Irish American

Listen to “Irish American”:

The dead were everywhere

Lying in fields and ditches
Clustered in mud huts and caves
Kneeled and crumpled in churches
Eyes blackened, lungs caved

There were to the eye more dead
Than ever seemed to have been alive
And for the living who could
It was time to leave…

It was a long, hard pull from being Irish in America to Irish American, but it’s done now, and for some time, too.

Now America itself came out of the simplest of human yearnings - fairness. Simple fairness was what was wanted. And the force and power that saw the Founders to the realization of this quest was common sense, that we are each and all created equal - of worth by fact of birth. To them, this was self-evident, as was certainly that we each must assume responsibility for the living of our own lives. America, then, was a deliberate act, one now continuing for some 240 years.

So that’s where it all started. That’s the American part. What, then, of the Irish?

Well, what I know of the Irish in America comes largely from the writing of the Swampoodle Trilogy. This began with St. Patrick’s Day, a wholly fictional tale of the Riley’s of Chevy Chase, Maryland, it taking place in the spring of 1968. Then, after some years of curing, the characters in it came to a need of explanation as to from where they’d come and why they were as they were. This led back in time to Swampoodle, it running from 1848 to 1936 and telling of the life and times of good Jack Hennessey.

Swampoodle, the name given the slum just north of the Capitol building where clustered the famine Irish in Washington City, was to give me a far greater appreciation of the Irish here in America, the how and the why of them. It also gave me a deeper, richer understanding of the characters in St. Patrick’s Day which, in turn, led to Mount Olivet, the third book. It takes place in the September of 1993. Now as it took form and purpose, Mount Olivet emerged in my mind as the third iteration of the Irish in America, its subtitle – The Rising – even suggesting an arrival at journey’s end. Yes, the Irish I, II, III and done…well, maybe.

The first and second iterations are pretty easy, really, the times all settled out and their characters’ lives lived, certainly those of Swampoodle. Yes, they of the Great Famine and its disgorging onto these shores of more than a million starving souls - mostly illiterate and many unshod. It was these and their succeeding generations who put the Irish in America. And it was these whose faith and purpose came to a grounding here, as in never going back - ever. This was into the 1920s by some’s reckoning, the 1930s by others’. That was Iteration I.

Iteration II, now, it runs from there and through to the 1960s, maybe into the 1970s. A world-war contested and won, it breaking down barriers and opening doors, signs of Irish Need Not Apply scattered and trampled in the wake of national crisis and then buried in a post-war boom of a wholly unanticipated scope and strength. Then come an Irish Catholic president, one of unbridled energy and optimism, followed by a Vatican II that cracked open the enclaves of Catholic America, perhaps even more than it opened the windows of St. Peter’s in Rome. Mass in a foreign tongue? A faith kept safe from question and thought? Those not of it damned to perdition for all eternity? That world was gone now, all gone, and near that quick.

The third iteration, well it brings with it nuance, subtle complexities. We had the metrics to mark our trekking through Iterations I and II, so many things done and owned, academic degrees earned, partnerships and promotions fairly won, boxes checked, gains made. There was a toast I remember in common usage then – ‘To the Irish, none better’. Yes, a phrase to reassure, to claim a place, a ranking. Yet for much of Iteration II, it was a ‘we’ comparing ourselves to a ‘them’ who didn’t compare themselves to us at all save in quiet disparagement. But over the course of Iteration II the metrics did close, coming to nil as it ran its course, differences now resting largely on distinctions of association these driven by common and mutual preference, sets of mind as much as anything else, aye, the breathing easier, now, all settling in.

So then, as we stand in Iteration III, secure in all things meaningful in society and before the law, it might usefully be asked, How did this happen? What did we do? Must we have had an ‘in’ to be where we are? Indeed, if we are now fully American, what made us so? And what of before?

Well, the Irish coming over, they certainly knew the Founders’ yearning for fairness. Landless in their own land, literally starving in their measly leaseholds, yes, they knew all about a yearning for fairness. And in the ache of hunger and loss, in the want and strife of their lives and trekking, they too came to a knowing of the need for and the meaning of the core values on which the place to where they had come had been founded – individual worth and personal responsibility.

Yes, shunted to the wrong side of the tracks, tracks that many of them had laid, they built their own place, their own America. And in the schools they raised, the orphanages, too, they were taught to love no less than they were taught to add numbers and to spell words. By the faith that both marked and bound them, they were taught that it is better to give than to receive, that no greater love has one than to lay down their life for another. Yes, they learned of Good Samaritans, of forgiveness and prodigal sons, of caring for others, of caring for its own sake, the sweetness and wonder of it all. Each day, each week they were taught to love and as a continuous, deliberate act.

Love – the eleventh commandment. It was this that the Irish lived and held themselves to do no less than any other, to love one another, the need and wonder of it all in the living of their lives. And they did this by and through their faith as they settled in the places allowed to them, these being in every city of any size in the land. And it was in this that they came to a grounding on America in America, an understanding of what it is, an understanding that in the political world about and around them love finds its expression in the fairness of things. Simple fairness.

