O’Kelly adapted himself to local styles and conditions: realist in Ireland, naturalist in France, and Orientalist in North Africa. As a republican realist, he challenged the conventional relationship between high art and popular culture. And in multiple colonial circumstances, he explored the underlying connections between art and nationalism. He projected the west of Ireland as the repository of the spiritual, cultural, and social values of the imagined nation, thereby giving visual form to an emerging national identity. By 1881, he was appointed special artist to the Illustrated London News, for which he produced a remarkable suite of illustrations highlighting the Land League in Connemara. Here he painted the recently rediscovered masterpiece, Mass in a Connemara Cabin, the first painting of an Irish subject ever exhibited in the Paris Salon. O’Kelly’s interest in North Africa led to a dangerous adventure in which he allied himself with the anti-imperialist forces of the Mahdi, which he visually documented for the Pictorial World. In Cairo, O’Kelly painted many Orientalist scenes—games of draughts, street and bazaar scenes, desert scenes, and mosque paintings—but avoided the emblems of Orientalism that
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appeared to justify colonial domination. O’Kelly is unusual in that although he worked in the Orientalist style, he was not ideologically so himself. In 1895, his adoption of a nom de pinceau points to ongoing political activism, culminating in his return to Ireland, even after his immigration to the United States in 1895, to unsuccessfully offer himself for election as an MP for South Roscommon in 1897, the matching Roscommon constituency to his brother, James J. Kelly. In New York, he executed a series of political portraits of prominent Irish men. Some of his most captivating paintings are of a quintessential American subject, Huckleberry Finn, at least one of which is said to have been commissioned by Mark Twain himself. O’Kelly moved around the art colonies of America, as well as returning frequently to France to paint. It would appear that he returned to France, living in Paris until he died, probably during the World War II. Although described in the House of Commons as a “young painter of genius” and admired by Vincent van Gogh, O’Kelly remained a shadowy figure who effaced his much-traveled footsteps. Nevertheless, he exhibited in the important exhibition venues in Ireland, Britain, France, and the United States, including the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of British Artists, the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours, the Royal Hibernian Academy, the National Academy of Design, the New York Water Color Club (of which he was a member), the American Water Color Society and the Society of American Artists in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, the Boston Art Club, and the Paris Salon. A major retrospective exhibition of his work www.abc-clio.com
took place in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin in 1999–2000. Niamh O’Sullivan See also: IRISH REPUBLICAN BROTHERHOOD; LAND LEAGUE References Campbell, Julian. “Aloysius O’Kelly in Brittany.” Irish Arts Review. 1996. O’Sullivan, Niamh. “Lines of Resistance: the O’Kelly Brothers in the Sudan.” ÉireIreland. Fall 1999. O’Sullivan, Niamh. Re-orientations. Aloysius O’Kelly: Painting Politics and Popular Culture. Dublin: Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, 1999. Potterton, Homan. “Aloysius O’Kelly in America.” Irish Arts Review. 1996.
OKLAHOMA The history of the Irish in Oklahoma precedes Oklahoma statehood (1907) by more than 100 years. Don Alexandro O’Reilly, born in Dublin of Spanish/Irish descent, was the last governor of the Spanish territory, which included the future state of Oklahoma. His reign as governor began in 1769 and ended in 1800. Irish trappers were already in the area because of the bountiful fur-bearing animals. Fort Gibson, a major military base, was established in Oklahoma Territory in 1824, and many Irish enlisted in the military to earn more money. However, the building of railroads, coupled with mass Irish immigration in the 1840s, brought in vast numbers of Irish who were eager to move west for prosperous farmland and economic opportunity. The Potato Famine pushed Irish to move farther west than many other ethnic groups because they were desperate to forge new lives for themselves and to become economically sound in an area of the country where land was plentiful and cheap.
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After the Civil War, more Irish laborers began to move in. Track layers ended up staying in what was then known as Indian Territory. Many Irish married American Indians and lay claim to land in Oklahoma as Indian citizens. One such Irishman started a controversy that would become known as Shanahan’s War. Patrick Shanahan, a railroad worker, had been fired by the railroad. Believing his dismissal to be unfair, he bought up land he believed the railroad would later need. Because he was married to a Cherokee woman, he claimed Indian citizenship and built his barn right in line with the tracks the railroad was laying. He refused to tear down his barn and negotiations continued for several months. He later sold his land to the railroad for a very high price and became a very wealthy man. Many Irish communities were created in Oklahoma Territory. The town of Edgewood was renamed Erin Springs by Frank Murray, an early settler to the area. The towns of Hennessey and Deer Creek also had large Irish populations. Oil boomtowns, such as Shamrock, Oklahoma, appeared almost overnight in the 1910s. In fact, Shamrock’s town color was green, and the newspapers were The Brogue and The Blarney. Oklahoma Territory also attracted skilled Irish miners from Pennsylvania to work in the southeastern Oklahoma coal mines. Many Irish became victims of mining disasters. In the 1890s, Irish union activists were deported by the U.S. Army for leading mining strikes. In 1877, a railroad strike was led by Mary Harris Jones, known as “Mother Jones,” a fearless rally crier from Co. Cork. She led rallies for almost 50 years. Her speeches packed union halls in the territory, and when she died in 1930, her death marked the end of an era for the Irish labor movement. The song “The www.abc-clio.com
Death of Mother Jones” became a popular song in the United States shortly after her death. Although many Irish were of the Catholic faith, they attended Protestant services, as there were few priests in the territory. It was not unusual for many to convert to Protestant sects. Saint Patrick’s Church, established by brothers Father Laurence Smyth and Michael Smyth in Atoka, Oklahoma, in 1868, became the center for Catholic life. Later, Sacred Heart Mission was founded as a Benedictine Abbey. In 1929, it was moved to St. Gregory’s in Shawnee, Oklahoma, where St. Gregory’s College stands today. As for Irish in early Oklahoma politics, Dennis T. Flynn stands out as one of the most influential. In 1889, Flynn was appointed postmaster of Guthrie, Oklahoma; he arrived on April 22, the day of the Oklahoma Land Run. In that same year, he became a Republican delegate from Oklahoma Territory. He was one of the most effective political campaigners in Oklahoma history, for although he was a Republican Catholic and distrusted for being so, he won over the public with his knowledge of homesteading and prairie life. He worked tirelessly for homesteaders and sponsored the “piecemeal absorption” plan that paved the way for Oklahoma statehood. This plan initially failed but it served to start the ball rolling for Oklahoma’s eventual statehood in 1907. During the Oklahoma Land Run on April 22, 1889, many Irish participated in the rush to obtain land in Indian Territory. Together with those of British descent, the Irish formed the largest of any European group in Oklahoma Territory. In 1992, the film Far and Away, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, was filmed in Oklahoma. Even though it is a fictional account of Irish
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involved with the Oklahoma Land Run, it nevertheless brought attention to Irish presence during the pre-statehood period. The Depression hit Oklahoma hard, and the Irish were not immune to its effects. Many Irish departed for California in a mass exodus during the Dust Bowl, having lost all of their crops to the incessant wind and terrible drought. In 1930, Governor William “Alfalfa Bill” Murray, who was of Irish descent, opposed New Deal legislation that would have helped out many citizens of the state. The number of immigrants from Ireland to Oklahoma and Irish birthrates dropped significantly, and the state never recovered from this loss. After World War II, some Irish immigrated into Oklahoma as war brides. In the 1950s, Bishop McGuiness urged Irish priests to immigrate to Oklahoma to establish Catholic churches. Most of these priests are now deceased, and the Irish Catholic presence in Oklahoma has declined tremendously. Today, the Irish-born presence in Oklahoma is certainly not what it was before statehood. However, because of earlier Irish political involvement, union activism, and business leadership, the contribution of the Irish in Oklahoma cannot be denied, for it was not only an integral factor in Oklahoma’s statehood, but it was also very central to the founding of industrial, business, and educational entities in present-day Oklahoma. Cynthia A. Klima See also: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR; GREAT FAMINE, The References Blessing, Patrick. The British and Irish in Oklahoma. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980. Byron, Reginald. Irish America. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. www.abc-clio.com
Fitzpatrick, Marie-Louise. The Long March: The Choctaw’s Gift to the Irish Famine Relief. Hillsboro, OR: Beyond Words Publishing, 1998.
OLCOTT, CHAUNCEY (JOHN CHANCELLOR) (1858–1932) The grandson of Irish immigrants who settled in Buffalo, New York, Chauncey Olcott was the reigning Irish-American tenor from 1898 into the early 1920s. He starred in numerous “Irish” musicals, out of which came many of the best-known IrishAmerican popular songs, some of which Olcott helped to write. Starting in minstrelsy, Olcott established a reputation as a singer and a leading man on both sides of the Atlantic, once playing opposite Lillian Russell. In 1891, the New York impresario Augustus Pitou asked Olcott to replace the ailing William Scanlan as the star for Pitou’s series of popular musicals set in Ireland. Olcott fit perfectly into the mold of the new type of romantic Irish tenor that Pitou and Scanlan had helped to create. Olcott moved easily into shows in which Ireland was a fantasized backdrop for historical romances and idealized love stories, perfect vehicles for some of the best songs Tin Pan Alley could produce. While the musicals were forgettable, the songs delivered by Olcott’s fine lyric tenor voice captured the hearts of American audiences. One did not have to be Irish to enjoy “My Wild Irish Rose” (A Romance of Athlone, 1899), “Mother Machree” (Macushla, 1911), “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” (Isle O’ Dreams, 1912), “Too-raloo-ra-loo-ra (That’s An Irish Lullaby)” (Shameen Dhu, 1912), and “A Little Bit of Heaven (Sure, They Call It Ireland)” (Heart of Paddy Wack, 1914). Although Olcott
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wrote “My Wild Irish Rose,” and collaborated on other songs, Pitou was careful to hire some of the best Tin Pan Alley talents to guarantee his star first-rate material: lyricists, such as George Graff, Jr., Rida Johnson Young, and J. K. Brennan, along with composers of the stature of Ernest Ball. The resulting songs, many of which Olcott recorded himself, virtually defined IrishAmerican musical themes for much of the twentieth century. Although John McCormack (to whose voice Olcott’s was once compared) is today remembered as the popularizer of these songs, it was Olcott for whom they were written and who introduced them to the American public. Although Olcott occasionally sang a traditional Irish song, such as “The Wearing of the Green,” his songs, like the musicals in which he appeared, were American confections. They presented a storybook Ireland scrubbed of poverty and political violence. Irish nationalism was limited to swashbuckling historical romances, set far enough back in the past so that failure did not hurt. The musicals also helped to foster that peculiar Irish love triangle: the lad, his colleen, and his mother. Moreover, there was none of vaudeville’s rough-and-tumble Paddy comedy that had entertained Irish immigrants in the post–Civil War years. Olcott’s musicals were made for the upwardly mobile American-born Irish who wanted an identity that did not shame them, one that they could embrace, even if it had little to do with reality. William H. Murphy See also: BALL, Ernest R.; DAY, Dennis; MCCORMACK, John; SCANLAN, William J. References Fiedler, Mari Kathleen. “Chauncey Olcott: Irish-American Mother-Love, Romance, www.abc-clio.com
and Nationalism.” Éire-Ireland 22, no. 2 (1987): 4–26. Olcott, Rita. Song in My Heart, New York: Fields, 1939.
O’LEARY, DANIEL FLORENCE (1801–1854) Born in Cork, Daniel Florence O’Leary became a compatriot and chronicler of Simón Bolívar’s campaign for South American independence. Not much is known of O’Leary’s childhood apart from the supposition that he must have received a good education, owing to his mature ability to read, write, and speak English and Spanish. At 16, he enlisted as an ensign in the First Division of the Red Hussars of Venezuela, a cavalry regiment being raised in support of the war in northern South America. The regiment sailed from Portsmouth on December 3, 1817, and reached Angostura (now called Ciudad Bolívar), over 250 miles above the delta of the Orinoco, sometime in April 1818. This was the temporary capital of Simón Bolívar’s Venezuelan republic. Unimpressed with his new English colleagues—not only had many deserted but the commander, Colonel Wilson, had been implicated in a plot to replace Bolívar as captain general of the army—Daniel applied and obtained a transfer to a native unit, the Guard of Honor of General José Antonio Anzoátegui. Also, at this time, he was introduced to Bolívar, a meeting to which he ascribes the esteem and friendship that Bolívar ever afterwards showed him. O’Leary went to Anzoátegui as a second lieutenant, not yet 18, but just a year later he was a captain and one of Anzoátegui’s aides-de-camp. As such, O’Leary took part in Bolívar’s famous invasion of New Granada, where
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soldiers had not only to cross the flooded plains of Casanare, often waist deep in water, but also had to scale the Andes by climbing 13,000 feet over the Páramo de Pisba. After accomplishing this seemingly impossible feat, this young army then managed to fight and defeat the professional and well-equipped Spanish Army in battles at Pántano de Vargas (July 25, 1819)— where O’Leary suffered a severe head wound but continued to fight on—and Boyacá (August 7), freeing New Granada from Spanish rule. O’Leary also participated in the culmination of the Venezuelan campaign, in the second battle of Carabobo in 1821, and the battle of Pichincha in 1822, effectively ending Spanish rule in Ecuador. By this time he had risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel and had become an aide-de-camp to Bolívar himself. By the time Bolívar had succeeded in liberating Peru, at the battle of Ayacucho in 1824 (a battle O’Leary missed as he had been sent on a mission to Chile), O’Leary had become Bolívar’s principal aide-de-camp. In 1825, with the creation of the new state of Bolivia, Bolívar reached the height of his power and fame. However, his attempts to create a Spanish League of Nations with constitutions modeled on the one he drafted for Bolivia resulted in dissension, mutinies, and failure. Bolívar died on December 17, 1830, his last moments recorded by O’Leary as, “the last embers of an expiring volcano, the dust of the Andes still on his garments” (Humphreys 1969, 14). By this time, O’Leary had married Soledad Soublette, a sister to General Soublette (who would later become president of Venezuela). After the death of Bolívar, O’Leary immigrated with his family to Jamaica—to avoid the backlash against Bolívar’s former allies—finally returning to www.abc-clio.com
Venezuela in 1883, after General Soublette advised him that all was now safe. In 1834, O’Leary acted as secretary to a Venezuelan mission to London, Paris, and Madrid and, in 1837, was appointed chargé d’affaires to the Vatican. On June 1, 1841, he became acting consul for Caracas for the British Foreign Service and, later in the year, consul at Puerto Cabello. Finally, on November 28, 1843, he was appointed Her Majesty’s chargé d’affaires and consul-general at Bogotá. He died there, 10 years later, on February 24, 1854. O’Leary had been collecting all the information he could on the wars of independence in northern South America since he first arrived in Venezuela in 1818. After Bolivar’s death O’Leary renewed his interest in writing a history of the wars and a biography of Bolívar. Though a draft of O’Leary’s memoirs, written partly in English and partly in Spanish, seems to have been completed by 1840, they remained in this state for 40 years, until the Memorias del General O’Leary publicados por su hijo Simon B. O’Leary, por orden del Gobierno de Venezuela were printed in 32 volumes between 1879 and 1888. These memoirs added greatly to the legacy of Simon Bolívar and to Daniel O’Leary’s legacy as compatriot and chronicler of the northern states’ struggle for South American independence. James P. Byrne See also: PANAMA References Humphreys, R. A., ed. The Detached Recollections of General D. F. O’Leary. The Athlone Press: London, 1969. O’Leary, Peter. “Celebrating Venezuela’s General Daniel Florence O’Leary.” March 16, 2003. www.vheadline.com/ readnews.asp?id=4464 (accessed August 21, 2007).
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O’LEARY JANE (1946–) Born in Hartford, Connecticut, on October 13, 1946, Jane (Strong) O’Leary is an American composer who has lived in Ireland since 1972. She is one of the bestknown and most often performed contemporary composers in Ireland today. O’Leary studied at Vassar College (BA 1968) and at Princeton University (MA 1971, PhD 1978) where her composition teachers included Milton Babbitt and J. K. Randall. Before she moved to Ireland with her Irish husband she taught at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania (1971–1972). In Ireland, O’Leary taught at the College of Music in Dublin (1974–1977) and lectured in music at University College Galway (1978–1983). She is the founder (1976), pianist, and artistic director of the chamber ensemble Concorde, which specializes in contemporary music. The group has given many first performances of music by contemporary Irish composers and frequently tours the country and abroad and performs on radio. O’Leary has spoken at many gatherings of women composers around the world and has had her music performed there. She has also been a member of the executive committee of the International League of Women Composers (1986–1994). Besides her work as a composer and performer O’Leary has taken an active part in the administration and organization of music in Ireland. She was a founder of Music for Galway in 1981 (chairperson 1984–1992), a member of the Board of Directors of the National Concert Hall in Dublin (1986–1996), a member of the Irish Arts Council (1998–2003), chairperson of the Contemporary Music Centre in Dublin, and a member of the Cultural Relations Committee at the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs. She has been a www.abc-clio.com
member of Aosdána, the Irish academy of creative artists, since 1981 and received the prestigious Marten Toonder Award for composition in 1994. Before 1983, O’Leary’s music was oriented toward dodecaphonic and serial techniques. Most of these pieces were short movements for chamber music combinations such as a Quartet (1969) for clarinet, bass clarinet, violin, and violoncello, and some piano and vocal music. This early opus was published by Mobart Music (today APNM, New Jersey). Her membership in Aosdána brought about a change of style in her music from strict 12-tone procedures of a fragmentary character to a more personal music characterized by long and fluid melodic lines and rich harmonic textures. Sometimes modal elements in harmony and folk-song-like melodies tend to reflect her adopted home country. Extramusical influences can be found in the landscape of the Irish west coast and in poetry, especially of the Irish poet Brendan Kennelly. Important orchestral works along these lines are from the flatirons (1985), sky of revelation (1989), Islands of Discovery (1991), and From Sea-Grey Shores (1999). Axel Klein Reference Klein, Axel. Die Musik Irlands im 20. Jahrhundert. New York: Georg Olms, 1996.
O’LEARY, JUAN EMILIANO (1879–1969) Juan Emiliano O’Leary, a Paraguayan historian, poet, and journalist born in Asunción on June 1, 1879, is considered to be one of the most important intellectuals in modern Paraguay. His key contribution was the historical studies of Paraguayan
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revisionism, as well as his support of the Guaraní-language poetry revival. He was the son of John O’Leary, who was probably born in 1841 in Salto, Uruguay, and María Dolores Urdapilleta. John O’Leary arrived in Paraguay during the War of the Triple Alliance working as a peddler. He had a relation with Natividad Mercedes Moreno, and from this illegitimate union was born Fulgencio Ricardo Moreno, writer, historian, and minister of foreign affairs. On February 3, 1870, John O’Leary married María Dolores Urdapilleta. He died in Pergamino, Buenos Aires (Argentina). Juan O’Leary studied in the school of law in Asunción. He actively participated in public life, following General Bernardino Caballero of the National Republican Association (“Partido Colorado”), which dominated political life of Paraguay. O’Leary occupied key posts in the party, as head of the National Archive and later as diplomat. For a short time, he was foreign affairs minister during Alfredo Stroessner’s administration. O’Leary’s major contribution to Paraguay’s historiography was the reappraisal of Francisco Solano López and his role in the War of the Triple Alliance against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay (1864–1870). In the beginning, surely under family influence, O’Leary was bitterly critical of Solano López, and was distinguished for his poem against the dictator written while he was a student at the Colegio Nacional. However, at age 25, O’Leary considered that López’s régime, though tyrannical and authoritarian, was beneficial to the country in the context of the aggressive foreign policies of its neighboring countries. O’Leary painted the Mariscal as a great hero, a great patriot, and a great promoter of nationalism. One of his close personal friends was Enrique Solano, son of the Mariscal. www.abc-clio.com
O’Leary distinguished himself as the pioneer of historical revisionism in Paraguay. His nationalist—sometimes overly racist— views expressed in his narrative of Paraguayan history were effectively used by politicians to raise the awareness of native identity among the population that was emerging after the catastrophic results of the war. Among his books of history are Páginas de Historia (1916), Nuestra Epopeya (1919), El Mariscal Solano López (1920), El Paraguay en la Unificación Argentina (1924), El Héroe del Paraguay (1930), Los Legionarios (1930), Apostolado Patriótico (1933), Historia de la Guerra de la Triple Alianza (1912), and Prosa Polémica (published posthumously in 1982). By the beginning of the twentieth century O’Leary was a member of the group of poets who began writing to reaffirm national identity, and his name is linked with the Guaraní renaissance of Rosicrán (Narciso R. Colman). In the magazine Ocara Poty Cue-mi he encouraged readers “to preserve our language; we must develop Guaraní and protect it from the corrupt and intruding effects of Spanish.” Several of his poems are epic ballads about the Paraguayan War of Independence and against the Triple Alliance. He also researched oral legends and narrated them in the form of short stories or epic poems. O’Leary published the following books of poetry: El Alma de la Raza (1899), A la Memoria de Mi Hija Rosita (1918), Salvaje (1902), Los Conquistadores (1921), and several anthologies in Guaraní language. O’Leary died on October 31, 1969 in Asunción. A street in this city and a district of Alto Paraná department bear O’Leary’s name. Edmundo Murray See also: PARAGUAY
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728 O’MAHONY, JOHN References Bareiro Saguier, Rubén, and Carlos Villagra Marsal, eds. Poésie Paraguayenne duXX e Siècle: Édition Trilingue en Espagnol, Français et Guarani. Geneva: Patiño, 2003. Wolf, Lustig. Chácore Purahéi—Canciones de Guerra: Literatura Popular en Guaraní Eidentidad Nacional en el Paraguay. Mainz, Germany: Author’s Edition, 2005.
O’MAHONY, JOHN (1816–1877) John O’Mahony was born in Mitchelstown, Co. Cork, in 1816 and attended Trinity College Dublin from 1833 to 1835. The O’Mahony family was well known for their support of Irish Catholic nationalism and had played a part in the abortive 1798 Rising. As a member of the Young Ireland movement, which had broken away from the cautious policies of Daniel O’Connell, O’Mahony took part in the abortive 1848 uprising; at its conclusion, he fled to France to avoid prosecution. While there, he supported himself by working as a tutor while imbibing the radical republican rhetoric of a Parisian community fresh off its own revolt. O’Mahony immigrated to New York City in 1853, where he became involved in diasporic nationalism. O’Mahony recognized that the United States, with its large population of Irish immigrants, would be an important recruiting ground for the cause of Irish independence, and that Irish Americans were an important constituency for antiBritish activism. To this effect, O’Mahony was a founding member of the Emmet Monument Association, a military organization that had as its expressed aim the liberation of Ireland. It was hoped that Britain’s difficulties in the Crimean War could become Ireland’s opportunity, but the speedy resolution of that crisis prevented www.abc-clio.com
Portrait of John O’Mahony, founder of the Fenian Brotherhood. (Library of Congress)
the realization of O’Mahony’s plans. A skilled Gaelic scholar, O’Mahony supported himself by editing a translation of Geoffrey Keating’s History of Ireland. Appearing in 1857, it received good reviews and gave much attention to the Fianna, a band of Celtic warriors who further inspired in O’Mahony a desire to liberate his homeland. O’Mahony was a founding member of the Fenian Brotherhood. Organized in 1858, the Fenians were the American branch of a transatlantic organization that had as its aim the forced removal of Great Britain from Ireland. Serving as head centre of the Fenians, O’Mahony sought to funnel money, war materiel, and trained soldiers to his revolutionary brethren—the Irish Republican Brotherhood, headed by James Stephens— in Ireland. These plans were interrupted by the American Civil War, a conflict in which O’Mahony took part—he raised and served as colonel of the 99th New York
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Regiment—though he feared the divisive impact the war had on Irish nationalism. Although his relationship with Stephens was often bitter, O’Mahony was an effective organizer, who oversaw the coalescence of disparate bands of embittered Irishmen into a cohesive organization. Despite a slow start, by 1865 the Fenians had some 40,000 members and were contributing several hundred thousand dollars per year to the cause. But there was dissension in the ranks. Many within the movement chafed at O’Mahony’s autocratic style; at their annual convention (1865) he was stripped of his title as head centre; though he was retained as president, he was now restrained by a senate. A few months later a quarrel over finances split the Fenians, and the antiO’Mahony forces lined up behind dry goods magnate W. R. Roberts. The Roberts wing made plans for an invasion of Canada, hoping to use that territory as ransom for Irish independence. O’Mahony, for his part, was opposed to action anywhere but in Ireland. In April 1866, against his better judgment, O’Mahony reluctantly backed a plan to stage military raids in Canada against the British; the results were farcical, and O’Mahony was forced to resign from his position of leadership. Despite their considerable financial and political influence, the Fenians soon fell into disunion and disarray. They were superseded in later years by such organizations as the Clan na Gael and the Friends of Irish Freedom. Seeking to revive the movement in 1872, O’Mahony was coaxed out of retirement and reinstated as head centre, but he was unable to restore the movement to its former prestige and prosperity. O’Mahony died in relative obscurity and poverty in New York on February 6, 1877. www.abc-clio.com
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His remains were sent to Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery, where a massive funeral took place on March 4, 1877. Ironically, in his death he achieved the one thing that had escaped him in life: a union of Irish and Irish American nationalists. O’Mahony was never married. Tim Lynch See also: FENIANS; IRISH REPUBLICAN BROTHERHOOD References Denieffe, Joseph. A Personal History of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood. Shannon: Irish University Press, 1969. O’Leary, John. Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism. London: Downey and Company, 1896.
O’MALLEY, WALTER (1903–1979) Walter O’Malley owned the Brooklyn Dodgers and moved them to Los Angeles; thus, he may be regarded as the father of baseball’s expansion to the West Coast. O’Malley was born in New York City, the son of Edwin J. O’Malley and Alma Feltner. O’Malley’s grandfather came to the United States from Co. Mayo. Edwin O’Malley was a prominent local politician, who once served as commissioner of public markets. Walter O’Malley earned an engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1926 and a law degree from Fordham University in 1930. His drive and personal political connections soon put him near the top of New York’s business world. He sat on the board of the Brooklyn Borough Gas Company and the Long Island Railroad, among other companies. He represented many more companies as an attorney. In 1941 he replaced Wendell Willkie as corporate attorney for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
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O’Malley now had a springboard to control of the club. In 1944, O’Malley, Dodgers president Branch Rickey, and Charles Pfizer Chemical Company president John Smith purchased 25 percent of the team from the Brooklyn Trust Company. In 1945, they expanded their holdings to 75 percent of the team. Smith played little or no role, leaving O’Malley and Rickey to battle for control of the team. In 1950, Rickey’s contract as president expired. O’Malley bought his shares for $1.05 million and all other outstanding shares for $1 million. Soon O’Malley began to put his stamp on the Dodgers. He considered Rickey’s construction of the farm system and establishment of a training camp at Vero Beach, Florida, as wastes of money. After the 1953 season O’Malley fired manager Charlie Dressen, despite a 105-win season, and replaced him with Walter Alston. Alston remained the manager until the end of the 1976 season, although O’Malley twice considered replacing him with Leo Durocher. The Dodgers were a laughingstock in the 1930s, but they became a powerhouse in the O’Malley years, winning pennants in 1947, 1949, 1952, 1953, 1955, and 1956. Brooklyn won its only world championship in 1955, defeating their most frequent postseason opponents, the Yankees. The Dodgers also had the most devoted fan base in the game. O’Malley believed the main obstacle to the future success of the Brooklyn Dodgers was their stadium, Ebbets Field. State of the art when it opened in 1913, Ebbets Field was a typical urban stadium with limited facilities and almost no parking. O’Malley saw that the demographic shifts of the postwar era, particularly the move to the suburbs, made a new stadium necessary. As early as 1947, O’Malley had plans for a www.abc-clio.com
domed stadium, at the time considered a fantasy. O’Malley also saw that baseball would move west. In 1953, O’Malley and Giants owner Horace Stoneham asked the National League to approve relocating the Boston Braves to Milwaukee. O’Malley noted that the Braves’ revenue doubled, and he feared they would soon dominate the league. O’Malley’s first choice was to remain in Brooklyn. In 1955 he asked for the city’s help in purchasing a lot in the Flatbush/Atlantic area. City officials balked at the request, and O’Malley talked of playing in Jersey City. Preparing an alternative plan, O’Malley met with Los Angeles officials in October 1956. In February 1957 O’Malley purchased the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League from Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley. That April, Robert Moses offered a site at Flushing Meadows in Queens. O’Malley concluded that Los Angeles was the better option. He convinced Giants owner Horace Stoneham to abandon plans for Minneapolis and embark for San Francisco instead. The two longtime National League rivals moved to the West Coast for the 1958 season. On June 3, 1958, the citizens of Los Angeles approved the contract giving O’Malley 300 unused acres at Chavez Ravine. Initially, the Dodgers played in cavernous Los Angeles Coliseum. In May 1959 the Dodgers set a single-game attendance record when 93,103 fans paid tribute to Roy Campanella, the former Dodgers catcher who was paralyzed in an automobile accident after the 1957 season. The Los Angeles Dodgers won their first world championship in 1959. The team moved into Dodger Stadium in 1962. It was privately financed, seated 56,000, and had parking space for 16,000 cars. Throughout the O’Malley years the Dodgers drew 2 million fans per year,
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reaching 3 million in 1979. The Dodgers won the National League pennant in 1963, 1965, 1966, 1974, 1977, and 1978 and the World Series in 1963 and 1965. O’Malley was a hands-on owner who handled the business end while leaving player personnel to the field manager and general manager. O’Malley ceded day-to-day control of the team to his son Peter in 1970. Robert W. Smith See also: BASEBALL References Kowet, Don. The Rich Who Own Sports. New York: Random House, 1977. Parrott, Harold. The Lords of Baseball. New York: Praeger, 1976. Sullivan, Neil J. The Dodgers Move West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
O’NEILL, EUGENE (1888–1953) Eugene O’Neill is generally recognized as the founding father of modern American drama. In a theatrical career spanning four decades, O’Neill won four Pulitzer prizes— for Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1921), Strange Interlude (1928), and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956). In 1936, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Son of the celebrated IrishAmerican actor James O’Neill, Eugene repudiated in early naturalistic works the theater of Victorian melodrama that had provided a lucrative, if artistically unchallenging, livelihood for his father, an exShakespearean actor and long-term leading man in a vaudevillean dramatization of The Count of Monte Cristo. He also rejected the unquestioning Irish Catholicism of his father, replacing it with a Nietzschean concept of man’s tragic destiny, though his struggle with what he termed the relation www.abc-clio.com
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between man and God would pursue him throughout his dramatic career. O’Neill’s young manhood was colorful, providing him with many of the experiences that later found their way into his plays. Suspended from Princeton, he married, and promptly abandoned his pregnant wife; tried gold prospecting; then worked as a seaman, spending drunken times between trips living at Jimmy the Priest’s, a notorious waterfront saloon-hotel in New York. In 1912, recovering from a suicide attempt and a bout of tuberculosis that placed him in a sanatorium for six months, O’Neill wrote his first one-act plays, one of which, Bound East for Cardiff, would be produced by the Provincetown Players in 1916, appropriately in a converted fish warehouse at the tip of Cape Cod. O’Neill later claimed as a formative influence the work of the Irish Players who had successfully toured in the United States in 1911, awakening him to the possibilities of “real theatre as opposed to the unreal—and to me then hateful—theatre of my father.” While there is little to rival the poetic naturalism of a J. M. Synge in these early plays, there are characters such as Driscoll, a stereotyped Irish seaman who demonstrates both O’Neill’s fondness for the type and his inability to render a “brogue” convincingly. Indeed, it is on the question of language that much of O’Neill’s definition of Irishness seems to rest. The characteristic he identifies in his first three-act Broadway play, Beyond the Horizon, when he describes Robert Mayo as having “a touch of the poet” is one that he associated with both an Irish propensity for artistic vision and a flair for poetic expression. Evidence of Mayo’s language skills is slight, but the concept was one that O’Neill pursued through his career, achieving greater success with
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characters in the dark plays of his maturity whose eloquence is truly poetic and emotionally moving. The plays of O’Neill’s middle period contain his greatest experimentation and possibly his greatest legacy to future American dramatists. While he demonstrated new uses to which the naturalistic stage could be put, he also addressed contemporary social themes such as race, in both The Emperor Jones (1920) and All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924). In the context of a burgeoning Harlem Renaissance, O’Neill’s treatment of African-American experience probes the psychology of racism, though of the former play the celebrated black actor Charles Gilpin boasted that he had created the role of the Emperor, dismissing O’Neill as “that Irishman” who just wrote the play. In the latter, more Freudian drama, Ella Downey, whose name clearly denotes Irish origins, makes a disastrous mixed-race marriage with Jim Harris, a “new negro” of the era; though it is to be hoped that her decline into a delusional racism is not intended as representative of relations between AfricanAmerican and Irish-American ethnic groups. The protagonists’ Irish origins are again evident in those plays of O’Neill’s late period that secure his greatness in terms of world drama. In The Iceman Cometh it is not the corrosive truth of death, which the “iceman” Hickey brings, that prevails at the end of the play, but the protective dreaming of Larry Slade, whose “gaunt Irish face” and melancholy touch of the poet make him the most sympathetic character: “I’ll be a weak fool looking with pity at the two sides of everything till the day I die.” A similar sympathy informs the speeches of Edmond Tyrone in the harrowingly autobiographical Long Day’s Journey into Night, a play “written in tears and www.abc-clio.com
blood” according to O’Neill, but one that nevertheless manages, amid so much family angst, to trace the Irish origins and milieu of the Tyrones: servant girls named Bridget and Cathleen, one with a singing voice like a “wild Irish lark”; Shaughnessy, the troublesome tenant farmer, described as a “wily Shanty Mick” by James Tyrone; the family physiognomy likened frequently to the map of Ireland; James Tyrone’s parsimony, attributed to his boyhood experience as a penniless Irish immigrant, abandoned by a homesick father who returned to Ireland to die. Within such a context, the crippling burden of family guilt suggests that the intellectual acceptance of Nietzsche did not altogether compensate for the emotional loss of Irish Catholic faith, either by the Tyrone brothers, or O’Neill himself. Certainly, Irishness remained important to O’Neill, not just emotionally, but creatively, too; in fact, he wished to hire a cast exclusively of Irish actors for A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943), the last of the plays to be produced in his lifetime, and an unfortunately anticlimactic coda to Long Day’s Journey. While the rambunctious Phil Hogan delights in a stage-Irish display of drinking, cursing the English, and singing Famine songs like “Oh the praties they grow small,” his daughter Josie is given the touch of the poet that allows her to console the despairing James Tyrone in phrases that confirm O’Neill’s abiding dramatic kinship with the peasant drama of Synge. After a lifetime as America’s leading dramatist, O’Neill’s health began to decline. The stress of work and his haunted family history, added to years of alcohol abuse earlier in his life, weakened him and in his later years he suffered from a hereditary motor neuron condition, for which he was nursed by his third wife, Carlotta Monterey.
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O’Neill died in a Boston hotel on November 27, 1953. His work remains the most important contribution to modern American drama; indeed, without O’Neill, modern American drama would not exist in its present form. William Lazenbatt References Bogard, Travis, Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Manheim, Michael, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O’Neill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. O’Neill, Eugene. Complete Plays. 3 vols. New York: The Library of America, 1988. Shaughnessy, Edward L. Eugene O’Neill in Ireland: The Critical Reception. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Shaughnessy, Edward L. Down the Nights and Down the Days: Eugene O’Neill’s Catholic Sensibility. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996.
O’NEILL, FRANCIS (1848–1936) Born in Tralibane, Co. Cork, near Bantry, Francis O’Neill established himself in Chicago, where he eventually became the superintendent of police and the collector and publisher of several of the most important collections of traditional Irish music. The Music of Ireland (1903) and The Dance Music of Ireland: 1001 Gems (1907) provided musically literate musicians on both sides of the Atlantic with a treasure trove of tunes. It remains a major resource for anyone interested in the music. O’Neill first left Ireland and went to sea in 1865. After a series of adventures, including shipwreck, he eventually found his way to the United States. Arriving in Chicago in 1870, he tried several jobs before entering the city’s police force in 1873. He was promoted through the ranks, www.abc-clio.com
becoming superintendent in 1901, a position he held until 1905. By the time he left the force O’Neill had already published the first of his two great tune collections. O’Neill was born into a musical family, and his love of Irish music accompanied him to America. He was an accomplished musician and was able to play the fiddle, various types of bagpipes, and the flute, his main instrument. He had a natural inclination to pick up tunes in his travels. However, when he arrived in Chicago he found himself at a sort of crossroads of Irish traditional music. The rapidly growing city attracted many traditional musicians among the Irish immigrants who passed through or settled there. Who better to pick out Irish music flowing through the city than a policeman circulating through the streets and neighborhoods? There were certainly times when music and policing were quite compatible. For example, when he met young James O’Neill, a skilled fiddler from Co. Down, who could note down music as he heard it (a skill the Corkman lacked), the older O’Neill managed to find his fellow musician a place in the ranks of Chicago’s police force. Working with James, O’Neill began by getting onto paper the tunes he recollected from his family and neighbors in Cork. Then the two men began collecting tunes from the numerous Irish musicians around the city. By around 1900 the two O’Neills had around 2,000 tunes in manuscript. Deciding to publish the collection, the Chief formed a committee of traditional musicians to help him collate his material. When it appeared in 1903, O’Neill’s Music of Ireland, financed entirely by the compiler himself, contained 1,850 airs and dance pieces. It was the largest collection of Irish music ever published, until the two-volume Sources of Irish Traditional Music, edited by Aloys Fleischmann
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and containing some 7,000 tunes, appeared in 1998. Published in a limited edition, O’Neill’s first collection was too expensive for most musicians, who were primarily interested only in dance music. So in 1907, O’Neill brought out The Dance Music of Ireland, containing 1,001 tunes, most drawn from the larger compendium. Known generally as “The Book,” it was used by musicians in Ireland and the United States. By this time, Irish music was being played in “respectable” halls and in households that could afford pianos. O’Neill’s Irish Music, offering 250 pieces with piano accompaniment, was published in 1908. With several decades of active collecting behind him, O’Neill began writing up his experiences and his ideas about Irish music. Irish Folk Music: A Fascinating Hobby came out in 1910, and Irish Minstrels and Musicians followed in 1913. O’Neill continued to publish new editions of his tune collections, and in 1922 he brought out Waifs and Strays of Gaelic Melody, a collection of 335 Irish and Scottish tunes, drawn from a variety of manuscript sources. O’Neill was a dedicated musician and collector, not an academic folklorist. He sometimes corrected James O’Neill’s generally accurate transcriptions, relying on his own sense of the music. He filled in notes when his informants forgot parts of a tune. He supplied titles when they were missing. Tunes in “odd” modes were transposed into the more popular keys. Like the recordings of skilled musicians such as Michael Coleman in the 1920s and 1930s, O’Neill’s collections were not an unmitigated blessing for the Irish musical tradition. On the one hand, tunes that might have disappeared were preserved. Moreover, the collections helped to valorize www.abc-clio.com
the music, providing it with some authority and respectability. Yet in cases where his versions of tunes took precedence and eclipsed local variants, too much authority may have occasionally been granted to O’Neill’s work. Nevertheless, O’Neill’s collections could not have appeared at a more important time. During the first half of the twentieth century traditional Irish music was under great pressure in both Ireland and America. O’Neill’s works provided invaluable support in preserving it for later generations. William H. A. Williams See also: COLEMAN, Michael Reference Carolan, Nicholas. A Harvest Saved: Francis O’Neill and Irish Music in Chicago. Cork: Ossian, 1997.
O’NEILL, ROSE CECIL (1874–1944) Rose Cecil O’Neill, a writer, illustrator, and doll designer who created the Kewpies, was born on June 25, 1874, to bookseller William Patrick O’Neill and former schoolteacher Alice Smith O’Neill in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The O’Neills lived in a home with ornamental cupids on the living room ceiling. It is likely that this early childhood memory prompted O’Neill to create the Kewpies, plump infants with tiny wings, who also reflect the influences of Irish mythology. In 1878, the family moved to Omaha, Nebraska. By 1879, O’Neill had begun selling drawings to magazines and newspapers. With the hope of finding a publisher for her novel, O’Neill moved to New York City in 1893. She had no luck marketing the book, but New York magazines began
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Illustration by Rose Cecil O’Neill. O’Neill was a writer, illustrator, and doll designer who created the Kewpies, plump infants with tiny wings. (Library of Congress)
purchasing her illustrations. In 1896, she embarked on a brief marriage to Virginia aristocrat Gray Latham; the relationship ended in divorce in 1901. O’Neill then married writer Harry Leon Wilson in 1902. Neither marriage produced children, but life with Wilson proved creatively fulfilling for O’Neill. She published The Loves of Edwy: Tale and Drawings in 1904 and illustrated Wilson’s Lions of the Lord (1903), The Seeker (1904), and The Boss of Little Arcady (1905). Unfortunately, the solemn Wilson clashed with the gregarious, free-spirited O’Neill to the point that the couple separated in 1907. One of O’Neill’s best poems, “Established,” published in her only book of poetry, the Master-Mistress in 1922, apparently refers to her sadness at parting from Wilson. www.abc-clio.com
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Already the best-known female commercial illustrator in the United States, O’Neill began drawing her famous Kewpie characters after the end of her marriage. The characters would become the most widely known cartoons in American popular culture until the advent of Mickey Mouse. The Kewpies first appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1909. Instantly popular, the Kewpie illustrations accompanied stories in Woman’s Home Companion, Good Housekeeping, and the Delineator. By 1913 the chubby, winged infants, with their impish faces and rakish tufts of hair, had become a commercial phenomenon decorating soap, fabric, and stationery. Generations of Americans would read about the exploits of the Kewpies in comic strips, play with Kewpie dolls, and purchase Kewpie inkwells, napkin rings, tableware, and other spin-offs. O’Neill became a millionaire. Perhaps in reaction to the sweetness and innocence of the Kewpies, O’Neill produced a series of Titans, or monster drawings, that depicted the tragic tensions between the physical and spiritual aspects of life. O’Neill’s writings took on the same dark qualities as the monster drawings. Master-Mistress focused on the sadness of lost love. Her novel Garda (1929) told a strange story, drawn from her Irish heritage, of unbearable love between a twin brother and sister. O’Neill lost much of her money in the Great Depression. In 1936, she retreated to the family homestead, now in Branson, Missouri. Living with her mother and younger sister, she continued to sell illustrations to magazines and publish poems. O’Neill died on April 6, 1944. Caryn E. Neumann References Brunell-Formanek, Miriam. Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of
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736 O’NEILL, JR.,THOMAS “TIP” American Girlhood, 1830–1930. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Brunell-Formanek, Miriam, ed. The Story of Rose O’Neill: An Autobiography. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997.
O’NEILL, JR.,THOMAS “TIP” (1912–1994) Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 9, 1912, Thomas Phillip “Tip” O’Neill, Jr., was the grandson of immigrants from Ireland, and the son of Thomas P. O’Neill, a bricklayer and Cambridge city councilman. After graduating from Boston College in 1936, Tip O’Neill worked as a real estate agent and insurance broker in Cambridge and served in the state legislature (1936–1952). He was also a member of the Cambridge school committee (1946–1947). O’Neill became the first Democratic Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives (1949–1952). In 1953 he succeeded John F. Kennedy in the House of Representatives (1953–1987), rising rapidly in the national Democratic Party leadership. Under the mentorship of House Speakers Sam Rayburn and John W. McCormack, O’Neill became House majority whip (1971–1973), House majority leader (1973–1977), and Speaker of the House (1977–1987). O’Neill became an inside man who mastered the internal processes of Congress and its political nuances. His good humor and intimate knowledge of the Congress made him both influential and respected by Democrats and Republicans. Always loyal to the New Deal Democratic tradition, like many urban Irish-American Catholic politicians, O’Neill was liberal on economic issues and more conservative on social issues. His congressional district included the elite Harvard University campus, where he had mowed www.abc-clio.com
the lawns as an adolescent, but the motto his father taught him, “all politics are local,” became his byword. O’Neill prided himself on serving his constituents and protecting the poor, sick and helpless. When John McCormack arranged his appointment to the powerful Rules Committee in 1955, O’Neil became a source of information and influence for hundreds of House members and steered important federal funds to Massachusetts. Although a loyal ally of President Kennedy, by 1967 O’Neill openly opposed President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam War policies. He was the most prominent Democrat calling for the impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974. Primarily focused on domestic issues, O’Neill was frustrated by President Jimmy Carter’s preference for foreign policy rather than practical legislation. During the administration of President Ronald W. Reagan, O’Neill defended the liberal Democratic House against relentless neoconservative Republican criticism. The tall, stout, cigarsmoking O’Neill, who opposed Reagan’s frugal economic and aggressive foreign policies, became the target of vicious partisan attacks as a big spending old-fashioned liberal in cartoons and television commercials. In the wake of Watergate and other Washington scandals, O’Neill worked tirelessly to restore the tarnished image of Congress, and he supported a rigorous code of ethics. O’Neill retired from politics in 1987, wrote his autobiography with William Novak, Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O’Neill (1987), and retired to his summer home on Cape Cod. A beloved figure among breadand-butter liberal Democrats everywhere, he bridged the eras of Governor James
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Michael Curley and Senator Edward M. Kennedy in Massachusetts politics. Unlike Curley, the roguish Irish-American chieftain, O’Neill rose from the narrow world of ward politics to play a major role in the national government. In 1979, he was a key member of the congressional delegation visiting Northern Ireland to support peace negotiations. The eighth Speaker from Massachusetts, and the person with the longest tenure in that office, O’Neill’s represents the impressive contributions the Bay State has made to national government. The library at Boston College (1984) and a federal office building (1987) in Boston bear his name. O’Neill died in Boston on January 5, 1994, and was buried at Mt. Pleasant Cemetery in Harwichport, Massachusetts. Peter C. Holloran See also: CURLEY, James Michael; KENNEDY FAMILY; KENNEDY, John Fitzgerald; MASSACHUSETTS; REAGAN, Ronald Wilson References Clancy, Paul, and Shirley Elder. Tip, A Biography of Thomas P. O’Neill, Speaker of the House. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1980. Farrell, John. Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century. Boston: Little, Brown, 2001. O’Neill, Tip, and Gary Hymel. All Politics is Local, and Other Rules of the Game. New York: Times Books, 1994. Savage, Neil J. Extraordinary Tenure: Massachusetts and the Making of a Nation, from President Adams to Speaker O’Neill. Worcester, MA: Ambassador Books, 2004.
ONTARIO From the times of early European settlement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Irish people have immigrated to what is now Ontario. A small number of Irish served New France as missionaries, soldiers, www.abc-clio.com
geographers, and fur trappers. After the creation of British North America in 1763, the migration of Irish-born Anglicans and Presbyterians increased as settlement schemes began to appear offering land for suitable farm families. By contrast, early Irish Catholic immigrants in Upper Canada coped with severe disabilities, being a small minority of the population and marked by their religious persuasion. After the war of 1812, a growing number of Catholics joined the flow of immigration, enticed by employment opportunities with infrastructure projects, including canals, roads, and railroads. Faced with high levels of distrust and suspicion from their Protestant counterparts, many Catholic Irish in Canada remained torn between loyalty to their new home and memories of harsh British rule in Ireland. In 1847, as the Potato Famine devastated Ireland, boatloads of desperate migrants arrived in Ontario, and quarantine facilities were hastily constructed to accommodate them. Nurses, doctors, priests, nuns, compatriots, politicians, and ordinary citizens provided aid according to their abilities, and yet thousands died that summer alone, mainly from typhus. As the survivors began to establish themselves, the animosities from the Old World spilled over into the streets of Upper Canadian cities, and militant Irish Catholics fell back on their traditional peasant prerogative to defend themselves and thereby compensate for the failure of the authorities to protect their rights. Religion functioned as a unifying force in each community, but so did ingrained attitudes toward the Orange Order. While British Protestants tended to celebrate Orangeism, from the outset Catholics viewed the Order as the main enemy in their new environment. Furthermore, the emergence of distinct class
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differences created acute divisions within the Irish community. In general, the Irish community in Ontario tended to demonstrate a greater concern for Catholic, as opposed to Irish, issues than their counterparts in the United States. This is partly because the clergy functioned as spokesmen for Ontario’s Irish Catholics. The laity became prominent in journalism, in politics, and in the churches, where they agitated for religious toleration and responsible government. In particular, they aggressively demanded that separate schools be established. This inadvertently stoked paranoia concerning an impending coalition between French Canadian and Irish Catholics. Such an alliance would not occur. Although the potential voting power of the French was considered a last line of defense for Catholic rights in Ontario, the Irish resisted being linked with a group viewed as an implacable barrier to Canadian nationalism. Irish Catholics instead strove to establish themselves as a part of the linguistic mainstream, emphasizing their new identity as English-speaking Catholics. The Canadian confederation was a political innovation that would be emulated by many British colonies, including Ireland itself. Irishman Thomas D’Arcy McGee espoused the vision of a new nation in North America and inspired colonists scattered across the northern colonies. Without his oratory it may have been possible to distill confederation down to a matter of railway dividends, freight rate, and tariffs. At the time of confederation, people of Irish origin were the second-largest group in Canada after the French Canadians. McGee first tried to ally himself with George Brown’s Reformers, but his dream of an all-powerful Irish-Reform alliance
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proved untenable, and McGee was forced to acknowledge the preference of the Catholic clergy, who favored the paternalistic, sympathetic ethos of the Conservatives and who believed John A. Macdonald’s more conciliatory attitude was reliable because of his dependence on French Canadian votes. After Confederation and McGee’s mysterious assassination (1864), Irish Catholics continued to face difficult conditions and widespread oppression. Bishop John Joseph Lynch and his colleagues assumed the role of mediators between the Irish and the political establishment. The bonds of ethnicity endured for decades, and spiritually sensitive issues never failed to rally the Irish vote. At the end of the nineteenth century, under the leadership of Charley Murphy, the majority of Irish Catholics transferred their support to Wilfred Laurier’s Liberal party. By this point, sectarian struggles were already beginning to abate. In 1877 Nicholas Flood Davin had published The Irishman in Canada, in which he declared that his objective was to “sweep aside misconceptions, to explode cherished fallacies, to point out the truth and to raise the self-respect of every person of Irish blood in Canada.” The same year, the Irish Benevolent Society, a brotherhood of Irish men and women of both Catholic and Protestant faiths, was established in London. The society promoted Irish Canadian culture, but it forbade members to speak of Irish politics when meeting. This companionship between Irish people of all faiths had a considerable impact, and branches of the Society are still operating. During the twentieth century, the majority of Irish in Ontario, and in Canada generally, came to reconcile Catholic and
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Protestant Irish identities. The gradual dissipation of Orange-Green friction accelerated as the two groups cooperated and participated in the world wars as Irish Canadians. This measured amelioration can also be viewed as an index of assimilation and political adjustment to Canadian society. However, to some extent it also reflected the experience of the Irish Republic, where the Catholic majority has sought to reassure their fellow countrypeople about their continued place in the community. Today it is common for Canadians of Protestant Irish descent to participate in Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations, and for those of Irish Gaelic descent to take as much pride in the great Irish figures of Protestant tradition, including Edmund Burke, Jonathan Swift, and William Butler Yeats, as they do to the heroes of their own faith, such as Daniel O’Connell and the fathers of the Irish republic. Mike Cottrell See also: DAVIN, Nicholas Flood; GREAT FAMINE, The; LYNCH, Archbishop John Joseph; McGEE, Thomas D’Arcy; ORANGE ORDER References Akenson, Donald Harman. The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History. 2nd ed. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. Burns, Robin B. “McGee, Thomas Darcy.” In Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online. Library and Archives Canada. Available online at www.biographi.ca/EN/ ShowBio.asp?BioId=38705 (accessed August 21, 2007). Cottrell, Michael. “St. Patrick’s Day Parades in Nineteenth-Century Toronto: A Study of Immigrant Adjustment and Elite Control.” In A Nation of Immigrants: Women, Workers, and Communities in Canadian History, 1840s–1960s, edited by Franca Iacovetta with Paula Draper and Robert Ventrescan, 35–55. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.
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Davin, Nicholas Flood. The Irishman in Canada. London: S. Low; Toronto: Marston, 1877. Elliot, Bruce. Irish Migrants in the Canadas: A New Approach. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988. Reynolds, Lorna and Robert O’Driscoll, eds. The Untold Story: The Irish in Canada. Vols. I and II. Toronto: Celtic Arts of Canada, 1988.
ORANGE ORDER The Orange Order was founded in 1795 after the Battle of the Diamond near Loughall, Co. Armagh, at which the Protestant Peep O’ Day Boys killed 48 Catholic defenders. The organization that was formed took its name from King William of Orange who had defeated the Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Members of the Orange Order were required to be Protestant and had to swear allegiance to the British monarch. Each year on July 12 they paraded to commemorate King William’s victory, which they viewed as establishing the civil and religious liberties associated with the Glorious Revolution. Within a few years of its founding, the Order had spread rapidly, and it soon established lodges throughout Ireland. However, the majority of its lodges were in Ulster, where there was the greatest concentration of Protestants. Lodges were also established in Scotland, England, Canada, West Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. With increased emigration from Ireland to America, Protestant immigrants founded the first Orange lodges in New York in the 1820s. The Loyal Orange Institution in America, as it was called, was affiliated with the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland. As most of the immigration at that time was to the East Coast of America, the
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majority of the Order’s lodges were located in eastern states such as Pennsylvania, Delaware, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, and most Orange activity was concentrated in New York where the majority of immigrants had settled. However, there were even lodges as far away as Michigan, Illinois, and California. In short, wherever large numbers of Protestant immigrants from Ulster congregated, there could be found an Orange lodge. By 1872, the Order claimed to have 42 lodges, and this figure increased to a total of 120 lodges with 10,000 members in 1875. As well as acting as a forum for Ulster Protestant immigrants to assert the common ties they shared, the Order also warned against the dangers of Catholic immigration to America. With the growth of the Orange Order in America there were frequent clashes with Irish Catholics. In 1824 there were battles in Greenwich Village, and in 1831 Irish Catholics rioted against the Orangemen in Philadelphia. The most significant episodes in American history involving the Orange Order were in 1870 and 1871, when there were fierce riots at the Orange parades in New York City. In both years on July 12 Irish Catholics tried to prevent Orangemen from parading through the streets of New York. In 1870, when it was claimed that Orangemen had fired a gun at a Catholic church, armed Irish Catholic immigrants left their jobs and confronted the Orangemen, who were also armed. A battle between the two sides ensued, and the police arrived too late to quell the disturbance. In total, eight people were killed, fifteen injured, and six arrested. The following year the violence was much worse: at least 62 dead, more than 100 injured, and another 100 arrested. With the memory of the preceding year’s events, there were rumors that elements on each www.abc-clio.com
side were planning to orchestrate trouble for their own ends. While the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Knights of St. Patrick demanded that the authorities ban the Orangemen’s parade, the Order called for the police to ensure that the parade went ahead. When violence followed, the National Guard opened fire on the Irish Catholics who were trying to prevent the parade from proceeding. In both years the Orange parades and the riots that accompanied them were used as an excuse to undermine the political administration in New York City. Orangemen alleged that the Tammany Hall leader William Marcy “Boss” Tweed had pandered to the Irish Catholic masses who voted for him and his Democratic Party. Irish Catholics, on the other hand, viewed the violent crackdown against them as evidence that the Orangemen were attempting to suppress them in the United States as they had done in Ireland. After these riots the Orangemen did not parade again until 1890. David Doyle References Gordon, Michael A. Orange Riots: Irish Political Violence in New York City 1870, 1871. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. Long, Samuel E. A Brief History of the Loyal Orange Institution in the United States of America. Orange Institution, 1979.
OREGON The clear, cool, rainy climate of Oregon seems familiar to those who have spent time in Ireland, and so it cannot come as a surprise to learn that many Irish found themselves among the earliest settlers of the temperate western territory. Many came to help build the railroads, others came across on the Oregon Trail, still others came with
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the Army, and at least one came as part of the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804–1806. Some came to flee the Famine in Ireland, and some came in response to the western gold rush. All of them came in hopes of at last owning land, educating their children, and escaping religious persecution, dreams that seemed possible to achieve in Oregon. On August 14, 1848, the Oregon Territory was established; in 1859, part of that territory became the 33rd state in the United States. Although some say the name came from a wandering Celt named Michael Patrick O’Regan, who arrived even before the Native Americans did, none have been able to prove it, and most believe the first Irish settlers appeared as part of the group coming over the Oregon Trail. Of the 780 who made it across in that group, 14 were originally from Ireland. The trek across country was difficult and expensive, and most of the Irish who made it to Oregon had spent a considerable amount of time on the East Coast first, saving money for the journey; most of those who had recently emigrated from Ireland lacked the resources for such a journey. For those who had some resources, however, and considerable pluck, one of the most obvious draws to Oregon was the promise of virtually free land. The Donation Act of 1850 promised a husband and wife 640 acres if they could live on that land for five years; the later Homestead Act of 1862 revised that amount to 160 acres and required a nominal fee to file the paperwork. Many of the arriving Irish initially settled in St. Paul, south of Portland near the Willamette River, where there was a Catholic mission, but many others built up an Irish community in Portland itself, establishing churches, schools, and fraternal www.abc-clio.com
organizations such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH). From 1877 to 1933, the AOH remained one of the key social and philanthropic organizations in Oregon for the Irish in the Pacific Northwest, especially after the opening of Hibernian Hall in 1914. The Clan na Gael (also known as the United Brotherhood or the Robert Emmet Literary Society) was active in the area as well between 1910 and 1922. John McLoughlin, a Canadian of Irish descent and the head of the Hudson’s Bay Company in Portland, brought in a group of FrenchCanadian nuns to start up St. Mary’s Academy, a Catholic school for the young girls of Portland; they also opened St. Joseph’s, for boys, but had to close it when many of the nuns died. Although nonCatholic students were also attracted by the discipline and quality of education provided, these schools were free to teach about Catholicism without the same social and political stigma that had long been troublesome in Ireland, and many of the Irish families sacrificed to send their children there. In 1870, the Catholic Sentinel began publication, a newspaper that is still being published today, providing the voice for Catholics to speak out about their own concerns; in the early days, the newspaper was criticized for being more Irish than Catholic. The Irish population in Portland, however, was never very constant. Many unskilled laborers came and went, and although some became professionals and stayed (as Irish Catholics were not barred from holding public office in Oregon), and although the churches and schools were built largely by volunteers among the Irish community, there was never a strong sense of community bound by long history together. By the early 1920s, many of the Irish who had
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helped settle Portland had gone. Other immigrant groups began to populate Portland; the Germans established their own Catholic church within the city, and the Chinese began to take many of the jobs that had hitherto been given to the Irish. Tension between the groups increased as the economy declined. By the time Eamon de Valera, president of the Dail and soonto-be president of Ireland, came to Portland in November 1919, the dissension between the Irish immigrants and other ethnic groups had reached a peak: the American Legion attacked de Valera while the Irish acclaimed him. Many of those who made it to Oregon did not settle in Portland, choosing instead the more rural areas of Oregon. The potential for sheepherding was evident, as much open land remained, and the climate and terrain were favorable. It was a lucrative business, though difficult and challenging. Much of the land, especially east of the Cascade Mountains, remained part of the public domain, and initially there were no restrictions about grazing those lands. Tension with cattle ranchers, coyotes, and bears made the job of sheep herding dangerous, and weather that could sometimes be unpredictably treacherous could result in a total loss of fortune, but banks were, by and large, willing to bail out destitute sheepherders, knowing that another fortune could easily be made. In time, however, sheepherding became impracticable. The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 stipulated that an itinerant sheepherder must be able to prove land ownership; presumably land ownership would guarantee that a herd of sheep would have access to at least two months’ supply of hay in the winter, hay that did not have to be purchased from a second party, thus ensuring a better survival www.abc-clio.com
rate for the sheep in winter. The requirement, however, could not be met by many sheepherders, whose only capital was the sheep. (Most of the profits from successful sheepherding were sent back to Ireland.) With the onset of the Great Depression and World War II, the influx of Irish immigrants who could help herd the sheep also decreased, and profits were hurt. By about 1934, sheepherding in Oregon was basically over, and cattle herding was on the rise. World War II affected the city populations as well, and many Irish men went off to war. By the mid-1930s, the AOH in Portland was down to thirty members, and the group disbanded completely with the onset of World War II. It was, however, reestablished with 27 new members in 1998. Portland today remains an active, vibrant scene for the Irish, featuring many cultural events and organizations that celebrate all things Irish. The All-Ireland Cultural Society has been active for 65 years, bringing music, dance, sports, and language to the area. Other towns in the state, settled long ago by the Irish, continue to hold large Irish celebrations, especially on Saint Patrick’s Day; Heppner, Irish Bend, Bandon, St. Paul, and other towns continue to align themselves with Irish culture. As the 1990 census lists 19.8 percent of Oregonians claiming Irish descent, Irish influence in Oregon does not appear to be waning any time soon. Kathleen Heininge
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See also: ANCIENT ORDER OF HIBERNIANS; DE VALERA, Eamon References The Irish in Early Oregon History. Portland, OR: Irish Interest Group Genealogical Forum of Oregon, 1993. Kazin, Michael. “Irish Families in Portland, Oregon: 1850–1880: An Immigrant 1-800-368-6868
O’REILLY, JOHN BOYLE 743 Culture in the Far West.” Master’s thesis. Portland State University, Portland, OR, 1975. Kelleher, Marie. Duhollow to Oregon: 1880–1960. Lakeview, OR: Duhallow Development Association, 1985. Kilkenny, John F. Shamrocks and Shepherds: The Irish of Morrow County. Portland: Oregon Historical Society, 1969. Ó Longaigh, David, ed. We Irish in Oregon. Portland, OR: 1998.
O’REILLY, JOHN BOYLE (1844–1890) On June 28, 1844, John Boyle O’Reilly, the son of a schoolteacher, was born in Co. Meath. In 1863, he enlisted with the British Army’s Tenth Hussars, then stationed in Dublin. Arrested in 1866 as a Fenian, he was court-martialed and condemned to 20 years of hard labor. In 1868, O’Reilly was sent to Western Australia on the last convict ship ever sent to the penal colonies, The Hougoumont. With the assistance of a parish priest and local settlers and funded by overseas Fenian sympathizers, O’Reilly managed to escape in February 1869. He was smuggled aboard an American whaling ship, The Gazelle, and eventually, in November 1869, he arrived in the United States. Settling in Boston, O’Reilly was taken under the wing of the Irish-American community. Within a couple of months he established himself as a reporter for The Pilot, then an eight-page weekly newspaper covering Irish and Irish-American affairs. He quickly made a name for himself covering events such as a disastrous 1870 invasion of Canada by a group of Irish-American Fenians and bloody Orangemen’s riots in New York City between Catholic and Protestant Irish immigrants in 1870 and 1871. His balanced and critical assessment of such events reflected his increasing detachment from www.abc-clio.com
Portrait of John Boyle O’Reilly, revolutionary, newspaper editor, and poet. (Library of Congress)
his revolutionary past. By the time he died in 1890, O’Reilly was one of the bestknown American poets and undoubtedly one of the best-known Irish immigrants in the United States. O’Reilly was rapidly promoted at The Pilot and soon felt established enough to wed Mary Murphy, a daughter of Irish immigrants. By 1876, he had become part owner and editor-in-chief of The Pilot. From then until his death in 1890, O’Reilly controlled what was probably the second most powerful media outlet in Massachusetts short of the Boston Globe. He wrote editorials, hired writers, and built The Pilot up from a minor Catholic news weekly to a major newspaper with an international reputation. O’Reilly was elected president of the Boston Press Club in 1879, and his status ensured that the “ethnic”
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papers in Massachusetts would get a serious hearing. As befitted his position as an interpreter of all things Irish, rival newspapers would regularly run to O’Reilly for his analysis of both Irish, and increasingly, Irish-American, issues. O’Reilly’s ascendancy through Boston society was rapid. Within a short number of years he was not only considered a spokesman for the Irish immigrants of Boston, but he was also a well-known poet, public speaker, sportsman, and activist for political causes ranging from labor reform to Civil Rights. He counted among his good friends not only the stalwarts of what was rapidly becoming the Irish political machine, but also literati such as Oliver Wendell Holmes and Julia Ward Howe and activists such as Wendell Phillips. He became friendly with President Grover Cleveland and with Cardinal Gibbons, the head of the Catholic Church in America. O’Reilly was president of both the literary Papyrus Club and the Boston Press Club. A member of numerous Catholic charities and radical reform movements, within a few years of his arrival, O’Reilly became a recognizable figure of Boston’s social elite. Bridging the gap between the affluent area of Beacon Hill and what was rapidly becoming a city dominated by Irish-American immigrants, O’Reilly was hailed as a cross-cultural ambassador. O’Reilly had begun writing poetry as a child, which he continued to do during his long stints in prison and aboard ships. With The Pilot as a ready outlet, O’Reilly was prolific with his verse. His specialty was ballad stanza political couplets that would call out for freedom and against tyranny. These immensely popular poems, written in a romantic and sentimental tradition, promoted a genteel bourgeois sensibility. Nostalgic, often didactic, and essentially propagandistic, these poems www.abc-clio.com
appealed to the Irish immigrants who sought assimilation and to well-established Bostonians alike. Through works such as his most famous poem, “In Bohemia,” written in 1888 and later included in an important anthology of the same name, O’Reilly attracted a broad readership. He had a fervent belief that the arts could provide a vehicle to bridge the gap between the powerful and the powerless, although his incongruous mixture of political radicalism and sentimental themes does not appeal to modern audiences. Other notable works include Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport (1888); The King’s Men (1884); The Moondyne (1878), which is set in Australia and draws on many of his own experiences as a prisoner and escapee; and poetry collections such as Songs from the Southern Sea (1873), Songs, Legends, and Ballads (1878), and The Statues in the Block and Other Poems (1881). O’Reilly’s poetry attracted important commissions throughout the 1870s and 1880s. He also wrote hundreds of occasional poems to mark significant events. Some of his most important poems include ones written about the African-American patriot Crispus Attucks, whaling adventures, the American Civil War, and western Australia. In 1889, O’Reilly was commissioned to write the dedicatory poem for the Pilgrim monument at Plymouth Rock; it was a remarkable achievement for a foreign-born writer to be chosen to help define a founding symbol of American national identity. O’Reilly died suddenly in 1890 as a result of an accidental overdose of his wife’s sleeping medicine. He had suffered terribly from exhaustion and insomnia for the months before his death, which many scholars have ascribed to the unrelenting pressure he felt to constantly appease,
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explain, and negotiate among Boston’s various groups. Whatever the cause, his sudden death at a comparatively young age—leaving a wife and four daughters—shocked Boston and the world. Tributes poured in from memorial services that were held in cities and townships around the world. The New York Metropolitan Opera House was filled to capacity for a civic ceremony of remembrance. Reading groups and social clubs were founded in O’Reilly’s name, scholarships were endowed, statues were put up, and honorary poems were written. Susanna Ashton See also: BOSTON; FENIANS; MASSACHUSSETS References Betts, John R. “John Boyle O’Reilly and the American Paideia.” Éire Ireland 2 (1967): 36–37. Brady, Veronica. “The Innocent Gaze: John Boyle O’Reilly’s ‘The King of the Vasse.’” Kunapipi 16, no. 2 (1994): 1–6. Doyle, David. “John Boyle O’Reilly and Irish Adjustment in America.” Journal of the Old Drogheda Society (1996): 7–25. Evans, A. G. Fanatic Heart: A Life of John Boyle O’Reilly, 1844–1890. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997. Goldie, Terry. “Emancipating the Equal Aborigine: J. B. O’Reilly and A. J. Vogan.” SPAN 20 (April 1985): 44–66. O’Reilly, John Boyle, Robert Grant, Frederic Jesup Stimson, and John T. Wheelwright. The King’s Men: a Tale of Tomorrow. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1884.
O’ROARKE, JULIÁN “HUBERTO” (1852–1913) Julián O’Roarke was born in 1852 in Baradero, the oldest city of Buenos Aires province, the son of Michael O’Roarke (1822–1867) and Mary Maguire (1819– 1890). During his public life he supported the organization of Argentine institutions in the province of Buenos Aires during the www.abc-clio.com
last decades of the nineteenth century. In 1881 O’Roarke was appointed proxy and later president of Baradero’s city council, and he served additional terms in 1882 and 1883. He was elected mayor of Baradero in 1890, 1894, 1904, 1905, and 1910. Sarmiento Park in Baradero (previously named Parque del Bajo) was created by O’Roarke in 1905. This park was designed by the French architect Charles Thays, and in 1906 it housed the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of Baradero’s Swiss colony. In 1902 O’Roarke was elected member of Parliament in the provincial parliament of Buenos Aires, representing Baradero department. O’Roarke was a member of the Conservative Party of Buenos Aires province, which became a major political force representing provincial, and later national, landed elite. In March 1879 a group of 300 influential Irish and Irish-Argentine businessmen and estancieros (ranchers) led by the Catholic priest Patrick J. Dillon founded the General Brown Club. Among the members were O’Roarke and other representatives of Baradero and San Pedro departments. The club, structured in the fashion of the political organizations of the Argentine ruling elite, was determined to secure representation in Parliament, protect and encourage immigrants from the British Isles, and improve the moral and material life of native rural workers, “making the voices of the English-speaking Porteños [people from Buenos Aires] heard in the Senate.” A political alliance was shaped with the hegemonic Autonomist Party, and the following year Father Dillon and Eduardo Murphy were elected members of Parliament to Buenos Aires in the provincial lower house. The General Brown Club lasted less than 10 years, but its members
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pioneered the political participation of many Irish Argentines within the social circles of the landed class in Buenos Aires. In 1910 Julián O’Roarke, Alfredo Butty, Eduardo Doyle, Jack Kelly, Ricardo C. Kennedy, Benito E. Lynch, Enrique Lynch, Guillermo Mooney, Miguel Murphy, Antonino O’Gorman, and others with Irish names who had participated in the General Brown Club were members of the powerful provincial Conservative Party. O’Roarke contributed to the celebrations of the 100th anniversary of Argentine independence, which the ruling elite in Argentina viewed as an opportunity to create a series of nationalist symbols for the country. Julián O’Roarke died on June 28, 1913, in Buenos Aires. The municipal authorities of Baradero changed the name of Sauces street to Julián O’Roarke (the street is near the railway station). Edmundo Murray See also: DILLON, Patrick Joseph, LYNCH, Benito Eduardo References Barbich, Alejandro. Historia de Santiago del Baradero. Buenos Aires: Author’s Edition, 1989. Cané, Gonzalo, “Don Julián O’Roarque,” The Southern Cross, April 2001. Coghlan, Eduardo A. Los Irlandeses en la Argentina: Su Actuación y Descendencia. Buenos Aires: Author’s Edition, 1987.
Later he joined the touring Carl Rosa Opera Company in Dublin making his operatic debut in Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore in August 1895. He continued to sing various roles with the Carl Rosa Company. In 1896, he sang the title role in the first performance of Irish composer C. V. Stamford’s opera, Shamus O’Brien in London, a role he later also sang in Dublin and at the Broadway Theatre in New York in 1897. In America he was also successful in the one-act opera The Post Bag by composer Michele Esposito of the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin. In 1900 the Dublin Academy invited O’Sullivan to sing at their concerts, where he was quite successful. He continued his involvement with the Academy over the next three years, after which he returned to America. In addition to his musical activity he found time to perform in the plays of the Dublin-born playwright Dion Boucicault while in America. After O’Sullivan’s death in 1908 his widow donated an initial fund to the Academy to create a Denis O’Sullivan Medal award in his honor. The award still exists to this day and most years at the Feis Ceoil, the Denis O’Sullivan Medal is awarded to one of the participating competitors. Basil Walsh References Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 4th ed. New York: G. Schirmer, 1940. Pine, Richard, and Charles Acton, To Talent Alone, The Royal Irish Academy of Music 1848–1998. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1998.
O’SULLIVAN, DENIS (1868–1906) The Denis O’Sullivan Medal honoring this American-born singer is one of the principal awards at Ireland’s national musical competition, the Feis Ceoil, which is held annually. Initially, O’Sullivan studied with Karl Formes in San Francisco, Giovanni Sbriglia in Paris, and then Charles Santley in London, where he made his concert debut in 1895. www.abc-clio.com
O’SULLIVAN,TIMOTHY H. (1840–1882) Timothy H. O’Sullivan had a remarkable career as a documentary photographer. His subjects extended from the battlefields of
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the Civil War to the exploration of the Southwestern frontier. Although few details about his life are known, the apparently adventurous Irishman was the first to photograph the Great Salt Lake, the Mojave Desert, and the Grand Canyon. These, along with images of underground mining in Nevada and Native American culture in New Mexico, resulted in an evocative yet realistic body of work. Reports of O’Sullivan’s birthplace differ. Some say he was born in Ireland and came to the United States with his parents after the Great Famine; others contend he was born in Staten Island, New York. In any event, by the time he was 16, O’Sullivan began an apprenticeship in photography, first with Mathew Brady in his New York gallery and later in Brady’s Washington, D.C., studio under the tutelage of Scottish photographer Alexander Gardner. When the Civil War broke out, O’Sullivan signed on to photograph the field operations of the Army of the Potomac. In that capacity he copied maps for immediate distribution to field commanders. He also captured battle scenes, war strategy sessions, group and individual portraits of officers and enlisted men, and the general devastation of war. Known as a master technician, O’Sullivan often put his own life in jeopardy to capture a particular image, at one point coming so close to the action that his camera was destroyed by a stray shell. He was present at Gettysburg, Antietam, the Wilderness, Fredericksburg, and Appomatox. As was the custom at the time, many of his photographs were printed in Photographic Incidents of the War from the Gallery of Alexander Gardner while others appeared in Harper’s Weekly, credited to Brady. In his best known picture, “Harvest of Death,” the fallen soldiers of the Iron Brigade, the www.abc-clio.com
24th Michigan Infantry, are strewn across the landscape at Gettysburg. After the war, Brady offered O’Sullivan the position of manager of his Washington, D.C., photographic studio, but O’Sullivan chose instead the life of a traveling documentarian. In 1867 he accompanied Clarence King’s exploration of the 40th Parallel, charting the expansive territory between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada. Except for a journey in 1869 to the Isthmus of Darien in Panama (then part of Colombia) to explore possible routes for a canal, O’Sullivan spent the next seven years crisscrossing the American frontier, including portions of present-day Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming, to document the wilderness for civilian and military commissions. Using a converted horse-drawn ambulance as a portable dark room and withstanding rough terrain and extreme climatic conditions, O’Sullivan made hundreds of glass plates of geological formations and natural landscapes, such as the lime tufa formations and volcanic islands on Pyramid Lake in Nevada. While in Virginia City, Nevada, he also produced the first photographs of subterranean mining ever made in America, descending several hundred feet into extremely cramped shafts and using magnesium flares for light. O’Sullivan’s 1869 views of the Devil’s Slide and Witches Rocks in Utah were among the first to capture the immense and barren landscape west of the Mississippi. In 1871 he joined the George Wheeler–led expedition surveying the territory west of the 100th meridian and traveled up the Colorado River from Nevada, a particularly arduous trek, to record the isolation and majesty of both the Black Canyon in Arizona and the Shoshone Falls in Snake River, Idaho.
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In 1873 and 1874, not satisfied to record only geological features for internal distribution to the scientific and educational communities, O’Sullivan returned to the Southwest to document what remained of the pueblo and rock-dwelling tribes in the Canyon de Chelly region in New Mexico, the San Miguel Church in Santa Fe, and Apache culture in Arizona. O’Sullivan was married in 1873 to Laura Virginia Pywell, the sister of fellow photographer William Reddish Pywell, an event that perhaps influenced him to end his expeditionary work around 1875. The couple had no children. O’Sullivan was a working photographer in the nation’s capitol for several years, accepting an appointment to the U.S. Geological Survey Office in 1879. In November 1880, he became
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photographer to the U.S. Department of the Treasury but was forced to resign a few months later because of ill health. Laura O’Sullivan died of tuberculosis in October 1881 and three months later, at the age of 42, O’Sullivan succumbed to the same disease while at his parents’ home on Staten Island. Patricia Fanning
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See also: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR References Dingus, Rick. The Photographic Artifacts of Timothy O’Sullivan. Albuquerque, NM: The University of New Mexico Press, 1982. Horan, James D. Timothy H. O’Sullivan: American’s Forgotten Photographer. New York: Bonanza Press, 1966. Snyder, Joel. American Frontiers, The Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan, 1867–1874. New York: Aperture, 1981.
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P PANAMA The part of Central America that became Panama was occupied by the Spanish from the early sixteenth century until Colombia (which included Panama) gained its independence, as Gran Colombia, in 1821. During the seventeenth century, the region was attacked by ships belonging to British buccaneers—which no doubt included Irishmen in their crew—culminating in Henry Morgan’s attack on Panama City in 1671. When the rebellions against Spanish rule broke out in the late 1810s, one of the men who rallied the independence forces around Panama City was Daniel Florence O’Leary (1801–1854), who had been born in Cork. His father was a friend of the Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell. Despite his young age, Simón Bolívar sent O’Leary to Panama to hold it against the Spanish Royalist troops. He later moved to Bogota where he died, but his body was later exhumed and buried close to that of Bolívar in Caracas, Venezuela. Europeans had long realized that Panama included the narrowest part of Central America, and the possibility of building a canal had been raised as early as 1524. However, it was not until the 1849 gold rush in California that the idea was raised as a serious engineering proposition. With so many people anxious to get to
California while avoiding the dangerous trail across the United States or the long and hazardous journey around Cape Horn, plans were quickly hatched to push a railway across Panama, if a canal proved too difficult. Planning was helped by an Irish physician and a member of the Royal Geographical Society, Dr. Edward Cullen, who had, in 1850, walked from the Atlantic coast of Panama to the Pacific across Darien, apparently several times. His book, The Isthmus of Darien, was published in London in 1852, by which time a railway line was being built, and much of the work was undertaken by Irish navvies. Cullen’s later book, Over Darien by a Ship Canal, published in 1854, started raising the idea of a canal, a year before the railway was finally completed, at the cost of many Irish and local lives. The idea of a canal continued, and, when the man behind the Suez Canal, Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps, became interested, so did other Frenchmen, including Lt. Lucien Napoleon-Bonaparte Wyse, the illegitimate son of Napoleon I’s niece Princess Laetitia. Although she had long since separated from her husband, the Irish diplomat Sir Thomas Wyse, the boy took his surname. Wyse was to help de Lesseps with the futile attempt to build the Panama Canal in the 1870s.
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The plans for a Panama Canal were welcomed by many in Panama, including the Star & Herald newspaper, which had been established in Panama City in 1852 by Archibald Boyd, a migrant from Clemenstown, Co. Fermanagh. In the early years of the twentieth century, with renewed interest in the Panama Canal from the United States, a breakaway movement in Panama led the province to independence from Colombia in 1903. Archibald Boyd’s eldest son, Federico Boyd, was a member of the junta that seized power in the newly proclaimed Republic of Panama. He was acting president of Panama in 1910 and foreign minister from 1911 to 1912. Federico Boyd, born on November 3, 1851, in Panama City, was a member of the Panama City Municipal Council from 1888, and became the acting president from October 1 to 5, 1910. He subsequently served as minister for foreign relations, and then ambassador to Germany, Netherlands, and Belgium, before becoming Panama’s business representative in Honduras and El Salvador. Boyd died on May 25, 1924, in New York City. His son, Augusto Samuel Boyd (1879–1957) was the 18th president of Panama, serving from December 18, 1939, until October 1, 1940. The Missouri-born botanist Paul Carpenter Standley (1884–1963), author of Flora of the Panama Canal Zone, which was published in 1928, was also of Irish descent through his mother. Another important Panamanian of Irish descent was Marcos Gregorio McGrath (1924–2000), archbishop of Panama from 1969 until 1994. Justin Corfield See also: O’LEARY, Daniel Florence www.abc-clio.com
Reference McCullough, David. The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal,1870–1914. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977.
PARAGUAY Under the old Spanish regime, Paraguay included the Argentine provinces of Tucumán, Córdoba, and Buenos Aires, all of which were subject to the Adelantado of Asunción. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Governor Fernando Arias introduced the Jesuits to check the cruelties of the Spanish conquistadors. For nearly 200 years the Jesuit missions were the admiration of travelers, and, as Voltaire confessed, they were a triumph of humanity. The missions included 30 self-governing cities of native Guaraní people strung along both sides of Paraná River, which today forms the border between eastern Paraguay and northern Argentina. Raids of the white slave traders from southern Brazil convinced the Jesuits of the need to establish these missions. In the late sixteenth century, three priests, one of them the Irishman Thomas Field (1547–1626) of Limerick, ventured into the area to work with the Guaraní. Father Field had entered the Jesuits in Rome in 1574 and landed in Brazil on December 31, 1577, where he spent 10 years as a scholastic at Piratininga (today’s São Paulo). In 1857, he moved to Paraguay, and he eventually arrived in Asunción with Father Ortega from Portugal and Father Saloni from Italy. Father Field got to know the Guaraní people through his missionary travels, and his recommendations about their evangelization were to have a major influence on how the Jesuit missions were set up. Father Field attended the key synod
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of 1603 where decisions were made to set up the missions (or Reductions as they were called). Father Field died in Asunción in 1626 and is credited by the Irish Jesuit historian, Father Aubrey Gwynn, with being the first Irish priest to celebrate the Roman Catholic Mass in the Americas. Other Irish Jesuits followed Father Field and worked in the Paraguayan missions: Father Thomas Browne of Waterford (1656–1717), Brother William Leny of Dublin (1692–ca. 1760), and Father Thaddeus Enis who was working in the Reductions at the time of the Jesuit expulsion. Brother Andrew Stritch arrived in Paraguay as the Jesuits were being expelled and was deported to Italy, where he died in 1773. The governor of Paraguay from 1766 to 1772, Lt. Col. Carlos Morphi, was a Spanish officer related to the Murphy family of southern Ireland. Morphi founded the city of Caacupé in April 1770. When he received the order to expel the Jesuits, Morphi helped them to conceal and destroy documents and to escape from Paraguay. He was prosecuted for this reason and sent back to Spain. Science, culture, and music flourished in the missions; they had some of the earliest printing presses in the Americas and published books in Guaraní. Angered by the Jesuits’ defense of the native people, the colonial authorities finally persuaded King Charles III of Spain to expel the order from his territories in 1767. This opened the way for the breakup of the Jesuit missions in Paraguay. However, the legacy lived on, as the absence of a landholding class in this part of South America made Paraguay the most progressive state in the Americas after its independence in 1811, and today Guaraní is the only native vernacular language of any American state. www.abc-clio.com
Undoubtedly the most colorful Irish person to enter Paraguayan history was Cork-born Elisa Lynch (1835–1886), who met Dictator Francisco Solano López when he was visiting Paris in 1853. She returned with him to Asunción, and in 1862 López became president and Eliza Lynch the first lady. She played an active role in the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), and some historians argue that many of the cruelties that marked López’s rule were attributed to his mistress. The second Paraguayan president after López, Juan B. Gill (1840–1877) also had Irish origins. His term was 1874–1877. Gill was murdered on April 2, 1877. Edmundo Murray See also: LYNCH, Elisa (Eliza); O’LEARY, Juan Emiliano; RE-EMIGRANTS WITHIN THE AMERICAS References Cawthorne, Nigel. The Empress of South America. London: Heinemann, 2003. Kirby, Peadar. Ireland and Latin America: Links and Lessons. Dublin: Trócaire, 1992. Williams, John Hoyt. The Rise and Fall of the Paraguayan Republic, 1800–1870. Austin,TX: Institute of Latin American Studies, 1979.
PASSENGER ACTS Laws regarding immigration were first enacted in Massachusetts in 1701 to prevent the diseased, infirm, and impoverished from entering port and becoming a burden to society. People who could not support themselves were returned to their port of origin. During the next several years other states would follow the Massachusetts example and enact statutes of their own regarding immigrants into the colonies. These statutes in the colonies were actually the precursors to the Passenger Acts, which were adopted in the United States in 1847.
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The Passenger Acts of 1847 were created to limit the immigration of large numbers of aliens. They were to prevent shipping companies from taking advantage of Irish immigrants at this time by stopping greedy companies from overloading ships and underproviding passengers. The number of Irish immigrants into the United States had grown exponentially because of the Potato Famine, which left many Irish starving and desperate to leave Ireland. The population of Ireland had also grown greatly as a result of the devastation by the Napoleonic Wars in 1803; thus, the Passenger Acts served to restrict the number of European immigrants, particularly the Irish and the Germans; to relieve the country of any fiscal burden; and to reduce crime committed by those of amoral character. There was also fear of disease resulting from the great numbers of immigrants who were entering the ports. Many were sick with typhus, dysentery, and severe abdominal illnesses. Before these laws were created, ships from Ireland and England were loaded with passengers headed for the New World. However, the ships were often unsafe, overloaded, and lacked provisions. British ships were worse than the American ones, as they often had temporary toilets, usually two for 250–300 immigrants on board; were poorly ventilated; and had captains of questionable talent for steering ships. It was not uncommon for a ship to take up to eight weeks to reach Canada or America because of the incompetence of a British sea captain, a situation that resulted in the death of fully 20–30 percent of immigrants on board because of a lack of fresh water and food. Rats passed diseases to passengers, and, because many immigrants had lived in squalor before coming aboard ship, they www.abc-clio.com
carried blankets and clothing infested with lice, which spread typhus. Although Great Britain had previously enacted regulations in 1842 similar to the U.S. Passenger Acts of 1847, these regulations were ignored and ship employees were bribed to turn a blind eye to lawbreakers. The U.S. ordinances were very strict compared with the British ones. Each passenger was to be allotted a certain amount of space to avoid overcrowding, and a doctor was required to be on board ship, contrary to the British regulations. American boats were usually in better shape, contained more toilets, and were managed by well-trained sailors. There had to be a certain amount of provisions for passengers aboard American ships. However, American ship passage was more than double the price of passage aboard a British ship bound for Canada. To make matters even worse, many Irish decided to depart out of lesser-kempt ports of Ireland, where it was impossible to maintain regulations. In many cases, there was almost no food on board, water was stagnant, and the ships were not very seaworthy. It is not known how many Irish died on British ships or drowned when ships sank because there was no enforcement of laws regarding the number of passengers. All that is known is that ships simply vanished and all on board were assumed drowned on their way to the “promised land” of the United States. In addition, those who died as a result of illness were quickly dumped into the sea without services or record of their deaths. Thus, such vessels were known as “coffin ships.” Ships that did make their way to Canada were, in fact, quite lucky to make port. Those who survived the sea journey found that they could make their way to America by simply walking across the
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border. Many Irish did so, and thus, they became one of the largest groups of immigrants to come to America. Although the Passenger Acts of 1847 were later repealed and replaced with the Passenger Acts of 1852, which were much more stringent, they did not slow the flow of immigrants into the New World. The price for a ticket to America, even at double the price of British passage, was small compared with the number of deaths on unregulated and unhealthy British ships. Cynthia A. Klima References Gallagher, Thomas. Paddy’s Lament. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1982. Scally, Robert James. The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine and Emigration. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Woodham-Smith, Cecil. The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849. London: Penguin Books, 1991.
