In David Fitzpatrick's final book – the culmination of a brilliant career – he returned to a topic that has been central to his research – migration. Although he has written widely on emigration, little of that work focused on North America, so this book marks something of a departure. It is obvious that this book was part of a larger project that was truncated by illness. He has set out a challenging research agenda for younger scholars relating to the Americanisation of post-Famine Ireland. A conference in Trinity College Dublin in the autumn of 2019 began the process of tackling this.
This book concentrates on people: the Irish emigrants to North America (some material relating to Canada is included) who returned home, and American-born residents of Ireland in 1901 and 1911. He makes extensive use of digitally-available sources, including the 1901 and 1911 Irish census and applications for U.S. passports in the years between 1914 and 1925. His findings show the potential that these digital resources offer for research on demographic and social history. The chapters display Fitzpatrick's characteristic combination of detailed statistical analysis, sometimes-eccentric personal details, and acerbic commentary. The copies of passport photographs that are reproduced provide the basis for an analysis of topics such as moustaches, shaving, women's hats, ties, and body language in group family photographs.
One of the features that distinguished Irish emigrants to the United States in the late nineteenth- and the early twentieth-centuries was the low rate of return migration, when compared with other immigrant communities, such as Italy. For that reason there has been little research into this topic, though Fitzpatrick supervised the work of Marjolein ‘t Hart, who published a related article in Irish Economic and Social History in 1983. This book suggests that return migration may have been more common than has been acknowledged. In the years from 1895 to 1911, 47 Irish passengers returned from outside the United Kingdom for every 100 who left; the highest proportions of returnees were from India and South Africa. For the United States the figure was 46 returning for every 100 departing, which was similar to the figure for Britain.
The detailed analysis of returning emigrants concentrates on Leitrim, a county that Fitzpatrick has investigated in the past (I was not aware that his ancestors came from Leitrim). Many of the U.S.-born who were living in Leitrim in 1901 and 1911 were the children of Irish emigrants, and these children enabled him to identify some of the returned emigrants, who would otherwise be invisible. There were undoubtedly other American returnees in Leitrim, who were not accompanied by a U.S.-born wife or children. Some of the children were living with one or both parents; others were living with grandparent(s). He describes them as the children of emigrants ‘who had struggled to make ends meet in America’, noting that ‘The remarkable prominence of American grandchildren, nephews, and nieces strongly suggests that relatives in the homeland were routinely helping out when child-rearing became burdensome for emigrant parents’ (p. 36). The best-known example of a child being sent to Ireland from the U.S. because his parent could no longer provide for him was Éamon de Valera, who is not mentioned in this book. Irish historians have until now failed to realise that in at least this respect he was not unique. For some returning emigrants the stay in Ireland may have been brief; Fitzpatrick estimates that approximately half of the American-born residents in Leitrim in 1901 remained in Ireland in 1911, and less than one-quarter of the 1911 Leitrim Americans were resident in Ireland in 1901.
The applications for American passports between 1914 and 1925 add another dimension to the profile of Leitrim's returning Yanks and their families. Fitzpatrick has determined that almost 29,000 passports were issued in those years to applicants born in Ireland. Some secured more than one passport and made more than one return visit. They included approximately 600 natives of Leitrim, (or Leitrimonians as he describes them), which was equivalent to 1 per cent of the county's population at the time. The socialist James Gralton was among those applying. Almost 80 per cent listed ‘visiting relatives’ as the motivation for their visit; one-sixth were coming for economic reasons – mainly relating to property and inheritance. The common narrative of post-Famine rural Ireland suggests that land passed to non-emigrants; this research suggests that this was not always the case, and we know that in the mid- and late-twentieth century land was often inherited by emigrants in England.
This book ranges beyond Americans and Canadians in early twentieth-century Ireland to include a parade of other foreign-born residents. The large number of Irish men who served in the British forces, or had careers in India and other parts of the British Empire, meant that provincial Ireland contained wives, children and servants who were born in these countries. His exploration of census returns introduces us to three Italian Waldensians, a Hindi midwife in the Rotunda hospital, Hindu nurse-maids, Swiss governesses and other exotic residents.
There is a chapter on the approximately 1,000 U.S.-born men and women recorded in the 1901 and 1911 census, who Fitzpatrick has deemed to constitute a professional, clerical and moneyed elite: performing artists, Mormon missionaries, and American and other foreign-born religious. The short details taken from census returns raise some interesting questions about shortages of skills and expertise in early twentieth-century Ireland. The biographies include doctors and university lecturers, engineers, a Canadian-born linen manufacturer, the proprietor of Cleeves condensed milk factory (also Canadian-born) and the manager of a flour mill. Three Americans were employed by the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction: a tobacco expert, a geologist and an expert on sheep-dipping. The U.S.-born women include a number of typists and women in white-collar positions at a time when these were almost unknown in Ireland, plus three American-born post-mistresses. Many of the featured Americans had family connections with Britain or the empire, as indicated by the birth-place of children and wives.
Some of this discussion is rather detailed, at times excessively so; however, it opens up a range of potential topics that need investigation, such as migration and return-migration among the clergy and among female religious, and the need to examine return migration to Ireland from the colonies, especially India. His overall ambition is to present a picture of Ireland as more cosmopolitan than is generally appreciated; that is a topic that might repay further study.
The epilogue, entitled ‘Questions unanswered’, deserves wide readership among historians who are teaching or researching post-Famine Ireland. He suggests that ‘“Americanisation” was a far darker experience in Ireland than in Britain’ – a comment which echoes (but does not reference) Kerby Miller's writings on Irish Catholic emigrants to the United States. He suggests that the modernisation of post-Famine Ireland, which has commonly been identified with Anglicisation, should be re-examined from the perspective of Americanisation, going so far as to suggest that ‘the course of modern Irish history is inexplicable without confronting Americanisation’. In 1977 David Fitzpatrick published his first book Politics and Irish life, 1913–1921: provincial experience of war and revolution, which has inspired a large number of regional studies of Ireland during these years. His final work presents a challenge to future scholars, and a new template for investigating post-Famine Ireland.
