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Chapter 7. Still Standing in the Gale
- University of Massachusetts Press
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151 7 Still Standing in the Gale { If there is any central theme in the story of the Irish in America, it is . . . how they stayed Irish: how an immigrant group already under punishing cultural and economic pressures, reeling in the wake of the worst catastrophe in western Europe in the nineteenth century, and plunged into the fastest industrializing society in the world, regrouped as quickly as it did; built its own far-flung network of charitable and educational institutions ; preserved its own identity; and had a profound influence on the future of both the country it left and the one it came to. —Peter Quinn, Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America Irish-American ethnic identity needs to be understood as historical, contingent , and contested, rather than essential, fixed, and agreed upon. . . . [D]efinitions of Irish-American ethnicity, moreover, were caught up in a larger social conflict whose outlines are best described in terms of social class. —Kevin Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires Many of the Ballykilcline immigrants in the United States avoided the worst fears envisioned for them by their primary storyteller, Robert Scally, who worried darkly after resurrecting their history that they might have ended up as skid row charity cases (Scally 1995, pp. 226, 227). In fact, many of them did far better than Scally envisioned, though unsurprisingly , it took some time, tremendous obstacles confronted them, and not all of them made it. In Rutland though, a sizable and helpful community from Ballykilcline and surrounding Kilglass Parish had taken root before the arrival of the immigrating evictees and mentored them in settling in. It was enormously helpful to the distraught people who, forced from their homes, were wearied by their ordeals and still grieving their losses. The Ballykilcline immigrants came out of a long, bitter strike experience that pitted them against elites at home, and they had seen their ground dissolve into chaos by reason of famine and death, a hostile government , interclass conflict, widespread eviction, and forced emigration. 152 Chapter Seven They stood up against the Crown’s agents, the highest British administrators in Ireland, the property owners, a biased judicial system, massive police forces (especially in the wake of the landlord murders in Roscommon ), and incursions into their townland. During the famine, many of them witnessed the deaths of family and friends in politically frustrating circumstances beyond their control. Of course, the farmers of Ballykilcline lost to towering opposition, oppressive power, and catastrophe. In the end, those who lived were forced to surrender their homes, their grip on the life-giving land, their place in Irish society, and their cherished homeland. They were forced out to a new world, forced into risk—though risk was hardly foreign to them. In the United States it took them a decade or so to regroup while they recuperated from their wounds and their harsh memories, found themselves and family members again or made new families, and adjusted to and remade their place in the world—that is, built those “useful and coherent bridges to membership in the American community” that Kevin O’Neill cited (2001, pp. 121, 122). The strikers arrived in America with both certain liabilities and some distinct advantages. Among their liabilities were a particularly horror- filled experience of the famine years in hard-hit Kilglass; being forced to leave after many had lost family members to hunger, disease, and emigration chaos; their lack of financial assets and job skills for a demanding industrial economy in flux; and other legacies, mental and physical, of their protracted and contentious strike. If their liabilities were burdensome, their advantages for life in the United States were nevertheless many and significant. They included, for some, that they had previously worked in England or Scotland; that they had been sent to the United States and their way paid; that friends had preceded them; that they came from a cohesive communal culture; that they were bilingual and mostly literate; and that they had lived alongside Protestants so that they knew something more about interclass relations and getting along with Anglos than did those Irish from more homogeneous western parts of Connacht and Munster. They had devised strategies for dealing with Protestants and their culture. They had a strong and practiced sense of identity politics, of being underlings in a hierarchical social structure, and of collective action on uneven ground. Moreover, the fact that such a large group from Kilglass had settled in one...