A Renegade History of the United States

by Thaddeus Russell

  Irish minstrels introduced the jig, the reel, and “the double” to the American public. One visitor to Ireland described the double as consisting “in striking the ground very rapidly with the heel and toe, or with the toes of each foot alternately. The perfection of this motion consists, besides its rapidity, in the fury in which it is performed.” One of the greatest black dancers in the early United States was an Irishman. “Master” John Diamond was a featured performer in P. T. Barnum’s traveling show. His performances of four dances, the “Negro Camptown Hornpipe, Ole Virginny Breakdown, Smokehouse Dance and Five Mile Out of Town Dance” were so good that Barnum invited local dancers to challenge him in a competitive “Negro breakdown.” Diamond, according to one theater manager, “could twist his feet and legs, while dancing, into more fantastic forms than I ever witnessed before or since in any human being.” Diamond and his black rival, “Master Juba,” are widely credited by dance historians as having created the style that became tap dancing.

  Tap dancing was not the only contribution by the renegade Irish. No matter who you are, you may very well owe much of your vocabulary to the filthy, primitive, and uncivilized Irish Americans of the nineteenth century. If you ever use or enjoy the terms “babe,” “ballyhoo,” “bee’s knees,” “bicker,” “biddy,” “big shot,” “billy club,” “blowhard,” “boondoggle,” “booze,” “boss,” “brag,” “brat,” “brisk,” “bub,” “buckaroo,” “buddy,” “cantankerous,” “clout,” “cockeyed,” “cute,” “feud,” “fink,” “fluke,” “flunky,” “freak,” “gab,” “galore,” “gimmick,” “giggle,” “goof,” “grifter,” “hanker,” “helter skelter,” “humdinger,” “malarkey,” “mayhem,” “moniker,” “scoot,” “scram,” “scrounge,” “shack,” “shill,” “shindig,” “skedaddle,” “skidoo,” “slob,” “slogan,” “slop,” “smithereens,” “smudge,” “snap,” “snazzy,” “sneak,” “sneeze,” “snide,” “snoot,” “so long,” “spic-and-span,” “spiel,” “spree,” “spunk,” “squeal,” “stocky,” “stool pigeon,” “stutter,” “swoon,” “tantrum,” “taunt,” “teeming,” “throng,” “twerp,” “wallop,” “whiz,” “yack,” or “yell,” or if you have a “beef” with a young “buck” and have to “bounce” him because he talks a lot of “bunk” and doesn’t mind his own “bee’s wax,” refer to the street you live on as your “block” or call a town a “burg” or a pirate a “buccaneer,” call excrement “caca,” are in “cahoots” with a “crony,” get knocked on your “can” or have your “clock cleaned” while “chucking” a football or playing “chicken,” call a police officer a “cop,” make a wise “crack,” dismiss a “crank” theory or just feel “cranky,” play “craps,” say that a dead person “croaked,” “ditch” a job because you were “docked” pay for being late, “duke” it out with some “dude,” “finagle” a deal that makes you “flush” with cash, are “framed” for a crime you did not commit, are a little old-fashioned and like to say “by golly” and “gee whiz,” can’t stand that “gawky” and “grouchy” old “geezer” who talks “gibberish” and “guzzles” beer, complain of “hack” politicians who take “graft,” have a “hunch” that leads to a “jackpot,” listen to “jazz,” call someone a “jerk” for being a prostitute’s “john,” like to visit your favorite “joint,” refer to a child or a pal as “kid,” tell someone “kiss my ass,” put money in a “kitty,” are on the “lam” from the law, “lick” a man in a fight, see the ugly “mug” of a “mugger” who takes your money on a “muggy” night, pride yourself on being a “natty” dresser, give someone a “noogy,” are either “nuts” or have the “nuts” to raise the bet but then get dealt the “nuts” hand in a game of “poker,” have a “pet” animal or child or project or peeve, hate “phoneys” and young “punks” and “pussies,” are proud or ashamed of being “queer” or just a little “quirky,” complain about the neighbors’ noisy “racket” or a corrupt business “racket,” have a “rollicking” good time, think the promising “rookie” should be given playing time on the team you “root” for, call a gullible fool who falls for a “scam” a “sap,” “shoo” away a fly or get the “skinny” on a “shoo-in,” “skip” town, “slack” off, “slug” a shot of good Irish whiskey then “smack” the bar with the glass and “slug” a temperance reformer in the “smacker,” know that many good things come out of the “slums,” get a “square” deal, are just a working “stiff,” create a “stink,” laugh so hard you’re in “stitches,” are a “sucker” for “swanky” stuff, or say “uncle,” you might have early Irish Americans to thank.

