Irish Americans

IRISH AMERICANS. The American Irish, third largest ethnic group in the United States, arrived to occupy the lowest occupational categories open to whites. Canal diggers, domestic servants, and common laborers, they can be considered the first large-scale American proletarian group. Their relationship with the Left has been ambivalent. Although active in militant and sometimes revolutionary unionism, Irish Americans have, to many observers, epitomized the conservative side of the American worker (and, especially, the labor leader). Proportionally to the size of the group, very few have enrolled in Left movements. Yet Irish Americans have taken their place in the vicinity of the Left, at important times sharing anticapitalist sympathies even while restrained by religious and other reasons from adopting Marxism.

Irish American labor activity grew with the new industrial society of the early nineteenth century and expanded among the refugees from Ireland’s Great Famine of the 1840s. Conflicts with Protestant workers (most notably in Philadelphia during the 1840s) and antipathy toward blacks (most notably in New York City during the 1840s–1860s) mixed with class-conscious rhetoric and action. The creation of the “Stage Irish” proletarian archetype or caricature beloved by the rising urban audiences, also provided symbols both sympathetic and ridiculing about the American worker.

In the later 1860s and early 1870s, Fenian conspiracies and proletarian discontent overlapped with early Marxist agitation. The First International made contact with groups of nationalists, and socialist wunderkind P. J. McGuire led a mostly-Irish slum proletariat of New York in dramatic public demonstrations demanding relief. Violent repression followed, and McGuire (who, along with International Labor Union and later Paterson, New Jersey, labor leader J. P. McDonnell, was one of the rare prominent Irishmen in the American socialist movement until the 1880s) recruited few Irish here or elsewhere in his lecture tours to socialist ranks.

Meanwhile, however, the Irish World and American Industrial Liberator (1870–1984) championed labor and Irish national causes, its earliest editor, Patrick Ford, sometimes espousing socialistic ideas without describing them as such. The burgeoning of the Irish Land League in the later 1870s and early 1880s laid a political basis for important labor causes shortly to follow.

The Knights of Labor, one of the most universalistic and potentially revolutionary of American social movements, was disproportionately Irish, from leader Terrence Powderly to the local craftsmen and factory operatives who joined with workers of all kinds (including many Irish American working women) in short-lived but impressive solidarity. In many places, the middle-class-oriented Land Leagues flowed into Knights’ branches, and in some served as one origin of avowedly revolutionary intent. In Denver, Colorado, the anarchistic Rocky Mountain Social League and its important weekly, the Labor Enquirer, found strong support in the Irish community. From Saginaw, Michigan, Land League veteran Tom Barry rose to the National Executive Board of the Knights and simultaneously embraced social revolutionism.

Irish Americans played a major role in the formation of local labor parties in the mid-1880s. Many won local office temporarily and forced an accommodation of the Democratic Party to working-class demands. The most spectacular, the Single-Tax mayoralty campaign of New Yorker Henry George, seemed to merge Irish nationalism and socialist idealism under one banner.

During the confusion after the Haymarket incident, Powderly and most Knights leaders disavowed all radical connections, alienating socialists without slowing the Knights’ disintegration. Local labor parties also faded away. However, in a number of industrial localities, individual Irish American labor activists made common cause with German American socialists, forming “American” branches of the Socialist Labor Party. This was especially so in New England, where shoemakers and assorted tradesmen sent socialists to the Massachusetts legislature during the 1890s and elected several local officials. The socialist-led National Union of Textile Workers, founded in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1896, was a largely Irish effort to revive the spirit of the Knights of Labor.

Socialist success, however limited, alarmed Catholic prelates, affecting no community more than the Irish Americans. Rigorously espousing the social doctrines of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, leading bishops endorsed the principle of unionism (in the moderate version of the American Federation of Labor) while turning full fury against the Socialist movement and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Along with the appeal of the Democratic Party labor politics, rapidly spreading in the Progressive Era, this pressure limited radical appeal to Irish Americans. Just to the right of the Socialist Party, however, the more aggressive nonsocialist unions (such as those in the Chicago Federation of Labor) and the then-muckraking, anti-war appeals of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, stirred Irish radicalism of another kind. Between the two types stood a barrier as large as that between May Day and Labor Day, or between the neighborhood ethnic Marxist and the occasional “labor priest.” Recruitment among Irish was proportionally very small, if not insignificant, into the Socialist Party. James Connolly, in the United States for only a few years, launched his unsuccessful Harp, founded the Irish Socialist Federation in 1908, and debated fellow socialists over the morality of divorce. He found fame (and martyrdom) on his return to Ireland.

