The Declining Political Significance of Irish-American Identity

Today is St. Patrick’s Day. And tonight, Irish-Americans across the country will be gathering to toast their control of the highest political office in the land. After all, Joe Biden is only the second Irish Catholic president of the United States. For their part, millions of WASPs are  seething about the loss of their political hegemony to the Irish. St. Patrick’s Day celebrations are a painful reminder of their humiliation. Police forces in major cities are on alert for possible ethnic riots.

OK, actually nothing like that is happening! In reality, very few Americans even care that Biden is an Irish Catholic. Even fewer fear that he is somehow promoting Irish interests at the expense of WASPs, or that he is secretly doing the bidding of the Vatican. Political conflict between Irish-Americans and WASPs has almost completely disappeared. Most of the time, we barely even notice the difference between the two groups. St. Patrick’s Day is perhaps the one exception to that indifference.

It wasn’t always so. In the 19th and early twentieth centuries, political antagonism between Irish and WASPs was ubiquitous, sometimes rising to the level of anti-Irish rioting by nativists. There was also substantial discrimination and social prejudice against the Irish.

As late as  the 1960 presidential campaign, when John F. Kennedy became the first Irish Catholic president, he felt the need to make a highly publicized speech assuring people that he would take “instructions on public policy from the Pope,” if elected:

The idea that Biden—or any other political leader—would have to give a speech like this is almost inconceivable today.

How did this change come about? The story is long and complicated, and I obviously cannot do it justice in a blog post. But one crucial factor is that most Americans came to realize that the differences between Irish-Americans and other groups were far less significant than previously thought, and also that these ethnic and religious divergences should be downgraded i