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Originally Posted by Mac15
Hahah.
Yesterday me and my family were talking about our american "family". Well my mum ranted for about 30 minutes about how annoying Americans were when they aren't Irish. She said "they haven't got a baldies notion about Ireland and I don't know what their obsession is about, they are freaks!".
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On the whole I agree with your mother, though, of course, her perspective is that of a born-in-Ireland person...and the tradition she is annoyed with, is essentially an immigrant Irish-American or Canadian-American tradition that is about many things, but - alas - does include those annoying stereotypes and clichés that annoy her. First of all, whether it pleases the Irish (or Italians or whatever), from the arrival of the first huge wave of non-Protestant (and later non-English-speaking) immigrants there developed a very strong tradition in many parts of the U.S. of being a "hyphenated American", i.e. Irish-American, etc.
These groups, of which the R.C. Irish were the first sizable one, were rejected by the native born American population for their Catholicism (and later for Judaism, or because they spoke a foreign language.) Not surprisingly they stuck together like glue, especially in urban environments, and their defensiveness and clannishness made them easily organisable and exploitable by existing political machines for the purposes of block voting. (These machines, ironically, were native-born American Protestant at this time.)
The Irish immigrant reaction was against the mid-19th anti-Catholic, anti-Irish political movement usually called the Know Nothings, who organized into the Native American party and later the American party, and who for a brief number of years seemed a potentially threatening force on the existing political scene. (Already tensed up to the max by the increasing likelihood of an American civil war.)
It didn't take long before these immigrant groups - Irish first, (and later Italians, Jews) seized control of these political machines and were soon voting themselves into all of the major political offices in many cities. To keep the "glue" sticking them together their religion was emphasized as a basic part of their identity, as was their heritage of being Irish. And this was urgently necessary after the Know Nothing movement collapsed, and the Irish had succeeded in gaining control of urban political machines. The ethnic heritage became diluted over generations into clichés that severely condensed and distorted a complicated historical past, and essentially ignored the fact that their forefathers homelands had changed over the years as well.
After the 1960's most of these political machines had lost their clout and these "hyphenated Americans" were more mixed than hyphenated, and had moved to the suburbs. In my childhood, adolescence and early youth it was still a standard identity to call yourself Irish-American, Italian-American, etc., though after that it seemed to finally pass from the social landscape...due
in part to the admixture your father referred to.
The term "hyphenated American" was originally coined as a derogatory epithet by native-born American Protestant politicians in the latter part of the 19th century. It achieved its greatest notoriety in the early 1900s when an American president and a major leader of the other party made high-profile denunciations of such hyphenated creatures (mainly the Irish-Americans and the German-Americans.) However, that - and other factors - actually turned the use of the hyphenated labels into badges of pride among those groups that were being denounced for using them. And then 1930's and 1940's Hollywood films and national radio programs found movies and serials about hyphenated Americans were box office hits.
The bottom line, which may be unknown to most Irish in Ireland, is that the crux of this Irish-American identity was sustained by political machines (and emphasized by a preponderant Irish-descended R.C. clergy) and this group identity served these machines well, e.g. Tammany Hall in NYC. They had a very, very strong interest in seeing this identity last (no matter how bizarre and attenuated it might appear to Irish in Ireland) because it gave Irish Catholics (and now other Catholics and Jews) a stranglehold on political power in some urban areas. While it may seem on the surface to be about some bizarre version of Ireland, the history of this identity is distinctly American, and distinctly about manipulating an ethnic and religious identity for generations for the naked purposes of holding onto political power. Too-ra-lura-lura, leprechauns, "Up the republic" and all the rest is a show for March 17th, the purpose it serves is the really big holiday called Election Day when you want to steamroll your opponents with dependable voting blocs.
In places like New York and Boston, a steady trickle of R.C. Irish immigrants did to an unusual degree actually keep dosing this heritage of stereotypes with elements of reality, but their influence was in total rather small and often concentrated in clubs and associations that didn't have much (or any) appeal to those still calling themselves Irish-Americans. There were in NYC, for example, in the second half of the 20th century, a number of scholarly and culturally oriented institutions, libraries, etc. that essentially held themselves quietly aloof from what annoys your mother, and were (and probably are) a rather different kettle of fish.
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My dad also said an important factor. They will be mixed down to have basically like 10 percent Irisih ancestry. We all agreed that you can only call youself Irish if you have Irish parents.
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Your dad is probably more right than wrong, but perhaps not as right as his statistic.
My own family is made up of Irish Catholics on my father's side and on my mother's with Irish Protestants (with the exception of one British Loyalist way back ancestor of Dutch heritage.) My step-sister's families on both side are of Irish Catholic background.
My father's ancestors arrived in Canada four and five generations ago. It was not until my father's generation that anyone in his family married someone who was not descended from Irish immigrants whose children married the children of other Irish immigrants, and their children married the grandchildren of Irish R.C., and their children the married the grtgrandchildren, etc. Having taken up family genealogy as a pastime, I can assure you that its all on paper and not the stuff of fallible "family history."
My mother's maternal family (with the exception of one grtgrandfather who was the Loyalist in the American Revolution) were Irish or Scots who had immigrated to Canada after a brief stay in Ireland. Her father's family were former tenants of the Marquis of Abercorn in Ardstraw parish, Co. Tyrone. They immigrated to Canada, and like my father's Catholic ancestors married only "their own kind" - and its all on paper, generation after generation. And in their case the Orange Order was a major force in eastern Ontario province, and right down to my grandfather, who died in 1942 in the U.S., they continued to belong and to be officers in their lodges.
My mother and father marrying broke generations their families' tradition of marriage, but ironically only to the extent of marrying someone on the other side of the Irish religious divide. Though, of course, there's that grtgrandfather of Loyalist background who thins the bloodline 1/8 on her side.
This many generations of endogamous ethnic marriage is unusual in either Canada or the U.S. (where we ended up finally) for so many generations. It was probably only possible because both family lines lived in areas where the local church and the local schools were dominated by people of their own heritage...thus, it was as much my accident as design.
My first cousins on both sides of the family are breaking the tradition, and a fair number are married to persons of very mixed heritage or at least one that is not Irish. And only a couple, who are interested in genealogy, have any interest in or extensive knowledge of aspects of Irish history.
My step-sister's families immigrated to the town we grew up in in the U.S., some were her Irish R.C. grtgrandparents and the others grtgrtgrandparents. A couple of her first cousins have married outside the Irish descended from Irish descended from Irish bailiwick, and all of her own children have.
Thus, while in general agreeing with your parents' observations, I would point out that the lack of understanding is bilateral and lacking in the nuance of historical detail on both sides.
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