Looking for Jimmy

A Search for Irish America

Peter Quinn

• Publisher: ABRAMS Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781590205983
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

“[An] exceptionally thoughtful and interesting inquiry into Irish America . . . More a meditation than a history” from the acclaimed author of Dry Bones ( The Washington Post ).
 
In the hands of historical novelist and speechwriter Peter Quinn, the Irish stereotype of “Paddy” gives way to an image of “Jimmy”—an archetypal Irish American (a composite of Jimmy Cagney and Jimmy Walker) who comes to life as a fast-talking, tough-yet-refined urban American redefining US politics, street culture, religion, and imagination. From immigrating to the United States to modern day politics, Quinn’s vibrant prose weaves together the story of a people that has made an immeasurable contribution to American history and culture.
 
“Entertaining and informative . . . There are portraits of the Irish as politician, cop, priest, teacher, writer. In this deft examination of America’s Irish, Quinn adds color and nostalgia with his tales of growing up and working in the Bronx of another time.” — Publishers Weekly
 
“You don’t have to be Irish or Irish-American to love this book. Whoever you are, you are in it. This is the kind of book you will want to bestow on anyone with, or without, a hyphen in their history.” —Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Angela’s Ashes
 
“Well written and researched, showcasing the author’s pride in his Irish Catholic heritage.” — Kirkus Reviews

I. FAMILY AND MEMORY

Peter A. Quinn (the author’s father) on his First Communion, St. Brigid’s Church, New York’s Lower East Side (1911)

Looking for Jimmy

Tell us, doctors of philosophy, what are the needs of a man. At least a man needs to be notjailed notafraid nothungry . . . not a worker for a power he has never seen . . . that cares nothing for the uses and needs of a man . . .

—JOHN DOS PASSOS, The Big Money

THE PHOTOGRAPH OF THE ELEVEN IRONWORKERS perched nonchalantly on an I-beam suspended over Midtown Manhattan may not enjoy the same celebrity as Dorothea Lange’s Dust Bowl madonna, her handsome face plowed under by want and worry, or Alfred Eisenstadt’s sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square on V-J Day, a serendipitous recapturing of Ulysses’s return to Penelope, but it is famous enough. Several years ago, I purchased a copy outside the Time & Life Building from a street vendor, who told me it was his best-selling print.

I was drawn to the picture by what a cultural historian might call its “iconic significance.” Like those photos by Lange and Eisenstadt, it seems to hold in frozen permanence not just a single moment, but a whole era. It is one of those images that a historical novelist studies for long periods, scanning faces, clothes, gestures, searching foreground and background, in the hope of slipping away from the dead certainties of facts and dates to touch the kinetic intensity of a once living, now departed moment. The novelist’s impossible dream isn’t merely to distill the subtle particulars, but to unfreeze the entire scene and melt into it, much like the main character in Jack Finney’s novel Time and Again, who actually succeeds in transporting himself back to gaslight New York with the help of such visual aids.

I had the print of the ironworkers framed and hung it on a wall in my office. Although I have spent more working hours gazing at it than I care either to count or admit, I have never achieved the long-sought sensation of transtemporal transport.

The discoveries I have made have been more prosaic, the result of a casual mix of research and reverie. According to Phil McCombs, a reporter for the Washington Post who investigated the photo’s provenance several years ago, the image was taken as part of a shoot done in 1932 by Hamilton Wright, Jr., a professional photographer and pioneer in the practice of public relations. Wright was involved in promoting the construction of Rockefeller Center and snapped this photo as part of that assignment.

McCombs tracked down Wright’s son, who told him that either his father “took it personally, or one of his guys.” Whichever the case, the man behind the camera caught—or arranged—his subjects in a breathtaking tableau that juxtaposes the run-of-the-mill New York sight of construction workers enjoying a time out with a setting that would turn most inhabitants of terra firma into jelly. The ironworkers appear utterly oblivious to where they are. Aligned not unlike the figures in Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, they seem as at ease on their steel aerie as the disciples with Jesus in the cenacle.

