1955 AND THE RETURNED YANK

The figure of the Returned Yank who emerges from the Folklore Commission interviews is always clean, well dressed, and eager to perform his or her mastery of modern ways. Men might wear bowler hats or panamas and villagers crowded Sunday mass to see a fashionable female Yank. A common remark was, “It must be a wonderful country and the fine decent clothes that comes from it.” The most notable accessory proudly displayed by Returned Yanks was the gold watch. Watches potently symbolized the contrast between the Old World and the New and were almost always hung on a gold watch chain looped across a man's waistcoat, serving as a sign of wealth and modernity. Emigrants returning for a visit frequently brought watches (along with jewelry and “razors in boxes”) as gifts. Watches, of course, were critical to success in industrialized society, which demanded that workers report to work on time. What use did the watch have in an agricultural society other than as an emblem of a foreign place or a successful family member? In rural Ireland, the symbolic meaning of the watch far outweighed its practical significance.

Informants of the survey differed in their appraisal of the Yanks' appearance. Some thought the clothes, caps, and watches demonstrated the “opulence” of America – particularly those emigrants with multiple suits and dresses – others felt that returned emigrants put on airs with their displays of modern clothing. One informant said conclusively, “Returned Americans who wore any ‘loud’ clothes and had a pronounced accent were not favourably regarded and were made fun of behind their backs; whereas those who showed little change in dress or speech or manners were favourably commented on.”Footnote ²³ Another reported that Returned Yanks “wore the best of clothes and they would hardly look at us home here in the bare feet. When you would see them you would say to yourself ‘now wasn't I the fool didn't go across for I would be coming home a great swank like that now.”Footnote ²⁴ And still another informant elaborately described one type of Yank as

Female Yanks, like their male counterparts, displayed up-to-date clothing – one informant alleged they inspired the transition from traditional shawls to more modern capes – as well as modern stoves and cooking methods. Dowries earned through years of domestic service in the United States particularly attracted husbands, thus underscoring that the female Yank posed no challenge to conventional domestic roles – although we might speculate that, considering women's role in socializing children, the modernizing influence of returned women exceeded that of men (without evidence from the households of returned Yanks such an argument is beyond the scope of this article).

Comments on dress and behavior indicate that emigrants had mastered “respectable” middle-class mores while in the United States – or at least had learned the relationship between commodities and performed status. On returning to their communities in Ireland they attempted performances of affluence, material success, and social mobility. As importantly, neighbors observed that the Returned Yank had accepted the “time, work, discipline” of an industrial society and frequently spoke approvingly of the work habits of Americans. These were, after all, people who had made a dramatic transition from a rural world where time was measured by agricultural rhythms and had adjusted (or not) to the demands of time told by the clock, punctuality, and hard work. One informant commented,

Repeated references to the time, work, and discipline habits necessary for success in an industrial society testify to the historically accurate aspect of the interviews, as do memories shared by elderly interviewees of Yanks with experiences of the American Civil War and its immediate aftermath.Footnote ²⁷ Yet, while continued references to watches demonstrate the way in which this particular symbol of modernity had become incorporated into the figure of the Yank, it is hard to believe that watches in 1955, even in rural Ireland, were such a startling sight. The significance of these memories of watches, stylish dresses, and boastful Yanks is less in their accuracy and more in their ability to allow the Irish to define themselves as authentically rural, communal, and old-fashioned by contrast to the synthetic modern, urban, and materialistic Yanks.Footnote ²⁸

CONSTRUCTING AMERICA

To understand the complex roots of the Returned Yank figure in Irish culture it is important to consider how the Irish developed and maintained a vision of America as a place of wealth and opportunity. Even before the flood tide of famine emigration, indeed as early as the 1840s, writers like Thomas Mooney, an Irish journalist known for his columns in the Nation and the Boston Pilot, created expectations for life in America. His advice letters to immigrants published in Irish newspapers promised “lots of available work for men and women,” but cautioned that success would only come to the temperate, the punctual, and the hardworking. In words that echoed his popular British contemporary Samuel Smiles,Footnote ²⁹ Mooney told immigrants to save their wages and seek edifying amusements after work. In fact, Mooney promised that while both men and women labored hard during the day,

