Selling the Songs in Their Hearts:
The Irish American Image in Popular Culture
Excerpted with permission from Irish America: Coming Into Clover by Maureen Dezell (Doubleday, 2001)

Each year in early March, the mud thaws, the days lengthen, and advertisers roll out images of shamrocks, party-hearty leprechauns, and freckle-faced inebriates. St. Patrick's Day is fast approaching, and competition is keen to sell beer and spirits by suggesting an Irish brand endorsement--a seal of approval of sorts from the ethnic group "known" to overimbibe.

St. Patrick's Day advertising is sui generis in the realm of niche marketing, and a slogan the Leo Burnett Company came up with to sell beer one year -- "Irish I had a Schlitz" -- explains why. The logo was the exception that proves the rule that unflattering ethnic images are far too offensive to use in the serious American business of selling. No sane advertiser would create a commercial for Florida condominiums suggesting: "Jewish it cost less?" None would put together a promotion for a white-shoe financial services house urging: "Take the sting out of investing. Have WASPs watch your money."

Obnoxious caricatures of the "clever Jew," "penny-pinching Protestant," or "inscrutable Asian" have mercifully disappeared from the American mainstream. The Irish boozer still bobs about in media flotsam, not because some pernicious prejudice keeps the cliche afloat, but because Irish Americans endorse it. Drinking to wretched excess is a time-honored tradition on St. Patrick's Day in the United States, an annual occasion in which a splendid heritage is reduced to Eiresatz: a sentimental slur of imagined memories, fine feeling, and faux Irish talismans and traditions.

On the American day when everyone is Irish, lovely lasses and pugilistic Paddies parade on urban avenues carrying lucky clovers and silent harps; leering leprechauns serve as symbols of Irish wit and cunning; mawkish music and fight songs pay "tribute" to the Irish spirit; public drunkenness passes for Irish pride.

"No other ethnic group demeans itself this way," the Irish-born Los Angeles psychiatrist Garrett O'Connor has noted. "The Irish character becomes caricature" around St. Patrick's Day, "when being drunk is supposed to be the same thing as being Irish."

The New York St. Patrick's Day parade, which has long made a concerted effort to counter cultural clowning, is a caricature in its own right. A solemn, quasimilitaristic display of staunch Roman Catholicism, self-righteousness, and Irish republicanism, the event is recognized around the world as a symbol of Irish culture, when, in fact, it is not. The pageant reflects nothing so much as the membership and mind-set of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the all-male fraternal society who organize the parade, and who once led an unsuccessful campaign to keep America safe from the Abbey Theatre. Today, they bar the equally insidious and threatening Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization from the line of march.

The essence and ethos of the New York parade were vividly expressed on a gusty, sun-warmed March 17 morning of 1999, when the late John Cardinal O'Connor greeted Irish screen actress Maureen O'Hara, grand marshal of the parade, on the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral: conservative Catholicism meets The Quiet Man.

As the country's oldest, largest ethnic group, the Irish have been secure enough for long enough to shrug off anachronisms and hackneyed stereotypes that might raise hackles among others. Reasonable people of Celtic heritage figure that St. Patrick's Day displays are silly; life is too short to get exercised over a parade or a fifteen-second TV spot of a winking leprechaun swilling a Budweiser. Why get upset?

Why indeed.

Self-lampooning, a St. Patrick's Day staple, dates at least to vaudeville days, when struggling immigrants and their children realized that their comic sense and the songs in their hearts would sell. The stage Irishman's blarney-imbued "Don't mind me, I'm just a funny Irish guy" renditions of shuffle-alongs and happy drunks were officially hooted out of music halls and theaters in the 1900s -- in a campaign led by the Ancient Order of Hibernians. But American popular culture by that time had embraced the idea that the Irish were a genial, down-to-earth, self-effacing people with a romantic past and a weakness for drink. For better and for worse, so had the Irish--which is why those notions define Irish America's image and self-image to this day.

A stage Irish story

Descendants of dreamers and tale-tellers in the land of money, myth, and Disney, the American Irish early on developed a capacity for romanticizing their heritage and sentimentalizing themselves.

The throngs who fled Ireland's Great Hunger and their children had little choice but to reinvent who they were. Famine immigrants spilled out of coffin ships into American cities "dressed in rags, weak with hunger, and numb with the fresh memory of corpse-filled workhouses, skeletal children, and tales of cannibalism," in Dennis Clark's words. They were premodern peasants, "homeless, nationless, and all but hopeless after a grim sea passage to an unwelcoming land."

Like immigrants who would later take their place on the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder, they represented much of what upstanding American society abhorred. The Irish were Celts, not Anglo-Saxons; Papists, not Protestants; rebels fighting to expel America's Motherland from their homeland. They were communal in a land of vaunted individualist achievers; drinkers at the dawn of the American temperance movement; a gregarious and boisterous people who showed little interest in serious American enterprise but loved politics.

Newspaper and magazine illustrators who provided visual definition for the pre-tabloid, pre-television age borrowed from British newspaper pages and vaudeville stages to reflect prevailing opinion with drawings of apelike Irish, drunken Paddys, menacing Micks, and surly Biddies. The influential cartoonist Thomas Nast "regarded the politicized Irish Celt as a menace to a good society," L. Perry Curtis Jr. writes in Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature. Anytime he "drew an Irish-American, he invariably produced a . . . cross between a professional boxer and an orangutan."

The Irishman onstage was Sambo with a shillelagh. Actor, producer, and writer Tyrone Power (forebear of a theatrical family that would include his namesake, the movie actor, and the director Tyrone Guthrie) made himself a star in the role of "Paddy Power," a re-creation of a blabbing, blundering Irish peasant who was such a hit in London. The Paddy stage schtick called for Irish props--pigs in the parlor, whiskey--and almost always featured a fight that turned into a melee. Brawls were a trademark of Irish immigrants, who gave name to the police vehicle, the paddy wagon.

