ABSTRACT
In the first half of the twentieth century, the American Irish left behind them much of the discrimination and impoverishment that had characterized the nineteenth century. The arrival in the United States from the 1880s onward of the ‘new immigrants’ from southern and eastern Europe was greeted by an upsurge of racial nativism. To many Americans, the cultures, religions and lifestyles of these ‘new immigrants’ seemed so strange that the Irish must have appeared quite normal by comparison. In racial terms, the Irish were soon begrudgingly included in the superior ‘Nordic’ or ‘Teutonic’ category, while southern and eastern Europeans were classified as inferior. The Catholicism of Irish Americans excluded them from full respectability in the United States for decades to come, until the election of John E Kennedy as president in 1960 finally settled that question. But already, by the early twentieth century, the American Irish had achieved rough occupational and educational equality with the American population as a whole, and they considerably exceeded the ‘new immigrants’ in social mobility and success. 1 At the same time, they began to make their mark on American literature, played a disproportionately powerful role in the American labour movement, made a greater contribution than ever to Irish nationalism and continued to dominate both the Catholic Church and the politics of American cities. The American Irish, despite the forces of nativism and condescension that still surrounded them, began to come into their own in the first half of the twentieth century.