Fanciful as this uplift image is, Mooney also offered practical advice. Workers were advised to save specifically to buy a farm – men should not drink and women should not buy “‘gewgaws’ of the milliners.” Once they owned property,

then dress as fine as your neighbours … but in the meantime, always be cleanly in your person, – on working days as well as on Sundays. Shave … cleanliness of face, shirt, and well mended working dress, are equal to the best written character you could bring from Ireland – and rather better, too, as you will find out in the course of a short time here.Footnote ³¹

Mooney concluded that success in America was “not to be had without exertion, mind, and enterprise – above all character. No place on earth where an honest character is worth more than in America.”Footnote ³² Despite Mooney's insistence that strength of character resulted in success in America, it is clear that for Mooney success was measured in material terms and presentation was equal to character.

By far the most important source of information about America for the Irish was “the American letter,” a ubiquitous feature of Irish village life from the eighteenth century onwards and a staple of sentimental fiction and illustrations. Although often correspondence between illiterate individuals, written by a scribe in America and read by a literate neighbor or priest in Ireland, such letters, historian Kerby Miller claims, “imparted objective and carefully balanced information concerning the United States and its comparative advantages for potential migrants.”Footnote ³³ Letters refreshed memories of those who had left and brought remittances that saved countless family farms from bankruptcy. Money sent home provided powerfully tangible evidence of America as a place of wealth and opportunity and surely helped create a sense of an Ireland dependent upon American largesse for sustenance. The wealth and accomplishment demonstrated by the Returned Yanks of the Folklore Commission survey embody expectations created by essayists like Mooney and by the American letter.

THE RETURNED YANK IN GAELIC REVIVAL AND FREE STATE LITERATURE

Admittedly, a robust literary stereotype of the Returned Yank existed in Ireland long before the Folklore Commission agents posed their questions in 1955. Indeed, as I have argued, the commonplace nature of that figure in Irish popular culture may have shaped the questions and answers of the survey.Footnote ³⁴ As early as 1900 the Returned Yank had stepped onto the stage of Irish popular culture – quite literally in plays of the Gaelic revival, the nationalist cultural movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Just as the Returned Yank who is described in 1955 appeared at a conflicted time of Irish nationalism, the pocan or Returned Yank featured in innumerable plays, novels, and short stories, boasted of his wealth and – importantly for the nationalist writers of this period – betrayed the cause of incipient Irish nationalism by his absence. As Phillip O'Leary succinctly states, “positive images of Irish Americans in the Gaelic literature of the early years was [sic] virtually nonexistent.”Footnote ³⁵

While resentment, scorn, and anger color most essays pouring from the pens of nationalist writers of the Free State period (1922–39), some writers, aware of the substantial financial contribution that Irish “Yanks” made to the cause of Irish independence, created a more nuanced image of the Returned Yank. Indeed, one 1927 editorial chided Irish readers that “were it not for America and the great filial tradition that exists between that country and the children of the West there would be no Gailtacht [sic] left for us either to save or lose.”Footnote ³⁶ While such writers implored the new government to limit the tide of Gaelic speakers flowing from traditionally Irish-speaking areas to America, they also produced cautionary tales in which Irish emigrants to America face challenges to their faith in the harsh American environment – a character more to pity than to scorn. Yet the slick Returned Yank persisted as a stock character in Free State fiction. The Yank of Peadar O Dubhda's 1929 story “The Yank's Complaint,” for example, foreshadows the well-presented Yank of the Folklore Commission survey with his flashy dress and prominent gold watch. He

was clean shaven and neatly groomed. And he was well dressed – dressed like a Yank: the colored little vest, you know, and the chain of yellow gold across his breast … That mouthful of big, even teeth that had never been rooted there but that shift out of their places sometimes because of the talking – so that the yellow gold can be seen here and there.Footnote ³⁷

The period's intense concern with Irish identity demanded that the Gaelic Revival and Free State construct a Returned Yank as false as the Yank's teeth in O Dubhda's story with an identity eviscerated by time spent in America.

