POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY QUARTERLY, Vol. 8, No. 3, July 1989.255-269

Public rituals and community power: St. Patrick’s Day parades in Lowell,

Massachusetts, 184 1- 1874

SALLIE A. MARSTON

Department of Geography and Regional Development, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 8J 721, USA

ABSTRACT. The development of a political strategy to address the uneven distribution of power and resources in a 19thcentury American city is the focus of this paper. It is argued that public celebrations of St. Patrick’s Day in the city of Lowell, Massachusetts must be seen as something more than simple expressions of Irish tradition and culture. Instead, as the literature in social history is making increasingly clear, parades and other forms of mass public ritual are better charac- terized as demonstrations of community power and solidarity and serve as complex commentaries on the political economy of urban-industrial social relations. In Lowell, the parades were at first used to impress both the Yankee and the Irish communities with the spectacle of Irish respectability. Ultimately they were used to press for Irish participation in republican America on specifically Irish terms.

Freshly-fallen snow from the night before still covered the streets of Lowell as well as over 100 members of the Irish Benevolent Society assembled in front of the Merrimack House for the city’s first St. Patrick’s Day procession on 17 March 1841 .I It was eight o’clock in the morning and a chill wind stung as each Society member pinned a large rosette of green and white to his lapel and waited in the cold for the band to strike up and the procession to begin. An hour later, with the band in tune and the marchers in order, the procession ceremoniously commenced and made its way through mud and snow as crowds gathered along the streets to watch it pass (Lowell Advertiser, 184 1).

It was scene ‘highly gratifying to Irishmen’; yet there were strained relations within the Irish Benevolent Society (ES), within the Lowell Irish community, and between the Irish and the Yankee community of the city, that belied the orderly appearance of the parade. Indeed, disagreements between members of the IBS and the wider Irish community over the content and meaning of the day threatened to prevent the occurrence of the first St. Patrick’s Day procession that frosty morning. A few years earlier, the mounting of nativist hostility toward Irish Catholics in Lowell and other cities throughout the eastern USA had prompted The Sentinel (the national Irish Catholic newspaper later known as The Pilot) to warn the day’s celebrants away from revelry so that ‘nothing will happen, among Irishmen, tending to derogate from the Irish character or to leave any grounds for the calumnious press on

0260.9827/89/03 0255-15 $03.00 0 1989 Butterworth & Co (Publishers) Ltd

256 Public rituals and c~~m~nit~ power

which to build the rude fabric of prejudice, envy and misrepresentation’ (The Sentinel, 1835).

In 1841 the textile-mill town of Lowell was not quite 20 years old. As the town had grown, so too had the Irish population, which had been a part of Lowell’s history since its inception. From 30 laborers in 1822 the number of Irish in Lowell had grown tremendously so that by 1855, swelled by famine migrants, there were over 10000 Irish out of a total population of about 37 000 (A. Mitchell, 1976).2 As the number of participants increased, and in spite of the antagonism and dissension they often aroused, the St. Patrick’s Day parades and ceremonies were of certain importance to the Lowell Irish community. At the very least, the parades served as demonstrations of community pride and solidarity and a manifestation of interest in the political turmoii in native Ireland. But more importantly, they were also public rituals directed toward impressing the Yankee community of Lowell. Though sometimes veiled and at other times righteous declarations, the St. Patrick’s Day parades served to remind the rest of society that the Irish, as a moral and political unit, had a legitimate claim to full participation in republican America.

In this paper, it is argued that the 19thcentury Irish parades and ceremonies of St. Patrick’s Day should be seen as an expression of ‘contested terrain’. As Ralph Miliband insists, in reference to the ideological hegemony of the ruling class, the discussion of the development of political consciousness among subordinate groups in society ‘requires the inclusion of the concept of a battle being fought on many fronts and on the basis of tensions and contradictions which are present in the actual structures of work and life . . . the ideo- logical terrain is highly contested territory’ (Miliband, 1977: 53-54).

The importance of American 18th- and 19th.century public rituals and festivals has only recently begun to receive attention in social historiography (Wilentz, 1983; Davis, 1986; Conzen, 1989). As Sean Wilentz has pointed out, what might have once appeared as

anecdotal marginalia, has come to take center stage as scholars attempt to unravel the origins of American working-class political ideology and culture. By focusing on public events, we can begin to gain some insight into how subordinate groups in society-groups which often lacked the skills of literacy-were able to articulate their perceptions of and reactions to the political economy of urban industrial America. Public demonstrations of group solidarity, like the Irish community’s St. Patrick’s Day parades in Lowell or the artisan’s Evacuation Day pageants in New York City, provide a frame of reference for grappling with the subordinate ideologies that were developed to challenge the dominance of

the status quo. 3

Lowell and the coming of the Irish

The city of Lowell, Massachusetts was the first planned industrial city in the United States. Its foun~ng and early history were a direct response to the changes that were taking place in the Boston mercantile community at the turn of the 18th century. The Napoleonic Wars, the Embargo Act in 1808, the Non-Intercourse Act in 1809 and the War of 1812 were critical forces that plunged mercantile activity in Boston into a prolonged economic decline. Several leading figures from Boston’s commercial community, calling themselves the Boston Associates, began searching for new and more dependable outlets for their considerable capital reserves, and they planned and eventually constructed what was to become the city of Lowell on agricuitural land in the small village of East Chelmsford which lay approximately 30 miles north-west of Boston4

