The Luck and Persistence of the Irish

            Though the United States of America remains one of the youngest countries in existence, our status as an influential power is well established across the globe.  Widely heralded as the “land of opportunity”, America has always been a popular destination for immigrants in search of a better life.  Thanks to this daily influx of new citizens, the typical American has become a constantly evolving individual.  The purpose of this report is to chart the progress of one ethnic group, the Irish-Americans, through the basic stages of the immigrant narrative, and use this framework to enrich the tale of my own family story.  By applying the oral account of my third generation Irish-American grandmother to the official history of the immigrant group, I hope to better understand how the presence of “The Emerald Isle” has shaped my life as a twenty-first century American. 

            Because the decision to leave the country of one’s birth and journey thousands of miles to an unknown land is a difficult and frightening one, the prospect of staying put must be very bleak indeed.  Such was the situation of the Irish during the late eighteenth-early nineteenth century.  At that time Ireland was a country under the control of an antagonistic Protestant England.  English command of property rights reduced the Irish citizens to the status of poor agricultural workers with no hope of owning land.  Poverty stricken and bereft of any real education, many of the peasants struggled to support sizeable families on little income.  Additionally, as the agriculture in Ireland progressively declined, the country experienced long periods of food shortage.  Perhaps the most famous of these starvation epidemics is known as the Great Famine, which occurred between 1845 and 1849 (Kenny 16).  For these reasons many natives of the island set their sights on America, and the hope of a more prosperous future.  Among these were my great-great grandparents, Dennis Kennedy and Kathleen Keogh, who, with their 6 children, settled in Philadelphia in 1845. 

            “Over four and a half million Irishmen entered the United States in the century from 1820 to 1920,” and all of them arrived by boat at various ports on the Eastern seaboard (Wittke 1).  Having little in the way of marketable skills, male immigrants took service jobs such as waiting tables or labored on construction crews, while their female counterparts found employment as domestic servants.  Though most remained in ethnic enclaves (known as “shanty towns”) in major cities like New York, a small portion moved westward to work on canals and railroads, or to try their hand at farming.  Married in 1910, my great-grandmother (Irish) and great-grandfather (Scotch-Irish) moved to Sparta, Georgia, where they, too, took up farming.  After the death of her husband during a flu epidemic, my great-grandmother was unable to support the farm, and she and her 3 children moved to Augusta, where she ran a boarding house.  While they did face some hardships, the American experience of my relatives would prove to be much easier than the struggles of the average Irish immigrant.  Many of those that managed to survive the long boat trip to the United States found themselves in conditions not unlike those they had left behind, and facing a variety of unpleasant reactions from the majority of the American population. 

            Within a short time the “sons of Erin” had established a reputation as boisterous and uneducated types prone to hard-drinking and even harder fighting.  Along with this stereotype, the Irish demonstrated an intense devotion to the Catholic Church, which functioned to create an atmosphere of fear and suspicion among the largely Protestant Americans.  By setting up private religious schools for their children and infiltrating political groups, the immigrants continued to ruffle feathers in their pursuit of the American Dream.  By the mid-1800’s, discrimination against the Irish was at its peak, and signs advertising “No Irish Need Apply” became a common sight in store windows.  But the prospect of returning home was non-existent, and the refugees pushed forward in their adopted homeland.  Though bias continued to exist against the Irishman until the turn of the century, it centered mainly on religion, a trait that remained deeply ingrained in the immigrants, even as the underwent the process of assimilation. 

            While the Irish certainly represented a significant portion of the immigrant population in America in the nineteenth century, it was inevitable that new immigrant groups would arrive and overshadow the lingering prejudices of the fickle American public.  “By the end of the nineteenth century, with the influx of large numbers of Southern and Eastern Europeans, many native Americans formerly opposed to the Irish now insisted that they had the capacity to assimilate (Coppa & Curran 109).”  Thus, the children of Ireland began to sow the seeds of their success in the United States.  Having once earned a living as laborers and servants, the Irish-Americans found themselves in elevated levels of employment.  Functioning as schoolteachers and secretaries (like my great-grandmother, who proudly claimed to be the first person to use a typewriter in her office) or politicians and factory workers (my great-grandfather serviced cotton gins), these once poor and hopeless people created a bright new future for themselves.  Amazingly, “in little more than a century, the Irish-Americans’ assimilation was a reality (Coppa & Curran 109).” 

            Today, in the twenty-first century, being Irish in America is less of a burden than it was for those early settlers.  For starters, there are very few full-blooded Irish-Americans left, and if you manage to find one, the odds are that he or she is a fairly recent arrival to our shores.  Most of the pure Irish blood that once existed has been repeatedly diluted with a variety of other ethnic influences, as America’s “melting pot” demands.  Though mainstreamed, many of Irish heritage have retained their Catholicism, and the people and the religion have become irreparably co-mingled.  Perhaps predictably, capitalism has turned Ireland’s influence on America into big business; just think of the millions of dollars spent each year on the promotion and celebration of St. Patrick’s Day!  In just one hundred years being Irish in America has gone from a curse to a blessing, and those of us with roots on the Emerald Isle rarely hesitate to claim them whenever an opportunity arises. 

            Curiously, I have often identified with my “Irishness” without really considering the struggles of those that came before me.  Thanks to a combination of my grandmother’s words and this assignment, I have been able to make a connection with one facet of my complicated American identity.  In fact, I am entertaining the notion of tracing all of my various genealogical roots and studying them with the aid of the tools for evaluation learned in this course.  Undoubtedly, immigrant waves will continue to crash upon our American shores, and though we may resist the influence of these strangers, they will persist in becoming part of our communities and contribute invaluable colors to the complex and ever-changing fabric of the twenty-first century American identity. 

Works Cited

The Immigrant Experience in America.  Ed. Frank J. Coppa & Thomas J. Curran.  Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976.

Kenny, Kevin.  The American Irish: A History.  Harlow, England: Pearson Education Limited, 2000.

Wittke, Carl.  The Irish In America: A Student’s Guide to Localized History.  New York: Teachers College Press, 1968.

Phone interview with Kathryn Carpenter, 04/28/06. 

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