Mediating America: Black and Irish Press and the Struggle for Citizenship, 1870–1914 by Brian Shott (review)

Brian Shott's study of African American and Irish American newspapers during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era focuses on four editors: Patrick Ford, T. Thomas Fortune, James Samuel Stemons, and Rev. Peter C. Yorke. Shott examines how these four "race men of the black and Irish press" (7) sought to "calibrate group identity within American norms" even as they promoted "national belonging" for Black and Irish Americans in an era when debates over the limits of US citizenship were inflamed by Reconstruction and Jim Crow, Chinese exclusion, and the annexation of Hawaii and the Philippines (164). Rather than offer a tidy Andersonian narrative of newspapers unifying the nation, Shott follows Trish Loughran's lead in seeing nineteenth-century US print culture as a site of "discord and division as well as unity" (13). He reveals how the Black and Irish press in the United States balanced "the construction of ethnic, racial, and religious identity" to argue for broader conceptions of national citizenship of varying degrees of inclusiveness (3).

Shott gives two reasons for his focus on the African American and Irish American press to the exclusion of other ethnic newspapers. One reason, he says, is linguistic: restricting the study to English-language publications permits him to "gauge … black and Irish journalists' effect on broader public policy debates" (9). But he also sees the African American and Irish American press as linked by a special combination of "affinity and resentment": "the interplay between black and Irish nationalisms, religious concerns, responses to empire, and visual elements within these presses lends greater insight into the building of competing, racialized discourses of citizenship in the late nineteenth century" (10).

Shott's examination of the Irish American press in the book's first half picks up where Cian T. McMahon's Global Dimensions of Irish Identity: Race, Nation, and the Popular Press, 1840–1880 left off: with Patrick Ford and the Irish World. The Irish-born Ford, who came to the United States as a child refugee from the Great Famine, cut his teeth as a newspaperman in Boston's abolitionist press. In 1870 he founded the Irish World, which became one of the leading Irish American newspapers and boasted an international readership. Shott agrees with McMahon that the Irish World's stated aims to "knit" the global Irish into one "integral body" and to "confront the pretensions of Anglo-Saxon ascendancy" (21–22) were initially rooted not in a desire to assimilate Irish Americans to a more expansive racial category of whiteness but in a spirit of pluralism, complicating familiar accounts of the "whitening" of the Irish in America. Ford argued that the only "veritable" Americans were the indigenous people, dismissed belief in a homogeneous American "people" as absurd, and envisioned a pluralist United States in which "the Irish-Americans … and the African-Americans" were on a level (44). Yet Shott, unlike McMahon, follows the Irish World into the racial nadir of the 1890s and beyond, where he discovers wavering support for African American equality. Although the World consistently condemned lynching as a moral outrage, Ford "lost some control of his egalitarian message" as columnist Robert Ellis Thompson began denouncing Black suffrage and the "blunder" of Reconstruction and claiming that the lynching epidemic would die out if the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were repealed (52–53).

The World's support for labor activism likewise proved inconsistent. Ford signified his support by renaming the paper the Irish World and American Industrial Liberator in 1878, but in the early 1900s the labor section disappeared and the paper grew increasingly moderate, a shift Shott attributes to both Ford's growing conservatism and a burgeoning Irish American middle class. The paper's record on US imperialism is similarly mixed. While the World was characterized by "fierce anti-imperialism" and "passionate calls for solidarity with (typically nonwhite) victims of colonialism around the globe" (24...