The transformation of the village of East Chelmsford into a textile manufacturing center began in 1822 with the arrival of the Irish. The Irish were initially employed in the

SALLIE A. MARSTON 257

expansion of an old navigation canal that was to provide the water power to operate the mills. AS construction of the planned city progressed the Irish also became involved in the building

of the machine shop, the mills, the corporate-owned boarding houses, and every other aspect of the infrastructural development of the city. In 1822,30 unskirled male laborers made the journey from Charlestown, just outside of Boston, to work on the Lowell construction projects (O’Dwyer, 1920: 7). Within a few years the original group had increased to several hundred men, women and children living on the outskirts of the city in several small squatter settlements. According to Brian Mitchell (19SS), camps representing the north- west and south-east regions of Ireland sprang up on the open land on the outskirts of the city. These separate camps harbored ancestral animosities transported to America from Ireland and hostility and violence characterized relations between the ‘Corkonian Acre’, which contained migrants from southern Ireland, and ‘Connaught’s Half-Acre’, which was largely composed of ‘West Country’ Irish. During the 182Os, the camps were established outside the boundaries of the mill village, although the land itself belonged to the Proprietors of the Locks and Canals. Local officials paid scant attention to what went on in the ‘paddy camps’ where the regional factions provided a system of social organization.

By the 1830s, with additional construction projects underway in Lowell, the mill village began to expand physically so that the Irish residential settlement became incorporated into the heart of a growing manufacturing center. With the coming of the 1840s the Irish population increased dramatically, swelled by those fleeing the Great Potato Famine in Ireland. Following the hiatus brought about by the Panic of 1837, the mill center began to expand once again in the 1840s. New mills opened to the north of the camps. To the west was an expanding respectable Yankee neighborhood. To the east developed a small commercial district. The camps, which became more commonly known as The Acre, expanded to the south as ramshackle huts gave way to congested tenements (B. Mitchell, 1988: 95).

During this same decade new Irish settlements developed in the Chapel Hill area on the eastern outskirts of the city, with a much smaller concentration of Irish ~ginning to appear along Market and Middle Streets (a main commercial area in the city). With the expansion of the mill center and the concomitant growth of the Irish population, local officials began to raise concerns about the Irish presence. As B. Mitchell (1988: 95) explains:

. despite Lowell’s considerable growth it remained a smatf city physically. The enormous wave of famine immigrant, when concentrated in a congested city, much of which had already been given over to mills and boardinghouses, made the Yankees feel that the Irish were everywhere.

In newspaper reports during these decades the Irish were often characterized as obstreperous and given to intemperance: a characterization not without some factual basis (B. Mitchell, 1981). Fearing that their residential squalor and their widespread dissolution were threaten- ing the showcase industrial experiment, the Yankee community began to legislate control over the Irish.5

The initial attempt to keep the Lowell Irish regulated involved the donation of land by Kirk Boott, the overseer of mill operations in the city, to the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. By 1831 the first Catholic church, St. Patrick’s, was dedicated on the acquired plot, with Boott in hopeful anticipation that the priest would provide discipline to the nearly 1000 Irish now residing in Lowell. Unfortunately, order and discipline through religious control were not so readily forthcoming and the Yankee community had to redouble its efforts over the years devising ‘educational, health and criminal systems to encourage, preserve and enforce peace on their own terms’ among the Irish (B. Mitchell, 198 1).

258 F&lic r&d5 and conmunity pouer

During the decades before the Civil War, Irish residential areas expanded and leapfrogged throughout the city. By 1860 there were four neighborhoods in Lowell where Irish surnames dominated (A. Mitchell, 1976: 205-211; Marston, 1986: 82-88). After the 1860s the Irish percentage of the population began a steady decline that continued throughout the remainder of the 19th century so that by 1900, with the general population of Lowell at 94969, the percentage of foreign-born Irish in the population had decreased to 30 (B. Mitchell, 1986: 4). In 1905 a new immigrant group, the French-Canadians, replaced the Irish as the largest ethnic group in the city (Early, 1982).

From their arrival in 1822 untii the turn of the century the Irish constituted the largest single ethnic group in the city. During this time the Irish community created a number of institutions that lent support to the development of an ethnic identity. The first and most important of these were the Irish-dominated neighborhoods. For most of the 19th century, Irish lived among Irish in the areas of the city indicated in Figure 1. 6 The existence of these Irish-dominated neighborhoods was critical to the fostering of ethnic ties. Within the

neighborhoods a group identity was fostered that was reinforced by the existence of Irish Catholic churches and schools. Besides the common religion, Irish voluntary associations and the neigh~rhood saloons helped the Irish to maintain an identity that was distinct from the dominant Yankee society. In effect, the Irish neighborhoods, and the attendant institu- tions of ethnicity, enabled the Irish to exist in a partially separate sphere within the larger native American community.

