Pride and Prejudice

Thomas Keneally is an archeologist of memory, and “The Great Shame” is an important reclaiming of the Irish past and American history. It is a brave work whose narrative threads connect the personal, the political and the historical, leaving us with vivid impressions of “Irish ghosts” in both triumph and tragedy.

The personal thread is the story of Keneally’s Irish Australian wife’s 19th century ancestors. Twenty-four-year-old blue-eyed, robust Galway wool grower Hugh Larkin was convicted of threatening a landlord and was banished from Ireland to an Australian penal colony in 1833. It was a time of strife and poverty that climaxed in what the Irish call an gorta mor, the Great Hunger of 1845-51, in which Ireland’s peasant population was decimated by starvation in a trauma that the British treasury minister described as an act of providence.

Banished convicts like Larkin were chained below their ship’s deck, confined with four others on a 6-foot-square sleeping bench, never to see their families again. In Australia, Larkin was confined to the barren Monaro hinterlands between Sydney and Melbourne, where he lived in a shepherd’s hut. “What slave cotton was to the American South, convict wool would be to Australia,” Keneally notes. Severed from his family, Larkin eventually married another banished Irish girl, Mary Shields, a servant from Limerick whose crime was stealing bread. Mary was sent to the so-called Female Factory in Parramatta, which held 887 women and 405 children though designed for 300.

Hugh and Mary’s grandchildren included Keneally’s mother-in-law. One wishes that Keneally became more personal here, but he only briefly mentions that these ancestors’ story is a “scandal best forgotten” in his wife’s family, a good example of the “great shame” still attached to having convict blood. It is this repressed shame that blocks the access of so many people to their ethnic roots. The subject of hidden shame was a theme of Robert Hughes’ 1986 classic on Australia, “The Fatal Shore,” in which Hughes noted that “convict history was ignored in schools and little taught” in universities until the 1960s. Such amnesia seems to be a required condition of assimilation and patriotism among many immigrants. Today, many Australians still “stake their claim to respectability on Britishness,” according to Hughes. This not only prevents people from knowing and embracing their past, it also serves the purpose of intellectual counterinsurgency by leaving the British blameless for what happened to the Irish.

Despite the title of his book, Keneally does not dwell much on this process of cleansing history to shame the victim. But his storytelling power brings the dynamics of prejudice vividly to life. For example, to describe the historic backdrop of suffering, he chooses a grisly detail. A disease caused by prolonged malnutrition caused hair to fall from Irish children’s heads and regrow in patches on their faces. This trait was exploited to “prove” the claims of early British eugenicists and magazines like Punch that the Irish were “white chimpanzees.”

Larkin’s triumphant survival--the stuff of immigrant myth--was balanced by the painfulness of his death in Australia when he was 47. The coroner listed alcoholism, but the obituary recorded Larkin as “raving in a frightful manner.” All too frequently, this was the trauma of the banished Irish around the world. In New York City at the time of Larkin’s death, the vast majority of those “raving” like Larkin in lunatic asylums were Irish immigrants. Their average life expectancy in America was less than 10 years and, ironically, many thousands died in New World slums of the very typhus fevers that they escaped in the Old Country.

Keneally shifts from Larkin’s saga to the story of the Irish rebels, known as the Fenians, who were deported from Ireland for attempted insurrection and later escaped from Australia. The extraordinary lives of these Irish nationalists--among them Thomas Francis Meagher, John Mitchel, William Smith O’Brien, Charles Gavan Duffy and John Boyle O’Reilly--constitute a veritable book within this book. But they also serve the author’s purpose in chronicling how the Irish emerged from banishment to affect history.

