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James Silas Rogers
March 15, 2018
Christina Gray
“To this day I can go to a party and I can tell who is Irish in the room,” James Silas Rogers told Catholic San Francisco on March 9 over a pint and a view of the bay.
The author of “Irish-American Autobiography: The Divided Hearts of Athletes, Priests, Pilgrims, and More,” (The Catholic University of America Press, 2016), had arrived to San Francisco a few days ahead of his March 11 talk at the city’s main library as part of the 15th Annual Irish-American Crossroads Festival and agreed to tell us about his book.
San Francisco-based Irish-American Crossroads is an organization that promotes an understanding of the Irish experience in America. The annual Crossroads Festival is a cultural event running through April that brings Irish and Irish-American writers, musicians, dancers, filmmakers and more to venues throughout the Bay Area.
In his book, Rogers, the longtime director of the Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, and editor of its quarterly literary journal, “New Hibernia Review,” says that Irish identity has survived beyond the historic era of Irish immigration even if Irish-Americans themselves often can’t quite put their fingers on it.
“What I say in this book is that I think that Irish-American ethnicity has certainly moved out of the quantifiable,” he said. “Ethnicity is handed on to us in ways that are below our consciousness.”
He said his Midwestern parents, a “Yankee” father with a vague and perhaps more-wishful Irish ancestry than his second-generation Irish-American mother, loved pop culture Irish expression – green eggs and marching in the St. Patrick’s Day parade and the like.
“My parents believed there was something very distinctive about being Irish even if they couldn’t really say what that was,” he said.
Twenty-two years in the making, “Irish-American Autobiography” is a compilation of 10 themed essays based on memoirs and other autobiographical material that follows the progression of Irish-American life from roughly the beginning to the end of the 20th century. It includes the stories of American-born boxers, dancers, priests, actors, writers and others of Irish descent.
“It is my hope that the chapters that follow persuade readers that the story of the Irish in America is in some way the story of an ‘ethnic fade’ that never quite happened,” he writes in the book’s introduction.
Rogers said that the “linking thread in all this” is that there are two parts of the self at war in Irish American life,” he said.
In the book’s first chapter, “Sporting Gentlemen,” Rogers reflects on the memoirs of three Irish athletes of the late-19th century: rough-and-tumble bare-knuckle champion boxer John L. Sullivan, James “Gentleman Jim” Corbett and baseball player Connie Mack.
These Irish-American men were preoccupied with their “respectability” in different and often paradoxical ways, said Rogers, perhaps a vestigial by-product of Ireland’s history of British suppression, national poverty and the weight of anti-Catholic sentiment in America.
John L. Sullivan’s wish to have it both ways, to be able to walk into a saloon, crash his fist down on the table and declare he could “lick” any opponent in the room but also take tea with the Prince of Wales “might in fact be a paradigmatic expression of Irish-ness of America,” Rogers said.
Rogers said it is easy today to forget what a profound distrust of Catholics there was in America at that time. “And the Irish were the face of Catholicism,” he said.
Rogers’ books demonstrate how much respectability continued to be a concern for Irish Americans, said the author. In many ways it drives the “divided hearts” of the book’s subtitle.
“Indeed, one way or another, we can discern a certain psychic or emotional split in the heart of all of these biographers,” said Rogers. They often reported a sense of exclusion, of being “an outsider.”
Catholicism, one of the indisputable “badges” of Irish-American identity percolates throughout the accounts, he said, though not as directly as the chapter on priest autobiographies. He found priest memoirs to be “an impoverished body of literature” marked by diffidence.
Rogers said he was surprised to find later writers attuned to what is sometimes called, “The Catholic imagination” – a way of looking at the world and structuring reality that can be traced to Catholic origins.
“As I looked more and more at the generations before me and what it meant to be an Irish-American Catholic, the church, faith, doctrine, conviction, was only one spice in a complicated soup,” he said.
“Irish-American Autobiography: The Divided Hearts of Athletes, Priests, Pilgrims, and More” can be found online at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com.