Will History Channel tell the Irish American ‘story’?

This Sunday, April 25, the History Channel is presenting a much-hyped new documentary entitled America: The Story of US. It is being billed as the first comprehensive televised history of America in well over a generation.

Pop over to the History Channel website and you will be greeted with this humble statement: “For the first time in 40 years, an epic television event presents the complete history of America.”

This begs the question: Where are the Irish going to fit into all of this?

You can’t say the producers of America: The Story of US have not devoted adequate time to telling America’s complex story. The series begins with a two hour program this Sunday and will continue to air Sunday evenings until May 30, totaling a whopping 12 hours.

And with that, I can already hear some of you yawning. Which is why the folks over at the History Channel claim that this is not your father’s historical documentary.

The producers are touting its regular use of computer-generated images (CGI), realistic recreations and even high-wattage celebrities commenting on events such as the U.S. Civil War and the voyage of the Mayflower.

In fact, one of the first talking heads to appear in The History of US is none other than noted historian Donald Trump!

Other notables who will comment include actor Michael Douglas, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Colin Powell.

Celebrities and CGI are all well and good. There’s obviously nothing wrong with packaging educational material in a dramatic or entertaining way.

But this does not bode well for getting a strong sense of how important and complex the Irish role in building America has been.

Sure, we’ll probably get some strong segments on the horrors of the Great

Hunger. This may even lead to some revelations about the strong streak of anti-Catholicism in 19th century America.

But will the thriving Democratic political machines built by so many Irish immigrants and their children be discussed? And if not, why?

Is it because they were often corrupt? And therefore, “bad guys” in the minds of producers who are leaning towards a kind of black-and-white version of American history?

Machines, of course, often dabbled in criminal mischief. But they also helped a generation of destitute immigrants -- and not just Irish -- get a foothold in America. They also helped elevate the likes of Al Smith and John F. Kennedy to the national stage.

All of which makes it highly doubtful other pivotal but disturbing moments of Irish American history will be dealt with in any depth. Think of the horrific Draft Riots of 1863, when immigrants, yes, tortured African Americans, but also vented their rage at the upper classes who rigged the system so that the rich could buy their way out of military service?

This is important not simply because this was a crucial moment in the U.S. Civil War (the Draft Riots took place the very same month as the Battle of Gettysburg), but also set a tone for the kind of racial, political and ethnic tensions which would explode in American cities for decades to come.

By the time America: The Story of US gets to the 1960s, it will surely spend some time with JFK and the trauma which followed his assassination. Not only was it a shocking moment, but it also seemed to be a harbinger for the chaos which was to come in the late 1960s.

But if the producers of this show did their homework, they should really devote some time to the aforementioned Alfred Emanuel Smith, who paved the way for JFK, by running for president in 1928 at a deeply anti-Catholic time.

Smith, a child of the Lower East Side, is a vivid symbol not only for the Irish experience in America but also American history itself.

Former outsiders make their way inside, but very slowly. This is not a matter of focusing disproportionately on the Irish, or, for that matter, focusing on only negative things.

It is simply a matter of presenting a full portrait. Let’s see if Donald Trump can handle that.

(Contact at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan.)

Are the Irish still white?

This past St. Patrick’s Day, TV viewers were treated to a strange sight on The Colbert Report, Comedy Central’s late night satire show.

Host Stephen Colbert, who never misses an opportunity to remind viewers of his Irish roots, was interviewing a very professorial African American woman. Or at least she appeared to be African American.

But when Colbert noted, with mock seriousness, that he doesn’t “see race,” he asked her if she was, indeed, African American.

“I don’t know,” Colbert’s guest said. “I have a Ph.D. Am I white?”

From there the interview got even stranger. Colbert ranted and raved about Cromwell and Northern Ireland and how the Scotch-Irish “do not have one ounce of Irish blood.”

In the end, Colbert and his guest arm wrestled.

The reason for all of this silly banter was that Colbert’s guest, Princeton professor Nell Irvin Painter, has written a new book called The History of White

People. An important portion of the book explores the painful process of Irish assimilation into the American mainstream in the wake of the Irish Famine.

