Movie Review

May the Road Rise to Meet You: The Irish-American Experience. Prod. by Bryan Skene. Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 1998. 57 mins. (Films for the Humanities and Sciences, Box 2053, Princeton, NJ 085432053)

A million and a half people fled Ireland during the famine of the late 1840s, and another 4.2 million left the country between 1851 and 1920. Roughly half of all those leaving Ireland in those years were women, usually unmarried, seeking paid work in American cities. Once across the Atlantic Ocean, Irish women provided the passage money for hundreds of thousands of their siblings still at home. By the turn of the century, the daughters of the immigrant generation had entered the educated lower middle class of teaching and nursing. Despite the importance of women in the history of Irish America, the focus of two recent television documentaries, The Irish in America and May the Road Rise to Meet You, is almost exclusively on men.

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The longer of the two films, the four-part The Irish in America, begins with the famine of the late 1840s, making that atypical disaster the trope for the entire Irish experience in America. Using a hodgepodge of unattributed snippets from recent research on the subject of the famine and Irish migration, the series shows how Irish men, forced out of Ireland by the failure of the subsistence potato crop, fanned out across the United States in search of work. They dug canals and railroads, drained swamps, and quarried ore. They died untimely deaths from yellow fever in New Orleans. They were hanged as Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania's coalfields. They huddled, resentful, in Boston, facing the contempt of the city's Brahmin elite. They built Virginia City, Nevada, and Butte, Montana. Occasionally, individuals such as John L. Sullivan or Al Smith rose to national prominence, but even these heroes eventually met defeat. The Irish experience in America culminates with the lives of two grandsons of famine-era immigrants, the Nobel-winning playwright Eugene O'Neill and the presidential father Joseph Kennedy, presented here as tragic heroes. The series ends with the return of Kennedy's son John to the ancestral home in Ireland in 1963. Only then could the American Irish integrate their Irish roots with their American success.

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