Political and social leadership within the Lowell Irish community changed in important ways between their initial settlement in 1822 and the post Civil-War years. B. Mitchell

(1988) argues that a small group of what he calls ‘middle class’ Irish, assumed a leadership

FIGURE 1. The Irish neighborhoods of Lowell, 1839-1875.

SALLIE A. MARSTON 259

role in the paddy camps as early as the 1820s.’ His contention is that Hugh Cummiskey,

as foreman of the first team of Irish laborers to come to Lowell to work on the canal, controlled a pyramidal employment system that gave him a large measure of authority and control both over his team and with the Yankee employers. In addition to Cummiskey, there was Michael Connolly, a stone mason, who also headed a work team and competed directly with Cummiskey for construction jobs in the area. As opportunities for work increased in the mill village and more and more Irish filtered in to take advantage of work opportunities, men like Cummiskey and Connolly were able to extend their control. Common laborers, who constituted the base of the employment pyramid, were oftentimes transients, moving from construction site to construction site around New England. Foremen and supervisors and other occupational categories like small shopkeepers, were most likely to be permanent residents. Those few men at the most advanced levels of the employment hierarchy became important political influences in the larger community which was often changing its composition. B. Mitchell (1988) contends that those select individuals occupying positions at the top, set the posture and tone for Irish interactions with Yankee society.

In 183 3 a few members of this elite group established the first Irish voluntary association in Lowell, the Hibernian Moralizing and Relief Society (O’Dwyer, 1920). In 1836 the group renamed itself the Lowell Irish Benevolent Society. As the decades passed, the Lowell Irish Benevolent Society played an important political role in the wider Irish community particularly by way of its adoption of an accommodative stance toward Yankee values and expectations (Marston, 1986). B. Mitchell (1988: 54) suggests that by the late 1830s the peaceable relationship that the IBS had established with the Lowell Yankee community had begun to come apart as the IBS began to lose control over the rapidly growing Irish popula- tion. Yet, while the IBS may have lost their exclusive dominance, there is insufficient evidence to suggest that they entirely relinquished power, especally given their powerful hold over the St. Patrick’s Day parades in Lowell through the mid 1860s.

With the coming of the famine migrants in the late 1840s the composition of the Irish

population changed dramatically. As the IBS lost pedantic hold over this burgeoning mass, the Catholic Church emerged as an important and critically influential institution (B. Mitchell, 1988). From 1840-1850 as the manufacturing center was transformed from a mill village to congested industrial immigrant city, two Irish Catholic priests, Father John and Father Timothy O’Brien, emerged as powerful religious leaders of an expanding and diversified community. These two decades also witnessed the tumescence of rabid nativism both within the state and the city. B. Mitchell (1988) maintains that the Lowell Irish community was able to endure this hostility through the influences of the O’Briens who advised the population to patiently and silently weather the nativist storm until it passed. The O’Briens, whom B. Mitchell contends replaced the IBS as the leading Irish institution in the city, took a different approach to Irish-Yankee relations:

the O’Briens devised a strategy which not only served the needs of an Irish neighborhood in the throes of social, political, economic, and religious transition but which also demonstrated that they safeguarded the rights of Lowell’s Irish. As part of their plan the O’Briens abandoned the assimilation philosophy of the Irish middle class, arguing instead for a more pluralistic perspective. In the process, they created an Irish identity in Lowell which transcended the ‘limbo’ status of the early unskilled Irish laborers (1988: 126).

The O’Briens successfully accomplished the creation of an Irish Catholic identity that both superseded and encompassed all classes of the Irish population from the newly-arrived peasants to the first generation Irish-American.

260 Public rituals and community power

The Irish community’s response to living and working in a Yankee-dominated society was varied. There were incidents of outright physical harassment and brutality which the Irish often returned in kind. Other forms of Yankee dominance were more subtle and pervasive. For example, Irish women were kept in the lowest-paid jobs in the mills while Irish men were employed in the lowest-status occupations in the city (Dublin, 1979). The Irish response to occupational and residential segregation was seldom violent. Instead, it was a complex rejoinder precariously poised between accommodation to and rejection of the uneven distribution of power: the St. Patrick’s Day parades and ceremonies are emblematic of this response.

The meaning of public rituals

In a book that examines parades and public ceremonies in 19thcentury Philadelphia, Susan Davis contends that urban dwellers of the period often used collective public displays to make statements about prevailing social relations. She states that:

Parades are public dramas of social relations, and in them performers define who can be a social actor and what subjects and ideas are available for communication and consideration. These defining images in turn shape the actions and alternatives people can imagine and propose. Street performances, then, are both shaped by the field of power relations in which they take place, and are attempts to act on and influence those relations (1986: 6).