"What really surprised me at first was the level of hatred that people I thought of as white directed at other people I thought of as white," Painter said in a recently published interview.

"So the amount of hatred directed toward the Irish immigrants in the middle of the 19th century, I -- coming out of straight U.S. history -- I thought of those Irish people as people who beat up other people.

“That's a dumb way of saying it, but that's how poor Irish people figure into the general history of the U.S."

Give Painter credit for her honesty. The basic argument she is making is that race is basically a fake category. Religion is a choice you make based on faith or birth.

Ethnicity generally refers to the nation you hail from. But race?

Well, sure, by now we believe it is based on skin color. But that, Painter argues, is superficial.

In fact, the Irish and their famously white skin were, for a very long time, not allowed to enter the exclusive white club in America.

Blacks, of course, were lowest on the racial ladder. Then Jews, Italians and Slavs began coming over in larger numbers and they faced their own discrimination.

Painter’s book could very well have been called “How the Irish Became White.”

There’s just one problem with that. A book with that exact title was published well over a decade ago.

It begs the question -- who knew the Irish were still “thought of as white”?

Okay, so I’m dabbling in some Colbert-level absurdity here myself. Painter’s book is much broader in scope than How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev.

Painter’s book goes all the way back to the Greeks. And sure, as Painter and others argue, if you think about it, race is kind of a hard thing to define, especially in a place such as America, where all kinds of different people intermarry.

And yet, something is missing here. Painter, like Noel Ignatiev before her, acknowledges that the Irish initially had a horrible time in America.

But you get the sense that once they were finally allowed into the country club, they didn’t just become white. That’s all they became.

Irish American novelist Peter Quinn dealt with these issues admirably in a 1996 essay entitled “How the Irish Stayed Irish.”

If the Irish essentially became cozy WASPS as the 19th century wore on, how on Earth can you explain this group’s century-long obsession with liberating the nation they left behind?

How do you explain their construction of what amounts to a separate Irish Catholic nation in America, where you grow up in vast cities such as New York or Boston, and yet, from the cradle to the grave, define yourself mainly by the people and particularities of your parish.

Then again, Painter’s index for The History of White People shows she read Ignatiev’s book, but not Quinn’s essay.

Oh well. At least it’s a partial history.


(Tom Deignan will be discussing “20 Books Every Irish American Should Read” at the mid-Manhattan branch library, 455 Fifth Avenue, April 17 at 2:30 p.m., and at the Riverdale, Bronx branch library on April 22 at 6 p.m. Contact

tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan.)

George Will is wrong on immigration

Americans are now diligently filling out their census forms, a once every decade tradition which causes nervousness among immigrants.

Many -- documented or undocumented -- are leery of filling out paperwork, lest authorities use the census information to arrest anyone not born in the United States.

Already, the Alliance for Legal Immigration, and other anti-immigrant groups, have been accused of supporting the use of census data to target newcomers.

In short, convincing immigrants to participate in the census is already challenge. So imagine what it would be like 20 or 30 years down the road if prominent columnist and pundit George Will, as well as a growing number of activists, get their way.

“A simple reform,” the famously bow-tied and bespectacled Will wrote in a recent Washington Post column, “would drain some scalding steam from the immigration arguments that may soon again be roiling to a boil.”

Will, citing a provocative article in the Texas Review of Law and Politics, wants to review the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This grants American citizenship to every child born within the borders of the United States, even if their parents are undocumented.

“To end the practice of ‘birthright citizenship,’” Will writes, “all that is required is to correct the misinterpretation of that amendment's first sentence … from these words has flowed the practice of conferring citizenship on children born here to illegal immigrants.”

The 14th Amendment begins, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside."

Will argues that these words, written in the late 1860s, actually had nothing to do with immigration.

“The authors … could not have intended birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants because in 1868 there were and never had been any illegal immigrants because no law ever had restricted immigration,” Will writes.

It is true that the federal government did not technically begin regulating immigration until the 1870s. But based on this, Will goes on to make a very questionable leap.

“If those who wrote and ratified the 14th Amendment had imagined laws restricting immigration -- and had anticipated huge waves of illegal immigration -- is it reasonable to presume they would have wanted to provide the reward of citizenship to the children of the violators of those laws? Surely not.”

