When “The Irish Diaspora in America” was first published in 1976, it quickly became required reading about the Irish-American experience. A blend of personal insight and scholarship, Lawrence J. McCaffrey’s highly readable book was praised by Andrew Greeley as the “best short history of the Irish in America.” McCaffrey, professor emeritus at Loyola University and co-founder of the American Conference for Irish Studies, brings out a new edition of his classic this month. McCaffrey has retitled this edition “The Irish Catholic Diaspora in America” (Catholic University of America Press, 253 pages, $24.95 paper), and he recently discussed the book with Tribune literary editor Elizabeth Taylor.
Q. Why did you change the title of your book?
A. When I first wrote this book, I was trying to show the strong connections between Ireland and Irish America. I think I said a lot of things that had never been said before about Irish America because there weren’t that many people working on Irish-American history. I guess the Irish had become so respectable and acceptable that most people didn’t think of us even as ethnics.
This book is different. It’s more up to date. I changed the title because so many people lately have been saying, “Well, most of the Irish who now designate themselves as Irish in this country in the last census aren’t even Catholic.” So I decided the people I’m mainly interested in are the Irish Catholics, and they are probably the most representative of what Irish America really is, so I decided to change the title.
The other thing I was interested in was that arguments had been made that the Irish weren’t all that urban. The fact is they are probably the most urban group, next to Jewish Americans, right from the beginning. The thing that really disturbed me was the thesis that the Irish had the psychology of exiles–that they didn’t really want to leave Ireland, that they were forced out, that they were misfits and had a hard time adjusting because of their Catholic and Gaelic personalities.
It seems to me that the Irish are the most chameleon-like people. They adjust very rapidly. They were the Europeans least likely to go back to the old country. They’ve come a long way as pioneers in the urban ethnic ghetto. They have finally become one of the most successful middle-class groups in the country.
Q. You have argued that Chicago’s Irish are different than those in New York City or other places.
AIt seemed to me that the Irish went into New England, Boston particularly, where there was a rigid social structure with a local aristocracy, Anglo-Protestant, anti-Catholic, who made it difficult for the Irish to achieve anything. In time, they became victims of their own insecurities. They became paranoid, and ghettos of place became ghettos of mind. They thought the world was against them, and if you feel like that, the world is against you.
To a certain extent, maybe when there’s too many of you in a city, frustrations and paranoia reinforce themselves. The Irish were less ghettoized in Chicago than in Boston or New York. There is a lot of Irish-German intermarriage, for example. The less ghettoized you become, the more likely you are to get ahead.
Q. You have made the point in both editions of your book that the potato famine of the late 1840s is the most important thing to happen in Irish history.
A. Yes, it was a watershed. Some of the things that happened after the famine were beginning to happen before the famine, but it speeded everything up. For example, the famine institutionalized immigration. It made it an Irish way of life. So parents were, in a sense, exporting half their children. Immigration became the great safety valve with the famine.
Also, there was massive change in Irish Catholicism because of the famine. Before the famine, maybe only 40 percent of Catholics in Ireland went to mass on Sunday; there weren’t enough churches or priests to serve the people. From 1780 to 1840, the population had expanded from roughly 3 million to 9 million. The clergy didn’t grow that quickly, so there weren’t enough priests to serve the people, there wasn’t enough chapel space. What the famine did, (by eliminating millions of people through death and emigration), was address the balance between priests and people, churches and people, and eliminate the most ignorant and poorest Catholics in the country. Of course, we got some of those people over here. So the Catholic Church in this country faced a great crisis when the Irish arrived here. There weren’t enough priests to serve them. There wasn’t enough chapel space to serve them, so a lot of the early priests came from Ireland.
Q. How does it feel to look critically at a book published more than 20 years ago?
A. I’ve had to make some changes. I’m very pessimistic in the first book about the future of Irish America. I think the move from the city to the suburbs was a trip from someplace to no place, and I saw Irish ethnicity vanishing. It’s quite obvious to me now that there has (developed) a big interest in certain aspects of Irish culture: dance, theater, reading Irish fiction.
There may be fewer people who are consciously Irish, but I think the people who are consciously Irish know more about Ireland than people before.
