The American Irish: A History
by Kevin Kenny
Addison Wesley Longman 2001

by Maureen Murphy

This new history of the Irish in America, the first from a new generation of historians of the Irish diaspora, is a valuable survey of Irish immigration to North America, primarily to the United States, from the earliest settlers in the first decades of the eighteenth century to the present. There are chapters devoted to six periods: The Eighteenth Century; Before the Famine; The Famine Generation; After the Famine; Irish America, 1900-1940; and Irish America since the Second World War. Drawing on the pioneering work of Irish immigration historians like Dennis Clark, Hasia Diner, Lawrence J. McCaffrey, Kerby Miller, and Janet Nolan, on the work of current immigration historians like Mary Corcoran and Timothy Guinnane, and on the work of specialists like Francis Carroll (Irish-American politics), David Noel Doyle (the Irish-American labor movement) and Charles Fannning (Irish-American literature), Kenny has produced a history that is an engaging introduction to the American Irish for the general reader, a clear and highly readable (and teachable) text for a course in the history of the Irish in America, and a reliable reference for the specialist.

Kenny calls his book a synthesis; however, his book is much more. He has made a number of original contributions to the study of the Irish in America. He places each of his chapters on the Irish in America in the context of events in Ireland during the same period so that the reader understands the forces that shaped Irish emigration in a particular era. (This approach provided the "making sense" in Kenny's first book Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (1998) where he traced the relationship between traditional forms of agrarian protest in Ireland and the beginning of trade unionism in the 1870s among Irish immigrant miners in the hard coal country of Pennsylvania.)

Kenny introduces his readers to contemporary conditions in Ireland before he discusses the major themes that characterized those Irish immigrants' experiences in the United States: nationalism, labor, politics, religion.Kenny's book identifies and discusses the current issues in the historiography of the American Irish: the "Celtic Thesis" developed about ethnic origins and the first federal census, the "whiteness" of the Irish in pre-Civil War America, the various interpretations of the Great Irish Famine, Irish-American nationalism, and the nature of Irish-American urban politics. In such discussions, Kenny often suggests new areas of research or questions about the experience of the Irish in America that need to be investigated or revisited. One could add to Kenny's list the work on the American Irish and religious orders done by scholars like Suellen Hoy and the attention given to local history by researchers like Ellen Skerritt who has studied Chicago parishes.

The language of Kenny's The American Irish: A History is one of inclusion. He moves beyond the old distinction between the "Scotch-Irish" (Ulster Presbyterian Irish in America) and the Irish Americans (traditionally identified as Catholic) and uses the term American Irish to embrace all those have come to America from Ireland. Kenny's inclusion is about more than terminology; he pays generous attention to the story of the American Irish from Protestant (mainly Ulster Presbyterian) tradition. He argues that land was a defining force in their pattern of migration: from Scotland to Ulster, from Ulster to North America, and from the eastern shores west to the frontier, a frontier they shared with German immigrants. Their "shallow roots" in Ulster meant that the American Irish of Ulster Presbyterian tradition chose to migrate to North America where they would have increased economic opportunity (land) and religious independence; they generally did not share the sense of involuntary exile that Kerby Miller has identified as characteristic of later American Irish of Roman Catholic tradition. Kenny argues that the assimilation of the Ulster Presbyterians was linked to the matter of race and slavery. "The greater the stake of the Scotch-Irish in slavery, the more they came to be regarded as the equals of other white Americans in the South" (p. 39).

Access to land-as tenants, not as owners-was the central issue for most of the population of Ireland in the nineteenth century. 900,000 families lived on less than two acres or were landless (p.49). Enclosure legislation further limited available land, which resulted in the Irish who were pressed for land reacting with secret agrarian society and with emigration. Kenny demonstrates that Irish violence in America over access to employment was based on the use of agrarian violence as a form of protest about access to land. In his chapter "Before the Famine," Kenny also considers the debate about Irish "whiteness" and cautions that the charge of Irish racism runs the risk of blaming the Irish for the misfortunes of the African Americans rather than an employment system that created antagonism over access to employment between two disadvantaged groups (p. 67).

