Editor’s Introduction

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION In the course of the twentieth century, the American Irish overcame most of the discrimination and impoverishment that had characterized their history in the nineteenth century. With the arrival in the United States of the “new immigrants” from southern and eastern Europe from the 1880s onward, the Irish moved from largely unskilled work to primarily skilled and managerial positions. At the same time, the racial typologies of antiimmigrant nativists somewhat begrudgingly included the Irish in the superior “Nordic” or “Teutonic” category, while confining the “new immigrants ” to racial inferiority. The Catholicism of Irish Americans excluded them from full respectability in the United States for decades to come, until the election of John F. Kennedy as president in 1960 finally settled that question. But the social trajectory of the American Irish was firmly upward by the 1920s. The immigration restriction laws of that decade, combined with the effects of the Great Depression in the 1930s, directed Irish migration away from America and toward Britain, a pattern that has remained in place ever since. Though there would be a significant influx from Ireland to the United States in the 1950s and again in the 1980s, Irish immigration never again assumed anything like the mass proportions of the preceding century. Consequently, the primary object of study in this period is not so much immigration as the multi-generational ethnic group. This is the second of two special issues devoted to Irish America, a theme that has been broadly defined to include reciprocal interactions between Ireland and the United States as well as the history, culture, and current position of Americans of Irish descent. The first issue examined the period up to 1900; this one examines the relatively neglected period thereafter. We know much more about nineteenth-century Irish America than we know about any period of Irish settlement anywhere in the world. But in recent years the most dynamic period in Irish-American scholarship, as indeed in U.S. historiography more generally, has arguably been the twentieth century. The field is young compared to the nineteenth -century scholarship, but this very imbalance made it all the more pleasurable and important to compile the current issue. In keeping with EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION 5 the eclectic tradition of Éire-Ireland, the essays presented herein represent a broad range of disciplines and methodological approaches. Along with some poems and an edited collection of letters, there are three essays by historians, two by educators, and one each by a historical geographer, a film critic, a sociologist, and a social psychologist. The disciplinary range, noticeably broader than for the nineteenth-century issue, is significant; clearly, the abundance of twentieth-century sources allows for a greater variety of methodological approaches. The first two essays presented here, by William Jenkins and Matt O’Brien, examine the nature of the Irish-American community in the early twentieth century. Jenkins traces the persistence into the 1950s and beyond of an Irish ethnic neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, whose origins go back before the Great Famine. Using the skills of a historical geographer , he analyzes patterns of settlement, residence, labor, and politics to show how Buffalo’s First Ward retained its distinctive Irish character across several generations. Twentieth-century continuity is also the theme of Matt O’Brien’s study of community and transatlantic connections during the neglected era of the Great Depression. Taking immigration restriction and the foundation of the Irish Free State as their cues, most studies of Irish America have until recently stopped abruptly in the 1920s. Yet, as O’Brien demonstrates, the extensive migration networks established between Ireland and America remained critically important thereafter. These networks moved in both directions across the Atlantic, bringing immigrants in and sending remittances home. It was the Great Depression, rather than the events of the early 1920s, that finally constituted the decisive break. Harvey O’Brien, Mary Daly, and Katherine Powers examine aspects of Ireland’s political and cultural interaction with America in the equally neglected mid-twentieth century, from the 1930s to the 1960s. O’Brien analyzes the image of Ireland portrayed in Irish and American tourist films, which turned Ireland’s history, geography, and culture into commodities designed...