  Lexicographers have found evidence that working-class Irish Americans either invented these terms, modified them from Gaelic origins, redefined them, or put them into common use.* Only their colleagues of the bottom, African Americans, have created as much of the language of the United States.

  THE MAKING OF THE IRISH COP

  Eric Lott and other scholars have argued that expressions of antiblack racism by Irish Americans—such as the lynchings of blacks during the New York City draft riots of 1863, or their invention of the word coon, or the deliberate attempts by some to belittle blacks in minstrel performances—were efforts to hide “their resemblance, in both class and ethnic terms, to ‘blackness.’” As Noel Ignatiev puts it, “while the white skin made the Irish eligible for membership in the white race, it did not guarantee their admission; they had to earn it.”

  A minstrel song, written in 1844 after a series of Irish-led riots in Philadelphia, noted the beginning of a shift among white-skinned immigrants:

  Oh, den de big fish ’gin to fear,

  Dey thought the burnin’ was too near,

  Dey call’d a meetin’ to make peace,

  An’ make all white folks turn police.

  One of those white folks was William “Bull” McMullen of Philadelphia, leader of the Irish American gang the Killers and its sister fire company the Moyamensing Hose. McMullen grew up among the smoked Irish and white niggers of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. In the 1840s, he took part in several of the city’s riots, including one in which he shot to death an anti-immigrant, and was charged with stabbing one policeman and injuring another. To avoid trial, McMullen and other Killers enlisted in the army. Soon after being shipped out to the Mexican War, the Killers physically overthrew the captain of their unit and replaced him with McMullen. By all accounts, McMullen and his crew became full-fledged Americans in Mexico, serving with discipline and loyalty and fighting so fiercely in the battle of Mexico City that they were cited for “the extremest of bravery.” Like many other Irish Americans, McMullen moved immediately from service in the Mexican War to municipal politics. In 1850 he was elected president of the Democratic Party Keystone Club in Philadelphia, where he organized much of the Irish population to vote for a pro-Irish candidate for mayor. The candidate won and promptly named six members of the Moyamensing Hose Company to the police force. For his efforts, McMullen was appointed to the board of inspectors of Moyamensing Prison. The following year he was elected alderman, a position that allowed him to fill the Philadelphia police force with Irishmen.

  The same pattern followed in New York, where in the nineteenth century the Irish transformed themselves from white niggers into white citizens. The Irish gangs in the city waged a relentless carrot-and-stick campaign to gain power and legitimacy. On the one hand, their riots, arson, and general criminal mayhem forced city officials to greatly expand the police and fire services. And on the other hand, the gangs’ aggressive political organizing among immigrants—the Irish were known to vote “early and often” for candidates selected by gang leaders—forced mayors and police chiefs to fill the newly created jobs with Irishmen. In 1840, at the beginning of the great wave of Irish immigration, there was only a handful of Irish police officers on the force. But Mayor Fernando Wood, who was elected with most of the Irish vote in 1855, added 246 positions to the police force and filled half of them with Irishmen. By th
e end of the year, Irish made up more than one-quarter of the New York City police, and by the end of the century, more than half the city’s police and more than 75 percent of its fire fighters were Irish Americans. In addition, Irish were disproportionately represented among prosecutors, judges, and prison guards. Soon, the Irish cop was a stock figure in American culture. Once known as apelike barbarians, the Irish were now able to show themselves as the most selfless and patriotic civil servants.

