"I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually."
-
Daniel
Patrick Moynihan
Pat Moynihan only
appeared on the New York-based sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live once. It was for the show’s 100th
episode, on March 15 1980, a few days before St. Patrick’s Day, when he
appeared as the narrator in a sketch reading ‘one of the Old Irish Fairy
Tales.’ The story was that of Sean the leprechaun who ‘while wee, was even so
the least wee of all the wee people.’ Sean lived with his fellow faerie-folk
‘in a tiny, small grass house nearby to an empty milk can.’ Played by Peter
Aykroyd (with Jane Curtin and Harry Shearer as supporting leprechauns), Sean
was an annoyance to the other leprechauns. Too large to escape after their
acts of mischief, Sean was regularly caught and had to hand over pots of gold
to be freed. Taller than a milk can and fatter than a bucket, Sean ignored his
fellow leprechauns’ injunctions to diet (‘shamrock salads,’ apparently) or even
slouch. One day, after having taunted Old Man McGuire by tying his shoelaces
together, knocking over his tea, and throwing his scones out of the window,
Sean was hiding behind the milk can when ‘a big wind’ blew up, knocked over the
milk can, and flattened poor Sean. The sketch ended with Moynihan delivering
the punchline, ‘People, even little people, who live in grass houses shouldn’t
throw scones.’[1]
‘St. Patrick’s Day,’
wrote the New York Times in 1981, ‘is
at once a clarion of spring, a saint’s day and the celebration of a people.’[2]
It is also, in many respects, a uniquely American phenomenon. It is a day, as
the old joke runs, when vast swathes of Americans rediscover their Irish lineage,
however tenuous their link to the Old Country might be. The festival is
particularly important in New York City, home to one of the largest Irish-American
communities in the United States. The New York St. Patrick’s Day parade is not
only the largest of its kind, but the oldest civilian parade in the world.
Somewhere in the region of 150,000 marchers – bands, police and fire services,
county associations, immigrant societies, and other clubs – process along Fifth
Avenue, led by the 69th Infantry Regiment (New York), nicknamed the ‘Fighting
Irish.’ As senator, Moynihan was a regular attendee at the parade, usually
with some sartorial flourish to mark the occasion. In 1980, for instance, he
was spotted marching arm-in-arm with First Lady Rosalynn Carter, wearing ‘gray
pinstripes and a polka dot tie in green.’[3] Two years earlier, he had been the
host the official pre-parade “wake-me-up party” at Charley O’s saloon on 48th
Street, where politicians and journalists squeezed in to start the festivities
‘shamefully early’ (to quote the event invitation).[4]
Such propitiations are
expected of New York Democrats, who have counted on Irish-American voters to
return them to office for decades. However, Moynihan’s parade appearances, and
his participation in folksy sketches, were far more than expedient politicking.
Moynihan was, of course, an Irish-American, and proud of his heritage. However,
his relationships with his own Irishness, with Irish-Americans, and with
Ireland itself, were complicated and multi-layered.
Always keen to dispel stereotypes about Irish-Americans, in this photograph Moynihan invites
members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to hear testimony from his
two expert witnesses, St. Michael and St. Thomas, March 1976
The Moynihans came
originally from County Kerry. Moynihan’s paternal great-grandfather, Cornelius
Moynihan, farmed and bred horses in Headford Junction. His eldest son, Daniel,
inherited the farm; the younger, John C. ‘Jack’ Moynihan (Pat’s grandfather)
emigrated to the U.S. in 1886, where he got a job laying oil and gas lines for
Standard Oil. Moynihan had the opportunity to see Headford Junction in 1951 as
a holidaying LSE student.[5]
Irish associations marked his life in other ways. As a young man, he worked as
a longshoreman, a profession dominated by Irish-Americans in New York City; and
when in London, his closest friends belonged to a Catholic family from Belfast,
the Golloglys. However, unlike many other Irish-Americans, he was also an
Anglophile, which, as discussed in a previous blog post, manifested in his
dress and speech patterns.
