[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 3]
[House]
[Pages 3208-3209]
[From the U.S. 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. Madam 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

[[Page 3209]]

     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 had 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 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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