The Oddities of Isolation

THE AMERICAN IRISH by William V. Shannon. 458 pages. Macmillan. $7.95.

In the late 1800s, long lines formed outside saloons all over New York City. But the queuers were not thirsty; they were there to be naturalized, a process that Irish-controlled Tammany Hall had made easy. Inside the saloon, everybody was handed a red card stating: "Please naturalize the bearer." Card in hand, the bearer went to court, where Tammany judges naturalized as many as 150 at a time. Tests were unheard of.

In the banner year of 1868, Tammany naturalized 41,112 New Yorkers.

To Author William Shannon, able columnist for the liberal New York Post, this casual naturalization represents the Irish contribution to America: a concern for people, and a comparable disregard for the niceties of law. Where the Irish have failed in America, writes Shannon, it has been a failure not of nerve but of knowledge.

Instinct for Power. Shannon, 36, is himself a first-generation American; his father, a carpenter, immigrated from Ireland in 1910, settling in Worcester, Mass. As Shannon sees it, the Irish developed a sophistication in politics through their long struggle against their British overlords. Their favorite maxim: "It is better to know the judge than to know the law." In the U.S., they built the political machines that would eventually govern many cities, and they instructed later immigrants in their intricacies. "For the Irish," writes Shannon, "politics was a functioning system of power and not an exercise in moral judgment."

But the Irish performed less brilliantly in other areas of American life. A practicing Catholic, Shannon nevertheless blames the Irish Catholic clergy for most Irish shortcomings in the U.S. The clergy were too busy building the church to bother about intellectual pursuits, and warned their congregations not to mix with the Protestant population. "The conservatives of the church," writes Shannon, "struggled to ensnare and pinion the live corpus of the faithful in their own petty vision, a vision of a claustral parish world: tidy, thick-curtained, breathing of dust, every antimacassar firmly in place."

In intellectual isolation, authentic Irish genius was stunted; basic good instincts went strangely awry; and some of America's best-known rogues had Irish names. James M. Curley had wit, verve, and a burning sense of social injustice, but hardly any sense of personal integrity. Father Charles Coughlin, broadcasting in a mellifluous baritone from his pulpit in Detroit, berated the callous bankers and businessmen who, he said, had brought on the Depression. But like Curley, Coughlin had no positive remedies; his Sunday sermons became exercises in slander. Before he was finally forced off the air by dwindling financial support, Coughlin was denouncing Jews and calling for a Franco-type rebellion in the U.S. Joe McCarthy derived most of his support from the "worst, the weakest and most outdated parts of the Irish experience. He was a rascally, blarneying, happy-go-lucky adventurer."

Coming of Age. But there has always existed a countervailing, more enlightened element in the Irish community, writes Shannon. The list ranges from James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore, who in the 1880s urged lay Catholics to join trade unions, to Al Smith, the ebullient Governor of New York, on to the liberal priest John Ryan, who was Father Coughlin's most persistent Catholic critic.

In Shannon's view, the best of the Irish came to flower in the person of John F. Kennedy: "the poetry, the power and the liberalism." Writes Shannon:

"A people who have produced so many bards, singers, orators, actors, dramatists, poets and good talkers deserved to have as their greatest political leader a man who loves the language and can use it. And what they deserved they, in this instance, happily obtained." Kennedy's election, says Shannon, represented an Irish coming of age in America. Never again will the Irish be able to feel, or react, like an oppressed minority.

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