Volume 2, Number 1 · February 20, 1964
Coming Up For Eire
By Julian Moynahan
The American Irish: A Political and Social Portrait
by William V. Shannon
Macmillan, 458 pp., $7.95
The American Irish is a contribution to American immigrant history more broadly based than a pioneering work like Handlin's The Boston Community and less searching and professional with respect to demographic and sociological factors than John Archer Jackson's recent monograph on a parallel subject, The Irish in Britain. At the same time it is a journalistic account of how the Irish of the famine and post-famine generations came to the United States and made their varied marks on American life, told largely by means of profiles of leading personalities active from about 1850 onwards in such fields as religion, politics, sport, literature, and the theater. The author takes a good deal of satisfaction in the spectacle of Irish upward mobility, but he also writes as an American Catholic liberal who believes in the open society and all the major social and economic reforms introduced into our national community since the New Deal. Interestingly enough, he makes a good case for the existence of a substantial Irish-American liberal tradition within the American Catholic establishment, citing Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop John Ireland, and the progressive economist Father John Ryan as its principal begetters and ornaments in the earlier part of this century. Unfortunately, Mr. Shannon's liberal hopes for the Irish betray him into the book's only serious distortion. Writing of the late President and his administration he says they bodied forth 'the three main themes of the history of the Irish in this country: the poetry, the power and the liberalism,' seeming to forget that throughout his own book he has demonstrated—by balancing ultraconservative churchmen like McQuaid and O'Connell against liberals like Ryan and Ireland, the Coughlinites and McCarthyites against the New Deal Irish, a Curley against an Al Smith—that the relation of the Irish to liberal ideas and politics has been disturbingly dualistic.
Review, 1419 words
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