And it was as they came to a place here, their own place, working and forging their way up and in, always building on the values of the Founders, that they held their betters to the promise of America. And as they did so, they strengthened and further validated the America to which they had come as that which it must always be – a continuing, deliberate act and nothing less.

For all the traditions of it, though, even for the love of the liberty within it, we must remember that America is firstly of the political realm, not the spiritual. As history’s first ‘idea’ place, America was a product of the human mind. By the very nature of its founding, being an American was not to be of a tribal determination. We are not a race. We are not a religious sect or creed.

Yet when in human history did humans not pray? More importantly, where in the logic of the mind is hope, or even love for that matter? Yet are not these engaged and expressed through and in prayer by hundreds of millions each day in faiths across the earth, billions even? Indeed, what is human life without either, hope or love? Is it not by and through hope that our futures are formed, that things are made better? Love – the need for others and the caring of them – yes, is it not by and through love that our values are birthed and nurtured, the good and bad of our lives made clear and pressing?

Yes, there is more to humanity than the mind, than logic. As the body serves the mind, so the mind serves the soul, the who of us inside using the mind, engaging it. It was the great genius of the Founders to craft a nation of structure and laws and to trust to those living in it such matters as hope and love, faith and spirituality. While some might doubt the existence of God, there can be no doubt as to the existence of human spirituality, the force and wonder of it, indeed, the absolute historic reality and fact of it. We do hope. We do love. We do pray.

In a closing chapter of Mount Olivet, Mary Riley, the matriarch of the Riley clan, shares a scene with her son John, the lead character of that book. Taking place in the morning quiet after a Saturday mass, Mary speaks, as much to herself as to her son. “The most important thing we learn from those who raise us,” she says quietly, “is ‘right’ from ‘wrong’, the good from the bad, that, that’s the most important thing…”

From here, Mary goes on to say that what she knows of right and wrong she and those of her life had learned in church, the teachings of the faith, a commonality of purpose in living with others. And beneath it all, even the written word of the faith, there was for her an ever deepening appreciation of love, the need and force of it, the true root and well-spring of all human values.

Over the course of her 91 years, she had come to know the need to do it, to love, to live life as a loving person. And she had come to realize further that it was in loving that they had got the better of them, their ‘betters’ that is, that the keeping of the Irish down and apart had been a violation of the very values that had bound and driven them, the Founders and their issue. This needed to be fixed, and not in retribution and false righteousness but in persistence and courage and, not least, in fairness…and so it was.

So this is Mary Riley – born in 1902, come to America at six years, her life spent in a faith-bound community anchored in the core values coming to expression in an ethnicity that wove itself into the very fabric of America. A weaving of purpose and yearning made real through each generation to claim as their own and to pass on again. We did get through to a place that is fair enough, and still forming, and with a tradition still held and justly cherished that keeps close and real that it did happen and so may it continue.

And it is in this that our ethnicity, our Irishness, provides a comfort of mind, a sense of direction and purpose of its own, a reminder that we remain on a journey, a continuing quest for fair treatment in the daily lives we live and the lives of those yet to come. Fairness is what was wanted and, in time, it was gotten, largely by a faith-driven sense of it and a gut-driven demand for it – simple fairness. And as its finding was done by journeys made, so must its keeping be done by journeys yet to come.

Yes, to understand what happened, to truly feel it, we need more than to hear or to read of it as fact, paging the ledgers of the dead, studying still photographs of the homeless, tempest-tossed beside the golden door. We need turn to the trials and trekking of it all, the stories, the real and the near real, even the outlandish. It is from these that we can best sense and appreciate the push and pull of the human heart, taking it inside to discover what makes us tick, what makes us be, the where and why of our lives, each one of us.

Indeed, we speak of standing on the shoulders of giants, of greatest generations. But in this we must understand what made them such if we ourselves are to have shoulders worthy of a good stand. And it is knowing and respecting the traditions, the stories of our past, that we are able do this and with good purpose.

It is in this, then, that we Americans of Irish lineage are most fortunate. We do know how it happened, and appreciate that it did happen, that America is not a fairy tale. There are those amongst us still who lived across the iterations of it all. Yes, it is we who know as well as any of the journey to America in America. And in knowing it so well, in living it still through our own trekking, in our own time, that it falls on us to speak of and to share it, to keep it fresh in the minds of all here so that America may remain as it began – a continuing, deliberate act.

I’d like to close with a story about Benjamin Franklin, perhaps the wisest of the Founders. It was in Philadelphia, 1787 being the year. They had just done the Constitution, it finished now and off to the states for ratification. As Franklin was making his way home a Mrs. Powell approached him.

“So, Dr. Franklin, what have you given us?”

“A republic,” said he, “if you can keep it.”

Yes, if we can keep it…

Well, I know of no ethnic tradition in this land that can claim a stronger hand in the keeping of Dr. Franklin’s republic than that of the Irish. None. And it is on us to know and to remember well and always the trekking of the iterations of those who bore us, not in prideful boast but in deep appreciation and great respect for what it took to get it done and for the strengthening of the Republic by their doing of it.

From a place of oppression and want, we came to a land of freedom and plenty, and we made it better.

Adapted from a presentation at the Dublin Irish Festival Dublin, Ohio – August 2016