PATTERSON, FRANK (1938–2000) The singer Frank Patterson was born in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, on October 5, 1938, and died in New York City on June 10, 2000. He began performing as a child, but received formal training from 1962 in Dublin with Hans Waldemar Rosen, the German-born conductor of the RTÉ Singers. By the mid-1960s he had collected several prizes for his tenor voice at the Dublin Feis Ceoil, and he was in constant demand in classical recitals and oratorio. As a member of the Irish Festival Singers (Feis Éireann) he toured the United States in 1966 and a year later married the ensemble’s director, the pianist Eily O’Grady. The couple lived in Paris (1968–1972) while Patterson continued his studies with Janine Micheau. During this time he www.abc-clio.com
received a recording contract from the Philips company and has since recorded more than 40 albums of both classical and Irish repertory. Although he was classically trained, Patterson’s popularity stemmed from his recordings of Irish ballads, similar to John McCormack who had a similar repertory 50 years previously. As “Ireland’s Golden Tenor,” and with an increasing mix of musical styles, including broadway songs and other favorites, Patterson won the heart of Irish-American audiences, while also being in demand for his renderings of Bach cantatas, Handel arias, and the songs of Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, and Wolf. In the latter capacity he performed with major European orchestras in London, Paris, Rome, Rotterdam, and Basel. In the United States, he performed with the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., as well as with the Colorado, St. Louis, Hartford, Syracuse, Rochester, Utah, and Seattle symphonies. He has sung to soldout audiences at Carnegie Hall in New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Boston Symphony Hall, and the Ray Thompson Hall in Toronto. From 1974 to 1984 Patterson hosted his own show on RTÉ television, Frank Patterson: For Your Pleasure, entertaining his audiences with light classics and humorous commentary. In the United States he had a number of engagements with commercial television and three famous specials on public television: Ireland’s Golden Tenor—Ireland in Song, Frank Patterson: Songs of Inspiration, and God Bless America. For the movie screen he had two short stints in The Dead (1987), directed by John Huston, and Michael Collins (1996), directed by Neil Jordan. He was invited to perform before President Ronald Reagan in 1982 and President Bill Clinton
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in 1995, and he was honored by being asked to perform on the occasion of the pope’s visit to Ireland in 1979 with 1.3 million people present. Frank Patterson received numerous awards for his art and for his commitment to social causes. In 1984, the pope conferred upon him the Knighthood of St. Gregory. He also became a Knight of Malta and a Knight Commander of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem. He was awarded honorary doctorates by Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island (1990) and Manhattan College in New York City (1996). In 1998 both Patterson and his wife were awarded the Gold Medal of the Éire Society of Boston. Axel Klein See also: CLINTON, William Jefferson; HUSTON, John; JORDAN, Neil; McCORMACK, John; REAGAN, Ronald Wilson
PEARSON, NOEL (1941–) Noel Pearson was born in Dublin on January 5, 1941. Pearson has been a wellknown and much respected figure in the Irish theatrical and entertainment industry. His early career included both the serious and the comical theatrical worlds. Indeed, Pearson is credited with discovering such Irish entertainment artists as “Twink” and Eileen Reid. He was later employed as director of the Gaiety Theater in Dublin and as chairman and artistic director of the world-renowned and historical Abbey Theatre. However, it was for his role as producer in the Tony award–winning Broadway version of Dancing at Lughnasa and as producer of the two-time Oscar-winning film My Left Foot that Pearson became an internationally recognized figure. www.abc-clio.com
Pearson will be forever connected with Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa. The play originally opened in Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 1990. On October 11, 1991, Pearson took the play to Broadway. By the time it closed just over a year later, after 436 performances, the play had won a Tony for Bríd Brennan in her role as Agnes, a Best Direction award for Patrick Mason, and a Best Play Award for Pearson. In 1998 Pearson brought Dancing at Lughnasa to the big screen in a version that starred Meryl Streep. Pearson’s 1989 production, My Left Foot, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as disabled artist Christy Brown, received five Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture. It won two Oscars—Best Actor for Day-Lewis and Best Actress for Brenda Fricker. The film also earned Pearson top European film awards, including a Donatello and a BAFTA. Pearson’s film success continued in 1990 when Richard Harris was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in the Pearson-produced The Field. Other less successful Pearson film productions have included Frankie Starlight (1995) and Maeve Binchy’s Tara Road (2005). The most current production is How About You, based on a another story by Maeve Binchy. Pearson’s production company, Ferndale Films, has also been involved in successful documentary work for television. Among his works here are Luke, an account of the life and death of Luke Kelly of the Dubliners folk group, and Brian Friel, which provides an insight into the work and life of the elusive author of Dancing at Lughnasa, Translations, and Wonderful Tennessee. Friel unusually makes an appearance for a brief interview at the end of each documentary.
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In 1992, Pearson, along with Gregory Peck, set up a film school in University College Dublin, where he often guest lectures. In 1994, the National University of Ireland, recognizing his artistic work and his delight at passing on opportunities to younger Irish filmmakers, awarded him an honorary doctorate. Pearson is known to seriously guard his privacy; he does not give interviews and prefers not to comment on any aspect of his work or career. Brid Nicholson See also: GLEESON, Brendan; HARRIS, Richard; DAY-LEWIS, Daniel; PECK, Gregory; SHERIDAN, Jim. References McLoone, Martin. Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema. London: University of California Press, 2001. Pettitt, Lance. Screening Ireland. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000.
PECK, GREGORY (1916–2003) Eldred Gregory Peck was born in La Jolla, California, in 1916 to a father of Irish descent and a Missourian mother. Peck was related to Thomas Ashe, who took part in the 1916 Easter Rising and died on a hunger strike in 1917. Peck’s parents divorced when he was five, and he was raised by his grandmother. She took him to the cinema once a week, and his earliest film memory was of being terrified by The Phantom of the Opera. He attended a Roman Catholic military academy in Los Angeles that was run by Irish nuns. Peck planned to become a doctor and studied medicine at the University of California at Berkeley. During his senior year the director of the campus theater invited him to audition for a part in a play. He was so taken by the stage that he switched his www.abc-clio.com
major to English, performing in five plays that year. Eager to pursue an acting career, he headed for New York without graduating. There, as Gregory Peck, he enrolled at the Neighborhood Playhouse. It was while studying movement under Martha Graham that he sustained the back injury that kept him out of World War II. His Broadway debut in Emlyn Williams’s The Morning Star (1942) impressed the New York Times theater critic. A year later he was in Hollywood to appear in his first film, playing a Russian partisan fighting the Nazis in Days of Glory (1944). His second film, Keys of the Kingdom (1944), based on the A. J. Cronin novel, in which he played a Roman Catholic priest, earned him the first of five Academy Award nominations. Leading roles in Spellbound (1945), The Yearling (1946), and Duel in the Sun (1946) followed. In Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), he played a journalist posing as a Jew to investigate anti-Semitism. That year also, with Dorothy McGuire and Mel Ferrer, he founded the La Jolla Playhouse where he acted in such plays as Patrick Hamilton’s Angel Street, Elliot Nugent’s The Male Animal, and Moss Hart’s Light Up The Sky. He returned to screen acting as the lawyer in love with his dangerous client in The Paradine Case (1948), which he followed with Twelve O’Clock High (1949), in which he took the role of a stressed-out air force officer. One of his best performances was as Johnny Ringo, a hired gun at the end of his tether, in The Gunfighter (1950). He acted in two Hemingway adaptations, The Macomber Affair (1947) and The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), and in between he played the leader of a gang of bank robbers in the fine western, Yellow Sky (1948). He
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switched to romantic comedy in Roman Holiday (1953) with Audrey Hepburn, and starred in the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), a tale of adultery, angst, and disaffection in the advertising industry. As Captain Ahab he struggled with his demons in Moby Dick (1956), which was largely filmed in Youghal, Co. Cork, and featured many Irish actors. He returned to comedy in Designing Woman (1957) with Lauren Bacall. He showed his tough side in an epic fistfight with Charlton Heston in The Big Country (1958). Another western, The Bravados (1958), was followed by Pork Chop Hill (1959), a story of the Korean War that he also produced. As the producer of Cape Fear (1962), in which he also acted, he cast Robert Mitchum in the meatier, more memorable role; he took a cameo role in Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake of the film. In 1962 he also produced and starred in his most celebrated film, To Kill a Mockingbird, playing a southern lawyer who incurs the wrath of his fellow townspeople when he defends a black man accused of raping a white woman. He won an Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus Finch, the hero of Harper Lee’s best-selling novel. In May 2003, the American Film Institute voted the character of Finch the greatest screen hero of all time. Subsequent films included How the West Was Won (1962), Captain Newman, M.D. (1963), Behold a Pale Horse (1964), and two Hitchcockian thrillers, Mirage (1965) and Arabesque (1966). He played the mission controller in Marooned (1969), an excellent film about a NASA accident, which was withdrawn when its release coincided with a real-life space mishap. He was ill at ease in the hit horror film The Omen (1976), in command as MacArthur (1977), and miscast as the Nazi scientist Josef www.abc-clio.com
Mengele in The Boys from Brazil (1978). Often described as Lincolnesque, he played the Great Emancipator in the TV miniseries The Blue and the Gray (1982). There followed The Scarlet and the Black (1983), another TV series, in which he portrayed Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, an Irish-born Vatican priest who helped Allied soldiers and civilians to escape from the Nazis during World War II. And he made the most of the dramatic opportunities presented by the role of Ambrose Bierce in Old Gringo (1989), playing opposite Jane Fonda. In 1993 he produced a TV adaptation of an off-Broadway play, The Portrait, which provided ideal parts for himself, Lauren Bacall, and his daughter Cecilia Peck. His last film role was as Father Mapple in a remake of Moby Dick (1998); in all he acted in 52 films. For seven years, from 1995 on, he toured in an entertaining oneman show in which he reminisced about his career. Peck never hid his liberal sympathies. In 1947 he risked being blacklisted when he signed a letter of protest against a House Un-American Activities Committee investigation of alleged communists in the film industry. A lifelong Democrat, he seriously considered challenging then California Governor Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign in 1970, making a last-minute decision not to do so despite pressure from the Democratic Party leadership. He was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War, although he supported his son Jonathan, who served there. In 1972 he produced the film version of Philip Berrigan’s play, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, about the prosecution of Vietnam protestors for civil disobedience. The Nixon White House feared him. In 1992 Peck was one of the driving forces behind the initiative to set up the
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Centre for Film Studies at University College Dublin. In 1997, Irish America magazine named him Irish-American of the Year. In an interview with the magazine he revealed that President Lyndon Johnson had told him that he would have nominated him as ambassador to Ireland in a second term. A patron of the Ireland Funds, in 2000 he was made a doctor of letters of the National University of Ireland. Patrick Gillan See also: PEARSON, Noel; REAGAN, Ronald Wilson; WALSH, Raoul References Fishgall, Gary. Gregory Peck: A Biography. New York: Scribner 2002. Munn, Michael. Gregory Peck. London: Hale, 1998.
PENNSYLVANIA Pennsylvania, the host state of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, was the second state to ratify the U.S. Constitution (after Delaware). From the late eighteenth century onward, Pennsylvania grew into an industrially powerful state, synonymous with steel and coal. Irish Americans were prominent in its growth, and in supplying much of the industrial labor they were involved in several significant events in the history of state and national labor relations. Pennsylvania’s population of 28,522 in 1790 made it the second largest state, and it continues to be one of the largest states in the nation with a 2000 population of 12,281,054. After early disputes among the English, Dutch, and Swedish, the first permanent settlement was established in 1643, but in the space of 20 years the area moved from Swedish to Dutch (1655) to British control (1664). William Penn, a devout Quaker, www.abc-clio.com
was given proprietary rights to most of modern-day Pennsylvania in 1681 and set about creating a visionary City of Brotherly Love (Philadelphia). Penn’s “Frame of Government” provided liberal governance, and he signed a peace treaty with the Delaware tribe. Quakers, English, and Welsh were concentrated in the city, which would quickly become a large and influential city, and in the eastern counties. Ongoing immigration diversified the area, and several religiously persecuted groups were drawn there, notably the Mennonites (including the Amish), Moravians, Lutherans, and Germans (Pennsylvania Dutch). Penn’s colony also attracted Irish immigrants. Several travelers on the first ship, the Welcome (1682), were from Wexford and Cashel in Ireland, and James Logan, from Lurgan, was colony administrator from 1701 to 1751. In 1719, George Taylor, who later signed the Declaration of Independence, also arrived. In the 1710s, settlement patterns began to push into western Pennsylvania, and very significant numbers of Scots-Irish continued to arrive in the decades leading up to the Revolution. Many settled in Pennsylvania, while others moved on to Virginia and the Carolinas. Large numbers of eighteenth-century Scots-Irish were from Ulster, relatively educated, better off, and able to assimilate fairly quickly. By the late 1720s the number of new Irish arrivals in Philadelphia was estimated to be in the region of 6,000 per year. Tension between settlers and native tribes continued for a number of decades and included the alliance between Native Americans and the French in the Seven Years’ War against the British. Parts of Pennsylvania also became embroiled in Pontiac’s Rebellion in 1763.
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The history of the state is intimately entwined with the American Revolution and the birth of the Republic: the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was declared in 1776; the state provided some of the most influential leaders, including Benjamin Franklin; and the state witnessed some significant military engagements, such as Germantown and Valley Forge. The city of Philadelphia hosted the First and Second Continental Congresses (1774, 1775–1781), as well as the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Philadelphia was also where the Declaration of Independence was signed, and it was the seat of the new federal government from 1790 to 1800. Canal and railroad work, docks, and coal mines all attracted more settlers, and there was more movement into the west of the state, resulting in the emergence of Pittsburgh. Philadelphia and Pittsburgh grew rapidly, numbers bolstered by the Irish famine. By 1850, the Irish population was 18 percent of the total population of Philadelphia, and there were more than 72,000 Irish-born residents in the region. At the same time, areas such as “Little Ireland” had emerged in Pittsburgh. The overcrowding led to waves of anti-Irish and anti-Catholic anxiety and propaganda, manifested through organizations such as the Know-Nothings. In 1844, the Philadelphia Nativist Riots, sometimes known as the Bible Riots, took place between recent Irish Catholic immigrants and city Protestants, including Irish, ostensibly over the issue of religion in schools. One of the defining moments of the Civil War occurred in Pennsylvania when Confederate forces were defeated in 1863 at the Battle of Gettysburg, where, in the aftermath, President Abraham Lincoln made his famous Gettysburg Address. The www.abc-clio.com
Philadelphia Brigade’s 69th Pennsylvania Infantry was predominantly Irish, marched with a green regimental flag, and was involved in the heart of the battle. Oil, coal, and steel would make the state immensely successful, all industries buoyed by immigrant labor. Pittsburgh’s role as a steel center began in the 1870s, when Andrew Carnegie started steelmaking operations on a huge scale. The city’s industrial progress was reflected when Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone was first demonstrated publicly at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876. In such an industrial state, the potential for friction between the working classes and union representation with the factory owners was realized on several occasions in the late nineteenth century and rumbled on into the twentieth century. This was famously manifested with the emergence of the Molly Maguires in the anthracite minefields of east Pennsylvania in the 1860s–1870s; the group protested against a raft of issues. A secretive society that had evolved in Ireland in the 1840s–1850s, the Molly Maguires used intimidatory tactics in confronting mine officials, leading Pinkerton agents to infiltrate the group, notably James McParlan, himself Irish. This resulted in a series of sensationalist and clearly biased trials, which saw 20 men hanged for 16 murders, of mostly mine officials; a further 19 men were imprisoned. Uncertainties surrounding the group have led to many interpretations since: some consider them working-class revolutionaries, and others regard them as terrorists. Friction flared up again in the Railroad Strike of 1877 and the Homestead strike of 1892, when steel workers protested against wage cuts, which led to running
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battles between strikers and Pinkerton agents. There was steel-based unrest in 1919, and the area was instrumental in forming the unions that became the United Steelworkers of America in 1942. Pennsylvania flourished in the immediate period after World War II. From the mid-1960s, however, the state began to experience a gradual erosion of its industrial strength. The term “rust belt” came to be applied to it and other old industrial states, as the steel, auto, and rubber companies found themselves increasingly uncompetitive with overseas factories. In 1940, David Lawrence, an Irish politician, was elected mayor of Pittsburgh and ushered in a sequence of high-profile Irish officeholders, including mayor and governor, but today the state is considered an electoral swing state. Today, those of Irish ancestry make up 16.1 percent of the total state population, the third largest population in the country, and they form the largest ancestry group in the Philadelphia region. The state also claims to have the town with the highest percentage of Irish surnames in the country—Havertown. Sam Hitchmough See also: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR; AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE References Doyle, David Noel, and Owen Dudley Edwards, eds. America and Ireland, 1776–1976: The American Identity and the Irish Connection, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White, London: Routledge, 1995. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish, London: Longman, 2000. Kenny, Kevin. Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. www.abc-clio.com
Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
POLITICAL PARTIES, IRISH Of perennial interest to political scholars and commentators on Irish-American relations, the Irish party system defies traditional party system analysis and is regularly classified as sui generis. This derives from a combination of issues, such as the electoral system in use and the divergent make up of Irish society, but the primary factor determining Ireland’s unique party system is the legacy of British rule and specifically the split that rended the country apart during the civil war in 1922. Throughout the nineteenth century Ireland was part of the Union of Great Britain and Ireland. Party political activity, therefore, was channeled through the Westminster parliament in London. Irish political parties during this era agitated for greater, or outright, independence from Britain. Those minority groups committed to complete separation aligned themselves with violent organizations, such as the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who carried out unsuccessful campaigns for Irish freedom. The parliamentary route to autonomy proved only marginally more successful, but majority opinion in Ireland consistently supported parties committed to exclusively peaceful politics such as the Irish Parliamentary Party led for a time by Charles Stewart Parnell, who was regarded as one of Ireland’s greatest parliamentarians. When World War I began, political opinion in Ireland was divided over how to react. The Irish Parliamentary Party, then led by John Redmond, supported the British forces in the war, while Sinn Féin
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and other militant groups viewed the war as an opportunity to strike at a distracted Britain. The 1916 rebellion, a complete failure in military terms, changed the Irish political landscape, and thereafter public support shifted toward the radical separatists, as evidenced by Sinn Féin’s triumph in the 1918 elections. Sinn Féin’s elected representatives refused to take their seats in Westminster and in 1919 established the Dáil (parliament) in Dublin. A two-year war of independence with Britain followed, which ended with the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921. The provisions of the treaty established a 26-county independent Ireland while a six-county region in the North remained under British dominion. The treaty bitterly divided Ireland, and Sinn Féin split into pro-treaty and antitreaty factions. Soon after the 1922 elections, which demonstrated a majority in favor of the treaty, the country was plunged
into civil war, the legacy of which is still the most obvious cleavage within the Irish party system. Those who had been committed to subverting the British State in 1916 now turned against each other in a bloody war that saw friends and family fight to the death. The civil war ended in 1923 when Eamon de Valera, leader of the anti-treaty faction, issued a proclamation stating that the war was over. The treaty, however, remained a major issue in Irish politics, both overtly and covertly. The bitterness created by the treaty was so great that it precluded opponents from seeking reconciliation, even when they agreed on virtually ever other issue. A person’s stance on the treaty became that person’s, and hence the party’s, most defining feature, regardless of policy platforms in other areas. The continued existence of both Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, who differ on little else other than the treaty, attests to the ongoing salience of the treaty’s legacy.
Sinn Féin Standing Committee on March 9, 1922. (Bettmann/Corbis) www.abc-clio.com
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Given that the central issue upon which Irish political parties divided was constitutional and nationalistic, it followed that future debates within the Irish political system centered on these issues more than economic and social issues. The differing positions taken with respect to the treaty transcended left and right, urban and rural, and social classes, thereby dividing the electorate into two camps diametrically opposed on this one issue; however, each group lacked any unifying bond outside of its perspective on the treaty. The effect of the treaty split remains the primary reason the Irish system is so unique in the European context. Comparative studies of European democracy have struggled to situate Ireland within the prevailing party classifications. Essentially, the Irish party system has three unusual features. First, Ireland lacks any clear social cleavage that manifests in the party structure. Irish voters do not divide politically along class, religion, or regional lines. The three major political parties in Ireland—Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, and Labour—compete for votes in the same areas and among broadly similar voters. The supporters of each party have no obvious social characteristics, and this is particularly evident in the supporters of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. The second feature that adds to the Irish system’s uniqueness is the electoral weakness of the Left. In European democracies it is typical for one of the two major parties to have a conservative or Christian democrat nature and the other major party to have a social democratic persuasion; however, in Ireland the Labour Party has never progressed beyond its position as the third most popular party in the country. Its support base has often fluctuated widely, www.abc-clio.com
Fianna Fáil, the Republican Party of Ireland— traditionally translated as Soldiers of Destiny—is the largest political party in Ireland. From its establishment in the early twentieth century, the party moved from being a radical, slightly left of center party, to become the establishment, its influence dominating government and Irish political life from the 1930s onward. (Library of Congress)
and although it has been in coalition government with both Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, it has never been able to break the monopoly of the big two. The Labour Party has averaged around 11–14 percent of the vote in elections since 1945. A number of smaller communist and socialist parties are active in Ireland, but when they have occasionally enjoyed electoral success, as the Workers Party did in the 1980s, it has tended to be at the expense of the Labour party or independent left wingers. Combined electoral support for parties of the Left in Ireland has consistently averaged at most 16 percent, while the average in the rest of Europe is 45 percent. Even in countries where there has been traditionally less
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support for the Left, such as Iceland and Switzerland, the overall figures far exceed those evident in Ireland. The third unique feature of the Irish party system, as identified by analysts of comparative European politics, is the extent to which the two major parties have similar policies and support bases. In the post–cold war era it is evident that major political parties across Europe have moved toward the center and away from clear leftright divides, thus leading to a blurring of distinctions between prospective governmental parties. However, the fight for dominance of the center has long been a feature of Irish politics, and Fianna Fail and Fine Gael have often struggled to define what makes them different, apart of course from their positions on the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Ideologically and socially the parties are almost identical, and both have strong ties to the business community and the Catholic Church. Yet, although it is unique to have two dominant parties that are so similar in a democracy, the situation is further complicated by the fact that it is very difficult to locate either Fianna Fail or Fine Gael in the broader European party spectrum. Neither party fits readily within existing European party families, and the constitutions of both make it difficult to draw accurate parallels with other parties in Europe. The party system in Ireland has proved remarkably stable, and while most European countries experienced increased volatility in party alignments after the 1960s, Ireland maintained its traditional formation, arguably until 1987 when a new party, the Progressive Democrats, polled 12 percent of the vote. Support for the Progressive Democrats has fallen since then, however, and apart from the rise of Sinn Féin since the Belfast Agreement was www.abc-clio.com
signed in 1998, the party structure has remained dominated by Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, with the Labour party and the Progressive Democrats acting as minor coalition partners. The parliament in Ireland is elected by a proportional representation system. The state is divided into 42 constituencies, which return between three and five Teachtaí Dála (TDs—members of Parliament) depending on the population of each constituency. This system enables smaller parties to achieve electoral success by concentrating their resources in a small number of areas. As a result of this system Ireland has tended to have many parties represented in Parliament and coalition governments. This means that relatively small parties, such as the Progressive Democrats and the Democratic Left (now defunct), have at times formed part of the government and had some of their representatives appointed to cabinet positions. In this respect Ireland differs significantly from countries like Great Britain, where a traditionally two-party system has precluded people from ‘“wasting” their votes on the smaller parties, as they have very little chance of getting elected and even less chance of forming part of the government. In Ireland, independent Teachtaí Dála are quite common and are usually elected on a left-wing or single-issue agenda. After the 1997 election, four independent Teachtaí Dála held the balance of power in Parliament and propped up a minority government coalition of Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats. The lineage of most major parties in Ireland, and the majority of smaller parties, can be traced along two family trees—the nationalist and the socialist. As already mentioned the political parties of
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the nineteenth century were preoccupied with the national question, and by 1919 the less radical Irish Parliamentary Party had all but disappeared, leaving Sinn Féin dominant. Following the split within Sinn Féin in 1922, Cumann na Gaedheal came to represent the pro-treaty faction, and it formed the first Irish government in 1922. In 1926, the anti-treaty faction itself split when Eamon DeValera recognized the 26-county state and formed Fianna Fail (meaning Soldiers of Destiny). Fianna Fail is a classic catch-all party and has attracted support from a very wide and varied constituency. It is ideologically indistinct but has sought to portray itself as a center left party, though its recent coalition governments with the center right Progressive Democrats has undermined this claim. In 1933 Cumann na Gaedheal merged with the Centre Party and the fascistic Blueshirts to form Fine Gael (meaning the Family of Ireland). Fine Gael has been accused as defining itself as whatever Fianna Fail is not. Like Fianna Fail it is difficult to situate it on the ideological spectrum, and it has gone through phases of being left and right of center. Sinn Féin, originally established in 1905, lost much support in the 1920s as people tended toward either Fianna Fail or Fine Gael, both of whom, unlike Sinn Féin, took part in the administration of the 26-county state. The party, along with its armed wing, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), has endured numerous splits, and the recent centenary celebration of the party’s formation was observed by a number of groups purporting to be the true heirs to the original party, such as Republican Sinn Féin. Sinn Féin endured a very significant split in 1970 over the issue of recognizing both the Dublin and British parliament. The majority group, www.abc-clio.com
which had a more socialist inclination, became known as Official Sinn Féin, while the more republican minority was termed Provisional Sinn Féin. In 1974, the Irish Republican Socialist Party split from the Officials. In 1977, Official Sinn Féin became Sinn Féin the Workers Party. In 1992, all but one of the Workers Party’s elected representatives left the party to form the Democratic Left, which formed part of the “Rainbow coalition” with Fine Gael and the Labour Party in 1994. In 1999, the Democratic Left merged with the Labour party. Provisional Sinn Féin itself split in 1984 when Republican Sinn Féin was formed to reflect those who again refused to recognise the Dáil. Provisional Sinn Féin, which maintained close ties to the provisional IRA, the largest and most active Irish terrorist organisation, has achieved great electoral success since the peace process was initiated in the 1990s. Sinn Féin is now the fastest-growing party in Ireland—north and south—and, provided the IRA maintains its cease-fire, is likely to be part of a governing coalition in the coming years. In 1985, a number of prominent members of Fianna Fail left the party to form the Progressive Democrats, which have formed coalition governments with Fianna Fail on three occasions since. To the right of center, the Progressive Democrats, despite their narrower electoral appeal, have exercised great influence on Irish politics, and their representatives have held many of the more important ministerial positions. Parties of the Left in Ireland have emerged from a different political lineage that owes its origins to the emergence of trade unions in the late nineteenth century. In 1912, the Irish Trade Unions Congress proposed that “the independent representation of labour upon all public
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boards be and is hereby included among the objectives of this congress.” While the Labour party cites this as its starting point, the party existed only in the vaguest form until 1922, and even then local trade unions were largely responsible for determining the policies of their candidates. In 1917, most of the congress leaders were members of the Socialist Party of Ireland (SPI), although they left in 1921 when the SPI became the Communist Party. The Labour party, more conservative than most social democrat parties in Europe, has enjoyed limited success and has had to rely on coalitions with Fine Gael and Fianna Fail to achieve governmental office. In 1996, the Socialist Party was formed by Trotskyites who had left the Labour party in the late 1980s. The Communist Party has gone through many incarnations and endured many ideological splits, the largest occurring after the breakdown of Soviet-Sino relations, when members sided with either the USSR or China. The radical left in Ireland has attracted negligible support, and since the 1980s the Labour Party itself has moved toward the center in a bid to increase its support. Parties that have evolved outside these nationalist and socialist family trees include the Green Party, which has seen its support increase rapidly in the past 20 years. The Greens emerged from the ecology movements of the 1970s and 1980s and, though their more radical policies have been abandoned, today constitute a potential coalition partner for the major parties. Various religious conservative parties have come and gone, and the Christian Solidarity Party remains the sole voice of the Christian right. The far right, like the far left, has never achieved popular www.abc-clio.com
support in Ireland since the National Guard, more commonly known as the Blueshirts, were active for a time in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Irish party system is therefore both difficult to explain and unique in the European context. The electoral system encourages voters to support smaller parties, and coalition governments are therefore common. Given that there is no major ideological difference between the major political parties, governments have been formed from many different party combinations. Despite the numerous splits that have occurred among Irish parties, the system remains very stable and is dominated by Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, although Fianna Fail has maintained a traditional dominance. Emerging trends, such as the rise of Sinn Féin and the Green Party, may threaten the predictability of the system, but it is unlikely that the dominance of the two major parties will be challenged for many years to come. Aidan Hehir
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See also: DE VALERA, Eamon; IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY References Coakley, John, and Michael Gallagher. Politics in the Republic of Ireland. Limerick: Folens and PSAI Press, 1993. Collins, Stephen. The Power Game: Ireland Under Fianna Fáil. Dublin: O’Brien, 2001. Laver, Michael. A New Electoral System for Ireland? Dublin: The Policy Institute in association with The All-Party Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution, 1998. Mair, Peter. The Changing Irish Party System: Organisation, Ideology and Electoral Competition. London: Pinter, 1988. Manning, Maurice. Irish Political Parties: An Introduction. London: Macmillan, 1972. Moss, Warner. Political Parties in the Irish Free State. New York: AMS Press, 1968. 1-800-368-6868
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POWDERLY, TERENCE VINCENT (1849–1924) The son of Irish immigrants, Terence Powderly was born in Carbondale, in northeastern Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal region, on January 22, 1849. He left school when he was 13 to become a railway worker. By the time he was 24 he had gone on to complete an apprenticeship, become a machinist, join the Machinists’ and Blacksmiths’ International Union, become that union’s president, and lose his machinist’s job after the Panic of 1873. Powderly joined the “great brotherhood” of the Noble and Holy Order of Knights of Labor in 1874, as it was expanding outward from its founding local in the Philadelphia area. The order had been organized as a secret society by six Philadelphia garment cutters on Thanksgiving Day in 1869. At first membership was limited to its founders’ craft, but the vision of at least one founder, Uriah Stephens, was to create a new type of labor organization uniting wage earners of all crafts and skill levels, and after a year the founding local’s members had voted to include nonvoting skilled workers from other crafts. They thought that the nonvoting sojourners—so named using Masonic terminology— would eventually be able to create locals in their own crafts. The Knights were able to gradually expand their membership among the skilled workers of Philadelphia and adjacent southern New Jersey, to survive the corporate bankruptcies and unemployment after the Panic of 1873, and to expand to include both skilled and unskilled workers in Pennsylvania’s anthracite mines and railways. Powderly’s organizing and political skills led to his being elected mayor of Scranton on the Greenback-Labor Party www.abc-clio.com
Portrait of Terence Powderly, leader of the Knights of Labor (1879–1893). (Library of Congress)
ticket in 1877, to his becoming active in the order’s national affairs—helping to resolve an internal dispute over ritual—in 1878, and to his succeeding Stephens as the Knight’s grand master workman (the order’s president) in 1879. He served as mayor of Scranton from 1878 to 1884 and as grand master workman from 1879 until he resigned in 1893 at the age of 44. Powderly’s 14 years as the Knights’ grand master workman remain controversial to this day. The order had approximately 9,300 members when Powderly took office in 1879. Its small numbers declined in 1881, but then grew to around 50,000 in 1883 and exploded to between 700,000 and 1,000,000 members following railway strikes in the mid-1880s, only to decline precipitously in the aftermath of the Haymarket Riot in 1886. Instead of one big brotherhood, America’s workers increasingly chose to follow the path of
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individual craft or industry unions after 1886. When the Industrial Workers of the World attempted to create One Big Union in the early twentieth century, it was less successful than the Knights had been. Some of Powderly’s difficulties resulted from one of the Knight’s strengths. The order excluded from membership only lawyers, bankers, stockbrokers, gamblers, liquor dealers, scabs, and spies, so it included skilled and unskilled workers, blacks, women, owner-proprietors of small businesses, shop foremen, and other business people who chose to join. Powderly was successful in bringing workers of all ideological stripes—anarchists, socialists, middle-class reformers—into the order. But that very mixture was certain to engender substantial internal conflict and to exacerbate conflicts with business and local communities, as it did. The order faced many issues, any response to which was, necessarily, not going to please everyone. For example, the order had to decide how to respond to local strikes and the Haymarket Riot (Powderly chose to denounce rioters) and whether to support a third party in the 1892 elections. Needing to support himself and his family after resigning as grand master workman, Powderly studied for the Pennsylvania bar and was admitted in 1894, resulting in his expulsion from the Knights. The Knights’ new leaders simultaneously expelled miners and glassblowers, who had been Powderly supporters and were seen as the order’s backbone. The expelled miners promptly joined the rival United Mine Workers. A year later the Knights’ new leaders denied the credentials of socialist Daniel DeLeon at the order’s national assembly, resulting in the irritated socialists forming the Socialist Trade and www.abc-clio.com
Labor Alliance and taking with them an estimated 13,000 of the order’s 30,000 remaining members. Comparative unity had been achieved, but at the cost of reducing the order’s membership to an unsustainable level. The later years of Powderly’s life were mostly spent as a federal official in Washington, D.C. He was appointed commissioner-general of the Bureau of Immigration by President William McKinley in 1897, where he served until he was removed by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902. After a few years in small business ventures, Powderly was appointed chief of the Bureau of Immigration’s Division of Information, a position he held until 1921. He then became a Department of Labor employee. He died in Washington on June 24, 1924. Steven B. Jacobson
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References Buhle, Paul M. From the Knights of Labor to the New World Order: Essays on Labor and Culture. London: Taylor and Francis, 1997. Dubofsky, Melvyn. We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969. Falzone, Vincent J. Terence V. Powderly, Middle Class Reformer. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1978. Fink, Leon. Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985. Fitch, Robert. Solidarity for Sale. New York: Public Affairs, 2006. Phelan, Craig. Grand Master Workman: Terence Powderly and the Knights of Labor. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Powderly, Terence V. “The Army of Unemployed.” In The Labor Movement: The Problem of Today, edited by George E. McNeill. Boston: A. M. Bridgeman & Co., 1887. Powderly, Terence V. Thirty Years of Labor, 1859–1889. New York: Augustus M. Kelly, 1967. 1-800-368-6868
POWER, FREDERICK TYRONE, SR. 767 Voss, Kim. The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. Weir, Robert E. Beyond Labor’s Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Weir, Robert E. Knights Unhorsed: Internal Conflict in a Gilded Age Social Movement. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2000.
POWER, FREDERICK TYRONE, SR. (1869–1931) Although born and raised in London, Frederick Tyrone Power had many ancestors from Co. Waterford, including his grandfather, Tyrone Power (1795–1841), who was considered to be one of the greatest Irish actors of the nineteenth century. Frederick’s father, Harold Power, and his mother, Ethel Levenu, were both entertainers who, as “Mr. and Mrs. Power at Home,” performed satirical lectures and short sketches. However, when young Frederick expressed an interest in acting, his education at Dulwich College in London was abruptly terminated, and at the age of 16 he was sent to a plantation in Florida to learn how to grow oranges. Frequently punished and tormented by the plantation foreman, Power ran away to nearby St. Augustine, where in 1886 he pursued his ambitions and made his acting debut as Gibson in The Private Secretary. Following the lead of his famous grandfather, who had performed frequently in the United States, Frederick dropped his first name, and became known as Tyrone Power the Younger. For the next ten years, Power appeared in a variety of roles in a variety of places— Philadelphia, Montreal, New York, www.abc-clio.com
London, and many other places on tour— slowly building his reputation. In 1898 he married Edith Crane, an Australian actress, but they separated several years later. By the first years of the twentieth century, Power had entered the top ranks of acting, playing Caliban in The Tempest, Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice, Judas Iscariot in Mary of Magdala, the Marquis of Steyne in Becky Sharp, Ulysses in Ulysses, and many more roles in which he was able to portray everything from evil to elegance. As described by one of his contemporaries, Power appeared “massive and imposing. His face is large, with strongly marked features, and is expressive of acute sensibility. His eyes, dark and brilliant, are communicative equally of tenderness and fire. . . . His voice is deep, strong, copious, and of a rarely melodious, resonant tone” (Winter, p. 172). Shortly after Edith Crane died in 1912, Power married Patia Réaume, a former actress who taught the dramatic arts in Cincinnati. In 1914, their first child, Tyrone Edmund Power, was born; he would later achieve great fame in Hollywood, the third in the line of actors known as Tyrone Power. A second child, Anne, was born in 1915. However, the marriage became strained when Power became infatuated with Bertha Knight, one of the dancers in a Broadway production. The couple separated in 1917, and then divorced in 1920. The following year, Power married Knight, who died 1927. Although Power continued to enjoy success on stage—most notably as Brutus in Julius Caesar—he also found work as an actor in the new medium of the movies. From his film debut in 1914 to his final role as a wagon driver in the epic western, The Big Trail (1930), Power appeared in 41 films: dramas, mysteries, westerns,
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comedies, and adventures. He was hired to play the role of the Patriarch in The Miracle Man, but suffered a massive heart attack shortly after the filming had started. He died in the arms of his son, Tyrone. James I. Deutsch References Arce, Hector. The Secret Life of Tyrone Power. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1979. Guiles, Fred Lawrence. Tyrone Power: The Last Idol. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1979. Power, Tyrone. “The Actor as a Gambler.” Green Book Album, 2 (December 1909): 1214–1218. “Tyrone Power Dies Suddenly on Coast.” New York Times, December 31, 1931: 12. Winter, William. Tyrone Power. New York: Moffat, Yard, and Co., 1913.
PRESBYTERIANISM The term “presbyterian” refers to a form of church government based on the rule of elders. It is, in a sense, a republican or representative system, which is distinct from a simple monarchy (e.g., rule by the pope), an oligarchy (e.g., rule by bishops), and a pure democracy where individuals in a particular congregation make important decisions for the life of their church. Ruling and teaching elders constitute a session. Their duty is to teach, train, and, if need be, discipline church members. The elders are distinct from another important office: deacons, whose job it is to provide for the material needs of congregants. The local session is part of a broader regional presbytery, composed of a few churches within a particular area, and a general assembly, where representatives from various presbyteries discuss matters related to the national church. Beyond the mere defining characteristics, Presbyterianism has a rich history. Its www.abc-clio.com
more immediate and institutional origins, though many believe the New Testament church was presbyterian in orientation, can be traced back to the Scottish Reformation, a branch of the much larger reforming impulse sweeping Europe in the sixteenth century. The Protestant Reformation began in 1517 with a German monk, Martin Luther, who protested (hence the word “Protestant”) the wayward practices of the reigning Roman Catholic Church. Protestants sought a return to the essence of Christianity in both faith and practice as delineated in the scriptures of the Old and New Testament alone. Galvanized by the flames of Protestantism, John Knox (1514–1572), a former bodyguard who became the father of Scottish Presbyterianism, regularly interacted with and imbibed the works of Geneva’s John Calvin (1509–1564), the Reformation’s leading intellectual next to Martin Luther. Calvinism, a term many believed encapsulated the fundamental doctrines of the Bible, highlighted the centrality of God’s sovereignty in the works of creation and salvation. Knox virulently criticized Catholicism in England and Scotland, denouncing it as idolatrous and false. He worked to incorporate Calvinism, recognized broadly as Reformed theology, into the culture of Scottish Presbyterianism. Beginning in the seventeenth century, the Scottish church underwent significant social and geographic changes. James VI of Scotland inherited the English and Irish thrones in 1603, eventually consolidating each and changing his title to James I. To persuade the recently conquered Irish to accept the union, James orchestrated the resettlement of English-speaking Protestants (mainly Scottish Presbyterians) in Ulster after confiscating the acreage from
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two Ulster chieftains. The Scots flooded the area. The north Ireland settlement marked the beginning of the history of Presbyterianism among the Irish. A presbytery at Ulster was formed in the early 1640s. In the late seventeenth and early eighteen centuries, Presbyterianism gained a foothold in North America. Francis Makemie (1658–1708) is commonly recognized as the father of American Presbyterianism. He was born in Northern Ireland, attended the University of Glasgow, and ministered in Ireland, Barbados, and on the east coast of North America, particularly New York, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. He organized the first Presbyterian Church in Maryland in 1684. Many religious leaders at the time, including New England’s Mathers, appreciated Makemie’s work. In 1706, Makemie helped bring together English, Welsh, and Scots-Irish to form the first presbytery in Philadelphia and the first synod in 1716. Beginning in 1717, Ulster Presbyterians, for both economic and political reasons, initiated a series of mass migrations to North America. Increased land rent, drought, poverty, famine, and political oppression posed a challenge for future survival in Ulster. The majority of Scots-Irish Presbyterians found solace in North America. In 1788, the Philadelphia synod formed the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church and formally adopted the seventeenth-century Westminster Confession of Faith and its Catechisms, each a summation of Protestant Calvinism as they related to the doctrines of revelation, creation, salvation, and the church. Presbyterianism has left an indelible mark on America’s founding institutions www.abc-clio.com
and traditions. Hostility to British authority laid the groundwork for the American Revolution. In 1707, for example, the governor of New York, Lord Cornbury, arrested Makemie for preaching without a license. Makemie appealed to the English Toleration Act of 1689, which granted tolerance to religious dissenters not part of traditional Protestantism. Likewise, Presbyterians in England were barred from government offices and were forced to pay tithes to the established Anglican Church. Ministers preached against what they viewed as English tyranny and encouraged their parishioners to migrate. The majority of newcomers who settled in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas found stable jobs, acquired cheap land, and participated in colonial administration, an opportunity largely unavailable to them in their mother country. Makemie’s trial and the experience of the Scots-Irish presented a picture of the Presbyterians as a group that would oppose dictatorial governments. Aside from politics, Presbyterians played a key role in America’s religious life. In both Scotland and Northern Ireland they would gather annually to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. After a marathon of sermons emphasizing the importance of spiritual renewal through Christ’s atoning work, the multitude participated in communion. These “communion seasons” fit well with America’s religious awakenings, which corresponded with farming seasons, especially along the frontier. The Reverend James McGready, with a few other ministers, organized a camp meeting at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1800, inaugurating America’s Second Great Awakening. Yet such evangelical fervor created internal divisions. Revivalism tended to accentuate the importance of the emotions
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over theological rationality, which relegated confessionalism, elevated impulsive spirituality above institutional religion, and thus emphasized the role of the individual’s ability to choose salvation, threatening doctrines related to God’s sovereignty. The first American Presbyterian split occurred in 1741. Ministers, divided between “Old Side” and “New Side,” argued over revivalism, requirements for ordained teaching elders, and the interpretation of confessional standards. The church reunited in 1758. The second division in 1837 revolved around the 1801 Plan of Union, which combined the efforts of Congregationalists and Presbyterians (“Presbygationalists”) to evangelize the western frontier. Issues of church discipline, revivalism once again, and slavery were the dividing factors. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, the church was divided regionally. Southern churches of the “Old School” variety, as they were known, formed the Presbyterian Church of the Confederate States of America, weakening the Old School churches in the North. The “New School” also divided during the war, forming the United Synod, which later merged with the Confederate branch. The newly consolidated Confederate church reorganized into the Presbyterian Church in the United States. The regional denominations finally reunited in 1869. Presbyterians were also at the forefront of higher education, laying the foundation for America’s intellectual infrastructure. During the time of the first schism, New Side Presbyterians established the College of Jersey, which later became Princeton. John Witherspoon—a signatory of the Declaration of Independence and mentor to James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution”—became the college’s first www.abc-clio.com
president. By the 1850s, the church had been instrumental in organizing two-thirds of America’s educational institutions for higher learning, and by 1861 49 permanent schools were associated with—if not directly founded by—Presbyterians. Yet the Americanization of Presbyterianism included religious intolerance. With the massive wave of Irish and German immigration to the United States in the 1840s, the Irish became inextricably linked to Catholicism. American nativists forgot that many of the Irish who came in the early eighteenth century were Presbyterian. Protestant nativists viewed Catholicism and therefore the Irish as a detriment to the American Republic. The Irish fought to secure a foothold in antebellum America. Irish Catholics flourished after the Civil War. Ryan McIlhenny See also: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR; AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE; SCOTS-IRISH; SCOTS-IRISH CULTURE References Brooke, Peter. Ulster Presbyterianism, 1610–1970: The Historical Perspective. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Griffin, Patrick. The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Leyburn, James G. The Scotch-Irish: A Social History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1962.
PRESS, THE ETHNIC IRISH Mainstream newspapers, and now the electronic media, have long played an important role in Irish America, with a presence that has included Irish Americans as reporters, commentators, and managers. Today, as in the early nineteenth century, when the first Irish-American newspapers
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October/November 2005 edition of Irish America magazine. (Courtesy of Irish America magazine)
were published, the Irish ethnic media continue to play a key role in chronicling and in interpreting the Irish American experience throughout the United States. With the significant Irish exodus to America in the 1820s, a number of Irish publications appeared to inform, entertain, and guide Irish immigrants in their new land. In cities such as Boston, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia, the new immigrants experienced situations that often resulted in violent clashes and heavy prejudice (such as “No Irish Need Apply”). To counter this, the Irish-American press played an important part in working out misunderstandings and easing fears, instructing the Irish about the United States, and emphasizing that Catholicism and Irishness were not threats to the liberty and independence of the United States and that they could exist harmoniously with www.abc-clio.com
American institutions. Most important, ethnic newspapers provided Irish Americans with an outlet to criticize their new country on their own terms and to compare their own lifestyles with the Irish struggle on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The Irish-American press had two distinct types of papers: those that addressed their readers as a national group in the United States, with their own unique political, economic, and social interests connected with both America and Ireland, and those that dealt chiefly with religious issues and with the Irish as Catholics. During this period Catholic publications, such as The Boston Pilot and the New York Freeman’s Journal, which took their names from newspapers in Ireland, enjoyed much success, because nationalist opinion was not yet fully formed and articulated in the United States. The Boston Pilot, which continues today as the archdiocesan paper, contained news from Ireland and the United States. Donahoe’s Magazine printed fiction for its Irish immigrant readers and advice columns to help them negotiate American customs while declaring that Irish Catholics would deliver Protestant America back to the Catholic faith. Other popular Catholic magazines were the Columbiad and the Republic. In the early 1840s, the Freeman’s Journal was organized to promote the Catholic cause in the New York school controversy, in which Catholic children were required to read the Protestant Bible for religious instruction, and textbooks often made disparaging remarks about Catholicism. Freeman’s Journal defended Catholic parents and Archbishop John Hughes of New York and supported the Maclay Law of 1842, which broke up the Protestant
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monopoly over education and forbade state aid to religious schools. Like the Boston Pilot, the journal encouraged Catholics to vote for supporters of their cause. Aggressiveness of this sort further inflamed nativist fears and hatred of the Catholic presence in America. The success of the Irish-American press was largely the result of the editors, who were influential in shaping Irish nationalist opinion and in helping the Irish transform themselves from foreigners and immigrants to American citizens. Outstanding editors included Patrick Donahoe, who published The Boston Pilot for more than 60 years; James A. McMaster, who edited the New York Freeman’s Journal (1848–1885); John Mitchell, an Ulster Protestant and Young Irelander, who wrote for the Irish Nation and founded the United Irishman to inspire others toward revolutionary nationalism; Patrick Lynch, who worked for several American newspapers, including the New York Herald, and edited The Boston Pilot and the Irish American, as he attempted to reconcile nationalism with Catholicism; Patrick Ford, editor of the Irish World (1870–1913), whose newspaper became the voice of the politically conscious IrishAmerican working class; and John Devoy, who directed the Clan na Gael as the dominant revolutionary nationalist organization in Irish America and edited the Irish Nation (1881–1885) and the Gaelic American, founded in 1903, in his pursuit of an Irish party in the United States. The mid-nineteenth century marked the height of Irish-American journalism, but gradually Irish-American assimilation into mainstream American society reduced the need for ethnic newspapers. Since the mid-1960s, there has been a growing interest in Irish and Irish-American history, www.abc-clio.com
and several scholarly journals have emerged to cater to this interest, among them Eire-Ireland, James Joyce Quarterly, New Hibernia Review, and Irish Literary Supplement. Other newspapers, such as the monthly Boston Irish Reporter, the Irish Edition (Philadelphia), the San Francisco Gael, Desert Shamrock (Arizona), and the Irish American Post (Chicago), benefited from the late twentieth century interest in all things Irish, and another publication, the quarterly World of Hibernia, was launched in the mid-1990s to promote the affluence and the accomplishments of Irish America. Today, the premier publication is probably Irish America, a magazine established in 1985 to inform Irish-Americans of the latest happenings in Ireland, especially Northern Ireland, and to spotlight the rich and varied history of the Irish in the United States. In an editorial in October 1986, founding publisher Niall O’Dowd expressed his hope that the publication would be “a powerful vehicle of expression for Irish Americans.” The first issue contained a listing of the top 100 Irish Americans, and Senator Edward Kennedy, tennis star John McEnroe, and then-U.S. president Ronald Reagan were featured on the front cover alongside the proud boast of “Irish America’s finest.” The Irish-American press served its constituents in many ways, from helping them understand, adjust to, and eventually assimilate into American society to arousing and formulating Irish nationalist opinion, but the Irish were not as dependent on ethnic newspapers as other immigrant groups because they spoke English and were to an extent culturally Anglicized. The general American press was often sufficient for their needs.
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Other Media Another source of Irish identity has been through radio and television and, now, the Internet. Irish radio programs in markets across the country have taken on many of the former functions of newspapers. They offer a forum for ideas and news of interest to Irish Americans, including events in Ireland as well as in local neighborhoods. Since 1970, Irish Radio Network USA, headquartered in New York, has provided a unique platform for airing all crucial political, social, and economic issues affecting the Irish in America as it continues to offer fast-paced magazine shows that aim to entertain and inform its listenership. It has developed an intimate relationship with its core audience in the American Irish community. Promotion of benefit concerts, dances, fund-raising, and not-for-profit support groups and provision of current immigrant informational matters are an integral part of each radio broadcast and webcast. Locally, there are programs that address their local communities, such as WROL 950 AM, the Irish channel in Boston, which broadcasts hours of music every Saturday. A Brockton, Massachusetts, station also hosts an Irish music program with Jim Larkin (Sounds of the Emerald Isle), a local program since 1982 on WBET Radio 1460 AM. Other cities with large Irish populations, such as Chicago and Philadelphia, also have radio programs with music and current events of special interest to Irish Americans in that area. In the mid-1990s, ethnic media expanded to the national airwaves with the debut of Out of Ireland, hosted by Patricia O’Reilly; it now appears weekly on public television stations across the country. Another source of Irish television has been www.abc-clio.com
programs imported for viewing from Ireland’s RTÉ (Radio Telefis Eireann), from the BBC, or from other television outlets, instead of those created directly for the medium in the United States. This includes popular Irish sports programs, such as rugby and Gaelic football, and the serial drama, Ballykissangel, filmed in Ireland and shown on BBC America, and now available on DVD. The series title was a play on Baile Coisc Aingil, in Co. Kerry. With its popularity in the United States, the actual locations in Avoca, where the show was filmed, became a popular tourist attraction for many Americans when visiting Ireland. Finally, there is the Internet, which seems to bring the earlier forms of communication together; it has made it possible to view Irish-American newspapers online and check out websites. Journalism continues to be a signature profession for Irish-Americans: Jimmy Breslin (New York Daily News), Anna Quindlen (New York Times), Jim Dwyer (now-defunct New York Newsday), and Eileen McNamara (Boston Globe) have won Pulitzer Prizes. Major Irish-American television news commentators include Patrick Buchanan (CNN), John King (CNN), and Tim Russert (NBC), while Maureen Dowd (New York Times), Michael Kelly (National Journal ), and William F. Buckley (National Review) have entertained readers with their opinions. Martin J. Manning See also: BUCKLEY, William F., Jr.; DEVOY, John; FORD, Patrick; HUGHES, Archbishop John; NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW; NO IRISH NEED APPLY References Blessing, Patrick J. Irish in America. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1992.
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774 PRESS, THE IRISH IN LATIN AMERICA Clark, Dennis. Hibernia America: The Irish and Regional Cultures. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986. Coffey, Michael, ed. The Irish in America. New York: Hyperion, 1997. Glazier, Michael, ed. Encyclopedia of the Irish in America. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1999. Eleuterio-Comer, Susan K. Irish American Material Culture: A Directory of Collections, Sites, and Festivals in the United States and Canada. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988. McMahon, Eileen. “The Irish-American Press.” In The Ethnic Press in the United States: A Historical Analysis and Handbook, edited by Sally M. Miller, 177–189. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987. Weaver, Jack W., and DeeGee Lester. Immigrants from Great Britain and Ireland: A Guide to Archival and Manuscript Sources in North America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986.
PRESS, THE IRISH IN LATIN AMERICA Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Irish presence in the Latin American press has been representative of the diversity of opinion and influence of Irish communities in the region and has served to convey the culture, ideas, and business strategies of professional journalists, entrepreneurs, and community leaders. Compared with traditional literary production and publishing, Irish-linked newspapers have always been relatively more important and have channeled the production of poets and writers of fiction. Argentina is undoubtedly the Latin American country where most Irish-owned newspapers were published. The settlement of significant numbers of English-speaking immigrants in rural and urban areas of this country during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided the core readership for these newspapers, only some www.abc-clio.com
of which were aimed specifically at the Irish community. Stephen Hallet, an Irish-born printer who arrived in Buenos Aires in the early 1820s, established and edited Cosmopolite, The American, The North Star, and Prices Current and Statistical Register between 1826 and 1836. Hallet was also an editor of La Gaceta Mercantil, which published a section in English. James Kiernan (1806–1857), who arrived from Ireland in 1823, assisted Halley and later became editor and owner of La Gaceta Mercantil. Published in Buenos Aires from 1861 to 1959, the Standard was long considered one of the most important (and the first daily) English-language newspapers in South America. The Standard was founded by Dublin-born brothers Edward Thomas Mulhall (1832–1899) and Michael George Mulhall (1836–1900) with the aim of forging “the bond of fellowship between the various members of our Anglo-Celtic race [and to be] interesting to all who read our language: offensive to none. Liberty without anarchy, religion without sectarianism, fusion without confusion is our motto” (from the first editorial, May 1, 1861). Although the Mulhall brothers were Irish, they usually referred to themselves as English, championing the commercial and political interests of the British community in Argentina. For this reason, especially from the late 1880s, the Mulhalls were often castigated by Irish nationalists, among them historian Thomas Murray and journalist Padraig MacManus, who dismissed them as representing the shoneen (anglophile) sector of the Irish community. The Standard was published in three editions: the daily for Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the weekly for the provinces, and the fortnightly for Europe.
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The latter accompanied thousands of emigrants’ letters sent home to Ireland and to family members scattered throughout the English-speaking world. The circulation in 1869 was 3,000 (by comparison, Tribuna, the largest newspaper in Buenos Aires at that time, had a circulation of 5,000). Contents included European and North American news (with particular attention paid to Irish events), local church news, and advertising, especially by shipping companies. Argentine news often focused on sensationalistic stories, such as murders and Indian raids. The Standard ceased publication in 1959 because of financial troubles, in particular as a consequence of competition from the Buenos Aires Herald. The Southern Cross was founded in 1875 by Father Patrick Joseph Dillon; it is still produced, now as a monthly tabloid, claiming to be the oldest Irish newspaper published outside Ireland. When launched, the Southern Cross was aimed at the traditional Irish Catholic audience living in rural areas. However, during the first years, the editorial content of the Southern Cross appeared very similar to that of the Standard. The first issues of the Southern Cross were produced at the office of the Standard, and one of the first editors, Francis Healy Mulhall (1845–1898), was a brother of the Standard’s owners. But in the 1880s the Southern Cross succeeded in increasing its circulation, thanks to the inclusion of news of Irish events, such as the Land Wars and the nationalist movement in Ireland, clearly linking such stories with the Catholic Church. In 1882 Father Dillon was succeeded by Michael Dineen (1839–1896), a Corkborn university professor. Dineen had arrived in South America after being hired by the Chilean government to develop educational policy, and he later moved to Buenos Aires. A fluent Irish, French, www.abc-clio.com
Italian, and of course English speaker, Dineen inspired the nationalist content of the Southern Cross. After Dineen’s death in 1896, the journalist and writer William Bulfin (1862–1910) was appointed editor, and he later purchased the paper. Bulfin was a skilled and intelligent editor, who through his short stories and articles merged the identity aspirations of the Irish in Argentina with an empathy toward the vanishing gauchos, the cowboys of the pampas. In 1906, Bulfin was succeeded by Gerald Foley (1868–1927), who, together with his brother Frank, covered the period of World War I and the Irish independence and civil war. From then on, the Roman Catholic Church has owned the Southern Cross, either directly or through its lay institutions. In the early 1960s, the Southern Cross began to feature articles in Spanish; today only a small proportion of its articles are in English. The most difficult period of the Southern Cross was during the 1976–1983 military dictatorship. The editor, Father Fred Richards, condemned human rights abuses, alienating much of the paper’s readership—who tended to be extremely conservative—and Argentina’s reactionary Catholic Church. The Southern Cross, the Buenos Aires Herald, and La Opinión were among the few journalistic voices in Argentina to clearly criticize the regime’s human rights record. For instance, the account of the Massacre at Saint Patrick’s Church in 1976 and an interview with liberation theologian Dom Helder Camera of Brazil were perceived by both supporters and critics of the Southern Cross as acts of defiance. There were other Irish newspapers in Argentina with less significance than the Standard and the Southern Cross. The Irish Argentine (1888–1889) was founded
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by Pallotine Father Bernard Feeney (1844–1919) in Azcuénaga, a village in an area with a significant Irish farming community. Father Feeney started an industrial school in nearby San Antonio de Areco to provide orphaned boys with opportunities to learn a trade. As a training exercise he edited 12 issues of a monthly magazine, Flowers and Fruit. The school was moved to Azcuénaga, and Father Feeney created a more professional journal, the Irish Argentine, which published articles of William Bulfin under the pen name “Bullfinch.” In 1906, John Nelson (1859–1931), businessman and founder of the Nelson shipping company and a coldstorage plant, Las Palmas, in Entre Ríos province, launched the HibernianArgentine Review, a weekly that continued publication until 1927. The Review was moderately nationalistic in politics and strongly clerical, although there was less coverage of Catholic Church affairs than appeared in the Southern Cross. During World War I the Review rallied in defense of the British cause. Fianna, a nationalist review published from 1910 to 1912, was edited by Padraig MacManus (b. 1852) and supported by the Irish chaplain of San Pedro, Father Edmund Flannery, and farmer James Hennesy. MacManus led a republican group and sought to be appointed as diplomatic representative of Ireland in Argentina. The content of Fianna included sensationalistic stories of the British in Ireland, and the newspaper never missed an opportunity to attack Britain’s occupation of the Falkland/Malvinas Islands. Thomas J. Hutchinson (1820–1888?) and Nicholas Lowe (1827–1902) were individual entrepreneurs who among other businesses launched diverse journalistic undertakings. While both Hutchinson and www.abc-clio.com
Lowe came from Ireland, their newspapers did not display strong Irish influences. Hutchinson was a physician who traveled widely in Africa in the 1850s and 1860s, and he published several books recounting his adventures. In 1864 he was appointed British consul in Montevideo and later in Rosario. Hutchinson began the Argentine Citizen, which was primarily concerned with encouraging immigration and industrial progress, in 1865; the paper ceased publication after just one year. Nicholas Lowe, of Co. Cork, settled in Mercedes in 1855. He was a successful sheep farmer, banker, and educator. Lowe founded a number of short-lived newspapers: the Daily News (1874), addressed to Protestant readers, and the Buenos Ayres News and River Plate Advertiser (1873–1874). In 1865, Irish-born William Scully started the Anglo-Brazilian Times, “to develop and foster British enterprises; [. . .] to point out, and seek remedies for grievances and defects in the commercial and political intercourse of England and Brazil.” Scully remained the editor for almost 20 years. Even though the Times received a subsidy from the Brazilian authorities, the paper was capable of criticism. For example, Scully—a founder of the Sociedade Internacional de Imigração—opposed restrictions on Protestants, seeing this as impeding the attraction of immigrants. In 1988 in Uruguay, the Argentine businessman Eduardo Casey financed the Independent, a weekly paper edited by W. H. Denstone. In 1889, Casey also purchased the River Plate Times (established in 1877), merging it with the Independent to form one larger paper, retaining the title the River Plate Times. As Uruguay’s Irish population was small, for commercial reasons the papers set out to appeal to
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the country’s wider English-speaking community. Edmundo Murray See also: BULFIN, William; CASEY, Eduardo; DILLON, Patrick Joseph; MASSACRE AT SAINT PATRICK CHURCH, The; MULHALL, Michael George; MURRAY, Thomas; SCULLY, William
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References Graham-Yooll, Andrew. The Forgotten Colony: A History of the English-Speaking Communities in Argentina. 1981. Reprint, Buenos Aires: Literature of Latin America, 1999. Marshall, Oliver. The English-Language Press in Latin America. London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 1996.
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Q QUEBEC CITY From its foundation in 1608 to 1763, Quebec City was the most important town in what was known as Nouvelle France, which included most of Canada down into the Mississipi Valley and Louisiana. The first waves of Irish immigration in Quebec City came after the British invasion of 1759, and culminated in the mid-nineteenth century. In the mid-nineteenth century, Quebec City was the second most important town in Canada, and in 1867 it became the capital of the francophone province of Quebec. From 1815, many Irish immigrants arrived in the (by then) colonial town, the nearest from the very active immigration center located at Grosse Ile, on the St. Laurent River. In 1847, the population of Quebec City doubled, going from 40,000 to almost 100,000 persons, because of the massive arrivals of Irish families. The trip across the Atlantic was not expensive per se, but it took six weeks, in terrible, unhealthy conditions. Quebec City suffered from two epidemics of cholera in 1832 and 1834 because of the massive European immigration. Hundreds of orphan children whose parents died in the ships coming from Ireland were adopted by francophone and
Irish families living in Quebec City. The working-class Irish community living in Quebec City was often rejected by the local English elite and found hospitality from the francophone population who were also of the Roman Catholic faith. Quebec City’s Notre-Dame-des-Victoires Church in Place Royale, was designated by the bishop of Quebec City as the church of the Irish in 1824, until the Irish population built their own Saint Patrick’s church uptown, on McMahon Street, in 1833. According to various census numbers cited by Robert Grace, the Irish represented almost one-third of Quebec City’s population in 1861. Their number was around 12,000 in 1871, but they had declined to 4,170 or 3.2% of the population in 1931. Most of these Irish came from Munster, Ulster, and Leinster. As many Canadians became affected by the lack of jobs, many Irish newcomers migrated toward Montreal and the United States. Those who stayed in Quebec City were mostly integrated, and later generations became francophone (or bilingual): nowadays, many French-speaking Quebecois are named Johnson, Ryan, O’Neil, McGoldrick, among many other names. Among those who stayed were Charles Joseph Alleyn (1817–1890), who arrived in Quebec City in 1837 from Co.
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Cork; he learned French and became mayor of Quebec City (1854–1855), deputy at the Assemblée législative (Provincial Parliament) (1854–1867), and district sheriff (1866–1890). Similarly, James McInenly was the mayor of the city of Sillery (now part of Quebec City) between 1878 and 1880. Today, Quebec City is completely francophone, but it still has a population of about 30,000 persons of Irish descent who have their own English-speaking schools. St. Patrick’s High School, which teaches exclusively in English, and street names such as Maguire are further proof of the tolerance and diversity that still exists in this French part of Canada. There are still Irish communities living in rural villages located 25 kilometers north of Quebec City, in Tewksberry, Stoneham, Shannon, SaintGabriel de Valcartier, and Ste-Catherine de la Jacques-Cartier, most speaking English rather than Gaelic. On the south shore of the St-Laurent River, there are also many villages founded by Irish newcomers, not far from Quebec City: Armagh, Coleraine, Saint-Jacquesde-Leeds, St-Adrien d’Irlande. Today, there is an association called Irish Heritage that promotes the history, traditions, and contributions of the Irish in the region of Quebec City. In 2000, a memorial cross was offered by Ireland to the population of Quebec City for its hospitality; it can be seen near the Parc de l’Artillerie, in the old part of the capital, where the Irish population was at its highest during nineteenth century. Yves Laberge See also: ETHNIC AND RACE RELATIONS, IRISH AND FRENCH CANADIANS References Grace, Robert G. “The Irish in Quebec City in 1861: A Portrait of an Immigrant www.abc-clio.com
Community.” Mémoire de maîtrise, Université Laval, 1988. Tessier, Yves. An Historical Tourist Guide to Québec City. Quebec: Sociétéhistorique de Québec, 2005.
QUILL, MICHAEL JOSEPH (1905–1966) Michael Quill was a U.S. labor leader and one of the founding members of the Transport Workers Union of America (TWU). Influenced by his experiences in the Irish republican movement, Quill was one of a group of Irish subway workers in New York who aligned with the Communist Party in 1934 to found the TWU, which eventually become a national body whose members include bus, subway, railway, and airline workers. Serving as the union’s president for three decades, Quill was a colorful, dynamic speaker who was popular among workers for spearheading successful union efforts to raise the qualities of workers’ lives. Quill was born into a republican family in Gortloughera, Kilgarvin, Co. Kerry in 1905. As a youth he became involved in Irish Republican Army activities and fought against the Black and Tans in the War of Independence, although his accounts of his activities sometimes varied. After he immigrated to New York in 1926, Quill took a series of labor jobs, but he settled into a job as a ticket agent for the Interboro Rapid Transit Company, a poorly paid job featuring 12-hour shifts, seven days a week. Quill also became involved with fellow republican activists through Clan na Gael, a revolutionary group active in the United States. He and his fellow Clan na Gael members were influenced by the works of James Connolly, the socialist labor leader
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executed in Dublin for his part in the 1916 Rising; Connolly had cofounded the Irish Transport and Workers General Union of Ireland, and the new union would be named in tribute to the Irish union. The Communist Party, which recognized the potential power of an organized body of transit workers, was instrumental in the founding of the new union. The official date of the TWU’s founding was April 12, 1934, when party organizers met with Quill and fellow Clan na Gael members in a cafeteria at Columbus Circle in New York. John O’Shea was the first union president, but he was quickly replaced by Quill, whose militant dynamism, strength of conviction, and wit combined to make him a charismatic leader. At first, to foil company spies, the union recruited members mainly through clandestine meetings of trusted associates. Quill became one of the first public faces of the union, reaching his fellow workers through speeches from the soapbox and on the radio. At the time of the union’s founding, the Depression’s effects were resulting in layoffs, pay cuts, and longer hours for transit workers. The union grew in strength throughout the 1930s, gaining members from throughout the transit system as it succeeded in winning better pay and conditions and shorter work weeks. A decisive strike in 1937 supporting TWU members fired from the BMT subway line demonstrated the union’s power and increased membership dramatically. By the middle of that year, the union had more than 40,000 members among the city’s bus and subway companies, as well as streetcar and taxicab companies, and had joined the Congress of International Organizations. Also that year, Quill was elected to the city council of New York, where he would serve from 1937 to 1939 and from 1943 to 1949. www.abc-clio.com
The Communist Party would maintain strong control over the union leadership, until Quill led a backlash against the party in the late 1940s. After his split with the communists, Quill stayed in power and continued to play an often controversial role in ensuring that city politicians met the union’s demands. He remained a leftist throughout his career, taking strong stances against racism and anti-Semitism, and he was also an early opponent of the Vietnam War. Quill’s final union activity, and the one for which he is arguably best remembered, was leading New York City’s bus and subway workers in a major strike that began on January 1, 1966; it would cripple the city for 12 days. In a public act of defiance early in the strike, Quill tore up an injunction to halt it, and declared famously, and with characteristic provocation, “The judge can drop dead in his black robes.” He was arrested on January 4, along with several other union leaders, but his stay in jail was short: he collapsed from a heart attack and was hospitalized. Although Quill recovered enough to address a union event celebrating the win of a substantial wage increase and greater pension benefits, he died only days later on January 28. His funeral was held at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and was attended by many of the workers whose lives he had helped improve. Noreen Bowden See also: IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY References Freeman, Joshua B. In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933–1966. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Whittemore, L. H. The Man Who Ran the Subways: The Story of Mike Quill. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968.
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QUINN, DECLAN (1957–) Part of a cinematic family that includes actors Aidan and Marian Quinn and director Paul Quinn, Declan Quinn was born in Chicago in 1957 to Irish parents. After a childhood divided between Co. Offaly and Chicago, he attended Columbia College in Chicago, where he studied filmmaking. After graduating in 1979 he worked as a news cameraman for an NBC affiliate in Illinois; he also worked as a cinematographer (director of photography) of commercials and industrial films. In 1980 he headed back to Ireland and got a job at Windmill Lane studios in Dublin. There he worked as a cinematographer/codirector (with Barry Devlin) on a number of music videos, including “Pride” for U2 and the documentary, The Unforgettable Fire. He also found work on Irish television as a cinematographer on Clash of the Ash and Last Catholics. In 1985 he returned to New York and made music videos for a range of artists that included Debbie Harry and Whitney Houston. He also won a Clio Award in 1991 for his work as a cinematographer on an MTV short film on the subject of AIDS. In 1989 Quinn branched into films and made his debut as a feature cinematographer on The Kill Off, a gritty film noir based on the novel by cult writer Jim Thompson and directed by Maggie Greenwald. More features and television work followed, including Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991), yet another entry in the Nightmare on Elm Street series. He teamed up again with Greenwald for The Ballad of Little Jo (1993), an unusual western shot in Montana that told the story of a middle-class woman who reinvents herself as a male rancher on the American frontier of the late nineteenth century. The evocative, expressive cinematography of the www.abc-clio.com
film effectively conveyed the harsh nature of life on the frontier and won Quinn much critical praise. In 1994 he returned to Ireland to shoot All Things Bright and Beautiful, directed by his former collaborator, Barry Devlin, which told the story of a young boy whose claims that he has witnessed a miracle throw his small town into chaos. The film featured Gabriel Byrne in a small role. Upon his return to America in 1994 he teamed up with legendary French director Louis Malle to make the acclaimed film Vanya on 42nd Street. His work on that film attracted the attention of a number of directors, including Mike Figgis and Mira Nair. Figgis employed him as cinematographer on his Academy Award–winning film, Leaving Last Vegas, a poignant love story that told the story of a suicidal alcoholic (Nicolas Cage) who travels to Las Vegas to kill himself and there meets a lonely prostitute (Elisabeth Shue) with whom he begins a pitiful affair. Quinn’s innovative work on the film won much critical praise and was a key element of the film’s success; he went on to work with Figgis on two later features, One Night Stand (1997) and Cold Creek Manor (2003). Quinn’s work on Vanya on 42nd Street also inspired Nair, the Indianborn director of the hit film Salaam Bombay (1998), to approach him to work on her latest feature, Kama Sutra (1996), which was shot in India and was notable for its sumptuous visual design. Quinn worked again with Nair on Monsoon Wedding (2001), a comic story of an elaborate Indian wedding. In the past decade Quinn has made a number of Irish and Irish-American films. He served as a cinematographer on 2 By 4 (1998), written and directed by Dublinborn Jimmy Smallhorne and set in the Irish community in New York. He has also worked with Irish directors such as
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Neil Jordan (for whom he shot Breakfast on Pluto, released in 2005) and Jim Sheridan. His work with Sheridan was particularly productive: he shot Sheridan’s semibiographical In America, which told the story of an Irish family trying to survive in New York in the 1980s, and Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (2005), which marked the acting debut of rapper 50 Cent. In 1998 Quinn took on a film that was very close to his family: This Is My Father. It gave him the opportunity to work with his brothers, Aidan and Paul (who directed), and his sister Marian; it was shot around Dublin, Kildare, and Wicklow. Although the film received mixed reviews, it was an important personal project for his family. Most recently, Quinn has been working on a range of U.S. and European films, including Vanity Fair (2004) and Pride and Glory, scheduled for release in 2007. He has received many nominations and awards, including an Emmy nomination for his work on Hysterical Blindness, a television film directed by Nair in 2002, and Independent Spirit Awards for his work on In America, Kama Sutra, and Leaving Las Vegas. Quinn and his wife, Etta, have four children and live in New York State. Gwenda Young References Davenport, Richard. “One Drink Minimum: Interview with Mike Figgis and Declan Quinn.” American Cinematographer, February 1996, 28–33. Thompson, Andrew O. “The Look of Love: Director Mira Nair and cinematographer Declan Quinn on Kama Sutra.” American Cinematographer, February 1997, 96–102.
QUINN, GLENN (1970–2002) Born in Dublin, Glenn Martin Christopher Francis Quinn grew up in Cabinteely, Co. Dublin, and attended Clonkeen www.abc-clio.com
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College in Blackrock. As a teen, he played drums and guitar in local bands, influenced by his father, Murty Quinn, an Irish musician and singer. However, in 1988, Quinn moved to southern California with his mother and two sisters, finding work as a housepainter, factory worker, construction worker, and waiter. Discovered by a Hollywood casting director, Quinn first appeared in a 1989 music video, playing a pool shark, and quickly moved into minor roles on several television programs, including Beverly Hills, 90210 in 1990. His big break came that same year when he was cast as Mark Healy, the boyfriend of Becky Connor on the popular television series Roseanne. Quinn’s character was a biker and mechanic, who after several years of dating Becky eventually elopes with her, thereby becoming the onscreen son-in-law of the show’s star, Roseanne. Quinn played Mark Healy on 76 episodes of Roseanne from 1990 until the show ended in 1997. During this time, he made his feature-film debut as a drummer in Shout (1991), starring John Travolta, and played the sensitive son, Cedric Grey, in the short-lived television series, Covington Cross (1992), which was set in fourteenthcentury England. Quinn had no difficulty shifting accents in these roles—American as Mark Healy, English as Cedric Grey—but he was especially pleased to use his natural voice for his next starring role, playing Allen Francis Doyle, an Irish half-demon (on his father’s side), in the popular television series, Angel. As Quinn explained, “I’ve been hiding it [his native accent] for so long that it’s amazing to have some freedom. It was like putting on an old pair of shoes—it’s bringing my soul back to life”
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(Hayward 2002, 18). Quinn reportedly proclaimed his Irish heritage with two tattoos: “Erin Go Bragh” (Ireland Forever) on his left shoulder, and a harp on his right shoulder. Unfortunately for Quinn, his role in Angel was terminated abruptly in the ninth episode of the first season when Doyle sacrificed himself to save dozens of other half-demons from an evil horde of puredemons. Many fans (known as “Doyle’s Loyals” and “Quinn-T-Essentialists”) protested. “I think it’s a crime that Doyle was killed off so early in the first season,” wrote one fan in an Internet forum. “He was a character that had been developed, he was multidimensional, and now he’s gone, just like that?” (Mitchell 1999, 3). The character Doyle died in the episode aired on November 30, 1999. Glenn Quinn died almost exactly three
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years later, on December 3, 2002, apparently from an overdose of heroin, in a friend’s apartment in North Hollywood, California. His final role was as a professor of criminal psychology, Dr. Hal Evans, in the film R.S.V.P. (2002). James I. Deutsch
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References Fretts, Bruce. “Parrying the Luke Perry Factor.” Entertainment Weekly, September 18, 1992: 62. Hayward, Anthony. “Obituary: Glenn Quinn.” The Independent, December 18, 2002: 18. Martindale, David. “His Irish Returns.” Houston Chronicle, October 10, 1999: 5. Masson, Charles. “Fighting Irish: Glenn Quinn.” New Orleans Times-Picayune, September 27, 1992: T4. Mitchell, Pamela. “Doyle’s Doom: Angel Fans Not Happy with Sidekick’s Demise.” Houston Chronicle, December 9, 1999: 3. Reed, Christopher. “Obituary: Glenn Quinn.” The Guardian, December 21, 2002: 18.
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R REAGAN, RONALD WILSON (1911–2004) Ronald Reagan was born on February 6, 1911, in Tampico, Illinois. The son of a shoe salesman, Reagan spent most of his youth in Dixon, Illinois, and was thus firmly rooted in the midwestern middleclass; for this region and social group he felt a lasting affinity and from them he drew his most firm political support. Even in his youth and adolescence Reagan was distinguished by his geniality, optimism, and physical vigor. In his teens he became a certified lifeguard and is credited with saving dozens of people in peril of drowning. Although not an outstanding student, he performed credibly in academic pursuits. He attended Eureka College. Upon graduation he began his professional career as a sports broadcaster for radio stations in Davenport and Des Moines, Iowa. In 1937 a radio colleague with contacts in California helped him obtain a screen test. When this was successful Reagan began his film career, eventually making 50 movies. Despite later political gibes that depicted him as an untalented hack, his work in Hollywood contained several accomplished performances. His role as George “the Gipper” Gipp in Knute Rockne—All American was probably his
best role, and it gave him one of his more enduring nicknames. He is said to have considered King’s Row of 1942 as his best film. Although he never attained absolute stardom, Reagan earned numerous desirable roles, and he appeared in films with such stars as Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis (and, memorably, Bonzo, a chimpanzee). Reagan was also active in the Screen Actors Guild, holding its presidency for several terms. In 1964 Reagan gave a televised speech in support of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Goldwater was crushed in the election, but Reagan’s political career was born. He was a natural politician, for he was able to intermix persuasive optimism, suspicion of government, and personable geniality without appearing insincere. Within two years Reagan had won the governorship of California. He served as governor until 1975, during which time he became one of the most nationally prominent Republicans. In 1980, he ran for the presidency, eventually defeating the incumbent, Jimmy Carter. He assumed office in January 1981. Economics dominated Reagan’s first term. His initial campaign promises emphasized lowering taxes, showing greater strength in the world, confronting communism
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directly, and lessening governmental regulation of citizens’ lives. Despite inheriting a significant economic depression, Reagan lowered taxes, believing that the government spends money rashly, people spend it wisely, and the economy would therefore accelerate if people retained more of their own money. Moreover, he believed it was possible to promote his political policies and attack economic stagnation simultaneously; therefore, he instituted a massive increase in military and other defense spending (e.g., research and development of advanced weapons technologies). These increases succeeded in reviving the economy, but came at the cost of accumulating enormous governmental debts. It has also been claimed that this spending was an undeclared attempt to force the Soviet Union to match American defense spending, eventually driving the Soviets into economic collapse. Shortly after taking office, on March 30, 1981, Reagan was shot by an attempted assassin. Although the severity of his wound was minimized at the time, it has since emerged that the bullet came closer to killing him than was originally acknowledged. Several of his colleagues standing nearby were grievously wounded, his press secretary James Brady being the most severely harmed. Reagan’s good humor when speaking with the emergency room surgeons (“I hope you’re all Republicans”) and during his recuperation (“Honey, I forgot to duck”) endeared him to the American people. Even those politically opposed to him began to acknowledge his personal charm for the magnificent political advantage it was. Reagan ran for reelection in 1984, on a platform that emphasized strength, optimism, and economic recovery. He crushed www.abc-clio.com
his opponent Walter Mondale in one of the most lopsided victories in modern U.S. political history. Reagan’s international policies in both his first and second terms were largely based on confronting and discrediting the Soviet Union. When, however, his friend British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher met the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, Thatcher’s willingness to work with Gorbachev led Reagan to begin his own negotiations. The Reagan-Gorbachev summits were among the major diplomatic events of the 1980s and served, on the whole, to lessen tensions between the superpowers. Other major international events in which Reagan had a leading role were the deployment and withdrawal of U.S. Marines as peacekeepers in Beirut (1983), the invasion of Grenada (1983), and repeated air strikes against targets in Libya. He also covertly supported the Afghan rebels in their war against the invading Soviet armies, and he supported the Nicaraguan contra rebels in their fight against the ruling Sandinista regime. Reagan’s support for the contra rebels led to the greatest crisis in Reagan’s presidency. In late 1986, rumors began to circulate that there was an intricate, covert, and illegal scheme to fund the Nicaraguan rebels by selling weapons technology to Iran and funneling the proceeds to the contras. Despite initial denials, it emerged that such a plot did indeed exist, and seemed to reach near, and possibly into, the Oval Office itself. Reagan unquestionably authorized arms shipments, although his remaining involvement, if any, is still debated. Aside from the outright illegality of the scheme, the entire Iran-Contra scandal left Reagan looking like a man either too inattentive or too exhausted by the presidency
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to be effective. His reputation never fully recovered. It was the nadir of his presidency. By the time his successor, George H. W. Bush, took the White House in January 1989, Reagan appeared almost relieved to relinquish his presidential responsibilities. Reagan’s political legacy remains a source of intense partisan disagreement. To his supporters he was one of the great U.S. presidents, embodying American conservatism’s post-Vietnam and post-Watergate resurgence. They view his most significant accomplishments as being the destruction of European bolshevism; the global reassertion of U.S. military might; the diminishment of governmental intrusion into American civil life; a reduction of the tax burden on citizens; and a general renewal of patriotism and optimism in the United States. Opponents sharply dispute this interpretation of Reagan’s legacy. To his detractors, Reagan was recklessly provocative of an already stagnating Soviet Union; concealed regressive social policies behind populist antigovernment banalities; ignored the crucial early years of the AIDS/HIV epidemic; spent wildly with no plan to pay the concomitant debts; and directly broke the law in the Iran-Contra scandal, then lied about his actions. The two sides continue to differ, yet the intensity and durability of the debate signifies the undoubted consequentiality of Reagan’s administrations. After leaving the White House Reagan lived quietly in California. Although he gave occasional speeches in support of Republican political candidates or conservative social causes, he largely left politics to his successors. In 1994, however, he reentered American public life in an unexpected and pitiable way. After being diagnosed with the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s www.abc-clio.com
disease, he immediately disclosed his condition to the American people, who responded with sorrow and support. For reasons of health and personal dignity Reagan spent most of the rest of his life in privacy. During this period his wife Nancy became widely admired for her constancy in supporting him through his illness. He died on June 5, 2004, at his family home in Los Angeles, California. He was accorded a state funeral in Washington, D.C., after which his body was interred on the grounds of his presidential library in California. Reagan’s connections with Ireland have been largely overemphasized. Although he unquestionably took pride in his Irish heritage, he does not appear to have had a distinctive or unusually informed interest in the country or its culture. The elements of his personality that were often described as being peculiarly Irish—his “Irish humor” or “the Irish twinkle of his eye”—have a greater relevance to American popular sentiment than to any reality in Ireland. Reagan nonetheless holds an important place in the history of Irish-American relations. He attained the significant distinction of being an Irish American who rose to the highest position of power in the world. Despite the undoubtedly American qualities of his life and outlook, he represented to the United States, and to the world, the social and political achievements of the Irish in America. Reagan was himself highly popular in Ireland, despite the misgivings many Irish felt about his policy of deploying advanced missile systems in Europe. His 1984 visit to his ancestral home of Ballyporeen, Co. Kerry, was accorded a warm welcome. Whatever Reagan’s personal interest in Ireland may have been, his numerous achievements and
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enormous political legacy will continue to be regarded as yet another enduring accomplishment of the Irish peoples in America. Andrew Goodspeed See also: MULRONEY, Brian; O’NEILL, Thomas P. “Tip”; PATTERSON, Frank; PECK, Gregory References Noonan, Peggy. When Character Was King. New York: Viking, 2001. Reagan, Ronald. An American Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990. Reagan, Ronald. Speaking My Mind: Selected Speeches. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989. Reagan, Ronald. Where’s the Rest of Me? New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1965. Stockman, David A. The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed. New York: Harper and Row, 1986.
