Catholics Cornered – Frank McNally on how a university in Indiana became the ‘Fighting Irish’

South Bend, Indiana, where I write this, is named prosaically for its location at the southernmost point of the St Joseph river, which dips into Indiana here before a sharp turn north towards Lake Michigan.

The names of the two things for which the city is most famous, however, are not so straightforward.

First there is the University of Notre Dame, founded in 1842 by a French missionary but now pronounced locally in a way that may be adding to the missionary’s suffering in purgatory.

Notre Dame, in American, rhymes with “motor game”. And indeed, South Bend was a big player in the motor game once, when Studebaker had headquarters here, employing tens of thousands.

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After the company’s demise in 1963, the city threatened to go down an S-bend of a different kind. But in recent years, it’s been making a comeback, thanks in part to the regenerative policies of “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg, before he went on to bigger things.

Meanwhile, cars or no cars, South Bend’s name had been made, and gradually eclipsed, by the fame of the Catholic university and its sports teams, especially the football one.

It was through the footballers that a once-derogatory nickname, “Fighting Irish”, came to be applied to the college in general. In time, that was often abbreviated to “Irish”, an adjective now scattered around these parts like snuff at a wake.

As a visitor from Dublin, you have to get used to the strange experience of reading headlines in local newspapers that refer to the “Irish”, or just “Irish”, but have nothing directly to do with you.

How the nickname came about is still debated. What’s generally agreed is that it was originally an insult from WASPish rivals, who used also refer to the college’s students and sports teams as “papists”, “dirty Irish”, “horrible Hibernians”, etc, before settling on the violent stereotype.

The slur aside, “Fighting Irish” wasn’t even demographically accurate. Poles were a large part of the student body too, while the college’s greatest ever football coach, Knute Rockne – whose name is now synonymous with it – was Norwegian.

But a visit from Eamon de Valera in 1919 seems to have cemented the association, with Irishness and fighting alike. That and other events gradually turned what had been a negative image into a brand.

Like Quakers, French impressionists, and Suffragettes, the Fighting Irish of South Bend soon adopted the former insult as a badge of pride. The nickname had taken firm root in the college by the 1920s (unlike de Valera’s “tree of liberty”, by the way, which was dug up by a unionist student soon afterwards).

The decisive factor may have been a week of riots in South Bend in May 1924, which pitched the university against the local Ku Klux Klan and – in the longer run – put it on the side of the angels.

The Klan was borderline respectable then in the US, still boosted by the 1915 cinema blockbuster The Birth of a Nation, which portrayed its members as patriots and solid citizens defending their communities.

In South Bend, the Klan had offices downtown. There as in Indiana generally, they benefitted from the leadership of the state’s “Grand Dragon”, DC Stephenson, a charismatic figure who promoted the image of a kinder, gentler Klan, right up to the time he was jailed for rape and murder in 1925.

By 1924, Indiana was Klan Central, with more members – 425,000 – than the combined deep-southern states of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi: Stephenson benefitting from subscriptions to the tune of $10 each.

In South Bend, the organisation’s primary targets were Catholics, and Notre Dame in particular. Hence the 1924 rally, designed to protest against this insidious threat to American values, and perhaps draw a violent response.

Fearing exactly that, university president Fr Matthew Walsh urged his students not to fall for the trap. But he was overruled in three nights of skirmishes during which Klansmen were roughed up, disrobed, and generally routed.

The students’ athleticism played a part. So, incidentally, did another ethnic stereotype. In a detail you couldn’t make up, they weaponised potatoes to break the windows of Klan HQ.

When a last lightbulb burned in the upstairs offices, the college’s star quarterback was deployed to smash it with a pin-point throw. The lights continued to go out on the Klan thereafter. Stephenson’s disgrace completed the humiliation.

Having put down roots on campus, the Fighting Irish nickname was officially watered from 1927. Back in actual Ireland that year, de Valera was turning his back on militancy to enter the Dáil. Meanwhile in South Bend, Fr Walsh resigned himself to accepting the old slur – with qualifications – as a corporate identity.

In a formal statement, he announced that university authorities were now “in no way averse” to the nickname. He added: “I sincerely hope that we may always be worthy of the ideal embodied in the term ‘Fighting Irish’.”