The trouble is, America actually had undergone a massive immigration wave in the 1840s. The Famine Irish (as well as millions of Germans) came to the U.S. (many crossing the border from Canada) and changed that nature of American life in far more comprehensive ways than current immigrants.

The impact of 19th century immigration was plainly evident to the likes of the anti-Catholic Know Nothing Party as well as pro-immigrant Tammany Hall.

How could Will believe the authors of the 14th Amendment could not possibly have “anticipated huge waves of illegal immigration?”

Meanwhile, though an 1875 Supreme Court case (Henderson vs. the Mayor of the City of New York) transferred immigration regulation from states to the federal government, that does not mean the feds had not dabbled in anti-immigrant policy.

The notorious Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 were aimed at the French as well as their revolution-minded Irish Catholic supporters. If President John Adams figured out how to use the federal government to target immigrants, how come the authors of the 14th Amendment could not have some six decades later?

If George Will’s history is off, it’s because he’s not interested in the past.

He wants to cut immigration right now because, as he sees it, immigrants continue to flock to America solely for the generous social welfare benefits. (Such as health care, right?)

Even if that analysis were true, denying citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants would not prevent them from coming here in the first place. It would only further expand the American ethnic underclass.

When that happens, good luck running a census every 10 years.

(Tom Deignan will be discussing “20 Books Every Irish American Should Read” at the mid-Manhattan branch library, 455 Fifth Avenue, April 17, and at the Riverdale, Bronx branch library on April 22. Contact tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan.)

Irish gangsters are back in vogue in 2010

Later this year, we will receive two more heaping platefuls of Irish gangsterism. In September, Martin Scorsese presents a new HBO mini-series called "Boardwalk Empire," about the creation of gambling mecca Atlantic City, featuring numerous Irish underworld characters.

Also, "The Irishman" is expected to hit the big screen in late 2010. Starring Christopher Walken, the film explores the rise and fall of Cleveland killer Danny Greene, the Celtic-obsessed gangster who challenged Cleveland’s high-level Italian American mob.

But if your appetite for Irish crime lords is such that your can’t wait, stroll over to St. Mark’s Place on the Lower East Side where the Museum of the American Gangster is about to open. Located in a former speak-easy, the museum is currently conducting preview tours.

When renovations are completed in the coming weeks, viewers will be able to explore the entire facility, where it is said Frank Sinatra (no stranger to the underworld) once worked as a singing waiter.

The museum is the brainchild of native New Yorker and gang historian Eric Ferrara as well as Lorcan Otway, whose family has managed the museum building for decades.

The Museum of the American Gangster is not the only site dedicated to studying unsavory figures such as Meyer Lansky, Al Capone and Donegal native Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll. Next year, the long-planned Mob Museum is set to open in Las Vegas.

Of course, any museum dedicated to the American underworld would have to dedicate significant space to the role the Irish played.

Several of the Museum of the American Gangster’s consultants have explored some of the darkest corners of the Irish American underworld.

First there’s Patrick Downey, who has written about New York crime in the early 20th century when gangsters like “Mad Dog” Coll and Owney “the Killer” Madden reigned.

Downey is currently writing a book about Jack “Legs” Diamond (pictured above), the Philadelphia-born criminal whose parents were born in Ireland.

Also contributing to the museum is Rose Keefe, who has written at length about Chicago Irish gangster Deanie O’Banion.

Given that the museum building once housed a speakeasy, it makes sense that one of the museum’s first exhibits focuses on the prohibition era of 1919-1931 and the broader “history of alcohol trafficking in the United States.”

According to the museum’s founders, some $2 million in prohibition-era artifacts were discovered hidden in the building’s maze of secret rooms.

Prohibition, of course, was America’s ill-fated noble experiment to outlaw alcohol. The Irish played a central role in this era, though not for reasons one would think, given the stereotypes about the Irish and drink.

In fact, it was those very stereotypes that fanned the flames of prohibition.

Those who supported banning booze were not just opposed to alcohol. They believed they were doing what was best for the decadent, lawless ethnics who ran cities such as New York, Boston and Chicago.