Indeed, 19th.century parades often took place within the context of social antagonism and conflict. Certainly this was the case in Lowell where Yankees dominated the social, economic, and political hierarchy and, in general, looked with disdain upon the Irish popula- tion. Incidents of conflict between the two groups ranged from hostility and outright violence to more subtle forms of racism and prejudice. For example, in 1831, as the first Catholic church in the city was nearing completion, a group of Yankee laborers gathered to make a raid on the Irish settlement with the intent of dstroying it and the unfinished church. A ‘battle’ between this group and members of the Irish community ensued as bricks and rocks rained down on both sides (O’Dwyer, 1920: 15-17). In 1854, just months before a ‘new’ St. Patrick’s Church was dedicated, anti-Catholic violence was exhibited once again when a Know-Nothing mob attacked the church (B. Mitchell, 1988).

In addition to the external tensions there was conflict within the Irish community itself. The division that existed early on between the two main regional factions grew wider during the 1830s and 1840s. Sometimes this dissidence took the form of violence, as in 184 1 when local newspapers report the occurrence of a riot in the Irish camps (Da@ Journal and Courier, 1949; Lowell Advertiser, 1949; Tri Weekly American, 1949; VOX Pop& 1949). This bitter division also posed problems for the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston which, in its attempt to organize a Catholic parish in the city, found the rancor so deep- seated that it took decades to overcome the regional loyalties and achieve unification and co- operation from the whole of the community.

As the years passed the Yankee response to the Irish presence in Lowell decreased in violence but was sustained in more subtle forms of censure, as attested by the following excerpt from a letter to the editor which appeared in 185 1:

We notice with regret indications that our mills are being filled more and more with Irish help. Whether it is owing to the consideration that such help is more profitable than American girls, or whether it be that the scarcity of the latter help renders the step necessary we do not know. In either case the fact is to be deplored. Not because we wish to see the Irish crowded out from honorably obtaining a living, but because we think in the end it will be a serious damage to our hitherto illustrious little city. The fact that our Yankee girls, most of whom are the

SALLIE A. MARSTON 261

daughters of thriving farmers in the country, and who come here only to rid their parents of the burden of their maintenance, will have to place themselves on a level with those who are unmistakably their inferiors in every sense, will tend to cast a slur on the name of the Lowell factory girl, something which it has not yet obtained (Lowed Daily Morning News, 185 1).

In 1854, a Know-Nothing governor was elected in the state, and the city of Lowell had its first Know-Nothing mayor and council. Several months later, the governor of Massachusetts signed a proclamation ordering the disbanding of Irish militia companies. Unquestionably, the local context within which the St. Patrick’s Day parades evolved was one of great disquiet both between the Irish and the Yankee communities and often within the Irish community itself. As such it is important to see the parades and public ceremonies as an embodiment of and reaction to conflicting aspirations. Public celebrations were, in effect, ‘[iImages of social relations . . filtered through a complex process of inclusion, exclusion, influence and planning until the parade expressed power and interest more than unity and consensus’ (Davis, 1986: 5). In Lowell, the Irish used the parades as a means of confronting the political, economic and social relations that existed in the city. They used their parades to address a number of needs and to influence a variety of issues.

At the surface, the parades were meant to establish the importance of Ireland and Irish tradition. They served to present the critical issues of the home country to a wider audience in the hope that republican Americans and transplanted Irish men and women might sympathize with the plight of Ireland. They also addressed less obvious issues as well. As directed at the Yankee community, they served as demonstrations of respectability and community solidarity. Both through the parade participants as well as through the crowds that gathered along the route, the parades presented the Irish community as a social and political force to be reckoned with. Even within the Irish community the parades were used to convey a message. The form and content of the parade was very carefully controlled for several decades by the powerful IBS. The organization’s apparent intent was to promote an image of respectability by including certain groups in the procession and excluding others. By allowing the representation of only a small part of the larger Irish community, the parades were intended to convey particular ideals and norms while excluding controversial community issues and conflicts. Thus, for many years the power and interests expressed in the parade were the exclusive purview of a small group of men.*

Despite the fact that a small group of ‘elite’ Irish men were sometimes distinguished from the wider community, it is important to recognize that, in general, the gulf between the Yankees and the Irish was a vast one. One way of characterizing the relationship between them is to see it as one of competing meaning-systems where one, the Yankee, is clearly dominant, while the other, the Irish, is subordinate. Within the social context of Lowell both

of these systems were in competition for expression, though the native American system held considerable and, for many years, irresistible sway (Parkin, 1971). In Lowell, because the Yankee value-system was dominant, its social and political definitions became part of the major institutional order. Conversely, because the Irish were part of the subordinate value- system, theirs was accommodative-emphasizing various ways of negotiating the status

quo. While adaptation was a characteristic of this relationship, it is important to recognize that it implies neither endorsement of the dominant value-system nor normative opposition to the dominant order. Specifically, adaptation assumed unique forms based on local conditions as they existed and changed in Lowell. In this way localized social knowledge of existing institutions like the corporations and the press, and daily face-to-face relationships like the ones between various Irish and Yankee groups and individuals formed the basis for the specific kinds of expressions that accommodative behaviors affected.