THE IMAGINARY IRELAND OF THE DIASPORA

Even before Irish independence, Ireland and the Irish diaspora existed in distinct but inexorably linked cultural spaces. As Oona Frawley asserts, “diasporic memory feeds back into and influences Irish identity in Ireland,”Footnote ³⁸ and nowhere is this more apparent than in the countless songs popularized in vaudeville and published as sheet music or on piano rolls in the early and mid-twentieth century. In such tunes as “Come Back to Erin,” “Galway Bay,” and “I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen,” Ireland emerges as a rural idyll shrouded in a perpetual Celtic mist. “Dear Old Donegal,” a rollicking tune popularized by American crooner Bing Crosby, promises an exuberant welcome for the emigrant from “all his friends and neighbours,” as well as from his family and “the girl he used to swing down on the garden gate” when he returns.Footnote ³⁹ The powerful sentiments of longing and nostalgia expressed in these songs infused the Returned Yank site of memory with an additional cultural valence – the Yank by his or her return migration satisfies the intense longing of the exile for the homeland expressed in the many sentimental songs written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It helps explain how, despite the “minuscule” size of return migration, the Returned Yank has assumed a cultural significance out of proportion to the phenomenon it represents and illustrates the cultural function of the site of memory.

Lieux de mémoire, according to historians Genevieve Fabre and Robert O'Meally, are “products of this interaction between history and memory, of the interplay between the personal and the collective … lieux de mémoire can prompt both the processes of imaginative recollection and the historical consciousness.”Footnote ⁴⁰ For the Irish, the cultural function of the Yank is as a site where the tension between modernity and tradition, the politics of nostalgia, and the deep ambivalence the Irish felt about migration reside. They allow the Irish as well as the Irish of the diaspora to incorporate the loss of millions of emigrants to America and elsewhere while shaping for those emigrants the memory of an idyllic homeland. The complex relationship between history and memory in the Returned Yank is rooted in the contradiction that millions left Ireland, particularly in the early nineteenth century, and relatively few returned, yet one would be hard-pressed to find a more familiar and persistent trope than the Returned Yank in modern Irish culture.

THE RETURNED YANK IN MID-CENTURY IRISH FICTION

The Irish Constitution, passed in 1937, enacted draconian censorship of books and films, rigid proscriptions against contraception and divorce, support for Gaelic as a national language, and irredentist claims on Northern Ireland. The IRA continued its internecine violence, creating political instability in the new republic. The Returned Yank motif appears in mid-century Irish fiction as a site where the repression and violence of the new republic can be explored. Two Irish novels published in the 1940s, Sean O'Faolain's Come Back to Erin (1940) and Maura Laverty's Never No More (1942), feature explicitly gendered representations of the Returned Yank to comment on the Yank's meaning at mid-century.

Come Back to Erin, although published in 1940, is set in 1936. The novel tells of two brothers, Frankie and St. John Hogan Hannafey, who follow conventional masculine scripts – the brigand and the entrepreneur – set against the ambivalent meaning of emigration for Ireland in the 1930s. Frankie, an IRA gunman on the run, is trying to escape Ireland for America; St. John, who emigrated from Cork to the United States as a boy and achieved entrepreneurial success, returns to Ireland for a visit thirty-two years after his departure. The one brother sees his move to America as an expedient exit from Ireland's violent troubles, the other romanticizes a quiescent Ireland as a balm for psychological wounds. Like most fictional Returned Yanks, St. John exudes wealth and modernity. He drives a “long cream Lincoln,” an analogue for the gold watch of the Folklore Commission Yanks, and is happy to share quality whiskey.Footnote ⁴¹

In a paradigmatic scene, the brothers find themselves watching a ship leaving for America. A bugle plays the mournful tune “Come back to Erin, Mavourneen, mavourneen / Come back to Erin the land of thy birth / Come back to Erin, the shamrock, and spring time …”. “In the old days,” said Frankie, “there would be hundreds going.” His brother responds,

Stephanie Rains could almost be describing St. John when she references the quintessential Irish American hero as a man traumatized not by war but by the “modern urban environments of the industrial city … a particular American form of modernity.”Footnote ⁴³ St. John has found material success but not personal fulfilment in America. His return to Ireland reminds him of its poverty. Unable to reconcile his Irish and American identities, he returns to America and kills himself. Frankie flees to America, yet, as the song and novel's title suggests, comes back to Erin.

