I could have picked another ethnicity to make the same point - being Greek, being Swedish - but the information about the Irish immigration to America is the most generally known.
I wrote in a recent post about our many group identities, noting that these are not as stable as we pretend. There was a long migration from Ireland to America in the 19th C. We picture this as a trickle growing to a flood at the time of the great famine in the 1840s and 50s, then subsiding. It is much more complicated, and when we assemble the pieces we have a clearer picture of how great a change in meaning it was for a person to think of himself as Irish in 1800 versus 1900. When we look nostalgically back at the Auld Sod, even if we have never been there, we think of the items of continuity. Instruments and music, foods, remembered historical events, accents and scraps of language, legends, and decorative items. Those items themselves change over time - what we think of as Irish music or Irish legends are not that similar to what even my parents' generation would have thought in their youth, because Celtic revival has brought back intentional elements from many centuries. Corned beef is more Irish-American, because it was a luxury for export in Ireland, not affordable by the Irishmen resentfully packing it. Thus even the supposedly solid ground is marshy.
There was considerable migration from Ireland well before the famine and well after it. The numbers were about doubled, occasionally tripled to America in the most intense years. In 1800 an Irishman seeking fortune or even just survival might think "I could go to America," and would know some who had already done so. He might first internally migrate to Dublin seeking work, or cross eastward and try to find work in Liverpool, Manchester, or London. Australia and Canada were also possible.
There was also back-migration, of people returning to Ireland after having made money, or failing to make money, in one of those places. Some went back and forth a few times. They came back different. Their fathers and grandfathers would have thought of themselves as O'Tooles from County Wicklow or even from a small cluster of villages, but they would have thought of themselves as more generically Irish. They would know different versions of the old songs, Irish music from Mayo never heard in Cork, and even Irish music written in London or New York. They would have done entirely new jobs, seen different places, and not shared in the joys and sorrows of the events in the intervening years. They had married a woman from another part of Ireland who made food a slightly different way. Or was not Irish at all. To be Irish meant something different to them not only than it had to their grandfathers, but even their brothers and sisters.
To be Irish in New York in 1900 likely meant never having seen Ireland, and speaking little if any Gaelic. Yet they perceived themselves as a separate and identifiable group, and some still do. They would also know Americans who only vaguely knew they were at all Irish. "Oh is Cody an Irish name? I always thought it was English."
This on top of the changes that happened to everyone in that century, as new technologies came into use and nationalisms became increasingly important.
Tangential note: America has had the advantage in tying its heritage to ideas, principles, and written documents. This is not entirely so, as Americans also define themselves according to historical events and geography, but it is more true of us than of others. As those abstracts become less unifying, I'm not sure what we have left, as even the history and geography are seen differently. Even myths have their usefulness.
8 comments:
I always think of the recipe book my Swedish mother put together that contains few if any Swedish foods, because the 'fancy' food her foremothers learned to cook was what the English who employed the Swedish girls as servants wanted to eat.
Also, the joke about why the ends of the roast were cut off.
To be Irish in New York in 1900 likely meant never having seen Ireland, and speaking little if any Gaelic.
To be Irish in Ireland in 1900 probably meant speaking little Gaelic. Revival projects for the language were a major focus of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (later "Army"), precisely in order to further a national identity that the British had long been gently suppressing. Even today, only about 10% of the population speaks it even though it is the official language of the country.
@ Christopher B - The Gethsemane Lutheran fundraising cookbooks from 1948 and 1973 both contain a lot of non-Swedish recipes that reflect exactly what you are referencing here: aspirational cooking that was possible in America, of many heritages (Italian cooking, how amazing for a Swede), but most of all of the prosperity to be able to actually afford better cuts of meat and diverse ingredients. The "traditional" cooking of all our regions and all our ethnic forebears is mostly pretty poor stuff. The exception would be Tidewater Virginia, especially among the elite, after the first generation or two of poor starving bastards. Because of the destruction of the Native Americans by disease and displacement, the population of game, fish, and waterfowl exploded, and the wealthy could make the servants and slaves put together more amazing stuff.
@ Grim - true. Gaelic was found more on the islands than the mainland. I had forgotten that.
I think the dependence of American identity on principles and ideas is what G. K. Chesterton meant when he said that America was "a nation with the soul of a church." He was used to a nation based on real or imagined blood relationship. ("Nation" comes from natus, meaning "birth.") Not here it doesn't.
The founding documents are the product of Anglo-Saxon, Protestant men and culture. Other European peoples can embrace and understand some of the concepts, but it is clear that the waves of European immigration changed the meaning of them. No European can accept the Bill of Rights, and none does. No modern European country recognizes freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the right to keep and bear arms ... None. None of the modern Anglophone countries, except the US, do, either.
Anglo Saxon women never got it.
And the founding documents are utterly alien and unintelligible to non-Europeans.
The deep reality is that much of culture is at least partly genetic. Ever character of every organism, including behavior, has a genetic component.
You should read the archives of hbdchick and Chateau Heartiste.
@ Earl - I agree, and there is a serious weakness in both the conservative and liberal responses to the immigration debate around that very issue. Many (not all) conservatives lean too heavily on what is close to a blood-and-soil approach to Americanism, responding to the emotional symbols without caution, and excluding some who assent quite nicely to American ideals. On the other side, too many liberals (not all) are now discarding all aspects of assimilation as important, including some values that I think are central, just because some aspects of assimilation are indeed unnecessary. As I mentioned in my post about the Connecticut driver I encountered here: I expect people to assimilate to the place they moved to.
@ sykes.1 - I have read both and liked much of the former, less of the latter. Anglo-Saxons (which is an inaccurate name derived from Bede, but stands in for many tribes and subtribes along that north coast) had a stronger tradition of female rights than the tribes to the south. Christianity had preached improved rights for women for centuries, with some success, but it really took off in the north. Ditto forbidding cousin marriage. The Church forbade cousin marriage in a lot of places, but only in Northern Europe did people say "Right. We'll do that forthwith." I credit that northernness substrate rather than the Protestantism directly for that. I think the notion of rights and Protestantism both derived from that culture in which followers were not always kin, and warriors could gather themselves around a leader who was competent, and not just an uncle. Ties were more voluntary for centuries. A lot of the rights ideas were long present in Catholicism and were repeatedly expressed, but never reached critical mass.
How the Americans succeeded in taking it one step farther than even the other British colonies is a subject of considerable debate. A half-dozen possibilities are suggested, and it may be that it was a perfect storm, with all of them playing a part.
I remember The Quiet Man, when Maureen O'Hara is confessing an embarrassing situation to the priest, and asks, "May I use the Old?"
Her words are stumbling and unsure, indicating that most native Irish of that time were greatly unfamiliar with the Gaelic.
Too many people's conception of Ireland is colored by movies, songs, and RiverDance. The Irish I've known are more complex than that.
As are most people.
Yeah, I've noticed the cohesion in culture and expectations among almost ALL foreigners. They just don't 'get' America, where going along with the crowd is not that popular. We are relatively tolerant of individualism and differences, compared with most of the rest of the world.
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