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Take the lost story of Terrence McManus, an escapee who came to booming San Francisco in 1851, where he met a “raucous welcome” among Irish immigrants. But McManus could not fit the expectations of the American dream, dying a few years later of a loneliness that only the banished fully understand. The story worth remembering about McManus is that of his 1861 funeral procession. The Fenians undertook the world’s longest for this now-unremembered martyr, spanning nine months, during which they carried his body from San Francisco to Ireland, where a crowd of 300,000 met the casket in Cork. No other story quite shows the scale of Irish sentiment for their banished nationalist heroes. McManus was denied a Dublin cathedral service by the conservative Catholic hierarchy because he was considered a Fenian subversive. His body then was carried across the land past numerous hanging sites of previous Irish martyrs until his final burial. His story, like so many others, was not so much the Melting Pot as it was the Odyssey.

Driven to prove their patriotic gratitude to America and also fantasizing an eventual war against the English, the Irish immigrants fought by the tens of thousands in the U.S. Civil War. The tragedy was that they shared their new nation’s own division, fighting on both sides. The scene in Keneally’s book, at Fredericksburg, where Meagher (known as “Meagher of the sword” for his advocacy of an armed uprising in Ireland) led 2,200 members of his Irish Brigade, wearing sprigs of green, into a one-day slaughter that only 218 survived, made me weep.

Keneally brilliantly paints a scene around campfires where the Union troops started singing “Ireland Boys Hurrah,” the anthem of revolutionary nationalists. “The chorus spread from Irish voice to Irish voice six miles along the river, and then was echoed by Irishmen in the Confederate lines on the further bank.” On the last night of their lives, ready to kill one other, they sang of the home they would never see again.

Keneally even finds a Los Angeles connection worth noting in the life of a distant relative, one John Kenealy, a Fenian ex-convict who planned the sensational rescue of Irish prisoners from Australia in 1875. This relative ran a three-story dry goods business at 86 Main St. at a time “when Los Angeles looked for all the world like a little town in Australia.” Once charged with trying to torch Cork, Kenealy went into the fire insurance business here. His business partner’s father, W.H. Workman, was the mayor of Los Angeles and built such a successful immigrant political machine that the WASP establishment eventually banned partisan elections. Entirely unknown today, Kenealy died in 1908, eulogized by the Los Angeles Times with a front-page headline: “Revolutionist Irish Leader Has Passed On.”

It is important to retrieve these immigrant memories like old photos found in a closet because memories help us recover and define our identity, and because such histories were not “lost” by accident.

To lift this “great shame,” Irish everywhere are rewriting Anglo history. A recent Oxford history used in public schools shows the need. It says only of the Famine generation that the Irish “were ambitious, or they wouldn’t have made the big journey to the ‘New World.’ They’re the kind of people who don’t mind moving--and moving again once they are in America.” The Irish “potato famine” is misunderstood as simply an ecological calamity, not a direct result of British prejudice and laissez-faire economics. Only in 1997, as part of the Irish peace process, did a British prime minister, Tony Blair, have the courage to acknowledge British moral responsibility. It was this gesture that helped the peace process at the level below the diplomatic table, where wounds have to be acknowledged and healed.

In Hugh Larkin’s time, the Irish had been called savages for centuries by the most civilized British opinion. “Until Ireland can be famished, it cannot be subdued,” Sir Edmund Spenser wrote to Queen Elizabeth in 1598. Malthus followed up two centuries later by advising that England should “facilitate . . . the operations of nature” in causing famine and emigration. The virus of anti-Irish bigotry was reproduced in Yankee America as well, not simply in a Protestant Know-Nothing movement similar to today’s Proposition 187 crusades but also among America’s finest national writers. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that the Irish could “never occupy a very high place in the human family,” and Herman Melville once described them as “maggots.”

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But it is not enough, finally, to restore Irish pride simply by refuting the old stereotypes and building intellectual monuments to forgotten heroes. A genuine history also must dig up and examine genuinely shameful Irish memories, such as Irish racism and anti-Semitism, and seek their possible roots in the experience of people at the bottom of history’s ladder. Unfortunately, Keneally restores the glory of memory while glossing the shadow side.

