Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880-1928 (review)

Meagher's excellent study of Irish Americans in Worcester, Massachusetts, opens and closes on St. Patrick's Day. In 1890, an upwardly mobile group of American-born men voted to march in honor of Ireland's patron saint but only after a heated discussion. The debate pitted their desire to honor the old sod against their concern that the parade would expend funds better-spent on a library, encourage drunken brawling, and undermine the respectability that they so craved. Their wish "to call themselves Irishmen" won out only narrowly over their yearning to be "American" (2). The next decades saw the St. Patrick's Day celebration go in and out of fashion in Worcester as residents continued to argue about whether it was a valuable and appropriate statement. Even today, Meagher notes in his conclusion, the resurrected parade remains a lightning rod for debates over Irish-American politics and identity.

These vignettes provide effective bookends for a study that convincingly argues for the contested and contingent nature of ethnicity. Taking as his subject the second generation often overlooked by immigration historians, Meagher seeks to understand how Irish Americans invented, and reinvented, their identities in a New England industrial city. The author rejects a linear model that sees a straight trajectory from "ethnic" to "American." Instead, he traces a more complicated path from the "search for accommodation" of the 1880s and early 1890s, to the "ethnic revival" of the 1890s and early 1900s, to the "triumph of militant, pan-ethnic, American Catholicism" that culminated in the 1920s (133, 201, 269). This path, Meagher argues, evolved as the result of internal shifts between generations and external shifts (informed by economic and political trends) in how the Irish related to Yankees and newer immigrants. His study thus links culture with structure to reveal the complex process by which newcomers defined their positions in the new world.

As Meagher notes, "Worcester is my hometown and, being Irish American, this community is my community" (ix). His insider's position gives him a flair for the vivid detail and the telling anecdote, without undermining his critical perspective. He mines a rich variety of sources—newspapers, diaries, government records, corporate papers, and records of parishes and fraternal orders—to explode popular assumptions about ethnicity and assimilation and to recreate the texture of Irish-American life. Particularly effective is his creative use of census records to reveal naming, residential, and marital patterns—finding, for example, that the second generation married (or did not marry) in ways that resembled patterns in Ireland more than those of the first generation. Throughout, his book crosses disciplinary boundaries by demonstrating how shifts in culture, religion, economics, and politics worked together to change the ways in which Irish Americans defined themselves and their relationships to others.

The author's closeness to the subject matter may have prevented him from culling his extraordinary rich evidentiary base; the book is dense and would have benefited from shorter, tighter chapters. Nonetheless, Meagher's intense focus on the locality does not blind him to the broader context; one strength of the book is its linking of changes in Worcester to shifts in Vatican policy and Irish politics. Even though the author is careful to note that "there was no typical Irish American experience" (16), scholars will wish to apply many of his perceptive insights to their studies of immigrants from Ireland and elsewhere. Inventing Irish America is a masterful study that should be required reading for any student of immigration or religious history.