262 Pitbiic ritu& and community power

St. Patrick’s Day parades and celebrations

Although it is difficult to ascertain the exact date of the first St. Patrick’s Day celebration in Lowell, it seems safe to say that some public commemoration of the day probably occurred in the early 1830s with the opening of the first Irish Catholic church in the city. O’Dwyer indicates that the first gathering to commemorate St. Patrick’s Day in Lowell occurred on 16 March 1833 (1920: 40). In 1835, The Literary and Catholic Sentinel mentions the occurrence of a celebration in the city. In 1839, The Boston Pilot records the first full account of a St. Patrick’s Day celebration in Lowell. During the decade of the 1840s the annual celebration of the patron saint of Ireland recurred as evidenced by a published notice of the parade route, a newspaper account of the speeches made at the evening’s banquet, or a newspaper description of the event such as the following:

The Lowell Irish Benevolent Society celebrated the festival of Ireland’s patron Saint, in a manner which did credit not only to the society, but also to those of their countrymen who thought proper to join with them on this grand occasion. The society met at an early hour in the morning . . , and at 9 o’clock they proceeded in procession to St. Patrick’s Church, accompanied by an excellent Band of Music, to worship God in the manner in which St. Patrick taught . . Service being over, the society again took up a line of march through Lowell, Central, Gorham, and Merrimack streets (Lowell Advertiser, 1841).

Typically, for the voluntary associations who formally celebrated, the day’s festivities culminated in a banquet held at one of the local lodging-houses and later at their own

muting-halls. Speeches were made and toasts exchanged and usually, ‘temperance and hilarity reigned throughout’. By 1849, however, while an occasional notice appears announcing the upcoming celebration of St. Patrick’s Day in the city, there is a dearth of newspaper coverage of the actual event until 1859 when published reports of the speeches resume and continue through 1875. The reporting blackout of St. Patrick’s Day celebra- tions through the decade of the 1850s parallels the development of nativist hostility which was occurring both locally and nationally (Beals, 1960; Billington, 1974). The waves of famine migrants who arrived in Lowell in the last half of the 1840s exacerbated the feelings of uneasiness that the Yankee population had begun to experience. More and more Irish women were replacing Yankee women in the mills (Dublin, 1979). Additionally, public- health conditions were deteriorating (B. Mitchell, 1988). At its nadir, hostility toward the Irish was translated into a political movement epitomized in the Know-Nothing party which often articulated its anti”immigrant sentiment through acts of violence and harassment. One explanation for the protracted interruption in public celebration might be that local nativist hostility or threats of violence prohibited a formal parade.

Such an explanation would be consistent with the response being advocated by the O’Briens, St. Patrick’s parish priests, who preached restraint and unity through devotion to the Catholic religion. Through the creation of Catholic schools and church-related social activities, the O’Briens attempted to draw the Irish community closer together in order to undermine the internecine conflict and to negotiate the Know-Nothing siege. It is also possible that the parade proceeded as usual, while the press ignored its occurrence. The former explanation is the more likely one as the Irish Catholic newspaper, The Pilot, did not report any celebratory activities in Lowell during this period.

The 1841 parade was a modest affair with little over 100 marchers accompanied by a small brass band. It was a procession composed entirely of members of the Lowell IBS-a conservative group that was mostly tolerant of the uneven distribution of power and resources in the city and which sought access to local political and economic power not through confrontation but through accommodation. The speech delivered by President

SALLIE A. MARSTON 263

Michael Cassidy at the evening’s banquet gives some evidence of the general mood of compliance and accommodation as it treads a neutral ground by contrasting the deplorable conditions in Ireland with the myriad opportunities and privileges that abound in America. Setting the tone for the evening in 1841, and for the following decade, Mr. Cassidy, who listed his occupation in the 1839 city directory as ‘laborer’, addressed the gathering accord- ingly:

My countrymen, our hearts should glow with gratitude and thanks for the peculiar blessings and advantages we here enjoy. The Genius of liberty smiles on us as on the native born, her wings are extended for our protection as well as for those who fought in her defence, the blessings of education are extended to us with a profuse and liberal hand unexampled elsewhere. The boons we value and appreciate, and for them we offer our grateful acknowledgements (LowelL Advertiser, 184 1).

Cassidy’s speech, the longest of the evening, was consistently effusive. While toasts and praise of similar sentiment were expressed throughout the evening in 184 1, at least one discordant note was heard. Mr. John Buckley insisted:

we are all born free and equal, [and] I wish a speedy repeal to all laws, which gives [sic] privilege to one class of the community, and persecute another (Lowell Advertiser, 1841).

For nearly three decades the IBS dominated the formal public commemoration of St. Patrick’s Day with their solemn, respectable processions and their inordinately patriotic banquets (see Shannon, 1964, for more on the super-patriotism of the Irish). It was not until well after the reporting hiatus of the 1850s that other Irish voluntary associations were reported to have participated in the parade. Although it is more than likely that most members of the Irish community celebrated the day in their own way, it was only IBS members who marched in procession and received approbative recognition from the press. Still, it is clear from various toasts made at the yearly banquets that the exclusive public representation of the Irish community by the IBS was not widely and unquestionably accepted by the growing Irish community in the city (The Lowell Daily Courier, 1842). Notwithstanding vehement opposition, from 1841 until 1869 the IBS continued to control, with a measured hand, the largest and most widely publicized annual show of community solidarity and strength. Furthermore, it appears that its principal objective was to present to

the Yankee community as well as to the various factions within the Irish community, a portrait of the Irish as respectable, temperate, industrious, and law-abiding ‘adopted citizens’.

