Ohio History Journal

  • 1
  •  
  • 2
  •  
  • 3
  •  
  • 4
  •  
  • 5
  •  
  • 6
  •  
  • 7
  •  
  • 8
  •  
  • 9
  •  
  • 10
  •  
  • 11
  •  
  • 12
  •  
  • 13
  •  
  • 14
  •  
  • 15
  •  
  • 16
  •  
  • 17
  •  
  • 18
  •  
  • 19
  •  
  • 20
  •  
  • 21
  •  
  • 22
  •  
  • 23
  •  
  • 24
  •  
  • 25
  •  
  • 26
  •  

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

 

 

 

The Irish in America. By Carl Wittke. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State

University Press, 1956. xi??319p.; list of works cited in the text and

index. $5.00.)

Dean Wittke's notable contributions to an objective understanding of the

role of the immigrant in United States history have stimulated many to

look forward eagerly to the publication of the present volume. This has

been especially the case because writers both of Scotch-Irish and of Catholic

Irish antecedents have often been less than impartial in their appraisal of the

activities of their own people from the Emerald Isle. The mood of ex-

pectation has been enhanced, furthermore, by the fact that William Forbes

Adams, who carefully analyzed the background and the trends of early

nineteenth-century Irish migration in Ireland and Irish Emigration to the

New World from 1815 to the Famine (1932), died while yet a young

scholar before he could carry his promising research activities to further

fruition.

Dean Wittke as the son of an immigrant father is able to enter most

sympathetically into the story of this outstanding ethnic group which com-

prised one of the most important elements in the "Old Immigration" as

distinguished from the later "New Immigration" originating in southern

and eastern Europe. He is, moreover, as one definitely outside the Catholic,

Presbyterian, and Anglican traditions, able to view with detachment the

influential religious factor in the molding of Irish cultural characteristics.

The author definitely excludes all but incidental discussion of the Scotch-

Irish, hence one finds no reference to such persons as James Wilson and

his Scotch-Irish sweetheart (soon to be his wife), who migrated from

Ireland in 1807 and were destined to be the grandparents of Woodrow

Wilson. Since the Irish Catholics were few in the English colonies, the

account begins with the national period and concludes with the period

after World War I, when Irish-Americans were rather definitely assimilated.

In the volume, one will find a most readable account of the factors which

led to Irish emigration and of the vicissitudes of the journey to the New

World. The adjustment of the immigrants in America to life as farmers,

firemen, policemen, politicians, actors, athletes, journalists, businessmen,