REDSHAW, THOMAS DILLON (1944–) Born in Salem, Massachusetts, and raised in nearby Marblehead, Thomas Dillon Redshaw was educated at the Mt. Hermon School and at Tufts University, where he edited the literary magazine before graduating in 1966. Redshaw attended University College Dublin in 1966–1967, earning an MA in Anglo-Irish Literature under the direction of Roger McHugh. During his years in Ireland, and later in the Twin Cities, Redshaw published poetry and frequently gave readings from Such a Heart Dances Out (1971), Heimaey (1974), and The Floating World (1979). In Dublin, he established lifelong literary friendships, most notably with the poet John Montague, the subject of his 1980 dissertation at New York University, which was directed by M. L. Rosenthal. In 1971, Redshaw moved to Minnesota to take a position with the College www.abc-clio.com
(now University) of St. Thomas. His association with the quarterly journal ÉireIreland, the journal of the Irish American Cultural Institute, lasted from 1974 to 1985. Redshaw spent a year as a senior fellow in Irish studies at Queen’s University Belfast in 1986–1987 and returned to ÉireIreland as editor from 1989 to 1995. In 1997, Redshaw and others launched New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua, published by St. Thomas’s Center for Irish Studies. In both publications that he has edited, Redshaw has expanded the journals’ creative writing, coverage of the visual arts, and Irish-language materials. He has spent several summers studying Irish in Carraroe, Co. Galway. Redshaw’s critical writings tend toward historicism and focus on twentieth-century Irish poetry, particularly the work of Thomas Kinsella, Austin Clarke, George Reavey, Thomas McCarthy, and John Montague. In 1989, he compiled Hill Field: Poems and Memoirs for John Montague on His Sixtieth Birthday, and in 2004, Redshaw edited a collection of 21 critical articles, Well Dreams: Essays on John Montague, including his own survey of Montague criticism, a study of Montague’s fiction, and an annotated checklist of Montague’s publications. Since the mid1990s, Redshaw has published articles through Liam Miller’s Dolmen Press. He has edited a series of acclaimed broadsides and limited editions of Irish poets for Traffic Street Press in Minnesota. James Silas Rogers
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References Redshaw, Thomas Dillon. Collected Poems of Thomas MacGreevy. Dublin: New Writers’ Press, 1971. 1-800-368-6868
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RE-EMIGRANTS WITHIN THE AMERICAS Traditionally, historians have understood the migration process as a linear phenomenon in which the emigrants depart from one place and settle in another. However, most of the Irish emigrants to Latin America had an opportunistic mind and their migration pattern can be seen more as circular than linear. When they were not successful in attaining their goals in one place, they swiftly re-emigrated to another destination with better prospects. In the 1820s, Irishmen who had served in the British Army were applying for assistance from the British Colonial Office to settle in the New World, mostly Canada. They looked for free passages and the possibility of free land. Once in the New World, they often moved on to the United States and possibly to Latin America. In the same period there was a flux of Irish immigrants in Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina from the United States and Canada. On the one hand the North Atlantic seaway was safer than the South Atlantic route, as most of the new republics in South America were still fighting for their independence against Spain. On the other hand, positive news circulated among Irish circles in the United States through private family letters, newspapers, and travel guides. This particular migration resulted in what was known in Argentina as the “Irish Yankees.” In the same period, hundreds of members of the Irish Colony in Brazil traveled to Argentina, while Irish and Irish-American rural settlers in California and Texas crossed the southern frontier and settled in Mexican land or farther south in Panama and Central America. During and after the U.S. Civil War a new flow of Irish immigrants traveled www.abc-clio.com
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from North America to Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires. Most were experienced soldiers and enlisted for some time in the Triple Alliance army against Paraguay. Among these soldiers were John Stephen Dillon and Peter Garland, who successfully managed to gain positions in the Argentine government as immigration agents in Ireland. In 1890–1920, following thousands of European settlers in Argentina and Brazil who re-emigrated to the United States, numbers of poor Irish emigrants and their families who would not find an opportunity in South America decided to try their luck in the United States. The records of the Ellis Island Database also include some families who were victims of the Dresden Affair and would later be transferred to the United States. Edmundo Murray See also: DRESDEN AFFAIR; PARAGUAY References Murray, Thomas. The Story of the Irish in Argentina. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1919.
REPEAL MOVEMENT From the granting of Catholic Emancipation in 1829 until the onset of the Irish Famine in 1845, Daniel O’Connell— known as “the Liberator” for his successful leadership of the emancipation movement— led a campaign for the repeal of the Act of Union. The Act, passed in 1800, had dissolved the Irish parliament and transferred legislative power to Westminster. Repeal, according to O’Connell’s plan, would restore an Irish parliament to Dublin. O’Connell was convinced that only an Irish parliament could properly address the
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political, social, religious, and economic problems unique to Ireland. The relationship that an independent Irish parliament would have to Britain and the Empire was not made explicit, though O’Connell consistently emphasized loyalty to the British crown. Despite his large following during the emancipation campaign, initially O’Connell had a difficult time garnering support for repeal. The Anglo-Irish ascendancy feared that an end to the Union would mean an end to their privileged position within Irish society. Many Irish people in the middle classes, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, were reluctant to risk the social upheaval that might accompany such a constitutional change. At the same time, rural discontent was largely focused on the question of tithes (imposts levied by the Church of Ireland) and could not easily be channeled to support the repeal movement. Meanwhile, regional variations in the economy led many people in the north of Ireland to oppose repeal, as the textile and linen industries depended on British capital and technology. Nor did O’Connell find support for repeal among British politicians, whose backing would be crucial for the repeal movement to succeed. When, in April 1834, O’Connell introduced a motion for repeal before the House of Commons, the motion was overwhelmingly defeated by a vote of 523 to 38. Unable to gain widespread support for repeal in the early 1830s, O’Connell sought an alliance with the governing Whig party. A Benthamite Utilitarian, O’Connell hoped to gain concessions for Ireland, even if those concessions fell short of his ultimate goal of repeal. The government, in return, believed that by granting concessions it could more fully reconcile Irish Catholic www.abc-clio.com
opinion to the Union. An informal agreement was reached in March 1835; according to the Lichfield House Compact, O’Connell agreed to suspend his repeal agitation in exchange for a number of legislative reforms. While those reforms, which included a new tithe bill and an Irish poor law, ultimately fell short of O’Connell’s expectations, they—together with a new willingness on the part of the Irish administration in Dublin Castle to open large areas of patronage and employment to Catholics—were enough to keep the repeal movement fairly quiescent for several years. Pessimistic about the Whigs’ chances for success in the next British election, O’Connell took steps to revive the campaign for repeal in 1840. In April he launched the National Association of Ireland, which was soon renamed the Loyal National Repeal Association. Hoping to gain mass support, as he had for Catholic Emancipation, O’Connell modeled the Repeal Association on the enormously successful Catholic Association. Members paid £1 in annual dues; those who could not afford the annual membership dues were invited to become associate members for a shilling per year. As part of the effort to popularize the repeal movement, reading rooms were established throughout the country where anyone interested in the movement could read nationalist newspapers and pamphlets. Foremost among the literature was the Nation, first published in October 1842 by Thomas Davis, John Dillon, and Charles Gavan Duffy. These three men, along with John Mitchel and William Smith O’Brien, formed the core of the Young Ireland movement. As cultural nationalists, Davis and his associates believed an Irish parliament would help
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protect Ireland from the contaminating influence of British culture. When repeal activity tapered off temporarily in 1842 while O’Connell served as lord mayor of Dublin, the Nation newspaper helped to keep the movement alive. During the spring of 1843, the Repeal Association grew in strength, numbers, and financial stability. The upsurge of support can be partly explained by widespread discontent over the new poor law, which O’Connell wisely channeled to his cause. The public meetings held on Sunday afternoons in different parts of the country also contributed greatly to the movement’s popularity. Hundreds of thousands came to hear O’Connell speak. In addressing the vast outdoor meetings, O’Connell promised his audiences that they would have a parliament in Dublin before the year was out. He emphasized, however, that theirs would be a moral victory and that the audiences at his “monster meetings” should disperse and go home peacefully. O’Connell’s commitment to nonviolence was put to the test in October 1843 when the government proscribed a massive meeting scheduled to be held at Clontarf. Rather than risk a potentially violent confrontation with the authorities, O’Connell canceled the meeting, much to the dismay of his followers. A week later, O’Connell was arrested and charged with sedition. He was sentenced to a year in prison, but after seven months the Law Lords reversed the decision and ordered O’Connell’s release from Richmond Gaol. The repeal movement never again regained the momentum that it had enjoyed in the spring and summer of 1843. For one thing, the Conservative government under Sir Robert Peel adopted a policy of conciliation that seemed to undermine the www.abc-clio.com
case for repeal. In addition, the Young Irelanders became increasingly critical of O’Connell’s pragmatic utilitarianism and what they considered his sectarian rhetoric. Tensions ran especially high over the question of university education; whereas Davis supported Peel’s 1845 proposal to establish nondenominational colleges in Galway, Cork, and Belfast, O’Connell joined Archbishop MacHale of Tuam in opposing the “godless” colleges. The conflict initiated a feud that eventually ended in a split between O’Connell and Young Ireland, ostensibly over Young Ireland’s unwillingness to abjure violence unconditionally. Finally, the onset of the Famine hastened the collapse of the repeal movement, as the struggle for basic survival temporarily eclipsed political concerns. By the time O’Connell died in Genoa in May 1847, the movement had already run its course. Kathleen Ruppert See also: O’CONNELL, Daniel References Boyce, D. George. Nineteenth-Century Ireland: The Search for Stability. Savage, MD: Barnes and Noble Books, 1991. Hoppen, K. Theodore. Ireland Since 1800: Conflict and Conformity. London: Longman, 1989. MacDonagh, Oliver. The Emancipist: Daniel O’Connell, 1830–47. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.
RESEARCH COLLECTIONS, IRISH, IN CANADA Libraries and archives in Canada that contain major collections in Irish history, language, and literature vary greatly in their holdings. Large Irish collections that are suitable for serious research are often held in major universities or in research organizations. Interest in Irish research in
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Canada, as in the United States, has coincided with the development of Irish studies programs in academic institutions and research organizations. The other positive sign is the number of active Irish cultural and historical societies, many of which work closely with the local academic community, that serve specialists and those whose interests are more broadly based. Although only a sampling of these collections, mainly the largest and most important, are described here, there are many other Irish collections, smaller in scale, many with only a few holdings useful to Irish research, in Canada. Researchers should examine their online catalogs and websites to get an overview of their collections. Most require special permission for visitors to use and are open by appointment only.
Government Archives, Private Organizations, and Public Libraries At the federal level, the best source is still Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, which is the national repository for Canadian history and records. Library and Archives Canada combines the collections, services, and staff expertise of the former National Library of Canada and the National Archives of Canada, as an easy, one-stop access to the texts, photographs, and other documents that reflect Canadian cultural, social, and political development. It includes the National Photography Collection, among other units, and eleven provincial archives scattered throughout Canada. The archives have the papers of many Irish Catholic politicians and correspondence between government departments and Irish Catholic leaders. www.abc-clio.com
Genealogical collections include city/county/ provincial directories, family histories, census records, birth/marriage/death records, church/parish records, land records/claims, and estate records. A number of Record Groups (RGs) are of special interest to Irish research. In Military/Naval Records, RG-8 includes materials relating to the War of 1812, medal registers, Fenian Raids, Red River and North West Rebellions, and the South African (Boer) War. Registers from 1866 to 1902 are available on microfilm. RG-9 covers Fenian Raids and bounty claims of militia veterans (on microfilm), although the information included is scanty and incomplete. RG-38 includes information on veterans’ applications for land grants under the Volunteer Bounty Act for those who served in the Boer War. Among the Immigration Records there are few lists before 1865, however, passenger manifests since 1865 are included for major Canadian ports and some U.S. ports. Loyalist Sources includes muster rolls for Loyalist regiments. In the National Photography Collection, collections of special interest to Irish research are the following: Robert F. H. Bruce Collection (black and white photographs, 1880–1900); Canada, Department of Manpower and Immigration Collection (black and white, 1958–1960); Canada, Immigration Branch Collection (black and white, 1894–1934); W. Worth Davis Collection (black and white, 1917–1919), with scenes in Ireland; Eva McKitrick Collection (black and white, 1898–1914); Irish Canadian Society; Edward Plunkett Taylor Collection (black and white, 1956–1970), which includes brewing operations in Ireland; Frank Curry Collection; Arnold Heeney Collection; W. J. Topley Collection; and Robert Magill
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Collection. The Other Countries (Ireland) Collection includes World War I military photos of the Duchess of Connaught’s Own and Irish Canadian Rangers. The major research organization is the Canadian Association for Irish Studies (CAIS), which has been serving students of Irish culture for more than 30 years, seeking to foster and encourage the study of Irish culture in Canada. It also works to encourage young scholars, develop the next generation of Irish studies enthusiasts, and support discussion of current issues in Irish studies and culture through conferences, publications, and online resources. CAIS brings together all those who are committed to promoting Irish culture in Canada. Members of CAIS can be found in every province and territory of Canada. Members also come from Ireland, Northern Ireland, Britain, the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australasia. Every year, the Association convenes at one of Canada’s universities for a celebration of Irish culture and heritage. CAIS publishes a semiannual scholarly journal, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies; a semiannual newsletter for members; information about CAIS’s annual conference; and a Web site for discussion of matters relevant to CAIS members. The Canadian Catholic Historical Association (CCHA), which calls itself “A National Society for the Promotion of Interest in the History of the Canadian Catholic Church,” was founded in 1933 by James F. Kenney, a descendant of prefamine immigrants, who was motivated by a love of his Canadian and Irish roots; he hoped CCHA would “bring to light the silent and neglected records of her [Canadian Catholic Church’s] adventurous and spacious past.” It has now become one of the primary agencies for researching and www.abc-clio.com
publishing Irish Catholic Canadian history, primarily through its journal, Historical Studies (started in 1984). Members belong either to the English Section of the CCHA, or to the French Section of La Société Canadienne D’Histoire de L’Eglise Catholique. Each section is autonomous and holds its own annual conference. The French section usually holds its conference in French-speaking cities in the autumn. Across the Atlantic, in Dublin, there is the Association for Canadian Studies in Ireland (ACSI), established in May 1982 to support and encourage the study and understanding of Canada; its culture, history, and institutions; and the connections and parallels between the two countries. It sponsors an international conference every two years. ACSI strives to initiate and support courses on Canadian topics in universities and third-level colleges, facilitate the exchange of scholars and scholarship between Canada and Ireland, and encourage research and publication on Canada. An interesting resource in Toronto is the United Empire Loyalists’ Association of Canada, which preserves the history and traditions of the families who, as a result of the American Revolution, sacrificed their homes to retain their loyalty to the British. There is a specialized library on Loyalists of Canada, including materials relating to those Irish who were United Empire Loyalists and left the United States during and after the American Revolution (1776–1783). The Loyalist Gazette is published semiannually.
Colleges and Universities Besides research organizations, several academic institutions have established research collections to support programs of Irish
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studies, but these archives and special collections are also invaluable to researchers interested in Irish history and literature. A major repository is in Vancouver, at the University of British Columbia. The library’s Norman Colbeck Collection contains Irish materials that make up a relevant part of the collection of 1,508 volumes. The Anglo-Irish portion of this Collection includes writers from the Irish Literary Revival (Austin Clarke, Padraic Colum, Daniel Corkery, Thomas Crofton Croker, Lord Dunsany, Darrell Figgis, Robin Flower, Monk Gibbon, Oliver St. John Gogarty, Eva Gore-Booth, Robert Graves, Lady Gregory, Stephen Lucius Gwynn, Nesta Higginson [Moira O’Neill], Katharine Tynan Hinkson, Douglas Hyde, James Joyce, Emily Lawless, Sir Shane Leslie, Thomas MacDonagh, Anna Johnston MacManus [Ethna Carbery], Edward Martyn, George Moore, Sean O’Casey, Standish O’Grady, Seumas O’Kelly, Padraic Pearse, Joseph Mary Plunkett, Forrest Reid, Lennox Robinson, George Russell (Æ), George Bernard Shaw, James Stephens, John Millington Synge, Oscar Wilde, Jack Yeats, and W. B. Yeats. There is also a miscellaneous collection of 81 titles, including memoirs and biographies of prominent Irish figures, anthologies and histories of Irish literature, and sets of Irish Statesman (1923–1929) and Dublin Magazine (1923–1958), among other items. Also in British Columbia, there is the University of Victoria’s McPherson Library, which contains the Dolmen Press Archive, with its Anglo-Irish literature material on John Yeats, Jack Yeats, W. B. Yeats, Padraic Colum, Philip Hobsbaum, Frank O’Connor, and Sir William Orpen. Another important research collection is the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, www.abc-clio.com
University of Toronto. Among its extensive holdings are books and material relating to Anglo-Irish revival. The Alfred Tennyson De Lury Collection of Anglo-Irish Literature contains his 1890–1941 papers (12 boxes and items), including his extensive correspondence with Anglo-Irish writers, his diaries, a bound volume of DeLury’s memoranda, and Yeats’s works. However, much of DeLury’s correspondence received from Irish writers is in Trent University, Peterborough. The books in the Delury Collection include more than 5,000 volumes centered on works of W. B. Yeats and his contemporaries (Thomas Davis, J.C. Mangan, and Samuel Ferguson), plus a small sampling of William Carlton, strong holdings (about 30 volumes) of William Allingham, and nearly complete runs of Emily Lawless and Jane Barlow. There are materials on Yeats’s contemporaries, including Lady Gregory, Katharine Tynan Hinkson, George Russell (Æ), George Moore, Standish O’Grady, Oliver St. John Gogarty, Douglas Hyde, Frank O’Connor, Austin Clark, Padraic Colum, Lord Dunsany, James Stephens, Sean O’Faolain, Liam O’Flaherty, and James Joyce, and records relating to the Abbey Theatre (Yeats, Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, Lennox Robinson, St. John Ervine, Sean O’Casey, Edward Martyn, Seumas O’Kelly, among others), plus a collection of Abbey Theatre programs and ads (1903–1925). Also important are materials relating to Arthur Symons and Michael Field and a fine collection relating to Cuala Press. Periodicals include The Yellow Book, The Hobby Horse, The Savoy, Samhain, and Beltaine. Fisher also has the personal library of an Irish gentleman, Quentin Dick, which represents the country house library of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
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century. The entire collection was acquired by William Henry Barrett, who donated it to the university. In Hamilton, Ontario, McMaster University’s Mills Memorial Library, in its William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, maintains material on the Anglo-Irish renaissance (1890–1939), which houses the holdings of several major writers, including W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde, Lady Gregory, and J. M. Synge. There is also a small amount of manuscript material, including the holograph manuscript of Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer, letters and manuscripts of Samuel Beckett, letters of Jack Yeats, and Anglo-Irish literary periodicals. A copy of Rules and Orders to be Observed in the Upper House[of Lords] of [the Irish] Parliament [between 1750 to 1760] is also found. Another set of material at McMasters University pertains to C. F. McLoughlin (1886–1967), a member of the United Arts Club in Dublin and an acquaintance of Jack Butler Yeats and other Irish writers. The collection consists of 37 letters from Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957) to McLoughlin, a Christmas card signed by Yeats, and an unsigned, unaddressed post card, possibly from Yeats. Other items belonging to McLoughlin are a poem by Padraic Colum (1881–1972), “The Sea Bird to the Wave,” which, McLoughlin notes, Colum wrote down for him one night at the Arts Club in 1958, and two manuscripts, one about the Irish troubles in 1916–1921 and the other a collection of Irish proverbs from a social evening at the Club in 1967. The first manuscript is the result of McLoughlin contacting veterans of the troubles and getting them to write down their memoirs in 1966. There are www.abc-clio.com
also several items that do not appear to have a direct tie to McLoughlin, including a poem, “Sleep Song,” by Frederick Robert Higgins (1896–1941), editor, poet, and playwright; a signed Christmas card from James Sullivan Starkey and E. F. Starkey to J. J. Chichester containing a printed poem, “1939,” by Seumas O’Sullivan (1879–1958) and signed by O’Sullivan (O’Sullivan was the pseudonym of James Sullivan Starkey); a letter from Katharine Tynan (1861–1931), poet and novelist, to Mr. O’Leary; two letters from W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), one to Sara Allgood and the other to Mr. Farrell; poems on Christmas cards by Donagh MacDonagh (1912–1968), barrister, editor, poet, and playwright; a sermon by the Right Reverend Robert Wyse Jackson, bishop of Limerick; and an Irish National Theatre Society program. For the music researcher, there is the Irish and Scottish Song Collection, collected by Harry S. Higginson [ca. 188–], a bound, 621-page manuscript of lyrics, with song lyrics by Thomas Moore, Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Lever, Christie, and others. There is also a collection on English, Irish, Scottish and German composers, conductors, musicians, writers and publishers (1827–1957). Irish musicians include Michael William Balfe (1808–1870, a singer and the most successful composer of English operas in the nineteenth century; Thomas Moore (1779–1852), a poet, musician and composer of songs; and Vincent Wallace (1812–1865), a composer of operas and piano pieces. In Halifax, the Patrick Power Library at St. Mary’s University is a resource center for the study of the Irish, supplemented by the Thomas D’Arcy McGee Chair in Irish Studies. Stauffer Library at Queen’s
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University, Kingston, focuses on AngloIrish literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and features 200 works by or about W.B. Yeats; 250 works by or about James Joyce; 270 works by or about George Bernard Shaw; works of Æ (George Russell), Maria Edgeworth, Thomas Croker, Katherine Tynan Hinkson, and Monk Gibbon; and a complete set of the Cuala Press publications. The University Archives has regional collections (House of Industry registers, Kingston General Hospital registers, and manuscript census microfilm, including Irish immigrants). Two collections include materials for Irish immigrant workers (Calvin Company and Tett Family). Literary papers include those of Katharine Tynan (1861–1931) and Æ (pseudonymn for George Russell). The Monk Gibbon Papers, the largest collection (almost 30 linear feet), with more than 300 items, include lectures, proofs, reviews, typescripts and galleys, illustrations, journals for travel books, manuscripts, news cuttings, correspondence, revisions, essays, radio scripts, letters from publishers, photocopy of AE diary, BBC debate, TV appearances, essays on K. Tynan, D. Hyde, etc., film/ballet essays, unpublished play by Gibbon, World War I materials, two Army journals, jotting for poems, copies of poems, and so on. Douglas Library also has materials on the Roger Casement controversy, ballet, an outline for a film on Jenny Lind, education, religion, Dublin Rebellion, miscellaneous notes on war and rebellion, historical diaries and letters regarding the Easter Rising of 1916, and Gibbon’s poetry publications. The holdings in the libraries at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton include material from the Royal Irish Academy; Ordinance Survey Memoirs; www.abc-clio.com
immigrant lists to New Brunswick from the counties of Antrim and Londonderry (1834–1835); extracts from the Douglas Hyde manuscript diary in the National Library of Ireland, January-May 1891 (microfilm); and Sources for the History of Irish Civilisation: Articles in Irish Periodicals, ed. by Richard J. Hayes. 9 vols. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1970. Killam Library, at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, includes several items in the areas of general literature and history, as does the Queen Elizabeth II Library, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, which also keeps material on Gaelic literature, Anglo-Irish literature, Irish history, geography, politics, linguistics, and folklore, along with approximately 14,000 monograph titles and several hundred back runs of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish newspapers and a number of statistical publications relating to population and land use. The Rare Books and Special Collections at McLennan Library, McGill University, Montreal, has the William Butler Yeats collection, composed of first, early, and variant editions of most of his writings, some 86 volumes in all. There is some criticism and a few books by his brother Jack Butler Yeats. The Yeats material is complemented by a selection of material in the Colgate History of Printing Collection, published by the Cuala Press. This includes a complete run of A Broadside (1908–1915), early works by Yeats and others, and some of their more recent works dealing with the Celtic Twilight. The University of Alberta in Edmonton has strong holdings in Anglo-Irish literature in its University Library, including a complete run of Cuala Press publications and the works of Liam O’Flaherty in
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original editions. The University of Ottawa’s Morisset Library has a facsimile reprint of the James Joyce Archive and Irish Texts Society.
Religious Archives Church archives remain one of the best sources of information on the Irish immigrant populations that settled in various communities throughout Canada. The richest unpublished material on the history of Irish Catholics in the country can be found in the major archdiocesan and diocesan archives in Canada. Particularly useful are the archives of the archdioceses of Toronto, Quebec, and St. John’s, Newfoundland. Much of the correspondence from the Archives of the Archdiocese of Halifax is on microfilm at the Provincial Archives of Nova Scotia. Collections of Irish Catholic newspapers are rare, but the Archives of the Archdiocese of Kingston has an excellent collection of originals of twentieth-century journals, as does St. Paul’s College (University of Manitoba) and St. Michael’s College (University of Toronto). Both Memorial University in St. John’s and St. Mary’s University in Halifax contain research centers for the study of Irish culture and folklore. Overseas, Irish Catholic materials for Canada can be found in the Secret Vatican Archives and in the Archives of the Propaganda Fide (Rome), the Public Record Office (London), and the Archives of the Archdiocese of Dublin. For the Irish in the Anglican Church, a good source is at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. In 1975, the university reached an agreement with the Anglican Diocese of Niagara to collect, describe, and preserve the records of the churches in the diocese as well as the nonactive diocesan www.abc-clio.com
records. Since that time the records of almost all of the churches in the diocese have been deposited at McMaster, accounting for more than 100 parishes. The diocese covers approximately 3,320 square miles in the province of Ontario. The most northerly towns are Harriston and Mount Forest, the western boundary is Nanticoke, the eastern perimeter is marked by Oakville, and the diocese extends southwards to Fort Erie. These records, which have been described by type of record and date, but are not indexed by personal name, are of particular value for genealogical research. They supply information concerning baptisms, confirmations, marriages, burials, and church membership. They also provide a unique perspective on the social history of the area. The earliest records date from the 1780s. In the early nineteenth century the Niagara region was part of the Diocese of Quebec and it belonged to the Diocese of Toronto from the 1830s until 1875. The Diocese of Niagara was established in 1875. For further information concerning Anglican Records in Ontario, see Guide to the Holdings of the Archives of the Ecclesiatical Province of Ontario (Agincourt, ON: Generation Press, 1990). Researchers should also be aware of the Gladys McAndrew collections, which relate to missionary work and residential schools undertaken by the Anglican Church in Canada from 1943 to 1954. Martin J. Manning See also: AMERICAN CONFERENCE FOR IRISH STUDIES; ANCIENT ORDER OF HIBERNIANS; PRESS, The IRISH ETHNIC; RESEARCH COLLECTIONS, IRISH, IN THE UNITED STATES References Clark, Dennis. Hibernia America: The Irish and Regional Cultures. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986.
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798 RESEARCH COLLECTIONS, IRISH, IN THE UNITED STATES Eleuterio-Comer, Susan K. Irish American Material Culture: A Directory of Collections, Sites, and Festivals in the United States and Canada. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988. Glazier, Michael, ed. Encyclopedia of the Irish in America. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1999. Lester, DeeGee. Irish Research: A Guide to Collections in North America, Ireland, and Great Britain. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987. Magocsi, Paul R., ed. Encyclopedia of Canada’s Peoples. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto; published for the Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1999. Weaver, Jack W., and DeeGee Lester. Immigrants from Great Britain and Ireland: A Guide to Archival and Manuscript Sources in North America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986.
RESEARCH COLLECTIONS, IRISH, IN THE UNITED STATES Libraries and archives in the United States that contain major collections in Irish history, language, and literature vary greatly in their holdings. Some focus on contemporary material while others have older material that highlights specific areas. Large Irish collections that are suitable for serious research are often held in major universities or in research organizations. Interest in Irish research in the United States and around the world has coincided with the development of Irish studies programs in academic institutions and research organizations. Scholars and teachers with Irish research interests have been well served by an Irish studies organization, the American Conference for Irish Studies (formerly the American Committee for Irish Studies) that not only supports their work but also brings together academicians and others interested in Irish studies. The other positive sign is the number of active Irish cultural www.abc-clio.com
and historical societies, many of which work closely with the local academic community, that serve specialists and those whose interests are more broadly based. Although only a sampling of these collections, mainly the largest and most important, are described here, there are many other Irish collections, smaller in scale, many with only a few holdings useful to Irish research, in the United States and Canada.
Government Archives, Private Organizations, and Public Libraries The oldest of these private organizations is the American Irish Historical Society, founded in Boston in 1897 to document the contributions of the Irish in the United States. It moved to its present New York City location in 1940. The society’s library and archives hold an unparalleled collection of newspapers and periodicals chronicling the American Irish experience, including copies of the Northern Star and Belfast Newsletter, dating back to the late eighteenth century, and several early and mid-nineteenth century newspapers, such as The Nation, The United Irishman, and The Dublin Penny Journal. The library also has a unique collection of letters from Patrick Pearse and Charles Stewart Parnell, along with the archives of other societies and organizations and the personal papers of leading Irish Americans like Daniel F. Cohalan. The collection is complemented by works of art from such noted Irish artists as Nathaniel Hone, John Faulkner, George Russel (Æ), John Butler Yeats, Aloysius O’Kelly, and Augustus St. Gaudens; an extensive collection of Irish music and theater, including a taped interview with Brendan Behan that became his Confessions
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of an Irish Rebel; and documents and papers of Friends of Irish Freedom, the Land League, the Society of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, the Catholic Club, and the Guild of Catholic Lawyers. The library’s journal, The Recorder, is usually published twice a year. The wide range of programs created by the Irish American Cultural Institute (IACI) has developed an appreciation of Irish heritage among young and old. Founded in 1992 by Eoin McKiernan, professor of English at the College (now University) of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, and supported by local philanthropist Patrick Butler, the IACI and its local branches sponsored the Irish Fortnight lecture series while the society’s library houses more than 10,000 volumes, the most complete private collection of Irish and American Irish history and literature in the United States. There is also a small genealogical collection and appropriate reference volumes. In addition, the institute publishes the quarterly Eire-Ireland, an internationally acclaimed interdisciplinary journal; Ducas, a newsletter that offers members insight into the world of Irish culture, history, and the latest happenings at the IACI; and IACI Bulletin, a monthly e-mail newsletter that provides the latest news and events related to Irish and IrishAmerican culture and heritage. The American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS), established in 1962, is an interdisciplinary organization whose purpose is to encourage research and writing in Irish studies and to promote Irish studies as a distinct course of study in American colleges and universities. Beginning in 1963, ACIS has held an annual spring conference. In 1976, ACIS began to sponsor fall regional conferences in New England, the www.abc-clio.com
Middle Atlantic States, the South, the Midwest, and the West. A number of ACIS publications and affiliated publications, The ACIS Newsletter, the Reprint Series, and the Irish Literary Supplement, further encourage the development of Irish studies by providing news, reviews, bibliographies, and research reports and queries. The Ward Irish Music Archives in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, is a private collection that developed from one person’s background in the field of Irish music. It has several major collections, most notably the Michael and Mary Comer Collection, which has more than 5,000 reel-to-reel, CD, cassette, LP, 45 rpm, and 78 rpm records on Irish labels, with material dating from the 1940s through 1980s, and the Ed and Cathy Ward Collection of more than 400 LPs, CDs, and cassettes collected since the 1970s, when Ward ran Irish Music Ltd., which distributed for numerous Irish recording labels. The collection also has more than 1,000 pieces of Irish sheet music, several thousand Irish and IrishAmerican 45 rpm and 78 rpm records, hundreds of songbooks and music periodicals, and a number of authentic antique phonographs and juke boxes. The Ward Irish Music Archives also houses the Irish Fest Collection, which has more than 6,000 items, including many of the LPs, tapes, and CDs collected from bands sending material to Irish Fest for possible booking, as well as the Irish Fest John McCormack Collection, one of the world’s largest public collections of the great Irish tenor’s recordings. This collection features 11 very rare cylinders from 1903 and 1904 and rare McCormack recordings on such labels as Odeon, Columbia, Regal, Okeh, Gramophone G & T, HMV, and Victor; advertisements; books; postcards; more
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than 40 photographs; and LPs. Finally, the Bing Crosby Collection is the largest public collection of his recordings and memorabilia outside Gonzaga University. Washington, D.C., houses two national archival repositories. The Library of Congress has very strong holdings of Irish materials. Irish children’s books are well represented in the general collection, and the library recently has begun purchasing titles in Gaelic. Many of the leading illustrators of children’s books are represented in the collections. The library’s microform collections include Irish biographies (1840–1940), with biographical entries for more than 180,000 persons. Proceedings of the Irish parliament are contained in Printed Records of the Parliament of Ireland, 1613–1800. The Local History and Genealogy Reading Room contains British and Irish parish registers, family histories, record society publications, and county histories of interest to genealogists, historians, and social historians. The numerous American, Irish, and English editions of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, a primary text on the development of the English common law, form the core of the William Blackstone Collection. In College Park, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C., the National Archives and Records Administration has substantial Irish materials throughout its invaluable holdings, including military records and ship and passenger records. For U.S. diplomatic relations with Ireland, the National Archives has the records of the U.S. Department of State relating to internal affairs in both the Irish Free State (1910–1929) and Ireland (1930–1944), on microfilm and in the hard copy texts. There are also records for U.S. consular posts in www.abc-clio.com
Ireland and material on U.S. postwar economic aid to that country. The New York Public Library contains papers relating to the history of Ireland from the beginning of the Fenian movement to the proclamation of the Irish Republic. The papers include Sir Roger Casement’s correspondence from 1904 to 1916, reflecting his activities in the United States as a spokesman for Irish independence and in Germany as a fund-raiser for the Irish Volunteers and organizer of the Irish Brigade. Also included are the papers of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa (1857–1904), relating to the history of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood and the Fenian Brotherhood; papers of Joseph McGarrity (1911–1937), relating to the Irish Republican Movement in the United States; papers of Patrick McCartan (1915–1949), including reports on conditions in Ireland after the Easter Rising in 1916 and copies of his reports as envoy of the Provisional Government of Ireland to the Soviet Union; letters to James O’Donoghue (1888–1912), chiefly regarding his 1912 book Poets of Ireland and other writings; papers of James McGurrin from his time as secretary of the Joint Committee on the Immigration Act of 1924; correspondence of Darmuid Lynch (1919–1922), relating to the Irish bond certificate campaign; and papers of William J. Maloney relating to Sir Roger Casement, the Irish Volunteer Movement, and Irish-American relations. The library’s Berg Collection contains some 30,000 printed volumes, pamphlets, and broadsides, and 2,000 linear feet of literary archives and manuscripts, representing the work of more than 400 authors. This collection has extensive manuscript holdings from the period 1820–1970. For
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the Irish, a short list would include W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Sean O’Casey (comprising the remnants of his fireravaged papers). Institutional papers found in the Berg include those of the Abbey Theatre. Public libraries in cities with large Irish immigrant population, such as the Boston Public Library and the Chicago Public Library, have the collections of important Irish officials and organizations from their regions along with passenger and ship records and microfilmed copies of Irish newspapers and other publications that were created by those cities’ ethnic presses. Also useful are state archives and diocesan church archives in cities with large Irish immigrant populations (e.g., Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, New York); the Embassy of Ireland in Washington, D.C., and the Irish consulate-generals in Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco; the Ancient Order of Hibernians in America; Gaelic League–Irish American Clubs in the Detroit area; and local historical societies, such as the Irish American Heritage Center in Chicago and the Irish Family Historical Society Library in Newton, Massachusetts.
Colleges and Universities Besides research organizations, several academic institutions have established research collections to support programs of Irish studies, but these archives and special collections are also invaluable to researchers interested in Irish history and literature. The University of St. Thomas created the Center for Irish Studies (Larionad an Leinn Eireannaigh) in March 1996 to provide academic, scholarly, and cultural programs on Irish topics. The center’s quarterly, New Hibernia Review (Iris Eireannach Nua), publishes articles of Irish and www.abc-clio.com
Irish-American interest. The center advances teaching and scholarship in Irish studies through an extensive publications and education program that provides a regional focus for the scholarly consideration of Irish culture. The university’s significant library holdings in Irish literature complement its work. The rarest of the materials are held in the substantial Celtic Collection in O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library Center. A collection that has grown to national renown as a guardian of Irish research is at Boston College, in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. It is presently considered the largest of its kind in North America and represents nearly every aspect of Irish history and literature in its Irish Collection. The foundation of the renowned Irish rare book collection at the Burns Library consists of books, pamphlets, manuscripts, newspapers, periodicals, and landholding records documenting Irish history and society from the late 1700s to the present. In recent years the collection has expanded into the areas of literature, art (especially the book arts), music, agricultural history, and economic history. Boston College also maintains very fine literary collections of Samuel Beckett, William Butler Yeats, and Seamus Heaney. To promote greater awareness and use of the impressive holdings, in 1991 the University established the Burns Library Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies Chair, which is open on an annual basis to scholars who have distinguished themselves in the areas of Irish history, culture, and life. Part of the Irish Collection, although housed in a separate building, is the Irish Music Center, which provides access to the Irish Music Archives. These archives include traditional music recordings, sheet music, videotapes, and special collections
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of note, such as the Frederick M. Manning Collection of John McCormack and the Gaelic Roots Festival Collection. The Irish Music Archives include commercial and field recordings, video recordings, sheet music, manuscripts, photographs, memorabilia, and books about music. DePaul University in Chicago has its Irish Collection, which began in 1927, when the Irish American Association’s Chicago chapter donated books to the university library. The portion of the collection housed in Special Collections includes resources relating to key figures of the Irish literary renaissance, such as William Butler Yeats, Edward Martyn, and Lady Gregory, and the plays and poetry of those associated with the Abbey Theatre. The collection also contains numerous contemporary nineteenth-century histories of Ireland, travel accounts of the customs of the Irish as seen by British observers, various histories of Ireland printed in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and facsimilies and studies of The Book of Kells. Harvard University has enormous, diverse Irish collections that cover Irish history, literature, drama, and language, including a Celtic Collection of nearly 400 rolls of microfilm copies of medieval Celtic manuscripts and some 40 volumes of more modern Irish and Welsh manuscripts. The Archives of Irish America at New York University are a repository of primary research materials that aim to transform an understanding of the Irish migration experience and the distillation of American Irish ethnicity over the past century. The archives have been building on a pilot project started in 1997 to survey and collect materials related to the New York Irish community. The archives are housed www.abc-clio.com
in a climate-controlled building close to Glucksman Ireland House and are a part of New York University’s Elmer Holmes Bobst Library. Another repository of major Irish literary figures is at Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas. In 1953, the Library acquired Chicago attorney and book collector James F. Spoerri’s collection of James Joyce; it contains nearly all the books and pamphlets devoted entirely to the author and his works and more than 200 books and periodicals containing critical and biographical material. Particularly rare items in the Joyce collection are copies of two broadsides, The Holy Office (1904 or 1905) and Gas from a Burner (1912), the latter bearing in holograph the author’s story of the destruction of the first (Dublin) edition of The Dubliners. Also present is a copy of the first edition of Ulysses in French, signed by Stuart Gilbert, who oversaw the translation, and inscribed by Joyce to Gilbert’s daughter Lucia on the date of issue; this copy has the novelty of bearing the strange post-mortem bookplate of the author. There is also a copy of the elusive Pomes Penyeach (Cleveland, 1931). The William Butler Yeats collection has all of Yeats’s works in first edition except the very scarce Mosada (1886) and The Hour-Glass (1903) as well as many later and variant editions and printings; books edited or containing contributions by Yeats; several score of books from Yeats’s personal library (including copies of his own works with his annotations) or books that have close association in one way or another with the Yeats family; runs of periodicals with which Yeats was associated, such as Samhain, The Arrow, Shanachie, and Dana; and many single issues of periodicals in which material by or about Yeats appeared, including particularly elusive
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journals such as the Kilkenny Monitor and the Irish Home Reading Magazine. The Irish literary renaissance figures other than Yeats are here in profusion: the Abbey Theatre plays; an extensive group of Abbey Theatre programs, more than 160 of them ranging from 1904 to 1922; the plays of Lady Gregory and John Synge; the complete output of the Dun Emer and Cuala presses, including broadsides and other ephemera; books and periodicals reflecting this national literary movement. Also, Irish history, from the seventeenth century to the revolutionary movements of the twentieth century, is extraordinarily well represented by newspapers, propaganda pamphlets, broadsheets, local history publications, songs, and scholarly works. Indeed, the Irish holdings of the O’Hegarty Library, taken together with the Joyce collection; the Sean O’Casey publications given to the library by Franklin D. Murphy, former Chancellor of the University; and the earlier Irish writers already in the collections, give Kansas outstandingly strong Hibernian resources. At Notre Dame, which was founded as an educational institution for the Irish, several collections document that ethnic group’s experiences. The O’Neill Collection of Traditional Irish Music is made up of over 1,000 volumes relating to Irish studies. While most relate in some way to Irish music, only about 150 of the volumes are exclusively devoted to music. The collection includes first editions of O’Neill’s own works, notably The Music of Ireland. The majority of imprints are late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but the collection also includes some rare eighteenth century titles. With selected recent additions, this collection was Captain O’Neill’s personal library, which he donated to Notre Dame in 1931. www.abc-clio.com
The Monsignor Arthur T. Connolly Irish Collection at the Catholic University of America honors a man who was a major donor to the library. A child of Irish immigrants, Connolly amassed a considerable collection of material relating to Ireland and the Irish in America. These books, periodicals, and pamphlets, some 2,292 volumes, were among the first of his gifts to arrive at Catholic University in March 1916. In 1925, the University announcements described this material as “possibly the most complete collection of Irish history and literature in the United States.” Of particular importance is the collection of more than 1,000 Irish pamphlets from about 1700 to 1850, which contains “a wide range of the popular literature of the early stages of Ireland’s campaign for parliamentary reform and the first appearance of the Catholic Question. The content of these series and monographs depicts the mutually influential currents of agrarian, economic, social and cultural change which affected the national political process.” Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia has an extensive collection of books, cassettes, and videos related to Ireland. These materials are housed on the second floor of the Logue Library in its Special Collections. The holdings concentrate on Irish literature, language, history, and culture. In Atlanta, Emory University’s Irish Rare Book Collection is an exceptional collection of rare books and periodicals that bolsters the university’s Irish literary renaissance and contemporary poetry manuscript collections. The library holds numerous first editions and other rare volumes by Yeats, including many presentation copies to Lady Gregory that retain corrections in the poet’s hand. A diverse and extensive collection of Samuel Beckett’s volumes includes French, English, and American
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editions, along with early published work, significant variant editions, first serial publications, and various fine press editions. Emory also maintains a complete run of the Honest Ulsterman and holds large collections of works published by the Cuala Press, Dolmen Press, Peppercanister Press, Gallery Press, and other Irish literary presses. Among the contemporary poets, the Seamus Heaney collection of rare and special edition books stands out. There are also other libraries, archives, and research organizations that maintain Irish materials. Researchers should examine their online catalogs and Web sites to get an overview of their collections. Most require special permission for visitors to use and most are open by appointment only. For a more complete listing, see Subject Collections: A Guide to Special Book Collections and Subject Emphases as Reported by University, College, Public, and Special Libraries and Museums in the United States and Canada, compiled by Lee Ash and William G. Miller, with the collaboration of Barry Scott, Kathleen Vickery, and Beverley McDonough, published in two volumes in 1993. To date, this is the latest edition but many of the institutions described in this encyclopedic work maintain websites that can be reviewed for more current information on their collections. Martin J. Manning See also: AMERICAN CONFERENCE FOR IRISH STUDIES; ANCIENT ORDER OF HIBERNIANS; PRESS, The IRISH ETHNIC; RESEARCH COLLECTIONS, IRISH, IN CANADA References Clark, Dennis. Hibernia America: The Irish and Regional Cultures. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986. Glazier, Michael, ed. Encyclopedia of the Irish in America. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1999. www.abc-clio.com
Eleuterio-Comer, Susan K. Irish American Material Culture: A Directory of Collections, Sites, and Festivals in the United States and Canada. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988. Hamer, Philip M., ed. A Guide to Archives and Manuscripts in the United States. New Haven, CT: Yale University; for the National Historical Publications Commission, 1961. Lester, DeeGee. Irish Research: A Guide to Collections in North America, Ireland, and Great Britain. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987. Malone, Russ. Hippocrene U.S.A. Guide to Irish America. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1994. Weaver, Jack W., and DeeGee Lester. Immigrants from Great Britain and Ireland: A Guide to Archival and Manuscript Sources in North America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986.
REYNOLDS, DEBBIE (1932–) Born Mary Frances Reynolds on April 1, 1932, in El Paso, Texas, to parents of Irish ancestry (Raymond F. and Maxene Reynolds), Debbie Reynolds, the quintessential all-American girl-next-door bundle of energy, has entertained generations around the world. Seven years after she was born, the family moved to Burbank, California, when her father, a carpenter for Southern Pacific Railroad, was transferred. She attended John Burroughs High School in Burbank, and in 1948, at age 16, she was chosen Miss Burbank, lip-synching to a Betty Hutton recording. A Warner Brothers talent scout soon contacted her parents, and, after a screen test, Debbie was offered a $65-a-week contract. Jack L. Warner, the studio head, changed her name to “Debbie.” That same year, 1948, she made her film debut in June Bride, and in 1950, she played one of June Haver’s sisters in The
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Daughters of Rosie O’Grady. When Warner Brothers dropped her option, Debbie signed with MGM, and that studio determined to make her a success. She was cast in Three Little Words (1950), playing Helen Kane. In the musical Two Weeks with Love, that same year, she sang “Aba Daba Honeymoon” with Carleton Carpenter. The two recorded the song for MGM, and it became her first million-selling record. Following other supporting roles in several other movies, MGM, seeing her star potential, cast her, at age 19, as the ingenue in Singin’ in the Rain (1952). Though Gene Kelly was a strict taskmaster, the part made her a star. That stardom was solidified when she was teamed with her Singin’ in the Rain costar Donald O’Connor in I Love Melvin (1953). She appeared in comedies and musicals throughout the 1950s, working with such stars as Frank Sinatra in The Tender Trap (1955) and husband Eddie Fisher in Bundle of Joy (1956). She and Fisher married September 26, 1955, and divorced in 1959, after Fisher’s highly publicized affair with Elizabeth Taylor. Reynolds and Fisher had two children, the actress and writer Carrie Fisher and Todd Emmanuel Fisher. In 1957, Debbie played the title role in Tammy and the Bachelor, and the movie produced her second million-selling recording “Tammy.” In 1964, Debbie was cast in the lead of MGM’s The Unsinkable Molly Brown, for which she was nominated for an Oscar. In 1969, she turned to television, starring in the short-lived The Debbie Reynolds Show, for which she received a Golden Globe nomination. In 1974, she divorced her second husband, Harry Karl, a wealthy shoe magnate and producer whom she had married in 1960; after the divorce, she discovered that she owed www.abc-clio.com
millions of dollars, and her determination to pay off the debt led to her Broadway debut in 1973 in the musical Irene; for that role she received a Tony nomination. After her record-breaking performances in Irene, Debbie began working in Las Vegas and other resorts with her nightclub act. She also began collecting movie memorabilia for the Hollywood Movie Museum at the Debbie Reynolds Hotel and Casino, which opened in April 1995 but had to close in July 1997, the same year she received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Throughout the 1970s Debbie continued her one-woman act in nightclubs and on the stage, including the London Palladium. Another short-lived television show, Aloha Paradise, came in 1981, following a cameo appearance in ABC-TV’s The Love Boat. She married for the third time to Richard Hamlett in 1985; the couple divorced in 1996. Reynolds appeared as a guest star in numerous television series and talk shows, and in the spring of 1989 she made a popular videocassette exercise tape, Do It Debbie’s Way. Throughout the 1990s and into the present, Reynolds has continued to work, appearing regularly in a variety of feature films, television specials, and animated movies, including In and Out (1997); These Old Broads (2001), where she appeared with Elizabeth Taylor and Shirley MacLaine; and in a recurring role in the television series Will & Grace, for which she received an Emmy nomination. An indefatigable performer, Reynolds has said, ‘“I’m going to perform till I drop. Then they can stuff me like Trigger and you’ll find me in my own museum. Put a quarter in my mouth and I’ll sing ‘Tammy’.” Gary Kerley See also: KELLY, Gene
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806 RHODE ISLAND References Parrish, John Robert, and Michael R. Pitts. Hollywood Songsters: Singers Who Act and Actors Who Sing: A Biographical Dictionary. New York: Routledge, 2003. Purciello, Maria. “Reynolds, Debbie.” In Women and Music in America Since 1900: An Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Reynolds, Debbie, with Bob Thomas. If I Knew Then. Bernard Geis Associates/Random House, 1962. Reynolds, Debbie, and David Patrick Columbia. Debbie: My Life. New York: William Morrow, 1988. Riggs, Thomas, ed. “Reynolds, Debbie.” Contemporary Theater, Film and Television. Vol. 31. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000.
RHODE ISLAND The smallest state in the Union, the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations was the first of the 13 colonies to declare independence from Britain, but it was the last to ratify the Constitution and achieve statehood (May 29, 1790). Rhode Island, also known by its original Indian name Aquidneck Island, is the largest island in Narragansett Bay, and Providence became the sole capital in 1900 (Newport had been the joint capital since 1854). Giovanni da Verrazano was the first explorer to visit the area during a voyage that started off the coast of the Carolinas and ended up in Nova Scotia. Subsequent visits of note included those of the English explorer John Smith and the Dutchman Adriaen Block, and then in 1620 settlers from the Plymouth Colony and Massachusetts Bay ventured into the region to trade with local Indian tribes. The Narragansett was the largest of a number of tribes in the area, and the first permanent white settlement in Rhode Island, Providence, was founded in 1636 on land Roger Williams purchased from the tribe. www.abc-clio.com
Williams had left the Massachusetts Bay Colony wishing to establish a community that was markedly freer in political and religious outlook. Enough fellow nonconformists followed suit in settling in the bay area that King Charles II of England granted a charter in 1663 that provided the most liberal form of self-government to be granted during the colonial era. Other nonconformists included Anne and William Hutchinson and William Coddington, all of whom founded Portsmouth in 1638 as a haven for Antinomians; thus, Portsmouth became the first town in America founded by a woman. After surviving King Philip’s War (1675–1676), in which Providence was burned by Indian forces, the colony had, by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century consolidated itself as a prosperous region, and Newport and Providence had become two of the busiest ports in the New World. Despite a strong agricultural character, the colony had a sophisticated and expansive involvement in the slave trade, was engaged in smuggling, and evaded the British Navigation Acts. As the British government tightened economic and navigational controls in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, Rhode Island was prominent in the evolving resistance movement and most famously scuttled and burned the British customs ship Liberty (1769) and burned the British ship Gaspee (1772). The first to select delegates to attend the Continental Congress, Rhode Island was also the first colony to declare independence from the British on May 4, 1776. The aftermath of the American Revolution witnessed reforms that aimed to reduce anti-Catholicism (1783) and emancipate slaves (1784). The antislavery
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of the Quakers and a widespread antifederalism contributed to its being the last of the original 13 states to ratify the U.S. Constitution, on May 29, 1790, by two votes. In the same year, America’s first successful water-powered cotton mill, owned by Samuel Slater, ensured Rhode Island’s involvement in the Industrial Revolution, and industry in the state expanded into jewelry, textiles, and silverware. From the mid-1820s onward, large numbers of Irish Catholics settled in Rhode Island, and the numbers continued to increase in step with works projects such as Fort Adams in Newport and the Blackstone Canal (both started in 1824), railroad construction (beginning in 1833), and the growing number of textile mills and metals factories. As the state industrialized and urbanized, existing laws concerning such issues as voting were increasingly perceived to be antiquated. By 1840, for example, some 60 percent of free adult males were disenfranchised. As a result, participants in Dorr’s Rebellion (led by Thomas Wilson Dorr) drafted a People’s Constitution in 1841, and Dorr was elected governor in 1842. Meeting with resistance from largely rural politicians, incumbent governor Samuel Ward King was reinstated through a separate election. Dorr’s response, an attempt to seize the state’s arsenal in May 1842, failed and resulted in his exile. The conservative reaction to the rebellion led to a revised constitution that limited the influence of the working classes and immigrants. Those of foreign birth were disenfranchised, as land was required to hold office or to vote. This was, in many ways, one of the more nakedly nativist actions aimed largely at the Irish. www.abc-clio.com
In many senses, assimilation was slow and difficult compared with the process in many other states because of this conservatism and difficulty in accessing the vote. The Know-Nothings compounded this resentment against immigrants and the “Irish problem” in the 1850s, and prejudice was fanned by the state’s newspapers. In 1855, James Smith, a Know-Nothing candidate was elected mayor, and the KnowNothings planned to raid a Catholic convent, but this attempt met with armed Irish resistance. Relative levels of disempowerment meant that many Irish did not support abolition during the Civil War, fearing competition from the freed slaves for lower-paid jobs. In the postwar years, Irish immigration remained steady but numbers fell proportionally as French Canadians, Germans, and later southern and eastern Europeans (particularly Italians) arrived in large numbers. One of the first strikes in America occurred in Rhode Island in 1885 and resulted in messy attempts to bring in strikebreakers and riots. The factory was owned by Joseph Bannigan, a prominent businessman and philanthropist who had migrated from Ireland during the Famine and had a strong tradition of hiring Irish workers and fostering Irish community. When Bannigan was compelled to cut wages, the recently formed Knights of Labor protested at the plant and Irish religious leaders were asked to intervene. Bannigan went on to become president of the U.S. Rubber Company. Jobs at the turn of the century were provided by a variety of businesses from the state, but the large mills declined in the early twentieth century. Intragroup tensions remained, notably between Irish communities and the Italians and French Canadians, but overall the large
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numbers of Catholics (Rhode Island became predominantly Catholic before 1910) began to translate into representation, and James Higgins, an Irish Catholic Democrat, was elected governor in 1906. In general, the state has been a reliable Democratic state since the Depression years. In recent years it has been linked with the Kennedy clan, as Ted Kennedy’s son, Patrick, was elected to the state House of Representatives in 1988 and has represented the state in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1995. Rhode Island is one of a number of states that signed on to the MacBride Principles, guidelines for U.S. companies investing in Northern Ireland. The state population stood at 1,048,319 in the 2000 U.S. Census. People with Irish ancestry make up 18.4 percent of the state population, the second largest ancestry group after Italian-Americans (19 percent). As a result, the state has a high concentration of Catholicism. Sam Hitchmough References Doyle, David Noel, and Owen Dudley Edwards, eds. America and Ireland, 1776–1976: The American Identity and the Irish Connection. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. McLoughlin, William, Rhode Island, A History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986. Miller, Kerby A., Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Kenny, Kevin, The American Irish. London: Longmans, 2000.
ROBINSON, MARY (1944–) Mary (Bourke) Robinson has shown the world what an Irishwoman can achieve. In a distinguished career, Robinson has displayed a new paradigm of female leadership, www.abc-clio.com
With the swearing in of Mary Robinson as Ireland’s first woman president, on December 3, 1990, a watershed was reached in Irish politics. After a productive seven-year tenure, she resigned from the presidency in September, 1997, to assume leadership of the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights. Since 2003, she has been president of Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative (New York City). (Patrick Bertschmann, Photo Bianco, 1998, Geneva. With kind permission.)
a paradigm melded from traditional Irish values of justice and activism, as well as an abiding pledge to global human rights. Foremost an advocate, Robinson launched a big public career, first in the service of Ireland and then in the service of the world. In 1990, when she famously placed a lighted candle in the kitchen window of Áras an Uachtaráin (the official presidential residence in Dublin), Robinson demonstrated a proud continuity with the rituals of an ancient race and an unwavering confidence in Ireland’s rising presence on the international stage. This simple gesture
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was more than a beacon of hope: it was a profession of faith in Ireland and in Ireland’s global role in the coming years, a role she would heartily invest with her own moral example. Herself a child of privilege, Mary Therese W. Bourke was to become an advocate for the underprivileged. She was born in Ballina, Co. Mayo, into an educated Irish Catholic family on May 21, 1944; both parents, Aubrey de Vere Bourke and Tessa O’Donnell Bourke, were physicians. Her late father, Dr. Aubrey Bourke (Edinburgh University, 1938), was the first general practitioner to use penicillin in the west of Ireland in 1941. Mary Bourke’s brothers are established professionals in the fields of medicine and law: Oliver, in medical practice in New Zealand; Henry, a barrister; and Adrian, a solicitor, who in 1991 served as president of the Law Society. (A fourth brother, Aubrey Bourke, died some years ago.) Her paternal line, the HibernoNorman Bourkes, has flourished in Mayo since the thirteenth century. By tradition, the Clan Bourke is decidedly political, either as rebels against the English crown or as knighted servants. Some Bourkes are linked to the Mayo Land League and the Irish Republican Brotherhood; others have been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for meritorious colonial service. Some Bourkes have been Catholic nuns; others have been Anglicans. It fell to a talented young woman of the Bourke line to take the clan to the summit of Irish political power in the 1990s. Mary Bourke’s career was finely planned, and she had the best international training any ‘comer’ could garner, even if access required special handling at the highest levels of the Irish government. To matriculate at Trinity College, University www.abc-clio.com
of Dublin, from which Catholics were traditionally barred by order of its founder, Elizabeth I, the young Mary Bourke obtained permission from John Charles McQuaid, D.D., Archbishop of Dublin. She graduated with a law degree from the King’s Inns Dublin (LLB, 1967); she then pursued further legal training in the United States, where she earned a Master of Legal Letters (LLM) at Harvard University in 1968. Shortly thereafter, she was appointed Reid Professor of Constitutional and Criminal Law at Trinity College, an enviable appointment for a young woman yet in her twenties. Barrister Mary Bourke began her public career in law and human rights advocacy in 1969, with her election as an independent candidate to the Irish Senate (Seanad Éireann). In this role, Senator Bourke had valuable public access and an official platform from which to launch several bold campaigns for the reform of Irish law. Then, as now, she strove to liberalize and modernize her nation, and she typically aligned herself with liberal, humanitarian, and feminist issues. An attractive and vocal new presence in the national press, Bourke proved to be a forceful speaker. She advocated for women’s right to participate as jurors in the legal process; for the legal and public availability of contraceptive devices (a hotly contested issue); for the admission of married women into Irish civil service; and, in one of her most controversial campaigns, for the decriminalization of homosexuality. In 1970, Senator Mary Bourke married Nicholas K. Robinson, a lawyer, conservationist, and published authority on eighteenth-century graphic arts, especially caricature; their union produced a daughter and two sons.
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As an Irish senator (1969–1989), Mary Robinson was something of an electric presence among a conservative and traditionalist body of mostly male politicians. She was more than a breath of fresh air: she was a force to be reckoned with. She served on several parliamentary committees, including the Joint Committee on European Community Secondary Legislation (1973–1989). In 1973, she was a member of the English Bar (Middle Temple). In 1979, she was elected to the Dublin City Council. In 1980, she was senior counsel, English Bar (Middle Temple). And by this time, Robinson had garnered broad media attention when she changed her status as an independent senator by joining the Labour party. From 1983 to 1985, she served on the parliamentary Joint Committee on Marital Breakdown. In 1988, Robinson and her husband founded the Irish Centre for European Law at Trinity College, Dublin University. After many years of vigorous political engagement, marked equally by victories and losses, Robinson did not seek reelection to the Irish Senate in 1989. It was in 1990 that Robinson’s career saw a huge advance. At the urging of her colleagues in the Labour Party, she decided to run for the presidency of Ireland. This was a bold and courageous decision; indeed, Robinson became the first Labour nominee for the Irish presidency and the nation’s first woman candidate. After a colorful and closely reported presidential race, Robinson became the first Labour candidate, the first woman, and the first nonFianna Fáil candidate to win the Irish presidency in the history of contested presidential elections. RTÉ (Ireland’s radio and television broadcasting network), memorably celebrated Robinson’s victory by preempting its usual coverage of the day’s www.abc-clio.com
Angelus to carry her victory speech live. President Mary Robinson was inaugurated as Ireland’s seventh president on December 3, 1990; she signed her Declaration of Office with the quill pen of Eamon de Valera, third president of Ireland (1959–1973). To her formidable new responsibilities as head of state, Robinson brought broad knowledge in international law and politics, complemented by many years of regional (grassroots) activism. Ireland’s new president knew the country, its urban and rural history, its mix of people, and its future challenges. Clearly, she was keen and well-positioned to shepherd Ireland into the new modern century. In her tenure as Ireland’s president, Robinson proved to be pleasantly popular, even among former contrarians. Brian Lenihan, Ireland’s defense minister and Robinson’s chief rival in her presidential campaign, would eventually admit that Robinson proved to be the better national leader. To her credit, she reimagined and redefined the Irish presidency, she sought out opportunities to meet with political colleagues of all hues and views, and she aimed to present Ireland as a worthy newcomer on the global stage. Her chief concerns were stemming the Irish diaspora (the sad exit of Irish to other lands, owing chiefly to Irish unemployment) and improving Irish relations throughout the globe. To these ends, in 1993, Robinson became the first Irish president to visit Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace; and at her official Dublin home, Áras an Uachtaráin, she hosted visiting British royals, including Charles, Prince of Wales, as well as the Christian Brothers and the Gay & Lesbian Equality Network. In a diplomatically unacknowledged trip in 1992, Robinson visited the war-ridden
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zones of Northern Ireland; and in 1993 in Belfast, she was photographed publicly shaking the hand of Gerry Adams, Sinn Féin president, local MP, and reputed member of the Irish Republican Army Council. Remarkably, Robinson was the first Irish head of state to visit Rwanda in the aftermath of its 1994 atrocities. She was also the first Irish head of state to visit Somalia after its troubles in 1992, and she received the CARE Humanitarian Award in recognition of her efforts for that country. During her tenure, she signed into law two new bills dear to her humanitarian beliefs: a bill to liberalize public access to contraceptives and a law to decriminalize homosexuality. Snarls from rivals notwithstanding, Robinson’s administration drew high praise from such prominent Irish statesmen as Albert Reynolds (Fianna Fáil, 1992–1994), John Bruton (Fine Gael, 1994–1997), and Bertie Ahern (Fianna Fáil, 1997-). Throughout a distinguished seven-year tenure as president of Ireland, Robinson made a serious contribution to Ireland’s developing presence as a globally-minded country, with productive economic and political links beyond its own borders. She also placed special emphasis on the needs of developing and underdeveloped countries, thus linking the history of An Gorta Mor (The Great Hunger or The Irish Famine) to modern-day devastation. Her vision as a politician was global and humanitarian; it created bridges of partnership among developed, developing, and underdeveloped countries and their leaderships. Robinson resigned the Irish presidency on September 12, 1997, three months before the end of her term, explaining that her vision for advancement in human www.abc-clio.com
rights required different measures and other opportunities, opportunities found in her pending new post in Geneva as high commissioner at the United Nations. As she said in her delivery of the Romanes Lectures at Oxford, in an address titled, “Realizing Human Rights” (November 1997), her new role with the United Nations presented daunting challenges, and she concluded her lecture with inspiring words from James Fraser’s The Golden Bough on the harmonious intersection of destiny and ambition. As high commissioner, Mrs. Robinson prioritized the reform proposal of SecretaryGeneral Kofi Annan to integrate human rights concerns in all the activities of the United Nations. She also oversaw an important reorientation of the priorities of her own office by refocusing its initiatives at the country and regional levels. As part of this new focus, her first year as High Commissioner included trips to South Africa, Colombia, Cambodia, China, and other countries. A memorable moment of Robinson’s tenure was her emotional report at a press conference on the staggering conditions she witnessed first-hand in the villages of Rwanda. (A political colleague judged her delivery moving and magnificent.) In 1998, Robinson was elected Chancellor of the University of Dublin. And in September 1998, she won high praise for herself and her office as the first high commissioner to visit China, where she signed an agreement whose goal was a wide-ranging program of cooperation to improve human rights in that country. Under a similar process, Robinson and her office sent human rights workers to Indonesia and to countries in Europe and Africa. Of special significance, High
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Commissioner Robinson strengthened human rights monitoring in high-conflict areas, such as Kosovo (Federal Republic, Yugoslavia). During her tenure as Human Rights Commissioner, Robinson also visited Tibet to meet with the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. Also at this time, Robinson denounced the Irish system of permits for non–European Union immigrants as “bonded labor,” and she condemned the continuing use of the death penalty in the United States, which she regarded as a human rights violation. Throughout her term, Mary Robinson maintained an energetic, committed staff, which monitored human rights or provided technical assistance to more than 20 countries. In 2001, Mary Robinson announced her intention to leave the UN Human Rights Commissioner post: “I believe that I can, at this stage, achieve more outside of the constraints that a multinational organisation inevitably imposes” (Guardian Weekly, March 22, 2001). In 2002, Robinson was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize for consistent support of the world’s vulnerable and disadvantaged. Dating from 2003, Mary Robinson’s chief focus has been her ambitious agenda as president of the entity Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative (EGI), based in New York City. Some of EGI’s supporters include Bishop Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter, and Musimbi Kanyoro, Secretary General of the World YWCA. EGI’s partners, board, and advisory council include prominent business leaders, educators, and human rights theorists and practitioners throughout the world. Working as a dedicated cross-cultural team of concerned specialists, the EGI consortium
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has adopted a broad agenda, driven by a three-pronged mission. It seeks to “realize human rights” and “sustainable growth” in underdeveloped countries, with an initial focus on Africa, by rectifying imbalances in global trade and development policies, global inequities in health with special focus on HIV/AIDS in Africa, and barriers to more humane international migration. “The three principal issues which inform the work of EGI invite practical opportunities to influence policy; each of these issues has reached a critical tipping-point where immediate decisions will have serious, long-term consequences for us all” (Mulvihill interview, New York City, May 4, 2005). A detailed statement of EGI’s programmatic goals and its continuing results are available at the EGI website (www.eginitiave.org). A recipient of numerous honors and awards throughout the world, Mary Robinson is Chair of the Council of Women World Leaders, the International Board of the International Institute for Environment & Development, the Fund for Global Human Rights, and the Irish Chamber Orchestra; Honorary President of Oxfam International; Vice President of the Club of Madrid; Patron of the International Community of Women Living with AIDS; a member of the Leadership Council of the United Nations Global Coalition on Women and AIDS, the Vaccine Fund Board of Directors, the Advisory Board of the Earth Institute, the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, and the American Philosophical Society; Professor of Practice in International Affairs at Columbia University in New York City; and Extraordinary Professor, University of Pretoria, South Africa.
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In 2004, Mary Robinson gave the 6th Sadat Lecture for Peace at the University of Maryland; her published address, “The Journey to Peace: Finding Ourselves in the Other,” included memorable words on the United States and on individual responsibility for global human rights: I am . . . encouraged by examples of innovative thinking here in the United States. Some of you may be aware of a report issued last year by the Migration Policy Institute, titled America’s Challenge, which, among other recommendations, proposes the creation of an independent national commission on integration to address the specific challenges of national unity presented by post-September 11 events and actions. . . . The challenges ahead are formidable, the familiar catalogue of problems and future obstacles remains to be faced. Yes, we have a long road to travel before human rights will be secured for all. But I am convinced that this is a time when civil society world-wide can make its voice heard as never before.”
Robinson also delivered the 2005 Thomas J. Volpe lecture at St. Francis College, Brooklyn Heights, New York, where she spoke on the critical intersection of globalization, nation development, and human rights. Also in 2005, Robinson was a guest speaker at Boston College, Robsham Theatre, where she spoke on “Human Rights and Justice for Refugees,” as a part of the lecture series sponsored by the Center for Human Rights and International Justice. In May 2005, she was awarded the first “Outspoken” award from the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission. On October 14, 2007, she was the keynote speaker at the University of Notre Dame conference, “Race and Immigration in the New Ireland” (October 14-October 17, 2007, Washington Hall), sponsored by the
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Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies (http://newsinfo.nd.edu/content .cfm?topicid=24786). In a 2005 interview, she expressed abiding optimism and a strong, forwardlooking vision for humanity: There are, of course, many urgent and also accessible opportunities for change; there are new policies, new bills, new laws in motion—all striving to restore human dignity throughout the world. This is a tremendous, long process, one requiring broad resources, talent, and genuine sympathy. Yet, results are possible. This has been the commitment of my public life, this struggle; and with the support and direction of many valuable associates, I am following that same track now because I feel—and I see—that we’re onto something good and necessary here” (Mulvihill interview, May 4, 2005).
Maureen E. Mulvihill References Brennan, Valerie. “Here’s to You, Mrs. Robinson!” Studies: An Irish Quarterly 87, no. 345 (1998): 7–14. Bresnihan, Valerie. “Symbolic Power of Ireland’s President Robinson.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 19 (1999): 250–262. Finlay, Fergus. “Beating the Big Guys.” In Snakes and Ladders. Dublin: New Island Books, 1998. Finlay, Fergus. Mary Robinson: A President with a Purpose. Dublin: O’Brien Press, 1991. Horgan, John. Mary Robinson: An Independent Voice. Dublin: O’Brien Books, 1997. Hug, Chrystel, Politics of Sexual Morality in Ireland. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Kenny, Mary. Goodbye to Catholic Ireland: A Social, Personal and Cultural History from the Fall of Parnell to the Realm of Mary Robinson. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1997. McQuillan, Mary. Mary Robinson: A President in Progress. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994. Mulvihill, Maureen E. 2005. Interview with Mary Robinson. On-site, May 4th, Ethical Global Initiatives office, New York City. O’Leary, Olivia, and Helen Burke. Mary Robinson: The Authorised Biography. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1998.
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814 ROWAN, STEPHEN C. O’Sullivan, Michael. Mary Robinson: The Life and Times of an Irish Liberal. Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1993. Purcell, Betty. “Images of the Irish Woman.” The Crane Bag 4, no. 1 (1980). Quinlan, Deirdre. Mary Robinson: A President in Progress. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1994. Quinn, David. “An Icon for the New Ireland: An Assessment of President Robinson.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly (Autumn 1997). Siggins, Lorna. Mary Robinson: The Woman Who Took Power in the Park. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1997. Stewart, Bruce, compiler. “Mary Robinson.” EirData. http://www.pgil-eirdata.org/ html/pgil_datasets/index.htm (accessed September 1, 2007).
ROWAN, STEPHEN C. (1808–1890) Stephen C. Rowan was born in Dublin, Ireland, on December 25, 1808, to John Rowan and Mary (Clegg). Appointed midshipman in the U.S. Navy on February 1, 1826, he participated in a four-year cruise aboard the Vincennes (1826–1830), the first time an American man-of-war had circumnavigated the globe. Upon returning to the United States, Rowan served aboard revenue cutters in New York and in the West Indies on the schooner Shark and the sloop Vandalia. In 1832, Rowan was promoted to midshipman. Actively engaged in naval operations on Florida rivers during the Seminole War, he was promoted to lieutenant in 1837. Rowan spent the next few years on coastal survey duties, serving aboard the Delaware, off Brazil, and on the Ontario, in the Mediterranean. He took an active role in the Mexican War, serving as executive officer of the Cyane during the capture of Monterey on July 7, 1846, and in the occupation of both San Diego and Los Angeles. www.abc-clio.com
Portrait of Stephen C. Rowan, an admiral in the United States Navy who served during the MexicanAmerican War and the American Civil War. (National Archives)
While operating in the Gulf of California, the Cyane captured 20 blockade runners and destroyed several enemy gunboats. After the war, Rowan served as ordnance inspector at the New York Navy Yard from 1850 to 1853, returning to that post in 1858 to 1861. During the interim he commanded the supply ship Relief and the receiving ship North Carolina. He was promoted to commander on September 14, 1855. As captain of the steam-sloop Pawnee at the outbreak of the Civil War, he made gallant attempts to relieve Fort Sumter and to burn the Norfolk Navy yard. During the latter engagement, he fired the first shot from a naval vessel in the war. In the fall of
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1861, he helped capture the forts at Hatteras and Ocracoke inlets; then, taking command of a flotilla in the North Carolina sounds, he cooperated in the capture of Roanoke Island in February 1862. In recognition of his service and gallantry, Rowan was simultaneously promoted to captain and commodore on July 16, 1862; he then supported the Union capture of Elizabeth City, Edenton, and New Bern. During the summer of 1863, he commanded New Ironsides on blockade duty off Charleston, South Carolina, engaging enemy batteries at Forts Wagner and Moultrie. In August, Rowan assumed command of all Federal forces in the North Carolina sounds. When the war ended, Rowan was promoted to rear admiral, receiving his commission on July 25, 1866. He served as commandant of the Norfolk Navy Yard until 1867, when he assumed command of the Asiatic Squadron. Returning in 1870, he was appointed vice admiral in August of that year. Rowan followed this with command of the New York Navy Yard, a position he held from 1872 to 1879. Subsequently, Rowan served as president of the Board of Naval Examiners (1879–1881), governor of the Naval Asylum in Philadelphia (1881), chairman of the Lighthouse Board (1883), and superintendent of the Naval Observatory, Washington, D.C., from 1882 until his retirement in 1889. Vice Admiral Rowan died in Washington, D.C., on March 31, 1890. His wife, Mary Stark, had died in 1875. Rowan and his wife had one child who survived infancy, Major Hamilton Rowan of the United States Army. Rowan is buried in the Oak Hill Cemetery, Georgetown. Tim Lynch See also: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR www.abc-clio.com
References Ayers, S. C. Sketch of the Life and Services of Vice Admiral Stephen C. Rowan. Cincinnati: Legion Press, 1910. Headly, J. T. Farragut and Our Naval Commanders. New York: E. B. Treat, 1867.
RYAN, ABRAM JOSEPH (1839–1886) Abram Joseph Ryan was born on August 15, 1839 (although some conflicting reports suggest that he was born on that date in 1838) in Norfolk, Virginia. The son of Irish immigrants, he trained as a Catholic priest in New York, and was thereafter almost invariably referred to simply as “Father Ryan.” At the outbreak of the American Civil War, Ryan joined the Confederate Army in
Portrait of Abram Joseph Ryan, poet and Roman Catholic priest. His support for the Confederate Army earned him the nickname “Poet-Priest of the Confederacy.” (Library of Congress)
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the role of chaplain. Despite the ferocious animosities of that struggle, he became known for his willingness to tend spiritually to members of either army. During his service he wrote poetry, some of which began to attract an enthusiastic public in the South. Yet his greatest success as a poet came at the war’s conclusion when, in his reaction to the defeat of the South, he wrote the poem “The Conquered Banner.” It became an instant success in the South and was often sung in public gatherings, both civil and religious. Despite never again writing a poem that was equally successful, Ryan’s deft poetry about the American South, and about his own theological interests, was very popular in the years immediately following the Civil War. His major collection Poems: Patriotic, Religious, and Miscellaneous was widely read and frequently reprinted. After the war, Ryan engaged in both religious ministry and journalistic activity. He traveled widely in the South in the pursuance of these interests, residing at various times in New Orleans, Louisiana; Augusta, Georgia; and Mobile, Alabama. His most prominent journalistic work was done during his stay in Georgia, where he founded, and for a time edited, a weekly paper called The Banner of the South. During these years he also engaged in extensive lecture tours, both in the North and the South, which were well attended. It was commonly attested of his public speaking—theological or cultural—that he combined geniality, force of intellect, and personal appeal. When Ryan died on April 22, 1886, in Louisville, Kentucky, he was mourned as a loss to both the poetical and religious life of the United States. Ryan’s major contribution to America was through his poetry. Although his www.abc-clio.com
prominence as a poet has diminished significantly since his own time, he was once one of the most popular poets in America. He is also notable as the most popular poet of the rebellious South, and through his poetry he gave expression to much of the cultural life for which the people of the Confederacy believed they were fighting. Although he was devotedly an American southerner, he occupies an important role in an often underrepresented aspect of Irish-American life: that of the IrishAmericans affiliated with the Confederacy. Because so many Northern soldiers were proudly Irish, a misconception has arisen that the Irish Americans were united in support of the United States against the Confederacy. But Ryan, through his unparalleled popularity as a poet of the South, serves to correct this oversimplification of Irish-American participation in the Civil War. Andrew Goodspeed See also: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR References Haegney, Harold. Chaplain in Gray. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1958. Painter, Franklin V. N. Poets of the South. New York: American Books, 1903. Ryan, Abram Joseph. Poems: Patriotic, Religious, and Miscellaneous. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1896. Ryan, Abram Joseph. Selected Poems of Father Ryan, ed. Gordon Weaver. Jackson: University and College Press of Mississippi, 1973.
RYAN, CATHIE (1959–) Cathie Ryan is a singer and songwriter whose work, both interpretive and original, bridges traditional Celtic music and the ideas of contemporary singer/songwriters. She was chosen as the Irish Voice of the
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Decade for the 1990s by the Irish American News of Chicago and has been called a singer of insight and originality by The Irish Times of Dublin, The Wall Street Journal, Billboard magazine, and U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins, among others. As a writer and composer she works with events and ideas of Irish and Irish-American history as well as with events and ideas of the heart’s history. Ryan was born in Detroit, Michigan, to parents who emigrated from Kerry and Tipperary in the late 1950s. They brought their music with them and passed it on to their daughter, through playing and singing along with traditional and mainstream recordings in the house, and through participating in events at Detroit’s Gaelic League. Soon Ryan began singing there herself, but she was taking in other sorts of music as well. A good friend’s parents came from Appalachia, so she heard that music often while growing up, as well as country music from artists such as Hank Williams and Merle Haggard. Living in Detroit, she was also exposed to the development of the Motown sound, adding a background in rhythm and groove that would emerge when as an adult she took up playing the bodhrán. Traditional Irish music was at the heart of what Ryan was learning, though, that and an appreciation for narrative structure and story, which are carried through song and myth. Regular summer visits to Ireland to spend time with her grandparents encouraged these interests, as her grandmother Catherine Ryan was a fiddle player who loved to have ceilídhs in her kitchen and get everyone to share in the music, while her grandfather Patrick Rice was a storyteller whose vivid accounts of Irish myth and history made the events and www.abc-clio.com
emotions seem very real to Ryan and her sister and brother. In her late teens Ryan began singing with traditional musician Dermot Henry’s band. Ryan and Henry married and relocated to New York, where for a time Ryan time studied sean nós singing with master singer Joe Heaney from Connemara, who was then in his seventies. More importantly than the passing on of musical technique and song knowledge, he encouraged the young woman to see herself as a singer and to see songs as entities that need to be understood and courted as the singer learns from them how they should be sung. Ryan has said that Heaney’s inspiration is what kept her going on with her music even when at times she found it difficult to find the right audience; though he taught her the most traditional of songs and style, his encouragement freed her to begin incorporating all her other influences and background into her own music. Divorced and raising her son, Ryan went back to college for a teaching degree in English, but a spur-of-the-moment performance at a friend’s party brought her to the attention of Joanie Madden, who was putting together a band of Irish-American women musicians called Cherish the Ladies. Through hard work and outstanding musicianship they would rise to be one of the best known, best loved, and most popular bands of any genre, known for the quality of their music and their respect for tradition. Ryan would be their lead singer for nearly eight years, during which time she would expand her gifts as a songwriter, work out her own unique style on the bodhrán, and as a singer demonstrate powerful abilities to interpret and inhabit contemporary and traditional songs in both English and Irish.
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The next step for Ryan was to set out upon her own solo career, which she has pursued through four albums. Each recording comprises songs sung in Irish, familiar songs from Ireland sung in English, contemporary covers of folk-influenced music in both languages, a song or two from the American traditional folk songbook, and several original songs. Over the years, her arrangements have become more spare, cutting back almost to the bone of the melody in service to the song, and her song choices have become both more focused and more wide ranging. In her writing, she has moved from telling of characters and events of history—the struggling immigrant of “The Back Door,” a track she recorded in 1992 for a Cherish the Ladies album of the same name, “Grace O’Malley,” a look at Ireland’s pirate queen that is just as feisty as she likely was; “Raithlin Island”
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(1847), an emigration song covering the history and present day of those who stayed behind; and “In My Tribe,” a consideration of the connection and duality of roots and rootedness framed in the landscapes of rural Ireland and the desert Southwest of the United States—to reflections on pain, healing, and the courage it takes to do so, in the very different songs “The Farthest Wave,” “Be Like the Sea,” and “What’s Closest to the Heart.” In both words and melody Ryan explores both the light and darkness of her dual heritage and creates music that invites listeners as well to consider the sources of what it means to be both Irish and American. Kerry Dexter
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See also: Cherish the Ladies Reference Dexter, Kerry. “Motown Meets Tipperary.” Dirty Linen 100 (June/July 2002): 35–38.
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S SADLIER, MARY ANNE (1820–1913) One of the most popular and prolific Irish authors in the nineteenth century, Mary Anne Sadlier emigrated from Cootehill, County Cavan, to Montreal in 1844, where she met her husband and publisher James Sadlier, with whom she relocated to New York (1860). Many editions of Sadlier’s works reached a far wider audience than most of the canonical texts of Anglo-Irish literature. Indeed, few nineteenth century authors could lay claim more convincingly to be populist writers in either Ireland or North America than Mary Anne Sadlier. She was, in many respects, a typical figure of the Irish emigrant community that she sought to represent and for which she wrote. During her lifetime, Sadlier published nearly 100 novels and translations, historical and religious tracts, all of which combined elements of Catholic piety, Irish nationalist fervor, and late-Victorian sentimentality and were widely sold in IrishAmerican communities, although by the time of her death in 1913 her literary reputation had already significantly diminished. Through her literary endeavours, Sadlier not only catered to but also effectively created and shaped the demands of a distinctly (and predominantly female) Irish American readership.
Sadlier’s novels were designed first and foremost for the moral edification and religious instruction of her emigrant readership, through the inculcation of Irish Catholic values. Moreover, she also sought to provide practical advice and occupational guidance for Irish emigrant women, especially those going into domestic service, “by showing them how to win respect and inspire confidence on the part of their employers, and at the same time, to avoid the snares and pitfalls which have been the ruin of so many of their own class” (preface to Bessy Conway; or, an Irish Girl in America, iv). Sadlier’s novels sought to resolve anxieties about the cultural retention of an Irish Catholic religious ethos in the adverse social, economic, and political circumstances that confronted Irish emigrants in urban America: various permutations of this underlying conflict provided the subject matter, sources of narrative tension, and plotlines for the thematic development of a range of social issues that were of vital concern to the Irish emigrant community as a whole, including: Irish emigrant manual labor (Willy Burke; or, The Irish Orphan in America, 1850), the separate, denominational “School Question” (The Blakes and Flanagans, 1855), Irish female domestic labor in North America (Bessy Conway; or, The Irish Girl in America, 1861), Irish Catholic colonization schemes
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for agricultural settlement in the midwestern United States (Con O’Regan; or, Emigrant Life in the New World, 1864), and genteel Irish, middle-class female migration to the New World (Elinor Preston; or, Scenes at Home and Abroad, 1861). Although she spent most of her literary career in New York, Sadlier was also a close friend and confidante of the Irish-Canadian statesman Thomas D’Arcy McGee, and she played an instrumental role in shaping his vision and disseminating his ideas through her family’s press. In fact, McGee corresponded regularly with Sadlier over a period that spanned from 1855, two years before he embarked from the United States for Montreal, until shortly before his assassination in 1868; his letters are now preserved as part of the James Sadlier collection in the National Archives of Canada. Throughout this period, McGee sought to publish much of his writing under the auspices of D. & J. Sadlier & Co; he frequently corresponded with Mary Anne Sadlier about his literary ambitions; and, after his assassination, it was Sadlier who collated and published his posthumous Poems of Thomas D’Arcy McGee (1869). After the tragic deaths of both D’Arcy McGee (1868), and then her husband (1869), Sadlier returned to Montreal (1885), but there she proved unable to arrest the declining fortune of either the family’s press or her own diminishing literary output, before eventually losing control not only of D. & J. Sadlier & Co. but even her own copyright in 1895. She died in straitened circumstances in Montreal in 1913, where she is buried. Jason King See also: McGEE, Thomas D’Arcy. References Howes, Marjorie. “Discipline, Sentiment, and the Irish-American Public: Mary Ann www.abc-clio.com
Sadlier’s Popular Fiction.” Ê´ire-Ireland 40, no. 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2005): 140–169. King, Jason. “The Feminization of the Canadian Frontier: Engendering the “Peaceable Kingdom” Myth in the Writings of Mary Anne Sadlier (1820–1913) & Isabella Valancy Crawford (1850–1887),” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 32, no. 1: 46–55. Lacombe, Michéle. “Frying Pans and Deadlier Weapons: The Immigrant Novels of Mary Anne Sadlier,” Essays on Canadian Writing 29 (Summer 1984): 96–116. McGee, Thomas D’Arcy. Letters to James and Mary Anne Sadlier, the James Sadlier Collection. National Archives of Canada. MG 24, c 16, Vol. 1, 1–52. Sadlier, Mary Anne. Bessie Conway; or, The Irish Girl in America. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co., 1861. Sadlier, Mary Anne (ed). The Poems of Thomas D’Arcy McGee, with copious notes. Also an Introduction and Biographical Sketch, By Mrs. J. Sadlier. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co., 1869.
SAINT-GAUDENS, AUGUSTUS (1848–1907) Augustus Saint-Gaudens was born in Dublin on March 1, 1848, to a French father and an Irish mother. Fleeing the Potato Famine, the family sailed first to Boston, and shortly thereafter moved to New York City, where Saint-Gaudens grew up. He showed an early aptitude for art and was apprenticed to several cameo cutters; this period of apprenticeships began his later mastery of portraits. In his teens he also attended drawing classes in the Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design. In 1867, Saint-Gaudens sailed to Paris, where he studied for a time at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He remained in Paris until the Franco-Prussian War turned decisively against the French; at that time he went to Rome. There he started accepting commissions, and
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his skills as a portraitist began to attain public notice, particularly among the affluent. While in Italy Saint-Gaudens met the woman who would later become his wife, Augusta Homer. Despite several early lean periods in both Europe and the United States, SaintGaudens’s breakthrough success came in 1881, when he unveiled his Admiral Farragut Monument in New York City. (Farragut was a Civil War hero for the Union.) This work caused a sensation—patriotic yet also artistic, it propelled Saint-Gaudens into the forefront of the widespread postwar market for monumental commissions. Indeed, one of his next commissions (1884) was also related to the Civil War, and it is likely his most famous single work. The subject of enormous and time-consuming effort, the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial was unveiled in Boston in 1897. This large and moving bronze commemorates both Shaw and the black soldiers he commanded, the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. Saint-Gaudens depicts an angel of benediction hovering over the men as they march to the 1863 Battle of Battery Wagner, in which they distinguished themselves with valor and were horribly slaughtered. The Gould Shaw Memorial remains one of the most admired public artworks in the country, and has inspired numerous other artists; it is the monument mentioned prominently in both Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead” and John Berryman’s “Boston Common.” Although the Farragut and Shaw memorials are likely Saint-Gaudens’s most prominent works, he spent the 1880s, 1890s, and the first years of the twentieth century creating a large body of successful monumental work. Among his greater achievements were his statue of Diana (1881; it was removed from atop the first www.abc-clio.com
Madison Square Garden in 1925 and is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art), his standing Abraham Lincoln (1887; Lincoln Park, Chicago), the Adams Memorial (1891; Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington D.C.), his bronze allegory Amor Caritas (1898; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), the William Tecumseh Sherman Monument (1903; Grand Army Plaza, New York), and his sculpture of a Pilgrim (1904; Fairmount Park, Philadelphia). He is also highly esteemed for his 1907 design for the $20 coin known as the “Double Eagle,” which many numismatists consider to be the most beautiful coin ever issued by the United States. On August 3, 1907, Saint-Gaudens died of cancer at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire. Although his fame has diminished since his death, he is still regarded as one of the most important American artists of the nineteenth century. His Civil War monuments particularly contribute to the public memory of the war in which so many of his fellow Irish Americans distinguished themselves, and in which many thousands gave their lives. Saint-Gaudens also left a lasting contribution to the city of his birth: his statue of Charles Stewart Parnell that stands at the northern head of O’Connell Street in Dublin. Andrew Goodspeed See also: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR References Dryfhout, John, and Beverly Fox. Augustus Saint-Gaudens: The Portrait Reliefs. Washington, DC: National Portrait Gallery, 1969. Garnett, Jeff, and Ron Guth. 100 Greatest U.S. Coins. Atlanta: H. E. Harris, 2003. Tharp, Louise Hall. Saint-Gaudens and the Gilded Era. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1969. Wilkinson, Burke. Uncommon Clay: The Life and Works of Augustus Saint- Gaudens. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.
