Irish Kilt?

[macwilkin]

Yes, sadly, the popular culture of American Irishness is far from anything the Irish themselves would claim as their culture or traditions. However, it is a very interesting phenomenon when studied against the backdrop of immigration from Ireland. Especially when you consider that much of the American sense of Irishness came from the Ulster Scots (aka Scots-Irish).

Two books I recommend on the subject are The Scotch-Irish: A Social History by James G. Leyburn, and Chasing the Frontier: Scots-Irish in Early America by Larry Hoefling. These books go a long way in explaining the unique aspects of how America's culture was shaped by Ulster Scots. Keep in mind that the large influx of Ulster Scots happened just prior to the large influx of Irish, although there was plenty of overlap in immigration between the two groups. The Ulster Scots immigration pattern had its most significant numbers in the early 1700s, while the Irish immigration pattern was around mid-century and later. Their cultures and histories were vastly different, but when they came to America they were simply seen as "Irish", and these two groups (despite their differences and even their mutual animosity) faced the same sort of prejudice from those who had already settled here. They were stereotyped, mocked, and culturally oppressed in a lot of areas. This stereotyping of Irish immigrants played an important part in our (later) perceptions of Irish culture. Especially with regards to such things as eating potatoes, alcoholism, being poor, etc.

Close, but no cigar. The "Scots-Irish" assimilated to American society long before the arrival of the "famine" or "Green" Irish in the mid-1840s, when the potato blight and political tensions as a result of the 1848 Revolutions drove many Southern Irish from Ireland across the sea. In fact, many of those "native" Americans who stereotyped, mocked and culturally oppressed the Irish were most likely of Ulster-Scots blood themsselves. Before the arrival of the "Green" Irish, those Scots-Irish that did maintain some semblance of ethnic identity did refer to themselves as "Irish", although as you mentioned, the Ulster Scots were only Irish in geographic residence, not necessarily in culture.

As I tell my classes, the Scots-Irish dropped their ethnicity very quickly, intermarrying with Germans and French Protestants (David Crockett is the most famous example of that mixture) to become a distinctly American culture. Ironically, it was the Scots-Irish who persecuted the Loyalist Highlanders & members of the British Army's Highland regiments during the Revolution.

So a curious thing happened. As American culture started getting blended with all these different groups (including all the other nationalities that had settled here), a new sense of "Irishness" came about. A lot of the Irish and Ulster Scot immigrants let go of their previous cultural attachments and attempted to embrace a new identity, or their cultural traditions changed over time (as they tend to do when separated from the motherland). Unfortunately, this means that they lost their original traditions and ties to the Old World. It was several generations later before people became interested in reviving it, and by that time, the cultures had been so mixed and distorted that it was difficult to find anything that remotely resembled the truth. That, coupled with the new Irish nationalist movement going on in Ireland, further distorted the American perception of the truth. And it has morphed into what we know today as the American sense of "Irishness". The Irish can't make any sense of it; nor can the Ulster Scots, or Northern Ireland inhabitants, regardless of where they came from originally.

Actually, Northern Ireland has embraced the revived interest in Scots-Irish heritage; numerous cultural organizations are quick to point out the Ulster origins of American culture, particularly in the American South, as well as the Scots-Irish devotion to the American Revolution, their impact on traditional folk music and folk lore, etc. As early as 1902, the noted writer Owen Wister stated that it was the "Orange Irish" and not the "Green Irish" who helped win the Revolution. No doubt Wister read his friend Theodore Roosevelt's history of the American frontier, which also discussed the Scots-Irish.

Regards,

T.