Since the Irish (who were the dominant big city political group in most cities) could not take care of themselves, the thinking went, right thinking rural Protestants would outlaw booze for their own good.

It is no surprise that, when Al Smith ran for president in 1928, he was not only slammed for being a low-class child of the lower East Side as well as a slavish devotee to the pope in Rome. He was also a dreaded “wet,” meaning he supported lifting the ban on alcohol.

“What else would you expect?” many people argued. It was just another reason one of “them” should never be allowed into the White House.

The Museum of the American Gangster also looks closely at lesser known Irish American criminals such as John Lonergan and his son Richard “Pegleg” Lonergan, who led Brooklyn’s White Hand Gang, and was killed by Al Capone.

Hopefully, down the road, the museum will also explore the stubborn endurance of Irish organized crime and its link to politics, from the Westies and “goodfella” Jimmy Conway in New York right up to Boston’s “Whitey” Bulger, who, to this day, stands next to the likes of Osama bin Laden on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

(Tom Deignan will be discussing “Twenty Books Every Irish American Should Read” at the mid-Manhattan branch library, 455 Fifth Avenue, April 17 and at the Riverdale, Bronx branch library on April 22. Contact tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan.)

HBO's 'The Pacific' shines light on Irish soldier Robert Leckie

Robert Leckie, a certified member of the “greatest generation,” was born in Philadelphia in 1920. As Leckie’s HBO biography notes, “He was the youngest of eight children in an Irish Catholic family” who was raised in New Jersey.

A few days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Leckie enlisted with the U.S. Marine Corps. He eventually became a machine gunner, serving in Guadalcanal as well as Peleliu, where he was wounded.

Until a few weeks ago, not many people recalled Leckie’s exploits. But these days, thanks to two fellows named Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, it’s hard to get away from Leckie.

Leckie is one of the soldiers featured in HBO’s critically-acclaimed new drama The Pacific. Played by James Badge Dale, The Pacific follows Leckie and his fellow soldiers as they fight their way through the treacherous series of islands in the later phases of World War II.

Leckie’s autobiography A Helmet for My Pillow was one of the main sources used by The Pacific producers Hanks and Spielberg, who previously brought the greatest generation to life for HBO with the popular Band of Brothers.

Needless to say, The Pacific, so far, has not had much time for the glamour and heroism of wartime.

“Jungle rot and malaria, not to mention dysentery, hunger and nervous breakdowns, are as much a part of The Pacific as machine guns and bombing raids,” is how The New York Times put it in a recent review, which nevertheless called the series “mesmerizing.”

Most critics agree. However, there is one small detail worth noting.

As opposed to previous depictions of Irish military families, from the Sullivan brothers to numerous Jimmy Cagney roles, Leckie’s parents, in The Pacific, seem oddly disinterested in their son’s desire to go halfway around the world and put his life in peril.

Generally speaking, it has been believed that World War I and World War II helped Irish Americans enter the mainstream of life in the U.S.

In fact, that is the argument made in a new book which also depicts an Irishman marching off to war. In The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War (Harper), author David Laskin tells the story of a dozen immigrants who joined the U.S. military after America entered the fight against Germany in World War I.

Among those immigrants is Peter Thompson, born in Antrim. Thompson “went to work at the age of 12 sorting flax fibers at the Whitehouse linen mill.”

Thompson was a bright student, but his mother Rose believed the family simply could not survive without the money Peter brought in.

So work was a bigger priority than school. This, sadly, is understandable.

Rose had a dozen children, including a sister named Mary, who eventually joined an uncle who had emigrated to the heavily-Irish mining town of Butte,

Montana.

In 1914, Peter himself left Ireland and settled in Butte. As the luck of the Irish would have it, that was the year war exploded across Europe and mine production plummeted.

Two of Thompson’s brothers back in Ireland went off to fight for the British Army. On this side of the Atlantic, however, Thompson listened to older relatives explain that they hoped the Kaiser and Germany prevailed.

After all, weren’t they fighting the hated British?

In the end, Thompson joined the U.S. Army in 1917, rising to the rank of sergeant.