Irish-Americans were the
subject of Moynihan’s first academic publication, his long essay on the New
York Irish in Beyond the Melting Pot,
the book he co-authored with sociologist Nathan Glazer, published in 1963. The
book was a collection of case studies of five ethnic groups in New York City:
African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish. Glazer, who had
been fascinated by the issue of ethnicity since his time as an undergraduate at
City College New York, had hoped to recruit a sociologist from each ethnic
group to contribute. In the end, he was only able to bring Moynihan on board.[6]
The unifying theme of the book was that the so-called melting pot ‘doesn’t melt,’
that immigrant groups maintained strong ethnic identities over many generations,
though those identities were certainly not static. According to Moynihan, the
New York Irish had been defined by two institutions, the Catholic Church and
the Democratic Party, which inculcated a respect for order and hierarchy, and a
commitment to waiting your turn and slowly ascending the ranks.[7]
Moynihan’s observations
about contemporary Irish identity are particularly instructive, and give some
insight into his later impatience with the romantic nationalist currents in Irish
America. He wrote that although New York’s ‘Irish era’ (roughly 1880 to the end
of the 1920s) had long since passed, and many Irish New Yorkers were leaving
both the working class and the Democratic Party, an Irish identity persisted.
At root, suggested Moynihan, Irishness identified ‘someone as plain rather than
fancy American.’ Moreover, the ‘more amiable qualities of the stage Irishman’ (friendliness,
wit, courage, and a fondness for drink) still held cultural currency and there
was ‘a distinct tendency to among many to try and live up to this image.’ Nonetheless,
the identity was weakening. The ‘stage Irishman’ image was ‘essentially
proletarian’ and no longer reflected the ‘middle-class reality’ of many
Irish-Americans. Furthermore, the gulf between the Irish and the descendants of
Irish immigrants in America was only widening. Irish-Americans who returned to
their ancestral home (and here one assumes Moynihan spoke from some experience)
found little to recommend it in comparison to their American lives. The charming
stereotypes could not withstand an encounter with reality. ‘Few sights are more
revealing than that of a second- or third-generation Irish-American tourist
sitting down to his first meal, boiled in one iron pot over the open peat fire,
in his grandparents’ cottage.’[8]
At the same time as he
was researching and writing his contribution to Beyond the Melting Pot, Moynihan was making first foray into
national politics was as an Assistant Secretary of Labor in the administration
of the first Irish Catholic president, John F. Kennedy. Though Moynihan was not
personally close to the Kennedys, he certainly felt an ethnic, as well as
political, affinity for them, and frequently identified himself as a Kennedy
Democrat, with all of the romance and mythology that the name is intended to
connote.[9]
He told a London Times journalist sent
to interview him in 1971 that he had arrived in Nixon’s White House as ‘a sort
of a Kennedy man … with an aura of acceptance and tragic heroism and noble but
failed expectations.’[10]
This was in spite of his closer association with Lyndon Johnson (He wrote in
1984 to Dean Rusk that ‘LBJ was always a bit of a brute to me. Thought me a
disloyal Kennedy sort’).[11]
It was after Kennedy’s assassination that Moynihan, emerging from a
congressional hearing into a waiting row of TV cameras, made the famous remark
that opened this blog post.
But Moynihan would not
make a sustained engagement with the politics of Irish Americans or of Ireland
until after he was elected to the Senate in 1976, within the context of intensifying
violence in Northern Ireland and a resurgence of nationalist sentiment among
Irish-Americans. The rise of the Northern Irish civil rights movement in the
late 1960s was a key catalyst for that nationalism. Explicitly modelling themselves
on African-American civil rights campaigners, Northern Irish activists, many of
them students, marched and sang ‘We Shall Overcome’ alongside Irish rebel songs
to protest anti-Catholic discrimination in voting, employment, and housing. Sympathetic
organisations were established in the U.S., most notably the American Congress
for Irish Freedom (ACIF), which claimed 3,000 members by 1969.
