Christopher Dowd - The Irish and the Origins of American Popular Culture

This book focuses on the intersection between the assimilation of the Irish into American life and the emergence of an American popular culture, which took place at the same historical moment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this period, the Irish in America underwent a period of radical change. Initially existing as a marginalized, urban-dwelling, immigrant community largely comprised of survivors of the Great Famine and those escaping its aftermath, Irish Americans became an increasingly assimilated group with new social, political, economic, and cultural opportunities open to them. Within just a few generations, Irish-American life transformed so significantly that grandchildren hardly recognized the world in which their grandparents had lived. This pivotal period of transformation for Irish Americans was heavily shaped and influenced by emerging popular culture, and in turn, the Irish-American experience helped shape the foundations of American popular culture in such a way that the effects are still noticeable today. Dowd investigates the primary segments of early American popular culturecircuses, stage shows, professional sports, pulp fiction, celebrity culture, and comic stripsand uncovers the entanglements these segments had with the development of Irish-American identity.

Christopher Dowd is Associate Professor and Department Chair of English at the University of New Haven.

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Christopher Dowd

Christopher Dowd

First published 2018
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ISBN: 978-1-138-63675-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-19654-1 (ebk)

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I extend my thanks to Lourdes Alvarez who provided encouragement and support for moving this project forward.

Portions of appeared previously in New Hibernia Review and Irish Studies Review. I am indebted to James Silas Rogers and E. Moore Quinn for their input as editors on those preliminary steps with this project.

I am grateful to the colleagues and friends who shared their expertise with me when I approached them for assistance, especially Jeff Debies-Carl and Jeffrey Shanks.

Above all, I would like to thank my family for their support, especially my wife Adrienne and my children, Harper and Graham.

This book focuses on the intersection between the assimilation of the Irish into American life and the emergence of an American popular culture, which took place at the same historical moment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whereas the concurrence of these two things might at first appear to be an interesting bit of synchronicity, I argue that there is a more significant connection. During this period, as many historians note, the Irish in America underwent a period of radical change. Initially existing as a marginalized, urban-dwelling, immigrant community largely comprised of survivors of the Great Famine and those escaping its aftermath, Irish Americans became an increasingly assimilated group with new social, political, economic, and cultural opportunities open to them. Within just a few generations, Irish-American life transformed so significantly that grandchildren hardly recognized the world in which their grandparents had lived. This pivotal period of transformation for Irish Americans was heavily shaped and influenced by emerging popular culture, and in turn, the Irish-American experience helped shape the foundations of American popular culture in such a way that the effects are still noticeable today. This book investigates the primary segments of early American popular culturecircuses, stage shows, professional sports, pulp fiction, celebrity culture, and comic stripsand uncovers the entanglements these segments had with the development of Irish-American identity.

This book has two primary objectives.

First, it seeks to show the profound impact that popular culture had on the shaping of Irish-American identity. Often, scholarship in the fields of Irish studies and ethnic studies undervalues or even ignores entirely popular culture texts and focuses instead on texts considered more serious or literary. The attention paid to high art, while important, leaves unconsidered the significance of low art. Commercial publications and entertainments affected the daily lives of Americans more frequently and consistently, and perhaps more substantively, than many more highly regarded works of cultural note. Critics sometimes decry popular culture works as base or mundane and equate commercial production with lack of artistry. These criticisms do not account for the possibility of high artistic merit in popular culture, which is an undeserving oversight. Popular culture, like serious literature, has produced both good and bad work. Such criticisms also unduly emphasize issues of quality over issues of significance, missing the possibility that a supposedly low quality work might indeed be culturally significant. Ignoring the influence of popular culture on the development of ethnic identity cannot be justified. My hope is that this study shakes off any lingering prejudice against popular culture texts so that those texts can be connected in a vital way to the ongoing discussions of the Irish-American experience.