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822 SAINT PATRICK’S CATHEDRAL
SAINT PATRICK’S CATHEDRAL The first Saint Patrick’s Church in New York was established by Jesuit Father Anthony Kohlmann on June 8, 1809, at Broadway and Bowery Road (today Mott and Prince Streets). Services were in English, French, and German. Father Kohlmann later purchased land and a house on 5th Avenue between 50th and 51st Streets to establish the New York Literary Institution for boys. It was attended by both Protestants and Catholics. The area, however, was not very accessible in the early part of the nineteenth century because of its location in a yetundeveloped area of the city, and this prevented the school from growing. Father Kohlmann was recalled to Maryland, and the Literary Institution continued, albeit haphazardly. When Napoleon was defeated and sent into exile, many French Catholics returned to France, a situation that took away the Catholic Mass from the Literary Institution. The Institution eventually closed its doors and fell into secular hands. For several years, it was a roadside inn. In 1828 the property was purchased outright by the Trustees of Saint Patrick’s and Saint Peter’s to be used as a cemetery. The ground proved to be too rocky and the idea for a cemetery had to be abandoned. But most importantly, the property was back in Church hands and as an investment, it proved itself to be a very valuable piece of real estate in the heart of present-day Manhattan. The new Saint Patrick’s Church on this site was prepared for dedication in 1815. The first priest ordained at Saint Patrick’s was Irish-born Father John Hughes in 1837. In 1850, Father Hughes announced the building of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, an idea
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many called “Hughes’s Folly.” He envisioned it becoming the center of Catholic life in New York. Catholics would no longer be outsiders in a mostly Protestant New York City, and such a cathedral would certainly announce their presence as a major religious group. Architectural plans were drawn up by architect James Renwick. Father Hughes’s vision came to fruition with the dedication of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in 1879. By then, Father Hughes had been dead for 15 years but his laying of the cornerstone in 1858 and the Cathedral’s eventual dedication 21 years later showed New York City and the world that such a massive, mostly marble building was indeed no folly. It was a symbol of Catholic life and Father Hughes’s ambitious wish. Contributions were solicited for many years before and after the construction of the cathedral, and it was finally consecrated as debt free in 1910. Since 1948, Midnight Mass has been televised live from Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. It is the first American church to have its name inscribed on the floor of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Cynthia A. Klima
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See also: CATHOLIC CHURCH, the; NEW YORK CITY References Burton, Katherine. The Dream Lives Forever: The Story of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. New York: Longman’s, Green and Company, 1960. Carty, Margaret. A Cathedral of Suitable Significance: St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York. Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1984. Cathy, M. P. Old St. Patrick’s: New York’s First Cathedral. New York: U.S. Catholic Society, 1947. Cook, Leland. St. Patrick’s Cathedral. New York: Quick Fox, 1979.
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SAINT PATRICK’S DAY PARADES Saint Patrick’s Day—March 17—has been observed by the Irish as both an ethnic festival and a national celebration for thousands of years on the saint’s religious feast day and the anniversary of his death in the fifth century. It is not a national holiday in the United States, but it is nationally observed. The original Patrick, based on his Confessio, was a missionary born in Roman Britain in the first decade of the fifth century who was kidnapped, at age 16, by Irish marauders and enslaved as a shepherd for six years in Antrim. He escaped, studied for the priesthood in Gaul, and then returned to Ireland in 432 with a group of companions. Despite the many legends that grew around him, Patrick
was not the first to introduce Christianity to Ireland—there is substantial evidence that it already had roots there—but he has been considered the patron saint of Ireland for 15 centuries. His writings are also the earliest extant documents written in Ireland. For these reasons, Patrick has achieved a special role in the cultural and spiritual life of the country, expressed in song, poetry, prose, prayer, and pilgrimage. Today, Saint Patrick’s Day is a rowdy festival of parading, revelry, dancing, and drinking, emblazoned with shamrocks and harps, all in emerald green. Irish immigration to the United States began as early as the eighteenth century. More than half of the soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War had Irish ancestors, and it was in colonial America that the
Saint Patrick’s Day parade in New York’s Union Square, 1870. (Library of Congress)
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Irish first paraded to express their identity and solidarity. In a touch of irony, those who marched in the first Saint Patrick’s Day parade were Irishmen in British uniform, soldiers stationed in the colonies who were sent by King George III to preserve the crown’s grip on a rebellious colony. The first public Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations outside a church in the United States were held by the Charitable Irish Society of Boston in 1737. The first parade in New York City, which is today considered the largest Saint Patrick’s Day parade in the world, took place on March 17, 1762, when a group of Irish-born soldiers were on their way to breakfast on Saint Patrick’s Day and staged an impromptu march through the streets of colonial New York with their regimental band. Along with their music, the parade helped the soldiers to reconnect with their Irish roots, as well as with fellow Irishmen serving in the English army. Until 1774, military units were a special part of Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations in New York. After 1783, Irish-American soldiers participated in the parade until 1812, when some societies, such as the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, the Hibernian Society, and the Shamrock Friendly Association, joined forces to run the parade, which soon consisted of small groups, many featuring bagpipes and drums, marching from the headquarters of their organizations to the first Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and other local churches. Since 1776, Boston has also had a parade. With the rise of these so-called Irish aid societies, Irish patriotism strengthened among American immigrants. After 1820, the increase in Irish immigration brought Saint Patrick’s Day parades to whatever city or community they settled in large numbers. For Irish workers, www.abc-clio.com
March 17 became the day to honor their ethnic roots with the wearing of the green that symbolized their identity as they paraded their Irish pride. Later, the significance of the day was overshadowed by the commercial aspects. Along with the parades, the political celebrations, and the Irish music and dancing, a microcosm of Irish culture and folklife in one day, people wear green, one of the national colors of Ireland and one of the signs of spring. On Saint Patrick’s Day, green stripes are painted on the streets where the parade will travel, flowers are dyed green, people wear green clothing and shamrocks, and many American taverns serve green beverages. However, the main attraction, the center of the events, remains the parade where political friend and enemy come together for the length of several blocks to show themselves to the thousands of cheering spectators lining the streets. By 1870, the order of march usually imcluded a platoon of policemen, the 69th Regiment (the Fighting 69th), the Legion of Patrick, men of Tipperary, 21 divisions of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and numerous parish benevolent societies and total abstinence units. The first floats appeared in 1875; according to reports at the time, one carried two women representing Ireland and America, and another had 32 women, one for each of the counties of Ireland. After New York and Boston, one of the oldest and biggest parades in the United States has been held in Savannah, Georgia, a city with a long Irish history. The oldest Irish society in this country, the Hibernian Society, was formed in that city in 1812 by 13 Irish Protestants who held a private procession the next year, a forerunner to the present Saint Patrick’s Day parade. The first
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public procession was held in 1824, and public parades have been held there since, with only six lapses: for wars, sympathy for the Irish Revolution, and for an unrecorded reason. Other parades soon followed in Carbondale, Pennsylvania (1833), New Haven, Connecticut (1842), Chicago (1843), San Francisco (1852), Scranton, Pennsylvania (1853), Atlanta (1858), and Cleveland (1867). By the late twentieth century, there were an estimated 235 parades in 44 states. As the parades began to increase in the 1850s and the 1860s, the press began to give them more detailed coverage. One hundred years later, the parades were covered by newspapers and on radio and on television, bringing moving images and sounds of the festivities to a very large audience. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, highlights of many of these parades were available on websites and on DVDs, sometimes within hours of the parade’s end. However, in the beginning, when Irish Americans in these cities paraded on Saint Patrick’s Day, newspapers portrayed them in cartoons as drunk, violent monkeys, one of the many stereotypes that persisted into the late twentieth century, but the Irish soon realized that their great numbers endowed them with a political power that had yet to be exploited. They started to organize, and their voting block (the “green machine”) became an important swing vote for political hopefuls. Suddenly, annual Saint Patrick’s Day parades became a show of strength for Irish Americans and a must-attend event for political candidates. In Boston, there are still memories of Mayor James M. Curley riding in the parade in a fur coat, shaking hands with priests and www.abc-clio.com
nuns; of Up-Up Kelly, a Curley lieutenant, punctuating the mayor’s Saint Patrick’s Day speech by jumping up every minute to applaud Curley’s condemnation of the British and urging the audience to do likewise; and of Grand Marshall Knocko McCormack, brother of former U.S. House Speaker John McCormack, heaving his 300 pounds onto a dray horse that hauled the ashcart for the city of Boston. In 1948, President Harry Truman attended New York City’s Saint Patrick’s Day parade, a proud moment for the many Irish whose ancestors had to fight stereotypes and racial prejudice to find acceptance in America.
Conflicts and Controversies A parade, by its very nature, requires incredible preparation and coordination and the participation of hundreds of organizations to make it a successful endeavor. For example, in 1868, the Irish Citizen protested that there were too many German bands in the parade and not enough Irish ones, which lessened the amount of Irish music that was played. This was quickly replaced by more political concerns, which continue today. For a time after the Civil War, the Fenian Brotherhood (Fenians), a wing of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a society devoted to gaining Irish independence through revolution, headed the annual Saint Patrick’s Day parades in Chicago until 1870 when the Catholic Church condemned and excommunicated them. This led to their removal from their position at the head of the Saint Patrick’s Day parade; they then marched in a separate procession right before the main parade. The Fenians’ chief rival was the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), which required members to be of Irish birth and Roman
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Catholics of good standing. They were to play a major role in Saint Patrick’s Day celebrations, especially in the control they exerted in the 1980s and 1990s over what groups and organizations could march. Also, they began to attend Mass as a group on the holiday and to allow the clergy a more active role in the celebrations. The last decades of the twentieth century saw an increase in the use of the parades to support the Northern Ireland conflict. At the 1970 New York parade, four men unfurled a banner demanding “Civil Rights for Northern Ireland” in full view of Cardinal Cooke at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. In 1972, members of the Irish Republican Aid Committee preceded the main body of the Boston parade along the march route in protest of the British presence in Northern Ireland, but despite the intervention of Northern Ireland politics into the background of the parade, the parades were carefully monitored through the rest of the 1970s for inappropriate political activity. In 1983, the choice of an alleged Irish Republican Army (IRA) sympathizer, Michael Flannery, to lead the New York parade led to demands that the parade be boycotted, and the Irish government criticized Irish Americans who supported IRA causes. Cardinal Cooke publicly declared his opposition to Flannery and refused to emerge from Saint Patrick’s Cathedral until Flannery walked past. By the early 1990s, a more serious dynamic emerged as more Saint Patrick’s Day parades, mostly controlled by the AOH, reflected conservative, traditional family values. The 1991 New York parade heralded the arrival of the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization (ILGO) who emerged from within the spectators, chanting “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re Irish.” Their attempts www.abc-clio.com
to publicly sanction homosexuality on Saint Patrick’s Day, while supported by the mainstream media, were rejected by the official organizing committee. Instead, another Irish group in the parade, Division 7 from Manhattan, subsumed ILGO into their group and were further assisted by then Mayor David Dinkins, who marched with Division 7 instead of at the nominal head of the parade. He was booed for his efforts. The next year, after a complex series of maneuvers by both sides after ILGO was excluded again, in what was clearly a violation of New York human rights legislation, ILGO sued the AOH. The judicial decision ruled in favor of the organizers: ownership of the invitation list belonged to the organizers. As such, they could overlook any group that they wished. In other words, although the parade was held on public streets, it was effectively a private parade, and only those who were invited could join. At subsequent parades, demonstrators who were opposed to the exclusion of gays from the event protested along the parade route on 5th Avenue, and this political statement continues today. As the controversy in New York grew, gay and lesbian groups across the United States campaigned to be in parades and in other celebrations. In Massachusetts, the Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston sought to enter that city’s parade, but its organizers denied their application. Unlike their New York counterparts, they went to the U.S. Supreme Court in what was officially a case between them and the Allied War Veterans’ Council of South Boston, the organizers of the parade. As in the New York situation, the organizers won. Although they were not allowed to exclude gay and lesbian marchers from the parade, they could prevent any group from
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participating. Commenting on the situation in New York and Boston, the New Republic (February 1, 1993) noted that “some Irish Americans show themselves to be narrower than their homelanders, and less festive too.” However, the debate still continues over the inclusion of these groups in the parades.
Other Parade Venues Today, Saint Patrick’s Day is celebrated by people of all backgrounds in the United States, Canada (Ottawa, Quebec, Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton, Vancouver), Australia, Argentina, Japan, Singapore, and Russia, while many leading Irish figures and politicians, including the president of the Republic of Ireland or the Irish ambassador to a particular country, often participate in the local parade. It is quite an honor for a parade to have a high Irish official within its ranks. The Dublin office of the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs receives overseas requests for government assistance in commemorating Saint Patrick’s Day from expatriate Irish societies, parade organizers, and Irish embassies, consulates, and legations across the globe; Irish ambassadors and diplomats are expected to participate in a lead role. In the United States, the best-known parades are still held in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C., where traditions of the parades reflect different celebrations, as do their counterparts in Australia, Canada, and across Ireland. In Washington, D.C., the parade, unlike its counterparts in other cities with highly defined Irish-American communities, better reflects its representation as “The Nation’s Saint Patrick’s Day Parade.” The first Saint Patrick’s Day parade in Washington, D.C., was held in 1871 and traveled along Massachusetts Avenue from Dupont Circle www.abc-clio.com
to the statue of Robert Emmet. In 1874, the Constitution Avenue route was established, and the march became a full-scale parade with marching bands, pipe bands, military units, and police and fire departments, as well as floats, novelty groups, and marchers wearing green. The parade is always held on the Sunday before Saint Patrick’s Day. Traditionally, the parade is not a forum for political issues. Elected officials march, but those running for office are not allowed to use the parade as a campaign site. The parade is an Irish community endeavor that was started by the Irish American Club and is now held in cooperation with the U.S. Capital Park Service. The president of the Irish American Club maintains a place on the Board of Directors of the Parade Committee.
Current Situation More than 200 years since the first Saint Patrick’s Day parade was held, the event continues to be celebrated with more fanfare in the United States than in Ireland, but it has also garnered its share of criticism for a loss of religious meaning, commercialism, unfortunate displays of drinking, and increasing political activity, which has long divided the Irish community, torn between those who support their conservative, traditional values and those who embrace alternative lifestyles but also want to honor their Irish heritage. At the same time, the parade, like the Saint Patrick’s Day celebration itself, has united Irish emigrants worldwide, whether in the United States, Canada, or elsewhere. Martin J. Manning See also: IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY; IRISH REPUBLICAN BROTHERHOOD; NATIONALISM, IRISH-AMERICAN; POLITICAL PARTIES, IRISH
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828 SAMPSON, WILLIAM References Barth, Edna, with Ursula Arndt. Shamrocks, Harps, and Shillelaghs: The Story of St. Patrick’s Day Symbols. New York: Seabury, 1977. Cronin, Mike, and Daryl Adair. The Wearing of the Green: A History of St. Patrick’s Day. London: Routledge, 2002. Davies, Wallace E. Patriotism on Parade: The Story of the Veterans’ and Hereditary Organizations in America, 1783–1900. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1955. Fraser, T. G., ed. The Irish Parading Tradition: Following the Drum. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. Glazier, Michael, ed. The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1999. Ridge, John J. St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New York. New York: New York St. Patrick’s Day Committee, 1988. Santino, Jack. All Around the Year: Holidays and Celebrations in American Life. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1994. Walkowski, Paul J., and William M. Connolly. From Trial Court to United States Supreme Court: Anatomy of a Free Speech Case, the Incredible Inside Story Behind the Theft of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Boston: Branden Publishing, 1996.
SAMPSON, WILLIAM (1764–1836) Educated at Trinity College Dublin and Lincoln’s Inn, London, William Sampson frequently acted as counsel for the Society of the United Irishmen, which had been established by his friend, fellow lawyer Theobald Wolfe Tone. As a reluctant rebel, Sampson did not believe in the violent plans of the organization but acted as defense counsel for the United Irishmen after efforts to suppress the organization in the latter half of the 1790s. In the eyes of the government, he was nevertheless a rebel, and as a consequence of his pro-United Irish activities he was imprisoned with the rest of the state prisoners at Fort George; in www.abc-clio.com
1805 Sampson managed to leave for the United States. He had initial difficulties setting up a law practice in New York, suffering from a lack of funds, but he was eventually successful. Sampson and Thomas Addis Emmet were the only United Irishmen who were admitted to practice law in New York, because of widespread dislike of the “fugitive Jacobins” among the predominantly Federalist law circles. Acting in accordance with his United Irish beliefs, Sampson became a lawyer heavily involved in civil rights litigation, often working on a pro bono basis. His longtime passion was the eradication of the British common law, upon which the New York legal system was based. Sampson’s 1823 address to the New York Historical Society did manage to generate a lively debate in the legal circles, and for the next two years he was involved in the debate for legal reform, particularly the codification movement. Sampson was best known as an advocate for Irish immigrants, fighting for their rights as Catholics in the justice system. His most famous case was in 1813, when he successfully defended the “priest-penitent privilege” that allowed a Jesuit priest not to disclose confessional details in court. In his cases, he also made frequent allusions to the suffering of Catholics in Ireland. William Sampson was an avid writer on Irish affairs, and in his memoirs he wrote extensively about the 1798 rebellion and its causes. Sampson was also active in benevolent Irish circles. In 1828, along with the United Irish surgeon William James MacNeven, he established the Society for Civil and Religious Liberties, the main objective of which was Catholic Emancipation. With Thomas O’Connor, another United Irish exile, he founded the Association of the Friends of Ireland in New York, which
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collected money for O’Connell’s emancipation campaign both in Ireland and Westminster. Aki Kalliomaki See also: O’CONNELL, Daniel References Madden, Richard R. United Irishmen, Their Lives and Times. London: 1887. Maxwell, Bloomfield. American Lawyers in a Changing Society, 1776–1876. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Twomey, Richard. Jacobins and Jeffersonians: Anglo-American Radicalism in the United States, 1790–1820. New York: Garland, 1989. Wilson, David: United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.
SAN FRANCISCO Unlike other American metropolises, such as Boston and New York, San Francisco is not usually a city associated with the Irish in the popular imagination. However, San Francisco’s Irish community, though no longer as large or as vibrant as in years past, has made its unique presence felt throughout the city’s history. Spanish priests and soldiers founded what would eventually become the city of San Francisco as a Roman Catholic mission, Mission San Francisco, on June 27, 1776. In 1834, Mexico, having won independence from Spain, closed the Catholic missions and sold their land. San Francisco was the first of the missions to be secularized. In 1846, California became part of the United States. Although some Irish had arrived in the region earlier, Irish immigrants began coming in substantial numbers when the California gold rush began in 1849, and they soon outnumbered even the Hispanics in the area. www.abc-clio.com
As early as the late 1860s, a visitor wrote that while “every civilized nation is represented [in San Francisco],” “[t]he Irish predominate and dominate.” Another, describing the great number and variety of religious faiths represented in the city, commented, “The Catholics, of course, are everywhere and very rich; fat lands have descended to them from the Spaniards and Mexicans; fat revenues flow to them now from the Irish.” By 1880, the number of Irish had swelled to one-third of the city’s population of 233,959. One way in which the San Franciscan Irish were atypical, if not unique, among their compatriots in the United States was in their degree of financial success. In part because they were early arrivals in the city—unlike the nineteenth-century Irish in New York and Boston—and in part because of San Francisco’s unusually welcoming attitude to Catholics, given the city’s Spanish colonial roots, the Irish were able to prosper there from the start. In addition, as opposed to those who arrived on the East Coast of the United States, many Irish arriving in San Francisco were second-stage immigrants, having earlier immigrated from Australia to Ireland, and they had already dealt with the travails of immigrant life. Gold rush arrival Eugene Kelly made his first fortune in San Francisco before moving to New York to advise the clergy there on the building of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. San Francisco’s “Silver King” and business titan John W. Mackay was born in Dublin in 1831, and fellow immigrant Peter Donahue was known as the “Father of California Industry.” James C. Flood, born in New York City to poor Irish immigrants, built the city’s landmark Flood Building. Flood made his initial money after moving to San Francisco during the
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gold rush. He later became far wealthier after investing in Nevada silver mining with his fellow Irishman and business partner, William O’Brien, and two Irish mining engineers, John Mackay and James Fair. Among the Irish middle class, Michael Maurice O’Shaughnessy, also from Dublin, designed San Francisco’s West Portal Tunnel, water system, and streetcar system. Another Irish engineer, Jasper O’ Farrell, laid out the city plan for modern San Francisco. Many other Irish were proprietors of saloons, groceries, and so on, as well as common laborers. As in other U.S. cities, the Irish were also well represented among the ranks of San Francisco’s police, firefighters, politicians, and Catholic clergy, frequently attaining the highest positions in those fields. Unfortunately, the Irish in San Francisco were not immune to the ethnic hatred that infected many of their compatriots in other cities such as New York. The Chinese rivaled the Irish in numbers and visibility as one of San Francisco’s largest immigrant communities. The height of Chinese immigration in the nineteenth century coincided with one of the worst economic depressions of the era, leading many white residents of San Francisco to blame the massive influx of Chinese laborers for the recession and consequent rise in unemployment. Dennis Kearney, an Irish immigrant and drayman, denounced the Chinese during a meeting of workers in San Francisco in 1877 as “shrewd, opportunist, and disloyal” to the labor cause by undercutting wages and acquiescing to poor working environments. Kearney’s inflammatory rhetoric aggravated a mob of hundreds of angry, unemployed men and resulted in the San Francisco riot of 1877, which became only the most infamous of a series of violent attacks against the Chinese in nineteenth-century California. www.abc-clio.com
White laborers, many of whom were Irish, roamed the streets of San Francisco for several days, searching for Chinese and other Asians to attack. Many Chinese businesses, particularly laundries and restaurants, were vandalized, robbed, and burned. Rioting became so frenzied that the National Guard, citizen volunteers, and three warships requested by Governor William Irwin were called in to try to quell the violence. However, the riots continued for several days. For more than a decade afterward, Kearney remained the leader of the struggle to expel the Chinese from California. Today, a street in San Francisco is named after him. The Irish were not only the instigators of some attacks driven by ethnic hatred, but also the victims of them. Although San Francisco was more welcoming to the Irish than other parts of the United States in the nineteenth century, California was a hotbed of the national Know-Nothing movement of the mid-1850s, which was fueled mainly by anti-Catholic sentiment and directed at Irish and German immigrants. California was the only state to elect a Know-Nothing governor, and the party was very strong in San Francisco. In 1851, San Franciscans also turned their hostility on Australians, who were arriving by the thousands. A group of citizens made up mainly of local businessmen formed the Committee of Vigilance, which met ships at the docks so they could turn away “undesirable immigrants,: particularly those from Australia, and even hanging immigrants without trial. The majority of these “Australian” immigrants were, in fact, Irish or of Irish descent. Despite such challenges, far more Irish Americans made positive rather than negative contributions to the cause of labor in
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San Francisco and to the city generally. In 1860, the first concerted drive by labor in San Francisco was for a shorter workday, with workers campaigning for a 10-hour rather than the then-standard 12-hour day. Later, Irishman Alexander M. Kenaday, a San Francisco printer, led the campaign for an eight-hour day. Among labor leaders who opposed Dennis Kearney was his fellow Irishman Frank Roney, who had fought as a revolutionary for the Irish Republic before becoming a voluntary exile to the United States. Although Roney had been born to a wealthy family, he dedicated himself to improving the status of the average laborer in San Francisco. Roney appeared at a labor gathering with Kearney only once, denouncing the latter as a “traitor” to the workingman’s cause. Another of Roney’s targets were the “crimps,” San Francisco’s boarding house keepers who had supplied sea captains with shanghaied— that is, kidnapped slave labor—crew members since the gold rush. In 1885, Roney became the first president of the newly formed Federal Trades and Labor Council in San Francisco. The Irish in San Francisco also distinguished themselves in political office. James D. Phelan, the son of a wealthy Irish gold rush banker and financier, became mayor in 1896 and pushed through a new city charter. The contributions of Irish Americans to civic life in San Francisco did not diminish in the next century. San Franciscan John Francis Houlihan, the son of Irish immigrants, served as mayor of the neighboring large city of Oakland in the 1960s. Irish-American Frank Jordan served as mayor in the late 1980s and early 1990s. More recently, IrishAmerican Gavin Newsom was elected to the office of mayor of San Francisco in 2004. The history of Irish-American politicians in www.abc-clio.com
San Francisco has not been entirely positive. In 1978, a tragic event again brought tensions between the city’s traditional, heavily Irish population and a growing minority group into sharp focus. Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk, a member of the city’s board of supervisors and the nation’s first openly gay elected official, were shot to death in their offices at City Hall by Dan White. White, an Irish American, was a native San Franciscan who had run for city supervisor in what was then a very conservative, working class, and Irish-Catholic neighborhood known as District 8. Although White was elected to the board of supervisors, he blamed Moscone and Milk for his later political failures. After the shock and sorrow of Moscone and Milk’s murders, tensions in the city escalated, culminating in riots, when White was found guilty only of manslaughter and given a minimal sentence. Many in San Francisco, particularly in the gay community, believed White’s lenient sentence was due in large part to general antigay sentiment as well as resentment of the growing political power of the city’s gay community. After being released from prison in January 1985, White committed suicide in October of that year. Today, San Francisco’s Irish population is no longer as large or as visible as it once was. The city’s Mission District, once largely Irish, is now home to a mainly Hispanic community drawn chiefly from Mexico and Central America. (Today, San Francisco boasts an Irish Mexican Association.) Another once predominantly Irish enclave, the Richmond District, is now called by many “New Chinatown,” although it is still known for its many Irish bars. Along with other formerly prominent ethnic groups in the city, such as the Japanese, Italians, Germans, and Jews, the
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Irish community in San Francisco has waned for a variety of reasons, mostly the post–World War II desire of many families to move into the suburbs and own their homes. However, a substantial minority of Irish immigrants still lives and works in San Francisco today, and one can find traces of the city’s strong Irish past in many street names, its lively Saint Patrick’s Day parade, its numerous Catholic churches, and its Irish bars. One of only four statues in the world of Irish patriot Robert Emmet, who was executed by the British in 1803, stands in the city’s Golden Gate Park. And the legendary Irish coffee drink was invented not in Ireland but at San Francisco’s Buena Vista Hotel bar. The New College of California in San Francisco is one of very few universities in the United States to offer degrees both in Irish studies and in the Irish language. Danielle Maze See also: NATIVISM AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM References Binetti, Mike. “Dennis Kearney.” http:// baseportal.com/cgi-bin/baseportal.pl?htx=/ zpub2000/sfentries&cmd=list&range= 0,50&cmd=all&Id=119 (accessed August 27, 2007). “California as I Saw It: First-Person Narratives of California’s Early Years, 1849–1900.” The Library of Congress. http://memory .loc.gov/ammem/cbhtml/cbhome.html (accessed August 27, 2007). McBroom, Patricia. “Hounded, Hunted, and Sometimes Hanged.” Berkeleyan Online, Office of Public Affairs, the University of California at Berkeley, 1994. www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/ 1994/1109/immigrant.html (accessed August 27, 2007). Milner, Clyde A., Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha J. Sandweiss, eds.The Oxford History of the American West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Morris, Charles R. American Catholic. New York: Vintage, 1997. www.abc-clio.com
SAN PATRICIOS BRIGADE The San Patricios were composed of deserters from the U.S. Army, the greatest single number being Irishmen and foreigners resident in Mexico. In five battles of the Mexican-American War the San Patricios Brigade bore arms for the Mexicans. It is disputed whether their principal motivation in deserting and fighting against their former comrades was to defend fellow Roman Catholics from conquest by a Protestant power and as a consequence of the nativism of their own officers, or was because of the prospects of better pay, rank, land, and citizenship offered to deserters by the numerically stronger Mexican Army. The deserters were originally organized in the border town of Matamoros by John Riley, a native of Co. Galway. He claimed that this company was formed from 48 Irishmen in the April of 1846. On May 3, 1846, this force assisted in the artillery bombardment of the American Army at Fort Texas from Matamoros. After the Mexican withdrawal to Monterrey on May 17, more deserters were added. When Monterrey was assaulted by the American Army of Zachary Taylor on September 21, Riley and his fellow deserters are thought to have again served with the Mexican artillery. After the Mexican surrender of the city on September 26, at least 100 deserters followed Riley in the retreat. Riley was himself summoned before General Santa Anna to fashion a force of deserters and foreigners resident in Mexico into artillerymen. From November 1846 the Voluntarios Irlandeses appeared in the payroll records of the Mexican Army. At San Luis Potosi with Santa Anna’s Liberating Army of the North, Riley displayed an emerald flag said in different accounts to be variously decorated with a harp, a shamrock, a cross,
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and an image of Saint Patrick as well as with the Mexican eagle and coat of arms. By 1847 the title of San Patricios had been given by the Mexicans to Riley’s men. At the Battle of Buena Vista on February 23, 1847, the San Patricios lost 22 men and won much praise for their heroism. Riley was promoted from lieutenant to captain. In April 1847 the San Patricios served at the Battle of Cerro Gordo against Scott’s expedition to capture Mexico City. On July 1, 1847, by the presidential decree of Santa Anna, the San Patricios were transferred from the artillery to the infantry and were merged into a Foreign Legion; however, they still retained their identity as two San Patricio companies of 102 men each. Riley commanded one company and Captain Santiago O’Leary the other. On August 20, 1847, at the Battle of Churubusco, in defence of the approach to Mexico City, the two companies of San Patricios suffered 35 dead and 85 taken prisoner, including the now Brevet Major Riley. The stand of the San Patricios at Churubusco is often credited with allowing most of Santa Anna’s army to escape to defend Mexico City. The American Army now tried those captured San Patricios who had deserted from their ranks. The defense offered by many of the San Patricios was that drunkenness had led to their capture by the Mexicans, who had then coerced them into bearing arms. Riley too claimed he had been captured and forced to fight for Mexico. This has led some to argue that neither the nativism of the American officers nor the religious conscience of Catholic soldiers motivated the San Patricios. Others have drawn attention to drunkenness being an acceptable defense for desertion under the American Army’s Articles of War www.abc-clio.com
that would save them from execution. The military judges sentenced 70 prisoners to death. General Scott pardoned five men, reduced 15 sentences, and confirmed 50 of the death sentences. Riley was reprieved because he had deserted before the declaration of war. Those San Patricios who had escaped at Churubusco and those later released from American captivity after punishment continued in the Mexican Army in what was now the Batallón de San Patricio, under the command of Riley. Despite fighting against rebels, they were suspected of involvement in one of the attempted coups that followed Mexico’s defeat and were disbanded in the summer of 1848. The records are incomplete, but approximately two-fifths of the San Patricios were Irishmen; many other nationalities filled the rest of their ranks. Santa Anna stated that with more soldiers like the San Patricios he would have defeated the United States. After the war Mexico certainly remembered the San Patricios as Irish Catholics, as was soon also true in the United States and Ireland. O. R. Butler References Hogan, Michael. The Irish Soldiers of Mexico. Guadalajara, Mexico: Fondo Editorial Universitario, 1997. Miller, Robert Ryal. Shamrock and Sword, The Saint Patrick’s Battalion in the U.S.–Mexican War. Norman, London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989. Stevens, Peter F. The Rogue’s March, John Riley and the St. Patrick’s Battalion. Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1999.
SCANLAN, WILLIAM J. (1856–1898) Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, William Scanlan began his career as the 13-year-old “Temperance Boy Singer,” appearing with
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temperance lecturers on the New England circuit. He eventually found his way to New York City and into vaudeville. He teamed up with Jim Cronin (“That Hibernian Wit”) and later toured with Minnie Palmer. He began writing songs, and, while appearing in Bartley Campbell’s Friend and Foe in 1882, he introduced his first success, “Midnight in Killarney.” Scanlan’s good looks and his abilities as a singer, actor, and songwriter attracted the attention of Augustus Pitou, an impresario with a knack for packaging talent. Pitou created a string of successful Irish musicals around Scanlan: The Irish Minstrel (1883), Shane-na-lawn (1885), Myles Arroon (1888), and Mavourneen (1891). Scanlan wrote songs for all of these shows, the most successful of which were “Peek-a-Boo,” “Scanlan’s Rose Song,” “Peggy O’Moore,” and “My Nellie’s Blue Eyes” (1883), the only one to survive into the twentieth century. Dennis Morgan sang it in the 1947 film biography of Chauncey Olcott, My Wild Irish Rose. (William Frawley played Scanlan in the film.) In fact, it was Olcott whom Pitou summoned to New York to take over Scanlan’s role in Mavourneen a few months after the show opened in September 1891. Since coming to New York, the former temperance singer had adopted a lifestyle that left him trapped in dementia at the age of 35. The performer was committed to Bloomingdale Asylum in White Plains, New York, in January 1892. He died there six years later. Although his career was short, Scanlan was an important pivotal figure in the Irish musical in America. Scanlan’s stage representations had less of the vaudeville Paddy and more of the smooth, self-assured Irish American. Musically, his songs were anchored www.abc-clio.com
firmly in the mainstream of American popular music and had little to do with traditional Irish melody. (In fact, “My Nellie’s Blue Eyes” is based on the Venetian song “Vieni Sul Mar.”) In terms of their lyrics, Scanlan’s songs offered Irish Americans a sense of Irishness based on romance, sentiment, and national pride that had nothing to do with famine, poverty, politics, or revolution. Scanlan helped to create the emerging genre of Tin Pan Alley Irish-American song. William H. A. Williams See also: OLCOTT, Chauncey References Fiedler, Mari Kathleen. “Chauncey Olcott: Irish-American Mother-Love, Romance, and Nationalism.” Éire-Ireland 22, no. 2 (1987): 4–26. Williams, William H. A. ‘Twas Only An Irishman’s Dream: The Image of the Irish and Ireland in American Popular Song Lyrics, 1800–1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.
SCOTS-IRISH The ethnic identifier “Scots-Irish” (sometimes “Scotch-Irish”) generally refers to American descendants of Presbyterian Scots who settled in Ulster (modern-day Northern Ireland) during the seventeenth century. The Scots-Irish left Ulster for varied reasons, including neomercantilist British economic policy in the region, requirements that they (along with other non-Anglicans in Northern Ireland) pay 10 percent of their income to the Anglican Church, ongoing friction with the native Catholic Irish, and greater economic opportunity in the New World. Although the Scots-Irish settled throughout the American colonies, initially they were concentrated most heavily in Pennsylvania.
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There has long been controversy surrounding the term “Scots-Irish.” According to some historians the term “Scots-Irish” originated in mid-eighteenth century America to distinguish the Ulster Presbyterian emigrants of Scottish ancestry from Roman Catholic Irish settlers in the colonies. Although the significance of Scots-Irish as a religious identifier in the United States has largely faded, its religious significance remained clear well into the twentieth century. Some commentators have postulated that noted Americans of Roman Catholic Irish descent, such as famed frontiersman Daniel Boone, have been commonly identified as Scots-Irish because Catholicism and Irish ethnicity did not fit prevailing ideals of American greatness at the time. The Scots-Irish were by far the most numerous of the early immigrant groups from Europe who settled in the United States. According to historian David Hackett Fischer, Puritan immigrants numbered about 21,000, while the Scots-Irish numbered 275,000. Scots-Irish historian Charles A. Hannah estimates that about 200,000 Protestants, mostly Presbyterians, one-third of the entire Protestant population of Ireland at that time, left Ulster between 1725 and 1768 for the American colonies. Another 30,000 came during the years 1771–1773. Having arrived later than the English Puritans, many Scots-Irish settled in the mountain backcountry of pre-Revolutionary America, leading a hardscrabble existence. Many others, however, gained considerable success in business, politics, and other spheres. Their descendants, many of whom moved westward, include such famous Americans as Patrick Henry, George Patton, John C. Calhoun, former U.S. President www.abc-clio.com
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Bill Clinton, writers Mark Twain and William Faulkner, infamous outlaws like Clyde Barrow, and Hollywood legend John Wayne. Danielle Maze See also: PRESBYTERIANISM; SCOTSIRISH CULTURE; SCOTS-IRISH PATTERNS OF SETTLEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES; SCOTS-IRISH POLITICS References Cobb, Irvin S. “The Lost Tribes of the Irish in the South: An Address at the Annual Dinner of the American Irish Historical Society.” New York: Office of Edward H. Daly, Secretary-General, American Irish Historical Society, 1917. Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Hanna, Charles A. The Scotch-Irish, or The Scot in North Britain, North Ireland, and North America. Vol. I. New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1902. Leyburn, James C. The Scotch-Irish: A Social History. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1962.
SCOTS-IRISH AND MILITARY CONFLICT Perhaps one of the most pervasive dimensions of the Scots-Irish stereotype that still exercises powerful influence at a popular level in modern America is the image of a people who were irascible, prone to feuding, and ready to take direct, violent action to settle disputes. Some of the power of this caricature relates to the notion of generational continuity back to the violence and conflicts forged in the environment of the “debatable land,” which constituted the shifting border between southern Scotland and northern England, and then later in the context of the Ulster Plantation. While it might be conceded that the outlook of
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those who adhered to the Calvinist theology and Covenanter principles of seventeenthcentury Presbyterianism shaped a culture that tended to be uncompromising rather than accommodating, we should be wary of applying too much determinism in characterizing people who were consistently mixing and changing in the British Isles and in the backcountry of colonial America. The reputation, not without some evidential foundation, the Scots-Irish attained for being dismissive of Native American rights and prone to violence in that direction, requires a little contextualization. If set in comparison to eighteenth-century Philadelphia Quakers such a judgment may seem fair, but if one looks back to Puritan New England in the previous century, it is harder to see Scots-Irish frontiersmen as particularly exceptional in their dealings with the Indians. Furthermore, as research progresses we can appreciate more and more that settlers from Ulster and their descendants enjoyed a significantly more complex relationship with native peoples, learning from and trading with the natives as well as grabbing land and plundering. Andrew Jackson, son of Ulster immigrants, and infamously associated with the forced migration of the Cherokee, both personified and compounded this negative reputation. However, a perusal of the biographical dictionaries illustrates the point that many prominent Scots-Irish figures demonstrated in their dealings with native peoples an approach which was pacific and cooperative rather than consistently antagonistic. It is not possible to ascribe an ethnic identity to all those who engaged in the various conflicts that dotted the history of Colonial America and the United States, but the involvement of the Scots-Irish in these campaigns has usually served as a www.abc-clio.com
source of pride to those who celebrate this heritage. In 2004, for example, James Webb, former assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, published a volume charting the contribution of the Scots-Irish to America under the title, Born Fighting. Given the extent of their settlement along the expanding southern frontier of the American Colonies and their enthusiasm for and familiarity with firearms, it was to be anticipated that they would play a prominent role in the French and Indian War (1756–1763). Their forebears, after all, had originally been encouraged to settle on the frontier in both Pennsylvania and Virginia because they were perceived to be experienced in and skilled at “dealing with a native threat.” The Scots-Irish pioneers of the Appalachian region were much admired for their adept guerrilla tactics in confronting both native and French forces. Epitomizing this reputation was Colonel John Armstrong, born in Brookeborough, Co. Fermanagh, around 1720 and a leading figure in the struggle in western Pennsylvania after 1756. Armstrong represented continuity between the French and Indian War and the Revolutuionary War (1775–1783), in which he was promoted to the rank of general in Washington’s patriot army. The military action with which the Scots-Irish are most commonly associated in this war is the Battle of King’s Mountain. Here on October 7, 1780, a body of about 1,000 “over-mountain militia,” many of Ulster extraction, routed a battalion of redcoats under the command of Scots aristocrat Major Patrick Ferguson. In truth, the decisiveness of the military contribution of the Scots-Irish and the unanimity of their commitment to the patriot’s cause have been prone to some exaggeration. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that they contributed
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significantly to the ideology underpinning the Revolution and that this acted as an inspiration for many radical Presbyterians in later eighteenth-century Ireland. Slightly perversely those figures who perhaps came to represent the greatest martial heroes of the Scots-Irish performed their deeds of valor well after independence from Britain had been won. Andrew Jackson, the son of settlers from Ulster and in so many ways the figure taken to personify the personality, culture, and values of his people was, of course, celebrated as a military strategist before being acknowledged as a master politician. Jackson, as southern theater commander, won a stunning and decisive victory over the British forces at the Battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815. It was symbolic of a somewhat curious conflict (1812–1815) that this victory was actually secured more than a fortnight after peace terms had been agreed between the warring parties in far-off Belgium. The other two figures, Sam Houston and Davy Crockett, both claimed Scots-Irish ancestry and had served under Jackson in the War of 1812. Yet it would be later that these men would win notoriety for their bravery and martial skill. Houston successfully commanded the Texan army to victory over Santa Anna in the Battle of San Jacinto (April 21, 1836), which led in turn to the establishment of Texan independence. Crockett, from Tennessee, was the most famous defender who surrendered his life at the Alamo (March 6, 1836) in the same cause. Crockett also reflected in his own genealogy that pride in the continuity of a warrior ethic. Allegedly, a number of Crockett’s ancestors back in Ireland had served the Williamite cause in the defense of Londonderry in 1690, while two uncles had participated in the victory at the Battle www.abc-clio.com
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of King’s Mountain in 1780. This could be said to represent the Scots-Irish pedigree par excellence. Again, somewhat curiously, one of the few books not yet written about the American Civil War is that dealing specifically with the contribution of those who could be considered ethnically Scots-Irish. No simple narrative could communicate the highly complex picture that emerges from even cursory exploration. One can accurately claim that a significantly greater proportion of the Confederate army, both officers and rank and file, was of Scots-Irish descent than was the case with the Union forces. However, several subregions within the South, across the Appalachian zone heavily settled by immigrants from Ulster in the eighteenth century, followed their leaders in opting to support the Union cause in 1861. Although there were many Confederate generals of Scots-Irish descent, Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stuart to name two of the most noted, it was Ulysses Simpson Grant, whose maternal grandfather had been a Presbyterian immigrant from Co. Tyrone, who contributed so much to achieving the final victory of North over South. Well beyond the era of the Civil War, involvement in the U.S. military continued to play a central role in the definition of a Scots-Irish identity, just as it did for the increasing numbers of citizens who saw themselves as Irish-American Catholics. Patrick Fitzgerald See also: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR; AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE; JACKSON, Andrew; PRESBYTERIANISM; SCOTS-IRISH; SCOTS-IRISH CULTURE; SCOTS-IRISH POLITICS References Leyburn, James, G. The Scotch-Irish: A Social History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962.
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838 SCOTS-IRISH CULTURE Marley, David, F. Wars of the Americas: A Chronology of Armed Conflict in the New World, 1492 to the Present. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1998. Webb, James. Born Fighting: How the ScotsIrish Shaped America. New York: Broadway Books, 2004.
SCOTS-IRISH CULTURE Immigrant groups who did not speak English on arrival, such as the Germans, tended to maintain a distinctive way of life longer in the New World. The fact that Presbyterian immigrants from Ulster spoke English gave them an immediate advantage in accessing mainstream American culture. Added to this, their tendency to move home successively over a wide area rather than remain in the first place of settlement increased their exposure to other cultural influences, making it relatively difficult to isolate a single distinctive Scots-Irish way of life. Scholars debate the extent to which Ulster Presbyterian settlers up until the middle of the nineteenth century were aware of themselves as a distinct ethnic group. Two major movements have documented and studied this group, the first associated with the establishment of the Scotch-Irish Society of America in 1889 to “preserve the history and perpetuate the achievements of the Scotch-Irish race in America,” and the second, under way since the 1950s with the foundation of the Ulster-Scot Historical Society, and particularly associated now with the Ulster-Scots movement in Northern Ireland (recognized by the Belfast Agreement of 1998), which has a strong interest in the Ulster-Scots diaspora, including the Scots-Irish in the United States. A main indicator of the varied pattern of Scots-Irish settlement in both broad www.abc-clio.com
belts and enclaves is the clustering of family names that are evidently of Ulster and ultimately Scottish origin (such as McKean, Read, and Thompson—signatories of the Declaration of Independence). Another indicator is the presence of place-names of Ulster origin, such as Belfast and Bangor in Maine, the towns of Londonderry and Antrim and the county of Hillsboro in New Hampshire, Orange County in what would later become Vermont, and Coleraine in Massachusetts. Economically, we may distinguish broadly between those who became increasingly successful in financial and entrepreneurial roles along the Philadelphia-Pittsburgh axis and those in the southern backcountry whose economic and political power diminished. The Scots-Irish came from what has been called “the most relaxed landlord regimen in the British Isles.” As farmers on the American frontier they engaged in much the same agricultural practices as their neighbors, learning the technique of making the V-notched log cabin from the Swedes and Finns of the Delaware Valley, and the winter foddering techniques and wagon styles from the Germans of Pennsylvania. Their main distinctiveness in western Pennylvania was involvement in linen production, which was a special craft they brought from the “old country.” Representations of this way of life may be seen today in the outdoor museums of Ulster-American Folk Park at Omagh, Co. Tyrone, in Northern Ireland and the Museum of American Frontier Culture in Staunton, Virginia. Contemporaries did not always compare the Scots-Irish favorably with their German neighbors, contrasting the indolence and carelessness of the former with the industry and neatness of the latter. There was often mutual antagonism between the
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groups, especially at election times, that were accounted for more by difference in social values than in farming skill. Whereas the Germans tended to remain where they first settled, the Scots-Irish tended to exploit their farms ruthlessly before moving on to others. It has been suggested that this was because migration was in a sense second nature to them. Situated mainly on the frontier, the Scots-Irish proved “hard neighbors to the Indians” and bore the brunt of Indian raids. The main social institution of Scots-Irish frontier settlements was the Presbyterian Church—usually the forerunner of the civil authority. Colonial officials regularly appealed to Presbyterian clergy for their support in civil matters, acknowledging their role as both the secular and religious leaders of their communities. Scots-Irish settlements in the Chesapeake Bay colonies, especially on the eastern shore of Maryland, became the cradle of the Presbyterian church in America. Francis Mackemie (ca. 1658–1708), who emigrated from Co. Donegal and settled in Virginia, is regarded as the “father of American Presbyterianism.” The development of an effective network of church organization was hindered by the relatively small size of scattered rural congregations across such a wide area and poor communications among them. Although some congregations had emigrated from Ulster en masse, accompanied by their ministers, these were relatively few. The ongoing shortage of well-qualified ministers prompted regular appeals for missionaries from Ulster and Scotland. Following the Ulster tradition of founding private schools or academies, Presbyterian colleges were eventually established to help meet this need, the first being Log College at Neshaminy, near Philadelphia, which www.abc-clio.com
was the seed from which the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) developed in 1746. Nevertheless, social organization was inhibited in many places on the frontier, where communities could be without a church building or pastor for years, having to rely on irregular visits of itinerant preachers. In such areas there tended to be a drift from Presbyterianism to other Protestant denominations better equipped to supply their spiritual needs, such as the Congregationalists in New England and the Baptists and Methodists in the southern colonies. At the outbreak of the American War of Independence the Scots-Irish still belonged predominantly to the Presbyterian church, but it was a church that had become, in competing actively for members, more evangelical and less insistent on the doctrine of election, which had been its distinguishing characteristic carried over from Ulster. Against expectation perhaps, the strict Calvinism of the Scots-Irish settlers proved a barrier to their integration with the less zealous and more broad-minded New England Puritans. The relative poverty of many Scots-Irish settlers who remained in Boston and their poor reputation among Puritan Bostonians for drinking, blasphemy, and violence also proved barriers to integration. As emigrants from Ulster were mostly removed by several generations from their original family immigration to Ulster from Scotland, they tended to regard Ireland rather than Scotland as “the old country” and the Presbyterian church in Ireland as their “mother church.” For the descendants of the pioneer emigrants from Ulster, their affiliation to a religious denomination generally proved more important than their experience as members of an ethnic subculture.
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As well as the Presbyterian Church, the Scots-Irish also carried over the Orange Order, a social and religious as well as a political organization. The earliest instances of parading on July 12, anniversary of King William of Orange’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, date to the 1820s. The first lodge of the Loyal Orange Institution or Orange Order, founded in Ulster in 1795, was established in the United States in New York in 1867. By 1873 there was a network of nearly 100 lodges and 10,000 members, and in 1914 that number had reached 364 lodges and 30,000 members. Although open to Protestants of all ethnic backgrounds, the Institution was overwhelming Scots-Irish in membership and leadership. As late as 1919 the Orange Order held a sizable Twelfth of July parade in New York City. After the Great Depression, which brought immigration from Ulster virtually to an end, the Scots-Irish sustained a distinctive identity to a reduced extent. Although proud of their Scottish roots, Presbyterian settlers from Ulster clearly did not think of themselves simply as Scots. Some, like Thomas Mellon, expressed strong affection for the poetry of Robert Burns and the novels of Sir Walter Scott, but for the most part they tended to have settled in different areas from the Scots and showed little interest in St. Andrew’s societies or Burns suppers. To a certain extent, however, their speech continued to mark them apart. The original ancestors of the Scots-Irish who had immigrated to Ulster in the seventeenth century spoke Scots—a sibling language to English. Much effort is currently being put into recovering what is called “Ulster Scots” and into identifying more evidence of it being spoken and written in Scots-Irish areas of America, as for example by David Bruce (ca. 1760–1830), an emigrant from www.abc-clio.com
Ulster to southwestern Pennsylvania, and Robert Dinsmoor (1757–1836), the son of an Ulster emigrant to southern New Hampshire, both of whom published poems in Ulster Scots in their local weekly newspapers. The original Scots-Irish settlers arrived with, in effect, a triple identity: Scottish in religion, local dialect, and specific culture; Irish by birth, polity, and local associations; and British by ultimate political allegiance and aspects of their wider culture (e.g., educated speech, legal, and commercial procedures). To a large extent this accounts for the complex trajectory of their descendants in the United States. Brian Lambkin
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See also: PRESBYTERIANISM; SCOTSIRISH; SCOTS-IRISH PATTERNS OF SETTLEMENT, UNITED STATES; SCOTS-IRISH POLITICS References Gilmore, Peter. “Scotch-Irish Identity and Traditional Ulster Music on the Pennsylvania Frontier.” Journal of ScotchIrish Studies 1, no. 2 (2001): 138–146. Gilmore, Peter. “The Scots Irish: Cultural Baggage of the Presbyterian Pioneers.” Causeway (Summer 1997): 44–49. Griffin, Patrick. The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Jones, M. A. “The Scotch-Irish in British America.” In Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, edited by B. Bailyn and P. D. Morgan. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Keller, Kenneth W. “What Is Distinctive about the Scotch-Irish?” In Appalachian Frontiers: Settlement, Society and Development in the Preindustrial Era, edited by R. D. Mitchell, 69–86. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991. Leyburn, J. G., The Scotch-Irish: A Social History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962. 1-800-368-6868
SCOTS-IRISH PATTERNS OF SETTLEMENT, CANADA 841 Montgomery, Michael. “The Problem of Persistence: Ulster-American Missing Links.” Journal of Scotch-Irish Studies 1, no. 1 (2001): 105–119.
SCOTS-IRISH PATTERNS OF SETTLEMENT, CANADA The settlement patterns of the Scots-Irish and the larger population of Irish Protestant immigrants set the stage for English Canada’s ethnic, economic, and political makeup in the nineteenth century. Sometimes this society was marked by conflict as Irish Protestants clashed with Irish Catholics, but for the most part the world the Scots-Irish created was rural and peaceful, and they surrounded themselves with kin and coreligionists. Canadian historians have noted that the Scots-Irish experience in Canada was dissimilar to that of the Scots-Irish in the United States. The term is actually misleading— most Irish Protestant immigrants came to Canada a century later than the American Scots-Irish and were not of the Scottish Presbyterian faith but were in fact Anglicans of English descent. Nevertheless, some nineteenth-century Irish Canadians claimed that the country’s Scots-Irish population was significant in quantity, heritage, and accomplishment. In 1891, the Reverend Stuart Acheson addressed the third congress of the Scots-Irish in America on the ethnic group’s status in Canada. He claimed that one quarter of Canadians were Scots-Irish and that every province contained counties almost entirely populated by Scots-Irish, such as Colchester, Nova Scotia. Although these population statistics were clearly false—Irish of all religions accounted for less than 25 percent of www.abc-clio.com
Canadians in 1871 and decreased in the following decades—they did suggest strong concentrations of people with similarities to the Ulster Presbyterians who migrated to New England and Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century. Within the larger group of Irish Protestants, Presbyterians tended to have ancestry among the Ulster Scots and remained an identifiable group in Canada at least until the late nineteenth century. They usually immigrated in group or chain migration paradigms, and despite their image as frontiersmen in America, they were more often found in Canadian areas known for their Irish Presbyterian roots. Attempts to promote Irish immigration in the British colonies before the nineteenth century were negligible. Alexander McNutt attempted to bring Scots-Irish settlers to Nova Scotia in the early 1760s through elaborate settlement schemes, and Thomas Desbrisay tried similar projects to L’Isle St. Jean (Prince Edward Island) in the following decade. Both had little success. McNutt’s emigration project was actually resisted by the English government who feared the loss of too many loyal subjects in Ireland. However, one group of Irish Presbyterian immigrants did settle in the Minas Basin area of Nova Scotia beginning in 1760. They traced roots to Ulster but actually migrated from Londonderry, New Hampshire. The settlers were in fact resettlers, inheriting cleared land, scattered buildings, and deteriorating dykes from the Acadian people who had been torn from the land by the British only a few years earlier. A census in 1766 showed 694 people in the townships of Truro, Onslow, and Londonderry: all were Protestants, and all but 16 came from Ireland or the American colonies. The community they
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created became part of Colchester County, which Acheson pointed to as the quintessential Scots-Irish settlement in Canada. Serious Irish emigration to Canada did not begin until after 1815 when the British Isles experienced postwar readjustment and Ulster experienced agricultural instability. As many as 100,000 Irish left per year in the pre-Famine decades, many to Britain for seasonal labor and many others to North America. That Canada drew the majority of the latter from 1825 to 1845 was due in some part to its convenience and affordability as a channel to the United States. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century more than two-thirds of immigrants to British North America were Irish. The cause of emigration was usually economic pressure. Many Ulster Presbyterians who experienced the instability of the Ulster linen industry saw opportunity in Britain’s sparsely populated North American colonies. Because of the high cost of transatlantic fares immigrants were rarely impoverished and were usually farmers and skilled tradespeople such as weavers seeking a life as agricultural settlers. Two general patterns of settlement emerged in the nineteenth century. The Scots-Irish community in Colchester is an example of a chain migration settlement that remained largely atypical in the British Atlantic region. Instead, most Atlantic colonies attracted Catholics from the south coast of Ireland whose immigration routes were paved before the Famine by the Atlantic fishery trade. Conversely, in the Saint John Valley and Central Canada the timber trade formed the most important migration channels for Ulster Protestants and immigrants from enclaves in the south of Ireland. The use of merchant vessels for passenger transport www.abc-clio.com
created the popular but rather exceptional story of immigrants arriving in “coffin ships.” A more reliable trend demonstrated by trade route migration is that many Irish were subsequently found in the areas most crucial to these industries. The early history of the Irish Presbyterians in what would become Canada is difficult to uncover. The historical literature on the subject is scarce, conflicting, and sometimes embellished. Donald MacKay argued that three-quarters of Irish emigrants to British North America were Presbyterian when the postwar Ulster emigration began. Of 4,000 farmers and linen weavers who left Belfast for British North America in 1818, only 20 percent were Anglican and most of the others were Presbyterian. If this was an early trend among Irish migrants it was short lived. Over the next few decades Anglicans outnumbered Irish Presbyterians, and it is clear that Presbyterians in Canada were either converting to other denominations, continuing on to the United States, or ceasing to immigrate in such magnitude. Although Protestants in Ulster were more than half Presbyterian in the midnineteenth century, less than one quarter were Presbyterian in Canada at Confederation. Protestant immigration to Canada originated in many parts of Ireland, including the southern areas, which were predominantly Anglican. Ulster Presbyterian emigrants were more likely to join their fellow Scots-Irish in the United States, but some established migration routes existed between Derry and Canadian ports like Saint John. New Brunswick’s Irish Presbyterians, therefore, accounted for more than the national average with 38 percent of the Irish Protestant immigrants and even 31 percent of the Protestants who claimed Irish ethnicity in 1871.
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Statistical software and increasingly available samples from the late nineteenth century manuscript censuses allow detailed studies of Irish Canadians—most of whom are second- and third-generation immigrants by this period. The Reverend Acheson exaggerated when he claimed that Colchester, Nova Scotia, was almost entirely Scots-Irish, but he did identify a community with unusually strong Irish Presbyterian roots. The 1881 Census of Canada recorded 5,520 Irish Presbyterians, who made up 64 percent of the county’s Irish population. The Baptists were the second largest group of Irish with only 16 percent of the population. The Methodists were a distant third, followed by Roman Catholics and Anglicans. A sample of the 1901 census reaffirms these concentrations and indicates that they remained consistent, with 64 percent Presbyterians and 15 percent Baptists. In Ontario, English Canada’s population center, the story was much different. Whereas the Colchester Irish Presbyterians were present in the late eighteenth century and assumed farms that were taken from Acadians during a prosperous golden age, Ontario’s Irish Presbyterians came later, with less organization, to unbroken land and in disputed numbers. According to the 1871 census, Ontario’s Irish were only 16.4 percent Presbyterian. This low representation was despite the fact that Protestants made up two-thirds of the Irish in Ontario. Anglicans and Methodists accounted for most of the Irish Protestants, but Methodists were only 1 percent above Presbyterians among the Irish born in Ontario. Methodism was popular among Irish pioneers and their descendants, and its circuit riders were more successful than the Presbyterian or Anglican missions. www.abc-clio.com
The Irish Presbyterians in Ontario remained consistent in 1881 at 16.5 percent of the Irish population. Thirty percent of Ontario’s Irish Presbyterians lived in the eastern counties in 1881, compared with 34 percent of the province’s Irish. By this time the western counties were experiencing more rapid population growth than the counties of the east. For instance, Euphrasia township in Grey County was settled largely by Ulster Protestants who had lived elsewhere in Ontario, which demonstrates their transience in Ontario and the popularity of resettlement in the western counties. Irish Protestants from Ontario represented the first of their group to settle the Canadian west in large numbers, because few Irish immigrated directly to the fur-trading region in earlier decades. Interestingly, Irish Presbyterian groups can be identified in the late nineteenth century—in a particularly concentrated area or an Irish Presbyterian church—though they were not as apparent as Acheson claimed. In Eastern Ontario, for instance, four adjacent counties between the Ottawa and St. Lawrence rivers had unusually high concentrations of Irish Presbyterians, around 25 percent of the local Irish population. Compared with Colchester, these are small concentrations, but for a province whose Anglican and Methodist Irish populations usually outweighed the Presbyterian, the numbers are significant. Dundas County’s Irish were more than 26 percent Presbyterian in 1881. The 1,899 Irish Presbyterians formed the largest religious group among the Irish in that region and almost half of the county’s Presbyterians. The county’s Irish were less than 15 percent Anglican. Dundas County is an interesting case study because it was one of the earliest
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settlements of English-speaking immigrants in Ontario. Loyalists were the first of these settlers in the late eighteenth century and were mostly Germans accompanied by a few Scottish Presbyterians. A riverfront county like Dundas was typically settled first along the lots on the St. Lawrence. Gradually, younger generations and later arrivals began moving into the northern townships. Almost two-thirds of the county’s highly Presbyterian Irish population lived in the two western townships: 28 percent were in Matilda, the riverfront township, and more than 36 percent were in Mountain to the north. If Irish Presbyterians settled early and permanently in Dundas it was most likely on the county’s western riverfront lots, and if later migration or land shortages for inheriting children made the northern townships more attractive to the Irish, the Presbyterians greatly preferred Mountain. The scattered centers of Irish Presbyterianism in Eastern Ontario demonstrate that this identification was important to Irish immigrants and their children when they chose where to live. Economically, the Scots-Irish differed very little from their neighbors. The 1881 census reveals that, like the rest of Canadians Irish, Presbyterians were mostly farmers and overwhelmingly rural—more than half of the Irish Presbyterians and Anglicans were farmers in Eastern Ontario. Methodists, Wesleyans, and Episcopal Methodists were each roughly 60 percent farmers, as were almost half of the Irish Catholics in the region. The unusually high amount of homemanufactured linen in the Dundas area suggests that the traditional Scots-Irish occupation of linen weaving might have perpetuated itself among Irish Presbyterian descendants. The county produced more
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than 20 percent of Ontario’s homemade linen in 1871, and with Russell, Dundas’ highly Irish Presbyterian neighbor, it produced one-third of the province’s linen in 1881. Ulster households had long been central parts of a linen industry, and early Irish Presbyterian immigrants to Canada, like those in Colchester, were skilled in flax cultivation and linen weaving. However, the linen produced in Dundas in 1871 did not belong to the Irish Presbyterians, nor was it ethnically neutral: 64 percent of the linen was produced in the township least favored by Irish Presbyterians, and more than 71 percent of the producers were of Dutch and German origin. The Irish, predominately Anglicans, were a distant second at 14 percent. The secondhighest linen production occurred in Mountain, the most Irish Presbyterian township, but the producers there were mostly English Anglicans and Methodists. The paucity of linen among the Irish in Dundas demonstrates that their geographical distinctiveness did not necessarily imply a rigid connection with other parts of their collective heritage. Before Canada became a place that spoke to the world about multiculturalism it hosted many culturally disparate and often acrimonious bedfellows. Religious and ethnic strife formed one of the more infamous parts of the early Scots-Irish experience in Canada. Occasionally, a report of Orange and Catholic violence or threats of violence would involve the regions of concentrated Irish Presbyterians. In some cases Irish Presbyterians were specifically mentioned, and in many cases Ulster Protestants in general were implicated. The first major confrontations in Ontario took place in Murphy’s Falls (now Carleton Place, Lanark)
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and Shipman’s Mills (now Almonte, Lanark) in the 1820s. The aggressors in the former were supposedly some Irish Catholics known as the Ballygiblins who started a bar fight with a group of influential Scottish immigrants that developed into a street battle between armed posses. The bar owner was Alexander Morris, an Ulster Orangeman, but most of the Protestants involved were Scottish. Occasionally, Orange violence erupted in reply to large-scale Irish Catholic immigration. Peter Robinson, a superintendent of colonization schemes in what would become Ontario, was well aware of the danger these confrontations posed to his immigrant communities and attempted to locate his settlements a safe distance from Ulster settlements. Later in the century the meeting of Irish Catholics with established Ulster Protestants in cities such as Saint John resulted in a series of violent outbreaks and riots. Orange activities cannot simply be explained as reactionary and xenophobic, however. They were more often symptomatic of political movements and localized attempts to create space and identity for established immigrants. Orange demonstrations were often connected to churches known to be Irish Presbyterian and were found in larger cities like Toronto and Kingston. Displays of ethnic and denominational pride were regular and often peaceful, but more importantly they identified the close connection between the Orange Lodge and Irish Presbyterians. The latter were also intimately—though not always happily— connected by doctrine to the Scottish Presbyterians in Canada. On many occasions, and especially in rural places, Irish Presbyterians shared congregations with
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their Scottish coreligionists. At other times, the distinct identity shared by the Irish Presbyterians was enough to split their churches along ethnic lines. Because of the smallness of Irish Presbyterianism in Canada, they relied on the Scottish United Presbytery for ministers. Some believe Irish Presbyterians were accustomed to a more active and evangelical ministry than the Scots. The complicated relationship between the two groups and the ecclesiastical work of Irish Presbyterians remains an uncharted section of Canadian history. Josh MacFayden See also: PRESBYTERIANISM; SCOTSIRISH; SCOTS-IRISH AND MILITARY CONFLICT; SCOTS-IRISH CULTURE; SCOTS-IRISH POLITICS; SCOTSIRISH PATTERNS OF SETTLEMENT, UNITED STATES References Akenson, Donald H. The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History. Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984. Elliott, Bruce. Irish Migrants in the Canadas: A New Approach. Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988. Houston, Cecil J., and William J. Smyth. Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement: Patterns, Links, and Letters. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Mackay, Donald. Flight From Famine: The Coming of the Irish to Canada. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1999. Murphy, J. M. The Londonderry Heirs: A Story of the Settlement of the Townships of Truro, Onslow, and Londonderry. Middleton, NS: Black Print Co., 1976. Wilson, Catharine. A New Lease on Life: Landlords, Tenants, and Immigrants in Ireland and Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994. Wilson, David. The Irish in Canada. Canada’s Ethnic Groups series, Booklet No. 12. Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1989.
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first- and second-generation settlers moved to Vermont and Rhode Island also.
Before 1725
1725–1775
The first concerted effort by Presbyterians from Ulster to emigrate across the Atlantic came in 1636 and was directed toward New England. The voyage, however, was aborted when mid-Atlantic storms were taken as a signal of divine disfavor and the vessel, Eagle Wing, returned eastward for Scotland. This episode appears to have dampened enthusiasm for emigration amongst Ulster Presbyterians for at least a generation. However, by the final quarter of the seventeenth century there is evidence of a renewed interest in transatlantic migration from Ulster. Reconstructing the precise patterns of emigration in the half century up to 1725 is problematic, but relative to later movement, it appears fairly diverse in terms of the destinations selected. Even before 1700 modest Scots-Irish settlement could be identified in Delaware, eastern Maryland, the lower Hudson Valley, and New Jersey. A significant acceleration in the pace of emigrant departures from Ulster occurred in the years after 1717. The great majority of vessels departing were destined either for the ports of New England or Delaware. While the significance of migration toward the Delaware River in this early phase of migration may have been underrepresented in the past, it remains the case that migration to New England was most significant in the decade before 1725. Theological disputes and a hunger for land helped fan out Scots-Irish settlers from Boston, the main port of entry, toward the New England frontier. They moved west within Massachusetts toward Worcester, and north toward New Hampshire and Maine. Ultimately, significant numbers of
Although migrants and hosts shared an enthusiasm for what one historian has described as “a hotter kind of Protestantism” there were numerous objections by the dominant Congregationalists of New England to these Ulster Presbyterians, and differing ethnicity, English versus Scottish/ Irish, added to the animosity. Thus, emigrants from Ulster increasingly directed their attentions south toward the Delaware ports. Here, indentured servitude offered a mechanism by which those of modest means could hope to establish a foothold on the land in the New World. In the years after 1717, migrants from Ulster coming into the Delaware ports settled in significant numbers in Chester and Lancaster counties near Philadelphia. As the population grew and competition for land increased on the fertile Pennsylvania Piedmont the Scots-Irish increasingly moved westward toward the frontier or backcountry. This westward settlement was to some degree sponsored by tidewater colonial governors nervous about a threat from native peoples and sensing that these Scots-Irish could provide an effective defensive buffer. Moving up the Delaware Valley and then beyond the Susquehanna River, in the 1730s and 1740s they came increasingly to occupy the Cumberland Valley. The physical barrier of the Allegheny Mountains, combined with growing friction with Native Americans and uncertain land titles, all served to deflect the further spread of settlement south toward western Maryland and in particular into the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Throughout the middle
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decades of the eighteenth century, the Valley of Virginia, flanked to the west by the Appalachian Mountains and to the east by the Blue Ridge Mountains, would come to represent the crucial artery carrying migrants from Ulster south and west toward the expanding settlement frontier. Scots-Irish settlement became particularly concentrated in the central counties of Augusta and Rockbridge but a continuing stream of fresh arrivals from Ulster and the sons and daughters of Scots-Irish settlers continued to move on. The Great Wagon Road, which stretched from Philadelphia in the north down through the Valley of Virginia and out into the Carolina backcountry, remained busy in the decades before the Revolutionary War with thousands of Conestoga wagons. The families they carried were predominantly from the north of Ireland and Germany. In the backcountry of North and South Carolina and in western Georgia settlers from Ulster who had traveled south from the Delaware were met by other Scots-Irish migrants who had entered the colonies through Charleston, South Carolina. Many of these people had been induced to settle the southern frontier by a bounty scheme operated in the 1730s and 1760s by colonial governors keen to maintain the proportion of white European Protestants peopling the colonies. While the bulk of Scots-Irish settlers in the colonial era were to be found peopling the southern Appalachian backcountry we should remain conscious of slowly expanding urban populations in cities like Philadelphia, Charleston, or New York as well as other pockets of rural settlement in places like western upstate New York. In attempting to characterize their settlement in colonial America, two particular features www.abc-clio.com
have been identified in relation to the Scots-Irish: high rates of mobility and scattered or isolated settlement. Throughout the period these settlers showed a particular propensity to uproot and move on. There is much evidence to support their traditional association with the expanding frontier. In addition wherever they settled in the backcountry, when land was plentiful, they often sought out settlement at a natural spring that offered a comfortable distance from their neighbours.
After 1775 The American Revolutionary War checked immigration from Ulster for the seven seasons after 1775, but as soon as the Atlantic reopened to emigrant shipping a strong flow of migration recommenced. The ports of what had been the middle colonies, Philadelphia and Baltimore, in particular, continued to receive those who might come to see themselves as Scots-Irish. Increasingly after 1815, however, there was a shift in the flow of migration, increasingly emanating from all over Ireland, it was directed toward northern ports such as New York and Boston. The evolving role of Liverpool as the dominant port of departure from the British Isles and the evolving timber trade served to draw the maritime Canadian ports into the orbit of the emigrants from Ireland. After American independence, Ulster Protestants were more likely to migrate to British North America, particularly to Upper Canada, which would become Ontario. From the core heartlands of Scots-Irish settlement before the Revolutionary War, western Pennsylvania and the Valley of Virginia, came the westward flow of subsequent generations of settlers who carried settlement through the iconic Cumberland Gap and on into Kentucky,
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Tennessee, and across the American South. In addition, there was expansion west into Ohio and beyond. Classically, the pattern of Scots-Irish migration and settlement is depicted as petering out around 1820 as Catholic migration became predominant, but this division is somewhat distorted. Very significant numbers of Protestants from Ulster—Presbyterians, Anglicans, Methodists, Quakers, and others—continued to migrate to and settle in the United States. The so-called “Orange riots” that convulsed New York City in July 1870 and 1871 were a graphic reminder of this presence. By no means would all of the parading Orangemen in Manhattan have considered themselves Scots-Irish, but many had their origins in the province of Ulster. Patrick Fitzgerald See also: PRESBYTERIANISM; SCOTSIRISH; SCOTS-IRISH AND MILITARY CONFLICT; SCOTS-IRISH CULTURE; SCOTS-IRISH PATTERNS OF SETTLEMENT, CANADA References Blethen, H. Tyler, and Curtis J. Wood, eds. Ulster and North America: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Scotch-Irish. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997. Fischer, David Hackett, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Fitzgerald, Patrick, and Steve Ickringill, eds. Atlantic Crossroads: Historical Connections between Scotland, Ulster and North America. Newtownards, Northern Ireland: Colourpoint Books, 2001. Jackson, Carlton, A Social History of the Scotch-Irish. Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1993. Jones, Maldwyn A. “The Scotch-Irish in British America.” In B. Bailyn and P. D. Morgan, eds. Strangers Within the Realm. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Leyburn, James, G. The Scotch-Irish: A Social History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962. www.abc-clio.com
SCOTS-IRISH POLITICS The contribution of the Scots-Irish to America political life parallels that of their military contribution. Before the 1760s they were relatively powerless, and their settlements (then largely mid-Pennsylvanian) were underrepresented in government. In the period 1763–1800 they came from the colony’s political margins to the center of state events. Except in New England they entered the American mainstream, pioneering the abandonment of ethnic enclaves for full assimilation and acculturation. Presidents Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan, and Chester A. Arthur were all sons of immigrants from Ulster, and James K. Polk, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson were of Scots-Irish descent. The Presbyterians in Ulster constituted one of the largest blocs of Protestant dissent in the British Isles. This helps to explain the ease with which, as immigrants, they fit into the American drive for republicanism and religious disestablishment within a broadly Calvinist framework. However, their attitudes to the American War of Independence were determined more by their local conditions in the New World than in the Old. They were divided in their allegiances as patriots and loyalists, and a substantial proportion struggled to remain neutral. In Pennsylvania the Scots-Irish largely supported independence, motivated strongly by their hostility to the Quaker oligarchy in Philadelphia. Their relations with other Irish groups were complicated: many opposed the proposal drafted by Dublin-born Protestant George Bryan (1731–1791) for the abolition of slavery in Pennsylvania, while others served alongside
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Irish Catholics in a loyalist regiment in Philadelphia known as the Volunteers of Ireland. There were similar divisions between the Scots-Irish in New England and the Carolinas. In the towns and cities the Presbyterian Ulstermen were able to make their political debut, obtaining local political offices that in the colonial period had been largely the monopoly of the Quakers and Anglicans. The failure of the United Irishmen rebellion of 1798 resulted in an emigration of between 100 and 200 political refugees and their families, Catholic and Anglican as well as Presbyterian, including the Presbyterian clergyman Thomas Ledlie Birch. These exiled United Irishmen, with their enthusiasm for revolutionary France, engaged in American politics on the side of Thomas Jefferson and his Republican supporters against the Federalists. Their example was followed by many urban Scots-Irish who joined in Republican clubs and militia units. On the frontier the Scots-Irish were also strongly Republican. Such was their perceived influence that the Naturalization Act of 1798 was introduced “to prevent the indiscriminate admission of wild Irishmen and others to the right of suffrage.” They voted in strength for Jefferson in the election of 1800. Later a majority of Scots-Irish inclined to the Democrats, influenced among other factors by the example of Andrew Jackson, son of Scots-Irish immigrants from Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim. Later still, the examples of James K. Polk and James Buchanan, both of Scots-Irish descent, exercised a similar influence. Continuing immigration to America from Ulster, interrupted during the War of Independence, was perceived as “a prodigious influx of indigent foreigners” and www.abc-clio.com
revived earlier anxieties about a growing burden on towns. While many immigrants from Ulster between 1783 and 1812 joined the Scots-Irish settlements on the frontiers of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas, many others settled in the cities of the eastern seaboard, especially Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, and Pittsburgh, which became the main Scots-Irish center in the United States. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century the Scots-Irish made up a gradually declining majority of immigrants to America from Ireland and were content to be described and to describe themselves as simply “Irish.” In politics they cooperated with Catholic Irish and shared membership of benevolent organizations such as the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick and the Hibernian Society. The term “Scots-Irish” or “Scotch-Irish” is not well attested between the end of the American War of Independence and the Great Famine. The Famine-induced influx of Catholic Irish coincided with anti-Catholicism becoming dominant in American nativism, and the Scots-Irish interpreted this new situation as a challenge to differentiate themselves as Protestant Irish. In the 1850s many Ulster Presbyterians shifted to the new Republican party. What one commentator calls their “discovery of Scotch-Irishness” was part of a nativistic reaction, including the KnowNothing movement of the 1850s, to the waves of poor southern Irish Catholics immigrating after 1835 and the continuing dominance of the New England elite. Many Scots-Irish sympathized with Unionist opposition in Ulster to Home Rule between the 1880s and 1914. During the War of Independence in Ireland (1918–1922), organizations like the Orange Order sought to refute the arguments of Nationalist organizations like the Friends of
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Irish Freedom. During World War II the stationing of U.S. troops in Northern Ireland was interpreted by many Scots-Irish as an endorsement of the partition of Ireland. The effect of the conflict in Northern Ireland during the 1970s was mainly to distance Scots-Irish from “the old country.” On visits to the United States, the Reverend Ian Paisley, as a leader of extreme Unionism and Protesantism, was received less warmly by the Scots-Irish than by southern fundamentalist churchmen who saw him as an anticommunist crusader. Scots-Irish organizations, such as the Scotch-Irish Foundation, the Loyal Orange Order of the United States, Ulster American Loyalists, and the Northern Ireland Service Council, lobbied the U.S. government on behalf of Northern Ireland during the 1970s and 1980s. They extolled the Scots-Irish record in America, drawing attention to Ulster’s role in World War II and contesting allegations of discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland, all of which indicated a continuing survival of political influence by this ethnic group. Today about 8 million Americans are identifiable as having some Ulster Protestant background, but few have much sense of it, mainly as a result of their closeness to the dominant English culture against which their ancestors occasionally fought. The Scots-Irish for the most part joined settlers of English heritage in forming the social basis of the emerging American nation. Their need to promote a distinct Scots-Irish identity seems to have passed after World War I in an age of mass culture and economic individualism. It remains to be seen how current efforts to promote increased awareness of historic links between the Scots-Irish diaspora in the United States (and elsewhere) and its Ulster homeland www.abc-clio.com
will play into the unfolding story of how ethnic identity is negotiated on both sides of the Atlantic. Brian Lambkin See also: PRESBYTERIANISM, SCOTSIRISH; SCOTS-IRISH AND MILITARY CONFLICT; SCOTS-IRISH CULTURE; SCOTS-IRISH PATTERNS OF SETTLEMENT, CANADA; SCOTSIRISH PATTERNS OF SETTLEMENT, UNITED STATES References Doyle, David N. “Ulster Migrants in an Age of Rebellion.” Irish Economic and Social History 22 (1995): 77–87. Ickringill, Steve J. S. “The Scotch-Irish and the American Revolution.” In The UlsterAmerican Connection, edited by J. W. Blake, 19–25. Coleraine: New University of Ulster, 1981.
SCULLY, WILLIAM (D. 1885) William Scully, an Irish journalist and businessman, was the owner and editor of the Anglo-Brazilian Times of Rio de Janeiro, and founder of the Sociedade Internacional de Imigraçao. According to genealogical sources in Ireland, William Scully was born in Buolick, south Co. Tipperary, into a family of minor Catholic landlords. The family entered hard times during the Famine, and William arrived in Brazil in the 1850s or early 1860s. In Rio de Janeiro he made his living as a teacher of calligraphy. He married into an English Protestant family in Rio and then worked as a shipping agent for British lines. In 1872 he was the agent for the National Bolivian Navigation Company, which owned the majority of the Madeira-Mamoré Railway Company. Scully’s most important undertaking was the Anglo-Brazilian Times, which was published weekly from February 7, 1865,
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to September 24, 1884. The masthead described the Times as being a “Political, Literary, and Commercial” newspaper, and among its intentions were “to point out, and seek remedies for grievances and defects in the commercial and political intercourse of England and Brazil, and to promote a good understanding between the two countries” (from the first issue). The editor argued that Irish immigration to Brazil was a potentially viable means of upgrading the country’s levels of economic productivity. As immigration and shipping businesses were complementary and beneficial to his interests, Scully both advertised Irish immigration in Brazil and promoted it in Great Britain. The Times contained general Brazilian news and political comments, commercial reports, market prices, and maritime and immigration news. Although the paper received a subsidy from the Brazilian government, it was capable of criticism. When the local aristocracy—of which Scully was disdainful—promoted restrictions to the immigration of Protestants, the Times editor opposed them. Scully’s newspaper was also critical of the British consul, claiming that he failed to help its destitute nationals. However, the legation believed Scully influenced the emperor and noted that Brazilian papers reprinted articles from the Times, believing it to be free of political bias. Foreign papers, including the influential London monthly Brazil and River Plate Mail, reproduced articles from the Times. The International Society for Immigration represented William Scully’s material support to the Brazilian government. The first meeting was held in February 1866, and Scully strongly recommended that the society be independent of the government. The society was active for the next two www.abc-clio.com
years. Although Great Britain forced Brazil to reduce its slave labor force from Africa, the Brazilian economy depended heavily on slaves. Arrangements were made for the slaves employed in the Northeastern provinces to be transferred to the burgeoning coffee production areas, especially in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Plans for an increase in the employment of European immigrants began to multiply. However, Irish immigration was, in Scully’s words, “nipped in the bud” and was never successful in Brazil. The episode that marked its failure was the collapse of the Irish colony Príncipe Dom Pedro’s in Santa Catarina, which was suddenly deprived of funds and support between 1868 and 1869. When the British minister William D. Christie published his Notes on Brazilian Questions (1865) in London, Scully had to appease most Brazilian leaders in power, and the emperor in particular, by criticizing very strongly the way Christie expressed his views on the slavery issue. The Irish newspaperman apparently delighted in trying to mend the badly damaged relationship between England and Brazil, to the point of verging on a pro-slavery stance, so as to dismiss the charges made public by Christie and thereby please the Brazilian political establishment. William Scully also published the guide Brazil: Its Provinces and Chief Cities; the Manners and Customs of the People; Agricultural, Commercial and Other Statistics, etc. (various editions in 1865, 1866, and 1868), as well as A New Map of Brazil in 1866. The Anglo-Brazilian Times was published until September 1884, and William Scully died in Pau, France, on February 14, 1885. Edmundo Murray See also: BRAZIL
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SHACKLETON, ERNEST (1874–1922) Ernest Shackleton spent the first six years of his life on a farm near his birthplace at Kilkea House, Co. Kildare, but then moved with his family to Dublin and later to suburban London. His father’s family was Anglo-Irish, originally from Yorkshire. His
mother’s family was Irish, from counties Cork and Kerry. Shackleton attended Dulwich College, but he was more interested in maritime adventures and left school at 16 to join the Merchant Navy. From 1890 to 1901 he sailed on numerous voyages across the Atlantic and Pacific, rising in rank from ship’s boy to second mate to third officer. In 1897 he met Emily Dorman, with whom he shared a love of poetry. While courting Emily, Shackleton decided to improve his situation. Accordingly, when he learned that Robert Scott was leading an expedition to Antarctica in 1901, Shackleton signed on as third lieutenant. His responsibilities included maintaining the ship’s provisions and arranging the expedition’s
Ernest Shackleton leaves for the Shackleton-Rowett Expedition aboard the Quest. (Library of Congress) www.abc-clio.com
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entertainment. He was also one of two crew members to join Scott on the unsuccessful sledge drive toward the South Pole in 1902, reaching the furthest point south anyone had ever traveled. Shackleton returned to England in 1903, and he was appointed secretary of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society (RSGS). With this enhanced status, Shackleton married Emily in 1904, and they moved to Edinburgh. Always looking for new adventures, Shackleton agreed to stand as the Liberal Unionist Party candidate for Parliament. The Liberal Unionists opposed Home Rule for Ireland, presumably an ironic stance for the Irish-born Shackleton, who spoke with a slight brogue. Shackleton lost not only the election in 1906, but also his position with the RSGS, which felt he was neglecting his official duties. The lure of Antarctica was still strong, so in 1907 Shackleton organized another expedition, hoping to reach the South Pole with the help of Manchurian ponies. Shackleton came within 97 miles of the Pole in 1909, but then turned back, fearing that no one would survive if he pushed forward. He returned to England a hero and was knighted for having reached the furthest point south. Shackleton’s published account, The Heart of the Antarctic (1909), brought him further acclaim, including a lecture tour and honors throughout Europe, the United States, and Canada. By all accounts, Shackleton was an engaging public speaker—bold and charming, but also modest and completely credible. He was especially admired by American audiences, who appreciated his Irish wit and manner of speaking. “Even [Shackleton’s Irish] accent [. . .] was received as a breath of fresh air. Knight and unionist he might be, www.abc-clio.com
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but democratic America was impressed” (Shackleton and MacKenna 2002, 130). When Roald Amundsen and Robert Scott both reached the South Pole in 1910–1911, Shackleton’s dream was dashed, but he soon made plans for another adventure: the first transcontinental crossing of Antarctica. In 1914, Shackleton and 27 other men sailed on the Endurance, hoping to reach the head of the Weddell Sea, and then travel east across the continent. However, floes of pack ice first trapped and then crushed the Endurance, forcing Shackleton to abandon not only his ship but his entire mission. In three small boats, the crew reached remote Elephant Island; from there Shackleton and five others set off for help on South Georgia, 800 miles away, through some of the roughest waters on earth. That they were able to reach this destination in 17 days is considered one of the greatest nautical feats, but their boat was badly damaged when it landed on South Georgia’s western shore. To reach the whaling station on the island’s eastern shore, Shackleton and two other men walked for 36 hours up and down jagged mountain peaks and treacherous glaciers. No one had ever crossed South Georgia by land before, and no one would ever do it again, until a group of expert climbers with professional equipment managed the feat in 1955. The fact that Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition never succeeded has in retrospect seemed less important than the endurance and survival of all crew members. Several films, exhibitions, and publications in the early twenty-first century have greatly enhanced Shackleton’s reputation, particularly in the United States, where business executives have admired his ability to hire an effective team, create a
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spirit of camaraderie, overcome obstacles, and lead effectively in a crisis. Unfortunately, Shackleton never lived to receive this acclaim. While heading south in 1922 to conduct an extensive mapping expedition of Antarctica, he died of a heart attack in South Georgia. James I. Deutsch See also: FALKLAND/MALVINAS ISLANDS References Alexander, Caroline. The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition. New York: Knopf, 1998. The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition. Directed by George Butler. Produced by Discovery Channel Pictures and FilmFour, 2000. Fisher, Margery, and James Fisher. Shackleton. London: Barrie, 1957. Huntford, Roland. Shackleton. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985. Lansing, Alfred. Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1959. Mill, Hugh Robert. The Life of Sir Ernest Shackleton. London: W. Heinemann, 1923. Morrell, Margot, and Stephanie Capparell. Shackleton’s Way: Leadership Lessons from the Great Antarctic Explorer. New York: Viking Penguin, 2001. Shackleton, Jonathan, and John MacKenna. Shackleton: An Irishman in Antarctica. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Shackleton: The Greatest Survival Story of All Time. Written and directed by Charles Sturridge. Produced by A&E Television Networks with Channel 4 Television, 2002.
SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD (1856–1950) George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland. He received little formal education, going to school only until he was 13 years old and never attending college. However, he read voraciously from an early age and was provided with a thorough introduction to music by his mother’s music teacher, www.abc-clio.com
Portrait of playwright George Bernard Shaw, who, during the course of his career, wrote over 60 plays. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925 and an Oscar in 1938. (Library of Congress)
George John Vandeleur Lee, who lived with the Shaw family. Additionally, Shaw frequented the theater in Dublin. At age 20, one year after his mother left his father and moved to London with her music teacher, Shaw followed. There, he tried his hand at a number of writing ventures with little initial success. He ghostwrote music criticism, attempted to compose short fiction and drama, and penned five unsuccessful novels. He also developed an interest in social and political reform, and in the 1880s he became a vegetarian, a socialist, a compelling public speaker, and a driving force behind the Fabian Society. He earned a reputation for his biting wit as a book reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette (1885–1888); a music critic for the Dramatic Review (1886) and then for the Star (writing under the name
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“Corno di Basseto”; 1888–1890); and later, a drama critic for the Saturday Review (1895–1898). As a drama critic, Shaw attacked the shallow hypocrisy he found in the theater of the day and sought to replace it with a theater of ideas like the one he lauded in the “new drama” of Henrik Ibsen in his 1891 book The Quintessence of Ibsenism. Toward this goal, he began writing his own plays, ultimately becoming the most significant dramatist of his time. Shaw’s plays were unique from the start, evincing a distinctive writing style and addressing issues and characters deemed by many to be inappropriate for dramatic representation. Repudiating the “well made” plays that were currently most popular, Shaw wrote about social topics such as prostitution, war, religion, family strife, and economics. Action was secondary to thought in his dramas, which encouraged audiences to reconsider their values. Despite the seriousness of their subjects, Shaw’s works avoided stodginess by using comedy and witty dialogue. This blending of social relevance, intelligent dialogue, and lively wit came to define the adjective “Shavian.” Shaw’s socialist beliefs, public speeches, and challenging plays were not widely accepted at first, and many considered him to be a subversive influence. His early dramas, Widowers’ Houses (1892), Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893), and The Philanderer (1893), were not seen publicly but were instead offered only in private club performances. Shaw’s first work to be publicly produced was Arms and the Man, which was staged at the Avenue Theatre in 1894. His unqualified success in the theater can be dated to the 1904 Vedrenne-Barker production of John Bull’s Other Island at the Royal Court Theatre. This play, originally www.abc-clio.com
commissioned by W. B. Yeats for presentation on the Abbey stage in Dublin (although the Abbey directors refused to produce it), included a comic Englishman who was every bit as buffoonish as the stage Irishman that was frequently dramatized at the time. Between 1904 and 1907, the Royal Court Theatre had enormous success maintaining 10 of Shaw’s plays in repertory. Shaw was highly prolific; a complete list of his works would be laborious. Some of his more important plays are Fanny’s First Play (1911), Androcles and the Lion (1913), Pygmalion (1914), Heartbreak House (1920), Back to Methuselah (1922), Saint Joan (1923), The Apple Cart (1929), Too True to Be Good (1932), Geneva (1938), and King Charles’s Golden Days (1939). For the publication of each of these plays, Shaw provided carefully crafted prefaces and line notes that explained how the plays should be performed and what they mean. Shaw’s reputation in the United States mirrored his success in England. The same year Arms and the Man was first seen in London, it was also produced to general acclaim at the Herald Square Theatre in New York. The Devil’s Disciple, when performed at the 5th Avenue Theatre in 1897, established Shaw’s reputation abroad and provided him with sufficient revenue to devote himself to playwriting full time. Many of his plays had their world premieres in the United States, including Heartbreak House and Saint Joan. Shaw received numerous awards for his work, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926 and Hollywood’s Academy Award for best screenplay for his adaptation of Pygmalion in 1938. Robert I. Lublin See also: FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT; YEATS, William Butler
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856 SHERIDAN, JIM References Dukore, Bernard. Shaw’s Theatre. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Holroyd, Michael. Bernard Shaw. New York: Random House, 1988. 4 vols. Innes, Christopher. The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Mander, Raymond and Joe Mitchenson. Theatrical Companion to Shaw. London: Rockliff, 1955. Weintraub, Stanley. Bernard Shaw: A Guide to Research. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1992.
SHERIDAN, JIM (1949–) Born to a working-class family in Dublin, Jim Sheridan came of age in an Ireland of rampant poverty that was only beginning to wake from years of self-imposed isolation from the outside world. Despite being best known as a cinematic director, Sheridan began his artistic career as a theater director and playwright, founding the Project Arts Centre in Dublin’s Temple Bar district in 1967 with his brother Peter. The project rapidly became (and remains) one of the most reputable avant-garde theater houses in the Irish capital. The urban, gritty, and frustrated aesthetic that dominated Sheridan’s early work at the project in plays such as Mobile Homes (1976), which deals with lowincome families who live on a mobile home site, cast light upon the dark underbelly of a rapidly modernizing Ireland. Sheridan resigned from the project, however, when the Dublin City Council pulled the company’s funding over a play that dealt openly with homosexuality. Sheridan relocated with his family to New York City in 1981, where, after a brief stint as a student at New York University’s film school, he became director of the Irish Arts Center. Sheridan’s time in New York
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had immense effects on his future work, exposing him not only to American filmmaking but also to the complex cultural relationship between Ireland and America. This would become an important theme in several of his later films. Sheridan returned to Ireland in 1989 at the behest of Noel Pearson, who had convinced Sheridan to make a movie based on Christy Brown’s memoir of growing up with cerebral palsy in working-class Dublin. My Left Foot (1989) was a breakthrough not only for Sheridan but also for the Irish film scene in general. The movie was nominated for five Academy Awards, and leads Daniel Day-Lewis and Brenda Fricker won Oscars for Best Actor and Actress. Over the next decade, Sheridan’s film work explored various and disparate forms of the Irish experience. The Field (1990), an adaptation of Jack B. Keane’s well-known play from the 1960s, depicts Bull McCabe’s (played by Richard Harris) maniacal fight with an Irish American (played by Tom Berenger) for the farmland McCabe’s family has possessed for generations. The film radically reinterprets the theme of John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952), which also dealt with the Irish-American “return” to the land in a much more nostalgic, sentimental way. This filmic dialogue with Ford would continue in Sheridan’s screenplay Into The West (1992), in which a group of Irish Traveler (or Gypsy) children embark on a journey into the west of Ireland inspired by westerns they have watched on television. The film makes important parallels between the Irish and American notions of the “West,” and Sheridan’s exploration of the racism leveled at the Irish Traveler community mirrors Ford’s own depiction of American racism toward Indians in films such as The Searchers (1956).
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In the 1990s, Sheridan turned his attention to the Northern Irish Troubles in a series of critically acclaimed films. In The Name of the Father (1993), which Sheridan directed and cowrote with Terry George, starred Day-Lewis again as the real-life Gerry Conlon, who was falsely imprisoned along with his father Giuseppe (played by Pete Postlethwaite) as one of the “Guildford four,” a group charged with the 1975 Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombing campaign in London. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards. The Boxer (1997), again starring Day-Lewis, is the story of ex-IRA man Danny Flynn, who takes up boxing after spending 15 years in prison in Belfast. His love affair with Maggie (played by Emily Watson), whose husband is still serving time for paramilitary activities, brings a critical lens to bear on the sexual politics of republican nationalism. Recently, Sheridan’s work has increasingly focused more explicitly on the transatlantic connections between Ireland and America. The semiautobiographical In America (2002) is the story of Johnny and Sarah, an Irish couple, and their two children, who move to New York in the 1980s so that Johnny can pursue his acting career. The film offers a modern version of the trauma of immigration, a mainstay of the Irish-American experience for more than a century and a half. His forthcoming project The Emerald City will continue to document this Irish-American immigrant experience, exploring the criminal underbelly of the predominantly Irish Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood in New York City. Sheridan remains a powerful force in Irish filmmaking whose work has consistently demonstrated, in its broad choice of material, a dynamic mind equally at home
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investigating the cultural particularities of his own country or in probing the complex interplay of the transatlantic relationship between Ireland and America. Michael P. Jaros See also: DAY-LEWIS, Daniel; HARRIS, Richard; FORD, John; PEARSON, Noel References Barton, Ruth. Jim Sheridan: Framing the Nation. Dublin: Liffey Press, 2002. Cavanagh, Dermot. “Nation and Narration: Rewriting ‘The Field.’” Literature/Film Quarterly 31, no. 2 (2003): 93–98. Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler. Gender and Ethnicity in Irish Literature and Popular Culture. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. McCloone, Martin. Irish Film: The Emergence of A Contemporary Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 2000. Pettit, Lance. Screening Ireland. Film and Television Representation. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000.
SHERIDAN, PETER (1792–1844) Peter Sheridan, a merchant and pioneer sheep breeder in Argentina, was born in Co. Cavan, brother of Richard and Hugh Sheridan. Sheridan arrived in Argentina in 1817 and opened Sheridan Bros., a textile merchant house in Buenos Aires. With his partner John Harrat from England he also established a felt factory and a meat-curing plant. In 1824 they purchased 100 merino sheep imported by the government of Buenos Aires from the Rambouillet breeders. In 1830, they founded Los Galpones ranch in Ranchos, near Luján, where Sheridan was appointed as member of the city council. The owners of Los Galpones produced large quantities of premium wool from the favored merino breeds, Saxony and negrete.
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Sheridan was an important employer of Irish workers. Irish settlers employed by Sheridan businesses, usually younger unmarried men, were ditchdiggers or factory workers. Sheridan employed more Irish workers than other Irish businessmen in Buenos Aires, like Thomas Armstrong, Patrick Browne, John Mooney, or Patrick Bookey, who formed a group of immigration sponsors. Sheridan did not want to be part of this group as he considered their strategy as expensive and short term. As a result of Sheridan’s refusal to sponsor immigration, his home area of Co. Cavan never became a source of Irish immigration to Argentina, whereas Armstrong’s and Browne’s areas did. In the 1820s and 1830s, cattle raising to obtain hides and tallow was the primary rural business among large landowners in Buenos Aires province. When Sheridan and Harrat began their production, sheep farming was secondary, but a few years later it became the principal activity for hundreds of newly arrived Irish and other shepherds who were employed by ranchers. Frequently, Irish immigrants started up with salaried jobs to pay the cost of their journey. When they married and were able to add the labor of wife and children (and often brothers and cousins), they worked in halves or thirds as shepherds or posters (in charge of a puesto, an outpost in the ranch’s limits). The wool industry, which Sheridan pioneered with an integral vision of the production cycle all the way from sheep farming to exports, became a primary industry in Argentina. Two decades after Sheridan established his methods the turnover was so important that many Irish managed to acquire their own means of production, that is, sheep and land, in about 10 years after their arrival. One of Sheridan’s frequent contacts was with the governor of Buenos Aires www.abc-clio.com
province, Juan Manuel de Rosas, who sometimes solicited his advice on sheep farming and cattle ranching. With his brothers Richard and Hugh (a physician), Peter Sheridan established a meat-processing plant and opened a store in Ranchos. They were also involved in the import and export trade. In 1832 he was appointed inspector of the Riachuelo harbor. Sheridan was a founding member of the Strangers Club of Buenos Aires. Sheridan died on January 8, 1844, in Ranchos. At the time of his death, he owned 40,000 purebred and mestizo head grazing on 16 outposts of Los Galpones. His son Enrique Sheridan (1836–1864) was a celebrated landscapist whose paintings of the pampas became popular in England. Edmundo Murray See also: ARGENTINA References Coghlan, Eduardo A. Los Irlandeses en la Argentina: Su Actuación y Descendencia. Buenos Aires: Author’s Edition, 1987. Murray, Thomas. The Story of the Irish in Argentina. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1919. Sabato, Hilda, and Juan Carlos Korol. Cómo fue la inmigración irlandesa en Argentina. Buenos Aires: Plus Ultra, 1981. Slatta, Richard. Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.
SMITH, ALFRED EMMANUEL “AL” (1873–1944) Alfred E. Smith, better know as Al Smith, is one of the key figures of twentieth-century Irish-American cultural history. By the early twentieth century Smith’s fate had become so indelibly linked to that of the IrishAmerican community that, after his death on October 4, 1944, the New York Times would write of his Irish roots: “Governor
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Smith was fortunate in his ancestry and his upbringing. They fitted him for honor and he in turn conferred it on them.” Al Smith was born on December 30, 1873, to Alfred Emmanuel Smith and Catherine Mulvihill on South Street on the Lower East Side of New York. Named after his father, whose heritage is presumed to be Italian and German (but not by Al), Al’s Irish connections came from his mother’s side; she was the daughter of an Irishman. However, it seems, more than his mixed parentage, the neighborhood in which Al grew up formed and confirmed his ethnic identity. As the New York Times said of Smith’s early New York parish, “it was a little Ireland of God-fearing people.” One of only two children, his early childhood was relatively untroubled: his father was a truckman, and they lived in a five-room flat in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. The young Al served as an altar boy in Saint James Church and attended the local parish school, where he was considered an average student. He did, however, win a citywide oratory contest at age 11, with an oration on the death of Robespierre. The next year his father died, and the family’s fortunes changed for the worse. Al was soon forced to drop out of school and take the first of a succession of odd jobs. By the age of 20, Al Smith would come to realize that the road to overcoming his social conditions lay in politics. Smith had become friendly with a local saloon owner and Democratic precinct leader, Tom Foley. After successfully defeating the Tammany candidate for the 4th District’s congressional seat in 1894, Tom Foley rewarded Al Smith, who had helped him achieve his victory, with a clerkship in the office of the commissioner of jurors. In 1903, after repairing his relations with Tammany www.abc-clio.com
Hall, Foley had Smith put forward as the Democratic candidate for state assembly of New York. By this time Smith had married Catherine Dunn, an Irish woman from the Bronx. They would go on to have five children together: Alfred Emmanuel, Emily, Catherine, Arthur, and Walter. Although initially ignored by both Republican and Democratic assembly members, by becoming an expert in assembly procedures and the structure of government Smith eventually established a reputation for himself as a hardworking and progressive legislator. It was well-known that he read the annual appropriation bill, a 300-page document, very carefully each year, becoming familiar with every item in it. His commitment to progressive legislation for the working-class people of New York gained national prominence in 1911, when a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company killed 146 people, mostly young women. Smith sponsored legislation for an investigating committee to examine working conditions in New York, a committee on which he would be vice chairman. The committee’s shocking findings in 1915 gave Smith the opportunity to sponsor much of the social legislation it recommended: sanitary, health, and fire laws; regulations on worker’s compensation; and regulations on the working conditions for women and children. The opportunity this committee afforded Smith, of working with some of the best social reformers and thinkers of the time, broadened his own ideas (such as changing his view on women’s suffrage to one of support) and his reputation, allowing him to transcend the taint of Tammany’s machine-style politics. He was subsequently elected to a two-year term as sheriff of New York City, a position offering an income of $60,000 a year.
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By 1918 Smith was one of the most popular New York Democrats, and with support from both Tammany politicians and independent reform groups, he was chosen over William Randolph Hearst as the Democratic candidate for the governorship of New York. Never simply a “Tammany man,” Smith selected talented, progressive thinkers for his campaign staff, regardless of their affiliation or sex, and, in a Republican year, he managed to beat the incumbent governor, Charles S. Whitman, by 15,000 votes. The first of four terms as governor of New York, Smith’s 1919–1920 gubernatorial term set the pattern for his progressive, constructive reform of municipal state politics. Despite strong opposition from Republicans and businesspeople, Smith fought for a 44-hour workweek for labor, developed low-cost housing projects, and sponsored the temporary extension of rent controls. In an effort to defend civil liberties, he opposed anti-sedition legislation, which sought to curtail the civil liberties of Socialists. He reformed New York’s state government by eliminating overlapping agencies and reducing costs. He also sought, unsuccessfully, to repeal prohibition. In 1920 a rising conservative tide swept him from government, but he easily regained the governorship in 1922; after this victory, he served three consecutive terms. By 1920, Smith’s national standing had risen enough for his name to be mentioned as a potential Democratic candidate for president; however, it was not until the 1924 presidential elections that Smith would become a serious contender for the Democratic candidacy. Noted for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speech, which named Smith the “happy warrior,” the 1924 Democratic convention was dominated by www.abc-clio.com
a resolution put forward by the northeastern representatives to condemn the Ku Klux Klan (an organization Smith had successfully outlawed in New York during his term as governor).This resolution implacably divided the convention and nomination process between the rural, dry, Protestant wing, centered in the South and West and represented by William McAdoo, and the urban, wet, northeastern wing, represented by Smith. After nearly two weeks of deadlock, both Smith and McAdoo (who had led Smith all the way in the balloting) withdrew, and weary delegates chose John W. Davis of Virginia as a compromise candidate. Davis was easily defeated in the presidential election by the Republican candidate, Calvin Coolidge. By 1928, Smith’s four terms as governor had made him the foremost Democrat in public office. This, combined with his four years of planning and publicity, made Smith the outright candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. However, opposition to him was still strong from certain sectors of the Democratic Party, particularly in the South. This opposition was based on three grounds: his Roman Catholicism, his assumed association with Tammany Hall, and his opposition to prohibition. Smith’s religious affiliations were directly challenged by Charles C. Marshall, a lawyer and prominent Episcopalian, in a letter published in the Atlantic Monthly, which questioned whether Smith’s Catholicism, in view of the historical policy of that church, did not effectively disbar him from being elected president. Smith’s reply, published in the Atlantic Monthly, was seen to capture the American Catholic viewpoint: he emphasized his belief in the total separation of church and state, and pronounced that thus he could see no conflict of duties between his
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role as a Catholic and any potential future role as president. Smith’s early Tammany associations, his “wet,” anti-prohibition leanings, and his Catholicism would deny him unanimous endorsement as Democratic candidate, four southern states refusing to vote for him. These issues would affect his campaign for president. The Republican Party selected Herbert C. Hoover, secretary of commerce, to run against Smith; he was an experienced and conservative Republican who not only saw prohibition as the “noble experiment” but also believed America would not elect a Catholic with Tammany associations in a time when its economy was booming. He got it right. In a campaign dogged by bigotry and agrarian distrust of big-city politics, and hampered by Smith’s inability to augment his regional appeal, Smith polled 15 million votes to Herbert Hoover’s 21.4 million, and the electoral votes were 87 to 444. While Smith did poll more votes than any former Democratic presidential candidate, he was abandoned by the voters of his own state. In a personally devastating campaign, awakening Smith to the full extent of bigotry still present in America, the loss of New York hit him particularly hard. Disillusioned with politics and becoming ever more conservative, Smith went into private business after his defeat. He became president of the Empire State Building Corporation at a salary of $50,000. He moved to a luxury 5th Avenue apartment and became a celebrity and friend to New York’s rich and famous. As his friends became more conservative, so did his politics: he moved away from the progressivism of his early political life. This move reflected in part his changing attitude toward his former friend and political ally, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). However, the www.abc-clio.com
growing disunion between Smith and FDR had a more personal origin: FDR, now governor of New York, had begun to disassociate himself from Smith, not consulting him or appointing any of Smith’s associates to his administration. In 1932, when FDR made a run at the Democratic nomination for president, Smith made his own bid for the nomination, possibly in an attempt to thwart FDR. Ill organized, Smith’s campaign was easily defeated by FDR. After this, Smith’s politics continued to harden conservatively, and he became an outspoken opponent of FDR’s New Deal. In 1936, Smith abandoned his allegiance to the Democratic Party and supported Alf Landon, the Republican candidate for the presidency, over FDR. He had finally broken with his former friends and supporters, betraying not just them but also his earlier political ideals. With the approach and outbreak of World War II, Smith and FDR overcame their differences and began to talk to each other again; Smith even visited the White House on at least two occasions. In May 1944 Smith’s wife, Catherine, died. They would not be separated long; by October of that year Smith too was dead. See also: CATHOLIC CHURCH, the; NEW YORK CITY; TAMMANY HALL References “Alfred E. Smith.” New York Times, October 4, 1944, early edition: 18. Burner, David. “Alfred Emmanuel Smith.” Dictionary of American Biography. Supplement 3: 1941–1945. New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1973. Burner, David. The Politics of Provincialism: The Democratic Party in Transition, 1918–1932. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. “Career of Alfred E. Smith, Presidential Nominee of 1928 and Four Times New York Governor.” New York Times, October 5, 1944: 12.
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862 SMURFIT, SIR MICHAEL W. J., KBE Handlin, Oscar. Al Smith and His America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1958. Josephson, Matthew, and Hannah Josephson. Al Smith: Hero of the Cities. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969. Shannon, William V. The American Irish: A Political and Social Portrait. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1966. Smith, Alfred E. Up to Now: An Autobiography. New York: Viking Press, 1929.
SMURFIT, SIR MICHAEL W. J., KBE (1936–) In a legendary business career spanning five decades to date, Sir Michael W. J. Smurfit, KBE, chairman and former chief executive officer of Jefferson Smurfit Group (Dublin, Ireland), may well be the world’s first “Celtic Tiger.” By any standard, Sir Michael has distinguished himself as one of Ireland’s wealthiest and most successful business professionals. He effectively turned the Jefferson Smurfit Group (JSG) into the largest worldwide maker of paper and packaging materials for cardboard boxes; at one time JSG owned, and operated in, some 600 facilities globally. JSG is also a major wastepaper recycler. Dating from the 1970s, Smurfit introduced fresh ideas to modernize Irish business at a time when the Irish economy and talent pool were provincial and uncompetitive. His seasoned entrepreneurial skills and international experience soon contributed to Ireland’s new status as Europe’s Celtic Tiger. Smurfit’s vision for an enlarged Irish role in the world economy helped reposition Ireland as a ‘comer’ of surprising potential on the world stage. An Englishman by birth, Smurfit holds dual Irish and British citizenship. He was reared in Ireland, and educated in Ireland and America, the dual base of his big career. And it has been to Ireland, as well as to America, that Smurfit has given generously of his resources, www.abc-clio.com
In a celebratory luncheon on February 10, 1998, at the Merrion Hotel in Dublin, Michael Smurfit was fêted Entrepreneur of the Year. This distinction would be followed in 2005 by an even grander one: Knight of the British Empire. Often called the first Celtic Tiger, Smurfit is Chairman and former CEO of Jefferson Smurfit Group, Dublin, and owner of the five-star golf venue and spa resort: K Club, County Kildare. (© Frank Fennell, Photographer, 1998. With kind permission.)
business acumen, and educational commitment. In his global business dealings and broad philanthropic contributions, Michael W. J. Smurfit continues to be a prominent presence in Ireland’s economic growth and an important voice in Irish-American relations. Born in 1936 in St. Helen’s, Lancashire, England, Michael W. J. Smurfit was the first of eight children of John Jefferson Smurfit, a master tailor from Sunderland, and Veronica Magee, from Belfast. Sir Michael acknowledges his father as his role model and career model: “Why, my father was working from the age of 12, an awe-inspiring individual. His ethics, integrity, his sheer ability to focus and move forward—all of this drove me” (Mulvihill 2005). The family
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first resided in Lancashire where, in the 1930s, the Smurfits began their lifetime association with paper packaging, owing initially to the Magee family’s interests in a box factory in Rathmines, Dublin. After some experience in the industry, the Smurfits relocated to Dublin, just after World War II, where they launched their own modest packaging concern. The first machines were manually constructed and assembled by John Smurfit himself. Understandably, early profits were unstable. Sir Michael recalls, “We went from huge houses in Killiney to rented places in Rathmines; my father went from success to close to bankruptcy, and then back again to success” (Thesing 2003). Money issues notwithstanding, the Smurfits valued education and enrolled their first son in the exclusive Jesuit boarding school, Clongowes Wood College, Co. Kildare. During this interval, the family business began to prosper and eventually became the incorporated entity Jefferson Smurfit & Sons Ltd. So busy and promising was the fledgling company that young Michael Smurfit was asked in 1952 to leave school and join his father and brothers on the factory floor at the age of 16, thus missing the experience of thirdlevel (university) training. As he recalls: “Yet, the results speak for themselves; I may not have had the ambition I had, had I gone on to university” (Thesing, 2003). Seeking to expand his skills, Smurfit then trained in management at the Continental Can Corporation in Connecticut, and shortly thereafter set up his own carton factories in Lancashire: Jefferson Smurfit Packaging. But when his father’s Dublin company went public in 1966, Michael Smurfit returned to Ireland to assume the helm. The sale of Smurfit’s United Kingdom company to his father’s Irish company effectively ensured his financial future (and www.abc-clio.com
fortune). By 1977, Smurfit’s developing aptitude for business was manifest, and he was appointed chairman and chief executive of the company known worldwide as Jefferson Smurfit Group (JSG). A corporate acquisitions spree by JSG throughout the 1960s and 1970s was swift and savvy, leading to a relative paper-andpackaging empire for JSG. A new international presence followed fast in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1986, Smurfit dramatically asserted its corporate muscle with the acquisition of Container Corporation of America at $1.2 billion. In 1994, Smurfit acquired the French company, Cellulose du Pain, for about $1.6 billion, making Smurfit the premier packaging group in Europe. By about 1995, JSG had more than doubled its sales base in Europe, owing primarily to its acquisition of the paper-and-packaging operations of the French company Saint-Gobain. In 1998, JSG brokered the merger of its U.S. associate, Jefferson Smurfit Corporation, with Stone Container Corporation, now forming the Smurfit Stone Container Corporation, an entity of unprecedented size in the industry. This merger gave JSG and its associates more than 70,000 employees and 600 facilities as well as a presence in some 30 countries. In the opening years of the new millennium, Smurfit and JSG had become the doyen of the paper industry. Poised for a profitable acquisition, the company was bought out and privatized by Madison Dearborn Partners in November 2002. Following the dispersal of JSG’s North American assets, the company’s chief focus is now South American and European markets. In 2004 alone, company sales amounted to approximately ⇔ 4 billion. Madison Dearborn spun off the North American operations, leaving JSG to focus on expansion in Latin America and Europe. By the second
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half of the twentieth century, Smurfit had become an industry brand, owing mostly to strategic buy-outs of smaller packaging entities in the United Kingdom, the United States, Latin America, and more recently continental Europe. “The one regret I have in my business career,” said Michael Smurfit in 2003, “is not finishing the development in Asia before Madison Dearborn came along; that was the last outpost which I was developing” (Thesing 2003). The recent buyout of JSG notwithstanding, Smurfit recently retired as chairman of JSG. Presently entering his eighth decade, Smurfit is however only semiretired, at work on a memoir, and developing a rapidly expanding business venture in Florida: Carsmedics (presently, a 20-unit operation). Complementing his achievements in business, Michael Smurfit has built an impressive record of educational and cultural patronage on both sides of the Atlantic, thus contributing to his long record of success in the United States. Well beyond the relatively huge employment opportunities his facilities and operations have offered Irish and Americans these many decades, Smurfit and his company have made large contributions to several Irish and U.S. universities. His chief educational legacy is founding in the 1990s the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business, a 25-acre campus at University College Dublin. Smurfit’s school enjoys the distinction of being the first educational entity in Ireland to offer an MBA degree. The school’s Corporate Partners Program and its longstanding hospitality to American students, in particular, through various student exchange programs, have contributed to continuing good relations between Ireland and the United States. Smurfit has also been a major contributor to the Keough Program in Irish www.abc-clio.com
Studies, based in Dublin and at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana, to whose Irish literature collection, housed at Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library, Smurfit has generously contributed. His sensible goal of bridging the two spheres of academia and business is also the vision of the Jefferson Smurfit Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at St. Louis University in Missouri. Smurfit’s long record as an educational patron is broadly acknowledged. He is a fellow of the International Academy of Management and holds honorary doctorates from Irish and American colleges and universities: Trinity College Dublin, the National University of Ireland, University College Galway, the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, and Babson College in Boston. Smurfit is also the honorary Irish consul to Monaco, and he has been honored for his achievements by the governments of France, Italy, Venezuela, Colombia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Poland. In June 2005, Queen Elizabeth II of England conferred upon Smurfit his most distinctive public honor, to date: Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (KBE) for his “services to British business and charitable interests” (RTÉ News online, June 11, 2005; Mulvihill correspondence with British Embassy, Dublin, June 13, 2005). On this occasion, Sir Michael said, “I am proud to be Irish; it is, however, a wonderful privilege to be honoured by my country of birth.” When asked for his thoughts regarding the present and future health of IrishAmerican relations, Smurfit had to admit that Ireland’s rising consumerism and multinational/multicultural presence in the twenty-first century was changing the island’s identity and Irishness: “Why, Dublin’s looking a bit more like New York
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City these days!” (Mulvihill 2005). While a good mix of talent and ethnicities can enrich the talent pool and strength of any nation, Smurfit is concerned about the continuing Irish identity of the island. As for Irish-American relations, in particular, he urges business and educational leaders to “hold steady” and to accelerate their current practice of business partnerships, charitable giving, and educational exchange programs. Smurfit is the father of six children (four sons, two daughters) and has 12 grandchildren. He has resided in Monaco since 1986. His present hobbies and nonbusiness interests include sport (horse racing, horse breeding, golf ), wine connoisseurship, and membership in several élite social clubs in France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Ireland. He recently purchased control of the K Club, a hotel and golf resort in Straffan, Co. Kildare, Ireland. He developed these facilities for JSG as a longterm vision to help put Ireland on the map as a premier golf venue. K Club is the home of the Smurfit European Open Golf Championship and the venue for the 2006 Ryder Club matches. Smurfit is a great credit to Irish business and Irish success; but more than this, he has used his resources humanely to improve the quality of life, especially in Ireland and America, the twin hubs of his continuing ventures. Maureen E. Mulvihill References The K Club Hotel & Golf. Straffan, Co. Kildare, Ireland, http://www.kclub .ie/default.asp (accessed June 3, 2005). Lavery, Brian. “Irish Financial Regulator Faces Its First Major Test.” New York Times, April 1, 2005: C2. Lavery, Brian, and Timothy L. O’Brien. “Insurers’ Trails Lead to Dublin.” New York Times, April 1, 2005: C1–C2. www.abc-clio.com
Mulvihill, Maureen E. Interview with Smurfit by Maureen E. Mulvihill. Transatlantic telephone call. April 26, 2005. Monaco to New York City. Mulvihill, Maureen E. “Wall Street Irish.” The World of Hibernia, Summer 1995, 140–159. With photos. Thesing, Gabi. “Man of Paper, Man of Power.” Interview with Michael W. J. Smurfit. Business & Finance. November 20, 2003: 16–21. University College Dublin. “Smurfit School of Business.” Smurfit School of Business and Smurfit Collection in Irish Studies, Notre Dame University, www.library.nd.edu/.
SOCCER, EARLY ARGENTINE The first Argentine soccer club was the Buenos Aires Football Club, founded on May 9, 1867, by a group of British players. Matches were organized in the field of the Buenos Aires Cricket Club in Palermo. In this period, playing soccer was associated with cricket and British social institutions, of which some Irish settlers were members. Among the first players was James Wensley Bond (b. 1846) of Co. Armagh. Bond played in a match on June 29, 1867, that lasted two and a half hours. Another player in the same match was Richard Henry Murray of Dublin, auditor of the Buenos Ayres British Clerk’s Provident Association. In the beginning, the rules of the game were not clear, and soccer was similar to today’s rugby. Only in the 1880s did soccer and rugby begin to effectively separate. However, the players of both sports belonged to the same social circle, which also participated in cricket and rowing and, in the countryside, horse racing and polo. In the 1890s, soccer extended to other English-speaking circles, especially in the rural areas of Buenos Aires. On July 3, 1892,
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a group of Irish Argentines and others founded the Lobos Athletic Club. Among the founding members were Tomás McKeon, Tomás P. Moore, Tomás Garrahan, Edmundo and Patricio Kirk, Santiago F. MacKeon, Eduardo Burbridge, Eugenio Seery, Juan Geoghegan, José Garrahan, Lorenzo Owens, Felix Dolan, Hugo Lawlor, Eduardo Walsh, William Weir, José Joyce, Eduardo Slamon, and Eduardo Burbridge, Jr. Tomás P. Moore was selected as their first team captain. The games were very popular among the native population, who gathered to watch the ingleses locos playing soccer. The club developed successfully, and in 1900 it merged with the English High School club, whose ex-pupils later formed the famous Alumni, winner of nine league championships from 1900 to 1911. The most famous player of Lobos Athletic Club was Paddy McCarthy. Born in 1871 in Cashel, Co. Tipperary, McCarthy arrived in Argentina in 1900 and was hired to teach athletics in the Escuela Nacional de Comercio, whose director was James Fitzsimons (1849–1944), son of the schoolmaster Patrick Fitzsimons. When his colleagues decided to merge Lobos with the English High School, McCarthy went to play with Club Atlético Estudiantes, founded in 1898. In 1900 he also played for Central Athletic Club, and then he was hired by Gimnasia y Esgrima in 1904. The following year the Boca Juniors hired him to train the enthusiastic teams of younger players. McCarthy was also one of the pioneers of professional boxing in Argentina. Many of the soccer clubs in the 1890s and 1900s were associated with schools, alumni associations, and British railway companies. Some of the first clubs were St. Andrew’s, Old Caledonians, English High
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School, Buenos Aires al Rosario Railway, Belgrano Football Club, Buenos Ayres Football Club, Lomas Athletic, Flores Athletic, and Lobos Athletic. On February 21, 1893, the Argentine Association Football League was founded, and the Scottish schoolmaster Alexander Watson Hutton became its first president. On July 20, 1902, the first international match was played between Argentina and Uruguay—Argentina won, 6–0. Among the first-division players at that time were Eduardo Duggan, Ernesto Brown, Edward Morgan, Juan Moore, and Jorge Brown. Other famous players of Irish origin were Miguel Murphy, a grandson of John James Murphy, and Carlos Lett. Most of these players came from Porteño Athletic Club, the institution founded by members of the Irish community, who proudly perceived themselves as the first Argentine-born players. Porteño started on July 28, 1895, and in the beginning a majority of the founding members were Irish Argentines: Tomás Hagan, José I. O’Farrell (brother of Dr. Santiago O’Farrell), Gerardo R. Kenny, Tomás Cavanagh, and Francisco Geoghegan. The club’s original name (Capital Athletic Club) was changed when the first members won a good amount of money through gambling on horse races, so that they could purchase balls and other equipment (Porteño was the name of the winning horse). Besides soccer, members played cricket and enjoyed other athletic disciplines. In 1899, Porteño had 42 members, and the president was Santiago G. O’Farrell (1861–1926), national member of Parliament and president of the Irish Catholic Association, who served as member of the board in several British-owned companies. That year there was a concert to collect funds to purchase a playing field. The club
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rooms were at the grounds of the Irish Orphanage in Caballito. In 1901 the first playing grounds were inaugurated in Palermo. Between 1899 and 1906, Porteño’s “first eleven” played in the second division. The club was promoted to the first division of the Football League in 1907 and won its first national championship in 1912. Some of the first Porteño players were Miguel A. Kenny, G. and E. Hearne, J. Tormey, M. A. Tyrrell, E. Rugeroni, A. Chopitea, J. McDonald, T. and F. Geoghegan, J. Oates, T. Cavanagh, J. Gahan, J. J. MacLoughlin, J. McAllister, and A.C. Hugues. During a match against Alumni, Porteño’s famous goalkeeper, Juan José Rithner, saved 67 shots. By the late 1930s there were no more Irish names among the members of Porteño, and soccer was gradually replaced by rugby as its main activity. As opposed to the sport of hurling in Argentina, many Irish Argentines who played soccer in those years belonged to traditional landowning families, followed AngloArgentine lifestyles and entertainments, and often revealed pro-British attitudes. Significantly, the Irish Argentines of Porteño Athletic Club founded their own institution and perceived themselves as “a group of Argentines,” therefore giving an indication that their loyalties were more with Argentina than with England or Ireland. Edmundo Murray See also: FITZSIMONS, Patrick; HURLING IN ARGENTINA; MURPHY, John James References Frydenberg, Julio David. “Prácticas y Valores en el Proceso de Popularización del Fútbol, Buenos Aires 1900–1910.” Entrepasados 6, no. 12 (1997): 7–27. Mastropietro, Guillermo. Misceláneas Lobenses. Buenos Aires: Author’s Edition, 2002.
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Olivera, E. Orígenes de los Deportes Británicos en el Río de la Plata. Buenos Aires: Talleres Gráficos Argentinos, 1932. Raffo, Victor, and Alfredo Yanes. Un Pionero Llamado Banfield: Origen del Club Atlético Banfield y de la Comunidad Británica de Lomas de Zamora. Buenos Aires: Author’s Edition, 1999.
SOMERVILLE, EDITH ŒNONE (1858–1949) The comic Irish short fiction of Edith Somerville and Martin Ross (Violet Martin) gained popular appeal, especially among sporting circles, in the United States after the publication of the Hitchcock edition of the Irish R.M. (resident magistrate) series in 1927. Following the successful introduction of Somerville and Ross’s writing into the United States, Edith Somerville toured the United States and exhibited her artwork in 1929 and 1936. She published an account of her initial visit to the southern states, New England, and New York City in The States through Irish Eyes in 1930. The travel book provides a significant connection between the Irish big house and the American southern plantation. Drawing various comparisons to Ireland, Somerville concentrates on riding to hounds, architecture, landscaping, and the manners of black servants in the various homes she visits. The Irish writer’s connection to the United States continued with her sales of Irish horses to Americans up until 1939. From her early years in West Cork, Edith Somerville was attracted by the rough glamour of the American West. She admired Mark Twain’s writing, and her earliest publication, The Mark Twain Birthday Book (1885), compiled quotations from Twain’s fiction. She became interested in the art of
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horse whispering when studying John Leech’s illustrations of a visiting American horse tamer in London, John S. Rary, in Punch magazine. In 1886, Somerville met her second cousin, Violet Martin from Galway; they shared an interest in horses and writing and eventually discovered critical acclaim with the publication of The Real Charlotte in 1894. Somerville and Ross’s popular short fiction, Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. (1898), Further Experiences of an Irish R.M. (1908), and In Mr. Knox’s Country (1915), deal with the comic escapades of the members of the Irish Hunt in West Cork. The stories provide lively and accurate treatment of the HibernoEnglish, and Somerville’s illustrations ensured their broad appeal. Her extended visits to Paris to study art in the 1880s and 1890s included tuition by the American illustrator Cyrus Cuneo. An accomplished sportswoman and activist for women’s rights, Somerville was master of the West Carbery Foxhounds, 1903–1908, and president of the Munster Women’s Franchise League in 1913. She was thus very happy to be the guest of another female master of the foxhounds, Mrs. Thomas Hitchcock, on her initial visit to America. In some of their writing, Somerville and Ross suggest that Irish America promotes a rabid form of Catholic nationalism that contributes to the upstart notions of the Irish peasantry, but they admired the independence and spirit of the American people. After Martin’s death in 1915, Somerville continued to publish writing under their joint names with a few exceptions, including her travel book on the United States. She believed Martin continued to collaborate with her through supernatural means (achieved through automatic writing). One suspects, however, that enthusiasm www.abc-clio.com
for the United States belonged more to Somerville than it did Martin. Julie Anne Stevens Reference Somerville, Edith and Martin Ross. Happy Days. London: Longmans, Green, 1946.
SOUTH CAROLINA The majority of Irish immigration to South Carolina took place between 1730 and 1775. As in other southern states at the time the vast number of immigrants were Scots-Irish or Ulster Protestants. Although there were some Irish Catholics, the state’s hostility to Catholicism proved a deterrent to their settling there. One of the first settlers in South Carolina was Captain Florence O’Sullivan, who was originally from Kinsale in Co. Cork. Sullivan’s Island was later named after him. During this colonial period there were two Irish governors of South Carolina. The first, Richard Kyrle of Cork, died shortly after his appointment, and the second, James Moore, served as governor from 1700 to 1703. Later, with the arrival of Irish Quakers and their settlement at Mulberry, the colony made several plans to attract groups of Irish Protestants to come and settle in South Carolina. In the years before the American Revolution, the number of Irish entering the state reached its height. With the War of Independence the Irish in South Carolina played an important role, and two of the state’s four signatories of the Declaration of Independence were of Irish ancestry. In 1749, the Irish Society of Charleston was formed, and it preceded the establishment of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick in 1773. After the Revolutionary War, the Friendly Brothers of Ireland was formed in 1786. Then, one year after the United Irishmen’s Rebellion of 1798, the
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Hibernian Society of Charleston was founded. In a similar fashion to its work in other states, its membership was largely composed of local men of property and business, and it raised funds and provided financial assistance for needy compatriots. The flurry of Irish organizations set up at this time continued with the establishment of the Irish Volunteers Company of Charleston in 1799 and the formation of St. Patrick’s Benevolent Society in 1817. Roman Catholic Bishop John England, who had been born in Cork in 1786, was consecrated as bishop of Charleston in 1820. He responded to Daniel O’Connell’s condemnation of slavery, saying that although he disapproved of it, he also recognized the impossibility of abolishing it in the southern states. Another prominent citizen of South Carolina who was of Irish extraction was John C. Calhoun, whose father had been born in Donegal. Calhoun recognized his Irish background and showed this by joining the Irish Emigrant Society of New York in 1844. In the 1820s, as was the case in many other states, the construction of canals and railroads led to an increase in the number of Irish emigrating to and settling in South Carolina. With the Great Famine in the 1840s many of the Irish associations in South Carolina raised funds to send to Ireland. Although there was a trickle of Irish immigrants from the northern cities, there was not the same level of immigration as there was in other states. With the outbreak of the Civil War, the Irish formed units to fight for the Confederacy. The Irish Volunteers of Charleston joined the Confederate army. Bishop Patrick Lynch of Charleston, who had been born in Clones, Co. Monaghan, became a representative of the Confederacy in Europe, where he defended slavery. With www.abc-clio.com
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the end of the Civil War and the defeat of the South, there was not the same level of immigration from Ireland to South Carolina as there had been in the antebellum period. In spite of this there were some success stories. including that of Michael Patrick O’Connor, the son of an emigrant from Charville, Co. Cork, who was elected to Congress as a Democrat in 1878. Following the Irish Parliamentary Party leader Charles Stewart Parnell’s address to the House of Representatives, he traveled the country speaking in support of Irish land reform. Parnell was not the only Irish leader who had an effect on South Carolina. In April 1920, Eamon de Valera, the president of the Irish Republic, visited the city of Charleston, where the city’s mayor, John P. Grace, received him. In a 1980 census 14 percent of the population of South Carolina claimed that they were of Irish ancestry. The Ancient Order of Hibernians continues the Irish presence today with its branches in Charleston, Columbia, and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. David Doyle References Gleeson, David T. The Irish in the South, 1815–1877. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Mitchell, Arthur. The History of the Hibernian Society of Charleston, South Carolina, 1799–1981. Charleston: Hibernian Society, 1982.
SOUTH DAKOTA South Dakota was originally inhabited by the Sioux (Dakota, Lakota, Nakota) and Arikara tribes. A portion of the area was first explored by Europeans in the mideighteenth century before the entire region was purchased from Napoleon as part of
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the enormous land sale in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The famous Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804–1806, which commenced in St. Louis to explore and chart the newly acquired land, ventured into sections of what would become South Dakota. White settlements grew primarily around trading interests: the first fur trading post was established at modern-day Fort Pierre in 1817, and there was subsequent activity by the American Fur Company. By the 1830s, the Sioux had become dominant and had largely pushed the Arikara from the land, and in 1858 a group of Sioux signed over much of eastern South Dakota to the U.S. government. Many, however, would fiercely resist white westward expansion. The first sizable numbers of white settlers arrived in the 1850s, many from Minnesota and Iowa; land companies were established and towns were planned. The Dakota Territory, with Yankton as capital, was organized in 1861 and encompassed both present-day Dakotas as well as part of Wyoming and Montana. Insect plagues, droughts, and the threat of conflict with local Indians resulted in a relatively depressed number of new immigrants, although the arrival of rail lines to Yankton in 1872 began to increase the number, mostly Irish, German, Scandinavian, and Russian. These first three groups still represent the largest ancestry groups in present-day South Dakota. Incoming numbers would be further helped by the discovery of gold reported by a military expedition led by George A. Custer in 1874. Prospectors and miners subsequently spilled into the Black Hills. The bulk of this region had been promised to the Sioux in the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868, and this sudden white encroachment represented a breach of the treaty. The government attempted to purchase the www.abc-clio.com
Black Hills, but owing to its highly sacred character, the offer was refused. Piqued, the government ordered the tribe to vacate and the situation descended into warfare, most famously known for the defeat of Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876 (present-day Montana). Wounded Knee creek in South Dakota would witness what is commonly regarded as the end of Native American resistance in the nineteenth century, when approximately 200 men, women, and children were massacred by Custer’s former regiment, the 7th Cavalry. In the late nineteenth century, cattle and mining fueled a steady growth, and the years 1878–1886 witnessed a land boom that saw a 300 percent increase in the population. Irish Catholics began to move steadily into the area—the religion had already been established in the state by French Catholics who had arrived and founded the first permanent mission in 1867. Other groups arriving included Germans, Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, and smaller numbers of Italians, facilitated by the arrival of the railroad from Sioux City, Iowa. Indeed, the white population rocketed to 82,000 by 1880 and 348,600 in 1890. Railroad construction attracted settlers and boosted the economic prospects of the state, but the boom came to a halt as agricultural difficulties in the late 1880s forced many to reconsider the area’s potential, and many settlers migrated out of state. Statehood was attained in 1889: the Dakotas were separated and admitted on the same day, and Pierre became the capital of South Dakota. With its strong agrarian and farming interests, South Dakota became involved, as many western and southern states did, in the Populist Party phenomenon in the
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1890s. Often known as the People’s Party, it represented a position of protest born out of increasing frustration after a series of events and issues, including droughts, agricultural hardship and debts, national financial policies, and resentment against the railroad (they lobbied for government ownership). South Dakota elected Andrew E. Lee, running on the Populist ticket, as governor in 1896, but in 1900 he lost to the Republicans when running for Congress, a loss that saw the rapid decline of the Populists in the state. From 1900 to 1930, immigration generally rose; settlers arrived from Scandinavia, Russia, much of mid-Europe, China, and Ireland. However, new agricultural difficulties (drought, 1910–1911) prompted some to move on to different states. Others turned once again to a more radicalized politics in the guise of the Progressives, reflected in the election of Peter Norbeck and Frank Byrne, the son of Irish immigrants; both were elected as state senators and subsequently governors. Further population losses occurred during the Great Depression decade (around 50,000), and many farmers with relatively small holdings were pushed out of business after World War II as agricultural techniques reshaped the character of farming in the state into large, consolidated farms. (The state has suffered a recurrence of out-migration at the turn of the twenty-first century.) Service industries began to establish centers in the state in the 1980s, and with the boom in Indian gaming, the state has witnessed a growth in casinos. The state also draws significant amounts of money through tourism to the Badlands National Park and the state’s most famous landmark, Mount Rushmore. Sam Hitchmough www.abc-clio.com
References Doyle, David Noel, and Owen Dudley Edwards, eds. America and Ireland, 1776–1976: The American Identity and the Irish Connection. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish. London: Longman, 2000. Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Schell, Herbert. History of South Dakota. Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society, 2004.
SPELLMAN, ARCHBISHOP FRANCIS JOSEPH (1889–1967) Born in Whitman, Massachusetts, Francis Joseph Spellman was the eldest of five children of William and Ellen (Conway) Spellman, both of whom were the children of Irish immigrants. During one of his visits to Ireland Spellman recalled how all four of his grandparents had immigrated to America from the counties of Cork, Carlow, Tipperary, and Limerick. After graduating from Fordham College in New York, he entered the seminary at the North American College in Rome, where he studied at the Urban College of Propaganda. He was ordained in Rome on May 14, 1916, and he returned to Boston, where he became an assistant pastor at All Saints’ Church in Roxbury, Massachusetts. He became assistant chancellor of the Boston archdiocese in 1922 and an archivist a year later. In 1925, Spellman was appointed to the position of vatican secretariat of state by Pope Pius XI. He was made a monsignor and was appointed auxiliary bishop of Boston in 1932 and became pastor of Sacred Heart parish in Newton Center. Following the death of Cardinal Patrick Hayes, on April 15, 1939, Spellman was appointed archbishop of New York, a
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position he would hold until his death, making him the longest serving person to hold that position. In addition, he was also military ordinary, or bishop, over the armed forces. In 1946 he was elevated to cardinal. After the war he became a vociferous opponent of communism, and for a while he embraced the anticommunism of Senator Joseph McCarthy. During this time he also bemoaned the decline of censorship in American films. In Christmas 1965 he visited American soldiers in Vietnam and expressed his support for their presence there, viewing the war as part of the fight against communism. Spellman died in New York on December 2, 1967, and was interred in the crypt under the altar of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Although Cardinal Spellman was conscious of his Irish ancestry he always identified himself as an American, correcting his biographer when he referred to him as an Irishman. In 1931, he had paid a visit to Ireland, the highlight of which was his time in Clonmel, where his grandfather had been born in 1831. The following year he accompanied the papal legate, Cardinal Lauri, as his official secretary and translator, to the International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. He met Archbishop Edward J. Byrne of Dublin; the newly elected taoiseach, Eamon de Valera; and the lord mayor of Dublin, Alfred Byrne. He read the English translation of the papal bull in Saint Mary’s Pro-Cathedral in Dublin. In 1942, during World War II, Spellman revisited Ireland, where again he met de Valera as well as Archbishop John Charles McQuaid at the American Embassy. On February 11, 1944, he made a third and final visit to Ireland, during which he landed at Shannon Airport, where he was
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met by Irish government officials and members of the Irish hierarchy before celebrating mass at Saint John’s Cathedral in Limerick. After the mass he recalled how his maternal grandmother had left Limerick more than a century before to immigrate to America, eventually settling in Whitman, Massachusetts. Afterward, he traveled to Killarney by train where, following a trip to the Gap of Dunloe, a state dinner was held in his honor with the taoiseach once again present. The anticommunism espoused by the cardinal at the height of the Cold War affected his relations with Ireland. In September 1957, Ireland’s minister for foreign affairs, Frank Aiken, announced in New York that Ireland would support a motion to discuss China’s admission to the United Nations at a time when communist China was not recognized by the United States and Taiwan held the Chinese seat at the United Nations. A representative of Cardinal Spellman called the Irish delegation to inform them that the cardinal would boycott a reception planned for that evening rather than accept hospitality from a friend of communist China. According to Conor Cruise O’Brien, a member of the Irish delegation at the time, the cardinal’s efforts to dissuade the Irish delegation from supporting the Chinese entry were rebuffed, and Ireland eventually voted for discussion of China’s entry to the United Nations. David Doyle
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References Cooney, John. The American Pope: The Life and Times of Francis Cardinal Spellman. New York: Times Books, 1984. Gannon, Robert I. The Cardinal Spellman Story. London: Hale, 1963. O’Brien, Conor Cruise. To Katanga and Back. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1966.
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STOKER, ABRAHAM “BRAM” (1847–1912) As acting manager of the Lyceum Theater, Bram Stoker became involved in the first large-scale acting tours of the United States by a British acting company. From 1884 until 1903 the company traveled across America on a series of visits. Stoker’s enthusiastic interest in the social and political life of the United States became apparent in a lecture given in England upon return from his first visit and entitled “A Glimpse of America.” He consequently became fascinated by the life and times of Abraham Lincoln and wrote an extended lecture on Lincoln, slavery, and the American Civil War in 1886, which he presented in both the United States and England. Stoker published a number of articles on American theater in early 1900, and although he had been publishing fiction from the 1870s onward, his most significant works followed upon his long involvement in the theatrical world. His melodramatic study of the Irish gombeen man in The Snake’s Pass (1890) and his popular treatment of the vampire in Dracula (1897) recall British and American theater of the late nineteenth century. Stoker was born in Dublin and educated in Trinity College, where he was introduced to the poetry of Walt Whitman. Initially, he worked as a civil servant until 1879, when he took over the business dealings of London’s Lyceum Theater. The theater company’s regular American tours (1883–1884, 1884–1885, 1887–1888, 1896, 1899, and 1903) featuring the most prominent English actors of the day, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, and complete with stage sets, costumes, performers, and technicians, indicate the popularity of English productions in the United States. Based on
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Portrait of Irish author Bram Stoker, who is best known for his 1897 novel Dracula. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)
his travels and research, Stoker’s Glimpse of America concentrates on the effect of climate and topography on the development of the American national character. The author provides an introduction to the nature of the American political system, the manners and dress of the people, attitudes toward women, and the practical approach of American citizens to matters of injustice. Stoker met Whitman during the theater company’s initial tour, and his lecture on Lincoln relies in part on the poet’s observations of the American statesman in “Memoranda During the War” in Two Rivulets (1876), which Stoker had read while in Trinity. Stoker also researched contemporary biographies on Lincoln. His lecture elaborates on the growth of the American nation, the events leading up to and throughout the Civil War, and the
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central figure of Lincoln, who manifests the ideals of democratic freedom as expressed by the northern states. Though Stoker initially depicts Lincoln as a man of the people, he soon elevates him as a hero. He illustrated his lectures with casts of Lincoln’s face and hands made by Augustus SaintGaudens. The lecture did not attract sufficient audiences in the United States after 1887, but Stoker continued to present his lecture in England up until 1893. Stoker’s writings on America demonstrate the extent of his interest in its history and his intent to improve Anglo-American understanding. Julie Anne Stevens See also: SAINT-GAUDENS, Augustus References Havlik, Robert J., ed. “Bram Stoker’s Lecture on Abraham Lincoln.” Irish Studies Review. 10, no. 1 (April 2002): 5–27. Stoker, Bram. A Glimpse of America, A Lecture Given at the London Institution, 28 December 1885. London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1886.
SULLIVAN, JOHN L. (1858–1918) John L. Sullivan was a second-generation Irish American who ushered boxing into the modern era of sport as the heavyweight champion of the world from 1882 to 1892. Sullivan, who was born in 1858 to Irish immigrant parents, was a product of his Irish working-class culture. He claimed to have finished school and attended Boston College for a brief period, although he actually left school with a ninth grade education and quickly fell into the laboring professions typical of Irish Americans of that time. With a fiery temperament, unsuited to conventional labor, Sullivan soon took to entering and winning boxing tournaments to gain repute and money. At 19, after www.abc-clio.com
knocking out Tom Scannel, a boxer of local repute, Sullivan began fighting in Boston theaters and music halls. After defeating three well-known opponents in quick succession and securing a victory over John Donaldson, the “champion of the West,” in his first prizefight, Sullivan was regarded as a possible challenger for the champion bare-knuckle boxer, Paddy Ryan. Ryan, however, spurned the challenge, and Sullivan began a cross-country tour where he offered $50 to anyone who would stand up against him for four rounds. This tour and Sullivan’s bombastic self-promotion (a harbinger of the modern game) secured his national reputation. Ryan finally agreed to fight Sullivan on February 7, 1882, in Mississippi City. The extensive newspaper exposure this fight received did much to foster the development of modern sports coverage. The fight itself lasted only nine rounds—Sullivan won easily, and earned himself the sobriquet of John the Great. At age 23 he had become the heavyweight champion; over the next decade he was to become one of the bestknown public figures in the world. As heavyweight champion, Sullivan began to dispense with the London Prize Ring code of bare-knuckle boxing, which had made boxing an illegal activity in America and had caused Sullivan no end of trouble with the law, choosing to fight instead under the Marquis of Queensbury rules, in four-round exhibition fights. Under these new rules, a round consisted of three minutes of fighting with a minute’s rest between rounds. As well as allowing Sullivan to evade prosecution (because fourround exhibition fights were not covered by America’s anti-prizefight law) and avoid unnecessary injuries (through the use of gloves and the elimination of wrestling),
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this decision ushered in the era of modern boxing as we now know it. Sullivan fought all comers and contenders under these rules, except for Peter Jackson—a black Australian fighter who probably presented the most formidable challenge to his dominance—drawing the color line as justification for his refusal. After extensive exhibition tours, including a “World Tour” of Great Britain (where he received a rousing welcome in Ireland), Sullivan was forced to defend his title in a prizefight on July 7, 1889, against Jake Kilrain. Sullivan’s years of heavy drinking had taken a serious toll on his health, and his fans had grown doubtful of his continued ability to defend his title. However, after enduring an intensive training program, Sullivan fought and defeated Kilrain in a 75-round fight that lasted two hours and 16 minutes, regaining his fans’ unquestioning adoration. This was the last heavyweight championship fought under London Prize Ring Rules.
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By the time Sullivan fought Jim Corbett, on September 7, 1892, he had slipped back into his old carousing ways and had not trained in any substantial form. It was to be the first fight of the modern era of heavyweight boxing—fought with gloves, under the Marquis of Queensbury rules, and inside the Olympic Club of New Orleans— and the last fight of John L. Sullivan’s long career. He lost to Corbett in 21 rounds. Though retaining his celebrity status until his death, Sullivan filed for bankruptcy 10 years after losing his title, and he died on February 2, 1918, aged just 59. James P. Byrne References Chidsey, Donald Barr. John the Great: The Times and Life of a Remarkable American, John L. Sullivan. New York: Doubleday, 1942. Fleischer, Nat. John L. Sullivan: Champion of Champions. New York: G. P. Putman’s Sons, 1951. Sullivan, John L. Life and Reminiscences of a Nineteenth Century Gladiator. Boston: Jas. A. Hearn & Co., 1892.
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T TALLCHIEF, MARIA (1925–) Though prima ballerina Maria Tallchief is most often associated with the Native American ancestry of her father, who was of the Osage tribe, she shares Irish background as well. Her mother, Ruth, was of Scottish and Irish descent. Tallchief describes her in her autobiography as a “true pioneer.” Part of that pioneering spirit must have been passed on to her daughters, Betty Marie and Marjorie. Both were interested in dance, and specifically in ballet, from a young age, at a time when that was not a common or easy career aspiration for young women from Native American tribes. Betty Marie, later Maria, was born in Fairfax, Oklahoma, and spent much of her young life there with her father’s people. Her mother, however, wanted to support and advance her daughters’ talents beyond what was available to them on the rural lands of the Osage tribe, and she spearheaded a family move to California, where the young ballerinas studied with Bronislava Nijinska. Maria adapted to the discipline required of a ballet dancer and began to show the grace, fire, and originality that would distinguish her work in later years. At 17, she auditioned in New York for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and was accepted into the corps de ballet, supporting such world-renowned ballerinas as Alexandra Danilova as the company toured
the world. Tallchief herself soon became a featured soloist with the company. Though she was barely in her early twenties, the power and individuality of her stage presence caught the eye and the imagination of famed choreographer George Balanchine. Tallchief soon joined Balanchine’s company, the New York City Ballet. A master choreographer, Balanchine found in Tallchief a professional and, for a time, a personal partner for his vision. Tallchief ’s interpretation of Balanchine’s choreography for The Firebird in 1949 allowed her talents to come full force to national and international attention and became a signature moment for both their careers. She also created the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy in Balanchine’s reinterpretation of the holiday ballet The Nutcracker. She also enthralled audiences with her performances in Swan Lake, Pas De Six, and Orpheus, among other works. The pair were married from 1946 to 1951, and Tallchief continued to dance with the company until 1960, when she joined the American Ballet Theater. Her graceful moves, her subtlety and delicacy of interpretation, and her strong sense of self expressed through the classical strictures of professional ballet drew audiences to Tallchief ’s work. The fact that she was not only an American prima ballerina at a time when that was not common, but
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also a Native American one at that, brought more attention to her work. In 1953 President Eisenhower named Tallchief Woman of the Year. That same year, she was also recognized by her native state Oklahoma as Wa-Xthe-Thomba, or “Woman of Two Worlds.” Tallchief did not want to dance past her prime, and professional ballet is physically very demanding, so, in her early forties, she retired. She became a wellrespected teacher and leader in the arts. She was artistic director and teacher at the Chicago Lyric Opera Ballet in the 1970s. With her sister Marjorie, who had also become a top ballerina, she founded the Chicago City Ballet and was its artistic director until 1987. Both Maria and Marjorie Tallchief were inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in recognition of their achievements. Tallchief remarried twice after her divorce from George Balanchine. With her third husband, Henry Paschen, she had a daughter, Elise, who became a poet. In 1996, Tallchief was given one of the highest artistic recognitions the United States gives its artists, the Kennedy Center Honors. Kerry Dexter References Gourley, Catherine. Who Is Maria Tallchief ? New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 2002. Kaplan, Larry. The Art of Maria Tallchief. 1954. Reprint, New York: Video Arts International, 2003. Tallchief, Maria, with Larry Kaplan, America’s Prima Ballerina. New York: Henry Holt, 1997.
TAMMANY HALL On May 12, 1789, Irish-born upholsterer William Mooney founded the Society of Saint Tammany in New York City. The www.abc-clio.com
society was created as a patriotic, benevolent, and nonpolitical organization to counteract the aristocratic influence of the Order of Cincinnati. Tammany’s name is derived from legendary Delaware chief Tamanend and patterned after the prerevolutionary Sons of Saint Tammany as a fraternal society. Tammany Hall became a power in Democratic Party politics during the Jacksonian era of the 1830s. When Fernando Wood was elected mayor in 1854, city hall became and generally remained a Tammany fiefdom until Fiorello La Guardia took office in 1933. Although a few similar short-lived societies were founded in other states, New York is where the name Tammany took on significant historical meaning. In 1805, the New York Society was incorporated as a benevolent society and built its first “wigwam” or hall in 1811. The Tammany Society was a secret organization with secret handshakes and elaborate rituals that supposedly had Native American origins. The organization was divided into tribes named by the “sachem after a specific animal.” The sachems acted as the chief officials and a grand sachem was the absolute authority. Other officials included a “sagamore” or master of ceremonies and a “winskinkie,” or doorkeeper. New York was the number one wigwam and served as the headquarters for the national eagle tribe. As new states were admitted to the United States they were also given tribal names. However, except for the first 15 years, the Tammany Society was not a truly national organization. The Tammany Society did not resemble the well-known political organization until Matthew Davis negotiated the rental of its New York wigwam to the Tammany Hall General Committee, which laid the groundwork for political control and opportunism.
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Tammany Hall, located on West 14th Street in New York City, ca. 1914. Tammany Hall was the meeting place for, and popular name of, the Democratic Party political machine that dominated much of New York City’s political life until 1933. (Library of Congress)
Thereafter, the Tammany Society and the Tammany Hall General Committee were nearly synonymous. Overall, Tammany Hall’s power came from its ability to organize citywide. Each ward or assembly district had a boss or leader who controlled the local committee that in turn sent representatives to the General Committee whose leaders made up the Executive Committee. Almost from the beginning Tammany was actively engaged in politics. Although its early membership was strongly Federalist, the group supported Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party in the 1800 election and sided with the Aaron Burr faction in New York City, which opposed De Witt Clinton’s largely Irish following. www.abc-clio.com
As a result, the Federalist members resigned from the society as Tammany lost all pretense of nonpartisanship. It was during the 1820s—when the Democratic-Republican Party, with Tammany’s support, passed legislation to extend male suffrage and abolish imprisonment for debt—that the organization became increasingly less Protestant and less elitist. In addition, after 1827, Tammany fought for reducing the five-year period necessary for naturalization. Thereafter, foreign-born immigrants gradually played a more prominent role in both the Tammany Society and Tammany Hall. Moreover, throughout the 1830s and 1840s the society expanded its political control by earning the
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loyalty of New York’s ever-expanding immigrant community and by helping newly arrived foreigners obtain jobs, find a place to live, and even attain citizenship so that they could vote for Tammany candidates in city and state elections. By 1842, Irish gangs regularly used physical violence at election time, thereby becoming a source of Tammany political strength. The money Tammany Hall garnered for itself and its leaders came from an assortment of activities. For example, they blackmailed corporations that preferred to purchase peace rather than fight bogus charges or corporations that desired to operate city concessions. In addition, money came from such purveyors of vice as liquor dealers, gambling establishments, and prostitution operators, who historically functioned at the mercy of the party in power or whose business was easily hampered by police, vigilant officeholders, and moralistic political candidates. By 1854, all of these factors had combined to make Tammany the political force in New York City, conferring immense power on the society’s “bosses” and allowing them to enrich themselves and their associates through corruption and administrative abuse. Most of the New York City board of aldermen during the 1850s were Tammany men who earned the title of the Forty Thieves. Corruption was elevated to a science when William Marcy Tweed rose to grand sachem of the Tammany Society in 1863. Tweed’s leadership made it a well-organized, powerful political machine that served as the model for the “big city” machines to follow. Although nobody knows how much money was actually stolen, the city’s bonded debt increased from $36 million in 1869 to $97 million in 1871 at a time www.abc-clio.com
when New York City borrowed an additional $20 million in floating loans. Tammany became the prototype of the all-pervasive corrupt city machine. “Honest” John Kelly fine-tuned Tammany into an efficient, autocratic organization that dominated New York City politics for several generations. Kelly’s successor, Richard Croker, lasted until 1901, then gave way to other important leaders or beneficiaries of Tammany Hall like Alfred E. Smith, James J. Walker, and William O’Dwyer. The New York Society was oftentimes charged with corrupt political practices that involved working with gangster elements in its control of municipal politics. As a result, from time to time investigations were undertaken by federal, state, and local groups. Foremost among the early muckrakers were Samuel Tilden, Thomas Nast, and Harper’s Weekly in the 1880s, along with the comprehensive and trend-setting Seabury Investigation of 1932 and the televised Kefauver Investigation of 1950 to 1951. In 1932, Tammany Mayor James J. Walker was brought up on corruption charges before Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and forced to resign. In retaliation, the Tammany leaders refused to support Roosevelt’s bid for the Democratic nomination for president, and as a result, the Roosevelt faction funneled federal patronage to New York City through the reform mayor, Fiorello La Guardia. Thereafter, Carmine G. De Sapio briefly revived Tammany Hall in the 1950s but lost control of his district to reformers in 1961, when the New York County Democratic Committee dropped the Tammany name. Mark Connolly
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TENNESSEE 881 References Allen, Oliver. The Tiger: The Rise and Fall of Tammany Hall. Reading, MA: AddisonWesley, 1993. Erie, Steven. Rainbow’s End: Irish-Americans and the Dilemma of Urban Machine Politics, 1840–1985. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. LaCerra, Charles. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Tammany Hall of New York. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997. Mushkat, Jerome. The Evolution of a Political Machine, 1789–1865. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1971. Myers, Gustavus. The History of Tammany Hall. New York: Ben Franklin Press, 1968. Riordan, William L. Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics. New York: Amereon House, 1982.
TENNESSEE As in many other states, early Irish immigration to Tennessee was mostly composed of Scots-Irish, and later mid-nineteenthcentury settlement was made up of Irish Catholics. The first Scots-Irish migrated to Tennessee in the 1760s and 1770s, where they were instrumental in founding towns such as Knoxville and Nashville. All three of Tennessee’s U.S. presidents, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Andrew Johnson, were of Scots-Irish ancestry, as were other notable figures, such as Davy Crockett and Sam Houston. Although there had been an increase in the number of Irish Catholics in Tennessee in the 1820s with the establishment of some Catholic parishes, there was a sharp rise in their numbers with the mass exodus from Ireland during the Great Famine in the 1840s. By this stage many of the earlier Scots-Irish immigrants had now become accepted as successful people of property and business, and the newer immigrants formed a poorer laboring class. Between 1850 and 1860, Tennessee saw the www.abc-clio.com
largest increase in its Irish population in all of the southern states and was in seventh position nationally. During this time, the Irish population in Knoxville, Nashville, and Memphis increased four times, with new towns called Erin and McEwen and areas known as “little Ireland.” This increase in the number of Irish brought success to some: Michael Burns, who had been born in Sligo, became the director of two railroads and banks and served in the state legislature. However, although some Irish prospered, most lived in poor and overcrowded slums. With a rise in hostility toward the new immigrants, as expressed by the KnowNothing movement, the Irish were forced to band together for solidarity. At the outbreak of the Civil War the Irish showed their loyalty to their new home by volunteering for and forming various units to fight for the Confederacy. The Second Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, which was nicknamed the “Irish Regiment,” the 10th Tennessee Infantry Regiment, also known as “the Sons of Erin,” and the Third Cavalry, which was led by Nathan Bedford Forrest, were all composed of Irishmen. By the end of the Civil War this newly found pride and confidence on the part of the Irish in Tennessee found expression in the establishment of a number of Irish organizations in the state. By 1868, a branch of the Ancient Order of Hibernians had been organized in Nashville, along with the Hibernian Benevolent Society and the Parnell Branch of the Irish National League. However, it was to be with the Irish separatists—the Irish Republican Brotherhood, known as the Fenians—that the next phase of Irish involvement in Tennessee occurred. There had been a history of Fenians in Tennessee: leading member John Mitchel settled in east
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Tennessee with his family in 1855 and later moved to Knoxville, where he edited a proslavery newspaper, The Southern Citizen. In 1866 the Fenians planned an invasion of Canada; their members in Tennessee assembled in Memphis and then traveled north by train, but the invasion itself was a complete failure. After the end of the Civil War, with newly freed blacks competing with the Irish for low-paid jobs, a three-day riot broke out in Memphis, which left 48 dead. A congressional investigation later discovered the extent of Irish control of the different services of the city; they controlled more than 90 percent of the police, 60 percent of city officers, and the office of mayor. Gradually, the position of the Irish in the city and the state began to change; some migrated to other states, while those who remained found their power restricted after the return of the old elites in the Reconstruction era. The standard of living rose for those who remained and they subsequently moved from the inner-city slums in which they had first settled to the suburbs. Recently, however, there has been a greater awareness of Irish ancestry among those currently living in Tennessee. In the 1990 census, one in five people living in Tennessee claimed that they were of Irish ancestry. As a way of expressing these ties, which bind Tennessee and Ireland together, in 1995 Nashville and Belfast were twinned as sister cities. David Doyle References Gleeson, David T. The Irish in the South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Gleeson, David T., ed. Rebel Sons of Erin. Indianapolis: 1993. Kennedy, Billy. The Scots-Irish in the Hills of Tennessee. Belfast: Ambassador Press, 1995. www.abc-clio.com
TEXAS The story of the Irish pioneer settlers in Mexican Texas is one of hardship, tragic loss of life, endurance, and ultimate triumph. They came from the United States and directly from Ireland in pursuit of land and a new life. They suffered from cholera, shipwreck, Indian depredations, and the destruction of their property at the hands of the Mexican army. Those who survived and stayed on made a powerful contribution to the independence of Texas and to the building of communities. In so doing, they prospered in the developing ranching industry and in business and commerce. After Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, Coahuila y Texas was the northern state most vulnerable to the influx of American squatters. Fear of the Americanization of Texas led to the recruitment of European settlers, especially Catholic Irish; and two pairs of Irish merchants were contracted as empresarios (agents) to establish mixed Irish and Mexican settlements. In 1830, John McMullen and James McGloin established the town of San Patricio de Hibernia on the Nueces River, and in 1834, James Power and James Hewetson founded Refugio on the site of the old Spanish mission a few miles inland from the port of El Copano. The Mexican government offered generous land grants to encourage settlement: each family received 4,428 acres of pasture and 177 acres of arable land. The Irish families that settled in San Patricio were mostly recruited from New York, Philadelphia, and New Orleans, while others came directly from Co. Tipperary. The Irish in Refugio—mostly small tenant farmers—were brought directly from Co. Wexford and other southern counties. Two ships, the Prudence (with
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81 listed passengers) and the Heroine (with 71 adult passengers), sailed in the spring of 1834 from Liverpool to New Orleans, where they encountered a cholera epidemic that killed some of the passengers of the Prudence. Many others died from cholera, and others died when some of the schooners taking them to the Texas coast were shipwrecked. The survivors acquired their land grants during the period 1834–1835 but were soon engulfed in the war between Texas and Mexico (1835–1836). At first San Patricio sided with Mexico, while Refugio stood for Texan independence. After the Mexican army, commanded by General Urrea, destroyed the two settlements, both communities fought for Texas. Some of the Irish who enlisted in the Texan army were killed alongside American volunteers at the massacres of Goliad and at the Alamo in March 1836. Others, including Thomas O’Connor, nephew of James Power, fought in the decisive battle of the war, under Sam Houston, at San Jacinto in April 1836. Texas won its independence. The Irish colonists were evacuated from the war zone in 1836. They faced an insecure future and threats from attacking Comanches and Mexican bandits, until 1845, when the families were allowed to return to their burnt-out homesteads. Thomas O’Connor had stayed all through the war and its aftermath and began to build up a ranching estate that was eventually to make him the “cattle king” of Refugio County. At his death in 1887, he had amassed 500,000 acres and 100,000 head of cattle, much of the land having formerly been in the possession of fellow colonists; it remains in the family to the present time. In 1934 oil was discovered on the O’Connor estate. www.abc-clio.com
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Irish families owned a third of all ranches and inherited the Hispanic ranching tradition in the coastal bend area of south Texas. From the 1840s, Irishmen were also prominent as judges, merchants, and bankers in Corpus Christi, Victoria, and San Antonio. Graham Davis See also: SAN PATRICIOS BRIGADE References Davis, Graham. Land!: Irish Pioneers in Mexican and Revolutionary Texas. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2002. Flannery, John Brendan. The Irish Texans. San Antonio: University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures, 1995.
TITANIC , IRISH ON THE When the Titanic left Queenstown on April 11, 1912, the third Home Rule Bill was going through Parliament, and England was experiencing the National Coal Strike of 1912. Emigrants were leaving Ireland in search of a better life abroad, continuing the flood of emigration that had already transported millions of Irish across the Atlantic. Some of those emigrants left on the Titanic from Queenstown, now known as Cobh. Two-thirds of them did not reach their destination. The Titanic was built in Belfast’s Harland and Wolff shipyard by a Protestant workforce for the White Star Line. One impetus for building the Titanic and its sister ships, the Olympic and the Britannic, was to cope with the competition from the Cunard Line’s popular Lusitania, which had been built in 1906. The Titanic was constructed in 36 months. It was 882 feet long, and 46,329 tons. The boat, fully equipped, cost £1.5 million sterling.
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However, a few aspects suggested problems when the ship left Ireland. There was a serious fire in one of the boiler rooms, and there were no binoculars on the lookout known as the crow’s nest. Moreover, there were not enough lifeboats. Despite that fact, and with full knowledge of it, the British Board of Trade deemed Titanic seaworthy on April 1, 1912. The ship’s departure from Belfast on April 2, 1912, was witnessed by thousands. Before its arrival in Queenstown on April 11, the Titanic picked up passengers in Southampton, England, and Cherbourg, France. It docked two miles from shore off the southern Irish coast and awaited passengers. They were transported to the Titanic on the tenders Ireland, for first-class and second-class passengers, and America for the third-class passengers. A substantial amount of mail, almost 1,400 bags, was also brought to the ship, and mail was returned to shore on the tenders. Ships leaving Queenstown were a common sight, as it had been the port of departure for emigrants for decades. The town had a number of boarding houses that accommodated passengers while they waited for passage. However, the visit of the Titanic was different. Great excitement greeted the enormous steamship. The Deepwater Quay in Queenstown was decorated with bunting. People from Cork City traveled around the harbor to see the ship at a distance out in the ocean. The crowds included Cork Examiner photographer Thomas Barker. Barker took photographs of passengers departing from the dock, and one photograph shows uilleann piper Eugene Daly, who reportedly played “Erin’s Lament” as Titanic left Ireland. A flotilla of boats traveled out to sell souvenirs, such as Irish linen and lace, to the passengers. www.abc-clio.com
Some of the Queenstown passengers had intended to go on a smaller ship whose voyage had been canceled because of the English coal strike. They now were to travel on the much bigger and more luxurious Titanic. The White Star Line had requisitioned coal from the St. Louis and the Philadelphia (belonging to American Line) and from their own Majestic so they would have enough fuel for the Titanic to sail across the Atlantic. The first-class passengers boarding at Queenstown consisted of Dr. Minahan, his wife, and his sister from Wisconsin. There were seven second-class passengers, five of whom were Irish and the other two Canadian and American (a priest). However, the bulk of the passengers who boarded at Queenstown were the 113 third-class Irish, consisting of 55 men and 58 women. There were also five children; the Rice brothers were all under 10. They were accompanying their mother home to Spokane, Washington. They had been back to Ireland for a visit after the death of their father. Some of the passengers were in groups. The largest group of 14 was from Co. Mayo. The third-class passengers included couples, families, and a number of single people. Apparently, one couple had eloped. Senan Molony’s extensive research on the Irish passengers in The Irish Aboard the Titanic indicates that some of the passengers were returning emigrants and others were going out to join brothers and sisters or other relatives with the purpose of getting employment as domestic servants and laborers. These Irish were housed in thirdclass accommodation, and the single men and women were in opposite ends of the ship. There were those who, for one reason or another, decided against the trip to the
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United States and disembarked at Queenstown. Irishman John Coffey, who embarked at Southampton, had signed up as a stoker for the entire journey but did not continue across the Atlantic. The Odells, who included the future Jesuit Father Francis Browne, also disembarked. Browne was the nephew of the Catholic bishop of Cork, who presided over the cathedral that overlooked Queenstown harbor. The bishop had given Browne a present of a first-class ticket from Southampton to Queenstown via Cherbourg. Browne took numerous photographs of his voyage. These subsequently appeared in newspapers all over the world and now represent an invaluable visual reflection of the last few days of the Titanic. When the Titanic departed from Ireland, in the early afternoon, at 1:55 p.m., it was watched from various coastal points by Irish people who wanted a glimpse of the famous ship. Those on the ship also watched as it sailed around the headlands of southern Ireland, their last view of Europe. The ship struck an iceberg on April 14 at 11:40 p.m. and sank on April 15 at 2:20 a.m. It is now accepted that the ship split into two, based on reports at the time and the Ballard expedition in 1985. There were two inquiries after the disaster. One was carried out by the United States Senate (April 19 to May 25, 1912) and the other by the British Board of Trade (May 2 to July 3, 1912). Most of the statistics on the number of deaths and survivors have been obtained from these reports. Books and articles written since the disaster have slightly different statistics. Apparently, differences in numbers can be explained by the following factors: some people traveled under pseudonyms, for one reason or another; some who may have disembarked at www.abc-clio.com
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Queenstown were not taken off the passenger list; the lists were sloppy, and there were at least two instances of female names being changed to male names. Nevertheless, the following seems to be reasonably accurate based on an assessment of the different primary and secondary sources, and Senan Molony’s research in particular. Of the 710 total third-class passengers, 536 died; 74 of the 113 Irish third-class passengers who departed from Queenstown were lost. These included the Rice children and at least 10 of the group from Co. Mayo. Dr. Minahan and five of the Irish secondclass passengers were also lost. A handful of Irish-born passengers who got on at Southampton and a number of Irish-born crew members also died. According to the U.S. Senate investigation, 60 percent of first-class passengers were saved while only 25 percent of third-class passengers lived. Clearly, the Irish third-class passengers were disadvantaged by their economic and colonial status. There has been debate in the literature on whether or not Irish passengers drowned because they were Irish. They were disadvantaged because most of them were poor and thus in third class and on the lower decks. For a period after the collision it seems they were told there was nothing to worry about and to go back to their cabins. Moreover, there were reports of some of them encountering locked doors and passageways and even loaded guns. However, according to the British enquiry into the disaster, “Irish emigrants were not discriminated against.” The U.S. Senate investigation does not comment on the matter and merely reports on the statistics of the deaths. The survivors were rescued by the S.S. Carpathia and taken to New York City, where they arrived on April 18. Irish newspapers
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followed events and reported when someone’s death or survival was confirmed. They also gave simultaneous and equal coverage to the passing of the third Home Rule Bill. Those who survived were helped by the American Red Cross in New York City. They were provided with clothes and money. Survivors later received compensation from the White Star Line for goods they had lost (clothes, money, and luggage). Eugene Daly lost his uileann pipes and received compensation of $50. The survivors always had this calamity in their history. Some lived for decades, others a few years. Danny Buckley from Kingwilliamstown, now known as Ballydesmond, joined the U.S. Army, and died on the last day of World War I. A neighbor of his in Kingwilliamstown, Nora O’Leary, later Herlihy, returned to her Irish home and lived until 1975. Cliona Murphy See also: EMIGRATION References Ballard, Robert D. The Discovery of the Titanic. New York: Madison Press Books, 1987. Butler, Daniel Allen. “Unsinkable”: The Full Story. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1998. Cameron, Stephen. Titanic Belfast’s Own. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1998. Lynch, Donald. Titanic: An Illustrated History. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995. Molony, Senan. The Irish Aboard Titanic. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 2000. O’Donnell, E. E. The Last Days of the Titanic. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1997.
TRAVEL PATTERNS FROM IRELAND TO SOUTH AMERICA For the emigrants from the British Isles, traveling to South America was very different from traveling to North America. The differences in places of origin, transport www.abc-clio.com
means, and areas of settlement made each experience unique, and in some way determined the social profile of the emigrants and the probability of their successful settlement and integration in the local societies. Most Irish emigrants to South America came from two areas, south-east of Wexford (16 percent), and a sector on the WestmeathLongford-Offaly central region (61 percent). They immigrated mainly to the River Plate (at that time comprising Argentina, Uruguay, and regions of Brazil and Paraguay). Moreover, scattered merchants, soldiers, servants, and professionals came frequently from Irish cities and settled in northern Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela. The River Plate countries were attractive to Irish emigrants because of their reputation as a place where land was relatively easy to acquire. By the mid-nineteenth century, migration networks had been gradually established by Irish landowners, merchants, and Catholic priests. All of them were highly regarded by the local bourgeoisie for their condition of ingleses (i.e., English speakers). The established immigrants hired family members, friends, and neighbors in Ireland to help them in their sheep farms in the pampas or in their businesses in other South American countries. During the highest peak of emigration (1840–1880), most emigrants from the Irish midlands would travel to Dublin; cross to Liverpool; sail to Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires; and then head for the major Irish settlements scattered over the pampas. Before this period, they would travel along the trading routes between Europe and North America and then journey on from the United States to the Caribbean, the Brazilian coast, and the
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River Plate. (A few would go to Panama to board ships to Peru and Chile.) After the 1880s, other transit ports were frequently used by emigrants, particularly Cork and Southampton. However, Dublin was the nearest port for emigrants from the midlands. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, to reach Dublin emigrants would use canal barges towed by horses. Later, from about 1848, they used the railway. Poorer emigrants would use less expensive means of transport or would simply walk. Most of them paid for their tickets, and some were reimbursed by their employers in Buenos Aires. In 1806, the Royal Canal reached Mullingar from Dublin. The Longford branch was opened in January 1830. The journey from Mullingar to Dublin took around 13 hours in the early years of the canal service. By the 1840s, faster boats (the “fly boats”) had cut journey times to eight hours. Canal barges lumbered along sedately at three or four miles per hour. The journey was relatively comfortable, even if one had to sleep on deck. But as emigration increased during the Famine years, the boats were often overcrowded. Some emigrants would have traveled by the Grand Canal, which was older and busier than the Royal Canal. Two boats left daily, and the fare for the Mullingar-Dublin section (41 miles) was 12 shillings and sixpence in first cabin and seven shillings and seven pence in second cabin. In 1848, the railway reached Mullingar, and in 1851 the line extended to Athlone. The railway age signaled the demise of the canal. By 1855 the train arrived in Longford, and the railway replaced the canal as the main means of transport to Dublin, with a journey time of about two hours. For those emigrants who lived at a distance from the www.abc-clio.com
railway, the journey to the station was made by coach. By the late 1840s, Bianconi coaches, each capable of carrying up to 20 passengers, provided the means by which emigrants could reach Longford, Mullingar, and Athlone from the countryside and from the small rural villages and townlands of Westmeath and Longford. Horse-drawn stagecoaches moved at about eight miles per hour, with frequent stops to rest horses and passengers. Bianconi coaches connected with the Royal Canal boats to Dublin and intermediate stages. Fares from Ballymahon to Mullingar were six shillings and 11 pence (state or first class) and five shillings and nine pence (back or second class). Emigrants to South America were advised to bring a revolver and a saddle. Once in Dublin, emigrants would stay a night at a local hotel. The fare for one bed for one person in a room containing two or more beds was two shillings and two pence. At least three boats daily crossed the Irish Sea from Dublin to Liverpool, and the journey took from 12 to 14 hours. For emigrants from Wexford steamboats were available to Liverpool. Departures were every Thursday at 6.00 a.m. and Saturday at 7.00 a.m., with an estimated journey time of 12 hours. In Liverpool, emigrants landed in Clarence Dock. Since most of them would already have purchased their sea passages in Ballymahon, Mullingar, or Wexford town, their money was secured and they just had to take care of their lodging until the boarding time. During the days of sailing ships, vessels were “expected any day now” and, if the wind was against them, they could be up to three weeks late. Once the emigrants managed to get on board the ships, the Atlantic crossing followed. It was not an easy voyage. It was long, taking usually between six weeks and
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three or up to six months. The sea was a strange environment for most emigrants, especially for those coming from rural areas. Owing to insurance requirements, the ships sailing from Liverpool to the River Plate were mostly first and second class, that is, surveyed and judged to be of best or good quality in terms of age, condition, and seaworthiness, unlike many ships on the North American routes in the 1840s, which were third class (the infamous “coffin ships”), a status that prohibited any but short voyages. Fares to Brazil and the River Plate varied with company and class, ranging from £10 to £35, with an average of £16 (half of an Irish farmhand’s annual salary in Argentina). The second half of the nineteenth century was marked by iron and steel sailing ships, and later by steamships. The length of the journey was reduced from three months to four weeks. Steamships were far superior vessels, to such a degree that the last sailing ships were built by 1855. The transition from sail to steam was radical. During the 1860s, which saw the highest peak in Irish immigration to South America (with the exception of the City of Dresden in 1889), the most active company was Lamport & Holt. In 1863 they began sailing to and from Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires. By 1892 the direct voyage took 22 days. Before the 1880s, the most important ship in terms of quantity of Irish emigrants carried was La Zingara, the smallest vessel of Thomas B. Royden & Co. She was a barque built in 1860 in Liverpool, sheathed in yellow metal fastened with copper bolts (287 tons). The captain was George Sanders. Tickets on La Zingara were cheaper than those of other vessels such as Raymond from Dublin (Captain Lenders). In 1889 the City of Dresden carried www.abc-clio.com
the largest number of passengers (1,774) ever to arrive in Argentina from any one destination on any one vessel, the result of a deceitful immigration scheme managed by Argentine government agents in Ireland, later called the Dresden Affair. Upon their arrival, the vast majority of the Irish in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay settled in rural areas. Temporary lodging for English-speaking guests in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires cost about eight shillings a day. The change of climate was a major concern for travelers, who were advised to rise early, take a cold bath every morning, and avoid walking in the sun. To cover the immense extension of the Argentine pampas, immigrants had to ride horses for days, sometimes weeks. Routes and bridges were almost nonexistent and during the rainy season in winter, floods and rivers prevented any attempt to travel. In the 1870s a few coach services were inaugurated, but still most of the travel was done on horseback. The railway definitively changed the carriage of passengers and cargo in the pampas. In 1892, Mercedes, one of the Irish parishes, was reached in three hours from Buenos Aires in the Western and Pacific Railway, and Fortín de Areco (called “Fourteen” by the Irish), 90 miles northwest of Buenos Aires, in six hours. Salto was connected to Arrecifes, on the Pergamino railway line. The journey to Lincoln (180 miles west of Buenos Aires) took one day, and to Venado Tuerto, a major Irish settlement in southern Santa Fe, eight hours from Rosario. Some Irish estancieros sold or donated their land to build railway stations, therefore originating some Irish place names: Murphy, Hughes, Duffy, Cavanagh, Maguire, Ham, Gahan, Kenny, Gaynor, Dennehy, Duggan, and Heavy. Some of these places, like Gahan or
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Murphy, are today flourishing villages, and others are solitary railway stations or abandoned wasteland. Edmundo Murray See also: DRESDEN AFFAIR References Howat, Jeremy N. T. South American Packets 1808–1880. York, UK: Postal History Society, 1984. Illingworth, Ruth, ed. When the Train Came to Mullingar. Mullingar: Author’s Edition, 1998. Murray, Edmundo. “The Irish Road to Argentina: Nineteenth-century Travel Patterns from Ireland to the River Plate.” History Ireland (Autumn 2004): 28–32.