Kenny's chapter "The Famine Generation" outlines the debate among historians over the causes of the Great Irish Famine and the matter of the British government's responsibility for their failure to take timely and appropriate action. Here again, Kenny discusses the complexity of historical questions. Was Ireland a colony or a partner in the United Kingdom? To what degree did British government, press, and public opinion regard the famine as divine intervention that provided an opportunity to transform social and moral conditions? What is clear is that the Great Irish Famine transformed the structure of rural Ireland. The number of those living on 0-5 acres declined from 44.9 to 15.5 percent while the number of those farming 50 or more acres increased from 7 to 26.1 percent.

The Great Irish Famine also changed the profile of the Irish emigrant to North America. The majority were "rural dwellers, Catholics, lacking in capital beyond their passage money, usually English-speaking and able to read or write to some extent, and whenever possible they left Ireland in family groups rather than alone." (p. 99) This generation of Irish immigrants were the least successful and most exploited. A high percentage of Irish immigrant women were single heads of household; there was a significant number of Irish immigrant women engaged in prostitution (1/3 of 2,000 interviewed in 1855). Competition for employment with African-Americans continued and the Irish opposed the emancipation of slavery because they feared that more cheap labor would arrive from the south. Tension erupted in the Draft Riots of 1863.

Kenny's final theme for the Famine period is the beginning of an Irish-American nationalism that embraced the physical force nationalism of the Young Irelanders rather than the constitutional nationalism of Daniel O'Connell. Irish nationalism in the United States reached a crossroads in the post-famine period. The competing interests of constitutional, physical force and social reform converged; the winner was Home Rule. Irish-born migrants to the United States reached their peak in 1890 (1,871,509); that year there were 2,924,172 second-generation Irish living in the United States. (p. 131) The continued high emigration from Ireland was a feature of a demographic profile of post-famine Ireland that included: low and late marriage rates and high rates of celibacy (p. 133), "Strong farmers" (30 plus acres), and the Catholic Church and Irish nationalism as the dominant forces in Irish society. Emigration and religious vocations were ways to accommodate non-inheriting or non-dowered children, so that this period saw more young, single emigrants. Single females frequently outnumbered males. Kenny considers the heavy concentration of Irish women who went into domestic service and questions the degree to which current historians have underestimated the social oppression of those women.

Kenny's last two chapters consider Irish America, 1900-1940, and Irish America since the Second World War. By the turn of the century, the Irish had moved into mainstream America, and immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were the "other." Irish emigration had changed too. More restrictive American immigration laws resulted in three times as many Irish migrating to Great Britain as migrated to North America. Irish independence dominated the first two decades of the twentieth century, and the influence of the American Irish brought the Irish question into the mainstream of American politics. The Irish continued to dominate the labor movement and American urban politics, and Kenny traces the development of the distinctive style of Irish machine politics up to the time of the New Deal.

Kenny's last chapter, "Irish America Since the Second World War," is less a survey of Irish immigration than a discussion of the identity of Americans of Irish descent and its shift from urban to suburban centers. The 1980s saw two new waves of Irish immigrants: skilled and highly educated immigrants with work visas and a larger number of undocumented Irish (40,000-200,000) who were living in urban centers and working off the books in the building trades, in bars and restaurants, and in child care or domestic service. The efforts of the grass roots Irish Immigration Reform Movement (IIRM) and other organizations in the American Irish community to lobby congress successfully for visa programs for the Irish was one of the great success stories of the last twenty years. The period also saw Ireland return to the American political agenda as the United States, particularly during the Clinton administration, played an active role in the peace process in Northern Ireland.

Kenny's study of the American Irish comes at a moment when the Irish are enjoying the benefits of the Celtic Tiger economy, and its culture has the world's attention. Irish Studies is enjoying a higher Profile, not only in American colleges and universities but also in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and South America. States are requiring that students learn about the Great Irish Famine. New York State will introduce its Great Irish Famine Curriculum for grades 4-12 later this year. The study of the Irish in America is essential to any Irish Studies program. Kevin Kenny has given us an essential text for the story of the American Irish.

Maureen Murphy, Professor of Curriculum and Teaching at Hofstra University, is Chair of the Great Irisih Famine Curriculum Committee, which has just written the curriculum for the New York State Education Department. Professor Murphy is currently working on a book on Irish domestic servants in America.

This article appears in the April 11 edition of the electronic journal of H-Net.

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