Paddys played themselves as well as Sambos in minstrel shows, dancing and shuffling in blackface to a blend of Irish fiddle music and African American songs. Both Paddy and Sambo were childlike, musical, hapless, exuberant, and irrationally loyal to their employers, the music historian William H. Williams observes his insightful, delightful study of Irish image in popular song lyrics, 'Twas only an Irishman's Dream.

Vaudeville helped turn Paddy, Mick, and Biddie into Pat, Mike, and Bridget. "In vaudeville, to be Irish was to dance. Irish immigrants brought traditional step dancing to America, where it became part of theatrical dancing," writes Williams. "Irish step dancing provided the start for more than one twentieth-century tap dancer. George M. Cohan began his career with the same Irish steps his father had used when he started in the theater."

While stage Irishmen were entertaining the masses, Irish community leaders were doing their best to soften and sanitize the tough urban Irish image. The Ancient Order of Hibernians seized control of New Yorkís St. Patrick's Day celebration in the late 1850s and turned it into a prototype public relations campaign "to send a favorable message about the Irish at their best to the rest of the city." Each year, they assembled thousands of "impeccably dressed Irish" to march in a solemn display of probity and patriotism through Manhattanís wealthiest neighborhoods.

Irish apologists like Thomas D'Arcy McGee propagandized on behalf of the Irish, portraying "the Celt [as] a being spiritually superior to the materialistic Saxon," according to Thomas N. Brown. "The Celt, he argued, is naturally aristocratic and full of veneration. ... Duty, Death, Eternity, are more congenial subjects to the Irish mind than Wealth, Liberty, or Fame." The myth of elevated Celtic spirituality would capture the imagination of people of influence, from the poet and critic Matthew Arnold in the Victorian era to the singer Enya a century later. But most Americans, Brown points out, preferred to emphasize "not uniqueness and magic, but the earthy ability to get along with people of diverse origins," and Irish secular democratic traditions.

Irish stereotypes gradually began to take on new dimensions in the latter half of the nineteenth century, as Catholic Church and political organizations established themselves, and Irish communities became less impoverished and more stable. The Civil War Draft Riots and the Orange Riots of 1870 and 1871 underscored the extent to which the Irish of New York remained an enemy within. But the tens of thousands who enlisted and fought bravely in regiments like the 69th New York militia, which became known as the Civil War Irish Brigade, for example, lent salutary connotations to the "fighting Irish" caricature.

The arrival of the celebrated actor/director/producer Dion Boucicault, a talented sensationalist and pioneer of melodrama, was cause for applause among the nascent Irish middle classes in the 1860s. Boucicault managed to couch Irish nationalist sentiment with broad audience appeal. There is a heroic British soldier, for example, in The Shaughraun, which he used to propagandize on behalf of Fenian prisoners.

To be sure, Boucicault brought with him new casts of Celtic caricatures: His Irish plays The Shaughraun, The Colleen Bawn, and Arrah na Pogue are wild romps through spectacular countrysides, where the peasants are wily and self-sufficient, and daredevil rogues outwit their British overlords with blarney and outmaneuver them with brawn. At the time, no less a light than Henry James, reviewing The Shaughraun in The Nation, compared it favorably to standard Irish fare, calling it a portrayal of "love, devotion, self-sacrifice, humble but heroic bravery, and brimming with Irish bonhomie and irony."

It was those characteristics, mixed with stage Irish slap-happiness and tippling, that came to define a consummate Irish American persona: the self-effacing regular guy. The theatrical origins of this enduring type owe much to writer, producer, and actor Edward Ned Harrigan and performer Tony Hart, the wildly popular vaudeville and theater team whose shows, including The Mulligan Guards, Reilly and the Four Hundred, have been hailed as precursors of at least three American art forms: the musical, the knockabout comedy, and the sitcom. Harrigan, whose renderings of urban life were compared to those of Charles Dickens, did some of his writing while perched on a New York park bench, leaping to his feet and following characters he found interesting, listening and scribbling. His shows sold out for weeks on end in Manhattan from the mid-1870s to the early 1890s. Harrigan and Hart productions teemed with ethnic stereotypes of all sorts, but a star among them was Dan Mulligan, hero of at least eight shows. A ward heeler, Civil War hero, American patriot, and Irish nationalist who was convinced Lafayette was really an Irishman named Lafferty, Dan was good-hearted if a bit of a rogue; a devoted son both of Erin and America who loved his glass; a hopeless beneficiary of his wife Cordeliaís civilizing ambitions.

A hardworking, home-and-family-loving Irish girl in the early Mulligan shows, Cordelia lost her heart and humor as she evolved into a social climber, and she and Dan moved from their shanty digs on Mulligan Alley (a stage re-creation of slums like Five Points) to a nice place uptown. There, she dressed him in suits and ensconced him in parlors where he was such a fish out of water, he drank out of a goldfish bowl. "Cordelia, I know you saved my money, and I know you're trying to elevate me, but I can't forget me neighbors," says Dan. "There's no one up here to sit out on the front stoop and have a glass of beer wid me. There's no barber shop open of a Sunday morning where you could hear the news of the week."

The social implications in this comedy of working-class urban manners are as subtle as slapstick. Irish women at the time tended to be better educated, more gainfully employed, and, like Cordelia, more socially aspirant than their men. All for the better, many might assume. But that would be a Protestant assumption. For the Mulligans and their friends and family in New York, the move into the middle classes suggested selling out or getting above yourself and that is a hell-bent place in Irish culture.

Maureen Dezell is a staff writer for the Boston Globe. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

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