TULLY, JIM (1888–1947) Irish-American writer Jim Tully may be said to have embodied the Horatio Alger legend—from abject poverty to fabulous Hollywood riches—leaving in his wake a series of proletarian novels that have at times been compared with the opus of Maxim Gorky. Born in a rural log cabin near St. Mary’s, Ohio, on June 3, 1891, Tully was the third son of immigrants James Denis Tully and Marie Bridget Lawler, a gradeschool teacher. When he was seven his mother died and his alcoholic ditchdigger father cast his three sons into St. Joseph’s Orphan Asylum in Cincinnati, Ohio. At 11 he was fostered out to a farmer who beat him, keeping him in near-starvation until he fled at 14, becoming a roving tramp. He crossed the continent three times by rail, occasionally finding work at odd jobs: dishwasher, newsboy, porter, circus roadie, tree surgeon, eventually settling into the trade of chain maker. During his wanderings the law dumped him in jail for vagrancy five times. At 21 he pursued a featherweight boxing career and, after several successful bouts, he was knocked unconscious for www.abc-clio.com
almost 24 hours. When he came to, he decided it might be more prudent to become an observer of the boxing scene and made great efforts to establish a career as a sportswriter, but he more often worked as an advertising salesman for newspapers. In 1911 Tully married Florence Bushnell and had two children, but the marriage failed in 1924. For eight years the self-educated Tully labored on his first novel, Emmet Lawler (1922); the manuscript was a single rambling paragraph of about 100,000 words. Despite Tully’s ignorance of elementary grammar, Rupert Hughes at Harcourt Brace tutored Tully, editing the manuscript to publication, thus launching the literary career of a personality larger than bourgeois life. Receiving reviews and magazine commissions, Tully turned to the writing life, often plucking at the typewriter 16 hours a day. Tully’s next book, Beggars of Life (1924), written in six weeks, limns a picaresque dramatization of his seven years as a tramp. Populated by outrageous characters from the underclass, these gripping adventures are so completely devoid of literary sensibility that they testify as one of the few authentic chronicles of tramp life in America. Maxwell Anderson rushed to fashion a play adaptation, Outside Looking In (1925), the first stage vehicle for the young tough-guy actor James Cagney (film version, 1928). Beggars of Life was the first of five autobiographical novels Tully called “the Underworld Edition,” also including his roustabout experience in Circus Parade (1927); his family background, Shanty Irish (1928); the difficulties of incarceration and the inhumanity of the death penalty, Shadows of Men (1930); and his passionate farewell to literature, Blood on the Moon (1931), his most eloquent book.
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Tully wrote more than a dozen selfindulgent, garrulous potboilers, from which his reputation never quite recovered. The most notable of these is the first Hollywood novel, the satire Jarnegan (1925), praised by H. L. Mencken. In 1925 Tully married Margaret Myers, but she had a difficult time adjusting to the presence of Tully’s old tramp friends in their Spanish-style Hollywood mansion and disliked sleeping on couch or floor to accommodate their drunken slumbers—the marriage ended in divorce (1930). Tully, the highest-paid Hollywood interviewer, prided himself on exposing the shallow lives of Hollywood celebrities. For 18 months he worked as publicist for Charlie Chaplin, writing a biography of him, but they parted bitterly. Tully collaborated on a number of screenplays, his most notable success being the 1935 version of Poe’s The Raven with Bela Lugosi. Inventing the Hollywood fanzine (ghostwriting complete issues, including letters to the editor), Tully weathered the Depression in high style. Tully’s books brim with authentic hard-boiled dialogue; although this was popular in his day, literary tastes have changed, preferring sophisticated ironies and less raw emotion. Some of Tully’s interviews and magazine work continue to fascinate, and his collection of character sketches, A Dozen and One (1943) remains indicative of this work. There is still a body of unidentified work, even as his books are now being reprinted as they fall into public domain. Kevin T. McEneaney References Anderson, David. “A Portrait of Jim Tully: An Ohio Hobo in Hollywood.” Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature Newsletter 23, no. 3 (Fall 1944): 8–14. www.abc-clio.com
Dawidziak, Mark, and Paul Bauer. Jim Tully: A Biography. Tucson, AZ: Dennis McMillan, 2006. Fanning, Charles. The Irish Voice in America. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000.
TUNNEY, JAMES JOSEPH “GENE” (1898–1978) Born in New York City’s Greenwich Village on May 25, 1897, to Irish immigrants John Tunney, a longshoreman, and Mary (Lydon), James Joseph “Gene” Tunney was one of five children. He grew up in modest circumstances, learning to fight on the streets and in the social clubs of New York City. At age 16 he began sparring with professional boxers at the Village Athletic Club; from July 1914 to 1916 he fought sporadically as a professional in New York and New Jersey, although he was not interested in pursuing pugilism as a profession. In 1918, after having been rejected earlier because of an arm injury, Tunney enlisted in the Marine Corps. He was sent to France but did not see any action at the front. While overseas, he was persuaded to engage in service boxing and soon became the middleweight and heavyweight champ of the camp and the light heavyweight champ of the entire American Expeditionary Force. At this point, Tunney decided to become a full-time boxer upon his return to civilian life. Tunney began to fight seriously in November 1919 and, under the tutelage of manager Frank “Doc” Bagley, won his first 24 fights. His success caught the eye of famed promoter Tex Rickard, who matched Tunney with notable opponents. On January 13, 1922, Tunney beat “Battling” Levinsky at Madison Square Garden to win the light heavyweight title. On May 23,
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1922, Tunney suffered the only defeat of his career, losing to Harry Greb at Madison Square Garden. Tunney returned to the ring, winning his next three bouts and a close rematch against Greb on February 23, 1923. Later that same year, he successfully defended his title against Greb, winning their third bout convincingly. Tunney fought a dozen bouts in 1924, winning all but a draw with Greb. Among his victories was a thrilling 15th-round knockout of Georges Carpentier on July 24 at the Polo Grounds. Despite standing only six feet one inch and weighing only 180 pounds, Tunney was quickly being touted as a serious contender for the heavyweight crown held by Jack Dempsey. On September 23, 1926, Tunney moved up to the heavyweight division to battle Dempsey before 120,000 spectators in Philadelphia. Dempsey had not fought in over three years, and his performance showed the effect of his sustained layoff. Tunney delivered a one-sided beating and won the title by decision. The fight garnered nearly $2 million in gate receipts and led, inevitably, to a rematch. The two fought again in Chicago on September 22, 1927, before 100,000 fans (and another 50 million listening on radio). Tunney was knocked down—for the only time in his career—in round seven, but was saved by the long count when Dempsey had to be escorted to a neutral corner. Tunney regained his senses and eventually won by decision in what is still considered to be one of boxing’s most controversial fights. Tunney’s relative intellectualism, reticence in public, and scientific boxing style distanced him from fight fans and the press. He was an extremely intelligent fighter who carefully studied his major www.abc-clio.com
opponents and adapted strategies designed to exploit their weaknesses. Fleet of foot, he was an excellent defender, adept at sidestepping and blocking punches. Despite this lack of contemporary acclaim, Tunney is remembered as a great fighter and one of the best strategists and quickest thinkers in the history of boxing. Tunney retired in 1929 with a professional record of 65–1–1. Soon after his last bout, he married Mary Lauder, heiress of the Carnegie fortune. The couple lived near Stamford, Connecticut; they had four children, one of whom served as a U.S. senator from California. In his retirement, Tunney had a long and successful business career. He served on the boards of many corporations and as director of the Boy Scouts of America and the Catholic Youth Organization. Tunney died in Greenwich, Connecticut on November 7, 1978, and was posthumously inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1990. Tim Lynch See also: DEMPSEY, Jack References Fleischer, Nat. Gene Tunney: The Enigma of the Ring. New York: The Ring Athletic Library, 1931. Van Every, ed. The Life of Gene Tunney: The Fighting Marine. New York: Dell Publishers, 1926.
TUOHY, PATRICK J. (1894–1930) Patrick Tuohy was born in Dublin, the only son of John Joseph Tuohy and Mary Murphy. His father was a prominent surgeon and both of his parents were ardent Irish nationalists. Despite being born with the fingers on his left hand not fully formed and despite the fact that there was no
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tradition of painting in the Tuohy family, he showed an early talent for drawing. After being educated by the Christian Brothers, at the age of 14 he attended St. Enda’s, the school that was founded and run by Patrick Pearse who, along with his younger brother Willie, was executed for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising. At this time he began painting, and while at St. Enda’s he was encouraged by the art teacher and sculptor Willie Pearse to develop his talent. He also attended evening classes at the Metropolitan School of Art, where he later enrolled as a full-time student. His teacher William Orpen regarded Tuohy as one of his finest students. In 1913 he was awarded a scholarship by the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, and he was present in the General Post Office with his father during the 1916 Easter Rising. Escaping afterwards, he traveled to Spain, where he spent more than a year working as a teacher and continuing to paint. His time in Madrid greatly influenced the future development of his art; the work of the Spanish painter Diego Velazquez in particular had a great impact upon him. In 1918 he was appointed, along with fellow painter Justin Keating, as a part-time teacher at the Metropolitan School of Art, and his work was later exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy. At this time he painted portraits of General Richard Mulcahy, Archbishop William Walsh, and the writer James Stephens. He also painted a number of religious works commissioned by various churches in Dublin. In 1922 his work was included in the Paris exhibition L’Art Irlandais, which had been organized by Maud Gonne on the occasion of the foundation of the new Irish state. Through James Stephens he was introduced to James Joyce in Paris. He painted two portraits of www.abc-clio.com
Joyce, and the writer also commissioned him to paint his father, John Stanislaus Joyce, while in Dublin. This painting was eventually hung in Joyce’s house in Zurich. Later Tuohy would continue his relationship with the Joyce family by sketching a portrait of Joyce’s mother as well as one of Joyce’s daughter, Lucia. In 1927 Tuohy immigrated to America; he settled in South Carolina, where relatives on his mother’s side had moved some years before. His first commission there was to paint a portrait of the governor of South Carolina, John G. Richards. He was unpopular in South Carolina as a result of his criticisms of the treatment of African Americans in the state. He was diagnosed as manic-depressive before moving to New York, where he was one of the founders of the Irish University Club. In New York Tuohy lived in an apartment on Riverside Drive overlooking the Hudson River. He traveled to Ireland for a brief holiday before returning to New York when his work was included in the first exhibition of contemporary Irish painting in America held at the Helen Hackett Gallery. The exhibition was a great success and Tuohy’s work was praised, particularly by Henry McBride, the art critic of the New York Sun. He lectured on art and was held in high regard by both critics and collectors. However, he began to suffer increasing bouts of depression, and he frequently spoke to his friends about contemplating suicide. A second exhibition of Irish painting took place at the Hackett Gallery in 1930, at which four of his paintings were exhibited. At the time of his death his portrait of the actress Claudette Colbert remained unfinished. He died, apparently the result of suicide, by gas poisoning in his apartment in September 1930. After his body was embalmed, it was
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taken back to Ireland and removed to the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin before being buried in Glasnevin Cemetery. David Doyle See also: JOYCE, James Augustine Aloysius References Kennedy, Christina. “Patrick J. Tuohy.” In The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, edited by Michael Glazier. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999. Mulcahy, Rosemary. Patrick J. Tuohy, 1894–1930. Belfast: 1991. Murphy, Patrick J. Patrick Tuohy: From Conversations with His Friends. Dublin: Townhouse, 2004.
TWEED, WILLIAM “BOSS” (1823–1878) The most notorious example of Tammany Hall–style corruption in the U.S. political system, “Boss” Tweed represented everything inimical about Irish immigrants without even being Irish. Though caricatured by his Republican opponents as a coarse, harddrinking Irishman, Tweed was, in fact, born in Manhattan, the son of third-generation Scots Protestants and a virtual teetotaler. Early in his career, Tweed was a brush and chair maker and a member of the local, mostly Irish, volunteer fire brigade. In 1850, he was elected foreman of the brigade and became the Democratic candidate for the post of assistant alderman in the Seventh Ward. He lost this election but quickly won the next one. In 1852, he was elected a Democratic alderman in New York; a year later he entered Congress. In 1856, he became chairman of the New York Board of Supervisors and School Commissioner. In 1867, he was elected a state senator, a position he retained until he was exposed for corruption in 1871. Finally, in 1870 he was appointed commissioner of public www.abc-clio.com
Harper’s Weekly cartoon lambasting William “Boss” Tweed. (Library of Congress)
works for the city, a seemingly innocuous position from which he wielded virtually complete control over the city. His association with Tammany brought about both his rapid rise to power and his headlong crash into public infamy. Originally the kind of society in which young men from good families could meet up, get drunk, and sing patriotic songs, by Tweed’s time Tammany was fast becoming the most important organized faction within the Democratic Party of New York. As a New York Democrat, Tweed would have long been recognized as an ally of the Tammany Society, but he did not actually become a member until 1859. His rise to the top was swift: he gained power throughout the 1860s, until he eventually became leader of the organization. He was appointed the grand sachem in 1868.
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Though in its early years Tammany had been ambivalent toward the issue of mass immigration, it had long since recognized the benefit of cultivating the immigrant vote. During Tweed’s reign Tammany perfected a method of registering and mobilizing the immigrant vote that both confounded and outraged their Republican opponents. Not only was Tammany naturalizing immigrants at the rate of three per minute, according to horrified Republican observers of 1867, but once they were naturalized Tammany kept the immigrants loyal to the Tammany cause by giving public jobs to loyal constituents and issuing free fuel to the Tammany wards in the winter. By 1870 the Tweed Ring, consisting of Boss Tweed (commissioner of public works), Peter “Brains” Sweeney (city chamberlain), Richard “Slippery Dick” Connolly (city comptroller), A. Oakey Hall (mayor), and John T. Hoffman (governor), had gained virtually total control over the city’s public institutions and municipal works and were siphoning off staggering sums of money from the hundreds of city projects under their control. Much of the time this was done by the simple device of having contractors pad their bills and slip the overcharge back under the table. The symbol of this type of corruption for the public became the New York County Courthouse, renowned as “Tweed’s Courthouse.” Begun in 1858, it was supposed to have cost
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$350,000; 12 years later, however, the cost had risen to $12 million and was still rising. When the accounts were uncovered, the extent of Tammany’s corruption was revealed by the New York Times. In just one instance, 11 thermometers had been charged at $7,500. Through lampooning and attack in the Times and Harpers Weekly, Tweed quickly became the scapegoat for Tammany corruption. He was indicted on three counts of fraud on December 15, 1871. In the winter of 1875, trying to avoid a civil suit, Tweed escaped from his warders while on a home furlough and fled to Spain. However, he was quickly recaptured by the Spanish police—after being recognized by a series of lampooning cartoons that had appeared in Harpers Weekly—and returned to prison. On April 12, 1878, he died of pneumonia in Ludlow Street Jail (built under his tenure in public office), penniless and broken. James P. Byrne
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See also: TAMMANY HALL References Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Hershkowitz, Leo. Tweed’s New York: Another Look. New York: Anchor Press, 1977. Lynch, Denis Tilden. The Story of a Grim Generation: “Boss” Tweed. 1927. Reprint, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2002. Mandelbaum, Seymour J. Boss Tweed’s New York. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965.
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U U2 U2 is a Dublin quartet that has gained and sustained worldwide popular and critical acclaim from the 1980s onward. Representing and influencing contemporary Ireland, U2 has become the voice and sound of the nation as perceived by the rest of the globe. Despite sometimes grandiose ambitions that threatened to derail the band and undermine their (at times) messianic
Studio portrait of the rock group U2, (left to right) Larry Mullen Jr., The Edge, Bono, and Adam Clayton during the Joshua Tree tour in 1987. (Corbis)
message, U2 has endured as a force of not only musical but also economic expansion; their efforts to broaden the social and the sonic realm have revitalized the Temple Bar section of Dublin, raised funds for charity, and heightened first world awareness of third world inequalities. Larry Mullen, Jr., (drums, born October 31, 1961, Artane, Dublin) recruited the members of what was first called Feedback, a cover band playing Beatles and Rolling Stones tunes, and then the Hype, in 1978. Malahide’s Adam Clayton (bass, born March 13, 1960, Chinnor, Oxfordshire); Dave Evans (“The Edge,” guitar, keyboards, vocals, born August 8, 1961, Barking, East London); and Dave’s brother Dick (“Dik Prune,” guitar, born 1958) joined Ballymun’s Paul Hewson (“Bono Vox,” vocals, guitar; born May 10, 1960, Stillorgan, Dublin) at Mount Temple school to form the band. As the nation’s first nondenominational, coeducational comprehensive school, Mount Temple attracted students from all over North Dublin’s suburbs: a diverse, and substantially Protestant, student body. This emphasis on a nonsectarian, inclusive, and broadly Christian (as opposed to Catholic) influence marked the band as well. Its members’ families were not only Irish
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Catholic but also Welsh Presbyterian, and Church of Ireland. The group’s themes of acceptance, struggle, and spiritual and ethical choices gained them an early and loyal following, an audience open to new musical experimentation and lyrical appeals in the aftermath of punk. The name U2 was suggested by Steve “Rapid” Averill of the Dublin band Radiators from Space. Stories differ on its origin: its suggestion of spying or its ability to be translated into any language suggest why it appealed to the band. Winning a Harp lager talent contest in Limerick, the four members (Dik had left to join the Virgin Prunes) were still at Mount Temple when Paul McGuinness, manager of the Stranglers, offered to direct them. Although failing a CBS Records audition, U2 issued an Irish-only extended play, U2:3, which topped the national charts but failed to attract English attention. In early 1980, after “Another Day” gained the notice of Island Records, the band signed and recorded its debut album, Boy, for release that autumn. Produced by Steve Lillywhite, this record and the next two albums he would craft with the band, October (1981) and War (1983), would shape the alternative rock sound of the decade. With The Edge’s arpeggios and ostinatos, Mullen’s thunderous beat, Clayton’s propulsive drive, and Bono’s combination of operatic, folk, and popular vocal styles, the band revised the familiar four-piece rock sound into a style of presentation of yearning for grand statements, in the words sung and the emotions conveyed. Steady touring of the United States and Britain gained them initial exposure on college radio and among the postpunk fans of new wave music; the rise of MTV in the early 1980s brought “I Will www.abc-clio.com
Follow” and “Gloria” to a wider audience. With video, U2 was one of the first bands to find success. On War, the political concerns of “New Year’s Day” and “Sunday Bloody Sunday” capitalized on the Troubles in the North of Ireland and established the band as spokesmen for an end to Irish Republican Army–motivated violence. This stance attracted worldwide interest, and Irish Americans embraced the group as it steadily increased its popularity in the United States and Britain. Their War tour concert at Red Rocks amphitheater in Colorado appeared on VHS and an extended play, Under a Blood Red Sky (1984), while appearances at Band Aid (1984) and Live Aid (1985) further promoted the band’s activist stance. The Unforgettable Fire (1984) featured a blurred Irish castle on its cover, but the album’s hit, “(Pride) In the Name of Love,” became their first number one song in Britain and first Top Forty charting in the United States. Commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr., this anthem revealed a band eager to adopt American themes (along with Elvis’s legacy) through a more expansive production under Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. Two songs from their U.S tour appeared on a follow-up extended play, Wide Awake in America (1985). The Joshua Tree (1987), with its attacks against American intervention in Central America, continued to preach from the pulpit of international rock music. Although it topped the U.S. charts and brought the band the arena-rock concert success for which their sound had always been suited, its lyrical self-righteousness irritated many critics. Nevertheless, U2 made the cover of Time magazine and the group was deemed the conscience of rock music.
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The band’s sound shifted, as its success in the United States grew, to American roots influences. Working with B. B. King and Harlem choirs, and integrating rhythm and blues and soul strains, Rattle and Hum (1988) documented their Joshua Tree American tour on film and record. The predictable backlash now weakened sales for both versions, and the band took a break. Returning with an electronic emphasis, and energized by the atmosphere in Berlin after the collapse of the Iron Curtain, Achtung Baby (1990) moved U2 into a catchier pop-rock hybrid that continued through the 1990s. This album debuted at number one throughout the world. The Zoo tour over the next three years portrayed a looser delivery of both message and media through a presentation, headed by Bono as “The Fly” and then “MacPhisto,” which satirized and celebrated technological saturation and rock star excess. As their albums Achtung Baby, the techno-driven Zooropa (1993), and Pop (1997) continued the legacy of chameleonlike David Bowie (who at the start of U2’s career had worked in Berlin with Eno), so their concerts glorified a band less intent (at least on stage) with saving than selling the world through multimedia entertainment. Although their musical direction has shifted, with All That You Can’t Leave Behind (2000) representing an amalgam of U2’s musical styles, the band’s support of humanitarian causes has earned them respect; Bono pursued efforts to aid Africa, end land mines, and cancel third world debt. In 2000, the members along with McGuinness were made honorary freemen of Dublin city, while the band’s financial clout has made them one of Ireland’s most valuable exports. Windmill Lane Studio www.abc-clio.com
and the Clarence Hotel attract fans and tourists alike because they are owned by the band. A deal in 1998 with Polygram reportedly netted $50 million for the band, as greatest hits releases have appeared: The Best of 1980–1990 (1998) and The Best of 1990–2000 (2002). John L. Murphy See also: MICHIGAN; MUSIC IN AMERICA, IRISH References Bordowitz, Mark, ed. The U2 Reader. Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 2003. Chatterton, Mark, ed. U2: The Complete Encyclopedia. 2nd ed. London: SAF/Firefly, 2004. Dunphy, Eamon. The Unforgettable Fire: The Definitive Biography of U2. New York: Warner Books, 1987. Gittis, Ian. U2: The Best of Propaganda: 20 Years of the U2 Magazine. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003. Parra, Pimm Jal de la. U2 Live: A Concert Documentary. London: Omnibus, 2003. Stockman, Steve. Walk On: The Spiritual Journey of U2. Lake Mary, FL: Relevant Books, 2001. Stokes, Niall, ed. U2: All For One—The Best of Hot Press: 1990–2003. Dublin: Hot Press Books, 2003. Waters, John. Race of Angels: Ireland and the Genesis of U2. Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1994.
UNITED IRISH LEAGUE OF AMERICA The United Irish League of America (UIL) was founded in 1900 first in the New York area, but it rapidly spread throughout the country. Its organizers patterned the group on the original United Irish League, which served as the chief support organization for the Irish Parliamentary Party, supplying parliamentary candidates and election funds for the party in its quest for a Home Rule government in Ireland.
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Though not directly administered by Irish party leaders, like its counterparts in Ireland and Great Britain, the UIL functioned as the chief fund-raiser for the Irish Parliamentary Party and the Home Rule movement in the United States and Canada during this time as well as a source of moral and political support for the Home Rule cause. The American organization developed quickly enough to hold a national meeting by 1902, but enthusiasm waned during its first decade because of a lack of progress on the Home Rule issue. A high level of member interest returned after 1910 when Home Rule became an active political issue in the British parliament. During this critical period, Michael Ryan, city solicitor of Philadelphia, held the office of national president; Thomas B. Fitzpatrick of Boston served as national treasurer; and John O’Callaghan acted as national secretary. The United Irish League suffered its first major organizational setback when O’Callaghan died in July 1913. O’Callaghan had served as national secretary since the body’s origin. League President Ryan called him “the soul of the League movement” and described him as nearly irreplaceable. His successor, Michael J. Jordan, possessed none of the organizational skill, ambition, or standing among Irish Americans that O’Callaghan had. Organizational effectiveness and loyalty to the nationalist leadership in Ireland, however, remained strong into 1914. Ryan and the leadership backed Irish Party leader John Redmond when he accepted the controversial principle of temporary exclusion of six northern counties from Home Rule in March 1914 and when he exerted party authority over the paramilitary Irish Volunteers in June. Ryan even forwarded $100,000 in American pledges to Redmond in July 1914. www.abc-clio.com
The onset of World War I, however, exposed fundamental disagreements between the Irish and American organizations, which doomed the league in America. In 1914, Redmond’s decision to support Irish enlistment in the British army in exchange for a promise of Irish self-government after the war devastated UIL unity and IrishAmerican support for Redmond’s party. Most of the American UIL’s leaders and members harbored much stronger antiBritish sentiments than Irish Party leaders did and they refused to back Britain in a war while the United States remained neutral. Internal disagreements about Ireland’s proper role in World War I wracked the league. UIL President Michael Ryan of Pennsylvania, whose wife was German American, had reacted as much of Irish America did to Redmond’s call for support of Britain in the war, calling for public neutrality and even privately praising Germany. He and league treasurer Fitzpatrick ceased their active support of the Irish Party after the start of the war, and only the national secretary, Michael J. Jordan, remaining loyal among the leadership. In October 1914, Ryan privately informed Redmond that with the final passage of a suspended Home Rule Act in Parliament the previous month the Irish Party leader ought to consider the United Irish League work in America completed. Starting that month all UIL funds from America evaporated. Ryan and Fitzpatrick favored shutting down the organization’s headquarters in Boston for the remainder of the war to cut expenses. National secretary Michael J. Jordan, the most recent and least influential of the organization’s leadership, opposed this move as a sign of defeat and irrelevance. Leading members of the New York UIL joined Jordan in vocal
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opposition to this shutdown, though ironically the prewar organization had drawn its most active support from the states of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. John Redmond, however, directed his followers in America to avoid a public breach and approved of the UIL’s decision to postpone its national convention indefinitely, based on the hope of a relatively short war and the benefit of at least the semblance of IrishAmerican unity. As a result, the UIL became largely defunct by 1915 and faded into insignificance once the Easter Rebellion of 1916 radicalized nationalist opinion in Ireland and the United States, undercutting all demands for a moderate Home Rule settlement. Joseph P. Finnan See also: EMMET, Thomas Addis; PRESS, The ETHNIC IRISH References Carroll, F. M. American Opinion and the Irish Question, 1910–1923. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978. Dangerfield, George. The Damnable Question: A Study in Anglo-Irish Relations. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976. Finnan, Joseph P. John Redmond and Irish Unity, 1912–1918. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004.
URUGUAY Known as Banda Oriental until the 1900s, Uruguay was part of the Spanish colonial vice royalty of Rio de la Plata, together with Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia. In 1814, José Artigas and other leaders broke with the junta in Buenos Aires and struggled for independence until annexed by Brazil in 1821. The republic was constituted in 1830. In 1762, Irish-born Captain MacNamara led a British force to occupy Colonia del Sacramento, a stronghold alwww.abc-clio.com
ternatively held by the Portuguese and the Spanish, but failed and lost his life together with most of his men. Brigadier General Samuel Auchmuty occupied Montevideo in 1807 with a regular force of British and Irish officers and rank and file. The British rule in Uruguay lasted 14 months, a period in which prominent merchants from the British Isles settled in the city and influenced its culture. One of the Irish soldiers, Peter Campbell (1780–ca. 1832), enlisted in the 71st regiment and later remained in the River Plate serving the patriot ranks. He served under Artigas and was appointed deputy governor of Corrientes province. Campbell is acknowledged as the founder of the Uruguayan navy. Sometimes perceived by English and Irish press as a part of the same country of Argentina and Paraguay, Uruguay started to receive a steady flow of Irish immigration in the decades after independence. The interior countryside, especially in Rio Negro department, was settled by some Wexford sheep farmers from around Kilrane. Paysandú, in the same department and near the Argentine province of Entre Ríos, was occupied by immigrants from Westmeath and Longford. In the 1840s, after Juan Manuel de Rosas’s dictatorship in Buenos Aires, which was favorable to British settlements, many Irish sheep farmers moved from Uruguay to Buenos Aires province and leased or purchased land in departments like Carmen de Areco, Salto, and Pergamino, and later Nueve de Julio and Lincoln. Landowners like James Gaynor (1802–1892) and John Maguire (d. 1905) moved to Argentina, but maintained their holdings in Uruguay and when they died left important ranches there. Other Irish settlers worked in Entre Ríos (Argentina) and Rio Negro (Uruguay). William Lawlor (1822–1909)
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of Abbeyleix, Co. Laois, married in Gualeguay, Entre Ríos (Argentina), and died at his ranch, Las Tres Patas, in Uruguay. It is likely that other Irish ranchers owned land on both sides of the Argentine-Uruguayan border, speculating with the prospects of political and financial stability in each country. However, the simultaneous management in both sides of the River Plate did not start off the immigration chains from Ireland as it did in Argentina. Distinguished Irish physicians in Uruguay were Constantine Conyngham (1807–1868), who rendered important services during the epidemic of 1856 in Montevideo, and Dublin-born Louis Fleury, surgeon-general to the army, who attended in Charity Hospital. Among the rural settlers were J. Hughes in Paysandú and several Irish managers working for Robert Young in what is today Young City in Rio Negro department. In the 1870s, Young purchased 10 square leagues of land
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in Estancia Bichadero and planted a magnificent quadrangle of ombúes (a typical tree of the pampas) near the house. In 1875 he owned 100,000 sheep and horned cattle, and he applied improved methods for farming and agriculture. Edmundo Murray
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See also: MULHALL, Michael George; O’BRIEN, John Thomond; O’LEARY, Juan Emiliano; RE-EMIGRANTS WITHIN THE AMERICAS References Coghlan, Eduardo A. El Aporte de los Irlandeses a la Formación de la Nación Argentina. Buenos Aires, 1982. Murray, Thomas. The Story of the Irish in Argentina. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1919. Pyme, Peter. The Invasions of Buenos Aires, 1806–1807: The Irish Dimension. Research Paper 20. Liverpool: University of Liverpool, Institute of Latin American Studies, 1996. Ryan, Hugh Fitzgerald. In the Shadow of the Ombú Tree. Dublin: Chaos Press, 2005.
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V VENEZUELA Relations between Ireland and Venezuela have been limited chiefly to the latter country’s engagement in the nineteenth-century war of independence from Spain. As a result of an appeal by Simón Bolívar for British volunteers, recruitment began in Ireland and Britain in 1817. Over the next two and a half years, 53 ships left Irish and British ports carrying some 6,500 men for service in South America, until pressure by the Spanish ambassador in London forced the British authorities to put an end to it in late 1819. Of those who left, some 5,300 landed in Colombia or Venezuela, most of them Irish. Many of these were former soldiers in the British army who were being demobilized as the Napoleonic wars had come to an end. In November 1817, the first group of 800 officers and men set out but were depleted through mutinies and shipwreck; only 240 arrived in South America. Known as the first Venezuelan Rifles, and put under the command of Kerryman Arthur Sandes in 1819, these served right through the war of independence and were only disbanded in 1830. Another officer, John Devereux, actively recruited in Ireland and sent about 2,000 men to Venezuela, who were enlisted
in the Irish Legion. The flag of the Legion was a golden harp on a green ground encircled by the stars of Venezuela and Colombia. The first contingent landed in Margarita between September and December 1819, and the rest arrived in Angostura (today’s Ciudad Bolívar) in April and May 1820. From the beginning the expedition was plagued with problems as they were given little food and no pay. Most of the men had to be evacuated after suffering a number of mutinies, and particularly after an attack on the Legion in Rio Hacha soon after they landed. Thirty or 40 officers refused even to remain in Venezuela and returned to Ireland in the same vessels in which they had come. Remnants of the various groups in the Irish Legion, the first Venezuelan Rifles, and others were reorganized in what became an Anglo-Irish Legion. Hundreds of Irish took part in the decisive battles of Boyacá (Colombia) and Carabobo (Venezuela). In the latter battle the Irish Legion was said to number 350, and of those, 11 officers and 95 men were killed and 50 were wounded. All of the survivors were awarded the Order of the Liberator, and the legion was renamed the Carabobo Battalion, which still exists in the Venezuelan army.
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A junior officer from Co. Cork, Daniel Florence O’Leary, won Bolívar’s esteem and an appointment as his aide-de-camp. O’Leary attained the rank of brigadier general and played a key role in plotting political and military strategy. After retiring from the army, O’Leary wrote his memoirs, which were published in Caracas by his son. His extraordinary compilation of eyewitness accounts, correspondence, and documents has proved an indispensable resource for every subsequent biographer and historian of the independence period. O’Leary died in 1854 in Colombia, and the Venezuelan government removed his remains to Caracas. He was laid to rest with high public honors in the national pantheon. Edmundo Murray See also: O’LEARY, Daniel Florence References Hasbrouck, Alfred. Foreign Legionaries in the Liberation of Spanish South America. New York: Columbia University, 1928. Kirby, Peadar. Ireland and Latin America: Links and Lessons. Dublin: Trócaire, 1992. McGinn, Brian. “Venezuela’s Irish Legacy.” Irish America 7, no. 11 (November 1991): 34–37.
VICUÑA MACKENNA, BENJAMÍN (1831–CA. 1886) Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna was a Chilean writer, journalist, and historian. Born in Santiago on August 25, 1831, he was the son of Pedro Félix Vicuña and Carmen Mackenna, and grandson of General John MacKenna of the war of independence. Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna studied in Santiago and joined the school of law in 1849. From the beginning of his career he contributed to La Tribuna newspaper, writing political articles. In 1851 he participated in the revolution of Pedro Urriola against www.abc-clio.com
the government but was imprisoned during the attack on the headquarters of Chacabuco Regiment. On July 4, Vicuña Mackenna and Roberto Souper managed to escape from the prison disguised as women. In 1852 he was exiled in the United States, and from San Francisco he traveled through Mexico and Canada. A year later he studied agronomy in England, and then visited many parts of Europe, including Ireland. Back in Chile in 1856, Vicuña Mackenna graduated as a lawyer from the University of Santiago. Although he did not practice as a barrister, his political and other writings were solidly based on legal knowledge. Together with Isidoro Errázuriz, in 1858 Vicuña Mackenna started the newspaper La Asamblea Constitucional. He was expelled by the government and exiled in England, but he was allowed to return in 1863. He began contributing to El Mercurio newspaper this same year. In 1865 he was in New York as envoy of the Chilean government and founded La Voz de América newspaper. Elected national senator for a six-year term, in 1872 Vicuña Mackenna was also appointed mayor of Santiago. His political career was interrupted in 1875 when he was defeated by Errázuriz in the elections for president of Chile. He dedicated himself to journalism and writing, and in 1880 edited El Nuevo Ferrocarril and La Nación. His most important works are El Sitio de Chillán (1849), La Agricultura Aplicada a Chile (1853), Chili (1855), Tres Años de Viajes (1856), Ostracismo de los Carrera (1857), Historia de la Revolución del Perú (1860), Ostracismo de O’Higgins (1860), Diego de Almagro (1862), Historia de la Administración Montt (1861–1862), Vida de Don Diego Portales (1861–1862), Historia de Santiago (1868), Historia de Chile
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(1868), Historia de Valparaíso (1868), La Guerra a Muerte (1868), Francisco Moyen (1868), and dozens of other novels, history books, and political essays, the most popular being El Santa Lucía, La Unión Americana, El Cambiazo, Seis Años en el Senado de Chile, and El 20 de Abril. Like his contemporary Bartolomé Mitre in Argentina, Vicuña Mackenna represented an intellectual class belonging to the South American landed elites. They started the mainstream historiography in their countries, and selected and immortalized the national discourse that served those elites to envision the model of national values to be imitated by the middle and working classes. Edmundo Murray See also: MACKENNA, John Reference Figueroa, Pedro Pablo. Apuntes históricos sobre la vida y las obras de don Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna. Santiago, Chile: Imprenta Victoria, 1886.
VIRGINIA During the colonial period, the practice of Catholicism was prohibited in Virginia. This, along with the fact that it had an economy that was heavily dependent upon slavery, meant that it was not a popular destination for Irish immigrants. In 1786, however, after the American Revolution and under the leadership of the Virginian Thomas Jefferson, Virginia became the first state to formally separate church and state with its Statute of Religious Liberty. Following this move there began to be a slow increase in the number of Irish immigrants arriving in the state, seeking work, and then settling there. In the 1790s, George Washington’s aide-de-camp, Colonel John Fitzgerald, who had been born in www.abc-clio.com
Rathdowney, Co. Laois, led a campaign to found the first Catholic parish in Alexandria, Virginia. Meanwhile, in nearby Norfolk, there was a small Irish community, some members of which had settled there after the 1798 rebellion in Ireland. Although the Holy See had considered creating a new diocese of Richmond under an Irish bishop, Patrick Kelly from Waterford, the plan was eventually shelved. And it was not until 1841 that Richard Vincent Whelan, who had been born in Baltimore of Irish parents, was consecrated bishop of Wheeling. Virginia was second only to California as the state that was most dependent on priests from overseas. In practice, overseas meant Ireland—many priests from All Hallow’s seminary in Dublin were transferred to Virginia to minister to Catholic communities there. With increasing numbers of Irish settling in Richmond to work on the railroad connecting the town with Lynchburg, there was a need for institutions to fulfill their religious requirements. Father Timothy O’Brien, who had been born in Co. Mayo, ministered to their needs by creating a second parish and by inviting the Sisters of Charity to come to the city. At this time, as well as working on the railroads, many of the Irish in Richmond worked in flour mills and tobacco warehouses, while in Norfolk they formed the bulk of the workers in the shipyard. After the yellow fever epidemic and the Know-Nothing movement, both of which threatened the position of the Irish in the state, the Civil War provided an opportunity for Virginia’s Irish to demonstrate their loyalty toward their new home. However, attitudes to the war among the Irish were sharply divided. Although some Irish formed the Montgomery Guards and the First Virginia Infantry Regiment,
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others sought exemptions because of their foreign-born status. In the years immediately after the war, unlike in some other southern states, the Irish continued to settle in Virginia. This presumably had much to do with its location as the most northerly of the all the states that had formed the Confederacy. As before the war, it was still the railroads that provided the principal source of employment for Irish laborers. By the 1920s, most Irish immigrants in Virginia had become assimilated into mainstream American life and did not think of themselves as a self-conscious ethnic minority with some of the restrictions that implied. The result was a situation where the Irish in Virginia did not seek political power in the same way they had done so in a state like New Jersey, where they created
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political machines. Instead, they realized it was only by working with those of other religions and backgrounds that they could hope to survive politically in Virginia. In terms of religious vocations, not much had changed over the years: Virginia is still very reliant on priests from Ireland and from other American dioceses. David Doyle
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References Bailey, James H. A History of the Diocese of Richmond: The Formative Years. Richmond: Chancery Office, Diocese of Richmond, 1956. Fogarty, Gerald P. “Virginia.” In The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America, edited by Michael Glazier. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999. Gleeson, David T. The Irish in the South, 1815–1877. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
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W WALL, EAMONN (1955–) Eamonn Wall, the poet and critic, was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, in 1955. He immigrated to the United States in 1982 and now lives in Missouri. He has a BA from University College Dublin, an MA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and a PhD from the City University of New York (1992). He was associate professor of English at Creighton University from 1992 to 2000. In addition to teaching courses in creative writing and Irish literature, he was director of the Creighton Irish Summer School. He is currently the Smurfit-Stone Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Wall first published poems in the Gorey Arts Festival magazine. Since then, his poetry has been published widely in Ireland and in the United States. A recurring theme in his poetry is the desire to integrate the Irish and American elements of his experience. His books include The Celtic Twilight (1974), Fire Escape (1988), The Tamed Goose (1990), Dyckman–200th Street (1994), Iron Mountain Road (1997), The Crosses (2000), and Refuge at DeSoto Bend (2004). He is also the author of a study of Irish diaspora to the America, From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills
(2000), which was co-winner of the Durkan Prize from the American Conference for Irish Studies for excellence in scholarship. In addition to poetry, Wall regularly contributes book reviews and articles on Irish fiction to The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and other newspapers and journals. He has been influential in the New Irish Writers movement, which advocates a more contemporary and realistic assessment of emigrant Irish writers in the United States. He has published essays on this topic in Forkroads. He also contributed to Ireland in Exile: Irish Writers Abroad (1993), edited by Dermot Bolger. He is widely regarded as an important critic of both Irish-American and Irish-in-America writing. In 2005, he became president of the American Conference for Irish Studies, the first Irish-born scholar to be elected to this position. Aoileann Ní Eigeartaigh See also: AMERICAN CONFERENCE FOR IRISH STUDIES References Glazier, Michael ed. The Encyclopaedia of the Irish in America. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999. Pierce, David, ed. Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader. Cork: Cork University Press, 2000.
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WALLACE, WILLIAM VINCENT (1812–1865) William Wallace, the Irish-born composer of English-language operas and virtuoso piano music, was one of the most frequently performed opera composers of his day, and a U.S. citizen from 1853. The son of a Scottish military bandmaster stationed at Ballina, Co. Mayo, Wallace was taught a number of musical instruments by his father and played second violin in the orchestra of the Theatre Royal, Hawkins Street, Dublin, from 1827. He took the additional name Vincent in 1830, when he fell in love with a Roman Catholic girl, Isabella Kelly, while working as an organist and teacher at Thurles. Her father would not agree to a marriage without Wallace changing his faith, which he duly did in the autumn of 1830. At age 22 he made his debut as a composer, playing a violin concerto of his own at a concert at the Dublin Anacreontic Society. In July 1835, Wallace immigrated with his wife and sister-in-law to Hobart, Tasmania, but quickly moved on to Sydney, Australia, in January 1836. He made a career in Australia as a performer and teacher, opening the first Australian Music Academy and becoming, in retrospect, the first composer of international stature to have resided in Australia. Wallace left Sydney (including his family and £2,000 of debt) in February 1838 to begin an adventurous journey, in which he reportedly fought against the Maoris of New Zealand and visited India, but the next established fact is a recital in June 1838 in Valparaiso, Chile, whence he explored the South American continent in musical travels via Buenos Aires, Lima, Jamaica, and Cuba, conducting an Italian opera season at Mexico City in 1841, proceeding to www.abc-clio.com
Sheet music for The Flag of Our Union, an American patriotic song by William Vincent Wallace. (Library of Congress)
New Orleans (1841), Philadelphia (1842), and Boston (1843), and then reaching New York in June 1843 with the reputation of “decidedly the first violinist and pianist in this country.” After travels to Germany and the Netherlands (1844) he became resident in London, where he produced his greatest operatic success, Maritana, in 1845. Maritana was played all over the Englishspeaking world for decades, reaching New York and Philadelphia as soon as May 1848, but although Wallace composed at least five other operas, he was never able to repeat its success. From 1849 Wallace again traveled the American continent, including several years at New York from 1850, where he married for a second time (the German pianist Helene Stoepel) and gained U.S. citizenship. He lived at various places in central Europe from 1858 while being
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more or less based in London, and in 1864 he retired to the south of France on account of increasing illness. Wallace died in the care of his wife Helene in the following year and was buried at Kensal Green, London. Of his two wives, Helene died in New York in 1885 and Isabella in Dublin in 1900. Together with his compatriot Michael William Balfe, Wallace was the most successful composer of English-language operas in the nineteenth century. His fluent style was full of memorable melodies that made his works instantly popular, and prints of the most popular songs appeared in multiple editions. He was one of the first composers to integrate elements of South American traditional music into Western art music. He also shared with Balfe the fate of largely falling into obscurity after the 1930s, but he has regained critical attention in recent years. Axel Klein See also: BALFE, Michael W.; MUSIC IN AMERICA, IRISH References Klein, John W. “Vincent Wallace (1812–1865): a Reassessment.” Opera 16 (1965): 709–716. Phelan, Robert. William Vincent Wallace. A Vagabond Composer. Waterford: Celtic Publications, 1994. White, Eric Walter. The Rise of English Opera. 1951. Reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1972.
WALSH, MARÍA ELENA (1930–) María Elena Walsh, an Argentine poet, singer, and writer, was born in Ramos Mejía in the greater Buenos Aires, on February 1, 1930. Her father was a son of Irish and English settlers and worked in the local branch of the railway company. www.abc-clio.com
Walsh studied in the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes. During this time, she worked on her poems, and in 1947 she published her first book of poetry, Otoño Imperdonable, which was an immediate success in the literary circles. She visited the United States with the Spanish writer Juan Ramón Jiménez and met Ezra Pound, Pedro Salinas, and Salvador Dalí. Walsh returned to Argentina and published her second book of poems, Baladas con Angel (1952), amidst the difficulties created for intellectuals by the Peronist regime. Having decided to seek voluntary exile out of Argentina, Walsh met the singer Leda Valladares in Panama, with whom she settled in Paris. The duo “Leda y María” began singing Argentine folkloric songs in the Parisian Latin Quarter and recorded their first LP, Le Chant du Monde. Walsh also began writing poems and songs for children. The Walsh-Valladares duo went back to Argentina, but they could not find a place in the folkloric scenario of the time, in which the stereotyped musical groups were always formed by gauchos (men). Walsh launched a music hall for children, “Los sueños del Rey Bombo” (1959), and published Tutú Marambá (1960), a book of children’s stories. In 1962, her famous Canciones para Mirar appeared both in recordings and in the theater and was a great success; it was later produced in France and the United States. By 1965, when “Hecho a Mano” appeared, Walsh was publishing poetry and children’s stories, singing in theaters, and recording. Her music show for adults Juguemos en el Mundo/Show para Ejecutivos (1968) was launched in the Teatro Regina in Buenos Aires and ran for one year. Given her general popularity and success with children,
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the censors of the military government were not willing to ban her protest songs. The film Juguemos en el Mundo was launched in 1971, with a screenplay written by Walsh and María Herminia Avellaneda. It was an economic failure, and Walsh began presenting music hall shows in many Latin American cities. In Buenos Aires, she presented El Viejo Variété and El Buen Modo. In 1974, Walsh was diagnosed with cancer and had to undergo operations and chemotherapy treatments. However, neither her poor health nor censorship were reasons enough for Walsh to remain inactive during the military dictatorship of 1976–1983, which took power after Perón’s death in 1974. On August 16, 1976, Walsh published in Clarín newspaper the polemic article “Desventuras en el País Jardín de Infantes,” including an explicit disapproval of the authoritarian military rule. Walsh’s whole body of work was immediately banned, although her immense popularity probably saved her life. Her song “Como la Cigarra” became a musical symbol of the resistance against the military junta. A tireless advocate of the rights of women, Walsh struggled during her entire life against male oppression, and among her targets were Perón, Fidel Castro, and Latin American military dictators. Further works by Walsh were published as anthologies in 1984 and 1994. In 1997 she published a book of short stories, Manuelita ¿Dónde vas?—the title of one of her most famous songs. Among the awards Walsh received are those of the Argentine Society of Authors, Fundación Konex, and the honoris causa doctorate of the Universidad de Córdoba. When Bill Meek of RTÉ interviewed María Elena Walsh in 1987, he inquired about her awareness of Irish culture www.abc-clio.com
through her poems and songs. She replied, “It is important to be bred up with two languages and I inherited this English tradition, and I think the Irish sense of humor . . . I think Irish and Andalusian is a very good combination for poetry and for fantasy” (Voices from the Camps, sound files). Edmundo Murray See also: ARGENTINA References Dujovne Ortiz, Alicia. María Elena Walsh. Madrid: Ediciones Júcar, 1982. Sibbald, Kay. “Tradición y transgresión en la poética de María Elena Walsh.” In Poéticas de Escritoras Hispanoamericanas al Alba del Próximo Milenio, edited by Trempe L. Rojas and Catharina Vallejo. Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1998. Walsh, María Elena. Las Canciones. Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1994.
WALSH, RAOUL (1887–1980) Raoul Walsh was born Albert Edward Walsh on March 11, 1887, in New York. His father, Thomas Walsh, was born in Ireland but emigrated to America in the 1870s, where he prospered in the garment industry. His mother, Elizabeth (Brough) Walsh was of Spanish-Irish descent. One of four children, Raoul was raised in a comfortable, middle-class household. According to his autobiography, Each Man in His Time (1974), Walsh left home while still a teenager to work as a sailor in Cuba; he would later work as a ranch hand in Texas and Mexico. By 1910, he had become an actor, working for stock theater companies in minor roles. In 1912 he signed with the Biograph Film Company and caught the eye of the era’s most important director, D. W Griffith, who employed him as an actor and assistant. Under Griffith’s tutelage, Walsh learned acting and directing skills that would prove invaluable
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in his long and varied career. Although Walsh was a competent actor, he had his sights set on directing, and by 1912 he was shooting scenes for the semi-documentary film, The Life of General Villa (codirected with Christy Cabanne). He continued directing films while also working for Griffith: in 1914 he was cast in the role of John Wilkes Booth in Griffith’s controversial epic, The Birth of a Nation. In 1915 Walsh signed a contract with Fox studios, where he got the opportunity to direct a number of prestigious films. One of his earliest surviving films—and one that anticipates some of the films he directed in the 1930s—was Regeneration, a crime melodrama filmed on the Lower East Side and featuring Rockliffe Fellowes and Anna Q. Nilsson, two major stars of the 1910s. Walsh’s attention to realistic detail, the authenticity of his tenement setting, and his sophisticated handling of action make the film one of his finest works. While under contract to Fox, Walsh proved himself a versatile director, equally adept at directing big-budget star vehicles (e.g., Carmen with Theda Bara); society dramas (e.g., Should A Husband Forgive? ); delicate art films (e.g., Evangeline); and gritty crime films (e.g., The Honor System). In the first 10 years of his career Walsh turned out more than 40 films, establishing himself as an important director. His importance was underscored when he was chosen to direct Douglas Fairbanks in a lavish 1924 production of The Thief of Bagdad, one of the most visually arresting films of the 1920s. Walsh continued to work steadily as a director throughout the 1920s, achieving big successes such as What Price Glory? (1926), while also taking occasional acting jobs, the most significant of which was his appearance with Gloria Swanson in Sadie Thompson (1928). In www.abc-clio.com
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1929, while filming In Old Arizona, he was involved in a car accident that cost him an eye. Undeterred, Walsh soon returned to directing and made a smooth transition to sound films. Walsh worked well with actors, most notably James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, and John Wayne. Although John Ford has often been credited with discovering John Wayne, it was Walsh who cast the actor in his first starring role in The Big Trail (1930). Throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s Walsh directed films in a range of genres, particularly excelling at action films (Under Pressure, 1935; Objective, Burma!, 1945), gangster films (The Roaring Twenties, 1939; High Sierra, 1941; White Heat, 1949), and westerns (They Died with Their Boots On, 1942; Colorado Territory, 1949). Walsh continued to direct well into his seventies. He retired soon after the release of his final film, A Distant Trumpet, made in 1964. He was the subject of many retrospectives and awards in Europe and America, and in 1974 he published his autobiography, Each Man in His Time, a highly colorful, often fanciful, account of his career. He died in California on December 31, 1980. Gwenda Young See also: CAGNEY, James; FORD, John; WAYNE, John Reference Hardy, Phil, ed. Raoul Walsh. Edinburgh: Vineyard Press/Edinburgh Film Festival, 1974.
WALSH, RODOLFO (1927–1977) Rodolfo Walsh was the son of Miguel Esteban Walsh (1894–1947) and Dora Gill and the great-grandson of Edward Walsh
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(1832–1903), who was probably from Ballymore, Co. Westmeath, and who immigrated to Argentina around 1853. Born in Choele-Choel, Rio Negro province, Walsh was sent to a Catholic orphanage. Walsh created the genre of investigative journalism in Latin American literature. In Operación Masacre, the account of a summary execution of 34 Peronists, Walsh combined detective suspense with nonfiction narrative techniques. Other works of investigative journalism include ¿Quién Mató a Rosendo? (1969) and El Caso Satanovsky (1973). Walsh began writing articles as a journalist, and from 1959 to 1961 he worked for the agency Prensa Latina in Cuba. Back in Buenos Aires, he wrote for Panorama, La Opinión, and Confirmado. His political activity led him to operate in the hard-line Montoneros group, where he acted as their top intelligence officer. Walsh played a key role in the bombing of the cafeteria at the police headquarters in July 2, 1976. On the first anniversary of the military dictatorship, March 24, 1977, Walsh condemned the military junta in an open letter, which Nobel Prize–winner Gabriel García Márquez considered one of the jewels of universal literature. But the next day three army tanks demolished his home in San Vicente (Buenos Aires), and Rodolfo Walsh was murdered in downtown Buenos Aires by a military death squad. Their instructions were to capture him alive, but they had to kill him when he pulled a gun to return their fire. His dead body was taken to the Navy Mechanics’ School and was never seen again. Among his published works that have survived are: Diez Cuentos Policiales (1953), Cuentos para Tahúres, Variaciones en Rojo (1953), Antología del Cuento Extraño www.abc-clio.com
(1956), Operación Masacre (1957), Secuencia Final, the plays La Granada and La Batalla (1965), Los Oficios Terrestres (1965), Un Kilo de Oro (1967), and Un Oscuro Día de Justicia (1973). Edmundo Murray See also: LITERATURE, IRISHARGENTINE References Geraghty, Michael John. “Rodolfo Walsh: An Argentine Irishman.” Buenos Aires Herald (29 March 2002). McCaughan, Michael. True Crimes: Rodolfo Walsh, the Life and Times of a Radical Intellectual. London: Latin America Bureau, 2002.
WASHINGTON, D.C. The seat of the United States government, Washington, D.C., is officially known as the District of Columbia, which makes it more than a city but less than a state. Because Washington has never been an industrial or commercial center, it did not attract as many European immigrants as other metropolitan areas on America’s Atlantic seaboard, but it nevertheless has been an important place for Irish Americans to settle. Even before the federal government moved to Washington from Philadelphia in 1800, Irish laborers were helping to build the U.S. Capitol and the White House. The latter was designed by architect James Hoban, born in Co. Kilkenny, who modeled it after Leinster House in Dublin and who also supervised its construction. To serve these Irish laborers, as well as other Roman Catholics, Saint Patrick’s Parish was established in 1794 in what would become Washington’s downtown. The Irish population continued to increase in the early nineteenth century. By
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1802, there were reports of Irish Americans parading on Saint Patrick’s Day with shamrocks in their hats. That same year, James Hoban founded the Society of the Sons of Erin in Washington. More Irish arrived as new federal buildings were constructed, and particularly after August 1814, when British troops burned the White House, the Capitol building, the Navy Yard, and more. Irish laborers—primarily from Belfast, Cork, Dublin, and Liverpool—also played a major role in constructing the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal during the 1820s and 1830s. Because of the Great Famine, many more Irish immigrants came in the 1840s and 1850s, making the Irish the largest ethnic group in Washington: 48 percent of the foreign-born population in 1850 and 58 percent of the foreign-born population in 1860. According to city directories from the 1850s, the Irish were employed primarily as laborers, grocers, and government clerks, and they resided in some of the poorer districts. The reaction of other ethnic groups to the Irish was not always favorable. As one resident recalled, “In the extreme western part of the town . . . dwelt the Irish, a wild-looking, undisciplined and turbulent people, different in every way from their countrymen amongst us at the present day” (quoted in McGirr 1949, 93). The xenophobic Know-Nothing Party sparked riots in 1856 and 1857 in Washington in which several members of the Irish community were killed. These ethnic tensions relaxed significantly after the upheaval of sectional violence during the American Civil War. New postwar construction in Washington brought more jobs and higher pay to Irish laborers during the 1870s and 1880s. By 1900, many Irish families that www.abc-clio.com
had lived in Washington for two or three generations had established small businesses and increasingly were members of skilled or semiskilled occupational groups. Religious and community organizations—including the Knights of St. Patrick, Sons of St. Patrick, St. Patrick’s Total Abstinence Benevolent Society, and six branches of the Hibernian Society—were prospering in Washington. In the twentietth and twenty-first centuries, Washington’s Irish community has been very much part of the mainstream, and therefore less conspicuous within American society. The community makes itself known primarily on Saint Patrick’s Day each year, when Washington’s Irish pubs serve traditional corned beef and cabbage, though not green beer. Another Saint Patrick’s Day tradition, which began in 1956, is to place a shamrock on the grave of George Washington Parke Custis (1781–1857), the adopted grandson of George Washington and father-in-law of Robert E. Lee. Custis founded the Washington Benevolent Society in 1826 to encourage solidarity with the citizens of Ireland and their struggle for independence. Traditional Irish culture, music, and dance are promoted today by the Greater Washington Céili Club, established in 1985. The club sponsors céilis, workshops, dinners, concerts, and other programs for the Washington community at large. James I. Deutsch See also: HOBAN, James; CANALS AND THE IRISH INVOLVEMENT; NATIVISM AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM References Hickey, Matthew Edward. “Irish Catholics in Washington up to 1860: A Social Study.” Master’s thesis. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1933. MacGregor, Morris J. A Parish for the Federal City: St. Patrick’s in Washington, 1794–1994.
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912 WAYNE, JOHN Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994. McAleer, Margaret. “‘The Green Streets of Washington’: The Experience of Irish Mechanics in Antebellum Washington.” In Washington Odyssey: A Multicultural History of the Nation’s Capitol, edited by Francine Curro Cary, 42–62. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1996. McGirr, Newman F. “The Irish in the Early Days of the District.” Records of the Columbia Historical Society of Washington, D.C. 48–49 (1949), 93–96. O’Neill, Michael J. “Friend of the Irish.” Washington Star, March 15, 1959: 14–15. Proctor, John Clagett. “Irish Have Played Important Parts in History of Washington and Nation.” Washington Star, March 17, 1940: C4.
WAYNE, JOHN (1907–1979) John Wayne, nicknamed “the Duke,” was born Marion Robert Morrison on May 26, 1907, in Winterset, Iowa. His parents, Molly and Clyde Morrison, were both part Irish: Molly’s mother was born in Cork in 1848 and Clyde’s great grandfather, Robert Morrison, was born in Co. Antrim in 1782. Clyde Morrison was a drug store clerk who, in 1914, abandoned his profession to embark on a new career as a farmer on a small farm near Lancaster, California. The venture was not a success, and in 1916 the family moved to Glendale, where Clyde resumed his career as a druggist. The young Marion Morrison grew up in Glendale, a city that was a popular location for film productions, particularly western shoots. Marion attended Glendale High School from 1921–1925, where he excelled at sports. Soon after his graduation from high school he entered the University of Southern California on a football scholarship. During his college years he began working www.abc-clio.com
part-time at the nearby Hollywood film studios. His first appearances as a film extra date from 1926 (Brown of Harvard and King Vidor’s Bardleys the Magnificent, both produced by MGM). However, it was his work as a props assistant at Fox studios that caught the eye of leading American director, John Ford, who cast him in small extra roles in Mother Macree and Hangman’s House in 1928. For the next year Morrison worked prolifically in the film industry, mainly as an extra or in bit parts. During that time he landed a leading role in Raoul Walsh’s epic production, The Big Trail (released in 1930) and changed his name to John Wayne (prompted by Walsh, who suggested the surname “Wayne” after “Mad” Anthony Wayne, a U.S. Army general in the American War of Independence). Wayne’s biographer, Gary Wills, credits Walsh as the discoverer of Wayne; certainly he was the first director to cast him in a major role. Despite his starring role in The Big Trail, Wayne seemed unable to capitalize on the publicity, and for the next eight years he went back to playing small roles at Columbia and Warner Brothers and larger roles for “Poverty Row” studios Mascot and Monogram. By the mid-1930s Wayne had appeared in a number of serials and in a recurring role as “Stony Brook,” the hero of a series of westerns made for Republic studios. The turning point in Wayne’s early career was his reunion with John Ford in 1939 for an “A” budget western, Stagecoach. Wayne’s performance as the Ringo Kid not only proved that he could hold his own among a fine ensemble cast that featured Claire Trevor and Thomas Mitchell, but it also renewed Hollywood producers’ interest in the charismatic actor. In 1940,
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Wayne played leading roles in four major productions: Dark Command, which saw him reunited with Raoul Walsh; Seven Sinners (the first of several pairings with Marlene Dietrich); Three Faces West, a romantic drama directed by future blacklist victim Bernard Vorhaus; and The Long Voyage Home, John Ford’s adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s play. Wayne’s career continued to flourish during World War II, and he often took starring roles in war films (Back to Bataan; They Were Expendable), despite his lack of involvement in active war service. Wayne’s output was prolific in the 1940s—he made 33 films in less than a decade—and saw him work with some of Hollywood’s most important directors, including John Ford, Rauol Walsh, Henry Hathaway, and Cecil B. De Mille. When Howard Hawks was casting for his first western, Red River (made in 1946), he chose Wayne to play the role of the aging western hero, Tom Dunson, alongside Montgomery Clift as Dunson’s adopted son, Matthew Garth. Hawks’ unusual casting (Clift was not a typical western hero) and his revisionist approach to the genre presented a challenge to Wayne, who delivered a complex, multilayered performance in an often unsympathetic role. By the time the film was released in 1948, Wayne had already embarked on the first of three westerns for John Ford (Fort Apache, 1948; She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, 1949; Rio Grande, 1950). The films were collectively known as the cavalry trilogy, and their success reinforced the public’s association of Wayne with the western genre. The 1940s also saw a hardening of Wayne’s right-wing politics: He was a leading member of the conservative Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of www.abc-clio.com
American Ideals, an organization founded in 1944 by director Sam Wood to help the House Un-American Activities Committee in its fight against communism. In 1948 Wayne became the head of the alliance, and his commitment to conservative cold war politics found expression in his starring roles in the anticommunist films Jet Pilot (made in 1950 but released in 1957), Big Jim McLain (1952), and Blood Alley (1955), and in his ultra-patriotic war film, The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). In 1952, Ford began production on a long -cherished project, an adaptation of Maurice Walsh’s novel The Quiet Man. Having secured funding from Republic studios, he cast Wayne in the leading role of Sean Thornton, with Maureen O’Hara taking the role of Mary Kate Danaher, the red-haired Irish girl Thornton falls in love with. The film was shot around Cong, Co. Mayo, and the cast featured many Ford stalwarts. It met with considerable success upon its release in 1952 and remains perhaps the most popular of the Ford-Wayne films. Wayne teamed up with Ford again on The Searchers (1956), in which he delivered an outstanding performance as the complicated, cantankerous Ethan Edwards, a man driven by an obsession that extends beyond the ostensible task of finding his kidnapped niece. The Searchers is still regarded by many critics as one of the most complex of all westerns, and Wayne’s Ethan represents a clear challenge to the notion of an “unproblematic” western hero. In 1960 Wayne’s directorial ambitions found expression in The Alamo, in which he directed himself in the role of Davy Crockett. The film was panned by critics and did not perform well at the box office. Wayne’s association with the western genre continued in the 1960s, and during that
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decade he worked again with Ford (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Horse Soldiers) and Hawks (Rio Bravo, Rio Lobo, and El Dorado). Although Wayne remained popular with the American public throughout the 1960s, his conservative stance on the Vietnam War, expressed in the ultra-right-wing film, The Green Berets (1968), alienated him from many. By the late 1960s Wayne was struggling with recurring bouts of cancer and his last westerns mixed sentiment, pathos, and humor. His performance as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit (1969) won him an Oscar (he had been nominated twice before), while art mirrored life in his final film, The Shootist (1975), in which he starred as a gunfighter battling cancer. Wayne succumbed to lung and stomach cancer on June 11, 1979. His third wife, Pilar Wayne, and seven children survived him. Gwenda Young See also: FORD, John; O’HARA, Maureen; WALSH, Raoul References Roberts, Randy, and James Olson. John Wayne: American. New York: The Free Press,1995. Shipman, David. “John Wayne.” In The Great Movie Stars. New York: Da Capo, 1982. Wills, Gary. John Wayne’s America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
WEBB, RICHARD DAVIS (1805–1872) Richard Davis Webb, an Irish Quaker printer and reformer, was a friend to many of America’s most influential abolitionists, most notably William Lloyd Garrison, Lucretia Mott, and Henry Clark Wright. Of equal importance is the practical support his printing business allowed him to www.abc-clio.com
extend to visiting reformers and antislavery speakers, especially Charles Lennox Remond and Frederick Douglass. Richard S. Harrison offers a comprehensive account of Webb’s life and suggests that “Webb kept open a small window of humanity on the world outside of Ireland” (Harrison 1993, 1). This impulse stems from his desire to highlight the many issues that required reform in the early Victorian era: temperance, the peace movement, and especially antislavery. Webb, like Garrison, but unlike other abolitionists, believed he should not confine himself to one reform topic, but should argue on behalf of causes as they arose. He was very aware of conflicts outside his immediate surroundings and his refined sense of conscience and extensive knowledge of world affairs is rooted in the practice and connections that were part of the Quaker world. These connections can be traced across the Atlantic as Webb and his fellow reformers discussed and debated reform topics in their extensive correspondence. While this transatlantic perspective was confined to an elite group, Webb moved beyond this and undertook the practicalities of reform work. He helped to establish reform organizations and regularly attended meetings. In 1840, Webb attended the first World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. Here he met Lucretia Mott, whom he described as the “Lioness of the Convention” (Harrison 1993, 24) and was one of the first to openly sympathize with her when she was not allowed to take her place as a delegate. He also met Garrison, and they became firm friends. Webb enjoyed their correspondence and was inspired by Garrison’s ideals. However, it was his position as a printer that allowed Webb to be of great value to the spread of the
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antislavery message in the British Isles. He organized and printed many pamphlets of a reform nature during his career, but the assistance he gave three individuals positions him as an important player in the transatlantic network of reform and change. Inspired by the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840, Webb and James Haughton organized an address to the Irish people of America. They wished to inspire Irish Americans to engage with the work of the abolitionists in their newly adopted home and to challenge them not to become involved with the ownership of slaves. They collected 60,000 signatures, including that of Daniel O’Connell. These Webb gave to Charles Lennox Remond in 1841 as he returned to America. Remond had undertaken a nationwide tour of speaking engagements in Ireland, which was organized by Webb. In 1845, Frederick Douglass, the American fugitive slave, visited Ireland and England. This was necessitated by the publication of his autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, which exposed him as a fugitive and revealed his whereabouts to his owner. The autobiography acquires deeper significance in an Irish context. Sales of the narrative were to finance Douglass’s lecturing tour; such was its popularity, Douglass had to have it republished twice in Ireland, and Webb undertook the task. These Irish editions reveal the newly acquired control that Douglass could now exercise over the presentation of his story and, by extension, the representation of his emerging selfhood. Webb was an astute observer of the political situation in Ireland and was very aware of the complexities and contradictions that motivated the nationalist and www.abc-clio.com
establishment structures. However, he was quick to assist in cases that he deemed grossly unjust. The Young Irelanders organized a minor and very unsuccessful insurrection in August 1848. The leaders— William Smith O’Brien, Patrick O’Donohoe, Thomas Francis Meagher, and T. B. McManus—were charged with high treason and sentenced to be hanged. Webb helped to organize a petition for clemency; 25,000 signatures were collected and presented to the lord lieutenant. Eventually, the sentences were commuted to penal servitude for life. Ann Coughlan See also: ABOLITIONISM AND SLAVERY; DOUGLASS, Frederick; MEAGHER, Thomas Francis; MOTT, Lucretia Coffin References Harrison, Richard S. Richard Davis Webb: Dublin Quaker Printer (1805–1872). Cork: Red Barn Publishing, 1993. Sweeney, Fionnghuala. “ ‘The Republic of Letters’: Frederick Douglass, Ireland, and The Irish Narratives.” Éire-Ireland 36, no. 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2001): 47–65.
WELLMAN, WILLIAM A. (1896–1975) William Augustus Wellman was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on February 29, 1896. His father, Arthur Wellman, born in Boston on April 8, 1858, was of English descent, and his mother, Celia Guinness McCarthy, born in Boston on July 13, 1869, was descended from the famous Guinness family of Dublin. Wellman attended Newton High School, where he excelled at athletics. He graduated in 1914 and went to work as a “lumper” in a lumberyard in Waltham, Massachusetts, but his sights were on a career in aviation. When he was refused entry
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into the U.S. Aviation Service in 1917, he traveled to France and there joined the Lafayette Flying Corps, an offshoot of the famous Lafayette Escadrille. Over the next year, Wellman experienced all the dangers, injuries, and excitement associated with life as an aviator, and he would often use this period of his life as material for his films. By March 1918, he was back in America, employed by the U.S Air Service as a flying instructor at Rockwell Field in San Diego. He also found time to publish a record of his French experiences (entitled Go, Get ’Em) and marry a young film actress, Helene Chadwick. Chadwick had a contract with the Goldwyn studios in Los Angeles and Wellman followed her there in 1919. Wellman’s first involvement in films was in a minor acting role in a Douglas Fairbanks film, The Knickerbocker Buckaroo (1919), but he soon found that he was more interested in staying behind the camera than appearing in front of it. He became an assistant propman on a number of Will Rogers films, all of which were directed by Clarence Badger. In 1921 he became Badger’s assistant director on A Poor Relation and, following his move to Fox studios in 1922, he served as an assistant director to Bernard Durning. Wellman made his directorial debut in 1923 with the release of The Man Who Won, a western starring Dustin Farnum. For the next three years, Wellman worked steadily as both a director and an assistant director for a variety of film studios. Soon after his move to Paramount Studios in 1926, Wellman began production on an action film entitled Wings, starring Clara Bow, Charles “Buddy” Rogers, Richard Arlen, and Gary Cooper. Drawing www.abc-clio.com
on his own experiences as a pilot, Wellman fashioned an action-packed saga detailing the lives of two American flyers (played by Arlen and Rogers) in World War I. Upon its release in 1927, it was greeted with critical acclaim and box office success, catapulting Wellman from the ranks of contract director to star director. Wellman followed it up with another aviation film, Legion of the Condemned, and a crime melodrama, Ladies of the Mob. One of his most unusual films, Beggars of Life, based on Jim Tully’s hobo novel and starring Louise Brooks, was released soon after the coming of sound and, with its theme of outsiders living on the margins of society, it anticipated his later Depression-era films, such as Wild Boys of the Road (released in 1933). By 1930, Wellman had left Paramount and signed with Warner Brothers. Over the next four years he directed some of his most powerful work, including the seminal gangster film, The Public Enemy, which helped launch the career of James Cagney, and several hard-hitting melodramas that exposed the seedier side of American society, such as The Star Witness (1931), Night Nurse (1932), and Heroes for Sale (1933). Despite his reputation as a maverick director (his nickname was “Wild Bill”), Wellman proved himself both efficient and effective as a director, bringing his films in on schedule and usually on budget. He worked steadily throughout the 1930s and 1940s for most of the major studios, and he produced some of the key examples of Hollywood genre filmmaking, including screwball comedies (Nothing Sacred [1937]), action dramas (Beau Geste [1939]), westerns (The Ox Bow Incident [1943]; Buffalo Bill [1944]), and war films (The Story of G.I. Joe [1945]). His last film,
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Lafayette Escadrille, paid tribute to the famed French air corp and was released in 1958. Wellman married four times and had seven children with his fourth wife, Dorothy Coonan, whom he married in 1933. He published his autobiography, A Short Time for Insanity, in 1974. He died in Los Angeles, California, on December 9, 1975. Gwenda Young See also: CAGNEY, James; TULLY, Jim References Schickel, Richard. The Men Who Made the Movies. New York: Atheneum Books, 1975. Thompson, Frank. William A. Wellman. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1983.
WILSON, THOMAS WOODROW (1856–1924) Of Scots-Irish ancestry, Woodrow Thomas Wilson became the 28th president of the United States. Born in Staunton, Virginia, in 1856, Woodrow Wilson was the third child of the Reverend Dr. Joseph Ruggles Wilson and Janet Woodrow. His father, a Presbyterian minister who could trace his ancestry back to Strabane, Ireland, bequeathed to Woodrow both the high moral scruples that would characterize his presidential reputation (if not, at times, his private life) and the outstanding oratorical ability that would set him apart from other contemporary political candidates. Though originally from Ohio, Wilson’s parents were confederate sympathizers during the Civil War. At age eight he watched as captured Confederate president Jefferson Davis was led through town in chains; this and other experiences of the Civil War would later affect his response to the great www.abc-clio.com
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conflict of his own presidency—World War I. Suffering from what many historians now believe to be a form of dyslexia, Wilson was a poor student in early life. To overcome his scholastic difficulties, his father spent many hours teaching him the art of debate, and he succeeded in teaching himself the new art of shorthand. At 17, he entered Davidson College, transferring a year later to Princeton University, before graduating from there in 1879. Next he studied law at the University of Virginia and practiced it briefly before returning to academia, earning a PhD in political science from John Hopkins University. The success of his published dissertation— Congressional Government—landed him teaching jobs at Bryn Mawr College and Wesleyan College; he finally returned to Princeton in 1890, as a professor of jurisprudence and economics. He remains the only U.S. president to date to have gained a doctoral degree. On a trip to Rome, Georgia, he met Ellen Louise Axson, marrying her in 1885. They would have three daughters: Margaret (1886), Jessie (1887), and Eleanor (1889). At Princeton, he established a reputation as a brilliant teacher and scholar, and in 1902, he became its 13th president. His tenure as president of Princeton was marked by educational reform and expansion for the university. However, it was also dogged by strong division, as many Princeton trustees, alumni, and students staunchly opposed many of Wilson’s reforms. After eight years, he was forced to resign. In 1910 Wilson was elected governor of New Jersey on the Democratic ticket. Expected by his gubernatorial backers to be largely conservative, Wilson instead aligned himself with the reform movement, pushing a series of political and economic reforms through the
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legislature, such as workmen’s compensation and regulation of public utilities. By 1912, Wilson’s accomplishments and outstanding oratorical ability had made him popular with the progressive element in the Democratic party, and he became the Democratic Party candidate for president. Helped by a split in the Republican Party nomination—between William Taft’s party regulars and Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose party—Wilson gained a commanding majority in the Electoral College and was elected as the first Democratic president in 20 years. Wilson had ridden to power on a platform of “New Freedom,” arguing that social justice could best be served by abolishing special privileges and restoring competition. Once elected, he went straight to work on his pledge, experiencing early successes with his antitrust laws and tariff reform. The Underwood Tariff (1913), the Federal Reserve Act (1913), the Federal Farm Loan Act (1916), and the Adamson Act (1916) are all parts of Wilson’s domestic legacy, aimed at redressing the growing economic and social gap between the haves and the have-nots in America. In 1913, Ellen Wilson developed a serious kidney problem and died within a year. Woodrow was left in a state of deep despair, just as the world was entering World War I. Up until now, apart from a brief squabble with Mexico, Wilson’s foreign policy had been largely nonexistent. With the outbreak of war in Europe, Wilson determined on a policy of neutrality as the best course of action for America. This policy became increasingly difficult to maintain, as Republicans called for tougher policies toward Germany, and a German submarine sank the British liner Lusitania in 1915. In December of this year, he married Edith www.abc-clio.com
Bolling Galt—a widow and 15 years his junior—and gained a new lease on life. In 1916, Wilson ran for presidential reelection on an antiwar platform, with the now infamous slogan: “He kept us out of the war.” He won reelection, defeating the Republican nominee—Charles Evan Hughes—277 electoral votes to 254. On April 2, 1917, just a month after his inauguration, Wilson went back on his implied election pledge and asked Congress for a declaration of war to “make the world safe for democracy.” Although revived German U-boat activity in 1917 has been ascribed as the reason for Wilson’s action, many now believe he entered the 1916 presidential election privately knowing he would eventually be forced to lead America to war. As commander-in-chief of the largest army the United States had raised to date, Wilson was an able leader and administrator. However, he was already dreaming of a just and lasting peace. On January 8, 1918, with the war not yet over, Wilson issued his Fourteen Point plan for postwar reconstruction. Some of the items contained within this plan were an end to secret treaties; freedom of the seas in war and peace; removal of trade barriers; the evacuation, restoration, and readjustment of certain countries and boundaries; and the creation of a League of Nations to prevent future international conflicts. Armistice was declared on November 11, 1918, and less than four weeks later Wilson sailed for Europe to attend the Versailles Peace Conference. Though he was initially revered and celebrated as a savior of humanity, Wilson’s early glory in Europe was soon to be replaced by disappointment and even embitterment at the allies squabbling over territory and refusing to embrace his principles at Versailles. As the months dragged on, Wilson saw his vision of “peace without
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victors” being gradually eroded as he was forced to concede on point after point. He managed to salvage his concept of the League of Nations, but by this time he was facing much opposition to it at home. In 1919 Wilson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. On July 10, 1919, he presented the Treaty of Versailles to the Senate for ratification, but he could not persuade the necessary two-thirds of the Senate to ratify the treaty. Asked by a group of senators, known as the “reservationists” and led by Henry Cabot Lodge, to modify the treaty—particularly aspects pertaining to U.S. participation in the League of Nations—Wilson refused. Instead, he went on a cross-country speaking tour in an effort to garner public support for the treaty and his cause. Unfortunately, at Pueblo, Colorado, on September 25, he collapsed and soon after suffered a paralytic stroke. Cared for by his second wife, Edith, who restricted all access to the president and kept the true extent of his invalidity secret, Wilson remained in office until the end of his term. He also remained adamant in his opposition to any modifications of the treaty, issuing appeals from his sickbed that the treaty be ratified. However, the Senate refused to ratify the treaty, and with the election victory of Republican Warren G. Harding in November 1920, Wilson’s last hope of U.S. participation in the League of Nations faded. Wilson remained in Washington after his retirement from the residency in 1921, forming a law partnership with Bainbridge Colby; however, his fading health prevented him from actively working. He died in February 1924; his legacy, however, survived him, in both Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal proposals and today’s United Nations. James P. Byrne www.abc-clio.com
See also: COHALAN, Daniel F.; DEVOY, John; PRESBYTERIANISM; SCOTSIRISH; SCOTS-IRISH POLITICS References Clements, Kendrick A. The Presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992. Clements, Kendrick A. Woodrow Wilson. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2003. Clements, Kendrick A. Woodrow Wilson, World Statesman. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Heather, Derek Benjamin. National Self Determination: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1994. Heckscher, August. Woodrow Wilson: A Biography. New York: Scribner, 1991. Hoover, Herbert. The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson. London: Museum Press, 1958. Link, Arthur S. Wilson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947. Olasky, Marvin. The American Leadership Tradition: Moral Vision from Washington to Clinton. New York: The Free Press, 1999. Walworth, Arthur. Woodrow Wilson. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965.
WINCH, TERENCE (1945–) The great wave of Irish immigration to America had slowed when Terence Winch’s parents arrived in New York City in the 1930s, where they met and married. Growing up in the East Bronx, then a very Irish neighborhood, Winch experienced the vibrancy of the old urban Irish-American culture before its precipitate decline. His father, Paddy, played tenor banjo, and Winch and his brother Jesse accompanied their father at gigs and house parties. Winch eventually settled on the button accordion as his instrument. This period in the Bronx became the subject for Winch’s first collection of poetry, Irish Musicians/ American Friends, which won the American Book Award in 1986. Whatever nostalgia there is in the book is kept firmly in check by a gritty, comic sense of realism. However,
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in his songs, When New York Was Irish, Saints (a litany of Irish Catholic schools), and The Irish Riviera (Rockaway), he is unabashedly sentimental. Whereas the immigrant generation used to sing nostalgic songs about the Emerald Isles, Winch writes in celebration of the lost world of Irish America. Winch seemed destined for an academic career, when he abandoned his doctoral studies at Fordham to join his brother Jesse in Washington, D.C., in 1971. After playing in various folk bands, the Winch brothers discovered that the traditional Irish music with which they had grown up was becoming popular. Celtic Thunder, the band they formed with flutist Linda Hickman in 1977, became one of the most prominent Irish bands on the New YorkWashington corridor. The band’s Light of Other Days won the INDIE award for the best Celtic album for 1986. Celtic Thunder was unique in that it had its own in-house poet. Not only did Winch write songs for the group, but performances were punctuated with readings of his poetry. Winch was and remains very active in Washington’s poetry scene. In the 1970s there were weekly readings above the Community Book Shop just off Dupont Circle. The sessions eventually produced Mass Transit, a magazine that Winch edited. Among the many poets Winch read with was Michael Lally, another prominent Irish American. Over the years Winch’s poems have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies. His published collections include Rooms (1992), The Great Indoors (1995), and The Drift of Things (2003). He has received grants and fellowships from the Maryland State Arts Council and from the National Endowment for the
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Arts. He has been interviewed on National Public Radio and in turn frequently interviews other writers. In addition to his poetry Winch has published a collection of short stories, Contenders (1989), and his memoirs of the musician’s life, That Special Place (2004). In most of these short pieces, some peculiar character or strange event seeps through the borders of the mundane to reveal an Irish appreciation for the humorously grotesque. However, the Irish quality of Winch’s work is not to be found only in those pieces about music, immigrant life, and occasional trips back to Ireland, subjects that clearly establish him as one of the major Irish-American writers of his generation. Most of his poems deal not with Irishness but with the universal themes of love, desire, loss, and death. Yet amid the surreal images etched with paranoia and irony, one hears echoes from deep within the Irish experience. Native-born son of the Bronx, Winch has somehow fully incorporated into his imagination the immigrant’s sense of loss. In many of his poems there is the sense of something missing. This is perhaps inevitable for one whose grandfather Winch, a German living in Britain, was incarcerated as a enemy alien during World War I. Terence’s grandmother was left for a time to raise the family alone in Mayo. More immediate was the death of Terence’s mother, Bridy, when he was a teenager. In “Non-Possession is One-Tenth of the Law,” Winch gives himself the ironic advice: “Hide precious items from yourself /Then forget where you have hidden them/This will promote non-attachment to things” (from The Drift of Things, 2001). Things, perhaps, but attachment to lost faces and places and love remains clear and painful in
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Winch’s poetry. There is the haunting sense that, no matter how good things may get, the world will still break your heart. William H. A. Williams References Morgan, Jack. “Memory and Music: An Interview with Terence Winch.” Irish Literary Supplement 21, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 24. Retallack, Joan. “Local Ex-Centrisms: The Dupont Circle School.” GW Washington Studies 1986. Winch, Terence. The Drift of Things. New York: Figures, 2001.