Romance rather than tragedy frames Maura Laverty's Never No More, in which the material sensuality of America transforms an Irish girl. The novel's protagonist, Maggie Doyle, has a sister who works as a domestic servant in America. She often sends Maggie boxes of her employer's cast-off clothing: “All kinds of lovely things came Maggie's way – furred coats, leather handbags, silk stockings, and clinging, vivid, wonderful frocks.” The American clothing transformed Maggie and made a plain village girl into a desirable woman: “It was an American frock that first made Denis Carroll take notice of Maggie.” Complicating the romantic narrative, Denis has his sights set on emigration to England. When a new box of clothing arrives that includes a sapphire chiffon chemise, “edged with the finest and most delicate of creamy lace through which was drawn a narrow velvet ribbon,” Maggie tries it on and “realized her body's beauty ! the cool silky feel of the beautiful garment against her skin gave her an airy headiness.” Emboldened by her costume, she steps outside the “confines of the smoky, peat-grimed little kitchen” to the moonlit garden and her lover's admiration.Footnote ⁴⁴ Not surprisingly, her love-struck swain pledges he will never leave her. Sexually empowered by the liberatory bit of American silk, Maggie stops rather than initiates emigration.

Contemporary Irish history – the puritanical nature of Irish culture and the persistent violence of the IRA – continue to shape the Returned Yank narrative throughout the twentieth century.Footnote ⁴⁵ Literary scholar Meredith Cary implicitly demonstrates the distinguishing features of the late twentieth-century Yank – direct involvement with terrorist activities of the IRA and sexual behavior at odds with traditional Irish values – in three novels from the 1980s. Ireland contributes the violence, in other words, and America the sex. The authors of all three novels depict Americans as childlike and naive, and, in Cary's words, “their passion focuses disconcertingly on sex rather than on politics.”Footnote ⁴⁶

The infusion of sex and contemporary politics into the Returned Yank demonstrates the expansive possibilities of this site of memory. Decades earlier watches and clothing symbolized the contrast between Ireland and the diasporic culture; by mid-century and later the contrast is between the repressive nature of Irish culture and the freer sexuality of America, between the random terrorism of the troubles and the quiescence of American suburbia.

THE QUIET MAN – THE APOTHEOSIS OF THE RETURNED YANK

The urtext of the Returned Yank is arguably John Ford's romantic comedy The Quiet Man. Filmed in Ireland and released in 1955, The Quiet Man follows Sean Thornton, played by John Wayne, a Yank returning to his natal village, Inishfree, sometime in the 1920s. Asked by villagers, “What are you after Yank?” Thornton responds that Inishfree “has become another word for heaven for me.” We learn gradually that, like St. John Hogan Hannafey, the New World has damaged Thornton – a boxer, he killed a man in a fight – so his journey is more than a search for his roots. As Stephanie Rains observes, Thornton “seeks recuperation, and completeness with his return to Ireland.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Once in Inishfree, like a typical Returned Yank, he demonstrates his affluence by buying White O'Morn Cottage, his mother's birthplace, and drinks for everyone in the village pub. A villager confirms Thornton's Returned Yank status with the comment: “He's a millionaire like all the Yanks.”

The Quiet Man's narrative centers on Thornton's courtship of Mary Kate Danaher, a spirited flame-haired beauty played by Maureen O'Hara. Falling in love at first sight of Mary Kate, Thornton confronts traditional gender conventions that make his integration into Inishfree less seamless than he anticipated. Thornton says, “In America I would honk the horn and a girl would come a runnin’.” By contrast, courtship in Inishfree means a chaperoned outing in a jaunting car. Following a traditional gender script, Mary Kate refuses to marry without her brother's consent – “this is not America,” she tells Thornton. Thornton sees no need for his wife's money but is convinced of its importance to Mary Kate when she refuses to consummate the marriage until the dowry – the “bride's fortune” – is returned.

