St Patrick’s Day in America then and now: the Irish-American diaspora is as vibrant as ever

In a proud tradition dating back to 1762, Irish Americans will once again be cheered by thousands as they march, bands playing and bagpipes skirling, past St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City to be greeted by Cardinal Dolan, before heading up Fifth Avenue to mark the Feast Day of Saint Patrick, patron saint of Ireland.

Similar celebrations will take place throughout the US during this weekend. This year, because Saint Patrick’s Day fell on a Sunday, the New York parade happened on 16 March, the day before the saint’s feast day. Despite clerical scandals, growing secularisation and the assimilation familiar to all segments of society, the US’s sense of Irish identity remains strong.

It’s a day when everything seems to stop. Former Ireland Fund Gala chair and Notre Dame alumnus Dan Keegan grew up on the Jersey Shore in Rumson, and remembers the whole town turning out for the St Patrick’s Day Parade. “My dad was Grand Marshal one year,” he recalls. “It was the one day we were allowed to ditch our school uniforms so long as we wore something green instead. We always had corned beef and cabbage and were quizzed on where our Irish ancestors came from. My wife comes from Chicago, where Mayor Daley dyed the Chicago River green every year!”

Loretta Brennan Glucksman, a former television host who married Wall Street legend Lewis Glucksman and visited Ireland with him for the first time at the age of 42, went on to found Ireland House at New York University and the Irish Arts Center in New York. She remembers growing up in gritty Allentown, Pennsylvania, and was named Grand Marshal in 2018: “Parading up Fifth Avenue in a horse and carriage with my grandson Liam was a highlight of my life!”

Elizabeth Stack is the newly appointed executive director of the century-old American Irish Historical Society. “Of course, we celebrate our Irish heritage every day of the year,” she says, “but St Patrick’s Day is an important part of the Irish American experience. In fact, the parade started here in the States and was exported back to Ireland in the 20th century.”

The earliest recorded parade honouring the feast day of St Patrick was held in what is now St Augustine, Florida. Records show that a St Patrick’s Day parade was held on 17 March 1601 in a Spanish colony under the direction of its Irish priest, Ricardo Artur. Over a century later, Irish soldiers serving in the English military marched in Boston in 1737 and again in New York City in March 1762. New York City has hosted a parade every year since.

“Irish Americans hosted the parade to showcase Irish immigrants’ contributions to American society,” Stack explains. “Men who were policemen, in the army and the navy, and in sanitation all marched up Fifth Avenue as a demonstration of their voting power as an immigrant group, but also it showed their willingness to serve and to be part of the fabric of American life.”

The “real first Irish family” in America was the Carrolls of Maryland, whose patriarch Charles Carroll – “the Settler” – emigrated from Ireland in the 1680s and achieved such wealth and political prominence that, in the third generation, his grandson, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, became the sole Catholic signatory of the Declaration of Independence.

Swelling tides of emigration from Ireland to America followed, initially of primarily Ulster Protestants to the South, where as late as the 1840s there was a county in Mississippi where Irish was the lingua franca. An early governor of the former Republic of Texas was none other than Hugo O’Conor, whose family had been among the so-called Wild Geese who made their way out of Ireland to serve in the Spanish Army after the Williamite Wars.

Before 1820, in New Amsterdam and New York, Irish immigrants were predominantly Ulster Scots. A small number of Irish immigrants lived in New Netherland, but the population really began to increase when the British took over the colony in 1664. Many settled in New York City, but Ulster Scots also settled in Orange and Ulster counties and in the Mohawk Valley, where they became farmers, merchants and artisans.

The greatest outflow from Ireland into America was of starving, land-deprived Catholics after the Great Famine in the 1840s. They helped build projects like the Croton Reservoir and many of the early railroads . The newly arrived Irish encountered prejudice with “No Irish need apply” signs and criticisms of their supposed ignorance and superstition. A typical story was that of the Irishman chopping wood in a New Jersey forest who became frightened of “faeries in the forest”. It was his first experience of fireflies!

Anti-Irish sentiment among Nativists and Know-Nothings brought simmering tensions and occasional violence, as Martin Scorcese’s film Gangs of New York depicted graphically. Even as late as 1928, the Ku Klux Klan worked actively to defeat the first Catholic candidate for president, Irish-American New York governor Alfred E Smith.

As the Irish developed their mastery of the political process (in part ironically aided by their fluency in the English their British occupiers had forced them to adopt), they took their place in the urban power structure, if not in establishment society. As the late Boston College historian Thomas N Browne wrote: “They could run the cities but couldn’t get into the country clubs.”

Among the first Irish fortunes to be made at the dawn of the 20th century was that of serial inventor Thomas E Murray, a partner of Thomas Edison. Murray could claim over 400 patents by the time he died and was CEO of the company that ran all the power plants in New York City. There were also many Irish fortunes nationally, such as Edward Doheny’s oil empire, which inspired Upton Sinclair’s Oil! and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis.

Leading Irish-American business men today include cable TV pioneer John Malone, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, Donald Keough of Coca-Cola and, of course, the Fords of the Ford Motor Company. They’ve since been joined by outstanding women executives such as Anne Sweeney and Christine McCarthy of Disney.

Irish Americans have won more Medals of Honor than any other ethnic group. “The Fighting Sixty-Ninth” received its name from General Robert E Lee for its furious charge up Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg and demonstrated its heroism once again in France in 1917; it still leads the parade up Fifth Avenue on 17 March, but there has been a slight change.

In the Civil War, the Sixty-Ninth was 90 per cent Irish. In World War I, it was 50 per cent Irish. Today, it is no more than 20 per cent Irish, but every member of the unit is designated an Honorary Irishman, who, in Fr Francis Duffy’s words, “are Irish by adoption, Irish by association, or Irish by conviction”.

Irish Americans remain extremely philanthropic, especially towards Church-related causes. The MacArthur Foundation, known for its “genius” awards, Chuck Feeney of Duty Free Shoppers and Atlantic Philanthropies, Tom Monaghan of Domino’s Pizza and Ave Maria University, Peter Flanigan of Student Sponsor Partners and the Inner-City Scholarship Fund, and Tom Murphy of Capital Cities/ABC, as well as a younger generation including Sean Fieler and Activision’s Brian Kelly, are a few examples.

There is also a long Irish prominence in the arts which includes Eugene O’Neill, Maureen O’Sullivan, Maureen O’Hara, John Wayne, Bing Crosby, Gene Kelly and Grace Kelly, carried forward in this generation by the poet Billy Collins and broadcasting talents Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Conan O’Brien and Jim and Jeannie Gaffigan, novelists Alice McDermott and Jennifer Egan, and musical actress Kelli O’Hara, among many others.

In politics, the Kennedy family’s long tradition of public service deserves commendation. The latest examples are Caroline Kennedy’s ambassadorships to Japan and Australia, and young Joe Kennedy’s trade mission to Northern Ireland, where history entered a new phase with the swearing-in of Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Fein as First Minister.

The American and Irish experiences are ever intertwined. On Saint Patrick’s Day, we should be grateful for what has been achieved and vigilant about what lies ahead.

Photo: Members of the New York City Fire Department’s Pipe and Drums band participate in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade along 5th Ave. in New York City, 17 March 2023. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.)

This article first appeared in the March 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our multiple-award-winning magazine and have it delivered to your door anywhere in the world, go here.

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