Irish American Fiction from World War II to JFK: Anxiety, Assimilation, and Activism

214 Pages·2021·6.28 MB·English

by  Beth O’Leary Anish

NEW DIRECTIONS IN IRISH AND
IRISH AMERICAN LITERATURE
Irish American Fiction
from World War II to JFK
Anxiety, Assimilation, and Activism
Beth O’Leary Anish
New Directions in Irish and Irish American
Literature
Series Editor
Kelly Matthews, Department of English, Framingham State University,
Framingham, MA, USA
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature promotes fresh
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seriesaimstoanalyzeliteraryworksandinvestigatethefluid,shifting,and
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Beth O’Leary Anish
Irish American Fiction
from World War II
to JFK
Anxiety, Assimilation, and Activism
Beth O’Leary Anish
Community College of Rhode Island
Lincoln, RI, USA
ISSN 2731-3182 ISSN 2731-3190 (electronic)
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature
ISBN 978-3-030-83193-6 ISBN 978-3-030-83194-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83194-3
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To Bob and Rita O’Leary,
whose love, faith, and support formed me,
and whose generation formed this book
Preface
When I began the process of revising my dissertation into a book
manuscript, I realized that the book was not the whole dissertation.
Where the dissertation had spanned 60 years of Irish American fiction,
film,andmemoir,thisbookwouldbetheonepartIkeptcomingbackto
repeatedly. It was the fiction of the 1940s and 1950s that most spoke to
theideasIwantedtogetacross.Theanxietyexpressedbyauthorsduring
that era over what Irish America had become was, to me, the story I
wanted to tell. In zeroing in on fiction of the era between World War II
and JFK’s presidency, I had to add novels that were not in my original
project. I found that the newly included novels supported my argument
that the years after World War II were an era of monumental change for
IrishAmerica,andforequallymonumentalconcernaboutthosechanges.
My dissertation was about the Irish American story, and the gaps and
fissures in that story, as seen through the literary output of some great
Irish American thinkers. This book is a slice of that story.
It is a story that is not restricted to the Irish alone. Post-World War
II, other white ethnic groups experienced the white flight out of the
cities, the move from working to middle class, and all the identity crises
that might come with those major transitions. Decades later, writers such
as Phillip Roth would remember their city neighborhoods with some
nostalgia. Roth’s Jewish Americans had already moved up and out of
Newark by the time he was writing. Still, his protagonists thought back
to their Newark neighborhood as an origin point for their families in the
vii
viii PREFACE
United States. It was a time of ethnic solidarity, when secular American
valueshadnotyetinfringedontheiryoungergenerations.Jewish,Italian,
and Irish urban neighborhoods gave way to African American neigh-
borhoods. Redlining and the opportunities afforded to whites through
governmentloansandtheG.I.Billbuiltthewhite,suburbanmiddleclass
as we now know it. For white ethnic Americans, only a couple of genera-
tions removed from the discrimination their grandparents faced, turning
intothedominantclasscamewithconflictedfeelings.AsIreadmoreIrish
American novels from the post-War period, I discovered a repetition of
characters involved in radical politics who were painted in a sympathetic
light by their authors. In these books the radical, or at least left-leaning,
characterswerepittedagainstsocialclimbersandbullieswhowereoutto
gain American “success” seemingly at the cost of their Irishness. Bigotry,
in the books covered here, is incompatible with Irishness.
I wrote the early drafts of this book in Donald Trump’s America. As
I wrote, I started to realize that I needed the stories of these liberal-
minded Irish Americans as much as the authors I was studying did. It
has become clear to me that this book exists in three time periods: the
early twentieth century of the authors’ childhoods, the mid-twentieth
century when they were reconstructing their memories of those child-
hoods in historical fiction, and the second decade of the twenty-first
centuryasIwrotethesewords.Inthismoment,mymoment,anewbatch
of Irish American names including Bannon, O’Reilly, Ryan, Kavanaugh,
and Conway, propped up a conservative government elected largely on
an anti-immigrant platform, and stoked racist fires to rally its base.
As much as Father Charles Coughlin and Senator Joe McCarthy (and
other less famous Irish Americans no doubt) scared these mid-twentieth
century authors into wanting a different Irish American memory, so
do these more recent names scare me. It is confusing how a commu-
nity founded by immigrants who faced discrimination upon entering this
country produced anti-immigrant bigots. Thankfully, it also produced
people willing to stand up to those bigots. The Irish in America are not
the only white ethnic group to experience this conflict, but as the first,
their example is instructive. Irish American Fiction from World War II to
JFK shows how some authors defined their Irish identity in contrast to
their more bigoted neighbors. It looks at how childhood memories spun
into fiction can be used to remind their peers of what their history was,
