[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 29 (Thursday, March 14, 2002)]
[House]
[Pages H927-H928]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
HONORING IRISH AMERICANS AND ESSAY CONTEST WINNER MICHAEL ANTHONY
PECORA BEFORE ST. PATRICK'S DAY
(Mr. FERGUSON asked and was given permission to address the House for
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
Mr. FERGUSON. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor all Irish Americans
and to wish everyone an early happy St. Patrick's Day, which we will
celebrate this weekend.
I also would like to pay tribute to Mr. Michael Anthony Pecora, the
first prize winner in the 2002 Morris County, New Jersey, St. Patrick's
Day Essay Contest.
Michael is currently a ninth grade student at Delbarton School in
Morristown, New Jersey, a school of which I am a proud alumnus.
Entrants in this contest were asked to discuss the contributions that
Irish Americans have made to the betterment of our country.
Michael wrote of the ways that Irish Americans have helped to shape
our political system, our education system, and our national literature
and theater and sports. He spoke of the unique prominence of women in
Irish communities, and the accomplishments that many women of Irish
heritage have achieved in our country.
Michael eloquently described the persistence of Irish Americans in
the face of ethnic and religious prejudice, and to overcome these
obstacles and to make lasting and important contributions to American
society.
I commend Michael Pecora for his award-winning essay about Irish
Americans, and congratulate him on his accomplishment.
Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record the essay by Mr. Pecora.
The document referred to is as follows:
The Contributions of Irish-Americans to the Development of the United
States
(By Mike Pecora)
The many contributions of Irish-Americans to the
development of the United States have enriched the true
meaning of what an American citizen represents today.
Although these accomplishments are numerous and varied, there
are spheres of endeavor in which Americans of Irish birth or
ancestry have distinguished themselves throughout our
country's history. Public service, politics, and governance
comprise one domain of American life in which the Irish, by
their overwhelming numbers, clearly left their impact on our
national life. As exemplified by the Kennedys of
Massachusetts, Irish-Americans have generally come from
strong, stable, and large families. But even more remarkably,
we find a pattern of increasing upward mobility from one
generation to the next. The key variable in this upward march
has been education, particularly the education of women.
During the twentieth century, the Irish have been at the
forefront of the nation's public and parochial educational
systems. Indeed, coming into a society dominated by Anglo-
Saxon Protestants, the Irish took the lead in the creation of
a distinctly American Catholicism. The collective cultural
achievements of Irish-Americans, from literature and theater
to sports and popular entertainment are legend. Given that
some forty million Americans claimed some Irish ancestry in
the 1990 census, the collective record of Irish-American
achievements does not seem surprising (Meager 1999, p. 280).
But to get to where they are today, Irish-American have had
to surmount major obstacles, including entrenched ethnic and
religious prejudice. By doing so, not only did the Irish
successfully assimilate into American society; they had a
major part in the making of the ``melting pot'' itself.
Long before the Great Potato Famine of the late 1840s,
substantial numbers of Irish immigrants came to the shores of
North America (Griffin 1973, p. v). By the time of the
American Revolution, there were an estimated 250,000
individuals of Irish descent living in North America, many of
them laboring in the construction of the country's rapidly
growing transportation infrastructure (Meager 1999, p. 280).
In 1857, Irish nationalists living in the United States
formed the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the forerunner of
the ``Fenian'' movement abroad, recruiting former state
militia members into their ranks. When the Civil War erupted,
the nucleus of Irish regiments already been organized. During
the Civil War, ``Ireland provided the largest proportion of
foreign born troops in the South and probably ranked equal
with Germany as the source of the largest immigrant element
in the Union armies'' (Blessing 1980, p. 536). The vast
majority of Irish-Americans in this conflict served the
North, wearing sprigs of green in their caps as they marched
into battle (Blessing 1980, p. 536). In the First World War
and the Second, units such as the famous ``fighting sixty-
ninth'' extended this legacy of Irish-Americans answering the
call to military duty.
In the 1920s, D.W. Brogan noted that the Irish had come to
constitute the ``governing class'' of America (cited in
Meager 1999, p. 286). At this time, white Anglo-Saxon
Protestants of English and Germanic ethnicity made up the
``ruling class'' of the United States, but is was the Irish
who led the way in public service (notably, in the police and
fire departments of the country's developing cities) and in
the nation's political life. The 1880s and 1890s witnessed a
wave of Irish majors; by 1910, Irish governors, like David
Walsh of Massachusetts, Edward Dunne of Illinois, and Alfred
E. Smith of New York were elected to the highest posts within
their own states. Al Smith's selection as the Democratic
Party's nominee for the presidency in 1928 was a milestone
for both the Irish and for all Catholic Americans. Smith was
defeated in this bid, but some three decades later, John F.