In the film's climactic sequence, Sean fights his recalcitrant brother-in-law Red Will Danaher in a comic donnybrook that draws spectators from near and far. Sean wins, Red Will returns the dowry to Mary Kate, and, the point being made, the couple burn the money. Sean and his brother-in-law then get drunk and stumble back to the Thornton cottage where Mary Kate happily serves them dinner. In the film's final scene, Sean literally breaks with convention when he breaks the rod that a neighbor has given him to keep his wife in line. The Returned Yank and his Irish bride stand on the brink of a hopeful, new Ireland – ravishing natural beauty, leprechaun-like villagers, true love, and the modernity provided by the Returned Yank. The sentimental soundtrack reinforces the message that the Yank can come home, and by doing so fuses the two halves of the diaspora.

Contemporary Irish studies scholars have read The Quiet Man through the lenses of postcolonial theory, of “the politics of nostalgia,” and of gender, and of course in light of its meaning for Ireland at the time of its release.Footnote ⁴⁸ While Luke Gibbons points out that The Quiet Man is the “bane of Irish cinema” for many Irish directors, one element of Irish society embraced the film – Bord Failte, the Irish Tourist Board. Gibbons claims that

Films, travelogues, and documentaries cloned the storyline of The Quiet Man multiple times to stimulate cultural and “roots” tourism by presenting an Ireland of friendly natives and quaint villages – the antithesis of modernity.Footnote ⁵⁰ By playing a central role in promoting the appeal of Ireland as a tourist destination, this fulfilling narrative enabled the figure of the Returned Yank to step into the market economy as an active participant in the increasingly lucrative tourism industry.

THE RETURNED YANK ENTERS THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: EPILOGUE

Ireland's entry into the European Union (EU) in 1973 inaugurated a period of unprecedented economic growth for the Republic of Ireland. Almost overnight it seemed Ireland went from being one of the most culturally backward nations in Europe to one of its hippest.Footnote ⁵¹ About ten years after entering the EU, Ireland suffered an economic downturn accompanied by high rates of unemployment, which sent significant numbers of Irish men and women on well-worn paths of migration to the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. By 1996, the roar of the Celtic Tiger, as Ireland's late twentieth-century economic renaissance was called, attracted emigrants home, particularly to rural Ireland. Two texts from this period illustrate the resilience of the Returned Yank as a site of memory in a recent historical landscape very different from the one sketched by the Folklore Commission in 1955.

A distinctive feature of these texts – the first a set of emigrant life narratives and the second a television documentary – is their ability to give voice to the Returned Yank experience and allow us to shift our focus from the perception and construction of Returned Yanks in fiction and Folklore Commission interviews to the actual experience of returning migrants themselves. Moreover, while many texts discussed earlier in this essay are certainly gender-minded, these contemporary texts express a gendered experience in ways not seen in earlier representations, which lends credence to feminist sociologist Breda Gray's assertion that “gender is the defining Irish cultural difference.”Footnote ⁵² While we might take issue with the boldness of Gray's claim, nonetheless, these texts strongly demonstrate the differences between women's and men's experiences of migration and return.

Feminist historians writing in the 1990s and later cast a critical light on the role that Free State and Republican policies played in encouraging traditional female roles while historian Roy Foster underlines the powerful role feminism, with its critique of sexual oppression and limited opportunities for women, played in bringing modernity to Ireland in the 1960s and afterwards. Two contemporary texts of migration and return – the first, cultural geographer Caitriona Ni Laoire's study of migrants who left Ireland and returned to settle in the mid-1990s, and the second, the television documentary The Irish Empire – echo these feminist sensibilities and shift the focus of the Irish from the perception of Returned Yanks to the experience of returning migrants themselves.Footnote ⁵³

Ni Laoire's life narratives of returning emigrants infuse subjectivity into the Returned Yank,Footnote ⁵⁴ almost as though we could title her study “The Returned Yank Speaks.” Ni Laoire contends that “rural return migrants are positioned somewhere between locals and incomers,” and their narratives can be understood “in terms of discourses of rurality, in particular through notions of a rural idyll and belonging/not belonging.”Footnote ⁵⁵ She demonstrates that a move back to modern Ireland is almost certainly disappointing for the modern migrant who arrives with “counterurban” fantasies of idyllic communities promising “safety, space, and nature” which are “bound up with heteronormative values of the nuclear family and the rearing of children in the countryside.”Footnote ⁵⁶

