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Irish, American Style

Assimilated though they are, Irish-Americans haven't lost touch with the themes of their subculture

I wouldn't be true to my Irish roots if I thought this was an entirely good thing. . . . I can hear my grandmother saying, "Now don't get a swelled head." I will clutch onto my Irish humility with great vigor. - Alice McDermott, accepting the National Book Award, 1998

Clever remarks made at the annual National Book Awards don't often grab mainstream media interest, and Alice McDermott's wry reaction to receiving the fiction honor might never have been noted outside publishing circles if Charming Billy hadn't beaten out Tom Wolfe's brash blockbuster novel A Man in Full for the literary prize that year. As it was, major newspapers reported what they cast as a David-versus-Goliath publishing industry upset and noted McDermott's Irish apercu in the coverage.

The attention was fleeting. Yet for months after McDermott parsed the peculiar, quasi-comic Irish conviction that success is cause for trepidation and self-deprecation, versions of what she said to a crowd of writers, editors, and publishers in Manhattan cropped up in conversations among Irish-Americans at a San Francisco courthouse, during a campus sherry hour in St. Louis, and in a Boston bar. Occasionally, what she said was recast as a joke (Did you hear the one about the Irish writer and her grandmother?). Clearly, one writer's remark resonated with any number of intelligent, accomplished postmodern men and women who harbor a similarly premodern sense of self-deprecation and free-floating anxiety about success. For it is no accident that Murphy's Law - anything that can go wrong will go wrong - is named for an Irishman; or that Daniel Patrick Moynihan said famously, after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, "There's no point in being Irish unless you think the world is going to break your heart some day."

Irish-American traits are not often characterized as such. For one thing, the Irish way with words frequently loses its bearing when the subject is human feeling. For another, according to conventional wisdom, a distinct Irish identity has disappeared in the United States. America's oldest ethnic story ended with Kennedy's election, at which point the Irish had made it; they had moved to the suburbs and were barely distinguishable from WASPs, save their Catholicism and perennial fondness for corned beef and cabbage, green beer, and sentimental song around St. Patrick's Day.

As is often the case, conventional wisdom is wrong.

Ethnicity has not determined where the Irish live or work for at least two generations. A secular world of neighborhoods known by parish names, where the dads were union men, the moms stayed home, Irish, Catholic, and Democrat were interchangeable descriptives, and a "mixed marriage" meant Tommy Leary and Teresa Garofolo were tying the knot has for the most part turned into the stuff of nostalgia. At least a generation of American media watchers would hardly know what to make of whistling police officers with brogues and cigar-chomping ward bosses. By last century's end, the best-known Irish-American flashing a law enforcement badge on television was Agent Scully on The X-files, and veteran Irish pol Moynihan was shortly to retire from one of the more cerebral careers in the United States Senate.

Traditional, institutional Irish Catholic subculture "collapsed when the bulk of Irish-Americans became middle-class suburbanites and revolted against authoritarian Catholicism," according to the historian and author Lawrence J. McCaffrey. Intermarriage and prosperity diluted the strength of most ethnic traditions and traits. But as John Steinbeck, whose mother was Irish, once observed of his own heritage, "Irish blood doesn't water down very well; the strain must be very strong."

Alice McDermott's worries to the publishing world recall shibboleths that were recited over rough-hewn farmhouse tables on the Dingle Peninsula in 1900 and are repeated over Waterford and imported linen in dining rooms in Winnetka, Illinois and Garden City, Long Island today. "Don't get a swelled head" is a quintessential Irish maxim; the fear that "this is not entirely a good thing" is an invocation of the Irish worldview that "this could all be gone tomorrow."

Middle-class Americans of Celtic ancestry today resemble WASPs in enough respects that they can puckishly be called CWASPs (Catholic - or Celtic - White Anglo-Saxon Protestants).

But if Studs Lonigan's grandchildren are at least as likely to be found sipping and nibbling at American Ireland Fund cocktail parties held in majestic homes in Nantucket or Pacific Heights as at parish bingos at the local Knights of Columbus hall, they remain oddly oblivious to the fact that they have arrived.

CWASPs live side-by-side with well-to-do Protestants in the toniest suburbs and play golf at the most exclusive country clubs. Since at least the early 1970s, they have gone to the same universities and graduate schools, held the same professional and managerial jobs, and pulled down virtually the same salaries. Studies show that Americans of Irish and English descent drink comparable amounts of alcohol - that is, more than most others. They share a peculiar fondness for "well-made" casual clothing emblazoned with extraordinary designs - garish plaids, for example, and arrays of blue whales on green backgrounds.

But CWASPs are different. According to the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, even three or four generations removed from the motherland, Irish-Americans score consistently higher than most Americans on measures of sociability, localism, trust, and loyalty.

On the whole, they are gregarious. Today, "38 percent of all Americans socialize with friends at least several times a month, as opposed to 49 percent of Irish Catholics," according to the National Opinion Research Center General Social Survey.