As peaceful
demonstrations in Northern Ireland gave way to conflict, ‘the Troubles’,
Irish-American nationalism became more hardline. Events in Northern Ireland
galvanised the turn towards ‘physical-force nationalism’ among Irish Americans,
most notably the ‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre of 1972, when British soldiers opened
fire on a civil rights demonstration in Derry, killing thirteen protestors.
NORAID (the Irish Northern Aid Committee) was founded in 1970, effectively to
fundraise for both Official and Provisional wings of the Irish Republican Army
(IRA). Based principally out of Irish bars across the nation, NORAID reportedly
had 80,000 contributors by 1972. IRA agents were able to purchase weapons in
American gun stores, which were then smuggled back to Ireland, often with the
collusion of Irish-Americans. This is to say nothing of the thousands of weapons
and millions of rounds of ammunition stolen from American military bases that
ended up in IRA hands.[12]
Moynihan watched the
re-emergence of militant nationalism with rising horror. Although a supporter
of Irish reunification through negotiated settlement, he was adamantly opposed
to violence. He had little time for sentimentalism, having once written that
nationalism among Irish Americans had become, by the time of the Easter Rising
of 1916, ‘a hodgepodge of fine feeling and bad history.’[13]
Moynihan’s sympathies were with the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), a
party of constitutional republicanism, founded in 1970. He would go on to enjoy
a long friendship with one of its founder members, John Hume – later a co-recipient
of the Nobel Peace Prize.[14]
It was as a result of appeals from Hume that in 1977, now Senator Moynihan
joined with three other Irish-American politicians – Senator Edward Kennedy of
Massachusetts, Speaker of the House Thomas P. ‘Tip’ O’Neill, also of
Massachusetts, and Governor of New York, Hugh Carey – to issue a St. Patrick’s
Day statement in 1977 that called on Irish-Americans to reject physical-force
nationalism. Though the IRA were not mentioned explicitly, the statement entreated
Irish-Americans ‘to renounce any action that promotes the current violence or
provides support or encouragement for organizations engaged in violence.’ The
appeal, noted the New York Times, was
‘unusual’ in that it broke ‘the long-standing reluctance to speak out on the
issue by elected officials of Irish descent.’[15]
The St. Patrick’s Day statement became an annual tradition, and Moynihan,
Kennedy, O’Neill, and Carey were quickly dubbed ‘The Four Horsemen.’
By the early 1980s, the
Four Horsemen were having to pick a careful path between the intransigence of
Margaret Thatcher’s government on Irish matters and the violence of paramilitary
organisations. In 1981, IRA prisoners embarked on hunger strikes to compel the
British authorities to grant them the status of political prisoners. The Four
Horsemen’s St. Patrick’s Day statement that year, co-signed by another 20
politicians, called for an end to ‘the fear and the terrorism and the bigotry’ and
announced the creation of The Friends of Ireland, an organisation to promote a
peaceful settlement and the reunification of Ireland through democratic
persuasion.[16]
After the deaths of several hunger strikers prompted protests in the U.S. – New
York City saw demonstrations almost every day in May and the International
Longshoremen’s Association orchestrated a 24 hour boycott of British shipping –
the Horsemen issued a second statement, in August, calling for compromise and
for President Ronald Reagan ‘to play an active role in ending the current
deadly impasse.’[17]
At the same time, Moynihan remained
implacably opposed to the IRA (though, interestingly enough, he did
confess ‘a vague memory’ to Godfrey Hodgson of having been ‘inducted into an
IRA auxiliary in the back of a bar in Rockaway Beach in the 1930s’).[18] This marked him out from many other Irish-American politicians, and sometimes put him at odds with the sympathies of his own constituents. The most dramatic confrontation came in 1983, when he refused to participate in the St. Patrick’s