The testimony of Ni Laoire's informants evokes many of the aspects of the Returned Yank trope – the longing for an idyllic homeland, the emigrant altered during their time elsewhere (in this case, emotionally or mentally rather than in appearance), and an inevitable disappointment upon return. They seem to have imbued the “fantasies of Ireland” noted by Diane Negra in “a staggering variety of consumable forms” which “posit a culture unsullied by consumerism and modernity.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Yet the contrast between the historical circumstances of Ni Laoire's subjects and those interviewed by the Irish Folklore Commission in 1955 is striking. Ni Laoire characterizes return migrants of the late twentieth century as middle class. And, while as “driven by the constructions of a rural idyll” as “Yanks” of the early and mid-twentieth century, these modern migrants show a contradictory reluctance to actually live in the countryside. These contemporary returnees share the inchoate longing for home and the pull of family obligations that motivated earlier returnees, but, by contrast, seek to escape the “individualism and materialism” they experienced while abroad rather than the “bosses and clocks” so prominent in earlier narratives. Unlike earlier generations of Returned Yanks, Ni Laoire's informants, enabled by cheap flights and budget airlines, regularly visited Ireland during the time they lived abroad. Despite knowledge of modern Ireland, they still express as sentimentally powerful a sense of what they hope to find when they returned home as Yanks of decades earlier. The contradiction between their first-hand knowledge of late twentieth-century Ireland and their idyllic expectations testifies to the resilient cultural power of memory embedded in the Returned Yank figure.

Once settled in Ireland, more realistic expectations did not guarantee easy integration into Irish society for modern migrants. Women who returned experienced “some loss of gendered autonomy” in Ireland's tradition-bound society. Others felt simply confined – as one married woman put it, “I remember my husband used to look out the window and he'd say ‘look at the lovely view’ and I used to think ‘God! I'm going crazy here!’”Footnote ⁵⁸ Finally, returnees expressed disappointment at Ireland's transformation by the economic boom. Rather than finding the warmth and community of their imagined idyll most found instead the “individualism and materialism” that they thought they left in behind in America or Britain.

The Irish labeled the contemporary migrant a “Returned Yank” as easily in the 1990s as they had fifty years before and earlier – the returnee who displays affluence through conspicuous consumption. And the “Yanks” reported their resentment and sense of “not belonging.” As expressed by returnee “Marie”: “In one way you're not different, in another you are – you're the one that came back from the States.”Footnote ⁵⁹

The Returned Yanks who appear in the tyelevision documentary The Irish Empire echo “Marie's” sentiment. Not surprisingly, the Returned Yank plays a prominent role amongst themes of migration, nostalgia, and return in this popular coproduction (RTE–BBC–SBS). Sociologist Breda Gray argues that the series effectively uses mass media as a vehicle for bringing “histories and memories together to form new lieux de mémoire.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Like Ni Laoire's study, The Irish Empire gives voice to returned migrants and demonstrates their inherently gendered experience.

The Irish Empire devotes one of five segments to women in the Irish diaspora. It profiles Mary Williams, who migrated to the United States in the 1940s from rural Ireland and returned in the 1950s. Williams found that her modern sensibilities set her apart from her family and others. She recalls criticism of her clothing, for example, and says: “for instance, I had nylon see-through blouses and they were all the rage in America, but they weren't the rage at home and I was treated very differently. I couldn't sort of be myself at all there.”Footnote ⁶¹ Identified in the film as a Returned Yank, Mary leaves Ireland in 1953 for work in Britain, where she settles and starts a family. As Breda Gray comments, “Mary's original exclusion through migration as a response to restricted opportunities for women in Ireland is repeated when Mary's choice of clothes sexualize and suggest a relationship of enjoyment to her gendered body and mark her as an outsider.”Footnote ⁶² Gray's feminist analysis, indeed Mary's own memory of her second departure from Ireland, complicates and sexualizes the notion of the Returned Yank as site of memory with a Returned Yank's actual memory rather than simply a memory of a Returned Yank.Footnote ⁶³