On the left, a worker lights the cigarette of the man next to him. You can see the muscles in his biceps as he crooks his arm to offer the light. Three men in the middle are having a conversation. Several have what look like rolled-up newspapers in their hands. Four hold what appear to be cardboard lunch boxes. One is shirtless. The man at the extreme right provides the only exception to the subjects’ unawareness of being photographed. He holds a flask and stares directly at the camera with a look of grumpy disdain, as though intent on puncturing the illusion of workers on an ordinary break who didn’t know a photographer had them in his sights. To me, he has always seemed ready to lift his right hand with middle finger extended, a traditional New York gesture of disapprobation.

Several years ago, on a book-tour stop in Austin, Texas, I dropped in to a soi-disant New York-style deli that had a poster-size version of the photo framed behind the counter. Usually, I concentrated my focus on the men. My routine was to start with the second figure on the right. He has his cap pulled down over his eyes, but his sharply chiseled profile remind me of my mother’s oldest brother, a World War I veteran and roustabout/bartender who died in 1933, fourteen years before I was born, and who I knew only from photographs. This time, however, perhaps because I was seeing it in an entirely new venue, my eyes didn’t settle on my uncle’s doppelganger, but on the buildings beneath the men’s dangling feet, especially the distant dome of the Mecca Temple. (Described in the 1939 WPA Guide as “the largest Masonic Shrine in the city,” the temple now operates as the City Center.)

Judging by the position of the Mecca Temple, I suddenly realized that the building under construction was the R.C.A. Building (now the G.E. Building), the main tower of the Rockefeller Center complex. I suppose this should have been obvious before, but obvious or not, it hadn’t made an impression. Every working day for several years I had been looking out of my office in the Time Warner Building at the very site where the photograph was taken without giving it a thought. This perception of missing the obvious drew me in even deeper. I wondered what else I had overlooked in my years of gazing at the faces mounted on my wall.

The year the picture was taken, 1932, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, which had reached an all-time high of 381 in September 1929, bottomed out at 41. The American economic slump no longer had the feel of a cruel interlude but of a permanently altered reality in which the collapse or overthrow of capitalism was eminently possible. However, there is no hint of that crisis anywhere in the photograph. In fact, the combination contained in Wright’s photo—the obvious brawn and casual daredevilry of the men on the beam, the soaring height of the edifice they are raising, the engineering and financial know-how implied, the sprawling city in the background, and the pall of auto exhaust and factory smoke obscuring Central Park and the Hudson River—all speak of a strength more elemental and enduring than the economic paralysis that was dragging the country to its knees.

The central show of confidence emanates from the men themselves. They are lean and wiry, their toughness of an old-fashioned kind, before Nautilus machines and steroids made the pretentious deltoids of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger an archetype of masculinity. These men didn’t work at staying in shape. Life saw to it. They all look as though they could handle themselves in a fight, and probably had. They are union workers, men with steady jobs (at least as long as Rockefeller Center was under construction) in a period when millions were just scraping by or standing in breadlines. There is nothing sorrowful about them, no uncertainty or fear in their faces, least of all of heights. It seems the talk going on among them would be natural and relaxed. Their everyday interaction is part of the magic of the scene, a surreal contrast of everyday behavior and extraordinary setting.

In all the years I have studied the faces in the photo, I have found in them a familiarity that goes beyond resemblance to a single uncle of mine. These are faces I knew firsthand in my childhood in the Bronx, faces of relatives, teachers, priests, Christian Brothers, cops, firemen, fathers and brothers of friends, my own father’s political associates; Irish faces that, in my mind, have no connection to the fields or boreens of Cork and Tipperary, but are natural to the concrete precincts of New York, to its streets, bars, and parish halls. Looking at them, I am always struck by the thought that what they are sitting upon is more than merely a beam. It is the hyphen between Irish-American, and they are straddling it in perfect equipoise.

