Tales of two emigrants – a novel take on the Irish in America

● New book on the Irish who thrived in the US will appeal to conservatives. But it is only a partial story

About 20 years ago, The New Yorker carried a cartoon by Leo Cullum depicting a man in a cloth cap and a snake drinking together at a bar. “Gimme a break,” the man says. “Being driven out of Ireland is the best thing ever happened to you.”

Tyler Anbinder, whose must-read Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York (Eriu) has just been published, is a brilliant historian who boasts a line-to-die-for on his resumé — historical consultant on Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York.

Anbinder is also that man in the bar. Plentiful Country, anchored by a deep analysis of accounts in the Emigrant Savings Bank archives, argues that Famine emigrants did well in America, rapidly adjusting to life there.

Those with accounts in the bank, founded in 1850, saved much more than expected. With meticulous genealogical research, Anbinder fleshes out the lives of labourers and domestics, peddlers, barmen and saloon-keepers, making for an absorbing read.

For sure, not everyone will find totally compelling an argument based so squarely on the lives of emigrants who had bank accounts at a time when vast swathes of them did not.

The obvious counterpoint is Kerby Miller’s Emigrants and Exiles (1985). Drawing heavily on emigrants’ writings — letters and memoirs, journals, diaries and songs — Miller contends that the Irish in America ached for home, regarding themselves as involuntary exiles.

As one fellow wrote to his parents, he was doing well and earning plenty of money, “but a job is not a home”. Those who fled the Famine — people who looked and sounded very different to ‘real’ Americans — endured waves of nativist animosity and, Miller argues, tended to live out their lives in the lowest occupational categories, as did their children.

There you have it — two histories applying different methods to different sources and making different arguments that will find adherents and opponents in households across Ireland and among the Irish and their descendants across North America.

Anbinder’s Plentiful Country will appeal to a conservative element. There will be readers who reduce it to “The Irish had it tough, but thrived, why can’t they?” — whether that be a “they” in Ireland or a “they” in America. And while his contention that “The Famine immigrants showed that any group could succeed in America…” holds true, it is important to keep in view that not all waves of immigrants — indeed, not all waves of Irish — “succeeded” at the same rate.

Conversely, Miller’s Emigrants and Exiles resonates with those of us who saw, in the 1980s, young people leaving to work illegally in the United States, knowing what they could not return to see — weddings, wakes, and funerals, Jackie’s Army, the All-Ireland, the blue hills of Antrim and the girls and boys they left behind.

And later, when they were given visas and could come and go, there would still come whispering the thought of what might have been had they stayed.

Transcripts of emigrant letters and memoirs collected by Miller are now being made available through an online database, Imirce, at the University of Galway. On its launch, the university appealed for additional material to be scanned and added to the database. It is particularly keen to source letters and memoirs written by people from the West of Ireland and material in Irish.

Among the items received for addition to Imirce is An Atlantic Passage: Recollections of an Irish Purser, published in Liverpool in 2022 by William Loughnane.

The son of a garda sergeant stationed in Ballingarry, Co Tipperary, Loughnane went to work on the Mauretania, a ship of the Cunard Line, in 1957. It sailed between Southampton, Le Havre, Cobh and New York.

“Our passengers were mainly emigrants from Europe, Britain and Ireland with some visitors to the United States, many emigrants returning to their native lands for holiday and some American university groups ‘doing Europe’.”

He writes poignantly of those emigrants — the sadness on the first day; young people “upset by the pain of leaving what they knew and the fear and excitement of what the New World might hold”; and “get-togethers out on deck on the warm nights when they were already beginning to sing the songs of their newly departed homeland”.

Loughnane writes, too, of a quiet and unassuming couple, Mr and Mrs Murphy, returning to Ireland after working for over 30 years in New York. On the third day, Mr Murphy was admitted to the ship’s hospital.

The young purser was not sure what Peter, the ship’s doctor, meant when he told him that the man was suffering from “the DTs”.

“Could he mean TB?” he wondered, being familiar with the disease in Tipperary. Or maybe, from the hushed way he said it, could it be “some kind of sexual problem”?

He was not long finding out, “and

When they got to Cobh, they were waiting to be greeted by friends and relatives, but no one had shown up

although I was used to seeing plenty of heavy drinking in a country village, and, indeed, on board ship, the DTs were something else again”.

“I was shocked,” Loughnane recalls. “How could a man get himself into such a state with a lifetime holiday coming up?”

He pieced the story together. The couple had arrived in New York from the West of Ireland. Mr Murphy worked as a tunneller — hard work but well paid.

“Gradually, over the years, the couple of beers in the saloon after work had increased to a lot of beers and the shot of Irish to a bottle a day.”

Aboard ship, Murphy continued drinking at the same level, but the lack of activity meant his system could not cope. Still, the doctor did a magnificent job, keeping him in the hospital throughout the voyage, where he treated him with a combination of diet, exercise and medicine.

At Cobh, when the Mauretania anchored, the Lady Killarney pulled alongside and the Irish passengers disembarked, everyone in high spirits. The rush over, the purser and the doctor saw Mr and Mrs Murphy aboard the Lady Killarney.

Loughnane and Peter walked back to tourist class. “Do you think he will be all right now, doctor?”

Peter gave him a sorrowful look.

“I’ll give him 36 hours before he has problems again.”

“Do you reckon?”

‘You must remember,” he said, “the emotional impact in seeing family, friends and neighbours for the first time in 30 years — he will need the booze to cope with it. Don’t forget, he was born and brought up in a quiet country life, he then emigrated in about 1927, and was pitch-forked into the fastest-moving city in the world.”

On the Mauretania’s return to Cobh a few weeks later, the landing agent told Loughnane he had watched Mr and Mrs Murphy standing on the pier, saying: “Two wee figures, slightly bent. They were still there when the passengers dispersed. They were waiting to be greeted by friends and relatives, but no one had shown up.

“Perhaps their friends and relatives had misread the schedule of arriving and departing ships. Perhaps they were too old or infirm to come down to the pier. Finally, towards dusk, Mr and Mrs Murphy picked up their luggage and moved out of view.”

Loughnane observes: “That was part of the emigrant saga that got obscured by all the wonderful stories gathered under the title of The American Dream. Here were history’s Little People, the nameless millions driven to another country, to make a living, and doing all right in their adopted land, but somehow never feeling at peace, always haunted by what they left behind, even when, at last, they had come home.”

It is all there.

The purser has written an illuminating memoir.

And a job is not a home.