“Polytics Ain’t Bean Bag”: The Twentieth-Century Irish-American Political Novel

The U.S. Department of Commerce's 1989 Statistical Abstracts of the United States identifies 40,166,000 Americans of Irish ancestry counted by the 1980 Census (41). Many of them are doubtless in politics, although the record will show that many fewer than in the past are in big city politics and political machines identified as Irish. The machines themselves have largely gone the way of the written ballot, at least partly because their functions and fruits are now served by government agencies and programs. A rural people in Ireland, most of the immigrants to America in the nineteenth century settled in large cities. Here, simply for survival at first, and later for respectability, and later yet for assimilation and prosperity, many of them entered politics. With their earned political clout - it was never simply conceded - it was inevitable that novelists would tell their story. An early negative definition of Irish-American politics provides not only the title of this survey but an insight into the fictional versions of politics. The definition is that of Chicago pub-owner, Martin Dooley, creation of Irish-American journalist Finley Peter Dunne, who said in 1895, "Polytics ain't bean bag. 'Tis a man's game; and women an' childer, and prohybitionists'd do well to stay out iv it" (25). The fifteen twentieth-century novels of this survey were published between 1902 and 1984. In the nearly one hundred years of fictional treatment of events and characters - from 1890 in Joseph Dinneen's Ward Eight to 1984 in George V. Higgins's A Choice of Enemies - can be seen the growth of Irish-American political power and its modulation into something we cannot be sure will continue as identifiably Irish-American as were the earlier versions. The action of all fifteen novels takes place almost in earshot of one another in the northeastern United States: one in Albany, three in New York City, three - a trilogy by Thomas Fleming - in an unnamed city that may be a fictionalized Jersey City, one in a city not far from Boston, and seven in Boston, America's most Irish city and where the hardest core of opposition to the Irish existed in the Yankees. How might we characterize the Irish-American political novel? Almost always tensions and conflicts thread their way through these important themes: tribalism and the boss; the father-son relationship; Christ and Caesar; the politics of revenge; idealism gone sour; sin, guilt, and cynicism, and the Irish-Americans and newer ethnics. So, why did the Irish get into American politics? And why, as is usually conceded, were they so extraordinarily successful at it? The first question might as well be, how could they have avoided politics? The root cause is that they left Ireland only to find in America what they thought they were escaping: extreme economic deprivation and civil and religious disabilities. These were particularly painful in America because of what the Irish had already suffered at home under the Penal Laws - Catholics being ineligible, for example, to hold certain public offices. As to why the Irish were successful, the short answer is that they had both motivation and traits or skills that turned motivation into action. In the first place, most of them knew English as did no other immigrant group except the English themselves. They had the gifts of eloquence and audacity and their political genius was in organization, developed at home in their struggle with the British. In addition to the example of a disciplined Church, there were, for instance, for the first half of the nineteenth century, groups such as Daniel O'Connell's various Irish Associations, which successfully collected weekly tithes in support of O'Connell's drives for Catholic Emancipation and the Repeal of the Union. Locally, Irish peasants struck at exploitation by landlords through such groups as the White Boys, Hearts of Steel, Captain Rock, and the Blackfeet. Perhaps the best known example of Irish organized resistance was in the boycott, named after Captain Charles Boycott, a ruthless land agent whose evictions of tenants led, in 1880, to his employees refusing him all cooperation. …