Century American Popular Culture

The Irish American's progress from immigrant to citizen of the New World has been less the path of civic assimilation than the road of racial alchemy.' Between 1840 and 1900, Irish immigrants entered not only a New World, but also a new arena, where race rather than national origin was the prevailing idiom in discussing citizenship. They adapted quickly-thanks in large part to their previous history of oppression-becoming accepted citizens almost seamlessly, in the shortest time of any of the mass immigrant groups, but not before they had overcome their own share of racial discrimination at the hands of the now native population, the Anglo Americans (Jacobson 1-90). Part of becoming citizen-like for the Irish immigrants was a necessary abdication of the former reality of their existence, in favor of a nostalgic sentimentalizing through symbolic representation. Stereotypes which had formerly conditioned their existence would eventually come to symbolize just how far they had come in their quest for citizenship. To understand the road to citizenship the Irish constructed, it is necessary to excavate some of these long-held stereotypes and discover the parameters of the stereotype's vicissitudes against a measure of historical objectivity. This paper looks at the previously unconsidered racial stereotype of whiteface utilized by Anglo Americans in the middle of the nineteenth century to distance their working-class from those of the newly arrived immigrant Irish.