For years, the toasts delivered throughout the evening’s banquet praised the local govern- ment officials, the local corporations, the cause of temperance, the friendship of native Americans, and the benefits of living under a republican form of government. In its outward demonstrations of compliance and conformity the IBS was setting an example for the Irish community as well as creating an acceptable image of the Irish for Yankee consumption. The evening’s banquets were not only an opportunity to praise St. Patrick, but, of equal importance, were occasions for rare socializing with prominent Lowell Yankees who were usually called upon to express their sentiments. Men like the mayor, editors of the local newspapers, and owners of corporations, used the occasion to demonstrate approval of the sanitized version of the Irish community that the IBS represented. What is most remarkable about the IBS banquets is that they were never used as an arena to vent bewilderment or frustration, despite the fact that the 1840s and 1850s were times of widespread and vicious anti-Irish hostilities. For example, in 1843, a stuffed effigy of St. Patrick placed along the parade route by a ‘blackguard’ was obviously meant to offend the marchers (The Lowell

Daily Courier, 1843; see also Davis, 1986: 47, who indicates that on the eve of St. Patrick’s

264 Public rituals and cnmmunily pozcier

Day, the burning of stuffed effigies ‘was a venerable nativist tradition’). Yet there was no public response to the incident at the IBS banquet that evening. While saint-like restraint was the watchword of the IBS, a growing restiveness in the wider Irish community signalled an end to the ‘halcyon’ years of IBS sovereignty in Lowell.

Finally, in 1859, 1% years after the first parade in the city, the IBS deigned to allow the Young Men’s Catholic Library Association to join its ranks in the St. Patrick’s Day procession. Even with an added group, the number of parade participants was still small- somewhere between 200 and 300. The tyrannical hold exerted by the IBS over the public celebration of St. Patrick’s Day lasted for seven more years until in 186% it was finally and irreparably fractured. As a result, the form and content of the parade was significantly altered. One important change was that the number of marchers increased from 300 to over 1000, representing a much larger collection of Lowell Irish voluntary associations. As reported on 1% March 1869:

Never has there been a celebration of this anniversary in this city so gratifying and complete a success as that of yesterday. It has been many years since all the Irish Societies of the city have united with harmony in a celebration (The Lowell Da@ Courierj.

Still it was a triumph that any public celebration of the day was held at ail as there had been rumblings in the Yankee press that the various voluntary associations were disinclined to march with the IBS in procession. In response to opposition to the parade from within the Yankee community, the new Chief Marshal of the procession, Patrick Keyes, a member of the Knights of St. Patrick, presented a speech to the mayor as the parade of IOOO-strong, as well as countless spectators, lined High Street-the location of the mayor’s residence and the exclusive domain of respectable Yankees. In a rather brief address, Keyes explicitly castigated the ‘. narrow-minded people, who in their wisdom do not think it is right for us to celebrate as Irishmen on this or any other occasion’ (The Lowell Daily Courier, 1869).

The mayor responded with a curt retort requiring temperance and moderation from the marchers and onlookers. And well the mayor should have been concerned; the popularity of the enlarged procession was such that many of the city’s corporations closed as thousands of Irish laborers joined in the festivities of the day.

Without a doubt, 1869 marked a momentous turning-point in the history of the St. Patrick’s Day parades in Lowell as the day’s celebrations finally embraced a much wider cohort of the Irish community than the staid and conservative IBS. Furthermore, for the first time, the IBS neither led nor controlled the parade; the position of honor was assumed by the Knights of St. Patrick. Throughout the remainder of the period under study, the St. Patrick’s Day parades and celebrations expanded in terms of the number of formal par- ticipants. Never again did the IBS exert its former control. In 1870 members of the police

department and the city government joined the procession, swelling the number of marchers to over 1500 (The LoweN Daily Courier, 1870). In 187 1, not only were laborers given St. Patrick’s Day as a holiday but the city schools were also closed (The Lowell Daily

Courier, 1871). The Irish community as spectators, also became more involved in the parade. Besides the

usual regalia among the parade participants, elaborate stationary decorations reflecting loyalty to both Ireland and America began to appear in the procession and along the route. Significantly, more and more residences and commercial establishments also began to &play banners and other decorations in commemoration of the day. Indeed, it appears that relations within the Irish community and between it and the Yankee community had finally eased sufficiently so that a massive celebration no longer posed an untold threat. Yet in 1874 there was evidence that ‘stormy opposition to a public parade’ threatened the day’s

SALLIE A. MARSTON 265

events once again (The LowellDaily Courier, 1874). Yet even after 1868, when the parades

were finally open for wider participation and hence expanded interpretation, they remained respectable in their outward display (Davis, 1986). Still, the increased number of parade participants and the many spectators who were drawn to witness the event must have had, at the very least, a tremendous visual impact. The time that the streets were tied up with marchers and celebrating onlookers increased from one hour in 184 1 to four hours in 187 1, and as the city physically expanded so too did the parade route (The Lowell Advertiser, 1841; The Lowell Daily Courier, 1872).

