Cartoon Portrayals of the "New" Immigrants in the Irish-American Press, 1880–1924

“Lazy, simian, violent Paddy”; the Irishman as subject of cartoons and caricatures in the nineteenth-century popular press is a well-trodden path in American historiography.  A regular fixture in periodicals like Harper’s Weekly, the politicized, ape-like Irish Celt was a menace to respectable society.  We still know very little, however, about the Irishman as author of cartoons and caricatures during the same period.  How did Irish-American artists and editors depict the “New” immigrants from southern and eastern Europe?  What new perspectives on old questions can this unique angle offer?

The visual nature of political cartoons makes a poster session the perfect medium for discussing them—and the New York Irish World offers an excellent case study.  Founded in 1870, the paper was the first Irish-American weekly to feature front-page cartoons and caricatures.  Its founder, Patrick Ford, was an Irish immigrant who had worked as a printer’s assistant for William Lloyd Garrison’s anti-slavery Liberator in the 1850s, fought for the Union Army’s Irish Brigade during the Civil War, and briefly edited the pro-Reconstruction South Carolina Leader in the 1860s.  His wide range of experiences, both technical and ideological, convinced Ford that Irish America needed to harness the power of the cartoon for their own advantage.

The Irish World’s eye-catching artwork opens new ground in American historiography on two fronts.  First, it undermines the truism that “Old” immigrants like the Irish were antagonistic towards the “New” immigrants from eastern and southern Europe.  “When we say the [American] ‘people,’” editorialized Ford, “we mean the whole people… without regard to race or color… [or] particular faction or class of the people.”  African-Americans, Amerindians, Italians, Poles, and even Chinese “coolies” all found support for their claims to American nationality in Ford’s newspaper.  In this way, the Irish World cartoons challenge the axiomatic antagonism between “Old” and “New” immigrants at the turn of the twentieth-century.

The second reason that American historians will find this important is that Ford’s caricatures offer new insight into immigrant “diasporic nationalism.”  The cartoons illustrate that the Irish saw themselves and other immigrants as members of both the old and new worlds.  While committed to the ideology of American civic nationalism, Irish immigrants simultaneously retained an ethnic solidarity with other Irish around the world.  One cartoon, for example, features Saint Patrick standing astride the globe with snapshots of Saint Patrick’s Day parades around the world all along the border.  “All Irishmen, and all Irishmen’s sons the world over,” editorialized Ford, “are parts of one mighty whole.”  The process of global migration rendered nationality, paradoxically, transcendent of the nation-state.

Its visually stimulating subject matter and innovative arguments make “Cartoon Portrayals of the “New” Immigrants in the Irish-American Press, 1880 – 1924” perfectly suited as a poster session for the 2012 AHA Annual Meeting.