Perhaps we remain fascinated by the likes of Peter Thompson and Robert Leckie because they seem to have been living in a simpler time. The wars Americans are fighting these days seem so messy that we often seem to forget about them entirely.

If nothing else, both Laskin’s book and The Pacific, with their diverse groups of soldiers trying to maintain grace under pressure, are solidly in the tradition of the marching song penned by another Irish American, John Mullin, a corporal in the 77th so-called “melting pot” division: “Oh the army, the army, the democratic army/All the Jews and Wops, the Dutch and Irish cops/They’re all in the army now.”



(Tom Deignan will be discussing “Twenty Books Every Irish American Should Read” at the mid-Manhattan branch library, 455 Fifth Avenue, April 17. Contact

tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan.)

Why "The Quiet Man" Endures

This St. Patrick’s season you surely came across it. On Turner Classic Movies or on a DVD player.

John Ford’s 1952 film The Quiet Man has been a St. Patrick’s Day staple for nearly 60 years now.

And for just as long the film has had its detractors. Those who grumble that the film is little more than a brightly-colored jaunt through Irish stereotypes -- the drunks, the brawlers and all those befreckled redheads.

Well, I have some bad news for the haters. The Quiet Man is growing in stature, not merely as entertainment, but as a work of art.

The sign of any great, enduring story is that it can be reimagined and reinterpreted by younger generations. And so, The Quiet Man -- for all of its legitimate flaws -- is going to be with us for many more St. Patrick’s Days.

Martin Scorsese, who’s got tons of cinematic street cred and just had a smash hit with Shutter Island, recently said The Quiet Man was a major inspiration.

Meanwhile, last month, it was announced that Aidan Quinn is among the stars of a new movie entitled Connemara Days, a romantic comedy which is actually set during the film shoot of The Quiet Man.

But the most interesting new take on The Quiet Man is Roddy Doyle’s forthcoming book The Dead Republic.

Doyle is one of Ireland’s more famous

contemporary writers. His book The Commitments went on to become a classic indy film, while his novel Paddy Clarke Ha, Ha, Ha won several major awards.

Doyle’s latest project is a trilogy or Irish historical novels based around the character Henry Smart, a sort of Irish Forrest Gump, who floats through the country’s history and has a knack for being at the center of key events.

In previous books, A Star Called Henry and O Play That Thing, Henry rose from the Dublin slums to become a leader of the Easter Rising, before traveling to New York and Chicago to rub elbows with gangsters and guide the career of a young musician named Louis Armstrong.

One of Doyle’s key aims here is to reexamine Irish American history. Believe it or not, this has made him some enemies.

Traditional historical writers such as Morgan Llywelyn believe Doyle is playing fast and loose with the facts.

The problem is, history is more than just a collection of facts. So, Doyle feels free to have some fun undermining readers’ conventional wisdom about the past.

In Doyle’s latest book The Dead Republic, Henry Star finds himself on the set of a film with Henry Fonda and the irascible Irish American director John Ford.

They are shooting a western, but Ford desperately wants to make a movie about

Irish rebellion. So, he has hired famous rebel Henry Smart to serve as “IRA consultant.”

But what began as a gritty tale of Irish liberation gets crammed into Ford’s myth-making machine and what emerges, instead, is what some believe to be the worst piece of paddywhackery Hollywood ever produced -- The Quiet Man.

Along the way, Henry Smart sees that Ford is transforming the story. “All references to the war and the IRA had gone. The Sean in the picture wasn’t a kid of the Dublin streets, and all the killings had become one big punch in a boxing ring,” writes Doyle.

But Doyle is not merely lamenting the whitewashing of Ireland’s past. He is examining the deeply complicated way myth and reality collide. How complicated?

Well, if it seems like an “IRA consultant” for a Hollywood movie is a priceless slice of Doyle’s imagination, guess again -- Ford’s film, indeed, had just such a hard man on set, the Irish Civil War veteran Ernie O’Malley.

And that begins to explain why The Quiet Man endures. For all of its donnybrooks and thatched-cottage charm, there are deep, violent undercurrents in the film.

