David Kilroy is an associate professor of history in the Farquhar College of Arts and Sciences.
Americans embrace March 17 as a festive date when “everyone is Irish for the day.” On St. Patrick’s Day, the Chicago River turns a bright emerald hue, beer sales spike, restaurants across the country add “Irish stew” and “bacon and cabbage” to their menus, and you are liable to get pinched for not wearing green. Elaborate parades wind through the streets of cities from New York to San Francisco and from Savannah, Ga. to Scranton, Pa. as they come to a standstill for 24 hours, while Seattle beats out Boston, according to CNN, as the best place “to get your green on.” St. Patrick’s Day is party time in America, and, Irish ancestry or not, it is clearly among the most popular holidays of the year.
Growing up in Dublin, my earliest memories of St. Patrick’s Day are just a little different. March 17 is traditionally both a national holiday and a Holy Day on the Irish calendar, a day when all schools and businesses are closed. My earliest memories of St. Patrick’s Day revolve around Mass in the morning, where the priest reminded us of the familiar story of how St. Patrick came to Ireland from Wales as a slave, escaped and returned as an adult in the middle of the fifth century to convert the pagan Irish to Christianity, and a family dinner (usually roast lamb, not bacon and cabbage) in the afternoon.
There was never any imperative to wear green, though it was common to sport real a shamrock, purchased from vendors outside the church, on your lapel. By the time I was a teenager, however, the holiday was increasingly taking on an American tone, with a growing emphasis on parades and public celebrations.
Today, St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland is largely indistinguishable from its sister events across the Atlantic, and you are liable to find as many plastic shamrocks and inflatable leprechauns in Dublin on March 17 as you are in New York or Boston. The green beer is purely a stateside tradition, however, as some things remain sacred on the “auld sod.”
Traditionalists in Ireland bemoan what they see as the Americanization, and by implication the commercialization, of Ireland’s national holiday. Such a perspective, however, misses the point that St. Patrick’s Day in the United States is a wholly different tradition, albeit a branch of the same tree. As waves of Irish immigrants began to arrive on American shores in the 1830s and during the famine years of the 1840s, they encountered widespread anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiment.
The modern St. Patrick’s Day parade was born in New York City in 1851. Irish units of the British Army actually organized the first St. Patrick’s parades in America in the 1760s, but 1851 marks the beginning of the modern parade tradition when various Irish fraternal and beneficial societies came together to form a grand parade as annual event in New York City. It was largely a symbol of defiance against nativist hysteria that deemed these new arrivals unfit candidates for American citizenship.
Some of the earliest parades spawned violence between Irish immigrants and nativist gangs, but slowly, as the Irish mastered the art of urban politics, St. Patrick’s Day became woven into the civic fabric of major American cities where the Irish congregated. The pride of the place given to firefighters, police officers and other city officials in modern American St. Patrick’s parades is testimony to the role these institutions played in providing an avenue toward assimilation for Irish immigrants in the 19th century.
The Irish were the first in a long series of immigrant groups coming to America in the 19th century whose presence challenged a narrow definition of the United States as a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant nation. The Irish experience would pave the way for later arriving Italians, Russians and Jews, among others.
St. Patrick’s Day in America represents a long tradition of assimilation politics that has modern parallels in Cinco de Mayo or Carnaval Miami, for example. St. Patrick’s Day is arguably the oldest immigrant holiday in this country, and, as such, it is quite fitting that on March 17 “everyone is Irish for the day.”