Day parade because the grand marshal chosen for the event was Michael Flannery, a
veteran of the 1922-23 Irish Civil War and the founder of NORAID. Although sharply
criticised by some of his own constituents – one Irish-American voter accused
him of ‘talking English’ and a Bronx bar owner announced he would refuse to
serve the senator – Moynihan had the solidarity of his fellow Horseman, former
governor Hugh Carey, who also declined to march.[19]
Moynihan and Carey were supported by the Archbishop of New York Cardinal
Terence Cooke, who refused to give his customary blessing of the parade,
pointedly closing the doors of St. Patrick’s Cathedral until the grand marshal
had passed. But they were the minority. Flannery received a hero’s welcome, cheered by placard- and flag-waving
crowds along Fifth Avenue. By contrast, Moynihan and his wife Liz had the front
pew to themselves during the morning Mass, as ‘none other would sit with us.’ In a 1988 letter to a friend, Moynihan noted that 'our parade has not been the same since' not least because he was now ‘required to march in body armor,
which takes some of the spring out of one’s step!’ As one journalist later noted, Moynihan was 'Irish, but not that Irish.'[20]
[1] Moynihan appeared in
another sketch in the same episode, extolling the virtues of New York’s wine
industry to a group of homeless alcoholic wine snobs, played by regular cast
members. “SNL Transcript,” March 15, 1980, papers of Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
Library of Congress, Manuscript Reading Room, Part II, Box 343.
[2] “Ireland’s Friends,” New York Times, March 17, 1981.
[5] Godfrey Hodgson, The Gentleman from New York: Daniel Patrick
Moynihan: A Biography (Boston and New York, 2000), 26-27, 45.
[6] In addition to the
chapter on the Irish, Moynihan wrote most of the conclusion. Glazer took the
studies of the other four groups. Nathan Glazer, “Daniel P. Moynihan on
Ethnicity,” in Robert A. Katzmann (ed.), Daniel
Patrick Moynihan: The Intellectual in Public Life (Washington, D.C., 1998),
16-21
[7] As Nathan Glazer
writes, Moynihan understood the displacement of regular Tammany Hall Democrats
by reformers in the New York Democratic Party as ‘an ethnic revolution,’ as
Irish American regulars were supplanted by reformers who mostly came from WASP
( White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) and Jewish backgrounds, and found their way
into politics through elite universities. Moynihan’s relationship with urban
machines and reform politics will be the subject of a later blog post. Glazer, “Daniel
P. Moynihan on Ethnicity,” 20.
[8] Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting
Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City
(2nd ed., Cambridge, MA, 1970), 218-19, 221-29, 250-52.
[9] Hodgson, The Gentleman from New York, 77.
[10] Rough Transcript,
Henry Brandon interview with Daniel P. Moynihan, March 23, 1971, DPM papers, LOC,
Part I, Box 187.
[12] Kevin Kenny, The American Irish: A History (New York,
2000), 247-52
[13] Martin Gottlieb,
“Moynihan’s Views on Parade Stir Ire of the Irish,” NYT, March 4, 1983
[14] For more on Hume, see
P.J. McLoughlin, John Hume and the Revision
of Irish Nationalism (Manchester and New York, 2010).
[15] Bernard Weinraub,
“Four Top Democrats Urge Halt in Support for I.R.A.,” NYT, March 20, 1977.
[16] Bernard Weinraub, “24
Politicians Urge U.S. Role in Ending Ulster Strife,” NYT, March 17, 1981.
[17] Kenny, The American Irish, 252; Bernard Weinraub, “Legislators Ask ‘Active Role’ by Reagan
on Ulster,” NYT, Aug 4, 1981.
[18] Hodgson, The Gentleman from New York, 284.
[19] Martin Gottlieb,
“Moynihan’s Views on Parade Stir Ire of the Irish,” NYT, March 4, 1983.
[20] Kenny, The American Irish, 253; Daniel P. Moynihan,
Steven R. Weisman (ed.), Daniel Patrick
Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary (New York, 2010),
501; Todd S. Purdum, "Political Notes: For Moynihan, Health Before Heritage," NYT, February 6, 1983.
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