During the 1830-50 period, great Irish leaders like Daniel O’Connell also distinguished themselves as opponents of American slavery and welcomed freed slaves like Frederick Douglass on speaking tours of Ireland. But most of the exiled Irish leaders in America, including the clergy and Fenian ex-convict Mitchel, were not on the abolitionist side. Treated like blacks in Ireland, how was it that so many supported slavery 10 years later in America, even lynching blacks on the streets of New York in anti-draft riots in 1863?

“How the Irish became white” is the provocative focus of a new generation of scholars. Partly the answer is that the Irish, denied the vote in Ireland, received in America a skin privilege of white male suffrage rights that blacks and Mexicans were denied. The Democratic Party offered to protect Irish immigrants but was also pro-slavery (thus protecting low-wage Irish jobs from the competition of freed slave labor). The Republican Party WASPs were antislavery but also anti-Irish Catholics. And following the Civil War, the Irish became numerous among the American Indian fighters rewarded with free homesteads in the West. “Give me Idaho!” Meagher proclaimed after the Civil War, dreaming of an Irish Zion. He became Montana’s first governor instead.

Keneally limits himself to a few sentences on these subjects, even though the Irish exiles in his own Australia must carry a share of responsibility for the decimation of the aboriginal people there. The Hugh Larkins, Keneally does note, were “passionate on land questions themselves [but] did not inquire whether the indigenous had any ownership of this ground.” Correspondence from Irish deportees to Australia in the 1830s, collected in David Fitzpatrick’s 1994 “Oceans of Consolation,” contains passages in which the aborigines are described exactly like Irish peasants and American slaves. “I mean to inform you about the native blacks of this Coloney,” one Irish immigrant wrote home. “They are an ugly race of people . . . when they come into town with their gins & pickenannies they go about cadgin [begging] for the price of a drink or tobacco . . . they don’t work.” The date was Aug. 3, 1856, one year before Hugh Larkin’s death.

Keneally does not analyze how oppression itself creates oppressors, choosing instead to retrieve the achievements of the Irish diaspora. And, of course, not all Irish “became white.” Besides the blood of Irish soldiers for the Union, there was Keneally’s favorite Irish exile, O’Reilly, who opposed California’s Indian Wars, saying that “we have too much and too old a sympathy with people badly governed to join in this shameful cry for Modoc blood.” In latter days, the Kennedys, the Berrigans and the martyred Irish priests and nuns in Central America have upheld an Irish solidarity with the poor.

It was his acclaimed “Schindler’s List” that triggered Keneally’s interest in his own roots, but it is disappointing that he makes no reference to Irish strains of anti-Semitism, another example of a shamed and persecuted group transferring its oppression to others. Keneally might have examined, for example, how the same archbishop of Dublin who refused to sanctify the body of the rebel McManus also blamed “the Jews of London” for “fattening themselves while Irish starved.” By blaming the Jews instead of the colonial system of the time, the Catholic hierarchy could coexist with the more powerful British state by finding a scapegoat for Irish misery in another minority.

On the other hand, the Irish in America eventually formed a coalition with Jewish immigrants that contributed to creating the labor movement and the New Deal. How the traumas of famine and persecution made some Irish liberal while hardening others is a question of great relevance today, when suburban Irish Americans are much coveted as a white ethnic “swing vote” in national elections. But Keneally does not traverse this ongoing aftermath of both Irish shame and triumph.

With greater Irish pride comes the need to take responsibility for these issues. Did the Irish immigrants, for example, become hardened and hierarchal--joining political machines, flocking to the church and entering law-and-order professions--as an understandable response to their own oppression, to ensure that it would never happen again? Is the recent explosion of Irish freedom in art, music, film and politics a thaw after 150 years of trauma? These are questions we need to ask so that the Irish can take an important place in our multicultural future and not simply be a deserving presence in our reconstructed past.