蜜桃传媒

The early inclusion of St. Patrick鈥檚 Day in the calendar of official American holidays and the development of profit streams built around its celebration sped the adoption of symbols like the shamrock as a visual cue for Irish. Holiday commercialization and, later, motion picture ballyhoos converged with Catholic interests to make the emerald sheen a very powerful force in the United States. It directed non-Irish consumers to a specific, albeit shallow, means of 鈥渂eing and feeling鈥� Irish, even if only on one day a year, and it provided a more tempting mainstream substitute than ethnic organizations or ethnic culture for late-generation Irish Americans, especially when endorsed by the Catholic Church. The template that emerged in the process was central to the ability of a capitalist system to commodify ethnicity. Most non-Irish Americans celebrated St. Patrick鈥檚 Day lightheartedly and with exuberance because the commercialization of holidays, Jack Santino argues, comes 鈥渇rom the top down and so reinforce[s] the social structure as it exists.鈥� The adoption of March 17 was a mercantile opportunity seized in much the same way as when florists promoted Mother鈥檚 Day as the May holiday after 1908. Consequently, St. Patrick鈥檚 Day in the United States rose in popularity in direct proportion to its trivialization in movie theaters, schools, and suburban living rooms. This seductive emerald sheen distracted everyone from the fact that a group with foreign ancestry was now upwardly mobile and, in some parts of the country like Worcester, Massachusetts, preferred to express their Catholic faith on Columbus Day rather than their Irish ethnicity on March 17. It also seriously undercut nativist opposition in the 1920s to celebrating a Catholic foreigner, St. Patrick, whom they had deemed unworthy of an annual American holiday. While commercialization generally had little practical effect on Irish American social mobility, the widespread inversion of Irish pride into ethnic exploitation had consequences for Ireland.

The American spin put on St. Patrick鈥檚 Day was so pervasive that it was widely conflated as genuinely representative of Ireland and the Irish by the middle of the twentieth century.

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In contrast, downplaying merrymaking suited modern Ireland. St. Patrick鈥檚 Day there was such a nondescript, sober anniversary for most of the twentieth century that holiday kitsch in the United States was rendered irrelevant to Ireland鈥檚 Catholic nation-building agenda at home or image-making abroad until the 1950s. When the first direct commercial flights between Shannon and New York inaugurated a new era in Ireland鈥檚 official relationship with the United States in 1952, it had to play by American holiday rules: a hundred thousand fresh shamrocks were delivered just in time for St. Patrick鈥檚 Day. The following year, President Dwight D. Eisenhower accepted a Waterford Crystal bowl of shamrocks from John J. Hearne, the new Irish ambassador to the United States. The bowl was compliments of the company, a bit of strategic product placement. Eisenhower wrote, 鈥淸It] graced my desk all day, and each visitor to my office took away with him a small bit of the emblem of your country.鈥� When Ireland鈥檚 taoiseach John A. Costello visited Washington, DC, in 1956, he was feted with a green-drenched luncheon by the American Newspaper Women鈥檚 Club: 鈥淒ecorations Chairman Jane Marilley and her committee had outdone themselves with maps of Ireland, leprechauns suspended from the ceiling, a bit of stone said to be part of the Blarney Stone, Gaelic slogans and Irish flags.鈥� Then he went to New York City to review the parade, where he was struck by the contrast between St. Patrick鈥檚 Day in Ireland (鈥渘ot such a big day鈥�) and St. Patrick鈥檚 Day in America. The New York Times estimated Costello witnessed 110,000 marchers 鈥渨ith others who were Irish for the occasion,鈥� prompting the exclamation that he 鈥渉ad never seen so many Irish men and women at one time before.鈥�

Ireland and its official representatives understood by then that dignified diplomacy and clear-eyed pragmatism rather than protests could harness the green space and its various echo chambers. The development during these same years of an Irish image that could be embraced by tourists is the next chapter in this story.

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Marion R. Casey is Clinical Professor of Irish Studies and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of History at New York University and co-editor of Making the Irish American History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States.