On March 17th, 1948 the president of the United States, Harry Truman, became the first holder of that office to review the St Patrick’s Day parade in New York. Later that evening his address to the city’s Friendly Sons of St Patrick banquet was broadcast coast to coast on radio.
A century after the worst Irish famine, the power and influence of Irish exiles was nearing its zenith. By 1959 some 108 of the 169 Democrats in the Massachusetts House of Representatives were Irish-American Catholics and a year later John Fitzgerald Kennedy, of old Irish and old Norman stock, was elected the 35th and youngest US president.
The Friendly Sons of St Patrick, founded in Philadelphia in 1770, was among innumerable clubs and societies that became “the first tangible, public embodiments of an Irish American identify”, writes Timothy J Meagher, former associate professor of history at the Catholic University of America, in this densely detailed study.
Roanoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina, is in the book’s subtitle because it was there that the first would-be Irish settlers arrived in the 1580s as part of Munster Plantation beneficiary Sir Walter Raleigh’s attempt to establish an English colony (to be named Virginia after his virgin queen, Elizabeth I).
In the waves of Irish immigrants who followed, the pioneering Ulster-Scots Protestants moved west and assimilated, while the overwhelmingly Catholic arrivals from the rest of Ireland settled mostly in east-coast cities and “became the assimilators”, conscious of their own separate ethnic identity and religion.
“Irish America was born in Ireland but has been made in [what Walt Whitman called] ‘another country’ – America, forged in an often complicated, but richly human, history of contingency and adaptation”, adds Meagher, whose eight great-grandparents were Famine immigrants.
While visiting Dublin to lecture at two universities Meagher realised and accepted that he was not Irish, but Irish American. His broad sweep over more than 400 years of emigration from the island of Ireland to North America is exhaustively sourced and fact filled (but it repeatedly misspells de Valera, of all surnames).
