concept of whiteness.
Bleaching the Green: The Irish in American Cinema
Irish people first came to the “New World” long before the United States declared its independence from Great Britain. These first Irish Americans were predominantly middle‐class Protestants, and therefore somewhat similar to settlers from Great Britain, the majority of whom were also middle‐class and Protestant. However, the cultural makeup of Irish immigrants changed dramatically during the 1800s. The great potato famine of the 1840s drove hundreds of thousands of Irish citizens – mainly of poor Catholic background – across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. Facing their first significant wave of immigration, many Americans reacted with fear and hostility. Conveniently forgetting their own recent resettlement from Europe, a number of American citizens rallied around the new cause of Nativism: that “America should be for Americans” and not for foreigners. Laws were passed in various states restricting immigration, denying voting rights, and prohibiting Irish American citizens from holding elective office. Speeches, newspaper editorials, and political cartoons often described Irish Americans as barely human: they were represented as small, hairy, apelike creatures with a propensity for violence, drunkenness, and unchecked sexual impulses.
Similar descriptions were used for African Americans during these years, and comparisons were often made between the two groups. Irish Americans were commonly called “white niggers” while African Americans were sometimes referred to as “smoked Irish.” Such shared discrimination at times tied the two communities together. Some people saw that the groups had a shared struggle and linked the institutional slavery of African Americans to the “wage slavery” of Irish immigrants, many of whom worked as servants in white households. Yet, more often than not, Irish American communities responded to such comparisons by distancing themselves from African Americans, in some cases through violent race riots. By strenuously denying similarities to African Americans, Irish Americans strove to be regarded as white and not black. Similarly, conceptions of Irish whiteness were dramatized on stage via the conventions of blackface, a popular theatrical tradition of the 1800s that featured white performers darkening their faces with makeup in order to perform broad, comedic stereotypes of African Americans. Blackface was one way that popular culture distinguished between white and non‐white behaviors and identities. By leading the blackface trend, Irish American performers did acknowledge on some level how many people conflated the two groups. Yet, these performers positioned themselves as white people who needed to “black up” to play the parts, defining themselves against a racial Other of blackness. In so doing, Irish American performers promoted their own whiteness, in effect saying “you may consider us lesser, but at least we are not black.”
Representations of Irish Americans in early American cinema drew upon already‐established stereotypes and misconceptions developed in other media such as literature, newspaper cartooning, and the theater. Alternatively referred to as “Paddy,” the “Boy‐o,” or the “Mick,” early films typically showed Irish Americans as small, fiery‐tempered, heavy‐drinking, working‐class men. Irish American women also appeared in many early films, typically as ill‐bred, unintelligent house servants, often named Bridget. The Finish of Bridget McKeen (1901) serves as a good example of these early cinematic representations: Bridget is a stout, slovenly scullery maid who tries to light an oven, and in her frustration stokes it with kerosene. When she lights a match, an explosion results, and the film dissolves to its supposedly uproarious punch line: a shot of Bridget’s gravestone. Yet these derogatory images of Irish Americans were short‐lived, for by the advent of early cinema, public perceptions about Irish Americans were shifting. Irish Americans had been assimilating into American whiteness for half a century, and by the early 1900s, new waves of immigrants from other countries began to inundate the United States. Many of these immigrants originated from Southern and Eastern Europe, and many Americans regarded these new immigrants as darker or swarthier (that is, less white) than immigrants from Northern and Western Europe. The Irish suddenly seemed more white in comparison.
Irish Americans began to be positioned as exemplars of immigrant assimilation, a group upon whom other immigrants should attempt to model themselves. Increasingly, the Irish were regarded as an ethnicity and a nationality, whereas they had previously been considered a race. As a consequence, Irish Americans (and their cinematic representations) moved up the scale of whiteness. Images of drunken, boisterous Micks still occurred throughout the 1920s – on stage in the long‐running Abie’s Irish Rose, and on film in The Callahans and the Murphys (1927). However, the predominant image of the Irish American in 1920s film shifted to that of the Colleen. Replacing the slovenly, stupid Bridget, Colleen was a spunky, bright‐eyed young woman who was quickly welcomed into American life; films about Colleen characters often ended in her marriage to a wealthy white man. Films such as Come On Over (1922), Little Annie Rooney (1925), and Irene (1926, based on the stage musical) center on young Irish American women, who, under the direction of white masculinity, successfully blend into the country’s melting pot. Often these films dramatized assimilation as an issue of generational difference: in them, parents who embodied the old Mick and Bridget stereotypes were shown to be less capable of assimilation than were their more Americanized offspring.
A number of the actresses who played these Colleen roles (such as Colleen Moore, Mary Pickford, and Nancy Carroll) were themselves of Irish heritage. Just as the stage had been one of the arenas in which Irish Americans “became” white, so did the Hollywood film industry help Irish Americans assimilate into whiteness. Unlike many other ethnic groups during the first half of the twentieth century, most Irish Americans actors did not feel the need to Anglicize their names – George O’Brien, Sally O’Neil, and Maureen O’Sullivan, (to name just a few) became stars under their own names. Irish American men also found work behind the camera as directors: Mickey Neilan, Raoul Walsh, and John Ford were all well‐established directors by the end of the silent film era. Furthermore, one of the first Irish American millionaires, Joseph P. Kennedy, became himself a film executive, producing films for Gloria Swanson in the late 1920s and helping found the RKO Radio studio in 1928.
In the 1930s, a few gangster films would acknowledge Irish Americans in organized crime. Based on real‐life criminals “Machine Gun” Kelly and “Baby Face” Nelson, these thugs portrayed by actor James Cagney might have presaged an anti‐Irish backlash. Yet films centered on Irish American hoodlums were invariably balanced by those that portrayed Irish Americans as law‐abiding citizens. For example, Cagney’s gangster character in Public Enemy (1931) has a policeman brother, and his character in Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) has a priest for a best friend. Cagney’s career itself dramatized Irish American assimilation into whiteness: his roles evolved from rebel outsiders to all‐American heroes. By 1940, he was starring in The Fighting 69th, a film about a famed Irish American regiment that fought in World War I. Two years later, Cagney won an Oscar for playing the flag‐waving Irish American showman George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942).
Irish Americans in film (and in real life) worked hard to assimilate through overt indications of patriotism and loyalty. Irish Americans came to dominate urban police forces and fire departments, and many joined the armed forces. Overt displays of Irish American patriotism were made in the movies as well. John Ford became known for directing films that glorified the United States – primarily his legendary Westerns, but also a number of overtly patriotic war films during World War II. In both types of films, Irish American characters consistently appeared as true‐blue Americans. Picturing Irish Americans as ultra‐nationalists often went hand in hand with seeing them as pious and moral, specifically by linking them to Catholicism. By the 1940s, the most common image of Irish Americans in Hollywood films was either as policeman or as priest. Films such as Boys Town (1938), Angels With Dirty Faces, the Oscar‐winning Going My Way (1944), its sequel The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945), and Fighting Father Dunne (1948) showed Irish American priests kindly dispensing wisdom and morality to future generations. This image of Irish Americans