As Notre Dame professor Luke Gibbons has written: “The Quiet Man bears out the Celtic stereotype that, in Ireland, the tear and smile seem twin-born, and comedy is shadowed by tragedy.”

Is that why millions love the film? No. Many, indeed, love Barry Fitzgerald’s drunken shenanigans. But such stuff cannot carry a film for decades.

This St. Patrick’s Day, give The Quiet Man another viewing. And really watch it this time. You might be surprised.



(Tom Deignan will be discussing “Twenty Books Every Irish American Should Read”

at the mid-Manhattan branch library, 455 Fifth Avenue, April 17. Contact

tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan.)

The green roots of the yellow ribbon tradition

Did you ever wonder why people wear yellow ribbons to express their respect for soldiers? Was it that song from decades ago? That one about the yellow ribbon on the oak tree?

Is that also (if you will) the root of the new movie called The Yellow Handkerchief, starring William Hurt and Twilight's Kristen Stewart, which carries this mysterious obsession with yellow garments into the 21st century?

Not quite. Erin Dignam (the screenwriter of The Yellow Handkerchief) is just the latest, and not even the first person with Irish roots, to tell a new version of this time-tested story.

Some believe this story begins in biblical days, or that its origins lie in the John Wayne movie "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon."

What can’t be denied is that the legend grew thanks to a son of Belfast who scoured the gritty streets of New York City for great stories.

To begin to unwrap this obsession with yellow ribbons, let us step back in time and belly up to the bar at the Lion’s Head, the bygone Greenwich Village watering hole best known as a haven for “drinkers with writing problems.”

It was there that the likes of Frank and Malachy McCourt, Newsday’s Dennis Duggan and so many other Irish American ink-stained wretches bent their elbows.

Perhaps the best known of the bunch was Pete Hamill, author, columnist, son of parents from Belfast.

Hamill recently explained that he was at the Lion’s Head one evening when he heard a durable tale which no one ever seemed to have actually written down.

The details might have changed with each dramatic telling. But the core of the story was more or less the same. A quiet man gets out of jail and wonders if his onetime wife will take him back.

In 1971, Hamill was writing (of all things) a short story column for the New York Post. The column was called “The Eight Million,” a reference to all of the souls living in the five boroughs of New York.

In October of ’71, Hamill published a column about college-age kids who get on a bus at 34th Street in Manhattan and head off to Florida. A man named Vingo is also on the bus with them.

The kids try to engage the mysterious stranger in conversation, but nothing ignites. That is, until one asks, “Are you married?”

Vingo replies, “I don’t know.”

Vingo finally opens up, “I told her, I said, Martha, I understand if you can’t stay married to me. I told her that. I said I was gonna be away a long time and that if she couldn’t stand it, if the kids kept askin’ questions, if it hurt her too much, well, she should just forget me.”

Vingo simply had one condition.

“We used to live in this town, Brunswick, just before Jacksonville, and there’s a big oak tree just as you come into town, a very famous tree, huge. I told her that if she’d take me back, she should put a yellow handkerchief on the tree and I’d get off and come home.”

And so the story ends with the revelation -- will he stay on the bus or go home?

Will there be a yellow handkerchief tied to the big oak tree?

Swiftly the Hamill column was a smash. People all over the country got a look at it when Reader’s Digest published it.

A TV movie starring James Earl Jones, based on the yellow handkerchief story, was aired. A Japanese film was also produced.

But it may well have been the 1973 song “Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” sung by Tony Orlando, which has stuck in people’s minds for the longest time.

When the song came out (two years after the Hamill column), the Vietnam War was in its last regrettable stages. Many soldiers had not yet come home.

Some people linked yellow ribbons to the hope that a loved one would return from southeast Asia. It is a tradition that went nationwide during the Iran hostage crisis in 1980, and has stuck with Americans through the first Gulf War and Iraq and Afghanistan.

So now we have a new movie, "The Yellow Handkerchief." Every charity from autism to breast cancer to AIDS uses some form of ribbon as its colorful symbol.

This might never have been the case, however, if Pete Hamill was not listening so closely one night in the Lion’s Head.

(Contact Tom Deignan at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)