WRIGHT, THOMAS CHARLES JAMES (1799–1868) Thomas Charles Wright was an officer in Simón Bolívar’s army and founder of the Ecuadorian naval school. Wright was born in Queensborough, Drogheda, on January 26, 1799, son of Thomas Wright and Mary Montgomery. In 1810 he was sent to the naval college at Portsmouth, and two years later joined HMS Newcastle under the command of George Stewart. In her he sailed to serve with the squadron under Borlase Warren, which was engaged in blockading the Atlantic coast of the United States. He was promoted and went home on leave in 1817. Since that time Wright seems to have been under the influence of radical and republican ideas such as had so influenced the French Revolution. In November 1817, Wright enlisted as officer in Bolívar’s British Legion. He sailed in the brigantine Dowson with 200 other volunteers and valuable ammunition, and after a series of delays, dangers, and adventures landed on Margarita Island off the Venezuelan coast on April 3, 1818. Nine years later Wright and another Irishman
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were the only survivors of the 32 officers who left in the Dowson. At Angostura (now Ciudad Bolívar) Wright first met Bolívar, for whom he quickly developed boundless admiration. His first action was at Trapiche de Gamarra on March 27, 1819. His victory here inspired Bolívar to undertake his astonishing New Granada campaign and the march over the Andes. Wright played important roles in the battles at Pantano de Vargas and Gamesa in July 1819, and in the decisive victory of Boyacá in August of the same year, after which he was promoted to captain. In 1820 he was sent back with his Rifles regiment to the coastal plain to operate in the jungle east of the Magdalena against the Spanish forces based at Santa Marta. The battle at Ciénaga de Santa Marta on November 10, 1820, resulted in the fall of this town. Convoyed by sea to Maracaibo, the Rifles participated on June 21, 1821, in Bolívar’s decisive victory of Carabobo. Cartagena was taken and the Rifles were brought in boats up the Magdalena en route for Popayán. They formed part of the contingent led by Bolívar in the second of his legendary Andean campaigns. After winning the battle at Bomboná on April 7, 1822, Wright was twice mentioned in Bolívar’s order of the day for his exceptional skill and courage. From February 1822 Wright was acting lieutenant colonel, a rank that was confirmed early in 1823, when he was serving under Sucre, who joined forces with Bolívar at Quito, Ecuador. Wright was sent to Guayaquil to improvise a naval force and patrol northward between that Ecuadorian city and Panama. In September 1824, after Bolívar’s great victory at Junín and Sucre’s at Ayacucho,
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the Spanish made their last bid to turn the tide and sent a fleet to break the republican blockade in the Peruvian stronghold of Callao. Wright had had a busy year ensuring the arrival of supplies by sea for Bolívar’s and Sucre’s armies. He had greatly impressed Bolívar, who had appointed him commodore of the Pacific squadron that joined the patriot naval force off Callao. Trying to force their way out, the royalist ships became closely engaged with the blockaders. The brigantine Chimborazo sustained three waterline hits and was in a collision with the ship of the line Asia, but by consummate skill Wright maneuvered free and avoided being driven ashore. In January 1826 Callao capitulated and the Spanish rule in South America was over. Meanwhile Wright, in Chimborazo, had ferried Bolívar from port to port all down the liberated Pacific coast to the frontier of Chile. Wright settled in Guayaquil in 1826, and founded there the nautical school that still exists. In 1828 the Peruvian government sent the corvette Libertad to blockade Guayaquil. Wright had intimately studied the unique swells and currents of the Gulf of Guayaquil, and he used his knowledge to drive off the Libertad. Wright’s Guayaquileña had 60 casualties out of 96 aboard. Wright took part at sea and on land in the fighting that ended with the delimitation of the Ecuador-Peru boundary, and he
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was specially commended by Sucre after the victory of Portada de Tarqui. Ecuador had been independent since August 8, 1830, and Wright became one of the new republic’s leading citizens. He married María de los Angeles Victoria Rico, the niece of Vicente Rocafuerte, president of Ecuador (1835–1839 and 1843–1845). Wright converted to Roman Catholicism before the wedding. After María’s death, Wright took her sister Pepita as his second wife. He was now commander of the Ecuadorian navy and governor of Guayaquil. His courage during a yellow fever epidemic in 1840 was remarkable. A military plot in 1845 overthrew the liberal regime supported by Wright, and he went into exile in Chile for 15 years. In Chile he met and became a great influence upon the Ecuadorian exile Eloy Alfaro, who would be president in 1897–1913. Wright went back to Ecuador in 1860 and joined various liberal conspiracies against the despot Moreno. With his house still surrounded by police, Wright died on December 10, 1868. Edmundo Murray
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See also: O’LEARY, Daniel Florence References Hasbrouck, Alfred. Foreign Legionaries in the Liberation of Spanish South America. New York: Columbia University, 1928. Ireland, John E. de Courcy. “Thomas Charles Wright: Soldier of Bolívar; Founder of the Ecuadorian Navy.” The Irish Sword 6, no. 25 (Winter 1964): 271–275.
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Y YEATS, JOHN BUTLER (1839–1922) John Butler Yeats was born on March 16, 1839, in Tullylish, Co. Down, where he spent the first 10 years of his life. He was then sent to a school near Liverpool, which he disliked; after two years he moved to the Atholl Academy, on the Isle of Man. In 1857 he entered Trinity College Dublin, from which he graduated in 1862. At about this time he met Susan Pollexfen, whom he married in 1863. Although he was called to the Irish Bar in 1866, he did not practice, and in 1867 he abandoned law, moved to London, and studied art. For most of the next three decades he and his growing family led an erratic existence, moving among London, Dublin, and the Pollexfen home in Sligo. Although Yeats concentrated on portraiture—for which he had real talent—he received too few commissions to establish a reliable income for his family. His fortunes were also hurt by his temperamental reluctance to treat art as a commercial endeavor; he gave away drawings, sketched acquaintances for little or no payment, and frequently reworked paintings that were, to other eyes, complete. Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, and continuing throughout the remainder
of his life, Yeats felt an artistic father’s ambiguous pride in being eclipsed by his children. Although one of his sons (Robert) died of croup as a child, his remaining children developed an imposing variety of talents. His son William became Ireland’s foremost poet; daughters Elizabeth (called Lolly) and Susan (called Lily) were distinguished textilists and publishers; and son Jack became one of Ireland’s most inventive and accomplished painters. After his wife died in 1900, Yeats settled again in Dublin, continuing his art and gaining a reputation for being a fine conversationalist. He took an active interest in the culture of the city and, in 1907, delivered a famous speech in defense of John M. Synge’s then-controversial play, The Playboy of the Western World. (W. B. Yeats wrote warmly of his father’s speech in the poem “Beautiful Lofty Things”). A year later Yeats accompanied Lily on what was intended to be a brief visit to the United States, yet he remained in Manhattan for the rest of his life. In New York Yeats led a life similar to that he had enjoyed in Ireland: he chatted often, dined well, enjoyed many friendships, and sold too few works to support himself. Yet in New York he had as friend and patron
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the lawyer John Quinn, whose financial assistance proved invaluable in keeping Yeats afloat. Despite growing exasperation with his elderly ward, Quinn never fully cut him off from financial rescue; and it was a commission from Quinn to paint a self-portrait that occupied the Irishman’s last years. Yeats was also pleased and surprised by the popularity of several collections of his letters that were published: Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats (1917, edited by Ezra Pound) and Further Letters of John Butler Yeats (1920, edited by Lennox Robinson). He died in Manhattan on February 3, 1922, of heart weakness compounded by influenza. Yeats’s American years were not notably productive, although he continued his Dublin habit of drawing fine informal sketches of friends and acquaintances. His significance for Irish-American relations lay in his unofficial role as a conduit into America for Irish cultural influence. Because he knew many of the artists and writers of prominence in Ireland, Yeats’s opinion on Irish matters was sought and valued by American benefactors, collectors, and journalists. By combining this cultural knowledge with personal likability, Yeats became one of the central figures of Irish New York between 1909 and 1922. Andrew Goodspeed See also: RESEARCH COLLECTIONS, IRISH, IN CANADA; RESEARCH COLLECTIONS, IRISH, IN THE UNITED STATES; YEATS, William Butler
Murphy, William M. Prodigal Father: The Life of John Butler Yeats. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978. Yeats, John Butler. Essays Irish and American. Dublin: The Talbot Press, 1918. Yeats, John Butler. Letters to his Son W. B. Yeats and Others, edited by Joseph Hone; abridged by John McGahern. London: Faber, 1999.
YEATS, WILLIAM BUTLER (1865–1939) Born in Dublin in 1865, William Butler Yeats was the son of the artist John Butler Yeats and Susan Pollexfen. The Yeats family was somewhat unsettled in his youth, and he grew up variously in London, Sligo, and Dublin. Later in life he became a passionate advocate of continuity, tradition, and rootedness, both in personal life and in the cultural life of Ireland. In 1884, he began study at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin. Although he had some rudimentary skill as a painter, the greater talent in visual art belonged to his brother, Jack. William, however, had demonstrated unusual ability in verse, and soon began publishing his writings. His early volumes reveal both extraordinary talent and a fascination with mythology and the Irish landscape. His 1889 narrative poem “The Wanderings of Oisin” is a particularly accomplished debut, and subsequent books (Crossways [1889]; The Rose [1893]; The Wind Among the Reeds [1899]; and In the Seven Woods [1904]) established him as the foremost young poet in Ireland. His early poetry is perhaps most notable for its technical virtuosity, by which he creates moving evocations of love or of mythological Irish heroes with an apparently effortless, and often memorable, lyrical beauty. Of these early poems perhaps “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is his most widely known.
References Archibald, Douglas N. John Butler Yeats. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1974. Jeffares, A. Norman. “John Butler Yeats.” In In Excited Reverie: A Centenary Tribute to William Butler Yeats, edited by A. Norman Jeffares and K. G. W. Cross. New York: Macmillan & Co., 1965. www.abc-clio.com ABC-CLIO
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Portrait of poet William Butler Yeats, who was an integral driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival. (Library of Congress)
In the 1880s and 1890s, Yeats undertook extensive research in matters that interested him. He made several trips through the rural countryside of Ireland, recording and preserving folk tales and fairy stories. These trips he conducted with a new acquaintance, Lady Augusta Gregory; her house (Coole), her person, and her work were to be emblematic for Yeats of the aristocratic continuity he most valued in the Irish cultural nobility. Her home also provided him with a quiet place in which to think and work, and many of his poems began, or were wholly written, in Coole. Their folkloric work, if somewhat unusual, has real value. Of less apparent value was the research Yeats also began into theosophy, mysticism, and the supernatural. He spent a lifetime fascinated by ghosts, fairies, and seances, and he evolved elaborate systems to communicate with mystical voices and explain multigenerational cycles of birth, death, www.abc-clio.com
and rebirth. These matters, although easy to simplify unfairly, had a great importance to Yeats; it is a tribute to his skills as a poet that their appearances in his verse are rarely repellent to those who disbelieve his mysticism. In 1889, Yeats met the young Maud Gonne, whose immediate impact and subsequent influence on his poetry is perhaps comparable only to that of Beatrice on Dante. Gonne was attractive, spirited, and devoted to Irish culture and Irish freedom. Most importantly for Yeats, she was also, for years, passionately friendly but (to him) sexually unobtainable. He wrote many of his most moving love lyrics for her, and he created an extensive and beautiful mythology around her. Her eternally radical Irish republicanism helped to encourage his own political interests. His belief in the desirability of Irish independence was deep but envisioned nothing like the violence Gonne would tolerate, and it finds expression in some highly skilled symbolic plays, most notably The Countess Cathleen (1892), and Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902). In 1899, Yeats inaugurated the Irish Literary Theatre, based on his conviction that Ireland required and deserved a worldclass national theater. This later became the Abbey Theatre, of which Yeats was a director for most of the rest of his life. In the early days the Abbey (which opened in 1904) drew largely from its own highly talented founders, producing original plays by Yeats, Lady Gregory, and John M. Synge. In 1907 Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World provoked civic disturbances, which offered Yeats an opportunity he relished to denounce the rowdies for attacking real artistic achievement by an Irishman. He was to repeat this denunciation of rioters at a later Abbey scandal when, in 1926, the theater premiered young Sean O’Casey’s play The
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Plough and the Stars, which provoked similar uproar. Through much of his later life the difficulties and pleasures of the Abbey Theatre were to occupy his time and his interests. As Yeats grew older, he achieved an unusual metamorphosis in his poetry; what had often been evocative, symbolic, gentle, hushed, or remorseful in his earlier work was sharply displaced by passionate public and philosophical verse of astonishing force and amazing vigor. In later verse collections (most notably: Responsibilities [1914]; The Wild Swans at Coole [1919]; Michael Robartes and the Dancer [1921]; The Tower [1928]; The Winding Stair and Other Poems [1933]; and New Poems [1938]) Yeats wrote with impeccable clarity and resonant beauty of exceptionally complex philosophical and political questions. He also asserted himself ever more as a subject of his own poetry, writing more powerfully and explicitly of his thoughts, sexual desires, and meditations than he had done as a youth (when he often referred to himself in verse as “the poet” or “he”). Moreover, he returned in his later verse to a series of self-referential mythological symbols, such as a tower, Byzantium, and a sword presented to him by a Japanese admirer named Junzo Sato. This later work bears some influence of the rising Modernists, particularly Ezra Pound, whom Yeats befriended; yet Yeats was not wholly convinced of the Modern emphasis on disjunction and never entirely embraced the movement. His accomplishment in modernizing his verse is almost wholly his own. The Easter Rising of 1916 had been led by several men whom Yeats knew, although he was out of the country when they rebelled, and he had not been in sympathy with a violent rising. He nonetheless embraced the notion of an independent www.abc-clio.com
Irish state when it arose, and later he served for several years as a senator. During this time he made an important speech on abortion and headed the committee that chose the design for the new Irish coinage. In 1917, he married Bertha Georgina “George” Hyde-Lees, with whom he had two children, Anne (1919) and Michael (1921). It was also with George that he engaged in extended attempts to contact spiritual advisers through automatic writing experiments, which had an enormous influence on Yeats’s thought, both about poetry and about the supernatural. The family bought and renovated a Norman tower in Co. Galway that Yeats called Thoor Ballylee and that he declared to be his symbol; aside from its symbolic value, it was prone to floods and cold winds and was uncomfortable. In 1923 he attracted world attention when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yeats spent his last years based in Dublin, while occasionally visiting London, Italy, and the south of France. His income, although never enormous, was aided by a benefaction presented in admiration by Irish Americans, primarily in New York City. A late exuberance for sex led him to have several affairs, yet he never seems to have given thought to leaving his wife. He also had a brief interest in what became an Irish political party with views that resembled fascism; this has resulted in a widespread but mistaken notion that Yeats was himself a fascist or sought to promote fascism. He died in 1939, in the south of France, but was later reburied, according to his wish, in Drumcliff, Co. Sligo. Yeats had several connections with the United States. His father spent his last years in New York City, which gave William a personal contact in America’s artistic circles.
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His father’s financial imprudence, however, also placed an unwelcome financial burden on him, and to discharge the debt he sold many of his manuscripts to the American patron and collector John Quinn (who essentially paid for J. B. Yeats’s life in America). W. B. Yeats himself visited the United States on several occasions, in connection with fund-raising for the Abbey Theatre or on lecture tours of his own: he undertook lecture tours in 1903, 1914, 1920, and 1932 and an Abbey fund-raising tour in 1911. These tours were lucrative for Yeats and helped him through several difficult economic periods. Although Yeats does not appear to have been heavily influenced by American culture (with the exception of western novels, which he read avidly), he astutely understood that Ireland’s world importance was enormously magnified by the affection and interest Americans felt for the smaller nation. He therefore took care to speak about cultural and literary matters that he felt would increase American understanding of Irish culture and politics. A rather slight volume entitled Letters to the New Island gathered early essays that originally appeared in U.S.
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newspapers. His works remain widely studied in American and Canadian universities. W. B. Yeats likely had a greater impact on twentieth-century Irish artistic culture than any other individual. Andrew Goodspeed See also: COLUM, Padraic; CUSACK, Cyril; ELLMANN, Richard David; GOGARTY, Oliver St. John; RESEARCH COLLECTIONS, IRISH, IN CANADA; RESEARCH COLLECTIONS, IRISH, IN THE UNITED STATES; MOORE, Marianne; YEATS, John Butler References Brown, Terence. The Life of W. B. Yeats. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Foster, R. F. W. B. Yeats: A Life—The Apprentice Mage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Foster, R. F. W. B. Yeats: A Life—The Arch-Poet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Jeffares, A. N. W. B. Yeats: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977. Yeats, William Butler. Autobiographies. London: Macmillan, 1955. Yeats, William Butler. The Plays, Vol. II of The Collected Works, edited by David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark. New York: Scribner, 2001. Yeats, William Butler. The Poems, edited by Daniel Albright. London: Dent (Everyman’s Library), 1994.
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INDEX Note: bold page numbers indicate main encyclopedia entries; italic page numbers indicate pictures. Abbey of Gethsemani, 498 Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 119, 225 and B. Fitzgerald, 332 founding, 199, 925 and Gleeson, 372 and Hinds, 413 and MacGowran, 535 and McCann, 558–559 as model for Federal Theatre Project (U.S.), 327–328 and Neeson, 660 and O’Hara, 712, 713 and O’Herlihy, 714 and Pearson, 754 and Shaw, 855 and Yeats, 925–926, 927 Abdullah, Khalid, 423 ABEI Journal: the Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies, 25, 112 Abie’s Irish Rose, 119, 193 Abolitionism, 41–44 and Cincinnati, 718 and O’Connell, 30, 267, 297–298, 697–700 and Theobald, 699 See also Great Irish Address of 1841; Douglass, Frederick; Garrison, William Lloyd; Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society
Acción Revolucionaria Peronista, 205 Acheson, Dean, 562 Acheson, Stuart, 841–842, 843 ACLU. See American Civil Liberties Union Act of Toleration of 1649, 548 Act of Union of 1800, 30, 58–59, 694, 695 and O’Connell, 694, 695, 789 See also Repeal movement Adam, Robert, 414 Adams, Gerry, 36, 464, 465 and Clinton, 183–184, 185, 651–652, 657 and Good Friday Agreement, 601, 602 and Moynihan, 620 and Robinson, 811 Adams, Henry, 277 Adams, John, 29, 414 Adams, John Quincy, 431, 474 Address from the People of Ireland to Their Countrymen and Countrywomen In America, 699 Address to the Roman Catholics of the United States of America, 161 Admiral Farragut Monument, 821 Adrift, 576 The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 715 Advice to Irish Girls in America, 227
AFL-CIO, 123. See also American Federation of Labor; Congress of Industrial Organizations African Americans, 292 as depicted in Mulligan Guard series, 396–397 as domestic servants, 257–258, 259 and draft riots of 1862, 272, 273 Healy and mulatto common-law wife, 406–407 and Huston, 439 and Irish in Illinois race riots, 446–447 and Knights of Labor, 506 relations with Irish Americans, 41–42, 50, 85, 267–268, 296–300 See also Abolitionism; Douglass, Frederick; Slavery The African Queen, 440 After the Hunt, 395 Agrarian societies, 315. See also Land League Ahern, Bertie, 3, 184, 186, 811 on Moynihan, 620 Aiken, Frank, 242, 872 Aikens, Kingsley, 53 Alabama, 44–45 Alamo, 837 The Alamo, 913 Albright, Madeleine, 181, 183 Alcock, Merle, 323
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930 INDEX Alexander, Grover Cleveland, 564 Alexander Brown & Sons, 127 Alfaro, Eloy, 922 Alias Grace, 5–6, 11, 12 Alison, Francis, 130–131, 213 All for Her, 118 All Good Men, 341 “All I Need Is Someone Like You,” 268 All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, 138, 531 All-Star Ceili Band, 249 Allen, Edward Patrick, 44 Allen, Fred, 45–47, 45 and O’Connor, 700 Allen, Gracie, 639 Allen, Richard, 699 Allen, Woody, 325–326, 325, 438 Alleyn, Charles Joseph, 779–780 Almost There: The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman, 707–708 Alsina, Adolfo, 275 Alston, Walter, 730 Altman, Robert, 362 Aluminum Company of America, 587 Amergen, 584 América Clavada en Mi Costado, 523 American Anti-Slavery Society, 41, 266 American Ballet Theater, 877 The American Celt, 573 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 342 American Civil War, 47–51, 48, 371 and Cleburne, 178–179 and Hughes, 433 and Maryland, 550 and O’Mahony, 728–729 and O’Sullivan, 746–747 and Rowan, 814–815 and Ryan, 815–816 and Scots-Irish, 837 See also Meagher, Thomas Francis American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS), 51–53, 798 www.abc-clio.com
American Congress for Irish Freedom, 36 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 123, 506–507 American Friends of Irish Neutrality, 242, 655 An American in Paris, 488 American Ireland Fund (AIF), 53–54 American Irish Defense Association, 655 American Irish Foundation, 53 American Irish Historical Society, 499, 500, 654 “The American Note,” 379 American Protective Association, 659–660 American Rainbow, 392 An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us, 160 American temperance movement, 54–56 American Wake, 244 American wakes, 32, 453 American War of Independence, 56–59, 58, 551 percentage of soldiers with Irish ancestors, 823–824 and Scots-Irish, 836–837, 848–849 See also Barry, John Americans with Disabilities Act, 599 Amistad case, 540–541 “Among School Children,” 612 Amsterdam, Morey, 156 Amundsen, Roald, 853 Anaconda mine, 231 Anales, 357 The Anarchists, 625 Anchors Aweigh, 487 Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), 61–64, 61, 286, 656 conflict with Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, 665, 826 and Daly, 232 ABC-CLIO
memorial tablets on Delaware and Raritan Canal, 154 and Molly Maguires, 603 monument to Irish immigrants to Canada, 5, 387 in Oregon, 741 and Saint Patrick’s Day parades, 825–826 in South Carolina, 869 in Tennessee, 881 Anderson, Clinton, 420 Andros, Edmund, 261 Angel (film), 481 Angel (TV series), 783–784 Angela’s Ashes, 569 Angels with Dirty Faces, 147, 148, 691–692, 692 Anglin, Timothy Warren, 64–65 Anglo-Argentine Treaty of Friendship, Navigation and Commerce of 1824, 21 Anglo-Brazilian Times, 111, 776, 850–851 Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1938, 378 Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, 651, 653 Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, 253, 378 as persistent Irish political issue, 760–761, 762 Anglo-Irish War (1919–1921), 253, 760 and Irish Americans, 673–674 and Irish immigration to Argentina, 23 Anna Christie, 128, 660–661, 731 The Annals of Chile, 621 Anshutz, Thomas, 425 Antarctica. See Shackleton, Francis Anthony, Susan B., 506 Anthracite Strike of 1902, 600–601 Anti-Catholicism. See Nativism and anti-Catholicism Anti-Saloon League, 54 1-800-368-6868
INDEX Anzoátegui, José Antonio, 724 Aosdána, 726 Apaches, 108 Appalachia, 65–66 Arafat, Yasser, 599 Áras an Uachtaráin, 287, 808 Arbenz, Jacobo, 388 Are You Somebody: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman, 707 Arena magazine, 518 Argentina, 66–69 anarcho-syndicalist movement, 213–214 boxing, 567 communist movement, 91–92 diplomatic relations with Ireland, 257 and Falkland/Malvinas Islands, 317–320 fascist movement, 90–91 Grupo de Oficiales Unidos, 322 halt in Irish immigration after 1930, 23 and hurling, 434–437 Irish immigrants to, 15, 21–23, 254–255, 887–889 Irish women immigrants, 310 and Irish Yankees, 472, 789 War of Independence, 129–130, 149–150 war with Brazil, 130, 207, 503 See also Dresden Affair; Irish Argentines; Perón, Juan Domingo; Massacre at Saint Patrick Church, The Argentine Association Football League, 866 Argentine Citizen, 776 Argentine Genealogical Institute, 189 Argentine Hurling Federation, 435 Argerich, Cosme, 710, 711 Arias, Fernando, 750 Arismendi, Juan Bautista, 251 Arkansas, 69–70 www.abc-clio.com
Arms and the Man, 855 Armstrong, John, 836 Armstrong, Justa Villanueva, 71 Armstrong, Thomas St. George, 21, 68, 70–71, 311, 312, 858 Armstrong, Pennsylvania, 306–307 Arnold, Frederick, 470 Arrowsmith, 404 Arruda, Marcus, 679–680 Art Deco, 369–370 Artane Boys Band, 220 Arthur, Chester A., 71–73, 71, 848 Artigas, José, 149, 150 Ascot Gold Cup, 422 Ashe, Geoffrey, 113 Ashe, Thomas, 755 The Asphalt Jungle, 440 Assembly lines, 344 Associaçao Brasileira de Estudos Irlandeses, 25, 112 Astaire, Fred, 364, 364, 487 Astor, Mary, 120, 364 Astral Weeks, 616–617 Attenborough, Richard, 126 Attridge, James, 477 Atwood, Margaret, 5–6, 11, 12 Auden, W. H., 504, 575 Australia, Irish immigrants to, 15, 291, 292 Avedon, Richard, 437 Avellaneda, Nicolás, 275 Avenging the Bright, 580 Avilés, Gabriel de, 538, 539 The Awakening, 174–175 Away, 5–6, 11, 12 Awful Disclosures, 30 Aylmer, William, 195, 704 B&O Railroad, 549 Babes in Toyland, 326, 412 Babes on Broadway, 364 Bacall, Lauren, 756 “The Back Door,” 818 The Back Door, 171, 818 Badin, Stephen, 686 Baeza, Braulio, 422 A Bag of Moonshine, 527 Baggot, King, 75–76, 76 ABC-CLIO
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Bagley, Frank “Doc,” 890 Balanchine, George, 877, 878 Balcon, Jill, 236 Balcon, Michael, 338 Balfe, Michael William, 76–78, 77, 678, 907 Ball, Ernest R., 78–79 The Ballad of Little Jo, 782 Ballesty, Miguel E., 435 Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, 877 The Ballroom of Romance, 706 Ballykissangel, 773 Ballymoss, 422 Baltimore, 79–80, 549–550 Baltimore Orioles, 86–87, 577 Bananas, 419 Banco de México, 710 Banim, John, 339 The Banner of the South, 816 Bannigan, Joseph, 807 Bannister, Edward, 162–163 Bapst, John, 545, 552 Bara, Theda, 118 Baradero, Argentina, 745, 746 Barak, Ehud, 599 Barbary Coast, 115 Barbeito, Salvador, 554 An Bárd ‘gus an Fó, 584, 585 The Bard and the Knight, 584 Bardwell, Leland, 279 Barker, Thomas, 884 Barkin, Ellen, 144 Barletti, Emilio, 554 Barley Boys, 457 Barnabo, Alessandro, 318 Barnett, Ross, 496–497 Barnum, P. T., 402–403, 669 Barrie, J. M., 119 Barris, Harry, 220 Barrow, Clyde, 835 Barry, John (bishop), 369 Barry, John (naval officer), 80–81, 80, 551 Barry, Philip, 82–83 The Barrytown Trilogy, 269 Bartholomew, Freddie, 83–84 Baseball, 34, 84–88. See also O’Malley, Walter Baseball managers, Irish-American, 88–90, 392–393. See also Hanlon, Ned; Mack, Connie; McCarthy, 1-800-368-6868
932 INDEX Baseball managers (continued) Joseph Vincent “Joe”; McGraw, John Joseph Bastard Out of Carolina, 437 Battell, Robbins, 425 Battle of Antietam, 550 The Battle of Aughrim, 625 Battle of Bull Run, 48, 49 Battle of Bunker Hill, 56 Battle of Fallen Timbers, 717 Battle of King’s Mountain, 836, 837 Battle of New Orleans, 837 Battle of San Jacinto, 837 Battle of Seven Oaks, 303 Battle of Stones River, 448 Baudelaire’s Bar Flowers, 519 Baxter, José Luis (Joe), 90–92 Bay of Pigs, 205 Bayou Folk, 175 Beach, Amy Marcy, 92–93 Beach, Sylvia, 93–94, 483 Beach, Thomas. See Le Caron, Henri Beatty, Jack, 223 Beau Geste, 119 The Beautiful and the Damned, 335 Beazley, Francisco, 567 Beckett, Samuel, 94–95, 94, 188, 189 and MacGowran, 535–536 Beecher, Henry Ward, 597 Beecher, Lyman, 552 Beggars of Life (film), 916 Beggars of Life (novel), 889 The Beginning and the End, 478 Begley, Philomena, 633–634 Behan, Brendan, 261–262 Behren, Peter, 5–6, 11, 12 Belcher, Jonathan, 584 Belfast Group, 408, 621 Belfast Harp Festival of 1792, 157 “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms,” 642 Belize, 95–97 Bell, Derek, 173 Bellecourt, Vernon, 305 The Bells of St. Mary’s, 220, 560 Bemberg, Maria Luisa, 709 Benedict XV, Pope, 405 www.abc-clio.com
Bennett, William J., 97–98 Benny, Jack, 46 Berenger, Tom, 856 Beresford, Bruce, 125 Beresford, William Carr, 18, 149 Berger, Wally, 581 Bergin, Patrick Connolly, 98–100 Berlin Wall, 496 Berrigan, Philip, 756 Bessy Conway: or, an Irish Girl Living in New York, 259, 819 Bettina, Melio, 201 Beyond the Horizon, 731 Beyond the Melting Point, 620 BFE. See Bord Fáilte Eireann Biaggi, Mario, 683 Biddle, Nicholas, 474 Big as Life: Three Tales for Spring, 426, 427 The Big Sleep, 169 A Bigamist’s Daughter, 570 Billy the Kid. See Bonney, William “Billy the Kid” Bion, W. R., 94 Birch, Thomas Ledlie, 849 The Birth of a Nation, 909 Bisaccia, Giovanni, 343 Bishop, Elizabeth, 100, 611 Björling, Jussie, 324 Black ’47, 382, 387 The Black Crook, 678 Black Hawk War, 445, 450 Black Robe, 609 Blackstone Canal, 153 Blaine, James Gillespie, 72, 73, 687 Blair, Samuel, 213 Blair, Tony, 180, 184 Blennerhassett, Richard, 477 Blind Raftery and His Wife, Hilaria, 143 Block, Adriaen, 806 Blondell, Joan, 147 Blount, William, 473 Blueshirts, 242, 763, 764 Bocayuva, Quintino, 110 Bodies in Motion and at Rest, 529 Bogart, Humphrey, 439, 909 The Bohemian Girl, 76, 77–78, 580, 678 Boland, Eavan, 100–101 ABC-CLIO
Boland, Frederick, 100 Boland, Raymond, 44 Bolívar, Simón and F. O’Connor, 704, 705 and Gran Colombia, 195 and Irish legionaries, 19, 250–251, 704–705, 901–902 and O’Leary, 724–725, 749, 902 and Wright, 921–922 Bond, James (fictional character). See Brosnan, Pierce Bond, James Wensley (soccer player), 865 Bond, Tommy, 85 Bonds, Barry, 581 Bonilla, Manuel, 419 Bonnet, Rubén P., 92 Bonney, William “Billy the Kid,” 101–103, 102, 475 Bono. See Hewson, Paul “Bono” Book of Kells, 166 Bookey, Patrick, 21, 858 Booking Passage, 529 Boone, Daniel, 497, 686, 835 Boorman, John, 126, 413 An Bord Fáilte, 104 Bord Fáilte Eireann (BFE), 60, 103–105 Borg, Björn, 571–572 Born Fighting, 836 Boston, 106–107 racial conflict of 1970s, 300, 308–309, 427, 428–429 Southie, 531–532 Boston Braves, 730 Boston College, 155 Boston Pilot, 551–552, 572–573, 650, 743–744, 771, 772 Boston Red Sox, 564 The Bothy Band, 173 Boucicault, Dion, 118, 192, 673, 678, 746 Bourke, John Gregory, 107–108 Bow, Clara, 119 Bowers, Henry F., 659 The Boxer, 238–239, 857 Boyce, Rupert, 96, 418 1-800-368-6868
INDEX Boyd, Augusto Samuel, 750 Boyd, Federico, 750 Boyle, Kathleen, 108–109, 109 Boyle, Kay, 95 Boyle, T. Coraghessan, 679 Boys of the Lough, 173–174 Boys Town, 148, 692 Brabazon, John, 310, 522 Brady, James, 786 Brady, Mathew, 747 Brady, Paul, 604 Bragg, Braxton, 178 Braham, David, 396 Brando, Marlon, 399 Brandon, Lowther, 319 Brant, Caroline and Molly, 479 Braun, Otto, 705 Braveheart, 372 Brazil, 110–112, 255 diplomatic relations with Ireland, 257 encouragement of Irish immigration, 207 and Irish immigrants, 15–16 Irish soldiers enlisted for conflict with Argentina, 20 and Irish Yankees, 472 war with Argentina, 130, 207, 503 Bread and Water, 646 Breaking Home Ties, 425 Breeder’s Cup, 423–424 Brendan, Saint, “The Navigator,” 112–113 supposed visit to North America, 15, 16, 27, 112–113 The Brendan Voyage, 113 Brennan, Joseph, 545 Brennan, Maeve M., 113–114 Brennan, Mary, 254 Brennan, Robert, 113 Brennan, Walter, 115–116 Brennan, William J., Jr., 116–117, 117 Brenon, Herbert, 75, 117–119, 118 Brent, George, 119–120 Bresnahan, Roger, 87 www.abc-clio.com
The Bridge, 144 The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 370 Bridgeport Bus, 426 Brigadier Gerard, 422 Bringing It All Back Home, 605 Bringing Up Father, 582–583 Bristow, George Frederick, 678 British Honduras, 95, 96. See also Honduras British Passenger Acts of 1848, 7 Broccoli, Cubby, 125 Broderick, David Colbreth, 120–122, 121 Broken Soil, 199 Bronson, Betty, 119 Brooklyn Dodgers, 729–730 Brooks, Van Wyck, 197, 278 Brophy, John, 122–123 Brosnan, Pierce, 123–127 Brouthers, Dan, 393 Brown, Alexander, 127–128 Brown, Alice, 390 Brown, Christy, 856 Brown, Clarence Leon, 128–129 Brown, George, 738 Brown, Patrick, 21 Brown, William, 19, 129–130, 632 and King, 503–504 Brown Brothers & Co., 127 Browne, Frances, 520 Browne, Francis, 885 Browne, Garech, 173 Browne, Patrick, 858 Browne, Thomas, 751 Bruce, David, 840 Bruton, John, 184, 811 Bryan, George, 130–131 Bryan, William Jennings, 486 Bryher, Winifred, 612 The Brylcreem Boys, 141 Buchanan, James, 121, 131–132, 371, 848, 849 Buckley, Donald, 257 Buckley, William F., Jr., 133–134 Buenos Aires colonial fights to control, 18 founding of, 16 ABC-CLIO
933
Buenos Aires Football Club, 865 Buenos Aires Hurling Club, 434, 435 Buffalo (New York) Irish Festival, 459 Bulfin, Eamon, 24, 134–135, 256 Bulfin, William, 67, 134, 135–137, 436 and hurling, 136, 434 and Irish press, 775, 776 Tales of the Pampas, 521–522, 523 See also The Southern Cross Bulger, Jackie, 139 Bulger, James “Whitey,” 137–138, 532 Bulger, William Michael (Billy), 138–139 Bunting, Edward, 157, 614 Bunting, Eve, 521 Burdett, Francis, 704 Burgoyne, John, 56–57 Burkard, Michael, 361 Burke, Edmund, 139–141, 140 Burke, Thomas Henry, 512 Burlington Irish Heritage Festival, 457 Burns, Michael, 881 Burns, Robert, 840 Burr, Aaron, 879 Burton, Richard, 399, 400 Burton, Virginia Lee, 520 Bury, Robin, 111 Bush, George H. W., 98, 180, 182, 657, 787 Bush, George W., 3, 133, 160, 581, 610 Bushnell, David, 416–417 Bushnell, William Avery, 403 The Butcher Boy, 482 Butler, Ed, 594–595 Butler, Jacinto, 67 Butler, Jean, 141–142 Butler, Nathaniel, 418 Butterly, Celestino, 319 Byrne, Alfred, 872 Byrne, Andrew, 70 Byrne, Donn, 142–143 Byrne, Edward J., 872 Byrne, Frank, 871 Byrne, Gabriel, 143–145, 372, 782 1-800-368-6868
934 INDEX Byrne, Patricio F., 435, 632 Byrne, William, 498 Caballero, Bernardino, 727 Cabot, John, 245, 548, 676 Cadillac Motor Car Company, 344 Caesar and Cleopatra, 404 Cagney, Frances “Bill” Vernon, 147 Cagney, James, 147–149, 148, 156, 192, 640, 889, 916 and O’Brien, 691 and Walsh, 909 Cahensly, Peter Paul, 452 Cahill, Gil, 51 Cahill, Joe, 185, 683 Cahokia, 593 Cairns, William, 96 Cal, 706 Calhoun, John C., 431, 474, 835, 869 Callaghan, Thomas Fitzgerald, 319 Calvert, Cecilius, 79, 548 Calvert, Leonard, 548 Calvin, John, 768 Camelot (film), 399 Camelot (play), 400 Camila, 709 Campbell, Bartley, 834 Campbell, Peter, 19–20, 149–150, 632, 899 Campbell, Robert, 594 Campbell, Wilfred, 390 “The Camptown Races,” 353 Can’t Help Singing, 324 Canada Fenian invasion attempts, 332, 672, 729, 743, 882 Irish immigrants to, 5–7 Canadian Association for Irish Studies, 12 Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 12 Canadian Orange Order, 8 Canadian Pacific Railroad, 607–608 Canadian Vickers, 607 Canals and the Irish involvement, 150–155, 368, 447, 551 www.abc-clio.com
in New Orleans, 668 in Ohio, 717 in South Carolina, 869 Canciones para Mirar, 907 Canseco, Jose, 581 Capilla Boys, 434, 435 Capra, Frank, 420 Carabhats, 313 Carey, Hugh, 36, 620, 651, 657 Carl Rosa Opera Company, 580 Carleton, Thomas, 547 Carleton, William, 339 Carman, Bliss, 502 Carnegie, Andrew, 758 Carney, Andrew, 155 Carney, Art, 149, 155–157 Carney & Sleeper Clothiers, 155 Carolan, Turloch, 157–158 Carolan, Victor, 135 Carpentier, Georges, 248, 891 Carr, Patrick, 551 Carreras, José Luis, 539 Carreras, José Miguel, 539 Carroll, Bishop John, 158, 160–161, 168, 549 Carroll, Charles, 28, 158–159, 160–161, 548 Carroll, Charles III, 28 Carroll, Daniel, 548 Carroll, James P., 159–160 Carroll, Tom, 468 Carson, Edward, 517 Carter, Jimmy, 182, 494, 785, 812 Carver, Raymond, 361 Cary, Joyce, 125 Casement, Roger David, 24, 111, 162–164, 162, 253, 541 and Duggan, 276 support of Putumayo, 256 Casey, Eamonn, 288, 289 Casey, Eduardo, 164–165, 274, 275–276, 776–777 Casey, Kevin, 100 “Casey at the Bat,” 84 Cash, Arthur, 375 Cash, Johnny, 280 Cass, Thomas, 552 Cassavetes, John, 325 ABC-CLIO
Cassidy, Ajax, 45–46 Cast in the Fire, 244 Castillo, Ramón, 322 Castlereagh, Viscount, 18–19 Castro, Fidel, 91, 388, 496, 908 Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Boston, 552 Cather, Elsie, 420 Cather, Willa, 77, 420 Cathey family, 685 Catholic Association, 167, 790 The Catholic Church, 165–169 and Al Smith, 860–861 and antagonism of nativists, 31 and assimilation of Irish Americans, 35, 168 Counter-Reformation and Irish, 16–17 growth in U.S. in 20th century, 34 and Irish-Italian conflict, 307–308 liberal movement, 33 Maryland tradition, 161 and McCormack, 568 scandals, 37, 167 and slavery, 42, 43 Texas, 303 “The Catholic Church and Civil Society,” 452 Catholic Emancipation, 694, 695, 700 Catholic Protectory, 432 Catholic Relief Act of 1793, 18 “Catholic Rent,” 167, 695 Catholic schools, 431, 452 Catholic Sentinel, 551–552 Catlin, George, 304 Causey, Peter, 245 Cavalcade of Stars, 156 Cavanagh, Jerry, 591 Cave, Nick, 534 Cavendish, Frederick, 649 Céilí music, 633–634 Celman, Juarez, 255, 273 Celtic Connections Festival, 170 Celtic Revival, 514 Celtic Thunder, 920 Celtic Tiger, 37, 351 and New Irish, 666 1-800-368-6868
INDEX Center for Canadian Irish Studies, 12 Centinel. See Bryan, George Centre for Public Inquiry, 330 Centre Party, 763 Ceoltóirí Chualann, 157, 172, 173 CERT (State Tourism Training Agency), 103 Cevallos Pedro de, 710 Chads, Henry Ducie, 376 Chamberlain, Neville, 378, 493 Chandler, Raymond Thornton, 169–170 Chaplin, Charlie, 280, 344, 890 Chapman, Henry, 398 Charbonnel, Armand de, 526 Charitable Irish Society, 286, 551 Charles, Fred, 214 Charles, Joseph, 594 Charles I, King of England, 548 Charles II, King of England, 806 Charles V, Emperor, 16–17 “Charles Sumner,” 389 Chase, Mary, 327 Chase, Samuel, 158, 160 Chase, William Merrit, 625, 628 Chatterton, Ruth, 120 Chelsea Girls, 646 Cherish the Ladies, 141, 170–172, 171, 644 and Ryan, 817 Cherish the Ladies, 170 Cherokees, 475 Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, 153 Chicago, 445–446 Great Chicago Fire of 1871, 446 Chicago Cubs, 564–565 Chicago Teachers’ Federation, 445–446 The Chieftains, 141, 157, 172–174 and V. Morrison, 617 The Children of Lir, 520 Chile, 538–539, 902 Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, 32–33, 72 www.abc-clio.com
Choctaw, 304, 383 Choice, 285 Chopin, Kate, 174–175 Christian Front, 210 Christian Solidarity Party (Ireland), 764 Christmas, Lee, 419 The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey, 527 Church of Ireland, 319 Cimarron, 278 Cincinnati, 717, 718 Circle of Friends, 413–414, 706, 707 Citizen, 596 Citizen Army, 467 Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, 124 Civil rights movement, 496–497 Cixous, Hélène, 578 Clan na Gael, 35, 191, 332, 648, 654 and Devoy, 234, 252, 253, 466, 672 in Oregon, 741 See also Friends of Irish Freedom; Irish Republican Brotherhood Clancy, Aoife, 172 Clancy, Liam, 175, 427 Clancy, Pat, 175 Clancy, Tom, 175 The Clancy Brothers, 175–177, 176, 604, 610, 643 Clark, Joe, 624 Clark, W. A., 232 Clarke, Austin, 518 Clarke, Mae, 147 Clarke, Thomas, 253, 467 Clay, Henry, 474, 475 Clayton, Adam, 895–897 Cleburne, Patrick Ronayne, 69, 177–179, 177 Cleveland, 717 Cleveland, Grover, 73, 492, 744, 848 Clinton, DeWitt, 295, 670, 879 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 180, 182 Clinton, William Jefferson, 29, 179–186, 180, 835 ABC-CLIO
935
and Adams, 651–652, 657 and Good Friday Agreement of 1998, 179–180, 180, 183–186, 545, 651 180 and Mitchell, 599 Clover Club, 286 Coca Cola Company, 499–500 Cochrane, Thomas, 19 Cockran, William Bourke, 186–188 Coddington, William, 806 Cody, Buffalo Bill, 164 Coe, John H., 130, 503–504 Coercion Bill, 510, 512 Coffey, Brian, 188–189 Coffin ships, 31 Coghlan, Eduardo Aquilio, 189–190, 522 Cohalan, Daniel F., 190–192, 191, 253 and De Valera, 191–192, 241, 654–655 and FOIF, 673–674 Cohan, George M., 148–149, 192–193, 639–640 Cohan, Josephine, 192 Colbert, Claudette, 892 Colbert, Con, 134 Cold Mountain, 694 Colegio Nacional (Argentina), 336 Coleman, Michael, 193–195 Colfax, Schuyler, 687 Coll, Brian, 634 Collins, Billy, 816–817 Collins, Jimmy, 85 Collins, John A., 699 Collins, Michael, 119, 372, 466 and De Valera, 241 and Gogarty, 373 and IRA, 467 Collins, Patrick, 349, 512, 553 Colombia, 195–196, 255 Colonia del Sacramento, 18 Colorado Irish Festival, 457 Colorado National Bank, 215 Colum, Mary, 196–198 Colum, Padraic, 197–198, 198–200, 520, 650 Columbiad magazine, 771 1-800-368-6868
936 INDEX Columbus, Christopher, visit to Galway, 16 Come and Get It, 115 Comedy, 639 Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, 176, 250 Comiskey, Brendan, 37 The Commitments, 269 Committee for the First Amendment, 439–440 Communist Party (Ireland), 764 Communist Party (U.S.), 342, 780, 781 “Como la Cigarra,” 908 “Cómo se pianta la vida!,” 523 The Company of Wolves, 481 The Company of Women, 375 Compass Records, 457 Compson, Betty, 119 Concorde, 726 Concordia University, 12 Condell, Charles, 19–20 Congo Railway, 163 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 122–123 Conkling, Roscoe, 72 Conlon, Gerry, 145, 238–239 Conn, William David, 200–202 Connolly, Frank, 330 Connolly, James (labor leader), 99–100, 342, 467, 650, 780–781 Connolly, James Brendan (athlete), 202–203, 202 Connolly, John (bishop), 168 Connolly, John (FBI agent), 137, 138 Connolly, Nial, 330 Connolly, Nora, 650 Connolly, Richard “Slippery Dick,” 894 Connolly, Seamus, 250 Connor, Roger, 85–86 Connors, Jimmy, 571, 572 Conscription Act of 1863, 433–434 Constantine, Emperor of Rome, 165 Conyngham, Constantine, 900 www.abc-clio.com
Coogan, Mary, 170–172 Cooke, John William, 203–205 Cooke, Juan Isaac, 203 Coolidge, Calvin, 589, 860 Coolmore stud farm, 422–424 Cooper, Gary, 398, 439, 490 Cooperation Ireland, 351 Coppola, Francis Ford, 438 Coquillard, Alexis, 686–687 Corbett, Jim, 875 Corbett, Young John III, 201 Corca Bascinn, 519 Corcoran, Michael, 48, 48, 671 Corder, F., 580 Cork Film Festival, 60, 104 Corn Laws, 380 Cornwallis, Charles, 57, 295 The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov, 576 Corrigan, Michael A., 405 Corson, Helen, 424 Cosmopolitan magazine, 341 Costa Rica, 206–207 Costello, Elvis, 610 Cotter, Wiliam, 20, 110, 207–208, 312 Coughlin, Charles, 34, 168, 208–210, 209 Country Blue Boys, 634 Country Flavour, 633–634 The Country Girl, 490 Couzens, James, 344 Cowan, Jorge, 19–20, 110 Cowell, Clarissa Dixon, 210 Cowell, Henry Dixon, 210–212, 211 Cox, Eleanor, 650 Coyle, James E., 45 Craig, John, 212–213 Crawford, Isabella Valancy, 10 Crawford, Joan, 128 Crawford, Julia, 221 Creaghe, John (Juan), 213–214 Creeks, 474 Creighton, Edward Charles, 215–216 Creighton, John Andrew, 216–217 Creighton University, 216, 217 ABC-CLIO
Cresey, Will M., 582 Cribbin, John, 112 Crist, Gainor Stephen, 262 Crockett, Davy, 837, 881 Croke, Thomas William, 274, 359 Croker, Richard, 33, 217–219, 218, 421, 492, 880 Cromwell, 399 Cromwell, Oliver, 166, 296 Cronin, Jim, 834 Cronin, John, 88 Crook, George, 108 Crosby, Bing, 219–221, 219, 264, 421–422, 490, 642 Crosby, Bob, 264 The Crossing, 694 Crouch, Frederick Nicholls, 221–222 Crozier, Francis, 319 Cruachan, 535 Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War, 160 The Cry of Oliver Hardy, 409 The Crying Game, 481–482 Cuba, and Irish immigrants, 15–16 Cuban Missile Crisis, 496 The Cuchulaine Cycle, 413 Cukor, George, 83 Cullen, Edward, 749 An Cumann Cabhrach, 683 Cumann na Gaedheal, 763 Cunningham, Larry, 634 Cuomo, Mario, 98 Curley, James Michael, 107, 222–223, 222, 553 and Saint Patrick’s Day parades, 825 and Tip O’Neill, 223, 736–737 See also The Last Hurrah Curran, John J., 600 Curran, Mary Doyle, 223–224 Cusack, Cyril, 224–225, 224 Cusack, Margaret Anna, 225–227 Cusack, Michael, 359 Cushing, Richard Cardinal, 287 Custer, George A., 870 Custer’s Last Rally, 625 1-800-368-6868
INDEX Custis, George Washington Parke, 911 The Customs and Habits of the Country of Buenos Ayres from the Year 1845, 522 Daggett, Thomas F., 103 Dahlen, Bill, 89, 393–394 Dáil Éireann, 191, 253, 256, 762 establishment of, 760 and IRA, 462 Dailey, Dan, 229–230 Daley, Richard J., 35, 446, 493, 495, 656 Daley, Richard M., 446 Dalí, Salvador, 907 Daltaí na Gaeilge, 515 Dalton, Timothy, 125 Daltrey, Roger, 141 Daly, (John) Augustin, 230–231 Daly, Eugene, 884 Daly, Marcus, 231–232 Dana (Rosemary Scallon), 45 Dance. See Flatley, Michael; Irish dancing in America; Riverdance The Dance Music of Ireland, 733, 734 Dancing at Lughnasa (play and film), 706, 707, 754 Dancing on Dangerous Ground, 141 Danehill, 423 d’Aubisson, Roberto, 288 Davendish, Frederick, 512 Davenport, Fanny, 230 David Copperfield (film), 83 Davin, Maurice, 359, 360 Davin, Nicholas Flood, 232–233, 738 Davis, Bette, 120 Davis, Jefferson, 69, 917 Davis, John W., 860 Davis, “Little Bob,” 667 Davis, Matthew, 878 Davis, Thomas, 136, 585, 595–596, 790–791 Davitt, Michael, 234–235, 511 and Devoy, 252, 672 www.abc-clio.com
and Gaelic Athletic Association, 359 and Land League and Ladies’ Land League, 509, 510, 511–512 and New Departure, 466, 511, 672 “The Day We Got Our Own Back,” 113 Day, Dennis, 235–236, 642 Day-Lewis, Cecil, 236 Day-Lewis, Daniel, 145, 236–239, 238, 754 and Sheridan, 856, 857 De Chastelain, John, 239–240 De Deannen, 173 De Lesseps, Ferdinand, 749 de Paor, Padraig, 111 De Sapio, Carmine G., 880 De Valera, Eamon, 240–243, 240, 674 and American Irish Foundation, 53 and Bulfin, 134 and Cohalan and Devoy, 191–192, 241, 253 declaration of end of Irish Civil War, 760 and Eire Society of Boston, 287 and formation of 26-county state, 763 and Gogarty, 373 and Gray, 378–379 and IRA, 463 and Spellman, 872 visit to America, 654–655 visit to Charleston, 869 visit to Oregon, 742 “The Dead” (short story), 114 The Dead (film), 437, 442, 559, 715, 753 Deane, Santiago, 319 Deans, Mickey, 365 Death of a Naturalist, 408 Death penalty, 351 December Bride, 413–414 Declaration of Independence, 56, 158 Defenders, 315 Delahanty, Ed, 87 Delaney, Juan José, 523 Delanty, Greg, 243–244, 606 ABC-CLIO
937
Delaware, 245–246 Delaware and Raritan Canal, 153–154 Delaware tribe, 757 Delcasse, Carlos, 567 DeLeon, Daniel, 766 Democratic Left party (Ireland), 763 Democratic Party, and Irish Americans, 31, 35–36, 43 Democratic Unionist Party, 601 Dempsey, George T., 246–247 Dempsey, Jack, 247–249, 247, 891 Denieffe, Joseph, 330 Denis O’Sullivan Medal, 746 Denstone, W. H., 776 dePaola, Tomie, 520 Depp, Johnny, 534 “Dermot Astore,” 221 Derrane, George, 249 Derrane, Joe, 249–250 Desbrisay, Thomas, 841 Descent to the Dead, 478 Description of the Realm of Chile, 716 Desert King, 423 The Deserted Village, 10 Desire Under the Elms, 442 Despard, Edward Marcus, 96 Detroit, 591 Devereux, John, 19, 195, 250–252, 472, 901 The Devil and Daniel Webster, 443 The Devil’s Disciple, 855 Devlin, Anne, 539 Devlin, Barry, 782 Devlin, Bernadette, 656 Devlin, Denis, 188, 189 Devlin, James, 85 Devoy, John, 35, 191, 252–253, 252, 648–649 and Davitt, 234 and De Valera, 191–192, 241, 253 and FOIF, 673–674 and Ford, 349 and IRB, 466 and Irish press, 772 1-800-368-6868
938 INDEX Devoy, John (continued) and Land League, 511 and New Departure, 511, 672 in New York City, 672 Dewey, George, 277 DeWitt, Justus, 249 The Dial, 650 Dial M for Murder, 490 Diamond, Patrick J., 318 Dickinson, Charles, 474 Dickinson, John, 130–131, 245 Dickson, William, 317 Dillon, John Stephen, 255, 273–274, 789, 790 Dillon, Patrick Joseph, 254–255, 273, 745, 775 and Falkland Island Catholics, 318 Dillon, Roisin, 172 Dineen, Joseph, 223 Dineen, Michael, 274, 775 Dinkins, David, 826 Dinsmoor, Robert, 840 Dinsmore, James, 662 Dinty Moore’s stew, 582, 583 Diplomatic relations, Irish–Latin American, 255–257 Dobbs, Arthur, 685 Dodge, Mabel, 421 Doheny, Michael, 648 in New York City, 672 Doherty, Maureen, 170–171 Dolan, Felix, 250 Dom Pedro I, Emperor of Brazil, 207, 208 Domestic servants, Irish, 257–260 in New Orleans, 668 in New York City, 673 and NINA, 680–681 Dominicans, 25 Donahey, George Washington, 69 Donahoe, Patrick, 551–552, 772 Donahoe’s Magazine, 771 Donahue, Peter, 829 Donaldson, John, 874 Dongan, John, 260 Dongan, Thomas, 28, 260–261, 669–670 www.abc-clio.com
Dongan’s Charter, 260 Donleavy, J. P., 261–263, 262 Donnelly, Bernard, 594 The Donnellys, 5–6, 11 Donovan, Gerard, 263–264 Donovan, Nicholas, 476 Donovan, T., 110 Donovan, William, 502 Dooley, Martin J., 276–278 Door into the Dark, 408 Dorr, Noel, 679 Dorr, Thomas Wilson, 807 Dorsey, Jimmy, 264, 265, 642 Dorsey, Thomas Francis “Tommy,” 264–265, 265, 642 Dorticós, Osvaldo, 91 Douglas, Stephen A., 121, 445 Douglass, David, 410 Douglass, Frederick, 265–268, 266, 298, 299 and Irish abolitionists, 699 and O’Connell, 267, 697–698 and temperance movement, 54 and Webb, 914, 915 Dowling, John, 135 Dowling, Patricio, 320 Downey, Morton, 268–269 Downey, Morton, Jr., 269 Downstream, 504 Doyle, Roddy, 269–270 Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, 439 Dr. Salt, 264 Dracula, 873 Draft Riots, 32, 50, 270–273, 271 Boston, 552 and Hughes, 434 Drama Centre, Camden, 124 Dreaming of America, 521 Dred Scott decision, 49 Dresden Affair, 23, 256, 273–275, 312, 888 and Dillon, 255, 273 and Gaughren, 367–368 Dressen, Charlie, 730 Dresser, Louise, 128 Drew, John, 231 Dropkick Murphys, 535 Drummond, Thomas, 315 Drysdale, John, 274 An Duanaire, 505 ABC-CLIO
Duane, James, 670 Duane, William John, 196 Dublin in Brass, 268 Dublin Theatre Festival, 60, 104 Dublin Trilogy, 328 Dubliners, 483 The Dubliners (band), 176–177, 534 DuBois, W. E. B., 259 Dubuque, Iowa, 450 Dudley, Joseph, 628 Dufau, Eduardo, 554 Duffy, Charles Gavan, 585, 595–596, 790 Duffy, Hugh, 86, 86 Duggan, Thomas, 164, 275–276 Dulany, Daniel, Jr., 158 Dunbar, Adrian, 99–100 Dunne, Colin, 141 Dunne, Finley Peter, 276–278, 277, 582–583 Dunne, Irene Marie, 278–279, 279 DuPont family, 245 Dupré, Marcel, 401 Durbin, Deanna, 363 Durcan, Paul, 279–281 Durocher, Leo, 89, 394, 730 Duty Free Shoppers, 329 Duveneck, Frank, 625 Dylan, Bob, 280, 610 Each Man in His Time, 908, 909 Eakins, Thomas, 425 Earle, Steve, 535 East Coast music, 548 Easter Rising (1916), 35, 760 and Bulfin, 134, 135 and Casement, 162, 163 and De Valera, 241 and Devoy, 253 and IRA, 462 and Irish Americans, 654 and MacDonagh, 135, 391 See also Irish Republican Brotherhood Eaton, John (brother of Timothy), 283 Eaton, John (son of Timothy), 284 1-800-368-6868
INDEX Eaton, Robert (brother of Timothy), 283 Eaton, Robert Young (nephew of Timothy), 284 Eaton, Timothy E., 283–284 The Echoes of the Lakes, 221 Écriture féminine, 578 Ecuador, 255, 921–922 The Edge. See Evans, Dave “The Edge” The Edge of Sadness, 701 Edgeworth, Maria, 339 Edison, Charles, 449 Edison film studio, 369, 449 Edison Illuminating Company, 344 Egan, Desmond, 285–286 Egan, Frank W., 256 Egan, Patrick, 24 Egan, Séamus, 604–605 Egan, Siobhan, 170–172 Eggers, Frank Hague, 667 Eguren, Alicia Graciana, 204 Eh Joe, 535 Eileen, 413 The Eire Society of Boston, 286–288 Éire-Ireland, 788 Eisenhower, Dwight, 91, 562, 563, 878 appointment of Brennan, 116 El Salvador, 288–289 Irish support for human rights groups, 257 Elephant Boy, 338 Eliot, T. S., 611, 612 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 166 Elizabeth II, Queen of United Kingdom, 810 Elliot, Elisabeth, 206 Ellis Island, 673 Ellman, Richard David, 289–290, 289 Elortondo, Federico, 70 Emerald Isle Immigration Center, 665 The Emigrant, 10 Emigration, 290–293 travel sequence within Ireland and beyond, 887–888 Emmet, John Patten, 293–295, 662 www.abc-clio.com
Emmet, Robert, 293, 295, 539 Iowa town named for, 451 and Mulvany, 625 statues of, 369, 827, 832 and T. Moore, 614 Emmet, Thomas Addis (father of John), 293, 295–296, 295, 828 in New York, 295–296, 670 Emmet, Thomas Addis (son of John), 294 Emmet Lawler, 889 Emmetsburg, Iowa, 451 Emmett, Daniel Decatur, 638 Engelhard, Charles, 422 England, John, 369, 869 English, James T., 195 English Triple Crown, 422 Enis, Thaddeus, 751 Erie Canal, 151, 154, 670, 717 Eriksson, Leif, 676 “Erin! The Tear and Smile in Thine Eyes,” 614 Eris (Ayers), William, 27–28 Escalada, Mariano J., 318 Esposito, Michele, 746 Estudios, 357 Ethnic and race relations Irish and African Americans, 296–300 Irish and Chinese, 830 Irish and French Canadians, 300–302. See also Quebec City Irish and indigenous peoples, 302–305, 311 Irish and Italians, 306–309 Irish and Latinos, 309–312 European Union, 350, 351 Evans, Dave “The Edge,” 895–897 Evans, Dick, 895, 896 Everything That Rises Must Converge, 704 Excalibur, 144, 413, 481, 660 Excess Profits Act, 589 Fabian Society, 854 Facing the Music, 386 Faction fighting, 313–316 ABC-CLIO
939
Facts of Life, 426 Fagnano, José, 318 Fahy, Anthony Dominic, 21, 25, 68, 254, 316–317, 632 and C. O’Gorman, 316, 709 and Falkland Island Catholics, 318 and Thomas Armstrong, 71 Fahy Boys, 434 Fahy Institute, 434 Fáilte Ireland, 105 A Fairy Tale of New York, 262 Falkland/Malvinas Islands, 317–320 Falkland/Malvinas War, 320 A Family Apart, 521 Far and Away, 372, 722–723 Far from the Shamrock Shore, 605 Farewell, My Lovely, 169 Farley, James Aloysius, 320–322, 321 Farley, John Murphy, 405 Farmer, William, 317 Farrel, Juan and Tomás, 16 Farrell, Edelmiro Juan, 322–323 Farrell, Eileen, 323–324, 323 Farrow, John, 324 Farrow, Mia, 324–326, 325 Fat City, 441 Faulkner, William, 835 Fay, Francis Anthony “Frank,” 326–327 Fay, Martin, 173 Fay, Sigourney, 335 Federación Obrera Regional Argentina (FORA), 214 Federal Theatre Project, 327–329 poster, 327 See also Abbey Theatre, Dublin Feeney, Bernard, 775–776 Feeney, Charles “Chuck,” 329–330 Feet of Flames, 340 Feis Ceoil, 568, 746, 753 Feis Éireann. See Irish Festival Singers Fenian Ram, 253, 417 Fenians, 330–332, 465 1-800-368-6868
940 INDEX Fenians (continued) banner, 331 in Canada, 8, 9, 64 Canadian invasion attempts, 332, 672, 729, 743, 882 and Chicago Saint Patrick’s Day parade, 825 and Davitt, 234 and Devoy, 252 founding of, 648 and Holland, 417 and IRB, 466 and Mitchel, 597, 650 and O’Mahony, 728–729 and O’Reilly, 743 in Tennessee, 881–882 Fenwick, Benedict, 544 Ferguson, Patrick, 836 Ferrer, Mel, 755 Festival of American Folklife, 604 Festival of Britain, 59 Fianna, 330, 728 Fianna, 776 Fianna Éireann, 134 Fianna Fáil, 242, 463, 760, 761, 763 campaign poster, 761 and De Valera, 241 dominance of, 764 similarity to Fine Gael, 760, 762, 763 The Field, 400–401, 754, 856 Field, Stephen, 122 Field, Thomas, 17, 67, 110, 750 Field Day Publishing, 409 Field Day Theatre, 409, 413 Field hockey, 436–437 Field of Honor, 143 Figgis, Mike, 782 The Fighting 69th, 692 Fillmore, Millard, 403, 549 Fin M’Coul: The Giant of Knockmany Hill, 520 Final Payments, 374 Fine Gael, 760, 761, 763, 764 similarity to Fianna Fáil, 760, 762, 763 Finlay, Samuel, 213 Finnegans Wake, 199, 483 The Firebird, 877 Firing Line, 133 Firpo, Luis Angel, 248 www.abc-clio.com
First Great Awakening, 213 First National Bank of Boston, 155 First National Bank of Omaha, 215 First Nations, 303, 304. See also Native Americans Fisher, Carrie, 805 Fisher, Eddie, 805 Fisher, José, 503 Fisher, Todd Emmanuel, 805 Fishing the Sloe-Black River, 558 Fitchburg (Massachusetts) Irish Festival, 458 Fitzgerald, Barry, 220, 332–333 Fitzgerald, Edward Mary, 70, 539 and T. Moore, 614 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 93, 333–336, 334, 673 Fitzgerald, Frank, 591 FitzGerald, Garret, 651 Fitzgerald, John (Washington’s aide-de-camp), 903 Fitzgerald, John Francis “Honey Fitz” (Kennedy forebear) 107, 492, 553 Fitzgerald, Miguel, 319–320 Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre, 334, 335–336 Fitzpatrick, John Bernard, 155, 407, 553 Fitzpatrick, Thomas B., 898 Fitzsimons, Guillermo, 336 FitzSimons, Juan, 567 Fitzsimons, Patrick, 336 Fitzsimons, Santiago, 336 Five Kellys, 487 Flaget, Benedict Joseph, 498 Flaherty, Robert J., 336–338, 337 Flanagan, Hallie, 327–328 Flanagan, Thomas, 338–340 Flanagin, Harris, 69 Flannery, Edmund, 435, 776 Flannery, Michael, 683, 684, 826 Flatley, Michael, 141, 340, 453, 455 Flaxseed, 460–461 Fleadh Cheoil, 176 Fleischmann, Aloys, 733–734 ABC-CLIO
Fleming, Michael A., 472 Fleming, Patrick, 472 Fleming, Thomas J., 340–342 Flemmi, Steve, 137, 138 Fleury, Louis, 900 Der Fliegende Hollander, 343 “The Flitting,” 579 Flood, Fergus, 330 Flood, James C., 829–830 Flora of Costa Rica, 206 The Flower Master, 578, 579 The Flying Swans, 200 Flynn, Dennis T., 722 Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 342–343, 673 Flynn, Errol, 909 Flynn, Raymond L., 107 Fogelson, Elijah “Buddy,” 367 Fógra Fáilte, 104 FOIF. See Friends of Irish Freedom Foley, Allan James, 343 Foley, Frank, 775 Foley, Gerald, 435, 436, 632, 775 Foley, Thomas (U.S. congressman), 653 Foley, Tom (local New York politician), 859 Foli, Signor. See Foley, Allan James For Every Child, 528 For Me and My Gal, 487 Foran, James, 318 Ford, Edsel, 345 Ford, Henry, 343–346, 591 Ford, Henry II, 345 Ford, John, 144, 223, 333, 346–348, 545–546, 856 and Hayes, 404 The Last Hurrah, 223, 553, 692–693, 701 and Wayne, 347, 909 Ford, Patrick, 234–235, 348–350, 348, 511, 648, 772 Ford, Robert, 476 Fordham University, 670–671 Foreign policy, Irish, 350–352 Forest Flower, 422 Forrest, Edwin, 678 Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 881 Forster, Nick, 693 1-800-368-6868
INDEX Förster, Terese, 411 Forty Carats, 488 Foster, August John, 354 Foster, Stephen Collins, 352–354, 353, 640–641 and T. Moore, 615, 640 Foster, Vere Henry Louis, 354–356 “Four Horsemen.” See Carey, Hugh; Kennedy, Edward (Ted); Moynihan, Daniel Patrick; O’Neill, Thomas P. “Tip” (politician) The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 449 Fourstar’s Allstar, 422 Franciscans, 17, 25 Franklin, Benjamin, 130 and the Carrolls, 158, 160–161 Fraser, Paula, 99, 100 Frawley, William, 834 The Fred Allen Show, 46 Frederick, Pauline, 128 Freed, Arthur, 363 Freedman’s Journal, 297 Freeman’s Journal (Ireland), 573 Freeman’s Journal (New York), 430, 771–772 French, Daniel Chester, 553 French and Indian War, 479 French-Canadians, 300–302, 738. See also Quebec City Frick, Henry Clay, 588 Fricker, Brenda, 237, 856 Friel, Brian, 156, 559, 660 Friendly Brothers of Ireland, 868 Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, 849, 868 Friends of Ireland, 651, 653, 667 Friends of Irish Freedom (FOIF), 191, 412, 649 and Cohalan, 673–674 and Devoy, 673–674 and Flannery, 684 Friends of Sinn Féin, 465, 684 From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills, 905 Frondizi, Arturo, 205 www.abc-clio.com
The Front Page, 691 Fulbright, William, 181 Fulton, Robert, 296, 416–417 Furlong, Guillermo, 356–357 Gable, Clark, 129, 490 Gaceta Mercantil, 472 Gaelcheoil Tiré, 635 Gaelic. See Language, the Irish Gaelic American, 253, 648–649, 672, 772 Gaelic Athletic Association, 359–361, 434, 673 Gaelic League, 514–515, 654 in Argentina, 135, 136, 436 and Casement, 162 and Hyde, 514 and P. Colum, 199 Gaelic Symphony op. 32, 92–93 Gaeltachtaí, 513, 514 Gahan, Elisa Murphy, 630 Gaiety Theatre, 535, 754 Galbreath, John, 422 Galindo, Juan, 96, 418 Gallagher, Jim, 62 Gallagher, Tess, 361–362 Gallo, Vincent, 438 Galloway, Joseph, 130 Galway Oyster Festival, 60 The Gangs of New York, 238, 545 Gannon, Michael, 708 An Gaodhal/The Gael, 514 Garbo, Greta, 120, 128 Garcia, Manuel, 402 García Márquez, Gabriel, 910 Gardner, Alexander, 747 Gardner, Ava, 490 Garfield, James, 72 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 1130 The Garies and Their Friends, 299 Garland, John, 716 Garland, Judy, 362–366, 487, 640 Garland, Peter, 789 Garner, John Nance, 321 Garrett, Pat, 102, 103 Garrison, William Lloyd and abolitionism, 41, 699 anti-Catholicism of, 42 and Douglass, 266 and Mott, 618 ABC-CLIO
941
and P. Ford, 348 and Theobald, 42, 555 and Webb, 914 See also Abolitionism; Slavery Garson, Greer, 366–367 Gartland, Francis X., 369 Gartland, Peter A., 274 Garvey, Marcus, 299 Gatain, Brother, 687 Gaughren, Matthew, 274, 367–368 Gavin, Frankie, 250 Gaynor, James, 311, 899 Gelb, Charlie, 337 Geminiani, Francesco, 157 The General, 373 General Brown Club, 254, 745–746 General Motors, 345 Gentleman of the Press, 442–443 Gentleman’s Agreement, 755 George, Henry, 234–235, 350, 511–512 George, Terry, 857 Georgetown University, 549 Georgia, 368–369 Gerulaitis, Vitas, 571 Gibbons, Cardinal, 744 Gibbons, Cedric, 369–370 Gibbs, James, 414 Gibran, Kahlil, 390 Gilbert, Humphrey, 676 Gilbert, Mrs. George, 230, 231 Gill, Juan B., 525, 751 Gill, Stanislaus, 435 Gillespie, Neal, 687 Gills, William, 582 Gilmore, Patrick Sarsfield, 370–372, 370 Gilmour, William R., 164 The Ginger Man (film), 263 The Ginger Man (novel), 262 The Ginger Man (play), 398–399 Gingrich, Newt, 183 Ginnell, Laurence, 24, 256 Ginsberg, Allen, 280 Girodias, Maurice, 262 Givarola, Guillermo, 554 “Give My Regards to Broadway,” 193, 640 Gladness, 422 1-800-368-6868
942 INDEX Gladstone, William, 509 and Home Rule, 332 on Irish World and Land League, 349 and Kilmainham Treaty, 234, 349, 512 Gleason, Jackie, 372 and Carney, 156 Gleason, Kid, 392–393 Gleeson, Brendan, 372–373 A Glimpse of America, 873 “Gloria,” 616 Glover, Anne, 550 Gmelch, Sharon and George, 469, 471 G-men, 489 God and Man at Yale, 133 Gogarty, Oliver St. John, 373–374 Going My Way, 220, 333, 560 Going to Patchogue, 575–576 Goldbeck, Willis, 119 Golden, Donald, 141, 455 The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived before Achilles, 520 Goldsmith, Oliver, 10 Goldsmith, Oliver Jr., 10 Goldsmith Press, 285 Goldwater, Barry, 785 Goldwyn, Sam, 115 Gonne, Maud, 136, 892 and Yeats, 925 Good Friday Agreement of 1998, 36, 242, 350–351 and Clinton, 179–180, 180, 183–186, 545, 651 and De Chastelain, 239–240 and Holkeri, 416 and Mitchell, 545, 599 and support of Ancient Order of Hibernians (U.S.), 62 See also Mitchell, George; Mitchell Principles, The; Northern Ireland peace process A Good Man Is Hard to Find, 703–704 The Good Shepherd, 341 Goodbye Mr. Chips, 366 Goose Quill Papers, 389 www.abc-clio.com
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 786 Gordon, Mary, 374–375 Gordon, Robert, 207, 208 Gore, Albert, 181–182 Gore, Robert, 24, 255–256, 375–376 Gore, William J., 375–376 An Gorta Mhór. See Great Famine Gould, Jay, 506 The Government of the Tongue, 408, 409 The Governor and J. J., 229 Gowen, Franklin B., 603–604 Grace, John P., 869 Grace, Seamus, 196 Grace, William Russell, 376–378, 377, 492, 672 Graham, Len, 173 Graham, Martha, 755 Graham, Robert, 438 Graham, Sheilah, 336 Gran Colombia, 195, 749 El Gran Senor, 423 Grand Canal (Dublin), 152 Grand Hotel, 370 Grand National Irish Fair and Music Festival (Pasadena, California), 458 Granny’s Wonderful Chair, 520 Grant, Ulysses S., 72, 594, 687, 837, 848 and Mitchel, 598 The Grapes of Wrath, 346, 347 Grattan, Henry, 648, 695 The Grave, 521 Gray, David (American envoy to Ireland), 242, 378–379 Great Britain, Irish immigrants to, 15, 291, 292 The Great Cloak, 606 Great Famine, 47, 291, 379–385 Hughes on, 432–433 and immigrants to Baltimore, 79 and immigrants to Boston, 106 and immigrants to Canada, 5–6, 291, 383–384, 663 ABC-CLIO
and immigrants to Kentucky, 498 and immigrants to U.S., 30–31, 291, 383–394, 552 and Jeanie Johnston, 476–477 and Mitchel, 596 The Great Gatsby (novel), 334, 335 The Great Gatsby (1926 film), 119 Great Irish Address of 1841, 267 Great Irish Fair (Brooklyn, New York), 459 The Great Redeemer, 128 Great River, 420 Great Society, 66, 493 Great Wagon Road, 847 The Great Wheel of Life. See Rotha Mór an tSaoil Greeley, Horace, 355 Green Cross, 683 The Green Fields of America, 644 The Green Lion, 391–392 Green Party (Ireland), 764 Greene, Graham, 609 Greene, Martin, 111 Greenfields of America, 141, 604–605 Greeting to Our Friends in Brazil, 280–281 Gregory, Augusta, 199, 925 Grenna, Rachael Kitzinger, 385 Grennan, Eamon, 385–386 Grenville, Richard, 28 Grierson, John, 337–338 Griffin, Gerald, 339 Griffith, Arthur, 136, 199, 253 and Gogarty, 373 Griffith, D. W., 908–909 Griffith, Nanci, 141 The Grifters, 437 Grosse Ile, 386–387, 779 monument to Irish immigrants, 5 quarantine station and mass graves, 7 The Group, 565–566 Guaraní, 750, 751 1-800-368-6868
INDEX Guardia Restauradora, 91 Guardo, Ricardo, 204 Guerin, Veronica, 99 Guest, Raymond, 422 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 205, 387–389 Guildford Four, 145, 238–239 Guinell, Laurence, 435 Guiness, Walter Edward, 419 Guiney, Louise Imogene, 389–390, 389 Guiney, Patrick R., 552 Gulf Oil, 587–588 Gumm Sisters, 363 The Gunfighter, 755 Gusfield, Joseph R., 55 Guthrie, Woody, 610 Gutierrez, Uladislao, 708–709 Gwin, William, 121, 122 Hackett, Francis, 391–392, 392 Hague, Frank, 667 Hahn, Michael, 371 Haines, Connie, 265 Hale, Samuel, 274 Haley, Margaret, 445–446 Hall, A. Oakey, 894 Hall, Charles M., 587 Hallam, Lewis, Jr., 410–411 Hallett, Stephen, 472, 774 Hamilton, Diane, 175 Hamilton, Samuel, 319 Hamlin, Hannibal, 545 Hammett, Dashiell, 169, 439 Hancock, Ian, 470 The Handbook of the River Plate, 622 Hanlon, Mrs., 472 Hanlon, Ned, 34, 87, 392–394 and dynasty of baseball managers, 88–89, 392–393 The Hard Road to Klondike, 32, 532 Hard Year Blues, 693–694 Hardee, William J., 178, 179 Harding, Warren G., 241, 588–589,588, 919 Hardy, Oliver, 77, 280, 559, 560 Harnett, Michael, 285 www.abc-clio.com
Harnett, Willliam Michael, 394–395 Harold and Maude, 225 Harper, Jared Vincent, 471 Harper’s Weekly, 880, 894 Harrat, John, 857 Harrigan, Edward (Ned), 192, 395–397, 639, 673 Harriman, W. Averell, 619 Harris, Cassandra, 124, 125, 126–127 Harris, Richard, 372, 398–401, 754, 856 Harris, Sam, 193 Harrison, Benjamin, 848 Harrison, Frank Llewellyn, 401–402 Harrod, James, 498 Harry and Tonto, 156 Hart, Tony, 395–397, 639, 673 Hart, William, 75–76, 76 Harte, James P., 434, 435 Hartnett, Michael, 279, 518 Harvey, 327 Haskard, Cosmo, 319 Hassam, Childe, 628 Haughery, Margaret, 668–669 Haughey, Charles, 246, 651 Haughton, James, 699, 915 “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” 364 Havertown, Pennsylvania, 759 Hawks, Howard, 115 Hayes, Catherine, 221, 402–403 Hayes, Helen, 403–404 Hayes, John, 472 Hayes, Patrick Joseph (Archbishop), 404–406, 405, 871 Hayes, Rutherford B., 72 Haymarket Riot (1886), 506, 765, 766 H. D., 611, 612 Healy, James Augustine, 407 Healy, Michael Morris, 406–407 406–407 children of, 406–407 Healy, Patrick Francis, 407 Healy, Tim, 274 Heaney, Joe, 817 Heaney, Seamus, 407–409, 578, 579 and Muldoon, 621 ABC-CLIO
943
Hearst, William Randolph, 860 Heart of Erin, 413 The Heart of the Antarctic, 853 Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, 440–441 Hedge schools, 167 Heffernan, Michael, 409–410 Heley-Hutchinson, John Luke, 377 Hemingway, Ernest, 93 Hempel, Edouard, 242 Heneghan, James, 521 Hennessey, David, 307 Hennesy, James, 776 Henry, Dermot, 817 Henry, John, 410–411 Henry, Patrick, 835 Herbert, Victor August, 411–413, 412, 642 Herron, Mark, 365 Hesburgh, Theodore M., 688 Heston, Charlton, 398 Hewetson, James, 20, 882 Hewson, Paul “Bono,” 610, 895–897 Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society, 267 Hibernian Benevolent Society, 881 Hibernian Society, 849 Hibernian Society of Baltimore, 79 Hibernian Society of Charleston, 868–869 Hibernian Society of Savannah, 368–369, 824–825 Hibernian-Argentine Review, 776 Higgins, James, 807–808 High Noon, 490 High Society, 220, 221 The Hillbillies, 634 Hindemith, Paul, 401 Hinds, Ciarán, 413–414 Hoban, James, 414–415, 910, 911 Hoban, Michael, 600 Hobsbaum, Philip, 408 Hoctor, P. T., 360 Hodgins, Jack, 5–6, 11, 12, 415–416 Hodgkinson, John, 411 1-800-368-6868
944 INDEX Hoffa, Jimmy, 495 Hoffman, John T., 894 Hogan, Dan, 69–70 Holbrooke, Richard, 183 Holiday, 82 Holkeri, Harri, 239, 416 Holland, John Phillip, 253, 416–418, 417 Holland VI, 417–418 Hollywood Ten, 439–440 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 744 Holy Ghost Fathers, 25, 112 Home Rule, 332, 349–350, 466–467. See also Irish nationalism Honduras. See British Honduras The Honeymooners, 156, 372 Hood, John Bell, 179 Hooker, Joseph, 179 Hoover, Herbert, 34, 589, 861 and Coughlin, 209 Hope, Bob, 220 Horan, Timothy, 257, 630 Horan, Winifred, 171–172 Horgan, Paul George Vincent O’Shaughnessy, 419–421 Horn, Charles E., 678 Hornsby, Rogers, 564 “Horrors of an Emigrant Ship,” 689 Horse racing, 421–424 Hot Rize, 693 Hough, Emerson, 103 Houlihan, John Francis, 831 The House in Clewe Street, 516 House Un-American Activities Committee, 439–440, 756. See also McCarthy, Joseph (politician) Houston, Sam, 837, 881, 883 Hovenden, Thomas, 424–425 The Last Moments of John Brown, 424, 425 How Green Was My Valley, 346, 347 and O’Hara, 712, 713 How to Be Poor, 326 Howard, Maureen, 426–427 Howard, Trevor, 399 Howe, Fanny Quincy, 427–430 www.abc-clio.com
Howe, Julia Ward, 744 Howe, Louis, 321 Howe, Molly, 427 Howe, Susan, 427 Howells, William Dean, 278 Howlin’ Wolf, 280 Huggins, Miller, 88–89, 392–393, 394 Hughes, Charles Evans, 588, 918 Hughes, John (Archbishop), 382, 430–434, 430, 670–671, 822 and Freeman’s Journal, 771–772 and McGee, 433, 650 and Mitchel, 597, 650 Hughes, Mary Angela, 432 Hughes, Ted, 409 Hume, John, 36, 183–184, 601, 620, 651 Humphrey, Hubert, 494, 496 Hunt, Rex, 320 Hunter, John, 286 Hurd, Peter, 420 Hurley, Julián, 356 Hurling in Argentina, 434–437 and W. Bulfin, 136, 434 The Huron Chief, 10 Hussein, Saddam, 351 The Hustler, 372 Huston, Anjelica, 437–438, 441–442 Huston, John, 399, 437, 438–442, 559 Huston, Tony, 442 Huston, Walter, 129, 439, 442–443 Hutchinson, Anne and William, 806 Hutchinson, Thomas J., 24, 256, 522, 776 Hutton, Alexander Watson, 866 Hy Brasil, 27 Hyde, Douglas, 136, 142, 514 I Remember Mama, 279 I’d Do It Again, 223 Ibanez, Vincente Blasco, 449 Ibarruri, Delores, 342 Ibsen, Henrik, 855 The Iceman Cometh, 732 Ignis, 528 ABC-CLIO
Illinois, 445–447 An Illustrated History of Ireland, 226 Imbert, Enrique Anderson, 523 Immigration Act of 1990, 615–616 IMP Company, 75, 118 In America, 783, 857 “In Bohemia,” 744 In Hoc Signo Vinces, 424–425 In the Name of the Father, 145, 237, 238–239, 238, 857 Indentured servants in Boston, 106 and canal building, 151–152 in Maryland, 79, 245 Independencia Americana, 705 Independent International Commission on Decommissioning, 239 Indiana, 447–448 Indigenous peoples, 302–305, 311. See also Cherokees; First Nations; Guaraní; Innu; Inuit; Iroquois; Métis; Micmac; Mohawks; Native Americans Industrial Britain, 337–338 Industrial Workers of the World, 34, 342, 766 The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 543 The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 543 The Informer, 346–347 El Inglés de los Güesos, 522, 524 Ingram, Rex, 448–450 Innu, 675–676 Inoculation, 711 Instituto de Cultura Hispánica, 356 International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, 123 International Eucharistic Congress, 406 1-800-368-6868