As Davis (1986: 164) has pointed out, the parade as a form of political ritual ‘was well suited to the shape and structure of the early nineteenth century city, with its close and busy but open streets and its compact arrangement of differentiating neighborhoods’. The St. Patrick’s Day parades in Lowell were an innovative if sometimes conservative way of using the streets to put across a message of solidarity, respectability, and community pride. Because Lowell was a classic ‘walking city’ and the streets contained a mix of residential, commercial and manufacturing activity, they provided a means for the wide broadcast of images and symbols. Unquestionably, different groups and classes could use the streets for varying purposes. Hence in Lowell the riots of 184 1, which filled the streets of the Irish residential area with a rowdy, uncouth element, were replaced just five months later by the first St. Patrick’s Day parade, seeking a redefinition of the community based on self-control and conventionality.

Every year, the route taken by the St. Patrick’s Day processions was well beyond the confines of the Irish neighborhoods in the city (see Figure 2). Routinely, the procession

FIGURE 2. St. Patrick’s Day parade routes, 1841 and 1867.

266 Public rituals and community powe?

moved down the main commercial streets of the city en route to the four Irish areas of the city. It passed by the corporate boarding houses, the City Hall, the mills, the edges of the Yankee residential areas, and moved in and out of the Irish residential areas. John Berger (1968) argues that the route public processions take is symbolically important because it signifies a ‘capturing’ or taking-over of various parts of the city. He states that the marchers, because of their sheer numbers, transform the areas through which they march into a ‘temporary stage on which they dramatize the power they still lack’. For the Irish in Lowell, the St. Patrick’s Day parades, as they wound through the city streets, promoted a corporate awareness that it was they, the Irish, who had built the city through hard labor, and it was they who continued to maintain it. ‘They see it [the city] through different eyes, they see it as their product, confirming their potential, instead of reducing it’ (Berger, 1968: 755).

As the map of the parade routes indicates, 19th.century Lowell was a classic Victorian walking city, its central area compressed into about one square mile. The parade accom- panied by several marching bands in the 1870s filled the streets of the city with colorful spectacle and military music. The larger demonstrations of the 1870s promoted an image for both marchers and spectators of powerful collective strength. Berger discusses the symbolism of mass demonstrations, like the St. Patrick’s Day parades, in terms of a metaphor:

I say metaphor because the strength thus grasped transcends the potential strength of those present, and certainly their actual strength as deployed at a demonstration. The more people there are there the more forcibly they represent to each other and to those who are absent. In this way a mass demonstration simul- taneously extends andgives body [original emphasis] to an abstraction. Those who take part become more positively aware of how they belong to a class. Belonging to that class ceases to imply a common fate, and implies a common opportunity (1968: 754-755).

Because of their ability to intrude upon and disrupt the routine of urban life, the parades

must be seen not simply as ‘Irish’ cultural experiences but also as displays of community

solidarity and strength directed at both the Irish and the Yankee community.

Conclusions

Murray Edelman, in The Symbolic Uses of Politics (1964), contends that in order adequately to understand how political activity is used by groups to attain power vis-a-vis other groups, we must view political acts as both instrumental as well as expressive. He states:

political analysis must then proceed on two levels simultaneously. It must examine how political actions get some groups the tangible things they want from government and at the same time it must explore what these same actions mean to the mass public and how it is placated or aroused by them (1964: 12).

In Lowell, while the parades generally were utilized as a vehicle for addressing a wide audience with demands for full participation in local political, economic and social life, they were also the locus of internecine conflict. Ultimately, the Irish gained sufficient political and economic power in Lowell to be able to elect an Irishman to the mayor’s office in 188 1. And while the parades were only one component of the organizing that facilitated this achievement, it was felt within the wider Irish community that the form and content of the IBS parades did not express the complete range of needs and demands. Indeed, it is clear that various groups and factions within the Lowell Irish community were perplexed and frustrated by the orderly compliance of the public demonstrations presented by the IBS during the early years. The examination of the St. Patrick’s Day parades in Lowell tells us much about how the Lowell Irish community sought to participate in the political and

SALLIE A. MARSTON 267

economic power-structure in Lowell. For the first several decades, the Lowell IBS established the paradigm that was to represent the collective group. It set out the rules of public action and attempted to assure that these rules would be followed by excluding potentially ‘aberrant’ groups from participating in the parade. Yet we also know that the IBS repre- sented only a small part of the community and that the image they offered to native American Lowell was just one perspective among many-and which eventually gave way to one that stressed pride in an Irish-American Catholicism.

