If Steven Spielberg and the Holocaust seemed an incongruous pairing, the combo of Walt Disney and the Irish Famine sounds irreconcilable. Mind you, Schindler's List turned out to be a masterpiece (albeit marred by a Hollywoodised happy ending) so maybe there could be hope for Disney's documentary on our diaspora's biggest and most influential segment? Fat chance.
Over three nights (January 26th to 28th), Walt Disney Studios' The Irish In America: Long Journey Home will be shown on PBS, the thinking person's TV channel in the US. Six hours long, epic in sweep and with splendid production values, it really is a pity that, ultimately, it all amounts to feel-good, Mickey Mouse history. In typical Disney style, it's a castrated story which, ironically, tells us as much about America's onanistic discourse with itself as about the Irish experience there.
Between the early 17th century and the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1921-22, as many as seven million people emigrated from Ireland to North America. The great wave, of course, was that generated by the Great Famine of 1845-51: in the dreadful decade after the onset of the Hunger, as many as 1.5 million people left. (In the 70 or so years between the mid-19th century and the 1920s, more than half of the three century total of seven million sought refuge across the Atlantic.)
Disney's documentary is concise and accurate in terms of hard information. Admirably researched and with archive material set to a soundtrack which includes The Chieftains, Sinead O'Connor, Van Morrison and Elvis Costello, it is often evocative, sometimes even seductive. But it is history which refuses to recognise the anger - the murderous (sometimes understandably murderous!) anger and vengefulness of many Irish emigrants.
Disney's is neither Irish nationalist nor Irish revisionist history. It is not even History Lite. It is History Ultra-Lite for the Great American Family of the Melting Pot. The terrible Famine happened alright, but nobody really behaved badly. Nice Mr Trevelyan and the nice landlords and the nice, if unfortunate, peasants were just unlucky. Fair enough, the extent of British blame for the magnitude of the Famine is still debated. But, for better or for worse, the Fenians and their IRA descendants emerged from the deep bitterness felt by emigrants at the British handling of the disaster. In the Disney version, they just don't figure.
No, here the emphasis is on telling a tale of great hardships and great misfortunes overcome. It chronicles, says its own publicity, "the triumphant role the Irish have played in shaping America". Ah, "triumphant". Here is a story which has as its central message not only the possibility of the achievement of the American Dream but the fulfillment of that possibility. This is Disneyified history, alright.
Not unexpectedly, if regrettably, it is heavily personality centred, not quite an Irish-American version of Hello! magazine on video, but not much better. John L. Sullivan, Al Smith, James Curley, Fr Coughlan, Eugene O'Neill and, of course, the Kennedys are rightly featured. They add colour, glamour, drama and crucially, available footage, to the story. They are stars, or, at any rate, notables. But the excessive concentration on a few individuals is distorting.
Still, in the documentary's defence, its relationship with reality is a significant improvement on the traditional treatment Ireland has received on American celluloid. Until recent years (and even now trace elements of the old depictions remain) Hollywood's Ireland was characterised by romantic/whimsical portrayals of such character types as priests, drunks, New York cops and servant women. Sometimes the early 20th-century Troubles featured but, even then, realism was never a consideration.
Television documentary is more rooted, of course, than cinema. Its range is narrower. The best aspects of Disney's production are the archive stills and moving pictures and, in fairness, some of these are splendid. Stills of the heyday of the Irish mining town of Butte, Montana, resurrect that genuinely amazing place. Pictures of the partly completed Brooklyn Bridge - with just a narrow, wooden rope-walk slung between its massive anchorage towers - display both the awesome frenzy and the egomaniacal vision of New York growing up.
Al Smith, the defeated Catholic presidential candidate in 1928, walked the terrifying rope-walk with his father shortly before the completion of the bridge in 1883. Smith was just nine-years-old at the time and the Tammany Hall Irish ran America's greatest city. Yet, almost half a century later, when Smith was defeated by Herbert Hoover for the US presidency, the very nomination of an Irish Catholic to contest the election was enough to revive the Ku Klux Klan.
Disney's documentary does not omit the anti-Catholic history of the United States. But it is uncomfortable at its mention and it rather downplays its extent and severity. From the nativists and know-nothings of the 1840s and 1850s through to Kennedy's winning of the White House in 1960, anti-Catholicism was a most robust strain in American life. Indeed, even today, such bigotry persists in certain big city boardrooms and redneck states.
Not that Irish-Americans have been lacking in bigotry themselves. At times, for instance, they have been notoriously anti-black and, pointedly, Disney avoids including the raving right-wing Senator Joe McCarthy in its pantheon of Irish-American luminaries. Rather, the all-American project must prevail here: to the melting pot of the New World come immigrants from many parts of the globe; their willingness to become all-American is the mark of their worthiness. In this vision, ethnicity is seen as essentially backward.
Now that five or six generations on from the Famine immigrants, most Irish-Americans are unquestionably more American than Irish, their story in America is a story of "triumph". And yes, materially and educationally the Irish have achieved a great deal in the US. What Disney essentially celebrates, however, is the Americanisation of the Irish. In order to validate itself, that is the process America must always praise and, even today, that is the most dominant and pervasive message of all Hollywood propaganda. The Disney Corporation knows this very well indeed.
"Whenever any group can vote in a bloc and decide the outcome of elections and it fails to do this, then that group is politically sick. Immigrants once made Tammany Hall the most powerful single force in American politics. In 1880, New York City's first Irish Catholic mayor was elected and by 1960 America had its first Irish Catholic president. America's black man, voting as a bloc, could wield an even more powerful force," wrote Malcolm X in his 1965 autobiography.
Both Tammany and Malcolm X understood that pragmatic power-politics had little to do with ethics. Faced by exploitative ruling elites, they, as the Americans say, played hardball themselves (Tammany mind, with much greater success). It was not pretty. But (as I once heard Tip O'Neill tell a Boston lecture hall) it's easy now to disapprove of the old political "methods" of the Irish in America. However, he added, without such eh, methods, banking, insurance, the professions, academia and all the rest of Boston's status jobs would not have become open (or, at least not until much later) to the Irish.
That is the real history of the Catholic Irish in the US. It is a history learned from the interminable, bloody struggle against British colonialism in Ireland. For all its commendable research and presentation, The Irish In America: Long Journey Home does not adequately reflect the nastiness and bitterness of that struggle on both sides of the Atlantic. By the way, it's still going on.