More characteristically, an Irish American syndicalist spirit operated on the sidelines of political socialism. Connolly himself contributed to that, with his journalism on industrial unionism. Leonora O’Reilly, although a socialist, made her foremost contribution as a luminary of the Women’s Trade Union League and speaker-strategist of the 1909 Shirtwaist Strike. William Z. Foster and Jay Fox, true European-style syndicalists urging work within the American Federation of Labor, pointed toward Communist strategies of the 1920s. Father Thomas Hagerty contributed the famous IWW preamble. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the Wobbly “Rebel Girl,” was already in her teens a member of Connolly’s Federation, before rising to the apex of her fame as agitator and strike leader in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and elsewhere. Even Margaret Sanger, pioneer leader of birth control agitation, had her political origins in syndicalist sympathies which strongly colored her short-lived tabloid, the Woman Rebel.

Communists like their predecessors recruited relatively few Irish Americans. But William F. Dunne (Farmer-Labor political leader and for many years an editor of the Daily Worker) and his brothers Grant, Miles, and Ray (organizers of the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934, and among the founders of American Trotskyism) exemplified the trade union orientation of Irish cadre. Michael Quill, who emerged as foremost leader of the Transport Workers Union (TWU) and a most popular spokesman of the American Labor Party, was by all odds the most successful. Irish American Communists in the National Maritime Union, somewhat greater in number, until the middle 1940s led one of the most powerful affiliates of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Neighborhood and community work had less success, despite moments of promise. At the height of the Depression, socialist James Grailton (deported from Ireland) organized Irish Workers Clubs, with branches in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, New York, and Providence (known there as the Right to Live Club). Grailton himself taught the writings of James Connolly to Mike Quill and a handful of veterans of Clan na Gael, the American affiliate of the Irish Republican Army, who went on to found the TWU. The Communist Party had meanwhile published the Irish Worker sporadically in the 1920s–1930s and promoted Connolly Clubs in the 1930s–1940s.

By the later 1940s and early 1950s, anti-radicalism held sway. Irish Americans contributed some of the most conservative individuals and institutions, including Joe McCarthy and the Church leadership. In part at least, however, the bitterly anti-Communist but (especially in its leadership) anarcho-radical Association of Catholic Trades Unionists (ACTU), disproportionately Irish and linked to the Catholic Worker movement, embodied much the same ambivalent conservative radicalism as the earlier Hearst following. Some ACTU local members, active past their days of anti-Communist concentration, worked with 1950s–1960s civil rights movements and, later, the 1970s grape boycott campaigns, embracing their once-bitterest foes.

In the late 1960s, Irish American radicalism revived in homeland-oriented activity, and emphasized a political dimension in the flourishing Irish American cultural associations. The North Irish Civil Rights Association spawned support groups and Republic Clubs throughout the United States. Irish American support for a united Ireland, long notoriously conservative in political orientation, grew more progressive or socialistic along with developments in the Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army. Irish Northern Aid, often embracing New Left veterans and reaching out to the new wave of Irish immigrants, retained an ambivalently radical spirit during the 1970s–1990s.

During the 1990s, a new wave of Irish immigration surged, but only for a few years while visas were available. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Irish immigration slowed. Nevertheless, forty-one million Americans, 14 percent of the population, traced their ancestry, at least in part, to Ireland. By this time, the remnants of their radical past had largely unraveled to the extent that nearly equal proportions supported Democrats and Republicans, including Donald Trump. Many continued to affiliate with the Left, but without their Irish identity intact. Scatterings of left-wing nationalist clubs continued to exist and urged the unification of Ireland. The James Connolly Forum, for example, located in Troy, New York, preserved the radical legacy of its namesake and conducted education on historical as well as contemporary topics on socialism, the working class, and international politics.

Cronin, Sean. Irish Nationalism: Its Roots and Ideology. New York: Continuum Press, 1981.

Doyle, Joe. “The American Women Pickets for the Enforcement of America’s War Aims.” Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, five installments (May–June 1983).

Foner, Eric. “Class, Ethnicity and Radicalism in the Gilded Age: The Land League and Irish-America.” Marxist Perspectives I (summer 1978).

Freeman, Joshua. In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933–1966. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.