Because of the complex nature of the celebration of the day, events like the St. Patrick’s Day parades should be viewed as ‘precariously poised between affirmation of the established order and its rejection’ (Cohen, 1982: 34). As Miliband would have it, the interplay of consensus and conflict, unity and discord, combine to make the celebration a contested event. Indeed, one of the major attractions of St. Patrick’s Day was that it allowed a release from the established social order. Participants in the festivities were freed from the usual day’s labor and could indulge in self-defined activities. Thus it was not unusual that while the IBS was parading through the streets of the city ‘didactically displaying the standards they wished everyone would strive for’, others were celebrating the day by heavily

consuming alcohol (Davis, 1986: 162). The following days’ newspapers routinely listed several notices like this one:

Police Court.-Monday, March 17. Peter Tearney ‘went in’ for celebrating St. Patrick’s day, and not taking good care of himself, was overhauled by the ‘stars’, who put him through Justice Crosby’s hopper at an expense of three dollars and incidentals (The Lowell Daily Journal and Courier, 18 56).

The point is, as Edelman notes, that the study of political behavior must go far beyond the famous dictum of Harold Laswell-of ‘who gets what, when, and how’-and focus as well on the complex mechanisms through which groups articulate strategies that address the distribution of power and resources in society. Toward that end Steven Lukes has suggested a whole new set of questions that must be addressed in order to understand political rituals:

Who (that is, which social groups) have prescribed their performance and specified the rules which govern them? Who (which social groups) specify the objects of thought and feeling they symbolize-specifically, certain forms of social relation- ship and activity-as of special significance? Who exactly holds them to be specially significant, and significant in what ways? In the interests of which social groups does the acceptance of these ways of seeing operate? And what forms of social relationship and activity are in consequence ignored as of less or no signifi- cance? Under what conditions are political rituals most effective in getting par- ticipants and observers to internalize the political paradigms they represent? How are such rituals used strategically by different groups, exerting or seeking power in society (1977: 6%69)?

The analysis of the St. Patrick’s Day parades and ceremonies in Lowell attempted to address all of these questions by showing how the parades served to link the past and the future with the present situation of the Irish in the city. Despite years of conflict over its interpretation, the parade served to unite the Irish, a subordinate group, in a public demonstration of strength. By linking the past glories of Ireland with the promises of a republican govem- ment, the 19th.century Irish community in Lowell struggled within the existing social order to define a place for themselves.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jorge Lizarraga and Tina Kennedy for their assistance with the graphics and Susan Smith, Peter Jackson, Mary Beth Pudup, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on

26% Public ritds and ~o~~uni~~~ power

and criticisms of earlier drafts of this paper. An abbreviated version of this paper was presented at the 8th Annual Lowell Conference on Industrial History, October 1987.

Notes

1. It is very likely that there were St. Patrick’s Day parades in the city before this date. Certainly there were formal gatherings to observe the day as early as 1833. Still, 22 March 1841 is the first time that a parade is reported by either the local press or the Jrish Catholic newspaper emanating from Boston.

2. B. C. Mitchell (1988: 14) indicates that the Irish were in Lowell as early as 1790 where they worked as day-laborers in the construction of the canal system in the village. It appears, however, that none of them became permanent residents.

3. The data used in this study are based on a statistical content analysis of various newspaper reports of the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day and speeches made at banquet gatherings in the city of Lowell, Massachusetts during the years 184 1- 1874. Secondary sources of information used were local histories written during the 19th century, city directories, voluntary association pamphlets and other literature, and more recent scholarly treatments of the American Irish community.

4. A number of critical events, like the establishment of an experimental textile mill at Wahham, preceded the establishment of Lowell. For an excellent discussion of the history of the Boston mercantile community and its impact on textile manufacturing in New England see R. V. Spalding (1969).

5. The promotion of industry in the United States and particularly in Lowell was very carefully pursued. Within the primarily agro-mercantile economy, the possibility of a Manchester, England being reproduced in the republic was highly obj~onable. Thus in the planning and building of Lowell, the enterprise was promoted as the construction of an industrial utopia. The arrival of the Irish was viewed by the native population as a powerful threat to the ideal of a poverty-free industrial city. For a more complete discussion, see Bender, 1975.

6. Data for establishing the existence of Irish-dominated residential areas were gathered from the following: Manuscript Censw of Lowell, 1860, microcopy 653, roll 507; ManuscplPt Census of ~~~~esex County, 1860, microcopy 803507; M~~us~r~~ Census of MdddIesex County, 1870, microcopies 552126 and 552127; and the Lowell Directory, 1839, microfiche 6044056; 1841. microfiche 604405%; 1842, microfiche 6044059; 1844-1845, microfiche 6044060; 1849, microfiche 6044063; 1860, microfiche 6044069; 1861-1869, microfilm reel 1377013; 1870-1875, microfilm reel 1377014; and A. G. Mitchell, op. cit.

7. Mitchell’s argument about the existence of a small middle class among the Lowell Irish as early as the 1820s appears overstated. While this small group of men may have had higher pay and more permanent employment than the mass of Irish within the city, there is little evidence to identify them as middle-class. I have chosen to call them an elite group to avoid the problems that identify- ing a class association entail.

8. G. F. O’Dwyer (1920: 40) indicates that the IBS was composed of ‘the most distinguished Irish- men of the city’. The IBS counted among its members Hugh Cummiskey, the patriarch of the Irish community in Lowell, who by his example advocated respectable behavior and hard work as the way toward Yankee acceptance of the Irish. Old Residents Histopical Society, nd., 144-147.

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