  Through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Irish American community leaders waged a remarkably successful campaign of assimilation with the goal, as the Irish newspaper the Boston Pilot put it, to create “calm, rational, and respectable Irish Catholics of America.” The movement was led at the grassroots by Irish Catholic priests such as Archbishop “Dagger John” Hughes of New York and Archbishops John Joseph Williams and William Henry O’Connell of Boston, who used the power of the church and Christian morality to make immigrants adopt the ways of their new country. Kerby Miller, the leading historian of Irish emigrants to North America, notes that Catholic discipline easily merged with American demands: “church teachings, as reflected in sermons and parochial school readers, commanded emigrants and their children to industry, thrift, sobriety, and self-control—habits which would not only prevent spiritual ruin but also shape good citizens and successful businessmen.” Irish priests began the work of disciplining their flock during the canal-building period, when they were hired by employers to shame indolent and unruly workers. When laborers made trouble on the Welland Canal in the winter of 1843–44, a Father McDonagh “used the whip upon them with his priestly authority.” And when Irish diggers put down their shovels in a spontaneous “turnout” on the Gallopes Canal, near Ontario, Father James Clarke pledged to the managers that “any assistance in my power to preserve order among the labourers is at your service.” Clarke lectured the strikers on their duty to work and, according to one account, convinced them to return to their jobs and become “perfectly peaceable.”

  According to Miller, most Irish priests during this period “reflected both their church’s concerns for order, authority, and spiritual conformity and their middle-class parents’ compatible obsessions with social stability and their children’s chastity.” They therefore “condemned traditional wakes, fairy belief, sexually integrated education, crossroads dancing, and all other practices which threatened either clerical or bourgeois hegemony… . This ‘iron morality’ helped make the post-Famine Irish the world’s most faithfully practicing and sexually controlled Catholics, but in the process it crushed many old customs which had given color and vitality to peasant life.”

  In America, the Church’s worldview merged seamlessly with a ruthless determination by many Irish immigrants to make themselves one with their new nation. Archbishop Hughes, who did more than anyone to assimilate the New York Irish, insisted that “the Catholic Church is a church of discipline.” To this end, he cajoled thousands of Irish New Yorkers to join temperance organizations and helped establish the Irish Emigrant Society, which placed immigrants in jobs and then monitored their diligence and commitment to the “work ethic.” Workers who misbehaved were publicly shamed by the Emigrant Society and their parish priest. Hughes placed an army of nuns in major executive positions—managing hospitals, schools, orphanages, and church societies—where they inculcated, among other teachings, the “Marian doctrine.” Girls were instructed to not only live chaste lives but also to ensure the purity of others. The Catholic schools established across the country by Hughes and other Irish priests punished children for using the “flash talk” that created so much of American slang and insisted on strict adherence to “proper” and respectable English.

  By the end of the nineteenth century these efforts were apparently successful enough to allow Irish American newspapers to make bold new claims about Irish biology. Irish “racial” characteristics had become inherently American: Celts were declared to be naturally hard-working, orderly, loyal, and sexually restrained. The Connecticut Catholic newspaper claimed at the turn of the century that Irish Americans “are an exceedingly well behaved and orderly class of men.” Rather than the stereotype of “idle, slovenly, and often vicious” beasts, the Irish actually “compare favorably … in all that goes to make up good citizenship … [and] the second generation are intensely American in their instincts.”

  All of this moralizing and re-racializing appears to have had some influence on the Irish, who by the end of the nineteenth century had left the ditches for good. Just one generation after the canals were dug, Irish were proportionally underrepresented in the lowest-paying occupations and overrepresented not only in police and fire departments but also in teaching, clerking, bookkeeping, and other white-collar jobs. Irishmen were elected mayor of New York in 1880, of Boston in 1884, and of Chicago in 1893. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Rhode Island, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York elected Irish governors. This was a great accomplishment, to be sure, but at what cost?

  FROM JIGGING TO MARCHING

  Like Irish Americans as a whole, Patrick Gilmore, Edward Harrigan, and Chauncey Olcott began their careers black and ended them white.

  Soon after his arrival in Boston from Galway in 1849, Patrick Gilmore organized a blackface minstrel troupe called Ordway’s Aeolians. Fourteen years later, while serving in the Union army, Gilmore took “Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye,” an Irish antiwar song of a soldier returning from war blind and limbless, added elements of a Negro spiritual he had heard sung by a black street urchin, “dressed it up, gave it a name, and rhymed it into usefulness for a special purpose suited to the times.” It became “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again,” one of the great patriotic—and often prowar—songs in American history. Gilmore penned several other wartime anthems including “God Save the Union,” “Coming Home to Abraham,” “Good News from Home,” and “John Brown’s Body.” According to one historian, “In terms of creating a positive image in the eyes of Bostonians toward the Irish, no one did it better than Gilmore.”