INDEX International League of Women Composers, 726 Interrupted Melody, 323 Into the West, 145, 856 Intruder in the Dust, 129 Inuit, 675–676 La Invención de América, 709 The Invention of the World, 5–6, 11, 12, 415 Iowa, 450–451 IRA. See Irish Republican Army Iran-Contra scandal, 786–787 Iraq, 351 IRB. See Irish Republican Brotherhood Ireland and American culture, 269–270, 280 annual presentation by Taoiseach of bowl of shamrock to U.S. president, 3 and Argentina, 3 and Bolivia, 3 and Brazil, 3 and Canada, 3 and Catholic CounterReformation, 16–17 contemporary relations with U.S., 37–38 division of (1921), 167 and Douglass, 266–268 and European Union, 350, 351–352 foreign policy, 350–352 350–352 and multiculturalism, 13, 37 peacekeepers, 351 Protestant settlement in, 166–167 public works (Famine period), 380 trade relations with Latin America, 24 Ireland: A Study in Nationalism, 391 Ireland, John, 451–453, 452, 514 Ireland Funds, 53 Ireland of the Welcomes, 104 www.abc-clio.com
Irish beginnings of immigration to North America, 28 and enlistment in British army, 18 as sailors on colonial expeditions to Americas, 27–28 Irish Aid Program (IAP), 352 Irish All-Stars, 249 Irish Amateur Athletic Association, 360 Irish America magazine, 771, 772 Irish American, 772 772 Irish American Caucus, 185 Irish American Unity Conference (IAUC), 62 Irish Americans and American Civil War, 41, 43–44, 47–51, 671–672 and American West, 32 antagonism toward Chinese immigrants, 32–33 and anti-Catholicism, 42 in the arts, 34 assimilation of, 32–36, 432 attitudes toward slavery and abolitionism, 41–44, 297–298 and canal building, 150–155, 368, 447 and Catholicism, 168 and city politics, 33, 35, 106–107 and Democratic Party, 43 and Gaelic sports, 360 and Irish nationalism, 35, 36, 191–192, 348–350 and Kennedy’s status as president, 35, 107, 168, 496, 497, 505 and labor movement, 32 “lace curtain,” 32 and Native Americans, 302–305 and nativism, 30 “New Irish” (1980s), 36–37 and O’Connell’s address, 30 population exceeding Ireland’s, 27 ABC-CLIO
945
poverty and agitation among, 29–30 and race riots in Illinois, 446–447 relations with African Americans, 41–42, 50, 85, 267–268, 272, 296–300 settlements in Mexican Texas, 20 sponsorship and immigration, 514 and Wild West, 304–305 See also Domestic servants, Irish Irish Argentine, 135, 521–523, 775–776 Irish Argentines assimilation to Argentine culture, 25–26 and Coghlan’s genealogical work, 189–190 commercial activities, 21, 23 and Irish nationalism, 23–24 as landlords and tenants, 22–23 Peile emigration, 21–22 Irish Benevolent Society, 738 Irish Brazilians, 207–208 Irish brigades (American Civil War), 49–50, 292, 446, 550, 587, 671, 758, 881. See also Irish Legion; San Patricios Brigade Irish Canadian Cultural Association of New Brunswick, 664 Irish Canadians and concept of peaceable kingdom, 10–13 demographic decline of, 12 and expansion into wilderness, 9 and First Nations, 303, 304 and French Canadians, 300–302, 738. See also Quebec City and Irish nationalism, 8–9 and Newfoundland, 7 19th-century literature, 10 and Ontario, 7–8 1-800-368-6868
946 INDEX Irish Canadians (continued) and organized labor, 7 and Quebec, 8 20th-century literature, 11–13 Irish Center of Pittsburgh Feis, 459 Irish Centre for European Law, 810 Irish Christian Brothers, 416 Irish Citizen, 598, 650 Irish Civil War (1922–1923), 760 and Irish immigration to Argentina, 23 Irish coffee, 832 Irish Connections Festival, 457 Irish Cultural Festival (Cleveland, Ohio), 459 Irish Culture Centre of New England, 457 Irish Dance World Championships, 455 Irish Dancing Commission, 454 Irish dancing in America, 453–455, 453 Irish Dancing Teachers Association of North America, 454, 455 Irish Days (Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania), 459 Irish Derby, 422 Irish Emigrant Association, 153 Irish Emigrant Society, 153, 671 Irish Emigrant Society of New York, 869 “Irish Evenings,” 412 Irish Fest (Sioux Falls, South Dakota), 457 Irish Festival on the Miramichi, 548 Irish Festival Singers, 455–456, 753 Irish festivals in the United States, 456–460 Irish Freedom, 467 Irish Friends of South American Independence, 251 Irish Fund, 256 www.abc-clio.com
Irish Heritage Weekend (Louisville, Kentucky), 458 Irish Immigration Reform Movement, 37, 665–666 The Irish in America: Long Journey Home, 341, 605 Irish language, 513–515 “Irish Lecturer.” See Crouch, Frederick Nicholls Irish Legion Illinois, 446 South America, 195, 250–251, 704–705, 901–902 Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, 665, 675, 826 Irish linen in North America, 460–461 Irish Linen Warehouse, 127 Irish Literary Theatre, 925 Irish Mafia (Hollywood). See Cagney, James; McHugh, Frank; O’Brien, Pat; Tracy, Spencer Irish Melodies, 353, 614, 640 Irish Memorial (Grosse Ile), 386, 387 Irish Mexican Association (San Francisco), 831 Irish Musicians/American Friends, 919 Irish Nation, 252–253, 648–649, 672, 772 Irish National Land League. See Land League Irish National League, 512–513, 881 Irish National Liberation Army, 464 Irish nationalism and American War of Independence, 58 and Douglass, 267, 268 and Duggan, 276 and Herbert, 412–413 New Departure, 234, 252, 466, 511, 672 See also Clan na Gael; Collins, Michael; Davitt, Michael; ABC-CLIO
Devoy, John; De Valera, Eamon; Easter Rising (1916); Home Rule; Irish Republican Army; Irish Republican Brotherhood; Ladies’ Land League; Land League; Parnell, Charles Stewart; United Irish League of America Irish News, 586 “Irish Nightingale.” See Downey, Morton Irish Northern Aid. See Noraid The Irish Novelists 1800–1850, 338 Irish Parliamentary Party, 759–760, 762–763 Irish People, 331, 683–684 Irish Players, 731 Irish Race Convention (1916), 191 Irish Radio Network USA, 773 The Irish Rebellion of 1916 and Its Martyrs, 650 Irish Repeal Association. See Repeal Association Irish Republican Army (IRA), 134, 461–466, 462 and De Valera, 242 declaration of war on Great Britain (in WWII), 242 and IRB, 467 and Marxism, 463–464 Provisionals, 464 “Real,” 465 and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), 196, 330 See also Good Friday Agreement of 1998 Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), 134, 332, 466–468, 759 and Davitt, 234 and De Valera, 241 and Devoy, 252, 466 and Fenians, 728 1-800-368-6868
INDEX and IRA, 467 See also Clan na Gael Irish Republican Socialist Party, 763 Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, 330 Irish R.M. series, 867, 868 Irish Society of Charleston, 868 Irish studies. See ABEI Journal: the Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies; American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS); Canadian Association for Irish Studies; Canadian Journal of Irish Studies; Center for Canadian Irish Studies; Keough Program in Irish Studies; New College of California; Research collections, Irish, in Canada; Research collections, Irish, in the United States Irish Sweeps Derby, 421–422 Irish Sweepstakes, 421 Irish Tourist Association (ITA), 103 Irish Tourist Board (ITB), 103 Irish Trade Unions Congress, 763–764 Irish Traditional Music–– Fossil or Resource?, 402 Irish Travelers, 99, 145, 470–471 in the United States, 468–471 Irish 2000 Guineas, 422, 423 The Irish Vindicator, 8 The Irish Voice, 185 Irish Volunteers, 134 and Casement, 163 and De Valera, 241 and IRA, 462 Irish War of Independence. See Anglo-Irish War (1919–1921) Irish Wilderness, 594 Irish women emigrants, 309–310, 354–355. www.abc-clio.com
See also Domestic servants, Irish Irish World, 348–350, 511, 648, 772 Irish Yankees, 472, 789 Irish-American, 514 The Irishman in Canada, 233, 738 The Iron Horse, 346 Irons, Martin, 506 Iroquois, 261, 479 Irwin, William, 830 The Island of Cuba, 540 It Must Be Done Right, 559 Italian Americans, 306–309 Ivers, Eileen, 170–172 IWW. See Industrial Workers of the World Jack Benny Show, 235 Jack MacGowran in the Works of Samuel Beckett, 535–536 The Jackie Gleason Show, 372 Jackson, Andrew, 473–475, 836, 837, 848, 849, 881 Jackson, James, 421 Jackson, Peter, 875 Jackson, Rachel Donelson Robards, 473 Jackson, Stonewall, 837 Jail Journal, 596 Jamaica Inn, 712 James, Frank, 476 James, Jesse Woodsom, 475–476, 475 James I, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 768–769 James II, King of England, 260–261, 739 Jarman, Claude, Jr., 129 Jay Treaty of 1794, 473 The Jeanie Johnston, 476–477 “Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair,” 354, 640–641 Jeffers, Robinson, 477–478 Jeffers, Una Call Kuster, 477, 478 Jefferson, Thomas, 293–294, 414, 662, 849, 879, 903 ABC-CLIO
947
Jefferson Smurfit Group, 862 Jennings, Hughie, 89, 392–393 Jessel, George, 363 Jesuit order, 17, 498, 750 Jesus and Mary Chain, 535 Jewett, David, 503 Jezebel, 120, 439 Jiggs and Maggie, 582–583 Jiménez, Juan Ramón, 907 “Jimmy Crack Corn,” 638 John, Augustus, 373 John Bull’s Other Island, 855 John Hancock Insurance Company, 155 John Murphy Country Céilí Band, 634 John-Munn Park, Québec, 477 Johnson, Andrew, 180, 389, 587, 848, 881 Johnson, Byron “Ban,” 86–87, 577 Johnson, Lyndon B. and De Valera, 240 and Great Society, 66, 493 and John Kennedy, 495, 496, 497 and Peck, 757 and Robert Kennedy, 494 and Tip O’Neill, 736 and War on Poverty, 66 Johnson, Robert, 280 Johnson, Sir William, 478–480 The Johnsons, 604 Jones, Mary Harris (“Mother Jones”), 34, 506, 722 Jones, Paula, 180–181 Jordan, Frank, 831 Jordan, Kate, 480–481 Jordan, Michael J., 898–899 Jordan, Neil, 481–482, 782–783 Journalists, 773. See also Press, the ethnic Irish; Press, the Irish in Latin America Journeymen Cordwainers, 296 Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius, 11, 482–484, 482, 519, 650 and Beach, 93–94, 483 and The Bohemian Girl, 77 1-800-368-6868
948 INDEX Joyce, James Augustine (continued) and the Colums, 197–198, 199, 200 “The Dead,” 114 Dubliners, 483 Ellman’s work on, 289, 290 Finnegans Wake, 199, 483 and Gogarty, 373 influence on Kinsella, 504 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 483 and Tuohy, 892 Ulysses, 11, 93, 373, 483 Joyce, King, 135 Joyce, Nora Barnacle, 483 Juan Manuel de Rosas Historical Society, 204 Juguemos en el Mundo, 907–908 The Juno and the Paycock, 332–333 Junta Renovadora, 203–204 Kama Sutra (film), 782 Kane, Paul, 304 Kanyoro, Musimbi, 812 “Kathleen Mavourneen,” 221, 222, 403 Kaufman, Philip, 237 Kavanagh, Patrick, 100, 279, 408, 518, 519 Kean, Charles, 678 Keane, Jimmy, 604–605 Keane, John B. (Jack), 144, 400, 856 Keane, Seán, 173 Kearney, Dennis, 830–831 Kearney, Peadar, 412 Kearney, Richard, 144 Kearns, Jack, 248 Kearns, Thomas, 485–487 Keating, Diago Nicolau, 19–20, 110 Keating, Geoffrey, 728 Keaton, Buster, 95 Keeler, “Wee” Willie, 393 Keenan, Seán, 652 Kefauver Investigation (1950), 880 Keith, B. F., 192 Kellerman, Annette, 118 Kelley, Frank, 591 Kelley, Joe, 89, 393 Kelly, Alfie, 554 www.abc-clio.com
Kelly, Eugene, 829 Kelly, Frances, 100 Kelly, Gene, 364, 487–488, 487, 640 and Reynolds, 805 Kelly, George “Machine Gun,” 488–490, 489 Kelly, Grace, 490–491 Kelly, Guillermo Patricio, 91 Kelly, Harry, 591 Kelly, “Honest” John, 33, 218, 491–492, 672, 880 Kelly, James J., 720 Kelly, Joseph, and Kelly’s Boys, 595 Kelly, Kathryn Thorne, 488–489 Kelly, Michael “King,” 85, 88 Kelly, Patsy, 326 Kelly, Thomas Hugh, 198–199 Kelly, Tony, 435 Kemble, Fanny, 299 Kenaday, Alexander M., 831 Kennan, George F., 246 Kennedy, Edward (Ted), 36, 107, 168, 494, 497, 553, 620 and Immigration Act of 1990, 615 and Northern Ireland peace process, 651–652, 657 as one of top 100 Irish Americans, 772 and Tip O’Neill, 736–737 Kennedy, Jacqueline Bouvier, 494 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 300, 492, 493, 495–497 and American Irish Foundation, 53 and anticommunism, 656 assassination of, 494, 497, 505 and De Valera, 53, 240 as first Catholic president of U.S., 168, 496, 553 handshake with Clinton, 181 and Moynihan, 619 presidency as symbol of Irish American acceptance, 35, 107, 496, 497, 505, 554, 650 ABC-CLIO
and Tip O’Neill, 736 visit to Ireland, 185, 240 Kennedy, Joseph, Jr., 493, 495 Kennedy, Joseph P., 492–493, 495 Kennedy, Kathleen, 493 Kennedy, Patrick, 808 Kennedy, Robert, 168, 300, 493–494, 495, 497, 553 and McCarthy, 493, 563 Kennedy, Rose Fitzgerald, 492, 493 Kennedy, Rosemary, 493 Kennedy family, 292, 492–495 and McCarthy, 493, 495–496, 563 See also Fitzgerald, John Francis “Honey Fitz”; Smith, Jean Kennedy Kennelly, Brendan, 100, 726 Kenner, Hugh, 285 Kenny, Enda, 620 Kentucky, 497–498 Kentucky, 115 Kentucky Derby, 498 Keough, Donald R., 499–502, 499 Keough Program in Irish Studies, 864 Kerney, L. H., 257 Kerr, Deborah, 440–441 Kerry, John, 682 Kerry do Brasil, 111 Kewpie characters and dolls, 734–735 Key, Francis Scott, 333, 549 Kiberd, Damien, 330 Kidd, Adam, 10 Kiernan, Bernard, 472 Kiernan, James, 472, 774 Killoran, Paddy, 194 Kilmainham Treaty, 234, 349, 512 Kilmer, (Alfred) Joyce, 502–503 Kilrain, Jake, 875 “The Kilrane Boys,” 629 Kiltegans, 25, 112 Kimel, Eduardo, 554 King, Charles B., 344 King, Clarence, 747 King, Ginevra, 335 King, John, 503–504 1-800-368-6868
INDEX King, Martin Luther, 496–497 King, Peter, 185 King, Rufus, 296 King, Samuel Ward, 807 King, the Detective, 75 King’s Row, 785 Kinsella, Thomas, 504–505, 605 Kirby, Peadar, 257 Kirwan, Lawrence, 318 “The Kiss of Gold,” 480 Kissed, 76 76 “Kitchen rackets,” 249 Knights of Labor, 32, 452, 505–507, 511, 549 and Bannigan, 807 formation of, 765 and Powderly, 765 Know-Nothing Party, 31, 47, 587, 658–659, 849 and anti-Catholicism, 168, 446 in California, 830 in Delaware, 245 and formation of Ancient Order of Hibernians (U.S.), 62 in Iowa, 451 in Maine, 545 in Maryland, 549 in New Jersey, 667 in New York City, 671 in Ohio, 717 in Rhode Island, 807 See also Nativism and anti-Catholicism Knox, Henry, 551 Knox, John, 768 Knox, Philander C., 588–589 Knute Rockne—All American, 785 Kohlmann, Anthony, 822 Kopechne, Mary Jo, 494 Kroc, Ray, 571 Krupa, Gene, 265 Krushchev, Nikita, 342, 496 Ku Klux Klan, 446, 545, 553 Kunitz, Stanley, 361 Kyrle, Richard, 868 La Gallienne, Richard, 502 La Guardia, Fiorello, 878, 880 La Jolla Playhouse, 755 La Plante, Laura, 128 www.abc-clio.com
Labour Party (Ireland), 761, 762, 763, 764 Labrador. See Newfoundland and Labrador Lachine Canal, 606–607 Ladies’ Irish Beneficent Society (Argentina), 2254 Ladies’ Land League, 234, 509–510, 673 Ladies’ Land League of America, 509–510, 512 Laemmle, Carl, 75, 449 Laemmle, Carl, Jr., 438 “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” 924 Lamb, Alphie, 196 Lamour, Dorothy, 220 Lamport & Holt, 888 Lamy of Santa Fe, 420 The Land, 338 Land League, 226, 510–513 American branch, 349, 510 and Davitt, 234, 349 Devoy’s book on, 253 and Ford, 349 and Parnell, 234, 349, 511 See also Ladies’ Land League Land of Eire, 253 Land War (1879–1882), 466 Landon, Alf, 861 Language, the Irish, 513–515 Larkin, Emmet, 51, 52 Larkin, Jim, 773 Larkin, Terry, 85 Larkspur, 422 LaRussa, Tony, 89, 394 The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), 598 The Last Hurrah, 223, 553, 692–693, 700–701. See also Curley, James Michael; O’Connor, Edwin The Last Moments of John Brown, 424, 425 The Last of the Mohicans, 238 The Last Roundup, 269 The Last Waltz, 617 Latin America and assimilation of Irish immigrants, 25–26 ABC-CLIO
949
intermarriage and endogamy, 309, 310–312 and Irish diplomatic relations, 24 and Irish priests and nuns, 25 and Irish re-emigration,15 Irish women immigrants, 309–310 and Irish Yankees, 472 trade relations with Ireland, 24 See also Argentina; Brazil; Diplomatic relations, Irish–Latin American; Dresden Affair; Irish Argentines; Paraguay; Press, the Irish in Latin America; Travel patterns from Ireland to South America; Uruguay; Venezuela Latinos, 309–312 Laughton, Charles, 712, 713 Laurel, Stan, 77, 280, 559, 560 Laurier, Wilfred, 738 Lavin, Mary, 144, 516–517 Law, Andrew Bonar, 517–518 Law, Bernard Cardinal, 37 The Law of Dreams, 5–6, 11, 12 Lawlor, William, 899–900 Lawrence, David, 759 Lawrence, Marjorie, 323 Lazenby, Joseph, 110–111 Le Caron, Henri, 466 Leaden, Alfredo, 554 League of Nations, 253, 257, 918–919 Leah the Forsaken, 230 Leaving Las Vegas, 782 Lebic, Thyon. See Lynch, Benito Eduardo Leda y María, 907 Lee, Andrew E., 871 Lee, Robert E., 587, 911 Legion of Mary, 25, 196 Leinster House, Dublin, 414 Leland, Charles Godfrey, 470 Lemke, William, 209 Lemmon v. New York, 72 L’Enfant, Pierre, 414 1-800-368-6868
950 INDEX Lenihan, Brian, 810 Leno, Jay, 141 Leny, William, 751 Leonard, Jack, 265 L’Escargot, 422 Leslie, Shane, 335 Lesnivich, Gus, 201 L’Estrange, F. Anthony, 195 Letterman, David, 141 Levertov, Denise, 100, 101 Levin, Ira, 325 Lewinsky, Monica, 180 Lewis, Andrew, 583 Lewis, James, 230, 231 Lewis, John L., 122–123 The Liberator: His Life and Times, Political, Social and Religious, 226 Liberty! The American Revolution, 341 Liberty Boys, 315 Library and Archives Canada, 792 Lichfield House Compact, 790 Liddy, James, 518–519 Life and Progress in Australasia, 235 Life of Aodh O’Neal, 595–596 The Life of Riley, 372 Light and Shade, 689 Light of Other Days, 920 The Lighthouse, 263 Liguest, Pierre Laclède, 593 Lincoln, Abraham, 132, 446 election of, 47, 48 and Emancipation Proclamation, 550 Stoker’s lecture on, 873–874 Linda di Chamounix, 402 Literary Digest, 650 Literature, American children’s, 519–521 Literature, Irish-Argentine, 521–523 Little, Patrick J., 24, 256, 257 “A Little Bit of Heaven, Shure They Call It Ireland,” 79, 723 Little Lord Fauntleroy, 83 Little Nellie Kelly, 364 Littlewood, Joan, 398 The Lives and Times of the United Irishmen, 539, 541 www.abc-clio.com
The Living Newspaper, 327, 328 Lobos Athletic Club, 865–866 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 919 Lodge, Henry Cabot, Jr., 493, 495 Logan, James, 757 Lomasney, William Mackey, 649 Lonardi, Eduardo, 204 Loncagüé, 523, 541, 542 Londonderry, New Hampshire, 460 The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, 609, 610 Lonergan, James, 44 Long Day’s Journey into Night, 731, 732 The Long Good Friday, 124 The Long Goodbye, 169 The Long-Winded Lady. See Brennan, Maeve M. Longley, Michael, 100, 621 Look Back in Anger, 236 López, Antonio Ñico, 388 López, Benigno, 524–525 Lord of the Dance, 340 Los Angeles Dodgers, 729, 730–731 Louis, Joe, 201 Louisiana Story, 338 Love Me or Leave Me, 149 Lover, Samuel, 412 Lovers, 156 Love’s Answer, 410 Lowe, Nicholas, 776 Lowell, Robert, 408 Lowell (Massachusetts) Folk Festival, 457 Loyal National Repeal Association. See Repeal Association Luby, Thomas C., 331 Lucey, Gregory F., 44 Luci di Lammermoor, 402 The Luck of Ginger Coffey, 11, 12, 610 Luft, Sid, 365 “Lullaby of Broadway,” 264 Lunny, Donal, 142 Lusitania, 883 Luther, Martin, 768 Lydon, John (Johnny Rotten), 534–535 ABC-CLIO
Lynam, Ray, 634 Lynch, Ashbel, 153, 154 Lynch, Benito Eduardo, 522, 523–524 Lynch, Elisa (Eliza), 524–526, 751 Lynch, John Joseph (Archbishop), 303, 526–527, 738 Lynch, P. J., 527–528 Lynch, Patricio (naval hero), 19–20 Lynch, Patrick (bishop), 869 Lynch, Patrick (journalist), 772 Lynch, Patrick (merchant), 472, 772 Lynch, Thomas, 528–529 MacArthur, Charles, 404 MacArthur, Douglas, 562, 656 MacBride, Catalina Bulfin, 134, 135 MacBride, Seán, 134–135 MacBride Principles, 808 MacCann, William, 522 MacColl, Ewan, 534, 610 MacColl, Kirsty, 262, 534 MacCool, Finn, 330 MacDonagh, Seamus, 135 MacDonagh, Thomas, 135, 197, 391 Macdonald, John A., 65, 738 MacDonald, Michael Patrick, 138, 531–532 Macdonald, Ross, 169 MacDonnell, Bishop, 301 MacGarvey, Cathal, 136 MacGowan, Michael, 32, 532–533 MacGowan, Shane, 533–535 MacGowran, Jack, 535–536 MacGreevy, Thomas, 188, 189 Mack, Connie, 34, 86, 87, 88, 89–90, 393, 536–538, 537 Mackay, John W., 829 Mackemie, Francis, 769, 839 MacKenna, John, 312, 538–539, 902 Mackenzie, A. C., 580 Maclay Law of 1842, 771–772 1-800-368-6868
INDEX MacLiammóir, Mícheál, 144 MacMahon, Martin, 24 MacManus, Padraig, 774, 776 MacManus, Seamus, 136 Macneven, William James, 295, 670, 828 Macnie, J., 522 MacSwiney, Terence, 406 MacWhite, Michael, 257 Madden, Joanie, 170–172, 817 Madden, Richard Robert, 539–541 Madison, James, 662, 770 Madoc, 621 Magnier, John, 422–423 Magón, Ricardo Flores, 214 Maguire, John (b. 1825), 541, 899 Maguire, John Walter (b. 1906), 523, 541–542 The Mahabharata (film and play), 413 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 542–544, 542 Mahon, Derek, 518, 621 Maine, 544–546 The Mainliners, 634 Major, John, 185–186, 602, 657 Make Way for Ducklings, 520 Makem, Tommy, 175–176, 457, 604, 643 Making Peace, 599 Maktoum, Mohammed bin, 423 Malatesta, Errico, 214 Malcolm’s Katie: A Love Story, 10 Malcolmson, Alexander, 344 Mallon, Seamus, 180 Malone, Dorothy, 546–547 The Maltese Falcon, 439, 443 Malvinas Islands. See Falkland/Malvinas Islands The Mammy, 437–438 Mamoulian, Rouben, 420 Man of Aran, 338 Man of the House, 736 Man O’War, 498 Manchester Martyrs, 332, 466 www.abc-clio.com
The Manions of America, 124 Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 363 Marconi’s Cottage, 579 Maris, Roger, 581 Maritana, 678, 906 Maritime Provinces (Canada), 547–548 Market Day, 521 Markievicz, Countess, 134 Marlowe, Philip, 169 Marsden, George, 688 Marshall, Charles C., 860 Marshall, George, 562 Martin, Billy, 89, 394 Martin, John, 596 Martin, Violet. See Ross, Martin Martin, William, 555 Marx Brothers, 560 Marxism, and Sinn Féin and IRA, 463–464 Maryland, 548–550 indentured servants in, 79, 245 and Maryland tradition (Catholic Church), 161 Mason, James, 144, 365 Mason, William R., 503 Mass in a Connemara Cabin, 720 Mass in E flat op. 5, 92–93 Mass Transit, 920 Massachusetts, 550–554 Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 30 Massacre at Saint Patrick Church, The, 554, 775 Massetti, Jorge Ricardo, 205 Matheson, Karen, 172 Mathew, Father Theobald, 30, 315, 554–556, 696 and abolitionism, 699 and C. Hayes, 403 and Carney, 155 and Douglass, 267 and Garrison, 42, 555 Mathis, June, 449 Mattea, Kathy, 694 Matthau, Walter, 156 Maupassant, Guy de, 174 Maury, Matthew Fontaine, 556–557, 556 Mayer, Louis B., 129, 363, 366, 369 Mays, J. C. C., 188 ABC-CLIO
951
McAdoo, William, 860 McAnally, Ray, 125, 400 McBride, Big Tom, 634 McBride, Sean, 285 McCafferty, John, 649 McCafferty, Nell, 708 McCaffrey, Lawrence, 51 McCann, Colum, 557–558 McCann, Donal, 126, 558–559 McCann, John J., 558 McCann, Susan, 634 McCarey, Leo, 559–560 McCarthy, Eugene, 494 McCarthy, Jack, 683 McCarthy, Joseph (politician), 35, 561–563, 656 Buckley’s defense of, 133 and Kennedys, 493, 495–496, 563 and Spellman, 872 See also House Un-American Activities Committee McCarthy, Joseph Vincent “Joe” (baseball manager), 89–90, 563–565 McCarthy, Mary, 565–566, 565 McCarthy, Patrick “Paddy,” 567, 866 McCarthy, Tom, 606 McCarthy, Tommy, 86 McCartney, Robert, 657 McClellan, Eleanor, 323 McCloskey, Robert, 520 McCormack, John (singer), 78, 568–569, 568, 641, 642, 673 McCormack, John W. (politician), 553, 736, 825 McCormack, Knocko, 825 McCourt, Frank, 569 McCran, Thomas, 667 McDermott, Alice, 570 McDonagh, Michael, 471 McDonald, Andrew J., 70 McDonald, Richard “Dick,” and McDonald’s Corporation, 570–571 McDonogh, John, 668 McDonough, John J., 202 McDowell, Michael, 330 1-800-368-6868
952 INDEX McElroy, John, 155 McEnroe, John, 571–572 as one of top 100 Irish Americans, 772 McFadden, Louis T., 589 McGann, John, 250 McGaw, James, 503 McGee, Thomas D’Arcy, 9, 10, 572–574, 607 assassination of, 650 and Canadian confederation, 738 and Hughes, 433, 650 influence on IrishCanadian literature, 10 and Sadlier, 820 McGill-Callahan, Sheila, 520 McGinley, Phyllis Louise, 574–575 McGinnity, “Iron” Joe, 87 McGloin, James, 20, 882 McGonigle, Thomas, 575–576 McGovern, Lorenzo, 24, 257 McGowan, John, 683 McGowen, Shane, 610 McGrath, Joe, 421 McGrath, Marcos Gregorio, 750 McGrath, Price, 498 McGraw, John Joseph, 34, 86, 88–89, 393–394, 576–578, 577 and Hanlon, 392–393 McGready, James, 769 McGuckian, Medbh, 578–580 McGuckin, Barton, 580–581 McGuinness, Martin, 464, 465 McGuire, Dorothy, 755 McGwire, Mark D., 581–582 McHenry, James, 548 McHugh, Frank, 691 McHugh, Roger, 52 McInenly, James, 780 McKinery, David, 44 McKinley, William, 452, 486, 766, 848 McLoughlin, Eduardo F., 320 McLoughlin, John, 741 McMahon, Sadie, 393 www.abc-clio.com
McManus, George, 582–583 McManus, Terrence B., 596, 915 McMaster, James A., 772 McMullen, John, 20, 882 McNairy, John, 473 McNally, Dave, 88 McNamara, John, 18 McNamara, Patrick, 591 “McNamara’s Band,” 220 McNary-Haugen Bill, 589 McNutt, Alexander, 583–584, 841 McParlan, James, 603, 758 McQuaid, John Charles, 872 McShain, John, 422 McSwiney, Paul, 584–585 McVeigh, Robbie, 471 Meagher, Thomas Francis, 49, 206, 433, 550, 585–587, 585, 915 and Irish Brigade, 671 and Mitchel, 596, 597 in New York City, 671, 672 Meek, Bill, 189 Meet Me in St. Louis, 364 Meeting the British, 621 Melai, Guss, 59 Mellon, Andrew William, 587–589, 588, 590 Mellon, Paul, 422 Mellon, Thomas, 587, 589–590, 840 Mellon National Bank, 587, 588 Memorias del General O’Leary publicados por su hijo Simon B. O’Leary, 725 Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, 565 Mendoza, Pedro de, 16 Menvielle, Julio, 91 Merchandise Mart (Chicago), 493 Meredith, James, 497 “The Messenger,” 504 Messer Marco Polo, 142 Métis, 304, 675–676 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), 369–370 Mexican-American War. See San Patricios Brigade Mexico, 3, 15, 255 ABC-CLIO
diplomatic relations with Ireland, 257 as mestizo country, 309 See also Texas Mi Prima May, 523 Miami Canal, 153 Michael Collins, 372, 482, 661, 753 Michigan, 590–592 Micmac, 675–676 Midland, 285 “Midnight in Killarney,” 834 A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, 325, 325 Mighty Avons, 634 Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, 520 Milestone, Lewis, 399 Milk, Harvey, 831 Miller, Liam, 504 Miller, Rebecca, 239 Miller, Robert, 329 Miller’s Crossing, 144 Milwaukee Braves, 730 Milwaukee Irish Fest, 457–458, 592–593 Minnelli, Liza, 364, 365–366 Minnelli, Vincente, 364 The Minstrel, 423 “The Minstrel Boy,” 614 Minstrelsy, 353, 638 Miranda, Francisco de, 539 Miranda v. Arizona, 117 The Misfits, 441 Missouri, 593–595 Missouri Sequence, 188 Mitchel, John, 49, 433, 586, 595–598, 596, 790 and Irish press, 772 in New York City, 672 in Tennessee, 881–882 Mitchell, George, 184, 239, 416, 545, 598–599 See also Good Friday Agreement of 1998; Mitchell Principles, The Mitchell, John, 599–601 Mitchell Principles, The, 601–602 Mitchum, Robert, 440–441 Mitre, Bartolomé, 317 Moana, 337 Moby Dick, 440, 756 1-800-368-6868
INDEX Model A, 344, 345 Model T, 344–345 Modern Times, 344 Mohawks, 479 Moira Sullivan, 523 Molineux, William, 551 Molloy, Daniel Murrah, 418–419, 679 Molloy, Matt, 173 Molly Maguires, 315, 513, 602–604, 758 The Molly Maguires, 399 Moloney, Cornelius Alfred, 96 Moloney, Mick, 141, 170, 604–605 Moloney, Paddy, 173 Molony, Guy Ross, 419 Mona Lisa, 481 Mondale, Walter, 182, 786 “Moneda de cobre,” 523 Monroe, James, 474 Monroe, Marilyn, 440 Monsoon Wedding, 782 Montague, John, 505, 518, 605–606, 788 Montez, Lola, 678 Montgomery, George, 111 Montgomery, Richard, 58, 58 Montgomery Guards, 155 Monticello, 662 Montpelier, 662 Montreal, 606–609 Moody, Richard Clement, 317, 318 Moon Crossing Bridge, 361–362 Moondance, 616–617 Mooney, John, 691, 858 Mooney, William, 21, 878 Moonlight Follies, 76 Moore, Annie, 673 Moore, Brian, 11, 12, 609–610 Moore, Christy, 535, 610–611 Moore, Domingo, 319 Moore, George, 483, 373 Moore, James (restaurateur), 583 Moore, James (South Carolina governor), 868 Moore, Marianne, 611–613, 612, 650 Moore, Roger, 125 www.abc-clio.com
Moore, Thomas, 353–354, 580, 613–615, 640 title page from collection of ballads, 613 Moore, Tomás P., 866 Moore, William Henry, 317–318 Moran, Betty, 422 Moran, Father, 690–691 Moreno, Fulgencio Ricardo, 727 Moreno, Mariano, 711 Morgan, Dennis, 834 Morgan, Edwin, 72 Morgan, Henry, 156 Morgan, Lady, 339 Morgan, William, 257 Moriarty, John, 279 Morphi, Carlos, 751 Morris, Buckner Stith, 446 Morris, Jack, 138 Morris, John B., 70 Morrison, Bruce, 615–616, 652 Morrison, Danny, 464 Morrison, James, 194 Morrison, Van, 616–617 The Morrison Tapes, 616 Morrison visas, 615 Morrissey, 534–535 Morrissey, Ruthie, 642 Moscone, George, 831 Moses, Robert, 730 “Mother Machree,” 78, 79, 642, 723 Mott, Lucretia Coffin, 617–618, 914 Mount St. Vincent College, 671 Mountains of the Moon, 99 Mountbatten, Lord, 464 Moving Hearts, 610 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 36, 619–620, 619, 651 and Northern Ireland peace process, 651–652, 657 Moynihan, Michael S., 44 Moytura: A Play for Dancers, 199 Mrs. Miniver, 366 Mrs. Parkington, 366 The Mudlark, 279 Muintir na Tire, 287 ABC-CLIO
953
Muldoon, Paul, 579, 621–622 Mules, 621 Mulhall, Edward, 254, 274, 622, 774 Mulhall, Francis Healy, 775 Mulhall, Michael George, 109, 254, 622–623, 632, 774 Mulhall’s Dictionary of Statistics, 622–623 Mullan, Larry, Jr., 895–897 Mullane, Tony, 85 Mullanphy, Brian, 303–304 Mullanphy, John, 303, 594 Mullen, Timothy, 450–451 Mulligan, James, 446 Mulligan Guard series and song, 396–397, 582–583, 639 Mullon, James, 403 Mulroney, Brian, 623–624 Mulvany, John, 624–626 Munn, John, 476 Murnau, F. W., 337 Murphy, Charles Francis, 33, 191, 626–627, 626 Murphy, Charley, 738 Murphy, “Commissioner,” 672 Murphy, Eduardo, 254, 745 Murphy, Frank, 591 Murphy, George, 364 Murphy, Hermann Dudley, 627–629 Murphy, Isaac, 69 Murphy, John James, 629–631 Murphy, John, 311–312 Murphy, Joseph, 471 Murphy, Matthew, 24, 257 Murphy, Michael (Irish nationalist), 632 Murphy, Michael (priest), 25 Murray, Daniel, 316 Murray, John (Irish Argentine), 67 Murray, John Courtney (Jesuit theologian), 281 Murray, Luis Alberto, 523, 631 Murray, Mirella, 172 Murray, Philip, 123 Murray, Richard Henry, 865 1-800-368-6868
954 INDEX Murray, Thomas (historian), 631–632, 774 Murray, Thomas “Thomas the Devil” (sheep farmer), 318 Murray, William “Alfalfa Bill,” 723 Music, country and Irish, 632–635 Music in America, Irish, 635–645 arrival of Irish musicians in America, 636–637 and musical theater, 637–640 popularization of, 640–643 revival of traditional, 643–644 traditional music in Ireland, 636 See also O’Neill, Francis Music in Medieval Britain, 402 The Music of Ireland, 157, 641, 733–734 Music publishing, 640–641 Muskie, Edmund S., 599 Mutiny on the Bounty, 399 My Beautiful Laundrette, 237 My Dream of You, 707 My Favorite Wife, 278 My Left Foot (film), 237, 754, 856 “My Nellie’s Blue Eyes,” 834 “My Old Kentucky Home, Goodnight,” 353, 640–641 My Wild Irish Rose (film), 236, 834 “My Wild Irish Rose” (song), 642, 723–724 Myers, Jean, 156 Myles, Eileen, 645–646 Mysteries of My Father, 340 Mystery and Manners, 702 Nair, Mira, 782 Nanook of the North, 337 Narragansett tribe, 806 Nasrullah, 422 Nast, Thomas, 880 Nation, 331, 790 National Association for Irish Justice, 36 www.abc-clio.com
National Association of Celtic Language Teachers, 515 National Endowment for the Arts, 170 National Guard (Ireland). See Blueshirts National Hunt, 422 National Labor Relations Board, 345 National Maritime Museum (U.S.), 477 National Repeal Convention, 30 National Review, 133 National Tourism Development Authority Act of 2003, 105 National Velvet, 129 Nationalism, Irish-American, 647–653 beginnings, 647 conflicting nationalisms, 648 constitutional nationalism, 651–652 cultural nationalism, 649–650 financial aid to Irish nationalists, 652–653 revolutionary nationalism, 648–649 and status anxiety, 647–648 Nationalism in the twentieth century, IrishAmerican, 653–658 Native American Party. See Know-Nothing Party Native Americans, 302–305 and Jackson, 474, 475, 836 and Scots-Irish, 302–303, 474, 475, 836, 839, 846 in South Dakota, 869–870 See also First Nations; names of individual tribes Nativism and antiCatholicism, 30, 31, 42, 106, 658–660 and Ancient Order of Hibernians (U.S.), 62–63 and Garrison, 42 Hughes’s resistance to, 430–431 ABC-CLIO
and New England, 550–551 and New Jersey, 666, 667 and New York, 670 and politicians, 682 See also Know-Nothing Party Natural History, 426–427 Naughton, Martin, 500 Naughty Marietta, 412 Navagatio sancti Brendani Abbatis, 112 Navigation Laws, 381 Needing the Sea, 286 Neeson, Liam, 372, 660–661, 661 Negri, Pola, 119 The Negro Family, 620 Neilson, John, 661–662 Nell, José Luis, 91 Nelligan, Émile, 10, 662–663 Nelson, John, 776 Neptune’s Daughter, 118 Neumann, St. John, 514 Nevin, Kathleen and Winnie, 522, 523 New Brunswick, 663–664 New College of California, 832 New Departure, 234, 252, 466, 511, 672 New England Irish Festival, 458–459 New Era, 573 New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua, 788 New Irish in America, 36–37, 664–666, 674–675 New Jersey, 666–667 New Musical Resources, 211 New Orleans, 30, 667–669 New York City, 669–675 early Irish presence, 669–671 Famine and postbellum immigration, 671–673 Five Points, 671 Irish in twentieth-century, 673–675 Irish-born population exceeding that of Belfast and Dublin, 669 1-800-368-6868
INDEX New York City Draft Riots (1863), 32, 50, 270–273, 271, 434, 672 New York Famine Relief Committee, 432 New York Giants (baseball), 577–578 New York Times, 894 New York Yankees, 564–565 The New Yorker, 113–114 New Zealand, and Irish immigration, 7, 15 Newfoundland and Labrador, 675–677 Newman, John Henry, 226 Newport (Rhode Island) Waterfront Irish Festival, 457 Newsom, Gavin, 831 The Next Corner, 480 Ney, Richard, 366–367 Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala, 606 Niblo, William B., and Niblo’s Garden, 677–678 Nicaragua, 678–680 Irish support for human rights groups, 257 and Walker, 206, 418, 679 Nicholls, Richard, 257 Nicholson, Jack, 437, 438, 441–442 Night in Tunisia, 481 Nijinska, Bronislava, 877 Nijinsky, 422 NINA. See No Irish Need Apply Nixon, Joan Lowery, 521 Nixon, Richard, 496, 736, 756 No Irish Need Apply, 680–683, 680, 771 “No Irish Need Apply” (song), 680, 681 Noraid, 465, 683–684 Norbeck, Peter, 871 North, Lord, 140–141 North American Feis Commission, 454 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 599 North Carolina, 685–686 North Texas Irish Fest, 459 www.abc-clio.com
Northern Ireland Aid Committee, 36, 465, 652 Northern Ireland peace process, 350–351 and B. Morrison, 616 and Feeney, 329–330 See also Good Friday Agreement of 1998 Notre Dame University, 168, 448, 501, 686–688 Nova Scotia, 547 and Scots-Irish, 843 See also New Brunswick Novios de Antaño, 522 Nugent, Andrew, 161 The Nutcracker, 877 Ó Conaill, Dáithí, 683 Ó hEochaidh, Seán, 532 Ó Riada, Seán, 157, 172, 173 Ó Tuama, Seán, 505 “O! Susanna,” 353, 640–641 O Westport in the light of Asia Minor, 280 Oberon, Merle, 439 Oblate order, 368 O’Boyle, Sean, 605 O’Brian, Conor, 319 O’Brien, Aidan, 423 O’Brien, Bernardo, 17, 110 O’Brien, Charlotte Grace, 689–690 O’Brien, Conor Cruise, 872 O’Brien, Frank P., 44–45 O’Brien, George, 19–20 O’Brien, Hugh, 107 O’Brien, Jerry, 249 O’Brien, John Thomond, 19, 70, 632, 690–691 O’Brien, Larry, 493–494, 553–554 O’Brien, Margaret, 364 O’Brien, Michael (diplomat), 256 O’Brien, Michael (horse trainer), 422 O’Brien, Mollie, 693 O’Brien, Pat (actor), 148, 691–693, 692 O’Brien, Pat (priest), 435 O’Brien, Tim, 693–694, 693 O’Brien, Timothy, 903 O’Brien, Tom, 87 O’Brien, Vincent, 422–423 ABC-CLIO
955
O’Brien, William, 830 O’Callaghan, Edmund Bailey, 606 O’Callaghan, John, 898 O’Callaghan, Kitty, 455 O’Casey, Sean, 328, 535, 559, 925–926 and Fitzgerald, 332–333 Oceanography. See Maury, Matthew Fontaine O’Cleary, John, 648 O’Connell, Beatriz, 195 O’Connell, Daniel, 19, 251, 296, 369, 694–700 and abolitionism, 30, 267, 297–298, 697–700, 915 “An Address of the Irish People to Their Countrymen in America,” 30 and American support, 647 and Catholicism, 167, 315 Cusack’s biography of, 226 and Douglass, 267, 697–698 and faction fighting, 315 and Hughes, 433 on McGee, 572 and Mott, 618 and Repeal movement, 789–791 and temperance movement, 555 and Whigs, 380, 585 and Young Ireland, 595, 648, 790–791 O’Connell, John, 585 O’Connell, Morgan, 251 O’Connell, Robbie, 604–605 O’Connell, William H., 553 O’Connor d’Arlach, Tomás, 705 O’Connor, Arthur, 704 O’Connor, Bill, 307 O’Connor, Donald, 805 O’Connor, Edwin, 223, 553, 700–702. See also The Last Hurrah O’Connor, Feargus, 704 O’Connor, Francisco (“Frank”) Burdett, 19, 195, 704–706 O’Connor, Joseph V., 679 O’Connor, Luke Smythe, 96 1-800-368-6868
956 INDEX O’Connor, “Mary” Flannery, 702–704, 702 O’Connor, Michael Patrick, 869 O’Connor, Pat, 237, 413–414, 706–707 O’Connor, Sinead, 534, 610 O’Connor, Thomas (Irish Texan), 883 O’Connor, Thomas (United Irishman), 828–829 O’Connor, Ulick, 144 O’Curry, J. E., 436 The Odd Couple, 156 Odd Man Out, 715 O’Doherty, Kevin, 596 O’Donnell, Colm, 535 O’Donnell, Daniel, 634–635 O’Donnell, Eugene, 604–605 O’Donnell, Juan Carlos, 67 O’Donnell, Kenneth, 493–494 O’Donoghue, John, 26 O’Donoghue, Patrick, 596 O’Donohoe, Patrick, 915 O’Donovan, William “Wild Bill,” 655 O’Dowd, Niall, 185, 772 O’Durnin, James, 257 O’Dwyer, William, 674, 880 O’Fallon, John, 594 O’Faolain, Eileen, 520 O’Faolain, Nuala, 707–708 O’Faoláin, Seán, 650 O’Farrell, F. K., 450 O’Farrell, Jasper, 830 O’Farrell, Santiago G., 866 O’Flaherty, Liam, 650 Ogden, Samuel, 295 O’Gorman, Adolfo, 708, 709 O’Gorman, Camila, 316, 708–709 O’Gorman, Cecil Crawford, 709 O’Gorman, Charles, 709 O’Gorman, Edmundo and Juan, 709–710 O’Gorman, Eduardo, 316, 708 O’Gorman, Michael, 690–691, 710–711 O’Gorman family (Argentina), 21, 316, 708–709 www.abc-clio.com
O’Grady, Diago, 19–20, 110 O’Grady, Francis, 632 O’Grady, James, 319 O’Grady, Patrick, 318–319 O’Grady, Standish, 10 O’Hara, Maureen, 333, 535, 712–714 O’Hara, Pat, 468 O’Herlihy, Dan, 714–715 O’Higgins, Ambrose (Ambrosio), 17–18, 19, 312, 538, 539, 715–716 O’Higgins, Bernardo, 19–20, 538–539, 716 O’Higgins, Pablo, 710 Ohio, 716–718 Ohio Canal, 717 O’Keefe, Georgia, 718–720, 719 O’Kelly, Aloysius C., 720–721 Oklahoma, 721–723 Olcott, Chauncey (John Chancellor), 78, 641–642, 673, 723–724, 834 The Old Violin, 394 “The Old Woman of the Roads,” 200 O’Leary, Daniel Florence, 19, 195, 724–725, 749 O’Leary, Jane, 726 O’Leary, Juan Emiliano, 726–728 O’Leary, Santiago, 833 O’Leary, Simón Bolívar, 195 Oliver, John, 79 Olivier, Laurence, 366, 439 Omaha, and the Creightons, 215–217 O’Mahony, John, 330, 648, 728–729, 728 in New York City, 672 O’Malley, Walter, 729–731 O’Meara, Buckley, 273–274 On Ballycastle Beach, 578, 579 On the Border with Crook, 108 On the Town, 488 Onassis, Aristotle, 494 One Crossed Out, 429 O’Neal, Tatum, 572 O’Neil, Joseph H., 553 O’Neill, Eugene, 193, 442, 731–733 ABC-CLIO
O’Neill, Francis, 157, 194, 641, 733–734 O’Neill, James (actor), 673, 731 O’Neill, James (musician), 733 O’Neill, James “Tip” (baseball player), 84–85 O’Neill, Nebraska, 485 O’Neill, Rose Cecil, 734–736 illustration by, 735 O’Neill, Thomas P. “Tip” (politician), 36, 553, 620, 736–737 and Curley, 223, 736–737 and Northern Ireland peace process, 651, 657 O’Neill, Tip. See O’Neill, James “Tip” (baseball player); O’Neill, Thomas P. “Tip” (politician) Ontario, 737–739 and Scots-Irish, 843–845, 847 Open Letter to the Military Junta, 523 Operación Masacre, 522, 910 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 420 Orange and Green Riots (1870 and 1871), 32 Orange Order, 739–740, 840, 849–850 Canada, 682 Maritime Provinces, 548 New Brunswick, 664 New York City, 670 Ontario, 737, 739 UK, 682 Orangemen, 314 Order of Cincinnati, 878 Order of the Star Spangled Banner. See KnowNothing Party Ordway, John P., 371 O’Regan, Michael Patrick, 741 Oregon, 740–743 O’Reilly, Alejandro (general), 710 O’Reilly, Alexandro (governor), 668, 721 O’Reilly, Anthony, 53 O’Reilly, George, 220 O’Reilly, Henry, 215 O’Reilly, John (San Patricio Brigade), 20 1-800-368-6868
INDEX O’Reilly, John Boyle (editor and poet), 106, 349, 355, 389, 512, 553, 743–745, 74. See also Boston Pilot O’Reilly, Patricia, 773 Ormond Boys, 315 Ormsby, Frank, 579 O’Roarke, Julián (Huberto), 745–746 O’Rourke, “Orator” Jim, 86 Orozco, Clemente, 710 O’Ryan, Fergus, 287 Osborne, John, 236 Oscar Wilde: Stories for Children, 527 O’Shaughnessy, Maurice, 830 O’Shea, John, 781 O’Shea, Katherine, 235 O’Sullivan, Daniel R., 24, 111 O’Sullivan, Denis, 746 O’Sullivan, Donal, 157 O’Sullivan, Florence, 868 O’Sullivan, Jeremiah, 44 O’Sullivan, Maureen, 324 O’Sullivan, Thaddeus, 413–414 O’Sullivan, Timothy H., 746–748 O’Sullivan, Vincent, 435 Otello, 343, 580 Otoño Imperdonable, 522, 907 O’Toole, Fintan, 103, 246, 304–305 O’Toole, Peter, 398, 559 Oughagan, John, 690–691 Our Friend James Joyce, 197–198, 200 Our Gang, 560 Out of Ireland, 605, 773 Oval House Theatre, 124 “Over There,” 640 Oxford Book of Irish Verse, 505 Oxford Movement, 226 Oxx, John, 424 Packaging industry. See Smurfit, Sir Michael W. J., KBE Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, 269 Pal Joey, 487 Palladius, 166 Pallotine fathers, 25, 435, 554 Palmer, Minnie, 834 Panama, 749–750 www.abc-clio.com
and Irish railroad workers, 15–16, 749 Panama Canal, 679, 749–750 Panic of 1873, 587 Papillon, 422 Papineau, Louis-Joseph, 301, 606 Paraguay, 750–751 and Campbell, 150 and Elisa Lynch, 524–526 as mestizo country, 309 Pareja, Antonio, 539 The Parish and the Hill, 223 Parker, Alan, 269, 569 Parker, Peter, 418, 679 Parliament (Ireland). See Dáil Éireann Parlor ballads, 353 Parnell, Anna, 234, 509, 512, 673 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 252, 349–350, 467, 509, 510, 512 and Davitt, 234–235 and Douglass, 268 and Gaelic Athletic Association, 359 and Kilmainham Treaty, 234, 349, 512 and Land League, 234, 349, 511 and New Departure, 466, 511 as parliamentarian, 759 Parnell, Fanny, 509, 512, 673 Parochial schools. See Catholic schools Passenger Acts, 751–753 Passionist order, 25, 312, 319, 435, 436 Pastor, Bob, 201 Pastor, Tony, 638 Patrick, Saint, 166, 823. See also Saint Patrick’s Cathedral; Saint Patrick’s Church; Saint Patrick’s Day; Saint Patrick’s School Patriot Rebellion (Canada), 606 Patterson, Frank, 753–754 Patterson, Walter, 547 Patton, George, 835 Patton, James, 685 ABC-CLIO
957
Paul Whiteman Orchestra, 268 Paus, Eva, 206 Paz, Octavio, 95 Peale, Raphaelle, 394 Pearl, 375 Pearse, Padraic (Patrick), 134, 197, 253, 467, 654, 892 Pearse, Willie, 892 Pearson, Noel, 400, 754–755, 856 Peart, Barbara, 522 Peck, Cecilia, 756 Peck, Gregory, 755–757 Peck, Jonathan, 756 Peckinpah, Sam, 399 Peel, Robert, 380, 791 Peep O’ Day Boys, 315, 739 Pellegrini, Carlos, 164 Penal Laws, 140, 167, 695, 696 Pendergast, Tom, 594–595 Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883, 72 Penn, Sean, 438 Penn, William, 151, 757 Pennsylvania, 757–759 and Scots-Irish, 28, 685, 757, 834, 838 Penny Emigrant’s Guide, 355 Penobscot Expedition, 81 Pernias, Antonio, 554 Perón, Juan Domingo, 91 and Cooke, 203–205 and Farrell, 322–323 and Murray, 631 and Walsh, 907, 908 Peronism, 91 Perot, Ross, 182 Peruvian Corporation, 377 Peter, Saint, as first Pope, 165 Peter Pan, 119 Pettit, James, 21 Peyton Place, 324, 547 La Pezuña de Oro, 541–542 Phelan, James D., 831 Philadelphia, 757, 758 Philadelphia Athletics, 537–538 Philadelphia Brigade, 758 Philadelphia Story, 82 Philip II, King of Spain, 16–17 Phillips, Wendell, 744 1-800-368-6868
958 INDEX Phoenix (Arizona) Irish Festival, 458 The Physical Geography of the Seas, 557 Pierce, Franklin, 132 Piggott, Lester, 423 Piniella, Lou, 89, 394 Pinkerton, Allen, 395 Pinkerton Detective Agency, 603 Pinn, Alan, 96 The Pirate, 364 Pitou, Augustus, 78, 723–724, 834 Pittsburgh, 758 Pius XI, Pope, 406, 451 Planxty, 173, 610 Plath, Sylvia, 100, 611 The Plattermen, 634 The Playboy of the Western World, 225, 923, 925 The Plough and the Stars, 225, 535, 925–926 The Plunger, 417 Plunkitt, George Washington, 187 Poetry Ireland, 518–519 Poets Theater, 427 The Pogues, 141, 262, 533–534 Poisoned Lands, 605 Poitín, 225 Polanski, Roman, 324–325 Political parties, Irish, 759–764 Polk, James K., 132, 848, 849, 881 The Polka Dots, 634 Pomes Penyeach, 93 Pontiac’s Rebellion, 479, 757 Poor Law of 1838, 382 The Popes, 533, 534 Populist Party, 870–871 Porteño Athletic Club, 866–867 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 483 The Post Bag, 746 Potato Famine. See Great Famine Potter, A. J., 287 Potts, Seán, 173 Pound, Ezra, 91, 93, 483, 504, 907 www.abc-clio.com
and M. Moore, 611, 612 and Yeats, 926 Powderly, Terence V., 32, 505, 506, 765–767, 765 Powell, Jane, 364 Power, Cuthbert Collingwood, 336 Power, Frederick Tyrone, Sr. (Tyrone Power the Younger), 767–768 Power, James, 20, 882, 883 Power, Tyrone (the Elder, 1795–1841), 673, 678, 767 Power, Tyrone (movie actor), 767, 768 The Preliminary Trial of a Horse Thief, 625 Presbyterianism, 212–213, 768–770, 839 Presentation Brothers, 608 Press, the ethnic Irish, 770–774, 771 Press, the Irish in Latin America, 774–777 Previn, André, 326 Previn, Soon-Yi, 326 Prevost, Marie, 75–76 Prince Ananias, 412 Prince Edward Island, 547 Princeton University, 770, 839 Printer, Robert, 461 Prizzi’s Honor, 437, 441–442 Profiles in Courage, 495 Progressive Democrats (Ireland), 762, 763 Prohibition, 54, 55, 187, 321 Project Arts Centre, 144, 856 Project Children, 459 Propaganda Fide, 318 The Prophet, 717 La Protesta, 214 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 210 The Public Enemy, 147, 916 Pueyrredon, Honorio, 256 Pujals, Luis, 92 Purcell, Betty, 679–680 Purcell, Philip and James, 17, 110 The Purple Shamrock, 223 Pusey, Edward, 226 Putumayo, 256 Pygmalion, 855 ABC-CLIO
Quakers and abolitionism, 41, 42 and Philadelphia, 757 Quantrill, William C., 475–476 Quebec City, 779–780 Queenstown, 884 Quetzalcoatl, 16 The Quiet Man, 144, 333, 346, 347, 535, 545, 913 and The Field, 856 and O’Hara, 712, 713–714 See also Ford, John; Wayne, John Quigley, Patrick, 450 Quill, Michael Joseph, 780–781 Quinlan, John, 44 Quinn, Aidan, 661, 782, 783 Quinn, Bob, 559 Quinn, Declan, 782–783 Quinn, Glenn, 783–784 Quinn, John, 923–924, 927 Quinn, Marian, 782, 783 Quinn, Murty, 783 Quinn, Paul, 782, 783 Quinn, Ronnie, 320 Radio, 773 Rafaelson, Bob, 99 Raftery, Anthony, 142 Ragtime, 149, 692 Railroads, 486 Railroads and Irish American workers Baltimore & Ohio, 79, 80, 549 Latin America, 15–16 midwestern U.S., 445, 447 Oklahoma, 721–722 southern U.S., 368, 869, 903 Rainier III, Prince of Monaco, 490, 491 Raleigh, Walter, 28 Ramblin’ Men, 634 Ramírez, Pedro Pablo, 322 Ranson, Joseph, 629 The Rascal King, 223 Ratchford, Michael Rattle and Hum, 897 Ravel family, 678 1-800-368-6868
INDEX Ray, Johnny, 200 Rayburn, Sam, 736 Re-emigrants within the Americas, 789 Rea, Stephen, 481 Reagan, Ronald Wilson, 97, 288, 657, 785–788 and Anglo-Irish relations, 651 and Mulroney, 623 as one of top 100 Irish Americans, 772 and Peck, 756 and Tip O’Neill, 736 visit to Ireland (1984), 25, 288–289, 787 The Real McCoys, 116 Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative, 812 Reaney, James, 5–6, 11, 12 Rear Window, 490 Reavey, George, 95, 188 Recorded music, 641–643 The Red Badge of Courage, 440 Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers, 693 Red Lantern, 156 Red Roses for Me, 534, 714–715 Redemptorists, 25, 112 Redmond, John, 350, 759–760, 898–899 Redshaw, Thomas Dillon, 788 Reed, Carol, 399 Reed, Joseph, 131 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 140 La Regeneración, 214 Regina Leader, 233 Regnans in Excelsis, 166 Rehan, Ada, 231 Reilly, Thomas, 139 Remington, Frederick, 625 Remington Steele, 124–125 Remond, Charles Lenox, 699, 914, 915 Rennie, George, 318 Rennie, John, 97 Renwick, James, 822 Repeal Association, 369, 585–586, 595, 648, 696, 790. See also O’Connell, Daniel www.abc-clio.com
Repeal movement, 789–791 Republic magazine, 771 Republican Sinn Féin, 763 Research collections, Irish, in Canada, 791–798 colleges and universities, 793–797 government archives, private organizations, and public libraries, 792–793 religious archives, 797 Research collections, Irish, in the United States, 798–804 colleges and universities, 801–804 government archives, private organizations, and public libraries, 798–801 Resistencia Peronista, 204 The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne, 415 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), 196, 330 Revolutionary War. See American War of Independence Rexroth, Kenneth, 478 Reynolds, Albert, 184, 601, 811 Reynolds, Debbie, 640, 804–806 Reynolds, Gene, 129 Rhode Island, 806–808 Ribbonmen, 314 Rice, Condoleezza, 688 Rich, Adrienne, 100 Rich, Buddy, 265 Richards, Fred, 775 Richards, John G., 892 Richardson, Natasha, 660–661 Rickard, Tex, 248, 890 Rickey, Branch, 730 Rickman, Alan, 661 Riddle, Samuel, 498 Rideau Canal, 151, 153 “Rides through Montana,” 587 Ridgewood Pearl, 424 Riel, Louis, 233 ABC-CLIO
959
Rigney, Bill, 89, 394 Riley, John, 832–833 Rinker, Al, 219–220 Rio Grande, 347 Rip Van Winkle, 678 The Rising Generation, 582 Rising of 1798, 539, 551, 670, 695, 849 Rising of 1848, 49, 382, 648, 672 and nationalists immigrating to New York, 672 and O’Mahony, 728 Rising of 1867, 648 Rising of 1916. See Easter Rising (1916) The Rising of the Moon, 175 The Rising Village, 10 Rithner, Juan José, 867 River Plate, 67, 129, 255 and colonial fights to control, 18, 21 and Gore, 376 and Irish settlers, 886–887 and King, 503 and Mendoza expedition, 16 See also Argentina; Paraguay; Uruguay River Plate Times, 776–777 Rivera, Antonio, 317 Rivera, Diego, 710 Riverdance and Butler, 141–142 and Flatley, 340 Roach, Hal, 560 The Road to Singapore, 220 Roane, Archibald, 473–474 Robassio, Abelardo, 567 Roberto, 422 Roberts, W. R., 729 Robertson, Sidney Hawkins, 211–212 Robeson Street, 428–429 Robinson, Edward G., 439 Robinson, Frank, 581 Robinson, Mary, 281, 808–814, 808 Robinson, Peter, 845 Robinson, Wilbert, 89, 392–393 Roche, Clement, 435 1-800-368-6868
960 INDEX Rock of Gibraltar, 424 Rockingham, Lord, 140–141 Rocky Mountain National Bank, 215 Roethke, Theodore, 361 Romani, 470, 471 Romero, Oscar, 288 Romney, Mitt, 139 Ronconi, Felice, 402 Roney, Frank, 831 A Room with a View, 237 Rooney, Dan, 53 Rooney, Mickey, 129, 363–364 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 378, 495 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 180, 561, 919 and Al Smith, 860, 861 and Coughlin, 34 and Curley, 223 and Farley, 321 and Federal Theatre Project, 327–328 and Gray, 378 and Joseph Kennedy, 493, 495 and Lewis, 123 and Powderly, 766 and Tammany Hall, 880 Roosevelt, Theodore, 187, 277, 295, 486, 766, 848, 918 Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 90, 255–256, 316, 504, 899 and C. O’Gorman, 708, 709 and Gore, 376 and Sheridan, 858 Rose, Billy, 487 Rose, David, 364 “The Rose of Tralee” (song), 642 Rose of Tralee International Festival, 60, 104, 459 Roseanne, 783 Rosemary’s Baby, 324–325 Rosen, Hans Waldemar, 753 Ross, Martin, 867–868 Rossa, Jeremiah O’Donovan, 252, 331, 467, 648 and IRB, 466 in New York City, 672 Rosset, Barney, 95 Rotha Mór an tSaoil, 532–533 www.abc-clio.com
Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, 821 The Rough Field, 605 Round Table, 422 Rowan, Stephen C., 814–815, 814 Rowland, Kevin, 534–535 Royal Canadian Mounted Police, 7 Royal Canal, 152 Royal Irish Constabulary, 360 Royal Shakespeare Company, 413 RTÉ adaptation of The Year of the French, 339 and Byrne, 144 and Crosby, 220 and Donleavy, 263 and election of Robinson, 810 and Rosen, 753 and Rotha Mór an tSaoil, 533 programs imported to U.S., 773 series on Irish Argentines, 189 Singers, 455 Rugby, 436 Rum, Sodomy & the Lash, 534 Ruppert, Jacob, 564 Rusby, Kate, 172 Rush, Benjamin, 55, 131 Russell, George, 373 Russell, John, 380 Russell, Lillian, 723 Russell, Seán, 463 Russo, Rene, 126 Ruth, Babe, 564, 565, 581 Ryan, Abram Joseph, 44, 815–816, 815 Ryan, Cathie, 170–172, 816–818 Ryan, Michael, 898 Ryan, Paddy, 874 Sabatini, Vincenzo, 568 Sadler’s Wells (racehorse), 423 Sadlier, James, 819, 820 Sadlier, Mary Anne, 259, 819–820 Saint Aloysius Church (Montreal), 607 ABC-CLIO
Saint Gabriel’s Church (Montreal), 607 Saint James Society, 25 Saint John, New Brunswick, 664 Saint John Weekly Freeman, 64–65 Saint Patrick’s Cathedral (New York), 168, 403, 406, 433, 822 and Hughes, 670–671, 822 and Spellman, 872 Saint Patrick’s Church Atoka, Oklahoma, 722 Buenos Aires. See Massacre at Saint Patrick Church, The Montreal, 607 New Orleans, 668 New York, 670 Newcastle, Maine, 544 Quebec City, 779 Saint Patrick’s Day, 368–369, 456 conflict between Ancient Order of Hibernians and Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, 665, 826 New Orleans, 668 Montreal parade, 608 New York parade, 670, 675, 823, 824, 825 parades, 823–828, 823 Saint Patrick’s Day, Dublin, 1974, 575 Saint Patrick’s School (Buenos Aires), 108–109 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 820–821, 874 Salesian Fathers, 318 Salinas, Pedro, 907 Sallustro, Oberdan, 92 Salt Lake and Los Angeles Railroad, 486 Salt Lake Tribune, 486 Sampson, William, 295, 296, 670, 828–829 San Francisco, 829–832 San Martín, José de, 18, 19, 538, 690 San Patricios Brigade, 20, 832–833. See also Irish brigades (American Civil War) 1-800-368-6868
INDEX Sandes, Arthur, 901 Sandinistas, 92, 679 Sandino, Augustino César, 679 Sanford, Henry Shelton, 163 Sangster, Robert, 423 Santa Anna, General, 832 Santucho, Mario R., 92 São Paulo, University of, 25 Sappho’s Boat, 646 Sarmiento, Domingo F., 336 Savage, Miguel, 320 Sawtelle, Charles, 693 The Saxon Shillin’, 199 Scanlan, William J., 723, 833–834 Schäffer, Gregor von, 207 Schindler’s List, 661 Schlesinger, John, 236 Schmidt, Gary, 521 Schneider, Alan, 95 School for Soldiers, 411 The School of Scandal, 410, 411 Schopenhauer’s Telescope, 263–264 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 494–495 Schwarzenegger, Maria Shriver, 494–495 Scotch-Irish Society, 838 Scots-Irish, 834–835 and American music, 636–637 and American Revolution, 666–667 in Applachia, 65 culture, 838–841 in Delaware, 245 disdain for Irish Catholics, 29 in Georgia, 368 in Indiana, 447 in Kentucky, 497–498 and linen, 460, 461 in Maine, 544 and military conflict, 835–838 in Missouri, 594 and Native Americans, 302–303, 474, 475, 836, 839, 846 in North Carolina, 685–686 in Ohio, 717 www.abc-clio.com
patterns of settlement, Canada, 841–845 patterns of settlement, United States, 846–848 and Pennsylvania, 28, 685, 757, 834, 838 politics, 848–850 as primary Irish immigrants to U.S. (18th and early 19th centuries), 28–29 settlement in Ulster, 768–769 in Tennessee, 881 See also Presbyterianism Scott, Robert, 852–853 Scott, Walter, 840 Scott, Zachary, 832, 833 Screaming Orphans, 457 Screen Actors Guild, 149 Scully, William, 111, 776, 850–852 Seabury Investigation (1932), 880 Sean nós, 636 Seanbheists, 313 The Searchers, 346, 347–348, 913 Second Bank of the United States, 474 Second Great Awakening, 769 Secret societies, 315 Secret Strings, 480 Securities and Exchange Commission, 493 Seeing Double, 285 Selkirk, Earl of, 303 Selznick, David O., 83 Seminoles, 474 Senna, Carl, 427–428 Sennett, Mack, 560 Seton, Elizabeth, 430 Seven Years’ War, 757 Severin, Tim, 113 Sevier, John, 473 Seward, William, 431 Seymour, Frederick, 96 Shackleton, Francis, 319, 852–854, 852 The Shadow Man, 374–375 Shake Hands with the Devil, 398 Shakers, 383 ABC-CLIO
961
Shakespeare and Company, 93, 483 Shamus O’Brien, 75, 746 Shanahan’s War, 722 Shaw, George Bernard, 328–329, 404, 854–856, 854 “She Moved Through the Fair,” 200 Sheehy, John, 356 Sheridan, Hugh, 857, 858 Sheridan, Jim, 144–145, 237, 238–239, 238, 372, 400, 856–857 and D. Quinn, 782–783 Sheridan, Peter (merchant and sheep breeder), 857–858 Sheridan, Peter (Project Arts Centre), 144, 856 Sheridan, Richard, 857, 858 Sherlock, Peter, 468 Sherman, William T., 179 Sherwood, Robert E., 82 Shields, Tommy, 249 Shillelaghs, 313 Shiner’s War, 9 Short Cuts, 362 The Show of Shows, 326 Showband Show, 634 Showboat, 278 Shriver, Eunice Kennedy, 493 Shriver, Sargent, 493 Shubenacadie Canal, 153 Siejes, Michael J., 111 Silver King Mining company, 485 The Silver Tassie, 332 Simon, Neil, 156 The Sin of Madelon Claudet, 404 Sinatra, Frank, 221, 265, 324 Singin’ in the Rain, 488, 805 Sinn Féin and Anglo-Irish Treaty, 760, 763 as fastest-growing party currently, 763, 764 and Good Friday Agreement, 601, 602 and Griffith, 136, 199 and IRA, 463–465, 649, 763 1-800-368-6868
962 INDEX Sinn Féin (continued) and IRB, 466 and Irish Americans, 36 and Irish Volunteers, 462 and Marxism, 464 and 1918 elections, 760 Official and Provisional, 763 recurring splits, 763 Standing Committee (1922), 760 and World War I, 759–760 Sinn Féin (newspaper), 136 Sinn Féin the Workers Party, 763 Sioux, 869–870 Sir Ivor, 422 Sisters of Charity, 432 Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, 526 Sisters of Loretto, 498 Sisters of Mercy, 25, 431–432 Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace, 226 Sisters of the Good Shepherd, 526 Six Nations, 479–480 Sixpence in Her Shoe, 574, 575 69th New York Volunteers, 49–50, 586–587. See also The Fighting 69th Skating with Heather Grace, 528 Skentelberry, Michael Leo, 257 “Skewball,” 421 Slater, Samuel, 807 Slavery, 41–44 Caribbean, 540–541 Casement’s reports on, 162 See also American Civil War Sleeper, Jacob, 155 Sleeping with the Enemy, 98, 99 Smallhorne, Jimmy, 782 Smallpox, 711 Smith, “Big Jim,” 667 Smith, Alfred Emmanuel (Al), 34, 223, 406, 493, 496, 674, 858–862 and C. Murphy, 627 and Tammany Hall, 672, 880 Smith, Gerald L. K., 209 www.abc-clio.com
Smith, James, 807 Smith, Jean Kennedy, 184, 281 Smith, John, 806 Smith, William, 295 Smith-O’Brien, William, 586, 596, 689, 790, 915 Smokey and the Bandit, 372 Smoot, Reed, 486 Smurfit, Sir Michael W. J., KBE, 862–865, 862 Smyth, Alfred, 245 Smyth, Patrick James, 596–597, 679 The Snake’s Pass, 873 The Snapper (film), 372 The Snapper (novel), 269 Snelson, Edward, 366 Soccer, early Argentine, 567, 865–867 Social Justice, 210 Socialist Party (post-SPI), 764 Socialist Party of Ireland (SPI), 764 Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, 766 Sociedade Internacional de Imigraçao, 850, 851 Society for the Protection of Desittute Catholic Children, 432 Society of American Women Composers, 92 Society of Ecclesiastical History, 356 Society of Geography, 356 “Sojourn in the Whale,” 612–613, 650 Solano López, Francisco, 524–525, 727, 751 “The Soldier’s Song,” 412 Soma, Enrica, 437, 440, 442 Somerville, Edith Œnone, 867–868 Song O’ My Heart, 569 Songdogs, 558 Songs at the Start, 389 Songs of Erin, 222 Songs of Raftery, 142 Songs of the Wexford Coast, 629 Sorin, Edmund, 686, 687 Sorkin, Adam J., 362 Sorrell and Son, 119 ABC-CLIO
Sosa, Sammy, 581 Sources of Irish Traditional Music, 733–734 South American Wars of Independence, 18–19. See also Bolívar, Simón South Carolina, 868–869 South Dakota, 869–871 The Southern Citizen, 597, 882 The Southern Cross, 22–23, 67, 135–136, 521–523, 775 and Dillon, 254 and hurling, 136, 434, 435 on indigenous peoples, 311 See also Bulfin, William Spalding, John, 498 Special Olympics, 493 Speech on American Taxation, 140–141 Spellman, Archbishop Francis Joseph, 406, 493, 871–872 “Spenser’s Ireland,” 613 The Spiral Staircase, 120 Spit Delaney’s Island, 12 Spring, Dick, 184 Spring Hill College, 44 Springfield College, 336 “The Springs of Affection,” 114 Spying on Miss Muller, 521 St. Gregory’s College, 722 St. Lawrence Seaway, 154 St. Louis University, Jefferson Smurfit Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, 864 St. Mary’s College, 498 St. Patrick’s Benevolent Society, 869 An Stad, 136 Stagecoach, 346, 347, 912 Stamford, C. V., 746 The Standard, 22–23, 254, 622, 774–775 Standley, Paul Carpenter, 206, 750 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 124 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 506, 618 Stanwyck, Barbara, 120, 326 A Star Is Born, 365 1-800-368-6868
INDEX Star of the Family, 268–269 Starbuck, George, 159 Stars in Your Eyes, 229 The States through Irish Eyes, 867 Stengel, Casey, 89, 90, 393–394 Stephens, James, 200, 252, 520, 720, 892 and Fenians, 330–332 and Gogarty, 373 and O’Mahony, 728–729 Stephens, Uriah S., 505, 764 Stephenson, Edwin R., 45 Steroids, 581–582 Stevens, George, 115 Stevens, Wallace, 410 Stevenson, Adlai, 496 Stevenson, Andrew, 698 The Steward of Christendom, 559 Stewart, James, 129 Stieglitz, Alfred, 719 Still Life with Waterfall, 385 Stimson, Henry, 201 Stivell, Alan, 535 Stoker, Abraham “Bram,” 873–874, 873 Stoneham, Horace, 730 Storer, Charles, 410 The Story of the Irish in Argentina, 632 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 299 Strachan, Kenneth, 206 Strand, Mark, 361 Strange Interlude, 731 Stritch, Andrew, 751 Stuart, Jeb, 837 Submarines, 416–418 Such a Heart Dances Out, 788 Sucre, Antonio José de, 19, 704 Sueyro, Sabá, 322 Sullivan, A. M., 331 Sullivan, Alexander, 649 Sullivan, James, 551 Sullivan, John L., 874–875 Sullivan, Pedro José, 67 Sulzer, William, 627 Summer Hill Gang, 137 Sunday Bloody Sunday, 236 Sunrise at Campobello, 367 Susquehanna Canal, 152–153 Sutherland, George, 486 www.abc-clio.com
Sweeney, Peter “Brains,” 894 “Sword Speech,” 585–586 Synge, John M., 197, 199, 923, 925 T. Eaton Company, 283–284 T. Mellon and Sons, 587, 588, 590 Tabu, 337 Tacuara, 90–91 Taft, William, 918 Táin Bó Cuailnge, 504 “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” 84 Talbot, Heidi, 172 Tales from Bective Bridge, 516 Tales of the Pampas, 136, 522, 523 “Talk of the Town,” 113–114 Tallchief, Maria, 877–878 Tallchief, Marjorie, 877, 878 Talmadge, Norma, 119 Tamahori, Lee, 126 Tamayo, Rufino, 710 Tammany (racehorse), 232 Tammany Hall, 31, 33, 878–881, 879 and Broderick, 120–121 and C. Murphy, 626–627 and Cockran, 187 and Cohalan, 191 and Croker, 217–219, 492, 880 Grace’s opposition to, 378 Irish takeover, 672 and Kelly, 491–492 Tammy and the Bachelor, 805 Taney, Roger, 49 Tanner, Henry Ossawa, 425 Taoiseach defined, 3 See also De Valera, Eamon Tap dance, 671 Tar Éis an Aifrinn (After the Mass), 225 Tauregue, 17 Taylor, Elizabeth, 129, 805 Taylor, Estelle, 248, 249 Taylor, George, 757 Taylor, Zachary, 121 An Teanga Mhartanach, 515 Tecumseh, 717 Telegraph, and Creighton, 215 ABC-CLIO
963
Temperance movement, 54–56 and O’Connell, 696 and Scanlan, 833–834 See also Mathew, Father Theobald Temple, Edmond, 472 Tender Is the Night, 335 Tener, John K., 87–88 Tennant, Gilbert, 213 Tennessee, 881–882 Tennis. See McEnroe, John Terrorism, 351 Terry, Alice, 449 Terry, Bill, 578 Terry, David, 121–122 Texas, 882–883 Texas Irish Festival, 459 That Nice Young Couple, 391 That Night, 570 Thatcher, Margaret, 320, 464, 624 and FitzGerald, 651 and Reagan, 786 Thayer, Ernest, 84 Them, 616 Theodora Goes Wild, 278 There’s No Business Like Show Business, 229 The Thief of Bagdad, 909 Third Person, 188 32-County Sovereignty Movement, 465 35th Indiana Infantry, 448 This Side of Brightness, 558 This Side of Paradise, 334, 335 This Sporting Life, 399 Thistle and Shamrock, 170 Thomas, A. G., 580 Thomas, George H., 179 Thomas B. Royden & Co., 888 Thomason, Charles, 58 Thomson, John, 212, 213 Thornton, Matthew, 58 Thornton, William, 415 Thorpe, Richard, 115 Three Sisters, 225 Through the Eyes of a Poet, 286 The Tides of Manaunaun, 211 Tidy Towns and Villages Competition, 60, 104 Tilden, Samuel, 880 Timarida, 424 1-800-368-6868
964 INDEX Time, Place and Music, 402 Times Three, 574–575 Tinkers, 468. See also Irish Travelers Tír Na nÓg, 27 Titanic, Irish on the, 883–886 To Kill a Mockingbird, 756 Tobin, John, 257 Toksvig, Signe, 391–392 Tomorrow and Tomorrow, 82 ita Tone, Matilda, 296 “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ra (That’s an Irish Lullaby),” 220, 723 Toolen, Thomas, 44 Torre, Joe, 89, 394 Torture, 351 An Tóstal: Ireland at Home, 59–61, 104 Touhey, Patsy, 192 Tourism. See An Tóstal: Ireland at Home; Bord Fáilte Eireann Tourism Ireland Ltd., 105 Tourneur, Maurice, 128 Town Hall Tonight, 46 Townsend, Francis, 209 Townsend, Kathleen Kennedy, 494 Tracy, Daniel, 606 Tracy, Spencer, 148 and O’Brien, 691, 692–693 Trail of Tears, 304, 836 Tralee, Co. Kerry, Ireland, 476–477. See also Rose of Tralee International Festival Transport Workers Union of America, 780 Trappist order, 498 Travel patterns from Ireland to South America, 886–889 The Travellers, 634 Treacy, Miguel Rice, 523 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 439, 443 Treaty of Nice, 352 Tréboles del Sur, 523 “Trees,” 502 Trevelyan, Charles, 381 www.abc-clio.com
The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (film), 756 Trimble, David, 180 Triple Alliance War, 472, 525 Trippe, Juan, 59 Trompe l’oeil, 394–395 Trouble-the-House, 480 The Troubles, 167, 464 and Irish-American support for nationalism, 36, 649, 651 Trudeau, Pierre, 623, 624 True Grit, 914 Truman, Harry, 223, 561–562, 595, 825 Truth Teller, 153, 154 Tubridy, Michael, 173 Tully, Jim, 889–890 Tumbleweeds, 75–76 Tunney, James Joseph “Gene,” 248, 655, 890–891 Tuohy, Patrick, 891–893 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 108 Turner, Kathleen, 441–442 Turner, Lana, 364 Tutu, Desmond, 812 Twain, Mark, 594, 681, 721, 835, 867 Tweed, William “Boss,” 33, 218, 491, 671, 672, 740, 893–894, 893 as pinnacle of Tammany Hall politics, 880 Two Journeys, 694 Tydings, Millard, 561–562 Tyler, Royall, 411 Tyrrell, William J., 44 Ulster Defence Association, 361 Ulster Unionist Party, 601 Ulster-Scot Historical Society, 838 Ulysses, 11, 93, 373, 483 court case, 483 The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 237 Uncle Pat’s Cabin, or Lights and Shades of Life in Ireland, 299 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 299 Under a Blood Red Sky, 896 ABC-CLIO
Under the Gaslight, 230 Underground Railroad, 42 The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, 528–529 The Unforgettable Fire, 896 United Auto Workers (UAW), 345 United Irish League of America, 897–899 The United Irishman, 135, 136, 253, 596, 772 United Irishmen, 295, 296 claim on Falkland/Malvinas Islands, 317–320 and Neilson/Nelsons, 661–662 and Sampson, 828 United Mine Workers (UMW), 122–123 United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), 599–601 United Nations, 350 and Robinson, 811–812 United States contemporary relations with Ireland, 37–38 decline of Irish immigration in 20th century, 33–34 illegal Irish immigrants, 36 and Irish Catholic immigration, 29–30 and Irish immigrants during Great Famine, 30–31 and post-Famine Irish immigration, 31–32 and Scots-Irish immigraton, 28–29 United States Capitol, 415 The United States v. One Book Entitled Ulysses, 483 Universidad Autónoma, 710 University College Dublin, Jefferson Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business, 864 The Unsinkable Molly Brown, 805 Uriburu, Alberto Ezcurra, 90–91 1-800-368-6868
INDEX Urquhart, Jane, 5–6, 11, 12 Urquiza, Justo José de, 376 Urriola, Pedro, 902 Urschel, Charles, 488–489 Ursu, Liliana, 362 Ursuline Convent, Charlestown, Massachusetts, 30, 545 Uruguay, 207, 899–900 and Campbell, 149, 150 and Casey, 164 Irish immigrants to, 21 U.S. Naval War College, 543 U.S. Navy. See Barry, John U.S. Rubber Company, 807 Ussher, Mary Jane, 319 Ussher, Santiago M., 319, 435 The Usual Suspects, 144 U2, 782, 895–897, 895 Valentino, Rudolph, 128, 449 Valladares, Eda, 907 The Valley of Decision, 366 The Van, 269, 270 Van Buren, Martin, 474, 475 Van Gogh, Vincent, 721 Vanya on 42nd Street, 782 Varian, John, 210–211 Vaudeville, 638–639 Velazquez, Diego, 892 Venado Tuerto, 164, 165 Venezuela, 255, 901–902 Venus and the Rain, 579 Verdi, Giuseppe, 402 Vernet, Louis, 317 Verrazano, Giovanni da, 806 Victoria Regina, 404 Vicuña Mackenna, Benjamín, 902–903 Villalón, Héctor, 91 The Vindicator, 8 Virginia, 903–904 Virginia, University of, 662 The Virginian, 443 A Visit to Colombia in the Years 1822 & 1823, 196 Viva Maria!, 206–207, 679 Viván, Carlos. See Treacy, Miguel Rice Volstead Act of 1919, 54, 55. See also Prohibition Voyage of Bran, 112 Voyage of Mael Duin, 112 www.abc-clio.com
Wagner, Robert, 627 Wagner Labor Relations Act of 1935, 345 Waiting for Godot, 94, 535, 559 Walker, Fred M., 477 Walker, Jimmy, 78, 672 and Tammany Hall, 880 Walker, Moses “Fleet,” 85 Walker, William, 206, 418, 679 Walker Brothers (mining), 231 Wall, Eamonn, 905 Wallace, George, 494, 496–497 Wallace, William Vincent, 678, 906–907 “The Flag of Our Union,” 906 Walsh, David I., 553 Walsh, María Elena, 522, 907–908 Walsh, Raoul, 908–909 Walsh, Rodolfo, 522–523, 909–910 Walsh, William, 318 Walters, Charles, 364 Walton, William, 195 “The Wanderings of Oisin,” 924 War, 896 War Admiral, 498 War Brides, 118 War of 1812, 474, 837 War on Poverty, 66 Ward, Ed, 592 Warner, Jack L., 804 Warren, Earl, and Warren Court, 117 Warren, Peter, 478 Wars of the Vendée, 424–425 Washington, D.C., 910–912 Washington, George, 414, 473, 903, 911 condemnation of antiCatholicism, 551 O’Connell on, 698 and War of Independence, 56 Watson, Emily, 857 Watson, Tom, 682 ABC-CLIO
965
Wayne, John, 144, 333, 347, 441, 535, 835, 912–914 and Ford, 347, 909 and Walsh, 909, 912, 913 Weaver, Earl, 89, 394 Webb, Frank J., 299 Webb, James, 836 Webb, Richard Davis, 267, 617–618, 699, 914–915 Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, 544 Weed, Thurlow, 72 Weld, Dermot, 424 Welland Canal, 151 Weller, John, 121 Welles, Orson, 144 Wellman, William A., 915–917 Wernick, Pete, 693 Western Union Company, 215 The Westerner, 115 Wexford Opera Festival, 104 Wharton, Charles Henry, 161 What Light There Is & Other Selected Poems, 385 What Price Glory?, 909 Wheeler, George, 747 Whelan, Patrick James, 573–574 Whelan, Richard Vincent, 903 “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” 79, 642, 723 When Jessie Came Across the Sea, 527–528 “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” 371 When My Baby Smiles at Me, 229 Whigs, 380–381 Whipple, Bayonne, 442 Whistler, James NcNeill, 628 White, Canvass, 152, 153 White, Dan, 831 White Christmas, 220 White Heat, 149 White House, 414, 415 The White Slave, 429 White Star line, 689. See also Titanic, Irish on the A White Thought in a White Shade, 519 1-800-368-6868
966 INDEX Whitelocke, John, 18 Whiteman, Paul, 220 Whitlocke. See Bryan, George Whitman, Charles S., 860 Whitman, Walt, 280, 410, 625, 669, 873 Whitney, J. H. “Jock,” 421 Who Shall Ascend, 206 Why England Slept, 495 “Wild Geese,” 17 Wilkes, Charles, 556 Willard, Jess, 248 William Barbour and Sons, 461 William of Orange, King of England, 739 William R. Grace & Co., 377 Williams, John J., 155, 553, 650 Williams, Roger, 806 Williams, Ted, 565 Williams, William Carlos, 504 Willing, Thomas, 130, 131 Willingly, 361 Wilson, Padraig, 330 Wilson, Thomas Woodrow, 191, 848, 917–919 Winch, Jesse, 920 Winch, Terence, 919–921 Wind and Current Charts of the North Atlantic, 557 Wings, 916 Winn, Matt J., 498 Winters, Yvor, 478 Winton, Alexander, 344 Wise Blood, 703 Wiseman, Cardinal, 318 Witherspoon, John, 770 The Wizard of Oz, 363 Wolf Trap Irish Folk Festival, 250 Wolfe Tone, Theobald, 539, 828 Wolfe Tone Society, 463 The Wolftones, 176–177
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The Woman Who Walked into Doors, 269 Women’s Christian Temperance Movement, 54 Women’s Rights Convention (1848), 618 Wood, Charles, 381 Wood, Fernando, 671, 878 Wood, Sam, 913 Woods, Macdara, 279 Workingmen’s Benevolent Association, 603 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 327, 438–439 World Anti-Slavery Convention (1840), 618, 914, 915 World Federation of Trade Unions, 123 World Peace Jubilee and International Music Festival, 371 World Trade Organization, 599 World War I and Irish Americans, 673, 915–916 and Sinn Féin, 759–760 World War II and Ford, 345 Irish neutrality in, 240, 242–243, 378–379 Wozzeck, 323 Wright, Elizur, 699 Wright, Henry Clark, 914 Wright, Thomas Charles James, 19–20, 921–922 Wright brothers, 685 Wrigley, Philip K., 730 Written on the Wind, 546 Wyeth, Henriette, 420 Wyler, William, 115, 438, 439 Wyse, NapoleonBonaparte, 749 Wyse, Thomas, 749
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Yankee Doodle Dandy (film), 148–149, 192 “Yankee Doodle Dandy” (song), 192, 193, 640 The Year of the French, 339 The Yearling, 129 Yeats, Elizabeth “Lolly,” 923 Yeats, George, 289 Yeats, Jack, 923, 924 Yeats, John Butler, 923–924, 926–927 Yeats, Susan “Lily,” 923 Yeats, William Butler, 99, 136, 410, 519, 923, 924–927, 925 on Burke, 141 and the Colums, 197, 199 Ellman’s work on, 289, 290 and Gogarty, 373 influence on Kinsella, 504 and M. Moore, 612 and Shaw, 855 You’ll Never Go Back, 522, 523 Young Ireland, 383, 790–791 and Buchanan, 132 and Canada, 10 and Cleburne, 177–178 and Davis, 136 Hughes on Rebellion, 433 and McGee, 573 and Meagher, 585–586 and Mitchel, 595–597 and O’Connell, 595, 648, 699 and O’Mahony, 728 and Stephens, 330–331 and Webb, 915 See also Rising of 1848 Young, Robert, 900 “You’re A Grand Old Flag,” 192, 640 Yukon, 532–533 Zeffirelli, Franco, 124 Zemurray, Samuel, 419 La Zingara, 888
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ABOUT THE EDITORS James P. Byrne is visiting assistant professor at Wheaton College, Norton, MA. A Fulbright scholar to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2000, he received his PhD from the National University of Ireland, Cork in 2002, and was IRCHSS Government of Ireland Fellow at Trintiy College Dublin from 2004–2006. He has published several articles on Irish-American cultural identity in both American and Irish journals, and is currently completing a book on the comparative literary study of Irish American and Jewish American ethnic identity. Philip Coleman, PhD, is a lecturer in English Literature specializing in American literatures and director of the MPhil in Literatures of the Americas program in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He has edited “After thirty Falls”: New Essays on John Berryman (Rodopi, 2007) and On Literature and Science: Essays, Reflections, Provocations (Four Courts, 2007), and he is the executive editor of IJASonline, the official journal of the Irish Association for American Studies. He has published articles on various aspects of modern American poetry and fiction. Jason King is a graduate of McGill University (BA), Simon Fraser University (MA), and the National University of Ireland, Maynooth (PhD). He has lectured at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and the National University of Ireland, Cork, and is currently an assistant professor in the English department and the Centre for Canadian Irish Studies, Concordia, Montreal. His research specializes in the literary culture of the Irish diaspora, Irish theatre, the Irish novel, and immigrant writing in Ireland. He has published numerous articles about Irish diasporic writing in journals and edited collections on both sides of the Atlantic.
967 www.abc-clio.com
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