CWASPS like to laugh and are given to exclamations - "Hey, how are you?" "That's terrific!" They are loath to talk down to people or speak through their teeth. As their phenomenal succes in organizing people and politicking suggests, many Irish possess an emotional intelligence about human interaction. They remember - and use - other people's first names; they know how to ask questions - and listen. At other people's weddings, their hostesses seat them strategically, assuming "they can talk to anyone."

One of the most flattering things that can be said of an Irish-American woman (from her own point of view, at least), is "She is one of the most down-to-earth people you would ever want to meet." It is considered a supreme compliment to call someone "a regular guy." The more accomplished one is, the more admired he or she will be for "playing it down."

Prosperous, white-collar Irish America is several worlds removed from west-of-Ireland villages where children suspected of getting highfalutin ideas about themselves were duly warned, "Now, don't go getting above buttermilk." Yet self-effacement remains sine qua non in the subculture - and one of the traits that distinguishes it from others. In a 1995 Irish America magazine interview with media entrepreneur Tom Murphy shortly after Disney bought his company, Capital Cities/ABC, for $19 billion, for example, Murphy answered questions about his career with a series of disclaimers: "The timing was right"; "I'm not an intellectual or anything like that, but I happened to be very good at the selling end of the business"; "It was the luck of the Irish, honest to God."

In the secular trinity of Irish-American values, loyalty and humor are father and son. Self-deprecation is the spirit that works in mysterious ways.

By many measures, it is remarkable that Irish identity has survived in the United States at all. Sociologists, family therapists, and historians alike have noted that the Irish are unusual among American ethnic groups in failing to pass on family histories or cultural traditions to their children. Branches of family trees, burnished narratives, songs, and legends have been lost in part because so few saw any reason to talk about them or write them down.

"There seems to have been a strong element of humility and self-abnegation in the typical Irish-Catholic upbringing that discouraged individuals from feeling that they were important enough to record their own stories," writes Boston College historian Thomas O'Connor, "or that any project in which they were engaged was of sufficient consequence to warrant being set down for future generations. Fear of the unpardonable sin of pride was still strong enough to preclude seeing one's small and insignificant self as an important element in the great scheme of things."

Some maintain that the Irish may have assimilated less than some other American ethnics, because it was easier for them to blend in. "The Irish came here speaking English, so, unlike other groups, they didn't have to learn everything in a new language," pointed out Monica McGoldrick, coauthor of Ethnicity and Family Therapy. "If you can pass - and the Irish had been passing for centuries - there's no need to change much of what's really going on with you."

In addition, deeply rooted Irish values were preserved in realms beyond hearth and home. Immigrants to the United States brought with them their communalism, a tradition of popular education, and their church, which they replicated first in urban wards and parishes and then in a massive parallel culture of Catholic schools and colleges, social service networks, unions, clubs, and sports and professional organizations. Many of those institutions did things in the good old Irish way through much of the 20th century. Some of them still do.

The late historian Dennis Clark observed, "Almost anything you can say about [Irish-Americans] is both true and false." The Irish "have a tremendous flair for the bravado, but inwardly tend to assume that anything that goes wrong is the result of their sins. They are good-humored, charming, hospitable and gregarious, without being intimate. They love a good time . . . yet they revel in tragedy," McGoldrick has written. The Irish are wits and optimists who struggle with loneliness and depression, fighters of fanatic heart who assume much of life is predestined. Known for their extraordinary loyalty to family, friends, and community, they can also be relied on to completely cut off relationships. The Irish value conformity and respectability but tend to have a high tolerance for eccentricity and subversion.

Much in the way a Bronx accent becomes muted in Westchester, and Dorchester cadences become softer in Wellesley or Needham, American Irishness loses some of its sharper distinctions as second and third generations move out of tightknit, mostly urban communities and suburbanize. But it hardly vanishes. Culture is a set of inherited and shared beliefs about body and soul, family, marriage, birth, death, food, sex, and friendship that may not be explicitly acknowledged - and in the case of the American Irish, seldom is.

Generations removed from the raucous wakes of the old country, the American Irish still celebrate death - which confirms their fatalistic sense that life is long and hard and the end a release to something better - and they still enjoy drama. They keep track of friends, family, and everyone else who passes peacefully to their eternal rewards in the Irish sports pages (known to most others as the obituaries). But they maintain an awed reverence for the sadder, more unusual deaths: a demise that is unexpected (She was gone in a month); inevitable (The drink finally got him); or singularly tragic (Three little ones under 6 with no mother - and, God love him, he can hardly change a diaper).

The notion that disappointment and disaster are sure to follow life's fleeting fortunes is part and parcel of a distinct Irish-American culture. So is an obsession with human tragedy. Culture explains the fact that the Irish put a premium on remembering where they came from and remain obdurately, sometimes irrationally, loyal to families and friends. It is why their get-togethers tend to be loud and lively even before the spirits start flowing - and are more likely than most to include a gaggle of glad-handers, at least one person no one else can stand, and a few people who've had a few too many - as well as a splendid speaker, a retiree who runs a soup kitchen, and a voracious reader.

Culture is the reason the Irish always get the joke.

This article is excerpted from Irish America: Coming Into Clover by Maureen Dezell (from Doubleday, February 2001, $24.95)