Erin's Heirs: Irish Bonds of Community by Dennis ClarkReview by: Janet A. NolanThe Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 116, No. 3 (Jul., 1992), pp. 385-387Published by: The Historical Society of PennsylvaniaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20092735 .

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1992 BOOK REVIEWS 385

But the special

interests and bureaucrats are always there, and how other

wise have they been or can they be held accountable? Morone writes as

though Alexander Hamilton and his successors had never dreamed of a

strong state purposefully serving powerful interests. And he deliberately excludes from consideration the impact of wars on the growth of the state.

That is the book he chose not to write, and fair enough. How can he ignore, however, that while the federal government seems weak and incapable of

forceful action in dealing with "the international economic order, domestic

social trouble, and the deadlock of American politics" (p. 325), that the

imperial-warfare state flexes its muscle overseas almost at will, having now

cowed the news media into either abject or willing cheerleading? There are

really two states, and the one that counts would seem to be the one that gets the money. Populist movements have had little to do with the growth of the

U.S. state that Morone does not discuss.

University oj Florida Ronald P. Formisano

Erin's Heirs: Irish Bonds oj Community. By DENNIS Clark. (Lexington:

University Press of Kentucky, 1991. ix, 238p. Bibliography, index.

$27.00.)

Dennis Clark's most recent book, Erin's Heirs, is in many ways a continua tion of his earlier The Irish in Philadelphia (1974). In both, Clark reminds us that historians of Philadelphia have emphasized only part of the city's past by concentrating on the political and economic elites of Philadelphia's colonial and early national heyday. Instead of following in this tradition, Clark's work looks at the industrial city Philadelphia became in the nine teenth and twentieth centuries?the era ignored by more conventional views of "historic Philadelphia."

Clark contends that the Irish were integral to the shaping of Philadelphia in its industrial era. He relies on many nontraditional sources to trace the

history of the long-overlooked Irish in Philadelphia. For example, he has collected numerous family histories and folklore, looked at neglected historic ethnic newspapers and other publications, surveyed organizational records, and conducted extensive oral histories on the family, work, and political lives of various Philadelphians. These unusual source materials have allowed Clark to overcome one of the most difficult obstacles in writing the history of the

Irish in America?the lack of centrally collected archival documentation.

Despite the obstacles, however, Clark has written a well-documented and

far-ranging discussion on the evolution of the Irish bonds of self-conscious

community in Philadelphia in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth

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386 BOOK REVIEWS July

centuries. He divides his discussion into four categories of Irish-American

community building: Identity, Association, Communication, and Leader

ship. In Identity, Clark assesses the impact of Irish-American culture on the

self-image of Irish-Americans in the City of Brotherly Love. By developing their own family histories based on their collective Irish heritage, the Irish

asserted a self-generated counterforce to the prevailing negative stereotypes

imposed on them from the outside.

The second section of the book, Association, demonstrates how the Phila

delphia Irish flocked to a wide variety of local and national organizations that helped them to assert their kinship with one another and stave off the

feelings of isolation caused by their immigration from close-knit rural Ireland to a large, impersonal industrial city. In Communication, Clark examines

the success of the Irish-American media in Philadelphia?especially the

lively newspapers and radio broadcasts that entertained and connected several

generations of immigrants and their families. He also explains why other

forms of communication failed to develop, most notably the lack of any

university curricula based on Irish and Irish-American literature and history, even in Catholic colleges founded and funded by Irish-Americans.

Last, in Leadership, Clark delineates three archetypes of Irish-American

leadership in Philadelphia. By examining the careers of three men who

assumed positions of prominence in the city's life, Clark shows how the Irish

reinforced their sense of community by assuming leadership roles in Irish

and Irish-American politics and in the church. Clark concludes by reasserting his central thesis that the Irish in Philadelphia managed to reclaim and

continue their traditional culture in a new environment, after their immigra

tion and despite hostility from ruling elites both in their homeland and in

Philadelphia. Erin's Heirs is written in a lively, highly readable style and contains many

insights into the lives of the Irish in Philadelphia over the last century and a half. It is based on imaginative research techniques, including oral history, and it offers a valuable "Research Note" in which Clark outlines the current

state of Irish-American historiography. Nevertheless, despite its many virtues, the book is ultimately unsatisfying. Throughout, the wealth of detail on

individuals, specific activities, and organizations overwhelms the author's

attempts to assess overall meaning in terms of the development of a self

conscious Irish community in Philadelphia. Furthermore, although the book

is about the experience of the Irish in one American city, this reader wished

Clark had developed a theme mentioned in his introduction: how the Irish

experience in Philadelphia relates to life in Irish communities in other cities.

Despite these shortcomings, Clark's book is an important corrective to the

traditional view of Philadelphia history. While it needed a stronger editorial

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1992 BOOK REVIEWS 387

hand to smooth out its uneven balance between evidence and analysis, it

offers a new insight into the Irish experience in urban America.

Loyola University, Chicago Janet A. Nolan

New Immigrants in New York. Edited by Nancy Foner. (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1989. ix, 318p. Index. Paper, $15.00.)

Immigration to New York. Edited by William Pencak, Selma Berrol, and Randall M. Miller. (London and Toronto: Associated Univer

sity Presses for the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, 1991. xiv, 245p. Tables, index. $35.00.)

Beginning with the Irish in the 1840s and ending with more recent

immigrants from the Caribbean, Central and South America, the Middle

East, and Asia, Immigration to New York treats various aspects of ethnic and

racial history in America's most fascinating and interesting city. While the

scope is large, the contributions are uneven in quality and significance and

lack a common purpose in theme and approach. Despite efforts by the editors to integrate essays in the three sections of the book, the essays are too disparate to result in a cohesive volume.

Although Immigration to New York disappoints as a whole, some of its

parts deserve consideration. In part I, Anthony Gronowicz argues that

charges against unsavory Irish influences in New York city Democratic

politics were exaggerations. Irish votes were important in party victories. In

exchange they received politically connected jobs and minor offices, but from

1844 to 1884 Irish power declined as Irish numbers increased. Anglo American business and professional people controlled the party as New York, like the nation, moved from Jacksonian democracy to plutocracy. In another

interesting essay, Stanley Nadel describes how German artisans dominated New York city's upper working class. Trained in Paris, they embraced radical

republican and socialist ideologies. Transferred to New York, these values

influenced the rise of the American labor movement. In a controversial

contribution, Leonard R. Riforgiato compares the attitudes of two Irish

American prelates to the subject of Irish colonization in rural and small

community America. Buffalo's bishop, John Timon, believed that it would

help solve the Irish social problem, thus raising the reputation of Catholic America. New York's archbishop, John Hughes, was convinced that urban

settlement enabled the church to best minister to Catholics and to protect them from Protestant and secular influences. Riforgiato believes that the

triumph of the Hughes viewpoint, mentally as well as physically, ghettoized American Catholicism. In rebuttal it can be said that while it is unfortunate

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