  The son of Irish immigrants, Edward Harrigan grew up a stone’s throw away from the heart of the Five Points during the heyday of the district’s interracial carousing. As a teenager, he learned to play the banjo, the instrument invented by slaves that was the centerpiece of the minstrel stage. In the 1860s, Harrigan moved to San Francisco, where he established himself as a minstrel star, specializing in telling jokes in black dialect. During the 1870s, he moved back to New York and began writing and performing in comic plays depicting life among New York’s lower classes, especially the Irish and African Americans. By the 1880s, Harrigan was the most successful playwright and theater producer of his era and had moved the Irish closer to respectability. At his shows, he offered “Pure Fun Only,” declaring them an alternative to the overtly sexual entertainment in much of variety theater (see chapter 4). In effect, as one historian puts it, “Harrigan broke through the Anglo-Protestant representational hierarchy of ethnic and racial groups by injecting a positive Irish image onto the commercial stage.” African American characters were featured in many of Harrigan’s plays, usually as an uncivilized counterpoint to the Irish. The nineteenth-century literary critic William Dean Howells noted that while the Irish had moved out of their primitive state in Harrigan’s characterizations, African Americans remained in theirs:

  All the Irish aspects of life are treated affectionately by this artist, as we might expect from one of his name; but the colored aspects do not fare so well under his touch. Not all the Irish are good Irish, but all the colored people are bad colored people. They are of the gloomy, razor-bearing variety; full of short-sighted lies and prompt dishonesties, amusing always, but truculent and tricky; and the sunny sweetness which we all know in the Negro character is not there.

  Harrigan drew laughs by poking fun at Irish drinking and brawling, but the overall trajectory of the Irish in his plots was upward into respectability. The main character in Harrigan’s most popular seri
es of plays, Dan Mulligan, immigrated from Ireland in 1848, fought in the Civil War, bought a grocery store, and served his community as a selfless politician.

  Irish characters in Harrigan’s plays had gained respectability but lost their rhythm. Songs written by Harrigan and his partner David Braham (also a former blackface minstrel) that depicted Irish American life were usually in the style of a jig but in a much slowed tempo and set to the regular cadence of a march. They were intended to evoke melancholy rather than movement. Rhythmic syncopation was reserved for the “cakewalk,” or “celebration,” songs sung by black characters and were among the classic tunes of the minstrel tradition, including “Walking for Dat Cake,” “Dat Citron Wedding Cake,” “Massa’s Wedding Night,” “The Old Barn Door,” and “The Charleston Blues.”

  Like Harrigan, Chauncey Olcott started in show business with burnt cork on his face. The son of an immigrant mother who was raised in a “paddy camp” along the Erie Canal, Olcott ran away from home several times to join minstrel troupes and became one of the more celebrated blackface performers in the 1870s. But in the 1880s, as the effort got under way to make the Irish respectable by returning them to their imagined roots, Olcott was recruited to perform “authentic” Irish songs in an operatic, bel canto style. According to historian William H. A. Williams, after a visit to Ireland in the 1880s, his Irish accent was “good enough to last for hundreds of performances, as Olcott established himself as the reigning Irish tenor in American theater.” Olcott specialized in sentimental ballads and melodramatic acting and pioneered “a new type of stage Irishman” who was utterly respectable and nonfunky. “Eschewing the excesses of the hard-drinking Paddy,” Olcott “was a handsome, witty, attractive, yet sentimental hero, who was not above shedding a manly tear for mother and motherland … He was a good-humored hero who, while capable of daring-do, was more at home singing love songs and lullabies.” Olcott wrote the lyrics to several sentimental ballads, including “My Wild Irish Rose” and “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” which came to symbolize the sober, romantic, chaste, and nondancing Irish who were invented to replace the white simians of old. “Olcott and his associates gave Irish Americans a glorious, albeit fantastic, past upon which to build dignity and respectability.”