ABSTRACT
Joe Kennedy, patriarch of the Kennedy family, once rebuked a Boston newspaper for labeling him an Irishman, saying, “I was born here. My children were born here. What the hell do I have to do to be called an American?” (Shannon vii). His frustration was the frustration of many Americans of Irish heritage who experienced a kind of identity crisis in the early decades of the twentieth century. They were, as historian William V. Shannon notes, the ethnic group “closest to being ‘in’ while still being ‘out’” (132). Since the Famine immigration, Irishness had changed from an identity implying a shared history to an identity connoting only vague, sometimes superfi cial, cultural similarities. As a result, many modern Irish Americans felt disconnected from the culture of their ancestors, but they also felt disconnected from American culture. Confusion emerged from this sense of being both defi ciently Irish and defi ciently American, and the challenge for this generation became reconciling their American identity with their cultural heritage in such a way as to show the two to be compatible, not mutually exclusive.
