Discarding the prototype

Irish Literary Supplement, Spring, 2007 by Lawrence McCaffrey

DONALD JORDAN AND TIMOTHY J. O'KEEFE, EDITORS The Irish in the San Francisco Bay Area." Essays on Good Fortune The Executive Council of the Irish Literary and Historical Society San Francisco, California, 2005, $25.00

WHILE A GRADUATE STUDENT at the University of Iowa, Professor James Edmund Roohan cautioned me not to assume that Boston's Irish were prototype Irish Americans. He pointed out that Irish Catholics moving west successfully responded to less or no nativist bigotry and to open societies with loads of employment prospects. Since the 1950 Roohan-McCaffrey conversations, historians have discovered and reported Irish-American regional diversity.

Timothy J. O'Keefe's "Introduction" to The Irish in the San Francisco Bay Area: Essays on Good Fortune and James P. Walsh's "The Evolution of the thesis: The Irish Experience in California was Different" abbreviate the Bay Area Irish experience. A few Irish arrived in Mexican-controlled California, not only to enjoy a pleasant climate and beautiful landscape, but also a congenial Catholic cultural mindscape. Discovery of gold in the Sierras attracted masses of Irish American fortune seekers. Some found wealth, most did not. After leaving the gold fields, many settled in San Francisco, joining Irish already there. As pioneers of an instant city they achieved rapid social mobility. With relative speed, Irish Catholics entered the upper-levels of the working and middle classes, becoming prominent in business, the professions, politics, and the Catholic Church. They produced a number of political firsts: a city mayor, a state governor, and a United States senator, and made their Faith a significant force in what was a relatively irreligious metropolis.

Walsh's essay appears in the "Irish-American Identity: Personal Experience and Historical Evaluation" section. So does Kevin Starr's "Fragments of Identity, Lost and Found." Start, a highly regarded historian of California, spent much of his childhood in an orphanage, losing contact with his mother's Irish and his father's Anglo Protestant heritages. Kindly Dominican German nuns in the orphanage and parochial school sustained his mother's Catholicism. Starr's maternal grandmother's articulated memories and the contents of Reverend Doctor Hugh Quigley's 1878 The Irish Race in California revived his Irishness. At Harvard, philosophy Professor Josiah Royce, a native Californian, reconnected Starr with his Anglo-Protestant background. Like so many Americans, he is proud to possess cultural perspectives of two ethnic and religious heritages.

Although essays in The Irish in the San Francisco Bay Area argue Irish Catholic uniqueness in that portion of the United States, they also emphasize its strong ethnic content and loyalty. Mathew L. Jockers, Gearoid O hAllmburaoin, and Lynn Lubamersky discuss three aspects of San Francisco's Irish culture--literature, music, and dance. In the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-centuries, Irish-American authors did not advertise their ethnicity; Jockers deals with three San Franciscan writers who did--Kathleen Norris, Peter B. Kyne, and Thomas Lennon. In an entertaining, well-written essay, O hAllmburarin discusses gold-mine camp traditional Irish music, and how it has survived in San Francisco, appealing to Irish and non-Irish alike, even attracting talents of the latter. In "Women in Irish Dance in San Francisco, 1910-1930," Lubamersky tells how Gaelic enthusiasts promoted Irish dancing, really more of an invention than an authentic tradition. She pays tribute to San Francisco Irish dancers, including Gracie Allen, and explains how late marriages, male irresponsibility, and a surplus of female immigrants encouraged women to seek fulfillment in dance.

In a clearly written, thoroughly researched essay, Janet Nolan credits significant teaching contributions of nuns and lay women to San Francisco's parochial and public schools. Timothy J. O'Keefe's "Educating Young Men-'Principally Irish': Men's Catholic Colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area" traces the origins and early years of Santa Clara, San Francisco, and St. Mary's. Italian Jesuits founded the first two but the students were mainly Irish and in time so were faculty members and administrators. Christian Brothers, usually Irish, developed St. Mary's, which moved from San Francisco to Oakland and to permanency in Moraga. Due to economic realities and an overemphasis on athletics, both common in American Catholic institutions of higher learning, these three did not intellectually or scholarly equal private or state alternatives until the 1960s. But within limitations, they culturally advanced students, providing them with tools to succeed in business and the professions.

In Donald P. Walsh's "Maggie's Boarding House: Irish American Assimilation in San Francisco, 1910-1930" Maggie Walsh, an immigrant from Irish-speaking Galway, had her San Francisco start as a domestic in the home of a kind and generous Jewish family. Then, as keeper of a boarding house, she introduced male members of her family to American ways. They learned English, found jobs, married, and produced many children. James P. and Daniel P. Walsh descended from Maggie's Boarding House occupants.