Kennedy completed the breakthrough (Vinyard 1997, p. 468). In
the 1968 presidential contest, his brother, Robert Kennedy
challenged Eugene McCarthy to become the Democratic standard-
bearer; only for Kennedy to be assassinated, and McCarthy to
be defeated in the primaries. Nevertheless, in that same
year, Irish Catholics held both positions of Speaker of the
House of Representatives (John McCormack) and majority leader
of the Senate (Michael Mansfield).
Given their Catholic faith, it is not surprising that
Irish-Americans have generally come from large and stable
families; the frequency of divorce among the Irish has been
significantly lower than that of other ethnic groups
(Blessing 1980, p. 541). But the success of Irish families is
even more evident when we consider patterns of generational
upward mobility. During the nineteenth century, Irish-born
immigrants did not fare well in the industrial capitalist
economy of the United States, Indeed, the ``famine'' Irish of
the 1850 and 1860s had a ``dismal record of movement up the
occupational scale'' (Blessing 1980, p. 531). Nevertheless,
second- and third-generation Irish-Americans far exceeded the
accomplishments of their parents and grandparents. By 1980,
with each successive generation of Irish-Americans, we see
upward leaps in years of completed schooling, occupational
status, and household income (Blessing 1980, p. 542).
One especially important aspect of Irish-American support
for education revolves around gender. ``Irish families often
gave their daughters more education than their sons;
accordingly, second-generation Irish women were able to take
advantage of opportunities becoming available to females''
(Vinyard 1997, p. 466). Irish-American women were heavily
over-represented within the ranks of public school
teachers during the
[[Page H928]]
Progressive Era and thereafter (Vinyard 1997, p. 466).
Moreover, Irish nuns and priests have been important
leaders in America's parochial school system.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Irish established
themselves as the dominant ethnic group within the American
Catholic Church, and have held that status ever since
(Vinyard 1997, p. 462). In 1970, for example, over 50 percent
of the bishops and 34 percent of the priests of the American
Catholic Church reported an Irish background (Blessing 1980,
p. 542). Such outstanding individuals as Cardinal William
O'Connell of Boston, Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York
City, and Spellman's successor, Cardinal John O'Connor,
honorably led the Catholic Church through the transition of
Vatican II. The Irish, therefore, left an unforgettable
imprint upon American Catholicism, creating a model for both
national and religious allegiance.
``Immigrants, but more often second- and third-generation
Irish, helped to create a new American urban culture that
emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries'' (Meager 1999, p. 288). Irish Americans were
highly visible in the theater during this period. Playwrights
like Eugene O'Neill, and novelists like James T. Farrell,
Edwin O'Connor, and, in the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald, made
world-class achievements in American literature. At the same
time, the Irish excelled in sports: John L. Sullivan in
boxing and such individuals as Connie Mack, John McGraw, and
Charles Comiskey help to transform baseball into America's
pastime.
It is only been in the second half of the twentieth century
that the scope, and depth of Irish contributions to America
has been given its full recognition. In January 1897, when
the founders of the Irish American Historical Society issued
that organization's founding statement, they lamented that
their countrymen had received ``but scant recognition'' from
U.S. historians and attributed this neglect to
``carelessness, ignorance, indifference or design'' (American
Irish History Society, in Griffin, 1973, p. 121). Despite
their English-language advantage, the Irish were subjected to
both ethnic and religious prejudice. This anti-Irish bias
unfolded in waves, increasing during the immigration period
of the 1840s, the Progressive Era at the turn of the century,
and into the 1920s with the revival of the anti-Catholic Ku
Klux Klan. As historian Patrick Blessing has put it: ``The
Irish were the first major immigrant group to threaten the
stability of American society. Out of their interaction with
the host society, came a more diverse and tolerant America''
(Blessing 1980, p. 545). Despite decades of bigotry and
repression, the Irish assimilated into the American ``melting
pot''. Indeed, not only did they serve as a model for other
immigrant groups, in the process of becoming full-fledged
Americans, they altered, enlarged, and enriched the very
definition of an ``American.''
references
American Irish Historical Society. ``Announcement of the
Organization of the American Irish Historical Society,
January, 1897. ``The Irish in America. Ed. William Griffin,
Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, 1973, 121-122.
Blessing, Patrick J. ``Irish.'' Harvard Encyclopedia of
American Ethnic Groups. Vol. 1. Ed. Stephen Thernstrom,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980, 524-545.
Griffin, William. ``Editor's Foreword.'' The Irish in
America. Ed. William Griffin, Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana
Publications, 1973, v-vi.
Meager, Timothy J. ``Irish.'' A Nation of Peoples: A
Sourcebook of America's Multicultural Heritage. Ed. Elliott
Robert Barkan, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999, 279-293.
Vinyard, JoEllen McNergney. ``Irish.'' American Immigrant
Cultures: Builders of a Nation. Vol. 1. Eds. David Levinson
and Melvin Ember, New York: MacMillan, 1997, 460-469.
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