Six decades before Wright produced his photograph, the cartoonist Thomas Nast drew a scene with two figures sitting on metal pans, their feet dangling in space. The pans are suspended from the beam of a weighing scale. From the side of the beam labeled “South” hangs the pan holding Sambo, the barefoot, thick-lipped, bug-eyed stereotype of the ignorant Negro ex-slave whose recent elevation to citizenship supposedly threatened to subjugate defeated but chivalrous whites to the rule of “pickaninnies” and scalawags. From the other, labeled “North,” hangs Paddy, a grotesquerie that Nast borrowed from contemporary English newspapers and journals and regularly employed as a pug-nosed, half-simian representation of Irish ignorance and savagery. The pans of Nast’s scale are in balance: Sambo and Paddy embody the equal burdens of rural blacks and urban Irish, underclasses that weigh down the future of America’s recently reunited Anglo-Saxon republic. (The sardonic solution to this dilemma was offered by the British historian Edward Freeman, who wrote that America might one day be a great nation “if only every Irishman would kill a Negro, and be hanged for it.”)

The Ignorant Vote—Honors Are Easy.

The view of Irish Catholics that reigned in Anglo-Saxon America through the later half of the nineteenth century is well described in Harold Fredric’s 1896 novel, The Damnation of Theron Ware. Frederic’s story of the loss of faith by Ware, a Methodist minister in the fictional town of Octavia, New York, is built upon his close encounter with the town’s Irish Catholics—“this curiously alien race.” Having served only rural congregations, Ware has no previous acquaintance with the Irish. This hasn’t stopped him from acquiring a stark and disturbing impression:

. . . the Irish had been to him only a name . . . But what a sinister and repellent name! His views on the general subject were merely those common to his communion and his environment. He took it for granted, for example, that in the large cities most of the poverty and all of the drunkenness, crime, and political corruption were due to the perverse qualities of this foreign people . . . The foundations upon which its dark bulk reared were ignorance, squalor, brutality, and vice. Pigs wallowed in the mire before its base . . . Above were sculptured rows of lowering ape-like faces from Nast’s and Keppler’s cartoons, and out of these spring into the vague upper gloom—on the one side, lamp-posts from which Negroes hung by the neck, and on the other, gibbets for dynamiters and Molly Maguires, and between the two glowed a spectral picture of some black-robed tonsured men, with leering satanic masks, making a bonfire of the Bible in the public school.

The historian and musicologist William H. Williams has done an exhaustive study of the Paddy stereotype as it played out in popular music. In ’Twas Only an Irishman’s Dream: The Image of Ireland and the Irish in American Popular Song Lyrics, 1800-1920, he makes the case that the massive immigration of Famine-era Irish Catholics inundated the cities of the Northeast with Europe’s poorest, most unskilled peasantry, a population with no experience of English-style village life, never mind of rapidly industrializing urban centers. The utter unfamiliarity of the Irish with the routines and demands of city life, and the absence of any previous immigrant group to blaze a path, or at least offer some hint of how to act or what to do, put the Irish at a distinct disadvantage. They would spend a long time climbing out of what Williams describes as “the worst slums in American history.” Yet Williams perceives that their unfamiliarity with cities also gave them an advantage:

In spite of their peasant origins, they had none of the Jeffersonian suspicion of, or disdain for, the city. Having no place else to go, the Irish burrowed into American cities and came to understand them better than many Yankees, as they turned politics into a profession, instead of a nose-holding duty, a function of upperclass noblesse oblige.

Williams makes clear that Thomas Nast wasn’t alone in equating Irish and blacks. (Indeed, one popular mid-century term for blacks was “smoked Irishmen.”) On stage, Paddy and Sambo were both childlike buffoons, lazy, superstitious, given to doubletalk, inflated rhetoric, and comic misuse of proper English. Unlike Sambo, Paddy was highly temperamental and always ready to fight, but this easy irascibility didn’t diminish their shared status “as an endless source of fun.” For both groups, the stereotype became so ingrained in popular attitudes and perceptions that it passed from being regarded as a theatrical parody to being a predeterminant of group behavior. “An Irishman,” writes Williams, “taking a drink, getting into a fight, or just generally having a high old time, was not like other men who might drink, fight, or celebrate. He was acting an elaborately scripted role. He was fulfilling a grimly comic prophesy. He was playing the stereotype of himself.”