and what their present should be. These two competing strains in Irish
American life echo through the books included in this study.
PREFACE ix
As I chose the focus of this book, I was surprised to find I was most
interested in the era in which my parents came of age. The more I read
and wrote, the more I realized in many ways I was writing about my
parents, the trends and issues that shaped them, and thereby the trends
andissuesthatshapedme.Inthesameway,millionsofotherIrishAmer-
icans have been shaped by the beliefs and attitudes of their parents and
grandparentsbeforethem,beliefsandattitudesthathadmuchtodowith
how the Irish were viewed in this country they adopted, and how they
reacted to those views. Reading about socially progressive Catholics and
the resistance they faced in their communities made me curious about
why I did not know any of these radical Catholics growing up. I wonder
now if that part of the story—the voices of the social reformers within
the Church—had been largely silenced. Thinking about this brought to
mind an exchange with my father that I thought was funny at the time
it took place, but I now realize was telling of the attitudes with which
he was raised. It was early in my teaching career and for some reason, I
mentioned that I was preparing a lesson on Marxist literary theory. He
yelled, “That’s bad! You can’t teach that!” His reaction caught me off
guard.IdonotthinkIevenprobedhimforareasonbehindhisposition,
since he found many things “bad,” from bacon to driving after dark. I
joked with my students about his response. I dismissed it as his being
elderlyandconservative.Hewasthedefinitionof“oldschool.”Itisonly
recentlythatIamstartingtoputtogetherhisgeneration,hisCatholicism,
hisIrishheritage,andhisexclamationthatanythingtodowithKarlMarx
is bad.
My parents’ generation was not far displaced from generations of Irish
Americans who faced discriminationin employment in the United States.
My mother remembered her uncle being passed over for a promotion at
the mill where he worked because he was Catholic. My father’s parents
decided not to name him after Irish hero Robert Emmet for fear of
discrimination he would face when he was born in 1922 (he was named
RobertEdwardinstead).NowIknowthathealsowasbornjustafterone
Red Scare and was a young man about to get married and start a family
duringanother.Itisnotjustinmyfamilythatthelegacyofdiscriminatory
treatment still appeared well into the twentieth century. Though there
have always been Catholics rallying for the cause of the poor and disen-
franchised,manyrealizedthatinvolvementwitharadicalsocialmovement
would only undermine the acceptance the Irish in the United States had
worked so hard to achieve. They also had the Church hierarchy warning
x PREFACE
themabouttheevilsofcommunism.Thisisthelegacybehindmyfather’s
“teaching Marx is bad!” comment. It is a transgenerational legacy of the
fear of rejection, combined with the fear that radicals were out to bring
down the Church. The roots of these fears had been largely forgotten by
the time I came of age late in the twentieth century, but there they were,
still haunting my father at the beginning of the twenty-first.
My father and mother graduated from high school in 1941 and 1944,
respectively. In my mother’s yearbook, most of the boys’ pictures are
either taken in military uniform or left blank. These high school boys
had quickly transitioned to being young men at war. This was a genera-
tion born just after World War I and just before the stock market crash
of 1929. Many saw their families struggle through the years of the Great
Depression. These were years of great anxiety over financial insecurity.
When their fortunes fared better after World War II and they moved out
ofurbanethnicneighborhoods,theanxietyofsomeIrishAmericanintel-
lectualsturnedtotheiridentity.CouldtheystillbeIrishinAmerica?What
was lost in moving from the working class to the middle class, and from
city neighborhoods to suburbia? The outpouring of fiction describing
Irish American life in this period is worthy of study. In sheer volume it
indicates there was something these authors were trying to preserve, and
trends they were trying to understand.
It is also worth considering these works in the broader field of ethnic
American Studies, as this was a crucial period for white ethnics to figure
out who they would be—what would still make them ethnic—out in the
suburbs.Ifnotinaclose-knitneighborhoodthatsharedthesameculture,
what of them would still be Irish, Jewish, or Italian? It is my hope that
readersofthisbookwillthinkoftheirownparentsandgrandparents,and
their own family’s process of ethnic identity formation. In other words,
I hope they will consider how the history of the country their ancestors
adopted, as well as the history they carried with them from their home-
lands,influencedwhotheyaretoday.Inparticular,theperiodafterWorld
WarII,whichbroughtnewopportunitiesforIrishandotherwhiteethnic
groups, should be studied for how it formed the white middle class. The
authors in this study are feeling the anxiety of this transition. It plays out
in their fiction. As we move through a greater reckoning with race and
whiteprivilegeintheUnitedStatestoday,itisworthlookingbackattheir
fears.
The ideas in this book flourished in the presence of my colleagues
in the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS), many of whom