To any old-line Chicago Irish alert to the symbolism, that March day must have seemed a nightmare on legs. It was Saint Patrick’s Day, and there was Harold Washington, nemesis of the Irish political machine, marching arm in arm with Jim Thompson, scion of the ancient foe of the Irish, the Anglo-Protestant establishment. It was enough to make a man move to Oak Lawn.
The new Irish-Americans were especially suited to operating within an urban political system that at its worst was so corrupt that ordinary embezzlers and swindlers avoided politics as unbecoming. Personal loyalty was traditionally prized. So too was a certain guile, acquired through “their old-country experience in circumventing the inequalities and oppression of the British legal system.” Irish-American politicians were resistant from the start to the virus of idealism, at least the kind espoused by Protestant Anglo capitalists who saw reform in terms of institutional efficiency and personal moral uplift. Victims in Ireland of manorial capitalism and victims in the U.S. of its industrial cousin, the Irish did not view poverty as a sin. No doubt many regarded outfits such as the Society for the Relief of the Deserving Poor as not just meddlesome but misnamed — surely no one deserves to be poor.
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Virtue in any event was properly the province of the church, not City Hall. The Catholic Irish were not individualist but communal in their orientation, and looked to the family for help when death or debt intruded. What the family couldn’t do the ward organization often could, and it didn’t ask for your soul in return, just your vote. Indeed, McCaffrey makes this provocative assertion: “The gradual emergence of the American welfare state owed more to Irish machine politics than to liberal ideology.”
That accommodation failed in the late 1970s. It may be, in terms of her coalition-building skills anyway, that Jane Byrne wasn’t Irish enough. Or maybe she was too Irish; McCaffrey explains the destructive antagonism shown during Washington’s first term as a reassertion of “Chicago Irish political provincialism and tribalism,” echoes of the days when a Limerick “butthermilk” couldn’t get a job on a gang run by a Dubl in “jackeen” and vice versa. You can take the boy out of Bridgeport, in other words, but . . .
The Irish indeed were the north’s niggers. Their culture owed much to poverty and, worse, forced dependence on the landlords in the old country, and as is so often the case, family and individual took precedence over the abstract values of “good community.” Skerrett tells the story of attempts in the late 1880s by Protestant residents of WASP Englewood to buy out Catholic church builders; a new church would bring in new Irish, and the Irish would bring in the crime and vice the good people of Englewood were trying to escape.
Fanning’s essay on Chicago Irish writing is the longest of the four, and the best written. He devotes most of that length to Dunne and Farrell. Yes, them again, here extolled as “the first American writers of genius to emerge from Irish ethnic backgrounds.” These are two of the brightest trophies in the city’s literary showcase, and the sheen of their reputations has begun to wear from all the polishing they get.
The Irish in Chicago by Lawrence J. McCaffrey, Ellen Skerrett, Michael F. Funchion, and Charles Fanning, University of Illinois Press, $19.95.