The difference was that, although they lived on the periphery of American society, the Irish were not barred by law as well as custom from trades and professions, or routinely denied their civil rights. The mere fact that they could vote gave them a wedge, which they used forcefully. Starting far behind America’s “old-stock” Protestant whites, despised for their religion and clannishness, and burdened by poverty and social dislocation, they were at least allowed to compete. In terms of the theater, the rise of Irish-Americans to prominent places as actors, performers, and songwriters allowed them not merely to suffer the Paddy stereotype, but to change it to their own purposes. In the hands of a writer and producer like Ned Harrigan, whose “Mulligan Guard” plays were so popular that he had his own theater to house them, the stage Irishman was transformed from goonish Paddy to good-natured, hard-working, decent Pat.

Pat retained elements of the old Paddy caricature. He was volatile and a born brawler. But whereas Paddy had echoed Theron Ware’s nightmare vision of Molly Maguires and their wild-eyed cousins who tried to incinerate New York City during the Draft Riots, Pat’s combative instincts were tamed and Americanized. Instead of being a term of opprobrium, “Fighting Irish” became the moniker of the 69th Regiment and the University of Notre Dame football team. By the time of World War II, the association of Irish and fighting, once so basic to Paddy’s disruptive image, had become a rallying cry for American patriotism. The 1944 movie The Fighting Sullivans portrayed a brood of five brawling Irish-American brothers, all lost on the same ship, as the apotheosis of loyalty and sacrifice. In the 1941 movie Yankee Doodle Dandy, which celebrated the life and music of the Irish-American actor and songwriter George M. Cohan, the actor playing President Roosevelt says to Cohan (played by Jimmy Cagney), “I like the way you Irish-Americans wear your patriotism on your sleeve.” Gone were the days when Paddy was told to not even apply. Now Pat was assured that he was “in like Flynn.”

Irish progress from Paddies to Pats was gradual and incremental. It both reflected and hastened the diminishment of anti-Irish prejudice. But it would be misleading to lump the ironworkers in Wright’s photograph in either category: as the bog-trotting ape-men of Thomas Nast’s imagination, or as suburban-bound Pats about to springboard on the G.I. Bill right into the middle of the American mainstream. These men are of another type. For them, rural Ireland is barely a memory, the never-never land of Tin Pan Alley productions such as When Irish Eyes Are Smiling or A Little Bit of Heaven. Suburbia is still a white-collar, Protestant place. Their home is the city. It is the context that defines them, and which, in their hard-edged, streetwise style, in their slang and their gait, in the way they hang a cigarette out of their mouths or wear their caps or ogle a girl, they helped define. They are no longer a living part of urban America, but they remain a major ingredient in its genetic composition.

By the time the Depression struck, the urban Irish community that had been created willy-nilly in the aftermath of the Famine no longer ruled New York the way it once had. Along with making the Catholic Irish seem less threatening to America’s Protestant majority, the waves of immigrants from Italy and Eastern Europe dwarfed the size and significance of Irish neighborhoods. The reflexive link between urban and Irish, which was forged in the 1840s and ’50s and which at one point was so strong in popular music that, as William Williams summarizes it, “an Irish name conjured up the American urban scene,” was no longer as all-embracing or surefire as it once had been. Italians came to provide much of the city’s rude, unskilled labor. Jews became dominant in entertainment. The African-American migration from the South was adding a dynamic new element to the city’s mix.

The relations of the Irish with these groups has mostly been framed in terms of conflict and struggle. Jews have frequently written about the pugnacious belligerence with which the Irish harassed and bullied them. Italians, though nominally sharing the same Catholic religion, found little welcome among the Irish. Black and Irish relations have long seemed synonymous with ethnic bitterness and strife. This was never the whole story, however. With the Jews, for instance, Tammany Hall had early on recognized the potency of their vote, and while many progressives were agonizing over the introduction of a Semitic strain to Christian America, Tammany was working hard to win and keep their loyalty.

Their shared religion might not have produced brotherly love between the Italians and Irish, but it did increasingly lead to intermarriage. Coitus vincit omnia. The parish school I attended in the East Bronx was made up of both Irish and Italians, so that by the 1940s, in addition to classmates named Caesar Di Pasquale and De...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• I. FAMILY AND MEMORY
• II. POLITICS & PLACE
• III. FAITH AND IMAGINATION
• IV. SILENCE AND HISTORY
• CONCLUSION