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Rapscallion or in Bernard Shaw, an ancient cold, explosive, detonating impartiality.… The English mind … has turned into a bed-hot harlot.” In a poem, Yeats wrote, “I carry from my mother’s womb/A fanatic heart.”
    Jews arriving in the New World from reactionary Germany at about the same time had also, for generations, endured the same sort of persecution, and had been politically repressed. But the Jews, though proud and independent—refusing, among other things, to take the menial jobs the Irish took in America, as ditch-diggers and housemaids, and preferring instead to take off with packs of dry goods on their backs and roam the countryside as foot peddlers—simply lacked this inner Irish fire. It was a fire, of course, that for centuries had been fed and nourished by the Church in Ireland. In Europe, rabbis had counseled moderation in the Jews’ relations with the outside world, a more subtle way ofdealing, perhaps, with the pressures of persecution. “Live as best you can within the strictures of the system,” had been the rabbis’ advice; “don’t be too conspicuous in your demands; stay out of fights, which only call attention to your presence; be ready to pack up and go when the enemy threatens; don’t rock the boat, for you might rock yourself right out of it.”
    Then, too, there was the Irish gift for talk, for poetry and oratory—all useful tools for the clever politician. * Just as nineteenth-century New York had few Jewish maids and gardeners and footmen, there were even fewer Jewish orators and firebrands. The Jews were not great talkers. A European visitor in the 1870’s, calling on both Jewish and Christian banking firms in New York, commented that all Wall Street firms did business in much the same way, “But the Jews appear to do it quicker because they do it with less talk.” In all this, of course, the Irish were assisted by an enormously important single fact: they spoke the language. It did not take, as it did with other Europeans, a full generation before an immigrant family became fully English-speaking. While a German Jew could make money peddling—displaying the wares from his cart or pack before a rural housewife, using gestures and symbols when he did not know the words—he shied away from politics and other forms of endeavor that required direct and precise communication with an English-speaking people. The Irish, on the other hand, leaped into politics with gusto.
    There is also the fact that the Irish have always been a highly social people—again unlike the Jews, who have been traditionally timid and reluctant to mix with “outsiders.” The Irish love company and, in Ireland, have become famous for the relish and charm with which they invite passing strangers into their houses.Cecil Woodham-Smith has pointed out that the Irish “depend to an exaggerated extent on human intercourse,” and when, in County Donegal, Lord George Hill in the nineteenth century tried to move some of his tenants into better houses, he found the farmers unwilling to move because it meant separation from their neighbors. In America, Irish pride and ferocity and what Yeats labeled “fanaticism” caused the Irish to maintain, and even exaggerate, their national characteristics. Through all this, of course, they were supported by their priests, who constantly reassured them that, because they were truer to the letter of their faith than other Catholics—the German, the French, the Italian, the Spanish—the Irish Catholics were the noblest and best Catholics in the world.
    In nineteenth-century American politics, the Irish also had the strength of sheer numbers. In 1850 the Irish constituted 42.8 percent of the entire foreign-born population of the United States, which represented a goodly share of voters. The Catholic Irish loyalty to the Democratic Party, meanwhile, extended back to prefamine days